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On the 13th of March, 1781, between ten and eleven o'clock at night, Herschel was examining the small stars near H Geminorum with a seven-foot telescope, bearing a magnifying power of 227 times. One of these stars seemed to him to have an unusual diameter. The celebrated astronomer, therefore, thought it was a comet.

The roofs of the houses grew flatter and campanile, and the domes rose, silvery or blue, in the dazzling day. A mountain shepherd, furnished with water-gourd, a seven-foot staff, and a gigantic pipe, lingered in the country railway-station. This shepherd's skin was like coffee, and he wore hair hanging far over his shoulders, and his beard reached to his waist. Nice!

"Certainly not, little brother," interrupted the court fool, Eyebolt, "but for that very reason you must open the Eysvogel's cage as quickly as possible and let him fly hither, for on the ride to the beekeeper's you crossed in your own seven-foot tall body the limits of this good city, whose length does not greatly surpass it your imperial person, I mean.

Now taking for good omen this, that I was a seven-year Valentine, though much too big for a Cupidon, I chose a seven-foot staff of ash, and fixed a loach-fork in it, to look as I had looked before; and leaving word upon matters of business, out of the back door I went, and so through the little orchard, and down the brawling Lynn-brook.

I realized it, and now, as I gazed into the peering faces of these men from Mars, I cursed myself for the witless rashness which had brought Anita into this! The brigands some ten or fifteen of them here on deck stood in a ring around us. They were all big men, nearly of a seven-foot average, dressed in leather jerkins and short leather breeches, with bare knees and flaring leather boots.

"You can carry a staff," Oswald said, laughing; "and being so big a man, you will assuredly require a long and heavy one; and, even if it is heavily shod with iron, no one need object." "That is not so bad, Master Oswald. A seven-foot staff, of the thickness of my wrist; with an iron shoe, weighing a pound or two, is a carnal weapon not to be despised.

Suddenly a lane opened in the crowd, and from the great black and gold building there came a file of men in tight-fitting green uniforms; a file of seven-foot giants. Obviously they were soldiers of some particular branch, for in the crowd there were a number of men dressed in similar uniforms of deep blue. "I think they want one or more of us to accompany them," Arcot said.

In constructing the seven-foot reflector, he finished no fewer than two hundred specula before he produced one that would bear any power that was applied to it, a striking instance of the persevering laboriousness of the man. While gauging the heavens with his instruments, he continued patiently to earn his bread by piping to the fashionable frequenters of the Pump-room.

A thousand stories clustered about him: of how he killed Watkins; of how Langley, the famous Federal marshal, trailed him for five years and was finally killed in the duel which left Allister with that scar; of how he broke jail at Garrisonville and again at St. Luke City. In the imagination of Andrew he had loomed like a giant, some seven-foot prodigy, whiskered, savage of eye, terrible of voice.

In one hand she held a sceptre, and in the other the imperial globe, and on either side of her stood two rows of halberdiers, each smaller than the other, from a seven-foot giant to the tiniest little dwarf no higher than my little finger. Many princes and dukes were standing before her. The fisherman went up to her quietly and said: 'Wife, are you emperor now? 'Yes, she said, 'I am emperor.