United States or French Polynesia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
But just at that instant Billy's aunt jumped to her feet, her eyes large with excitement, and pointed toward the open session door, where framed against the light stood Mark Carter, straight and tall facing the circle of men, and behind him, out in the dark, with only his swaggy old sweater shoulder and the visor of his floppy old cap showing around the door jamb lurked Billy. "There! There!"
Hours later, he called us to the living room and began to talk. And talk. And talk. I tried to understand how his words were affecting us. I thought in terms of computers. I decided that he had rebooted us with LSD and now, as we were coming down, he was downloading his wordy operating system to our unformatted, receptive minds. "He's formatting us like floppy disks!" I thought.
"Wait now, boy. Take it easy. I like you and all that, but let's not get carried away with ourselves." Hanlon scratched the puppy behind one of its floppy ears, and pressed it firmly but gently down so it was lying on his lap. "That's better. Just lie there and take it easy." A sudden thought brought a grin onto the young man's lips.
Tall, brown-faced boys, got up much like glorified Buttons, were sauntering about, holding sunshades over the heads of girls so young that they would have been in short frocks with their hair down their backs, in England. The girls were in white muslin or pale colours, with charming, floppy Leghorn hats trimmed with flowers; and they looked like the daintiest, prettiest of French dolls.
On returning from church, I threw my velvet cap into the water-butt, where, for all I know, it probably is still, and nothing would induce me to put on the velvet tunic or the floppy collars a second time. I bombarded my family with letters until I found myself equipped with a high hat and Eton jackets and collars such as the other boys wore.
To run down for it I didn't dare. There was no time. All at once my strained, yearning stare distinguished a white object floating within a yard of the ship's side. White on the black water. A phosphorescent flash passed under it. What was that thing?... I recognized my own floppy hat. It must have fallen off his head... and he didn't bother. Now I had what I wanted the saving mark for my eyes.
He rose at my entrance, flapping like a seal; I can use no other description. He flapped a plaid shawl over his right arm; he flapped a pair of pathetic black gloves; he flapped his clothes; I may say, without exaggeration, that he flapped his eyelids, as he rose. He was a bald-browed, white-haired, white-whiskered old clergyman, of a flappy and floppy type. He said: "I am so sorry.
How well I remember when I was little, the colossal effort of blowing up the dark red, floppy India rubber until it got brighter and brighter and more and more transparent, though it always stayed opaque enough to hold the promise of still greater bigness. And then the crucial moment when ambition demanded an extra puff and a catastrophe became ever more imminent.
She thought he was going to bellow at her: "I hear they want more!" The mere notion of it made her smile, and Alf imagined that she was still laughing at her own manoeuvre or at her impertinent jest. "What did you do it for?" he asked, coming to the table. "Cause it was all floppy. What did you think? Why, the girls all talk about me wearing it so long."
I know you had hard luck, suddenly finding yourself without money and all that, but, good heavens, everybody else in the world who has ever done anything has been broke at one time or another. It's part of the fun. You'll never get anywhere by letting yourself be picked up by the family like... like a floppy Newfoundland puppy and dumped down in any old place that happens to suit them.
Word Of The Day