Various

“ Quicker than thought came a flash of fire from a loophole in the fort, and Benton fell in the doorway with a bullet from Tom Champion’s rifle through his lungs.
“Keep back, boys!” he gasped. “Stay inside. You’re saved—the troops are coming.” They dragged him in, but these were his last words; the heavy hand of the avenging angel had fallen on him, and he had gone for a final reckoning.
“To the loopholes, boys!” shouted Williams, who had now taken command. “Shoot as you never shot before. If we can hold them in check for five minutes we are saved.” ”

“ On the north the undulating flatness is relieved by a low line of rocky barren hills, round the top of which is a curious dark line, which one could swear was a high-water mark. On a hot summer day these hills rise black as coal out of the flame of golden sand around them; then, as evening draws nigh, some become pale rose-colour, others deepest pansy purple, or bright ochre yellow, and all so vivid, so luminous, that the artist despairs of transferring their colours to his canvas.
Nearly all the houses at Laghouat are built of mud bricks, mixed with straw and baked in the sun. ”

“ The Lapps are very reticent; they will never tell you, for instance, how many reindeer they possess. Mickel Nilsson Nia, to whom I am giving you this letter of recommendation, is wealthy and educated, yet he covers himself with reindeer skins like the humblest of his herdsmen, drinks the warm blood of the animal he kills, and thinks no dish more succulent than a sort of cake made of reindeer blood mixed with flour! He is a splendid specimen of a people who have at once assimilated and resisted civilization. ”

“ Away up in the mountains of one of the most beautiful cantons of Switzerland, the Valais, the peasant women have for years found it expedient to don the garb of their men-folk and work in the hayfields and among the grazing cattle on the slopes, while their lords and masters lounge their days away in ease and the quiet of their log huts. ”

“ And yet, in the case of the accidents that have occurred in the Lake District, much is to be learnt. Every disaster on the mountains, if properly understood, should teach a lesson, for the majority of them are only accidents in part, and have been directly due to the disregard or violation of some cardinal law governing the sport of mountaineering.
If a man who has never been on a mountain in his life before endeavours to scale a steep precipice and loses his life in the attempt, can such be truly called an accident? ”

“ Every man braced himself for the leap—ready, in fact, anxious, to have the dreadful suspense at an end, though each well knew that the opening of the door would be a signal for five hundred rifles to sweep the space between the house and the fort with a perfect hail of lead. Quickly the door swung open, and Benton leaped out. His eyes swept the surrounding hills; then he turned and tried to leap back into the protection of the log walls again. ”

“ I said to Ben Aouda, one of the Bach-Agha’s three grown-up sons. “I thought she was your mother.”
“My mother and my brothers’ mother has been dead a long time,” he replied. “That one”—and I distinguished a shade of contempt in his voice—“only gave my father daughters—feeble creatures who died young.”
If an Arab woman wishes to retain any power she may ever have had over her husband, she must first be a mother, and, secondly, the mother of male children, strong and lusty. There are, of course, exceptions; I knew of one at Laghouat later. The two longed for a family. ”

“ I did not hesitate to indicate my choice by at once turning it face upwards, when, lo and behold! all that met my gaze was a plain white surface. Instead of being in the middle, the “lady” was at the right of me, though how this sleight-of-hand trick had been accomplished under my very eyes without my detecting it was past my comprehension.
“Thank you,” said the swindler, suavely; “thirty-two shillings, please”; and after some fumbling in my trousers pocket I succeeded in detaching two pound notes from the roll. ”

“ An hour or so later—about nine o’clock, to be exact—the men were startled by an extraordinary noise, apparently coming from the eastern end of the island, a noise unlike anything they had ever heard before. Dropping their tools and staring towards the east, they beheld such a sight as it falls to the lot of few people to witness. There, not five hundred yards from the shore, was being waged a battle to the death—a fight between the great cow whale previously seen and a school of thresher sharks. ”

“ It is not easy to get these people to talk of themselves to strangers; they often resent being asked questions about their work and ideas.
Yet the young women take interest in the pretty clothes of strangers. One of them came up to me and touched a blue lapis-lazuli ring I was wearing, her eyes simply devouring it, and the other trinkets I wore of the same stone. Finally, she exclaimed that she liked them very much, and also the frock of the same colour. I am quite certain there was a momentary pang of feminine envy in her heart, and a hatred for her own incongruous garments. ”

“ The remembrance of Ridsdale’s heroic appeal to them to tend the others before him, and afterwards the manly efforts of Mr. Webb and his friend to help and sustain their dying comrade in such awful circumstances through those long, dark hours of waiting, must ever linger with pride in the hearts of all true Englishmen. We may be a degenerate race; but, if this Scawfell tragedy has done nothing else, it has proved that there are still men amongst us. ”

“ The mate looked at him in silence for a moment; then the skipper chimed in.
“Who the deuce are you?” demanded Captain Monk; “and what are you doing aboard my ship?”
“What are you trying to get at, captain?” cried the crimp, furiously. “You know very well I’m Dan Sullivan. I brought you six men last night, and when we took them into the forecastle—”
There was a shuffle among the men, and the next minute the young Swede had sprung at Sullivan’s throat and the two were tossing about the deck battering each other like wild beasts.
“Stand back, everybody!” cried the mate. “Let them have it out.” ”

“ The attention of one man was necessarily taken up with the rope, and a slip on his part meant instant death to Williams in the way of a fall to the rocks at the foot of the precipice. With a rifle in his hand the other man watched that nightmare fight in mid air, far below him. He could not shoot without endangering Williams even more than the eagle.
Just then things were going very badly with the nest-robber. Blood was flowing from a dozen cuts on his head and face, his hand was lacerated, the clothing about his shoulders was cut into ribbons. ”

“ He told me that the Lapps are very fond of stimulating drinks; they think nothing of drinking fifteen or twenty cups of coffee a day, while their consumption of punch is on a vast scale. It is no uncommon thing to see numbers of helplessly drunk natives in the streets of Tromsö, especially when the sale of reindeer flesh has been profitable. Yet robbery and, indeed, crime in general are practically unknown among them; the innate honesty of the people is quite extraordinary. ”

“ The story of one of the most sanguinary “cattle wars” the West has ever known. The long-standing feud between the big cattlemen and the homesteaders, whose advent means the doom of the open range, led in this instance to a most extraordinary state of affairs, in which one side raised a regiment of ruffians to wipe out their enemies, while the other retorted by laying siege to their opponents’ head-quarters with rifle-pits and dynamite bombs! ”

“ Sullivan was put into the mate’s watch and the two crimps in the second mate’s watch.
There was another row at once, and again the blackguards got a good thrashing. They were put to the most menial work, were made to wait on the others, and do all the dirty work about the decks; in fact, their lives were made a misery to them from morning till night. Hardly a day passed that one or other of the scoundrels did not get a licking. They had a taste of the misery they had caused many another man, and, as the captain had prophesied, they had time to repent of their misdeeds. ”

“ The most amusing thing about it is that the upper part of the costume remains feminine—the ordinary rough bodice of the peasant woman, often in bright colours of red or blue, worn with the most nondescript cut of trousers, of the “home-made” variety. That such a costume is necessary for women who take upon themselves the work of their men-folk in such a region of the world is quite apparent to any woman who attempts to follow them at their work for even ten minutes. ”

“ Being by this time well acquainted with Roberto and his betrothed, I laughingly suggested one afternoon to the two daughters and himself that it would be a good idea, as a means of finding out exactly what Enrique’s intentions were, for me to kiss the Señorita Hortensia one day when Enrique called, doing it in such a manner that the bashful lover could not fail to see, but so that his witnessing the act should appear an accident. ”

“ A ride of eight miles, over rough mountain trails, brought them to the canyon, half-way up the perpendicular side of which they saw the horizontal cleft in which the wise old birds had built their nest. At the foot of the cliff, directly under the cleft, was a pile of bones—the remains of lambs, thrown out of the nest by the eagles after they had been picked clean.
“We ain’t any nearer that nest down here than when we were at home,” remarked Williams to his comrades. “Nothing but a balloon or an airship can help us from down here. ”

“ After all, then, in this strange country, where there is supposed to be “nothing but reindeer,” one may still find among these half-savage people financiers—like Mickel Nilsson Nia—poets, and artists—types which certainly go to show that the Lapps possess some of the attributes of a civilized nation. Music alone is unknown in Lapland, and this may be because the Lapp, with his boundless pride of race, considers he has no need of its chastening and refining influence. ”

“ From a Photograph.
Like all true artists worthy the name—like the Japanese, for instance—the Laplander will only reproduce what he sees. Consequently, in nine cases out of ten his carved reindeer bones show only reindeer—reindeer at rest, reindeer jumping, reindeer harnessed to sledges, and reindeer browsing. The thing becomes an absolute obsession. And what realism is displayed by these unconscious artists! What long hours of patient observation are implied by the life-like attitudes they depict, and which might almost have been photographed, so true are they to Nature! ”

“ OF PERTH, W.A., REFERRING TO THE BATTLE BETWEEN A WHALE AND THRESHER SHARKS.
Click here for image.
More and more feeble grew the whale’s struggles, and at last—to the heartfelt relief of the spectators, for her death-fight had been terrible to behold—the great body turned over and sank beneath the red-tinted water. The unequal battle was over, having lasted from nine o’clock until noon—as awe-inspiring a contest as man was ever privileged to witness. It is a thousand pities that there was no camera on the island to make a pictorial record of the struggle. ”

“ A wide détour was necessary, but at last this was accomplished and they stood on the brink of the cliff, half-way down which the eagles’ nest had been built.
“There’s nothing to be done from here, either,” said one of the men, despondently. “We might just as well go back home; we shall never reach that nest.”
While the men stood and talked, from far down below them there arose the shrill piping call of young birds.
“Young ones!” said Williams. “I wish we could get them alive; they would be worth money to us.” ”

“ What souvenirs, you ask, can one carry away from this strange country, where the reindeer rules supreme, and which, without the presence of that useful animal, would sink into a condition of abject poverty and utter desolation? Appropriately enough, there is nothing but carved reindeer bones. Some 496 are carved in so extraordinarily realistic and expert a fashion that more than one eminent sculptor to whom I have shown them has lifted his hands in admiration. ”

“ I tramped across the court, knee-deep in water, to my Arab servant’s room.
“Mohammed,” I cried, “come with me to see if the pathway to town is in a good enough state to take the children to the hotel. The water frightens me; we shall be drowned like rats in a trap.”
We tried to open the garden door giving on the wall-lined pathway along which the irrigation stream ran, and which was the only road to the town for the houses or gardens of the northern oasis. ”

“ Sullivan was an adept at drugging liquor, and he always kept materials at hand for that purpose. Just a little tobacco ash dropped in the glass when pouring out the drinks, and the thing was done. When he required a few sailors for a ship ready to sail, he picked out the likeliest men in the room—usually strangers—and when the seamen, hot and thirsty with dancing, ordered drinks through the women who acted as waitresses, these Delilahs would bring the prepared stuff, and soon the men would feel muddled and sleepy and would go into the side room and sink down on the benches. ”

“ In the long, dark watches I began to feel pretty queer myself. The silence seemed tangible, heavy, impermeable. I was not exactly frightened; the feeling was indescribable—a sort of nameless terror at nothing, a horror of some unknown impending fate against which it was useless to struggle and from which there was no escape. Mutuality, sympathy, hypnotism—call it what you will—a weight of fear lay on my senses, a veritable obsession of dread. ”

“ As for the men, the Spanish blood seems to predominate in point of passion, for, besides being the most valiant soldier in time of war of any Central American race, the Salvadorean is also the most ardent lover and the most jealously-inclined towards his inamorata of any person upon the face of the earth. ”

“ One day in February, 1872, it happened that there were three British ships lying at the buoys, loaded and ready to sail, but each was in want of a few seamen to make up her complement. Not a man could be got at the shipping-office for love or money—the news of a fresh gold-field on the Barrington had reached Newcastle that morning, and all the disengaged men had made tracks for that district. So the only possible way to get hands for the vessels ready to sail was to obtain them from the ships that had lately arrived, and which would have some time to wait for a loading berth. ”

“ Despite the fact that the women work hard out of doors, summer and winter, exposed to the worst of weathers, they are mostly long-lived and seldom know what illness is. I often saw them working in the hayfields with their babies lying blinking in the sunlight near by. At noon they lounged under the trees, talking mother-foolishness to the wee things, and their queer garments never seem so hideous and 449 altogether distasteful as when they are nursing the children. ”

“ There are just two things the foreigner in Salvador must not do: he must not poke his nose into political squabbles or try to interfere in a love affair. Ten times out of ten, if you do, it will be to your very great sorrow not counting the danger you run.
Now, when the wealthy coffee-planter or “hacienda” owner has need of the services of a doctor or dental surgeon he never thinks of leaving his plantation, but rounds up his mule-train, heads it with an excellent saddle animal, sends it off to the doctor, and invites the latter to pay him a visit. ”

“ From a Photograph.
The constant tramping along rough mountain ways and following cows over dangerously narrow ledges, the cutting of hay on inclines so acute as to be seemingly almost perpendicular, the going in search of lost sheep in thickets and snowdrifts, are but a few of the things which make the tyranny of skirts altogether impossible. 446 These women do not seem to mind in the least being stared at and questioned as to their clothes. In fact, they rather feel the pride of distinction their garments confer upon them. ”

“ I felt confident that I could win a lot of money, and up to this point had not the faintest suspicion that I was in the midst of a gang of card-sharpers of whose modus operandi of working the business I was now being given a practical demonstration. Therefore, when the leader of the coterie, the man, who had “hooked” me outside, suggested that the stakes should be thirty-two shillings I made no demur, but blindly accepted, fondly imagining that by exercising a little care in watching where the cards were placed I should be able to spot the “lady.” ”