#especially the gay oars

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

i ended up drawing more stained glass inspired puppet history art

[crispycreambacon]

S-oar Wounds

— ☆ —

Warning: The fic above contains brief depictions of violence, gore and death. Moreover, the themes of this fic heavily involve trauma, specifically PTSD. If any of the following distresses you, please read with caution or refrain from clicking the fic.

The Professor finally reunites the Sword and the Oar after years of being apart. But can they even be together again after everything that happened to them?

— ☆ —

Fun fact! The Oar's piece is based on "Gifu Road Station: Godo, Nagara River Cormorant Fishing Boat" by Keisai Eisen and Utagawa Hiroshige. Another fun fact! The Oar's palette lowkey looks like the gay mlm flag while the Sword's palette looks like the lesbian flag. How fun! How gay even :3

Anyways, Happy Valentine's Day, everyone!! I hope y'all are doing swell whether you're spending today with your partner, your friends, your family, or you're simply vibing. As for me, I cooked up another fic featuring your favourite gay couple! Don't let the oar pun in the title fool ya, this is uhm. I think you can tell from the warning :D

The fic has it all! We got:

An exploration of the Sword and the Oar, particularly how they grapple with their trauma and how it affects their relationship with each other

Honest depictions of, well, life which can get ugly, and sometimes, they don't know how to handle it, but it's okay! It's part of the process

A really cute friendship between the Professor and the Oars! (Albeit the Professor and the Sword uh. Not exactly wholesome especially at the start-)

Hand-holding! And hugs. And general physical affection to even out the amount of drama radiating from this fic

A happy ending! Because they deserve it god DAMN IT

If all of that sounds like up your alley, you can click here to read the fic, click the title or search "S-oar Wounds" by crispycreambacon on AO3. This was a very interesting and cathartic piece to write, and I hope you get even a fraction of that catharsis while reading it too.

Thank you for showing interest in the fic, and even if you don't end up reading it, I hope you enjoy the art. Have a lovely day, everyone!

[ciderjacks]

I watch some of Watcher's stuff, tell me whatever you want about Shane Madej!

HOUGHHHH. OHHRHFHTHABK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOY

i think a lot of people who are aware of Shane sort of just think of him as the skeptic guy on bfu/ghost files (not saying that’s u obv just a lot of ppl bc I guess I need this to be a pitch meeting) and I think that is a shame because HOLY SHIT HES SO TALENTED AND COOL AND WEIRD AND THE SHIT HE MAKES IS SO FUCKIKNG INSANELY GOOD

Ok so going back in time for a second to b*zzfeed. Who btw did not deserve this guy. Afaik he had two major like, creative projects on there. Ruining History and The Hot Daga. Both were very good. ruining history was a fun history show he did with Sara and Ryan and there are rotating guests every episode. Shane is very interested in history, very good at teaching history, and i think in an alternate universe hes a beloved high school history teacher. Ruining History is the father of puppet history. B*zzfeed canned it and i miss it every day. and then there’s the other father of Puppet History, Hot Daga. Hot Daga is insane. I love Hot Daga, its not for everyone, but I think its so good. The lore goes crazy, he produced and made original songs for it, he animated the whole final half season by himself which is fuckinf insane. He made a ballad for it and actually i need everyone reading this to Listen to “believe me maizey” and then directly after listen to the Meteor Ballad from Puppet History. OH LOOK A SEGWAY

Puppet history is so fuckinf good. Its So Good. And especially in later seasons since hes doing so much you really start to see his improvement as an artist and its just. Its incredible. Some of the somgs are genuinely fucking masterpieces, like some of my favs are The Flower Boat Song, Asmodeus, The Horse and God song, the Emu song, Big Pile Of Diamonds, Infinitiger, The Window Song, Gay Oars Duet, Hologram Professor Song, and the Meteor’s Ballad. And more. Uhh OH the Olympic Torch is really good too. His lyrics are so smart and fun and his vocals are so impressive and he has such good range, he duetted Himself for the Oar song and managed to make the two voices identifiable as separate characters without being over the top. The lyrics range from poetic anf beautiful to weird and funny often within the Same song! Its just so good and he starts so good and gradually over the years he’s done the show you can see him getting more comfortable and better at music which is crazy causw again HE STARTED OFF GOOD! HE WAS INSANE IN HOT DAGA AND HE IS SOMEHOW EVEN BETTER IN PUPPET HISTORY LIKE! and and and ok here’s where I get crazy and a little parasocial (lol not really i am misusing that word for the bit LOL)

Something about all his work is that you can kind of see how his art depicts the world. In Hot Daga you get the line “what else can you do in the face of such monumental loss, but breath a weary sigh as the world is a little quieter now.” And in Puppet history you get uh actually you get like 20 things from the meteor song but one of my favorite parts is (read blue as the professor, orange as the meteor, pink as both) “some shit’s just etched into the stars, calamities you cant outrun/and when sweet earth we finally meet/the sky will burn and boil the sea/as mountains rend/its you and me.” i think both these lyrics and these somgs demonstrate a maturity about the world that you dont really see in a lot of people, his general kindness towards anything and everything and his ability to change perspectives on things without being forceful. (On a personal note I listened to The Meteor song after someone I knew passed, and as dumb as it maybe sounds the idea that like,, death is not cruel, you can’t always run and sometimes the best thing you can do is be there with the people you love as the world ends.) and also I think that you really can tell that he views the people he’s telling you about as People and not just like, figures. Ykwim. He shows such genuine respect and care for everyone in these stories and I’ve already like briefly in these stories but like, you KNOW if a guy can make me cry for the Meteor that killed the dinosaurs then he’s something special. i also think the way he portrays death in his work is very comforting as a whole. and another thing speakinf of rhat is that he has so much respect for other cultures in a level I think that goes beyond just bare minimum not being a piece of shit. Like especially when he’s teaching history, an example that always sticks out to me is how much effort he put into making sure people remembered and thought about Hatshepsut by having a whole episode on her history then also making an EXTREMELY (probably intentionally so though i cant be sure bc I can’t reas minds) catchy song that Told you to think of Hatshepsut and explained Why uou should think of Hatshepsut and it’s been stuck in my head ever since I first heard it years ago. Also I’m consistently impressed by his good pronunciation of things, I remember in the Tunguska event episode of mystery files there were so many ppl from tbe area he was talking about shocked by how good his pronunciation was. And ive seen that so many times w him like, idk i just think thats very cool. He’s a genuinely really mature and respectful guy I think. Wise too. So much of his work has educated me, changed my worldview for the better, inspired me. Like He’s so talented ik i keep saying that but HE IS!

Like ok so. He can write both songs and stories beautifully. he’s wise as fuck and could probably be a philosopher. He can make puppets (and just tbc later season puppet history the puppets are not him, but in the early seasons afaik they were all him, so he is definitely skilled at that.), he can sing, he can voice act, his graphics and editing are off the charts, he’s educated and smart, hes funny. He’s so fuckinf cool.

also again getting parasocial here but I just really like how much of a zest for life the guy seems to have. And Honestly im impressed that he worked in retail, had actual trash thrown in his face by an angry customer (true story) and still came out it like “man the world sure is wonderful!”. What a guy. And He’s so fucking weird and interesting and I could seriously just listen to him rant about Literally anything Forever. Anything. It doesnt matter I think he could talk about anything in a way that would make me invested in it and i’d come out of it more educated than before with a fresh new perspective on life.

This is getting Essay-like so here are some other Random Shane Things I know to close me out I guess

-he loves community was in the community fandom and has a crush on troy barnes

-he wants to be a mouse

-he’s lived 7000 years

-

-was DB cooper

-makes a fine ass Krampus

-actually the coolest guy alive

sorry this is almost 100% incomprehensible thank you for letting my autism loose tho

[noa-nightingale]

✨ Oars Time! ✨

I wanted to write an analysis about the first appearance of the gay oars in the Miyamoto Musashi episode but this is more rambling than anything else tbh. Thank you to @puppethistorian for the encouragement in my notes after I said I wanted to write about the oars. ^-^

First of all, I love that the Professor just says “one of the oars” when the song is about to start. And then Oar Oar refers to Sword Oar as “my friend” which is a little bit misleading lmao. I love how it is set up because I did not expect one of the most beautiful and tragic songs in the entirety of Puppet History and I did not expect to see a gay couple on Puppet History, getting an entire song that not only is about the topic of the episode but also about their love for each other. Completely caught me off guard the first time I watched, and I still have not recovered. It’s a beautiful beautiful thing.

I love Shane’s voice acting for both of them but especially for Oar Oar - his voice is so soft and when he speaks for the first time Garrick and Ryan immediately speak quieter too - like, for a second there they both seem genuinely concerned for a piece of cardboard lol. It’s kind of touching.

Some random stuff:

“We were in love once” Ugh right in the heart.

I am a huge fan of all the oar puns.

When Sword Oar shows up!!!

The different voices! Their voices are so different from each other, Sword Oar sounds so gruff and Oar Oar sounds so soft and I am SO here for it.

I love the Puppet History eyebrows. Like, the eyebrow animation for various people throughout the entire show, the Professor’s eyebrows, and obviously the oarbrows too. I love that Oar Oar looks so sweet and that Sword Oar looks so tough and is still so in love with himmmmmm.

I like their outlines/silhouettes. Like, just their shape. They complement each other really well and it is pleasing to look at.

“How we splashed and we smooched, oh remember” Hnnnnnnnghghgn.

The song is so tragic and it hurts my heart and make me so happy.

Yes you are meant to be!

Yeah I am biased but this is one of the most beautiful songs Shane has ever blessed us with, including the hot daga songs.

The thing Garrick does with his hands at 30:11. It’s so adorable.

The yearning. The pining. The longing. Do I need to say more.

Yes I cried, this song just makes me so emotional.

I did not actually expect them to kiss the first time I watched. He kept teasing the kiss (three times! three times he did this to us!!) and I just kept thinking “surely not. surely we won’t be so lucky”. And then they kissed. Ayyyyyyyyyyy!!!

“Kiss! Kiss...” Ryan’s voice and little laugh - same tbh.

On a less emotional note, it’s hilarious to me how obvious Shane’s hands are here.

Soooooo don’t get me wrong I adore the entire song to pieces but I will have nightmares about those godawful sawing noises for years to come lmao.

There is a lot more to say but for now, that’s my little retrospect. ^-^ I love writing about these two guys and probably won’t stop anytime soon.

Thanks for reading. <3

[whoacanada]

Camp Sweetgum

Pre-Canon Zimbits —  Camp Sweetgum shares lakefront with a private resort and Eric is used to wealthy, entitled people wandering into his camp. He isn’t used to them awkwardly hitting on him.

“Hello?”

Eric looks up from the mess he’s cleaning out of the bottom of a canoe to find a man waving awkwardly a few yards away. The glare from the lake is enough to mask any discerning features, but Eric can make out a thick accent. 

“Hi. One of your campers left this oar near the water polo court?”

“Oh, bless,” Eric sighs, rinsing his hands in the lake to clear any lingering stench. “The little kids are still learning and our new counselors are just as green. Thank you for bringing it back, I hope they didn’t interrupt your morning?”

The man comes into focus and Eric realizes he’s younger than he sounds, the hair on his head floppy and overgrown, softening his sharp features and oddly bright eyes. Eric can’t recall the last time he’d met someone with such light blue eyes, if he ever has; and the realization comes with a flutter low in his stomach. A flutter Eric always tries very hard to ignore when he’s working.

“Oh, no worries,” the man says, smile half-timid. “I saw the kids playing and should have said something before they left it behind.”

He’s older. He’s foreign. He’s cute. Not that Eric needs to think too hard about any of those details.

“So, bleach, eh?”

Eric looks down at the bucket and rag, realizes he hasn’t spoken aloud recently enough for this to be a real conversation and takes steps to amend the problem.

“How else are we supposed to determine what campers get motion sickness?” Eric offers with some measure of levity. “What’s life without a little mess?”

“Are you a counselor?”

“Caught me,” Eric balances the plastic bucket as he steps out of the canoe onto the pier, trying not to stain his shirt when the bleach solution splashes over the edge. “You’re looking at Sweetgum’s Senior Counselor. Why? Looking for a summer job? We need a cook if you’re halfway decent in the kitchen.”

He’s only half joking. Eric doesn’t have the authority to hire anyone, but they do need a new chef, and there’s very little Eric enjoys more than knocking rich guys down a peg.

“No thanks, I’m just on vacation,” the guy points over his shoulder at the resort on the opposite side of the lake, completely missing Eric’s sass. “But I’ll keep that in mind. I’m good with kids, I used to coach bantam hockey.”

“Used to?”

“I’m going back to college this fall,” he shrugs, bending low to rest the oar on the sand. At this angle, Eric can see the man shares the familiar, slightly bowlegged stance of some of his lifer teammates; the good ones who’ve played ice hockey as long as Eric’s known how to walk. “It’s kind of weird, isn’t it?”

It takes a moment for Eric to realize what the guy is talking about, but then he notices the way he’s looking at the bunk buildings behind Eric.

“Oh, you mean how there’s a middle-income summer camp next door to a super secret private resort? Believe me, I know. Half my job is making sure tech billionaires on speedboats don’t mow down my campers in water wings.”

The words are out before Eric has time to think, and the man’s pale cheeks flush pink, which Eric only notices because he’s already so pale. Who spends their summer at a lake resort and doesn’t tan?

“I don’t like speedboats,” the man offers. “I mostly golf with my dad.”

“Well I appreciate you not murdering my kids.”

“You’re welcome.”

They stand in silence for a few moments, Eric waiting for his visitor to do something, anything other than awkwardly hover while Eric’s campers scream and play a short ways away.

“Well, thank you for the oar,” Eric says, opening the door on the end of their conversation so this hottie can escape. “You feel like coming by the snack shack, I’d be happy to reward you with a fun-size candy bar of your choosing.”

“Thanks. I’m conditioning so I can’t.”

Eric’s used to rich kids sneaking across the lake to play pranks and be generally unworthy of any measure of kindness, but this is new. This boy, this hockey player, has accomplished his mission of returning a missing camp item, he’s made small talk, and rejected Eric’s thank you offer outright; and yet, he isn’t leaving.

“Is there anything else you needed?” Eric asks. “You’re welcome to help me clean.”

Pale, blue-eyed hottie actually scuffs his heel into the sand.

“Yes?” Eric prompts gently.

“I just saw a sniper scrubbing puke out of a boat and thought I’d say hello,” he says, looking appropriately horrified the moment the words leave his mouth.

Eric suddenly gets it.

This is not the first time someone’s mistaken him for a girl at a distance, especially when he’s wearing his swim shorts. Figure skating did wonders for his coordination, it also gave him the ass and thighs of a co-ed. One day, a boy will hit on Eric from behind and actually be interested in what’s happening on the front end as well, but that’s a day he’s saving for his college up north, the one with a much healthier gay-straight ratio.

“No stress,” Eric forces. “It’s an easy mistake. You aren’t the first guy to clock me at a thousand yards. Happens all the time.”

Blue-eyes blushes harder and looks away.

“I-I didn’t,” he stammers. “I’m sorry, I should go. Thanks for . . . um, don’t ruin your clothes. The cleaner.”

Eric waves halfheartedly as the man departs, walking quickly to the wooded path before breaking into a sprint the second he thinks Eric can’t see him any longer. When he disappears from sight, Eric adds another tally to a mental checklist labeled ‘sexuality crisis’.

“Stupid boys,” Eric sighs, giving up on appearances as he dumps the remaining contents of the bleach bucket into the canoe.

[mercuryislove]

It is once again the best day of the week! Happy Friday!

🪞 for Anwei

👄 for Yixing

👁 for Ciaran

👀 for Azetahn

👖 for Andhira

happy friday and also saturday and i might as well say sunday too!! my weekend has been super busy so far and SOMEHOW I'm still dealing with the lingering cough from my weird sinus bug thing last week!

🪞 How does your oc perceive themself? Do they believe themself to be attractive, unattractive, or average? Does their view of themself affect their self-esteem, oar they unbothered by their physical appearance? If your oc does have things they're confident or insecure about, what are they?

Anwei has lived long enough to no longer give a damn about what other people think of her looks. When she was growing up, she cared way too much and it warped her self-esteem for years and years and years. She used to hate being tall because her mother always said that boys didn't like tall girls (um. news flash mom she is GAY), and she hated the shape of her jaw and her nose and her dark brows because people used to say they were too “masculine,” so she spent a lot of her teenage years trying to mask it all. Then one day when she was like 20 she woke up and said “WHO GIVES A DAMN?” and quit plucking her brows and dyed her hair cotton candy pink and started wearing platform heels and made sure everyone knew that she didn't give a fuck about everyone else's opinions anymore. (Except her mom. And her mom was fucking mortified that she would dye her hair such a garish color.)

These days, she doesn't try to stand out (except when she's hosting a party lmao) and she doesn't try to blend in (except when she's hiding from people that want her dead), and she truly could not care less about what other people think. She wears clothes that are comfortable and functional, and she styles her hair to keep it out of her way, and like. what the fuck is self-esteem? She knows she can't really change what she looks like and that in a few decades, trends around the world will be completely different, so why bother? She is happy just to be herself. But she really does miss being able to dye her hair weird ass colors. And the platform boots, if only to tower even further over Ciaran.

--

👄 What is your oc's smile like? Is it bright and wide, or thin and reserved? Does your oc wear any lipgloss or lipstick? Do they chew their lips?

Yixing has two distinct smiles. There's the “professional” smile that he uses with most people he knows. It's like a customer service smile where he squints a little bit and smiles without even showing his teeth, and people eat that shit up. They LOVE it. He whips out the customer service smile to haggle with people and get discounts and to get free drinks and to get his way. Mari tells him he should use it sparingly because people might get used to it and he won't get what he wants with it anymore, but that doesn't stop him lol. And then there's his genuine smile that he only uses when he's around people he's comfortable with (or when he's like. stupid drunk lol) and he smiles with his WHOLE face and it's goofy and toothy and he kind of sticks his tongue out a little bit too and he doesn't try to hide his crow's feet or the creases in his forehead. And honestly that's the smile that people should really get into because it's just um better lol.

Also he is a notorious lip chewer, especially when he's nervous or deep in thought, so his bottom lip gets a little chapped sometimes. Anwei makes him a lip balm to help with it but he always forgets to use it on his lips because it works great for dry hands too and he cares more about that lol

--

👁 What is your oc's eye color? Do they have any eye-related habits, like winking or rubbing their eyes? Do other people tend to notice their eyes?

Ciaran's eyes are black. Technically, they're just really really dark brown, but they reflect virtually no light even in the brightest sun. It's kind of spooky. (Anwei's eyes are the same, for the record.) It's his distinguishing feature for sure. To make it even weirder, he likes to make eye contact for an uncomfortable length of time, and he doesn't blink often. It definitely freaks people out. Typically, people have trouble holding his gaze because the uncanny nature of his eyes is too much.

--

👀 What is the first physical feature people notice when they see your oc? Why?

Aside from his height (he's 6'4” which is honestly not that tall in his family because his mother is seven feet tall lmao), the first thing people notice about Azetahn is probably his smile. He has a warm and open smile that he gets from his mother. He's very friendly and wants to make friends with everyone he meets, so he's hardly ever without a smile on his face. People might also notice his eyes. He has his mother's eyes for sure. They're dark brown but in the sunlight they're crimson. It's a distinct trait from her side of the family. (Andhira's eyes are similar but not nearly as remarkable.) The Maram family that Tahire comes from is kind of famous for that because there isn't another family of vampires with such a distinct eye color. It makes it very hard to hide who they are lol

--

👖 What type of clothing does your oc generally wear? Why? Do they have any signature accessories?

Andhira, like everyone in her family, has expensive taste lol She is always dressed well, always wearing designer labels, and everything is tailored to fit her. She's a big fan of heels and long skirts and sheer fabrics and anything with a good drape, but she generally prefers a suit for formal wear over a gown. She likes to wear dark colors (burgundy, royal purple, emerald green, etc) and wouldn't be caught dead wearing pink or pastels under any circumstances. She always keeps her nails manicured, never very long, prefers to paint them black or red. If that doesn't count as an accessory, she also has an extensive collection of designer sunglasses and she would never leave home without a few pairs to spare. Why does she dress this way? Um, she wants to look her best always and make people jealous when she enters a room because she KNOWS she's better than anyone that could ever hope to make her acquaintance. Also she wears sunglasses religiously because even though she can go out in sunlight, her eyes are very sensitive to it lol

[galacticnova3]

Got headcanons for Lor’s relationship/interactions with the cat wizard ?

BOY DO I!

-Their relationship has actually changed a lot from how it was when they first met! Initially Lor just kinda saw Magolor as some guy who randomly showed up one day and didn't leave and made messes he was too lazy to clean up. Then she started seeing him as some kid who showed up one day and wouldn't leave who was clearly hurting and depressed and she guessed she would have to look after him for a little while until he gets better. Then he was the guy she did so much for, who still lied to her and kept the truth of why she woke up again in the first place hidden despite that. Then he was the boy who didn't really have anywhere to go or anyone to go to who was going to be living with a weight he could barely carry by himself that she couldn't just abandon. Now there is a 50/50 chance she'll just straight up call him son in any given conversation, especially in emotional moments.

-Magolor was kinda the same way. First Lor was just someone who was rude and loud and he just wanted her to take him home and leave him be. Then she was someone who had the audacity to try and replace his own family and act like she was his only family now, even though his real parents were still very much alive and his real home very much still existed. Then Lor became his new found family because he finally accepted he wouldn't be going home and his parents probably wouldn't want him around after what he did anyways. Then she was someone he hurt, and yet who still loved him for some reason, even after knowing he used her as a tool and left her to crash when she was defeated in battle. Now she's his boat mom(allegedly), but you didn't hear that from him. Situations involving catnip or sleep deprivation don't count.

-Lor cares a lot about Magolor. She also worries a lot about Magolor. She has what is pretty much separation anxiety, and if Magolor isn't home 20 or 30 minutes after he said he would be, she immediately starts stressing over it and fearing the worst. After all, Magolor still isn't all that popular on Popstar, and people can be dangerous, and there's wildlife, or he could be lost, or maybe the annual planetary threat has shown up, or

-Magolor is in the same but simultaneously opposite situation. If he gets home and Lor isn't in the same spot he left her and didn't text something about going somewhere/where to find her, he immediately jumps to fearing abandonment. This has resulted in tears on at least 2 occasions but probably more.

-They have gotten very good at that kind of "heads up" communication to make up for those issues.

-Lor knows a lot more about Magolor than he is aware of. This isn't like an ominous thing, more like she knew he was gay gay homo sexual gay before he was even trying to think of how to tell her. Or that he has a "secret" stash of catnip in a loose panel he never fixed when she crashed that he occasionally goes to great lengths to replenish without being caught. He does not realize that he was caught approximately 8 seconds into the first refill he did when Lor was awake.

-Magolor, like most people, often underestimates just how intelligent/powerful Lor is and then every once in a while gets reminded when she casually explains something like dimensional reflections/alternate timelines with the same ease he'd explain how to make mac n' cheese, or does a good deed by using one of her oars to carefully move a fallen tree off a road like a kid pushing a toy car. He really hopes nobody manages to discover and get on Lor's bad side.

[pamphletstoinspire]

Children's Religious Stories - The Saints - Part 55

With Image:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/childrens-religious-stories-saints-part-55-harold-baines/?published=t

ST VINCENT DE PAUL

IN the year 1576, when Blessed Edmund Campion was still studying at Prague and St Teresa still founding new convents in Spain, a boy named Vincent was born to a farmer in Pouy, a village in the south-west of France. Like St Joan, Vincent, when he was small, looked after his father's sheep; but his parents were quite sure he would never be a farmer, and though they were very poor, they managed to save enough money to send him to school. He studied hard and at last was able to go to a university in Spain, where he passed all his examinations and became a priest.

As he was coming back to France by sea the ship he was in was captured by Turkish pirates, and taken to Tunis in Africa; and Vincent, who was twenty-five, found himself in the slave-market, being sold as a slave. He was bought by a fisherman, who sold him to an old alchemist, and finally he belonged to a Frenchman who lived in Africa and had turned Mohammedan. Vincent converted his last master back to Faith; and together they escaped and managed to get back to France, where after more travels including a visit to Rome, Vincent became the parish priest of a little place not far from Paris called Clichy. But he did not stay there long. An important French nobleman, Gondi, sent for him to become tutor to his children. The two men became lifelong friends.

Gondi was the General of the Galleys — that is to say he was responsible for seeing that the king's ships were properly manned. In those days the galleys were rowed by convicts chained to their oars and continually whipped like animals when they showed signs of being tired. When they were not at sea they were crowded into damp dungeons with chains on their legs and given for their food only water and black bread.

Vincent persuaded Gondi to appoint him Chaplain to the Galleys, and immediately he got this position he set to work to bring hope into the lives of these hopeless men. He had known what it was to be a slave and, because of that, he was perhaps the only person in the whole of France who could have helped them. One day, when he was with Gondi visiting the fleet, one of the galley-slaves — so the story says — fainted at the oar. Vincent quietly took his place. The convicts learned to love and trust him. He served them in any way he could, doing what was possible to lessen their sufferings; and at last, by asking for money from the wealthy people he met in Gondi's palace, he built a hospital for them.

But there were others besides galley-convicts who were poor and outcast and miserable. In Paris alone, four out of every fifty people had absolutely nothing they could call their own and only managed to keep alive by begging scraps to eat. There were thousands of children, whom their parents did not want, in institutions where they were ill-treated or died of hunger — or, even worse, made lame or blind or in some way deformed so that they could be used as sideshows in fairs or hired out to people who made them beg on the roadside. Then there were the country labourers, kept working like cattle so that they seemed like "black animals." And above all — for Vincent never forgot these — there were the Christian slaves in Africa, at least forty thousand of them, including many French and English boys.

Vincent wanted to help them all and he set about it in a very sensible way. He knew that the rich people he met were not really as selfish as they seemed. They just had not thought about the way they were treating the poor. Many of them were not as happy as they seemed either. The Court life, which seemed so gay and splendid, was often very dull and always very empty. So Vincent went to them and pleaded the cause of the poor and the outcast and especially of the children and the slaves. No one in all France's history had thought of doing this before in the way that Vincent did it. He asked the rich and the well-born for money and — what was more difficult — service. He got both. He got enough money to build hospitals, ransom slaves, train priests who would go into the countryside.

At first these priests lived together in a monastery dedicated to St Lazarus — the poor man who sat at the rich man's gate in the parable that Jesus had told. They were called Lazarists, and the part of Paris where they lived is still commemorated in the name of the railway-station which now stands there — Saint-Lazare. Vincent sent his Lazarists not only over all France but abroad to Ireland, up to the Scottish Hebrides, to Egypt and Brazil and Madagascar and China.

But the most extraordinary thing he did was to persuade many wealthy and famous women to give up their lives in the fashionable world and to visit and help the sick and poor. He called them his Sisters of Charity, and so many people joined them that they grew into a great order — and the wide white hats that Vincent made their "uniform" are still worn by those who do the same work now, three hundred years later.

It is not surprising that when the King of France, Louis XIII, knew that he was dying he sent for Vincent, so that he might die in his arms.

"O, Monsieur Vincent," he said, "if I am restored to health I shall appoint no bishops unless they have spent three years with you." And after his death Vincent was always asked who he thought should be made a bishop, so that the whole church in France might show the charity of Christ which had been so forgotten.

Vincent was over eighty when he himself died. He had become so feeble that he could only raise himself from his bed by a cord nailed to a hook in the ceiling. But he never stopped organizing his charities and seeing that all the money that now came to him was used as best it could be. He knew that his followers would see that the work went on.

"Ready," he used to whisper, thinking that death had come for him. And when at last it did come one September morning at four o'clock — the time when he always got up to pray — he said just, "I believe," then, "I trust," and did not speak again.

[yourghastlycloseness]

hi

i got some work done even though today is an off day. i’m learning not to be salty about doing work on an off day.

will be heading home now to reply an e-mail re: a project.

one of the project teams i an in can be pretty sweet at times, because no one’s malicious or obviously trying to step on someone else to get ahead or to leave good impressions. everyone’s just trying to get work done. some members drop you cute messages like ‘thanks for your hard work’ — i don’t get this ‘safe’ feeling at all with the project team that’s under me, which is why even after a year, i still feel sour about having to manage it. sometimes it isn’t you

i’ve been plugging in my earphones these days at the office, because all i want to listen to is the tablo podcast/class. i work in a place — i might have mentioned it before — where if i’m just at my desk getting shit done, nobody frowns at you for shutting out the world with a track/podcast episode. so that’s nice.

had brunch at five oars coffee roasters - ordered a lite breakfast of brioche and jam (? not sure what kind), scrambled eggs, grilled tomatoes, sautéed mushrooms, iced mocha. these brunch menus at cafés are starting to all taste the same to me. but there’s still some fun in trying to locate every one of these places with our best bud, google maps, and checking out the interior design. why did they pick out those plants? why did they choose benches instead of seats? and etc.

read a bit of infinite jest. DFW is funny as ever. there’s a lot of vocab in there that i don’t know. mental NTS to look them up later. he is a clever man. lovely as he seems in interviews, i don’t think i would ever want to be in his presence, because i would be wasting his time.

later picked up a matcha latte from another place down the street.

at 2.10pm, i visited a dog café on my own and realized that all cute dogs are chad dogs. i first saw chad dogs in action when i visited a dog café in seoul. the golden retriever though would come and do cute little tricks if they sniffed dog treats on you.

waffles the corgi was no different. cute, and only after your biscuits. i didn’t buy any dog treats so i was mostly ignored by waffles, though she did come by to lick me about two times before scuttling off to someone who could give her what she wanted.

i was touched. she did that despite knowing that i didn’t have sweets on me. the dachshund there was unresponsive. not sure what the other breeds were (i only remember the names of conventionally cute and popular breeds), but i had a good time. i prefer how much calmer and cleaner this dog café is compared to the one i visited in seoul, where dogs would poop and pee on the floor every few minutes, and the large ones especially would bark bark bark and climb all over the seating areas.

once again, i was the only person visiting the place alone. that got me some looks from couples or groups of friends if i moved over to touch the dogs they were stroking. this doesn’t really happen if i come with someone else.

when people see me alone, i find that they either:

i) are meaner to me and prioritize groups of friends/couples/families (in that order)

ii) talk to me like i’m some weirdo/societal outcast who has no friends

iii) approach me more often for directions, because my lonesome, ethnic- and age-ambiguous self must seem less intimidating than when i hang out with a group of singaporean chinese girls in their mid-twenties (describing myself and my social circle, basically)

iv) have no reaction

v) seem a little freaked out and uncomfortable, like i could be some psycho serial killer

vi) think i’m a prostitute

vii) are nicer and ‘look out’ for me (i’ve only experienced such kindness 3 times: the korean barista at ediya coffee in jongno-5 ga who looked over the counter after she made my drink to made sure i could find the straw and serviette; a service staff at jewel’s jinjja chicken who choped one seat for me and told me to go order my food; the chinese lady at the korean food stall in my neighbourhood mall, who makes sure i am OK when carrying hot soup on a tray, and helps me ‘store’ my takesway orders when i’m eating there, but have also bought food to take home for the family)

the above has been ranked in terms of frequency.

i got asked earlier by the staff at the dog café — a girl, about 5-8 years younger than me — if i was, by any chance, ‘a student under 20’, and i realized then that even at 25, i still don’t give off very adult vibes in first impressions. it’s only after people get to know me that they see the gay grandpa trapped in a woman’s body.

[noa-nightingale]

✨Ryan and the Professor✨

I drew this for the Gay Oars Donation Project and donated 15$ to the GoFundMe of @queerunsolved‘s mother. I am still taking requests for the project!

There is a little bit of a story behind this one - I always appreciate reblogs but I especially would appreciate them for this one.

My mother requested this art. She watched many Puppet History episodes with me and she did not like what happened to the Professor - so she requested art of Ryan and the Professor being friends and having drinks together (I decided to use the Flamin’ Hot Bergara, as created by Ricky Wang); basically, she wanted a reconciliation.

She wanted to donate for the Gay Oars Project herself. Unfortunately, she is currently in hospital, had to have surgery two times already and I don’t know when she will be home.

So, I dediced to draw her request and donate in her name. I thought it was only fitting that I’d donate to @queerunsolved‘s mother.

I am terribly worried about my mother and I would really appreciate reblogs. I would also be over the moon if you would decide to donate to the GoFundMe as well.

Thanks for reading.

[lids-flutter-open]

more character development for an evil teacher from my book under the cut, sorry if ur on mobile

 Okay tv show

 Open on JULES VERNON HOLMES, at home in his kitchen. JULES is 36, with thinning brown curly hair. He has a pinched look to his face, because he recently lost eighteen pounds in three months. He wears glasses when he teaches high school history, but he is not wearing them now. The kitchen is cramped and made of a series of brown uniform prefab cabinets. There are no dishes in the sink and the counters are clean except for a piece of buttered toast without a napkin that sits next to the sink with one bite taken out of it. A long garland of garlic and onions hangs over the window like a party decoration. It is dark outside, and rain spatters the glass. JULES is standing on one leg in his kitchen, bracing his hip against the edge of the formica counter while he scratches at his calf with his bare right foot. He is wearing underwear and a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of a diner. He is struggling to open a pickle jar.

The phone rings from the next room. JULES starts, and his hand slips on the lid. He looks over at the oven. The clock on the oven displays the time as 12:18. JULES glances in the direction of the next room and scowls. He runs his tongue over his top teeth inside his lip, and does not move towards the ringing phone. JULES puts new effort into opening the jar of pickles. Across the room, there is a framed group photograph of college-age men standing with oars on the bank of a river. It includes JULES sixteen years before, when he was a member of his university’s rowing team. He is smiling; his arms are larger in the photo than they are in real life.

JULES opens the pickle jar with a pop. The phone is still ringing. There is only one pickle and a number of garlic cloves left at the bottom of the jar. He digs into the jar with his fingers, stretching his hand, and puts a garlic clove into his mouth.

 EXERCISE 2

 Jules was caught again by the display of different kinds of canned soup. He stood with his shopping basket on the linoleum tiles and held two cans of tomato soup in front of his face, studying the ingredients. One had cream and one had milk. There was another can of tomato soup on the shelf before him that had lentils in it, too. When he was younger there had only been one kind of canned tomato soup in every grocery store, or two. There were eighteen different things in front of him, all with different caloric and fat content. Jules was paralyzed. He put the soup with cream back on the shelf, and then picked it up again. It had higher fat content. Jules measured his blood pressure every morning before he ate breakfast. He threw the can into the cart, thinking that it would be better to eat real food than to find some watery diet version and be dissatisfied and end up binging on chips and peanut butter in the middle of the night. He would get the low sugar juice to compensate.

A man approached Jules in the aisle. He was older, and wore a gray sweatshirt and gym shorts. His shoes were dirty sneakers.

               “Excuse me,” he said to Jules. “Sir I don’t mean to bother you, but I’ve got no way else to do this, my daughter has a baby at home and we’re here to buy formula but it’s 37 dollars and they don’t let me put that on my credit card and I’m out of my EBT for the month.”

               Jules, whose mind had been in an alternate dimension of calories and aspartame and ideal blood pressure, jumped when he realized the man was speaking to him.

               “I’m sorry?”

               “Sir, it’s like a thing at this store, they don’t let you buy the formula with credit cards because some people just charge it on a stolen card, and I don’t have enough cash, and my EBT is all out for the month. But we have a baby at home and we need the formula, we’re all out. It’s my daughter. I wouldn’t ask for anything normally, I’m not that kind of man. Sir, I’m a military veteran, I served in Vietnam.”

               “Uh,” Jules said. He was not sure whether to look at the man’s eyes or not. “I don’t know what you’re asking me. I don’t have a lot of cash on me. I can give you a couple dollars.” He remembered he had only a fifty and a ten in his wallet, and tried to change tacks. “I think there’s an ATM outside the store to get money from a bank account.”

               “I don’t get paid till Friday,” the man said. “I don’t have money in my account.”

               “Oh,” Jules said. “Well, that’s—I’m sorry. And your daughter doesn’t have cash either?”

               “She’s at home with the baby,” the man said. “I didn’t want to ask her to come. Her husband left her and she’s saving as much as she can. Please, I just have to buy some infant formula for her.”

               Jules glanced desperately back at the soup, and then accidentally made eye contact with the man. He hated the way it made him feel to think of moving away down the empty aisle. He looked in his wallet and dug in it. His fingers hesitated on the ten and then took the fifty and thrust it at the man. “Good luck, sir,” he found himself saying. He couldn’t look into the man’s eyes. Jules already felt the sweat dripping down his back and a pillow of guilt emerging in his solar plexus, simultaneously related to giving the man too much money and at the same time to not being able to look in his eyes.

               “Thank you, sir, god bless you,” the man said. “I’m Boris. My name’s Boris. You’re a good man, you know that? Thank you, this means a lot. I won’t forget it.”

               “It’s no,” Jules said, and stopped, because it really was a problem. “I’m Jules. I hope you’re okay and the baby’s okay.”

               “We’re all getting by,” the man said.

               Night came. Jules’ cupboards were lined with the cans of tomato soup. He took an Ambien to sleep and then wandered around the house, looking out the windows.

                  Jules is holding the receiver of the phone up to his ear.

               “How have you been, then?” Jules says into the phone. He is still wearing the collared shirt and tie he wore to work. The papers he is grading are spread out on the table in front of him. He wants to make the kids excited about the grimy parts of history and he wants to make them understand the reasons their state developed the way it did.

               “Well, after the crash I’ve been just eating like frozen dinners,” Michelle says on the other end. “My arm is in the sling and all.”

               “Crash?” Jules tries to remember anything about a crash from the last time he and Michelle talked two weeks ago.

               “Mom said she called you. She didn’t?”

               “No,” Jules says. “Well, maybe if I was at work, but she didn’t call back.”

               “You don’t ever check your messages. I got in a motorcycle accident, isn’t that funny? Okay, it doesn’t sound funny, but here’s the context: I ran into an ice cream truck that didn’t signal and I literally flew over the top of the truck into the street and there were like four kids staring with their mouths open and one dropped his ice cream. I love like the mental image of everyone’s faces, it’s gonna bring me joy till the day I die.”

               “Michelle! Jesus!”

“My boss let me have the time off, it’s one of the good things about working as a nanny for a nice family, there’s no regular hassle about taking sick leave cuz she knows me. She’s even giving me a week’s pay, which like, must be nice to be rich, right? She’s so sweet though, and the baby’s so sweet.”

               “I warned you about that motorcycle,” Jules says. “Didn’t you already crash on a motorcycle a year ago?”

               “That time was worse. I got thrown into a tree! I mean, I was on more a path than a road. It was dumb. This time it wasn’t my fault, the ice cream company is even gonna give me compensation maybe if I can figure out a lawyer.”

               “You could seriously die, Michelle. Just get a car.”

               “I mean, I may have to. For now I’m using Mom’s.”

               “How is she getting around? Are you driving with, what, a broken arm? Why does nobody ever catch me up on this shit?”

               “Because you’re like this,” Michelle says. “And you don’t call, either. If you called Mom once a week you’d know what’s going on with everyone.”

               “You know how I feel about Mom,” Jules says. “I know you’ve sort of mended your relationship with her, but I still can’t forgive her. Especially after how she treated you and Ed when we were kids.”

               “Whatever, Jules,” Michelle says. Jules can see her rolling her eyes. “She’s here now and who knows for how long we’ll have her, you know? She’s a good person. I know she and you fought last month again, but just let it slide. She is how she is, and anyway she’s a lot better now. She just has her weird manias sometimes. She didn’t mean it about the nose job. She’s working at a paper here, you know. Or a gazette I guess. It’s about seafood restaurants. She’s working and getting up every day and she’s a decent, pleasant person. You can’t hold a grudge forever. She has all kinds of fun friends now too from her weird weed group. They’re really fun, there’s this gay truck driver who drops in whenever he’s in the city and has a ton of stories.”

               “This is crazy. I’m not going to talk to her. You said last year—do you remember what you said? Do you remember Mima’s funeral?”

               “So she got a little drunk. You can’t expect her to be well behaved at her ex husband’s mother’s funeral.”

               “So why did she even go?”

               “She just likes to have some fun. Like me. She’s just a little more messed up. Think about it this way, Jules, at least she left Scientology. Imagine if she’d stayed in it and we’d been raised like that. She’s gonna deal with this stuff the rest of her life but she’s like, in general a functional person. And she paints. It’s nice to have a mom who paints.”

               “She paints aliens.”

“How are your students? Are you teaching them about how to be good little mini George Bushies?”

“Michelle, so, I’m going to get off the phone now. I have papers to grade and I’m not having this conversation. I will say that I love you and I am asking you to please get a car, or take the bus, or something. I’m going to have nightmares about you on that motorcycle.”

“I could get a little quad. You know, four wheels.”

“Are you able to shop for yourself? Do you need anything?”

               “Jules, we’re really all right here.” Michelle takes a thin breath and Jules hears her exhale and imagines her smoking a cigarette on the balcony of his mother’s apartment in Seattle.

[thebibliophileconfessions]

Welcome to my stop of the Small Town Hearts Blog Tour!

I just finished reading it last weekend and I adored it so much! Babe and Levi were so cute and it was such a sweet and heartfelt story about summer love and friendships. It made me feel warm and fuzzy all over and it’s definitely one of my favorite contemporary books so far! It made me feel validated and I’ve never related to a character so much as I did to Babe (okay maybe Ramona Blue and this book are on the same level haha).

For today, I’ll be featuring some of my queer YA recommendations in other media. In this time where we all fell in love with Simon and Blue in Love, Simon (or Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda as we all came to know it), or rooted for our bisexual icon Rosa Diaz from Brooklyn Nine Nine, I feel like it’s more important that ever to boost more LGBTQ voices and stories because let’s be real, there’s still limited visibility for LGBTQ representation in the media today.

So without further ado, here are three more queer YA recommendations to check out!

The Miseducation of Cameron Post

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This book boldly explores sexuality and identity in the 90’s, and we all know that our society wasn’t as receptive to SOGIE as it is today. It was adapted into a film last year, with Chloe Moretz as the titular character. This mainly tackles Cameron’s experiences and journey to finding her identity after being sent into a gay conversion therapy camp.

Check out the book here.

Alex Strangelove

I don’t really have strong feelings about this movie, but I ended up enjoying it. It’s a romantic comedy that is perfect for movie nights where you just want to have fun! Basically, this is about Alex who’s keen on losing his virginity to his girlfriend, Claire. However, he began to question his sexuality after meeting Elliot, an openly gay teenager. This is available on Netflix so you people can easily watch it if  you have a subscription!

The Bright Sessions

This is a science fiction audio drama podcast created by Lauren Shippen, which takes place in a universe where “Atypical” people exist. Atypicals are people with super-powers. The main character is Dr. Joan Bright, a therapist for Atypicals. So this isn’t straight up YA, but I think YA readers would appeal to this especially in terms of writing and worldbuilding. Plus a lot of characters are queer, like Caleb and Adam are gay, Mark is bisexual, and Chloe is ace! What’s more exciting about this is that three spin-off YA books written by Lauren Shippen and published by Tor Teen will be released starting this year.

The first book is The Infinite Noise, which is expected to release by September 2019, and is about Caleb and Adam. Caleb is a high school football player who is an empath, while Adam is a normal teenager. I’m really excited about this one because I love these two so much, I’d literally die for them! AND LOOK AT THAT COVER!!!!

I think The Bright Sessions is available anywhere where podcasts are available, but I do listen to it on Spotify or Soundcloud as seen above! Please check this out and talk to me because I HAVE SO MANY FEELINGS ABOUT IT!

Check out the podcast on their website and add The Infinite Noise on your TBR!

ABOUT SMALL TOWN HEARTS

Small Town Hearts by Lillie Vale Date of Publication: March 19th, 2019 by Swoon Reads Get the book on Amazon or Book Depository

Synopsis

Rule #1 – Never fall for a summer boy. 

Fresh out of high school, Babe Vogel should be thrilled to have the whole summer at her fingertips. She loves living in her lighthouse home in the sleepy Maine beach town of Oar’s Rest and being a barista at the Busy Bean, but she’s totally freaking out about how her life will change when her two best friends go to college in the fall. And when a reckless kiss causes all three of them to break up, she may lose them a lot sooner. On top of th

  at, her ex-girlfriend is back in town, bringing with her a slew of memories, both good and bad.

And then there’s Levi Keller, the cute artist who’s spending all his free time at the coffee shop where she works. Levi’s from out of town, and even though Babe knows better than to fall for a tourist who will leave when summer ends, she can’t stop herself from wanting to know him. Can Babe keep her distance, or will she break the one rule she’s always had – to never fall for a summer boy?

GIVEAWAY

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Queer YA Recommendations // Small Town Hearts Blog Tour Welcome to my stop of the Small Town Hearts Blog Tour! I just finished reading it last weekend and I adored it so much!

[greymantledlady]

OKAY WHY IS NO-ONE TALKING ABOUT THESE TWO GUYS FROM MOANA?

The guy in the red headdress is an ancient chief, one of Moana’s forebears. He’s shown in a flashback lasting a couple of minutes, revealing the fact that Moana’s ancestors were ocean-travelling voyagers.

The guy next to him I’m going to call long-haired guy to differentiate. In almost every scene, he’s next to or near the chief.

We first see them here, on the oars of one of the ships.

I’ll just take a moment to point out the fond expression on long-haired guy’s face as he looks at the chief. Noted? Okay.

He’s always there, somewhere in the background but close by. Here, he’s dancing.

Next we have the chief spotting a white bird, which flies towards the island they’re aiming for. In the picture below, you can see him looking up towards the bird. And yes, right behind him? Long-haired guy.

The view shifts to the front, and he’s striding up behind the chief.

Oh and then? He puts his arm round him and clasps his shoulder, while smiling adoringly up at him:

And the chief looks down at him, and they share a moment of loving eye-contact. It starts off joyful and bright, and then softens into gentle and affectionate, as you can see in the two pictures below:

I also want to point out the couple to the right in the two pictures above, and the parallel that can be drawn. Also, from two of the most well-known recent Disney animated films:

Tangled:

Frozen:

My point is that there is a very specific way that Disney portrays a couple in an established relationship. Firstly, they usually stand with overlapping shoulders, nested into each other’s bodies, often with one partner’s hand curled comfortingly/protectively around the other’s shoulder. Secondly, moments of deep emotional connection, sharing joy or grief, are marked by long silent gazes into each other’s eyes. All of which are portrayed in classic fashion between the two men in the scene below, and also mirrored by the m/f couple to the right.

Anyway, after spotting the island, the voyagers land and make their home there. Next, we get this scene:

Yes, that’s the chief and long-haired guy on the boat, facing each other. It zooms up close:

The chief is fastening his own necklace round the other guy’s neck. They’re sharing a long, meaningful look all the time:

It cuts back to the chief, and he’s making a soft, loving ‘I’ll miss you’ expression (this one is even more obvious when you’re watching the film):

Long-haired guy is heading off on an exploratory voyage (presumably dangerous) while the chief is staying behind. I didn’t take screenshots, but the sail on this boat matches one of those stashed in a cave that Moana found on the island, which means that long-haired guy returned to his chief safely.

In conclusion: I believe that this is Disney quietly portraying an actual gay couple in an animated movie.

Okay, okay, wait up – I’m going to refute some arguments that might be made against this conclusion. Firstly – is this ambiguous? Yes. But consider this scene from Frozen:

This is Oaken, a minor character who is most likely Disney’s first tiny attempt at sliding a gay character into an animated movie. Oaken waves at the people in the window and says ‘Hello family,’ and the group appears to be another man surrounded by four children. Yes, it’s blink-and-you-miss-it, and very ambiguous, but if you consider where Disney’s coming from, and the pressure from certain religious groups, this makes a lot of sense. It’s tiny, but it’s a thin-end-of-the-wedge thing. Disney has given very ambiguous answers when questioned about this, which is to be expected.

The couple in Moana seems like the natural next step up from Oaken and his family, while still maintaining solid plausible deniability. Which brings me to the next argument that might be made: is long-haired guy simply the chief’s son?

First, I want to make the point that when I was watching this, long-haired guy being the son didn’t even occur to me. In my opinion, it doesn’t look at all like a parent-child relationship. There are subtle things that are done in film to differentiate this kind of relationship, especially between a parent and their grown child. For example, a parent will usually be the one to clasp their child’s shoulder, rather than the other way round.

To me, the way these two men look at each other is not the way a parent and child look at each other. It does, however, seem like the way two people in love might look at each other. Yes, this is purely my opinion, and there is no way to prove it either way. All I can say is that if the screenshots above haven’t convinced you on this point, is to go and watch these scenes, with heteronormativity goggles off, and pass your own judgement.

The necklace the chief takes from around his own neck to give to the long-haired guy could mean anything and doesn’t serve as conclusive evidence. It could just as easily be a ceremonial gift to his lover or partner, or a hereditary heirloom.

Also significant is the lack of any female figure near them in any of their scenes who could be interpreted as a partner to either of them. Of course I am not saying that everyone has to be paired up, but it’s an interesting choice, especially for Disney.

And now! Some historical context! I accept that Moana is not going to be historically accurate in every detail, that’s just not what Disney does. But the culture of Moana’s people is loosely based on Polynesian culture, and here are some very interesting pieces of history (including links to sources):

‘Polynesia's ancient same-sex acceptance’ (article)

Aikāne (same-sex) relationships in pre-colonial Hawaii

Takatāpui (LGBT+) people in Maori culture

Fa'afafine (third-gender) people in Samoa

All of the above evidence considered, I believe this is Disney quietly giving us a fairly obvious (and sweet) same-sex relationship in an animated film, whilst maintaining a thin layer of plausible deniability.

[gurguliare]

From a few hundred feet up, the swan-ships could be seen to hesitate. They darted and lagged, fanning out on separate roads to harvest Manwë’s wind. If the wind changed then they wheeled together, without a breath in which for word to fly from ship to ship. The coordination was too smooth to feel surprise at; but Elwing thought that Círdan’s fleet had not looked so to the gulls. Nor had it gleamed like frost in the field, small mariners rolling as black motes from bow to stern. Hard to credit motes with the driving forth of ships, though in the harbor they had been her own height, cheerful and brave; they clotted the rigging, arguing with each other as an inventor to himself. Everywhere the world had a second face. Rising, she had not seen it turn over, but this must be its underside. Elves were ash, the bay was wrinkled rock, and foam sprouted to mark where ships had wetted the dry sea.

Círdan’s fleet, too, had never been escorted by armored giants. But Elwing paid no attention to the marching Valar, in case one looked back.

Before the fleet set sail, at the farewell feast, Olwë the king had given her a round black crystal, rather ugly. “It will get you news of the war. Sight or sound of the Outer Lands is not forbidden you.” He said it with such certainty, she thought he had not asked, to learn if it were true. “This speaks to other palantírs. Finarfin my son will gladly share his tidings.” Later in the course of the meal, and without acknowledging a lull in their conversation, Olwë said, “When speaking to him you may find that the image is strange, the color good but the image warped. The palantírs took time to perfect. Finarfin’s stone... Fëanor made him a present of it when Finarfin was young.”

She tried not to show discomfort, or much pity, when Olwë spoke of Fëanor and his sons. The sting was not in the names. She had grown accustomed to having her father’s murderers for kin: people who might yet die, who might be reasoned with and escaped---never forgiven. It was in his manner, thoughtless, dry, moderated by care for her but small care for himself, and yet not numb---as though five hundred years of the Sun had served just to hem in the pain with calm, and as though pain had neither destroyed nor restored the old, impatient, worn-out love; as though time could add and add without receiving back its treasures, and in that way run faster, having unburdened itself.

The feast had lasted the night and at dawn, after Eärendil’s departure, she lay awake. If she thought for a moment of Sirion, the pain stabbed deep into her belly; she would then spend hours or the day surrendering. But that at least was all. To her no stranger would come, saying, Here is my pain, which gives me a claim on you.

Unless her sons returned. At that she laughed and fell asleep. Unless my son, my son---

Now she resolved to fly lower. She spread her wings very far, shoulder-bones almost knocking, the wind baled under her arms. The skin there felt a cool touch worst, spring like winter, winter like the sea.

She didn’t have the courage to dive when she spied her tower. She came down flapping, doubled up, and touched one foot to sand and knelt, wings thrown over herself like a cloak. The grass-furred dunes were safe enough to walk on, winged. She staggered a little under added weight; her long gray primaries traced furrows in the sand---but she could think. She did not want to fly further, only because blood had made her head and legs so heavy. The useless stammer of her pulse was like when birds had come to her, on these sacred shores, speaking with the old urgency, shouting as they had shouted when she fell.

So she had learned their tongue a second time. And if I forget, she said to herself, grimly, I will learn again.

Olwë’s people had built her tower of unfaced marble. The door had five bolts, because she had asked for a bolt. She had to have hands to work the door.

Up to her chamber. Vingilot! she cried, nearly aloud, on the stair. Vingilot! I will wait till he appears. Then when she had reached the top she thought she could not bear to wait so long. The deep blue in her window, and the white sun her only visitor. Well, and she had forgotten to set out bread. She did that. Then she spoke to gulls for an hour about the Valar’s preparations, the departing host, and especially their friends the Teleri, who had so unexpectedly and so graciously consented to captain the ships that would carry those fools, the fair-elves and the Noldor---some of whom had even been present for, or else had narrowly avoided fighting at, the Battle at Alqualondë!

“It is strange,” agreed Elwing, tearing out and eating a chunk of coarse bread herself. The rooms in the tower were made for sunset or the light of the Silmaril, that on every white surface laid the boughs of the two Trees; also they were made for music, and gulls’ talk fought the vaulted roof in a flat cacophony. Yet she loved the tower at other times. Cold at noon, the black shadows were a balm to her, much as were the wide sky and the shore. She was safe and safe. Sometimes she woke without sleeping, and sweat bound her dress to her back. A bandage that wanted changing---mortal wounds she could not feel. On this afternoon she did not dream but, banishing the gulls, sat on the floor to resume work on a pennant for Vingilot, since the army had carried off their banners. The palantír she took from its pedestal and set down on the end of the pennant, to anchor her work.

Then somehow, though she checked the sky often, dusk was underway. The design bloomed, unfinished. Elwing left her needle in the silk.

Vingilot‘s oars worked stiffly in air. Vingilot’s sails were not harried by winds that worked on her, savage and gay. They seemed rather to hold that wind which fills the moon’s trim crescent.

By a miscalculation Elwing shot past the railing and had to alight, from above, on the bow.

“I don’t remember commissioning a figurehead,” said her husband. He planted a hand on her foot, but made no other move to steady her. “Who carved you?”

“I---I was a birch tree, in Doriath’s woods, and I have greatly fallen in station,” she said, trying not to laugh. Her wings beat time to the hiccups she suppressed.

Her husband frowned. His hand crept to her ankle. “You’ll have redress. This is the West. Yet whoever he was, he must have been a fair craftsman: and so, your legs... ah!” He fell away from the kick, coughing his laughter. Incensed, she hopped down to give chase.

They were busy while the ship, of her own genius, laid anchor like Arien in the sea; busy when fishermen came to fling sweet wreaths and shout, because without Eärendil to pilot it, the ship made port near a Teleri settlement, north of her tower. At last a pounding on the cabin door roused Eärendil, who woke her carefully, with a touch on the wrist---as though it mattered now if they made noise.

In their hurry she ended up in his tunic, while he went shirtless to the door. She had time to lace her sandals. Eärendil adjusted the Nauglamír from where it had slipped over one eye, and slid back the latch.

The fishermen carried her out and carried Eärendil out on their shoulders. They tossed him after her into the stinking dinghy, then jumped down themselves, with very little discussion. It was night faster than night had ever come in Sirion. The Silmaril paved the water with silver and gold.

Then on the pier they must all drink to the departed fleet, and weep for those who would come home from the Halls and not the sea. Someone lent Eärendil their black cloak, saying, wisely, that he must be chilled. Elwing ate shrimp, and piled up shells in a glassy heap, and drank sparingly. The headache from the feast was not quite cured, and it came and went with bright evenness, like it took just what was owed---just half of time. Eärendil, noticing her silence, offered her the Nauglamír. After a minimum of protest she let him transfer it to her neck; its weight sharpened the pain to a cruel point, and then removed it.

The Silmaril covered the pier with fine snow. In its light, smoke from the brazier hung as rags, and the coals glowed almost pink.

“I have a brother,” said the man opposite Elwing, “who has a wife. She goes to fight. He promised me he would not leave the ship. Do I believe him?”

“No,” said Eärendil, sounding apologetic. He had an arm over Elwing’s shoulder. “Your brother will wait till the horn is sounded and leap over the side. He’ll run through the foam and say to his lady, ‘I fell overboard!’“

“Do you get along with his wife?” Elwing asked.

She was drowsy and leaden, plagued by untouchable hunger. The absence of pain clasped her throat very lightly, and scratched her with gold links. She was not drunk. But she had Eärendil by her, and the Silmaril on her breast. When the fishermen had had enough of their own clear liquor to make requests, she sang a canto of the Lay. Lúthien before Morgoth, a supplicant.

In eagerness she misplaced a verse, and told how Fingolfin rode over Dor-nu-Fauglith. “In overmastering wrath and hate...” but no, no, it was her grandmother, Lúthien who wore the demon’s skin and flew. She could salvage that. She went from Fingolfin’s challenge to Lúthien’s lie, binding together two broken couplets.

At midnight the fishers went singing and rowing away to the cluster of huts on the headland. Elwing heard the enchantments of Lúthien fitted, first with caution, and then with increasing creativity, to a drinking song---though the words were archaic, to her ear. A tumbled version of Eärendil’s mother tongue.

She was listening with interest; and then she had jumped to her feet. Why did she have to go? She ran up the length of the pier to the beach, heard steps pursuing, and ran faster. Her hair got in her face, ticklish, muddy, dyed red by the jewel, as if she lay hidden in a deep brake of reeds. She fumbled at the Nauglamír’s catch.

Eärendil came and stopped Elwing, and helped her. Throughout she could not tell him why she had to have it off: except she could not be found, she could not be caught with the jewel, though she loved it. She was its protector. Eärendil kept one hand on the side of her neck while she spoke. He gathered the Nauglamír idly in the other, like a torn scrap of mail.

“We should go back to the tower,” she said, losing the thread of her explanation. “Olwë gave me a stone---you should see it. We can speak with the host. Not---Finarfin, right now, perhaps---but someone must stand watch.”

He said, “Would you like to fight?”

She tried to understand. Her panic had almost subsided, though it rose and fell with the hissing from the waves. Eärendil seemed sorry not to have made himself comprehensible; he took the Nauglamír and threw his mantle over it, and the Silmaril, obedient, drew half its light out of the air, till what was left had a shape. It flamed white on her face, palpably. It made a prism of her lashes, radiant and alive.

Finally he smiled. A forceful smile, as though he had solved his trouble and yet doubted himself. But he looked at her and the smile disappeared, it became just the forgetful pleasure behind smiles, graven very deeply on flat calm. “What I do, you do. So do you want to fight?”

It was as though they had a secret language that she had neglected to learn. It was like nothing he had ever said to her. Not when he left, or returned from his voyages, and not when he asked her to stay aboard the ship, lest she be killed.

Then she remembered. It was used by the twins. When they were separated by sickness, or a parent’s unreasonable whim: what I do, you do.

She and Eärendil were not well clear of the tide. A wave crashed down, spray raining on their heads. She could not think how to tell him he was ridiculous. (”Yes. Of course we will fight.”) She saw for the first time that in the future their lives would be better; she would have peace, or have it longer, and he would be less patiently afraid. She took his hand, still wrapped in the mantle, and held it to her chest.

The dark and the sound of the sea all around them. The Silmaril whitened her chest, in a ring of red. Red for a warning---she liked that the Silmaril still flashed its warnings. Any word to steer by, in this unending storm.

[biofunmy]

‘Friends’ Is Turning 25. Here’s Why We Can’t Stop Watching it.

Once upon a time, we made do with less television. Three broadcast networks dominated everything. (Channels weren’t flipped so much as triangulated.) We had a local public station and whatever oldies a UHF signal could tune in. Now? Now, we romanticize our cable-assisted, internet-borne so-called golden age and carp about the galactic girth of the streaming era. Somebody even lent the girth a fretful name: “peak TV” — the “money can’t buy happiness” of screen life.

In retrospect, less television has come to imply lesser — by volume, by value, by verisimilitude. But what was “Friends” lesser than? There are 236 episodes of it, merely one fewer than a combined tally of “Game of Thrones,” “House of Cards,” and “Orange Is the New Black.” Most of those episodes are perfect as tidy comedies. Maybe it’s hard to think of “Friends” as perfect, let alone as great, because it looked easy.

Most “old TV” looked easy — even when characters broke up, bled and died. That’s because, even when they did, they were obviously not in a movie. TV now is the movies, so we love it more. We believe it more. For its entire existence, the American sitcom was anti-cinematic, beholden to the demands of advertisers.

Before there was too much TV, there was simply a lot, including a lot of NBC’s “Friends.” Think about the effort required to make about 24 episodes in a nine-month season (certain scripted shows somehow made more). This was impossible work that we at home took for granted. A network like NBC could turn “granted” into “mandatory” with maximal FOMO threat. “Let’s all be there,” it demanded in the 1980s. A decade later, we had to be there for “Must See TV.” Technologically, it was an uncertain age. If you missed an episode, who knew when you’d be able to catch it again?

“Friends” was easy TV at an elite level. So many jokes, so much body comedy, so many surprises and awwws, and squeals of live-studio audience excitement. Hairdressers were doing — and not infrequently botching — the Rachel. Coffee shops became people’s second homes. Tens of millions of Americans watched all of that writing and directing and acting, all of that seemingly effortless effort, for all 10 of its years. That work and a country’s devotion to it feels like proof of a golden age of something.

Familiarity is the magnet of every decent American sitcom. The “com” can’t compete alone and neither can the “sit,” even though, together, they’re obviously quite the sandwich. But the many nights I’ve spent recumbent on my sofa laughing at, say, Ross and Phoebe debating evolution, or Phoebe, Joey and Ross impersonating Chandler, or Chandler blanching at Monica’s desperate new cornrows or Rachel taking forever to tell somebody who the father of her baby is — those nights have never really been about the situation comedy of “Friends.” They’ve only ever been about us — me and these six people — and my apparently enduring need to know what they’re up to and how they are, even though I’ve known for 25 years.

“Friends” debuted on NBC in the fall of 1994, ran for an entire decade, typically had around 25 to 30 million viewers a week (sometimes many more) and now airs in Nickelodeon’s Nick @ Nite block, which my cable conglomerate has stationed near the top of the channel pyramid. That means if you’re a chronologist like me, the five-channel trip from NY1 — past the local news, TNT and “The Simpsons” — always terminates at Chandler, Joey, Monica, Phoebe, Rachel and Ross. Laziness is a factor. (Do you use the number keys on your remote? I’ll bet you don’t even have a remote at this point.)

But, really, it’s simplicity. “Friends” actually is enormously easy to watch. “The genius of “Seinfeld” (and “The Simpsons,” too) has everything to do with the “com” arising from the “sit.” What trouble will Jerry and the gang instigate? Whether you’re watching an episode for the first time or the 27th, the inciting premise is a major element of the pleasure. The premise of “Friends” is the friends.

Of course, the friends started out with a touch of the Jerrys. They, too, were a white cohort living in New York City (the West Village rather than Seinfeld’s Upper West Side). And many an early episode involved defending social etiquette (“Those are not the rules!” Ross barks at a foe in a laundromat) and trying out twisted dating schemes (Monica and Joey try to bust up a couple in order to have the newly single partners for themselves). But on “Seinfeld,” the city and the characters’ righteous belief in their own norms spurred them on to increasingly lunatic misanthropy. They were anti-socialites.

Not so on “Friends.” Matters of behavior and economic inequality only seemed to bring them together. Take the show’s 29th episode. Everybody goes out for a nice dinner to celebrate Monica’s promotion, and Phoebe, Joey and Rachel order the cheapest items on the menu, then balk at evenly dividing the bill. Income turns those three against the other three, until Monica loses her job and Joey valiantly offers to pay for her $4 coffee — with Chandler’s money. The theme song didn’t lie: They really were there for each other, punch lines and all. That thereness was the show’s intangible hook. The writers could engineer plots for the directors to orchestrate. But these six actors working together, on anything, on nothing — it was the highlight of many a person’s week. That thereness was phenomenally elastic, too. These were six people who could snipe at one another, who could fight and lie and practice what we’d now call radical honesty yet keep so many secrets, who can break up (many times, in many ways) but, as a sextet, keep snapping back together. I like them that way, as half a dozen. I like them in tandems and trios, as human math problems, as chemistry experiments. Maybe 10 times I’ve watched Chandler, Joey and Monica break down and confess to the other three that, yes, Chandler did pee on Monica’s jellyfish sting.

I don’t know how many takes that sequence took or how much caffeine was consumed. But it’s never less than a marvel of harmonized hysterics. That kind of exclamatory, high-energy comedy could happen in any configuration of the cast because it was the best such collection in the history of television. Other hall-of-fame comedies, like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “Cheers,” had wits and jesters and clowns mixed in among the goody-goodies and grumps. Some, like “All in the Family” and the first few seasons of “Designing Women,” were all zingers, personality and delivery before the whole thing went to schtick. A few permanently watchable jewels like “The Golden Girls” and “Frasier” sneaked in a combo platter of slapstick, vinegar and fuzzies. But the proportions were bigger on “Friends.” They went for more, more often, and rarely missed.

For one thing, the actors had more to play with. The “Friends” friends started out as types. Rachel was a princess, Monica a control freak, Joey a dumb actor. But the types kept recombining.

Ross seemed like a geek because his paleontology was frequently mocked and there’s something gluey in the music of David Schwimmer’s whine. But Ross was sad, needy, insecure, quick to anger — dark, basically — and built like a jock. Phoebe evolved rapidly from hippie naïf to schemer, dreamer, peacekeeper, and pot-stirrer. In another era, she’d have been the “Three’s Company”-era Suzanne Somers of the bunch, a hapless bombshell. But Lisa Kudrow, with her akimbo intelligence, brought the part in sideways. Not far into the show’s run, actually, some of the six are watching TV and Chandler, in Matthew Perry’s contagious sardonic snark, says “I think this is the episode of ‘Three’s Company’ where’s there’s some kind of misunderstanding.”

“Then I’ve already seen this,” Phoebe snaps and turns off the TV.

“Friends” could easily have been “Three’s Company,” where “sit” and “com” strained credibility. Chandler was so frequently presumed gay that he could have been Jack Tripper, the faux-mosexual from the other show. And Matt LeBlanc played Joey like Somers but by way of Tony Danza. That probably would have made Courteney Cox the Joyce DeWitt of “Friends” — neutrally sane. For a few episodes at least, Cox, as Monica, seemed meant as the crux of the pack. Monica was Ross’s sister. Rachel was an old high-school friend who became her roommate.

But halfway through Season 1, it was clear this boat had no captain, just a lot of oars. And the rowing Cox did has never received its due. She wasn’t as rubbery a funny person as Perry and Schwimmer or as radiant and tangy in her approach to comedy as Jennifer Aniston was as Rachel. She couldn’t physicalize sarcasm and shock with as much cursive and calculus as the other five. But athletic gumption launched Monica entirely beyond classification.

I mean, I guess her type was Type A. Monica made the most psychological sense, as a former fat person who’s holding on to whatever it took to shed the weight and keep it off. We can shake our heads now at the idea of the show’s laughing at her size through the fat suit Cox wears in flashbacks. These flashbacks also explain why she seemed to think everything was grist for competition, why winning and losing mattered so much to her, why control was so important. And Monica lost so much control, so much cool, so much coolness. Each actor managed to do a lot with intensity, but Cox made it a state of Monica’s mind.

People now ding “Friends” for all kinds of offenses — regarding homosexuality, mental health, race, interracial dating, ethnicity. (Here’s pregnant Rachel, exasperated by the surfeit of gift diapers at her shower: “What are we feeding this baby — Indian food?”) “Friends”-as-problematic disserves the show’s complex relationship to those issues. Sometimes it winked at them. Monica did a lot of winking, especially under a spell of casual blackness. Her cornrows and Chandler’s disdain for them were one thing. My favorite, though, is the time she comes down with a cold but refuses to give up on sex with Chandler. He’d rather not. She comes at him anyway, in a bathrobe as plush and scarlet as a Muppet, full of mucus and the R&B of Guy. “Are you saying,” she asks, thrusting her body at her man, “that you don’t wanna. Git. With. This?” It’s peak Monica: addicted to victory, unlimitedly white.

There’s a way to watch “Friends” so that its very whiteness — and the associated entitlement — is the problem. That magical casting configuration probably couldn’t happen now without considerable umbrage — umbrage I’d understand. For a great while during “Friends”-mania, Eriq La Salle, of “ER,” was just about the biggest star on a smash-hit show who wasn’t white. “Friends” gave you white people who leave infants on city buses without consequence, who only rarely face a challenge to their permanent spot at Central Perk (for many years, a “reserved” card rested on the coffee table). But I’m not sure this was the show to do the labor, to open those doors with the same alacrity.

“Friends” could never have had, say, Joey drop by a black party in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn and tell Chandler how strange or exhilarating an experience it was without it also becoming a Very Special Episode. For some of its run, “Friends” aired opposite “Living Single,” on Fox, a good, “Friends”-ish show that was also the black party. As it is, Ross and Joey did date nonwhite women without their race being even a point of interest in the 1990s and 2000s, and even if that seems willfully naïve, it actually did feel special.

“Friends” made most of its social bets on gender differences, the way men get away with being chauvinists and lust buckets and layabouts, and the women have to pick up the slack. But tweaking the stereotypes became a meaningful staple of the show. Once, the girls’ failure to know the boys as well as the boys knew them cost Monica and Rachel their apartment. To be fair: Do you know what Chandler does for a living? Nonetheless, their place suddenly belongs to Joey and Chandler. It remains a shocking turn of events. I watched the early years of this show with roommates in the dorm of a college where bad housing could ruin friendships. I wasn’t watching a comedy that night. I was watching a cautionary tale. The show knew our loyalties were with the women and that Monica might not survive making breakfast in a man cave. So it refused to shake the Etch A Sketch. She unleashes a scream of “no” fit for no sitcom. It belonged in “Hamlet.”

“Friends” left prime-time television in 2004, just as the culture began to distrust meaningful inter-gender adventure. Its offspring — “How I Met Your Mother,” “The Big Bang Theory” “The Mindy Project,” “New Girl,” the short-lived masterpiece of repartee “Happy Endings” — did their best. But “Sex and the City,” which hit HBO in 1998, and the movies that sprang from Judd Apatow’s laugh factory would so convincingly relocate the sexes into ladies’ nights and boys’ clubs that the culture never quite came to reinvest in the coed comforts of a Central Perk.

“Friends” wasn’t a fantasy during its original run. But I can see why so many people who weren’t alive the first time around have devoured the show on cable and streaming like it’s a tub of ice cream. (I know of a 10-year-old as “Friends” conversant as I am.) There are no sexual threats, just Monica, her robe and her cold; just a vengeful guest star, in Julia Roberts, stranding Chandler in a pair of her underwear as comeuppance for a preadolescent prank; just a last-run of Rubik’s Cube hookups and occasionally vaguely funny lechery. Otherwise, the show was an oasis: adult women hanging out with adult men, with no monsters to fear, run from or prosecute. That could explain why droves of us are addicted to it. Sure, it’s excellent Easy TV — funnier, dirtier and more audacious than you heard it was, than you remember it being. But maybe, now, “Friends” is a fantasy. If you’re looking to restore some thereness to your life, maybe it’s more than must-see TV. Maybe it’s a clue.

Sahred From Source link Arts

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[readbookywooks]

THE BEGINNING OF A LONG JOURNEY

What is natural in me, is natural in many other men, I infer, and so I am not afraid to write that I never had loved Steerforth better than when the ties that bound me to him were broken. In the keen distress of the discovery of his unworthiness, I thought more of all that was brilliant in him, I softened more towards all that was good in him, I did more justice to the qualities that might have made him a man of a noble nature and a great name, than ever I had done in the height of my devotion to him. Deeply as I felt my own unconscious part in his pollution of an honest home, I believed that if I had been brought face to face with him, I could not have uttered one reproach. I should have loved him so well still - though he fascinated me no longer - I should have held in so much tenderness the memory of my affection for him, that I think I should have been as weak as a spirit-wounded child, in all but the entertainment of a thought that we could ever be re-united. That thought I never had. I felt, as he had felt, that all was at an end between us. What his remembrances of me were, I have never known - they were light enough, perhaps, and easily dismissed - but mine of him were as the remembrances of a cherished friend, who was dead. Yes, Steerforth, long removed from the scenes of this poor history! My sorrow may bear involuntary witness against you at the judgement Throne; but my angry thoughts or my reproaches never will, I know! The news of what had happened soon spread through the town; insomuch that as I passed along the streets next morning, I overheard the people speaking of it at their doors. Many were hard upon her, some few were hard upon him, but towards her second father and her lover there was but one sentiment. Among all kinds of people a respect for them in their distress prevailed, which was full of gentleness and delicacy. The seafaring men kept apart, when those two were seen early, walking with slow steps on the beach; and stood in knots, talking compassionately among themselves. It was on the beach, close down by the sea, that I found them. It would have been easy to perceive that they had not slept all last night, even if Peggotty had failed to tell me of their still sitting just as I left them, when it was broad day. They looked worn; and I thought Mr. Peggotty's head was bowed in one night more than in all the years I had known him. But they were both as grave and steady as the sea itself, then lying beneath a dark sky, waveless - yet with a heavy roll upon it, as if it breathed in its rest - and touched, on the horizon, with a strip of silvery light from the unseen sun. 'We have had a mort of talk, sir,' said Mr. Peggotty to me, when we had all three walked a little while in silence, 'of what we ought and doen't ought to do. But we see our course now.' I happened to glance at Ham, then looking out to sea upon the distant light, and a frightful thought came into my mind - not that his face was angry, for it was not; I recall nothing but an expression of stern determination in it - that if ever he encountered Steerforth, he would kill him. 'My dooty here, sir,' said Mr. Peggotty, 'is done. I'm a going to seek my -' he stopped, and went on in a firmer voice: 'I'm a going to seek her. That's my dooty evermore.' He shook his head when I asked him where he would seek her, and inquired if I were going to London tomorrow? I told him I had not gone today, fearing to lose the chance of being of any service to him; but that I was ready to go when he would. 'I'll go along with you, sir,' he rejoined, 'if you're agreeable, tomorrow.' We walked again, for a while, in silence. 'Ham,'he presently resumed,'he'll hold to his present work, and go and live along with my sister. The old boat yonder -' 'Will you desert the old boat, Mr. Peggotty?' I gently interposed. 'My station, Mas'r Davy,' he returned, 'ain't there no longer; and if ever a boat foundered, since there was darkness on the face of the deep, that one's gone down. But no, sir, no; I doen't mean as it should be deserted. Fur from that.' We walked again for a while, as before, until he explained: 'My wishes is, sir, as it shall look, day and night, winter and summer, as it has always looked, since she fust know'd it. If ever she should come a wandering back, I wouldn't have the old place seem to cast her off, you understand, but seem to tempt her to draw nigher to 't, and to peep in, maybe, like a ghost, out of the wind and rain, through the old winder, at the old seat by the fire. Then, maybe, Mas'r Davy, seein' none but Missis Gummidge there, she might take heart to creep in, trembling; and might come to be laid down in her old bed, and rest her weary head where it was once so gay.' I could not speak to him in reply, though I tried. 'Every night,' said Mr. Peggotty, 'as reg'lar as the night comes, the candle must be stood in its old pane of glass, that if ever she should see it, it may seem to say "Come back, my child, come back!" If ever there's a knock, Ham (partic'ler a soft knock), arter dark, at your aunt's door, doen't you go nigh it. Let it be her - not you - that sees my fallen child!' He walked a little in front of us, and kept before us for some minutes. During this interval, I glanced at Ham again, and observing the same expression on his face, and his eyes still directed to the distant light, I touched his arm. Twice I called him by his name, in the tone in which I might have tried to rouse a sleeper, before he heeded me. When I at last inquired on what his thoughts were so bent, he replied: 'On what's afore me, Mas'r Davy; and over yon.' 'On the life before you, do you mean?' He had pointed confusedly out to sea. 'Ay, Mas'r Davy. I doen't rightly know how 'tis, but from over yon there seemed to me to come - the end of it like,' looking at me as if he were waking, but with the same determined face. 'What end?' I asked, possessed by my former fear. 'I doen't know,'he said, thoughtfully; 'I was calling to mind that the beginning of it all did take place here - and then the end come. But it's gone! Mas'r Davy,' he added; answering, as I think, my look; 'you han't no call to be afeerd of me: but I'm kiender muddled; I don't fare to feel no matters,' - which was as much as to say that he was not himself, and quite confounded. Mr. Peggotty stopping for us to join him: we did so, and said no more. The remembrance of this, in connexion with my former thought, however, haunted me at intervals, even until the inexorable end came at its appointed time. We insensibly approached the old boat, and entered. Mrs. Gummidge, no longer moping in her especial corner, was busy preparing breakfast. She took Mr. Peggotty's hat, and placed his seat for him, and spoke so comfortably and softly, that I hardly knew her. 'Dan'l, my good man,' said she, 'you must eat and drink, and keep up your strength, for without it you'll do nowt. Try, that's a dear soul! An if I disturb you with my clicketten,' she meant her chattering, 'tell me so, Dan'l, and I won't.' When she had served us all, she withdrew to the window, where she sedulously employed herself in repairing some shirts and other clothes belonging to Mr. Peggotty, and neatly folding and packing them in an old oilskin bag, such as sailors carry. Meanwhile, she continued talking, in the same quiet manner: 'All times and seasons, you know, Dan'l,' said Mrs. Gummidge, 'I shall be allus here, and everythink will look accordin' to your wishes. I'm a poor scholar, but I shall write to you, odd times, when you're away, and send my letters to Mas'r Davy. Maybe you'll write to me too, Dan'l, odd times, and tell me how you fare to feel upon your lone lorn journies.' 'You'll be a solitary woman heer, I'm afeerd!' said Mr. Peggotty. 'No, no, Dan'l,' she returned, 'I shan't be that. Doen't you mind me. I shall have enough to do to keep a Beein for you' (Mrs. Gummidge meant a home), 'again you come back - to keep a Beein here for any that may hap to come back, Dan'l. In the fine time, I shall set outside the door as I used to do. If any should come nigh, they shall see the old widder woman true to 'em, a long way off.' What a change in Mrs. Gummidge in a little time! She was another woman. She was so devoted, she had such a quick perception of what it would be well to say, and what it would be well to leave unsaid; she was so forgetful of herself, and so regardful of the sorrow about her, that I held her in a sort of veneration. The work she did that day! There were many things to be brought up from the beach and stored in the outhouse - as oars, nets, sails, cordage, spars, lobster-pots, bags of ballast, and the like; and though there was abundance of assistance rendered, there being not a pair of working hands on all that shore but would have laboured hard for Mr. Peggotty, and been well paid in being asked to do it, yet she persisted, all day long, in toiling under weights that she was quite unequal to, and fagging to and fro on all sorts of unnecessary errands. As to deploring her misfortunes, she appeared to have entirely lost the recollection of ever having had any. She preserved an equable cheerfulness in the midst of her sympathy, which was not the least astonishing part of the change that had come over her. Querulousness was out of the question. I did not even observe her voice to falter, or a tear to escape from her eyes, the whole day through, until twilight; when she and I and Mr. Peggotty being alone together, and he having fallen asleep in perfect exhaustion, she broke into a half-suppressed fit of sobbing and crying, and taking me to the door, said, 'Ever bless you, Mas'r Davy, be a friend to him, poor dear!' Then, she immediately ran out of the house to wash her face, in order that she might sit quietly beside him, and be found at work there, when he should awake. In short I left her, when I went away at night, the prop and staff of Mr. Peggotty's affliction; and I could not meditate enough upon the lesson that I read in Mrs. Gummidge, and the new experience she unfolded to me. It was between nine and ten o'clock when, strolling in a melancholy manner through the town, I stopped at Mr. Omer's door. Mr. Omer had taken it so much to heart, his daughter told me, that he had been very low and poorly all day, and had gone to bed without his pipe. 'A deceitful, bad-hearted girl,' said Mrs. Joram. 'There was no good in her, ever!' 'Don't say so,' I returned. 'You don't think so.' 'Yes, I do!' cried Mrs. Joram, angrily. 'No, no,' said I. Mrs. Joram tossed her head, endeavouring to be very stern and cross; but she could not command her softer self, and began to cry. I was young, to be sure; but I thought much the better of her for this sympathy, and fancied it became her, as a virtuous wife and mother, very well indeed. 'What will she ever do!' sobbed Minnie. 'Where will she go! What will become of her! Oh, how could she be so cruel, to herself and him!' I remembered the time when Minnie was a young and pretty girl; and I was glad she remembered it too, so feelingly. 'My little Minnie,' said Mrs. Joram, 'has only just now been got to sleep. Even in her sleep she is sobbing for Em'ly. All day long, little Minnie has cried for her, and asked me, over and over again, whether Em'ly was wicked? What can I say to her, when Em'ly tied a ribbon off her own neck round little Minnie's the last night she was here, and laid her head down on the pillow beside her till she was fast asleep! The ribbon's round my little Minnie's neck now. It ought not to be, perhaps, but what can I do? Em'ly is very bad, but they were fond of one another. And the child knows nothing!' Mrs. Joram was so unhappy that her husband came out to take care of her. Leaving them together, I went home to Peggotty's; more melancholy myself, if possible, than I had been yet. That good creature - I mean Peggotty - all untired by her late anxieties and sleepless nights, was at her brother's, where she meant to stay till morning. An old woman, who had been employed about the house for some weeks past, while Peggotty had been unable to attend to it, was the house's only other occupant besides myself. As I had no occasion for her services, I sent her to bed, by no means against her will, and sat down before the kitchen fire a little while, to think about all this. I was blending it with the deathbed of the late Mr. Barkis, and was driving out with the tide towards the distance at which Ham had looked so singularly in the morning, when I was recalled from my wanderings by a knock at the door. There was a knocker upon the door, but it was not that which made the sound. The tap was from a hand, and low down upon the door, as if it were given by a child. It made me start as much as if it had been the knock of a footman to a person of distinction. I opened the door; and at first looked down, to my amazement, on nothing but a great umbrella that appeared to be walking about of itself. But presently I discovered underneath it, Miss Mowcher. I might not have been prepared to give the little creature a very kind reception, if, on her removing the umbrella, which her utmost efforts were unable to shut up, she had shown me the 'volatile' expression of face which had made so great an impression on me at our first and last meeting. But her face, as she turned it up to mine, was so earnest; and when I relieved her of the umbrella (which would have been an inconvenient one for the Irish Giant), she wrung her little hands in such an afflicted manner; that I rather inclined towards her. 'Miss Mowcher!' said I, after glancing up and down the empty street, without distinctly knowing what I expected to see besides; 'how do you come here? What is the matter?' She motioned to me with her short right arm, to shut the umbrella for her; and passing me hurriedly, went into the kitchen. When I had closed the door, and followed, with the umbrella in my hand, I found her sitting on the corner of the fender - it was a low iron one, with two flat bars at top to stand plates upon - in the shadow of the boiler, swaying herself backwards and forwards, and chafing her hands upon her knees like a person in pain. Quite alarmed at being the only recipient of this untimely visit, and the only spectator of this portentous behaviour, I exclaimed again, 'Pray tell me, Miss Mowcher, what is the matter! are you ill?' 'My dear young soul,' returned Miss Mowcher, squeezing her hands upon her heart one over the other. 'I am ill here, I am very ill. To think that it should come to this, when I might have known it and perhaps prevented it, if I hadn't been a thoughtless fool!' Again her large bonnet (very disproportionate to the figure) went backwards and forwards, in her swaying of her little body to and fro; while a most gigantic bonnet rocked, in unison with it, upon the wall. 'I am surprised,' I began, 'to see you so distressed and serious'when she interrupted me. 'Yes, it's always so!' she said. 'They are all surprised, these inconsiderate young people, fairly and full grown, to see any natural feeling in a little thing like me! They make a plaything of me, use me for their amusement, throw me away when they are tired, and wonder that I feel more than a toy horse or a wooden soldier! Yes, yes, that's the way. The old way!' 'It may be, with others,' I returned, 'but I do assure you it is not with me. Perhaps I ought not to be at all surprised to see you as you are now: I know so little of you. I said, without consideration, what I thought.' 'What can I do?' returned the little woman, standing up, and holding out her arms to show herself. 'See! What I am, my father was; and my sister is; and my brother is. I have worked for sister and brother these many years - hard, Mr. Copperfield - all day. I must live. I do no harm. If there are people so unreflecting or so cruel, as to make a jest of me, what is left for me to do but to make a jest of myself, them, and everything? If I do so, for the time, whose fault is that? Mine?' No. Not Miss Mowcher's, I perceived. 'If I had shown myself a sensitive dwarf to your false friend,' pursued the little woman, shaking her head at me, with reproachful earnestness, 'how much of his help or good will do you think I should ever have had? If little Mowcher (who had no hand, young gentleman, in the making of herself) addressed herself to him, or the like of him, because of her misfortunes, when do you suppose her small voice would have been heard? Little Mowcher would have as much need to live, if she was the bitterest and dullest of pigmies; but she couldn't do it. No. She might whistle for her bread and butter till she died of Air.' Miss Mowcher sat down on the fender again, and took out her handkerchief, and wiped her eyes. 'Be thankful for me, if you have a kind heart, as I think you have,' she said, 'that while I know well what I am, I can be cheerful and endure it all. I am thankful for myself, at any rate, that I can find my tiny way through the world, without being beholden to anyone; and that in return for all that is thrown at me, in folly or vanity, as I go along, I can throw bubbles back. If I don't brood over all I want, it is the better for me, and not the worse for anyone. If I am a plaything for you giants, be gentle with me.' Miss Mowcher replaced her handkerchief in her pocket, looking at me with very intent expression all the while, and pursued: 'I saw you in the street just now. You may suppose I am not able to walk as fast as you, with my short legs and short breath, and I couldn't overtake you; but I guessed where you came, and came after you. I have been here before, today, but the good woman wasn't at home.' 'Do you know her?' I demanded. 'I know of her, and about her,' she replied, 'from Omer and Joram. I was there at seven o'clock this morning. Do you remember what Steerforth said to me about this unfortunate girl, that time when I saw you both at the inn?' The great bonnet on Miss Mowcher's head, and the greater bonnet on the wall, began to go backwards and forwards again when she asked this question. I remembered very well what she referred to, having had it in my thoughts many times that day. I told her so. 'May the Father of all Evil confound him,' said the little woman, holding up her forefinger between me and her sparkling eyes, 'and ten times more confound that wicked servant; but I believed it was YOU who had a boyish passion for her!' 'I?' I repeated. 'Child, child! In the name of blind ill-fortune,' cried Miss Mowcher, wringing her hands impatiently, as she went to and fro again upon the fender, 'why did you praise her so, and blush, and look disturbed? ' I could not conceal from myself that I had done this, though for a reason very different from her supposition. 'What did I know?' said Miss Mowcher, taking out her handkerchief again, and giving one little stamp on the ground whenever, at short intervals, she applied it to her eyes with both hands at once. 'He was crossing you and wheedling you, I saw; and you were soft wax in his hands, I saw. Had I left the room a minute, when his man told me that "Young Innocence" (so he called you, and you may call him "Old Guilt" all the days of your life) had set his heart upon her, and she was giddy and liked him, but his master was resolved that no harm should come of it - more for your sake than for hers - and that that was their business here? How could I BUT believe him? I saw Steerforth soothe and please you by his praise of her! You were the first to mention her name. You owned to an old admiration of her. You were hot and cold, and red and white, all at once when I spoke to you of her. What could I think - what DID I think - but that you were a young libertine in everything but experience, and had fallen into hands that had experience enough, and could manage you (having the fancy) for your own good? Oh! oh! oh! They were afraid of my finding out the truth,' exclaimed Miss Mowcher, getting off the fender, and trotting up and down the kitchen with her two short arms distressfully lifted up, 'because I am a sharp little thing - I need be, to get through the world at all! - and they deceived me altogether, and I gave the poor unfortunate girl a letter, which I fully believe was the beginning of her ever speaking to Littimer, who was left behind on purpose!' I stood amazed at the revelation of all this perfidy, looking at Miss Mowcher as she walked up and down the kitchen until she was out of breath: when she sat upon the fender again, and, drying her face with her handkerchief, shook her head for a long time, without otherwise moving, and without breaking silence. 'My country rounds,' she added at length, 'brought me to Norwich, Mr. Copperfield, the night before last. What I happened to find there, about their secret way of coming and going, without you which was strange - led to my suspecting something wrong. I got into the coach from London last night, as it came through Norwich, and was here this morning. Oh, oh, oh! too late!' Poor little Mowcher turned so chilly after all her crying and fretting, that she turned round on the fender, putting her poor little wet feet in among the ashes to warm them, and sat looking at the fire, like a large doll. I sat in a chair on the other side of the hearth, lost in unhappy reflections, and looking at the fire too, and sometimes at her. 'I must go,' she said at last, rising as she spoke. 'It's late. You don't mistrust me?' Meeting her sharp glance, which was as sharp as ever when she asked me, I could not on that short challenge answer no, quite frankly. 'Come!' said she, accepting the offer of my hand to help her over the fender, and looking wistfully up into my face, 'you know you wouldn't mistrust me, if I was a full-sized woman!' I felt that there was much truth in this; and I felt rather ashamed of myself. 'You are a young man,' she said, nodding. 'Take a word of advice, even from three foot nothing. Try not to associate bodily defects with mental, my good friend, except for a solid reason.' She had got over the fender now, and I had got over my suspicion. I told her that I believed she had given me a faithful account of herself, and that we had both been hapless instruments in designing hands. She thanked me, and said I was a good fellow. 'Now, mind!' she exclaimed, turning back on her way to the door, and looking shrewdly at me, with her forefinger up again.- 'I have some reason to suspect, from what I have heard - my ears are always open; I can't afford to spare what powers I have - that they are gone abroad. But if ever they return, if ever any one of them returns, while I am alive, I am more likely than another, going about as I do, to find it out soon. Whatever I know, you shall know. If ever I can do anything to serve the poor betrayed girl, I will do it faithfully, please Heaven! And Littimer had better have a bloodhound at his back, than little Mowcher!' I placed implicit faith in this last statement, when I marked the look with which it was accompanied. 'Trust me no more, but trust me no less, than you would trust a full-sized woman,' said the little creature, touching me appealingly on the wrist. 'If ever you see me again, unlike what I am now, and like what I was when you first saw me, observe what company I am in. Call to mind that I am a very helpless and defenceless little thing. Think of me at home with my brother like myself and sister like myself, when my day's work is done. Perhaps you won't, then, be very hard upon me, or surprised if I can be distressed and serious. Good night!' I gave Miss Mowcher my hand, with a very different opinion of her from that which I had hitherto entertained, and opened the door to let her out. It was not a trifling business to get the great umbrella up, and properly balanced in her grasp; but at last I successfully accomplished this, and saw it go bobbing down the street through the rain, without the least appearance of having anybody underneath it, except when a heavier fall than usual from some over-charged water-spout sent it toppling over, on one side, and discovered Miss Mowcher struggling violently to get it right. After making one or two sallies to her relief, which were rendered futile by the umbrella's hopping on again, like an immense bird, before I could reach it, I came in, went to bed, and slept till morning. In the morning I was joined by Mr. Peggotty and by my old nurse, and we went at an early hour to the coach office, where Mrs. Gummidge and Ham were waiting to take leave of us. 'Mas'r Davy,' Ham whispered, drawing me aside, while Mr. Peggotty was stowing his bag among the luggage, 'his life is quite broke up. He doen't know wheer he's going; he doen't know -what's afore him; he's bound upon a voyage that'll last, on and off, all the rest of his days, take my wured for 't, unless he finds what he's a seeking of. I am sure you'll be a friend to him, Mas'r Davy?' 'Trust me, I will indeed,' said I, shaking hands with Ham earnestly. 'Thankee. Thankee, very kind, sir. One thing furder. I'm in good employ, you know, Mas'r Davy, and I han't no way now of spending what I gets. Money's of no use to me no more, except to live. If you can lay it out for him, I shall do my work with a better art. Though as to that, sir,' and he spoke very steadily and mildly, 'you're not to think but I shall work at all times, like a man, and act the best that lays in my power!' I told him I was well convinced of it; and I hinted that I hoped the time might even come, when he would cease to lead the lonely life he naturally contemplated now. 'No, sir,' he said, shaking his head, 'all that's past and over with me, sir. No one can never fill the place that's empty. But you'll bear in mind about the money, as theer's at all times some laying by for him?' Reminding him of the fact, that Mr. Peggotty derived a steady, though certainly a very moderate income from the bequest of his late brother-in-law, I promised to do so. We then took leave of each other. I cannot leave him even now, without remembering with a pang, at once his modest fortitude and his great sorrow. As to Mrs. Gummidge, if I were to endeavour to describe how she ran down the street by the side of the coach, seeing nothing but Mr. Peggotty on the roof, through the tears she tried to repress, and dashing herself against the people who were coming in the opposite direction, I should enter on a task of some difficulty. Therefore I had better leave her sitting on a baker's door-step, out of breath, with no shape at all remaining in her bonnet, and one of her shoes off, lying on the pavement at a considerable distance. When we got to our journey's end, our first pursuit was to look about for a little lodging for Peggotty, where her brother could have a bed. We were so fortunate as to find one, of a very clean and cheap description, over a chandler's shop, only two streets removed from me. When we had engaged this domicile, I bought some cold meat at an eating-house, and took my fellow-travellers home to tea; a proceeding, I regret to state, which did not meet with Mrs. Crupp's approval, but quite the contrary. I ought to observe, however, in explanation of that lady's state of mind, that she was much offended by Peggotty's tucking up her widow's gown before she had been ten minutes in the place, and setting to work to dust my bedroom. This Mrs. Crupp regarded in the light of a liberty, and a liberty, she said, was a thing she never allowed. Mr. Peggotty had made a communication to me on the way to London for which I was not unprepared. It was, that he purposed first seeing Mrs. Steerforth. As I felt bound to assist him in this, and also to mediate between them; with the view of sparing the mother's feelings as much as possible, I wrote to her that night. I told her as mildly as I could what his wrong was, and what my own share in his injury. I said he was a man in very common life, but of a most gentle and upright character; and that I ventured to express a hope that she would not refuse to see him in his heavy trouble. I mentioned two o'clock in the afternoon as the hour of our coming, and I sent the letter myself by the first coach in the morning. At the appointed time, we stood at the door - the door of that house where I had been, a few days since, so happy: where my youthful confidence and warmth of heart had been yielded up so freely: which was closed against me henceforth: which was now a waste, a ruin. No Littimer appeared. The pleasanter face which had replaced his, on the occasion of my last visit, answered to our summons, and went before us to the drawing-room. Mrs. Steerforth was sitting there. Rosa Dartle glided, as we went in, from another part of the room and stood behind her chair. I saw, directly, in his mother's face, that she knew from himself what he had done. It was very pale; and bore the traces of deeper emotion than my letter alone, weakened by the doubts her fondness would have raised upon it, would have been likely to create. I thought her more like him than ever I had thought her; and I felt, rather than saw, that the resemblance was not lost on my companion. She sat upright in her arm-chair, with a stately, immovable, passionless air, that it seemed as if nothing could disturb. She looked very steadfastly at Mr. Peggotty when he stood before her; and he looked quite as steadfastly at her. Rosa Dartle's keen glance comprehended all of us. For some moments not a word was spoken. She motioned to Mr. Peggotty to be seated. He said, in a low voice, 'I shouldn't feel it nat'ral, ma'am, to sit down in this house. I'd sooner stand.' And this was succeeded by another silence, which she broke thus: 'I know, with deep regret, what has brought you here. What do you want of me? What do you ask me to do?' He put his hat under his arm, and feeling in his breast for Emily's letter, took it out, unfolded it, and gave it to her. 'Please to read that, ma'am. That's my niece's hand!' She read it, in the same stately and impassive way, - untouched by its contents, as far as I could see, - and returned it to him. '"Unless he brings me back a lady,"' said Mr. Peggotty, tracing out that part with his finger. 'I come to know, ma'am, whether he will keep his wured?' 'No,' she returned. 'Why not?' said Mr. Peggotty. 'It is impossible. He would disgrace himself. You cannot fail to know that she is far below him.' 'Raise her up!' said Mr. Peggotty. 'She is uneducated and ignorant.' 'Maybe she's not; maybe she is,' said Mr. Peggotty. 'I think not, ma'am; but I'm no judge of them things. Teach her better!' 'Since you oblige me to speak more plainly, which I am very unwilling to do, her humble connexions would render such a thing impossible, if nothing else did.' 'Hark to this, ma'am,' he returned, slowly and quietly. 'You know what it is to love your child. So do I. If she was a hundred times my child, I couldn't love her more. You doen't know what it is to lose your child. I do. All the heaps of riches in the wureld would be nowt to me (if they was mine) to buy her back! But, save her from this disgrace, and she shall never be disgraced by us. Not one of us that she's growed up among, not one of us that's lived along with her and had her for their all in all, these many year, will ever look upon her pritty face again. We'll be content to let her be; we'll be content to think of her, far off, as if she was underneath another sun and sky; we'll be content to trust her to her husband, - to her little children, p'raps, - and bide the time when all of us shall be alike in quality afore our God!' The rugged eloquence with which he spoke, was not devoid of all effect. She still preserved her proud manner, but there was a touch of softness in her voice, as she answered: 'I justify nothing. I make no counter-accusations. But I am sorry to repeat, it is impossible. Such a marriage would irretrievably blight my son's career, and ruin his prospects. Nothing is more certain than that it never can take place, and never will. If there is any other compensation -' 'I am looking at the likeness of the face,' interrupted Mr. Peggotty, with a steady but a kindling eye, 'that has looked at me, in my home, at my fireside, in my boat - wheer not? - smiling and friendly, when it was so treacherous, that I go half wild when I think of it. If the likeness of that face don't turn to burning fire, at the thought of offering money to me for my child's blight and ruin, it's as bad. I doen't know, being a lady's, but what it's worse.' She changed now, in a moment. An angry flush overspread her features; and she said, in an intolerant manner, grasping the arm-chair tightly with her hands: 'What compensation can you make to ME for opening such a pit between me and my son? What is your love to mine? What is your separation to ours?' Miss Dartle softly touched her, and bent down her head to whisper, but she would not hear a word. 'No, Rosa, not a word! Let the man listen to what I say! My son, who has been the object of my life, to whom its every thought has been devoted, whom I have gratified from a child in every wish, from whom I have had no separate existence since his birth, - to take up in a moment with a miserable girl, and avoid me! To repay my confidence with systematic deception, for her sake, and quit me for her! To set this wretched fancy, against his mother's claims upon his duty, love, respect, gratitude - claims that every day and hour of his life should have strengthened into ties that nothing could be proof against! Is this no injury?' Again Rosa Dartle tried to soothe her; again ineffectually. 'I say, Rosa, not a word! If he can stake his all upon the lightest object, I can stake my all upon a greater purpose. Let him go where he will, with the means that my love has secured to him! Does he think to reduce me by long absence? He knows his mother very little if he does. Let him put away his whim now, and he is welcome back. Let him not put her away now, and he never shall come near me, living or dying, while I can raise my hand to make a sign against it, unless, being rid of her for ever, he comes humbly to me and begs for my forgiveness. This is my right. This is the acknowledgement I WILL HAVE. This is the separation that there is between us! And is this,' she added, looking at her visitor with the proud intolerant air with which she had begun, 'no injury?' While I heard and saw the mother as she said these words, I seemed to hear and see the son, defying them. All that I had ever seen in him of an unyielding, wilful spirit, I saw in her. All the understanding that I had now of his misdirected energy, became an understanding of her character too, and a perception that it was, in its strongest springs, the same. She now observed to me, aloud, resuming her former restraint, that it was useless to hear more, or to say more, and that she begged to put an end to the interview. She rose with an air of dignity to leave the room, when Mr. Peggotty signified that it was needless. 'Doen't fear me being any hindrance to you, I have no more to say, ma'am,' he remarked, as he moved towards the door. 'I come beer with no hope, and I take away no hope. I have done what I thowt should be done, but I never looked fur any good to come of my stan'ning where I do. This has been too evil a house fur me and mine, fur me to be in my right senses and expect it.' With this, we departed; leaving her standing by her elbow-chair, a picture of a noble presence and a handsome face. We had, on our way out, to cross a paved hall, with glass sides and roof, over which a vine was trained. Its leaves and shoots were green then, and the day being sunny, a pair of glass doors leading to the garden were thrown open. Rosa Dartle, entering this way with a noiseless step, when we were close to them, addressed herself to me: 'You do well,' she said, 'indeed, to bring this fellow here!' Such a concentration of rage and scorn as darkened her face, and flashed in her jet-black eyes, I could not have thought compressible even into that face. The scar made by the hammer was, as usual in this excited state of her features, strongly marked. When the throbbing I had seen before, came into it as I looked at her, she absolutely lifted up her hand, and struck it. 'This is a fellow,' she said, 'to champion and bring here, is he not? You are a true man!' 'Miss Dartle,' I returned, 'you are surely not so unjust as to condemn ME!' 'Why do you bring division between these two mad creatures?' she returned. 'Don't you know that they are both mad with their own self-will and pride?' 'Is it my doing?' I returned. 'Is it your doing!' she retorted. 'Why do you bring this man here?' 'He is a deeply-injured man, Miss Dartle,' I replied. 'You may not know it.' 'I know that James Steerforth,' she said, with her hand on her bosom, as if to prevent the storm that was raging there, from being loud, 'has a false, corrupt heart, and is a traitor. But what need I know or care about this fellow, and his common niece?' 'Miss Dartle,' I returned, 'you deepen the injury. It is sufficient already. I will only say, at parting, that you do him a great wrong.' 'I do him no wrong,' she returned. 'They are a depraved, worthless set. I would have her whipped!' Mr. Peggotty passed on, without a word, and went out at the door. 'Oh, shame, Miss Dartle! shame!' I said indignantly. 'How can you bear to trample on his undeserved affliction!' 'I would trample on them all,' she answered. 'I would have his house pulled down. I would have her branded on the face, dressed in rags, and cast out in the streets to starve. If I had the power to sit in judgement on her, I would see it done. See it done? I would do it! I detest her. If I ever could reproach her with her infamous condition, I would go anywhere to do so. If I could hunt her to her grave, I would. If there was any word of comfort that would be a solace to her in her dying hour, and only I possessed it, I wouldn't part with it for Life itself.' The mere vehemence of her words can convey, I am sensible, but a weak impression of the passion by which she was possessed, and which made itself articulate in her whole figure, though her voice, instead of being raised, was lower than usual. No description I could give of her would do justice to my recollection of her, or to her entire deliverance of herself to her anger. I have seen passion in many forms, but I have never seen it in such a form as that. When I joined Mr. Peggotty, he was walking slowly and thoughtfully down the hill. He told me, as soon as I came up with him, that having now discharged his mind of what he had purposed doing in London, he meant 'to set out on his travels', that night. I asked him where he meant to go? He only answered, 'I'm a going, sir, to seek my niece.' We went back to the little lodging over the chandler's shop, and there I found an opportunity of repeating to Peggotty what he had said to me. She informed me, in return, that he had said the same to her that morning. She knew no more than I did, where he was going, but she thought he had some project shaped out in his mind. I did not like to leave him, under such circumstances, and we all three dined together off a beefsteak pie - which was one of the many good things for which Peggotty was famous - and which was curiously flavoured on this occasion, I recollect well, by a miscellaneous taste of tea, coffee, butter, bacon, cheese, new loaves, firewood, candles, and walnut ketchup, continually ascending from the shop. After dinner we sat for an hour or so near the window, without talking much; and then Mr. Peggotty got up, and brought his oilskin bag and his stout stick, and laid them on the table. He accepted, from his sister's stock of ready money, a small sum on account of his legacy; barely enough, I should have thought, to keep him for a month. He promised to communicate with me, when anything befell him; and he slung his bag about him, took his hat and stick, and bade us both 'Good-bye!' 'All good attend you, dear old woman,' he said, embracing Peggotty, 'and you too, Mas'r Davy!' shaking hands with me. 'I'm a-going to seek her, fur and wide. If she should come home while I'm away but ah, that ain't like to be! - or if I should bring her back, my meaning is, that she and me shall live and die where no one can't reproach her. If any hurt should come to me, remember that the last words I left for her was, "My unchanged love is with my darling child, and I forgive her!"' He said this solemnly, bare-headed; then, putting on his hat, he went down the stairs, and away. We followed to the door. It was a warm, dusty evening, just the time when, in the great main thoroughfare out of which that by-way turned, there was a temporary lull in the eternal tread of feet upon the pavement, and a strong red sunshine. He turned, alone, at the corner of our shady street, into a glow of light, in which we lost him. Rarely did that hour of the evening come, rarely did I wake at night, rarely did I look up at the moon, or stars, or watch the falling rain, or hear the wind, but I thought of his solitary figure toiling on, poor pilgrim, and recalled the words: 'I'm a going to seek her, fur and wide. If any hurt should come to me, remember that the last words I left for her was, "My unchanged love is with my darling child, and I forgive her!"'