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Show LONG WORDS AND ABUNDANT ADJECTIVES. The author's English is not of the kind that suffers by an admixture of a few French phrases. It is bad enough not to admit of being easily made worse. She is one of those who delights in long words and an abundance of adjectives. She tells how a little girl brought a basket of peaches; she calls them "large, heavy, deep red and pale green balls." She wishes to say that a wife who was kept by her husband without money was greatly embarrassed; she writes that "she felt keenly the dilemmas which impecuniosity entails." What a fine mixture - a bit of logic, and a word of Latin origin in seven syllables! The heroine goes to Ceylon. One night she looked thoughtfully at the thick foliage, undistinguishable in the gloaming. "Gloaming," by the way, we venture to inform the author, does not mean the darkness of a tropical night. The breeze wafted her acrid odors. There was a faint murmur as of wings, and of living things. The wings apparently belonged to things that were dead. There were strange sounds of musical instruments, with a weirdness in them that soothed the spirit. Now we come to the climax of the writing; "It seemed as if all those sounds combined to produce a somnolent effect." The reader by this time owns that he himself begins to feel drowsy. - London Saturday Review. |