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More "Sheer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reading some miserable cant about Southern humanity, for there are people everywhere who take the wrong side of every subject, from sheer obstinacy. What can disprove the laws of human nature? They require that things should be at the South as our ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... actually overtaken by the breaking crest of the wave, she is apt to refuse to answer her helm, and he who is steering her loses all control over her; she seems to be seized with a perverse determination to take a broad sheer one way or the other, with disastrous results, despite a hard-over helm, and then the only thing to be done to retrieve the situation is to effect a lightning shift of helm against all your past experience and your better judgment. But notwithstanding this, it generally has the desired effect, ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... But when he had finished the sheer, hopeless snare, the Father sent glorious Argos-Slayer, the swift messenger of the gods, to take it to Epimetheus as a gift. And Epimetheus did not think on what Prometheus had said to him, bidding him never ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... drooping from sheer weariness, and a few minutes later he was lying back fast asleep, with nature working steadily and well to build ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... though the roof still stretched above him; and before him lay the two abysses full of stars, for they cut their way through the whole Earth and revealed the under sky; and threading its course between them went the way, and it sloped upward and its sides were sheer. And beyond the abysses, where the way led up to the farther chambers of the fortress, Leothric heard the musicians playing their magical tune. So he stepped on to the way, which was scarcely a stride in width, and moved along it holding Sacnoth naked. And to and fro beneath ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... had said that she had not changed; now he perceived that she had. Not in face, except that it was more beautiful; not in form, except that it was a little fuller—no! She had changed spiritually. There was more of her, as it were, something of activity and daring, where there had been sheer passive resistance. 'Ah!' he thought, 'that's her independent income! Confound ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... still as good as anybody, and are wild to regain their old position. If they had always been poor and commonplace, they would not be so likely to presume. What you say about the girl's not caring for you is sheer nonsense. She'd marry you to-morrow if she could. The one idea of such people is to get out of the slough into which they have fallen, and they'll marry out of it the first chance they get, and like enough they'll do worse if they can't marry. I tell you ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... we look down upon the cultivated plain, and across it to the golden belt of sand dunes, tapering like the waist of an hour-glass where the olive plain touches the sea at Jaffa; beyond, lies the deep blue of the Mediterranean. Eastwards is a sheer abyss falling into the Jordan Valley, where that river, like a silver thread, winds its way along until it falls into the Dead Sea. Beyond, as if across a fifteen-mile moat, rise abruptly the mountains of Moab. The map of Palestine might ...
— With the British Army in The Holy Land • Henry Osmond Lock
... lost one of its brightest ornaments, and he himself both fame and fortune; for, as Mr. Bates observes, "some of his earliest friends were alienated, and remunerative work that might have been his was diverted, from sheer prejudice, into other hands." His style, too, as Mr. Bates further remarks, "suffered by the contraction of his ideas and sympathies, and his art became associated with that vulgarity and want of aestheticism which ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... Sheer, nervous inability to listen is responsible for one phase of interruption to conversation. It is the interruption of the wandering eye which tells that one's words have not been heard. "The person next to you must be bored by my conversation, for it is going into one of your ears and ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... beat the ground with the stout clubs they carried. They pried up logs in search of snakes. They whooped, they sang, they whistled. They rolled over and over each other, giggling as they wrestled, in the sheer delight of being alive on such a day. When they finally killed a harmless little chicken-snake, no prince of the royal blood, hunting tigers in Indian jungles, could have been prouder of his striped trophies than ...
— Ole Mammy's Torment • Annie Fellows Johnston
... blow was now to be struck. Closing up to Lloyd, he came down on him "with an awk stroke," as the old romancers say, that fairly broke down his guard, and beat him back upon three or four of his followers, who all went over together. The Whigs raised a shout, made a rush forward, and by sheer weight hurled the Butt-enders down the staircase. After them poured the victors, with Travis at their head. The Irish shillelahs were nothing before his hickory: he knocked down or disabled a man at every blow. Still the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... them," he says to his assistant—the thoughtful German Government is careful to provide every official with another official for company, lest by sheer force of ennui he might be reduced to taking interest in his work—"twenty of 'em, all in a row! Some of 'em been there for the last ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... gone, the miser hung Himself in sheer despair: Thus each the other's wants supplied, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... no canoes, and such swarms of natives clustering upon the cliffs that the Bishop did not think it prudent to land. In Mota, though the coast for the most part rises up in sheer crags, forty or fifty feet above the sea, with a great volcanic cone in the centre, a little cove was found with a good beach, where a number of inhabitants had assembled. They were entirely without clothing or ornament, neither tattooed ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... higher education and money for school houses and salaries. It is usually assumed that a hundred or more institutions for Negro training are to-day turning out so many teachers and college-bred men that the race is threatened with an over-supply. This is sheer nonsense. There are to-day less than 3,000 living Negro college graduates in the United States, and less than 1,000 Negroes in college. Moreover, in the 164 schools for Negroes, 95 per cent. of their students are doing elementary ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.
... younkers in this wood, Well-sorted, for each lad hath got his lass. Marry, indeed, there is a tricksy[467] girl, That three or four would fain be doing with, But that a wily priest among the rest Intends to bear her sheer away from all. The miller, and my brother Grim the collier Appointed here to scuffle for her love. I am on Grim's side; for long time ago The devil call'd the collier like ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... By all that was ill-timed and embarrassing, the Percivals themselves, returned from their visit, choosing a wet afternoon to drive over and pay their respects to Lady Hayes's young guest! Sheer horror of the situation took away Darsie's breath; she stood stock still in the middle of the floor, felt her lips gape apart, the crimson rush to her face, saw in a mental flash a vision of the country bumpkin she ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... you really mean to tell me,' I said, 'that you were baffled by the case, that you actually don't know what the man died of?' 'Pardon me,' he replied, 'I know perfectly well what caused death. Blank died of fright, of sheer, awful terror; I never saw features so hideously contorted in the entire course of my practice, and I have seen the faces of a whole host of dead.' The doctor was usually a cool customer enough, and a certain vehemence in his manner struck ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... swelled on his neck, but he kept silent. He looked the cowboy in the eye and was met by a gaze as steady as his own; an aggressive and insolent gaze that had for its backing sheer physical courage and nothing more. It became a battle of mental endurance and ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... the more foolhardy in which, partly doubting their word, for the fountains no longer played, and partly ambitious of showing their superior courage, rushed to the Gothic bridge. Down came the drawbridge with a clang, and with it in sheer descent a torrent of water fit to sweep a regiment away, which shot along the stone bridge and dashed them from it bruised and bleeding, and half drowned with the water which in their terror and surprise found easy way into their bodies. Casper withdrew satisfied, for he ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... felt for the professor as some one not quite (according to my ideas) "comme il faut"—a fact which I deduced from the shortness, strength, and roundness of his nails—flared up in me more and more and turned all my other feelings to sheer animosity. Happening, presently, to glance at me, and to note my quivering lips and tear-filled eyes, he seemed to interpret my agitation as a desire to be accorded my marks and dismissed: wherefore, with an air of relenting, ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... that spurs the warrior's heart To the last thundering gallop and sheer leap Came on the men of the Guides; they flung apart The doors not all their valour could longer keep; They dressed their slender line; they breathed deep, And with never a foot lagging or head bent, To the clash and clamour and ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... repented. "What's the matter with me?" demanded he of himself, as his courage came swaggering back, once the danger had been banished. "Why, the best is not too good for me. She is the best, and mighty proud she ought to be of a man who, by sheer force of character, has lifted himself to where I am and who, is going to be what I shall be. Mighty proud! There are only two realities—money and brains. I've certainly got more brains than she or any of her set; as ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... and, with Nathan's help, gained the same precarious foothold. "Look in, Sir," said Nathan, not venturing a glance himself. Mr. Dudley looked, and had not Nathan's arm been about his body he would have lost his hold, in sheer amazement. The building was crowded, as he had never known it before; and crowded with people whom his eye, versed in the dress and manners of our forefathers, recognized as the church-goers of a century and a half ago. The singers' gallery was filled by a choir of girls and boys, while his ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... a sudden between Akbar's legs and the elephant slid on his rump in the futile effort to turn after him—then crashed into the wall opposite Tripe's dismantled shed—cannoned off it with a grunt of sheer disgust—and set off up-street, ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... was wickedly selfish last night!" she murmured. "It was sheer unkindness in me—or worse—to treat Arabella as I did. I didn't care about her being in trouble, and what she wished to tell you! Perhaps it was really something she was justified in telling you. That's some more of my badness, I suppose! ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... should have three pairs of eyes wherewith to watch his movements. He should have the alert brain of a Robespierre, the physical strength of a Danton, the relentlessness of a Marat. He should be a giant in sheer brute force, a tiger in caution, an elephant in weight, and a mouse ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... eyes belonged to a boy of twelve, though he looked older—a street urchin—dirty, ragged, with a pinched face and a starved, ill-clad form. A look of sheer desperation came into these eyes when their owner saw the money, and he trembled with excitement as a certain bold and wicked thought came into his mind—a thought born, not of a bad heart, but of—an ...
— Richard Dare's Venture • Edward Stratemeyer
... in our own day, as it has happened so often before. It seems that imminent disaster alone will arouse the nation to its best military effort. In 1757, however, England was thoroughly aroused. Failure then on her own special element, the sea, touched her vitally. Admiral Byng—through sheer cowardice, as was charged—had failed to attack a French fleet aiding in the siege of the island of Minorca which was held by the English, and Minorca had fallen to the French. Such was the popular clamor at this disaster that Byng was tried, condemned, and shot. There was also an upheaval in the ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong
... upon you, while all else is flashing white in the winter sunlight. For once, in this last buttress thrown out into the plain of Lothian towards the royal city, the outer folds of the Pentlands loses its boldly-rounded curves, and drops an almost sheer descent of black rock to the little glen below. In a wrinkle of the foothills Swanston farm and hamlet are snugly tucked away. The spirit that breathes about it in summer time is gently pastoral. It is sheltered from the rougher blasts; it is set about with trees ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... an entrancing thing, was "Blue-eyed Mary." The tenderness of her lips, the softness of her complexion, the glamour of her glance increased day by day, and without apparent reason. She seemed to be more eloquent, with the sheer eloquence of womanly emotion. Everything that made her winning was intensified, as if Love, the Master, had touched to vividness what hitherto had been no more than a ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... and seemed to have lost the use of her limbs, then sank into a chair and bowed her head. When she rose and looked wildly round, her face had changed. Sheer fright and distress looked from her eyes. Again and again she passed her hand over her forehead, and sat down at the table, only to jump up again. She tore the shawl from her shoulders and threw it on the bed; then with ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... at the fiesta. Just imagine, Capitan Joaquin is almost broke. Capitan Tiago has doubled up on him three times and won at the first turn of the cards each time, so that Capitan Manuel, the owner of the house, is growing smaller every minute from sheer joy. Padre Damaso smashed a lamp with his fist because up to now he hasn't won on a single card. The Consul has lost on his cocks and in the bank all that he won from us at the fiesta of Binan and at that of the Virgin of ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... suddenly upon the beautiful suppliant. A thought had come into his brain so whimsical and so fantastic that it made him as dizzy for an instant as if the smooth grass beneath him had yawned into a sheer and evil precipice. ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... adventurers determined, at all hazards, to cross to the opposite side, in hopes of finding a country that might afford them sustenance. A frail bridge was constructed by throwing the huge trunks of trees across the chasm, where the cliffs, as if split asunder by some convulsion of nature, descended sheer down a perpendicular depth of several hundred feet. Over this airy causeway the men and horses succeeded in effecting their passage with the loss of a single Spaniard, who, made giddy by heedlessly looking down, lost his footing and fell into the ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... being engaged, he did not pretend to bother his brain about an affair that did not concern him, trusting that the girl had good sense enough to make a proper choice; that with regard to paying his addresses to her, he might sheer alongside as quick as he liked—he would without doubt find her at quarters and all ready for action; and finally that he, her father, would not interfere to thwart her wishes in so important an affair as the choice of a husband, ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... for two hours. Sometimes it dropped with locked wheels down sheer walls of clay, again it was dragged, careening drunkenly, out of fathomless pits. It pitched and tossed, slid and galloped, danced grotesquely from one wheel to another, from one stone to another, recoiled out of ruts, butted against ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... missed both the joys and the demands of home life. No recluse, but, rather, a companionable man, he cared little for what most people call amusement, but he cared tremendously for the human scene in which he lived and worked. He would be happy in the Experiment for its sheer human fascinations. That it held a deeper interest, that if it succeeded it would reveal an untapped reservoir of resources available for the church and the kingdom of God, did but make him the more eager to be ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... TO REASON.—Were there no appeal save to the social will as it happens to make its pressure felt upon this person or that, in this situation or that, there could be no issue to dispute. Dispute would be useless and sheer dogmatism would prevail. But there is such an appeal and men do make it, where they are in any degree enlightened. It is ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... and failed in every expedient but one,—the employment of sheer force. Even this he attempted in order to avenge the death of Mary Stuart and to bring England, politically, religiously, and commercially, into harmony with his Spanish policies. The story of the preparation ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... indeed behoove her occupants to look out for spray. The sparkling spume came flying back in sheets as she cut through the waves, but the boys didn't mind that any more than did their weather-beaten companion. As for Skipper, he barked aloud in sheer joy as the Flying Fish slid along as if she were trying to live up to her ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Eagle Patrol • Howard Payson
... have attempted the feat seemed to him, the next morning, sheer insanity. Dancing, however, knew the treacherous face of the river wall. To his gigantic size and strength he united the sureness of a cat in climbing up or down a mountain arete. Often he had crept with a telegraph wire, unaided, where his best men ...
— The Mountain Divide • Frank H. Spearman
... no martyr-hope with which to console himself; his endurance is of the finest order—simple, sheer resolution, a resolve that with no reward, he will never disgrace himself. He knows what ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... prepare! A show they want, they come to gape and stare. Spin for their eyes abundant occupation, SO that the multitude may wondering gaze, You by sheer bulk have ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... It was a sheer fifteen feet of solid masonry, but my chief delight since landing on Martian soil was the inordinate springiness of my leg muscles against the feeble gravity. I ran and sprang lustily with the ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... mountain in Great Britain, in SW. Inverness-shire, 4406 ft. high, and a sheer precipice on the NE. 1500 ft. high, and with an observatory on the summit supported ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... on the romanticists by making the very landlord of the Tabard cry out in indignant disgust against the stuff which he had heard recited — the good Host ascribing to sheer ignorance the string of pompous platitudes and prosaic details which Chaucer ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... behind our beloved guns and noted the ridiculous brevity of our line—as we sank from sheer fatigue, and tried to moderate the terrific thumping of our hearts—as we caught our breath to ask who had seen such-and-such a comrade, and laughed hysterically at the reply—there swept past us and over us ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... weak-minded and ignorant can scarcely be credited. We know of one case where a cab-driver, who was ordered to go at an early hour in the morning to a house in the suburbs to convey a lady and gentleman from an evening party, positively refused to go, through sheer terror of encountering "Jack," as the ghost was named, preferring rather to risk losing his situation. It is said that the girls employed in factories in the vicinity of the Canal would not venture to their work till it was fairly daylight, and even then they went in a body. Several ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... when they entered the bed-chamber, a deathly silence fell on them; a leaden wall seemed to rise between their bodies. Here they no longer had to dissemble; they looked at each other face to face with silent hostility. Their life at night was sheer torment, but neither of them dared to change their mode of living. Their bodies could not leave the common bed; they found in it the places they had occupied for years. The habit of their wills subjected them to this room and its furnishings, ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... publicity and exposure—I rely on you, dearest friend of ours, to at least lend us your influence when the time shall come—a word may be invaluable. If there is any show made, or gratification of strangers' curiosity, far better that I had left the turf untouched. These things occur through sheer thoughtlessness, carelessness, not anything worse, but the effect is irreparable. I won't think any more of ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... South. Overhead, as she declined, long ripples of silver cloud were imperceptibly stealing toward her. They were the van of a tempest. He did not observe them or the leaves beginning to chatter. When he again pursued his course with his face to the Rhine, a huge mountain appeared to rise sheer over him, and he had it in his mind to scale it. He got no nearer to the base of it for all his vigorous outstepping. The ground began to dip; he lost sight of the sky. Then heavy, thunder-drops streak ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sheer momentum of terror and did not realize that his mother did not hear him but, with eyes frozen and popping at the cage, was screaming in thin, ...
— Youth • Isaac Asimov
... hygiene and cleanliness. The earth would be conducted according to our convenience. In short, the day men realize who their worst enemies are, they will form an alliance against them, they will cease to murder one another like wild beasts from sheer folly. Then they will be the true rulers of the ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... me. Often, too, in the most terrific tempests, when sea and sky have met in one black and threatening mass, and when the startled fishermen have in vain attempted to dissuade me from my purpose, have I ventured, in sheer bravado, out of sight of land, and unaccompanied by a human soul. Then, when wind and tide have been against me on my return, have I, with my simple sculls alone, caused my faithful bark to leap through the foaming ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... gorge formed the frontier between the Jews and the Samaritans. This gorge is the Wadi Deir Ballut. The sides of this wadi are at all points steep, at some precipitous, presenting in places an almost sheer drop of several hundred feet. The bed of the wadi is from a hundred to a couple of hundred yards wide and the surface level. Thus the Wadi Ballut formed an admirable defensive line for the Turk; after ...
— With the British Army in The Holy Land • Henry Osmond Lock
... fitted for its protection than Dogberry and Verges. Readers of the Spectator will remember how when Sir Roger de Coverley went to the play, his servants 'provided themselves with good oaken plants' to protect their master from the Mohocks, a set of dissolute young men, who, for sheer amusement, inflicted the most terrible punishments on their victims. Swift tells Stella how he came home early from his walk in the Park to avoid 'a race of rakes that play the devil about this town every night, and ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... I should drink. I do it out of sheer boredom, because I am idle and have no occupation. But don't be afraid that I shall set the house on fire or murder anybody. To-day I am drinking more than usual because I am tired and cold. But I am not ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... until they were very nearly black, but she was so happy as to be absolutely oblivious of such trifles, while the awkward youths fell entirely under the spell of her sparkling, fun-filled eyes and the merry, bubbling laugh that seemed to overflow from sheer joy. ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... rule, and would assist in their entire subjection by preventing fire-arms and ammunition from entering the country, except for the use of the Boers, it was not to be wondered at that I was detained for months at Kuruman from sheer inability to get wagon-drivers. The English name, from being honored and respected all over the country, had become somewhat more than suspected; and as the policy of depriving those friendly tribes of the means of defense was represented ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... his hands trembling, and a creeping, chilling sensation running through his fingers. It was of finest fabric, sheer and soft and very simply embroidered. It was without, rather than with, surprise lie found the letters "F. F." in one corner. He raised it, and, not knowing what to say for the moment, sat there inhaling the delicate fragrance that hung about the ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... Plattville on business speak of him: "They've got a young fellow down there who'll be Governor in a few years. He's a sort of dictator; and runs the party all over that part of the State to suit his own sweet will, just by sheer personality. And there isn't a man in that district who wouldn't cheerfully lie down in the mud to let him pass over dry. It's that young Harkless, you know; owns the 'Herald,' the paper that downed McCune and smashed those imitation 'White-Caps' in Carlow County." Meredith ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... readers from around the world to share their observations and specialized knowledge is very helpful as we try to produce the best possible publications. Please feel free to continue to write and e-mail us. At least two Factbook staffers review every item. The sheer volume of correspondence precludes detailed personal replies, but we sincerely appreciate your time and interest in the Factbook. If you include your e-mail address we will at least acknowledge your note. ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... bent over the boat, causing it to heel to one side rather dangerously; and when next Toni came to the surface he gripped her strongly by the shoulder, bidding her keep quite still, and then lifted her, by sheer force of muscle, into the boat, where she collapsed in a dripping ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... a furious Radical. Instead of imitating the young aristocrats he hated and scorned them. There must have been great force of originality in the boy. Of course I don't know whether any Etonians of his time preached Radicalism, but it seems unlikely. I think it was sheer vigour of character, and the strange desire to oppose his father in everything. From Eton he was of course to pass to Oxford, but at that stage came practical rebellion. No, said the boy; he wouldn't go ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... and rock descended toward Barey. They were overgrown with stunted vegetation. It was quite possible to get down to the lowlands that way, but rather difficult. On either side of the landslip, to cast and west, the ridge came down in a long line of sheer, terrific cliffs. A low haze concealed Barey from view. Complete stillness was in the air, broken only by the distant thundering of an ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... were called 'Orthodox;' they felt this imposition of liberty as the worst coercion one man could apply to another—the coercion of the conscience. They did not care to see the Bible treated as a piece of sheer human manufacture, however exalted; they felt it a burning shame to have to pay taxes towards the maintenance of irreligious, or even anti-religious, scientific chairs and colleges. They thought of their stern forefathers, who had broken the power of ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... we thank you for your fine contribution to our midst," announced the Queen, and the Sand Crab burrowed in the sand and kicked in sheer delight ...
— Marjorie at Seacote • Carolyn Wells
... a poor, quiet, old Bullfrog, as little wiry, wicked Wasp came at him, barking and yelping. He jumped with all his force sheer over a patch of bushes into the river, and swam back to his old home among the cat-tails. And always after that it was observable that he was very low-spirited, and took very dark views of life; but nothing made him so angry as any allusion ...
— Queer Little Folks • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... in its fullest force, the practical difficulty in education which a mere student could never overcome; a difficulty not in theory, or knowledge, or even want of experience, but in the sheer chaos of human nature. Lord Russell's course had been consistent from the first, and had all the look of rigid determination to recognize the Southern Confederacy "with a view" to breaking up the Union. His letter ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... minutes, she saw him walking hastily across the Common to the station, and she noticed that his head was bent, and that the spring, the confidence of his usual gait and manner had deserted him. Milly locked herself with her baby in her room, and sobbed until she was quieted by sheer exhaustion. ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... his savings, and had his pockets full of Chapman's "equivalents," from which he looked for a fortune in a very short time. Finally the innocent settlers began to regard Chapman as a great genius, who had invented this new way of making their fortunes out of sheer goodness. "I want to tell you, my good friends," he would say to them, patronizingly, "you will appreciate me better as we become better acquainted. Invest your money, and there's a fortune for you all." And they took his ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... find no such thing as a pure conception of wedded love in our old dramatists. In Massinger, and Beaumont and Fletcher, it really is on both sides little better than sheer animal desire. There is scarcely a suitor in all their plays, whose abilities are not discussed by the lady or her waiting-woman. In this, as in all things, how transcendant over his age and his ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... on the verge of a precipice more than three thousand feet in height,—a sheer granite wall, whose terrible perpendicular distance baffled all visual computation. Its foot was hidden among hazy green spiculae—they might be tender spears of grass catching the slant sun on upheld aprons of cobweb, or giant ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... much more Pelle observed while he stood just inside the door upon his bare feet, not daring from sheer nervousness to raise his eyes. Then the farmer turned round in his chair, and drew him toward him by the collar. "Now let's see what you've got there under your smock, my ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... had merely preferred it formerly to bitter or nauseous tonics; in Society it had been a necessary stimulant, when her strength began to fail, nothing more. After her grim decision she had forced large quantities down her throat by sheer strength of will. But she had found the result all that she had expected, she had alternated between exhilaration and oblivion, and was sure that it was killing her by inches. Now, she could indulge in neither wild imaginings nor forget. And if he ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... adventure; men were made rich overnight by the blow of a drill in a well. Then was the time for that equality of opportunity to come which the pioneers sought if ever it was coming. But alas, even in matters of sheer luck, the fates played favorites. In those fat years it began raining red-wheeled buggies on Sundays, and smart traps drawn by horses harnessed gaudily in white or tan appeared on the streets. Morty Sands often hired a band from Omaha or Kansas City, and held high ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... little belt of wet pineland, where the woodcock runs across our path or whistles up from the wet leaves, we come suddenly upon a dozen or more little basins, the largest not over six feet by nine, which have no outlet whatever. One hole about two feet in diameter goes sheer down between two pine trees to a depth never yet fathomed: you cannot see it until right on it, and you cannot use a rod, but drop your line about twelve feet deep, and your cork will go down like ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... a hasty exit, without offering her hand in farewell. Katherine lay back among her pillows with a long sigh of sheer relief. She felt that she could not have endured her caller two minutes longer without telling her frankly how utterly ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... as soon as they were gone, 'I think it right to tell you, that we were obliged, out of sheer charity, to take that poor Irish girl into the house. It was impossible to move her without risk ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... is bordered by a hilly rampart, broken only here and there, in the bays where the larger streams find their outlet, by flat and sandy plains. Between Dellys and Philippeville high mountains rise almost sheer from the sea, leaving only a narrow strip of beach. East of Philippeville the mountains recede from the coast, and the rampart of hills reappears. Only between Bona and La Calle is the general character of the sea-board low and sandy. Save near ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the dream was of practical use, as without it the worthy housekeeper would without doubt from sheer force of habit have opened the door in the ordinary way in ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... I can safely say that we were excited. What would the result be, after marching blindly for so long and over such impossible ground, as we had been doing? We added and subtracted, and at last there was the result. We looked at each other in sheer incredulity: the result was as astonishing as the most consummate conjuring trick — 88deg. 16' S., precisely to a minute the same as our reckoning, 88deg. 16' S. If we were forced to go to the Pole on dead reckoning, then surely the most exacting ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... wife—hangs on your arm, and he himself is denied that privilege, and fares poorly beside her sumptuousness, and lives as a stranger to her, you can scarcely regard his presence with pleasure. And from the sheer force of circumstances, as it seemed to me then, Mrs. Falchion's hand was often on my arm; and her voice was always in my ear at meal-times and when I visited Justine Caron to attend to her wound, or joined in the chattering recreations of the music saloon. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... I was so sheer above the floor of the valley and the sun was so sheer above me that the chestnuts in the meadow of Bondo squatted upon their own shadows and the gardens were as though the valley had been paved with bricks of various colours. The old grass- grown road ran below, ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... "It's sheer nonsense," said Beam, turning away from the window and throwing himself into a chair; "why should an old fellow like Tippengray take up all the spare time of that girl? She doesn't need to learn anything. From what she has said to me I judge that ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton
... no longer paralyzed by matter, becomes one with them and acts with them; and he who understands ends by approving, or else the universe would be a mistake, which is not possible. I do not believe that another sorrow of the sheer mind can be imagined. The only one which, before reflection, might seem admissible and which, in any case, could be but ephemeral would arise from the sight of the pain and misery that remain on the earth which we ...
— Death • Maurice Maeterlinck
... moment later he weighed the keen gray flash of the eyes beneath the thick fair hair, the coating of dust and sweat over the high-bred curve from brow to nose, and the fullness of the jaw which bore with a suggestion of sheer brutality upon the general impression of a fine racial type. Taken from the mouth up, the face might have passed as a pure, fleshly copy of the antique idea; seen downward, it became almost repelling in ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... slightly as he stood there, the sound of the clock conveying to him (it may be) a sense of old buildings and time; and himself the inheritor; and then to-morrow; and friends; at the thought of whom, in sheer confidence and pleasure, it seemed, he yawned and ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... that direction. Rooted—Heaven knows how!—in some reft or fissure of the rock, grew a wild ash, throwing out a few boughs over the solitary pool; this was all the support Luke could hope for, should he attempt to scale the rock. The rock was sheer—the pool deep—yet still he hurried on. He reached the muddy embankment; mounted its sides; and seemed to hesitate. The keepers were now within a hundred yards of him. Both guns were discharged. And, sudden as the reports, with a dead, splashless plunge, like a diving otter, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... think, to show that books were eagerly sought after, and deeply appreciated, in Canterbury cloisters during the middle ages, and when the reader considers that these facts have been preserved from sheer accident, and, therefore, only enable us to obtain a partial glimpse of the actual state of their library, he will be ready to admit that bibliomania existed then, and will feel thankful, too, that it ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... to crystallize her, she cannot absorb even the gravest of warnings; not from unwillingness or stupid obstinacy, but from sheer inability to grasp any novelty. That her beloved master and mistress—either or both—should not have the best of everything and plenty of it is, at this advanced stage in her career, unthinkable. Even though she read it in print she would disregard it, for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 16, 1917. • Various
... coming. I do so hate writing letters. I wish all my friends would come and live in town. Charles has been telling me even it is better [than] two months that he ought to write to your brother. [It is not] my dislike to writing letters that prevents my [writing] to you, but sheer want of time, I assure you, because [I know] you care not how stupidly I write, so as you do but [hear at the] time what ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... At last, by sheer luck, a Carabineer* happened along, who, hearing all that noise, thought that it might be a runaway colt, and stood bravely in the middle of the street, with legs wide apart, firmly resolved to stop ...
— The Adventures of Pinocchio • C. Collodi—Pseudonym of Carlo Lorenzini
... the palisade. The anchor dragged on the landward side of the knolls. These were sheer rock that the steel talons clawed ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... if I can get first dig at him before he claws me, he may sheer off. Ah, mind, sir! you'll have me off. Oh! it's you, ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... of crows pulling corn after the second hoeing, when the scare-crows had been removed from the field. The corn thus pulled had reached pretty good size. This pulling must have been done from sheer malice on the part of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... chance the idle boys would venture aboard of her to play and amuse themselves that I hallooed them away; or when a newly-arrived ship, not caring for the old boat, would run foul of her, and carry away some spar or piece of running rigging, I would suddenly call out to them to sheer off and not damage us? By degrees, they came all to notice this; and I found that they thought me out of my senses, and many a trick was played off upon old Noah, for that was the name ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... mosquitoes, no human endurance could, with any patience, submit to the trial. The flies are at you all day, crawling into your eyes, up your nostrils, and down your throat, with the most irresistible perseverance; and no sooner do they, from sheer exhaustion, or the loss of daylight, give up the attack, than they are relieved by the musquitos, who completely exhaust the patience which their predecessors have so severely tried. It may seem absurd to my readers to dwell upon such a subject; but those, who, like myself, have been half-blinded, ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... millions were spent to conquer whole populations—millions which might have been used for better and nobler purposes. And to-day thousands of British subjects are ruled by the point of the bayonet—by sheer force, ...
— In the Shadow of Death • P. H. Kritzinger and R. D. McDonald
... know the full pressure of the case, I am confident that you would justify it." It was unfortunate that the President could not stand against this "pressure," which was not military, but political. Fremont could do, and did, nothing at all, and to reinforce him was sheer absurdity.[7] Against it McClellan protested almost indignantly, but was "partially relieved by the President's positive and emphatic assurance" that no more troops "should in any event be taken from" him, or "in any ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... and fruitless search for game, but late in the afternoon the youth came upon a slight, sheer descent, along the foot of which ran a shallow but broad creek, beyond which was a little grass-grown valley, where were feeding a fine herd of the little deer. They were feeding in the direction of the creek and the wind blew from them to the hunter, ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... said he, "it is sheer folly to waste more time hunting for this bird. My father is old, and if he dies I shall inherit ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... you confusing two things?" she queried. The subject apparently interested her. "To win one's objects by sheer personal force is one thing. To merely secure them because one's purse is longer than other people's—that's quite ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... on. What need of more words? Before a year was out, Rose Salterne was far more in love with Don Guzman than he with her; and both suspected each other's mind, though neither hinted at the truth; she from fear, and he, to tell the truth, from sheer Spanish pride of blood. For he soon began to find out that he must compromise that blood by marrying the heretic burgher's daughter, or all his ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... up where the cliff sprung sheer Till I looked upon her decks And saw the plunder of half-a-year And the loot of her scuttled wrecks; There were gems and ivory, plate and pearl, And Tyrian rugs a-pile, And, set in the midst, was a milk-white girl, The loot of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various
... uttering faint shrieks when hurt, of partaking of physical food and pleasure, it was perfectly natural to believe it susceptible of material imprisonment and material torments. Such was the common belief when the doctrine of a physical hell was wrought out. The doctrine yet lingers by sheer force of prescription and unthinkingness, when the basis on which it originally rested has been dissipated. We know great as our ignorance is, we know that the soul is a pure immateriality. Its manifestations depend on certain physical organs and accompaniments, but are not ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... going to see this b. . . . I called on the Abbe Testa Grossa, whom I had known at Venice in 1753. Although he was a man of low extraction he had a keen wit. At this time he was old and resting on his laurels; he had fought his way into favour by the sheer force of merit, and his master, the Duke of Modena, had long chosen him as his ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... answered the coach dryly, "I suppose you know that your presence on the team is a sheer accident? If you don't, allow me to tell you candidly that if there had been anyone else in the college to put in Corson's place, we would never have called ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... escaped a drawl—"My dear Miss Smith, your work is interesting and your faith—marvellous; but, frankly, I cannot make myself believe in it. You are trying to treat these funny little monkeys just as you would your own children—or even mine. It's quite heroic, of course, but it's sheer madness, and I do not feel I ought to encourage it. I would not mind a thousand or so to train a good cook for the Cresswells, or a clean and faithful maid for myself—for Helene has faults—or indeed deft and tractable ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... our recognition of your right and power to be a free and independent people. Of those who fought against you I say nought. But I must speak of those who fought for you—who brought to naught, by sheer hard blows, that family compact of the House of Bourbon, which would have been as dangerous to you upon this side of the ocean as to us upon the other; who smote with a continual stroke the trans-Atlantic ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... out. A street-lamp some little distance away gave enough light through the murk of the rain that was again falling in torrents to make it entirely plain that "no one was there." In truth there was nothing but the sheer blank wall ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... is that you have never seen the end of it. M. and I have not worked very hard at our galleries and churches, but I have got so far as a commencing dislike for the fine arts generally. Perhaps after a week or two I shall take to science out of sheer weariness. ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... and the present, he is for that reason called Bhava. The word Kapi is said to mean supreme, and Vrisha is said to mean righteousness. The illustrious God of gods, therefore, is called Vrishakapi. And since Maheswara by means of his two eyes closed (in meditation), created through sheer force of will a third eye on his forehead, he is for that reason called the Three-eyed. Whatever of unsoundness there is in the bodies of living creatures, and whatever of soundness there is in them, represent ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... living in the village, one can hardly tell how. Now appealing to the charity of old Rachael Strong, the laundress—a dog-lover by profession; now winning a meal from the light-footed and open-hearted lasses at the Rose; now standing on his hind-legs to extort, by sheer beggary, a scanty morsel from some pair of "drowthy cronies," or solitary drover, discussing his dinner or supper on the alehouse-bench; now catching a mouthful, flung to him in pure contempt by some scornful gentleman of the shoulder-knot, mounted on his throne, the coach-box, whose notice he ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 336 Saturday, October 18, 1828 • Various
... servant came to the door to tell the watcher that first breakfast, and then lunch, was waiting for him in the room below; but he would not leave the bedside, taking from sheer necessity what was brought to him, and then resuming ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... some nine hundred beds, which were always so full that the last surgeon admitting to his wards constantly found himself with extra beds poked in between the regulation number through sheer necessity. It afforded an unrivalled field for clinical experience and practical teaching. In my day, however, owing to its position in London, and the fact that its school was only just emerging from primeval chaos, it attracted ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... we came to the base of the hill which, from seaward, had appeared so curiously truncated. As we opened its steep-to sides, they rounded gradually into a high curve at the skyline, and, at the base, into a foreshore of tumbled rock through which ran a cleft with still water protected by sheer rocks—a narrow slit, but worth risking with the wind to drive us straight through. So I upped helm on the heave of a comber, and drove her for it, the walls of rock so close on either hand that twice the end of our short boom brushed them before Farrell, who held the sheet, ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... revenge her on her cruel stepmother. And three-and-thirty of his men took the oath with him. Then they set to work and built a long ship, and its keel they made of the rowan tree. And when all was ready, they out with their oars and pulled sheer for Bamborough Keep. ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... Mary Smith snatched her hand suddenly from mine and moved toward the edge of the cliff, crying out that we must continue our search. I climbed the orchard wall and looked along the shore. Here the cliff dropped away almost sheer, and the narrow strip of shingle at its base was lost in the surf. Farther to the north it widened a little with the curve of the shore, and through a swaying curtain of rain I could follow it to a point we called the Notch, near the entrance of the Cat's Mouth; ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... swept the park below. Heavily wooded gulches pushed down from the roots of the mountains that girt Huerfano to meet the fences of the ranchers. The cliffs rose sheer and bleak. The panorama was a wild and primitive one. It suggested to the troubled mind of the young man an eagle's nest built far up in the crags from which the great bird could swoop down upon its victims. He carried the figure ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... one," the plucky boy in the boat made answer, and with a parting shot and a laughing "Farval!" he leaped from the sinking boat into the dancing Maelar water. Striking boldly out, he swam twice round the boat in sheer bravado, defying the enemy; now ducking to escape the pursuing stream, or now, while floating on his back, sending a return shot with telling force against the men at the pump—for he still ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... the blazing pine aloft, and disclosed the gaping mouth of the old pit, its margin wet with the rain, and its sheer sides slippery with ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... two weeks of Radville had driven Duncan to desperation; on the morning of the fifteenth day he wakened in his room at Miss Carpenter's and lay for a time abed staring vacantly at the gaudily papered ceiling, not through laziness remaining on his back, but through sheer inertia. The prospect of rising to ramble through another purposeless, empty day appalled his imagination; it had been all very well when the humour of his project intrigued him, when the village was a novelty and its inhabitants "types" to be studied, watched, analysed and classified ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... the cross, and he said to me: "Come!" I longed to fly to Him with my body, but could not make up my mind to show myself naked. However, I was carried away by a force I could not control, I threw myself on my Saviour's neck, and felt that all was over between the world and me.' From that day, 'by sheer reasoning,' she has understood everything. Previously she thought that the religious life was a renunciation of the joys of marriage and enjoyment generally; now she understands its object. Jesus Christ desires that she should have relations with a priest; he is himself ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... count them) Mr Gordon had managed to tone him down to average respectability of execution. Still he was always uneasily aware that whenever his eye was not upon him, Jackson was doing what he ought not to do with might and main. Gordon had, indeed, kept him on from sheer necessity, but he intended none the less to mark ...
— Shearing in the Riverina, New South Wales • Rolf Boldrewood
... me," said Alexey Alexeitch, frowning. "I know my business. If only my enemy intones the litany in the right key. He may . . . out of sheer spite. ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Angora goats making silky pictures on the hillside all day long, the drifts of purple lupins along the fences, the long hot grass on slope and roadside, the summer-burnt hills tawny as crouching lions—and even have I seen the sheer sensuous pleasure of the Little Lady with bathing her arms and neck ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... child must have needed both, for she wept unceasingly on Karen's knees till late in the night; and then in sheer weariness the heavy eyelids closed upon the tears that were yet ready to come. She slumbered, with her ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... a long arm and pointed. Away in the distance, on the summit of a line of pebbled shore, standing, as it seemed, sheer over the sea, was a ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Admiralty, he obtained no reward for his services, nor promise of further employment. No one in authority seemed to consider that he had been sent to sea in a rotten old ship, unfit for the service, and that she had foundered not from any fault of his, but through sheer old ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... was resumed. It was all on an amicable basis. A bystander would have seen merely a group of lazy native servants gossiping idly. And, indeed, for one word of relevance were a dozen of sheer chatter. That is ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... Coleridge and I stopped, and William went up towards the house, which was in a field, where about half a dozen people were at work. He addressed himself to one who appeared like the master, and all drew near him, staring at William as nobody could have stared but out of sheer rudeness, except in such a lonely place. He told his tale, and inquired about boats; there were no boats, and no lodging nearer than Callander, ten miles beyond the foot of the lake. A laugh was on every face when William said ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... cliff down which George was slipping was not sheer all the way. It was steep; indeed, so steep that it was impossible for the frightened boy in spite of his desperate attempts to check his flight, to gain a foothold. In his descent some of the loose ground gave way and whenever ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and Simon's Mine • Ross Kay
... with sheer precipices at the back. Snow-clad peaks rise to the right, and lose themselves in drifting mists. To the left, on a stone-scree, stands an old, half-ruined hut. It is early morning. Dawn is breaking. The ...
— When We Dead Awaken • Henrik Ibsen
... the joy that spurs the warrior's heart To the last thundering gallop and sheer leap Came on the men of the Guides; they flung apart The doors not all their valour could longer keep; They dressed their slender line; they breathed deep, And with never a foot lagging or head bent, To the clash and clamour and dust of ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... contrast, as far as outward characteristics went, was offered by the other great orator of the same time. Sheil was very small, and of mean presence; with a singularly fidgety manner, a shrill voice, and a delivery unintelligibly rapid. But in sheer beauty of elaborated diction not O'Connell nor any one else could surpass him. There are few finer speeches in the language than that in which he took Lord Lyndhurst to task for applying the term "aliens" to the Irish in a ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... him pinned on that narrow shelf of rock. Watching that holocaust below, Shann Lantee could not force himself to move. The sheer ruthlessness of the Throg move-in left him momentarily weak. To listen to a tale of Throgs in action, and to be an eye-witness to such action, were two vastly different things. He shivered in spite of the warmth ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... is sheer nonsense!" Thornton broke in with irritable impatience. "I can understand this man here, in a way—he has the superstition, if you like to call it that, due to lack of education, if he'll pardon my saying so in his presence; but ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... she took a slow, sinuous step toward him—then another.... He stepped back, still looking at her, his eyes still on hers.... He was back to the great cliff—the sheer cliff at the base of which the huge seas ever beat in sullen, unceasing impotence.... Yet, another step she took, ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... "Sheer off, men," he said, and as he did so the boatswain of the ship gave the word, "Now, lads, three cheers for them boys; may they ...
— The Young Buglers • G.A. Henty
... marvelous of intellects that any age has produced is about to be sacrificed, and that, too, while half the mystery of its strange powers is yet a secret. Here is a man who has never entered the doors of a college or a university, and yet by the sheer might of his innate gifts has made himself such a colossus in abstruse learning that the ablest of our scholars are but pigmies in his presence. By the evidence of Professor Mather, Mr. Surbridge, Mr. Richmond, and other men qualified to testify, this man is as familiar with the broad domain of ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... hundred next, and so on, because the beastly capitalist wants more and more aliens imported to do his work and the beastly politician wants them all thrown into citizenship neck and heels, so he can have more votes. You're defeated, Jeff, before you begin. You're defeated by sheer numbers." ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... by sheer contrast, how different it is with the hypothesis of an unseen world that is purely spiritual. The testimony in such a case must, under the conditions of the present life, be forever inaccessible. It lies wholly outside the range ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... in good time, and I soon realized the great advantage of rest. Six hours of office work came so near nothing to do, that had I been in usual health I should probably have raised some disturbance from sheer idleness; but I learned by and by that the close attention demanded to avoid mistakes, could not well ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... baby's dress is not made of the finest of handkerchief linen, French nainsook or a very fine batiste is usually chosen. These are the soft materials, soft as well as sheer. They are the materials on which embroidery is done most successfully and the baby dress de luxe is always hand embroidered. It may have on it the merest touch of hand work—scarcely more than a few eyelets and a tiny blossom and stem and yet follow ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... at colour, to look at line, to describe pictures. But far more important than this, he could now create in the imagination gardens and sunsets and sheer colour, so as to give to his novels and stories pictorial value, to his fantasies glow, and to his poetry vision of the realities of things. In his very first volume of Essays, The Defendant, were to be passages that could be written only by one ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... Mrs. Muldoon in the kitchen. A less convincing story than that by which the Professor sought to account to Mrs. Muldoon for the how and the why of Malvina it would be impossible to imagine. Mrs. Muldoon out of sheer kindness appears ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... consultation was held, in which it was debated as to the best manner of making an attack upon the herd. Some advised that we should ride boldly forward, and overtake the cows by sheer swiftness, but this mode was objected to by others. The cows are at times very shy. They might break off long before we were near, and give our horses such a gallop as would render them useless for the rest of the day. Besides, ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... out the wearer of the too familiar object. Marshal Crow let go of the door knob and stared at the lady in sheer stupefaction. ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... and, like them, calls up the grand ideal of a searcher after truth and interpreter of Nature. They think of him who bore it as a rare combination of genius, industry, and unswerving veracity, who earned his place among the most famous men of the age by sheer native power, in the teeth of a gale of popular prejudice, and uncheered by a sign of favour or appreciation from the official fountains of honour; as one who in spite of an acute sensitiveness to praise and blame, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... black and inhospitable even in the sunlight. The rock walls rose sheer, the roofs slanted rakishly, the signs scratched on the rock by facetious riders were pointless and inane. Lone picked his way through the crooked defile that was marked MAIN STREET on the corner of the first huge boulder and came abruptly into the road. Here ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... unfolding in due order under the hand of the poet, from the largest to the least. Now the reader should be informed that every one of these unities has been violently attacked and proclaimed to be a sheer phantasm. Chiefly in Germany has the assault taken place. What we have above considered as the joints in the organism of the poem, have been cut into, pried apart, and declared to make so many separate poems or passages, which ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... time to expose the sheer foolishness of this argument. The first absurdity is that the women who are in comfortable circumstances could continue to be cultured and of social value if they were the mothers of large families. Neither ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... he bounded down by the upper end of the cleft, and entering Zretazoola by the outer gate which looks out sheer on the stars, he galloped suddenly down the narrow streets. Many that rushed out on to balconies as he went clattering by, many that put their heads from glittering windows, are told of in olden song. Shepperalk did not tarry to give greetings or to answer challenges ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany
... we should see a parallel, and only a parallel, to that system of legislation which we witness daily. We should see large bodies of men conspiring to bring perfectly groundless suits, against other bodies of men, for large sums of money, and to carry them by sheer force of numbers; just as we now continually see large bodies of men conspiring to carry, by mere force of numbers, some scheme of legislation that will, directly or indirectly, take money out ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... is the bank which falls Sheer downward from the second circle there; But on this, side and that the ...
