quotes_aug2_2009.htm

There were still, hot hollows surrounded by wet rocks where he could hardly breathe for the heavy scents of the night flowers and the bloom along the creeper buds; dark avenues where the moonlight lay in belts as regular as checkered marbles in a church aisle; thickets where the wet young growth stood breast-high about him and threw its arms round his waist; and hilltops crowned with broken rock, where he leaped from stone to stone above the lairs of the frightened little foxes.

This is from “The Spring Running” in The Second Jungle Book.

Spring has come with a rush, and the jun gle is full of new growth and smells and sounds. Mowgli. now a young man, feels a great sense of unhappiness, and decides to make a running at night through the jungle to the marshes of the north. 

‘So long as Whitgift blood lasted, Robin promised there would allers be one o’ her stock that—that no Trouble ’ud lie on, no Maid ’ud sigh on, no Night could frighten, no Fright could harm, no Harm could make sin, an’ no Woman could make a fool of.’

‘Well, ain’t that just me?’ said the Bee Boy, where he sat in the silver square of the great September moon that was staring into the oasthouse door.

This is from “Dymchurch Flit” in Puck of Pook’s Hill. The People of the Hills have decided to flit out of Old England because they are so disturbed by people’s sufferings after Eng;and’s break with Eome. They need flesh and blood to help them take a boat away out over the sea. and they turn to a widow woman, who has second sight, and two sons eho can help them. She gives them leave to go, and in return Puck made this promise to her.

I had attacked the distance several times, but always with a Mistral blowing, or the unchancy cattle of those parts on the move. But once, running from the East, into a high-piled, almost Egyptian, sunset, there came a night which it would have been sin to have wasted. It was warm with the breath of summer in advance; moonlit till the shadow of every rounded pebble and pointed cypress wind-break lay solid on that vast flat-floored waste…

This is from “The Bull that Thought” in Debits and Credits.

The narrator is in the Carmargue, in the Rhone Delta, in France, cattle country. At the beginning of the tale he takes his car out on a moonlit night, for a speed trial, and takes with him M. Voiron, a distinguished Frenchman, who he has met by chance. Later, over dinner, M. Voiron tells him the story of “The Bull that Thought”, a bull that through its intelligence and ‘stalky’ qualities, avoids death in the bull ring.