Autobiography of Mark Twain (44 page)

_^
the crushing strain upon her
astonishing
_^
astounding
_^
memory, fighting
that
long battle
serene and
undismayed against
these
colossal odds
,stands alone in its pathos and its sublimity; it
_^
It
_^
has nowhere its
mate
,
_^
match,
_^
either in the annals of fact
or in the
creations of fable.
_^
realms of fiction.
_^

3.
And how
_^
How
_^
fine and great were the
things she daily said, how fresh and crisp—and she so worn in body,
_^
words she spoke day by day, her ready answers, her bright demeanour, and crisp criticisms, and she so worn in body,
_^
so starved,
and
_^
so
_^
tired,
and
_^
so
_^
harried
They
_^
Her utterances
_^
run through the whole gamut of feeling and expression
from scorn and defiance,
uttered
_^
spoken
_^
with soldierly fire and frankness,
all down the scale
to wounded dignity clothed in words of noble pathos
;as, w
hen her patience was exhausted by the pestering attempts of her persecutors to
find out
_^
discover
_^
what
kind of
devil’s-witchcraft she had employed to rouse the war-spirit in her soldiers she
burst
_^
cried
_^
out
with
“What I said was, ‘Ride these English down’—and I did it myself!”
and as, w
hen insultingly asked why it was that
her
standard had place at the crowning of the King in the Cathedral of Rheims rather than
the standards
_^
those
_^
of
the
other captains, she uttered that touching speech, “It had borne the burden, it had earned the honour
”
a phrase which fell from her lips without
preparation, but whose
_^
premeditation, the
_^
moving beauty and simple grace
it
_^
of which
_^
would bankrupt the art
of language to surpass.