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.

He wasn't a dwarf but he was a bit of a comic figure.

Alexis (, c. 394 BC – c. 288 BC ) was a Greek comic poet of the Middle Comedy period.

The public opinion of voters was remarkably influenced by the political satire performed by the comic poets at the theatres.

Salieri would also write several bravura aria's for a soprano playing the part of a middle class character that would combine coloratura and concertante woodwind solos, another innovation for a comic opera that was to be widely imitated.

Again a classic of Renaissance literature was the basis of the libretto by Boccherini, in this case a comic mock-epic by Tassoni, in which a war between Modena and Bologna ensues over a stolen bucket.

Gluck feared that the Parisian critics would denounce the opera by a young composer known mostly for comic pieces and so the opera was originally billed in the press as being a new work by Gluck with some assistance from Antonio Salieri, then shortly before the premiere of the opera the Parisian press reported that the work was to be partly by Gluck and partly by Salieri, and finally after popular and critical success were won on stage the opera was acknowledged in a letter to the public by Gluck as being wholly by the young Antonio.

Alfred Gerald Caplin ( September 28, 1909 – November 5, 1979 ), better known as Al Capp, was an American cartoonist and humorist best known for the satirical comic strip Li ' l Abner.

The technique — as invigorating as it was unorthodox — was later adopted by cartoonists like Walt Kelly and Garry Trudeau ," wrote comic strip historian Rick Marschall.

Li ' l Abner was also the subject of the first book-length, scholarly assessment of an American comic strip ever published.

( This fable-like story was collected into an educational comic book called Mammy Yokum and the Great Dogpatch Mystery !, and distributed by the Anti-Defamation League of B ' nai B ' rith later that year.

" The article recounted Capp's days working for an unnamed " benefactor " with a miserly, swinish personality, who Capp claimed was a never-ending source of inspiration when it came time to create a new unregenerate villain for his comic strip.

As is usual with collaborative efforts in comic strips, his name was the only one credited — although, sensitive to his own experience working on Joe Palooka, Capp frequently drew attention to his assistants in interviews and publicity pieces.

There was also a separate line of comic book titles published by the Caplin family-owned Toby Press, including Shmoo Comics featuring Washable Jones.

Cartoonist Mell Lazarus, creator of Miss Peach and Momma, wrote a comic novel in 1963 titled The Boss Is Crazy, Too which was partly inspired by his apprenticeship days working with Capp and his brother Elliot at Toby.

In the Golden Age of the American comic strip, successful cartoonists received a great deal of attention ; their professional and private lives were reported in the press, and their celebrity was often nearly sufficient to rival their creations.

Besides his use of the comic strip to voice his opinions and display his humor, Capp was a popular guest speaker at universities, and on radio and television.

Li ' l Abner was one of 20 classic American comic strips honored with a USPS commemorative postage stamp.

In the comic, minor characters like Earl, Billy Bob, Clark Cobb, and Mistress Cora Anthrax would get repeated appearances ; Earl was quite regular, and Anthrax was in two issues and got to answer a letter's page.

William " Bill " Boyd Watterson II ( born July 5, 1958 ) is an American cartoonist and the author of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, which was syndicated from 1985 to 1995.

Later, when Watterson was creating names for the characters in his comic strip, he allegedly decided upon Calvin ( after the Protestant reformer John Calvin ) and Hobbes ( after the social philosopher Thomas Hobbes ) as a " tip of the hat " to the political science department at Kenyon.

On December 21, 1999 a short piece, written by Watterson to mark the forthcoming end of the comic strip Peanuts, was published in the Los Angeles Times.