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"If Major Carrington would drop that heavy cloak, he would find it more comfortable." The man recoiled. "You know me!" he cried incredulously. "I know the Carrington arms and motto. Tenax et Fidelis, is it not? You should not wear your signet ring when you go a-plotting." The Surveyor-General of the Colony dropped his cloak, and springing forward seized Landless by the shoulders.
"Then you shouldn't keep ostriches," retorted Sergeant Archelaus, as he gained the topmost step and, after a fearful glance behind him, sank against a pilaster and mopped his brow. "Take care of that urn!" cried the Lord Proprietor, in a warning voice. "It contains a Phormium tenax that I wouldn't lose on any account." "A what?" "A New Zealand Flax.... The ostriches chased you, did they?"
"The Tenax, señor," Oliva answered with a defiant smile. Then Dick turned to the others with a gesture which implied that there was no more to be said, and quietly sat down. Tenax was not the brand that Fuller used, and its different properties would have appeared in the tests. The sub-contractor had betrayed himself by the lie, and his accomplice looked at him with disgust.
The distinctive marks which characterise it as not English are the occasional Ti palms, which have a very tropical appearance, and the luxuriance of the Phormium tenax. If you strip a shred of this leaf not thicker than an ordinary piece of string, you will find it hard work to break it, if you succeed in doing so at all without cutting your finger.
It was the hour of nones, and the strains of the hymn of St. Ambrose, "Rerum Deus tenax vigor," were pealing from the Benedictines in the choir: which has been thus paraphrased: "O strength and stay, upholding all creation: Who ever dost Thyself unmoved abide, Yet, day by day, the light, in due gradation, From hour to hour, through all its changes guide.
On the crumbling, rotten earth the New Zealand flax, the Phormium tenax, loves to grow, and to its long, ribbon-like leaves the eel-fishers fastened their lines securely, baiting each alternate hook with mutton and worms.
Loaded from his first step with discouragements, that soon appalled every other of the original co-partners in the purchase of Nashaway from Showanon, Prescott alone, tenax propositi, held to his purpose, and death found him at his post. His grave is in the old "burial field" at Lancaster, yet not ten citizens can point it out.
Virgil's description of fame, that reaches from earth to the stars, tam ficti pravique tenax, to carry lies and knavery, will serve astrologers without any sensible variation. He is a fortune-seller, a retailer of destiny, and petty chapman to the planets.
I remarked, as they were working, how strong and pliant these strips seemed, and, examining them closely, I found they were composed of long fibres, or filaments, which made me suspect it to be Phormium tenax, or New Zealand flax, a most important discovery to us, and which, when I communicated it to my wife, almost overwhelmed her with joy.
The plant that makes this leaf is so like the ubiquitous New Zealand Phormium tenax, or flax, as it is there called, that I shall speak of it as flax in future, as indeed I have already done without explanation on an earlier page; for this plant grows on both sides of the great range.
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