An old man in a dress of the quaintest simplicity ascended a platform, wiped the dust from his spectacles, and, in a voice of suppressed emotion "lined the hymn," of which that vast multitude could recite the words, to be sung with an air in which every voice could join.

A bob of courtesy, wholly charming, prefaced a reply pattered in English of quaintest accent: "You' handmaidenChou Nu is my name.

He was nothing if not superlative: his diatribes, now culminating in a very extravaganza of hyperbolenow sailing with loose wing through the downy, witched, Dutch cloud-heaps of some quaintest tramontane Nephelococcugia of thoughtnow laying down law of the Medes for the actual world of to-dayhad oft-times the strange effect of bringing back to my mind the very singular old-epic epithet,

From month to month has the exhaustless flow Of thy original mind, its wealth revealing, With quaintest humour, and deep pathos healing The World's rude wounds, revived Life's early glow:

She has the quaintest way of handing her surplus cavaliers on to me, but I really much prefer Victor and Boggley as companions.

" Tom looked at him with the quaintest smile: a flush of mingled anger and contempt had been rising in him as he heard the ex-bottle-boy talking sentiment: but he only went on quietly, "No, sir; with your more delicate sensibilities, you may thank Heaven that you did not become a medical man; your life would have been one of torture, disgust, and agonising sense of responsibility.

The quaintest rose-leaf of a Rosalind she looked, just a wisp of grace, utterly unlike a boy.

He followed it, careless whither he went; and in five minutes found himself in the quaintest little woodland cavern he ever had seen.

Altogether there is the quaintest and most unexpected mingling of the ancient and modern in the little feudal town.

And whereas up to fifty years ago Burford was a rich country town, famous for the manufacture of paper, malt, and sailclothenriched, too, by the constant passage of numerous coaches stopping on their way from Oxford to Gloucesterit is now little more than a villagethe quietest, the cleanest, and the quaintest place in Oxfordshire.

Engaged with these are columns bearing elaborately carved capitals embellished with little figures of the quaintest workmanship.

The nave entrance has two columns on each side supporting archivolts, and upon the capitals of these columns are carved figures of the quaintest Romanesque character, illustrating Biblical subjects.

In his book, published in 1871, Mr. Hazard says: "Puerto Principe (the present Camaguey) is, probably, the oldest, quaintest town on the island,in fact, it may be said to be a finished town, as the world has gone on so fast that the place seems a million years old, and from its style of dress, a visitor might think he was put back almost to the days of Columbus."

The London taverns heard always the quaintest conversation, whether it was Ben Johnson's at the Mermaid or Sam Johnson's at the Cock.

I feel convinced that if all men had their own, the invocation I have just quoted would fly back into the works of Shirley, and so, no doubt, would the following quaintest bit of conceited fancy.

The wide portion of the High Street at once attracts one's notice, for with one or two exceptions its whole length is full of the quaintest of buildings with cream walls and mossy tiled roofs.

It is the quaintest and prettiest of all the quaint and pretty towns I have seen.

Probably he would have been quite disturbed; for many of these clerics entertain the quaintest of old-world ideas.

"Marvin," it read, "the prettiest, quaintest village on the south shore.

This was the Bigelow house, the joint property of Mrs. Dr. Van Buren, née Sophia Bigelow, who lived in Boston, and her sister, Miss Barbara Bigelow, the quaintest and kindest-hearted woman who ever bore the sobriquet of an old maid, and was aunt to everybody.

As the train neared that quaintest of old cities, toward which my heart warms anew as I think of it, he broke the silence as though we had held a long and heated argument on the matter.

Meanwhile at many cradles Her busy foot she plied, Humming the quaintest lullaby That ever rocked a child.

But one of the quaintest touches in the whole affair was that his strongest private reason for holding back, at first, from the splendid appointment as British Minister was that he did not wish to tie himself for five years longer in Chinaand yet after all he was to stay twenty-five willingly in the land of his exile.

It is near one of the quaintest little villages that the past ages have left us, and not far away are the beautiful waters of the Bristol Channel, with the mountains of Wales rising against the sky on the horizon, and all about are hills and valleys, and woods and beautiful moors and babbling streams, with all the loveliness of cultivated rurality merging into the wild beauties of unadorned nature."

He was the quaintest baby, Annethe cutest morsel you ever saw.