Dorothy Dunnett Quotes

How do you take leave, for all time, of a brother?'

'You wish him well,' Lymond said, 'if that is what is in your mind. And you accept from him his understanding, and his pity, and his fellowship as he is driven, as you are, through the world.

The sparkling smile became enormous. 'Do you think she has a dagger there? Do you? Ask her, M. Francis? For,' said the most noble and most powerful Princess Mary Stewart, Queen of Scotland, delving furiously under all the stiff red velvet, showing shift, hose and garters, shoes, knees and a long ribboned end of something recently torn loose, and emerging therefrom with a fist closed tight on an object short and hard and glittering, 'for I have!' And breathlessly, flinging back her head, with the little knife offered like a quill, 'Try to stab me!' she encouraged her visitor. There was a queer silence, during which the eyes of Oonagh O'Dwyer and her love of one night met and locked like magnet and iron. The child, waiting a moment, offered again, the ringing, joyful defiance still in her voice. 'Try to stab me! … Go on, and I'll kill you all dead!'

Her throat dry, Oonagh spoke. 'Save your steel for those you trust. They are the ones who will carry your bier; the men who cannot hate, nor can they know love. Send away the cold servants.' The red mouth had opened a little; the knife hung forgotten in her hand.

'I would,' said Mary, surprised. 'But I do not know any.' And, anxiously demonstrating her point, she caught Lymond by the hand.

Once, long ago, Francis Crawford had reduced her to terror and, the episode over, she had suffered to find that for Kate, apparently, no reason suggested itself against making that same Francis Crawford her friend. He was not Philippa's friend. She had made that clear, and, to be fair, he had respected it. He had even, when you thought of it, curtailed his visits to Kate, although Kate's studied lack of comment on this served only to make Philippa angrier. He had been nasty at Boghall. He had hit her at Liddel Keep. He had stopped her going anywhere for weeks. He had saved her life. That was indisputable. He had been effective over poor Trotty Luckup, while she had been pretty rude, and he hadn't forced himself on her; and he had made her warm with his cloak. He had gone to Liddel Keep expressly to warn her, and when she had been pig-headed about leaving (Kate was right) he had done the only thing possible to make her. And then he had come to Flaw Valleys for nothing but to make sure of her safety, and he had been so tired that Kate had cried after he had gone. And then it had suddenly struck her, firmly and deeply in her shamefully flat chest, so that her heart thumped and her eyes filled with tears, that maybe she was wrong. Put together everything you knew of Francis Crawford. Put together what you had heard at Boghall and at Midculter, what you had seen at Flaw Valleys, and it all added up to one enormous, soul-crushing entity. She had been wrong. She did not understand h

… You see,' said Marthe. 'I am not here to mock. I have worn out my revenge. You have guided me into a world which has been closed to me all my life. You have shown me that what I hold by, you hold by and more. You have shown me strength I do not possess, and humanity I thought belonged only to women. You are a man, and you have explained all men to me.…'

His eyes were closed, nor did he give any sign that he had heard her. Marthe smiled and, moving closer, laid her hand for the first time on his. 'Francis. It is morning. Come and sleep.

The drink was almost certainly safe. He would probably get pleurisy, quinsy and pox from the cup.

You're going to declare a rest period?' asked Jerott. Leisure, with Gabriel there, seemed too good to be true.

'Rumour being what it is, I imagine it will have declared itself by now,' Lymond said. 'Yes. We shall take three days from our labours to relax. Provided Sir Graham understands that by midday tomorrow St Mary's will be empty and all the men at arms and half the officers whoring in Peebles.' In the half-dark you could guess at Gabriel's smile.

'Do you think I don't know human nature?' he said. 'They are bound by no vows. But as they learn to respect you, they will do as you do.'

'That's what we're all afraid of,' said Jerott; and there was a ripple of laughter and a flash of amusement, he saw, from Lymond himself.

This,' said Lymond, 'is by no means a game I will play, or consider playing. Move.

A versatile commodity, death; except for those suffering it.

The more modest your expectations, the less often you will court disappointment.

War had given Francis his respite, and success had brought him his final reward: the freedom he wished from his marriage. The licence, if he desired it, to go back to Russia. The knowledge, one supposed, that, severed from Philippa, he could allow the past to lie in peace, and cease troubling him.

You invited them without Lymond knowing?' said Danny Hislop. He wriggled into the circle. 'Can I be there when he hears about it?

Lymond, released, flung his head back and, viewing his winnings, gave them solemn dispensation to descend for the space of the dance. He asked for and obtained some chalk, and set to marking his and Mat's property where the cross was most obvious and the whim most appreciated.

How generous is your mistress,' said the light, mocking voice of Prince Dmitri Ivanovich Vishnevetsky, 'who said that as your guest I might hunt where I pleased.'

Half veiled by the blossom, he leaned against the opposite wall: a man strongly made with cleft chin and soft chestnut hair and moustache, and all the arts of a courtier. In his hands was a small Turkish bow; and across the spangled silk of his shirt hung a quiver. He smiled as he ceased speaking, and bending the bow, took aim, lightly, at a fluttering host of birds calling from the cherry tree over his head.

The Voevoda smiled. 'I am more generous still,' he said, and drew back his arm, the fingers brushing his girdle. A flick of silver, arching through the air, touched Vishnevetsky's bow with a click, and the Prince made a sound, cut off at once, as he stumbled off-balance, the sliced wood and hemp whipping about him: his arms flung involuntarily apart. Lymond's knife, its chased hilt gold in the lamplight, lay on the cracked tiles at his feet. Lymond said, 'I give you both weapon and quarry.

As a man, this child would be one's offering to the future races of men. The burden of his upbringing, wherever it fell: however tiresome or onerous, was of no importance compared with his living grasp of the future.

man had blandly abstained. He had been right: it would have lost him money. But not in Scotland,

You've changed the metre,' said Philippa.
'I reserve the right,' said Lymond, 'to change the metre. Don't interrupt.

Speak for yourself,' said Danny Hislop. 'I'm held together by intellectual curiosity. So are we all. We were wonderfully specious at Novgorod - Best will remember - about our reasons for staying in Russia. No one gave the correct one. You can hate a man and stay in his company because of his sheer, God-given, irresistible powers to stimulate. We all liked fighting, and we liked talking about fighting. With Lymond you don't talk about fighting; you discuss the art of warfare, and then its philosophy, and then ten dozen other subjects all through the night, or for as long as he has patience to stay with you. I thought, God help me, that you were all trailing through Europe because you were enamoured of him. It wasn't that in the least.'

'We loved his mind,' said Adam Blacklock, with sudden terrible bitterness.

Don't stop,' said Lymond pleasantly. 'You've my father, my brother, my late sister and a whole clecking of aunts to get through. Auntie May is a good one to start with. Fifteen stone, and every spring she goes broody; and we find her out in the hen run on a clutch of burst yolks; except the year mother got there first and hard-boiled them.

His tranquil smile deepened. 'We shall meet in Malta, Jerott. Pray for us all. God has been good tonight.'

'Thompson has been rather splendid too,' said Lymond cordially. and waved a cheerful farewell.

A trained fighting man, accustomed to hard words and hard blows and the company of men like himself, for years ruled by the self-discipline required by the world's greatest order of chivalry, Jerott had come to terms now with the fact that one man could make him feel and act like a rhinoceros in a cloud of mosquitoes.

And the effect on yourself?' Guthrie said.

For a short time, Lymond was silent. Then he said, 'I had some strengths, which have grown. I had some weaknesses, which have gone.'

'That is true,' Adam Blacklock said. Slumped between floor and wall, he had leaned his tired head on the panelling; his face, with its thin scar, was turned without expression to Lymond. 'You have become a machine.'

'No,' said Philippa. 'That is not so.'

'But that is so,' said Lymond. 'How could I do my work otherwise?

I hope never to have to do that to you again. I hope one day you will forgive me. Try to remember, just at this moment, that my trade calls for acting. Try to remember, Richard, as I have told you, that because of your own honesty I can't confide in you.

For reliable information, apply to a lawyer, a barber or prostitute. My informant hasn't found out so far who paid the captain.' 'But she will,' said Margaret, her face grave. 'I hope so,' he said with equal gravity,

Mr Blyth, you should remember one thing. A celibate island life fighting Turks is no particular guarantee of early maturity. Take a little crone-like advice, and don't rush your judgements.

Whatever fascination Lymond held for her mother, it had no power at five in the morning.

Mariotta listened to it all, sitting judicially in a whirl of velvet with all
the Culter jewels and the emerald necklace for moral support.

Jenny Fleming merely looked exasperated. 'That young man,' she said, 'ought to be plucked out of his pride and impaled on a thornbush. He introduced me to someone as the Controller of the King's Beam, last time we met.' Which at least had the merit of making her daughter laugh, if a little wildly.

I wish,' said Lymond, 'it would try a major key sometimes.'

'Wind,' Chancellor said, 'is a melancholy creature.

Are you by any chance …' said Lymond.

'… baiting you?' Philippa said. 'Only when you are inclined to be magisterial.'

'Oh, good God,' Lymond said. 'Kate must be out of her mind.'

'And thank heaven you aren't my father?' said Philippa.

'Roughly,' said Lymond, and began to laugh, and then stopped.

Gardington was made over to me once, by the Crown. It's one of their standard good-conduct prizes for espionage.'

Philippa said, rather blankly, 'I thought you were spying at that time for Scotland.'

'Well, I wasn't spying for England,' Lymond said.

There's some of them'll be nursing a guid scratch or two on their hinder-ends this night.… Man, it was a rout.'

'I imagine,' said Piero Strozzi, his dark face impassive, 'that my lord Grey's army would not relish their defeat either.'

'Oh, aye, the English,' said Buccleuch absently.

'We are, after all, at war with them and not with the Kerrs,' the Marshal said mildly.

Kate won't be troubled. I don't know any gentlemen, anyway.'

'Thank you,' said Lymond.

If you're the first of November, you're Scorpio. A large reporter of his owne Acts. Prudent of behaviour in owne affairs. A lover of Quarrels and theevery, a promoter of frayes and commotions. As wavery as the wind; neither fearing God or caring for Man.'

'Better,' said Lymond coldly, 'to be stung by a nettle than pricked by a rose.

That day, engrossed together in the fate of the child, he met her mind to mind and fell in love with her, with every grain of his spirit and cell of his body; with the essential finality of death.

He regards boredom, I observe, as the One and Mighty Enemy of his soul. And will succeed in conquering it, I am sure - if he survives the experience.

I can live alone, but it is better to have someone else to concern oneself with; to help and be helped by. There is nothing so strong as a family.

Jerott's hand increased its grip on her arm. 'He is an island with all its bridges wantonly severed. What hostage to evil,' said Jerott, poetic in his thumping displeasure, 'will this night's business conceive?'

'I don't know. But they're both nice and clean, if that's anything,' said Philippa. And led the way philosophically down.

Come, my love,' said Míkál, 'and say goodnight to the dark.' And held him close, full of a sweet young compassion, as the little boy died.

Whether romance existed in him or not, sentimentality had no place at all.

They play at gods,' said Piedar Dooly, and spat. 'French and English alike. Gods out of hell would you say, harrowing green land for their tennis courts and dressing lapdogs in treasure that would keep half Ireland in bread for a year. The heroes of Tara would have put them face to schisty face and used them for millstones.

Strophe and counterstrophe reached their epode.

Philippa Somerville, standing back a little, did not withdraw her arm. In her white face, a shadow of motherly irritation appeared. 'Has no one here any sense? Be quiet and sit down. The world will look after itself for a night, without your hand on the rim.

Your blasted Nanny should have taught you what mine did,' said Lymond. 'The things you enjoy most aren't good for you.

Oh, Marigold!" Lymond spoke plaintively. "A silken tongue, a heart of cruelty. Don't berate us. We're only poor scoundrels - vagabonds - scraps of society; unlettered and untaught.

And then the blue eyes, with gentleness, scanned all her new-made body and came to rest on her eyes. 'I have begun to eat,' said Francis Crawford. 'And I have begun to slake my thirst. But in you I have found a banquet under the heavens that will serve me for ever.

It seems we are sparing no cliché. You impertinent oaf of a schoolboy.… It's because you can't have Francis Crawford that you want me. That's all.

Gabriel,' said Jerott firmly, 'is now at Birgu, Malta, engaged in a life-and-death struggle for the Grand Mastership of the Order of St John. He is unlikely to spend a large part of his time arranging esoteric disasters for his adversaries. He is far more likely to arrange to kill them stone dead.'

'All right. You go and get killed stone dead on that side of the garden, and I'll stick to this,' said Lymond.

It is not enough,' Robert Reid said, 'to offer justice. The laws of men, the laws of God himself are not enough unless you know the heart, the tongue, the brain, the gut of your people.

Be kind to her when she comes back. Her love is not only for children but for humanity. She will be a good-hearted and magnificent zealot one day. As her mother is now.
Goodbye, Kate. And below he had signed as he rarely did, with his Christian name.

No, Mr Crawford!' cried Philippa forbiddingly, and ducking under the snatching arms that tried to prevent her, she ran forward. 'No! What harm can Sir Graham do now? What might the little boy become?' And sinking on her knees, she shook, in her vehemence, Lymond's bloodstained arm. 'You castigate the Kerrs and the Scotts and the others, but what is this but useless vengeance? He can do us no harm; he can do Scotland no harm; he can do Malta no harm. There is a baby!' said Philippa, very loudly and insistently and desperately, as if Lymond could not hear her, or were too tired or too simple to understand. 'There is a baby. You can't abandon your son!

The six elephants stood, roped each by the foreleg side by side in the vast thirty-foot tent put up several days since for their comfort; their trunks peacefully swaying as the cowardie scuttled back and forth with limp forkloads of hay. Small puffs of steam came from their mouths. Their breath was sweet, filling the sun-warmed, crisp air; and their hides, soothed, clean and lustrous from the water, lay calm on their great hips like the skin of the moon. Only at the end of the line the great bull stirred a little, the towering back swathed and padded and the knowing eye blurred.

Will he?" said Lymond. "Will you, Marigold?"

Brilliant, youthful face confronted restless one.

A little, malicious smile crossed the Master's face.

"Oh, no, he won't," said Lymond confidently. "He's going to be a naughty, naughty rogue like you and me.

Philippa allowed polite regret to inform every muscle. 'Whatever day it occurs,' she said, 'I feel I have a previous engagement.'

'May I congratulate you,' he said agreeably, 'on your evident popularity.'

'Anything I can do,' Philippa said, 'to save you from the exhaustions of pluralism.

It is not advisable to crow. It might be oneself next time.

And that was when she realized that laughter, which they had lost, had come back to them, and they were whole again.

He was a second too late. Ducking, the felt-capped man, muscles hard, dragged himself out of that grasp and, flinging off to one side, got his balance, glanced once at Jerott, and then darted off into the darkness. After the first step, breathing hard, Jerott stayed where he was, swearing. But he could hardly leave Lymond. He looked up. 'Bravo,' said Francis Crawford, sitting crosslegged on top of the wall, his hood shaken free on his shoulders. 'You're a credit to the bloody Order, aren't you? You know you've got a knife in your hand?

Discomfort without hope of betterment is not a great springboard.

Only common mortals like the Somervilles have good old rotten hates, dear,' said her mother. 'Sir Graham manages to love everybody and wouldn't know what you're talking about. Have a bun.'

'He doesn't love the Turks,' said Philippa. 'He kills them.'

'That isn't hate,' said Kate Somerville. 'That's simply hoeing among one's principles to keep them healthy and neat. I'm sure he would tell you he bears them no personal grudge; and they think they're going to Paradise anyway, so it does everyone good.

Lymond said, 'Have I been talking?'

'We all have, in nightmares. But yours have not been about the sea.

Verily, God hath eighteen thousand worlds; and verily, your world is one of them, and this its bright axle-tree.

I've wed his two empty boots.' 'That you havena,' said Janet, Lady of Buccleuch, lowering her voice not at all in the presence of two hundred twittering Scott relations as they gazed after their vanishing husbands. 'They aye remember their boots. It's their empty nightgowns that get fair monotonous.

I prize freedom of the mind above freedom of the body.

I devised a somewhat arbitrary way out of my own difficulties that evening.

Gilles made up his mind, and snapped, 'D'you write Latin?'
Sometimes Jerott forgot that the blazon of chivalry, with all the status it once had carried, was no longer his. In any case, he had an incredible headache. He stared at this enormous, round-shouldered old man in the filthy nightgown and buskins, and snapped back. 'Of course.

Depose him,' said Will Scott, astonished.

'The Grand Master's holy office terminates with his life.'

'And can nobody think of an answer to that?' said Will Scott.

When Philippa had first demanded his help in eluding Kate and travelling to St Mary's, he had indignantly refused. He was there now because he had discovered, to his astonishment, that she was desperate, and perfectly capable of going without him. Why she had got it into her young head she must see this man Crawford, Cheese-wame didn't know. But after pointing out bitterly that (a) he would lose his job; (b) the rogues in the Debatable would kill them, (c) that she would catch her death of cold and (d) that Kate would never speak to either of them again, he went, his belt filled with knives and her belongings as well as his own in the two saddlebags behind his powerful thighs, while Philippa rode sedately beside him on her smaller horse, green with excitement, with her father's pistol tied to her waist like a ship's log and banging against her thin knees.

Jerott's voice was stony. 'I am prepared to go wherever I can be of most help. I meant only that I expect to be too occupied to give the attention I ought to Mile Marthe's safety. I think M. Gaultier should come with us.'

'Then who,' said Lymond agreeably, 'do you suggest looks after the spinet?'

'Onophrion?'

'Jerott,' said Lymond, with the thinnest edge beginning to show in his voice.

It was the only field, so far, in which the Pearl of Fortune had shown any precocity, other than the feat of keeping her head, her reason and her sense of the ridiculous amid conditions of civilized lunacy.

Happiness, that most childish of states, is infectious. Furthermore, in its innocence, it will not be hidden, even when tempered with sorrow

Jerott?' said Lymond. 'What are you not saying?' His eyes, as the orderly cavalcade paced through the muddy streets, had not left that forceful aquiline face since they met. And Jerott, Philippa saw with disbelief, flushed. For a moment longer, the strict blue eyes studied him; and then Lymond laughed. 'She's an eighteen-year-old blonde of doubtful virginity? Or more frightful still, an eighteen-year-old blonde of unstained innocence? I shall control my impulses, Jerott, I promise you. I'm only going to throw her out if she looks like a troublemaker, or else so bloody helpless that we'll lose lives looking after her. Not everyone,' he said, in a wheeling turn which caught Philippa straining cravenly to hear, 'is one of Nature's Marco Polos like the Somerville offspring.

The crossroads may not be of your own seeking, but at least the road you choose will be your own.

We met once when you were a boy, at Midculter.' He paused. 'You are not like your brother.'

'No,' Crawford said. He gave his hand another shake and then loosed it with apparent reluctance. 'Richard will never be whipped at a cart-arse for bawdry. I don't know whether you notice, but he wears nothing but mockado and fustian. The graveyard at Culter is full of pauperized mercers.

Your husband appears to possess an uncanny gift for seducing his enemies.

And as he followed after the Irishwoman, Margaret Erskine, most levelheaded of women, picked up a Palissy vase, looked at it earnestly and smashed it clean on the floor.

So, as Lymond strode out and stopped, rigid and white by the doorpost, Sybilla set eyes on Francis, the son of her heart; and so Francis Crawford, after four years of unharnessed power, came face to face at last with his mother.

And Kate, falling upon the door and looking up at her self-contained relative by marriage, saw his face torn apart and left, raw as a wound without features; only pain and shock and despair and appalled recognition, all the more terrible for being perfectly voiceless.

Man is a being of varied, manifold and inconstant nature. And woman, by God, is a match for him.

I prefer a society which accepts that I have no choice, and does not pretend that I have. I prefer a God who does what he wills, and rules as he desires, and enjoins on me not to prevent anything against its destiny.

Fools make news, and wise men carry it.

We are here. We will work together for what purpose seems to us right. We will work with calm, and with tolerance and, please God, with saving laughter.

'We know something of men. We know of evil, and of sloth, and of self-seeking ambition. We accept it, and will use what we have of wit and good faith to overcome it.

'And if we do not overcome it, still we are the road; we are the bridge; we are the conduit. For something have we been born. For something have we been brought here. And if we hold firm, the men who peopled our earth need not be ashamed, when the reckoning comes, to say, we worked with all we had been given; and for one another.'

After I convinced them that I was a harmless novelist, I actually got them to give me a tour of the harem - which is usually off limits for tourists.

If I did not know how to live, I shall know how to die.

Lymond surveyed the grinning audience with an air of gentle discovery. Is there no work to be done? Or perhaps it's a holiday?

Humility is a virtue Scotsmen require to be taught.