— Dante's Purgatory • Dante
... off so much for their respective types of body, a bigger body going in general with a bigger head, that in the end you find yourself comparing mere abstractions. Again, the European may be the first to cry off on the ground that comparisons are odious; for some specimens of Neanderthal man, in sheer size of brain cavity, are said to give points to any of our modern poets and politicians.... Nor, if the brain itself be examined after death, and the form and number of its convolutions compared, ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... women who know just enough to appreciate their compliments—women who deprecate their "strong-minded" sisters, and are ready to agree implicitly with every statement that the lords of creation may make; but this readiness is due to sheer inability to produce a thought ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... the laughter of the stars at Earth, And Nature's, too, with every pitch of voice. Earth's carnival of sheer grotesque and noise, Where, gagged and manacled, walk Peace and Mirth, Shows Britain now, a beast of broadening girth, Set out to crush World Freedom. He destroys, And thinks his bear-like rearing, planet poise That is to influence ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... Eve! It is sheer obstinacy. If everybody wanted you to marry Brooks, you'd want to marry me. But because Aunt Maude and Winifred and I, and a lot of others know that you shouldn't, you have set your ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... was merry. He was as much merrier than you, for instance, as you are merrier than your father. Sometimes he fell, like a spinning-top, from sheer merriment. Have you seen a greyhound leaping the fences of the Gardens? That is how ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... rounded a corner with a little flock behind him. Terry dropped the leader with a snapshot and watched the flock scamper down what was almost the sheer face of a cliff—a beautiful bit of acrobatics. They found foothold on ridges a couple of inches deep, hardly visible to the eye from above. Plunging down a straight drop without a sign of a ledge for fifty feet below them, they broke the force of the fall and slowed themselves constantly ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... unconsciousness of genius. Anne took her courage in both hands when she sat down to write The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. There are scenes, there are situations, in Anne's amazing novel, which for sheer audacity stand alone in mid-Victorian literature, and which would hold their own in the literature of revolt that followed. It cannot be said that these scenes and situations are tackled with a master-hand. But there is a certain grasp in Anne's treatment, and an astonishing lucidity. ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... is a most exhilarating and delightful treat. I don't enjoy it above once in ten days, but therefore with double zest." What told on him most was the physical depression induced by the very look of these vast, monotonous masses of sheer poverty. "My wits are getting blunted," he says, "by the monotony and ugliness of this place. I can almost imagine, difficult as it is, the awful effect upon a human mind of never seeing anything but the meanest and vilest of men and men's works, ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... have heard that one quite as dangerous is under your own roof; and, once more, it is not only your life that is at stake. What you call courage, what seems to us sheer folly, may cost you and others what you value far more than your life. An error of softness now may make your future existence one long ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... the wild sheep, or Rocky Mountain bighorn, a most admirable beast, with limbs that never fail, at home on the most nerve-trying precipices, acquainted with all the springs and passes and broken-down jumpable places in the sheer ribbon cliffs, bounding from crag to crag in easy grace and confidence of strength, his great horns held high above his shoulders, wild red blood beating and hissing through every fiber of him like the wind through ...
— The Grand Canon of the Colorado • John Muir
... turned to surprise, sheer incredulous amazement. I glanced at Anthony to learn whether he had seen; but he was beckoning the old wise man of the desert. "Fenton," said I, "it seems we weren't the only passengers to get off here. There are three people we know, ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... watched Hollis. Curly-head was an accomplished rider, and Sam felt that he himself cut but an awkward figure. In reality he was too conscious of his defects. By strict attention he was proving himself a fair ordinary rider, but when Hollis, out of sheer showiness, turned aside from the path to jump his horse over a fallen tree, and Miss Stevens out of bravado followed him, Sam Turner well-nigh ground his teeth, and, acting upon the impulse, he too attempted the jump. The horse got over safely, but Sam went ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... trails to ride each day from dawn to dark as he should choose. Once unfamiliar with the timber country, he grew to love the twinkling gold of the aspens, the twilight vistas of the spruce and pines, and the mighty sweep of the great purple tides of forest that rolled down from the ranges into a sheer of space that had no ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... surprise she went on: "You must have seen for yourself that excepting a little plot of ground where the gardener plants a few carrots and cabbages for the Bishop's table, the whole of the garden is left to run wild; it is sheer waste and of no use to anybody. Now instead of buying vegetables, I mean to grow some, since Monseigneur gives me leave to turn over his ground, and by the same token I will give some to ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... anywhere. It's worth being a tramp for that alone, to be able to sleep naturally, to know in the daytime that you will have it at night, and then to lie down and feel it stealing over you like the blessing of God. I used to wake myself at first for sheer joy when it was coming. And then to nestle down, and sink into it, down, down into it, till one reaches the great peace. And no more wakings in torment as the drug passes off, waking as in some iron grave, unable ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... into Ijale and Mikah who were milling about confusedly in the dark, kicked Mikah again out of sheer malice and hatred of all mankind, and led them towards the ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... seat of Berenice, Countess of Hurstmonceux, was situated about seven miles south of Edinboro', on the north banks of the Esk. It was an elegant modern edifice, raised upon the ruins of an ancient castle, overhanging a perpendicular precipice, with a sheer descent of several hundred feet to the river. It looked down upon the course of the Esk, winding between rocks of lofty height, whose sides were fringed with a tangled mass of shrubs, ferns, and thistles, and whose summits were crowned with thickets of hazel, ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... how. With a general strike we can paralyze the plutocracy from coast to coast. Hundreds of thousands will join eagerly and serve loyally in the fight. We can stop the wheels, cut off the food supply, and compel the plutocrats in sheer terror to sue for peace.... A few men may be needed who are not afraid to die. Be ye also ready.... Let us swear that we will fight to the last ditch, that we will strike blow for blow, that we will use every weapon at our command, and that we will never ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... night. And at that time the princess of Videha, that girl of beautiful hips, had her deep and compact bosom copiously drenched by her inauspicious tears shed ceaselessly. And she who regarded her husband as her god, answered that mean wretch, saying, "By sheer ill-luck it is, O king of the Rakshasas, that I am obliged to hear such words of grievous import spoken by thee! Blessed be thou, O Rakshasa fond of sensual pleasures, let thy heart be withdrawn from me! I am the wife of another, ever devoted ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... volume of the same poet's verse: "This will never do." The Quarterly Review in 1818 spoke of the "insanity" of the poetry of Keats. In 1819 Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine gave a fatherly warning to Shelley that Keats as a poet was "worthy of sheer and instant contempt," advised him to select better companions than "Johnny Keats," and promised that compliance with this advice would secure him ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... exclaimed as soon as they found themselves in the street, "I am going to take a cab and go straight back to the factory. What can we do here until dinnertime? A sheer waste of time, kicking our heels about, and I am afraid our worthy merchant is like the well-known goat, neither good for ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... this morning reported that the Bull-dog engaged the Friseur, yard-arm and yard-arm, three glasses and a half, but was obliged to sheer off for want of powder. It is hoped that inquiry will be made into this affair ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... debutante wears her very prettiest ball dress. Old-fashioned sentiment prefers that it be white, and of some diaphanous material, such as net or gauze or lace. It ought not to look overelaborate, even though it is spangled with silver or crystal or is made of sheer lace. It should suggest something light and airy and gay and, above all, young. For a young girl to whom white is unbecoming, a color is perfectly suitable as long as it is a pale shade. She should not wear strong colors such as red, ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... prospered so little, that, positively, at the seventh No. it stopped. Laugh I did, and laugh I could not help but do, at this picture of baffled malice: writers willing and ready to fire with poisoned bullets, and yet perfectly unable to get an effective aim, from sheer want of co-operation on the part of ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... Religion of Brahma.—The Brahmans did not discard the ancient gods of the Vedas, they continued to adore them. But by sheer ingenuity they invented a new god. When prayers are addressed to the gods, the deities are made to comply with the demands made on them, as if they thought that prayer was more powerful than the gods. And ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... estates, is the young Duca di Sant' Agata—the same that pushes his fortunes with the senate in a claim to the riches and honors of the last Monforte that sat in thy councils. The debate hath so long endured, that the lad hath made himself a gondolier by sheer shoving an oar between his master's palace and those of the nobles he moves with interest—at least such is Gino's own ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... tongue, Xarifa,' said the mother, who was not so amiable. 'The man shall have revenge. Since he has trotted about so long on all fours, he must be paid for it. It is not revenge, it is sheer justice.' ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... is this?" I asked. "Merely because they lie in an appointed place. But now, if you are seeking for a human being, and that too at times when he is seeking you on his side also, often and often shall you give up the search in sheer despair: and of this again the reason? Nothing else save that no appointed place was fixed where one was to await the other." Such, so far as I can now recall it, was the conversation which we held together touching the arrangement of our ...
— The Economist • Xenophon
... a matter of form! But I expect that she is destined to marry a duke, my dear fellow; and I call it sheer folly on your part to have fallen in love ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... consciousness whenever our instincts and ready formed habits find themselves blocked by novel conditions. Then we are thrown back upon ourselves to reorganize our own attitude before proceeding to a definite and irretrievable course of action. Unless we try to drive our way through by sheer brute force, we must modify our organic resources to adapt them to the specific features of the situation in which we find ourselves. The conscious deliberating and desiring which precede overt action are, then, the methodic personal readjustment ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... the lady—who was no doubt the stepdaughter referred to by Mrs. Vrain—had obtained his address, and why she desired to see him so particularly, Lucian, out of sheer curiosity, obeyed the summons. Next day, at four o'clock—the appointed hour—he presented himself as requested, and, on giving his name, was shown immediately into the presence of his correspondent, who occupied ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... paralyzed by matter, becomes one with them and acts with them; and he who understands ends by approving, or else the universe would be a mistake, which is not possible. I do not believe that another sorrow of the sheer mind can be imagined. The only one which, before reflection, might seem admissible and which, in any case, could be but ephemeral would arise from the sight of the pain and misery that remain on the earth which we have left. But this sorrow, after all, would be but one side and an insignificant ...
— Death • Maurice Maeterlinck
... to talk of his land and his "folks," delighting in his low, soft speech, wherein the vowels languished and the r's fainted from sheer inertia. ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... a regular lion! After all, you will admit that it is sheer folly to come and attack him in his cage and pull his whiskers through the bars. And that is what you are doing. To be in love with his wife and pay court to her in Paris, when he is a hundred leagues from you, is all very well, but ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... nights, however, as the disease ran its course, when she had to give up from sheer lack of force. Then she permitted me to watch, though even at these times she often broke from sleep to come and be assured that the worthless black hound had not ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... very first time in all his life that he had experienced such a sensation as fear of robbery. When a man has never possessed anything worth stealing, he can hardly know what the feeling is. So it must have been sheer instinct that caused Jo to thus stand on guard, ready apparently to fight, in order to protect his property, however recently it may have ...
— Boy Scouts on a Long Hike - Or, To the Rescue in the Black Water Swamps • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... part, Maximus Claudius, and you, gentlemen who sit beside him on the bench, I regarded it as a foregone conclusion that Sicinius Aemilianus would for sheer lack of any real ground for accusation cram his indictment with mere vulgar abuse; for the old rascal is notorious for his unscrupulous audacity, and, further, launched forth on his task of bringing me to trial in your court before ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... fortress after fortress and repulsing the duke of Sudermania, afterwards Charles IX, from Riga. In 1604 he captured Dorpat, twice defeated the Swedish generals at Bialy Kamien, and was rewarded with the grand baton of Lithuania. Criminally neglected by the diet, which from sheer niggardliness turned a deaf ear to all his requests for reinforcements and for supplies and money to pay his soldiers, Chodkiewicz nevertheless more than held his own against the Swedes. His crowning achievement ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... bit, sir. It's natural after what I've gone through. You've never been in a prison, maybe. And you don't know what it's like to shake the bars of a cell at midnight and howl out of sheer madness to be off ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... been stated, had for twenty years never ceased to hope that her prayers would procure for her the grace of bearing a son to her husband. Out of sheer weariness she had given herself up to all kinds of charlatans, who at that period were well received by people of rank. On one occasion she brought from Italy a sort of astrologer, who as nearly as possible poisoned her with a horrible nostrum, and was ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... countries that have so much of this work before them. And now this possibility of fruitful co-operation is, for the time being, and it may be for many years, suspended. I say nothing of the loss of markets in the older countries which will be occasioned by sheer loss of population and the lower standard of living. That is one of the more obvious but not perhaps the most important of the ways in which ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... characteristic of the tall office building? It is lofty. This loftiness is to the artist-nature its thrilling aspect. It must be tall. The force of altitude must be in it. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a dissenting line." The Prudential (Guaranty) building in Buffalo represents the finest concrete embodiment of his idea achieved by Mr. Sullivan. It marks his emancipation from ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... Achille, to sit down there in the middle of the trail, beside a fire that was sure to serve as a beacon, and wait for us to come. It reflects little credit, however, on your skill as a woodsman, and, from sheer kindness of heart, we're not going to let you stay out in the forest ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... story of men so accustomed to danger that they throw away their lives in sheer carelessness. A fire down in the third level, five hundred feet underground; delay in putting it out; shifting of responsibility of one to another, mistakes and stupidity; then the sudden discovering that they were all but cut off; ...
— The Courage of the Commonplace • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... was inclined to become pessimistic, the mate treated it lightly, for he feared the strong sailor would break before long from sheer homesickness. ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... I could see that the blow was a feint, and I had a flashing, instantaneous memory of Dallisa's threat to drive the knife through my palms. But even while I commanded myself to stand steady, sheer reflex threw me forward, grabbing at his wrist ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... to get the horses over the mountains at this spot. Upon arriving at the top of the slope, I was, however, undeceived upon that score, for we found the high mount, for which we were steering, completely separated from us by a yawning chasm, which lay, under an almost sheer precipice, at our feet. The high mountain beyond, near the crown, was girt around by a solid wall of rock, fifty or sixty feet in height, from the edge of which the summit rose. It was quite unapproachable, except, perhaps, in one place, round to ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... encounters another obstacle from the restorations pictures have undergone. Injured by time or obscured by repeated varnishings, they often require some degree of cleaning to make them intelligible. Unfortunately, in most instances, the process is sheer assassination. Many of the best works of public galleries have been subjected to scrubbings more analogous to the labors of a washtub than to the delicate and scientific treatment requisite to preserve ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... of the noble, scholarly, free spirits of the German nation! And he climbs into the fire from a sheer sense of duty! But to conquer anything—the world, happiness, or even a wife—for that ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... semi-transparent folds of the black brought out the brilliance of the white neck and shoulders, the pale carnations of the face, the beautiful hair, following closely the contours of the white brow. Even through all his pain and preoccupation, Buntingford admired; was instantly conscious of the sheer pleasure of her beauty. But it was the pleasure of an artist, an elder brother—a father even. Her mother was in his mind, and the strong affection he had begun to feel for his ward was shot through and through ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... longer distinguish objects more than five feet from my eyes. Groping blindly along, I became entangled in a dense undergrowth, and after struggling and stumbling along for some distance in vain endeavours to get through it, I came to a stand at last in sheer despair. All sense of direction was now lost: I was entombed in thick blackness—blackness of night and cloud and rain and of dripping foliage and network of branches bound with bush ropes and creepers in a wild tangle. I had struggled into a hollow, ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... Pierre. For that Pierre, she knew, was to big Wilbur what Dick himself was to the great mass of law-abiding men. Accident had cut Wilbur adrift, but it was more than accident which started Pierre on the road to outlawry; it was the sheer love of dangerous chance, the glory in fighting ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... there is a cliff called Vulture-Crag, and thereupon grew a great fig-tree. It was hollow, and within its shelter lived an old Vulture, named Grey-pate, whose hard fortune it was to have lost both eyes and talons. The birds that roosted in the tree made subscriptions from their own store, out of sheer pity for the poor fellow, and by that means he managed to live. One day, when the old birds were gone, Long-ear, the Cat, came there to get a meal of the nestlings; and they, alarmed at perceiving him, set up a chirruping ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... impoverished them by the ravages of his army. If Hasdrubal could have done the same in Upper Italy; if Etruria, Umbria, and Northern Latium had either revolted or been laid waste, Rome must have sunk beneath sheer starvation, for the hostile or desolated territory would have yielded no supplies of corn for her population, and money to purchase it from abroad there was none. Instant victory was a matter of life or death. Three of her six armies were ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... members of the congregation, and all their friends and relations—to say nothing of the whole human race which was included in a general clause—would have had nothing more to hope for, and must have succumbed to sheer repletion. It was a rousing sermon, but it contained not a single reference to the ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... been reading some miserable cant about Southern humanity, for there are people everywhere who take the wrong side of every subject, from sheer obstinacy. What can disprove the laws of human nature? They require that things should be at the South as our ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... the other; the work of revolution finished or begun, they experience fatigue and reaction. In Hawthorne's romance, after Miles Coverdale had passed his spring and summer among the Utopians of Blithedale, he felt that the time had come when he must for sheer sanity's sake go and hold a little talk with the Conservatives, the merchants, the politicians, 'and all those respectable old blockheads, who still in this intangibility and mistiness of affairs kept a death-grip on one or two ideas ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... which Rosendo and Don Jorge carried that his human endurance had been strained so far beyond the elastic limit that there could now be no rebound. Every thought that touched his sore mind made it bleed anew, for every thought that he accepted was acrid, rasping, oppressive. The sheer weight of foreboding, of wild apprehension, of paralyzing fear, crushed him, until his shoulders bent low as he walked. How, lest he perform a miracle, could he hope to extricate himself and his loved ones from the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... unheard-of system of parliamentary obstruction, which has inevitably recoiled upon themselves. O'Connell was far too sharp-sighted—far too intelligent and clever a man to make so grave a mistake as this. By the sheer force of his genius he exercised for many years of his life a most powerful influence on English politics. He figures in one of John Doyle's sketches in the character ascribed to him probably by most of his contemporaries. In the sketch referred to, the ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... mention of his name. Alas! he is a specimen of the "homeless boy" of whom his neighbours the minstrels will sing to-morrow. He is silent and moody, for he is not in funds. Are there none among the company whom sheer misfortune has brought down into this underworld? we ask. Aye, there are, for in this kitchen there are representatives of all sorts and conditions. See that man in the corner by himself, speaking to no one, cooking nothing, ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... the coffee and was out of Major Holt's quarters and headed for the Shed's nearest entrance. The Shed was a gigantic metal structure rising out of sheer flat desert. There were hills to the westward, but only arid plain to the east and south and north. There was but one town in hundreds of miles and that was Bootstrap, built to house the workmen who'd built the Platform and the still invisible, ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... she known of it. The mind turns aside from the contemplation of the effect that a story or two of Kipling's would have produced upon her could she have grasped their vocabulary; she would probably have taken to her bed in sheer fright, as she did in a thunderstorm. Poetry of the heart and emotions, which never verged, even most distantly, upon what her traditions and her susceptibilities told her was the indecorous, satisfied her highest demands, and the ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... tyrant. He also gave them many cruel beatings, cudgellings, blows and other kinds of cruelty every day and every hour. 16. It is told of him that he destroyed and burnt eight hundred towns in that kingdom of Xalisco: he goaded the Indians to rebellion out of sheer desperation, and after they saw such numbers perish so cruelly, they killed some Spaniards, in which they were perfectly justified, and then retreated to the mountains. 17. Afterwards, the injustice ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... of the sea, they found themselves finally at the angle between the creek and the open bay, beyond the end of the low sea-wall which has earlier been mentioned. The creek here turned in sharply toward the foot of the mountain, and across from where the boys stood a sheer rock wall rose several hundred feet. This shut off the view of a part of the bay on that side, but in other directions they could see the white-topped waves rolling, eight or ten miles across to the farther side, where there were many ...
— The Young Alaskans • Emerson Hough
... soberly and calmly as you can—hundreds of people, all in their right minds, stamping and shouting and yelling for you to come and show yourself before the curtain; the entire house at your feet. Why, it's worship, Sir, sheer worship; and worship is a very sacred thing. Show me the man who's superior to that, and I'll show you a man who's either above or below the level of human nature. Whatever he may be, I don't envy him. To-morrow morning I shall be an ordinary citizen in ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... wits were driven hard. He had drawn to Mr. Frost every splinter of power he could command by barter, and thrown in his own State delegation in the House by sheer stress of that machine which he had upreared for his own defense at home. It was not enough; even the subtraction of two State delegations from the standards of the foe, by the adroit scheme, applied to each delegation, of ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... the city, where everything is manufactured or sold ready-made, a person simply goes to the store and buys whatever he needs. In the country this cannot be done, and one is driven by sheer necessity to devise ways and means of supplying his needs, himself. He simply has to invent or devise a remedy. Necessity is the mother ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... who picked his way over these jungled hills. Huts were seldom lacking; poor, ragged, cheerful Indians never. In the afternoon the trail pitched headlong down and around through a rock-spilled barranco with two sheer walls of the densest jungle and forest shutting it in. Where it crossed a stream, Dakin and I found a shaded, sandy hollow scooped out behind a broad flat rock in the form of a huge bathtub of water, clearer than any adjective will describe. Ems, whose swarthy tint and strong ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... languid interest. Another nurse, much younger, without the "black band," watched the surgeon from the foot of the cot. Beads of perspiration chased themselves down her pale face, caused less by sympathy than by sheer weariness and heat. The small receiving room of St. Isidore's was close and stuffy, surcharged with odors of iodoform and ether. The Chicago spring, so long delayed, had blazed with a sudden fury the last week ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... Duke indicated, where the view broadened in every direction, that being the last barrier between the river and the distant hills. The ranchhouse appeared big even in that setting of immensities, and perilously near the edge of the crumbling bluff which presented a face almost sheer on the river more ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... started on again, heading straight for what looked like a sheer wall of black rock a thousand feet or more in height, up a path so steep that Robertson and I got out and walked, or rather scrambled, in order to ease the bearers. Billali, I noticed, remained in his litter. The convenience ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... in 1783, with our recognition of your right and power to be a free and independent people. Of those who fought against you I say nought. But I must speak of those who fought for you—who brought to naught, by sheer hard blows, that family compact of the House of Bourbon, which would have been as dangerous to you upon this side of the ocean as to us upon the other; who smote with a continual stroke the trans-Atlantic power of Spain, till they placed her once vast and rich possessions at your mercy ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... Bumppo, cried Benjamin, your top-light frightens the fish, who see the net and sheer off soundings. A fish knows as much as a horse, or, for that matter, more, seeing that its brought up on the water. Haul oil, Master Bumppo, haul off, I say, and give a ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... girls like you,' said the lawyer. He stopped from sheer inability to express what he meant and felt, which was that such an exceptionally pretty girl as Stella Wharton ought not to start life alone in London and be thrown on her own resources, even though she was a thoroughly ...
— A City Schoolgirl - And Her Friends • May Baldwin
... could always take refuge, while sometimes the more daring chiefs converted these detached peaks and masses of rock, numbers of which you can see as you come up the Ghaut by railway, into almost impregnable fortresses. Many of these masses of rock rise as sheer up from the hillside as walls of masonry, and look at a short distance like ruined castles. Some are absolutely inaccessible; others can only be scaled by experienced climbers; and, although possible for the natives with their bare feet, are impracticable to European troops. Many of these ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... had joined in conversation with the Germans; his use of their tongue was far from idiomatic, but by sheer determination to force a way through linguistic obstacles, he talked with a haphazard fluency which was amusing enough. No false modesty imposed a check upon his eloquence. It was to the general table that he addressed himself on the topic that had arisen; in an ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... The ground fell almost sheer six hundred feet to the flat bottom of the valley. Beneath, the Tugela curled along like a brown and very sinuous serpent. Never have I seen such violent twists and bends in a river. At times the waters seemed to loop back on themselves. One great loop bent towards us, and at the arch of this ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... of Ares set up in this way:—bundles of brushwood are heaped up for about three furlongs 62 in length and in breadth, but less in height; and on the top of this there is a level square made, and three of the sides rise sheer but by the remaining one side the pile may be ascended. Every year they pile on a hundred and fifty waggon-loads of brushwood, for it is constantly settling down by reason of the weather. 63 Upon this pile of which I speak each people has an ancient iron sword 64 set up, and this ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... horizon, and the rocky little island grew nearer. As we approached it no landing-place was to be seen, no beach or strand. An iron-bound coast of sharp and rugged crags confronted us, which it seemed impossible to scale. At last we cast anchor at the foot of a great cliff, rising sheer out of the sea, where a ladder hung down the face of the rock for a few feet. A wilder or lonelier place I had never seen. Nobody could pursue and ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... the Tower on the Marshes at Mondement. It was the key of the swamp of St. Gond, the French centre. The Tower was held by the French when, by every military rule, they should have given it up. At length they lost it. They won it again, but because of sheer unreason, so far as the evidence shows, for at the moment they regained it Mondement had ceased to be anything but a key to a door which had been burst wide open. Foch, by the books, was beaten. But Foch as we know was fond of quoting Joseph de Maistre: ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... to drive in their wedge, and to further shorten that line across which French troops must retreat if indeed the salient was to be evacuated. And towards the east, towards the apex of the salient, outlying advance-parties of the French had been driven in by sheer weight of guns and numbers, and were now back on the heights of the Meuse, their line drawn from that held by their comrades in the neighbourhood of Louvemont, close to the Cote du Poivre, round about Douaumont and its village, and so to Vaux and south of it. Here, indeed, we must ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... right in my idea. I have found—Oh, joy! I treated the Vice-Prefect's son to a dinner of five courses at the Trattoria La Stella d'Italia out of sheer jubilation—I have found in the Archives, unknown, of course, to the Director, a heap of letters—letters of Duke Robert about Medea da Carpi, letters of Medea herself! Yes, Medea's own handwriting—a round, scholarly character, full ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... fondness for their old language. Not only the energy and power, but the intelligence and music of Europe have come mainly from Teutonic sources, and this glorification of everything Celtic, if it were not pedantry, would be sheer ignorance. The sooner all Welsh specialities disappear from the face of the ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... coolest and most practised men in London was ill-mannered towards me from sheer absence of mind—and could there be higher flattery? When a man of that sort does not give you the politeness you deserve, it means that in his heart he is rebelling against another feeling which his pride suggests that ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... mournful, absolutely still; and, as she looked, there seemed to her morbid imagination—diseased and disturbed with long brooding, sick with the monotony of repeated sensation—to be disengaged from all this immensity, a sense of a vast oppression, formless, disquieting. The terror of sheer bigness grew slowly in her mind; loneliness beyond words gradually enveloped her. She was lost in all these limitless reaches of space. Had she been abandoned in mid-ocean, in an open boat, her terror ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... failure. Now the survivors wheeled and gave chase, though they soon abandoned it, for the plane that Reade drove was a new one and faster than any of his pursuers. For a minute or so more the two Americans survived by sheer good luck. Then they ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys with Pershing's Troops - Dick Prescott at Grips with the Boche • H. Irving Hancock
... go to my Third House friend, the 'Sheriff,' who was posted up in such matters, and I concluded to act on his suggestion. The 'Sheriff's' advice was of a very practical nature. He thought it might take $3,000 to get it through—perhaps $5,000 for both House and Senate. It seemed a sheer piece of robbery and corruption, and I delayed further action until I could write to the directors of our corporation and state the case to them. This delayed me another week. When the answer came, it enclosed a check for $5,000, with directions to 'buy the scoundrels, if they were for sale, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... legs. Suddenly sitting down on the ground the child swiftly took off her shoes and stockings. Getting up she undid the heavy shawl and the two little dresses. Out she slipped without more ado and stood up in only a light petticoat. In sheer delight at the relief, she threw up her dimpled arms, that were bare up to her short sleeves. To save the trouble of carrying them, her aunt had dressed her in her Sunday clothes over her workday garments. ...
— Heidi - (Gift Edition) • Johanna Spyri
... an almost startled reverence. He stepped into the carriage, signed feebly, but with determination, to the Arab coachman, and was driven away, followed by a parting "Oh, la la!" from the chasseur, uttered in a voice that sounded shrill with sheer amazement. ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... the base of the ice cliff, and stood on a narrow ledge between the cliff and the churning sea. He saw no one. He extended the detector's range to maximum, and worked the scanners up the sheer face of the ...
— The Dueling Machine • Benjamin William Bova
... his betel-nut and buyo-leaf [87] in the kabir. He had not travelled far, before he came to a steep ascent of rock-terraces,—the Terraces of the Wind, that had eight million steps. The Malaki knew not how to climb up the rocky structure that rose sheer before him, and so he sat down at the foot of the ascent, and took his kabir off his back to get out some betel-nut. After he had begun to chew his betel, he began to think, and he pondered for eight days how he could accomplish ...
— Philippine Folk-Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss, Berton L. Maxfield, W. H. Millington,
... articles for removal, when a sudden revolution occasioned the disarming of his Indian laborers, who for some time had served for a protection, and all further operations were suspended, as longer residence in that exposed region without arms was sheer madness. It was at that time that Dr. Le Plongeon wrote the following Memorial to the Mexican President, Senor Don Sebastian Lerdo de Tejada, which is given nearly entire, as it makes a statement of his claims and wishes, ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... to Dwight? Something that is not easily settled; for as the chickens sputter in the oven below, and the water boils off the potatoes, and the pudding is manufactured, and the cloud deepens and glooms, he does not recover his free-and-easy air and manner. He ceases his walk after a little, from sheer weariness, but he thrusts out his arm and seizes a chair with the air of one who has not time to be leisurely, and flings himself into it, and clasps his arms on the table, and bends his head on ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... had been brought down by the accursed drink, which is the bane of our nation, and some few by sheer misfortune. ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... season there came to them above the slow throb of the ship's engines the liquid music of innumerable cascades, and from a mountain that seemed to float almost directly over their heads fell a stream of water a sheer thousand feet to the sea, smoking and twisting in the sunshine like a living thing at play. And then a miracle happened which even Alan wondered at, for the ship seemed to stand still and the mountain to ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... swayed from side to side, rolled, dipped, and plunged, but Bill kept the track, as if, in the whispered words of the Expressman, he could "feel and smell" the road he could no longer see. We knew that at times we hung perilously over the edge of slopes that eventually dropped a thousand feet sheer to the tops of the sugar-pines below, but we knew that Bill knew it also. The half visible heads of the horses, drawn wedge-wise together by the tightened reins, appeared to cleave the darkness like a ploughshare, held between his rigid hands. Even the hoof-beats of the six ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... they make its motive mere exclusiveness and vanity. The culture which is supposed to plume itself on a smattering of Greek and Latin is a culture which is begotten by nothing so intellectual as curiosity; it is valued either out of sheer vanity and ignorance, or else as an engine of social and class distinction, separating its holder, like a badge or title, from other people who have not got it. No serious man would call this culture, or attach any value to it, as culture, at all. To find ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... coach dryly, "I suppose you know that your presence on the team is a sheer accident? If you don't, allow me to tell you candidly that if there had been anyone else in the college to put in Corson's place, we would never have called on you, ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... maturity and bodily vigor as yet unimpaired by age. The Yale commencement orator of 1909 said of Sumner, in presenting him for the Doctorate of Laws: "His intellect has broadened, his heart has mellowed, as he has descended into the vale of years." While advancing age weakened in no respect the sheer power and the steady-eyed fearlessness of mind and character which made Sumner a compelling force in the university and in the wider world, it seems to some of us that the essential kindliness of his nature came out with especial clearness ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... purpose in my passion. 'Tis my aim to manage everything in order categorical— My fame as Cosmos-maker I intend shall be historical. I know they call me Paul Pry, say I'm fussy and pragmatical— But that's because sheer moonshine always hates the mathematical. I'm not content to "play the King" with an imperial pose in it— Whatever is marked "Private" I shall up and poke ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 30, 1892 • Various
... Bernhard," replied Anton, "that, even with the best will in the world, it is not permitted us to force ourselves thus into the affairs of others. However good our intentions may be, still I am a stranger to the baron. My interference may seem, both to him and to your father, sheer presumption. I do not say that the step is a useless, but it is a most uncertain one. It would be better that you should first find out the ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... the consciousness of increasing wealth, to add to which his energies are unceasingly devoted; his relaxation, meantime, an occasional frolic or debauch, which he grapples with, as his father did with fortune and the forest, closely and constantly, only pausing for breath through sheer exhaustion, or prostration rather. His person is square, and better knit together than most men's; his complexion clear, though bronzed by exposure to sun and storm; his manner rustic, but not rude; with a self-possession that is evident at a glance, and which makes him at all ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... windings of the solitary stream; then, in quick succession, rapid followed rapid, till the bed of the Ottawa seemed a slope of foam. Now, like a wall bristling at the top with woody islets, the Falls of the Chats faced them with the sheer plunge of their sixteen cataracts; now they glided beneath overhanging cliffs, where, seeing but unseen, the crouched wildcat eyed them from the thicket; now through the maze of water-girded rocks, which the white cedar and the spruce clasped with serpent-like ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... Elia, as though in sheer idle curiosity, watched the scene, steadily continuing his meal the while. There was no sort of feeling expressed in his cold eyes. Nor did he display the least relief when Jim assured him Eve was alive. Peter watched the boy, and while Jim ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... was open, and by sheer perversity some bundles of straw were peeping out, luring Slimak to a doze. But he turned away his head and looked at one of the hills where he had sown oats that morning. He fancied the yellow grain in the furrows was looking frightened, as if trying in vain to hide from the sparrows that ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... citadel close to the wall, erected on the level summit of a ragged hill, of which the centre, rising up to a great height in its round circle, resembled an Argive shield, except that in the north it was not quite round, but at that point it was protected by a precipice which ran sheer down into the Euphrates; the walls were built of baked bricks and bitumen, a combination which is well known to be the strongest of ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... the Fish Patrol. He only waited to catch up on sleep lost while hammering out "Typhoon Off the Coast of Japan," before applying himself to new fiction. That was what was the matter with it: it was sheer fiction in place of the white-hot realism of the "true story" that had brought him distinction. This second venture he afterward termed "gush." It was promptly rejected by the editor of the Call. Lacking experience in such matters, ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... but short, for on the following morning our anchor was at the bows, and the ships heading for Hakodadi. This town—the largest in Yesso—reminds one very forcibly of Gibraltar. There is a similar high rock standing sheer out of the sea—almost the same narrow strip of land connecting it with the main; whilst the town is built on the slopes of the eminence, and circling the bay as at Gib. The town is not over large, and commodities are very ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... mention, but which I would have believed to have been a longing for Roberta, Marquise of Grez and Bye, if I had heard it so spoken, with an English or Russian or French accent, to me in a robe of tulle or sheer linen. "And may I not return immediately after that supper to that Club of Old Hickory for conversation with you and my Uncle, the General ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... reiterated this as if sheer force of mind could make me yield. And then her hair, uncoiling, fell softly over my ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... letter very much, and am so glad you keep "office hours." It is very good of you not to be angry with my good advice! "Experientia does it," as Mr. 'Aughton would say.... I break down about once in three months like clockwork—from sheer overwork. I certainly am never happy idle; but I have too often to sit in sackcloth in the depths of my heart—whilst everybody is beseeching me to be "idle"—from a consciousness that, not from doing nothing, but by doing B when I should ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... decidedly. "Them critturs hev got to git around this way. They're on a line that'll strike Fort Randall, wi' a heap more military 'n they'll notion. They'll strike south an' sweep round sheer through to Wyoming. We're dead ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... side, where, after shelving down gently from the wall for some distance, it terminates abruptly in a precipice, black and horrible, of some three hundred feet at least, as if the axe of nature had been here employed cutting sheer down, and leaving behind neither excrescence nor spur—a dizzy precipice it is, assimilating much to those so frequent in the flinty hills of Northern Africa, and exhibiting some distant resemblance to that of Gibraltar, towering in its ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... wanted to give you something to remember that was just a little bit different than other girls had given you—some distinct impression that must linger with you—always—always! I'm not like other women! Do you see, Paul? It was all sheer vanity. I wanted you ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... called Vulture-Crag, and thereupon grew a great fig-tree. It was hollow, and within its shelter lived an old Vulture, named Grey-pate, whose hard fortune it was to have lost both eyes and talons. The birds that roosted in the tree made subscriptions from their own store, out of sheer pity for the poor fellow, and by that means he managed to live. One day, when the old birds were gone, Long-ear, the Cat, came there to get a meal of the nestlings; and they, alarmed at perceiving him, set up ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... at which he sat was a good instance of his taste. The silver-plate on it was really remarkable. There was a delightful Caroline tankard in the middle, placed there for the sheer pleasure of looking at it; there was a large silver cow with a lid in its back; there were four rat-tail spoons; the china was an extremely cheap Venetian crockery of brilliant designs and thick make. The coffee-pot and milk-pot were early Georgian, with very peculiar marks; but these ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... the giraffe herd and the performing elephants, and, in six months more was quit of an of them, save the pony Repeater who turned air-springs, at another profit of fifteen thousand dollars. As for Repeater, he sold the pony several months later for a sheer profit of two thousand. While this bankruptcy of the Circling Brothers had been the greatest financial achievement of Harris Collin's life, nevertheless he enjoyed no mean permanent income from his plant, and, in addition, split fees with ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... a clear mountain stream that leaped in a succession of waterfalls down the sheer hill-side into the valley. Bradley got out to loosen the bridle to allow the animal to drink, and stood with one foot on the shore and the other on a brown stone in the water. Try as he would, Westerfelt could not banish Harriet from his mind. Her sweet personality seemed to be trying ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... she lay there with her babies, quivering and shaking with fright—for the man was trying to get in. The light was getting broader and brighter, and at last, in sheer terror, Pero began to burrow further ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... waked by a strange neighing in the nighttime seeming to come from the direction of his sweetheart's bedroom. He ran hurriedly for her father and the two of them raced to her room. They found her awake and ill with sheer terror, having been awakened by the neighing, seemingly ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... additional force from the vague heathen rumors of the time. Finally the Hoc vince, which has passed into proverbial significance as a most appropriate motto of the invincible religion of the cross, is too good to be traced to sheer falsehood. Some actual fact, therefore, must be supposed to underlie the tradition, and the question only is this, whether it was an external, viable phenomenon ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... down under the onrushing waves of humanity. Half a dozen of them were dragged down and hurled back into the milling crowd where they were torn limb from limb. The balance of the guards, guided by Havenner's stentorian shouts, closed in around Glavour and the prisoner and battered their way by sheer brute force toward the Viceregal chariot. They had reached in and climbed in when a feminine shout pierced the ...
— Giants on the Earth • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... you that he too has been hit by one of Eros' darts. You may turn red and white, and look at me as if I were your enemy, and talking contemptible nonsense. I have seen many strange things, but I never saw any one before you who was a coward out of sheer courage, and yet of all the women I know there is not one to whom fear is less known than my bold and resolute Klea. The road is a hard one that you must take, but only cover your poor little heart with a coat of mail, and venture in all confidence to meet the Roman, who is an excellent ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... on the subject. Having repeated my wishes to him, he asked me several questions which seemed to indicate a prying disposition, and a curiosity as impertinent as it was inconvenient. In fact, I did not like his manner at all; but conceiving that his conduct might arise from sheer ignorance, and from no sinister motive, I still felt inclined to avail myself of his assistance to procure a messenger. Finding that he could not sift me, he at length said that he had no doubt a friend of ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... instructors. Nevertheless, the scheme now agitated by British statesmen must culminate in some such measure, if they would have their schools attended; and the inference is natural that education viewed from such a stand-point becomes a design criminal and oppressive in its nature, as well as a sheer impossibility in its carrying out. Once again the whole British power would launch itself in vain against the unyielding rock of as stubborn a will as ever animated human beings, as durable and unshrinking almost as the inner rock upon which it is ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... out on the steps of the pagoda with a programme in his hand. Mose bounced into view, handed his tackle to Shanghai, Curry's hostler, and started for the jockeys' room, singing to himself out of sheer lightness of heart. He knew what he would do with that twenty-two-dollar ticket. There was a crap game every ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... west of our haven the coast-front runs, as it were, in two tiers. From the sea rises a sheer face of naked rock, averaging some two hundred feet in height, for the most part unscaleable, but here and there indented with steep gully-ways, down each of which, through thickets of cow-parsley, flax, kale, and brambles, matted curtains of ground-ivy, tussocks ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... James at this point falling backwards with his feet together and his eyes shut, with a semi-circular dotted line marking the progress of his flight and a few stars above his head to indicate moral collapse. There are no words that can adequately describe the sheer, black horror that froze the blood in his veins as this ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... first year had passed without mishap, and already the second was nearing its close. The school board congratulated itself. Had the faculty known that for most of his scholarship, poor as it often was, Van Blake was indebted to the sheer will power of Bob Carlton they might have felt less sanguine. Day after day Bob had patiently tutored his big chum in order that he might contrive to scrape through his lessons. It was Bob who did the work and Van who serenely accepted ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett
... defects? The question strikes at the root of many a social injustice. Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict suffering on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of its genuine humility, or indifference, or sheer helplessness. Do we not, one and all, like to feel our strength even at the expense of some one or of something? The poorest sample of humanity, the street arab, will pull the bell handle at every street door in bitter ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... such a pretty bower. Clean India matting on the floor, and airy cane furniture, dressed up in pink and blue ribbons, scattered about; through the sheer muslin hangings at the windows the early sunshine glinted between the closed shutters, and danced in bars of light ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... sensation as I had anticipated. When I opened the door of the large, barely-furnished room, which we called our workshop, Arthur sprang from the table on which he had been lounging, and Mabane, who was still working, dropped his brush in sheer amazement. I turned towards ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... ship to port Howe'er the breeze may be; Just when she nears the waiting shore She drifts again to sea. No tack of sail, nor turn of helm, Nor sheer of veering side. Stern-fore she drives to sea and night ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... kingdom; but for the first time his experience was identical with the experience of the men around him, and he came to a larger conception of life. He put himself in the place of "the poor naked wretches," and unexpectedly found healing and comfort. He took poor Tim in his arms from a sheer desire for human contact and animal warmth, a primitive and genuine need, through which he suddenly had a view of the world which he had never had from his throne, and from this moment his heart began to ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... sir!" I cried. "Do you know you have accused that young man of a villainy which must damn him for life? And now you tell me—" I broke off in sheer indignation. ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... imperial pages in a body; and, finally, the imperial horse-guard (/Hatschiergarde/) itself, in black velvet frocks (/Fluegelroeck/), with all the seams edged with gold, under which were red coats and leather-colored camisoles, likewise richly decked with gold. One scarcely recovered one's self from sheer seeing, pointing, and showing, so that the scarcely less splendidly clad body- guards of the electors were barely looked at; and we should, perhaps, have withdrawn from the windows, if we had not wished to take a view of our own magistracy, ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... am not a sycophant hanging round White Hall! 'Twas sheer good luck and no merit of mine that got me the guardianship of Sue. Lord Middlesborough, her kinsman, wanted it; the Courts would have given her to him, but old Noll thought him too much of a 'gentleman,' whilst I—an out-at-elbows country squire, was more to my Lord Protector's liking. ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... opposite side, in hopes of finding a country that might afford them sustenance. A frail bridge was constructed by throwing the huge trunks of trees across the chasm, where the cliffs, as if split asunder by some convulsion of nature, descended sheer down a perpendicular depth of several hundred feet. Over this airy causeway the men and horses succeeded in effecting their passage with the loss of a single Spaniard, who, made giddy by heedlessly looking down, lost his footing and fell into the ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... replied Edward. "It will be quite sufficient to give me that title when you find me with venison in my possession; and as for going with you, that I certainly shall not. Sheer off, or you ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... apart from the poetry composed in the fashion described in the passage preceding. The poet here does not coolly say to himself: "Go to, I will make a poem to relieve my feelings"; he sings, to quote Goethe's own expression, "as the bird sings," out of the sheer fulness of his heart, which insists on immediate expression.[46] True it is that Goethe, like all other poets, frequently wrote under no immediate pressure of inspiration, but to affirm this of the highest efforts of his genius is at ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... to descend the water seemed to be about thirty feet below, but the rocky side of the river bed ran sheer up quite fifty feet as far as we could make out in the darkness, and I did not wonder ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... changed slightly as he stood there, the sound of the clock conveying to him (it may be) a sense of old buildings and time; and himself the inheritor; and then to-morrow; and friends; at the thought of whom, in sheer confidence and pleasure, it seemed, he ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... to sketch the future extension of Britannic lordship and influence. Kingdoms were overthrown with a joke, continents were annexed in a boyish phrase; Armageddon transacted itself in sheer lightness of heart. Laughing, he waded through the blood of nations, and in the end seated himself with crossed legs upon the throne of ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... young people stood in silence. There was no moon, and the mountains rose darkly, a sheer wall at the end of the garden, their tops cutting into the starry sky with a dull edge, over which a dim white ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... rising again, driven by that unrelenting, irresistible desire, this poor waif of humanity, impelled by sheer force of will, staggered and crawled towards its hope, forward to its dream, and at last stood by the window of the home ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... and humorous person, who was once a Church worker and a singer in the choir, etc., when, in his own words, he used 'to put on religion with his Sunday clothes and take it off again with them,' came to grief through sheer love of amusement, such as that which is to be found in music-halls and theatres. His habit was to spend the money of an insurance company by which he was employed, in taking out the young lady to whom he was engaged, to such entertainments. Ultimately, of course, he was found out, and, when starving ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... to meet the swift glance I got for that, for in sheer sweetness and affection it outdid all remembered glances of the past. In a moment it was as though I had more than regained the lost ground of lost years. And in another moment, on the heels of the discovery, came the still more startling one that I was glad to have regained ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... book of which we have read every word for the sheer pleasure of reading, and which we put down with a pang that we cannot forget it all and start ...
— The Wallypug in London • G. E. Farrow
... perhaps from sheer amazement at this outbreak of Gillian's, who had never seemed particularly fond of her cousin. Gillian was quite as much surprised at herself, but something seemed to drive her on, with flaming cheeks. 'Dolores is half broken- hearted ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... hurried on, a confused mass of monks and populace, with their hapless prisoners in the centre, who, hauled, cuffed, questioned, and cursed by twenty self-elected inquisitors at once, thought fit, either from Jewish obstinacy or sheer bewilderment, to give no ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... mother-of-pearl, which is intrinsic and necessary, being the result of the arrangement of the particles,—the flowering of the mechanism of the shell; or like the beauty of health which comes out of and reaches back again to the bones and the digestion. There is no grace like the grace of strength. What sheer muscular gripe and power lie back of the firm, delicate notes of the great violinist! "Wit," says Heine,—and the same thing is true of beauty,—"isolated, is worthless. It is only endurable when it rests on ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... due season, in common with the feast, it ended. After sitting the usual time, the guests retired. Sir Gervaise then went on deck, and paced the poop for an hour, looking anxiously ahead, in quest of the French signal; and, failing of discovering them, he was fain to seek his berth out of sheer fatigue. Before he did this, however, the necessary orders were given; and that to call him, should any thing out of the common track occur, was repeated no ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the first with such headlong impetuosity that it was repulsed and gave back; but the fourth and last line passing through, and being reinforced by the other broken lines, came unfaltering, and swept us back from sheer weight of numbers. We were now reduced to a mere skirmish line. It was at this moment that I saw Strahan fall, and it seemed but a second later that the enemy's advance passed over the spot. It was impossible then to rescue him, ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... to brush her shining hair out in two silky lengths on either side. Manella gazed and gazed at the glittering splendour till she could gaze no more for sheer envy, and then she turned ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... age. When we find an artist of supreme excellence in any craft, we generally find that he has been practising it all his life. To say that he has a genius for it, means that he has practised it, and concentrated his main force upon it, and that he has been driven irresistibly to do so by sheer bent of nature. It was so with Defoe and his power of circumstantial invention, his unrivalled genius for "lying like truth." For years upon years of his life it had been his chief occupation. From the time of his first connexion with Harley, at least, he had ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... the managers of the oracles were frequently shrewd fellows, and could often pick up the materials of a very smart and judicious answer from the appearance of the customer and his question. Very often the answer was sheer nonsense. It was, in fact, believed by many that as a rule you couldn't tell what the response meant until after it was fulfilled, when you were expected to see it. In many cases the answers were ingeniously ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... fortunately found impracticable in the execution. Land was little worth without hands to till it; labourers enough could not be obtained from England and Scotland, and the Hamiltons, Stewarts, Folliots, Chichesters, and Lamberts, having, from sheer necessity, to choose between Irish cultivators and letting their new estates lie waste and unprofitable, it is needless to ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... had foreseen, except by direct assault, the place proved impregnable, its moat protecting it upon three sides and the sheer wall of the old city terminating in the deep fosse upon the fourth. In its little armoury, among other weapons they had found a great store of arrows and some good bows, whereof Hugh took the best and longest. Thus ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... be anywhere on the face of the earth, young women, good women, mothers of babes who died of sheer hunger like this mother of Nerina's up yonder in the snows of the Abruzzo? He thought not; his heart revolted at the vision of her, a living skeleton ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... dream of a sunken city wall of old Syracuse, and conjured up a vision of the hoary Archimedes upon it before the inundation, directing the destruction, by his burning-glass, of the enemy's ships. The side of the reef toward the land was as sheer as an engineer could make it with a plumb-line. The coral animals had as accurate a measure of the vertical as of defense against ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... almost animal passion, which for one instant revealed the real, inner man, he went up to Chauvelin and towering above him like a great avenging giant, he savoured for one second the joy of looking down on that puny, slender figure which he could crush with sheer brute force, with one blow from his ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... By sheer visualization under my eyelids I constructed chess-boards and played both sides of long games through to checkmate. But when I had become expert at this visualized game of memory the exercise palled on me. Exercise it was, for there could be no ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... subtle change when the girl took her seat by his side. From a machine quivering with life and power it became a triumphal chariot. By sheer perfection of mechanical energy it had bridged the gulf that lay between the millionaire's daughter and the hired man, since there could be no question that Cynthia Vanrenen placed Viscount Medenham in no other category. Indeed, his occasional ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... kind of language, in daily life, would be called sheer impertinence; and the person who could talk so before educated gentlemen would probably receive an intimation that he was making himself offensive. He would certainly be looked upon as a weak and conceited ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... sprang, for his messenger, swift-footed Iris; And between Samos anon and the rocks of precipitous Imber Smote on the black sea-wave, and about her the channel resounded: Then, as the horn-fixt lead drops sheer from the hand of the islesman, Fatal to ravenous fish, plung'd she to the depth of the ocean: Where in a cavern'd recess, the abode of the sisterly Sea-nymphs, Thetis the goddess appear'd, in the midst ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... pine-leaves and the grapevine-withes supplied the rebels with water, and their plantation-grounds were the wild pine-apple and the plantain groves, and the forests, where the wild-boars harbored and the ringdoves were as easily shot as if they were militia-men. Nothing but sheer weariness of fighting seems to have brought about a truce at last, and then a treaty, between those high contracting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... her, but was too poor for the proud wealthy father, who tauntingly dismissed him till the day when he too should be master of as large herds as the old herdsman. From this time forwards had the old herdsman no luck more, but sheer misfortune. Report ran that a fiery dragon was seen passing o' nights over his grounds; and his substance decayed. The poor swain was now as rich, and again sued for his beloved, whom he obtained. Upon the wedding-day a snake came gliding into the room, upon whose coiled ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... island and the point that formed one termination of the bay, heading, of course, toward the tree to which the warp had been secured. It was an impulsive feeling, rather than any reason, that made me give the vessel a sheer with the helm, so as to send her directly through the passage, instead of letting her strike the rocks. I had no eventual hope in so doing, nor any other motive than the strong reluctance I felt to have the good craft hit the ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... consented to this adventure from sheer lack of purpose. But whither was it leading her? She was a married woman, with her shackles heavy upon her. Yet she walked that night with a stranger, as one who owned her freedom. The silence between them was intimate and ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... reception. She withheld her fire until we were close to her, intending, I suppose, to utterly demolish us just before we got alongside; but I was watching them with my telescope, and as soon as they had got their broadside carefully trained and were about to fire, we simply took a broad sheer to port, and before they could lay their guns afresh, we were under her bows, and into her head, from whence we at last managed to hew our way in upon deck. This disheartened the Frenchmen, and they began to give way, and at that moment in ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... one which above all appears incapable of decision except by the complete overthrow of the one Power or the other. There was no complication of alliances nor any expectation of them. The Anglo-Japanese Treaty had isolated the struggle. If ever issue hung on the sheer fighting force of the two belligerents it would seem to have been this one. After the event we are inclined to attribute the result to the moral qualities and superior training and readiness of the victors. These qualities indeed played ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... Ephesus is better than the evidence for a renowned presbyter of the same name having lived in Ephesus. This has been wisely pointed out by Juelicher, even though he himself denies that the apostle wrote St. John's Gospel. And the justice of this argument proves that it is sheer paradox to maintain, as some now maintain, that the only John who lived in ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... from sheer love of the work and without expectation of public recognition, and it was therefore a great surprise as well as gratification to him, to find that the demand for his Marco Polo was such as to justify the appearance of a second edition only a few years after the first. The preparation ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... and the sound of roaring water grew tumultuous as they rounded the curve in the road and came into the little triangular nook which had been anciently formed by the Colorow as it descended in power from its source in the high parks. On the left the ledges rose almost sheer for a thousand feet, and from the edge of this cliff ore-buckets, a-slide on invisible cables, appeared in the sky, swooping like eagles, silently dropping one by one, to disappear, tamely as doves, in the gable end of a huge, drab-colored mill which stood upon the flat beside the stream. ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... vocal cords rehearse an oratorio in the afternoon at a public rehearsal and sing the same work in the evening at the regular concert performance, when, to use his own words, "I feel as if every note will be my last. I have no grip on my voice." It was a clear case of indomitable will and sheer physical strength carrying the singer over obstacles that even to my mind seemed well-nigh insurmountable. A cure was effected in this obstinate case simply by insisting upon observance of hygienic law. There is no better instance of efficacy of vocal hygiene than in the case of this ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... unperturbed. At table she sat serenely, her dark lashes shading the oval of her cheeks, while the young men's eyes—and one pair of them, especially—took in the black, braid-bound head and the small, Madonna-like face, faintly flushed by sun and wind, above the golden glow of the sheer frock. ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley
... had made a mistake, for during this same period the development of the older man had been far greater than his own. Covington to-day was, perhaps, as able a business man as Gorham had been when the Consolidated Companies was born, but Gorham in the mean time, by sheer display of extraordinary genius, had become an international figure. The business relations between the two men were closer than ever, but never once was there any question as to which was the master. Covington would not have been Covington ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... window was in a kind of circular tower projecting from the side of the building, such as one often sees in old Norman architecture;—it overhung not only a wall of dizzy height, but a precipice with a sheer descent of some thousand feet; and far below, spread out like a map in the distance, lay a prospect of enchanting richness. The eye might wander over orchards of silvery olives, plantations with their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... to him a valid argument. Loath to leave his money at the mercy of chance comers, he climbed up and closed the iron shutters of the grated window,—the cliff descended, sheer, one hundred and two feet to the Dnyepr at that point,—double-locked the great iron doors, and there we were in a bank vault, with all possible customers excluded. Luckily, the saints in these caverns, which differed very little from those in the former, ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... die or his wife will prove unfaithful. If he is compelled to go, the usual course is to write to his wife and tell her that she is free to look out for another husband. Having made up his mind that he will die, I have no doubt that he often dies through sheer funk." (R. Logan JACK, Back Blocks of China, 1904, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... me in time to assist two more of the 9th who were struggling under their horses at the bottom of the ditch. Without a moment's hesitation, Adams jumped into the ditch. He was an unusually powerful man, and by sheer strength dragged the Lancers clear of their horses. The Afghans meanwhile had reached Bhagwana, and were so close to the ditch that I thought my friend the padre could not possibly escape. I called out to him to look after himself, but he paid no attention to my warnings ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... cross," she repeated. "Just as cross as ever you like, so long as you don't keep it up too protractedly. It's the most engaging piece of flattery I've come across for a month of Sundays. Only you needn't worry in this particular instance, dear man, I give you my word you needn't. It's a sheer waste of feeling. For Fallowfeild's always been perfectly decent with me. I know people think him an awfully risky lot, but they're noodles. He's racketed in his day—of course he has. But if he'd been more of a hypocrite, people would have talked less. ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... concerned—all that relates to secondary causes—upon purely scientific grounds, as he must do in any case. Perhaps, confident, as he evidently is, that his view will finally be adopted, he may enjoy a sort of satisfaction in hearing it denounced as sheer atheism by the inconsiderate, and afterward, when it takes its place with the nebular hypothesis and the like, see this judgment reversed, as we suppose it would ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... road, and, striking into a steep, narrow trail, began the ascent of one of the mountains of the main range. It still lacked a little of midday when he at last found himself on a narrow bench, near the summit, in a small growth of pines and firs. He stopped from sheer exhaustion and looked about him. Not a sign of human life was visible; not a sound broke the stillness save an occasional breath of air murmuring through the pines and the trickling of a tiny rivulet over ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... her. At first against Pen, and suspicious of him, she was his partisan now, and almost as enthusiastic about him as her daughter. When two women get together to like a man, they help each other on; each pushes the other forward, and the second, out of sheer sympathy, becomes as eager as the principal: at least, so it is said by philosophers who ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... between fifty and sixty, a sheer wreck, I had noticed earlier in the night standing in Piccadilly, not far from Leicester Square. She seemed to have neither the sense nor the strength to get out of the rain or keep walking, but stood stupidly, whenever she ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... heaviness of spirit he spake to himself: "Woe is me! for now, when beyond all hope Zeus hath given me the sight of land, there is no place where I may win to shore from out of the sea. For the crags are sharp, and the waves roar about them, and the smooth rock riseth sheer from the sea, and the water is deep, so that I may gain no foothold. If I should seek to land, then a great wave may dash me on the rocks. And if I swim along the shore, to find some harbour, I fear lest the winds may catch me again and bear me out into ...
— The Story Of The Odyssey • The Rev. Alfred J. Church
... up the paper-knife with an expression of sheer animal ferocity. "Yes," he hissed, "the whole lot. Torturing them, too!"—and fell back into his chair with peal upon peal ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various
... you were at the Board?' To this Felix made no direct answer. Roger knew that there had been no Board. Mr Melmotte was in the country and there could be no Board, nor could Sir Felix have had business in the city. It was sheer impudence,—sheer indifference, and, into the bargain, a downright lie. The young man, who was of himself so unwelcome, who had come there on a project which he, Roger, utterly disapproved,—who had now knocked him and his household up at four o'clock in the morning,—had uttered ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... heart thumping, not at the thought of danger, though danger he knew was all round, but from sheer panic that he himself was about to play an unworthy part. Whatever fears or doubts he may have had suddenly fall away from him and he rose to his knees, for not twenty yards away at a window, her hands grasping the bars, her ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... head, and then sits down on the nearest stone- bench. She sits for a long time, lost in thought. I watch her with a sort of malevolent pleasure, finally I pull myself together by sheer force of will, and ironically step before her. She startles, and ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... much easier to have gone around the mountain. But the Chasm was supposed to be like a huge cavity scooped out of the plateau beyond the mountain, rimmed with sheer cliffs a mile high. Only on the side next to the mountain was there a slope leading ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... aboard, and the band struck up the usual lively air. At the first notes the old woman executed a few feeble little jig steps in sheer exuberance. Then the solemnity of the situation sobered her. Her great, wealthy, powerful, kind friends were departing on their long voyage over mysterious seas. Again and again, very earnestly, she repeated the graceful, ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... being quite a hobby with him. She was a splendid craft of her kind, measuring thirty feet in length, with a beam of six feet, and she pulled six oars. She was a most beautiful model of the whale-boat type, double-ended, with quite an unusual amount of sheer fore and aft, which gave her a fine, bold, buoyant bow and stern; moreover, these were covered in with light turtle-back decks, that forward measuring six feet in length, while the after turtle-back measured five feet from the stern-post. She was ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... built our boat again; We guessed and groped, North, ever North, with many a twist and turn; We saw ablaze in the deathless days the splendid sunsets burn. O'er soundless lakes where the grayling makes a rush at the clumsy fly; By bluffs so steep that the hard-hit sheep falls sheer from out the sky; By lilied pools where the bull moose cools and wallows in huge content; By rocky lairs where the pig-eyed bears peered at our tiny tent. Through the black canyon's angry foam we hurled to dreamy ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... in the hall, and Irene came in. She was beautifully attired in a gown Mostyn had not yet seen. It was most becoming. How strange! There seemed, somehow, to-night more about her to admire than on any former occasion. Was it due to his return to his proper social plane? Was the other life sheer delusion? What exquisite poise! What easy, erect grace! Her whole being was stamped with luxurious self-confidence. How soft was the feel of her delicate fingers as they touched his! Why had he clasped them so warmly? How charming the gentle and seductive glance of her eyes! ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... obliged himself to execute the men whose execution his testimony secured; if he had been forced to lay the lash on quivering flesh or fit the noose round the necks of living men; it is likely that no bribe would have bought him, that sheer cowardice and an instinctive horror of death and pain would have saved him, as no consideration of honour and truth did, from the extreme baseness of an informer's trade. Here lay part of the meaning of his ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... train, whilst in this upper stillness sweet sounds of church bells reach us from hamlets close underneath the convent. Nothing can be more solid, fresher, or more brilliant than the rich beech- and pine-woods running sheer from our airy eminence to the level world below, nothing more visionary, slumberous, or dimmer than that wide expanse teeming, as we know, with busy human life, yet flat ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... theirselves men, is so foolish as to try to evict us from this packet, then all I got to say is that they're triflin' with death." (Here Mr. Gibney thrust out his superb chest and thumped it with his horny fists, after the fashion of an enraged gorilla. This was sheer bluff, however, for while there was not a drop of craven blood in the Gibney veins, he realized that his footwork, in the event of battle, would be sadly deficient and he hesitated to wage a losing fight.) "I got my arms left, even if my feet is on the fritz, Scraggs," he continued, ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... top of the gulch and paused to gaze at its extent. The great hills rose sheer and rugged a mile away; the cocoanuts ceased at a lower level, and where I stood the precipices were a mass of wild trees, bushes, and creepers. From black to lightest green the colors ran, from smoky ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... cannot sing, dances; the gnats in the air and the long-legged spiders on the water. Even the ants and beetles, the workers that are quoted for examples by hoarding men, run about doing nothing, putting their busy antennae into everything, tumbling over the brown mould for sheer enjoyment, and running home at last without the little white paper parcel in their mouths which gives them so respectable an air. Doubtless the poor things are scolded by their infirm parents, who sit sunning themselves at the door ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... hope; he had a kingdom indeed, but it was not of earth; and, in an hour of sheer cruel bodily pain, earth alone has dominion and ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... great plenty, and they afforded good sport to a First of September shooting party, provided with a setter. At length the poor quail had their quarters so thoroughly beaten up, that several, in attempting to escape from the island, were observed to fall into the water from sheer exhaustion. Nor did the birds receive all the benefit of the shot, for Captain Stanley, while observing with the theodolite, became unwittingly a target for a juvenile shooter; but, fortunately, no damage was done. Some turtles were seen at night, but they were too wary ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... a man of some distinction in the later history of the mining communities, says that five men drowned themselves in the Humboldt River in one day out of sheer discouragement. He says that he had to save the lives of his oxen by giving Indians fifteen dollars to swim the river and float some grass across to him. And with weakened cattle, discouraged hearts, no provisions, the travelers had to ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... for some end or purpose. The end is always regarded by the agent in the light of something good. If evil be done, it is done as leading to good, or as bound up with good, or as itself being good for the doer under the circumstances; no man ever does evil for sheer evil's sake. Yet evil may be the object of the will, not by itself, nor primarily, but in a secondary way, as bound up with the good that is willed in the ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... schooner, without firing or showing any unfriendly disposition. As she drew near, I felt more and more convinced that she must be the Foam. She had a peculiarly long cutwater and a very straight sheer, which, as she came up to the windward of us, and presented nearly her broadside, was discernible. As she heeled over to the now freshening breeze, I fancied that I could even discern, through the glass, Captain ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... binding this book is of the stout, heavy grade; but that used for clothing and scarfs is often as sheer as fine muslin. ...
— Legends of Wailuku • Charlotte Hapai
... the tide of gossip overflowed with his name and carried in its current tales of his greatness, his cruelty, his lawless loves and his quick forgettings. It was libeled against him that he had magnetic power over all with whom he came in contact, bending them to his will by the sheer dominance of his presence. There was, I recall, a story rife that upon my Lord Thurlow's opposition to the bill for the restoration of the forfeited estates becoming known, it was the Duke of Borthwicke who was sent to treat with him concerning it, and immediately ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... fear or fuss that Lorna might find end of troubles, and myself of eager waiting, with the help of Parson Bowden, and the good wishes of two counties. We heard that people meant to come for more than thirty miles around, upon excuse of seeing my stature and Lorna's beauty; but in good truth, out of sheer curiosity and the ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... this second marriage, this second leap in the dark? No, she could not honestly pretend that she did; yet it had its sufficiently sinister side, its occasional admixture of sheer horror. But this was only when the mysteries which encompassed her happened to prey upon nerves unstrung by some outwardly exciting cause; it was then she would have given back all that he had ever given her to pierce the veil of ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... with a passionate energy. "The dull figuriste!" he exclaimed. "Daguerre. Once I could have done that, yes, and been entertained by its adroitness and insolence—before you made me. Do you suppose I was able then to understand the sheer tragic fortitude to live of a scrubwoman! The head you thought unpleasant—haven't you seen her going home in the March slush of a city? Did you notice the gaps in her shoes, the ragged shawl about a body twisted with forty, ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... not yet in sight, because the front of White Face, though apparently a sheer and awful precipice when viewed from the valley, was in fact wrinkled with gullies and buttresses and bucklings of the tortured strata. But the sound of his coming was now quite intelligible to her. That softly ponderous tread, that careless displacing of stones, those undisguised ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... on up the ascent, at length coming into open light upon a small plateau marked by huge, rugged, weather-chipped stones. On the eastern side was a rocky promontory, and close to the edge of this cliff, an hundred feet in sheer descent, rose a gnarled, time and tempest-twisted chestnut tree. Here the borderman laid down his rifle and knapsack, and, half-reclining against the tree, settled himself to ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... masterly; which expression changed slightly as he stood there, the sound of the clock conveying to him (it may be) a sense of old buildings and time; and himself the inheritor; and then to-morrow; and friends; at the thought of whom, in sheer confidence and pleasure, it seemed, ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... richer than ever, for he has never married and his London and North- Western shares have nearly doubled themselves. Through sheer inability to spend his income he has been obliged to hoard in self-defence. He still lives in the Temple in the same rooms I took for him when he gave up his shop, for no one has been able to induce him to take a house. His house, he says, is wherever there is a good hotel. When he is in town ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... human nature in the manifestations we are concerned with will still be at work, an obscure instinct often acting differently in each sex, but tending to drive both into the same risks. Here we need even more fundamental social changes. It is sheer foolishness to suppose that when we raise our little dams in the path of a great stream of human impulse that stream will forthwith flow calmly back to its source. We must make our new channels concurrently with our dams. We can at least begin today a task of education ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... upon their foes. But of course there were lawless characters on both sides; in certain localities where the crop of jealousies, always a rank backwoods growth, had been unusually large, and had therefore produced long-standing and bitter feuds,[2] the rival families espoused opposite sides from sheer vindictive hatred of one another. As a result, the struggle in the backwoods between tories and whigs, king's-men and congress-men,[3] did not merely turn upon the questions everywhere at stake between ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... The night seemed treacherous, in league with her foe. It was endless. She prayed for dawn—yet with a blank hopelessness for what the day might bring. Could she hold out through more interminable hours? Would she not break from sheer strain? There were moments when she wavered and shook like a leaf in the wind, when the beating of her heart was audible, when a child could have seen her distress. There were other moments when all was ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... Mrs. Radcliffe in a big low-ceilinged room at Garside Scar, looking about him with quiet interest. He had now and then spent a day or two in huge Western hotels, but he had never seen anything quite like that room. The sheer physical comfort of its arrangements appealed to him, but after all he was not one who had ever studied his bodily ease very much, and what he regarded as the chaste refinement of its adornment had a deeper effect. ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... the sea rose. The helm was put down, and without a rag of canvas on her she came round; but when she brought the hurricane fair abeam, I thought it was all over with us. She lay down to it until her bulwarks were under water, and the sheer-poles in the ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... region of rugged, barren mountains cloven by giant chasms and seamed by rocky nullahs down which brawling streams rushed or tumbled over falls. A herd of gooral—the little wild goat—rushed away before their coming and sprang in dizzy leaps down almost sheer precipices. ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... sustained his consciousness for a while. Then the torturing pain abated, the rough dragging shattered the bruised body less. It was as if the Lady and the storm together were making easier for the slowly dying man his last trail across the desert. He still struggled to keep alive, by sheer will-power, flickering sparks of consciousness, and to do so concentrated every thought on Nan. It was a poignant happiness to summon her picture to his fainting senses; he knew he should hold to life as long as he could think of her. Love, stronger than ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... covert and protection. It is situated about four miles from the high-road, whence you obtain at intervals short glimpses as it rears its tiny head into the open day. If the traveller be fresh from an overworked and overworking city, he looks upon what he deems a sheer impossibility—the residence of men living cheerfully and happily in solitude intense. The employment of the villagers is in the silent fields, from day to day, from year to year. Their life has no variety, the general heart ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... we've always wanted to do—but didn't have time to do. Brace must get married—he'll have children and you'll begin all over with them. Then I'd like to take in some music with you this winter. I've rather let my pet fads drop from sheer loneliness. Let's go to light opera—we're all getting edgy over here. I tell you, Helen, it's up to us older fry to steer the youngsters away from ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... straw, replied unto that wanderer of the night. And at that time the princess of Videha, that girl of beautiful hips, had her deep and compact bosom copiously drenched by her inauspicious tears shed ceaselessly. And she who regarded her husband as her god, answered that mean wretch, saying, 'By sheer ill-luck it is, O king of the Rakshasas, that I am obliged to hear such words of grievous import spoken by thee! Blessed be thou, O Rakshasa fond of sensual pleasures, let thy heart be withdrawn from me! I am the wife of another, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... the Slavic populations the prevalence of illiteracy is such that the number of persons who could attain the possession of even one direct vote would be insignificant. By the Socialists, and by the radical and Slavic elements generally, the scheme was denounced as a sheer caricature of the universal, equal, and direct suffrage for which demand ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... sad. The hills ran up clear above the vegetation in spires of naked rock. All were strangely shaped, and the Spy-glass, which was by three or four hundred feet the tallest on the island, was likewise the strangest in configuration, running up sheer from almost every side and then suddenly cut off at the top like a pedestal to put ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... God; mere rustics, if I may say so. So we were only too ready to listen to the tales of France from our comrade Tomassov. He had been attached to our mission in Paris the year before the war. High protections very likely—or maybe sheer luck. ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... these slippery little savages of Titan, their half naked bodies crowding him and stifling him with their sweaty nearness. Again and again Carr struck out, but it was like fighting a horde of squirming and clawing feline creatures that swarmed over him and bore him down by sheer weight of numbers. They dragged Ora from his arms and quickly overpowered him. Thongs of rawhide twisted deeply into the flesh of his wrists and he was hauled forth ...
— Creatures of Vibration • Harl Vincent
... surprise, alarm, and at last positive fear. But one thought possessed his mind, to win at any cost, by fair means or foul. His rushes, which had slackened, grew more violent. He came at Percy head down; he tried to crowd him into a corner, to throw his arms around him, to overpower him by sheer, brute strength. ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... "It wasn't pluck—it was sheer obstinacy—I'm rather ashamed of it," said Rilla, kicking joyously. "I wanted to show mother. It's mean to want to show your own mother—most unfilial conduct! But I have shown her. And I've shown myself a few things! Oh, ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... their pleasure in each other and stop up the perspective of our happiness with their hulking personalities, bare of all the iridescence of potentiality, which we could have cast about them. Something of this iridescence may cling to unmarried lovers, in spite of themselves, but wedded bliss is a sheer offence. ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... were come so close that I might see the place very well; a smallish island with sheer cliffs very jagged and grim where the seas broke in foam and crowned with many and divers trees, beyond which rose greeny slopes with more trees that mounted up and up to a lofty summit of rocks and brush. Being within some two miles of ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... "than that the brave captain should be eager to read the sweet confession of your love?" Madame missed not a word which dribbled from the lips of the poor, puzzled patron, who contributed the comic sauce which titillated her humorous palate. The patron to her was a sheer joy. ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... stop reading, your Excellency. Couldn't you find something else to read about?" cried the other Official in sheer desperation. He snatched the paper from his colleague's hands, and started to ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... trouble, ought to be spared for so exalted an aim. But if the only point is the establishment of one opinion in the place of another, then the travelling expenses of even one single Infallible are sheer waste. If you want to spare the two most valuable things on earth, time and money, make all haste to write to Rome, in order to procure thence a lawful decision which shall declare the unlawful doubt. Nothing more is needed; policy asks ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... fellow blacks for example, encounter a white person on the street, and did Vesey's companions make the customary bow, which blacks were wont to make to whites, a form of salutation born of generations of slave-blood, meanly humble and cringingly self-effacing, rebuking such an exhibition of sheer and shameless servility and lack of proper self-respect, he would thereupon declare to them the self-evident truth that all men were born free and equal, that the master, with his white skin, was in the sight of God no whit better than his black slaves, and that for himself he would not cringe ...
— Right on the Scaffold, or The Martyrs of 1822 - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 7 • Archibald H. Grimke
... source of revenue after another; who did not shrink from sconcing the powerful landed phalanx like other people; and who at the same time boldly used and manfully defended the most unpopular of all the public imposts. In politics the spectacle of sheer courage is often quite as good in its influence and effect as the best of logic. It was so here. While proposing that the income-tax should come to an end in seven years, he yet produced the most comprehensive ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... here. And I strayed from the town and its dust and heat. And walked in a wood, while the noon was near, Where the shadows were cool, and the atmosphere Was misty with fragrances stirred by my feet From surges of blossoms that billowed sheer Of the ...
— Afterwhiles • James Whitcomb Riley
... ensued; because, as he admirably expressed it, Parliament insisted upon being omnipotent when it was not omniscient. In other words, the affairs of the unrepresented colonies were mismanaged through sheer ignorance. It is noteworthy that England has since recognized the necessity of precisely the principle indicated by Franklin for colonial government; all her great colonies are now "trusted in a great measure with the government" ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... when the latter burst into the flame-swept belt of heath. Their boots kicked up clouds of black ashes as they bounded forward, and their pursuer followed at once. Twice he put his unprotected foot down in safety, missing by sheer luck the thickly planted spikes, but the third time he set the very middle of his sole on a short stout fang standing bolt upright, and pointed by fire ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... AFTER forming! Think only of one fact: Daun, on sight of their intention, has opened 400 pieces of Artillery on them, and these go raging and thundering into the hem of the Wood, and to whatever issues from it, now and for hours to come, at a rate of deafening uproar and of sheer deadliness, which no ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... relative of the name of Seymour, to study the profession of the law; but this dry kind of study was soon found to have no attractions for one of his volatile turn of mind. Something, however, was to be done to rescue from sheer idleness a youth of nineteen, with very narrow means, few friends, and no definite prospects; and, by the kindness of Dr. Wheelock, the pious founder of Dartmouth College, who had been the intimate friend of his grandfather, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 327, August 16, 1828 • Various
... price for the blessing, he brought her out, delighting in the finery which the bright-eyed daughter of a mighty father had given her, to the place where the other gods and men were. And wonder took hold of the deathless gods and mortal men when they saw that which was sheer guile, not to be ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... the second book of Homer. And, oh! the garrulity of the biographers, the minuteness of detail, the petty incidents, the host of dates! With these we are inflicted because some adventurous Yankee happened, by sheer luck, to build the first shanty on what became the site of a great city, or chanced there to be a pioneer victim of ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... {224} more notice until he can contrive to surpass himself, which I doubt his being able to do. He informs me that by changing A into [Hebrew: t] in my name he can make a 666 of me; adding, "This is too hard for me, although not so for the Lord!" Sheer nonsense! He could just as easily have directed to "Prof. De Morg[Hebrew: t]n" as have assigned me apartment 7A in University College. It would have been seen for whom it was intended: and if not, it would still have reached me, for my colleagues ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... Adams, unmoved by argument, anger, or entreaty, thus alienated many and discouraged all, every one was made acquainted with the antipodal principles of his rival. The consequence was inevitable; many abandoned Adams from sheer irritation; multitudes became cool and indifferent concerning him; the great number of those whose political faith was so weak as to be at the ready command of their own interests, or the interests of a friend or relative, yielded to a pressure against which no counteracting ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... Earth, And with his sceptre touching both the chiefs, Fill'd them with strength and courage, and their limbs, Their feet and hands, with active vigour strung; Then like a swift-wing'd falcon sprang to flight, Which down the sheer face of some lofty rock Swoops on the plain to seize his feather'd prey: So swiftly Neptune left the chiefs; him first Departing, knew Oileus' active son, And thus the son of Telamon address'd: "Ajax, since some one of th' Olympian Gods, In likeness ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... think it is—those good people that love you! And I'll try, too!—I do try. And you mustn't cry, my little sweetheart," Chris added, with a tenderness so new, and so poignantly sweet, that Norma was almost faint with the sheer joy of it, "you mustn't blame me for just saying this, this once, because it's for the last time! We mustn't meet——" His voice dropped. "I think we mustn't meet," he repeated, painfully ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... complete. He was a small, thin-haired, squeaky-voiced bachelor of fifty, and as full of good intentions as the road to perdition. If Tommy Glass ever did any evil it would not only be without intent but from sheer accident. ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... declared with no uncertain voice that she intends to fight under the British Flag, and the KAISER'S vexation on realising that the money spent on a certain famous telegram was sheer waste is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 26th, 1914 • Various
... twelve new, numerous, and compact burgess communities to be discovered? Lastly, the declaration of Drusus that he would have nothing to do with the execution of his law was so dreadfully prudent as to border on sheer folly. But the clumsy snare was quite suited to the stupid game which they wished to catch. There was the additional and perhaps decisive consideration that Gracchus, on whose personal influence everything depended, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... great and small shot charge him, board him thwart the hawse, on the bow, midships, or, rather than fail, on his quarter; or make fast your grapplings to his close-fights and sheer off' [which would tear his ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... years, with another little book of directions, has also been published by the same lady, and is perhaps a still greater boon to every nursery; for this is the age when many a child's temper is ruined, and the inclination of the twig wrongly bent, through sheer want of resource and idea, on the part ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... people the Negro was thoroughly disliked, persecuted and relegated to an inferior social status by no means in harmony with the doctrine of the inalienable and unalterable rights of man. Negroes were set upon in the streets, beaten, cut and even stoned to death in sheer wanton cruelty. In 1831 the refusal of New Haven, Connecticut, to establish a Negro college was enthusiastically endorsed in resolutions passed at a public meeting in Philadelphia, and in 1834, 1835, 1838, 1842 and 1849 this city was ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... got then was a very rough one,—so hard that at first she could not bear it. Her anger at his love for her brother's wished-for bride was lost in her dismay that Phineas should love any one after having once loved her. But by sheer force of mind she had conquered that dismay, that feeling of desolation at her heart, and had almost taught herself to hope that Phineas might succeed with Violet. He wished it,—and why should he not have what he wished,—he, ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... so deeply that he brought small furrows into his forehead by sheer force of reverie. Where the issue of an interview is as likely to be a vast change for the worse as for the better, any initial difference from expectation causes nipping sensations of failure. Oak went up to the door a little abashed: his mental rehearsal and the reality had ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... you doing in the top so long?" demanded Foster, the first master, as the truants reached the sheer-pole. ...
— Outward Bound - Or, Young America Afloat • Oliver Optic
... dragged up precipices and perched on ledges fit only, one might think, for an eagle's nest, where food, ammunition, reinforcements, wounded and sick have all to travel in small cages attached to wire ropes, slung from peak to peak above sheer drops of many thousand feet, where sentries have to stand rigidly stationary, so as to remain invisible, and have to be changed every ten minutes owing to the intense cold, where Battalions of Alpini charge down ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... break of day! A stream of light in an obscured sky! Hope ever causes chords long forgotten to resound, and existence becomes once again pleasant as of yore. Such were the feelings which animated me during that night of happiness when, thanks to you alone, everything was sheer joy. Thy spirit lifted up mine out of sadness; never did an intoxication equal ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... but from sheer modesty, JUSTIN MCCARTHY has taken up almost identical position; Truculent TIM guards the corner seat, where he can snap and snarl with fuller freedom. Fell upon Prince ARTHUR to-night with fearsome ferocity. The Prince, having explained his measure last week, when TIM and the rest ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Dec. 20, 1890 • Various
... Evidently, so long as the spirit of party was thus rampant, any measure of Church comprehension was entirely out of question. Many Low Churchmen were as anxious for it as ever. But they were no longer in power; and had they been a majority, they could only have effected it by sheer weight of numbers, and under imminent peril of disrupture in the Church. Therefore, they did not even attempt it, and were content to labour toward the same ends by more ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... society carry activity and disseminate disease. Some prosper, some vegetate. Some have mounted the steps of thrones and owned islands and navies. Others again must marry for a livelihood; a strapping, merry, chocolate-coloured dame supports them in sheer idleness; and, dressed like natives, but still retaining some foreign element of gait or attitude, still perhaps with some relic (such as a single eye-glass) of the officer and gentleman, they sprawl in palm-leaf verandahs and entertain an island audience ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... Prefect paused, from sheer weakness and want of breath. His oration, however, was not concluded. He had disheartened the people by his narrative of what had occurred to the ambassadors; he now proceeded to console them by his relation of what had occurred to himself, when, ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... Rowland, as soon as they were gone, 'I think it right to tell you, that we were obliged, out of sheer charity, to take that poor Irish girl into the house. It was impossible to move her ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... loneliness are here revealed! His poverty is great; but his solitude, how horrible! Think of it. Of a Sunday, Wall-street is deserted as Petra; and every night of every day it is an emptiness. This building, too, which of week-days hums with industry and life, at nightfall echoes with sheer vacancy, and all through Sunday is forlorn. And here Bartleby makes his home; sole spectator, of a solitude which he has seen all populous—a sort of innocent and transformed Marius brooding among the ruins ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... and some a hundred. We may, in this country, have peach-trees live fifty years, in the most healthy bearing condition. By trimming in this way, and carrying out fully this system, some have thrifty-looking peach-trees, more than a foot in diameter, bearing the very best of fruit. It is sheer neglect that causes our peach-orchards to perish after having borne from three to six years. Let every man who plants a peach-tree remember, that this system of training will make his tree live long, be healthy, grow vigorously, ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... to its feet roaring and shrieking with frenzy. Men smashed their neighbors with clenched fists—not knowing or caring how hard or whom they struck—or that they themselves were being hit. Women screamed frantically, hysterically, tears streaming from thousands of eyes because of sheer joy at the wonderful thing the Gold Dust maverick was doing. Even the stolid Sing Pete was jumping up and ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... leaving you without a ship. Come, I'll give you, in exchange for the Onslow, my own vessel, the Commodore here. I can vouch for its being a good sailer and valuable, though I got it very cheap. But from sheer philanthropy, I can't give up your crew, you would decimate it; the soldiers, however, you shall have, I don't care what becomes of ...
— The Corsair King • Mor Jokai
... and Dying Words of Margaret MacCraw, or Murdockson, executed on Harabee Hill, near Carlisle, the day of 1737." It was, indeed, one of those papers which Archibald had bought at Longtown, when he monopolised the pedlar's stock, which Dolly had thrust into her trunk out of sheer economy. One or two copies, it seems, had remained in her repositories at Inverary, till she chanced to need them in packing a cheese, which, as a very superior production, was sent, in the way of civil challenge, ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... just dragged the Senorita Ramona up the garden-walk, and shoved her into her room and locked the door, and that it was because she had caught her with Alessandro at the washing-stones, Marda first crossed herself in sheer mechanical fashion at the shock of the story, and then cuffed Margarita's ears ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... and receive right judgment, no matter how it was palliated or evaded here. Then for an instant it was as if a gulf without bottom had opened under him, and he had to fight himself back from its edge for sheer self-preservation. To look too long in that direction was simple insanity beyond ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... the part of the young man. The unpleasant impression haunted him, for having looked over his letters he came out of his private office and again glanced uneasily at the colorless face, which gave evidence that only sheer force of will was spurring a failing hand ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... descends sheer into deep water, waves swash up and down the face of the rocks but cannot break and strike effective blows. They therefore erode but little until the talus fallen from the cliff is gradually built up beneath the sea to the level at which the ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... drawl—"My dear Miss Smith, your work is interesting and your faith—marvellous; but, frankly, I cannot make myself believe in it. You are trying to treat these funny little monkeys just as you would your own children—or even mine. It's quite heroic, of course, but it's sheer madness, and I do not feel I ought to encourage it. I would not mind a thousand or so to train a good cook for the Cresswells, or a clean and faithful maid for myself—for Helene has faults—or indeed deft and tractable laboring-folk for any one; but I'm ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... without any unprofessional antics, biting the tip of a smoked-out cigar, which he had picked up off the pavement in sheer instinct, retained from the old times when he had used to rush in, the foremost of la queue, into the forsaken theaters of Bouffes or of Varietes in search for those odds and ends which the departed audience might have left behind them—one of the favorite modes of seeking a livelihood ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... projector of the expedition. Pardon himself barely escaping with his life. These calamities were the more distasteful to the worthy Dodge, whose inclinations were of no warlike cast, and whose courage never rose to the fighting point, as he freely professed, until goaded into action by sheer desperation. He had "got enough," as he said, "of the everlasting Injuns, and of Kentucky, where there was such a shocking deal of 'em that a peaceable trader's scalp was in no more security than a rambling scout's;" and cursing his bad luck, and the memory ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... subjugation to him, because of his power to escape, to exist, other than she did, because he was not consistent, not a man, less than a man. She hated him in a despair that shattered her and broke her down, so that she suffered sheer dissolution like a corpse, and was unconscious of everything save the horrible sickness of dissolution that was taking place ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... a short pocket between two sheer granite walls they saw Rebstock's weather-beaten cabin, and he stood in front of it smoking. He looked moodily at his visitors out of eyes buried between rolls of fat. Whispering Smith was a little harsh as the two shook hands, ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... the neighbourhood. Even if they had climbed to the loftiest known turret, they would have found it swathed in a garment of clinging vapour, affording no refreshment to the eye, and no hope to the heart. There was one lofty tower that rose sheer a hundred feet above the rest, and from which the fog could have been seen lying in a grey mass beneath; but that tower they had not yet discovered, nor another close beside it, the top of which was never seen, nor ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... the slight space between them. The plan worked well as long as the material lasted, but no other wagons than my twenty-five coming on the ground, the work stopped when the bridge was only half constructed. Informed of the delay and its cause, in sheer desperation I finished the bridge by taking from my own division all the wagons needed to ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... and amatory Seeders had, as it were, performed for her a miraculous piece of one-day laundry work. He had taken the sackcloth of her uncomeliness, had washed, dried, starched and ironed it, and returned it to her sheer embroidered ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... basaltic lava-flows, piled layer upon layer, with intervening beds of bole and tuff, up to a thickness, according to Geikie, of about 3,500 feet. At the grand headland of Gribon, on the west coast, the basaltic sheets are seen to rise in one sheer sweep to a height of 1,600 feet, and then to stretch away with a slight easterly dip under Ben More at a distance of some eight miles. This mountain, the upper part of which is formed of beds of ashes, ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull
... to take your two bare hands, And choke out of the world your big success? Beat, torn fists bleeding, pathways rugged, grand, By sheer brute strength and bigness, nothing less? So at the last, triumphant, battered, strong, You might gaze down on what you choked and beat, And say, "Ah, world, you've wrought to do me wrong; And thus ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... a profound turn was the sheer indolence of his temperamental breed. He had no liking at all for labor; spreading fish on the flakes, keeping the head of his father's punt up to the sea on the grounds, splitting a turn of birch and drawing a bucket of water ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... on the top storey—the eighth—and from it you had a view sheer to the ground. Twenty feet below ran a narrow cornice about a foot wide; three feet or so above the window another and wider cornice jutted out, and above that was the high steep roof of the hotel, though you could not see it from ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... was astonished to see any member standing up in defence of polygamy in the nineteenth century. If some member should stand up in any other century and defend it, it would not astonish him at all. It was sheer inhumanity to refuse to come to the rescue of our suffering brethren in Utah. How a man who had one wife could consent to see fellow- creatures writhing under the infliction of two or three each, was what, Mr. WARD remarked, got over him. Mr. BUTLER pointed out how much money ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various
... joyous unction with which they entered into their task, their eagerness to keep their load close upon the heels of their masters. He heard Mukoki's short, sharp, and unnecessary commands, his hi-yi's and his ki-yi's, as though he were crying out for no other reason than from sheer physical exuberance. He saw Father Roland's face turned backward for a moment, and it was smiling. They were happy—now! Men and beasts were happy. And he could see no reason for their happiness except that their blood was pounding through their veins, even as it was ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... a mist of words. But his real concern throughout was with the temper of the army. Under whatever spurious disguises he cloaked the true nature of his government from the world, Cromwell knew well that it was a sheer government of the sword, that he was without hold upon the nation, and that the discontent of his soldiery would at once shake the fabric of his power. He vibrated to and fro between his sense of the political advantages of such a settlement, and his sense ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... war immediately shortened sail, and formed a line of battle; while the rest, under the protection of the six frigates, proceeded on their voyage with all the sail they could carry. The British squadron was likewise drawn up in line of battle; but Mr. Warren, perceiving that the enemy began to sheer off, now their convoy was at a considerable distance, advised admiral Anson to haul in the signal for the line, and hoist another for giving chase and engaging, otherwise the French would, in all probability, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... one more modest and no one quite so shy. Many actors have played for him for years and never spoken to him, have perhaps seen him dart up a side street because they were approaching. They may not have known that it was sheer shyness, but it was. I have seen him ordered out of his own theater by subordinates who did not know him, and he went cheerfully away. "Good men, these; they know their business," was all his comment. Afterward he was shy of going back lest ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... those people with incoherent personalities, who gather in the chapels and meeting-places of certain obscure sects, because I also have felt fixed habits and principles dissolving before a power, which was hysterica passio or sheer madness, if you will, but was so powerful in its melancholy exultation that I tremble lest it wake again and drive me from my ...
— Rosa Alchemica • W. B. Yeats
... their wants, and she is expected to become a perfect slave to her mother-in-law. It is not uncommon for a meek little wife, who has obeyed every one, to become a perfect tyrant as a mother-in-law, ordering her son's wife right and left, and making the younger woman's life a sheer misery. The mother-in-law has escaped from the land of bondage. It is no longer her duty to rise at dawn and open the house; she can lie in bed, and be waited upon by the young wife; she is free to go here and ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Japan • John Finnemore
... debase. Tarrant, whatever the possibilities of his nature, had fallen under a spell of indolent security, which declared its power only when he came face to face with the demand for vigorous action. The moment found him a sheer poltroon. 'What! Is it possible that I—I—am henceforth penniless? I, to whom the gods were so gracious? I, without warning, flung from sheltered comfort on to the bare road side, where I must either toil or beg?' The thing seemed unintelligible. ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... for it. It surely can be no disgrace to the house of a soldier that he was ordered to perform the last offices towards a Samurai who died by hara-kiri. To slay his enemy against whom he has cause of hatred, and then to kill himself, is the part of a noble Samurai; and it is sheer nonsense to look upon the place where he has disembowelled himself as polluted. In the beginning of the eighteenth century, seventeen of the retainers of Asano Takumi no Kami performed hara-kiri in the garden of a palace at Shirokane, in Yedo. When it was over, the people ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... In Heaven by many a tower'd structure high;— Nor was his name unheard or unador'd In ancient Greece: and in the Ausonian land Men called him Mulciber: and how he fell From Heaven, they fabled, thrown by angry Jove Sheer o'er the chrystal battlements; from morn To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, A summer's day; and with the setting sun Dropt from the zenith like a falling star On Lemnos, the AEgean isle: ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... imagined. It rivals Gibraltar and Constantinople, Bombay and San Francisco. Immediately behind the town, which lies along the sea, the majestic mass of Table Mountain rises to a height of 3600 feet, a steep and partly wooded slope capped by a long line of sheer sandstone precipices more than 1000 feet high, and flanked to right and left by bold, isolated peaks. The beautiful sweep of the bay in front, the towering crags behind, and the romantic pinnacles which rise on either side, make a landscape that no one who has ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... is an awfully nice boy," she said, slipping a hand into Judith's and Elinor's arm, as they paced the platform, waiting for Miss Jinny's train. "But for pure, sheer adorableness, give me Mr. Hilton, every time. Don't you think he's a perfect ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... stretches from shore to shore and the drop is sheer. With much excitement, the bowsman points out the channel that seems to him the safe one. No one speaks, and the big awkward craft is brought up for the jump. It is an elephant drawing his feet together to take a water-fence. ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... relate stories of this beauteous fury, and her tempestuous quarrels with the King, and of how 'twas known his ease and pleasure-loving nature stood in terror of her violence and gave way before it with bribes and promises through sheer weariness. ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... insignificant in extent that horse exercise is impossible on it. What it lacks in superficial area is more than made up, however, in its stupendous height. From the 'Welcome,' though it lies in a dell, one looks down perhaps a hundred sheer feet upon the ocean. Its solemn murmur, even in calm, always reaches the place, and when in storm, its spray. As one watches it from the lawn among the fuchsias, one scarcely knows which mood becomes it best. The fuchsias grow against our walls and tap at ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... we progressed past Hincaster, Sedgwick, and Natland, and at about three o'clock in the afternoon reached Kendal, where the canal system curiously ends in a sheer wall. We were now practically of our destination, and after carefully bumping the nose of the canoe against the headwall of the canal, we ...
— Through Canal-Land in a Canadian Canoe • Vincent Hughes
... another wrinkle. His mirth always increased wrinkle by wrinkle, until at times it appeared as if he were actually going to screw his own neck by sheer force of ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... completely impenetrable defense against attack is still not possible, total defensive strength must include civil defense preparedness. Because we have incontrovertible evidence that Soviet Russia possesses atomic weapons, this kind of protection becomes sheer necessity. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Dwight D. Eisenhower • Dwight D. Eisenhower
... detached and narrow points. If a bill is prepared which even attempts to deal with the whole of any subject (and it is impossible to legislate properly on any part without having the whole present to the mind), it hangs over from session to session through sheer impossibility of finding time to dispose of it. It matters not though the bill may have been deliberately drawn up by the authority deemed the best qualified, with all appliances and means to boot; or by a select commission, chosen for their conversancy with the subject, and having ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... fatiguing into the bargain. In many places Nick and Pipes were no more able to get through than they were, and they were also constantly afraid that they might come suddenly upon some natives and betray themselves. At last, coming to a brook, from sheer fatigue they were compelled to halt and eat the remainder of the provisions they had cooked in the morning. After resting they again pushed on, but their progress was not more rapid than at first. ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston
... McClellan bequeathed to writers on the Civil War are innumerable, but no one can read his correspondence at this stage without concluding that he was almost impossible to deal with, and that the whole of his evidence in his own case was vitiated by a sheer hallucination that people wished him to fail. He had been nearly two months in the Peninsula when he was attacked at a disadvantage by Johnston, but defeated him on May 31 and June 1 in a battle which gave confidence and prestige to the Northern side, but which ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... tangle of harness chains, while Salty would sit on the high seat with the sun glare heavy in his eyes, dealing out curses of pacification in a level, uninterested voice until the clamor fell off from sheer exhaustion. There was a line of shallow graves' along that road; they used to count on dropping a man or two of every new gang of coolies brought out in the hot season. But when he lost his swamper, smitten without warning at the noon halt, Salty quit his job; he said it was "too durn hot." The swamper ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... was fought and won in the eleventh century any national prejudices that belong wholly to the modern world are quite as much out of place with regard to it as they are with regard to Caesar or St Augustine. And if we must be indignant and remember old injuries that as often as not were sheer blessings, scarcely in disguise, let us reserve our hatred, scorn and contempt for those damned pagan and pirate hordes that first from Schleswig-Holstein and later from Denmark descended upon our Christian country, and for a time overwhelmed us with their brutish ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... of the escarpment rises the rock of Essalona, and the convent is built on the edge of the rock, in such sort that, leaning over the parapet of the open cloister, Desiderius might have dropped a pebble sheer down to the plain below. A single path wound up the rock to the gate, so narrow and steep that one sturdy lay-brother might have held the way with a thresher's flail ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... 10 the veto message went to Congress. Its contention about the constitutionality of the Bank was not important, for it was not a question of what was constitutional, but of sheer power. The majority of the votes in the coming election was what each side sought. Jackson appealed to the West and South, urging that the Bank was a sectional institution constantly drawing money to the big cities of the East, or worse still, sending it to England; ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... unopened. Now, do not flatter yourself; Eusebius, that all these things are matters of choice with you. "Non omnia possumus omnes," is the regular rule of the profession; some stick to the curtain all their lives, from sheer inability to set it—to draw it aside. You remember the sign-painter that went about painting red lions, and his reply to a refractory landlord who insisted upon a white lamb. "You may have a white lamb if you please, but when all is said ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... its eighty feet fall in a few rods, and that wild, Indian-haunted Spicket, taking its wellnigh perpendicular leap of thirty feet, within sight of the village meeting- house, kicking up its Pagan heels, Sundays and all, in sheer contempt of Puritan tithing-men. This latter waterfall is now somewhat modified by the hand of Art, but is still, as Professor Hitchcock's "Scenographical Geology" says of it, "an object of no little interest." My friend T., favorably known as the translator of "Undine" and as a writer of fine ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... top of the slope, I was, however, undeceived upon that score, for we found the high mount, for which we were steering, completely separated from us by a yawning chasm, which lay, under an almost sheer precipice, at our feet. The high mountain beyond, near the crown, was girt around by a solid wall of rock, fifty or sixty feet in height, from the edge of which the summit rose. It was quite unapproachable, except, perhaps, in one place, round ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... He says he doesn't see how in creation the minister manages to keep his bearings, and look out for a change in the wind, and things that have to be done, and read all those books too. Well!" she kissed Imogen's nose again, from sheer enjoyment, and threw her head back with a laugh of delight. "I'm coming to it now, Imogen!" she cried. "At last the minister took down a big book—OH! you precious old thing, how I love you!" (this apostrophe ...
— Captain January • Laura E. Richards
... bosom thus prepared, Its still small voice is often heard, Whispering a mingled sentiment, 'Twixt resignation and content. Oft in my mind such thoughts awake, By lone Saint Mary's silent lake; Thou know'st it well,—nor fen, nor sedge, Pollute the pure lake's crystal edge; Abrupt and sheer, the mountains sink At once upon the level brink; And just a trace of silver sand Marks where the water meets the land. Far in the mirror, bright and blue, Each hill's huge outline you may view; Shaggy with ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... trees have thus perished near London?—witness the large elms that once stood in Jews' Walk, at Sydenham. Barking the trunks for sheer wanton mischief is undoubtedly the cause in some cases, and it has been suggested that quicksilver has occasionally been inserted in gimlet holes. The mercury is supposed to work up the channels of the sap, and to ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... What would have been her feelings if I had made her unhappy for the remainder of her life! Would anyone, then, knowing the whole case, have condemned me if I had destroyed my own life in order to deliver myself from everlasting remorse? No, for the man who kills himself from sheer despair, thus performing upon himself the execution of the sentence he would have deserved at the hands of justice cannot be blamed either by a virtuous philosopher or by a tolerant Christian. But of one thing I am quite certain: if such a misfortune ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... subtler delicacies in poetic rhythm or of the more exalted and translunar harmonies in the imaginative suggestiveness of words, can afford to leave Milton untouched. In sheer felicity of beauty—the beauty of suggestive words, each one carrying "a perfume in the mention," and together, by their arrangement in relation to one another, conveying a thrill of absolute and final ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... man, I haven't the least idea," she protested. "It is sheer unadulterated curiosity which made me send Perkins for you up here. We're not at all upon the sort of terms, you know," she added, looking up at me with her big blue eyes, "for this ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... folks on his plantation going about bare-headed, had at one time offered a reward of a dollar to those who should habitually wear hats without being able to induce them to do so, which he attributed to sheer careless indolence; but I think it was merely the force of the habit of going uncovered rather than absolute laziness. The universal testimony of all present at this conversation was in favour of the sweetness of temper and natural gentleness of disposition of ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... was like a trough, and the reef was very near, scarcely a quarter of a mile from the shore. The water did not shelve, it went down sheer fifty fathoms or more, and one could fish from the bank just as from a pier head. He had brought some food with him, and he placed it under a tree whilst he prepared his line, which had a lump of coral for a sinker. He baited the hook, and whirling the sinker round in the ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... not sorry—not altogether sorry this has happened!" He moved slowly across the room, and laid a friendly palm on Vyse's shoulder. "In a queer illogical way it evens up things, as it were. I did you a shabby turn once, years ago—oh, out of sheer carelessness, of course—about that novel of yours I promised to give to Apthorn. If I had given it, it might not have made any difference—I'm not sure it wasn't too good for success—but anyhow, I dare say you thought my personal influence might have helped you, might at least ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... this heavenly wrath! For the sake of a pair of lovely eyes you are ready to execrate a life which the saints have so blessed with every gift that thousands and tens of thousands would not give it up from sheer gratitude and joy, even if it ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Atlantic Mid-Ocean Ridge Saint Helena: rugged, volcanic; small scattered plateaus and plains Ascension: surface covered by lava flows and cinder cones of 44 dormant volcanoes; ground rises to the east Tristan da Cunha: sheer cliffs line the coastline of the nearly circular island; the flanks of the central volcanic peak are deeply dissected; narrow coastal plain lies between The Peak and the ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... coming down the pass from Tourcarol, was as novel as though all my life had been spent upon empty plains. By the map it was 9000 feet. It might have been 90,000! The wonderment as to what lay beyond, the sense that it was a limit to known things, its savage intangibility, its sheer silence! Nothing but the eye seeing could give ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... be solemnly decided. Note well. Whenever you present the actual, simple truth, it is, somehow, always denounced as a lie—they disown it, cast it off, throw it on the parish; whereas the product of your own imagination, the mere figment, the sheer fiction, is adopted, petted, termed pretty, proper, sweetly natural—the little, spurious wretch gets all the comfits, the honest, lawful bantling all the cuffs. Such is the way of the world, Peter; and as you are the legitimate ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... Firefly to be one of the smartest crafts afloat. The weather was dirty, and when the gallant little boat lifted the Atlantic waves they were running mountains high. But Calthorpe drove his vessel sheer through them, and never slackened his speed for all their fury. And now it must be explained how Dane came to be on board. The explanation may be given in his own ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... believe that there were communities of life in the visible and the invisible worlds which did not permit of the one being wholly estranged from the other. A clever person who loves the marvellous will soon find by the sheer force of logic that marvels are the most natural things in the world. Should we not credit human testimony? Should we not evict prejudice from our understandings? Should we not investigate alleged ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... verifiable as well as useful that practical breeders ignore it. So slight is its independent power that it seems to allow natural selection or sexual selection or artificial selection to modify organisms in sheer defiance of its utmost opposition, just as readily as they modify organisms in other directions with its utmost help. If it partially perpetuates and extends the pecked-out indentations in the motmot's tail feathers, it on the other hand fails to transmit the slightest trace of ...
— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball
... other hand, it must not be supposed that no patriotic party existed. There was a patriotic party, and the exigencies of the time inspired some of its leaders nobly. But the sheer weight of numbers, of indifference, and of selfishness to which this party was opposed was too much for it. The best method of realizing this nowadays is by the study of the newspaper files for the early years of the century. From these it will be seen ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... writers into his narratives, and may have done so here. I have visited most of the principal capitals of the world, he says in The Bible in Spain. This we would call a palpable lie were not so much of The Bible in Spain sheer invention. ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... little is he disposed to caricature, that rather, it may be said, many of his traits are almost too nice and delicate for the stage, that they can only be made available by a great actor, and fully understood by an acute audience. Not only has he delineated many kinds of folly, but even of sheer stupidity has he contrived to give a most diverting and entertaining picture. There is also in his pieces a peculiar species of the farcical, which apparently seems to be introduced more arbitrarily, but which, however, is founded on imitation ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... and weeping from sheer despair, would simply have to tell some one of her troubles, she would go off to the tavern-boat, which, like its mistress, was also aging rapidly with the years. There she would be listened to in silence, with ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... of the river to cross and assist him, but they, after making an abortive attempt to send a canoe load across, remained idle spectators of the terribly unequal conflict. Dale, seeing that no help was to come from them, and knowing that the Indians would shortly overcome him by sheer force of numbers, resolved upon a recklessly daring manoeuvre, namely, an attempt to capture the Indian canoe! He called ...
— The Big Brother - A Story of Indian War • George Cary Eggleston
... dropping her hand. She wondered, vaguely distressed; and he went on presently: "As a plain matter of fact, I don't know much. It's an astonishing discovery for me, but it's a fact that I am not your mental, physical, or spiritual equal. In sheer, brute strength perhaps I am, and I am none too certain of that, either. But, and I say it to my shame, I can not follow you; I am inferior in education, in culture, in fine instinct, in mental development. You chatter in a dozen languages to your sisters: my French appals a Paris cabman; you ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... From sheer exhaustion he finally slept. It was but the passing of a moment, and he was awake again. There in the moonlight he read, "Jane." Could he bear it? He could see her now saying good-by. Oh, it was forever, forever! Then, like a flash it came—forever? No; ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... of his desire shone like a mocking mirage before his mind's eye. It was all impossible, hopeless, but to love and lose were better than to live in ignorance of life's strongest passion. To dally with the impossible were sheer madness, he knew that. But what was to be done but obey the yearnings of his heart, though it brought ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... are mostly good fellows of the live-and-let-live type, who would rather cultivate their own potatoes than quarrel about vestments or the Trinity. Violently acquisitive, of course, like most southerners. I know a parish priest, a son of poor parents, who, by dint of sheer energy, has amassed a fortune of half a million francs. He cannot endure idleness in any shape, and a fine mediaeval scene may be witnessed when he suddenly appears round the corner and catches his workmen wasting their time and ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... course of action possible. Reggie was not one of those who feared his fate. He was always eager to put it to the touch. Inaction was abhorrent to him. To desire a thing and to do nothing to obtain it seemed to him sheer foolishness. Whether any amount of effort would get for him what he desired just now was on the knees of the gods. But it was the waiting that tried him far more than the uncertainty. He was not conceited. He was confident, ready to take risks and ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... tale, as is easy to guess, for we in our own trouble had not yet heard of it, there being little or no traffic between one village and another; and thinking on Jerusalem, [Footnote: Where, according to Josephus, the same thing occurred.] and sheer despairing because the Lord had visited us, as of old that ungodly city, although we had not betrayed or crucified Him, I almost forgot all my necessities, and took my staff in my hand to depart. But I had not gone ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... to turn one's brain into a curiosity shop. When I undertake to pick out of the pile of rubbish some picture that must have been originally worth a great deal of money, I find it so disfigured by the sheer force of friction that it looks no better than an old daub. The pity of it is, too, that the very best of my gatherings are apt to get lost or ruined; and sometimes it happens that when I varnish up ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... intricate and difficult of access, and, but for the interruption already referred to, it is not impossible that a continued course in the same direction, would have brought the rider to a full stop from the sheer inaccessibleness of the forest. ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... who had just joined, remarked. "Five times has the pivot-gun made them sheer off without venturing to come to close quarters; and indeed I have never had to loose the broadside guns but three times, in each of which they came suddenly round the corner into a bay where we were lying ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... present turn uncomfortably in his chair. All this would be told with infinite glee, as if he considered it an excellent joke, and then he would give such a tyrannical leer in the face of his next neighbor that the poor man would be fain to laugh out of sheer faint-heartedness. If anyone, however, pretended to contradict him in any of his stories, he was on fire in an instant. His very cocked hat assumed a momentary fierceness, and seemed to resent the contradiction. ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... felt such a fool in my life. How awful it will be if I burst out laughing in his face! It is quite as likely as not that I shall do it out of sheer hysterical fright. Oh, how different! how much nicer it was when we last parted! I had taken him to see the jackdaw, and the little bear that Bobby brought from foreign parts; and jacky had bitten his finger so humorously, and we had been so merry, and I had told him ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... teeth till he yelled in agony, and another sound was heard across the silent water. And then, when one hand was loosed in the struggle, she twisted it through his long hair, and dragged back his head till his eyes were nearly starting from their sockets. Anastasia Bergen had hitherto been a sheer woman, all feminine in her nature. But now the foam came to her mouth, and fire sprang from her eyes, and the muscles of her body worked as though she had been trained to deeds of violence. Of violence, Aaron Trow had known much in ...
— Aaron Trow • Anthony Trollope
... James declared, "it's just what I expected—sheer exhaustion, and nothing else. But she'd better be got out ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... by degrees, the worthy lady went on, increasing in smiles and decreasing in tears, until at last she could not laugh enough at Miss Monflathers, who, from being an object of dire vexation, became one of sheer ridicule and absurdity. ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... breaking waves. But to the right, and nearer to them, the sea was still as an inland pool, guarded by the tree-covered hump of land on which stood the house of the sirens. This hump, which would have been an islet but for the narrow wall of sheer rock which joined it to the main-land, ran out into the sea parallel to ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... pioneer corps. This morning I was in the rear guard, with Obed and Short, and all the Indians with their old chief. We had marched about a mile, and had just entered one of the defiles I have spoken of, with lofty cliffs on each side, and the mountains rising, it seemed, sheer up above our heads for thousands of feet, when I saw the Indians prick up their ears; then they stopped and bent down to the ground as if to listen. There was a great talking among them, and old White Dog called ...
— Dick Onslow - Among the Redskins • W.H.G. Kingston
... leader—they won glory eternal. Every man of them who fell had first killed his foeman—some half a score—while of those who survived there was not one so craven as to cry "Quarter!" The white flag went not up till they were overwhelmed and overpowered by sheer ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... profoundest blue—the tropical sun flaming through massive clouds of vapor—a sea of exuberant color, foaming white over coral beaches—waving cocoa palms against a background of exotic verdure marking a tortuous shore line, which now rises sheer and precipitous from the water's edge to dizzy, snowcapped, cloud-hung heights, now stretches away into vast reaches of oozy mangrove bog and dank cinchona grove—here flecked with stagnant lagoons that teem with slimy, crawling life—there flattened into interminable, forest-covered ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... maybe. Meredith remembered, now, hearing a man who had spent a day in Plattville on business speak of him: "They've got a young fellow down there who'll be Governor in a few years. He's a sort of dictator; and runs the party all over that part of the State to suit his own sweet will, just by sheer personality. And there isn't a man in that district who wouldn't cheerfully lie down in the mud to let him pass over dry. It's that young Harkless, you know; owns the 'Herald,' the paper that downed McCune and smashed those ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... lad in the Macdonald tartan; and the tea bell rang me down to a most appetising repast of strawberries and cream, scones, and delicious buttered toast. I fell in love with my hostess—it would be sheer sacrilege to designate such a divine creature by the vulgar term of "landlady"—at once. When one's impressions of a place are at first exalted, they are often, later on, apt to become equally abased. In this case, however, ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... saw was a common enough sight in Ajmere, or in any other town of India. The balcony was built out from a brick wall which fell sheer to the bottom of the foss. But at some little distance from the end of the balcony and at the head of the foss, a road from the town broke the wall, and a flight of steep steps descended to the spring. The steps descended along ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... rise to assume gigantic stature. And then, just because he was very stiff, and the pain of stiffness and stretching made him uncouth, he grew angry. He resented his captivity, chafed at his being limited like that, did not understand how it had come about. It had come about through love, through sheer sheltering love. She had placed a crystal cup above him to keep him safe, and he had sat safe beneath it all these years, fearing to stir, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... expressed with a single crumbling touch; the key-note of the whole is given, and every part of it passes at once far into glowing and aerial space. The reader can scarcely fail to remember at once sundry works in contradistinction to this, with great names attached to them, in which the sky is a sheer piece of plumber's and glazier's work, and should be valued per yard, with heavy extra ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... theological refinements. There is an excuse for the Fathers, because the heretics forced them to define particular points; but every definition is a misfortune, and for us to persevere in the same way is sheer folly. Is no man to be admitted to grace who does not know how the Father differs from the Son, and both from the Spirit? or how the nativity of the Son differs from the procession of the Spirit? Unless I forgive ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... Nils burned to express; but the fiddle refused to obey him, and screeched something utterly discordant, as it seemed, from sheer perversity. ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... tides had thundered and ebbed many times since the night of her party, submerging the happy inconsequence of her sixteen years, but leaving her unshaken spirit with wide clarified vision, felt young to-day from sheer reaction. She would listen to no protest from her prudent mother and smothered her with kisses and a ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... of Brest, old fisher, lay Like a herring gasping here; Bunker of Nantucket Bay, Blown from out the port, dropped sheer Half a cable's length to leeward; yet we faintly raised a cheer As with his own right hand Our Commodore made fast The foeman's head-gear and The "Richard's" mizzen-mast, And in that death-lock clinging held us there from first ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... grandeur not to be attained by the egoist. Leconte's temperament leads him to subjects which are already instinct with tragedy and thus in his hands assume this grandeur without effort. The power of sheer style to ennoble is better seen in Sully Prudhomme's tours de force of philosophic poetry—when he unfolds his ideas upon 'Justice' or 'Happiness', for instance, under the form of a debate where masterly resources of phrase ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... that dark house. When her pure soul had passed,— Just as a perfume floats from out the world,— Wild tales were told of how the brothers loved The self-same maid, whom neither one would wed Because the other loved her as his life; And that the two, at midnight, in despair, From one sheer cliff plunged headlong in the sea. And when, at night, the hoarse east-wind rose high, Rattled the lintels, clamoring at the door, The children huddled closer round the hearth And whispered very softly with themselves, "That's Master Regnald looking ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... Teddy's note had suggested something most urgent, but told her nothing, she entered the drawing-room to meet him with foreboding added to a consuming fear. At the sight of him, so honest and kindly, she could have gone to his arms out of sheer longing for ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... further adventure during this day's journey, than buying bread and cheese from sheer hunger, at a little wooden tavern by the road-side, whose shelves were covered with glittering rows of bottles of brandy and mezcal. At some of the Indian huts also we bought various branches of pltanos, ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... perhaps. Present moving life, and long-past history, the mighty movement of nature and the changes of geologic time: sheer beauty too and the gaiety of amusements and excursions; do not all have their place in unwinding us from the tight coils we ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... soul thought this was sheer wandering of the mind, and she looked very frightened, and implored ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... toil I get it in the neck; I am fed up with it; and from this morning I shall not seek to keep your crimes in check; Sin as you will—I shall but acquiesce; Sleep on, O sentinels—I shall not curse; And so, maybe, from sheer contrariness Some day a guard may be a slight success; At any rate ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, August 1, 1917. • Various
... laid it at my feet, saying, "I met you here before," pointing to the spot on the river where we turned. I remember her coming then, and that I asked the boat to wait while she went to bring us a basket of food, and I think it was given to Chiko, and no return made. It is sheer kindliness that prompts them sometimes, though occasionally people do make presents with a view of getting a larger one in return: it is pleasant to find that it is not always so. She had a quiet, dignified manner, both in talking and walking, and I now gave her a small looking-glass, ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... be for a couple of weeks, may be three, and if you're coming to do a bit of a talk to me ever and again, then I tell you I don't call this a misfortune. It isn't a misfortune. It's right down sheer good luck...." ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... was as perfect as the indifferent glance she gave him. "Enjoying himself, I hope," she answered. "He hung around me until I sent him out in the sheer ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... will be that he will either run away from the city out of sheer desperation, or else humbly beg for his deposition and confess his incompetence. It is only for this purpose that I have come to you, Master Sanderus, to beg your help in putting this scheme into operation, for I know that you are skilful at that ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg
... is felt even in 'Adonais' (1821), his elegy on the death of Keats. John Keats was a very different person from Shelley. The son of a livery-stable keeper, he had been an apothecary's apprentice, and for a short time had walked the hospitals. He was driven into literature by sheer artistic passion, and not at all from any craving to ameliorate the world. His odes are among the chief glories of the English language. His life, unlike Shelley's, was devoted entirely to art, and ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... man, with the slow and careful habit of speech sometimes found in those who live much with massive machinery. "No, he wasn't killed; he's in the hospital. But he wrecked as good a car as ever was built, through sheer ...
— The Flying Mercury • Eleanor M. Ingram
... arises, of vast importance for both good and evil. This mental and moral heredity, over-leaping all boundaries of blood and natural kinship, spreads light and good influence or an immoral contagion through the community. And thus, in sheer self-defence, society passes laws setting limits to the oppression of the poor and weak, lest, degraded and brutalized, they become breeding centres of physical and moral disease in the community. The positive lesson that the surest ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... of fortune, his poor cockboat was being swamped in the black waters of adversity. He had staked much upon a little campaign at the Foreign Office in London. The cold rebuff which he had received to there had carried him in sheer desperation over to Monaro and incoming onto Geneva, he had "burned his ships" behind him. Ignorant of the precise manner in which his clouded reputation had stopped the way to his advancement in the English Secret Service, he remembered, even at the last, ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... arrondissement, the local autocrat, and the soured temper of the unsuccessful candidate who has never been returned since the year 1816. As to countenance—a wizened, wrinkled, sunburned face, and long, sleek locks of scanty gray hair; as to character—an incredible mixture of homely sense and sheer silliness; of a rich man's overbearing ways, and a total lack of manners; just the kind of husband who is almost entirely led by his wife, yet imagines himself to be the master; apt to domineer in trifles, and to let more important things slip past ...
— The Message • Honore de Balzac
... perhaps—without dreaming for an instant that there was any sort of connection between Pauline and herself! Or else—what would almost be stranger still—not to have read the novel, not to have heard of it! To have inspired such a book, such a beautiful book—yet to remain in sheer unconscious ignorance that there was such a book! Oh, I think it is even more extraordinary from the woman's point of view than from the man's. There is something almost terrifying about it. To have had such an influence on the destiny ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... questions followed one another in quick succession. Meanwhile father took me aside, and whispered into my ear: "How about . . . . how about religion?" Out of sheer spitefulness I wanted to worry the poor old folks a little; may the Lord not consider it a sin on ...
— In Those Days - The Story of an Old Man • Jehudah Steinberg
... scrupulous, capable of long-sustained efforts, often of heroic devotedness and superhuman endurance, for which their reward is not in this world, as the art of pleasing is singularly deficient in them. Here are found the people who are "so good, but so trying," ever in a fume and fuss, who, for sheer goodness, rouse in others the spirit of contradiction. These characters are at their best in adversity, trouble stimulates them to their best efforts, whereas in easy circumstances and surrounded with affection they are apt to drop into querulous and exacting habits. If they are endowed ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... our right, down Star Hill, lies the famous White Lion Inn, now a miserable pot-house, where George IV. used to stay, and where, on the day that the London and South-western Railway was opened, the old ostler cut his throat in sheer despair, for Othello's occupation was gone. Ten miles up the road lies Bagshot Heath, the terror of travellers in those coaching days. There stood, and stands still, a little wayside inn called the Golden Farmer, where many of the coaches stopped to water the horses. The wearied travellers ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... that he might look down upon the stately avenue that ran by the flat-house, and watch the people going to and fro about their business. But the change, instead of cheering, cast him into a deeper melancholy. It was nearly a hundred feet, sheer drop, to those healthy people walking so fast, and the mere distance depressed him unutterably. He played with the scores of visiting-cards that his friends had left for him, and he tried to play ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... face masked all emotion; Kendric's displayed frankly his sheer delight. He was playing his game; he ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... if we were able to get back without mischance. Not to be daunted, I waited till nearly noon, thinking it was possible that the mist might rise, and restore to us the bright skies of yesterday. A change came, but not the one we hoped for. The cold rain turned into snow, so it would have been sheer madness ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... suppose, of which he had probably heard famous mention, but which I would have believed to have been a longing for Roberta, Marquise of Grez and Bye, if I had heard it so spoken, with an English or Russian or French accent, to me in a robe of tulle or sheer linen. "And may I not return immediately after that supper to that Club of Old Hickory for conversation with you and my Uncle, the General ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... make you kill one another. The house of Bourbon is the enemy of the house of Valois; remember that, monsieur. All younger branches should be kept in a state of poverty, for they are born conspirators. It is sheer folly to give them arms when they have none, or to leave them in possession of arms when they seize them. Let every younger son be made incapable of doing harm; that is the law of Crowns; the Sultans of ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... of Teletskoye (length, 48 m.; maximum width, 3 m.; altitude, 1700 ft.; area, 87 sq. m.; maximum depth, 1020 ft.; mean depth, 660 ft.), are only inhabited by nomad Telenghites or Teleuts. The shores of the lake — reminding a visitor somewhat of the Swiss lake of Lucerne — rise almost sheer to over 6000 ft. and are too wild to accommodate a numerous population. From this lake issues the Biya, which joins the Katun at Biysk, and then meanders through the beautiful prairies of the north-west of the Altai. Farther north the Altai highlands are continued ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Moreover, he pointed out sheer losses of oil by picking up a handful of metal cuttings from a box, letting them drip, measuring the oil that accumulated and recommending a simple device for reclaiming that oil before the ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... in his speech or attitude. He was not posing. He spoke of his necessity in the matter-of-fact way in which he had accepted it. It was necessary to earn the sheer essentials of life, in order to get a footing—to get sufficient capital to open up his office again. He would not have borrowed if he could, and a penniless lawyer in New York is in as bad a position as a penniless tramp. Not only ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... plunged into the rainy darkness of the highroad. The way was familiar. For a while he was content to feel the buffeting, caused by his rapid pace, of wind and rain against his depressed head and shoulders in a sheer brutal sense of opposition and power, or to relieve his pent-up excitement by dashing through overflowed gullies in the road or across the quaggy, sodden edges of meadowland, until he had controlled ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... which we were now going, and in those of the shifting Hwang ho further north, centuries of toiling millions have executed works of almost incalculable magnitude, fundamentally along such lines as those just suggested. They have accomplished an enormous share of these tasks by sheer force of body and will, building levees, digging canals, diverting the turbid waters of streams through them and then carrying the deposits of silt and organic growth out upon the fields, often borne upon the shoulders of men in the ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... seem to have as much influence as expected; we must be as considerate and liberal as possible to secure their confidence ourselves. We are in St. Mary's paying the highest rate of wages in the island; 1s. 8d. currency per day nett, with allowances, are generally offered; I am giving here, from sheer necessity, 2s. 6d. currency per day, without charging any rent in the mean time. In the present state of things when so few estates are doing anything at all, I have much satisfaction in saying that the people here, on ——, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... wasn't fussing, sir!" protested Rae Malgregor with a timid sort of dignity. "Why, it never had occurred to me for a moment that anybody blamed me for—anything!" Just from sheer astonishment her hands took a new clutch into the torn flapping corner of the motto that she still clung desperately to even ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... a few hundred yards from the little farmhouse; green grass, with interrupting rocks, extending all the way. Faith hardly knew what she was corning to till she reached the brink. There the precipitous rocks rose sheer a hundred feet from the bottom, and at the bottom, down below her, a narrow strip of beach was bordered with the billowy crest and foam of the sea. Nothing but the dark ocean and the illimitable ocean line beyond; there was not even a sail in sight this evening; in full uninterrupted power and ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... Conde and Plessis-Praslin,—we follow the bewildering turns of their fortune and the senseless evolution of their mercenaries, without being able to trace any moral line of conduct, any ethical aim on the part of the one or the other. It was anarchy for the sheer fun of anarchy's sake, a struggle which pervaded the nation without ever contriving to be national, a riot of forces directed by no intellectual or ethical purpose whatever. The delirium of it all reached a culminating point in 1652 when the aristocratic bolshevists of ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... the beach and away from the village, and in and out among the rocks for quite two miles, till they were where the cliff went sheer up like a vast wall of rugged granite, at a part of which, where a mass of broken stone had either fallen or been thrown down, Will stopped and looked round to see if they were observed. As they were alone with no other watchers than a swarthy-looking cormorant sitting on a sunny ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... that only the eye of Omniscience can possibly distinguish between what passes for philanthropy and what is sheer egotism." ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... to the door to tell the watcher that first breakfast, and then lunch, was waiting for him in the room below; but he would not leave the bedside, taking from sheer necessity what was brought to him, and ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... window-casing for support, while he stood watching it. Just as far as he could see it his eye followed that hood, and when it disappeared from view, he turned from the window, deathly sick, and tottering back to his bedroom, vomited from sheer nervous excitement. ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... the Englishman went on, "it's no simple thing that we have to do. I lay it to sheer luck that I've escaped so long, but my turn may come at any moment. I've lost a number of friends in this same ...
— Dave Darrin After The Mine Layers • H. Irving Hancock
... gladdening their friends and relatives, they live, depending on each other, like tall trees growing in the same forest. We, however, have been forced in exile by the wicked Dhritarashtra and his sons having escaped with difficulty, from sheer good fortune, a fiery death. Having escaped from that fire, we are now resting in the shade of this tree. Having already suffered so much, where now are we to go? Ye sons of Dhritarashtra of little foresight, ye wicked fellows, enjoy your temporary success. The gods are certainly auspicious ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... horse and carriage break down, and at last we reach the place on foot. I have meanwhile drunk three glasses of tea and annihilated several eggs; the efforts at getting warm have also so perfectly succeeded that I feel the need of fresh air. I should, out of sheer impatience, commence shaving if I had a glass. This city is very straggling, and very foreign-looking, with its green-roofed churches and innumerable cupolas; quite different from Amsterdam, but both the most original cities I know. No German guard has a conception of the luggage ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... inn in the village, told a startling tale. The Duke of St. Quentin, though known to have been at Mantes and strongly suspected of espousing Navarre's cause, had ridden calmly into Paris and opened his hotel! It was madness—madness sheer and stark. Thus far his religion had saved him, yet any day he might fall under the swords ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... threw his cloak over his shoulder and came down slopes of gold in El Dorado. From incredible heights he came. He came from where the peaks of the pure gold mountain shone a little red with the sunset; from crag to crag of gold he stepped down slowly. Sheer out of romance he ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... to take infinite pains to get the right notes, so he was forcibly removed, and Dennison installed in his place. "The Gondoliers" and the noise began again, while Ward, protesting that it was time we went away, was disregarded entirely. From sheer distaste for punch and only a very limited taste for wine I had not been seeking my enjoyment in drinking, but I had smoked far more than was good for me, and my head felt as large as a pumpkin. It occurred to me, however, that if Ward wished our entertainment to close he was sure to ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... been there, and spent two months at Bombay, and almost six months at Calcutta. There were so many gorgeous things,—silks, and bright stuffs with threads of gold, jackets all embroidery, and queer Eastern dresses, two made of pineapple cloth,—a sheer, beautiful fabric,—and one had ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... Jennings! She forestalled every assertion I made, herself bubbling and blushing in sheer delight. Nor did she lack in charity. Tapping me with her fan lightly, she exclaimed: "You rogue! I know that you two want to be alone; that is what you want. Now I am going away—just down the room. You will ride home with us after ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... and strength that surprised the latter no more than it did his white friends, he drove the head of the weapon sheer through one of the assailants, who went over backward with a screech that drowned all ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... a good thing I was not there at that time, for at the sight of tears in the faces of those dear women I would have been driven to sheer madness. I believe I would have taken a club to the hard-hearted or stupid Tescheron and murdered him with mince-meat minuteness in the presence of the gossipers lolling around the fireplace in the living-room. At the time of the tearful scene ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... the trammels of etiquette was very complete. In theory—and he abounded in theory—his manners were purely democratic. It was by sheer habit and inadvertency that he permitted Firmin, who had discovered a rucksack in a small shop in the town below, to carry both bottles of beer. The king had never, as a matter of fact, carried anything for himself ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... she had lost her father, but all the scenes of his last days were still so clear to her that it seemed to her often sheer incredibility that the room, the bed, the helpless form, the noise of the breathing, the clink of the medicine glasses, the tread of the doctor, the gasping words of the patient, were all alike fragments and phantoms of the past,—that the house was empty, the bed sold, the patient gone. Oh! ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... themselves: they could not eat or drink, as the late mass was not yet over at the Hermitage; the Monastery shops where pilgrims are so fond of crowding and asking prices were still shut. In spite of their exhaustion, many of them from sheer boredom were trudging to the Hermitage. The path from the Monastery to the Hermitage, towards which I directed my steps, twined like a snake along the high steep bank, going up and down and threading in and out among the oaks and pines. Below, the Donets gleamed, reflecting the sun; ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... he thought of Baudelaire. He uttered the snort that was his laugh, and 'Baudelaire,' he said, 'was a bourgeois malgre lui.' France had had only one poet: Villon; 'and two-thirds of Villon were sheer journalism.' Verlaine was 'an epicier malgre lui.' Altogether, rather to my surprise, he rated French literature lower than English. There were 'passages' in Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. But 'I,' he summed up, 'owe nothing to ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... Wyllard sat with Mrs. Radcliffe in a big low-ceilinged room at Garside Scar, looking about him with quiet interest. He had now and then spent a day or two in huge Western hotels, but he had never seen anything quite like that room. The sheer physical comfort of its arrangements appealed to him, but after all he was not one who had ever studied his bodily ease very much, and what he regarded as the chaste refinement of its adornment had a deeper effect. Though he had lived ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... did all this out of sheer love for Fannie, and because she had been kind to her in her mother's house, and never put on airs and ordered her about, ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... lines marked the lazy course of Po and Ticino, while little lakes like Varese and the lower end of Maggiore spread themselves out, connecting the mountains with the plain. Five minutes' walk from the hotel brought us to a ridge where the precipice fell suddenly and almost sheer over one arm of Lugano Lake. Sullenly outstretched asleep it lay beneath us, coloured with the tints of fluor-spar, or with the changeful green and azure of a peacock's breast. The depth appeared immeasurable. San Salvadore ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... the housing of a menagerie during a projected cruise of forty-odd days! "What philanthropy!" ejaculated the editor of The Gad. What a kindly old soul was the projector of this wonderful enterprise, that he should take a couple of tired old elephants off on a Mediterranean trip out of the sheer kindness of his heart! Was it not the acme of generosity for a man who had lately been so hard up that he had mortgaged his farm to go to the expense of building a huge floating barge on which the gorillas, giraffes, ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... they moved a few feet down-stream and stood looking at the frothing cataract that dropped the great river a sheer two-hundred feet ...
— Before Egypt • E. K. Jarvis
... miserable condition, and yet they will not relax their hold upon the etheric double, feeling that that is at least some sort of link with the only world that they know. Thus they drift about in a condition of loneliness and misery until from sheer fatigue their hold fails them, and they slip into the comparative happiness of astral life. Sometimes in their desperation they grasp blindly at other bodies, and try to enter into them, and occasionally they are successful in such an attempt. They may seize ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... climbed to the crest of the Ridge and was making his way through the great pines to the point where the crag jutted out sheer and massive, overlooking the reaches of rolling country below, when he lifted his eyes, and just above him, half seated, half reclining against a ledge of rock, was the very girl he had seen two days before. Her eyes were closed, ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... it, his hands trembling, and a creeping, chilling sensation running through his fingers. It was of finest fabric, sheer and soft and very simply embroidered. It was without, rather than with, surprise lie found the letters "F. F." in one corner. He raised it, and, not knowing what to say for the moment, sat there inhaling the delicate fragrance that ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... want to be taken nationally, and not personally, by foreigners. Beyond any other people we wish to be loved by other peoples, even by others whom we do not love, and we wish to be loved in the lump. We would like to believe that somehow our sheer Americanism rouses the honor and evokes the veneration of the alien, and as we have long had a grudge against the English, we would be particularly glad to forget it in a sense of English respect and affection. We would ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... ever drawn a sham bill of exchange on a fictitious uncle at a sham address, and feared lest you should not be in time to take it up? Come now, I am attending! If you were going to drown yourself for some woman, or by way of a protest, or out of sheer dulness, I disown you. Make your confession, and no lies! I don't at all want a historical memoir. And, above all things, be as concise as your clouded intellect permits; I am as critical as a professor, and as sleepy as ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... "'Tis sheer folly, lad," I burst out then, "and let us have no more of it. 'Tis but the idle prating of a lovesick girl, who should have a lover, ere she try to steal a nest in the heart of one of her own sex. ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... scraping away in the deserted parlor, with not another person in attendance, without a single listener. Miss Lamont happened to peep through the window-blinds from the piazza and discover this residuum of gayety. The band itself was half asleep, but by sheer force of habit it kept on, the fiddlers drawing the perfunctory bows, and the melancholy clarionet men breathing their expressive sighs. It was a dismal sight. The next morning the band ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... dash, the nerve. You will perform wonders. But you don't realize what this war is. You will perish of sheer curiosity to see or eagerness to fight. But these are the least of ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... opening of spring the little house at Hillfoot took on fresh activities. Tillie was house-cleaning with great thoroughness. She scrubbed carpets, took down the clean curtains, and put them up again freshly starched. It was as if she found in sheer activity and fatigue ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Christian people who have been trained up in the way they should not go, by this active class of fanatics, are naturally either opposed to reason or impervious to it. Hence, arguing with them is sheer waste of brains and leisure—a casting of pearls before swine. They are convinced not only that the wisdom of the world is foolishness with God, but that wisdom with God is foolishness with the world; nor will any one affirm their 'moderation' ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... levelled at his head. I said that he wore a steel cap, with a gilt iron spike of six inches, and a hood of chain mail. I rose in my stirrups and delivered "ST. GEORGE;" my sword caught the spike exactly on the point, split it sheer in two, cut crashing through the steel cap and hood, and was only stopped by a ruby which he wore in his back-plate. His head, cut clean in two between the eyebrows and nostrils, even between the two front teeth, fell one side on each shoulder, and he galloped on ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of putting her under restraint was a very slight one. We merely turned her empty boast about knowing the Secret into a fixed delusion. Having first spoken in sheer crazy spitefulness against the man who had offended her, she was cunning enough to see that she had seriously frightened him, and sharp enough afterwards to discover that HE was concerned in shutting her up. The consequence was she flamed out into ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... must be hot passion, white of flame, Pure hate of this unutterable wrong, Sheer wrath for Christendom so sunk in shame, To ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 2nd, 1914 • Various
... that "the governor," as he persisted in calling Mr. Frampton, was going to make a speech. The cry was immediately taken up by the others, who for some moments defeated their own purpose by calling vociferously for "silence for the governor's speech!" Having at length, from sheer want of breath, obtained the required boon, Mr. Frampton, waving his hand with a dignified gesture, ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... passionate regret to, and hear one sound of heartfelt forgiveness from, the cold and ghastly form that lay rotting in the pauper's grave! The children wild in the streets, the mother a destitute widow; both deeply tainted with the deep disgrace of the husband and father's name, and impelled by sheer necessity, down the precipice that had led him to a lingering death, possibly of many years' duration, thousands of miles away. We had no clue to the end of the tale; but it was ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... were soon sunk, their crews hurled into the waves. On went the fleet, sweeping over the broad waters which lay between Zoeterwoude and Zwieten. As they approached some shallows, which led into the great mere, the Zealanders dashed into the sea, and with sheer strength shouldered every vessel through. Two obstacles lay still in their path—the forts of Zoeterwoude and Lammen, distant from the city five hundred and two hundred and fifty yards respectively. Strong redoubts, both well supplied with troops ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... I think, is born of a sheer excess of animal spirits. But not all of it. Some of it is based on downright wilfulness. I have seen him do without things he really wanted, rather than unbend and say the necessary "Ta-ta" which stands for both "please" ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... of surprise at his father's words. The Captain had never shown any serious interest in the possibility of faster-than-light travel before. He had always regarded the whole idea as sheer fantasy. ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... to be content with; in order that they shall pass beyond it, it is necessary that a superior and far-seeing mind, the civilizer, should assist them, should draw them to himself, raise them a degree by sheer force, as in the 'Deluge' of Poussin, those on the upper terraces stretch their hands to those below, clutch and lift them up. But humanity, I shall be told, is at last emancipated; it has no longer any deluge to fear; it has attained its majority; it finds within itself ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... to discourse a little about a free Black Mountain. Of indefatigable obligingness, this amiable nobleman filled the functions of an interpreter in the household, or those of a steward at a pinch, and all for nothing for the sheer pleasure of it. Apart from him, Tartarin received none but "Turks." All those fierce-headed pirates who had given him such frights from the backs of their black stalls turned out, when once he made their acquaintance, to be good inoffensive ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... Wickersham, from sheer despair and physical exhaustion, sank limp in the arms of his captors, the sergeant, on the pretext of seeking the aiders and abettors in the riot, half carried, half led the prisoner ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... a slope, my kurumaya swerves to one side with a suddenness that gives me a violent start, for the road overlooks a sheer depth of several hundred feet. It is merely to avoid hurting a harmless snake making its way across the path. The snake is so little afraid that on reaching the edge of the road it turns its head to look ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... locked in her own room next to his, she slept at last from sheer weariness. And she dreamed that he was playing to her, for her—the Adagio, and then the "Funeral March of ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... very simple one of sheer white organdie, and was the only evening dress she had. She knew there would be many smarter dresses at the reception, but the knowledge did not disturb her sensible head in ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... he would now bring his speech to a close. (Uproarious applause). Again Monsieur Souley rose, and amid shouts of—'question!' said the question was of no kind of consequence, that he always went on the principle of making himself heard. Further attempts to rein up Monsieur Souley would have been sheer madness; so he continued his speech, which included fifty irrelevant topics without discussing one. He even charged Louis Napoleon with poisoning the champagne. Whatever of truth there might be in the charge, we only know that the speaker ere he had concluded his speech found himself ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... sit still in the train which was carrying her towards Mansfield, from sheer excitement at the anticipation of actually seeing the haunts of Robin Hood. Ever since Mrs. Pitt had mentioned that town as the gateway of the Sherwood Forest of Betty's dreams, the name had seemed an enchanted one ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson
... world. What is more, he throws money away as if it were dust. The day on which he gave the thrashing with blows like falling leaves and flowing water, he dragged (lit. pull alive, drag dead) Ying Lien away more dead than alive, by sheer force, and no one, even up to this date, is aware whether she be among the dead or the living. This young Feng had a spell of empty happiness; for (not only) was his wish not fulfilled, but on the contrary he spent money and lost ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... hair, the great nose, and the massive bones of the jaw, suggested a man of strength; and yet Philip wondered whether perhaps the mask concealed a strange weakness. Clutton's refusal to show his work might be sheer vanity: he could not bear the thought of anyone's criticism, and he would not expose himself to the chance of a refusal from the Salon; he wanted to be received as a master and would not risk comparisons with other work which might force ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... we sat in room 407—I in a blue funk from sheer nervousness, Raffles Holmes as imperturbable as the rock of Gibraltar from sheer nerve. It was the usual style of hotel room, with bath, pictures, telephone, what-nots, wardrobes, and centre-table. The last proved to be ...
— R. Holmes & Co. • John Kendrick Bangs
... His face grew a little white as he threw a quick glance into his sister's eyes; but his voice, when he spoke, was clear and strong from sheer force of will. ...
— Across the Years • Eleanor H. Porter
... moral mood. For when I reflect upon the difference between what books have to offer and what even relatively earnest readers take the trouble to accept from them, I am appalled (or should be appalled, did I not know that the world is moving) by the sheer inefficiency, the bland, complacent failure of the earnest reader. I am like yourself, the spectacle of inefficiency rouses ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... are kept in a sort of cage, and the Indians "take great care when the female is in season to prevent her uniting with a dog of an inferior description." The Indians told Sir Robert that, if a dog proved bad or useless, {207} he was not killed, but was left to die from sheer neglect. Hardly any nation is more barbarous than the Fuegians, but I hear from Mr. Bridges, the Catechist to the Mission, that, "when these savages have a large, strong, and active bitch, they take care to put her to a fine dog, and even take care to feed her ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... and beasts in infinite variety, as also of those creatures which seem neither bird nor beast. There are large black howling monkeys, and little black-faced ones with prehensile tails, by means of which they swing in mid-air or jump from tree to tree in sheer lightness of heart. There is also the sloth, which, as its name implies, is painfully deliberate in its motions. Were I a Scotchman I should say that "I dinna think that in a' nature there is a mair curiouser cratur." Sidney Smith's ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... quarrel that morning Rose had roundly confessed to the sending of the letter. Oh yes, he might present himself at his great lady's house; he would be well received! After long hesitation he had come despite everything—out of sheer courage. But La Faloise's imbecile pleasantry had upset him in spite of ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... Cancion is no doubt a composition of great charm and mystic unction; but it lacks the concentrated force of Luis de Leon. Luis de Leon has a lofty dignity of his own; he outstrips all rivalry by virtue of his nobility, by virtue of his intellectual vigour, by virtue of sheer excellence rather than by curious refinements of technique. These positive qualities defy reproduction by even the most accomplished of imitators. It has been said that Luis de Leon's verse, as well as his prose, has noticeable roughnesses; but let us ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... by one they led them up the gangways from the holds, and then, sliding and slipping on their weak legs, down a steep gangway to the low quay. Once on firm ground, the horses threw up their heels, bucked and neighed in sheer delight. But they overestimated their strength and came sprawling to earth and soon, for lack of breath, quieted down. The squadron led its horses to a piece of waste sandy ground, removed their covers, and let them roll to their hearts' content. They ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... mulberry trees would be about them, and the long vineyards watched over by the aristocratic cypress lifting its dark spire to the sun. But now the kingdom of the pine trees joyously held them. They were in the happy woods in which even to breathe was sheer happiness. Now and then they pulled up and looked back to the crescent-shaped plain which held a child instead of armies. They traced the course of the river marked out by the reeds and sedges. They saw the tiny dark specks, which were ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... is not this duty of neutrality where only our inner interests would lead us to believe, the most ridiculous of commands? Is it not sheer dogmatic folly to say that our inner interests can have no real connection with the forces that the hidden world may contain? In other cases divinations based on inner interests have proved prophetic enough. Take science itself! Without an imperious inner demand on our ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... account of the struggle written by Major Steadman, who served under Howe, Clinton, and Cornwallis, and from other authentic contemporary sources. You will see that, although unsuccessful,—and success was, under the circumstances, a sheer impossibility,—the British troops fought with a bravery which was never exceeded, and that their victories in actual conflict vastly outnumbered their defeats. Indeed, it may be doubted whether ...
— True to the Old Flag - A Tale of the American War of Independence • G. A. Henty
... imposition, the fruit of a depraved heart, and a lying tongue, implies so much home-born deceit that, till the heart capable of such a prejudice be completely changed, no reasoning can have any solid fulcrum of truth or goodness to rest on. It is sheer folly to talk of one's being wholly unprejudiced in such an inquiry. No man ever was, or could be so. As his sympathies are toward goodness and virtue, and the happiness of mankind, or toward pride and deceit, and selfishness and savageness, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... made any excuses to himself. He had a sort of idea that if he saw the magnificence that housed her, it would through her sheer remoteness kill the misery in him. But he regarded himself with a sort of humorous pity, and having picked up a stray dog, he addressed it now ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... a view around the world From such a mountain—if it isn't wooded Clear to the top." I saw through leafy screens Great granite terraces in sun and shadow, Shelves one could rest a knee on getting up— With depths behind him sheer a hundred feet; Or turn and sit on and look out and down, With little ferns in crevices at his elbow. "As to that I can't say. But there's the spring, Right on the summit, almost like a fountain. That ought to be worth seeing." ...
— North of Boston • Robert Frost
... spirit-stirring example it has bequeathed to future generations of English soldiers, for its illustration of death-defying, disciplined courage; the great fight at Inkerman was only converted from a calamitous surprise into a victory by sheer obstinate valour, not by able strategy; and the operations that after Lord Raglan's death brought the unreasonably protracted siege of Sebastopol to a close did but evince afresh how grand were the soldierly qualities of both French and English, and ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... at the Board?' To this Felix made no direct answer. Roger knew that there had been no Board. Mr Melmotte was in the country and there could be no Board, nor could Sir Felix have had business in the city. It was sheer impudence,—sheer indifference, and, into the bargain, a downright lie. The young man, who was of himself so unwelcome, who had come there on a project which he, Roger, utterly disapproved,—who had now knocked him and his household up at four o'clock in the morning,—had uttered no ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... ease up thy pikestaff, man; I can barely fetch my breath—how many? Why, one,—if it be long enough," and, wriggling from his captor, the nimble Lionel tripped him up in turn, and, in sheer delight at his discomfiture, turned a back somersault and landed almost on the toes of two unhelmeted knights, who came from the inner pavilion ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... his bedtime yet," she excused herself. She rested her cheek on the child's head and looked over at the doctor. She wore a dark crimson silk, the bosom filled with sheer white muslin that was caught together under her soft chin by a little pearl pin; her lace undersleeves were pushed back so that William could see the lovely lines of her white wrists. Her parted hair fell in soft, untidy waves down over her ears; she was staring absently ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... ceased to be objects of admiration, and the War Office would have howled with exquisite torture at sight of their hair and clothes. Speak of wrapping clothes around head or body to keep out the dust? It is sheer nonsense to prate so. Why it is hard enough to gape and gasp and catch a mouthful of sanded breath, without that added worry. There is nothing for it, but to grin and bear it and get through with the swallowing of that ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... with gratification. Yet the worst historian has a clearer view of the period he studies than the best of us can hope to form of that in which we live. The obscurest epoch is to-day; and that for a thousand reasons of inchoate tendency, conflicting report, and sheer mass and multiplicity of experience; but chiefly, perhaps, by reason of an insidious shifting of landmarks. Parties and ideas continually move, but not by measurable marches on a stable course; the political soil itself steals forth ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and day through rain and sunlight, careless of vigils or of dangers, but, safe at home and seated before the fire, is seized by extreme lassitude and can hardly drag himself to bed, so France, the widow of Caesar, suddenly felt her wound. She fell through sheer exhaustion, and lapsed into a coma so profound that her old kings, believing her dead, wrapped about her a burial shroud. The veterans, their hair whitened in service, returned exhausted, and the hearths of deserted castles sadly ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... the L. wall, Tritons and Nereids, from the Fontaine des Innocents, executed 1548-49, and those (R. wall) from the old choir screen of St. Germain l'Auxerrois in 1544, happily rescued from clerical vandals.[200] For sheer loveliness of form and poetry of outline, those reliefs are unsurpassed by any contemporary artist. His younger contemporary, Germain Pilon (1535-1590), is well represented in this room. The Three Graces (trois graces decentes), which Catherine de' Medici ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... the road for about a mile it became precipitous, and Wilbur could readily see where there was likely to be trouble. Shortly before they reached the place where the bridge was being repaired the bank on the right-hand side of the road gave place to a sheer drop forty to fifty feet high and deepening with every step forward. As the bunch neared the bridge Merritt and Wilbur, with the cowpunchers, slowed up until the steers were quite close. Then Grier and Rodgers went ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... farmer's man, tilling his own ground, and then tilling other people's;—affording a proof, even in this declining age, when the circumstances of so many worthy members of the community seem to have 'an alacrity in sinking,' that it is possible to amend them by sheer industry. He, who was born in the workhouse, and bred up as a parish boy, has now, by mere manual labour, risen to the rank of a land-owner, pays rates and taxes, grumbles at the times, and is called Master Welles,—the title next to Mister—that by which Shakspeare was called;—what ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... says a correspondent of The Daily Mail, "should not be sent to the country for sale." The playful kind, on the other hand, that bite and kick from sheer joie de vivre, are bound to have a beneficial effect ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various
... was, as Tonnison put it, like nothing so much as a gigantic well or pit going sheer down into the bowels ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... would be still more cruel," I cried. "Such a long, long voyage is a hard and dangerous venture even for strong men—men who should be both good navigators and good seamen. But a weak, delicate woman—oh, it's all sheer nonsense, girl." ...
— The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton - 1902 • Louis Becke
... grapevine-withes supplied the rebels with water, and their plantation-grounds were the wild pine-apple and the plantain groves, and the forests, where the wild-boars harbored and the ringdoves were as easily shot as if they were militia-men. Nothing but sheer weariness of fighting seems to have brought about a truce at last, and then a treaty, between those high contracting parties, Cudjoe ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... sank down, felled by the sheer burden of weariness, and no matter how exhausted they might be the Trail continued, springing on with the same apparently tireless energy toward its unknown goal in the North. Gradually they lost sight of the ultimate object of their quest. It became obscured by the immediate object, and that ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... not, in nineteen-eight, repeated the glorious success of nineteen-three. The deed he thought so adorable when she did it in the innocence of her unwedded will, he regarded somehow as impermissible in his wife. Then, by its sheer extravagance, it was flattering to his male pride; now, by the same conspicuous quality, it was not. As for his family, it was clear that they condemned the transaction as an unjustifiable and fantastic folly. Brodrick was not sure that he did not count it as one of the disasters ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... practice," says the missionary Moffat (99); "in reply to which, they would only laugh." "It appears an awful exhibition of human depravity," he adds, "when children compel their parents to perish for want, or to be devoured by beasts of prey in a desert, from no other motive but sheer laziness." Kicherer says there are a few cases of "natural affection" sufficient to raise these creatures to "a level with the brute creation," Moffat, too, refers to exceptional cases of kindness, but the only ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... in deep breaths and stood silent in a very ecstacy of delight. At their feet was a terraced garden, running downward two hundred feet to where the crag fell sheer to the sea. It was glorious with blooming flowers of every sort that grows, and the people on the balconies imagined at the moment they had been transferred to an earthly paradise too fair and sweet for ordinary ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... angry at this sudden desertion; and Mary Brooks tried rather unsuccessfully not to smile. The rest were merely astonished at so sudden a change of mind. Finally Betty gave a little nervous cough and in sheer desperation began to talk. "That's a good enough argument to change any one's mind," she said. "Isn't it queer how many different views ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... volume. Their isolation ended when the sea was no longer a barrier; and for maritime nations it is but an extension of their territory. A third invasion began in the sixteenth century, and has continued till our own day. The underlying motive was not economic necessity, nor religious enthusiasm, but sheer lust of gain. ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... with passion. A terrible loathing for himself, for his crime which had been the precursor of this terrible situation, filled his soul to the verge of sheer physical nausea. A red film gathered before his eyes, and through it he saw the grinning face of the inhuman monster who had planned this hideous, abominable thing. It seemed to him as if in the silence ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... at Hugh, who took to chopping in sheer desperation; and the muscles of both gave them full occupation for five minutes. Philetus stood comfortably warming himself at the fire, looking first at one and then at the other, as if they were a show and he had paid for ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... yet dead, but a ball from the rifle finished him. He was a monster in size. Doubtless the wound in his fore leg had made it difficult for him to get food, and he had attacked the children on account of sheer hunger. But had he not been in that maimed condition, 20 his attack would have been successful and the hindmost child would have been torn to pieces and eaten up in the shortest time and with little ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... the hushed and Eastern night They swam together, hand in hand, Or lay and laughed in sheer delight Full length ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... acquainted with the allusion made by Maura to the "dacent and purty girl that hasn't a stain upon her name, or upon the name of one of her seed, breed, or generation." This "purty" girl is no other than Alley Bawn Murray; and although Maura, from a sheer spirit of contradiction, spoke of her to Hugh in a favorable point of view, yet nothing could be more obstinately bitter than her opposition to such a match on ...
— Lha Dhu; Or, The Dark Day - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... to dine in town that night, and, for sheer protection, she made Maudie Sinclair come and share her evening meal. The children were put to bed, and they sat down alone together, talking over the party. Maudie was pleased to relax a little of her ...
— Frivolous Cupid • Anthony Hope
... They thought him violent, rude, ill-educated, a "man of the woods," a revolutionist, almost a communist. We are apt to think of him as a gentle sentimentalist, a soul full of compassion for the hard lot of the poor, a man whose art achieves greatness by sheer feeling rather than by knowledge and intellect. In spite of his own letters, in spite of the testimony of many who knew him well, in spite of more than one piece of illuminating criticism, these two misconceptions endure; and, for the many, ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... jobs, hospital jobs, God knows what—I persevered, and might for the next three years have been kicking my heels, like any other patriot, in the corridor of some dingy Government office at the mercy of a pack of tuppenny counter-jumpers, but for a God-sent little accident, the result of sheer boredom, which counselled a trip ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... charmed. So much so, that out of sheer pleasure they began to eat too. The meal, if brief, was a merry one. Mr Rollitt took a special fancy to the Abernethys—a choice which of course put the shop- directors in an ecstasy. They only reproached themselves that they had not ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... itself, and the brave things you have done. My father's dislike flared into hatred because you worsted him when he discovered that he could not successfully defend the wrong against you and fell back upon sheer insult. ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... of the inhabitants with the peristylium of a sacred place. At the extreme back, towards the north, which could not be seen from the point of view where we last stationed ourselves, there was a sheer descent of rock, bestowing on the city, when it was seen at a distance on the Mediterranean side, the same bold and striking appearance which attaches to Castro Giovanni, the ancient Enna, ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... and watched Hollis. Curly-head was an accomplished rider, and Sam felt that he himself cut but an awkward figure. In reality he was too conscious of his defects. By strict attention he was proving himself a fair ordinary rider, but when Hollis, out of sheer showiness, turned aside from the path to jump his horse over a fallen tree, and Miss Stevens out of bravado followed him, Sam Turner well-nigh ground his teeth, and, acting upon the impulse, he too attempted ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... Washington in good time, and I soon realized the great advantage of rest. Six hours of office work came so near nothing to do, that had I been in usual health I should probably have raised some disturbance from sheer idleness; but I learned by and by that the close attention demanded to avoid mistakes, could not well ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... was lying in her stateroom below and crying bitterly, while her cousin Beth strove to soothe her. All unused to such horrors as she had witnessed that day, the girl had managed to retain her nerve by sheer force of will until the Red Cross party had returned to the ship and extended first aid to the wounded; but the moment Dr. Gys dismissed ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... of the Incas and Chibchas concludes the civilized elements of the Aboriginal South American. To the east of the Andes were a number of tribes, all of which were, to a greater or lesser degree, still in a state of sheer savagery. Near the eastern frontier of the Inca Empire resided such peoples as the Chiriguanos, Chunchos, Abipones, Chiquitos, Mojos, Guarayos, Tacanas; while to the north were similar tribes, such as the Ipurines, Jamamaries, Huitotos, Omaguas. These ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... may flatter themselves that by superior intelligence and political sagacity the higher orders of men will always govern, but when the ignorant foreign vote already holds the balance of power in all the large cities by sheer force of numbers, it is simply a question of impulse or passion, bribery or fraud, how our elections will be carried. When the highest offices in the gift of the people are bought and sold in Wall Street, it is a mere chance who will be our rulers. Whither is a nation ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... So in sheer weariness and desperation he went to Tintagel, having, as he thought, kept his determination to himself, as he wished no one to know whither he had retreated. One of the newspapers, however, heard of it, and in a little paragraph told that Lord Arleigh of Beechgrove had gone to Tintagel for the ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)
... eyes in sheer astonishment and looked again, but the second view only confirmed the vision of the first. His worst fears were realised; his ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... Never fell such fragrance from the flower-month's rose-red kirtle As from chaplets on the bright friends' brows who slew their lord: Greener grew the leaf and balmier blew the flower of myrtle When its blossom sheathed the sheer tyrannicidal sword. None so glorious garland crowned the feast Panathenaean As this wreath too frail to fetter fast the Cyprian dove: None so fiery song sprang sunwards annual as the paean Praising perfect love of friends and perfect ...
— Studies in Song, A Century of Roundels, Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets, The Heptalogia, Etc - From Swinburne's Poems Volume V. • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... their stay at Plymouth. Next day, they fell in with five ships of Biscay, well manned, coming, as they supposed, from the great bank of Newfoundland, which attacked the Desire; but Mr. Candish gave them so warm a reception, that they were glad to sheer off, and continued their course without giving him any farther disturbance. As it grew dark, and he feared losing sight of his consorts, Mr. Candish did not continue ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... cross to the opposite side, in hopes of finding a country that might afford them sustenance. A frail bridge was constructed by throwing the huge trunks of trees across the chasm, where the cliffs, as if split asunder by some convulsion of nature, descended sheer down a perpendicular depth of several hundred feet. Over this airy causeway the men and horses succeeded in effecting their passage with the loss of a single Spaniard, who, made giddy by heedlessly looking down, lost his footing and fell ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... keep your eyes open," advised Patricia. "You've gone too far to take any chances; that is, any more than you have to take. She was going to run, then she held herself steady by sheer grit. I don't like her, I don't like any of them, but I know real courage when I see it and she showed it ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls Under Canvas • Janet Aldridge
... did he not say! He boasted of his rise, he bragged of his riches, and he blackguarded society for taking him up for his money and dropping him out of sheer pique and jealousy because he had so much. He mentioned names, too, with the most charming freedom, and swore he was as good a man as the Old Country had to show—PACE the Old Bohemians. To prove it he pointed to a great diamond in the middle of his shirt-front with a little ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... do—but I can't forget the loss of the little Caption all through his stupid blundering; and this morning he must needs sleep so long that he lost the early train, and has very likely cut me out of business for the sheer want of a pair of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... from year to year, until they were tired of fighting the liquor dealers, backed by the Democrats in the State and on the borders. They wearied of being taunted with the fact that they had not the power to enforce the law. Then in 1887 they gave municipal suffrage to women as a sheer party necessity. Just as much as it was a necessity of the Republicans in reconstruction days to enfranchise the negroes, so was it a political necessity in the State of Kansas to enfranchise the women, because they needed a new balance of power to help ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... Chariot," "Nobody Knows de Trouble I See," "I Couldn't Hear Nobody Pray," "Deep River," "O, Freedom Over Me," and many others of these songs possess a beauty that is—what shall I say? poignant. In the riotous rhythms of Ragtime the Negro expressed his irrepressible buoyancy, his keen response to the sheer joy of living; in the "spirituals" he voiced his sense of beauty ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... determined at last to cut short the painful interview, he had seized the unfortunate man at an unguarded moment from behind, and strangled him; then, fearing that his dastardly work was not fully accomplished, he had shot twice at the already dead body, missing it both times from sheer nervous excitement. The murderer then must have emptied his victim's pockets, and, finding the key of the garden, thought that it would be a safe way of evading capture by cutting across the squares, under the tunnel, and so through the more distant ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... alteration in a small room in a small time as in that parlour when they went back to finish tea. So dark, so deserted, so perfectly disenchanted. It seemed such sheer nonsense to be sitting tamely there, when she was at a dance with more lovers than man could calculate fluttering about her—with the whole party doting on and adoring her, and wanting to marry her. Miggs was hovering about ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... ship, some way inside of us, was seen to break adrift, and soon after came driving down towards us. Being twice our size, she might speedily have sunk us. Mr Gale and Peter were at the helm to try and sheer the brig clear of her as she approached us. This, however, was not easily effected when there was but a slight current. Down came the ship! "Stand by with your axes, my lads, to cut her clear if she touches us!" shouted the captain. The ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... to rally the flying Walloons he met on the way. For a few minutes the two parties of Germans made a brave stand; but they were unable to resist the weight and number of the Spaniards, who bore them down by sheer force. Champagny had fought gallantly in the melee, and Ned, keeping closely beside him, had well seconded his efforts; but when the Germans were borne down they rode off, dashing through the streets and shouting to the burghers everywhere to rise ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... wasteful water ringed about, And wrapped in sheeted foam from base to peak, A sheer, stupendous monolith, wrought out By the slow, ceaseless labor of the deeps, In awful isolation, old as Time, The gray, forbidding Rock of Skidloe stands— Breasting the wild incursions of the North— The grim antagonist ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... horse-guard (/Hatschiergarde/) itself, in black velvet frocks (/Fluegelroeck/), with all the seams edged with gold, under which were red coats and leather-colored camisoles, likewise richly decked with gold. One scarcely recovered one's self from sheer seeing, pointing, and showing, so that the scarcely less splendidly clad body- guards of the electors were barely looked at; and we should, perhaps, have withdrawn from the windows, if we had not wished to take a view of our own magistracy, ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... wretch, un miserable, as what Tom Hood loved to call "a hapless wight:" one who is poor and wretched and outcast and out of work, not through any fault of his own, through idleness or fecklessness, but through sheer ill-luck. There is a word to describe what we feel when we hear the tearing of silk or the ripping of calico, a word expressing that sense of angry irritation which gives a man a gnawing in the muscles of the arms, a word that tells what we really feel in our hair when we pretend that it "stands ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... while and stared dejectedly down upon that wild orgy of the earth's upheaval which is the Badlands. She felt as though it was sheer madness even to think of finding anybody in there. It was worse than a mountain country, because in the mountains there is a certain semblance of some system in the canyons and high ridges and peaks. Here every thing—peaks, gorges, tiny valleys and all—seemed to be just dumped ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... and light had made a heaven more fair Than ever dream or truth Showed earth in time's keen youth When men with angels communed unaware. Above the sun's head, now Veiled even to the ardent brow, Rose two sheer wings of sundering cloud, that were As a bird's poised for vehement flight, Full-fledged with plumes of tawny ...
— A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... King Philip. "Do you suppose that any rambling Don is going to take up my time when by a sheer accident his verbosity has started me on a true scent? Out, Aristotle, out! Or, stay, take this note with you to the Captain of the Guard"—and King Philip hastily scribbled upon a parchment an order for ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... through the lightning's glare, I have walked where the cliffs fell sheer To a gorge below, but I breathed a prayer, And my ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... she was to have them. As far as that went she was not merely glad; she was one sheer quiver of excitement. It was not the end she shrank from; it was the means. If she could only have had fifty dollars to go "poking round" where she knew that bargains could be found, she might have enjoyed the prospect; but Steptoe could only "take measures" on the grand scale to ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... patriotism the world over, all hope of government by and for the people! The South ought at least to have spared itself. Either its alleged horror at the advance of central-sovereignty sentiment at the North was sheer pretence, or it should have been certain that this section would not hesitate, as Buchanan so illogically did, to coerce "rebellious" state-bodies. If the North believed the totality of the nation to be the "paramount authority," Lincoln would surely imitate Jackson ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... with a patience that was almost heroic. She saw that her husband was ill, and that this mysterious malady of his, which had at first seemed to her sheer hypochondriasis, was only too real. It was a malady which affected the mind more than the body. Brian's character had undergone a complete change since his illness. He who had been of old so easy-tempered, so lively, was now melancholy and irritable, ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... mere confidence carry the occult neophyte. How many European readers who would be quite incredulous if told of some results which occult chelas in the most incipient stages of their training have to accomplish by sheer force of confidence, hear constantly in church, nevertheless, the familiar Biblical assurances of the power which resides in faith, and let the words pass by like ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... away, calling his daughter, whose absence was intriguing him. Receiving no answer, he entered her room, to find her in a swoon across her bed. She had fainted from sheer horror at ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... they meet many interesting people from the East or England; but some of them won't leave their busy husbands or the husbands won't be left; or parents are not amenable; so they try to create an atmosphere of high spirits and sheer delight in youth and one another, and the result is almost a work of art. I rather respect them, but I envy them a good deal less than before I knew them ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... are likely to meet the bride and bridegroom on the continent, puts Laura's marriage, for the first time, in a distinctly favourable light. It is likely to be the means of healing a family feud. Hitherto Madame Fosco has chosen to forget her obligations as Laura's aunt out of sheer spite against the late Mr. Fairlie for his conduct in the affair of the legacy. Now however, she can persist in this course of conduct no longer. Sir Percival and Count Fosco are old and fast friends, and their wives will have ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... ridge stretches in a south-westerly direction from about fifty degrees north towards the coast of South America, then in a south-easterly direction towards the coast of Africa, changing its direction again about Ascension Island, and running due south to Tristan d'Acunha. The ridge rises almost sheer about 9,000 feet from the ocean depths around it, while the Azores, St. Paul, Ascension, and Tristan d'Acunha are the peaks of this land which still remain above water. A line of 3,500 fathoms, or say, 21,000 feet, is required to sound the deepest parts of the Atlantic, ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... the bitch of ruin Unspoken and of voiceless death, kept watch; And she led thee away from the blue shore With lilies sown, to the salt marsh of terror And the sheer ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... store Darby had drawn; for with an eye to thrift which would have done credit to Aunt Catharine herself, and expectation of the fresh and beautiful rig-out awaiting them in the land for which they were bound, he considered that it would be sheer and sinful extravagance to carry away with them any clothes, except what they could with an easy conscience cast aside—as Christian left his rags behind when by the Shining One ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... And the people of Thierri of Loos, who had fortified the church of St. Sophia, and were therein, besought their lord and the emperor to come to their relief; for if they received no help they could not hold out, especially as they had no provisions. Through sheer distress and sore need, the Emperor Henry and his people agreed that they must once more abandon thought of going to Adrianople, and cross the straits of St. George, to the Turkish side, with as many people as they could collect, ...
— Memoirs or Chronicle of The Fourth Crusade and The Conquest of Constantinople • Geoffrey de Villehardouin
... so often applied to regions like this, would, however, be inappropriate here, for in God's name the locality is famous. On a promontory whose sides fall down in sheer precipices all about, except where a narrow neck of rock connects it with the net-work of cliffs, is a vast monastery, the Mother Abbey of the Olivetani. In 1313 a noble of Siena, Bernardo Tolomei, in the midst of a life of literary distinctions ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... right. "To Paris!" For in the Desnoyers' mind, to go to Europe meant, of course, to go to Paris. Let the "aunt from Berlin" keep on chanting the glories of her husband's country! "It's sheer nonsense!" exclaimed Julio who had made grave geographical and ethnic comparisons in his nightly forays. "There is no place but Paris!" Chichi saluted with an ironical smile the slightest doubt of it—"Perhaps they make as elegant fashions in Germany as in Paris? . . . Bah!" Dona ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... hours he spent in bitter reviling of Wilding, of himself, and even of his sister, whom he blamed for this awful situation into which he had tumbled; at other times he wept from self-pity and sheer fright. ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... a pretty bower. Clean India matting on the floor, and airy cane furniture, dressed up in pink and blue ribbons, scattered about; through the sheer muslin hangings at the windows the early sunshine glinted between the closed shutters, and danced in bars of light ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... resting to-night, and well I think my poor body has earned some kind of respite. Such a ten days' work I never did before of sheer hard work. How I have come through it, and come through so well, I cannot understand, except that God ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... it by sheer accident, and it fits me like an evil habit, and under the circumstances is as inconvenient to get ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... face of this callous behavior it was sheer wrongdoing to spare the man. "I do not allude to the forgery, though that is bad enough," said Cuthbert, glancing round to see that the door was closed, "but to the murder of your aunt. You ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... quarters. Even the delicate foliage of a clump of pepper trees did not stir, so breathless would be the darkness warmed by the radiation of the over-heated rocks. Don Pepe would stand still for a moment with the two motionless serenos before him, and, abruptly, high up on the sheer face of the mountain, dotted with single torches, like drops of fire fallen from the two great blazing clusters of lights above, the ore shoots would begin to rattle. The great clattering, shuffling noise, gathering speed and weight, would be caught ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... circumstance, the interaction of events, the correlative eduction of personal characteristics: the other by his apprehension of that quintessential movement or mood or phase wherein the soul is transitorily visible on its lonely pinnacle of light. The elder poet reveals life to us by the sheer vividness of his own vision: the younger, by a newer, a less picturesque but more scientific abduction, compels the complex rayings of each soul-star to a singular simplicity, as by the spectrum analysis. The one, again, ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... and licked sheer out of go an' grit, From the times of Pharaoh down to the Khe-dive; Till you 'ardly feel yerself one bloomin' bit, And I almost wonder you are left alive. But we've got you out of a good deal of that, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 14, 1893 • Various
... Bookshop was a delightful place, especially of an evening, when its drowsy alcoves were kindled with the brightness of lamps shining on the rows of volumes. Many a passer-by would stumble down the steps from the street in sheer curiosity; others, familiar visitors, dropped in with the same comfortable emotion that a man feels on entering his club. Roger's custom was to sit at his desk in the rear, puffing his pipe and reading; though if any customer started a conversation, the little man ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... of animal terror and agony was mine. I was the horse, hanging poised on the verge of the giddy tower, the next moment to be borne sheer down to destruction. Involuntarily, I raised my hand to feel the leanness and sharpness of my face. Oh horror! the flesh had fallen from my bones, and it was a skeleton head that I carried on my shoulders! With one bound I ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... solidify them into a mass; on the top of this other trees had been placed, and the former process repeated. But the Tyrians had met the new tactics with new methods. They had employed divers to attach hooks to the boughs where they projected into the sea, and by sheer force had dragged the trees out from the superincumbent mass, bringing down in this way large portions of the structure.[14398] But with Alexander's coming, and the retirement of the Tyrian fleet, all this was altered. Alexander's workmen were no longer impeded, except from the town, and ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... neither side could keep its hold on Battle Rise. By this time Drummond was wounded; and Riall was both wounded and a prisoner. Among the Americans Brown and Winfield Scott were also wounded, while their men were worn out after being under arms for nearly eighteen hours. A pause of sheer exhaustion followed. Then, slowly and sullenly, as if they knew the one more charge they could not make must carry home, the foiled Americans turned back and felt their ...
— The War With the United States - A Chronicle of 1812 - Volume 14 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • William Wood
... mistress's eyebrow, sonnets to their lady's lute, and general songs of a fiddlestick; peevish men for the most part, as is the way of all fleshly and affected beings; men so ignorant of human subjects and materials as to be driven in their sheer bankruptcy of mind to raise Hope, Love, Fear, Rage (everything but Charity) into human entities, and to treat the body and upholstery of a dollish woman as if, in itself, it ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... seems not to sympathizewith her beloved children. She sits there so eternally calm and self-possessed, so very motherly and serene, and cares so little whether the heart of her child breaks or not, that at times I almost lose my patience. About that, too, she cares so little, that, out of sheer obstinacy, I become good-humored ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... better of me throughout, but somehow I blundered through without letting him find the chance for which he looked. I kept my head, and parried by sheer luck his brilliant lunges. I broke ground and won free—if but barely—from his incessant attack. More than once he pricked me. A high thrust which I diverted too late with the parade of tierce drew blood freely. He fleshed ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... on for Glen Ellen sitting slack-kneed in the saddle and softly humming forgotten songs. He dropped down the rough, winding road through covered pasture, with here and there thickets of manzanita and vistas of open glades. He listened greedily to the quail calling, and laughed outright, once, in sheer joy, at a tiny chipmunk that fled scolding up a bank, slipping on the crumbly surface and falling down, then dashing across the road under his horse's nose and, still scolding, ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... she started away at a quick walk; but her strength soon failed her. She heard the sound of the snow crunching under a heavy step, and knew that the pitiless spy was on her track. She was obliged to stop. He stopped likewise. From sheer terror, or lack of intelligence, she did not dare to speak or to look at him. She went slowly on; the man slackened his pace and fell behind so that he could still keep her in sight. He might have ...
— An Episode Under the Terror • Honore de Balzac
... Earth's great offspring, by decree, Must rot if they abjure rapacity, Not argument but effort shall decide. They number many heads in that hard flock: Trim swordsmen they push forth: yet try thy steel. Thou, fighting for poor humankind, wilt feel The strength of Roland in thy wrist to hew A chasm sheer into the barrier rock, And bring the army of the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... compelled to go, the usual course is to write to his wife and tell her that she is free to look out for another husband. Having made up his mind that he will die, I have no doubt that he often dies through sheer funk." (R. Logan JACK, Back Blocks ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... eh? Not a hair on my chin? Do you know why? Well, I'll tell you! You see I get mad easy as hell; and when there's nobody to pick on, I pull my hair until my temper passes. If I hadn't pulled my beard hair by hair, I'd have died a long time ago from sheer anger!" ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... seeing Harper's bunch ride up—that feed them through policy. But whenever you make it plain to a man that he's compelled to do a thing whether he likes it or not it's ten to one he'll balk out of sheer human pride. If Harper kills the Three Bar foreman on the grounds that he refused to feed all his men—why then, right off, every other foreman and owner within a hundred miles starts to resenting the possibility that maybe the albino feels the same ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... knee. Bringing the edges of the end designed for the stem into apposition, using a device on the principle of the harness-maker's clamp, he sewed them together with strips of freshly cut cane. Two stretchers gave to the craft beam, and the necessary sheer and thwart-ship stays of twisted cane stiffness. Gunwales of cane were sewn on, the stitches being cemented with gum made plastic by frequent renderings over the fire on a flat stone, and then the canoe ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... rights have been. On one of its most beguiling days Roberta Gray was walking home from Miss Copeland's school. Usually she came by way of the broad avenue which led straight home. To-day, out of sheer unwillingness to reach that home and end the walk, she took a quite different course. This led her up a somewhat similar street, parallel to her own but several blocks beyond, a street of more than ordinary attractiveness ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... the High Commissioner and President Kruger had agreed to meet at Bloemfontein, was received by the Uitlanders with relief; not hope, because it was believed that the President's object was to get something, not to give something; but sheer relief, because, come what might, the position could never again be the same as it was before the conference. Something must change; someone must yield; the unbearable strain must cease. Sir Alfred Milner—wise ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... more Pelle observed while he stood just inside the door upon his bare feet, not daring from sheer nervousness to raise his eyes. Then the farmer turned round in his chair, and drew him toward him by the collar. "Now let's see what you've got there under your smock, my ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... strove furiously to prevent and to keep him at his work. Cap fought savagely, flinging his head aloft, rearing, plunging, and refusing to follow the direction toward which the redskin twisted his head by sheer strength. It was a strife between rider and steed, and the latter made no progress in either direction while keeping up the fight, which was as fierce ...
— Cowmen and Rustlers • Edward S. Ellis
... down, and at last we reach the place on foot. I have meanwhile drunk three glasses of tea and annihilated several eggs; the efforts at getting warm have also so perfectly succeeded that I feel the need of fresh air. I should, out of sheer impatience, commence shaving if I had a glass. This city is very straggling, and very foreign-looking, with its green-roofed churches and innumerable cupolas; quite different from Amsterdam, but both the most original cities ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... his third daughter coming out, there was need of more money than ever. He was harassed nearly to death with financial worries. [RUTH begins to cry softly. MRS. HUNTER gets angrier and angrier.] And finally, in sheer desperation, and trusting to the advice of the Storrings, he risked everything he had with them in the Consolidated Copper. The day after, he was taken ill. You know what happened. The Storrings, Hunter, and others were ruined absolutely; ...
— The Climbers - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch
... have killed us in a trice, but they ran as soon as they fired at us. They killed one of my men, putting five bullets in his body and eight in his buffalo-robe. The Indians were a band of Sioux on the war-trail after a band of Snakes, and found us by sheer accident. They endeavoured to ambush us the next morning, but we got wind of their little game and killed three ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... nature—to plunder and to oppress is to gratify them all. They wanted the huzzas of mobs, and they have for ever blasted the fame of England to obtain them. Were the fleets of Holland, France, and Spain destroyed by larceny? You resisted the power of 150 sail of the line by sheer courage, and violated every principle of morals from the dread of fifteen hulks, while the expedition itself cost you three times more than the value of the larcenous matter brought away. The French trample on the laws of God and man, not for old cordage, ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... the increased risk of committing a scholarly sin against which I have myself protested. In my own defense I can say that I know the highly conjectural nature of what I am doing. Johnson's pride may have suffered when he was arrested for debt in the presence of unsympathetic onlookers. This is sheer hypothesizing. But when, in Henry IV, ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... directions to the letter. Her lips in lines of order and discretion, her skirts hanging in perfect folds, she advanced up the straggling path, the picture of maidenly composure. The nearer she drew to the rosebush the more fixed became the look of meeting a serious obstacle and overcoming it by sheer force of will. ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... of life from inside the mountain had put new heart in us. And in a moment we were all scrambling around trying to find any opening or crevice which would give us something to work on. Chee-Chee scaled up the sheer wall of the slab and examined the top of it where it leaned against the mountain's side; I uprooted bushes and stripped off hanging creepers that might conceal a weak place; the Doctor got more leaves and composed new picture-letters for the Jabizri to take in if he ...
— The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... until they were tired of fighting the liquor dealers, backed by the Democrats in the State and on the borders. They wearied of being taunted with the fact that they had not the power to enforce the law. Then in 1887 they gave municipal suffrage to women as a sheer party necessity. Just as much as it was a necessity of the Republicans in reconstruction days to enfranchise the negroes, so was it a political necessity in the State of Kansas to enfranchise the women, because they needed a new balance of power to help them elect and re-elect officers ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... they are. There are only two sorts of soldiers: old ones and young ones. I've served fourteen years: half of your fellows never smelt powder before. Why, how is it that you've just beaten us? Sheer ignorance of the art of war, nothing else. (Indignantly.) I never saw ...
— Arms and the Man • George Bernard Shaw
... all in a dry-voiced way that cost her an effort, as Garrison felt and comprehended. He had turned about, in sheer sympathy for her predicament. ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... the Juno; Laud Cavendish is in her, and I want to know what he is about. Don't speak a word, or make a particle of noise. If you do, he will sheer off; and I want to see ...
— The Yacht Club - or The Young Boat-Builder • Oliver Optic
... But—you remember the story of Gough and his diamond ring—I am determined not to let any diamond ring get between me and my audience. Writing should not get between the reader and the picture. I take a great joy in sheer lucidity, and if any sentence of mine does not at the very first sight express my meaning, I rewrite it. Obscurity of style indicates that the writer is not entirely master of what he has ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... of all in sheer expression of military power was the visit to the British Grand Fleet; most humanly appealing, the time spent in Belgium under German rule; most dramatic, the French victory on the Marne; most precious, my long stay ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... not a sycophant hanging round White Hall! 'Twas sheer good luck and no merit of mine that got me the guardianship of Sue. Lord Middlesborough, her kinsman, wanted it; the Courts would have given her to him, but old Noll thought him too much of a 'gentleman,' whilst I—an out-at-elbows country squire, ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... to answer for themselves,—at that moment, he perceives two or three of the persons he had particularly in view begin an active whispering, prolonged with the accompaniment of the appropriate vulgar smiles. They may possibly relapse at length, through sheer dulness, into tolerable decorum; and the instructor, not quite losing sight of them, tries yet again, to impel some serious ideas through the obtuseness of their mental being. But he can clearly perceive, after the animal spirits have thus been a little quieted by the necessity ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... always poured itself forth in writing so copiously that his revision was chiefly devoted to reducing the over-abundance. He never shrank from any of the drudgery of preparation, but I think his own part of the work was sheer pleasure ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... young man. He was rather deep, of few words on any given subject, but wholly non-communicative as regards himself. He perhaps was possessed of more intuition than his manner would reveal, although he gave every appearance of arriving at his conclusions by the sheer force of logic. His words and deeds never betrayed his whole mind, of that she was certain, yet he could assert himself rather forcibly when put to the test, as in the painful incident at the Coffee House. He would never suffer from soul-paralysis, thought she, for want of decision or ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... perilous moment of all, which is the moment before she is actually overtaken by the breaking crest of the wave, she is apt to refuse to answer her helm, and he who is steering her loses all control over her; she seems to be seized with a perverse determination to take a broad sheer one way or the other, with disastrous results, despite a hard-over helm, and then the only thing to be done to retrieve the situation is to effect a lightning shift of helm against all your past experience ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... for the dawn. I plied the goad with one hand; with the other, so steep was the ascent, I had to hold on the pack-saddle. Half a dozen times she was nearly over backwards on the top of me; half a dozen times, from sheer weariness of spirit, I was nearly giving it up, and leading her down again to follow the road. But I took the thing as a wager, and fought it through. I was surprised, as I went on my way again, by what appeared to be chill rain-drops falling on my hand, and more than once looked up ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... place, my sperm spurted out: and only the last drop remained just as I buried my prick in her. Then instead of meeting her humid tongue with mine, I sank on her breast kissing, yet damning and cursing like a dragoon, at my spoiled pleasure,—I had spent out of sheer copiousness of spunk, ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... southward valley, and began to follow it steadily upwards, crossing and recrossing a swiftly rushing stream. The snow peaks began to be hidden behind the rising bulk of hills that overhung us, and sometimes we could see nothing before or behind but the wooded walls of our valley rising sheer and green a thousand paces high on either hand; with grey rocks half masked by fern and ivy jutting here and there through the firs ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... almost uncanny. Rising sheer from the flood on either hand, the tall green silent hills stretched away before us, changing tint through the summer vapour, to form a fantastic vista of blue cliffs and peaks and promontories. There was not one ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... men who guarded the German frontier—and I dare say every other frontier—in the first stress of war, were wrenched and shaken with veritable hysteria. At St. Ludwig and Constance those husky soldiers in ironmongery, with shaved heads and beards and outstanding ears, fell into sheer savagery, not because they were bad and savage men, but simply because they were hysterical. ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... behind them. Now, when they were thrust out of their famous stronghold and plastered with every sort of projectile, they held up repeated attacks, backed by enormous artillery preparation and support, held them up by sheer dogged fighting and superior knowledge of war. Their Staff work must have been good, and the training and morale of the troops equally good to have done it. After the first great success, we gained only small local successes, costing thousands of casualties and vast expenditure ...
— Q.6.a and Other places - Recollections of 1916, 1917 and 1918 • Francis Buckley
... judges of motives, principles, and character, twenty-fold, than he who lives at the gate, and merely sees the owner of the grounds pass in and out, on his daily avocations. There is, and can be no greater absurdity, than to imagine that the sheer neighbourhood, or proximity of position, makes men acquainted. That was one of Jason Newcome's Connecticut notions. Having been educated in a state of society in which all associated on a certain footing of intimacy, and in which half the difficulties that occurred were "told to the church," ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... it, Dr. John: it is not worth while. If Ginevra were in a giddy mood, as she is eminently to-night, she would make no scruple of laughing at that mild, pensive Queen, or that melancholy King. She is not actuated by malevolence, but sheer, heedless folly. To a feather-brained school-girl ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... the stairs, he jostled a man who was ascending, and naturally was led to look at him. Harry came near dropping with sheer surprise. The man he recognized at once as Vernon, one of the men whom he ...
— The Tin Box - and What it Contained • Horatio Alger
... reduced to making war by stealth instead of openly carrying off their slaves in fair battle. It seems probable that they now creep into a nest of the far more powerful slave ants, poison or assassinate the queen, and establish themselves by sheer usurpation in the queenless nest. 'Gradually,' says Sir John Lubbock, 'even their bodily force dwindled away under the enervating influence to which they had subjected themselves, until they sank to their ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... to a balcony on the first floor and looked out. The tide of the affray was surging gradually back into the wide open space before the inn, and very shortly this was filled with a chaos of furious faces and struggling arms. The University were evidently recoiling, pressed back by the sheer weight of their opponents; but soon came a re-enforcement of grooms and stable-men, lightweights, active and wiry; and these, with their hunting-crops and heavy cutting-whips used remorselessly—like Caesar's legionaries, they ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... solemn promise given that we should leave at seven in the morning. When we were ready, no animals were to be seen. The presidente asserted that the price which we had paid was only to that point, and that if we wanted animals for Cuicatlan we must make a new arrangement. This was sheer blackmail, because there had been no misunderstanding in the matter, and a liberal price had been paid. After wrangling for an hour, we shook the dust of Papalo literally from our feet, and started to walk to Cuicatlan, telling the town authorities that our burdens must ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... the road or down it, though that's bad enough, but sheer across it, sending the rain slanting down like the lines they used to rule in the copy-books at school, to make the boys slope well. For a moment it would die away, and the traveller would begin to delude himself into the belief that, exhausted with its previous fury, it had quietly laid itself down ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... morning reported that the Bull-dog engaged the Friseur, yard-arm and yard-arm, three glasses and a half, but was obliged to sheer off for want of powder. It is hoped that inquiry will be made into this affair in ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... because they had been spiritually starved. And all the riding hard, shooting true and dying game—those poor ethics of the open—had not brought a crumb, not a crumb, of the real bread of life. Nor could mountains of mere energy nor icebergs of sheer nerve! In needing the bread of life—they were different from the others, and so they lingered, unable to speak, while a poor little Tagal—"one of the niggers"—all unconsciously played. "Surely," they ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... For sheer terror the wild, fantastic witch-dance, seen through a Gothic window in the ruins of Kirk-Alloway, with the light of humour strangely glinting through, has hardly been surpassed. The Ballad-collections, beginning with Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... the circumstances. Within the past year many tribes have shown, in a degree greater than ever before, an appreciation of the necessity of work. This changed attitude is in part due to the policy recently pursued of reducing the amount of subsistence to the Indians, and thus forcing them, through sheer necessity, to work for a livelihood. The policy, though severe, is a useful one, but it is to be exercised only with judgment and with a full understanding of the conditions which exist in each community ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... suddenly horse an' rider sprang up i' the air, it seemed some distance, an' then doon to the earth again. When he cam to the place young Malcolm was sair dooncast to find before him a great, big, wide, yawnin' gulf, wi' a roarin' torrent at the bottom, an' sheer rocky sides that nae human ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... madden me, Leah? Have I not asked you to be brave, even unto the end? If you falter now, I am lost. My health and my strength are already gone. Only the consciousness of innocence sustains me. Leave me now. Sheer me with the hope of acquittal, and be brave as only a ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... poured out upon land and sea. All that God had made was as beautiful as if sin had never spoiled it. Just a little to the right of our cottage the ground rose up suddenly, and sloped up about a quarter of a mile to the top of a high cliff, from the edge of which was a sheer descent, almost unbroken, to the beach, of several hundred feet. It was a favourite spot of observation, for vessels could be ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... demonstrably not living can be, without the aid of organisms already living, endowed with the properties of life. Judged of hastily, and apart from the facts, it may appear to some minds that an origin of life from not-life, by sheer physical law, would be a great philosophical gain, an indefinitely strong support of the doctrine of evolution. If this were so, and, indeed, so far as it is believed to be so, it would speak and does ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... gentleman, the late President of the Board of Trade, wonders that other nations consider our abhorrence of slavery and the Slave Trade as sheer hypocrisy. Why, Sir, how should it be otherwise? And, if the imputation annoys us, whom have we to thank for it? Numerous and malevolent as our detractors are, none of them was ever so absurd as to charge us with hypocrisy because we took slave grown tobacco and slave ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of not-heed is 'with the hair of the head closely cut.' The verb to nott means to cut the hair close. 'Tondre, to sheer, clip, cut, ...
— A Concise Dictionary of Middle English - From A.D. 1150 To 1580 • A. L. Mayhew and Walter W. Skeat
... lively condition, but his wife did not mind, for she thought that a man must have his glass. Women of the lower and middle classes have a great deal to do with supplying customers to the public-house. Some of them drive their men there by nagging, but more of them lead a man on to drink by sheer indulgence. They encourage him to enjoy himself without thinking of the day when enjoyment will be impossible, and when they and their children will reach the lowermost rung of the ladder of shame ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... scoundrel was one of the ringleaders in the conspiracy. "I would have flung him over into the pit," the faithful fellow said (and Sampson was man enough to execute his threat), "but I saw a couple of Mr. Nadab's followers prowling about the lobby, and was obliged to sheer off." And so the eggs we had counted on selling at market were broken, and our poor hopes lay ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... attraction of his own character. It might be a small matter,—something he had read or observed during the day, some quaint odd fancy from a book, a vivid little out-door picture, the laughing exposure of some imposture, or a burst of sheer mirthful enjoyment,—but of its kind it would be something unique, because genuinely part of himself. This, and his unwearying animal spirits, made him the most delightful of companions; no claim on good-fellowship ever found ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... declared elected. He instituted a contest for the office, and, being defeated in the court below, appealed to the Supreme Court. He then became very much exercised over his appeal, because I was one of the Justices. There were not wanting persons who, out of sheer malice, or not comprehending any higher motives of conduct than such as governed themselves, represented that I would improve the opportunity to strike him ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... perseverance, but in our short daily journeys we made but trifling way against it." The effects of severe toil were painfully evident. The men lost the muscular jerk with the oars. Their arms were nerveless, their faces haggard, their persons emaciated, their spirits wholly spent. From sheer weariness they fell asleep at the oar. No ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... number more Simla stories to the square page than any other volume of Mr Kipling. Now Mr Kipling's Simla stories are the least important, but in some ways the most significant of all the stories he wrote. They begin and they end in sheer literary virtuosity. We feel in reading Mr Kipling's studies of the social world at Simla that he had no intuitive call to write them; that they are exercises in craft rather than genuine inspirations. Mrs Hawksbee stands for ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer
... could not help feeling the want of that excitement which, singularly enough, was most conducive to that calm equanimity for which he was notorious. He looked at the gloomy walls that rose a thousand feet sheer above the circling pines around him, at the sky ominously clouded, at the valley below, already deepening into shadow; and, doing so, suddenly he ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... week or two Catherine did her best to be young, and climbed the mountain grass, or forded the mountain streams with the energy and the grace of perfect health, trembling afterwards at night as she knelt by her window to think how much sheer pleasure the day had contained. Her life had always had the tension of a bent bow. It seemed to her once or twice during this fortnight as though something were suddenly relaxed in her, and she felt a swift Bunyan-like terror of backsliding, of falling ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... continued their volleys from the vantage-ground above. The Lacedaemonians again made efforts to pursue their persistent foes even up the slope. At last darkness descended on them, and as they retired man after man dropped, succumbing to the sheer difficulty of the ground; some in their inability to see what lay in front, or else shot down by the enemy's missiles. It was then that Gylis the polemarch met his end, as also Pelles, who was on his personal staff, and the whole of the Spartans present without exception—eighteen or thereabouts—perished, ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... not pleasure. He laid out books for me, which I neglected. He was part and parcel of that American environment in which literary ambition was regarded as sheer madness. And no one who has not experienced that environment can have any conception of the pressure it exerted to stifle originality, to thrust the new generation into its religious and commercial moulds. Shall we ever, I wonder, develop the enlightened education that will know how to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the plain, a turn that gives a wide view glowing in a hundred hues in the sun, a savage gorge with beetling rocks, a solitary butte or red truncated pyramid thrust up into the blue sky, a horizontal ledge cutting the horizon line as straight as a ruler for miles, a pointed cliff uplifted sheer from the plain and laid in regular courses of Cyclopean masonry, the battlements of a fort, a terraced castle with towers and esplanade, a great trough of a valley, gray and parched, enclosed by far purple mountains. And then the unlimited freedom of it, ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... attained a wide circulation by means of one scene. In recollecting "Anna Karenina," powerful scenes crowd into the memory—introspective and analytic as it is, it is filled with dramatic climaxes. The sheer force of some of these scenes is almost terrifying. The first meeting of Anna and Vronsky at the railway station, the midnight interview in the storm on the way back to Petersburg, the awful dialogue between them after she has fallen (omitted from the first American translation), the fearful ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... held his prisoners in tow to an Armenian, and we climbed up together on foot. Around the corner of the spur, within fifty feet of where Will stood, was an almost sheer escarpment, and at the foot of that, a thousand feet below us, with ramparts of living rock on all four sides, crouched a little village fondled in the ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... palanquin that finally came in sight showed by its richness that it could belong only to royalty, and by its beauty and grace, only to a woman. Made of silver and rock crystal, studded with diamonds and pearls, and hung about with sheer curtains of embroidered yellow silk, the palanquin belonged without doubt to a young girl of the royal house. As it appeared under the high arch of the outer gate, a roar of joy and greeting arose from the waiting crowd and with one accord every man ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... good prospects, and decent means?—or cannot any of our readers call to mind from among the list of their quondam acquaintance, some fallen and degraded man, who lingers about the pavement in hungry misery—from whom every one turns coldly away, and who preserves himself from sheer starvation, nobody knows how? Alas! such cases are of too frequent occurrence to be rare items in any man's experience; and but too often arise from one cause—drunkenness—that fierce rage for the slow, sure poison, that oversteps every other consideration; that casts aside wife, children, friends, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... Laugh at the preachings of an old grey-beard of a father; go on, I tell you, and mind them not. Upon my word, I am of opinion that these old, effete and grumpy libertines come to stupify us with their silly stories, and being virtuous, out of necessity, hope through sheer envy to deprive young people of all the pleasures of life! You know my talents; I am ...
— The Blunderer • Moliere
... side of a range from the other. And for Anne Brown to talk the way she did—saying I had always been crazy about Jim, and that she believed I had known all along that his aunt was coming—for Anne to talk like that was sheer idiocy. Yes, there was an aunt. The Japanese butler started the trouble, and Aunt Selina ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... further on, an Indian hunter drew near on horseback, but Nakpa did not pause or slacken her pace. On she fled through the long dry grass of the river bottoms, while her babies slept again from sheer exhaustion. Toward sunset, she entered the Sioux camp amid great excitement, for some one had spied her afar off, and the boys and the ...
— Old Indian Days • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... secretly and terribly alive, waiting the tiny gesture which will set them free. Officers, handling destruction with the nonchalance of a woman handling a hat, may say what they like—the ammunition train is to my mind an unsafe neighbour. And the thought of all the sheer brain-power which has gone to the invention and perfecting of those propulsive and explosive machines causes you to wonder whether you yourself ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett
... M. Sorel. There were men who were revolutionaries to be in the fashion, some who were so out of snobbishness, and some from shyness: some from hatred, others from love: some from a need of active, hot-headed heroism: and some in sheer slavishness, from the sheeplike quality of their minds. But all, without knowing it, were at the mercy of the wind. All were no more than those whirling clouds of dust which are to be seen like smoke in the far distance on the white roads in the country, ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... assurance of his mistress, the woollen-draper endeavoured to carry his threat into execution, but all his efforts to remove her were unavailing. At length, after he had given up the point from sheer exhaustion, the Amazon seized him by the throat, and pushed him backwards with such force that he ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... out with a swinging left, all the weight of his body behind the blow. Clay stepped back, shot a hard straight right to the cheek, and ducked the counter. Jerry rushed him, flailing at his foe blow on blow, intending to wear him out by sheer hard hammering. He butted with head and knee, used every foul trick he had learned in his rotten trade of prize-fighting. Active as a wild cat, the Arizonan side-stepped, scored a left on the eye, ducked again, and fought back the ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... this to Millikens Bend, La., in January, 1863, garrisoned by the 9th and 11th Louisiana and the 1st Mississippi, all Negroes, and about 160 of the 23rd Iowa (white), about 1100 fighting men in all? Attacked by a force of six Confederate regiments, crushed out of their works by sheer weight of numbers, borne down toward the levee, fighting every step of the way, hand to hand—clubbed musket, bayonets, and swords,—from three A. M. to twelve noon, they fought desperately until a Union ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... King Theophile leaped down and rushed forward to see what was frightening the animal; and all at once he crashed against something hard, and his broken right arm fell to his side. He grew gray, not with pain but with sheer terror, for he could see nothing, yet his arm had been broken upon a substance that ...
— The Faery Tales of Weir • Anna McClure Sholl
... inlet of Rio Medio. I had come on deck when Tomas Castro had started out of his doze. I wanted to see. We went round violently as I emerged, and, clinging to the side, I saw, in a whirl, tall, baked, brown hills dropping sheer down to a strip of flat land and a belt of dark-green scrub at the water's edge; little pink squares of house-walls dropped here and there, mounting the hillside among palms, like men standing in tall grass, running back, hiding in a steep valley; silver-gray huts with ragged ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... disaster we had come desperately ashore. Whence arises the strange pride of him who by sheer accident slips through ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... the cold increased, and although we were spurred on to almost superhuman efforts by sheer desperation to thwart the fate we knew would be ours should we falter by the way, gradually our strength failed us, and although we tried to encourage each other to quicker progress, it took every vestige of our will power to drag our benumbed feet from ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... without firing or showing any unfriendly disposition. As she drew near, I felt more and more convinced that she must be the Foam. She had a peculiarly long cutwater and a very straight sheer, which, as she came up to the windward of us, and presented nearly her broadside, was discernible. As she heeled over to the now freshening breeze, I fancied that I could even discern, through the glass, Captain Hawk walking the quarter-deck. When she got about a quarter ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... of industrious principles in the writer. Mr. Clare took his own characteristically opposite view. "These London men," said the philosopher, "are not to be tri fled with by louts. They ha ve got Frank by the scruff of the neck—he can't wriggle himself free—and he makes a merit of yielding to sheer necessity." ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... "For a hundred years," says Johnston, "slaves in Barbados were mutilated, tortured, gibbeted alive and left to starve to death, burnt alive, flung into coppers of boiling sugar, whipped to death, overworked, underfed, obliged from sheer lack of any clothing to expose their nudity to the jeers of the 'poor' whites."[133] And yet the owners of these slaves were English, of the same stock under which developed the mild patriarchal type of slavery of Virginia. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... rapidly through the ordnance yard to the "Hygeia House," where our agent boarded; he had gone into the Fortress to pass the night, and when I attempted to follow him thither, a knot of anxious idlers, who knew that I had just returned from the battle-fields, attempted to detain me by sheer force. I dashed rapidly up the plank walk, reached the portal, and had just vaulted into the area, when the great gates swung to, and the tattoo beat; at the same instant the sergeant ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... to Seal Lake, and walled in on three sides by the hills. On either hand reaching up their steep slopes were the spruce woods with beautiful white birches relieving their sombreness, and above- -the sheer cliffs. A network of little waterways gave back images of delicate tamaracks [Larches] growing on long points between. Not a leaf stirred, and silence, which is music, reigned there. The valley was flooded with golden light, seeming ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... the old abuses?" Those who had eyes to see could not weep enough, those who had hearts to feel could not sympathize enough, with the fate of many a noble and honest samurai who signally and irrevocably failed in his new and unfamiliar field of trade and industry, through sheer lack of shrewdness in coping with his artful plebeian rival. When we know that eighty per cent. of the business houses fail in so industrial a country as America, is it any wonder that scarcely one among a hundred samurai who went into trade could succeed in his new vocation? It ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... with a look of mock horror behind a railway van. Here he put both hands to his sides, and indulged in a chuckle so hearty—though subdued—that an ordinary cat, to say nothing of a Cheshire one, might have joined him from sheer sympathy. ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... thing looked to him like a piece of sheer neglect and contemptuous indifference, which he ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... I do after that?" This question she asked, not in the least as desirous of obtaining from him any assurance of assistance, but in the agony of her spirit, and in sheer dismay as ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... combination of the single cane and bow system, and the horizontal arm training, which I first tried on the Concord from sheer necessity; when the results pleased me so much that I have adopted it with all strong-growing varieties. The circumstances which led me to the trial of this method were as follows: In the summer of 1862, when my Concord vines were making their ...
— The Cultivation of The Native Grape, and Manufacture of American Wines • George Husmann
... he knew from personal experience that there was really no limit to the time one might lie unconscious without being any the worse for it. It had happened to him in Ireland, years before; he had been pitched out of a dogcart, had turned a sheer somersault and landed on his head. They thought he was dead, but he wasn't; they carried him first to the nearest cabin, where he lay for some days with the pigs, and then to an inn in a neighbouring town—it was a near thing they didn't put him under ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... threshing machine all day. It had covered her with dirt and chaff; and the process of changing was only half through when she heard the rattle of Ellesborough's cycle outside. She stood now before the glass, a radiant daughter of air and earth; her veins, as it were, still full of the sheer pleasure of her long day among the stubbles and the young stock. She was tired, of course; and she knew very well that the winter, when it came, would make a great difference, and that much of the work before her would be hard and disagreeable. But for the moment, ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sea tern fleck and skim The morning's rim; Or the dark thrushes clear Their flutes of music leisurely and sheer, ...
— Behind the Arras - A Book of the Unseen • Bliss Carman
... because there was no one better, I've left the property at Rudham to you," he went on with a smile. "There would have been plenty of money to have left with it; but I've made some very bad speculations lately, and lost a great deal. I took to speculation from sheer want of amusement. I was a good billiard player as long as I had the use of my limbs; but here I've been, literally tied by the legs, for the last two years. The only thing properly alive about me was my brain, and speculation has interested ...
— The Village by the River • H. Louisa Bedford
... In sheer amazement, Mr Benden's hand unloosed from Alice's arm; and seizing her opportunity, she walked rapidly back to the Court House. For a moment he stood considering what to do. He had little more concern for his own reputation than for hers; but he felt that if he followed her to the constable, he ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... boyhood, and we will yet be happy in reciprocal affection, come what may to us as emperor and empress. I do not believe that he said he had never seen so lovely a woman as Riccardo. Poor, dear Franz! He has a tedious life as husband of the reigning sovereign. From sheer ennui he sometimes wanders from his wife's heart, but oh! he must, he must return to me; for if I were to lose him, earthly splendor would be ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... snow that the travellers ran some risk of falling into them. Indeed, at one place, so narrow was their escape that Chimo fell through the crust of snow, and disappeared into a fissure which descended a hundred feet sheer down; and the sledge would certainly have followed had not Frank held it back by the line; and Chimo was not hauled up again without great difficulty. After this, Frank went in front with a pole, and sounded the snow in dangerous-looking places ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... supposed to mention it, might just hint that his mine was only hurrying to forestall an enemy mine which was judged to be approaching the trench the Infantry officer would presently occupy. This last was a sheer invention of the moment, but it served excellently, and the Sapper and his party bore off their pump in triumph. It was later erected in the mine shaft, and the difficulty of providing sufficient piping to run from the pump to the waterlogged part of the mine was met by ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... and the grim, forbidding hills echoed the loud sound of wheel and hoof. Down the steep flank of the mountain, with screaming, grinding brakes, they thundered and clattered into the narrow hall-way of Devil's Canyon with its sheer walls and shadowy gloom. The little stream that trickled down from the tiny spot of green at the spring tried bravely to follow but soon sank exhausted into the dry waste. A cool wind, like a draft through a tunnel, was in their faces. After perhaps two ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... must not be supposed that no patriotic party existed. There was a patriotic party, and the exigencies of the time inspired some of its leaders nobly. But the sheer weight of numbers, of indifference, and of selfishness to which this party was opposed was too much for it. The best method of realizing this nowadays is by the study of the newspaper files for the early years of the century. From these it will be seen that even the people ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... they are not thus known to be modes of Brahman, and others again are known neither in themselves nor as modes of Brahman. The text therefore cannot merely refer to them as things otherwise known, but gives fundamental instruction about them. Hence the later passage cannot be meant as a sheer negation, but must be taken as denying the previously described 'so-muchness' of Brahman; i.e. the passage denies that limited nature of Brahman which would result from Brahman being viewed as distinguished by the previously stated attributes only. The word so refers ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... was but short, for on the following morning our anchor was at the bows, and the ships heading for Hakodadi. This town—the largest in Yesso—reminds one very forcibly of Gibraltar. There is a similar high rock standing sheer out of the sea—almost the same narrow strip of land connecting it with the main; whilst the town is built on the slopes of the eminence, and circling the bay as at Gib. The town is not over large, and commodities are very scarce, the only thing ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... the church of St. Sophia, and were therein, besought their lord and the emperor to come to their relief; for if they received no help they could not hold out, especially as they had no provisions. Through sheer distress and sore need, the Emperor Henry and his people agreed that they must once more abandon thought of going to Adrianople, and cross the straits of St. George, to the Turkish side, with as many people as they could ...
— Memoirs or Chronicle of The Fourth Crusade and The Conquest of Constantinople • Geoffrey de Villehardouin
... mainspring; each one sought personal happiness. And Pierre was grieved to think that those young people, instead of discarding the past and marching on to the truths of the future, were relapsing into shadowy metaphysics through sheer weariness and idleness, due in part perhaps to the excessive exertion of the century, which had been overladen ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Milly Overton has perpetrated two more crimes on the community, at three-thirty to-day—assorted boy and girl." And David grinned with sheer delight at having projected such a ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... whip over Bengal's nose, the cruel lash cutting the tender snout with every blow. But he was not doing it from sheer cruelty, as many of the spectators who raised their ...
— The Circus Boys on the Flying Rings • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... our glasses of the old towers of Dunstanborough Castle. As the wind fell light, we pulled in to have a look at it, papa being anxious to do so, as he had visited it in his younger days. The weather-beaten ruin stands on the summit of a black cliff, rising sheer out of the ocean. Three towers, one square, and the others semicircular, remain, with the greater portion of the outer wall, enclosing several acres of green turf, over which, instead of mail-clad warriors, peaceable sheep now wander. The principal tower overlooks a deep gully or gap in the rocks, ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... altogether sorry this has happened!" He moved slowly across the room, and laid a friendly palm on Vyse's shoulder. "In a queer illogical way it evens up things, as it were. I did you a shabby turn once, years ago—oh, out of sheer carelessness, of course—about that novel of yours I promised to give to Apthorn. If I had given it, it might not have made any difference—I'm not sure it wasn't too good for success—but anyhow, I dare say you thought ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... elocutionist, or a new poem fresh from the pen of some celebrated writer. And you have always conversation; that is to say, the wit and sparkle of the wittiest and brightest nation on the face of the earth. In a world that is becoming more and more a Paradise of Fools the charm of sheer brain and brightness is irresistible. To live in such an intellectual centre is in itself delightful. Paris is a veritable Foire aux Idees. Its criticism, keen as the sword of Saladin, overwhelming as the battle-axe of Coeur de Lion, is in itself a study. It is not so much the intellectual ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... in the front room, although the shutters are closed, the white rays pierce through the chinks, and lie like sword-blades along the floor. The study is pleasant and the wine refreshing. The house seems built on the sheer hillside. Fifty feet—more than that—a hundred feet under me there are gardens, gardens caught somehow in the hollow of the hill, and planted with trees, tall trees, for swings hang out of them, otherwise I should not know ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... instantaneous pause he looked into the rose-pink room and saw Liane Delorme, in a negligee like a cobweb over a nightdress even more sheer, kneeling and clawing at her throat, round which a heavy silk handkerchief was slowly tightening; her face already purple with strangulation, her eyes bulging from their sockets, her tongue protruding ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... exclaimed the Spider, his square jaws immobile from sheer astonishment. "Say, you ain't crazy, are ye—I mean you ain't dippy or cracked in the dome, are ye? Because d' Kid's goin' ten rounds with Young Alf, d' East Side ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... warriors in the field. That number under any sort of leadership, even though they were only armed with spears and swords, should wipe out the three hundred, in spite of the discipline and two or three machine-guns, by sheer weight of numbers. But, from what he had already heard, zu Pfeiffer had evidently caught them unprepared, wiped out a mass and secured a supernatural effect by destroying the idol. He remembered his talk on das Volkliches and his comment that ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... met, and for a second she trembled again with the nearness of the temptation. "You're mistaken; I know nothing; I saw nothing," she exclaimed, striving, by sheer force of reiteration, to build a barrier between herself and her peril; and as he turned away, groaning out "You sacrifice us both," she continued to repeat, as if it were a charm: ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... opposite side of the room from which you enter there is a hole or opening in the wall. It is large enough to go through but it goes into the great dark room on the other side of the Throne. An abyss confronts you, a sheer precipice which descends for many feet, perhaps hundreds. No man knows. This outer room of Blondy's Throne has been named the Chamber of the Fairies. Leaving it and continuing the ascent, the top of the Throne is soon reached and is about twenty feet across; and from ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... Kirk's hostess led him, then across a level sward, pausing at length upon the brink of a mighty chasm. It took him a moment to grasp the sheer magnitude of the thing; then he broke into his ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... tired. Max walked with drooping tail, and Brenda was whining softly to herself from sheer weariness and weak-mindedness. The parrot alone was happy—or at least contented. ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit
... no ill-luck to-night!" continued Captain Monk as a grim joke, disregarding Harry's remark. "Perhaps they will, though, out of sheer spite, knowing they'll never have another chance of it. Well, well, they're ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 5, May, 1891 • Various
... The enemy gave a sheer to port, and with a loud crash ran alongside the "Concorde." Grappling-irons were hove aboard her and the next instant the Frenchmen, in overpowering numbers, rushed like a ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... dismissed the morning session at quarter to twelve, so that those who lived near enough could go home for a change of dress. Emma Jane and Rebecca ran nearly every step of the way, from sheer excitement, only stopping ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... gig, impelled by six stout oarsmen, was nearing the Waterport Guard, and was already under the shadow of the frowning batteries of the Devil's Tongue. High above them rose the sheer straight wall of the rock, bristling with frowning fortifications, line above line, and countless embrasures ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... bluejackets pulling and a Petty Officer steering, the Turks began to shell H.M.S. Savage as she lay about a hundred yards out. She did not like it, and, instead of waiting to let us get aboard, Commander Homer thought it wiser to sheer off about half a mile. When she quitted the Turks turned their guns on to our cockleshell, and although none of the shot came near us they still came quite near enough to interest the whole gallery of some thousands of bathing Tommies who, ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... duty of man—"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength; and thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." According to Mr. Mivart's definition, the man who loves God and his neighbour, and, out of sheer love and affection for both, does all he can to please them, is, nevertheless, destitute of a particle of ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... said Mr. Hepworth, who had crossed the room and joined them just in time to hear Nan's last words. "Patty is holding herself together by sheer nervous force, and she needs care if she is to keep up through ...
— Patty's Summer Days • Carolyn Wells
... had to stop from sheer want of breath, and on entering the hut Kakaik informed us that it was through the exertions of Manilick that the fiddle had been recovered. He had paid half-a-dozen yards of cotton, the same number ...
— Afar in the Forest • W.H.G. Kingston
... But for sheer ill humor nothing could have surpassed her conduct when they had "done" San Francisco, which she declared to be "a dull, dirty, windy place, with a harbor of which entirely too much is made,—ridiculously over-praised, in fact," and got under way for the Yosemite. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... their slender legs. Suddenly sitting down on the ground the child swiftly took off her shoes and stockings. Getting up she undid the heavy shawl and the two little dresses. Out she slipped without more ado and stood up in only a light petticoat. In sheer delight at the relief, she threw up her dimpled arms, that were bare up to her short sleeves. To save the trouble of carrying them, her aunt had dressed her in her Sunday clothes over her workday garments. Heidi arranged her dresses neatly in a heap and joined ...
— Heidi - (Gift Edition) • Johanna Spyri
... by the enemy and pursued, from this danger he was rescued by a strong south wind, which sprang up and raised so high a sea, that the enemy's galleys could make little way. But his own ships were driving before it upon a lee shore of cliffs and rocks running sheer to the water, where there was no hope of escape, when all of a sudden the wind turned about to south-west, and blew from land to the main sea, where Antony, now sailing in security, saw the coast all covered with the wreck of the enemy's fleet. For hither the galleys in pursuit had been carried ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... could in Sour Creek. He drifted from the blacksmith shop to the kitchen of Mrs. Mary Caluson, but both these brimming reservoirs of news had this day run dry. Mrs. Caluson vaguely remembered a Riley Sinclair, a man who fought for the sheer love ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... backed by crusted grey stone-work remaining from a yet remoter Casterbridge than the venerable one visible in the street. The old-fashioned fronts of these houses, which had older than old-fashioned backs, rose sheer from the pavement, into which the bow windows protruded like bastions, necessitating a pleasing chassez-dechassez movement to the time-pressed pedestrian at every few yards. He was bound also to evolve other Terpsichorean figures in respect of door-steps, scrapers, cellar-hatches, ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... remembrance of another combining such genuine power with such horrid taste. Both together have equally assisted to gain the great popularity it has enjoyed; for in these days of extravagant adoration of all that bears the stamp of novelty and originality, sheer rudeness and vulgarity have come in for a ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... moved away, calling his daughter, whose absence was intriguing him. Receiving no answer, he entered her room, to find her in a swoon across her bed. She had fainted from sheer horror at what she ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... following. He would have us get the life even though it means the knife. Most times—every time, shall I say?—the life comes only through the knife. Yet when the life has come, with its great tireless strength, and its deep breathing, and sheer delight of living, you are grateful for the knife that led the ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... all over Philadelphia that I had cleared out John Guy's the night before, sans merci. True, I am not seven feet high, but some men (like stories) expand enormously when inflated or mad; so my denial was attributed to sheer modesty. But I recognised in the Charles Leland a mysterious cousin of mine, who was really seven feet high, who had disappeared for many years, and of whom I have ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... a bell, go to the hard bench in the schoolroom with another bell, and even play ball when the recreation bell rang. It was hard on an independent spirit to get used to all this, and while he had no mind to be disorderly, he often broke forth into direct disobedience of the law from sheer misunderstanding of the ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... the deck, musing into a sheer muddle this singular business of the Maharajah of Ratnagiri's gift to the Queen of England, with all sorts of dim, unformed suspicions floating loose in my brains round the central fancy of the fifteen thousand pound stone there, when the captain returned. He was ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... breath. After all, although she was lacking in any real strength of character, she was filled with a certain compensatory doggedness. His challenge was there to be faced. There was no way out of it. She would have lied willingly enough but for the sheer futility of falsehood. She commenced the task of bracing herself for ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... foot and unthrobbing heart along a narrow ledge of rock with beetling precipice above us and black depths beneath, and we would like a little bit of a wall of some sort, for imagination if not for reality, between us and the sheer descent. But it is blessed to learn that naked we are clothed, solitary we have a Companion, and unarmed we have our defenceless heads covered with the shadow of the great wing, which, though sense sees it not, faith knows is ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... without entering the city—to enter the city would have been to abandon his hopes of a triumph—Cato condescended to use the arts of obstruction in opposing him. He spoke till sunset against the proposition, and it failed by sheer lapse of time. Yet the opposition was fruitless. Caesar of course abandoned the empty honor, and secured the reality, all the more certainly because people felt that he had been hardly used. And so he continued to act, always ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church
... says the missionary Moffat (99); "in reply to which, they would only laugh." "It appears an awful exhibition of human depravity," he adds, "when children compel their parents to perish for want, or to be devoured by beasts of prey in a desert, from no other motive but sheer laziness." Kicherer says there are a few cases of "natural affection" sufficient to raise these creatures to "a level with the brute creation," Moffat, too, refers to exceptional cases of kindness, but the only instance he gives (112) describes their terror on finding he had drunk some water poisoned ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... back from his hand. For a moment sheer horror looked out from her eyes. Then, almost in the same instant, they were veiled. She caught her breath, saying ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... fox-earth in the spinney attached. I saw a vixen and her cubs there one morning as clearly as I see this paper. She barked at me once or twice, sitting high on her haunches, but the children played on without a glance at me. They were playing at catch-as-catch-can—with a full-grown hare. Sheer fun. No after-thoughts. I watched them ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... contested battle, in which the sea-rovers showed desperate courage and reddened the sea with their blood. There might be inserted here a battle-piece worthy of the Drakes and Morgans of old, if the facts only bore us out. Instead of that, however, we are forced to say that the pirates proved sheer caitiffs when matched against honest men, and the ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... let him live if he kept speaking it,—the wild Son of the Desert resolved to defend himself, like a man and Arab. If the Koreish will have it so, they shall have it. Tidings, felt to be of infinite moment to them and all men, they would not listen to these; would trample them down by sheer violence, steel and murder: well, let steel try it then! Ten years more this Mahomet had: all of fighting, of breathless impetuous toil and struggle; ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... looked satisfied; indeed masterly; which expression changed slightly as he stood there, the sound of the clock conveying to him (it may be) a sense of old buildings and time; and himself the inheritor; and then to-morrow; and friends; at the thought of whom, in sheer confidence and pleasure, it seemed, he ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... to reach the foot of the western rise of ground; here they slept under a rock, continuing their way next morning, climbing till they reached the summit of the rise and keeping their course along the edge of a cliff that fell a sheer three hundred ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... which a knowledge, then merely potential, and an experience still to come, would one day occupy. And so, those who cannot admit his actual speculative results, precisely his report on the invisible theoretic world, have been to the point sometimes, in their objection, that by sheer effectiveness of abstract language, he gave an illusive air of reality or substance to the mere nonentities of metaphysic hypothesis—of a mind trying to feed itself on ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... Prince,' is the most perverse and passionate being in the whole world. What is more, he throws money away as if it were dust. The day on which he gave the thrashing with blows like falling leaves and flowing water, he dragged (lit. pull alive, drag dead) Ying Lien away more dead than alive, by sheer force, and no one, even up to this date, is aware whether she be among the dead or the living. This young Feng had a spell of empty happiness; for (not only) was his wish not fulfilled, but on the contrary ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... Leslie, "you have no right to assume that a disbelief in a general Good, however genuine, necessarily involves a sheer egoism in conduct? For a man might find that his own Good consisted in furthering the Good of other people; and in that case of course he will ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... see it through the clouds of earth, into that keen icy stillness, where only favoured and long-trained souls can breathe, up the piercing air of the slopes that lead to the Throne, and there in the listening silence of heaven, where the voice of adoration itself is silent through sheer intensity, where all colours return to whiteness and all sounds to stillness, all forms to essence and all creation to the Creator, there he let him fall in self-forgetting love and wonder, breathe out his soul in one ardent all-containing act, and ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... onward by the silence like a fly on a summer stream. And sometimes, suddenly, for no reason, she would begin to run. She would run like a little animal, head and shoulders a little leaning to the right, moving easily and supply. She was like a kid climbing and slithering among the stones for the sheer joy of leaping about. She would talk to the dogs, the frogs, the grass, the trees, the peasants, and the beasts in the farmyard. She adored all the creatures about her, great and small: but she was less at her ease with the great. She saw very few people. ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... whitewashed house on the edge of a Connaught bog which has somehow got itself called Monte Carlo. But these misfits of names moved me only to mirth mingled with a certain sadness. "Woodbine" is a sheer astonishment. I hear the word and think of the rustic arches in cottage gardens, of old tree trunks climbed over by delightful flowers. I think of open lattice windows, of sweet summer air. Nothing in the whole long train of ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... origin it is a world apart from the poetry composed in the fashion described in the passage preceding. The poet here does not coolly say to himself: "Go to, I will make a poem to relieve my feelings"; he sings, to quote Goethe's own expression, "as the bird sings," out of the sheer fulness of his heart, which insists on immediate expression.[46] True it is that Goethe, like all other poets, frequently wrote under no immediate pressure of inspiration, but to affirm this of the highest efforts of his genius is at once to contradict his own testimony and to misinterpret ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... for smoother fields That yield no crop of self-denying will; A hand is stretched to him from out the dark, Which grasping without question, he is led Where there is work that he must do for God. The trial still is the strength's complement, And the uncertain, dizzy path that scales 230 The sheer heights of supremest purposes Is steeper to the angel than the child. Chances have laws as fixed as planets have, And disappointment's dry and bitter root, Envy's harsh berries, and the choking pool Of the world's scorn, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... modest and no one quite so shy. Many actors have played for him for years and never spoken to him, have perhaps seen him dart up a side street because they were approaching. They may not have known that it was sheer shyness, but it was. I have seen him ordered out of his own theater by subordinates who did not know him, and he went cheerfully away. "Good men, these; they know their business," was all his comment. Afterward he was shy of going back lest ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... in sheer disgust; "we've gone and let the Slavin fellers have another crack at us. A nice lot of scouts we look like, not to keep sentries on duty when we have a secret meeting. And now they've got us cooped up here like a lot of old hens! Shucks! ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts - Or, The Struggle for Leadership • George A. Warren
... in town that night, and, for sheer protection, she made Maudie Sinclair come and share her evening meal. The children were put to bed, and they sat down alone together, talking over the party. Maudie was pleased to relax a little of her severity toward Harry Sterling; she admitted ...
— Frivolous Cupid • Anthony Hope
... from the main one, all nuzzling their mouths in her flanks like so many sucking pigs; for there are hundreds of these lesser canyons, and any one of them would be a marvel were they not dwarfed into relative puniness by the mother of the litter. Imagine walls that rise sheer and awful as the Wrath of God, and at their base holes where you might hide all the Seven Wonders of the Olden World and never know they were there—or miss them either. Imagine a trail that winds like a snake and climbs like a goat and soars like ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... with their hulking personalities, bare of all the iridescence of potentiality, which we could have cast about them. Something of this iridescence may cling to unmarried lovers, in spite of themselves, but wedded bliss is a sheer offence. ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... men gathered around the instrument-board and Dunark explained the changes he had made—and to such men as Seaton and Crane it was soon evident that they were examining an installation embodying sheer perfection of instrumental control—a system which only those wonder instrument-makers, the Osnomians, could have devised. The new object-compasses were housed in arenak cases after setting, and the housings were then ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... was so happy as to be absolutely oblivious of such trifles, while the awkward youths fell entirely under the spell of her sparkling, fun-filled eyes and the merry, bubbling laugh that seemed to overflow from sheer joy. ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... able to sleep in his bed at nights. He would bolt and bar himself in his chamber so securely that it was a matter of perfect impossibility to effect an entrance, and then, still doubtful, he would be wakeful and uneasy during the long, weary hours of the night, until from sheer exhaustion he would fall into a troubled sleep, which lasted late into ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... barbarous excesses committed by the savages upon the whites in their power, that the minds of those who were actors in those scenes, were deprived of the faculty of discriminating between what was right or wrong to be practised towards them. And if acts, savouring of sheer revenge, were done by them, they should be regarded as but the ebullitions of men, under the excitement of great and damning wrongs, and which, in their dispassionate moments, they would condemn, even ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... Oxford, but failed there for the same reason. Then he just drifted. Now, still on the sunny side of thirty-five, he was knocking about, sick of things, just existing, and fearfully bored. He had dropped into Sihasset through sheer curiosity—just to see a typical New England summer resort where the Yankee type had not yet entirely disappeared. Now that the season was over he simply did not care to pull out for New York and continue his trip to—nowhere. He was "seeing" America. It might take months and it might take years. ...
— Charred Wood • Myles Muredach
... where the coast abrupt Dips greyly westward, Circe's strong-armed son Swept down the foam of sharp-divided straits And faced the stress of opening seas. Sheer out The vessel drave; but three long moons the gale Moaned round; and swift, strong streams of fire revealed The labouring rowers and the lightening surf, Pale watchers deafened of sonorous storm, And dipping decks and rents of ruined sails. Yea, when the hollow ocean-driven ship Wheeled ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... to ask you that! I don't know why I did. Just sheer egotism—and I hate women who dwell on their own foolish ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... the door across the rice fields and banana plantations to the Hebron Mountains. The wife's eyes fixed on the hills and stayed. A road ran down the hill towards a platform of rock which swept smooth and straight to the sheer side of the mountain called White Bluff. At first glance it seemed that the road ended at the cliff— a mighty slide to destruction. Instead, however, of coming straight to the cliff it veered suddenly, and ran round the mountain side, coming down at a steep but fairly ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the small temple with which the sovereigns of the XIIth and XIIIth dynasties had been satisfied, and replaced it by a structure which is still one of the finest yet remaining of the times of the Pharaohs. The naos rose sheer above the waters of the Nile, indeed its cornices projected over the river, and a staircase at the south side allowed the priests and devotees to embark directly from the rear of the building. The sanctuary was a single chamber, with an opening on its side, but ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... two inches and five-sixteenths at the stern; the stern-post (s t) is laid off, and the outer line of the stern (t f); and finally the curved lines a f and a v are drawn, completing what is called the sheer plan. ...
— Harper's Young People, April 6, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... divinest of the arts. However, they were not allowed to stay long, as the Kaffirs said that the geese would begin their afternoon flight within about half an hour. So the spectators were all requested to arrange themselves under the sheer cliff of the kloof, where they could not be seen by the birds coming over them from behind, and there to keep silence. Then Pereira and I—I attended by my loader, but he alone, as he said a man at his elbow would ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... Tonnison put it, like nothing so much as a gigantic well or pit going sheer down into the bowels of ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... he printed up that afternoon was the most horrible collection of mince-pie dreams that ever a sane man run afoul of. Rosy used one of the grass huts for a dark room; and while he was developing them plates, they could hear him screaming from sheer fright at being shut up alone with 'em in ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... up to me better than your father ever did," said Mrs. Comerford in white and gasping fury. Had she no pity, Mary O'Gara asked herself; and remembered that Grace Comerford's anger was sheer madness while it lasted. She had always known it. She had a memory of how she and Terence had tried to screen each other when they were ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... Each struck upon the other's shield, and wide the splinters flew. Then Antolinez seized his sword, and as he drew the blade, A dazzling gleam of burnished steel across the meadow played; And at Diego striking full, athwart the helmet's crown, Sheer through the steel plates of the casque he drove the falchion down, Through coif and scarf, till from the scalp the locks it razed away, And half shorn off and half upheld the shattered head-piece lay. ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... programming, easily enough. But as he stood before the banks of complex, yet beautifully familiar levers, the sheer exquisite complexity of it overcame him. To compute the movements of thousands of stars, all moving at different speeds in different directions in the vast swirling directionless chaos of the Universe—and yet to be sure that every ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... the rent? A. Father and mother.—Q. Who demands the rent? A. The landlord.—Q. Can you say how much the landlord takes from the wages of father, generally for rent? A. Yes; a fourth.—Q. That is sheer robbery, is it not? A. Yes; but working men cannot help it.—Q. Why is that? A. Because the landlord class have a monopoly of land and houses, and workmen have no land and are too poor ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... had snubbed her for some unimaginable familiarity the White Linen Nurse winced back in hopeless confusion. Just for sheer shock, short-circuited with fatigue, a big tear rolled slowly down ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... afternoon at the open window up-stairs, looking over a box of airy trifles, flowers and bows and laces, searching for a parcel of sheer white love-ribbon, a slip of woven hoarfrost that was not to be found. There was none like it to be procured; this was the night of the little masquerade; it was indispensable; and immediately she proceeded to raise the house. In answer to her descriptive inquiry, Paula, who every noon ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... other. They used, without qualm, whatever instruments they found at hand. They had been obliged, in 1861, to turn aside and waste immense energy in settling what had been settled a thousand years before, and should never have been revived. At prodigious expense, by sheer force, they broke resistance down, leaving everything but the mere fact of power untouched, since nothing else had a solution. Race and thought were beyond reach. Having cleared its path so far, society went back to its work, and threw itself on that which stood first ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... was rather displeased; for he did not like it that the little boy had begged of the Abbot something which he himself was too proud to ask. But when he thought it over, and reflected that it was out of sheer kindness that Gabriel had made the request, his heart strangely warmed toward the lad. Indeed, through all his life in the Abbey, no one had ever really cared whether he was happy or unhappy; and so poor Brother ...
— Gabriel and the Hour Book • Evaleen Stein
... first a mere apprentice, then an assistant, finally buoyed up by the advice of friends to study medicine and pharmacy, in the hope of being, some bright day, himself no less than the owner of a drug-store. Did Mr. Anstey know this, or was it the sheer adventure of genius, when he contrasted the qualities of the master into "Pill-Doctor Herdal," compounding "beautiful rainbow-colored powders that will give one a real grip on the world"? Ibsen, it is allowable to think, may sometimes have dreamed of a pill, "with arsenic in it, Hilda, and digitalis, ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... the struggle. In dull, stupid, obstinate despair, I threw myself on my bed, and fell from sheer fatigue ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... Moussorgsky, are more virile, stronger, more resisting than Wagner's music. Only folk aristocratically sure of themselves can be as gay and light at will. If there is anything in modern music to be compared with the sheer, blunt, powerful volumes of primitive art it is the work of Moussorgsky. And as the years pass, the man's stature and mind become more immense, more prodigious. One has but to hearken to the accent of the greater part of modern music to gauge in whose shadow we ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... fisher, lay Like a herring gasping here; Bunker of Nantucket Bay, Blown from out the port, dropped sheer Half a cable's length to leeward; yet we faintly raised a cheer As with his own right hand Our Commodore made fast The foeman's head-gear and The "Richard's" mizzen-mast, And in that death-lock clinging held us there from ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... he stopped from sheer lack of breath, Old Mother Nature spoke, and her voice was very severe. "I'm ashamed of you, Chatterer," said she. "Unfortunately, what Happy Jack has said about you is true. In many ways you are a disgrace to the Green Forest. Still I don't know how the Green Forest could get ...
— The Burgess Animal Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... father, but her character, that I was thinking of," he answered, and the next instant fell back in sheer surprise, for Will, flinging himself recklessly upon him, struck him squarely in ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... on end. Where on earth can they have come from? Unless they blunder on purpose, as I often think. Of course, I never look at a lecture before I go in, I know it all nearly by heart, so it would be sheer waste of time. I hope I shall take to reading something or other by myself; but you know I never was much of a hand at sapping, and, for the present, the light work suits me well enough, for there's plenty to see and learn about in ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... that we could now go alongside with safety, we hailed again, and asked permission. After some parleying, they threw us a rope, which we made fast to the boat, and lowered our sail, keeping off on a broad sheer, as there still was a great deal of sea. They then entered into conversation with us. I told them all that had happened, and inquired where the brig was ...
— The Privateer's-Man - One hundred Years Ago • Frederick Marryat
... have reached the blacks' camp, or at least where Landa was bogged, but found myself altogether too weak and exhausted; in fact, had extreme difficulty in getting across the numerous little gullies, and was at last obliged to camp from sheer fatigue. Night ultimately both clear and cloudy, with ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... "I believe our spirit is sufficiently broken at Mowbray. Wages weekly dropping, and just work enough to hinder sheer idleness; that sort of thing keeps the people in very humble trim. But wait a bit, and when they have reached the starvation point I fancy we shall ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... occasion she was attacked by two American outlaws, while riding on the river bank. One of them seized the bridle of the horse, and the other attempted to drag her from the saddle. Turning upon the latter, she shot him dead, and the other, from sheer amazement at her daring, lost his self-possession and begged for mercy. After compelling him to give up his arms, she allowed him to depart unmolested, as there was no tribunal of justice near by where he could be punished for his villainy. These exploits gained ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... sink to the depths in which John B. Gough found himself at the age of twenty-five years. By sheer force of will he raised himself from the slough in which he wallowed, till he attained a position honored among men, and performed a service ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... got on our nerves. It was deadly monotonous, always knowing when his severest shelling would start and I have known the boys run races with the shells, driven to take foolish risks by sheer ennui. We always expected some shells on "V. C. House" at 4 P. M., and were rarely disappointed. The men off duty would assemble in front of the old house and at the sound of the first shell race for the shelter of a dugout about a hundred yards away. Generally they would all tumble in ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... of the subject renders some more complicated theory necessary. Remembering has to be a present occurrence in some way resembling, or related to, what is remembered. And it is difficult to find any ground, except a pragmatic one, for supposing that memory is not sheer delusion, if, as seems to be the case, there is not, apart from memory, any way of ascertaining that there really was a past occurrence having the required relation to our present remembering. What, if we followed ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... tribes have shown, in a degree greater than ever before, an appreciation of the necessity of work. This changed attitude is in part due to the policy recently pursued of reducing the amount of subsistence to the Indians, and thus forcing them, through sheer necessity, to work for a livelihood. The policy, though severe, is a useful one, but it is to be exercised only with judgment and with a full understanding of the conditions which exist in each community for which it is ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... back some twenty years before the date of the said sermon to find a certain merchant-burgess of the city of Edinburgh, David Grierson, occupying a portion of a front land situated in the Canongate, a little to the east of Leith Wynd. It would be sheer affectation in us to pretend that this merchant-burgess had any mental or physical characteristic about him to justify his appearance in a romance, if we except the power he had shown of amassing wealth, of which he had so much that he could boast the possession of more than twenty ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... had seen the bird as he was carrying the princess to his cave. This cave, though, was in the middle of a sheer wall of rock. One could not climb up to it from below, nor could one climb down to it from above. And as the youth was walking around the rock, another youth came along and asked him what he was doing there. ...
— The Chinese Fairy Book • Various
... movement again; actually rolling off Dresden-ward again." "Haha, do they smell me already!" laughed he: "Well, I will send Daun to the Devil,"—not adding, "if I can." And instantly ordered sharp pursuit,—and sheer stabbing with the ox-goad, not soft and delicate pricking, as Henri's lately. [Retzow, ii. 168; Tempelhof, iii. 306.] Friedrich, in fact; was in a fiery condition against Daun: "You trampled on me, you heavy buffalo, these three months; but that ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Trinity men are busy with buoys, anchors, and cables; elsewhere labourers are toiling, idlers are loafing, and lifeboat—men are lounging about, leaning on the parapets, looking wistfully out to sea, with and without telescopes, from the sheer force of habit, and commenting on the weather. The broad, bronzed, storm-battered coxswain of the celebrated Ramsgate lifeboat, who seems to possess the power of feeding and growing strong on hardship and exposure, is walking about at the end of the east pier, ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... It's sheer, brutal attempt to assimilate a thing that may or may not have fallen from the sky, with phenomena admitted by the anthropologic system: or with the early French or Spanish explorers of Illinois. Though ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... her head and blushed. He tried again to look at her beaming eyes and golden complexion, and for sheer joy of being followed up she turned her ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... we remembers your sermon or the 'orrors an' medicines most, the Lord only knows! But it's in them papers I sees how fine leddies goes on nowadays, and if they misses so much as a two-and-sixpenny 'airpin, some of 'em out of sheer spite, will 'aul a gel up 'fore the p'lice and 'ave 'er in condemned cells in no time, so that ye see, Passon, if so be Miss Maryllia counts over the sparkling diamants and one's lost, we'll all be brought 'fore Sir Morton ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... lava-flows, piled layer upon layer, with intervening beds of bole and tuff, up to a thickness, according to Geikie, of about 3,500 feet. At the grand headland of Gribon, on the west coast, the basaltic sheets are seen to rise in one sheer sweep to a height of 1,600 feet, and then to stretch away with a slight easterly dip under Ben More at a distance of some eight miles. This mountain, the upper part of which is formed of beds of ashes, reaches an elevation of 3,169 feet, so that the accumulated ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull
... pot, to my back, and my bait pail in one hand and lunch basket in the other, I started on my tramp. It was a long four miles to Seabury's Pond, my destination, and Lute, to whom, like most country people, the idea of a four-mile walk was sheer lunacy, urged my harnessing the horse and driving there. But I knew the overgrown wood roads and the difficulty of piloting a vehicle through them, and, moreover, I really preferred to go afoot. So I marched off and left ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... yells the foe, half a hundred strong, charged down upon the unprepared enemy. McCabe didn't stop to review his troops or present a battle front. He fled like Antony from the clutch of Caesar. Judd was slow in getting under way but gave a good account of himself until overpowered by sheer ...
— Over the Line • Harold M. Sherman
... quaint bridge and opening upon an inner lake of astonishing beauty. The rocks were disposed in every variety of grouping,—sometimes rising in even terraces, step above step, sometimes thrusting out a sheer wall from the summit, or lying slant-wise in masses split off by the wedges of the ice. The fairy birches, in their thin foliage, stood on the edge of the water like Dryads undressing for a bath, while the shaggy male firs elbowed each other on the heights ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... trouble to read vol i. This, I say, is just permissible with a novel, where vol. iii. has a meaning, even for those who have not read the earlier part of the story; but with a scientific book, it is sheer insanity. You will find the latter part hopelessly unintelligible, if you read it before ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... be sheer bigotry for my own notions, but I prefer to the Atlantis, my notion of plants and animals having migrated from the Old to the New World, or conversely, when the climate was much hotter, by approximately the line of Behring's ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... ignorant European intrudes and calls them "blood-thirsty" we all meekly acquiesce. In Europe we kill and maim people by the hundred thousand, not seriously and deliberately for any sacred ends that make Life more precious to us or the Mystery of Nature more intelligible, but out of sheer stupidity. We spend the half, and sometimes more than the half, of our national incomes in sharpening to the finest point our implements of bloodshed, not to the accompaniment of any Bacchic Evoe, but incongruously mumbling the Sermon on the Mount. We put our population ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... phrasing that adapts itself admirably to the essay form he has chosen. The subjects he takes up are beloved figures of the past. Robert Burns, as Lord Rosebery talks of him, walks about in Dumfries and holds spellbound by sheer personal charm the guests of the tavern. There are papers on Burke, on Dr. Johnson, on Robert Louis Stevenson, and others as great. One group deals with Scottish History and one with the service of the state. The last is a study of the ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... decorous, that he cannot walk all day without undue somnolence after dinner, or rush off after a heavy meal without indigestion. These are sad moments which we all of us reach, but which are better laughed over than fretted over. And a man who, out of sheer inability to part from boyhood, clings desperately and with apoplectic puffings to these things is an essentially grotesque figure. To listen to young men discussing one of these my belated contemporaries, and to hear one enforcing on another the amusement to be gained ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... could have you for my own, what a delight it would be! My whole theory of training is so different,—you should never waste your energies in house-work, my darling, (Johnnie had been dusting the parlor); it is sheer waste, with an intelligence like yours lying fallow and only waiting for the master's hand. Would you come, Johnnie, if Papa consented? Inches Mills is a quiet place, but lovely. There are a few bright minds in the neighborhood; we are near Boston, and not ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... the street was, straight uplong the path led 320 The warriors together. There shone the war-byrny The hard and the hand-lock'd; the ring-iron sheer Sang over their war-gear, when they to the hall first In their gear the all-fearful had gat them to ganging. So then the sea-weary their wide shields set down, Their war-rounds the mighty, against the hall's wall. ...
— The Tale of Beowulf - Sometime King of the Folk of the Weder Geats • Anonymous
... increasingly cooperate in this movement, as they come to realize that the securing of efficiency in their workmen is to their interest, and that monotony, long hours, and other unhygienic elements which are now, through sheer carelessness, often imposed on their workmen, bring back in the end big financial losses ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... consumption of others, or to exercise its increased purchasing power on some new thing. If so, the supply will adapt itself accordingly, and the values of things will continue to conform to their cost of production. At any rate, it is a sheer absurdity that all things should fall in value, and that all producers should, in consequence, be insufficiently remunerated. If values remain the same, what becomes of prices is immaterial, since the remuneration of producers does not depend on how much money, but on how much ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... rooms adapted for working purposes, the objects of purely scientific interest. For example, we will say I am an ornithologist. I go to examine a collection of birds. It is a positive nuisance to have them stuffed. It is not only sheer waste, but I have to reckon with the ideas of the bird-stuffer, while, if I have the skin and nobody has interfered with it, I can form my own judgment as to what the bird was like. For ornithological purposes, what is needed is not glass cases full of stuffed birds on perches, ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... Simkins, advancing with many bows to Cecilia, "humbly craving pardon for the liberty, I can't pretend for to say I think Mr Harrel did quite the honourable thing by us; for as to his making us drink all that champagne, and the like, it was a sheer take in, so that if I was to speak my mind, I can't say as I esteem it much of ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... as though he would nod it off on to the tablecloth. He looked as if any minute he might burst into flame with the sheer enjoyment of it. "Warm all over," he gasped. "I could strike a match on ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... fundamental characteristic of human language that it includes two distinct elements: first, the purely acoustic element, represented by the sheer succession of sounds, and secondly the variety of meanings represented by various groups of sounds, meanings which seem to have nothing to do with the sounds as such. This state of language, where the sound-value of the ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... though for metaphysical, or what I suppose should now be called psychological interests, the elder lady was probably the most interesting of the two. Elinor beat her foot upon the carpet, out of sheer impatience, while John lingered alone in the dining-room. What did he stay there for? When there are several men together, and they drink wine, the thing is comprehensible; but one man alone who takes his claret with his dinner, and cares for nothing more, why should ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... was a huge fellow, over six feet high and broad in proportion, one who could have tackled Toro himself, as far as weight and sheer brute strength went. ...
— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng
... the invasion of Indiana and Ohio by Morgan seems like sheer madness. He had a force of only a little over three thousand, and the states which he invaded had millions of population. But he had reasons to believe that thousands of that population were friendly to him, would welcome him with gladness. When he so nearly escaped ...
— Raiding with Morgan • Byron A. Dunn
... character to yield for the sake of peace, wrath made him dogged, and the more steadily he regarded his position, the more was he appalled by the outlook. Why, this meant downright slavery! He had married a woman so horribly like himself in several points that his only hope lay in overcoming her by sheer violence. A thoroughly good and well-meaning woman, an excellent housekeeper, the kind of wife to do him credit and improve his social position; but self-willed, pertinacious, and probably thinking herself ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... Then they got tired of waiting and quarrelled between themselves, with the result that one of them got killed. The general idea is that they quarrelled over the division of the spoil, and, seeing what you have discovered to-day, I am inclined to agree with it. Last night's escapade was sheer bravado to mock at you and Brennan. What do you ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... to work, his new fastidiousness asserted itself. A wave of cheap perfume assailed his nostrils. The untidy pretentiousness of her ill-chosen clothes, the unreality of her manner and carriage, the sheer vulgarity of her choice of words and phrases—these things seized him as a nightmare. Like a man who rushes to a cafe for a drink in a moment of exhaustion, he hastened along towards the National Gallery. His nerves were all quivering. An opalescent ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... questions which seemed to indicate a prying disposition, and a curiosity as impertinent as it was inconvenient. In fact, I did not like his manner at all; but conceiving that his conduct might arise from sheer ignorance, and from no sinister motive, I still felt inclined to avail myself of his assistance to procure a messenger. Finding that he could not sift me, he at length said that he had no doubt a ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... the Marshes at Mondement. It was the key of the swamp of St. Gond, the French centre. The Tower was held by the French when, by every military rule, they should have given it up. At length they lost it. They won it again, but because of sheer unreason, so far as the evidence shows, for at the moment they regained it Mondement had ceased to be anything but a key to a door which had been burst wide open. Foch, by the books, was beaten. But Foch as we know ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... thirty-five, maybe, a rate at which he did himself no justice, bucketting forward fast, and waiting over the beginning till he'd missed it. In discontent with himself he quickened again; but now the oars behind him were like a peal of bells. By sheer strength they forced the boat along somehow, and with the tide under her she travelled. But the Indefatigable Woman by ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... was, the immediate shore was interesting and romantic in its form. In one place perpendicular cliffs, cut up by ragged gorges, descended sheer down into deep water, and meeting the constant roll of the Irish Channel, even in calm weather, fringed themselves with lace-work of foam, as if in cool defiance of the ocean. In another place a mass of boulders and shattered rocks stretched out into the sea ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... you for the life of me why I feel it. In many ways he's admirable: I believe he's about the youngest brigadier we have who rose from the ranks. There was no hanky-panky about his promotion either—no petticoat influence; it was all sheer merit and courage. He was a fighting-man from first to last and shared all the chances. But the trouble is that one doesn't know where he came from, and, therefore, one can't be sure where he's going. I know that sounds snobbish. You have the right ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... on the same course until abreast of the perch, which was only a forked stick. The men came aft and hauled in the mizzen sheer. Chambers put up the helm. The mizzen came across with a jerk, and the sheet was again allowed to run out. The jib came over with a report like the shot of a cannon, and at the ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty
... Arrayed against them were all the resources of a mighty realm—shipping, arms, munitions of war, gold, statecraft, a widespread and calculating diplomacy, the prestige of a great Sovereign and a famous Court—and the Irish clan and its chieftain, by the sheer courage of its members, by their bodily strength and hardihood and feats of daring, for years ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... any one to tell me that now was my time; but it was with limbs that almost refused their office from sheer fright, that I crept past the sleeping man, and reached the edge of the wharf. There was the vessel moving very slightly, and groaning dismally as she moved, and there was the hole, and it was temptingly dark. But—the gangway that had been laid across from ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... The decrepit casements were fitted with the heavy, unwieldy shutters necessary in that climate, and held in place by massive iron cross bars. It would have puzzled you to find a more dilapidated house in Angouleme; nothing but sheer tenacity of mortar kept it together. Try to picture the workshop, lighted at either end, and dark in the middle; the walls covered with handbills and begrimed by friction of all the workmen who had rubbed past them for thirty years; the cobweb of cordage across the ceiling, the stacks ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... some men who by the sheer force of their personality subdue their church difficulties. They hold the captious in awe. By a sort of magnetic persuasion and lively sense of humor they soothe this one and that, win the regard of the outlying ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... eyes, shining, large, lustrous, and wistful, as they looked out of the white thin face, where the once glowing colour had dwindled to two burning carnation spots. It was so piteous a change that as he took her hand he was silent, from sheer inability ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... gathered around with such restoratives as they had at command. Gradually the stricken woman revived, but as the whole miserable truth came back, she turned her face to the wall with a sinking of heart akin to despair. At last, from sheer exhaustion, feverish sleep ensued, from which she often started with moans and low cries. One impression haunted her—she was falling, ever falling ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... Certain. Knew no more about the lists? No. Had not procured them himself, for instance? No. Expect to get anything by this evidence? No. Not in regular government pay and employment, to lay traps? Oh dear no. Or to do anything? Oh dear no. Swear that? Over and over again. No motives but motives of sheer patriotism? ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... life of Washington two old blokes—no other word can properly describe them—Jack Dade, who signed himself "the Honorable John W. Dade, of Virginia;" and Beau Hickman, who hailed from nowhere and acquired the pseudonym through sheer impudence. In one way and another they lived by their wits, the one all dignity, the other all cheek. Hickman fell very early in his career of sponge and beggar, but Dade lived long and died in office—indeed, toward the close an office was ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... upon which the temples of the Acropolis are built is more of a hill than a rock. It is much steeper upon one side than the other, with a sheer fall a hundred yards broad; on the opposite side there are the rooms of the Hospital of Aesculapius and the theatres of Dionysus and Herodes Atticus. The top of the rock holds the Parthenon and the other smaller temples, or what ...
— The Princess Aline • Richard Harding Davis
... purse, that fairies and gold dollars alone might have entered, and looked at its contents. By sheer good luck and chance, it contained three or four sovereigns—more than sufficient for the return journey. To-morrow morning she would go back to Powyss Place and tell ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... surprising that a bill should at last have reached the Chambers, proposing, first, the better distribution of the revenues of the Church, equal to a fourth of the kingdom; and, second, the suppression of those "houses," the rules of which bind over their members to sheer, downright idleness, leaving only those who have some show of public duty to perform. The priests denounce the bill as "spoliation and robbery" of course, and prophesy all manner of things against so wicked a kingdom. ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... shawls. Now while he slept, the Fairy Princess Shâhpasand, who was taking the air, fairy-fashion, in the shape of a pigeon, happened to fly over the garden, and catching sight of the beautiful, splendid, handsome young Prince, she sank to earth in sheer astonishment at beholding such a lovely sight, and, resuming her natural shape—as fairies always do when they touch the ground—she stooped over the young man and gave ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel
... I said. "I never saw anything like her in my life. In spite of the fact, last night, that I guessed she was mad, I could not keep my eyes off of her. It wasn't curiosity. It was wonder, sheer wonder, ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... looked forth composedly, as may one who has been born to know of such matters, and reared in the knowledge of them. And, anon, I would look upward, and see the grey, metalled mountain going up measureless into the gloom of the everlasting night; and from my feet the sheer downward sweep of the grim, metal walls, six full miles, and ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... every man in charge of that damnable Scarlet Pimpernel should have three pairs of eyes wherewith to watch his movements. He should have the alert brain of a Robespierre, the physical strength of a Danton, the relentlessness of a Marat. He should be a giant in sheer brute force, a tiger in caution, an elephant in weight, ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... as to be absolutely oblivious of such trifles, while the awkward youths fell entirely under the spell of her sparkling, fun-filled eyes and the merry, bubbling laugh that seemed to overflow from sheer joy. ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... argument. He looked satisfied; indeed masterly; which expression changed slightly as he stood there, the sound of the clock conveying to him (it may be) a sense of old buildings and time; and himself the inheritor; and then to-morrow; and friends; at the thought of whom, in sheer confidence and pleasure, it seemed, he ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... were sorry marksmen. Their projectiles always burst either too far or too near, too high or too low. And as soon as a hundred men had got across, and the first sharpshooters had clambered up the heights that rise sheer from the river and begun to debouch upon the plateau, there was a sudden silence. The enemy's cavalry had given way, and our corps d'armee was free to pass the Marne by the bridge ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... mistake. Hasn't he, Milt? Take it from me, J. C., if you'd been cruising the high seas in the days of Captain Kidd, you'd have given him a run for his money! Some buccaneer, believe me!" and he went off into a peal of laughter born of sheer admiration. ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... in practice his pet conviction that a woman loves to be mastered, and by sheer brute force, in all the pride and passion of his intense masculinity, he ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... rather unpromising surroundings, lifted herself through sheer determination to a ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... could have my proper wish With these two friends I'd sit and fish Where sheer cliffs wear their mossy hoods And Dream Lake widens in the woods, But Fate says "No! Produce ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... was beautiful. He never would have thought so but for the accident of the walk with Mr Orgreave; he might have spent his whole life in the town, and never troubled himself a moment about the Sytch Pottery. Nevertheless he now, by an act of sheer faith, suddenly, miraculously and genuinely regarded it as an exquisitely beautiful edifice, on a plane with the edifices of the capitals of Europe, and as a feast for discerning eyes. "I like architecture very much," he added. And this too was said with such feverish conviction ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... when the flash came and he drew a deep breath of horror and surprise. The pony had halted within a foot of the edge of a high cliff whose side dropped away sheer, as though cut with a knife. Down below, perhaps a hundred feet, was an immense basin, through which flowed a stream of water. To Hollis's right, parallel with the stream, the cliff sloped suddenly down, reaching the ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... of a sloping mountain which rose gradually for two miles, behind it; and then fell at once in a great precipice towards Geneva, going down three thousand feet in four or five cliffs, or steps. Now that whole group of cliffs had simply been torn away by sheer strength from the rocks below, as if the whole mass had been as soft as biscuit. Put four or five captains' biscuits on the floor, on the top of one another; and try to break them all in half, not by bending, but by holding one half down, and tearing the other halves straight ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... 'em first—you couldn't have done it better," said Mr. Simlins with a sly cast of his eye;—"you can set her to be your 'vice' when you want one. I was comin' up from the river, you see, and came up behind 'em, and I couldn't hear what they said; but when she let him go, I see her give a kind o' sheer look round this way, and then she put up her hand to her cheek and cleared for home like—a gazetteer!"—said Mr. Simlins, who had given this information in an undertone. "Made straight tracks for the house, ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... circumstances the enemy could not be cleared out of their entrenchment by direct attack without entailing heavy loss, which I could ill afford and was most anxious to avoid. I therefore reconnoitred both flanks to find, if possible, a way round the hill. On our left front was a sheer precipice; on the right, however, I discovered, to my infinite satisfaction, that we could not only avoid the hill which had defeated us, but could get almost in rear of the Peiwar Kotal itself, and threaten the ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... perhaps not to hit the bull's eye!' he said, a little grimly. Then dropping his unaccustomed air of chill disapproval, he appealed to his friend's better taste. A confession of sheer physical loathing crept into his face as he let fall two or three little sentences about these women's offence against public decorum. 'Why, it is as hideous as war!' he wound ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... to have depended almost for their very existence upon the horse; and in old pictures the Tartar is often seen lying curled up asleep with his horse, illustrating the mutual affection and dependence between master and beast. Out of sheer gratitude and respect for his noble ally, the man took upon himself the form of the animal, growing a queue in imitation of the ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... much that Nils burned to express; but the fiddle refused to obey him, and screeched something utterly discordant, as it seemed, from sheer perversity. ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... not astonished when the week went by and no announcement of his wedding appeared. But I was troubled and am troubled still, for if mistakes are made in criminal courts, and the innocent sometimes, through the sheer force of circumstantial evidence, are made to suffer for the guilty, might it not be that in this little question of morals Mrs. Walworth has been wronged, and that when I played the part of arbitrator in her fate, I ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... to lead a humble and hidden life, divided between the study of the Scripture and the contemplation of God. Later on, his enemies were to accuse him of having become a convert from ambition, in view of the honours and riches of the episcopate. This is sheer calumny. His conversion could not have been more sincere, more disinterested—nor more heroic either: he was thirty-three years old. When we think of all he had loved and all he gave up, we can only bow the head and bend the ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... at her post. Mrs. Lamotte, who is resolved to retain her strength for Sybil's sake, lies down in the dressing room and sleeps from sheer exhaustion. ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... shopkeeper should come out and hold you to the thing you were looking at. Remember also that you are the life-long owners of some things just because they were thrown at your head. Remember how you sauntered into a sale on one occasion, and, out of sheer idleness and pure fun, made a bid, and to your consternation the encumbrance was knocked down to your name; and it fills up your house to- day till you would give ten times its value to some one to take it ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... joy that spurs the warrior's heart To the last thundering gallop and sheer leap Came on the men of the Guides; they flung apart The doors not all their valour could longer keep; They dressed their slender line; they breathed deep, And with never a foot lagging or head bent, To the clash and clamour and dust ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... had gone to many balls in his lifetime, but never had he been so painfully particular before. He drove Edward, his valet, to the verge of madness with his whims, and left off at last in sheer desperation and altogether dissatisfied with ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... look out from the loopholes of the tower. On the one side, as he had noticed, the rock fell sheer away from the foot of the wall, to a depth of two or three hundred feet. On the other side he looked down into a courtyard, sixty feet below him. This was surrounded by high and very strong walls, ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty
... in any given new thing which is not only allowable but commendable, if we are to preserve the outlines of our identity from the violence of alien intrusion, becomes a sheer waste of energy when it is transmuted into ponderous principles ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... returned in a moment with the girl's bundle. And with his return one glance showed him how nearly his plans were upset. Jessie was clasping Jamie in her arms, kissing him hungrily, tears streaming down her cheeks, while, out of sheer sympathy, little Vada was clinging to her mother's skirts, her small face buried in amongst them, sobbing as though her heart ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... say that we were excited. What would the result be, after marching blindly for so long and over such impossible ground, as we had been doing? We added and subtracted, and at last there was the result. We looked at each other in sheer incredulity: the result was as astonishing as the most consummate conjuring trick — 88deg. 16' S., precisely to a minute the same as our reckoning, 88deg. 16' S. If we were forced to go to the Pole on dead reckoning, then surely the most exacting ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... words were uttered in quite a simple fashion, there was a ring about them that Berrington did not altogether like. He wanted to flatter himself that he had conquered this murderous ruffian by sheer force of will, as he had done more than once with certain native tribes that he had ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... extremely dignified in his demeanour towards the native officials, yet he is most affable and cheery, with a very taking, charming manner. That goes a much longer way in Persia than the other unfortunate manner by which many of our officials think to show dignity—sheer stiffness, rudeness, bluntness, clumsiness—which offends, offends bitterly, instead ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... she ceased to cry from sheer exhaustion, and when, with his hand under her chin, he forced up her head again, she looked at him a full minute and ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... yet they will not relax their hold upon the etheric double, feeling that that is at least some sort of link with the only world that they know. Thus they drift about in a condition of loneliness and misery until from sheer fatigue their hold fails them, and they slip into the comparative happiness of astral life. Sometimes in their desperation they grasp blindly at other bodies, and try to enter into them, and occasionally ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... time so simple and childishly devoted to old, plain Martha. She had never read letters like the mother's letter to her son, so beautiful, affectionate and elevating. He had always read them to her, and she had had to cry every time from sheer emotion. She had never before seen as beautiful linen as the boy had worn, and it had all been ...
— Cornelli • Johanna Spyri
... myself," went on Doubleday, beginning on a new quill, "I'm very particular. I dare say I'm about as rackety a lot as any you'd pick up near here. But somehow I've no fancy for seeing a fellow going to the dogs out of sheer folly. It spoils ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... honesty we shall set right, Sir, We Surgeons of the Law do desperate Cures, Sir, And you shall see how heartily I'le handle it: Mark how I'le knock it home: be of good chear, Sir, You give good Fees, and those beget good Causes, The Prerogative of your Crowns will carry the matter, (Carry it sheer) the Assistant sits to morrow, And he's your friend, your monyed men love naturally, And as your loves are clear, ...
— The Spanish Curate - A Comedy • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... plum-colour, the dreamlike beauty of Elysian plains, and the stately palm-forests extending league upon league, with mighty vans clashing in the mountain breeze, assume magical charm as we penetrate into the heart of the alluring land. Two pyramidal peaks, Haroeman and Kaleidon, rise sheer from the fair plain of Leles in colossal stairways of green rice-terraces. Knots of palm shelter innumerable villages which dot the mountain flanks, the woven huts fragile as houses of cards, but built up on identical sites through countless ages, recorded in perennial ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... illustrate the thought that I would leave with you by the description of one of our western railroads. Your train sweeps across the desert like some bold knight in a joust, and when about to drive recklessly into a sheer cliff it turns a graceful curve and follows up the wild meanderings of a stream until it reaches a ridge along which it finds its flinty way for many miles. At length you come face to face with a great gulf, a canyon—yawning, resounding and purple in its depths. Before ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... space" in the articulate intercourse of the human race will forever be associated with the name of Alexander Graham Bell, born in Edinburgh in 1847. By its means he has promoted commerce, created new industries, and has bridged continents, all the result of "sheer hard thinking aided by unbounded genius." To Dr. Graham Bell we are also indebted for the photophone, for the inductoin balance, the telephone probe, and the gramophone. During the war he designed a "submarine chaser" capable of traveling ...
— Scotland's Mark on America • George Fraser Black
... his reproaches they did not cease from their laughter or labour, nor did the flying Sancho stop his lamentations, mingled now with threats and now with prayers. Thus they carried on their merry game, until at last from sheer weariness they stopped and let him be. And then they brought him his ass, and, helping him to mount it, wrapped him in his coat, and the kind-hearted Maritornes, seeing him so exhausted, gave him a pitcher of water, which, that it might ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... necessary, being the result of the arrangement of the particles,—the flowering of the mechanism of the shell; or like the beauty of health which comes out of and reaches back again to the bones and the digestion. There is no grace like the grace of strength. What sheer muscular gripe and power lie back of the firm, delicate notes of the great violinist! "Wit," says Heine,—and the same thing is true of beauty,—"isolated, is worthless. It is only endurable when it rests ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... inquest I met him, and asked him about it. 'Do you really mean to tell me,' I said, 'that you were baffled by the case, that you actually don't know what the man died of?' 'Pardon me,' he replied, 'I know perfectly well what caused death. Blank died of fright, of sheer, awful terror; I never saw features so hideously contorted in the entire course of my practice, and I have seen the faces of a whole host of dead.' The doctor was usually a cool customer enough, and a certain ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... parlors could have them for the asking. It was rather in the hooking of men of the stamp of the Hon. Seneca Bowers and her own husband that she gloried, for in their candid souls they styled great Shakespeare rot and voted Ibsen and Tolstoi sheer bedlamites at large. While mind met mind below stairs these honest gentlemen contentedly knocked the balls about the green, smoked hospitable Joe Hilliard's cigars, and sampled the choicest liquors of his sideboard. By such diplomacy every important walk in the ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... leak, and all hands were now summoned to work the pumps; but weakened by disease and famine, and overcome with fatigue, they were soon obliged to give up the almost hopeless task. Three days of horror passed away without any ship coming near them, while several of them died from sheer starvation. Fortunately, at last they discovered some gunpowder which, being in tin cases, was not spoilt, and with it they managed to fire the guns which had ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... placed more confidence in her husband than she had ever done before; and when he came in of an afternoon and sat by her side and talked of herself and of their little baby, softened in all the intimate fibres of her sex, she laid her hand in his, and sighed for sheer joy. The purpose of her life seemed now to show a ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... Count Guido Franceschini. The two monologues spoken by him are, for sheer depth of human science, the most marvellous of all: "every nerve of the mind is touched by the patient scalpel, every vein and joint of the subtle and intricate spirit divided and laid bare."[41] Under torture, he has confessed to the murder of his wife. He is ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... to school to you. Yet the fellow is not bashful in battle neither; keeps his station well, and makes himself both heard and felt. Ah! there he is, flourishing his hat on the poop, and wondering what the deuce Sir Jarvy's after, now! Sheer in, Wychecombe, and let us hear what he has ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... and the sacred corpse 'swings senseless of the cross.' A sheet of vermilion flame shoots sheer through the air and vanishes; the rocks of Carmel and Lebanon cleave asunder; the sea rolls on high from the sands its black weltering waves. Earth yawns, and the graves give up their dwellers. The ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... place of this kind and trying to find any one was, as Alderson informed Butler on hearing of its character, exceedingly difficult. It involved the right of search, which was difficult to get. To enter by sheer force was easy enough in most instances where the business conducted was in contradistinction to the moral sentiment of the community; but sometimes one encountered violent opposition from the tenants themselves. It might be so in this case. The only sure way of avoiding ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... ability who held their jobs on the strength of this one trait. It was a mystery how they misled magnates and managers alike; how for months they held their places, weakening a team, often keeping a good team down in the race; all from sheer bold suggestion of their own worth and other players' worthlessness. Strangest of all was the knockers' power to disorganize; to engender a bad spirit between management and team and among the players. The team which was without one of the parasites ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... soldiers made a rush at Harry. His two friends closed in by him. The two first of the soldiers who arrived were knocked down. Others, however, seized the young men, but the apprentices crowded up, pelted the soldiers with stones, and, by sheer weight, overthrew those who had taken Harry and carried him off. The soldiers soon came pouring out of their barracks, but fleet-footed lads had, at the commencement of the quarrel, run down into the streets, raising the shout of "clubs," and swarms of apprentices came ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty
... wine. We dined in a depressing room with dark brown wallpaper decorated with dusty stags' antlers, an enormous green-tiled stove dominating everything. The General and his son ate solidly through the courses while the lady pecked furtively at her plate. As for myself I could not eat for sheer fright. Every nerve in my body was vibrating at the thought of the evening before me. If I could not avoid the interview, I was resolutely determined to give Master von Boden the slip rather than return to the frontier empty-handed. ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... hearty farewells, they returned to their forests. The natives whom I had taken with me from Goa had proved so lazy and morose that nearly the whole task of making the path through the forest had fallen upon the Igorots. From sheer laziness they threw away the drinking water of which they were the porters; and the Igorots were obliged to fetch water from a considerable distance for our bivouac on the summit. In all my troublesome marches, ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... the long dining-room, backwards and forwards, from the grate where the fire blazed to the glass-panelled sideboard at the other end, where its reflection sparkled, yawning every now and then from sheer ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... keep a perturbed and restless Major from the line waiting while he finishes his light-hearted badinage with a subordinate. It is altogether magnificent in its sheer sangfroid. Why is it that such a one is labelled merely A.M.L.O., when he should obviously be the M.L.O.? He has his subordinate, happily insignificant and obsequiously proud to serve. Let the subordinate be the a.m.l.o., and let It, Itself, be openly acknowledged ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 10, 1917 • Various
... house and point the finger at me? Have I not always been a faithful wife, nursing my husband for years and never leaving his sick-bed, never thinking of anything but how to ease his pain? I have lived like a recluse from sheer sense of duty and faithful lose, while other wives, who have less means than I, live in state and go to entertainments.—And whose slaves are better kept and more often freed than ours? Where is the beggar so sure ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... there, among strangers,' she said; 'she must see one friend before she died. She must go home at once and be forgiven.' And thus she went, half in delirium, until I feared that her life would pass away, from sheer exhaustion. I determined to ride over to your picket at once, not dreaming, however, that you were in command. At dawn to-morrow we shall probably be relieved, and it might be beyond my power then to ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... all its ineffable mystery, its monstrous and unendurable strangeness. They lived face to face with it, they saw a thousand aspects of it. Sometimes Corydon would be obsessed with the sense of the sheer weight she carried; a burden fastened upon her and not to be got rid of—an imposition and torment to her. Then again, she would see herself in grotesque and even comical lights—as akin to all ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... you land, and, following the path by the hillside, come suddenly on the little port with its few fishing-boats and litter of ropes and nets, above which rises the little town, house piled on house, from the ruined church rising high, sheer out of the sea to the church of marble that crowns the hill. Before you stands the gate of Porto Venere, a little Eastern in its dilapidation, its colour of faded gold, its tower, and broken battlement. Passing under the ancient arch past a shrine of Madonna, you enter the ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... classes who never become conscious of their class interests, and steadfastly refuse to join with the members of their class. The workingman who refuses to join a union, or who "scabs" when his fellow-workers go out on strike, may act from ignorance or from sheer self-interest and greed. His action may be due to his placing personal interest before the larger interest of his class, or from being too shortsighted to see that ultimately his own interests and those of his class must merge. Many an employer, likewise, may ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... girl, born in rather sordid conditions, lift herself through sheer determination to the better things for which her ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... auntie!" was all she could say, as she threw herself into the arms of her aged relative and sobbed through sheer joy. ...
— Dorothy's Triumph • Evelyn Raymond
... kind of person would be able to throw something at you so that you'd Guess, so that you'd dodge, and be so preoccupied with that first dodging that you'd miss the Guess on the aiming of the beamgun because of sheer physical inertia? What kind of person would know exactly where you'd be when you dodged? What kind of person would know exactly where ...
— But, I Don't Think • Gordon Randall Garrett
... with whom he had once exchanged easy conversation about the weather. Whenever she came to lay his table, he felt bound to say something. Not being an experienced gagger, he found it more and more difficult each evening to hit on something bright, until finally, from sheer lack of ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... I recover'd that, waking early next morning, and finding my sweet nurse asleep from sheer weariness, in a corner of the hut, I stagger'd up from my bed of dried bracken, and out into the pure air. Rare it was to stand and drink it in like wine. A footstep arous'd me. 'Twas Mistress Delia: and turning, ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... this is the one most to be dreaded. The intense pain and the high fever render the animal weak and thin in the extreme. The appetite becomes impaired, sometimes altogether lost, and the patient in many cases appears to die from sheer exhaustion. Added to this is always the extreme probability of the wound becoming purulent, and later the dread of general septic infection of the blood-stream ensuing, and death resulting from that. Even with the happier ending of resolution, anchylosis of the joint and incurable lameness ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... she reflected that she had several miles to travel, most of which was through the gloomy woods; but there was no hesitation on the part of Nellie, who, but for the sturdy teaching of her parents, would have crouched down beside the log and sobbed in terror until she sank into slumber through sheer exhaustion. ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... hardly be serious in my life again—ha, ha, ha!—and for luck, it was no such thing—sheer wit, and excellent contrivance; and but that I don't care to affront Fortune, like the old Greek general, I might tell her to her face—In this thou hadst no share. You have heard, Ned Christian, that Mother ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... to my husband's arrival within a week, but Ronald had said not a word of his intended visit; so that Salemina was properly nervous lest some one of us should collapse out of sheer joy at the ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... twinkling streams, The lilied marge their waves caress; And the sheer constellations sway O'er soundless ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... those who paint in music; but though Handel wrote more great choruses, his debt to Purcell is enormous. His way of hurling great masses of choral tone at his hearers is derived from Purcell; and so is the rhetorical plan of many of his choruses. But in Purcell, despite his sheer strength, we never fail to get the characteristic Purcellian touch, the little unexpected inflexion, or bit of coloured harmony that reminds that this is the music of the open air, not of the study, that does more than this, that actually ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... communicable passion in it such as we find in Agamemnon or Othello. We sympathize, indeed, with the fears, the bravado, the despair that succeed the crime. But when all is said, the central figure of the book is born out of fantasy. He is a grotesque made alive by sheer imaginative intensity and passion. He is as distantly related to the humanity we know in life and the humanity we know in literature as the sober peasant who cut his friend's throat, saying, "God ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... uttered these words he felt the sheer brutality of them. By a strange irony of fate, his own child had fallen ill about the time that Ragni took to her bed, and the minister and his wife were now talking over the couch of their suffering little boy. Something was wrong with ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... sixty European soldiers. The latter worked with the energy of despair at their task of clearing the deck, in spite of the twofold danger of being burnt and stunned by the hot falling stones. While we were engraved in this struggle, and enveloped in the sheer blackness of a veritable hell, a new and terrible danger came upon us. This was the approach of the tidal wave caused by the final eruption, which occurred about 12.30 to 1 p.m. The wave reached us at 2 p.m. or thereabouts, ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... points by the assailants, and met, here by furious volleys poured from the bushy sides of the hill, there by charges of horsemen galloping through the meadows and cornfields, they were again driven back into the town, where, in sheer desperation, they turned upon their foes to sell their lives as dearly as they might. They were met at the edge of the village by the party of horse and footmen that had first dislodged them, with whom, being driven pell-mell among them by the shock of the intercepting ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... Americans, both at home and abroad, that they want to be taken nationally, and not personally, by foreigners. Beyond any other people we wish to be loved by other peoples, even by others whom we do not love, and we wish to be loved in the lump. We would like to believe that somehow our sheer Americanism rouses the honor and evokes the veneration of the alien, and as we have long had a grudge against the English, we would be particularly glad to forget it in a sense of English respect ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... thinking of going on such a day as this? It would be a sheer impossibility. Why, the carriage would be blown over, and if it wasn't, no horses would ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty
... the further side of the harbour, and almost repented of his venture. To complete his dejection, he seems to have courted failure. Instead of boldly throwing his whole force upon the small garrison and overwhelming them by sheer weight, he tried a reconnaissance, and fell into an ambuscade; upon which he incontinently abandoned all thought of a siege, and contented himself with laying waste the interior of Malta, and taking ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... Nick and Pipes were no more able to get through than they were, and they were also constantly afraid that they might come suddenly upon some natives and betray themselves. At last, coming to a brook, from sheer fatigue they were compelled to halt and eat the remainder of the provisions they had cooked in the morning. After resting they again pushed on, but their progress was not more rapid than at first. Towards evening Tom, in hopes of getting ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston
... stature, in the dust They prance, as like a flood they pour across the plain; And on their saddles perched are warriors richly clad, That with their hands do smite on kettle-drums amain. Couched are their limber spears, right long and lithe of point, Keen- ground and polished sheer, amazing wit and brain. Who dares with them to cope draws death upon himself; Yea, of the deadly lance incontinent he's slain. Come, then, companions mine, rejoice with me and say, "All hail to thee, O friend, and ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... the horses over the mountains at this spot. Upon arriving at the top of the slope, I was, however, undeceived upon that score, for we found the high mount, for which we were steering, completely separated from us by a yawning chasm, which lay, under an almost sheer precipice, at our feet. The high mountain beyond, near the crown, was girt around by a solid wall of rock, fifty or sixty feet in height, from the edge of which the summit rose. It was quite unapproachable, except, perhaps, in one ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... not always be at war. Interminable as the conflict by which it is now racked seems, and endless as appear the resources of the nations participating in it, the time must come when victory or sheer exhaustion shall compel peace. People talk of that peace being permanent. That is perhaps too sanguine a dream while human nature remains what it is, and nations can still be as covetous, ambitious, and heedless of others' rights ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... them that the brig had put into Salcombe range. It is a wild-looking yet land-locked harbour on the Devonshire coast. Black rocks rise sheer up out of the water on either side of the entrance, and give it a particularly melancholy and unattractive appearance. One of the owners had come round in the brig, but he had landed and taken a post-chaise back towards London. In the morning the brig sailed, and by noon the gale ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... well as sigh deeply; and that it was better to conciliate than provoke those who even for an hour had felt their strength. The red rain made Wexford's harvest grow. Theirs was no treacherous assassination—theirs no stupid riot—theirs no pale mutiny. They rose in mass and swept the country by sheer force. ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... did not look at me, but kept facing the front. We were now somewhat to the west of Garland, with it between us and the Mercutians. The few lights of the town could be seen plainly. The country beneath us seemed fairly level. To the west, half a mile away, perhaps, I could make out a sheer, perpendicular wall of rock. We seemed to be flying parallel with it and about ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... content of Aileen's nature was a portion that was purely histrionic, a portion that was childish—petted and spoiled—a portion that was sheer unreason, and a portion that was splendid emotion—deep, dark, involved. At this statement of Cowperwood's which seemed to throw her back on herself for ever and ever to be alone, she first pleaded willingness ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... Candia, and eat a little of it, presently the shafts come out and all is well again; even as kind Venus cured her beloved byblow Aeneas when he was wounded on the right thigh with an arrow by Juturna, Turnus's sister. Since the very wind of laurels, fig-trees, or sea-calves makes the thunder sheer off insomuch that it never strikes them. Since at the sight of a ram, mad elephants recover their former senses. Since mad bulls coming near wild fig-trees, called caprifici, grow tame, and will not budge a foot, as if they had the cramp. Since ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... Successful Migrant much information is given us of individuals who succeeded by sheer grit in making their way to freedom, and in some cases in building neat fortunes for themselves and their families. The charge that the Negro appears to be naturally migratory, an assertion which comes to ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... in seeing an envelop of one's own after it has gone through the post. It looks as if it had gone through so much. But this was the first time I had ever seen an envelop of mine eating its heart out in bondage on a letter-board. This was outrageous. This was hardly to be believed. Sheer kindness had impelled me to write to "A. V. Laider, Esq.," and this was the result! I hadn't minded receiving no answer. Only now, indeed, did I remember that I hadn't received one. In multitudinous London the memory of A. ...
