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More "Accidental" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... whose art was 'joy in widest commonalty spread.' Mr. Crane began his lecture by pointing out that Art had two fields, aspect and adaptation, and that it was primarily with the latter that the designer was concerned, his object being not literal fact but ideal beauty. With the unstudied and accidental effects of Nature the designer had nothing to do. He sought for principles and proceeded by geometric plan and abstract line and colour. Pictorial art is isolated and unrelated, and the frame is the last relic of the old connection between ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... interesting features in this connection. Admitting such inoculation may secure immunity, recent experiments in the action of this as well as kindred poisons give no grounds for believing it at all universal or even common, but as depending upon occult physiological or accidental phenomena. For instance, the writer and his father are equally proof against the contagion and inoculation of vaccination and variola, in spite of repeated attempts to secure both, while their respective mothers ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... but not exceed the compass of your imagination. But how shall I convey to you an idea of the ever-varying and accidental beauties of this majestic scenery! Sometimes the vapour-winged tempest, flitting along some lonely vale, embrowns it with a solemn shade, whilst every thing around glitters in the fullness of meridian splendour. On a sudden, all is dark and gloomy; the thunder rolls from rock to ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... moment he realised that he had heard the intonation of Miss Wycliffe's voice, or had imagined it. He would doubtless have thought it mere imagination, some accidental resemblance to which his ear had given identity, had not Cardington's manner registered a sudden emotional disturbance. He paused in his narration, like one smitten with mental atrophy and searching for the word that was about to reach ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... seemed to be descended from as good parentage, was as well dressed and fed, and held in as much estimation as those who employed him; they were once nearly related; their different degrees of prosperity is what has caused the various shades of their community. But this accidental difference has introduced, as yet, neither arrogance nor pride on the one part, nor meanness and servility on the other. All their houses are neat, convenient, and comfortable; some of them are filled with two families, for when the husbands are at sea, the wives require less house-room. ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... that there might be water to wash the statue'. JOHNSON. 'Nay, sir, the argument from the name is gone. The name is exhausted by what we see. We have no occasion to go to a distance for what we can pick up under our feet. Had it been an accidental name, the similarity between it and Anaitis might have had something in it; but it turns out to be a mere physiological name.' Macleod said, Mr M'Queen's knowledge of etymology had destroyed his conjecture. JOHNSON. 'You ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... admit, Mr. Langford," the chairman replied, "is a very strong point in your evidence. It is your only strong point, however, and there is just a possibility that we may all be misled by a mere accidental resemblance. Will you permit me to see ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... chameleonship that his greatest good fortune lies. He has only to change his habitat—his ASSOCIATIONS. But the impulse to do it must come from the OUTSIDE—he cannot originate it himself, with that purpose in view. Sometimes a very small and accidental thing can furnish him the initiatory impulse and start him on a new road, with a new idea. The chance remark of a sweetheart, "I hear that you are a coward," may water a seed that shall sprout and bloom and flourish, and ended in producing a surprising fruitage—in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... but momentary, and might have been accidental, the person inside having evidently given orders to let them pass. Leaning on his oar against the out-flowing tide, the gondolier took his hat off and bowed lowly, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... provoking a second edition of it. The Earl was grieved—so far as a nature like his could entertain grief—to lose his second wife; but to find that the first wife had been discovered, and by her daughter, possessed the additional character of insult. That the occurrence was accidental did not alter matters. Words would not content the aggrieved mourner: his hand sought the hilt of his sword, and Sir Richard, thinking discretion the better part of valour, made his way, as quickly as ...
— The Well in the Desert - An Old Legend of the House of Arundel • Emily Sarah Holt
... more richly cultivated, or who was more calculated to adorn the highest station. And here he was wasting life in a secluded village in a foreign country! What would become of him after his present apparently slender resources should be exhausted, was painful to imagine. The more painful, that the accidental discovery of the direction of a letter had disclosed his former rank. It was part of an envelope addressed, "A Monsieur Monsieur le Comte Choynowski," and left as a mark in a book, all except the name being torn off. But the fact needed no confirmation. All his habits and ways of ...
— Country Lodgings • Mary Russell Mitford
... that for fully an hour I felt ill; and I spoke quite wickedly to George the day after he arrived, because he said that Sholto had better not take me down to dinner, although his doing so was quite accidental. I know you will believe me when I tell you that I was quite unconscious that he had been unusually attentive to me; and I was about to write you an indignant denial, only I shewed Nelly your letter, and she crushed me by telling me she had noticed it too. We ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... a moment as this, a single accidental shot (several such have happened this morning; a woman standing at a window at the corner of the Rue Saint Marc was nearly killed by the carelessness, of one of the Guards),—a single shot, a cry even, or a menacing gesture would suffice to kindle the blaze. Nobody. moves or speaks. ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... historians, was attracted to Ireland by a noble sympathy for the fallen which he shared with very few of his fellow-countrymen. We are told that he sympathized with the spirit of Irish nationality. "A State," he would say, "is accidental; it can be made or unmade; but a nation is something real which can be ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... mistakes," Bellamy assured her. "He saw Laverick enter that passage and come out. Afterwards he went back to his office, although he had closed up there and had been on his homeward way. The thing could not have been accidental." ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Neal, a member of the Royal Society of London.—Translator. Sir Paul Neal, whose lapsus suggested this fable, thought he had discovered an animal in the moon. Unluckily, however, after having made his "discovery" known, it was found that the ground of it was simply the accidental presence of a mouse in the object-glass of his telescope. Samuel Butler, the author of "Hudibras," has also made fun of this otherwise rather tragical episode in the early history of the Royal Society of London, vide his "Elephant in the Moon." [27] One philosopher.—Democritus, ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... his son's infancy and boyhood Michael Gregoriev, disregarding all thought of his child, saw practically nothing of the boy. He had, in his heart, some faint satisfaction concerning Ivan's sex, mingled with a fancy, gained after one accidental interview, that nevertheless, considering his tastes and traits, Sophia's child should have been a girl. Later, as Ivan began to emerge a little from utter childishness, his father had resorted occasionally to his school-room to search the little dweller there for certain longed-for ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... ELLEN,—Arthur wishes you would burn my letters. He was out when I commenced this letter, but he has just come in. It is not "old friends" he mistrusts, he says, but the chances of war—the accidental passing of letters into hands and under eyes for ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... that a peculiarity appearing in a caterpillar (or in a child, as shown by the hereditariness of peculiarities in the milk-teeth) reappears in its offspring, so we can at once see that our common principle of the selection of slight accidental variations would modify and adapt a caterpillar to a new or changing condition, precisely as in the full-grown butterfly. Hence probably it is that caterpillars of different species of the Lepidoptera differ more than those embryos, at a corresponding early period of life, ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... butter and potatoes into the kitchen. This project of theirs at first comprehended vegetables of every description and fruits as well, but the sagacious house-maid vetoed anything so wholesale as all that. She agreed that the accidental delivery of a side of bacon, or a mistake in the counting of a dozen eggs, or the overweighing and undercharging of a pound of butter, or the perfectly natural error of sending a peck and a half of potatoes ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... human inconsistency that one of the interests of the new place to her was the accidental virtues of its lying near her forefathers' country (for they were not Blakemore men, though her mother was Blakemore to the bone). The dairy called Talbothays, for which she was bound, stood not remotely from some of the ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... I may never again be in a state of mind so unchristian as the mental frame in which I lived for some weeks, respecting the memory of Master B. Whether his bell was rung by rats, or mice, or bats, or wind, or what other accidental vibration, or sometimes by one cause, sometimes another, and sometimes by collusion, I don't know; but, certain it is, that it did ring two nights out of three, until I conceived the happy idea of twisting Master B.'s neck—in other words, ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... this history would have been written but for an accidental and highly interesting circumstance. In the first party young Jack Irons rode a colt, just broken, with the girl captive, now happily released. The boy had helped every one to get away; then there seemed to be no ridable horse for him. He walked for a distance by the stranger's mount ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... one I shouldn't be able to say for certain; because once a thing's done, no one ever knows how it happened. Oh! dear me, the mystery of life; The inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of our possessions we have—what an accidental affair this living is after all our civilization—let me just count over a few of the things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that seems always the most mysterious of losses—what cat would gnaw, what rat would nibble—three ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... department is genuinely interested in declining "fraudulent and unworthy" copy, I would call their attention to the ridiculous claims of Dr. Shoop's medicines, which "cure" almost every disease; to two hair removers, one an "Indian Secret", the other an "accidental discovery", both either fakes or dangerous; to the lying claims of Hall's Catarrh Cure, that it is "a positive cure for catarrh", in all its stages; to "Syrup of Figs", which is not a fig syrup, but a ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... looked, but saw nothing different from the general surface in that quarter. The master beckoned the negro, and touching a stone not wider than his three fingers, but reddish in hue, and looking like mere chinking lodged in an accidental crevice, signed him to strike it with the end of the bar. Once—twice—the stone refused to stir; with the third blow it was driven in out of sight, and, being followed vigorously, was heard to drop on the other side. The wall thereupon, to the height of the sarcophagus and the width ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... arbitrarily chosen, and changeable at will, must therefore necessarily lead to error, and it has done so to a very great extent. For this designation makes it appear as though the Jewish element in the Christian religion were something accidental, while it is rather the case that all Christianity, in so far as something alien is not foisted into it, appears as the religion of Israel perfected and spiritualised. We are therefore not justified in speaking of Jewish Christianity, where ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... and improper to be in a room at all, but to have anything to do with a young lady seemed to him impossible. He cast down his eyes and hurried out as if it were none of his business, careful as he went not to inflict any accidental injury on ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... Greek is [Greek: naulos] or [Greek: naulon], and in Latin naulum. Have these any connexion with the Arabic word, or are they to be traced to an independent source, and the coincidence in sense and sound with the Arabic merely accidental? If distinct, are the words now in use in the Mediterranean ports derived from the Greek or the Arabic? If the words be not identical, may not the Greek be derived from the Sanscrit, thus [Sanskrit: nau], nau, or in the pure form [Sanskrit: nawah], nawah, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 54, November 9, 1850 • Various
... he was particularly against us at the start," said Edmund. "Only he was for treating us with less consideration than Ala was disposed to show. But after the first accidental shooting, and the drubbing that Juba gave him, naturally his prejudices were aroused, and he could hardly be blamed for thinking us dangerous. Then, when he found himself defeated, and his wishes ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... of the characters in Wilhelm Meister, "lies before us, like a vast quarry before the architect. He does not deserve the name if he does not compose with these accidental natural materials an image whose source is in his mind, and if he does not do it with the greatest possible economy, solidity, and perfection. All that we find outside of us, nay, within us, is object-matter; but deep within us lives ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... The accidental direction of the wind determines which way it falls; but either north or south it remains for the good of man. In like manner watch not for favorable winds; dispense on every side, north and south, of thy abundance; nor be too solicitous as to ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... medium, and the irritability of the organs which receive the impressions: it is because experiments have not been sufficiently multiplied with a view to these three variable elements, that, in the action of electric eels and torpedos, accidental circumstances have been taken for absolute conditions, without which the ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... message from her father, and a reaction of disgust set in. Of what good were such encounters if they were to have no sequel? She would probably never meet Peter Van Degen again—or, if she DID run across him in the same accidental way, she knew they could not continue their conversation without being "introduced." What was the use of being beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to relapse again into the ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... for the day, boys, I wish to refer to an incident that happened here yesterday morning, which must be fresh in your memories. I mean the accidental discovery of the lost examination paper for the Nightingale Scholarship. I hope you will not draw hasty conclusions from what then occurred. The boy in whose book the paper was found is present here, and has assured me on his honour he never saw the paper before, and is quite ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... cried, thinking of Rachel's words. He looked so encouraged that I am afraid I have sent him post-haste to the Flossy girl, and gotten him into life-long trouble. But I had gone too far. I quite hurried, in my accidental endeavor to ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... with us. Then we lost sight of him, only to find him standing near the public library when we had emerged from it that afternoon, and now here he was sitting in the stalls of the theatre not half a dozen chairs from us. Whether this continual companionship was designed or only accidental, I could not of course say, but I must own that I did not like the look of it. Could it be possible, I asked myself, that Nikola, learning our departure for Australia in the Pescadore, had cabled from Port Said to this man ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... peasant, as I know him, and about people of lowly culture in general so far as I have learnt to know about them, is that the ethics of amity belong to their natural and normal mood, whereas the ethics of enmity, being but 'as the shadow of a passing fear,' are relatively accidental. Thus to the thesis that human charity is a by-product, I retort squarely with the counter-thesis that human hatred is a by-product. The brute that lurks in our common human nature will break bounds sometimes; but I believe that whenever man, be he savage or civilised, is at ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... designed or accidental violations of treaties and the laws of nations afford JUST causes of war, they are less to be apprehended under one general government than under several lesser ones, and in that respect the former most favors ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... understood to wear them around his soul, as he may the ancient armour or the modern uniform around his body; whilst it is easy to conceive a dress more graceful than either. The beauty of the internal nature cannot be so far concealed by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to the very disguise, and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in which it is worn. A majestic form and graceful motions will express themselves through the most barbarous and tasteless costume. Few poets of ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... to grasp at eternal life. He was not fit to carry water for her—he knew that; it was a miracle of luck and a fantastic stroke that had enabled him to see her and be with her and talk with her that night. It was accidental. There was no merit in it. He did not deserve such fortune. His mood was essentially religious. He was humble and meek, filled with self-disparagement and abasement. In such frame of mind sinners come to the penitent form. He was convicted of sin. But as the meek and lowly at the penitent ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... Weezee village," he tells us, "there are few sounds to disturb the traveller's night rest. The horn of the new-comers, and the reply to it from a neighbouring village, an accidental alarm, the chirping of crickets, and the cry from a sick child occasionally, however, broke the stillness. At dawn the first sounds were the crowing of cocks, the lowing of cows, the bleating of calves, ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... dangerous things. He began shrewdly to suspect that the popular heresy was rapidly extending into higher regions; but it was not the President alone who discovered how widely the contamination was spreading. The meeting, the accidental small talk, which had passed so swiftly from gaiety to gravity, the rapid exchange of ideas, and the free-masonry by which intelligence upon forbidden topics had been mutually conveyed, became events of historical importance. Interviews between nobles, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... a basis, on which to rest their Chronology? Must we run back to the epoch of the original dispersion of man, or can we rest at a subsequent point? Has the era of christianity any definite relation to their migration? Was the migration designed, or accidental? Did it consist of one tribe, or twenty tribes? Did it happen at one epoch, or many epochs? Have they wandered here eighteen centuries, or double that period? These are some of the ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... fillip from an accidental meeting with Kilmeny, the first since the night of her engagement. Joyce and Moya were coming out of a stationer's when they came face ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... resolved to keep a strict silence respecting his interview with Theodora, and he entertained a belief that the fears of the unfortunate girl would induce her to follow a similar course. Thus he flattered himself there was nothing to apprehend farther than the danger of an accidental meeting. ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... characters but wrote that "it will be observed that the name Eutamias, proposed by Trouessart in 1880 as a subgenus of Tamias is here adopted as a full genus. This is because of the conviction that the superficial resemblance between the two groups is accidental parallelism, in no way indicative of affinity. In fact the two groups, if my notion of their relationship is correct, had different ancestors, Tamias being an offshoot of the ground-squirrels of the subgenus Ictidomys of Allen, and Eutamias ...
— Genera and Subgenera of Chipmunks • John A. White
... may be called accidental, had nearly done more than repay the Austrians for all their reverses. The left of their line, stationed still further down the Mincio,—at Puzzuolo, no sooner learned from the cannonade that the French were at Borghetto, than they hastened to ascend the stream, with the view of assisting ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... say for sure, but I think not," the professor replied. "I am inclined to believe that they got these tanks of gas to use in driving away any who might try to get at their secret—a useless secret as it proves now. But the accidental deaths, both of cattle and men, from the underground gas must have been going on here a long time," ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Death Valley - or Diamond X and the Poison Mystery • Willard F. Baker
... a stamp around, and when we was separated it was only a question of shootin' on sight. He left Lagrange at sun up the next morning, and I struck across a bit o' buckeye and underbrush and came upon him, accidental like, on the Red Chief Road. I drawed when I sighted him, and called out. He slipped from his mare and covered himself with her flanks, reaching for his holster, but she rared and backed down on him across the road and into the grass, where I got in ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... conversation, had started a new covey of strange fancies. Lancelot followed them over hill and dale, glad to escape a moment from the mournful lessons of that evening; but even over them there was a cloud of sadness. Harry Verney's last words, and Argemone's accidental whisper about 'a curse upon the Lavingtons,' rose to his mind. He longed to ask Tregarva, but he was afraid—not of the man, for there was a delicacy in his truthfulness which encouraged the most utter confidence; but of the subject itself; but ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... We have seen how St. Paul was led on to grasp the conception of one church universal manifested in all the local churches. Its unity is not purely accidental in that individuals have been forced to act together under pressure of chance circumstances. Nor is the ideal of unity adopted simply because experience teaches that "union is strength." Nor is it even based on the philosophical conception ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... exchanged for lonely emotions excited by night reading. She was weeping over the dramatist's fifth act of tragedy, or the romancist's more morbid appeals to the passions, while nature demanded rest. Then an accidental meeting with the young harper—he recovering a book she had dropped into the Tivy out of her hand, from having fallen asleep through exertion, and restoring it with a grace quite romance-hero like—produced a new era, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... producing animals similar to themselves in their general structure, but with frequent additional improvements; which the preceding parent might in some measure have acquired by his habits of life or accidental situation. ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... looked I seemed to see this question written: Was Page Hanaford's absence at the time of the detectives' visit accidental or planned? Try as I would to put the hateful thought away from me, it came ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... more frequent opportunities of displaying his learning, he arose, in a short time, to a high reputation, of which the great number of his auditors was a sufficient proof, and which the proficiency of his pupils showed not to be accidental ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man.—It is not, then, to be supposed that any one, who holds that sublime notion of Poetry which I have attempted to convey, will break in upon the sanctity and truth of his pictures by transitory and accidental ornaments, and endeavour to excite admiration of himself by arts, the necessity of which must manifestly depend upon the assumed ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... Hiram, boring the Cap'n with inquisitive gaze. "But you never can tell what's what in this world, and so long as we're looking for clues we might as well have an understandin', so's to see if there's any such thing as two wimmen meetin' accidental and comparin' notes and ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... "photographic artist," and you see at once that the thing is a mask, as silly as the old tragic and comic mask. The only expression allowable in great portraiture is the expression of character and moral quality, not of anything temporary, fleeting, and accidental. Apart from portraiture you don't want even so much, or very seldom: in fact, you only want types, symbols, suggestions. The moment you give what people call expression, you destroy the typical character of heads and degrade them into ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... prairie districts of the United States, though many of them come north as far as southern Kansas and southwestern Missouri to spend the summer and rear their families. In winter they go as far south as Costa Rico. Restricted as their habitat is, it is curious to note that they are "accidental" in a few unexpected places, such as Key West, Fla., Norfolk, Va., and also in several localities in New England, Manitoba, and Hudson Bay Territory. Prof. W. W. Cooke, of Colorado, says they are "rare, if not accidental," ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... the dark he was conscious of only a blob of faces and the grip of one hand that was quite too hot. Even in the dark he felt embarrassed, as the conscious caller exposed nakedly to the world. What had she done this for? It was not too considerate of her. Perhaps it was purely accidental. He began to speculate on how soon the crowd might break up, and found himself dangling uncomfortably on the porch railing close beside the chair of a shadowy girl who was buried in its depths. He could look down into ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... to prove that her father was a white man who had penetrated into these regions and lived for some little time at least among the blacks—much as I myself was doing. My interest in the matter was first of all roused by the accidental discovery of a cairn five feet or six feet high, made of loose flat stones. My experience was such by this time that I saw at a glance this cairn was not the work of a native. Drawings and figures, and a variety of curious characters, were faintly discernible on some of the stones, but were ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... discouraged and disgruntled men and the cheerfulness of the lot actually digging. Nobody had any scientific system to go on. Often a divining-rod was employed to determine where to dig. Many stories were current of accidental finds; as when one man, tiring of waiting for his dog to get through digging out a ground squirrel, pulled the animal out by the tail, and with it a large nugget. Another story is told of a sailor who asked some miners resting at ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... prints taken from Europe by missionaries. Major Strange says: "The European art of chiaroscuro engraving is in all essentials identical with that of Japanese colour-printing.... It seems, therefore, not vain to point out that the accidental sight of one of the Italian colour-prints may have suggested the process to the Japanese." The Italians aimed more at expressing "relief" and the Japanese at flat colour arrangements; the former used oily colours, and the latter fair distemper tints; these are ...
