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.

He was aware of her as a frightfully good-looking American WAC, a second lieutenant assigned to do the paper work, ( regardless of how important she might have thought she was ) in the Command offices, but that was all.

He was in his early forties, rather short and very compactly built, and with a manner that was reserved and stiff despite his efforts to adapt himself to American ways.

Although New Orleans was not to learn of it for a spell, she also was a sadist, a nymphomaniac and unobtrusively mad -- the perpetrator of some of the worst crimes against humanity ever committed on American soil.

The present issue in Atlantica -- whether to transform an alliance of sovereign nations into a federal union of sovereign citizens -- resembles the American one of 1787-89 rather than the one that was resolved by Civil War.

I was having lunch not long ago ( apologies to N. V. Peale ) with three distinguished historians ( one specializing in the European Middle Ages, one in American history, and one in the Far East ), and I asked them if they could name instances where the general mores had been radically changed with `` deliberate speed, majestic instancy '' ( Francis Thompson's words for the Hound Of Heaven's Pursuit ) by judicial fiat.

They, perhaps, gave the pitch of their position in the preface where it was said that Eisenhower requested that the Commission be administered by the American Assembly of Columbia University, because it was non-partisan.

In truth, we can say that this broke the power of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was finally exposed in full light to the American people.

He gave us a simile to explain his admission that even at the worst period of his second illness it never occurred to him there was any renewed question about his running: as in the Battle of the Bulge, he had no fears about the outcome until he read the American newspapers.

After a year in a studio on Sheridan Square, having married an American girl who was a native of Virginia, Helion moved to a village in the Blue Ridge mountains, where he produced some of the most imposing of his abstract canvases.

But what you could not know, of course, was how smoothly the Victorian Fitzgerald was to lead into an American Fitzgerald of my own vintage under whose banner we adolescents were to come, if not of age, then into a bright, taut semblance of it.

In due time Sandburg was a walking thesaurus of American folk music.

The result was a collection of 280 songs, ballads, ditties, brought together from all regions of America, more than one hundred never before published: The American Songbag.

By this time she had learned that it was futile to argue with her young husband, yet the uncomfortable fact remained: the American Congregationalists were sending them as missionaries to the Far East and paying their salaries.

City editor Victor Watson of the New York American was a man of brooding suspicions and mysterious shifts of mood.

He was the son of a Scottish father and an American Jewish mother, long widowed, with whom he lived in a comfortable home in Flushing.

Just when it was needed for the campaign, Hearst Paper No. 8, the Boston American, began publication.

On one visit he stopped at the office of the American, where he was known surreptitiously as `` the Great White Chief '', and for the first time met his managing editor, fat Moses Koenigsberg.

This was historic in its way, for it marked the first time an American Presidential aspirant had advertised his own virtues in his own string of newspapers spanning the land.

By this time word had got around that an American doctor was on the premises.

The film they did after his return was an inconsequential bit of nothing titled Out Of This World, a satire on the Sinatra bobby-soxer craze.

Each successive movement in his growing was recorded on the unreeling film inside her.

Never a `` quick study '', he now made no attempt to learn his `` lines '' and many a mile of film was wasted, many a scene -- sometimes involving as many as a thousand fellow thespians -- was taken thirty, forty, fifty times because Miss Poitrine's co-star and `` helpmate '' had never learned his part.

Our last joint venture, Sainted Lady, a deeply religious film based on the life of Mother Cabrini, and timed so that its release date would coincide with the beatification of America's first saint in November, 1938, was a fiasco from start to finish.

By the time the film was released we were three million dollars over-spent, war was imminent and the public apparently had forgotten all about Mother Cabrini.

) The film was called The Diet of Worms, which I felt was just what Letch deserved.

It was a `` potboiler '' made on a `` shoestring '' and not the sort of film I like, as all I had to do was look blank and scream a great deal.

For example, when the film is only four minutes old, Neitzbohr refers to a small, Victorian piano stool as `` Wilhelmina '', and we are thereupon subjected to a flashback that informs us that this very piano stool was once used by an epileptic governess whose name, of course, was Doris ( the English equivalent, when passed through middle-Gaelic derivations, of Wilhelmina ).

Rudyard Kipling's scorn for the `` jargon '' of psychical research was altered somewhat when he wondered `` how, or why, had I been shown an unreleased roll of my life film ''??

This discovery of Melies was vastly more important than his sometimes dazzling, magician's tricks produced on film.

It was Porter, however, who produced the very first movie whose name has lived on through the half century of film history that has since ensued.

Before he was forty Griffith had created the art of the film.

Motion picture cameras had been installed to film the audience, the reservation list was being checked out name by name, and a special detail was already at work in the parking lot scrutinizing automobiles for a possible lead.

When arrested, he had the submarine secrets on a roll of candid camera film as well as anti-submarine secrets in Christmas gift wrapping, it was testified.

He said that drawings of the Dreadnought and printed details about the ship were found reproduced in an undeveloped roll of film taken from Lonsdale when he was arrested with the two civil servants outside the Old Vic theater Saturday afternoon, Jan. 7.

And it was interesting to observe that B.B.C.'s television film on Christmas Eve was The Bells Of St. Mary's.

Another source of NBC pride was its rare film clip of Bix Beiderbecke, but this view of the great trumpeter flew by so fast that a prolonged wink would have blotted out the entire glimpse.

Winning the 1951 Best Picture Oscar and numerous other awards, the film was directed by Vincente Minnelli, featured many tunes of Gershwin, and concluded with an extensive, elaborate dance sequence built around the An American in Paris symphonic poem ( arranged for the film by Johnny Green ), costing $ 500, 000.