George W. De Long

“ Terrific was the yell that the multitude sent forth—a yell formed of a thousand combining voices, so long, so loud, so wildly agonizing, that never had the welkin rung with so appalling an ebullition of human misery before! Madly rushed the wolf amidst the people, dashing them aside, overturning them, hurling them down, bursting through the mass too dense to clear a passage of its own accord, and making the scene of horror more horrible still by mingling his hideous howlings with the cries—the shrieks—the screams that escaped from a thousand tongues. ”

“ But it was drag or die, and George Washington De Long was determined that not one man should die if he had to kill him to prevent it. For over De Long from the moment we were thrown on the ice had come a hardness and a determination which were new to us. Gone was the gravely courteous scholar, interested mainly in scientific discovery, scrupulously anxious to hurt no one’s feelings if it could be avoided. The Arctic ice had literally folded up his scientific expedition beneath his feet, closing the books at 77° North, in his eyes practically a complete failure. ”

“ This seemed to check with our last news on Nordenskjöld’s Vega. If indeed she had reached St. Lawrence Bay and passed south, she was of course safe now and we need no longer concern ourselves. But was it really the Vega?
Patiently, like a skilled lawyer examining an ignorant witness, De Long worked on George to find that out. Who was the Vega’s captain? An old man with a white beard who spoke no English. Who then had George conversed with? Another officer, a Russian, who spoke their tongue, the Tchuchee dialect, like a native. ”

“ But what kind eyes he has!"
"He's a fine fellow," said Desboro without emphasis.
Before they came within the firelight, he asked her whether she had really decided to give them a little lecture on jades and crystals; and she said that she had.
"It won't be too technical or too dry, I hope," she added laughingly. "I told Captain Herrendene what I was going to say and do, and he liked the idea."
"Won't you tell me, too, Jacqueline?"
"No, I want you to be surprised. Besides, I haven't time; we've been together too long already. Doesn't one's host have to be impartially attentive? ”

“ And here, in the dear dream-days, the conquering of the world will be a simple matter; for through the mist-prisms that rise from the foaming waters below the dam only rainbows can be seen—and there is Youth and the Springtime, and the new-born flowers and mating birds, and The River....
And when the sun is low we'll wind our poles, at the end of a rare and great day—one that cannot die with the sunset, but that will live so long as Memory is. ”

“ So he stood, leaning on his walking stick, the upturned collar of his raincoat framing a face which was too colourless and worn for a man of his age; and presently the little old salesman came trotting back, the tassel on his neat silk cap bobbing with every step.
"Miss Nevers will be very glad to see you in her private office. This way, if you please, sir."
Desboro followed to the rear of the long, dusky shop, turned to the left through two more rooms full of shadowy objects dimly discerned, then traversed a tiled passage to where electric lights burned over a doorway. ”

“ Desboro passed a miserable afternoon at the office. If there had been any business to take his mind off himself it might have been easier for him; but for a long time now there had been nothing stirring in Wall Street; the public kept away; business was dead.
After hours he went to the club, feeling physically wretched. Man after man came up and congratulated him on his marriage—some whom he knew scarcely more intimately than to bow to, spoke to him. ”

“ LONG, GEORGE (1800–1879) , English classical scholar, was born at Poulton, Lancashire, on the 4th of November 1800, and educated at Macclesfield grammar-school and Trinity College, Cambridge. He was Craven university scholar in 1821 (bracketed with Lord Macaulay and Henry Malden) , wrangler and senior chancellor’s medallist in 1822 and became a fellow of Trinity in 1823. ”

“ And the collection was full of fakes, too. But she came floating in here one morning, and what she did to my junk-heap was a plenty, believe me!" And the huge fellow grinned and grinned until Desboro's sombre face altered and became less rigid.
A maid appeared with a table and a frosted cocktail shaker.
"You'll stop and lunch with us," said Clydesdale, filling two glasses. "Elena won't be very long. Don't know just what ails her, but she's nervous and run down. I guess it's the spring that's coming. Well, here's to all bad men; they need the boost and we don't. Prosit!" ”

“ If the page blurs, as it may do if you were ever a child and if you have been tempered in the cruel furnace of the years, maybe the mists that fill the eyes will bathe the soul of you in their hallowed flood until the world-ache is soothed, and you can start up the big road again with some of the same wonderful exultation that sped you onward and forward in the Long Ago ... One touch of that, and the burden of Today, grown great in the years of struggle, slips from your shoulders as lightly as the wild-rose petal drops upon the bosom of the stream and floats away to the music of the riffles. ”

“ Staple to be a man of fine mind and extensive culture, a hearty sympathizer in the rebellion—into which he would have thrown his last dollar—and one of the most successful men on the Levee. Long, his senior partner, was a western man of hard, keen business sense, who had come to New Orleans fifty years before, a barefooted deck-hand on an Ohio schooner. By shrewdness, dogged industry and some little luck, he made "Long's" the best known and richest house in the South-west, until in the crash of '37 it threatened to topple down forever. ”

“ What he should take along was in the forefront of every man’s mind. We had salvaged far more of everything than we could possibly drag—what should be left behind? De Long abruptly settled the question with an order limiting what was to be taken to three boats, sixty days’ food, the ship’s papers and records, navigating outfits, and the clothes each man wore including his sleeping bag and his knapsack, the contents of which were strictly prescribed. ”

“ The heavy taxes consequent upon the maintenance of an army on a war footing pressed more and more upon a country whose income was insufficient to meet its expenses. People grew [pg.403] tired of waiting for a change in the political position that became every year more remote. Luxemburg was of little interest to the Dutch; they only saw that Belgium was prosperous, and that the maintenance of the status quo was apparently all to her advantage. The dissatisfaction of the Dutch people, so long patient and loyal, made itself heard with increasing insistence in the States-General ”

“ Hard-pressed men, driven to almost any lengths by the crying need of their families for such bare necessities as food and shelter, were being forced to promise they would “praise Roosevelt and cuss Long” before being granted a WPA laborer’s pittance.
At the outset of Long’s senatorial career this entire trove of cash and documentary dynamite was kept in some strongboxes of the Mayflower Hotel, where the Senator first established his capitol residence. ”

“ Such was the reward that Oldenbarneveldt received for life-long services of priceless value to his country. He more than any other man was the real founder of the Dutch Republic; and it will remain an ineffaceable stain on Maurice's memory that he was consenting unto this cruel and unjust sentence.
Sentences of imprisonment for life were passed upon De Groot and Hoogerbeets. They were confined in the castle of Loevestein. The conditions of captivity were so far relaxed that the famous jurist was allowed to receive books for the continuance of his studies. ”

“ The challenge he proposed to fling at the man who subsequently carried all but two of the Union’s states was neither a forlorn token like that of Governor Landon, nor a visionary crusade like the campaign of Henry Wallace and Glen Taylor. No one appraised this more realistically than Roosevelt himself. He never underestimated the sort of monolithic organization Long could create around the hard core of existing Share-Our-Wealth clubs, the amount of whose mail, as delivered to the Senate office building, dwarfed that delivered to any other member of the Congress. ”

“ These would be headed by House Bill Number One, the anti-Pavy gerrymander, and a somewhat similar measure which was designed to keep Congressman J. Y. Sanders, Jr., from returning to his home in Baton Rouge to run for a judgeship. His father, a former governor and congressman, stood at the very head of Huey Long’s bête noire list. Another measure high on Long’s “must” roster made provision for the fact that his current senatorial term would expire unless renewed in the fall of 1936 by re-election. ”

“ In the first ten days' march the travellers made no more than twenty miles, so difficult was the country; but during those days they enjoyed the luxury of a meal of deer's flesh, which, but for the crippled condition of several of the men, would have put new life into the whole party.
Then Captain De Long determined to send Ninderman and Noros ahead, for they were in better condition than any others of the party, and when they left on their perilous mission they bade a sad farewell to a gallant yet almost hopeless band of men, whom no one ever saw again until, nearly six months later, Mr. ”

“ The truth is that on the eve of Congress’ adjournment, Long was trying to build up against Roosevelt something he could tub-thump before the voters in the next year’s presidential campaign.
On the principle that “the best defense is an attack,” he was keeping the New Deal hierarchy in Washington so busily occupied on another front that he could take advantage of their preoccupation to infiltrate Louisiana’s federal patronage with his followers. ”

“ But it was another of the conferees whom Senator Long quoted next, reading from [36] the transcript, as suggesting that “we have Dear to make a trip around the state and then announce that the people want him to run for Governor, and no one will know about this arrangement here ... as you all know we must all keep all of this a secret and not even tell our own families of what is done.” Whereupon, according to the record, another voice proposed that “we should make fellows like Farley and Roosevelt and the suffering corporations ... cough up enough to get rid of that fellow.” ”

“ Every personal interest bade him throw in his lot with the Union. His property lay so close to Washington that it was certain to be destroyed and swept of every slave, as belonging to a rebel. But the die was cast; he forsook everything for principle and the stern duty it entailed. Then came that final temptation which opened out before him a vista of power and importance greater than that which any man since Washington had held in America. General Long's book proves beyond all further doubt that he was offered the post of commander-in-chief of the Federal army. ”

“ The hovels of the poor echoed not to the sounds of mirth and music—but to the wail of hunger and the cry of misery. In those sad abodes there was no joviality to welcome a new year;—for a new year was a curse—a mere prolongation of the acute and poignant horrors of the one gone by. ”

“ The declining rays of the orb of light bathed in molten gold the pinnacles, steeples, and lofty palaces of proud Florence, and toyed with the limpid waves of the Arno, on whose banks innumerable villas and casinos already sent forth delicious strains of music, broken only by the mirth of joyous revelers. ”

“ So it is that most brides and bridegrooms go to their marriage bed with the most widely diverse views as to what is right and wrong in the premises—as to the life they will lead in their new estate. The young wife is for "purity" and "chastity." The young husband, driven by a passion which he has long held in thrall, in the belief that he can now give the fullest vent to it, when he has got where such relief is possible, is like an excited hound when it seizes its prey, which he fully believes he has the right to deal with as he pleases! ”

“ What strange and appalling noises are heard on board a ship laboring in a storm—the cracking of timber, the creaking of elastic planks, the rattling of the cordage, the flapping of fragments of sails, the failing of spars, the rolling of casks got loose, and at times a tremendous crash throughout the vessel, as if the whole framework were giving way and the very sides collapsing! ”

“ And tonight, as the Boy still watches, in memory, old Jimmy on his rounds, they are a bit odd, these queer old street lamps that just seem to belong to the night, after the garish blaze of electric signs and the great arc-lights in the shop windows. Yet it shines through the years, this simple lamp of the Long Ago, as it shone through the night of old—a friendly beacon only, the modest servant of an humble race..... ”

“ Though unhurt by his glistening fangs—though unwounded by his sharp claws, yet the maiden—an instant before so enchanting in her beauty, so happy in her love—lay stretched on the cold turf, the cords of life snapped suddenly by that transition from perfect bliss to the most appalling terror! ”