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As she bends over the stream there comes without the slightest warning the lightning swish of a scaly tail, a scream, the crunch of monster jaws, a widening eddy, a scarlet stain overspreading the surface of the water and there is one less inhabitant of Borneo.

It is that dragon of lawless power which was overspreading, in his time, all the common human affairs, and infolding in its gaudy, baleful wings all the life of men, it is that which takes from the first the speculative eye of this new speculator, this founder of the science of things, and not of words instead of them.

November 2d. A young Frenchman enters, of gentlemanly aspect, with a grayish cloak or paletot overspreading his upper person, and a handsome and well-made pair of black trousers and well-fitting boots below. On sitting down, he does not throw off nor at all disturb the cloak.

"My family, madam, are certainly respectable," interrupted George Douglas, a deep flush overspreading his face. He was indignant at her presuming to question his respectability, Madam Conway thought, and so she hastened to appease him by saying: "Certainly, I have no doubt of it. There are marks by which I can always tell."

"We were told here," he says, "that the road farther on was beset with Turcomans, a people supposed to be descended from the Nomades Scythæ: or Shepherd Scythians; busied, as of old, in breeding and nurturing cattle, and leading, as then, an unsettled life; not forming villages and towns with stable habitations, but flitting from place to place, as the season and their convenience directs; choosing their stations, and overspreading without control the vast neglected pastures of this desert empire.... We set out, and ... soon after came to a wild country covered with thickets, and with the black booths of the Turcomans, spreading on every side, innumerable, with flocks and herds and horses and poultry feeding round them."

"Don't worry, Alec, you've got a snap, believe me," chuckled Stallings; and then unable to longer resist a certain alluring limb which he had been eying longingly for some little time, he bolted up the trunk of the overspreading tree, to hang by his toes, and swing daringly to and fro as some of them had seen a yellow-headed, green-bodied poll-parrot do from his perch.

From the ship's bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive; hammers, bits of plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically retained in their hands, just as they had darted from their various employments; all their enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which from side to side strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad band of overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed.

On entering the hut, in response to the cry of "Come in" which followed their knock on the framework of the portal, the visitors at once found themselves face to face with the four ladies, who had risen to their feet to meet them; the sable attendants crouching at the rear end of the apartment with a grin of sympathetic curiosity overspreading their shining visages.

The men had got the canvas clewed up, and were aloft furling it when Miss Trevor emerged through the companion-way; and Leslie, with a word of greeting, hastened to arrange a deck-chair for her accommodation on the lee side of the deck, within the shadow of the main trysail; for although there was a slight veil of thin, streaky cloud overspreading the sky, the sun shone through it with an ardour that made shelter of some sort from it very acceptable, especially to a girl who might be supposed to set some value upon her complexion.

The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad white forehead, beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together; as head on, he came churning his tail among the boats; and once more flailed them apart; spilling out the irons and lances from the two mates' boats, and dashing in one side of the upper part of their bows, but leaving Ahab's almost without a scar.