Though the four boys and two girls, the youngest nineteen years of age, the oldest twenty-four, came from varying backgrounds and had different professional and personal interests, there was surprising agreement among them.

The champions of the Union maintained that the Constitution had formed, fundamentally, the united people of America, that it was a compact among sovereign citizens rather than states, and that therefore the states had no right to secede, though the citizens could.

They recognized that slavery was a moral issue and not merely an economic interest, and that to recognize it explicitly in their Constitution would be in explosive contradiction to the concept of sovereignty they had set forth in the Declaration of 1776 that `` all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

One evening, while a volley-ball game was being played in the yard among the prisoners remaining there, a simulated melee was staged -- just as the gates were opened to admit other prisoners returning from work.

As the field on which my tent was pitched was a favorite natural playground for the kids of the neighborhood, I had made many friends among them, taking part in their after-school games and trying desperately to translate Grimm's Fairy Tales into an understandable French as we gathered around the fire in front of the tent.

Katherine Douglas King '' The invitation was accepted and other letters followed, in which she spoke of her concern for his health and her delight in seeing him so much at home among the crippled children she served.

He dabbled in verse, could get along well among most of the European languages, and was fluent in French and German.

The Americans lost forty-four men, among them Major Joseph Morris of Morgan's regiment, an officer who was regarded with high esteem and affection, not only by his commander, but by Washington and Lafayette as well.

He was placed in charge of athletics, and among other things adapted the type of calisthenics known as the daily dozen.

His metier was the American tropics, and he had lived all over Latin America and among the primitive tribes on the Amazon river.

It reminded me of my other professor, Edward Kennard Rand, of whom I had been so fond when I was at Harvard, the great mediaevalist and classical scholar who had asked me to call him `` Ken '', saying, `` Age counts for nothing among those who have learned to know life sub specie aeternitatis ''.

The Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948 was followed immediately by the conclusion of the Brussels Treaty, a 50-year alliance among Britain, France and the Benelux countries.

In 1957 the social-economic approach to European integration was capped by the formation among `` the Six '' of a tariff-free European Common Market, and Euratom for cooperation in the development of atomic energy.

when his Holiness Pope John 23, first called for an Ecumenical Council, and at the same time voiced his yearning for Christian unity, the enthusiasm among Catholic and Protestant ecumenicists was immediate.

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.

And of course the news of who the composer was did finally begin to get around among his closest friends.

How titillating it was to go among people who did not know him as the composer, but who talked in the most glowing terms of the promise of the piece after having heard the first rehearsals.

An occasional traveler from Italy brought news of Peter Robert, who was now distributing his Bible among the Waldensian peasants.

He was seeing, somehow, the face of a young boy, the boy Simms Purdew must once have been, a boy with sorrel hair, and blue eyes dancing with gaiety, and the boy mouth grinning trustfully among the freckles.

First thing I knew he was in the kitchenette cooking up the breakfast and I was handing Eileen her coffeecup and she was lying there handsome as a queen among her courtiers.

It was her work to go among her neighbors and collect their checks.

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

There was an artificial lake just out of sight in the first stand of trees, fed by a half dozen springs that popped out of the ground above the hillside orchard.

The first part of the road was steep, but it leveled off after the second bend and curled gradually into the valley.

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.

The herd was watered and then thrown onto a broad grass flat which was to be the first night's bedground.

Once again, Tom Horn was the first and most likely suspect, and he was brought in for questioning immediately.

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.

The Indian's arm whipped sidewise -- there was a flash of amber and froth, the crash of the bottle shattering against the side of the first car.

It was her first smile.

At first, I thought he was out of his head, talking wildly like this.

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

Miss Langford ( her first name was Evelyn ) was an attractive girl.

School began in August, the hottest part of the year, and for the first few days Miss Langford was very lenient with the children, letting them play a lot and the new ones sort of get acquainted with one another.

It was just as well that the ignorant Dandy enjoyed himself to the hilt that first evening, for the room was to become his prison cell.

`` Bastards '', he would say, `` all I did was put a beat to that Vivaldi stuff, and the first chair clobbered me ''!!

In 1961 the first important legislative victory of the Kennedy Administration came when the principle of national responsibility for local economic distress won out over a `` state's-responsibility '' proposal -- provision was made for payment for unemployment relief by nation-wide taxation rather than by a levy only on those states afflicted with manpower surplus.

The first systematic thinking about this Pandora's box within Pandora's boxes was done four years ago by Fred Ikle, a frail, meek-mannered Swiss-born sociologist.

The smell at first was more surprising than unpleasant.

His collaboration with Washington, begun when he was the general's aide during the Revolution, was resumed when he entered the first Cabinet as Secretary of the Treasury.