He could hear its footsteps.
Something was pushing its way through the bushes.
Being in front carried its responsibilities.
If they give me plenty of it I'll not complain about its color.
She reached out and put her hand over the ring, stopping its infernal winking.
He saw its shaggy head and big round eyes.
In answer to her response, his kiss lost its hesitancy and became ardent.
The rear end of the car danced sideways, bouncing like a horse kicking up its heels.
Obviously the long week was taking its toll on him as well.
"Tastes differ," murmured the dragonette, slowly drooping its scaley eyelids over its yellow eyes, until they looked like half-moons.
She shoved the book back into its place and gave the shelf a last swipe, curbing her tongue as she dismounted the chair.
Ridges of sparkling white sand surrounded the camp like a sleeping dragon, soaking heat from the sun - resting now so it could spit its fiery breath at them later in the day.
A long oak table graced the center of the room, its ten carved chairs at attention.
The envelope had a mind of its own, and it drew her back to the coffee table - demanded that she tear it open and read the answer.
It would be an excellent opportunity to get out of this house with its unpleasant memories.
He picked up a newspaper and snapped it open, his attention instantly captured by something he found in its crinkled pages.
The bay stumbled slightly and he patted its neck.
She shoved the photo back into the envelope and closed the lip, willing herself not to think about the previous pregnancy and its tragic end.
Of course, the system only shapes decisions insofar as you take its guidance, which begs the question: Will people follow suggestions they may not fully understand?
I place my hand on the hand of the speaker so lightly as not to impede its movements.
A warm hand caressed its way up her back and around to cradle her breast.
There is some of the same fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's building its own nest.
Along the broad country road, edged on both sides by trees, came a high, light blue Viennese caleche, slightly creaking on its springs and drawn by six horses at a smart trot.
Thanks to the strictness and assiduity of its commander the regiment, in comparison with others that had reached Braunau at the same time, was in splendid condition.
"You won't bear me a grudge, Prokhor Ignatych?" said the regimental commander, overtaking the third company on its way to its quarters and riding up to Captain Timokhin who was walking in front.
If the noble awistocwacy of the pwovince of Moscow thinks fit, it can show its loyalty to our sov'weign the Empewah in other ways.
The burning of Smolensk and its abandonment made an epoch in his life.
When you look at a product on one of its web pages, Amazon suggests other products you might like as well.
The regiment fluttered like a bird preening its plumage and became motionless.
The unreaped corn was scorched and shed its grain.
Napoleon, after making the Cossack a present, had him set free like a bird restored to its native fields.
And she recalled in all its detail the night at Bald Hills before he had the last stroke, when with a foreboding of disaster she had remained at home against his will.
A slow smile worked its way across his face and into his eyes.
The black car sat outside the building with its trunk open.
He could see its shadow as he peeped out through the clusters of leaves.
At last, however, the sea, as if weary of its new toy, threw me back on the shore, and in another instant I was clasped in my teacher's arms.
Only now in the stillness of the night, reading it by the faint light under the green shade, did he grasp its meaning for a moment.
It turned its head and watched as she placed a foot in the stirrup.
Bordeaux cupped a hand over its muzzle, silencing the horse.
Then our country will be rid of all its unwelcome visitors.
He leaped from his hiding place and clasped it round its neck.
He now felt ashamed of his speech with its constitutional tendency and sought an opportunity of effacing it.
The actors of 1812 have long since left the stage, their personal interests have vanished leaving no trace, and nothing remains of that time but its historic results.
Even though her skin now had a healthy tan, the sun was doing its best to burn it.
He pushed the hair from her neck and his lips sizzled a hot trail in its wake.
It darted back toward her, and she scrambled to get out of its path, tossing sand at it.
He fired at another figure trying to force its way into the circle.
She took the tin from his hand and opened its hinged lid.
A few minutes later another horse came by, its hooves clattering loudly above them.
Bordeaux had been leading the horse along the ravine to spare its hooves, but it had been a risk that hadn't paid off.
"If it had any bones, I ate them," replied the kitten, composedly, as it washed its face after the meal.
Noticing that the light was growing dim he picked up his nine piglets, patted each one lovingly on its fat little head, and placed them carefully in his inside pocket.
"Oh, there is no need of that," said the voice, which from its gentle tones seemed to belong to a young girl.
"Very," said the dragonette, snapping its jaws.
The Sawhorse stopped at the same time and stared at the other with its queer protruding eyes, which were mere knots in the log that formed its body.
As the Princess held the white piglet in her arms and stroked its soft hair she said: Let Eureka out of the cage, for she is no longer a prisoner, but our good friend.
And I think that helps explain why no one quite foresaw the rise of the Internet: because it doesn't have an offline corollary of its own.
Because its meaning has to be imputed, we have tended to describe it in terms of prior technologies—which, in many cases, understates its potential by many orders of magnitude.
Back in the old days (the 1980s), you only had data—say, the Yellow Pages with its list of restaurants.
Its social good, on average, is $2,000 a pan.
Once a nation shows its willingness to seize foreign-owned property at will, foreign investors are reluctant to do business there again.
The right is inseparable from its possessor.
Its greatest value cannot be hauled off.
That said, it also has its plus side.
The Internet is still in its adolescence.
I have often held in my hand a little model of the Plymouth Rock which a kind gentleman gave me at Pilgrim Hall, and I have fingered its curves, the split in the centre and the embossed figures "1620," and turned over in my mind all that I knew about the wonderful story of the Pilgrims.
In a word, every study had its obstacles.
The soil, it appears, is suited to the seed, for it has sent its radicle downward, and it may now send its shoot upward also with confidence.
If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend my life in years past, it would probably surprise those of my readers who are somewhat acquainted with its actual history; it would certainly astonish those who know nothing about it.
Under the most splendid house in the city is still to be found the cellar where they store their roots as of old, and long after the superstructure has disappeared posterity remark its dent in the earth.
Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.
It does not clasp its hands and pray to Jupiter.
It is wonderful how rapidly yet perfectly the sand organizes itself as it flows, using the best material its mass affords to form the sharp edges of its channel.
Her beautiful eyes glanced askance at her husband's face, and her own assumed the timid, deprecating expression of a dog when it rapidly but feebly wags its drooping tail.
Another voice, from a man of medium height with clear blue eyes, particularly striking among all these drunken voices by its sober ring, cried from the window: "Come here; part the bets!"
Tall and stout, holding high her fifty-year-old head with its gray curls, she stood surveying the guests, and leisurely arranged her wide sleeves as if rolling them up.
But not far from Bald Hills he again came out on the road and overtook his regiment at its halting place by the dam of a small pond.
Like some huge many-limbed animal, the regiment began to prepare its lair and its food.
Not one of the plans Nicholas tried succeeded; the estate was sold by auction for half its value, and half the debts still remained unpaid.
His face again resumed its former stiff and cold expression.
Another man says the locomotive moves because its wheels go round.
And corresponding to the event its justification appears in people's belief that this was necessary for the welfare of France, for liberty, and for equality.
People ceased to kill one another, and this event was accompanied by its justification in the necessity for a centralization of power, resistance to Europe, and so on.
That familiar yet annoying pang of disappointment took its place.
With a wild neigh of terror the animal fell bodily into the pit, drawing the buggy and its occupants after him.
Before this crowned Gargoyle had recovered himself Zeb had wound a strap several times around its body, confining its wings and arms so that it could not move.
Its wooden legs moved so fast that their twinkling could scarcely be seen, and although so much smaller than the cab-horse it covered the ground much faster.
An instant later the Tiger crouched and launched its huge body through the air swift and resistless as a ball from a cannon.
He could hear its heavy breathing.
The little company began its long journey.
The frightened fox scampered away as fast as it could; and Aristomenes followed, clinging to its tail.
Do this, or I will burn Rome and destroy all its people.
Just as he spoke, the ant lost its footing and fell to the ground.
The next minute it ran safely into its home, carrying its precious load.
He turned quickly and saw an eagle rising into the air with his moneybag in its claws.
People from all parts of the world sent to it, to tell it their troubles and get its advice.
Today we have the Internet and all its associated technologies, vastly more versatile, almost infinite in possibility.
Its end led directly to the Cold War, which consumed inconceivable amounts of money and almost pushed the world to the brink of nuclear devastation.
Every time you buy a book from Amazon, its employees use your data—information about what you did on their site in the privacy of your own home—to try to sell other people more products.
A few years later, with the United States again at war, most of its top medical minds were engaged in the war effort.
So if its person-to-person transmission can be interrupted, it truly can be eradicated from the planet.
In the century leading up to its extermination, smallpox killed about 500,000,000 people.
Around 430 BC, Athens, embroiled in the Second Peloponnesian War, endured three years of epidemics that wiped out a third of its inhabitants.
Its makers had not conceived bupropion hydrochloride as a drug to help people quit smoking.
Let's look at this from its beginning.
They accurately described the construction of DNA as a double helix and showed how its structure made replication both possible and reliable.
Once we have identified it, we can understand how it is going about doing its damage.
What we call "heart disease" will become hundreds of individual conditions each with its own cause and, hopefully, cure.
We cannot only see our enemy but have deconstructed it to its very core.
It boggles the mind, especially when you consider that this science is in its infancy.
If you had access to a library, its stock of medical books and journals was very small.
All scientific material from the past is making its way online.
What we need to make its parts—iron ore to make steel, rubber to make tires, sand to make glass, petroleum to make plastics—is generally a few cents' worth of raw materials.
A genetically engineered tree that converts sunlight into fuel and then pumps the fuel through its roots to where it is needed.
They are able to produce widgets for ten cents, putting the Dollar Widget Company (with its unfortunate name) out of business.
