Various

“ When Henry said "Percival Thorne is an uncommonly lucky fellow," she colored, but only that transient flush betrayed her, for she answered readily: "Why, Mr. Hardwicke, what a dreadful thing to say to me! I hope you don't have second-sight or anything horrible of that sort?"
"Second-sight!" Henry repeated doubtfully, looking down at a little dangling eye-glass: "what's that?"
"Oh, you must know. Isn't it second-sight when you can tell if people are going to die? You see them in their winding-sheets, and they are low down if it will only be rather soon. ”

“ It was not without serious misgivings that we took our places in the great lumbering vehicle which travels twice a week between Batna and the oasis. Nothing but a heavy, strongly-built conveyance could stand the jolting of such a journey; and in order to accomplish it at all within the day it is necessary to start between two and three o'clock in the morning. Now, if there is one thing more than another likely to damp one's enthusiasm, it is turning out at such an untimely hour. We all felt this as we wended our way through the cold, dark streets to the diligence-office ”

“ He smiled and shook his head. "You have lost a great deal," he returned with unwonted tenderness: "you need much happiness, much private, individual contentment, to enable you to bear the troubles that have come upon you. Georgy was in a measure concerned in causing them: she ought to make full atonement for all the harm she has done. Ever since you came back I have felt that if I could do you any good I would cut off my right hand to serve you. At last I see a way. If you wish it, Floyd, the dearest wish of your heart may come to pass." ”

“ The valley of Kashmir, properly so called, remains, as in the seventeenth century, the largest and the most beautiful bit of landscape-gardening in the world, a park thirty leagues by ten or twelve. Everything in it seems planned with supernatural ingenuity to delight the eye—fields, orchards, dwellings, rivers and lakes sprinkled with green and flowery islets and ploughed by boats of varied form and size navigated by hanjis (boatmen) whose intelligent countenances, sculpturesque figures and graceful costumes harmonize admirably with the enchanting scenery ”

“ This is a more suitable sentiment for an organist, no doubt, for what possible business can Dan Cupid have at St. Sylvester's? Louder and louder yet pours the great stream of music; and that is a joke too, for Lisle feels as if he were shouting his secret to the four winds, and yet keeping it locked in his inmost soul, taking the passers-by into his confidence in the most open-hearted fashion, and laughing at them in his sleeve. But the musician is exhausted at last, and the end comes with a thundering crash of chords. ”

“ She sprang from the wagon, ran across the meadow, put her foot in the deep print: her bosom heaved, the tears came to her eyes. Isabel was not a sentimental, silly girl, but a shrewd, hard-working woman. She had not seen her lover for a long time, and she thought it would be years before she would see him again.
She walked down to the river—sat down under a walnut tree. Surely she might rest there a minute. She would never see David's home again.
A tall, dark man gathered himself up from among the deep fern, watching her breathlessly. ”

“ Hungry as we were on arriving at El Kantra after our long ride, we could scarcely take time to breakfast, but hurried on in advance of the diligence to get our first view of the mysterious land beyond the mountain-range. The stream which here descends from the hills to the plain causes the desert, if not "to blossom like a rose," to become at this point a rich and beautiful oasis. ”

“ The little man stood up as he talked, gesticulating fiercely as if in the presence of the foe, his linen coat flapping about his legs, his white hat set jauntily on one side. "Ha! those were pleasant days, squire," wiping his forehead in a glow of triumph. "They brought men up to their proper level! Boyer was never promoted, though. He was too modest to push himself, and war was hardly the right groove for him, after all."
"So this great man was a personal friend of yours, Sam?" asked Byloe with another wink and shrug at the crowd. ”

“ In the neighborhood of Algiers there are many fine trees, but the fruit never thoroughly ripens there.
For upward of a mile after passing through the mountain-gorge we skirted the oasis. It is surrounded by a mud-built wall, and half hidden among the palms we could discern the mud-built cottages and mosque belonging to the Arab village. On the other side of our route we observed a forest of upright stones, rough and unhewn. This was the last resting-place of the people of the desert, and a sad and lonely sight an Arab burial-place is, dreary even amid the utter desolation around. ”

“ What strikes an Anglo-Saxon as the merest commonplace of healthy politics or intellectual life is in his eyes the most pernicious heresy. We believe that freedom to teach and to write is the only way to discover the truth, and are confident that in the struggle of life which opposing systems must pass through the truth is sure in the end to win. Not so Renan. "The idea that there is a true knowledge, which must be taught, protected, patronized by the state, to the exclusion of false knowledge, is losing ground—one of the results of the general enfeeblement of notions of government." ”

“ I am worn out: you are too young to have duties to society, and ought to try life, and examine, criticise and become enlightened. I suppose I shall catch the mania for bric-à-brac and curiosities, and make them the object of my life, since I have no other. If I do, I shall be obliged to will them to you, Floyd, for, Goodness knows, Helen will have enough to set up a museum of art without any help from me. ”

“ Little Helen Floyd has been a good friend to my poor girl, who has none of Fortune's gifts. Not a month passes without a letter with an enclosure of money; and she begs Georgy to look upon her as a loving sister who is proud and glad to be of help to her in any way."
"And Miss Georgy accepts the money?" drawled Harry with a well-known look on his handsome face.
"Of course she does," responded Georgy's father with considerable heat. "Mr. Raymond ought to do anything for her. The amount of that man's income is fabulous, sir: I tell you, it is fabulous: he cannot begin to spend it. ”

