Here are the quotations for the coming week (September 20th to 26th):
1. They seated themselves in the heavy chairs on the
pebbled floor beneath the eaves of the summer house by the orchard. A table
between them carried wine and glasses, and a packet of papers, with pen and ink.
The larger man of the two, his doublet unbuttoned, his broad face blotched and
scarred, puffed a little as he came to rest. The other picked up an apple from
the grass, bit it, and went on with the thread of the talk that they must have
carried out of doors with them.
2. Her cinnabar-tinted topsail,
nicking the hot blue horizon, showed she was a Spanish wheat-boat hours before
she reached Marseilles mole. There, the mainsail brailed itself, a spritsail
broke out forward, and a handy driver aft; and she threaded her way through the
shipping to her berth at the quay as quietly as a veiled woman slips through a
bazaar.
3. John drew from his bosom a stamped leather box. Some
six or eight inches long, wherein, bedded on faded velvet, lay what looked like
silver-bound compasses of old box-wood, with a screw at the top which opened or
closed the legs to minute fractions. The legs terminated, not in points, but
spoon-shapedly, one spatula pierced with a metal-lined hole less than a quarter
of an inch across, the other with a half-inch hole. Into this latter, John,
after carefully wiping with a silk rag, slipped a metal cylinder that carried
glass or crystal, it seemed, at each end...
The sources of last week's extracts (September 13th to 19th) are as
follows:
1. (...' tell him from me that I expect to be through with my little
trouble by the twenty-first of next month...') This is from "A Madonna of
the Trenches" in Debits and Credits.
2. (…'Come spring , I 'ad something else to rage for. I'd growed a
nasty little weepin' boil, like, on me shin...') This is from "The Wish
House" in Debits and Credits.
3. (...In the middle of his singing he felt the cold touch of the
Crab's claw on the apple of his throat....) This is from "The Children of
the Zodiac", in Many Inventions.
In the New Readers Guide we have just published the full text of "With
Number Three". an 'uncollected' article about a journey in a hospital train
during the South African War, with links to John McGivering's notes.
Good wishes to all, John R
