Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 10, 2025
The tables and chairs were put away in rows, like figures in a sum; fires were so rarely lighted in the rooms of ceremony, that they felt like wells, and a visitor represented the bucket; the dining-room seemed the last place in the world where any eating or drinking was likely to occur; there was no sound through all the house but the ticking of a great clock in the hall, which made itself audible in the very garrets; and sometimes a dull cooing of young gentlemen at their lessons, like the murmurings of an assemblage of melancholy pigeons.
He had heard it a dozen times since supper and paid no attention to it, but this time it was followed by a voice at the detachment office that hit him like an electrical shock. Then, a moment later, came low laughter. It was a woman who laughed. He stood up. He heard the detachment office door close, and silence followed. The watch in his hand seemed ticking off the seconds with frantic noise.
For several moments no one spoke, nor moved, nor listened carefully; but the fall of the poor lieutenant's death-drops, like the ticking of a clock, went on. Until an old tar, who had seen a sight of battles, crooked his legs across a thwart, and propped up the limp head upon his doubled knee.
The ticking parcel drew the discreet attention of the doctor. The machine was one guaranteed to go in any position, and was much more difficult to stop than to start. "It's only an alarm," said Edwin, not without self-consciousness. The doctor went, tripping neatly and optimistically, off towards his own breakfast. He got up earlier than his horse.
He had been swept, he thought, into a movement where centuries were but the fretful ticking of seconds. "Outside death," he said fantastically, unconsciously aloud. A remarkable sentence recurred to him, the most profound, he told himself, ever written: "Before he was I am."
There were first editions of rare books, illuminated missals, dinner services of silver and gold, Dresden and Sèvres, and even Royal Worcester; splendid crystal cases of spoons and jewellery; watches old and new; weapons of many countries, and an astonishing array of clocks, all ticking, and pointing to different hours.
We hum a tune and whistle to hurry time, but the indicating fingers of the tediously ticking clock seems stationary, and time waits for fair weather. The ladies love their chambers, and sleeping away the laggard hours, do not feel the oppression of a slow, continuous, lazy rain. The morning has well-nigh passed, and the drawing-room is still untenanted.
I heard the solemn ticking of the clock on the mantel behind me; I heard Mary laughing softly in her retreat beyond the table; I heard Luther, now bending over his book, mumbling to himself a few words of the text. "It is about the faymine in Injy," he said at last, holding his place on the page with a long, thin forefinger, and looking up at me. "There are three volumes, and this is the second.
All was so still that the ticking of the old clock upon a bracket seemed to grow into an emphatic beat upon my ear quickened with nervous pain; but I sat down and was soon immersed in my accustomed drudgery of figures, so that, when I had taken out sundry balances, and checked the totals with a sum of money in gold and silver that lay upon the table in a leather bag, I had ceased to note how the night wore on; and after tying up the cash and placing it inside the secretaire, of which I turned the key, I sat down before the fire in a high-backed old leather chair and began to think, or dream, no matter which.
His mind was strangely vacant, but even in the darkness and the silence he found a thousand things in which to take a leaden interest: as the swaying of the window-curtains where a slight draught caught them; the faintly-seen progress of the rain-drops down the window-pane; the wet glints of light where the street gas-lamp dimly irradiated the windows and the houses on the opposite side of the way; a ticking insect in the wall-paper; sounds of night traffic in the great thoroughfare a quarter of a mile off; the squashing tramp of a policeman on his rounds; the moaning voices of wind and rain; the very beating of his own pulses in his head; the very stupor of his own intelligence.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking