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More "Simple-minded" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Simple-minded Bud readily accepted the wily half-breed's explanations and surmises, and fell into the trap he was preparing. This was to hold up the express-agent and rob him of the money Payson was expecting, on securing which it was McKee's intention to flee the country before Dick Lane returned to ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... certain kind of culture. He had read a good deal of the odds and ends of literature and, as a simple-minded islander expressed it in my hearing, knew more bookfuls than anybody on the island. He was naturally an intelligent man; and he might have attained influence in the community had it not been for his utter aimlessness of character, ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... occupied by Pascualet, the villagers would sit in the open air all night sometimes, on low stools or on the ground, listening open-mouthed while the sailor told about the countries he had visited, embroidering his adventures with harmless embellishments to rouse greater thrills in his simple-minded audience. As compared with the uncouth fishermen they knew, dull and stupid from the routine of daily toil, or with the stevedores he used to work with in Valencia, Tonet looked like an aristocrat to the girls of the Cabanal, with his ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... was but shortly before the hour appointed for the dinner, there was another arrival betokened by the clatter of hoofs and grinding wheels in the courtyard; and then entered a gentleman of different mien from the bluff, ruddy, simple-minded, yet worldly Englishmen around him. He was a tall, dark man, with a black moustache and almost olive skin, a slender, lithe figure, a flexible face, quick, flashing, mobile. His deportment was graceful; his dress, ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to come to the gardens a little fat red-faced girl called Mary Kitson, the child of simple and ingenuous parents (her father was a writer of stories of adventure for boys' papers); she was herself simple-minded, lethargic, unadventurous, and happily stupid. Walking one day slowly with Hortense down one of the garden paths, Sarah saw Mary Kitson engaged in talking to two dolls, seated on a bench with them, patting their clothes, very happy, her ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... nothing like a striking appearance to help a man over a difficulty,—I've found that before and since. People like ourselves, who're up to diving-dresses by the time we're seven, can scarcely imagine the effect of one on a simple-minded savage. One or two of these niggers cut and run, the others started in a great hurry trying to knock their brains out on the ground. And on I went as slow and solemn and silly-looking and artful as a jobbing plumber. It was evident they took me ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... squire; to be lulled into a placid doze by the humming of Dorlecote Mill; to sit down in Dandie Dinmont's parlour ... or to drop into the kitchen of a good old country inn, and to smoke a pipe with Tom Jones or listen to the simple-minded philosophy of Parson Adams.'" ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... interest in this discussion, and they hastened their departure as soon as the atmosphere began to look stormy. The barber was sorry he had said anything. Simple-minded man as he was, he had not foreseen that he was getting Mr. Checkynshaw into trouble, and he determined to say nothing ...
— Make or Break - or, The Rich Man's Daughter • Oliver Optic
... have been established in this semi-desert realm, the wandering tribes being at first cajoled and in the end defied. The glove of silk has been at first extended to the tribes, but within it the hand of iron has always held fast its grasp. The simple-minded chiefs have easily been brought over to the Russian schemes. Some of them have been won by money and soft words; others by some mark of distinction, such as a medal, a handsome sabre, a cocked hat or a gold-laced coat. Rather than give these ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... better explanation—and, after all, it was no bad one—this theory was generally received, and, with a shuddering horror, people asked themselves, if the whole of the churchyard were excavated, how many coffins would be found tenantless by the dead which had been supposed, by simple-minded people, to ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... in an institution. The total cost of maintaining this family will be approximately L9,500. These children are cousins of another family under State control. There are four children, two of whom are simple-minded. The mother is feeble-minded, and the father died in a mental hospital. In this case the mothers of the ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... number of instruments yearly made in Mirecourt and Saxony[1] amounts to many thousands, and is yearly increasing. They send forth repeated copies of Amati, Maggini, Guarneri, and Stradivari, all duly labelled and dated, to all parts of the world, frequently disappointing their simple-minded purchasers, who fondly fancy they have thus become possessed of the real article at the trifling cost of a few pounds. They produce various kinds of modern antiques in Violins, some of which display an amount of ingenuity worthy of being exercised in a better cause; but usually the whole ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... be extremely simple-minded," she announced, "to imagine anything else. You wouldn't be a male human being if you had sat here for half an hour patiently ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... much for the patience of the simple-minded owner of Greenwood. "May Belza have us all," he fumed, "if I can see the bottom or even the sides of this criss-cross business. Just tell us a straight tale, lad, if we are not to ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... strangely affected by human and unscriptural methods, after they have experienced some new sensations, they proclaim to the world that now they have found the light which they could never find in the Lutheran Church! And thus not a few of our simple-minded and unreflecting people are led to depart from the faith and follow ...
— The Way of Salvation in the Lutheran Church • G. H. Gerberding
... as good as his word. He longed to make Ireland a Protestant country; and the whole modern history of Ireland might have been altered. But Comenius had now become an unpractical dreamer. For all his learning he was very simple-minded; and for all his piety he had a weak side to his character. He had listened in his youth to the prophecies of Christopher Kotter; he had listened also to the ravings of Christina Poniatowski; and now he fell completely under ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... most delicate form of attention. There were days when his room door was closed; there were days succeeding these blanks when he met her as frankly and naturally as if he had seen her yesterday. Indeed, on those days following his flight the simple-minded Carmen, being aware—heaven knows how—that he had not opened his door during that period, and fearing sickness, sudden death, or perhaps suicide, by her appeals to the landlady, assisted unwittingly in discovering his ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... When the simple-minded Conquistadores first pushed their frail cockleshells out into the gigantic embouchure of this tawny stream and looked vainly for the opposite shore, veiled by the dewy mists of a glittering morn, they unconsciously crossed themselves and, forgetful for the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... information than this, although whenever she was questioned concerning the matter, she did only reply by a very grave shake of the head, each vibration of which (particularly when accompanied by a pursing of the mouth, and a mysterious looking round) more and more convinced her simple-minded auditors (i.e. some of them, for it is not to be denied that there were a few incredulous ones who, either from former experiences, or natural sagacity, or some cause unknown, hesitated not to declare it to be their fixed and unalterable opinion that these seeming indications ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... in all the Turkey Track regions. The Southern mountaineers have little affinity, socially or politically, with the people of the settlements. There were never any slaveholders among them, and the few isolated negroes were treated with almost perfect equality by the simple-minded ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... our edition. In the "Fables," Gay is happy in proportion to the innocence and simplicity of his nature. He understands animals, because he has more than an ordinary share of the animal in his own constitution. AEsop, so far as we know, though an astute, was an uneducated and simple-minded man. Phaedrus was a myth, and we cannot, therefore, adduce him in point. But Fontaine was called the "Fable-tree," and Gay is just the Fable-tree transplanted from France to England. In so doing we do not question our poet's originality, but merely indicate a certain resemblance in spirit ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... be seen," returned Fred, in a mysterious manner, evidently taking some delight in frightening the simple-minded young ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... Many simple-minded people, with something of a sentimental turn, (they are almost always fond of raw oysters, and gloat over a roasted turkey, although they know that it was bled to to death by cutting the roots of its tongue,) look upon angling as a "cruel sport." Let us see, with Mr Scrope, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... nothing but oysters or beefsteak, but they wait till they get in an extra chef and then send her a formal invitation. I believe ours is one of the half-dozen houses where people don't pretend to be something quite different from what they are when Mrs. Lenox appears. And yet she's the most simple-minded and genuine person, and would rather have beefsteak and friendship than pate de fois gras and good gowns ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... the tactics of Conachar when brought face to face with Hal o' the Wynd, I have been trying to get my simple-minded adversary to follow me on a wild-goose chase through the early history of Christianity, in the hope of escaping impending defeat on the main issue. But I may be permitted to point out that there is an alternative hypothesis which equally fits the facts; and that, after all, there may ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... had the general known him. That Willett was a many-sided man, that he could be an eager and ambitious officer when once afield, and a mere butterfly about the garrison, had not occurred to this simple-minded chief. The combination of terrier and lapdog is rare in the army. However, Willett was not yet fit for field service, and the Gray Fox meant that he should have fair play and ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... has ensnared me while my reason and freedom were asleep, while I was following with docile steps the path He had Himself traced out for me, distracting thoughts crowd themselves upon me. God knows that I was simple-minded and pure; I took nothing upon myself; I walked with free and unflagging steps in the path which He disclosed before me, and behold this path has led me to the brink of a precipice! God has betrayed me! I never doubted but that a wise ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... occasional hammering, which echoed in hollow reverberations, no sound disturbed repose. Here one felt the meaning of retreat and self-absorption, the dignity of silence which respected itself; the presence which was not to be touched or seen. To a simple-minded child like Catherine Brooke, the first effect was as impressive as though she were in the church of St. Mark's. She was overwhelmed by the space and silence, the color and form; and as she came close to Wharton's four great figures of the ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... will be the worse for you!" and now Tom caught the simple-minded youth by the collar. He did not intend to harm the lad, but he ...
— The Rover Boys on the Plains - The Mystery of Red Rock Ranch • Arthur Winfield
... bedroom, and returned in a few minutes in the character of an amiable and simple-minded Nonconformist clergyman. His broad black hat, his baggy trousers, his white tie, his sympathetic smile, and general look of peering and benevolent curiosity were such as Mr. John Hare alone could have equalled. It was not merely that Holmes changed his ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... case did not come on. Day by day passed away, and still it was not in the paper. The reason, however, is simple, and need not be told to any except those of my readers who are under the impression that the expeditious administration of justice is of any consequence. It was obvious to the most simple-minded that the case could not be taken for a day or two, because there was a block in every one of the three Courts devoted to the trial of Nisi Prius actions. And you know as well as anyone, Mr. Bumpkin, that when you get a load of turnips, or what not, in the market town blocked by innumerable ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... it enjoyed a comparatively tranquil existence till A.D. 1740, when Ratanpur fell to the Marathas almost without striking a blow. "The only surviving representative of the Haihayas of Ratanpur," Mr. Wills states, [538] "is a quite simple-minded Rajput who lives at Bargaon in Raipur District. He represents the junior or Raipur branch of the family, and holds five villages which were given him revenue-free by the Marathas for his maintenance. The malguzar of Senduras claims descent from the ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... simple-minded piper Such a kindly nature had That he lifted up the viper And bestowed her in his plaid. "Though the Scot is stern, at least he No unhappy creature spurns, 'Sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie,'" Quoth the ...
— Fables for the Frivolous • Guy Whitmore Carryl
... trembling with fear, but on seeing the person who was to play "Garrick," she quickly mastered herself. This amateur was hardly more than a boy, skinny, awkward, and simple-minded. He lisped and waddled about like a duck, but since he was the cousin of one of the influential journalists who backed him, he regarded everybody at the theater with a haughty expression and treated them with an air of condescension. The members of the company delicately ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... he would say, slapping his comrade on the back. "It will be mine from the dungeons forty foot below the ground, right up, bedad, to the flagstaff from which the imblem of loyalty flaunts the breeze." At these speeches the simple-minded German used to rub his great red hands together with satisfaction, and feel as pleased as though he had actually been presented with the fee simple of the castle ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... objects that are not there in reality. To this power are due the frequent reports of apparitions of Buddha, seen generally by single individuals, and the visions of demons, the accounts of which alone terrify the simple-minded folk, and cause them to pay all their spare cash in ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... mixed character of the council, and the choice of the courses open before it. As Socrates describes the incident, the disputes were running so high, from the mere pleasure of argument, that there seemed likely to be no end to the controversy, when suddenly a simple-minded layman, who by his sightless eye or limping leg bore witness of his zeal for the Christian faith, stepped among them and abruptly said, "Christ and the apostles left us not a system of logic nor a vain deceit, but a naked truth to be guided by faith and good works." "There has," says ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... The light of tremulous joy in their lovely depths startled and thrilled him. A snicker from the group of young men behind roused in him a deep indignation. They were taking their coarse fun out of this simple-minded girl. Cameron's furious glance at them appeared only to increase their amusement. It did not lessen Cameron's embarrassment and rage that now and then during the reading of the hymn Mandy's eyes were turned upon ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... More people then began to see the self-contradictions of the opposition, and most of those "plain people" to whom Lincoln consciously appealed were touched to the heart by his pathetic question: "Must I shoot the simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of the wily agitator who induces ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... country dreadfully dull; and that, consequently, she was extremely glad to have made his acquaintance. But what he chiefly realized when they parted was that he had spent a couple of pleasant hours talking nonsense with a girl who was natural, simple-minded, and entirely free from that repellently protective atmosphere with which a woman of the 'classes' so carefully surrounds herself. He and Esther had 'made friends' with the ease and rapidity of children before they have ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... tried to decide whether Groener was really unconscious of impending danger. Was he deceived by this Matthieu disguise? Or was it possible, could it be possible, that he was what he appeared to be, a simple-minded wood carver free from any wickedness or duplicity? No, no, it was marvelous acting, an extraordinary make-up, but this was his man, all right. There was the long little finger, plainly visible, the identical ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... you really mean it?" she said with the indulgent incredulity one shows to the simple-minded—"But just think! The session will go on, every one says, till quite the end of September. Isn't that enough of itself to make a party discontented? All our big measures are in dreadful arrears. And my father believes so much of the friction might have been avoided. He ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Roger Acton; almost since morning light, the leprosy had changed his very nature. The simple-minded Christian, toiling in contentment for his daily bread, cheerful for the passing day, and trustful for the coming morrow, this fair state was well-nigh faded away; while a bitterness of feeling against (in one word) GOD—against unequal partialities in providence, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Spirit[602] had justified their excesses in language which they borrowed from men of such noble and holy life as Eckhart[603] and Tauler, and Nicolas of Basle, so the flagitious conduct, at Bedford and elsewhere, of some who called themselves Moravians threw scandal and odium on the tenets of the pure and simple-minded community of Herrnhut. This was a danger to which Wesley was, without doubt, all the more sensitive, because he lived among hostile critics who were only too ready to discredit his teaching by similar imputations on its tendencies. The truth is that Methodism, ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... the excitements of the selfish crowd, and ignorant of the sorrows and sufferings of great cities. She is found in the enjoyment of the sunshine and the open air, in the shady groves and flowery fields, by the side of the murmuring brooks, and in the society of the gay, frank, and simple-minded peasant of my own dear country. Oh! my white and pretty pavillon, whose walls are clad with fragrant creepers and the luscious vine, whose porch is scented with the woodbine and the rose—oh! lovely valleys, dark forests, deep blue lakes which sleep unruffled in the bosom of the ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... that which lends such a charm to the author's essays,— brilliant, epigrammatic, vigorous. Indeed, herein lies the fault of the work, when viewed as a mere detail of historical facts. Its sparkling rhetoric is not the safest medium of truth to the simple-minded inquirer. A discriminating and able critic has done the author no injustice in saying that, in attempting to give effect and vividness to his thoughts and diction, he is often overstrained and extravagant, and that his epigrammatic style seems better ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... speak to the simple-minded man or child about the freedom of the human will. Their lessons in this are learned from observation and experience. By experience every one knows that he has the power to choose what he likes and to reject what he does not like. Even beasts, and birds, and reptiles do the same. They choose ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... certainly impressed people very much, and I suppose his letters as newspaper correspondent were quite wonderful. He was remarkably intelligent and absolutely unscrupulous, didn't hesitate to put into the mouths of people what he wished them to say, so he naturally had a great pull over the ordinary simple-minded journalist who wrote simply what he saw and heard. As he was the Paris correspondent of The London Times, he was often at the French Embassy. W. never trusted him very much, and his flair was right, as he ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... nationalize land, railways, mines, quarries, factories, workshops, warehouses, shops, and all and every agency for the production and distribution of wealth? I say again, within a generation? He who entertains such hopes must indeed be a sanguine and simple-minded Socialist."[45] ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... same. Mr. Dempster, however, was not willing to relinquish his half-made proselyte; and certainly, the less Jane was inclined to believe in these manifestations the more she became attached to the simple-minded pious visionary who rested so ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... view, the excitement was beyond description. Young and old, women and children, fell simultaneously upon their knees, and tears and sobs mingled with the blessings showered upon His Majesty by thousands of his simple-minded, affectionate people. ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... gentlemen travel abroad, to reduce their waists or improve their minds, the effects on the hotel waiters and cabmen must be immense. They will be charged three times the ordinary tariff instead of only the double which is the stranger's usual fate at the hands of simple-minded foreigners. The satisfaction must be cheap, ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... there in the hot weather—especially men who die in the state the Boss was in. Then Ned went to the public-house where the barmaid was and called the landlord out. It was a desperate fight: the publican was a big man, and a bit of a fighting man; but Ned was one of those quiet, simple-minded chaps who will carry a thing through to death when they make up their minds. He gave that publican nearly as good a thrashing as he deserved. The constable in charge of the station backed Ned, while another policeman picked up the publican. Sounds queer to you city ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... embarrassed and troubled. If this big-hearted, simple-minded countryman had come to New York to buck the stock market, it was time to sound a warning. But had he, on such short acquaintance, the right to warn? The captain was shrewd in his own way. Might ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... India. Nor is there anything in such a natural sentiment that need give umbrage to Englishmen; although the liberality of a recent English governor of Bombay who headed a list of subscriptions for public commemoration of the deed, betrayed a somewhat simple-minded unreadiness to appreciate the significance of ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... often encountered and recognized each other in them. Contractors and "jobbers" used to besiege the offices of the Secretaries of War and Navy, and the venerable Welles (who reminded me of Abraham in the lithographs), and the barnacled Stanton, seldom appeared in public. Simple-minded, straightforward A. Lincoln, and his ambitious, clever lady, were often seen of afternoons in their barouche; the little old-fashioned Vice-President walked unconcernedly up and down; and when some of the Richmond ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... course, been president; his moral character,—a point on which so many geniuses were weak—was absolutely irreproachable; foremost of all, however, among his many great qualities, and perhaps more remarkable even than his genius was what biographers have called "the simple-minded and child-like earnestness of his character," an earnestness which might be perceived by the solemnity with which he spoke even about trifles. It is hardly necessary to say he was on the Liberal side ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... The poor, simple-minded Noah with tears in his eyes, for he was very fond indeed of Zip, replied, "He's done and gone and ...
— Zip, the Adventures of a Frisky Fox Terrier • Frances Trego Montgomery
... too! Why, I knew Marc Runyon when he thought an upper berth was the very lap of luxury; knew him when he'd grind his teeth over payin' a ten-dollar fee to a doctor. And now he's trying to buy back his digestion by hiring a private physician, is he? The simple-minded old sinner!" ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... come on the twentieth of May; it was then the seventh, and Jeanne awaited their arrival with intense impatience. Besides her natural desire to see her parents, she felt it would be such a relief to have near her two honest hearts, two simple-minded beings whose life and every action, thought and desire had always been upright and pure. She felt she stood alone in her honesty among all this guilt. She had learnt to dissimulate her feelings, to meet the comtesse with an outstretched hand and a smiling face, ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... the simple-minded Uncle in his secret attraction towards the marvellous and adventurous—of which he was, in some sort, a distant relation, by his trade—had greatly encouraged the same attraction in the nephew; and that everything that had ever been put before the boy to deter ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... Mr. Crawford; for this is evidently a sweet, simple-minded lady, and more over nothing has turned up to indicate that Mr. Crawford had a romantic ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... drove down town, the Magistrate's wife went up to the nursery and hugged her sleeping little ones, one after the other, and tear-drops fell upon their warm cheeks that had wiped out the guilt of more than one sinner before, and the children smiled in their sleep. They say among the simple-minded folk of far-away Denmark that then they see angels ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... by some simple-minded reader why we should not resort to crude Communism as the disciples were told to do. This would be quite practicable in a village where production was limited to the supply of the primitive wants which nature imposes on all human ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... patiently and approvingly though the rain was pouring down upon them, and the branches of the trees and the tops of the tall nettles, agitated by the gusts from the mountain hollows, were beating in their faces, for enthusiasm is never scoffed at by the noble, simple-minded, genuine Welsh, whatever treatment it may receive from the coarse-hearted, sensual, ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... I have been forced to regard as being within the exceptions of the Constitution and as indispensable to the public safety.... I think the time not unlikely to come when I shall be blamed for having made too few arrests rather than too many.... Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert? This is none the less injurious when effected by getting a father, a brother, or friend into a public meeting ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... The boy would return! That was all she cared for. She really liked him, for he was so candid, so good, and so simple-minded. With such a son-in-law much was possible, she thought. Okoya could certainly be moulded to become a very useful tool to her as well as to Tyope. The woman felt elated over the results of the evening; she felt sure that notwithstanding one egregious mistake, of which of course she would ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... further questions; that is, the principle of Purpose. Let us take a very simple illustration. Across many of the hills in Cumberland the way from one village to another is marked by white stones placed at short intervals. We may easily imagine a simple-minded person asking how they came there, or what natural law could account for their lying in that position; and the physical antecedents of the fact—the geological history of the stones and the physiological structure of the men who moved them—give ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... Genial and simple-minded as he was, eagerly as he desired to appreciate at her full value the young lady who was one day to be the wife of Amelius, Rufus felt the tone in which those words were spoken. It was not easy to stimulate his modest sense of what was fairly due to him into asserting itself, but the ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... other companies of our battalion was equally great, as it was also with the prisoners generally. Not less than twenty-five thousand gallant, noble-hearted boys died around me between the dates of my capture and release. Nobler men than they never died for any cause. For the most part they were simple-minded, honest-hearted boys; the sterling products of our Northern home-life, and Northern Common Schools, and that grand stalwart Northern blood, the yeoman blood of sturdy middle class freemen—the blood of the race which has ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... Bishop is the richest man in the Island, and his income is about £150 a year, a sum which these simple-minded folk look upon ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... announces the birth of a new epoch, it is meet that the rank and file remain silent; and at this Congress of the Church of England no jarring interruptions marred the solemnity of the moment. No old-fashioned doctor was there to utter a futile protest, and there was no simple-minded clergyman to rise in the name of Christ and give Lord Dawson the lie. Without dissent, on a public platform of the Established Church, presided over by a Bishop, and in full view of the nation, "the moth-eaten mantle of Malthus, the godless robe of Bradlaugh, and ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... great cry of welcome that caused the forest to ring with its echoes. As the pious leader of the expedition stepped on shore, he took Rene by the hand, and both kneeling on the sands, gave thanks to Him who guided them thus far in safety in their perilous wanderings. Though the simple-minded Indians could not understand what Laudonniere said or was doing, they were so anxious to show their respect and love for him that all knelt when he did and maintained a deep silence ...
— The Flamingo Feather • Kirk Munroe
... had been a man of the world he would have divined that the present was a rare opportunity for catching his bumptious young friend by the ear, and making him carry out his threat then and there. But, being a simple-minded new boy, unlearned in the ways of the world, he merely said "Pooh!" and walked on, leaving his assailant in possession of the field, calling out "coward!" and "sneak!" after him till he was out ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... to anyone except to her confessor, and he, a simple-minded man of great learning and a total lack of knowledge of the world, was completely at ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... smile at such simple-minded ebullitions of feeling; yet I would by no means be understood to laugh at them. On the contrary, they are so manifestly spontaneous and sincere as to be really touching. Whatever may be the future of the Portuguese Republic, it has given the nation some weeks of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... his mild blue eyes struggled for freedom now, and one or two flowed slowly down his wrinkled cheek. Marguerite, though heartsore and full of agonizing sorrow herself, felt her whole noble soul go out to this kind old man, so pathetic, so high and simple-minded ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... my brother officers were strangers to me, and mostly to each other, so it took a little time before we became acquainted and shook into our places. Captain Cranley, I found, was somewhat of the old school—very kind-hearted and simple-minded, and not less strict towards himself than towards others—with a nice sense of honour, and very sensitive of rebuke. I was very glad to find that my old friend Jack Stretcher had volunteered, with the hope of one day becoming a warrant-officer. I ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... dominates the whole novel, Turgenev has, I think, displayed genius of a still higher order in the creation of that simple-minded pair of peasants, the father and mother of the young nihilist. These two are old-fashioned, absolutely pious, dwelling in a mental world millions of miles removed from that of their son; they have not even a remote idea of what is passing in his mind, but they look on ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... Johnson, Addison, Bishop Berkeley. Bishop Berkeley, who crossed Mont Cenis on New Year's Day 1714, complained that he was "put out of humour by the most horrible precipices." There is huge comfort to be drawn from Stephen's pages descriptive of the "simple-minded abhorrence of mountains," and from his categorical declaration that love of the sublime shapes of the Alps springs from "a delicate and cultivated taste." But we are puzzled by the presence outside the pale of some who cannot rightly be ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... since it is their fundamental principle that they are not a pillar or ground of truth, but voluntary societies, without authority and without gifts, the Bible Church they cannot be. If the serious persons who are in dissent would really imitate the simple-minded Ethiopian, or the noble Bereans, let them ask themselves: "Of whom speaketh" the Apostle, or the Prophet, such great things?—Where is the "pillar and ground"?—Who is it that is appointed to lead us to Christ?—Where are those teachers which were never to be removed into ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... than that of inaccuracy or deficient authority lies against the writings which have come down to us from the second century. There can be no doubt that great numbers of books were then written with no other view than to deceive the simple-minded multitude who at that time formed the great bulk ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... more need of publishing than any other of my sermons or tracts. For the greatest of all questions has been raised, the question of Good Works, in which is practised immeasurably more trickery and deception than in anything else, and in which the simple-minded man is so easily misled that our Lord Christ has commanded us to watch carefully for the sheep's clothing under which the wolves hide ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... left it in the hands of friends, who paid him a very small percentage on it, and whom he always regarded as being very kind to take care of the troublesome stuff on his account. In matters of art, Gibson was a great master; in matters of business, he was hardly more than a simple-minded child. ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... nought but his simple-minded talk,' replied the farmer, taking a huge bite out of a slice ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... that; I've reached it, and I intend to maintain it. Why, you simple-minded jackass, these scientists will eat you up. They'll make a monkey of me and disgrace the girl. They'll pretend to expose her—the press will be on their side—and I will be made the butt of all their slurring ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... name also, the L at the last moment having been found to stand for Liberty. If they had consulted the groom, he would have decried all fuss, for Fannie's chief attraction was that he thought her an unspoiled, simple-minded ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... men—officers of the law at that—being simple-minded enough to come fogging out here to me, instead of getting on the trail of the men that were seen on the spot! You say they came in a machine to the bank and you never so much as tried to trace it, or to get the license number even, I'll bet a month's salary you didn't! It was a moving-picture ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... child! Such a dear, simple-minded child! Report engaged her to at least ten different people at Simla. She had a crowd of cavaliers there—I was one of them. The whole place adored her. She is a very rare little creature, but well looked after, I can tell you—a long array ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... puzzled glance at his companion. As a simple-minded English gentleman he was quite unable to penetrate the obscurity of expression which masked the meaning of the last remark. Merrington caught the look, but had formed too poor an opinion of his companion's understanding to ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... after another to define with scientific accuracy and to everybody's satisfaction his exact nature and attributes; in consequence of which efforts there had come to be several most distinct but quite contradictory ideas upon the subject. There were some simple-minded folk to whom the chime typified a God essentially masculine, and like a man, hugely exaggerated, but somewhat amorphous, because they could not see exactly in what the exaggeration consisted except in the size of him. They pictured him sitting alone on a throne of ivory and gold ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... registers in Boggs City may give us a clew. If you don't mind, Mr. Crow, I'll have this New York detective, who is coming up to-morrow, take a look into this phase of the case. It won't interfere with your plans, will it?" asked Bonner, always considerate of the feelings of the good-hearted, simple-minded old marshal. ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... offenders be brought up for trial, Iyeyasu advises that, in the case of common people, particular deliberation be given to the matter: he remarks upon the weakness of human nature, and suggests that, among the young and simple-minded, some momentary impulse of passion may lead to folly even when the parties are not naturally depraved. But in the next article, [346] No. 51, he orders that no mercy whatever be shown to men and women of the upper classes when convicted of the same crime. "These," he declares, "are expected ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... number of characters in these novels are of the same unpromising quality. Most of them are ignorant, uncouth and simple-minded; yet George Eliot gives them a warm place in our hearts, and we rejoice to have known them all. This ignorant rusticity is discovered to have charms and attractions of its own. Especially does the reader learn that what is most human and ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... brat. Don't draw that chair farther off, Miss Eyre; sit down exactly where I placed it—if you please, that is. Confound these civilities! I continually forget them. Nor do I particularly affect simple-minded old ladies. By-the-bye, I must have mine in mind; it won't do to neglect her; she is a Fairfax, or wed to one; and blood is said ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... manner men differ in regard to want of sense. Those who are most out of their wits we call 'madmen,' while we term those who are less far gone 'stupid' or 'idiotic,' or, if we prefer gentler language, describe them as 'romantic' or 'simple-minded,' or, again, as 'innocent' or 'inexperienced' or 'foolish.' You may even find other names, if you seek for them; but by all of them lack of sense is intended. They only differ as one art appeared to us to differ from another or one disease ...
— Alcibiades II • An Imitator of Plato
... the one side devotion, simple-minded loyalty and a fighting heart in a body of such mechanical perfection as Mars had never seen before or since. On the other side a primal beast, just as huge, ...
— The Martian Cabal • Roman Frederick Starzl
... obeyed the King, or in other words, the dictates of her own heart, imprudently embarking upon a career of passion, for which a temperament wholly different from hers was needed. It is not simple-minded maidens that one wants at Court to share the confidence of princes. No doubt natures of that sort—simple, disinterested souls are pleasant and agreeable to them, as therein they find contentment such as they greedily prize; but for these unsullied, romantic natures, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... less legal ward, not less, despite his being so very much Albert's senior. In these facts and in the character of each of the three persons involved resided the drama; which must more or less have begun, as I have hinted, when simple-minded Henry, at a date I seem to have seized, definitely emerged from rustication—the Beaverkill had but for a certain term protected, or promoted, his simplicity—and began, on his side, to pace the well-worn ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... people's reading, notwithstanding all the involutions of style and thought which might suggest a different judgment. He certainly does not write like Cobbett or Franklin, nor has he the thin, clear polish of the popular historian. Yet his shrewdness and tenderness will touch all simple-minded men; and twenty Cobbetts, or people's writers, sharply rubbed together, could never light the flame of his imperial imagination, for it is a kind of sunshine, sometimes hot enough, but broad, impartial, and quickening, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... kept woman, is a feat. Your Madame de Thievre, with her shawl which she slips up and down over her fat shoulders, isn't she decidedly of the Restoration! And the uncle who wants to confiscate his nephew's grisette! And Antoine, the good fat tinsmith so polite at the theatre! The Russian is a simple-minded, natural man, a character that is not ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... for the largest, and resolved to shape a course for it, and so I did. It will be distant five leagues from this of San Salvador, and the others some more, some less. All are very flat, and all are inhabited. The natives make war on each other, although these are very simple-minded ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... years old, and small of his age. He dresses in homespun, and is a simple-minded, honest, old-fashioned farmer, with a strange proclivity for writing rhymes. He writes them on all possible subjects, and gets them printed on slips of paper, with his portrait at the head. These he will give to any man who comes along, whether he has anything against ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... by President Woodruff and his two Councillor's, George Q. Cannon and Joseph F. Smith. But President Woodruff was as helpless in the political world as a nun. He was a gentle, earnest old man, patiently ingenuous and simple-minded, with a faith in the guidance of Heaven that was only greater than my father's because it was unmixed with any earthly sagacity. He had the mind, and the appearance, of a country preacher, and even when he was "on the underground" he used to do his daily "stint" of farm labor, ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... long. She did occasionally visit the house, though only for an hour or two; just to show, said Buncombe, that there was no ill-feeling. On his part, evidently, there was none whatever. An easy-going, simple-minded fellow, aged about forty, with a boyish good temper and no will to speak of, he seemed never to entertain a doubt of his wife's honesty, and in any case would probably have agreed, on the least persuasion, to let bygones be bygones. ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... marriage, before embarking for Turkey, Philip, with his bride, paid a visit to Newberg. His second sermon he preached in the Baptist church. To those simple-minded country people, he stood before them a living illustration of what the grace of God might effect. Six years previously he had startled and amazed them, as though he had ridden through the air on a broomstick; now he came back to them in peace and gentleness. Before he had laid sacrilegious ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... child, she had never known the love of brother or sister; and the aunt who brought her up was a strict narrow-minded sort of person, with manners that must have been singularly uncongenial to my affectionate, simple-minded Jessie. Poor Jessie! I could not help giving her one of my bear-like hugs at this, so well did I know the meaning of that sigh; and there is no telling into what channel our talk would have drifted, ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... until her last few shots have been quite good. That is Maiyo all the world over. I will wager that he is thinking of nothing on earth at this moment but of making that poor old lady feel at her ease and enjoy her game. A stranger, looking on, would imagine him to be just a kind-hearted, simple-minded fellow. Yet there is not one of us three who has wit enough to get a single word from him against his will. You shall see. There is an excellent opportunity here. I suppose both of you read his speech at ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... uneventfully away, Nat remaining at home, nursing his wrath and the wounds upon his face, and Henry Schulte attending to his various duties upon the farm. The quarrel finally ceased to be a matter of remark, and the simple-minded villagers, believing that Nat's threats were only the utterances of a man crazed with drink, and smarting under the punishment he had received, quieted their fears and resumed their ordinary peaceful and contented mode ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... wide. "It seems to me that you were simple-minded," she breathed. "Why did you not thrust the iron ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... well, Brannan," said Langston, with a smile of deep meaning, "and among simple-minded military folk the answer would be enough, perhaps, but not to a lawyer. Would you declare that Howard did not wield the knife that slashed you—but was ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... door he had had to burst was bolted as well as locked. He confirmed Mrs. Drabdump's statement about the windows; the chimney was very narrow. The cut looked as if done by a razor. There was no instrument lying about the room. He had known the deceased about a month. He seemed a very earnest, simple-minded young fellow, who spoke a great deal about the brotherhood of man. (The hardened old man-hunter's voice was not free from a tremor as he spoke jerkily of the dead man's enthusiasms.) He should have thought the deceased the last man in the world to ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... infatuated persons!" Mr. Nash replied, understanding that she had asked for a description. "Strange eccentric, almost romantic, types. Predestined victims, simple-minded sacrificial lambs!" ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... in some place not stated. There, so far as the Essenes were concerned, the matter ended. Indeed, as the peasant who was concealed in the gully when the Jew was murdered had talked of what he had witnessed, even the most simple-minded of the Essenes could suggest a reason for this sudden departure. Nor did they altogether regret it, inasmuch as in many ways Caleb had proved himself but an unsatisfactory disciple, and already they were discussing the expediency of rejecting him from the fellowship ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... was who had discovered Jem Agar's talent for this rough, peculiar soldiering of the frontier. He it was to whom the simple-minded young officer had owed promotion after promotion. General Michael had fixed upon Agar as his last hope—his last chance of doing something brilliant in this deathly country, which moved with a slowness ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... in like manner men differ in regard to want of sense. Those who are most out of their wits we call 'madmen,' while we term those who are less far gone 'stupid' or 'idiotic,' or, if we prefer gentler language, describe them as 'romantic' or 'simple-minded,' or, again, as 'innocent' or 'inexperienced' or 'foolish.' You may even find other names, if you seek for them; but by all of them lack of sense is intended. They only differ as one art appeared to us to differ ...
— Alcibiades II • An Imitator of Plato
... resources, coats richly laced with gilt braid, red trousers, medals, flags, knives, colored handkerchiefs, paints, small looking-glasses, beads and tomahawks were believed to be so attractive to the simple-minded red man that he would gladly do much and give much of his own to win such prizes. Of these fine things there were fourteen large bales and one box. The stores of the expedition were clothing, working tools, fire-arms, food supplies, ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... favorite method of these German plotters, Hugh," said Mr. Cook. "Very often they get some simple-minded, ignorant fellow like Heinrich and make a tool of him. Heinrich hasn't got brains enough to ...
— Bob Cook and the German Spy • Tomlinson, Paul Greene
... was all Charlie. He was a thief, an' I was sech a simple-minded old fool I never knowed what he was. I let him go ahead, an' I set in the house with a white apurn tied on me an' thought I was havin' an easy time. I set here and let him rob my neighbors that I ain't ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... Belding was simple-minded, a man more inclined to action than reflection. When the complexities of life hemmed him in, he groped his way out, never quite understanding. His wife had always been a mystery to him. Nell was sunshine most of the time, but, like the sun-dominated desert, ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... his old nurse, had not a little to do with this. She was one of those simple-minded humble Christians who, all unknowingly, plant in many minds the good seed which grows up ...
— Beneath the Banner • F. J. Cross
... cannon, the glittering steel swords, the thick armor and shining helmets, the prancing horses on which the Spanish leaders were mounted, gave the whole a strange, unearthly appearance to the simple-minded Indians. The story is told that the Mexicans believed that one of their gods had once floated out to sea, saying that, in the fulness of time, he would return with fair-skinned companions to begin again his rule over his people. Many Aztecs looked upon the coming of the white men as the return ...
— Introductory American History • Henry Eldridge Bourne and Elbert Jay Benton
... into natural grandeur and magnificence; his streams seem all abodes for nymphs, his hills are fit haunts for the muses, and his temples worthy of gods,"—a passage, we think, most worthy the monosyllable commonly used upon such occasions by the manly and simple-minded Mr Burchell. That Sir Joshua occasionally transgressed in his wanderings into mythology, it would be difficult to deny; nor was it his only transgression from his legitimate ground, as may be seen in his "Holy Family" in the National Gallery. But we ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... men of the law, and Mr Robert Queeker was a man of their office—in other words, a clerk—not a "confidential" one, but a clerk, nevertheless, in whose simple-minded integrity they had much confidence. Bob, as his fellow-clerks styled him, was sent on a secret mission to Ramsgate. The reader will observe how fortunate it was that his mission was secret, because it frees us from the necessity of setting ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... still a very lovely child. Her father, wrapped in his literary pursuits, had left the entire control of his plantation to overseers, in whom he trusted almost implicitly. And many a tale of wrong and sorrow came to the ear of Camilla; for these simple-minded people had learned to love her, and to trust in her as an angel of mercy. Often would she interfere in their behalf, and tell the story of their wrongs to her father. And at her instance, more than one overseer had been turned away; which, coming to the ears of others, made them ...
— Minnie's Sacrifice • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... because they rejoice in its repose. But Michael Angelo and Raphael invent for it ingenious mechanical motion, because they think it uninteresting when it is quiet, and cannot, in their pictures, endure any person's being simple-minded enough to stand upon both his legs at once, nor venture to imagine anyone's being clear enough in his language to make himself intelligible ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... fear himself, or for himself, as he investigated himself, when the blame had already been put publicly on some one else, some simple-minded old soul who could go back to his cotton fields in Mississippi and forget all about it, strong in his innocence, even though shorn of reputation, and ...
— A Gentleman from Mississippi • Thomas A. Wise
... history, and perhaps with many others also, the puzzle was to construe this splendid testimonial for the edification of his simple-minded parents, when he came home with the burden of his blushing honors. But in this effort we question whether he ever succeeded. Indeed it has always been a grave matter of doubt among philologers, whether the document was even capable of being rendered into English, in conformity with the laws ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... lose. We were still in an agitated state, when Mr. Hardinge appeared at the door of the cabin, with a prayer-book in his hand. He demanded our attention, all kneeling in both cabins, while the good, simple-minded old man read some of the collects, the Lord's Prayer, and concluded with the thanksgiving for "a safe return from sea"! He would have given us the marriage ceremony itself, before he would have gone out of the prayer-book for ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... this preparation, the situation proves to be a familiar trick of theatrical thimble-rigging: you lift the thimble, and instead of Pea A, behold Pea B!—instead of Lady Saumarez it is Mrs. Trevelyan who is concealed in Isidore de Lorano's bedroom. Sir William Saumarez must be an exceedingly simple-minded person to accept the substitution, and exceedingly unfamiliar with the French drama of the 'seventies and 'eighties. If he had his wits about him he would say: "I know this dodge: it comes from Sardou. Lady Saumarez has just slipped out by that door, up R., and if I look about I shall certainly ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... that he himself had not the dramatic sense. The baldness of the idea and of the language had evidently offended him. But this is exactly where the true merit lies. Macaulay is giving the rough, blunt words with which a simple-minded soldier appeals to two comrades to help him in a deed of valour. Any high-flown sentiment would have been absolutely out of character. The lines are, I think, taken with their context, admirable ballad poetry, and have just the dramatic quality and sense which a ballad poet must ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... suppose his letters as newspaper correspondent were quite wonderful. He was remarkably intelligent and absolutely unscrupulous, didn't hesitate to put into the mouths of people what he wished them to say, so he naturally had a great pull over the ordinary simple-minded journalist who wrote simply what he saw and heard. As he was the Paris correspondent of The London Times, he was often at the French Embassy. W. never trusted him very much, and his flair was right, as he was anything but true to him. The last days of the Congress were very busy ones. The negotiations ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... On the one side devotion, simple-minded loyalty and a fighting heart in a body of such mechanical perfection as Mars had never seen before or since. On the other side a primal beast, just as huge, ...
— The Martian Cabal • Roman Frederick Starzl
... The prospect I have before me now is the most inspiriting one any man can have. Health, strength, as much conscious ability as makes one hope to be able to get the language of the people to whom I am sent, a new field of work among men who are decidedly religious and simple-minded, left pretty much to my own ideas as to what is best to be done in the attempted evangelization of Mongolia, friends left in Britain behind me praying for me, comfort and peace here in the prosecution of my present studies, the idea that what I do is for eternity, and that this life is but ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... with simple-minded compunction at that distance of time. He said: "You understand that directly I stooped to pick up that coil of running gear—the spanker foot-outhaul, it was—I perceived that I could see right into that part of the saloon the curtains ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... he arrived, bringing a great tale of the excitement of the countryside at the kidnaping of the princess. So far its simple-minded inhabitants and the suite of the princess were content with the socialist explanation of her disappearance; and three counties round were being searched by active policemen on bicycles for some one who had seen a suspicious motor-car containing Socialists and a princess. It was the ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... others, it seemed, lived across the island. They had heard Monson's laugh, and afterward, hearing and seeing nothing more, they'd taken it to be ghosts and were afraid. They were fierce-looking little men, but pleasant enough and simple-minded. "Doubtless," they said, "the senores were distinguished persons, who had come on a ship and would buy tobacco." We arranged that the four, who lived across the island, should come back in the morning ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton
... the spirit-lamp which he used with his blow-pipe, he melted a large mass of sealing-wax upon the knot of the red tape, and pressed upon it the great seal hanging from his watch-chain. Herr Schlager was a simple-minded man, and doubtless he believed that the seal was a perfect protection to the contents of the bag. Possibly he thought that no mortal man would dare to "cut the red-tape." Leopold was less superstitious in regard to the sanctity of a seal; and he relied more upon the ...
— The Coming Wave - The Hidden Treasure of High Rock • Oliver Optic
... which I may refer." This is feeble. However, without taxing his memory further, he says that he feels certain it must be a mistake, because he never could have used such language. He never in his life said anything personal, but criticised opinions only. This is "the language of simple-minded consciousness ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... a puzzled glance at his companion. As a simple-minded English gentleman he was quite unable to penetrate the obscurity of expression which masked the meaning of the last remark. Merrington caught the look, but had formed too poor an opinion of his companion's understanding to explain himself further. Besides, he ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... good Protestant of the old Puritan type would have felt a strong impulse to seize this "idolatrous" figure and dash it to pieces on the stone floor of the little church. But one must have lived awhile among simple-minded pious Catholics to know what this poor waxen image and the whole baby-house of bambinos mean for a humble, unlettered, unimaginative peasantry. He will find that the true office of this eidolon is to fix the mind of the worshipper, and that in virtue of the devotional ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Mrs. M'Alister was too simple-minded to discern the profound agitation that lay beneath Miss Merivale's quiet manner. And the kind voice and kind, gentle face of her visitor led her to be more confidential than was ...
— Miss Merivale's Mistake • Mrs. Henry Clarke
... we had been snubbed by the jefe, who would not treat with us outside of office hours. When the presidente of Pahuatlan took us to the house where arrangements had been made for our accommodation, we found a garrulous, simple-minded, individual who was set to clear our room and make our beds. To myself, as leader of the company, he was attentive and ceremonious in the highest degree, and on several occasions he took my companions to task for their ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... attention. There were days when his room door was closed; there were days succeeding these blanks when he met her as frankly and naturally as if he had seen her yesterday. Indeed, on those days following his flight the simple-minded Carmen, being aware—heaven knows how—that he had not opened his door during that period, and fearing sickness, sudden death, or perhaps suicide, by her appeals to the landlady, assisted unwittingly ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... generally such faithless, unscrupulous and pitiless humbugs in their dealings with their own sex—which, whatever they may say, they despise at heart—that I am happy to be able to say, Mrs. Vane proved true as steel. She was a noble-minded, simple-minded creature; she was also a constant creature. Constancy is a rare, a ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... the judicial bench what a simple-minded deputy said to the President of the Chamber: "It is your duty to protect ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... home, she found the country dreadfully dull; and that, consequently, she was extremely glad to have made his acquaintance. But what he chiefly realized when they parted was that he had spent a couple of pleasant hours talking nonsense with a girl who was natural, simple-minded, and entirely free from that repellently protective atmosphere with which a woman of the 'classes' so carefully surrounds herself. He and Esther had 'made friends' with the ease and rapidity of children before they have learned the dread ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... not talk now. They could only sit and gaze in the direction in which the hostler had disappeared, and wait for somebody to come and call off the dogs. Bob hoped that somebody would be Bert. He was a simple-minded little fellow, and might be persuaded to believe the story that Bob had told the hostler. But Bert did not come to their relief; it was his father. When Bob saw him he wished most heartily that the roof would open and let him ...
— The Boy Trapper • Harry Castlemon
... on the Saturday following his incarceration the very mountains rang with the news? That it should be mangled and turned topsy-turvy, and that in the eyes of his simple-minded neighbors he should be thought of as the murderer, by reason of his great strength? For how could it come into the intelligence of law-abiding citizens and law-respecting people, that a man should be shut up ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... mirrored, and not a headland, nor rock, nor cliff, that was not pictured below. It was, in a word, a little paradise; nor were the people all unworthy of their lovely birthplace. They were a quiet, civil, obliging, simple-minded set—if not inviting strangers to settle amongst them, never rude or repelling to them; equitable in dealings, and strange to all disturbance or outrage. What they are now is no more easy to say than what a rivulet is when a torrent has carried away its banks ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... February 21, 1848 — and the month of February brought life and death as a family habit — when the eighteenth century, as an actual and living companion, vanished. If the scene on the floor of the House, when the old President fell, struck the still simple-minded American public with a sensation unusually dramatic, its effect on a ten-year-old boy, whose boy-life was fading away with the life of his grandfather, could not be slight. One had to pay for Revolutionary patriots; grandfathers and grandmothers; Presidents; diplomats; Queen ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... conspicuously by the tall spire which marks the site of an Episcopal chapel and college of great architectural beauty, built within the last few years. And in Arran are the villages of Lamlash and Brodick. The two Cumbrae islands constitute a parish. A simple-minded clergyman, not long deceased, who held the cure for many years, was wont, Sunday by Sunday, to pray (in the church service) for 'the islands of the Great and Little Cumbrae, and also for the adjacent islands of ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... herself—"Kitty, here's that lock I promised you"—just like that. Then he had laughed and joked as if nothing unusual had happened—only was he watching her out of the corner of his eye when he thought she wasn't looking? That was the real question. The idea of Raymond trying to make her jealous! How simple-minded boys are! ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... five at Our Lady of the Snows; he never saw an English newspaper; he spoke French imperfectly, and had he spoken it like a native, there was not much chance of conversation where he dwelt. With this, he was a man eminently sociable, greedy of news, and simple-minded like a child. If I was pleased to have a guide about the monastery, he was no less delighted to see an English face and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... eyes looked like coals, whose voice pierced him like a flint-tipped arrow. Ah, well, they would never quarrel again like that, he told himself. She loved him so, and would forgive him after he had talked quietly to her, and told her what an ass he was. She was simple-minded and awfully ignorant to pitch those old Indian laws at him in her fury, but he could not blame her; oh, no, he could not for one moment blame her. He had been terribly severe and unreasonable, and the horrid McDonald temper had got the better of him; and he loved her so. Oh! He loved ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... would return! That was all she cared for. She really liked him, for he was so candid, so good, and so simple-minded. With such a son-in-law much was possible, she thought. Okoya could certainly be moulded to become a very useful tool to her as well as to Tyope. The woman felt elated over the results of the evening; she felt sure that notwithstanding one egregious mistake, of which of course she would be ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... who has but one horse," I observed contemptuously. "You are only a footpad, a simple-minded marquis of ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... boyhood can. With my fellows, arm in arm through the streets, I shouted imbecile songs. I went to all kinds of reprehensible places—to the bals du quartier, for instance, where we danced with simple-minded damsels who thought choucroute garnie a generous supper and a bottle of vin cachete as setting the seal of all that was most distinguished upon the host. With the first five francs that I made by selling a drawing I treated Fanchette, the little ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... the fence outside of the country church, or sauntering through the woods with a fish-pole over their shoulders and a creel by their sides, or with their heads together on the porch of some cross-roads store, bartering eggs and butter for cotton cloth and brown sugar. All these simple-minded, open-aired, out-of-doors old fellows, with the bark on ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... principle of Purpose. Let us take a very simple illustration. Across many of the hills in Cumberland the way from one village to another is marked by white stones placed at short intervals. We may easily imagine a simple-minded person asking how they came there, or what natural law could account for their lying in that position; and the physical antecedents of the fact—the geological history of the stones and the physiological structure of the men who moved them—give no answer. As soon, however, as we ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... Jonas, who, with all his bitterness, was nothing worse than a simple-minded enthusiast, and never imagined that Sir Willmott's words could convey aught than approbation of his zeal, and the right spirit that dwelt within him;—"even so; and it rejoiceth me to find thee apt and prompt in scriptural passages. Verily, I am glad of thy company; and as thou ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... Deferred no saying, qualifying that; Set no word-trap for unsuspecting souls; Spoke no oracular, ambiguous phrase, Intending merely the vicarious pure; Reserved no strange or mystical condition To breed fine points of doctrine, or confound The simple-minded and the slow of faith. Heart-purity and singleness and love, Fertile in loving acts, sole proof of these, Summed up for them, my father and my mother, All nobleness, all duty, ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... aide-de-camp, with his bluey grey chin, who was continually offering his services, pleased Nekhludoff by his good nature. But it was the charming young couple, the General's daughter and her husband, who pleased Nekhludoff best. The daughter was a plain-looking, simple-minded young woman, wholly absorbed in her two children. Her husband, whom she had fallen in love with and married after a long struggle with her parents, was a Liberal, who had taken honours at the Moscow University, a modest and intellectual young man in Government service, ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... say they would come on the twentieth of May; it was then the seventh, and Jeanne awaited their arrival with intense impatience. Besides her natural desire to see her parents, she felt it would be such a relief to have near her two honest hearts, two simple-minded beings whose life and every action, thought and desire had always been upright and pure. She felt she stood alone in her honesty among all this guilt. She had learnt to dissimulate her feelings, to meet the comtesse with ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... table! We were in a mood to laugh about anything, and we laughed at the thought of the table; at the thought, too, of all the simple-minded folk who had imagined that they would be able to purchase 'souvenirs' at the auction so abruptly brought to ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... 7: The purpose for which judges are appointed among men, is that they may decide doubtful points in matters of justice. Now a matter may be doubtful in two ways. First, among simple-minded people: and in order to remove doubts of this kind, it was prescribed (Deut. 16:18) that "judges and magistrates" should be appointed in each tribe, "to judge the people with just judgment." Secondly, a matter may be doubtful even among experts: and therefore, in order ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... respectful attention, for, despite the feelings of pity, almost bordering on contempt, with which they regarded the stranger's weapons and his knowledge, or rather ignorance, of woodcraft, they could not help reverencing the simple-minded enthusiasm in a good cause that had conducted the artist so deep into a savage land in which he was evidently unfitted, either by nature or training, ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... head master told me she will make a good scholar, and dear a me! she does nothing but read books from mornin' till night." While Hetty and her mother removed the dishes we drew our chairs about the fire, and Mr. Chaffin, a blunt, simple-minded man, entertained me with sage observations regarding politics and the weather. He spoke rather loudly, and in a key which, as I learned afterward, he only employed on very special occasions. Presently the youngest lad in the family, who sat on his father's knee, demanded a song. The response ...
— The Master of Silence • Irving Bacheller
... who have had an opportunity of observing the Aborigines in their original state, it is not very difficult to distinguish the guilty from the innocent, for they are a simple-minded race, little skilled in the arts ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... is the living record of every incident; he does the work of the police without suspecting it. A government should maintain two hundred spies at most, for in a country like France there are ten millions of simple-minded informers.—However, we need not trust to this report; though even in this little town something would be known about the twelve hundred thousand francs sunk in paying for the Rubempre estate. We ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... course of the evening, she found courage to converse more freely, giving her views, for instance, on the great servant question, and on other matters of domestic interest, it became clear to Mr. and Mrs. Rymer that their landlady, though a soft-hearted and simple-minded woman, was by no means to be regarded as ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... egotism which is very likely to be lasting. I had not accomplished very much in my studies. I was nothing in particular among my religious brethren. My general reputation up to this moment in the ship was that of a simple-minded Irish lad, who was a religious fanatic, a sort of sky pilot or "Holy Joe." I became flushed with the only victory worth while in the army or navy, and the second experience lasted twice as ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... all for subject be able to get away from its form and colour. And it is wrong to say "If he paints the mountain faithfully from the form and colour point of view it will suggest all those other associations to those who want them," unless, as is possible with a simple-minded painter, he be unconsciously moved by deeper feelings, and impelled to select the significant things while only conscious of his paint. But the chances are that his picture will convey the things ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... innocent of the world ways, the experienced reader knows at once what is coming. Innocence is hard on the woman, however charming it may be to men. The women who go a step beyond innocence and are so trusting as to be described as simple-minded, no matter how gentle, patient, and sweet they are, are absolutely unsafe in this world of man's chivalry and protection. If you want to know what fate overtakes them, ask the matron of the Refuge for Unfortunate Women, ask any ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... The simple-minded Monticelli had no psychology to speak of—he was a reversion, a "throw back" to the Venetians, the decorative Venetians, and if he had possessed the money or the leisure—he hadn't enough money to buy any but small canvases—he might have become a French Tiepolo, and perhaps the greatest ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... allowed to be the best compote-maker (the nuns were famous for their compotes, which were in great demand), the best embroiderer, the best altar-decorator in the convent. What more could be expected or demanded of life? Soeur Lucie, at any rate, was quite satisfied with her position, and this perfectly simple-minded, good-tempered little sister was a general favourite. Madelon could not have fallen into kinder hands; Soeur Lucie, if not always very wise, was at least very good-natured, and if she did not win much respect or admiration from our little Madelon, who was not long in discovering ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... fanatical patriot's enthusiasm fell flat. The Bretons were marching into danger partly from desire, but more from duty and discipline. At the very first shot these simple-minded creatures reach the supreme wisdom of loving one's country and losing one's life for it, if necessary, without interesting themselves in the varied mystifications one calls government. Four or five of the men, more or less astonished at ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... along, bereft of its passengers, sunk to the level of carrying the baggage for its contemptuous aristocratic supplanter; and as Lee Virginia looked up at the driver, she caught the glance of a simple-minded farm-boy looking down at her. Tom Quentan no longer guided the plunging, reeling broncos on their swift and perilous way—he had sturdily declined to "play second ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... man, he called upon Don Ramon, and actually offered to purchase the land, or "go shares" with him in the agricultural profits. It was alleged that the Don was so struck with this concession that he not only granted the land, but struck up a quaint reserved friendship for the simple-minded agriculturist and his family. It is scarcely necessary to add that this intimacy was viewed by the miners with the contempt that it deserved. They would have been more contemptuous, however, had they known the opinion that Don Ramon entertained of their ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... conviction of the simple-minded Sol that no one knew the various natural indications of human passion better than himself. Perhaps it was one of the fallacies of his profession that the expression of all human passion was limited to certain conventional signs and sounds. Consequently, when Rand colored violently, ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... take the long view. For my part, the only thing I admire in militarist Prussia is its military organization. After the war—for we must not limit our outlook to the present conflict—we must take lessons from it, and just let the simple-minded humanitarians go on ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... ancestors of man, showing that man has developed from the little mass of protoplasm, as have all animals and plants. He therefore was not spontaneously created, but was developed. The question is often asked by simple-minded people, with much delight, Why do we not behold the interesting spectacle of the transformation of a chimpanzee into a man, or conversely of a man by retrogression into an orang?—it only shows that they are not acquainted with the first ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... "jobbers" used to besiege the offices of the Secretaries of War and Navy, and the venerable Welles (who reminded me of Abraham in the lithographs), and the barnacled Stanton, seldom appeared in public. Simple-minded, straightforward A. Lincoln, and his ambitious, clever lady, were often seen of afternoons in their barouche; the little old-fashioned Vice-President walked unconcernedly up and down; and when some of the Richmond captives came home to the Capital, immense meetings were held, where patriotism bawled ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... devil," replied Lord Etherington, "would lose his money, and run the risk of a quarrel into the boot!—We will try it another way—Suppose this good-humoured and simple-minded gamester had a favour of the deepest import to ask of his friend, and judged it better to prefer his request to a winner than ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... lengths of ten spaces each and digging at those points? Wouldn't the minds of those men work in that way? Instead of choosing distances of seven feet, nineteen feet, twenty-three feet, wouldn't they first think of ten, twenty, thirty and so on? It's the simplest way, and they were rough, simple-minded men." ...
— The Rushton Boys at Treasure Cove - Or, The Missing Chest of Gold • Spencer Davenport
... tracks with his customary care. He had sufficient faith in his knowledge of disguise, which was extensive, to believe that those mysterious persons who were interested in his movements remained unaware of the fact that the simple-minded visitor from Vancouver who had spent several hours in and about the Savoy, and Paul Harley of Chancery Lane, were one ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... think we shall interest you, my poor girl and I. I am sure that if you were to see Catherine, she would interest you very much. I don't mean because she is interesting in the usual sense of the word, but because you would feel sorry for her. She is so soft, so simple-minded, she would be such an easy victim! A bad husband would have remarkable facilities for making her miserable; for she would have neither the intelligence nor the resolution to get the better of him, and yet she would have an exaggerated power of suffering. I see," added the Doctor, with his ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... less magnificent, but still respectable, and even genteel enough. That of a nursery-governess, for instance; you are fond of children, and could teach them their letters. Or you could be companion to a lady; some simple-minded, old-fashioned dame who stays at home, and would not require you to know languages. Or, better still perhaps, you might go into one of the large West End shops. I do not think it would be very difficult for you to get a place of that kind, as your appearance is so much in your favour. I know ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... moments Juve was able to size up his man, who seemed only too anxious to impart information about himself and his affairs. While quite as simple-minded as Wulf, he appeared far more sinister. Juve also divined without much difficulty that his wife, Madame Heloise Heberlauf, was the best informed woman in the kingdom ...
— A Royal Prisoner • Pierre Souvestre
... be intolerable to me to pass a whole evening tete-a-tete with a brat. Don't draw that chair farther off, Miss Eyre; sit down exactly where I placed it—if you please, that is. Confound these civilities! I continually forget them. Nor do I particularly affect simple-minded old ladies. By-the-bye, I must have mine in mind; it won't do to neglect her; she is a Fairfax, or wed to one; and blood is said to be ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... amazed that any one could be so simple-minded as to squander his money upon such a notoriously unprofitable form of entertainment. Nevertheless, men were playing, and they did not seem to suspect that the persons whom the dealer occasionally paid were ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... the outrage, the yelling, the clamor, the by-battles, and scurrilous contests in the lowest description of blackguardism with which it was garnished; thus causing it to occupy at least four times the period we have ascribed to it. The simple-minded priest, who could never have dreamt of such an exhibition, scarcely knew whether he was asleep or awake, and sometimes asked himself whether it was not some terrible phantasm by which he was startled and oppressed. The horrible impress of naked and hardened villany—the light ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... had these ancient damsels fancied that they were bewitched, or that they were haunted, or that they held communion with the spirits of the invisible world, instead of exciting laughter and pity, they would have occasioned no small excitement among the simple-minded people of the neighborhood in which ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... effrontery of his military companion, who had claimed to be his friend, and forced himself upon the acquaintance of the powerful man on the strength of that intimacy; had even brought to his notice the fact—if it was a fact—that he had been at Magenta and in the Crimea. The simple-minded young man had seen no such diplomacy in Pinchbrook, or in the course of his travels in Maryland and Virginia; and he was fearful that the audacious fellow would dare to address the daughter as he had ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... they rendered her so happy, and took away from her all fear. It was so shocking, too," she thought, "to think so ill of men—our fellow-creatures, and the creatures of a perfect Father. She loved her brother—he was so simple-minded, and so kind to her, too; how could she call him wicked ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... offered . . . with a trembling hand." When the lad tendered payment she declined the money, and patted his face, murmuring some unintelligible words. Obviously there was nothing in the boy's nature now that appeared strange to simple-minded folk. Probably the intercourse with other boys at Edinburgh and Norwich had been beneficial in its effect. Keenly interested in everything around him, George fell to speculating as to whether he could learn Irish and speak to the people in their ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... from this that poor Mr. Burdovsky must be a simple-minded man, quite defenceless, and an easy tool in the hands of rogues. That is why I thought it my duty to try and help him as 'Pavlicheff's son'; in the first place by rescuing him from the influence of Tchebaroff, and secondly by making myself his friend. I have resolved ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... habitation or had established a home on any spot in the universe, it was because no man envied him what he took; for Tom was one of God's fools, a foot-loose pilgrim in this world of ours, a poor addle-pated, simple-minded, harmless ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... tormentors. It is that, just for a time, I was troubled with a genuine doubt whether Mr. A. NEIL LYONS was not becoming too satirical to be sincere, and allowing his gift for facetiousness to betray him. The device of inventing a simple-minded young enthusiast, and making him ask perpetual questions to the undoing of all those who accept blindly the beliefs which Mr. LYONS is out to ridicule—well, there was nothing specially enlivening in that. Briefly, young Simon Honeyball ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... or it will be the worse for you!" and now Tom caught the simple-minded youth by the collar. He did not intend to harm the lad, but he wanted to make ...
— The Rover Boys on the Plains - The Mystery of Red Rock Ranch • Arthur Winfield
... far better, and far more civilised than we. I know one old chief Ko-o- amua, a great cannibal in his day, who ate his enemies even as he walked home from killing 'em, and he is a perfect gentleman and exceedingly amiable and simple-minded: ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Redclyffe had entered the reception-room, which was but shortly before the hour appointed for the dinner, there was another arrival betokened by the clatter of hoofs and grinding wheels in the courtyard; and then entered a gentleman of different mien from the bluff, ruddy, simple-minded, yet worldly Englishmen around him. He was a tall, dark man, with a black moustache and almost olive skin, a slender, lithe figure, a flexible face, quick, flashing, mobile. His deportment was graceful; his dress, though it seemed to differ in little or nothing ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... at her, his blue eyes full of a contented admiration. To this simple-minded, big-hearted man, his wife and child represented the whole world. All he had, all he owned, he valued only for the pleasure it might mean ...
— Patty and Azalea • Carolyn Wells
... of the great man of the law seemed incongruous here to me, who knew of old my simple-minded, simple-hearted friend whom, the truth be told, I patronized perforce. Then I looked about more carefully, and saw a dozen photographs of a woman, sometimes alone, sometimes holding a pretty child, and the faces were the ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... I'd better not," replied the Saint. "The fact is, your simple-minded old friend's getting conceited, now they've begun cheering him, and he'll forget all about the arrangement and take to playing the fool, and there's no telling where he would stop. I'll just finish him off ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... establishment and furniture of a great city as police-offices, lamp- lighting, or newspapers. Waiving however this one instance of something like compliance with the brutal spirit of the world, on all other subjects he was eminently unworldly, child-like, simple-minded, and upright. He would flatter no man: even when addressing nations, it is almost laughable to see how invariably he prefaces his counsels with such plain truths uttered in a manner so offensive as must have defeated his purpose if it ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... "here is the child Abel—he is found!" and seizing the trembling boy, with evident exultation, led him to her. The effect of this act of the poor simple-minded man was electrical. The mother instantly revived, but turned her face from her husband; and, entwining her son in her arms, pressed him closely to her side. The clergyman proceeded to interrogate the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 580, Supplemental Number • Various
... their labours. The number of instruments yearly made in Mirecourt and Saxony[1] amounts to many thousands, and is yearly increasing. They send forth repeated copies of Amati, Maggini, Guarneri, and Stradivari, all duly labelled and dated, to all parts of the world, frequently disappointing their simple-minded purchasers, who fondly fancy they have thus become possessed of the real article at the trifling cost of a few pounds. They produce various kinds of modern antiques in Violins, some of which display an amount ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... been pleased to cast His eyes on the lowliness of His servant. Although this advice came from a poor countryman, it was nevertheless the very best that could be given to a saint. So true it is that no one should be despised, and that the most simple-minded persons often say more sensible and more spiritual things than men of the ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... as these belong to a higher plane than the astral, they form no part of our present subject. The faculty of accurate prevision, again, appertains altogether to that higher plane, yet flashes or reflections of it frequently show themselves to purely astral sight, more especially among simple-minded people who live under suitable conditions—what is called "second-sight" among the Highlanders of Scotland ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... the President, for all his semblance of vacillation, was a great man. Seward was undeniably vain. That the President with such a Secretary of State should judge the strength of a Cabinet vote by counting noses—preposterous! But that was just what this curiously simple-minded President had done. If he went on in his weak, amiable way listening to the time-servers who were listening to the bigots, what would become of the country? And of the Secretary of State and his deep policies? The President must be pulled ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... in the event of serious attack. Moreover, it was desirable, from his point of view, to keep them out of the way while he developed his plans against the person of the Child of Kings, for whom these simple-minded men had a hereditary and almost a ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... name no more, among the dead, who found is being built, or the like, acceptable. 'Simple-minded common people and those of culture were alike protected against it by their attachment to the idiom of their mother tongue, with which they felt it to be directly at variance.' So Mr. White informs us. But the writers whom I have quoted are formidable exceptions. Even Mr. White ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... of defense, and are simple-minded to the last degree. Most are incapable of long-distance speed, but all have an exuberance of multiplication that fills their ranks as fast as foe can thin the line. If, indeed, they did not have several families, several times a year, ...
— Wild Animals at Home • Ernest Thompson Seton
... he had to overcome to get an education, made him a strong man. He knew people, and when he came later to be President and to guide the country through the greatest trial in its history, it was those same qualities of perseverance and courage and trust in the people that made the simple-minded man the great helmsman ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland
... Bolshevik agitation as a cover for their own nefarious work. As we have seen already, Lenine had previously been imposed upon by a notorious secret police agent, Malinovsky. But the open association of the Bolsheviki with men who played a despicable role under the old regime is not to be denied. The simple-minded reader of Bolshevist literature who believes that the Bolshevik government, whatever its failings, has the merit of being a government by real working-men and working-women, needs to be enlightened. Not only are Lenine and Trotzky not of the proletariat themselves, but they have ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... "in the trances, of which she had divers and many,[310] consequent upon her illness, told wondrously things done and said in other places whereat she was neither herself present, nor yet had heard no report thereof." To simple-minded people who believed in Romanism and the legends of the saints, the natural explanation of such a marvel was, that she must be possessed either by the Holy Ghost or by the devil. The archbishop's bailiff, ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... and then send her a formal invitation. I believe ours is one of the half-dozen houses where people don't pretend to be something quite different from what they are when Mrs. Lenox appears. And yet she's the most simple-minded and genuine person, and would rather have beefsteak and friendship than pate de fois gras and ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... and returned in a few minutes in the character of an amiable and simple-minded Nonconformist clergyman. His broad black hat, his baggy trousers, his white tie, his sympathetic smile, and general look of peering and benevolent curiosity were such as Mr. John Hare alone could have equalled. It was not merely that Holmes changed his costume. His expression, his manner, ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... in Spain," he added. "You have, as everywhere else, two kinds of women—coquettes in abundance, and a very few simple-minded domestic women. The former care only to please their lovers, the latter their husbands. Neither the one nor the other, however, have any ambition beyond indulging themselves in vanities and luxuries. They only employ their ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... benevolent, simple-minded old gentleman, is the founder of the Pickwick Club. He and three other members, Mr. Winkle, Mr. Snodgrass, and Mr. Tupman, form the Corresponding Society of the club, and they travel over England together, meeting with many laughable adventures. ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... a nuisance! I dont know what to do. You know, Juggins, your cool simple-minded way of doing it wouldnt ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... a while a new lot of come-ons show up, with their old charts and their nice new shovels, and go to digging. Why, I was shown a place just north of Little Gasparilla—Cotton River, they call it—where the banks have been dug up for miles by these simple-minded nuts. ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... and let Nature take its course with the poor things. And she said these was A-Number-One beagles, being sure to get a rabbit if one was in the country. She'd just had 'em at a big fashionable country resort down South, some place where the sport attracted much notice from the simple-minded peasantry, and it hadn't been a good country for rabbits; so the beagles had trooped into a backyard and destroyed a Belgian hare that had belonged to a little boy, whose father come out and swore at the costumed hunters in a very common ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... knickerbockers, I often heard Palmerston speak. I remember his abrupt, jerky, rather "bow-wow"-like style, full of "hums" and "hahs"; and the sort of good-tempered but unyielding banter with which he fobbed off an inconvenient enquiry, or repressed the simple-minded ardour of a ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... are, &c. The assonance of the original might perhaps be partly reproduced by rendering 'evil-minded as you are, it was yet a very simple-minded idea that your mind ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 2 • Demosthenes
... difficulties in a party struggle, again opened negotiations with Pisistratus, proposing that the latter should marry his daughter; and on these terms he brought him back to Athens, by a very primitive and simple-minded device. He first spread abroad a rumour that Athens was bringing back Pisistratus, and then, having found a woman of great stature and beauty, named Phye (according to Herodotus, of the deme of Paeania, but as others say a Thracian flower-seller of the deme of ...
— The Athenian Constitution • Aristotle
... furnished as to leave no shadow of opportunity for concealment or trick, was the residence of honest piety and rural simplicity. All who ever knew them bore witness to the unimpeachable character of the good mother, while the integrity of the simple-minded farmers who were father and brother to the sisters who have since become so celebrated as the "Rochester Knockers" stands proved ...
— Hydesville - The Story of the Rochester Knockings, Which Proclaimed the Advent of Modern Spiritualism • Thomas Olman Todd
... that time far too simple-minded and too clannish to feel their pride piqued at this offer, or to take offense at the rude manner in which it was made. Commodore Waugh was their grand-uncle, and therefore had a right to educate them, and to be ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... tradition of the county, or any feeling whatever for history in stone, was about to demolish much, if not all, that was interesting in that ancient pile, and insert in its midst a monstrous travesty of some Greek temple. In the name of all lovers of mediaeval art, conjured the simple-minded writer, let something be done to save a building which, injured and battered in the Civil Wars, was now to be made a complete ruin by the freaks of an irresponsible owner. Her sending him the paper seemed to imply that she required his opinion on the ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... residence and storeroom. One-half of it was devoted to the storage of provisions, clothing, and such other goods as are required by hunters and trappers. These Mr. Barton exchanged for furs with said hunters and trappers. Hunting, trapping, and fishing constituted the sole business of the simple-minded inhabitants. Here they are born, live, die contentedly, knowing little of and caring nothing about the great world which the most of us are so anxious ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... outriders, launched packets of tracts among the cottagers and tenants, and would order Gaffer Jones to be converted, as she would order Goody Hicks to take a James's powder, without appeal, resistance, or benefit of clergy. My Lord Southdown, her late husband, an epileptic and simple-minded nobleman, was in the habit of approving of everything which his Matilda did and thought. So that whatever changes her own belief might undergo (and it accommodated itself to a prodigious variety of opinion, taken from all sorts of ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... conquerors, they live on a pedestal and are to assert their superiority in every way. It will be long ere Arabs can appreciate French art and science, but they understand visible trifles of this kind, and, conversing with them, I have found that, like many simple-minded people, they are disposed to contrast unfavourably their own burial-grounds with our trim method of sepulture, which assures to the defunct a few more years of apparent respect, while flattering the vanity of the living. To ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... colonies of France and England, there was no civil war, bringing into the midst of the plantations the demoralizing influences of the camp, harassing the simple-minded freedmen with constant fear of reverses, which would consign them to a worse bondage than they had ever known, and tending, in the absence of all civil law and the restraints of a well-ordered society, to draw away the laborer from the cultivation of the soil. In South Carolina, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the head of the Church was a very different character, and was a most simple-minded and really good religious man. I employed a photographer of the Royal Engineers (kindly permitted by Major Maitland, R.E.) specially to take his picture, as he sat every morning knitting stockings, with a little boy by his side reading ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... emotion that we have followed, at close range, this struggle for the mastery of the Ruthenian soul. We hardly know which we should admire the more, the faithfulness of the simple-minded Ruthenian, or the devotedness of the few missionaries who, for the last fifteen years, have lived, worked and died among them. We all remember that cry of distress, that demand for help which came from Archbishop Langevin ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... or nineteen, as I suppose, the son of the great enchanter in Lifu in old times—the hereditary high priest of Lifu indeed. He was a simple-minded, gentle, good fellow, not one probably who would have been able to take a distinct line as a teacher, yet he might have done good service with a good teacher. We found that afternoon a slate on which he had written down some thoughts when first taken ill, ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... windows and polished metalwork when the occasion demanded. He was only one of a large crew of similarly employed men, but he was a favorite with the Head Custodian, who not only felt sorry for the simple-minded deaf-mute, but appreciated the hard work he did. If, on occasion, Comrade Turenski would lean on his broom and fall into a short reverie, it was excusable because he still managed to get all his ...
— The Foreign Hand Tie • Gordon Randall Garrett
... next to Mr. Lindsay, she liked the company of the old housekeeper best. She was a simple-minded Christian, a most benevolent and kind-hearted, and withal sensible and respectable person; devotedly attached to the family, and very fond of Ellen in particular. Ellen loved, when she could, to ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... had then bound him and tied him to the back of a horse and rapidly borne him into the interior. They might not have meant any harm to him at first, he thought, but when they found him examining a dog with great care they were convinced the simple-minded old man was a witch doctor and at once sentenced him to ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... a small picture of Jesus and his disciples leaving the upper room at Jerusalem after the Last Supper. This, too, was painted in the most realistic manner. The disciples, simple-minded fishermen, rude in features and dress, were plodding homeward, while Christ himself gazed at the stars and drew the attention of his nearest companions to some of the brightest. Tolstoi expressed especial admiration for this picture, ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... who resides in Paris; let his dwelling be searched, and should he be absent, it will warrant a suspicion that Pichegru is here; if, on the contrary, his brother should be at home, let him be arrested: he is a simple-minded man, and in the first moments of agitation will betray the truth. Everything happened as I had foreseen, for no sooner was he arrested than, without waiting to be questioned, he inquired if it was a crime to have received his brother into his house. Thus every doubt was removed, and a miscreant ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... the white man's riches and resources, coats richly laced with gilt braid, red trousers, medals, flags, knives, colored handkerchiefs, paints, small looking-glasses, beads and tomahawks were believed to be so attractive to the simple-minded red man that he would gladly do much and give much of his own to win such prizes. Of these fine things there were fourteen large bales and one box. The stores of the expedition were clothing, working ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... III. died on the 8th of March, 1702, and was succeeded by James II.'s daughter Anne, who was then thirty-eight years old, and had been married when in her nineteenth year to Prince George of Denmark. She was a good wife and a good, simple-minded woman; a much-troubled mother, who had lost five children in their infancy, besides one who survived to be a boy of eleven and had died in the year 1700. As his death left the succession to the Crown unsettled, an Act of Settlement, passed on the 12th of June, 1701, had provided ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... to the rehearsal, trembling with fear, but on seeing the person who was to play "Garrick," she quickly mastered herself. This amateur was hardly more than a boy, skinny, awkward, and simple-minded. He lisped and waddled about like a duck, but since he was the cousin of one of the influential journalists who backed him, he regarded everybody at the theater with a haughty expression and treated them with ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... the soil was receiving enrichment and the air warmth. The processes of mathematics were constantly improved, the heavenly bodies were steadily observed, and at length appeared, far from the centres of thought, on the borders of Poland, a plain, simple-minded scholar, who first fairly uttered to the modern world the truth—now so commonplace, then so astounding—that the sun and planets do not revolve about the earth, but that the earth and planets revolve about the sun: this man was ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... may judge of our modern aristocracy by that very slender fragment of our contemporary fiction, mostly American, that still thinks it worth writing about, our young noble of to-day is the most good-humoured, tolerant, simple-hearted, simple-minded, unsophisticated creature alive—thinking nothing of his honours—prostrate under the little foot of some fair Yankee, who is just as likely as not to jilt him for some transatlantic painter ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... which I have felt more need of publishing than any other of my sermons or tracts. For the greatest of all questions has been raised, the question of Good Works, in which is practised immeasurably more trickery and deception than in anything else, and in which the simple-minded man is so easily misled that our Lord Christ has commanded us to watch carefully for the sheep's clothing under which the wolves hide ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... political spectacles at which the simple-minded stare, and the politic smile; when, after the most cruel civil war of words,[411] Cartwright wrote very compliant letters to his old rival, Whitgift, now Archbishop of Canterbury; while the Archbishop ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... remembered that she herself had been young, and, on those days, whoever talked with her found in her a sincere friend. She related to us her flirtations with Monsieur, and we told her of the flirtations she had had with others, or, at least, the rumors of them that had spread abroad. Poor woman, so simple-minded! she laughed at them, as we did. ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Detecting, tiptoed to the door of the bedroom he shared with the mysterious Mr. Critz. In appearance Mr. Gubb was tall and gaunt, reminding one of a modern Don Quixote or a human flamingo; by nature Mr. Gubb was the gentlest and most simple-minded of men. Now, bending his long, angular body almost double, he placed his eye to a crack in the door panel and stared into the room. Within, just out of the limited area of Mr. Gubb's vision, Roscoe Critz ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... "plot." It is an attempt to present a happy, witty, simple-minded woman who attracted love because she gave it out. This is a very difficult type of book to write. The attention of the reader must be aroused and held by the sheer merit of the writing, and the publishers believe they have ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... is the richest man in the Island, and his income is about £150 a year, a sum which these simple-minded folk look upon ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... happen to get jagged up in good shape, about the first thing I'd do would be to lick the stuffing out of you for being such a simple-minded cuss," Ford prophesied grimly, as one who knows well ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... in love with this simple-minded American, who comes—" Peter Brutus started to say at one stage of the discussion, when the frail girl was battling ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... claim-jumpers. I have always had a weakness for him because of his blind and unshakable love for my little Dinkie, for whom he whittles out ships and windmills and decoy-ducks. But when I explained things to simple-minded old Whinnie, and he offered to hand over the last of his ready money—the money he was hoarding dollar by dollar to get back to his hidden El Dorado—it brought a lump up ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... method of these German plotters, Hugh," said Mr. Cook. "Very often they get some simple-minded, ignorant fellow like Heinrich and make a tool of him. Heinrich hasn't got brains enough to think ...
— Bob Cook and the German Spy • Tomlinson, Paul Greene
... but smile at such simple-minded ebullitions of feeling; yet I would by no means be understood to laugh at them. On the contrary, they are so manifestly spontaneous and sincere as to be really touching. Whatever may be the future of the Portuguese Republic, it has given the nation some weeks of unalloyed ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... 'Simple-minded old fellow,' thought Waring, lighting a fresh pipe; 'has lived around here all his life apparently. Think of that,—to have lived around here all one's life! I, to be sure, am here now; but then, have I not been—' And here followed a revery of remembrances, ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... locked. He confirmed Mrs. Drabdump's statement about the windows; the chimney was very narrow. The cut looked as if done by a razor. There was no instrument lying about the room. He had known the deceased about a month. He seemed a very earnest, simple-minded young fellow, who spoke a great deal about the brotherhood of man. (The hardened old man-hunter's voice was not free from a tremor as he spoke jerkily of the dead man's enthusiasms.) He should have thought the deceased the last man in ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... incarnation of divinity; and when the Sacred Person really burst upon their view, the excitement was beyond description. Young and old, women and children, fell simultaneously upon their knees, and tears and sobs mingled with the blessings showered upon His Majesty by thousands of his simple-minded, ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... of it too," said the Rector. "Garth is an independent fellow: an original, simple-minded fellow. One day, when he was doing some valuation for me, he told me point-blank that clergymen seldom understood anything about business, and did mischief when they meddled; but he said it as quietly and respectfully as if he had been talking to me about sailors. ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... was put down. The committee refused to sign. More people then began to see the self-contradictions of the opposition, and most of those "plain people" to whom Lincoln consciously appealed were touched to the heart by his pathetic question: "Must I shoot the simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of the wily agitator who induces him ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... though constantly affecting a cheerful friendliness in his manner to her; after all, their union was but temporary. In Hanover Street he was also silent regarding the Hewetts, for there his role was that of a good, simple-minded fellow, incapable of intrigue, living for the domestic affections. If Kirkwood chose to speak to Michael or Jane of the matter, well, one way or another, that would advance things a stage, and there was nothing for it ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... up, and when he saw his master stretched out, with no sign of life, his eyes filled with tears, and he thrust himself over his master's body, crying and wailing like a little child. It was pitiful to see the sorrow and the devotion of the poor, simple-minded fellow, bewailing his master's fall from the blow of a mere stick. And he ended his tribute by thanking him for the great generosity he had always shown; for Don Quixote, for but eight months of service, had given him the best island that ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... claim. For a whole week or two Uncle Billy sulked, but his invincible optimism and good humor got the better of him, and he thought only of his old partner's good fortune. He wrote him regularly, but always to one address—a box at the San Francisco post-office, which to the simple-minded Uncle Billy suggested a certain official importance. To these letters Uncle Jim ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... old man was so intense and childlike that Jasper had not the heart to say one word that would in any way dampen his joy. To him, however, the whole thing was a great puzzle. Was it a joke, he wondered, which some people were playing upon this simple-minded man? A company was mentioned, but its name was not given. And further, why should any company be willing to pay five thousand dollars for David's idea, which was not new? It had been successfully carried out in other localities. Surely a concern ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... continuous effort of one generation after another to define with scientific accuracy and to everybody's satisfaction his exact nature and attributes; in consequence of which efforts there had come to be several most distinct but quite contradictory ideas upon the subject. There were some simple-minded folk to whom the chime typified a God essentially masculine, and like a man, hugely exaggerated, but somewhat amorphous, because they could not see exactly in what the exaggeration consisted except in the size of him. They pictured him sitting alone on a throne of ivory and gold ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... unprincipled adventurers, men of violence and blood, it was very difficult to find a suitable person. At length he fixed with much hesitation upon M. Codro, the astrologer. He was a simple-minded, good man; learned, though very artless. M. Codro was strongly attached to De Soto, the preserver of his life. As we have seen, he was well aware of the peril to which his benefactor was hourly exposed from the malignity of the governor. Gladly therefore he ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... With the exception of Dicky Sharpe, all my brother officers were strangers to me, and mostly to each other, so it took a little time before we became acquainted and shook into our places. Captain Cranley, I found, was somewhat of the old school—very kind-hearted and simple-minded, and not less strict towards himself than towards others—with a nice sense of honour, and very sensitive of rebuke. I was very glad to find that my old friend Jack Stretcher had volunteered, with the hope of one day becoming a warrant-officer. I must also mention the boatswain, who, though ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... for Turkey, Philip, with his bride, paid a visit to Newberg. His second sermon he preached in the Baptist church. To those simple-minded country people, he stood before them a living illustration of what the grace of God might effect. Six years previously he had startled and amazed them, as though he had ridden through the air on a broomstick; now he came back to them in peace and gentleness. Before he had laid ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... Jurgen's finding, simple-minded fiends who allowed themselves to be deplorably overworked by the importunate dead. They got no rest because of the damned, who were such persons as had been saddled with a conscience, and who in consequence demanded interminable torments. And at the time of Jurgen's coming into Hell political ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... him. They used every possible weapon. They dragged out once more the old pettifogging engine of war which has always served the impotent against creative men, and, though it has never killed anybody, yet it never fails to have an effect upon the simple-minded and the fools: they accused him of plagiarism. They went and picked out artfully selected and distorted passages from his compositions and from those of various obscure musicians, and they proved that he had stolen his inspiration from ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... went unflinchingly to a big store and, guided by that special Providence which looks after simple-minded old souls in their dangerous excursions into the world, found a sympathetic clerk who knew just what she wanted and got it for her. The Old Lady selected a very dainty muslin gown, with gloves and slippers in keeping; and she ordered it sent at once, expressage prepaid, to Miss ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... drug for allaying the pangs of moral discontent. His partners were the gloomily humorous editor of a celebrated magazine; a silent, elderly barrister with malicious little eyes; and a highly martial, simple-minded old Colonel with nervous brown hands. They were his club acquaintances merely. He never met them elsewhere except at the card-table. But they all seemed to approach the game in the spirit of co-sufferers, as if it were indeed a drug against the secret ills of existence; and every day as the sun ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... rate in all his most virulent developments; the "new woman" with stupendous lopsided opinions on difficult Old Testament subjects; the "lady authoress" with a mission to show up the vices of a society which she knew only by hearsay. Hither came, unwittingly, simple-minded Church dignitaries, who, Sybell hoped, might influence for his good the young agnostic poet who had written a sonnet on her muff-chain, a very daring sonnet, which Doll, who did not care for poetry, had not been shown. Hither, by mistake, thinking ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... talk together about his prospects, in all of which Olive took a warm and lively interest. He told her of his new house and grounds; of his plan of life, which seemed very Arcadian and poetical indeed. But he was a simple-minded, warm-hearted youth, and Miss Rothesay listened with pleasure to all he said. It did her good to see that there was a little happiness to be found ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... She bent her head aside, in a secret consciousness that her sister might alone detect, and form her own conclusions concerning the colour that she felt warming her cheeks. But, Maud's own sensitive feelings attributed more to Beulah than the sincere and simple-minded girl deserved. So completely was she accustomed to regard Robert and Maud as brother and sister, that even all which had passed produced no effect in unsettling her opinions, or in giving her thoughts a new direction. Just at this moment Farrel came back, and placed ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... yet another link betwixt the author and the simple-minded and excellent Society of Friends, through a proselyte of much more importance than Walter Scott of Raeburn. The celebrated John Swinton, of Swinton, nineteenth baron in descent of that ancient and once powerful family, was, with Sir William Lockhart of Lee, the person whom Cromwell chiefly ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Belle thought for a minute. "We couldn't stuff any part of that down the throat of a simple-minded six-year-old. We haven't really got anything, anyway. Time enough, I think, when we have six or seven hundred planets in each region, instead of only one planet. Maybe we'll know something by then. Does that ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... committees, where, practically, no one heard them, or of them, except the members themselves. The only objection which can be raised to this theory is, that if the matter is so very clear and simple, and the expenditure so imperatively called for, it is most wonderful that some ingenuous simple-minded member had not thought of making himself popular at one bound, by giving a little information to the public as the matter proceeded, and so silence all the grumbling and general dissatisfaction ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... Grantly had ever referred to the night of young Rabbich's dinner at the Moonstone, but since that night she had been distinctly conscious of a slightly more respectful quality in his manner towards her. The tendency was indefinable, illusive, but it was there, and simple-minded Mary only reflected gratefully that Grantly was "growing ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... Thus the simple-minded colored man, taught to meditate by the solitude which his affliction enforced upon him, speculated in regard to the leges non scripta which control the action of the human ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... a man so simple-minded and so sensitive as Dr. Lloyd should have provoked an encounter in which I can well conceive him to have been worsted. With your leave, Mr. Mayor, I will look into your ballroom. I may perhaps find ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the storeroom in a nice big trunk, where I fixed a bed and everything for it, while its mother was working down in the laundry, and I thought they'd look a while and give it up, but this Mrs. Wadley is kind of simple-minded or something. She took on so I had to say maybe somebody had put it in this trunk where it could have a nice time. And this stepmother taking on ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... they were abroad, a year before the time of this story, that the boy met Aunt Jane's three nieces again. They were "doing" Europe in company with a wealthy bachelor uncle, John Merrick, a generous, kind-hearted and simple-minded old gentleman who had taken the girls "under his wing," as he expressed it, and had really provided for their worldly welfare better than Aunt Jane, his sister, ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne
... the more free to gain a foot-hold and go about controlling the tone of our life. There is real advantage in bringing the large issues of life to a point where not only our mind but, as it were, our senses, can lay hold on them. It is the impulse of simple-minded men like those early disciples, and if we continue straight-seeing we do not outgrow it. What makes these views of life so deep is not that they are less simple than those of others, but that they are more simple. ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... oppressive silence prevailed, for neither voice of bird nor insect was to be heard. Crockett began to feel very uneasy. The fact that he was lost himself did not trouble him much, but he felt anxious for his simple-minded, good-natured friend, the juggler, who was left entirely alone and quite unable to take care of himself ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... Washinton, the great Adams, and the sainted Linkin, the President mite be considered the Father of his country, hevin so large a number of helpless children to provide for; and besides, he hed a instinctive respeck for the dispenser of anything. It wuz difficult for him, bein a open and simple-minded man, not to ...
— "Swingin Round the Cirkle." • Petroleum V. Nasby
... late sixties. Fifty years ago, what would they have said if someone had predicted this flight? The answer to that was easy; at that time, high-school songbooks featured a well-known piece entitled "Darius Green and His Flying Machine." Darius, it seems, was a simple-minded lad who actually thought he ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
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