It so happened that, a few weeks later, "Old Ernie" [Ernest Hemingway] himself was using my room in New York as a hide-out from li...terary columnists and reporters during one of his rare stopover visits between Africa and Key West. On such all-too-rare occasions he lends an air of virility to my dainty apartment which I miss sorely after he has gone and all the furniture has been repaired.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He had seen the end of an era, the sunset of the pioneer. He had come upon it when already its glory was nearly spent. So in the b...uffalo times a traveller used to come upon the embers of a hunter's fire on the prairies, after the hunter was up and gone; the coals would be trampled out, but the ground was warm, and the flattened grass where he had slept and where his pony had grazed, told the story. This was the very end of the road-making West; the men who had put plains and mountains under the iron harness were old; some were poor, and even the successful ones were hunting for rest and a brief reprieve from death. It was already gone, that age; nothing could ever bring it back. The taste and smell and song of it, the visions those men had seen in the air and followed,--these he had caught in a kind of afterglow in their own faces,--and this would always be his.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
She might have been old once and now, miraculously, young again--but with the memory of that other life intact. She seemed to know... the world down there in the dark hall and beyond for what it was. Yet knowing, she still longed to leave this safe, sunlit place at the top of the house for the challenge there.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At Hayes' General Store, west of the cemetery, hangs an old army rifle, used by a discouraged Civil War veteran to end his earthly... troubles. The grocer took the rifle as payment 'on account.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, t...he moon rose in the east, as big as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose colour, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world. In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
O, there's a wind a-blowing, a-blowing from the west, And that of all the winds is the one I like the best,... For it blows at our backs, and it shakes our pennon free, And it soon will blow us home to the old countrie.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All the historians are Harvard people. It just isn't fair. Poor old Hoover from West Branch, Iowa, had no chance with that crowd; ...nor did Andrew Jackson from Tennessee. Nor does Lyndon Johnson from Stonewall, Texas. It just isn't fair.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Well, Mary, only six more days to go and your old Nathan will be out of the army. Haven't decided what I'll do yet. Somehow I just... can't picture myself back there on the banks of the Wabash rocking on a front porch. No, I've been thinkin I, maybe I'll push on west, new settlements, California.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Wild Bill was indulging in his favorite pastime of a friendly game of cards in the old No. 10 saloon. For the second time in his c...areer, he was sitting with his back to an open door. Jack McCall walked in, shot him through the back of the head, and rushed from the place, only to be captured shortly afterward. Wild Bill's dead hand held aces and eights, and from that time on this has been known in the West as "the dead man's hand."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »