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Updated: June 14, 2025
She would have excluded milk, as bilious, and would have forbidden sugar, as a creator of acidity; and then, when the little victim was about one and a half, she would have seated it before the most dry-as-dust edition of the alphabet, and driven it triumphantly upon the first stage on the high-road to Kings and Chronicles.
He remembered his early efforts to imitate with chalk or charcoal the woodcuts of birds or foliage happily discovered on the title-pages of dry-as-dust Hebrew books; how he used to steal into the unoccupied, unfurnished manor-house and copy the figures on the tapestries, standing in midwinter, half-frozen, the paper in one hand, the pencil in the other; and how, when these artistic enthusiasms were sternly if admiringly checked by a father intent on siring a Rabbi, he relieved the dreary dialectics of the Talmud so tedious to a child uninterested in divorce laws or the number of white hairs permissible in a red cow by surreptitious nocturnal perusal of a precious store of Hebrew scientific and historical works discovered in an old cupboard in his father's study.
"But they'll know that Jim Robinson and Jerry Benham are the same." Jerry winked an eye and laid a finger along his nose. "No, they won't, old Dry-as-dust, for the very simple reason that he isn't." "I don't understand." "Well, you see, I'm Jim Robinson and you are Jerry Benham." "I!" I gasped. "Precisely.
So glorious is the flight of the seagull that it tempts us to fling aside the dry-as-dust theories of mechanism of flexed wings, coefficient of air resistance, and all the abracadabra of the mathematical biologist, and just to give thanks for a sight so inspiring as that of gulls ringing high in the eye of the wind over hissing combers that break on sloping beaches or around jagged rocks.
He was conscious of a peculiar pleasure in sitting there and thinking of those few hours which already were becoming to assume a definite importance in his mind a place curiously apart from those dry-as-dust images which had become the gods of his prosaic life.
He began reading Jomini, Preuss, the king's own Memoirs and Despatches, and groaned at the mountains through which he had to dig. "Prussian Friedrich and the Pelion laid on Ossa of Prussian dry-as-dust lay crushing me with the continual question, Dare I try it? Dare I not?"
"It has been for long?" "For years." "And for the sake of your principles," she went on, almost angrily, "your stupid, canonical and dry-as-dust little principles, you've let your life shrivel up." "I can't help it," he answered. "What would you have me do? Stand in the market place and shout my needs?" She clung to his arm. "You dear thing!" she said. "You're a great baby!"
"Old Dry-as-dust, I will." "A promise? You've never broken one, Jerry." "A promise, Roger. I I think I'm getting a little glimmering of sense. A promise. I'll keep it." "Thank God, for that," I said, in so fervent a tone that the boy smiled at me. "Good old Roger! You're a brick," he said. "Friendship, after all, is the greatest thing in the world."
He invited me to join him and when I refused seemed to find amusement in twitting me about my abstemious habits. "Come along now, just a nip of brandy, Roger. 'Twill make your blood flow a bit faster. No? Why not, old Dry-as-dust? Conscientious scruples? A dram is as good as three scruples. Come along, just a taste." "Brandy was made for old dotards and young idiots. I'm neither."
It was he who made the words croakery, dry-as-dust, and grumbly, and he introduced also the Scottish word feckless, which describes a person who is a terribly bad manager, careless and disorderly in his affairs, the sort of person whom Carlyle so much despised. The great writers of the present time seem to be unwilling to make new words.
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