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While other nations were drawn into this wide-sweeping whirlpool, we sat quiet and unmoved upon our own shores. While the flower of their numerous armies was wasted by disease or perished by hundreds of thousands upon the battlefield, the youth of this favored land were permitted to enjoy the blessings of peace beneath the paternal roof.

Scarlet, woolen bands and tassels adorned their broad foreheads and wide-sweeping, black-tipped horns, and here and there a scarlet drop their flanks, where the goad had pricked them too shrewdly. And upon it all the unrelenting southern sun looked down, and Helen de Vallorbes' unrelenting eyes looked forth. One of those quick realisations of the inexhaustible excitement of living came to her.

The richest possible sweep of country was spread out at their feet like a huge map, bathed in a glow of yellow sunshine. Lakes and streams, crags and rocks, sward, and swamp, and plain undulating and abrupt, barren and verdant all were there, and could be embraced in a single wide-sweeping glance. It seemed, to the entranced travellers, like the very garden of Eden.

No leader of slave-hunters can come near him for bold and wide-sweeping raids, the terror and unexpectedness of which, together with the complete and ruthless fixity of purpose wherewith the objects of them, however strong, however alert, are struck and promptly subjugated, have gained for him among his followers and allies the sobriquet of El Khanac, "The Strangler."

It is a chalk river, clear as a chalk river always is if unpolluted; the downs are chalk, and though they are wide-sweeping and treeless, save for clusters of beech here and there on the heights, the dale with its water, meadows, cattle, and dense woods, so different from the uplands above them, is in peculiar and lovely harmony with them. One day she contrived to reach Stonehenge.

There is no institution which better reveals the character of the French Emperor, with its singular combination of greatness and littleness, of wide-sweeping aims with official pedantry.

In their massed hundreds, the savages dropped where they stood, life rived away by the torturing ultra-violet, burned away by the blast of pure heat, or consumed by the conflagrations that raged instantly wherever that wide-sweeping fan encountered combustible material. In the face of power supernatural they lost all thought of attack or of conquest, and sought only and madly to escape.