Three days after the Easter banquet, which was traditionally a great occasion in the Lamonica household, both in its lavishness and in the number of its guests, Donna Cristina Lamonica was counting the table linen and silver service, and replacing them one by one, methodically, in drawer and cupboard, in readiness for future banquets.
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Young Gwilliam, fresh and brown from his two years in the wilds, and with two inches added to his chest measure, hurried to the club and searched for Drysdale. He found his Petronius sitting just as he had left him, in the accustomed well-cushioned chair, in the accustomed corner, on his face the accustomed quiet, faintly amused smile. Gwillam drew up a chair opposite; the necessary ceremonies were performed, and then they plunged into one of those long garrulous gossips, which they both liked so well.
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The girl was one of those pretty and charming young creatures who sometimes are born, as if by a slip of fate, into a family of clerks. She had no dowry, no expectations, no way of being known, understood, loved, married by any rich and distinguished man; so she let herself be married to a little clerk of the Ministry of Public Instruction.
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The war was over, and he was back in his native city that had been retaken from the Vandals. He was walking rapidly through a dimly lit quarter. A woman touched his arm and accosted him in fuddled accents.
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He had become very ill—could hardly move from where he lay; and she, who loved him, and was to have married him, and spent all her waking hours in thinking what she could do for him, persuaded him to have a telephone installed and brought to his bedside so that he and she could talk, and he could talk with others, too. Every night he rang her up and they had a long conversation; many times in the day also. Nothing, as it happened, could have saved his life, but this modern device lightened his last weeks.
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“Are they any old legends attached to the castle?” asked Conrad of his sister. Conrad was a prosperous Hamburg merchant, but he was the one poetically-dispositioned member of an eminently practical family.
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It was curious—that sense of dull uneasiness that came over him so suddenly, so stealthily at first he scarcely noticed it, but with such marked increase after a time that he presently got up and left the theater. His seat was on the gangway of the dress circle, and he slipped out awkwardly in the middle of what seemed to be the best and jolliest song of the piece. The full house was shaking with laughter; so infectious was the gaiety that even strangers turned to one another as much as to say, “Now, isn’t that funny?”
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“That woman’s art-jargon tires me,” said Clovis to his journalist friend. “She’s so fond of talking of certain pictures as ‘growing on one,’ as though they were a sort of fungus.”
“That reminds me,” said the journalist, “of the story of Henri Deplis. Have I ever told it you?”
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Sept. 4.—I have hunted all over London for rooms suited to my income—£120 a year—and have at last found them. Two rooms, without modern conveniences, it is true, and in an old, ramshackle building, but within a stone’s throw of P— Place and in an eminently respectable street. The rent is only £25 a year. I had begun to despair when at last I found them by chance.
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Anthony Trotz went first to the politician, Mike Delado. “How many people do you know, Mr. Delado?”
“Why the question?”
“I am wondering just what amount of detail the mind can hold.”
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He began by breaking things that morning. He broke the glass of water on his night stand. He knocked it crazily against the opposite wall and shattered it. Yet it shattered slowly. This would have surprised him if he had been fully awake, for he had only reached out sleepily for it.
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“Lieutenant Townley,” said Captain Von Dee sharply, “as a spy you will be executed in two hours. Pursuant to my custom you will be given a choice in the matter. Either you may elect to be shot in the customary manner, or you may pass through the Black Door which you see behind me. State your choice when the hour comes.”
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About this time (said Christian), poor as a church mouse, I took refuge in the roof of an old house in Minnesänger Street, Nuremberg, and made my nest in the corner of the garret.
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In the town of Vladimir lived a young merchant named Ivan Dmitrich Aksionov. He had two shops and a house of his own.
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Across the valley of the Oreto from Monreale, on the slopes of the mountains just above the little village of Parco, lies the old convent of Sta. Catarina.
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Marseilles, one hears while traveling through Europe, is the most vicious town in France.
Whether or not this ancient seaport, whose history reaches deep into the shadows of antiquity, is deserving of a criticism so sweeping and so condemnatory, I do not know. Such, at any rate, is the reputation it suffers among travelers.
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A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man’s hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck. It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack fell to the level of his knees.
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There were twenty-six of us—twenty-six living machines shut up in a damp cellar, where from morning to evening, we kneaded dough to make cakes and biscuits. The windows of our cellar looked upon a ditch yawning open before them and crammed full of bricks, green with damp; the window-frames were partly covered from the outside by an iron grating, and the light of the sun could not reach us through the window-panes covered with flour dust.
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Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. The fair page now lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation. This has been already too much an object for the scorn—for the horror—for the detestation of my race.
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The fact that Henry Armstrong was buried did not seem to him to prove that he was dead: he had always been a hard man to convince.
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In a forest of mixed growth somewhere on the eastern spurs of the Karpathians, a man stood one winter night watching and listening, as though he waited for some beast of the woods to come within the range of his vision, and, later, of his rifle.
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The dim lights of the old pawnbroker’s shop flickered violently as the street door opened, letting in a gust of icy wind. The man who came with the wind closed the door with difficulty, approached the low desk, took off his thin coat, shook the sleet from it and laid it on the counter.
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Many years ago, as evening was closing in, the venerable Pedro Arbuez d’Espila, sixth prior of the Dominicans of Segovia, and third Grand Inquisitor of Spain, followed by a fra redemptor, and preceded by two familiars of the Holy Office, the latter carrying lanterns, made their way to a subterranean dungeon.
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They had been talking of the Marsdens, who had just gone down with the torpedoed ship; and among the kindly and affectionate things said about them, the exceptional happiness of their married life was mentioned.
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Among the towns of Jutland, Viborg justly holds a high place. It is the seat of a bishopric; it has a handsome but almost entirely new cathedral, a charming garden, a lake of great beauty, and many storks. Near it is Hald, accounted one of the prettiest things in Denmark; and hard by is Finderup, where Marsk Stig murdered King Erik Glipping on St Cecilia’s Day, in the year 1286. Fifty-six blows of square-headed iron maces were traced on Erik’s skull when his tomb was opened in the seventeenth century. But I am not writing a guide-book.
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PHENISTONE ROAD, CLAPHAM.
August 20th, 190–.
I have had what I believe to be the most remarkable day in my life, and while the events are still fresh in my mind, I wish to put them down on paper as clearly as possible.
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They were sitting round the fire after dinner—not an ordinary fire—one of those fires that has a little room all to itself with seats at each side of it to hold a couple of people or three.
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The wind tears at the shingles that poorly cover the attic at the top of seven flights of stairs. The snow crystals, blown as fine as frost by the force of the tempest, buzz through crannies and sift upon the mean bed. Some shutters outside slam and creak with every frequent gale, and the snow clouds sweeping southward suffer a splendent blue-tinged star to turn a radiant eye downward upon the world.
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His arms were very tired, but he lifted the chisel and mallet again. He was almost through; only a few more letters and the inscription, cut deeply into the tough granite, would be finished.
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Conradin was ten years old, and the doctor had pronounced his professional opinion that the boy would not live another five years.
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“Henry had words with Edward in the study the night before Edward died,” said Caroline Glynn.
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The empty vial—the odour of bitter almonds—and in the chair what had been a man.
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In 1830, only a few miles away from what is now the great city of Cincinnati, lay an immense and almost unbroken forest. The whole region was sparsely settled by people of the frontier—restless souls who no sooner had hewn fairly habitable homes out of the wilderness and attained to that degree of prosperity which to-day we should call indigence than impelled by some mysterious impulse of their nature they abandoned all and pushed farther westward, to encounter new perils and privations in the effort to regain the meagre comforts which they had voluntarily renounced.
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