“ Ghitza looked about and saw what was at stake: the wealth and honour of his tribe and the wealth and honour of the village and the surrounding villages.
Then the Tartar came. He was tall and square. His trunk rested on short, stocky legs, and his face was black, ugly, and pock-marked. All shouting ceased. The men formed a wide ring around the two wrestlers. It was so quiet one could hear the slightest noise. Then the mayor spoke to the Tartars and pointed to the Danube; the inn was right on its shore.
"If your man is thrown, this very night you leave our shore, for the other side." ”

“ Mart Brenner's wife laid down the ladle with which she had been stirring the contents of a pot that was simmering on the big, black stove, and dragging her crippled foot behind her, she hobbled heavily to the door.
As she opened it a new horde of fog-wraiths blew in. The world was a gray, wet blanket. Not a light from the village below pierced the mist, and the lonely army of tall cedars on the black hill back of the house was hidden completely.
"Who's there?" Mrs. Brenner hailed. But her voice fell flat and muffled. Far off on the beach she could dimly hear the long wail of a fog-horn. ”

“ What we knew and were to each other had not only to do with our bodies. Men call me 'dead' but you know that I am not. Why do you not study and work and pray to learn what I am become, that you may turn to me, that I may reach to you?"
Mockwooders, dropping in at Heartholm for afternoon tea, began to accustom themselves to finding Mrs. Strang sitting near some flower-bed where John Berber worked, or going with him over his great books of specimens. The smirk the fashionable world reserves for anything not usual in its experience was less marked in this case than it might have been in others. ”

“ Soon some of us began to gather, as of old. Marvel of marvels, Withrow had not spoken in that crimson week of autumn. Without jealousy he had apparently left her to Habakkuk. It was a brief winter—for Kathleen Somers's body, a kind of spring. You could see her grow, from week to week: plump out and bloom more vividly. Then, in April, without a word, she left us—disappeared one morning, with no explicit word to servants.
Withrow once more—poor Withrow—shot forth, not like a runner, but like a hound on a fresh scent. He needed no time-tables. He leaped from the telephone to the train. ”

“ Claire René sat very still with her hands in her lap. Jacques was a wise man. He knew a great deal. All old people were wise; but such strange things made them happy, far-away things that they couldn't ever touch or see, things out in the big world that went round and round. She knew that Clément and Fernand and Alphonse were out in the big world, going round and round; but in her heart she saw them only in the forest, in the garden patch, by the hearth in the tiny house, asleep in their high white bed. ”

“ The endurance and skill, the inventiveness, the precision of science, the daring of human wits, the poetry and fire that go into the making of great buildings! We women walk in and out of them day after day, blindly—and this indifference is symbolical, I think, of the way we walk in and out of our men's lives.... I wish I could make you see that job of young Robert's so that you would feel in it what I do—the patience of men, the strain of the responsibility they carry night and day, the things life puts up to them, which they have to meet alone, the dogged endurance of them.... ”

“ Our people cried and begged him to hold on. The eyes of the Tartars shot fire, their white teeth showed from under their thick lips and they called on Achmed to crush the Giaour. Oh! it seemed that all was lost. All our wealth, the honour and respect Ghitza had won for us; the village's wealth and all. And all the maidens were to be taken away as slaves to the Tartars. One man said aloud so that Ghitza should hear:
"There will not be a pair of oxen in the whole village to plough with; not a horse to harrow with, and our maidens are pledged to the black sons of the devil." ”

“ It would have been easier for Mary Matheson in a city, for in a city there is always the blankness of the crowd. In a village there is no such blessed thing as a stranger, the membership committee of the only club is the doctor and the midwife, and all the houses are made of glass.
In a city public opinion is mighty, but devious. In a village, especially in an island village, it is as direct and violent as any "act of God" written down in a ship's insurance papers. A word carries far over the fences, and where it drops, like a swelling seed, a dozen words spring up. ”

“ The world was full of men and women like Luke and Kit. Some had given up great hopes because they were too good to tread others down in their quest. Some had quenched great talents because they were too fearsome or too weak or too lazy to feed their lamps with oil and keep them trimmed and alight. Some had stumbled through life darkly with no gifts of talent, without even appreciation of the talents of others or of the flowerlike beauties that star the meadows. ”

