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49 matches in All Departments
Tom, a poor orphan, is employed by the villainous chimney-sweep,
Grimes, to climb up inside flues to clear away the soot. While
engaged in this dreadful task, he loses his way and emerges in the
bedroom of Ellie, the young daughter of the house who mistakes him
for a thief. He runs away, and, hot and bothered, he slips into a
cooling stream, falls asleep, and becomes a Water Baby. In his new
life, he meets all sorts of aquatic creatures, including an
engaging old lobster, other water babies, and at last reaches St
Branden's Isle where he encounters the fierce Mrs Bedonebyeasyoudid
and the motherly Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby. After a long and arduous
quest to the Other-end-of-Nowhere young Tom achieves his heart's
desire.
In the four hundred and thirteenth year of the Christian Era, some
three hundred miles above Alexandria, the young monk Philammon was
sitting on the edge of a low range of inland cliffs, crested with
drifting sand. Behind him the desert sandwaste stretched, lifeless,
interminable, reflecting its lurid glare on the horizon of the
cloudless vault of blue. At his feet the sand dripped and trickled,
in yellow rivulets, from crack to crack and ledge to ledge, or
whirled past him in tiny jets of yellow smoke, before the fitful
summer airs. Here and there, upon the face of the cliffs which
walled in the opposite side of the narrow glen below, were
cavernous tombs, huge old quarries, with obelisks and half-cut
pillars, standing as the workmen had left them centuries before;
the sand was slipping down and piling up around them, their heads
were frosted with the arid snow; everywhere was silence, desolation
- the grave of a dead nation, in a dying land.
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