United States or Sudan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
When Toole ended his little family anecdote, which, you may be sure, he took care to render as palatable to Magnolia's knight as possible, by not very scrupulous excisions and interpolations he wound all up, without allowing an instant for criticism or question, by saying briskly, though incoherently. 'And so, what do you say, lieutenant, to a Welsh rabbit for supper?
And that evening Berkley lay at Paigecourt in the chintz-hung chamber where, as a girl, his mother had often slept, dreaming the dreams that haunt young hearts when the jasmine fragrance grows heavier in the stillness and the magnolia's snowy chalice is offered to the moon, and the thrush sings in the river thickets, and the fire-fly's lamp drifts through the fairy woods.
Clutters' ghost if she ... if she started to walk!" he thought to himself, as he descended the stairs to his room. He had switched off the light on Magnolia's landing, but there was a light showing dimly up the stairs from the landing beneath. It shone faintly on the door of the room in which Mrs. Clutters' body was lying. He went down the stairs towards the door, and then, half-way down, stopped.
Magnolia's fat and highly painted parent poor bragging, good-natured, cunning, foolish Mrs. Macnamara, the widow joined, with a venemous wheeze in the laugh. Those who suppose that all this rancour was produced by mere feminine emulations and jealousy do these ladies of the ancient sept Macnamara foul wrong. Mrs.
Those who had heard the same story from the mischievous merry little doctor before, were I dare say, amused at the grand and complimentary turn he gave it now. The fact was, that poor Magnolia's name came to her in no very gracious way.
"We'd better get some one to look after her," Gilbert proposed when Ninian had gone. "Magnolia's no damn good!..." "No, sir, I ain't ... not with dead people I ain't!" "Clear out, Magnolia!" Gilbert shouted at her. "Go and make the beds or sit in the kitchen or something!" "Yes, sir, certainly, sir!" Magnolia answered, and then she left the room.
It was martyrdom; but anything was better than the incapacity which threatened, and certainly, by the end of five minutes, his head was something better. In this satisfactory condition Jerome being in the back garden brushing his regimentals, and preparing his other properties he suddenly heard voices close to the door, and gracious powers! one was certainly Magnolia's.
Thy fragrance moves me with a touch As from a hand divine: So many dead! so many wed! Since first, by this Magnolia's tree, I pressed a gentle hand and said, A word no more for me! Lady, who sendest from the South This frail, pale token of the past, I press the petals to my mouth, And sigh as 'twere my last. Oh, love, we live, but many fell! The world's a wreck, but we survive!
Had he listened, as I, to those musical numbers That liven its woods through the summer-day long Had he slept in the shade of its blossoming trees, Or inhaled their sweet balm ever loading the breeze, He would scarcely have ventured on statement so wrong "Her plants without perfume, her birds without song." Ah! closet-philosopher, sure, in that hour, You had never beheld the magnolia's flower?
Mack, on the contrary, had a fat and genial soul of her own, and Magnolia was by no means a particularly ungenerous rival in the lists of love. But Aunt Rebecca was hoitytoity upon the Macnamaras, whom she would never consent to more than half-know, seeing them with difficulty, often failing to see them altogether though Magnolia's stature and activity did not always render that easy.
Word Of The Day