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More "Precarious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... universities, of our commercial and professional offices, whose occupations, whatever they are, are entirely remote from the direct needs and meanings of life; or again of the vast masses who inhabit the mean streets of our great towns, ignorant, ill-grown, unskilled, and in a chronic state of most precarious and uncertain employment. What would these populations do in any case of national crisis—say in a case of serious war or famine or huge bankruptcy of trade or multitudinous invasion by Chinese or Japanese, or of total collapse ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... according to Mill, can we ever calculate with security what undiscoverable conditions may suddenly bring about an unexpected event contrary to previous experience. The uniformity of Nature, as Mr. Stephen remarks, is thus made exceedingly precarious; and to the practical intelligence, which looks for some basis that cannot be argued about, there is still something to be said for Intuition. And when Mill, still in search of some precise formula, undertook to interpret persistent sequences ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... a fund for emergencies of this sort, and some outside aid might be looked for; but such supplies are in their nature precarious and soon exhausted. It is a noticeable feature of strikes that the moment the workman's pay stops his living expenses increase. Even the more economical becomes improvident. If he has money, the tobacco shop and the tavern are likely to get more of it than the butcher's cart. ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... nature-philosophy. Only a few years ago the cosmic ether was to the majority of scientists an imponderable something, of which, strictly speaking, absolutely nothing was known, and which could be admitted provisionally only as a precarious working hypothesis. All this was changed when Heinrich Hertz (1888) demonstrated the nature of electrical energy, by his beautiful experiments establishing the conjecture of Faraday that light and heat, electricity and magnetism, are closely related phenomena of one single set ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... extensive experience and knowledge of the West, was the guide and authority on all matters regarding their travels. He generally kept watch during the night, obtaining what sleep he could through the day. The latter, however, was generally very precarious, as at sight of every horseman or cloud of smoke, they generally awakened him, so as to be sure and ...
— The Huge Hunter - Or, the Steam Man of the Prairies • Edward S. Ellis
... this auspicious moment. I may say it is the proudest moment of my life to be able to stand on this mantelpiece and look down on you all, to feel myself enrolled a member of such an august corps. I may say I feel myself elevated at this present moment, but as, gentlemen, there is no saying, in the precarious situation I am now placed, how long I may be in a position to contemplate the elegance of his majesty and court, I hasten to propose that his majesty's health be eaten in plum-cake, and that if I ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... which was followed by a fever, which became more alarming every day. Thus, in addition to the loss of one of their children, Mr and Mrs Campbell were threatened with being deprived of two more; for their nieces were regarded as such, and Alfred was in a very precarious state. The wounds had assumed such an angry appearance, that Mr Campbell was fearful of mortification. This accumulated distress had, however, one good effect upon them. The danger of losing Emma and Alfred so occupied ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... the inkstand was a Testimonial to be presented after the Address; and the gentlemen who occupied the three private carriages were all eminent members of the religious society which Mr. Thorpe had served in the capacity of Secretary, and from which he was now obliged to secede in consequence of the precarious state of his health. ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... fell upon Foy, upbraiding him for his roughness, begging him to remember that if he were not careful he might kill his brother, whose arteries were understood to be in a most precarious condition, till the poor man covered his ears with his hands and waited till he saw their ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... question to solve; and the mere fact of its being strongly presented to his mind by all that he had seen and heard, was not encouraging. He sat down at the deserted board, and becoming more and more despondent, as he thought of all the uncertainties and difficulties of his precarious ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... patriots are made, having, in his early life, been reared in Pennsylvania, even though he first saw the light near Campbletown, Scotland, in 1748. His father (who moved to America in 1753) was a poor farmer, and Hugh received his schooling under precarious conditions, as many boys of that time did. We are given pictures of him, trudging thirty miles in all kinds of weather, in order to borrow books and newspapers, and we are told that, being quick in the learning of languages, he made ...
— The Battle of Bunkers-Hill • Hugh Henry Brackenridge
... to have gone abroad; but the indisposition of his mother made him unwilling to leave the kingdom till her health seemed in a situation less precarious. That time, however, came not; the Winter advanced, and she grew evidently worse. He gave over, therefore, his design till the next Spring, when, if she were able, it was her desire to try the South of France for her recovery, whither he meant ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... unsatisfactory condition of those who have risen to distinction by undue paths, and the outworks and bulwarks of fiction and falsehood, by which they are under the necessity of surrounding and defending their precarious advantages. But she was not called upon, she thought, to unveil her sister's original history—it would restore no right to any one, for she was usurping none—it would only destroy her happiness, and degrade her in the public estimation. Had she been ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... consumed with indignation that Laurier should pass them by to associate with his former enemies. They did not realize the political necessity that controlled Laurier's course. Laurier had great need to hold his new allies for his position in Quebec for the first year or so of office was precarious. The Manitoba school question had still to be settled. Laurier was political realist enough to know that he would have to take what he could get and this he would have to dress up and present to the public as his own child. He knew that the bishops, chagrined, ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe
... square masses of naked rock (sandstone), sometimes towering, and rounded, sometimes pyramidal, sometimes in truncated cones, sometimes in circular ridges, with sharp, rugged, naked backs, with but little vegetation anywhere visible, except it obtained a precarious tenure in the fissured crown of some gigantic hill-top, whither some soil had fallen, or at the base of the reddish ochre scarps which everywhere lifted their ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... like a costume; every attitude implied a presence-chamber or a ball-room. The girls complained that in private theatricals no combination of disguises could reduce Kate to the ranks, nor give her the "make-up" of a waiting-maid. Yet as her father was a New York merchant of the precarious or spasmodic description, she had been used from childhood to the wildest fluctuations of wardrobe;—a year of Paris dresses,—then another year spent in making over ancient finery, that never looked like either finery ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... came out first—a priest with a pointed nose and great cheek-bones, whom we have met before at the great dejeuners. On bad terms with his bishop, he had left the diocese where he had been engaged, and in the precarious position of an unattached priest—for the clergy have their Bohemians too—he was glad to teach the little Jansoulets, recently turned out of the Bourdaloue College. With his arrogant, solemn air, overweighted with responsibilities, which would ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... declining in energy and health, and his income was very small. She worked long hours over her fancy work, but the prices paid for it at the shops were so small that she felt with a growing despondency it was but a precarious means of support. Their first month in the old mansion was drawing to a close, and they had been compelled to draw slightly on the small sum of ready money still remaining after paying for their summer's board. They still had a few ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... picked up an odd sum now and then by a "Sunday story." He has always been an anonymous writer. He has never had sufficient intellectual character to do anything well. The downward side of middle age finds him afflicted with various physical ailments, entirely dependent upon a precarious position at a moderate salary, without influential friends, completely disillusioned, with a mediocre mind now much fagged, devoid of high ambition, and with a most unstimulating prospect before him. His attitude toward the business of book reviewing is that he wishes he had gone ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... evidence is always precarious." This canon he illustrates by several examples: "If a reading is in accordance with the general style of the writer, it may be said on the one side that this fact is in its favor, and on the other that an ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... for it is to New England[43] that we are indebted for the public library as well as the public school. It is not, however, economically possible for every small community to support a permanent local library, and many of those established have a precarious existence and are maintained only through the devotion of public-spirited individuals. To meet the need of isolated neighborhoods a few county libraries, notably in Washington County, Maryland, and a few counties in Delaware and Minnesota, have made use of book-wagons ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... to answer. But she did not dare to equivocate as to her precarious state. And where the use, when a few hours would probably see the end ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... their penalty who did not use the Book of Common Prayer, and adhere strictly to the ritual of the Church of England. The oligarchical power of the bishops was restored, and two thousand ministers were driven from their livings, and compelled to seek a precarious support. Many other acts of flagrant injustice were passed by a subservient parliament, and cruelly carried into execution by unfeeling judges. But the religious persecution of dissenters was not consummated until the reign of James under whose favor or direction the inhuman Jeffreys inflicted ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... zig-zag path, sloping sharply downward at an angle of some sixty-five degrees, paved with broad stones, and flanked on either side by houses, no two of which occupied the same level, and which seemed to realize their precarious footing, and hug the rift in which they were planted ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... morning Nan was better, and although for days she was in a very precarious state, and had to be kept as quiet as possible, yet Miss Danesbury's great dread that fever would set in had passed away. The doctor said, however, that Nan had barely escaped real injury to her brain, and that it would be many a day before she would ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... family, who had enjoyed a valuable freehold, perhaps near 500 years, were obliged to pay rent, homage, suit and service, attend the Lord's court at Dudley every three weeks, be called into the field at pleasure, and after all, possess a precarious tenure ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... the columns of the 'Penny Banner' for which he worked, and so grotesquely and persistently reduced all the problems of the time to terms of nitrogen and albumen, that curt dismissal came upon him, and for a time Dora saw nothing but her precarious earnings between them and starvation. It was then also that, by virtue of that queer charm he could always exercise when he pleased, he laid hold on a young Radical manufacturer and got out of him a loan of 200 pounds for ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and effect a ready sale. There is beyond this a numerous class of what may be described as 'book-ghouls,' or men who make it a business to haunt the cheap bookstalls and bag the better-class or more saleable books and hawk them around to the shops, and so make a few shillings on which to support a precarious existence, in which beer and tobacco are the sole delights. We once met a man who did a roaring trade of this description, chiefly with the British Museum. He took notes of every book that struck him as being ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... existence in 1812—a victim, says Hughes, of the condition of public apathy which brought about in the same year a reconstruction of the older organization under the joint title of the Oil and Water Color Society, and which eked out a precarious existence until the birth of the association now known as the Royal Institute ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... chances against them. In Turkey, where the place, where the fortune, where the head itself are so insecure that scarcely any have died in their beds for ages, so that the bowstring is the natural death of bashaws, yet in no country is power and distinction (precarious enough, God knows, in all) sought for with such boundless avidity,—as if the value of place was enhanced by the danger and insecurity of its tenure. Nothing will ever make a seat in this House not an object of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... of great powers can permanently bury himself, no matter how obscure the position which he chooses. Sooner or later the world will find him out, and he will be lifted to his rightful place. When General Grant occupied a desk in the office of a lawyer in St. Louis, and made a precarious living by collecting bills, it didn't look as if Fame had a niche for him; but occasion came, and lifted him to distinction. So I must confess that the young graduate seemed to be making a mistake when, turning his back upon Williams College, he sought ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... voyage, and escaped on a raft with one other passenger: how they had drifted far south, before waves and current, till they were cast at last on this wretched island: how they remained there for a month or two, picking up a precarious living on roots and berries and eggs of sea-birds: and how at last, one day, he had come back from hunting limpets and sea-urchins on the shore of a lonely bay—to find, to his amazement, his companion gone, and himself left alone on that desolate island. His fellow-castaway, he knew then, ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... his headquarters at Panama. De Soto, accompanied by a single dragoon, who like himself was an admirable horseman, rode with the utmost possible dispatch to Panama, where he informed the governor of the disasters which had befallen the expedition, and of the precarious condition in which he had left the remnant of the troops. He also made such representation of the military conduct of General Espinosa as to induce the governor to remove him from the command and send General Herman Ponce to take his place. ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... anxious expectation. The Parliament certainly meets on Thursday. I think, from the style of their language, and particularly from Lord Shelburne's trying to make me pledge you to it, that they are confident of a peace; and certainly, if they have it not, their situation is very precarious, to say no more of it. If they do meet Parliament with a peace, I am persuaded they will stand their ground. The country gentlemen hold in general rather a friendly language than otherwise. I shall certainly now stay over ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... prominent varieties; the life of pleasure or sensuality,—the political life, aspiring to honour,—and the contemplative life. The first is the life of the brutes, although countenanced by men high in power. The second is too precarious, as depending on others, and is besides only a means to an end—namely, our consciousness of our own merits; for the ambitious man seeks to be honoured for his virtue and by good judges—thus showing that he too regards virtue as the superior good. ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... Newfoundland, recognized as belonging to Great Britain. The French colonists were allowed to remain, but during the course of the eighteenth century they combined with the Amerindians (who liked the French and disliked the British) and made the position of the British colonists so precarious that they were finally expelled and obliged to transfer themselves to Louisiana and Canada. This was the departure of the Acadians so ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... up to a certain point, and that a changing of the captain-general or of the alcalde can cause great evils, and change the aspect of so pleasing a picture? Yes, it is a lamentable truth; and I shall do what is in my power so that your lot may be less precarious, and so that the government which rules you may be so organized that you may be as little as possible subject to the injustice and avarice of men; and so that, wherever you see a Spaniard, you may salute him with ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... and directly accountable to Man. A reforming Pope is a lucky accident, and dull indeed must be the brain which believes in the possibility of a long succession of reforming Popes, or which can regard as other than precarious and unstable the discordant combination of a constitutional ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... think—who was feebly trying to shield the lad. This was such excellent sport that more was thought expedient. A charge of shot was fired into the father's legs, and as one knee-joint is injured, the elder Quirke's condition is precarious even without his broken ribs and other injuries. The cowardly hounds then left, in their horrid disguise adding a new terror to the lonely night. The evening's entertainment was not yet over. They crossed a couple of fields to a house where dwelt Quirke's married son. They burst open ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... me, for it's the last chance you'll have. I have you absolutely at my mercy. I've caught you! You are trapped!" There was no doubting that the girl believed what she said, and the Senator's affairs were in a sufficiently precarious ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... Economy a Study at School. First Reason why it should be so made. State of Domestic Service precarious. Second Reason. Examples illustrating. Third Reason. Questions asked. First Objection; how answered. Next Objection; how answered. Next Objection; ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... the whole. This doubt as to a personal future life will unquestionably increase. Let traditional teachers beware how they venture to shift the moral law from its immutable basis in the will of God to a precarious poise on the selfish hope and fear of man. The sole safety, the ultimate desideratum, is perception of ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... to rule, and that no other outcome could even be considered by Nature. This is one of the remnants of ignorance certain religions have left: but it's odd that men who don't believe in Easter should still believe this. For the facts are of course this is a hard and precarious world, where every mistake and infirmity must be ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... more than an ordinary interest for Sophie. Her eyes brightened when I entered, and her manner towards me was so gentle and so confiding, that I could not help fancying that the feelings I had for her were returned. Then I began to ask myself the question, Have I, with the precarious profession I have to depend on, without a name or family, with only one friend able to assist me, any right to attempt to win the affections of a young girl accustomed to all the luxuries of a rich planter's establishment? or is it indeed likely that ...
