United States or Tuvalu ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
What he loved and sought was ever the savage, the legend-haunted, the ghoulish, seats and ambuscades of kelpie, hobgoblin, brownie and their kind. From the nursery upwards, if the term can be applied to French children, his life was a succession of artistic abnormalities and tours de force.
An elderly guest, who was examining a time-table on the wall, turned to them as the porter disappeared. "Ye'll be strangers noo, and not knowing that Tonalt the porter is a McHulish hissel'?" he said deliberately. "A what?" said the astonished Miss Elsie. "A McHulish. Ay, one of the family. The McHulishes of Kelpie were his own forebears. Eh, but he's a fine lad, and doin' well for the hotel."
After a few attempts to unseat her, not of the most determined kind, however, Kelpie, on her part, consented to carry her, and ever after seemed proud of having a mistress that could ride. Her foal turned out a magnificent horse.
No remonstrance from the bystanders was of power to stop him he plunged into the stream, and perished. Kelpie. On the day when the unhappy Porteous was expected to suffer the sentence of the law, the place of execution, extensive as it is, was crowded almost to suffocation.
All this time Kelpie was trying hard to get at the lady's horse to bite him. But she did not see that. She was much too distressed and was growing more and more so. "I wish you would let my groom try her," she said, after a pitiful pause. "He's an older and more experienced man than you. He has children. He would show you what can be done by gentleness."
When he lifted it again, it was pale, not with fear but with resolution, for he had made up his mind like a gentleman. 'Mr. Angus MacQueen, he said, 'will you give me your daughter to be my wife? 'If you kill the kelpie, I will, answered Angus; for he knew that the man who could do that would be worthy of his Nelly." "But what if the kelpie ate him?" suggested Allister.
The sea was not terrible to her; she knew all its ways nearly as well as Malcolm knew the moods of Kelpie; but the earth and its ways were less known to her, and to turn her face towards it and enter by a little door into its bosom was like a visit to her grave.
By this means he might perhaps get her a little accustomed to his presence before she could be at leisure to challenge it. When he put Kelpie in her stall the last time for a season, and ran into the house to get his plaid for Lizzy, who was waiting him near the tunnel, he bethought himself that he had better take with him also what other of his personal requirements he could carry.
Now all the day he had been fuming over Malcolm's behaviour to him in the morning, and when he went home and learned that his wife had seen him upon Kelpie, as if nothing had happened, he became furious, and, in this possession of the devil, was at the present moment wandering about the grounds, brooding on the words Malcolm had spoken. He could not get rid of them.
All at once the wild vitality of Kelpie filled the space beside her, and the voice of Malcolm was in her ears. She turned her head. He was looking very solemn. "Will you let me tell you, my lady, what this always makes me think of?" he said. "What in particular do you mean?" returned Clementina coldly. "This smell of new sawn wood that fills the air, my lady." She bowed her head.
Word Of The Day