Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 3, 2025
Surely I could not be mistaken about that movement, the slow, undulating, rhythmic walk, the floating shadow of the night before. Certainly not with the light of the sacristan's lantern now full on her face. Yes: the same finely chiseled features, the same waves of brown hair, the same eyes, the same drooping eyelids, like blossoms wet with dew! At last I had found her.
At last the dusty sun-blinds were taken off the windows of the big house, and Yefremovo heard the strains of the broken-down, out-of-tune piano. Father Kuzma was pining, though he could not himself have said why, or whether it was from delight or alarm. . . . The deacon went about grinning. The following Saturday evening Father Kuzma went to the sacristan's lodgings.
And when they had to sing "forte" the sacristan's fat face expressed alarm and even horror. The "Cherubim" hymn was sung well, so well that the school-children abandoned their copies and fell to watching the movements of Alexey Alexeitch. People stood under the windows. The schoolwatchman, Vassily, came in wearing an apron and carrying a dinner-knife in his hand and stood listening.
'They make as good bread here as in France, and 'by night all cats are grey, and 'a hard case enough his, who hasn't broken his fast at two in the afternoon, and 'there's no stomach a hand's breadth bigger than another, and the same can be filled 'with straw or hay, as the saying is, and 'the little birds of the field have God for their purveyor and caterer, and 'four yards of Cuenca frieze keep one warmer than four of Segovia broad-cloth, and 'when we quit this world and are put underground the prince travels by as narrow a path as the journeyman, and 'the Pope's body does not take up more feet of earth than the sacristan's, for all that the one is higher than the other; for when we go to our graves we all pack ourselves up and make ourselves small, or rather they pack us up and make us small in spite of us, and then good night to us.
I saw the sacristan's face glimmer white before me from a hollow in the well shaft, as I set my foot on the last rung of the ladder, and I held out my hand to him. Then in a moment I was beside him in a little chamber built in the walling of the well; and after me came the prior. He jerked the ladder from side to side till the hooks above lost their hold and it fell, so that he drew it in.
All this information may be perfectly relied on, though the fact is, we did not see the mosaic-work: the sacristan, who guards it, was yet in bed; and it was veiled from our eyes in a side-chapel by great dirty damask curtains, which could not be removed, except when the sacristan's toilette was done, and at the price of a dollar.
Akim went into the sacristan's hut. "Here, sit on the bench," said Yefrem. "Run away, you little rascals," he cried to three other children who suddenly came out of different corners of the room together with two lean cats covered with wood ashes. "Get along! Sh-sh! Come this way, Akim Semyonitch, this way!" he went on, making his guest sit down, "and won't you take something?"
His spectacles were placed on his forehead amid long locks of hair, while his thin, squalid chest, which was bare, rose and fell regularly. The rustic took a seat near by, as if to wait patiently, but he dropped a piece of money and started to look for it with the aid of a candle under the senior sacristan's chair.
No ghost was ever known to steal out of this blessed cemetery." "That is well," responded Miriam; "may he whom you now lay to sleep prove no exception to the rule!" As they left the cemetery she put money into the sacristan's hand to an amount that made his eyes open wide and glisten, and requested that it might be expended in masses for the repose of Father Antonio's soul.
The sacristan's little son took me to the upper chapel, where it hangs quite lost upon those below. It is as beautiful as its altarpiece in wood; the three central compartments filled with large figures of the Abbot of St. Claude and his Apostles; below, on a small scale, the Last Supper, and other subjects, treated in a masterly manner.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking