United States or Togo ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
To hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a gale out of the freezing north is no high industry, but it is one that serves to occupy and compose the mind. And when the present is so exacting who can annoy himself about the future? Whene'er I buckle on my pack And foot it gaily in the track, O pleasant gauger, long since dead, I hear you fluting on ahead.
But said one of the four servants, "Unless, indeed, this is a deliberate joke, I cannot bring myself to believe that men so intelligent as those present are, or seem to be, can venture to declare and assert that this is not a basin, and that not a pack-saddle; but as I perceive that they do assert and declare it, I can only come to the conclusion that there is some mystery in this persistence in what is so opposed to the evidence of experience and truth itself; for I swear by" and here he rapped out a round oath-"all the people in the world will not make me believe that this is not a barber's basin and that a jackass's pack-saddle."
On hearing this one of the newly arrived officers of the Brotherhood, who had been listening to the dispute and controversy, unable to restrain his anger and impatience, exclaimed, "It is a pack-saddle as sure as my father is my father, and whoever has said or will say anything else must be drunk."
The landlord alone insisted upon it that they must punish the insolence of this madman, who at every turn raised a disturbance in the inn; but at length the uproar was stilled for the present; the pack-saddle remained a caparison till the day of judgment, and the basin a helmet and the inn a castle in Don Quixote's imagination.
Like deer they moved, not like horses, and as they advanced, the carts they drew swayed behind them, and I thought every jolt would hurl them over the precipice. Fascinated I watched, I could not choose but watch. At length came a grey horse, not drawing a cart, but carrying something on his back, on a pack-saddle apparently.
The officers, who did not understand Don Quixote's mode of speaking, and found themselves roughly handled by Don Fernando, Cardenio, and their companions, were not to be appeased; the barber was, however, for both his beard and his pack-saddle were the worse for the struggle; Sancho like a good servant obeyed the slightest word of his master; while the four servants of Don Luis kept quiet when they saw how little they gained by not being so.
Within he found the man he had seen through the chinks of the cabin. He wore the blue berret cap of the Basques on one side, and, enveloped in an ample cloak, seated on the pack-saddle of a mule, and bending over a large brazier, smoked a cigar, and from time to time drank from a leather bottle at his side.
There Nasmyth changed his clothes for the dry garments he had brought in a valise strapped to the pack-saddle, and an hour after supper he fell quietly asleep in his chair. Then Laura turned to her father. "You let him walk all the way when he is worn-out and hurt!" she said accusingly. Waynefleet waved his hand.
With that two hundred thousand dollars I knew I could find May Martha Mangum if she was on earth. And with it I could flutter the butterflies in old man Mangum's dovecot, too. If I could find that treasure! But Lee and I established camp. Across the river were a dozen little mountains densely covered by cedar-brakes, but not one shaped like a pack-saddle. That did not deter us.
Having concealed some water, provisions, and the pack-saddle at the camp, I sent the man back with the pack-horse to encamp at the undulating plains, where nine gallons of water had been left for him and his horse, and the following day he was to rejoin the overseer at the sand hills.
Word Of The Day