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Updated: June 12, 2025
There's a mighty difference between the canine and the human, eh? You're one of our breed, Armstrong yellow dog of the yellow dog quill-driving tribe and your comrades haven't the gentlemanly instinct of the Constantinople cur.
The reporters' gallery, was merely occupied by one or two watchful sentinels of the quill-driving guild; the main body cared nothing for a debate that had dwindled to a mere vaporing of dull speakers and now and then a brief quarrel over a point of order; but there was an unusually large attendance of journalists in the reporters' waiting-room, chatting, smoking, and keeping on the 'qui vive' for the general irruption of the Congressional volcano that must come when the time was ripe for it.
Our forefathers were not ashamed of their beards; but now even the soldier is only allowed to keep his moustache, while our quill-driving masses shave themselves as close as they can; and in proportion to a man's piety he wears less hair, from the young curate who shaves off his whiskers, to the Popish priest who shaves his crown! 'What do you say, then, to cutting off nuns' hair?
He is an original, spontaneous genius and not, like most of his contemporaries, a disputatious, quill-driving theorist, that is to say, a fanatical pedant, an artificial being composed of his books, a mill-horse with blinkers, and turning around in a circle without an issue.
Even if I had been able to write a good hand and keep accounts I couldn't have brought myself to think that quill-driving and counting other people's money was a fit employment for a man. It's not what a man would like to do that he must do in this world, it's what he CAN do; and the only mortal thing I could do properly was to fight.
So just listen to my story and you will see why I ventured to speak to you like this. "It was about this time last year that it occurred. But, first of all, I must tell you that I am a clerk in the Admiralty, where our chiefs, the commissioners, take their gold lace as quill-driving officials seriously, and treat us like forecastle men on board a ship.
And thus during all those eventful days-the last weeks of July and the first weeks of August the clerical deputation remained in England, indulging in voluminous protocols and lengthened conversations with the Queen and the principal members of her government. It is astonishing, in that breathless interval of history, that so much time could be found for quill-driving and oratory.
"Oh yes, that will be all right!" "I put in a good word for you too, Master Douglas." "That was kind," and he swept off his straw hat. "I wonder if that's meant sarcastic? Perhaps you think good wine needs no bush? Yes, and I've told Polly I knew you as a boy and how, instead of quill-driving, you hoped to wear a sword." "Hope told a flattering tale," he answered with a laugh.
I found all this, and the knowledge I had gained from my model-ship at home of great use to me; so much so, indeed, as to induce even that indurated bit of mortality, Marble, to say I "was the ripest piece of green stuff he had ever fallen in with." All this time, Rupert was kept at quill-driving.
But this was the life of those Dutch rebels. Quill-driving, law-expounding, speech-making, diplomatic missions, were intermingled with very practical business in besieged towns or open fields, with Italian musketeers and Spanish pikemen. And here, too, young Maurice was taking his first solid lesson in the art of which he was one day to be so distinguished a professor. It was a sharp beginning.
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