United States or Lebanon ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The people of those parts have little to do now-a-days, and must have had still less during the Pontificate of His Holiness Pope Clement XIV.; and we can imagine how all the windows of the unplastered houses, all the black and oozy doorways, must have been lined with heads of women and children; how the principal square of each town, where the horses were changed, must have been crowded with inquisitive townsfolk and peasants, whispering, as they hung about the carriages, that the great traveller was the young Queen of England going to meet her bridegroom; a thing to be remembered in such world-forgotten places as these, and which must have furnished the subject of conversation for months and years, till that Queen of England and her bridegroom had become part and parcel of the tales of the "Three Golden Oranges," of the "King of Portugal's Cowherd," of the "Wonderful Little Blue Bird," and such-like stories in the minds of the children of those Apennine cities.
And concerning this mystic Brotherhood of the Cross and Star, what treasures of wisdom they must have secreted in their chronicles through so many thousands of years! What a privilege it would be to explore such world-forgotten tracks of time! Yielding to a sudden impulse, Alwyn spoke his thought aloud: "Heliobas," he said, "tell me, could not I, too, become a member of your Fraternity?"
And as the lady of this realm she did honor to her father's guests sitting stately behind the beautiful silver service, below the portrait of the Company's greatest explorer, Sir George Simpson, dispensing crude fare in gracious manner, listening silently to the conversation, finally withdrawing at the last with a sweeping courtesy to play soft, melancholy, and world-forgotten airs on the old piano, brought over years before by the Lady Head, while the guests made merry with the mellow port and ripe Manila cigars which the Company supplied its servants.
Perhaps not; and yet when, a few years later, the Countess of Albany was already wont to say that her married life had been just such as befitted a woman who had gone to the altar on Good Friday, she must have remembered, and the remembrance must have seemed fraught with ill omen, that last day of her girlhood, travelling through the black deserted valleys of the March, through the world-forgotten mountain-towns with their hushed bells and black-draped churches and funereally strewn streets.
"You must wonder," he went on, after a little pause, "what brings me to use this world-forgotten spot as a workplace; why I come to a town where there are eight women to one man, to an island whose whole energy is not equal to that of the smallest city on the Continent. Have you heard of Raymond Lully? Yes?
Captain Bertram was not at all averse to the charms of a small flirtation. He was forced to remain for a few days in the remote little world-forgotten town of Northbury, and it occurred to him as he helped the Bells to lobster salad, and filled up Miss Matty's glass more than once with red currant wine, that Beatrice could solace him a good deal during his exile from a gayer life.
I could imagine for the moment that the whole of that house of life had marched out of the sacred East, alive and interlocked, like an army. Some Eastern nomad had found it solid and silent in the red circle of the desert. He had slept by it as by a world-forgotten pyramid; and been woke at midnight by the wings of stone and brass, the tramping of the tall pillars, the trumpets of the waterspouts.
If you have any doubts about it in your own mind, you may take my word for it had you loved her, you would not have parted from her. You would, if necessary, have carried her off from Paris, and continued to live with her in some world-forgotten spot, as you did at St. Valery.
They call it Bled-el-Adher nowadays, and this is the place to spend the evening. I was there yesterday, perhaps for the last time. It exhales a soporific, world-forgotten fragrance.
Word Of The Day