Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Alphonse Maria Mucha paintings

Alphonse Maria Mucha paintings
Benjamin Williams Leader paintings
Bartolome Esteban Murillo paintings
Berthe Morisot paintings
It was easy to think this; but it was hard to brace himself up to try it. Three times he stretched his hand a little way out into the dark gingerly; and snatched it suddenly back, with a gasp-not because it had encountered anything, but because he had felt so sure it was just going to. But the fourth time he groped a little further, and his hand lightly swept against something soft and warm. This petrified him nearly with fright-his mind was in such a state that he could imagine the thing to be nothing else than a corpse, newly dead and still warmHe thought he would rather die than touch it again. But he thought this false thought because he did not know the immortal strength of human curiosity. In no long time his hand was tremblingly groping again-against his judgment, and without his consent-but groping persistently on, just the same. It encountered a bunch of long hair; he shuddered, but followed up the hair and found what seemed to be a warm rope; followed up the rope and found an innocent calf; for the rope was not a rope at all, but the calf's tail.
The king was cordially ashamed of himself for having gotten all that fright and misery out of so paltry a matter as a slumbering calf; but he need not have felt so about it, for it was not the calf that frightened him but a dreadful non-existent something which the calf stood for; and any other boy, in those old superstitous times, would have acted and suffered just as he had done.

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