— Charley Laurel - A Story of Adventure by Sea and Land • W. H. G. Kingston
... exacted from the tenantry in general the performance of duty-labor to such an extent, that his immense agricultural farms were managed with little expense to himself. If a poor man's corn were drop ripe, or his hay in a precarious state, or his turf undrawn, he must suffer his oats, hay, and turf, to be lost, in order to secure the crops of the agent. If he had spirit to refuse, he must expect to become a martyr to his resentment. In renewing leases his extortions were exorbitant; ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... I must be content to stand aside, but on your return from sea it will be my turn, and I shall be hurt and grieved indeed if you do not allow me an opportunity of proving my gratitude to you. As to the career you speak of, it is a precarious one. There are indeed many English and Scotch officers who have risen to high rank and honour in foreign service; but to every one that so succeeds, how many fall unnoticed, and lie in unmarked graves, in well-nigh every country in Europe? Were you like so many of your age, bent merely on ...
— When London Burned • G. A. Henty
... success of this work; and Minna herself seemed not disinclined to yield to my hopes in this respect. We had reason to be concerned as to how matters would pan out for us at the beginning of the spring, for this season is always a bad one in which to start such precarious theatrical enterprises. In spite of royal support and the participation of the theatre committee in the general management of the theatre, our worthy director's state of perennial bankruptcy suffered no alteration, and it seemed as if his theatrical ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... La Pampanga. As, however, the provinces are frequently visited with dreadful hurricanes (called in the country, baguios), desolated by locusts, and exposed to the effects of the great irregularities of nature, which, in these climes, often acts in extreme, the crops of this grain are precarious, or at least, no reliance can be placed on a certain surplus allowing an annual exportation to China. On this account, rice cannot be placed in the list of those articles which give support to ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... look down upon the people? Because a nobleman will never be one of the lower classes. Why are the Turks generally kinder and more hospitable than ourselves? Because, under their wholly arbitrary system of government, the rank and wealth of individuals are always uncertain and precarious, so that they do not regard poverty and degradation as conditions with which they have no concern; to-morrow, any one may himself be in the same position as those on whom he bestows alms to-day. This thought, which occurs again and again in eastern romances, lends them a certain ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... whom Don Francesco had called "not exactly a liberal." He tallied with that description. A wicked old face! He was blear-eyed, brown as a mummy, and so fat that his legs had long ago ceased to be any use save as a precarious support while standing. He rode, in gorgeous apparel, on a milk-white donkey which was led by two pretty choristers in blue. Attached to the end of a long pole, a green umbrella of Gargantuan proportions, adorned with red tassels, protected his wrinkled head from the rays of the sun. ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... on an instrument for catching them. He makes the net by mere labor, but he catches the fish by means of labor and the net. Without such instruments to aid in production a dense population could not live at all, and a very sparse one could live only in a meager and precarious way. If the instruments are artificially made, or if they are furnished by nature in limited amounts, they are forms of wealth, or goods; but as their function is not to minister directly to consumers' ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... long in bringing in a report that there was not an armed man visible, the whole of the fighting element having retreated with the rajah, as soon as it was seen that the guns were retaken. But our numbers were so small, and the position so precarious, that Brace used every precaution, throwing out posts in the two directions from which danger was likely to approach, while the men were rested and refreshed, and a search made for ammunition, of which there was none too ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... was not asked at any time by the military what had become of the Government flag, and he was able to keep it in safety until his position on the Committee became precarious and made it dangerous for him to preserve this precious relic of the past at his ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... stock, and a good trade; that he regularly examined his stock every half year, and he found that it was in a flourishing state. My answer was, the man lives a very debauched life, and therefore his affairs must be in a precarious state; but the quaker was inflexible, and nothing was done in the matter. The brewer continued his debauched course, and neglected and quarrelled with his family, and my uncle Powell continued his confidence. ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... objection, the precarious nature of the business. You might sometimes go a month, perhaps, without selling a sketch, and meanwhile your expenses would go on. I think, however, that I have found a way of obviating this objection. I have a friend—Mr. Bushnell—who is in the real estate ...
— Chester Rand - or The New Path to Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr
... Th' afflicting rod, or break the general law? Shall he who soars, inspired by loftier views, Life's little cares and little pains refuse? Shall he not rather feel a double share Of mortal woe, when doubly arm'd to bear? "Hard is his fate who builds his peace of mind On the precarious mercy of mankind; Who hopes for wild and visionary things, And mounts o'er unknown seas with vent'rous wings; But as, of various evils that befall The human race, some portion goes to all; To him perhaps the milder lot's assigned ...
— The Library • George Crabbe
... my own were confirmed. It seemed that Laura's constitution was not fit, Janet averred, to bear these irregular hours, early and late; and she plaintively dwelt on the untasted oatmeal in the morning, the insufficient luncheon, the precarious dinner, the excessive walking, the evening damps. There was coming to be a look about her such as her mother had, who died at thirty. As for Marian—but here the complaint suddenly stopped; it would have required far stronger provocation ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... out Jorian and Boris, and, having carried in the bread and wine, we three sat down to the remains of the stew. Indeed, I saw but little difference as to quantity from the time that Jorian had taken it in. For maids' appetites when they are anyways in love are precarious, but, after they are assured of their love's return, then the back hunger comes upon them and the larder is made ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... better than it had been in the summer. I had my strength again, although the long confinement had told on me. But my position was precarious enough. I had my pay from the Ella, and nothing else. And McWhirter, with a monthly stipend from his hospital of twenty-five dollars, was not much ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the oasis there are some large gardens which belong to the poor, who are allowed to eat the dates and cultivate patches of the gardens. I think also the Sanctuaries sometimes give alms in the way of the ancient monasteries. These are miserable and precarious resources. Nevertheless, before the Turks so fleeced the inhabitants, I question if there were any poor person ever likely to die of starvation, for the rich members of families provide for the poor, and rich friends for poor friends, and ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... Julia's sailing, our conditions began to be a little precarious. We were without any regular supply of food; the arrival of ships was growing less frequent; and, what was worse yet, all the natives but good old Captain Bob began to tire of us. Nor was this to be wondered at; we were obliged to live upon their benevolence, ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... which made Paris the center of attention for astonished and alarmed Europe. Cherubini's connection had been with the aristocracy, and now they were fleeing in a mad panic or mounting the scaffold. His livelihood became precarious, and he suffered severely during the first five years of anarchy. His seclusion was passed in studying music, the physical sciences, drawing, and botany; and his acquaintance was wisely confined to a few musicians like himself. Once, indeed, his having learned the violin as a child ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... in the precarious position of sitting upon a limb in a rather complicated network of small branches and foliage, hanging onto his motorcycle for dear life, while the buoyant float went swirling and ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... the shoulder, knocking him from his precarious hold upon the frantically plunging horse. Freed of the weight of both girl and lion the pony raced ahead toward safety. Numa tore and struck at the missile in his shoulder but could not dislodge it. Then ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... nestling beside the road, struggling for a precarious existence, frail wild flowers of delicate shades, surrounded by vigorous ferns and creeping vines, showing that Nature has her poetic moods even among these deserted regions. Now we came upon a crystal stream of water, winding and fretting ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... points out that a very large number, probably the majority of scholars, were not well provided for. They eked out their precarious allowances by begging, by learning handicrafts, and by "picking up the various doles at funerals and commemoration masses, where such needy miserables were always to be found."[1] Such students would not be likely to have many or perhaps any books. "The stock ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... eye!—and there is the poor wife, the doting mother, who has never suspected anything, or at least has clung always to the hope which you are just going to wrench away from her!—I must tell Iris that I think her poor friend is in a precarious state. She seems ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... position became extremely precarious, for I was now on the black list and being searched for. While previously my connection with the Mission had been a protection, now it was just the opposite. I could not very well remain in our apartment and we all scattered, except ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... loneliness. A childless widow in delicate health, whose paternal family had been for the most part cruelly robbed, exiled, or destroyed by the reigning Pope and his family, she felt her own situation a most unprotected and precarious one, since the least jealousy or misunderstanding might bring upon her, too, the ill-will of the Borgias, which had proved so fatal to the rest of her race. No comfort in life remained to her but her religion, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... so-called humour led him to make these low appeals to the witless. And even as he looked the cross-eyed man entered the scene. Garbed in the weirdly misfitting clothes of a waiter, holding aloft a loaded tray of dishes, he entered on roller skates, to halt before Baird with his uplifted tray at a precarious balance. ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... heavy job of work need example. If you wish me to weep, be grieved yourself first of all. Soltikof angrily wipes his countenance at this point, and insists on a few tears from Daun. Without metaphor, Soltikof has shot away all his present ammunition, his staff of bread is quite precarious in these parts; and Soltikof thinks always, 'Is it my business, then, or is ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... upon the muscular organization in obtaining it; a fact of which the lower animal world is full of illustrations. The life of the forest and desert hunters is one of incessant activity, and their food supply is precarious. The Hottentots, on the contrary, take life easily and are inclined to indolence, their herds supplying them with food in abundance with little exertion. They retain enough of the primeval strain to be fond of hunting, and while thus engaged display the activity of their ancestral ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... while he tenderly cherished a knee, and an elbow. He had been on the brink of tears for a moment, but meeting Bellew's quizzical gaze, he manfully repressed the weakness, and, lifting the small, and somewhat weather-beaten cap that found a precarious perch at the back of his curly head, he gravely wished Bellew ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... Denboro, the village eight miles above East Harniss, in his "power dory," or gasoline boat, the Lady May. The Lady May was a relic of the time before Issy was assistant depot master, when he gained a precarious living by quahauging, separating the reluctant bivalve from its muddy house on the bay bottom with an iron rake, the handle of which was forty feet long. Issy had been seized with a desire to try quahauging once more, hence his holiday. The rake was ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Their precarious life seemed to concern the yellowtails very little, if at all. All living beings, without doubt, are afraid of death. Nevertheless, some of the species I saw huddle together as though they knew they were created for the larger fishes, and wished to give the ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... more children than might have been expected, considering their precarious means of support and their wandering life. This inconvenience is however balanced by the wonderful facility with which their females undergo the operations of child-birth. In the most advanced state of pregnancy ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... it not universal? Why has it all this time been withheld from nations even more in need of it than those to whom it was given? Are we to suppose that the salvation of these myriads was a matter of indifference to their Creator, or that Heaven preferred the slow and precarious working of the missionary to the instantaneous action of its own fiat? This is the question which scepticism asks, and which the great author of the "Analogy of Religion" fails ...
— The Religious Situation • Goldwin Smith
... reasons, wished to have few dependents about him—partly in order that he might be near his old friend, Dr. Garden, who was established in the neighbourhood, and whose society and advice were necessary to Mr. Strange's life. That life was, it appeared, held by this suffering gentleman on a precarious tenure. It was ebbing away fast with each passing hour. The servant already spoke of his master in the past tense, describing him to me as a young gentleman not more than five-and-thirty years of age, with a young ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... however, was in a precarious condition. There could be nothing permanent under such a regime, for permanency of government is necessary to the advancement of civilization. The government was non-progressive. It allowed no freedom of the people and gave no incentive to advancement, and it was a detriment many times to the progressive ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... grave demeanor, but a graceful deportment. I could not but regard her with deep interest, knowing what important concerns depended upon the life of this fragile little being, and to what a stormy and precarious career she might be destined. Her solitary position, also, separated from all her kindred except her little sister, a mere effigy of royalty in the hands of statesmen, and surrounded by the formalities and ceremonials of ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... changed the entire situation. The capture of his two regiments made General Bliss's situation decidedly precarious. His case was not hopeless yet, by any means, since, as the attacking force, the Blue army had been the stronger to begin with, because the War Department had so arranged matters that the advantage of position favored the Red forces sufficiently to make up for the superior force of General ...
— The Boy Scout Automobilists - or, Jack Danby in the Woods • Robert Maitland
... little out of focus, and though I admit her precarious position in the heart of Europe, she exaggerates the necessity for her autocratic military government to meet the situation. That philosophical and literary radical Lord Morley, now wearing a coronet, in the land where logic is a foundling and compromise a darling, writes: "A weak ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... a miserable and most precarious plight, indeed; and I could not help wondering how they had possibly managed to cling for so many hours to so insecure a refuge—assuming, of course, that the brig had capsized on the previous ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... correct one; but we have no clue to guide us with certainty to the causes of their rupture. In after-life they were reconciled, though the intimacy of early friendship never appears to have been restored between them. (49) Scott says of Walpole, that , his temper was precarious;" and we may, perhaps, affirm the same of Gray. At all events, they were persons of such different characters, that their not agreeing could not be surprising. What could be more opposite than "the self-sequestered, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... you at all of anyone: all inside the house is a simmer of peace and quiet, with blinds drawn down against the heat the whole day long. No callers; and as for me, I never call elsewhere. The gossips about here eke out a precarious existence by washing each other's dirty linen in public: and the process never seems to result in ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... square after square, with Peter listening gravely, his head bent. And square after square it was borne in on him what a precarious future stretched before this girl beside him, how very slender her resources, how more than ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Endicott would have liked to prolong the argument. As a matter of fact, neither she nor her husband counted the risks of a midnight fracas of great moment to themselves: they had so very little to lose. A precarious existence based on illicit deeds of all sorts had rendered them hard ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... the water on the lee-side, well out of the wake, letting it run until it gets beyond the eddies, then a person holding the glass turns it up just as the first mark, or stray-line, goes out, from which the knots begin to be reckoned. The log is, however, at best, a precarious way of computing, and must be corrected by experience. The inventor of it is not known, and no mention is made of it till the year 1607, in an East India voyage, published by Purchas. The mode before, and even now in some colliers, and in native craft in the ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... and by posterity with the epithet of Cruel, had filled with blood and murder his kingdom and his own family; and having incurred the universal hatred of his subjects, he kept from present terror alone, an anxious and precarious possession of the throne. His nobles fell every day the victims of his severity: he put to death several of his natural brothers, from groundless jealousy: each murder, by multiplying his enemies, became the occasion ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... and Lothian; provinces which they were not legally entitled to inhabit[34], and which, therefore, they pillaged with as little remorse as if they had belonged to a foreign country. This strange, precarious, and adventurous mode of life, led by the borderers, was not without its pleasures, and seems, in all probability, hardly so disagreeable to us, as the monotony of regulated society must have been to those, who had been long accustomed to a state of rapine. ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... demanding attention, gave her financial backing when necessary, moral support upon all occasions, and was ever her most interested friend and faithful ally. She received also the sympathy and assistance of her mother, who, no matter how heavy the domestic burdens, or how precarious her own health, was never willing that she should take any time from her public work to give to the duties of home, although she ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... these noblemen had been long contemplating the possibility of James's return to Scotland. Like the Earl of Errol, they had been dissatisfied with the prudence of the Duke of Hamilton, whose policy it had been to postpone the risk of a precarious undertaking, and whose foresight was acknowledged when it was too late. Lord John Drummond, Lord Kilsyth, and Lord Linlithgow, had been all deeply concerned in the schemes and speculations which had ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... an island from the natives in 1651. On this island they built a small fort, called St. Andre, from which they traded to several factories up the river[4]. Besides the Courlanders, the French and the Dutch carried on a very precarious trade on the river. In the early part of 1659, as a result of the war in the northern part of Europe, the duke of Courland became a prisoner of the king of Sweden. Under these circumstances the Amsterdam chamber of the Dutch West India Company[5] induced the Duke's commissioner, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... were marching during great heat, insufficiently supplied in every way, and how they suffered from manifold hardships, has been described in von Scherer's dissertation. The Westphalian corps was in as precarious a condition as the Wuerttembergian, as in fact the whole army and the Westphalian battalions were already reduced to one-half their former number. Many soldiers had remained behind on account of ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... the Night, a volume of poems which contained the "Coplas de Manrique" and the translations, with a selection from the verses of the Literary Gazette, which the author playfully reclaims in a note from their vagabond and precarious existence in the corners of newspapers —gathering his children from wanderings in lanes and alleys, and introducing them decorously to the world. A few later poems were added, and these, with the Hyperion, ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... in deserts, but she had not. They might even hate each other, and she might quit him. Even if they were to leave Europe, a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of man precarious ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... bound by a very dear friend of mine, now alas! in precarious health!—the Marquis of Bridlington," said Mr. Albany Todd—an audible groan from Harold Jupp; an imploring glance from Millie Splay, and to her immense relief the butler ushered in Harry Luttrell. He was ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... that was Roland Marleigh's," Crispin muttered. "Heigho! Life is precarious as the fall of a die at best an ephemeral business. To-night you say the house that was Roland Marleigh's; presently men will be saying the house that the Ashburns lived—aye, and died—in. Give you good ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... "They'll have plenty of good land to grow potatoes, and oats, instead of water, which produces them a precarious living from wild-fowl and fish, and ruins no end of them with rheumatism ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... more often manifested—even though unconsciously—in women. Women who have no love for their husbands are nevertheless often fiercely jealous, because consciously or unconsciously they are afraid that their husbands may desert them for other women, and that they may thus find themselves in a precarious economic condition. ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... general hatred upon Calderon. But his extraordinary address and vigorous energies, his perfect mastery of the science of intrigue, not only sustained, but continued to augment, his power. Though the king was yet in the prime of middle age, his health was infirm and his life precarious. Calderon had contrived, while preserving the favour of the reigning monarch, to establish himself as the friend and companion of the heir apparent. In this, indeed, he had affected to yield to the policy of the king himself; for Philip the Third had a wholesome terror ...
— Calderon The Courtier - A Tale • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to do an average day's work. When this period arrives employers of labour often discharge him in order to make way for younger and more vigorous men. If his home, as sometimes happens, is broken up by the death of his wife, his existence becomes a very lonely and precarious one. An odd job now and again is all he can get to do, and even these jobs are often hard to find. His sons and daughters are too heavily encumbered with large families to be capable of rendering any effective assistance, and the Union looms gloomily in the ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... utmost importance to get safely over the precarious part of the 'road' before the seasonal going-out of the sea-ice. To wait until all the ice should go out and enable the ship to sail to Hut Point would have meant long uncertainty and delay. As it happened, ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... long enough to sum you up as a sulky puppy," he said. "If you had any sort of gumption you would realize that you occupy a singularly precarious position. Were it not for the lucky accident that my colleague and I were on the spot this morning it is more than likely that the county police would have arrested you at sight. Don't give us any ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... of the original front had been handed over to the 29th Division, and the 6th Division now held a rectangular strip 2,500 yards by 7,000 yards, with the head at Cantaing and Noyelles, and the rear in the Hindenburg Main Line. The 29th Division had a precarious hold of the ground across the canal on the right, and the Guards Division was having hard fighting at ...
— A Short History of the 6th Division - Aug. 1914-March 1919 • Thomas Owen Marden
... of his life, the precarious occupation of a country school teacher. It was then, as it still is in many thinly settled parts of the country, an almost nomadic profession, a teacher seldom remaining more than one or two years in the same place. ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... of receiving succour from the Bridgewater having become very feeble, after two days of moderate weather had elapsed, I called a council of all the officers, to deliberate upon the best means of relieving ourselves from the precarious situation in which our misfortune, and captain Palmer's want of energy and humanity had left us exposed; and it was finally determined, that an officer and crew in the largest of the two six-oared cutters, should endeavour to get to Sandy Cape, sixty-three leagues ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... the Escolta, already bordered by American signs—and saloons,—and rendered even more than usually precarious by American drinks, the blue-shirted boys wandered, open-eyed, marvelling much to find 'twixt twelve and two the shutters up in all the shops not conducted, as were the bars, on the American plan, while from some, still more Oriental, the sun and ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... did not like the titles of some of my books, and inquired whether I really wanted them for my defence. I replied that I did. "Then," said he to the chief warder, "they may all be brought up, but you must take care they don't get about." At half-past eight, according to the rules, I retired to my precarious and uncomfortable couch; a few minutes later my gas was turned off, and I was left in almost total darkness to seek the sleep which I soon found. Thus ended my first day ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... the Doctor, who was quite as angry. "How dare you come here, disturbing my patients, and turning the place into a bear-garden just because you have dropped your idiotic eyeglass and broken it? Do you know I have poor fellows in the next room in a precarious state?" ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... enough to be anything," said Carol frankly. "Maybe you'll make it go, after all. I should like to have an author in the family and since Lark's lost interest, I suppose it will have to be you. I couldn't think of risking my complexion at such a precarious livelihood. But if you get stuck, I'll be glad to help you out a little. I really have an imagination myself, though ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... booksellers to speculate, and buy an increased supply of books on special terms. Speculation has now almost ceased in consequence of the enormous number of books published, which makes it difficult for a bookseller to keep a large stock of any single work, and renders the life of a new book so precarious that the demand for it may at any moment come to a ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... should there be Industry in a Country where all Property is precarious? What Subject will sow his Land that his Prince may reap the whole Harvest? Parsimony and Frugality must be Strangers to such a People; for will any Man save to-day what he has Reason to fear will be taken from him to-morrow? And ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... raged for about thirty-six hours, overturning our covered cart and threatening to sweep ourselves and our tents away. We had to load down our tent ropes with bags of earth, stones, sod, the bodies of our carts, wheels, boxes, and anything we could find, and even then we had but a precarious existence. Every now and then, by day and by night, there would arise a shout from the one tent or the other, and amid the roar of the wind we heard cries for the hammer and the spare tent pins. We managed to fix ourselves without being blown away, and when the ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... if in continuation of the precipitous cliff on which it is based. Originally, the only mode of ingress was by a narrow portal in the very wall which overtopped the precipice, opening upon a ledge of rock which afforded a precarious pathway, cautiously intersected, however, by a deep trench cut with great labour in the living rock; so that, in its original state, and before the introduction of artillery into the art of war, this tower might have been pronounced, and that not presumptuously, ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... out of the gymnasium unnoticed. This was the first time he had heard the particulars concerning that game, although on Saturday the surprising information had been telephoned to Oakdale that Wyndham had been barely able to squeeze out a precarious victory on her own grounds. As Eliot had stated, the Clearporters were batters to be feared, and Phil was now in no condition to be unruffled by this ...
