"Drifting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... silent. She was drifting away from her mother. It was quite easy to say, "Because George Emerson has been bothering me, and if he hears I've given up Cecil may begin again"—quite easy, and it had the incidental advantage of being true. But she could not say it. She disliked confidences, for they might ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... a strange circumstance that prompted the chief to this wise action. On a hunting tour in the Red River country, with a part of his band, they were overtaken by a drifting storm and remained, for several days, under the snow, without any food whatsoever. While buried in those drifts, he resolved to rely, in part, upon agriculture, for subsistence, if he escaped alive, and he carried out his resolution, ...
— Among the Sioux - A Story of the Twin Cities and the Two Dakotas • R. J. Creswell
... it over in her room that evening vague and baffling doubts came drifting across this conviction. She doubted how she stood toward him and what the restrained gleam of his face might signify. She felt that perhaps, in her desire to play an adequate part in the conversation, she had talked rather more freely than she ought to have ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... then a hundred yards away, careening crazily, and drifting aimlessly before the light breeze. The strange green fire had vanished. Parts of the ship apparently had been carried away or disintegrated by the ray or the force of which it was a visible effect. The mainmast was down, and was hanging over the ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... guano of these birds, their dead bodies, and the refuse of their food, mingling and agglomerating with the sand and rotting seaweed, would form an extraordinarily rich soil, upon which a few coconuts, drifting across the illimitable ocean, would be cast up by the surf, and, becoming buried, would sprout, throw out roots and shoots, and become trees, as has happened in the case of so many others of the Pacific islands. But at that moment there was not a ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... lay down, and was fast drifting into the Land of Nod, when I was aroused by a sound something like the ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume VIII, No 25: May 21, 1887 • Various
... tower and contained tubes of radioactive solution to simulate, at a low level of activity, the radioactive products expected from a nuclear explosion. The test produced a bright sphere which spread out in an oval form. A column of smoke and debris rose as high as 15,000 feet before drifting eastward. The explosion left a shallow crater 1.5 meters deep and 9 meters wide. Monitoring in the area revealed a level of radioactivity low enough to allow workers to spend several hours in the area ...
— Project Trinity 1945-1946 • Carl Maag and Steve Rohrer
... and three rams were now disabled; the latter drifting down with the current under the guns of Fort Pillow. Those remaining were five in number, and only two gunboats, the Benton and Carondelet, were actually engaged, the St. Louis just approaching. The enemy now retired, giving as a reason that the Union gunboats ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... forfeiture of pay to remain idle temporarily, in order that his hand may recover the requisite precision of touch. As I listened, Hamlet's courtly criticism of the grave-digger's want of sensibility came drifting into my memory. "The hand of little employment hath the daintier sense," says Shakespeare, who has left ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... cliff, that all hope of saving the ship must be abandoned. Perhaps the Spaniards, mistaking Saint Magnus's Bay for the entrance of Yell Sound, she had been kept away and then hauled up again; but there she was drifting bodily down towards the terrific ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... little and big, came out of school the snow was coming down more thickly. The flakes were not so large, but there were more of them, and they blew here and there in the wind, drifting into piles that would make the shoveling off of walks hard ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at School • Laura Lee Hope
... dusk would blend to her, the myriad footsteps, a thousand overtures, would blend to her footsteps; and there would be more drunkenness than wine in the softness of her eyes on his. Even his dreams now were faint violins drifting like summer sounds ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... frost, the drifting snow fell thick Upon the plain, where late the battle rag'd. Benumb'd with cold, my heart was deathly sick, When my pale looks ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... had piled up fast. What promised to be a heavy storm had become a reality, and it was whirling and drifting dreadfully. You must remember that I had on my ...
— Five Little Peppers at School • Margaret Sidney
... Fairy, carrying sticks on their shoulders to look like guns, in order to frighten away the natives, who were very numerous on that part of the coast. On this journey they found the wreck of a vessel, supposed to be a Spanish one, which has since been covered by the drifting sand. When Captain Mills was afterwards harbour master at Belfast, he took the bearings of it, and reported them to the Harbour Department in Melbourne. Vain search was made for it many years afterwards in the hope that it was a Spanish galleon ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... quickened. A thousand little snow demons beat in his face to challenge his courage. The wind swept down, as if enraged at the thought in his mind, and scooped up volley after volley of drifting snow and hurled them at him. There was only the thin glass between. It was like the defiance of a living thing. It threatened him. It dared him. It invited him out like a great bully, with a brawling show of fists. He had always been more or less pusillanimous ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... of thunder and then the rain began drumming on the roof of the porch. Jessie looked out. The clearing about the house had darkened speedily. A sheet of rain came drifting across the lake toward the hillock on which ...
— The Campfire Girls of Roselawn - A Strange Message from the Air • Margaret Penrose
... French squadron, which had engaged the forts in a most brilliant fashion, was passing out the Bouvet was blown up by a drifting mine and sank in less than three minutes, carrying with her most of her crew. At 2.36 P.M. the relief battleships renewed the attack on the forts, which again opened fire. The Turks were now sending mines down with the ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... a fierce chance blow, delivered with all the strength of the maddened boy, alighted fairly, just below the head of the snake carrying away the bird, and in a second it was done for, floating, writhing down the stream with a broken neck, and its tiny prey loosened and drifting away beside it. ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... there was the purple sheen. He saw it as he stood on the hangman's bridge and looked down into the water where pieces of ice were drifting about. But when he raised his distressed face a gigantic countenance became visible. The great vaulted arch of heaven was a countenance fearfully distorted by vengeance and scorn. Of escape from it there could be no thought. Within his soul everything became wrapped ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... Lawrence appeared, covered with drifting floes; the Isle of Orleans, with the Falls of Montmorency behind it; the ascending heights which slope up to the Chateau Frontenac, the fort-crowned citadel, the long parapet, bristling ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... cloud, so to speak, that reaches thus far; and that, combined with the proper evaporation of the region itself, that is, from its own springs and rivers, yields all the rain that falls upon it. Great bodies of vapour, rising from the Pacific and drifting eastward, first impinge upon the coast range, and there deposit their waters; or perhaps they are more highly-heated, and soaring above the tops of these mountains, travel farther. They will be intercepted a hundred miles farther on by the loftier ridges of the Sierra Nevada, and carried ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... found every variety of motion and of rest, from the inactive plain, sleeping like the firmament, with cities for stars, to the fiery peaks which, with heaving bosoms and exulting limbs, with clouds drifting like hair from their bright foreheads, lift up their Titan hands to heaven saying, 'I live for ever.'" We learn, too, a wonderful power in the excited earth, far beyond that which other "naturalists" describe of the lobster, who only, ad libitum, casts off a claw ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... light touched the earth the Thunder Bird was bathed in its glow. Cliff's profile emerged clear-cut from the dusk as he gazed toward the east. Johnny, too, glanced that way, but he was not thinking then of the wonderful effect of the rising moon upon the drifting world below. He was wondering just why this trip to-night should be so important ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... two gray firmaments of sky and water seemed collapsed into a vague ellipsis. And alike, the Chamois seemed drifting in the atmosphere as in the sea. Every thing was fused into the calm: sky, air, water, and all. Not a fish was to be seen. The silence was that of a vacuum. No vitality lurked in the air. And this inert blending and brooding ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... he carried it promptly to the Echo building the next morning? He might have gone to Mr. Carter's house with it. There were a score of ways it might have been delivered to its rightful owner. Alas, he had been very weak, and by drifting along and taking no positive action had got himself into the dilemma in ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... on her back was making her nervous, she said. She could feel a little damp spot coming through her gossamer. Gertie drew her bare feet up under her and cast longing looks toward the house. She was getting cold and the drifting smoke from the kitchen chimney looked wondrously inviting. She did wish Katy would stop reading. But Katy read on as steadily as the rain pattered, rolling out the big words reckless of mistakes and lifting her shrill little voice almost to a shriek ...
— Chicken Little Jane • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... through, but were quickly brought down as Otah's drifting rear-guard deployed to their assignments. It became evident early that Otah's tribe was more proficient in ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse
... dreadfully damp down there; and I cannot keep the guns bright and the floors dry," No, good old "Resolute." May and June pass off the next year, and nobody comes; and here you are all alone out in the bay, drifting in this dismal pack. July and August,—the days are growing shorter again. "Will nobody come and take care of me, and cut off these horrid blocks of ice, and see to these sides of bacon in the hold, and all these mouldy sails, and this ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... escape dullness, as also love of finery and joy in receiving presents, are the principal motives that lead girls into illegal relations. And what I want to make plain is this: a characterless girl, irresponsible, without care for the future, drifting, snatching at pleasure, taking the easiest course—this is the girl who bears a child illegitimately and this is the girl incapable of becoming ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... gale his line had parted; so that the boat, drifting fast to leeward, was out of sight by morning. Reduced, after this, to great extremities, the boat touched, for fruit, at an island of which they knew nothing. The natives, at first, received them kindly; but one of the men getting into a ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... poesy, wrapping the horrible idol in his pilgrim's mantle, had placed it on a marble altar in the midst of perfumes and holy incense. Already the children were tightening their idle hands and drinking in their bitter cup the poisoned brewage of doubt. Already things were drifting toward the abyss, when the jackals suddenly emerged from the earth. A cadaverous and infected literature which had no form but that of ugliness, began to sprinkle with fetid blood ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... knocking away our bulwarks, and threatening to carry off those on deck to destruction. Scarcely had we made good forty or fifty miles to the westward, than the wind increasing we had again to heave-to under a close-reefed fore-topsail. Here we lay day after day, drifting rapidly back from the point it had taken us so long to gain. Each day, too, saw our bulwarks more and more shattered by the furious ...
— The Two Whalers - Adventures in the Pacific • W.H.G. Kingston
... hands,—free to work, to live, to love! Free! His right! He folded the scrap of paper in his hand. As his nervous fingers took it in, limp and blotted, so his soul took in the mean temptation, lapped it in fancied rights, in dreams of improved existences, drifting and endless as the cloud-seas of color. Clutching it, as if the tightness of his hold would strengthen his sense of possession, he went aimlessly down the street. It was his watch at the mill. He need not go, need never go again, ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... motor boat! It's disabled—drifting! It must have been on the rocks. It's a large one, too. Look out you don't ...
— Frank and Andy Afloat - The Cave on the Island • Vance Barnum
... saw by the light of his little electric torch men sound asleep on the narrow shelves they had dug in the side of the trench, their feet and often a shoulder covered with the drifting snow. Strange homes were these fitted up with the warriors' arms and clothes, and now and then with some ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the river the Germans were at work. Barelegged, and armed with long poles, they waded carefully through the flooded fields towards the river to catch the drifting logs. ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... disposition made it impossible for him to remain long in one position. After some drifting, he settled in Philadelphia in 1838, where he did hack work until he became associate editor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine and American Monthly Review in July, 1839. In 1840 appeared a volume of his tales which attracted favorable notice. In 1841 he became ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... the night of Tuesday, the fourth of September, the crew of Ribaut's flag-ship, anchored on the still sea outside the bar, saw a huge hulk, grim with the throats of cannon, drifting towards them through the gloom; and from its stern rolled on the sluggish air the portentous banner ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... them more or less dust-grimed, weather-beaten, or ragged. Occasionally one was to be seen in heavy beery slumber under the hedgerow, or lying on the grass smoking lazily, or with painful thrift cobbling up a hole in a garment. Such as these were drifting in early that they might be on the ground when pickers were wanted. They were the forerunners of the ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... of the whole thing. Every now and then in the course of my work I have come across lads who were really drifting to the bad through the good qualities in them. A clean combative strain in their blood, and a natural turn for adventure, made the ordinary anaemic routine of shop or warehouse or factory almost unbearable for them. What splendid little soldiers they would have made, and how ...
— When William Came • Saki
... and lends them their mystery. A belt of thick brushwood and low trees lay before me, clinging to the slope, and as I pushed with great difficulty and many turns to right and left through its tangle a wisp of cloud enveloped me, and from that time on I was now in, now out, of a deceptive drifting fog, in which it was most ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... away along a country road towards Arden; and once more Clarissa saw the things that she had dreamed of so often in her narrow white bed in the bleak dormitory at Belforet. Every hedge-row and clump of trees from which the withered leaves were drifting in the autumn wind, every white-walled cottage with moss-grown thatch and rustic garden, woke a faint rapture in her breast. It was home. She remembered her old friends the cottagers, and wondered whether goody Mason were still alive, and whether Widow Green's fair-haired children would ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... deadwater were several floating platforms; the men called them "headworks." On the platforms were capstans. The headworks were anchored far in advance of the drifting logs, around which were thrown pocket booms; men trod in weary procession, circling the capstans, pushing against long ashen bars, and the dripping tow warp hastened the drift of ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... him, as, for the first time, the real significance of that which he had done in carefully guiding the rower on to the old rotten pile came home. A cold chill ran through him, and, for the moment, he clung, speechless and helpless, to the drifting boat. ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... snowstorm, visible on three sides of your wide-windowed room, loading the evergreens, blown in fine powder from the great chestnut-tops, piled up in ever accumulating masses, covering the paths, the shrubbery, the hedges, drifting and clinging in fantastic deposits, deepening your sense of security, and taking away the sin of idleness by making it a necessity, this is an excellent ground to your day by ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... young man to think it? But since her engagement to Rodney, Henry's feeling towards her had become rather complex; equally divided between an impulse to hurt her and an impulse to be tender to her; and all the time he suffered a curious irritation from the sense that she was drifting away from him for ever upon unknown seas. On her side, directly Katharine got into his presence, and the sense of the stars dropped from her, she knew that any intercourse between people is extremely partial; from the whole mass of her feelings, only one ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... thirty years the shadow and glory of a great Eastern figure has lain upon our English literature. Fitzgerald's translation of Omar Khayyam concentrated into an immortal poignancy all the dark and drifting hedonism of our time. Of the literary splendour of that work it would be merely banal to speak; in few other of the books of men has there been anything so combining the gay pugnacity of an epigram with the vague sadness of a song. But of its philosophical, ethical, and ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... of the past. He revives for us the princesses and queens, the knights and troubadours, and they move before us, a fascinating, glittering pageant. The perfume of flowers, the sunlight on the water, the great birds flying in the air, the silent drifting of the boats in the broad valley, the reflection of the tall poplars in the water, the old ruins that crown the hilltops—all these things are exquisitely woven into the verse, and more than a mere word-painting they create a mood in ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... the bright dance of the waves. And now and then she heard what she knew to be the rush of a round shot far above her head, and following the sound saw a little silver fountain leap up into the sunshine and skim before the breeze; then glancing up the hill she saw the gray puff drifting, and presently felt the dull rumble of the air. At the root of the smoke-puffs, once or twice, she descried a stocky figure moving leisurely, and in spite of the distance and huddle of vapour could declare that it was Captain Stubbard. Then a dense mass of smoke was brought down by an eddy of ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... part of the enemy's ships ceased to fire; some of the lighter vessels were adrift, and the carnage on board their ships was dreadful the crews having been continually re-enforced. Soon after this, the Danish commodore's ship took fire, and drifting in flames before the wind, spread terror and dismay throughout their line. The ships a-head, however, with the crown-batteries, as well as the prizes made by the British, still continued to lire, and Nelson, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Rising and stepping, with wonderful lightness for a thick-set heavy man, he spread his open blanket over the smoke, and then quickly drew it away. He repeated the operation at least twenty times and at least twenty great coiling rings of smoke arose, sailing far up into the blue sky, and then drifting away over the forest, until they were lost in ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... National interest saw in a personal union, and generally in every more radical rupture of the bonds of the Union, a risk that the influence of Sweden would thereby become unduly lessened. For if Sovereign power became the only essential bond of Union, there would be the risk of the balance of power drifting into the hands of the Storthing (especially after the events of 1884 when the Sovereign power of the King was weakened), a risk that has at the present conjuncture of affairs already made ...
