United States or Réunion ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
As soon as it was morning, however, the man with the sabre, who had neglected to take the simplest precautions, reviewed the troops. The contingents were drawn up in line with their backs turned to the plain. They presented a wonderful medley of costume, some wearing brown jackets, others dark greatcoats, and others again blue blouses girded with red sashes.
The roughest specimens of humanity begin to gather in from the country around the corners of the streets near the hotel, with all the worn-out, lame, halt, blind, and spavined horses that can be raked up by hook or crook in the neighborhood. Such a medley was never seen in any other country.
It is not only that this proceeding can never lay claim to the very rare merit of a true philosophical popularity, since there is no art in being intelligible if one renounces all thoroughness of insight; but also it produces a disgusting medley of compiled observations and half-reasoned principles.
Further on lay our own two poor riflemen with their heads smashed like eggshells; and I suppose they had mothers or wives far away at the end of the deep-sea cables. Ah, horrible war, amazing medley of the glorious and the squalid, the pitiful and the sublime, if modern men of light and leading saw your face closer, simple folk would see it hardly ever.
He could feel the sea roaring in front of him in the gloom. The column disappeared; and in a lull of wind, uprose from the place where it had been such a hideous medley of shrieks, laughter, and exultant wrath, that John Rex paused in horror. Too late. The ground gave way it seemed beneath his feet. He was falling clutching, in vain, at rocks, shrubs, and grass.
"And the patriots, sir; are they included in this chance medley?" "Far from it. As a reward for their dangers, they have a little wheel to themselves, although they, also, are compelled to submit to the rotatory principle. Their cases differ from those of the others, merely in the fact that they always get something."
On his return to the half-deck, Medley said to me, "Now, Jack, let us thank our merciful Father in heaven that you have been preserved from the greatest danger you were ever in during your life. Had the cook not been looking your way in another moment of time you would have been overboard, and it would have been impossible to pick you up."
The sort of complicated medley created by the hasty arrangements of the various clans under their respective banners, for the purpose of getting into the order of march, was in itself a gay and lively spectacle. They had no tents to strike, having generally, and by choice, slept upon the open field, although the autumn was now waning, and the nights began to be frosty.
I had not hitherto paid attention to the medley on our bookshelf, but I now saw that, besides a Nautical Almanack and some dilapidated Sailing Directions, there were several books on the cruises of small yachts, and also some big volumes crushed in anyhow or lying on the top. Squinting painfully at them I saw Mahan's Life of Nelson, Brassey's Naval Annual, and others.
Some are lost in that medley of the living which whirls continually under the scourge of necessity, and others in that resting-place of the dead, who sleep under the hand of God! Peter the bookbinder is one of these last. Wrapped up in selfishness, he lived alone and friendless, and he died as he had lived.
Word Of The Day