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"I'm going to holler awful, and make you sit up and tell me about that little boy that ate the giant, and Cinderella, how she lived in the stove-pipe, and that man that builded his house out of a bungle of straws: and well, there's some more, but I don't remember 'em just now, you know." "O Moppet!" "I am," glared Moppet over his mug. "You made me put on a clean collar.
From the stone bridges I looked down on the river; the gritty dust, the straws that lie on the bridges, flew up and whirled round with every gust from the flowing tide; gritty dust that settles in the nostrils and on the lips, the very residuum of all that is repulsive in the greatest city of the world.
I heard Seward's oration at Plymouth in 1855, a worthy effort which may be read in his works, but I do better here to pick up only the straws, not meddling with the heavy-garnered wheat. He spoke in the pulpit of my grandfather, who at the time had been for nearly sixty years minister of the old Pilgrim parish.
But whilst we look with pain at his desperate and laborious trifling, whilst we are apprehensive that he will break his back in stooping to pick up chaff and straws, he recovers himself at an elastic bound, and with a broadcast swing of his arm he squanders over his Indian field a sum far greater than the clear produce of the whole hereditary revenue of the kingdom of Ireland.
So the worn-out and half-famished wife did not care three straws for the dying husband, whom a year or two ago she had vowed to love and cherish in sickness and in health. But still she seemed to care, for she moaned, and pined, and wept, as the man's breath grew fainter and fainter. "Ah, Jean!" said she, sobbing, "what will become of me, a poor lone widow, with nobody to work for my bread?"
Well, up I came again, and caught the brim of my beaver-hat though I have heard that drowning men catch at straws: I floated, and hoped to escape by hook or by crook; and, luckily, just then, I felt myself suddenly jerked by the waistband of my whites, and found myself hauled up in the air at the end of a boat-hook, to the sound of "Yeho! yeho! yehoi! yehoi!" and so I was dragged aboard.
Vere, according to Maurice's orders, then opened with his artillery against the place, which soon capitulated in great panic and confusion. The captain demanded the honours of war. Vere told him in reply that the honours of war were halters for the garrison who had dared to defend such a hovel against artillery. The twenty-six were accordingly ordered to draw black and white straws.
She hadn't cared two straws whether he accepted it or not, only did not want to be too markedly indifferent. Now she took it up and still read it through uncomprehendingly, her thoughts absent with the fate of Miss Cavell. "Well! what is all the fuss about? I still see nothing in it. It is just simply the ordinary sentimental flip-flap that a French versifier can turn out by the yard."
"I'll go," said the other two at the same time, though with a certain air of "But I hope I don't have to, all the same." "You kin have the honour, Yan," said the Woodpecker, with evident relief. "Of course, I'd like the chance but but I don't want to push ahead of you you're the oldest; that wouldn't be square," was the reply. "Guess we'd better draw straws for it."
Yet the sad fact remains that the transforming power of Christianity was practically helpless before the surging floods of vice and superstition. The noble struggles of a few saints were as straws in a hurricane. The church had all she could do to save herself.
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