— Rival Pitchers of Oakdale • Morgan Scott
... present. Thanks to poor old Dick the Firm is in rather a precarious condition! Another six months over, and we may be perfectly all right. No! I must stick on, and get another partner. And look here, Gladys, you know I let you do pretty nearly everything you like. But let me beg of you not to be too friendly with that young Davenport. I caught him looking very ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... servant's set of bedroom furniture. Do with a set! He was a gloomy man with (I should judge) some internal pain. I tried to tell him that there was quite a lot of middle-class people like myself in the country, people of limited or precarious means, whose existence he seemed to ignore; assured him some of them led quite beautiful lives. But he had no ideas beyond wardrobes. I quite forgot the business of shopping in an attempt to kindle a little human enthusiasm ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... blue eye, first attracted his envious notice; his steady, contented industry excited in him a desire to pervert a workman whose daily life was a practical argument against the doctrines of socialism, by which Offitt made a part of his precarious living; and after he had met Maud Matchin and had felt, as such natures will, the force of her beauty, his instinctive hate became an active, though secret, hostility. She had come one evening with Sleeny to a spiritualist conference frequented by Offitt, and he had at once ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... was the dominant power of Asia during the most interesting period of Jewish history, until taken by Cyaxares the Median. The limits of the empire varied at different times, for the conquered States which composed it were held together by a precarious tenure. But even in its greatest strength it was inferior in size and power to the Empire of Cyrus. To check rebellion,—a source of constant trouble and weakness,—the warlike monarchs were obliged to reconquer, imposing not only tribute and fealty, but overrunning ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... regained his balance upon his precarious seat by this time, and he finished with a ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... however, of his incessant toil, Lamarck's position continued to be most precarious. He lived by his pen, as a publisher's hack, and it was with difficulty that he obtained even the poorly paid post of keeper of the king's cabinet of dried plants. Like most other naturalists he had thus ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... courage have in thousands of cases brought our people to their proper place in the social scale, but it is only too often the case that adverse circumstances compel the great bulk of them to have recourse to the hardest, the most precarious, and the worst paid employments to be found ...
— The Life Story of an Old Rebel • John Denvir
... and poorest of the inhabitants of Scotland, and at a period when their daily meal must have been always scanty, and frequently precarious, one luxury seems to have established itself, which has unaccountably found its way into every part of the world. We mean tobacco. The inhabitants of Scotland, and especially of the Highlands, are notorious for their fondness for snuff; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII. F, No. 325, August 2, 1828. • Various
... soul is weak, . . . . . . . . But if I cannot plant resolve on hope, It will stand firm on certainty of woe. . . . Hopes have precarious life; But faithfulness can feed on suffering, And knows no disappointment. Trust in me. If it were needed, this poor trembling hand Should grasp the torch—strive not to let it fall, Though it were ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... of $79,864,100 of such surplus was applied to the payment of the principal and interest of the 3 per cent bonds still outstanding, and which were then payable at the option of the Government. The precarious condition of financial affairs among the people still needing relief, immediately after the 30th day of June, 1887, the remainder of the 3 per cent bonds then outstanding, amounting with principal and interest to the sum of $18,877,500, were called in and applied to the sinking-fund contribution ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... divine order of things, declares the possession of a great many children to be a blessing only when it really is so! And the other set of Hebraisers, have they not to learn that if they call their private acquaintances imprudent and unlucky, when, with no means of support for them or with precarious means, they have a large family of children, then they ought not to call the State well managed and prosperous merely because its manufactures and its citizens multiply, if the manufactures, which bring new citizens into existence just as ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... the South have swelled the tide of prejudice until it has almost revolutionized public sentiment, which has given birth to severe legislative enactments in some of the States, and almost ruined our interests and prospects in others, in which, in the opinion of your Committee, our situation is more precarious than it has been at any other period since ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... and 'to give an oracle', two ways of helping people in an emergency. Sometimes a tribe might happen to have a real ancestor buried in the neighbourhood; if so, his tomb would be an oracle. More often perhaps, for the memories of savage tribes are very precarious, there would be no well-recorded personal tomb. The oracle would be at some place sacred to the Chthonian people in general, or to some particular personification of them, a Delphi or a cave of Trophonius, a place ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... recognised by their physical type in modern England. "It is quite possible," says Mr. Freeman, "that even at the end of the sixth century there may have been within the English frontier inaccessible points where detached bodies of Welshmen still retained a precarious independence." Sir F. Palgrave has collected passages tending to show that parties of independent Welshmen held out in the Fens till a very late period; and this conclusion is admitted by Mr. Freeman ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... done. Sealing was no longer the regular, systematic pursuit it had been on that island, but had become precarious and changeful. At times, the men met with good success; then, days would occur in which not a single creature, of any of the different species, would be taken. The Vineyard schooner was not more than half-full, and the season was fast drawing ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... wherewith to cover his nakedness. The civilized nations of the present day were in their origin savages composed of erratic tribes,—mere wanderers who were occupied with war; employed in, the chace; painfully obliged to seek precarious subsistence by hunting in those woods which the industry of their successors has cleared; which their labour has covered with yellow waving ears of nutritious corn; in time they have become stationary: ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... had greatly excited Mrs. Bundlecombe, who had for some time past been in that precarious state in which any excitement, however slight, is dangerous. She was completely happy, because she had jumped to the conclusion that Lettice would henceforth do for Alan all that she herself would ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... open, and upon the rough floor the snow-water from the recent thaw had collected in puddles and frozen, rendering the footing precarious. ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... images are more domestic, quiet, leisurely. No severe, wasting labor is demanded before corn and milk for wife and little ones are wrung from reluctant clods. No danger is there of sons or daughters being obliged to quit their homes and roam over foreign lands for a precarious and beggarly subsistence. No prairie-boy will ever carry about a hand-organ and a monkey, or see his sister yoked to the plough, by the side of horse or ox. Blessed be God that there are still places where grinding poverty is unfelt and unfeared! "Riches fineless" belong to these deep, soft fields, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... moreover, of a precarious, risky parasitism, wherein the Meloid is not sure of finding its food, which the Sitaris finds so deftly, getting itself carried by the Anthophora, after being born at the very entrance to the Bee's galleries and leaving its retreat only to slip ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... voice—albeit a faint one—could not be other than a recent occupant of the small boat he had seen disappear. This person must have leaped upward at the critical moment, and caught one of the taut strands upon which he had somehow managed to hoist himself and to which he now clung desperately. It was a precarious position and one that the motion of the yacht made but ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... may need it yet," asserted Mr. Parker. "I have been making some observations just now, and the island is in a very precarious state. It is, I believe, resting on only a slim foundation, and the least shock may break that off, and send it into the sea. That is what my ...
— Tom Swift and his Wireless Message • Victor Appleton
... passion of the mind for unknown good, but experience.—The forest of Arden in As You Like It can alone compare with the mountain scenes in Cymbeline: yet how different the contemplative quiet of the one from the enterprising boldness and precarious mode of subsistence in the other! Shakespeare not only lets us into the minds of his characters, but gives a tone and colour to the scenes he describes from the feelings of their imaginary inhabitants. He at the same time preserves the utmost propriety of action and passion, and gives all their ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... under the rule of some eight or ten overseers, and the brutal surveillance of a company of Libyan or negro mercenary troops. The least political disturbance in Egypt, an unsuccessful campaign, or any untoward incident of a troubled reign, sufficed to break up the precarious stability of these remote establishments. The Bedawin at once attacked the colony; the workmen deserted; the guards, weary of exile, hastened back to the valley of the Nile, and all was at ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... and the right of Great Britain to manage British affairs will not prevent the dismemberment of England. Home Rule, such as it is for England, means at best a totally different thing from Home Rule for Ireland. In the case of England it means a limited and precarious control of legislation for Great Britain by British members of Parliament. In the case of Ireland it means the real and substantial and exclusive government of Ireland by an Irish Ministry and ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... there is something in the still sails of one of those inventions of man's industry peculiarly eloquent of repose: the rest seems typical of the repose of our own passions, short and uncertain, contrary to their natural ordination; and doubly impressive from the feeling which admonishes us how precarious is the stillness, how utterly dependent on every wind rising at any moment and from any quarter of the heavens! They saw before them no living forms, save of one or two peasants ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... would indemnify him from the consequences, he would forthwith pay the legacy into his hands. To this proposal the father replied that it was not to be supposed he would risk the fortune of his only child upon any idle scheme or precarious issue; and therefore he thought it reasonable, that he should have the use of it in the meantime; and that, as to security, he was loth to trouble any of his friends about an affair which might be compromised without their interposition; observing, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... head of the table. They hailed him as the discoverer who had made their fortunes. From their talk it was clear that there had been much difficulty about finding the cave, and that for a time Mr. Tubbs's position had been precarious. Finally Captain Magnus had stumbled ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... following year espoused John, eldest son of Alan, Sire d'Albret. Catherine at this time was fourteen years old, and her husband, who by the marriage became King of Navarre, was only one year her senior. Their title to the crown was disputed by a dozen pretenders, for several years they exercised but a precarious authority, and eventually, in July 1512, Ferdinand the Catholic despatched the Duke of Alva to besiege Pamplona. On the fourth day of the siege John and Catherine succeeded in escaping from their capital, which, three days later, surrendered. Ferdinand, having sworn to maintain the fueros, ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. III. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... humour led him to make these low appeals to the witless. And even as he looked the cross-eyed man entered the scene. Garbed in the weirdly misfitting clothes of a waiter, holding aloft a loaded tray of dishes, he entered on roller skates, to halt before Baird with his uplifted tray at a precarious balance. ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... and alert. He thrilled with the thought that in all probability he would have a commendatory letter from the Admiral to send to his father and that a duplicate would be published to the fleet. As for his position in the house, that was hourly growing more precarious. So far as he could gather, almost every one but the Prince and the Wellington boys knew his identity, and it certainly could not be long before this ignorant minority would be wiped out. There must be action, and quick action. With the Prince away for the night the opportunity could ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... blasting, had not been made at the South. No saltpeter was in store at any Southern point; it was stored wholly at the North. There were no worked mines of lead except in Virginia, and the situation of those made them a precarious dependence. The only cannon-foundry existing was at Richmond. Copper, so necessary for field-artillery and for percussion-caps, was just being obtained in East Tennessee. There was no rolling-mill for bar-iron south of Richmond, and but few blast-furnaces and these, with trifling exceptions, ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... borders had little attachment to the monarchs, whom they termed, in derision, the kings of Fife and Lothian; provinces which they were not legally entitled to inhabit[34], and which, therefore, they pillaged with as little remorse as if they had belonged to a foreign country. This strange, precarious, and adventurous mode of life, led by the borderers, was not without its pleasures, and seems, in all probability, hardly so disagreeable to us, as the monotony of regulated society must have been to those, who ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... gaps in the process, the theory which would derive all things out of matter by development is seen to be a very precarious one. ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... not return to port until the last minute of the open season had expired, they had before them nearly a month in which to recover their exhausted energies and learn the business of sealing. White had suffered so severely, and reached such a precarious condition, that he required every day of the allotted time for recuperation, and even at its end his strength was by no means fully restored. Cabot, on the other hand, woke after a thirty-six-hour nap, ravenously hungry, and as fit as ever for anything that might offer. After that, although ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe
... great ship close beside him, and grasping a rope trailing from the bowsprit, managed by its aid to climb up until he reached the bobstay, across which he seated himself with his back to the stem. The position was a precarious one, and after a time he gained the wooden carved work above, and obtained a seat there just below the bowsprit, and hidden from the sight of those on deck a few feet above him. As he knew the vessels were drifting to leeward towards the shoals, he hoped to remain ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty
... pleasures. They who have learnt, from their own experience, a just confidence in their own powers; they who have tasted the delights of well-earned praise, will not lightly trust to chance, for the increase of self-approbation; nor will those pursue, with too much eagerness, the precarious triumphs of fortune, who know, that in their usual pursuits, it is in their own power to command success proportioned to their exertions. Perhaps it may be thought, that we should have deferred our eulogium upon literature till we came to speak ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... the precarious nature of the business. You might sometimes go a month, perhaps, without selling a sketch, and meanwhile your expenses would go on. I think, however, that I have found a way of obviating this objection. I have a friend—Mr. Bushnell—who is in the ...
— Chester Rand - or The New Path to Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr
... little, low consulting at the door with the renowned "ship's doctor," who positively refused to approach me because he had just come from a case of ship-fever in the steerage, which he feared to communicate to one in my precarious state, but who sent in his imperative orders that I should have soup and sherry-cobbler forthwith, and try and build up my strength for the time of debarkation—speaking in a low, growling voice divested of its ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... his father, in his fits of drunken fury, and had been obliged to forage for himself for the most part, getting a meal from one neighbor, a basket of provision from another, and so managed to eke out a precarious subsistence in the tumble-down shanty which he and ...
— The Young Outlaw - or, Adrift in the Streets • Horatio Alger
... it necessary to unite to repel the foe. They chose Clovis as their leader. This was the origin of the French monarchy. He was but little elevated above the surrounding chieftains, but by intrigue and power perpetuated his supremacy. For about three hundred years the family of Clovis retained its precarious and oft-contested elevation. At last, this line, enervated by luxury, became extinct, and another family obtained the throne. This new dynasty, under Pepin, was called the Carlovingian. The crown descended generally from father to son for about ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... risk even further rebuff. He would write again, and this time he would trust no precarious and problematical post-office. He would drop his letter into the Pixley letter-box himself, and so be ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... though in response to my wish, was a fitting knight to play a leading role with my young lady, the desire for whose wellbeing had taken grip of me. For her sweet sake, and the sake of the fragrant manliness of the stalwart and deserving knight, I straightway resolved to enter the thankless and precarious business of matchmaking, one in which I had not had one iota of experience; but as women have to ace marriage, domesticity, and mostly all the issues of life assigned them, without training, I did not give ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... diminutive face, both in features and expression, is uncommonly like one end of a cocoa-nut. What a sad lot for these children to be left thus—perhaps even turned adrift by their parents, to wander about the streets, and pick up, here and there, a precarious crumb! And now, as I turn round, I see three others, apparently in the same wretched outcast condition—two boys and a girl. The elder boy seems not to care much about it; he has, no doubt, become more accustomed to his lot. He is between twelve and thirteen. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... it?" she said. "And how shall it come to pass in the face of the Pharaoh's denial and the might of Egypt's arms? Thou art young and so am I, but both of us remember Rameses. There has been none like him. He overthrew the world, did he not? And it was a hard task and a precarious and a long one, when he but measured arms with mortals. Is it not a problem worthy the study to ponder how he might have fared in battle with ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... tenure by which Englishmen in the public service held their posts became the subject of debates in the Union Parliament, and the employment of Government servants of colour was decidedly precarious. They were swept out of the Railway and Postal Service with a strong racial broom, in order to make room for poor whites, mainly of Dutch descent. Concession after concession was wrung from the Government by fanatical Dutch postulants for office, for Government doles and ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... under way again, Rex looked about for the rest of the train, but in vain. After a halt of a minute or so he decided that they were lost and would have to stay lost, the situation being too precarious, in this land of policemen, with one hundred and ninety pounds of noisy uncertainty on his hands, to risk any unnecessary movement. Billy kept every breath of time alive and varied. Within two minutes ...
— A Good Samaritan • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... aid of philosophy. Marcus Aurelius was an Emperor of Rome, and Diogenes was a bachelor living rent free. I want the philosophy of the bank clerk married on thirty shillings a week, of the farm labourer bringing up a family of eight on a precarious wage of twelve shillings. The troubles of Marcus Aurelius were chiefly those ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... chamber locked up all the day, spending his time in devout prayer, in reading the Scriptures, and in carding the wool which his wife spun. His wife also begged bread for herself and her children, by which precarious means they supported themselves. Thus the saints of God sustained hunger and misery, while the prophets of Baal lived in festivity, and were costily pampered ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... travelling a thousand miles ere the season is done. But the great demand for agricultural labor is in the summer. In the winter, work is slack, and these floating populations eddy into the cities to eke out a precarious existence and harrow the souls of the police officers until the return of warm weather and work. If there were constant work at good wages for every man, who ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... it rises. It is this ascending and contracting proportion that adds stability to any government; for when the departure is sudden from one extreme to another, we may pronounce that state to be precarious. The nobility therefore are the pillars, which are reared from among the people, more immediately to support the throne; and if that falls, they must also be buried under it's ruins. Accordingly, when in the last century the commons had determined to extirpate ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... left New York for Europe, Italy was "on the verge" of entering the great war. According to the meager reports that a strict censorship permitted to reach the world, Italy had been hesitating for many months between a continuance of her precarious neutrality and joining with the Allies, with an intermittent war fever in her pulses. It was known that she was buying supplies for her ill-equipped army—boots and food and arms. Nevertheless, American opinion had ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... devising means to overcome the climatic and other difficulties of the country was also German, with the result that they waxed fat and prosperous, while the people indigenous to the soil scraped a precarious living by tending the flocks and tilling the land of the interlopers. All through the country from Gaza, where there was actually a German school, to Haifa, of which the largest and wealthiest portion of the population was German, you will find these ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... the land of the Slavonians were fortunate in being regarded as aliens in a country which, as we have seen, they inhabited long before those who claimed to be its possessors by divine right of conquest. If their position was precarious, their sufferings were those of a conquered nation. As the whim and fancy of the reigning prince, knyaz, varied, they were induced one day to settle in the country by the offer of the most flattering privileges, and the next day ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... fugitive prince landed near Morlaix, in Brittany, having been absent from France about fourteen months, five of which had been months of the most perilous and precarious series of escapes and adventures ever recorded of a princely fugitive in history or romance. During these months of flight and concealment several hundred persons had been aware of his movements, but none, high or low, noble or outlaw, had a thought of betraying his secret. Among them all, the ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... blue. Eighteen hundred feet below, it might be more, the Tarn threaded lush bottom-lands, tilled fields, goodly orchards, plantations of walnut and Spanish chestnut, and infrequent, tiny villages that clung to precarious footholds between ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... any possibility that way had never entered her head. She could do nothing,—except dress like a lady with the smallest possible cost, and endeavour to be obliging. Now, at this moment, her condition was terribly precarious. She had quarrelled with Lady Linlithgow, and had been taken in by her old friend Lizzie,—her old enemy might, perhaps, be a truer expression,—because of that quarrel. But a permanent home had not even been promised to her; and poor Miss Macnulty was aware that ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... furnished in a manner conformable to its external appearance. It was, indeed, declared that the rooms were for the most part bare; and the young Duke never gave the lie to these assertions by throwing them open to his friends. It was said of him also that his income was so small and so precarious that it amounted almost to nothing, that the cross old Duke at Venice never allowed him a shilling, and that he had done everything in his power to destroy the hopes of a future inheritance. Nevertheless, he was beautiful to look ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... bank in London. Now he had borrowed 80,000 pounds at one bank, and 35,000 pounds at another. And, without his ships, could not possibly pay a quarter of the money. If the banks in question were run upon, and obliged to call in all their resources, his credit must go; and this, in his precarious position, was ruin. ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... prevented his receiving supplies by water. While the American vessels in the river above Fort Mifflin, the name given to the fort on Mud Island, rendered it difficult to forage in Jersey, Washington hoped to render his supplies on the side of Pennsylvania so precarious as to compel ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... are all growing together on a rise of ground near an old barn foundation. The ground is rich and they love it. Each bush is individual and distinctive as are their nuts—some tucked far in the husk, some bulging out in a precarious fashion, some fat and round, others long and narrow. They're interesting. I can let the butternuts, bitternuts and hickories pass, the heartnuts, chestnuts, and pecans can wait until I am sure they will bear here. The walnut will grow up along with the other trees—blending into the ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... officer's permission and later a precarious perch on the broken roof of the barn, while Private Robinson extended himself in the manufacture ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... Tennessee and North Carolina to Texas have neither pasture nor mowing; their feeble stock gains but a precarious livelihood from the cane-brakes or weeds of the forests and Northern hay. Corn and grain were transported by railway more than three hundred miles into the interior. The writer has stood beside a yoke of Georgia oxen ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... the village that had to be supplied with food was large, and, just previous to the hunt, they had been living on somewhat reduced allowance. Even the blackbirds shot by the brown-bodied urchins before mentioned had been thankfully put into the pot. Thus precarious is the supply of food among the Red-men, who on one day are starving, and the next are ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... In later years mamma disapproved, but there is (may I confess it?) this to be said for war, that beneath its awful frown—under cover of what I may venture to call the shaking of its gory locks—you can do a heap of things you wouldn't dream of under ordinary circumstances. Life, though more precarious, becomes distinctly less artificial. Two years ago, for instance, lulled in a false security by the so-called Peace of Amiens, I should as soon have thought ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... illustration at all times ready, when it was required. I resembled to a certain degree the persons we read of, who are said to be struck as if with a divine judgment. I was for a moment changed into one of the mere herd, de grege porcus. My powers therefore were precarious, and I could not always be the intrepid and qualified advocate of truth, if I vehemently desired it. I have often, a few minutes afterwards, or on my return to my chambers, recollected the train of ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... Pittsburg was for a long time in a precarious condition, perceiving which, Mr. Gould bought up all the stock he could find, and threw his whole ability and experience into the development of the same. The stock soon took an upward move, and when it reached 120 he sold his twenty-five thousand shares. We next see him ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... precarious, problematical, insecure; equivocal, ambiguous, indefinite, irresolute, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... spare conveniently,—but that troubled him less than the thought of Dresser's folly. It was likely that he had thrown up his position—he had chafed against it from the first—and had taken to the precarious career of professional agitator. Dresser had been speaking at meetings in Pullman, with apparent success, and his mind had been full of "the industrial war," as he called it. Sommers recalled that the man had been allowed to leave Exonia College, where he had taught for a year on his ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... a jolt that it was impossible to prevent; a crack was heard, and the vehicle began to lean over in a most precarious manner. The water now rose to the ladies' feet; the whole concern began to float, though John Mangles and Lord Glenarvan hung on to the side. ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... her parents in Martinique letters which had for their object to persuade her with the tenderness of love, with all the reasons of wisdom, to return to her home, to the house of her parents, to withdraw with bold resolution from all the inconveniences and humiliations of her precarious and dangerous situation, and, instead of living in humble solitude as a divorced, despised woman, sooner to come to Martinique, and there in her parents' home be again the ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... the rock. The mooring of the floating light was a great point gained, but in the erection of the beacon at this late period of the season new difficulties presented themselves. The success of such an undertaking at any season was precarious, because a single day of bad weather occurring before the necessary fixtures could be made might sweep the whole apparatus from the rock. Notwithstanding these difficulties, the writer had determined to make the trial, although he could almost have wished, upon looking at the state ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... succour from the Bridgewater having become very feeble, after two days of moderate weather had elapsed, I called a council of all the officers, to deliberate upon the best means of relieving ourselves from the precarious situation in which our misfortune, and captain Palmer's want of energy and humanity had left us exposed; and it was finally determined, that an officer and crew in the largest of the two six-oared cutters, should ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... the Marquis de St. Caux and the little body of royalists who still remained faithful to the king became more and more anxious; the position of the royal family was now most precarious; most of the troops in Paris had been sent to the frontier, and those left behind were disorganized and ready to join the mob. Two out of the three Swiss battalions had been sent away and but one remained at the Tuileries. ...
