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.

`` But that was war '', I said.

Out in front of our walls the grass was covered with dead and dying men, war shields, lances, blankets and wounded and dead horses.

The war captain had been badly wounded and was fighting to hold his seat.

Keith Sterling had looked down on the Brahmaputra more times than he could remember, during the war days when he flew over the Hump of the world, thinking it high adventure in those times before man was guiding himself through outer space.

But `` after the war '' was a luxury of a phrase he did not permit himself.

The RAF was Britain's weapon of attrition, and flying a fighter plane was the way her sons could serve her best at this point in the war.

It was a war of nerves, of stamina, of dogged endurance in which the stupid insistence of the British on their right to their own country became ultimately an unsurmountable obstacle to the Nazis, who were better organized and technically superior.

He had a war reputation, but this was the kind of man women like even without medals.

In every war of the United States since the Civil War the South was more belligerent than the rest of the country.

what they feared most was war or political instability in their own country.

One is tempted to say that, on the difference between the concepts of sovereignty in these two preambles, the worst war of the Nineteenth century was fought.

To my knowledge, Lincoln remains the only Head of State and Commander-in-Chief who, while fighting a fearful war whose issue was in doubt, proved man enough to say this publicly -- to give his foe the benefit of the fact that in all human truth there is some error, and in all our error, some truth.

And by the time the war ended, liberal leadership in this country was spiritually Marxist.

`` I hated the war '', he said, `` but thought I ought to go because I was, perhaps, one of those who hadn't done enough to prevent it ''.

In June, 1940, Sergeant Helion, with a company of reserve troops waiting to go into battle, was sketching the hills south of the Loire River, when the war suddenly rolled in upon him.

`` It was then I knew that they were making war against Man, the individual within!!

Robbie was a war veteran with battle-shattered knees.

Mama had told her how Emmett's lungs had been affected when he was gassed in the war.

A popular belief grew up after the war that the only time during the Civil War that Thomas ever put his horse to a gallop was when he went to hurry up Stanley for this assault.

It was the hard way to fight a war but Thomas did it without making any disastrous mistakes.

At headquarters -- sufficiently far from the firing line to make you forget occasionally that you were in a war -- Lewis found that the Commander in Chief's only desk was his knees ( and his only comb, his fingers ).

It was not merely a hunger for `` money, gold and precious objects '' that delayed the papal pronouncement that could have brought the war to an end ; ;

In spite of the armistice negotiated by Amadee two years earlier, the war between Bishop Guillaume of Lausanne and Louis of Savoy was still going on, and although little is known about it, that little proves that it was yet another phase of the struggle against French expansion and was closely interwoven with the larger conflict.