United States or Romania ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The party must have been less numerous than by the romantic tradition or confused notation of my youth, and what I mainly remember of it beyond my sense of our being at once an attendant train to my aged and gentle and in general most unadventurous grandmother, and a chorus of curiosity and amusement roundabout the vivid Gussy, is our collective impression that State prisons were on the whole delightful places, vast, bright and breezy, with a gay, free circulation in corridors and on stairs, a pleasant prevalence of hot soup and fresh crusty rolls, in tins, of which visitors admiringly partook, and for the latter, in chance corners and on sunny landings, much interesting light brush of gentlemen remarkable but for gentlemanly crimes that is defalcations and malversations to striking and impressive amounts.
There he sat with all his books, a man so rich he never even went to his office, a man who had owned not only warehouses but hundreds of ships and had sent them to every land in the world! While, as for me, my grandfather was not even alive. I felt poor and small, and I did not like it. Besides, these unadventurous boys all put me down as "a queer kid."
Our clothes were for the most part unadventurous like our conversation, though I indeed wore a brown velveteen coat, a loose tie and a very old Inverness cape, discarded by my father twenty years before and preserved by my Sligo-born mother whose actions were unreasoning and habitual like the seasons.
It would have needed a photograph because photographs, besides flattening the features, also in some manner "compose" and distinguish them to reveal the likenesses in shape, in shadow, even in outline, which were momentarily obscured by the natural differences of colouring and expression. Emmy was less dark, more temperamentally unadventurous, stouter, and possessed of more colour.
It can only be the flexible talent of a young man that will evolve a new efficiency out of its obsolete strength. It is a pity that old men grow unfit for war, not only by their incapacity for new ideas, but by the peaceful and unadventurous tendencies that gradually possess themselves of the once turbulent disposition, which used to snuff the battle-smoke as its congenial atmosphere.
I felt as he strolled with me round my garden on the following morning that he was regarding my paltry, unadventurous life with a sincere pity, as the life of one who had stolen from the brisk encounters of wit and revelry to a quiet bedroom and a basin of gruel. And yet the curious thing was that I felt no kind of resentment about it at all.
Mark Twain has described the terms on which he and his father lived as a sort of armed neutrality. If at times this neutrality was broken and suffering ensued, the breaking and the suffering were always divided up with strict impartiality between them his father doing the breaking and he the suffering! Sam claimed to be a very backward, cautious, unadventurous boy.
I remember how, once in my life, I wasted untold energy trying to make over my dearest friends. There was Harriet, for example, dear, serious, practical Harriet. I used to be fretted by the way she was forever trying to clip my wing feathers I suppose to keep me close to the quiet and friendly and unadventurous roost!
Say," he leaned forward and whispered, after a look at his clerk which ought to have exterminated that unadventurous youth "say, is it true what they say, that you're doing this on a ten-thousand-dollar bet?" "Well," and Father thawed a little, "that's what they're all saying, but, confidentially, and don't let this go any further, it isn't as much as that. This is between you and I, now."
"Yours first," he said. So Robin told him. He had been ordained priest a month ago, at Châlons-sur-Marne.... The college was as full as it could hold.... They had had an unadventurous journey. Anthony put a question or two, and was answered. "And now," said Robin, "what of Derbyshire; and of the country; and of my father? And is it true that Ballard is taken?"
Word Of The Day