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More "Peculiarity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... went slowly downstairs she forced herself to smile. The smile came with difficulty, but it came, and when she met Louth he did not seem to notice any peculiarity in her. But, to tell the truth, he scarcely seemed to notice her at all with any particularity. For her strange and abnormal pre-occupation was matched by a like pre-occupation in him. He took off his hat, bade her good ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... and he had offered to accept a staff position with me. I had a real regard for him, and naturally offered my friendly services in his present predicament. It seemed that Sheridan had called on him for a report as to the condition of things in his front, and Hazen had taken advantage of some peculiarity of the situation which he thought Sheridan did not sufficiently understand, to make a report which was ironical and so irritating that Sheridan's answer was to order him to keep his quarters in arrest. Their quarrel, ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... seem one unfailing source of felicity and joy; independent of creed, independent of country, independent even of character. He might have discovered that perpetual spring of happiness in the sensibility of the heart. But this was a sealed fountain to Sidonia. In his organisation there was a peculiarity, perhaps a great deficiency. He was a man without affections. It would be harsh to say he had no heart, for he was susceptible of deep emotions, but not for individuals. He was capable of rebuilding a town that was ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... Christian spirit rose by the power of faith. They shunned rather all worldly business in a manner that caused Luther to ascribe to them a certain monastic character. Their priests lived, like Catholics, in celibacy. Another peculiarity of their teaching was, that in striving after a more spiritual conception of life, and under the influence of the writings of the great Englishman Wicliffe, which were largely disseminated among them, they ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... had never before been seen on the western frontier. It was shorter in the barrel and larger in the bore than the weapons chiefly in vogue at that time, and, besides being of beautiful workmanship, was silver-mounted. But the grand peculiarity about it, and that which afterwards rendered it the mystery of mysteries to the savages, was, that it had two sets of locks—one percussion, the other flint—so that, when caps failed, by taking off the one set of locks and affixing ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne
... quite a feature in the eisteddfodau of the Cymry, and was much practised in the houses of the Welsh gentry. The pennillion were sung by one voice to the harp, and followed a quaint air which was not only interesting, but owing to its peculiarity, it set forth in a striking manner the humour of the verse. This practice, which was quite a Welsh institution, is fast dying out, and is not now much in ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... the contest had not been fully settled by the election of McKinley in 1896. Godkin was emphatically for gold, Walker equally emphatic for a double standard. And they clashed. It is a notable example of the peculiarity of Godkin, to allow at the portal of death the one point of political policy on which he and Walker disagreed to overweigh the nine points in which ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... money is not settled in an exceptional way, there is nevertheless a peculiarity about it, as there is about many articles. It is a commodity subject to great fluctuations of value, and those fluctuations are easily produced by a slight excess or a slight deficiency of quantity. Up to a certain point money is a necessity. If ...
— Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market • Walter Bagehot
... Street or Scott, Viollet-le-Duc, and Ruskin breathe a totally different inspiration; while even the valuable series of architectural writings which we owe to the pen of Mr. Fergusson are too cosmopolitan in range and too impartial in tone for such a peculiarity as is here traceable to be visible ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Volume 01, No. 05, May 1895 - Two Florentine Pavements • Various
... and was thought to be a Capparis; the gouty habit of the stem, which was soft and spongy, gave it an appearance of disease; but as all the specimens, from the youngest plant to the full-grown tree, possessed the same deformed appearance, it was evidently the peculiarity of its habit. The stem of the largest of these trees measured twenty-nine feet in girt, whilst its height did not exceed twenty-five feet. It bore some resemblance to the Adansonia figured in the account of Captain Tuckey's ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... of this number, a very respectable man, had actually reached the boat, and was raising his hand to lay hold on the gunwale, when the bow of the boat, by a sudden pitch, struck him on the head, and he instantly went down. There was a peculiarity attending this man's case that deserves notice. His wife, to whom he was warmly attached, not having been of the allotted number of women to accompany the regiment abroad, resolved in her anxiety to follow her husband, ...
— The Loss of the Kent, East Indiaman, in the Bay of Biscay - Narrated in a Letter to a Friend • Duncan McGregor
... the action of walking. As a Galliard consists of five paces or bars in the first strain, and is therefore called a Cinque pace; the passa mezzo, which is a diminutive of the Galliard, is just half that number, and from that peculiarity takes its name."—Sir John Hawkins's "History of Music," iv. 386. [Compare Dyce's second ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... this peculiarity; he had kept himself as usual apart from the others, and was now trying to compel himself to brave the terrors of an avowal at the first opportunity. He followed the others up the steps with an uneasy wonder whether, after all, he would not find himself ignominiously ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... weary and the troubled, who came in their various ways to ask pity of Jesus, and found it; and reporting to Johnny as if she had heard them the words of promise and love that a little child could understand. Mrs. Derrick listened; she had never heard just such a talk in her life. The peculiarity of it was in the vivid faith and love which took hold of the things as if Faith had had them by eyesight and hearing, and in the simplicity of representation with which she gave them, as a child to a child. And all the while she let Johnny constantly be changing his position, as restlessness ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... certain well-defined characteristics. It is asserted, as we have elsewhere noted, that the chief subjects of the first were the politics of the day and the characters and deeds of leading persons; that the chief peculiarity of the second, in which the action of the chorus was much curtailed, was the exclusion of personal and political criticism, and the adoption of parodies of the gods and ridicule of certain types of character; and ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... due point and piquancy to the prose of Moliere. He is taught to tread in the well-beaten path of French dramatic art, fenced in and hedged around with sacred traditions. If he attempts to embody any one of the characters of the classic drama, every tone, every gesture, every peculiarity of make-up, every shade and style in his costume, is prescribed to him beforehand. Originality of treatment and of conception is above all things to be avoided. So spoke Moliere, so looked Lekain, so stepped ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... generally a peace-loving animal, but bites, scratches, and claws if it is teased. Its best defence however is flight." All these technical details left the good woman cold. What she remembered best were the practical qualities of the creatures. The kangaroo has one very great peculiarity, the female has a pouch, a sort of bag, in which she hides her young if danger appears, just as the soldier ...
— The Curly-Haired Hen • Auguste Vimar
... we stopped to change horses, the first stage after Ansbach. It rained heavily, and we had only time to run hastily through these very curious old relics, which, if appearances formed the test of truth, might, from the colour of the stone and the peculiarity of the structure, have been old enough to designate the first christian place of worship established in Germany. The whole, however, was upon a singularly small scale. I earnestly recommend every English antiquary to stop longer than we did at Feuchtwang. From thence to Heilbronn, ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... couldn't help it!" Not one of them turned round, and stood upon his Kingship, as upon a right he could afford to die for, or to risk his skin upon; by no manner of means. That, I say, is the alarming peculiarity at present. Democracy, on this new occasion, finds all Kings conscious that they are but Play-actors. The miserable mortals, enacting their High Life Below Stairs, with faith only that this Universe may perhaps be all a phantasm and hypocrisis,—the truculent Constable of ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... discrimination must be exercised in digital manipulation of the triceps region because many animals are normally sensitive to palpation of these parts. It is sometimes difficult to correctly interpret the true state of conditions because of this peculiarity. ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... himself yesterday; and this same point of character was true the other way—-for whilst certain that you had him for a friend, perhaps you found him hard at work to oppress or over-reach you if he could. The consequence of this peculiarity was that he had a two-fold reputation in the country. Some were found to abuse him, and others to mention many acts of generosity and kindness which he had been known to perform under circumstances ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... absence, each can sue the other by the action on uncommissioned agency; the direct action being available to him whose business was managed, the contrary action to him who managed it. It is clear that these actions cannot properly be said to originate in a contract, for their peculiarity is that they lie only where one man has come forward and managed the business of another without having received any commission so to do, and that other is thereby laid under a legal obligation even though he knows nothing of what has ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... minds of certain other people. When they speak, you know exactly what they are going to say; you have heard the same thing so many times already from them, you know all their ideas by heart. These people are welcomed everywhere: because they have nothing peculiar about them; and peculiarity, especially in the upper classes, is always irritating and offensive; they detest ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... thinking he recognized a peculiarity about this chuckle that stamped the identity of the one who ...
— The Boys of Columbia High on the Gridiron • Graham B. Forbes
... a peculiarity which you Yankees seldom think of, that Englishmen can't endure to live in America. Well, that peculiarity is just as active after they "shuffle off the mortal coil." They must have their little England, ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... singularly rich in fossil remains. Montmartre and its vicinity, covered with buildings and crowded with people, would not strike many observers as a promising field for scientific exploration; but it is the peculiarity of genius to read instruction where others can find only a blank, or a record of commonplace character. Cuvier discovered in the geological construction and the fossil remains of the Paris basin, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... given from some peculiarity of clothing. Scarlet, an old English name, probably came from the colour of the clothing of the people who were first called by it—scarlet, like all bright colours, being very much liked in the Middle Ages. So we hear of the name Curtmantle, or "short cloak," and Curthose, ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... hard to teach and forgets what it has learned. The parrot which is most easily taught the language of man is one that feeds on acorns and manlike has five toes on each foot. All parrots do not possess this last peculiarity, but there is one point which all have in common: their tongue is broader than that of any other bird. Wherefore they articulate human words more easily owing to the size of their palate and the organ of speech. When it has learnt anything, ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... was a dandy, but he had this peculiarity, that he seemed to dress to please himself rather than the rest of the world. His glances never roved about taking account of the admiration of others. As he leaned there in the door of the hotel he was the type of the young, happy, genuine and carefree fellow, whose ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand
... undertake anything on so grand a scale. I could repeat only a few lines of the verses it contained; but the plan of the whole work, as I rounded it in Gottingen and Hosterwitz, I remember perfectly, and I think, if only for the sake of its peculiarity and as the mirror of a portion of my intellectual life at that time, its ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Compare Quesnay, 94, ed. Daire. Even Twiss says that money employed as money is unproductive, but that, when employed as a commodity, it is productive. (View of the Progress of Political Economy, since the sixteenth Century, 1847.) Besides it is not a peculiarity of money alone, that, after it has served the purposes of production, it comes out of the product unaltered. The same is true of quicksilver employed in amalgamation. (Hermann, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... in the seven years' fire; but the contrast of the southern coast with the northern, where the forests primaeval of Lauraceae and Myrtaceae still linger, shows the same destructive process which injured Ireland and ruined Iceland. The peculiarity of these uplands, within certain limits, is that the young spring-verdure clothes them before it appears in the lower and warmer levels. Here they catch a sunshine untarnished ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... with all her children around her. Some of these hills, her offspring, are covered with forests and rich vegetation—such having enjoyed a lasting repose. Others are still arid and bare, having been more recently formed. Owing to this peculiarity in its structure, Etna does not present that conical aspect which characterizes most other volcanoes. Strange as it may seem, there are, on the sides of the mountain, caverns which the Sicilians use ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... speaking to him, and finished by running away from him. Accordingly, like most books which spring out of personal circumstances, his treatises on this subject have a frankness and a mastery of detail which others on the same topic sometimes want. He is remarkably free from one peculiarity of modern writers on such matters. Several considerate gentlemen are extremely anxious for the "rights of woman"; they think that women will benefit by removing the bulwarks which the misguided experience of ages ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... had been stripped from the necklace by forcible contact with the iron rail of the fire-escape at the point where Average Jones had found the "color" of precious metal. The stones were identified by Kirby, from a peculiarity in the setting, as the end three, nearest the clasp at the back; a point which Jones carefully noted. But there the trail ended. No more fire-blue stones ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the life insurance," added the usurer, with a slight peculiarity of intonation that might have escaped the notice of one whose nerves were less exalted in their sensitive power ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... heat is on the decline, are to produce a number of toadstools; and, also, that when the bed is "spent," that is, when the heat is altogether gone, the tendency to bear toadstools has gone too. This peculiarity is more apparent in spring than in fall. All mushroom growers know that spurious fungi, when they appear at all, are most numerous three to two weeks before it is time for the mushrooms to come in sight. The same growth appears in the manure piles out in the yard; ...
— Mushrooms: how to grow them - a practical treatise on mushroom culture for profit and pleasure • William Falconer
... part being in fact relative, and inferring all the rest. It is true that the point of action or sentiment, which we are most concerned in, is always held out for our special notice. But who does not perceive that there is a peculiarity about it, which conveys a relish of the whole? And very frequently, when no particular point presses, he boldly makes a character act and speak from those parts of the composition, which are inferred only, and not distinctly shewn. This produces a wonderful effect; it seems ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... of his analysis and in the accurate heaping up of exact and pregnant observations, Lieut. Nichols comes closer than any other of these English poets to the best of the French paladins, of whom I wrote in Three French Moralists. One peculiarity which he shares with them is his seriousness: there is no trace in him of the English cheerfulness and levity. Most of our war-writers are incorrigible Mark Tapleys. But Lieut. Nichols, even when he uses colloquial ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... they attain manhood, and graves before the wild ambition thus kindled and inflamed can receive its first chaplet. All our literature teaches this unquiet and discontented spirit as to the present, and this rash and impatient determination to achieve immediate success. Now, this is a peculiarity of our country, the land of all others which should cherish a disposition to be gratefully contented with the unequaled blessings with which it is endowed. There is no necessity for this forcing system to ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... settling the particular shade of the hair, Harry then inquired if there was any strongly marked peculiarity of face or person about ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... of the revolutionary movement; its gain, in so far as it emancipated the intelligence from superstitious illusions, and its loss, in so far as it destroyed the faith which was the bond of social union, without substituting any other faith in its room. At the same time, the expression points to a peculiarity of Comte's Psychology, which affects his whole view of the history, and especially of the religious history, of man; and it is therefore necessary to subject it to a ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... carrying out practically so great a measure as that of the union, difficulties of no ordinary kind will be felt. I have pressed upon, and fully explained our financial matter to, Earl Grey, who has, I believe, written to Lord Elgin on the subject. I think I have made Earl Grey understand the peculiarity of our case. You must press the matter on ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... it was proposed that I should go to school, that was a remedy I could not listen to with patience for a moment. The peculiarity of my education had separated me entirely from the girls around, except that when they were playing at active games, I would sometimes go out and join them. I liked violent bodily exercise, which always relieved my nerves. But I had no success in associating with them beyond ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... from the translations of the above that each gens takes its name from some peculiarity or habit it is supposed to possess. It will also be noticed that each tribe has a few gentes common to one or both of the other tribes. This is caused by persons leaving their own tribe to live with another one, but, instead of uniting with some gens of the adopted tribe, they ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... numerous members of the household was one who, from being a turnspit, had risen, chiefly in virtue of an immovably lugubrious expression of countenance, to be the earl's fool. From this peculiarity his fellow-servants had given him the nickname of The Hangman; but the man himself had chosen the role of a puritan parson, as affording the best ground-work for the display of a humour suitable to the expression of countenance with which his mother had endowed him. That ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... the regular and healthy regime, the strengthening of my soul and body was helped by the wonderful, yet natural, peculiarity of our prison, which eliminates entirely the accidental and the unexpected from its life. Having neither a family nor friends, I am perfectly safe from the shocks, so injurious to life, which are caused by treachery, ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... drawl, but it is varied by an occasional extreme rapidity of utterance, in which they seem to skip from consonant to consonant, until, lighting upon a broad, open vowel, they rest upon that to restore the balance of sound. The women carry this peculiarity of speaking to a much greater extreme than the men, who have more evenness and stateliness of utterance. A common bullock-driver, on horseback, delivering a message, seemed to speak like an ambassador ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... thirty years of age, plainly but elegantly dressed, and of a prepossessing but somewhat sickly countenance, the lines of which were now working under the influence of some violent emotion. The only peculiarity in his appearance was a black silk band which, passing under his chin, was brought up on both sides of the head, and fastened on the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... never really studied any science whatever; but he had dabbled in a number of them, and he felt that he had immense capacity for deep thought and subtle investigation. His mind was powerfully analytical—that's what it was. One consequence of this peculiarity of mind was that he "took his bearings" on short and known distances, as well as on long venturesome rambles; he tested himself and ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... as it is now built up by a layer of thin stone externally, and the soil of the garden has been heaped up against it and the whole south wall to the depth of several feet, it is difficult to make out its full relations and character. There is a peculiarity, however, about the head of this entrance which deserves special notice. The top of the doorway, as seen both from within and from without the building, is arched, but in two very different ways. When examined from within, the ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... as to the peculiarity of a chimney-pot which is afraid of being caught in the act, and which retires when some one looks at its shadow, for the shadow had taken the alarm when Cosette had turned round, and Cosette had thought ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... arid curious creature, about forty inches long from nose to tip of tail. The fur is ash-gray, mottled with black spots, and the tail is divided by numerous black rings. It is of the genius Viverra, and is exceedingly fierce when attacked. It preys chiefly upon fowls, hares, rats, etc. Its great peculiarity is the musk-bag or gland situated nearly under the tail; this is a projecting and valued gland, which secretes the musk, and is used medicinally by the Cingalese, on which account it is valued at about six shillings a pod. The smell is very powerful, and in my opinion very offensive, ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... no pensive or consolatory teaching, no appeal to souls in the modern sense. The effect aimed at is that of horror, of solemn preparation for the advent of death, as by one who fears, in the flutter of mortality, to lose some peculiarity of the skeleton, some jag of the vast crooked scythe of the spectre. The most ingenious of poets, the most subtle of divines, whose life had been spent in examining Man in the crucible of his own alchemist fancy, seems anxious to preserve to the very last his powers of unflinching spiritual observation. ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... rude slabs of limestone with an intermixture of bowlders. The bowlders usually occur only in the lower part of the wall, near the ground, and in several cases, where nothing exists of the wall above the surface of the ground, the remains consist entirely of bowlders. A good example of this peculiarity of construction is shown in plate XLIV, and plate XLV shows the character of stone employed and also a section of standing wall on the western side of the village. A section of standing wall near the center of the ruin is illustrated in plate XIII. It will be noticed that some of ...
— Aboriginal Remains in Verde Valley, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... sail above the island of little Barro.[444] There was a small purse made up by the passengers, each one contributing what he pleased, for the person who should first discover land. We gave two shillings each. The minister would not give anything. It seems that meanness is a peculiarity of this class of people. This was done in order that the sailors might look out more zealously for land, and so we might not fall upon land unexpectedly. The purse was nailed to the mast, so that, being always in sight, ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... he descended the staircase, trying frantically to remember which of the treads would creak under his weight. Faithfully to ascertain which of them possessed this important peculiarity had been one of the last things he did before quitting Mr. Bumble's service. Was it the fifth or sixth? He hesitated, then avoided the fifth gingerly, and hoped for the best.... Beneath the increased pressure the sixth stair ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... A peculiarity of houses in the Five Towns is that rooms are seldom called by their right names. It is a point of honour, among the self-respecting and industrious classes, to prepare a room elaborately for a certain ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... to feel that there actually were such people, and to have moments of half-surprise that I couldn't see them; particularly as each of the Hunchberg's developed a character entirely his own to the last peculiarity, such as the aged Aunt Cooley Hunchberg's deafness, on which account Beasley never once forgot to raise his voice when he addressed her. Indeed, the details of actuality in all this appeared to bring as great a delight to the man as to the child. Certainly he built them ...
— Beasley's Christmas Party • Booth Tarkington
... considerations, all the books he had then printed, or might thereafter print, to a convent where his sister was a nun. No book, however, has yet been discovered bearing the name of Gutenberg; and we can only guess what came from his press by a peculiarity of type, of which, after the first Bible, the most marked is the famous Catholicon, dated 1460—a kind of universal dictionary, the germ of all future cyclopaedias, and which became so popular that more than forty editions were printed of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... already the influence of its cheerful atmosphere, and have rarely threaded the crowds of a stranger city, with so light a heart as I do now daily, on the thronged banks of the Seine. And yet it would be difficult to describe wherein consists this agreeable peculiarity. You can find streets as dark and crooked and dirty anywhere in Germany, and squares and gardens as gay and sunny beyond the Alps, and yet they would affect you far differently. You could not, as here, divest yourself of every particle of sad or serious thought and be content to ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... epoch in the history of scholarship, was by temperament a poet, and a poet of the people. Nothing was easier for him than to throw aside his professor's mantle, and to improvise 'Ballate' for the girls to sing as they danced their 'Carola' upon the Piazza di Santa Trinita in summer evenings. The peculiarity of this lyric is that it starts with a couplet, which also serves as refrain, supplying the rhyme to each successive stanza. The stanza itself is identical with our rime royal, if we count the couplet in the place of the seventh line. The form is in itself so graceful and is so beautifully treated ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Japan to China, the Prude will find a condition of things which, for iron severity of morals, is perhaps unparalleled—no dancing whatever, by either profligate or virtuous women. To whatever original cause we may attribute this peculiarity, it seems eternal, for the women of the upper classes have an ineradicable habit of so mutilating their feet that even the polite and comparatively harmless accomplishment of walking is beyond their power, those of the lower orders have not sense enough to dance, and that men should ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... the corners; a nose that had something in it exceedingly consequential; eyebrows sage and shaggy; ears large and fiery; and a chin that would have done honour to a mandarin. Now Mr. Jeremiah Bossolton had a certain peculiarity of speech to which I shall find it difficult to do justice. Nature had impressed upon his mind a prodigious love of the grandiloquent; Mr. Bossolton, therefore, disdained the exact language of the vulgar, and built unto himself a lofty fabric of words in which his sense managed ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... power; although their legislation would be various, interfering, and full of all the evils which the Constitution of the United States intended to provide against. But they have not the power; Congress, which has the power, does not exercise it. This is the peculiarity of our condition. The States would pass bankrupt laws, but they cannot; we can, but we will not. And between this want of power in the States and want of will in Congress, unfortunate insolvents are left to hopeless ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... one's brain was when I could keep from thinking of being smothered or crushed, or so fixed in that I could not get out. For then I began to think about moles burrowing underground, and worms in their holes, and rabbits and mice; and on one of these occasions I started and wondered at the peculiarity of the coincidence, for I suddenly became aware of a peculiar, half-musky smell, and then there was a scuffling, squealing sound which sent ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... doubt but that definition belongs to the genus, and is distinguishable by a certain peculiarity of the characteristics which it mentions, or else by a number of common circumstances, from which we may extract something which looks like a peculiar property. But since there is often very great disagreement about what are peculiar properties, we must ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... GENDERS. A peculiarity, which the Arawack shares with the Iroquois[3] and other aboriginal languages of the Western continent, is that it only has two genders, and these not the masculine and feminine, as in French, but the masculine and ...
— The Arawack Language of Guiana in its Linguistic and Ethnological Relations • Daniel G. Brinton
... Double Shock.—If the double shock were observed at only a few places, we should naturally look for some local explanation of the peculiarity. The second shock, for instance, might be a subterranean echo, the earth-waves being reflected at the bounding surface of two different kinds of rock. In the case of the Andalusian earthquake, such an explanation ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... third type of circle. It consists of a cist-tomb covered by a low mound, often with a retaining wall of small blocks, but there is no entrance passage leading into the cist. Outside the whole is a circle of large upright blocks with this peculiarity, that between the two highest—generally to the south or slightly east of south—lies a long block on its side, occupying the whole interval between them. The uprights nearest this 'recumbent' block are the tallest in the circle, and the size of the rest decreases ...
— Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders • T. Eric Peet
... characteristic of his nature. Although I had frequently seen him in the progress of the Revolution and had corresponded with him from France in 1781 and 1782, this was the first occasion on which I had contemplated him in his private relations. I observed a peculiarity in his smile which seemed to illuminate his eye; his whole countenance beamed with intelligence, while it commanded confidence and respect. The gentleman who had accompanied me from Alexandria left in the evening, and I remained alone in the enjoyment of the society of Washington ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... room, one was Mahala Richardson, whom he knew, a young girl, and the prisoner. If she had been alone, his recognition would have been of no avail. The fact is obvious to this court, that the respondent has no peculiar physiognomy or gait. It has been shown she has no peculiarity of voice; I cannot but feel that the fact alleged by the claimant is very doubtful, when the witnesses, without mark or peculiarity, testify that they can readily recognize the girl of fifteen in the woman of forty. The ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... extremity of the insect. There are in the northern part of this country two species which attack chestnuts, one which attacks hickory-nuts, one which attacks hazel-nuts and about a dozen which attack acorns. And here may be mentioned an interesting peculiarity of the feeding habit which is decidedly to the advantage of the nut-grower. Each species adheres closely to its own food plant. The hickory-nut weevil does not attack hazel-nuts nor the hazel-nut weevil hickory-nuts. None of the acorn-infesting species ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... Maldon I enter the parish church in the centre of the town, and find that the tower, which appears outside, so far as one is able to view it, of the normal four-sided shape, is really triangular; and when in the nave one faces west, this peculiarity imparts an adventurous sense of novelty to the church, a delicious and mysterious surprise one could not anticipate, nor even realise, until ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... are located at some distance from her, she sees them clearly; but if they are under her very nose she overlooks them altogether, unless they are sufficiently fragrant or audible to address other senses. This physical peculiarity she carries over into her mental processes. Her impression of the Disruption movement, for example, would be lively and distinct, but her perception of a contemporary lovers' quarrel (particularly if it were fought at her own apron-strings) would be singularly vague. If she suggested, ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... This peculiarity of the invitation is important in connection with the severity of the punishment which was subsequently inflicted on the recusants. They did not repudiate the invitation when it was first addressed to them. By retaining it, and enjoying the advantage of being accounted the king's guests ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... was closely engaged in his studies. His constitution was somewhat renovated. His correspondence now became limited, and was principally confined to Mrs. Prevost. Here again the peculiarity already referred to was in full operation. The greater part of this correspondence is in cipher. But portions of it that are not thus written are highly interesting, and give evidence that Mrs. Prevost possessed a cultivated mind. Her ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... smerdi, which simply means smelling offensively. Is the exhalation of an offensive odor the necessary property of a people imbruted by poverty and filth? In America that unpleasant effluvium has generally been considered a peculiarity pertaining to the colored race. Philosophic observation may show that it is a disease, the result of uncleanliness, but, like other diseases, often transmitted from the guilty parent to the unoffending ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... male sapphire exhibits, through some peculiarity of crystalline structure, a star of bright rays. It is also known as "the star sapphire" and "the asteriated sapphire." The ruby shows a clear red light ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... each province has its own, founded on the government, climate, mode of husbandry, customs, and peculiarity of circumstances. Europeans submit insensibly to these great powers, and become, in the course of a few generations, not only Americans in general, but either Pennsylvanians, Virginians, or provincials under some other name. Whoever traverses the continent must easily observe those strong ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... irregularities, and even absurdities, should so frequently disfigure the animated and passionate scenes intermixed with them; and at the same time, we perhaps admire the more those beauties, on account of their being surrounded with such deformities. A striking peculiarity of sentiment adapted to a singular character, he frequently hits, as it were by inspiration; but a reasonable propriety of thought he cannot for any time uphold. Nervous and picturesque expressions, as well as descriptions, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... at the Court of the Two Sicilies, the versatile diplomatist who eventually married the beautiful but frail Emma Hart. During his long period of residence in Naples, Sir William made no fewer than fifty-eight explorations of the crater alone, besides carefully studying every peculiarity visible upon the sides of the Mountain. He was, of course, a close observer of the great eruptions of 1766-7, and also of the still greater convulsion of 1779, which, strangely enough, occurred on the seventeenth centenary of the awakening of the Mountain from its pre-historic slumbers. On this ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... growth of divorce and of vice may be put down as a fourth cause of the decay of the Roman family. Some may say that this was an effect of the decay of the Roman family rather than a cause, but it was also a cause as well as an effect, for it is a peculiarity of social life that what is at one stage an effect reacts to become a cause at a later stage; and this was certainly the case with the growth of divorce and vice in Rome, in its effect upon the Roman family. Moreover, much of this came from Greece through imitation. The family life ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... a second time examined the body, confining his attention particularly to the hands. The right one showed nothing upon which to found a theory, save that it was, indeed, a capable hand with smooth skin and well-tended nails; but on examining the left Paul noted a marked peculiarity. Near the ends of the thumb and the first finger the skin was roughened, abrased; there were numerous tiny black spots beneath the skin, which, upon careful scrutiny, he ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... matter of fact, the property was considerable; but Durant noticed that its owner applied the endearing diminutive to every object that appealed specially to his egotism. It was a peculiarity of the Colonel that he was ready to melt with affection over the things that belonged to himself, and was roused almost to ferocity by whatever ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... of the Andes, traversing its whole extent near the Pacific Ocean, has stamped a character upon South American nature which belongs to no other country. The peculiarity which distinguishes the regions which belong to this immense chain, are the successive plateaux, like so many huge natural terraces, which rise one above another, before arriving at the great central chain, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... one peculiarity in his performance which distinguished him from French open-air artistes—he never spoke. Possibly he was diffident of his French accent. He simply uttered a grunt when he wished to call attention to any extraordinary perfection in his performance; in imitation, ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... of insurance practised by level-premium companies that demands brief notice here. It would seem that to mention it would be to call down upon it public reprobation: we refer to what is called prudential or industrial insurance. The peculiarity of this form is that its patrons are found among the poorest and the lowest classes of our population, and, in the judgment of others than the writer, it appeals to the very worst instincts of those unfortunate people. The insurance is effected ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various
... of both rooms were lined with bookcases, but their contents were widely diverse, and, to Darrell's surprise, he found the young girl's library contained far the better class of books. But even in their selection he observed the same peculiarity that he had noted in the furnishing of the room; there were few complete sets of books; instead, there were one, two, or three volumes of each author, as the case might ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... contact with the heavy manufacturers throughout the Eastern States, and during that long experience I was particularly impressed with a peculiarity common to the mill owners, which, I believe it may be said with truth, is equally common to those interested in locomotive engineering, namely, how much we overlook common, every-day facts. For instance, we ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... are the prognostics formed by men of wit and sense, as these two certainly were, concerning the future character and conduct of those for whose welfare they were honestly and deeply concerned; and so late do those features of peculiarity come to their growth, which mark a character to all ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... the wild currents, which boiled as they rushed by a short distance out. This cavern appeared as if, at some distant period, it had been eaten out of soft or half-decayed strata by the waves; and its peculiarity was the great extent of low, fairly level roof, which in places the lads could touch by tiptoeing and extending their fingers. It ran in at least a hundred feet; and apparently, from the state of the sand, was never invaded by the highest tides, ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... time there lived a certain family of the name of Skratdj. (It has a Russian or Polish look, and yet they most certainly lived in England.) They were remarkable for the following peculiarity. They seldom seriously quarrelled, but they never agreed about anything. It is hard to say whether it were more painful for their friends to hear them constantly contradicting each other, or gratifying to discover that it "meant nothing," and was ...
— The Peace Egg and Other tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... the wise old woman of Hollowbush, who had the amiable peculiarity of appearing just when people most needed her, stopped before the window, and said, as she looked up at her young friend, "You were wishing for a diamond necklace, my child. What would you do if I should tell you of a country where diamonds are as ...
— Harper's Young People, January 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... straws, and that others do not attract them. By accident we discovered one that has a virtue more extraordinary still,—that of attracting at a distance, and without being rubbed, iron filings and other bits of iron. This peculiarity amused us for some time before we saw any use in it. At last we found out that it may be communicated to iron itself, when magnetized to a certain degree. One day we went to a fair, where a juggler, with a piece of bread, attracted a duck made of wax, and floating on a bowl of water. Much ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... of those periods; or where it may be already in existence it becomes excessively aggravated. This disease cannot be propagated by contact or contagion; it exists in individuals in whom there is a peculiarity of constitution which predisposes them to its attacks; and this brings me to the consideration of one of the most important causes of the disease, namely, an hereditary taint. It is a well ascertained fact that 99 cases out of 100 arise from this cause, and the result of my practice corroborates ...
— Observations on the Causes, Symptoms, and Nature of Scrofula or King's Evil, Scurvy, and Cancer • John Kent
... windy Olympus of Nob Hill, or perhaps just skirted its frontier; passed almost immediately after through a stage of little houses, rather impudently painted, and offering to the eye of the observer this diagnostic peculiarity, that the huge brass plates upon the small and highly coloured doors bore only the first names of ladies—Norah or Lily or Florence; traversed China Town, where it was doubtless undermined with opium ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ago we were in perpetual motion. We did not then suppose that anything would tempt us on a circle-squaring expedition: but the circumstances of the book above named have a peculiarity which induces us to give it ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... possible that the irregular thickness and the strange contortions of the strata of the sandstone at Petra may be due to some such cause. A curious observation of Professor Forchhammer suggests an explanation of another peculiarity in the structure of the sandstone of Mount Seir. He describes dunes in Jutland, composed of yellow quartzose sand intermixed with black titanian iron. When the wind blows over the surface of the dunes, it furrows the sand with alternate ridges and depressions, ripples, in short, ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... otherwise be dangerous to morality under the code of Mohammed, and with the example before men and women of the early worthies of Islam. So long as the sentiments and habits of the Moslem world remain as they are some remedial or preventive measure of the kind seems indispensable. But the peculiarity of the Mussulman polity, as we have seen, is such that the sexual laws and institutions which call for restrictions of the kind as founded on the Koran are incapable of change; they must co-exist with the faith itself, and last while it lasts. So long, then, ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... accounting and control of distribution—the consumers' co-operatives. They are developed in Russia less than in the more advanced countries, but they comprise more than 10,000,000 members. The decree on consumers' associations which was recently issued is extremely significant, showing clearly the peculiarity of the position and of the problem of the Socialist Soviet Republic at the ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... similar sounds have ever jarred upon the ear of humanity. There were two particulars, nevertheless, which I thought then, and still think, might fairly be stated as characteristic of the intonation—as well adapted to convey some idea of its unearthly peculiarity. In the first place, the voice seemed to reach our ears—at least mine—from a vast distance, or from some deep cavern within the earth. In the second place, it impressed me (I fear, indeed, that it will be impossible to make myself ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... or flesh-eating animals, Bears take the first place; for their characters and habits link them in some degree with the preceding order, the Insectivora. Both principally live on fruit, grains, and insects, and only eat flesh from necessity, or some peculiarity of life, ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... vain, perhaps, to emulate the achievements of the Scottish antiquary; but surely something might be done better than the county Garlands, which, with a few honorable exceptions, are sad abortions, mere channels for rhyme-struck editors. There is one peculiarity of the midland songs and ballads which I do not remember to have seen noticed, viz. their singular affinity to those of Scotland, as exhibited in the collections of Scott and Motherwell. I have repeatedly noticed this, even so far south as Gloucestershire. Of the old Staffordshire ballad which ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 207, October 15, 1853 • Various
... It was a peculiarity of Miss Deemas's character, that she claimed the right to be as rude as she chose to people in her own house, and rather prided herself on this evidence ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... One peculiarity of this artist's pictures was that he used actual goldleaf to make the high lights upon hair, leaves, and draperies. The effect of the use of this gold was very beautiful, if unusual, and it may have been that his apprenticeship as a goldsmith ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... so easily frightened, Major; it is just as well that she should be prepared. Well, my dear Miss Hannay, Indian society has this peculiarity, that the women never grow old. At least," he continued, in reply to the girl's look of surprise, "they are never conscious of growing old. At home a woman's family grows up about her, and are constant reminders that she is becoming a matron. Here the children ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty
... gratiam capimus,—observes one of our scholarly travellers; and their road that day lay through a country, well-fitted, by the peculiarity of its landscape, to ripen a first acquaintance into intimacy; its superficial ugliness throwing the wayfarers back upon each other's entertainment in a real exchange of ideas, the tension of which, however, it would relieve, ever and anon, by the unexpected assertion of something singularly attractive. ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... that our aspect might give them half the satisfaction we had in watching their eager faces and noting their droll costumes. Ludicrously high stocks and "swallow-tail" coats of brown homespun made the dress of the men different from that of corresponding rustics in America. The chief peculiarity in the women's attire was a straw hat, of which the towering crown, decked with huge bows, and the vast flapping brim, were like an extravagant caricature of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... Another peculiarity observed in this winter was the rare occurrence of the Aurora Borealis, and the extraordinary poorness of its display whenever it did make its appearance. It was almost invariably seen to the southward, ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... left alone after this, if Sydney Cooke had not discovered a remarkable peculiarity she possessed. Sydney was a great lover of games, and he had brought his pocket checkerboard and men with him. He persuaded Winifred Marion Brown to play a game with him, and the rest of the ...
— Betty Gordon at Boarding School - The Treasure of Indian Chasm • Alice Emerson
... reminiscences to solicitude for her comfort almost startled Patty, but she was getting used to that peculiarity of the British mind. ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... would have left there. Edgar Vaughan seemed to be conscious of her character; for, in his letters, he gave her a name that was happily appropriate to the sensitiveness of her disposition, the delicate peculiarity of her manners, and the ethereal beauty both of her mind and person. Instead of Sylvia, he called her Sylph,—with the prerogative of a cousin and a ...
— Sylph Etherege - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... three distinguished by one peculiarity, which doubtless entered largely into their transcendent merit—they wrote in the infancy of civilization. Homer, as all the world knows, is the oldest profane author in existence. Dante flourished about the year 1300: he lived at a time when the English barons lived in rooms ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... escaped to the sea; and this great fact in physical geography can never be referred to without calling to mind the remarkable hypothesis by which the distinguished President of the Royal Geographical Society (Sir Roderick I. Murchison) clearly indicated this peculiarity, before it was verified by actual observation of the altitudes of the country and by the courses of the rivers. New light was thrown on other portions of the continent by the famous travels of Dr. Barth, by the researches of the Church ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... throw in their way, and invite them to his house. A pretty large party being mustered, they were well plied with whiskey-punch and wine; when, forgetting their cares, and free from all restraint, they gave loose to every peculiarity of their respective characters. When the entertainment was over, Sir Richard declared, that besides the pleasure of filling so many hungry bellies, and enjoying an hour of rich amusement, he had gleaned ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... peculiarity of all great novelists. Who experiences this insight, this influence more than Balzac, or Flaubert, in Madame Bovary? And so with Maupassant, who, pen in hand, is the character he describes, with his passions, his hatreds, his vices and his virtues. He so incorporates himself ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... was this peculiarity about the affair—namely, that the affection which he bore her was born more of her stronger will than of his own feelings, as was shown by the fact that, so long as he was actually with her and within the circle of her influence, ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... wonder— "Some large fig-trees sent out great lateral roots, large as their own trunks, fifty feet into salt water; an anchor-root extending perpendicularly at the extremity to support them. Thence they have sent up another tree as large as the parent stem, at high-water presenting the peculiarity of twin-trees, on shore and in the sea, connected by a rustic root bridge." These trees have no place ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... it may generally be said, that in the county of Lancaster, Catholics as well as Protestants displayed a firm attachment to the reigning family. Instances of defection were very rare; and, when they occurred, might be imputed to some peculiarity in the situation of the delinquents rather than to party or religious feelings. The romantic attempt of the young Chevalier, as displayed in this rebellion, had in it something imposing to ardent and enthusiastic minds; and those who embraced his cause south of the Tweed were principally ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... Indian woman is no easy task for one who lives among them, for every peculiarity becomes so familiar, and so interwoven with our common everyday experience, that we forget how strange and unlike white women she appeared to us at first. But she is a woman, even though she wears her shawl over her head and carries ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 38, No. 01, January, 1884 • Various
... though the smaller trees bore a general resemblance to this one—so that you could tell they were of the very same kind—yet they differed very considerably from it, both in form and aspect; and, but for the peculiarity of the leaves, one might have taken them for trees of altogether distinct species. The leaves of both, however, were exactly alike, and from this and other indications it was evident that both were trees of the same kind, only that a difference of age ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... voice, accent, and pronunciation which distinguished him as a youth, adhered to him in old age. This was singular enough, and formed a very ludicrous contrast with the learned and deep-read tone of his conversation; but another peculiarity, still more striking, belonged to him. When he became a fellow, he was obliged, by the rules of the college, to take holy orders as a sine qua non to his holding his fellowship. This he did, as he would have assumed a red hood or blue one, as bachelor of laws or doctor ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... are striving; and while they vomit forth rage, wish to be thought wise. Indeed it is certain that those covet glory the most who are loudest in declaiming against its abuse and the vanity of the world. Nor is this a peculiarity of the ambitious, but is common to all to whom fortune is adverse and who are impotent in mind; for we see that a poor and avaricious man is never weary of speaking about the abuse of money and the vices of the rich, thereby achieving nothing ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... art is made—reality; artists, even, can grasp it only when they have reduced things to their purest condition of being—to pure form—unless they be of those who come at it mysteriously unaided by externals; only in pure form can a sense of it be expressed. On this hypothesis the peculiarity of the artist would seem to be that he possesses the power of surely and frequently seizing reality (generally behind pure form), and the power of expressing his sense of it, in pure form always. But many people, though they feel the tremendous significance ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... that this perilous peculiarity in the Pruss, or Positive Barbarian, should be seized. He has what he fancies is a new idea; and he is going to apply it to everybody. As a fact it is simply a false generalisation; but he is really trying to make it general. This does not apply to the Negative Barbarian: it ...
— The Barbarism of Berlin • G. K. Chesterton
... early part of the century, when "the Green Man," "the Lady in Black," and other oddities notorious for some peculiarity of dress, were well known in the City, the "White Lady of Threadneedle Street" was a daily visitor to the Bank of England. She was, it is said, the sister of a poor young clerk who had forged the signature to a transfer-warrant, and who was hung in 1809. She ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... Anne Wheelright sought a new home in the wilderness, and was subsequently murdered by the Indians. But the force of mental exercise which she had put in motion still continued. It is worthy of remark that almost the only intellectual peculiarity to which Franklin refers, in speaking of his father, is 'a turn for polemics.' The great features of New England character were, at that day, opinion and faith. It was these, as boldly and defiantly expressed, which excited the fears and jealousy of Charles the Second, and instigated the deprival ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... ignorance of the commonest things frequently exposed him to ridicule, than which he dreaded nothing more. The unfortunate prejudice which attached to his native country appeared to him a challenge to overcome it in his own person. Besides this, there was a peculiarity in his character; he was offended with every attention that he thought was paid him on account of his rank rather than his personal qualities. He felt this humiliation principally in the company of persons who shone ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... of the reasoning faculty itself, unworthy of a sensible person, and is generally exhibited only by those who, while boasting of exemption for themselves, have really little or nothing else to boast of. It is the infirmity of small minds, not a peculiarity of great ones. Prejudices are like household vermin, and the human mind is like the traps we set for them. They get in with the greatest facility, but find it impossible to get out. Beware of entertaining ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... any remark upon it—every lady has some foible, some little peculiarity. She was a perfect wife, and this little feeling of small jealousies was not worth mentioning. If they went to a ball and he danced three times with the same lady, he knew he would hear something in faint dispraise. ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... the effects which this monopoly of education by women is having on the curriculum of the schools we must first agree on what constitutes the peculiarity of women's minds as compared with men's minds.[29] In our first chapter, it was asserted that women are more interested in the concrete, human, personal, conserving and emotional aspects of life; while men more easily turn to the abstract, material, impersonal, creative and rational ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... everybody else their company from selfish motives, did not come rushing into the drawing-room just then, but a quarter of an hour later. For even if the parties had caught the sound of their arrival in time, the peculiarity of Mr. Torrens' blindness would have stood in the way of any successful pretence that he and Lady Gwendolen had been keeping their distance up to Society point. We know how easy it is for normal people, when caught, to pretend they are looking at dear Sarah's interesting watercolours ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... When he was old enough his tutor taught him history; and whenever any great king or lovely princess was referred to, the tutor always took care to mention that he or she had a long nose. All the royal apartments were filled with pictures and portraits having this peculiarity, so that at last Prince Wish began to regard the length of his nose as his greatest perfection, and would not have had it an inch less even to save ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... master of my own actions, I had formed the design of visiting England, whither I was called by some private business. However, I was fully aware of the peculiarity of my situation, and I was resolved to take no step that should in any way ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... like balls of fire, making one of the giants appear like a fiersome though not repulsive monster. The most unusual feature about the face is the peculiarity of the chin and forehead. Each is covered with convolutions of an ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... is shown a German instrument especially designed to avoid this slipping. The peculiarity of this instrument consists in the arrangement of the centre point, which remains stationary whilst the pen or pencil, resting by its own weight on the paper, is guided round by gently turning, without pressure, the small knob at the ...
— Mechanical Drawing Self-Taught • Joshua Rose
... admiration for all kinds of superiority: it is certain that if one class of English society can be justly accused of an over-great veneration for rank, the class which is rank itself is not behindhand in doing homage to the political stars of the day. In favor of this peculiarity of English people it may fairly be said that they love to associate with persons of rank and power from a disinterested love of those things themselves, whereas in most other countries the society of noble and influential ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... great speech. Perhaps Conwell asked the reporters to suppress it. I don't know as to that. But it was the first thing we looked for. Not a word. There is no clue to account for that. Yet that is the peculiarity of this singular life: one of the most public, one of the most successful men, but yet one of the least discussed or written about. He was to us as visitors the great feature of that banquet as a speaker, and yet wholly ignored by the press of his own city. ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... you are the queerest! Do you really mean that you don't like or notice girls?" asked Rose, much amused at this new peculiarity of her ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... elsewhere, and one or two occasions of automatic writing. This latter method of inquiry displayed all the weakness to which it is usually, and apparently, inherently liable, and is only mentioned here as explaining other matters. Its chief interest was that it supplied a name marked by a certain peculiarity which afterwards became familiar, and that it led to a hypothesis as to at least one of the personalities by whom certain phenomena ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... the germs may be that the children resulting from their conjugation become idiots, epileptics, dwarfs or feeble minded. Thus it is not alcoholism or the craving for drink which is inherited. No doubt the peculiarity of badly supporting alcohol is inherited by ordinary heredity as a hereditary disposition, but it is not this which produces the alcoholic degenerations of the race. These are the result of the single blastophthoria. When, on the other hand, a man is found to be imbecile or epileptic as the result ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... of peculiarities about this intruder. To begin with, she was hatless, quite as if she were a habitue; of the house, and was costumed in a prim lilac-colored lawn of the style of two decades past. But a greater peculiarity was the resemblance this lady bore to a faded daguerrotype. If looked at one way, she was perfectly discernible; if looked at another, she went out in a sort of blur. Notwithstanding this comparative invisibility, ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... west door a peculiarity will at once be noticed. About fifteen feet from the inner side of the west wall there is a rise of five steps which stretch right across the church from north to south. The floor to the east of these steps slopes imperceptibly upwards for ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Saint Albans - With an Account of the Fabric & a Short History of the Abbey • Thomas Perkins
... God, and the record, often the only one, of the transient names, and local factions, and obscure ambitions, and forgotten crimes of the poet's own day; and in that awful company to which he leads us, in the most unearthly of his scenes, we never lose sight of himself. And when this peculiarity sends us to history, it seems as if the poem which was to hold such a place in Christian literature hung upon and grew out of chance events, rather than the deliberate design of its author. History, indeed, here, as generally, is but a feeble exponent of the course of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... that I had stood up for the Truth, is more comfort to me than Mr. Borland's unhandsomeness is discomfort." He also speaks of him as being a bearer several times at funerals, where, at one, with others, he received a scarf and ring which were "given at the House after coming from the Grave." A peculiarity of the venerable schoolmaster is seen where Judge Sewall says: "Mr. Wadsworth appears at Lecture in his Perriwigg. Mr. Chiever is grieved at it." In 1708, the judge gives in this Diary some touching particulars as to the sickness ...
— Bay State Monthly, Volume I, No. 2, February, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... imitation of the House of Lords, was made a supreme court of errors. On the other hand, the assembly answered to the House of Commons, save that its power was really limited by the senate as the power of the House of Commons is not really limited by the House of Lords. But this peculiarity of the British Constitution was not well understood a century ago; and the misunderstanding, as we shall hereafter see, exerted a very serious influence upon the form of our federal government, as well as upon the constitutions of the ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... Mr. Damon here to bless the submarine and his liver and collar buttons a few times," put in Mr. Sharp, who brought in another bundle. He referred to an eccentric individual Who had recently made an airship voyage with himself and Tom, Mr. Damon's peculiarity being to use continually such expressions as: "Bless my soul! ...
— Tom Swift and his Submarine Boat - or, Under the Ocean for Sunken Treasure • Victor Appleton
... appeareth as proper, and that which is proper appeareth as improper unto the man about to be overwhelmed by destruction, and evil and impropriety are what he liketh. The time that bringeth on destruction doth not come with upraised club and smash one's head. On the other hand the peculiarity of such a time is that it maketh a man behold evil in good and good in evil. The wretches have brought on themselves this terrible, wholesale, and horrible destruction by dragging the helpless princess of Panchala into the court. Who else than Duryodhana—that false player of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Part 2 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... replied Mr. Gibson. 'Black folk are not remarkable for their powers of reasoning, I believe, so that they have not much chance of altering his opinion by argument, even if they understood each other's language; and certainly if he shares my taste, their peculiarity of complexion will only make him ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... fortuitous bits of building tacked on at odd times as necessity has arisen, the Peggottys live is as brightly tarred as ever, and still stoutly braves the gales in which many a fine ship has foundered just outside the front door. One peculiarity of the otherwise desirable residence is that, with the wind blowing either from the eastward, westward, or southward, Mrs. Peggotty will never allow the front door to be opened. As these quarters of the wind comprehend a considerable ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... twinkling stars of humble village spheres shun him for an ominous comet, whose very trail robs them of light, or as paling glow-worms hide away before some prying lantern; and all who have in one way or another prided themselves on some harmless peculiarity, avoid his penetrating glance as the eye of a basilisk. Then, again, those casual encounters of witlings in the world authorial, so anticipated by a hostess, so looked-forward-to by guests! In most cases, how forlorn they be! how ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... a still greater refinement and elegance than the other two, and was introduced toward the end of the Peloponnesian war. Its peculiarity is columns with foliated capitals, and still greater height, about ten diameters, with a more ornamented entablature. Of this order, the most famous temple in Greece was that of Minerva at Tegea, built by Scopas of Paros, but destroyed by fire four ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... of Great Britain, as that of no other country in a like latitude, derives its peculiarity from its situation and from the prevailing winds, which are from the southwest, except in the months of April and May. The thermometer for six months in the year averages near 60 degrees, and seldom, if ever, drops below 36 degrees during the remaining six months, thus affording, according to ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... clothing. I have heard of you, sir, and you occupy a position of trust and, to a certain degree, of honor, in your village. Therefore, while I cannot depart from my rule—for I wish to make no precedent of that kind—I will ask you to spend the night at my house. You need not be annoyed by the peculiarity of your attire. If you desire to avoid observation you can remain here until it grows darker, and then you can walk up to the mansion. I shall have a bed-room prepared for you, and whenever you choose you can occupy it. I have been informed that you have had something to eat, and it is as ...
— A Bicycle of Cathay • Frank R. Stockton
... lameness connected with, or attributable to, the kennel. According to the early opinion of Mr. Asheton Smith, who is a good authority, it was referable to some peculiarity in the breed or management of the hounds; but, agreeably to a later opinion, it is dependent on situation and subsoil, and may be aggravated or increased by circumstances over which we have no control. Some kennels are in low and damp situations, ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... is a striking peculiarity of the style of the Vicar of Broad Chalke[60]. He informs us that "in virtue of the identity of Thought with Being the primitive Trinity represented neither three originant principles nor three transient phases, ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... evil, arising from the peculiarity of the voluntary system is, that in any of the principal sects the power has been wrested from the clergy and assumed by the laity, who exercise an inquisition most injurious to the cause of religion: and to such an excess of tyranny is this power exercised, ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... foreign ruler, the principal part in which was played by John Mueller, who attempted to convince his fellow countrymen that by means of the French usurpation they had first received the boon of true liberty. This cheaply-bought apostate said, in his usual hyperbolical style, "It is a marked peculiarity of the northern nations, more especially of those of German descent, that, whenever God has, in His wisdom, resolved to bestow upon them a new kind or a higher degree of civilization, the impulse has ever been ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... host was a chair-maker, and that the chairs assigned to us were mere frames, altogether without bottoms of any sort; so that we passed the evening on perches. Nor was this the absurdest consequence; for when we unbent at supper, and any one of us gave way to laughter, he forgot the peculiarity of his position, and instantly disappeared. I myself, doubled up into an attitude from which self-extrication was impossible, was taken out of my frame, like a clown in a comic pantomime who has tumbled ...
— The Holly-Tree • Charles Dickens
... a hundred more," was Johnny's mental comment. Then he noticed a peculiarity of the envelope. There was a red circle in the lower, left hand corner, as if a seal had been stamped there. He would remember that envelope should he ...
— Triple Spies • Roy J. Snell
... be most unjust so to speak of Russian serfdom as to convey the impression that it ever was quite so bad as American slavery is. It is the peculiarity of American slavery, that it has no redeeming features. Long before it had become so odious as we see it, and before its existence was found incompatible with the peaceful prevalence of a constitutional system of government, its character was emphatically summed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... get no nearer. I wished to avoid what seems to me the only error of Lowell's "Biglow Papers" in respect to dialect, the occasional use of an extreme misspelling, which merely confuses the eye, without taking us any closer to the peculiarity ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... attributed this reception, or rather, non-reception, to the capricious humours to which his honour was constantly liable without rhyme or reason (it is a peculiarity of self-made plutocrats as everybody knows); but he was not a bit offended,—he knew his place. His honour doesn't want to see Margari just now, very well, he shall not see him so he jumped up behind the carriage alongside the lacquey. ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... In the surname there are half a dozen points of difference. To begin with, the whole writing slopes less than in the other signatures. In both your father's letters the cross of the first 't' is much lower than usual and almost touches the top of the 'r' and i.' The same peculiarity is shown in the second 't' in both letters, while on the deed the 't's' are crossed a good deal higher. The whole word is more cramped, the flourish at the end of the 'n' is longer but less free. In the capital letter, the two downstrokes are a good deal closer together. There ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... into one of the squalid dens of that great sewer of vice and crime. But first we pause to read and admire the sign which decorates the exterior of a "crib" opposite Keith's Alley, and which, with a peculiarity of orthography truly amusing, notifies you that it is a "Vittlin Sollor." (This sign remains there to this day.) Passing on, we cannot fail to be impressed with the "mixed" nature of the society of the place; colored ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... through Tranmere yesterday forenoon, and lingered awhile to see the sports. The greatest peculiarity of the crowd, to my eye, was that they seemed not to have any best clothes, and therefore had put on no holiday suits,—a grimy people, as at all times, heavy, obtuse, with thick beer in their blood. Coarse, rough-complexioned ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... such cases, though he was careful never to admit this to her. At the same time all the circumstances pointed so strongly to the lad's guilt that, as he reviewed them there hardly seemed a doubt of it. It is a peculiarity of sheriffs and jailers to regard a prisoner as guilty until he has been proved innocent. Nevertheless this sheriff gave his mother permission to visit Rod as often as she liked; only charging her to lock the ...
— Cab and Caboose - The Story of a Railroad Boy • Kirk Munroe
... time so that nearly all styles of architecture are represented. Tradition has it that it was founded by St. Cuthbert, whose chief characteristic is declared to have been his antipathy toward women of all degrees. A curious relic of this peculiarity of the saint remains in a granite cross set in the center of the floor of the nave, beyond which, in the earlier days, no woman was ever allowed to pass. The interior of the church is mainly in the massive and imposing Norman style. The ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... that the peculiarity of Augmentative and Diminutive terminations (with the exception of the Augment. on, which denotes only increase) is that besides the idea of increase or diminution a further disparaging or endearing meaning is implied ...
— Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar (2nd ed.) • C. A. Toledano
... legibility and that should therefore be considered in reforming the shapes of letters. Enlargement of size and increase of differences are obvious aids to clearness. Simplicity of outline and concentration of peculiarity upon one feature are important elements of legibility. Even a letter of small size, like v, is brought into the first group by a combination of these two qualities. Serifs are necessary to prevent irradiation, ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... you to know, that within this larger vase there is a number of smallest bottles, some of glass, others of gold, in each of which are contained a few of the tears, and which are warranted to retain their potency, and lend their celestial peculiarity to your clothes or your apartments, without loss or diminution in the least appreciable degree, during the life of the purchaser. Now, if it please you, bend this way, and receive the air which I shall ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... of local condition, interest, and rights in which a portion of the States, constituting one great section of the Union, differed from the rest and from another section, the most important was the peculiarity of a larger relative colored population in the Southern than ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin Pierce • Franklin Pierce
... told the story of much work with the microscope. They were curiously, though not unattractively, unlike. The left he used for observations, the right for making the accompanying drawings. That gave them a peculiarity only the man of ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... fruit, and that every human being should mate and produce offspring. The plant that fails in any of its functions is usually blighted in some way, and the woman who fails of life's full experiences seems to show some repellent peculiarity. But she need not, once she sets a watch upon herself; she has a conscious soul and mind, and can control such tendencies ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... is divided into sets, in all of which there is some peculiarity of manner, or some dominant tone of feeling. It is necessary to study these peculiarities ...
— The Laws of Etiquette • A Gentleman
... meat and drink and sex, thus generously treated; we must turn to another aspect of Rabelais' work—his predilection for excrement. This also, though few would admit it, is a symbolic secret. This also is a path of initiation. In this peculiarity Rabelais is completely alone among the writers of the earth. Others have, for various reasons, dabbled in this sort of thing—but none have ever piled it up—manure-heap upon manure-heap, until the animal refuse of the whole earth seems to reek to the stars! There is not the slightest ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... clay in the sculptor's hand. But still the girl's refusal had been but as the refusal of a girl. She should not have been as are other girls. She should have known better. She should have understood what the peculiarity of her position demanded. But it had not been so with her. She had not soared as she should have done, above the love-laden dreams of common maidens. And so the visit to Yoxham was permitted. Then came the great blow,—struck ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... But when the charge is merely this, that he has not, in a long and intricate series of transactions, done all that it would have been wise to do, how is he to vindicate himself? And the case which we are considering has this peculiarity, that the envoy to whom the Ministers are said to have left too large a discretion was fifteen thousand miles from them. The charge against them therefore is this, that they did not give such copious and particular directions as were ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... look back upon!" says he. "I can remember half a dozen, at least, who had a hand in directing the course of my budding intellect, and each one of them developed some peculiarity which complicated the domestic situation. I am wondering what this new governess ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... spies. A few Dutch have been arrested, but the commonest cases are out-of-work Kaffirs, who are wandering in swarms over the country, coming down from Johannesburg and the collieries, and naturally finding it rather hard to give account of themselves. The peculiarity of the trials which I have attended has been that if a Kaffir could give the name of his father it was taken as a sufficient guarantee of respectability With one miserable Bushman, for instance—a child's caricature of man—it was really going hard till at last he managed to explain that ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... placentals, which diverges most from that of the amphioxus, the primitive form, is reduced to the original type, the invagination of a modified blastula. Its chief peculiarity is that the folded part of the blastoderm does not form a completely closed (only open at the primitive mouth) blind sac, as is usual; but this blind sac has a wide opening at the ventral curve (opposite to the ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... about painting. He died on October 26, 1821, to his brother's great grief, leaving Charles everything. He married late in life a Mrs. Dowden. Probably she had her own money and needed none of her second husband's. Hence the peculiarity of the will. Mrs. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... visible as the centre of government, the royal residence from whence laws were issued, and where the business of the nation was carried on. Following what seems to be one of the most wonderful rules of heredity—a peculiarity considerably opposed to the views which have been recently current on that subject—Robert Bruce was too great a man to have a son worthy of him: and after the trifling and treacherous David the inheritance of his kingdom ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... Asbury began to cover the paintings by pinning the sheets together. Beulah took off her gloves and assisted; there was silence for some time; but, on lifting a piece of drapery, Mrs. Asbury exposed the face of a portrait which Beulah recognized, from the peculiarity of the frame, as the one that had hung over the mantel in her guardian's study. Paper and pins fell from her fingers, and, drawing a deep breath, she gazed upon the face she had so long desired to see. She traced a slight resemblance to Antoinette in ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... dare say that he would justify the device with great skill and convincingness. But it undoubtedly gives an effect of clumsiness. The first story in the volume, "Gaspar Ruiz," is a striking instance of complicated narrative machinery. This peculiarity also detracts from the realistic authority of the work. For by the time you have got to the end of "A Set of Six" you have met a whole series of men who all talk just as well as Mr. Conrad writes, and upon calm reflection ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... is called, works pretty smoothly, on lines similar to that English original whence it is copied. The most interesting peculiarity is the Cape method of forming the smaller House. In England the Upper House is composed of hereditary members; in the Canadian confederation, of members nominated for life—both of them methods which are quite indefensible in theory. Here, however, we find the same plan as ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... benevolence and administrative measures. Then it perceived in the progressive increase of pauperism, not the necessary consequence of modern industry, but rather the consequence of the English poor rate. It regarded the universal distress as nothing more than a peculiarity of English legislation. What was formerly ascribed to the lack of charity was now attributed to a superfluity of charity. Finally, poverty was regarded as the fault of the poor, ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... attained by hard work on their part and by starvation on the part of the garrison. Criticism and denunciation, by no means confined to those officers whose knowledge of the art of war is drawn from books, have been freely passed upon this peculiarity, yet both alike have been wasted, since no proposition can be clearer than that a nation, justly proud of the superior intelligence of its soldiers, cannot expect to reap the full advantage of that intelligence and at the same time ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... and starry sky a majestic star that is not visible from the Earth, and exhibits this peculiarity that it is stationary in the Heavens, while all the others pass behind it, may constantly be admired, by day as well as by night; and it is also of considerable apparent magnitude. This orb, some four times as large as the Moon in diameter, and thirteen to fourteen times ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... the case from the travelled labors of many a learned and celebrated man. Frequently, nay almost always, it is a fact, that the learned are destitute of the opportunity of acquiring a knowledge of the real life of the people, while it is exactly here that the greatest peculiarity of the manners and customs of foreigners is to be found. Our honest hand-worker lived among the people, and therefore possessed the best means to describe them in graphic characters.' There is something very forcible and comprehensive ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... strangers had listened to the narrative with mingled sensations of compassion and surprise, the one feeling excited by the peculiarity, the other by the pertinacity of his misfortunes, when their cogitations were interrupted by a dissonant clamour amongst the prisoners, who, it appeared, had united in enmity against an unlucky individual, whom ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... follows: the flies, with two wings only; the bees, wasps, and ants, with four delicate wings; the beetles, with four wings—two hard, horny ones covering the two more delicate ones. When the beetle is at rest its two hard wings meet in a straight line down the back. This peculiarity distinguishes it from the true bug, which has four wings. The two outer wings are partly horny, and in folding lap over each other. Butterflies and moths are much alike in appearance but differ in ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... by an ordinary rudder, a movable rudder was attached to the lower part of the true or fixed rudder, descending to the same depth as the two false keels, and, like them, could be raised or lowered at pleasure. Another striking peculiarity of her construction was that she was divided into seven water-tight compartments by means of iron bulkheads, so that, in fact, she resembled a number of iron tanks cased over, a contrivance which saved her from the almost certain ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... to be very true. Had it not been for this peculiarity of Mr. Hinckman, I might have been more willing to talk to him ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... scene he knows, although he has noticed only the young men, that some young women (whom on account of the nature of the place he cannot then see) are desirous of going into the garden to these young men. One might say that all this is merely a peculiarity of the representation inasmuch as the author has for convenience, or on account of lack of skill, or for brevity, left out some connecting link which would have afforded us the means of acquiring this unexplained ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... signs multiplied the hunters proceeded with increased vigilance and caution, each exhibiting the peculiarity of his character, more or less, by his look and actions. The Mullers, Van Dyk, Rennie, Hans, and other experienced men, rode along, calmly watchful, yet not so much absorbed as to prevent a humorous glance and a smile at the conduct of their less experienced comrades. Considine and Rivers ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... size; and even when the Squire had lit the candles upon the mantle-piece, and those which clustered on either side of the great pier-glass, the darkness did but give place to a sort of shining gloom: the cause of this strange effect was the peculiarity of the furniture; the walls were of bog-oak, relieved, like those of a ball-room, by silver sconces; the chairs were of the same material. The curiosity of the room was, however, the bedstead; this was of ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... the present M.P., as a young man had been sent for some years to North Germany, and when he came home in 1833, he had a fine beard. Mr. G.F. Muntz thereupon resolved to allow his to grow, and when he went to Parliament this peculiarity attracted much notice. H.B., the celebrated caricaturist, was not slow to make it the subject of one of his inimitable sketches. In the collected edition there are 917 of these famous pictures, all admirably drawn, and excellent likenesses. ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... important, for criminals rarely have normal dentition. The incisors show the greatest number of anomalies. Sometimes both the lateral incisors are absent and the middle ones are of excessive size, a peculiarity which recalls the incisors of rodents. The teeth are frequently striated transversely or set very wide apart (diastema) with gaps on either side of the upper canines into which the lower ones fit, a simian characteristic. In some cases, these spaces occur between the middle incisors or between ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... have a saying that the redwood is too good a tree to live. On the mountains a few miles east of the Bay of San Francisco, there are a number of patches of young redwoods, indicating where large trees have been felled, it being a peculiarity of this tree that it sends up vigorous young plants from the roots of old ones immediately around the base. Hence in the forests these trees often stand in groups arranged nearly in a circle, thus marking out the ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... species, a native of the Cape of Good Hope, was sent to me by Dr. Hooker. The leaves are elongated, slightly concave along the middle and taper towards the apex, [page 280] which is bluntly pointed and reflexed. They rise from an almost woody axis, and their greatest peculiarity consists in their foliaceous green footstalks, which are almost as broad and even longer than the gland-bearing blade. This species, therefore, probably draws more nourishment from the air, and less from captured insects, than the other species of the genus. Nevertheless, the tentacles are ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... kindled and inflamed can receive its first chaplet. All our literature teaches this unquiet and discontented spirit as to the present, and this rash and impatient determination to achieve immediate success. Now, this is a peculiarity of our country, the land of all others which should cherish a disposition to be gratefully contented with the unequaled blessings with which it is endowed. There is no necessity for this forcing system to expand properly ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... on each side. They had not seen a rise even, in any direction for miles, whilst the creek presented only occasional rocks of flat water-worn sandstone, and the screw-palm 'Pandanus Spiralis' occurred in all the water-courses, a tree that from its peculiarity would scarcely have been unnoticed or undescribed. As it was quite unlikely that he should have misrepresented the country, the natural presumption was, that Mr. Richardson must have been in error as to their true position; this was in reality ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine
... belonged to blond races, but the modern Chinese have little left of the immigrant stock. The oblique, almond-shaped eyes, with black iris and the orbits far apart, have a vertical fold of skin over the inner canthus, concealing a part of the iris, a peculiarity distinguishing the eastern races of Asia from all other families of man. The stature and weight of brain are generally below the average. The hair is black, coarse, and cylindrical; the beard scanty or absent. The colour of the skin is darker in the ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... of Monzie—the southern boundary of the parish—where stands the church, the hamlet, and the Castle of Monzie, extends for nearly three miles in a north-east direction, gradually rising to the height of several hundred feet. The most striking peculiarity of the surroundings of Monzie is the combination of wild and mountainous scenery with cultivation and picturesqueness. One of the finest views in the whole of Strathearn can be had from the Highland Road, to the east of the church. In the foreground are the luxuriant woods, the rich pastures, and ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... athletic build, he had none of the distinctive traits of the average policeman. He dressed quietly and in good taste, and carried himself easily; a peculiarity of his thoughtful, somewhat lawyer-like face was that the left eye was noticeably smaller than the right. Among other qualifications, he ranked as the best amateur photographer in the "Yard," and was famous as a rock climber ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... [Of every line and trick of his sweet favour!] So in King John; he hath a trick of Coeur de Lion's face. Trick seen to be some peculiarity of look or feature. ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... There is a peculiarity about the word "light," in the old Egyptian language, which is well worth consideration in this connection. Among the Egyptians, the hare was the hieroglyphic of eyes that are open; and it was adopted because that timid animal was supposed never ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... Miss Thorne were proud of this peculiarity of their dwelling, though the brother was once all but tempted by his friends to alter it. They delighted in the knowledge that they, like Cedric, positively dined in their true hall, even though they so dined tete-a-tete. But though they had never owned, they had felt and endeavoured ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... the tops of a group of tall trees were covered with yellow- white blossoms. Others bore red blossoms. Many of the big trees, of different kinds, were buttressed at the base with great thin walls of wood. Others, including both palms and ordinary trees, showed an even stranger peculiarity. The trunk, near the base, but sometimes six or eight feet from the ground, was split into a dozen or twenty branches or small trunks which sloped outward in tent-like shape, each becoming a root. The larger trees of this type looked as if their trunks were seated on the tops of the pole ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... the threshold before the main entrance, which faced the other buildings of the farm. There was this peculiarity about the Parsonage, that the high-road, leading to the town, passed right through the farm-yard. The Pastor did not at all like this, for before everything he loved peace and quietness; and although the district was sufficiently ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... editoress, a Miss Minette Gattina, had already performed her part. This latter animal appears, however, to have been so learned a cat—one may say so deep a puss—that she had furnished more notes than there was original matter. Another peculiarity which distinguished her labours was the obscurity of her style; I call it a peculiarity, and not a defect, because I am not quite certain whether the difficulty of getting at her meaning lay in her mode of expressing herself or my deficiency in the delicacies ...
— The Adventures of a Dog, and a Good Dog Too • Alfred Elwes
... seemed destined, should he ever attain the Papal dignity, to combine the qualities of the Borgian and Medicean Pontiffs. But before his elevation to that supreme height, he lived through the reigns of Julius II., Leo X., Adrian VI., and Clement VII. Herein lies the peculiarity of his position as Paul III. The pupil of Pomponius Laetus, the creature of Roderigo Borgia, the representative of Italian manners and culture before the age of foreign invasion had changed the face of Italy, Paul ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... a very long low narrow island, with the peculiarity that one side was sea, the other inland lake. The sun shone brilliantly, and the punt in which the squire, Farmer Tallington, Dave, Warren, Hickathrift, and the two lads had come was lying on the inner side of the sandy ridge covered with thin, ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... True vegetable hydras, when you cut down one, ten spring in its place: every separate morsel of the thick and succulent stem has the power of growing anew into a separate cactus. Surprising as this peculiarity seems at first sight, it is only a special desert modification of a faculty possessed in a less degree by almost all plants and by many animals. If you cut off the end of a rose branch and stick it in the ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... "The most important peculiarity of American English is a laxity, irregularity, and confusion in the use of particles. The same thing is, indeed, observable in England, but not to the same extent, though some gross departures from idiomatic propriety, ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... nor to the French method of the Chevalier Antoine de Ville, but to the system of Manesson Mallet, a skillful engineer, who about six or eight years previously had quitted the service of Portugal to enter that of France. The works had this peculiarity, that instead of rising above the earth, as did the ancient ramparts destined to defend a city from escalades, they, on the contrary, sank into it; and what created the height of the walls was the depth ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... name of "Mira," or the Wonderful, and Boulliaud in 1667 fixed the length of its cycle of change at 334 days. It was not a solitary instance. A star in the Swan was perceived by Janson in 1600 to show fluctuations of light, and Montanari found in 1669 that Algol in Perseus shared the same peculiarity to a marked degree. Altogether the class embraced in 1782 half-a-dozen members. When it is added that a few star-couples had been noted in singularly, but it was supposed accidentally, close juxtaposition, and that the failure of repeated attempts to measure stellar parallaxes pointed to distances ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... this country in 1884, he called upon Mr. Whittier, and this is the impression he received of his personality: "The peculiarity of his face rested in the extraordinarily large and luminous black eyes, set in black eyebrows, and fringed with thick black eyelashes curiously curved inward. This bar of vivid black across the countenance was startlingly contrasted with the bushy snow-white beard and hair, offering a sort ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... development of the Celtic nation also presents very remarkable phenomena. The constitution of the state was based in this case, as everywhere, on the clan-canton, with its prince, its council of the elders, and its community of freemen capable of bearing arms; but the peculiarity in this case was that it never got beyond this cantonal constitution. Among the Greeks and Romans the canton was very early superseded by the ring-wall as the basis of political unity; where two cantons found themselves together within the same walls, they amalgamated ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... himself, and all this was sufficient to keep off any desire for sleep; while a whisper from time to time was sufficient to satisfy myself that my companion was as wakeful as I. As the time passed on the mist seemed to thicken around us, with this peculiarity striking me: it seemed to shut us completely in, so that not a sound reached our ears, the silence being to ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... other of another set of exactly similar instruments. Any one possessing a private wire can write at his own desk in the manual character a letter or message on one of these slips. Placing it in his own instrument, it at once reproduces itself exactly in his autograph, and with every peculiarity, blot, or erasure, at the nearest office. Here the copy is placed in the proper box, and at once reproduced in the office nearest the residence of the person to whom it is addressed, and forwarded in the same manner to him. A letter, therefore, covering one of these slips, and saying as much ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... arch. The Champs Elysees may look pretty in summer; though I suspect they must be somewhat dry and artificial at whatever season,—the trees being slender and scraggy, and requiring to be renewed every few years. The soil is not genial to them. The strangest peculiarity of this place, however, to eyes fresh from moist and verdant England, is, that there is not one blade of grass in all the Elysian Fields, nothing but hard clay, now covered with white dust. It gives the whole scene the air of being a contrivance ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... effaces it, and the furrows we have made succeed one another like graves in the cemetery. Is not the furrow of the ploughman as valuable as that of the idler, who has a name, however, a name that will live, if, by reason of some peculiarity or some absurd exploit, he makes a little ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... a profound slumber, but it was a peculiarity of our Yankee friend to wake at the least touch. This, of course, was not known to Dick Fletcher, who felt that there would be no risk in a careful exploration ...
— In A New World - or, Among The Gold Fields Of Australia • Horatio Alger
... forward at the same swift gallop, and Nick knew that more than once she felt the blistering heat on her haunches. It is a strange peculiarity of the horse, which often shows a wonderful degree of intelligence, that he generally loses his wits when caught in a conflagration. Instead of running away from the flames he often charges among them, and there remains, ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... Bessie had a provincial French air in spite of her English face, and Mr. Cecil Burleigh perhaps regretted that she was not more suitably equipped for making her debut in his company. He had a prejudice against peculiarity in dress, and knew that it was a terrible thing to be out of the fashion and to run the gauntlet of bold eyes on Ryde pier. At the seaside the world is idle, and has nothing to do but stare and speculate. Bessie had beauty enough to be stared at for ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... has already been written of Shakespeare that it would seem as if nothing remained to be said; yet it is the peculiarity of a great mind ever to stimulate other minds. This time I propose to consider Shakespeare from more than one point of view—first as a poet in general, then as compared with poets ancient and modern, and finally, as a strictly dramatic poet. I shall endeavor to show what effect the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the world, had retired from it, and settled on a curacy with a very small fortune of his own. He, the most excellent man that can be imagined, perfect in character, temper, and manners, without the smallest drawback or peculiarity to prevent his being the most delightful companion to his daughter from one year's end to the other. Heroine,[318] a faultless character herself, perfectly good, with much tenderness and sentiment and not the least wit,[319] very highly accomplished,[320] ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... the very effective decorative design impressed upon a large fragment of pottery from Alabama, shown in Fig. 113. The peculiarity of this example is the use of plaited instead of twisted cords. The work is neatly done and very effective. It seems to me almost certain that single cords have been used. They have been so imprinted ...
— Prehistoric Textile Fabrics Of The United States, Derived From Impressions On Pottery • William Henry Holmes
... Genius does not herd with genius. The musk-deer and the civet-cat are never found in company. They don't care for strange scents,—they like plain animals better than perfumed ones. Nay, if you will have the kindness to notice, Nature has not gifted my lady musk-deer with the personal peculiarity by which her ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... as an arch (Fig. 57). Abronia has only a single fully developed cotyledon, but in this case it is the hypocotyl which first emerges and is arched. Abronia umbellata, however, presents this peculiarity, that the enfolded blade of the one developed cotyledon (with the enclosed endosperm) whilst still beneath the surface has its apex upturned and parallel to the descending leg of the arched hypocotyl; but it is dragged out of the ground by the continued growth of the hypocotyl, with the apex ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... on my innocence—and with some reason too. Whatever else I may be, I pride myself on not being a hypocrite. I was innocent—so far as the brandy was concerned. I had put it into the lemonade, in pure ignorance of Armadale's nervous peculiarity, to disguise the taste of—never mind what! Another of the things I pride myself on is that I never wander from my subject. What Midwinter said next is what I ought to be writing ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... answered readily yes and no to direct questions. Gradually, as they traveled by short stages, drawing near to their destination, Cutter altogether lost the habit of talking to her, and almost ceased to notice her one peculiarity. She would sit for hours in the same position, apparently never wearied of her silence, her placid expression never changing save into a gentle smile when she ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... was a good two hours before he reappeared, and the landlord, who met him with the news that the missing suit-case had been awaiting him in his room since twenty minutes past ten, was struck by a certain peculiarity in his manner. It was nothing very much beyond a suggestion of suppressed excitement and that rather wild look which lingers in a man's eyes when he is just fresh from a dispute or has experienced a narrow escape from danger. Then Gifford ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... the third type of circle. It consists of a cist-tomb covered by a low mound, often with a retaining wall of small blocks, but there is no entrance passage leading into the cist. Outside the whole is a circle of large upright blocks with this peculiarity, that between the two highest—generally to the south or slightly east of south—lies a long block on its side, occupying the whole interval between them. The uprights nearest this 'recumbent' block are the tallest in the ...
— Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders • T. Eric Peet
... of Aristotle and makes a deliberate effort to harmonize the Aristotelian system with Judaism. To be sure, he too owes his Aristotelian knowledge to the Arabian exponents of the Stagirite, Alfarabi and Avicenna, rather than to the works of Aristotle himself. But this peculiarity was rooted in the intellectual conditions of his time, and must not be charged to his personal neglect of the sources. And Maimonides does nothing more than repeat the effort of Ibn Daud in a ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... explore some other region, they eventually returned to their own home range. In tracing their movements I kept a sort of big-game Bertillon record; only instead of taking finger-prints, as is done with criminals, I measured footprints sketching them in my notebook, noting any slight peculiarity that would distinguish one track from another, and thus made ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... Cotuntum, Carabela Zuzunda, Na Soledad, and Raton Cojonudo, are each named after some personal peculiarity. ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... gatherings after service, had not applied, and Shock would not think of bringing him under pressure; and all the more because he had not failed to observe that the Kid's interest seemed to be more pronounced and more steadfast in those meetings in which Marion's singing was the feature. True, this peculiarity the Kid shared with many others of the young men in the district, to Shock's very considerable embarrassment, though to the girl's innocent and frank delight; and it is fair to say that the young men, whom Shock had put upon their honor in regard ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... to look on Sedleigh with quite a personal enmity. London was too big to be angry with. It took no notice of him. It did not care whether he was glad to be there or sorry, and there was no means of making it care. That is the peculiarity of London. There is a sort of cold unfriendliness about it. A city like New York makes the new arrival feel at home in half an hour; but London is a specialist in what Psmith in his letter had called the Distant Stare. You have to ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... living for. Notwithstanding this, it was observed that she had a good appetite. Indeed, Miss Harding appeared to thrive on her gloomy views of life and human nature. She was, it must be acknowledged, perfectly consistent in all her conduct, so far as this peculiarity was concerned. Whenever she took up a newspaper, she always looked first to the space appropriated to deaths, and next in order to the column of accidents, casualties, etc., and her spirits were visibly exhilarated when she encountered a ...
— Jack's Ward • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... be found on napping a reef, that the gold occurs at more or less regular intervals. This deposit of gold in the surface outcrop is the top of a "shoot" of gold, which may be followed down on the underlay for many feet. And this peculiarity in the distribution of the metal has been the cause of much ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... generations. Agassiz states: "Alternate generation was first observed among the Salpae. These are marine mollusks, without shells, belonging to the family Tunicata. They are distinguished by the curious peculiarity of being united together in considerable numbers so as to form long chains, which float in the sea, the mouth(m) however being free ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... but if he is jaundiced, he does not say that he has yellow in his eyes, but that everything looks yellow; and if he is troubled with muscae volitantes, he says, not that he has specks in his eyes, but that he sees specks dancing before his eyes. In fact, it appears to me that it is the special peculiarity of visual sensations, that they invariably give rise to the idea of remoteness, and that Berkeley's dictum ought to be reversed. For I think that anyone who interrogates his consciousness carefully will find that "every proper visual ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... carriages, and unbounded opportunities for amusing yourself, and a familiar acquaintance with the entire peerage, were always taken for granted in conversation whenever you dined out; but at first she was unacquainted with this peculiarity and did not feel quite easy in her mind about allowing it to be supposed that she was so much greater a person. Her little hesitations, however, as to how she should reply and the pauses she made when she heard that laugh arrested the current of her companion's talk, and ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... he was yet unborn when his father, partly in consequence of a wound from which he never quite recovered, met with rather a serious accident through a young horse in the harvest-field, and the report reached his wife that he was killed. To the shock she thus received was generally attributed the peculiarity of the child, prematurely born within a month after. He had long passed the age at which children usually begin to walk, before he would even attempt to stand, but he had grown capable of a speed on ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... upon his breast, and he fell tranquilly asleep. The tears were running down the boys' cheeks —they were suffocating with suppressed laughter—and had been from the start, though I had never noticed it. I perceived that I was "sold." I learned then that Jim Blaine's peculiarity was that whenever he reached a certain stage of intoxication, no human power could keep him from setting out, with impressive unction, to tell about a wonderful adventure which he had once had with his grandfather's old ram—and the mention of the ram in the first ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Julian on the top of the flight of steps which led down the rock from the Castle court. We ought to observe, that as Julian's manner to the unfortunate girl had been always gentle, and free from those teasing jests in which his gay friend indulged, with less regard to the peculiarity of her situation and feelings; so Fenella, on her part, had usually shown much greater deference to him than to any of the household, her mistress, the Countess, ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... performance to which the Emperor Nicholas had made reference was marked by one strange, marvellous, almost inexplicable peculiarity. The player sounded on his instrument, simultaneously, a chord of four notes. To produce at the same time four different notes from one and the same tube seems, and must be, an impossibility. But Vivier did it, and the fact was certified to by ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... to whether she were willing to obey "the inward voice" which prompted her to serve God in a certain way. This specific way was the way of preaching in Meeting, or "bearing testimony," as she phrased it, "at the prompting of the Holy Spirit." It will be remembered that this is a distinguishing peculiarity of the society which George Fox founded. Preaching is only permitted upon the spur of the moment, as people of the world would say, but at the prompting of the inward voice, as Quakers deem. Certainly no one ever became a preacher among ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... eyes were unceasingly opened wide to take in the growing wonders of her situation. Mrs. Goddard was still dressed in black, as when John Short had seen her five months earlier. There was something a little peculiar in her mourning, though Mrs. Ambrose would have found it hard to define the peculiarity. Some people would have said that if she was really a widow her gown fitted a little too well, her bonnet was a little too small, her veil a little too short. Mrs. Ambrose supposed that those points were suggested by the latest fashions in London and ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... beautiful and interesting. "The fruit is not a long berry, nor is it of a purple color, but it grows from buds on the limbs and twigs something after the manner of the pussy-willow. It is smaller, of light color and has a very distinct flavor. The most striking peculiarity about the fruit is that it keeps on ripening during two months or more, new berries appearing daily while others are ripening. This is why it is such good bird food. Nor is it half bad for folks, for the berries are good to look at and to eat, ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... itself, unworthy of a sensible person, and is generally exhibited only by those who, while boasting of exemption for themselves, have really little or nothing else to boast of. It is the infirmity of small minds, not a peculiarity of great ones. Prejudices are like household vermin, and the human mind is like the traps we set for them. They get in with the greatest facility, but find it impossible to get out. Beware of entertaining them yourself, Lizzie. Shun everything like repining at what you call ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... I frankly admit at the present moment that the nettle sting has an obtrusive and unnecessarily pungent way of forcing itself upon the human attention; but it does not sum up the whole life-history of the plant in its own one peculiarity for all that. The nettle exists for its own sake, we may be sure, and not merely for the sake of occasionally inflicting a passing smart upon the meddlesome ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... (either fermented or distilled), have the peculiarity of exciting the sexual appetite in a bestial manner, thereby leading to the most absurd and disgusting excesses, although at the same time they weaken the sexual power. The transient pleasure produced by these substances is, therefore, of no real and lasting advantage, while it ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... than myself. Among the large numbers of estimable and remarkable people whom I have known, and who have now passed away, there is in my memory an inner circle, and within it are the forms of those who were marked off from the comparative crowd even of the estimable and the remarkable by the peculiarity and privilege of their type. Of these very few, some four or five I think only, your father was one: and with regard to them it always seemed to me as if the type in each case was that of the individual exclusively, and as if there could be but one such person in our world at a ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... the Hon. Melville Jocelyn on deck, and without his wife, recalled her to business. It is a peculiarity of female diplomatists that they fear none save their own sex. Men they regard as their natural prey: in women they see rival hunters using their own weapons. The Countess smiled a slowly-kindling smile up to him, set her brother adrift, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... front door and called again; whereupon a side door opened, and from it issued a slip-shod, untidy-looking woman in a shawl, while over her shoulder and under her arm appeared a little troop of children in various stages of growth and untidiness. Mrs. Colwyn had the peculiarity of never being ready for any engagement, much less for any emergency: she had been expecting Janetta all day, and with Janetta some of the Court party; but she was nevertheless in a state of semi-undress, which she tried to conceal underneath her shawl; and on the first intimation of the approach ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... to Geneve. As this was our first experience in the diligence line, we noticed particularly every peculiarity. A diligence is a large, heavy, strongly-built, well-hung stage, consisting of five distinct departments,—coupe, berline, omnibus, ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... of that thoughtful but not gloomy disposition which constitutes the peculiarity of affectionate natures. On the whole, however, there was something decidedly sluggish and insignificant about Jean Valjean in appearance, at least. He had lost his father and mother at a very early age. His mother had died of a milk fever, which had not been properly ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... within the city and upon the narrow ledges and terraces that broke the lines of the buildings and which seemed to be a peculiarity of Ho-don architecture, a concession, no doubt, to some inherent instinct that might be traced back ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the semi-official organ with an impudent disregard of truth—have never yet had such an easy life in Russia as they have at the present time, and yet they have never complained so bitterly. There is a reason for it. It is a peculiarity of Semitism: a Semite is never satisfied with anything; the more you give him the more ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... as potent as it was peculiar; for, not only is it a long historic elaboration, the final and condensed essence of the tendency of the thought of the century, but again its two principal ingredients have this peculiarity, that, separate, they are salutary, and in combination they ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... of the surface veins of the legs, the condition known as varicose veins, is not a peculiarity of pregnancy. Anyone who must be on his feet a great deal is liable to suffer from this ailment. It is true, nevertheless, that pregnancy increases the likelihood of the development of varicose veins. The walls of the vessel are generally able to withstand whatever strain ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons
... choose our wives, limit our expenses, and stint us to a certain number of dishes of meat, of glasses of wine, and of cups of tea? Plato, whose hardihood in speculation was perhaps more wonderful than any other peculiarity of his extraordinary mind, and who shrank from nothing to which his principles led, went this whole length. Mr. Gladstone is not so intrepid. He contents himself with laying down this proposition, that whatever be the body which in any ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... palatable where other meat can be had. It is without juice, and resembles dry short-grained beef more than venison. For this reason it is looked upon by both Indians and white hunters as inferior to buffalo, moose, caribou, or even the common deer. One peculiarity of the flesh of this animal is, that the fat becomes hard the moment it is taken off the fire. It freezes upon the lips like suet, and clings around the teeth of a person eating it, which is not the case with that of other ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... not a few, that circumstances unfavorable to the understanding were connected with the causes or occasions of their first effectual religious impressions. Some quaint cast in the exposition of the Christian faith, not essentially vitiating, but very much distorting and cramping it, or some peculiarity or narrow-mindedness of the teachers, may have conveyed their effect, to enter, as it were, at the door at the same moment that it was opened by the force of a solemn conviction, and to be retained and cherished ever after on the strength of this association. This may have tended to ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... Maurice and Lucia saw the speaker emerge from behind the altar on the side furthest from where they stood. She was a tall woman, neither young nor pretty, but very fashionable—distinguished, Lucia supposed she should be called; and but for the peculiarity of her voice, would have made a favourable rather than an unfavourable impression on a stranger. She stopped just at the top of the steps, and turned round to speak again to some one behind her who was still concealed by the altar. This time ...
