This blow should be given fore-handed, as soon as the colt has quitted the wall.

We used a descending sort.

With that, he stood rasping his beard, and frowning at her, and going back a few paces to frown and peer at her from this and that angle. Cora knew what that meant, and stood to be tonalised, relieving self-consciousness in her muscles by stretching and relaxing, and preening up her breasts in those cat-like turnings and twistings of her body that seemed to make an ostentatious exhibition of its graces because of her affectation of unawareness in being looked at.

to cram fruit into a basket; to cram a room with people