Excerpt from Dead-Sea Fruit It is but a thankless task to catalogue such a face; the dark gray eyes which pass for black; the mobile month which, in one moment, seems formed to express an unbending pride and an in domitable will, and in the next will wreathe itself into such a smile that it must needs appear incapable of any expression but manly tenderness or playful humour; the loosely arranged auburn hair, which gives something of a leonine aspect to the lofty head; the complexion of almost womanly fairness, with a rich glow that comes and goes with every changing impulse or emotion - all these go such a little way towards the Individuality of the young Englishman walking up and down the lonely square during his half-hour's respite from the monotonous duties of the afternoon. This half-hour's holiday was not Mr. Thorburn's only privio lege. He had two hours in every day for his own studies - two hours which he generally spent in the public library, for his ambition had shaped itself into a palpable form, and had mapped the outline of a career. He was to be a man of letters. If he had been a rich man, he would have shut himself in his library and made himself a poet. But as he was nothing but a name less and penniless stripling, with his bread to earn, he had no right to indulge in the luxury of verse-making. The wide arena of literary labour lay before him, and he had no choice but to force his way into the lists, and fight for any place that might happen to be vacant. Fate might make of him what she would journalist, novelist, dramatist, magazine-hack, penny-a-liner; but she must use him very cruelly before she could quench the fire of his young ambition, or bend the crest with which he was pre pared to confront the world. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.