Various

“ Giron was driving hard. Lescault saw that he passed the grand stand with the engine “wide open,” forcing the car to its utmost. Then the Saturn roared away, and out of the distance came another apparition that, flashing by in a blur of white, cast up dust and was gone. Down in the pits, Lescault, one of few who had recognized the white car, so great was its speed, drew his hideous features into a smile. ”

“ For miles about the hospice there is not a tree, not a bush or a single blade of grass, and the view from my window offered nothing but barren rocks, bleak mountains, glaciers, and snow-fields. The mean annual temperature is below the freezing-point, being about the same as Spitzbergen, within the Arctic Ocean! One cannot help admiring the little group of monks, about twelve in number, who, with an equal number of lay brothers and servants, live here, in this highest human habitation of Europe, summer and winter, year after year, till they die. ”

“ No more do the human cries sound in the midst of that darkness which is created by our misunderstanding. No longer do the frantic footfalls go by. The golden age has returned, with its knowledge of what is not needed—a knowledge that we have lost.
I looked up from Hermes and the little brother, and, in the distance, through the doorway of the museum, I saw a tiny picture of Elis bathed in soft, golden light; a calm hillside, some green and poetic country, and, in the foreground, like a message, a branch of wild olive. ”

“ With such surpassing genius is it placed that it literally makes itself one with the rock it embraces. To gain some sort of foothold for the masonry, deep grooves were cut in the face of the cliff, and from these a wall of brick and mortar was erected, and this in turn supported the great limestone blocks which form the surface of the road. This roadway was wide enough for four men to walk abreast, and was protected by a wall nine feet high.
It is hard to emphasize sufficiently the wild boldness of the conception and achievement. From base to summit the splendid gallery mounted. ”

“ He’ll break you on the greatest day of your career. He, a boy, will make you a laughing-stock—you, the favorite. You’ve come from Europe, your great reputation preceding you but you’ll fail. And it’ll be the clean, strong body of young Stevenson, like mine was. But more than that, the brain of Jean Lescault will break you, Giron—the brain of poor old Lescault, working down in the pits. ”

“ He quickly learns his power, and becomes in turn the trainer and the ruler of the household. In fact, he is a small king, with only a soft ring of dark hair for a crown, and a chop-stick in his chubby fist for a scepter. His lightest frown or smile is a command to all the house, from the poodle with the ingrown nose to the bent old grandmother. But more willing subjects never bent before a king of maturer growth. Father and mother, with a train of relatives, yield glad obedience and stand ever ready for action at the merest suggestion of a wish. ”

“ Why, Eleanor, since I have been running over to New York every few weeks to see Amy and the children, and staring out of the car-windows at ninety weary miles of continuous advertising, I am cured forever of touching pills or pickles.
Yet they tell me (though I don’t believe it) that the success of any business venture depends wholly and entirely on its advertisements; that if people are told often enough to buy a thing they end by buying it; that if they are told imperatively or persuasively they buy it a little sooner; and that they can be startled into buying it at once. ”

“ In striving to become “Greek,” too many unhappy ones become nothing at all. Standing before the Hermes of Olympia, one realizes as never before the meaning, the loveliness, of restraint, of the restraint of a great genius, one who could be what he chose to be, and who has chosen to be serene. This it is to be Greek. Desire of anything else fails and lies dead. In the small and silent room, hidden away from the world in the green wilderness of Elis, one has found that rare sensation, a perfect satisfaction. ”

“ Nature has taken Olympia into her loving arms. She has shed her pine-needles and her leaves of the golden autumn upon the seats where the wrestlers reposed. She has set her grasses and flowers among the stones of the Temple of Zeus. Her vines creep down to the edge of that cup of her earth which holds gently, as a nurse holds a sleeping child, palaces, temples, altars, shrines of the gods and ways for the chariots. All the glory of men has departed, but something remains which is better than glory—peace, loveliness, a pervading promise of lasting things beyond. ”

“ Out in the kitchen, maids run hither and thither, hurrying the boiling pot, cleansing the already spotless rice, and scampering to bring the best wine. It is glad service. The happiness in the coming of the baby is shared by everybody from the parents to the water-coolie. Hence the eagerness with which the little house shrine is decorated and offerings of food and sake set before the benign old image who is responsible for this great favor. ”

“ It is wit and not humor, no doubt, when Holmes promulgates the law of financial safety: “Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.” It is wisdom as well as wit, but is it a pun? Is it only a play on words? Is it not also a play on the idea? And take the somewhat parallel remark about the rising fortune of a successful man, to the effect that “he got on, he got honor, he got honest.” That again is wit; but is it fairly to be termed a pun? ”

“ They could no more escape the consequences of their failure than could other public men, baffled and defeated by events.
The murder of Lincoln removed the sun from the heavens. The clouds of hate and fear, or both, overspread the sky. The policy of “thorough,” adopted by the Radicals in Congress, was not only cruel, taking no account of the myriads in the South who had perpetrated no wrong, but was obtusely senseless, on one hand breeding an oligarchy of corruption, and, on the other, driving a whole people to desperation. It was thus, and thus alone, that a “solid South” was created. ”

“ Now Giron could see the flames of its exhausts, the yellow and red flashes, wild fire shining through the mists. Now he saw the white bulk of the machine, the long, lean hood, the tilted steering-post, the two black forms crouched behind.
On it came, faster than the wind, a spew of flame and smoke, a voice-breathing thunder, a monstrous white dragon bursting the dawn. As Giron watched, as his trained eye timed instantly the frightful speed, as his experience whispered that for a car to rush the Jericho turn meant disaster, possible death, the man’s face showed only cold interest. ”

“ All the anti-monopoly laws and anti-trust suits, all the regulating statutes and the public-utilities commissions, have one principle at bottom, and it is to make all men stand equal before the law. On the one hand to strike down oppression, on the other to equalize opportunity, has been the intent of these new activities of government which, whatever else they show, leave no doubt of an altogether changed view of what governments owe. ”

“ For the boys, the road leads to the sterner things of life. Every step of the girls’ path is trained for the inevitable end—marriage. Whatever the future, it never yields—to the girl, at least—the same golden hours of freedom and equal right to joy and pleasure as in the glory days of youth. Every boy in Japan is a prospective soldier or sailor, every girl, a wife; and a training toward the end best fitting each for the duties involved is the principal aim of the carefully planned curriculum. In all grades the teaching is en masse; individual attention is rare. ”

“ He smiled as if that age-long, simple service of poverty were a light matter, an excuse, perhaps, in the eyes of the citizen of a larger world for their having nothing to show. Only the citizen, as he looked at Brother Leo, had a sudden doubt as to the size of the world outside. ”

“ Ten elephants, led by a furious old cow, he explained, had been trapped. To-morrow the rest of the herd would be caught. In this, however, he proved a bad prophet, for during the night the elephants outside the kraal broke through the beaters’ lines and escaped.
Around the circle of the stockade they were now lighting hundreds of fires. Flames and smoke shot up half-way to the tops of the trees, and the whole jungle was an endless moving parade of black shadows. Scores of men lined the barricade, their bodies dripping sweat, points of light flashing from their sharpened spear-heads. ”

“ And as it went, as its dust-cloud trembled and fell, as its explosions grew fainter and fainter, Giron stood watching, a startled figure leaning far over the porch-rail, unbelief and venom in his face. And as he watched, waiting until the white car was only a speck dissolving toward Westbury, his lips began to move. To the air he talked doubtfully, musingly, saying aloud:
“I thought there was only one man who could take a turn like that. One man,”—his eyes glittered,—“Jean Lescault was his name, and I fixed him seven years ago.” ”

“ He may be a wise bird, but if he thinks by the swiftness of his wings to find a home beneath roof of straw or palace tile unprepared for his coming, he is mistaken. He will discover that he has failed utterly to comprehend the joy of the mother to be. A childless woman is of no value in a land where the perpetuation of the family name is the most vital law prescribed in its religious and moral teachings. For a Japanese woman, therefore, the pinnacle of desire is reached when the white bird taps at her door and lays its precious bundle in her outstretched arms. ”

“ Beyond are ranges of beautiful, delicate mountains.
The ruins of Delphi lie above the highroad to the left of it, between Kastri and the Castalian fountain, unshaded, in a naked confusion, but free from modern houses and in a fine loneliness. At one time, and not very long ago, the village of Kastri stood close to the ruins, and some of it actually above them. But when excavations were undertaken seriously, all the houses were pulled down, and set up again where they stand to-day. Like the ruins at Eleusis and Olympia, the remains at Delphi are fragmentary. ”

“ And so came the eve of the race, with Giron the word on the public’s lips. The favorite, conceded beyond all doubt as the winner, he sat alone in his quarters at Jericho, scorning the gossip of the camps, hearing no word of the cripple who had been seen on the course with Stevenson, coolly confident, an eternal sneer on his lips, the ruthless fires of a Messala in his eyes. No man could come between him and this greatest triumph of his career; no man could do it and live. ”

“ There where the lion sits, raised now on a high pedestal and with cypresses planted about him, was fought the great battle of Chæronea between the Greeks and Philip of Macedon; and there the Greeks lost much, but not their honor. Had it been otherwise, would the lion be there now after so many centuries, testifying to the grief of men long since dead, to their anger, even to their despair, but not to their cowardice or shame? I have heard people say that the face of the lion does express shame. ”

“ Numberless droves of them came by motor, an endless, fiery-scaled snake that writhed slowly down the roads from New York, coiled round the course, moaned constantly, and waited. At dawn the race was to start; thirty of the most powerful automobiles ever made would pit their speed for three hundred miles, a harsh test, over an oblong of country road, with half a million people looking on.
Lescault, shivering despite his warm wraps, was in the repair pits as the cars began to come to the line. ”