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More "Freak" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "is because you do not know. Now listen. You have to make, within the next few minutes, a great decision. Very likely, after you have chosen, you will curse me all your days. It was a freak of fate which brought us together. But I must say this. You are the sort of man whom I would have chosen, if any measure of choice had fallen to my lot. And yet," he looked around, "I am almost afraid to speak now that I have seen you in your home, now that I have realized ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... still, of the softest brown—eyes dreamy and mournful, and deeply sunk in their orbits—looked out at you, and (in my case, at least) took your attention captive at their will. Add to this a quantity of thick closely-curling hair, which, by some freak of Nature, had lost its colour in the most startlingly partial and capricious manner. Over the top of his head it was still of the deep black which was its natural colour. Round the sides of his head—without the slightest gradation of grey to ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... he said. "A son. That's what I want. A real son. Not a freak. Not a damned little monster that has to go to the Clinic every month and take injections so it won't grow. And what happens to you if you take your shots now? What if they drive you crazy ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... freedom of style and treatment was reached, the prevailing genius of architecture still enforced a certain calmness and continence in the statue. As soon as the statue was begun for itself, and with no reference to the temple or palace, the art began to decline: freak, extravagance, and exhibition, took the place of the old temperance. This balance-wheel, which the sculptor found in architecture, the perilous irritability of poetic talent found in the accumulated dramatic materials to which the people ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... is a freak who attends to the labours, Small and domestic, that make up the home: Pays all the calls and leaves cards on the neighbours, Leaving his wife to be ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 1, 1914 • Various
... Well, in the old days thoughts and ideas commenced to make themselves felt in me, to crop up in my work. I would start on a picture with a clear settled design; when it was finished, I would notice that by some unconscious freak I had introduced a figure, an arabesque, always something which made the whole incongruous and bizarre. I discovered the cause during the week after I received your last letter. The thoughts, the ideas were yours; better than mine perhaps, but none the less death ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... recluse in Jersey; and one afternoon he drove me to the charming villa the General had occupied, situated in an ideal spot on the coast. The villa was most solidly built, and of picturesque architecture—the freak of a rich Parisian merchant, who had spared no pains or money over it. The work both inside and out was that of the best artists Paris could supply. It was magnificently furnished—a museum of beautiful objects, and curious ones, too. One bedroom ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... rude sports in vessels of the King; but I do not remember to have known any more serious result than the settlement of some ancient quarrel, or some odd freak of nautical humour, which has commonly proved as harmless as it ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... captivates the fancy of a whole drove of mules, but often an animal nowise akin. Lieutenant Beale told me that his whole train of mules once galloped off suddenly, on the plains of the Cimarone, and ran half a mile, when they halted in apparent satisfaction. The cause of their freak was found to be a buffalo-calf, which had strayed from the herd. They were frisking around it in the greatest delight, rubbing their noses against it, throwing up their heels, and making themselves ridiculous by abortive attempts to neigh and bray; while the poor ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... be misjudged," said Tom simply; "I got the reputation of being kind o' queer, anyway, and they'll just say I had a freak. You can see for yourself," he added, "that it wouldn't be good for us to go back together—even if my ...
— Tom Slade with the Colors • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... and he wares white wings dose he, and jumps up in the air. Some angel beleeve me, say mebbe he is a angel that has fallen from the sky? or a acrobat from Barnums? only I guess if he comes from Barnums he must be a freak al-rite. Ennyway until this yere ends you are my godchild and I am your godfather, and I forbid you to tuch enny more of that Teddys eats, understand? If you are hungry you just tell me, and I will send you the proper food; and it will not be ...
— Deer Godchild • Marguerite Bernard and Edith Serrell
... dancing of clothes-pins from the pockets of the dancers, as Emerson has said, or if it once happened it was probably the intentional freak of a happy schoolboy—a bit of farcical fun, too unworthy even to be mentioned by the "Sage of Concord" in his "Historic Notes." It was poor history ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... surplice, gown, hood, and stole. It is stupidly worded, but the meaning is obvious. I was vexed from your experience to hear of such foolish proceedings at Bridge of Allan, contrary to canon and to common sense.... The green part of the dress which caused your wonder, naturally enough, is not a freak of new vestments, but is a foolish way which the Glenalmond students have adopted of wearing the hood, which our Bishops (not without diversity of opinion) had granted for those who had been educated at ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... consideration is inseparably connected with that of her husband, and after paying the full price for it, she finds that she is to lose it, for no reason of which she can feel the cogency. She has sacrificed her whole life to it, and her husband will not sacrifice to it a whim, a freak, an eccentricity; something not recognised or allowed for by the world, and which the world will agree with her in thinking a folly, if it thinks no worse! The dilemma is hardest upon that very meritorious class of men, who, without possessing talents which qualify them ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... the world who needs pleading for; but suppose, Leucha—I don't say for a moment I shall succeed—but suppose I were to go to Hollyhock, who feels that she has done her part and has shown her sorrow for her little childish freak in every possible way, would you, my child, accept her words of contrition, and when I brought her to meet you, receive her as one so ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... she had certain features in her character almost in excess, which kept anything in the slightest degree dangerous utterly at a distance. She would run about with anybody, just as she fancied; no one was free from danger of a push or a pull, or of being made the object of some sort of freak. But no person ever ventured to do the same to her; no person dared to touch her, or return, in the remotest degree, any liberty which she had taken herself. She kept every one within the strictest barriers of propriety in their behavior to herself, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... "Hostiles!" he presented his stick, banged, reloaded, banged again, reloaded and banged yet again. I took up a stick and presented it—bang! With amazing verisimilitude Beppo rolled over—shot through the heart. Really, for a moment I had a mad apprehension that in some occult way, some freak of hypnotic suggestion, I had actually wrought the child harm. I stood there breathlessly triumphant and wondering whether it was now my business to rush in and scalp the defenceless prisoners. I became aware of a head and a stick above ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... days of the goldfields, she, going to draw water at a little stream soon after her first arrival, had seen these lying close together in the bed of the shallow rivulet—three lumps of gold formed by a freak of nature into the likeness of the golden pippins her father used to be so proud of, and the gathering of which had been the crisis of the courtship of the two handsome lads ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ambition, or any abnormal love of it. She did it, so far so I can find out, because she wished to do good that way. She's been a little notional, she's had her head addled by women's talk, and she's in a queer freak; but it's only a girl's freak after all: you can't say anything worse of her. She's a splendid woman, and her property's neither here nor ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... in one who from his face appeared to be old? Was there perchance, after all, some truth in the legend of Samson and did it dwell in that gigantic beard and those long locks of his? It was impossible to say and probably the man was but a Herculean freak, for that he was as strong as Hercules all the stories that I heard afterwards of his feats, ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... "But there is one thing I want to suggest: you are devoting too much of your time to the brown-eyed little maid. You must seek favor with Twonette. She is harmless, and through her you may, by some freak of fortune, reach the goal of your desires. With the prestige of your family and the riches of Burgundy, you may become the most powerful man in the ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... good deal about my friend's previous life and occupation. He was of very good family, had enjoyed an excellent university education, and had the finest prospects of a prosperous career at home, when, as far as I could ascertain, he took a sudden freak to emigrate. He had inherited a modest fortune, and now maintained himself as cashier in a large tea importing house in the city. He read the newspapers diligently, apparently with a view to convincing himself of the universal wretchedness of mankind in general and the American ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... fame came to him. All over the Missouri Valley, men knew that Grant Adams, a big, lumbering, red-polled, lusty-lunged man with one arm burned off—and the story of the burning fixed the man always in the public heart—with a curious creed and a freak gift for expounding it, was doing unusual things with the labor situation in the Harvey district. And then one day a reporter came from Omaha who uncovered this bit of news in ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... be one of the very few people who knew or surmised anything about the matter, I thought it better to take affairs into my own hands—especially when I found that my daughter had come to your house. But for this freak of hers I should not, perhaps, have interfered. As you are no doubt prepared now to resign all hope of her, I am quite satisfied with the result of my afternoon's work. ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... threw a swift glance about him, to measure his surroundings. Then he laid down his cudgel, and proceeded to unbutton his great-coat, which by some strange freak of irony happened to be one of mine that they had lent him at the Cedars for ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... yourself. I wanted air and quiet, having been much fatigued on my nephew's amendment, trying to dissuade him from making the campaign with his militia; but in vain! I now dread hearing of some eccentric freak. I am sorry Mr. Tyson has quite dropped me, though he sometimes comes to town. I am still more concerned at your frequent disorders-I hope their chief seat ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... Fate, "to the red planet Mars," to the "wild west wind." Mere impersonation and invocation in apostrophe and paeans are not necessarily worship. Doubtless these spells and charms often arose from a superstitious half-belief, an imaginative freak, such as possesses the civilized visionary who shows a coin to the new moon to propitiate its fancied waxing influence in behalf of a balance at the banker's, or the Christianized Scotch Highlander of even the early nineteenth century who threw a piece of hasty pudding ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Guggenslocker because a man was unnecessary," she said, so gravely that he smiled. "I was without a title because it was more womanly than to be a 'freak,' as I should have been had every man, woman and child looked upon me as a princess. I did not travel through your land for the purpose of exhibiting myself, ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... I could see how; it is the oddest freak. You seem to go the furthest around to get at a thing—but you are in ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 5. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... acquainted with Dr Beddington, who had charge of the asylum, was not sure that he would be pleased with their freak, and earnestly dissuaded his intended ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... and I groaned and limped down to it: but it is a truly spasmodic arrangement, singularly independent of human control, and I have not the slightest doubt that the reason why Mr. Gilman obligingly remained in the vicinity was, lest I should be scalded or blown to atoms by a sudden freak of Kilauea, though I don't see that he was capable of preventing either catastrophe! A slight grass shed has been built over a sulphur steam crack, and within this there is a deep box with a sliding lid and a hole for the throat, and the victim ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... lively words with the lively young man at her side, continuing to eat his candies, although their rich, cloying taste had already palled on her palate—here was Mrs. Hubert throwing Eleanor at Jerry's head, when what Eleanor wanted was that queer, rough-neck freak of an assistant prof; and here were Jerry's parents making such overtures to Sylvia, when what she wanted—she didn't know what she did want. Yes, she did, she wanted a good time, which was somehow paradoxically hard to attain. Something always kept spoiling it,—half ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... did something for Amy Carringford—the pauper! You were spoons with her then, and you wanted to get her to my party. You begged an invitation for her and then dressed her up. like a freak ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... quantity of corn or other commodity. Its value is in the necessities of the animal man. It is so much warmth, so much bread, so much water, so much land. The law may do what it will with the owner of property; its just power will still attach to the cent. The law may in a mad freak say that all shall have power except the owners of property; they shall have no vote. Nevertheless, by a higher law, the property will, year after year, write every statute that respects property. The non-proprietor will be the scribe of the proprietor. What the owners ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... men as are weak enough to be subverted by such trifles can do as little honor to Christianity, as their abandoning it for such reasons, can affect it with disgrace. The belief of such men could never have been more than habit, and their Infidelity nothing else than a freak of folly, which is reproachful only to themselves. But after all, this vehement objection to wit and ridicule, appears to me a little imprudent; for a sarcastic opponent might reply, that sceptics, have been not unfrequently attacked with irony most severe, and sometimes sorely wounded by ...
— Letter to the Reverend Mr. Cary • George English
... it was," explained the inventor. "By some strange freak of nature the volcanic mass dropped back into the ocean a little before I was ready to blow it to pieces. In settling down it lowered the ship. Then the explosion occurred beneath the waves. If I had waited a little while I need not ...
— Under the Ocean to the South Pole - The Strange Cruise of the Submarine Wonder • Roy Rockwood
... with the edge of the hill, he actually descended, turning himself over and over till he came to the bottom." This story was told with such gravity, and with an air of such affectionate remembrance of a departed friend, that it was impossible to suppose this extraordinary freak an invention of Mr. Langton.' It must have been in the winter that he had ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... has gone home, and opened a studio in New York. The Colossus has grown two more inches and hates to hear me mention the freak museums in the Bowery. Carleton is a hubby, and wifey is English and captivating. Rowden told me one day he was going to get married too. When I asked her name he said he didn't know. ...
— In the Quarter • Robert W. Chambers
... as a sort of comic freak, who, though he had enough to live on, could not be said to be in the best of circumstances. When he rolled the sum the Auffenberg family owed him from his tongue, she was filled with astonishment and delight, and from then on she took ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... wings, rose here and there, startled from their quiet nests by the approaching inundation, which by this time had completely hidden what was called in that region the public road. De Fervlans, at a loss what to make of this singular freak of nature, sent a horseman to the right, and one to the left, to examine the ground, and learn whence came the sea of slime, and how it might be avoided. Each of his messengers returned with the information that the slime was flowing in the ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... first saw my name printed below a passage of critical opinion. How many reputations, within that half-century, have not been exalted, how many have not been depressed! We have seen Tennyson advanced beyond Virgil and Victor Hugo beyond Homer. We have seen the latest freak of futurism preferred to The Lotus Eaters, and the first Legende des Siecles rejected as unreadable. In face of this whirlwind of doctrine the public ceases to know whether it is on its head or its feet—"its trembling tent all topsy-turvy wheels," as an Elizabethan ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... glaring at Wingate, "remember this. Only half an hour before I was taken, Scotland Yard rang up to tell me that they thought they had a clue as to Stanley's disappearance. You risk five years' penal servitude by this freak." ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Osborne as a mere fortune-hunter, and it was a thorn in the flesh to see him talking to Nan while he, old Abe, was too far away to hear what they were saying. He had a good deal of confidence in Nan, she was a sensible, level-headed girl. Still, there was no knowing what freak even a sensible girl might take into her head, and Nan was so determined when she did make up her mind. She was his own daughter ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... it as soon as I have eaten something," said Stanley. "But what is this I hear of a visit from a lion? Did the brute actually dare to leap into the midst of our camp and carry off one of its inmates? It shall not be the fault of my rifle if he does not pay dearly for his freak ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... wigwag. Weariness, languor, lassitude, enervation, exhaustion. Wearisome, tiresome, irksome, tedious, humdrum. Wet (adjective), humid, moist, damp, dank, sodden, soggy. Wet (verb), moisten, dampen, soak, imbrue, saturate, drench Whim, caprice, vagary, fancy, freak, whimsey, crotchet. Wind, breeze, gust, blast, flaw, gale, squall, flurry. Wind, coil, twist, twine, wreathe. Winding, tortuous, serpentine, sinuous, meandering. Wonderful, marvelous, phenomenal, miraculous. Workman, laborer, artisan, artificer, mechanic, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... dial whose shade no hand puts back, Trick as we may! My friend, you are forty-three This very year in the world— [JOSEPHINE breaks out sobbing again.] And in vain it is To think of waiting longer; pitiful To dream of coaxing shy fecundity To an unlikely freak by physicking With superstitious drugs and quackeries That work you harm, not good. The fact being so, I have looked it squarely down—against my heart! Solicitations voiced repeatedly At length have shown the soundness of their shape, And left me no denial. You, at times, My dear ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... she answered passionately. "I am the curiosity. I am the freak. The townspeople take a pride in me, yes, just the same pride they took in her, and I find that pride more difficult to bear than all the aversion of the Pettifers. I too slink out early in the morning or late after night has ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... and sparse of flesh in the mountain-desert. It was the more surprising to Pierre to see this young fellow with the marvelously delicate-cut features. By some freak of nature here was a place where the breed ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... "pocket-mining" during three months in the one little patch of ground in the whole globe where Nature conceals gold in pockets—or did before we robbed all of those pockets and exhausted, obliterated, annihilated the most curious freak Nature ever indulged in. There are not thirty men left alive who, being told there was a pocket hidden on the broad slope of a mountain, would know how to go and find it, or have even the faintest ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... was on her way out to California, you see," Ellsworth began again; "down at El Paso she took a sudden freak for coming up here to see about the climate—lots of folks go West nowadays, you know, even in the spring. I'll warrant she's sick of the trip by now. A good climate has to have dust to season it. One ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... that I stand by no means secure; and besides the chance of my cousin's reappearance—a certain event, unless he is worse than I dare hope for—I have perhaps to expect the fantastic repugnance of Clara herself, or some sulky freak on her brother's part.—In a word—and let it be such a one as conjurers raise the devil with—Harry Jekyl, I ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... the little Count, it was known that people were on the spot at the precise time he mentioned, and had heard nothing. The Count was pardoned, on account of his youth. The Dauphin made him confess the truth, and it was looked upon as a childish freak to set people ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... can't help thinking of the notorious starvation freak at the circus who gets his meals ...
— Moral • Ludwig Thoma
... the empire of which they are the guardians. But if, from whatever cause, they are unwilling to recall the noble lord, then I implore them to take care that he be immediately ordered to return to Calcutta. Who can say what new freak we may hear of by the next mail? I am quite confident that neither the Court of Directors nor Her Majesty's Ministers can look forward to the arrival of that mail without great uneasiness. Therefore I say, send Lord Ellenborough back to Calcutta. There at least ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... a city of people given over to the meditative, if sympathetic, silence. It was an artificial city sprung from the sterile seeds of legislature, and thriving on the arid food of Bills. It was a mere habitation of governments. It was a freak city created coldly by an act of Solomonic wisdom. Before 1858 it was a drowsy French portage village, sitting inertly at the fork of the Ottawa and Rideau rivers, concerning itself only with the lumber trade, almost inattentive to the battle which Montreal and Quebec, Toronto and Kingston were fighting ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... wealthy, was a man of business. His daughter should marry a man who had money sufficient to insure his worth. With perspicacity rare in a man, he had observed that the two singular men of this narrative admired his daughter. Now, Bat, being a freak, was making money rapidly, while Sampey was only a poor literary bureau! Castellani felt the need of a partner. Why should not a partner be a son-in-law? Surely Bat was ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... seen freak moving picture films where the actor suddenly bobs up in another place, without visibly crossing the intervening space. The next thing I knew, Garrick was standing across the room, in just that way. The handkerchief was folded up ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... a broidery freak'd with tissue of images olden, 50 One whose curious art did blazon valour of heroes. Gazing forth from a beach of Dia the billow-resounding, Look'd on a vanish'd fleet, on Theseus quickly departing, Restless ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... with the scandal, but by the personal influence of the King, it was withdrawn from the courts of law. Buckhurst and Sedley, the chosen associates of the King in his notorious bouts of drunken debauchery, roused disgust by a freak of sickening lewdness; the only result was the committal to prison, by the order of the Lord Chief Justice, and at the behest of the King, of the constable who interfered with the indecent escapade. We have a proof of the change that had come since Clarendon's ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... Like the Sun-god, he was buoyant and beautiful, careless, free, elastic, unfading. Years never cramped his bounding spirits, or dimmed the lustre of his soul. He was ever ready for prank and pastime, for freak and fun. Of all his loves at Elleray, boating was the chief. He was the Lord-High-Admiral of all the neighboring waters, and had a navy at his beck. He never wearied of the lake: whether she smiled or frowned on her devotee, he worshipped ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... a clever fellow a very clever fellow in the eyes of his father. Bernard Amedroz knew that he himself was not a clever fellow, and admired his son accordingly; and when Charles had been expelled from Harrow for some boyish freak in his vengeance against a neighbouring farmer, who had reported to the school authorities the doings of a few beagles upon his land, Charles had cut off the heads of all the trees in a young fir plantation his father ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... away, heard every word he said and heard the music of the phonograph too. A ship two thousand miles out on the Atlantic heard the same record, and so did another ship in a harbor in Central America. Of course, the paper said, that was only a freak, and amateur sets couldn't do that once in a million times. But it did it that time, all right. I tell you, fellows, that wireless telephone is a wonder. Talk about the stories of the Arabian Nights! They ...
— The Radio Boys' First Wireless - Or Winning the Ferberton Prize • Allen Chapman
... woman who crosses their path. Why should not a woman go to the City? She has as much right there as man, and yet if she is in the least degree superior to the flower girls (?) who surround the Royal Exchange, she is looked on as a freak of nature, a positive curiosity, and is followed by every pair of male eyes ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren
... strange freak Ashmole MS. writes Guesse, and the Museum MS. Ghesse; but the emendation Kiss (adopted both by Dr. Grosart and Mr. ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... Through a queer freak of fate, Thad Brewster and his comrades of the Silver Fox Patrol find themselves in somewhat the same predicament that confronted dear old Robinson Crusoe; only it is on the Great Lakes that they are wrecked instead of the salty sea. ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... willingness under easy conditions to hallmark and incorporate it as one of the elements of the new ordering. From the crimes laid to its charge they were prepared to make abstraction. The barbarous methods to which it owed its very existence they were willing to consign to oblivion. And it was only a freak of circumstance that hindered this embodiment of despotism from beginning one of their accepted means of rendering the world ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... some fatal freak of fortuity these were acting under late telegraphic advice from London, Lanyard held himself well in hand: the first sign of intent to hinder him would prove the signal for a spectacular demonstration of the ungentle art of ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... quarter of a century, the writing of many books, and the building up of a justly great and world-wide reputation between the two writings) strikes me as a singular, and, in a way, pleasing literary coincidence; singular, as a freak of subconscious memory for words, pleasing, as a verification in mature life of the writer's comparatively youthful observations of natural phenomena. I wonder if the author, or any others among his almost innumerable readers, ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... can bloom in northern New England, why should not a poet or a painter come to his full growth here just as well? Yes, but if the gorgeous tree-flower is rare, and only as if by a freak of Nature springs up in a single spot among the beeches and alders, is there not as much reason to think the perfumed flower of imaginative genius will find it hard to be born and harder to spread its leaves in the clear, cold atmosphere of our ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... what I took to be the rail, breathed, and breathed the sweet air again. I tried to rise, but struck my head and was knocked back on hands and knees. By some freak of the waters I had been swept clear under the forecastle-head and into the eyes. As I scrambled out on all fours, I passed over the body of Thomas Mugridge, who lay in a groaning heap. There was no time to investigate. I must ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... freak of memory, it all came back to him through the dream-inducing haze of tobacco smoke. And there, on his writing-table, stood a full-length photograph of Lance in Punjab cavalry uniform. Soldiering on the Indian Border, fulfilling himself ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... does Love speak? By the uneven heart-throbs, and the freak Of bounding pulses that stand still and ache, While new emotions, like strange barges, make Along vein-channels their disturbing course; Still as the dawn, and with the dawn's swift ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... fictitious one, a freak of disordered nerves or imagination, but sane and actual, both brother and sister could convincingly have affirmed. And this although time—as time is usually figured—had neither lot nor part in it. Such projections of personality are best comparable, in this respect, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... ascertain the cause of the disturbance. The sentry told them excitedly the charge upon which I had been arrested, at which the men turned to blink wonderingly upon the "Englandische Spion!" I was not sorry when they at last wearied of gazing upon me as if I were a freak side-show, and sank down to finish their two hours' rest before going on guard ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... ball of the yellow-white sun ahead and wondered that such a relatively stable, inactive star could have produced such a tremendously energetic plasmoid that it could still do the damage it had done so far out. It had been a freak, of course. Such suns as this did not normally produce such ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... was a great poet who sometimes nodded. . . . Coleridge was a muddle-brained metaphysician who, by some strange freak of fortune, turned out a few real poems amongst the dreary flood of inanity which was his wont. . . . I have been through the poems, and find that the only ones which have any interest for me are: (1) 'Ancient Mariner'; (2) 'Christabel'; (3) 'Kubla Khan'; and (4) ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... house gable could see that the innocent had climbed to the top of the peat-stack in some elvish freak, and sat there cracking his thumbs and ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... back upon each other for that transgression as they ever come to anything definite. The girl is the offspring of a stupid surf-man and a nondescript sort of woman. She is not the product of any known better stock; she is, well, a freak of nature! You cannot transplant that kind of flower, Dick. The roots are hid in shallow soil of a peculiar kind. If you planted her in, well, in even your artistic world, she would either die, shrivel up, and be finished, or ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... butting in for, anyhow?" said Creviss angrily. "Can't this freak that comes here in a dress suit and tries to lord it over us take care ...
— Ted Strong's Motor Car • Edward C. Taylor
... I am—heaven help me!" Nick broke out, tossing his hat down on his little tin table with vehemence. "I'm a freak of nature and a sport of the mocking gods. Why should they go out of their way to worry me? Why should they do everything so inconsequent, so improbable, so preposterous? It's the vulgarest practical joke. ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... believe anything queer is going to result? You don't suppose she has anything to do with this extraordinary freak of yours?" ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... or female—an elderly "party," so to speak, who begins to find out that some young wag of the company is "chaffing" him? Have you ever tried the sarcastic or Socratic method with a child? Little simple he or she, in the innocence of the simple heart, plays some silly freak, or makes some absurd remark, which you turn to ridicule. The little creature dimly perceives that you are making fun of him, writhes, blushes, grows uneasy, bursts into tears,—upon my word it is not fair to try the weapon of ridicule upon that innocent young ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 'keep it up' in earnest, upon my word; and very becoming it is, dear. But won't you ruin your complexion and roughen your hands if you do so much of this new fancy-work?" asked Emily, much amazed at this novel freak. ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... and congratulate himself when the clown becomes shameless right before him, or the scientific satyr speaks out. There are even cases where enchantment mixes with the disgust—namely, where by a freak of nature, genius is bound to some such indiscreet billy-goat and ape, as in the case of the Abbe Galiani, the profoundest, acutest, and perhaps also filthiest man of his century—he was far profounder than Voltaire, and consequently also, a good deal more silent. ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... acknowledging, however, that we were not practical in our use of them, and kept them for political purposes often to the perversion of our social laws and their natural dispositions. He spoke of his son's freak in joining the Navy. 'That was the princess's doing,' said Temple. 'She talked of our naval heroes, till she made me feel I had only to wear the anchor buttons to be one myself. Don't tell her I was invalided from the service, Richie, for the truth ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... anywhere could have worked out that table!" he said stridently. "Nobody! Morgan said you'd appreciate my work! He said you needed my talent! But what good do you see in it? You think I'm a freak!" ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... Al-Maamun's Wazirs. The Caliph married his daughter whose true name was Buran; but this tale of girl's freak and courtship was invented (?) by Ishak. For the splendour of the wedding and the munificence of the Minister ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... light up his park for his own solitary delectation and on one occasion ordered a sumptuous entertainment there, in which he alone took part. This rustic Sardanapalus returned from Italy so passionately charmed with the scenery of that beautiful country that, by a sudden freak of enthusiasm, he spent four or five millions in order to represent in his park the scenes of which he had pictures in his portfolio. The most charming contrasts of foliage, the rarest trees, long valleys, and prospects ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... in this crusade I was called crazy and a "freak" by my enemies, but now they say: "No, Carry Nation, you are not crazy, but you are sharp. You started out to accomplish something and you did. You are a grafter. It is the money you are after." Jesus said: "John came neither eating or drinking ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... "But her greatest freak was seen when th' Assizes came. Sir, she wouldn' even go to the trial. She disdained it. An' when, that mornin', the judges had driven by her window, same as they drove to-day, ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... flake fleck flick cake sock deck meek flock pack yoke slick shock poke track hack dock snake neck stuck clack sleek strike crack freak pluck truck stroke brake drake shake black struck sneak spoke tweak broke ...
— The Beacon Second Reader • James H. Fassett
... a freak of temper, and she chose to be self-willed about it. I hope she will show herself penitent to Sinclair; she can turn him around her little finger if she likes; but sometimes she prefers to quarrel with him. I really think Edna enjoys a regular flare up," finished Richard, laughing. "She says a good ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... all of them. Ascending a sloping, ancient path that was never precipitous, they came to the place, a flat tableland that perhaps measured an acre and a half, which by some freak of nature had been scooped out of the side of the koppie, and was backed by a precipitous cliff in which were caves. The front part of this plateau, that which approached to and overhung the river, was of virgin rock, but the acre or so behind was filled with very rich soil that in the course ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... childhood in the expert use of safes and strong-boxes. My other papers the world can read if it choose to waste its time; at any rate, I am not going to lock them up and have the worry of a key preying on my mind. I should only lose it as I lost the other one. Now, by a freak of fortune, the key of Jaffery's flat remained in the suit-case wherein I had flung it at Havre, until it was fished out by Franklin on my ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... comforted him. And Blair, taking the white, maternal hand in both of his, looked at her speechlessly; his chin trembled. Instantly, without words of shame on one side or of forgiveness on the other, they were back again, these two, in the old friendship of youth and middle age. "It was a freak," said Mrs. Richie, soothingly. "She is probably at the hotel by this time. Don't be troubled, Blair. Go and see. If she isn't at the hotel let me ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... Quatermain. I had that foolish fancy, a lover's freak, I suppose. When we married the curtain was removed although the brass rod on which it hung was left by some oversight. On my return to England after my loss, however, I found that I could not bear to look upon ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... carnival of 1775, where he dressed himself up as Apollo, and recited at the public ball at the theatre a masquerade he had composed on the subject of love, twanging a guitar vigorously all the time. He was afterwards heartily ashamed of this freak, which he wonders he could ever have been guilty of. An ardent desire for glory now seized him, and after some months spent in constant poetical studies, and in fingering grammars and dictionaries, he succeeded in producing ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... supplied the Orchardina library with a special bibliography on the subject, and induced the new Woman's Club to take up a course of reading in it, so that there gradually filtered into the Orchardina mind a faint perception that this was not the freak of an eccentric individual, but part of an inevitable business development, going on in various ways in ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... "This is an odd freak of nature," remarked Josie, gazing at the waste with a puzzled expression. "It is easy to understand why Mr. Cragg hasn't sold this lot, as he did all his other land. No ...
— Mary Louise in the Country • L. Frank Baum (AKA Edith Van Dyne)
... fifty dollars as well as the map-makers, and this gave the young man practice. Hope, kindled into such a flame, led the young man in a march of improvement that even continued in his dreams, for he often dreamed out some combination of colors, some freak of lettering, that elicited everybody's admiration. ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... however, almost worth while to go through the freak-splendours and transformation-scene excitements of Fortunio to prepare the palate[212] to enjoy La Toison d'Or which follows. Here is once more the true Gautieresque humour, good humour, marvellous word-painting, and romance, agreeably—indeed ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... that she was not carrying her audience with her, and longing for the time when she could take her letter away and have it all to herself. If she stopped now, Christine, in this sudden new freak of distrustfulness, ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... such monstrous perjuries and cruelties that the reader ought to be warned not to think of him as a saturnine and Machiavellian Italian. He was a son of the Bourbon Charles III. of Spain. His character was that of a jovial, rather stupid farmer, whom a freak of fortune had made a king from infancy. A sort of grotesque comic element runs through his life, and through every picture drawn by persons in actual intercourse with him. The following, from one of Bentinck's despatches ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... as a yoke"—(that of the Italian Renaissance) "because no living generative force was there to throw it off—with results too often dreary beyond measure; and, finally, we shall meet this strange freak of nature, a soil without artistic initiative bringing forth the greatest initiator—observe, I do not say the greatest artist—the greatest initiator perhaps since Lionardo in modern art—except it be ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... hearing this. Two words from him would have wrecked the house of cards. Instead, he blushed and smiled modestly. Slowly it was filtering into his brain that by some unusual, unexpected, unprecedented freak of fortune his difficulties had been overcome; that some way or other he had proposed and had ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various
... I saw and heard, was, that, the artist, by some unaccountable freak of fate, or perhaps in some fit of enthusiastic and fanciful passion, had been induced to unite himself with a person altogether beneath him, and that the natural result, entire and speedy disgust, had ensued. I pitied him from the bottom ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... [FN240] This freak is of course not historical. The tale- teller introduces it to enhance the grandeur and majesty of Harun al-Rashid, and the vulgar would regard it as a right kingly diversion. Westerns only wonder that such things ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... away from his native Alabama, that he has had but the most limited advantages of education, and that he has shared the portion of his race in hardship, poverty and toil. He does not know why he wrote these poems. It is an amazing thing that he should have done so—a freak, we may call it, of the wind of genius, which bloweth where it listeth and singles out one in ten thousand to find a fitting speech for the dumb thought and ...
— Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt • William James Edwards
... it is doubtful if he felt it acutely. Nature was gradually dulling his sensibilities with that wonderful anaesthetic of hers, which is so much kinder to the patient than it is to his watching friends. After the first wild freak of selling the house, he showed, for a long time, no marked signs of mental impairment, beyond his lack of interest in the things which he had once cared about—even in the growth of the city he loved. And in a lonely and unoccupied man, sixty-five ...
— The Story of a New York House • Henry Cuyler Bunner
... and unreasonable freak, which, I must say, I do not approve of. There are plenty of nurses to be hired, who have more experience, and are every way far more suitable ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... "an old-fashioned child!" My mother's oft and resigned ejaculation—"What next, I wonder!" was to my ears a covert reproach for not being "steady" and "a comfort," like Mary 'Liza. Even my less critical father's shout of laughter at any unusual freak or experiment abraded my moral cuticle sometimes. At home the colored children would have entered heartily into my mortuary enterprise,—yes! and kept my counsel. The reticence of the serf exceeds in dumb doggedness that of a ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... came to his call. Some freak of the moonlight still kept the shadowy head in view, while its owner remained completely hidden, unconscious, perhaps, that any part of his reflection was showing. Ned did not know what to do. After waiting a long time, and, ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... around for a few moments in a state of great nervous agitation, upsetting dishes, knocking down plates, and huddling up contrary suggestions as to what ought to be done first, in such impossible relations that Mrs. Katy Scudder stood in dignified surprise at this strange freak of conduct in the wise woman of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... chair at the edge of the ring Hedwig's lady in waiting sat resignedly. She was an elderly woman, and did not ride. Just now she was absorbed in wondering what would happen to her when the Archduchess discovered this new freak of Hedwig's. Perhaps she would better ask permission to go into retreat for a time. The Archduchess, who had no religion herself, approved of it in others. She took a soft rubber from her pocket, and tried to erase a spot from her white ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... will! I believe you've hit on the very best possible solution of our difficulty. The episcopal palace at Blanford is absolutely the last place in the world where any one would think of looking for a political conspirator, and, by some freak of fortune, the police are entirely ignorant that I'm in any way connected with ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... dare say he's more fool than knave!" said Michele. "Anyhow, the people are mad after him, and the last new freak is for the pilgrims to go round that way to ask his blessing. Domenichino thought of going as a pedlar, with a basket of cheap crosses and rosaries. The people like to buy those things and ask the Cardinal to touch them; then they put them round their ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... I should make fun of anything that I have seen in this country!" replied the Hunter. "I now rejoice that a mad freak brought me here to these woods and fields, for otherwise I should probably never have learned to know the region; for it has very little reputation abroad, and there is, in fact, nothing here to attract exhausted and surfeited ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... appearance, calm and cold, reacted on Madame Grandet; she looked at her daughter with the sympathetic intuition with which mothers are gifted for the objects of their tenderness, and guessed all. In truth the life of the Hungarian sisters, bound together by a freak of nature, could scarcely have been more intimate than that of Eugenie and her mother,—always together in the embrasure of that window, and sleeping ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... you all these details, to you so paltry, and try to describe the vision of green with which my prophetic gaze clothes this bare rock—on which top some freak of nature has set up a magnificent parasol pine—it is because in all this I have found an ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... with me and try to convince me of the error and enormity of being a Protestant!!! I promised faithfully to go. Of course, however, the adventure stops there, and I hope I shall never see the priest again. I think you had better not tell papa of this. He will not understand that it was only a freak, and will perhaps think I am going to turn Catholic. Trusting that you and papa are well, and also Tabby and the Holyes, and hoping you will write to me ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... though they were to great goodness of heart and many sterling qualities, did not appear very pleasing to the stiff, etiquette-loving fine lady, and it was without any great surprise that we heard, some time afterwards, of the marriage being broken off, in consequence, it was said, of some wild freak of Doughby's. We were asking one another for the particulars of this rupture, which neither of us had heard, when the Kentuckian made his reappearance in the cabin. He had changed his dress, and, taking him altogether, was by ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... aware. Among the true were some vainglorious fools Called by the fife and drum from native mire To lord and strut in shoulder-straps and buttons. Scrubs, born to brush the boots of gentlemen, By sudden freak of fortune found themselves Masters of better men, and lorded it As only base and brutish natures can— Braves on ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... of this adventure as a most remarkable answer to prayer. He had prayed for Suleiman before starting, and had also asked for guidance for himself, and God heard him. It has sometimes been represented as a mad freak on Gordon's part to put himself into the lion's den in this way, but it was nothing of the kind. Suleiman was in revolt, supported by a splendid army. Gordon was absolutely at his mercy, for he could not rely on his troops. It was only Gordon's daring courage that intimidated Suleiman, and ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... good; but those special types of news, those little hobbies for which individual papers have characteristic weaknesses, one can learn only by studying the columns of the paper for which one corresponds. Some newspapers make specialties of freak news, such as odd actions of lightning, three-legged chickens, etc. Others will not consider such stories. One daily in America wants a bulletin of every death or injury resulting from celebrations of the Fourth of July. Another in a Middle Western state wants ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... Dismal Swamp that Lake Drummond was discovered, by whom I do not know, but is said to have been found by a man named Drummond, whose name it bears; that will make no difference with me, the question is, how came it there? Was it a freak of nature, or was it caused by warring of the elements, is a question for the consideration of those who visit it? That it was the effect of fire caused by lightning setting fire to the turf, or some dead tree, there can be no doubt. At what time in the Christian era this eventful period ...
— The Dismal Swamp and Lake Drummond, Early recollections - Vivid portrayal of Amusing Scenes • Robert Arnold
... Besancon?" asked pretty Madame de Chavoncourt. "Could no one tell him how little chance a stranger has of succeeding here? The good folks of Besancon will make use of him, but they will not allow him to make use of them. Why, having come, did he make so little effort that it needed a freak of the President's to ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... anything queer is going to result? You don't suppose she has anything to do with this extraordinary freak of yours?" ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... the dominant race of Pellucidar. By a strange freak of evolution her kind had first developed the power of reason in ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Varley usually got fair prices for his pictures, but the expenses of a numerous family kept him miserably poor. Then he took to "judicial astrology," and eventually made it a kind of second profession. Curious to say, some of his predictions came true, and thanks to this freak of fate he obtained more fame from his horoscopes than from his canvasses. He "prognosticated," says Burton, "that I was to become a great astrologer." Straightway Burton buried himself in astrological and cabalistic books [56], studied the uncanny arts, and became learned ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... that they have done us. Does not such an agreement subsist between a man and his monkey or his parrot?... If you take a young provincial to the menagerie at Versailles, and he takes it into his head for a freak to push his hands between the bars of the cage of the tiger or the panther, whose fault is it? It is all written in the silent compact, and so much the worse for the man who forgets or ignores it. How I could ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... much disposed to laugh at this freak of the old man's fancy, but to her surprise Humfrey coloured up, and looked so much out of countenance that a question darted through her mind whether he could have any such step in contemplation, and she began to review the young ladies of the ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... beautiful snow, Filling the sky and the earth below! Over the house-tops, over the street, Over the heads of the people you meet, Dancing, Flirting, Skimming along. Beautiful snow! it can do nothing wrong. Flying to kiss a fair lady's cheek; Clinging to lips in a frolicsome freak; Beautiful snow, from the heavens above, Pure as an angel ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... very pleasing to the stiff, etiquette-loving fine lady, and it was without any great surprise that we heard, some time afterwards, of the marriage being broken off, in consequence, it was said, of some wild freak of Doughby's. We were asking one another for the particulars of this rupture, which neither of us had heard, when the Kentuckian made his reappearance in the cabin. He had changed his dress, and, taking him altogether, was by ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... "A freak cannon-ball, made at the Forge and Manor of Greenwood, Virginia, 1778. Presented in 1889 to Lord Roberts by General George Bolling Anderson, Governor of the State ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... have hitherto obtained, but, as we have explained, a study is not complete if it confine itself to these two answers. When we know the law and the cause of an object submitted to our study, we further look for the end designed. This is no freak of our fancy, but the direct result of the constitution of our understanding. The universe is the creation of God. What is the design of the creation? I answer: the design of the creation is the happiness of spirits. Nature is made for the spiritual beings to which it offers the condition ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... is sleeping! Is it but a freak of the lamplight, or is there a smile upon his lips? Eustace takes the lamp and bends over him to see; and as he bends he hears Frank whispering in his dreams his mother's name, and a name ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... mind. In short, to speak plainly, he was mad, and deserved a strait-waistcoat as richly as any straw-crowned monarch in Bedlam. A single instance, in my opinion, fully substantiates this. I allude to his absurd freak at Frederickshall, when, in order to discover how long he could exist without nourishment, he abstained from all kinds of food for more than seventy hours! Now, would any man in his senses have done this? Would ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 290 - Volume X. No. 290. Saturday, December 29, 1827. • Various
... tough game, anyway you play it, if you are disposed to be fat. No man living, who isn't a freak, can persist always in one diet. Nor can any man who has anything else on his mind be always exercising—especially after he has reached forty years of age, when there are so many better things ...
— The Fun of Getting Thin • Samuel G. Blythe
... to tell that one evening, a great many years ago, when Dr. Hugh Blair and I were sitting together in the pit of Drury-lane play-house, in a wild freak of youthful extravagance, I entertained the audience prodigiously[1095], by imitating the lowing of a cow. A little while after I had told this story, I differed from Dr. Johnson, I suppose too confidently, upon some ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... certain sort of pedagogue sometimes throws off, for the consolation of a recently-caned boy; and that Sterne's vanity, either then or afterwards (for it remained juvenile all his life), translated it into a serious prophecy. In itself, however, the urchin's freak was only too unhappily characteristic of the man. The trick of befouling what was clean (and because it was clean) clung to him most tenaciously all his days; and many a fair white surface—of humour, of fancy, or of sentiment—was ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... you promise me, upon your honor, that when this freak of yours is over, and the bug business (good God!) settled to your satisfaction, you will then return home and follow my advice implicitly, as that of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... smoke. Crawling up from the deck, sheltered from the wind by the mast, by some freak it took form and visibility at that height. It writhed away from the mast, and for a moment overhung the captain like some threatening portent. The next moment the wind whisked it away, and the captain's jaw returned ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... welfare of the empire of which they are the guardians. But if, from whatever cause, they are unwilling to recall the noble lord, then I implore them to take care that he be immediately ordered to return to Calcutta. Who can say what new freak we may hear of by the next mail? I am quite confident that neither the Court of Directors nor Her Majesty's Ministers can look forward to the arrival of that mail without great uneasiness. Therefore I say, send Lord Ellenborough back to Calcutta. There at ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... despair about his mistress, who has taken a freak of——. He began a letter to her, but was obliged to stop short—I finished it for him, and he copied and sent it. If he holds out, and keeps to my instructions of affected indifference, she will lower her colours. If she don't, he will, at least, get rid of her, and she don't seem much worth keeping. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... now—indeed, could hardly be persuaded to go; and she bore her aunt's putting a stop to her weekly lesson in fine-work at the Chase without the least grumbling or pouting. It must be, after all, that she had set her heart on Adam at last, and her sudden freak of wanting to be a lady's maid must have been caused by some little pique or misunderstanding between them, which had passed by. For whenever Adam came to the Hall Farm, Hetty seemed to be in better spirits ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... a voice called out, "Of course his bills are worth four hundred pounds; but, my good sir, four hundred pounds to a man in my position is not worth the getting. Why, I've given four hundred pounds for a freak of my girl Sarah! Is it right, eh, Jezebel? She's a good girl, though, as girls go. Mrs. Lionel Crofton, of the Crofts, Sevenoaks, ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... there was a scrubby growth of weeds or lichen upon it, which against the sun looked for all the world like the wool on a colossal negro's head. It certainly was very odd; so odd that now I believe it is not a mere freak of nature but a gigantic monument fashioned, like the well-known Egyptian Sphinx, by a forgotten people out of a pile of rock that lent itself to their design, perhaps as an emblem of warning and defiance to any enemies ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... fleck flick cake sock deck meek flock pack yoke slick shock poke track hack dock snake neck stuck clack sleek strike crack freak pluck truck stroke brake drake shake black struck sneak spoke tweak ...
— The Beacon Second Reader • James H. Fassett
... in the rock. Inside of this spiral staircase, instead of concentric circles which twist around with each complete turn, the involutions become wider as they proceed, in such a way that the bottom of the pit is three times as large as the opening. Is it an architectural freak, or did some reasonable cause determine such an odd construction? It matters little to us. The result was to cause in the cistern that vague reverberation which anyone may hear upon placing a shell at his ear, and to make you aware of steps on the gravel path, murmurs ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... it enlarged into a lofty, spacious room remarkable for nothing except being of an extraordinary size, and faintly lighted by an opening in the top which permitted a few rays of light to penetrate and soften the gloom below. This part of the cavern was evidently a natural freak of nature, for they found no traces of hewn rock or precious ore. From the opposite side of the cavern they found a low opening which, on entering, they gradually descended winding round in a curve, the passage enlarging ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... she said it, Pearl laughed, and began to dance up and down, with the humorsome gesticulation of a little imp, whose next freak might be to fly ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... man, his soul, his life, everything. Well, in the old days thoughts and ideas commenced to make themselves felt in me, to crop up in my work. I would start on a picture with a clear settled design; when it was finished, I would notice that by some unconscious freak I had introduced a figure, an arabesque, always something which made the whole incongruous and bizarre. I discovered the cause during the week after I received your last letter. The thoughts, the ideas were yours; better than ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... tops of embankments, and on the rafters or beams of old buildings. The nests are made of mud, moss and grass, lined with feathers. The four or five eggs measure .75 x .55. Occasionally, eggs will be found that have a few minute spots of reddish brown. Freak situations in which to locate their nests are often chosen by these birds, such as the brake beam of a freight car, in the crevices of old wells, hen houses, etc. The birds are one of the most useful that we have; being very active and continually on the alert for insects ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... dear, no; whoever said there was? By the way, is not this freak of yours of going out into the roads to smoke, as you say, alone, rather a slight on your guest? Here is Mr. Wilde; how very amusing! we all seem to be drawn out towards ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... the comfortably-upholstered bench on the dais of the Audience Hall, didn't look particularly regal. But then, to a Terran, any of the kings of Ullr would have looked like a freak birth in a lizard-house at a zoo; it was hard to guess what impression Harrington would make ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... river-man, Iberville himself, with others, rowed the subaltern back almost to the side of the admiral's ship, for by the freak of some peasants the boat which had brought him had been set adrift. As they rowed from the ship back towards the shore, Iberville, looking up, saw, standing on the deck, Phips and George Gering. He had come for ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... by the rest of the herd. Another moment and they would have plunged into the open gate, when suddenly they wheeled round, re-entered the forest, and in spite of the hunters resumed their original position. The chief headman came forward and accounted for the freak by saying that a wild pig[1], an animal which the elephants are said to dislike, had started out of the cover and run across the leader, who would otherwise have held on direct for the corral; and intimated that as the herd was now ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... semicircular canals of the ear well developed. It has a strong tendency to waltz round and round in circles without sufficient cause and to trip sideways towards its dormitory instead of proceeding in the orthodox head-on fashion. But this freak is a very educable creature, as Professor Yerkes has shown. In a careful way he confronted his mouse-pupil with alternative pathways marked by different degrees of illumination, or by different colours. If the mouse chose compartment A, it found a clear passage direct to its nest; if it chose ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... is a good boy and a quiet one; given to mischief like other boys of his age, doubtless, but always amenable. What can have possessed him to behave in such a wild manner I cannot conceive, but it seems to me that it was but a boy's freak." ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... in his. As he took it, by a curious freak of his brain, there flashed into his mind the memory of the day when, by the side of this fragile white little hand lying in his, Hetty, laughingly, had placed her own, broad and firm and brown. The thought of that ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... It seemed a wondrous freak of chance, so perfect, yet so rough, A whim of Nature crystallized slowly in granite tough; The thick spires yearned towards the sky in quaint harmonious lines, And in broad sunlight basked and slept, like ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... Remember the difficulty you had in extorting from me what was supposed to be the truth, remember the threats which made me compliant. I am a victim of circumstances. Whatever I confessed is false. No man of sense can discover the stamp of probability in my statements. In a freak of desperation I bore false witness. Tell my father that his cruelty is more sure to rob him of his daughter than her seeming transgression. Already I know not what I should believe, the past escapes my memory, my confidence begins to totter. If it is too much to ask for justice, then I beg for mercy. ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... Boulanger when he was a political recluse in Jersey; and one afternoon he drove me to the charming villa the General had occupied, situated in an ideal spot on the coast. The villa was most solidly built, and of picturesque architecture—the freak of a rich Parisian merchant, who had spared no pains or money over it. The work both inside and out was that of the best artists Paris could supply. It was magnificently furnished—a museum of beautiful objects, ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... scientist and profound scholar—had a queer little place at the edge of the town where he raised wonderful bees, and grew freak squashes inside glass molds in every ...
— Bart Stirling's Road to Success - Or; The Young Express Agent • Allen Chapman
... he turned on his radio and cried for help. It was a bare hundred miles or less to that wonderful world below, but there was the Heaviside layer, and the weak signals beat but feebly against it. All that seeped through by some instant's freak of transmission was a fragment of incoherent babble to reach the uncomprehending ear of an Arkansas ham and give that gentleman uneasy sleep for some ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... star! I never saw it lovelier than now It rises for the last time. If it sets, 'Tis that the re-assuring sun may dawn. [As he prepares to ascend the last tree of the avenue, TRESHAM arrests his arm.] Unhand me—peasant, by your grasp! Here's gold. 'Twas a mad freak of mine. I said I'd pluck A branch from the white-blossomed shrub beneath The casement there. Take this, and hold ...
— A Blot In The 'Scutcheon • Robert Browning
... banged, reloaded, banged again, reloaded and banged yet again. I took up a stick and presented it—bang! With amazing verisimilitude Beppo rolled over—shot through the heart. Really, for a moment I had a mad apprehension that in some occult way, some freak of hypnotic suggestion, I had actually wrought the child harm. I stood there breathlessly triumphant and wondering whether it was now my business to rush in and scalp the defenceless prisoners. I became aware of a head and ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... bookman's trivial adventures and discoveries. They would be worse than trivial indeed if they led him to forget or ignore that by which Goldsmith earned his immortality, or to regard Traherne merely as a freak in the history of literary reputations, and not primarily as the writer of such words ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... in the commons. Richmond again became master of the ordnance and a little later re-entered the cabinet. Dundas was treasurer of the navy. Pitt's acceptance of office was regarded by the opposition as a "boyish freak"; his ministry was "a mince-pie administration which would ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... rascallion, That old Pyg — (what d'y' call him) malion, That cut his mistress out of stone, Had not so hard a-hearted one. 330 She had a thousand jadish tricks, Worse than a mule that flings and kicks; 'Mong which one cross-grain'd freak she had, As insolent as strange and mad; She could love none, but only such 335 As scorn'd and hated her as much. 'Twas a strange riddle of a lady: Not love, if any lov'd her! Hey dey! So cowards never use their might, But against such as will not fight; 340 So some diseases ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... and by that time had made sufficient progress in their simple movements to begin to feel that there was after all something more in it than they had fancied. For the first hour it had seemed to them a sort of joke—a mere freak on the part of their young chief; but they were themselves surprised to find by the end of the day how rapidly they were able to change from their rank two deep into the solid formation, and how their spears rose and fell together at the order. Beric bade them ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... partnership full of perplexity to the working member of it, the ordinary forensic creature of senses, passions, ambitions, and self-indulgences, the eating, sleeping, vainglorious, assertive male of common experience—and it is not to be denied that it has been fruitful, nor again that by some freak of fate or fortune the house has kept a decent front to the world at large. It is still solvent, still favourably regarded by the police. It is not, it never will be, a mere cage of demons; its walls have not been fretted to transparency; no passing eye can detect revelry behind its decent stucco; ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... deep creases between his eyebrows, and put back his saddle. "You can do as yuh like," he said, coldly. "I'm going to stay and go to meeting this afternoon, according to her invite. If it's going to make that poor old freak feel any better thinking she's a real missionary—" He turned and walked out of the stable without finishing the sentence, and the Happy Family stood quite ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... some definite object in view," said Harley, "or it may have been merely a freak of his client. Is there anything characteristic about ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... seen. "Then, Paddy," exclaimed Jack, clutching his rifle, "let us have a cruise on our own hook. You remember the prize you took among the Ionian Islands, old fellow?" How merrily they laughed at the recollection of that early freak of theirs. Paddy, of course, was delighted to join in any scheme of Jack's. They could not tell in which direction the frigate had gone. They, at a hazard, steered to the southward. They had a good ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... and that other, which, by some freak of Providence, has found its way to Philadelphia, have backgrounds which carry our imagination very far. Is this primordial ice, with its livid steel-blue shadows, the stuff out of which the gods make other planets than ours—dead planets, ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... hermitage of Arishtanemi, son of Kasyapa. And saluting that great Muni, so constant in austerity, they all remained standing, while the Muni, on his part, busied himself about their reception. And they said unto the illustrious Muni, "By a freak of destiny, we have ceased to merit thy welcome: indeed, we have killed a Brahmana!" And the regenerate Rishi said to them, "How hath a Brahmana come to be killed by you, and say where may be he? Do ye all witness the power of my ascetic practices!" And they, having ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... in women's clothes, as well as in men's. But fashion changes too rapidly to make value of material always wise expenditure for one of slender purse. Better usually have two dresses, each cut and made in the whim of the moment, than one which must be worn after the whim has become a freak. In men's clothes the opposite rule should be followed since good style ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... the events that led up to Raleigh's Virginia patent may not be out of place in a bibliographical Life of Hariot. The patent was no sudden freak of fortune but was the natural outgrowth of stirring events. Had it not been allotted to Raleigh it would doubtless soon after have fallen to some other promoter. But Raleigh was the Devonshire war-horse ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... where the spoils party had been particularly busy; and though the Company Officer was full six foot, he could only just see over the top; as a fire step it was useless to any one but a giant from a freak show. ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... me they do," he replied, "but the more he says it the less I believe him. Miss Flora, the fate of all my uncle holds dear is hanging by a thread, a spider's web, a young girl's freak! If ever she gives him a certain turn of the hand, the right glance of her eye, he'll be at her feet and every hope ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... perceive thou knowest me not. You and I were rivals in our pursuit—the hand of Melissa. Whether from freak or fortune, the preference was given to you, and I retired in silence. From coincidence of circumstances, her father has now been induced to give the preference to me. My belief was, that Melissa would ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... church was laid low. In the roof two thin arches of the groining remain, marvellously. One remembers this freak of balance—and a few poor flowers on the altar. Mass is celebrated in that church every Sunday morning. We spoke with the cure, an extremely emaciated priest of middle age; he wore the Legion of Honour. We took to the trenches again, having in ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett
... you do not know. Now listen. You have to make, within the next few minutes, a great decision. Very likely, after you have chosen, you will curse me all your days. It was a freak of fate which brought us together. But I must say this. You are the sort of man whom I would have chosen, if any measure of choice had fallen to my lot. And yet," he looked around, "I am almost afraid to speak now that I have ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... thought, a petty pique, Enwraps in gloom, or bursts in storm; She questions all that love may speak, And weighs its tone, and marks its form, Or yields her frailty to a freak ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... giant coal scuttle, sir," said Carrick the trite. The description was apt, for the freak of nature which confronted them. Towering high above its neighbors this mountain was unusual. Some outraged Titan in his ire had, in some long-forgotten aeon, apparently seized and turned upon its head the top-heavy crest, whose form roughly speaking was of a reversed ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... A freak of fancy set him wondering where and when in the future a beautiful girl with red hair might march along some splendid aisle. Never mind! He became aware ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... release a story saying the baby was a freak. The kid was born at home, you see. The only other person who saw her, besides me and my wife, was this doctor we had. And he died a couple of ...
— Get Out of Our Skies! • E. K. Jarvis
... McClellan replied: 'Why, Mr. President, according to Military Science it is our duty to guard against every possible or supposable contingency that may arise. For example, if under any circumstances, however fortuitous, the Enemy, by any chance or freak, should, in a last resort, get in behind Washington, in his efforts to capture the city, why, there the fort is to ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... the operator, a capable and long-suffering young woman, came over to complain to the doctor that she really found it impossible to carry out the duties of her office, if the feeble-minded Delilah Freak was to be incarcerated only six inches distant from her ear. It seems that Delilah spends her days yelling at the top of her lungs, and Miss Dennis states that she prefers to take telegraphic messages down in competition with the mail steamer's ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... at that old picture; got up, as you say, on a chair to do so. Wasn't that the freak of an idle man, wandering, he hardly knows why, from room to room in ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... occurrences are registered—there is a kind of "wild justice" even in smoking-room disclosures. But whatever our bad or good fortune may have been, it is not to be supposed for a moment that any of us enjoy such an enchanting revelation as comes to a young girl who, by nature's kind freak, has been made beautiful. Daisy Medland was radiant as she turned from Norburn's pale thoughtful face and careless garb to Dick Derosne, the outward perfection of a well-born, well-made, well-dressed Englishman, bowing, smiling, and debonair. Daisy liked Norburn very much—how ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... the name indicates, consists of two sets of planes, one above the other. There are some triplanes, but they have not been very successful, and there are some freak aeroplanes built with as ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis
... sympathy and help he gives folks. These crack specialists, the young scientific fellows, they're so cocksure and so wrapped up in their laboratories that they miss the human element. Except in the case of a few freak diseases that no respectable human being would waste his time having, it's the old doc that keeps a community well, mind and body. And strikes me that Will is one of the steadiest and clearest-headed counter practitioners ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... to stare at any woman who crosses their path. Why should not a woman go to the City? She has as much right there as man, and yet if she is in the least degree superior to the flower girls (?) who surround the Royal Exchange, she is looked on as a freak of nature, a positive curiosity, and is followed by every pair ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren
... of solicitors, Messrs. Freak and Able, had put in a defence on Bosinney's behalf. Admitting the facts, they raised a point on the correspondence which, divested of legal phraseology, amounted to this: To speak of 'a free hand in the terms of this correspondence' is ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... his mistake, was fain to make his retreat; but we would not hear tell of it, till he came in, and took a dram out of the bottle, as we told him the not doing so would spoil the wean's beauty, which is an old freak, (the small-pox, however, afterwards did that;) so, with much persuasion, he took a chair for a gliff, and began with some of his drolls—for he is a clever, humoursome man, as ye ever met with. But he had now ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... with another question. Why is a two-headed calf? And my own answer to this is that it is a freak. And so I answer your question. I have this other-personality and these complete racial memories because I am ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... not mean that we should adopt freak styles. There is no necessity for that Clothing need not be a bag with a hole cut in it. That might be easy to make but it would be inconvenient to wear. A blanket does not require much tailoring, but none of us could get much work done if we went around Indian-fashion ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... that I have, in the fourth chapter, by some odd cerebro-mechanical freak, substituted the name of my Aunt Martha for that of my Aunt Millicent, another sister of my father, whom he has not, I believe, had occasion to mention in either of his preceding books. My Aunt Martha is Mrs. Weir, and ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... himself at the controls. Max is a small dark man with angry eyes and the saddest mouth I've ever seen. He is also a fine pilot and magnificent bacteriologist. I wanted to slap him. I hate these professional British types that think a female biochemist is some sort of freak. ...
— Competition • James Causey
... returned to Val de Cire, and her husband, who had not expected her for some time, blamed her for a freak. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... for Warde Hollister I'd take him into my patrol. I've got every kind of a freak in there now except ...
— Roy Blakeley's Bee-line Hike • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... queer freak of fate, Thad Brewster and his comrades of the Silver Fox Patrol find themselves in somewhat the same predicament that confronted dear old Robinson Crusoe; only it is on the Great Lakes that they are wrecked instead of the salty sea. You will admit that those Cranford ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... by its fight with the crocodile; and coming straight from the encounter, had in some way connected the children with its conquered enemy. Murtagh's shout might have freshly incensed it; or, what to Saloo seemed more probable than all, the seizure of the child might be a wild freak suddenly striking the brain of ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... will you? You're a sport all right, Will, only it happens that your tastes run in a different direction from mine. Don't knock my love of fair play, and I won't laugh at your wanting to snap off every living thing you see, to make up a freak collection." ...
— The Outdoor Chums - The First Tour of the Rod, Gun and Camera Club • Captain Quincy Allen
... might be. And they soon after reached the hermitage of Arishtanemi, son of Kasyapa. And saluting that great Muni, so constant in austerity, they all remained standing, while the Muni, on his part, busied himself about their reception. And they said unto the illustrious Muni, 'By a freak of destiny, we have ceased to merit thy welcome: indeed, we have killed a Brahmana!' And the regenerate Rishi said to them, 'How hath a Brahmana come to be killed by you, and say where may be he? Do ye all witness the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... writes like one accustomed to good European society, who has read books and collected stores of information, other than could be perused or gathered in the places and amongst the rude associates he describes. These inconsistencies are glaring, and can hardly be explained. A wild freak or unfortunate act of folly, or a boyish thirst for adventure, sometimes drives lads of education to try life before the mast, but when suited for better things they seldom persevere; and Mr Melville does not seem to us the manner of man to rest long contented with the coarse company and humble ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... was wheeled out, and he was strapped, or harnessed, into his seat. "Was the machine a 'freak' monoplane?" we wondered. ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... I am a Spanish gentleman from Santiago, that you are an English friend of mine, and that we have for a freak come over here. I speak the Spanish language perfectly, of course, while you speak it with an English accent. Leave all to me. I'll ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... apartments. It was a painful and difficult business to ascend that thin and yielding ladder in such a confined space, but Racksole was managing it very nicely, and had nearly reached the top, when, by some untoward freak of chance, the ladder broke above his weight, and he slipped ignominiously down to the bottom of the wooden tube. Smothering an excusable curse, Racksole crouched, baffled. Then he saw that the force of ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... tribe, for it has no locomotion, stability, or endurance, neither goes to pasture, gives milk, chews the cud, nor performs any other function of the horned beast, but is a mere creation of the brain, begotten by a freak of the fancy and nourished by ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... or where the sovereign privilege is at least largely circumscribed by the parliamentary power. It is different in an Empire like Russia, with its murderous dynastic antecedents. There, the personal character of the princely personages is of the utmost importance; for a youthful freak or hideous trick may point to a coming horrible event. In olden times, previous to the Tatar dominion, Russia passed through the so-called Appanage Period of Separate Principalities, when the Empire was actually partitioned. The feuds which then tore the various branches of the Rurik ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... minutes a week! When Jerry's around. How on earth he puts up with her I can't understand. She follows him about like a little dog. Listens to him. Behaves herself. But the moment he's gone—Poof! back she goes to her old tricks. I tell you she's a freak!" and Alaric dismissed the matter, ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... the possession of a dog of doubtful ancestry and antecedents, but reputed to be intelligent. It was called "Little Willie" because of its marked tendency to the predatory habit. His other leading characteristic was an inordinate craving for Punter's "Freak" biscuits. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 15, 1919 • Various
... we attempted to climb to the mouth of the crater. The mountain sheered down at an angle of from seventy-five to eighty degrees, and its smooth, slippery sides afforded absolutely no foothold. Anything more barren than this rocky freak of nature it would be difficult to conceive. Only a few tufts of wild herbs were to be seen upon the whole island, and these seemed ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... Angelique!" Bigot thought she contemplated some idle freak that might try his gallantry, perhaps his purse. But she was in earnest, ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... beginnings that cannot be classed under any of the above heads. Some of them, much like the "freak" leads that may be seen in many newspapers of the present day, may be called free beginnings for want of a better name. These free beginnings are quite effective when properly handled but the novice must use them with fear and trembling. They may be witty or ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... tiny dwarf! Neither within nor without a freak exhibition had I seen so small a human being! A kind of supernatural dread gripped me by the throat at sight of it. As it turned with animal activity and bounded into my bathroom, I caught a three-quarter view of the creature's swollen, ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... saw that old Katchiba was in a great dilemma, and that he would give anything for a shower, but that lie did not know how to get out of the scrape. It was a common freak of the tribes to sacrifice the rain-maker should he be unsuccessful. He suddenly altered his tone, and asked, "Have you any rain in your country?" I replied that we had, every now and then. "How do you bring it? Are you a rain-maker?" I told him that no one believed in rain-makers in our country, ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... it was said, than the income of any other living man. In the next place he spent it very splendidly. There were no entertainments given in London during the years 1909, 1910, and 1911, equal in extravagance to those which Conroy gave. He outdid the "freak dinners" of New York. He invented freak dinners of his own. His horses—animals which he bought at enormous prices—won the great races. His yachts flew the white ensign of the Royal Yacht Squadron. His gifts to fashionable charities were princely. English society fell at his ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... before you a grinning gargoyle head, to which he will give in an instant more a pair of spider legs, and then, with one roll, stretch it out into a crocodile, whose jaws seem so near snapping that you involuntarily draw your chair further back. Next, in a freak of ventriloquism, he startles you still more by bringing from the crocodile's mouth a sigh, so long drawn, so human, that you really shudder, and are ready to implore him to play no more tricks. He knows when he has reached this limit, and ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... to conclude that the Odyssey is written by a woman. A girl, such as Nausicaa describes herself, young, unmarried, unattached, and hence, after all, knowing little of what men feel on these matters, having by a cruel freak of inspiration got her hero into such an awkward predicament, might conceivably imagine that he would argue as she represents him, but no man, except such a woman's tailor as could never have written such a masterpiece as the Odyssey, would ever get his hero into such an undignified ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... sensuality and malevolence, and he makes his ominous appearance in history as a Caligula, a Domitian, a Nero. More fit for a madhouse than a throne, his advent is the signal of a despotism controlled by no guiding principles, but given over to that spirit of freak and mischief which springs from the union of the boy's brain with the man's appetites; and his fate is to have that craze of the faculties and delirium of the sensations which he calls his life abruptly closed by suicide or assassination: by suicide, when he has become ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... a queer freak of our human nature, that those who use the Bible in a dead, foreign language, unsuited for use in our public schools, should call our English version of the scriptures a sectarian book, and then oppose its ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... cunningly, with the trunk of a tree for the support of the bed, by Odysseus (odyssey, XXIII. 177-204), is, according to Noack, an exception, a solitary freak of Odysseus. But we may reply that the thalamos, the separate chamber, is no freak; the freak, by knowledge of which Odysseus proves his identity, is the use of the tree in the construction of the bed. [blank ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... my father's son in their hands without winning something out of him, and I saw by what passed the other day that thou and thy father would stand by me, hap what hap, and I'll never embroil him and peril the lady by my freak.' ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... foolishly sensitive about," said he. "A childish freak—playing with edged tools, you know. A boy-playmate chopped it off by accident: I cut his head open with his own hatchet, and made an idiot of him ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... in northern New England, why should not a poet or a painter come to his full growth here just as well? Yes, but if the gorgeous tree-flower is rare, and only as if by a freak of Nature springs up in a single spot among the beeches and alders, is there not as much reason to think the perfumed flower of imaginative genius will find it hard to be born and harder to spread its leaves in the clear, cold atmosphere ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... not already been in such mortal terror of the consequences of Joe's mad freak, I should have laughed to see the wayfarers as they skipped out of the course of the runagate, not one of them aware as yet that it held human contents, nor guessing that the end might ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... brought dismay to the negro, the carpet-bagger, and the scallawag of Ulster. A peculiar freak of weather in the early morning added to their terror. The sun rose clear and bright except for a slight fog that floated from the river valley, increasing the roar of the falls. About nine o'clock a huge black shadow suddenly rushed over ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... isn't romance. I think Mr. Cameron is a freak, anyway. But it's all amusing, and I hope you'll be at ...
— Patty's Suitors • Carolyn Wells
... out, to recognise how much of the charm of these tales of our childhood can be traced to the eternal truths that lie hidden in them, or to perceive that the shining fairy concealed beneath the frequent guise of some crabbed old woman, is no mere freak of fancy, but the symbol of a reality, less exceptional perhaps amongst us poor mortals, than amongst the fairies themselves, who, finding their presence no longer needed, vanished from our earth ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... lay there in the grass, wet-cheeked but no longer sobbing, listening to the sound and wondering that he had been able to hear it on the beach of Ringmanu. Some freak of air pressures and air currents, he reflected, had made it possible for the sound to carry so far. Such conditions might not happen again in a thousand days or ten thousand days, but the one day it had happened had been the day he ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... weather-beaten cheek. Miss Henderson again noticed the observant curiosity in the old man's eyes. Everybody, indeed, seemed to look at her with the same expression. As a woman farmer she was no doubt just a freak, a sport, in the eyes of the village. Well, she prophesied they would ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... disastrous results. It is unsafe to play with the emotions of a person who is simply labelled, often mistakenly and insufficiently, in your mind as belonging to a class, and possessing the characteristics of that class. There is always the chance that some old strain of tendency, some freak of heredity, may develop in the way which is most of all dangerous to you and to your career. For you cannot play with a woman's physical nature without touching, how remotely soever, her spiritual constitution as well; and, as Browning assures us, it is indeed "an awkward thing ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... hinterland of the country round Colville and Okanagan. Yet nothing occurred to cause any excitement in Victoria. There was a short-lived flurry over the discovery in Queen Charlotte Islands of a nugget valued at six hundred dollars and a vein of gold-bearing quartz. But the nugget was an isolated freak; the quartz could not be worked at a profit; and the movement suddenly died out. {4} There were, however, signs of what was to follow. The chief trader at the little fur-post of Yale reported that when he rinsed sand round in his camp frying-pan, fine ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... ambition of so vast an enterprise. He professed that the fugitive Adminius had ceded to him the kingship of the whole island, and sent home high-flown dispatches to that effect. He had no fleet, but drew up his army in line of battle on the Gallic shore, while all wondered what mad freak he was purposing; then suddenly bade every man fill his helmet with shells as "spoils of the Ocean" to be dedicated in the Capitol. Finally he commemorated this glorious victory by the erection of a lofty lighthouse,[126] probably at the ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... great work of any sort which owes nothing to the historic guild which does that sort of work? Is there one great man in history who gave to the future without getting anything from the past? The bare scientific fact is that no man escapes the tuition of society. The crank does not escape. The freak does not escape. They miss the highest traditions of society only to become victims of lower traditions. Whether such a man have genius or the illusion of genius, it is his tragic fate to have the best that he can do lie far below the best ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... British embassador to take the matter in hand, and he did so with such effect that the prisoner was liberated. He had been treated with some severity at first, but he was young, and the government was persuaded to look upon it as a youthful freak. Brandon's powerful influence with the British embassador obtained his ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... marry him? Ah, say why! How was her fancy caught? What was the dream that he drew her by, Or was she only bought? Gave she her gold for a girlish whim, A freak of a foolish mood? Or was it some will, like a snake in him, Lay a charm ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... (2) Perhaps a freak of the wind-yet perhaps a sign of remembrance,— This fall of a single leaf on the water I pour ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... rain prevented a contemplated progress to Hosho-ji, he sentenced the rain to imprisonment and caused a quantity to be confined in a vessel.* To the nation, however, all this meant something very much more than a mere freak. It meant that the treasury was depleted and that revenue had to be obtained by recourse to the abuses which Go-Sanjo had struggled so earnestly to check, the sale of offices and ranks, even in perpetuity, and the inclusion of great tracts of ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... not rather a sudden freak of Raffaello Cellini's to leave Cannes? We all thought he was settled for the winter there. Did you know he was ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... clarioned Mr. Cassidy as the first skylarkish pair showed in the doorway. His manner was drolly that of a showman exhibiting a rare freak, ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... of ice: An allusion, apparently, to the ice-palace built by the Empress of Russia, Catherine II, "most magnificent and mighty freak. The wonder of the North," Cowper called it. Compare Lowell's description of the frost work with Cowper's similar description in The Task, in ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... and applause at this witty freak, while the girl passed the keen blade, and the impassive rider jingled in his palm the increasing hoard of silver buttons. He eased her to the ground with both her hands full. After whispering for a while with a very strenuous face, she walked away, staring haughtily, ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... enable him to delay it grievously. We divided seventeen times, and between every division this vexatious Irishman made us a speech of apologies and self-condemnation. Of the two who had supported him at the beginning of his freak one soon sneaked away. The other, Sibthorpe, stayed to the last, not expressing remorse like Shaw, but glorying in the unaccommodating temper he showed and in the delay which he produced. At last ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... they had fled. But unluckily for the little Count, it was known that people were on the spot at the precise time he mentioned, and had heard nothing. The Count was pardoned, on account of his youth. The Dauphin made him confess the truth, and it was looked upon as a childish freak to set people talking ...
— The Secret Memoirs of Louis XV./XVI, Complete • Madame du Hausset, an "Unknown English Girl" and the Princess Lamballe
... to outstay you," he said, in answer to her glance. "You were here first; it's your turn to go now. But about this latest freak of Mrs. Brenton: where do you suppose ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... the fancy of a whole drove of mules, but often an animal nowise akin. Lieutenant Beale told me that his whole train of mules once galloped off suddenly, on the plains of the Cimarone, and ran half a mile, when they halted in apparent satisfaction. The cause of their freak was found to be a buffalo-calf, which had strayed from the herd. They were frisking around it in the greatest delight, rubbing their noses against it, throwing up their heels, and making themselves ridiculous by abortive attempts to neigh and bray; while the poor calf, unconscious ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... singular freak of nature, this instinct which prompts one bird to lay its eggs in the nests of others, and thus shirk the responsibility of rearing its own young. The cow buntings always resort to this cunning trick; and when one reflects upon their numbers, it is evident that these little tragedies ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... out of this notion, which Mac and I regarded as a freak, unnecessary in the first place, and impossible anyhow. But he was persistent, and I had to start out and try. I expected an expense of $1,000 and a delay of two weeks, but fortune or the devil favored us. So, purchasing at the exchange broker's in London 200,000 francs in ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... thus imparted to her form and to her draperies, it seemed to Raphael that all her being was suddenly communicated to him in an electric spark. The lace and tulle that caressed him imparted the delicious warmth of her bare, white shoulders. By a freak in the ordering of things, these two creatures, kept apart by social conventions, with the abysses of death between them, breathed together and perhaps thought of one another. Finally, the subtle perfume of aloes completed ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... said that she was broad awake; but had happened not to catch any sound till she heard the commotion of people moving about downstairs. This she took to mean that breakfast-time had arrived, and that this was destined to be another dark day like the freak of nature ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... clever fellow a very clever fellow in the eyes of his father. Bernard Amedroz knew that he himself was not a clever fellow, and admired his son accordingly; and when Charles had been expelled from Harrow for some boyish freak in his vengeance against a neighbouring farmer, who had reported to the school authorities the doings of a few beagles upon his land, Charles had cut off the heads of all the trees in a young fir plantation his father was proud ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... a tradition that a vast serpent once lived in the waters of the Mississippi, and that, taking a freak to visit the Great Lakes, he left his trail through the prairies, which, collecting the waters from the meadows and the rains of heaven as they fell, at ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... said Ezra. "It's rather much to pay for a freak of this sort, but we won't haggle over a pound ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... latter have lost less than their companions; yet more, because they deem it infinite. Perchance the two species of unfortunates may comfort one another. Here are Quakers with the instinct of battle in them; and men of war who should have worn the broad brim. Authors shall be ranked here whom some freak of Nature, making game of her poor children, had imbued with the confidence of genius and strong desire of fame, but has favored with no corresponding power; and others, whose lofty gifts were unaccompanied with the faculty of expression, or any of that earthly machinery ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Lamotte as a sister; she thought and sorrowed not a little over the strange freak Fate had played with her friend's life, and she wondered often if Doctor Heath had really lost all regard for her; she knew, as what woman does not, that a warm regard had once existed; and she assured herself that whether he had or not, ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... has given birth to a freak of nature. The animal's face is almost human in appearance, it has neither eyes nor nostrils, but a nose like ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 2nd, 1914 • Various
... himself, with others, rowed the subaltern back almost to the side of the admiral's ship, for by the freak of some peasants the boat which had brought him had been set adrift. As they rowed from the ship back towards the shore, Iberville, looking up, saw, standing on the deck, Phips and George Gering. He had come for this. He stood up in his boat and took off ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... will attract readers of all ages and of either sex. The incidents of the plot, arising from the thoughtless indulgence of a deceptive freak, are exceedingly natural, and the keen interest of the narrative is sustained from beginning to end. Under False Colours is a book which will rivet the attention, amuse the fancy, and touch ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... with a front tooth is Show Low," began Slim, speaking like a lecturer in a freak-show. "The one without a front tooth is Fresno, a California product. This yere chap with the water-dob hair is Sage-brush Charley. It makes him sore when you ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... the crowd, he bustled to and fro, never still for a moment, "dragging his anchors," as the sailors say, gesticulating, making free with everybody, biting his nails with nervous avidity. He was one of those originals which nature sometimes invents in the freak of a moment, and of which she ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... years ago, she thought she ought to know something about the government of the house; so she asked me about it, and proposed to her father that the new one should come to her for orders, and that she should pay the wages and have the accounts in her hands. Mr. Rivers thought it was only a freak, but she has gone on steadily; and I assure you, she has had some difficulties, for she has come to me about them. Perhaps Ethel does not ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... anything but name; it is something else, and more in the nature of a picnic. A walking tour should be gone upon alone, because freedom is of the essence; because you should be able to stop and go on, and follow this way or that, as the freak takes you; and because you must have your own pace, and neither trot alongside a champion walker, nor mince in time with a girl. And then you must be open to all impressions, and let your thoughts take colour from ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... reluctant affection for that robust man. He leaves not a shred of my substance untrodden: for the writer's substance is his writing; the rest of him is but a vain shadow, cherished or hated on uncritical grounds. Not a shred! Yet the sentiment owned to is not a freak of affectation or perversity. It has a deeper, and, I venture to think, a more estimable origin than the caprice of emotional lawlessness. It is, indeed, lawful, in so much that it is given (reluctantly) for a consideration, for several considerations. There ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... his paradox in showing that indebtedness is a necessary condition of human life, and all his sophistry in confusing it with the abstract sense of obligation. It is, perhaps, scarcely fair to call attention to such a mere argumentative and literary freak; but there is something so comical in a defence of debt, however transparent, proceeding from a man to whom never in his life a bill can have been sent in twice, and who would always have preferred ready-money payment to receiving a bill at all, that I may be forgiven for quoting some ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... climb to the mouth of the crater. The mountain sheered down at an angle of from seventy-five to eighty degrees, and its smooth, slippery sides afforded absolutely no foothold. Anything more barren than this rocky freak of nature it would be difficult to conceive. Only a few tufts of wild herbs were to be seen upon the whole island, and these seemed ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... getting accustomed to it, and that meanwhile the traditions of both are so far agreed in allowing a certain amount of free will to direct the actions of men and women that a tale which should be all necessity and no free will would, in effect, be necessity's own contrary—a merely wanton freak. ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... have been to Early and his followers to note the panic and confusion into which McCausland's predatory riders once more threw the capital and the border States, this absurd freak produced far-reaching consequences that were not in the thoughts of any one on either side. Its first effect was to stop the withdrawal of the Sixth Corps, and to put Wright and Emory once more in march toward the Shenandoah. ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... was not the freak of a madman, but rather a step in the grand progress of universal emancipation, and that Old John had foundations for his purposed campaign, quite as substantial as those upon which better starred enterprises ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... lessee of the mine to deliver the coal or iron-stone at so much per ton, himself hiring the labourers, using his own horses, and supplying the tools requisite for the working of the mine. The contract price was known as the 'charter price' or 'charter'. Thus by a freak of language the Staffordshire miner knew by the same word the 'butty's charter' which was the symbol of his oppression, and the 'people's charter' which was the goal ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... they enable him to delay it grievously. We divided seventeen times, and between every division this vexatious Irishman made us a speech of apologies and self-condemnation. Of the two who had supported him at the beginning of his freak one soon sneaked away. The other, Sibthorpe, stayed to the last, not expressing remorse like Shaw, but glorying in the unaccommodating temper he showed and in the delay which he produced. At last the bill went through. Then Shaw rose; congratulated himself that his ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... said Beatrice, who was evidently easy-going; "I snapped her as she did it and she looked ugly enough to turn milk sour. My! do look at that girl with the queer cap and the big dog. She's a freak and no mistake! Stand back, Maude, and let me have ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... Freak and Able, had put in a defence on Bosinney's behalf. Admitting the facts, they raised a point on the correspondence which, divested of legal phraseology, amounted to this: To speak of 'a free hand in the terms of this correspondence' ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... blotted out completely for an hour by some freak of the memory, comes back to him, and he sees his sullen, morbid boyhood changing into something worse still, until by slow degrees he became what he is ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... my voice, sir. It is not a voice, it is a freak of grammar. It is masculine, feminine, and neuter in gender, singular by nature, and generally accusative, and it is optative in mood and full of acute accents. If you can find such another voice in creation, sir, I will forfeit mine in ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... bluffs, to whar I hed a good look-out erlong the north trail. I laid out thar all night. The storm come up, an' I mighty nigh froze, but snuggled down inter ther snow an' stuck. When yer onc't get a killin' freak on, yer goin' through hell an' high water ter get yer man. Thet's how I felt. Well, just 'long 'bout daylight an outfit showed up. With my eyes half froze over, an' ther storm blowin' the snow in my face, I could n't see much—nuthin' ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... about us," declared Whistler seriously. "I doubt if the source of the noise is in this room at all; it is somewhere near and by some freak of acoustics the sound is heard ...
— Navy Boys Behind the Big Guns - Sinking the German U-Boats • Halsey Davidson
... "I am by profession a manicurist, but some freak of nature gave me the power of keeping my mouth closed, of looking as though I knew a good deal, but of saying so little. Now, messieurs, what could a poor girl know in the way of secrets for which that young man would get credit if he had succeeded ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Kasyapa. And saluting that great Muni, so constant in austerity, they all remained standing, while the Muni, on his part, busied himself about their reception. And they said unto the illustrious Muni, "By a freak of destiny, we have ceased to merit thy welcome: indeed, we have killed a Brahmana!" And the regenerate Rishi said to them, "How hath a Brahmana come to be killed by you, and say where may be he? Do ye all witness the power of my ascetic practices!" ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... sure, sir. I returned here at nine o'clock, and saw this mark on our door. I did not pay much heed to it, but went upstairs. Then, as I thought it over, I said to myself, 'Is this a freak of some passerby, or is it some sort of signal?' Then I thought I would see whether our house alone was marked, or whether there were crosses on other doors. I went to the houses of several gentlemen of our party, and on ...
— Saint Bartholomew's Eve - A Tale of the Huguenot WarS • G. A. Henty
... on to assimilate a novel idea, and, in consequence, are choosing your words badly," he said. "It was not a freak marriage. Although I may have broken the laws of the State of New York by using a license issued to some other person, Lady Hermione and I are legally husband and wife, and no power on earth can dissolve the union without the expressed consent ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... wide causeway that crosses the narrow river. With equal speed the camp of the Crusaders, fully roused, is pouring forth its thousands, and King Baldwin sees, with the joy of a practised warrior, that the foolish freak of a thoughtless little maiden has brought about a great and glorious battle. The rescued Isabelle is quickly given in charge of a trusty squire, who bears her back to camp, and then, at the head of the forward battle, the boy Crusader bears down upon the ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... hard, and there was little mercy shown for JOANNA's freak. Her husband had slain her. That was all. She with her flashes, her gaiety, her laughter, was consigned to dust. But in Sir JOHN's note-book it was written that, "The hob-nailed boot is but a bungling weapon. The drawing-room poker ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, October 18, 1890 • Various
... unbalanced development of those socialistic tendencies, the seeds of which were sown by his mother and nurtured in the hard experience of his early days. Besides this, Peter's interest in the boy was probably a mere freak, or at the best, sprang from a desire to serve his cousin, unless by any remote chance he had stumbled on a ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... This belongs to Cheyne House, the property of Dr. Phene; the house cannot be seen from the street in summer-time. The oldest part is perhaps Tudor, and the latest in the style of Wren. One wall is decorated with fleurs-de-lys. In the garden was grown the original moss-rose, a freak of Nature, from which all other moss-roses have sprung. In the grounds was discovered a subterranean passage, which Dr. Phene claims fixes the site of Shrewsbury or Alston House. It runs due south, and indicates the site as adjacent to ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... and interesting series of contemporary books of the kind, its own individual interest is not small; and I commend it with confidence to students of seventeenth-century domestic manners. To apologise for it, to treat it as if it were some freak, some unowned sin of Digby's, would be the greatest mistake. On the contrary, its connection with his life and career is of the closest; and I make bold to assert that of all his works, with the doubtful ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... of the softest brown—eyes dreamy and mournful, and deeply sunk in their orbits—looked out at you, and (in my case, at least) took your attention captive at their will. Add to this a quantity of thick closely-curling hair, which, by some freak of Nature, had lost its colour in the most startlingly partial and capricious manner. Over the top of his head it was still of the deep black which was its natural colour. Round the sides of his head—without the slightest gradation of grey ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... Lanning's coming to Los Toros a mad freak, whereas it was in reality a very clever stroke. Hal Dozier would have been on the road five hours before if he had not been held up in the matter of horses, but this is to tell the story ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... is personal. Because the Revolution is the dominant fact in modern history, therefore people suppose that the doings of this or that provincial lawyer, tossed into temporary eminence and eternal infamy by some freak of the revolutionary wave, or the atrocities committed by this or that mob, half drunk with blood, rhetoric, and alcohol, are of transcendent importance. In truth their interest is great, but their importance is small. What we are concerned to know as students of the philosophy of history is, not ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... it, with another and worthier woman. Even his mother, a woman of keen discernment and delicate intuitions, had been deceived by this girl's specious exterior. She had brought away from her interview of the morning the impression that Rena was a fine, pure spirit, born out of place, through some freak of Fate, devoting herself with heroic self-sacrifice to a noble cause. Well, he had imagined her just as pure and fine, and she had deliberately, with a negro's low cunning, deceived him into believing that she was a white girl. The pretended confession of the brother, in ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... line of the Casiquiare is infested with myriads of tormenting insects. A few miserable groups of Indians and half-breeds have their small villages along its southern portion. It is thus seen that this marvellous freak of nature is not, as is generally supposed, a sluggish canal on a flat tableland, but a great, rapid river which, if its upper waters had not found contact with the Orinoco, perhaps by cutting back, would belong entirely ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... did not seem to the critic to agree with Stuart's handling. To make his impressions fit with the pictures, the critic supposed that Stuart painted a smaller portrait of Jaudenes and started one of his wife, which through some freak of temper he left (as he frequently did) with only the head and part of the background finished. These being brought to Spain, some artist there finished the lady's portrait, painted from Stuart's original a companion piece of her ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... not at the time condescend to offer any explanation of his "smilin' expression;" but years afterwards, on an occasion when he and I were making a journey together, he told me that he never quite understood, himself, what whimsical freak took possession of his mind that day. To have saved his life—he said—he could not have kept a sober face when Lockett raised his hand to the cap. The ambrotype faithfully reproduced the sudden resentful expression on his countenance; ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... for two hours after your departure I lay in bed in no small trepidation, thinking whether His Majesty might have a fancy to send me to Spandau, for the freak of which we had both been guilty. But in that case I had taken my precautions: I had written a statement of the case to my chief, the Austrian Minister, with the full and true story how you had been set to spy upon me, how you turned out to be my very near relative, how you had been kidnapped ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... brown horse and his burden must have gone over the terrible drop, as straight as a plumb-line, on to the awful rocks below. We could see where the brown had torn up the turf as he struck all four hoofs deep into it at once. Indeed, he had been newly shod, a freak of Jim's about a bet with a travelling blacksmith. Then the other tracks, the long score on the brink—over the brink—where the frightened, maddened animal had made an attempt to alter her speed, all in vain, and had plunged over the bank and the ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... was it? I groped in vain for some clue. The pebble worried me, and I made a peevish gesture to throw it away. No! Whatever it was, I must not do that, rather wash it, wash it. Yes! that was what we used to do. But where was the batea, for now by some strange freak I was back in Brazil, and must have my batea. We washed our gravel for diamonds in that wooden ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... gain or loss. Week after week, as he overcame one difficulty after another, he was learning, learning, just as he had done at Weil & Street's. His hazel eyes grew keener, his face thinner. For the job began to develop every freak and whimsy possible to a growing building. The owner of the department store next door refused to permit access through his basement, and that added many hundred dollars to the cost of building ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... and every neighborhood, city or country, has its freaks and every freak within five miles will be over in that lighthouse parlor to-night. Just take 'em for freaks, that's all, but DON'T take 'em for samples of our people down here." She paused, and then added, with an apologetic laugh, "I ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... A spitter is a freak in a regular tempest—a midsummer madness of weather upheaval. It is a thunderbolt of wind, a concentration of gale, a whirling dervish of disaster—wind compactly bunched into one almighty blast—wind enough to last ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... tours extended over a couple of years, but brought few returns, except in Russia. Wagner became despondent and almost convinced he ought to give up trying to be a composer. People called him a freak, a madman and ridiculed his efforts at music making. And yet, during all this troublesome time, he was at work on his one humorous opera, "Die Meistersinger." On ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... to him the kingship of the whole island, and sent home high-flown dispatches to that effect. He had no fleet, but drew up his army in line of battle on the Gallic shore, while all wondered what mad freak he was purposing; then suddenly bade every man fill his helmet with shells as "spoils of the Ocean" to be dedicated in the Capitol. Finally he commemorated this glorious victory by the erection of a lofty lighthouse,[126] probably at the entrance ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... wreck. And, in our vacant mood, Not seldom did we stop to watch some tuft Of dandelion seed or thistle's beard, That skimmed the surface of the dead calm lake, Suddenly halting now—a lifeless stand! 20 And starting off again with freak as sudden; [1] In all its sportive wanderings, all the while, Making report of an invisible breeze That was its wings, its chariot, and its horse, Its playmate, rather say, its moving soul. [2] 25 —And often, trifling ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... to automobilism of this great trial one can hardly overestimate it. There is no place here for the freak machine or scorching chauffeur, such as one has found in many great events of the past. A great touring contest over such a course would be bound to have important results in many ways. The ordinary class of circuit is a very close approach ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... gouties or rubber snow-boots which slipped about inside the binding so that I had absolutely no control. This did not make much difference, as I knew nothing of the art and only used the Skis as a freak on days off from tobogganing. I knew nothing of wax, and when the Skis stuck, they stuck, and I thought it a poor game. When they slid I sat down and I thought it a poorer game. It never entered my head that I could ...
— Ski-running • Katharine Symonds Furse
... he remarked, "to call upon others to uphold the dignity of one who is always at some freak or other to ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... heard yer Leddieship laugh at that auld rhyme," replied the servitor. "Fear naething for a madman's freak. But it's true that three oaks by its side are blasted, riven and laid on the earth, and yet ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... this, two sturdy Englishmen and their sister had come to the New World, with a good deal of energy and some money. The freak that led them up the river to this place was their love of beautiful scenery. Land was cheap, and at first they tried farming, but presently they started a carpet factory, their old business, and being ingenious men, they made some improvements. Ralph Stanwood, another ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... the old sense of the word, the liveliest. Why is this? Is it that it is born between Wind and Water?—Wind the father, ever casting himself into multitudinous shapes of invisible tides, taking beauteous form in the sweep of a "lazy-paced cloud," or embodying a transient informing freak in the waterspout, which he draws into his life from the bosom of his mate;—Water, the mother, visible she, sweeping and swaying, ever making and ever unmade, the very essence of her being—beauty, yet ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... it thrown out of the window. Oh, yes, of course I know you will reimburse me, but that isn't the question; and, anyway, it's the opinion of your friends, old man, that you will not be worse off for a little abstinence from fleshly pleasures. You are positively a freak in this ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... Clarence, whom I will not describe, as he will, I trust, show himself more effectually by his actions, was like his mother in disposition, or so, at least, she made herself happy by thinking; but by some freak of nature he was like his father in person, and carried his mouse's heart in a huge frame, somewhat hulking and heavy-shouldered, with the same roll which distinguished Mr. Copperhead, and which betrayed something of ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... the arrangement of tendons of thumb and fingers characteristic of the macaque; but whether such a case should be regarded as a macaque passing upwards into a man, or a man passing downwards into a macaque, or as a congenital freak of nature, I cannot undertake to say." It is satisfactory to hear so capable an anatomist, and so embittered an opponent of evolutionism, admitting even the possibility of either of his first propositions. Prof. Macalister has also described ('Proceedings Royal Irish Academy,' vol. x. 1864, ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... lightest. This descent on the Champs—Elysees had been a freak on Elise's part, who wished to do nothing so banal as take her companion to the Palais Royal. But the restaurant she had chosen, though of a much humbler kind than those which the rich tourist commonly associates with this part of Paris, was ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... preserved the whole of his work in a final edition, and his publishers still insist upon printing it, rubbish and all. The result is that the few rare verses which stamp him as a poet are apt to be overlooked in the multitudinous gabblings which, of themselves, might mark him as a mere freak or "sensation" ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... confined. The same wriggly patterns and alien noises were picked up in Montevideo, in Australia, in Panama City, and in grimly embattled England. All the newspapers discussed them without ever suspecting that they had been translated into plain speech. They were featured as freak news—and each new account mentioned that the broadcast reception had ended with a break-down of ...
— The Machine That Saved The World • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... himself parallel with the edge of the hill, he actually descended, turning himself over and over till he came to the bottom." This story was told with such gravity, and with an air of such affectionate remembrance of a departed friend, that it was impossible to suppose this extraordinary freak an invention of Mr. Langton.' It must have been in the winter ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... becomes us not to tell how that strange wooing sped. Suffice it to say that at the expiration of an hour Maude Glendower had promised to be the wife of Dr. Kennedy when another spring should come. She had humbled herself to say that she regretted her girlish freak, and he had so far unbent his dignity as to say that he could not understand why she should be willing to leave the luxuries which surrounded her and go with him, a plain, old-fashioned man. Maude Glendower scorned to ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... group is put first, that it may be seen how the series on the two sides of the apse answer each other. It was a very curious freak to insert the triangle e, in the outermost place but one of both the fourth and eighth sides of the apse, and in the outermost but two in the third and ninth; in neither case having any balance ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... hour was thronged with promenaders. Isolated, buried in thought, in the midst of that teeming throng, the various episodes in the drama of which my mysterious neighbor was the principal character, passed before my mind. I again and again reviewed the strange events which, by some freak of fortune, I had been a witness to. What was the basis on which my friend, with two sets of names, founded his dream of inexhaustible wealth, this mission he had intrusted to Pepito? What the mission which the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... a look at that old picture; got up, as you say, on a chair to do so. Wasn't that the freak of an idle man, wandering, he hardly knows why, from room to room in an old and ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... where to strike. When, however, the Bill, after passing the Commons, was opposed and modified by the Lords, Defoe suddenly appeared on a new tack, publishing the most famous of his political pamphlets, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, which has, by a strange freak of circumstances, gained him the honour of being enshrined as one of the martyrs of Dissent. In the "brief explanation" of the pamphlet which he gave afterwards, he declared that it had no bearing whatever ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... is impossible to avoid contrasting this beautiful account of elegant dissipation with the noted freak of Sir Charles Sedley, to whom it is addressed. In June 1663, being in company with Lord Buckhurst and Sir Thomas Ogle, in a tavern in Bowstreet, and having become furious with intoxication, they ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... volume of smoke was parted, by some freak of the wind, from shore to shore, and for a couple of rods they saw the water, the blazing banks, the fiery tree-tops and each other. The trapper turned his face, blackened and stained by the grimy cinders, toward his companion ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... of all sorts, potatoes, and dried fruit. No milk, butter, cheese, tea, or meat appeared. Even salt was considered a useless luxury, and spice entirely forbidden by these lovers of Spartan simplicity. A ten years' experience of vegetarian vagaries had been good training for this new freak, and her sense of the ludicrous supported ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... to close the trap door have been exposed to the storm's full fury by the tornado getting into the opening and lifting off the whole roof after having first swept away the house above. Another pathetic case resulted in the death of a whole family by an extraordinary freak of the tornado. The storm first struck a large pond and swept up all the water in it. Its next plunge deposited this water on one of these dugouts, and the family were drowned like chipmunks in ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... getting killed in a cause I did not understand. Then, too, I was threatened with the wretched condition of an object of common curiosity. If I was going to be gazed at by this officer and his men,—if I was to be regarded as a freak,—my way certainly did ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... could I even dismount from Rocinante, because they no doubt had me enchanted; for I swear to thee by the faith of what I am that if I had been able to climb up or dismount, I would have avenged thee in such a way that those braggart thieves would have remembered their freak for ever, even though in so doing I knew that I contravened the laws of chivalry, which, as I have often told thee, do not permit a knight to lay hands on him who is not one, save in case of urgent and great necessity in defence of his ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... fiercely upward until the points are nearly on a level with his flashing dark eyes. Another point of dissimilarity between us is that he seems to have been poured molten into his clothes, whereas mine hang as from pegs clumsily arranged about my person. By no conceivable freak of outer circumstance could I have the adventures ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... appeared to be old? Was there perchance, after all, some truth in the legend of Samson and did it dwell in that gigantic beard and those long locks of his? It was impossible to say and probably the man was but a Herculean freak, for that he was as strong as Hercules all the stories that I heard afterwards of his feats, ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... that he did not wish to see them, that Princess Mary might do so if she chose, but they were not to be admitted to him. She had decided to receive them, but feared lest the prince might at any moment indulge in some freak, as he seemed much ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... gladioli in their wild state are small and lacking in beauty. Abnormal or freak varieties should not be selected as the best for breeding, because they are usually the result of a violent cross, and are nearly always weak as ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... brother's earnest request that he would continue to answer to the name, he was too weak to trouble his head much about the matter; and the two Welsh brothers were regarded by the English attendants as too insignificant to be worthy of much notice. The prince's freak to have them as travelling-companions was humoured by his parents' wish; but they little knew how much he was wrapped up in the brothers, nor how completely his heart was set upon seeing the accomplishment of ...
— The Lord of Dynevor • Evelyn Everett-Green
... strange, perhaps, that I should speak of it in the midst of the terrors that surround me, and yet I can't help thinking of the whole affair as one freak of fate." ...
— The Crime of the French Cafe and Other Stories • Nicholas Carter
... strong-boxes. My other papers the world can read if it choose to waste its time; at any rate, I am not going to lock them up and have the worry of a key preying on my mind. I should only lose it as I lost the other one. Now, by a freak of fortune, the key of Jaffery's flat remained in the suit-case wherein I had flung it at Havre, until it was fished out by Franklin ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... Safety or Convenience to the publick be removd to Cambridge? Will our Constituents consent to be at the Expence of erecting a proper House at Cambridge, for accommodating the General Court, especially when they have no Assurance that the next Freak of a capricious Minister will not remove the Court to some other place? Is it possible to have that Communication with our Constituents, or to be benefited by the Reasonings of the people without Doors here, as at Boston? We cannot ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... said that she favored him; others denied it with more or less conviction and indignation. But, whatever might chance to be the truth about that, it was plain that the duchess had something to say for herself when she declined to receive the lady. Her refusal was no idle freak, but a fixed determination, to which she would probably adhere. And, in fact, adhere to it she did, even under some considerable ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... the library, where all we readers go to feed, and he made me so mad I couldn't digest my bread and milk. Once, just once, when he was real young, he met an American woman student—a regular P. G. freak, I gather—and nothing will convince him that all American girls aren't like her. 'May God forgive Christopher Columbus!' he groans ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... shriek rent the air, for all knew that to be cast into that dreadful tideway meant almost certain death. The impulse of my sister Jessie and Thora to put out in a small boat that lay at the water's edge, on the possible chance of saving some of us, was, therefore, looked upon as a mad freak. But when the two girls were seen to rescue me from the upturned boat, they were ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... concerning his, Dayton's, conversation with Louis Napoleon, points to Europe being likewise menaced by revolutionists. Unnecessary spread-eagleism, and an awful want of any, even diplomatic, tact. I hope that Mr. Dayton, who has so much sound sense and discernment, will keep to himself this freak of Mr. Seward's ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... again. "If I don't win to-night," she said, "it's all over. I shall have to own that he cares for me less than the dust. I shall have to throw up my hands and creep away and hide. Oh, my God, am I such a rotten little freak as all that, Irene? Tell me, ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... resting-place. The fact that this was a grave, sacred in the same sense that his father's grave in Woodlawn was supposed to be sacred to him and to his mother, was overlooked in the silent contemplation of what an even less sophisticated person might have been justified in describing as a "freak." Nothing was farther from his mind, however, than the desire or impulse to be disrespectful. And yet, as he was about to turn away from this sombre pile, he leaned over and struck a match on one of the huge boulders. As he was conveying the lighted sulphur match,—with which ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... herself suddenly appeared before him like a shadow in the dusk; a perverse freak of the poet within him found a vague resemblance between her black and white striped petticoat and the bony ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... Mr. President, according to Military Science it is our duty to guard against every possible or supposable contingency that may arise. For example, if under any circumstances, however fortuitous, the Enemy, by any chance or freak, should, in a last resort, get in behind Washington, in his efforts to capture the city, why, there the ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... To the enforcement of such numerous proofs Doubt and mistrust, methinks, must needs give way. Long has a creeping rumor filled the world That Dmitri, Ivan's son, is still alive. The Czar himself confirms it by his fears. —Before us stands a youth, in age and mien Even to the very freak that nature played, The lost heir's counterpart, and of a soul Whose noble stamp keeps rank with his high claims. He left a cloister's precincts, urged by strange, Mysterious promptings; and this monk-trained ...
— Demetrius - A Play • Frederich Schiller
... of his labors, indeed. But latterly even these scenes had palled; and it came to him with a faint shock of surprise that he was beginning to remember with relief those few occasions on which such talks had ended, by reason, truly, of some mere wanton freak, in unconditional release.—Preposterous indeed that the only acts of his life hitherto viewed with self-contempt, were beginning to seem the only ones bearable ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... Captain Prescott. Some freak of the fancy has mastered you. I know nothing of the documents. How could I, a woman, do such ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... so I resolved to make the best of it by meeting the disagreeable old pantaloon on his own ground. I lit one of his cigars and sat down to tell the curious old freak what I thought of him. Ordinarily I would have avoided doing this, but his tyrannical exercise of his temporary advantage made me angry to the ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs
... King's service), wondering anxiously, meantime, what could have become of Walter, with many secret and painful misgivings, though she had been striving to persuade her mother that he was only absent on some freak ...
— The Pigeon Pie • Charlotte M. Yonge
... on the mind of Louis was the eloquence of Ignatius when he met the young Xavier in the streets of Paris. "And then?" asked by another saint of an ambitious youth, did not lose its force with the holy youth who found himself, by some freak of blind fortune heir to one of the millionaires of the ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... back I reflected that at any rate I was saved from submitting Miss Francis to vulgar publicity. Everything is for the best—Ive seen a hundred instances to prove it. Perhaps—who knew—something might yet happen to make it possible for me to profit by the freak growth. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... celebrated a parody on the Church-service, the mock Abbot officiating at the altar; they sung ludicrous and indecent parodies, to the tunes of church hymns; they violated whatever vestments or vessels belonging to the Abbey they could lay their hands upon; and, playing every freak which the whim of the moment could suggest to their wild caprice, at length they fell to more lasting deeds of demolition, pulled down and destroyed some carved wood-work, dashed out the painted windows which had escaped ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... was a thorn in the flesh to see him talking to Nan while he, old Abe, was too far away to hear what they were saying. He had a good deal of confidence in Nan, she was a sensible, level-headed girl. Still, there was no knowing what freak even a sensible girl might take into her head, and Nan was so determined when she did make up her mind. She was ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... and hiding Pollyooly had played the important part. It had been a freak of nature to make her and Lady Marion Ricksborough so closely alike, that even when they were together it was hard to tell which was which. The duchess had taken advantage of this likeness to substitute Pollyooly for ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... will clearly understand me, sir, that I do not accuse you of being at all party to this freak of intellect of your uncle's. He, no doubt, alone conceived it, with a laudable desire on his part of serving you. If, however, to meet me, do so to-night, in the middle of the park surrounding ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... side show of one of the great circuses some years ago was a strange creature which, for lack of a better name, its owner and the public dubbed, "A What Is It?" This freak had the semblance of humanity, and yet was not human. All its functions and feelings reversed the normal. Tickle it and it would cry bitterly; pinch or torture it and it would grin rapturously; when starved it repelled food, and when overfed it was ravenous for more. It had heart-beats but no ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... upon the whole, raised and exalted his character to the true heroic dimensions. His factor, a respectable Edinburgh burgess, a gunsmith by trade, whom he had selected for no aptitude but from the freak of the name (Innes), could not always appreciate his schemes of improvement on the estate, which really were not based on economic considerations, but were meant to afford large means of employment to the people. In consequence, the duke, though he respected him greatly, would ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... think this freak of Law-less's may enable me to get rid of my rival—this Mr. Lowe Brown—and I should take it as the greatest kindness if you would go with him, and keep him in order; of course I must not be seen at all in the ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... water-fowl, with clamorous cries and rustling wings, rose here and there, startled from their quiet nests by the approaching inundation, which by this time had completely hidden what was called in that region the public road. De Fervlans, at a loss what to make of this singular freak of nature, sent a horseman to the right, and one to the left, to examine the ground, and learn whence came the sea of slime, and how it might be avoided. Each of his messengers returned with the ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... him Ed had gone with this circus side show. "Side show!" he says. "That's just where he belongs. He ought to be setting right up with the other freaks, because he's a worse freak than the living skeleton or a lady with a full beard—that's what he is. And yet he's sane on every subject but that. Sometimes he'll talk along for ten minutes as rational as you or me; but let him hear the word accident and off he goes. But, by doggie, he won't bother ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... Without, pouring rain; within, a fireless hearth; a room with but one window, and that containing only one whole pane of glass; not an article of furniture to be seen, save an old painted pine-wood cradle, which had been left there by some freak of fortune. This, turned upon its side, served us for a seat, and there we impatiently awaited the arrival of Moodie, Wilson, and a man whom the former had hired that morning to assist on the farm. Where they were all to be stowed might have puzzled a more sagacious brain than ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... brother's corse And set it down. Perhaps he paused to gaze A moment on the quiet moon-lit face, The face yet beautiful with new-told love! Perhaps his heart misgave him,—or, perhaps—— Now, whether 't was some dark avenging Hand, Or whether 't was some fatal freak of wind, We may not know, but suddenly the door Without slammed to, and there was Regnald shut Beyond escape, for on the inner side Was neither spring nor bolt ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... Little Step") is lumpy grey granite of the coarsest elements, whose false strata, tilted up till they have become quasi-vertical, and worn down to pillars and drums, crown the crest like gigantic columnar crystallizations. We shall see the same freak of nature far more grandly developed into the "Pins" of the Shrr. It has evidently upraised the trap, of which large and small blocks are here and there imbedded in it. The granite is cut in its turn by long horizontal dykes of the hardest quadrangular basalt, occasionally pudding'd ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... relief. It is noble to struggle on and wait for the reward, which always comes." The good woman heard these words with tears in her eyes, and began to tax her resolution for means to meet the emergency; for she saw clearly that the major had got a freak into his head, and was about to give up the business of peddling tin ware, at which he made an honest living, and again lead the ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... me, upon your honor, that when this freak of yours is over, and the bug business (good God!) settled to your satisfaction, you will then return home and follow my advice implicitly, as that ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... were amiable towards him, because they loved him; and because they wholesomely feared him, they were amiable in the main towards each other. There were certain members of the Family who might be described as perennial. They were of the nature of established institutions. Such were Stumpy, the freak-legged dachshund-setter; James Edward, the wild gander; Butters, the woodchuck; Melindy and Jim, the two white cats; Bones, the brown owl, who sat all day on the edge of a box in the darkest corner ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... themselves to be confused. Their inquiry has ignored the age of the parents at marriage—or, better still, at the births of their respective children—and has assumed that the number of the family was the all-important point: a good example of that idolatry of number as number which is the "freak religion" of the biometrician. Supposing that the conclusion reached by this method be a true one—which it would need more credulity than I possess to assert—we must conclude that, somehow, primogeniture, ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... other was lost in that bally rabbit-hutch they put me in on shipboard? No bigger than a parcels-lift!" And he had too plainly crossed North America in this shocking state! Glad I was then that Belknap-Jackson was not present. The others, I dare say, considered it a mere freak of fashion. As quickly as I could, I hustled him into the waiting carriage, piling his luggage about him to the best advantage and hurrying Cousin Egbert after him as rapidly as I could, though the latter, as on the occasion of my own arrival, halted our departure long enough to present ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... work them off, as some might have done. I possessed no distinct talents, no marked vocation. If there was nothing behind and beyond all this, what an empty freak of destiny my life would have been—full, not even of sound and fury, but of dull common-place suffering: a tale told by an idiot with a spice of malice ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... turned upside down. Decorative painting in this sense may easily be carried so far as to seem incongruous and inept, in spite of its superficial attractiveness. The peril that threatens it is whim and freak. Some of Monticelli's, some of Matthew Maris's pictures, illustrate the exaggeration of the decorative impulse. After all, a painter must get his effect, whatever it be and however it may shun the literal and the exact, by rendering things with pigments. And some of the ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... My mother's oft and resigned ejaculation—"What next, I wonder!" was to my ears a covert reproach for not being "steady" and "a comfort," like Mary 'Liza. Even my less critical father's shout of laughter at any unusual freak or experiment abraded my moral cuticle sometimes. At home the colored children would have entered heartily into my mortuary enterprise,—yes! and kept my counsel. The reticence of the serf exceeds in dumb doggedness that of a misunderstood ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... of every flower, after having touched them all at first with that heavenly timidness, the shadow of Proserpine's; and gilded them with celestial gathering, and never stops on their spots, or their bodily shape, while Milton sticks in the stains upon them, and puts us off with that unhappy freak of jet in the very flower that without this bit of paper-staining would have been the most precious to us of all. "There is pansies, that's ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... his protest against this unexpected freak of fortune, for Sylvia seized the paper and read the paragraph aloud with such happy emphasis amid Prue's outcries and his father's applause, that Mark began to feel that he really had done something praiseworthy, and that the "daub" was not so ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... better to keep them in his pocket. The meeting was at a stand, when little Dr. Radcliffe, who was sore to his heart's core with his petty loss, jumped up and declared that he had a series of resolutions to offer. There was a world of unconscious humor in his freak,—unconscious, because his resolutions were intended to express his spite, not only against Mr. Belcher, but against the villagers, including Mr. Snow. He began by reading in his piping voice the first resolution passed at the previous meeting which so pleasantly dismissed the proprietor to the ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... incorporate it as one of the elements of the new ordering. From the crimes laid to its charge they were prepared to make abstraction. The barbarous methods to which it owed its very existence they were willing to consign to oblivion. And it was only a freak of circumstance that hindered this embodiment of despotism from beginning one of their accepted means of rendering the ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... the hearts of kings. See Major Wee-Wee, the smallest man in the world, no bigger than a two-year-old baby, and Tom Morgan, the giant who stands seven feet three inches in his stocking feet. They are all there—every kind of human freak from the living skeleton to the fat woman who weighs four hundred pounds. The price is the same to one and all—twenty-five cents, only a quarter of a dollar. This way and get your tickets for the side show. There is just time to take in all its wonders before ...
— The Circus Comes to Town • Lebbeus Mitchell
... joke, and after starting me off trotted on behind, but my military escort looked troubled. No longer striding proudly in front, he showed a desire to loiter behind, although so long as my grand chair kept close at my heels he could save his face by explaining my strange proceeding as the mad freak of a foreigner. But finally, when I bade the chair-men stop for a smoke at a rest-house, knowing they could easily overtake my slow-moving vehicle, he too disappeared, and only took up his station again at the head of the procession ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... by some freak of fortune his little friend had indeed stumbled upon the truth. Dreux was leaning back in ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... What sudden freak overcame his anger probably not even Fletcher himself could tell. But, turning towards his wife, who was supporting the child, whose little fingers still held him fast, his face cleared instantly, and, with a sudden movement, he drew the surprised ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... worked out that table!" he said stridently. "Nobody! Morgan said you'd appreciate my work! He said you needed my talent! But what good do you see in it? You think I'm a freak!" ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... boating freak of yours, Vincent, seems to occupy all your thoughts. I wonder how long it ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... floe, drifting steadily southward, by the strange freak of the antarctic current, came in view of the lookouts on the ships, who had been posted as soon as the boys were missed. The boats were at once despatched, and headed for the little ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... unmoved they took the dust of my feet, saying that I was above all human weaknesses. That is to say, they saw that day the vaporous envelope which was my idea, but failed to perceive the inner me, which by a curious freak of fate has been created tender ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... detective's outlook on life was cynical and coarse. The cynicism was the natural outcome of his profession; the coarseness was his heritage by birth, as his sensual mouth, blubber lips, thick nose, and bull-neck attested. It was a strange freak of Fate which had made him the guardian of the morals of society and the upholder of law and order in a modern civilized community. By temperament and disposition he belonged to the full-blooded type of humanity which found its best exemplars in the early Muscovite Czars, and, if Fate had ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... in London, long before the invention of freak verse and Freudism, I was standing in front of the Cafe Royal in Regent Street when there emerged from its portals the most famous young writer of the day, the Poet about whose latest work "The Book Bills of Narcissus" all literary London was ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... rancour, spites, He knew as little as men's claim on rights. A kindness for old servants, early friends, Was constant in him while they served his ends; And if irascible, 'twas the moment's reek From fires diverted by some gusty freak. His Policy the act which breeds the act Prevised, in issues accurately summed From reckonings of men's tempers, terrors, needs:- That universal army, which he leads Who builds Imperial on Imperious ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... he said to himself. In three minutes' unpremeditated talk the "Junior Freak," as he mentally denominated her, had managed to irritate him, to puncture his pride, to entertain and ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... I can only repeat, general, that our foolhardy freak has put us in collision with your sentries," said Lagrange, with a slight hauteur, that replaced his former jauntiness; "and we were very properly made prisoners. If you will accept my parole, I have no doubt our commander will proceed to exchange a couple of gallant fellows of yours, whom ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... collecting ardour and the apparent blind faith placed in him by M. Chasles, Lucas embarked upon a series of deceptions so impudent, that it is easy to sympathise with the defence put forward by his advocate at the trial, namely, that the fraud was so transparent that it could only be regarded as a freak. ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... chancellor; and Howe, first lord of the admiralty; besides Pitt who alone among them sat in the commons. Richmond again became master of the ordnance and a little later re-entered the cabinet. Dundas was treasurer of the navy. Pitt's acceptance of office was regarded by the opposition as a "boyish freak"; his ministry was "a mince-pie administration which would end with ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... financial gain or loss. Week after week, as he overcame one difficulty after another, he was learning, learning, just as he had done at Weil & Street's. His hazel eyes grew keener, his face thinner. For the job began to develop every freak and whimsy possible to a growing building. The owner of the department store next door refused to permit access through his basement, and that added many hundred dollars to the cost of building the party wall; the fire and telephone companies ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... end. As was the case with his great successor, Roundhead Blake's failure proved to him far better than a success. For his francesada, or coup de tete, Nelson expected to lose his commission, instead of which some popular freak flung to him honour and honours. So Protector Cromwell sent a valuable diamond ring to his 'general at sea,' in token of esteem on his part and that of his Parliament. Our histories, relying on the fact that a few weak batteries were silenced, claim for the ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... quietly enough, as above indicated, till I was about fourteen, when by a freak of fortune my father became suddenly affluent. A brother of his father's had emigrated to Australia in 1851, and had amassed great wealth. We knew of his existence, but there had been no intercourse between him and my father, and we did not even know ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... is made to be crowded and noisy. All the billboards scream at you, as if they had to get your attention. So when the place is empty, it looks like the whole thing was a freak ...
— It's like this, cat • Emily Neville
... the ceremony was progressing in the dim recesses of the choir, and the surprise and dishonor this unexpected denouement brought upon the home were nothing to the unhappiness in store for the childish bride, whose latest and wildest freak brought neither wisdom for self-discipline nor power to endure that relentless criticism which ceased only when a little one lay in the place of the child-mother, who had been too weak to cope with the worries of the year that had followed ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... Ah, say why! How was her fancy caught? What was the dream that he drew her by, Or was she only bought? Gave she her gold for a girlish whim, A freak of a foolish mood? Or was it some will, like a snake in him, Lay a charm ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... words. Though Joyce by no means looked upon Jared as a protege of his organization, yet his essential sympathy with the country still held full sway, and he felt it possible to regard young Stiles not as a mere freak, but as a human creature like ourselves, and struggling upward, like the rest of us and to the best of his powers, toward the light. But the town did not want restraint and reason just then, and Joyce's well-considered words ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... able to come up with him. Animals are frequently lost in this way; and it is necessary to keep close watch over them, in the vicinity of the buffalo, in the midst of which they scour off to the plains, and are rarely retaken. One of our mules took a sudden freak into his head, and joined a neighboring band to-day. As we are not in a condition to lose horses, I sent several men in pursuit, and remained in camp, in the hope of recovering him; but lost the afternoon to no purpose, as we did not see ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... mean by that, Mr Bideawhile. I fancy that if I were to speak in that way of your client you would be very angry with me. Besides, what does it all amount to? Will the old gentleman say that he gave the letter into his son's hands, so that, even if such a freak should have come into my client's head, he could have signed it and sent it off? If I understand, Mr Longestaffe says that he locked the letter up in a drawer in the very room which Melmotte occupied, ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... said there was? By the way, is not this freak of yours of going out into the roads to smoke, as you say, alone, rather a slight on your guest? Here is Mr. Wilde; how very amusing! we all seem to be drawn out ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... play. And then he flew out about his boy, and said that my wife insulted him! I used to like that boy. Before his father came he was a good lad enough—a jolly, brave little fellow. But since he has taken this madcap freak of turning painter there is no understanding the chap. I don't care what a fellow is, if he is a good fellow, but a painter is no trade at all! I don't like ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... as he tells us, his "love was tried to some purpose." He became the victim of an extraordinary temptation—"a freak of fancy," Mr. Froude terms it—"fancy resenting the minuteness with which he watched his own emotions." He had "found Christ" and felt Him "most precious to his soul." He was now tempted to give Him up, "to sell and part with this most blessed Christ, to exchange Him for the things of this life; ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... contortions have delighted the eyes and moved the hearts of kings. See Major Wee-Wee, the smallest man in the world, no bigger than a two-year-old baby, and Tom Morgan, the giant who stands seven feet three inches in his stocking feet. They are all there—every kind of human freak from the living skeleton to the fat woman who weighs four hundred pounds. The price is the same to one and all—twenty-five cents, only a quarter of a dollar. This way and get your tickets for the side show. There is just time to take in all its wonders before the big ...
— The Circus Comes to Town • Lebbeus Mitchell
... confounded millionaire soap-boiler," commented Mr. Blunt through his clenched teeth. "A man absolutely without parentage. Without a single relation in the world. Just a freak." ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... was, the face she saw when a freak of chance led to her following that cab, and looking in out of mere curiosity at its occupant, was the face of her old lover—of her husband. Eighteen—twenty—years had made a man of one who was then little more than a boy. The mark of the world he had lived in was ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... she had no need to ask the question. She had heard of Anne Hamilton's extraordinary freak and had suggested that for the protection of the interests of Anne's relatives she had better be put under proper restraint. Still, she asked the question. One would have said from the deadly monotony of Lady Drummond's voice that she could not get any ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... long before the invention of freak verse and Freudism, I was standing in front of the Cafe Royal in Regent Street when there emerged from its portals the most famous young writer of the day, the Poet about whose latest work "The Book Bills of Narcissus" all literary London ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... new freak is that?" and Aunt Eunice gazed at him in astonishment as he declined the cup she had prepared with so much care, dropping in the whitest lumps of sugar, and stirring in the ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... This satire on the azure-pedalled coteries of Washington Square has perhaps received more publicity than any other of Marquis's writings, but of all Don's drolleries I reserve my chief affection for Archy. The cockroach, endowed by some freak of transmigration with the shining soul of a vers libre poet, is a thoroughly Marquisian whimsy. I make no apology for quoting this prince of blattidae at some length. Many a commuter, opening his evening paper on the train, ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... Mal de Mer Belt Co., National Drug and Chemical Co., St Gabriel Street, Montreal, Canada. Bad sailors take note! On this steamer were also, as honoured guests, Jim Jeffries, the redoubtable, going to his doom; "Tay Pay" O'Connor; and Kessler, the "freak" Savoy Hotel dinner-giver; also, by the way, a certain London Jew financier, who gave me a commission to go to and ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... this freak struck Madam Conway favorably. Arthur Carrollton knew that Maggie was unlike any other person, and the joke, she thought, would increase, rather than diminish, the interest he already felt in her. So she made no objection, and in a few days it was ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... the storm's full fury by the tornado getting into the opening and lifting off the whole roof after having first swept away the house above. Another pathetic case resulted in the death of a whole family by an extraordinary freak of the tornado. The storm first struck a large pond and swept up all the water in it. Its next plunge deposited this water on one of these dugouts, and the family were drowned like chipmunks ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... archway, of no great height, formed in the rock. The arch itself was white; the super-incumbent stone was of a dull red hue. On the left flank of the arch were a series of inscribed characters, which might have been cut by a human hand, or might have been a mere natural freak. They looked like some rude system of hieroglyphics, and bore no ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... poor Jake was after them, for the simple reason that it was a snap case, and even I didn't know that Poddington was trying for the giants until he had started. But Waydell was soon after him, and he knows that when I once set out for a freak or a certain kind of animal I keep on until I get it. So he has probably already figured out that I'm making new plans ...
— Tom Swift in Captivity • Victor Appleton
... meanwhile the traditions of both are so far agreed in allowing a certain amount of free will to direct the actions of men and women that a tale which should be all necessity and no free will would, in effect, be necessity's own contrary—a merely wanton freak. ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Andrew Lanning's coming to Los Toros a mad freak, whereas it was in reality a very clever stroke. Hal Dozier would have been on the road five hours before if he had not been held up in the matter of horses, but this is to tell the story ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... and bowed, to this strange freak of an introduction; and, of course, I rose and Curtsied low, and waited his commands to sit again; which were given instantly, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... Gibbon Wakefield will probably be remembered as long as the history of Australia and New Zealand is read, the man himself was, during most of his active career, under a cloud. The abduction of an heiress—a mad freak for which he paid by imprisonment and disgrace—deprived him of the hope of ordinary public distinction. For many years he had to work masked—had to pour forth his views in anonymous tracts and letters, had to make pawns of dull men with respectable names. This and more ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... bough, Each on the other heaped, along the line 15 Of the dry wreck. And, in our vacant mood, Not seldom did we stop to watch some tuft Of dandelion seed or thistle's beard, That skimmed the surface of the dead calm lake, Suddenly halting now—a lifeless stand! 20 And starting off again with freak as sudden; [1] In all its sportive wanderings, all the while, Making report of an invisible breeze That was its wings, its chariot, and its horse, Its playmate, rather say, its moving soul. [2] 25 —And often, trifling with ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... world is hard, and there was little mercy shown for JOANNA's freak. Her husband had slain her. That was all. She with her flashes, her gaiety, her laughter, was consigned to dust. But in Sir JOHN's note-book it was written that, "The hob-nailed boot is but a bungling weapon. The ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, October 18, 1890 • Various
... to the house on horseback. She was a fat, clumsy woman, and got on and off her horse with difficulty. Isaac knew that all the family were absent; but when he saw her come ambling along the road, he took a freak not to tell her of it. He let down the bars for her; she rode up to the horse-block with which every farm-house was then furnished, rolled off her horse, and went into the house. She then discovered, for the ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... the fallen men. At Shiloh, during the first day's fighting, wide tracts of woodland were burned over in this way and scores of wounded who might have recovered perished in slow torture. I remember a deep ravine a little to the left and rear of the field I have described, in which, by some mad freak of heroic incompetence, a part of an Illinois regiment had been surrounded, and refusing to surrender was destroyed, as it very well deserved. My regiment having at last been relieved at the guns and moved over to the heights above this ravine for no obvious purpose, I obtained leave to ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... of manhood, Ted soothed his wounded soul by appearing in collars of an amazing height and stiffness, and ties which were the wonder of all female eyes. This freak was a sort of vengeance on his hard-hearted mother; for the collars drove the laundress to despair, never being just right, and the ties required such art in the tying that three women sometimes laboured long before—like Beau Brummel—he turned from a heap of 'failures' ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... "All sorts of places. I ran a tailor shop myself, pressing and cleaning. I understand that Poseidon and Pluto entered freak shows—they were fine attractions, too. Pan lived mostly in the forests, doing well enough for himself running wild. Diana and Athena ran a small hairdressing studio ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... his freak, By a Narrabri beak, He was jawed with a deal of verbosity; For his only appeal Was 'professional zeal' ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... there, with brilliant eye. And Health, with rosy cheek,— Manhood, with forehead stern and high, And youth with many a freak. ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... so, my love. As you get older you will, perhaps, see as I do—that to carry out the spirit of your father's will would be better than to follow so closely the letter of it. But you are still very young, and Jock is younger; and, fortunately, you can afford to indulge a freak of this sort. I shall let Mr. Rushton know that I withdraw all opposition. And now, give me a kiss, and let us forget that there ever was any controversy between us—it never went further than a controversy, did ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... knowledge that will just shake the puzzle into place, and explain the whole mystery to us. It seems to me a most remarkable thing that these two strange affairs should have happened in exactly the same place. That it is some strange freak of nature I have no doubt, but I am absolutely at a loss to think what it ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... southward, by the strange freak of the antarctic current, came in view of the lookouts on the ships, who had been posted as soon as the boys were missed. The boats were at once despatched, and headed for the little ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... hope that this new idea of his is only a freak. He will soon tire of his task of censor of morals. Meanwhile, we are to be most guarded in our conversation. And as ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... besides anxiety and suspense; keen disappointment was wringing his heart cruelly. Just when their clever little plot seemed on the point of working, a freak of fate had dashed his hopes to ...
— The Boy Scouts of Lenox - Or The Hike Over Big Bear Mountain • Frank V. Webster
... the truth, I have not yet had an opportunity to question them. Some freak of the girl's, I should guess. The young teacher to whom I give house-room informs me that they were excited last night by an appearance of the Northern Lights—a very fine display, he tells me. I regret that, being asleep, I missed it. He suggested that the pair had set out to ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... being waged against our country by a clever and powerful enemy. And I feel that our work in connection with the unraveling of the mystery and overcoming the enemy or enemies is but begun. It's a cinch that the thing is organized by human minds and is not any sort of a freak of the elements. Our work is cut out for us, all right, and I wish you would stick to George and me through ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... presented her with the half kindly, half patronising air of one who feels that any genius in man or woman is a kind of disease, and that the person affected by it must be soothingly considered as a sort of "freak" or nondescript creature, like a white crow or ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... and were exposed to dangers on all sides. Every colony acted as a fortress to protect the boundary and keep subjects to their allegiance to Rome. This establishment was not a matter of individual choice nor was it left to any freak of chance. A decree of the senate decided when and where a colony should be sent out, and the people in their assemblies elected ...
— Public Lands and Agrarian Laws of the Roman Republic • Andrew Stephenson
... at a sharp angle over the prison camp, and as he cleared the barbed wire fence Tom, who had been given charge of the packets, let one go. It fell just outside the barrier, caused by some freak of the wind perhaps, and the lad could not keep back a sigh of dismay. One of the three precious packages had fallen short of the mark, and would doubtless be picked up by ...
— Air Service Boys in the Big Battle • Charles Amory Beach
... himself up as Apollo, and recited at the public ball at the theatre a masquerade he had composed on the subject of love, twanging a guitar vigorously all the time. He was afterwards heartily ashamed of this freak, which he wonders he could ever have been guilty of. An ardent desire for glory now seized him, and after some months spent in constant poetical studies, and in fingering grammars and dictionaries, he succeeded in producing his first tragedy; which, like the sketch already mentioned, he entitled ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... out into the gulf to avoid the treacherous shoals, and to pass beyond the furious race of white-capped billows that poured from the great river for miles into the sea. Then they turned and made for the group of half-submerged mountains and scattered rocks that Nature, in some freak of fury, had thrown into the throat of Seven Islands Bay. That was a difficult passage. The black shores were swept by headlong tides. Tusks of granite tore the waves. Baffled and perplexed, the wind flapped and whirled among the cliffs. Through all this the little boat ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... wireless messages between certain hours in the evening, while not infrequently, during the winter months, a whole week would go by and nothing could be done. During such a period auroral displays were usually of nightly occurrence. Then a "freak night" would come along and business would be brisk at ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... I prefer to make a collection that shall show future ages who it was that built up our finances, and furnished the sinews of war. Some may look upon this move as a mercenary one, but with me it is a passion. It is not simply a freak, it is ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... Tullidge were allowed to see his head and hear his arm. The corp'el gave these private views at any time, and was quite willing to show off, though the exhibition was apt to bore him a little. His fellows displayed him much as one would a 'freak' in a dime museum. ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... glance, as, thanks doubtless to the diffusion of my portrait, everybody seemed to do. The interest with which she regarded me would have been more flattering had I not been aware that I owed it entirely to my character as a freak of Nature and not at ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... a becomingly meek disposition, he accepted me as a deformed creature afflicted with a mild form of lunacy. Then he proceeded to examine my clothing and especially my knees, trying to solve by what freak of nature I was cursed since I had no lower arms such as he had. My small face, smooth forehead, and the short straight hair on my head aroused in him no little wonder and merriment, so that, all in all, I was the oddest freak he had ever seen. He soon showed ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... You surely must have something to say about this strange freak, though I own I have not given you much chance to say it. Come in if you can spare the ...
— Allison Bain - By a Way she knew not • Margaret Murray Robertson
... tapped with his fingers on the desk. Then he smiled. The postmaster was fond of a joke. Why not let this odd little freak from the West have an interview ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... an opportunity for him to make me that long-delayed explanation; but Monsieur Dorlange seemed so little inclined to take advantage of it that, using Monsieur Armand's freak as a text, he read me a lecture on the danger of spoiling children: a subject which was not at all agreeable to me, as he must have perceived from the rather stiff manner with which I listened to him. ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... the gayer Court he had left behind, but through all the reckless episodes of his long and stirring career, Francois was by his side, patient, adroit, silent when necessary, at other times a madcap for freak and fantasy. Faith of a gentleman—Francois Gaillard was everything his noble master should have been, and that master too often such as the poorest lackey might have been ashamed to be, yet—faith of a gentleman—De ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... years, tall, spare, sallow of complexion, with long, straight, black hair, and dark eyes—the precise colour of which no man precisely knew, for it seemed to change with his varying moods—was, as we have seen, by some strange freak of fortune, an apothecary's assistant. But merely to say that he was an apothecary's assistant very inadequately describes the man; for, in addition to that, he was both a poet and a painter in thought and feeling, if not in actual fact. ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... Bigot thought she contemplated some idle freak that might try his gallantry, perhaps his purse. But she was in earnest, ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... His gaze fall slowly. And quietly striking himself on the breast with a bony finger, Iscariot repeated solemnly and sternly: "I, I shall be nearest to Jesus!" And he went out. Struck by his insolent freak, the disciples remained silent; but Peter suddenly recalling something, whispered to Thomas in an ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... important than ever, sat in his private office, twirling his thumbs and nodding his head for lack of business on which to employ his mighty mind. The afternoon, by some freak of the sun which had to do with his solar majesty's unusual spotty complexion, was exceptionally hot for a late September day, and the heat made Mr Inspector drowsy and indolent. He might have fallen into the condition of an official sleeping beauty, but that a sharp knock at the ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... defiance of the earnest warnings of Freycinet, some of the young officers and the seamen chose to sally forth in the middle of the day, and with the view of fortifying themselves against the injurious effects of their dangerous freak, drank and ate plentifully of cold water and sour fruits. The result was that in a short time five of the most imprudent were confined to their hammocks with dysentery. This necessitated a departure from Timor; so the Uranie weighed anchor and set ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... the bookman's trivial adventures and discoveries. They would be worse than trivial indeed if they led him to forget or ignore that by which Goldsmith earned his immortality, or to regard Traherne merely as a freak in the history of literary reputations, and not primarily as the writer of such words ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... kept mainsail and boom from being blown straight ahead. The boom end swung outboard till it dragged in the seas as she rolled. Only by a miracle and the stoutest of standing gear had she escaped dismasting. Now, with the mainsail broaded off to starboard, and the jib by some freak of wind and sea winged out to port, the sloop drove straight before the wind, holding as true a course as if the limp body on the cockpit floor laid an invisible, controlling hand on sheet ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... way through the village Terry explained Ohto's decision, concluding with: "And so he awaits one of their 'signs,' the appearance of the limocons, or some freak of weather or natural phenomenon like an earthquake—they read ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... from Edgar Crandall's face; he pulled his hat over the flaming helmet of hair. "I might have known such things ain't true," he said; "it was just a freak that saved Alec. There's no chance for a man, for a living, in these dam' mountains. They look big and open and free, but Greenstream's the littlest, meanest place on the earth. The paper-shavers own the sky and air. Well, ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... coal scuttle, sir," said Carrick the trite. The description was apt, for the freak of nature which confronted them. Towering high above its neighbors this mountain was unusual. Some outraged Titan in his ire had, in some long-forgotten aeon, apparently seized and turned upon its head the top-heavy ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... thing. From now on I will look for him whether I am on land or on sea. Some day, somewhere, I shall hear news of him. I wish you to remember that if ever you need a friend, you have only to let me know. I am ashamed to think that I have let this strange freak of circumstance find Robert Morton's daughter for me. I should have looked you up years ago. Do you know what a fellow's chum means to him when he is a boy at school?" Captain Moore queried, less seriously. "Don't you think a man ought to wish to do ...
— Madge Morton's Secret • Amy D. V. Chalmers
... to him, and feel his sympathy. He never retired much before midnight, and it was scarcely ten minutes' walk. She would get back before her father returned, and no one would know. Seizing her hat, she went quietly out. It was a freak, but then Beth had freaks now and then. A great black cloud drifted over the moon, and made everything quite dark. A timid girl would have been frightened, but ...
— Beth Woodburn • Maud Petitt
... benignantly through the first waves of smoke. "Well, Johnny's an old patient of mine, and he's an old admirer of Thea's. She was born a cosmopolitan, and I expect she learned a good deal from Johnny when she used to run away and go to Mexican Town. We thought it a queer freak then." ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... By some strange freak of fancy, Lyndsay and his wife had attracted the attention of Miss Carr, who never passed them in her long rambles without bestowing upon them a gracious bow and a smile, which displayed, at one gesture, all her glittering store of large, ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... above, who was evidently ignorant of the extent to which these monuments are scattered over the earth, seemed to regard it as a singular freak of Nature with no significance other than that of ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... to me, "I see the Doctor, sir. Oh, what an old man! He has got a white beard." And I—what would I not have given for a bit of friendly wilderness, where, unseen, I might vent my joy in some mad freak, such as idiotically biting my hand; turning a somersault, or slashing at trees, in order to allay those exciting feelings that were well-nigh uncontrollable. My heart beats fast, but I must not let my face betray my emotions, lest it ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... was prouder of than of all his other sons and all his possessions put together. Clarence, whom I will not describe, as he will, I trust, show himself more effectually by his actions, was like his mother in disposition, or so, at least, she made herself happy by thinking; but by some freak of nature he was like his father in person, and carried his mouse's heart in a huge frame, somewhat hulking and heavy-shouldered, with the same roll which distinguished Mr. Copperhead, and which betrayed something of the original navvy who was the root of the race. ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... the lengthing twine, Bait harmless hooks, and launch a leadless line! Their shadows on the stream, the sun behind— Egregious anglers! are the fishes blind? Gull'd by the sportings of the frisking bleak, That now assemble, now disperse, in freak; They see not deeper, where the quick-eyed trout, Has chang'd his route, and turned him quick about; See not those scudding shoals, that mend their pace, Of frighten'd bream, and silvery darting ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... liberty! Don't like liberties. Always courteous to everybody—consequently, expect everybody to be courteous to me! Still, can't help smiling. It was a quaint idea to hang my old wideawake on the clock in my study. I wonder what put such a freak into the joker's head! Now let me look at the paper that has just reached me from London. Dear me, "The Vacant Chair." That seems a good title. And all about Gray's Inn! Now, I like Gray's Inn—a most excellent place; everyone connected with it great friends of mine. And writing of Gray's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 1, 1890 • Various
... bloused Peonies, half adoze; Mimulus, wild in change and freak; Dainty flesh of the China Rose, Tender and fine as a fairy's cheek; (I watched him finger the folds apart To get at the blush ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... charm for Moonshee, and was he animated by the antiquarian's enthusiasm, that he delved away hour after hour, unearthing, with his spade, bricks and stones and tiles and slabs? I was at a loss to account for this new freak in the old man; but seeing him infatuated with his eccentric pursuit, and Boy enraptured over grubs and snails and bits of broken figures, the resurrections of the nimble spade, I left them to their cheap ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... on Lightmark's derelict paper, with its scribble of a girl's head. He considered it thoughtfully for some time, starting a little, and covering it with his blotting-paper, when Mrs. Bullen, his housekeeper, entered with a cup of tea—a freak of his nerves which made him smile when she ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... had a figure-head, or only a plain beak, was not quite certain, owing to canvas wrapped about that part, either to protect it while undergoing a re-furbishing, or else decently to hide its decay. Rudely painted or chalked, as in a sailor freak, along the forward side of a sort of pedestal below the canvas, was the sentence, "Seguid vuestro jefe" (follow your leader); while upon the tarnished headboards, near by, appeared, in stately capitals, once gilt, ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... returned alone Exactly where my glove was thrown. Meanwhile came many thoughts: on me Rested the hopes of Italy. 50 I had devised a certain tale Which, when 'twas told her, could not fail Persuade a peasant of its truth; I meant to call a freak of youth This hiding, and give hopes of pay, And no temptation to betray. But when I saw that woman's face, Its calm simplicity of grace, Our Italy's own attitude In which she walked thus far, and stood, 60 Planting each naked foot so firm, To crush the snake and spare the worm— At first sight of ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... By a mental freak which was characteristic of him he nursed the thought of connecting himself with Messrs. Quodling & Son, oil and colour merchants. Theirs was a large and sound business, both in town and country. It might not be easy to become traveller to such a firm, but his ingenious ...
— The Town Traveller • George Gissing
... was the man of no children and large resources, whose failure astonished nobody. There, were the people who were always going out to-morrow, and always putting it off; there, were the people who had come in yesterday, and who were much more jealous and resentful of this freak of fortune than the seasoned birds. There, were some who, in pure meanness of spirit, cringed and bowed before the enriched Collegian and his family; there, were others who did so really because their eyes, accustomed to the gloom ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... atoms, which have momentarily met together to form this woman, present a combination which is agreeable to the eye. But that is but a freak of nature, and the atoms know not what they do. They will some day separate with the same indifference as they came together. Where are now the atoms which formed Lais or Cleopatra? I must confess that women are sometimes beautiful. But they are liable to grievous afflictions, ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... this instant, you young villain!" yelled Pearl, whose hope of saving himself was thus endangered by the unexpected freak of the owner ...
— All Adrift - or The Goldwing Club • Oliver Optic
... guide. Tolstoi realized he could not be of service to the people he would uplift unless he lived among them, shared their trials and experienced their needs. The time has gone by when the musician and composer was considered a sort of freak, knowing music and nothing else. We know the great composers were men of the highest intelligence and learning, men whose aim was to work out their genius to the utmost perfection. Nothing less than the highest would satisfy them. As George Eliot said, 'Genius is ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... whim, caprice, vagary, freak; priggery, vanity, egotism, self-conceit, inflation, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... our class, I mean—a great deal may depend on a young man's making a good match; and in Guy's case I may say that his mother and sisters (I won't include myself, though I might) have been simply stranded—thrown overboard—by his freak. You can understand how serious it is when I tell you that it's that and nothing else that has brought me all the way to America. And my first idea was to go straight to your daughter-in-law, since ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... times the diabolic agency in sheer enthusiasm at the marvellous results. The logical design is little more than ostensible; and Sir Thomas, though he knew it not himself, is really satisfied with any line of inquiry that will bring him in sight of some freak of nature or of opinion suitable to his museum ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... that she's anything like me," he assured her quite good-temperedly; "nobody ever believes she's my daughter, except me and the old woman. She's a little lady, she is. Freak o' nature, I ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... curious freak of nature, the tendency of the channel of the Mississippi is always toward one or the other of its banks, being influenced by the direction of its bends. The principle is one of nicely regulated ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... first at the labor which this freak of his masters entailed. But as the work went on and he saw how snug and comfortable was the result, he took a pride in it, and the time was not far off when its utility was to become manifest. Indeed, later on in the winter the ...
— Jack Archer • G. A. Henty
... evening sky lighted up the vast rift for a while, and Bart forgot his hunger in the contemplation of this strange freak of nature, of a river running below in a channel whose walls were perfectly perpendicular and against which in places the rapid stream seemed to beat and eddy and swirl, while in other parts there were long stretches of pebbly and rocky shore. For as far as Bart could judge, ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... the edge of one of them and look sheer down a precipice two thousand feet! You may fancy a whole mountain scooped out and carried away, and yet you may have to reach the bottom of this yawning gulf by a road which seems cut out of the face of the cliff, or rather has been formed by a freak of Nature—for in these countries the hand of man has done ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... then after the boy, who was walking up the street, and she couldn't help thinking how very little it was, and how she hoped he would have given her more. She looked at the little broom he had ruined, and everything seemed sadder than before. Then, by some strange freak, her mind ran off to the gardens where her mother slept, as it always did when darkness gathered round her, and she longed, more than ever before, to throw herself on the ground there, and quietly sleep a long, long time. During the whole day she had received but a ...
— The Angel Children - or, Stories from Cloud-Land • Charlotte M. Higgins
... which were evidently not far off. Being short of fresh food, he hitched up his team, and also his pilot's team, leaving only his boy driver in charge, while the men pursued the caribou. He enjoined the boy very strictly not to move on any account. By an odd freak a sudden snowstorm swept out of a clear sky just after they left. They missed their way, and two days later, starving and tired out, they found their first refuge, a small house many miles from the spot where they had left the sledges. ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... a 'blunder,'" Phil said thickly. "You made a freak of an unborn baby for your own ends, and you call it a blunder. Anyone else might be content with a little innocent butchery, but not you ... you take over children, body ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... An' hyar she's runned off an' married old Tom Kittredge's gran'son, Josiah Kittredge's son—when our folks 'ain't spoke ter none o' 'em fur fifty year—Josiah Kittredge's son—ha! ha! ha!" He laughed aloud in tuneless scorn of himself and of this freak of froward destiny and then fell to wringing his hands and ...
— His "Day In Court" - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... 'Prince Polozov's' drawing-room was a fact perfectly well known to its mistress; the whole point of her entry had been the display of her hair, which was certainly beautiful. Sanin was inwardly delighted indeed at this freak on the part of Madame Polozov; if, he thought, she is anxious to impress me, to dazzle me, perhaps, who knows, she will be accommodating about the price of the estate. His heart was so full of Gemma that all other women had absolutely ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... very simple. Nevertheless it was also amazing to realize how by what might be called a freak of fate the air service boys had been enabled to discover these facts. But for the accident to the motor they would not have dreamed of making a landing short of the aviation field at Bar-le-Duc. Then, had they not caught that woeful sound of loud sobbing, the idea of looking ...
— Air Service Boys Over The Enemy's Lines - The German Spy's Secret • Charles Amory Beach
... abreast to each, their harness jingling with bells, drew up in a line before the steps, the runners creaking and crunching over the frozen snow. Natacha was the foremost, and the first to tune her spirits to the pitch of this carnival freak. This mirth, in fact, proved highly infectious, and reached its height of tumult and excitement when the party went down the steps and packed themselves into the sleighs, laughing and shouting to each other at the top of their voices. Two of the ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... intonation, and immediately some chimes began to play, and kept up their resounding music for five minutes, as measured by the hand upon the dial. It was a very delightful harmony, as airy as the notes of birds, and seemed a not unbecoming freak of half-sportive fancy in the huge, ancient, and solemn church; although I have seen an old-fashioned parlor-clock that did precisely the same thing, in its ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... the feasibility of Mr. Lincoln's plan is matter of fruitless disputation, having to do only with fancied probabilities, and having never been put to the proof of trial, at least no one will deny that it was creditable to his nature. A strange freak of destiny arranged that one of the most obstinate, sanguinary wars of history should be conducted by one of the most humane men who ever lived, and that blood should run in rivers at the order of a ruler to whom bloodshed was repugnant, and to whom the European ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... most effect on the mind of Louis was the eloquence of Ignatius when he met the young Xavier in the streets of Paris. "And then?" asked by another saint of an ambitious youth, did not lose its force with the holy youth who found himself, by some freak of blind fortune heir to one of the ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... women's clothes, as well as in men's. But fashion changes too rapidly to make value of material always wise expenditure for one of slender purse. Better usually have two dresses, each cut and made in the whim of the moment, than one which must be worn after the whim has become a freak. In men's clothes the opposite rule should be followed since good style in ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... Had given, in pity to the blooming boy, Feelings more exquisitely tuned to joy. Fond to excess was he of all that grew; The morning blossom sprinkled o'er with dew, Across his path, as if in playful freak, Would dash his brow, and weep upon his cheek; Each varying leaf that brush'd where'er he came, Press'd to his rosy lip he call'd by name; He grasp'd the saplings, measured every bough, Inhaled the fragrance that the spring ...
— May Day With The Muses • Robert Bloomfield
... of year," he said. "Folks expect no better from that reckless, harum-scarum Joe Raymond. He'll drown himself some day, there's nothing surer. This mad freak of starting off down the shore in November is just of a piece with his usual performances. But you shouldn't have let Chester ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... that at the moment Philippa was suffering acutely, she was by no means prepared to permit this vile thing to conquer. She would fight it and root it out. It had come upon her so suddenly. What was the cause? Was it merely a freak of that incomprehensible phenomenon the human mind that had twisted the chain of her affection into so mischievous a knot, or merely a figment of the brain springing from inner consciousness to torment her with devilish ingenuity? or did the fault lie ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... the motley crowd were laughing at the strange, ungirlish freak, And the boy was scared and panting, and so dashed he could not speak; And, "Miss, I have good apples," a bolder lad did cry; But she answered, "No, I thank you," from the corner ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... safe to say that after this hideous insult not one of us will speak," declared one of the group. "But I for one would like some light on the insane freak that prompted this performance. As you are at the head of this peculiar community, we'd like ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... Heaven knows that I could not get up enthusiasm enough to cross the room if at the other end of it all Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey were condensed into the little china bottle yonder."[4] It was thus no mere freak of juvenile taste that took shape in these early Byronic poems. He entitled them, with the lofty modesty of boyish authorship, Incondita, and his parents sought to publish them. No publisher could be found; but they won the attention ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... menaced by revolutionists. Unnecessary spread-eagleism, and an awful want of any, even diplomatic, tact. I hope that Mr. Dayton, who has so much sound sense and discernment, will keep to himself this freak of ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... were saying just then instantly riveted the attention of the listeners, for as though by some strange freak it had an intimate connection with the object of the scouts' coming ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren
... mind, mental disease results. The psychic is over-intensified in the emotional and intuitional functions of his mind, thus rendering his common sense states uncommon, and according to the degree of over-activity, he is either a "freak," a creature of "temperament," a "genius" or ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.
... Alexander the Great is said to have followed the festive example of his royal predecessor, and to have drunk deep in the majestic halls of Persepolis. It has been supposed by some that he caused the splendid palaces there to be set on fire in a drunken freak. ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon
... man that has nothing to conceal. And our little old million-dollar-a-rod hill is the unlikeliest place to look for a mine I ever did see. Just plain dirt and sand. No indications; just a plain freak. I'd sooner take a chance in the pasture lot behind pa's red barn—any one would. We covered up all the scratchin' we did and the wind has done the rest. Here—you was to ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... won't be eighteen for a month," he gave prompt explanation. "Under the latest law freak turned out at Albany, I'm too young to drive a motor vehicle safely on the public roads unless I have a licensed chauffeur alongside of me. Oh, of course ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... way to the handsome church, indulged in characteristic meditations of his own regarding Winifred's strange freak. He heartily hoped she would get over it. It was a stupid turn for affairs to take as regarded himself; for perpetual meetings at the choir, with the pleasant walks attached, and frequent private rehearsals in the Gray drawing-room ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... Cochrane. "Tell me the worst. What's the trouble with him? Is he the result of six generations of keeping the money in the family? Or is he a freak?" ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... some of the most fantastic workmanship of the sea, but the Gouliot Caves are its wildest and maddest freak. A strong, swift current sets in from the southwest, and being lashed into a giddy fury by the lightest southwest wind, it has hewn out of the rock a series of cells, and grottos, and alcoves, some of them running far inland, in long, vaulted ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... the liveliest. Why is this? Is it that it is born between Wind and Water?—Wind the father, ever casting himself into multitudinous shapes of invisible tides, taking beauteous form in the sweep of a "lazy-paced cloud," or embodying a transient informing freak in the waterspout, which he draws into his life from the bosom of his mate;—Water, the mother, visible she, sweeping and swaying, ever making and ever unmade, the very essence of her being—beauty, yet having no ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... footprint before him; and Middleton doubted not that, having studied and re-studied the family records and the judicial examinations which described exactly the track that was seen the day after the memorable disappearance of his ancestor, Mr. Eldredge was now, in some freak, or for some purpose best known to himself, practically following it out. And follow it out he did, until at last he lifted up his eyes, muttering to himself: "At this point the footsteps ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... perfect general taste, who yet, not having paid much attention to the first principles of architecture, permitted the humor of their disposition to prevail over the majesty of their intellect, and, instead of building from a fixed design, gratified freak after freak, and fancy after fancy, as they were caught by the dream or the desire; mixed mimicries of incongruous reality with incorporations of undisciplined ideal; awakened every variety of contending feeling and unconnected memory; consummated confusion of form by trickery ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... thus to complicate his labor. I caught a glance of the simple-minded fellow, as the craft turned, and I heard him yell, "Hookie!" He was nonplussed by the change of the raft; but he did not know enough to follow it round upon the outside. I am not sure this freak of the current did not save us from a calamity, for as it revolved, and the rope became tangled in the platform, we were thrown against the raft, thus saving my helpmate half his toil. Fortunately the end of the stick on which I ...
— Down The River - Buck Bradford and His Tyrants • Oliver Optic
... Adminius had ceded to him the kingship of the whole island, and sent home high-flown dispatches to that effect. He had no fleet, but drew up his army in line of battle on the Gallic shore, while all wondered what mad freak he was purposing; then suddenly bade every man fill his helmet with shells as "spoils of the Ocean" to be dedicated in the Capitol. Finally he commemorated this glorious victory by the erection of a lofty lighthouse,[126] probably at the ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... Meg and her mother busy at some necessary needlework, while Beth and Amy got tea, and Hannah finished her ironing with what she called a 'slap and a bang', but still Jo did not come. They began to get anxious, and Laurie went off to find her, for no one knew what freak Jo might take into her head. He missed her, however, and she came walking in with a very queer expression of countenance, for there was a mixture of fun and fear, satisfaction and regret in it, which puzzled the family ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... It was a strange freak for him to take, when he expressed his wish to join the mountain boys, and Ethan could not ...
— The Hero of Ticonderoga - or Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys • John de Morgan
... counted occasional. Life in those preposterous palaces would be an agony of dullness; it is clear we are meant to visit them only as in a flying vision. And what is true of the old freaks of wealth, flavour and fierce colour and smell, I would say also of the new freak of wealth, which is speed. I should say to the duke, when I entered his house at the head of an armed mob, "I do not object to your having exceptional pleasures, if you have them exceptionally. I do not mind your enjoying the strange and alien energies ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... our Rowland started back Loaded with thanks and all that words could speak, The stars were overcast, the night was black, The wind arose as from some sudden freak; At intervals was seen a livid streak, And distant rumblings fell upon the ear; 'Twas true a storm had threatened all the week And lurked about the sultry atmosphere, Then was the time they were to have it, ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... he would write, "a horse, a horse, with four feet and a mane and tail. Not a wooden freak out of Noah's ark, whittled out with a jack-knife, such as I had last year. Get ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... To-night, by some freak of memory, it all came back to him through the dream-inducing haze of tobacco smoke. And there, on his writing-table, stood a full-length photograph of Lance in Punjab cavalry uniform. Soldiering on the Indian Border, fulfilling himself in his own splendid fashion, he was clearly ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... some spirit Which protects us, and controls Every impulse we inherit, By some sympathy of souls? Is it instinct? is it nature? Or some freak or fault of chance, Which our liking or disliking ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... say, the odd little freak of substitution only endeared the twins to the people of Mount Mark ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... spiteful. But I'll tell YOU something. Such friendships as you speak of are only possible where the woman is old—or ugly—or abnormal, in some way: a man-woman, or a clever woman, or some other freak of nature. Now, our women are, as a rule, sexually healthy. They know what they're here for, too, and are not ashamed of it. Also, they still have their share of physical attraction. While yours—good God! I wonder you manage ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... stooped to punish, and to cook a sprat have passed all Paris through the net. But remembering the days when I myself attended the College of Burgundy, I set the freak to the credit of some young student, and, shrugging my shoulders, dismissed it from my mind. An instant later, however, observing that the fragments of the snowball were melting on the seat and wetting ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... never been away from his native Alabama, that he has had but the most limited advantages of education, and that he has shared the portion of his race in hardship, poverty and toil. He does not know why he wrote these poems. It is an amazing thing that he should have done so—a freak, we may call it, of the wind of genius, which bloweth where it listeth and singles out one in ten thousand to find a fitting speech for the dumb thought and feeling ...
— Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt • William James Edwards
... tender solicitude, was, Brigit thought, almost divinely beautiful as she watched it. And by some curious freak of the down-falling light only his head and shoulders were visible, and seemed almost to be floating in the gloom. Never had he been so handsome, and never so pitilessly remote. He had forgotten her; he had forgotten love; he was not ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... been to Early and his followers to note the panic and confusion into which McCausland's predatory riders once more threw the capital and the border States, this absurd freak produced far-reaching consequences that were not in the thoughts of any one on either side. Its first effect was to stop the withdrawal of the Sixth Corps, and to put Wright and Emory once more in march toward the Shenandoah. It determined ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... around her thin shoulders; the hood framed a small, kittenlike face. She was a Mentorian, and she was human, and Bart's eyes rested with comfort on her face; she, on the other hand, was looking up with anxiety and uneasy distrust. That's right—I'm a Lhari, a nonhuman freak! ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... piece did not seem to the critic to agree with Stuart's handling. To make his impressions fit with the pictures, the critic supposed that Stuart painted a smaller portrait of Jaudenes and started one of his wife, which through some freak of temper he left (as he frequently did) with only the head and part of the background finished. These being brought to Spain, some artist there finished the lady's portrait, painted from Stuart's original a companion piece ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... should make fun of anything that I have seen in this country!" replied the Hunter. "I now rejoice that a mad freak brought me here to these woods and fields, for otherwise I should probably never have learned to know the region; for it has very little reputation abroad, and there is, in fact, nothing here to attract exhausted and surfeited tourists. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... walls, and she ran from one to another rejoicing over them. There was even a further surprise. Years ago an artist cousin had sketched her portrait in pastel crayons upon the color-wash of the wall. It had been done as a mere artistic freak, but like many such spontaneous drawings it had been an admirable likeness and a very pretty picture. It bore her name, "Ingred," in flourishy letters underneath. The whole of this had now been protected with a sheet of glass and enclosed by a frame. A table ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... circumscribed by the parliamentary power. It is different in an Empire like Russia, with its murderous dynastic antecedents. There, the personal character of the princely personages is of the utmost importance; for a youthful freak or hideous trick may point to a coming horrible event. In olden times, previous to the Tatar dominion, Russia passed through the so-called Appanage Period of Separate Principalities, when the Empire was actually partitioned. ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... anomaly, and each of its component parts was separately a freak. It was a gathering-together of all the outmoded and obsolete hulks and monstrosities of space. One would have to scavenge half the galaxy to bring together so many crazy, over-age derelicts that should have been in ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... life was cynical and coarse. The cynicism was the natural outcome of his profession; the coarseness was his heritage by birth, as his sensual mouth, blubber lips, thick nose, and bull-neck attested. It was a strange freak of Fate which had made him the guardian of the morals of society and the upholder of law and order in a modern civilized community. By temperament and disposition he belonged to the full-blooded type of humanity which found its best exemplars in the early ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... who loves freak bets, ''if I get him you quit the Army soon as this job's done, and join up with Rammy and me: if I don't I'll stay and help you ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... Pisos, that just such a freak Is the crude and preposterous poem Which merely abounds in a torrent of sounds, With no ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... "What freak is this?" quoth Stuyvesant grim. Quoth Herman, "'Twas a charger brave— Like my first bride in eye and limb— A wedding-gift; indulge the whim! And from his back to plunge, I crave, ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... "A foolish freak—worrying the whole family, delaying supper, and what not. Now come and eat your porridge without more delay. Mary, go bring the milk; and, Timmie, you fetch a clean saucer from the pantry. Martin, stop pestering your brother until he eats something; he'll play with ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... — a small creek marked by a line of gum trees, issuing from a glen in a low range. By a kindly freak of nature, enough water had been confined in this glen to provide a permanent supply for the exploring party and their animals, during the long term of ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... to be prepared to find, as in point of fact we do find, within the main body of Judaism, and not merely as a freak of occasional eccentrics, distinct mystical tendencies. These tendencies have often been active well inside the sphere of the Law. Mysticism was, as we shall see, sometimes a revolt against Law; but it was often, in Judaism as in the Roman Catholic Church, the outcome of a sincere and even passionate ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... surrounded by thousands of miles of sea, the nearest land a group of islets like unto them, is found the gigantic tortoise, and in only one other place in the wide world, the Galapagos group of islands in the South Pacific. How, or by what strange freak of Dame Nature these curious reptiles, sole survivals of another age, should come to be found in this lonely spot, is a deep mystery, and one not likely to be unfolded now. At any rate, there they are, looking as if some of ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... risk in so doing. But Francis had no desire to be caught, and perhaps imprisoned for a considerable time, until he was able to convince the council that his share of the night's work had been merely the result of a boyish freak. With two strokes of his oar, therefore, he swept the boat's head round, thereby throwing their pursuers directly astern of them; then he and Giuseppi threw their whole weight into the stroke, and the boat ...
— The Lion of Saint Mark - A Story of Venice in the Fourteenth Century • G. A. Henty
... before me as they had appeared on the night of that escapade, I realized that the real romance of life is made by memory, and that for these two old friends to be able thus to recall together across all those years that laughing freak of their young blood was still more romantic than the original escapade. But as I went on looking at Irene, with the bloom of her immortal youth upon her, I grew jealous of the General's share in that historic night. Well, ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... reward. The Statue accordingly whispered a most elaborate panegyric on Furioso, which was of course duly delivered. The Admiral, who was neither a coward nor a fool, was made ridiculous by being described as the greatest commander that ever existed; one whom Nature, in a gracious freak, had made to shame us little men; a happy compound of the piety of Noah, the patriotism of Themistocles, the skill of Columbus, and the courage of Nelson; and his exploit styled the most glorious and unrivalled victory that was ever achieved, even by the Vraibleusians! Honours ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... possessions put together. Clarence, whom I will not describe, as he will, I trust, show himself more effectually by his actions, was like his mother in disposition, or so, at least, she made herself happy by thinking; but by some freak of nature he was like his father in person, and carried his mouse's heart in a huge frame, somewhat hulking and heavy-shouldered, with the same roll which distinguished Mr. Copperhead, and which betrayed something of the original navvy who was the root of the race. He had ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... hiding Pollyooly had played the important part. It had been a freak of nature to make her and Lady Marion Ricksborough so closely alike, that even when they were together it was hard to tell which was which. The duchess had taken advantage of this likeness to substitute Pollyooly for Lady Marion at ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... nigh past work now, but in the ten years you have been with me things have always gone well with me, and I have money enough to make a shift with for the rest of my life, even if I work no longer. But I don't like this freak that you have taken into your head. It will mean trouble, lad, as sure as you are standing there. The men here won't understand you, and will like enough think that the revenue people have got hold of you. You will be shown the cold shoulder, and ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... to freak it on us. The pedant, Holofernes, in Love's Labour's Lost, characteristically puts the origin of his good things in the ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... occurrence, which has nevertheless turned and altered his whole career. 'Tis with almost all of us, as in Monsieur Massillon's magnificent image regarding King William, a grain de sable that perverts or perhaps overthrows us; and so it was but a light word flung in the air, a mere freak of a perverse child's temper, that brought down a whole heap of crushing woes upon that family whereof ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... it certain that even then the woman would go free. The murdered man would still, by a strange freak, be her husband; the murderer—in the ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... resting. He soon recovered consciousness, and by the light of an old-fashioned Argand lamp he could make out the most charming girl's face he had ever seen, one of those heads which are often supposed to be a freak of the brush, but which to him suddenly realized the theories of the ideal beauty which every artist creates for himself and whence his art proceeds. The features of the unknown belonged, so to say, to the refined and delicate type of Prudhon's school, but ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... primeval forest have the ages edged with their fine steel cut through, and given to the plough! Fashion has its Iron Age as well as its Golden; and, what is more remarkable, the first of the two has come last, in the fitful histories of custom. And this last freak of feminine taste has brought a wonderful grist of additional business to the Sheffield mill. The fair Eugenie has done a good thing for this smoky town, well deserving of a monument of burnished steel erected to her memory on one ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... with one eye Staring to threaten and defy— That thought comes next—and instantly The freak is over. The shape will vanish,—and behold! A silver shield with boss of gold, That spreads itself, some fairy bold ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... to be, and Irving Berlin, reading the signs of the times, decides to write The Blue Laws Blues. Fashions of thought change; other fashions, also. A girl who was born without hips or eyebrows and who in childhood was regarded as a freak, now finds herself, at the age of eighteen, exactly in the mode, thus proving that all things come to those who wait. Czecho-Slovakia is discovered. The American forces spent three days taking Chateau-Thierry ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... was the same with a tortoise found in Italy scarcely thirty years ago. Dr. Carl, in a work published at Frankfort[5] in 1709, took up another theory, and, such was the general ignorance at the time, he used long arguments to prove that the fossil bones were the result neither of a freak of nature, nor of the action of a plastic force, and it was not until near the end of his life that the illustrious Camper could bring himself to admit the extinction of certain species, so totally against Divine ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... I will be standing at my door. It is as well that you should look carefully round, before you enter, so as to be sure there is no one in the corridor, and that you can slip in unobserved. You may be sure that I am asking you to come for no idle freak, but because I have something very ...
— The Tiger of Mysore - A Story of the War with Tippoo Saib • G. A. Henty
... Adlerstein, give me thy solemn word that I never again hear of this freak of turning priest or hermit. What! art slow to speak? Thinkest me too ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... "You're freak mutants who can capture a battleship. Maybe you will take Athena and Earth from us. But"—the animation of hatred returned to his face—"What good will it do you? Did you ever ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... are making you better and broader and stronger," I answered. "But there is one thing I want to suggest: you are devoting too much of your time to the brown-eyed little maid. You must seek favor with Twonette. She is harmless, and through her you may, by some freak of fortune, reach the goal of your desires. With the prestige of your family and the riches of Burgundy, you may become the most powerful man in ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... what it was," explained the inventor. "By some strange freak of nature the volcanic mass dropped back into the ocean a little before I was ready to blow it to pieces. In settling down it lowered the ship. Then the explosion occurred beneath the waves. If I had waited a little while I need ...
— Under the Ocean to the South Pole - The Strange Cruise of the Submarine Wonder • Roy Rockwood
... which evidently led into the interior of the castle were its only outlets. The earth at the bottom had remained as it had been left by the builders, who surely must have thought that no madder architectural freak was ever planned than this shut tower of the Castle of Machecoul with its blank walls and ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... anything about true military tactics, and wishing to learn,—and not too proud to learn, being born with disdain of conventionalities and precedents,—entered the regiment as drummer, in sight of his own subjects, who perhaps looked upon the act as a royal freak,—even as Nero practised fiddling, and Commodus archery, before the Roman people. From drummer he rose to the rank of corporal, and from corporal to sergeant, and so on through all ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... is a matter of absolute indifference to me who the person is; but if it is that lout Coldevin—Lord, man! do you really pay any attention to what such a freak says? A man who carries a cigar-holder and a dirty comb in the same pocket! Well, I must be ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... calm and cold, reacted on Madame Grandet; she looked at her daughter with the sympathetic intuition with which mothers are gifted for the objects of their tenderness, and guessed all. In truth the life of the Hungarian sisters, bound together by a freak of nature, could scarcely have been more intimate than that of Eugenie and her mother,—always together in the embrasure of that window, and sleeping together in the ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... give "freak dinners," when the guests themselves would be dressed up, the men in women's clothes, the women in men's, the male imitating the piping treble of the female voices, and the female the over-vowelled slang of ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... seeking fame, fame came to him. All over the Missouri Valley, men knew that Grant Adams, a big, lumbering, red-polled, lusty-lunged man with one arm burned off—and the story of the burning fixed the man always in the public heart—with a curious creed and a freak gift for expounding it, was doing unusual things with the labor situation in the Harvey district. And then one day a reporter came from Omaha who uncovered this bit of news in his Sunday ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... to-day in great despair about his mistress, who has taken a freak of * * *. He began a letter to her, but was obliged to stop short—I finished it for him, and he copied and sent it. If he holds out, and keeps to my instructions of affected indifference, she will lower ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... started out in this crusade I was called crazy and a "freak" by my enemies, but now they say: "No, Carry Nation, you are not crazy, but you are sharp. You started out to accomplish something and you did. You are a grafter. It is the money you are after." Jesus said: "John came neither eating or drinking and ye say, ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... Told her he was a great admirer of her ladyship once on a time—a boyish freak—that sort of thing! Pretends all the gilt is off the gingerbread now. Wish I had been there when Sir Hamilton turned up at the Towers, ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... one in fact, a natural sovereignty, I believe. The really rigid and mechanical thing is the charter behind which Tammany works. For Tammany is the real government that has defeated a mechanical foresight. Tammany is not a freak, a strange and monstrous excrescence. Its structure and the laws of its life are, I believe, typical of all real sovereignties. You can find Tammany duplicated wherever there is a social group to be governed—in trade unions, in clubs, in boys' ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... maternal hand in both of his, looked at her speechlessly; his chin trembled. Instantly, without words of shame on one side or of forgiveness on the other, they were back again, these two, in the old friendship of youth and middle age. "It was a freak," said Mrs. Richie, soothingly. "She is probably at the hotel by this time. Don't be troubled, Blair. Go and see. If she isn't at the hotel let ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... power of the Infinite Mind. These are the two answers which we have hitherto obtained, but, as we have explained, a study is not complete if it confine itself to these two answers. When we know the law and the cause of an object submitted to our study, we further look for the end designed. This is no freak of our fancy, but the direct result of the constitution of our understanding. The universe is the creation of God. What is the design of the creation? I answer: the design of the creation is the happiness of spirits. Nature is made for the spiritual beings to which it offers the condition ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... worth while to go through the freak-splendours and transformation-scene excitements of Fortunio to prepare the palate[212] to enjoy La Toison d'Or which follows. Here is once more the true Gautieresque humour, good humour, marvellous word-painting, and romance, agreeably—indeed charmingly—twisted ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... her face Presaging ill to him whom Fate Condemned to share her love or hate. A woman tropical, intense In thought and act, in soul and sense, She blended in a like degree The vixen and the devotee, Revealing with each freak or feint The temper of Petruchio's Kate, The raptures of Siena's saint. Her tapering hand and rounded wrist Had facile power to form a fist; The warm, dark languish of her eyes Was never safe from wrath's surprise. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... is also alleged to have seized the lady in a drunken freak. It is stated that the Sultan was so much enraged at this that he proposed to make war on Bruni. His minister, however, suggested that enquiries should be made into the strength of that kingdom before commencing operations. He was accordingly ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... offended by the idea of such a freak, was quite willing to intervene. But she closed his mouth with her gloved hand and repeated with the gay obstinacy of intoxication: "Pooh, it will be all the more amusing if they do jeer at us! Come, let us be off, let us ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... to it, and that meanwhile the traditions of both are so far agreed in allowing a certain amount of free will to direct the actions of men and women that a tale which should be all necessity and no free will would, in effect, be necessity's own contrary—a merely wanton freak. ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and not time enough to close the trap door have been exposed to the storm's full fury by the tornado getting into the opening and lifting off the whole roof after having first swept away the house above. Another pathetic case resulted in the death of a whole family by an extraordinary freak of the tornado. The storm first struck a large pond and swept up all the water in it. Its next plunge deposited this water on one of these dugouts, and the family were drowned like chipmunks ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... assimilate a novel idea, and, in consequence, are choosing your words badly," he said. "It was not a freak marriage. Although I may have broken the laws of the State of New York by using a license issued to some other person, Lady Hermione and I are legally husband and wife, and no power on earth can dissolve the ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... been asleep. The sun denoted that several hours had passed. It was early afternoon. He dragged himself into the stern and sat up. The boat was in the middle of the stream. The wooded banks, with their base-lines of flashing ice, were slipping by. Near him floated a huge, uprooted pine. A freak of the current brought the boat against it. Crawling forward, he fastened the painter ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... with no means of tightening or loosening it. Not knowing better, I used to try to run in gouties or rubber snow-boots which slipped about inside the binding so that I had absolutely no control. This did not make much difference, as I knew nothing of the art and only used the Skis as a freak on days off from tobogganing. I knew nothing of wax, and when the Skis stuck, they stuck, and I thought it a poor game. When they slid I sat down and I thought it a poorer game. It never entered my head ...
— Ski-running • Katharine Symonds Furse
... there.... So what I am is some kind of a freak. Maybe a kind of super-Master and maybe something altogether different. Maybe duplicable in a less lethal fashion, and maybe not. Veree helpful—I don't think. But I don't want to kill anybody, either ... especially ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... turning himself over and over till he came to the bottom." This story was told with such gravity, and with an air of such affectionate remembrance of a departed friend, that it was impossible to suppose this extraordinary freak an invention of Mr. Langton.' It must have been in the winter that he ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... may not take your hand, sir, until you know me for what I am. There are none worse. I have been through the mire of hell itself. I have dishonorably betrayed a kinsman in the hope of gold. I had thought to kill. Only a freak of fate has stayed my hand. And there is more that ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... he must have convulsed the gravity of the Edinburgh literati invited to meet Johnson on their return from the Hebrides. 'I told, when Dr Hugh Blair was sitting with me in the pit of Drury Lane, in a wild freak of youthful extravagance I entertained the audience prodigiously by imitating the lowing of a cow. I was so successful in this boyish frolic that the universal cry of the galleries was "encore the cow." In the pride of my heart I attempted imitations of ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... of one of the great circuses some years ago was a strange creature which, for lack of a better name, its owner and the public dubbed, "A What Is It?" This freak had the semblance of humanity, and yet was not human. All its functions and feelings reversed the normal. Tickle it and it would cry bitterly; pinch or torture it and it would grin rapturously; when starved ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... delay it grievously. We divided seventeen times, and between every division this vexatious Irishman made us a speech of apologies and self-condemnation. Of the two who had supported him at the beginning of his freak one soon sneaked away. The other, Sibthorpe, stayed to the last, not expressing remorse like Shaw, but glorying in the unaccommodating temper he showed and in the delay which he produced. At last the bill went through. Then Shaw rose; congratulated ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... radio and cried for help. It was a bare hundred miles or less to that wonderful world below, but there was the Heaviside layer, and the weak signals beat but feebly against it. All that seeped through by some instant's freak of transmission was a fragment of incoherent babble to reach the uncomprehending ear of an Arkansas ham and give that gentleman uneasy sleep for some ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... of Complaints tapped with his fingers on the desk. Then he smiled. The postmaster was fond of a joke. Why not let this odd little freak from the West have ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... uncomfortable, not to say, gritty mittens (they were constructed of a cool fabric like a meat-safe), or of ambling to unknown places of destination with her foot in her cotton stirrup, was so perfectly serene, that most observers would have been constrained to suppose her a dove, embodied by some freak of nature, in the earthly tabernacle of a bird of ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... had a long talk, all of which I don't pretend to report. It began with, "I'm so glad that you take to poor Considine. You are so very much his sort of woman. He's a dear, simple creature, far too good for most of us—and a Nugent freak, I assure you. They've never known the like in the County of Cork.... I like him immensely, but of course he's too remote for the like of me. No small talk, you know, and I'm aburst with it. I talk while I'm thinking, and he when he has ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... that she had no need to ask the question. She had heard of Anne Hamilton's extraordinary freak and had suggested that for the protection of the interests of Anne's relatives she had better be put under proper restraint. Still, she asked the question. One would have said from the deadly monotony of Lady Drummond's voice that she could not get any expression ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... it of wine because wine is rare; nor the walls of gold because gold is rare: that would have been too childish: but because I would match for beauty a human work with the works of those Others: and because it happens, by some persistent freak of the earth, that precisely things most rare and costly are generally the ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... you two up to?" asked Fuller. "What good is another star? The one we're interested in is this freak underneath us." ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... beside "Danny's Own Story" and "The Cruise of the Jasper B." This satire on the azure-pedalled coteries of Washington Square has perhaps received more publicity than any other of Marquis's writings, but of all Don's drolleries I reserve my chief affection for Archy. The cockroach, endowed by some freak of transmigration with the shining soul of a vers libre poet, is a thoroughly Marquisian whimsy. I make no apology for quoting this prince of blattidae at some length. Many a commuter, opening his evening paper on the train, ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... except his entertainers and the Doctor. One would have said, to look at him, that he was not at the party by choice; and it was natural enough to think, with Susy Pettingill, that it must have been a freak of the dark girl's which brought him there, for he had the air of ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... rustic simplicity, that attracted and lured, while it foiled and disgusted those hunters of human prey who, in every large city, wait to take in the wayfaring man, whether he be fool or wise. Because he wore comfortable shoes, and cared next to nothing about conformity to the last new freak of fashion, the bunco man was very apt to make a fool of himself, and find that he, and not the stranger, was the victim. In Boston, which of late years has been so far captured by the Irishman that even St. Patrick's is celebrated under the guise of "Evacuation Day," matters ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... the school. What remained now was his dark, quiet, business countenance. As Shirley had said, a certain hardness characterized his air, while his eye was excited, but austere. So much the worse timed was the present freak of Shirley's. If he had looked disposed for holiday mirth, it would not ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... interesting series of contemporary books of the kind, its own individual interest is not small; and I commend it with confidence to students of seventeenth-century domestic manners. To apologise for it, to treat it as if it were some freak, some unowned sin of Digby's, would be the greatest mistake. On the contrary, its connection with his life and career is of the closest; and I make bold to assert that of all his works, with the doubtful exception of his Memoirs, ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... credible. Miss Greenlow could not resist pointing out how entirely it annihilated my vision. No suicide!—no knife!—no rush up the staircase!—nothing, in fact, that might not have been, and, of course, must have been a mere freak of imagination during my troubled sleep. In the face of Kuentze's quiet and detailed statement I could only agree with her, and so the matter rested for some months. The poor woman meanwhile remained in the hospital, ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... passes his life in almost unbroken silence. Of course I refer to the waxwing, or cedar-bird, whose faint, sibilant whisper can scarcely be thought to contradict the foregoing description. By what strange freak he has lapsed into this ghostly habit, nobody knows. I make no account of the insinuation that he gave up music because it hindered his success in cherry-stealing. He likes cherries, it is true; and who can blame him? But he would need to work hard to steal more than ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... were exposed to dangers on all sides. Every colony acted as a fortress to protect the boundary and keep subjects to their allegiance to Rome. This establishment was not a matter of individual choice nor was it left to any freak of chance. A decree of the senate decided when and where a colony should be sent out, and the people in their assemblies elected ...
— Public Lands and Agrarian Laws of the Roman Republic • Andrew Stephenson
... Trottingham Minton that he restrained himself from uttering the obvious remark on hearing this. Two words from him would have wrecked the house of cards. Instead, he blushed and smiled modestly. Slowly it was filtering into his brain that by some unusual, unexpected, unprecedented freak of fortune his difficulties had been overcome; that some way or other he had proposed and ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various
... dressed herself in her best garments and put on all her ornaments. Then she told her parents she was going to meet her little lover, the chieftain of the green plume, who was waiting for her at the Spirit Grove. Supposing she was going to act some harmless freak, they let her go. When she did not return at sunset alarm was felt; with lighted torches the gloomy pine forest was searched, but no trace of the girl was ever found, and the parents mourned the loss of a daughter whose inclinations they had, in the ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... happened to be one of the very few people who knew or surmised anything about the matter, I thought it better to take affairs into my own hands—especially when I found that my daughter had come to your house. But for this freak of hers I should not, perhaps, have interfered. As you are no doubt prepared now to resign all hope of her, I am quite satisfied with the result of my ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... better, from the lips of an old Highland seeress! For me, I felt it so true, that the joy of hearing her say so turned, by a sudden metamorphosis, into freak. I pretended to rise, ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... the clock struck twelve with a very deep intonation, and immediately some chimes began to play, and kept up their resounding music for five minutes, as measured by the hand upon the dial. It was a very delightful harmony, as airy as the notes of birds, and seemed a not unbecoming freak of half-sportive fancy in the huge, ancient, and solemn church; although I have seen an old-fashioned parlor-clock that did precisely the same thing, in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... chance." It seemed to me like a long speech, but nothing happened. Kramer went away, came back. He showed me a large scalpel from his medical kit. "I'm going to start operating on your face. I'll make you into a museum freak. Maybe if you start talking soon enough I'll ...
— Greylorn • John Keith Laumer
... in silence, as if his energies were benumbed by the hitherto undreamt-of possibility that his position was untenable. Reason had had nothing to do with his whimsical conversion, which was perhaps the mere freak of a careless man in search of a new sensation, and temporarily impressed ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... infinite advancement. The idea, therefore, that "death ends all" nips in the bud this grand conception of man's greatness, and blights forever that which is noblest and truest in his nature. To regard this life as the ne plus ultra of man's development, is to charge nature with a freak of folly, and an abortion in her best works. Men may laud human virtue for human virtue's sake; but if man is but the moth of a day, the fire-fly whose phosphorescent light flashes for a moment and then goes out in eternal night, his virtues ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... boats had parted company, there was no redress. He was conceited, selfish, tyrannical, and inordinately lazy. He never took a hand with the paddle, but would compel the others to work, or to idle, as the freak took him. He docked the crew's allowance but fed himself complacently on more than full rations, proving this to be his due by discourse on the innate superiority of Frenchmen over Canadians, Englishmen or Indians. He would sit by the ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... If it is a wolf, at this time of year they are tame, and would never attack two people." Thus Riasantzeff sought to reassure her, while secretly annoyed at Yourii's childish freak. ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... but a three-mile walk along the beach from Pozzuoli to Baiae, passing beside the Lucrine Lake and the southern slope of the Monte Nuovo, which always seems to us a far more wonderful freak of Nature than the Solfatara. Here we have a miniature mountain, a mile and a half round its base and nearly five hundred feet high, that was made in the course of a single night, and is to-day less than four hundred years old! The presence of this brand-new ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... you do nothing more," replied Moggy. "I must retire, ladies—your freak's up. You know I never keep late hours. Ladies, I wish you ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... a whimsical freak of fortune which has sent men from a little island in the Atlantic to administer the land of the Pharaohs. We shall pass away and never leave a trace among the successive races who have held the country, for it is an Anglo-Saxon custom to write their deeds upon ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... from it can be plainly heard in the telegraph office adjoining. Friday morning the operator, a capable and long-suffering young woman, came over to complain to the doctor that she really found it impossible to carry out the duties of her office, if the feeble-minded Delilah Freak was to be incarcerated only six inches distant from her ear. It seems that Delilah spends her days yelling at the top of her lungs, and Miss Dennis states that she prefers to take telegraphic messages down in competition with the mail steamer's ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... lengthing twine, Bait harmless hooks, and launch a leadless line! Their shadows on the stream, the sun behind— Egregious anglers! are the fishes blind? Gull'd by the sportings of the frisking bleak, That now assemble, now disperse, in freak; They see not deeper, where the quick-eyed trout, Has chang'd his route, and turned him quick about; See not those scudding shoals, that mend their pace, Of frighten'd bream, and silvery darting dace! Baffled at last, they quit the ungrateful shore, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... thole to see my father's son in their hands without winning something out of him, and I saw by what passed the other day that thou and thy father would stand by me, hap what hap, and I'll never embroil him and peril the lady by my freak.' ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the moment Philippa was suffering acutely, she was by no means prepared to permit this vile thing to conquer. She would fight it and root it out. It had come upon her so suddenly. What was the cause? Was it merely a freak of that incomprehensible phenomenon the human mind that had twisted the chain of her affection into so mischievous a knot, or merely a figment of the brain springing from inner consciousness to torment her with devilish ingenuity? or did the fault lie ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... measure that its dream is based on true self-knowledge there must be a reality corresponding to it—a valid argument enough, supposing the locksmith to act on the usual lines and not to be indulging in a freak. ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... flamingly about on a surface of water. Of geology he was perfectly ignorant, though he lived in a district whose whole livelihood depended on the scientific use of geological knowledge, and though the existence of Oldcastle itself was due to a freak of the earth's crust which geologists ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... gloves, and then she took off her ear-rings and began to admire them. These ear-rings were a freak of hers—her only freak. She had always wanted some, and the day Gerald asked her to marry him she went to a shop and had her ears pierced. In some wonderful way she knew that it was right. And he had given her the rings—little gold knobs, copied, the jeweller told them, from something prehistoric ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... lady considerably; and she awoke her other daughters. Next, she learned from the maid that Aglaya had gone into the park before seven o'clock. The sisters made a joke of Aglaya's last freak, and told their mother that if she went into the park to look for her, Aglaya would probably be very angry with her, and that she was pretty sure to be sitting reading on the green bench that she had talked of two or three days since, and about which she had nearly ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... he presented his stick, banged, reloaded, banged again, reloaded and banged yet again. I took up a stick and presented it—bang! With amazing verisimilitude Beppo rolled over—shot through the heart. Really, for a moment I had a mad apprehension that in some occult way, some freak of hypnotic suggestion, I had actually wrought the child harm. I stood there breathlessly triumphant and wondering whether it was now my business to rush in and scalp the defenceless prisoners. I became aware of a head and a stick ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... Miss Marley's a freak like the white peacock at the gardens?" broke in a callow youth whom ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... be. A mystery to Sweetwater's eyes, and like all mysteries, interesting. For what purpose had it been built and why this isolation? It was too flimsy for a reservoir and too expensive for the wild freak of ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... earth to bury himself? You killed him, you put him there; don't hide your bad conduct with lies!' Then he would bring out his big guns and shoot us, and destroy our Island in revenge. You are making your own grave, Missi, and you will make ours too. Give up this mad freak, for no rain will be found by going downwards on Aniwa. Besides, all your fish-hooks cannot tempt my men again to enter that hole; they don't want to be buried with you. Will you not ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... in effect, a plea for Milton's method, although by a freak of fate it was uttered in vindication of Congreve. Some years earlier, in his edition of Shakespeare, Johnson had remarked on the same passage, and had indicated the poetic method that he approved: "He that looks from a precipice finds himself ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... time, and was told that a respectable clergyman awaited his arrival in an adjoining parlor. O'Leary enters the room, where he finds, sitting at the table, with the whole correspondence before him, his brother friar, Lawrence Callanan, who, either from an eccentric freak, or from a wish to call O'Leary's controversial powers into action, had thus drawn him into a lengthened correspondence. The joke, in O'Leary's opinion, however, was carried too far, and it required the sacrifice of the correspondence and the interference of mutual ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... the steamer, in the midst of the crowd, he bustled to and fro, never still for a moment, "dragging his anchors," as the sailors say, gesticulating, making free with everybody, biting his nails with nervous avidity. He was one of those originals which nature sometimes invents in the freak of a moment, and of which ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... delighted the French heart of Charles. Other artists have had the handling of this great domain since the days of Le Notre. A crazy wilderness of rock-work, amid which the artificial waters commit freak upon freak, has been strewed athwart the lawn; a stately conservatory has risen, under which the Duke may drive, if he choose, in coach and four, amid palm-trees, and the monster-vegetation of the Eastern archipelago; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... followed, Dr. Campbell amused himself with the indulgence of a new freak. He leaned his elbow on the back of the chair in front of us, and turning his face towards me supported his head in the palm of his hand. There was a new expression on his countenance which foreboded ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... 'Rapahoe such a derned freak as thet thar would be a reg'ler snap fer ther boys. They'd hev more fun with him then a funeral. Somehow, this yere place seems dead slow, an' it makes me long ter go back whar thar is a little sport now ...
— Frank Merriwell's Bravery • Burt L. Standish
... mightily: been the cream of his labors, indeed. But latterly even these scenes had palled; and it came to him with a faint shock of surprise that he was beginning to remember with relief those few occasions on which such talks had ended, by reason, truly, of some mere wanton freak, in unconditional release.—Preposterous indeed that the only acts of his life hitherto viewed with self-contempt, were beginning to seem the only ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... rising bank he had climbed so laboriously before, Ross miscalculated and tumbled back, rolling down into the mud of the reed bed. Mechanically he wiped the slime from his face. The tree was still anchored there; by some freak the current had rammed its rooted end up ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... others. The red stone blocks lie, strata on strata, forming fortifications with embrasures, projecting wings and round towers; but shaken, split and fallen in ruins—it is an architectural fantastic freak of nature. A brook falls gushing down from one of the highest points of the Cleven, and drives a little mill. It looks like a plaything which the mountain sprite ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... of Heaven; and he did not forget to note in his journal the details of the last dinner of which he partook. This quaint observation may have been due to some valetudinary motive, or, more probably, to some odd freak of association. Once, when eating an omelette, he was deeply affected because it recalled his old friend Nugent. "Ah, my dear friend," he said "in an agony," "I shall never eat omelette with thee again!" And in the present case there is an obscure reference to some funeral ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... a giant coal scuttle, sir," said Carrick the trite. The description was apt, for the freak of nature which confronted them. Towering high above its neighbors this mountain was unusual. Some outraged Titan in his ire had, in some long-forgotten aeon, apparently seized and turned upon its head the top-heavy crest, whose form roughly speaking was of ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... you were born, and, having had my head shaved during my illness, my hair grew out the bright gold you see it now, instead of the dark brown it had hitherto been. A strange freak of nature, but a providential aid to the disguise I wished to maintain. I wrote to Cuthbert, informing him of your birth, praying his speedy return, but no reply came; and again and again I repeated the petition. At length I was answered ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... coolness into the steering-seat of a pretty high-toned Panhard; he was accompanied by a girl wrapped in a ragged shawl. On the police interfering, the young woman threw back the shawl, and all recognized Millionaire Todd's daughter, who had just come from the Slum Freak Dinner at the Pond, where all the choicest guests were in a similar deshabille. She and the gentleman who had donned prison uniform were going ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... she returned alone Exactly where my glove was thrown. Meanwhile came many thoughts: on me Rested the hopes of Italy. 50 I had devised a certain tale Which, when 'twas told her, could not fail Persuade a peasant of its truth; I meant to call a freak of youth This hiding, and give hopes of pay, And no temptation to betray. But when I saw that woman's face, Its calm simplicity of grace, Our Italy's own attitude In which she walked thus far, and stood, 60 Planting each naked foot so firm, To crush the snake and spare the worm— ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... followed by the rest of the herd. Another moment and they would have plunged into the open gate, when suddenly they wheeled round, re-entered the forest, and in spite of the hunters resumed their original position. The chief headman came forward and accounted for the freak by saying that a wild pig[1], an animal which the elephants are said to dislike, had started out of the cover and run across the leader, who would otherwise have held on direct for the corral; and intimated ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... wrong righted, the estates restored, And my promotion, with the ink not dry! Those fairies which neglected me at birth Seemed now to lavish all good gifts on me— Gold roubles, office, sudden dearest friends. The whole world smiled; then, as I stooped to taste The sweetest cup, freak dashed it from my lip. This very night—just think, this very night— I planned to come and beg of you the alms I dared not ask for in my poverty. I thought me poor then. How stript am I now! There's not a ragged ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... intervals of his labours; and he may now and then be taken by surprise by a glimpse of the cool bright stars, or by the waving of the boughs of some neighbouring tree. He may be beguiled by the grace or the freak of some little child, or struck: by some wandering flower scent in the streets, or some effect of sunlight on the evening cloud. But with these few and rare exceptions, he loses sight of the natural earth, and of its free intercourses, for weeks and months together; and ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... along the line 15 Of the dry wreck. And, in our vacant mood, Not seldom did we stop to watch some tuft Of dandelion seed or thistle's beard, That skimmed the surface of the dead calm lake, Suddenly halting now—a lifeless stand! 20 And starting off again with freak as sudden; [1] In all its sportive wanderings, all the while, Making report of an invisible breeze That was its wings, its chariot, and its horse, Its playmate, rather say, its moving soul. [2] 25 —And often, trifling with ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... beloved mistress," "My dear, dear mistress," recur like sobs. Margaret would have become a fiend under the mean shrew; but the holy influence of a good lady made a noble woman of her, and she became a pattern of goodness long after one rash but blameless freak was forgotten. All Margaret's race now rise up and call her blessed, and her spirit must have rejoiced when she saw her brilliant descendant appearing in England two years ago as representative ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... know nothing of women," was the end of his reflections, "if you do not know that what seems most improbable is what is most likely to be true. This maid is certainly not one of the flute-players or the like. Who knows what incomprehensible whim or freak may have brought her here? At any rate, it will be easier for her to keep her eyes open ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... with Flora for a time. Come, come, Mr. Holland, you ought, and you shall know all; then you can come to a judgment for yourself. This way, sir. You cannot, in the wildest freak of your imagination, guess that which I have now ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... interest in looking out husbands for them. The King spoke to him, as hardly could be avoided, of the famous fool's-cap livery. The Count laughed the matter off as a jest, protesting that it was a mere foolish freak, originating at the wine-table, and asseverating, with warmth, that nothing disrespectful or disloyal to his Majesty had been contemplated upon that or upon any other occasion. Had a single gentleman ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... much disturbed by the doubt just mentioned, felt inclined to question whether any perceptible advancement had been made by this freak business of his canny subordinate. He was hardly ready to say yes, and was not a little surprised when on his way toward the head of the staircase he heard the exultant voice of Mr. Gryce whisper in ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... prefer to make a collection that shall show future ages who it was that built up our finances, and furnished the sinews of war. Some may look upon this move as a mercenary one, but with me it is a passion. It is not simply a freak, it is ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... sufficiently appreciated the general practitioner and the sympathy and help he gives folks. These crack specialists, the young scientific fellows, they're so cocksure and so wrapped up in their laboratories that they miss the human element. Except in the case of a few freak diseases that no respectable human being would waste his time having, it's the old doc that keeps a community well, mind and body. And strikes me that Will is one of the steadiest and clearest-headed counter ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... us!" exclaimed the King. "Don't let all those whimsies trouble you further, or you will give birth to some monstrosity, some freak of nature." His Majesty was a true prophet. The Queen was delivered of a fine little girl, black as ink from head to foot. They did not tell her this at once, fearing a catastrophe, but persuaded her to go to sleep, saying that the ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... to hear you say this, Countess," he said very seriously. "I have been so bold on occasion as to assert—for your private ear, of course—that you could not, by any freak of nature, happen to care for Count Marlanx, whom I know only by description. You have laughed at my so-called American wit, and you have been most tolerant. Now, I feel that I am justified. I'm immeasurably glad to hear you confess that you do not ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... accommodating at one and the same time my bodily members and the Latin language. Even my "Caesar" caused me less misery at this period than did the problem of the proper disposal of my hands and feet. Do what I would they were hopelessly (by some singular freak of nature) in my way. The breeding of all the Bolingbrokes would have been taxed to its utmost, I believe, to behave for a single instant as if ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... week. I have been here since Friday as much a hermit as yourself. I wanted air and quiet, having been much fatigued on my nephew's amendment, trying to dissuade him from making the campaign with his militia; but in vain! I now dread hearing of some eccentric freak. I am sorry Mr. Tyson has quite dropped me, though he sometimes comes to town. I am still more concerned at your frequent disorders-I hope their chief seat ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... the country. One misty day, a week ago, I was on the hill; I thought I had it to myself, when suddenly I heard a voice cry sharply, 'Shoulder arms.' I could see no one, and after a moment I put it down to a freak of the wind. Then all at once the mist before me blackened, and a body of men seemed to grow out of it. They were not shadows; they were Thrums weavers drilling, ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... conference has been written about time after time, as though it were a gathering of the very flower of humanity. Perched up there by the freak or wisdom of Leblanc, it had a certain Olympian quality, and the natural tendency of the human mind to elaborate such a resemblance would have us give its members the likenesses of gods. It would be equally reasonable to compare it to one of those enforced meetings upon the mountain-tops ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... they would," remarked Jerry, shrugging his shoulders, "for you certainly have a collection of freak pictures, some of which would ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... that at the moment I found surprising and extremely startling, yet which I took for a mere carnival freak, while later on I could scarce review the occurrence ...
— The Gray Nun • Nataly Von Eschstruth
... to be in waiting for us; and the same evening we were to be married by a priest, to whom I have given due notice, at a place called Longarone. And so we should have gone on, across the Ampezzo Pass homeward. Now would you believe that all this has been defeated by a mere freak on the part of my colonel? Only this morning, after it was much too late to make any alteration in our plans, he told me that he should require me to be on duty all to-day and to-morrow, and that my leave could not begin until the next day. Is it not maddening? ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... with McCormick, whose first reaper was called "a cross between an Astley chariot, a wheelbarrow, and a flying-machine"; with Morse, whom ten Congresses regarded as a nuisance; with Cyrus Field, whose Atlantic Cable was denounced as "a mad freak of stubborn ignorance"; and with Westinghouse, who was called a fool for proposing "to stop a railroad ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... sleep has been disturbed by strange, wild dreams. I see the warm ocean currents which wash our shores, shifted westward by some strange freak of nature, and a land far north of us, now ice and snow, turned into greenland; while our whole land is enshrouded in death dealing cold and ice and snow and preceding this, the waters creep up and engulf our city. ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... man in Worthington," she informed him, "is a phenomenon, a social phenomenon. Of course he may be a freak, ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... a mirage?" Tom asked. "Some freak air current reflecting from another island and superimposing over this one?" Then he answered himself. "No. I guess it isn't. There ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... the same pedagogic rules of numeration and mensuration which they would apply to the general question of the order and succession of his collective works. This vivisection of a single poem is not defensible as a freak of scholarship, an excursion beyond the bounds of bare proof, from which the wanderer may chance to bring back, if not such treasure as he went out to seek, yet some stray godsend or rare literary windfall which ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... them to think of the despised grub-rider in the light of a rival, so they decided it was just a freak of coquettishness ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... cleared up fine. And the next day the Gov'ment fellers said "clear" and Beriah said "rain," and she poured a flood. And, after three or four of such experiences, Beriah was all hunky with the "house-party," and they looked at him as a sort of wonderful freak, like a two-headed calf or the "snake ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... and "The Cruise of the Jasper B." This satire on the azure-pedalled coteries of Washington Square has perhaps received more publicity than any other of Marquis's writings, but of all Don's drolleries I reserve my chief affection for Archy. The cockroach, endowed by some freak of transmigration with the shining soul of a vers libre poet, is a thoroughly Marquisian whimsy. I make no apology for quoting this prince of blattidae at some length. Many a commuter, opening his evening ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... dollars! Gentlemen from city and country rushed to Genin's store to buy their hats, many of them willing to pay even an extra dollar, if necessary, provided they could get a glimpse of Genin himself. This singular freak put thousands of dollars into the pocket of "Genin, the hatter," and yet I never heard it charged that he made poor hats, or that he would be guilty of an "imposition under fair pretences." On the contrary, he is a gentleman of probity, ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... actually descended, turning himself over and over till he came to the bottom." This story was told with such gravity, and with an air of such affectionate remembrance of a departed friend, that it was impossible to suppose this extraordinary freak an invention of Mr. Langton.' It must have been in the winter that he had ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... himself, he would unhesitatingly take the Prince's advice, sooner than trust to his own private judgment; and yet here was this model of keen, healthy, worldly wisdom gravely inviting him to meet the devil face to face, and not only this, but promising that it should be no unintelligible freak of electro-biology, but as a simple fact. Gerard smoked thirty cigarettes without coming to any satisfactory solution of the enigma. What if after all he, the Abbe Gerard, for once should abandon the line of conduct he had laid down for himself, and, to satisfy his curiosity, and perhaps with ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... but exactly like our hair except that it is much finer and softer, and instead of being black is red. I am like to lose my mind over the capricious and harassing developments of this unclassifiable zoological freak. If I could catch another one—but that is hopeless; it is a new variety, and the only sample; this is plain. But I caught a true kangaroo and brought it in, thinking that this one, being lonesome, would rather have that for company than have ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... she looked around vaguely, her mind thrown out of gear by this unexpected delay. Another freak of ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... final touches, while Tods patrolled the Burra Simla Bazar in his morning rides, and played with the monkey belonging to Ditta Mull, the bunnia, and listened, as a child listens to all the stray talk about this new freak of the Lat Sahib's. ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... thing," I replied. "By some freak its vibratory qualities had that effect. The deep whistle of the sunken Lusitania would, for instance, make the Singer Building shake to its foundations; while the Olympic did not affect the Singer at all but made the Woolworth shiver all through. In each case they stimulated ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... cruelties that the reader ought to be warned not to think of him as a saturnine and Machiavellian Italian. He was a son of the Bourbon Charles III. of Spain. His character was that of a jovial, rather stupid farmer, whom a freak of fortune had made a king from infancy. A sort of grotesque comic element runs through his life, and through every picture drawn by persons in actual intercourse with him. The following, from one of Bentinck's despatches of 1814 (when Ferdinand had just heard that Austria had ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... [prob. from ad-agency tradetalk, 'house freak'] A hacker occupying a technical-specialist, R&D, or systems position at a commercial shop. A really effective house wizard can have influence out of all proportion to his/her ostensible rank and still not have to wear a suit. ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... Commons, was opposed and modified by the Lords, Defoe suddenly appeared on a new tack, publishing the most famous of his political pamphlets, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, which has, by a strange freak of circumstances, gained him the honour of being enshrined as one of the martyrs of Dissent. In the "brief explanation" of the pamphlet which he gave afterwards, he declared that it had no bearing whatever upon ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... utterly foolish creature. How many shattered idols had not Lady Bridget picked up from beneath their over-turned pedestals and consigned to Memory's dust-bin! On how many pyres had not that oft-widowed soul committed suttee to be resurrected at the next freak of Destiny! And yet with it all, there was something strangely elusive, curiously virginal about ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... him to riot in the mad caprices of sensuality and malevolence, and he makes his ominous appearance in history as a Caligula, a Domitian, a Nero. More fit for a madhouse than a throne, his advent is the signal of a despotism controlled by no guiding principles, but given over to that spirit of freak and mischief which springs from the union of the boy's brain with the man's appetites; and his fate is to have that craze of the faculties and delirium of the sensations which he calls his life abruptly closed by suicide or assassination: ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... wobbled past apricot hedges and detached houses and huts, and got into an open country without a tree, but here and there a stunted camel-thorn. The soil was arid, and grew little food for man or beast; yet, by a singular freak of nature, it put forth abundantly things that here at home we find it harder to raise than homely grass and oats; the ground was thickly clad with flowers of delightful hues; pyramids of snow or rose-color bordered the track; ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... answered Sal. "What's to hinder. Haven't I told you repeatedly, that I once possessed an unusually large amount of judgment; and this, added to my knowledge of grammar, and uncommon powers of imagination, enabled me to produce a work which, but for an unaccountable freak of the publisher, would have ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... he'd set an' flosserfize 'Bout what it wuz held up the skies, An' how God made this earthly ball Jest simply out er nawthin' 'tall, An' 'bout the natur, shape, an' form Of nawthin' that he made it from. Then, ef his wife sh'd ask the freak Ef he wouldn't kinder try to sneak Out to the barn an' find some aigs, He'd never move, nor lift his laigs; He'd never stir, nor try to rise, But ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... Sometimes they would give "freak dinners," when the guests themselves would be dressed up, the men in women's clothes, the women in men's, the male imitating the piping treble of the female voices, and the female the over-vowelled slang of the ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... smoking-room disclosures. But whatever our bad or good fortune may have been, it is not to be supposed for a moment that any of us enjoy such an enchanting revelation as comes to a young girl who, by nature's kind freak, has been made beautiful. Daisy Medland was radiant as she turned from Norburn's pale thoughtful face and careless garb to Dick Derosne, the outward perfection of a well-born, well-made, well-dressed Englishman, bowing, smiling, and debonair. ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... miles of sea, the nearest land a group of islets like unto them, is found the gigantic tortoise, and in only one other place in the wide world, the Galapagos group of islands in the South Pacific. How, or by what strange freak of Dame Nature these curious reptiles, sole survivals of another age, should come to be found in this lonely spot, is a deep mystery, and one not likely to be unfolded now. At any rate, there they are, looking as if some of them might be coeval with Noah, so venerable ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... our time to class poetry as a thing very pleasant and useful shall hardly be found. At most the saying will suffer reprint as a quaintness, a freak, or a paradox; and so it has proved. From Prato, dusty little city of mid-Tuscany, and with the impress of its Reale Orfanotrofio (nourisher, it would thus appear, of more Humanities than one) comes an "Opera Nova, nella ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... strangest freak of chance or liking, the next book on my shelf contains the poems of Ebenezer Elliott, the Corn-law Rhymer. This volume, adorned by a hideous portrait of the author, I can well remember picking up at a bookstall for a few pence many years ago. It seems curious to me that ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... only he who has been over the road can be a safe or sympathetic guide. Tolstoi realized he could not be of service to the people he would uplift unless he lived among them, shared their trials and experienced their needs. The time has gone by when the musician and composer was considered a sort of freak, knowing music and nothing else. We know the great composers were men of the highest intelligence and learning, men whose aim was to work out their genius to the utmost perfection. Nothing less than the ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... spleen at her more fortunate rival. Although she found herself a guest at the Alhambra instead of being the mistress of the palace, probably, like many other ladies, she looked upon this affair of the singing-bird as a freak that must end—and then perhaps his Grace, who was a charming young man, would return to his senses. There also was her sister, a long, fair girl, who looked sentimental, but was only silly. There was a little French actress, like ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... evinced was, a great partiality for the society of Mr. Andrews, and for the next week, they were together every day. He frequently referred, in conversation with Andrews, to the freak his imagination had played, while returning from the plantation, and, though Andrews always made light of it, and laughed at him, he evidently thought about it a great deal. It seemed to be a kind of relief to him to discuss it with Andrews, and so the ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton
... about his mistress, who has taken a freak of——. He began a letter to her, but was obliged to stop short—I finished it for him, and he copied and sent it. If he holds out, and keeps to my instructions of affected indifference, she will lower her colours. If she don't, he will, at least, get rid of her, and she don't seem much worth ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... Cadwalader's daughter, Evelyn, it has been thought by many that the boy really beheld this old soldier, who for some mysterious reason had chosen nightfall for this fleeting visit to his daughter's resting-place. But to others it was only a freak of the lad's imagination, which had been much influenced by the reading of romances. For, as these latter reasoned, had it really been Cadwalader, why did he not show himself at John Poindexter's house—that old friend who now had a little daughter and no wife and who ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... joined though they were to great goodness of heart and many sterling qualities, did not appear very pleasing to the stiff, etiquette-loving fine lady, and it was without any great surprise that we heard, some time afterwards, of the marriage being broken off, in consequence, it was said, of some wild freak of Doughby's. We were asking one another for the particulars of this rupture, which neither of us had heard, when the Kentuckian made his reappearance in the cabin. He had changed his dress, and, taking him altogether, was by no means an ill-looking fellow. His light blue gingham frock and snow-white ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... than a freak, or a mere geographical adaptation, in taking together, and at the last, the contributions of the three peninsulas which form the extreme south of Europe. For in the present scheme they form, as it were, but an appendix to the present book. The dying literature of Greece—if indeed it be ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... then saw was so exact a repetition of what had met my eyes when for the first time I passed under that roof, that it did not seem as though it could be real; it seemed as though it must be a freak of memory: the same long low room, the same heavy beams across the ceiling, the same three chairs, standing in the same places where they stood then, the same table, and upon it the crwth and bow. There was ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... as Apollo, and recited at the public ball at the theatre a masquerade he had composed on the subject of love, twanging a guitar vigorously all the time. He was afterwards heartily ashamed of this freak, which he wonders he could ever have been guilty of. An ardent desire for glory now seized him, and after some months spent in constant poetical studies, and in fingering grammars and dictionaries, he succeeded in producing his first tragedy; which, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... Hard-riding, hard-drinking, hard-fighting cavaliers, upon whose deeds and adventures the staid, circumspect Carmodys looked aghast. And this girl-wife, whose soft eyes and gentle nature had won his love, had borne him a son, and by some freak of atavism had transmitted to him the turbulent spirit of ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... old lady considerably; and she awoke her other daughters. Next, she learned from the maid that Aglaya had gone into the park before seven o'clock. The sisters made a joke of Aglaya's last freak, and told their mother that if she went into the park to look for her, Aglaya would probably be very angry with her, and that she was pretty sure to be sitting reading on the green bench that she had talked of two or three days since, and about ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... devoted animal is that it is personified greed on four legs. There are two or three horses of unusual intelligence, which no doubt our friend the Hun would long since have devoured, but which, even though hunting is over, are by some odd freak of sentiment or even of loyalty still kept alive. There are rabbits. And there is a bird in a cage against the wall of a small yard. This bird is a chaffinch, which a friend ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 25, 1917 • Various
... The plutocratic wolves presently smell him out. The fugitive shoots the unlucky wolf whose nose is nearest; shoots himself; and then convinces the world, by his photograph, that he was no monstrous freak of reversion to the tiger, but a good looking young man with nothing abnormal about him except his appalling courage and resolution (that is why the terrified shriek Coward at him): one to whom murdering a happy young couple on their wedding morning would have ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... old codgers who are so broken into the office system that they think they are perfectly happy—don't know how much fun in life they miss. Still, they're no worse than the adherents to any other paralyzed system. Look at the comparatively intelligent people who fall for any freak religious system and let it make their lives miserable. I suppose that when the world has no more war or tuberculosis, then offices will be exciting places to work in—but not till then. And meantime, if the typical ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... later. The two dark openings on either side, raised questions which the most unimaginative mind would feel glad to hear explained. Ere the second gate swung open and he found himself again in the street, he had built up more than one theory in explanation of this freak of parallel fences with the strip of ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... to avoid contrasting this beautiful account of elegant dissipation with the noted freak of Sir Charles Sedley, to whom it is addressed. In June 1663, being in company with Lord Buckhurst and Sir Thomas Ogle, in a tavern in Bowstreet, and having become furious with intoxication, they not only exposed themselves, by committing the grossest indecencies in ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... odd freak of nature," remarked Josie, gazing at the waste with a puzzled expression. "It is easy to understand why Mr. Cragg hasn't sold this lot, as he did all his other land. No one ...
