Beast

excerpt I May the flame of Saint Vitus strike you, bubblehead! and the slaps shot out in pair like two barrels firing in unison. The one to give them was a very upset Simion Mandruta, and the one to receive them was his rascal of a son, Toader, thin like a rake, fair-haired,

Can you still remember hearing once a story told to you by meOf the wolf who chanced anointed to the royal throne to be?I shall now impart what followed in his state or polity. Hearing first His lawful Highness that under his reign and ruleMost of his revered lieutenants

Once there was an old woman and an old man. The old bag had a hen and the old man, a rooster; the woman's hen laid eggs twice a day and the hag would eat a barrel of eggs; and to the greyhead she would give none. One day, the old man lost his temper and spoke:Old woman,

One day Nassredin the Hajji, down a lane and past a rail,Walking, caught in so much wonder one rich sight, beyond the pale:In a rich man's yard an ass foal gaudily bedecked was, all,Clad in very gaudy harness gold embroidered and preparing for a day's big festival

excerpt The sweet-watered Danube plunges into the salt-watered sea with a sluggish sort of rage soon to be changed into tranquil candor – the grand finale of a classic novel. Fabulous, resplendent, etc. , the Delta comes across at times as a sheer waste of waters, an

I enter Sulina as one would enter a myth; that is to say, I have that feeling of chimerical quality, of life heightened into memory. The ship sets anchor, therefore I find myself at Sulina, the gateway to the Delta, watching the white countenance of the town, the neatly

On the arm… downstream. Facing a grove with sparse trees, the Danube pauses in an endless lake, segregating at the bottom. Silvery waved, the Saint George Arm rushes to the right – a dead arm, with no fishermen's boats on it, only a decrepit Turkish town the likes

From the hotel on the lake we proceeded to the fisheries. Leaden clouds began to lour in the sky, a sharp wind began to blow; and the willows on the banks writhed in every direction. Far off, in the lakes, as far as our eyes could see from the upper deck of the ship, the

(not for children's use) For many years after the fall of communism, the association between Romania and children meant a hellhole: European champions of neonatal and infant mortality (16. 7 % in 2003, down from 26. 9 % in 1990), juvenile AIDS (almost 9000 cases of