"Vagary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cripple—was standing straight up, close behind her. For a second Martha doubted her eyes. The storm still raged, and she thought it was a vagary of the lightning. She held her hands out, though, and convinced herself that it was true. Scylla was standing on her feet, for the first time in many years. The two girls threw their arms around each other, and sank to their knees on the prairie. As they said ...
— Southern Stories - Retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... seldom went to a place of worship, and when he did, went to church! A cranky, visionary, talkative man, he was in Mr. Drake's eyes. He set him down as one of those mystical interpreters of the Word, who are always searching it for strange things, whose very insight leads them to vagary, blinding them to the relative value of things. It is amazing from what a mere fraction of fact concerning him, a man will dare judge the whole of another man. In reality, little Polwarth could have carried big Drake to the top of any hill Difficulty, ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... his wife's happiness in the changed order. The episode, as he deemed it, in which she had been given a partnership with him, hardly remained in his memory. When he thought of it at all, he smiled over it as over the vagary of one among a woman's innumerable varying moods. But he thought of it very rarely, for his time was absorbed in the desperate struggle to find a way out from the destruction that loomed very close at hand. In the end, he decided not to ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... Another curious vagary of the war that obtains now is the sudden disappearance of the copper sou or what ranks with our penny. Why it is scarce no one seems to know. The generally accepted explanation is that the copper has flown to the trenches where millions of men are dealing in small sums. But whatever the ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... the head of my capricious crony to pay me an unexpected and unannounced visit, had he not arrived precisely at the time at which he came, had he not encountered just the persons he met just where he did meet them, had not his prankishness hatched in him the vagary which led him to give quizzical replies to their questions; had I not, carried away by my elation at my prosperity and fine prospects, been a trifle ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... morbid tendencies, its infatuation and deceit, has not been of any substantial value in this inquiry. It may afford to those who have experienced any positive visitation from another world a very comforting and indisputable proof. To most sane people it is a humiliating and ludicrous vagary. ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... and that all women could not make all men do what they wanted them to do—against their wills. Perhaps they couldn't. Perhaps they could. There are more ways of coercing them than by brute force. But in any case what has this preposterous vagary to do with ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... desire, imagination, predilection, caprice, humor, inclination, supposition, conceit, idea, liking, vagary, conception, image, mood, whim. ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... displeasure, considering her extremely foolish and straitlaced, "for all young men of any spirit had their little vices, and came out well enough when the wild oats were sowed." So she indulged Charlie in his new vagary, as she had in all his others, and treated him like an ill-used being, which was neither an inspiring nor helpful course on her part. Poor soul! She saw her mistake by and by, and when too late repented of ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... railroads, and steam ploughs, and electric telegraphs, and all the things which you see in the Great Exhibition; and to foretell famine, and bad weather, and the price of stocks and (what is hardest of all) the next vagary of the great idol Whirligig, which some call Public Opinion; till at last he grew as rich as a Jew, and as fat as a farmer, and people thought twice before they meddled with him, but only once before they asked him to help them; for, because he earned his money well, he could afford to spend ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... and which has received the title, 'Music of the Future;' looking forward to a time when, perhaps, men's senses will be preternaturally quickened to comprehend its discordant harmonies. It is something akin to that vagary of religious sentiment, which, whatever may be its merits, whatever its satisfaction for a spiritually illuminated chosen few, is, nevertheless, beyond the present ken and comprehension and spiritual compass of most mortals, and may be called the Religion of the Future. The fatal ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... conquest of this big, gorgeous creature than Pete Murphy developed what Honey called "a case." It was scarcely a question of development; for with Pete it had been the "thin one" from the beginning. Following an inexplicable masculine vagary, he christened her Clara—and Clara she ultimately became. Among themselves, the men employed other names for her; with them she was not so popular as with Pete. To Ralph she was "the cat"; to Billy, "the ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... the way of agricultural machinery. He first introduced a steam engine for farming purposes in a district containing a million of acres. That, too, at the outset, was a fantastic vagary in the opinion of thousands of solid and respectable farmers. They insisted the Iron Horse would be as dangerous in the barn-yard or rick-yard as the very dragon in Scripture; that he would set everything on fire; kill the men who had care of ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... and Gracieuse, with other little girls of her age, had taken seats on the granite benches to look at them. The girls, all pretty; with elegant airs in their pale colored waists cut in accordance with the most recent vagary of the season. And they were laughing, these little girls, they were laughing! They were laughing because they had begun laughing, without knowing why. Nothing, a word of their old Basque tongue, without ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... programme-music; neither is it, as was much of Schubert's, pure delight in beautiful sound. It did not break through formalism by sheer violence of emotion, as did Beethoven's: it represents the rhapsodical revery of an inspired poet to whom no imaginative vagary seems strange or alien, and who has the faculty of relating his visions, never attempting to give them coherence, and unaware of their character until perhaps when, awakened from his dream, he naively wonders what they may have meant—you remember ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... involved in a blinding light and hurled into the air. He said he never lost consciousness; but when at the hospital he seemed very deaf and stupid. He was discharged perfectly cured twenty weeks after the occurrence. The scientific explanation of this amazing escape from this most eccentric vagary of the electric fluid is given,—the fact that the wet condition of the man's clothing increased its power of conduction, and in this way saved his life. It is said that the electric current passed down the side of Orman's body, causing everywhere a sudden production of steam, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... all sweet tolerance of the vagary, folded her hands to await enlightenment. "Come, now! Tell auntie what you need money for. What ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... beautiful because the subjective bias that discriminates between them is the cause of their being beautiful at all. The principle of personal preference is the same as that of human taste; real and objective beauty, in contrast to a vagary of individuals, means only an affinity to a more prevalent and lasting susceptibility, a response toa more general and fundamental demand. And the keener discrimination, by which the distance between beautiful and ugly things is increased, far from being a loss of aesthetic insight, ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... Lucy Ann Hood, wife of Edward P. Hood, and daughter of Ezra Goddard. It is now given to the public without addition or alteration, and with but a slight abridgment. A strange and startling story it certainly is. Perhaps the reader will cast it aside at once as a worthless fiction,—the idle vagary of an excited brain. The compiler, of course, cannot vouch for its truth, but would respectfully invite the attention of the reader to the following testimonials presented by those who have known the narrator. The first is ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... be on deck. We've got to decide, at once, whether or not we're going to turn him loose on the miners, to smash that gang of union thugs and Socialist fanatics, and do it right. That's a game worth playing, Flint; but this Air Trust vagary of yours—stuff ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... muttered; but he was helpless. The old man would give no sign of what, no doubt, was in his mind; he would hold that leathery face in placid acquiescence in prevalent moral vagary. ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... upholstered lady, who offered a fine shoulder and the rear wall of a collar of pearls for my observation throughout the evening, as she leaned forward talking eagerly with a male personage across the table. This was a prince, ending in "ski": he permitted himself the slight vagary of wearing a gold bracelet, and perhaps this flavour of romance drew the lady. Had my good fortune ever granted a second meeting, I should ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... delirious confusion it struck him that he had never seen such wonderful moonlight, nor such a big, inviting world. The vagary of thought altered. He would not seek the workmen's quarters, after all. The mountains were better. They called him. They did not seem far away. He would not feel so hot and then so shivery if he could lie down on their cool tops, with only the sky above him. Aye, they called him; and ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... that by some vagary of chance—of fate if you will—I had struck a surface area where breathable air still remained. I swam, striving to plan, to think where I might be swimming. Yet it was all a phantasmagoria, with ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... herself even momentary extravagances. To those who will remember duty, hosts of duties appeal, and it was not long before my father and mother began to save for their children's future the money which flowed in. Miss Cushman's vagary of an amusing watch-chain was exactly the sort of thing which they never imitated; they smiled at it as the saucy tyranny over a great character of great wealth. My father's rigid economy was perhaps more ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... herself as doomed. So friendly, yet so calm did she seem through all their interview, that Mr. Bernard could only look back upon her manifestation of feeling towards him on their walk from the school as a vagary of a mind laboring under some unnatural excitement, and wholly at variance with the true character of Elsie Venner as he saw her before him in her subdued, yet singular beauty. He looked with almost scientific closeness of observation into the diamond eyes; but that peculiar ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... his forehead for a moment, as if he had discovered some new vagary in femininity to puzzle him. Then he resumed his patrol with the slow stride of the master mariner. Hue and Cry raised dim bulk in the harbor jaws, showing no glimmer of light. It was barren, treeless, a lump of land which ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... first and second Vagary she would Accept of me returning her Victorious Kindness and Good Will would be ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... of spirit the whole day: calm, kind attentive—half matronly, and half girlish. The three who had been longest acquainted with her expected every instant to see her capricious spirit break out in some whimsical change or sportive vagary. But their fears were quite unnecessary. Undine continued as mild and gentle as an angel. The priest found it all but impossible to remove his eyes from her; and he ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... husband, and we cannot compel people to be honest against their inclinations.' And coming down from the seat where he sat, he embraced Octavio a hundred times, and told the board, he was extremely glad they found the mighty plot, but a vagary of youth, and the spleen of a jealous husband or lover, or whatsoever other malicious thing; and desired the angry man might be discharged, since he had so just a provocation as the loss of a mistress. ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... that is badly treated. I can assure you he is much more afraid of Mr. Slope than you are. But you see Madeline cannot go out without him—and she, poor creature, goes out so seldom! I am sure you don't begrudge her this, though her vagary does knock about our ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... damsels, I have found that you can bear to pass half your time with an antediluvian, without discovering any ennui or disgust; though his greatest merit towards you is, that he is not one of those old fools who fancy they are in love in their dotage. I have no such vagary; though I am not sorry that some folks think I am so absurd, ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... Alexis—"Elizabeth, you, my august and gentle empress, you will not sacrifice an innocent woman to a momentary jealous vagary!" ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... without a pang that Harald Kaas had done this, his face and manner had shown it for a long time and still did so; but he had expected that a roar of laughter would greet his extraordinary vagary. This was evident from the composure with which he had carried his wife out; and still more from the glance of gratified revenge with which he looked round him afterwards. But there was only dead ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... were standing on nothing, or, at best, nothing better than dissolving quicksands, which were liable at any moment wholly to slide away and leave us; and it required some strength of mind to resist the vagary, and prevent it from effecting a troublesome ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... was my benevolent and creditable allotment, such my unworthy vagary, at the time this record opens. I had camped in the Dead Man's Bend late on the previous evening, had wakened-up a little after sunrise, and turned out a little after eleven. Then a dip in the river, to clear away the cobwebs, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... accepted unhesitatingly in the past by Betterton, Garrick, Edmund Kean, the Kembles, and notably by Phelps. They are recognised principles to-day in the leading theatres of France and Germany. But by some vagary of fate or public taste they have been reckoned in London, for a generation at any rate, to ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... With the queer vagary of a mind at great tension, his senses became particularly acute for a single moment. He saw the silver-pierced vault of the sky, smelled the fragrance of the plains borne on the gentle wind, and heard the rustle of the dappled cottonwoods and the ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... a mechanical attempt to retrieve his buffoon's reputation, for he was really very much in love, and very serious in his desire to be married in quite the ordinary way. With a rather lack-lustre eye he noticed the amusement of his friends at his last vagary; but when Winifred Ames entered the ballroom a nervous vivacity shook him, as it has shaken ploughmen under similar conditions, and for just a moment he felt ill at ease in the lonely lunacy of his flowered ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... turmoil which might suffice to drive away a whole army of evil spirits, even at so great a distance." [320] We have reached three general conclusions. First, when the moon is occulted by the earth it is believed to be devoured by some evil demon, or by wolves or dogs. This is the superstitious vagary of the Hindoos, the Chinese, Asiatics generally, Europeans, Africans, Americans, and Polynesians. Secondly, a lunar eclipse is the precursor of some dreadful calamity to the inhabitants of the earth. This notion is also traceable in every ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... George W. Curtis says that at first he "pressed it upon an utterly listless Congress, and his proposition was regarded as the harmless hobby of an amiable man, from which a little knowledge of practical politics would soon dismount him."[45] Most members of Congress thought the reform a mere vagary, and that it was brought forward at a most inopportune time.[46] Mr. Jenckes was the pioneer of the reform, according to Curtis, who says that he "powerfully and vigorously and alone opened the debate ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... will tell, as my father said; and I stuck to it gallantly: all afternoon I continued selling that infernal stock, all afternoon it continued skying. I suppose I had come (a frail cockle-shell) athwart the hawse of Jay Gould; and, indeed, I think I remember that this vagary in the market proved subsequently to be the first move in a considerable deal. That evening, at least, the name of H. Loudon Dodd held the first rank in our collegiate gazette, and I and Billson (once more thrown upon the world) were competing for the same clerkship. The present ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as she knew you were dead, and that, any way, it was lonesome without you. So when I saw that it comforted her a bit to have someone to cook for, I encouraged the fellow. I told him he'd nothing to look for from me, for his father is richer than I am nowadays; but he's just the sort to like vagary." ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... not geometrical ones. I brought this book forward to the Royal Commission on the British Museum as an instance of the absurdity of attempting a classed catalogue from the titles of books. The title of this book sends it either to theology or geometry: when, in fact, it is a logical vagary. Some of the houses which Jack built were destroyed by the fortune of war in 1745, at Edinburgh: who will say the rebels did no good whatever? I suspect that Jack copied the ideas of J.B. Morinus, "Quod Deus sit," Paris, 1636,[322] 4to, containing an attempt ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... neokupata. Vacate forlasi. Vacation libertempo. Vaccinate inokuli. Vacillate sxanceligxi. Vacillating sxanceligxa. Vacuous malplena. Vacuum malplenajxo. Vagabond sentauxgulo, vagisto. Vagary kaprico. Vagrant vagisto. Vague malpreciza. Vain (fruitless) vana. Vain (conceited) vanta. Vain, in vane. Vainly vane. Vale valeto. Valet lakeo, servisto. Valiant brava. Valid legxa. Valise valizo. Valley valo. Valorous ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... story over there of this Mrs. John Fletcher which interested and helped me much. This saintly gifted woman told of a dream which came to her with such vividness as to seem to her mature mind more than a common passing vagary of sleep. In her dream she was engaged in an intense struggle with an evil spirit. She was ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... vagary of her brain, Mildred imagined she wanted to go to New York, and, as she had plenty of money, she bought a ticket for that city, the one to Seattle having been lost. Lieutenant Varley had helped her and, though he suspected something was wrong with the young ...
— The Moving Picture Girls in War Plays - Or, The Sham Battles at Oak Farm • Laura Lee Hope
... there was no such purpose in reality, he was sure of it. Edmonson only talked wildly as he had a way of doing. The very thought seemed a crime to Bulchester. If he really believed, he ought to speak. But he did not believe, and he could hardly denounce his friend on a vagary. Still, he was troubled by Elizabeth's evident pondering, and was glad to have the conversation turned into any channel that would sweep out thoughts of Edmonson from ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 4 • Various
... thus throughout the whole day, quiet, kind, and attentive—at once a little matron and a tender bashful girl. The three who had known her longest expected every moment to see some whimsical vagary of her capricious spirit burst forth; but they waited in vain for it. Undine remained as mild and gentle as an angel. The holy father could not take his eyes from her, and he said repeatedly to the bridegroom, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... suspected or laughed at. A truthful traveller, who should have seen some extraordinary creature in the likeness of a sea-serpent, would have no fear of mentioning it; but the same traveller, having had some singular presentiment, impulse, vagary of thought, vision (so-called), dream, or other remarkable mental impression, would hesitate considerably before he would own to it. To this reticence I attribute much of the obscurity in which such subjects are involved. We do not habitually communicate our experiences of ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... when the strawberry season begins. A waiter who came within hail in an unguarded moment was captured and paroled on an errand to the Doctor Wiley experimental station. The ballet was now in the midst of a musical vagary, and danced upon the stage programmed as Bolivian peasants, clothed in some portions of its anatomy as Norwegian fisher maidens, in others as ladies-in-waiting of Marie Antoinette, historically denuded in other portions so as to represent ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... in the Sunday edition of a newspaper. A young lady attached to the staff of this journal had got hold of his story, and had made her reporter's Story of it, which she imaginatively cast in the shape of an interview with Hewson. But worse than this, and really beyond the vagary of the wildest nightmare, she gave St. Johnswort as the scene of the apparition, with all the circumstances of the supposed burglary, while tastefully disguising Hewson's identity in the figure of A ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... orange stamens upright to the sun. There—I cannot describe it. It must be seen first afar off, and then close, to understand the vagaries of splendour in which Nature indulges here. And yet the Norantea, common in the high woods, is even more splendid, and, in a botanist's eyes, a stranger vagary still. ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... was destined to become so, but she did not know it; she had had colds before, and she had always got well. Why should'nt she now? It is a strange vagary of old people to consider themselves just as young as they used to be, notwithstanding their advanced years. To the majority of the old people, the idea of death is not so appalling as the inability to work and ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... clasping the locket which contained her dead lover's hair with a gesture with which all who knew her were very familiar. Mr. Landale never could resist a thrust at the faithful foolish bosom always ready to bleed under his stabs, yet never resenting them. Inexplicable vagary of the feminine heart! Miss Sophia worshipped before the shrine of her younger brother, to the absolute exclusion of any sentiment for the elder, whose generosity and kindness to her were yet as ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... all children, his own particularly, were such unaccountable beings that a vagary more or less could not more hopelessly perplex his misunderstanding of them. With a "Tut! tut!" of impatience, he took the paper from her and ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... Boy was set to keep A little flock of goats or sheep; He thought the task too solitary, And took a strange perverse vagary: To call the people out of fun, To see them leave their work and run, He cried and screamed with all his might,— "Wolf! wolf!" in a pretended fright. Some people, working at a distance, Came running ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... ministerial duties so far, that for more than a year he dispensed entirely with a minister of finance, and divided the functions of that office among three of the clerks: no bad preparation for a national bankruptcy, we must allow—yet the protecting powers viewed this political vagary of his majesty ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... directed Verdant's attention to this vagary of nature. "This is one of my favourite haunts," she said. "I often steal here on a hot day with ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... them deeper in despair. The blind themselves laughed in the face of Hauey when he offered to teach them to read. How pitiable is the cramped sense of imprisonment in circumstances which teaches men to expect no good and to treat any attempt to relieve them as the vagary of a disordered mind! But now, behold the transformation; see how institutions and industrial establishments for the blind have sprung up as if by magic; see how many of the deaf have learned not only to read ...
— Optimism - An Essay • Helen Keller
... mathematical turn of expression is no vagary, but perfectly germane to the subject, and accurate in application, we propose to prove to those who love coincidences and analogies sufficiently to fish them out of a ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... by any means at once that we in the Choragium realized that the Emperor had abandoned his vagary. We knew only that we were suddenly unemployed and were merely glad of the respite and then uneasy at the change. I had time to reflect how marvellous had been my luck. Commodus himself had three several times asked me questions about my ability to control ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... without vagary, now became the fire's progress. Terrible in its absolute precision, in its measured advance down the wind, this implacable river of flame rolled down the city. Far ahead of the actual fire itself ran its fatal forerunner, the sheet of gases and superheated air, ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... on. Mr. Johnson came duly for the lancers, and M. Jaquetanape for the polka. Johnson was great at the lancers, knowing every turn and vagary in that most intricate and exclusive of dances; and it need hardly be said that the polka with M. Jaquetanape was successful. The last honour, however, was not without evil results, for it excited the ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... because he had been condemned—the second, who had lost his way, because he was the cause of his companion's death—and the executioner, because he had disobeyed his orders. He had but to pretend to be greatly grieved at his vagary, to have the act lauded as an instance of Roman virtue. I look upon the famed Brutus, when he thought it a matter of conscience to witness, as well as order, his sons' execution, to have been a vain unfeeling fool or a madman. Let us have no prate about conscience proceeding ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... or Coventry weather may vary;— And yet, when the "area of change" gets too wide, Men fancy it's more than a passing vagary;— Ay, even our side. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 93, August 13, 1887 • Various
... they assume that man is his own arbiter, has both the requisite intelligence and the moral ability to control his own destiny; secondly, they place the source and criterion of this power in collective wisdom, not in individual vagary and not in divine revelation. They assert, therefore, that the law of the group, the perfected and wrought out code of human experience, is all that is binding and all that is essential. To be sure, and most significantly, ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... heightened by the lather, which lather, again, was intensified in its hue by the contrasting sootiness of the negro's body. Altogether the scene was somewhat peculiar, at least to Captain Delano, nor, as he saw the two thus postured, could he resist the vagary, that in the black he saw a headsman, and in the white a man at the block. But this was one of those antic conceits, appearing and vanishing in a breath, from which, perhaps, the best regulated ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... therefore, was his consternation when Monsieur le Comte announced his intention of attending the ball, ordering him to prepare in all haste his court-costume for the purpose! Dulac was accustomed to obey without opposition, and, although wondering at this sudden vagary on the part of his master, usually so reasonable in all things, hastened to do his bidding. The toilet was completed in silence. A few tears were shed by Dulac over the thin lank locks he was called upon to friz, and when all was completed and he held ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... now that he was being guided by fate. He then became confused in mind—dazed, as it were. In odd vagary, as his ice-raft floated on down the river, he peopled the darkness about him with imaginary foes, and "squared off" at them pugnaciously. His blood warming with this exercise, he began delivering in grandiloquent tones the address which he had declaimed at school, when a voice from the darkness ...
