White Fang

Lip-lip continued so to darken his days that White Fang became wickeder and more ferocious than it was his natural right to be.  Savageness was a part of his make-up, but the savageness thus developed exceeded his make- up.  He acquired a reputation for wickedness amongst the man-animals themselves.  Wherever there was trouble and uproar in camp, fighting and squabbling or the outcry of a squaw over a bit of stolen meat, they were sure to find White Fang mixed up in it and usually at the bottom of it. They did not bother to look after the causes of his conduct.  They saw only the effects, and the effects were bad.  He was a sneak and a thief, a mischief-maker, a fomenter of trouble; and irate squaws told him to his face, the while he eyed them alert and ready to dodge any quick-flung missile, that he was a wolf and worthless and bound to come to an evil end.

White Fang

They camped early that night.  Three dogs could not drag the sled so fast nor for so long hours as could six, and they were showing unmistakable signs of playing out.  And the men went early to bed, Bill first seeing to it that the dogs were tied out of gnawing-reach of one another.

But the wolves were growing bolder, and the men were aroused more than once from their sleep.  So near did the wolves approach, that the dogs became frantic with terror, and it was necessary to replenish the fire from time to time in order to keep the adventurous marauders at safer distance.

 

White Fang

But with the sheep-dog it was otherwise.  Being a female, she possessed no such instinct.  On the other hand, being a sheep-dog, her instinctive fear of the Wild, and especially of the wolf, was unusually keen.  White Fang was to her a wolf, the hereditary marauder who had preyed upon her flocks from the time sheep were first herded and guarded by some dim ancestor of hers.  And so, as he abandoned his rush at her and braced himself to avoid the contact, she sprang upon him.  He snarled involuntarily as he felt her teeth in his shoulder, but beyond this made no offer to hurt her.  He backed away, stiff-legged with self-consciousness, and tried to go around her.  He dodged this way and that, and curved and turned, but to no purpose.  She remained always between him and the way he wanted to go.

 

White Fang

The master was running up, but was too far away; and it was Collie that saved the hound’s life.  Before White Fang could spring in and deliver the fatal stroke, and just as he was in the act of springing in, Collie arrived.  She had been out-manoeuvred and out-run, to say nothing of her having been unceremoniously tumbled in the gravel, and her arrival was like that of a tornado–made up of offended dignity, justifiable wrath, and instinctive hatred for this marauder from the Wild.  She struck White Fang at right angles in the midst of his spring, and again he was knocked off his feet and rolled over.

 

White Fang

The man was badly frightened.  It was not so much White Fang’s ferocity as it was his silence that unnerved the groom.  Still protecting his throat and face with his torn and bleeding arm, he tried to retreat to the barn.  And it would have gone hard with him had not Collie appeared on the scene.  As she had saved Dick’s life, she now saved the groom’s. She rushed upon White Fang in frenzied wrath.  She had been right.  She had known better than the blundering gods.  All her suspicions were justified.  Here was the ancient marauder up to his old tricks again.

 

Call of the Wild

Later, the nine team-dogs gathered together and sought shelter in the forest. Though unpursued, they were in a sorry plight. There was not one who was not wounded in four or five places, while some were wounded grievously. Dub was badly injured in a hind leg; Dolly, the last husky added to the team at Dyea, had a badly torn throat; Joe had lost an eye; while Billee, the good-natured, with an ear chewed and rent to ribbons, cried and whimpered throughout the night.

At daybreak they limped warily back to camp, to find the marauders gone and the two men in bad tempers. Fully half their grub supply was gone. The huskies had chewed through the sled lashings and canvas coverings. In fact, nothing, no matter how remotely eatable, had escaped them. They had eaten a pair of Perrault’s moose-hide moccasins, chunks out of the leather traces, and even two feet of lash from the end of Francois’s whip. He broke from a mournful contemplation of it to look over his wounded dogs.

 

Abraham Lincoln

So far as practicable, you will, by means of your military force, expel guerrillas, marauders, and murderers, and all who are known to harbor, aid, or abet them. But in like manner you will repress assumptions of unauthorized individuals to perform the same service, because under pretense of doing this they become marauders and murderers themselves.

 

From A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

A quainter corner than the corner where the Doctor lived, was not to be found in London. There was no way through it, and the front windows of the Doctor’s lodgings commanded a pleasant little vista of street that had a congenial air of retirement on it. There were few buildings then,north of the Oxford-road, and forest-trees flourished, and wild flowers grew, and the hawthorn blossomed, in the now vanished fields. As a consequence, country airs circulated in Soho with vigorous freedom, instead of languishing into the parish like stray paupers without a settlement; and there was many a good south wall, not far off, on which the peaches ripened in their season.

From The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Holmes nodded his head. “The name is familiar to me,” said he. “The family was at one time among the richest in England, and the estates extended over the borders into Berkshire in the north, and Hampshire in the west. In the last century, however, four successive heirs were of a dissolute and wasteful disposition, and the family ruin was eventually completed by a gambler in the days of the Regency. Nothing was left save a few acres of ground, and the two-hundred-year-old house, which is itself crushed under a heavy mortgage. The last squire dragged out his existence there, living the horrible life of an aristocratic pauper; but his only son, my stepfather, seeing that he must adapt himself to the new conditions, obtained an advance from a relative, which enabled him to take a medical degree and went out to Calcutta, where, by his professional skill and his force of character, he established a large practice. In a fit of anger, however, caused by some robberies which had been perpetrated in the house, he beat his native butler to death and narrowly escaped a capital sentence. As it was, he suffered a long term of imprisonment and afterwards returned to England a morose and disappointed man.

 

Grapes of Rath

“Never no beholden.” Al said, “I’ll fix your car—me an’ Tom will.” And Al looked proud that he could return the family’s obligation. “We could use some help.” Wilson admitted the retiring of the obligation. Pa said, “We got to figger what to do. They’s laws. You got to report a death, an’ when you do that, they either take forty dollars for the undertaker or they take him for a pauper.”

Uncle John broke in, “We never did have no paupers.”

Tom said, “Maybe we got to learn. We never got booted off no land before, neither.”

“We done it clean,” said Pa. “There can’t no blame be laid on us. We never took nothin’ we couldn’ pay; we never suffered no man’s charity. When Tom here got in trouble we could hold up our heads. He only done what any man would a done.”

 

Grapes of Rath

“We go in like the law says an’ they’ll come out for him. We on’y got a hundred an’ fifty dollars. They take forty to bury Grampa an’ we won’t get to California—or else they’ll bury him a pauper.” The men stirred restively, and they studied the darkening ground in front of their knees.

Pa said softly, “Grampa buried his pa with his own hand, done it in dignity, an’ shaped the grave nice with his own shovel. That was a time when a man had the right to be buried by his own son an’ a son had the right to bury his own father.”

 

Grapes of Rath

She gazed at him, and she closed her eyes slowly. “Funny, ain’t it. All the time we was a-movin’ an’ shovin’, I never thought none. An’ now these here folks been nice to me, been awful nice; an’ what’s the first thing I do? I go right back over the sad things—that night Grampa died an’ we buried him. I was all full up of the road, and bumpin’ and movin’, an’ it wasn’t so bad. But now I come out here, an’ it’s worse now. An’ Granma—an’ Noah walkin’ away like that! Walkin’ away jus’ down the river. Them things was part of all, an’ now they come a-flockin’ back. Granma a pauper, an’ buried a pauper. That’s sharp now. That’s awful sharp. An’ Noah walkin’ away down the river. He don’ know what’s there. He jus’ don’ know. An’ we don’ know. We ain’t never gonna know if he’s alive or dead. Never gonna know. An’ Connie sneakin’ away. I didn’ give ’em brain room before, but now they’re a-flockin’ back. An’ I oughta be glad ’cause we’re in a nice place.” Pa watched her mouth while she talked. Her eyes were closed. “I can remember how them mountains was, sharp as ol’ teeth beside the river where Noah walked. I can remember how the stubble was on the groun’ where Grampa lie. I can remember the choppin’ block back home with a feather caught on it, all criss-crossed with cuts, an’ black with chicken blood.”

 

Heart of Darkness

“I listened. The darkness deepened. I was not even sure whether he had given me the right bundle. I rather suspect he wanted me to take care of another batch of his papers which, after his death, I saw the manager examining under the lamp. And the girl talked, easing her pain in the certitude of my sympathy; she talked as thirsty men drink. I had heard that her engagement with Kurtz had been disapproved by her people. He wasn’t rich enough or something. And indeed I don’t know whether he had not been a pauper all his life. He had given me some reason to inferthat it was his impatience of comparative poverty that drove him out there.

 

Abraham Lincoln

“I ask, What is the real situation of the agriculturalist? Where has the American farmer a market for his surplus produce? Except for cotton, he has neither a foreign nor a home market. Does not this clearly prove, when there is no market at home or abroad, that there [is] too much labor employed in agriculture? Common sense at once points out the remedy. Take from agriculture six hundred thousand men, women, and children, and you will at once give a market for more breadstuffs than all Europe now furnishes. In short, we have been too long subject to the policy of British merchants. It is time we should become a little more Americanized, and instead of feeding the paupers and laborers of England, feed our own; or else in a short time, by continuing our present policy, we shall all be rendered paupers ourselves.”–General Jackson’s Letter to Dr. Coleman.

 

Pudd’n Head Willson

She gathered up her baby once more; but when her eye fell upon its miserably short little gray tow-linen shirt and noted the contrast between its pauper shabbiness and her own volcanic eruption of infernal splendors, her mother-heart was touched, and she was ashamed.

 

Pudd’n Head Wilson

But she was back in a hour. The bank had gone to smash and carried her four hundred dollars with it. She was a pauper and homeless. Also disabled bodily, at least for the present. The officers were full of sympathy for her in her trouble, and made up a little purse for her. She resolved to go to her birthplace; she had friends there among the Negros, and the unfortunate always help the unfortunate, she was well aware of that; those lowly comrades of her youth would not let her starve.

 

The Prince and the Pauper

There was no talk in all England but of the new baby, Edward Tudor, Prince of Wales, who lay lapped in silks and satins, unconscious of all this fuss, and not knowing that great lords and ladies were tending him and watching over him–and not caring, either. But there was no talk about the other baby, Tom Canty, lapped in his poor rags, except among the family of paupers whom he had just come to trouble with his presence.

 

The Prince and the Pauper

In a moment all the heavy sorrow and misery which sleep had banished were upon him again, and he realised that he was no longer a petted prince in a palace, with the adoring eyes of a nation upon him, but a pauper, an outcast, clothed in rags, prisoner in a den fit only for beasts, and consorting with beggars and thieves.

From Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

My state of mind regarding the pilfering from which I had been so unexpectedly exonerated did not impel me to frank disclosure; but I hope it had some dregs of good at the bottom of it. I do not recall that I felt any tenderness of conscience in reference to Mrs. Joe, when the fear of being found out was lifted off me. But I loved Joe,–perhaps for no better reason in those early days than because the dear fellow let me love him,–and, as to him, my inner self was not so easily composed.

 

From A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

In the midst of them, the hangman, ever busy and ever worse than useless, was in constant requisition; now, stringing up long rows of miscellaneous criminals; now, hanging a housebreaker on Saturday who had been taken on Tuesday; now, burning people in the hand at Newgate by the dozen, and now burning pamphlets at the door of Westminster Hall; to-day, taking the life of an atrocious murderer, and tomorrow of a wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer’s boy of sixpence.

 

Edgar Allen Poe Narrative of A. Gordon Pym

By the last of the month we had everything in readiness for departure. We had agreed, however, to pay a formal visit of leave-taking to the village, and Too-wit insisted so pertinaciously upon our keeping the promise that we did not think it advisable to run the risk of offending him by a final refusal. I believe that not one of us had at this time the slightest suspicion of the good faith of the savages. They had uniformly behaved with the greatest decorum, aiding us with alacrity in our work, offering us their commodities, frequently without price, and never, in any instance, pilfering a single article, although the high value they set upon the goods we had with us was evident by the extravagant demonstrations of joy always manifested upon our making them a present. The women especially were most obliging in every respect, and, upon the whole, we should have been the most suspicious of human beings had we entertained a single thought of perfidy on the part of a people who treated us so well. A very short while sufficed to prove that this apparent kindness of disposition was only the result of a deeply laid plan for our destruction, and that the islanders for whom we entertained such inordinate feelings of esteem, were among the most barbarous, subtle, and bloodthirsty wretches that ever contaminated the face of the globe.

 

The Prince and the Pauper

The King’s heart was filled with joy–he could make his escape, now, if Hugo’s quest only carried him far enough away. But he was to have no such luck.  Hugo crept behind the woman, snatched the package, and came running back, wrapping it in an old piece of blanket which he carried on his arm.  The hue and cry was raised in a moment, by the woman, who knew her loss by the lightening of her burden, although she had not seen the pilfering done.  Hugo thrust the bundle into the King’s hands without halting, saying–

 

Pudd’n Head Wilson

By the time she reached Dawson’s Landing, she was her old self again; her blues were gone, she was in high feather. She would get along, surely; there were many kitchens where the servants would share their meals with her, and also steal sugar and apples and other dainties for her to carry home–or give her a chance to pilfer them herself, which would answer just as well. And there was the church. She was a more rabid and devoted Methodist than ever, and her piety was no sham, but was strong and sincere. Yes, with plenty of creature comforts and her old place in the amen corner in her possession again, she would be perfectly happy and at peace thenceforward to the end.