Word: gentler
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Instant Nose Job. White trappers, with their ingrained leaning toward monogamy and lingering romantic respect for womanhood, often made gentler husbands than Indian braves. Among the Blackfeet, for example, a woman caught in adultery by her Indian husband had to submit to an instant nose job, performed with a skinning knife. Many of the white traders were exceptionally devoted to their Indian wives. When John ("Liver Eating") Johnson's Flathead wife, the Swan, was murdered by Crow warriors, for example, Johnson went on the warpath, killed some 300 Crows, and ate their livers in revenge...
...locks have been in the doors since Cabot was built in 1936. "They haven't been used for years, if they ever were," J. Boyd Britton, Radcliffe Administrative vice president, said yesterday. "These buildings were built in a gentler age when there weren't so many robberies," he added...
...review of Henry VIII by J. J. Scarisbrick [Aug. 2] mentioned that Anne Boleyn, second wife of King Henry, said "a gentler nor a more merciful prince was there never" before being beheaded. This may not mean that the King was an admirable character, since it was traditional in those days for condemned persons to say a good word for the monarch before their death. If a convicted person started a last-minute inflammatory tirade against the monarch, he could be dragged off at the very last minute, to a much crueler death...
...playing God. An English observer saw him as an idler who wanted "only an apple and a fair wench to dally with." To one subject he was "a tyrant more cruel than Nero." When his wife Anne Boleyn was about to be beheaded by his executioner, she maintained: "A gentler nor a more merciful prince was there never." Even as they felt the impact of his boisterous personality, the sting of his vindictiveness, or the thrust of his appetite for pleasure and power, the contemporaries of King Henry VIII could never quite understand...
...shadow and sun, by elm or oak, A gentler-seeming kind of folk, More leisurely, as if their ways, Inherited from better days, Knew mildness and the atmosphere Held in suspension, even here, A sense of ceremonial, Of courtesy, of ritual, As if even here, unconsciously, We moved in grave amenity, Or dwelt in grace, as if the air Bespoke us laudable and fair...