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More "Flicker" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... engines worked in perfect harmony. A gentle breeze from the south urged them on their way. The sun soon set and a long night began, but what of that? The moon and snow lighted the earth as if by day, and with a silvery glory. And now the Northern Lights began to flicker, flash and shoot across ...
— Lost In The Air • Roy J. Snell
... him blandly, without so much as a flicker of humour in her serene blue eyes. "Your grandfather used to be very fond of quoting something from 'Sappho,'" she returned thoughtfully, "or was it from Mr. Pope? I can't remember which or what it was except that it was hardly the kind of thing ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... young woman's story, I wager," said Sir John with a smile. "Truly, I was not much impressed with her. If I may be allowed to speak a word of warning, I should say beware of her. She could lie easily, I fancy, with never a blush or the flicker of an eyelid to betray her. No, it was not about her I wished to ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... don't look!" screams she. There is a flicker of something scarlet—a second flicker of something that might be described as ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... quick look of inquiry. They had subtle modes of communication. Charlotte could command him by the flicker of an eyelash or a modulation of tone, so that Jerry seemed, in the resultant act, to be following only his own ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... bride, but she passed our office that day, going the rounds of the dry-goods stores, giggling with the men clerks—a picture of sin that made men wet their lips. She was big, oversexed, and feline; rattling in silks, with an aura of sensuousness around her which seemed to glow like a coal, without a flicker of kindness or shame or sweetness, and which all the town knew instinctively must clinker into something black and ugly ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... into those cavernous abysses with which all men communicate. Hence come angels or fiends into our twilight musings, according as we may have peopled them in by-gone years. Over our friend's face, in the rosy flicker of the fire-gleam, stole an expression of repose and perfect trust that made him as beautiful to look at, in his high-backed chair, as the child Pansie on her pillow; and sometimes the spirits that ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... whatever that the man was dead. His hands and body were warm enough—but there was not a flicker of breath; he was as dead as any of the folk who lay six feet beneath the old gravestones around him. And Bryce's practised touch and eye knew that he was only just dead—and that he had died in his sleep. Everything there pointed unmistakably ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... giving passage to a gust of rain-laden wind, which made the candle flicker, and refreshed the dense atmosphere of the kitchen. The dark rectangle of the doorway was lighted by the splendor of a lightning flash, and all saw in it, against the livid sky, a kind of penitent, with half-concealed face, a hooded ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... palace—he was not a human being, but a lamplighter. They went on, down a short flight of broad steps, and then through a wider corridor where the lights were better, though the night breeze was blowing in and made them flicker and flare. ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... afraid of the sound of his own voice, and not so much in awe as some of the other witnesses, here in his eagerness overstepped the bounds of prudence. His words indeed brought a tremulous flicker of grateful emotion over the prisoner's face; but by carrying the inquiry into the region of character and opinion, he opened the door to a dangerous re-examination by the Crown lawyer, who required the exact meaning of his unqualified commendation, especially in the matter of humanity, demanding ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in the pasture stood an old apple tree, all alone by itself. On a dead branch was Ya-rup the Flicker. He was using the hard shell of the dead branch for a drum. "Rat, a tat, tat," he went faster and faster, till the beats ran into one long resounding roll. Then he stopped and screamed, "Kee-yer, kee-yer!" Perhaps he meant, "Well done! good boy! ...
— The Magic Speech Flower - or Little Luke and His Animal Friends • Melvin Hix
... very late when the flicker of a candle came up stairs, and a pale lady, with a sweet sad face, appeared, bringing a pair of red and a pair of blue mittens for her Dolly and Polly. Poor Mrs. Blake did have a hard time, for she stood all day in a great store that she might earn ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... persisted; no living thing other than himself lent any flicker of motion to the scene. Not even a lizard could hope for existence amid these dead and barren heights. He was alone—the certainty of it had driven deeply into his mind before the canyon end was reached. And, desert man though he was and accustomed to traveling the waste places of the earth, Rawson ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... a handkerchief wet with spring water on his hot brow, laid her head on his heart to see whether it was still beating. He was alive! Beckoning to two of his comrades, Molly commanded them to carry him to the shade of a near-by tree. And soon she had the satisfaction of seeing a faint smile flicker over his face as she bent above him. At that moment her keen ears heard ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... on him, staring: and in the flicker of his eyes as he lifted them for one instant towards his master, I read the whole devilish cunning of the plot. They might securely let her go, as an Englishman's widow. The fact had merely to be proclaimed ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... think it very beautiful, particularly when it occupies its present position, and, as it were, offers to weary travelers so inviting a seat. Yet often I am strangely awed, in gazing on the group so enveloped in unfathomable mystery. Who may say when another of its jewels shall flicker and go out? And when may not our own world to other planets be a 'Lost Star?' How childish associations cling to one in after years. I never looked up at Cassiopeia, without recalling the time when my tutor gave me as a parsing ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... with many things of daily use, and sitting in a chair, with his back to the light, sate a very old thin man, with a frosty beard, clad in a loose grey gown. Over the fireplace hung a large rusty sword; the room was very clean and cool, and the sunlight danced on the ceiling, with the flicker of moving leaves. ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... "the eyelid will flicker, the light-coloured lashes be lifted a second, and a blue eye, glancing out from under the screen, will take its brief, sly, searching ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... the morning Helena lay in the deliciously cool water, while small waves ran up the beach full and clear and foamless, continuing perfectly in their flicker the rhythm of the night's passion. Nothing, she felt, had ever been so delightful as this cool water running over her. She lay and looked out on the shining sea. All things, it seemed, were made of sunshine more or less soiled. ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... deserted, and came and went, on either side, phantom-like in their soft, gray, faded tints. Under every bridge flashed and foamed the clear beryl-green waters. And nobody in St. Petersburg, except ourselves, saw this last and sunniest flicker of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... of old brick palaces and black and white towers, where I heard a mass before the high altar but two Sundays ago. All Prato was in church that showery morning, I think. The air was close, even in the depths of the great nave: the fans all about me kept up a continual flicker, like bats' wings, and the men had to use their hats, or handkerchiefs where they had them. To hear the responses rolling about the chapels and echoing round the timbers of the roof you would have said the thunder ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... which no drought can tinge with grey or brown, where there are never-failing streams, where cool fresh water trickles among the shale and shattered coral on the beaches, where sweet-voiced birds sport and resplendent butterflies flicker, then these writings will ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... the broken windows, was running in streams across the stone floor of the hall; and the old walls were trembling in the storm. The night wind was whistling through chinks in the roof and making the flames of our resin torches flicker weirdly. During the meal my uncles had rallied me very much on what they called my virtue; they had treated my shyness in the presence of women as a sign of continence; and it was especially in this matter that they urged me to evil by ridiculing my modesty. While parrying these ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... down the creaking steps to the soft, fragrant sod, and made his way to where a thread of light outlined the stable door. Sim was seated on a box, the lantern at his feet casting a pale flicker over his riven face and the horse muzzling the trough. Gordon sat down upon ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... doctor and the ice. If he meet not the ice cart on the road, let him borrow all they will lend him at the houses of the sahibs," said the cook. "Jhut!—lose no time. In these illnesses the life of a child is as the flicker of a candle. A breath, and it is out; and once dead, who can restore it ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... taking Carinthia's impression of Chillon, compelled to it by an admiration that men and women have alike for shapes of strength in the mould of grace, over whose firm build a flicker of agility seems to run. For the young soldier's figure was visibly in its repose prompt to action as the mind's movement. This was her brother; her enthusiasm for her brother was explained to him. No sooner ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... at the top; and sometimes a pole is lashed across the stem at a height from the ground and bunches of palm leaves hung upon it; a "bull-roarer," which is used by boys as a toy, is sometimes hung upon such a cross-piece to dangle and flicker ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... Tom was a smuggler; others, even, that he was a wrecker. True it was that often strange lights were seen to flicker outside the ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... not know that as soon as the door was shut on him and the little flicker of gas, Bernard fell into an anguish of sobs and tears, the work of her persevering love, softening and lessening the obstinate pride so far that the next visitors met with a much better reception than they might have done. The first came stumbling up with a weary step, and pushed open the ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Napoleon was the last flicker of the lamp of despotism; it destroyed and it parodied kings as Voltaire the Holy Scripture. And after him was heard a great noise: it was the stone of St. Helena which had just fallen on the ancient world. Immediately there appeared in the heavens the cold star of reason, and its rays, ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... the slightest provocation, and then when the rest of the outfit have raced across country for miles to find out what the good news is she probably shows them, with great enthusiasm, that some fringed gentians are already in blossom or that the flicker's eggs have hatched. Unfortunately, there is no smoke code given for snappy replies, but in the next paragraph it tells how to carry on a conversation with pistol shots. One of these would serve the ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... up, in time to see the flicker of amusement sponged from his face. It stirred vague anger in her. ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... left. Brierly and Mrs. Fowler were opposite Mrs. Smiley. The room was lighter than at any other of our sittings—both on account of the infiltering light of day, and also because an open grate fire in the north wall sent forth an occasional flicker of red flame. ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... great disaster, as we were soon to find out, for it was but a few minutes after the last flicker had died away, and left the night looking all the blacker after the bright light to which our eyes had become accustomed, when we all distinctly heard the approaching of many feet. Apparently the impi was about to attack us ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... longed for brilliant light that should reveal all parts of the room equally, or else for a thick darkness that should conceal him from everything in the world. The uncertain flicker of a single candle playing miserably between the two was the last thing in the world to ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... I was up with my squad in those divers' dresses, inside the gas-chambers, with sheets of silk for caulking. We couldn't see a thing outside except the lightning flashes. I never saw one of those American aeroplanes. Just saw the shots flicker through the chambers and sent off men for the tears. We caught fire a bit—not much, you know. We were too wet, so the fires spluttered out before we banged. And then one of their infernal things dropped out of the air on us and ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... Mr. Chilton's name in a year until yesterday," said Mabel, the scarlet spots ceasing to flicker, and her voice hard ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... his head. His eyes did not flicker as he answered steadily: "Surely you cannot think that I would have so much as ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... in a wretched little town on a miserable day in November, two men sat by a small wood fire, warming their hands at the tiny blaze and silently watching the flicker of the flames. They were both young men; the elder was not more than twenty-six or seven and the younger ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Walker Farr with a frank smile which won an answering flicker from the face under the vizor. ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... Magin slowly. "Are you thinking of going up there?" He considered the question, and his guest, with a flicker in his lighted eyes. "Well, decent is a relative word, you know. However, wonders can be accomplished with a stout rope and a gang of natives, even beyond Dizful. But here you see me and my ark still ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... an early hour, but hoped that Mrs Manderson would see him on a matter of urgent importance. Mrs Manderson would see Mr Trent. She walked to a mirror, looked into the olive face she saw reflected there, shook her head at herself with the flicker of a grimace, and turned to the door as Trent was ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... Suddenly she was walking all bathed in a ruddy light. She felt this light like something that causes pain, and she narrowed her eyes and bowed her head lower. Gradually the light became golden, there was a flaming radiance and flicker everywhere, and a humming began in the air, and a rustling in the moss. Billy felt how a busy life had awakened about her, and she walked faster: it was like a race with this Day, that was advancing so calmly and wakefully in all ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... It had been a sin To drop a pin— So intense is silence after a din, It seem'd like Death's rehearsal! To stir the air no eddy came; And the taper burnt with as still a flame, As to flicker had been a burning shame, In ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... Lights flicker out in the gloom, like diminutive goblins that beckon; Onward we stagger and gasp in the grip ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Jan. 9, 1892 • Various
... anything, all the owls of all the ages in collaboration could not have produced an expression of time-honoured wisdom so convincing. Sometimes his old lantern-jaws would emit an uncanny cackle of a laugh, and a ghastly flicker of humour play across his parchment features; but these only deepened the general sense of solemnity, as the hoot of a night-bird deepens the loneliness of some desolate hollow among ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... wearily coiled herself up for sleep. The rain was falling heavily, as the woman, pail in hand, emerged from the mouth of the alley, and turned down the narrow street, that stretched out, long and black, miles before her. Here and there a flicker of gas lighted an uncertain space of muddy footwalk and gutter; the long rows of houses, except an occasional lager-bier shop, were closed; now and then she met a band of millhands skulking to or ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... young man rose from a desk in the inner office when Rose entered exactly at ten. In his eyes there sparked a little flicker of surprised appreciation. Jack Cunningham was always susceptible to the beauty of women. This girl was lovely both of feature and of form. The fluent grace of the slender young body was charming, but the weariness of grief was shadowed ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... with distinguished grace. Not a flicker of relief had disturbed the calm serenity of his aspect, yet when a moment later, he stepped among his shouting admirers in the street, his air and glance betrayed a bounding joy for which another source must be found than that of gratified pride. A chain ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... sabbath-train whirls by; But once a year, on the eve of All-Souls, Through these arches dishallowed the organ rolls, Fingers long fleshless the bell-ropes work, The chimes peal muffled with sea-mists mirk, The skeleton windows are traced anew On the baleful flicker of corpse-lights blue, And the ghosts must come, so the legend saith, To a preaching of Reverend ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... enough, while the children watched, Toby gave his tail a flicker and a twist, and the fly, which had ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue and Their Shetland Pony • Laura Lee Hope
... London was one grey temple of an awful rite, ring within ring of wizard stones circled about some central place, every circle was an initiation, every initiation eternal loss. Or perhaps he was astray for ever in a land of grey rocks. He had seen the light of home, the flicker of the fire on the walls; close at hand, it seemed, was the open door, and he had heard dear voices calling to him across the gloom, but he had just missed the path. The lamps vanished, the voices sounded thin and died away, and yet he knew that those within were waiting, ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... without that nervous agitation which their cold glitter had produced on her when they were full of their natural light. She felt sure that her mother must have been a lovely, gentle woman. There were gleams of a beautiful nature shining through some ill-defined medium which disturbed and made them flicker and waver, as distant images do when seen through the rippling upward currents of heated air. She loved, in her own way, the old black woman, and seemed to keep up a kind of silent communication with her, as if they did not require the use of speech. ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... old hand patted hers. Old Mrs. Gregory lay with closed eyes, no flicker of life in her parchment-colored face. "Pray about it!" she said in a whisper. She patted Rachael's hands for another moment, but she ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... voice to a whisper, but his hand jerked to draw their attention to the right at deck level. Dane saw that flicker along a log. The stowaway pest was now the same brilliant color as the wood, indistinguishable until it moved, which probably explained how it had ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... wrists. A few hundred-thousand years ago his remote ancestor would have recoiled violently from the touch of what was then a strangler vine, but now he casually disengaged the half-sentient tendril and with his mind caught the faint, faint flicker of rudimentary awareness; thus far had nature progressed with the vine, apparently reluctant to abandon a false start toward mobility and intelligence for an unsuitable species. Or perhaps, Andra added, in nature's long-term view the experiment might still ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... jewel he was, all the way through! And he'd have marched straight to the altar, too, with never a flicker of an eyelid, I ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... the decanter holding my whiskey, seized a glass from the shelf, and started to pour out the usual dram, when the glass fell from my hand, and was shivered into a thousand pieces on the hardwood floor; for, as I poured, I glanced through the open door, and there in my sanctum the flicker of a random flame divulged the form of a being, the eyes of whom seemed fixed on mine, piercing me through and through. To say that I was petrified but dimly expresses the situation. I was granitized, and so I remained, until by a more ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... pass over the throng. Scurrying figures on the field announced that the expected was being carried out. Chester was making a last desperate effort for a touchdown. It would be the expiring flicker of the flame; for whether successful or not it must mark the end, since the referee would be blowing his whistle ...
— Jack Winters' Gridiron Chums • Mark Overton
... much the Revd. Howel Williams had failed since the cold spring of 1909, and how in the colder spring of 1910 he had once or twice narrowly survived influenza. In July, 1910, he was dying of heart failure. Nevertheless the return of David, his well-beloved, brought to him a flicker of renewed life, a little pink in the cheeks, ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... but later in the evening she brought the purse, and set it on the table where the patient's eyes might rest on it. For aught she could detect, they expressed no thanks, gave no flicker of recognition. But the child had been watching them too, and was quicker—by one-fifth ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... glide toward me swiftly. The whole great roadstead to the right was just a mere flicker of blue, and the dim cool hall swallowed me up out of the heat and glare of which I had not been aware till the very moment I passed ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... suddenly that Susie was vaguely frightened. It gave one flicker, and they were in total darkness. It seemed as though someone had leaned over the chimney and blown it out. The night was very black, and they could not see the window which opened on to the country. The darkness was so peculiar that for a ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... minutes something stranger yet—though even of this he was to take the full measure but afterwards—and the note of it already trembled. It was, for the matter of that, one of the signs that her eyes were having again the high flicker of their prime. He had to admit, however, what she said. "Oh yes, there were times when we did go far." He caught himself in the act of speaking as if it all were over. Well, he wished it were; and the consummation depended for him clearly more ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... night my garden is o'erhung with gems Fixed in an onyx setting. Fireflies Flicker their lanterns in my dazzled eyes. In serried rows I guess the straight, stiff stems Of hollyhocks ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... the plain, in the direction of Amiens, the star-sprinkled sky began to flicker with ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... song, the torches flicker out and the figures are no longer distinguishable in the darkness. They pass out like shadows. The purple curtain ...
