Forrester laughed so unrestrainedly that Isabel looked at him
beseechingly, in evident dread of the consequences.

"My dear Miss Raymond," he said, answering her frightened glance, "don't
alarm yourself. Do you think I am a Quixote, to war with windmills?"

No one could look at Bruce's long arms and legs, all working at once,
without owning the aptness of the simile.

For the third time he came down at the brook, and, I really believe,
meant going; but Kathleen, unused to such vacillating measures, had got
sulky, and swerved on the very brink, almost sliding over it. Her rider
lost his seat, rolled over her shoulder, and for an instant disappeared
in the water.

Achelous or Tiber, emerging from his native waves, crowned with aquatic
plants, presented, I doubt not, an appearance at once dignified and
becoming, but I defy any ordinary non-amphibious mortal to look, under
similar circumstances, any thing but supremely ridiculous. The wrathful
face framed in dripping hair and plastered whiskers--the movements of
the limbs, awkward and constrained--the rivulets distilling from every
salient angle, turning the victim into a walking Lauterbrunnen--when we
saw all these absurdities exaggerated before us, no wonder that from the
whole party, including the groom, there broke "unnumbered laughters."

"Curse the mare!" Bruce hissed out. The words came crushed and broken,
as it were, through the white ranges of his grinding teeth.

Livingstone's face hardened directly. "Swear as much as you think the
circumstances require, or as my cousin will allow," he said, "but be