— Mary Louise in the Country • L. Frank Baum (AKA Edith Van Dyne)
... but how would he get the fun out of doing a thing like that? No, we have to look either for a freak or a poor neglected child. Now, True Treds, take your choice!" ...
— The Girl Scouts at Sea Crest - The Wig Wag Rescue • Lillian Garis
... the lightest. This descent on the Champs—Elysees had been a freak on Elise's part, who wished to do nothing so banal as take her companion to the Palais Royal. But the restaurant she had chosen, though of a much humbler kind than those which the rich tourist commonly associates with this part of Paris, was still a good deal more ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... "death ends all" nips in the bud this grand conception of man's greatness, and blights forever that which is noblest and truest in his nature. To regard this life as the ne plus ultra of man's development, is to charge nature with a freak of folly, and an abortion in her best works. Men may laud human virtue for human virtue's sake; but if man is but the moth of a day, the fire-fly whose phosphorescent light flashes for a moment and then ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... took possession of the same table in the same corner of the room, from which nobody ever now thought of ousting him. One or two mad wags and wild fellows had in former days, and in freak or bravado, endeavoured twice or thrice to deprive him of this place; but there was a quiet dignity in the Major's manner as he took his seat at the next table, and surveyed the interlopers, which rendered ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... white; the super-incumbent stone was of a dull red hue. On the left flank of the arch were a series of inscribed characters, which might have been cut by a human hand, or might have been a mere natural freak. They looked like some rude system of hieroglyphics, and bore no meaning to ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... snake drawed out on his waist; of that I've heard rumors, but I ain't had no reports. Not," said Mr. Poddle, impressively, "what you might call undenigeable reports. And Richard," he whispered, in great excitement and contempt, "that there half-cooked freak won't be done for a year! He's bein' worked over on the installment plan. And I'm give to understand that she'll wait! Oh, wimmen!" the Dog-faced Man apostrophized. "Took by ...
— The Mother • Norman Duncan
... recompense of one hundred sous for every image destroyed. But, since no one seems ever to have been punished, it is probable that this report was a fabrication; and the question whether the mutilation of the Virgin of the Rue des Rosiers was the deliberate act of a religious enthusiast, or a freak of drunken revellers, or, as some imagined, a cunning device of good Catholics to inflame the popular passions against the "Lutherans," must, for the present, at least, remain a subject ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... custom, violation of usage, infringement of law, infringement of custom, infringement of usage; teratism^, eccentricity, bizarrerie^, oddity, je ne sais quoi [Fr.], monster, monstrosity, rarity; freak, freak of Nature, weirdo, mutant; rouser, snorter [U.S.]. individuality, idiosyncrasy, originality, mannerism. aberration; irregularity; variety; singularity; exemption; salvo &c (qualification) 469. nonconformist; nondescript, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... cacique and his subjects to dance before them for their amusement. Their very pleasures were attended with cruelty. They never addressed the natives but in the most degrading terms, and on the least offence, or the least freak of ill-humor, inflicted blows and lashes, ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... in during the afternoon bearing an albino penguin with a prettily mottled head; a curious freak of which the biologists immediately took possession. The penguins now swarmed along the foreshores, those not settling down in the rookeries wandering about in small crowds, occasionally visiting the Hut ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... them. There's nothing else so lean and fine produced on the globe to-day. I was next door to them at Pozieres and saw them fight. Lord! Such men! Now and then you had a freak, but most ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... sobers and clarifies human thinking a little, perhaps, to reflect on how thin a line separates the sublime and the ridiculous, the saint and the sensualist, the martyr and the fool, the genius and the freak. ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... They did not wound her sensibilities, as he hoped they might have done. Either this disappointment or the need of relief provoked a change of tactics. With a sudden zeal that was half earnest and half a freak of vanity, he devoted himself to Adele. The father's sympathy with him was just now dead; that of the aunt had never been kindled to such a degree as to meet his craving; with the Elderkins he was reluctant to unfold ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... had become distasteful to Armitage, who inwardly was floundering for a method of escape from the predicament into which his folly had led him. He had no wish to pose as a freak in her eyes. Still, no ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... others that had proven better able to stand up against the wind. A few were fashioned in weird shapes, too; and to tell the truth, it looked as if Nature had taken pains to gather together on that one particular island all the freak ...
— The Strange Cabin on Catamount Island • Lawrence J. Leslie
... little ironical curl of the lip that showed plainly her good sense held her steady, on the crest of that high wave whereon it had been fortune's freak to raise her. "Lucile showed me a place, on the next floor of the store, where I could get the tan taken off my face while I was waiting for alterations to my suit. They did it with a sort of cold ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... Gerald, startled. And his face opened suddenly, as if lighted with simplicity, as when a flower opens out of the cunning bud. 'No—I never consider you a freak.' And he watched the other man with strange eyes, that Birkin could not understand. 'I feel,' Gerald continued, 'that there is always an element of uncertainty about you—perhaps you are uncertain about yourself. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... physical peculiarities—the snarling habit and that high-pitched animal voice, for instance—which made him a being different from others—one separate and far apart? Was he, so admirably formed, so complete and well-balanced, merely a freak of nature, to use an old-fashioned phrase—a sport, or spontaneous individual variation—an experiment for a new human type, imagined by Nature in some past period, inconceivably long ago, but which she had only now, too late, found time to carry out? Or rather was he like that little ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... she supplied the Orchardina library with a special bibliography on the subject, and induced the new Woman's Club to take up a course of reading in it, so that there gradually filtered into the Orchardina mind a faint perception that this was not the freak of an eccentric individual, but part of an inevitable business development, going on in various ways ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... eighteen for a month," he gave prompt explanation. "Under the latest law freak turned out at Albany, I'm too young to drive a motor vehicle safely on the public roads unless I have a licensed chauffeur alongside of me. ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... yes, of course I know you will reimburse me, but that isn't the question; and, anyway, it's the opinion of your friends, old man, that you will not be worse off for a little abstinence from fleshly pleasures. You are positively a freak in this famine-cursed city ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... Alma picked up Gilbert Murray's letter and went to her room. She wanted to cry, since she could not shake Anna. Even if she could have shook her, it would only have made her more perverse. Anna was in earnest; Alma knew that, even while she hoped and believed that it was but the earnestness of a freak that would pass in time. Anna had had one like it a year ago, when she had cast Gilbert off for three months, driving him distracted by flirting with Charlie Moore. Then she had suddenly repented and taken him back. Alma thought ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... for talent, John Friar Brownlow at once for industry and steadiness. They had stood out resolutely against more than one of his pranks, and had been the only boys in the house not present on the occasion of his last freak-a champagne supper, when parodies had been sung, caricaturing all the authorities; and when the company had become uproarious enough to rouse the whole family, the boys were discovered in the midst of the most audacious but droll ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... appeared. Even salt was considered a useless luxury, and spice entirely forbidden by these lovers of Spartan simplicity. A ten years' experience of vegetarian vagaries had been good training for this new freak, and her sense of the ludicrous supported her through ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... Molly, to her dismay, shut up with Lord Cumnor and Lady Harriet in the other. Lady Harriet's gown of white muslin had seen one or two garden-parties, and was not in the freshest order; it had been rather a freak of the young lady's at the last moment. She was very merry, and very much inclined to talk to Molly, by way of finding out what sort of a little personage Clare was to have for her future ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... specify the instruction mix —- sounds like smoke and mirrors to me." The phrase, popularized by newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin c.1975, has been said to derive from carnie slang for magic acts and 'freak show' displays that depend on 'trompe l'oeil' effects, but also calls to mind the fierce Aztec god Tezcatlipoca (lit. "Smoking Mirror") for whom the hearts of huge numbers of human sacrificial victims were regularly ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... the vessel was in no way delayed by this little freak, as there was no cargo down. Captain Macgregor, however, had not been seen for several days, and the vessel was nearly ready for sea. The proper agencies were instructed to have him brought aboard, ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... amusement the Japanese bill of particulars, as it had been drawn out, on which they had founded their orders for the first assorted cargo ever to be sent from America to Edomo. Bill of particulars there was, stretching down the long tissue-paper in exquisite chirography. But by some freak of the "total depravity of things," the translated order for the assorted cargo was not there. John Coram, in his care to fold up the Japanese writing nicely, had left on his own desk at Shanghae the more intelligible English. "And so I must wait," said Tom philosophically, ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... approaching the young man closely, "that you will no longer speak ill of any one, as it seems you have the unfortunate habit of doing; for a man so puritanically conscientious as you are, who can reproach an old soldier for a youthful freak five-and-thirty years after it happened, will allow me to ask whether you, who advocate such excessive purity of conscience, will undertake on your side to do nothing contrary either to conscience or the principle ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... much per ton, himself hiring the labourers, using his own horses, and supplying the tools requisite for the working of the mine. The contract price was known as the 'charter price' or 'charter'. Thus by a freak of language the Staffordshire miner knew by the same word the 'butty's charter' which was the symbol of his oppression, and the 'people's charter' which was the goal of ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... naturally, full. Such a beard was out of fashion, save among country doctors. It signified carelessness, indifference, or a full life wherein the niceties of the razor had of necessity been ignored. Keenly she searched the familiar likeness. What an amazing freak of nature! It was unreal. She tossed the photograph back into the kit-bag, ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... fancy in this freak, we have partly lost the power of restraint and guidance. We distinguish an unlooked-for figure in our visionary scene. Among those ancestral people there is a young man, dressed in the very fashion of to-day: he wears ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the best right, which of course they have if they pay, to enter the most select places; so the conglomeration even at Sherry's sometimes is too amusing, and at the mirror place, which society would only go to as a freak, the company is beyond description. But they all seem such kindly, jolly people, all amusing themselves, and gay and happy. I like it, and the courtesy and fatherly kindness of the men to the women is beautiful, and a lesson to the male creatures of other nations. I have not ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... the profits. They took and sold quite a heap of flour at this rate—sixty thousand barrels to be exact—on which there was a net profit of seven hundred thousand dollars. Then one of those freak things happened that knocked us all silly. Flour just dropped down out of sight. Why? Manipulation. They've got a smart lot out here. The mines had flour enough for the time being; and the only thing that held the price up was the uncertainty of just where the flour ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... power." Mme. Turreau, wife of one of the new commissioners, was now the ascendant star in his attentions. One day, while walking arm in arm with her near the top of the Tenda pass, Buonaparte took a sudden freak to show her what war was like, and ordered the advance-guard to charge the Austrian pickets. The attack was not only useless, but it endangered the safety of the army; yet it was made according to command, and human blood was shed. The story was told by Napoleon himself, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... a strange fancy to start out of the earth in three, five, or more trunks, all joined at the base, and each trunk an enormous tree. I have an idea that this has arisen from the stony, loose soil they grow in, which has caused this strange freak of Nature, by making it difficult for the young plant to rear its head out of the ground. Whatever is the reason, however, all the masts of some "great Amiral" might be truly provided out ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... seems as if I could still hear the call in my aunt's shrill voice, repeated countless times a day, "Adolphe!" and the answer, following promptly in the deepest bass tones, "Henriette!" This singular freak, which greatly amused us, was due, as I learned afterward, to my aunt's jealousy, which almost ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... land or on sea. Some day, somewhere, I shall hear news of him. I wish you to remember that if ever you need a friend, you have only to let me know. I am ashamed to think that I have let this strange freak of circumstance find Robert Morton's daughter for me. I should have looked you up years ago. Do you know what a fellow's chum means to him when he is a boy at school?" Captain Moore queried, less seriously. "Don't you think a ...
— Madge Morton's Secret • Amy D. V. Chalmers
... farther in his protest against this unexpected freak of fortune, for Sylvia seized the paper and read the paragraph aloud with such happy emphasis amid Prue's outcries and his father's applause, that Mark began to feel that he really had done something praiseworthy, and that the "daub" was ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... her husband's dissatisfaction—and this occurred occasionally—she became more quiet, sat down by his side, caressed him, whispered something smilingly into his ear, and smoothed the wrinkles that were gathering on his brow. But immediately afterward, some wild freak would again lead her to return to her ridiculous proceedings, and matters would be worse than before. At length the priest said in a serious and kind tone: "My fair young maiden, no one indeed can look at you without ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... he discharged them with efficiency. Laws and railway tariffs at home, diplomatic facilities and valuable information abroad smoothed the way of the Teuton trader. Berlin rightly gauged the worth of this pacific interpenetration at a time when Britons were laughing it to scorn as a ludicrous freak of grandmotherly government. To-day its results stand out in relief as barriers to the progress of the Allies in the conduct ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... little. They were much deeper and broader than those caused by any species of cart he had yet seen or heard of in the country, and the width apart was so great, that he began to suspect he must have mistaken a curious freak of nature for the tracks of a gigantic vehicle. Following the track for some distance, he came to a muddy spot, where the footprints of men and horses became distinctly visible. A little further on he passed the mouth of what appeared to be a cavern, and, being of an inquisitive disposition, ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... the foothills in the environs of Clinton, Lillooet District, Province of British Columbia, there lived a "mossback" who was as happy as the 22nd day of June is long in each year. At initiative conclusions he would be classified with the freak species of humanity, but beneath his raw exterior there lurked rich mines which the moss kept a secret ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... reached home. But I was clear in my mind about one thing. I meant to present myself at the office in the morning, and if the chance were given me, to apprentice myself for a while. It was indeed a strange freak of destiny, that he should have been confronted by me with the same appeal that I had heard him make so short a time ago. Perhaps it were better called a strange freak of my caprice, for though of course my position was not premeditated, the words that I said to him were necessarily ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... the fellows will return, and if they do we must treat them as before," he observed. "The chances are that in a short time they will be all fast asleep. They attacked us in a drunken freak more than with any ...
— The Two Whalers - Adventures in the Pacific • W.H.G. Kingston
... Iver, "it is not a question as to what my father and mother should have done. I did not seek to be made trustee. It was a freak on the part of my dear mother. As she has done it, there it is; neither you nor ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... or blight. He saluted hardly anybody except his entertainers and the Doctor. One would have said, to look at him, that he was not at the party by choice; and it was natural enough to think, with Susy Pettingill, that it must have been a freak of the dark girl's which brought him there, for he had the air of a ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... brown—eyes dreamy and mournful, and deeply sunk in their orbits—looked out at you, and (in my case, at least) took your attention captive at their will. Add to this a quantity of thick closely-curling hair, which, by some freak of Nature, had lost its colour in the most startlingly partial and capricious manner. Over the top of his head it was still of the deep black which was its natural colour. Round the sides of his head—without the ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... Heine, whose writings you ought not to neglect, describes beautifully a human menagerie. We'll quote that, and then let you off for the day. Heine was living in Paris in the forties, and used to visit a curious revolutionary freak named Ludwig Borne. Of this man's ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... arrival in an adjoining parlor. O'Leary enters the room, where he finds, sitting at the table, with the whole correspondence before him, his brother friar, Lawrence Callanan, who, either from an eccentric freak, or from a wish to call O'Leary's controversial powers into action, had thus drawn him into a lengthened correspondence. The joke, in O'Leary's opinion, however, was carried too far, and it required the sacrifice of the correspondence and the interference ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... years of wind and weather, and, to complete the resemblance, there was a scrubby growth of weeds or lichen upon it, which against the sun looked for all the world like the wool on a colossal negro's head. It certainly was very odd; so odd that now I believe it is not a mere freak of nature but a gigantic monument fashioned, like the well-known Egyptian Sphinx, by a forgotten people out of a pile of rock that lent itself to their design, perhaps as an emblem of warning and defiance to any enemies ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... so to speak, Is, my child, an awful freak; For if you get him in a stew, He'll blush quite red and glare at you. Yet if you eat much lobster salad, It ...
— Poems for Pale People - A Volume of Verse • Edwin C. Ranck
... Broken tiles littered the ground. Here and there, lay bricks and bits of mortar. Some freak of backblast had torn a shutter off the house and it lay brokenly a few feet from him. He looked back ...
— The Best Made Plans • Everett B. Cole
... of tender solicitude, was, Brigit thought, almost divinely beautiful as she watched it. And by some curious freak of the down-falling light only his head and shoulders were visible, and seemed almost to be floating in the gloom. Never had he been so handsome, and never so pitilessly remote. He had forgotten her; he had forgotten love; he was not even the Musician—he ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... Bideawhile. I fancy that if I were to speak in that way of your client you would be very angry with me. Besides, what does it all amount to? Will the old gentleman say that he gave the letter into his son's hands, so that, even if such a freak should have come into my client's head, he could have signed it and sent it off? If I understand, Mr Longestaffe says that he locked the letter up in a drawer in the very room which Melmotte occupied, and that he afterwards found the drawer open. It won't, ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... the career of this potentate, that he was by no means of a sane mind. In short, to speak plainly, he was mad, and deserved a strait-waistcoat as richly as any straw-crowned monarch in Bedlam. A single instance, in my opinion, fully substantiates this. I allude to his absurd freak at Frederickshall, when, in order to discover how long he could exist without nourishment, he abstained from all kinds of food for more than seventy hours! Now, would any man in his senses have done this? Would Louis XVIII., for instance, that wise and ever-to-be-lamented monarch? Had it ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 290 - Volume X. No. 290. Saturday, December 29, 1827. • Various
... high-spirited pride. By one of the strange chances that often befell in the early days of the goldfields, she, going to draw water at a little stream soon after her first arrival, had seen these lying close together in the bed of the shallow rivulet—three lumps of gold formed by a freak of nature into the likeness of the golden pippins her father used to be so proud of, and the gathering of which had been the crisis of the courtship of the two handsome lads ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... such it appeared and such it proved to be. A mystery to Sweetwater's eyes, and like all mysteries, interesting. For what purpose had it been built and why this isolation? It was too flimsy for a reservoir and too expensive for the wild freak of a crank. ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... of King Magnus's ship. King Magnus received him in a friendly way, and bade him welcome. King Harald answered, "I thought we were come among friends; but just now I was in doubt if ye would have it so. But it is a truth that childhood is hasty, and I will only consider it as a childish freak." Then said King Magnus, "It is no childish whim, but a trait of my family, that I never forget what I have given, or what I have not given. If this trifle had been settled against my will, there would soon have ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... them in the closet here,' she said, 'and put them on in a freak. What have I else to do? You are ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... "A freak storm, in Titan's atmosphere. Guess the Nomad's done for." Carr drew her fiercely close as an awful picture flashed across his mind—of Ora's body mangled in twisted wreckage; of the ...
— Creatures of Vibration • Harl Vincent
... is, Bess, I waited as long as I could for you to come over this side to look after me, that I might cease wandering and settle down. As you know, I've tried my hand at a good many occupations, often for the freak of the thing, but always with a reserve force for doing the right thing at last, and somehow I've mostly made bread and cheese and a little more. The gold fever was over long before I reached Australia, but ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... wrecked fort followed and among other interesting sights the guide pointed out the trail of the famous freak shot that killed the cow. The shell went first through a glass window, then through the wall at the back of the room, into a second chamber, where, without exploding, it had amputated a hind leg of the milch cow whose loss is still ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... recognizably human, not with the grotesque, supernatural, impossible. He imparts a vivid sense of the social interrelations, for the most part in a medieval environment, but in any case in an environment which one recognizes as controlled by human laws; not the brain-freak of a pseudo-idealist. Scott's Novels, judged broadly, make an impression of unity, movement and climax. To put it tersely: he painted manners, interpreted character in an historic setting and furnished story ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... cabin-top to keep her drier from it, and the two boys also sprang to a point of safety. Mrs. Daniver, less agile, was caught by Peterson and Williams and held to the rail, wetted thoroughly. And by some freak of the wind, at that instant came fully the roar of the surf. We of the Belle Helene ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... cried Mr. Van Wink, "am inclined to regard our loss of the train as a happy freak of fortune. Let us take the owl-train, also, Ketchem, and make a jovial night of ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... Roaring Girl (Mermaid Series, Middleton's Plays, volume ii), somewhat idealizing her, however. She seems to have belonged to a neurotic and eccentric stock; "each of the family," her biographer says, "had his peculiar freak." As a child she only cared for boys' games, and could never adapt herself to any woman's avocations. "She had a natural abhorrence to the tending of children." Her disposition was altogether masculine; "she was not for mincing obscenity, but would talk freely, whatever came uppermost." She never ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... took most effect on the mind of Louis was the eloquence of Ignatius when he met the young Xavier in the streets of Paris. "And then?" asked by another saint of an ambitious youth, did not lose its force with the holy youth who found himself, by some freak of blind fortune heir to one of the ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... it, 'kase they 'spise him more'n ye. An' hyar she's runned off an' married old Tom Kittredge's gran'son, Josiah Kittredge's son—when our folks 'ain't spoke ter none o' 'em fur fifty year—Josiah Kittredge's son—ha! ha! ha!" He laughed aloud in tuneless scorn of himself and of this freak of froward destiny and then fell to wringing his hands and calling ...
— His "Day In Court" - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... attached to "The Transformed Metamorphosis": there can hardly have been two Cyril Tourneurs in the field, but there may well have been half a dozen Thomas Middletons. And Tourneur's abortive attempt at allegoric discourse is but a preposterous freak of prolonged eccentricity: this paraphrase is simply a tideless and interminable sea of limitless and inexhaustible drivel. There are three reasons—two of them considerable, but the third conclusive—for assigning to Middleton the two satirical tracts in the style of Nash, ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... bush-folk, and hungry, our guests enjoyed it, passing over all incongruities with simple merriment—a light-hearted, bubbling merriment, in no way comparable to that "laughter of fools," that crackling of thorns under a pot, provoked by the incongruities of the world's freak dinners. The one is the heritage of the simple-hearted, and the other—all the world has to give in ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... not in his mind when he started from the monastery; neither had he thought of it on the way, or of the dark history it had helped him to; in a freak, he took the seat he had formerly occupied, placed his arm along the coping of the parapet, and closed his eyes. And strange to say, the conversation of that day repeated itself almost word for word. Stranger still, it had now a significancy not then observed; and as he ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... altogether a freak of Nature, and the wonder to me is how, being so tender, it lives here at all. You see how small and delicate a thing it is. They say it is blind, but you observe it is not; although the creatures live mostly underground. They also say that the chlamyphorus ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... Nature's a dial whose shade no hand puts back, Trick as we may! My friend, you are forty-three This very year in the world— [JOSEPHINE breaks out sobbing again.] And in vain it is To think of waiting longer; pitiful To dream of coaxing shy fecundity To an unlikely freak by physicking With superstitious drugs and quackeries That work you harm, not good. The fact being so, I have looked it squarely down—against my heart! Solicitations voiced repeatedly At length have shown the soundness of their shape, And left me no denial. ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... on perfunctorily, feeling that she was not carrying her audience with her, and longing for the time when she could take her letter away and have it all to herself. If she stopped now, Christine, in this sudden new freak of distrustfulness, ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... many charges to answer. He was accused of founding a new sect, a society for laziness; he was accused of holding strange opinions, opposed to the teaching of the Lutheran Church; he was accused of being a sham Christian, a sort of religious freak; and now he undertook the task of proving that these accusations were false, and of showing all fair-minded men in Germany that the Brethren at Herrnhut were as orthodox as Luther, as respected as the King, and as ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... a streak of light in the western sky, whether caused by the low-hanging, mist-hidden moon or a freak reflection of the coming dawn. Against that patch of brightness the northern headland of Lost Island loomed up high and barren save for its one tall tree. But it was neither headland nor tree that caught Jerry's attention and caused the gasp ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... while, they forgot that good inborn is too vigorous a matter for any mere razor finally to subdue. See, again, what a great beard Saint Paul had, and what an outspoken, vigorous heart! Was it from freak that Greeks and Easterns reverenced beards as symbols of manhood, dignity, and wisdom? or that Christian Fathers thundered against the barber, as a violator of divine law? No one, surely, could accuse that handy, oily, easy little ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... news for you," went on young Crawford, "did you know that Sam Redding has entered that freak motor boat he's been building in the yacht club regatta? He's out for the ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Eagle Patrol • Howard Payson
... pride and affection made him nicely observant of any change in Angelica, but still he was at a loss to understand this new freak, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... that Claire would find him intrusive, Milt was grave in her presence. He couldn't respond either to her enthusiasm about canyon and colored pool—or to her rage about the tourists who, she alleged, preferred freak museum pieces to plain beauty; who never admired a view unless it was labeled by a signpost and megaphoned by a guide as something they ought to admire—and tell the Folks Back ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
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