— A. V. Laider • Max Beerbohm
... and "Siegfried's Death" at the end of 1858, paying in each instance the honorarium on the delivery of the manuscript. They also bind themselves to publish the whole in 1859, the year of the performance. I have been led to this by sheer despair; the Hartels are to supply me with means for the purchase of a piece of ground according to my fancy. If we agree, which must be decided soon, I shall have to send them, in the first instance, my two scores, so as to place them in possession of the material for their future publication. ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... Grant's recent movements, except it be those of Sherman. Each is wriggling about like a snake in the presence of an ichneumon. They both work round and round, now on one flank and then on the other, and on each move meet the unwinking eye of the enemy, ready for his spring and bite. In sheer despair Grant and Sherman must do something at last. As to shelling! Will they learn from history? Then they will know that they cannot shell an army provided with as powerful artillery as their own out of a position.... The Northerners have, indeed, ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... so, to be able to get the horses over the mountains at this spot. Upon arriving at the top of the slope, I was, however, undeceived upon that score, for we found the high mount, for which we were steering, completely separated from us by a yawning chasm, which lay, under an almost sheer precipice, at our feet. The high mountain beyond, near the crown, was girt around by a solid wall of rock, fifty or sixty feet in height, from the edge of which the summit rose. It was quite unapproachable, except, perhaps, in one place, ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... just here was like a trough, and the reef was very near, scarcely a quarter of a mile from the shore. The water did not shelve, it went down sheer fifty fathoms or more, and one could fish from the bank just as from a pier head. He had brought some food with him, and he placed it under a tree whilst he prepared his line, which had a lump of coral for a sinker. ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... at the rate she was now progressing she would only run from one little suggestion to another, and that he, either wilfully or in sheer simplicity, would take such suggestions simply as jokes; and she was aware that she lacked the skill to bring the conversation round gradually to the point which she was bound to reach. She must make another ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... soon as they found themselves in the street, "I am going to take a cab and go straight back to the factory. What can we do here until dinnertime? A sheer waste of time, kicking our heels about, and I am afraid our worthy merchant is like the well-known goat, neither good for milk nor ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... Piper's face—it was so near—and then he was standing up, shaking all over, but free and a man ready to explain a number of very painful things to Paris as soon as he caught him. He took one step toward the dining-room, sheer rage tugging at his body as high wind tugs at a bough. Now that woman was out of ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... and had prepared these articles for removal, when a sudden revolution occasioned the disarming of his Indian laborers, who for some time had served for a protection, and all further operations were suspended, as longer residence in that exposed region without arms was sheer madness. It was at that time that Dr. Le Plongeon wrote the following Memorial to the Mexican President, Senor Don Sebastian Lerdo de Tejada, which is given nearly entire, as it makes a statement ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... To him the Factor was at first physically unable to utter a syllable. Then finally he managed to ejaculate the name of his bowsman with such violence of gesture that the frightened servant comprehended by sheer force of terror and ran out ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... panting from her exertion into the driver's seat and taken the wheel, in sheer excess of boyish excitement he leaned over and ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Tolhurst, whom Joanna, before setting out for market, had commissioned to "see as she went." Not that Joanna could really bring herself to believe that Ellen was truthful in saying she did not care about the show, but she thought it possible that sheer ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... the quarter-deck of H.M.S. Dauntless as she lay at anchor within the reef. It was at Borabora, one of the Society Islands, and the time forty years ago. The wonderful old rock, rising sheer naked and frowning from the bluest water in the world, seemed to those at its foot as though it were holding up the very sky itself. Precipice upon precipice dizzily scaled the basaltic heights, ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... keep it up too protractedly. It's the most engaging piece of flattery I've come across for a month of Sundays. Only you needn't worry in this particular instance, dear man, I give you my word you needn't. It's a sheer waste of feeling. For Fallowfeild's always been perfectly decent with me. I know people think him an awfully risky lot, but they're noodles. He's racketed in his day—of course he has. But if he'd been more of a hypocrite, people would have talked ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... deep valley, with mountains rising sheer up on every side, and nothing to be seen among the rocks but those terrible ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... hear what erst he longed To hear—some voice to break the hush; but bathes Both hands with childish laughter in the gold, And lets it trickle through his fevered palms, And begins counting half a hundred times And loses count each time for sheer delight And wonder in it; meantime, if he knew, Passing the cave-mouth, far away, beyond The still lagoon, the coral reef, the foam And the white fluttering chatter of the birds, A sail that might have saved him comes and goes Unseen across the blue Pacific sea. So Drake, too, played with ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... lovers 'tis, not thou, that wane and waste away? Art thou a god, that thou, indeed, by favouring whom thou wilt And slighting others, canst at once bring back to life and slay? GCod moulded beauty from thy form and eke perfumed the breeze With the sheer sweetness of the scent that cleaves to thee alway. None of the people of this world, an angel sure thou art, Whom thy Creator hath sent ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous
... Marius among the ruins of Carthage, was waiting for the two lodgers that yet remained to her, and bemoaning her lot with the sympathetic Sylvie. Tasso's lamentations as recorded in Byron's poem are undoubtedly eloquent, but for sheer force of truth they fall far short of the widow's cry from ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... off their orders till the morning of the paper going to press, from sheer inattention. On that busy morning, auctioneers' clerks rush in with columns of auction sales of cattle, sheep, horses, hay, or standing crops (according to the season of the year), and every species of farm produce. After them come the solicitors' clerks, with equally ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... and on his course. The enemy's vessels were soon sunk, their crews hurled into the waves. On went the fleet, sweeping over the broad waters which lay between Zoeterwoude and Zwieten. As they approached some shallows, which led into the great mere, the Zealanders dashed into the sea, and with sheer strength shouldered every vessel through. Two obstacles lay still in their path—the forts of Zoeterwoude and Lammen, distant from the city five hundred and two hundred and fifty yards respectively. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... short the painful interview, he had seized the unfortunate man at an unguarded moment from behind, and strangled him; then, fearing that his dastardly work was not fully accomplished, he had shot twice at the already dead body, missing it both times from sheer nervous excitement. The murderer then must have emptied his victim's pockets, and, finding the key of the garden, thought that it would be a safe way of evading capture by cutting across the squares, under the tunnel, and so through ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... view. "These London men," said the philosopher, "are not to be tri fled with by louts. They ha ve got Frank by the scruff of the neck—he can't wriggle himself free—and he makes a merit of yielding to sheer necessity." ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... carriers, even though she were a common scold. There she was, portentous as the British Female portrayed by Thackeray. Backed by apparently abundant means and obviously indomitable "gall," she counted on carrying all before her by sheer force of her powers of self-assertion and the name of the Patriotic Daughters of America. But the commanding general was the most impassive of men, gifted with a keen though little suspected sense of humor, and no little judgment in estimating motive and character. He actually enjoyed ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... to the so-called "piety" founded upon the scrupulous observance of the law, which had become a very Upas tree of self-complacency. Mankind is already encompassed by so many and such terrible evils, that it would be sheer madness to turn religion into a means of ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... from the companionship of other children, Sara's whole affections had centred round her mother, and she had never forgotten the sheer, desolating anguish of that moment when the dreadful, unresponsive silence of the sheeted figure, lying in the shabby little bedroom they had shared together, brought home to her ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... regret this second marriage, this second leap in the dark? No, she could not honestly pretend that she did; yet it had its sufficiently sinister side, its occasional admixture of sheer horror. But this was only when the mysteries which encompassed her happened to prey upon nerves unstrung by some outwardly exciting cause; it was then she would have given back all that he had ever given her to pierce the veil of her husband's past. Here, however, the impulse ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... high enough, but their relation all too tender to the gross people about them. Men cannot afford to live together on their merits, and they adjust themselves by their demerits,—by their love of gossip, or sheer tolerance and animal good-nature. They untune and dissipate ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... nature, in which was great kindliness; and before she knew Pepe there was some little chance, perhaps, that in sheer pity of his forlornness she might have given Pedro her love. This, of course, showed how weak and how thoughtless Pancha was; how ignorant of the feelings of society; how careless of the good opinion of the world. ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... her motive. Here was no literary lady with all the recognised adjuncts except the literature. She did not write in order that she might talk of having written. She did not talk in such flowing periods and with such overbearing wisdom that insincere friends in sheer weariness were called upon to suggest that ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... herded or working in a temperature of about 140 deg.. Nobody could complain of such an ordeal if we'd been defending Lucknow or attacking Shaiba, but to put such a strain on the men's health—newly arrived and with no pads or glasses or shades—gratuitously and merely by dint of sheer hard muddling—is infuriating to me and criminal in the authorities—a series of scatter-brained nincompoops about fit to look after a ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... town and themselves to his apostolic clemency. On the 11th of November, S. Martin's day, Giuliano della Rovere made his triumphal entry into Bologna, having restored two wealthy provinces to the states of the Church by a stroke of sheer audacity, unparalleled in the history of any previous pontiff. Ten days afterwards we find him again renewing negotiations with the Signory for the ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... clean-shaven, eh? Not a hair on my chin? Do you know why? Well, I'll tell you! You see I get mad easy as hell; and when there's nobody to pick on, I pull my hair until my temper passes. If I hadn't pulled my beard hair by hair, I'd have died a long time ago from sheer anger!" ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... want of decision! All I can do now, is to hurry my work; but where shall I find the historical documents I still need? I am seriously anxious to save these ruins. There is here a rare landscape, a valuable picture, which it would be sheer vandalism ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... at the post-office she turned homeward, feeling like singing from sheer happiness. Then she looked down at her pink ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... of the world, worldly; but I am a woman, womanly,—though I may not care to be thought it. And, therefore, though what you say is, regarded in a worldly point of view, sheer nonsense, regarded in a womanly point of view, it is logically sound. But still you cannot know Lilian as I do. Your nature and hers are in strong contrast. I do not think she is a safe wife for you. The purest, the most innocent creature ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... trap-baits, and at the same time avoiding the traps set for him. He is wonderfully expert in springing steel traps for the bait or prey there is in them, without getting caught himself. He will follow up a trap line for miles, springing all traps and devouring all baits as he goes. Sometimes in sheer wantonness he will throw a trap into a river, and again he will bury a trap in deep snow. Dead martens in traps are savagely torn from them. Those that can not be eaten on the spot are carried off and skilfully cached under two or ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... board, and a hundred and sixty European soldiers. The latter worked with the energy of despair at their task of clearing the deck, in spite of the twofold danger of being burnt and stunned by the hot falling stones. While we were engraved in this struggle, and enveloped in the sheer blackness of a veritable hell, a new and terrible danger came upon us. This was the approach of the tidal wave caused by the final eruption, which occurred about 12.30 to 1 p.m. The wave reached us at 2 p.m. or thereabouts, and made the ship tumble like a sea-saw. Sometimes ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... certainty that the Teutonic Powers would go on fighting, under the lash of Prussia, sacrificing hundreds of thousands of loyal German and Austrian boys, plunge countless more families into hopeless grief, doom all the children in the land to sheer ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... pointed out that it was all sheer frontal fighting, that the Germans had been twelve months trying frontal attacks against Warsaw on a comparatively narrow front and in vain. What chance had they, he added, "of success by dividing their forces against the united strength of Russia." This sort of argument is typical ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... certain. In South Italy Hannibal had either detached Rome's allies from her, or had impoverished them by the ravages of his army. If Hasdrubal could have done the same in Upper Italy; if Etruria, Umbria, and Northern Latium had either revolted or been laid waste, Rome must have sunk beneath sheer starvation; for the hostile or desolated territory would have yielded no supplies of corn for her population; and money, to purchase it from abroad, there was none. Instant victory was a matter of life and death. Three of her six armies were ordered to the north, but the first of ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... a great submarine mountain chain that is believed at one time to have belonged to the continent of North America. The outside edge of it is in the welter of the shoreless Atlantic, and from this edge there is a sheer drop into almost unsounded depths. These depths have got the name of the Whale Hole, and many a fishing skipper has dropped his anchor into this abyss and earned the laughter of his crew when he ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... paint quality, beautiful surfaces, or handling, but with books about the philosophy of the painter, his "weltanschauung," his ethics; you all the while wondering why he uses such muddy paints, why he is blind to the loveliness of atmosphere, pure colours, and sheer pictorial quality. Style and quality are, I believe, suspected in Germany as evidences of superficiality, of a desire to add ornament where plain speech should suffice. Like German prose and German singing—oh, ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... necessary to salvation—nothing more natural, if such a method is indispensable; for no effort, no trouble, ought to be spared for so exalted an aim. But if the only point is the establishment of one opinion in the place of another, then the travelling expenses of even one single Infallible are sheer waste. If you want to spare the two most valuable things on earth, time and money, make all haste to write to Rome, in order to procure thence a lawful decision which shall declare the unlawful doubt. Nothing more is ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... her behind, and she could see their very forms no more. Then she cried out in agony, and still, with that power of self-excitement, which her sex possess in an eminent degree, she struggled on and on, beyond her strength till, at last, she fell down from sheer exhaustion, and the snow fell ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... discretion he might with undoubted propriety communicate to Congress. But he had apparently failed to satisfy his own conscience in thus summarily reasoning the executive and governmental power of a young, compact, vigorous, and thoroughly organized nation of thirty millions of people into sheer nothingness and impotence. How supremely absurd was the whole national panoply of commerce, credit, coinage, treaty power, judiciary, taxation, militia, army and navy, and Federal fag, if, through the mere joint of a defective law, the hollow reed of ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... branch of some tree in the orchard, and pore over the pages of her beloved "Little Women," or some other of her favourites. Reading was the sole sitting-down occupation that Cricket did not think was intolerably stupid, and a sheer waste of time. Fortunately, she always had boundless resources of amusement within herself, and she would not have been lonely on ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... antonishing success. "He said that at the beginning of his first great battle he had carefully studied the characteristic differences of each army, in order that he might prevent his little band from being overborne by sheer force of numbers. The chief difference which he noted was that almost all the Roman (Imperialist) soldiers and their Hunnish allies were good Hippo-toxotai, while the Goths had none of them practised the art ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... boulders or across fallen stones, till they reached a small beach of firm white sand, on whose even floor the waves were rolling in and curling over magnificently. It was a curious place, Eustace thought, rather dreary than beautiful. On either side rose black cliffs, towering sheer into the air, and shutting out overhead all but a narrow cleft of murky sky. Around, the sea dashed itself in angry white foam against broken stacks and tiny weed-clad skerries. At the end of the first point a solitary islet, just separated from the mainland by a channel of seething water, ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... winters, the sleepless nights, the endless walks in search of work, the desperate rage experienced at feeling so small, so lost, and unknown in the immense crowd that pushes, hustles, upsets, and crushes. And yet all alone, without patronage or money, he had managed to rise. By sheer talent, sir! And his head thrown back, and eyes half-shut, the worthy man kept repeating out loud to himself: "By sheer talent. Nothing ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... land Men called him Mulciber; and how he fell From heaven, they fabled, thrown by angry Jove Sheer o'er the crystal battlements; from morn To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, A Summer's day; and with the setting sun Dropt from the Zenith like a falling star, On ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... Von Barwig laughed from sheer joy. Time! to some one who came from her! He could only nod in acquiescence and wait for the young ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... to get the right notes, so he was forcibly removed, and Dennison installed in his place. "The Gondoliers" and the noise began again, while Ward, protesting that it was time we went away, was disregarded entirely. From sheer distaste for punch and only a very limited taste for wine I had not been seeking my enjoyment in drinking, but I had smoked far more than was good for me, and my head felt as large as a pumpkin. It occurred to me, ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... hide; I do want some one to play with so much!" And out jumped a great turbot with his ugly eyes and mouth all awry, and flopped away along the bottom, knocking poor Tom over. And he sat down at the bottom of the sea, and cried salt tears from sheer disappointment. ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... Great is notable for the removal of serious checks upon the power of the tsar and the definitive establishment of that form of absolutism which in Russia is called "autocracy." By sheer ability and will-power, the tsar was qualified to play the role of divine-right monarch, and his observation of the centralized government of Louis XIV, as well as the appreciation of his country's needs, convinced him that that ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... rowers, before and abaft the middle compartment, while the steersman with his long oar thrust behind was to sit on the deck of the after-cabin, all the decks being flush with the gunwale, except that of the forward cabin the deck of which was carried back in a straighter line than the sheer of the boat and thus formed a nose to help throw off the waves. It was believed that when the hatches were firmly in place and the canvases drawn taut over the decks, even if a boat turned over, as was expected sometimes ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... were within gunshot. Then he fixed his eye on one of the flock that seemed plump and fat. The long barrel of the gun was quickly raised, the geese discovered their mistake, and the whole flock were thrown into wild confusion as they attempted to sheer off; but it was too late. Smoke and fire burst from the bush, and an enormous grey goose fell with a heavy crash ...
— Away in the Wilderness • R.M. Ballantyne
... is never so rife as in communities where the demagog and the agitator bear full sway, because in such communities all moral bands become loosened, and hysteria and sensationalism replace the spirit of sound judgment and fair dealing as between man and man. In sheer revolt against the squalid anarchy thus produced men are sure in the end to turn toward any leader who can restore order, and then their relief at being free from the intolerable burdens of class hatred, violence, and demagogy is such that they can not for some time be aroused to indignation ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... pages in a body; and, finally, the imperial horse-guard (/Hatschiergarde/) itself, in black velvet frocks (/Fluegelroeck/), with all the seams edged with gold, under which were red coats and leather-colored camisoles, likewise richly decked with gold. One scarcely recovered one's self from sheer seeing, pointing, and showing, so that the scarcely less splendidly clad body- guards of the electors were barely looked at; and we should, perhaps, have withdrawn from the windows, if we had not wished to take a view of our own magistracy, who closed the procession in ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... against the sheer yellow stone facing at the base of Lost Chief range, known incorrectly as the Yellow Canyon. The house of half a dozen rooms was the most picturesque cabin in the valley, for Grandfather Rodman had built the roof with an overhang, giving the house ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... to twist the reality into caricature or monstrosity, nay, perhaps without much psychologic analysis to tell him the exact meaning of what he is painting, going straight to the point, and utterly ruthless from sheer absence of all alternative of doing otherwise than he does. There is nothing more cruelly realistic in the world, cruel not only to the base originals but to the feelings of the spectator, than the harmony of villainies, of various combinations of black and hog-like ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... of a girl of the Michigan woods; a buoyant, lovable type of the self-reliant American. Her philosophy is one of love and kindness towards all things; her hope is never dimmed. And by the sheer beauty of her soul, and the purity of her vision, she wins from barren and unpromising surroundings those rewards of ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... scrap-basket. I had got as far in answer as "Dear John"—when these visions of the past interrupted. I am not soft-hearted. I am crabbed and prejudiced and critical, and I dislike irregularity. Above all I am thoroughly selfish. But the sum of that is short of being brutal. Only sheer brutality could repel the lad's note and request. My answer went ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... being a timbered slope, this mountain was a sheer precipice of rock that rose abruptly a thousand feet in air. Its rugged sides were seamed and scarred. Here and there a projecting ledge offered 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 ...
— 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
... sixteen of them when, like so many hunted rabbits, they were first securely trapped among the frowning rocks, and forced relentlessly backward from off the narrow trail until the precipitous canyon walls finally halted their disorganized flight, and from sheer necessity compelled a rally in hopeless battle. Sixteen,—ten infantrymen from old Fort Bethune, under command of Syd. Wyman, a gray-headed sergeant of thirty years' continuous service in the regulars, two cow-punchers from the "X L" ranch, a stranger who had joined ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... lighter, leaner, more finely drawn. Lacking the impression of pure force, of sheer power, he seemed to express the capacity for larger endurance, of better staying qualities, of greater tensile strength. He was cast in another mould, a weapon of a different pattern. Farwell might be compared to a battle-axe; ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... our soldiers have made any attack on the life or property of a single Belgian citizen without being forced to it by sheer necessity.... ...
— Their Crimes • Various
... moved an old wooden chest against it, which I had found under the bed. To remove this chest (my blood ran cold as I thought of what its contents might be!) without making some disturbance was impossible; and, moreover, to think of escaping through the house, now barred up for the night, was sheer insanity. Only one chance was left me—the window. I stole to it ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... contact she exposes the more likely she is to slip into victory; the more she assumes, and the less she argues, the slighter the hold she gives her opponents. She is either perfectly good-humored or blankly innocent; she either smiles you into indulgence or wearies you into compliance by the sheer hopelessness of making any impression on her. She may, indeed, if of the very vociferous and shrill-tongued kind, burst out into such a noisy demonstration that you are glad to escape from her, no matter what spoils you leave on her hands; just as ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... poured itself forth in writing so copiously that his revision was chiefly devoted to reducing the over-abundance. He never shrank from any of the drudgery of preparation, but I think his own part of the work was sheer pleasure to him." ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... as high as ever. As for my Lord Durrisdeer, he was sunk in parental partiality; it was not so much love, which should be an active quality, as an apathy and torpor of his other powers; and forgiveness (so to misapply a noble word) flowed from him in sheer weakness, like the tears of senility. Mrs. Henry's was a different case; and Heaven alone knows what he found to say to her, or how he persuaded her from her contempt. It is one of the worst things of sentiment, that the voice grows to be ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... love has a clearer eye, Hence from the arms of love you go not forth to die. There, where the broken mountain drops sheer into the glen, There shall you find a hold from the boldest hunter of men; There, in the deep recess, where the sun falls only at noon, And only once in the night enters the light of the moon, Nor ever a sound but of birds, or the rain when it falls with a shout; ...
— Ballads • Robert Louis Stevenson
... risen from the sofa, and was still standing with it ready in his hand. He was even now half-minded to escape; and the name of Lily Dale in Miss Demolines' mouth was so distasteful to him that he would have done so,—he would have gone in sheer disgust, had she not stood in his way, so that he could not escape without moving her, or going round behind the sofa. She did not stir to make way for him, and it may be that she understood that he was her prisoner, in spite of her late command to him to go. It may be, also, that she understood ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... satisfaction. Little danger, I think, of my dying from ennui in the next twelve months. Head and hands will both be pretty well occupied for that period, if not longer. There is too much vitality about me for the life of a drone. I was growing restless and unhappy from sheer idleness and want of purpose. How does our dear Fanny seem? I feel no little concern about her. Mr. Lyon makes no direct proposition for her hand, but it is evidently his purpose to do so. I wish I knew him better, and that I had, just now, a freer mind to consider the subject. Weigh it well ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... and thought he had a right to make whiskey out of it—he had no other means of livelihood. Breakers of God's laws; of man's; victims of tricks and legal technicalities, of torturing want and of headlong passion, and of sheer court errors or of perjured testimony—here they were, all on the same footing, no discriminations made! To what end? So that they might be punished and repent and go forth better men and useful workers, ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... under way. It takes a little time to get things into proper shape, but once it is going, the work is very absorbing and sheer delight. You were talking of going abroad again. Are you ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... well-to-do are spread broad on the records. The still continuing scandals of partitioning refereeships among the family relatives of judges will soon be stopped and the shame and scandal of damage suits or of libel suits, without cause, maintained by procured and false testimony and conducted on sheer speculation, will be brought to an end. The law is full of rare crockery, but it is also replete with crockery that ought to be smashed. Much bad crockery in it has been smashed and much more will be, if necessary, by the press, which is itself not without ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... away his last defences, and he caught her in his arms; straining her to him, and kissing her almost roughly on lips and eyes and throat. She submitted at first, in sheer amazement and half-frightened joy at having roused him thus. Then she tried to free herself; but he held ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... the day after they elect me. Call it sheer wounded vanity—anything you like! The name makes no difference. I know only that I will have the editorship for a day—and all for the worthless pleasure of pitching it in their faces." He looked past ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... dear Miss Smith, your work is interesting and your faith—marvellous; but, frankly, I cannot make myself believe in it. You are trying to treat these funny little monkeys just as you would your own children—or even mine. It's quite heroic, of course, but it's sheer madness, and I do not feel I ought to encourage it. I would not mind a thousand or so to train a good cook for the Cresswells, or a clean and faithful maid for myself—for Helene has faults—or indeed deft and tractable laboring-folk ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... father, the slave who, from fear of the lash, bears trials and burdens placed upon him by the master, the hireling who, from desire for the wages, bears trials and burdens, and the stoic who, from sheer force of will, or from a cold sense of duty, bears trials and burdens, because he must,—are developing altogether different characters. Even so, the child of God, redeemed and adopted, who, from love, bears the trials and burdens of life, the unredeemed one who, from fear ...
— God's Plan with Men • T. T. (Thomas Theodore) Martin
... left, eagerly scanning the precipice on both sides. On each side of them towered the black cliffs, like prison walls, frowning and forbidding. No ledge of any size appeared on either; no terrace, no sloping ravine, that might afford them a path out of that dark valley. The cliffs, sheer and smooth, presented no hold for the human foot. The eagles, and other birds that screamed over their heads, ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... seek and obtain such loans I can prove to you at the present moment, in one instance at least, for it was through me the affair was negotiated. I think he fully realized his enormous error, but refused to admit it even to himself, and strove by sheer force of will-power to carry a hopeless ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... you where needed: August the Strong's Hunting-Lodge (JAGDHUTTE) is here (August went thither in a grand way, 1708, with his Wife); Lodge still extant, by the side of a wood;—Lilienstein towering huge and sheer, solitary, grand, like some colossal Pillar of the Cyclops, from this round Pediment of Country which you have been climbing; tops of Lilienstein plumed everywhere with fir and birch, Pediment also very green and woody. August ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... pirouetting on my heels to achieve the various curves, up comes a woman from the village and stares at me. Oh, how she stares at me, what a look she gives me! At the foot of the cross! Acting in such a silly way! People talked about it. It was sheer witchcraft. Had I not dug up a dead body, only a few days before? Yes, I had been to a prehistoric burial-place, I had taken from it a pair of venerable, well-developed tibias, a set of funerary vessels ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... stern words and forbidding gestures made no impression whatever on the old woman, and she resolutely continued to climb the stairs, bent on carrying out her son's orders. Upon this some of the courtiers seized her by the arms, and held her back by sheer force, at which she set up such a yell that the King himself heard it, and stepped out on to the balcony to see what was the matter. When he beheld the old woman flinging her arms wildly about, and heard her scream that ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Various
... singularly, the statement was true. Sir Brian had won his political position by sheer brilliancy. He was utterly unreliable and totally indifferent to that code of social obligations which ordinarily binds his class. He held his place by force of intellect, and it was said of him that had he possessed the faintest conception of his duties toward his fellow ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... the hospitals where diseased and aged people were kindly cared for by them. She said they were active in the societies for the prevention of cruelty to children and to animals. They fed armies of tramps out of sheer pity; even the debauched drunkard was the object of their tenderest care and their earnest prayers. They held out a friendly hand to the prisoners in the jails and sent them flowers and Bibles; they pitied and cheered the outcast with kind words. They offered themselves ...
— Dickey Downy - The Autobiography of a Bird • Virginia Sharpe Patterson
... digest it and stay what they are; you've got to be democratic, to some extent, to understand the idea. What keeps us obeying laws we ourselves make? What keeps us obeying laws that make things inconvenient for us? Sheer self-interest, of course—but try to make a Tr'en ...
— Lost in Translation • Larry M. Harris
... thing—to work, not with the natural easy absorption in a well-loved calling, but with faculties through sheer force of will concentrated on tasks set by others, in which he had no heart; to shut out of mind and heart, while he was working, all other facts of his life. It is a good thing for a man ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... dream," said he; "but 'twas droll enough altogether. I fancied that I was the lieutenant over there: and yet the thing was not very much to my taste after all. I missed my good old mother and the dear little ones; who almost tear me to pieces for sheer love." ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... year many tribes have shown, in a degree greater than ever before, an appreciation of the necessity of work. This changed attitude is in part due to the policy recently pursued of reducing the amount of subsistence to the Indians, and thus forcing them, through sheer necessity, to work for a livelihood. The policy, though severe, is a useful one, but it is to be exercised only with judgment and with a full understanding of the conditions which exist in each community for which it is intended. On or near the Indian reservations there is usually ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... to Purcell is enormous. His way of hurling great masses of choral tone at his hearers is derived from Purcell; and so is the rhetorical plan of many of his choruses. But in Purcell, despite his sheer strength, we never fail to get the characteristic Purcellian touch, the little unexpected inflexion, or bit of coloured harmony that reminds that this is the music of the open air, not of the study, that does more than this, that actually floods you in a moment with a ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... aunt is only half as anxious to see you again, my love, as I am to see my son, I must forgive her for taking you away from us." The words came from me without premeditation. It was not calculation this time, but sheer instinct that impelled me to test her in this way, once more, by a direct reference to George. She was so close to me that I felt her breath quiver on my cheek. Her eyes had been fixed on my face a moment before, but they ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... came again. There was no chance ultimately, he knew that; it was only the elemental within him that rose in fierce revolt at the thought of tame submission, that bade him sell his life as dearly as he could. Panting, gasping for breath, dragging them by sheer strength as they clung to him, he got his back to the wall, fighting with the savage fury and ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... unlucky children credit. For a week or more all three of them—Lucien, Berenice, and the invalid—were obliged to live on the various ingenious preparations sold by the pork-butcher; the inflammatory diet was little suited to the sick girl, and Coralie grew worse. Sheer want compelled Lucien to ask Lousteau for a return of the loan of a thousand francs lost at play by the friend who had deserted him in his hour of need. Perhaps, amid all his troubles, this step cost him ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... foraged for food in the kitchen. He returned with the shank of a ham and a loaf of bread. His fear was ill-disguised. The presence of the outlaw, if discovered, would bring him trouble; and Doble was so unruly he might out of sheer ennui or bravado let it ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... said King Philip. "Do you suppose that any rambling Don is going to take up my time when by a sheer accident his verbosity has started me on a true scent? Out, Aristotle, out! Or, stay, take this note with you to the Captain of the Guard"—and King Philip hastily scribbled upon a parchment an order for the immediate execution of the whole of the inhabitants of Euboea, saving ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... stretched above him; and before him lay the two abysses full of stars, for they cut their way through the whole Earth and revealed the under sky; and threading its course between them went the way, and it sloped upward and its sides were sheer. And beyond the abysses, where the way led up to the farther chambers of the fortress, Leothric heard the musicians playing their magical tune. So he stepped on to the way, which was scarcely a stride in width, ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... for him to exhort her to patience. It ate already into her soul as iron bands eat into flesh. The greater part of her life was now spent in practising it. And for sheer loathing of it, she turned over, on waking, and kept her eyes closed, in an attempt to prolong the night. For the day stretched empty before her; the hours passed, one by one, like grey-veiled ghosts. Yet not ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... among all the older occupants. The dock-masters, whose authority is declared by tin signs worn conspicuously over their hats, mount the poops and forecastles of the various vessels, and hail the surrounding strangers in all directions:—"Highlander ahoy! Cast off your bowline, and sheer alongside the Neptune!"—"Neptune ahoy! get out a stern-line, and sheer alongside the Trident!"—"Trident ahoy! get out a bowline, and drop astern of the Undaunted!" And so it runs round like a shock of electricity; touch one, and you touch all. ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... too good," Winfree panted. "Cover yourself—I might hurt you out of sheer clumsiness." His chin and throat were covered with blood, now; blood enough to satisfy the most indignant consumer. The moment the measure was set again, Winfree lunged, trying to slip his blade beneath MacHenery's ...
— The Great Potlatch Riots • Allen Kim Lang
... blankets near the clouds. In this melting season there came to them above the slow throb of the ship's engines the liquid music of innumerable cascades, and from a mountain that seemed to float almost directly over their heads fell a stream of water a sheer thousand feet to the sea, smoking and twisting in the sunshine like a living thing at play. And then a miracle happened which even Alan wondered at, for the ship seemed to stand still and the mountain ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... purpose of cleansing it. Therefore, have no fear from the use of proper syringe points; the jet of water will not hurt the mucous membrane. My professional brethren at least ought to know that the idea of such harm is sheer nonsense. ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... command over the ship, and as I had not men sufficient to fight all the guns, I ran them all over on one side, in order to make the first broadside as formidable as possible. I hoped thus to sink or disable our antagonist, or to make her sheer off. Should she, however, venture to board, I had no fear, as I felt certain that my men would not fear to encounter twice their number. They were full of fight, and the way they went about their preparations gave me every confidence that we should succeed. The brig approached us with ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... singular strains. We miss in them altogether that captivating simplicity which the young Goethe, and later the young Heine, caught from the songs of the people. Schiller is always in pursuit of the intense, the extraordinary, the ecstatic, and sometimes fails to impress through sheer superabundance of the impressive. His imagination wanders between a wild sensuality,—so lubricious in its suggestions, now and then, as to occasion gossip to the effect that he had become a libertine,—and ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... passionate being in the whole world. What is more, he throws money away as if it were dust. The day on which he gave the thrashing with blows like falling leaves and flowing water, he dragged (lit. pull alive, drag dead) Ying Lien away more dead than alive, by sheer force, and no one, even up to this date, is aware whether she be among the dead or the living. This young Feng had a spell of empty happiness; for (not only) was his wish not fulfilled, but on the contrary he spent money ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... of the week, people were compelled to be a little more quiet, from sheer exhaustion, but on New Year's Day, when there was a grand dinner at Rich Bar, the excitement broke out, if possible, worse than ever. The same scenes, in a more or less aggravated form, in proportion as the strength ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... unions, especially on the part of in-coming Whites desiring to strengthen their position and to increase their influence in [40] the land of their adoption by means of advantageous Creole marriages. Love, too, sheer uncalculating love, impelled not a few Whites to enter the hymeneal state with the dusky captivators of their affections. When rich, the white planter not seldom paid for such gratification of his laudable ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... did she see, except a few here and there upon the ground, which had been plucked too close to their poor heads to be held in anybody's hands. These showed the way, however, and Ida picked them up in sheer pity and carried them ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... services of persons, or even a portion of them, is called "buying" those persons. The objector, at the outset, assumes that servants were bought of third persons; and thence infers that they were articles of property. This is sheer assumption. Not a single instance is recorded, of a servant being sold by any one but himself; not a case, either under the patriarchal, or the Mosaic systems, in which a master sold his servant. That the servants who were "bought" sold themselves, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... within himself during this nonsense. He had been feeling an intense hatred of the two men, and was looking as gloomy as deep water. "All acting, sheer acting," he thought, and then he told himself that Glory was only worthy of his contempt. What could attract her in the society of such men? Only their wealth, and their social station. Their intellectual and moral atmosphere ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... early or more recent conquest, and sometimes upon a sort of wholesale squatter-sovereignty title whereby a whole tribe, in the course of a sudden and perhaps forced migration, would settle down upon an unoccupied portion of the territory of some less numerous tribe, and by sheer ...
— Cessions of Land by Indian Tribes to the United States: Illustrated by Those in the State of Indiana • C. C. Royce
... Gordon this term was sheer joy. He loved cricket passionately—last season at his preparatory school he had headed the batting averages, and kept wicket with a certain measure of success. As a bat he was reckless in the extreme; time after time he flung ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... seen, and the most curious. It was just wide enough to admit the passage of a sleigh perhaps; the crumbling and dilapidated old houses, which seemed deserted, were connected overhead by a succession of wooden bridges, and those on my left were built into the solid rock, which rose sheer overhead. ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... from 1720 to 1742 by sheer corruption—there was no other way open to him. He laughed openly at all talk of honesty and purity, and his influence lowered the whole tone of public life.[68] But he kept in touch with the middle classes, was honest personally, ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... perpetual parliaments, his appeals to them and to the country at large for counsel and aid, seemed to promise a ruler who was absolutely one at heart with the people he ruled. But when once Edward passed from sheer carelessness and gratification at the new source of wealth which the Parliament opened to a sense of what its power really was becoming, he showed himself as jealous of freedom as any king that had gone before him. He sold his assent to its demands for heavy subsidies, and when he had ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... position taken by Kenkenes when he discovered it. A wall built between it and the north would bar the sand and form a nook, wholly closed on two sides and partly closed at each end by stones. All this made itself plain to the mind of the young sculptor at once. With a laugh of sheer content, he turned to retrace his ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... were accustomed to at the South; and about my old June, who had once been an acquaintance of hers. Smiling at me the while, between the thrusts of her curiosity, and over my answers, as if for sheer pleasure she could not keep grave. The other faces were as interested and as gracious. There was Pete, tall and very black, and very grave, as Darry was also. There was Jem, full of life and waggishness, ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... a leer to the remaining features. As the boy looked at it he laughed suddenly, and his voice startled him amid the droning of bees. Then he sat up and glanced at his brier-scratched feet stretched upon the slab, and laughed again for the sheer joy ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... fought sleep desperately with all the limited resources at his command. In spite of his determination to keep his eyes open at any cost, his lids drooped and lifted, drooped and lifted, drooped and were dragged open by sheer will-power. Each time it was more difficult. Just as the water laps inexorably at length over the face of an exhausted swimmer, so these waves of sleep, smothering, clutching, dulled his senses and strove to wrap him in their soft, ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... so received all his fellows; and they thought it so sweet that it was marvellous to tell. Then said he to Galahad: Son, wottest thou what I hold betwixt my hands? Nay, said he, but if ye will tell me. This is, said he, the holy dish wherein I ate the lamb on Sheer-Thursday. And now hast thou seen that thou most desired to see, but yet hast thou not seen it so openly as thou shalt see it in the city of Sarras in the spiritual place. Therefore thou must go hence and bear with thee this Holy Vessel; for this night it shall depart from the realm ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume II (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... and sprang clear of the net. The silvery flash, the sudden splash, startled the gods, so that they almost dropped the net; but it told them what they wanted to know—Loki WAS in the stream. Turning, they dragged the net down the stream, driving Loki nearer and nearer to the sheer drop of the waterfall, down which he dared not plunge. Desperate, he made another leap, and again he almost escaped; but Thor's quick eyes saw him, Thor's strong, iron-gloved hand gripped him. The great salmon struggled, but ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... does it care to display its powers where they would be easily verifiable as well as useful that practical breeders ignore it. So slight is its independent power that it seems to allow natural selection or sexual selection or artificial selection to modify organisms in sheer defiance of its utmost opposition, just as readily as they modify organisms in other directions with its utmost help. If it partially perpetuates and extends the pecked-out indentations in the motmot's tail feathers, it on the other hand fails to transmit the slightest ...
— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball
... nightmare, if it is to assume paternal charge of all the tens or hundreds of thousands of children whose parents cannot or will not provide adequately for them and is to guarantee to all such children as much education as they are capable of receiving, and a really fair start in life: then in sheer self-preservation the community must insist on, and rigidly enforce, its absolute claim to secure that no degeneracy or inheritable congenital defects shall persist beyond the present generation of ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... little book of directions, has also been published by the same lady, and is perhaps a still greater boon to every nursery; for this is the age when many a child's temper is ruined, and the inclination of the twig wrongly bent, through sheer want of resource and idea, on the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... regretfully. "Of course it's a mercy the poor child was brought back safe; and never shall I forget what we suffered unknowing. But talking of beds brings back that boot to me, and it's no use telling me it doesn't matter, for it's sheer waste of ...
— Troublesome Comforts - A Story for Children • Geraldine Glasgow
... bellicose, an' none of 'em ever faces any anamile more warlike than a baby colt or mebby a half-grown deer. I'm ridin' along the Caliente once when I hears a crashin' in the bushes on the bluff above—two hundred foot high, she is, an' as sheer as the walls of this yere tavern. As I lifts my eyes, a fear-frenzied mare an' colt comes chargin' up an' projects themse'fs over the precipice an' lands in the valley below. They're dead as Joolius Caesar ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... pretty kind of man for a skipper if you like," said the second officer bitterly. "He ought to be hanged for pretending he's a sailorman. It's sheer murder to put such a jackass in command of a ...
— "Pig-Headed" Sailor Men - From "The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton and Other - Stories" - 1902 • Louis Becke
... indigo blue in the evening light, streaked with arabesques of foam, and he could hear waves rumble against the sheer walls. Overhead the sky was tall with a few clouds in the west turning aureate. The hovering gulls seemed cast in gold. A haziness in the darkened east betokened the southern California coastline. He breathed deeply, ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... on terms of distant iciness, Valentine and Katherine constantly sparring over trifles, Fauvette preserving an attitude of martyred dignity, and Aveline, out of sheer perversity, striking up a friendship with Maudie Heywood, matters were not very brisk in ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... matter of form! But I expect that she is destined to marry a duke, my dear fellow; and I call it sheer folly on your part to have fallen in love ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... Hamilton mean? If he insist upon the definitions as yielding a ground of conceivable difference, he must abandon the inconceivability; but if he insist upon the inconceivability, he must abandon the definition as sheer verbiage, devoid of all conceivable meaning. There is no possible escape from this dilemma. Further, two negations can never contradict; for contradiction is the asserting and the denying of the same proposition; two denials can not conflict. If Illimitation ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... we could get so many centuries together to talk with at once, and wrought upon him to spend several days with me, unattended by servants, in this tranquil society of the dead ages, which still live by sheer force of the beautiful that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... rate in France, that from comic interludes in sacred plays to sheer profane comedy in ordinary life the step would not be far nor the interval of time long. The fabliaux more particularly were farces already in the state of scenario, and some of them actually contained ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... interior lining. Now that breech-loading and slow powders have been introduced, these conditions have been changed. The strains, though less severe, and less tending to explosive rupture, last longer, and are more fully transmitted through the body of the gun. Sheer strength of material now tells more, and signs have not been wanting that coils of wrought iron afford insufficient support to the lining. It becomes, therefore, advantageous to thicken the inner ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... spite of all his cant, is Not a whit better than a Mantis— An insect, of what clime I can't determine, That lifts its paws most parson-like, and thence, By simple savages—through sheer pretense— Is reckoned quite a saint among the vermin. But where's the reverence, or where the nous, To ride on one's religion through the lobby, Whether as stalking-horse or hobby, To show its pious paces ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... he explained, "is where I've scored. I knew that Viola is obstinate, and that if she starts by turning you down she'll keep it up out of sheer cussedness. ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... I went to Cintra out of sheer ennui, for my inability to talk Portuguese made me silent and solitary perforce. And at Cintra I evaded my obvious duty, and only looked at the lofty rock on which the Moorish castle stands. For one thing the hill was swathed in ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... man who had come down the Capitol steps sprang forward like a cat and grasped the weapon. For a moment the two men struggled, but only for a moment. From the crowd, stunned for a moment by the sheer audacity of the attack, came a roar of rage. The police closed in about the struggling men but the crowd rolled over them like a wave. The captor shouted his identity and tried to display the gold badge of the secret service but the mob was in no state of mind to listen. The police were trampled ...
— The Solar Magnet • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... reached the top, found my companions in a small valley below. Descending to them, we continued climbing, and in a short time reached the crest. I sprang upon the summit, and another step would have precipitated me into an immense snow-field five hundred feet below. To the edge of this field was a sheer icy precipice; and then, with a gradual fall, the field sloped off for about a mile, until it struck the foot of another lower ridge. I stood on a narrow crest, about three feet in width, with an inclination of about 20 ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... vessel or passage-boat on canals. In ship-building, a sudden rising, or a greater curve than sheer, at the cheeks, ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... seemingly insurmountable, to win high honors and rewards, to retain for more than a generation the respect of good men in many lands, and to be deemed worthy of enrolment among his country's great men. Such a man was Frederick Douglass, and the example of one who thus rose to eminence by sheer force of character and talents that neither slavery nor caste proscription could crush must ever remain as a shining illustration of the essential superiority of manhood to environment. Circumstances made Frederick ...
— Frederick Douglass - A Biography • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... sash which just peeped from beneath his waistcoat—in all, striking, yet not bizarre, and notably of gentlemanlike manner. What arrested attention most, however, was his voice. People who heard it invariably turned to look or listened from sheer pleasure. It was of such penetrating clearness that if he spoke in an ordinary tone it carried far. Among the Indians of the Hudson Bay company, where he had been for six years or more, he had been known as Man of the Gold Throat, and that long before he was called by the negroes on his ...
— An Unpardonable Liar • Gilbert Parker
... other sound followed, and he wondered. At first, he had thought it indicated the presence of warriors, but Indians did not cut down trees and doubtless it was due to some other cause, perhaps an old, decayed trunk that had been weighted down by snow, falling through sheer weariness. In any event he was going to see, and, emerging from his shelter, ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... he made no move. With the sheer perversity of a child or a savage, he insisted there was no wind, even while the ripples were washing ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... thus early, I had some notion of the bo'sun's design; for I went to the edge that overlooked the valley, and peered down, and, finding it nigh a sheer precipice, found myself nodding my head, as though it were in accordance with some part formed wish. Presently, looking about me, I discovered the bo'sun to be surveying that part which looked over towards the weed, and I made across to join him. Here, again, I saw that ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
... his questions, kindly at first but becoming exasperated as he was convinced that she was either "touched in her wits" or "guying" him, he obtained a confused story of the persecutions of the two young men, and in sheer bewilderment he finally took her to the station on the very charge against the thought of which ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... A.M. the force moved on in the same inextricable confusion. Already nearly half the sepoys, from sheer inability to keep their ranks, had joined the crowd of non-combatants. The rearguard was attacked, and much baggage lost, and one of the guns having been overturned, was taken by the Affghans, whose cavalry charged into the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... forming! Think only of one fact: Daun, on sight of their intention, has opened 400 pieces of Artillery on them, and these go raging and thundering into the hem of the Wood, and to whatever issues from it, now and for hours to come, at a rate of deafening uproar and of sheer deadliness, which no observer can find ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Maurice, we have been running around and around in this tread-mill, scourging each other. Let us quit before we get to the point of sheer madness. ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... persons" both as the means to a higher type and as ends honorable in themselves. At the same time she does not let herself run on in the ungirt dithyrambs of Whitman or into his followers' glorification of sheer bulk and impetus. Taste and intelligence hold her passion in hand. It is her distinction that she combines the merits of those oddly matched progenitors, Miss Jewett and Walt Whitman: she has the delicate tact to paint what she sees with ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... adventure during this day's journey, than buying bread and cheese from sheer hunger, at a little wooden tavern by the road-side, whose shelves were covered with glittering rows of bottles of brandy and mezcal. At some of the Indian huts also we bought various branches of pltanos, that most useful of fruits, and basis of the food of the poor ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... herself was Madelon Hautville, in a sheer white gown, which she had fashioned for herself out of an old crape shawl which had belonged to her mother, and cunningly wrought with great garlands of red flowers. She was going to Burr Gordon's wedding, ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... stated, had for twenty years never ceased to hope that her prayers would procure for her the grace of bearing a son to her husband. Out of sheer weariness she had given herself up to all kinds of charlatans, who at that period were well received by people of rank. On one occasion she brought from Italy a sort of astrologer, who as nearly as possible poisoned her with a horrible nostrum, and was sent back to his own country in a hurry, ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... be splendid to have Martha!" said both the Bertrams; while Olive, always gay, spirited, and full of fun, laughed from sheer delight. ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... and particularly many of the teachers of your youth, had come to preach the deification of sheer might. They proclaimed with fanatical arrogance the doctrine that the German nation being the chosen people, superior to all others, was therefore not only permitted, but, indeed, called upon, to impose the blessings of its civilization and "Kultur" upon other countries, by force if ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... of sheer fatigue, Laura found herself sitting up in bed struggling with a sense of horrible desolation. Augustina was dead—Mr. Helbeck was gone, was a Jesuit—and she herself was left alone in the old ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... impression on the mind of the man in the street; and to the man in the street God, as he understands Him, is neither a very friendly nor a very comprehensible element in life. Instead of mitigating fear He adds to it, not in the Biblical sense of "fearing God," but in that of sheer animal distrust. ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... the miser hung Himself in sheer despair: Thus each the other's wants supplied, And that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 20, 1841 • Various
... parties (how sad that they must be so called!) are enfeebled, mine, to all appearance, has been strengthened, nevertheless I well know that, whenever I go beyond my duty, God will no longer bless me; and I shall do so whenever, without reason and in sheer lightness of heart, I attack my king and trouble the repose of his kingdom. . . . I declare, then, first of all to those who belong to the party of the king my lord, that if they do not counsel him to make use of me, and of the means which God ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... the arts, however, the very idea of craftsmanship implies some sort of external percipient, or, in other words, some sort of an audience. In point of sheer self-expression, a child's scrabblings with a box of crayons may deserve to rank with the most masterly canvas of Velasquez or Vermeer. The real difference between the dramatist and other artists, is that they can be their own audience, in a sense ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... sat alone in her room in the cottage, and rushing to the river bank she joined the Indians who swarmed to the water's edge to welcome the huge freight canoe that had rounded the point below the clearing. Chloe clapped her hands in sheer joy and relief, for there, proud and erect, in the bow of the canoe stood Lapierre, and behind him from bank to bank the Yellow Knife fairly swarmed with other full-freighted canoes. The ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... doubt about mine, whenever Will and I have met at Mynheer's house—and he is for ever going there—he has shown such downright rudeness to me, that I have required more than ordinary patience to keep my temper. He has contradicted me once, twice, thrice in the presence of the family, and out of sheer spite and rage, as it appeared to me. Is he paying his addresses to Miss Lydia, and her father's ships, negroes, and forty thousand pounds? I should guess so. The old gentleman is for ever talking about his money, and adores his granddaughter, and as ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
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