— Chums of the Camp Fire • Lawrence J. Leslie
... Therefore I can only beg, I can only implore. I implore you not to do this fantastic, this incredible, this unheard-of thing. I will go on my knees to you. I will entreat you, not for my sake, but for your own sake, for the sake of your dead father and mother, to put this ruinous vagary from you, to abandon this preposterous journey, and to stay quietly here in Sampaolo. Then, if you must open up the past, if you must get into communication with your distant cousin, I 'll help you to find some other, some sane and decorous method ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... himself on his cleverness and wisdom; sheer accident had saved his skin—and once the complex and unaccountable vagary of a feminine mind had saved him from annihilation so utter that it slightly sickened him to remember his position in Ilse Dumont's stateroom as she lifted her pistol and coolly made good her boast as a dead-shot. But he forced himself to ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... last this double shore is a petrified history of two nations, mutually shadowed by a mad vagary of fate with the lust of conquest, which makes them fly at each other's throats ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... is spending it upon a vagarya chimera; and that is as much as to say he is throwing it into a quicksand. He will go ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... said Mrs. Vostrand. "What a small world it is!" With these words she fell into a vagary; her daughter recalled her from it with a slight movement. "Breakfast? How impatient you are, Genevieve! Well!" She smiled the sweetest parting to Whitwell, and suffered herself to be led ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... you," said the captain, "but you must remember that that is only a poor heathen's ignorant vagary. Please say nothing about it, especially to ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... Sumter when a fresh difficulty arose for Lincoln, but one which enabled him to become henceforth master in his Cabinet. The strain of Seward's position upon a man inclined to be vain and weak can easily be imagined, but the sudden vagary in which it now resulted was surprising. Upon April 1 he sent to Lincoln "Some Thoughts for the President's Consideration." In this paper, after deploring what he described as the lack of any policy so far, and defining, in a way that does not matter, ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... its calm. Variable emotions shot over it. Prescott, as he stood there before her, was conscious of admiration. What vagary had sent a girl who looked like this ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... local invention of Perpendicular at Gloucester, and its spreading abroad by the great Bishops of Winchester forty or fifty years later, is a remarkable fact; but it is a small matter to this fiction. So strange a vagary need no longer be discussed; but it is worthy of a place in the memory among odd delusions. As an honest delusion, it is at least more respectable than making Alfred found things at Oxford ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... the length of the room, hands clasped behind his back, his head bent in thought. When he came back to the fire he stood a little while before Morgan, looking at him with intent directness, like a physician sounding for a baffling vagary which ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... The vagary of Timothy Fairway was infectious. The turf-cutter seized old Olly Dowden, and, somewhat more gently, poussetted with her likewise. The young men were not slow to imitate the example of their elders, and ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... full of thought over these sayings. What had he been about when he mated with a woman of this sort? "A man don't live like that," had been Nevile's explanation of part of his own history. Was this the meaning of her friend's vagary? Would he tell her? She would never ask him, but would give ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... barbarians that their prisoners were not of some hated, hostile tribe. Evidently the tradition of the outer world had long since perished as a belief among them. The patriarch's faith in it had come to be considered a mere doting second childhood vagary, just as the tradition of the Golden Age was held to ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... found to fit into three gaps which Mendeleeff had left in his periodic scale. In effect the periodic law had enabled Mendeleeff to predicate the existence of the new elements years before they were discovered. Surely a system that leads to such results is no mere vagary. So very soon the periodic law took its place as one of the most important ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... throbbed; he was in an overwrought mood. He was ready for any illusion, susceptible to any vagary of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... will hit some characteristic which you would quietly let slip his notice; and you flatter yourself that I might help to mislead him. Are you afraid of being made too amiable, or too plain? No, no! You are not vain. Whence comes this vagary?—well, we shall all know in good time. Were I to be with you, I should talk—perhaps maliciously—on purpose to see how your features would unsettle and shift themselves to the vagrant humour, that though one would know another from habit, and their old acquaintanceship, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... progress of the Life he turned aside to his last literary vagary—No Abolition of Slavery; or the Universal Empire of Love, 1791. This long-lost brochure has this year been rediscovered, but it will add little interest to his life, as its main tenets had long been known. A writer in the Athenaeum for May 9th describes it as quarto ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... made by the orthodox Christologians of the fifth century. The campaign was fought and won then. It has, however, to be fought anew in each generation and in the experience of individual thinkers. Monophysitism is commonly regarded as a vagary of oriental thought, killed once and for all by a church council in the fifth century. That is a superficial view. Monophysitism is a hydra growth, and no Hercules can be found to exterminate it. It reappears in each succeeding age, in West ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... more preparation and modification, Mrs. Day took her seat at the head of the table, and during the latter or tea division of the meal, presided with much composure. It may cause some surprise to learn that, now her vagary was over, she showed herself to be an excellent person with much common sense, and even a religious seriousness of tone on matters ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... tradition. Ethnologists who have studied strange marriage customs, such as the "couvade," ought to turn their attention to discovering the causes of this other and socially more important marital vagary. ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... withered cheeks. He heard her footstep mounting her bedroom staircase, but no clue to the mystery of her purchase offered itself to mitigate his surprise. Had she not been his housekeeper now for six years, and during that time not so much as a trace of any vagary of mind ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... people more than the accounts our emissaries give of the changes of fashion in the outside world, and of the ruin of soul and body which the love of dress often works. Our own dress, for men and for women, is studied, in one ideal of use and beauty, from the antique; caprice and vagary in it would be thought an effect of vulgar vanity. Nothing is worn that is not simple and honest in texture; we do not know whether a thing is cheap or dear, except as it is easy or hard to come by, and ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... the day when my socialism grew respectable,—still a vagary of youth, it was held, but romantically respectable. Romance, to the bourgeois mind, was respectable because it was not dangerous. As a "red-shirt," with bombs in all his pockets, I was dangerous. As a youth with nothing more menacing than a few ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... new "scientific" vagary, Some hope of escape to my prison to bring, And scribes on my case will be sportive and airy And tell how I look, eat, sleep, dress, talk ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 17, 1891 • Various
... called her. Virginia had been nurse in turn to all the children of Rudolph Musgrave's parents; and to the end of her life she appeared to regard the emancipation of the South's negroes as an irrelevant vagary of certain "low-down" and probably "ornery" Yankees —as an, in short, quite eminently "tacky" proceeding which very certainly in no way affected her vested right to tyrannize over the ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... was at first disposed to decline the proposition made by the "old harridan," as he called her. He had never put any restraint on his language in talking of Miss Stanbury with his nephew, and was not disposed to do so now, because she had taken a new vagary into her head. But there was something in his nephew's manner which at last induced him ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... only easy but delightful; and he used to believe, though he would not assert it as a fact, that it made his intellect more keen and active. He only ceased to be a vegetarian in obedience to the remonstrance of his unphilosophical father, who would have easily tolerated what he regarded as a mere vagary had it not involved the danger of giving rise to a calumny. For about this time Tiberius banished from Rome all the followers of strange and foreign religions; and, as fasting was one of the rites practiced in some of them, Seneca's father thought that ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... laughing-half to view The strangeness and vagary of the feat: Laughing indeed! with twenty minds to call From his inner bed-chamber the Forty forth, Who watched all night beside their monarch's bed, With naked swords and torches in their hands, And test this lover's-knot with steel and fire; But with a thought, "To-morrow yet will serve To ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... good as a declaration from many less knowing or suggestive people. All over Europe, the wise took Buffon's hint for what he meant it; and the unwise blandly passed it by as a mere passing little foolish vagary of that great ironical ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... [Fr.]; extravagance, romance; sciamachy^. sell, pun, verbal quibble, macaronic^. jargon, fustian, twaddle, gibberish &c (no meaning) 517; exaggeration &c 549; moonshine, stuff; mare's nest, quibble, self- delusion. vagary, tomfoolery, poppycock, mummery, monkey trick, boutade [Fr.], escapade. V. play the fool &c 499; talk nonsense, parler a tort et a travess [Fr.]; battre la campagne [Fr.]; hanemolia bazein [Gr.]; be absurd &c adj.. Adj. absurd, nonsensical, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... But he is very civil to the family. As long as a Palliser represents the borough, Mr. Sprugeon thinks that it does not matter much on which side he may sit. I have had my little vagary, and I don't think that ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... half-absurd, half-tragic secret which underlay her life, and she could not honestly think herself very much to blame for that. She always thought of that with bewilderment, as one might think of some dimly remembered vagary of delirium. Sometimes it seemed to her now that it could not be true. Maria realized that she was full of self-righteousness, but she was also honest. She saw no need for her to blame herself for faults which she had not committed. She thought ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... either infallible, or altogether world-embracing; that there have been other methods than theirs of conceiving the Unseen; that the common ground from which both Christian and heathen Alexandrians start, is not merely a private vagary of their own, but one which has been accepted undoubtingly, under so many various forms, by so many different races, as to give something of an inductive probability that it is not a mere dream, but may be a right and true instinct of the human mind. I mean ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... the chasm of the Grand Canyon proper, which, were the missing strata restored to the adjacent plateau, would be sixteen thousand feet deep. The layman is apt to stigmatize such an assertion as a vagary of theorists, and until the argument has been heard it does seem incredible that water should have carved such a trough in solid rock. It is easier for the imagination to conceive it as a work of violence, a sudden rending of ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... father. "Under all your cloakings of vagary I observe that you have a foundation of common-sense, just as the giddiest weathercock is bedded on a stone. As for the reward, considered properly it seems to be one upon which ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... come to Paris to look me up. I had an hour's painful struggle with myself to settle the course I should pursue, and decided not to allow the step I had taken in regard to her to be looked upon as an ill-considered and excusable vagary. I left Montmorency and betook myself to Paris, summoned Kietz to my hotel, and instructed him to tell my wife, who had already been trying to gain admittance to him, that he knew nothing more of me except that ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... a vagary of Mr. Shrimplin's that ten reckless years of his life had been spent in the West, the far West, the West of cow-towns and bad men; that for this decade he had flourished on bucking broncos and in gilded bars, the admired hero of a variety of deft homicides. Out of his inner consciousness he had ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... accompanied this young person's curiously cordial invitation to enter, he accepted the invitation and was shown into the salon: where he seated himself—a left-handedness of which he would have been incapable had he been less perturbed—in Madame Jolicoeur's own special chair. An anatomical vagary of the Notary's meagre person was the undue shortness of his body and the undue length of his legs. Because of this eccentricity of proportion, his bald head rose above the back of the chair to a height approximately identical with that ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... the alienists, say that all of us are insane on certain subjects, however sane we may be upon other subjects. Certainly in the mental composition of every one of us is some quirk, some vagary, some dear senseless delusion, avowed or private. As for Trencher, the one crotchet in his cool brain centred about that worthless trade dollar. With it in his possession he had counted himself a winner, always. Without ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... been used as a peg upon which to hang every whim, fancy, formula, and vocal vagary that has floated through the human mind in the last two centuries. It has furnished an excuse for inflicting upon vocal students every possible product of the imagination, normal and abnormal, disguised in the word Method, and the willingness with which students submit themselves as subjects ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... of delirium and vagary mingled themselves with strands of forced clarity in Cal Maggard's thinking that night, for as he lay there a totally unreasonable comfort stole over ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... to be my insane wife, whom I am taking to New York on a visit to your parents, in the hope that the sight of your native home may benefit your mind. I have already anticipated your story, and represented it as the vagary of a disordered intellect. My arrangements are all made, and you leave this state-room no more until we reach New York. Withdraw your affections as speedily as possible from Purcel, and centre them on your lawful husband, or it may be ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... in the reminiscences which follow, which he has kindly sent me, that at one time Newman "took to walking from his house" (in town) "to the college and back in cap and gown." This, however, was not such a startling vagary of costume in a London street as was that of a certain professor of my acquaintance, very absent-minded and dreamy, who, intent on making some abstruse point clear to a young lady pupil, walked one evening round and round a London square with her, talking earnestly, and attired ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... make her an offer of them." "The most accomplished woman my eyes ever beheld," he repeats, a month later. The sentimental raptures of a young man about a handsome girl have in themselves too much of the commonplace to justify mention. What is remarkable, and suggests an explanation of the deplorable vagary of his later years, is that his attachment to his wife, even in the days of courtship, elicited no such extravagance of admiration as that into which he freely lapses in his earlier fancies, and yet more in his ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... exhibiting to his men friends—to some of them—this treasure to which he always returned the more enamoured for his vagary and its opportunity of comparison. Women he would not permit. In general, he held that all women, the respectable no less than the other kind, put mischief in each other's heads and egged each other on to carry out the ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... tiny, creeping, chilly shudder went up his back. Then he remembered, he felt, he saw his little attic room, in the old home back among the wheat-hills of the Northwest. Six thousand miles away! He would never see that room again. What unaccountable vagary of memory had ever recalled it to him? It faded out ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... had some ridiculous engagement with the Blakes. Percival, I am growing seriously uneasy at this new vagary on Audrey's part. Would you believe it?—she has been the whole afternoon at the Gray Cottage helping those children! and Michael has been there, too; we ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... that the words, "If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold," etc., are not to be taken for the Word of God. For that generation did not have the Word; how, then, could Lamech be believed to have been a prophet? Thus, even such a man as Jerome produces the vagary that, inasmuch as, according to Luke, seventy-seven generations can be counted between Adam and Christ, it was after this space of time that Lamech's sin was taken away by Christ. If such vaporings are legitimate, anything can be proved from the ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... upon his feet, whereas the same thing happening when he was facing in the opposite direction would cause him to tumble over backward, with excellent prospects of cracking his skull. But in obedience to an immutable but inexplicable vagary of sex, a woman follows the patently wrong, the obviously dangerous, the plainly ...
— 'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... our rikishas, we came on the last house of the village, which was standing intact, and entered in conversation with the owner, a very old man. He attributed the safety of his house to its being slightly removed, and to a vagary of the wind. He was alive because he was not a Christian and had not been called into the church. The details of his story of the occurrence tallied exactly with the others, as to what ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... ma'am. That any man should have had such a vagary as this! But he's dying to come back. I'm sure of it. And when he does come and finds that he's let to come quiet, and that he's asked to say nothing as he don't like, and that you are all smiles to him and kindness,—and ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... upon his absent-mindedness one evening as he dined with her. By an effort he shook off his vagary of the other girl. He loved Bertha. But, for some unfathomed cause, she held him off. Never had she let him ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... with the warning that Mr. Tubbs was "simply furious"—and had said something about "standing this vagary about as long as he could," which did not mean much to Robin, not half so much as Beryl's own ill-temper, for the tutor had taken the annoyance of Robin's high-handed absentedness out on the remaining pupil. With Beryl cross she could not ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... expression common to her class. All the time I knew William was waiting like an experienced fisherman for a chance to swing his net on her side of the boat. The poor man did not dream that she was one of those unfortunate persons who has swapped her real soul for a Hindu vagary. But presently ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... Preux, Paris, some years before the Gryphius family came into notoriety, and it was employed contemporaneously with this by B.Aubri, Paris. The Mermaid makes a prettier picture than the Griffin, but its appearance on Printers' Marks is an equally fantastic vagary of the imagination. In one of the earliest Marks on which it occurs, that of C.Fradin, Lyons, 1505, the shield is supported on one side by a Mermaid, and on the other by a fully-armed knight; half a century after, B.Mac, Caen, had a very clever little Mark in which ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts
... she sat, with its grand piano and its deep chairs, its sofa and its capacious writing-table, was accurately adjusted to her needs. It, too, was all in white, carpet, curtains and dimity coverings. Madame von Marwitz laughed at her own vagary; but it had had only once to be clearly expressed, and the greens and pinks that had adorned her sitting-room at Mrs. Forrester's were banished as well as the rose-sprigged toilet set and hangings of the bedroom. "I cannot breathe among colours," she had said. "They ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... nature. On seeing her happy like a yellow mermaid on a sunlit, blissful shore, and knowing what Friedrich was with all his talent, Gard realized she was never for him or he for her. It had been for him a vagary, an irresponsible venture in ethno-psychology, a poorly based confusion of appreciation with a vague notion of duty intermingled ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... "Oh, it is a vagary of Peter Mangrove's, sir. Not contented with getting the doctor to set Sneezer's starboard foreleg, he insists on bringing him away from amongst the people ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... that had gone before. She hadn't meant to ask anything for herself. Her stifled misery had betrayed her. She had been fighting down this thought for days: that Hoddy did not care, that he did not love her, that he had mistaken a vagary of the mind for a substance, and now regretted what he had done—married a girl who was not his equal in anything. The agony on the sands now ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... things one morning quite alone. Anna heard me when I was most sedate with manifest pleasure, and she smiled mournfully when the thread of my argument was entangled by a vagary of the imagination. I felt at my heart's core what a blessing such a mentor would be, and how fortunate would be my lot could I succeed in securing her for life. Still I did not, could not, summon courage to lay bare my inmost thoughts, ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... do men prize them, when a woman knows how to render them estimable." I fear ——- will be convinced of this but too late. I am glad to find, however, that the idea so often urged (in vain) by me, is not a mere vagary of my own brain, but is supported ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... footfall echoed along the hall, and Arthur Carrollton stood before her. His face was very pale, bearing marks of the storm he had passed through; but he was calm, and his voice was natural as he said: "Possibly what we have heard is false. It may be a vagary of ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... morning we wended our way up into the Bronx, where one of the mystics had ensconced himself rather out of the beaten track of police protection, or persecution, one could not say which. I was wondering what sort of vagary would come next. It proved to be "Swami, the greatest clairvoyant, psychic palmist, and Yogi mediator of them all." He also stood alone in his power, for ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... consequences of the practice which he justified seemed to be still speculative and inferential, and to the national indifference which followed the war the demand of Mr. Jenckes for reform appeared to be a mere whimsical vagary most inopportunely introduced. ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... was struck by his first significant utterance at the age of twenty-eight. How inevitable that it should have no significance to the congregation of good fellows who thought of him merely as one of their own sort, who put up with their friend's vagary, ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... morning she was assailed by a distressing fear. Had she been to Estenega's room the night before? The memory was too vivid, the details too practical, for a sleep-vagary. At breakfast she hardly dared to raise her eyes. She felt that he was watching her; but he often watched her. After breakfast they were alone at one end of the corridor for a moment, and she compelled herself to raise her eyes ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... with Mr. Hooper's intellects," observed her husband, the physician of the village. "But the strangest 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 ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... passage. Then I was rewarded by a sight seldom accorded to humans. It was worth all the fatigue, cold, and bruises, for that appallingly illogical cloud cap took a new vagary. It split and lifted a little, and there, not three hundred yards away, in the twilight of that cold wet cloud, on that mountain in the sky, were two bull elk in deadly combat. Their far branching horns ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... comfort of all days reached its heat,) this unaccountable dread was on the boy; why, he never knew. It might be that under the hurry and preparation of Martha Yarrow on that day some deeper meaning did lie, which his instinct had discerned: more probably, however, it was but the sickly vagary of a child grown ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... only his fancy, but it was absorbing enough to make him accept the sudden appearance of a head, coming out of the gloom, as part of his idle fantasy or as the beginning of another short dream, of another vagary of his overtired brain. A face with drooping eyelids, old, thin, and yellow, above the scattered white of a long beard that touched the earth. A head without a body, only a foot above the ground, turning slightly ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... the vagary is, sir, but the permission is assured in advance," laughed Dick. "What are you going to do, ...
— The High School Boys in Summer Camp • H. Irving Hancock
... been somewhat diversified of late. The 6 weeks that finished last year and began this your very humble servant spent very agreeably in a mad house at Hoxton—I am got somewhat rational now, and don't bite any one. But mad I was—and many a vagary my imagination played with me, enough to make a volume ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... and trailed its length after you for a considerable distance. Here the effect of the wide sea struck you suddenly. Here you fronted the ocean, looking at a sail, distant in the sunny blue. Here you looked at some plant on the bank. Here some vagary of mind seems to have bewildered you; for your tracks go round and round, and interchange each other without visible reason. Here you picked up pebbles and skipped them upon the water. Here you wrote names and drew faces with a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... that, any way, it was lonesome without you. So when I saw that it comforted her a bit to have someone to cook for, I encouraged the fellow. I told him he'd nothing to look for from me, for his father is richer than I am nowadays; but he's just the sort to like vagary." ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall |
