A CHILD'S NIGHTMARE Through long nursery nights he stood By my bed unwearying, Loomed gigantic, formless, queer, Purring in my haunted ear That same hideous nightmare thing, Talking, as he lapped my blood, In a voice cruel and flat, Saying for ever, "Cat! ...

"Come, Kit-ty, come; you need not fear, Nor make that plain-tive mew; Don't be a-fraid, but ven-ture near, And lap the milk we bring you here,

The lakes are lapping their granite shores and wearing them away, and every one of these rills and young rivers is fretting the air into music, and carrying the mountains to the plains.

In the summer time the drouth lapped up its waters, and it dried away to a little brook, trickling over the falls, and went winding, a small streamlet, around the base of the hill; sometimes it disappeared in the gravel, or among the loose stones, save here and there a pool of narrow limits and shallow depth.

I should love to gaze out on the wild feline element from a front window of my own, just as I should love to look on a caged panther, and see it stretch its shining length, and then curl over and lap its smooth sides, and by-and-by begin to lash itself into rage and show its white teeth and spring at its bars, and howl the cry of its mad, but, to me, harmless fury.

Still holding the cup on her knee, where Matilde could not possibly see it, she quietly fished the superfluous piece of sugar out with her teaspoon, and bending down again she deposited it in the saucer from which the cat was lapping the last drops of cream.

As the girl had said, the tops of pines alone met the view, miles on miles of them, undulating, rising, swelling, breaking against the barrier of a dike, or lapping the foot of a great round boulder-mountain.

The sleepy waves lapping the sand unfurled themselves along the shore that extended as far as the eye could see, but where land began, it was limited by the downs which separated it from the "Swamp," a large meadow shaped like a hippodrome.

I had been down to the bar lapping up a few drinks and pretty soon a band comes up the street.

Into this broke the passion of the gliding lovers, deep and strong, giving a soul to the whole, and fading away again, behind its wild beating,with the silence of lapping ripple and dipping oar.

An' then"sinking her voice and speaking hurriedly and excitedly"I looked up at sky (we was out o' doors i' my dream), an' then I saw it all full o' light, and rays coomin', goldy rays, same assame as ye see sometimes on a Christmas card; an' they coom down, an' gathered all about my mother, an' lapped her round.

The waves lapping the beach helped muffle my footsteps, but no other sound reached my ears, nor could my eyes perceive the slightest movement along the water surface within reach of vision.

He was living the fulfilment of his dreams in exile, lounging in the stern in the ancient clothes he had purchased, his feet stretched comfortably before him in their broken shoes, one foot upon a thwart, the other hanging overside so laxly that occasional ripples lapped the run-over heel.

The idle waters of the lagoon, lying without tide or current in eternal indolence, rippled and sparkled in breeze and sunlight with a merry surface activity, and seemed to lap the leaky little boat more swiftly on its way.

Crops of the grey coral moss, and hoary thyme, Or laps with rosy tongue the melting rime, Eyes with mute tenderness her distant dam, Or seems to bleat a vegetable lamb.

As we float away through the watery streets, old Shylock shuffles across the bridge,black barges glide by us in the silent canals,groups of unfamiliar faces lean from the balconies,and we hear the plashing waters lap the crumbling walls of Venice, with its dead Doges and decaying palaces.

One galley, Hecuba, there lingereth yet, Lapping the wave, to gather the last freight Of Pyrrhus' spoils for Thessaly.

A brave great window it was, and I mind me how many a dark summer's night, we two leaned over its edge and watched the soft flow of the River of the Cross, where its shadowy tide came up and lapped the stone foundations of that old house by the water-side,I and Angus.

In a tavern of foul repute three men were lapping gin.

Monsieur Tudesco heard him out, lapping up a glass of Chartreuse drop by drop the while, and taking snuff from a screw of paper.

In the wet sand, where the incoming waves lapped his hands and feet, Nathaniel sank down, his eyes staring out into the shimmering distance where Marion had gone.

Now the stream laps my vesture hem; Back thou from my sad bosom to the world, Leaving me here this current cold to stem; Soon from thy sight shall I be swiftly whirl'd Into the mystic darknessnever fear!

The cook who served up the dwarf in a pie (to continue the frolic) might have lapped up such an historian as this in the bill of fare.

'If you can picture our house nestling below this small hill on a long stretch of black sand, with many tons of provision cases ranged in neat blocks in front of it and the sea lapping the icefoot below, you will have some idea of our immediate vicinity.

The three sat unmoved, blinking into the live charcoal, save at rare intervals when the elder of the two women cast a handful of fragrance upon the brazier and wrapped us all in a fresh pall of smoke which billowed round the room and lapped the interstices of the rotten tiles.