Word: vain
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Rarer still but now unknown was a red Masdevallia orchid powdered with gold. Lager once found a single specimen of it growing high in a South American tree. He searched in vain for more nearby, later found some 500 mi. away. He shipped a lot to the coast where they somehow got sidetracked. In a seaport warehouse they lay until they were dead. No one has yet found any more gold-powdered red orchids like that...
...with no ringing word of righteous indignation. And there is 'Buchmanism' alias the 'Oxford Group Movement' (shades of Pusey, Keble and Newman!*), alias 'First Century Christian Fellowship!' . . . summed up in 'For Sinners Only,' a book in which one searches in vain for grand distinctive doctrines. . . . If the General Assembly shall speak out . . . it will be one of the most useful and most memorable since the first meeting...
Died. John Leslie Urquhart, 58, British mining engineer and promoter, chairman of the Association of British Creditors of Russia ($900,000,000), bitter antiCommunist; of pneumonia; in London. After the Russian revolution he plotted, fought, howled in vain for his Russo-Asiatic Consolidated Mining Trust's $280,000,000 stake in Russian copper, zinc, lead and coal. In 1923 he recouped by getting a monopoly on Turkish imports and exports. Plump, dapper and grey, he sat behind David Lloyd George at The Hague as his adviser on Russian economics...
...suggestion that the pruning be placed in the hands of leading educators in each community. Such men, cognizant of both the needed retrenchments and the really indispensable expenditures, can best reach a balance in the dilemma against which our scholastic bureaucracy and befuddled business men committees have struggled in vain...
...occupied with such melancholick reflections as might have befitted Panterias the sage, when the future course of his life was revealed to him by the haruspex; as that all the labors of the scholar, the resolutions of the philosopher, even the ecstasies of the poet are meaningless and in vain, when they confront the dark and fathomless abyss beyond. Outside, through the high shining windows of the hall, could be seen the white, jagged clouds and the blue author in which they were so lightly afloat. The sweet wind hurried in through the open casement after it had touched...