Word: murmur
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...some time now the threat of tobacco prohibition in the U. S. has subsided to an occasional murmur. It began vigorously in 1878, with the founding of the Anti-Tobacco Society in New York; it sank this year as Kansas, last state with an antitobacco law, repealed its pertinent legislation. The sequence recalls 17th Century Persian history; Shah Abbas made his tobacco-using courtiers smoke camel's dung for punishment; his grandson Shah Sen poured hot, melted lead down the throats of tobacco merchants; another Shah, Abbas II, found smoking pleasant and canceled old Persian laws...
...There", said the authority on the Spanish Empire, pointing toward what would eventually be a forward pass, "there you have a concrete exemplification of the Drang Nach Osten tendency". A polite murmur of assent ran over the professorial assemblage and the blanketed professorial knees quivered in jubilation over the crack. Then a bony forefinger protruded into space and long white curtains floated in the Stadium atmosphere. "Will the gentleman entering the lower Portal of Section 39 kindly remove his hat?" Thousands sat in awe and whispers of "Well played, ... good eye ... bravo" were heard here and there...
...Night, is not merely a man whom life has defeated: he is a generalization, a symbol, an inclusion of defeat. After a day of selling his pencils to the faces behind back doors, he crawls into a cattle shed near a railroad station, to sleep there tasting the dark murmur and damp smell of cows. "First he had been a bound boy, then a hired man. He had had a room over kitchens. For a summer or two he had tramped it, and slept in groves or in straw piles or on the hay in barns. But this place here...
...years ago, at the exhibition of the John Quinn Collection in Manhattan, old ladies and dilettantes gathered round an object, gaping, making a murmur of "Is it a bird? If it isn't, what is it? Whatever it is, is it art?" It was tall, shiny, spindling, like a magnification of an exclamation point, like a Freudian symbol. Manufactured by famed Sculptor Constantin Brancusi of Rumania, it was titled, with a supreme disregard of appearance, with an arrogant, baffling simplicity, "The Bird...
...murmur of "I told you so," went up. Boris was looking for an English girl of aristocratic parentage, of which there were scores eligible. But those who knew smiled, recalled the young King's sentiments not long ago expressed: "Bulgaria cannot afford a Queen. I sometimes wonder if she can afford a King...