Word: scarlets
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Dearest Enemy. Back in the days when the scarlet coated forces of the Crown were warring with the Colonists, it happened that one evening General Putnam at the Battery (New York) was obliged to join General Washington on Harlem Heights. Failure to meet this obligation might have meant annihilation of the rebel army. Unfortunately the British were encamped at Kip's Bay, half way up the island, and it was necessary to distract their attention while Putnam made his march that evening. A certain Mrs. Murray undertook the task, gave a party, and kept all the enemy generals so drunk...
...wife who had passed away at the age of 95; at Breckenridge, Mo., in the night. For a year he was the family physician of Henry Clay, famed orator. In 1851 Mrs. Clay called him in to treat some slave children on their plantation who had contracted scarlet fever. He became the friend and medical adviser of Mr. Clay, who died...
...news would have hooted through Florence like a high wind, whipping the scarlet soutanes of cardinals up around their knees, blowing fear into the faces of swart gonfaloniers, and scuttling down lonely corridors to pry under the doors of gay and gracious gentlewomen ? whisk! up the coverlet, into the closet and out of the window...
...bravely to heart: a fish taken unawares and frozen fast in black pond ice; a drunken quarryman who compares plowing the deep soil to sailing the sea; a wounded white-breasted hawk staked out for torture by African children; a band of bearded woodcutters hupging a fire that flames scarlet among Alpine snows. The genius of the family, Theodore F. Powys, appears in the journal, now plunged in abysmal moroseness, now making "his sardonic, dry quips, his double-tongued chirpings, jumping this way and that like crickets in a hot hayfield," always sniffing and listening around metaphysical corners...
They knew too well what really went on behind those apparently dismal walls; no housefront however dreary, could hide from them its inner chambers hung with a thousand twilit blazonries and perfumed with the musk of frankincense and grated orris-root?chambers wherein slim Chinese girls with scarlet fingernails and breasts like almond-petals submit among Himalayas of varicolored cushions, to the embraces of opium-bloated laundrymen...