— A Canadian Heroine - A Novel, Volume 3 (of 3) • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... peculiar mode of manifesting Spiritualistic power; it is a peculiarity of this Medium, as has been before stated, that the completion of the Spirit message within the slates is indicated not by raps, as is frequently the case with other Mediums, but by the sudden and marvelous appearance on the top of the slate of the little fragment of ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... characteristic nose—it was a combative nose, and a decided pug. So was the nose on the window-pane. Plunger's hair, too, was peculiar to Plunger. It was wiry, stubborn hair, with a tuft in front which resembled the comb of a turkey-cock. The same peculiarity was seen in the head on the window. And Plunger's eyebrows had a way of mounting to his head, as though they were anxious to get on terms of friendship with the tuft above. The same eccentricity was noticeable in the eyebrows ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... also from other causes, the inexhaustible source of marital wounds is jealousy. But by tacit consent it is determined to conceal them from all, and we conceal them. Knowing them, each one supposes in himself that it is an unfortunate peculiarity, and not a common destiny. So it was with me, and it had to be so. There cannot fail to be jealousy between husbands and wives who live immorally. If they cannot sacrifice their pleasures for the welfare of their child, they conclude therefrom, and truly, that they ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... not, and there are also on the ground some rings of kalai, commonly called tin; but pure tin is an expensive metal, and I do not think it is any part of the Kalai-wallah's care to see that you are not poisoned with lead. One notable peculiarity there is in this Kalai-wallah, or tin- man, which deserves record, namely, that he pays no dustooree to any man. I take it as sufficient evidence of this fact that, though even the matie could tell you that the pots ought to be tinned once a month, neither the butler nor the cook ever seems to ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... "The peculiarity of his terminology in all these passages [all which I have given above in pages 73-78], so markedly different, and even opposed to that of the Fourth Gospel, will naturally strike the reader." (Vol. ii. ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... a well-known and highly-esteemed variety, approaching very near the Peach Blow in quality. One peculiarity of this potato is, the largest tubers appear to be of as good quality as the small ones. With proper soil and culture, it yields a fair crop; is quite free from disease; and its smoothness, high flavor, and fine appearance make it much sought after ...
— The $100 Prize Essay on the Cultivation of the Potato; and How to Cook the Potato • D. H. Compton and Pierre Blot
... she stood irresolute and perplexed from the peculiarity of her situation, yet not wanting in courage when, it was to be called forth) an object well worthy of gaze and admiration. Her features thrown into broad light and shade by the candle which at times was half extinguished by the wind—her symmetry of form and the gracefulness ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Scotch ghost was not unpleasant, like the Salem ghost, although it had one peculiarity in common with its trans-Atlantic fellow-spook. It never appeared to the holder of the title, just as the other never was visible to the owner of the house. In fact, the Duncan ghost was never seen at all. It ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... "talks out" her pain is not the one who is killed by it. A peculiarity of hopeless cases of cancer is that the sufferer therefrom has a dread of mentioning the horror that ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... of self-restraint is plainly an inborn character, for it may show itself in but one member of the family brought up in exactly the same circumstances as other members who do not show any such peculiarity. The victim is born with one important mental faculty defective, precisely as another may ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... some overhanging branches, fell on the dark features, now composed and thoughtful. She met his glance in silence, with large eyes that had taken into their depths something of the surrounding shadow. He had never felt so strongly before the peculiarity of her fascination—perhaps because he had never seen her in a setting which seemed so entirely a part of herself. The distant music, the hum of voices, and that strange charm which permeates an Indian nightfall—above all, ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... a ring from his finger and gave it to his love. It was a common flat-sided silver ring that had been taken from the grave of a Roman soldier: one peculiarity it had, however; on its inner surface were roughly cut the words, "ave atque vale." Greeting and farewell! It was a fitting gift to pass between people in their position. Beatrice, trembling sorely, whispered that she would wear it on her heart, upon her hand she could not put it yet awhile—it ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... the Influenza Bacillus, has been caught at last! The peculiarity about him, confound him, is said to be his "immobility." Ugh! the hard-hearted infinitesimally microscopic monster! No tears, short-breathings, sighs, no groans, no sufferings, nothing will move him. There he remains, untouched, immobile. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 16, 1892 • Various
... of all three met in a point over their noses, a peculiarity which gave them a very singular and unpleasant appearance. When he quickened his pace, they quickened theirs; whilst his dog still continued to bark and show every indication of excessive fear. In this way they all four proceeded till they ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... who built it for his own delight. In the midst of the town was a famous and stately palace which Shaddai intended for himself.[3] He had no intention of allowing strangers to intrude there. And the peculiarity of the place was that the walls of Mansoul[4] could never be broken down or hurt unless the townsmen consented. Mansoul had five gates which in like manner could only be forced if those within allowed ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... riding-horse to a kago, he must, if he does not carry a saddle with him, determine to ride on an unsaddled horse, which, with the wretched steeds that are only available here, soon becomes so unpleasant that he at last prefers to let his legs hang benumbed from the kago. A peculiarity in Japan is that the rider seldom himself guides his horse. It is commonly led by a halter by a groom running alongside the rider. These grooms are very light-footed and enduring, so that even at a rapid pace they ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... development. Happy the author whose earliest works are read and understood by the lustre thrown back upon them from his latest! for then we receive the impression of continuity and cumulation of power, of peculiarity deepening to individuality, of promise more than justified in the keeping: unhappy, whose autumn shows only the aftermath and rowen of an earlier harvest, whose would-be replenishments are but thin dilutions ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... of the Christian and that of the man of the world, or the mere ordinary religionist, is not a difference in mental operation, but in the object of the faith—to believe that Jesus is the Christ is the peculiarity of Christian faith. ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... far as it emancipated the intelligence from superstitious illusions, and its loss, in so far as it destroyed the faith which was the bond of social union, without substituting any other faith in its room. At the same time, the expression points to a peculiarity of Comte's Psychology, which affects his whole view of the history, and especially of the religious history, of man; and it is therefore necessary to subject it to ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... can do it now better than at the beginning. The consequence of which is that an active occupation is salvation to him. . . . Nobody exactly understands him except me, who am in the inside of him and hear him breathe. For the peculiarity of our relation is, that he thinks aloud with me and can't stop himself. . . . I wanted his poems done this winter very much, and here was a bright room with three windows consecrated to his use. But he had a room all last summer, and did nothing. Then, he worked himself out by riding for three ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... Jews, who are very numerous at Tabarith, are not clothed in the Turkish or Greek fashion, but quite like their brethren in Poland and Galicia. Most of them also spoke German. I immediately inquired the reason of this peculiarity, and was informed that all the Jewish families resident in this town originally came from Poland or Russia, with the intention of dying in the Promised Land. As a rule, all Jews seem to cherish a warm desire ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... Jacobinism, for the purpose of inculcating war in those distant regions, on Jacobin principles, and of forming Jacobin clubs, which they actually succeeded in establishing, and which in most respects resembled the European model, but which were distinguished by this peculiarity, that they were required to swear in one breath, hatred to tyranny, the love of liberty, and the destruction of all kings and sovereigns—except the good and faithful ally of the French ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... example before men and women of the early worthies of Islam. So long as the sentiments and habits of the Moslem world remain as they are some remedial or preventive measure of the kind seems indispensable. But the peculiarity of the Mussulman polity, as we have seen, is such that the sexual laws and institutions which call for restrictions of the kind as founded on the Koran are incapable of change; they must co-exist with the faith ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... luminous in the face of a good man, and Dr. Morrison had this peculiarity in a remarkable degree. His face seemed to radiate light; moreover, he was a man anointed with the oil of gladness above his fellows, and John no sooner felt the glow of that radiant countenance on him than his heart leaped up ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... you,' cried Hermione, stooping to the ground in her bluish, brilliant foulard. It was a great joy to her to DO things, and to have the ordering of the job, with Birkin. He obeyed her subduedly. Ursula and Gerald looked on. It was a peculiarity of Hermione's, that at every moment, she had one intimate, and turned all the rest of those present into onlookers. This raised her ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... others,—that the prototype of Parson Adams was a friend of Fielding, the Reverend William Young. Like Adams, he was a scholar and devoted to AEschylus; he resembled him, too, in his trick of snapping his fingers, and his habitual absence of mind. Of this latter peculiarity it is related that on one occasion, when a chaplain in Marlborough's wars, he strolled abstractedly into the enemy's lines with his beloved AEschylus in his hand. His peaceable intentions were so unmistakable that he was instantly released, and politely ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... I presume, are made of that substance to which I referred in a former lecture. You see that they are even far more highly ornamented than the French candles; and, I suppose, are candles of luxury, judging from their appearance. They have a remarkable peculiarity about them—namely, a hollow wick,—that beautiful peculiarity which Argand introduced into the lamp, and made so valuable. To those who receive such presents from the East, I may just say that this and such like materials gradually undergo a change which gives ...
— The Chemical History Of A Candle • Michael Faraday
... laid down would reach just half-way to the second floor,—a peculiarity of amateur sketches so universal that we will say nothing more about it. But what principle of good taste or hospitality requires you to blockade the main entrance to your house with this same staircase? Do you send all your visitors, of whatever ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... forbids. They learn to think there is some subtle merit in evading the law. They encourage others to break the law, and so develop cliques and finally new and silly conventions. Or, prohibition has another effect. It makes a whole class who accept its rulings, and gradually these people, owing to a peculiarity which all gregarious animals seem to have, begin to believe that unless all are of their persuasion and of their number the fault lies with the rebels. First of all they consider themselves superior to the rebels, and despise them. Then, when they find that the rebels think that they are the ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... which is concerned not with their evidence, but with their intrinsic credibility. There has arisen in a certain class of minds an apparent perception of the impossibility of suspensions of physical law. This is one peculiarity of the time; another is a disposition to maintain the disbelief of miracles upon a religious basis, and in a connection with a declared ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... broad and straight, and were crossed by others at regular intervals of two or three hundred feet. These streets paralleled each other with mathematical regularity. The city thus was laid out most orderly, but with one peculiarity; the streets did not run in two directions crossing each other at right angles, but in three, each inclined to an equal degree with the others. The blocks of houses between them, therefore, were cut into diamond-shaped sections and into triangles, never into ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
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