— Hymen • Hilda Doolittle
... could plainly perceive the flicker of torches moving about the wharves and piers of Chhung-ju, and presently a few of those same lights appeared on the bosom of the river. The rebels had evidently rowed out in small boats, and were towing the barges left anchored in mid-stream to the shore. A moment before ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... camp-fire's flicker, Deep in my blanket curled, I long for the peace of the pine-gloom When the scroll of the Lord is unfurled, And the wind and the wave are silent, And world is singing ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... the last hope flicker and die in their eyes and watch them turn away, to go and sit for the ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... peasants armed with scythes and carrying torches which flicker in the frosty air have invaded the slopes and flats of the military zone. They are yelling "Vive l'Empereur!" at the top of their voices, and from walls and bastions reverberates the answering cry "Vive l'Empereur!" vociferated by infantrymen and gunners ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... women were better listeners than men. Women are perhaps better trained; they think it more ill-mannered not to show interest. They will listen to stories about servants, or reports of the inane sayings of infants, they will hear you through, without the flicker of a yawn, but with ejaculations and noddings, while you tell them about your children's diseases. They are well-bred; they drive themselves on a tight rein, and endure. They are ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... for a moment a flicker of color crept into her cheek. It was, she felt, a clean pride that had impelled him to the speech. There were, she admitted, no benefits within her command that she would not gladly have thrust upon him; but, for all that, she would not have had him quietly acquiesce in them. Perhaps ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... in the evening. She thought to find her father in his study. But they told her that, now, he usually sat alone in the great drawing-room. She opened the door softly. The room was dark save for a flicker of firelight; she could see nothing. Nor was there ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... may well marry) for sometimes a man hath most need of a wife, according to Puccius, when he hath no need of a wife; otherwise it is most odious, when an old Acherontic dizzard, that hath one foot in his grave, a silicernium, shall flicker after a young wench that is ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... a single glance for each,—a glance trained by gambling to see a great deal between the flicker of his lashes. He did not seem to look once at the Captain, yet he knew that Jack's ivory-handled pistols hung at the Captain's rocking hips as he went striding past; and he knew that malice lurked under the grizzled ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... Without the flicker of an eyelid the Ramblin' Kid looked into the eyes of Carolyn June. He had seen her coming from the corral and guessed correctly the reason for her second visit to the enclosure. Indeed at that moment his hand was in his pocket toying with the delicate souvenir for which she had gone ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... But no flicker disturbed the rigid face: the keen eyes gave no sign. The old man raised a hand as if enjoining silence, dismounted hastily, and, kneeling down, pressed his ear close ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... to spread the sheets of vellum On the form, and plainly tell them That the art was then perfected, As he pressed the platen down, He had not the faintest notion Of the rhythmical commotion, Of the brabble and the clamor And the unremitting roar Of the mighty triple decker, While the steel rods flicker, And the papers, ready folded, Fall in thousands to ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... him so quickly that he did not realize her departure until he saw her form flicker in the darkness and then disappear completely. A faint smile appeared on ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... malice, as though he were relating his experiences at a foreign university. He addressed himself to Bateman and Bateman was confused and then confounded. He saw Edward's eyes fixed on him and there was in them a flicker of amusement. He blushed scarlet, for it struck him that Jackson was making a fool of him, and then because he felt absurd—and knew there was no reason why he should—he grew angry. Arnold Jackson was impudent—there was no other word for it—and his callousness, whether assumed or not, was outrageous. ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... against him was himself. He cast his mind back over the meeting and dinner but there had been no slips past the first shock of the chairman's announcement, and that had been unobserved by anyone. The psychologist they had hired might perhaps get a betraying flicker of expression from him in an interview, many well-trained observers of human reactions could read expressions that keenly, but the interviewing of all the Board by the psychologist was not likely. The Directors of the Board were even now climbing into trains and strato planes to scatter back ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... A flicker of light from the dying fire in the stove fell on the face of the alarm-clock ticking tinnily on the shelf. It was ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... alluded casually to the coming gaieties, and mentally paid a tribute of admiration to the aplomb with which Claire listened, and smiled, betraying not a flicker of surprise at the sudden change of programme. The good lady was so pleased with the result of her own scheming, that when later on the Major proposed a game of patience, she accepted at once, and viewed with equanimity the sight of the two young people strolling down the garden path. It would ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... reached, a fast pace was set and maintained for miles. At the Ehrenstein barrier no question was asked, and Carmichael's one hope was shattered. At the Jugendheit barrier the carriage stopped. There were voices. Carmichael saw the flicker of a lantern. His captors got out. Presently there appeared at the door an old man dressed as a mountaineer. In ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... right. At the bottom of this platform, which was a kind of wharf on piles, a black mass could be made out, which was a tolerably large vessel. On the deck of the vessel, near the prow, was a glimmer, like the last flicker of ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... the little kitchen, where on the hearth a fire was crackling and flashing its red flicker over the walls. He sat down on a rough wooden bench by the door, wondering if his uncle could really have forgotten that he was coming, and feeling not all light-hearted, while Hagar clattered away to "see Mas'r Dick." She came back ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... two friends. See what a fine study they make with the red flicker of the fire on their faces and the background of dark pines ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... resulted in a complete victory for mud. Rain continued, and work as we would the conditions could not be conquered. Men stood in it, and when they could, slept in it. To move about meant wading through it, in places up to the thighs, and this was steadily wearing out the last flicker of humanity and grit in our men. Casualties were also increasing. Lieut. Bateman was wounded in Essarts whilst on his way back to the battalion from a Course, and in "B" company 2nd-Lt. Woodworth ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... been traversing the moor for miles in search of wild duck and teal, a waterman, and a small spaniel. In the corner stood their guns, and two or three wild mallards, which represented the scanty product of their morning's labour, the iridescent necks of the dead birds replying to every flicker of the fire. The two sportsmen were smoking, and their man was mostly occupying himself in poking and stirring the fire with a stick: all three appeared to be ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... not stir nor did his eyelids flicker. He was used to the proximity of foes, and the distant report did not cause his heart to miss a single beat. Instead, he felt a sort of dry amusement that they should be so near and yet know it not. How Tandakora would have rejoiced if there ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... awoke it was still pitch dark, except for the flicker of the veiled lamp; and the continual roaring and oscillation testified to the unrelaxed velocity of the train. He sat upright in a panic, for he had been tormented by the most uneasy dreams; it was some seconds before he recovered his self-command; and even after he had resumed a recumbent attitude ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... enough in common to warrant that union. In a word and in the fullest sense of the word, it is sex comradeship. Pre-nuptial love cannot survive marriage any considerable time. It is doomed inexorably to flicker out, and when it has flickered out it must be replaced by affection, or else the parties to it must separate. We well know that many men and women, unable to build up affection on the ruins of love, do separate, or if they do ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... midnight came and went, and Tedaldo was still awake. As thus he watched, he heard shortly after midnight, a noise as of persons descending from the roof into the house, and then through the chinks of the door of his room he caught the flicker of an ascending light. Wherefore he stole softly to the door, and peeping through a chink to make out what was afoot, he saw a very fine young woman bearing a light, and three men making towards her, being evidently those that had descended from the roof. The ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... me," he assured her. "I have long desired to revenge myself upon your impudent mistress. Often she has made sport of me with her tricking shadows. Often she has even dared to make my own form flicker and dance before me—not as it is—indeed, but twisted and misshapen to please her own mischievous fancy." His eyes glinted with malice, and Black Shadow was well pleased to find him so willing ...
— The Shadow Witch • Gertrude Crownfield
... the door was closed, and the lights had their usual appearance, the flicker of hope sank down into ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... glance that was fixed on her. It was curious how Eleanor's eye met it; how her eye roved over Mrs. Caxton's face and looked into her quiet grey eyes, with a kind of glinting of some spirit fire within, which could almost be seen to play and flicker as thought and feeling swayed to and fro. Her eye said that much was to be said, looked into Mrs. Caxton's face with an intensity of half-speech,—and the lips remained silent. There was consciousness of sympathy, consciousness of something that required sympathy; and the ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... and the commencement of the present century. Except in a few isolated cases, they also failed in producing any noticeable change in either the moral, social, or religious condition of the Gipsies, and with the death of Hoyland, Borrow, Crabb, Roberts, and others, died the last flicker of a flickering light that was to lead these poor, deluded, benighted heathen wanderers upon a road to usefulness, honesty, uprightness, and industry. Third, that on the decline of religious zeal, fervour, and philanthropy on behalf of the Gipsies more than ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... Dougherty and his reorganized Delia passed they stared, momentarily petrified, and then removed their hats—a performance as unusual to them as was the astonishing innovation presented to their gaze by "Big Jim". On the latter gentleman's impassive face there appeared a slight flicker of triumph—a faint flicker, no more to be observed than the expression called there by the draft of little casino ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... that the fine expression of life with which her upturned eyes had glittered was gradually passing away, clasped her mother's hands within her own: suddenly they struggled for freedom, and as her eye followed the pointing of her parent's finger, she saw the lamp's last beam flicker for a moment, and then expire!—Her mother, too, ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... cease to be alive in my consciousness. I willed that toe to die—to die so far as I, its lord, and a different thing entirely from it, was concerned. There was the hard struggle. Morrell had warned me that it would be so. But there was no flicker of doubt to disturb my faith. I knew that that toe would die, and I knew when it was dead. Joint by joint it had died under the compulsion of ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... the Great North-West where all the rovers go," and knocked about the country for six or seven years before I met Peter M'Laughlan again. I was young yet, but felt old at times, and there were times, in the hot, rough, greasy shearing-shed on blazing days, or in the bare "men's hut" by the flicker of the stinking slush-lamp at night, or the wretched wayside shanty with its drink-madness and blasphemy, or tramping along the dusty, endless track—there were times when I wished I could fall back with all the experience I'd got, ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... master's chamber, where they usually took their dessert. This part of the house had been lately re-built, but the old woodwork had been re-used, and the pale oak panels, each crowned by an elaborate foliated head, gave back the pleasant flicker of the fire that burned between the polished sheets of Flemish tiles on either side of the hearth. A great globe stood in the corner furthest from the door, with a map of England hanging above it. A piece of tapestry hung over the mantelpiece, representing ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... alone. I was not frightened, for I was one of those happy children who are studiously kept in ignorance of ghost stories, of fairy tales, and of all such lore as makes us cover up our heads when the door cracks suddenly, or the flicker of an expiring candle makes the shadow of a bedpost dance upon the wall, nearer to our faces. I was vexed and insulted at finding myself, as I conceived, neglected, and I began to whimper, preparatory to a hearty bout of roaring; when to my surprise, I saw ...
— Carmilla • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... black horses which carried Mephistopheles and Faust to the abyss. It died away almost at once, and she knew it for an imagination. To-night she was peopling the desert with phantoms. Even the fires of the nomads were as the fires that flicker in an abode of witches, the shadows that passed before them were as goblins that had come up out of the sand to hold revel in the moonlight. Were they, too, waiting for a signal ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... with her throughout the night. Just before death there came to her a brief season of long-lost animation, the last flicker of the torch before darkness. She talked to them almost continuously until the dawn. Into their hands was given the task of educating the others of the family, and on their hearts and consciences the charge was graven. Charlie, who was born during ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... robe. His head is large and beautifully domed, his hands tapering and aristocratic. When he speaks it is of subtleties. But when he speaks his dignity drops from him. His eyes shift quickly from one end of their little slit to the other, his mouth, his full brown mouth, moves over-fast, his hands flicker back and forth. ...
— Profiles from China • Eunice Tietjens
... the pale moon hang her crescent on The pyramid's sharp peak,—e'en there, well in The straits of Time's perspective, Went out, by Caesarean gusts from Rome, The low-burned candle of the Ptolemies: Went out without a flicker in full glare Of noon-day glory. When her flame lacked oil Too proud was Egypt's queen to be The snuff of Roman spirits; so she said, "Good-night," and closed the book of life half read And little ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... the pulse quickens, the mind clears, and thought awakes, like a fine instrument under the magic touch of a master. The wind moans drearily without, the rain beats dismally against the windows, the fagots flicker blue-flamed and weird in the dark recesses of the chimney-place; but what care I? The white walls are lurid in the flare, the great bed stands out in the darkness like a grotesque engine of the Inquisition; but who suffers? Au troisieme, No. 30, Rue Lepelletier, was never ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... beginning to be afraid that this famous mother instinct which we hear so much about was left out of my character. Children as children are dirty, spitty little things, and their noses all need wiping. Here and there I pick out a naughty, mischievous little one that awakens a flicker of interest; but for the most part they are just a composite blur of white face and ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... would gaze out of the window; and he gazed oftenest when a freight train hid the beauties of outside nature. The dun sides of freight cars make out of a window a passable mirror. Twice, in those dim and confused glimpses, he caught just a flicker of her eye across her book, as though, she, on her part, ...
— The House of Mystery • William Henry Irwin
... Commissioner for Foreign Affairs. The "dictatorship of the proletariat" was thus begun. Kerensky's attempt to rally forces enough to put an end to this dictatorship was a pathetic failure, as it was bound to be. It was like the last fitful flicker with which a great flame dies. The masses wanted peace—for that they would tolerate even ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... to flicker onaisy, an' our men roared. "Opin ordher! Double!" sez Crook. "Blow, child, blow for the honour av the ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... nature the events of the night had made some impression. I read, or thought I read, in his countenance, signs of emotions not quite in accordance with what I knew of him—emotions strange and varied. I could almost have sworn that as he looked at us a flicker of kindliness lit up his stern and cruel gloom; I could almost have sworn he smiled with a curious sadness. As for Louis, riding with a squad who stood in a different part of the yard, he did not see us; had not yet seen us at all. His side face, turned ...
— The House of the Wolf - A Romance • Stanley Weyman
... of performing miracles, of healing the sick, hypnotizing the well, transforming poverty into wealth, and changing age to youth, are the rays of light which flicker through the darkness and draw them ...
— The Heart of the New Thought • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... winding-sheet, fastened round her head, hangs with her white hair down to the very extremities of her legs, thin as sticks. The brilliancy of her teeth, which are like ivory, makes her clayey skin look darker. The sockets of her eyes are full of gloom, and in their depths flicker two flames, like lamps ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... rutuburi, the yumari soon becomes tiresome, in spite of its greater animation. Yet the spectacle has something weird in it, especially when seen by the fitful flicker of the fire, which throws a fantastic light upon the grotesque figures, like goblins moving about on the same space. Many mothers carry their sleeping infants on their backs. Sometimes, the blanket which supports the baby loosens, and ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... Flicker, flicker, flame! Whose hand above this blaze is lifted Shall be with touch of magic gifted, To warm the hearts of chilly mortals Who stand without these open portals. The touch shall draw them to this fire, Nigher, ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... who arrives shortly after Robin-Redbreast, with whom he associates both at this season and in the autumn, is the Golden-Winged Woodpecker, alias, "High-Hole," alias, "Flicker," alias, "Yarup." He is an old favorite of my boyhood, and his note to me means very much. He announces his arrival by a long, loud call, repeated from the dry branch of some tree, or a stake in the fence,—a thoroughly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... enjoyment of the ludicrous, our friend Mr. W. Botha could not easily be surpassed; and I advise you, good reader, if you have the chance, to induce him to tell you the following story in his own words, and to watch the flicker ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... was a faint rustle, the swinging to and fro of the curtain door, and the man stood before her. Not a sound broke the stillness, not a movement caused a flicker to the name of the shaded hanging lamp, which, just above the girl's head, threw down the light on the radiance of her hair, and the wonder of her body which the diaphanous garment half ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... With a palpable flicker of interest Zillah Forsyth looked back across her shoulder. "Engaged? How many times?" ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... mortified kind. Only, for him (poetic dream, or philosophic apprehension, it was this which never failed to evoke his wonderful genius for exquisitely impassioned speech) over all those ugly anatomical preparations, as though over miraculous saintly relics, there was the perpetual flicker of a surviving spiritual ardency, one day to reassert itself—stranger far ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... appears that of seven species considered the Downy Woodpecker is the most beneficial." He then goes on to give the food habits based on contents of the stomachs of our most common species. "Judged by the stomach examinations of the Downy and Hairy Woodpecker and Flicker it would be hard to find three other species of our common birds ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... Guardsmen jumped to the hasty and quite unjustifiable conclusion that the campaign was closing, and that in the course of about another fortnight some of us would be on our homeward way. They forgot that after a candle has burned down into its socket it may still flare and flicker wearisomely long before it finally goes out. War lights just such a candle, and no extinguisher has yet been patented for the instant quenching of its flame just when our personal convenience chances to clamour for such quenching. Indeed, the "flare and flicker" ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... of England toward Mr. Perry told upon his constitution to such an extent that at one time it was feared the gentle bard would fade and flicker out altogether; wherefore, the solicitude of influential officials was aroused in his behalf, and through their generosity he was provided with an asylum in Sing Sing prison, a quiet retreat in the state of New York. Here he wrote ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... shortly after Robin-redbreast, with whom he associates both at this season and in the autumn, is the gold-winged woodpecker, alias "high-hole," alias "flicker," alias "yarup." He is an old favorite of my boyhood, and his note to me means very much. He announces his arrival by a long, loud call, repeated from the dry branch of some tree, or a stake in the fence,—a thoroughly melodious April sound. I think how Solomon finished that beautiful description ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... Yule fires flicker red Where thronged refectory feasts are spread; With mystery-play and masque and mime And wait-songs speed ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... picture she painted but that which she made, there in the sunshine. She was whiter than ever. Deep shadows were under her eyes. But the eyes themselves were very steady, her voice never quavered, nor did the smile flicker. Where did she get her spirit, this slender fragile girl who seemed so in need of ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... there are vast areas which no drought can tinge with grey or brown, where there are never-failing streams, where cool fresh water trickles among the shale and shattered coral on the beaches, where sweet-voiced birds sport and resplendent butterflies flicker, then these writings will have ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... emotion, save perhaps a flicker of admiration. "You are decisive. You have many good qualities, Georg Brende. I wonder if you ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... who arrives shortly after robin redbreast, with whom he associates both at this season and in the autumn, is the golden-winged woodpecker, alias "high-hole," alias "flicker," alias "yarup." He is an old favorite of my boyhood, and his note to me means very much. He announces his arrival by a long, loud call, repeated from the dry branch of some tree, or a stake in the fence,—a thoroughly ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... old men tottering away to their final resting place be enthusiastic on the reception of a stranger? What could Mr. Quiverful be to them, or they to Mr. Quiverful? Had Mr. Harding indeed come back to them, some last flicker of joyous light might have shone forth on their aged cheeks; but it was in vain to bid them rejoice because Mr. Quiverful was about to move his fourteen children from Puddingdale into the hospital house. In reality they did no doubt receive ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... bush in the pasture stood an old apple tree, all alone by itself. On a dead branch was Ya-rup the Flicker. He was using the hard shell of the dead branch for a drum. "Rat, a tat, tat," he went faster and faster, till the beats ran into one long resounding roll. Then he stopped and screamed, "Kee-yer, kee-yer!" Perhaps he meant, "Well done! good boy! ...
— The Magic Speech Flower - or Little Luke and His Animal Friends • Melvin Hix
... wish was answered; for he caught a glimpse of a man standing beneath a gas-lamp, and that man was of the stature and wore the likeness of Harry Feversham. Durrance rubbed his eyes and looked again. But the wind made the tongue of light flicker uncertainly within the glass; the rain, too, blurred the quay. He could only be certain that a man was standing there, he could only vaguely distinguish beneath the lamp the whiteness of a face. It was an illusion, he said to himself. Harry ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... enabled him to glance incuriously after the steamship. She seemed smaller, less genuine than ever, a shadow shape that boasted visibility solely through that unearthly light on her after deck. Even that now had waned to a mere glimmer, the flicker of a candle lost in the immensities of that night-bound world of empty sky and empty ocean. Even as he that had been named Michael Lanyard was a lost light, a tiny flame that guttered toward ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... the room. He had already placed before his visitor a box containing cigars of a brand which that gentleman keenly appreciated but generally regarded as unattainable, and the matter-of-fact ease and certainty with which the blind man had brought the box and put it before him had sent a questioning flicker through Carlyle's mind. ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... requisite number of pages. The dusk has interrupted his labour, and he rises from his writing-table asking who will care whether the last stories are written or left unwritten? If he write them his ideas will flicker green for a brief springtime, they will enjoy a little summer; when his garden is fading in the autumn his leaves will be well-nigh forgotten; winter will overtake them sooner than it overtakes his garden, perhaps. The flowers he deemed immortal are more mortal than the rose. "Why," he asks, ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... their way to Him, not afraid of His severity, nor daunted by His royalty. No doubt they haunted the temple precincts as beggars, with perhaps as little sense of its sacredness as the money-changers; but their misery kindled a flicker of confidence and desire, to which He who tends the dimmest wick till it breaks into clear flame could not but respond. Though in His house He casts out the traders, He will heal the cripples and the blind, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... of last century. As, to use their own beautiful expression, "'Tis always the darkest the hour before day," so the gloom had never settled down so darkly over the land, when light began to dawn, and the first symptoms of returning life to flicker over the face of the, to all seeming, dead nation. Its coming has been best described in the "History of the Catholic Association" by Wyse. On reading his account, it is impossible not to be struck with the very small share that men have ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... None spoke. The light gave a great flicker. "What the bloody hell!" exclaimed John Widger. The day-dreamers awoke, as if from a light sleep. An everyday look came quickly into their eyes and each one shifted in his seat. Some even shook themselves like dogs. A joke was made about the woman who came in to collect ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... we found a little company of our acquaintances seated together at the triangular foremost table. A more forlorn party, in more dismal circumstances, it would be hard to imagine. The motion here in the ship's nose was very violent; the uproar of the sea often overpoweringly loud. The yellow flicker of the lantern spun round and round and tossed the shadows in masses. The air was hot, but it struck a chill from ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thread,' he said, 'I shall flicker like that candle when it reaches the socket, and then I shall go out. But I am not afraid of death: death is a great experience, and we are all better for every experience. ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... a quick look of inquiry. They had subtle modes of communication. Charlotte could command him by the flicker of an eyelash or a modulation of tone, so that Jerry seemed, in the resultant act, to be following only his own ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... red-tailed hawk, yellow-billed cuckoo, kingfisher, flicker, humming-bird, swift, meadow-lark, red-winged blackbird, sharp-tailed finch, song sparrow, chipping sparrow, bush sparrow, purple finch, Baltimore oriole, cowbunting, robin, wood thrush, thrasher, ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... night when the plain was like a sea of liquid black, and the sky blazed with stars, we rode by a sheep-herder's camp. The flicker of a fire threw a glow out into the dark. A tall wagon, a group of silhouetted men, three or four squatting dogs, were squarely within the circle of illumination. And outside, in the penumbra of shifting half light, now showing clearly, ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... to be mine, was pierced by three windows, lined with some lustrous wood disposed in panels, and carpeted with the skins of many savage animals. A bright fire burned in the chimney, and shed abroad a changeful flicker; close up to the blaze there was drawn a table, laid for supper; and in the far end a bed stood ready. I was pleased by these preparations, and said so to Felipe; and he, with the same simplicity of disposition that I held ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was in a distant corner of the yard. The night was dark, a thick mist rose from the river, and the gusty puffs of wind that now and then swept through the compound caused the wood fire to flare up and flicker, casting fitful and fantastic shadows around. Moonshee stared, with fixed eyes, expecting every moment the reappearance of the supernatural poultry; but I, being as yet sceptical, descended the stairs, followed by ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... inside the lodge burned lower and lower. The hunter and his little son drew closer and watched the last flame flicker and die out. ...
— Stories the Iroquois Tell Their Children • Mabel Powers
... The parks and gardens were wholly deserted, and came and went, on either side, phantom-like in their soft, gray, faded tints. Under every bridge flashed and foamed the clear beryl-green waters. And nobody in St. Petersburg, except ourselves, saw this last and sunniest flicker of the dying season! ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... when ye turn the page; no influence, no bearing have they on such future events as may mark what yet rests of life to Guy Darrell. But as he there stands and gazes into space, the two forms are before his eye as distinct as if living still. Slowly, slowly he gazes them down: the false smiles flicker away from their feeble lineaments; woe and terror on their aspects,—they sink, they ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of the out-buildings, where she and Aniela look after him. When I heard of this I went to pay him a visit, and instead of the dying man I expected to see, I found a young, rather thin-looking lad, but bright and full of life. The doctor says it is the last flicker of the lamp. The young cleric was nursed by his mother, who, upon seeing me, overwhelmed me with a shower of gratitude copious enough ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... a kerosene-lamp, set on a bracket in the wall at the far end of the hall, caused weird shadows to flicker on the floor and up the narrow staircase, and for a half-minute Selwyn and I waited until we could see where we should go. From the middle room we could hear hoarse and labored breathing and the stir of footsteps on the bare floor. Putting my hand on the door-knob, ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... Jefferson was that his son should be well educated, and attain to a degree of useful manliness that the father had never reached. And into the keeping of this fourteen-year-old youth the dying man, with the last flicker of his intellect, gave the mother, sisters ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... expedients precisely as a man in the perturbed sleep occasioned by opium would be apt to fall upon for a similar purpose—each and all of which appear by turns to the dreamer the most reasonable and the most preposterous of conceptions, just as the reasoning or imaginative faculties flicker, alternately, one above the other. At last an idea occurred to me which seemed rational, and which gave me cause to wonder, very justly, that I had not entertained it before. I placed the slip of paper on the back of a book, and, collecting the fragments of the phosphorus matches which I had brought ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... things that the fever made him see. I wuz too big a coward to stay 'nd help his mother to bear up; so I went out-doors 'nd brung in wood,—brung in wood enough to last all spring,—and then I sat down alone by the kitchen fire 'nd heard the clock tick 'nd watched the shadders flicker through the room. ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field
... Paris and him he wronged Fight for her, who should have her! We stood Upon the walls, and she with her hood Close to her cheek. But I saw the flicker In her ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... old resentment she had cherished against him was gone—gone just when she most needed its sustaining power. It was in vain that she recalled every incident and emotion of that memorable occasion and tried to feel the old satisfying anger. That day by the pond had witnessed its last spasmodic flicker. Anne realized that she had forgiven and forgotten without knowing it. But ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... light a low, sibilant whisper reached him. At the cross-corridor doorway he was in time to see the flicker of a vanishing gray garment and a sandaled foot on a naked ankle flash over the vestibule wave-check. He shook ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... by he saw the light go out, and he thought, after all, he was not to catch Mr. Crow that night; but just as he was going away he saw a tiny flicker of light at another window. Up went Mr. Coon ...
— Sandman's Goodnight Stories • Abbie Phillips Walker
... his lack of feeling for the child; the baby was so entirely hers that she did not think of it as his, too. This sense of possession, never menaced on Maurice's part by even a flicker of interest in the little thing, kept them to the furtive and very formal acquaintance of giving and receiving what money he could spare—or, oftener, couldn't spare! As a result, he thought of ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... the boy and there was a flash of eyes between them, the flicker of a smile. Hal Dozier drew a breath. "I got no kids of my own," he declared. "You're lucky, friend. And you're lucky to have this neat ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... doublet, and glowed in the rubies, the Bishop conceived the whimsical fancy that the Knight might well be some splendid archangel, come down to force the Convent gates and carry off a nun to heaven. And the Knight, watching the leaping flame flicker on the Bishop's crimson robes and silvery hair, saw the lenient smile upon the saintly face and took courage as he realised how kindly was the heart, filled with most human sympathy, which beat beneath the cross of gold upon ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... coldly. It was not a question; there was no flicker of the interest of a question in his voice, only a dreary indifference which seemed to demand what in the world you were thinking of to trouble him about a stupidity which had happened twenty times a day throughout twenty years of his ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... heaven's lifted gate The priestly ephod in sole glory swept When Christ ascended, entered in, and sate (With victor face sublimely overwept) At Deity's right hand, to mediate, He alone, He for ever. On His breast The Urim and the Thummim, fed with fire From the full Godhead, flicker with the unrest Of human pitiful heart-beats. Come up higher, All Christians! Levi's tribe is dispossest. That solitary alb ye shall admire, But not cast lots for. The last chrism, poured right, Was on that Head, and poured for burial And not for domination ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... being who loves you hopelessly,' replied the voice, and at the same moment the flames began to flicker and cease to burn, and I saw a fairy, whom I had known as long as I could remember, and whose ugliness had always horrified me. She was leaning upon the arm of a most beautiful young girl, who wore chains of gold on her wrists and was evidently ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... wood on the hearth, and the little place was all a-waver and a-flicker with firelight. Grotesque shadows danced over the walls and ceiling, and sprawled uncertainly on the floor. Clemency looked up in James's face, and her own had a shocked whiteness and horror, in spite of the tenderness in ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... his head and, watching it, was thankful to see that at last the tardy dawn had begun to spread. Over the withered stretch of woodland to his right the Aurora swept between the stars, like an extinguishing angel, who caused them to flicker and, as he beat his wings about them, one ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... wind now being behind the machine in a diagonal direction, our speed in relation to the ground is twice the speed of the outward half of the journey. The sun is pleasantly warming, and I look towards it gratefully. A few small marks, which may or may not be sun-spots, flicker across its face. To get an easier view I draw my goggles, the smoke-tinted glasses of which allow me to look at the glare without blinking. In a few seconds I am able to recognise the spots as distant aeroplanes moving ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... The flicker of hope died out of his face as she shook her head. He looked down the alley for a moment; then he turned toward ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... justly, angered at that Dakota Joe Fenbrook. But she scarcely expresses that feeling in her face or voice. She speaks of his cruelty to her with sadness in her voice merely, and scarcely a flicker ...
— Ruth Fielding in the Great Northwest - Or, The Indian Girl Star of the Movies • Alice B. Emerson
... silence. A cold fear was at his heart. That terrible Grodman! As the hangman's cord was tightening round Mortlake, he felt the convict's chains tightening round himself. And yet there was one gleam of hope, feeble as the yellow flicker of the gas-lamp across the way. Grodman had obtained an interview with the condemned late that afternoon, and the parting had been painful, but the evening paper, that in its turn had obtained an interview with the ex-detective, announced ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... up, and have a great deal more—well, experience than I. And then you are very beautiful, and I am—not," he added with a flicker of irrepressible mirth ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... an instant. There wasn't a flicker of an eyelash to show that Ralph was the least bit nervous. The experiences of the last few days ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering
... days ago while strolling through the woods with my field glass, I saw a pretty sight. On one tree I saw a Redheaded Woodpecker, a Flicker, an Indigo Bunting, and a Rose-Breasted Grosbeak. I thought then, if we could only have the Evening Grosbeak our group of ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [August, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... chant with hollow voices, such as skeletons may be supposed to have, a funeral dirge. Meantime Mephistopheles is busy summoning his demons to keep watch over the dead body, lest the soul should escape like a mouse, or flicker up to heaven in a little flamelet. Hideous forms of demons, fat and thin, with straight and crooked horns, tusked like boars and with claws like vultures, come thronging in, while the jaw of hell opens itself, showing in the distance the fiery ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... impregnable to pestilence as the grave. So, had the vitality gone out of the nation's heart, had that lamp of love for freedom and justice and of homage to the being of man, which once burned in its bosom so brightly, already sunk into death-flicker and extinction, then in the sordid and icy dark that would remain there could be no war of like nature with this that to-day gives the land its woful baptism of blood and tears. Oh, no! there would have been peace—and putrefaction: ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... paused; the least flicker of an innocent self-laudatory smile invested his round face ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... shut out. We may raise our thresholds, build up a bulwark of indifference to a whole class of excitations, shut our mental doors, and pull down the shades; or we may lower the thresholds so that the slightest flicker of an idea or the smallest pin-prick of a sensation finds ready access to the ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... The deed is dun! The tiranikle government which hez sway at Washington hez finelly extinguished the last glimerin flicker uv Liberty, by abolishin slavery! The sun didn't go down in gloom that nite—the stars didn't fade in2 a sickly yeller, at wich obstinacy uv nachur I wuz ...
— "Swingin Round the Cirkle." • Petroleum V. Nasby
... water on his hot brow, laid her head on his heart to see whether it was still beating. He was alive! Beckoning to two of his comrades, Molly commanded them to carry him to the shade of a near-by tree. And soon she had the satisfaction of seeing a faint smile flicker over his face as she bent above him. At that moment her keen ears heard General ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... the Second Nurse; but later in the evening she brought the purse, and set it on the table where the patient's eyes might rest on it. For aught she could detect, they expressed no thanks, gave no flicker of recognition. But the child had been watching them too, and was quicker—by one-fifth ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... time Dunbeg was awake again, and Miss Dare, satisfied with her success, allowed herself to become more reasonable, until a slight shade of sentiment began to flicker ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... grew Helen pale, Like golden stars that flicker in the dawn, Or like a child that hears a dreadful tale, Or like the roses on a rich man's lawn, When now the suns of Summer are withdrawn, And the loose leaves with a sad wind are stirr'd, Till the wet grass is ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... renewal of the word, had come into the Colonel's face. "If they're each and all so extraordinary then, isn't that why one must just resign one's self to wash one's hands of them—to be lost?" Her face, however, so met the question as if it were but a flicker of the old tone that their trouble had now become too real for—her charged eyes so betrayed the condition of her nerves that he stepped back, alertly enough, to firmer ground. He had spoken before in this light of a plain man's vision, but he must be ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... and marvelled at the innumerable lovely groups in streets and by-ways, the flicker of light through banyan trees on white-robed figures, the little carts with big wooden wheels and small oxen and sharp big shadows, and we stopped to watch a splendid group of men washing clothes, a dozen or more naked brown statues against a white low wall, water splashing over them and round ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... in shape, and all around its edge, near to the ground, appeared groups of dull yellow lights, two of them being always side by side. These were motionless at first, but soon began to flicker more brightly and to sway slowly from side to side and ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... till something besides smoke makes itself visible, as also audible. Here and there flames flicker up, with a sharp crackling noise, which continues. The one is not flashes from the guns, nor the other ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... looked in that direction, and saw a smooth polished object with a brass pipe. The flicker from the fire reached him across the snow. The Snow-man felt wonderfully happy, and a feeling came over him which he could not express; but all those who are not ...
— The Pink Fairy Book • Various
... and when the mass is being said—inaudible, indeed, and not to be seen, at the furthest end of that dense, underground crowd, but testified to by the lighting of a thousand tapers, and by the strong desire for some flicker of the holy flame. ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... seemed, somehow, to survey Rudolph Musgrave and all his doings with complete and unconcerned aloofness. The man's life, seen in its true proportions, dwindled into the merest flicker of a match; he had such a little while to live, this Rudolph Musgrave! And he spent the serious hours of this brief time writing notes and charts and pamphlets that perhaps some hundred men in all the universe might care to read—pamphlets ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... where they had been gathered, expecting attack, some of them also bearing lanterns. For a moment the two parties stood staring at each other; then followed a wild and savage scene. With shouts and oaths and battle-cries they fought furiously. The massive, oaken tables were overthrown, by the red flicker of the pole-borne lanterns men grappled and fell and slew each other upon the floor. A priest struck down a yeoman with a brazen crucifix, and next moment himself was brained with ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... every soul in it,—so tranquil it seems, so cool, so careless, so morrowless. I cannot see the faces of that luxurious society, but there I imagine is the local albino, and a certain blind man, who resorts thither much by day, and makes a strange kind of jest of his own, with a flicker of humor upon his sightless face, and a faith that others less unkindly treated by nature will be able to see the point apparently not always discernible to himself. Late at night I have a fancy that the darkness puts him on an equality with other wits, and that he enjoys his own brilliancy ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... really blissful was to be alone with the Virgin, who looked down, her dark face gleaming dimly in the gloom when a wick happened to flicker with short flashes of ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... men. Women are perhaps better trained; they think it more ill-mannered not to show interest. They will listen to stories about servants, or reports of the inane sayings of infants, they will hear you through, without the flicker of a yawn, but with ejaculations and noddings, while you tell them about your children's diseases. They are well-bred; they drive themselves on a tight rein, and endure. They are ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... they give the sensation of a musical or continuous sound. In our sense of sight we can see pulsations or intermittent flashes up to only six in a second, beyond that number they give the sensation of a continuous light; a gas jet, if extinguished and relit six times in a second, can be seen to flicker, but beyond that rate is to our sense of sight a steady flame. The effect may also be shown by making the top of a match red-hot; when stationary or moving slowly, it is a point of light, but, moved quickly, it becomes a continuous ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... leathern loop, and held it in readiness over my right shoulder. Then, down-stairs I stole, as Raffles himself had taught me, close to the wall, where the planks are nailed. Nor had I made a sound, to my knowledge; for a door was open, and a light was burning, and the light did not flicker as I approached the door. I clenched my teeth and pushed it open; and here was the veriest villain waiting for me, his little ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... had fallen swiftly. It was incredibly silent. There was no sound in the Master's room, and no light except the flicker of the logs smoldering in the fireplace. The thin line of it appeared faintly along the sill of ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... that the candles were all a-flicker in that unnatural wind.... I believe I just squatted there and stared in a horribly frightened, wooden way for some minutes. I shall never be able to let you know how disgustingly horrible it was sitting in that vile, cold wind! And then, flick! flick! flick! ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... immediately evident. It has been my experience, again and again, that with dying men who have sunk into the last lethargy, irresponsive to every other word, the Name of Jesus still can penetrate and arouse. The hurried breathing becomes for a moment regular, or the eyelids flicker, or the hand faintly returns the pressure. I have scarcely ever known this to fail though all other communication had stopped. It is surely very significant ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... changed, and he was sorry—for everything. It was a petty matter—it was always some petty thing—that came in between them. He longed to recall the moment on the beach when she had asked him, with a flicker of a smile upon her face, why he had decided to remain in Chicago. But they were strangers to each other now,—hopelessly strangers,—and the worst of it was ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... crabbed old age; rich and poor meet upon the same level before the sacred altar. Priests by the half dozen, in scarlet, blue, gilt, and yellow striped robes officiate hourly before tall candles which flicker dimly in the daylight, while boys dressed in long white gowns swing censers of burning incense. The gaudy trappings have the usual theatrical effect, and no doubt serve, together with the deep peals of the organ, the dim light of the interior, the monotone of the priest's voice, ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... old poetry began to flicker in my mind like summer lightning. In the orchard, crammed with bloom, two unseen children were calling to each other; a sunburned, careless, graceful boy, whose rough clothes could not conceal his shapely limbs and easy movements, came driving some cows along ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... little honey-drops; oh, for a song to be set to the melody! Tra-la-la, tro-lo-lo, up again, Butterfly. Little silk handkerchief, little lace neckerchief, fluttering, fluttering! Feathery wings of her, bright little eyes of her, flit, flit, flicker! Now, she blushes, blushes, blushes; deep crimson; oh, what a colour! Paint it, painter! Now she speaks. Oh, what laughter! Silvery, silvery, treble, treble, treble; trill away, trill away, silvery treble. Musical, beautiful; ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... window, reading, I could scarcely satisfy myself of the reality. He was lividly pale; his eyes deep sunk, and surrounded with two dark circles, while along his worn cheek the tears had marked two channels of purple color. What need of the guillotine there; the lamp of life was in its last flicker without it. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... wear your cats'-eyes in honor of the cat-headed deity of the Pagans, Mrs. Greyson?" Rangely asked, as she paused near his chair, watching a burner which seemed disposed to flicker. ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... border the bunch upon the back denote sunbeams penetrating storm clouds. The black circle zigzagged with white around the head is a cloud basket filled with corn and seeds of grass. On either side of the head are five feathers of the red shafted flicker (Colaptes cafer); a fox skin is attached to the right side of the throat; the mountain sheep horns are tipped with the under tail feathers of the eagle, tied on with cotton cord. The horns are filled with clouds. The rainbow ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... appear that Francis Sark was an unknown name to their guests, for no flicker of recognition passed over the countenance of any Spaniard. They sat at the long table, and foe drank to foe while fiddle and hautboy made music and the candles slowly wasted and in the hot night the garlands withered. ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... an answer, he brushed past Mary and strode up to his house. The girl stood motionless for a little while, gazing after him with a flushed face, twitching lips and a flicker of ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... spoken the truth, but he held on up the ever-steepening trail, ceasing his song only when he needed the breath to climb. A cottontail waved its beacon for a minute before him, then darted into the underbrush; the mountain jays called out a wailing cry; and the flicker clucked above. Sharp turns were in the trail, else it had faced an upright cliff or overshot a precipice; but it was easily followed and, at length, he was above the cedars. Here the horse trail ended, but a moccasin ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... March twilight settled deeper over the room. There was only a flicker on the brass andirons, a blur of pale blossoms where the potted azalea stood. The rain drummed steadily, and as steadily came the gentle modulations of Kirk's voice, as the ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... for miles in search of wild duck and teal, a waterman, and a small spaniel. In the corner stood their guns, and two or three wild mallards, which represented the scanty product of their morning's labour, the iridescent necks of the dead birds replying to every flicker of the fire. The two sportsmen were smoking, and their man was mostly occupying himself in poking and stirring the fire with a stick: all three appeared to be ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... we happen to die. And I would be stupid if I did not understand the situation here. It would be quite easy for you to get rid of me. But I don't believe you are a murderer, even if your Jeanne tried to be." A flicker of a smile crossed his lips. "And ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... soon on the spot, but he arrived just in time to record the last flicker of life in the tortured eyes. Then, as one in a dream, Curtis gave the policeman the details of the crime, the name of the chauffeur, and the number of the car, his testimony being borne out to some extent ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... came to the end of the road, rose a hill with a broad plateau on its stomach. Here through the dull haze of the morning they saw smoky-orange lights beginning to flicker uncertainly as the wind that heralds the sunrise came fitfully up. The soft wet grass under their feet was flecked with little grayish-silver cobwebs, and here and there they heard the morning chirp of ground-nesting birds. As they went farther up the hill a hum of voices ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... unruly beast!" roared Dodge. Behind him rode the detachment, grimly merry, though with not a flicker ...
— Dick Prescott's Second Year at West Point - Finding the Glory of the Soldier's Life • H. Irving Hancock
... movement of her lips, a flicker of contempt in her eyes. It seemed an age before ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... figure on the chair remained motionless. No flicker of intelligence or interest disturbed the calm of his features. It was a silence almost unnatural. "I have brought the Duchesse here," Peter continued, "to tell you the truth ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... length the Cointets had come to understand David's character and habits. They did not slander him now; on the contrary, wise policy required that they should allow the business to flicker on; it was to their interest indeed to maintain it in a small way, lest it should fall into the hands of some more formidable competitor; they made a practice of sending prospectuses and circulars—job-printing, as it is called—to the Sechard's establishment. So it came about that, ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... the punishment, and swerves aside from the slum to vagabondage. The average beast in the social pit is either too much of a beast, or too much of a slave to the bourgeois ethics and ideals of his masters, to manifest this flicker of rebellion. But the social pit, out of its discouragement and viciousness, breeds criminals, men who prefer being beasts of prey to being beasts of work. And the mediocre criminal, in turn, the unfit and inefficient criminal, is discouraged by the strong arm of ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... this bird as remarkable for its rapid flight, its courage, and its enterprise in attacking birds even larger than itself. This accords with my experience, for my only specimen was shot in the act of destroying a hen. He is about the size of our common flicker, or high-holder, which bird, with robins, pigeons, and others of similar size, is his favorite game. The sparrow-hawk is rare at this time, and is only abundant occasionally during its migrations. The red-shouldered hawk is a handsome bird, with some very good traits, and is a common permanent ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... Jacky saw Lablache shake his great head. Then something made him look at the mountains beyond. There were the three dimly-outlined peaks. They were clear enough to guide him. Jacky, watching, saw the expression of his face change. It was as though a flicker of hope had risen within him. Then she saw him turn and eye Baptiste. He seemed to read in that cruel, dark face a vengeful purpose. He seemed to scent a trick. Presently he turned ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... demanded a curt voice, and Hugh and Bob saw the figure of a man in khaki outlined against the skyline. A faint flicker of light showed a keen-edged bayonet affixed to ...
— Bob Cook and the German Spy • Tomlinson, Paul Greene
... and might have saved, of the distant settlement, of to-morrow's plans. An owl hoots off in the mountain and he thinks of him; if a wolf were to howl or a panther to scream, he would think of him the rest of the night. As it is, things flicker and hover through his mind, and he hardly knows whether it is the past or the present that possesses him. Certain it is, he feels the hush and solitude of the great forest, and, whether he will or not, all his musings ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... tremor of her tilted mouth, the flicker of an eyelash, an almost invisible veiling of her brilliant eyes; I do not think it would have been perceptible to anybody who watched her with a less tense anxiety than mine. But it was there, and it hurt me to ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... chair, with his back to the light, sate a very old thin man, with a frosty beard, clad in a loose grey gown. Over the fireplace hung a large rusty sword; the room was very clean and cool, and the sunlight danced on the ceiling, with the flicker of moving leaves. ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... respec' to my gowd they did gie, I thoucht a' the time was intended for me; But whanever the end o' my money they saw, Their friendship, like it, also flicker'd awa'. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... was not even the faintest flicker of light. It was most annoying. And Brownie was so disappointed that for once he forgot to be careful when he was cutting down a tree. He kept his eyes on the bushes all the time, instead of on the ...
— The Tale of Brownie Beaver • Arthur Scott Bailey
... opened windows. Sometimes a vagrant puff of air would find its way in, and suddenly the ball-room dimmed and the dancers moved like phantoms. The flames of the candles would struggle and, with many a flicker, right themselves, and the radiant colors and jewels ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... telling, and he started back, but did not begin to breathe freely till the angle of the rock wall was passed and they found themselves again in silence, just too as another candle began to flicker. ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... and a curious intent look on her pointed delicate face. That intent look, as he was to discover, was very constant with her. It was as though she were always watching something of absorbing interest which no one else could see. Sometimes it amused her, and and then a flicker of laughter ran up from her mouth to her grey eyes and danced there. At other times she was sorry. Her face was like still water, ruffled by invisible winds and ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... he tried to think of other doctors. He thought of telephoning to Jonesboro. Just as he decided he must turn away there came a stirring in the dead house, a flicker of light appeared on the inside now here, now there; it steadied into a tiny beam and approached the door. The door opened, and Dr. Jallup's head and breast appeared, illuminated against ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... spread like a twofold sore! Yet all things slept, and scarce some pale late light Flitted along the streets through the still night, Lamps of debauch, forgotten and alone, The feast's lost fires left there to flicker on; The walls' large angles clove the light-lengthening shades 'Neath the white moon, or on some pool's face played. Perchance one heard, faint in the plain beneath, The kiss suppressed, the mingling ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... turned to the westward, and as he did so there was a flicker in the darkness, where the rugged top of the Asmai Hill could just be made out. For an instant there was perfect silence; then, as the flame caught and flared, there rose from the men around him a low, involuntary "A—h," such as one may sometimes ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... Mrs. Manderson would see him on a matter of urgent importance. Mrs. Manderson would see Mr. Trent. She walked to a mirror, looked into the olive face she saw reflected there, shook her head at herself with the flicker of a grimace, and turned to the door as ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... language—in language that must not be either misunderstood or misquoted. At such times oratory is unhappily elbowed to a back bench, the manuscript is solemnly withdrawn from the capacious inner pocket of the new frock coat, and everyone settles himself resignedly, with only a feeble flicker of hope that the so-called speech may not be as long as it is thick. The words may be golden, but the hearers' (?) eyes are prone to be leaden, and in about one instance out of a hundred does the perpetrator really deliver an impressive address. His ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... amusements, who duly exerts himself temperately in all his works, and who is temperate in sleep and vigils. When one's heart, properly restrained, is fixed on one's own self, then, indifferent to all objects of desire, he is one called a devotee.[195] As a lamp in a windless spot doth not flicker, even that is the resemblance declared of a devotee whose heart hath been restrained and who applieth his self to abstraction. That (condition) in which the mind, restrained by practice of abstraction, taketh rest, in which beholding ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... to the stretches of pasture and plough And the flicker of sterns through the gorse on the hill, And the mulberry coats there, alone with them now, To cheer as they're finding and whoop at the kill; Farewell to the vale and the woodland forlorn, To the fox in his earth and the hound on his bench; Unheard is the pack ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 28, 1914 • Various
... wrung their hearts still more cruelly, but each one felt that Benedetto was about to give forth a last flicker of instruction, of counsel, and they all checked their sobs. Benedetto's voice ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... The spindle still turned in Golda's hand, but less and less swiftly and more quietly. Gusts of wind blew through the chinks in the wall and caused the yellow flame of the candle to flicker. ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... nor did his eyelids flicker. He was used to the proximity of foes, and the distant report did not cause his heart to miss a single beat. Instead, he felt a sort of dry amusement that they should be so near and yet know it not. How Tandakora would have rejoiced if there had been a whisper in his ear that Willet, ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Catharine to braid it, and polish it till it looked glossy and soft. Indiana in her turn would adorn Catharine with the wings of the blue-bird or red-bird, the crest of the wood-duck, or quill feathers of the golden-winged flicker, which is called in the Indian tongue the shot-bird, in allusion to the round spots on its cream-coloured breast: [FN: The Golden-winged Flicker belongs to a sub-genus of woodpeckers; it is very handsome, and is said to ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... of war unfolds to an accompaniment of yelling newsboys in the narrow old Cambridge streets, of the flicker of papers hastily bought and torn open in the twilight, of the doubtful reception of doubtful victories, and the insensate rejoicings at last that seemed to some of us more shameful ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... to reach the Queen. Would she remember their childish intimacy? Would she make him a sign? Would she let him see her, for old sake's sake? Oh, in all probability, no. Most certainly, no. And yet—and yet, he couldn't forbid a little furtive hope to flicker in ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... flicker and, turning, she saw that it was spending its last dying flame. It was impossible to write. She lay still, watching the glimmering dark square of the window. She could not see another candle there. All she could see was the little phial of tabloids. But she lay back and ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... to talk about Gwenda either now. So that her face showed the faintest flicker of dismay when Rowcliffe suddenly began ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... He did turn up; about eleven o'clock he came in and found Francie alone. She noticed, for strangeness, that he was very pale at the same time that he was sunburnt; also that he didn't for an instant smile at her. It was very certain there was no bright flicker in her own face, and they had the most singular, the most unnatural meeting. He only said as he arrived: "I couldn't come last evening; they made it impossible; they were all there and we were up till three o'clock this morning." He looked as if he had been through terrible things, and it ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... bill had been paid overnight, there was nothing to wait for, so they clambered into the cart and made a start. But before they had proceeded forty yards, however, John heard a voice calling to him to stop. He did so, and presently, holding a lighted candle which burnt without a flicker in the still damp air, and draped from head to foot in a dingy-looking blanket, appeared the male Cassandra of ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... to keep apart from men and was shunned by them, but this one ventured to mingle with the 'great multitudes' that 'followed' Jesus, till he reached His side. He must have known something of Christ to have approached Him with a flicker of long-absent hope in his heart. No doubt he had heard of some of the earlier miracles; and no doubt the crowd recoiled from him so that he could easily reach Jesus. When he got there he worshipped, or, as Luke puts it, 'fell on his face,' and made his appeal. It would be all the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... his hand was the will, signed and witnessed, regularly executed, all its provisions seeming, as he glanced through it, reasonable and feasible. As he laid it aside, he experienced the business man's satisfaction with a document duly capable of the ends desired. Then he opened with a sudden flicker of curiosity a bulky envelope placed with the will and addressed to himself. He read it through, the natural interest on his face succeeded by amazement, increasing gradually to fear, the chill drops starting from every pore. He had grown ghastly white ...
— The Phantom Of Bogue Holauba - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... perambulator," shouted the Eagle Man. Not a flicker disturbed the serenity of the man addressed, no matter what were his inner feelings. He put out two arms straight and stiff like rods, and Suzanna placed the baby upon them. Saying quickly their adieus, Suzanna and Maizie walked behind the uniformed man, ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... at Van again—terribly. Her fingers felt like iron rods, pressing into his flesh. As if to complete her renunciation she dropped his hand abruptly. She mastered some violent convulsion that left the merest flicker of her life. ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... reached the top. The driving ice particles stung her skin and eyeballs when she turned to face it, the wind carried her soothing calls from her lips as she uttered them, her skirt whipped about her as though it would soon be in ribbons, and then with a leap and a flicker the flame went out in the smoke-blackened chimney, leaving ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... dear lad," replied the old man, letting a smile flicker on his large lips, which gave to his rosy mouth the kindliest expression that the genius of a painter ever imagined, "can we not be moved to the deepest pity by the spectacle of human wretchedness which Paris holds within her walls? Did Saint Vincent de Paul need the spur of remorse ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... Williams had failed since the cold spring of 1909, and how in the colder spring of 1910 he had once or twice narrowly survived influenza. In July, 1910, he was dying of heart failure. Nevertheless the return of David, his well-beloved, brought to him a flicker of renewed life, a little pink in the cheeks, and ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... was falling heavily, as the woman, pail in hand, emerged from the mouth of the alley, and turned down the narrow street, that stretched out, long and black, miles before her. Here and there a flicker of gas lighted an uncertain space of muddy footwalk and gutter; the long rows of houses, except an occasional lager-bier shop, were closed; now and then she met a band of millhands skulking to or ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... some minutes before the flicker of the girl's eyelids proved Jim's words. Then he sighed his relief and for a moment ceased the bathing and examined the wound. Then he reached a cushion from one of the kitchen chairs and folded it ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... reclined, was blazoned with the heraldic insignia of Granada's monarchs. His guard, and his mutes, and his eunuchs, and his courtiers, and his counsellors, and his captains, were ranged in long files on either side the canopy. It seemed the last flicker of the lamp of the Moorish empire, that hollow and unreal pomp! As Muza approached the monarch, he was startled by the change of his countenance: the young and beautiful Boabdil seemed to have grown suddenly ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book V. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the most intense silence reigned over the whole scene, which, illuminated as it was by the flicker of the lamps striking out broad patterns of light and shadow upon the rocky walls, was as strange as any I ever saw, even in that unholy land. Upon the ground before the dais were stretched scores of the corpselike ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... and structure, that combined to make the most remarkable living-room that Henley had ever seen. The decaying portraits, the singular carvings and peculiar furniture, now only revealed themselves by suggestion in the faint illumination of the lamp and uncertain flicker of ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... with lightning, slowly turned from him to the girl on the sofa who had not moved. But in her eyes, too, a little flame began to flicker and play, and the fixed smile relaxed into an expression of ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... on the hearth-stone, Peering up the flue, See a mimic welkin, Lights that twinkle through,— Sparks that flash and flicker, Little short-lived stars, On the sooty darkness Glowing ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... night heron, red-tailed hawk, yellow-billed cuckoo, kingfisher, flicker, humming-bird, swift, meadow-lark, red-winged blackbird, sharp-tailed finch, song sparrow, chipping sparrow, bush sparrow, purple finch, Baltimore oriole, cowbunting, robin, wood thrush, thrasher, catbird, scarlet tanager, red-eyed ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... but hoped that Mrs. Manderson would see him on a matter of urgent importance. Mrs. Manderson would see Mr. Trent. She walked to a mirror, looked into the olive face she saw reflected there, shook her head at herself with the flicker of a grimace, and turned to the door as ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... evening. The streets in that suburb were lonely: he went down them, the new-fallen snow dulling his step. It had covered the peaked roofs of the houses too, and they stood in listening rows, white and still. Here and there a pale flicker from the gas-lamps struggled with the ashy twilight. He met no one: people had gone home early on Christmas eve. He had no home to go to: pah! there were plenty of hotels, he remembered, smiling grimly. It was ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... the door and returned to find Barbara still standing, still in her cloak. The flicker of animation which she had presented on meeting Agnes had died down, and she was again the sport of man and ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... had to keep apart from men and was shunned by them, but this one ventured to mingle with the 'great multitudes' that 'followed' Jesus, till he reached His side. He must have known something of Christ to have approached Him with a flicker of long-absent hope in his heart. No doubt he had heard of some of the earlier miracles; and no doubt the crowd recoiled from him so that he could easily reach Jesus. When he got there he worshipped, or, as Luke puts ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... background, replaced by the more splendid vision of seeing an accepted article from his pen in a real London magazine; he gave frantic chase to the will o' the wisp of literary fame, which so many pursue all their lives in vain, fortunate if it comes at last to flicker for ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... end of good luck in you, Will-o'-the-wisp, with a flicker of Puck in you, Wild as a bull-pup, and all of his pluck in you— Let a man tread on your coat and he'll see! Eyes like the lakes of Killarney for clarity, Nose that turns up without any vulgarity, Smile like a cherub, and hair that is carroty— ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... consciousness—during those night-watches—had grappled with the unknown ahead, reaching impatient fingers to find and save Dhoop Ki Dhil in time. But he let no flicker of ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... him was himself. He cast his mind back over the meeting and dinner but there had been no slips past the first shock of the chairman's announcement, and that had been unobserved by anyone. The psychologist they had hired might perhaps get a betraying flicker of expression from him in an interview, many well-trained observers of human reactions could read expressions that keenly, but the interviewing of all the Board by the psychologist was not likely. The Directors of the Board were ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... second. With the stronger light there is a more rapid and a greater loss of the initial intensity of the impression or effect of stimulus, and though each successive effect remains as long, or longer, in dwindling intensity, you get want of continuity, or "flicker."] ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... catch the flicker under them bushy eyebrows. But I did, and I knew he was goin' to back ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... time Ridge watched the flicker of its flames, until they finally died down, and the darkness was only illumined by the fitful flashing of fire-flies. As these were the most brilliant he had ever seen, his eyes followed their zig-zag dartings until they exercised a hypnotic influence, and his heavy breathing showed ...
