تحت السماء الواسعة المرصعة بالنجوم احفر لي قبرا، ودعني أرقد. - Robert Louis Stevenson

Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more by-path meadows, where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave. Idleness, which is often becoming and even wise in the bachelor, begins to wear a different aspect when you have a wife to support.

It was Silver's voice, and before I had heard a dozen words, I would not have shown myself for all the world. I lay there, trembling and listening, in the extreme of fear and curiostiy, for, in those dozen words, I understood that the lives of all the honest men aboard depended on me alone.

The gift of reading, as I have called it, is not very common, nor very generally understood. It consists, first of all, in a vast intellectual endowment - a free grace, I find I must call it - by which a man rises to understand that he is not punctually right, nor those from whom he differs absolutely wrong.