Gabe

“ But next day Gabe himself happens along, and I see right off that I'd made a mistake in my reckonin'. The Honorable Atkinson Holway wa'n't figgerin' to borrow nothin'. When a chap has been skinnin' halibut, minnows are too small for him to bother with. Gabe was full of fried clams and philanthropy.
“'By Jove! Stitt,' he says, 'livin' here has been the dream of my life.'
“'You'll be glad to wake up, won't you?' says I. 'I wish I could.'
“'I tell you,' he says, 'this little old village is all right! All it needs is a public-spirited resident to help it along. ”

“ On’y fur yeou I’d be like a lost lamb awanderin’ ’raound the countryside, bleatin’, an’ shiverin’ fur fear the pesky wolves’d get me.”
“That’ll do for you, buddy,” Jack sternly told him. “We’ve both got our several good and bad points; but we’re essential to each other to make up a working team, six of one, and half a dozen of the other—now, don’t let me hear you getting off any of that boloney stuff again, mind.”
“Huh! yeou lets me daown too easy, partner; guess I know my shortcomings better’n anybody else; an’ thinkin’ ain’t much o’ a long suite with Gabe, not at no time in hist’ry.” ”

“ As mile after mile was covered, Gabriel’s strength seemed to renew itself, even, indeed, as that of the young eagle; hope revived within his breast, ministering to his keen vitality; and when at last the Indian paused, and kneeling, examined in ominous silence a bent twig here, a crushed blade of grass there, and finally laid his ear to the ground, Gabriel was inclined to scout Jean Jacques’ fears and his own suspicions.
“Feet have passed this way,” muttered Jean Jacques, “feet of red men, with them a white man. Let Wild Deer put his head to the ground, and he will hear them yet. ”

“ Now Gaby is the little chauffeuse who has been driver for a French general three years and who turns up periodically in town. She is quaint as a wood-cut and solemn as an owl, with her shock of bobbed hair and her great staring child-like eyes. She sits at the mess table and never says a word but draws your glance irresistibly. Always she wears an odd little straight-cut dress hanging just below her knees and a croix de guerre pinned to her breast. Gaby killed a man with her car not long since and was held a prisoner at Ligny-en-Barrois for ten days in consequence. ”

“ I knew Gab for at least two years before it entered into my head that she was fond of me. She was always so calm, so silent, so undemonstrative, so unlike any other human being that only a supernatural personality, it seemed, would ever be able to understand her.
Her eyes and her hair are just alike, deep black and very brilliant. In her presence people never know for certain whether she is looking at them or not. Yet nothing about them escapes her, and through her half-closed eyes she penetrates to the very depths of their souls. She is neither tall nor slight, neither plump nor thin. ”

“ The meal ended and the kitchen restored to its wonted order, Margot, in whom, as in all Acadians, the frugal spirit of the French peasant prevailed, extinguished the tallow dips; then, taking her seat on a cricket at her grandfather’s knee, she eagerly awaited Gabriel’s story.
This story of Gabriel’s was no easy one to tell; this he felt himself. In the brief time that he had been absent from his home, brief in actual duration, but to himself and to his loved ones so long, life had acquired for him a wholly different meaning. ”

“ One or the other we will have!”
“Very well, then; since it is so,” said Gabriel, raising his head, and advancing with calmness, resignation; and fearlessness; “he or me,” added he;—“it seems to make no difference to you—you are determined to have blood—take mine, and I will pardon you, my friends; for a fatal delusion has unsettled your reason.”
These words of Gabriel, his courage, the nobleness of his attitude, the beauty of his countenance, had made an impression on some of the assailants, when suddenly a voice exclaimed: “Look! there is the poisoner, behind the railing!” ”

“ Gab is deeply serious. She has long, black eyes which seem to slumber perpetually. When she walks, despite her youth, she proceeds with slow and protracted steps, which give you an impression that she must be of a serious and meditative nature.
When I became acquainted with her she was living in a dark little apartment, furnished in Hindu style, where in her black velvet costume she looked like some Byzantine princess. Jean Aicard, the poet, said one day that her voice [Pg 251] is of velvet, her skin and locks are of velvet, her eyes are of velvet and her name ought to be Velours. ”

“ A path betwixt yews led him to the garden below the terrace, a garden redolent of jasmine, lavender, and rose. A thousand flowers upturned their innocent faces at his feet.
Beyond the balustrading of the terrace, with its rampart of red roses, Gabriel saw his father standing in the sun. The old man turned to meet him as he climbed the steps. There was a ruthlessness upon his stubborn face, an arrogance in his stout, stolid manner. John Strong stood out like a patriarch of old, save that there was but little ardor in his keen, gray eyes. ”

“ Castle Gabingly had been something of a hermitage, and a Greek-faced youth such as Gabriel had more vivid interest for the lady Ophelia than monotonous novels and the society of Lord Gerald her father. Gabriel Strong had fine eyes, a quick tongue, and a certain cynical quaintness in his attitude towards women. ”

“ "Don't take on about her, Gabriel. What difference does it make whose sweetheart she is, since she can't be yours?"
"That's the very thing I say to myself," said Gabriel. ”

“ In wakeful nights, as one may fancy, the wild soul of the man, tossing amid these vortices, would hail any light of a decision for them as a veritable light from Heaven; any making-up of his mind, so blessed, indispensable for him there, would seem the inspiration of a Gabriel. ”

“ When the love-led man had ceased from his labours, Bathsheba came and looked him in the face.
"Gabriel, will you stay on with me?" she said, smiling winningly, and not troubling to bring her lips quite together again at the end, because there was going to be another smile soon.
"I will," said Gabriel.
And she smiled on him again. ”

“ Gabriel expanded. "I'm sorry to have made you run so fast, my dear," he said, with a grateful sense of favours to come. ”

“ Separation, which was the means that chance offered to Gabriel Oak by Bathsheba's disappearance, though effectual with people of certain humours, is apt to idealize the removed object with others -- notably those whose affection, placid and regular as it may be, flows deep and long. ”

“ She might have looked her thanks to Gabriel on a minute scale, but she did not speak them; ”

“ Whatever Janet, then, might, perhaps—I do not know—have imagined it her duty to say to Gibbie had she surmised his ignorance, having long ceased to trouble her own head, she had now no inclination to trouble Gibbie’s heart with what men call the plan of salvation. It was enough to her to find that he followed her Master. ”

“ What a way Oak had, she thought, of enduring things. Boldwood, who seemed so much deeper and higher and stronger in feeling than Gabriel, had not yet learnt, any more than she herself, the simple lesson which Oak showed a mastery of by every turn and look he gave—that among the multitude of interests by which he was surrounded, those which affected his personal well-being were not the most absorbing and important in his eyes. Oak meditatively looked upon the horizon of circumstances without any special regard to his own standpoint in the midst. That was how she would wish to be. ”

“ "He is as good as anybody in this parish! He is very particular, too, about going to church—yes, he is!"
"I am afeard nobody saw him there. I never did, certainly."
"The reason of that is," she said eagerly, "that he goes in privately by the old tower door, just when the service commences, and sits at the back of the gallery. He told me so."
This supreme instance of Troy's goodness fell upon Gabriel ears like the thirteenth stroke of crazy clock. It was not only received with utter incredulity as regarded itself, but threw a doubt on all the assurances that had preceded it. ”

“ You can do anything and smash anything in the world with a kopeck.' After giving his son this advice, the father parted from him and was dragged home again by the magpie, and he never saw the boy again; ”

“ On the triangular portion of the gable, that fronted next the street, was a dial, put up that very morning, and on which the sun was still marking the passage of the first bright hour in a history that was not destined to be all so bright. ”

“ Gabriel's malignant star was assuredly setting fast. ”

“ Now Gibbie had been honoured with the acquaintance of many dogs, and the friendship of most of them, for a lover of humanity can hardly fail to be a lover of caninity. ”

“ He therefore, in blessing his people, lays his hands across, guiding them wittingly and laying the chiefest blessing on the head of Ephraim, or in that providence that sanctifies affliction. Abel-what to the reason of Eve was he, in comparison with Cain? Rachel called Benjamin the son of her sorrow; but Jacob knew how to give him a better name. Jabez, also, though his mother so called him because, as it seems, she brought him forth with more than ordinary sorrow, was yet more honorable, more godly, than his brethren.
He that has skill to judge of providences aright, has a great ability in him "to comprehend with other saints what is the breadth and length and depth and height;" ”

“ ⁠She cried, “Laura,” up the garden,
“Did you miss me?
Come and kiss me.
Never mind my bruises,
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeezed from goblin fruits for you,
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
Eat me, drink me, love me;
Laura, make much of me:
For your sake I have braved the glen
And had to do with goblin merchant men.” ”

“ As Master Nathaniel jogged leisurely along, his thoughts turned to the farmer Gibberty, who many a time must have jogged along this path, in just such a way, and seen and heard the very same things that he was seeing and hearing now.
Yes, the farmer Gibberty had once been a real living man, like himself. And so had millions of others, whose names he had never heard. And one day he himself would be a prisoner, confined between the walls of other people's memory. And then he would cease even to be that, and become nothing but a few words cut in stone. What would these words be, he wondered. ”

“ And Jabim is the Lord of broken things, who sitteth behind the house to lament the things that are cast away. And there he sitteth lamenting the broken things until the worlds be ended, or until someone cometh to mend the broken things. Or sometimes he sitteth by the river’s edge to lament the forgotten things that drift upon it.
A kindly god is Jabim, whose heart is sore if anything be lost. ”

“ Robin, and Red Riding Hood
Take together to the wood,
And Sir Galahad lies hid
In a cave with Captain Kidd.
None of all the magic hosts,
None remain but a few ghosts
Of timorous heart, to linger on
Weeping for lost Babylon. ”

“ "Now, whither does this trail lead?" Kaa's voice was gentler. "Not a moon since there was a Manling with a knife threw stones at my head, and called me bad little tree-cat names, because I lay asleep in the open." ”

“ Alderic, Knight of the Order of the City and the Assault, hereditary Guardian of the King's Peace of Mind, a man not unremembered among makers of myth, pondered so long upon the Gibbelins' hoard that by now he deemed it his. Alas that I should say of so perilous a venture, undertaken at dead of night by a valorous man, that its motive was sheer avarice! Yet upon avarice only the Gibbelins relied to keep their larders full, and once in every hundred years sent spies into the cities of men to see how avarice did, and always the spies returned again to the tower saying that all was well.
It may be thought that, as the years went on and men came by fearful ends on that tower's wall, fewer and fewer would come to the Gibbelins' table: ”

“ Have heard her sigh and soften out the name,
Then would she change it for Egyptian sounds
More sweet, and seem to taste them on her lips,
Then loathe them—Gebir, Gebir still returned. ”

“ For the bliss of the animals lies in this, that, on their lower level, they shadow the bliss of those—few at any moment on the earth—who do not “look before and after, and pine for what is not,” but live in the holy carelessness of the eternal now. Gibbie by no means belonged to the higher order, was as yet, indeed, not much better than a very blessed little animal. ”

“ There was a young man in Rome, that was very like Augustus Cæsar; Augustus took knowledge of it, and sent for the man, and asked him, "Was your mother never at Rome?" He answered, "No, sir, but my father was." ”

“ Yet Gregor's sister was playing so beautifully. Her face was leant to one side, following the lines of music with a careful and melancholy expression. Gregor crawled a little further forward, keeping his head close to the ground so that he could meet her eyes if the chance came. ”

“ Open the old cigar-box—let me consider anew— Old friends, and who is Maggie that I should abandon you? A million surplus Maggies are willing to bear the yoke; And a woman is only a woman, but a good Cigar is a Smoke. Light me another Cuba—I hold to my first-sworn vows. If Maggie will have no rival, I'll have no Maggie for Spouse! ”

“ ‘He’s made himself a rabbit-skin cap, Jim, and a rabbit-skin collar that he buttons on outside his coat. They ain’t got but one overcoat among ‘em over there, and they take turns wearing it. They seem awful scared of cold, and stick in that hole in the bank like badgers.’
‘All but the crazy boy,’ Jake put in. ”