QUOTE
Then they were ordered to resume their march, and they moved on into battle, jesting at God and sudden death. But before he had passed from their hearing, Bacchus Pentland turned and shouted at the staring boys once more his triumphant prophecy of eternal life.
"Hit's a-comin', boys. Tell yore folks hit's a-comin'."
The boy Oliver stared down the road, the hard Dutch order of his life touched by the scarecrow gallantry of the ragged men, with a grey darkening of his small cold eyes as there arose in him the obscure and passionate hunger for voyages that had led from Fenchurch Street to Philadelphia. And as his gaze followed the burly figure of the prophet, he was touched by something strange and fleeting, far more remote than Armageddon. He had been touched by the dark finger of Chance, but he did not know it.
Thomas Wolfe, O Lost, p. 12
Thomas Wolfe, O Lost, A Story of the Buried Life,
The original version of Look Homeward, Angel,
Text established by A. Bruccoli and M.J. Bruccoli,
University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, SC, 2000.