Baroness Emma Magdolna Rozalia Maria Jozefa Borbala "Emmuska" Orczy de Orczi (23 September 1865 - 12 November 1947) was a British novelist, playwright and artist of Hungarian noble origin. She is most known for her series of novels featuring the Scarlet Pimpernel. Set in Holland in 1623/1624, The Laughing Cavalier, by British novelist Baroness Orczy, revolves around Percy Blake, a foreign adventurer and ancestor of the Scarlet Pimpernel who goes by the name Diogenes. Diogenes, we are told by Orczy, is the real subject of the famous painting The Laughing Cavalier by Frans Hals. The son of an...

It was not, Heaven help us all a very uncommon occurrence these days: a woman almost unsexed by misery, starvation, and the abnormal excitement engendered by daily spectacles of revenge and of cruelty. They were to be met with every day, round every street corner, these harridans, more terrible far than were the men. This one was still comparatively young, thirty at most; would have been good-looking too, for the features were really delicate, the nose chiselled, the brow straight, the chin round and small. But the mouth Heavens, what a mouth Hard and cruel and thin-lipped; and those eyes ...

A surging, seething, murmuring crowd of beings that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate. The hour, some little time before sunset, and the place, the West Barricade, at the very spot where, a decade later, a proud tyrant raised an undying monument to the nation's glory and his own vanity.

Master Hymn-of-Praise Busy folded his hands before him ere he spoke: "Nay but I tell thee, woman, that the Lord hath no love for such frivolities and alack but 'tis a sign of the times that an English Squire should favor such evil ways." "Evil ways? The Lord love you, Master Hymn-of-Praise, and pray do you call half an hour at the skittle alley 'evil ways'?" "Aye, evil it is to indulge our sinful bodies in such recreation as doth not tend to the glorification of the Lord and the sanctification of our immortal souls."

The perfect calm of an early spring dawn lies over headland and sea-hardly a ripple stirs the blue cheek of the bay. The softness of departing night lies upon the bosom of the Mediterranean like the dew upon the heart of a flower. A silent dawn. Veils of transparent greys and purples and mauves still conceal the distant horizon. Breathless calm rests upon the water and that awed hush which at times descends upon Nature herself when the finger of Destiny marks an eventful hour. But now the grey and the purple veils beyond the headland are lifted one by one; the midst of dawn rises upwards like...

The gaffers stood round and shook their heads. When the Corporal had finished reading the Royal Proclamation, one or two of them sighed in a desultory fashion, others murmured casually, "Lordy Lordy to think on it Dearie me " The young ones neither sighed nor murmured. They looked at one another furtively, then glanced away again, as if afraid to read each other's thoughts, and in a shamefaced manner wiped their moist hands against their rough cord breeches.

"God bless them all they are good lads." It was now close on eight o'clock and more than two hours ago since first the dawn broke over that low-lying horizon line which seems so far away, and tinged the vast immensity of the plain first with grey and then with mauve and pale-toned emerald, with rose and carmine and crimson and blood-red, until the sun-triumphant and glorious at last-woke the sunflowers from their sleep, gilded every tiny blade of grass and every sprig of rosemary, and caused every head of stately maize to quiver with delight at the warmth of his kiss.

Even Noailles, in his letters to his royal master, admits that the weather was glorious, and that the climatic conditions left nothing to be desired. Even Noailles Noailles, who detested England as the land of humid atmospheres and ill-dressed women Renard, who was more of a diplomatist and kept his opinions on the fogs and wenches of Old England very much to himself, declared enthusiastically in his letter to the Emperor Charles V, dated October 2nd, 1553, that never had he seen the sky so blue, the sun so bright, nor the people of this barbarous island more merry than on the memorable...

"D'Aumont " "Eh? d'Aumont " The voice, that of a man still in the prime of life, but already raucous in its tone, thickened through constant mirthless laughter, rendered querulous too from long vigils kept at the shrine of pleasure, rose above the incessant babel of women's chatter, the din of silver, china and glasses passing to and fro.

"Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth, is Mount Zion...."-Psalm xlviii. 2. And it came to pass in Rome after the kalends of September, and when Caius Julius Caesar Caligula ruled over Imperial Rome. Arminius Quirinius, the censor, was dead. He had died by his own hand, and thus was a life of extortion and of fraud brought to an ignominious end through the force of public opinion, and by the decree of that same Caesar who himself had largely benefited by the mal-practices of his minion."