Bax

“ Although he was in part prepared for the discovery, Tregenna gave a slight start on finding himself face to face with this being.
For he saw before him not Ann Price the decent farmer’s daughter, with her neat cap and snow-white apron, her calm face and quiet manners; but Jem Bax, the young smuggler, with the rough shock of shoulder-length hair, the seamen’s breeches, and high boots, the loose shirt, open jacket, and flowing tie, with the pale set face, and fierce devil-may-care expression. ”

“ Nobody moved fast enough for him.
At last they reached the summit of the range. They were now on the dividing line between Chinese ground and savage territory, and the men who dared go a step farther went at terrible risk. The head-hunters would very likely see that they did not return.
But Mackay was all for pushing forward, and Captain Bax was no less eager. So they spent a night in the forest and the next day marched on up another and higher range. As they journeyed, the travelers could not but burst into exclamations of delight at the loveliness about them. ”

“ There turned out to be two horses belonging to the best waggonette, or you could have a one-horse one, much smaller, with the blue cloth of the cushions rather frayed, and mended here and there, and green in patches from age and exposition to the weather.
Oswald told Mrs. Bax this, not concealing about how shabby the little one was, and she gloriously said—
"The pair by all means! We don't kill a pig every day!"
"No, indeed," said Dora, but if "killing a pig" means having a lark, Mrs. Bax is as good a pig-killer as any I ever knew. ”

“ Hope it won't make him more conceited than he is.
"How about that Chinese cove who came along with me in the Ringdove!" he asked, with some little display of interest.
"He's all right, B.-T.," someone said. "Came aboard with the wounded."
"Um! I thought I'd given him the slip. Promised him a hundred dollars for getting me out of it, and" (yawning several times) "I haven't got a hundred cents in the world."
"That's all right. You've got your last month's pay due to you," Old Bax growled impatiently. "But, man alive, shove on with your yarn." ”

“ I was walking twenty miles a day in the Alps, drinking milk in lonely chalets, sleeping as you sleep, and thinking it was all very good fun; but Baxter told me it would never do, that the Alps were 'd——d rot,' that Baden-Baden was the place, and that if I knew what was good for me I would come along with him. It is a wonderful place, certainly, though, thank the Lord, Baxter departed last week, blaspheming horribly at trente et quarante. But you know all about it and what one does—what one is liable to do. ”

“ He heard a sharp sob escape from Annie's lips, then Rolanda was rocking him and comforting him.
"Don't you worry, sweetheart. It's all right. We'll get along. Daddy's insured. And there's his service pension. We'll get along just fine."
An intuitive flash of horror chilled Baxter. He struggled to escape to his own brain, his own dying body, but now the barrier was up again, not impalpable but tough and impenetrable.
The more he struggled the weaker he became. Sensations from the nursery began to fade. The light grew dimmer, and Rolanda's face became hazy. ”

“ Baxter. "It was the dogs that gnawed through the bonds and released us. I see how it happened. The thongs were freshly cut from some hide, and the half- [194] starved dogs smelled them. They burrowed under the snow until they could gnaw them, and thus they released us. I thought at first it was Holfax and his men."
"So did I," spoke Fred. "But what had we better do now?"
"We must first get something to eat," said Mr. Baxter. "Wait until our blood is in a little better circulation, and we will steal down to the camp and see if we can't get something without attracting attention." ”

“ You can't be poor and needy any way, whatever your——"
We hastily hushed him, stifling his murmurs with sand.
"I always think," said Mrs. Bax dreamily, "that 'the more the merrier,' is peculiarly true of picnics. So I have arranged—always subject to your approval, of course—to meet your friends, Mr. and Mrs. Red House, there, and——"
We drowned her conclusive remarks with a cheer. And Oswald, always willing to be of use, offered to go to the 'Ship' and see about the waggonette. I like horses and stable-yards, and the smell of hay and straw, and talking to ostlers and people like that. ”

“ Baxter, having occasion to mention them in his profoundly instructive Narrative of his Life and Times, and liking neither, cannot forbear to observe, that 'vanity and sterility were never more fitly joined together;' and speaks elsewhere of 'the vanity of Vane, and the sterility of Sterry.' This last, let me observe, is an eminently unjust charge, as Baxter himself in a later volume [Footnote: Catholic Theology, pt, 3, p. 107.] has very handsomely acknowledged. ”

“ We look to you to keep up the credit of the neighbourhood."
Horace painted his barn.
I think Doctor North was fonder of Charles Baxter than of anyone else, save his sister. He hated sham and cant: if a man had a single reality in him the old Doctor found it; and Charles Baxter in many ways exceeds any man I ever knew in the downright quality of genuineness. The Doctor was never tired of telling—and with humour—how he once went to Baxter to have a table made for his office. ”

“ Deeply disappointed to find that I was four years older than he expected, Mr. Baxter hurried from the drawing- room and buried himself in a column of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
TREMAYNE. Well, that settles Baxter. Are there any more men in the neighbourhood? ”

“ But Ann, whether she knew the reason of his question or not, was cautious in her answer.
[80]
“Maybe,” she answered, as if indifferently, “there be plenty o’ Baxes in these parts; they’re in every village. I know not whether I ever heard yonder fellow called by any other name than ‘Ben the Blast.’”
“He’s a fisherman, I suppose, by his dress?” pursued Tregenna. ”

“ Baxter, I don't dare go home with a breath like cocktails. You know Mary and I sleep together," objected Lorna.
"Don't worry about that, little girlie," said Baxter. "She won't mind it to-night."
To Burke's keen ears there was a shade of hidden menace in the words.
"Come on, now, just this one," said Baxter coaxingly. "It won't hurt. There's always room for one more."
What a temptation it was for the muscular policeman to swing around and shake the miserable wretch as one would a cur!
But Bobbie had learned the value of controlling his temper ”

“ Enter: and, if you will, stay with me long. But, if you like it not, Go with good grace. The man Who builds his own house builds to please himself. Twenty-five Chinese Poems, paraphrased by Clifford Bax. ”

“ The glare of a hundred conflagrations reflected in pools of blood; corpses and human remains wherever the eye lighted; the half of Paris one vast, hideous, dreamlike hell, against the reality of which Dante's imagination seems feeble! ”

“ As evening approaches, our traveller strolls forth into the streets and narrow lanes of the town, lined with overhanging gables that almost meet overhead and shut out the light of the afternoon sun, so that twilight seems already to have fallen. ”

“ In all quarters the pickaxe was to be heard removing paving stones and digging the foundations of barricades, which rose by the hundred. Men, women, and children were at work. Now began that enthusiasm, that limitless courage and contempt of death—displayed in defence of an ideal—the colossal proportions of which dwarf everything similar in history, and which alone suffices to redeem the sordidness of the nineteenth century. ”

“ Strange it is that to an extent unparalleled in any other movement the vilifiers of the Commune succeeded immediately in travestying the situation and giving currency to the grotesque notion among the unthinking of the Commune as responsible for the horrors of its own suppression! Never before has a murderer been so successful in casting the obloquy of his own foul crime upon his innocent victim whose mouth he has closed in death. ”

“ Poor Flourens was a type of revolutionist of whom we have few nowadays left. Many there are now who undertand the economic question better than Flourens, but none we know who have quite that old-world chivalrous devotion to the Revolution which this remarkable man had, and which so endeared him to the impressionable working-classes of Paris. ”

“ At this point it may be well to say a word on the one rule of the divorce law which Feminists are perennially trotting out as a proof of the shocking injustice of the marriage law to women: that to obtain her divorce the woman has to prove cruelty in addition to adultery against her husband, while in the case of the husband it is sufficient to prove adultery alone. ”

“ When the limelight of a little plain but critical common-sense is turned upon this notion of chivalry hitherto regarded as so sacrosanct, it is seen to be but a poor thing after all; and when men have acquired the habit of habitually turning the light of such criticism upon it, the accusation, so terrible in the present state of public opinion, of being “unchivalrous” will lose its terrors for them. In the so-called ages of chivalry themselves it never meant, as it does to-day, the woman right or wrong. It never meant as it does to-day the general legal and social privilege of sex. ”

“ Finally, the senseless cry of "Every man to his arrondissement! when every man ought to have been out of his arrondissement at strategical points, settled matters. An immense number of barricades were thrown up, without system, in each arrondissement, and heroically defended, without method, with the inevitable sequel of capture and massacre, and thus was the Paris of the Revolution annihilated piecemeal. ”

“ As the shadows deepen and darkness falls upon the plain, our visitor joins the groups which are now fast leaving the meadow, and re-passes the great embrasure just as the rushlights begin to twinkle in the windows and a swinging oil-lamp to cast a dim light here and there in the streets. ”

“ THE ENTRY OF THE VERSAILLESE.
Sunday, the 21st of May, was one of those glorious spring days in which the avenues of the Champs Elysées and the Tuilleries Gardens show up in the clear air a splendour of young foliage, to which hardly another capital in Europe than Paris can offer a parallel. This afternoon a monster open-air concert was being held under the trees in the Tuilleries Gardens by order of the Commune, for the benefit of the widows and orphans of National Guards slain in defence of Paris. Thousands of Parisians in holiday attire thronged the grounds. ”

“ Such an extreme of squalid unrighteousness has been reached that it has become a commonplace of the legal profession that no justice is to be had in the Courts against a woman—unless in some case of outrageous atrocity, and not always even then. ”

“ But here again we are met with the fact that the man in the hands of the law—to wit, in the grip of the forces of the State, ay, even the strongest man, were he a very Hercules, is in as precisely as defenceless and helpless a position relative to those in whose power he finds himself, as the weakest woman would be in the like case, neither more nor less! ”

“ For even as we punish thieves with the sword, murderers with the rope, and heretics with fire, wherefore do we not lay hands on these pernicious teachers of damnation, on popes, on cardinals, bishops, and the swarm of the Roman Sodom—yea, with every weapon which lieth within our reach, and wherefore do we not wash our hands in their blood? ”

“ Had there been a leading body of men to have given a head to the insurrection of the 18th of March, the gates of Paris would have been immediately closed, and the already disaffected troops would never have been suffered to slip through the fingers of the insurrection and form the nucleus of a hostile army at Versailles. ”

“ Now that he had to deal with the beginnings of a world-market, money was a prime necessity. The first and most obvious way of getting it was to squeeze the peasant on his estate, who, bitten by the new mania, had also begun to accumulate and turn into cash the surplus products of labour on his holding. ”

“ The peasant folk streamed to Niklashausen, from all sides,—men and women, young and old, journeymen, lads from the plough, girls from the fields, their sickles in their hands, without leave of lord or master, and without preparation of any sort whatever. ”

“ The female on the other hand often claims to be fully justified when she has committed the greatest conceivable infamy. While the genuine criminal is obtusely silent against all reproaches, a woman will express her astonishment and indignation that anyone can doubt her perfect right to act as she has done. Women are convinced of their being in the right without ever having sat in judgment on themselves. The male criminal, it may be true, does not do so either, but then he never maintains that he is in the right. ”

“ The wife has but to scream and appeal to the nearest policeman, and prison, separation, custody of children, and maintenance, are decreed as matters of course.
A woman can habitually repudiate her duties, neglect her children, pawn her husband's and children's clothes, waylay her husband at his work, and disgrace him before his friends, procure his dismissal, assault him, and there is no remedy open to the working man. To tell him that he can appeal to the Divorce Court at a cost of forty pounds, is a piece of savage and scornful irony. ”

“ There were a few honest middle-class men to be found who, though caring nothing for the Commune, and with no sympathy for its aims, yet refused to join in the great class-conspiracy of vilification, and who, at all events up to their lights, spoke the truth as to what they had seen and heard in Paris under the red flag, who bore witness to the noble disinterestedness of the defenders of the Cause, and to the foulness of their persecutors. ”