— In the Reign of Terror - The Adventures of a Westminster Boy • G. A. Henty
... the bonds of roads to be built by the proceeds of their sale. It was a false and dangerous system—and the event has proved its unsoundness—for new companies to rely from the outset upon this source for the means of construction. It was a hand-to-mouth policy, resting upon so precarious a foundation that, in the light of experience, we can only wonder that eminent and otherwise conservative bankers should have adopted it to the extent they did, thereby not only jeopardizing their own position, but imperiling the whole financial community. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... speak of. As Duelling was made a Fashion, the Point of Honour became, of Course, a common Topick of Discourse among the best bred Men: By this Means the Rules for Quarrelling and Ponctilio in Behaviour, which at first were very uncertain and precarious, came to be better understood, and refin'd upon from Time to Time, till, in the Beginning of the last Century, the Sence of Honour was arrived to such a Degree of Nicety all over Europe, especially in France, that barely looking upon a Man was often ...
— An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War • Bernard Mandeville
... sure of himself Max suddenly let go his precarious hold on the lower part of the railing. It was a bold thing to do, and must have sent a shudder through many a breast ashore, as men and women held their breath, and stared at ...
— Afloat on the Flood • Lawrence J. Leslie
... that startled sensation that follows unexpected, undesired slumber, the door was open, and Lovin Child was gone. She had not believed that he could open the door, but she discovered that its latch had a very precarious hold upon the worn facing, and that a slight twist of the knob was all it needed to swing the door open. She rushed out, of course, to look for him, though, unaware of how long she had slept, she was not greatly disturbed. ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... Apollo! Thee, from thy father stolen and bound To serve in Vulcan's clangorous smithy, Prometheus (primal Yankee) found, And, when he had tampered with thee, (Too confiding little maid!) In a reed's precarious hollow To our frozen earth conveyed: For he swore I know not what; 20 Endless ease should be thy lot, Pleasure that should never falter, Lifelong play, and not a duty Save to hover o'er the altar, Vision of celestial beauty, Fed with precious woods and spices; Then, perfidious! ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... fate, there was no chance for the operation and it was put off. But ... would it be possible to have it later? That the oculists could not decide. They were uncertain, so long as the blind man's health continued in this precarious state. ...
— Nobody's Girl - (En Famille) • Hector Malot
... were talking the cook set up a couple of precarious benches and laid a wide board thereon. Mose ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... education at the parish-school of Longside, whither his parents had removed, the subject of this memoir was sent, in his eleventh year, to tend cattle. When somewhat older, he found employment as a farm-servant; but having married in his twentieth year, he afterwards followed the more precarious occupation of a day-labourer. Of a delicate constitution, he suffered much from impaired health, being frequently, for months together, confined to the sick-chamber. During the periods of convalescence from illness, he composed ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... period after the American troops were first landed in France was that of dealing with the food situation, both at home and abroad. At that time the German U-boats had sunk merchant ships having a total of more than 5,000,000 tonnage, and the food situation was precarious in the Allied countries. Germany, on the other hand, because of long preparation for the struggle, coupled with efficient management and practices, was more largely independent of ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... were always "intended" to rule, and that no other outcome could even be considered by Nature. This is one of the remnants of ignorance certain religions have left: but it's odd that men who don't believe in Easter should still believe this. For the facts are of course this is a hard and precarious world, where every mistake and infirmity must ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... perhaps some relative, forced into this current of emigration, and obliged from necessity, in the evening, probably, of a long life, to abandon his State and friends, and the home of his fathers and childhood, to seek a precarious subsistence in the supposed ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... question. I cannot even discuss it with you or with anyone in your position. I have told you what my connections are; what my family is, you have now, I hope, some correct idea, and you will see how utterly impossible it is that I should, even to better my circumstances which I admit are somewhat precarious, make such a mesalliance— such a mistake, I mean, ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... conveyed their supplies from Batiscan to St. Augustin by water, and thence overland to Quebec, a distance of thirteen miles. But the presence of Admiral Holmes's squadron rendered this method of transport precarious, and an attempt was made to drive supplies overland from Batiscan; but as this place was sixty-seven miles distant from Quebec, famine laid its hand upon the city before they could arrive. French transports were therefore compelled to run the perilous blockade ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... Walters, taking a seat by her; "it's useless to disguise the fact that Ellis is in a precarious situation—how long he may be sick it is impossible to say; as soon as it is practicable, should he get better, we will bring him here. You remember, Ellen, that years ago, when I was young and poor, Ellis often befriended me—now 'tis my turn. You ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... condemned to die; but, notwithstanding his mother's interference to prevent the exercise of the royal clemency, he was pardoned by the queen, who afterwards gave him a pension of L50 a-year. He supported himself in a precarious way by writing poetical pieces. Lord Tyrconnell took him for a while into his house, and allowed him L200 a-year, but he soon quarrelled with him, and left. When the queen died he lost his pension, ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... refugees from Turkey, Bulgaria and Servia to be provided for, and the native population, owing to the rise in the cost of living {90} and to unemployment, also stood in urgent need of relief. At the same time, customs and other receipts became more and more precarious owing to the Allies' constant interference ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... participated in the counter-attacks and were subjected to a terrible concentrated fire from the British artillery and Canadian machine guns. Their losses were frightful and all German efforts to retake Hill 70 came to naught, while their hold on the central portion of the mining city became most precarious, as the Canadians consolidated the advantageous positions their valor ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... whether any man of great powers can permanently bury himself, no matter how obscure the position which he chooses. Sooner or later the world will find him out, and he will be lifted to his rightful place. When General Grant occupied a desk in the office of a lawyer in St. Louis, and made a precarious living by collecting bills, it didn't look as if Fame had a niche for him; but occasion came, and lifted him to distinction. So I must confess that the young graduate seemed to be making a mistake when, turning his back ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... a few fish were to be caught in the waters of their little harbour. Most of them also cultivated patches of ground on the sides of the valley which opened out at the further end of the gorge, but, except potatoes, their fields afforded but precarious crops. ...
— Michael Penguyne - Fisher Life on the Cornish Coast • William H. G. Kingston
... present system of the capitalist farmer, the great industries, and the universal world- market. Some see a solution of the social problem in sham co- operation, which is merely an improved form of joint-stockery: others preach thrift to (precarious) incomes of eighteen shillings a week, and industry to men killing themselves by inches in working overtime, or to men whom the labour-market has rejected as not wanted: others beg the proletarians not to breed so fast; an injunction the compliance with which might be at first of advantage ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... to ascend the rock, striding, with the help of his hands, from one precarious footstep to another, till he got about half-way up, where two or three bushes concealed the mouth of a hole, resembling an oven, into which the Baron insinuated, first his head and shoulders, and then, by slow gradation, the rest of his l ong body; his legs and feet ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... dilemma—Christianity or nothing. Inside Christianity, light and certainty; outside it, chaos. 'If it were not for the Gospels and the Church I should be a Positivist to-morrow. Your Theism is a mere arbitrary hypothesis, at the mercy of any rival philosophical theory. How, regarding our position as precarious, you should come to regard your own as ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Firmstone's nocturnal visits at any unexpected hour made napping a precarious business and visits to the Blue Goose not ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... the Property of private Birds, which they would make you believe was much safer amongst them, than under any other Government in the World, appeared to me to stand upon a very precarious Foot, since it was always at the Mercy of the Law, and the most cunning and sagacious amongst them could never pretend to be sure what Law was: Nay, it was often found by Experience, that what was Law one Day amongst them, was not so another; ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... time unconsciously, but spontaneously, and as part of what he felt. He would not, however, have dared to hold her hand on any other occasion, while always wanting to hold it, and wanting her also to share his not wholly reputed, though far from precarious, existence. He had never got so far as to tell her that; but if she had understanding she would realise after to-night what he had in his mind. She, feeling her arm thrill with the magnetism of his very vital palm, had her turn at explanation. "I ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the dashing Fremont would have found himself, is a matter of surmise. He had gambled strongly—on his own responsibility or at least at the unofficial suggestion of Benton—on an early declaration of war with Mexico. Failing such a declaration, he would be in a precarious diplomatic position, and must by mere force of automatic discipline have been heavily punished. However the dice fell for him. War with Mexico was almost immediately an actual fact. Fremont's injection into the revolution had been timed at the happiest ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... did he now though the path was dangerously narrow and rocky, overhanging unfathomable abysses of dark water. But Christina was in mortal terror, both for herself and Andrew. She did not dare to call his name, lest, in the sudden awakening he might miss his precarious foothold, and fall to unavoidable death. She found it almost impossible to follow him nor indeed in her ordinary frame of mind could she have done so. But the experience, so strange and thrilling, had lifted her in a measure above the control of the physical and she was conscious of an ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... when he came into power, had seen this unpopularity increase during the first six years of his rule, despite all the efforts he had put forth to govern well. His solicitude about maintaining a certain order within the state was described as haughtiness and harshness, his preoccupation lest the precarious resources of the government be dissipated in useless expenditures was dubbed avarice, and the prudence which had impelled him to restrain the rash policy of expansion and aggression which Germanicus had tried to initiate ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... lives of gentlemen devoted to such pleasures as Richard Swiveller, are extremely precarious. The spiritual excitement of the last fortnight, working upon a system affected in no slight degree by the spirituous excitement of some years, proved a little too much for him. That very night, Mr Richard was seized with an alarming illness, ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... 85, south side) is said to occupy the site of the small school, in the house of a tailor, in which Milton once earned a precarious living. Here, ever since 1841, the pleasant jester of Fleet Street has scared folly by the jangle of his bells and the blows of his staff. The best and most authentic account of the origin of Punch is to be found in the following communication to Notes ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... objections to your accepting it—objections I cannot name to her. She continues to vary; is sometimes worse, and sometimes better, as the weather changes; but, on the whole, I fear she loses strength. Papa says her state is most precarious; she may be spared for some time, or a sudden alteration might remove her before we are aware. Were such an alteration to take place while she was far from home, and alone with you, it would be terrible. The idea of it distresses me inexpressibly, and I tremble whenever ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... a last touch of horror to the thought of this precarious annular gangway in the sea, that even what there is of it is not of honest rock, but organic, part alive, part putrescent; even the clean sea and the bright fish about it poisoned, the most stubborn boulder burrowed in by worms, the lightest dust ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... amusements, for their life is painful and laborious; all their exertions are necessary to earn even their precarious subsistence. During the summer and autumn they are busily occupied in fishing for salmon and collecting their winter store of roots. In winter they hunt the deer on snow-shoes over the plains, and ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... dry and sunny, is at times precarious. In nooks sheltered by hills from the wind the heat is often oppressive, but on leaving their protection a chilling current of air is experienced. The mean winter temperature is 47 Fahr. The average number of rainy days in the year is 52, ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... by drooping fernery. It crosses streams of crystal clearness, rises afresh in endless gyrations under the pines only to vanish, yet again, into the twilight of deeper abysses, where it skirts the rivulet along precarious ledges, until some new obstruction blocks the way—so it writhes about for long, long ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... be mad. She confirmed this opinion by quarreling with Monsieur Rivet, who bought the business of Pons Brothers, and with whom the Baron wished to place her in partnership; she would be no more than a workwoman. Thus the Fischer family had relapsed into the precarious mediocrity from which Baron Hulot had ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... people? Because a nobleman will never be one of the lower classes. Why are the Turks generally kinder and more hospitable than ourselves? Because, under their wholly arbitrary system of government, the rank and wealth of individuals are always uncertain and precarious, so that they do not regard poverty and degradation as conditions with which they have no concern; to-morrow, any one may himself be in the same position as those on whom he bestows alms to-day. This thought, which occurs again and again in eastern romances, lends them a certain tenderness which ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... bishops with regard to the inferior clergy; for which I can find no reasons, but such as naturally should seem to operate a quite contrary way. The maintenance of the Clergy, throughout the kingdom, is precarious and uncertain, collected from a most miserable race of beggarly farmers; at whose mercy every minister lies to be defrauded: His office, as rector or vicar, if it be duly executed, is very laborious. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... back to an economic nationalism is a natural reaction of the war, and is fed by a dangerous and precarious peace. Fear, greed, and suspicion prompt the victorious nations to guard their gains by reverting to a close nationalism or a ringed alliance; humiliation, without humility, the bitter pain of thwarted ambitions, resentment at their punishment, dispose the vanquished nations to keep ...
— Morals of Economic Internationalism • John A. Hobson
... submissively to their yoke; the Spaniards began to work in earnest on their farms; and there descended upon island affairs a brief St. Martin's Summer of peace before the final winter of blight and death set in. The Admiral, however, was obviously in precarious health; his ophthalmia became worse, and the stability of his mind suffered. He had dreams and visions of divine help and comfort, much needed by him, poor soul, in all his tribulations and adversities. Even yet the cup was ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... dickey, a collar of too lenient flexure, and a black necktie with a 'made' bow that was fastened by means of a button and button-hole under the chin to the right; twenty times a day Meshach had to secure this precarious cravat. Lastly, the top and bottom buttons of his ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... serious on your mind than that? If, as you say, your—your financial position has been rendered precarious by this failure of the Marut Company, would it not be advisable to hurry on our marriage at once? Of course, in the meanwhile, if I can do anything to help ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... people in this section in colonial times. In 1720, Robert Temple from Cork brought to Maine five shiploads of people, mostly from the province of Munster. They landed at the junction of the Kennebec and Eastern rivers, where they established the town of Cork, which, however, after a precarious existence of only six years, was entirely destroyed by the Indians. For nearly a century the place was familiarly known to the residents of the locality as "Ireland." The records of York, Lincoln, and Cumberland counties contain references ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... Americans recognized that conditions were precarious, and that the greatest need was for a better organization. Zeal was not wanting. Whenever the British cannonade recommenced, whenever there were rumors of an attack, the troops were ready for a fight. But means of communication, and prompt and ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... almost overtook them. A freakish air current caught the flitter as if in a giant hand, and Raf fought for control as they lost altitude past the margin of safety. Had he not allowed for just such a happening they might have been smashed against one of the rock tips over which they skimmed to a precarious safety. Raf, his mouth dry, his hands sweating on the controls, took them up—higher than was necessary—to coast above the last of that rocky spine to see below the beginning of the downslopes leading to the plains the range cut in half. He heard ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... very possible, that he has no right of settlement in Petrograd and is allowed to stay there only as one of the wounded; a rather precarious right! And that which is home for others is nothing but a kind of honourable imprisonment for him; he will be kept for a while, then they will let him go, saying: "Go away, you must not ...
— The Shield • Various
... that something demanding instant attention had happened to the boom. He therefore ran at once to the man's assistance, ready to help him personally or to call other aid as the exigency demanded. Owing to the precarious nature of the passage, he could not see beyond his feet until very close to the workman. Then he looked up to find the man, squatted on the boom, ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... themselves from the World; when, to support their Independency, the Father laboured as well as he could at Husbandry, and the Mother and Daughter sometimes got spinning and knitting Work, to help to furnish the Means of Subsistence; which however was so precarious and uncertain, that they often, for many Weeks together, lived on nothing but Cabbage and Bread boiled in Water. But God never forsaketh the Righteous, nor suffereth those to perish who put their Trust in him. At this Time a Lady, who was just come to England, ...
— Goody Two-Shoes - A Facsimile Reproduction Of The Edition Of 1766 • Anonymous
... its external beauties, which have enabled it, in a certain degree, to resist the centralising tendency, and have hitherto always supplied it with a succession of eminent men. But now that London is at our door, how precarious is our hold of them, and how ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... mental audacity of the youth won him recognition; he picked up a precarious living, and was a frequenter at scientific lectures and discussions, and in gatherings where great themes were up for debate, he ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... farther from the stem of the tree and out upon the tapering branch, where his footing became ever more precarious. The cat, infuriated by the pain of spear wounds, was overstepping the bounds of caution. Already he had reached a point where he could do little more than maintain a secure footing, and it was this ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... He must press on this marriage at once. Delay would only be worse. His situation here was precarious. If he were to linger too long, the Carlists might rally, and he would be besieged. Before that could happen he must have Katie for his wife, and then retreat as fast as possible. He could not defer the ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... Europe, 1851-1852, with his wife, whose health was then precarious, stimulated his scholarly interests, and gave substance to his study of Dante and Italian literature. In October, 1853, his wife died; she had borne him three children: the first-born, Blanche, died in ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... in the habit of trusting to her son that she dismissed the matter with less anxiety than Fred felt. He knew very well that trusting for something to turn up is a precarious dependence, but there seemed nothing better ...
— The Erie Train Boy • Horatio Alger
... came too late, for as he spoke another order was given out by Joe Cross, who had loosed the precarious hold he had with the boat-hook, as he shouted while giving the boat ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... ordering the death of the honest priest who had refused to grant him absolution. The Christian sect having become a powerful and dangerous faction, Constantine conceived the idea of strengthening his usurped and precarious position by attaching it to his interest, and to that end he professed himself a convert to its tenets, and, taking the Church of Rome under his especial patronage, elevated her Bishop to the rank of a prince of the Empire and gave him one of his ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... a scant foothold, but mostly the face of the cliff was one vast, frowning rock that rose almost perpendicularly. On tiny ledges and in crevices of the rock little ferns grew in masses, hanging down the face of the cliff like green fringes. Wild flowers had taken possession of the crannies. In precarious footholds, where it seemed impossible for them to exist, a few trees had sprung up, their roots crawling fantastically over the rocks in search of bits of earth to grow in, while the tops of the trees stood up slantingly against the face of the cliff. Mostly ...
— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... with God. There are plenty of other bonds that draw us to one another; but these, if they are not strengthened by this deepest of all bonds, the affinity of souls, that are moving together in the realm of light and purity, are precarious, and apt to snap. Sin separates men quite as much as it separates each man from God. It is the wedge driven into the tree that rends it apart. Human society with its various bonds is like the iron hoop that may be put around the barrel staves, giving them a quasi-unity. The ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... Signor Rinaldi, of Turin, in 1873, we learn that Pressenda was the son of poor parents, who lived in Lequio-Berria, a hamlet in the vicinity of Alba, in Piedmont. His father Raffaele was a strolling fiddler, and gained his precarious livelihood by playing at village fairs and other rejoicings. On these occasions he was accompanied by his son Giovanni, who followed the occupation of his father, playing the Violin with some degree of ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... by the connecting bridge which I have just spoken about was, to say the least of it, a precarious proceeding. But it would save us a mile or two, and in our tired state this was worth considering. After a minutes rest we placed the sledge on this ice bridge, and, as Crean described it afterwards, "We went along the crossbar ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... thither in force and with despatch. The Dutch are like to do nothing this year; their affairs draw to a crisis, and it is to be hoped, that it will prove favorable to our friends. The Emperor is occupied in ecclesiastical and civil changes, his health is in a precarious state, and he runs the risk of losing entirely his sight. The motions of Russia indicate a war with the Porte no longer Sublime. The Empress negotiates loans in Holland and at Genoa. I have taken measures to be ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various
... his precarious situation; he knew that these men had already condemned him to death. The quiet repression they imposed on themselves told him as much. But his gaze passed calmly from one to another, without the least shrinking. All of them save Keller and Phil were unusually ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... knew the truth, which is that artificial abortion, even under the best hospital conditions, is a precarious undertaking, so frequently leading to invalidism as never to be 'safe'; if, moreover, we spread the truth about Russia's legalized abortions, and put a stop to the false reports circulated by ill-informed enthusiasts ...
— Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Various Aspects of the Problem of Abortion in New Zealand • David G. McMillan
... I must take this opportunity of impressing the necessity of being strictly particular in watching the due season; for of all the variety of articles in this department to furnish the well-regulated store-room, nothing is so precarious, for frequently after the first week that walnuts come in season, they become hard and shelled, particularly if the season is a very hot one; therefore let the prudent housekeeper consider it indispensably necessary they should be purchased ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... twelve feet above the water. The situation was all the more interesting because I saw no possible way to land my fish. I could not lead him ashore, and my frail tackle could not be trusted to lift him sheer from that pit to my precarious perch. What should I do? call for help? but no help was near. I had a revolver in my pocket and might have shot him through and through, but that novel proceeding did not occur to me until it was too late. I would have taken a Sam Patch leap into ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... laughing; "but your line touched bottom, and gave me a new feeling which I think was good for me. Now, since we're going to know each other, I want to introduce myself. My name is Webster—named after the great Daniel, but called Dan so that future historians can distinguish between us—and I earn a precarious living by chasing news for a New ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... Lord Howick's speech was directed, felt himself most deeply hurt, and so expressed himself in private afterwards to Lord Melbourne. Upon the whole, Lord Melbourne cannot but consider that affairs are in a most precarious state, and that whilst there is so much discontent fermenting within the Cabinet itself, there must be great doubt of Lord Melbourne's being much longer able to hold ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... distance the foothold was precarious. Jenks helped the girl in this part of the climb. His strong, gentle grasp gave her confidence. She was flushed with exertion when they stood together on the summit of this elevated perch. They could look ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... old, he was made tutor of Christ Church, Oxford, where he lectured on Greek, rhetoric, and philosophy. He interested himself in theology, but never took orders; and he also studied medicine and for a time practiced it. His own health was precarious, he having suffered, from chronic consumption nearly all his life. Nevertheless, he accomplished a tremendous amount of work. The friendship of the Earl of Shaftesbury gave Locke some political prestige. He lived in the family of that nobleman ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... barroom, and discover the wreckage of the slot-machine! Chick was beginning to feel the handcuffs on his wrists, when he became aware of ascending footsteps overhead. What were they going up-stairs for? Was it a sparring match? Forgetting his precarious position he leaned forward to listen, upsetting a box ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... 28.—This day we had the afterpiece of the debauch. The king and queen, in European clothes, and followed by armed guards, attended church for the first time, and sat perched aloft in a precarious dignity under the barrel-hoops. Before sermon his majesty clambered from the dais, stood lopsidedly upon the gravel floor, and in a few words abjured drinking. The queen followed suit with a yet briefer allocution. All the men in church were next addressed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... much the more fortunate and singular as our Government is far from being content with the mutinous spirit (as Bonaparte calls it) of the Government of Naples, which, considering its precarious and enfeebled state, with a French army in the heart of the kingdom, has resisted our attempts and insults with a courage and dignity ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... jealousy, pride, resentment, and despair. The punishment of Cain was expulsion from his father's house, the further curse of the land for him, and the hatred of the human family. He relinquished his occupation, became a wanderer, and gained a precarious support, while his descendants ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... it! Rising cautiously to her knees she crawled up one more step and rested a moment, digging her fingers into the crevices of the rock and finding a precarious foothold against a projecting ledge. Keeping her eyes fixed upon the door she scrambled up a few inches further, then paused again, exhausted with ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... Malone said. He let go of the post with one hand, keeping a precarious grip with the other. He stared at his watch. The hands danced back and forth, but he focused on them after a while. It was 1:05. "Happened just—a few minutes ago," he said. "Maybe you can ...
— Out Like a Light • Gordon Randall Garrett
... facts to the House of Lords. Finding how serious the king's illness was, the party of the Duke of York concluded to wait a little longer. There was a great probability that the king would soon die. The life, too, of the infant son was of course very precarious. He might not survive the dangers of infancy, and in that case the Duke of York would succeed to the throne at once without any struggle. So a sort of compromise was effected. Parliament appointed the Duke of York protector and defender ...
— Margaret of Anjou - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... pathetick page, had not Mr. Maclean of Col... piloted us safe into his own harbour.' Johnson's Works, ix. 117. Sir Walter Scott says, 'Their risque, in a sea full of islands, was very considerable. Indeed, the whole expedition was highly perilous, considering the season of the year, the precarious chance of getting sea-worthy boats, and the ignorance of the Hebrideans, who, notwithstanding the opportunities, I may say the necessities, of their situation, are very careless and unskilful sailors.' Croker's Boswell, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... centuries remote from one another as well as from ours. In short, that they might leave no liberty untaken, even a wild fantastical similitude of sounds has served to prop up a system. As the materials they have are few, so are the very best and such as pass for authentic extremely precarious, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... among snow patches which grew in frequency and extent; at noon he built his little fire on a snow crust. He crossed a raging tributary of the American, travelling upward along the rock-bound, spray-wet gorge a full mile before he came to the possible precarious ford. At six o'clock he made a second fire in a bleak windy pass, surrounded by a glimmering ghostly waste. Trees were stiff with frost; the wind whistled and jeered through them and about sharp crags, filling the crisp air with eerie, shuddersome music. He set his coffee to boil ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... undertake this voyage: but I determined previously to mention the affair to Paul; and my surprise was great, when this young man said to me, with a degree of good sense above his age, 'And why do you wish me to leave my family for this precarious pursuit of fortune? Is there any commerce more advantageous than the culture of the ground, which yields sometimes fifty or a hundred fold? If we wish to engage in commerce, we can do so by carrying our superfluities to the town, without my wandering to the Indies. Our mothers tell me, that Domingo ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... the several reserves, together with certain farming implements; and it was now represented to me by the spokesman of the bands, that as the Queen had, with that kindness of heart which distinguished her dealings with her red children, expressed a desire to see the Indians discard their former precarious mode of living and adopt the agricultural pursuits of the white man, they were desirous of acceding to the wish of their great Mother, and were now prepared to receive the gifts she had been good enough to speak of, ...
— The Treaties of Canada with The Indians of Manitoba - and the North-West Territories • Alexander Morris
... sacred anchor of the Ecclesiastical Reservation, ('Reservatum Ecclesiasticum',) which makes the temporal existence of a spiritual prince entirely dependent on his fidelity to the olden religion, the Roman Catholic Church in Germany is still held fast; and precarious, indeed, would be its situation were this anchor to give way. The principle of the Ecclesiastical Reservation was strongly opposed by the Protestants; and though it was at last adopted into the treaty of peace, its insertion was qualified with the declaration, that parties had ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... brandy and lingered yet a while on earth, to take a drink with the boys. But for this he would have been no more—or possible a great deal less—in a moment. So he survived; but he has been in a mighty precarious condition ever since. I have been up to see how he was getting along two or three times a day.... He is a very sick man; I was up there a while ago, and I could see that his friends had begun to entertain hopes that he would not get over it. As soon as I saw that, all my enmity vanished; I even felt ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... Colors, which came into being in 1807 and went out of existence in 1812—a victim, says Hughes, of the condition of public apathy which brought about in the same year a reconstruction of the older organization under the joint title of the Oil and Water Color Society, and which eked out a precarious existence until the birth of the association now known as the Royal Institute for ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... violently forward off the seat, striking her head as she fell, and while the car yet rocked with the force of its collision with the motor-bus another vehicle drove blindly into it from the rear. It lurched sickeningly and jammed at a precarious angle, ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... society, and in all times. We found, or we thought we found, an inconvenience in having every man the judge of his own cause. Therefore judges were set up, at first, with discretionary powers. But it was soon found a miserable slavery to have our lives and properties precarious, and hanging upon the arbitrary determination of any one man, or set of men. We fled to laws as a remedy for this evil. By these we persuaded ourselves we might know with some certainty upon what ground we stood. But lo! differences arose upon the sense and interpretation of those laws. Thus ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Precarious Tenant of that gay Retreat, Fann'd by pure gales on Hampstead's airy downs, Where filial troops for thee delighted wait, And their fair Mother's smile thy ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... unfolded, more absorbing, more overpowering, more abiding than the brightest of visible objects, which to the eye of the philosopher looking inward, seemed to pale before them, retaining only a faint and precarious existence. At the same time, the minds of men parted into the two great divisions of those who saw only a principle of motion, and of those who saw only a principle of rest, in nature and in themselves; there were born Heracliteans or Eleatics, as there ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... The old time wrapping of twine or of raffia had to be released in order to allow growth at the point of union of scion and stock. When cord is used it cuts deeply into the new growth, and raffia, which is placed on flat, will be burst open. In either case new wrapping is required at a precarious time, according to old methods. The Spanish windlass, which is used in surgery for controlling haemorrage, seemed to me to be applicable for fastening scions in place. It consists in a paraffined cord with ends tied in a firm knot but hanging loosely ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... of those precarious ladies who make uncertain incomes by writing full-bodied storyettes. In the most dismal circumstances she enjoyed a buoyancy bordering on the indecent; which always amused old Heythorp's cynicism. But of his grandchildren Phyllis and Jock (wild ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... had been so astonishingly bold and quick that the main body were unaware of the success; and Colonel Duran, thinking the explosion was caused by the bursting of one of the enemy's guns, continued steadily firing at the fort. The position of the twenty men and three officers was precarious, indeed, as they were thus exposed to a heavy fire from behind, as well as in front. With splendid heroism, however, they held on to the advantage they had gained till some reinforcements came up; and then, pressing on through the shattered gate, ...
— Through Three Campaigns - A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti • G. A. Henty
... old game of Rafts,—a game that will be played till all the oceans are dry and all the trees in the world are felled—and after. And we were all crowded together on the precarious little platform, and Selina occupied every bit as much room as I did, and Charlotte's legs didn't dangle over any more than Harold's. The pitiless sun overhead beat on us all with tropic impartiality, and the hungry ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... all possible tenacity. It was Goodman, and a little farther on was Howland tossed upon a small island, with his brother stranded upon a rock some distance below. Howland struck out for Goodman with a pole, by means of which he relieved him from his precarious position, and very soon the wrecked crew stood together, bruised, shaken and scared, but not disabled. A swift, dangerous river was on each side of them and a fall below them. It was now a problem how to release them from this imprisonment. Sumner volunteered, and in one of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... slime; but he himself bounded off right-handed. The peril was appalling, the possibility untried, the chance one which only a doomed man would have taken. But he reached the straw-bale, and it gave him a momentary, a precarious footing. He could not regain his balance, he could not even for an instant stand upright on it. But from its support he leapt on convulsively, and, as a pike, flung from above, wounded him in the shoulder, he fell his length in the slough—but forward, with his outstretched hands ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... Graves, refolding the will, "is purely formal. It is dated May 15th, three years ago. Your brother, Captain Warren, evidently realized, although no one else seems to have done so, the precarious state of his health, and prepared, as every careful person should, for ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... warm time discussing the situation," remarked John, as he noted the surging inhabitants. That there was indecision became apparent, and the condition of the Krishnos more precarious, as light began to give them a more decided glimpse of the activities ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Conquest of the Savages • Roger Thompson Finlay
... reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The unceasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon the workers begin to form combinations (Trades Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they ...
— The Communist Manifesto • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
... what we may expect. What we call reason in Man is not an innate endowment, basic and enduring, but a tardy acquisition and a fragile composition. The slightest physiological knowledge will tell us that it is a precarious act of balance, dependent on the no less greater instability of the brain, nerves, circulation and digestion. Take women that are hungry and men that have been drinking; place a thousand of these together, and let them excite each other with their cries, their anxieties, and the contagious reaction ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... me in confidence and as a professional secret, I would not disclose it to anyone. Having friends in Boston, she made some excuse to visit them, and she was not long there when her husband received a telegram, stating that his wife had had a premature confinement and lay in a precarious state in Boston, whither her loving husband instantly repaired. The child (a beautiful girl) was sent to Mrs. Sedley in Montreal, and given out to nurse. She was eventually adopted by a childless dry goods merchant in ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... Scottish professorships—those which are fundamentally morticed to the moral institutions of the land—are upon the footing of Oxford tutorships, as regards emoluments; that is, they are not suffered to keep up a precarious mendicant existence, upon the alms of the students, or upon their fickle admirations. It is made imperative upon a candidate for admission into the ministry of the Scottish Kirk, that he shall show a certificate of attendance through a given number ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... outside the door. He is a dismounted cavalry-corps man, and he owns one cow. His fence, I may note, belonged to a little wooden farm we bought in Switzerland. Its human inhabitants are scattered; its beasts follow a precarious living as wild guinea-pigs on ...
— Floor Games; a companion volume to "Little Wars" • H. G. Wells
... drawn guns ordering the women into the boats. All feared to leave the comparative safety of a broad and firm deck for the precarious smaller boats. Women clung to their husbands, crying that they would never leave without them, and had to be ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... critics give to him the Talbot scenes and the quarrel in the Temple; but Professor Neilson warns us that the grounds for this and other assignments of authorship in the play "are in the highest degree precarious." ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... this Ministry have been briefly stated at the close of the last chapter; working with a precarious majority, they had to cope with starvation and revolt in Ireland, Chartism in ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... appointments on the editorial and reportorial staff of all contemporary journals paying good salaries, the saddest are those written by more than middle-aged men with families. Some have for years been earning a precarious living as reporters or sub-editors on obscure papers, and now find themselves adrift; others are men who, having vainly knocked at all other gates, are flushed by the happy thought that at least they can write acceptably for the newspapers; others, again, already engaged in daily work, are ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... obtained for the future. Ossaroo's skill had provided their breakfast; but how about their dinner? And after that their supper? Even should something turn up for the next meal, they might not be so fortunate in obtaining the next after that; and this precarious way of subsistence—living, as it were, from hand to mouth—would be a constant exposure of their lives to the chances ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... snow-bridges that crumbled away beneath their feet; of furious, icy winds that, seeming to be imbued with demoniac intelligence and malignity, always assailed them in some especially perilous situation, and sought to buffet them from their precarious hold; and of long hours of intolerable suffering when, during the hours of darkness, they were compelled to camp on some snow-patch and build themselves a snow-hut as a partial protection from the howling, marrow-piercing, snow-laden gale. Such a narrative, however, exciting as it might be in ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
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