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The author is under obligation to these gentlemen for their courtesy in permitting him to reprint the article. There are a number of climbers in the bird realm, but none are quite so expert as the nuthatch, which may be regarded as a past-master in the art of clambering.
There are very few men whom John Saltram cannot drink under the table, and rise with a steady brain himself when the wassail is ended; yet I believe, in a general way, few men drink less than he does. At cards he is equally strong; a past-master in all games of skill; and the play is apt to be rather high at one or two of the clubs he belongs to.
The occult tradition tells us that Jesus was a past-master in the knowledge and application of the occult forces of nature, and that even the wonders that He wrought during His Jewish ministry were but as child's play when compared with those that He might have manifested had He seen fit to do so.
Emile Blondet, though himself a past-master of hoaxing, could not keep his cheeks from blushing like those of a virgin who hears an indecorous story of which she knows the meaning. "Ha! ha! so you have hunted the otter this morning with Pere Fourchon?" cried the general, with a roar of laughter. "What is it?" asked the countess, uneasy at her husband's laugh.
Sherlock Holmes was a past-master in the art of putting a humble witness at his ease, and very soon, in the privacy of Godfrey Staunton's abandoned room, he had extracted all that the porter had to tell. The visitor of the night before was not a gentleman, neither was he a workingman.
"Don't let me interrupt your drink! I only want a few words with you." "I'll fetch another glass, sir" murmured the discreet man-servant, and vanished. Scott stood, stiff and uncompromising, by his chair. There was a hint of hostility in his bearing. "What can I do for you?" he asked. Bathurst ignored his attitude with that ease of manner of which he was a past-master.
"I'm not a past-master, yet," he said. "I haven't reached the point where I can believe my own lies; so I don't tell 'em and get caught. I've dug down in the mortuaries of other men too often long as a man doesn 't believe his own lies, he's on guard and doesn't get caught. It's when he comes ping against a buzz-saw and finds it's a fact that he has to pay or back down or lose out.
And he exhibited such a knowledge of the subtler phases of the nooks and crannies of woman's heart, as to be hailed as past-master down to the present day by a whole school of analysts and psychologues; for may it not be said that it is the popular distinction of the nineteenth century fiction to place woman in the pivotal position in that social complex which it is the business of the Novel to represent?
Two other convicts, brought with la Pouraille from La Force within these twenty-four hours, had at once acknowledged and made the whole prison-yard acknowledge the supremacy of this past-master sealed to the scaffold.
The insolent and overbearing look had passed away from the amateur's face, but a grim half-smile was on his lips and his eyes shone fiercely from under his tufted brows. From the way in which he stood it was very clear that he was a past-master at the game.
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