"Ghostlike" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... spectre wore my features, was a liquid presentation of my own proportions colossally enlarged; that I stood in the centre of a lunar rainbow, and that I was gazing on the reflection of myself in the mist. As I moved my arms, my body, or my head, the ghostlike figure moved, and I felt myself irresistibly changing my postures—oddly and nervously at first—then, with an awakening sense of the ridiculous in my actions—so as to make my image change and ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... breathe, she fled, ghostlike, up the stair, and in a wild paroxysm of fear dashed into the room at the angle of the hall, where "Prince Djiddin" lay extended upon his couch of Oriental shawls and cushions. He was restless, and still dreaming, open-eyed, of ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... was changed. The ruddy faces of the men were become green, blue, yellow, and purple, according to temperament, but few were flesh-coloured or red. When the bell rang there was a universal groan below, and half a dozen ghostlike individuals raised themselves on their elbows and looked up with expressions of the deepest woe at the dim skylight. Most of them speedily fell back again, however, partly owing to a heavy lurch of the vessel, and partly owing to indescribable ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... antique mirror which was well worthy of a tale by itself, and perhaps may hereafter be the theme of one. The gold of its heavily-wrought frame was tarnished, and its surface so blurred that the old woman's figure, whenever she paused before it, looked indistinct and ghostlike. But it was the general belief that Esther could cause the governors of the overthrown dynasty, with the beautiful ladies who had once adorned their festivals, the Indian chiefs who had come up to the province-house to hold council or swear allegiance, the grim provincial ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... as though to veil the majestic sight from our curious eyes, strange vapours and clouds gathered and increased around the mountains, till presently we could only trace their pure and gigantic outlines, showing ghostlike through the fleecy envelope. Indeed, as we afterwards discovered, usually they were wrapped in this gauze-like mist, which doubtless accounted for our not having ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... up a steep gravel drive and stopped before a broad Japanese entrance, three wide steps like altar stairs leading up to a dark cavernous hall full of bowing women and men in black clothes, similar, silent and ghostlike. The first impression was lugubrious, ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... ready, he placed himself in a position, remained a second or two, and then instantly closing his camera, surveyed the result of his operation. On bringing the picture out upon the plate, he was surprised to find a shadowy representation of a human being, so remarkably ghostlike and supernatural, that he became amused at the discovery he had made. The operation was repeated, until he could produce similar pictures by a suitable arrangement of his lenses and reflectors known to no other than himself. About this time he became acquainted with one ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... are we to put up beside Him? Is it to be these dim figures of religious reformers that are gliding, ghostlike, to their doom, being wrapped round and round about by ever thicker and thicker folds of the inevitable oblivion that swallows all that is human? Brethren, by common consent it is Christ or nobody. Aaron ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... hours later, the sledge was packed with camp-gear and bundles of skins. The door of the cabin was shut; a ghostlike wreath of blue smoke curled from the chimney. Luke stood, in his snowshoes, on the white surface of the River of the Way Out. He turned to look back for a ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... faster the notes rang out, and faster and faster in the ruddy firelight, the cats, like living shadows, whirled round the still black figure in the chair, with the ancient harp on its knee. Anything so weird, wild, and ghostlike I never imagined before even in a dream! The music changed, and the whirling cats began to leap. One perched itself at a bound on the pedestal of the harp. Four sprung up together, and assumed their ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... achievements may gain in a very small circle. Something of what he gains fortunately sticks by him: he does not quite forget the mountain language; his eye still recognises the space and the height and the glory of the lofty mountains. And yet there is some pain in wandering ghostlike among the scenes of his earlier pleasures. For my part, I try in vain to hug myself in a sense of comfort. I turn over in bed when I hear the stamping of heavily nailed shoes along the passage of ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... dotted the azure for a little with their white wings, ere they dipped below the horizon's rim. Hence, though the old, exhilarating, briny odor was the same, I felt that, as an ocean, this was unfamiliar. The Atlantic's waves are haunted by historic memories, but few reminders of antiquity rise ghostlike from the dreary waste of the Pacific. Few battles have been fought, few conquests made upon these shores. On the Atlantic coast one feels that he is looking off toward civilized and friendly lands, across ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... house was astir by now. Torches burned in great sockets in the vast hall and along the massive oak stairway, and hundreds of candles flickered ghostlike in the vast apartments of the ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... the December-night Steals coldly around the chamber bright, Where those lifeless lovers be; Swinging with it, in the light 150 Flaps the ghostlike tapestry. And on the arras wrought you see A stately Huntsman, clad in green, And round him a fresh forest-scene. On that clear forest-knoll he stays, 155 With his pack round him, and delays. He stares and stares, with troubled ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... upon the porch half an hour later, with others of the family, when the two figures came again up the stretch of lawn between the slim white birches, showing ghostlike now in the June moonlight. They came in silence, as far as any sound of their voices reached the porch, and they disappeared like two shades toward the front of ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... what little daylight there was lived on the western horizon. The form of the horse, cut out in black relief against the sky, was weird and ghostlike. It was standing by the side of the road, apparently grazing. As they approached it, its outlines became ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... design and faults of execution—and when it is admitted, further, that there is a general want of reality, substance, distinctness, and strength in the personages of the poem—that, compared with the contemporary drama, Spenser's knights and ladies and villains are thin and ghostlike, and that, as Daniel ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... which rose ghostlike out of the gulf of the past, and cloudily possessed the stage where the Hamlet of Mme. Bernhardt was figuring, was called a romantic Hamlet thirty years ago; and so it was in being a break from the classic Hamlets of the Anglo-American theatre. It was romantic as Shakespeare ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... left nearly uncovered, we forded from the island to the mainland. It was dark when we reached it, and for three hours after dark, bending under our packs, walking in Indian file, we pushed on in silence through the knee-deep snow upon which the moon, half hidden by flying clouds, cast a weird ghostlike light. Finally the Eskimos stopped in a gully by a little patch of spruce brush four or five feet high, and while Iksialook foraged for handfuls of brush that was dry enough to burn, Potokomik and Kumuk cut snow blocks, which they built into a circular wall about three feet high, as ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... soft whistle of quail caused Polly to lift her rifle, but the whir of wings told of a flight. From jagged rents in the cliffs, through which the horses passed, their hoofs ringing echoes from the iron-veined rock, they came to sleepy hollows where the Quaker Aspens stood ghostlike as sentinels on guard before ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... the turmoil of cities and armies, with superb force—a capacity of which there is hardly a trace in Paracelsus. Sordello himself stands out less clearly than Paracelsus from the canvas; but the sympathetic reader finally admits that this visionary being, who gleams ghostlike at the end of all the avenues and vistas of the poem, whom we are always looking at but never rightly see, is ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... humanity could have entered the paddock with the ghostlike glide of that mysterious figure. They were a woman and a gipsy man. A woman was out of the question in such an occupation at this hour, and the comer could be no less than a thief, who might probably have known the weakness of the household on this particular night, and have chosen it on ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... speculate on the reasons which had led Maud to leave home. It was but seldom now that his thoughts busied themselves with Maud; the unreal importance which she had for a time assumed in his life was only a recollection; her very face was ghostlike in his mind's eye, dim, always vanishing. If the news of her departure from England moved him at all, it was with a slight sense of satisfaction; it would be so much easier to write letters to her than to speak face to face. Yet, in the days that followed, the ghostlike ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... had sunk down on his breast, and he sat there in the high-backed chair, one hand resting on each leather-covered arm, his pale face showing almost ghostlike against the dark background, and with the faint November light illumining the dark-circled eyes, the bloodless lips, and ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... silence, profound, tense, ghostlike. We walked through street after street, from one end of the town to the other, and saw only one light, a faint glimmer which came from a slit of a cellar window almost on the level of the pavement. We were curious, ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... traffic had roared all day, plugged up the maze of dark side-streets, and blotted out the open squares. Close to the ground it was thick, viscous, impenetrable, so that one could not see a yard ahead, and walked ghostlike, adventuring into a ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... me. No, don't say that you intend doing so, for you know you have no intention of the kind; nor indeed have I, either. As for you, you will take your vows where they will result in something more substantial than the pursuit of such a ghostlike, ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... and go"—is a fine line of Charles Lloyd's. But no bird skims, no arrow pierces the air, without producing some change in the Universe, which will last to the day of doom. No coming and going is absolutely trackless; nor irrecoverable by Nature's law is any consciousness, however ghostlike; though many a one, even the most blissful, never does return, but seems to be buried among the dead. But they are not dead—but only sleep; though to us who recall them not, they are as they had never been, and we, ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... sittin' out here in our front yard, not doing any harm to anybody, and here it's nine times we've counted you passing the place—always going the same way!" He spoke as with complaint, a man with a grievance. "It's kind of ghostlike," he added. "We'd give a good deal to know what ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... light began to flush faintly. Rosy shafts shot upward, and the stars vanished. Here and there birds began to twitter. An old grouse scuttled away, wings a-trail, as if mortally hurt, to distract attention from her young brood hidden in the short grass. A huge owl sailed ghostlike on silent wings, homeward bound from midnight foray. A coyote yipped shrill protest against the day. Away to the west, where the mountains loomed grandly, bright lights lay on peaks still white with the remnants of ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... eagerness to know quickly the great secret of what comes next after this world, with its seeming muddle of injustice and disappointment, its joys and broken aspirations. "Why! it was like this with me when we had our accident in the Golden Eagle!" I thought. And even as the remembrance flitted ghostlike through my brain, I saw tearing through the sky, far above the big bulk of the Zeppelin, a monoplane etched in black against ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... except that her painter was fast to a stanchion. It was just possible that she might still be afloat, riding to the schooner as a sea anchor. Still clinging to the rail he peered and peered through the darkness, only to see the great white mainsail now and again gleam ghostlike in the dim light when the super-incumbent water foamed over it, as the Leading Light wallowed in the sullen seas. Then something dark rose against the sky away out beyond the peak end of the gaff—something black looming ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... forgot the subtle delight of that stolen walk. A spell of glamour was over us. The breezes whispered strange secrets of elf-haunted glens, and the hollows where the ferns grew were brimmed with mystery and romance. Ghostlike scents crept out of the meadows to meet us, and the fir wood before we came to the church was a living sweetness ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the British Empire. But English is at a discount here; Cree and French and a mixture of these are spoken on all sides. The swart boatmen are the most interesting feature of the place,—tall, silent, moccasined men, followed at the heel by ghostlike dogs. From this point north dogs are the beasts of burden; the camel may be the ship of the desert, but the dog is the automobile of the silences. The wise missionary translates his Bible stories into the language of the latitude. As Count von Hammerstein says, "What means ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... curls and white cheeks, but doubted, nevertheless, when you came to meet her great eyes, so dreamy that you wondered which was alive, you or she. Her hand, usually held up to her cheek, was absolutely ghostlike. Her form was so small, and deeply imbedded in a reclining-chair or couch-corner, that it amounted to nothing. The dead Galileo could not possibly have had a wiser or more doubtfully attested being as a neighbor. If the poor scientist had been there ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... recollection, so unexpected, so ghostlike in that weird light that he thought he was losing his senses—stood before him. It moved forwards with staring eyeballs and white and open lips from which a horrible inarticulate sound issued that was the speech of no living man! With ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... fierce California sun by day, and were now touched with silver in the gracious moonlight. Culpepper leaned against the low fence, and gazed long and earnestly at the building. Then the moonlight vanished ghostlike from one of the windows, a material glow took its place, and a girlish figure, holding a candle, drew the white curtains together. To Culpepper it was a vestal virgin standing before a hallowed shrine; to the prosaic observer I fear it was only a fair-haired young woman, whose ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... during the absence of her landlady, and I opened the door upon a terrible scene. My poor child stood before me, with a white scared face, and heaving breast, upon which was pinned a bunch of autumn violets, Antoine's last gift to her. Her slender figure, her fair hair, her pallid complexion looked ghostlike in the uncertain twilight; she seemed like a troubled spirit, beautiful and sorely distressed, but there was no shame in her lovely face, nor any sense of guilt. Seeing me enter, she uttered a cry of relief, and sprang forward as though to ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... point in the peace intrigue the ambiguous figure of Napoleon the Little reappears, though only to pass ghostlike across the back of the stage. The determination of Northern leaders to oppose Napoleon had suggested to shrewd politicians a possible change of front. That singular member of the Confederate Congress, Henry S. Foote, thought he saw in the Mexican imbroglio means to bring ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... you're sane enough to know what you're doing. Give them to me." He took them back and crept quietly, ghostlike, about the room until he found a receptacle in which he knew they would be safe; then, removing one hundred francs from the amount, he brought it back and thrust it in his friend's pocket. "There—that's enough for you to throw away on ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... no means of ascertaining the time. So many of the church-bells and clock towers had been silenced recently that not one of those welcome sounds penetrated to the dreary desolation of this canal wharf, with its abandoned carts standing ghostlike in a row. Darkness had set in very early in the afternoon, and the heavers had given up work soon ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... be that bad!" exclaimed Enoch. "Are you cold, Diana? I thought you shivered. What a strange, ghostlike country it is! It would be horrible up ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... on down, now crossing a shaft of light flung on the water from some lamp or fire, now blending with the ghostlike shadows which lay in the moonless night. It passed out of the town itself, and edged into the shade of the forest that swept continuously for so ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... the grape blossoms on the wall—these were as familiar to him as the streets of the little crowded town in which he had lived. It was as if nature had stood still here for twelve long summers, or as if he were walking, ghostlike, amid the ever present memories ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... midst of an atmosphere of gloom. The room was large and lofty, and the lighting was altogether inadequate. From the walls there frowned through the shadows the warlike faces of generations of Rowchesters. At the farther end of the apartment four armed giants stood grim and ghostlike in the twilight, which seemed to supply their empty frames with the presentment of actual warriors. I looked down upon the table, all agleam with flowers, and fruit, and silver, over which shone the red glow of the shaded ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... usual gait, and his head bent slightly; though his eyes were wide open, he seemed to see nothing, yet he did not stumble or even hesitate. Ida followed behind him with absolute noiselessness. They were both ghostlike in their movements, and the dogs stood and watched them intently, ears erect, and with that gravity in their eyes which dogs wear ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... be but a heap of rubbish, revealed by the removal of the mantle of snow, lighting up with flickering, changing glow a rectangular door yard, the children stand and gaze into the dancing flame, their vast, distorted, ghostlike shadows lost in the night, their faces reflecting every evanescent glare, and their spirits charmed by the same spell that took form in the fire-worship of their ancestors. How they delight in stirring up the ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... fog, and formed a species of rainbow in the west, bestriding my intended road like a gigantic portal. I had never known before that a bow could be generated between the sunshine and the morning mist. It had no brilliancy, no perceptible hues, but was a mere unpainted framework, as white and ghostlike as the lunar rainbow, which is deemed ominous of evil. But, with a light heart, to which all omens were propitious, I advanced beneath the ...
— Passages From a Relinquised Work (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... placing one hand quickly on her arm, and with the other pointing. In the uncertain moonlight she saw moving cautiously away from them, and unconscious of their presence, a white, ghostlike figure. ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... giving every note its true value; the cadence rising and falling like waves of a still sea; softer and softer; till the last note faded away, ghostlike—a sigh ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... swiftly, a white, ghostlike figure. In the middle of the lawn she stopped short once as if in doubt what to do—as a thought-reader pauses in his search for the mental scent again, ere he rushes upon the object of his search with the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... across the lake and the darkening waters were still that we rose reluctantly to put the dishes in the tea basket and start on our homeward journey. The tawny fires of the sunset were dying down behind us, the mist stealing, ghostlike, into the valleys below; in the sky a little moon curled like a freshly cut silver shaving, that presently turned to gold, the white ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... actually proposed to me to walk in the garden with him! Good night, or, as my ancestors—don't forget, MY ANCESTORS—used to say: 'Buena noche—hasta manana!'" She lingered over the Spanish syllables with an imitation of Dona Anna's lisp, and with another smile, but more faint and more ghostlike than ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... in the air, and to Frances Durkin, sitting beside Keenan on the promenade deck, there seemed something restless and phantasmal and ghostlike in the thin, North Atlantic sunlight, after the mellow and opulent gold of the Mediterranean calms. It seemed to her to be a presage of the restless movement and tumult which she felt to be ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... steading of Waster Lunny sunk deeper into the waste. The schoolhouse, I suppose, serves similarly as a snowmark for the people at the farm. Unless that is Waster Lunny's grieve foddering the cattle in the snow, not a living thing is visible. The ghostlike hills that pen in the glen have ceased to echo to the sharp crack of the sportsman's gun (so clear in the frosty air as to be a warning to every rabbit and partridge in the valley); and only giant Catlaw shows here ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... ghostlike into a thousand rooms, Whirls over sleeping faces, Spins in an atomy dance round misty street lamps; And blows in cloudy waves over open spaces ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... the summer came The trunks of madrono, all aflame, Here and there through the underwood Like pillars of fire starkly stood. All of the breezy solitude Was filled with the spicing of pine and bay And resinous odors mixed and blended; And dim and ghostlike, far away, The smoke of the burning woods ascended. Then of a sudden the mountains swam, The rivers piled their floods in a dam, The ridge above Los Gatos Creek Arched its spine in a feline fashion; The forests waltzed till they grew sick, And ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... thousand natterjacks were whirring like the nightjar. Strange birds screamed and rushed out of the trees as she sped along. White moths, ghostlike, wavered about her, mosquitoes piped. ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... under the barred prison window, an open Bible on his knees. Slowly the shadows were falling about him, and to the man every shade had an entity of its own. First there trooped before him all the old memories of the many yesterdays—of Peg—his little dead lad—and Jinnie. And lastly, ghostlike, came the shattered hopes of to-morrow, and with ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White
... they danced in a circle round the fire, chanting wild sounds that had no meaning or rhythm but were supposed to be ghostlike wails and groans. ...
— Two Little Women • Carolyn Wells
... voice far away. He could see the returning figure of the servant, but it seemed as gray and ghostlike as the entire room about him. In his shaking fingers he took the official papers which Copeland handed over to him. He could read the words, he could see the signatures, but they seemed unable to impart any clear-cut message ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... consigns the Boboli at Florence, the Cinnamon Gardens of Colombo, Concepcion at Malaga, Versailles, Hampton Court, the Generaliffe at Granada, and La Mortola to the category of "also ran." Nothing so free and gracious, so lovely and wistful, nothing so richly coloured, yet so ghostlike, exists, planted by the sons of men. It is a kind of paradise which has wandered down, a miraculously enchanted wilderness. Brilliant with azaleas, or magnolias, it centres round a pool of dreamy water, overhung by tall trunks ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... Ghostlike I paced round the haunts of my childhood. Earth seem'd a desert I was bound to traverse, Seeking to ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... had on light-colored outing shirts, and these, with the handkerchiefs over their faces, made them look quite ghostlike in ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - or The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht. • Edward Stratemeyer (AKA Arthur M. Winfield)
... the long alley of roses. Their strong perfume—confined in the high, hot walls—at first made him giddy. This was followed by an inexplicable languor; he turned instinctively towards the stone bench and sank upon it. The long rows of calla lilies against the opposite wall looked ghostlike in the darkness, and seemed to have turned their white faces towards him. Then he fancied that ONE had detached itself from the rank and was moving away. He looked again: surely there was something ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... fell upon the speaker, standing stockstill in the cloven path below him, not twenty feet away. In his relief, he laughed. He beheld a slim figure in riding-togs. Nothing formidable or ghostlike in that! Nevertheless, a pair of dark blue eyes transfixed him with indignation. They looked out from under the rim of a black sailor hat, and ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... rose wearily; through the back-drifting smoke the long battle line of the Excelsiors wavered like phantoms in the mist. Six flags flapped ghostlike above them, behind them men writhed in the trampled, bloody grass; before them the sheeted volleys rushed outward into darkness, where the dull battle ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... were no longer in sight. A boundary pillar gleamed ghostlike a few hundred yards ahead. The last rim of the sun had already slipped behind the hills. Their harsh peaks black against a sky of faint amber, had a threatening look; and darkness was racing up out of the east. ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... her ghostlike as she passed through the living-room, their startled questions unheeded. Could it be true that she had betrayed every decent attribute of a woman in vain? Why had the counter-attack failed? Because Westerling had been too strong, too clever, for old Partow? Because God was ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... moonlight the lamps on the fishing-boats and on the bridge, now locked against the outside world, burned mistily, and the deck of the steamer moored directly below him was as deserted and bare, as uncanny and ghostlike, as the deck of the ship of the Ancient Mariner. Except for the chiming of ships' bells, the whisper of the running tide, and the sleepy murmur of the longshoremen, the town of Willemstad was steeped in sleep and silence. Roddy, finding he could arrive at no satisfactory explanation of ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... shivered under his feet. Huge waves roared by, of such vastness that Madden could hear their crests crashing and thundering high above the level of the bridge. These moving mountains shook tons of black water into dim, ghostlike spray, and sent it hissing down into cavernous troughs. The weight of the wind-swept spume flashing out of darkness through the binnacle light almost took the boy off his feet. It pounded his oilskin, ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... but a sound behind him made him turn. He wheeled round and saw his father standing almost up against him. He had only time for a horrified vision of the ghostlike figure, the staring eyes, the open mouth, the white cheeks. The old man caught ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... had hopes, however, of being able in some degree to indemnify ourselves for our loss, when, on the 2nd of August, about two hours before daylight, the shadowy outline of a ship was seen dead to leeward between us and the land, the wind being somewhere from the south-west. Now she was there, ghostlike and indistinct, a spirit gliding over the face of the waters; now as I looked she had disappeared and I could scarcely believe that I ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... the boat from the Santa Teresa. The lady whom we sought lay like a fallen flower on the dark ground beneath a pine. She did not move, and her eyes were shut. At her head crouched the negress, her white garments showing ghostlike through the gloom. Beneath the next tree sat Diccon, his hands tied behind him, and around him my Lord Carnal's four knaves. It was Diccon's voice that we had heard. He was still speaking, and now we could ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... the edge of the pool he listened to its turmoil, for the shadows were gathering so fast that, with some ghostlike shapes of foam excepted, he could not even see the surface of ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... Amenthe in the west may have arisen in the following way. Some superstitious Egyptians, travelling westwards, at twilight, on the great marshes haunted by the strange gray white ibis, saw troops of these silent, solemn, ghostlike birds, motionless or slow stalking, and conceived them to be souls waiting for the funeral rites to be paid, that they might sink with the setting sun ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... streaks, and though the wind had abated somewhat, the Tiger still ploughed along into the obscurity at a fair rate of speed. Jeremy stayed forward with the lookout, peering constantly into the gloom ahead, and half expecting to see the ghostlike sails of the Revenge whenever for a moment a gray aisle opened in the mist. But there were only the grim, uneasy seas and ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... it seemed, below the sound of the unearthly hurricane I heard Larry's voice, thin and ghostlike, beneath its clamour. ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... part of the affair is the effect of this vagary, even on a sober-minded man like myself. The black veil, though it covers only our pastor's face, throws its influence over his whole person, and makes him ghostlike from head to foot. Do you not ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... before, and shut them in on the spot where they walked, as in a world desolate and apart, allowed nothing to be seen in front; but now and again a ragged thorn-tree or a furze bush, dripping with moisture, showed ghostlike to right or left. There was nothing to indicate the point they were approaching, or how far they were likely to travel; until the Colonel, peering keenly before them, caught the gleam of water. It ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... them but the large sleepy lids, fringed with lashes so long and dark that the eye looks as if it had been painted, in the Eastern fashion, with antimony; the dark lashes, dark eyebrows, dark hair, crisped (as West-country hair so often is) to its very roots, increase the almost ghostlike paleness of the face, not sallow, not snow-white, but of a clear, bloodless, ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... Choosing the northern route brought about the dire disaster, in his mind, and it was the saving of three hours for the sake of a new record that ended in the collision with the tragic victory for the ghostlike monster out ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... its opening, with all traces of their conflict removed. The air was crisp and cold,—a trifle colder than usual,—and there was a singular thickening of the sun's rays on the ridge, which made the distant peaks indistinct and ghostlike. However, the two combatants stripped "to the buff," and Fleming patronizingly took position at the "corner," leaning upon a rifle, which, by reason of his superior years, and the wilderness he was obliged to traverse in going to school, his father had ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... Hilyard, the unexhausted riders under Sir John Coniers and his knightly compeers, were dealing fearful havoc, as they cleared the plain; and Gloucester, fighting inch by inch, no longer outnumbering but outnumbered, was driven nearer and nearer towards the town, when suddenly a pale, sickly, and ghostlike ray of sunshine, rather resembling the watery gleam of a waning moon than the radiance of the Lord of Light, broke through the mists, and showed to the earl's eager troops the banner and badges of a new array hurrying to the spot. "Behold," cried the ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... places and lit their cigars. The train swayed gently along, its rattle muffled by the storm. Polished black squares represented the windows across which drifted hazy lights and ghostlike suggestions of snowflakes. Bob watched this ebony nothingness in great idleness of spirit. Presently one of the half-dozen men arose from his place, walked the length of the car, and dropped into the ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... years and upwards had fled since we had taken farewell of the illustrious Ornithologist—on the same spot—at the same hour; and there was something ghostlike in such return of a dear friend from a distant region—almost as if from the land of spirits. It seemed as if the same moon again looked at us—but then she was wan and somewhat sad—now clear as a diamond, and all the starry heavens wore ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... no sign. Where Gogoomy and his followers had emerged from the river, the canoe abruptly stopped, then turned and disappeared into the deeper mangrove gloom. A second and a third canoe came around the bend from below, glided ghostlike to the crossing of the runaways, and vanished in ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... over her grave. Tradition has it that the boy Abraham brought this about very likely, at ten years old, he felt that her troubled spirit could not have peace till this was done. Shadowy as she is, ghostlike across the page of history, it is plain that she was a reality to her son. He not only loved her but revered her. He believed that from her he had inherited the better part of his genius. Many years after her death he said, ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... There was no cessation of the monotonous, dismal chanting of the priests, as these newcomers,—whose sinister purpose no one could doubt,—moving with the silence of spectres, their bodies draped in shapeless robes of skin, appearing ghostlike beneath the uncertain flickering of flame, moved forward like a great writhing snake, passed along the southern wall beneath the face of the flying dragon overhead, until they found seats on the hard floor between altar and platform; two or three, evidently superior chiefs, by their richer trappings, ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... are bringing them back who went forth so bravely. Grey, ghostlike cars down the long white road Come gliding, each with its cross of scarlet On canvas hood, and its heavy load Of human sheaves from the crimson harvest That greed and ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... the female was unutterably calm and sweet (though with a something of severe); there was no line nor wrinkle in the hueless brow; care never wrote its defacing characters upon that everlasting beauty. It knew no sorrow or change; ghostlike and shadowy floated on that Shape through the abyss of Time, governing the world with an unquestioned and noiseless sway. And the children of the green solitudes of the earth, the lovely fairies of my tale, shuddered as they gazed and ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... story about Archie, too long to tell you here; but each castle of Northumberland (the county of castles, not of collieries) has dozens of wonderful old stories, warlike, ghostlike, tragic, and romantic. I have been reading a book about some of them, which I will bring you. It's more interesting than any novel. And King Arthur legends are scattered broadcast over Northumberland, as in Cornwall. Also the "Scots wha ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... not live by, whose relations and large harmonies and controlling power are not being increasingly realised in your lives; that truth is becoming less and less real, more and more shadowy, and ghostlike to you. Truth which is not growing is becoming fossilised. 'The things most surely believed' are often the things which have least power. Unquestioned truth too often lies 'bedridden in the dormitory of the soul side by side with exploded error.' The sure way to reduce ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... were two beds and he threw himself on one of them. In ten minutes Bateman knew by his regular breathing, peaceful as a child's, that Edward was asleep. But for his part he had no rest, he was disturbed in mind, and it was not till the dawn crept into the room, ghostlike and silent, that he ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... sovereignty. His kingdom pervades the world. It is a fact that challenges thought. No world conqueror has ever had such an empire. Beside this the royalty of men like Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon, and more modern aspirants is shadowy and ghostlike. His is an abiding ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... room in which the caretaker and the Boy Scouts met was in the breaker. There was no fire in the great heater, and the tables and chairs were black with dust. A single electric light shone down from the ceiling, creating long, ghostlike shadows as it swayed about in a gentle wind blowing through a ...
— The Call of the Beaver Patrol - or, A Break in the Glacier • V. T. Sherman
... fish with the fly from a birch-bark canoe on absolutely still water? You do not seem to move. But far below you, gliding, silent, ghostlike, the bottom slips beneath. Like a weather-vane in an imperceptible current of air, your bow turns to right or left in apparent obedience to the mere will of your companion. And the flies drop softly like down. Then the silence becomes sacred. You whisper— ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... heavy silence of the crypt, he heard the turning of the key in the lock, his heart stood still, and every emotion hung suspended, as the first veiled figure—shadowy and ghostlike—moved into view. ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... the boy was kept locked up, but after that the Jew left him at liberty to wander about the house; which was a weird, ghostlike place, with the mouldering shutters fast closed, and no evidence from outside that it sheltered human creatures. Oliver was constantly with Charley Bates and the Dodger, who played the old game ...
— Ten Boys from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... not the faint harp, tremulous, combine Its ghostlike sounds with organ's mighty tone? Let my poor song be ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... they beat drums, fired guns, rang bells, and it was evident to me that no wild beast would hold to his lair under such a torrent of abuse. I found the words they were using were curses on the wild boar. I saw two or three fallow deer glide past me, with their usual ghostlike silence, and shortly afterwards the woods very near me seemed to shake with something coming. Suddenly some fifteen to twenty wild boar appeared among the bushes, coming straight towards me. The first of these was an enormous brute, evidently the ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... once he looked up. The room was so still it seemed ghostlike. He heard the clock ticking audibly and half suspected that he had been dozing. The paper was so straight in his hands, however, and the items he had been reading so directly before him, that he rid himself of the doze idea. Still, it seemed ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... sidewalk and held you there open-eyed. No longer was it regiments of men marching, but something uncanny, inhuman, a force of nature like a landslide, a tidal wave, or lava sweeping down a mountain. It was not of this earth, but mysterious, ghostlike. It carried all the mystery and menace of a fog rolling toward you across the sea. The uniform aided this impression. In it each man moved under a cloak of invisibility. Only after the most numerous and severe tests at all distances, with all materials and combinations ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... mysterious shadows. Only when our torches lit the darkness did we perceive the actual forms of the cocoanuts, mango- and purau-trees which bordered the banks and climbed the hills into the distance. The puraus often seemed like banians, stretching far over the water in strange and ghostlike shapes, with twisting branches and gnarled trunks that in the obscurity gave a startling suggestion of the fetish growths of the ancients. I felt a faint touch of fear as I groped through the stream, now and again falling into a deep hole or stumbling ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... up by camp fires which send their flames toward heaven in a cloud of smoke. These little red spots throw everywhere a fiery glow over the snow, and down upon this wonderful color symphony the moon pours its weak, ghostlike light through a curtain of clouds so that people seem to float away as in a dream. In the foggy twilight three battalions march to the front.... The noise of the gunfire penetrates to us in separate, spasmodic outbreaks. Flashes of fire flare up on the horizon.... Gradually we come closer and closer ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... with a ghostlike litheness through the moonlight, her eyes wide and frightened and her whole seeming one of unreasoning panic so that the man, who knew her dauntlessness of spirit, ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... sound of footsteps, and there came Fair Brother running towards her. She saw his face pale and ghostlike, yet he never looked at her, but ran past and ...
— The Blue Moon • Laurence Housman
... line of irregular houses, of projecting ilex roundings and pointed cypresses marking the separation between hill and sky, the one scarcely more solid, corporeal than the other; the hill almost as blue as the sky, the sky almost as vaporous as the hill; the tangible often more ghostlike than the intangible. But the sun has smitten the higher hills, and the vapours have partially rolled down, in a scarcely visible fold, to their feet; and the high hill, not yet rock or earth, swells up into the sky as something real, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... night, distance from the city, and those ghostlike forms made a deep impression, replied in a voice somewhat uncertain,—"I know not, lord; I have never been in Ostrianum. But they might praise God in ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... and presently, as if by magic carpet, he had left all that sunlight and glitter and cheerful noise and stood alone in the shadowy, narrow street of a frontier town. There was no bustle here, only an intense stillness. The street was deserted, the shop doors closed. There was a ghostlike, chilling effect that left him uneasy. He called upon himself to remember that he was not actually in a remote and desolate frontier town from which the inhabitants had fled; that back of him but a few steps was abounding life, that outside was the prosaic world passing and repassing a gate hard ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... developed the outlines of a steam craft, set low in the water, and of not more than two thousand tons. She was not a handsome craft, but, on the contrary, appeared ghostlike as she stood only half-revealed through ...
— Dave Darrin After The Mine Layers • H. Irving Hancock
... earth. In some cases the quarried ore yields from 50 to 70, and even as much as 90 per cent of iron. The Dannemora Mine is a vast quarry open to the sky. When you come near it the place looks like a vast deep pit, with an unfathomable bottom. Ghostlike, weird-looking pinnacles of rocks stand out from its profound depths; but beyond these you see nothing but wreaths of smoke curling up from below. The tortuous chasm in the earth, caused by the quarries beneath, is about half a mile long, and about ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... so very narrow, dark, and filthy, and the few figures slid away into the windowless house walls in so ghostlike a fashion, that the girls hesitated a little ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... did Janet think of refusing this sad petition. She sat down beside her; she laid Sophy's head against her broad loving breast; she looked with wondering pity at the small, shrunken face, so wan and ghostlike in the gray light. Then she called Christina, and Christina lifted Sophy easily in her arms, and carried her into her own house. "For we'll give Braelands no occasion against either her or Andrew," she said. Then they undressed the weary woman ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... the sea. A soft, steady breeze was blowing, and the rippled surface of the water was sparkling in the quiet moonlight. I looked again, and there passed slowly, between me and the track of the moon, a long black vessel with tall, shadowy, ghostlike sails, gliding smooth and noiseless through the water, like ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... velvet skull-cap from his white hair, bowed low three times, and kissed his hand to the ladies. The Lido in front of them stretched a brown strip of sand with white villages shining out of it; on their left the Public Gardens showed a mass of hovering green; far beyond and above, the ghostlike snows of the Alpine heights haunted the ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... had served in Jersey, and was persuaded to dine at mess. A melancholy dinner it was for me, meeting old friends whom I had not seen for so long. Yet not possessing energy enough for conversation or feeling the spirit of "Hail fellows, well met." I felt that my moody silence and ghostlike appearance (for I was dressed in black) threw a gloom over them. This was no doubt a morbid fancy as also was perhaps the idea that they looked at me with pitying eyes. But these feelings seized me, and increased till they became unbearable, and I was glad ...
— Three Months of My Life • J. F. Foster
... energetic; the under-lip protruding, as if pushed forward by the inspiration of his feelings; the chin strong; cheeks pale, rather hollow than full, freckly; the eyelids a little inflamed; the bushy hair of the head dark red; the whole head rather ghostlike than manlike, but impressive even in repose, and all expression when Schiller declaimed. Neither the features nor the somewhat shrieky voice could he subdue. Dannecker,' adds the satirical Witness, 'has unsurpassably cut this head in ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... his destination a ghostlike face and figure startles Leonhard: he looks back and sees it is "our little minister, Wenck," whom Spener had pointed out to him in their morning walk. He is hurrying down the street, and it ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... as they approach; but those who come hold the hands of those who go, and that troop has no rosy light upon their limbs, their garlands are faded, the sunshine falls not upon the grey and shrouded shapes, as they steal ghostlike through the gloom—and ever and ever the bright and laughing sisters pass on into that funereal band which grows and moves away from us unceasing. Alas! for many of us it bears away with it our lost treasures, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the window, looking up at the dismal silhouette of the ancient castle. The moon had risen, on the edge of the horizon, and already the place was beginning to look ghostlike with the pale iridescence. ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... innocence; but gazed and gazed, and remembered and realized and dreamt: it all gave him unspeakable excitement, and a strange tender wistful melancholy delight for which there is no name. Je connais ca! I also, ghostlike, have paced round the ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... away; and Mrs. Gaylor, who had brought her guest as far as the beginning of the bamboo grove; stood watching the white figure flit farther and farther away, among the intricate green pillars of the temple. Then, when the elusive form became ghostlike in the distance, Carmen went back to the house. She walked slowly and with dignified composure while it was possible that she might be seen by some servant. But once in her room, with the door ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... wrapped in a suit of borrowed oilskins, leaned against the deck-house and grinned at the breaking day. Like a fire opal the sun rose out of the sea, its first rays dissipating the ghostlike wisps of fog that drifted over the water. The "Felice" was shouldering her way up channel against the slap of a running tide and the greeny-black waves, as yet undyed by the morning blue, spumed ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... distinguish nothing. Only straining my eyes, presently I thought that about a hundred yards down the slope beneath us in the dim light I caught sight of ghostlike figures flitting from tree to tree; also that these figures ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard |
