Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 26, 2025
THREE wild-horse hunters made camp one night beside a little stream in the Sevier Valley, five hundred miles, as a crow flies, from Bostil's Ford. These hunters had a poor outfit, excepting, of course, their horses. They were young men, rangy in build, lean and hard from life in the saddle, bronzed like Indians, still-faced, and keen-eyed.
If I had to select the woman in all the world best informed about the faults, sins and weaknesses of mankind, I should not choose the sophisticated woman of the world, but I should point without hesitation to the little, pale, still-faced Methodist preacher's wife.
In the spring, when the old people get the coughs which give them a few shakes and their lives drop in pieces like the ashes of a burned thread which have kept the threadlike shape until they were stirred, in the hot summer noons, when the strong man comes in from the fields, like the son of the Shunamite, crying, "My head, my head," in the dying autumn days, when youth and maiden lie fever-stricken in many a household, still-faced, dull-eyed, dark-flushed, dry-lipped, low-muttering in their daylight dreams, their fingers moving singly like those of slumbering harpers, in the dead winter, when the white plague of the North has caged its wasted victims, shuddering as they think of the frozen soil which must be quarried like rock to receive them, if their perpetual convalescence should happen to be interfered with by any untoward accident, at every season, the narrow sulky rolled round freighted with unmeasured burdens of joy and woe.
What was the reason he did n't go abaout to taown-meetin's 'n' Sahbath-meetin's, 'n' lyceums, 'n' school 'xaminations, 'n' s'prise-parties, 'n' funerals, and other entertainments where the still-faced two-story folks were in the habit of looking round to see if any of the mansion-house gentry were present? Fac' was, he was livin' too lonesome daown there at the mansion-haouse.
We were mostly, perhaps, Spanish families come from our several provinces for a bit of the season which all Spanish families of civil condition desire more or less of: lean, dark fathers, slender, white-stuccoed daughters, and fat, white-stuccoed mothers; very still-faced, and grave-mannered.
The green lawn which occupies nearly half the court is studded over with crocuses of all colors growing out of the grass, for there are no flower-beds; delightful for the large still-faced white-robed babies whom their nurses carry up and down on the gravel court where it skirts the green.
Mr. Taylor's muse has of late become very still-faced, decorous and mindful of the art-proprieties. Cautious is she, and there is perhaps nothing in this pastoral that will cause the grammarian to wince, or make the censorious rhetorician writhe in his judgment-seat with the sense that she is committing herself. Not such were the early attributes of the great itinerant's poetry. When he used to unsling his minstrel harp in the wilds of California or on the sunrise mountains of the Orient, there were plenty of false notes, plenty of youthful vivacities that overbore the strings and were heard as a sudden crack, and, withal, a good deal of young frank fire. Now there is much finish and the least possible suspicion of ennui. But the life-history of Lars is worth reading. It is a calm procession of pictures, without pretence, except the slight pretence of classical correctness. The first part, which reflects Norwegian manners in a way reminding us more or less of the exquisite stories of Bjornsen, tells how two swains of Ulvik, Lars the hunter and Per the fisher, quarrel for love of Brita, and at a public wrestling decide the question by a combat, fighting with knives, in Norse fashion, while hooked to each other at the belt. They strip,
First, the quiet of the great house and courtyard, the flower-pricked grass, the "still-faced babies"; then the sudden clash of the street-cries! "Your uncle's description of this house," writes the present Lord Lansdowne, in 1910, "might almost have been written yesterday, instead of in 1848.
He also seemed to recall the picture of a burning cabin, and of a slaughtered cow lying on the roadside. Still another picture seemed to flit before him that of a group of women and children alone within high log walls, and of a bewildered, heart-broken little boy being lifted by one of these women from a rude pallet where lay a dying mother and a still-faced, tiny babe.
In the spring, when the old people get the coughs which give them a few shakes and their lives drop in pieces like the ashes of a burned thread which have kept the threadlike shape until they were stirred, in the hot summer noons, when the strong man comes in from the fields, like the son of the Shunamite, crying, "My head, my head," in the dying autumn days, when youth and maiden lie fever-stricken in many a household, still-faced, dull-eyed, dark-flushed, dry-lipped, low-muttering in their daylight dreams, their fingers moving singly like those of slumbering harpers, in the dead winter, when the white plague of the North has caged its wasted victims, shuddering as they think of the frozen soil which must be quarried like rock to receive them, if their perpetual convalescence should happen to be interfered with by any untoward accident, at every season, the narrow sulky rolled round freighted with unmeasured burdens of joy and woe.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking