How well the man reasoned. Lunatics always do within their own scope.
The other was fair, as fair as can be, with great masses of golden hair and eyes like pale sapphires.
The gypsies may not have known the language, but there was no mistaking the tone, in whatever tongue the words were spoken.
When she saw my face at the window she threw herself forward, and shouted in a voice laden with menace, “Monster, give me my child!
They say that people who are near death die generally at the change to dawn or at the turn of the tide.
I have always thought that a wild animal never looks so well as when some obstacle of pronounced durability is between us.
Ah, sir, you dwellers in the city cannot enter into the feelings of the hunter.
As he went down the wall, lizard fashion, I wished I had a gun or some lethal weapon, that I might destroy him. But I fear that no weapon wrought along by man’s hand would have any effect on him.
Like them we shall travel towards the sunrise. And like them, if we fall, we fall in good cause.
I was evidently expected, for when I got near the door I faced a cheery-looking elderly woman in the usual peasant dress – white undergarment with a long double apron, front, and back, of coloured stuff fitting almost too tight for modesty. When I came close she bowed and said, “The Herr Englishman?” “Yes,” I said, “Jonathan Harker.” She smiled, and gave some message.
I am here to do your bidding, Master. I am your slave, and you will reward me, for I shall be faithful. I have worshipped you long and afar off. Now that you are near, I await your commands, and you will not pass me by, will you, dear Master, in your distribution of good things?” He is a selfish old beggar anyhow.
How can he” – and he pointed at me with the same look and gesture as that with which once he pointed me out to his class, on, or rather after, a particular occasion which he never fails to remind me of – “know anything of a young ladies?
This is no jest, but life and death, perhaps more.
Here I am, sitting at a little oak table where in old times possibly some fair lady sat to pen, with much thought and many blushes, her ill-spelt love-letter, and writing in my diary in shorthand all that has happened since I closed it last.
I am beginning to feel this nocturnal existence tell on me. It is destroying my nerve. I start at my own shadow, and am full of all sorts of horrible imaginings. God knows that there is ground for my terrible fear in this accursed place!
I positively opened my eyes at this new development. Here was my own pet lunatic – the most pronounced of his type that I had ever met with – talking elemental philosophy, and with the manner of a polished gentleman.
I had hung my shaving glass by the window, and was just beginning to shave. Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder, and heard the Count’s voice saying to me, “Good morning.” I started, for it amazed me that I had not seen him, since the reflection of the glass covered the whole room behind me.
Just fancy! He is only nine-and-twenty, and he has an immense lunatic asylum all under his own care.
1897 edition How these papers have been placed in sequence will be made manifest in the reading of them. All needless matters have been eliminated, so that a history almost at variance with the possibilities of latter-day belief may stand forth as simple fact. There is throughout no statement of past things wherein memory may err, for all the records chosen are exactly contemporary, given from the standpoints and within the range of knowledge of those who made them.
Never did tree or grass wave or rustle so ominously. Never did bough creak so mysteriously, and never did the far-away howling.