— Wood-Block Printing - A Description of the Craft of Woodcutting and Colour Printing Based on the Japanese Practice • F. Morley Fletcher
... of Pig No. 3 rolling down hill in the churn and the Lambikin in the Drumikin can scarcely be accidental, though, it must be confessed, the tale has undergone considerable modification before it ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs
... other hand, Say Koitza, when she began to question her son, had in view a certain object. She was anxious to find out who the maiden was whose looks had at once charmed her. Next she was curious to know whether the meeting of the two was accidental or not. Therefore the leading question, "And you go with that girl?" Under ordinary circumstances his affirmative reply might have filled her motherly heart with joy, for Mitsha's appearance had struck her fancy; but now it filled her with dismay. ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading a pink and white checked cloth over the ...
— Prufrock and Other Observations • T. S. Eliot
... "at first some of them would go up like pop corn, higher than my head. But I never once have been injured by one of them except perhaps an accidental stepping on my foot. They never kick; they don't know how to kick. You can go behind them as ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... few days will complete them,—not to show my innocence,—the improbability of your charge, and inconsistency of your own conduct, making that unnecessary; but to show to what lengths a rancorous heart, puffed up by sudden and accidental wealth, can push a man of weak judgment and ...
— Nuts for Future Historians to Crack • Various
... which variations, man made a Fantail, cannot, I think, logically argue that the tail of the woodpecker was formed by variations providentially ordained. It seems to me that variations in the domestic and wild conditions are due to unknown causes, and are without purpose, and in so far accidental; and that they become purposeful only when they are selected by man for his pleasure, or by what we call Natural Selection in the struggle for life, and under changing conditions. I do not wish to say that God did ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... when in the Koran he informs his followers that birds, beasts, and the rest are 'nations' like themselves, nor does any intrinsic distinction exist between them and the human species, except what accidental diversity the 'King,' the 'Proud One,' the 'Mighty,' the 'Giant,' etc., as he styles his God, may have been pleased to make, just as he willed it, and so long as he ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... would pluck it out. I suppose you think, and baith o' you farmers too, that there's no necessity for praying for rain the nicht? You'll be content, will ye, if Mr. Dishart just drops in to the kirk some day, accidental-like, and ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... had already started homewards, with the tin bath balanced once more on the top of the mattresses and boxes; when the house was empty, and I was waiting, my hat and jacket on, and flax-stick in hand, eager to set out, a doubt arose about the expediency of our return home. Some accidental delay had prevented the dray from arriving in time to start for Christchurch with the last load, and between two and three hundred pounds worth of wool still remained in the shed,—packed and labelled indeed, but neither insured nor protected from the ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... mornings Wade had surprised Jack Belllounds in the blacksmith shop. The meetings were accidental, yet Wade ever remembered how coincidence beckoned him thither and how circumstance magnified strange reflections. There was no reason why Jack should not be tinkering in the blacksmith shop early of a morning. But Wade followed an uncanny guidance. Like his hound Fox, ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... of this legend is its Norse-like breadth or grandeur and its genial humor, which are very remarkable characteristics for the fictions of savages. Its resemblance to the Scandinavian tales is, if accidental, very remarkable. The two heroes are, like Thor and Odin, giant heroes who make war on Jotuns and Trolls; that is, giant-like sorcerers. It is their profession; they live in it. No one can read Beowulf or the ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... jutting rocks, and timeworn boulders of granite, one doesn't feel much astonishment to see some one stone set on end a little more obviously than the rest, or to find out by dint of perseverance a little arrangement, which may or may not be accidental: added to this, the cottages, and walls, and field enclosures are built of such immense blocks cleared off the surface of the fields, that one's mind is prepared for far more than the Druids ever did: many a Stonehengeified doorway, many a Titanic pigstye, ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... reply was 'Vary nigh a hundred years'!" In 1845 there died at Buxton, at the age of ninety-six, a woman named Pheasy Molly, who had been for many years an inveterate smoker. Her death was caused by the accidental ignition of her clothes as she was lighting her pipe at the fire. She had burned herself more than once before in performing the same operation; but her pipe she was bound to have, and so met ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... Pollution opened for signature - 17 February 1978 entered into force - 2 October 1983 objective - to preserve the marine environment through the complete elimination of pollution by oil and other harmful substances and the minimization of accidental discharge of such substances parties - (115) Algeria, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Australia, Austria, The Bahamas, Barbados, Belarus, Belgium, Belize, Benin, Bolivia, Brazil, Brunei, Bulgaria, Burma, Cambodia, ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... was leanin' over the rail, When his footing some way slipped, An' (this is the woefulest part o' my tale), He was accidental unshipped! ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... cases of this nature, that the fate of the convicts has depended more upon the accidental circumstance of their being brought earlier or later to trial than to any steady principle of equity applied to their several cases. Without great care and sobriety, criminal justice generally begins with anger and ends in negligence. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... her that Mr. Lee had no alternative in reporting to the commandant his discovery "down the road," but she had believed herself of sufficient value in that officer's brown eyes to induce him to at least postpone any mention of that piece of accidental knowledge; and though, in her heart of hearts, she knows she respects him the more because she could not prevail against his sense of duty, she is stung to the quick, and, womanlike, has made him ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... calling upon all native and patriotic Porto Ricans who hold liberty dearer than life, to join them and accomplish the overthrow of the Spanish government and the death of the governor and his officials. The plans of the conspirators were so carefully laid that had it not been for the accidental discovery of Castillo's letter, they would unquestionably ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... dear, it would mortify your family, who have a right to be proud, and then there is Mr. Millard, who, I suppose, would feel that it would be a lasting disgrace." These words were spoken in a relaxed and indifferent tone, as though it was an accidental commonplace of the subject ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... accidental home-shot, but kept still; he was learning his part; and he was playing it well, too, for a pretty dull beginner. I struck up a diversion. I offered the woman food and liquor, but she refused both. She would allow nothing to come between her and the release of death. Then I slipped ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... that could, except by great stretching of charity and the imagination, be called Christianity. One might find, perhaps, a parallelism with the system ascribed to some Gnostics, but that is far more probably an accidental rather than a sympathetic coincidence. Of that the reader shall presently have an ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... enable me to procure them. For the situation of affairs in England I refer you to Mr Rogers, Aid de Camp to Mons. du Coudray. I have presented a number of memoirs, which have been very favorably received, and the last by his Majesty, but my being wholly destitute of other than accidental and gratuitous assistance will not permit my sending you copies. Indeed I was obliged to make them so as to explain the rise, the nature, and the progress of the dispute. I have been assured by the Ministers, ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. I • Various
... and I are like to like. We come of the same race, we speak the same language, we worship the same God, we have the same ideas of culture and of pleasures. The difference is one that is not patent to the eye or to the ear. It is a difference of accidental incident, not ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... than the simple truth, when on his departure from Rome he declared that, if he had only gold enough, he would undertake to buy the city itself. But the whole external and internal government of this period bore the same stamp of miserable baseness. In our case the accidental fact, that the war in Africa is brought nearer to us by means of better accounts than the other contemporary military and political events, shifts the true perspective; contemporaries learned by these revelations nothing but what everybody knew long before and ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... and deep matters. Presently she heard a step behind her, and Elsie's father came up and joined her. Since his introduction to Helen at the distinguished tea-party given by the Widow Rowens, and before her coming to sit with Elsie, Mr. Dudley Venner had in the most accidental way in the world met her on several occasions: once after church, when she happened to be caught in a slight shower and he insisted on holding his umbrella over her on her way home;—once at a small party at one of the mansion-houses, where ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... getting up several times between that hour and the breaking of dawn Owen slept sounder than he had done for many a day; he seemed to feel a new confidence in himself, as if matters had taken a turn for the better, and in this accidental meeting with his benefactors his fortunes had begun to ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... This ancient homestead of the Carroll family is very well described by Mr. Russell in his "Diary:" his visit, however, was to the late Professor, who died last year. The law of primogeniture does not prevail here, and it was only an accidental succession of single heirs, that brought an undivided patrimony down to the present generation. One cannot help regretting that the estate is to be cut up now into five shares or more. Eleven thousand acres of fertile hill and dale, sinking ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... what he called "barber-shop chords." He used a beautiful accidental at the word "be," of which he was very fond, and he used to hang on that note for a long time, so that those in the extreme rear of the hall, as he was wont to explain, should get the full benefit of it. And it was his custom to emphasize "for" in the last line by speaking instead ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, —master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... of Probabilities, theory of Chances; bookmaking; assurance; speculation, gaming &c 621. V. chance, hap, turn up; fall to one's lot; be one's fate &c 601; stumble on light upon; take one's chance &c 621. Adj. casual, fortuitous, accidental, adventitious, causeless, incidental, contingent, uncaused, undetermined, indeterminate; random, statistical; possible &c 470; unintentional &c 621. Adv. by chance, accidentally, by accident; casually; perchance &c ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... subsequently acquire considerable magnitude in the bladder, it may be inferred, that the formation of this compound is connected with a distinct diathesis, excluding the existence of other diatheses, and that is not an accidental occurrence, happening in common with ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... life makes us perfectly assured, come over us like the soft pulsations of a west wind in summer, laden with the sweets of a new-mown field; or like the clear, streaming moonlight in the brief interval between the broken clouds; or like remembered music, which some accidental word of a song has startled from its place and diffused through the soul. Thus departed Christian friends are the means of unspeakable happiness to survivors; thus "their works do follow them;" and we should make large account of this when ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... the French into literature. Most of the works of imagination published in France contain some opinions or some tinge caught from pantheistical doctrines, or they disclose some tendency to such doctrines in their authors. This appears to me not only to proceed from an accidental, but from ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... original plan of 1090, or thereabouts, the old tower—the southern tower—was given greater width than the northern. Such inequalities were common in the early churches, and so is a great deal of dispute in modern books whether they were accidental or intentional, while no one denies that they are amusing. In these towers the difference is not great,—perhaps fourteen or fifteen inches,—but it caused the architect to correct it, in order to fit his front to the axis of the church, by throwing his ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... who made themselves so strongly felt in the salons. SainteBeuve tells us that Fontenelle, with other friends of Mme. de Lambert, first gave it this tendency; but his mission was apparently an unconscious one, and strikingly illustrates the accidental character of the sources of the intellectual currents which sometimes change the face of the world. "If I had a handful of truths, I should take good care not to open it," said this sybarite, who would do nothing that was likely to cause ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... of this description, which are somewhat external, and as we say accidental, and certainly incidental, to a life in this world, and in all of which we are led in a way that we know not; there are unexpected changes of another kind, that we all have experienced. I now refer to changes in the inner man, and in the ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... individual isolated lives apart from our fellows. The parish is not the centre of the universe. The tendency of the uneducated mind is to isolate itself from the interests of others, and to look at all matters from a purely selfish point of view. The parish is an accidental collection of individual souls in a particular diocese. The diocese is an aggregation of separate parishes scattered through an assigned area. The members of the Church in a particular parish and diocese are members of the Holy Catholic Church, which by its very nomenclature abrogates individual ...
— Churchwardens' Manual - their duties, powers, rights, and privilages • George Henry
... difficult to explain, but somehow by then I had grown aware that the long series of little obstacles, each one accidental and temporary, seemed to express something unseen, something impersonal, a kind of fate ... as if the verdict had gone forth from the lords of things that Paul was not to succeed. And everything seemed to hang in the balance that night. I thought that the fact ...
— Read-Aloud Plays • Horace Holley
... a critic," he said to him early in their accidental acquaintance. "Now, I want to experiment on you. I want you to see Irving to-night and write your impressions of it. I have a notion you'll ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... future and pregnant with the past. We should not do so, although every rag of printed paper swept from the gutter would have some connection with the past day's event. But its significance, the significance of the words printed upon it is so small, that we relegate it into the limbo of the accidental and meaningless. There is no vital connection between the many torn bits of paper—only an accidental connection. Each bit of paper has reference to some actual event: a bus-ticket, an envelope, a tract, a pastry-shop bag, a newspaper, a hand-bill. But take them all together, bus-ticket, torn envelope, ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... the queen arose to crown the victor, Thomas Seymour, her handkerchief, embroidered with gold, fell from her hands, and that the earl, after he had taken it up and presented it to the queen, had thrust his hand for a moment, with a motion wholly accidental and undesigned, into his ruff, which was just as white as the small neatly-folded paper which he concealed in it, and which he had found in ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... like the Common Long Blood, is a popular winter sort, retaining its color well when boiled. It is of larger size than the last named, grows more above the surface of the ground, and has fewer fibrous and accidental small side-roots. While young, it compares favorably with the old variety; but, when full grown, can hardly be said to be much superior. To have the variety in its greatest perfection for winter use, the seed should not be sown ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... proceeding (instinctive, probably), which later I detected, to his infinite rejoicing. In company with my slender purse, and bunch of useless keys, a pencil, and a small memorandum-book, they remained perdu until that moment of accidental discovery arrived which was to test their value and place it ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... prosperity upon serving the people. He may get by for a while serving himself, but if he does, it will be purely accidental, and when the people wake up to the fact that they are not being served, the end of that producer is in sight. During the boom period the larger effort of production was to serve itself and hence, the moment the people woke up, many producers went to smash. ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... fancy that it was quite accidental that the six figures of this picture are so well arranged, and wonder why the art of Rembrandt should be so praised here, you may try an experiment with your camera upon a group of six figures. In posing six persons in any order which is not stiff, and getting them all to look with one accord ...
— Rembrandt - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... in that the body is not suspended. It may be effected by a ligature round the neck, or by direct pressure on the windpipe with the hand, in which case death is said to be caused by throttling. Strangulation is frequently suicidal, but may be accidental. When homicidal, much injury is done to the neck, owing to the force with which the ligature is drawn. In throttling, the marks of the finger-nails ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... Loth-to-stoop again, 'But, sir, may not my master, and great Lord, by letters, by passengers, by accidental opportunities, and the like, maintain, if he shall deliver up all unto thee, some kind of old friendship ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... did the Anglo-Saxons rase to the ground the early churches, that, until a few years ago, but few traces of these early buildings were thought to exist. An accidental discovery, however, in the year 1835, brought to light an undoubted relic of an early British church in the west, this being the remains of a little church which had been until the date above mentioned completely buried in the sand ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath
... knee in his hands, smiling. The semicircle had widened out from the fire, and in the midst Mr. Tarbox stood telling a story, of which Grande Pointe was the scene, Bonaventure Deschamps the hero, a school-examination the circumstance, and he, G. W., the accidental arbiter of destinies that hung upon its results. The big-waisted man had retired for the night, and half an eye could see that the story-teller had captivated the whole remaining audience. He was just at the end as Marguerite re-appeared at the door. The laugh suddenly ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... effect of the action of the primitive elements and laws originally implanted in humanity by the Creator, of the free causality and self-determining power of man, and of all the conditions, permanent and accidental, within which the national life has been developed. And in cases where physical and moral causes are blended, and reciprocally conditioned and modified in their operation;—where primary results undergo endless ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Impatiens fulva, the spotted touch-me-not,—named from the sudden bursting of the pod when touched. The plant in question I had not seen for some time and the fitness of the symbolism to the bodily state was too close to be accidental. After a walk in the spring when the ground was white with the cotton-tufted seeds of the poplar and I thought if all germinated how overwhelmed we should be with poplars, I dream that I am sweeping a floor upon which cotton is scattered, some of which flies and is caught in my hair. I ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... be of a construction that will bear to take the ground; and of a size, which in case of necessity, may be safely and conveniently laid on shore, to repair any accidental damage or defect. These properties are not to be found in ships of war of forty guns, nor in frigates, nor in East India Company's ships, nor in large three-decked West India ships, nor indeed in any other ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... massive frame, with a profusion of red hair on his head and face, and a peculiarly humorous twinkle in his eye. His name was Kettle Flatnose. We have reason to believe that the first part of this name had no connection with that domestic utensil which is intimately associated with tea! It was a mere accidental resemblance of sound no doubt. As to the latter part, that is easily explained. In those days there were no surnames. In order to distinguish men of the same name from each other, it was usual to designate them by their complexions, or by some peculiarity of ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... of an exile population, a broad line must be drawn between the accidental offender and the hereditary robber. To the first no special description will be applicable: they are often not inferior to the ranks from which they sprung. Though a small section of the whole, they present not the least affecting picture ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... bride, together with the Abbot's resignation, his ignorance of the fate of their unhappy offspring, and above all, the good father's listless and inactive disposition, had suffered the matter to become totally forgotten, until it was recalled by some accidental conversation with the Abbot Ambrosius concerning the fortunes of the Avenel family. At the request of his successor, the quondam Abbot made search for it; but as he would receive no assistance in looking among the few records ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... temperance and care the human frame will exist as long in vigor in the latter as in Europe.—Another remark as a proof of the former has been made which is that the human mind sooner arrives to maturity in America than in Europe; but this if true may be more owing to accidental than ...
— First History of New Brunswick • Peter Fisher
... Yet even if we make the largest possible concession to happy coincidences, there cannot remain the slightest doubt that the experiments carried on under standard conditions yielded results the correctness of which endlessly surpasses any possible accidental outcome. We may take a typical illustration: I drew cards which she could not possibly see, while they were shown to the mother and sister sitting next to me, Beulah sitting on the other side of the room. The first was a nine of hearts; she ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... alarming for this country, separately, and as a part of the general system. After all, we may be looking in vain in the regions of politics for what is only the operation of temper and character upon accidental circumstances. But I never knew accidents to decide the whole of any great business; and I never knew temper to act, but that some system of politics agreeable to its peculiar spirit was blended with it, strengthened it, and got strength ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... a bird's tail of anything but common-place stuff, bought in the London market, and (if any dweller in a distant city is simple enough to order it from the unsophisticated vendor) charged with a good profit and the freight up. Naturally the provincial dealer, if he stumbles on a gem or two in an accidental way, takes care that it is sold in no corner, unless it be at the corner of Wellington Street in the Strand. He considers that the value may be a matter of doubt, and he leaves it to gentlemen to decide between them how much it is worth. Do ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... recognizable except in the form of an injury inflicted upon some person or persons. An offence against the State there could not be, simply because there was no State to be offended. Everything, from murder down to the smallest and most accidental injury, was compensated for by "erics" or fines. The amount of these fines was decided upon by the Brehon, who kept an extraordinary number of imaginary rulings, descending into the most minute particulars, such as what fine was to be paid in the case of one person's cat stealing ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... them, feigning, as geese will, that it suited them so to submit, and that in reality they were still quite independent. But in the peculiar eye of the Barnacle gander, who was leading, an observer with sufficient fancy might have deciphered a mild revolt against this triumph of the absurd, the accidental, and the futile; a passive yet Promethean spiritual defiance of ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... country, are very cheap. We paid two piasters (about nine cents) for an oche (two and a half pounds), but we soon made the discovery that a Turkish oche contained a great many "stones"—which of course was purely accidental. Eggs, also, we found exceedingly cheap. On one occasion, twenty-five were set before us, in response to our call for eggs to the value of one piaster—four and a half cents. In Asiatic Turkey we had some extraordinary dishes served to us, including daintily ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... Rome, and the works of Michael Angelo in particular, were to him an academy. On the site of the Capel la Sistina he immediately from a dry, Gothic, and even insipid manner, which attends to the minute accidental discriminations of particular and individual objects, assumed that grand style of painting, which improves partial representation by the general and invariable ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... lesson is a good one, proletaires; we should profit by it. It is not talent (which is also a force), it is not knowledge, it is not beauty which makes the man. It is heart, courage, will, virtue. Now, if we are equal in that which makes us men, how can the accidental distribution of secondary ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... of astonishment upon uncreasing the note. Indubitably he had made a terrific and everlasting impression upon Mr. Bryany. He was sending Mr. Bryany out of the Five Towns a different man. He had taught Mr. Bryany a thing or two. To what brilliant use had he turned the purely accidental possession of a hundred-pound note! One of his finest inspirations—an inspiration worthy of the great days of his youth! Yes, he had had his hour that evening, and it had been a glorious one. Also, it had cost him a hundred pounds, and he did not care; he would retire ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... justice,' Lord Montbarry persisted. 'There are not half a dozen lines more that I can make out! The accidental breaking of his jar of acid has burnt the Baron's hands severely. He is still unable to proceed to the destruction of the head—and the Countess is woman enough (with all her wickedness) to shrink from attempting ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... colonel, "not to risk his life in another advance. An accidental shot might injure him, and ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... in comparison with the Hebrews and Arabs of the desert; and the Israelitish spies described themselves as grasshoppers by the side of them (Numb. xiii. 33). It is possible, however, that the name was really an ethnic one, which had only an accidental similarity in sound to the Hebrew word for "giants." At all events, in the list of conquered Canaanitish towns which the Pharaoh Thothmes III. of Egypt caused to be engraved on the walls of Karnak, the name of Astartu or Ashteroth Karnaim is followed by that ...
— Patriarchal Palestine • Archibald Henry Sayce
... a formidable responsibility as regarded his fellows: a slip of memory, the slightest accidental impurity, made him a bad priest, injurious to himself and harmful to those worshippers who had entrusted him with their interests before the gods. Since it was vain to expect ritualistic perfections from a prince constantly troubled with affairs of state, the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... himself completely taken possession of and made a part of something larger than himself, a carefully correlated and guarded system of ranks and rules and traditions. In retrospect the former school seemed as accidental and fleeting as a street crowd, while the new one was an institution with a jealously preserved and deeply revered history to which each new pupil was expected to add more lustre. But most remarkable of all seemed the fact that this collective body added ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... unusually pleasant and communicative. With such a companion he always moved about the garrison, descanting upon its force and power, and imperceptibly stealing into his good graces, until he found some opportunity of making an apparently accidental enquiry touching the information he was desirous of obtaining. In this way he became possessed of the knowledge that even Quebec held within its impregnable walls many a man who was far from being the true friend of England, and who, as he surmised, waited the opportunity of not only ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... man's shoulder, Trueman reads of the deaths of financiers, statesmen, manufacturers. All have met sudden and violent deaths, and in each instance there is announced the suicide or accidental death ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... later he brought it back to me without explanation. I could not get a ray of light on the reason of his refusal; but he looked lowering and unhappy. Had he some mystical instinct that it is just such accidental and irrational wealth that is the doom of all peasantries? Perhaps he dimly felt that the boy's pirate tales are true; and that buried treasure is a thing for robbers and not for producers. Perhaps he thought there was a curse on such capital: on the ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... that in the course of a second the whole was united into a perfect little sphere, which occupied the position of the septum at one end of the now quite hollow case. The formation of the granular sphere was hastened by any accidental injury. I may add, that frequently a pair of these bodies were attached to each other, as represented above, cone beside cone, at that end where ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... capriciously failed him. He looked at Julia. He looked back at the wall. It was nothing but a funny old picture which hung there confronting them. The commonplaceness, beside it, of Julia's long-drawn expression made him snicker, until, as a result of this accidental reaction, they were both actually ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... tenacity to it through all its generations. A seedling may, in size, color, and form resemble its parent; but its constitution and quality are in a great degree dependent on the nature of the soil, climatic influences, and other accidental causes. ...
— The $100 Prize Essay on the Cultivation of the Potato; and How to Cook the Potato • D. H. Compton and Pierre Blot
... attracted to the subject of the Vaudois in the following curiously accidental way. Being a regular visitor at Apsley House, he called on the Duke one morning, and, finding him engaged, he strolled into the library to spend an idle half-hour among the books. The first he took up was Dr. Gilly's "Narrative," and what he read excited so ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... was greatly abashed and made up his mind that the people of Iolchos were exceedingly ill-bred to take such public notice of an accidental deficiency in his dress. Meanwhile, whether it were that they hustled him forward or that Jason of his own accord thrust a passage through the crowd, it so happened that he soon found himself close to the smoking ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... lover is dead, and it was because she detected certain resemblances in my appearance to him that she looked at me sometimes in the way you described. I had surmised as much before, but at one time hoped that this accidental resemblance might give me a vantage-ground in winning her from a past that I knew must have been very sad indeed. My resemblance was only an outward one, the man himself was immeasurably my superior, and on the principle of contrast alone Jennie ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... gone, they sat in silence, watching the deepening twilight in the cool woods. The day, the season, the fair passion of life, seemed to wane. Like the intimations of autumn that come in unknown ways, even in August, surely in September, this accidental visitor ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... picture of the school of Rubens, which was owned by one of his artist friends, produced a study which he afterward seems to have developed into his well-known Boy and Bird; a Cupid-like figure, holding a bird closely against its breast. These exercises, however, seem to have been, as it were, accidental, and had little or no effect in leading him to the practice in ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... When the widest and wildest violations of that divine right of Property, the only divine right now extant or conceivable, are sanctioned and recommended by a vicious Press, and the world has lived to hear it asserted that we have no Property in our very Bodies, but only an accidental Possession and Life-rent, what is the issue to be looked for? Hangmen and Catchpoles may, by their noose-gins and baited fall-traps, keep down the smaller sort of vermin; but what, except perhaps some such Universal Association, can protect us against whole ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... to contradict this [19]; but your name will not be mentioned: for your own part, you are a free agent, and are to do as you please. I only hope that now, as always, you will think that I wish to take no unfair advantage of the accidental opportunity which circumstances permitted me of being of use to ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... you," he said to Denny, when he had happened to kick his follower in the eye. "You've nothing to fear except my boots, and whatever they do is accidental, and so it doesn't count, but I may be going straight into some trap that has been yawning for me for ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit
... are going to have her whether or no," I cried, thinking of Rachel's words. He looked so encouraged that I am afraid I have sent him post-haste to the Flossy girl, and gotten him into life-long trouble. But I had gone too far. I quite hurried, in my accidental endeavor to ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... The number of accidental deaths in France is attaining alarming proportions. It is certainly time that a stop was put to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 3, 1920 • Various
... that could conceivably occur in the fields we know; but soon these disappeared, and the traveller saw nothing but fabulous beasts, browsing on flowers as astounding as themselves, and rocks so distorted that their shapes had clearly a meaning, being too startling to be accidental. Even the trees were shockingly unfamiliar, they had so much to say, and they leant over to one another whenever they spoke and struck grotesque attitudes and leered. Jones saw two fir-trees fighting. The effect of these scenes on his nerves was ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... be torn out, head and all, by the long shaft catching in the underwood, or striking against trees. The poison used here, and called kombi, is obtained from a species of strophanthus, and is very virulent. Dr. Kirk found by an accidental experiment on himself that it acts by lowering the pulse. In using his tooth-brush, which had been in a pocket containing a little of the poison, he noticed a bitter taste, but attributed it to his having sometimes used, the handle in taking quinine. Though the ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... I cannot conceive, upon every principle, anything more alarming for this country, separately, and as a part of the general system. After all, we may be looking in vain in the regions of politics for what is only the operation of temper and character upon accidental circumstances. But I never knew accidents to decide the whole of any great business; and I never knew temper to act, but that some system of politics agreeable to its peculiar spirit was blended with it, strengthened it, and got strength from it. Therefore the politics can hardly ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... been an accidental meeting, I fancied she might have thought of telling Miss Jenrys what she knew of her loss, hoping for a ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... much to do with the press will sympathise with MR. CHARLES KNIGHT in all that he has stated ("NOTES AND QUERIES," Vol. iii., p. 62.) respecting the accidental—but not at first discovered—substitution of modern for moderate. If that word modern had not been detected till it was too late for an explanation on authority, what strange conjectures would have been the consequence! ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 69, February 22, 1851 • Various
... has an interest short of the welfare of Romeo and Juliet; or, perhaps, murders. But neither of these topics lend themselves, at least until they too become ancient history, to discussion by a Society, or entry on its minutes. Perhaps it was the accidental occurrence of the former one, just as the party started to walk back to the Towers, that had caused Mr. Percival and Aunt Constance to lag so far behind it, and substitute their own interest in a contemporary ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... see that they confirmed their teaching with signs and wonders, we become persuaded that they did not speak at random, nor run riot in their prophecies. (79) We are further strengthened in our conclusion by the fact that the morality they teach is in evident agreement with reason, for it is no accidental coincidence that the Word of God which we find in the prophets coincides with the Word of God written in our hearts. (80) We may, I say, conclude this from the sacred books as certainly as did the Jews of old ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part III] • Benedict de Spinoza
... first used the alexandrine freely, at his pleasure, amid heroic verse; and after him Dryden took possession and then Pope. But both these masters, when they wrote alexandrines, wrote them in the French manner, divided. Cowley, however, with admirable art, is able to prevent even an accidental pause, making the middle of his line fall upon the middle of some word that is rapid in the speaking and therefore indivisible by pause or even by any lingering. Take this one ...
— Flower of the Mind • Alice Meynell
... sive ita Scriptores Septentrionales rerum ante-Columbiarum, in America, edited by Professor Rafu, at Copenhagen, has given final and conclusive evidence on this interesting subject. America owes its name to an accidental landing. Nor is it at all improbable that the Phoenicians, in their voyage across the stormy Bay of Biscay, or the wild Gulf of Guinea, may have been driven far out of their course to western lands. Even in 1833 a Japanese junk was wrecked upon the coast of ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... lightning. This was a moment of great danger. The friction of the line as it passed the loggerhead was so great that Parr had to keep constantly pouring water on it to prevent its catching fire. A hitch in the line at that time, as it flew out of the tub, or any accidental entanglement, would have dragged the boat and crew right down: many such fatal accidents occur to whalers, and many a poor fellow has had a foot or an arm torn off, or been dragged overboard and drowned, in consequence of getting entangled. One of the men stood ready with a small ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... as Aladdin rubbed his magic lamp, and straightway her desire became fact! It was modern magic. This time it happened that her desire was a generous one and brought her the approval as well as the envy of the small social world at the Hall. But that was purely accidental: the next time she should try her lamp, as likely as not the cause might be purely selfish. As a matter of fact she soon discovered that, by distributing her favors and lending her extra horse to a number of schoolmates, she could enlarge her circle of influence and consideration. So the little ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... and furnished no matter how, while velvets were hanging from the ceilings and in the corners, and seemed to show that as the servants were no longer paid except by hopes, they no longer did more than give them an accidental, careless touch with the broom occasionally. The drawing-room, which was extremely large, was full of useless knick-knacks, rubbish which is put up for sale at stalls at watering places, daubs, they could not be called paintings of portraits and of ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... Immediately upon the accidental election of Jim Irwin to the position of teacher of the Woodruff school, he developed habits somewhat like a ghost's or a bandit's. That is, he walked of nights and ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... curses. For the law as it commands, hath nothing to do, but to be a rule and obligation to men, and as it curses, it condemns men, and speaks nothing of Jesus Christ, or a way to make up the breach of the law. The gospel is not contained in the law, but rather accidental to it. For Jesus Christ comes with the gospel, as if some unexpected cautioner would come in, when the Judge is, as the angel that held Abraham's hand,—when he was to slay his son, and offer him up a burnt ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... in 1828 and 1829 an accidental and very brief scarcity of cash, whose cause we have just indicated; but since the second half of the year difficulties arising from metallic ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar
... should be badly constructed—cramped, as the Malakand positions; commanded, like Chakdara; without flank defences, as at Saraghari; without proper garrisons, as in the Khyber. This is a side issue and accidental. The rest of the situation has ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... give at the end of the next chapter a summary of the three preceding chapters; but as isolated and striking cases of reversion have here been chiefly insisted on, I wish to guard the reader against supposing that reversion is due to some rare or accidental combination of circumstances. When a character, lost during hundreds of generations, suddenly reappears, no doubt some such combination must occur; but reversions may be constantly observed, at least to the immediately preceding generations, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... ranch, alighted, hitched, and came in to dinner; standing and general invitations being the custom of the country. One of them was a great San Antonio doctor, whose costly services had been engaged by a wealthy cowman who had been laid low by an accidental bullet. He was now being driven back to the station to take the train back to town. After dinner Raidler took him aside, pushed a twenty-dollar bill against ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... been introduced by Paao some five hundred years ago, together with the ceremonial taboo of which it is the symbol. Since for a person of low rank to approach a sacred place or person was death to the intruder, it was necessary to guard against accidental offences by the use of a sign. The puloulou consisted of a ball-shaped bundle of white bark cloth attached to the end of a staff. This symbol is to be seen represented upon the Hawaiian coat of arms; and Kalakaua's puloulou, a gilded wooden ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... Ships, 1973 (MARPOL) note - abbreviated as Ship Pollution opened for signature - 17 February 1978 entered into force - 2 October 1983 objective - to preserve the marine environment through the complete elimination of pollution by oil and other harmful substances and the minimization of accidental discharge of such substances parties - (109) Algeria, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Australia, Austria, The Bahamas, Barbados, Belarus, Belgium, Belize, Benin, Bolivia, Brazil, Brunei, Bulgaria, Burma, Cambodia, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Cote d'Ivoire, Croatia, Cuba, ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Lutherans cherished exorcism with a kind of passionate fondness." "In the sixteenth century exorcism was alternately defended in one place and disapproved in another; and in the latter half of the eighteenth, attention was again directed to the subject partly by accidental circumstances, and partly also by the great changes in the department of theology. The result has been that exorcism has been entirely abolished in different individual towns; and in several countries. This, for example, was the case in Regensburg in ...
— American Lutheranism Vindicated; or, Examination of the Lutheran Symbols, on Certain Disputed Topics • Samuel Simon Schmucker
... one who had seen Beauregard fastened at Morico's door. Hosmer was making a tour of inspection that afternoon through the woods, and when he came suddenly upon Therese some moments after she had quitted the cabin, the meeting was not so wholly accidental as that ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... told her that Mr. Lee had no alternative in reporting to the commandant his discovery "down the road," but she had believed herself of sufficient value in that officer's brown eyes to induce him to at least postpone any mention of that piece of accidental knowledge; and though, in her heart of hearts, she knows she respects him the more because she could not prevail against his sense of duty, she is stung to the quick, and, womanlike, has ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... remarkable as the ironical spirit in which he goes about doing good only in vindication of the credit of the oracle, and in the vain hope of finding a wiser man than himself. Yet this singular and almost accidental character of his mission agrees with the divine sign which, according to our notions, is equally accidental and irrational, and is nevertheless accepted by him as the guiding principle of his life. Socrates is nowhere represented to us as a freethinker or sceptic. ...
— Apology - Also known as "The Death of Socrates" • Plato
... they would have effected little against a power which was an overmatch for any single adversary, however powerful. At this period of imperfect policy, accidental circumstances alone could determine distant states to afford one another a mutual support. The differences of government, of laws, of language, of manners, and of character, which hitherto had kept whole nations and countries as it were insulated, and raised a lasting barrier between them, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... pulling the coarse thread with it, as in process in fig. 167. Taking it through by the aid of a thick needle would make too large a hole. Thread can be knotted into the eye of the needle if for any reason it is required to be quite safe from accidental unthreading. The neatest way of doing this is to pass the needle through the centre of the thread and draw it tight; this is a useful trick for any unskilled worker with needles and thread, for re-threading also may ...
— Embroidery and Tapestry Weaving • Grace Christie
... hardly have been in a different position, the plain which separates the church from them may have been bedecked with woods. The visitor to-day cannot help wondering why the beautiful building, with its splendid works of art, is dropped down in that particular spot, which looks so accidental and arbitrary. But there are reasons for most things, and there were reasons why the church of Brou should be at Brou, which is a vague little suburb of ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... chance to git close enough to a man to have him git in her way. I said I'd seen lots of women who said they hated men, but they generally hadn't had a chance to find out whether they could love 'em. I guess I was like a blind mule then, kicking out in space and hittin' something accidental, 'cause she got red and then I was sorry and I sort of tried to make it up. I said, 'Of course there's lots of marriages that's mistakes, 'cause a lot of people git married like they learn a job, take about three weeks to it, and that's the reason there's so many poor workmen and poor marriage ...
— Drusilla with a Million • Elizabeth Cooper
... resignation, his ignorance of the fate of their unhappy offspring, and above all, the good father's listless and inactive disposition, had suffered the matter to become totally forgotten, until it was recalled by some accidental conversation with the Abbot Ambrosius concerning the fortunes of the Avenel family. At the request of his successor, the quondam Abbot made search for it; but as he would receive no assistance in looking among the few records of spiritual experiences and important ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... if I had heard aright, or if the sound portended the coming of some servant of the Doctor who was locking up the establishment for the night. The jangling sound was repeated, and in such a way that I could not suppose it to be accidental. Some one was deliberately rattling a small bunch of keys in ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... force the barrier. One or two persons had now ventured to return to the battery, and seizing a slow-match, discharged a gun, when the American front was within forty paces of it. This single and accidental fire proved fatal to the enterprise. The general, with Captains M'Pherson and Cheeseman, the first of whom was his aid, together with his orderly sergeant and a private, were killed upon the spot. The loss of their general, in ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... to say that the Sawtooth country had not had a real "killing" for years, though accidental deaths had been rather frequent. One man, for instance, had fallen over a ledge and broken his neck, presumably while drunk. Another had bought a few sticks of dynamite to open up a spring on his ranch, and at the inquest which followed the jury had returned a verdict of "death caused ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... it's an escapade—an accidental escapade," Barry qualified carefully. "But I don't know any way out of it—unless we all stand together," he said slowly, "and all pretend that you got lost alone and found alone. That's very simple, really, and I think perhaps it would make ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley
... be called accidental, had nearly done more than repay the Austrians for all their reverses. The left of their line, stationed still further down the Mincio,—at Puzzuolo, no sooner learned from the cannonade that the French were at Borghetto, than they hastened to ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... visits, always against the grain, were rendered more irritating from a half-conscious antagonism between the chief female actors in the tragi-comedy; the one sometimes innocently unobservant of the wants of her guest, the other turning every accidental neglect into a slight, and receiving every jest as an affront. Carlyle's "Gloriana" was to the mind of his wife a "heathen goddess," while Mrs. Carlyle, with reference to her favourite dog "Nero," was in ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... that I've chucked poetry. A statesman's life is the life for me; behold Mr. Devenish, the new M.P.—(she holds up her L. hand admonishingly and he laughs apologetically )—no, look here, that was quite accidental. ...
— Belinda • A. A. Milne
... was still the beautiful hostess—never more beautiful, never so winning before. No one noticed that, by her orders, or her husband's, the window through which she had beheld the goblin visage was closely curtained. Or, this may have been an accidental disposition of the drapery, since no trace of her momentary alarm remained in her countenance ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... the kingdom entirely; especially, as the expense of establishing a large distillery was so great, that no man would choose to employ his money for this purpose, judging from experience that some future accidental scarcity of corn might induce the legislature to interpose a ruinous delay in this branch of business. They affirmed, that from the excessive use of malt-spirits no good argument could be drawn against this branch of traffic, no more than against any ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... the moment it was ascertained that an English colony, such as landed in this place, could sustain itself against the dangers which surrounded it, and, with other similar establishments, overspread the land with an English population. Accidental causes retarded at times, and at times accelerated, the progress of the controversy. The Colonies wanted strength, and time gave it to them. They required measures of strong and palpable injustice, on the part of the mother country, to justify resistance; ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... guardian or tutor, which was the privilege of women who were the mothers of three children; when they go abroad, they have the fasces carried before them; and if in their walks they chance to meet a criminal on his way to execution, it saves his life, upon oath made that the meeting was an accidental one, and not concerted or of set purpose. Any one who presses upon the chair on which they are carried, is put to death. If these vestals commit any minor fault, they are punishable by the high- priest only, who scourges the offender, sometimes with her clothes ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... Tor is the name of this singular-looking rock. But it is proper to add, that its appearance is probably accidental, the head of the Sphynx being produced by the three angular blocks of rock seen in profile. Mr. Borlase, however, in his ' Antiquities of Cornwall,' expresses the opinion that the rock-basins on the summit of the rock ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... daybreak, hit or miss, an accidental gunshot giving Foster's men the alarm. For five hours it waged, most of the time across the village street, not more than sixty feet wide, and during those five hours every recruit there felt the force of Gen. Sherman's ...
— The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself • Cole Younger
... coroner and the press call it accidental death, but I—may God forgive me for saying it—I know better! He left word where none could find it but me, that you knew the truth, and ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... case derived its interest then from the debates to which it gave rise, and its effects on parties at home, rather than from any intrinsic value of its own, so does it now mainly owe its importance to the accidental circumstance, that it was the remote and insignificant cause which led to a total revolution in the foreign policy of the Celestial Empire, and to the demolition of most of those barriers which, while they were designed to restrict all intercourse ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... the course of the preceding night and day, while of the Mohammedans as many as 6000 had been slain. Thus the last day of the Kadisiyeh fight was stoutly contested; and the Persian defeat was occasioned by no deficiency of courage, but by the occurrence of a sand-storm and by the almost accidental death of the commander. Among the Persian losses in the battle that of the national standard, the durufsh-kawani was ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... that the group of shoals which form the Bar—composed, as they are, for the most part, of loose and shifting sands—are not accidental accumulations, modified by violent storms and freshets, but that they are orderly arrangements, made by the currents, to whose unceasing activities are due the form and preservation of each bank and channel. The peculiar contours of the shoals ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... known his intention to abandon a conquest that seemed more than half achieved, he was not heard without murmuring. The authority of an Indian Chief is far from despotic, and though there is reason to think it is often aided, if not generated, by the accidental causes of birth and descent, it receives its main support in the personal qualities of him who rules. Happily for the Narragansett leader, even his renowned father, the hapless Miantonimoh, had not purchased a higher name for wisdom, or for daring, than ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... and ingenious; but we have no reason to think that French judges used the same imprecations, when interrupted, in the thirteenth as they did in the sixteenth century, or that what Cellini heard on this occasion was more than an accidental similarity of sounds, striking his quick ear and awakening ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... examination in order to determine in that manner their character. In half-a-dozen cases or so, it is recorded that the result determined the virginity of the person. But such a test as this rests upon the accidental presence of an exceptional condition among even virgins, and what became of those who did not answer to the exceptional test, and yet were as pure as the rest? They would everyone of them be consigned to the fate of ...
— Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers • Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell
... formation of the foetus in the womb, we are very ignorant; but it appears to me probable, that an accidental physical cause may account for this phenomenon, and prove it not to be a law of nature. I have met with some pertinent observations on the subject in Forster's Account of the Isles of the South Sea, that ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... professing to be invaluable, and some claiming to be infallible. It appears to be a fatal objection to these memory-systems that they substitute a wholly artificial association of ideas for a natural one. The habit of looking for accidental or arbitrary relations of names and things is cultivated, and the power of logical, spontaneous thought is injured by neglecting essential for unessential relations. These artificial associations of ideas work endless mischief by crowding out the ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... the earth and rebuilt round about her. And the language, the language in which all our experience here on earth lies stored, will this be everlasting? Shall we in another life speak English or Sanscrit? The philologist knows too well of what material speech is made, how much of the temporal and accidental it has adopted in its eternal forms, to cherish such a hope, and to think that the Logos can be eternally bound to the regular or irregular declensions or conjugations of the Greek, the German, or even the Hottentot languages. What then ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... that thou dost not drink wholly in God: when thou sufferest from that which thou lovest, either by some talk thou didst hold, or because thou wast deprived of some consolation thou wast used to receiving, or for some other accidental cause. If thou sufferest, then, from this or anything else except wrong against God, it is a clear sign to thee that this love is still imperfect, and drawn far from the Source. What way is there, then, to make the imperfect perfect? This way: to ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... particular styles that from time to time he affected, had their marked influence on the young exquisites of the Mayfair balls and Pall Mall club windows, who copied him in everything that he did, and tried to reproduce the accidental charm of his graceful, though ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... shut, to prevent his following the postman, the dog always leaped a high wall to get after him. One day, when the postman was ill, or detained by some accidental circumstance, he sent a man in his place. Bass went up to the man, curiously scanning his face, whilst the man retired from the dog, by no means liking his appearance, and very anxious to decline all acquaintance with him. But as the man left the place, Bass followed ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... its existence by inhering in some other thing is in philosophic parlance an "accident." St. Thomas expressly teaches that, "since it transcends human nature, grace cannot be a substance nor a substantial form, but is an accidental form of the soul itself."(988) Agreeable to this conception is the further Thomistic teaching that sanctifying grace is not directly created by God, but drawn (educta) from the potentia obedientialis of the soul.(989) ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... for the community that all power was to be exercised. In Homer's time popular assemblies existed, and claimed the right of conferring privileges on rank. The nobles were ever jealous of the prerogative of the prince, and ever encroaching on his accidental weakness. In his sickness, his age, or his absence, the power of the state seems to have been wrested from his hands—the prey of the chiefs, or the dispute of contending factions. Nor was there in Greece that chivalric fealty to a person ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... really fire extinguishers in the real sense of the word," went on the other man behind the screen. "It must have been some accidental combination of them. But in spite of that we put it all over ...
— Tom Swift among the Fire Fighters - or, Battling with Flames from the Air • Victor Appleton
... her talks with her mother-in-law; they furnished her with excellent material, to be worked up later by the raconteuse's art into something too delicious and absurd. She enjoyed, too, telling Mrs. Hilary the latest scandals; she was so shocked and disgusted; and it was fun dropping little accidental hints about Nan, and even about Gilbert. Anyhow, what a treasure of a relic of the Victorian age! And how comic in her jealousy, her ingenuous, futile boasting, her so readily exposed deceits! And how she hated Rosalind ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... tonsils were painful from the cabman's fingers, and the skin of my neck had been scratched by his nails; my feet hurt exceedingly and I was lame from a little cut on one foot. I saw in time a blind man approaching me, and fled limping, for I feared his subtle intuitions. Once or twice accidental collisions occurred and I left people amazed, with unaccountable curses ringing in their ears. Then came something silent and quiet against my face, and across the Square fell a thin veil of slowly falling flakes of snow. I had caught a cold, and ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... modifications of great ground-plans which they presented, that interested him. But the opportunity for engineering did not present itself, and at an exceedingly early age he began to study medicine. Two brothers-in-law were doctors, and this accidental fact probably determined his choice. In these days the study of medicine did not begin as now with a general and scientific education, but the young medical student was apprenticed to a doctor engaged in practice. He was ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... Such coincidences, whether accidental or designed, are at least curious, and the following is another of somewhat a different kind:—"Steal! (says Sir Fretful) to be sure they may; and egad, serve your best thoughts as gipsies do stolen children, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... worth while to try and get at the reason for this wide-spread, deep-rooted, fear of beauty: for some reason there must surely be. Such instinctive feelings, on so broad a scale, are not accidental. And so soon as one begins to analyse the attitude of religion towards beauty, the reason ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... neighborhood, of whom you have often heard me speak, a friend of my uncle's and a friend of mine since boyhood. The fights, as Tanno explained to you, had nothing to do with Marcia and her involvement in them was as accidental as mine." ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... humble obscurity—here I have lived, and here I hope to die in quiet," returned the meek Alice; "if I have known any pleasure, in late years, beyond that which every Christian can find in our daily duties, it has been, my sweet friends, in your accidental society.—Such companions, in this remote corner of the kingdom, has been a boon too precious to be enjoyed without alloy, it seems; and I have now to exchange the past pleasure for present pain. Adieu! ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... it, with a personal observation of its condition three years before, and could therefore mark its onward or retreating footsteps, and the better judge what was permanent, and what merely temporary or accidental. With these qualifications, he may at least hope to have spoken so much of truth as entirely to gratify neither the friends nor ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... perfect stranger. Yet, if she could only see Captain Jules again and he might be persuaded to show her his diving suit and to tell her something of the strange business of pearl-fishing, she couldn't be really sorry for her impudence. This accidental meeting with an old sailor inspired Madge afresh with her love of the sea and the mystery of it. She could not get the man out of her mind, nor her own desire to see him soon again and to ask him ...
— Madge Morton's Victory • Amy D.V. Chalmers
... with the mill stopped almost entirely. Annie never pretended to any liking for the helpless Phoebe, who could not even answer her back when she insulted her, as she frequently did all timid people. Never since that accidental touch of quaintness on the first evening had Ishmael discovered any kindred habit of mind in Phoebe, and she, in her sweetly-obtuse way, sometimes wondered that Ishmael did not want to be more ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... branch of insurance business, the object being to compensate a person in case of pecuniary loss through the accidental burning of his property. By paying annually a com- paratively small amount in the shape of pre- mium, a person may insure that in case of the destruction by fire of such of his goods as may be specified in a fire policy, issued by the Insur- ance Company, ...
— Everybody's Guide to Money Matters • William Cotton, F.S.A.
... "Declaration." After his examination by Harsnet in 1602, Mainy seems to have sunk into the insignificant position which he was so calculated to adorn, and nothing more is heard of him; so the references to him must be accidental merely. ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... as the inflectional ending in -en, which distinctly contribute to his romantic effect. His constant use of alliteration is very skilful; the frequency of the alliteration on w is conspicuous but apparently accidental. ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... gauge can from time to time be tested by varying the relations of these to each other. This I did quite elaborately, and proved that such constant errors as exist are small compared with inevitable accidental errors, as, for example, that there was no measurable correction for capillarity, that the calculated volume of the "meniscus" was correct, etc. It is essential in making a measurement that the temperature of the room should change as little as possible, and that the temperature ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 303 - October 22, 1881 • Various
... Towns Hotel had made fortunes, and still made them. It was large and imposing and sombre. The architect, who knew his business, had designed staircases, corridors, and accidental alcoves on the scale of a palace; so that privacy amid publicity could always be found within its walls. It was superficially old-fashioned, and in reality modern. It had a genuine chef, with sub-chefs, good waiters whose sole weakness was linguistic, and an ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... often comes to pass that the fate of a Ministry and the destiny of the Empire depend upon the Whip. A bad division, even though it be plainly due to accidental circumstances, habitually influences the course of a Ministry, sometimes giving their policy a crucial turn, and at least exercising an important influence on the course of business ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... me to procure them. For the situation of affairs in England I refer you to Mr Rogers, Aid de Camp to Mons. du Coudray. I have presented a number of memoirs, which have been very favorably received, and the last by his Majesty, but my being wholly destitute of other than accidental and gratuitous assistance will not permit my sending you copies. Indeed I was obliged to make them so as to explain the rise, the nature, and the progress of the dispute. I have been assured by the Ministers, that ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. I • Various
... effects, the natural effects—I say, the natural effects—to wit, the sense, the sorrowful sense of the displeasure of an infinite Majesty, and his chastisements for the sin that hath provoked him. There are effects natural, and effects accidental; those accidental are such as flow from our weakness, whilst we wrestle with the judgment of God—to wit, hellish fear, despair, rage, blasphemy, and the like; these were not incident to Jesus Christ, he being in his own person every way perfect. Neither ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... were there," mused Clif, "or they would not have been so easily taken by surprise. Why were they there? Their capture of the Cuban courier was accidental, I'm sure. They were on some ...
— A Prisoner of Morro - In the Hands of the Enemy • Upton Sinclair
... advantages which the fine arts may expect to derive from such a repository of antiques in a capital so centrical as Paris. The contemplation of them cannot fail to fire the genius of any artist of taste, and prompt his efforts towards the attainment of that grand style, which, disdaining the minute accidental particularities of individual objects, improves partial representation by the general and ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... wait before she accepts this bit of brass for pure gold. Emerson defines "sterling fashion as funded talent." Its objects may be frivolous or objectless; but, in the long-run, its purposes are neither frivolous nor accidental. It is an effort for good society; it is the bringing together of admirable men and women in a pleasant way. Good-breeding, personal superiority, beauty, genius, culture, are all very good things. Every one delights in a person ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... their parishioners and the apple of their eye. At times they make use of unjust and compromising expressions: Thus the tobacco monopoly is "an imposition" or "a bit of knavery." The impost for elections of gobernadorcillos, the signing of a passport, or any other accidental expense which is incurred [by the Indian], is "a theft." The services for the repairing of roads and bridges are "annoyances" or "tyrannies." And so on all in this tenor. Many would wish that the Filipino be left stretched out at ease all day long, and that afterward the manna ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... some to question whether it can be Bunyan's own. The resemblance, as Mr. Froude remarks, is "too near to be accidental." "Perhaps he may have heard the lines, and the rhymes may have clung to him without his knowing whence ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... causes affecting the rise and fall of nations or the development of mental outlook from one age to another. But even if this be conceded, we still must not forget that the course of history is worked out by individuals, who, in spite of the accidental condensation that the needs of human life thrust upon them, are isolated at the last and alone—for no man may deliver his brother. In consequence, it is only in periods when the stream of personal record flows wide and deep that history begins to live, ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... to Manchester, which led to this, was quite accidental," said Coningsby. "I am bound for the other division of the county, to pay a visit to my grandfather, Lord Monmouth, but an irresistible desire came over me during my journey to view this famous district ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... the form and size of the breasts may be the result of causes unconnected with pregnancy. They may enlarge in consequence of marriage, from the individual becoming stout and fat or from accidental ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... been asked how the general tone of morality in that country compared with that in our own. To answer such a question with anything approaching to an air of finality or absoluteness would be an act of extreme presumption. The opinions which one holds depend so obviously on a number of contingent and accidental circumstances, and must so inevitably be tinged by one's personal experiences, that their validity can at best have but an approximate and tentative character. In making this comparison, too, it is only right to disregard the phenomena of mining camps ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... to be looked at as a mere accidental coincidence, that while Napoleon was modernizing the political world, Bichat was revolutionizing the science of life and the art that is based upon it; that while the young general was scaling the Alps, the young surgeon was climbing the steeper summits of ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... manifestations of being. Nature is not reduced to this indigence. From the fusion of these three states, in varying and incessant combination, and from the predominance of one of the primitive modalities, whether accidental or permanent, countless individualities are formed, each with its personal constitution, its shades of difference of ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... could not hear quietly. I began a warm defence, protesting I knew no one whose heart was more feelingly devoted to the royal family, except, perhaps, Mr. Smelt; and that as to his laughing, it must have been at something of passing and accidental amusement, since he was grave even to melancholy, except when he exerted his spirits for the relief or entertainment ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... conceit of superior wisdom, we have resolved that we will look for human perfection neither exclusively in the Old World nor exclusively in the New—neither among Catholics nor Protestants, among Whigs or Tories, heathens or Christians—that we have laid aside accidental differences, and determined to recognise only moral distinctions, to love moral worth, and to hate moral evil, wherever we find them;—even supposing all this, we have not much improved our position—we cannot leap ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... because in that there is no true nor constant beauty, and for this reason it cannot evoke true nor constant love. That beauty, which is seen in bodies is accidental and transitory, and is like those which are absorbed, changed, and spoiled by the changing of the subject, which very often, from being beautiful, becomes ugly, without any change taking place in the soul. The reason then comprehends the truest beauty, ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... said so, and Mr. Phelps never said so, and nobody else knew anything of the matter, then the thief's presence in the room was purely accidental. He saw his chance and he ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... now supposed to be in league with the Druses, against the Government. Including this party, only six persons have succeeded in reaching Palmyra within a year, and two of them, Messrs. Noel and Cathcart, were imprisoned four days by the Arabs, and only escaped by the accidental departure of a caravan for Damascus. The present party was obliged to travel almost wholly by night, running the gauntlet of a dozen Arab encampments, and was only allowed a day's stay at Palmyra. They were ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... complete mastery of the table of poisons, as set forth on the two following pages, is really a physician's business. At the same time, no one of fair education should neglect to learn a few of the essential things to do in accidental ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... belonging to the period about 1820, when Gentz was really at the centre of affairs. The Metternich papers, interesting as far as they go, are a mere selection. The omissions are glaring, and scarcely accidental. Many minor collections bearing on particular events might be named, such as those in Guizot's Memoires. Frequent references will show my obligation to the German series of historical works constituting the Leipzig Staatengeschichte, as well as to French authors who, like Viel-Castel, have ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... some instances it has been necessary to remove the entire jaw. Then, too, matches made of yellow or white phosphorus ignite easily, and, when rubbed against any rough surface, are apt to take fire. Many destructive fires have been started by the accidental friction of such ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... older philosophy of life. She looked on Mark's personality with such suspicion that she gradually withdrew herself from his influence. Hideously disturbed by his audacity of thought, she had even gone so far as to tell Tatiana Markovna of this accidental acquaintance, with the result that the old lady told the servants to keep a watch on the garden, but Volokov came from the direction of the precipice, from which the watchmen were effectually kept away by their superstitious fears. Mark himself had noted Vera's distrust, and he set himself ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... form of reaction is known as habit. On account of the plastic character of the matter constituting the nervous tissue in the human organism, any act, whether instinctive, voluntary, or accidental, if once performed, has a tendency to repeat itself under like circumstances, or to become habitual. The child, for example, when placed amid social surroundings, by merely yielding to his general tendencies of imitation, sympathy, etc., will form many valuable modes of habitual reaction connected ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... honored everywhere as a statesman, was known in his own home as "the old man of the Bible." It was the reading of the Bible that equipped John Bunyan to become the author of "Pilgrim's Progress." The novelists have not failed to recognize the influence of some single book on a human life. It was the accidental possession of a folio volume of Shakespeare—in Blackmore's "Lorna Doone"—that transformed John Ridd from a hulking countryman to a man of profound acquaintance with the world. And who does not remember Gabriel Betteridge, the simple-hearted old steward in Wilkie ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... references, because I have never read any author on political economy, except Adam Smith, twenty years ago. Whenever I have taken up any modern book upon this subject, I have usually found it encumbered with inquiries into accidental or minor commercial results, for the pursuit of which an ordinary reader could have no leisure, and by the complication of which, it seemed to me, the authors themselves had been not unfrequently prevented from seeing to ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... causes. Some of their names in common language are taken from the remote cause, as worms, stone of the bladder; others from the remote effect, as diarrhoea, salivation, hydrocephalus; others from some accidental symptom of the disease, as tooth-ach, head-ach, heart-burn; in which the pain is only a concomitant circumstance of the excess or deficiency of fibrous actions, and not the cause of them. Others again are taken from the deformity occasioned ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... vacuum, and a vacuum does not exist in nature; and granting that one were formed, it would be immediately filled up by the rushing in of the element in which the vacuum had been generated. Therefore, from the definition of weight, which is this—Gravity is an accidental power, created by one element being drawn to or suspended in another—it follows that an element, not weighing anything compared with itself, has weight in the element above it and lighter than it; as we see that the parts of water have no gravity or levity compared with ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... observe the rules of the vessel, which allowed of no riot or quarrelling. Toward me there moved one whom I hardly know how to describe, and yet feel that I must. You will here doubtless exclaim, 'Why obliged to describe? Why say so much of accidental companions?' But you will answer yourself, I feel persuaded, my Curtius, by supposing that I should not particularly notice a mere companion of the voyage, unless he had connected himself in some manner with my fortunes. Such has been the ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... even if we make the largest possible concession to happy coincidences, there cannot remain the slightest doubt that the experiments carried on under standard conditions yielded results the correctness of which endlessly surpasses any possible accidental outcome. We may take a typical illustration: I drew cards which she could not possibly see, while they were shown to the mother and sister sitting next to me, Beulah sitting on the other side of the room. ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... affectionate, yet what he wrote of her to Mrs. Thrale shews that her love for him was not strong. Thus he writes:—'July 20, 1767. Miss Lucy is more kind and civil than I expected.' Piozzi Letters, i. 4. 'July 17, 1771. Lucy is a philosopher, and considers me as one of the external and accidental things that are to be taken and left without emotion. If I could learn of Lucy, would it be better? Will you teach me?' Ib p. 46. 'Aug. 1, 1775. This was to have been my last letter from this place, but Lucy says I must not go this week. Fits of tenderness ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... the part of fate, for he was in no respect a Bostonian, and it was to Bostonians especially that he was anathema. His parents were actors, travelling from place to place, and his birth at Boston was purely accidental. They had no home and no fortune, but lived from hand to mouth, in the most precarious way, and both of them were dead before their son was two years old. He had an elder brother and a younger sister, ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... spirit is not a tame, tender plant, but a wild—in the sense of natural—growth; it is indigenous to the soil; its accidental qualities it may share with the flowers of other lands, but in its essence it remains the original, spontaneous outgrowth of our clime. But its nativity is not its sole claim to our affection. The refinement and grace of its beauty appeal to our aesthetic sense as no other flower ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... the accidental insertion of another clause in the constitution under consideration, Section 1, of Article VII., any foreign born woman, naturalized previous to January, 1870, was given the right to vote. So that Illinois ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... preserved in its entirety. With any disease of the brain, temporary or permanent, amnesia or memory loss may and usually is present (e. g., general paresis, tumor, cerebral arteriosclerosis, etc.). As the result of Carbon monoxide poisoning, as after accidental or attempted suicidal gas inhalation, the memory, especially for the most recent events, is impaired and the patient cannot remember the events as they occur; he passes from moment to moment unconnected to the recent past, though his remote past is clear. Since memory is the basis ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... Tregellan sat for a long time without speaking, appreciating his purpose. It seemed more monstrous the closer he considered it: natural enough withal, and so, harder to defeat; and yet, he was sure, that defeated it must be. He reflected how accidental it had all been: their presence there, in Ploumariel, and the rest! Touring in Brittany, as they had often done before, in their habit of old friends, they had fallen upon it by chance, a place unknown of Murray; and the merest chance ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... walked slowly toward the station Crane met abruptly the girl who was just then so much in his thoughts. Her sudden appearance quite startled him, though it was quite accidental. She had gone in to do some shopping, she explained, after ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... Differing from Michael Angelo, Donatello made no Brutus; he did not concentrate the political tragedies of his day into a Penseroso and a group of statues full of grave symbolical protests against the statecraft of his time; and, except for the accidental loss of Judith's pedestal, Donatello's art never suffered from the curse of politics. Michael Angelo was always surrounded by the pitfalls of intrigue and politics: some of his work was sacrificed in consequence. The colossal statue of Pope Julio ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... indeed—in fact, contemporary, certainly accidental. Sir Roger Casement had been abroad in the tropics most of his life: he hated politics; he cannot speak German, and has had to have all his negotiations done through ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... the lesson for the day, boys, I wish to refer to an incident that happened here yesterday morning, which must be fresh in your memories. I mean the accidental discovery of the lost examination paper for the Nightingale Scholarship. I hope you will not draw hasty conclusions from what then occurred. The boy in whose book the paper was found is present here, and has assured ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... statue.' JOHNSON. 'Nay, Sir, the argument from the name is gone. The name is exhausted by what we see. We have no occasion to go to a distance for what we can pick up under our feet. Had it been an accidental name, the similarity between it and Anaitis might have had something in it; but it turns out to be a mere physiological name.' Macleod said, Mr. M'Queen's knowledge of etymology had destroyed his conjecture. JOHNSON. 'Yes, Sir; Mr. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... closing of the affair without precipitating a scandal. Gard's own hasty actions led back to his fear for Mrs. Marteen, that in turn involved the cause of that suspicion. To convince the newsmongers that the crime was one of an almost accidental nature, he felt would be easy. An escaped lunatic had committed the murder. That revenge lay behind the insane act would be hidden. If necessary, the authorities of the asylum could be silenced with a ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... I seemed to see this question written: Was Page Hanaford's absence at the time of the detectives' visit accidental or planned? Try as I would to put the hateful thought away from me, it came back again ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... delight only be the medium of whatever poetry or science may lie beyond them, in the intention of the composer. In its primary aspect, a great picture has no more definite message for us than an accidental play of sunlight and shadow for a moment, on the wall or floor: is itself, in truth, a space of such fallen light, caught as the colours are caught in an Eastern carpet, but refined upon, and dealt ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... Mangles was a tardy ornament, needed above all things a capacity for leaving things unsaid, the American diplomatist was not ignorant in his art. For he did not inform his sister that the invitation to which she attached so flattering a national importance owed its origin to an accidental encounter between himself and Lord Orlay—a friend of his early senatorial days—in Pall ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... many ways in which accidental infection may occur. Take, for example, the case of a person who receives a cut on the face by being knocked down in a carriage accident on the street. Organisms may be introduced to such a wound from the shaft or wheel by which he was struck, from the ground on which he lay, from any portion ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... sharp slant which drops into the precipice of Glacier Gorge, and ascends the box-like summit cap by a shelf trail which sometimes has terrors for the unaccustomed. Several hundred persons make the ascent each summer without accident, including many women and a few children. The one risk is that accidental snow obscure the trail; but Longs Peak is not ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... traffic, sure to increase as it grew later, to give him his chance. Something accidental, he knew, there must be, or he would not be able to get away. And it was not long before his chance came. As they crossed a wide street there was a sudden outburst of shouting. A runaway horse, dragging ...
— The Boy Scout Aviators • George Durston
... belief in its practical necessity. The steam locomotive was all too huge and heavy for the high road—it had to be put upon rails. And so clearly linked are steam engines and railways in our minds that, in common language now, the latter implies the former. But indeed it is the result of accidental impediments, of avoidable difficulties that ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... of sugar-cane, some improvement in their condition took place. Still, there were only 130 citizens in San Juan in 1556, and only 30 in New San German. In 1595, when Drake appeared before San Juan with a fleet of 26 ships, the governor could only muster a few peons and 50 horsemen, and but for the accidental presence of the Spanish frigates, Puerto Rico would probably be an English possession to-day. It was taken by the Duke of Cumberland four years later, but abandoned again on account of the epidemic that broke out among the English troops. When the Hollanders laid siege to the capital in 1625 ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... the sovereign people, and an iron aspect which was enough of itself to make the very bowels of his adversaries quake with terror and dismay. All this martial excellency of appearance was inexpressibly heightened by an accidental advantage with which I am surprised that neither Homer nor Virgil have graced any of their heroes. This was nothing less than a wooden leg, which was the only prize he had gained in bravely fighting the battles of his country, but of which he was so proud ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... let him see that reading between the lines I had guessed his difficulty to be a personal one. "We must proceed cautiously," I said, "there may be a woman in the background.... The literary compliments he pays me and the interest that my book has excited are accidental, circumstantial. Life comes before literature, for certain he stands at the branching of the roads, and the best way I can serve him is by drawing his attention to the fallacy, which till now he has accepted ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... freely. What I mean by "freely" can best be shown by one incident A little gathering of men started shouting "Mansei" in a street in Seoul. The police came after them, and they vanished. One man—it is not clear whether he called "Mansei" or was an accidental spectator—was pushed in the deep gutter by the roadside as the demonstrators rushed away. As he struggled out the police came up. There was no question of the man resisting or not resisting. He was unarmed and alone. They ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... discovery is purely fictitious and accidental. First of all, eight planets are now known; and secondly, their real distances agree only very ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... mention the expansion of my own life partly as an example of what I mean. My earliest recollection is of a small one-room log hut on a large slave plantation in Virginia. After the close of the war, while working in the coal-mines of West Virginia for the support of my mother, I heart in some accidental way of the Hampton Institute. When I learned that it was an institution where a black boy could study, could have a chance to work for his board, and at the same time be taught how to work and to realize the dignity of labor, I resolved to go there. Bidding my mother good-by, ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... average middle-class person is in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the cruelest possible commentary on his intelligence, and, as a matter of fact, if it contains a couple of volumes worthy of the name of books, their presence is more often than not an accidental one. A few volumes of the Sunday at Home, the Leisure Hour, Cassell's Magazine, or perhaps a few other monthly periodicals, carefully preserved during the twelve months of their issue, and bound up at the end of the year—with ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... history than the unmistakable signs and proofs of preadaptation. Our life-occurrences are not disjecta membra—scattered, disconnected, and accidental fragments. In God's book all these events were written beforehand, when as yet there was nothing in existence but the plan in God's mind—to be fashioned in continuance in actual history—as is perhaps suggested ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. Antipathy in one nation against another disposes each more readily to offer insult and injury, to lay hold of slight causes of umbrage, and to be haughty and intractable, when accidental or trifling occasions of dispute occur. Hence frequent collisions, obstinate, venomed, and bloody contests. The Nation prompted by ill-will and resentment, sometimes impels to war the Government, contrary to the best calculations of policy. ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... prohibit the assumption of the rebel debt—are of vital importance, and the only thing that can prevent the combined forces of copperheads and secessionists from legislating against the interests of the Union whenever they may obtain an accidental majority. ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... meeting with Mr Keswick at Midbranch was entirely accidental. When I arrived there, a few days ago, I had no reason to suppose that I should meet him. But I must ask you to excuse me from giving my reasons for wishing to find your cousin, and for coming to see him here. The matter ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... twice a day from the sea, and presented a broad silvery expanse on which every arriving and departing vessel of the port was borne in broad view from the portico. But, aside from the assessed value of the lot, which was accidental and produced nothing, there was no exhibition of wealth within. All was plain as became the residence of a man who had those claims to public respect which no mere wealth could give, and which the absence of wealth could not impair. As you lifted the knocker of his door—for ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... all the business. I have been rather sick and have had two small hemorrhages, but the second I believe to have been accidental. No good denying that this annoys, because it do. However, you must expect influenza to leave some harm, and my spirits, appetite, peace on earth and goodwill to men are all on a rising market. ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... what was seemingly a convincing statement of the fortunate hazard that led to his appearance at Cheddar. The Frenchman was too skilled a stalker of shy game to pretend a second time that the meeting was accidental. ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... nearly. And, what is a wiser and better thing, Can keep the living from ever needing Such an unnatural, strange proceeding, By showing conclusively and clearly That death is a stupid blunder merely, And not a necessity of our lives. My being here is accidental; The storm, that against your casement drives, In the little village below waylaid me. And there I heard, with a secret delight, Of your maladies physical and mental, Which neither astonished nor dismayed ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... him, only to find him standing near the public library when we had emerged from it that afternoon, and now here he was sitting in the stalls of the theatre not half a dozen chairs from us. Whether this continual companionship was designed or only accidental, I could not of course say, but I must own that I did not like the look of it. Could it be possible, I asked myself, that Nikola, learning our departure for Australia in the Pescadore, had cabled from Port Said to ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... the shot was found to have been accidental, and the person who had been the cause of the mischief, though condemned to death, was pardoned. Such at least is the account of the affair transmitted to us by contemporary writers; but it still remains a mystery how the man came ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... pure artists is small: few souls are so finely tempered as to preserve the delicacy of meditative feeling, untainted by the allurements of accidental suggestion. The voice of the critical conscience is still and small, like that of the moral: it cannot entirely be stifled where it has been heard, but it may be disobeyed. Temptations are never wanting: some immediate and temporary effect can be produced at less expense of inward exertion ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... is unpopular in this country to talk much about gentlemen and gentlewomen. People are touchy about social distinctions, which no doubt are often invidious and quite arbitrary and accidental, but which it is impossible to avoid recognizing as facts of natural history. Society stratifies itself everywhere, and the stratum which is generally recognized as the uppermost will be apt to have ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the Blood Offering on God's altar counting his own life as of no account in the reckoning and from that hour he had been a fugitive from justice, hiding in the woods. He had escaped arrest only by the accidental assembling of a mob of a hundred and fifty disorderly fools who had stolen his own goods before they had ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... Arab. singular (whence the French "genie"), fem. Jinniyah; the Div and Rakshah of old Guebre-land and the "Rakshasa," or "Yaksha," of Hinduism. It would be interesting to trace the evident connection, by no means "accidental," of "Jinn" with the "Genius" who came to the Romans through the Asiatic Etruscans, and whose name I cannot derive from "gignomai" or "genitus." He was unknown to the Greeks, who had the Daimon {Greek Letters}, a family which separated, like the Jinn and the Genius, into two categories, the good ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... precipitate and unconstitutional proceeding. But they served as a text for the speech which Lincoln made in Committee of the Whole, which deserves the attentive reading of any one who imagines that there was anything accidental in the ascendency which he held for twenty years among the public men of Illinois. The winter was mostly devoted to speeches upon the same subject from men of eminence and experience, but it is within bounds to say there was ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... diseases which he had cured during his lifetime were just as effectively relieved by visiting the good father's tomb, in the firm belief that a miracle would be performed. From the following cure, his first one, it will be seen that the discovery of his healing power was rather accidental. ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... short he believed that the untimely murder of Mrs. Vernon had threatened to direct attention to the commercial enterprise of the Greek, and that he, Soames, had become incorporated in the latter in this accidental fashion. He believed himself to have been employed in a private intrigue during the time that he was at Palace Mansions, and counted it a freak of fate that Mr. Gianapolis' affairs of the pocket had intruded upon ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... art by Brunner. Her exclamations were so childish, she seemed so pleased to have the value and beauty of the paintings, carvings, or bronzes pointed out to her, that the German gradually thawed and looked quite young again, and both were led on further than they intended at this (purely accidental) first meeting. ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... violently with aqua fortis, and partly of an ochry powder, which would not dissolve in that acid. The ochry powder, as it usually appears in chalk to the eye, in the form of veins running thro' its substance, must be considered only as an accidental or foreign admixture; and, with respect to the minute portion of alkaline earth which composed the remainder of the sediment, it cannot be supposed to have been originally different from the rest, and incapable, from its nature, ...
— Experiments upon magnesia alba, Quicklime, and some other Alcaline Substances • Joseph Black
... sub-lieutenant, seconded for Secret Service? Have you ever been surprised by anything? I don't know. You have said often in my hearing that you suspect every one. Have you suspected me? Sometimes when I have caught that sidelong squint of yours, that studied accidental glance which sees so much, I have felt almost sure that you were far from satisfied that Trehayne was the man he gave himself out to be. I have been useful to you. I have eaten your salt, and have served you as faithfully as was consistent with the supreme Orders by which I direct my action. ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... as a possible origin, and examining the history of these Cults, their evolution, and their variant forms, we do, in effect, find at every period and stage of development undoubted points of contact, which, though taken separately, might be regarded as accidental, in their ensemble can hardly be thus considered. When every parallel to our Grail story is found within the circle of a well-defined, and carefully studied, sequence of belief and practice, when each and all form part of ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... of my cases can we trace the influence of any definite "suggestion," as asserted by Schrenck-Notzing, who believes that, in the causation of sexual inversion (as undoubtedly in the causation of erotic fetichism), we must give the first place to "accidental factors of education and external influence." He records the case of a little boy who innocently gazed in curiosity at the penis of his father who was urinating, and had his ears boxed, whence arose a train of thought and feeling which ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... some little accidental movement—I think I dropped my thimble on the floor, and in stooping to regain it, hit the crown of my head against the sharp corner of my desk; which casualties (exasperating to me, by rights, if to anybody) naturally made a slight bustle—M. Paul became irritated, and dismissing ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... Preston,) equally intimate with both, but who, to do him Justice, entertained not even a remote suspicion of my design. To give to this a better colouring, I had contrived to have assembled a party of some eight or ten, and was solicitously careful that the introduction of cards should appear accidental, and originate in the proposal of my contemplated dupe himself. To be brief upon a vile topic, none of the low finesse was omitted, so customary upon similar occasions that it is a just matter for wonder how any are still found ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... British Liberalism" has less actuality, and, moreover, it belongs to a group of which enough has been said in reference to the Irish Essays. But "Porro Unum est Necessarium" possesses not merely an accidental but a real claim to fresh attention, not merely at the moment when there is at last some chance of the dream of Mr Arnold's life, the interference of the State in English secondary education, being realised, but because it is one of the expressions of that dream which was in ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... entire displeasure. He assured me one day, when I asked him for a new copy of Horace, that the translation of "Poeta nascitur non fit" was "a nasty poet for nothing fit"—a remark which I took in high dudgeon. His repugnance to "the humanities" had, also, much increased of late, by an accidental bias in favor of what he supposed to be natural science. Somebody had accosted him in the street, mistaking him for no less a personage than Doctor Dubble L. Dee, the lecturer upon quack physics. This set him off at a tangent; and just at the epoch of this ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... disease is to remove the affected bone, and in some instances it has been necessary to remove the entire jaw. Then, too, matches made of yellow or white phosphorus ignite easily, and, when rubbed against any rough surface, are apt to take fire. Many destructive fires have been started by the accidental friction of such ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... the privilege of women who were the mothers of three children; when they go abroad, they have the fasces carried before them; and if in their walks they chance to meet a criminal on his way to execution, it saves his life, upon oath made that the meeting was an accidental one, and not concerted or of set purpose. Any one who presses upon the chair on which they are carried, is put to death. If these vestals commit any minor fault, they are punishable by the high- priest only, who scourges ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... was held on the body of this poor girl, the jurymen devoted their entire attention to the character of the animal she was riding, and as the father of the young lady, who had bred the pony himself, was able to show that it was a staunch and reliable animal, the usual verdict of accidental death was given. These twelve good men and true absolutely ignored the stirrup, which had been the sole cause of this awful occurrence, and concentrated their entire attention on the innocent ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... But no weakling broke off that bedpost in Henry M. Gillespie's room. I assumed the theory that the phenomena of that night were symptomatic rather than accidental. Therefore, I set out to find in what other places the mysterious H. M. ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... learned men, to be true, which are: 1. Ham's name, which they allege, in Hebrew, means black; 2. The curse denounced against him, that a servant of servants should he be unto his brethren; and that this curse, was denounced against Ham, for the accidental seeing of his father Noah naked—that this curse was to do so, and did change him, so that instead of being long, straight-haired, high forehead, high nose, thin lips and white, as he then was, and like his brothers Shem and Japheth, he was from that day forth, to be kinky-headed, low forehead, ...
— The Negro: what is His Ethnological Status? 2nd Ed. • Buckner H. 'Ariel' Payne
... met again on the terrace of the Kleine Schanze. It was not an accidental meeting. The stranger had walked directly up ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... Hotel had made fortunes, and still made them. It was large and imposing and sombre. The architect, who knew his business, had designed staircases, corridors, and accidental alcoves on the scale of a palace; so that privacy amid publicity could always be found within its walls. It was superficially old-fashioned, and in reality modern. It had a genuine chef, with sub-chefs, good waiters whose sole weakness was ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... lengths; but no confusion is possible if the student will recollect and apply the rule that the objective point (the heart, so to speak) of each motive is the first primary accent it contains; counting from these points, all irregularities of melodic extent become purely accidental and harmless. For illustration (the ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius
... Gregory's Pastoral, printed in 1629. 19. He reformed the Sacramentary, or Missal and Ritual of the Roman church. In the letters of SS. Innocent I., Celestine I., and St. Leo, we find mention made of a written Roman Order of the mass: in this the essential parts were always the same; but accidental alterations in certain prayers have been made Pope Gelasius thus augmented and revised the liturgy, in 490; his genuine Sacramentary was published at Rome by Thomasi, in 1680. In it are mentioned the public veneration ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... really native to the sentiment and experience of Miss Cummins is exhibited in its last perfection, with the addition of a positive, though not creative, faculty of imagination. Feeling a strong attraction for all that related to the East, through an accidental connection with friends who in conversation discoursed of its peculiarities and wonders, she was led to an extensive and thorough study of the numerous eminent scholars and travellers who have recorded their experience and ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... register may be connected to operate as a Real Time Clock. This is a counting register operated by a crystal controlled oscillator. The clock can be reset to zero by manual operation. A toggle switch interlock prevents an accidental reset. The state of this counter may be read at any time by the ...
— Preliminary Specifications: Programmed Data Processor Model Three (PDP-3) - October, 1960 • Digital Equipment Corporation
... of lilac and green, and stuck over (cunning fellows!) with stripes of dead sea-weed to serve as improvised parasols? One cannot say that in him we have the first type of the human skull: for the resemblance, quaint as it is, is only sensuous and accidental, (in the logical use of that term,) and not homological, I.E. a lower manifestation of the same idea. Yet how is one tempted to say, that this was Nature's first and lowest attempt at that use of hollow globes of mineral for protecting soft fleshy parts, ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... finished it is etched; that is, treated with a weak solution of nitric acid and gum-water, in order to remove all accidental traces of scum from its surface, and to prepare it for printing. Then proofs are made, which serve as a guide to the lithographer during the progress of his work, and finally as a guide to the transferrer and to the printer. The proving is done ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... tip of the radicle aids it slightly in penetrating the ground; and it may be observed in several of the previously given diagrams, that the movement is more strongly pronounced in radicles when they first [page 72] protrude from the seed than at a rather later period; but whether this is an accidental or an adaptive coincidence we do not pretend to decide. Nevertheless, when young radicles of Phaseolus multiflorus were fixed vertically close over damp sand, in the expectation that as soon as they reached it they would form circular furrows, this did not occur,—a ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... any buffaloes there. Meantime the bear has learned to paddle around all by itself on its hind legs, and says "poppa" and "momma." It is certainly a new species. This resemblance to words may be purely accidental, of course, and may have no purpose or meaning; but even in that case it is still extraordinary, and is a thing which no other bear can do. This imitation of speech, taken together with general absence of fur and entire absence of tail, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... hypothetical nature, owing to the circumstances under which it has been gained. One cannot be imposed upon any longer by the inflated insubstantial antitheses of the older metaphysics of true and false, good and evil, identical and differentiated, necessary and accidental; one knows that these antitheses have only a relative significance, that that which is recognized as true now, has its concealed and later-developing false side, just as that which is recognized as false, its true side, by virtue of which it can later on prevail as the ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... lady. Nor was this unnatural: her brown skin invited a different assumption. Despite this almost unconscious mental aggressiveness, she was unusually presentable and always well-groomed and pleasant of speech. Yet she found nearly all careers closed to her. At first it seemed accidental, the luck of life. Then she attributed it to her sex; but at last she was sure that, beyond chance and womanhood, it was the colorline that was hemming her in. Once convinced of this, she let her imagination play and saw the line even where it ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... particulars; while those who offer themselves for guides are (as was said) themselves also puzzled, and increase the number of errors and wanderers. In circumstances so difficult neither the natural force of man's judgment nor even any accidental felicity offers any chance of success. No excellence of wit, no repetition of chance experiments, can overcome such difficulties as these. Our steps must be guided by a clue, and the whole way from the very first perception ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... varies in the course of their life: originally given in childhood, from the mere necessity of distinguishing objects, or from some accidental resemblance to external objects, the young warrior is impatient to change it by some achievement of his own. Any important event, the stealing of horses, the scalping an enemy, or killing a brown bear, entitles him at once to a new name which he then selects for himself, and ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... in an edible shape. At these hotels it is brought to you in horrid little oval dishes, and swims in grease; gravy is not an institution in American hotels, but grease has taken its place. It is palpable, undisguised grease, floating in rivers—not grease caused by accidental bad cookery, but grease on purpose. A beef-steak is not a beef-steak unless a quarter of a pound of butter be added to it. Those horrid little dishes! If one thinks of it, how could they have been ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... out of the way, after the information the colonel had received from my clerk, and that the colonel was to have rewarded him handsomely if he had sent you into the other world. I suspect, after this, that the fowling-piece going off in the cover was not quite so accidental as was supposed. However, the colonel is out of your way now, and the old lady has received such a shock, that there is no fear of her altering the will; indeed, if she attempted it, I doubt if it would be valid, as she is now quite gone in her intellect. I have, therefore, destroyed the ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... to Mazarin. They have, in common, the fear of death, inordinate love of money, a strong family feeling, utter indifference to the people's welfare, contempt for mankind, and some other accidental points of resemblance. They were born in the same mountains, or nearly so. One obtained the influence over a woman's heart which the other possesses over the mind of an old man. Both governed unscrupulously, and both have merited and obtained ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... beyond doubt, injurious both to my natural powers, and to the progress of my education. It would perhaps have been destructive, had it been continued; but from this I was auspiciously withdrawn, partly indeed by an accidental introduction to an amiable family, chiefly however, by the genial influence of a style of poetry, so tender and yet so manly, so natural and real, and yet so dignified and harmonious, as the sonnets and other early poems ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Woodman and the Tin Soldier took occasion to polish their bodies and oil their joints, for both were exceedingly careful of their personal appearance. They had forgotten the quarrel due to their accidental bumping of one another in the invisible country, and being now good friends the Tin Woodman polished the Tin Soldier's back for him and then the Tin Soldier polished the Tin ...
— The Tin Woodman of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... battle. Now the conduct of Sextus at Regillus, as described by Livy, so exactly resembles that of Paris, as described at the beginning of the third book of the Iliad, that it is difficult to believe the resemblance accidental. Paris appears before the Trojan ranks, defying the ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... rivalry of their authorship is no subject of concern; but it is enough for any ingenuous man to have toiled for years in solitude to complete a work of public utility, without entering a warfare for life to defend and preserve it. Accidental coincidences in books are unfrequent, and not often such as to excite the suspicion of the most sensitive. But, though the criteria of plagiarism are neither obscure nor disputable, it is not easy, in this beaten track of literature, for persons of little reading to know what ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... An almost accidental experiment at the Middlesex County truant school at North Chelmsford has shown it to be a truth, that wickedness takes flight at martial strains; for a full-fledged brass band, in which the delinquent youths are the ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... being very smooth, but the outside was formed of irregular nodules of clay hardened in the sun and lying just as they fell when dropped from the top of the mound. A small quantity of grass and leaves was mixed through the mound, but this was apparently accidental. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various
... congestion.—Whether the previous congestion of any organ has been a continuous normal one—that is, a repeated functional activity—or has been a morbid temporary overloading, it always leaves the walls of the vessels weakened and more predisposed to recurrent attacks from accidental causes than are perfectly healthy tissues. Thus a horse which has had a congestion of the lungs from a severe drive is liable to have another attack from ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... borrowed from Cowper's "Tirocinium," —truths on which depend our main concern, That 'tis our shame and misery not to learn; but I believe the resemblance to be purely accidental. It may serve however to show that the more serious passages in Horace, as well as the lighter ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... space, the duration of time, appear to be alike annihilated; we are transported in an instant to the most distant regions of the earth, and the events of ages are condensed into the span of a few seconds. The accidental jarring of a door, or any noise, will, at the same moment, it awakens a person, suggest the incidents of an entire dream. Hence some persons—Lord Brougham in particular—have supposed that all our dreams take place in the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... conceit of themselves, and shall gain this by attacking them, that they will not be so insolent when we come to the battle; for our distresses are not so great, nor is what hath happened all indication of the anger of God against us, as some imagine; for such things are accidental, and adversities that come in the usual course of things; and if we allow that this was done by the will of God, we must allow that it is now over by his will also, and that he is satisfied with what hath already ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... with Mrs. Romer entirely accidental on Monsieur D'Arblet's part. He had never forgotten the pretty Englishwoman who had so foolishly and recklessly placed herself in ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... in various manners in different places defunct: Percy Apjohn (killed in action, Modder River), Philip Gilligan (phthisis, Jervis Street hospital), Matthew F. Kane (accidental drowning, Dublin Bay), Philip Moisel (pyemia, Heytesbury street), Michael Hart (phthisis, Mater Misericordiae hospital), Patrick ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... fruit is still fair to the eye, it is not probable that it has permanently degenerated in fragrance or flavour. The great diversities of national character may, perhaps, be attributed principally to moral and accidental causes, but partly also to climate, and to original diversities in ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... reverence, my unimportant work to you, my honored lord. I shall rejoice if this novel leaves on the mind of your highness the impression that its conception is in faithful keeping with the laws of life and of art, without ever being a slavish copy of the accidental ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... mass of solid gold, which proved, on assay, to be of the purest quality. Every one was questioned as to what he had cast into the furnace, when there appeared no reason to suppose the transmutation could have been effected by such an accidental mixture of metals. At length it was remarked, that a dervish, accompanying the barber's son, had cast in a lump of ore, and immediately disappeared. Upon this the sultan summoned the youth to his presence, and inquiring after ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... the Burgundian, Sigfred the Frank, and Attila the Hun, in the poetical stories of the Niblung treasure may be in one sense accidental. The fables of the treasure with a curse upon it, the killing of the dragon, the sleeping princess, the wavering flame, are not limited to this particular course of tradition, and, further, the traditional motives of the Niblung story have varied enormously not only in different countries, but ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... friendliness had not escaped him and it had occurred to him that their frequent meetings were not entirely accidental. Past experiences had taught him the significance of certain signs, and when Dr. Harpe appeared with her hair curled and wearing a lingerie waist, the fact which roused the risibilities of her friends stirred in him a feeling which resembled the instinct ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... had not been accidental, as the reader will at once infer. Jaspar's passion, and the danger which he thought the young officer's presence menaced, had prompted him to an act which was not attended with his usual prudence, and the failure was likely to place him ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... of many things; sometimes of Mr. Povy, whose vanity, prodigality, neglect of his business, and committing it to unfit hands hath undone him and outed him of all his publique employments, and the thing set on foot by an accidental revivall of a business, wherein he had three or fours years ago, by surprize, got the Duke of Yorke to sign to the having a sum of money paid out of the Excise, before some that was due to him, and now the money is fallen short, and the Duke never likely to be paid. This being revived hath ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... to the chief medicine man south of Massett was accidental. While making a trip of several days alone with my canoe, I sought shelter from a severe storm on a little islet in Skidegate Inlet, where I passed a sleepless night in the rain and wind. It was only a short distance to the Indian village of Gold Harbor, where, the following day, I landed ...
— Official report of the exploration of the Queen Charlotte Islands - for the government of British Columbia • Newton H. Chittenden
... to make a fresh start. On one hand, to keep on in chase of the monkey with so little chance of reaching him was madness. On the other, to accept as definite this accidental interruption to all his plans, to be not only conquered, but cheated and hoaxed by a dumb animal, was maddening. And in the meantime Torres had begun to think that when the night came the robber ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... to go to Bilbao by sea, but the advice came too late. The last steamer from Bayonne had ventured there four-and-twenty hours before I sought my passage, and even on that last steamer the few voyagers were unable to insure their lives with the Accidental Company, although they consented to promise that they would descend into the hold the instant they heard a shot. It was almost as full of jeopardy to travel to Bilbao by sea as to sail down the Mississippi with a racing captain and a lading of rye-whisky on board. ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... high by the pestilential state of the towns, and thus the pressure of numbers was less felt than it is now, since it was possible to have, though not to rear, unlimited families. Occasionally, from accidental circumstances, England was for a short time under-populated, and these were the periods when, according to Professor Thorold Rogers, Archdeacon Cunningham, and other authorities, the labourer was well off. The most striking ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... either designed or accidental violations of treaties and the laws of nations afford JUST causes of war, they are less to be apprehended under one general government than under several lesser ones, and in that respect the former most favors ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... of undue friction and heating of rapidly rotating machinery arises from some inaccuracy or want of due parallelism between the rotating shaft or spindle and its bearing. This is occasioned in most cases by some accidental change in the level of the supports of the bearings. Many of the bearings are situated in dark places, and cannot be seen. There are others that are difficult of access—as in the case of bearings of screw-propeller ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... character of the present season, as compared with that of several previous seasons, clearly shows the cause of the rise and fall of the lakes not to be periodical, as has heretofore been asserted, but entirely accidental. For several years the summers have been cloudy and cold, with a prevalence of easterly winds and rainy weather. The last summer has been excessively warm for the whole season, and of exceeding drought. When it is remembered that the amount of water evaporated over ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... becoming increasingly constructive and selective, less patient under tradition and the bondage of initial circumstances. As education becomes more universal and liberating, men will sort themselves more and more by their intellectual temperaments and less and less by their accidental associations. The past will rule them less; the future more. It is not simply party but school and college and county and country that lose their glamour. One does not hear nearly as much as our forefathers did of the "old Harrovian," "old ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... insisted upon as the one thing needful by all, or nearly all,* the great religions of the world. No language could seem more purposely chosen to indicate that it is the individual nature itself, and not merely its accidental evils, that has to be abandoned and annihilated. It is not denied that what was spared was good; there is no suggestion of a universal infection of physical or moral evil; it is simply that what is good and useful relatively ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... somewhat similar feeling comes over one who walks the narrow path down the centre of the machinery compartment of a submarine. He seems hedged about by mysterious apparatus a touch of which, or even an accidental jostle may release powerful ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... there was a more intimate and personal consideration. Her own feeling toward Fergus Derrick was friendship at first, and then she had suddenly awakened and found it something more. That had startled her, too, but it had not alarmed her till her eyes were opened by that accidental speech of Derrick's. After that, she saw what both Derrick and Joan were ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... long as I keep my mind I can afford to adjourn religion." But suppose you do not keep it? A fever, the hurling of a missile, the falling of a brick from a scaffolding, the accidental discharge of a gun—and your mind is gone. If you have ever been in an anatomical room, and have examined the human brain, you know what a delicate organ it is. And can it be possible that our eternity ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... official positions. Each of the new favorites was not only eager to obtain wealth for himself, but had a number of relations for whom provision must also be made. To the more prominent courtiers above enumerated was added Jacques d'Albon de Saint-Andre, son of Henry's tutor, who, from accidental intimacy with the king in childhood, was led to aspire to high dignities in the state, and was not long in obtaining a marshal's baton.[552] Herself securing not only the rank of Duchess of Valentinois, with the authority of a queen,[553] but the enormous ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... observation, the parent and the tutor are rarely skilful in discovering the character of their child or charge. Custom blunts the fineness of psychological study: those with whom we have lived long and early are apt to blend our essential and our accidental qualities in one bewildering association. The consequences of education and of nature are not sufficiently discriminated. Nor is it, indeed, marvellous, that for a long time temperament should be disguised and even stifled by education; for it is, as it were, a ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... and communicative. With such a companion he always moved about the garrison, descanting upon its force and power, and imperceptibly stealing into his good graces, until he found some opportunity of making an apparently accidental enquiry touching the information he was desirous of obtaining. In this way he became possessed of the knowledge that even Quebec held within its impregnable walls many a man who was far from being the true friend of England, and who, as he surmised, waited the ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... services, precluded the probability of his long surviving the battle of Trafalgar, had he fortunately escaped the Enemy's shot: but the Writer of this can assert that HIS LORDSHIP'S health was uniformly good, with the exception of some slight attacks of indisposition arising from accidental causes; and which never continued above two or three days, nor confined him in any degree with respect to either exercise or regimen:[29] and during the last twelve months of his life, he Complained ...
— The Death of Lord Nelson • William Beatty
... objections some weak persons make against this regimen and method, is, that upon accidental trials, they have always found milk, fruit, and vegetables so inflate, blow them up, and raise such tumults and tempests in their stomach and bowels, that they have been terrified and affrighted from going on. I own the truth and fact to be such, in some as ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... ascends now through a long and wearisome limestone gap called Valle di Gaudolino, only the last half-hour of the march being shaded by trees. It was in this gully that an accidental encounter took place between a detachment of French soldiers and part of the band of the celebrated brigand Scarolla, whom they had been pursuing for months all over the country. The brigands were sleeping when the others fell upon them, killing numbers and carrying off a large booty; ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... Barwood, a treasury clerk, was killed yesterday at the Holbrook estate near Washington, by the discharge of a pistol in his own hands. The shooting is thought to have been accidental, although he had been ill and depressed for some days, and is said to have shown symptoms of insanity on ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... course, the coincidences could not possibly have been accidental, for both translators were supposed to take from the four printed Arabic editions. We shall presently give a passage by Burton before Payne translated it, and it will there be seen that the phraseology of the one translator bears no resemblance whatever to that of the ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... Julius Caesar is doubtless a fairer instance, but the whole mode of argument is unsound and unsatisfying. Why run off from the fact in question, or the class at least to which it belongs? The victory can be but accidental—a victory obtained by the unguarded logic, or want of logical foresight of the antagonist, who needs only narrow his positions to narrations of facts and events, in our judgment of which we are not aided by the analogy of previous and succeeding experience, ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... things happening, as if by the sheerest contingence, without warning or previous knowledge; and so it is with reference to ourselves, and to all the world perhaps: but with reference to divine Providence it is not so; there is nothing accidental, nothing unforeseen with respect to God. "Without Thy counsel and Providence, and without cause, nothing cometh to pass in the earth,"(95) says the Imitation. But what does this mean, "God provides?" It means ...
— The Shepherd Of My Soul • Rev. Charles J. Callan
... heard what really started the commotion, whether it was premeditated or accidental, but this illustrates what a furor a rifle shot creates instantly. The nervous tension of both the invader and invaded ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... right and left, ragged masses of life torn from their setting; he selects. And upon these trophies he sets to work with the full force of his imagination; he detects their significance, he disengages and throws aside whatever is accidental and meaningless; he re-makes them in conditions that are never known in life, conditions in which a thing is free to grow according to its own law, expressing itself unhindered; he liberates and completes. And then, upon all this ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... believe that true greatness is not accidental. To think and to say that greatness is a lottery, is pernicious. Man may be wrong sometimes in his judgment of others, both individually and in the aggregate, but he who gets ready to be a great man ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... imitating the prints taken from Europe by missionaries. Major Strange says: "The European art of chiaroscuro engraving is in all essentials identical with that of Japanese colour-printing.... It seems, therefore, not vain to point out that the accidental sight of one of the Italian colour-prints may have suggested the process to the Japanese." The Italians aimed more at expressing "relief" and the Japanese at flat colour arrangements; the former used oily colours, and the ...
— Wood-Block Printing - A Description of the Craft of Woodcutting and Colour Printing Based on the Japanese Practice • F. Morley Fletcher
... well we know that a sober moderation of action, an appropriate gravity of demeanor, belonging to the mature period of life, change from the wanton willfulness of youth, which may be ushered in, or its beginnings marked by many accidental incidents; in one perhaps by domestic bereavements, in another by the loss of fortune, in a third by ill-health. We are correct enough in imputing to such trials the change of character; but we never deceive ourselves by supposing that it would have failed to take ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... example of the type that he admired most. Probably only two persons in the world had the power of causing him annoyance, but both of these, by an irony of fate that it seemed scarcely possible to consider accidental, were closely connected with him, for one was his sister, the other ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... who are humbled by their condition, cannot glory in it, as the rich may; and that it makes the lower ranks of people love and admire the high-born, who can so condescend: whereas pride, in such, is meanness and insult, as it owes its boast and its being to accidental advantages; which, at the same time, are seldom of his procuring, who can be so mean as to be proud: that even I would sooner forget pride in a low degree than in a high; for it may be a security in the first against doing a base thing: but in the rich, it is a base ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... haemorrhage is a too frequent result. Wounds of these great vessels generally result in so rapid death from haemorrhage as to give no time for surgical interference. One case, however, is recorded,[5] in which the external iliac was cut in a lad of seventeen by an accidental stab, and in which Drs. Layraud and Durand, who were almost instantly on the spot, succeeded in stopping the bleeding by compresses, till Velpeau arrived, who tied the vessel above ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... methods of vindication every intelligent reader may form his own judgment. He will doubtless reach the conclusion that such vital omission of essential facts,—no matter whether accidental or intentional,—absolutely nullifies the value of the entire apology. Let us hope that the next defender of these experiments, writing not only for the instruction of the medical profession but also for the general public, will proceed along somewhat different lines; that every ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... one. In either case, he receives the notice too late to reach the City Hall in time. We were present in the Councilman's Chamber when Mr. Pullman stated this inconvenience, assuming that it was accidental, and offered an amendment to the rule, requiring notice to be left five hours before the time named for the meeting. Mr. Roberts also gave his experience in the matter of notices, and both gentlemen spoke with perfect moderation ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... eat it daily to meat at dinner, though hitherto with considerable despair. Question first, therefore: Is there by nature a bitter final taste, which makes the throat smart, and disheartens much the apprentice in Indian meal;—or is it accidental, and to be avoided? We surely anticipate the latter answer; but do not yet see how. At first we were taught the meal, all ground on your side of the water, had got fusty, raw; an effect we are well used to in oaten and other meals but, last ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... had made a terrific and everlasting impression upon Mr. Bryany. He was sending Mr. Bryany out of the Five Towns a different man. He had taught Mr. Bryany a thing or two. To what brilliant use had he turned the purely accidental possession of a hundred-pound note! One of his finest inspirations—an inspiration worthy of the great days of his youth! Yes, he had had his hour that evening, and it had been a glorious one. Also, it had cost him a ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... in humble obscurity—here I have lived, and here I hope to die in quiet," returned the meek Alice; "if I have known any pleasure, in late years, beyond that which every Christian can find in our daily duties, it has been, my sweet friends, in your accidental society.—Such companions, in this remote corner of the kingdom, has been a boon too precious to be enjoyed without alloy, it seems; and I have now to exchange the past pleasure for present pain. Adieu! my young friend; let your trust be in Him, to whose eyes both prince and peasant, ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Mr. Emerson, "is beginning to find reasons in the nature of things for results that once seemed only accidental, yet followed with remarkable certainty the same phenomena. It discovers a relation of cause and effect where ignorance only recognizes some ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... this ephemeral kind of ownership, limited by accidental political boundaries, that our Philadelphia friends are willing to concede to the work of a man's mind, the productions into which have been absorbed the grey matter of his brain and perhaps the best part of ...
— International Copyright - Considered in some of its Relations to Ethics and Political Economy • George Haven Putnam
... gathered up his papers and motioned to his friends to follow him out of the schoolroom. The foreman of the jury was returning a verdict of accidental death as they passed through the door, and they emerged into the street to an accompaniment of loud cheers for the Squire and ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... laudable intention of duly impressing his companion with the superiority of a real seaman over a mere fresh- water navigator, he had inadvertently laid bare a weak spot in his estimate of heights and distances, that the Commodore seized upon, with some such avidity as the pike seizes the hook. This accidental mistake alone saved the latter from an abject submission, for the cool superiority of the Captain had so far deprived him of his conceit, that he was almost ready to acknowledge himself no better than a dog, when he caught a glimpse of ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... facades and agricultural decorations, such as the caves of Karli, Ajunta, and Ellora.[1] But in Ceylon the earliest rock temples were merely hollows beneath overhanging rocks, like those still existing at Dambool, and the Aluwihara at Matelle, in both of which advantage has been taken of the accidental shelter of rounded boulders, and an entrance constructed by applying a facade of masonry, devoid of ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... disaster that shocked the world. A disaster in which it is impossible not to suspect the element of treachery. A disaster which if purely accidental, occurring to a hated ship in a port surrounded by men who were enemies at heart, was the most extraordinary coincidence in history. The story is brief. Not until this war is ended and the authority of the United States is employed to clear up the mystery, can ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... class of attorneys called, in Scotland, writers to the signet, and was the original from whom his son subsequently drew the character of Mr. Saunders Fairford, in "Redgauntlet." His mother was a lady of taste and imagination. An accidental lameness and a delicate constitution procured for Walter a more than ordinary portion of maternal care, and the influence of his mother's instructions was strongly impressed on his character. In early ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... causes or means of the transformation of species. Certainly those who read Mr. Darwin's own works attentively will find no lack of fluctuation in his case; and reflection will show them that a theory of evolution which relies mainly on the accumulation of accidental variations comes very close to not entering upon the causes or means of the transformation of ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... restraints were imposed, they were no other than those sanctioned by the practice of all civilized states: and though they may have affected the immediate interests of a few who were desirous to avail themselves of accidental circumstances presented during the contest, it is a gratification to know that such interests were only postponed for the general good. Should there, however, be any who conceive themselves aggrieved by my conduct. I have to request them to make known their complaints, in order that I may have ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... Sydney, which Sir John still thought to be expedient. And this thing which he had now seen was not one within his own branch of work,—was not a matter with which he was bound to be conversant. Somebody else ought to have found it out. His own knowledge was purely accidental. There would be no disgrace to him in not finding it out. But he had ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... not enjoy this triumph over nature, and over conscience, without its being embittered to him, not only by the internal rebellion of his feelings against the violence which he exercised over them, but by many accidental circumstances, which, in the course of the banquet, and during the subsequent amusements of the evening, jarred upon that nerve, the least ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... rounds bend after bend in the river, the same magnificent forest scenery is repeated over and over again. Sometimes a tall matamata tree stands in a little accidental clearing, entirely covered with a luxuriant growth of vegetation. But these are borrowed plumes. Bushropes, climbers, and vines have clothed it from root to topmost branch, but they are only examples of the legion of beautiful parasites that seem to abound in the tropics. They will sap the vitality ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... defendant, his culpability or innocence, implies a refinement of juridical conception equally foreign to Rome before the Lex Aquilia, and to England when trespass took its shape. I do not know any very satisfactory evidence that a man was generally held liable either in Rome /4/ or England for the accidental consequences even of his own act. But whatever may have been the early law, the foregoing account shows the starting-point of the system with which we have to deal. Our system of private liability for the consequences of a man's own acts, that is, for his trespasses, started from the notion of actual ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... interpret his melancholy, then, it was not merely an accidental vitiation of his humors, though it was doubtless also that. It was logically called for by the clash between his inner character and his outer activities and aims. Although a literary artist, Tolstoy was one of those primitive ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... in truths that are universal and immutable; that of prudence in second causes that are transient and subordinate. What is universally true is alone necessarily true—the knowledge that rests in particulars must be accidental. The theorist disdains experience—the empiric rejects principle. The one is the pedant who read Hannibal a lecture on the art of war; the other is the carrier who knows the road between London and York better than Humboldt, but a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... during the summer, when algae are likely to develop in the reservoir. The filter was installed after an epidemic of typhoid which was apparently caused by an infection of the water supply. Normally, the water has been little contaminated, but the supply is subject to accidental contamination at any time, among other possible sources of infection being the camps of workmen now engaged in constructing the Catskill ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXXII, June, 1911 • E. D. Hardy
... help was to come to the plan of an academy from a most unexpected source, in a most accidental way. In the reign of George II., if little was done for art and artists, great interest was displayed in works of public benevolence. From that period dates the rise of very many national hospitals and charitable institutions of various kinds. Among others, the London Foundling Hospital, which ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... auxiliaries were on their flanks; the legions faced them in front; and the cavalry by a sudden manoeuvre had closed in on their rear. However, Suetonius Paulinus did not immediately give the signal for his infantry to charge. He was by nature dilatory, and preferred cautiously reasoned measures to accidental success. He kept on issuing orders about filling up the ditches, clearing the fields and extending the line, convinced that it was soon enough to play for victory when he had taken every precaution against defeat. This delay gave the Vitellians time to take refuge ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... trying to get out of the way, and fell. Received a cut on her temple and is being taken to the hospital. Accidental all right." ...
— Second Sight • Basil Eugene Wells
... Ilsey boy?" I was compelled to admit my ignorance. "Well!" she said with a reminiscent sigh of satisfaction, "HE'S got only two toes on his left foot—showed 'em to me. And he was born so." Need it be said that in these few words I read the dismal sequel of Warts' unfortunate attachment? His accidental eccentricity was no longer attractive. What were his evanescent accretions, subject to improvement or removal, beside the hereditary and ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... animals of inferior interest engaged their attention. The fact that the mound is a nondescript, with no others resembling it, certainly lessens the probability that it was an intentional representation of the mastodon, and increases the likelihood that its slight resemblance was accidental; a slide of earth from the head, for instance, might readily be interpreted by the modern artist as a trunk, and thus the head be made to assume a shape in his sketch not intended by the original maker. As is well known, no task is more difficult for the artist than to transfer ...
— Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley • Henry W. Henshaw
... and, besides, it was evident that Mrs. Clymer was used to a better station in life than her husband. It was while the crowd was laughing and chattering at the picnic-table of new boards from the mill that Mrs. Clymer stole away to her modest little house, and a neighbor who had followed her was an accidental witness to a singular episode. Mrs. Clymer was kneeling beside her bed, crying over the picture of a child, when Clymer entered unexpectedly and attempted to take the picture ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... man, it is a double dignification of that person:] and so, if this Antiquitie of Angling (which, for my part, I have not forc'd) shall like an ancient Familie, by either an honour, or an ornament to this vertuous Art which I both love and practise, I shall be the gladder that I made an accidental mention of it; and shall proceed to the justification, ...
— The Complete Angler 1653 • Isaak Walton
... life-work. They held ideas in common on a score of impersonal topics. He told himself that he had behaved very boorishly in his abrupt departure from Arles. It had been unnecessary, as Chance had now pointed out to him by this second accidental encounter. This acquaintanceship was the merest passing of "ships that pass in the night"—in a day or two she would be away and back to Paris, and in all human probability they would never ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... talked on, partly in German and partly in English, their purpose in visiting Ansbach appeared to the Marches more meditated than it was. In fact it was somewhat accidental; Ansbach was near Nuremberg; it was not much out of the way to Holland. They took more and more credit to themselves for a reasoned and definite motive, in the light of their companion's enthusiasm for the place, and its charm ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... brother while they remained on the Jim Crow diggings, but thought of him constantly, dreading to hear of some further daring escapade on the part of Solo, fearing more the possibility of his capture. Burton was perplexed by the note of gravity that had developed in his mate, until he made an accidental discovery of Lucy Woodrow's locket, and then he thought he understood all, especially as Jim's visits to Kyley's shanty were comparatively rare of late. Meanwhile, Jim had written once to Lucy, but had received ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... writer's nerves all night. A somewhat similar feeling comes over one who walks the narrow path down the centre of the machinery compartment of a submarine. He seems hedged about by mysterious apparatus a touch of which, or even an accidental jostle may release ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... beneath an angel's guise on earth, first awakened the fire of love. And afterward Lord Byron gave his heart, of fifteen, to another affection, was deceived, met with no return,[162] but, on the contrary, was sorely wounded. Yet all the melancholy thus engendered was accidental and factitious, springing from the excessive sensibility of his physical and moral being, as well as from circumstances; his griefs resembled the usual griefs of youth. It was in these dispositions that he quitted Harrow for Cambridge University. There, one of the greatest sorrows ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... adjoining house. The women are especially "enraged at not finding anything," and wish to renew the attempt, swearing that they will discover where things are hidden in ten minutes. The nightmare is evidently too much for these unballasted minds. They break down under the weight of their accidental kingship, their inflamed pride, extravagant desires, and intense and silent fears which form in them that morbid and evil concoction which, in democracy as well as in ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... has brought me here. Your house is on fire of hell, and you do not seem to apprehend it. Did you not notice at the table that she spilled some wine on the Reverend (?) Mr. Malcolm's head and white cravat, and do you suppose it was accidental? No, sir, they are better acquainted than you and I, for he did not start when it was done, but was conscious who did it. When I entered your drawing-room and saw you standing between these two graceless villains, I looked around me in order to ascertain how many ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... when some wholesale system of plunder in cattle was brought to light. It is now commonly applied to any circumstance of this sort, whether greater or less, and whether springing from a felonious intent or accidental." ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... he has paid a hundred thousand livres to the guards, sixty-four thousand livres to the hospitals, twenty-five thousand to the Swiss, a hundred and thirty thousand for provisions, a thousand for arms, ten thousand for accidental expenses; I do not err, then, in reckoning upon nine hundred thousand livres that are left." Then turning towards Colbert, like a disdainful head of office towards his inferior, "Take care, monsieur," said he, "that ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... hospitalities of many of the principal citizens of Copenhagen; the visits to the tomb and museum of the works of Thorwaldsen, and to the room in which the immortal Oersted made his brilliant electro-magnetic discovery; the casual and accidental introduction and interview with a daughter of Oersted,—all created a train of reflection which prompted me to devise some suitable mode of showing to these hospitable people my appreciation of their friendly attentions, and I proposed to myself the presentation ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... have burnt so glorious a town before he had offered it to ransom. The Spaniards have always charged Morgan with the crime, but it seems more probable that the Spanish Governor was the guilty one. It is yet more probable that the fire was accidental. Most of the Spanish houses were of wood, and at that season of the year the timber would have been of extreme dryness, so that a lighted wad or match end might have caused the conflagration. At the time when the fire was first noticed, the pirates were raging through the town in search of ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... was by such means I had the honour of forming an acquaintance with this grand personage. He was of the middle height, between forty and forty-five years of age, rather inclined to corpulency, and had features strikingly like those of the Bourbons. It is very probable that this accidental resemblance may have led him to assume the character he did, and play so melancholy ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... whenever my sister was coming to see me Blagovo turned up too, and they always greeted each other as though their meeting in my room was accidental. My sister listened while the doctor and I argued, and at such times her expression was joyfully enthusiastic, full of tenderness and curiosity, and it seemed to me that a new world she had never dreamed of before, and which she was now striving to fathom, was gradually opening ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... indebted compels, or at least induces, men to fish to the creditor; and, indeed, it is so obviously and naturally an inducement to do so, that it is impossible to avoid regarding indebtedness to the merchant and the engagement to fish for him as more than a merely accidental sequence of events. Experience, however, has been teaching the more extensive merchants, and teaching them perhaps more readily because they have less difficulty than others in getting fishermen, that free or unindebted men are the most successful fishermen; and that to act on the old Shetland ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... however, of this accidental increase in the number of victims, Professor Mercalli considers that the earthquake of 1887 was the most disastrous of all those which have visited either the Riviera or northern Italy in the last three centuries; though, during the nineteenth century, ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... slave. Young, well-formed and very handsome, he said he had been a HOUSE- servant, which seemed to account in some measure for his gentlemanly manners and pleasing address. The meeting was entirely accidental; but it was a sad occurrence for poor Alfrado, as her own sequel tells. Suffice it to say, an acquaintance and attachment was formed, which, in due time, resulted in marriage. In a few days she left W——-, and ALL her home comforts, and took up her abode in New ...
— Our Nig • Harriet E. Wilson
... what it is to be "in charge," or who was in charge. Nay more, the jury at the inquest actually altogether ignored the same, and apparently considered the tap "in charge," for they gave as a verdict "accidental death." ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... after that evening, he seemed to haunt us in our walks, and, go where we would, we were always meeting him, in company with a Scottish deerhound called Nestor, of which Milly became very fond. When we met in this half-accidental way he used to join us in our walk for a mile or two, very often bearing us company till we were within ...
— Milly Darrell and Other Tales • M. E. Braddon
... his indifference, "you will find the two too many, if you refuse to discover the villainous source of such calumny." The gentleman, surprised at his heat, said he was sorry to find he had been the accidental instrument of giving him offence, but translated the blame, if any there was, from himself to a third person, to whose information he owed his knowledge of the report. The plaintiff, according to the direction he received, repaired to ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... different from that upon the surface. She was trying to read Marlow's conduct towards Emily—to judge whether he loved her or not. She asked herself whether his having escorted her to that house was in reality purely accidental, and she wished that she could have seen them together but for a few moments longer, though every moment had been a dagger to her heart. Nay, she did more: she strove by many a dexterous turn of the conversation, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... called fathers of Cordelia or Creiddylad.[341] Perhaps the two were once identical, for Manannan is sometimes called son of Alloid ( Lludd), in Irish texts, as well as son of Ler.[342] But the confusion may be accidental, nor is it certain that Nodons or Lludd was a sea-god. Llyr's prison was that of Eurosswyd,[343] whose wife he may have abducted and hence suffered imprisonment. In the Black Book of Caermarthen Bran is called son of Y Werydd or "Ocean," according to M. Loth's interpretation ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... that is full of attitude, can hardly be aware that a crimson snapdragon of great stature and many stalks and blossoms is standing on its furthest summit tiptoe against its sky. The cornice of another church in the fair middle of Rome lifts out of the shadows of the streets a row of accidental marigolds. Impartial to the antique, the mediaeval, the Renaissance early and late, the newer modern, this wild summer finds its account in travertine and tufa, reticulated work, brick, stucco and stone. "A bird of the air carries ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... on my mind; and I felt a secret longing to meet him again. Suddenly it occurred to me that I was acting with impropriety, and that you would be angry with me. I therefore resolved not to mention to you my accidental encounter with the handsome cavalier; but I determined at the same time not to repair to the forest next day. When the appointed hour drew near, my good genius deserted me; and I went. He was there, and he seemed pleased ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... cared not a whit whether Clayton had been waylaid by accidental thugs, betrayed at the bank, duped by some insidious woman, or slain by an inner ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... society crime in fact was hardly recognizable except in the form of an injury inflicted upon some person or persons. An offence against the State there could not be, simply because there was no State to be offended. Everything, from murder down to the smallest and most accidental injury, was compensated for by "erics" or fines. The amount of these fines was decided upon by the Brehon, who kept an extraordinary number of imaginary rulings, descending into the most minute particulars, such as what fine was to be paid in the case of one person's cat stealing ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... for.—Howard Report, pp. 35-36. Indeed, the Border Ruffian habit of voting in Kansas had become chronic, and did not cease for some years, and sometimes developed the grimmest humors. In the autumn of that same year an election for county-seat took place in Leavenworth County by the accidental failure of the Legislature to designate one. Leavenworth city aspired to this honor and polled six hundred votes; but it had an enterprising rival in Kickapoo city, ten miles up the river, and another, Delaware city, eight miles down stream. Both were paper ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... was subjected to an accidental intrusion, I called out, first in a gentle and afterward in a ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... after fifty years, he read 'Richard's Story of his Boyhood,' in the Tales of the Hall, with the same delight as on its first appearance, and he considers that a Poem which thus pleases in Age as it pleased in Youth must be called (in the 'accidental' sense of ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... kinds of knowledge in the mind. But as yet all attempts among us to properly relate studies are but weak and ineffective approaches toward the solution of the great problem of concentration. The links that now bind studies together in our work are largely accidental and no great stress has been laid upon their value, but if concentration is grappled with in earnest it involves relations at every step. Not only are the principal and tributary branches of knowledge ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... that we are accustomed to call savages, was by no means accidental, or peculiar to this case. While in battle, they are unsparing and unrelenting as tigers—while, after the fury of its excitement is past, they will exult with frantic and demoniac joy in the cries of their victims expiring ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... experimentally become acquainted with them as facts. Pitiably mean is he that measures the relations of such cases by the scenical apparatus of purple and gold. That which never has been apparelled in royal robes, and hung with theatrical jewels, is but suffering from an accidental fraud, having the same right to them that any similar misery can have, or calamity upon an equal scale. These proportions are best measured from the fathoming ground of a real ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... not lead individual isolated lives apart from our fellows. The parish is not the centre of the universe. The tendency of the uneducated mind is to isolate itself from the interests of others, and to look at all matters from a purely selfish point of view. The parish is an accidental collection of individual souls in a particular diocese. The diocese is an aggregation of separate parishes scattered through an assigned area. The members of the Church in a particular parish and diocese are members of the Holy Catholic Church, which by its very nomenclature abrogates ...
— Churchwardens' Manual - their duties, powers, rights, and privilages • George Henry
... knowledge, and only between the good; hence it is not possible for anyone to have many real friends. Of the conventional forms, that which is born of intellectual sympathy is more enduring than what springs from sexual attraction; while what comes of utility is quite accidental. The former may develop into genuine friendship if there be virtue in both parties. Companionship is a necessary ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... concentrated in the accidental meetings of the Mazourka! It can surround, with its own enchantment, the lightest emotion of the heart, while, through its magic, the most reserved, transitory, and trivial rencounter appeals to the imagination. Could it be otherwise in the presence of the women who give to this dance that ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... Neipperg of everything the Prussian Army undertakes, and the Postscript always, "Come and deliver us, your Excellency." Of these latter Documents, I have heard of some with Syndic Guzmar's and other Official hands to them. Generally such things can, through accidental Pandour channels, were there no other, easily reach Neipperg; though they do not always. Enough, could Neipperg appear at the Gates of Breslau, in some concerted night-hour, or push out suitable Detachment on forced-march that way,—it is evident to him he would be let in; might ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... my principles, I must see several conditions. 1st, The object affected by the abuse should be great and important. 2nd, The abuse affecting this great object ought to be a great abuse. 3d, It ought to be habitual, and not accidental. 4th, It ought to be utterly incurable in the body as it now stands constituted. All this ought to be made as visible to me as the light of the sun, before I should strike off an atom of their charter. A right honorable ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice, but an accidental one, here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death! In the centre of the world-whirlwind, verily now as in the oldest days, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... 1875, and three sons and three daughters survived him. One daughter is the wife of Dr. Routh, of Cambridge, and his other daughters were the constant companions of their father during the declining years of his life. Up to the age of ninety he enjoyed perfect physical health, but an accidental fall which then occurred was attended with serious results. He died on Saturday, January 2nd, 1892, and was buried in the churchyard ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... read it preparatory to retiring for prayer. Her teacher could put her finger on no part of those large pages without touching a tear.[1] Still later, when news of the death of Munny, of Ardishai, by the accidental discharge of a gun, reached Miss Fiske in America, her first thought was, "Dear child, I shall never again break off your communion with Jesus;" for she remembered that when once she begged her to leave her closet and get rest for the Sabbath, her reply was, "O, ...
— Woman And Her Saviour In Persia • A Returned Missionary
... Moors were bold, hardy fellows. The step was at once made from the cooling into the hot room, or bath, and in taking the step it was necessary to pass over one of the open sewers of the town—to judge from the smell thereof. But this last was a mere accidental circumstance connected with the bath, not an essential part of it. Thus it will be seen there were but two apartments in the establishment, ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... free from all external compulsion, but that he is free from himself, not determined even by his own character. And if we ask what it really is that causes him to act, it must be answered, some caprice of the moment, some accidental impulse or arbitrary freak of fancy. The late Professor James makes a valiant attempt to solve the 'dilemma of determinism' by resorting to the idea of 'chance' which he defines as a 'purely relative term, giving us no information about that which is predicated, ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... exchanged a glance of surprise. Was this suggestion accidental? Or had they before them, contrary to their expectations, the very couple of whom ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... cause of Lord Palmerston's absence yesterday? If it was not accidental, she must say she thinks it most disrespectful ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... they furnished her with excellent material, to be worked up later by the raconteuse's art into something too delicious and absurd. She enjoyed, too, telling Mrs. Hilary the latest scandals; she was so shocked and disgusted; and it was fun dropping little accidental hints about Nan, and even about Gilbert. Anyhow, what a treasure of a relic of the Victorian age! And how comic in her jealousy, her ingenuous, futile boasting, her so readily exposed deceits! And how ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... some one who had been living in Palo Duro Canon with the outlaws? Or was this meeting an accidental one? The odd thing about it was that there was no sign of her horse. She had come on foot, in a country where ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... in 1700, may have been his father. He was sent to Italy to study art, and afterwards came to England. He professed to teach amateurs how to produce pictures without study. Edwards, in his "Anecdotes of Painting," describes his process as dashing out a number of accidental large blots and loose flourishes from which he selected forms and sometimes produced very grand ideas. Dayes called him "Blotmaster-general ...
— Masters of Water-Colour Painting • H. M. Cundall
... with Mr. Plummer came about in quite an accidental and easy way—Mr. Crayon saw to that—and the Easterner was deferential, as became one who had so little experience of the West, who, in case he was presumptuous, was likely to be reminded that Idaho was nearly twenty times as large as Connecticut and twice ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... return homeward an incident befell him, which he afterwards related as ominous, though probably his heated imagination, joined to the universal turn of his countrymen for the marvellous, exaggerated into superstitious importance some very ordinary and accidental circumstance. ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... some torture. Nor could he be persuaded to leave his place for food or sleep, urge who would, but with careworn face and haggard eyes never left it for thirty hours. Occasionally, when for a minute or two there would come an accidental break in the firing, his lips could be seen to move as if he were speaking to himself. Not one knew why he stood there following each shot so anxiously, or little recked that, when there was not one to fasten his attention, he ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... the winter. A strong piece of ground at Valley Forge, on the west side of the Schuylkill between twenty and thirty miles from Philadelphia, was selected for that purpose, and some time before day on the morning of the 11th of December (1777) the army marched to take possession of it. By an accidental concurrence of circumstances Lord Cornwallis had been detached the same morning at the head of a strong corps on a foraging party on the west side of the Schuylkill. He had fallen in with a brigade of Pennsylvania militia commanded by General Potter which ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... door. Hosmer was making a tour of inspection that afternoon through the woods, and when he came suddenly upon Therese some moments after she had quitted the cabin, the meeting was not so wholly accidental as ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... explore in its innermost recesses the sentiments and secret motives which actuate the conduct of men. By connecting moral effects with their probable internal and external causes, it tended to establish a systematic consistency in the concatenation of transactions apparently anomalous, accidental, or totally independent of ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... celebrated French scientist, an authority on the subject of heredity. You doubtless know something of the subject, how certain traits appear in families generation after generation. Accidental traits, if repeated for two or three generations, often become inherent traits. To show you to what a strange extent this is true, I will call your attention to the case of the ducal house of Bethune ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... certainly to believe); but suppose it were certain,(1254) yet for this, and all the other circumstances, which are not exemplary, there were special reasons either in the urgency of the legal necessity, or in the exigency of present and accidental occasions, which do not concern us: whereas the gesture of sitting was freely and purposely chosen, and so intended to be exemplary, especially since there was no such reason moving Christ to use this gesture of sitting as ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... had thus taken from them were spoiling in his stores, while the poor wretches from whom they were plundered were pining in poverty. Though the destruction of this tyrant was accidental, the people chose the cucumber-gatherers for their governors, as a mark of their gratitude for destroying, though accidentally, ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... it was my turn to do the open face act! Course, knockin' around as much as I have and rubbin' against so many diff'rent kinds of folks, I'm liable to run across people that know me anywhere; but blamed if I expected to do it just walkin' out accidental into a ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... staff of that versatile editor not long afterwards, and took a lion's share of the writing in the Magazine of Architecture. Meanwhile he had been introduced to another editor, and to the publishers with whom he did business for many a year to come. The acquaintance was made in a curious, accidental manner. His cousin Charles Richardson, clerk to Smith, Elder, and Co., had the opportunity of mentioning the young poet's name to Thomas Pringle, editor of the "Friendship's Offering" which John ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... last night at the Tuileries, to which the Chiefs of the Diplomatic Body were invited. On these occasions seats are assigned to the Ambassadors according to their accidental rank, and I was placed between the Nuntio and the Russian Ambassador. It is customary for the Emperor, during the interval between the two parts of the concert, to say a few words to each of the Ambassadors individually, and it is ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... tenants from sending their children to these schools; but, as usual, I experienced but little gratitude at their hands, or at those of their parents. This, however, was not so much owing to my interference, as to the accidental circumstance of three or four of them having been hanged or transported for crimes which they were base enough to impute to the ignorance occasioned by my principles—for so ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... voluntarily my existence to my daughter, so that a final and terrible, unspeakable culminating evil deed should mark the end of my career. I feared this even more than another narrow escape from accidental disclosure, such as I had had in my first attempt to enter the old garden on that winter night ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... to remember that you never did care for me all the time I was making such a little fool of myself. I know you never did. Folks said you was changeable, but I never once believed it till last night on the road. I have fixed it so everybody will think my death was accidental. I've been warned time and again about that foot-log, and nobody will suspicion the truth. You must never mention it to a soul. It is my last and only request. It would go harder with mother if she knew that. Good-bye, John. I love ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... troubles that affect other orchard crops are of any avail in this case. When it is noted that there has been practically no advance in the improvement of varieties since the origin of the Franquette and Mayette about one hundred and fifty years ago, except the accidental appearance of the Santa Barbara which was produced presumably from a nut from Chili (!) in 1868 on the grounds of Joseph Sexton, Goleta, California, it is evident that our nuciculturists have been indifferent, ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Second Annual Meeting - Ithaca, New York, December 14 and 15, 1911 • Northern Nut Growers Association
... preeminence due to our merits and deserts. Everything that comes to us from God is purely gratuitous on His part, and undeserved on ours. Since our very existence is the effect of a free act of His will, why should not, for a greater reason, all that is accidental to that existence be dependent on His free choice? Finally, nothing of all this is ours or ever can become ours. Our qualities are a pure loan confided to our care for a good and useful purpose, and will be ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... From this despair arises an awakening of the soul. From such awakening proceeds study of the Scriptures. From contemplation of the import of the scriptures, O king, one sees the value of penance. A person possessed of the knowledge of what is essential and what accidental, O king, is very rare,—he, that is, who seeks to undergo penances, impressed with the truth that the happiness one derives from the possession of such agreeable objects as spouses and children leads ultimately to misery.[1533] Penances, O child, are for all. They are ordained for ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... perhaps, society will know that evil is an accidental, not organic malady; that criminals are almost always good in substance, but false and wicked through ignorance, selfishness, or negligence of those governing; and that the health of the soul, like that of the body, is invincibly subordinate ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... that the school superintendent had been killed by an accidental explosion at the munition works, and the newspapers stated that Mrs. Dyer did not desire a public funeral. Indeed, she was too overwhelmed by the tragedy to express any desire regarding the funeral but left it all to Colonel Hathaway ...
— Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls • Edith Van Dyne (AKA L. Frank Baum)
... precipitated the outbreak, which was easily crushed, as was also a rising in May at Yung chow, a town in the south of Hu-nan. Much mission and mercantile property was wrecked at Changsha, but the only loss of life was the accidental drowning of three Roman ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... line as it passed the loggerhead was so great that Parr had to keep constantly pouring water on it to prevent its catching fire. A hitch in the line at that time, as it flew out of the tub, or any accidental entanglement, would have dragged the boat and crew right down: many such fatal accidents occur to whalers, and many a poor fellow has had a foot or an arm torn off, or been dragged overboard and drowned, in consequence of ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... the position they have taken to claim jurisdiction over this great question of reaedmitting these States, from that hour they surrender all the power that the Constitution places in their hands and that they were sworn to support, and they are the mere slaves of an accidental Executive; of a man who formerly associated with us upon this floor; who was no more infallible than the rest of us poor mortals; and yet the moment, by death or accident, he is placed in the executive ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... how he had grappled with Isom in an endeavor to prevent him turning the gun against him; told of the accidental discharge of the weapon; the arrival ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... reached his room, he sat down in the arm-chair to think. He had made a grand and wonderful success, but it was not upon that that his mind was now fixed. It was upon the casual and accidental effect of the work of his invention, of which he had never dreamed. Bryce had made a great mistake in thinking that it was not what Roland Clewe had seen, but what he had expected to see, which had caused him to drop insensible. It was what he ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... the clouds and the mountains, covered with their immense, mute attestation what the old city murmured beneath them; they confirmed in silence the sombre truths: heaven empty as the churches are, serving for accidental phantasmagoria, and uninterrupted times rolling their flood, wherein thousands of lives, like insignificant nothings, are, one after another, dragged and drowned.—A knell began to ring in that distance which Ramuntcho saw whitening; very slowly, the old belfry gave its voice, once more, for ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... said to himself, joyously. "Fifty men quietly introduced by the secret passage, and led right into the house. Why, we could surprise them all asleep, and the place would be taken without loss of life. What a result to an accidental discovery!" ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... of two fleets, he said, would have no more effect than a neutrality, and that, however the British cabinet might desire peace between England and France, it was impossible to foresee the consequences that might arise from accidental collision. This had some effect, for the squadron at Brest was countermanded; but soon after the French minister, in hopes of eluding observation, gave orders for the equipment of an armament at Toulon, under pretence of exercising the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... must have had some tendency to increase this proportion. If an average of ten years had been taken in the intervals of the returns of this dreadful disorder, or if the years of plague had been rejected as accidental, the registers would certainly give the proportion of births to burials too high for the real average increase of the population. For some few years after the great plague in 1666, it is probable that there was a more than usual excess of births above burials, particularly if Dr Price's opinion ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... Accidental causes have given frequent occasions to mistakes, which, when we consider, we cannot be surprised if sometimes good men have been deceived by false memoirs. As to authors of wilful forgeries, we have no name ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... had always been stayed at his door, but this time the King laid siege to Arcona, determined to make an end of him. Some of the youngsters in his army, making a mock assault upon the strong walls, discovered an accidental hollow under the great tower over which the Stanitza flew and, seizing upon a load of straw that was handy, stuffed it in and set it on fire. It was done in a frolic, but when the tower caught fire and was burned ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... OF A HIGHLY SUSCEPTIBLE NERVOUS TEMPERAMENT OUGHT NOT.—There are other women who ought never to become nurses. The mother of a highly nervous temperament, who is alarmed at any accidental change she may happen to notice in her infant's countenance, who is excited and agitated by the ordinary occurrences of the day; such a parent will do her offspring more harm than good by attempting to suckle it. Her ...
— The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease. • Thomas Bull, M.D.
... am Emmeline, though I might've been Sophia or Debby Jane! Namin' people is sort o' accidental. I always wished they'd named me somethin' prettier by accident! But I guess Emmeline ...
— Four Girls and a Compact • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... by the regular and healthy regime, the strengthening of my soul and body was helped by the wonderful, yet natural, peculiarity of our prison, which eliminates entirely the accidental and the unexpected from its life. Having neither a family nor friends, I am perfectly safe from the shocks, so injurious to life, which are caused by treachery, by the illness or death of relatives—let my indulgent ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... The flowers of various kinds of orchids are very remarkable for the peculiar forms which they take. Some of them have a great resemblance to bees, flies, or butterflies, and this resemblance is at times so great that we wonder whether it is only an accidental likeness, or whether it serves some useful purpose. One of the oddest shapes which any plant takes, however, is that of the leaves of the pitcher-plant; and in this case naturalists, who have studied the plant carefully, are able to show us ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... established church (with form) in the state. The universal church is only visible in its fruits; the established church in its external arrangement, which it must receive from the state, or subject to its approval. The universal church is unchangeable, eternal; the established church variable, accidental. ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... whispered to Tamara, too. The words were nothing, only some ordinary nonsense, of which she took no heed. But as he spoke his lips touched her ear. A wild thrill ran through her, she almost trembled, so violent was the emotion the little seemingly accidental caress caused. A feeling she had never realized in the whole of her life before. Why did he tease her so. Why did he always behave in this maddening manner! and choose moments when she was defenseless and could make no move. Of one ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... know we were there," mused Clif, "or they would not have been so easily taken by surprise. Why were they there? Their capture of the Cuban courier was accidental, I'm sure. They were on ...
— A Prisoner of Morro - In the Hands of the Enemy • Upton Sinclair
... purpose of working on the tinker's beat and making horse-shoes. After some days he was visited down in a Shropshire dingle by a Gypsy girl, who poisoned him at the instigation of his enemy, old Mrs. Herne. Only the accidental appearance of the Welsh preacher, Peter Williams, saved him. Years afterwards, in 1854, it may be mentioned here, he told a friend in Cornwall that his fits of melancholy were due to the poison of a Gypsy crone. He spent a week in the company ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... in] suspension or solution, it is evident how necessary it is to be quick-sighted in regard to the possible impurity of water from incidental causes of this kind. Therefore all tanks and cisterns should be inspected regularly, and any accidental source of impurity must be looked out for. Wells should be covered; a good coping put round to prevent substances being washed down; the distances from cess-pools and dung-heaps should be carefully noted; no sewer should be allowed to pass near a ...
— The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking - Adapted to Domestic Use or Study in Classes • Helen Campbell
... Lady Neville had treated the duke with great reserve in her accidental intercourse with him at the reunions of the court, but now, since he was her accepted lover, he thought he might reasonably expect a greater degree of cordiality in her demeanor toward him. But he found ...
— Margaret of Anjou - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... sighed incredulously. What a pity, she thought, that among the humbler vocations Paul's father should have been just a plain "hired man." Cowboy, miner, man-o'-war's man, even enlisted man, though that were bad enough—any of these he might have been in an accidental way, that at least would have been picturesque; but it is only the possession of land, by whatsoever means or title, that can dignify an habitual personal contact with it in the form of soil. That is one of the accepted prejudices which one does not meddle with at nineteen. "Youth is conservative ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
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