“ Drunkenness was the last thing people suspected of a hard-working man nowadays. He slipped his hand in his pocket. They were coming now—the fat women with the babies at home, their handkerchiefs still at their eyes. His hand slipped to his mouth. His jaws moved savagely. One thing was certain: out of to-day's stake he'd buy some decent-tasting soap. This awful stuff that he'd borrowed from the Island——
The stoutest woman paused; she screamed faintly as the dummy-chucker staggered, pitched forward, and fell at her short-vamped feet. ”

“ Perhaps three hundred years from now some other shrine would claim the pilgrims, the home perhaps of some American boy now groping through the amber mists of adolescence or some man as little revered by his own neighbors and rivals as the man Shakespeare was when he went back to Avon to send back to London his two plays a year to the theatres.
Being a practical man, which is a man who strives to make his visions palpable, Wixon thought of his own home town and the colony of boys that prospered there in the Middle West. ”

“ By RUPERT HUGHES From Collier's Weekly
A skiff went prowling along the Avon River in the unhurried English twilight that releases the sunset with reluctance and defers luxuriously the roll call of the stars.
The skiff floated low, for the man alone in it was heavy and he was in no greater haste than the northern night. Which was against the traditions, for he was an American, an American business man. ”

“ Grand'mère's fingers would smooth the sunny tangled hair, touch the freckled upturned nose; they would pause and tremble at the slightest brush from the eyelashes that fringed the deep, gray eyes.
Claire René would pile more logs on the fire and wonder what thoughts lay in grand'mère's mind; wonder whether she knew that they had so much more wood in the shed than they had food in the larder. She was clever about cooking the roots from the cellar. But grand'mère's coffee was weaker each day, and only once in a long while did Jacques bring milk. ”

“ The past with all its misfortunes is gone forever. Let us live in the present and contemplate a future full of bliss."
A quivering sigh of assent and relief went round the supper-table. But Fiammetta protested:
"I should not care to forget the past. It contained too much happiness. The hours at twilight, when I waited on the platform of the Castle of Foscone, and you clambered up the wall, are not for oblivion! Do you remember, Antonio, how you once brought with you a bunch of little damask roses, which you tossed up to me while clinging to the masonry? Those roses became my treasure. ”

“ The concept of a hotel in his native city of Chicago was a steel structure of many stories, brilliantly lighted and decorated, supplied with a lightning elevator service running through the polished marble halls which swooned in a tropical atmosphere of steam heat emanating from silvered radiators. So it was no wonder that the young man felt more at home in this inn in old London than he had ever felt in an American caravansary. ”

“ The excessive commercialisation of literature in the past decade is now turned against the very magazines which fostered it. The magazines which bought and sold fiction like soap are beginning to repent of it all. They have killed the goose that laid the golden eggs.
This fight for sincerity in the short story is a fight that is worth making. It is at the heart of all that for which I am striving. The quiet sincere man who has something to tell you should not be talked down by the noisemakers. He should have his hearing. He is real. ”

“ By FRANCES GILCHRIST WOOD From The Pictorial Review
The old mail-sled running between Haney and Le Beau, in the days when Dakota was still a Territory, was nearing the end of its hundred-mile route.
It was a desolate country in those days: geographers still described it as The Great American Desert, and in looks it certainly deserved the title. Never was there anything as lonesome as that endless stretch of snow reaching across the world until it cut into a cold gray sky, excepting the same desert burned to a brown tinder by the hot wind of Summer. ”

“ But those men had all, he reflected, been older than he. And yet, he recalled the words of his doctor:
"A man's as old as his arteries. You've been too long out here. Be sensible, Ayling.... Go home—take it easy—rest. You'll have a long time yet...."
Just a week later, to the day, Ayling stepped into a telephone-booth, looked up Mrs. Lonsdale's number, and telephoned. He had not counted upon loneliness.
At forty-five Bessie Lonsdale had encountered one of those universal experiences which invariably give us, as individuals, so strong a sense of surprise. ”

“ Jacques no longer brought even thin blue milk. There was no coffee in the cupboard, no sugar, no bread—only hateful roots of the garden.
Claire René no longer walked in the forest. Sometimes she would lie down on a mossy place and look up through the tall trees at the patches of blue sky overhead. She wondered whether the good God still kept His home above, whether He, too, were hungry, whether the Holy Mother had work to do when her back ached and her fingers wouldn't move and were thin and bony, like young dead birds that sometimes fell from nests. ”

“ I remembered that somewhere in the hills north of the city there was a dilapidated stronghold called the Castle of Manzecca. Behind those walls, in the confusion of the Middle Ages, Antonio's family had developed into a nest of rural tyrants. Those old steel-clad men of the Manzecca had become what were called "Signorotti"—lords of a height or two, swooping down to raid passing convoys, waging petty wars against the neighboring castles, and at times, like bantams, too arrogant to bear in mind the shortness of their spurs, defying even Florence. ”