He didn't always tell his father when it happened, because the old man's face turned mottled blue over his doublet, and unless Will got in first, he would send a runner round all the estates, and the threshing would stop while grousing, reluctant men straggled back for their pikes and swords and mail shirts, taking a long time about it, waiting for Buccleuch the Younger to come up, furious on his sweating horse, and tell them curtly to get back to the fields.

Something comes out of every voyage,' said the other man sharply. 'Out of every bloody fruitless endeavour. All the striving after the unknowable. The unattainable, the search for Athor, the creative force, rolled into a circle. You with your quest; I with my care-ridden Emperor; Sir Thomas, sitting before the fire, his bowels burning before him. We add something. If we didn't add something, there would be no object in it.

Francis Crawford's face in this fleeting moment of privacy was filled with ungovernable feeling: of shock and of pain and of a desire beyond bearing: the desire of the hart which longs for the waterbrook, and does not know, until it sees the pool under the trees, for what it has thirsted.

Disdainful of fur and fretful, privately, about the cost of his buttons, Jerott Blyth sat like the born horseman he was, and watched discreetly for trouble.

The unicorns, led by costumed grooms, were behaving well about their horns, and the painted rhapsodies all round the cart were more than flattering while the pseudo-king, sceptred in ermine, was positively handsome, as well as resembling the real one quite a lot. The small boy acting as the Dauphin, was obviously his son. It was easy to guess that the angel and the other three children, demure on tasselled cushions, were also related. Reminded by the red heads before her, the Queen Dowager spoke absently to Margaret Erskine. 'I must tell your mother to destroy that marmoset. Mary teases it, and it bites.

They are afraid of him?' D'Harcourt raised his comedian's eyebrows.

Danny Hislop's bright teeth flashed in his hairless, unremarkable face. 'If they were afraid, they'd tear him to pieces like schoolgirls. My guess is that he's gorgeous. A terrible tease and nasty at moments, but oh Maeve, he has such a way with him.… Is he gorgeous, dear Adam?'

Adam Blacklock, thus addressed, said quietly, 'Undoubtedly gorgeous.

I have a feeling that someone is going to be malicious, and we may as well set them a standard. Shall we go in, lewd and rude, and provoke them?

I'm sorry,' said Jerott, his eyes elsewhere. What was the attraction here, in God's name? Not the little woman in the stained gown, surely? Or the plain fourteen-year-old who had been so courageous the night Trotty died?

Tuned to the din, O'LiamRoe and his deerhound heard the footfalls at once. Shaggy brindle next to hispid gold, the two Irish heads turned as Thady Boy Ballagh strolled over the grass.

For him, it was now of no importance, as his place in the world was of no consequence. He was home, after long and harsh buffeting. And it was she, who knew his quality as Grey had done, who had to live with the knowledge that there was no channel by which it could continue; that for the purposes of the present world the flourish, so brief, was now over with.

Will he travel tomorrow?'

They both gazed, united in fascination, at the insensible and manhandled person of the sacrosanct Voevoda Bolshoia. 'I doubt it,' said Ludovic d'Harcourt.

But he did. He stirred some time after that conversation, and if his awakening took rather less time than was obvious, the effect was to cheat Danny Hislop's expectant ears of whatever uncouth revelations he was hoping for. Without warning, his eyes closed, Lymond said, 'Hislop?'

'Yes sir?' said Danny, jumping. Then he said sympathetically, 'How are you, sir?'

'Well enough to guess which vulture would be present,' said Lymond pleasantly.

Scott, deaf and enchanted in the gallery, and the whole row of pretty heads at his side saw the concerted rush on Lymond: his assailants downed him without malice and eighteen stones of Molly planted themselves on his chest. "A throw!" said Molly, and Lymond, half buried, gave a choked whoop of laughter and raised a defeated hand in signal to Tammas.

I must apologize for these damned entrances,' said Francis Crawford of Lymond. 'I feel Tom here never knows if he should send for a bishop or start a round of applause.

Well, get the coffer out," said Tobie roundly. "You find his clean clothes and I'll cut his hair round his cap and wash his ears out. Then, when we get to the Palazzo Medici, you imitate his voice and I'll sit him on my knee and move his arms up and down. Where is the problem?

If they place the sun in my right hand and the moon in my left and ask me to give up my mission, I will not give it up until the truth prevails or I myself perish in the attempt.

Don't you think you should retire again? The first retiral seems to have got mislaid.

Where are the links of the chain ... joining us to the past?