— The Swedish-Norwegian Union Crisis - A History with Documents • Karl Nordlund
... near me when all else is from me drifting Earth, sky, home's pictures, days of shade and shine, And kindly faces to my own uplifting The ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... and the intensity of isolation a new horror was added. The murmur of plashing forest-streams, which had hitherto been the only sound greeting them from the nether gloom, now gave place to the measured roll of the surf, and this, in turn, to complete silence. They were drifting out to sea, and were already far beyond the shore! The valve was opened at once, and as the balloon slowly settled into a dense, chilly fog the occupants of the basket momentarily expected a plunge-bath. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... cause would check the advance of the Cossacks. Here then was the last interval of comfort which gleamed upon the unhappy nation during their whole migration. For ten days the snow continued to fall with little intermission. At the end of that time keen bright frosty weather succeeded: the drifting had ceased: in three days the smooth expanse became firm enough to support the treading of the camels, and the flight was recommenced. But during the halt much domestic comfort had been enjoyed: and for the last time universal plenty. The cows and oxen had perished in such vast numbers ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... ventured to haul it up to the boat. On getting it on board he found that the hook was twisted, and some more time was employed in putting on a new one. Thus eager in and occupied with the sport, Dick did not observe that the boat was slowly drifting along the reef, away from the entrance, by which alone he could regain the shore. The wind was also increasing, though as the sea was smooth he did not discover this. At length, looking up, he observed the position of the boat, and on ...
— Charley Laurel - A Story of Adventure by Sea and Land • W. H. G. Kingston
... of protecting our left was most apparent, and the next day the drifting in that direction was to be continued. This movement in the presence of the enemy, who at all points was actively seeking an opportunity to penetrate our line and interpose a column between its right and left, was most dangerous. But the necessity for ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... heard only the rumbling monotone of the drifting ice— not the breath of a sound from the scores of ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... know, madam," answered Mistress Margaret; "but, of all birds in the air, I would rather be the lark, that sings while he is drifting down the summer breeze, than the weathercock that sticks fast yonder upon his iron perch, and just moves so much as to discharge his duty, and tell us which way ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... rain was less heavy, and clouds of fog were drifting in before the wind. Seth waded on for a short distance, but soon realized that wading would be an impossibility. Then, as in despair, he was about ready to give up the attempt, a dark object came into view beside him. It was a dory belonging to one of the lobstermen, which, at the ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... first a landscape rose 470 More wild and waste and desolate than where The white bear, drifting on a field of ice, Howls to her sundered cubs with piteous ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... without a prayer; for his freed spirit had soared above the reach of earthly intercession, and to the foreigners who stood around, it would have been a senseless form. And there they left him in his unquiet sepulchre; but it matters little, for we know that while the unconscious clay is "drifting on the shifting currents of the restless main," nothing can disturb the hallowed rest of the immortal spirit. Neither could he have a more fitting monument, than the blue waves which visit every coast; for his warm sympathies went forth to the ends of the earth, and included the whole family ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... What chance! What luck! What fortune! They themselves had no luck, they must remain here how long, ah, who knew how long! They all stood there upon the beach watching the departing one until he reached the steamer, drifting idly at the length of ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... the conversation drifting toward people of whose existence Molly has hitherto been unaware, she moves a little apart from the other two, and amuses herself by turning over a book of Byron's beauties; while wishing heartily those stupid men would weary ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... man. They are symbols of mystery. They rise briefly against the skyline, they are gone into the grey distance. Something beckons or something drives. They are lost to human sight, perhaps to human memory, like a couple of chips drifting out into the ocean. Patient time may witness their return; it is still likely that soon another incarnation will have closed for man and beast, that they will have left to mark their passing a few ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... Oh! swift years ever drifting fleet Adown life's current, tempest toss'd, Roll on! till on Time's brink we meet And hail the life ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... crossed the threshold when from the room where she was lying I heard a low, plaintive moan, and, as though it had been wafted me by the wind from Russia, I thought of Orlov, his irony, Polya, the Neva, the drifting snow, then the cab without an apron, the prediction I had read in the cold morning sky, and the ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... poignant, meltingly tender, or, as it might be, martial and gay exquisite in themselves, yet never complete, fragments rather, as it seemed, of some theme yet to come, which they had hardly time to suggest before they were torn, as it were, from their roots and sent drifting down the stream, to reappear in new settings, richer combinations, and fairer forms; and these, I knew, were symbols of the lives ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... physician could not bring himself to the point toward which the dinner was intended to smooth the road. The "Dago red" had mellowed them both and they talked merrily of the days at Palo Alto, bringing up one good memory after another, drifting gradually to an exchange of Alumni personals of which the newspaper man furnished the larger part. They talked of the men their young University had sent into the distant parts of the world, youngsters running mines in the Antipodes, with fat salaries ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... seen a little rough model of the statue, nodded his head, in order that he might not have to answer immediately. Decidedly, that good fellow Mahoudeau was turning traitor, and drifting towards gracefulness, in spite of himself, for pretty things ever sprang from under his big fingers, former stonecutter though he was. Since his colossal 'Vintaging Girl,' he had gone on reducing and reducing the proportions of his figures ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... interview with Sidwell, he knew no rest from the torment of a mocking voice which bade him bear in mind that all his dishonour had been superfluous, seeing that whilst he played the part of a zealous Christian, Sidwell herself was drifting further and further from the old religion. This voice mingled with his dreams, and left not a waking hour untroubled. He refused to believe it, strove against the suggestion as a half-despairing man does ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... was a bank of heavy gray clouds in the west shutting down like a curtain, and the sea was silver-colored. You could look under and beyond the curtain of clouds into the palest, clearest yellow sky. There was a little black boat in the distance drifting slowly, climbing one white wave after another, as if it were bound out into that other world beyond. But presently the sun came from behind the clouds, and the dazzling golden light changed the look of everything, and it was the time then to ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... ocean of rivers, some swiftly flowing, some slow, and a league from where you are drifting at the rate of a mile an hour another ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... another flash and another crash, and the pour began again. But all the while the storm was wearing itself out, and he began to wonder if a sullen day, ending in this apocalypse, would pass into a cheerful evening. It seemed as if it would, for some blue was showing between the clouds drifting westward, threatening every moment to blot out the blue, but the clouds continued to brighten at the edges. 'The beginning of the sunset,' the priest said; and he went out on his lawn and stood watching the swallows in the shining air, their dipping, swerving flight ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... interjection from Miss McCroke, who in a manner represented the Goddess of Wisdom in this somewhat frivolous family, and came in with a corrective and severely rational observation when the talk was drifting towards idiocy. ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... London express never stops at Clinton) jerked through the deep valleys, heavy with woods, golden brown at their heart, the low hills carrying, on their horizons, white drifting clouds that flung long grey shadows. Seymour felt suddenly as though he could never return to London again exactly as he had returned to it before. "That period of my life is over, quite over.... Some one is taking me down here now—I know that I am being compelled ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... Hours aimless-drifting as the milkweed's down In seeming, still a seed of joy ye bear That steals into the soul when unaware, And springs up ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone
... can see, but it is enough to make a deep impression. Outside, the sun is glaring, the leaves quiver, and the clouds are drifting across the sky, but here it is dim and cool as in a cathedral, not a breeze blows, everything is lapped in a holy calm. Abandonment, repose, sublime thoughtlessness drop down on us in the shadow of the giant tree; as if in a dream we breathe the damp, soft, ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... spirits were depressed. He watched the drifting storm for a few minutes, and then turned away and looked for a novel in his bag, and filled a pipe with some English tobacco he had jealously guarded from the lynx-eyed custom-house men in New York, and then sat down with a sigh before his small coal fire, and prepared to ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... strong inclination to take her in his arms and shower tenderness upon her; but if he has been drifting that way for the past week, he is rudely awakened now. He looks at her helplessly. If she would only cry; the girls he has seen have been ready ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... to Stockholm. Strike the iron while it is hot. Much I hope from this armistice. It will make the lords of Warsaw, Regensburg, and Vienna more pliant and yielding, for it will show them that the Elector of Brandenburg is no longer drifting helplessly about in a leaky boat, but that he has succeeded at least in stopping one hole and keeping himself above water! And now, friend Leuchtmar, how fared you in your secret mission? Did you hand my ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... called to Hugh, pointing to the bottle as it danced about, twirling round and round, tossing from side to side in the wide ripples sent out by the children and the drifting raft. ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... and jumbled way," answered Aaron. "She was so much upset and distressed that I couldn't make much of her letter. I gathered that he had taken a box containing a large amount of money aboard a coastwise craft, and that he had been found later drifting in an open boat. He had been wounded, and the presumption was, of course, that he had been assaulted and robbed of the money. But, of course, I concluded, as I suppose every one else did, that the money had been divided and spent. At any rate, ...
— The Rushton Boys at Treasure Cove - Or, The Missing Chest of Gold • Spencer Davenport
... palaces, monuments, and tombs were characteristic of both peoples. On account of the dryness of the climate, these great monuments have been preserved with a freshness through thousands of years. In the valley of the Euphrates many of the cities that were reduced to ruin were covered with the drifting sands and floods until they ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... forty-five minutes past 12, the Venerable and Pompee hauled to the wind on the starboard tack; at 1h. cut the sheet-cable, and slipped the end of the kedge hawser, and spring on the sheet-anchor,—got the boats ahead to tow,—found the ship drifting under the island fort, which did us considerable injury,—the rocks close under the lee-bow,—cut away the best bower-anchor to check her head, and bring her broadside to bear, it being calm; at twenty minutes past 1, a light breeze ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez, Vol. I • Sir John Ross
... sink with the ship into the roaring waters. Suddenly, to her horror, a high rocky island appeared a few miles ahead. Toward this island, over whose cruel reefs the ocean was foaming and breaking, the ship was drifting fast. Tied to the mast, the Princess listened to the terrible cry of the breakers, and, spell-bound, watched the jagged rocks of the island ever ...
— The Firelight Fairy Book • Henry Beston
... passed without trouble far above the scene of our first fight,—the Battle of the Hundred Pines, as my officers had baptized it; and ever, as we ascended, the banks grew steeper, the current swifter, the channel more tortuous and more encumbered with projecting branches and drifting wood. No piloting less skilful than that of Corporal Sutton and his mate, James Bezzard, could have carried us through, I thought; and no side-wheel steamer less strong than a ferry-boat could have borne the ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... boat had, indeed, vanished from her moorings. On the bronze current, nothing moved but three fishing-boats drifting down, with the smoke, toward the marsh and the bend of the river, and a small junk that toiled up against wind and tide, a cluster of naked sailors tugging and shoving at her heavy sweep, which chafed its rigging ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... she stormed. "What sort of a ship is this? There's that colored man upstairs asleep under the wheel; the Doctor asleep down here; and you making pot-hooks in a copy-book with a pencil! Expect the ship to steer herself to Brazil? We're just drifting around the sea like an empty bottle—and a week behind time as it is. What's happened to ...
— The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... to Parliament; nor has a single paper of any kind been laid upon the table of the House by Her Majesty's Government. It is, therefore, thought to be time to ask for explanations, and thereby, so far as may now be possible, to prevent that gradual 'drifting' into serious complication which disfigured the transactions of the Whig Government in 1854 (Russian war), in 1861-2 (Poland), and in 1863-4 (Denmark). The Reciprocity Treaty provided not merely for free interchange of commodities between Her Majesty's ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... that man, who had known how to give up his life to the independence and unity of his country, who had known how to be as enthusiastic in his generosity as the youngest of those who fell for that very cause of which old Giorgio Viola was a drifting relic, as a broken spar is suffered to float away disregarded after a naval victory. The Marchesa led a still, whispering existence, nun-like in her black robes and a white band over the forehead, in a ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... cross the square, which I doubted, they took me for just another Dry-town vagabond, curious about the world of the strangers from beyond the stars, and who, curiosity satisfied, was drifting back where he belonged. I turned down one of the dark alleys that led away, and soon was walking in ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... night. More and more, as I lay wide-eyed through the night, it seemed to me that Miss Emily must be helped, that she was drifting miserably out of life for need ...
— The Confession • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... portion of the basin of the Colorado is traversed by a labyrinth of these deep gorges. About the basin are mountains; within the basin are canon gorges; the stretches of land from brink to brink are of naked rock or of drifting sands, with here and there lines of volcanic cones, and of black ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... was looking up again, at the single wide window which gave out on the lonely landscape over which sometimes came drifting the distant cry ...
— Under Arctic Ice • H.G. Winter
... But even by the frontier tests of efficiency, of gameness, of going the limit, Weaver stood head and shoulders above his neighbors. She had lifted her gaze to meet his, quite sure that her answer was not in doubt, but now her heart was beating like a triphammer. She felt herself drifting from her moorings. It was as though she were drowning forty fathoms deep in those calm, unwinking ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... morning after the strange happenings in the garden, Kalora sat by one of the cross-barred windows overlooking a side street, and envied the humble citizens and unimportant woman drifting happily across ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... coast of Nova Scotia is herring ground at some season of the year. "Drifting" for herring was formerly a considerable industry from Digby to Briers Island, but in these last few years it has not been important, although the year 1927 had a very good run of large food fish. This western coast is also an important fishing ...
— Fishing Grounds of the Gulf of Maine • Walter H. Rich
... food. For millennia it had been drifting across the vast emptiness of space. Without consciousness, it had spent the countless centuries in the void between the stars. It was unaware when it finally reached a sun. Life-giving radiation flared around the hard, dry spore. Gravitation tugged ...
— The Leech • Phillips Barbee
... all else is from me drifting: Earth, sky, home's pictures, days of shade and shine, And kindly faces to my own uplifting The love ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... she had wanted him to spend every cent of the fifty dollars for a STUNNING coat! Bert laughed at her April face. He took her triumphantly to the fifty-cent luncheon and they talked over it for a blissful hour. And when she left him at the office door, Nancy consoled herself by drifting into one of the near-by second-hand bookshops, and buying him a tiny Keats, "Pepy's Diary" somewhat shabby as to cover, and George's "Progress and Poverty," at ten cents apiece. These books were ...
— Undertow • Kathleen Norris
... not only to the fields that have been blown out, but the adjoining fields, on to which the "drifting soil" has blown in great clouds and settled, have suffered likewise, and whole pastures have been known to be destroyed by the same means. For several years the farmers have been working night and day to devise some method to prevent the damage ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... descried some shapeless object drifting at a distance. At sea, everything that breaks the monotony of the surrounding expanse attracts attention. It proved to be the mast of a ship that must have been completely wrecked; for there were the remains of handkerchiefs, by which some of the crew had fastened themselves to this ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... before the world misconceived because misdescribed; and if society is gradually clearing its ideas of the man, it is not only because the preconceptions of that multitudinous authority are themselves gradually drifting away, but also because substantial facts are slowly coming into view. Their development has been hindered by obstacles which will be understood when I have proceeded a little farther, and even within the compass of this brief sketch I hope that I shall be able to make readers on both sides of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... quite the military man. His new passion took him away from womankind, saved him from temptation, and freed his thoughts from the obsession of either Kedzie or Charity. The whole nation was turning again toward soldiering, drifting slowly and resistingly, but helplessly, into the very things it had long denounced as Prussianism and conscription. A universal mobilization was brewing that should one day compel all men and all women, even little ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... as I watched you, little thought had I How soon beneath the dim low-drifting sky Your soul should wander down the darkling way, With eyes that peer a little wistfully, Half-glad, half-sad, remembering, as they see Lethean ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... have said that the war may assume another aspect, and be a short and bloody one. And to such a war—an anti-slavery war—it seems to me we are inevitably drifting. It seems to me hardly in the power of human wisdom to prevent it. We may commence the war without meaning to interfere with slavery; but let us have one or two battles, and get our blood excited, and we shall not only not restore any more slaves, ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... waters of the south. The wind had risen, and was once more sweeping over the prairie in gusts, which it was often vain to oppose; and then again the blasts would seem to mount into the upper air, as if to sport with the drifting vapour, whirling and rolling vast masses of the dusky and ragged volumes over each other, in a terrific and yet grand disorder. Above the little brake, the flocks of birds still held their flight, circling with heavy wings ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... and swirled and bubbled; objects drifting up on the tide were left hopelessly behind. But the stout little Irish boat had got under good headway, and for a while she kept it, looming before them a blacker patch in a ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... and in her fortune, in her power to establish and maintain a settled government, we have a far deeper interest, socially, commercially, and politically, than any other nation. She is now a wreck upon the ocean, drifting about as she is impelled by different factions. As a good neighbor, shall we not extend to her a helping hand to save her? If we do not, it would not be surprising should some other nation undertake the task, ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Buchanan • James Buchanan
... alter his mother's nature,' Cyril thought sadly. He could only do the best he could for them all. He was clever enough to see that his mother was wilfully shutting her eyes to her own mismanagement of Mollie, and that she preferred drifting on in this happy-go-lucky fashion. With all her energy and fits of industry, she was extremely indolent, and never liked taking trouble about anything. No; it was no use talking to her any more about Mollie, unless he had some definite ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... suggested no solution to Denise's difficulties. The estate seemed to be drifting naturally into the hands of the only man who wanted it, and, after all, had offered a ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... of the provisions, with the water-breakers as well, were lost. On this tin of potatoes we lived—so he told the master of the Britannia—for five days, constantly in sight of the land around which we were drifting, sometimes coming to within a distance of thirty miles of it. All this time, by God's providence, we had frequent heavy rain squalls, and the potato tin, which was about eighteen inches square, and was perfectly water-tight, proved our salvation, for the ...
— "Old Mary" - 1901 • Louis Becke
... can bet we didn't have any fun drifting up. Nobody said anything much; we just sat around the edge of the deck with our staffs and pushed her off, whenever she ran against ...
— Roy Blakeley • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... no angel tell her?—would not the loving God, who knew all, just whisper one word? He must have read the little Bible! What had he thought? What did he feel in that awful hour when he felt himself drifting on to that fearful eternity? Perhaps he had been regenerated,—perhaps there had been a sudden change;—who knows?—she had read of such things;—perhaps—Ah, in that perhaps lies a world of anguish! Love ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... fellow, my escort; the pale-blue dress, so often worn; the random words—idle, thoughtless, and unkind, at least in their effect; even pretty Belle Mason fades away, and her charm and her triumph no longer remembered against her. I go a-drifting from all unpleasant memories! I murmur a prayer learned at mamma's knee long years ago, and alas! for long years left unsaid. I kneel in the firelight glow, I tenderly, fondly kiss that red rose. True, it is withered and dead, yet how sweet it is to my lips, and how dear it is to my heart! ...
— The Inner Sisterhood - A Social Study in High Colors • Douglass Sherley et al.
... Meanwhile, the felucca, slowly drifting down the lagoon, encountered—at a distance of some fifty fathoms below the battery—another obstacle, in the shape of a second chain, similar to the former, stretched across the channel, which rendered our further ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... virility of the young man began to develop in him. It was a distressing, uncanny period. Had Vandover been a girl he would at this time have been subject to all sorts of abnormal vagaries, such as eating his slate pencil, nibbling bits of chalk, wishing he were dead, and drifting into states of unreasoned melancholy. As it was, his voice began to change, a little golden down appeared on his cheeks and upon the nape of his neck, while his first summer vacation was altogether spoiled by a ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... ragged patches of snow which yet lingered in the hollows; and the harbour water rippled under balmy, fragrant winds from the wilderness; and workaday voices, strangely unchanged by the solemn change upon our days, came drifting up the hill from my father's wharves; and, ay, indeed, all the world of sea and land was warm and wakeful and light of heart, just as it used to be. But within, where were the shadow and the mystery, we walked on tiptoe and spoke in whispers, lest we offend the spirit which had ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... see all clear for a run of the anchors, Mr. Leach, should you set within a mile of the shore," called out the captain, as they pulled off from the vessel's side. "The ship is drifting along the land, but the wind you have will hardly do more than meet the send of the sea, which is on shore: should any thing go wrong show an ensign at the head ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... out in the water for days and nights. All alone. Tossed about. Days and nights. She! who'd never hurt a soul. Couldn't. She was always laughing and happy. Drifting about. All alone. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... had heard only such vague rumors as had sifted through the letters written by Lois. He had been reported as going on in his old way in the mining-camps, drifting from one to another. She heard nothing more now. He was the only one who had really loved her up here, except Lois, who loved her now. Dosia had slipped into her new position of sister and helper as if she had always filled it. She was not an ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... seen to-day in every Southern State where new railroads are building, various manufacturing enterprises springing up, and vast mining interests being developed. The steady flow of capital into all those channels is greatly due to their influence. There is more money drifting that way to-day than ever before, and the time will soon come, if it is not already here, when the sentiment to which I have responded will admit of transposition, and we can with as much propriety toast "Wall Street in the South," as to-night we toast "The ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... her relative for more than a week or two, Mrs. Damerel had already been twice to Bournemouth, and now she decided to go for a third time, just to talk quietly over the forthcoming event, and, whether Horace broached the subject or not, to apprise him of the straits into which she was drifting. Unannounced by letter, she reached Bournemouth early in the afternoon, and went straight to Horace's lodgings. The young man had just finished luncheon, and, all things considered, including the fact that it was a remarkably ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... fireship for an explosion-vessel, and being deceived as to their distance, not only did the French make no effort to divert them from their course, but some of their ships cut their cables and were seen drifting away broadside on to the wind and tide, whilst others made sail, as the only alternative to escape from what they evidently considered certain destruction. At daylight on the morning of the 12th, not a spar ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... course five hundred and sixty islands, without counting islets, drifting or stationary, forming a kind of archipelago, and yielding of themselves the ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... belated cabs had not passed from time to time over the Pont-Neuf, with their lamps showing like those shooting sparks which dart at times through embers. A red lantern, on a level with the dam of the Mint, cast a streamlet of blood, as it were, into the water. Something huge and lugubrious, some drifting form, no doubt a lighter which had become unmoored, slowly descended the stream amid the reflections. Espied for a moment, it was immediately afterwards lost in the darkness. Where had the triumphal island sunk? In the depths of that flow of water? Claude still gazed, gradually fascinated by ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... you can to the very last, for anything that is for your own good, but when you set your heart on something that means more trouble and hardship and won't add one iota to your happiness, I think it is my duty to persuade you if I can. We've been drifting apart lately; why not let us both go back to the beginning and start over again, and by kindness, and fairness, and liberality, and—and sympathy, try to recover something of ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... streams, where, with a little more than the usual timber, was sometimes gathered a little wilderness of plants, we encamped on a small stream, after a march of 22 miles, in company with a few Indians. Temperature at sunset 51 deg.; and the night was partially clear, with a few stars visible through drifting white clouds. The Indians made an unsuccessful attempt to steal a few horses from us—a thing of course with them, and to prevent which the traveler ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... winds. At the neighbouring island, moreover, of Feurteventura, there is an earthy limestone, which, according to Von Buch, is quite similar to specimens which he has seen from St. Helena, and which he believes to have been formed by the drifting of shelly detritus. (Idem pages 314 ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin |
