“Lemon?”
It was not so easy to forgive Aunt Alphonsine, for her voice had been as sharp as the shears click-clacking with never-ceasing vigilance through the exiguous fleeces of the lanate lambs now, in alliterative honesty, so palely, so profitably become shorn sheep, and yet not angry, though with an acerbating asperity evident in every tone of its fluctuating timbre, running indefatigably up the switch-backs and circling in the merry-go-rounds, capriciously perambulating on which the voices of French-women, from the lucent symbolism of the errant wife of Charles Martel, bathed in the ineffable luxury of mediæval intricacy, to the misguided, yet pitiable, complacency of a Parisian midinette, travel eternally, since that French thrift, which made her clean her shoes at home and thereby maim herself into something new and strange, seared by the hot vapors of the exploding benzine, that desired to assassinate love, sacred and profane, whenever she saw it, made her terribly exercised at the potency of starvation to dull the edge of appetite into the semblance of inarticulate inevitability, the crucifixion of honest hunger. Richard himself was aware of that.
“No, thank you.”
In all of this there had been nothing to distract her attention, which so often divagated intermittently, as with the pulsing beat of the tides, now lapsing into desuetude, in the purple-bathed intricacies of interminable monotony, from a candid valuation of the dress of the other so blue, so deeply blue, that, from depths unsounded, whence ghostly memories of her childhood emerging, appeared and beat upon her nether eyelids, there was now extruded none of those waves of intelligent vacuity, whose infrequency alone gave her pleasant physical sensations as of creeping gooseflesh at the roots of her hair and the desire to erase from the pages of her memory the pictures of the Christmas number of the Graphic, though all their colors seemed to refuse to travel from her eyes to her nerves and back again, as with rhythmic diastole, pendulously they swung in their predestined arc, such as she usually experienced when the turbid instancy of old rose impinged in somnolent ecstasy upon the complicated convolutions of her brain. Richard was right after all.
THE PERILS OF PEREGRINE
à la
Jeffrey Farnol
I
I awoke very sore from the gruelling adventures of the previous day. Being more hungry than was my wont, I quickly despatched the hunch of crusty bread and bit of cheese, which the highwayman had left me, and fared forth upon my journeying. My way lay adown a leafy lane, lined with hedgerows, gemmed with myriad sparkling dew drops, wherein birds sang a jubilant pæan. So faring forth, I crossed a small rustic bridge spanning a murmurous brook and so into a dense wood, whose twisted, writhen branches and myriad leaves made a dim twilight, wherein a wind dank and chill moaned fitfully, very dismal to hear.
I sought to flee these gloomy shades, but tripped and fell headlong into a leafy glade, where sat a small, fierce, quick, keen-eyed tinker a-tinkering.