Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title, James Sp...alding, or Charles Budgeon, and the passengers going the opposite way could read nothing at all--save "a man with a red moustache," "a young man in grey smoking a pipe."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As for freedom, it will soon cease to exist in any shape or form. Living will depend upon absolute obedience to a strict set of ar...rangements, which it will no longer be possible to transgress. The air traveler is not free. In the future, life's passengers will be even less so: they will travel through their lives fastened to their (corporate) seats.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our Lamaze instructor . . . assured our class . . . that our cervix muscles would become "naturally numb" as they swelled and stre...tched, and deep breathing would turn the final explosions of pain into "manageable discomfort." This descriptions turned out to be as accurate as, say a steward advising passengers aboard the Titanic to prepare for a brisk but bracing swim.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All these young souls were passengers in the Durbeyfield ship--entirely dependent on the judgment of the two Durbeyfield adults fo...r their pleasures, their necessities, their health, even their existence. If the heads of the Durbeyfield household chose to sail into difficulty, disaster, starvation, disease, degradation, death, thither were these half-dozen little captives under their hatches compelled to sail with them--six helpless creatures, who had never been asked if they wished for life on any terms, much less if they wished for it on such hard conditions as were involved in being of the shiftless house of Durbeyfield. Some people would like to know whence the poet whose philosophy is in these days deemed as profound and trustworthy as his song is breezy and pure, gets his authority for speaking of "Nature's holy plan."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Helpless, unknown, and unremembered, most human beings, however sensitive, idealistic, intelligent, go through life as passengers ...rather than chauffeurs. Although we may pretend that it is the chauffeur who is the social inferior ... most of us, like Toad of Toad Hall, would not mind a turn at the wheel ourselves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The slave-ship is on her way, crowded with its dying victims; new cargoes are being added in mid-ocean; a small crew of slaveholde...rs, countenanced by a large body of passengers, is smothering four millions under the hatches, and yet the politician asserts that the only proper way by which deliverance is to be obtained is by "the quiet diffusion of the sentiments of humanity," without any "outbreak." As if the sentiments of humanity were ever found unaccompanied by its deeds.... What is that I hear cast overboard? The bodies of the dead that have found deliverance. That is the way we are "diffusing" humanity, and its sentiments with it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
. . . the ship struck at ten minutes after four A.M., and all hands, being mostly in their nightclothes, made haste to the forecas...tle, the water coming in at once. There they remained; the passengers in the forecastle, the crew above it, doing what they could. Every wave lifed the forecastle roof and washed over those within. The first man got ashore at nine; many from nine to noon. At flood-tide, about half past three o'clock, when the ship broke up entirely, they came out of the forecastle, and Margaret sat with her back to the foremast, with her hands on her knees, her husband and child already drowned. A great wave came and washed her aft. The steward (?) had just before taken her child and started for shore. Both were drowned.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was inspiriting to hear the regular dip of the paddles, as if they were our fins or flippers, and to realize that we were at le...ngth fairly embarked. We who had felt strangely as stage-passengers and tavern-lodgers were suddenly naturalized there and presented with the freedom of the lakes and woods.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Their leader was a handsome man about thirty years old, of good height, but not apparently robust, of gentlemanly address and faul...tless toilet; such a one as you might expect to meet on Broadway. In fact, in the popular sense of the word, he was the most "gentlemanly" appearing man in the stage, or that we saw on the road. He had a fair white complexion, as if he had always lived in the shade, and an intellectual face, and with his quiet manners might have passed for a divinity student who had seen something of the world. I was surprised to find, on talking with him in the course of the day's journey, that he was a hunter at all,--for his gun was not much exposed,--and yet more to find that he was probably the chief white hunter of Maine, and was known all along the road.... In the spring, he had saved a stage-driver and two passengers from drowning in the backwater of the Piscataquis in Foxcroft on this road, having swum ashore in the freezing water and made a raft and got them off,--though the horses were drowned,--at great risk to himself, while the only other man who could swim withdrew to the nearest house to prevent freezing. He could now ride over this road for nothing. He knew our man, and remarked that we had a good Indian there, a good hunter; adding that he was said to be worth $6000. The Indian also knew him, and said to me, "the great hunter."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »