Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 07
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Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 07
Literature -- Collections
And now up runs Baptiste, covered with slime, and prepares to cast his
projectiles. The first one fell wide of the mark; the schooner swung
round into a long reach of water, where the breeze was in her favor;
another shout of laughter drowned the maledictions of the muddy man; the
sails filled; Colossus of Rhodes, smiling and bowing as hero of the
moment, ducked as the main boom swept round, and the schooner, leaning
slightly to the pleasant influence, rustled a moment over the bulrushes,
and then sped far away down the rippling bayou.
M. Jules St.-Ange stood long, gazing at the receding vessel as it now
disappeared, now reappeared beyond the tops of the high undergrowth; but
when an arm of the forest hid it finally from sight, he turned townward,
followed by that fagged-out spaniel his servant, saying as he turned,
"Baptiste?"
"_Miché?_"
"You know w'at I goin' do wid dis money?"
"_Non, m'sieur._"
"Well, you can strike me dead if I don't goin' to pay hall my debts!
_Allons!_"
He began a merry little song to the effect that his sweetheart was a
wine-bottle, and master and man, leaving care behind, returned to the
picturesque Rue Royale. The ways of Providence are indeed strange. In
all Parson Jones's after-life, amid the many painful reminiscences of
his visit to the City of the Plain, the sweet knowledge was withheld
from him that by the light of the Christian virtue that shone from him
even in his great fall, Jules St.-Ange arose, and went to his father an
honest man.
CAIUS JULIUS CÆSAR
(100-44 B.C.)
BY J. H. WESTCOTT
"Truly a wonderful man was Caius Julius Cæsar," says Captain Miles
Standish. Truly wonderful he was on each of his many sides: as soldier,
statesman, orator, and author, all of the first rank--and a respectable
critic, man of science and poet besides.
As a writer of Latin prose, and as an orator, he was second to Cicero
alone in the age that is called the Ciceronian; and no third is to be
named with these two. Yet among his contemporaries his literary power
was an insignificant title to fame, compared with his overwhelming
military and political genius. Here he stood alone, unrivaled, the most
successful conqueror and civilizer of all history, the founder of the
most majestic political fabric the world has ever seen. There have been
other generals, statesmen, authors, as great as Cæsar; but the
extraordinary combination of powers in this one man goes very far toward
making good the claim that he was the most remarkable man in history.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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