I was once more face to face with the big bonfire that occupies the kernel of our system.
Freedom, to be desirable, involves kindness, wisdom, and all the virtues of the free; but the free man as we have seen him in action has been, as of yore, only the master of many helots; and the slaves are still ill-fed, ill-clad, ill-taught, ill-housed, insolently treated, and driven to their mines and workshops by the lash of famine.
They say cowardice is infectious; but then argument is, on the other hand, a great emboldener; and so when each had said his say, my mother.
Utterson became so used to the unvarying character of these reports, that he fell off little by little in the frequency of his visits.
And life is all a variorum, at the best.
It is always a bad sign when the lower classes laugh: their taste in humour is both poor and sinister;.
God knows; I am careless; this is my true hour of death, and what is to follow concerns someone other than myself.
The figure in these two phases haunted the lawyer all night: and if at any time he dozed over, it was but to see it glide more stealthily through sleeping houses, or move the more swiftly and still the more swiftly, even to dizziness, through wider labyrinths of lamp-lighted city, and at every street corner crush a child and leave her screaming.
Captain,” said the squire, “the house is quite invisible from the ship. It must be the flag they are aiming at. Would it not be wiser to take it in?” “Strike my colours!” cried the captain. “No, sir, not I;” and, as soon as he had said the words, I think we all agreed with him.
Watch for the ace of spades, which is the sign of death, and the ace of clubs, which designates the official of the night.
We must lay to, if you please, and keep a bright lookout. It’s trying on a man, I know. It would be pleasanter to come to blows. But there’s no help for it till we know our men. Lay to, and whistle for a wind, that’s my view.
You can’t begin and then stop. If you begin, you must keep on beginning: that’s the truth. No rest for the wicked.
I incline to Cain’s heresy,′ he used to say quaintly: ‘I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.’ In this character, it was frequently his fortune to be the last reputable acquaintance and the last good influence in the lives of down-going men.
We are all such as He was – the inheritors of sin; we must all bear and expiate a past which was not ours; there is in all of us – ay, even in me – a sparkle of the divine. Like Him, we must endure for a little while, until morning returns bringing peace.
Watch for the ace of spades, which is the sign of death, and the ace of clubs, which designates the official of the night. Happy, happy young men!” he added. “You have good.
The man who came with the barrow told us the mail had set him down the morning before at the Royal George, that he had inquired what inns there were along the coast, and hearing ours well spoken of, I suppose, and described as lonely, had chosen it from the others for his place of residence. And that was all we could learn of our guest.
He had taken me aside one day and promised me a silver fourpenny on the first of every month if I would only keep my “weather-eye open for a seafaring man with one leg” and let him know the moment he appeared.
And altogether I paid pretty dear for my monthly fourpenny piece, in the shape of these abominable fancies.
The sun was getting up, and mortal white he looked about the cutwater. But, there he was, and the six all dead – dead and buried.
Yes,” he thought; “he is a doctor, he must know his own state and that his days are counted; and the knowledge is more than he can bear.