Author: Frank A. Russell

Publisher:

Published: 2015-07-10

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 9781331075332

Excerpt from The Ashes of Achievement "The Lamp of our Youth will be utterly out; hut we shall subsist on the smell of it, And whatever we do, we shall fold our hands and suck our gums and think well of it. Yes, we shall be perfectly pleased with our work, and that it the perfectest Hell of it!" - The Old Men The road from Deniliquin, glimmers, gray and uninviting, across a changeless expanse of browned grass, like a soiled ribbon on a drab's hair. It narrows to a point miles ahead, with something like a promise of fulfilment, only to widen maliciously as you approach, to march endlessly on as before, dull and level, an exasperating highway. Like a crawling insect the doctor's buggy crept across the plain. Dr. Payne would have indignantly questioned the word "crept," for he would never use a horse that could not do its level ten miles, and indeed the term is but a comparative one, for any progress seemed almost imperceptible in that country of vast distances. The "clop-clop" of the horse was pleasantly muted in the dust, spirals of which slowly mounted into the still, hot air, and marked for miles the passage of the open buggy. Odo Kent, two days off the English boat, looked about him curiously. Inwardly he was wondering how his old school chum could stand this grim monotony. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.