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Many of the seamen employed in the Newfoundland trade of Poole, gaining the shore at Chapman's Pool or Lulworth, whiled away their stolen leisure either in the clay-pits of the Isle of Purbeck, where they defied intrusion by posting armed sentries at every point of access to their stronghold, or their favourite haunt on Portland Island, which the number and ill-repute of the labourers employed in its stone quarries rendered well-nigh impregnable.
It was he who helped the doctor to carry her out into the garden on the great day when she was first allowed to go. Peter, too, whiled away many an hour for the invalid with his stories and old legends. No father could have been more devoted than Dr. Hunter was to his niece during this time.
He had not been at home since he entered the school, having undertaken to do in three years the work which usually required four. He wrote frequently, however, and Doctor Dexter invariably went to the post-office himself on the days Ralph's letters were expected. He had the entire correspondence on file and whiled away many a lonely evening by reading and re-reading the breezy epistles.
The door to the parlour was closed although the lodger had left town for the holidays, and so nothing but the living-room remained. There Keith whiled away the long hours in vain speculation on the contents of the mysterious package. He tried to recall what things he had wished for during the year. He felt sure that nothing of the kind could be in the package.
The period of convalescence was to be an exceedingly trying one for the invalid. At first he was kept in-doors, and the hours were whiled away by playing cards. But Monty considered "bridge" the "pons asinorum," and preferred to play piquet with Peggy. It was one of these games that the girl interrupted with a question that had troubled her for many days.
In company with a friend, who was interested in a Ural mining concern, he had made a trip across Eastern Europe at a moment when the great Russian railway strike was developing from a threat to a reality; its outbreak caught him on the return journey, somewhere on the further side of Perm, and it was while waiting for a couple of days at a wayside station in a state of suspended locomotion that he made the acquaintance of a dealer in harness and metalware, who profitably whiled away the tedium of the long halt by initiating his English travelling companion in a fragmentary system of folk-lore that he had picked up from Trans-Baikal traders and natives.
If I had thus employed the hours and half-hours which I have whiled away in putting off something that must needs be done at last, "My Conscience!" I should have had a journal with a witness. Sophia and Lockhart came to Edinburgh to-day and dined with us, meeting Hector Macdonald Buchanan, his lady, and Missie, James Skene and his lady, Lockhart's friend Cay, etc.
It results from this that when the neophyte handles a real sword, and defends his life upon the turf, the ground has a new feeling; its elasticity or even its slipperiness discomposes him, and sets him at a disadvantage." He agreed with me, whilst Andrea expressed a wish to try the turf. Foils were brought, and we whiled away best part of an half-hour.
There was he of Scanno dead, I doubt not, by this time that simple-hearted venerable with whom I whiled away the long evenings at the shrine of Sant' Egidio, gazing over the placid lake below, or up stream, at the dusky houses of Scanno theatrically ranged against their hill-side.
We rested at a police- station always a pleasant sight in Trinidad, for the sake of the stalwart soldier-like brown policemen and their buxom wives, and neat houses and gardens a focus of discipline and civilisation amid what would otherwise relapse too soon into anarchy and barbarism; we whiled away the time by inspecting the ward police reports, which were kept as neatly, and worded as well, as they would have been in England; and then rolled comfortably in the carriage down to Port of Spain, tired and happy, after three such days as had made old blood and old brains young again.
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