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Held by Chinese Brigands

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Год написания книги
2017
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"I think it is," said the boy, and then he added: "You are a strange man indeed."

"I believe I am," said Ling. "A singular mixture: evil and good, brutality and kindness, strength and weakness."

"I should not call you weak," said the boy.

"Then you do not know me, after all. What was all my vanity and boasting but weakness? What right has any man to boast? In the midst of the universe he is smaller than the ant; his voice, beside the thunder, is no more than the croaking of a frog. And now, bid me farewell, for I am about to die, and would gladly do so, that the pain I suffer may be ended."

It was just as if the man passed into the other world of his own free will. Slowly he closed his eyes; and then he breathed no more. The features of his face relaxed; the hardness and the cruelty, the lines of agony and crime, vanished from his features. The tiger was no more. And let us believe what he himself believed: that the evil that was in him remained upon this earth in that great casket of sinew, nerve and muscle, destined to decay, and the good that was within him-all that was noble and heroic, the great thoughts that he had had and the wisdom he had acquired-was carried by his soul into what he himself had described as "the expansive arch of heaven."

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