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1 " Sir Arthur stopped at the bottom of the hill and awaited the charging rider. The horseman halted in front of Sir Arthur and mud flew in all directions.“Who are you?” demanded Sir Arthur. He stared into the masked face and turbaned head of an assassin.Rufus's heart stopped. A gasp escaped his frozen lips and his legs wobbled.Sir Arthur asked again, “Who are you?”The man dismounted and drew from his golden sash a long scimitar. He approached Sir Arthur. The knight lifted his sword and the duel began. "
2 " He does seem rather taken with you,” Jacques said, almost sending Ignatius off bleating with laughter. The man sounded quite perplexed and put out that the horseman had chosen another over him.“The same could be said of you,” Ignatius reminded him, thinking of a forced seduction by chicken. "
3 " When I was a child I had a fishless aquarium. My father set it up for me with gravel and plants and pebbles before he'd got the fish and I asked him to leave it as it was for a while. The pump kept up a charming burble, the green-gold light was wondrous when the room was dark. I put in a china mermaid and a tin horseman who maintained a relationship like that of the figures on Keat's Grecian urn except that the horseman grew rusty. Eventually fish were pressed upon me and they seemed an intrusion, I gave them to a friend. All that aquarium wanted was the sound of the pump, the gently waving plants, the mysterious pebbles and the silent horseman forever galloping to the mermaid smiling in the green-gold light. I used to sit and look at them for hours. The mermaid and the horseman were from my father. I have them in a box somewhere here, I'm not yet ready to take them out and look at them again. "
― Russell Hoban , Turtle Diary
4 " In these days when science is clearly in the saddle and when our knowledge of disease is advancing at a breathless pace, we are apt to forget that not all can ride and that he also serves who waits and who applies what the horseman discovers. "
