|
|
|
More "Erratic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... well, you liberals, And navigators into realms intellectual, You sailors through heights imaginative, Blown about by erratic currents, tumbling into air pockets, You Margaret Fuller Slacks, Petits, And Tennessee Claflin Shopes— You found with all your boasted wisdom How hard at the last it is To keep the soul from splitting into cellular atoms. While we, seekers of earth's treasures Getters ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... see me in an ordinary way—why should you not? But, of course, not in such a way as this. I should not have come now, if it had not happened that the Duke is away from home, so that there is nobody to check my erratic impulses.' ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... tenderness, on a suspicion that a quaint old high-frilled bleached and puckered Puritanical rectitude (her thoughts rose in pictures) possibly condemned the speculator as a description of gambler. An erratic severity in ethics is easily overlooked by the enthusiast for things old English. She was consciously ahead of them in the knowledge that her father had been, without the taint of gambling, a beneficent speculator. The Montgomery colony in South Africa, and his dealings with the natives ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... out in Beaulieu," he cried; "they shall not say it of me that I came back in rags. Look, here is a watch which I shall return to you, for it is mine; and, like its owner, it is erratic in ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... was coming up at full speed in pursuit. The Emden did not wait to discuss matters, but, firing her first shot at a range of about 3,700 yards, steamed north as hard as she could go. At first the firing of the Emden seemed excellent, while that of the Sydney was somewhat erratic. This, as I afterward learned, was due to the fact that the Australian cruiser's range finder was put out of action by one of the only two shots the Germans got home. However, the British gunners soon overcame any difficulties that this may have caused, and settled down to their work, so ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... little for individuals. He did not believe (as some one has said) that the history of mankind is the history of its great men. Great men with him were but larger atoms, obeying the same impulses with the rest, only perhaps a trifle more erratic. With them or without them, the course of things would have been ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... of a clergyman of the Church of Scotland, and had been educated as a surgeon; but being of an eccentric and erratic genius, he adopted literature as a profession, and was the principal editor of the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Becoming embroiled in politics, he published a handbill of a seditious tendency, and consequently was compelled to seek a refuge in America, where ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne
... wild streak of the MacDuffs in her, and what could you expect? The Gordon family had generally been genteel enough to keep this objectionable MacDuff connection hidden, but occasionally it came out in red hair, deep gray eyes, and a wild, erratic disposition. To be sure, little Elizabeth's hair was not red, but a deep nut-brown, shading to rich yellow at the ends, where it curled upwards. But down the middle of her heavy brown braid ran a thick strand of reddish gold, quite enough to account ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... to be a drover, and he was on the spree and 'shouting' with spontaneity and freedom. His horse, a fine upstanding bay, stood saddled and bridled under McMahon's shed at the Drovers' Arms by day and night. His behaviour in drink was original and erratic. He would fraternise with the man at the bar for a time, and then go roaming at large about the township in a desultory way, sleeping casually in all sorts of absurd places; but Waddy had a large experience in 'drunks' and ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... thereunto Drawn out by his inquiring turn of mind,— "My Gran'ma she's read all books—ever' kind They is, 'at tells all 'bout the land an' sea An' Nations of the Earth!—An' she is the Historicul-est woman ever wuz!" (Forgive the verse's chuckling as it does In its erratic current.—Oftentimes The little willowy waterbrook of rhymes Must falter in its music, listening to The children laughing as they ...
— A Child-World • James Whitcomb Riley
... temper as they now did, the boys were not unprepared for anything that might happen. Gritting their teeth they marched bravely on even though they felt that at any moment the erratic man behind them might send a bullet into their backs. They resolved, however, to show ...
— Boy Scouts in Southern Waters • G. Harvey Ralphson
... of the hurricane and fluttering away like a seabird from the mountains that towered far above and were only permitted to kiss her stern with their spray. The crew were forbidden to look behind while at the helm lest their nerves should be affected and cause erratic steering. There was really more danger in this than in any lack of seakindliness on the part of the vessel. Each time she ran away from a treacherous-looking breaker, the captain would pat the topgallant bulwarks and speak words of touching tenderness as though ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... one barely moving craft was in sight. This had received the brunt of our fire and seemed to be entirely unmanned, as not a moving figure was visible upon her decks. Slowly she swung from her course, circling back toward us in an erratic and pitiful manner. Instantly the warriors ceased firing, for it was quite apparent that the vessel was entirely helpless, and, far from being in a position to inflict harm upon us, she could not even control herself ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... truth. He shows us that among the sharks and harpies of Wall Street there are phases of honor and generosity—that the arrogance or coldness of a bank-officer may have a rational foundation—that feelings as intense are awakened in common business pursuits as in the most dramatic and erratic lives. In this just treatment of character,—this avoiding of the old saint and angel system of depicting men,—KIMBALL is truly pre-eminent, and under it even the casual SOL DOWNER strikes us with an ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... and The Rebel rounded up their outfits and started south for the Mulberry, while Bob Quirk gathered his own and my lads preparatory to leaving for the Saw Log. I had agreed to remain on guard for that night, for with the erratic turn on Tolleston's part, we were doubly cautious. But when my outfit was ready to start, Runt Pickett, the feisty little rascal, had about twenty dollars in his possession which he insisted on gambling away before leaving town. Runt was comfortably drunk, and as Bob urged humoring him, I ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... she would answer she had been to see some one who was ill in the village, for if she and Mary heard Harry was likely to return to his home, they would oppose it, she knew. The household had become somewhat accustomed to Maud's erratic doings by this time, and so little wonder was expressed that she did not come into the keeping-room to supper. Every one supposed she was in her own room, and so at the usual hour the watch dogs were set upon their guard and the house locked up, and by the time Maud got ...
— Hayslope Grange - A Tale of the Civil War • Emma Leslie
... the best and most serious thing in the way of friendship, protection and guardianship that I have had during my life. That butterfly acted as my godmother. Do you wonder now at the zigzags, the erratic flights of my mind? Lucky for me that I have clung ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... the speech of Fage's counsel, Margery, the dreaded wit, who convulses the whole assembly and the bench with the mere sound of his nasal 'Well.' Some fun was to be expected; the whole atmosphere of the place announced it, the erratic tilt of the barristers' caps, the gleam in the eyes and curl in the corners of the mouths of people giving one another little anticipatory smiles. There were endless anecdotes current about the achievements in gallantry ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... it which crossed the village street. For such projectiles as laden toboggans, passing across the trunk line of the village traffic at an average rate of a mile a minute, were hardly less dangerous than cannon-balls, and of much more erratic flight. ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... enough to be self-sustaining. Too large a charge simply rekindles the original vortex—still larger—in its original crater. And the activity that must be matched varies so tremendously, in magnitude, maxima, and minima, and the cycle is so erratic—ranging from seconds to hours without discoverable rhyme or reason—that all attempts to do so at any predetermined instant have failed completely. Why, even Kinnison and Cardynge and the Conference of Scientists ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... arrived. And we arrived, furthermore, without any trouble, as you shall see; that is, without any trouble to amount to anything. To begin with, Roscoe tackled the navigating. He had the theory all right, but it was the first time he had ever applied it, as was evidenced by the erratic behaviour of the Snark. Not but what the Snark was perfectly steady on the sea; the pranks she cut were on the chart. On a day with a light breeze she would make a jump on the chart that advertised "a wet sail and a flowing sheet," and on a day when she just raced over the ocean, she ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... the craft's erratic course, as it swung loggily westward and headed toward that yawning abysm from which they had all ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... prevented the degeneration of species. It could boast of a temperature ever equable, and a soil which every plant had long enriched to thrive therein in the silence of its vigour. Its vegetation was mighty, magnificent, luxuriantly untended, full of erratic growths decked with monstrous blossoming, unknown to the spade and watering-pot of gardeners. Nature left to herself, free to grow as she listed, in the depths of that solitude protected by natural shelters, threw restraint ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... He never entirely shook off his erratic use of negatives. See, also, Lamon, 424; ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... "Ici on parle Francais," played on the boards which I, in my corporate capacity, had planed, and sawn, and nailed. My route last Sunday lay across the crisp sward of the Scrubbs; and it was quite a pleasure to be able to walk there without danger of falling pierced by the bullet of some erratic volunteer; for there are three butts on Wormwood Scrubbs, which I examined with minuteness on Sunday, and was exercised to see by marks on the brickwork how very wide of the target a volunteer's shot can go. I wonder there is not a wholesale slaughter of ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... that possibly the near future may award to it. Certain fallacies existed for a long time as to the relative merits of the dry or molten and the wet or electrolytical methods of galvanizing. The latter was found to be costly and slow, and the results obtained were erratic and not satisfactory, and soon gave place to the dry or molten bath process, as in practice at the present day; but the difficulty of management in connexion with large baths of molten material, and the ...
— Handbook on Japanning: 2nd Edition - For Ironware, Tinware, Wood, Etc. With Sections on Tinplating and - Galvanizing • William N. Brown
... of uneven ground crossed and recrossed by the narrow-gauge tracks upon which the sand and grit trucks ran, avoiding one or two localities where steam shot upward from the ground in a witch-like and erratic manner, with short angry hisses and chopping sounds that suggested danger, and finally stood before the door designated "OFFICE" in plain lettering. Joyce looked around at her companion with ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... also the father of one each of the offspring of daughters Nos. 2 and 3. Most of the children are delicate and poorly developed, and at least six of them are definitely tubercular. The remainder are either neurotic or erratic in their conduct and have given a great deal of trouble in their upbringing. The total cost to the State for the maintenance of these children may be quoted at L10,000, but of this amount L482 has been recovered from the various men liable. It is difficult to assess the State's total commitment. ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... even the average German official—wedded as he may be to his rank or his title, anxious as he may be to preserve an outward decorum in exact keeping with the precise shade of his public status—is often the most delightfully unconventional, good-natured, unsophisticated, and even erratic being in the world, as soon as he has left the cares of his office behind him. Germany is the classic land of queer people. It is the land of Quintus Fixlein, Onkel Braesig, Leberecht Huehnchen, and the host of Fliegende Blatter worthies; it is the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... lunch basket which the erratic ramifications of the road leading to Judson Centre had obliged them to carry, there was still, fortunately, a supply of sandwiches and fruit. A hasty search through the nearest pantry revealed jelly, marmalade, and pickles, ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... on either side, both of which were now down and barred. We were not quite sure whether the captain were really the Honourable John's relative, or whether our comrade's proposal to join the captain was only one of those erratic notions which visited his aristocratic brain, and were often carried through with a confidence so complete as to be rarely unsuccessful. He was unmercifully snubbed sometimes, and he richly deserved it; but the curious thing about ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... the fulfilment of its obligations. They must know themselves and their own powers in order to exercise control and direction on the current of their lives. The complaint made of many women is that they are wanting in self-control, creatures of impulse, erratic, irresponsible, at the mercy of chance influences that assume control of their lives for the moment, subject to "nerves," carried away by emotional enthusiasm beyond all bounds, and using a blind tenacity of will to land themselves with the cause they have embraced in a dead-lock ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... to the Union in 1850, owing to the erratic character of her early population, has passed through more vicissitudes than any other State, but she secured at last social order, justice in her courts and a somewhat liberal constitution, as far as the personal and property rights of the "white ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... study my psychological difficulties dwindled, and now the man stands before me exquisitely understood, a perfect piece of logic. All that seemed discordant and discrepant in his nature has now become harmonious and inevitable; the strangest and most erratic actions of his life now seem natural and consequential (I use the word in its grammatical sense) contradictions are reconciled, and looking at the man I see the pictures, and looking at the pictures ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... I took my stand, steadying myself by grasping the royal stay in my left hand. The motion away out there, at the far extremity of that long spar, was tremendous; so much so, indeed, that seasoned as I was to the wild and erratic movements of a ship in heavy weather, the sinkings and soarings and flourishings of that boom-end, as the vessel plunged and staggered down toward the wreck, made me feel distinctly giddy. The wait was not a ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... winging bullet did what the sentry's voice had failed to do. There came a clatter of spasmodic hoof-beats, an erratic shower of sparks, a curse in clean-lipped decent Urdu; a grunt, a struggle, more sparks again, and then a thud, followed by a devoutly worded prayer that Allah, the all-wise provider of just penalties, might ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... the Coast at that time was a fellow so erratic that he was nicknamed "Crazy-horse." Right in the midst of the strike Crazy-horse wired that he had secured a big silk shipment for New York. We were paralyzed. We had no engineers, no firemen, and no motive power to speak of. The strikers were pounding our men, wrecking ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... Hornpipe, and one or two movements from a Scotch Reel, but as I was no dancer myself, I had no means of judging the quality of his performances. I kept a respectful distance away, as sometimes his movements were very erratic, and his boots, like those of the Emperor Frederick, were rather heavy. We could not persuade our friend to come with us a yard farther than the village. As a fellow bandsman, he confided the reason why to my brother; he ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... the way, young man!" cried Mrs Frog, brushing indignantly past him, in one of her erratic bursts. "Oh! Bobby—where has that ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... naval preparations had been pushed with great vigor. A powerful squadron under Admiral Cervera, which had assembled at the Cape Verde Islands before the outbreak of hostilities, had crossed the ocean, and by its erratic movements in the Caribbean Sea delayed our military plans while baffling the pursuit of our fleets. For a time fears were felt lest the Oregon and Marietta, then nearing home after their long voyage from San Francisco of over ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... quiet. Harry Fleming saw a wonderful sight a whole people aroused and determined. There was no foolish boasting; no one talked of a British general eating his Christmas dinner in Berlin. But even Dick Mercer, excitable and erratic as he had always been, seemed to have undergone a ...
— The Boy Scout Aviators • George Durston
... the creature, realising that again it was being cheated, started in pursuit. With leaps and bounds that seemed erratic and purposeless, it gradually diminished the distance between itself and the running man. Once it alighted on the outstanding branch of a gnarled tree, then from thence it took shelter in a clump of shrubs, then across the stream, swimming to the opposite shore; for the running man had rounded ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... aspect to ancient streams of lava congealed by the cold, an opinion which has not been generally received. Other astronomers have seen in these inexplicable rays a kind of moraines, ranges of erratic blocks thrown out at the epoch of the ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... his head. "After all," said he, "I can't trust them. Patricia is too erratic and too used to having her own way. Jack will try to break off with her now, of course; but Jack, where women are concerned, is as weak as water. It is not a nice thing to do, but—well! one must fight ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... their leave by this time. Angelica proceeded to deposit one of her erratic kisses somewhere on the old duke's head, with an emphasis which caused him to wince perceptibly. Then she went up to Father Ricardo, and shook ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... the verdant and untrampled pastures of ingenious bees; but those are more like the mange of lecherous boars and he-goats. And though a voluptuous temper of mind be naturally erratic and precipitate, yet never any yet sacrificed an ox for joy that he had gained his will of his mistress; nor did any ever wish to die immediately, might he but once satiate himself with the costly dishes and comfits at the table of his prince. But now Eudoxus wished he might stand by the ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... from outer space. Encouraging, truly, is the lesson taught us by the success of earnest study and careful inquiry in determining some at least among the laws which govern bodies once thought the wildest and most erratic creatures in the whole ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... a plane of life possibly far in advance of one's normal experience; so that while new centres of activity are as yet under imperfect control, the normal functions of the brain and other centres of action are left in neglect. Hence, to the casual observer, the erratic nature of Genius is not distinguishable from some incipent ...
— How to Read the Crystal - or, Crystal and Seer • Sepharial
... his family, noble in name but in nothing else, the least said the better. He was born in London, but spent his childhood in Aberdeen, under the alternate care or negligence of his erratic mother. At ten he fell heir to a title, to the family seat of Newstead Abbey, and to estates yielding an income of some L1400 per year,—a large income for a poet, but as nothing to a lord accustomed to make ducks and ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... have ever suffered more, or more nobly redeemed an apparently lost cause, than the one which was defeated at Quebec and victorious at Saratoga. The train of misfortunes which brought Burgoyne's erratic course to so untimely an end was nothing by comparison. And the quickness with which raw yeomanry were formed into armies capable of fighting veteran troops, affords the strongest proof that the Americans ...
— Burgoyne's Invasion of 1777 - With an outline sketch of the American Invasion of Canada, 1775-76. • Samuel Adams Drake
... free initiative that makes the advance of civilisation, and also the greater part of its conservation, would in effect be allowed only in the erratic members of the kept classes; where at the same time it would have to work against the side-draught of conventional usage, which discountenances any pursuit that is not visibly futile according to some accepted manner of futility. Now under ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... to Norris that some indefinable change was coming over Dick. At times he was vivid, even fantastic, and again he lapsed into erratic silences out of which he came at new and unexpected points. He developed ideas that appeared to his friend not quite in keeping with the sterling Dick of old. He was less sensitive, so thought Ellery, in his code ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... that there was later some backsliding. Madison's record is characteristically erratic. His statement in The Federalist No. 39 written probably early in 1788, is very positive: The tribunal which is to ultimately decide, in controversies relating to the boundary between the two jurisdictions, is to be established under the general government. ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... different. I have seen the world. He is temperamental, your father, a genius in his way, and a little mad, perhaps. Leave him to me, Monsieur, and it will be quite all right. Last night, it was so sudden, that I was frightened for a moment. I should have remembered he is erratic and apt to change his mind. I should have guessed why he changed it. It is you, Monsieur. You have had a bad effect upon him. You have made him turn suddenly grotesque. What did you ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... you're right," said the minister. "She's a good woman if a little erratic, and a sovereign means a large part ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... some, and with others merely exchanging greetings. With some tribes we would perhaps travel a little way south, and only part with them when they were about to strike northwards; and as their course was simply from water-hole to water-hole, as I have told you, it was always pretty erratic. ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... chimney-corner smoking his pipe, and making severe mental comments upon the conduct of Parliament, then in session, of whose erratic proceedings he was reading an account in a small but highly seasoned newspaper. Sammy shook his head ominously over the peppery reports, but feeling it as well to reserve his opinions for a select audience at The Crown, allowed Mrs. Craddock to ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... modern inquirer (of Mr. Langdon, for instance) is that he acknowledges the fog, and does not pretend to guide us out of it by haphazard hypotheses propounded with pontifical gravity and assurance—which was the way of that erratic genius, ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... leaving that island in charge of his wife, set sail for Florida, where he soon safely disembarked, and sent his ships back, in order to leave no opportunity for relentment in the stern resolves of his followers. After a somewhat erratic journey, on his way passing through Georgia, Alabama, and Northern Mississippi, he struck the 'Great River' at the Lower Chickasaw Bluffs, as they are still called, and upon which now stands the city ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... market-place, Intends, to every saint and sinner in't, To state what he calls Ireland's Case; Meaning thereby the case of his shop,- Of curate, vicar, rector, bishop, And all those other grades seraphic, That make men's souls their special traffic, Tho' caring not a pin which way The erratic souls go, so they pay.— Just as some roguish country nurse, Who takes a foundling babe to suckle, First pops the payment in her purse, Then leaves poor dear to—suck its knuckle: Even so these reverend rigmaroles Pocket the money—starve the souls. Murtagh, however, in his glory, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... do not agree," Fred was saying. "The correlation is erratic; it makes no statistical sense. ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... and archangels, well nigh forgotten; a man who, by pandering to human passions and setting wide as virtue's avenue the flower-tricked gates of vice; should thus, like Lucifer before him, in a comet-like career of victory, sweep the startled firmament of earth, and drag to his erratic orbit the stars of heaven from ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... attainments asked me if Connecticut was not the capital of Pittsburgh and notable for its great Mormon temple,"—an elaborate combination due solely to his own active brain. The same ingenuous (and ingenious) youth caused me to invent "an erratic young Londoner, who packed his bag and started at once for any out-of-the-way country for which a new guide-book was published." Another, with equal lack of ground, committed me to the unpatriotic ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... the charm of his society, though it brought to light some startling defects, both in his mental and moral organization. I have before said that his knowledge, though it had swept over a wide circuit and dipped into curious, unfrequented recesses, was desultory and erratic. It certainly was not that knowledge, sustained and aspiring, which the poet assures us is "the wing on which we mount to heaven." So, in his faculties themselves there were singular inequalities, ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... had spent most of his life in the House of Representatives. He loved the associations and life of Congress. The most erratic and uncertain of bodies is Congress to an executive who does not understand its temper and characteristics. McKinley was past master of this. Almost every president has been greatly relieved when Congress adjourned, but Mr. McKinley often expressed to me his wish ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... a narrow bunk, watching the play of light that came through a porthole beyond his line of vision, noting in this erratic shuttling of reflected sunlight the roll and pitch of cabin walls, listening to the low boom of waves followed by the swash alongside that told him the Karluk was bucking heavy seas, a slow rage mastered him, centered against the doctor with the sardonic smile and Captain Simms, ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... of the little sloop should have been preparing breakfast, as he had for many mornings past, but, instead he swung his little craft into the wind and watched for near an hour the erratic rushes and shivering haltings of the larger ship. But long before this time had passed Thorpe knew he was observing the aimless maneuvers of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... exploring this path or that leading amongst the rugged cliffs, until finally he began to take note of his erratic wanderings and wonder where he was. Climbing an elevated rock near the path he poised himself upon its peak and studied the ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... an erratic but harmless impulse in driving off recklessly with the priest; her nature, so long restrained by residence in a dull, circumscribed village instead of a lively town, needed some such prank to reanimate and amuse it. She seized the reins dramatically, ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... tributaries. This river, which takes its rise in the distant mountains of the Mimbres, passes under various names through an immense extent of sandy barren country, the arid monotony of which is interrupted only by the ravines hollowed by the waters, which in their erratic ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... of a "Treatise on Differential Logarithms," and especially of a "Theory of Perpetual Motion," four volumes, quarto, with engravings, Paris, 1825; lived, in 1840, No. 9 rue du Val-de-Grace. Being very near-sighted and erratic, the prey of his thieving servant, Madame Lambert, his family thought that he needed a protector. Being instructor of Felix Phellion, with whom he took a trip to England, Picot made known his pupil's great ability, which the boy had modestly kept secret, at ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... the poetic Raggles in an erratic and singular way. It seemed to him that he had drunk cold tea and that the city was a white, cold cloth that had been bound tightly around his brow to spur him to some unknown but tremendous mental effort. And, after all, ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... I am in the mood I am likely to write a dozen sheets to you. When I'm not, a page will be all you'll care to read. Will you agree to the most erratic correspondence you ever had, with the most ...
— Red Pepper Burns • Grace S. Richmond
... under the shadow of the grim and flame-throated mountain, while I was forced to listen to Major Stanleigh's persistent questionnaire and Leavitt's erratic and garrulous responses—all this, as I was to discover later, at the instigation of the Major's niece—had made me frankly curious about ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... all the time, no wonder George had begun to feel nervous. Even though he saved himself, and Nick, should he lose his boat, it would almost break his heart; for in spite of her many and serious faults the jaunty skipper of the erratic Wireless ...
— Motor Boat Boys Down the Coast - or Through Storm and Stress to Florida • Louis Arundel
... especially transmissible:—dementia precox, a sort of precocious old age, in which the patient (generally young) sinks into a lethargy from which he rarely recovers; and manic-depressive insanity, an over-excitable condition, in which there are occasional very erratic motor discharges, alternating with periods of depression. Constitutional psychopathic inferiority, which means a lack of emotional adaptability, usually shows in the family history. The common type of insanity which is characterized by mild hallucinations ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... were full of the energy of a good night's sleep, of breakfast, and of comfortable nursery warmth. And George Lovegrove stepped among them carefully, watching their gambols moist-eyed, nervously anxious lest his quaintly solid figure should obstruct the erratic progress of toy-horse, or hoop, or ball. He craved for notice, for even the veriest scrap of friendly recognition, yet was too diffident to attempt any direct intercourse with these delectable small personages, who, on their ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... Tulliver, indeed, fails in business; but his failure only serves as an offset to the general integrity and prosperity. His son is obstinate and wilful; but it is all on the side of virtue. His daughter is somewhat sentimental and erratic; but she is more conscientious yet. Conscience, in the classes from which George Eliot recruits her figures, is a universal gift. Decency and plenty and good-humor follow contentedly in its train. The word which sums up the common traits of our author's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... of telepathy, or thought transference, occurs on both the physical and the mental plane. On the physical plane it is more or less spontaneous and erratic in manifestation; while on the astral plane it is as clear, reliable and responsive to demand as is astral ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... abroad clearing tracks, dry snow-dust spinning from under them. At Longacre Square the flakes blew upward in spiral flurries, erratic, full of antics. The cab snorted, plunged, leaped forward. Mr. Fitzgibbons inclined toward the little ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... with that little knob of a sight, and when the smoke cleared away he saw it careering like a kite with too light a tail in the distance. Gould also missed twice, and then shot one the moment it was off the ground, before the erratic course commenced. ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... cooperation has had an erratic development. Within the past seven years, however, there has been a rapid increase in new societies until today it is estimated that there are about three thousand with a membership of half a million. In number of societies New York is far behind most of its sister states. It ...
— Consumers' Cooperative Societies in New York State • The Consumers' League of New York
... of the Empire. When, after more than a year, the unfortunate druggist reached the last outpost of Russian power in North-Eastern Asia, and was set at liberty, he made his way to the little log church, entered the belfry, and proceeded to jangle the church bells in a sort of wild, erratic chime. When the people of the town ran to the belfry in alarm and inquired what was the matter, Schiller replied, with dignity, that he wished the whole population to know that 'by the Grace of God, Herman Schiller, after long and perilous wanderings, had reached, in safety, the town ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... and closely connected with the organization of the individual." He was inclined to accept lunar influence, and believed that the physiological cycle is made up of definite fractions and multiples of a period of seven days, especially a unit of three and a half days. Albrecht, a somewhat erratic zooelogist, put forth the view a few years ago that there are menstrual periods in men, giving the following reasons: (1) males are rudimentary females, (2) in all males of mammals, a rudimentary masculine ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... does that; but she's not erratic. She always has a reason for going off in that way. When you get to know her as I do, you will think she's the sweetest woman in ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... to Rory's, for the look on his face told only of a dogged resolution to continue sinning against the light. He knew that his own contumacy in this respect would land his soul in perdition, and he deliberately let it go at that. Brave old Rory! Never does erratic man appear to such advantage as when his own intuitive moral sense rigorously overbears a conscientiousness warped by some fallacy which he still accepts ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... laid the foundation of this branch of astronomy. Halley's comet punctually reappeared on Christmas Day, 1758, and effected its perihelion passage on the 12th of March following, thus proving beyond dispute that some at least of these erratic bodies are domesticated within our system, and strictly conform, if not to its unwritten customs (so to speak), at any rate to its fundamental laws. Their movements, in short, were demonstrated by the most unanswerable of all arguments—that of verified calculation—to ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... small difference between random and fugitive desires and those more fundamental desires that express truly the nature of a man. Desires organized and harmonized gain great strength, and are enabled to overcome and expel from the mind erratic impulses, the obedience to which may easily be followed by regret. Action taken without a clear foresight of consequences, with an imperfect conception of the relation of means to ends, is blind and irrational action. Reason, as bringing ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... but erratic Earl of Peterborough, had been engaged for two years, after the unsatisfactory inquiry into his conduct in Spain by the House of Lords in 1708, in preparing an account of the money he had received and expended. The change of Government brought him relief from his troubles; ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... erratic as our understanding; it is the shoe of Theramenes, fit for all feet. It is double and diverse, and the matters are double and diverse too. "Give me a drachm of silver," said a Cynic philosopher to Antigonus. "That is not a present befitting a king," replied he. "Give me ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... must, as it seemed to me, have been a novice or else have lost his nerve in this disturbance, for he drove vilely on the way to the station. Twice we nearly had collisions with other equally erratic vehicles, and I remember remarking to Summerlee that the standard of driving in London had very much declined. Once we brushed the very edge of a great crowd which was watching a fight at the corner of the Mall. The people, who were much excited, raised cries of ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... imaginings of Gustave only served his father and mother with food for laughter; and his erratic absurdities in making ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... Wallace went on the road again for eleven weeks, and Martie and Ted enjoyed a delicious spring together. They spent hours on the omnibuses, hours in the parks. Spring in the West was cold, erratic; spring here came with what a heavenly wash of fragrance and heat! It was like a re-birth to abandon all the heavy clothing of the winter, to send Teddy dancing into the sunshine in socks and ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... habits are being scrutinized, when standards are being formulated and personal responsibility is being realized, when ideals are made vital and controlling. It may be a period of storm and stress when the youth is in emotional unrest; when conduct is erratic and not to be depended on; when there is reaction against authority of all kinds. These characteristics are unfortunate and are usually the result of unwise treatment during the first period. If, on the other hand, the period of transition is prepared for during the preadolescent years by ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... to go on. Although our course has been erratic and irregular; although we have had one character disappearing for a long time (like Tom Troubridge); and, although we have had another entirely new coming bobbing up in the manner of Punch's victims, unexpected, and apparently unwanted; although, I say, the course of this ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... persons instructing Negroes, these philanthropists saw their schoolhouses burned, themselves expelled from the white churches, and finally driven from the city in 1858.[1] Other white men and women were teaching colored children during these years. The most prominent of these were Thomas Tabbs, an erratic philanthropist, Mr. Nutall, an Englishman; Mr. Talbot, a successful tutor stationed near the present site of the Franklin School; and Mrs. George Ford, a Virginian, conducting a school on New Jersey Avenue between K and L Streets.[2] The efforts of Miss Myrtilla Miner, their ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson
... Our erratic procedure naturally invited investigation, and when a Government pilot boat put off to enquire our reason for anchoring in a certain bay he came to the conclusion that our steering gear was not in very good order and that we had ...
— My Adventures as a Spy • Robert Baden-Powell
... more the "Black Gentleman"—the name they had given him—was erratic in his movements; he did not always come down the Rue du Tourniquet; the old woman sometimes saw him in the evening when he had not passed in the morning, and he did not come by at such regular hours as the clerks who served Madame Crochard instead of a clock; ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... know and all we ever shall know of the world of matter and of minds must rest ultimately upon observation,—observation of external things and of our own mind. We must clip the erratic wing of a "reason" which seeks to soar beyond such knowledge; which leaves the solid earth, and hangs suspended ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... on the impossibility of any such visit being admitted. According to her lights the coming of Colonel Osborne, after all that had been said, would be like the coming of Lucifer himself. The Colonel was, to her imagination, a horrible roaring lion. She had no idea that the erratic manoeuvres of such a beast might be milder and more innocent than the wooing of any turtle-dove. She would have asked whether the roaring lion had gone away again, and, if so, whether he had taken his prey with him, were it not that she was too much frightened at the moment ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... like this before in all his life," thought Bob, as he found considerable difficulty in keeping his saddle, such were the sudden whirls the black made in his erratic course. ...
— The Saddle Boys of the Rockies - Lost on Thunder Mountain • James Carson
... was betrayed into one of his erratic positions, as when he moved to strike out the section against dueling, and also to expunge from the bill of rights all restrictions upon bearing arms. He said: "Let the people bear arms for their own protection, whether in their boots ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... answered their appeal readily, and for five years were busily engaged in bringing proofs of the new science before the commission. These were M. de Foissac, M. Dupotet, M. Chapelain, and M. de Geslin. It would be but an unprofitable, and by no means a pleasant task to follow the commissioners in their erratic career, as they were led hither and thither by the four lights of magnetism above mentioned; the four "Wills-o'-the-Wisp" which dazzled the benighted and bewildered doctors on that wide and shadowy region of metaphysical inquiry — the influence of mind over matter. It ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... pomp and dignity not unlike the funeral obsequies of a great lord. But my business is with that little chip; by some means it has been thrust out of the principal current, and, now that it is out, see what pranks it is playing. How erratic are its motions!—into what strange holes and corners it is thrust! The same phenomenon will happen in life. Once start a being out of the usual course of existence, and many and strange will be his adventures ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... stirring in the latter's heart. He had long been searching for a fitting rider for the erratic and sensitive Dixie—whimsical and uncertain of taste as any woman—and though he could not bring himself to believe in Crimmins' eulogy of Garrison's riding ability, he was anxious to ascertain how ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... Schurz's popularity—a popularity that was very marked in the earlier period of his career—is due in part to certain unsteady and erratic tendencies, some of which are in strong contrast with characteristics that are recognized as belonging in an especial degree to his race. Through all the centuries since Tacitus drew his vivid picture of the habits and manners of the Germans, their attachment, it might almost ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... stream, which it assumes at its issue from this lake. There are five creeks that fall into it, formed by innumerable streamlets oozing from the clay-beds at the bases of the hills, that consist of an accumulation of sand, gravel, and clay, intermixed with erratic fragments; being a more prominent portion of the great erratic deposit previously described, and which here is known by the name of 'Hauteurs des ...
— Minnesota and Dacotah • C.C. Andrews
... course together, day in and day out, for four weeks. He was my partner in our foursome. Rather a helpful partner at times, I must admit, although he hasn't been at the game long enough to be a really experienced golfer. Fairly long off the tee, but erratic with the brassie, and not all dependable when it came to short iron work. However, as a rule we held them. Our opponents, ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford
... the stranded machine was the work of an instant for the erratic professor, and he extended his hand to Peggy. With a supreme effort she pulled herself together and accepted his proffered help. But agitated as she: was, she did not fail to notice a surprising fact, and that was that the professor's hair was on one side! The next ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... I haven't done," Darry answered. "It's also what none of us have done. We haven't thanked our very pleasant, even if slightly erratic, host for ...
— The High School Boys in Summer Camp • H. Irving Hancock
... and, except for the gleaming hand, and the erratic circles of light cast by the lantern, we could see nothing. The hand gradually moved faster, increasing to a good walking pace, passing over the garden-gate and leading us on till I completely lost knowledge of our position; but ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... soberly, "you could render me a little help, once or twice a day, if you would. It is not much that I would ask of you—merely to note the chronometer times for me when I take my observations of the sun for the longitude. I have sometimes thought that Chips has been a little erratic in his noting of the time; and I have more than once had it in my mind to ask you to undertake this small ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... of this famous woman, by Miss Thomas, is the only one in existence. Those who have awaited it with pleasurable anticipation, but with some trepidation as to the treatment of the erratic side of her character, cannot fail to be pleased with the skill by which it is done. It is the best production on George Sand that has yet been published. The author modestly refers to it as a sketch, which it undoubtedly is, but a sketch that gives a just and discriminating analysis ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... hard on winter's traces. In fact, one belated train, after hours spent on the road, had succeeded in pushing through, an evidence that they all would soon be running with their accustomed, if rather erratic regularity, and there was naturally a tremendous excitement and jollification in the camp at this arrival of the first mail bearing news from the ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... wild and erratic imagination of our ancestors manifested itself, was in the creation of a world of visionary beings of a less terrific character, but which did not fail to annoy their thoughts, and perplex their determinations, known by ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... hear the sound of a fiddle, scraped in a loose and erratic fashion and giving forth an occasional note of a tune. I looked around and saw Lamborn sitting in the doorway of the hut. Zoe was near him, laughing at his half-drunken attempts to manage the instrument. Douglas looked up. A quick smile shot across his face. He glanced into my ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... I die. Talking of dying makes me tell you that my confounded stomach is much the same; indeed, of late has been rather worse, but for the last year, I think, I have been able to do more work. I have done nothing besides the barnacles, except, indeed, a little theoretical paper on erratic boulders (27/2. "On the Transportal of Erratic Boulders from a Lower to a Higher Level" ("Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc." Volume IV., pages 315-23. 1848). In this paper Darwin favours the view that the transport ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... of a conic section moves along the axis of the curve to infinity, banished by the mutual consent of the individual particles which compose the curve, or the nation, a figure is formed, called a parabola. This is the curve which the most erratic bodies in the universe describe in space, as they rush along at a speed inconceivable to human minds, and are supposed to produce all kinds of mischief and injury to the worlds whose courses they wend their ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... action, of which they were not conscious. There is a vein of romance in the French composition; a love of adventure for the sake of the adventure itself, which, when not tamed or directed, makes a Frenchman fitful, erratic, and unreliable. When it is toned by personal ambition, it becomes a sort of Paladin contempt for danger; sometimes a crazy furor. When accompanied by powerful intellect, and strengthened by concentration on a purpose, it makes a great commander—great for the quickness ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... bat the visitors did not do as much. Perhaps Frazer managed to tighten up, and pitch better ball. He was very erratic, and could never be depended on to do consecutive good work. In every other inning the heavies could not seem to gauge his work at all, and he mowed them down. Then they would come at him again like furies, and knock his offerings to every part of the field as ...
— The Chums of Scranton High Out for the Pennant • Donald Ferguson
... to tell you that we believe that you and your erratic roommate are going to save a desperate situation for us," resumed the captain of the Navy team. "Not that we were destitute of good players before. But we lacked enough of different kinds to make a strong, all-around eleven. Now we've a team ...
— Dave Darrin's Third Year at Annapolis - Leaders of the Second Class Midshipmen • H. Irving Hancock
... watching the slanting volleys of rain driven by a strong southwester against the windows of the hotel reading-room, I was struck by the erratic movements of a dripping figure outside that seemed to be hesitating over the entrance to the hotel. At times furtively penetrating the porch as far as the vestibule, and again shyly recoiling from it, its ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... Irishman turned to the right, and followed the stream into the rocks. The course was so winding that he speedily disappeared from sight. The boy, who was compelled to sit still and await his return, at perhaps the most dangerous portion of the road, felt anything but comfortable over the erratic proceeding of his friend. But, fortunately, the latter had been gone but a short time when he reappeared, hurrying forward as if somebody was at ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... was Nan's nightmare thought. Not intellectually, for Nan's brain was sharp and subtle and strong and fine, Mrs. Hilary's was an amorphous, undeveloped muddle. But where, if not from Mrs. Hilary, did Nan get her black fits of melancholy, her erratic irresponsible gaieties, her passionate angers, her sharp jealousies and egoisms? The clever young woman saw herself in the stupid elderly one; saw herself slipping down the years to that. That was why, where Neville and Pamela and their brothers pitied, ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... and I returned in time for a late dinner), I wandered among the Roman remains of the place by the light of a magnificent moon, and gathered an impression which has lost little of its silvery glow. The moon of the evening before had been aqueous and erratic; but if on the present occasion it was guilty of any irregularity, the worst it did was only to linger beyond its time in the heavens, in order to let us look at things comfortably. The effect was admirable; it brought back ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... moment when his eye was taken from the mad game of ring-around-the-rosy, McGee demonstrated that the skill was not equally placed. The Fokker was now spinning down, obviously out of control, and McGee was following, filling it with enough lead to sink it. It spun earthward, sickening in its erratic gyrations. ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... bear-skins tall. Glorious in golden clothing comes The great drum-major with his drums And sun-smit brass of trumpets; then The scarlet wall of marching men, Midmost of which great Mavors sets The colours girt with bayonets. Yes, there were you—and there was I, Unshaved, and with erratic tie, And for that once I yearn'd to shun My social system's central sun. How could a sloven slave express The frank, the manly tenderness That wraps you round from common thought, And does not ask that you should know The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... again, yet nevertheless spring had at last loosed her hounds and they were hard on winter's traces. In fact, one belated train, after hours spent on the road, had succeeded in pushing through, an evidence that they all would soon be running with their accustomed, if rather erratic regularity, and there was naturally a tremendous excitement and jollification in the camp at this arrival of the first mail bearing news from the ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... escape. A considerable torrent (one of whose falls is the well-known Cascade des Pelerins[91]) descends from behind the promontory h: its natural or proper course would be to dash straight forward down the line f g, and part of it does so; but erratic branches of it slide away round the promontory, in the lines of escape, k, l, &c. Each row of trees marks, therefore, an old torrent bed, for the torrent always throws heaps of stones up along its banks, on which ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... Who ever saw a Confederate line advancing that was not crooked as a ram's horn? Each ragged rebel yelling on his own hook and aligning on himself! But there is as much need of the machine-made soldier as of the self-reliant soldier, and the concentrated blow is always the most effective blow. The erratic effort of the Confederate, heroic though it was, yet failed to achieve the maximum result just because it was erratic. Moreover, two serious evils attended that excessive egotism and individuality which came to the Confederate through his training, ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... is next drawn to the erratic blocks or boulders, which in many parts of the earth are thickly strewn over the surface, particularly in the north of Europe. Some of these blocks are many tons in weight, yet are clearly ascertained ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... Thackeray; the obstinate refusal to give Browning, even after Bells and Pomegranates, a fair hearing; the recalcitrance to Carlyle among the elder, and Mr Ruskin among the younger, innovators in prose; the rejection of a book of erratic genius like Lavengro; the ignoring of work of such combined intrinsic beauty and historic importance as The Defence of Guenevere and FitzGerald's Omar Khayyam. For a sort of quintessence of literary ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... next day, which wandered like an erratic caterpillar along the backbone of the Cape, she began to wonder if, after all, she was displaying that judgment which daddy-professor praised so highly. It was too early in the season for the "millionaire's special" to be scheduled, in which those wealthy summer folk who have "discovered" ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... vessel behind. Another whizzing rocket, carrying its line with it, went hurtling through or close to the crowd clustered on the top-gallant forecastle, where they cowered before creeping out on to the bowsprit. No harm was done by the erratic flight of the rockets, but the wrecked sailors naturally preferred to go ashore in the lifeboat to being dragged through the breakers in the cradle of the rocket-apparatus, and declining to use it, ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... Wynter! Gone at last!" staring at the shaking signature at the end of the letter that speaks so plainly of the coming icy clutch that should prevent the poor hand from forming ever again even such sadly erratic characters as these. "At least," glancing at the half-read letter on the cloth—"this tells me so. His solicitor's, I suppose. Though what Wynter could want with a solicitor—— Poor old fellow! He was often very good to me in the old days. I don't believe I should have done even as much ...
— A Little Rebel • Mrs. Hungerford
... heavy and halting, and his way down the long chamber was devious and erratic. His fancied strength and elasticity were born of ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... considerable space of uneven ground crossed and recrossed by the narrow-gauge tracks upon which the sand and grit trucks ran, avoiding one or two localities where steam shot upward from the ground in a witch-like and erratic manner, with short angry hisses and chopping sounds that suggested danger, and finally stood before the door designated "OFFICE" in plain lettering. Joyce looked around at her companion ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... myself together and wrote straight to the printers, to the effect that the suffering the erratic and careless printing of "We and the World" cost me was such that I was obliged to protest against X. and Sons economizing by using boys and untrained incapables to print (printing from print being easier, and therefore adapted ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... author had refused to follow in his kinsmen's footsteps, he promised to study as an advocate to satisfy his father, who urged his son to follow a recognised profession. Owing to his easy-going schooling and lack of a settled course of study, the law classes were excellent training for the erratic, mercurial-notioned youth. Stevenson had the good fortune in 1869 to be elected a member of the Speculative, the famed Debating Society where Jeffrey first met Scott. There Stevenson encountered his contemporaries in years and social standing, his superiors in debate, and he, "the lean, ugly, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson
... with a remark about its being his busy day. The amateur detective and the porter together mounted guard over lower ten. Outside the heat rose in shimmering waves from the tracks: the very wood of the car was hot to touch. A Camberwell Beauty darted through the open door and made its way, in erratic plunges, great wings waving, down the sunny aisle. All around lay the peace of harvested fields, ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... That is, he got soused on about three, and, while snooted, would deride Victor Herbert, thus proving that he was Brilliant, though Erratic. ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... very erratic flight to reach the planet. A haze of clouds obscured the atmosphere. They approached from the night side and no details were visible. ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... father," she answered softly. A plan had sprung full-born from her quick brain. She would win this erratic father back to memory of his former life and her place in it—somewhat as did one Lucy Manette, a favorite heroine of Split's that Sissy had read about and told her of. That would be a fine thing to do—almost as fine, and requiring the center ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... or three days; then gave it up. During his apprenticeship in St. Louis he joined a number of churches, one after another, and taught in their Sunday-schools—changing his Sunday-school every time he changed his religion. He was correspondingly erratic in his politics—Whig to-day, Democrat next week, and anything fresh that he could find in the political market the week after. I may remark here that throughout his long life he was always trading religions and enjoying the change of scenery. I will also remark that ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... The first named contains a notable monument—the Lewknor. Near by is the beautiful West Dean Park. Mid-Lavant church is Early English but boasts a Norman window. The name of this village perpetuates a phenomenon which is becoming more rare each year. At one time erratic streams would make their appearance in the chalk combes in the head of the valley and combining, cause serious floods or "lavants." For some unknown reason the flow of water is gradually becoming smaller and of late years ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... as if the room were revolving about him, and as if his throat were choked with imprecations,—as if his old erratic passion had again taken possession of him, like a mingled legion of devils and angels. It was through pity that his love returned. He went forward and dropped on his knees at Gertrude's feet. "Speak to me!" he cried, seizing her hands. "Are you unhappy? ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... 38).—Erratic chancre is the term applied by Jonathan Hutchinson to the primary lesion of syphilis when it appears on parts of the body other than the genitals. It differs in some respects from the hard chancre as met ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... the Floss." Mr. Tulliver, indeed, fails in business; but his failure only serves as an offset to the general integrity and prosperity. His son is obstinate and wilful; but it is all on the side of virtue. His daughter is somewhat sentimental and erratic; but she is more conscientious yet. Conscience, in the classes from which George Eliot recruits her figures, is a universal gift. Decency and plenty and good-humor follow contentedly in its train. The word ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... or two of sleep, which seemed to turn, as sleep sometimes will, the erratic currents of his mind back into the old channels, from which it had been forced by this earthquake stress of life, he experienced ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... perfumes hung heavy on the moist air. And within a stone's throw of the rear the Danube noiselessly slid along its green banks. All I knew about the inn was that it had been by a whim of nature the birthplace of that beautiful, erratic and irresponsible young person, her Serene Highness the Princess Hildegarde. It was here I thought to find Hillars; though it was idle curiosity as much as anything which led me to ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... been the lot of Tom and his companions to take part in such a novel hunting scene as that in which they were now participating. With the airship moving quickly about, darting here and there under the guidance of the young inventor, the erratic movements hither and thither of the buffaloes could be followed exactly. Wherever the mass of the herd went the ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle • Victor Appleton
... lawful business to transact. If my surprise had been great without the sacred edifice, what was it within, and at that particular portion of it known by the designation of the Chapel of the Virgin Mary, at which I beheld, questioning my own senses, my unaccountable friend, this exceedingly erratic baron—upon his knees—in solemn prayer! Yes, kneeling in low humility, and praying audibly, with a devotion and an awful earnestness that could not be surpassed. He remained upon his knees, and he persevered ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... one sets out, "for to admire, and for to see, for to behold this world so wide," he never quite gets over being surprised at the erratic manner in which "civilization" distributes itself; at the way it ignores one spot upon the earth's surface, and upon another, several thousand miles away, heaps its blessings and its tyrannies. Having settled in a place ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... elevation. Like Pensa, Zacuto was the disciple of great masters, and a comparison of either with Lope de Vega and Calderon will reveal the same southern warmth, stilted pathos, exuberance of fancy, wealth of imagery, excessive playing upon words, peculiar turns and phrases, erratic style, and other qualities characteristic of Spanish ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... the conduct or the fate of Bras, but by her being the heroine of so mad an adventure. She knew that he wished her to be serious and subdued and proper, like the ladies whom she met, while an evil destiny seemed to dog her footsteps and precipitate her into all sorts of erratic mishaps and "scenes." However, this adventure was likely soon to have an end. She could go no farther. Whatever had become of Bras, it was in vain for her to think of pursuing him. When she at length reached ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... would really be a good thing that we should all go over the house together and make certain that this rather erratic burglar did not, after all, carry anything ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... or ten numbers, until type came from Launceston. This was soon followed by "The Gazette" of George Arden, and that again by "The Herald" of George Cavenagh. All three had, I think, the common prefix of "Port Phillip". "The Gazette", after a brief career, under its very able but rather erratic owner, went to the wall. "The Patriot", under Boursiquot, who had succeeded the overworked Fawkner, was, somewhat later, bought up by the "Argus", under Wilson and Johnston, in succession to Kerr. The Herald, when quitted after an ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... and mistake his dim vision of earth for proximity to heaven." And in like manner, when a thinker frees himself from all the trammels of fact, and propounds a "bold hypothesis," people mistake the vagabond erratic flights of guessing for a higher range of philosophic power. In truth, the imagination is most tasked when it has to paint pictures which shall withstand the silent criticism of general experience, and to frame hypotheses which ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... at once, but Errington's heart sank. Thelma had gone!—gone, most probably, for one of those erratic journeys across the Fjord to the cave where he had first seen her. She would not come back, he felt certain; not even at her father's request would that beautiful, proud maiden consent to alter her plans. What an ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... his efforts in this direction were not very serious, though I allow that he did us more harm thereby than we him. For our trench mortars were in an experimental stage, made locally by the R.E., and constructed of thin gas-pipe iron and home-made jam-pot bombs, whose behaviour was always erratic, and sometimes, I regret to say, fatal to the mortarist. (Poor Rogers, R.E., a capital subaltern, was killed thus, besides others, ...
— The Doings of the Fifteenth Infantry Brigade - August 1914 to March 1915 • Edward Lord Gleichen
... town in South Wales, it was very awkward to have to leave your train on the banks of the Severn and make a voyage of more than two miles in a slow ferry-boat before you could take another train on the opposite shore. The Severn tides, too, were so erratic that there was never any knowing when the ferry-boat would be able to start. But that was what people had to put up with forty years ago. So the Great Western Railway Company, in 1871, decided to go under the fickle waters, as they found it so troublesome to go over ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... evidently not to Rory's, for the look on his face told only of a dogged resolution to continue sinning against the light. He knew that his own contumacy in this respect would land his soul in perdition, and he deliberately let it go at that. Brave old Rory! Never does erratic man appear to such advantage as when his own intuitive moral sense rigorously overbears a conscientiousness warped by some fallacy which he still accepts ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... boulders and "till," which latter deposit is perfectly characterised in Tierra del Fuego, is progressing rapidly. (499/6. "On the Distribution of the Erratic Boulders and on the Contemporaneous Unstratified Deposits of South America," "Trans. Geol. Soc." ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... Dundas to lead him to suppose that she could not be so munificent, and solicitous of secrecy. Besides, how could she have learned his situation? He thought it was impossible; and that impossibility compelled an erratic hope of his present liberty having sprung from the goodness of Miss Beaufort to pass by him with ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... getting darker all the time, no wonder George had begun to feel nervous. Even though he saved himself, and Nick, should he lose his boat, it would almost break his heart; for in spite of her many and serious faults the jaunty skipper of the erratic Wireless fairly ...
— Motor Boat Boys Down the Coast - or Through Storm and Stress to Florida • Louis Arundel
... brother's greatness. Yes, greatness: that was the word which Deronda now deliberately chose to signify the impression that Mordecai had made on him. He said to himself, perhaps rather defiantly toward the more negative spirit within him, that this man, however erratic some of his interpretations might be—this consumptive Jewish workman in threadbare clothing, lodged by charity, delivering himself to hearers who took his thoughts without attaching more consequences to them than the Flemings to the ethereal chimes ringing above their ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... his mind in erratic starts and blanks as he bent over the wounded man, listening to his respiration with more of a humane than professional fear that the next breath might tell him of the hemorrhage which would make a sudden end of Boyle's wavering and ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... agree," Fred was saying. "The correlation is erratic; it makes no statistical sense. Malone, ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... hurricane and fluttering away like a seabird from the mountains that towered far above and were only permitted to kiss her stern with their spray. The crew were forbidden to look behind while at the helm lest their nerves should be affected and cause erratic steering. There was really more danger in this than in any lack of seakindliness on the part of the vessel. Each time she ran away from a treacherous-looking breaker, the captain would pat the topgallant bulwarks and speak words of touching ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... with allowances for her erratic husband, could offer none for the woman of a long widowhood, that had become a trebly sensitive maidenhood; abashed by her knowledge of the world, animated by her abounding blood; cherishing her new freedom, dreading the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was extremely erratic, zigzagging through the riven, rocky barrier which formed the ancient dam at the foot of the lake; and one minute they were swept to right, the next to left, while at every angle there was a whirlpool which threatened to suck ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... In his particular district he was a power; in Dublin he soon showed the weaker side of his nature. He had a bad habit of making foes where he could easily have made friends. In his personal habits he was sober, but erratic. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... immovable on a steep inclined plane, and it required the nicest handling to keep the plane truly horizontal. So with one's tea, which would alternately rush forward to be drunk and fly as though one were a Tantalus; so with all one's goods, which would be seized with the most erratic propensities. Still we were unable to imagine ourselves in any danger, save that one flaxen-headed youth of two-and-twenty kept waking up his companion for the purpose of saying to him at intervals during the night, "I say, isn't ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... characteristic "teddiness" about Uncle Ponderevo. He failed as a retail chemist in Wimblehurst. He was not naturally dishonest, but he had windy ideas about finance, and he was careless in the matter of certain trust monies. He was "imaginative, erratic, inconsistent, recklessly inexact," and his imagination led him by way of a patent medicine to company promoting on the Hooley scale. "Do you realise the madness of the world that sanctions such a thing?" asks Mr Wells in the person of the supposed narrator ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... begun already or, at least, will do so in another hour and a half. He's promised to meet us at your house at eleven o'clock to-night. Chose that place because he lives at Putney, and it's nearer. Eleven was the hour he set, though, of course, he may arrive sooner; there's no counting on an erratic fellow like that chap. So we'll make it eleven, and possess our souls in patience ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... others were constantly changing their places, and as it were wandering about the sky. It is certain that the Babylonians at a very early date distinguished from the fixed stars those remarkable five, which, from their wandering propensities, the Greeks called the "planets," and which are the only erratic stars that the naked eye, or that even the telescope, except at a very high power, can discern. With these five they were soon led to class the Moon, which was easily observed to be a wandering ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... so supple and erratic as our understanding; it is the shoe of Theramenes, fit for all feet. It is double and diverse, and the matters are double and diverse too. "Give me a drachm of silver," said a Cynic philosopher to Antigonus. "That is not a present befitting a king," replied he. ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... hunger, often commit the fearful mistake of attacking the animal. My friend Mr. Ernest Gibson, of Buenos Ayres, in a communication to the Ibis, describes an encounter he actually witnessed between a carancho and a skunk. Riding home one afternoon, he spied a skunk "shuffling along in the erratic manner usual to that odoriferous quadruped;" following it at a very short distance was an eagle-vulture, evidently bent on mischief. Every time the bird came near the bushy tail rose menacingly; then the carancho ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... wider significance. The former traced the ancient limits of the Alpine glaciers as defined by the frame-work of debris or loose material they had left behind them; and Charpentier went farther, and affirmed that all the erratic boulders scattered over the plain of Switzerland and on the sides of the Jura had been thus distributed by ice and not by water, as had ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... he could have throttled Slim with his thumb and finger, have shaken the life out of him with one hand, that Bruce forbore; perhaps it was because he saw in Slim's erratic, surly moods a something not quite normal, a something which made him sometimes wonder if his partner was well balanced. At any rate, he bore his shirking, his insults, and his deliberate selfishness with a patience that would have made ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... that the engine was about to enjoy one of its periodical rests. The irregularity of these stoppages had always been a subject of remark among practical engineers. The hours of labor were exceedingly erratic, but the engine had never been known to work at night, except on one occasion, and then only for a few minutes, when it was suddenly stopped ...
— The Moon Metal • Garrett P. Serviss
... roused my father's admiration was Mr. D. Mackintosh's work on erratic blocks. Apart from its intrinsic merit the work keenly excited his sympathy from the conditions under which it was executed, Mr. Mackintosh being compelled to give nearly his whole time to tuition. The following passage is from a letter to Mr. Mackintosh ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... realizations, in which he has succeeded in setting all the rules of drawing at defiance, are rendered the more remarkable by reason of the circumstance that the work now under consideration is interspersed with numerous charming drawings, the effect of which is wholly marred by these erratic performances. Meadows was an admirable water-colour artist, and a scarce edition of this work contains some engravings of Shakespearian heroines after his designs. The Germans fancy they understand Shakespeare better than ourselves (an amiable and complimentary weakness), and the work ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... as high as thirty-five miles an hour have been made in America. Such high-speed boats must be assembled with infinite care, owing to the fact that the mechanism they carry is more or less erratic in its action, and unless it is well made results ...
— Boys' Book of Model Boats • Raymond Francis Yates
... Burke's temper had often proved itself to be, fantastic and grotesque as his obstinacy had often showed itself in {228} clinging defiantly to some crotchet or whimsey, that seemed to the spectator unworthy the adhesion of his great intellect, his most eccentric action, his most erratic impulse, appeared sweetly reasonable and serenely lucid when contrasted with the conduct that allowed him to guide or be guided by Fox in a course that proved as foolish as it looked disgraceful, to lead or to follow Fox ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... to do, for quite other motives than our high intellectual desire. There are ugly rebels and born rascals, cheats by instinct, and liars to women, swinish unbelievers who would compromise us with their erratic pursuit of a miscellaneous collection of strange fancies and betray us callously at last. Because a man does not find the law pure justice, that is no reason why he should fake his gold to a thieves' ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... strip of woodland in the fugitive's path was narrow and dense. Below it, in a patch of hillocky pasture ground, sloping to a pond of steel-bright ice, a red fox was diligently hunting. He ran hither and thither, furtive, but seemingly erratic, poking his nose into half-covered moss-tufts and under the roots of dead stumps, looking for mice or shrews. He found a couple of the latter, but these were small satisfaction to his vigorous winter appetite. Presently he paused, lifted his narrow, ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... amount of encouragement has been given by the performances of small craft fitted in this way; but it is objected by sea-faring men that the behaviour of a large vessel, encumbered with outlying parts moving on the waves independently, would probably be very erratic during a storm and would endanger the safety of the ship itself. No kind of floating appendage, moving independently of the vessel, could exercise any actual force by the uprising of a wave in lifting it without being to some extent sunk ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... keen for a solution of the riddle of that cut which had adorned Young Denny's chin as he had been. And yet, even while he hesitated, feeding his imagination upon the choicest of premonitory tit-bits, he knew he meant to go ahead. He was magnifying the unfathomed peril that existed in his erratic, hair-trigger old brain alone merely for the sake of the complacent pride which resulted therefrom—pride in the contemplation of his own ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... faculty made Beth either the naughtiest or the best of children; the difference depended on her heart: if that were touched, she was all sympathy; but if no appeal was made to her feelings, her daily doings were the outcome of so many erratic impulses acted on without consideration, merely to vary the disastrous monotony of those long ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... only terrified but angered, and whirling about, he brought down his gun with spiteful violence on the writhing body. The reptile struck again, but it was already wounded to that extent that its blow was erratic, and, though it came near reaching the hand of Jack, it missed by a ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... of the Republic of Cyprus under government control has a market economy dominated by the service sector, which accounts for 78% of GDP. Tourism, financial services, and real estate are the most important sectors. Erratic growth rates over the past decade reflect the economy's reliance on tourism, which often fluctuates with political instability in the region and economic conditions in Western Europe. Nevertheless, the economy in the area under government control grew by an average of ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... he was slain in this mannere, His lighte ghost* full blissfully is went *spirit Up to the hollowness of the seventh sphere In converse leaving ev'ry element; And there he saw, with full advisement,* *observation, understanding Th' erratic starres heark'ning harmony, With soundes ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... cabin and looking to him as her only friend seemed almost incredible. A sudden remembrance of Flower subdued at once the ardour of his gaze, and he sat wondering vaguely as to the whereabouts of that erratic mariner until his meditations were broken by the entrance of the boy with the steaming coffee, followed by Bill bearing a ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... hearts she realised that there was nothing more to say. Pixie was Pixie. As well try to move a mountain from its place, as persuade that sweet, loving, most loyal of creatures to draw back from a solemn pledge. Something might be done with Stanor perhaps, or, failing Stanor, through that erratic person, his uncle. She must consult with Geoffrey and Bridgie, together they might insist upon a period of waiting and separation before a definite engagement was announced. Pixie was still under age. Until her twenty-first birthday her guardians might safely demand ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... this figure advancing in our direction, and believed he was going to be treated to another visitation from the apparition which had terrified him previously, and which he was still only half convinced was but the creation of Tom's erratic fancy. ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... instant Blandford, who had been married two years, and was transacting a steady and fairly profitable manufacturing business in the adjacent town, actually believed he was more fitted for adventurous speculation than the grimly erratic man of energetic impulses and pleasures beside him. He managed ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... Miss Gwynne went her own erratic way, which led her over stiles, and through fields, and into various cottages, where she alternately scolded, lectured, and condoled, accordingly as she thought their inmates deserved the one or the other. She rarely left them, however, without giving some substantial ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... wading the Shenandoah River, and then on through Asby's Gap, in the Blue Ridge, that same night; still on, in the same direction, to a station on the Manassas Gap railroad, known as Piedmont, which is reached by the next (Friday) morning,—the erratic movements of Stuart's Cavalry entirely concealing the manoeuvre from ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... In and out of the path Drawn by the dream of a face. You have been watched, as star-men watch a star That leaves its way, returns and leaves its way, Until the exploring watchers find, can trace A hidden star beyond their sight, whose sway Draws the erratic star so long observed— So have ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... seemed singular even among his characteristic singularities. If redemption—Roderick seemed to reason—was to arrive with his mother and his affianced bride, these last moments of error should be doubly erratic. He did nothing; but inaction, with him, took on an unwonted air of gentle gayety. He laughed and whistled and went often to Mrs. Light's; though Rowland knew not in what fashion present circumstances had modified his relations with Christina. The ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... time for the crack Cambridge quarter-back to show what he is made of. The crowd yell with excitement. To right and left run the great Scotch forwards, grasping, slipping, pursuing, and right in the midst of them, as quick and as erratic as a trout in a pool, runs the calm-faced little man, dodging one, avoiding another, slipping between the fingers of two others. Surely he is caught now. No, he has passed all the forwards and emerges from ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... infirmities,—cannot but endear him to our deepest affections, while his unrivalled endowments command our highest admiration. To illustrate what is here alluded to, let the reader recall Burke's noble generosity towards that erratic victim of genius and grief,—the painter Barry; or his instantaneous sympathy in behalf of Crabbe the poet, when almost a foodless wanderer in our vast metropolis; and our estimate of Burke's excellencies as a man, will not ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... a child, and he should be allowed to remain a child. The ends in view are right habits, right ideals, and knowledge facts. In the secondary school the student is an adolescent, with the mind of an adolescent, having peculiar and erratic tastes, changing ambitions, and conflicting emotions. He is neither child nor adult, but passing thru the most dangerous and critical period of his entire life. The ends in view are no longer merely habits, ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... to the poetic Raggles in an erratic and singular way. It seemed to him that he had drunk cold tea and that the city was a white, cold cloth that had been bound tightly around his brow to spur him to some unknown but tremendous mental effort. And, after all, he came to shovel snow for a livelihood; ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... who have cherished the finest ideals have insisted that these should be shared by the multitude. In a newspaper of sixty years ago there is this contemporary character sketch: "Ralph Waldo Emerson is the most erratic and capricious man in America. He is emphatically a democrat of the world, and believes that what Plato thought, another man may think. What Shakespeare sang, another man may know as well. As for emperors, kings, queens, princes, or presidents, ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... begun to realize a great many things of which only a month before she had not been aware—that sudden illuminating grasp of old Barzil's inner pain, of her mother's wasted spirit, and the sense that some unguessed potent motive was at the back of her Uncle Edward's apparently erratic strolling and reiterations. Nettie stopped to wonder a little at the change in herself: she was more alive, more included. There were no reasons that she could see why this should be so; never had the present, the entire future, been darker. With her deeper consciousness, ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... habits of tigers in winter. This was quite natural, however, as he was a thorough Irishman and had never seen a tiger in his life. Mr. Currie Ghyrkins vainly attempted to stem the torrent of his eloquence, but at last pinned him on some erratic statement about tigers moulting later in the year and their skins not being worth taking. Kildare would have asserted with equal equanimity that all tigers shed their teeth and their tails in December; he was evidently trying to rouse Mr. Ghyrkins ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright of the "Free Enquirer," a paper advocating all sorts of extreme social and economic doctrines. It was not strange, therefore, that the new party was at once connected, in the public mind, with all the erratic vagaries of these Apostles of Change. It was called the "Fanny Wright ticket" and the "Infidel Ticket." Every one forgot that it aimed to be the workingman's ticket. The movement, however, was supported by "The Working Man's Advocate," ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... swallows—you remember? yes?— Northward, just then, were heading straight; No hint they dropped by which to guess That other fowl's erratic fate; An inner sense supplied their vision; Not one of them contused his scalp Or lost his feathers in collision Bumping ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, October 31, 1917 • Various
... flooded the room. At the compelling volume of the sound every man whirled and eight empty hands shot skyward. Their startled eyes beheld a man's squat body weaving uncertainly on the limbs of an insect, while in each hand shone a blue-black Colt that waved and circled in maddening, erratic orbits. ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... forward cautiously, because of the erratic leaping of the craft, the men yielding me room to pass, and soon had Sam busily engaged in passing out the various articles for inspection. Only essentials had been chosen, yet the supply seemed ample for ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... Universe," unless it might be the inverted tie of opposition, he never admitted. The love which his charming little actress mother cherished for the city in which she had enjoyed her greatest triumphs seemed to have turned to hatred in the heart of her brilliant and erratic son. In his short and disastrous sojourn in Boston, when his fortunes were at their lowest ebb, it is not likely that his thought once turned to the old house on Haskins, now Carver, Street, ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... with the country. The boys and girls of 1897 will laugh when they hear of the contents of our stockings in 1823. There was a little paper of candy, one of raisins, another, of nuts, a red apple, an olie-koek, and a bright silver quarter of a dollar in the toe. If a child had been guilty of any erratic performances during the year, which was often my case, a long stick would protrude from the stocking; if particularly good, an illustrated catechism or the New Testament would appear, showing that the St. ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... on S. Mark's Gospel.(438) To Origen's works, Eusebius, (his apologist and admirer,) is known to have habitually resorted; and, like many others, to have derived not a few of his notions from that fervid and acute, but most erratic intellect. Origen's writings in short, seem to have been the source of much, if not most of the mistaken Criticism of Antiquity. (The reader is reminded of what has been offered above at p. 96-7). And this would not be the first occasion on which it would appear that ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... fellows are not like the Delhi pandies, who are artillerymen trained by ourselves; here you will see the real genuine native product; and as the manufacture of shell is in its infancy, and as the shot seldom fits the gun within half an inch, or even an inch, you will see something erratic. They may knock holes in the wall, but it will take them a long time to cut enough holes near each other to make a breach. There, do you see? there are another lot of elephants and troops coming from the left. We shall have the whole countryside here before long. Ah! ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty
... dinner), I wandered among the Roman remains of the place by the light of a magnificent moon, and gathered an impression which has lost little of its silvery glow. The moon of the evening before had been aqueous and erratic; but if on the present occasion it was guilty of any irregularity, the worst it did was only to linger beyond its time in the heavens, in order to let us look at things comfortably. The effect was admirable; it brought back the impression ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... chased each other like the figures in a zoetrope. Now and then with a shock and rattle they went through sleeping moonlit villages, which must have stirred an instant in their sleep as at the passing of a fugitive earthquake. Sometimes in an outlying house a light in one erratic, unexpected window would give them a nameless hint of the hundred human secrets which they left behind them with their dust. Sometimes even a slouching rustic would be afoot on the road and would look after them, as after a flying ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... considered it a sufficient explanation or not the woman of experiences accepted it as such. She was the single lady of his circle whom nothing erratic in his doings could surprise, and he often gave her stray ends of his confidence ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... by his father's side is a reminder in his name of a disagreeable truth.[116] A little later the man is actually required to go about barefooted, and without clothing sufficient for conventional respectability, and to continue this for three years.[117] When we remember that he was not an erratic extremist, but a sober-minded, fine-grained gentleman of refinement and of a good family, it helps us to understand a little how hard-hearted and stubborn were a people that could be appealed to ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... are still large enough to be self-sustaining. Too large a charge simply rekindles the original vortex—still larger—in its original crater. And the activity that must be matched varies so tremendously, in magnitude, maxima, and minima, and the cycle is so erratic—ranging from seconds to hours without discoverable rhyme or reason—that all attempts to do so at any predetermined instant have failed completely. Why, even Kinnison and Cardynge and the Conference of Scientists couldn't ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... the tragedy. The old man had always been cranky and erratic, and he'd played the despot on Hikihoho so long that he'd got the idea in his head that there was nothing wrong with the king—or the princess either. When Armande was eighteen he sent for her. He had slews and slathers ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... charge. Arrived there, a smart rap with the ramrod moulded it to the grooves. But it also flattened the top, and forced the bottom partly into the chamber. Thus misshapen at birth, the bullet was cast upon the world to an erratic and fruitless career. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... to Colin McKeith about the message—partly because his movements were erratic and he was a good deal away from Leichardt's town just then. Thus Mrs Gildea did not know whether or not he had read the flowery description telegraphed by a Melbourne correspondent who interviewed Sir Luke Tallant and his ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... She affected fright, as the child expected. She cowered dismayed. "Oh, oh!" she cried, watching his erratic approach. "What is that?" She pretended flight, but sank into a chair, apparently overpowered. She gazed down at the child with the lifted hands of horror as he clasped the folds of her gown, his eyes shining with fun, his teeth glittering between his red lips, his laughter rippling with ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... The memorial and erratic clock of Our Square was just striking seven of the following morning, meaning approximately eight-forty, when my astonished eyes again beheld Martin Dyke seated on my bench, beautifully though inappropriately clad ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... to the knowledge of their pupils and the public, at any rate, think strange thoughts do imaginative or romantic things, pay tribute to beauty, laugh carelessly, or countenance any irregularity in the world. All erratic and enterprising tendencies in him have been checked by them and brought at last to nothing; and so he emerges a mere residuum of decent minor dispositions. The dullness of the scholastic atmosphere the grey, ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... Alcide Echauffourees, also a Zephyr, who had his nickname from the marvelous changes of costume with which he would pursue his erratic expedition, and deceive the very Arabs themselves into believing him a born Mussulman; a very handsome fellow, the Lauzun of his battalion, the Brummel of his Caserne; coquette with his kepi on one ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... failed—it is not collapse, but collision; the greatest railroad accident on record, with fire caught from the furnace, and Catiline's quenching "non aqua, sed ruina."[67] But I see not, in any of our talk of them, justice enough done to their erratic strength of purpose, nor any estimate taken of the strength of endurance of domestic sorrow, in what their women and children suppose a righteous cause. And out of that endurance and suffering, its own ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... of comets around us, and when we remember how near some of these have come to us during the last few years, who will undertake to say that during the last thirty thousand, fifty thousand, or one hundred thousand years, one of these erratic luminaries, with blazing front and train of dbris, may not have come ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... the three figures puttering about the bean-patch. Presently he got up and stepped into the house, drank some coffee, and came out again. He sat down on the bench and took mental stock of his own belongings. He had a few dollars in silver, his erratic watch, and his gun. Suddenly he bethought him of his saddle. The sun made his head swim as he stepped out toward the corral. Yes, his saddle and bridle hung on the corral bars, just where he had left them. He was about to return ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... Buch, who contended that the mountains had sprung up like veritable jacks-in-the-box. Von Buch, whom his friend and fellow-pupil Von Humboldt considered the foremost geologist of the time, died in 1853, still firm in his early faith that the erratic bowlders found high on the Jura had been hurled there, like cannon-balls, across the valley of Geneva by the sudden upheaval ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Thomas Tyrwhitt's scholarly instincts produced a comparatively good text from second-rate manuscripts and accompanied it with valuable illustrative notes. The next edition of any importance was that edited by Thomas Wright for the Percy Society in 1848-1851, based on the erratic but valuable British Museum manuscript Harley 7334, containing readings which must be either Chaucer's second thoughts or the emendations of a brilliantly clever scribe. In 1866 Richard Morris re-edited ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... sky above the clearing. His hair was white, his figure a little bent, and there was an anxious look upon his face, a permanent expression rather than one caused by any tardy arrival this evening. The man he waited for was too erratic in his goings and comings to make a few hours', or even a day's, delay ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... Review it is difficult to find a parallel. There was nothing like it at the time, and nothing exactly like it has been attempted since. The nearest approach to it among its predecessors was the Observator, a small weekly journal written by the erratic John Tutchin, in which passing topics, political and social, were discussed in dialogues. Personal scandals were a prominent feature in the Observator. Defoe was not insensible to the value of this element to a popular journal. He knew, he said, that people liked to be amused; and he supplied ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... imagery is so lucid that we are able to follow with effortless pleasure the intricate windings of a plot which at Beckford's whim twists and turns through scenes of wonderful variety. Amid his wild, erratic excursions he never loses sight of the end in view; the story, with all its vagaries, is perfectly coherent. This we should expect from one who "loved to bark a tough understanding."[72] It is the intellectual ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... hair on a man is not in good taste, and will indicate him to the observer as a person of unbalanced mind and unpleasantly erratic character—a man, in brief, who seeks to impress others with the fact that he is eccentric, something which a really eccentric ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... a deeply pathetic figure, because his great gifts and high qualities never had full scope. He might have been a great jurist, a great lawyer, a great professor, a great writer, a great administrator; and he ended as a man of erratic genius, as a teacher in a restricted sphere, though sowing, generously and prodigally, rich and fruitful seed. With great poetical force of conception, and a style both resonant and suggestive, he left a single essay of high genius, a fantastic ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... scattered trees begin to develop the necessary symbiosis and their growth takes off. On a bed of two-year-old seedlings, many individual trees are head and shoulders above the others. This is not due to superior genetics or erratic soil fertility. These are the individuals with ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... up, bold and erect, near the dog-kennel. Bluey nearly broke his neck trying to get at it. The kangaroo said: "Lay down, you useless hound!" and started across the cultivation!, heading for the grass-paddock in long, erratic jumps. Half-way across the cultivation it spotted a mob of other kangaroos, and took a firmer grip ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... complete Eritrea's development agenda. The government strictly controls the use of foreign currency, limiting access and availability. Few private enterprises remain in Eritrea. Eritrea's economy is heavily dependent on taxes paid by members of the diaspora. Erratic rainfall and the delayed demobilization of agriculturalists from the military continue to interfere with agricultural production, and Eritrea's recent harvests have not been able to meet the food needs of ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... of remarking that it is very common-place and dull, you are so much pleased and surprised' to find that the man can preach at all. And then, the dunces of college days are often sensible, though slow and in this world, plain plodding common sense is very likely in the long run to beat erratic brilliancy. The tortoise passes the hare. I owe an apology to Lord Campbell for even naming him on the same page on which stands the name of dunce: for assuredly in shrewd, massive sense, as well as in kindness of manner, the natural outflow of a kind and good heart, no judge ever surpassed ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... a most erratic craft. She might have done well enough upon a park lagoon if safely anchored, but upon the bosom of a mighty ocean she left much to ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of credit and shares, and that he had no ready money—a fact borne out by the testimony of his shipmates. The night he arrived was spent in an orgy on board ship, which he did not leave until the early evening of the next day, although, after his erratic fashion, he had ordered a room at a hotel. That evening he took ashore a portmanteau, evidently intending to pass the night at his hotel. He was never seen again, although some of the sailors declared that they had seen him on the wharf ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... the holocaust of flame was over. New suns and new worlds drifted calmly, with only a few erratic meteors and some settling dust-clouds left to tell of the explosion that had ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... liberty gone, his freedom contracted to a few cubic feet, his space diminished almost to the mould of his body, the great wild philosopher created his own liberty, made it out of his own love of it. Like a live, erratic shuttle he went to and fro, unweaving, unravelling, unwinding, drawing out the knot of confinement, flinging out, radiating and spreading and breathing out space in all directions, by multitudinous motion of disentanglement! ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... shall explain in another essay, is, to my mind, the proper function of criticism. I shall never forget my first visits to the Caillebotte collection; and in the unforgettable thrill of those first visits M. Mauclair's bad science and erratic judgement counted for something—much perhaps. They put me into a mood of sympathetic expectation; and such a mood is, even for highly sensitive people, often an indispensable preliminary to aesthetic appreciation. There are those who have got ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... he was for a time a friend of the erratic and gifted Rousseau, and was afterwards not unknown to Condorcet, the secretary of the French Academy of Sciences, so liberal in his views and so bitter an enemy of the Church; and though constantly in contact with ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... in name but in nothing else, the least said the better. He was born in London, but spent his childhood in Aberdeen, under the alternate care or negligence of his erratic mother. At ten he fell heir to a title, to the family seat of Newstead Abbey, and to estates yielding an income of some L1400 per year,—a large income for a poet, but as nothing to a lord accustomed ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... too, had been wounded. The process of "easing the first one off," besides affording him side-lights on a woman's heart, involved him in an erratic course of blowing hot and cold that defeated his own ends. When he blew cold the chill was such that he blew hotter than ever to disperse it. He could see for himself that this seeming capriciousness made it difficult for ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... essential difference consists in degree. Increase what is commonly called talent in the direction of its manifestation and it would develop into genius. Genius is commonly thought of as something abnormal, in the sense that it is essentially eccentric. A genius is generally spoken of as an eccentric, erratic, unbalanced, person. The eccentricity is then taken as constituting the substance of the quality of genius. This is undoubtedly a mistake. Because some geniuses have been erratic, the popular imagination has formed its picture of all genius as unbalanced. ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... was purely facial. It maddened her to hear his complacent justification of himself. And the most maddening part of it was her knowledge that Benton was right, that in many essential things he had done her a good turn, which her own erratic inclinations bade fair to ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... sullen, weedy lake, where I could not have so much as exercise for my swimming. Therefore I would fain do something, but that I cannot tell what is no wonder.' 'Though I be in such a planetary and erratic fortune that I can do nothing constantly,' he confesses later ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... the strain erratic Dimly glance from pole to pole; Raptures sweet and dreams ecstatic Fire ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... the commodore; for a year past, since his niece had attained the age of fourteen, he had been worrying himself and the elders of the family to have the marriage solemnized, "before the little devil shall have time to get some other notion into her erratic head," he said. All were opposed to him, holding over his head the only rod he dreaded, the opinion of ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... in recent years, been taken from us. With him the moral aim was always paramount, the pecuniary aim subordinate. Journalism, as he looked upon it, was not an end, but a means to higher ends. He may have had many mistaken and some erratic opinions on particular subjects; but the moral earnestness with which he pursued his vocation, and his constant subordination of private interest to public objects, nobly atone ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... The older states of the Oriental world had, as we have pointed out, grown weary of warfare which brought them nothing but loss of men and treasure; but behind these states, on the distant horizon to the east and north-west, were rising up new nations whose growth and erratic movements assumed an importance that became daily more and more alarming. On the east, the Medes, till lately undistinguishable from the other tribes occupying the western corner of the Iranian table-land, had recently broken away from the main body, and, rallying round a single leader, already ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... to claim the whole earth—or at least that portion of it—for his own; so, when he was constrained to make a choice, he settled himself in the wider, more fertile coulee, which he thereafter called the Flying U. While it is good policy to locate as near as possible to the source of those erratic little creeks which water certain garden spots of the northern range land, it is also well to choose land that will grow plenty of hay. J. G. Whitmore chose the hay land, and trusted that providence would insure the water supply. Through ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... eccentricities was one that cannot be labelled erratic. He had a wholesome horror of being buried alive, and he carried a slip about in his pocket, instructing whom it might concern to see that his body was kept unburied four days after his death, that small bells were attached to his ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... in the sky is often sudden and unexpected, and one of those erratic wanderers may become visible at any time and in any part of the heavens. It was remarked by Kepler that there are as many comets in the sky as there are fishes in the ocean. This may or may not be true, for they only become visible when they approach the Sun, and the time ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... another evil to the constitutions which knew only the equable English temperature, and could not face either the intense sun, or the sudden changes of the most erratic climate the earth knows. In the search for running-water, the colonists scattered, moving from point to point, "the Governor, the Deputy-Governor and all the assistants except Mr. Nowell going across the river to Boston at the invitation of Mr. Blaxton, who had until then been its ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... snatches of sustained melody with the intervening airy interludes are very lovely. These are the principal features, to describe all the whims is of course impossible. You may call this work an extravaganza, and point out its grotesqueness; but you must admit that only by this erratic character of the form and these spasmodic movements, could be expressed the peculiar restiveness, fitfulness, and waywardness of thought and feeling that characterise Chopin's individuality. To these unclassical qualities—for classical art is above all plastic and self-possessed—combined ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... offer small help to the student as to the doings of this erratic painter. He was born October 24, 1824. He died June 29, 1886. He was of mixed blood, Italian and French. His father was a gauger, though Adolphe declared that he was an authentic descendant of the Crusader, Godefroy Monticelli, who married in 1100 Aurea Castelli, daughter of the Duca of Spoleto. ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... movements of the figure, a something indicative of a desire to avoid observation, that attracted my attention from my book and aroused my curiosity. It seemed to be wandering about aimlessly; but when I had been watching it for some ten minutes I became convinced that, erratic as its movements seemed to be, they were not without method; and that method, I soon saw, was causing the unknown one—a man—to gravitate slowly but surely toward the wagon. So I waited patiently, and a quarter of an hour later he accomplished a masterly movement which brought him within the ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... soft structures and since this form of injury is subsurface, and limited to fractional portions of tendons, the inflammation occasioned usually remains an aseptic one. Reaction to this form of injury is characterized by inflammation, the course of which is erratic and variable. In chronic inflammation of tendons, where animals are continued in service, the usual sequel is contraction, or ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... organs. At this time she has traversed the period of joyous madness, and is about to enter upon the period of somber delirium: behold her capable of daring, suffering, and doing all, capable of incredible exploits and abominable barbarities, the moment her guides, as erratic as herself, indicate an enemy or ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Already low clouds of smoke were drifting overhead like a broken veil. The erratic foothill wind, which a few minutes before had been coming down the valley, was now blowing back up again. Even while they took in the situation they could feel the hot breath of the distant fire borne ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... known as the DeBeers group. His great rival was Barney Barnato, who gave African finance the same erratic and picturesque tradition that the Pittsburgh millionaires brought to American finance. His real name was Barnett Isaacs. After kicking about the streets of the East End of London he became a music hall performer under the name by which he is known to business ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... tower. A Viking rests on its fins. Anyway, it took off. It climbed ten miles, then went on an erratic course. We couldn't control it. Fortunately it crashed on the Las Vegas Bombing and Gunnery Range, which is a closed military area nearby, so no one was hurt. At first we thought it was just one of those typical accidents ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... field at Westbury, Long Island, held their breaths as they watched James Dent take off in the wildest, most erratic flight that they had ever seen. Under lowering storm clouds, with the wind roaring half a hurricane behind him, Dent spiraled upward as if unconscious of the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... were the denizens of this underground colony; their six little legs carrying their curious globular bodies backward and forward over the disturbed area from which the stone had been removed. At first the movements of the ants were extremely erratic and purposeless. Panic and alarm appeared to be the order of the day during the few minutes which elapsed after removal of the stone. But soon the eye could discern movements of purposive kind on the part of the alarmed ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... manners and intervals of "sensibility" but climbing, with the advance of science and the emancipation of thought to an ideal—the personal, original interpretation of life. The nineteenth century showed curiously erratic variations of the curve. From its beginning till 1815, Sulphitism was upon the increase, while from that year till 1870 there was a sickening drop to the veriest depths of bromidic thought. Then the Bromide infested the earth. With his black-walnut furniture, his jig-saw and turning-lathe ...
— Are You A Bromide? • Gelett Burgess
... else in the universe. Then the cause must be in the mist itself. Had it a mind, and a will, and a perception of propriety? Did the mist become sensible of the lightness of its behavior, and the fire resolve to cool off a little, and both consult together on the propriety of dropping their erratic blazing through infinite space, and resolve to settle down into orderly, well-behaved suns and planets? In the division of the property, what became of the mind? Did it go to the sun, or to the moon, or to the pole star, or to this ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... the Colonel reminds me of another unusual character with whom we were brought in contact in these bridge-building days. This was Captain Eads, of St. Louis,[26] an original genius minus scientific knowledge to guide his erratic ideas of things mechanical. He was seemingly one of those who wished to have everything done upon his own original plans. That a thing had been done in one way before was sufficient to cause its rejection. When his plans for the St. Louis Bridge were presented to ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... personal vanity, nor as a person reckless of the consequences of his own acts, nor as a Pecksniff who consoled himself for moral failure out of the Shorter Catechism. The books and the friends amongst them show me an erratic yet lovable personality, a man of devotion and courage, a loyal, charming, and rather irresponsible person whose very slight faults were counter-balanced many times over by very solid virtues. ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... so greatly dismayed at this experience as might have been expected. They had recently accompanied their erratic relative on a European trip and had learned to be ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... the whole earth—or at least that portion of it—for his own; so, when he was constrained to make a choice, he settled himself in the wider, more fertile coulee, which he thereafter called the Flying U. While it is good policy to locate as near as possible to the source of those erratic little creeks which water certain garden spots of the northern range land, it is also well to choose land that will grow plenty of hay. J. G. Whitmore chose the hay land, and trusted that providence would insure ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... next day Jacqueline kept to her coach. She was cross or nervously excited or melancholy, and by erratic turns in every mood that was hopelessly downcast, until her maid became well nigh frantic. At first Ney would hover near in helpless concern, but she ordered him away angrily. However, the storm broke at last when Driscoll reined in and waited at the roadside. She could see him through the little ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... and crops. Agriculture today provides a livelihood for more than 80% of the population but supplies only about 50% of food needs and accounts for only 5% of GDP. Subsistence farming and cattle raising predominate. The sector is plagued by erratic rainfall and poor soils. The driving force behind the rapid economic growth of the 1970s and 1980s has been the mining industry. This sector, mostly on the strength of diamonds, has gone from generating 25% of GDP in 1980 to 39% in 1994. The unemployment rate remains ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the patiently marching Una to be a creative thinker, yet she did hunger for self-mastery, and ardently was she following the erratic gibes at civilization with which young Walter showed his delight in having an audience, when the brown, homely Golden family ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... clays, often more or less regularly stratified, but containing erratic blocks, often of large size, and with their edges unworn, derived from considerable distances from the place where they are now found. In these beds it is not at all uncommon to find fossil shells; and these, though of ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... things of which only a month before she had not been aware—that sudden illuminating grasp of old Barzil's inner pain, of her mother's wasted spirit, and the sense that some unguessed potent motive was at the back of her Uncle Edward's apparently erratic strolling and reiterations. Nettie stopped to wonder a little at the change in herself: she was more alive, more included. There were no reasons that she could see why this should be so; never had the present, ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... brings up to the time of its being mentioned by the Lord Mayor, the consequence of which was that a Committee was formed at the Mansion House for the purpose of receiving subscriptions and deciding upon the best means of capturing this erratic genius. Probably feeling that he had sufficiently terrorised the districts before mentioned, he turned his attention to the East end of London, and particularly favoured Bow. A case is given in the Times of 23 Feb. A gentleman named Alsop, living between Bow and Old Ford, ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... explain certain evils in life, refuses to believe anything. That is the case with Van Dorn, a very bad man. Stepfather Joe is always conservative on that subject. Deviate as much as he may, he never disbelieves. Aunt Patty, too, erratic as she is, holds a conservative position ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... the mowers calling to each other across the meadow ended in a quavering "Rue Bar-ree-e!" That day spent in the country made him angry for a week, and he worked sulkily at Julian's, all the time tormented by a desire to know where Clifford was and what he might be doing. This culminated in an erratic stroll on Sunday which ended at the flower-market on the Pont au Change, began again, was gloomily extended to the morgue, and again ended at the marble bridge. It would never do, and Selby felt it, so he went to see Clifford, who was convalescing ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... about to-night that Courtland's running away should seem doubly erratic?" asked Mr. Linton, after a little pause. He had his eyes fixed coldly upon his ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... her dish-pan with dangerous haste, and Betty raised a cloud of dust "sweeping-up;" while mother seemed to be everywhere at once. Even Sanch, feeling that his fate was at stake, endeavored to help in his own somewhat erratic way,—now frisking about Ben at the risk of getting his tail chopped off, then trotting away to poke his inquisitive nose into every closet and room whither he followed Mrs. Moss in her "flying round" evolutions; next dragging off the mat so Betty could brush the door-steps, ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... her home directly after Richmond's funeral, an erratic wind blowing her soft loose hair against his face ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... been in the country west of Hudson Bay. So far as I can learn I alone, save the Indians, have witnessed the great migration there; but from such information as I was able to gather later at the coast, their movements appear to be as erratic as those of the caribou of northern Canada. [See Warburton Pike's "Barren Grounds of ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... qualm of conscience. The child really was too simple to be made game of. Besides, he felt sure that she had spoken the truth, so far as she herself was concerned. She didn't know where her erratic aunt had gone; and any further questioning would only frighten her without winning him the knowledge he sought. He therefore took the parcel back, said some soothing words and made his way across the walk to his taxi. But the number he gave the chauffeur was that of the house ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... Peal after peal follow each other in quick succession, the vigorous, newborn echoes of one peal seeming angrily to chase the receding voices of its predecessor from cliff to cliff, and from recess to projection, along its rocky, erratic course up the caon. Vivid flashes of forked lightning shoot athwart the heavy black cloud that seems to rest on either wall, roofing the caon with a ceiling of awful grandeur. Sheets of electric flame light up ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... of Congressmen. He made speeches in support of all these "reforms," but did not succeed in securing the discharge of a soldier, a sailor, a diplomatist, or a clerk, neither did he reduce the appropriations one single cent. The erratic Mr. David Crockett was then a member of the House, but had not attracted public attention, although the Jackson men were angry because he, one of Old Hickory's officers in the Creek War, was a devoted adherent of Henry Clay for the Presidency. One of his colleagues in the Tennessee ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... when the sick man could no longer hold it, and the tug was beginning to whirl about in an erratic manner, when the major rang the bell to stop the engine. The captain was carried down to his room, and put into his berth, where one of the soldiers was detailed to ...
— Taken by the Enemy • Oliver Optic
... Greek mythology is still the creed of a fragment of humanity existing somewhere in the mountains of Syria. At all events, since the late Sir Robert Peel placed it beyond the power of the governor and company to indulge in dangerous or erratic courses, it is abundantly manifest that to doubt of the perfect stability of the Bank of England is tantamount to questioning the infallibility of arithmetic. In the vaults and coffers of this huge establishment there is at present—as we learn from the published ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 420, New Series, Jan. 17, 1852 • Various
... captured, took a discreditable and craven part, signing, in return for his release and safety, an agreement to recognise Texan independence. Mexico, however, did not recognise this, notwithstanding that a Texan Constitution was set up in 1836. Returning now to Santa-Anna's Presidency, his erratic acts disgusted his countrymen, and pronunciamientos followed. Hoping to divert popular opinion from himself, Santa-Anna proposed the prosecution of a war with Texas, for its recovery, notwithstanding his personal ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... name of God and for the Son of God's sake,—this is humanity, this is Christianity; the rest is but formality and picture-courteous idolatry, and Jewish and Popish blasphemy against the Christian religion." And yet the mind of Roger Williams was impulsive, erratic, and unstable, compared with theirs; and in what respect has the work they left behind them proved, after the testing of two centuries, less solid or ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... time, in the course of his eager and somewhat erratic wanderings among solicitors and other men of business, Captain Millet made a sudden pause, and, by way of taking breath, rushed down to Folkestone, brought Rose up to Cranby, hired a dog-cart, and drove along the sands at low tide, in the ...
— Jeff Benson, or the Young Coastguardsman • R.M. Ballantyne
... of facts been of an erratic nature, given to wander from anecdote to description, and vice versa, he would perhaps have told, in a parenthetical sort of way, how that, during these three weeks, the trappers enjoyed uninterrupted fine weather; how the artist sketched so indefatigably that he at last filled his ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... down the room, looking as angry as a hungry lion which has just had a long expected dinner suddenly snatched away from it; but the worse he became the louder M'Allister shrieked with laughter. The latter was now simply rolling about the room—for it could not be termed walking, it was so erratic—holding his sides and laughing, whilst the tears were chasing each other down his cheeks. He kept trying to speak, but had no sooner stuttered out the words, "Heh, mon! heh, mon!" than he was off again into another wild paroxysm of laughter, and ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... not seriously disquiet anybody, for Patsy's ways were too erratic and the country too safe (so long, at least, as she kept to the Ferris properties) for any one to ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... elaborate preparations being made to cover the great event, of the special writers, experts, broadcasters, cameramen, I was thankful indeed I was no longer a newspaperman, arbitrarily to be ordered aloft or sent aboard some erratic craft offshore on the bare chance I might catch a comprehensive or distinctive enough glance of the action to repay an editor for my discomfort. Instead, I sat contentedly in my apartment and listened to ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... where for a time the river ran until it tired, and sought new scenes, new ways across the forests and cane-brakes. The charts may show you that this river is the boundary of a certain state; but who shall tell where or what that boundary may be? Who can trace the filum aquae of the most erratic and arrogant river in all the world? The river is not now as it was ten years ago, nor the same to-day as it will be ten years hence. Channel and cut-off and island and main current go on in their juggling, ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... that existed only in their imaginations. Their struggles may have educated them; but had they possessed sufficient genius they would have had neither struggle nor education. Perhaps that is why geniuses are such erratic people, and mediocrities so respectable. I grant you that I was very limited when I first came out; I was absolutely incapable of comedy. But I never took any trouble about it; and by and by, when I ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... grasses and legumes are very high in nitrogen, while dried straw from mature plants has a very high C/N. If compost is made catch-as-catch-can by using materials as they come available, then results will be highly erratic. Howard had attempted to make composts of single vegetable materials like cotton residues, cane trash, weeds, fresh green sweet clover, or the waste of field peas. These experiments were always unsatisfactory. So Howard wisely mixed ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... happened that when the unfortunate Black first became clearly conscious of anything again, he heard the gurgle of sliding water close beside his head, and, opening his eyes, caught sight of a smoky lamp that reeled to and fro, in very erratic fashion. Moisture dripped from the beams above him, and there was a sickly smell which seemed familiar. Black, who had been to sea before, decided that he caught the aroma of bilge water. Rows of wooden shelves tenanted by recumbent figures, became discernible, and ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... of his life, so to speak, that he owes his experiences; his after-life was all pudding, which attracts nothing but greedy children. With marriage the interest of his life ceased for all but one person, and his path became regular as the sun's instead of erratic as ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... of mankind was a natural growth, and it was only inadequate knowledge of the past that made the impossibility of predicting the future. Great men were like small men, obeying the same natural laws, though a trifle more erratic in their behaviour. Political economy was history in little, illustrating the regularity of human, like all other natural, forces. But can we predict historical events, as we can predict an eclipse? That is Froude's answer to Buckle, in the form of ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... his action in thus sailing away to a strange land alone was a shock to his parents. He was a man in years, but they regarded him as but a child, as indeed he was. He had never earned his own living. He was frail in body, idle, erratic, peculiar. His flashing wit and subtle insight into the heart of things were quite beyond his parents—in this he was a stranger to them. Their religion to him was gently amusing, and he congratulated himself on not having inherited it. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... course of stone was laid along the top. We notice within a smaller circle of stone. The material of these stones is such that we know they must have come from a distance. Mr. James tells us that they are erratic—that is, bowlders brought from the North of Scotland by the glaciers—and that others of the same kind are still to be seen lying around the country. But the more common opinion is that they were brought ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... my legionaries or those erratic Jews fail to get him between here and Jerusalem, he shall get into Jerusalem. But by Hector, he will earn ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... mustered out, and thus were remanded to their homes nearly a million of strong, vigorous men who had imbibed the somewhat erratic habits of the soldier; these were of every profession and trade in life, who, on regaining their homes, found their places occupied by others, that their friends and neighbors were different, and that they ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... he would, and as she happened at that moment to catch sight of the long tails of the Newmarket coat at the other side of the station, she begged Dick to call to the erratic musician. No sooner was the proposition put forward than it was accepted, and in five minutes they were at luncheon in a 'pub,' arranging the details ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... forget what is due to myself and to the dignity of this table as to reply to our erratic friend. Here is what I propose to do—first catch our hare. Steward, can you find out for me at what table and at what seat Miss ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... "it really would be a good thing that we should all go over the house together and make certain that this rather erratic burglar did not, after all, carry anything ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... o'clock, and having knocked up his landlady, Mrs. Richards, betook himself to bed. Alaric had been in his room for the last two hours, but of Charley and his latch- key Mrs. Richards knew nothing. She stated her belief, however, that two a.m. seldom saw that erratic gentleman ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... this power of gravitation that makes everything upon the earth tend to the centre? How does it reach out its invisible hands toward the erratic meteor-stones, arrest them in their swift course, and draw them down to the earth's bosom? It is a power. We ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... especially in the extensive peregrinations of Ferdinand de Soto, are merely the fugacious names of the caciques or sachems who happened at the time to rule over the various tribes of savages which were visited by Soto in his singularly erratic expedition. One point only in the whole course of his wanderings can be ascertained with certainty, the Bay of Espirita Santo on the western coast of Florida, in about lat. 28 deg. N. and long. 83 ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... to have been four youngsters in that nest, too, for there had been four greeny-blue, brown-spotted eggs to start with. But even crows have their troubles. And the pair that owned this particular nest were a somewhat original and erratic couple. When the mother had laid her last egg and was getting ready to sit, she decided to take an airing before settling down to work. Though her mate was not at hand to guard the nest, she flew ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... of his soaring for sublimity, and mistake his dim vision of earth for proximity to heaven." And in like manner, when a thinker frees himself from all the trammels of fact, and propounds a "bold hypothesis," people mistake the vagabond erratic flights of guessing for a higher range of philosophic power. In truth, the imagination is most tasked when it has to paint pictures which shall withstand the silent criticism of general experience, and to frame hypotheses which shall withstand the confrontation with facts. I cannot here enter ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... heart. The pen of Dickens portrayed all classes of society except, perhaps, that which Thackeray made his peculiar field. The historians, too, furnish singular contrasts: the vehement pugnacity of Freeman is a foil to the serene studiousness of Acton; the erratic career of Froude to the concentration of Stubbs. The influence exercised on their contemporaries by recluses such as Newman or Darwin may be compared with the more worldly activities of Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce. Often we see equally diverse elements ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... down, their eyes contemplatively closed, their whole appearance impressing one with an air of practical talent and reliableness. Your mule is evidently safe and stupid as any conservative of any country; you may be sure that no erratic fires, no new influx of ideas will ever lead him to desert the good old paths, and tumble you down precipices. The harness they wear is so exceedingly ancient, and has such a dilapidated appearance, as if held together only by the merest accident, that ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... which roused my father's admiration was Mr. D. Mackintosh's work on erratic blocks. Apart from its intrinsic merit the work keenly excited his sympathy from the conditions under which it was executed, Mr. Mackintosh being compelled to give nearly his whole time to tuition. The following passage is from a letter to Mr. Mackintosh of October 9, 1879, and ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... a company that was scarcely important enough to figure as a rival to the Vesuvius. The movements of the Karlsefin were dependent upon the state of the market. Sometimes she would ply steadily between the Spanish Main and New Orleans in the regular transport of fruit; next she would be making erratic trips to Mobile or Charleston, or even as far north as New York, according to the distribution of the ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... of March 1673 though still ostensibly a Roman Catholic, he spoke in favour of the Test Act, describing himself as "a Catholic of the church of Rome, not a Catholic of the court of Rome," and asserting the unfitness of Romanists for public office. His adventurous and erratic career closed by death on ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... lost the habits of his erratic life; the traditions of his fathers and his passion for the chase are still alive within him. The wild enjoyments which formerly animated him in the woods painfully excite his troubled imagination; and his former privations appear to be less keen, his former perils less appalling. He contrasts ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... 4. Ratke, though erratic and vulgar, instituted wholesome reforms in the teaching of languages, and promulgated theories which, under ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... on the bed and their hyphae become established, scattered trees begin to develop the necessary symbiosis and their growth takes off. On a bed of two-year-old seedlings, many individual trees are head and shoulders above the others. This is not due to superior genetics or erratic soil fertility. These are the individuals with a ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... replied. Then he suddenly stood still and brought her to a halt. Under his erratic guidance they had turned along Dilke Street, and northwards again, past the Botanical Garden. "And this is Paradise Row!" he said, surveying the broad street which ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... th' bachelors ye tax valor. Whin ye tax th' bachelors ye tax beauty. Ye've got to admit that we're a much finer lookin' lot iv fellows thin th' marrid men. That's why we're bachelors. 'Tis with us as with th' ladies. A lady with an erratic face is sure to be marrid befure a Dhream iv Beauty. She starts to wurruk right away an' what Hogan calls th' doctrine iv av'rages is always with thim that starts early an' makes manny plays. But th' Dhream iv Beauty figures ...
— Mr. Dooley Says • Finley Dunne
... Occasionally he intercepts the maid carrying her back the money, and extracts enough to pay a small per cent of his I O U's, which allows him to continue gambling with his guests. His moist, soft fingers tremble as he holds the cards, and he infuriates every one by his erratic bidding. ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... the erratic father of the house had turned over a new leaf. Exactly when he began, or how, or why, or how long he would continue the praiseworthy process,—in a word whether there would be more leaves turned as the months went on,—Mrs. Simpson ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... scurvily had she reduced me to such absurd oracles. The phenomena seem so rare and so irregular, the vast majority of mankind having to go through life only afraid of ghosts, but never seeing them, that no general law of posthumous existence could be based on these obscure and erratic accidents. There may be only a survival of the fittest. It is not in the aberrations, but in the constant factors of human life that we must seek for light, and the attitude of these smellers after immortality is precisely that of the mediaevals ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... breakfast time, and should the weather be rough, at the other meals also. If the elements are very boisterous, the "fiddles" are screwed on to the tables, and on them a lively tune is played by the jingling glasses and rattling cutlery to the erratic beating of the Atlantic wave. The Captain's right and left hand neighbours are exempt from the use of these appliances, and the small area caused by this is the only space in the yards and yards of table unencumbered by the "fiddles." The Captain scorns the aid of such mechanical contrivances, ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... intercept them. They failed. More missiles erupted from the battleship, aimed to intercept. They also failed. The battleship began to fling out every missile it possessed, in a frantic effort to knock out the Isis's erratic missiles, which neither instruments nor eyes were able to follow accurately enough to establish a ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... the terms with me. They are unusual. The gentleman, I may say, is erratic. He believes that you have originality, and he is planning to educate you to become ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... Southern Whigs opposed the repeal, and even these did not dare place their opposition on antislavery grounds. And especially the familiar voice and example of the neighboring Missouri Whigs were given unhesitatingly to the support of the Douglas scheme. Under these combined influences one or two erratic but rather prominent Whigs in central Illinois declared their adherence to Nebraskaism, and raised the hope that the Democrats would regain in the center and south all they might lose in the northern half of ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... realising that again it was being cheated, started in pursuit. With leaps and bounds that seemed erratic and purposeless, it gradually diminished the distance between itself and the running man. Once it alighted on the outstanding branch of a gnarled tree, then from thence it took shelter in a clump ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... mountains in which the mine lay. It tilted again, and swept onward over the mountaintops, and then tilted once more and went racing up the valley in which the landing-grid was plainly visible. Calhoun swung it on an erratic course, ...
— This World Is Taboo • Murray Leinster
... peace I might have gone home puzzled; but the crow is in one respect a very polite bird: he will seldom fly over your head without letting fall the compliments of the morning, and a vigorous caw, caw soon proclaimed my black gulls to be simply erratic specimens of Corvus Americanus. Why were they conducting thus strangely? Had they become so attached to their friends as to have taken to imitating them unconsciously? Or were they practicing upon the vanity of these useful allies of theirs, these master fishermen? ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... Castile, and in which the will of Berenguela, the person most interested, had not been consulted in any manner whatever. It is not on record that Eleanor was opposed to this arrangement for her daughter, not from any lack of independent spirit,—for she came of a self-willed race, as the erratic life of her brother, Richard Coeur de Lion, will show,—but because such marriages were the common lot of the royal maidens of her time and were accepted as matters of necessity. It must be remembered that the ideals ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... the band was a man far from illiterate: he was able to travel by the stars or the compass, and had marked in his erratic expeditions such places as are most worthy the notice of a passenger. He observed to me that buildings are always best preserved in places little frequented and difficult of access; for when once a country declines from its primitive splendour, the ...
— Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia • Samuel Johnson
... in her youth had definitely vanished, as it always does when responsibility lays its heavy hand on us. She went about her new life questioningly eager for understanding. There was so much for her to see and learn—the erratic ways of setting hens, the care of foolish little baby chicks; the spring house, cool and damp and gray-walled, with its trickle of cold water forever eddying about the crocks of cream-topped milk; the garden making, left ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... coarse-grained and granular trachyte, and reddish porphyroid trachyte. The roads leading to Quito cut through hills of pumice-dust. On the plain of Inaquito and in the valley of Esmeraldas are vast erratic blocks of trachyte, some containing twenty-five cubic yards, having sharp angles, and in some cases a polished, unstriated surface. M. Wisse does not consider them to have been thrown out of Pichincha, as La Condamine and ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... rose to my mind, but evidently not to Rory's, for the look on his face told only of a dogged resolution to continue sinning against the light. He knew that his own contumacy in this respect would land his soul in perdition, and he deliberately let it go at that. Brave old Rory! Never does erratic man appear to such advantage as when his own intuitive moral sense rigorously overbears a conscientiousness warped by some fallacy which he still ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... morn," he said, "ma suspeecions were aroused by the erratic movements of a graund clood. To think, wi' Tam the Scoot, was to act. Wi'oot a thocht for his ain parrsonal safety, the gallant laddie brocht his machine to the clood i' question, caircling through its oombrageous depths. It was a fine gay ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... telepathy, or thought transference, occurs on both the physical and the mental plane. On the physical plane it is more or less spontaneous and erratic in manifestation; while on the astral plane it is as clear, reliable and responsive to demand ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... Flanders. The altar is coloured, like most of the Spanish retablos. Cano was a pugnacious character, always getting into scrapes, using his stiletto, and being obliged to shift his residence on short notice. It is remarkable that his erratic life did not interfere with his work, which seems to have gone calmly on in spite of domestic and civic difficulties. Among his works at various places, where his destiny took him, was a tabernacle for the ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... thing. You and I are one. Whatever is mine is yours. I don't swear to make you a regular, unfailing allowance worthy of the new position you're going to have, because you see I do business with several countries, and my income's erratic; I'm never sure to the day when it will come or how much it will be. But there's nothing you want which you can't buy; remember that. And when we begin life in London, you shall have a standing account at as ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... the exclusive right of "calling students to the bar,"[A] also of "disbarring" a barrister for questionable practices,—a right exercised by Gray's Inn in 1864 in the case of the late erratic but brilliant Dr. Kenealy, counsel for the notorious Tichborne "claimant." From their decision no court, as such, can give relief. The disbarred one has only the right of appeal to and review by certain of the judges. The Inns neither govern nor license attorneys, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... Liane Delorme who provided the erratic equation. Her woman's mind was not only the directing intelligence, it was as eccentric as quicksilver, infinitely supple and corrupt, Oriental in its trickishness and impenetrability. Already it had conceived some project involving him which ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... that island in charge of his wife, set sail for Florida, where he soon safely disembarked, and sent his ships back, in order to leave no opportunity for relentment in the stern resolves of his followers. After a somewhat erratic journey, on his way passing through Georgia, Alabama, and Northern Mississippi, he struck the 'Great River' at the Lower Chickasaw Bluffs, as they are still called, and upon which now stands the city of Memphis. The expedition ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... called a genius for friendship. He did not, indeed, wear his heart upon his sleeve, but ties once formed were never unloosed by any failure in charitable and tender affection on his part. Never, throughout a lengthy life, did irritability and erratic petulance (displayed 'tis true, at times by the translator of "that large infidel"), darken the eyes of those he honoured with his friendship to the simple and whole-hearted genuineness ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... that has been sanctioned by good usage is great, yet there are limits. Grammar is based upon the usage of the best writers. Any offense against the grammar of our language is a sin against good use. Browning may use constructions so erratic that the ordinary reader does not know what he is reading about; Carlyle may forge a new word rather than take the trouble to find one that other people have used. But the young writer, at least, is far safer while keeping within the limits of ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... name, Then is the Goddess tenderness Maternal, and she has a sister's tones Benign to soothe intemperate distress, Divide despair from hope, and sighs from moans. Her gentleness imparts exhaling ease To those of her milk-bearer votaries As warm of bosom-earth as she; of the source Direct; erratic but in heart's excess; Being mortal and ill-matched for Love's great force; Like green leaves caught with flames by his impress. And pray they under skies less overcast, That swiftly may her star of eve descend, Her lustrous morning star fly not too fast, To lengthen blissful ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... mortars, with which the enemy made very good practice. A large trench mortar certainly did find its way up to the trenches by some means one day, and provided considerable amusement to our men. It is reported to have dropped its first bomb into the enemy trench, and its second into our own—its erratic behaviour ultimately making it no doubt more annoying to ourselves than to the enemy. Lieuts. A. Hacking and Hollins were the pioneers in the use of rifle grenades, with which they eventually did good work at ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman
... whole of this time she was under heavy fire, and is reported to have been struck more than one hundred times by heavy shells, in spite of which she later returned to her position in column and continued the fight. In the course of her erratic maneuvers, while not under control, she circled around the Warrior and received so much of the fire intended for that ship as to justify the belief that her accident saved the Warrior from ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... left the bridge, he saw the woman in the blue veil hurry past him, and with a furtive look about her, turn and go down the steep levee toward the water. There was something so nervous and erratic in her movements, that he ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... things freezing up again, yet nevertheless spring had at last loosed her hounds and they were hard on winter's traces. In fact, one belated train, after hours spent on the road, had succeeded in pushing through, an evidence that they all would soon be running with their accustomed, if rather erratic regularity, and there was naturally a tremendous excitement and jollification in the camp at this arrival of the first mail bearing news ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... be said as to the fate of poor Sel, which was mournful enough. Her trances grew gradually more frequent and erratic, till she became so thoroughly diseased in mind and body as to be entirely unfitted for household work, and, in short, nothing but an encumbrance. We kept her, however, for the sake of charity, and should have done so till her poor, tormented life ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... that the real Spain had generous though sluggish intentions, and noble though erratic impulses, but it awoke too late; too late for Doctor Rizal and too late to save the Philippines for Spain; tardy reforms after his death were useless and the loss of her overseas possessions was the result. Doctor Rizal lost when he staked his life on his trust in the innate sense of honor of Spain, ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... drizzling rain, and now and then the spray struck against her face. Blythe looked up at the "crow's nest," which was describing strange geometrical figures against the sky. The lookouts in their oil-coats did not seem in the least to mind their erratic passage through space. She wished it were eight-bells and time for them to change watch; it was always such fun to see them running up the ladder, hand over hand, their quick, monkey-like figures ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... years, and offer large possibilities of power and wealth in the future development of the New Dominion. It is a region remarkable for its long rivers, in places shallow and rapid, and extremely erratic in their ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... English history. The land is swept by vast changes, inseparable from the rapid accumulation of national power; but since power is the most dangerous of gifts until men have learned to control it, these changes seem at first to have no specific aim or direction. Henry V—whose erratic yet vigorous life, as depicted by Shakespeare, was typical of the life of his times—first let Europe feel the might of the new national spirit. To divert that growing and unruly spirit from rebellion at home, Henry led ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... without exaggeration, we may say he showed almost from his cradle, had reaped its own reward in the wonderful success which he achieved, if we find him then averse to respectable conventionality, erratic, and even dissipated in his habits, let us mercifully remember the bitter and degrading suffering which he passed through in his childhood, and not judge too harshly the great actor. Unlike those whose lives we have hitherto considered, he knew none of ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving
... friend Mr. Ernest Gibson, of Buenos Ayres, in a communication to the Ibis, describes an encounter he actually witnessed between a carancho and a skunk. Riding home one afternoon, he spied a skunk "shuffling along in the erratic manner usual to that odoriferous quadruped;" following it at a very short distance was an eagle-vulture, evidently bent on mischief. Every time the bird came near the bushy tail rose menacingly; then the carancho would fall behind, and, after a few moments' hesitation, follow on again. At length, ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... him or force him to explain, until he was quite ready to do so. Aunt Hannah bided her time. Peter was a thoughtful man, and he was doubtless thinking. His wife was not only a clever helpmate but was noted for her consideration of her erratic spouse. ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum
... messages that Liszt was constantly sending to his exiled friend. And we must understand that at this time Liszt had a world-wide reputation as a composer himself, and was the foremost pianist of his time. And Wagner—Wagner was only an obscure dreamer, with a penchant for erratic music! ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... popular fancy, especially in Paris, where he was best known, as erratic: as once when, by a stroke of financial sleight-of-hand, he got the young Government of Russia into a tight place, then refused them a loan, except on condition of the lease to him of the Kremlin: and for three months squalid old Moscow was the most cometary Court anywhere—acts savouring of ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... you both that I cannot be responsible for three erratic spinsters. They are undoubtedly prisoners if they ...
— More Tish • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... 'His manner is erratic and changed. It isn't another invention, because when he is inventing he is merely monosyllabic, with spasms of muttering and an increased tendency to knock things over. Now he's altogether different. It's the trend ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... only harsh experience can shatter. Secretly he was disposed to ascribe all the ills to which flesh is heir primarily to a disordered nervous system. It was evident that Cairn's mind persistently ran along a particular groove; something lay back of all this erratic talk; he had clearly invested the Mask of ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... declared a rebel against the Spanish government and deprived of his estates. Thus persecuted by her unfeeling brothers, Porzia Tasso sought refuge together with Cornelia in a Neapolitan convent, where, deprived of her erratic but beloved husband and pining for her absent son, the poor woman died of a broken heart a year or two later. As for Cornelia, she became affianced when of a marriageable age to a gentleman of Sorrento, the Cavaliere Marzio Sersale, and ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... The only consequence was fatal delay; not knowing what to do with their prisoner, the Government shipped him to Caprera. Personally he was perfectly free; no conditions were imposed; but nine men-of-war were despatched to the island to sweep the seas of erratic heroes. In spite of which, Garibaldi escaped in a canoe on the ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... everything to him that friend could be. I cannot tell you my story without mention of my brother, he has been so woven into every part of it. An unaccountable fancy for the study of medicine developed itself in his erratic nature soon after he came home; and he relinquished his brilliant prospects and devoted himself to the little white office near Doctor Percival's house, with Bernard McKey for his hourly companion. The two had scarce ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... bringing proofs of the new science before the commission. These were M. de Foissac, M. Dupotet, M. Chapelain, and M. de Geslin. It would be but an unprofitable, and by no means a pleasant task to follow the commissioners in their erratic career, as they were led hither and thither by the four lights of magnetism above mentioned; the four "Wills-o'-the-Wisp" which dazzled the benighted and bewildered doctors on that wide and shadowy region of metaphysical inquiry — the influence of mind over matter. It will be better to state ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... poop of the vessel behind. Another whizzing rocket, carrying its line with it, went hurtling through or close to the crowd clustered on the top-gallant forecastle, where they cowered before creeping out on to the bowsprit. No harm was done by the erratic flight of the rockets, but the wrecked sailors naturally preferred to go ashore in the lifeboat to being dragged through the breakers in the cradle of the rocket-apparatus, and declining to use it, they again summoned ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... horror, they watched the craft's erratic course, as it swung loggily westward and headed toward that yawning abysm from which they had all so ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... a French noble and a soldier of fortune, who rose to be governor of Guienne. His parents entered him at the Jesuit College, where he completed his novitiate and took the first vows, and in 1635 he was ordained as a priest. Early manifestations of an erratic temperament, a mystical habit of mind, and physical frailty, led to his severance from the Society of Jesus. He entered upon a preaching mission, and, coming under the attention of Pere Gondran, second general of the Congregation of the Oratory at Paris, he received a call to that city, ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... the chief custodian of the City Gates, of whom Lorenzino demanded post-horses, showing to the servant Alessandro's signet-ring, which he had pulled off his victim's finger. The Bishop made no demur, being well accustomed to the erratic ways of the cousins. They took the road to Bologna, where Lorenzino had the two broken fingers removed, and his hand dressed, and then on ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... these basins, elliptical in shape and walled with rough limestone. Moss grew in the crevices of the masonry and about it had been a sod of velvet grass. Black beetles slipped in and out among the stones; dragon-flies hung over the surface of the water and large ants made erratic journeys about the rough bark of the naked palms. Whoever came dipped his goblet deep, for there the water was cold. If he gazed through to the bottom he detected a convection in the sand below. This was not a ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... Berlin, and ladies who gather in their drawing-rooms all that is most interesting in the intellectual and political life of the day; but they are almost without exception obedient to the traditional officialdom, leaning upon a favor that is at times erratic, and without the daring of independence which is the salt of all ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... affair, they sometimes regretted it. Reviewing was carried on in small type, in the backs of certain magazines. Most of it was verbose and much of it was worthless as criticism. The belated recognition of the critical genius of Poe was due to the company he kept. He was a sadly erratic reviewer, as often wrong, I suppose, as right, but the most durable literary criticism of the age came from his pen, and is to be found in a review, a review of ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... looking for trouble! The old gentleman had been odder than ever the last day or so. He had ceased even to pretend that his guest's presence was anything but an annoyance. He had refused utterly to enter into any connected conversation and had been restless and erratic to a degree. "Too muchy moon-devil," according to Li Ho. That very afternoon he had met them coming down from their talk upon the rocks and the ironic courtesy of his greeting had been little less ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... since the death of their great monarchs. It had been an easier task for William the Silent to steer his course, notwithstanding all the perversities, short-comings, brow-beatings, and inconsistencies that he had been obliged to endure from Elizabeth and Henry. Genius, however capricious and erratic at times, has at least vision, and it needed no elaborate arguments to prove to both those sovereigns that the severance of their policy from that of the Netherlands was impossible without ruin to the Republic and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... winter cold as well as summer heat. "The night bird" was one of her father's playful names for her, and if ever she was able to slip away on a fine night, nothing delighted her more than to wander about in the park and the woods, listening to the cries of the owls and night jars, watching the erratic flight of the bats, and admiring the grand beauty of the sleeping world as it lay beneath the rays ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... you liberals, And navigators into realms intellectual, You sailors through heights imaginative, Blown about by erratic currents, tumbling into air pockets, You Margaret Fuller Slacks, Petits, And Tennessee Claflin Shopes— You found with all your boasted wisdom How hard at the last it is To keep the soul from splitting into cellular atoms. While we, seekers of earth's treasures ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... justification. We arrived. And we arrived, furthermore, without any trouble, as you shall see; that is, without any trouble to amount to anything. To begin with, Roscoe tackled the navigating. He had the theory all right, but it was the first time he had ever applied it, as was evidenced by the erratic behaviour of the Snark. Not but what the Snark was perfectly steady on the sea; the pranks she cut were on the chart. On a day with a light breeze she would make a jump on the chart that advertised "a wet sail and a ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... philosophic. Wilson's character was the grand object of attack and defence, and round it all the hard fighting was done. Though it was pure and blameless, it offered some points which an unscrupulous adversary might readily misconstrue, with some show of plausibility. His free, erratic life, his little imprudences, his unguarded expressions, and the reckless "Chaldee MS.," might, with a little twisting, be turned to handles of offence, and wrested to his disadvantage. But the fanatic zeal of his opponents ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... "God and the King," will soon be the rallying cry of all Frenchmen. The scattered elements of royalism must be gathered into one formidable sheaf; militant Vendee must be abandoned to its unhappy fate and marched within a more pacific and less erratic path. The royalists of the West have fulfilled their duty; those of Paris, who have prepared everything for the approaching Restoration, ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... he was a confirmed teetotaller, and his prominent eyes, beaming with intelligence, seemed almost to be starting from his head as, intent upon some project, he darted about the office, ever and anon checking his erratic movements to give further directions to his subordinates, when he had a funny habit of placing his hand on his mouth and blowing his moustache through his fingers, much to the amusement of his listeners, and to my astonishment, as ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... Gipsy to Robert in bewilderment. This was not the dazzling figure in gauzes and satins and jewels she had expected, a capricious lady of a foreign and Southern nobility, whose whimsical and erratic fancy was occasionally amused by a change of role. This was a daughter of the long, brown path, who afoot and light-hearted took naturally to the open road, with the tanned cheek, white teeth, and ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... representative of the French aristocracy, and Honore, a younger son, inherited something of his violent temperament, but was endowed with real genius. Entering the army, young Mirabeau soon displayed an erratic disposition by eloping with the young wife of an aged nobleman. He fled to Holland, but was captured and imprisoned. Being at length liberated, he turned to literature and politics, and soon gained celebrity in both. His magnificent oratorical powers brought him rapidly to the front ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... as for books, and the religion in which Charles believed is yet the established one. The religion of Cromwell, which represented simple industry, truth, and mutual helpfulness, omitting ritual, is still considered strange, erratic and peculiar. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... this," Miles said, as he crouched low in the sledge, holding on with both thickly mittened hands, for Katherine was driving, and the dogs were going with leaps and bounds, which made the sledge bounce and sway in a very erratic fashion. ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... but whether in reproof of Rupert's flippant language or of her elder nephew's erratic behaviour, it would ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... brought him fame. Francois, the younger son, was not forgotten though, and the father bethought him of some useful industry at which he might earn a living, and decided on clockmaking as the most suitable. Now mark the erratic workings of fate. The eldest son, from whom so much was expected, proved a comparative failure, inasmuch as that, instead of progressing, his work was distinctly inferior to that of his father.[1] Francois, on the other hand, became tired of clockmaking ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George
... ignorance of an event apparently so full of interest. Yet this silence is quite explicable; for of the three participants none has heretofore written for publication; and of my two associates, one is a quiet, retiring man, the other is erratic and forgetful. ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... Continental authorities, Elie de Beaumont and Leopold von Buch, who contended that the mountains had sprung up like veritable jacks-in-the-box. Von Buch, whom his friend and fellow-pupil Von Humboldt considered the foremost geologist of the time, died in 1853, still firm in his early faith that the erratic bowlders found high on the Jura had been hurled there, like cannon-balls, across the valley of Geneva by the sudden ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... birdlike voice; she was always more or less in hot water about her lessons, always behindhand in her tasks, always leaving undone what she should do, and doing what she should not do. She was a contradictory, erratic creature—jealous of no one, envious of no one—dearly loving a joke, and many times inflicting pain from sheer thoughtlessness, but always ready to say she was sorry, always ready to make ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... a diplomatist. Perhaps a little natural reserve of character might have been the beginning of it, but the habit had certainly grown from Daisy's experience of her mother's somewhat capricious and erratic views of her movements. She could not but find out that things which to her father's sense were quite harmless and unobjectionable, were invested with an unknown and unexpected character of danger or disagreeableness in the eyes of her mother; neither could Daisy ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 1 • Susan Warner
... the elaborate cult of the hawk and of the other omen-birds is to be explained on these lines. If we think of the hawk's erratic behaviour, how he will come suddenly rushing down out of the remotest blue of the sky to hover overhead, and then perhaps to circle hither and thither in an apparently aimless manner, or will keep flying ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... anticlerical proceedings. That he was able to do this, and at the same time turn them greatly to his own advantage, marks him as a man of more than usually keen and resourceful mentality. He was a native son, born of prosperous parents in the riverine town of Mompox, which, until the erratic Magdalena sought for itself a new channel, was the chief port between Barranquilla and the distant Honda. There had been neither family custom nor parental hopes to consider among the motives which had directed him into the Church. He was a born worldling, but with unmistakable ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... the idea amusing, therefore our payment. One of our editors will work your manuscript into less-erratic typescript for ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... his upper garment, and drew his head out of the water. He held on like an excited bulldog, in spite of the erratic vaulting of the boat and the struggles of him whom the deep sea seemed to have chosen as its victim. But the bowman was a muscular seaman of fifty, and he won the victory over the billows, and hauled the man into the cutter. He was a person ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... of the shining marks which disasters at sea seem invariably to involve have lived to tell the Lusitania's tale. Vanderbilt, the sportsman, is gone. Genial Charles Klein, the playwright, is gone. That erratic American literary genius, Elbert Hubbard, is gone, and with him a wife to whom he seemed particularly devoted. And Charles ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... mountainous brands of cross-seas. The way the poor Elsinore pitches, plunges, rolls, and shivers, with all her lofty spars and masts and all her five thousand tons of dead-weight cargo, is astonishing. To me she is the most erratic thing imaginable; yet Mr. Pike, with whom I now pace the poop on occasion, tells me that coal is a good cargo, and that the Elsinore is well-loaded because he saw ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... the Little Belt. Fnen, geologically a part of southern Jutland, has similar characteristics, a smiling landscape of fertile meadows, the typical beech-forests clothing the low hills and the presence of numerous erratic blocks, are the superficial signs of likeness. Several islands, none of great extent, lie off the west coast of Fnen in the Little Belt; off the south, however, an archipelago is enclosed by the long narrow islands ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... of Mr. Shamble's sermon (an erratic Anglican divine hired for the season at places of English resort, and addicted to debts, drinking, and even to roulette, it was said), Pen, chafing under the persecution which his womankind inflicted upon him, had been meditating a great act of revolt and of justice, as he had worked ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... who attained to them could not always explain, not account for the phenomena they created, so that the mightiness of their own deceptions deceived themselves; and they often believed they were the masters of the Nature to which they were, in reality, but erratic and wild disciples. Of such was the student in that grim cavern. He was, in some measure, the dupe, partly of his own bewildered wisdom, partly of the fervour of an imagination exceedingly high-wrought and enthusiastic. His own gorgeous vanity intoxicated ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Frances Wright of the "Free Enquirer," a paper advocating all sorts of extreme social and economic doctrines. It was not strange, therefore, that the new party was at once connected, in the public mind, with all the erratic vagaries of these Apostles of Change. It was called the "Fanny Wright ticket" and the "Infidel Ticket." Every one forgot that it aimed to be the workingman's ticket. The movement, however, was supported ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... them!—a live spring in a desert. A hard apprenticeship,—still, useful in many ways, to develop the sense of realities, to teach one to do without a host of things deemed indispensable before to keep the soul in tune. I declare, for my part, I don't regret those long years of erratic life. I bless them, on the contrary; for they opened my eyes to the worth of my country. The right point of view to take in physical or moral beauty, in its fulness, is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... chuckling over his folly, an agreeable woman of about thirty-five was making purchases in his name; she made tea, and the evening brew for such friends as he could collect, and apparently paid his rent for him, after a time; the distress was not in the house three days. It seemed to Warbeach an erratic proceeding on the part of Providence, that Nic should ever be helped to swim; but our modern prophets have small patience, and summon Destiny to strike without a preparation of her weapons or a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the literary career of Bernard Barton. If it have not left behind it the brilliant track of other poetical comets, it has been less erratic in its course; and if it have not been irradiated by the full blaze of a noonday sun, it has nevertheless been illumined by the silver lustre of the queen of night; and his Parnassian vespers may be said to possess all the mild and soothing beauties of the evening star. If his muse have not always ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 271, Saturday, September 1, 1827. • Various
... that this young man was daft, but it was not his business to say so; he took down his erratic customer's address and said that all his instructions would be attended ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... imprisonment! His liberty gone, his freedom contracted to a few cubic feet, his space diminished almost to the mould of his body, the great wild philosopher created his own liberty, made it out of his own love of it. Like a live, erratic shuttle he went to and fro, unweaving, unravelling, unwinding, drawing out the knot of confinement, flinging out, radiating and spreading and breathing out space in all directions, by multitudinous motion of disentanglement! Space gone from ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... train the next day, which wandered like an erratic caterpillar along the backbone of the Cape, she began to wonder if, after all, she was displaying that judgment which daddy-professor praised so highly. It was too early in the season for the "millionaire's special" to be scheduled, ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... Intube; erratic and wild, with a narrow dark Leaf, different from the Sative, tho' probably by culture only; and for being very bitter, a little edulcorated with Sugar and Vinegar, is by some eaten in the Summer, and more grateful to the Stomach than the ...
— Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets • John Evelyn
... looked quite alarmed—"Sir John cannot bear erratic people, he tells me so from morning to night. I am afraid you have managed to displease him very seriously, my dear. When you spilt your tea in the garden this evening, he acknowledged, when I pressed him on the subject, that it gave him quite a sense of nausea. You see, Antonia, ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... first named contains a notable monument—the Lewknor. Near by is the beautiful West Dean Park. Mid-Lavant church is Early English but boasts a Norman window. The name of this village perpetuates a phenomenon which is becoming more rare each year. At one time erratic streams would make their appearance in the chalk combes in the head of the valley and combining, cause serious floods or "lavants." For some unknown reason the flow of water is gradually becoming smaller and of late years it has been ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... Now of all the erratic cue performers I ever watched, Pinckney gets the medal. There's times when he can nurse 'em along the cushion and run up quite a string, and then again I've seen him play a game any duffer'd be ashamed of. But I begins ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... certain that the Babylonians at a very early date distinguished from the fixed stars those remarkable five, which, from their wandering propensities, the Greeks called the "planets," and which are the only erratic stars that the naked eye, or that even the telescope, except at a very high power, can discern. With these five they were soon led to class the Moon, which was easily observed to be a wandering luminary, changing her place among the fixed stars with remarkable rapidity. ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
Copyright © 2025 Free-Translator.com
|
|
|