You could finance the entire government and its (hopefully) noble agenda, by this method alone.
The company should insure its workers because if uninsured workers end up in the ER, the burden falls on society, not the company.
Someday the computer program will lose its job, although I don't know to what.
The word is broad in its meaning and I use it in its broadest sense, as a mechanical device built to independently perform a task.
It has 4,000,000K of memory—once again, a thousandfold increase over its predecessor.
Its walls will be moveable by a professional, so it can be redesigned in a day.
Its windows will darken at your command; its air will be automatically purified.
Its windows will darken at your command; its air will be automatically purified.
The overall economic output of the planet, GWP (gross world product), will rise dramatically in the years to come, but its distribution will be quite skewed.
In its most basic form (which I'll discuss here for simplification's sake), it is a guarantee of a minimum income above the poverty line for every citizen.
They would say, If government is obligated to protect its citizens from a foreign invader, then it is obligated to protect them from a criminal.
Some stocks reliably pay dividends, portions of a corporation's profits paid out in cash to its shareholders.
I describe these three situations because each, in its own way, illustrates how I think the future will play out regarding income and wealth.
Somebody else—actually, a lot of somebody elses—worked really hard for a long time to build the United States and its freedoms.
As technology enters its explosive period of growth, with the Internet and associated technologies flourishing in a Moore's-Law-like manner, it will create immense amounts of wealth.
So the problem must be that we have stretched the planet past its ability to feed its inhabitants, right?
This would be the case in a besieged city or a nation using the food supply to keep its citizenry in check.
If you love "Western medicine" and think all acupuncturists are "quacks," then you are not likely to heed (or even appreciate) your friend's well-meaning efforts to get you to drink your own urine for its health benefits.
This will produce extremely specific nutritional information for just you, will add years to your life, and will increase its quality as well.
And that fact is driven home by its generally low price in most locations.
While agriculture itself is a technology, it is, in its most basic form, extremely low tech.
Over the CCC's nine-year life, its workers planted nearly three billion trees, built eight hundred parks, and constructed roads in remote areas.
Eventually, the pea was as large as its genetic potential allowed it to be.
Because of its reliability, agriculture will become more like an exact science.
Yet even given its unnaturalness, transgenesis is profoundly good.
As noted previously, in the future much of what you do will leave a Digital Echo, a record of its occurrence, down to the very minutia of your life.
How would it not find its way to the poorest regions of the earth?
Since its founding in 2005, Kiva has loaned out nearly a quarter of a billion dollars and is repaid almost 99 percent of the time.
China pulled out all the stops, dividing its farmland into about twenty-five thousand collective farms with an average of five thousand households each.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the houses of its children ...
Notable examples exist, but the flow of history in this regard has rendered its verdict.
Russia, obligated by treaty to defend Serbia, mobilized its army.
With Britain in the war, its colonies and dominions joined in as well.
If someone writes a book in one country, does another country enforce the copyright within its borders?
History has rendered its judgment on such matters.
Maybe you don't think this deserves its own point.
When you have visited a place, you will find it harder to advocate its destruction.
The United States contributes much to this, including its movies, products such as iPhones, and websites such as Google, YouTube, Twitter, Amazon, and eBay.
British music is known and loved around the world, as is its comedy and royalty.
One might have expected to find YouTube making its cameo in the earlier "communication" section, but I deliberately moved it here.
I do not think the importance of YouTube lies in its role as a communication method nor as a fundamentally new means of distribution of media.
Civilization, like technology, also compounds over time, as do its benefits.
Disease is a problem of technology; thus, its solution will be technological.
So while such an attack and its aftermath would not derail our eventual arrival at the next golden age, it quite possibly would delay it.
The government operating in its correct role is instrumental to civilization.
It can lessen its enforcement of private property rights.
And most damaging, it can wage war and thereby siphon off wealth, technology, and the lives of its citizens.
As a government grows in size, even if the growth is in social programs, it inevitably grows in its intrusion on civil liberty.
The benefits of civilization—from wealth to individual liberty and self-determination, from better health to safety and peace—all outweigh what its proponents can offer.
And because it changed for the better, wondrously better, we can proudly claim our part in its forming.
It was Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings.
Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.
Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness.
Our life is like a German Confederacy, made up of petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment.
Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure.
The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things.
A bird sits on the next bough, life-everlasting grows under the table, and blackberry vines run round its legs; pine cones, chestnut burs, and strawberry leaves are strewn about.
Near the end of May, the sand cherry (Cerasus pumila) adorned the sides of the path with its delicate flowers arranged in umbels cylindrically about its short stems, which last, in the fall, weighed down with good-sized and handsome cherries, fell over in wreaths like rays on every side.
To do things "railroad fashion" is now the byword; and it is worth the while to be warned so often and so sincerely by any power to get off its track.
What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery.
Sometimes one would circle round and round me in the woods a few feet distant as if tethered by a string, when probably I was near its eggs.
Even the sailor on the Atlantic and Pacific is awakened by his voice; but its shrill sound never roused me from my slumbers.
After hoeing, or perhaps reading and writing, in the forenoon, I usually bathed again in the pond, swimming across one of its coves for a stint, and washed the dust of labor from my person, or smoothed out the last wrinkle which study had made, and for the afternoon was absolutely free.
Such is the color of its iris.
Yet a single glass of its water held up to the light is as colorless as an equal quantity of air.
It is well known that a large plate of glass will have a green tint, owing, as the makers say, to its "body," but a small piece of the same will be colorless.
Making another hole directly over it with an ice chisel which I had, and cutting down the longest birch which I could find in the neighborhood with my knife, I made a slip-noose, which I attached to its end, and, letting it down carefully, passed it over the knob of the handle, and drew it by a line along the birch, and so pulled the axe out again.
Little did the dusky children think that the puny slip with its two eyes only, which they stuck in the ground in the shadow of the house and daily watered, would root itself so, and outlive them, and house itself in the rear that shaded it, and grown man's garden and orchard, and tell their story faintly to the lone wanderer a half-century after they had grown up and died--blossoming as fair, and smelling as sweet, as in that first spring.
But this small village, germ of something more, why did it fail while Concord keeps its ground?
Such then was its nature.
He would perhaps have placed alder branches over the narrow holes in the ice, which were four or five rods apart and an equal distance from the shore, and having fastened the end of the line to a stick to prevent its being pulled through, have passed the slack line over a twig of the alder, a foot or more above the ice, and tied a dry oak leaf to it, which, being pulled down, would show when he had a bite.
In order to see how nearly I could guess, with this experience, at the deepest point in a pond, by observing the outlines of a surface and the character of its shores alone, I made a plan of White Pond, which contains about forty-one acres, and, like this, has no island in it, nor any visible inlet or outlet; and as the line of greatest breadth fell very near the line of least breadth, where two opposite capes approached each other and two opposite bays receded, I ventured to mark a point a short distance from the latter line, but still on the line of greatest length, as the deepest.
Even when cleft or bored through it is not comprehended in its entireness.
In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat-Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions.
This pond has no stream passing through it to melt or wear away the ice.
Ice has its grain as well as wood, and when a cake begins to rot or "comb," that is, assume the appearance of honeycomb, whatever may be its position, the air cells are at right angles with what was the water surface.
The largest pond is as sensitive to atmospheric changes as the globule of mercury in its tube.
When the warmer days come, they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly going out.
The whole cut impressed me as if it were a cave with its stalactites laid open to the light.
What makes this sand foliage remarkable is its springing into existence thus suddenly.
The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype.
The very globe continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit.
Is not the hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins?
Its throes will heave our exuviae from their graves.
So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.
But the wind slides eastward over its opaque surface in vain, till it reaches the living surface beyond.
It is glorious to behold this ribbon of water sparkling in the sun, the bare face of the pond full of glee and youth, as if it spoke the joy of the fishes within it, and of the sands on its shore.
You may tell by looking at any twig of the forest, ay, at your very wood-pile, whether its winter is past or not.
Where was the parent which hatched it, its kindred, and its father in the heavens?
The tenant of the air, it seemed related to the earth but by an egg hatched some time in the crevice of a crag;--or was its native nest made in the angle of a cloud, woven of the rainbow's trimmings and the sunset sky, and lined with some soft midsummer haze caught up from earth?
Its eyry now some cliffy cloud.
Its pleadings will not bear to be stereotyped.
The war of 1812, besides its national significance dear to every Russian heart, was now to assume another, a European, significance.
All this at the time seemed merely strange to Pierre: he felt he could not grasp its significance.
The presence and remarks of Willarski who continually deplored the ignorance and poverty of Russia and its backwardness compared with Europe only heightened Pierre's pleasure.
The more the plundering by the French continued, the more both the wealth of Moscow and the strength of its plunderers was destroyed.
But plundering by the Russians, with which the reoccupation of the city began, had an opposite effect: the longer it continued and the greater the number of people taking part in it the more rapidly was the wealth of the city and its regular life restored.
The house had escaped the fire; it showed signs of damage but its general aspect was unchanged.
Pierre looked again at the companion's pale, delicate face with its black eyes and peculiar mouth, and something near to him, long forgotten and more than sweet, looked at him from those attentive eyes.
"Yes, that was happiness," she then said in her quiet voice with its deep chest notes.
She caught the unfinished word in its flight and took it straight into her open heart, divining the secret meaning of all Pierre's mental travail.
The change that took place in Natasha at first surprised Princess Mary; but when she understood its meaning it grieved her.
The storm-tossed sea of European history had subsided within its shores and seemed to have become calm.
It was seething in its depths.
These questions, then as now, existed only for those who see nothing in marriage but the pleasure married people get from one another, that is, only the beginnings of marriage and not its whole significance, which lies in the family.
