It looked as Gavin had first seen it years ago, on those nights when he slept alone by his campfire and waked suddenly to the hoot of an owl or the rustle of a blade of grass in the moon's wind -- a savage land, untenanted and brooding, too strong to be broken by the will of men.

At first I thought he had missed.

But her prettiness was what he had noticed first, and all the other things had come afterward: cruelty, meanness, self-will.

No one was behind it, but in the rear wall of the office I noticed, for the first time, a door which had been left partially open.

For his first five years in prison, they had shared a cell.

For men who had left cattle alone after getting their first notices had received no second.

He had received both first and second anonymous notices, and each time he had accused his neighbors of writing them.

When Fred Powell's brother-in-law, Charlie Keane, moved into the dead man's home, the anonymous letter writer took no chances on Charlie taking up where Fred had left off and wasted no time on a first notice:

For Matilda, it was the first she had known in many a night.

Even the knowledge that she was losing another boy, as a mother always does when a marriage is made, did not prevent her from having the first carefree, dreamless sleep that she had known since they dropped down the canyon and into Bear Valley, way, way back there when they were crossing those other mountains.

Stevens was grunting over the last empty pocket when Russ abruptly rose and lunged toward Carmer's hat, which had tumbled half-a-dozen feet away when he first fell.

At the first shot Russ had hurled his mount to the left toward the side of the winding draw.

A call to the police had been placed from here a couple of minutes after nine P.M., and the first police car had arrived two or three minutes after that -- 10 minutes ago now.

( Would she have been able to had she known that the blanket belonged to a young ballet dancer Nicolas had found his first night in one of Walter's marked bars??

At first it had been just a romantic dream of his, the same as the idea of finishing Oxford after the war.

Old Commodore Forsythe, who had once lost a fifty-dollar bet on whether he could get both motors started and turn on the running lights without accidentally turning on something else first.

Hell, I gave him the first decent job he ever had, six, seven -- how many years ago was it, Rob ''??

He had presented the first German performances of Puccini's Manon Lescaut and De Falla's La Vida Breve.

After he had spent the first three years in New York as associate conductor, at Toscanini's invitation, of the NBC Orchestra, he made numerous guest appearances throughout the United States and Latin America.

When I mentioned that for my first long voyage I did not even have the money for the return fare, but had trusted to luck that I would earn a sufficient amount, the young people looked at me doubtingly.

He had plenty of work to do.

The arrangement I had with him was to work four hours a day.

That should do it, he thought, because Miss Langford had said she was going to be strict about school work.

At the outset of his career, Steinberg had dedicated himself to the advancement of contemporary music by vowing to do a Schonberg work every year.

Washington never had a chance to work for an extended stretch at the occupation he loved best, plantation management.

My wish to meet Samuel Beckett had been prompted by simple curiosity and interest in his work.

I knew that a conversation with the author would not settle such questions, because a man is not the same as his writing: in the last analysis, the questions had to be settled by the work itself.

Amid a shortage of profitable work, the memory of Albert Johnson's $20,000 stood out in lonely grandeur -- the money had quickly melted away.

After he had finished the first two volumes of his Lincoln, Sandburg went to work assembling a book of songs out of hobo and childhood days and from the memory of songs others had taught him.

Never well known, but he had done his work competently.

Hanoverian agents assisted in promoting circulation, said to have reached 40,000, and if one may judge by the reaction of Swift and other government writers, the work must have had considerable impact.

The work had its beginning in 1938 with an eight-bar musical strain to which Koehler set the words `` There'll be no more work ; ;

But again, there was danger that his lungs would suffer in the muggy Washington weather, and he had to return to the dry climate of the West to live and work.

He was seldom an unmethodical critic, and his reviews generally followed a systematic pattern: a description of what the work contained, a treatment of the things that had especially interested him in it, and, wherever possible, a balancing of whatever artistic merits and faults he might have found.

After all, Pike was an established poet and his work had been published in the respectable periodicals of that center of American culture, Boston.

Even so, Edward's ambassadors can scarcely have foreseen that five years of unremitting work lay ahead of them before peace was finally made and that when it did come the countless embassies that left England for Rome during that period had very little to do with it.

Small wonder that Milton later boasted of how well his work had been received there, since he attained a rank in the order of commencing bachelors higher than that of any other inceptor from Christ's of that year.

One day, Ching had told him ( smiling, patting him on the back ) as they walked to the weekly conference of squad leaders, `` Keep it up, your squad is good, one of the best, keep it up, keep up the good work ''.

Rousseau had to admit that though he couldn't agree to a public performance, he would indeed, just for his own private satisfaction, dearly love to know how his work would sound when done by professional musicians and by trained voices.

All these emotions were screwed up to new heights when, after acceptance and the first rehearsals, there ensued such a buzz of excitement among Parisian music lovers that Duclos had to come running to Rousseau to inform him that the news had reached the superintendent of the King's amusements, and that he was now demanding that the work be offered first at the royal summer palace of Fontainebleau.

His arm had been giving him some trouble and Rector was not enough of a medical expert to determine whether it had healed improperly or whether Hino was simply rebelling against the tedious work in the print shop, using the stiffness in his arm as an excuse.