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How far the gypsy language may be included with them it is impossible to say; but it has been largely borrowed from by them, thanks either to community of objects, and consequent sympathy of feelings, or to its obscurity and shapelessness, and the utter ignorance of it among the intelligent and plunderable classes.
The struggle, however, ended suddenly, and hailing a man who plodded behind another team, Winston picked up his broad hat, which was trampled into shapelessness, and turned towards the wagon. There was dust and spume upon him, a rent in the blue shirt, and the knuckles of one hand dripped red, but he laughed as he said, "I did not know we had an audience, but this, you see, is necessary."
Then too he learns to suspect that when he has tried to be impressive, he has often only succeeded in being priggish; and the result is that he falls into a kind of speechlessness, comforting himself, as he sits mute and awkward, unduly elongated, and with unaccountable projections of limb and feature, that if only other people were a little less self-absorbed, had the gift of perceiving hidden worth and real character, and could pierce a little below the surface, they would realise what reserves of force and tenderness lay beneath the heavy shapelessness of which he is still conscious.
He began to speculate on what would then happen first whether he would be blown to pieces or smashed into shapelessness, or whether an opening would be made by which he might be enabled to escape. If only a shot would strike directly upon the iron bars of the window, perhaps it would enlarge the aperture sufficiently to allow him to crawl through.
They were of every conceivable shape and shapelessness, most of them flattened; some of them, the greenhorn would swear, were fashioned by man into roughly embossed hearts, or shells, or polished discs like rude, defaced coins. One was a perfect staple, another the letter "L," another like an axe-head, and one like a peasant's sabot.
It gets away with me how Forrester can dry up a spring at long range that-a-way; there ain't a track in the mud around here bigger 'n a linnet's, not a track. It's pure deviltry, you can bet on that." Lysander fell back on the devil with restful inconsistency, and fanned himself with his straw hat, curled by much similar usage into fantastic shapelessness.
Ashvatthama cut off the legs of some, and the hips of others, and pierced some in their flanks, careering like the Destroyer himself let loose by Time. The Earth, O lord, was soon covered with human beings that were crushed into shapelessness or trodden down by elephants and steeds and with others that roared in great affliction. Many of them loudly exclaimed, "What is this?" "Who is this one?"
And each time something beautiful perishes by fire, it is a something representing an individual idea. Happily the art impulse itself, in this country of conflagrations, has a vitality which survives each generation of artists, and defies the flame that changes their labour to ashes or melts it to shapelessness.
"It's positively indecent," said Mrs. Hanley Black to her husband, herself a too-stout-in-the-middle matron of forty-five, who had been born in the Hawaiian islands, and who had never heard of Ostend. Hanley Black surveyed his wife's criminal shapelessness and voluminousness of antediluvian, New-England swimming dress with a withering, contemplative eye.
Not of strange sights alone is this charm made, but of numberless subtle sensations and ideas interwoven and inter-blended: the sweet sharp scents of grove and sea; the blood-brightening, vivifying touch of the free wind; the dumb appeal of ancient mystic mossy things; vague reverence evoked by knowledge of treading soil called holy for a thousand years; and a sense of sympathy, as a human duty, compelled by the vision of steps of rock worn down into shapelessness by the pilgrim feet of vanished generations.
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