A blissful bright smile was fixed on the baby's broad face with its toothless open mouth.
But in spite of much that was interesting and had to be discussed, the baby with the little cap on its unsteady head evidently absorbed all his attention.
As in every large household, there were at Bald Hills several perfectly distinct worlds which merged into one harmonious whole, though each retained its own peculiarities and made concessions to the others.
The questions put by these two kept the conversation from changing its ordinary character of gossip about the higher government circles.
In 1812 it reaches its extreme limit, Moscow, and then, with remarkable symmetry, a countermovement occurs from east to west, attracting to it, as the first movement had done, the nations of middle Europe.
But to know what can and what cannot be executed is impossible, not only in the case of Napoleon's invasion of Russia in which millions participated, but even in the simplest event, for in either case millions of obstacles may arise to prevent its execution.
The soldiers, of whom there are the most, form the lower section of the cone and its base.
But wherever it may turn there always will be the wave anticipating its movement.
Its cool year-round creek and rolling hills dotted with wild flowers filled her dreams at night – beckoned.
In her room, she dropped on the bed and threw her arms out, sinking into its softness.
She stared at the bath water, only mildly aware that it was losing its warmth.
The sun was trying to force its way through the curtains.
The stage came to a halt in front of the station, and people drifted by, satisfying their curiosity about its occupants.
A quail punctuated her statement with its crisp call.
She walked toward it and found the horse tied to a tree and standing motionless, with its head hanging down almost to the ground.
Just then the buggy tipped slowly over upon its side, the body of the horse tipping also.
It was all they could do, for to go away and leave that strange sight was impossible; nor could they hurry its fall in any way.
The Wizard reached out, caught the wee creature in his hand, and holding its head between one thumb and finger and its tail between the other thumb and finger he pulled it apart, each of the two parts becoming a whole and separate piglet in an instant.
They heard a crunching, grinding sound, a loud snap, and the turn-table came to a stop with its broadest surface shutting off the path from which they had come.
"What brought you back?" was the next question, and Dorothy's eye rested on an antlered head hanging on the wall just over the fireplace, and caught its lips in the act of moving.
Then I will jump out and throw my arms around its neck and choke it to death.
He drew his sword to hit the boy with its flat side.
His mother unlocked her cabinet and took the precious volume from its place of safe keeping.
A second time it tried to carry its load up the rough trunk of the tree, and a second time it failed.
From our standpoint, the plant wastes all the rest of its energy on riotous living: growing roots and leaves, soaking up water, separating carbon molecules from oxygen ones.
For environmentalist organizations like Greenpeace to be against GMO in all its forms under all conditions does nothing at all to serve them or the constituencies they purport to represent.
I remember in autumn of '87 thinking it was perfectly reasonable to take the red 1964 Corvair convertible for a test drive, despite its lack of functioning brakes.
We sailed on the Hudson River and wandered about on its green banks, of which Bryant loved to sing.
The mind drops them as a branch drops its overripe fruit.
It is not necessary that one should be able to define every word and give it its principal parts and its grammatical position in the sentence in order to understand and appreciate a fine poem.
I do not think that the knowledge which I have gained of its history and sources compensates me for the unpleasant details it has forced upon my attention.
Then, too, there is in German literature a fine reserve which I like; but its chief glory is the recognition I find in it of the redeeming potency of woman's self-sacrificing love.
Oh, would that men would leave the city, its splendour and its tumult and its gold, and return to wood and field and simple, honest living!
Is it not true, then, that my life with all its limitations touches at many points the life of the World Beautiful?
Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.
Those are red-letter days in our lives when we meet people who thrill us like a fine poem, people whose handshake is brimful of unspoken sympathy, and whose sweet, rich natures impart to our eager, impatient spirits a wonderful restfulness which, in its essence, is divine.
It shows how much the gift of writing is, in the early stages of its development, the gift of mimicry.
The doll cried, too, and stretched out its arms from among the green branches, and looked distressed.
I have laughed at the poor duck, with the red rag tied round its leg.
I hope the great ocean will love the new Helen, and let her sail over its blue waves peacefully.
This wonderful world with all its sunlight and beauty was hidden from me, and I had never dreamed of its loveliness.
I had the same feeling once before when I first stood by the great ocean and felt its waves beating against the shore.
I shall prize the little book always, not only for its own value; but because of its associations with you.
Love always finds its way to an imprisoned soul, and leads it out into the world of freedom and intelligence!
I cannot help feeling as if I knew its gifted author.
Then the world has advanced one step in its heavenward march.
He had just constructed a boat that could be propelled by a kite with the wind in its favor, and one day he tried experiments to see if he could steer the kite against the wind.
Words are powerless to describe the desolation of that prison-house, or the joy of the soul that is delivered out of its captivity.
When Miss Keller speaks, her face is animated and expresses all the modes of her thought--the expressions that make the features eloquent and give speech half its meaning.
In the same way her response to music is in part sympathetic, although she enjoys it for its own sake.
For Miss Keller to spell a sentence in the manual alphabet impresses it on her mind just as we learn a thing from having heard it many times and can call back the memory of its sound.
Dr. Howe was an experimental scientist and had in him the spirit of New England transcendentalism with its large faith and large charities.
Then she dropped on the ground and asked for its name and pointed to the pump and the trellis, and suddenly turning round she asked for my name.
Her mind grows through its ceaseless activity.
I told her that the book wasn't afraid, and must sleep in its case, and that "girl" mustn't read in bed.
But it hardly seems possible that any mere words should convey to one who has never seen a mountain the faintest idea of its grandeur; and I don't see how any one is ever to know what impression she did receive, or the cause of her pleasure in what was told her about it.
There are several near Tuscumbia; one very large one from which the town got its name.
She found the word "brown" in her primer and wanted to know its meaning.
She objected to its miscellaneous fruits and began to remove them, evidently thinking they were all meant for her.
TALK SHOULD BE NATURAL AND HAVE FOR ITS OBJECT AN EXCHANGE OF IDEAS.
Her behaviour is easy and natural, and it is charming because of its frankness and evident sincerity.
I tried to describe to her the appearance of a camel; but, as we were not allowed to touch the animal, I feared that she did not get a correct idea of its shape.
"But if I write what my soul thinks," she said, "then it will be visible, and the words will be its body."
Language grows out of life, out of its needs and experiences.
Her mind is so filled with the beautiful thoughts and ideals of the great poets that nothing seems commonplace to her; for her imagination colours all life with its own rich hues.
So Helen Keller's aptitude for language is her whole mental aptitude, turned to language because of its extraordinary value to her.
Miss Sullivan's vigorous, original mind has lent much of its vitality to her pupil.
A child of the muses cannot write fine English unless fine English has been its nourishment.
It would seem that Helen had learned and treasured the memory of this expression of the poet, and this morning in the snow-storm had found its application.
I knew that in that sunny land spring had come in all its splendour.
'All its birds and all its blossoms, all its flowers and all its grasses.'
Soon after its appearance in print I was pained to learn, through the Goodson Gazette, that a portion of the story (eight or nine passages) is either a reproduction or adaptation of Miss Margaret Canby's "Frost Fairies."
"A new word opens its heart to me," she writes in a letter; and when she uses the word its heart is still open.
In the years when she was growing out of childhood, her style lost its early simplicity and became stiff and, as she says, "periwigged."
Let the dead past bury its dead, Act, act in the living present, Heart within and God overhead.
Naturally I love peace and hate war and all that pertains to war; I see nothing admirable in the ruthless career of Napoleon, save its finish.
Its warm touch seemed so like a human caress, I really thought it was a sentient being, capable of loving and protecting me.
The instant I felt its warmth I was reassured, and I sat a long time watching it climb higher and higher in shining waves.
But a man has no more to do with the style of architecture of his house than a tortoise with that of its shell: nor need the soldier be so idle as to try to paint the precise color of his virtue on his standard.
This town is said to have the largest houses for oxen, cows, and horses hereabouts, and it is not behindhand in its public buildings; but there are very few halls for free worship or free speech in this county.
Genius is not a retainer to any emperor, nor is its material silver, or gold, or marble, except to a trifling extent.
The kind uncles and aunts of the race are more esteemed than its true spiritual fathers and mothers.
The upright white hewn studs and freshly planed door and window casings gave it a clean and airy look, especially in the morning, when its timbers were saturated with dew, so that I fancied that by noon some sweet gum would exude from them.
I did not need to go outdoors to take the air, for the atmosphere within had lost none of its freshness.
I discovered that my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe.
If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains.
The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity.
However much we may admire the orator's occasional bursts of eloquence, the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or above the fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind the clouds.
But consider how little this village does for its own culture.
As the sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hickory before my door, so had I my chuckle or suppressed warble which he might hear out of my nest.
Its broad pinnate tropical leaf was pleasant though strange to look on.
In those driving northeast rains which tried the village houses so, when the maids stood ready with mop and pail in front entries to keep the deluge out, I sat behind my door in my little house, which was all entry, and thoroughly enjoyed its protection.
The bullet of your thought must have overcome its lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last and steady course before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may plow out again through the side of his head.
The shore is composed of a belt of smooth rounded white stones like paving-stones, excepting one or two short sand beaches, and is so steep that in many places a single leap will carry you into water over your head; and were it not for its remarkable transparency, that would be the last to be seen of its bottom till it rose on the opposite side.
Successive nations perchance have drank at, admired, and fathomed it, and passed away, and still its water is green and pellucid as ever.
Flint's Pond, a mile eastward, allowing for the disturbance occasioned by its inlets and outlets, and the smaller intermediate ponds also, sympathize with Walden, and recently attained their greatest height at the same time with the latter.
By this fluctuation the pond asserts its title to a shore, and thus the shore is shorn, and the trees cannot hold it by right of possession.
It licks its chaps from time to time.
For four months in the year its water is as cold as it is pure at all times; and I think that it is then as good as any, if not the best, in the town.
Moreover, in summer, Walden never becomes so warm as most water which is exposed to the sun, on account of its depth.
Its pickerel, though not abundant, are its chief boast.
Its pickerel, though not abundant, are its chief boast.
Ducks and geese frequent it in the spring and fall, the white-bellied swallows (Hirundo bicolor) skim over it, and the peetweets (Totanus macularius) "teeter" along its stony shores all summer.
The forest has never so good a setting, nor is so distinctly beautiful, as when seen from the middle of a small lake amid hills which rise from the water's edge; for the water in which it is reflected not only makes the best foreground in such a case, but, with its winding shore, the most natural and agreeable boundary to it.
There is no rawness nor imperfection in its edge there, as where the axe has cleared a part, or a cultivated field abuts on it.
The trees have ample room to expand on the water side, and each sends forth its most vigorous branch in that direction.
The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows.
It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs; no storms, no dust, can dim its surface ever fresh;--a mirror in which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the sun's hazy brush--this the light dust-cloth--which retains no breath that is breathed on it, but sends its own to float as clouds high above its surface, and be reflected in its bosom still.
It is intermediate in its nature between land and sky.
It is remarkable that we can look down on its surface.
When I first paddled a boat on Walden, it was completely surrounded by thick and lofty pine and oak woods, and in some of its coves grape-vines had run over the trees next the water and formed bowers under which a boat could pass.
The hills which form its shores are so steep, and the woods on them were then so high, that, as you looked down from the west end, it had the appearance of an amphitheatre for some land of sylvan spectacle.
Though the woodchoppers have laid bare first this shore and then that, and the Irish have built their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its border, and the ice-men have skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on; all the change is in me.
It has not acquired one permanent wrinkle after all its ripples.
I see by its face that it is visited by the same reflection; and I can almost say, Walden, is it you?
Since the wood-cutters, and the railroad, and I myself have profaned Walden, perhaps the most attractive, if not the most beautiful, of all our lakes, the gem of the woods, is White Pond;--a poor name from its commonness, whether derived from the remarkable purity of its waters or the color of its sands.
It has the same stony shore, and its waters are of the same hue.
Instead of the white lily, which requires mud, or the common sweet flag, the blue flag (Iris versicolor) grows thinly in the pure water, rising from the stony bottom all around the shore, where it is visited by hummingbirds in June; and the color both of its bluish blades and its flowers and especially their reflections, is in singular harmony with the glaucous water.
Men come tamely home at night only from the next field or street, where their household echoes haunt, and their life pines because it breathes its own breath over again; their shadows, morning and evening, reach farther than their daily steps.
The hare in its extremity cries like a child.
The harp is the travelling patterer for the Universe's Insurance Company, recommending its laws, and our little goodness is all the assessment that we pay.
Possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change its nature.
I fear that it may enjoy a certain health of its own; that we may be well, yet not pure.
When I was building, one of these had its nest underneath the house, and before I had laid the second floor, and swept out the shavings, would come out regularly at lunch time and pick up the crumbs at my feet.
It could readily ascend the sides of the room by short impulses, like a squirrel, which it resembled in its motions.
At length, as I leaned with my elbow on the bench one day, it ran up my clothes, and along my sleeve, and round and round the paper which held my dinner, while I kept the latter close, and dodged and played at bopeep with it; and when at last I held still a piece of cheese between my thumb and finger, it came and nibbled it, sitting in my hand, and afterward cleaned its face and paws, like a fly, and walked away.
So perfect is this instinct, that once, when I had laid them on the leaves again, and one accidentally fell on its side, it was found with the rest in exactly the same position ten minutes afterward.
You only need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns.
They grew also behind my house, and one large tree, which almost overshadowed it, was, when in flower, a bouquet which scented the whole neighborhood, but the squirrels and the jays got most of its fruit; the last coming in flocks early in the morning and picking the nuts out of the burs before they fell, I relinquished these trees to them and visited the more distant woods composed wholly of chestnut.
I had often since seen its crumpled red velvety blossom supported by the stems of other plants without knowing it to be the same.
There are many furrows in the sand where some creature has travelled about and doubled on its tracks; and, for wrecks, it is strewn with the cases of caddis-worms made of minute grains of white quartz.
An old forest fence which had seen its best days was a great haul for me.
But my house occupied so sunny and sheltered a position, and its roof was so low, that I could afford to let the fire go out in the middle of almost any winter day.
Though mainly but a humble route to neighboring villages, or for the woodman's team, it once amused the traveller more than now by its variety, and lingered longer in his memory.
It chanced that I walked that way across the fields the following night, about the same hour, and hearing a low moaning at this spot, I drew near in the dark, and discovered the only survivor of the family that I know, the heir of both its virtues and its vices, who alone was interested in this burning, lying on his stomach and looking over the cellar wall at the still smouldering cinders beneath, muttering to himself, as is his wont.
The vivacious lilac still grows, unfolding its sweet-scented flowers each spring.
These he peddles still, prompting God and disgracing man, bearing for fruit his brain only, like the nut its kernel.
I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great bed-fellow in that part of Concord, as if it were restless in its bed and would fain turn over, were troubled with flatulency and had dreams; or I was waked by the cracking of the ground by the frost, as if some one had driven a team against my door, and in the morning would find a crack in the earth a quarter of a mile long and a third of an inch wide.
Its large eyes appeared young and unhealthy, almost dropsical.
Not without reason was its slenderness.
I never chanced to see its kind in any market; it would be the cynosure of all eyes there.
They are not like cups between the hills; for this one, which is so unusually deep for its area, appears in a vertical section through its centre not deeper than a shallow plate.
No doubt many a smiling valley with its stretching cornfields occupies exactly such a "horrid chasm," from which the waters have receded, though it requires the insight and the far sight of the geologist to convince the unsuspecting inhabitants of this fact.
So, probably, the depth of the ocean will be found to be very inconsiderable compared with its breadth.
As I sounded through the ice I could determine the shape of the bottom with greater accuracy than is possible in surveying harbors which do not freeze over, and I was surprised at its general regularity.
We know that a hill is not highest at its narrowest part.
Every harbor on the sea-coast, also, has its bar at its entrance.
In proportion as the mouth of the cove was wider compared with its length, the water over the bar was deeper compared with that in the basin.
One has suggested, that if such a "leach-hole" should be found, its connection with the meadow, if any existed, might be proved by conveying some colored powder or sawdust to the mouth of the hole, and then putting a strainer over the spring in the meadow, which would catch some of the particles carried through by the current.
At one rod from the shore its greatest fluctuation, when observed by means of a level on land directed toward a graduated staff on the ice, was three quarters of an inch, though the ice appeared firmly attached to the shore.
So the hollows about this pond will, sometimes, in the winter, be filled with a greenish water somewhat like its own, but the next day will have frozen blue.
In the right stage of the weather a pond fires its evening gun with great regularity.
The ear may be regarded, fancifully, as a lichen, Umbilicaria, on the side of the head, with its lobe or drop.
For a week I heard the circling, groping clangor of some solitary goose in the foggy mornings, seeking its companion, and still peopling the woods with the sound of a larger life than they could sustain.
As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age.
The Merlin it seemed to me it might be called: but I care not for its name.
Southern customers objected to its blue color, which is the evidence of its purity, as if it were muddy, and preferred the Cambridge ice, which is white, but tastes of weeds.
Before he had found a stock in all respects suitable the city of Kouroo was a hoary ruin, and he sat on one of its mounds to peel the stick.
This generation inclines a little to congratulate itself on being the last of an illustrious line; and in Boston and London and Paris and Rome, thinking of its long descent, it speaks of its progress in art and science and literature with satisfaction.
I see far inland the banks which the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets.
But it is not the less necessary for this; for the people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have.
After the first blush of sin comes its indifference; and from immoral it becomes, as it were, unmoral, and not quite unnecessary to that life which we have made.
Why do they not dissolve it themselves--the union between themselves and the State--and refuse to pay their quota into its treasury?
Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have them?
A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.
I did not see why the lyceum should not present its tax-bill, and have the State to back its demand, as well as the Church.
I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it.
If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.
I never had seen its institutions before.
We love eloquence for its own sake, and not for any truth which it may utter, or any heroism it may inspire.
When Telyanin had finished his lunch he took out of his pocket a double purse and, drawing its rings aside with his small, white, turned-up fingers, drew out a gold imperial, and lifting his eyebrows gave it to the waiter.
Down below, the little town could be seen with its white, red-roofed houses, its cathedral, and its bridge, on both sides of which streamed jostling masses of Russian troops.
"The squadwon can't pass," shouted Vaska Denisov, showing his white teeth fiercely and spurring his black thoroughbred Arab, which twitched its ears as the bayonets touched it, and snorted, spurting white foam from his bit, tramping the planks of the bridge with his hoofs, and apparently ready to jump over the railings had his rider let him.
I'll hack you with my saber! he shouted, actually drawing his saber from its scabbard and flourishing it.
Carelessly holding in his stallion that was neighing and pawing the ground, eager to rejoin its fellows, he watched his squadron draw nearer.
His face with its long mustache was serious as always, only his eyes were brighter than usual.
"Oh, every bullet has its billet," answered Vaska Denisov, turning in his saddle.
A wax candle stood at each side of the minister's bent bald head with its gray temples.
You abandon Vienna, give up its defense--as much as to say: 'Heaven is with us, but heaven help you and your capital!'