“ Upon the bazaars the English architect has laid his heavy hand, and villas and shops like those of the Thames promise to mark the artistic renaissance of Kashmir. The pleasure-houses of the emperors before mentioned have so far escaped him, although it is to be feared he will soon have the repairing of them. Their principal charms, the turf, the great trees and the cascades, were never more beautiful, and have rather gained by the softness with which age has enriched them. ”

“ The boy likes well enough to feed the oxen their full measures of meal; he likes to see them get down on their knees to lick up morsels that roll into corners of the stable-floor; he stretches his hand in before them for little balls of meal they cannot reach with their long tongues, at which they draw back with a thwack against the stanchion, breathing hard and gazing at him with their large black eyes; and when the off ox tries to capture the nigh ox's portion, the boy raps him back to his place. ”

“ Paris, any Frenchman will tell you, is the capital of intellect; and though this is but one of a hundred things equally flattering to their country which all Frenchmen believe, yet it happens to be true. In some societies it is social rank, in others wealth and fine houses, in others, still, capacity to render service to the state, which makes old men courted and opens doors to the novice. But in Paris it is brains. ”

“ Of all the men of letters at Paris, there was no one for whose works I cherished so hearty an admiration as I did for those of Ivan Tourgueneff, and none in whose personality I felt so profound an interest. Tourgueneff is far from being a model novelist, but his tales are written with wonderful power, and yet are neither indecent nor melodramatic nor rasping to the nerves. That the burden of strong natures is in proportion to their strength, that human nature in general is weak, and that the Devil still sometimes appears incarnate in the person of lovely woman, seem to form his theory of life. ”

“ It was as if one had sung a stirring song in the market-place.
As she drove away to-day the squire looked after her admiringly. "I heard you were going to send her North, Mr. Calhoun?" he said to the paunchy, brisk little man beside him.
"Yes, yes," pulling his black moustache. "Fact is, this is no place for Isabel, squire. She has no mother: I have to think for the child. She has kinsfolk in New England, and I'll send her there for a year or two. To tell you the truth, I can't see her mated with one of these loggish young ploughmen about Sevier." ”

“ By Jove, Harry! you have given me an idea. Just as soon as this new stock of mine gets above par I will sell out, reinvest and put the certificates in my wife's bureau-drawer. I should breathe more freely, there is no doubt of it. I confess to you, boys, it's a deuce of a life to keep a secret from a woman, she has you at such a disadvantage. Yes, on my honor, I'll buy in some of that stock: it's utterly worthless for years to come, and there must be thousands and thousands of shares of it in the market. ”

“ It is only on becoming acquainted with scenes and people which we have been in the habit of picturing to ourselves that we realize how feeble a power is the imagination. We found here everything so different from the creations of our fancy. My idea of an oasis, for example, had been a clump of trees, a spring of water and a little verdure. Here we found one several miles in length, and with sixty thousand palm trees, a considerable population, a market and a fort. Biskra is, however, the largest and finest of the group of oases which stud this part of the desert. ”

“ I asked. "Georgy is a trifle older than I am, and I am now almost nineteen."
"Everybody is so old!" she said with a droll little gesture of despair. "It seems to me I shall never grow up."
"Oh yes, you will soon be fourteen: I have heard you say your mother was married when she was seventeen: that is only three years off; and Georgy Lenox is much older, and only just engaged, and will not be married until Jack is out of college and a partner in his father's business."
"Does he like her very much?" asked Helen solemnly. ”

“ The old man does not see the boy shinning up a post in the horse-barn (there is no staircase—nothing but a few pegs stuck over the horses' heads by which to climb to the hay) , the tin lantern swinging on his arm, its door open and candle flaring. Nor does he see the boy attempt to increase the lantern's light by filling it with dry leaves. "What has that darned Irishman been up to now?" says the old farmer, finding it unsoldered on its shelf.
"The mill-streams that turn the clappers of the world arise in solitary places." The old hill-farmers are lovers of their country. ”

“ Another luxury of the hill-farmer is unabridged hospitality. He would agree with Doctor Johnson that nothing promotes happiness so much as conversation. Blazing fires—beacons of company—often flame up his best rooms' chimney-stacks, pouring their blue wood-smoke high in the clear air of the hills. Thanksgiving Day in the hills would do for a festival in honor of Jupiter, the patron of friendship, 'tis a day of such hospitality. It is the only day of the year when the boy has enough to eat. ”

“ There is always plenty of work for the boy. In the vast, dark, lofty, cathedral-like orchard, whose untrimmed, mossy trees bear profusely on their interlacing branches the small fair apples for countless barrels of cider, there is work for him. There is plenty of work at the cider-mill or in boiling down the sweet cider over the bonfire that cheers the damp fall weather. ”

“ The phases of life, manners and scenery which strike one in a rapid tour are perhaps most instructive, and certainly most entertaining, when reproduced just as they appear. The light female touch, which revolts at figures and documents, is well suited to that work, if work it can be called. The male traveller, we know, does much of his research when he gets home, keeping up, however, with a view to that end, a solemnly didactic frame of mind all the time he is abroad. He is thus apt to give us less of what he sees than of what he thinks—an error into which a woman is less prone to fall. ”

“ Isabel was an intimate friend of every woman in town. Sue Grayson hurried her in to read her last love-letter, and Mother Byloe consulted her about her cherry jam. It was a pity, they thought, that she had no beauty—there was always a lamentation on that point when she was gone—and the men agreed that she lacked flesh; but Major Fetridge, who had known something of the world outside of Sevier in his day, used to follow her far off to watch her clear, sparkling face. ”