Notes
Smith’s voice had darkened to a rookery croak, and there was no telling if he was putting on or taking off a mask.
For if your fortune at present is not such as pleases you, there is a prospect of mercy, as much as of doom, in the thought that Fortuna is fickle.
with fear as well as expectation. For what soul, to whom the world still is relatively new, does not feel the sensible excitement, the faster breath and expansion of hope, where every alley may yet contain an adventure, every door be back’d by danger, or by pleasure, or by bliss?
For what soul, to whom the world still is relatively new, does not feel the sensible excitement, the faster breath and expansion of hope, where every alley may yet contain an adventure, every door be back’d by danger, or by pleasure, or by bliss?
the urgent first cup and necessary second to the voluntary third which might be toyed with at leisure,
“I prefer to talk myself out of trouble, Mr. Oakeshott. Not into it.”
the intensity of the light and heat only seemed to reveal, for once at its true scale, the immense darkness of the continent at whose edge the little city perched—from this one pinpoint of defiant flame, the thousands upon thousands of miles of night unrolling westwards.
drinking, not to be convivial, not to take off the cold edge of the night, but to dissolve as much of themselves as spirits would eat away.
Now, it will be most necessary for the reader, in comprehending what followed, to possess a thorough and secure understanding of the rules of piquet, which shall therefore be explained. The play of the game, is in the taking of tricks, yet the greater part of the scores are won in the bidding that precedes it, as for tierce, quart, quint, of sequences, or trio or quatorze of sets— But wait, before that again comes the announcing of points, which must be most decisive, unless one player have carte blanche, at the outset, which is quite another thing, and then there is the declaration (at the right moment) of picque or repicque, one of which is worth thirty and the other sixty, though which way around is knowledge gone to the devil this moment—and there is capot too that has not yet been mentioned, and other scores beside, very particular ones, which alter according as the player is Elder or Younger, this governing the whole complexion or character of the game, unless— Wait—wait—alas the explanation is bungled, but it cannot be recalled and started over again, for the game has begun. We are out of time, with little enlightenment secured. Still, the reader may now find himself in as bemused a position as Mr. Smith; which is, to be sure, a kind of gain in understanding.
Wampum, tobacco bales, rum by the gallon: it was all money, in a world without money.
“People are different,” she said. “They differ even in their mad ideas,
how very ordinary and general and unremarkable a destiny it must be, how predictable a part of the universal portion of mankind it is, to love and to feel oneself beloved; and yet how astonishing it seems when it happens to you, yourself; what a stroke of glorious, undeserved, unprecedented, unsuspected luck it turns out to be, that you should be permitted, in your own person, to share in the general fate.
She is like a caricature of a temptation, drawn with such mad hyperbole that anyone with any sense would know better than to act on it.”
What could he do? Go on; and try to be wiser; and keep future promises better; and avoid future mistakes.
It is a striking thought that the New-York of my story only exists in my story, now.