Word: wisps
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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William D. (for David) Bayles went to Germany in 1932. He taught English for two years at the University of Munich, then free-lanced. In a little Munich cafe he used to see a "small, nervous, threadbare man with bad teeth, greasy, dandruffy hair, a colorless wisp of a mustache, and pale blue eyes which, like his hands, were never quiet." It was Adolf Hitler...
...George V, Prince of Wales, Jellicoe) had recently gone into the western Mediterranean, and the Repulse into the eastern. It appeared last week that some of the ships based on Gibraltar had joined the eastern squadron. All went out with lookouts alert-hunting for the will-o'-the-wisp Italian Fleet...
Thank you for your fine account [March 18] of the cribbage tournament and presentation of the history, theory and practice of the game. But you make no mention of that almost fabulous will-o'-the-wisp, that ultima Thule of all cribbage players, the "29 hand." It is to crib fans what the hole-in-one is to the golfer, the 13-spade hand to the bridge player. . . . Three generations of our family watched and waited for it, in vain, till on a rainy night in the winter of '32, when playing with my husband before the traditional...
...jampacked Plaza de Toros at Tampico, Mexico, 5,000 aficionados sat stock-still one afternoon last week. In the centre of the ring, glistening in the sunlight, a wisp of a girl stood directly in the path of a charging bull, heels together, her sword poised ready for the kill. With one businesslike thrust over his horns and between the shoulder blades, the bull crumpled to the sand, shuddered, lay dead...
...confusion for the army, a lapse that must never recur . . ."), with intimate affection of the quieter moments of routine ("Like the Lord's Prayer, you had it all by heart . . . feet, head, belly, legs; nearside, offside, eyes, nose, dock; hoof-pick, body-brush, dandy-brush, sponge, stable-rubber, wisp . . . 'Stables' hour was as sacred as the twenty minutes before the drawing room door opened and nurse came in to say that it was bed time . . ."). And with a dogged, unhurried intensity he makes Tubby Windrush grow up, grow sick of soldiering...