In our village there was an old, old man, Pímen Timoféich. He was ninety years old. He was living at the house of his grandson, doing no work. His back was bent: he walked with a cane and moved his feet slowly. He had no teeth at all, and his face was wrinkled. His nether lip trembled; when he walked and when he talked, his lips smacked, and one could not understand what he was saying. We were four brothers, and we were fond of riding. But we had no gentle riding-horses. We were allowed to ride only on one horse,—the name of that horse was Raven. One day mama allowed us to ride, and all of us went with the valet to the stable. The coachman saddled Raven for us, and my eldest brother was the first to take a ride. He rode for a long time; he rode to the threshing-floor and around the garden, and when he came back, we shouted: "Now gallop past us!" My elder brother began to strike Raven with his feet and with the whip, and R...
VI. --- REFORMATION. Under Henry VIII there was a new departure in Irish legislation. A species of Liberalism was evolved, no doubt the progenitor of what we know to-day by that name, a liberality that gave in order that it might take with a greater impunity. Henry VII., as we have seen, went in for coercion on a cheap scale by giving unlimited power to the noble who could best keep his fellows in check, requiring in return only a nominal allegiance. The rebellious disorder in Ireland had been more than once flung tauntingly in the faces of English ambassadors, when assent-bliss of the European crowned bullies met to concert plans of "robbery with violence." It was impossible for Henry VIII., who bad set the Pope and all Christendom at defi... (From : AnarchyArchives.)
1857. Five rich young men went at three o'clock in the morning to a ball in Petersburg to have a good time. Much champagne was drunk; a majority of the gentlemen were very young; the girls were pretty; a pianist and a fiddler played indefatigably one polka after another; there was no cease to the noise of conversation and dancing. But there was a sense of awkwardness and constraint; every one felt somehow or other—and this is not unusual—that all was not as it should be. There were several attempts made to make things more lively, but simulated liveliness is much worse than melancholy. One of the five young men, who was more discontented than any one else, both with himself and with the others, and who had been feeling all the evening a sense of disgust, took his hat, and went out noiselessly on purpose, intending to go home. There was no one in the ante-room, but in the next room at the door he heard two voices disputing. Th...