‘I imagine so, as I was opening the bazaar,’ said Mrs Keeling, with some dignity. ‘I fancy Lord Inverbroom does,’ he replied, secretly praising himself for his remarkable ingenuity. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Well then, Miss Propert, you must cross out what I have dictated to you about it. Please read the letter through.... Yes, cross out from the sentence beginning, “Re the payment for carriage of goods.” Dear me, it is nearly one: what a lot of time we have spent over that. The booking-clerk would have done it much more quickly.’ Charles looked at him with some shadow of the pity he had seen to-day in Norah’s eyes. With courage undaunted we mount toward the skies, "The bamboo," said the Doctor, "is of use from a very early age. The young shoots are boiled and eaten, or soaked in sugar, and preserved as confectionery. The roots of the plant are carved so as to resemble animals or men, and in this shape are used as ornaments; and when the bamboo is matured, and of full size, it is turned to purposes almost without number. The hollow stalks are used as water-pipes; rafts are made of them; the walls and roofs of houses are constructed from them; and they serve for the masts of smaller boats and the yards of larger ones. The light and strong poles which the coolies place over their shoulders for bearing burdens are almost invariably of bamboo; and where it grows abundantly it is used for making fences and sheds, and for the construction of nearly every implement of agriculture. Its fibres are twisted into rope, or softened into pulp for paper; every article of furniture is made of bamboo, and so are hats, umbrellas, fans, cups, and a thousand other things. In fact, it would be easier to say what is not made of it in these Eastern countries than to say what is; and an attempt at a mere enumeration of its uses and the articles made from it would be tedious. Take away the bamboo from the people of Japan and China, and you would deprive them of their principal means of support, or, at any rate, would make life a much greater burden than it now is." I sat by the window, capped, booted, belted, my bridle in one hand, revolver in the other. In all the house, now, there was no sound, and without there was a stillness only more vast. I could not tell whether certain sensations in my ear were given by insects in the grass and trees or merely by my overwrought nerves and tired neck. The moon sailed high, the air was at last comfortably cool, my horse stood and slept. I thought it must be half-past two. With his unconscious head still on my arm I faced toward the hundred after-sounds of the fray and hallooed for help. To my surprise it promptly came. Three blundering boys we were who lifted him into the saddle and bore him to the house reeling and moaning astride of Cricket, the poor beast half dead with hard going. The sinking sun was as red as October when we issued into the highroad and moved up it to the grove gate through the bloody wreckage of the fray. The Louisianians were camping in the woods-pasture, Ferry's scouts in the grove, and the captive Federals were in the road between, shut in by heavy guards. At our appearance they crowded around us, greeting their undone commander with proud words of sympathy and love, and he thanked them as proudly and lovingly, though he could scarcely speak, more than to ask every moment for water. A number of our Sessions house group crowded out to meet us at the veranda steps; Camille; Harry Helm with his right hand bandaged; Cécile, attended by two or three Sessions children; and behind all Miss Harper exclaiming "Ah, my boy, you're a welcome sight--Oh! is that Captain Jewett!" "Jo'! that to Quinn! wha'd Quinn answer?" On the next afternoon but one we heard that a great column of our soldiers was approaching on the nearest highway, bound up the railroad to Joe Johnston's army from the region about Port Hudson, and Charlotte instantly proposed that our ladies deal out food and drink from some shady spot on the roadside. It was one of those southern summer days when it verily seems hotter in the shade than in the sun--unless you are in the sun. The force was wholly artillery and infantry, the last Confederate infantry that region ever saw in column under arms; poor, limping, brown-faced, bloody-footed boys! their weapons were the only clean things, the only whole things, about them except their unbroken spirit; and when the very foremost command chanced to be one which the Harpers had seen in New Orleans the day it left there marching in faultless platoons and spotless equipments through the crowds that roared acclaim and farewell, our dear ladies, for one weak moment, wept. And then there was the Clockwork man—something else to think about, to be wondered at. Gifford murmured something about the honour and pleasure. There was no vehicle to be seen in the dark street besides the gleaming mass of brass and steel that quietly simmered by the pavement. "Well, you don't want those people to get them. Neither will they for long. It is all part of my little scheme. If you had dashed out just now you would certainly have caused a great sensation, and there would have been a great gap in the dazzling ranks of fashion, but you would have ruined my plans." "About my money! No. I shall get that all right. What I am uneasy about is this: How did you know I was coming, and why?"
Leona Lalage kept her face half hidden behind her fan. For the life of her she could not tell whether this man was playing with her or not Hitherto men had been her puppets, hitherto she had regarded all of them as fools. Lawrence smoked calmly on, as if he were discussing the weather or something equally exciting. Fifth.—The range and power of the blows, as well as the time in which they are delivered, is controlled at will; this constitutes the greatest distinction between steam and other hammers, and the particular advantage which has led to their extended use. "Oh yes, the Netherlanders are our friends; they remain neutral. And that is the best, for otherwise the whole lot would be smashed up, exactly as here in Belgium." Where the Cynics left off the Stoics began. Recognising simple self-preservation as the earliest interest and duty of man, they held that his ultimate and highest good was complete self-realisation, the development of that rational, social, and beneficent nature which distinguishes him from the lower21 animals.49 Here their teleological religion came in as a valuable sanction for their ethics. Epictêtus, probably following older authorities, argues that self-love has purposely been made identical with sociability. ‘The nature of an animal is to do all things for its own sake. Accordingly God has so ordered the nature of the rational animal that it cannot obtain any particular good without at the same time contributing to the common good. Because it is self-seeking it is not therefore unsocial.’50 But if our happiness depends on external goods, then we shall begin to fight with one another for their possession:51 friends, father, country, the gods themselves, everything will, with good reason, be sacrificed to their attainment. And, regarding this as a self-evident absurdity, Epictêtus concludes that our happiness must consist solely in a righteous will, which we know to have been the doctrine of his whole school. Saturday The one at the end accomplishing a graceful pirouette is me--I mean If I live to be ninety-nine I shall never forget the tiniest detail. A flight of regular steps, hewn in the rock, under the shade of banyans and bamboos, all tangled with flowering creepers, leads straight up to the temple. It is a vast hall, dug out of granite and supported by massive columns, with capitals of a half-flattened spheroidal shape—columns which, seen near, seem far too slender to support the immense mass of the mountain that rises sheer above the cave under a curtain of hanging creepers. The temple opens[Pg 21] to the north, and a very subdued light—like the light from a painted window—filtering through the ficus branches, lends solemnity and enhanced beauty to this titanic architecture. The poorhouse is about two miles from the city; it consists of a courtyard enclosed by walls, from which awnings are stretched supported on poles. And here from twelve to fifteen hundred wretched skeletons had found shelter, spectres with shoulder-blades almost cutting through the skin, arms shrunk to the bone, with the elbow-joint like a knot in the middle, and at the end hands which looked enormous and flat and limp, as if every knuckle were dislocated. Their gnarled knees projected from the fearful leanness of their legs, and the tightened skin between the starting ribs showed the hollow pit of the stomach. Men and women[Pg 192] alike were for the most part naked, but for a ragged cotton loin-cloth. And all had the same scared look in their eyes, the same grin of bare teeth between those hollow cheeks. Almost all had bleeding wounds where the bones had come through the skin. On entering the park the cocked turbans of the bodyguard again reminded us of the hats of the French Guards. The ambiguities and uncertainties which Plotinus exhibits in theorising on the origin of Matter, are due not only to the conflicting influences of Plato and Aristotle, but also to another influence quite distinct from theirs. This is the Stoic cosmology. While utterly repudiating the materialism of the Stoics, Plotinus evidently felt attracted by their severe monism, and by the consistent manner in which they derived every form of existence from the divine substance. They too recognised a distinction between Form and Matter, the active and the passive principle in Nature, but they supposed that the one, besides being penetrated and moulded by the other, had also been originally produced by it. Such a theory was well suited to the energetic and practical character of Stoic morality, with its aversion from mere contemplation, its immediate bearing on the concrete interests of life. Man was conceived as an intelligent force, having for his proper function to bring order out of chaos, ‘to make reason and the will of God prevail,’ and this ideal appeared to be reflected in the dynamic constitution of Nature. With Plotinus, on the other hand, as with Aristotle, theory and not practice was the end of life, or rather, as he himself expressed it, practice was an inferior kind of theorising, an endeavour to set before oneself in outward form what should properly be sought in the noetic world where subject and object are one.490 Accordingly, while accepting the Stoic monism, he strove to bring it into close agreement with Aristotle’s cosmology, by substituting contemplation for will as the creative principle in all existence, no less than as the ideal of happiness for man. Bacon begins by demanding that throughout the whole range of experience new facts should be collected on the largest scale, in order to supply materials for scientific generalisation. There can be no doubt that he is here guided by the example of Aristotle, and of Aristotle alone. Such a storehouse of materials is still extant in the History of Animals, which evidently suggested the use of the word ‘History’ in this sense to Bacon, and which, by the way, is immensely superior to anything that he ever attempted in374 the same line. The facts on which Aristotle’s Politics is based were contained in another vast descriptive work of the same kind, now unhappily lost. Even the Stagirite’s more systematic treatises comprise a multitude of observations, catalogued according to a certain order, but not reduced to scientific principles. What Bacon did was to carry out, or to bid others carry out, the plan so suggested in every department of enquiry. But if we ask by what method he was guided in his survey of the whole field to be explored, how he came by a complete enumeration of the sciences, arranged according to their logical order,—the answer is still that he borrowed it from the Peripatetic encyclopaedia. Closer and closer together came the swift turbine propelled yacht and the surface-skimming hydroplane. 189
At any rate, he knew that he was not alone inside the edifice, and if Dick’s common sense was too great to let him think of uncanny spirits, the sense of danger supplied chills and thrills a-plenty. Down the wood’s path raced Dick, Larry slightly ahead of him, the detective, older and not so quick, bringing up the rear. She said "Yes" as frankly as she would have said it to the children. It was blighting to any budding romance, but he tried hard nevertheless to save the next question from absolute baldness. He had a resentful sort of feeling that he was entitled to at least a little idealism. As she would not give it, he tried to find it for himself, noting the grace of her long free neck, the wealth of her coarse black hair, and the beauty of her smiling mouth. But the smiling mouth answered his low-spoken "Will you marry me then, dear?" with the same frank assent. "Not for a good while, though," she added. "I am too young." That was all, and in a moment she was telling him some of Brewster's absurdities, with a certain appreciation of the droll that kept it from being malicious. There were also magazines and a few books in more than one language, wild flowers arranged in many sorts[Pg 36] of strange jars, and in the corner, by an improvised couch, a table stacked with cups and plates of Chelsea-Derby, which were very beautiful and very much out of place. "Like as not she does up them boiled shirts and dresses herself, don't you think?" was the minister's awed comment to Cairness, as they went to bed that night in the bare little room. [Pg 130] [Pg 179] Landor held up a silencing hand. "If you have any explanations that you care to make, that it would be worth any one's time to listen to, you may keep them for a judge advocate." He pointed to the door. [See larger version] "Very sorry for you, sir," said the Lieutenant; "but we can't let you go on. Your pass is all right up to this point, but the Commandant at Nashville has no authority here. Orders are very strict against any more civilians coming to Chattanooga under any pretext. Rations are very short, and there is danger of their being much shorter, with the rebel cavalry slashing around everywhere at our cracker-line. We only saved two bridges to-night by the greatest luck. You'll have to go back to Nashville by the next train." THE BOYS MEET AN OLD FRIEND AND ARE TAKEN HOME IN A HURRY.
IT WAS not until late the next afternoon that the wagon-train finally reached Bridgeport, and the weak, wornout mules had at last a respite from straining through the mud, under the incessant nagging of the teamsters' whips and their volleyed blasphemy. But Mr. Bennett was persistent on the subject of morality in the army. He soon refused the offer of another apple, laid his knife back on the plate, put the plate on the table, wiped his mouth and hands, and said: "Well, for men workin' a dark-lantern job this is about the logiest crowd I ever struck," he said rather disgustedly. "An elephant'd have to step on 'em before they'd know he was around. They ain't hardly good fun." "And Cap Somerville took advantage of the break to snap up Cap's queen, which made him hotter'n ever. Whairz mi Gunn?????? "Hurroo!" echoed Hennessey; "that's the ticket." The wounded being carried back from the batteries impressed him sadly with the thought that Pete might have been struck by a piece of shell. Shorty glanced listlessly from the head of the table toward the foot. There his eye rested on the Second Lieutenant for a minute, and then he muttered to himself, "No, he's no worse than the rest ought to be on me," and shook his head in answer to the Judge-Advocate's formal question. "Is it good to learn?" the female asked. The question made Cadnan uncomfortable: who knew, for certain, what was good? He knew he would have to think it out for a long time. But the female wanted an answer.
"Oh, forget about that," Greta said. "Who cares about them?" Cadnan said: "I am Cadnan." "It is one of many truths," Gornom said. And that was an invitation, Cadnan recognized. He hesitated no more than a second. "I knew you'd be safe," she said. "I knew you had to be." Harry made good progress, and Reuben decided that he was to start his career at the October Fair. There had been a fiddler at the Fair for years, partly for the lasses and lads to dance to, partly for the less Bacchic entertainments of their elders. It was at the Fair that men took his measure, and engaged him accordingly for weddings and such festivals. Luck would have it that[Pg 58] for the last two years there had been no official fiddler—old Abel Pinch having been seduced by a semi-urban show, which wandered round London, camping on waste grounds and commons. The musical element had been supplied by strays, and Reuben had no doubt but that he should now be able to instal his brother honourably as chief musician. "What nonsense you're talking, Backfield," said Naomi primly. For the first time she began definitely to reproach herself for her treatment of Harry. Though she could never have married him, she could at least have been faithful to him. Then came an evening in April, when the air smelled of primroses and young leaves. The choir practice was early, and rifts of sunshine sloped up the clerk's kitchen, linking in one golden slant Robert's dark healthy face just under the ceiling, Bessie's shoulders pressed against his arm, the frail old hands of Joe Hearsfield on his flute, and the warm plum-brown of the bass viol close to the floor. To Robert it was all a dream of holiness and harmony. Old Spodgram confined himself almost entirely to two notes, Miss Hubble insisted on her four bars of arrears, young Ditch extemporised an alto of surprising reediness, and Robert bellowed the last lines of the last verse just as the other choristers were loudly taking in breath preparatory to line three—but the whole thing was to him a foretaste of Paradise and the angels singing ever world without end. The wind seemed to be laughing at him, as it bellowed up in gusts, struck him, sprayed him, roughed his hair out madly, smacked his cheeks, drove the rain into his skin, and then rumbled away with a hundred chatterings and sighings. It seemed to be telling him that as his breath was to this wind so was he himself to Boarzell. The wind was the voice of the Moor, and it told him that in fighting Boarzell, he did not fight the mere earth,[Pg 224] an agglomeration of lime and clay which he could trample and compel, but all the powers behind it. In arming himself against Boarzell he armed himself against the whole of nature's huge resources, the winds, the storms, the droughts, the early and the latter rain, the poisons in plants, and the death in stones, the lusts which spilling over from the beasts into the heart of man slay him from within himself. He had armed himself against all these, and once again the old words sang in his head—"Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook? or bore his jaw through with a thorn? Will he make a covenant with thee? Wilt thou take him for a servant for ever?" "It's all over now—I've touched bottom." Notwithstanding the recent flush of pleasure which warmed the heart of the yeoman, his resolution appeared again to forsake him—he endeavoured to speak, but in vain—he appeared to be overwhelmed by a variety of contending emotions; but the stern voice of De Boteler aroused him, and in a choked voice, he pronounced after Calverley the fealty of a bondman, holding his right hand over the book:— "It is well," replied De Boteler; "but can you learn no certain tidings of his course?" Calverley answered, that the only intelligence he had yet obtained, was, that Holgrave had been seen at dusk on the previous evening, standing at his door, talking to his wife's brother. "Fourthly.—That all lands should be rented at fourpence an acre."Xi extends condolences over Hong Kong building fire, urges all-out rescue efforts to minimize losses
(Xinhua) 08:02, November 27, 2025
BEIJING, Nov. 26 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday extended condolences over a deadly residential building fire in Hong Kong, which killed at least 13 people.
Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, expressed sympathy to the families of the victims and those affected by the disaster. He urged all-out efforts to extinguish the fire and minimize casualties and losses.
In the wake of the fire, Xi attached great importance to the accident and immediately sought updates on the rescue efforts and casualties.
Xi instructed the director of the Liaison Office of the Central People's Government in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) to convey his condolences and sympathies to HKSAR Chief Executive John Lee.
He required the Hong Kong and Macao Work Office of the CPC Central Committee and the liaison office to support the HKSAR government in making all-out efforts to put out the fire, do everything possible in search and rescue, treat the injured, and comfort the victims' families.
(Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Du Mingming)
China releases white paper on arms control in new era
(Xinhua) 10:19, November 27, 2025
BEIJING, Nov. 27 (Xinhua) -- China's State Council Information Office on Thursday released a white paper titled "China's Arms Control, Disarmament, and Nonproliferation in the New Era."
The white paper said that China plays a constructive role in international arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation, and actively offers its initiatives and solutions.
China has been and will always be a builder of world peace, a contributor to global development, and a defender of the international order, it said.
The white paper was released to comprehensively present China's policies and practices on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation, and its position on security governance in emerging fields such as outer space, cyberspace, and artificial intelligence.
It was also to restate China's commitment to safeguarding world peace and security, and to call on countries around the world to work together for international arms control.
The white paper noted that China is committed to upholding the international arms control regime with the United Nations (UN) at its core. It works to promote global governance in arms control, supports all efforts to build a world of lasting peace and common security, and serves as a key promoter of international arms control.
It also noted that as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, China has actively safeguarded the authority and effectiveness of the international arms control regime, played a constructive role in multilateral arms control in the nuclear, biological, chemical and other fields, and conscientiously performed its duties prescribed by international arms control treaties, making its due contribution to international arms control.
Emerging fields such as outer space, cyberspace, and AI represent new frontiers for human development. They create a new focus of strategic security, and new territories of global governance, the white paper pointed out.
China proposes that with the universal participation of all countries, the UN should play a pivotal role in fostering a global governance framework and standards for emerging fields based on broad consensus, while increasing the representation and voice of developing countries, it added.
The white paper stressed that China continues to build its domestic nonproliferation capacity, actively participating in the international nonproliferation process, promoting international cooperation on peaceful uses of science and technology, and facilitating the improvement of global nonproliferation governance.
Chinese modernization follows the path of peaceful development, and China's growth contributes to the growth of the world's peaceful forces. China stands ready to work with all peace-loving countries to build an equal and orderly multipolar world and promote universally beneficial and inclusive economic globalization. It will consolidate and develop the UN-centered international arms control regime, work with all parties to build a community with a shared future for humanity, and create a brighter future for all, according to the white paper.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry on Tuesday said the atmosphere of the phone call between Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday was "positive, friendly, and constructive."
At a regular press briefing on Tuesday, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning confirmed that the U.S. side had initiated the call. She noted that since the start of President Trump's second term, the two leaders have maintained frequent communication.
Mao said the two heads of state exchanged views on issues of mutual concern, stressing that such communication is vital for the stable development of China鈥揢.S. relations.
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