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.

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.

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.

There was only one place where Jake Carwood's description had gone badly awry: the peace and quiet.

There was only one place where the mountain might receive her -- that unnamed, unnameable pool harbored in its secret bosom.

Probably his horse would be close to where he was hiding.

He wondered where the superstition had originated that it was bad luck for a crew chief to watch his plane take off on a combat mission.

Over the rapidly-diminishing outline of a jump seat piled high with luggage Herry's black brushcut was just discernible, near, or enviably near that spot where -- hidden -- more delicately-textured, most beautifully tinted hair must still be streaming back in cool, oh cool wind sweetly perfumed with sagebrush and yucca flowers and engine fumes.

How lightly her `` eventshah-leh '' passed into the crannies where I was storing dialect material for some vaguely dreamed opus, and how the word would echo.

It was a disturbingly familiar face, too, but I couldn't remember where we had met.

The keys were still in it, and I was miles away before I remembered that my clothes and purse and everything were still in the little cabana where I'd changed ''.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed again, back in the same position where the snake had found her.

She softly let herself into the bed, and took her regular side, away from the door, where she slept better because Keith was between her and the invader.

That was where he met Penny.

Now, the next morning, they were anchored at The Elbow and the boat was riding directly over the underwater ledge where the green water turned to deepest blue and the cliff dropped straight down 600 fathoms, with the weighted line beside it ; ;

And so when Miss Langford came to teach at the one-room Chestnut school, where Jack was a pupil in the eighth grade, the Woman of Jack's mind assumed the teacher's face and figure.

Once ( this was on the third day of school ) she kneeled down to pick up some books where they'd dropped on the floor and Jack looked up her dress -- at the bare expanse of incredibly white leg.

Jack walked off alone out the road in the searing midday sun, past Robert Allen's three-room, tarpapered house, toward the field where the other boys were playing ball, thinking of what he would do in order to make Miss Langford have him stay in after school -- because this was the day he had decided when he thought he saw the look in her eyes.

In his native Cologne, where his mother taught him to play the piano, he was able to read notes before he learned the alphabet.

Yet when, at war's end, the ex-Tory made the first move to resume correspondence, Jay wrote him from Paris, where he was negotiating the peace settlement:

it was mud in wet weather and dust, ankle-deep, in dry, and could be crossed only at the corner where there were stepping stones.

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.

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.

She was exposing herself to temptation which it is best to avoid where it can consistently be done.

It was symbolized ( at least for those of us who recognized ourselves in the image ) by that self-consuming, elegiac candle of Edna St. Vincent Millay's, that candle which from the quatrain where she ensconced it became a beacon to us, but which in point of fact would have had to be as tall as a funeral taper to last even the evening, let alone the night.