Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 15, 2025
This instinct for the truth being so strong in him, he knows it when he sees it in others; he detects its absence, too; and has no patience and scant mercy for those past-masters in the art of blinking facts, those natural-history romancers who, realizing that "the crowd must have emphatic warrant," are not content with the infinite Variety of nature, but must needs spend their art in the wasteful and ridiculous excess of painting the lily, perfuming the violet, and giving to the rainbow an added hue.
Jews are notorious all the world over as money-lenders, and it may perhaps be wondered why none of them survived as money-lenders in Madras; but the fact that Coral Merchants' Street is now the habitat of Nattukottai Chetties, who are past-masters in the art of money-lending, suggests that even the Jews were unable to compete with Madras sowcars in the business of usury, and that the Chetties displaced the Jews who used to live in the street.
The first round showed that both were past-masters of ring tactics. Their wardings and layings for openings were so perfect that neither could get a blow in. When they stopped for a moment to breathe the Englishman said with frank admiration: "Y're a heap better lot than Hi thort yer. Where'd ye learn to handle yer dukes?" "Never mind where I learned," answered Shorty.
What! is this he? this raucous, pushing, red-haired, huge-handed, green-necktied vulgarian who has made his pile bricklaying in Chicago; this ward-politician; this Well, well; Sic transit gloria mundi! And the Roman cad of the second century B.C. was worse than a thousand Kellys. He had learned vice from past-masters in the Levant; and added to their lessons a native brutality of his own.
He knew that Ormuz Khan must finally and definitely disappear. It is just possible that he meant Miss Abingdon to disappear along with him! "However, that danger is past. Mrs. McMurdoch, who to-day accompanied her to his house, was drugged by these past-masters in the use of poisons, and left unconscious in a cottage a few miles from Hillside, the abode of Ormuz.
For a long time he was silent, and when he at last spoke it was to open a new phase of the negotiations. His ammunition was not all to hand yet, his rifles had not all been distributed, the grass had not appeared upon the veldt. The game must be kept going for a couple of months. 'You are such past-masters in the art of gaining time! said Mr. Labouchere to Mr. Montague White.
In this manner Cochise reverted to the customs of his ancestors; customs which had come gradually to the Apaches when they wandered down from Athabasca, passing southward through regions held by hostile tribes snatching their sustenance from these enemies, fleeing before superior forces of warriors, until they reached the flaming deserts down by the Mexican border, past-masters of the arts of ambush and raid and retreat, owning no longer any love of home or knowledge of tepee building; nomads who made their lodges by spreading skins or blankets over the tops of bushes which they had tied together; to whom the long march had become an ingrained habit and all the arts of bloody ambush an instinctive pleasure.
Boers are past-masters at hiding their real feelings and affecting any that they think will be acceptable. It is a trait which has become a national characteristic, and the craft, dissimulation, the slimness, as it is called, of the Boers is a by-word.
I had asked for an agent of no great account, backed by some official personage, and they send me those past-masters of the business! Ah, Grevin, Fouche wants to pry into my game. That's why I left those fellows dining at the chateau; they may look into everything for all I care; they won't find Louis XVIII. nor any sign of him."
Whether this inference is merely the mechanical deduction of a lesson, or a subtlety of moralizing, with a definite intention, on the part of the Cherokees, always past-masters in the intricacies of symbolism, it is difficult to determine, but the bears are certainly not alone in this illustration of retrogression, and memory may furnish many an image of a lost ideal to haunt the paths of beings of a higher plane.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking