Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 13, 2025
"But let me say," wrote Carleton, "if they were once brought into close contact with all the dreadful realities of war, if they were obliged to stand the chances of getting their heads knocked off, or blown to atoms by an unexpected shell, or bored through with a minie ball, to stand their chances of being captured by the enemy, to live on bread and water, and little of it, as all of the correspondents have been obliged to do the past week, to sleep on the ground, or on a sack of corn, or in a barn, with the wind blowing a gale, and the snow whirling in drifts, and the thermometer shrunk to zero, and then, after the battle is over and the field won, to walk among the dying and the dead, to behold all the ghastly sights of trunkless heads and headless trunks, to see the human form mutilated, disfigured, torn, and mangled by shot and shell, to step in pools of blood, to hear all around sighs, groans, imprecations, and prayers from dying men, they would be content to let others become historians of the war.
And from midst of them peered a trunkless skull, and on the skull was a mitre, and from the yawning jaws a voice came hissing, as a serpent's hiss, 'Harold, the scorner, thou art ours! Then, as from the buzz of an army, came voices multitudinous, 'Thou art ours! I sought to rise, and behold my limbs were bound, and the gyves were fine and frail, as the web of the gossamer, and they weighed on me like chains of iron.
But the head was pleased by Manuel's services, because Misery loves company: and the two used to have long friendly talks together when Manuel's services and Misery's work for that day were over. "And how came you, sir, to be thus housed in a trunkless head?" asked Manuel, one time.
So at last he fell asleep, and dreamed that he saw his mother's trunkless face dripping gore and frowning on him, dreamed that he heard her say: "Goest thou to the scene of my execution only to fawn upon my murderer?" Then a nightmare of horrors, of scaffolds and executioners and grinning mobs and agonized faces, came on him, dark, confused, and indistinct.
"All this is very true," answered the beautiful cat; "but, prince, I am not fond of talking, and least of all do I like compliments; let us therefore sit down to supper." The trunkless hands then placed the dishes on the table, and the prince and white cat seated themselves at it. The first dish was a pie made of young pigeons, and the next was a fricassee of the fattest mice.
Upon that basis you will soon build quartettes and symphonies. What is the good of rushing ahead? The pyramids were not begun at the top. Your symphonies at present are trunkless heads, ideas without any stuffing. Oh, you fair spirits, become incarnate! There must be generations of musicians patiently and joyously and piously living in brotherhood with these people.
"No," interposes my good genius again. "Men are always saying that a woman never goes when she engages to go. She is always a train later or a train earlier, and you can't meet her." Pliant to the last touch I say aloud, "No, I must go in this train"; and so I go trunkless and crest-fallen to meet Halicarnassus.
Observe the absence of a trunk and the enlarged front tooth in the upper jaw, which is converted in later members of the elephant-stock or line of descent into the great tusk. We now know the complete series of steps connecting elephants with ordinary trunkless, tuskless mammals.
Audrey had met Madame Piriac by sheer hazard in a corset shop in the Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin. The fugitive from justice had been obliged, in the matter of wardrobe, to begin life again on her arrival trunkless in Paris, and the business of doing so was not disagreeable. Madame Piriac had greeted her with most affectionate warmth.
Of course I was not for an instant deceived by all this: I knew that under it all lay a particularly forbidding and inhospitable expanse of sagebrush and cactus, peopled with nothing more nearly akin to me than prairie dogs, ground owls and jackass rabbits that with these exceptions the desert was as desolate as the environment of Ozymandias' "vast and trunkless legs of stone."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking