"Sheer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Bookshop was a delightful place, especially of an evening, when its drowsy alcoves were kindled with the brightness of lamps shining on the rows of volumes. Many a passer-by would stumble down the steps from the street in sheer curiosity; others, familiar visitors, dropped in with the same comfortable emotion that a man feels on entering his club. Roger's custom was to sit at his desk in the rear, puffing his pipe and reading; though if any customer started a conversation, the little man ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... of animal terror and agony was mine. I was the horse, hanging poised on the verge of the giddy tower, the next moment to be borne sheer down to destruction. Involuntarily, I raised my hand to feel the leanness and sharpness of my face. Oh horror! the flesh had fallen from my bones, and it was a skeleton head that I carried on my shoulders! With one bound I ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... solidify them into a mass; on the top of this other trees had been placed, and the former process repeated. But the Tyrians had met the new tactics with new methods. They had employed divers to attach hooks to the boughs where they projected into the sea, and by sheer force had dragged the trees out from the superincumbent mass, bringing down in this way large portions of the structure.[14398] But with Alexander's coming, and the retirement of the Tyrian fleet, all this was altered. Alexander's workmen were no longer impeded, except from the town, and ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... neither side could keep its hold on Battle Rise. By this time Drummond was wounded; and Riall was both wounded and a prisoner. Among the Americans Brown and Winfield Scott were also wounded, while their men were worn out after being under arms for nearly eighteen hours. A pause of sheer exhaustion followed. Then, slowly and sullenly, as if they knew the one more charge they could not make must carry home, the foiled Americans turned back and felt their ...
— The War With the United States - A Chronicle of 1812 - Volume 14 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • William Wood
... mistress's eyebrow, sonnets to their lady's lute, and general songs of a fiddlestick; peevish men for the most part, as is the way of all fleshly and affected beings; men so ignorant of human subjects and materials as to be driven in their sheer bankruptcy of mind to raise Hope, Love, Fear, Rage (everything but Charity) into human entities, and to treat the body and upholstery of a dollish woman as if, in itself, it ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... seems not to sympathizewith her beloved children. She sits there so eternally calm and self-possessed, so very motherly and serene, and cares so little whether the heart of her child breaks or not, that at times I almost lose my patience. About that, too, she cares so little, that, out of sheer obstinacy, I become good-humored ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... better of me throughout, but somehow I blundered through without letting him find the chance for which he looked. I kept my head, and parried by sheer luck his brilliant lunges. I broke ground and won free—if but barely—from his incessant attack. More than once he pricked me. A high thrust which I diverted too late with the parade of tierce drew blood freely. He fleshed ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... on for Glen Ellen sitting slack-kneed in the saddle and softly humming forgotten songs. He dropped down the rough, winding road through covered pasture, with here and there thickets of manzanita and vistas of open glades. He listened greedily to the quail calling, and laughed outright, once, in sheer joy, at a tiny chipmunk that fled scolding up a bank, slipping on the crumbly surface and falling down, then dashing across the road under his horse's nose and, still scolding, ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... she started away at a quick walk; but her strength soon failed her. She heard the sound of the snow crunching under a heavy step, and knew that the pitiless spy was on her track. She was obliged to stop. He stopped likewise. From sheer terror, or lack of intelligence, she did not dare to speak or to look at him. She went slowly on; the man slackened his pace and fell behind so that he could still keep her in sight. He might have ...
— An Episode Under the Terror • Honore de Balzac
... Earth's great offspring, by decree, Must rot if they abjure rapacity, Not argument but effort shall decide. They number many heads in that hard flock: Trim swordsmen they push forth: yet try thy steel. Thou, fighting for poor humankind, wilt feel The strength of Roland in thy wrist to hew A chasm sheer into the barrier rock, And bring the army of the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... compelled to go, the usual course is to write to his wife and tell her that she is free to look out for another husband. Having made up his mind that he will die, I have no doubt that he often dies through sheer funk." (R. Logan JACK, Back Blocks ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... eh? Not a hair on my chin? Do you know why? Well, I'll tell you! You see I get mad easy as hell; and when there's nobody to pick on, I pull my hair until my temper passes. If I hadn't pulled my beard hair by hair, I'd have died a long time ago from sheer anger!" ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... seeing Harper's bunch ride up—that feed them through policy. But whenever you make it plain to a man that he's compelled to do a thing whether he likes it or not it's ten to one he'll balk out of sheer human pride. If Harper kills the Three Bar foreman on the grounds that he refused to feed all his men—why then, right off, every other foreman and owner within a hundred miles starts to resenting the possibility that maybe the albino feels the same ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... knee. Bringing the edges of the end designed for the stem into apposition, using a device on the principle of the harness-maker's clamp, he sewed them together with strips of freshly cut cane. Two stretchers gave to the craft beam, and the necessary sheer and thwart-ship stays of twisted cane stiffness. Gunwales of cane were sewn on, the stitches being cemented with gum made plastic by frequent renderings over the fire on a flat stone, and then the canoe ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... rights have been. On one of its most beguiling days Roberta Gray was walking home from Miss Copeland's school. Usually she came by way of the broad avenue which led straight home. To-day, out of sheer unwillingness to reach that home and end the walk, she took a quite different course. This led her up a somewhat similar street, parallel to her own but several blocks beyond, a street of more than ordinary attractiveness ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... the High Commissioner and President Kruger had agreed to meet at Bloemfontein, was received by the Uitlanders with relief; not hope, because it was believed that the President's object was to get something, not to give something; but sheer relief, because, come what might, the position could never again be the same as it was before the conference. Something must change; someone must yield; the unbearable strain must cease. Sir Alfred Milner—wise ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... more Pelle observed while he stood just inside the door upon his bare feet, not daring from sheer nervousness to raise his eyes. Then the farmer turned round in his chair, and drew him toward him by the collar. "Now let's see what you've got there under your smock, my ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... strove furiously to prevent and to keep him at his work. Cap fought savagely, flinging his head aloft, rearing, plunging, and refusing to follow the direction toward which the redskin twisted his head by sheer strength. It was a strife between rider and steed, and the latter made no progress in either direction while keeping up the fight, which was as fierce ...
— Cowmen and Rustlers • Edward S. Ellis
... down, and at last we reach the place on foot. I have meanwhile drunk three glasses of tea and annihilated several eggs; the efforts at getting warm have also so perfectly succeeded that I feel the need of fresh air. I should, out of sheer impatience, commence shaving if I had a glass. This city is very straggling, and very foreign-looking, with its green-roofed churches and innumerable cupolas; quite different from Amsterdam, but both the most original cities ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... his third daughter coming out, there was need of more money than ever. He was harassed nearly to death with financial worries. [RUTH begins to cry softly. MRS. HUNTER gets angrier and angrier.] And finally, in sheer desperation, and trusting to the advice of the Storrings, he risked everything he had with them in the Consolidated Copper. The day after, he was taken ill. You know what happened. The Storrings, Hunter, and others were ruined absolutely; ...
— The Climbers - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch
... have killed us in a trice, but they ran as soon as they fired at us. They killed one of my men, putting five bullets in his body and eight in his buffalo-robe. The Indians were a band of Sioux on the war-trail after a band of Snakes, and found us by sheer accident. They endeavoured to ambush us the next morning, but we got wind of their little game and killed three ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... nature—to plunder and to oppress is to gratify them all. They wanted the huzzas of mobs, and they have for ever blasted the fame of England to obtain them. Were the fleets of Holland, France, and Spain destroyed by larceny? You resisted the power of 150 sail of the line by sheer courage, and violated every principle of morals from the dread of fifteen hulks, while the expedition itself cost you three times more than the value of the larcenous matter brought away. The French trample on the laws of God and man, not for old cordage, ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... the increased risk of committing a scholarly sin against which I have myself protested. In my own defense I can say that I know the highly conjectural nature of what I am doing. Johnson's pride may have suffered when he was arrested for debt in the presence of unsympathetic onlookers. This is sheer hypothesizing. But when, in Henry IV, ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... directions to the letter. Her lips in lines of order and discretion, her skirts hanging in perfect folds, she advanced up the straggling path, the picture of maidenly composure. The nearer she drew to the rosebush the more fixed became the look of meeting a serious obstacle and overcoming it by sheer force of will. ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... "Sheer tempting of Providence! I'm amazed! But—how did you get to know Mr. Ashton and to hear of this diamond? Did ...
— The Middle of Things • J. S. Fletcher
... of life from inside the mountain had put new heart in us. And in a moment we were all scrambling around trying to find any opening or crevice which would give us something to work on. Chee-Chee scaled up the sheer wall of the slab and examined the top of it where it leaned against the mountain's side; I uprooted bushes and stripped off hanging creepers that might conceal a weak place; the Doctor got more leaves and composed new picture-letters for the Jabizri to take in if he ...
— The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... until they were tired of fighting the liquor dealers, backed by the Democrats in the State and on the borders. They wearied of being taunted with the fact that they had not the power to enforce the law. Then in 1887 they gave municipal suffrage to women as a sheer party necessity. Just as much as it was a necessity of the Republicans in reconstruction days to enfranchise the negroes, so was it a political necessity in the State of Kansas to enfranchise the women, because they needed a new balance of power to help them elect and re-elect officers ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... they are. There are only two sorts of soldiers: old ones and young ones. I've served fourteen years: half of your fellows never smelt powder before. Why, how is it that you've just beaten us? Sheer ignorance of the art of war, nothing else. (Indignantly.) I never saw ...
— Arms and the Man • George Bernard Shaw
... all in a dry-voiced way that cost her an effort, as Garrison felt and comprehended. He had turned about, in sheer sympathy for her predicament. ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... the Juno; Laud Cavendish is in her, and I want to know what he is about. Don't speak a word, or make a particle of noise. If you do, he will sheer off; and I want to see ...
— The Yacht Club - or The Young Boat-Builder • Oliver Optic
... But—you remember the story of Gough and his diamond ring—I am determined not to let any diamond ring get between me and my audience. Writing should not get between the reader and the picture. I take a great joy in sheer lucidity, and if any sentence of mine does not at the very first sight express my meaning, I rewrite it. Obscurity of style indicates that the writer is not entirely master of what he has ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... of all in sheer expression of military power was the visit to the British Grand Fleet; most humanly appealing, the time spent in Belgium under German rule; most dramatic, the French victory on the Marne; most precious, my long stay ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... not a sycophant hanging round White Hall! 'Twas sheer good luck and no merit of mine that got me the guardianship of Sue. Lord Middlesborough, her kinsman, wanted it; the Courts would have given her to him, but old Noll thought him too much of a 'gentleman,' whilst I—an out-at-elbows country squire, ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... to answer for themselves,—at that moment, he perceives two or three of the persons he had particularly in view begin an active whispering, prolonged with the accompaniment of the appropriate vulgar smiles. They may possibly relapse at length, through sheer dulness, into tolerable decorum; and the instructor, not quite losing sight of them, tries yet again, to impel some serious ideas through the obtuseness of their mental being. But he can clearly perceive, after the animal spirits have thus been a little quieted by the necessity ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... always poured itself forth in writing so copiously that his revision was chiefly devoted to reducing the over-abundance. He never shrank from any of the drudgery of preparation, but I think his own part of the work was sheer pleasure ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... young man. He was rather deep, of few words on any given subject, but wholly non-communicative as regards himself. He perhaps was possessed of more intuition than his manner would reveal, although he gave every appearance of arriving at his conclusions by the sheer force of logic. His words and deeds never betrayed his whole mind, of that she was certain, yet he could assert himself rather forcibly when put to the test, as in the painful incident at the Coffee House. He would never suffer from soul-paralysis, thought she, for want of decision or ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... perilous moment of all, which is the moment before she is actually overtaken by the breaking crest of the wave, she is apt to refuse to answer her helm, and he who is steering her loses all control over her; she seems to be seized with a perverse determination to take a broad sheer one way or the other, with disastrous results, despite a hard-over helm, and then the only thing to be done to retrieve the situation is to effect a lightning shift of helm against all your past experience ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... for the dawn. I plied the goad with one hand; with the other, so steep was the ascent, I had to hold on the pack-saddle. Half a dozen times she was nearly over backwards on the top of me; half a dozen times, from sheer weariness of spirit, I was nearly giving it up, and leading her down again to follow the road. But I took the thing as a wager, and fought it through. I was surprised, as I went on my way again, by what appeared to be chill rain-drops falling on my hand, and more than once looked up ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... place, my sperm spurted out: and only the last drop remained just as I buried my prick in her. Then instead of meeting her humid tongue with mine, I sank on her breast kissing, yet damning and cursing like a dragoon, at my spoiled pleasure,—I had spent out of sheer copiousness of spunk, ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... southward valley, and began to follow it steadily upwards, crossing and recrossing a swiftly rushing stream. The snow peaks began to be hidden behind the rising bulk of hills that overhung us, and sometimes we could see nothing before or behind but the wooded walls of our valley rising sheer and green a thousand paces high on either hand; with grey rocks half masked by fern and ivy jutting here and there through the firs ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... sit still in the train which was carrying her towards Mansfield, from sheer excitement at the anticipation of actually seeing the haunts of Robin Hood. Ever since Mrs. Pitt had mentioned that town as the gateway of the Sherwood Forest of Betty's dreams, the name had seemed an enchanted one to her. As they had come only the comparatively short journey from Leeds, they ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson
... almost uncanny. Rising sheer from the flood on either hand, the tall green silent hills stretched away before us, changing tint through the summer vapour, to form a fantastic vista of blue cliffs and peaks and promontories. There was not one ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... men who guarded the German frontier—and I dare say every other frontier—in the first stress of war, were wrenched and shaken with veritable hysteria. At St. Ludwig and Constance those husky soldiers in ironmongery, with shaved heads and beards and outstanding ears, fell into sheer savagery, not because they were bad and savage men, but simply because they were hysterical. ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... behind them. Now, when they were thrust out of their famous stronghold and plastered with every sort of projectile, they held up repeated attacks, backed by enormous artillery preparation and support, held them up by sheer dogged fighting and superior knowledge of war. Their Staff work must have been good, and the training and morale of the troops equally good to have done it. After the first great success, we gained only small local successes, costing thousands of casualties and vast expenditure ...
— Q.6.a and Other places - Recollections of 1916, 1917 and 1918 • Francis Buckley
... judges of motives, principles, and character, twenty-fold, than he who lives at the gate, and merely sees the owner of the grounds pass in and out, on his daily avocations. There is, and can be no greater absurdity, than to imagine that the sheer neighbourhood, or proximity of position, makes men acquainted. That was one of Jason Newcome's Connecticut notions. Having been educated in a state of society in which all associated on a certain footing of intimacy, and in which half the difficulties that occurred were "told to the church," ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... it, Dr. John: it is not worth while. If Ginevra were in a giddy mood, as she is eminently to-night, she would make no scruple of laughing at that mild, pensive Queen, or that melancholy King. She is not actuated by malevolence, but sheer, heedless folly. To a feather-brained school-girl ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... the stairs, he jostled a man who was ascending, and naturally was led to look at him. Harry came near dropping with sheer surprise. The man he recognized at once as Vernon, one of the men whom he ...
— The Tin Box - and What it Contained • Horatio Alger
... reduced to making war by stealth instead of openly carrying off their slaves in fair battle. It seems probable that they now creep into a nest of the far more powerful slave ants, poison or assassinate the queen, and establish themselves by sheer usurpation in the queenless nest. 'Gradually,' says Sir John Lubbock, 'even their bodily force dwindled away under the enervating influence to which they had subjected themselves, until they sank to their ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... to a balcony on the first floor and looked out. The tide of the affray was surging gradually back into the wide open space before the inn, and very shortly this was filled with a chaos of furious faces and struggling arms. The University were evidently recoiling, pressed back by the sheer weight of their opponents; but soon came a re-enforcement of grooms and stable-men, lightweights, active and wiry; and these, with their hunting-crops and heavy cutting-whips used remorselessly—like Caesar's legionaries, they ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... solemn promise given that we should leave at seven in the morning. When we were ready, no animals were to be seen. The presidente asserted that the price which we had paid was only to that point, and that if we wanted animals for Cuicatlan we must make a new arrangement. This was sheer blackmail, because there had been no misunderstanding in the matter, and a liberal price had been paid. After wrangling for an hour, we shook the dust of Papalo literally from our feet, and started to walk to Cuicatlan, telling the town authorities that our burdens must ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... the road or down it, though that's bad enough, but sheer across it, sending the rain slanting down like the lines they used to rule in the copy-books at school, to make the boys slope well. For a moment it would die away, and the traveller would begin to delude himself into the belief that, exhausted with its previous fury, it had quietly laid itself down ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... morning reported that the Bull-dog engaged the Friseur, yard-arm and yard-arm, three glasses and a half, but was obliged to sheer off for want of powder. It is hoped that inquiry will be made into this affair in ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... because they had been spiritually starved. And all the riding hard, shooting true and dying game—those poor ethics of the open—had not brought a crumb, not a crumb, of the real bread of life. Nor could mountains of mere energy nor icebergs of sheer nerve! In needing the bread of life—they were different from the others, and so they lingered, unable to speak, while a poor little Tagal—"one of the niggers"—all unconsciously played. "Surely," they ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... For sheer terror the wild, fantastic witch-dance, seen through a Gothic window in the ruins of Kirk-Alloway, with the light of humour strangely glinting through, has hardly been surpassed. The Ballad-collections, beginning with Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... the circumstances. Within the past year many tribes have shown, in a degree greater than ever before, an appreciation of the necessity of work. This changed attitude is in part due to the policy recently pursued of reducing the amount of subsistence to the Indians, and thus forcing them, through sheer necessity, to work for a livelihood. The policy, though severe, is a useful one, but it is to be exercised only with judgment and with a full understanding of the conditions which exist in each community ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... suddenly horse an' rider sprang up i' the air, it seemed some distance, an' then doon to the earth again. When he cam to the place young Malcolm was sair dooncast to find before him a great, big, wide, yawnin' gulf, wi' a roarin' torrent at the bottom, an' sheer rocky sides that nae human ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... madden me, Leah? Have I not asked you to be brave, even unto the end? If you falter now, I am lost. My health and my strength are already gone. Only the consciousness of innocence sustains me. Leave me now. Sheer me with the hope of acquittal, and be brave as only a ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... poured out upon land and sea. All that God had made was as beautiful as if sin had never spoiled it. Just a little to the right of our cottage the ground rose up suddenly, and sloped up about a quarter of a mile to the top of a high cliff, from the edge of which was a sheer descent, almost unbroken, to the beach, of several hundred feet. It was a favourite spot of observation, for vessels could be ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... demonstrably not living can be, without the aid of organisms already living, endowed with the properties of life. Judged of hastily, and apart from the facts, it may appear to some minds that an origin of life from not-life, by sheer physical law, would be a great philosophical gain, an indefinitely strong support of the doctrine of evolution. If this were so, and, indeed, so far as it is believed to be so, it would speak and does ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... gentleman, the late President of the Board of Trade, wonders that other nations consider our abhorrence of slavery and the Slave Trade as sheer hypocrisy. Why, Sir, how should it be otherwise? And, if the imputation annoys us, whom have we to thank for it? Numerous and malevolent as our detractors are, none of them was ever so absurd as to charge us with hypocrisy because we took slave grown tobacco and slave ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of not-heed is 'with the hair of the head closely cut.' The verb to nott means to cut the hair close. 'Tondre, to sheer, clip, cut, ...
— A Concise Dictionary of Middle English - From A.D. 1150 To 1580 • A. L. Mayhew and Walter W. Skeat
... lively condition, but his wife did not mind, for she thought that a man must have his glass. Women of the lower and middle classes have a great deal to do with supplying customers to the public-house. Some of them drive their men there by nagging, but more of them lead a man on to drink by sheer indulgence. They encourage him to enjoy himself without thinking of the day when enjoyment will be impossible, and when they and their children will reach the lowermost rung of the ladder of shame ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... scoundrel was one of the ringleaders in the conspiracy. "I would have flung him over into the pit," the faithful fellow said (and Sampson was man enough to execute his threat), "but I saw a couple of Mr. Nadab's followers prowling about the lobby, and was obliged to sheer off." And so the eggs we had counted on selling at market were broken, and our poor hopes lay ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... attraction of his own character. It might be a small matter,—something he had read or observed during the day, some quaint odd fancy from a book, a vivid little out-door picture, the laughing exposure of some imposture, or a burst of sheer mirthful enjoyment,—but of its kind it would be something unique, because genuinely part of himself. This, and his unwearying animal spirits, made him the most delightful of companions; no claim on good-fellowship ever found ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... declared elected. He instituted a contest for the office, and, being defeated in the court below, appealed to the Supreme Court. He then became very much exercised over his appeal, because I was one of the Justices. There were not wanting persons who, out of sheer malice, or not comprehending any higher motives of conduct than such as governed themselves, represented that I would improve the opportunity to strike him ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... perseverance, but in our short daily journeys we made but trifling way against it." The effects of severe toil were painfully evident. The men lost the muscular jerk with the oars. Their arms were nerveless, their faces haggard, their persons emaciated, their spirits wholly spent. From sheer weariness they fell asleep at the oar. No ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... number more Simla stories to the square page than any other volume of Mr Kipling. Now Mr Kipling's Simla stories are the least important, but in some ways the most significant of all the stories he wrote. They begin and they end in sheer literary virtuosity. We feel in reading Mr Kipling's studies of the social world at Simla that he had no intuitive call to write them; that they are exercises in craft rather than genuine inspirations. Mrs Hawksbee stands for ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer
... could not help feeling the want of that excitement which, singularly enough, was most conducive to that calm equanimity for which he was notorious. He looked at the gloomy walls that rose a thousand feet sheer above the circling pines around him, at the sky ominously clouded, at the valley below, already deepening into shadow; and, doing so, suddenly he ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... week or two Catherine did her best to be young, and climbed the mountain grass, or forded the mountain streams with the energy and the grace of perfect health, trembling afterwards at night as she knelt by her window to think how much sheer pleasure the day had contained. Her life had always had the tension of a bent bow. It seemed to her once or twice during this fortnight as though something were suddenly relaxed in her, and she felt a swift Bunyan-like terror of backsliding, of falling ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... continued their volleys from the vantage-ground above. The Lacedaemonians again made efforts to pursue their persistent foes even up the slope. At last darkness descended on them, and as they retired man after man dropped, succumbing to the sheer difficulty of the ground; some in their inability to see what lay in front, or else shot down by the enemy's missiles. It was then that Gylis the polemarch met his end, as also Pelles, who was on his personal staff, and the whole of the Spartans present without exception—eighteen or thereabouts—perished, ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... not pleasure. He laid out books for me, which I neglected. He was part and parcel of that American environment in which literary ambition was regarded as sheer madness. And no one who has not experienced that environment can have any conception of the pressure it exerted to stifle originality, to thrust the new generation into its religious and commercial moulds. Shall we ever, I wonder, develop the enlightened education that will know how to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the plain, a turn that gives a wide view glowing in a hundred hues in the sun, a savage gorge with beetling rocks, a solitary butte or red truncated pyramid thrust up into the blue sky, a horizontal ledge cutting the horizon line as straight as a ruler for miles, a pointed cliff uplifted sheer from the plain and laid in regular courses of Cyclopean masonry, the battlements of a fort, a terraced castle with towers and esplanade, a great trough of a valley, gray and parched, enclosed by far purple mountains. And then the unlimited freedom of it, ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... attained a wide circulation by means of one scene. In recollecting "Anna Karenina," powerful scenes crowd into the memory—introspective and analytic as it is, it is filled with dramatic climaxes. The sheer force of some of these scenes is almost terrifying. The first meeting of Anna and Vronsky at the railway station, the midnight interview in the storm on the way back to Petersburg, the awful dialogue between them after she has fallen (omitted from the first American translation), the fearful ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... held his prisoners in tow to an Armenian, and we climbed up together on foot. Around the corner of the spur, within fifty feet of where Will stood, was an almost sheer escarpment, and at the foot of that, a thousand feet below us, with ramparts of living rock on all four sides, crouched a little village fondled in the ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... palanquin that finally came in sight showed by its richness that it could belong only to royalty, and by its beauty and grace, only to a woman. Made of silver and rock crystal, studded with diamonds and pearls, and hung about with sheer curtains of embroidered yellow silk, the palanquin belonged without doubt to a young girl of the royal house. As it appeared under the high arch of the outer gate, a roar of joy and greeting arose from the waiting crowd and with one accord every man ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... good prospects, and decent means?—or cannot any of our readers call to mind from among the list of their quondam acquaintance, some fallen and degraded man, who lingers about the pavement in hungry misery—from whom every one turns coldly away, and who preserves himself from sheer starvation, nobody knows how? Alas! such cases are of too frequent occurrence to be rare items in any man's experience; and but too often arise from one cause—drunkenness—that fierce rage for the slow, sure poison, that oversteps every other consideration; that casts aside wife, children, friends, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... Laugh at the preachings of an old grey-beard of a father; go on, I tell you, and mind them not. Upon my word, I am of opinion that these old, effete and grumpy libertines come to stupify us with their silly stories, and being virtuous, out of necessity, hope through sheer envy to deprive young people of all the pleasures of life! You know my talents; I am ...
— The Blunderer • Moliere
... side of a range from the other. And for Anne Brown to talk the way she did—saying I had always been crazy about Jim, and that she believed I had known all along that his aunt was coming—for Anne to talk like that was sheer idiocy. Yes, there was an aunt. The Japanese butler started the trouble, and Aunt Selina ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... further on, an Indian hunter drew near on horseback, but Nakpa did not pause or slacken her pace. On she fled through the long dry grass of the river bottoms, while her babies slept again from sheer exhaustion. Toward sunset, she entered the Sioux camp amid great excitement, for some one had spied her afar off, and the boys and the ...
— Old Indian Days • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... secretly and terribly alive, waiting the tiny gesture which will set them free. Officers, handling destruction with the nonchalance of a woman handling a hat, may say what they like—the ammunition train is to my mind an unsafe neighbour. And the thought of all the sheer brain-power which has gone to the invention and perfecting of those propulsive and explosive machines causes you to wonder whether you yourself ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett
... M. Sorel. There were men who were revolutionaries to be in the fashion, some who were so out of snobbishness, and some from shyness: some from hatred, others from love: some from a need of active, hot-headed heroism: and some in sheer slavishness, from the sheeplike quality of their minds. But all, without knowing it, were at the mercy of the wind. All were no more than those whirling clouds of dust which are to be seen like smoke in the far distance on the white roads in the country, ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... assurance of his mistress, the woollen-draper endeavoured to carry his threat into execution, but all his efforts to remove her were unavailing. At length, after he had given up the point from sheer exhaustion, the Amazon seized him by the throat, and pushed him backwards with such force that he ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... out with a swinging left, all the weight of his body behind the blow. Clay stepped back, shot a hard straight right to the cheek, and ducked the counter. Jerry rushed him, flailing at his foe blow on blow, intending to wear him out by sheer hard hammering. He butted with head and knee, used every foul trick he had learned in his rotten trade of prize-fighting. Active as a wild cat, the Arizonan side-stepped, scored a left on the eye, ducked again, and fought back the ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... From sheer necessity some of the old hands are kept on when these changes are made. Were this not done, the work would come absolutely to a dead lock. But as it is, it may be imagined how difficult it must be for men to ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... this to Millikens Bend, La., in January, 1863, garrisoned by the 9th and 11th Louisiana and the 1st Mississippi, all Negroes, and about 160 of the 23rd Iowa (white), about 1100 fighting men in all? Attacked by a force of six Confederate regiments, crushed out of their works by sheer weight of numbers, borne down toward the levee, fighting every step of the way, hand to hand—clubbed musket, bayonets, and swords,—from three A. M. to twelve noon, they fought desperately until a Union ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... King Theophile leaped down and rushed forward to see what was frightening the animal; and all at once he crashed against something hard, and his broken right arm fell to his side. He grew gray, not with pain but with sheer terror, for he could see nothing, yet his arm had been broken upon a substance that ...
— The Faery Tales of Weir • Anna McClure Sholl
... inlet of Rio Medio. I had come on deck when Tomas Castro had started out of his doze. I wanted to see. We went round violently as I emerged, and, clinging to the side, I saw, in a whirl, tall, baked, brown hills dropping sheer down to a strip of flat land and a belt of dark-green scrub at the water's edge; little pink squares of house-walls dropped here and there, mounting the hillside among palms, like men standing in tall grass, running back, hiding in a steep valley; silver-gray huts with ragged ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... disaster we had come desperately ashore. Whence arises the strange pride of him who by sheer accident slips through ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... the cold increased, and although we were spurred on to almost superhuman efforts by sheer desperation to thwart the fate we knew would be ours should we falter by the way, gradually our strength failed us, and although we tried to encourage each other to quicker progress, it took every vestige of our will power to drag our benumbed feet from ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... without firing or showing any unfriendly disposition. As she drew near, I felt more and more convinced that she must be the Foam. She had a peculiarly long cutwater and a very straight sheer, which, as she came up to the windward of us, and presented nearly her broadside, was discernible. As she heeled over to the now freshening breeze, I fancied that I could even discern, through the glass, Captain Hawk walking the quarter-deck. When she got about a quarter ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... of industrious principles in the writer. Mr. Clare took his own characteristically opposite view. "These London men," said the philosopher, "are not to be tri fled with by louts. They ha ve got Frank by the scruff of the neck—he can't wriggle himself free—and he makes a merit of yielding to sheer necessity." ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... "For a hundred years," says Johnston, "slaves in Barbados were mutilated, tortured, gibbeted alive and left to starve to death, burnt alive, flung into coppers of boiling sugar, whipped to death, overworked, underfed, obliged from sheer lack of any clothing to expose their nudity to the jeers of the 'poor' whites."[133] And yet the owners of these slaves were English, of the same stock under which developed the mild patriarchal type of slavery of Virginia. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... rapidly through the ordnance yard to the "Hygeia House," where our agent boarded; he had gone into the Fortress to pass the night, and when I attempted to follow him thither, a knot of anxious idlers, who knew that I had just returned from the battle-fields, attempted to detain me by sheer force. I dashed rapidly up the plank walk, reached the portal, and had just vaulted into the area, when the great gates swung to, and the tattoo beat; at the same instant the sergeant ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... to Seal Lake, and walled in on three sides by the hills. On either hand reaching up their steep slopes were the spruce woods with beautiful white birches relieving their sombreness, and above- -the sheer cliffs. A network of little waterways gave back images of delicate tamaracks [Larches] growing on long points between. Not a leaf stirred, and silence, which is music, reigned there. The valley was flooded with golden light, seeming ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... the old abuses?" Those who had eyes to see could not weep enough, those who had hearts to feel could not sympathize enough, with the fate of many a noble and honest samurai who signally and irrevocably failed in his new and unfamiliar field of trade and industry, through sheer lack of shrewdness in coping with his artful plebeian rival. When we know that eighty per cent. of the business houses fail in so industrial a country as America, is it any wonder that scarcely one among a hundred samurai who went into trade could succeed in his new vocation? It ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... with a look of mock horror behind a railway van. Here he put both hands to his sides, and indulged in a chuckle so hearty—though subdued—that an ordinary cat, to say nothing of a Cheshire one, might have joined him from sheer sympathy. ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... thing looked to him like a piece of sheer neglect and contemptuous indifference, which he ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... I do after that?" This question she asked, not in the least as desirous of obtaining from him any assurance of assistance, but in the agony of her spirit, and in sheer dismay as ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... combination of the single cane and bow system, and the horizontal arm training, which I first tried on the Concord from sheer necessity; when the results pleased me so much that I have adopted it with all strong-growing varieties. The circumstances which led me to the trial of this method were as follows: In the summer of 1862, when my Concord vines were making their ...
— The Cultivation of The Native Grape, and Manufacture of American Wines • George Husmann
... he knew from personal experience that there was really no limit to the time one might lie unconscious without being any the worse for it. It had happened to him in Ireland, years before; he had been pitched out of a dogcart, had turned a sheer somersault and landed on his head. They thought he was dead, but he wasn't; they carried him first to the nearest cabin, where he lay for some days with the pigs, and then to an inn in a neighbouring town—it was a near thing they didn't put him under ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... threshing machine all day. It had covered her with dirt and chaff; and the process of changing was only half through when she heard the rattle of Ellesborough's cycle outside. She stood now before the glass, a radiant daughter of air and earth; her veins, as it were, still full of the sheer pleasure of her long day among the stubbles and the young stock. She was tired, of course; and she knew very well that the winter, when it came, would make a great difference, and that much of the work before her would be hard and disagreeable. But for the moment, ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sea tern fleck and skim The morning's rim; Or the dark thrushes clear Their flutes of music leisurely and sheer, ...
— Behind the Arras - A Book of the Unseen • Bliss Carman
... because there was no one better, I've left the property at Rudham to you," he went on with a smile. "There would have been plenty of money to have left with it; but I've made some very bad speculations lately, and lost a great deal. I took to speculation from sheer want of amusement. I was a good billiard player as long as I had the use of my limbs; but here I've been, literally tied by the legs, for the last two years. The only thing properly alive about me was my brain, and speculation has interested ...
— The Village by the River • H. Louisa Bedford
... In sheer amazement, Mr Benden's hand unloosed from Alice's arm; and seizing her opportunity, she walked rapidly back to the Court House. For a moment he stood considering what to do. He had little more concern for his own reputation than for hers; but he felt that if he followed her to the constable, he ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... boyhood, and we will yet be happy in reciprocal affection, come what may to us as emperor and empress. I do not believe that he said he had never seen so lovely a woman as Riccardo. Poor, dear Franz! He has a tedious life as husband of the reigning sovereign. From sheer ennui he sometimes wanders from his wife's heart, but oh! he must, he must return to me; for if I were to lose him, earthly splendor would be ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... snow that the travellers ran some risk of falling into them. Indeed, at one place, so narrow was their escape that Chimo fell through the crust of snow, and disappeared into a fissure which descended a hundred feet sheer down; and the sledge would certainly have followed had not Frank held it back by the line; and Chimo was not hauled up again without great difficulty. After this, Frank went in front with a pole, and sounded the snow in dangerous-looking places ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... supposed to mention it, might just hint that his mine was only hurrying to forestall an enemy mine which was judged to be approaching the trench the Infantry officer would presently occupy. This last was a sheer invention of the moment, but it served excellently, and the Sapper and his party bore off their pump in triumph. It was later erected in the mine shaft, and the difficulty of providing sufficient piping to run from the pump to the waterlogged part of the mine was met by ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... and the grim, forbidding hills echoed the loud sound of wheel and hoof. Down the steep flank of the mountain, with screaming, grinding brakes, they thundered and clattered into the narrow hall-way of Devil's Canyon with its sheer walls and shadowy gloom. The little stream that trickled down from the tiny spot of green at the spring tried bravely to follow but soon sank exhausted into the dry waste. A cool wind, like a draft through a tunnel, was in their faces. After perhaps two ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... must not be supposed that no patriotic party existed. There was a patriotic party, and the exigencies of the time inspired some of its leaders nobly. But the sheer weight of numbers, of indifference, and of selfishness to which this party was opposed was too much for it. The best method of realizing this nowadays is by the study of the newspaper files for the early years of the century. From these it will be seen that even the people ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... they are not thus known to be modes of Brahman, and others again are known neither in themselves nor as modes of Brahman. The text therefore cannot merely refer to them as things otherwise known, but gives fundamental instruction about them. Hence the later passage cannot be meant as a sheer negation, but must be taken as denying the previously described 'so-muchness' of Brahman; i.e. the passage denies that limited nature of Brahman which would result from Brahman being viewed as distinguished by the previously stated attributes only. The word so refers ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... was but short, for on the following morning our anchor was at the bows, and the ships heading for Hakodadi. This town—the largest in Yesso—reminds one very forcibly of Gibraltar. There is a similar high rock standing sheer out of the sea—almost the same narrow strip of land connecting it with the main; whilst the town is built on the slopes of the eminence, and circling the bay as at Gib. The town is not over large, and commodities are very scarce, the only thing ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... the church of St. Sophia, and were therein, besought their lord and the emperor to come to their relief; for if they received no help they could not hold out, especially as they had no provisions. Through sheer distress and sore need, the Emperor Henry and his people agreed that they must once more abandon thought of going to Adrianople, and cross the straits of St. George, to the Turkish side, with as many people as they could ...
— Memoirs or Chronicle of The Fourth Crusade and The Conquest of Constantinople • Geoffrey de Villehardouin
... mainspring; each one sought personal happiness. And Pierre was grieved to think that those young people, instead of discarding the past and marching on to the truths of the future, were relapsing into shadowy metaphysics through sheer weariness and idleness, due in part perhaps to the excessive exertion of the century, which had been overladen ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... is sheer nonsense. I am surprised. I am amazed at you for insisting upon doing something you know I disapprove of. I CAN NOT allow you to go with this boy. Now please let me ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... Milly Overton has perpetrated two more crimes on the community, at three-thirty to-day—assorted boy and girl." And David grinned with sheer delight at having projected such a ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... whip over Bengal's nose, the cruel lash cutting the tender snout with every blow. But he was not doing it from sheer cruelty, as many of the spectators who raised their ...
— The Circus Boys on the Flying Rings • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... our glasses of the old towers of Dunstanborough Castle. As the wind fell light, we pulled in to have a look at it, papa being anxious to do so, as he had visited it in his younger days. The weather-beaten ruin stands on the summit of a black cliff, rising sheer out of the ocean. Three towers, one square, and the others semicircular, remain, with the greater portion of the outer wall, enclosing several acres of green turf, over which, instead of mail-clad warriors, peaceable sheep now wander. The principal tower overlooks a deep gully or gap in the rocks, ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... altogether sorry this has happened!" He moved slowly across the room, and laid a friendly palm on Vyse's shoulder. "In a queer illogical way it evens up things, as it were. I did you a shabby turn once, years ago—oh, out of sheer carelessness, of course—about that novel of yours I promised to give to Apthorn. If I had given it, it might not have made any difference—I'm not sure it wasn't too good for success—but anyhow, I dare say you thought ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... elocutionist, or a new poem fresh from the pen of some celebrated writer. And you have always conversation; that is to say, the wit and sparkle of the wittiest and brightest nation on the face of the earth. In a world that is becoming more and more a Paradise of Fools the charm of sheer brain and brightness is irresistible. To live in such an intellectual centre is in itself delightful. Paris is a veritable Foire aux Idees. Its criticism, keen as the sword of Saladin, overwhelming as the battle-axe of Coeur de Lion, is in itself a study. It is not so much the intellectual ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... in the front room, although the shutters are closed, the white rays pierce through the chinks, and lie like sword-blades along the floor. The study is pleasant and the wine refreshing. The house seems built on the sheer hillside. Fifty feet—more than that—a hundred feet under me there are gardens, gardens caught somehow in the hollow of the hill, and planted with trees, tall trees, for swings hang out of them, otherwise I should not know ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... instantaneous pause he looked into the rose-pink room and saw Liane Delorme, in a negligee like a cobweb over a nightdress even more sheer, kneeling and clawing at her throat, round which a heavy silk handkerchief was slowly tightening; her face already purple with strangulation, her eyes bulging from their sockets, her tongue protruding ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... exclaimed the Spider, his square jaws immobile from sheer astonishment. "Say, you ain't crazy, are ye—I mean you ain't dippy or cracked in the dome, are ye? Because d' Kid's goin' ten rounds with Young Alf, d' East Side ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... warriors in the field. That number under any sort of leadership, even though they were only armed with spears and swords, should wipe out the three hundred, in spite of the discipline and two or three machine-guns, by sheer weight of numbers. But, from what he had already heard, zu Pfeiffer had evidently caught them unprepared, wiped out a mass and secured a supernatural effect by destroying the idol. He remembered his talk on das Volkliches and his comment that ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... met, and for a second she trembled again with the nearness of the temptation. "You're mistaken; I know nothing; I saw nothing," she exclaimed, striving, by sheer force of reiteration, to build a barrier between herself and her peril; and as he turned away, groaning out "You sacrifice us both," she continued to repeat, as if it were a charm: ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... opposite side of the room from which you enter there is a hole or opening in the wall. It is large enough to go through but it goes into the great dark room on the other side of the Throne. An abyss confronts you, a sheer precipice which descends for many feet, perhaps hundreds. No man knows. This outer room of Blondy's Throne has been named the Chamber of the Fairies. Leaving it and continuing the ascent, the top of the Throne is soon reached and is about twenty feet across; and from ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... Kirk's hostess led him, then across a level sward, pausing at length upon the brink of a mighty chasm. It took him a moment to grasp the sheer magnitude of the thing; then he broke into his ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... tired. Max walked with drooping tail, and Brenda was whining softly to herself from sheer weariness and weak-mindedness. The parrot alone was happy—or at least contented. ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit
... no ill-luck to-night!" continued Captain Monk as a grim joke, disregarding Harry's remark. "Perhaps they will, though, out of sheer spite, knowing they'll never have another chance of it. Well, well, they're ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 5, May, 1891 • Various
... The enemy gave a sheer to port, and with a loud crash ran alongside the "Concorde." Grappling-irons were hove aboard her and the next instant the Frenchmen, in overpowering numbers, rushed like a ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... dismissed the morning session at quarter to twelve, so that those who lived near enough could go home for a change of dress. Emma Jane and Rebecca ran nearly every step of the way, from sheer excitement, only stopping ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... gig, impelled by six stout oarsmen, was nearing the Waterport Guard, and was already under the shadow of the frowning batteries of the Devil's Tongue. High above them rose the sheer straight wall of the rock, bristling with frowning fortifications, line above line, and countless embrasures ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... bluejackets pulling and a Petty Officer steering, the Turks began to shell H.M.S. Savage as she lay about a hundred yards out. She did not like it, and, instead of waiting to let us get aboard, Commander Homer thought it wiser to sheer off about half a mile. When she quitted the Turks turned their guns on to our cockleshell, and although none of the shot came near us they still came quite near enough to interest the whole gallery of some thousands of bathing Tommies who, ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... duty of man—"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength; and thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." According to Mr. Mivart's definition, the man who loves God and his neighbour, and, out of sheer love and affection for both, does all he can to please them, is, nevertheless, destitute of a particle of ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... said Mr. Hepworth, who had crossed the room and joined them just in time to hear Nan's last words. "Patty is holding herself together by sheer nervous force, and she needs care if she is to keep up through ...
— Patty's Summer Days • Carolyn Wells
... had to stop from sheer want of breath, and on entering the hut Kakaik informed us that it was through the exertions of Manilick that the fiddle had been recovered. He had paid half-a-dozen yards of cotton, the same number ...
— Afar in the Forest • W.H.G. Kingston
... But for sheer ill humor nothing could have surpassed her conduct when they had "done" San Francisco, which she declared to be "a dull, dirty, windy place, with a harbor of which entirely too much is made,—ridiculously over-praised, in fact," and got under way for the Yosemite. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... their slender legs. Suddenly sitting down on the ground the child swiftly took off her shoes and stockings. Getting up she undid the heavy shawl and the two little dresses. Out she slipped without more ado and stood up in only a light petticoat. In sheer delight at the relief, she threw up her dimpled arms, that were bare up to her short sleeves. To save the trouble of carrying them, her aunt had dressed her in her Sunday clothes over her workday garments. Heidi arranged her dresses neatly in a heap and joined ...
— Heidi - (Gift Edition) • Johanna Spyri
... by the enemy and pursued, from this danger he was rescued by a strong south wind, which sprang up and raised so high a sea, that the enemy's galleys could make little way. But his own ships were driving before it upon a lee shore of cliffs and rocks running sheer to the water, where there was no hope of escape, when all of a sudden the wind turned about to south-west, and blew from land to the main sea, where Antony, now sailing in security, saw the coast all covered with the wreck of the enemy's fleet. For hither the galleys in pursuit had been carried ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... could in Sour Creek. He drifted from the blacksmith shop to the kitchen of Mrs. Mary Caluson, but both these brimming reservoirs of news had this day run dry. Mrs. Caluson vaguely remembered a Riley Sinclair, a man who fought for the sheer love ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... backed by crusted grey stone-work remaining from a yet remoter Casterbridge than the venerable one visible in the street. The old-fashioned fronts of these houses, which had older than old-fashioned backs, rose sheer from the pavement, into which the bow windows protruded like bastions, necessitating a pleasing chassez-dechassez movement to the time-pressed pedestrian at every few yards. He was bound also to evolve other Terpsichorean figures in respect of door-steps, scrapers, cellar-hatches, ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... remembrance of another combining such genuine power with such horrid taste. Both together have equally assisted to gain the great popularity it has enjoyed; for in these days of extravagant adoration of all that bears the stamp of novelty and originality, sheer rudeness and vulgarity have come in for a ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... moved away, calling his daughter, whose absence was intriguing him. Receiving no answer, he entered her room, to find her in a swoon across her bed. She had fainted from sheer horror at what she ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... following. He would have us get the life even though it means the knife. Most times—every time, shall I say?—the life comes only through the knife. Yet when the life has come, with its great tireless strength, and its deep breathing, and sheer delight of living, you are grateful for the knife that led the ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... all over Philadelphia that I had cleared out John Guy's the night before, sans merci. True, I am not seven feet high, but some men (like stories) expand enormously when inflated or mad; so my denial was attributed to sheer modesty. But I recognised in the Charles Leland a mysterious cousin of mine, who was really seven feet high, who had disappeared for many years, and of whom I have ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... a bell, go to the hard bench in the schoolroom with another bell, and even play ball when the recreation bell rang. It was hard on an independent spirit to get used to all this, and while he had no mind to be disorderly, he often broke forth into direct disobedience of the law from sheer misunderstanding of the ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... the deck, musing into a sheer muddle this singular business of the Maharajah of Ratnagiri's gift to the Queen of England, with all sorts of dim, unformed suspicions floating loose in my brains round the central fancy of the fifteen thousand pound stone there, when the captain returned. He was ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... breath. After all, although she was lacking in any real strength of character, she was filled with a certain compensatory doggedness. His challenge was there to be faced. There was no way out of it. She would have lied willingly enough but for the sheer futility of falsehood. She commenced the task of bracing herself for ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... foot and unthrobbing heart along a narrow ledge of rock with beetling precipice above us and black depths beneath, and we would like a little bit of a wall of some sort, for imagination if not for reality, between us and the sheer descent. But it is blessed to learn that naked we are clothed, solitary we have a Companion, and unarmed we have our defenceless heads covered with the shadow of the great wing, which, though sense sees it not, faith knows is ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... without entering the city—to enter the city would have been to abandon his hopes of a triumph—Cato condescended to use the arts of obstruction in opposing him. He spoke till sunset against the proposition, and it failed by sheer lapse of time. Yet the opposition was fruitless. Caesar of course abandoned the empty honor, and secured the reality, all the more certainly because people felt that he had been hardly used. And so he continued to act, always ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church
... says the missionary Moffat (99); "in reply to which, they would only laugh." "It appears an awful exhibition of human depravity," he adds, "when children compel their parents to perish for want, or to be devoured by beasts of prey in a desert, from no other motive but sheer laziness." Kicherer says there are a few cases of "natural affection" sufficient to raise these creatures to "a level with the brute creation," Moffat, too, refers to exceptional cases of kindness, but the only instance he gives (112) describes their terror on finding he had drunk some water poisoned ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... back from his hand. For a moment sheer horror looked out from her eyes. Then, almost in the same instant, they were veiled. She caught her breath, saying ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... fox-earth in the spinney attached. I saw a vixen and her cubs there one morning as clearly as I see this paper. She barked at me once or twice, sitting high on her haunches, but the children played on without a glance at me. They were playing at catch-as-catch-can—with a full-grown hare. Sheer fun. No after-thoughts. I watched them ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... contested battle, in which the sea-rovers showed desperate courage and reddened the sea with their blood. There might be inserted here a battle-piece worthy of the Drakes and Morgans of old, if the facts only bore us out. Instead of that, however, we are forced to say that the pirates proved sheer caitiffs when matched against honest men, and the ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... let him live if he kept speaking it,—the wild Son of the Desert resolved to defend himself, like a man and Arab. If the Koreish will have it so, they shall have it. Tidings, felt to be of infinite moment to them and all men, they would not listen to these; would trample them down by sheer violence, steel and murder: well, let steel try it then! Ten years more this Mahomet had: all of fighting, of breathless impetuous toil and struggle; ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... looked satisfied; indeed masterly; which expression changed slightly as he stood there, the sound of the clock conveying to him (it may be) a sense of old buildings and time; and himself the inheritor; and then to-morrow; and friends; at the thought of whom, in sheer confidence and pleasure, it seemed, he ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... to reach the foot of the western rise of ground; here they slept under a rock, continuing their way next morning, climbing till they reached the summit of the rise and keeping their course along the edge of a cliff that fell a sheer three hundred ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... which a knowledge, then merely potential, and an experience still to come, would one day occupy. And so, those who cannot admit his actual speculative results, precisely his report on the invisible theoretic world, have been to the point sometimes, in their objection, that by sheer effectiveness of abstract language, he gave an illusive air of reality or substance to the mere nonentities of metaphysic hypothesis—of a mind trying to feed itself on ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... Prince,' is the most perverse and passionate being in the whole world. What is more, he throws money away as if it were dust. The day on which he gave the thrashing with blows like falling leaves and flowing water, he dragged (lit. pull alive, drag dead) Ying Lien away more dead than alive, by sheer force, and no one, even up to this date, is aware whether she be among the dead or the living. This young Feng had a spell of empty happiness; for (not only) was his wish not fulfilled, but on the contrary ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... Leslie, "you have no right to assume that a disbelief in a general Good, however genuine, necessarily involves a sheer egoism in conduct? For a man might find that his own Good consisted in furthering the Good of other people; and in that case of course he will ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... see it through the clouds of earth, into that keen icy stillness, where only favoured and long-trained souls can breathe, up the piercing air of the slopes that lead to the Throne, and there in the listening silence of heaven, where the voice of adoration itself is silent through sheer intensity, where all colours return to whiteness and all sounds to stillness, all forms to essence and all creation to the Creator, there he let him fall in self-forgetting love and wonder, breathe out his soul in one ardent all-containing act, and ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... onward by the silence like a fly on a summer stream. And sometimes, suddenly, for no reason, she would begin to run. She would run like a little animal, head and shoulders a little leaning to the right, moving easily and supply. She was like a kid climbing and slithering among the stones for the sheer joy of leaping about. She would talk to the dogs, the frogs, the grass, the trees, the peasants, and the beasts in the farmyard. She adored all the creatures about her, great and small: but she was less at her ease with the great. She saw very few people. ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... whitewashed house on the edge of a Connaught bog which has somehow got itself called Monte Carlo. But these misfits of names moved me only to mirth mingled with a certain sadness. "Woodbine" is a sheer astonishment. I hear the word and think of the rustic arches in cottage gardens, of old tree trunks climbed over by delightful flowers. I think of open lattice windows, of sweet summer air. Nothing in the whole long train of ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... origin it is a world apart from the poetry composed in the fashion described in the passage preceding. The poet here does not coolly say to himself: "Go to, I will make a poem to relieve my feelings"; he sings, to quote Goethe's own expression, "as the bird sings," out of the sheer fulness of his heart, which insists on immediate expression.[46] True it is that Goethe, like all other poets, frequently wrote under no immediate pressure of inspiration, but to affirm this of the highest efforts of his genius is at once to contradict his own testimony and to misinterpret ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... for smoother fields That yield no crop of self-denying will; A hand is stretched to him from out the dark, Which grasping without question, he is led Where there is work that he must do for God. The trial still is the strength's complement, And the uncertain, dizzy path that scales 230 The sheer heights of supremest purposes Is steeper to the angel than the child. Chances have laws as fixed as planets have, And disappointment's dry and bitter root, Envy's harsh berries, and the choking pool Of the world's scorn, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... modest and no one quite so shy. Many actors have played for him for years and never spoken to him, have perhaps seen him dart up a side street because they were approaching. They may not have known that it was sheer shyness, but it was. I have seen him ordered out of his own theater by subordinates who did not know him, and he went cheerfully away. "Good men, these; they know their business," was all his comment. Afterward he was shy of going back lest ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... in sheer disgust; "we've gone and let the Slavin fellers have another crack at us. A nice lot of scouts we look like, not to keep sentries on duty when we have a secret meeting. And now they've got us cooped up here like a lot of old hens! Shucks! ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts - Or, The Struggle for Leadership • George A. Warren
... in town that night, and, for sheer protection, she made Maudie Sinclair come and share her evening meal. The children were put to bed, and they sat down alone together, talking over the party. Maudie was pleased to relax a little of her severity toward Harry Sterling; she admitted ...
— Frivolous Cupid • Anthony Hope
... from the main one, all nuzzling their mouths in her flanks like so many sucking pigs; for there are hundreds of these lesser canyons, and any one of them would be a marvel were they not dwarfed into relative puniness by the mother of the litter. Imagine walls that rise sheer and awful as the Wrath of God, and at their base holes where you might hide all the Seven Wonders of the Olden World and never know they were there—or miss them either. Imagine a trail that winds like a snake and climbs like a goat and soars like ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... with their hulking personalities, bare of all the iridescence of potentiality, which we could have cast about them. Something of this iridescence may cling to unmarried lovers, in spite of themselves, but wedded bliss is a sheer offence. ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... men gathered around the instrument-board and Dunark explained the changes he had made—and to such men as Seaton and Crane it was soon evident that they were examining an installation embodying sheer perfection of instrumental control—a system which only those wonder instrument-makers, the Osnomians, could have devised. The new object-compasses were housed in arenak cases after setting, and the housings were then ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... was so happy as to be absolutely oblivious of such trifles, while the awkward youths fell entirely under the spell of her sparkling, fun-filled eyes and the merry, bubbling laugh that seemed to overflow from sheer joy. ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield |
