Young David
Hardy grew up in the house with this woman and as can well be imagined there was not much joy in his childhood.
The voyageurs or boatmen were the rank and file in the service of the trader, and even the
hardy "men of the north," those great rufflers and game birds, were fain to be paddled from point to point of their migrations.
The morrow having arrived, I was going from my hotel to the wharf, when Captain
Hardy met me and said that, "owing to circumstances"(a stupid but convenient phrase), "he rather thought the'Independence' would not sail for a day or two, and that when all was ready, he would send up and let me know." This I thought strange, for there was a stiff southerly breeze; but as "the circumstances" were not forthcoming, although I pumped for them with much perseverance, I had nothing to do but to return home and digest my impatience at leisure.
"And it is not long since a knight of the island of Rhodes that was
hardy and valiant said that he would kiss her.
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), the first of the rather prominent group of recent Scotch writers of fiction, is as different as possible from
Hardy. Destined for the career of civil engineer and lighthouse builder in which his father and grandfather were distinguished, he proved unfitted for it by lack both of inclination and of health, and the profession of law for which he later prepared himself was no more congenial.
I am portraying this
hardy companion as I really knew him.
Already Dantes had visited this maritime Bourse two or three times, and seeing all these
hardy free-traders, who supplied the whole coast for nearly two hundred leagues in extent, he had asked himself what power might not that man attain who should give the impulse of his will to all these contrary and diverging minds.
But those were not more noble than the others,
hardy barbarians, forests, and morasses.
The last I see of the
hardy little creatures they are taking a drink of water, side by side, and biting each other sportively in higher spirits than ever!
Sacred To the Memory of The late Captain Ezekiel
Hardy, Who in the bows of his boat was killed by a Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan, August 3d, This Tablet Is erected to his Memory by His Widow.
Even the farrier did not negative this sentiment: on the contrary, he took it up as peculiarly his own, and invited any
hardy person present to contradict him.
At their hospitable boards I occasionally met with partners, and clerks, and
hardy fur traders from the interior posts; men who had passed years remote from civilized society, among distant and savage tribes, and who had wonders to recount of their wide and wild peregrinations, their hunting exploits, and their perilous adventures and hair-breadth escapes among the Indians.