Sir H. H. Bashford

“ It was the first time that Gwendolen had been on the sea, and for two or three days she was rather sea-sick. But after that she began to enjoy the voyage and the smell of the spray and the sight of the waves. It was lovely weather, and as they drew near the equator a great yellow moon shone on them all night. It was so hot that she hardly wore any clothes, and used to go barefooted just like the sailors; and she grew so brown and so graceful that she scarcely looked like the same girl. As for her tummy—well, there was no marzipan on board, and she soon began to lose all her love for it. ”

“ Still too far to be raked, her decks were being excavated by half-ton shells dropping from the sky. In the narrow spaces below, apart from the shattering shell fragments, the enormous air-displacement wrought destruction and death. Iron plates were moulded by it as if they had been wax, and men tossed like apples and crushed to pulp against them. Later, as the range narrowed, the Blücher became more helpless, and, as she came under the full force of the British broadside fire, she staggered at each salvo, scarcely recovering before another hurled her again on her side. ”

“ You have re-created for me the right atmosphere. Belief is life, Tom, in a great many more senses than one. Hang on to that like a limpet, and the peace of heart that means strength of hand will never leave you. But it's because of the second of these things that I want you to hesitate just a little longer before you commit yourself to the proposition in your letter.
To be a lay evangelist, something like the gentleman whose services you attended, may be as high and noble a life as any that the world has to offer you. ”

“ Longingly they thought then of Uncle Joe's and of plates of hot muffins before the fire, and even more longingly of supper at home, with bowls of steaming bread and milk. But every field seemed endlesser than the last, and the snow grew deeper and ever more deep; and the night closed down upon them like a lid, and their feet felt heavier than ten-pound weights.
"I believe we're lost," said Cuthbert, but Doris didn't seem to hear, and so they toiled on with sinking hearts, and then at last, just as they were almost spent, they suddenly knocked their knees against a little gate. ”

“ From her invalid chair, in the shade, Lady Chantrey looked out over the lawn, sunny and fragrant, a sweet foreground to the wide hills beyond.
She turned to the poet with something like a sigh.
"I wonder why it is that we fortunate ones are so few," she said. "Why we few should be allowed to drown ourselves in all this beauty, that so many can only dream about. It would almost seem a waste of earth's good things." ”

“ Life, human life, trivial, cheery, part and parcel of the ages, has not here been sacrificed to any merely scenic splendour; while beneath it, if still flowing through it, lies the fierce and jovial memory of Briton and Saxon and Dane, their frames long since a part of this quiet crucible, and all but the heroic of their memories—a peaceable reflection—distilled into oblivion.
Yes, one might do a great deal worse, I think, than retire to Streatley. At any rate that is Uncle Jacob's opinion, and he has been there a year. ”

“ Beneath the Dover Barrage, the North Sea minefields, and the Straits of Otranto lay their dead submarines. Trapped by Q ships, rammed by destroyers, sunk by armed merchantmen, they had lost scores of others—more than two hundred in all had been put out of action by the Allied navies—while the spirit of admiralty that they had challenged, and the fringe of whose code they had been unable to grasp, had so ordered the ways of the world's free peoples that, even on land, they were reeling before them. ”

“ For, like yourself, it is always the humanity that these things frame that captures me first and holds me longest. And I believe I would exchange any merely physical panorama in the world for a new vista of the human soul. So greatly indeed is this preference growing in me that, keenly as I love it, I find my English landscape already rearranging itself in my memory. ”

“ Sometimes people have been frozen close to a house, but in a little while they saw a great dark shadow; and then to their joy they found themselves in front of a door, with a gleam of light shining through the letter-box. For a long time they knocked, but nobody came; and several times they shouted through the letter-box. But still nobody came, and then from behind the house they heard the barking of a dog.
Doris gripped Cuthbert's arm.
"It's old Mother Hubbard's," she said. "That's her dog. I know it's bark." ”

“ Our journey through the village was slow, for Tommy's friends were numerous, and spread out over the whole social scale, from the hand-to-mouth daysman to the unctuous chemist and stationer. They included the vicar, leaning over his garden gate, in his shirt-sleeves, surrounded by implements of horticulture, and also, I regret to say, the pot-boy of the Flaming Lion—a graceless young scamp, with poacher written in every lineament of his being. ”

“ Racing southward at thirty miles an hour were fourteen of the most powerful vessels in the world, belching half-ton shells in giant parabolas covering eight to a dozen miles of sea; while, in between them, and under the arch of their fire, were some thirty of the latest destroyers fighting a separate battle, as it were, at close quarters and with the greatest ferocity. On our own side, an 18,000-ton battle-cruiser had already been lost with most of her crew, while the enemy's third of the line was seen to be on fire in the mists now beginning to gather in the northeast. ”

“ Down in the cabin, Captain Jeremy was talking business with two of the fruit-merchants—dark-skinned men in white linen suits, smoking pale-coloured long cigars. But Marian and Gwendolen stayed up on deck, watching the night coming down like a shutter, and the lamps beginning to shine in the crooked streets and behind the windows of the houses. Now that it was cooler the people were taking the air, and gaily-dressed women sauntered up and down; and in front of a cafe, where there were a lot of little tables, some men were singing and playing guitars. ”

“ At that time the Leipzig and Nürnberg were well in view, with the Dresden almost out of sight on the horizon—the Leipzig on the starboard bow, nearer at hand, and being engaged by the Glasgow, and a moment afterward by the Cornwall, and the Nürnberg away to port and considerably more distant. Then came the order to pursue the latter, the Leipzig being given a salvo or two in passing; and it was then that there began the race that was destined to become traditional in every engine-room of the navy. With no coal to spare, everything combustible was crammed into her long-suffering furnaces. ”

“ I have just encountered one of those strange half-accidents that crop up like rocks in the quiet stream of one's everyday life just where a rock is the least likely to be. You turn the bend from Tuesday into Wednesday, and hey presto, before you know what's happened, your little canoe has been shot out of the main current into some unsuspected channel, whence it emerges presently as from a waking dream.
Last week as I went into the club between an afternoon at the hospital and two evening visits in Kensington, I met Bettany, of whom you may perhaps have heard me speak. ”

“ I merely protest against the ruling spirit of destruction which our country worships so deplorably. You may go."
And all this while Tommy stood bare-headed on the lawn, filling his lungs with the morning's sweetness, and feeling the grip of its appeal in his heart and blood and limbs. A sturdy little figure he was, clad in a short jacket and attenuated flannel knickerbockers which left his brown knees bare above his stockings.
The blood in his round cheeks shone red beneath the tan, and there were some freckles at the bridge of his nose. ”

“ In Lord Kitchener there had come to the War Office the foremost soldier of the Empire, the man who had been recalled by an irresistible popular appeal from the governorship of Egypt, in whose name the new armies, voluntarily recruited from every social rank, had outrun equipment, ammunition, even places to be lodged in—a man who already, in his sixty-fourth year, had become an almost legendary figure, the liberator of the Sudan, Roberts' successor in South Africa, the administrator of India and Egypt, omnivorous of work, relentless, silent, and the public's beau-ideal of personal efficiency. ”

“ Then it grew louder, until it sounded like thunder and sea-waves shattering on the beach; and then it grew softer again, like leaves rustling, and crickets chirping in the grass.
Before the stout lady had sung half the first verse, Doris could hardly stand still enough to play the flute. She could scarcely believe that it was possible for anybody in the world to feel so happy. She saw the policeman running toward them, and the postmen, and the man from the water-cart; and she saw the windows above the shops in the market-place thrown up, and people looking out. ”

“ Times have changed, but even then it was not the woman of affairs, whose education, ample or the reverse, had been salted by the winds of action—it was not the queens and the stateswomen at the one pole, or the workers in the fields at the other, but the secluded gentlewomen between them, who fainted daily, and agonised over beetles and mice. Requiescant in pace, for their day is no more, and their busier daughters have no longer time to write pathetic little self-revelations in unventilated boudoirs, or collapse at a knock upon the door. ”

“ O' Love along the upland road, an' God beyond the crest.
An' this should be my matin song—magic o' the down,
Mystery, an' majesty, an' wistfulness, an' hope,
I would sing the lay
O' Destiny an' Day,
As morning mounts the hill with me, an' summer storms the slope.
But this would be my vesper song—best at last is Peace
Whispered where the valleys lie, all deep in dying gold,
Stealing through the gloam
To speed the shepherd home
With one last dreamy echo o' the music in the fold. ”