The silence oppressed him, made him bend low over the horse's neck as if to hide from a wind that had begun to blow far away and was twisting slowly through the darkness in its slow search.

I had long since begun to lose my general innocence when I lost my trust in you, but this special innocence I lost before ever I loved, through my discovery that one could tremble with desire and even experience a flaming delight that had nothing, nothing whatever to do with friendship or liking, let alone with love.

Already Trevelyan had begun to parallel his nineteenth-century Italian studies with several works on English figures of the same period.

It is difficult to say what Thompson expected would come of their relationship, which had begun so soon after his emotions had been stirred by Maggie Brien, but when Katie wrote on April 11, 1900, to tell him that she was to be married to the Rev. Godfrey Burr, the vicar of Rushall in Staffordshire, the news evidently helped to deepen his discouragement over the failure of his hopes for a new volume of verse.

by now it was perhaps two days or longer after Papa had begun hemorrhaging.

The process of cosmopolitanism had begun in earnest about 1912, but the First War and the depression virtually stalled that process in its tracks.

It had begun with the blue jay feather.

Ever since he had first begun to study music and to teach it, Rousseau had dreamed of piercing through to fame as the result of a successful opera.

One soft evening -- that marvelous sea-blessed time when the sun's departing warmth lingers and a smell of spume and wrack haunts everything -- Amy had picked herself off the floor and begun to walk.

She had begun to turn back toward the house, but his look caught her and she stood still, waiting there for what his expression indicated would be a serious word of farewell.

They had cleaned up an old ice box and begun to buy fifty-pound blocks of ice in town, as the electric refrigerator came nowhere near providing enough ice for the crowds who ate and drank there.

He opened it a crack and in doing so made as much shuffling, coughing, and scraping noise as possible in order to drown emanations from the hen who had begun to protest.

The storms of the past had died away, and the great upheaval which was to mark the following century had not yet begun to disturb men's minds.

and moreover, he had already begun to broaden and simplify the facet-planes of Analytical Cubism as far back as the end of 1910.

Even before his death this influence had begun to ebb.

Below decks, Seaman 1/c Stanley Bishop had begun to write a letter home.

That finished the job that Captain Chandler and Lieutenant Carroll had begun.

The din was successful, too, for just before the moon disappeared, the frightened toad had begun to spit it out again, which meant good luck all around.

Radio broadcasts had not begun and most devotees of baseball attended the games near home, in the town park or a pasture, with perhaps two or three trips to the city each season to see the Cubs or the Pirates or the Indians or the Red Sox.

Sarah had begun to tell Lucien of Emile, she had begun to question and a little draft had crept across the room from the bedroom door, open barely enough to show a rim of blackness in the hall.

In any case, he had no intention of being caught asleep, so he carried his revolver in its holster on his hip and he took his Winchester with him and leaned it against the fence.

He put her down on the couch, and going into the kitchen, saw that the boy had dropped into a chair beside the table.

He had seen a few nester wagons go through the country, the families almost starving to death, but he had never seen any of them on foot and as bad off as these two.

Morgan returned to the kitchen, built a fire, and carried in several buckets of water from the spring which he poured into the copper boiler that he had placed on the stove.

He was thinking of Rittenhouse and how he had left him there, to rock to death on the porch of the Splendide.

He had taken a carbine down from the wall and it trailed from his hand, the stock bumping on the wood floor.

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.

The Gap looming before him -- the place where had confronted Jack English on that day so many years ago -- was his exit from all that had meaning to him.

The bullet had torn through the flesh just above the knee, inflicting an ugly gash that was forming a pool of blood on the floor.

But it had missed the bone and had passed on through.

In the brief moment I had to talk to them before I took my post on the ring of defenses, I indicated I was sickened by the methods men employed to live and trade on the river.

The cooks had prepared one of the best meals we'd had in a long time, and on Montero's orders had baked enough bread to last the day.

He scrubbed absent-mindedly at the pans and reflected on how things had turned out.

For although I had crossed a corner of the hall on my way to the toilet I still could not tell for sure how far to the rear the darkness extended.

And I had hardly finished my business in the toilet on the aforementioned occasion when the lights in that place, like the hall lights controlled from the switch in the office, flicked off and on impatiently.

I had signed it off on the forms.

This desire, I went on, growing voluble as my conviction was aroused, had mounted at such a rate recently that I now found its realization necessary not only to my physical but also to my spiritual wellbeing.

It was to him that Barton had sent Carl Dill on Dill's release from the prison.

On her bureau lay a small, brass ornament of simple design and faded engraving -- an object which, Pamela believed now, had been the property of her great-grandfather, Major Hiram Munroe Culver.

) Rumor had it he slipped two small rocks under each victim's head as a sort of trademark.

The bars were marked as Walter had marked them in a small black book kept in a nearly secret drawer.

He used the blanket for late morning naps when hosts of the night had gone off to jobs and proved reluctant to leave him in their small rooms with their few possessions.

Packing a small suitcase, informing her husband whom she found in Harry's Bar that she was taking a train to Germany to get away for a while, patting his arm, refusing a drink, getting on the train -- all this had only taken her two hours.

While he was handling the multi-million-dollar funding operations of the Government he had to resort to borrowing small sums from friends.

We had been walking quite briskly, for despite your being so small and me so tall, your stride in those days could easily match mine.

He had a small mouth with deep furrows on either side, a large flat nose, and penetrating blue eyes.

his hospital and doctor bills had been large and his income had been cut until he was receiving little except small rentals on some properties he still owned.

Moreover, he had spent six months on the Galapagos islands, among the great turtles that Captain Cook had found there, and now and then he would disappear into some small island of the West Indies.

Later, rising ninety, he was beset by publishers for the story of his life and miracles, as he put it, but, calling himself the Needy Knife-grinder, he had spent his time writing short articles and long letters and could not get even a small popular book done.

Then followed a period in which he wrote reviews for The New York Times Book Review, The Commonweal, Commentary, had a small piece in Partisan Review, and moved on to Hudson, The Village Voice, and Exodus.

Berto's The Sky Is Red had been a small masterpiece and in its special way the best book to come out of the war.

Now he was married to a beautiful girl, had a small son, and lived in an expensive apartment and worked for the movies.

The small shaft of blue had drifted down and come to rest at his feet.

at will, the voice of the auctioneer, the voices of the bidders, and finally the small boy who had been so interested in Mr. Podger's hammock purchase.

Since appeals to morality, to humanity, and to sanity have had such small effect, perhaps our last recourse is the deterrent example.

If he had any worries, it was only the small ones, about Mother in New York, and his daughter Edwina and what she might be doing at this hour, with her Aunt Asia, in Philadelphia.

The city had recently given him a small salary, but it was not enough to supply even necessities.

The dog refused to be scared off, so Kahler had purchased some small firecrackers.

The colony had been small until the Spanish Inquisition of 1492 drove many Jews into Rome.

Both of them had known the feeling of the small life in her waiting, ready, for the two of them to run up her sails.

An aircraft with a load of small nuclear weapons could very conceivably be given a mission to suppress all trains operating within a specified geographic area of Russia -- provided that we had used some of our ICBMs to degrade Russia's air defenses before our bombers got there.