What of the bridge and its celebrated bridgehead and Prince Auersperg?
When Prince Andrew reached the room prepared for him and lay down in a clean shirt on the feather bed with its warmed and fragrant pillows, he felt that the battle of which he had brought tidings was far, far away from him.
"The Berlin cabinet cannot express a feeling of alliance," began Hippolyte gazing round with importance at the others, "without expressing... as in its last note... you understand...
You are in a position to seize its baggage and artillery.
They talked of peace but did not believe in its possibility; others talked of a battle but also disbelieved in the nearness of an engagement.
If they attack our center we, having the center battery on this high ground, shall withdraw the left flank under its cover, and retreat to the dip by echelons.
Suddenly, however, he was struck by a voice coming from the shed, and its tone was so sincere that he could not but listen.
Here it is! was seen even on Prince Bagration's hard brown face with its half-closed, dull, sleepy eyes.
As he approached, a ringing shot issued from it deafening him and his suite, and in the smoke that suddenly surrounded the gun they could see the gunners who had seized it straining to roll it quickly back to its former position.
One could already see the soldiers' shaggy caps, distinguish the officers from the men, and see the standard flapping against its staff.
The head of the French column, with its officers leading, appeared from below the hill.
It was Timokhin's company, which alone had maintained its order in the wood and, having lain in ambush in a ditch, now attacked the French unexpectedly.
Blood was gushing from its leg as from a spring.
And he again saw her not as the daughter of Prince Vasili, but visualized her whole body only veiled by its gray dress.
But at the very time he was expressing this conviction to himself, in another part of his mind her image rose in all its womanly beauty.
Her face struck Pierre, by its altered, unpleasantly excited expression.
"It is done!" she said to the count, pointing triumphantly to the countess, who sat holding in one hand the snuffbox with its portrait and in the other the letter, and pressing them alternately to her lips.
It looked as if by that slight motion the army itself was expressing its joy at the approach of the Emperors.
Till the Tsar reached it, each regiment in its silence and immobility seemed like a lifeless body, but as soon as he came up it became alive, its thunder joining the roar of the whole line along which he had already passed.
Next day, the army began its campaign, and up to the very battle of Austerlitz, Boris was unable to see either Prince Andrew or Dolgorukov again and remained for a while with the Ismaylov regiment.
Wheels creak on their axles as the cogs engage one another and the revolving pulleys whirr with the rapidity of their movement, but a neighboring wheel is as quiet and motionless as though it were prepared to remain so for a hundred years; but the moment comes when the lever catches it and obeying the impulse that wheel begins to creak and joins in the common motion the result and aim of which are beyond its ken.
Kutuzov, with his uniform unbuttoned so that his fat neck bulged over his collar as if escaping, was sitting almost asleep in a low chair, with his podgy old hands resting symmetrically on its arms.
And his fancy pictured the battle, its loss, the concentration of fighting at one point, and the hesitation of all the commanders.
Rostov's horse was also getting restive: it pawed the frozen ground, pricking its ears at the noise and looking at the lights.
A sergeant of the battalion ran up and took the flag that was swaying from its weight in Prince Andrew's hands, but he was immediately killed.
"Your regiment fulfilled its duty honorably," said Napoleon.
Prince Andrew did not see how and by whom it was replaced, but the little icon with its thin gold chain suddenly appeared upon his chest outside his uniform.
Sitting on the sofa with the little cushions on its arms, in what used to be his old schoolroom, and looking into Natasha's wildly bright eyes, Rostov re-entered that world of home and childhood which had no meaning for anyone else, but gave him some of the best joys of his life; and the burning of an arm with a ruler as a proof of love did not seem to him senseless, he understood and was not surprised at it.
But after a while, just as a jury comes out of its room, the bigwigs who guided the club's opinion reappeared, and everybody began speaking clearly and definitely.
It was evident that the affair so lightly begun could no longer be averted but was taking its course independently of men's will.
His mouth wore its usual semblance of a smile.
The most solemn mystery in the world continued its course.
Strands of her black hair lay round her inflamed and perspiring cheeks, her charming rosy mouth with its downy lip was open and she was smiling joyfully.
She was lying dead, in the same position he had seen her in five minutes before and, despite the fixed eyes and the pallor of the cheeks, the same expression was on her charming childlike face with its upper lip covered with tiny black hair.
While that untrained voice, with its incorrect breathing and labored transitions, was sounding, even the connoisseurs said nothing, but only delighted in it and wished to hear it again.
With a pair of felt boots on his thin bony legs, and keeping on a worn, nankeen-covered, sheepskin coat, the traveler sat down on the sofa, leaned back his big head with its broad temples and close-cropped hair, and looked at Bezukhov.
And again, glancing at the stranger's hands, he looked more closely at the ring, with its skull--a masonic sign.
And thou art more foolish and unreasonable than a little child, who, playing with the parts of a skillfully made watch, dares to say that, as he does not understand its use, he does not believe in the master who made it.
Can I receive that pure liquid into an impure vessel and judge of its purity?
Having entered the courtyard of a large house where the Lodge had its headquarters, and having ascended a dark staircase, they entered a small well-lit anteroom where they took off their cloaks without the aid of a servant.
The book was the Gospel, and the white thing with the lamp inside was a human skull with its cavities and teeth.
"In the seventh place, try, by the frequent thought of death," the Rhetor said, "to bring yourself to regard it not as a dreaded foe, but as a friend that frees the soul grown weary in the labors of virtue from this distressful life, and leads it to its place of recompense and peace."
"I must also inform you," said the Rhetor, "that our Order delivers its teaching not in words only but also by other means, which may perhaps have a stronger effect on the sincere seeker after wisdom and virtue than mere words.
He quickly entered the small reception room with its still-unplastered wooden walls redolent of pine, and would have gone farther, but Anton ran ahead on tiptoe and knocked at a door.
Prince Andrew spoke with some animation and interest only of the new homestead he was constructing and its buildings, but even here, while on the scaffolding, in the midst of a talk explaining the future arrangements of the house, he interrupted himself:
They reached a river that had overflowed its banks and which they had to cross by ferry.
The Pavlograd regiment had had only two men wounded in action, but had lost nearly half its men from hunger and sickness.
Now he remembered Denisov with his changed expression, his submission, and the whole hospital, with arms and legs torn off and its dirt and disease.
With its huge ungainly limbs sprawling unsymmetrically, and its gnarled hands and fingers, it stood an aged, stern, and scornful monster among the smiling birch trees.
During this journey he, as it were, considered his life afresh and arrived at his old conclusion, restful in its hopelessness: that it was not for him to begin anything anew--but that he must live out his life, content to do no harm, and not disturbing himself or desiring anything.
Farther back beyond the dark trees a roof glittered with dew, to the right was a leafy tree with brilliantly white trunk and branches, and above it shone the moon, nearly at its full, in a pale, almost starless, spring sky.
Everything was stone-still, like the moon and its light and the shadows.
And this movement of reconstruction of which Prince Andrew had a vague idea, and Speranski its chief promoter, began to interest him so keenly that the question of the army regulations quickly receded to a secondary place in his consciousness.
He did not think of doubting Freemasonry itself, but suspected that Russian Masonry had taken a wrong path and deviated from its original principles.
(2) The purification and reformation of oneself for its reception, and (3) The improvement of the human race by striving for such purification.
Only the vicissitudes of life can show us its vanity and develop our innate love of death or of rebirth to a new life.
At that time, as always happens, the highest society that met at court and at the grand balls was divided into several circles, each with its own particular tone.
In the holy science of our order all is one, all is known in its entirety and life.
Sulphur is of an oily and fiery nature; in combination with salt by its fiery nature it arouses a desire in the latter by means of which it attracts mercury, seizes it, holds it, and in combination produces other bodies.
Suddenly a smallish dog seized my left thigh with its teeth and would not let go.
And in my dream I knew that these drawings represented the love adventures of the soul with its beloved.
And on its pages I saw a beautiful representation of a maiden in transparent garments and with a transparent body, flying up to the clouds.
That face struck her by its peculiarly serious and concentrated expression.
Gervais intervened with a joke, and the talk reverted to its former lively tone.
"Why do I strive, why do I toil in this narrow, confined frame, when life, all life with all its joys, is open to me?" said he to himself.
In their new, clean, and light study with its small busts and pictures and new furniture sat Berg and his wife.
Having finished her morning tea she went to the ballroom, which she particularly liked for its loud resonance, and began singing her solfeggio.
Religion alone can explain to us what without its help man cannot comprehend: why, for what cause, kind and noble beings able to find happiness in life--not merely harming no one but necessary to the happiness of others--are called away to God, while cruel, useless, harmful persons, or such as are a burden to themselves and to others, are left living.
He felt that sooner or later he would have to re-enter that whirlpool of life, with its embarrassments and affairs to be straightened out, its accounts with stewards, quarrels, and intrigues, its ties, society, and with Sonya's love and his promise to her.
Mitenka's wife and sisters-in-law thrust their heads and frightened faces out of the door of a room where a bright samovar was boiling and where the steward's high bedstead stood with its patchwork quilt.
The verdure had thickened and its bright green stood out sharply against the brownish strips of winter rye trodden down by the cattle, and against the pale-yellow stubble of the spring buckwheat.
Each dog knew its master and its call.
The wolf paused, turned its heavy forehead toward the dogs awkwardly, like a man suffering from the quinsy, and, still slightly swaying from side to side, gave a couple of leaps and with a swish of its tail disappeared into the skirt of the wood.
On its long back sat Daniel, hunched forward, capless, his disheveled gray hair hanging over his flushed, perspiring face.
A thousand times during that half-hour Rostov cast eager and restless glances over the edge of the wood, with the two scraggy oaks rising above the aspen undergrowth and the gully with its water-worn side and "Uncle's" cap just visible above the bush on his right.
Nearer and nearer... now she was ahead of it; but the wolf turned its head to face her, and instead of putting on speed as she usually did Milka suddenly raised her tail and stiffened her forelegs.
The reddish Lyubim rushed forward from behind Milka, sprang impetuously at the wolf, and seized it by its hindquarters, but immediately jumped aside in terror.
But the wolf jumped up more quickly than anyone could have expected and, gnashing her teeth, flew at the yellowish borzoi, which, with a piercing yelp, fell with its head on the ground, bleeding from a gash in its side.
Thanks to the delay caused by this crossing of the wolf's path, the old dog with its felted hair hanging from its thigh was within five paces of it.
Now they drew close to the fox which began to dodge between the field in sharper and sharper curves, trailing its brush, when suddenly a strange white borzoi dashed in followed by a black one, and everything was in confusion; the borzois formed a star-shaped figure, scarcely swaying their bodies and with tails turned away from the center of the group.
The house, with its bare, unplastered log walls, was not overclean--it did not seem that those living in it aimed at keeping it spotless--but neither was it noticeably neglected.
He took off its cloth covering, and the harp gave out a jarring sound.
Natasha was foremost in setting a merry holiday tone, which, passing from one to another, grew stronger and reached its climax when they all came out into the frost and got into the sleighs, talking, calling to one another, laughing, and shouting.
The old count's troyka, with Dimmler and his party, started forward, squeaking on its runners as though freezing to the snow, its deep-toned bell clanging.
The log walls of the barn and its snow-covered roof, that looked as if hewn out of some precious stone, sparkled in the moonlight.
Only the skeleton of life remained: his house, a brilliant wife who now enjoyed the favors of a very important personage, acquaintance with all Petersburg, and his court service with its dull formalities.
The small group that assembled before dinner in the lofty old-fashioned drawing room with its old furniture resembled the solemn gathering of a court of justice.
"Does it matter, Count, how the Note is worded," he asked, "so long as its substance is forcible?"
Natasha noticed this and guessed its reason.
Having fallen into the line of carriages, the Rostovs' carriage drove up to the theater, its wheels squeaking over the snow.
She even turned so that he should see her profile in what she thought was its most becoming aspect.
Morning came with its cares and bustle.
Count Rostov approved of this suggestion, appreciating its reasonableness.
She recalled her love for Prince Andrew in all its former strength, and at the same time felt that she loved Kuragin.
When the count came to see her she turned anxiously round at the sound of a man's footstep, and then her face resumed its cold and malevolent expression.
He took a heavy paperweight and lifted it threateningly, but at once put it back in its place.
In Pierre, however, that comet with its long luminous tail aroused no feeling of fear.
What were its causes?
A deed done is irrevocable, and its result coinciding in time with the actions of millions of other men assumes an historic significance.
History, that is, the unconscious, general, hive life of mankind, uses every moment of the life of kings as a tool for its own purposes.
Each of the three armies had its own commander-in-chief, but there was no supreme commander of all the forces, and the Emperor did not assume that responsibility himself.
On seeing the Russian general he threw back his head, with its long hair curling to his shoulders, in a majestically royal manner, and looked inquiringly at the French colonel.
* "Royalty has its obligations."
Balashev took out the packet containing the Emperor's letter and laid it on the table (made of a door with its hinges still hanging on it, laid across two barrels).
His full face, rather young-looking, with its prominent chin, wore a gracious and majestic expression of imperial welcome.
Balashev noticed that his left leg was quivering faster than before and his face seemed petrified in its stern expression.
What has she given you? he continued hurriedly, evidently no longer trying to show the advantages of peace and discuss its possibility, but only to prove his own rectitude and power and Alexander's errors and duplicity.
"Every country has its own character," said he.
The eighth and largest group, which in its enormous numbers was to the others as ninety-nine to one, consisted of men who desired neither peace nor war, neither an advance nor a defensive camp at the Drissa or anywhere else, neither Barclay nor the Emperor, neither Pfuel nor Bennigsen, but only the one most essential thing--as much advantage and pleasure for themselves as possible.
From among all these parties, just at the time Prince Andrew reached the army, another, a ninth party, was being formed and was beginning to raise its voice.
Though he concealed the fact under a show of irritation and contempt, he was evidently in despair that the sole remaining chance of verifying his theory by a huge experiment and proving its soundness to the whole world was slipping away from him.
Armfeldt says our army is cut in half, and Paulucci says we have got the French army between two fires; Michaud says that the worthlessness of the Drissa camp lies in having the river behind it, and Pfuel says that is what constitutes its strength; Toll proposes one plan, Armfeldt another, and they are all good and all bad, and the advantages of any suggestions can be seen only at the moment of trial.
In general, the summer of 1812 was remarkable for its storms.
A few minutes later it reappeared brighter still from behind the top of the cloud, tearing its edge.
In another moment Rostov's horse dashed its breast against the hindquarters of the officer's horse, almost knocking it over, and at the same instant Rostov, without knowing why, raised his saber and struck the Frenchman with it.
A child knocks itself and runs at once to the arms of its mother or nurse to have the aching spot rubbed or kissed, and it feels better when this is done.
The child cannot believe that the strongest and wisest of its people have no remedy for its pain, and the hope of relief and the expression of its mother's sympathy while she rubs the bump comforts it.
When she understood them her personal feeling became interwoven in the prayers with shades of its own.
She shared with all her heart in the prayer for the spirit of righteousness, for the strengthening of the heart by faith and hope, and its animation by love.
Napoleon rode on, dreaming of the Moscow that so appealed to his imagination, and "the bird restored to its native fields" galloped to our outposts, inventing on the way all that had not taken place but that he meant to relate to his comrades.
Heaven only knows who arranged all this and when, but it all got done as if of its own accord.
The sun had reached the other side of the house, and its slanting rays shone into the open window, lighting up the room and part of the morocco cushion at which Princess Mary was looking.
In a suffering and weary voice he was saying something to Tikhon, speaking of the Crimea and its warm nights and of the Empress.
And not the face she had known ever since she could remember and had always seen at a distance, but the timid, feeble face she had seen for the first time quite closely, with all its wrinkles and details, when she stooped near to his mouth to catch what he said.
After the Emperor had left Moscow, life flowed on there in its usual course, and its course was so very usual that it was difficult to remember the recent days of patriotic elation and ardor, hard to believe that Russia was really in danger and that the members of the English Club were also sons of the Fatherland ready to sacrifice everything for it.
Speak of the sun and you see its rays! and she smiled amiably at Pierre.
The Russian army, they say, in its retreat from Smolensk sought out for itself the best position for a general engagement and found such a position at Borodino.
Behind him a cavalry regiment was coming down the hill preceded by its singers.
The cavalry regiment, as it descended the hill with its singers, surrounded Pierre's carriage and blocked the road.
The driver in his bast shoes ran panting up to it, placed a stone under one of its tireless hind wheels, and began arranging the breech-band on his little horse.
It is organized for that, it is its nature.
Has your regiment had its rice?
The sun had risen brightly and its slanting rays struck straight into Napoleon's face as, shading his eyes with his hand, he looked at the fleches.
Napoleon, standing on the knoll, looked through a field glass, and in its small circlet saw smoke and men, sometimes his own and sometimes Russians, but when he looked again with the naked eye, he could not tell where what he had seen was.
The Russians stood in serried ranks behind Semenovsk village and its knoll, and their guns boomed incessantly along their line and sent forth clouds of smoke.
He could not stop what was going on before him and around him and was supposed to be directed by him and to depend on him, and from its lack of success this affair, for the first time, seemed to him unnecessary and horrible.
Without moving from that spot or firing a single shot the regiment here lost another third of its men.
The horse of an ammunition cart put its leg over a trace.
Another time, general attention was attracted by a small brown dog, coming heaven knows whence, which trotted in a preoccupied manner in front of the ranks with tail stiffly erect till suddenly a shell fell close by, when it yelped, tucked its tail between its legs, and darted aside.
His curly hair, its color, and the shape of his head seemed strangely familiar to Prince Andrew.
Men were supporting him in their arms and offering him a glass of water, but his trembling, swollen lips could not grasp its rim.
The French invaders, like an infuriated animal that has in its onslaught received a mortal wound, felt that they were perishing, but could not stop, any more than the Russian army, weaker by one half, could help swerving.
Whenever I look at my watch and its hands point to ten, I hear the bells of the neighboring church; but because the bells begin to ring when the hands of the clock reach ten, I have no right to assume that the movement of the bells is caused by the position of the hands of the watch.
Behind it were seven hundred miles of hunger-stricken, hostile country; ahead were a few dozen miles separating it from its goal.
It would not take place because the commanders not merely all recognized the position to be impossible, but in their conversations were only discussing what would happen after its inevitable abandonment.
His broad head with its bold features and glittering eyes was resting on his hand.
The other generals, however, understood it and, leaving aside the question of Moscow, spoke of the direction the army should take in its retreat.
When he felt he was being looked at he behaved like an ostrich which hides its head in a bush in order not to be seen: he hung his head and quickening his pace went down the street.
This city was evidently living with the full force of its own life.
He had the assurance of winning the contest.
There were still people in it, perhaps a fiftieth part of its former inhabitants had remained, but it was empty.
The beekeeper closes the hive, chalks a mark on it, and when he has time tears out its contents and burns it clean.
But there were no dealers with voices of ingratiating affability inviting customers to enter; there were no hawkers, nor the usual motley crowd of female purchasers--but only soldiers, in uniforms and overcoats though without muskets, entering the Bazaar empty-handed and silently making their way out through its passages with bundles.
The cart was loaded high, and at the very top, beside a child's chair with its legs in the air, sat a peasant woman uttering piercing and desperate shrieks.
Mavra Kuzminichna flicked the dust off the clavichord and closed it, and with a deep sigh left the drawing room and locked its main door.
The ship moves independently with its own enormous motion, the boat hook no longer reaches the moving vessel, and suddenly the administrator, instead of appearing a ruler and a source of power, becomes an insignificant, useless, feeble man.
Aren't they afraid of sinning?... said the same mob now, looking with pained distress at the dead body with its long, thin, half-severed neck and its livid face stained with blood and dust.
Two dragoons took it by its distorted legs and dragged it along the ground.
The gory, dust-stained, half-shaven head with its long neck trailed twisting along the ground.
The lunatic's solemn, gloomy face was thin and yellow, with its beard growing in uneven tufts.
But it remained an army only until its soldiers had dispersed into their different lodgings.
But despite all these measures the men, who had till then constituted an army, flowed all over the wealthy, deserted city with its comforts and plentiful supplies.
Moscow was burned by its inhabitants, it is true, but by those who had abandoned it and not by those who remained in it.
Moscow when occupied by the enemy did not remain intact like Berlin, Vienna, and other towns, simply because its inhabitants abandoned it and did not welcome the French with bread and salt, nor bring them the keys of the city.
Pierre knew this, but instead of acting he only thought about his undertaking, going over its minutest details in his mind.
He wrapped the bottle up to its neck in a table napkin and poured out wine for himself and for Pierre.
Two of the gazers went round to the other side of the coach and sat down on its steps.
In that world some structure was still being erected and did not fall, something was still stretching out, and the candle with its red halo was still burning, and the same shirtlike sphinx lay near the door; but besides all this something creaked, there was a whiff of fresh air, and a new white sphinx appeared, standing at the door.
Prince Andrew wished to return to that former world of pure thought, but he could not, and delirium drew him back into its domain.
The soft whispering voice continued its rhythmic murmur, something oppressed him and stretched out, and the strange face was before him.
Natasha's thin pale face, with its swollen lips, was more than plain--it was dreadful.
One of its sides had fallen in, another was on fire, and bright flames issued from the openings of the windows and from under the roof.
Only unconscious action bears fruit, and he who plays a part in an historic event never understands its significance.
In Petersburg and in the provinces at a distance from Moscow, ladies, and gentlemen in militia uniforms, wept for Russia and its ancient capital and talked of self-sacrifice and so on; but in the army which retired beyond Moscow there was little talk or thought of Moscow, and when they caught sight of its burned ruins no one swore to be avenged on the French, but they thought about their next pay, their next quarters, of Matreshka the vivandiere, and like matters.
When asked what he was doing when he was arrested, Pierre replied in a rather tragic manner that he was restoring to its parents a child he had saved from the flames.
The Kremlin, which was not destroyed, gleamed white in the distance with its towers and the belfry of Ivan the Great.
The domes of the New Convent of the Virgin glittered brightly and its bells were ringing particularly clearly.
But as soon as he closed them he saw before him the dreadful face of the factory lad-- especially dreadful because of its simplicity--and the faces of the murderers, even more dreadful because of their disquiet.
His face, despite its fine, rounded wrinkles, had an expression of innocence and youth, his voice was pleasant and musical.
But the chief peculiarity of his speech was its directness and appositeness.
He loved his dog, his comrades, the French, and Pierre who was his neighbor, but Pierre felt that in spite of Karataev's affectionate tenderness for him (by which he unconsciously gave Pierre's spiritual life its due) he would not have grieved for a moment at parting from him.
As always happens when traveling, Princess Mary thought only of the journey itself, forgetting its object.
His illness pursued its normal physical course, but what Natasha referred to when she said: "This suddenly happened," had occurred two days before Princess Mary arrived.
But just when he was clumsily creeping toward the door, that dreadful something on the other side was already pressing against it and forcing its way in.
That flank march might not only have failed to give any advantage to the Russian army, but might in other circumstances have led to its destruction.
Lanskoy informed the commander-in-chief that the army supplies were for the most part stored along the Oka in the Tula and Ryazan provinces, and that if they retreated on Nizhni the army would be separated from its supplies by the broad river Oka, which cannot be crossed early in winter.
The army turned more to the south, along the Ryazan road and nearer to its supplies.
The moan of that wounded beast (the French army) which betrayed its calamitous condition was the sending of Lauriston to Kutuzov's camp with overtures for peace.
Serpukhov is already occupied by an enemy detachment and Tula with its famous arsenal so indispensable to the army, is in danger.
The secrecy of the undertaking heightened its charm and they marched gaily.
But if the aim of the battle was what actually resulted and what all the Russians of that day desired--to drive the French out of Russia and destroy their army--it is quite clear that the battle of Tarutino, just because of its incongruities, was exactly what was wanted at that stage of the campaign.
Its members will be distinguished by a red ribbon worn across the shoulder, and the mayor of the city will wear a white belt as well.
The city police is established on its former footing, and better order already prevails in consequence of its activity.
With regard to supplies for the army, Napoleon decreed that all the troops in turn should enter Moscow a la maraude * to obtain provisions for themselves, so that the army might have its future provided for.
The genuine as well as the false paper money which flooded Moscow lost its value.
Not only was the paper money valueless which Napoleon so graciously distributed to the unfortunate, but even silver lost its value in relation to gold.
Very often a wounded animal, hearing a rustle, rushes straight at the hunter's gun, runs forward and back again, and hastens its own end.
Its lack of a master, a name, or even of a breed or any definite color did not seem to trouble the blue-gray dog in the least.
Its furry tail stood up firm and round as a plume, its bandy legs served it so well that it would often gracefully lift a hind leg and run very easily and quickly on three legs, as if disdaining to use all four.
Its furry tail stood up firm and round as a plume, its bandy legs served it so well that it would often gracefully lift a hind leg and run very easily and quickly on three legs, as if disdaining to use all four.
Now it would roll on its back, yelping with delight, now bask in the sun with a thoughtful air of importance, and now frolic about playing with a chip of wood or a straw.
To fear or to try to escape that force, to address entreaties or exhortations to those who served as its tools, was useless.
From the words of his comrades who saw better than he did, he found that this was the body of a man, set upright against the palings with its face smeared with soot.
A carriage that followed the escort ran into one of the carts and knocked a hole in it with its pole.
Pierre glanced up at the sky and the twinkling stars in its faraway depths.
It is natural for a man who does not understand the workings of a machine to imagine that a shaving that has fallen into it by chance and is interfering with its action and tossing about in it is its most important part.
On Konovnitsyn's handsome, resolute face with cheeks flushed by fever, there still remained for an instant a faraway dreamy expression remote from present affairs, but then he suddenly started and his face assumed its habitual calm and firm appearance.
"Who brought it?" asked Kutuzov with a look which, when the candle was lit, struck Toll by its cold severity.
An army has suffered defeat, and at once a people loses its rights in proportion to the severity of the reverse, and if its army suffers a complete defeat the nation is quite subjugated.
In proportion to the defeat of the Austrian army Austria loses its rights, and the rights and the strength of France increase.
People have called this kind of war "guerrilla warfare" and assume that by so calling it they have explained its meaning.
This contradiction arises from the fact that military science assumes the strength of an army to be identical with its numbers.
In military affairs the strength of an army is the product of its mass and some unknown x.
Military science, seeing in history innumerable instances of the fact that the size of any army does not coincide with its strength and that small detachments defeat larger ones, obscurely admits the existence of this unknown factor and tries to discover it--now in a geometric formation, now in the equipment employed, now, and most usually, in the genius of the commanders.
The tactical rule that an army should act in masses when attacking, and in smaller groups in retreat, unconsciously confirms the truth that the strength of an army depends on its spirit.
Its first period had passed: when the partisans themselves, amazed at their own boldness, feared every minute to be surrounded and captured by the French, and hid in the forests without unsaddling, hardly daring to dismount and always expecting to be pursued.
Like his horse, which turned its head and laid its ears back, he shrank from the driving rain and gazed anxiously before him.
His thin face with its short, thick black beard looked angry.
Please excuse its not being quite dry.
"Well, I am glad to see you," Denisov interrupted him, and his face again assumed its anxious expression.
On reaching a large oak tree that had not yet shed its leaves, he stopped and beckoned mysteriously to them with his hand.
He was armed with a musketoon (which he carried rather as a joke), a pike and an ax, which latter he used as a wolf uses its teeth, with equal ease picking fleas out of its fur or crunching thick bones.
When he espied Denisov he hastily threw something into the bushes, removed his sodden hat by its floppy brim, and approached his commander.
Dolokhov's appearance amazed Petya by its simplicity.
Something was boiling in a small cauldron at the edge of the fire and a soldier in a peaked cap and blue overcoat, lit up by the fire, was kneeling beside it stirring its contents with a ramrod.
We'll do some service tomorrow, said he, sniffing its nostrils and kissing it.
He climbed onto the wagon and sat on its edge.
Each instrument--now resembling a violin and now a horn, but better and clearer than violin or horn--played its own part, and before it had finished the melody merged with another instrument that began almost the same air, and then with a third and a fourth; and they all blended into one and again became separate and again blended, now into solemn church music, now into something dazzlingly brilliant and triumphant.
All who could walk went together, and after the third stage Pierre had rejoined Karataev and the gray-blue bandy-legged dog that had chosen Karataev for its master.
The blue-gray bandy legged dog ran merrily along the side of the road, sometimes in proof of its agility and self-satisfaction lifting one hind leg and hopping along on three, and then again going on all four and rushing to bark at the crows that sat on the carrion.
And Pierre's soul was dimly but joyfully filled not by the story itself but by its mysterious significance: by the rapturous joy that lit up Karataev's face as he told it, and the mystic significance of that joy.
Its whole surface consisted of drops closely pressed together, and all these drops moved and changed places, sometimes several of them merging into one, sometimes one dividing into many.
Looking more closely Pierre recognized the blue-gray dog, sitting beside the soldier, wagging its tail.
How was it that the Russian army, which when numerically weaker than the French had given battle at Borodino, did not achieve its purpose when it had surrounded the French on three sides and when its aim was to capture them?
But even if we admitted that Kutuzov, Chichagov, and others were the cause of the Russian failures, it is still incomprehensible why, the position of the Russian army being what it was at Krasnoe and at the Berezina (in both cases we had superior forces), the French army with its marshals, kings, and Emperor was not captured, if that was what the Russians aimed at.
There never was or could have been such an aim, for it would have been senseless and its attainment quite impossible.
Secondly it was attained by the guerrilla warfare which was destroying the French, and thirdly by the fact that a large Russian army was following the French, ready to use its strength in case their movement stopped.
For Princess Mary, listening to Natasha's tales of childhood and early youth, there also opened out a new and hitherto uncomprehended side of life: belief in life and its enjoyment.
The chief cause of the wastage of Napoleon's army was the rapidity of its movement, and a convincing proof of this is the corresponding decrease of the Russian army.
All the artful maneuvers suggested by our generals meant fresh movements of the army and a lengthening of its marches, whereas the only reasonable aim was to shorten those marches.
"Lower its head, lower it!" he said to a soldier who had accidentally lowered the French eagle he was holding before the Preobrazhensk standards.
An infantry regiment which had left Tarutino three thousand strong but now numbered only nine hundred was one of the first to arrive that night at its halting place--a village on the highroad.
The regiment passed through the village and stacked its arms in front of the last huts.
Even wormwood grows on its own root.
The French crowd fled at a continually increasing speed and all its energy was directed to reaching its goal.
It fled like a wounded animal and it was impossible to block its path.
And this embrace too, owing to a long-standing impression related to his innermost feelings, had its usual effect on Kutuzov and he gave a sob.
With this object his staff was gradually reconstructed and its real strength removed and transferred to the Emperor.
The flood of nations begins to subside into its normal channels.
When Nicholas first began farming and began to understand its different branches, it was the serf who especially attracted his attention.
In her face there was none of the ever-glowing animation that had formerly burned there and constituted its charm.
During that twenty-year period an immense number of fields were left untilled, houses were burned, trade changed its direction, millions of men migrated, were impoverished, or were enriched, and millions of Christian men professing the law of love of their fellows slew one another.
A third asserts that the cause of its movement lies in the smoke which the wind carries away.
From this fundamental difference between the view held by history and that held by jurisprudence, it follows that jurisprudence can tell minutely how in its opinion power should be constituted and what power-- existing immutably outside time--is, but to history's questions about the meaning of the mutations of power in time it can answer nothing.
The theory of the transference of the collective will of the people to historic persons may perhaps explain much in the domain of jurisprudence and be essential for its purposes, but in its application to history, as soon as revolutions, conquests, or civil wars occur--that is, as soon as history begins--that theory explains nothing.
Is there any collective action which cannot find its justification in political unity, in patriotism, in the balance of power, or in civilization?
Wherever the ship may go, the rush of water which neither directs nor increases its movement foams ahead of it, and at a distance seems to us not merely to move of itself but to govern the ship's movement also.
But in the Crusades we already see an event occupying its definite place in history and without which we cannot imagine the modern history of Europe, though to the chroniclers of the Crusades that event appeared as merely due to the will of certain people.
In the case of a crime we most urgently demand the punishment for such an act; in the case of a virtuous act we rate its merit most highly.
In the second case, if freedom were possible without inevitability we should have arrived at unconditioned freedom beyond space, time, and cause, which by the fact of its being unconditioned and unlimited would be nothing, or mere content without form.
Inevitability without content is man's reason in its three forms.
From the standpoint from which the science of history now regards its subject on the path it now follows, seeking the causes of events in man's freewill, a scientific enunciation of those laws is impossible, for however man's free will may be restricted, as soon as we recognize it as a force not subject to law, the existence of law becomes impossible.
Exhaustion from the ordeal was taking its toll on Carmen as well, but she tried to stay awake.
His eyes clouded with belated concern and his voice lost its edge.
Its course down the cliff was marked by the cracking of limbs.
A gray brick house dominated the landscape, its ranch style sprawling in a U shape with a garage on one end.
A huge marble fireplace dominated the large family room, its image reflected on the shiny expanse of hardwood floor.
It even found its way into her writing.
The horse lifted its head and nickered in the direction of the path.
With planning and diligence, his business would be on its feet in a few years and she would be working in the pediatric ward at the hospital.
One of the mules bared its teeth at him.
He glanced up at her; the sun darkened face with its thin lips completely devoid of emotion.
None of them were in clusters, such as villages or towns, but each had ample grounds of its own, with orchards and gardens surrounding it.
The horse was plunging madly about, and two or three deep gashes appeared upon its flanks, from which the blood flowed freely.
The mountain before them was shaped like a cone and was so tall that its point was lost in the clouds.
In the open space between the clouds and the black, bubbling sea far beneath, could be seen an occasional strange bird winging its way swiftly through the air.
"It isn't the bigness, dear; its the variety," replied the girl.
So the horse gave a groan, flopped its four wings all together, and flew away from the platform.
Ozma has it; for its powers won't work in a common, ordinary country like the United States.
The moon rose, and by its light he could see the dim form of the church tower, far away.
They could not see the speeding horse, but they heard the clatter of its hoofs far down the road, and they understood the cry, "Up! up! and defend yourselves!"
It is thought to have had its apex in Italy—in Venice, Florence, and Rome.
But that movement was, by its nature, backward looking.
Its reawakening of the arts derived chiefly from seeking to recapture something thought lost from a past Golden Age.
Instead of science proceeding at the slow speed of time, the only limit on its progress will be processor speed—and those two speeds hardly can be compared.
A website called Wolfram Alpha is amazing to me, especially in its aspirations.
Why are there fewer traffic jams in one certain city than in any other of its size?
Its old-fashioned garden was the paradise of my childhood.
Yes, there it was, all quivering in the warm sunshine, its blossom-laden branches almost touching the long grass.
Its delicate blossoms shrank from the slightest earthly touch; it seemed as if a tree of paradise had been transplanted to earth.
The sun had been under a cloud all day, and there had been brief showers; but suddenly the sun broke forth in all its southern splendour.
Plunging through drifts, leaping hollows, swooping down upon the lake, we would shoot across its gleaming surface to the opposite bank.
In the savage state every family owns a shelter as good as the best, and sufficient for its coarser and simpler wants; but I think that I speak within bounds when I say that, though the birds of the air have their nests, and the foxes their holes, and the savages their wigwams, in modern civilized society not more than one half the families own a shelter.
Each stick was carefully mortised or tenoned by its stump, for I had borrowed other tools by this time.
The sides were left shelving, and not stoned; but the sun having never shone on them, the sand still keeps its place.
What reasonable man ever supposed that ornaments were something outward and in the skin merely--that the tortoise got his spotted shell, or the shell-fish its mother-o'-pearl tints, by such a contract as the inhabitants of Broadway their Trinity Church?
I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame.
It is only necessary for one powerful nation like Russia--barbaric as she is said to be--to place herself disinterestedly at the head of an alliance having for its object the maintenance of the balance of power of Europe, and it would save the world!
But as soon as the prince had gone her face resumed its former cold, artificial expression.
From behind the crystal decanters and fruit vases, the count kept glancing at his wife and her tall cap with its light-blue ribbons, and busily filled his neighbors' glasses, not neglecting his own.
They went into the reception room familiar to Pierre, with two Italian windows opening into the conservatory, with its large bust and full length portrait of Catherine the Great.
Pierre well knew this large room divided by columns and an arch, its walls hung round with Persian carpets.
The sick man was so surrounded by doctors, princesses, and servants that Pierre could no longer see the reddish-yellow face with its gray mane-- which, though he saw other faces as well, he had not lost sight of for a single moment during the whole service.
Pierre well remembered this small circular drawing room with its mirrors and little tables.
Though the latter held on tenaciously, her voice lost none of its honeyed firmness and softness.
The immense house was brilliant with lights shining through its lofty windows.
Even a bird is smart enough to push the fledgling out of the nest when it fails to fly on its own.
The snow melted, leaving in its wake a harvest of spring flowers.
The car abruptly halted its progress, slinging Lisa against the steering wheel with bone jarring force.
And yet, its little engine hummed along with a surprising lack of noise.
He signed the paper with a flourish and returned the pen to its elaborate bronze holder.
She came to her feet, stretching her body to its maximum height.
Adrienne grabbed a large stainless steel spoon from its hanger on the wall and primped at her distorted reflection.
The gaze lost its humor and he grimaced.
The top of its head was carved into a crown and the Wizard's bullet had struck it exactly in the left eye, which was a hard wooden knot.
One was Mr. Webster's horse; the other was an old gray nag with a lady's sidesaddle on its back.
Pushing this to its logical extreme: What if everything you did was digitally remembered?
The little kitten brightened, its eyes shone, and it seemed ready to lift its tail, jump down on its soft paws, and begin playing with the ball of worsted as a kitten should.
Granted that the majority are able at last either to own or hire the modern house with all its improvements.
Once I went on a visit to a New England village with its frozen lakes and vast snow fields.
