[…] him in his house, down-lying and up-rising

If you're cast for fatigue by a sergeant unkind, Don't grouse like a woman, nor crack on, nor blind; Be handy and civil, and then you will find That it's beer for the young British soldier.

“Now in here,” their guide, sweating dark tentacles into his tab collar, briefed them, “you are going to see the members of the third sex, the lavender crowd this city by the Bay is so justly famous for.

Broken only by brief, grudging truces and attended since the middle of the century by periodic visitations of plague and famine, the long war had almost completely stripped their rocky, starveacre land of what little wealth it possessed.