— "Forward, March" - A Tale of the Spanish-American War • Kirk Munroe
... under parching heat and bitter cold, in the biting dust of alkali and under the silence of the primeval bush. For an hour we lounged smoking and chatting in ox-hide chairs, watching the red glow from the range door flicker upon the guns and axes on the wall, or the moonlight broaden across the silent grass outside each time it faded, until the mournful coyotes began to wail along the rim of the prairie and we crawled up a ladder into the little upper room, where in ten minutes we were fast asleep on hard wooden couches ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... with excited hurrying passengers. Soon he heard the great door clang shut, and saw the red light flicker on, warning of the take-off. He felt a slow surge of pressure as the ship arose from the ground, and his chair creaked ominously with the extra weight. He became fearful that it might collapse, and he strained forward trying to shift some of the pressure through his feet to the floor. He sat that ...
— The Stutterer • R.R. Merliss
... by the fire when Lucia came back from her errand. She looked excessively pale and tired, but in her face and in that of Mr. Strafford as he stood opposite to her there was a light and flicker of strong excitement. Both turned to Lucia, and Mrs. Costello held out ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 2 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... I lighted Brigitte's lamp; I watched its feeble flame and my thoughts seemed to flicker in the ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... protective suit arranged to give the impression that I am an Earthman." A flicker of something akin to distaste passed over his ...
— Reel Life Films • Samuel Kimball Merwin
... saw the white gown flicker against the soft light on the lawn, and saw the black shadow creeping by it, before she mounted the porch steps, ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... with a flicker of surprise, As I turn it low—to rest me of the dazzle in my eyes, And light my pipe in silence, save a sigh that seems to yoke Its fate with my tobacco and ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... sniffin' round the bloomin' locus' trees; And the clover in the pastur is a big day fer the bees, And they been a-swiggin' honey, above board and on the sly, Tel they stutter in theyr buzzin' and stagger as they fly. The flicker on the fence-rail 'pears to jest spit on his wings And roll up his feathers, by the sassy way he sings; And the hoss-fly is a-whettin'-up his forelegs fer biz, And the off-mare is a-switchin' all of ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... the spot which is to serve him for a retreat, he fells a few trees and builds a loghouse. Nothing can offer a more miserable aspect than these isolated dwellings. The traveller who approaches one of them towards nightfall, sees the flicker of the hearth-flame through the chinks in the walls; and at night, if the wind rises, he hears the roof of boughs shake to and fro in the midst of the great forest trees. Who would not suppose that this poor hut is the asylum of rudeness and ignorance? Yet no sort of comparison can ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... that Christian would be her escort home. Mrs. Van Pelt was not in the parlor when Mary entered, but Christian received her kindly, though with a slight embarrassment that embarrassed her. She tried to keep the love-flicker from her eyes and the love-tremor from her voice as she sat there alone with the man she loved, trying to reply indifferently to his indifferent remarks, and wondering if he could not hear the beating of her heart. She was greatly relieved ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... At the bottom of this platform, which was a kind of wharf on piles, a black mass could be made out, which was a tolerably large vessel. On the deck of the vessel, near the prow, was a glimmer, like the last flicker of a night-light. ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... not be ascertained. It went with the current at a like speed, and had it been motionless there would have been no appreciable difference for us, for the wind had fallen—at least, so we supposed—and not a breath was stirring. The flame of a torch held up in the air did not flicker. The silence of space was broken only by the clangour of the sea-birds, which came in muffled croaking tones through the stifling atmosphere of vapour. Petrels and albatross swept the top of the iceberg, where they kept a useless watch ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... about him which, dim and unreal in itself, served to make all things dim and unreal. He did not know whether he was asleep or awake, so strange was life, so vivid were his dreams. Mummie, Uncle John, the baby, Toby himself came with a flicker of the veil and disappeared vaguely without cause. It would happen that Toby would be speaking to Uncle John, and suddenly he would find himself looking into the large eyes of the baby, turned stupidly towards ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... collective hallucinations, as when two or more people at once have, or profess to have, the same false perception of a person who is really absent and dying, is next disposed of by Herr Parish. The same points de repere, the same sound, or flicker of light, or arrangement of shadow, may beget the same or a similar false perception in two or more people at once. Thus two girls, in different rooms, are looking out on different parts of the hall in their house. 'Both heard, at the same ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... small beach. They stood in the shallow water with sea boots on and forked the salmon into their rowboats and laid the rowboats alongside the Blackbird to deliver,—all in the dark without a lantern flicker, with muffled oarlocks and hushed voices. Three times ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... bent over her, he thought Dalla had been killed, an assumption justified by his knowledge of the deadliness of Akor-Neb bullets. Then he saw her eye-lids flicker. A moment later, he had the explanation of her escape. The bullet had hit the game bag at her side; it was full of spools of metal tape, in metal cases, and notes in written form, pyrographed upon sheets of plastic ring ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... his six-shooter, while the girl looked around in swift and eager impulse to the interrupting voice. Its owner, the color scheme of his attire emphasized by the glare of the low sun, expressed in his pose and the inquiring flicker of a smile purely the element of the casual. Far from making any movement toward his own six-shooter, he seemed oblivious of any such necessity. With the first glimpse of her face, when he saw the violet flame of her anger go ruddy with surprise and relief, then fluid and ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... hunting or keeping watch at the approaches. One young lad took the horses, and led us to a teepee bigger than the others, outside of which stood a finely-made savage, with heron's feathers in his hair, and a necklace of polished shells. On his Iron face there was no flicker of welcome or recognition, but he shook hands silently with the two of us, and struck a blow on a dry gourd. Instantly three warriors appeared, and took their place by his side. Then all of us sat down and a pipe was lit and handed by the chief to Ringan. He ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... sea. The rain ceased as suddenly as it had come, as suddenly as the flow of water is stopped by the turning of a tap; and for about a quarter of an hour nothing further happened. Then the sheet lightning began to quiver and flicker among the clouds once more; and presently the pall immediately overhead was rent apart by a terrific flash of sun-bright lightning that struck straight down and seemed to hit the water only a few yards from the brig. Simultaneously with ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... rescue of the pheasants about four in the afternoon, and all of us, men and women, were sitting at afternoon tea in the firelit study, drowsily watching the flicker of the flame on the black panelling. The characters will introduce themselves, as they ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... was sent over to Bordeaux with five thousand men to recover the south, the old English feeling revived, for England was their best customer, and they had little in common with France. It was, however, but a last flicker of the flame; in July, 1453, at the siege of Castillon, the aged Talbot was slain and the war at once came to an end; the south passed finally into the kingdom of France. Normandy and Guienne were assimilated to France in taxation and army organisation; and all that remained to England across ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... read Mrs. Radcliffe, or am I the only wanderer in her windy corridors, listening timidly to groans and hollow voices, and shielding the flame of a lamp, which, I fear, will presently flicker out, and leave me in darkness? People know the name of "The Mysteries of Udolpho;" they know that boys would say to Thackeray, at school, "Old fellow, draw us Vivaldi in the Inquisition." But have ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... nay disguise and block. Tone and gesture as revelations of the Inner-Me, the True-Me or Intra-Me if you will, are so potent because they are direct expressions of the vegetative apparatus. The curl of a lip, the flicker of an eye-lash, the twitch of a shoulder are the overflow of energy cramped in the increased intravisceral pressure, determined by increased outflow of endocrine secretion. Wittingly or unwittingly we interpret the little signs ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... strong effort to bear my misfortunes like a man, and, folding my arms, I sat down on a chest to abide my fate, whatever that might be, with as much composure as I could command, when half—a—dozen cockroaches flew flicker against my face. ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... defendant was capable of using such occasions to make love to the larger girls and teachers, whilst his artless companions were innocently—the Court will pardon me for introducing what I am credibly informed is the local expression—'doing gooseberry'?" The tremulous flicker of a smile passed over the faces of the listening crowd, and the Colonel slightly winced. But he recovered ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... doors to the apartment in which she lay, one, ornate with Turkish fretwork, which had in its center panel what seemed to be a small window, covered by a black grille. At the other end of the room another door, open, from which came a flicker of cool light, the soft pad of footsteps and the sound of a voice humming some curious Oriental air. Marishka did not get up at once, but sat among the pillows, her fingers at her temples as she tried to collect her thoughts. She knew that she ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... its construction, and the tower was anchored to the rock by means of long, heavy irons. The light, merely a flicker, flashed out from this tower in 1699, and for the first time the proximity of the Eddystones was indicated all around the horizon by night. Winstanley's critics were rather free in expressing their opinion that the tower would come down with the first sou'wester, but the eccentric builder was ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... diminish in size else the ship would have gone to the bottom ere dawn. Much water had washed down into the hold through the broken cargo hatch and the gaps where the runaway gun had torn other fittings away. The carpenter sounded the well and solemnly stared at the wetted rod by the flicker of his horn lantern. The ship was settling. It was his doleful surmise that she leaked where the pounding spars overside had started the butts. It was man the pumps to keep the old hooker afloat and Captain Wellsby ordered his ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... over Japan, White butterfly moon! Where the heavy-lidded Buddhas dream To the sound of the cuckoo's call.... The white wings of moon-butterflies Flicker down the streets of the city, Blushing into darkness the useless wicks of round lanterns in the ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... almost upon the group; and for once we were welcome to our enemies. Even Carmona's face brightened, a flicker of hope lit Lady Vale-Avon's grey eyes; and the Duchess deliberately ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... of vellum On the form, and plainly tell them That the art was then perfected, As he pressed the platen down, He had not the faintest notion Of the rhythmical commotion, Of the brabble and the clamor And the unremitting roar Of the mighty triple decker, While the steel rods flicker, And the papers, ready folded, Fall in thousands to ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... favorite one. But suddenly there had been a change. In opening one of the rolls and spreading it broadly in the show-room of Messrs. Gobelin's warehouse, it had appeared the most wonderful carpet that ever was known. A real sunlight gleamed over the leaves and flowers, seeming to flicker and dance among them as on a broad meadow. It shed a radiance which paled the light that struggled down between the brick walls through the high windows. It had been subject of such wonder that Messrs. Gobelin had been obliged ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... could plant a powder-bag, and as I glanced out I saw that he was rapidly laying a train by drawing a second bag of powder after him as he stepped rapidly back towards another man who was carrying a lighted lanthorn—lighted, I felt sure, though in the brilliant sunshine the flicker of the candle inside was ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... wake soon," she said, turning to Nora; "that gravel makes a great noise, and some of the neighbors may pop out their heads to see what is the matter. There! I saw a flicker of light in the room. She is thinking it is thieves; she won't for a single moment imagine that we are here. I do hope Miss Truefitt won't awaken; it will be all up with us if ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... strayed from the fire-flicker on the hearth to the office door, on whose farther side she knew Hartmann was ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... was the night"—and a flicker of a smile crossed Merry's face—"when I went out to the Bar Z Ranch, and before I had left I didn't know he ...
— Frank Merriwell, Junior's, Golden Trail - or, The Fugitive Professor • Burt L. Standish
... Sometimes it leaped up and sometimes it faded, but it got larger, and when they went to bed a red reflection played about the sky. In the morning there was no wind and a heavy trail of smoke stretched across the hills. In places, a bright flicker pierced the dark trail, and Carrie noted a smell of burning when she filled the kettle. Then she saw ...
— Partners of the Out-Trail • Harold Bindloss
... that. We'll get out of this scrape somehow—people always do." A flicker lit the room, and he saw that the face upturned to his was wide eyed, strained. That brief glimpse of Allie, like a picture seen through the shutter of a camera, remained long with the man, for her ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... know that as soon as the door was shut on him and the little flicker of gas, Bernard fell into an anguish of sobs and tears, the work of her persevering love, softening and lessening the obstinate pride so far that the next visitors met with a much better reception than they might have done. The first came ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... what they saw. The hollow whirr of the revolving pestles, the hazy atmosphere closely resembling a London fog in November, a phenomenon which is produced by the innumerable particles of tobacco floating about, and causing the gas to flicker and sparkle in a mysterious way, and producing a lively irritation of the mucous membrane, all combine in placing the visitor in a state of amusing bewilderment, and he is compelled to make a speedy exit, having only had just a running peep at the interesting process ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... that a beam is of necessity some violent reaction on our part. The first beginning of a resentment is a beam, as is also the first flicker of an unkind thought, or the first suggestion of unloving criticism. Where that is so, it only distorts our vision and we shall never see our brother as he really is, beloved of God. If we speak ...
— The Calvary Road • Roy Hession
... No persons shall catch, kill, injure, pursue or have in his possession either dead or alive, or purchase, expose for sale, transport or ship to a port within or without the state a turtle or mourning dove, sparrow, nuthatch, warbler, flicker, vireo, wren, American robin, catbird, tanager, bobolink, blue jay, oriole, grosbeck or redbird, creeper, redstart, waxwing, woodpecker, humming bird, killdeer, swallow, blue bird, blackbird, meadow lark, bunting, starling, redwing, purple martin, brown thresher, American ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various
... a sputter and a flicker and a last expiring tremor, we had begun to realize that the going season was, indeed, nearly gone, something happened. There was a rally, and a brief return to animation. The corpselike season sat up and waved its hands. An electric ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... There was a flicker of Irish fighting spirit in the Boer War. Many thousands, no doubt, were in the English army of 250,000 men brought against the 30,000 Boers, but there was a small "Irish Brigade" that fought on the Boer side, and was notably engaged at Spion Kop, where the English were driven ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... Did a curl of shavings drop to the ground, instantly Jezebel was at hand to catch it up in her diminutive paws; toss it from her; steal up and fall upon it again; and dragging it between her feet, roll over and over with it in a mad orgy of delight. A shadow, a string, a flicker of metal was the signal for a frolic. Let one's mood be austere as a monk's, with a single twist of her absurdly tiny body this small creature shattered its gravity to atoms. There was no such thing as dignity in Jezebel's presence. ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... constant speed for steady pressure—since the electric current, when analyzed, is merely a succession of pulsations through a wire, like waves beating against a sea wall. Water-power delivers these waves at a constant speed, so that electric lights made from water-power do not flicker and jump like the flame of a lantern in a gusty wind. On the other hand, to accomplish the same thing with steam or gasoline requires an ...
— Electricity for the farm - Light, heat and power by inexpensive methods from the water - wheel or farm engine • Frederick Irving Anderson
... nickname a flicker of intelligence came into the little thief's eyes, but he was still dazed, and did not recognize ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... for some little while; the sound of their voices ceased, but the distant flicker of the lantern enabled West to trace their progress up the alley, and then back again. They returned in no pleasant humour, convinced that their expected victim had escaped safely, but made no further ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish
... dim recesses, mid tresses, green tresses. Slow dipping, caressing, I've heard A whisper, a chuckle of laughter, a scamper; and high, High up in the air the cry, the call of a bird. And when the night came with a flicker of wings I have heard the earth breathing quiet and slow Like a pulse in the tiny, wild ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... February. Pretty soon a bevy of them come flitting and talking along, like a girl botany class on the search. Before they have passed out of sight the loud and prolonged "O-wick-o-wick-o-wick-o-wick" of the flicker makes us lift our eyes to the top of a scarlet oak and anon three or four of the handsome fellows alight nearer by so that we may the better admire their white-tailed coats, brown shoulders, scarlet napes and the beautiful black crescent on their breasts. When we hear ...
— Some Spring Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... a rain? And the wind! The Lord preserve us; it was praying Michael and me was, the others fast asleep, that the cottage might not be blown away, and us in it. It was like the night himself died. I was sitting here beside him, watching to see him flicker out. He died as peaceful as a child—just one smile for me, and he was gone. An' me alone in the house with him. Mrs. Smith that would have been beside me—she's dead herself now, God rest her soul, for she was a good neighbour—the rain and wind prevented her ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... ground could have judged it other." Rutowski had not known it, then? Browne never pretended to know it. Rutowski was not candid with the conditions; the conditions never known nor candidly looked at; and THEY are now replying to him with candor enough. From the first his Enterprise was a final flicker of false hope; going out, as here, by spasm, in the rigors of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... A little flicker of rage ran through his blood. It was as if she were rousing him, goading him. Why must she ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... worries me. I can confide it to you, Genevieve, you who are so perfectly happy. Why does the theatre draw me so that I am willing to sacrifice for it even those I love? I see the Countess Styvens every day. She seems a light ready to flicker out. Sometimes she looks at me as if she saw me far, very far away, and murmurs, 'Poor little thing, it is not her fault!' Then I shiver. What is not my fault? Albert's death. Dear Albert, who frightened me so much sometimes, ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... Bandy-legs' rather crooked lower extremities, and the faintest flicker of a smile crossed ...
— Chums of the Camp Fire • Lawrence J. Leslie
... burned lower and lower. The hunter and his little son drew closer and watched the last flame flicker and ...
— Stories the Iroquois Tell Their Children • Mabel Powers
... any expert woman trainer, either; but can I stand there with my mouth open and see an old friend get the hooks thrown into him by a class in hysterics? Not when the hookee happens to be one that once set me up as a stockholder in a gold mine. So I lets flicker with the first fool idea that comes ...
— Torchy • Sewell Ford
... her into the little kitchen, where on the hearth a fire was crackling and flashing its red flicker over the walls. He sat down on a rough wooden bench by the door, wondering if his uncle could really have forgotten that he was coming, and feeling not all light-hearted, while Hagar clattered away to "see Mas'r Dick." She ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... When the flicker of summer falls faint on the Clubroom's gold and green, The sons of Adam sit them down and boast of strokes unseen; They talk of stymies and brassie lies to the tune of the steward's cough, But the Devil whispers in their ears, ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... fulsome respec' to my gowd they did gie, I thoucht a' the time was intended for me; But whanever the end o' my money they saw, Their friendship, like it, also flicker'd awa'. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... voice.] Come in. [Nobody enters.] Where's a light? We've been sitting in the dark like owls. Come in. [A pause. He strikes a match and holds it above his head. The light shows the open door. A wind, blowing through the doorway, causes the match to flicker, and FREDERIK protects ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm • David Belasco
... O'Loughlin, was slain. Roderick O'Connor immediately assumed the reins of government, and was inaugurated in Dublin with more pomp than had ever been manifested on such an occasion. It was the last glittering flicker of the expiring lamp. Submission was made to him on every side; and had he only possessed the ability or the patriotism to unite the forces under his command, he might well have set all his enemies at defiance. An assembly of the clergy ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... approached the bottom he saw two of these sentinels walking back and forth, their bayonets reflecting a flicker now and then from the flames. He saw also five or six large white tents, and he was quite sure that the largest sheltered at that instant Martin Perfecto de Cos, whom he wished very much to avoid. He intended, when he reached the bottom, to keep as close as he could in the shadow ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... she had not seen him approach, she was conscious that he was at her side, looking down at her beneath a lantern which was beginning to flicker. A sense of deep peace—of perfect contentment with the world as God planned it—took possession of her. Even the minutes of suspense seemed good because they had brought at last this swift rush of happiness. Every line of his face—of that face which had captured her ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... distant from the Big Tree, after water, he had gone there and back on the run, as if he was fearful that something might be said while he was away that he ought to hear. But, to all this, our friends gave no heed, save that Ham once or twice turned his eyes on Pedro's excited face, with just a flicker of suspicion ...
— The Cave of Gold - A Tale of California in '49 • Everett McNeil
... went to the acacia; but when he was a few steps from it, the countess looked at him, as if defying him, although a slight expression of fear seemed to flicker in her eye; then, with a single bound she sprang from the acacia to a laburnum, and thence to a Norway fir, where she darted from branch to ...
— Adieu • Honore de Balzac
... painfully, betrayed by the clusters of piles set to mark the deep-water channels, which undulate far away in spotty chains like the studded backs of huge sea-snakes, and by the quick glittering of the crisped and crowded waves that flicker and dance before the strong winds upon the unlifted level of the shallow sea. But the scene is widely different at low tide. A fall of eighteen or twenty inches is enough to show ground over the greater part of the lagoon; and at the complete ebb the city is seen standing in the midst of a dark ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... "Never a flicker gets through," he announced when he returned. "A man would have to come close enough to hear the wood crackle or smell the smoke to ever guess we had a fire going. And even the smoke is taken care of." They tilted back their heads to see how it crept ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... smallest hole it went (like the thrill in a troublesome tooth) that here was a chance come of feeding, a chance at last of feeding. For the man on the cliff, the despairing watchman, weary of fastening his eyes upon the sea, through constant fog and drizzle, at length had discovered the well-known flicker, the glassy flaw, and the hovering of gulls, and had run along Weighing Lane so fast, to tell his good news in the village, that down he fell and broke his leg, exactly opposite the tailor's shop. And this was on ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... pity it is that men do nothing but torment and persecute poor creatures which never do them any harm!" said he, and he took out his knife and cut the cords of the net, and the owl flitted away into the darkness, but then turning, with one flicker of her wings, she came back to Charming ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... but with a little flicker of amusement in his eyes. How like her it was, to refuse to allow herself even time to get entirely well! But when she finished he was thoughtful. She had called it "Slacker Women." That was what Natalie was; he had never put it into words before. ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the Cluniac's breast. It seemed that here was a penitent. He approached the bed with a raised crucifix, and stumbled over the whimpering monkey. The woman's eyes saw him and a last flicker woke in them. ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... and resisting power of the enemy's front line. Each advancing wave of the Manchesters was swept away by machine-gun fire. A few of them gallantly reached the Turkish trenches and fell there. Long afterwards, during the last flicker of a British offensive in December, some Lowland Scots soldiers of the 52nd Division found in trenches on the west of the nullah the bodies of some of the Manchester men, who had also this day fought a way to their objective ...
— With Manchesters in the East • Gerald B. Hurst
... was once left in the room alone with a baby who was learning to creep. On the hearth an open fire was smouldering. Suddenly there was a bright little flicker of flame and the logs blazed up once more. Pleased with the sight, the baby began to creep towards the fire as fast as he could go. The dog saw the danger at once and seized the baby's dress tightly between ...
— Friends and Helpers • Sarah J. Eddy
... How can I? Believing, with you, that your wealth is a Divine trust, I regard your appeal as a call from God Himself. Besides, you could not have demanded from me a more congenial service. You shall have all the help I can give; and between us," he added, with a reviving flicker of his previous facetiousness, "we shall make the ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... too late to wheel and gallop away; so she remained with her hand fumbling at the butt of the revolver, and her wide, blue eyes fixed on the flicker of the fire. Not a voice accosted her. As far as she could peer among the lithe trunks of the saplings, not a sign of ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... again of the warning flashed from the shore. "Guess there must be something hellish afoot after all," he muttered again. "The flicker of green that stopped the signals, and the green fire that got us—what can they mean?" He looked toward the looming black shadow of the island, and began divesting himself of his clinging, sodden garments. "I don't wonder somebody wanted battleships. But even a battleship, ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... is dun! The tiranikle government which hez sway at Washington hez finelly extinguished the last glimerin flicker uv Liberty, by abolishin slavery! The sun didn't go down in gloom that nite—the stars didn't fade in2 a sickly yeller, at wich obstinacy uv nachur I wuz ...
— "Swingin Round the Cirkle." • Petroleum V. Nasby
... however; a dim red glow began to flicker on the shapes which rushed behind him in his flight. Wheeling once, he saw two broad flames leaping high in wild and splendid rivalry,—one from Heywood's house, one from the club. He caught also a whirling impression of many heads and arms, far ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... "Extinguish the flicker, and wait for the general war-dance. It will take place in ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish
... as solid in mind as in body, and ere the scene grasped him against his will he says he saw with an angry impatience the flicker of a leer on the darkened face of the Peruvian. But it did not last. In a few minutes the two young Burghers were not the only ones whom the spell had subdued—the wizard was netted too. And then, as he stood, his hands still fluttering, they heard him drone a string ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... on that of the former. To refute this charge Mr. Bell had insisted that both he and Watson carefully write out whatever they heard that the two records might afterward be compared and verified. 'That is,' Mr. Bell had added with the flicker of a smile, 'if we succeed in talking at all!' Well, they did succeed, as you have heard. At first they held only a stilted dialogue and conscientiously jotted it down; but afterward their exuberance got the better of them and in sheer joy they chattered away like magpies until ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... tall, martial-looking civilian riding in close attendance on the Cranston's equipage, basking in the life-giving sunshine and in the thrill and hope and sweet unrest of an ever-growing love, devoted and insistent in spite of vague and jealous dread, for there was not the feeblest flicker of encouragement in Miss Loomis's calm and oft-averted eyes. Langston asked himself in the still hours of the starlit night, camping on the banks of Dismal River, was it possible that her heart ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... that you shall be with me in my thoughts, tenderly ministering to me with those eyes whose soft light I would have my steady beacons. Darling Margaret, their flickering, or the fear that they will flicker, ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... memories—and Helmsley's thin, worn, delicately intellectual countenance, which in the brilliant rosy light flung upon it by the fire-glow, was like a fine waxen mask, impenetrable in its unmoved austerity and calm. Not so much as the faintest flicker of emotion crossed it at the mention of the name of the woman he knew so well,—the surprise he felt inwardly was not apparent outwardly, and he heard the remainder of Reay's narration with the most perfectly controlled ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... breezes blow through the room, from one veranda to the other, making the flames of the lamps flicker. They scatter the lotus flowers faded by the artificial heat, which, falling in pieces from every vase, sprinkle the guests with their pollen and large pink petals, looking like bits of broken, ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... importance began to impress itself upon her as she sat at the head of her own table in her own dining-hall, with all the Vandykes and Holbeins and Gainsboroughs gazing placidly down upon her from their gilded frames, and the flicker of many wax candles in old silver sconces glancing upon the shields, helmets, rusty pikes and crossed swords that decorated the panelling of the walls between and ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... Four against one, they played him at chess, and were beaten. They bowed, and passed into the night. Leo Diringer recited a sonnet, and slept suddenly at the foot of a lamp-post. The Jew's heavy-lidded eyes shone with a final flicker of caution, and he turned homeward resolutely, to the last not wholly drunk. My friend had wandered to his lodgings, in an infinite peace. He could not remember what had ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... various windows, and there was little danger of being discovered. In the gable was only the one window for which they were making. Mary went first, as better knowing the path, also as having the better right to look in. Through the window, as she went, she could see the flicker, but not the fire. All at once came a great blaze. It lasted but a moment—long enough, however, to let them see plainly into a small closet, the door ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... the last flicker of the expiring flame, for the white lids drooped over the dark eyes; the cold fingers relaxed their hold, and Gerald Goddard knew ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... so quickly that he did not realize her departure until he saw her form flicker in the darkness and then disappear completely. A faint ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... It was incredibly silent. There was no sound in the Master's room, and no light except the flicker of the logs smoldering in the fireplace. The thin line of it appeared faintly along the sill of ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... out of the tolerant eyes of the grown people. Maybe my voice lost something of its piping insistence and was touched with genuine feeling; perhaps some faint, faint spark of the divine fire which I longed to fan into a flame did flicker in me for that one time. I had the indescribable happiness of seeing the smiles die on the faces of my elders, and of hearing the giggles of my ...
— Painted Windows • Elia W. Peattie
... to his library,—a sombre, darkly-furnished apartment, large enough to seem gloomy by contrast with the gaiety and cheerfulness which were dominant throughout the rest of the house that evening. Only two or three shaded lamps were lit, and these cast a ghostly flicker on the row of books that lined the walls. A few names in raised letters of gold relief upon the backs of some of the volumes, asserted themselves, or so he fancied, with unaccustomed prominence. "Montaigne," "Seneca," "Rochefoucauld," "Goethe," "Byron," and "The Sonnets of William ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... trees or bushes. But you may depend upon it he is not alone; he is only a part of the rim of a feathered colony dwelling near at hand, and consisting, very likely, of tufted titmice, white-breasted nuthatches, juncos, tree sparrows, blue jays, one or two downy woodpeckers, a pair of cardinals, a flicker or two, and a cackling red-breasted woodpecker. There may be even a song sparrow in the company and a couple of brown creepers, and possibly a flock of purple finches, chirping cheerily in the tops ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... Christendom, and when the mass is being said—inaudible, indeed, and not to be seen, at the furthest end of that dense, underground crowd, but testified to by the lighting of a thousand tapers, and by the strong desire for some flicker of the ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... Eugene whispered, the ruling passion strong to the last. A flicker of the eyelids, a gurgle in the throat, and ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... on the wall. As a flicker of light blazed up, a small, meagerly furnished front room was disclosed. Neither Captain Hogan nor either of those who had chartered his ...
— Owen Clancy's Happy Trail - or, The Motor Wizard in California • Burt L. Standish
... see as much in the first flicker of the acetylene through a maze of hurrying figures, but as his eyes grew accustomed to the light, the plot would thicken: books orderly and disorderly, on bracketed shelves, cameras great and small in motley confusion, guns and a gramophone-horn, serpentine yards ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... had spread them across the sky to beckon the public to his great new department store on Sixth Avenue. Just as at the beginning of the gesture you saw only the tips of the fingers, so Peter Rolls, Sr., had begun with a tiny flicker, the first groping of his inspiration ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... two Italian officers who stood up to ward off possible shots, came a French captain. He was of that calm, splendid type that makes you think of the Chevalier Bayard, a knightly figure. Quietly he moved among his dead. Not by the flicker of an eyelid did he give token of what was working deep down in that French heart of his. I heard an Italian officer tell him that the French had started the most regrettable affair by firing on the Italian ships. The ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... him she would sometimes put her hand hastily to her side with a short twitch of her fine lips and a knitting of her black, straight eyebrows like a flicker of angry pain or an angry thought ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... leading into another compartment of the flyer, and before us lay the bodies of eight children. The beetle lifted the first one, a little girl, up until his many-faceted eyes looked full into the closed ones of the child. There was a flicker of an eyelash, a trace of returning color, and then a scream of terror from the child. The beetle set the girl down ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... had happened there, which, though the flicker of the fire had died down, she could ...
— The Adventures of Akbar • Flora Annie Steel
... he had vacated. To his disgust he found himself temporarily dumb. No flicker of thought illuminated the darkness of his confusion. How was he to open a diverting conversation with a young woman whom he had met under auspices so extraordinary? Any attempt to gloze the situation, he felt, would be futile. And, somehow, he did not care to ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... the minister gave a startled flicker and then grew comprehending. "I wondered why he gave up college after he had worked so hard ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... to regard him blandly, without so much as a flicker of humour in her serene blue eyes. "Your grandfather used to be very fond of quoting something from 'Sappho,'" she returned thoughtfully, "or was it from Mr. Pope? I can't remember which or what it was except that it was hardly ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... your cats'-eyes in honor of the cat-headed deity of the Pagans, Mrs. Greyson?" Rangely asked, as she paused near his chair, watching a burner which seemed disposed to flicker. ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... the kneeling crowd. Rags flutter beside the most costly laces; youth kneels with crabbed old age; rich and poor meet upon the same level before the sacred altar. Priests by the half dozen, in scarlet, blue, gilt, and yellow striped robes officiate hourly before tall candles which flicker dimly in the daylight, while boys dressed in long white gowns swing censers of burning incense. The gaudy trappings have the usual theatrical effect, and no doubt serve, together with the deep peals of the organ, the dim light of the interior, the monotone of the priest's voice, in an unknown tongue, ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... stepped back and kicked the door. With a hollow sound the door fell inward, taking with it the jamb. Brett stood staring at the gaping opening. A fragment of masonry dropped with a dry clink. Brett stepped through the breach in the grey facade. The black pool at the bottom of the pit winked a flicker of light back at him ...
— It Could Be Anything • John Keith Laumer
... make out a thin gleaming of wires—a jury-rigged safety field. Within the flimsy-looking protective cage was a double bank of instruments, some of them alive with the flicker and glow of lights. Those must be the very expensive and difficult-to-build items Maulbow had brought out from the Hub. Beside them stood the machine, squat and ponderous. In the vague light, it looked misshaped and discolored. A piece of equipment that had taken a bad beating ...
— The Winds of Time • James H. Schmitz
... ascended, entered in, and sate (With victor face sublimely overwept) At Deity's right hand, to mediate, He alone, He for ever. On His breast The Urim and the Thummim, fed with fire From the full Godhead, flicker with the unrest Of human pitiful heart-beats. Come up higher, All Christians! Levi's tribe is dispossest. That solitary alb ye shall admire, But not cast lots for. The last chrism, poured right, Was on that Head, and poured for burial And not for domination in men's sight. What are these ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... kinship with all other parts and with the whole. I am sauntering through the Public Garden on a fragrant hushed evening in June; touched by the lingering afterglow, the twilight has not yet deepened into night. Grouped about a bench, children are moving softly in the last flicker of play, while the mother nods above them. On the next bench a wanderer is stretched at full length, his face hidden in his crooked-up arm. I note a couple seated, silent, with shoulder touching shoulder. I meet a young man and woman walking hand in hand; they do ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... the native quarter. The houses were no longer huddled together; small hovels took the place of cramped and lofty tenements. Soon he could see dark masses of hills silhouetted against the sky, where its dense blue merged into the amber and green of the last flicker of daylight. Not far distant, a sheet of water, still as a mirror, reflected sky and hills in even more pronounced chiaroscuro, and he had just distinguished the straight black ridge of the landward causeway when Abdullah ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... brunt of the situation on her husband's hands, as if too absorbed in a grievance of her own to suspect that she might be the object of one herself. To Lily this attitude was the most ominous, because the most perplexing, element in the situation. As she tried to fan the weak flicker of talk, to build up, again and again, the crumbling structure of "appearances," her own attention was perpetually distracted by the question: "What on earth can she be driving at?" There was something positively ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... phenomena of thunder-storms among the Alps; and one who has seen lightning only in the sombre sky of Britain can scarce imagine its intense brilliancy in these more southern latitudes. With us it breaks with a red fiery flicker; there it bursts upon you like the sun, and pours a flood of noonday light over earth and sky. One evening, in particular, I shall never forget, on which I saw this phenomenon in circumstances highly favourable to its finest effect. I had walked out from Geneva to pass a ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... into the next room with Boy in my arms. There was indeed a fire, but it was in a distant corner of the yard. The night was dark, a thick mist rose from the river, and the gusty puffs of wind that now and then swept through the compound caused the wood fire to flare up and flicker, casting fitful and fantastic shadows around. Moonshee stared, with fixed eyes, expecting every moment the reappearance of the supernatural poultry; but I, being as yet sceptical, descended the stairs, followed by my trembling household, ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... that as soon as the door was shut on him and the little flicker of gas, Bernard fell into an anguish of sobs and tears, the work of her persevering love, softening and lessening the obstinate pride so far that the next visitors met with a much better reception than they ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... shoulders. His face was smooth, his jaw somewhat heavy, his eyes exceedingly keen, and he carried with him an indefinable air of authority. He observed, also, that the voice had in it something peculiarly clear and incisive. With a little thrill and a sudden flicker of the flame of hope, he pointed down the street that ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... giving me a glance that was a mere flicker of the eyelids. 'Captain, let me tell you, murder is brave and honorable compared to this. Consider what he did: Trained to the sea and ships, after a lifetime of service to his traditions, he suddenly forsakes them utterly. It is blasphemy which he has committed; blasphemy against the gods who guide ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... describe the effect of this magical illumination. The mosque, with its taper minarets, its airy galleries, and its great central dome, is built of compact, transparent flame, and in the shifting of the red and yellow fires, seems to flicker and waver in the air. It is as lofty, and gorgeous, and unsubstantial as the cloudy palace in Cole's picture of "Youth." The long white front of the arsenal is fused in crimson heat, and burns against the dark as if it were one mass of living coal. And over all hangs ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... obvious resident of the neighborhood, at four o'clock in the morning, was always the golden-winged woodpecker, or flicker. Though he scorned the breakfast I offered, having no vegetarian proclivities, he did not refuse me his presence. I found him a character, and an amusing study, and I never saw his tribe so numerous ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... him. He seized Charles with a grip of iron, and with the side of his heavy boot gave him a sharp and solid kick. He was about repeating the performance—for the child hung like a rag in his grasp—but all of a sudden his ears rang, as if pistols were snapp'd close to them; lights of various hues flicker'd in his eye, (he had but one, it will be remember'd,) and a strong propelling power caused him to move from his position, and keep moving until he was brought up by the wall. A blow, a cuff given in such a scientific manner that the hand from which it proceeded ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... defeated, and the Monarch, O'Loughlin, was slain. Roderick O'Connor immediately assumed the reins of government, and was inaugurated in Dublin with more pomp than had ever been manifested on such an occasion. It was the last glittering flicker of the expiring lamp. Submission was made to him on every side; and had he only possessed the ability or the patriotism to unite the forces under his command, he might well have set all his enemies at defiance. An assembly of the clergy and chieftains of Ireland was convened in ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... aristocratic. When he speaks it is of subtleties. But when he speaks his dignity drops from him. His eyes shift quickly from one end of their little slit to the other, his mouth, his full brown mouth, moves over-fast, his hands flicker back ...
— Profiles from China • Eunice Tietjens
... They were not asking it again as much and this was the way of arranging that there was not to be all there was of future. They took a walk together and they came oftener and they were not hidden by the light that made a flicker. They had undertaken enough. ...
— Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein - With Two Shorter Stories • Gertrude Stein
... he could plainly perceive the flicker of torches moving about the wharves and piers of Chhung-ju, and presently a few of those same lights appeared on the bosom of the river. The rebels had evidently rowed out in small boats, and were towing the barges left anchored in mid-stream to ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... It swung slowly round and the figure of a man slid with it side-long, and stood behind it looking in. The figure seemed to lean forward out of the darkness; its face, pressed close against the panes, was vivid, as if seen in a strong daylight. She saw the flame of its red moustache and hair, the flicker of its faun-like tilted smile. Its eyes were fixed ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... stranger there of course it knocked him groggy for a couple of minutes, then he would come to, and by that time she would be away down wind on another tack, and not expecting anything; so when he'd hail and ask her to cash in, I (the only dog on the inside of her game) could see her canvas flicker a moment—but only just a moment—then it would belly out taut and full, and she would say, as calm as a summer's day, "It's synonymous with supererogation," or some godless long reptile of a word like that, and go placidly about and skim away on the next tack, perfectly comfortable, ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... something seemed to fail, die out—perhaps a tiny newly lighted flame of unaccustomed purity, the dawning flicker of aspiration to better things. Whatever it was, material, spiritual, was gone now, and where it had glimmered for a night, the old accustomed twilit doubt crept in—the same dull acquiescence—the same uncertainty of self, the ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... who had been of late so joyful, were now grown old with sorrow in but an hour or two; for they feared that the fresh coming of the Earth-Current had been but the final flicker and outburst before the end. And, even in this short while of our speech, did it seem to me that the voice of Naani grew further off from me; and I felt like to have broken my heart with ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... the eve of All-Souls, Through these arches dishallowed the organ rolls, Fingers long fleshless the bell-ropes work, The chimes peal muffled with sea-mists mirk, The skeleton windows are traced anew On the baleful flicker of corpse-lights blue, And the ghosts must come, so the legend saith, To a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... to the northeast there came the flicker of a squadron of warships waving white swords of light about the sky. I kept them hull-down, and presently they were mere summer lightning over the watery edge of the globe.... I fell into thought ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... intently, but it was only the falling of spent shrapnel, not the patter of Dustbin's baby but quite enormous feet. A stove-pipe belching smoke and savoury fumes protruded itself through the pavement on my right. Through the chinks in the gaping slabs there came the ruddy flicker that bespoke a "home from home" beneath my feet; and then, still listening for signs ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, August 1, 1917. • Various
... was still pitch dark, except for the flicker of the veiled lamp; and the continual roaring and oscillation testified to the unrelaxed velocity of the train. He sat upright in a panic, for he had been tormented by the most uneasy dreams; it was some seconds before he recovered his self-command; and even after ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... before the year was out the death of his wife. That poor lady I had never seen, but I had had a futile theory that, should she survive him long enough to be decorously accessible, I might approach her with the feeble flicker of my petition. Did she know and if she knew would she speak? It was much to be presumed that for more reasons than one she would have nothing to say; but when she passed out of all reach I felt that renouncement was indeed my appointed lot. I was shut up in my obsession ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... air. The parks and gardens were wholly deserted, and came and went, on either side, phantom-like in their soft, gray, faded tints. Under every bridge flashed and foamed the clear beryl-green waters. And nobody in St. Petersburg, except ourselves, saw this last and sunniest flicker of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... humor gave its last pathetic flicker in his "John, don't let the awkward squad fire over me," was he thinking of actual brother-volunteers, or of possible biographers? Did his words betray only the rhythmic sensitiveness of poetic nerves, or were they a foreboding of that helpless future, when the poet lies at the mercy of the ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... Roger Poole came into the quiet house, weary and worn from the strain of a day in which he had tried to read his letter with Mary's eyes, he found his room dark, except for the flicker of the fire. ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... nearer. Tommy's nose was sharp, too, and he could smell Mr. Gray Squirrel. He smelled so good that Tommy couldn't help opening one eye the least bit, just to see him. That was when Mr. Gray Squirrel noticed that his eyelid quivered. And Tommy saw at once that Mr. Gray Squirrel had caught that flicker of his eyelid, and that he was frightened. Tommy knew then that he ...
— The Tale of Tommy Fox • Arthur Scott Bailey
... insignia of Granada's monarchs. His guard, and his mutes, and his eunuchs, and his courtiers, and his counsellors, and his captains, were ranged in long files on either side the canopy. It seemed the last flicker of the lamp of the Moorish empire, that hollow and unreal pomp! As Muza approached the monarch, he was startled by the change of his countenance: the young and beautiful Boabdil seemed to have grown suddenly old; his eyes were sunken, his countenance sown with wrinkles, and his voice sounded ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book V. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the friendly feeling which nought but death was henceforth to sever, and the two great names, which nothing can divide, are linked by the unbreakable chain of genius—genius, the fire of the universe, which at times may flicker low, but which, bursting into flame here and there, illumines the dark recesses of the soul of the universe—genius which has made the world we know, which, never absent, though dormant, has changed the stone to the flower, the flower to animal, and, gaining ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... her trouble began to moderate. Somewhere out of the uncrushed part of her womanhood there came one flicker of womanly pride to comfort her. She saw Philip at last from the point of revenge. He loved her; he would never cease to love her. Do what he might to banish the thought of her, she would be with him always; ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... a few moments, and a faint flicker of color crept into Mrs. Colston's face while the girl mused. Her sister had got all she asked for, but Muriel suspected that she was not content; now and then, indeed, she had seen a hint of weariness in her expression. Harry Colston made a model husband ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... about it all when she went to bed; she had got used to her big shadowy room by this time; she lay wide awake watching the fire-light flicker and dance on the walls; how odd that people who loved each other so much should misunderstand each other so strangely; of course Crystal loved this grand-looking Raby, and yet of her own accord she was hiding from him; and Fay thrilled with pity and affectionate sympathy, as she pondered ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... for them," The girl's dark eyes met his fearlessly. A flicker of a smile crept into them. "I've had the best of you all round, dad. You'd better make that two weeks ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... shabbily made and so flat on the top that the eggs frequently roll off. They are located near the ground in bushes or low trees. The three or four eggs are deposited at intervals of several days, and frequently young birds and eggs are found in the nest at the same time. Like the Flicker, this bird will frequently continue laying if one egg is removed at a time, and as many as twelve have been taken from the same nest, by this means. The eggs are light greenish blue. Size 1.20 x .90. They are usually laid during May ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... little studio, chilly under its top-light, the empty fireplace, the wind blowing as though they were out of doors and making the candle flicker, the solitary light on the scene of the night's labour of a poor and lonely man, reflected on sheets of paper scribbled over and scattered about, in short, this atmosphere of habitations wherein the soul of the inhabitants lives on its own ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... the flicker of a candle came up stairs, and a pale lady, with a sweet sad face, appeared, bringing a pair of red and a pair of blue mittens for her Dolly and Polly. Poor Mrs. Blake did have a hard time, for she stood all day in a great store that she might earn bread for the poor children who staid at home ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... Maitland that this Smith was a very unusual person. And his enthusiasms were strangely contagious. Fire insurance, New York, and now baseball, things in none of which had she ever felt more than a flicker of interest, suddenly, seen through his eyes, assumed a reality, a vital quality she had never dreamed they could possess. Was it all the difference in point ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... the lines on it standing out in sharp ridges; but not by so much as the flicker of an eyelid did he betray the slightest nervousness. Yet Tad Butler realized fully the perilous nature of his undertaking, and that the least mistake on his part or on the part of those above him might mean a sudden ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Rockies • Frank Gee Patchin
... French, but in spite of that we carried on an animated conversation in French and English, Basque and Spanish. At lunch my talk grew more fluent and Mariquita went more deeply into matters. She desired to know what I thought of the Basques, of whom she was one, and a sudden flicker of the deceitful imagination set me inventing. I told her that I was a Basque myself, though I was also an Englishman. She exclaimed at this. She had never heard of English Basques. How was it I did not speak it? This was ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... adjoining room there came a slight noise, a faint breath of sound; or it might have been only an echo of silence. Their eyes were fixed each upon the others unwaveringly, with not a flicker to indicate that either had heard. After a moment Miss Thorne returned to her ...
— Elusive Isabel • Jacques Futrelle
... goes after them; I doubt If many of them ever come to him. His memories are like lamps, and they go out; Or if they burn, they flicker ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... just what he said, John," she begged, making no attempt to carry the pleasantry farther, though its possibilities still seemed to flicker about her lip; and Amherst proceeded to recount ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... if he struck her in the throat; and he had raised the weapon, when the panther, surfeited perhaps with his caresses, threw herself gracefully at his feet, glancing up at him with a look in which, despite her natural ferocity, a flicker of kindness could be seen. The poor Provencal, frustrated for the moment, ate his dates as he leaned against a palm-tree, casting from time to time an interrogating eye across the desert in the hope of discerning ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... Drake that if Fielding had described, though with some exaggeration, an actual phase of Miss Le Mesurier's character, she must have been driven to make the first advance towards his acquaintance by a motive of unusual urgency. The notion, however, did but flash and flicker out. He had no mental picture of the girl to fix her within his view; he knew not, in fact, whether she was girl or woman. She was to him just an abstraction, and Drake was seldom inclined for the study of abstractions. His curiosity might, perhaps, have been stronger had Mallinson related ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... she said; "and—and this time I will not ask for the bill." The faintest flicker of a smile crossed her lips, and then was gone, and he thought that in its place a look of weariness and unhappiness ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... their native land and heard not a few sweet melodies, of which in faraway Ontario, New Jersey, and Maryland we had been favoured only with promising scraps when wintry clouds were broken by the sun. Nor were the old familiar ones away—Flicker, Sapsucker, Hairy Woodpecker, Kingfisher, Least Flycatcher, Alder Flycatcher, Robin, Crow, and Horned Owl were here to mingle their noises with the stranger melodies and calls of Lincoln Sparrow, Fox Sparrow, Olive-sided Flycatcher, Snipe, Rusty ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... him; half-sick with over-exertion, he struggled out and fell gasping to the ground. For a minute or two the universe was turning round with him. The Chinee and the strange white man moved in a kind of flicker, unreal as the figures in a cinematograph. Then all was ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... didn't catch the flicker under them bushy eyebrows. But I did, and I knew he was ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... 'is found in fashion as a man'; and though the origin of the conviction be of God, and though the voice in my heart be not only my voice, but God's voice there, it will obey those same laws which make human thoughts and emotions vary, and fluctuate, flicker and flame up again, burn bright and burn low, according to a thousand circumstances. The witness of the Spirit, if it were yonder in heaven, would shine like a perpetual star; the witness of the Spirit, here in the heart on earth, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... know, of course, what they had said, beyond that John had promised to come down immediately after lunch, but she got the idea that the professional medical attitude had been one of less alarm than the amateur one. Mary confessed to March, with a flicker of ironic amusement, that she had supported this lighter view so successfully that, a little before noon, Rush had confided to her his wish—if she were perfectly sure she didn't need him—to take the one o'clock train to Lake Geneva. He and Graham were still expected there for the ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... late to wheel and gallop away; so she remained with her hand fumbling at the butt of the revolver, and her wide, blue eyes fixed on the flicker of the fire. Not a voice accosted her. As far as she could peer among the lithe trunks of the saplings, not a sign of a living ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... sanded floor. Nothing else but a soft white glove, eternally fragrant, in your habergeon, an eternally fragrant memory; the dim vision in stone street and coppice; a word, a message, it might be, sent across the world of steel at death. And then, in the last flicker of vision, the arras and the clear insistent strings, the whispering brocade de Lyons ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... your shoes are. Why don't you wear boots when you're out like this?" A flicker of his earlier peremptoriness came into ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... we hear so much about was left out of my character. Children as children are dirty, spitty little things, and their noses all need wiping. Here and there I pick out a naughty, mischievous little one that awakens a flicker of interest; but for the most part they are just a composite blur of white face and ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... wandered up, and died out like a flicker of firelight. She did not move. And then it was that June perceived under the softness and immobility of this figure something desperate and resolved; something not to be turned away, something dangerous. She tore off her hat, and, putting both ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... ask her for an explanation when we were interrupted by the lifting of the latch of the door, and a rush of cold air made the lamp light flicker. ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... suffocating for want of sufficient air. All the doors and windows of the bungalow were wide open, but the atmosphere was absolutely stagnant, the naked flame of a newly ignited lamp burning without the faintest flicker. ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... in her fingers, and when half consumed throws it into waste-jar, sits on side of bed watching letter burn, then lies down across bed on her elbows, her chin in her hands, facing audience. As the last flicker is seen the ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter
... shortly after robin redbreast, with whom he associates both at this season and in the autumn, is the golden-winged woodpecker, alias "high-hole," alias "flicker," alias "yarup." He is an old favorite of my boyhood, and his note to me means very much. He announces his arrival by a long, loud call, repeated from the dry branch of some tree, or a stake in the fence,—a thoroughly melodious April sound. I think how Solomon ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... whirlwinds and bluish-black murk of a particularly sinister aspect. Then, with the lowered rattan- screens rattling desperately in the wind and the bungalow shaking all over, Freya would sit down to the piano and play fierce Wagner music in the flicker of blinding flashes, with thunderbolts falling all round, enough to make your hair stand on end; and Jasper would remain stock still on the verandah, adoring the back view of her supple, swaying figure, ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... skipper had ordered all our square sails forward to be set so as to take every advantage of the wind, in addition to our steam-power, the old barquey prancing away full speed ahead, with her topsails and fore canvas bellied out to their utmost extent, their leech lifting occasionally with a flicker as she outran the breeze and the clew-gallant blocks rattling as the sheets slackened and grew taut again, while the wind hummed through the canvas aloft like a thousand bees ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... the two parties stood staring at each other; then followed a wild and savage scene. With shouts and oaths and battle-cries they fought furiously. The massive, oaken tables were overthrown, by the red flicker of the pole-borne lanterns men grappled and fell and slew each other upon the floor. A priest struck down a yeoman with a brazen crucifix, and next moment himself was brained with its ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... he cut the flower stalks, then all at once he laid hold on the edge of a recollection—a pair of dark eyes, in which mirthful, mocking lights flickered, as the sun splashes flicker on the ground under trees—a voice, many-noted as a violin, that grew softest when it was going to strike hardest, that expressed a hundred ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... him to glance incuriously after the steamship. She seemed smaller, less genuine than ever, a shadow shape that boasted visibility solely through that unearthly light on her after deck. Even that now had waned to a mere glimmer, the flicker of a candle lost in the immensities of that night-bound world of empty sky and empty ocean. Even as he that had been named Michael Lanyard was a lost light, a tiny flame that ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... of July, much delayed, arrived.[511] If angry before, he was now incensed; for he knew for a certainty at last that Hindman had been a sort of usurper in the Trans-Mississippi District and, with power emanating from no one higher than Beauregard, had never legally possessed a flicker of authority for doing the many insulting things that he had arrogantly done to him.[512] Next, from ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... PRISCILLA sinks back into her chair before the fireplace; an hour passes, and she does not move; her aunt returns from the Bradfords' and after a few ineffectual attempts at conversation goes to bed alone; the candles gutter, flicker, and die out; the room is filled of sacred silence. Once more the clock chimes forth the hour—the hour of fluted peace, of dead desire and epic love. Oh not for aye, Endymion, mayst thou unfold the purple panoply of priceless years. She sleeps—PRISCILLA sleeps—and down the palimpsest of age-old ...
— A Parody Outline of History • Donald Ogden Stewart
... Miss Minty's speech was due quite as much to the faint flush that had accented Mainwaring's own smile as to the embarrassing remark itself. Mrs. Bradley and Miss Macy exchanged rapid glances. Bradley, who alone retained his composure, with a slight flicker of amusement in the corner of his eye and nostril, said quickly: "You see, Mainwaring, how nature stands ready to help your convalescence at every turn. If Miss Minty had only followed up her healing opportunity, your cure would ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... It should be remembered that though the Stuarts failed in England they fought for things that succeeded in Europe. These were roughly, first, the effects of the Counter-Reformation, which made the sincere Protestant see Stuart Catholicism not at all as the last flicker of an old flame, but as the spread of a conflagration. Charles II., for instance, was a man of strong, sceptical, and almost irritably humorous intellect, and he was quite certainly, and even reluctantly, convinced of Catholicism as a philosophy. The other ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... Flora's eyes wavered apologetically in the direction of the waiting Japanese. Clara's flicker of amusement made her hate herself the moment it was out. She could always depend on herself when she knew she was on exhibition. She could be sure of the right thing if it were only large enough, but she was still caught at odd moments by the ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... menacing flicker of them almost across her eyeballs, so close they lay to her experience, and yet how she could laugh when Getaway made a feint toward the one on her beat, straightening up into exaggerated decorum as the eye of the law, ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... garden is o'erhung with gems Fixed in an onyx setting. Fireflies Flicker their lanterns in my dazzled eyes. In serried rows I guess the straight, stiff stems Of ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... match would prove to be wet. The second match, when struck, would shine and smell, and fizz a little, and then go out. There would be only one match left. Death would ensue if it failed. I should get close to the log, crawl under my hat, strike the match, see it catch, flicker, almost go out (the reader painfully excited by this time), blaze up, nearly expire, and finally fire the punk,—thank God! And I said to myself, "The public don't want any more of this thing: it ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the shack was closed; a board covered the window, but a murmur of voices came from within. Maurice stole close and listened. Through a crack he could see the flicker of a candle-flame, and he heard the voice ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... the grave and chant with hollow voices, such as skeletons may be supposed to have, a funeral dirge. Meantime Mephistopheles is busy summoning his demons to keep watch over the dead body, lest the soul should escape like a mouse, or flicker up to heaven in a little flamelet. Hideous forms of demons, fat and thin, with straight and crooked horns, tusked like boars and with claws like vultures, come thronging in, while the jaw of hell opens itself, showing in the distance the fiery ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... ring, for six hours. The compounds dissolved in this fluid are scarce—only obtainable in the East, and even in the East months might have passed before I could have increased my supply. I had no months to waste. Replenish, then, the light only when it begins to flicker or fade. Take heed, above all, that no part of the outer ring—no, not an inch—and no lamp of the twelve, that are to its zodiac like stars, fade for ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... him which, dim and unreal in itself, served to make all things dim and unreal. He did not know whether he was asleep or awake, so strange was life, so vivid were his dreams. Mummie, Uncle John, the baby, Toby himself came with a flicker of the veil and disappeared vaguely without cause. It would happen that Toby would be speaking to Uncle John, and suddenly he would find himself looking into the large eyes of the baby, turned stupidly towards the ceiling, and again the baby would be Toby himself, a hot, dry little ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... chair and set it in the open doorway, using the door-post as a rest for his head; and then the cottage was silent. The wind breathed more gently; the stars shone out; the air was soft after the storm; the moonlight made a bright flicker of light and shade over all the outer world. Now and then a grasshopper chirruped, or a little bird murmured a few twittering notes at being disturbed in its sleep; and then came a soft ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 1 • Susan Warner
... the apartment of the king; while his people slept, the king watched, he watched to work and think for his people. Without the wind howled and blew the snow against his window, and made even the fire in his room flicker; but the king heeded it not. He had completed his toilet and drunk his chocolate; now he was working. It did not disturb him that his room was cold, that the candle on his table gave but a poor light, and even seemed to increase the appearance of ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... lit the fire of progress in Massachusetts. It has tended it faithfully. It will not flicker now. It has provided here conditions of employment, and safeguards for health, that are surpassed nowhere on earth. There will be no backward step. The reuniting of the Republican Party means no reaction in the protection of women and children in our industrial life. These ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge
... think of that. He was not listening. He was seeing, not the picture she painted but that which she made, there in the sunshine. She was whiter than ever. Deep shadows were under her eyes. But the eyes themselves were very steady, her voice never quavered, nor did the smile flicker. Where did she get her spirit, this slender fragile girl who seemed so in need of another's ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... acquaintances seated together at the triangular foremost table. A more forlorn party, in more dismal circumstances, it would be hard to imagine. The motion here in the ship's nose was very violent; the uproar of the sea often overpoweringly loud. The yellow flicker of the lantern spun round and round and tossed the shadows in masses. The air was hot, but it struck a ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... we have nothing at all to do, Or, at least, not now, neither I nor you; Though some day or other, possibly We may see it closer, both you and I; Let us visit the nearest altar first, Whence the yellow fires flicker and burst, Like the flames from molten ore that spring; We may stand in the pale of the outer ring, But forbear to trespass within the inner, Lest the sins of the past should find out the sinner. [They approach the first altar, and stand within the outer ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... nothing for him but death. If he had been anything, it could only have been a wild spark of the mad meteor from which he sprang; and as Heaven in its wisdom forbade that, I think it much of its mercy that it extinguished him early and utterly, and did not leave him to flare and flicker and burn himself out with foul gunpowder smoke, and smell of dead men slain in battle, in the middle of the smoldering ashes of his father's ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... several old operas of large historical and artistic significance, which had either never been heard at all in New York, or heard so long ago that all memory of them had faded from the public mind. It saw the light of competition flicker out completely at the Academy of Music, and after a year of darkness it beheld the dawn of Italian rivalry in what had become ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... river teem with varied forms of animal life. From the caverns of leafy shade came the gleam and flicker of many-colored plumage. The cormorant, the pelican, the heron, floated on the water, or stalked along its pebbly brink. Among the sedges, the alligator, foul from his native mud, outstretched his hideous length, or, sluggish and sullen, drifted past the boat, his grim head level with the surface, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... and windows were open for any breath of air that might be stirring in the dark garden. Max had retreated to the empty fireplace, finding the bricks cooler than the carpeted floor. All was very still, save when the emphatic sweep of a trump card made the candle flames flicker. But the deals were a diversion. Then the rector, who had tiptoed about, to look over the shoulder of each player, might say, "You didn't answer Miss Ruth's call, Denner;" or, "Bless my soul, Dale, what made you play a ten-spot on that second hand ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... camp he speeds, Where faint the watch-fires flicker far away, And tethered on the herbage graze the steeds, When briefly thus speaks Nisus, fain to stay The lust of battle and mad thirst to slay: "Cease we; the light, our enemy, is near. Vengeance is glutted; we have hewn our way." Bowls, solid silver armour here and there ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... welcoming face did she see, not a sign of breakfast upon the table, and but a flicker of light on the huge grate, before which knelt one untidy maid, while another stopped short in her dusting operations to stare at the ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... tides ebb and flow, chained to the wheels of moons beyond our ken. Appearances are ghosts. Life is ghost land, where appearances change, transfuse, permeate each the other and all the others, that are, that are not, that always flicker, fade, and pass, only to come again as new appearances, as other appearances. You are such an appearance, composed of countless appearances out of the past. All an appearance can know is mirage. You know mirages of desire. These very mirages are the unthinkable ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... Then for wine cooled in a brooklet losing itself in silver sands! Then for — but O these bilboes on our ankles, how mercilessly they grip! The vertical sun blisters the bare back: faint echoes of Olympian laughter seem to flicker like Northern Lights across the stark and pitiless sky. One earnest effort would do it, my brothers! A little modesty, a short sinking of private differences; and then we should all be free and equal gentlemen of fortune, and I would be your Captain! "Who? you? you would make a pretty Captain!'' ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... rovers go," and knocked about the country for six or seven years before I met Peter M'Laughlan again. I was young yet, but felt old at times, and there were times, in the hot, rough, greasy shearing-shed on blazing days, or in the bare "men's hut" by the flicker of the stinking slush-lamp at night, or the wretched wayside shanty with its drink-madness and blasphemy, or tramping along the dusty, endless track—there were times when I wished I could fall back with all the experience I'd got, and sit once more in the little slab-and-bark ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... his back against the tree, smoking in a meditative manner, and watching the flicker of the firelight on the face of his companion, whose thoughts seemed to ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... unquestionably rare upon the Massachusetts coast between the fall and spring migrations. Besides the species already named, my monthly list included the following: herring gull, great black-backed gull, ruffed grouse, hairy woodpecker, flicker, goldfinch, tree sparrow, snowbird, blue jay, crow, shrike, white-bellied nuthatch (only two or three birds), golden-crowned kinglet, and one ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... and were peering upwards at the black vault overhead, when an indescribable rushing sound filled the air of the cavern, and caused the flame of our torches to flicker with such violence that we could not see any object distinctly. We all came to a sudden pause, and I confess that at that moment a feeling of superstitious dread chilled the blood in my veins. Before we could discover the cause of this strange effect, several large black objects passed ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... acolyte, manoeuvred the chair as directed. Reggie van Tuyl, who had been yawning in a hopeless sort of way, showed his first flicker ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... nightingale was calling low its liquid invocation, "Ho-ren-k-y-y-o-o-o!" Perhaps old Kano moved so softly that he might not lose the echoes of this cry. The two men seemed alone in the silent scene. Once Tatsu thought his eye caught a swift flicker, as of a gray sleeve, but he was not sure. At any rate he would not think of it, or speculate, or marvel! He was beginning to tremble before the unknown. The sense of shrinking, of miracle, of being, perhaps, too small to contain the thing decreed, bore hard upon him. With it came a keen impression ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... into an outer semblance of decorum. However, I snatched a hasty glance at Jonathan's face. It was quite red and hot-looking, but calm, very calm, and I judged it to be the calm, not of defeat nor yet of settled militancy, but of triumph. I even thought I detected the flicker of a grin,—the mere atmospheric suggestion of a grin,—as if he felt the urgent if furtive appeal in my glance. At any rate, Jonathan was all right, that was clear. And as to Griz—whether she was still one mare or two half-mares—it didn't ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge
... rose and now stood upright, with her finger pointing straight at Quimby. Had he cringed or let his eyes waver from hers by so much as a hair's breadth, her accusation would have stood and her cause been won. But not a flicker disturbed the steady patience of his look, and Hammersmith, who had made no effort to hide his anxiety to believe her story, showed his disappointment with equal ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... repugnance crossed her face; she shuddered so violently that his hand went forth to clutch the fingers that trembled on the arm of the chair. He held them in his firm grasp for a moment. They looked into each other's eyes and he saw the flicker of undisguised horror in hers. An instant later she was herself again. Withdrawing her hand, she added, with a short laugh of derision: "Still I did not expect heaven, ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... himself contentedly on the chair, and the last flicker of the expiring light, as it played upward on his rugged countenance—rested on one of those self-hugging smiles, with which a sanguine ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the electric current, when analyzed, is merely a succession of pulsations through a wire, like waves beating against a sea wall. Water-power delivers these waves at a constant speed, so that electric lights made from water-power do not flicker and jump like the flame of a lantern in a gusty wind. On the other hand, to accomplish the same thing with steam or gasoline requires an especially ...
— Electricity for the farm - Light, heat and power by inexpensive methods from the water - wheel or farm engine • Frederick Irving Anderson
... other Eskimos. They had left their weapons outside. They seemed scarcely to breathe as they ranged themselves in a line and looked down upon Scottie Deane. Not a sign of emotion came into their expressionless faces, not the flicker of an eyelash did the immobility of their faces change. In a low, clacking monotone they began to speak, and there was no expression of grief in their voices. Yet Billy understood now that in the hearts ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... the faint flicker of it as it curved her lips and made her eyes shine for an instant. Minute following minute, she was becoming more attractive. His voice trembled when ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... and soon they went indoors to a friendship fire in the stone fire-place. They watched the flames roar up the chimney, then crackle cheerily, and at last flicker away to little blue tongues, which died almost as soon as they were born. There was no other light in the cabin. Virginia had said that none was needed, and she did not notice the apprehensive glances which the other Vigilantes ...
— Virginia of Elk Creek Valley • Mary Ellen Chase
... mouth of the portals seven Above our abodes he hover'd With lances that yawn'd for carnage; But vanish'd, afore his chaps With slaughter of Thebes were glutted; Afore the flicker of pitchy flame Might to the crown of turrets climb. So fierce the rattle of war around Was pour'd on his rear by the serpent-foe Hard match'd in deadly encounter. For Jove the over-vaunting tongue Supremely hates. Their full fed stream Of gold, of clatter, and of pride He saw, ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... produced papers and tobacco and rolled a cigarette. Then very deliberately, he produced a roll of bills, peeled a yellow one from the outside, and returned the roll to his pocket. Without so much as the flicker of an eyelash, the bartender noted that the next one also was yellow. The cowpuncher laid the bill on the bar, and with a jerk of the thumb, indicated the four engrossed in a game of solo at a table in the ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... planet's surface that the diagnosis had been made; as soon as the proper medications could be prepared, the doctors would land to begin treatment. There was a new flicker of hopefulness in the Bruckian's response, and an appeal to hurry. With renewed energy the doctors went back to the lab to start ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... trust, I regard your appeal as a call from God Himself. Besides, you could not have demanded from me a more congenial service. You shall have all the help I can give; and between us," he added, with a reviving flicker of his previous facetiousness, "we ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... sought Dave Drennen where other men drew together as they had congregated now. If under that hard exterior he felt any of the emotions which other men feel, if he had his joys and his griefs, he chose to experience them alone. Consequently the mere fact of his appearance here now brought a flicker of curious interest with it. Unless he had a quarrel with some man in the Frenchman's house, what ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... be amazed or to find these words wonderful and out of the common. For them the hand of approaching Doom had opened the gates of Distance, and they knew everyone that through these some light had broken on their souls, a faint flicker of dawn from beyond the clouds. They accepted it ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... his eyes suddenly away from Marina lest she should trace the faintest flicker of a doubt within them, as the vision rose before him of that imperious body, so relentless in its decrees, so tenacious in its traditions, so positive in its autocracy; but the threatened invincibility of this force only nerved him to a resistance as invincible, ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... over—not counting them, he was too much amazed and excited to do that—when the candle in the lantern gave a final flicker and went out, leaving the boys and the mystery of the compass and the money and Rad's pantaloons ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... to break from the ground at their feet, and in the flicker of an eyelash a shadow lifted up out of the scrub-encumbered level. Sophia cried aloud with alarm; Labertouche swore outright, heedless; and Amber put himself before her, drawing his revolver, heartsick with the conviction that they were trapped, that their labour had gone all for naught, that all ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... With the stronger light there is a more rapid and a greater loss of the initial intensity of the impression or effect of stimulus, and though each successive effect remains as long, or longer, in dwindling intensity, you get want of continuity, or "flicker."] ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... heat stood still and played over the ground, sparkling, with indolent voluptuousness and soft movements like the fish in the stream. Far inland it quivered above the rocks that bounded the view, in a restless flicker of bluish white; below lay the fields beneath the broiling sun, with the pollen from the rye drifting over them like smoke. Up above the clover-field stood the cows of Stone Farm in long rows, their heads hanging heavily down, and their tails swinging regularly. Lasse was moving ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... place that was almost a dimple, but not quite. There was a real dimple in her chin and another at each corner of her mouth, where the full scarlet lips drooped a little from sadness. Star-like, her brown eyes searched the far shadows and sometimes the flicker of the candle brought a dancing glint of gold into their depths. And as always, like a halo, stray gleams hovered about her head, bent slightly forward now and full into the light, throwing into ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... retreats of oriental Christendom, and when the mass is being said—inaudible, indeed, and not to be seen, at the furthest end of that dense, underground crowd, but testified to by the lighting of a thousand tapers, and by the strong desire for some flicker of the ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... Teutoberg's impassively. All too well he knew the innate cruelty of this Earthman. Some explanation would have to be made to satisfy him. Never a flicker of an eye-lash revealed what that explanation would be, but Jarl glanced stoically ...
— The Space Rover • Edwin K. Sloat
... bull turned, saw El Tigre, and charged him straight. El Tigre was not even facing him, for the bull was approaching from his left. But there he stood without the twitch of a muscle or the flicker of an eye lid, still as a ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... right. At exactly one hundred and twenty seconds the Rhamda closed his watch. He spoke something. Again the young man laughed. He lit a cigarette; from the flicker and jerk of the flame he was trembling. But he was still emphatic. The other rose from the table, walked down the aisle and out of the building. The youth spread out both arms and dropped his head ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... not been here for nine months. Besides, I did not come of my own free will," said "No. 4", with a faint flicker of humor on ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... ranged about over the dull gloom of the skies until they fell again to the earth level, and then he suddenly sat up, half believing himself in a dream—down the stream, how far away he could not judge, there gleamed a steady, yellowish light. It was no flicker of a camp fire, yet remained stationary. Surely no star could be so low and large; nor did he recall any with that peculiarity of color. If such a miracle was possible in the heart of that sandy desert he would have ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... pretty nearly my own man again. Your son very kindly brought me in, and gave me the opportunity of resting, which was really all I required. And your daughter offered me refreshments. I—ah—happened to slip,"—the protruding eyes met Jack's with a flicker, which, if such a thing could be imagined, was almost a wink!—"to slip on the pavement, and a man of my weight feels these things more than a boy. Gout, sir, gout in the feet! Your good son has already diagnosed my complaint, and, no doubt, you will be equally ready. Now, ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... left alone, she would fall to poring over the coloured bas-reliefs on the walls. These were intended to represent various of the powers of Nature under allegorical similitudes, and as nothing can be made that does not belong to the general scheme, she could not fail at least to imagine a flicker of relationship between some of them, and thus a shadow of the reality of things found ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... zeal as if she had been a queen. A sense of authority and importance began to impress itself upon her as she sat at the head of her own table in her own dining-hall, with all the Vandykes and Holbeins and Gainsboroughs gazing placidly down upon her from their gilded frames, and the flicker of many wax candles in old silver sconces glancing upon the shields, helmets, rusty pikes and crossed swords that decorated the panelling of the walls between ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... other. Thereafter he turned upon the three, but even as he did so, Walkyn uttered a fierce cry, and whirling about with axe aloft, sprang into the green, whence of a sudden rose a babel of voices, and the sound of fierce blows and, thereafter, the noise of pursuit. A flicker of steel amid the green—a score of fierce faces all about him, and Beltane was seized from behind, borne struggling to his knees, to his face, battered by unseen weapons, dragged at by unseen ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... became like those of the Sierras, wan as the face of death. Far later the cold golden light lingered in the west, with pines in relief against its purity, and where the rose light had glowed in the east, a huge moon upheaved itself, and the red flicker of forest fires luridly streaked the mountain sides near and far off. I realized that night had come with its EERINESS, and putting my great horse into a gallop I clung on to him till I pulled him up in Truckee, which was ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... stayed his hand. It seemed cruel to bring her back. But the suffering and the half instinctive look of horror passed from her eyes like a shadow, as they rested upon him. There was even the very faint flicker ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... rock, which, reared high above us, shut out the rest of the world. Far off across the bay we could see the trembling lights of the castle, and here and there along the shore the faint light of a fisher's window. For the rest the sea was a dark blue plain with an occasional flicker of light as the gleam of starlight fell on the slope ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... words, for I am dizzy and They flicker in my eyes. Lament not much, I beg of thee. If I remained alive, All mangled as I am, I never could Bring children into life for thee; my body Would be so ugly, whereas formerly I know I had some beauty. This would be So hard for thee to bear and hide from me. ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... and slightly below him a flicker of flame caught his eye, and he realized without even looking down that the retro-rockets of the shuttle on which he had arrived were slowly putting it out of orbit and tipping it over the edge of the long gravitic well back to Earth. It would be ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... never coming out where there was an audience, as The Rowdy did. And then he could beat everybody, and at his own song, too! He was at them all now, one after the other—robin, song sparrow, oriole, flicker, everything—with a medley of trills and variations worked in just to show that he had a whole lot of music of his own if he only cared to ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... tedious journey! It had seemed long enough when we had some slight flicker of hope, or at least of expectation, before us, but now that our worst fears were ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
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