“ At four o'clock a leaping fire in the drawing-room grate flickered cheerily against silver tea-things, against the sheen of newly dusted mahogany; books lay here and there, carelessly, a late illustrated review open as if some one had just put it down, and dressed in a soft gown of blue crêpe, Bessie Lonsdale received her guest. She was not an intimate friend, but a casual one whom she did not often see. A Mrs. Downey, who loved to talk of herself and of her own affairs. Bessie Lonsdale did not know why she had chosen her. ”

“ As he had laid out his seven-mile drive on a deer track leading to a forest spring, so had he spoken for his flowers the word, which, though it freed them from the prunes and prisms of a landscape gardener, held them, glorified vassals, to their original masters, sun and rain.
Strang and his love for untrammeled nature were hard pills for Mockwooders to swallow. Here was a man who, while he kept one on the alert, was to be deplored; who homesteaded squirrels, gave rabbits their own licentious ways, was whimsically tolerant of lichens, mushrooms, and vagabond vines. ”

“ The silence grew greater and greater. There were few seeds for Claire René to plant in her garden; there was little strength in her arms to work them. Weeds covered the flower patch of a year ago. A few straggling everlastings showed their heads above the tangle. Claire René had plenty of strength to uproot them angrily and throw them into the overgrown path.
The three wreaths were still on the shelf in the dark closet under the stair. Their colors were dimmed, like the hope in their maker's heart; their forms were shrunken, like the forms of Claire René and grand'mère and Jacques. ”

“ The Sylph rose and sank to the first long roll of the open sea.
"When we reach Malduna——" I began, but the words were only torture.
"I cannot—cannot go on. Take me back!—to that island. Let me live abandoned—or rather die——"
"Mrs. Joyce, I beg of you...."
The schooner rose and dipped again.
For what seemed an interminable time we paced the deck together while Lakalatcha flamed farther and farther astern. Her words came in fitful snatches as if spoken in a delirium, and at times she would pause and grip the rail to stare back, wild-eyed, at the receding island. ”

“ But silence was their portion, silence and the dark and an ache that had no voice.
Joel listened to Luke's elegy and groaned: "Gee!"
But he had an optimism like a powerful spring, and it struck back now with a whirr: "I'll tell you what, Luke. Just you wait till I'm rich, then I'll give you a job as vice president, and you can marry Kitty and live on Broadway, in Noo York."
"I've got over believin' in Sandy Claus," said Luke.
Joel saw little of him during this vacation and less during the next. Being by nature a hater of despair, he avoided Luke. ”

“ The silence, and the tension of all forms, continued even when we left the city behind us and found ourselves speeding northward along a country road.
"Northward. To the Castle of Manzecca, then?" I asked myself.
The rays from our lamps revealed the trees all bending toward the south. The wind pressed against our car, as if to hold us back from the revelation awaiting us ahead, in the midst of the black night, whence this interminable whistling moan pervaded nature. Rain dashed against the glass. Through the blurred windows the lights of farms appeared, to be instantly engulfed by darkness. ”

“ Bewildered Achmed lay stupefied and looked on. Tottering on his feet, in three jumps Ghitza was on the high point of the shore—a splash—and there was no more Ghitza. He was swallowed by the Danube. No Tartar had downed him!
And so our people had back their wealth, and the people of the village theirs. No honour was lost and the maidens remained in the village—only Maria did not. She followed her lover even as the people looked on. No one even attempted to stop her. ”

“ Before the building was done Joshua Kent had succeeded in making the owners meet part of the additional cost of the foundation, and Robert had developed an acumen that stood by him the rest of his life. But there was something for him in this job bigger than financial gain or loss. Week after week, as he overcame one difficulty after another, he was learning, learning, just as he had done at Weil & Street's. His hazel eyes grew keener, his face thinner. For the job began to develop every freak and whimsy possible to a growing building. ”

“ With a mighty effort Olga Brenner lifted her head so that her face, swollen beyond recognition, was turned toward her mother-in-law. Her almost sightless eyes fastened themselves on the old woman.
"Run!" she cried. "Run to the village!"
The mad woman, obedient to that commanding voice, flung open the door and lurched over the threshold and disappeared in the fog. It came to Mart that the woman running through the night with her wail of terror was the greatest danger he would know. Olga Brenner saw his look of sick terror. ”