"Earliest" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... my earliest experiences there was a deputation from the shaykhs and chiefs of the villages round, who brought me a present of a sheep, a most acceptable present. Often when alone at Bludan provisions ran short. I ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... arguments were true, and hold good, man would be still where he begun,—in the woods and caves,—an uncouth savage with nothing save an animal instinct to lead him where he could find food. But even this earliest instinct, savage though it was, taught him that something higher than himself had made him, and so he began to creep on by slow degrees towards that higher at once; hence instinct led to reason, and ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... I'm canvassing for the National Portrait Gallery; very valuable work; comes in numbers, fifty cents apiece; contains pictures of all the great American heroes from the earliest times down to the present day. Everybody subscribing for it, and I want to see if I can't ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... from the power of the laws who ought to be the most entirely submitted to them. Those who execute public pecuniary trusts ought of all men to be the most strictly held to their duty. One would have thought that it must have been among your earliest cares, if you did not mean that those administrative bodies should be real, sovereign, independent states, to form an awful tribunal, like your late parliaments, or like our King's Bench, where all corporate officers might obtain protection in the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Balchrystie cherished a great ambition. When the earliest blackbird awoke and began to sing, while it was yet gray twilight, Janet would be up and at her work. She had an ambition to be a great poet. No less than this would serve her. But not even her father had known, and no other had any chance ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... in clearing land and burning brush, and in constructing their houses, through the winter. In March we commenced ploughing: and on the first of April began planting seed for cotton. The hoeing season commenced about the last of May. At the earliest dawn of day, and frequently before that time, the laborers were roused from their sleep by the blowing of the horn. It was blown by the headman of the gang who led the rest in the work and acted under my direction, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... appreciate their connection, had now become impossible, since he had grown old enough to understand it. He would not be Raymond's son. He declined the filial relationship—doubtless prompted thereto from his earliest days, first on one admonition, then at another. The leaven had been mixed with his blood by his mother, in his infant mind by his grandmother, in his soul by fellow men ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... slavery, he said, had existed in Africa from the earliest time; and, unless other nations would concur with England in the measure of the abolition, we could not change ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... administer the law should tend to display a similar fusion of aspects. The chief, or king, has a "divine right," and is himself in one or another sense divine, even whilst he takes the lead in regard to all such matters as are primarily secular. The earliest written codes, such as the Mosaic Books of the Law, with their strange medley of injunctions concerning things profane and sacred, accurately reflect the politico-religious character ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... the officers, who were distributed with portions of the crew among the Jamaica-men, had orders respectively to deliver them to the first man of war or tender they should meet with, and to acquaint the Secretary of the Admiralty, by the earliest opportunity, of their proceedings. A pendant was hoisted on board the Belle, by way of distinction, that she might, if possible, lead the rest. Some of the trade kept with her, and others made the best of their way, apprehensive ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... Landor. From my earliest days I have avoided society as much as I could decorously, for I received more pleasure in the cultivation and improvement of my own thoughts than in walking up and down among the thoughts of others. Yet, as you ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... have been shown certain returns with regard both to the home and Faroe fishing, which you have been asked to fill up and return to me. You will do so at your earliest convenience, with the assistance of Mr. ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... colony of the large gallery, beginning with females and ending with males. And the layings in these apparatus do not always belong to late summer or even to the intermediate period: a few small tubes contain the earliest eggs of the Osmiae. A couple of Osmiae, more forward than the others, set to work on the 23rd of April. Both of them started their laying by placing males in the narrow tubes. The meagre supply of provisions was enough ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... La Fontaine's earliest works were Contes, so styled; that is, stories, tales, or romances. These are in character such that the subsequent happy change in manners, if not in morals, has made them unreadable,—for their indecency. We need concern ourselves only with the Fables, for it is on these that La Fontaine's ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... days he goes about his grounds, petting his trees and his chickens, and working in his garden. He has several ingenious methods of fighting weeds and raises the earliest, best and latest sweet corn ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... of God"), the earliest and most sublime of the four greater Hebrew prophets, was the son of Amoz (2 Kings xix, 2-20; Isaiah xxxvii, 2), and he uttered his oracles during the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of ...
— The Dore Gallery of Bible Illustrations, Complete • Anonymous
... with tears, as she said, "Does the love we have felt for each other from our earliest childhood, give me no claim to your confidence? Had we ever a cake, or a bunch of grapes, of which one did not reserve for the other the largest and best portion? I well remember the day when you broke the little marble kid Phidias had given you. You fairly sobbed yourself to sleep in my lap, while ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... no brother. She had neither brother nor sister;—had since her earliest infancy hardly known any other relative save her aunt and old Parson John. When first she had heard that Walter Marrable was at Loring, the tidings gave her no pleasure whatever. It never occurred to ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... The earliest instances of this action we find in China, where, in the thirteenth century, the Papacy concluded Treaties with the Mongol Emperors for the protection of Christian Missions.[4] It was not, however, until the Treaty of Tientsin in 1858 that Great Britain and France secured religious liberty ...
— Notes on the Diplomatic History of the Jewish Question • Lucien Wolf
... of the United States is taught from his earliest infancy to rely upon his own exertions in order to resist the evils and the difficulties of life; he looks upon social authority with an eye of mistrust and anxiety, and he only claims its assistance when he is quite unable to shift without ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... and deeper insights and relationships; but a magical charm which touches all things and turns them to gold, vanishes with the morning. In reaching its perfection of beauty the flower must part with the dewy promise of its earliest growth. ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... believed by many people that strong impressions made upon the mother during pregnancy may produce marks or defects in the child. This belief dates from earliest antiquity, and is widespread among all races. The belief particularly refers to the emotions of fright or sudden surprise; thus it is believed that if a woman during pregnancy should be frightened by some animal, the child might carry the mark of the animal upon its body, or it might even ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... small ink-black eyes. In Dry Town beyond the mountains, to which he was evidently now returning from the mines, he was known as Blackie, bartender of the Last Chance saloon. This morning he had been abroad as early as the earliest; he seemed to take a bright interest in everything, from the harnessing of the four horses to the taking on of mail bags and boxes. In a moment when Hap Smith, before the mine superintendent's cabin, was rolling a cigarette preparatory to the long drive, Blackie ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... his "Natural Theology" to illustrate "the duty which is laid upon men by the possibility or even the imagination of a God." He does not overlook, on the contrary he founds upon, the distinction between Skeptical and Dogmatic Atheism. "Going back," he says, "to the very earliest of our mental conceptions on this subject, we advert first to the distinction, in point of real and logical import, between unbelief and disbelief. There being no ground for affirming that there is a God, is a different proposition from there being ground for affirming that there is no God.... ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... legislative authority as well. He is thoroughly versed in the history of 'the struggle between liberty and authority,' which he says 'is the most conspicuous feature in the portions of history with which we are earliest familiar, particularly in that of Greece, Rome, and England. But in old times this contest was between subjects, or some classes of subjects, and the government. By liberty was meant protection against the tyranny of political rulers.' This struggle has been ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... and primate of all England, that he might complete the work he had so promisingly begun. Such is the story of the Christianizing of England as told in the ancient chronicle of the venerable Bede, the earliest of English writers. ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... "The earliest remembrance I have of myself is of the cooper's shop where I was made. Although I look worn now, I can recall the time when all my staves were smooth and clean, so that the oak-grain showed clearly from the top to the ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... crew went ashore at the earliest possible moment after their arrival in London, in search of recuperative draughts. Ben watched them a trifle wistfully as they moved off, and when Nibletts soon after followed their example without inviting him to join him in a social glass of superior ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... after this scene, a lovely Sabbath morning, in the earliest May, as Lumley, Lord Vargrave, sat alone, by the window in his late uncle's villa, in his late uncle's easy-chair—his eyes were resting musingly on the green lawn on which the windows opened, or rather on two forms that were seated upon a rustic bench in the middle of the sward. One was ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... [The earliest of a long series of letters to Edward Moxon, preserved at Rowfant by the late Mr. Locker-Lampson, but now in America. Emma Isola's ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... earliest Scotch letter; for I am sure nobody can sympathize in the emotions of the first approach to Scotland as you can. A country dear to us by the memory of the dead and of the living; a country whose history and literature, interesting enough of itself, has become to ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... climb, and clasp, and throw out longer and stronger shoots, and overspread your wall with its large bell-shaped flowers, so brilliant with every tint of white, lilac, pink, and rose colour, and so exquisitely delicate in their texture, expanding at earliest dawn, and closing, never to reopen, when the fervid rays of the noonday sun fall on them! But I must not attempt to depict every variety of holdfast, or every provision for climbing with which it has pleased God to invest and beautify ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 454 - Volume 18, New Series, September 11, 1852 • Various
... of our own old metrical romancers, would—merely for his antiquity, merely for the sublime fact of having been coeval with the eldest of those whom the eldest of histories presents to our knowledge; coeval with the earliest kings of Judah, older than the greatest of the Judean prophets, older than the separation of the two Jewish crowns and the revolt of Israel, and, even with regard to Moses and to Joshua, not in any larger ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... the earliest moment with Mr. Fox. She had been in the habit of sending him frequent telegrams as to her patient's condition. They had been invariable so far: "No difference; mind still a blank," or some code word significant of the same. But a new ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... stones themselves and even mountains, felt in the hard heart of them the power of this sweet music. It is one of the most perfect stories ever told—the precursor of the legends that gathered round Francis of Assisi and many a later saint and artist. It is the prophecy from the earliest days of that consummation of which Isaiah was afterwards to sing and St. Paul to echo the song, when nature herself would come to the perfect reconciliation for which she had been groaning and travailing through ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... behind the vanguard of the fashion. There is often no difference perceptible to the ordinary eye between cheap and high-priced clothing once the price tag is off. Jewels as a portable form of concentrated costliness have been in favor from the earliest ages, but now they are losing their factitious value through the advance of invention. Rubies of unprecedented size, not imitation, but genuine rubies, can now be manufactured at reasonable rates. And now we may hope that lace may soon be within the reach of all, not merely lace ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... commissioners to Spanish America to ascertain and report for our information concerning their actual circumstances, and in the fullness of time we acknowledged their independence; we exchanged diplomatic ministers, and made treaties of amity with them, the earliest of which, negotiated by Mr. John Quincy Adams, served as the model for the subsequent treaties with the Spanish American Republics. We also, simultaneously therewith, exerted our good offices with Spain to induce her to submit to the inevitable result and ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... dreadful tragedy of the preceding night shattered my nerves far more than they ever suffered amid the trying scenes I have passed through since. It was my first adventure of peril and of blood; and my soul shrank with the natural recoil that virtue experiences in its earliest encounter with flagrant crime. ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... of a word by telepathy is the simplest and earliest form of the "divine hearing" of the spiritual man; as that power grows, and as, through perfectly concentrated Meditation, the spiritual man comes into more complete mastery of it, he grows able to hear and clearly distinguish the speech of the great Companions, who counsel and comfort ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... and sometimes it took a good deal to go around, but Bart's father had a steady job, and Bart himself was an agreeable, willing boy, just at the threshold of doing something to earn a living and wide-awake for the earliest opportunity. ...
— Bart Stirling's Road to Success - Or; The Young Express Agent • Allen Chapman
... alone, each containing from thirty to sixty women, and there are as many monasteries! With open doors like coffee-houses, full upon the street, are placed at Palermo innumerable consulting shops of so many lawyers; the earliest to begin business, the last to close, you may have the luxury of law at any hour of the day till bedtime. Nay, your Sicilian lawyer, unlike the lazy tradesman who puts up his shutters and sleeps from ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... first foster-mother, still preserves in her depths many of those singular and incongruous shapes which were the earliest attempts of the animal kingdom; the land, less fruitful, but with more capacity for progress, has almost wholly lost the strange forms of other days. The few that remain belong especially to the series of primitive insects, ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... worked or rested. But the inestimable advantage of good early training told at this time on Ned Sinton. It is questionable whether his principles were strong enough to have carried him through the temptation, but Ned had been trained to reverence the Lord's-day from his earliest years, and he looked upon working on the Sabbath with a feeling of dread which he could not have easily shaken off, even had he tried. The promise, in his case, was fulfilled—"Train up a child in the way he should go, and he will not depart from it when he is old;" ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... been enduring, Prince Andrew enjoyed a blissful feeling such as he had not experienced for a long time. All the best and happiest moments of his life—especially his earliest childhood, when he used to be undressed and put to bed, and when leaning over him his nurse sang him to sleep and he, burying his head in the pillow, felt happy in the mere consciousness of life—returned to his memory, not merely as something ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... a member of the grass family, and an important cereal which belongs peculiarly to temperate regions. It originated from a wild species, H. spontaneum, a native of western Asia and has been cultivated from the earliest times. Three subspecies or races are recognized, (i.) H. sativum, subsp. distichum (described by Linnaeus as a distinct species, H. distichon), two-rowed barley. Only the middle spikelet of each triplet is fertile; the ear has therefore only two longitudinal ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... acceptance of it, viz. "The General Court has, with the King's approbation, as much power in New England, as the King and Parliament have in England; they have all English privileges, and can be touched by no law, and by no tax but of their own making."7 This is the earliest testimony that can be given of the sense our predecessors had of the supreme authority of Parliament, under the present charter. And it plainly shows, that they, who having been freely conversant with those who framed the charter, must have well understood the design and meaning ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... thoughtfully for a few moments before replying and then said with a half sigh, "You know, O Father, that I myself did not particularly desire that marriage. From my earliest childhood I have been fond of my cousin and playfellow. As she matured I have admired, with family pride, her perfect beauty of form, her haughty spirit and her ability to rule. And yet, as you, who can so easily read the innermost ...
— Within the Temple of Isis • Belle M. Wagner
... podium again: "For one thing, your assumption regarding Catherine is correct. At the time of the accident she was found to have Mekstrom's Disease in its earliest form. The Harrisons did take her in to save her life. Now, dropping that side of the long story, we must follow your troubles. The accident, to a certain group of persons, was a fortunate one. It placed under their medical care a man—you—in whose mind could be planted ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... in his career did Shakespeare attract the notice of the cultivated section of Elizabeth's Court, and hardly sufficient notice has been taken by students of the poet's biography of the earliest recognition accorded him by the great queen, herself an inveterate lover of the drama, and an embodiment of the taste of the people in literature. The story is worth retelling. In the middle of December ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... that he was master of the weapon, but I was far from dismayed. I saw his eyes widen with surprise as I parried his thrust and pressed him so closely that he gave back a step. I smiled dryly, for I knew my advantage. The earliest lesson I had learned at the foils was that victory comes only to the man who keeps his coolness. I had drunk little wine, while Allen had drunk much, and his bloodshot eyes told of previous nights spent over the cups and dice. No, ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... At the earliest opportunity (which, by the way, did not arise until he had made an excuse to go into the village, where he wrote at the post ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... of the Five Towers of Silence is mingled the dust of all the Parsee men and women and children who have died in Bombay and its vicinity during the two centuries which have elapsed since the Mohammedan conquerors drove the Parsees out of Persia, and into that region of India. The earliest of the five towers was built by the Modi family something more than 200 years ago, and it is now reserved to the heirs of that house; none but the dead of that blood ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... words by heart, in prose or rhyme; so that I believe my remembrance of events depends much more upon the events themselves than upon my possessing any special facility for recalling them. Perhaps I am too imaginative, and the earliest impressions I received were of a kind to stimulate the imagination abnormally. A long series of little misfortunes, connected with each other as to suggest a sort of weird fatality, so worked upon my melancholy temperament when I was a boy that, before I was of age, I sincerely ...
— The Upper Berth • Francis Marion Crawford
... men of thews and sinews are fond of the weaker brethren who run more to pallor and intellect; and he had always felt that if Eustace had not had to retire to Windles to spend his life with a woman whom from his earliest years he had always considered the Empress of the Washouts, much might have been made of him. Both at school and at Oxford, Eustace had been—if not a sport—at least a decidedly cheery old bean. Sam remembered Eustace at school, breaking gas globes with a slipper in a ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... circumstance aroused suspicion at the gates of Metz, and 600 copies were stopped. The ultimate fate of the books is unknown. Letter of Peter Alexander, May 25, 1542, Baum, Cunitz, and Reuss, Calvini Opera, vi. p. xv. A single copy of this Roman edition has recently come to light. It proves to be the earliest edition thus far discovered of Calvin's Strasbourg Liturgy, the prototype of his Geneva Liturgy. O. Douen, Clement Marot et le Psautier huguenot (Paris, 1878), i. 334-339; and farther on in note at the close ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... immediate stress of hunger, they are better able to live in peace with each other, that the greater morality of animals is due. Yet, we have to recognise, this mischievous tendency to warfare, so often (though by no means always, and in the earliest stages probably never) found in primitive man, was bound up with his superior and progressive qualities. His intelligence, his quickness of sense, his muscular skill, his courage and endurance, his aptitude for discipline and for organisation—all ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... in the morning till five, each of us used private prayer. From five to seven we read the Bible together, carefully comparing it (that we might not lean to our own understanding) with the writings of the earliest ages. At seven we breakfasted. At eight were the public prayers. From nine to twelve I usually learned German and Mr. Delamotte Greek. My brother writ sermons, and Mr. Ingham instructed the children. At twelve ...
— The Moravians in Georgia - 1735-1740 • Adelaide L. Fries
... been already remarked, are the Gothamites of Germany, and the stories of their stupidity, after being orally current for years among the people, were collected near the close of the sixteenth century, the earliest known edition being that of 1597. In a most lively and entertaining article on "Early German Comic Romances" (Foreign Quarterly Review, No. 40, 1837), the late Mr. W.J. Thoms has furnished an account of the exploits ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... like most of Tuscarora, he had been born of a later migration than the pioneers', and was hence less tempered by New York influences for good or ill. Begotten a generation earlier, he would have tended transcendental pigs at Brook Farm. His earliest political recollections were associated with heated quotations from Garrison and Wendell Phillips, and the sharpest-etched memory of his childhood had to do with a runaway slave harbored in his father's garret. As ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... and affords one of the earliest, as well as one of the best and most healthful, of spring greens. "The French use it bleached, as a salad; and if large, and well bleached, it is better than Endive, much more tender, and of finer flavor." The roots, after being dried as before directed, constitute ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... Tulun became the ruler, and another era of mosque and palace and hospital building prevailed. The Mosque of Ibn Tulun is the only monument that survives; it is also a congregational type and has the same general style as Amr; it is the earliest instance of the use of the pointed arch throughout a building, this being two centuries earlier than its use in England. Five rows of arches form the arcade, or cloisters, on the Mecca end of the building, with two rows on the other three sides. The ornaments on the arches and around the windows ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... which absorbed these years of his life. Certain stanzas in which, as they think, he gave utterance to this passion are by them ascribed to one of these years; so that if their view were correct, the poem in question would have to be regarded as the earliest of his extant productions. The problem which we have indicated must ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... with a courteous little wave of the hand. "I am very glad to have come across you both again so opportunely. I only arrived in England a few days ago, but I did not hope to have this pleasure until the morning at the earliest. You expected to have heard from ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... maker of quantities. In this phase, if hours were long, there were at least the breaks of the ordinary family life,—the care of details taken by each in turn, and thus a knowledge acquired, which, with the development of the factory system on its earliest basis, was quite impossible. There were other alleviations, too, as the store of songs and of traditions testifies, both these possibilities ceasing when home labor ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... pastor at Kinn in the Sndfjord, married in 1831 a sister of Welhaven, and in 1839 was transferred to Manger, near Bergen. Both the places mentioned were very convenient for zological study, which Sars resumed at once and continued unbrokenly. His earliest published work appeared in 1829; it was of first-rate importance, and his reputation was soon established everywhere in the world of learning. In 1853 he sought retirement from the Church, and in 1854 was professor of zology ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... the first time in many years, my earliest interpretations of the meanings of all the phenomena of the heavens. Two old janitor saints had charge of the floor of the skies. One of them was a jolly old man who liked boys, and always kept the sky swept clean and blue. The other took a sour delight in ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... which is the Law of God,—and thus it often happens that when obstinate humanity persists in considering its own ideas of Right and Wrong superior to the Eternal Decrees which have been visibly presented through Nature since the earliest dawn of creation, a faulty civilisation sets in and is presently swept back upon its advancing wheels, and forced to begin again with primal letters of learning. In the same way a faulty Soul, an imperfect individual ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... pale and was silent for a moment. At the end of that moment the story seemed almost old to her. It was a natural ending of the prison-life which had been round Myrtle since her earliest years. When she got large and strong enough, she broke out of jail,—that was all. The nursery-bar is always climbed sooner or later, whether it is a wooden or an iron one. Olive felt as if she had dimly foreseen just such ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... took the earliest opportunity of telling her special friends that there was a treasure hidden in the stump of the old tree. In short, she repeated Betty's exact action, doing so in the presence of ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... low voice, "the earliest moment is none too early!—Do you go tomorrow?" she persisted; but just then Trescorre advanced toward them, and under a burst of assumed merriment she privately signed ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... observations upon the contents of your last two letters; but my mind is not free enough at present. The occasion for the above stuck with me; and I could not help taking the earliest notice of them. ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... to him, for the most wonderful confidence and companionship existed between father and daughter. This sadness, Dulcie went on, came out almost pathetically in her father's even added tenderness to her—he whose tenderness and affection had always been such a wonderful thing to her since her earliest childhood. But now, she said, her father sometimes followed her about the house and grounds when she had been absent from him for a short time, seeking occasion for talks with her, giving her his confidence, and consulting her wishes on matters about the gardens ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... fighting with a sharp sword against the blunt one in his antagonist's hand, who probably had forgotten in the stable how to wield the sword as he had done of yore. But the German was the son of a chief, and had followed arms from his earliest youth. Here it was defense for dear life, however glorious it might be to die under the eyes of the man whom he had learned to honor as the conqueror and tyrant of many nations, among them his own. So the strong and practiced athlete did ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the terror not only of his home but of the entire village. His wife and children cowered at his approach; and on more than one occasion only accident (or Providence) saved him from the crime of murder. On one such occasion, we are told, the child Alexis, who from his earliest years had a passion for reading, was absorbed in a book, when his father, in ungovernable fury, seized a hatchet and hurled it at the boy's head. Luckily, the missile missed its mark, and Alexis escaped, to ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... mother's words were true! In the round mirror before her she saw her mother's face; but, oh, the joyful surprise! It was not her mother thin and wasted by illness, but the young and beautiful woman as she remembered her far back in the days of her own earliest childhood. It seemed to the girl that the face in the mirror must soon speak, almost that she heard the voice of her mother telling her again to grow up a good woman and a dutiful daughter, so earnestly did the eyes in the mirror ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... From the earliest days of the Moslem corsairs of the Mediterranean they were in close communication with their co-religionists of the Ottoman Empire; and this for a very good reason, which was that the Turk had not the habit of the sea, but was essentially a land warrior, and, as the story of the Sea-wolves progresses, ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... it should be; that is, the evidence 'a priori', securing the rational probability; and then the historical proofs of its reality. Pity that Baxter's chapters in 'The Saints' Rest' should have been one and the earliest occasion of the inversion of this process, the fruit of which is the Grotio-Paleyan religion, or 'minimum' of faith; the maxim being, ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... witnessed the splendid scenic triumphs which have been achieved by managers of late years would be astonished indeed were they confronted by one of the theatres of the earliest dramatic times. Nothing could present a much greater contrast than the elaborate drapery and the ingenious trap-doors, side wings, and numerous other mechanical contrivances which are now a necessary complement of the modern stage, and the superlative ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... all over the town, and its immediate environs: but my first object was the CHURCH, upon the top of the hill; from which the earliest (Protestant) congregation were about to depart—not before I arrived in time to hear some excellently good vocal and instrumental music, from the front seat of a transverse gallery. There was much in this ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... in this horrible dread. He telegraphed repeatedly from an inland town, and took the first train despatched toward the city. His daughter was right in believing that he would reach her at the earliest possible moment. ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... world is getting no better, but if we take a dip into history and consider the conditions which prevailed there from the earliest times up to only a few hundred years ago, we will find a race of human beings which in no wise resemble the present output except in form and stature. And our own forefathers—the people of the British Isles, the Anglo-Saxons ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... "From the earliest times," said he, "drinking has been regarded not alone as a necessary lubricant, but also as a pastime, and the ingenuity of every race under the sun has been exercised in the attempt to give variety and distinction ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... the King. "Forgiveness is a very beautiful Christian virtue, which we are taught to exercise from our earliest childhood. You have cut off my dearly loved brother in the flower of his youth, but you shall not die believing that I bear you any malice. So far as I am able, I freely forgive you for what you ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... little less, now. No—-don't try it," as Dick started to bolster himself up. "You want that knee in shape at the earliest moment, ...
— The High School Pitcher - Dick & Co. on the Gridley Diamond • H. Irving Hancock
... little things, harmless tricks, cut her off from him and irritated Christophe. The good old creature was doting. She had to talk about the local gossip, and she had that nurse's tenderness which will recall all the silly little things of the earliest years, and everything that is associated with the cradle. We have such difficulty in issuing from it and growing into men and women! And Juliet's nurse must forever be laying before us our duty-swaddling clothes, commonplace thoughts, the whole unhappy period in ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... Grande Anse—before the sun emerges from the rim of the Atlantic: about half-past four, doors are being opened and coffee is ready. At St. Pierre one can enjoy a sea bath till seven or half-past seven o'clock, even during the time of the sun's earliest rising, because the shadow of the mornes still reaches out upon the bay; —but bathers leave the black beach of Grande Anse by six o'clock; for once the sun's face is up, the light, levelled straight at the eyes, becomes blinding. ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... was one of the author's earliest stories, published in 1835. It is clearly based upon an old folk tale, one variant of which is "The Blue Light" from the Grimm collection (No. 174). "It was a lucky stroke," says Brandes, "that made Andersen the poet of children. ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... morning, with but a streak of brightness along the edge of the sky, where Midas could not see it. He lay in a very disconsolate mood, regretting the downfall of his hopes and kept growing sadder and sadder, until the earliest sunbeam shone through the window, and gilded the ceiling over his head. It seemed to Midas that this bright yellow sunbeam was reflected in rather a singular way on the white covering of the bed. Looking more closely, what ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... sat down to supper, and never was there a sadder meal than this, when for the last time we sat at the hospitable board of these our earliest and latest Mexican friends. We were thankful when it was all over and we had taken leave, and when, accompanied to the inn by Senor A—-d and other gentlemen, we found ourselves fairly lodged in the diligence, on a dark and ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... face of his young wife. She was sleeping. He slipped noiselessly out of the bunk, lightly pulled up the coverings again, and hurriedly drew on two pairs of heavy, home-knit socks of rough wool. The cabin was filled with the grey light of earliest dawn, and with a biting cold that made the woodsman's hardy fingers ache. Stepping softly as a cat over the rude plank floor, he made haste to pile the cooking-stove with birch-bark, kindling, and split sticks of ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... another name on the plea that the curiously mottled and delicately pencilled leaves bring to mind, not a snake's tongue, but its skin, as they surely do. Whoever sees the sharp purplish point of a young plant darting above ground in earliest spring, however, at once sees the fitting application of adder's tongue. But how few recognize their plant friends at all ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... attributed also to Homer, seems to have defined and enlarged the domain of comedy. Eleven years after Phrynichus appeared, and just previous to the first effort of Aeschylus (B. C. 500), Epicharmus, who appears to have been a native of Cos [321], produced at Syracuse the earliest symmetrical and systematic form of comic dialogue and fable. All accounts prove him to have been a man of extraordinary genius, and of very thoughtful and accomplished mind. Perhaps the loss of his works ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... rites gathered from nations as old as Phoenicia and Egypt and as modern as Switzerland, held the Romanys of the world in awe, for his fame had travelled where he could not follow. To Fleda in her earliest days he had been like one inspired, and as she now stood facing the intangible Thing, she recalled an exorcism which the Sage had recited to her, when he had sufficiently startled her senses by tales of the Between World. This exorcism ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... accusation in them and were heavy with pain—eyes that told he had trusted her, had loved her, and that he had always hoped she would be his—eyes that told of all they had been to each other from the earliest remembered days, and which plainly said, as they looked at her from the foot of her bed: "Mysie! Oh, Mysie! What way did ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... 25 For bearserks challenging men to holm, 51 For heritage of outlawed men in Norway in the days of Harold Fairhair, 11 For the utmost limit of outlawry, 225 For heathen sacrifices in the earliest days of Christianity in Iceland, 226 For a rightful suitor in a ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris
... One of Marty's earliest visits after her return was paid to Jennie in company with Cousin Alice. They found the invalid sitting up in the comfortable rocking-chair, looking very much better. She was overjoyed to see them and had a great deal to say. She was so pleased that she happened to be up, ...
— A Missionary Twig • Emma L. Burnett
... think back.... What is the earliest thing you can remember? Perhaps your baptism? Possibly even your first bath? It ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... of Jupiter and Minemosyne, nine in number. According to the earliest writers the Muses were only the inspiring goddesses of song; but later they were looked to as the divinities presiding over the different kinds of poetry, and over the arts and sciences. [181] 130-135. Note the poet's device for presenting a series of mental pictures. Compare with Tennyson's ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans were familiar with manual arithmetic and finger-numeration, as quaint John Bulwer shows by numerous citations in his Chironomia (1644). The earliest finger-alphabets extant appear to have been based upon finger-signs for numbers, as, for instance, that given by the Venerable Bede (672-735) in his De Loguela per Gestum Digitorum sive Indigitatione, figured in the Ratisbon edition of 1532.[4] Monks and others who had special ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... Henry, attended.] Henry rose with the earliest dawn, and immediately heard three masses. He was habited in his "cote d'armes," containing the arms of France and England quarterly, and wore on his bacinet a very rich crown of gold and jewels, circled like an imperial crown, that is, arched over. The earliest instance of an arched crown worn ...
— King Henry the Fifth - Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre • William Shakespeare
... been lurking continuously in the back of his head. To go away without Julie was impossible. Under ordinary circumstances her situation as a prisoner would not be alarming. Germans regarded women with respect. They had done so from the earliest times, as he had learned from the painful study of Tacitus. Von Arnheim had received a deep impression from Julie's beauty and grace. John could tell it by his looks, but those looks were honest. They came from the eyes and heart of one who could do no wrong. ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... twisted it about, enlarged upon it, provided a new setting for the story, and created something new, yet in truth far from new, from the idea furnished by another writer. Who evolved the "original" plot in any certain case is a question that will forever remain a question, for the earliest plays and stories are no longer extant. But this we do know: there are only a very few original or primary plots, and all the plays, novels, and short-stories that have been written are variations of these. Some writers have made the twist ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... sick, always slender and weakly, and regarded rather as a burden upon the family than a help to it. His feebleness early habituated him to being a recipient of aid and favor, and it decided his destiny. It has been the custom in New England, from the earliest time, to bring up one son of a prosperous family to a profession, and the one selected was usually the boy who seemed least capable of earning a livelihood by manual labor. Ebenezer Webster, heavily burdened with responsibility all his ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... From his earliest youth the little Buvat, who had a marked repugnance for all other kinds of study, manifested a particular inclination for caligraphy: thus he arrived every morning at the College des Oratoriens, where his ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... reproduced its kind in many variants, after the manner of other folklore. This love-lyric represents a type, very popular in Hawaii, that has continued to grow more and more personal and subjective in contrast with the objective epic style of the earliest Hawaiian mele. ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... biography of the city in volumes as remarkable for penetrative acumen as for definite delineation and dramatic interest. We possess picture-galleries of pages in which the great men of Florence live again and seem to breathe and move, epics of the commonwealth's vicissitudes from her earliest commencement, detailed tragedies and highly finished episodes, studies of separate characters, and idylls detached from the main current of her story. The whole mass of this historical literature is instinct with the spirit of criticism and vital with experience. The writers ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... circumstances or of this special trial, had been moved of God to send at that particular nick of time a love-offering to his daughter, such as they still send to each other in those kindly Scottish shires—a bag of new potatoes, a stone of the first ground meal or flour, or the earliest homemade cheese of the season—which largely supplied all our need. My mother, seeing our surprise at such an answer to her prayers, took us around her knees, thanked God for His goodness, ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... clutch being single. The nests do not provide accommodation for more than one chick, which before flight is obviously top large for its birthplace. Looking down into the cave, the eggs well advanced towards incubation seem to have a slight phosphorescent glow. The earliest date so far recorded of the discovery of a newly laid egg is October 14th, but there is reason to believe that the breeding season begins at least a month earlier. On January 10th this year (1910) half the nests in the cave ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... library—as she read in a carved inscription over the door—plunged into shade again presently to emerge at a square farmhouse, ancient and weathered, with a great square chimney thrust out of the very middle of the ridge-pole,—a landmark left by one of the earliest of Silliston's settlers. Presiding over it, embracing and protecting it, was a splendid tree. The place was evidently in process of reconstruction and repair, the roof had been newly shingled, new frames, with old-fashioned, tiny panes had been put in the windows; a little garden was ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... that he might start fair. He could not, at so great a distance, advise his mother what to do; but he knew she had kind friends and neighbours, who would not let things go wrong till he came home, which would be at the earliest possible day. In the meantime, he sent some money—not much, but all he had—and he begged his mother to keep her courage up, for the sake of the children with her, and for his sake ...
— Shenac's Work at Home • Margaret Murray Robertson
... were ready to return—anywhere, but especially to Wisconsin, their earliest home.[98] In July the whole tribe, stimulated by whiskey, started; but Governor Ramsey called on Colonel Loomis of Fort Snelling for aid, and a force under Captain Monroe proceeded to the north where ...
— Old Fort Snelling - 1819-1858 • Marcus L. Hansen
... indecent. (4) Even if they had been, surely they would not have been irrelevantly indecent and evidently addressed to the audience, two faults which are not in Shakespeare's way. (5) The lines are doggerel. Doggerel is not uncommon in the earliest plays; there are a few lines even in the Merchant of Venice, a line and a half, perhaps, in As You Like It; but I do not think it occurs later, not even where, in an early play, it would certainly have been found, e.g. in the mouth of the Clown in ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... is said that for the Romans the crux represented the gallows! Thus the earliest representation of the Crucified is a drawing in the Kirchnerian museum, which shows a Christian kneeling before a man with a donkey's head, who is nailed to a cross. In Greek letters one reads: 'Alexamenes adores his God.' They say this drawing comes from the Palace ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... in its earliest, incapable childhood easily managed to dispose of the mammoth and his huge fellow-monsters, still stands helpless before the little mosquito, deadliest of VISIBLE animals on ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... chain of gradual and advantageous changes, or by some sudden and miraculous ictus, placing at once a completed body on the earth, as an abode and instrument for a developed soul,—all these remote and difficult questions lead us on. And yet the search for human origins, or the earliest historic and scientific evidences of man on the earth, is but a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... the old man was saying, "if you would ask Mr. Richard Chester and Mrs. Sarah Smithers to come to my office at their earliest convenience. I will not trespass upon their ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... establishing dates was slowly reached. The invention of eras was indispensable to this end. The earliest definite time for the dating of events was established at Babylon,—the era of Nabonassar, 747 B.C. The Greeks, from about 300 B.C., dated events from the first recorded victory at the Olympic games, 776 B.C. ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... memorandum or basis agreed upon between General Sherman and General Johnston having been submitted to the President, they are disapproved. You will give notice of the disapproval to General Sherman, and direct him to resume hostilities at the earliest moment. ...
— History of the Eighty-sixth Regiment, Illinois Volunteer Infantry, during its term of service • John R. Kinnear
... memory, derived from Palaeolithic Man, who must, therefore, have been the native of a temperate climate, where there were green lepidoptera. Oh, my friends, what a thing is inherited memory! In each of us there slumber all the impressions of all our predecessors, up to the earliest Ascidian. See how the domesticated dog,' cried the professor, forgetting that he was not lecturing in Albemarle Street, 'see how the domesticated dog, by inherited memory, turns round on the hearthrug before he curls up to sleep! He is unconsciously remembering the long grasses ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... of the disease in Philadelphia was watched by the president at Mount Vernon with great solicitude, as the autumn wore away, for it was near the time for the assembling of a new Congress, and public affairs demanded their earliest and most serious attention. September passed away, and much of October had gone, before the fever abated. Meanwhile, he proposed to call the Congress together at Germantown, or some other place near Philadelphia, at a safe distance from the pestilence. He had ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... let me, then, quote you an authority which every educated American will respect. Mr. Justice Kent says, "The progress and impulse of popular opinion, is rapidly destroying every constitutional check, every conservative element, intended by the sages who framed the earliest American Constitutions as safeguards against the abuses of popular suffrage." Let us turn to another equally eminent American authority, Mr. Justice Story. "It might be urged, that it is far from being clear, upon reasoning or experience, that uniformity in the composition ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... I felt a real interest; but the interest called forth by a singularly pretty child, in whose expression the first glance discerns a character it will take long to read, rather than that commanded by the charms of earliest womanhood. ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... shall take the earliest opportunity to signify to Mr. Ross, who is at this time absent from the squadron on a particular service, the distinguished mark of favour his Majesty the King of Sweden has been pleased to confer ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez. Vol II • Sir John Ross
... extremists the whole movement quickly collapsed. The second revolt gave Henry an excuse for recalling his pardon, and for exacting revenge from all who had been implicated in either movement. Darcy deserved little pity; the earliest in his treason, he continued the game to the end; but Aske was an honest man, and his execution, condemned though he was by a jury, was a violent act of injustice.[998] Norfolk was sent to the North ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... throwing all their energies into the cultivation of physical endurance. It was probably at this time that there was laid the foundation of that dislike for the city of Berlin which Bismarck never quite overcame; and from his earliest years he was prejudiced against the exaggerated and affected Teutonism which was the fashion after the great war. A few years later his parents came to live altogether in the town; then the boy passed on to the Gymnasium, boarding in ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... on the hills, and have gone down among the cattle and stood by their great shoulders until I felt the fear run off me like water, and have straightway marched out as brave as any trooper of an empress. And from those earliest days when I rode, with the stirrups crossed on my brother's saddle, after some kind old straying ox, I was always satisfied to go where the horse would go. He could see better than I, and he could hear better, and if he tramped peacefully, the land was ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... contracted by the noblemen whose names are in Debrett's last edition? But we ought, says Mr Sadler, to have counted all the sterile marriages of all the peers "whose titles had become extinct during the period which our counting embraced;" that is to say, since the earliest marriage contracted by any peer living in 1828. Was such a proposition ever heard of before? Surely we were bound to do no such thing, unless at the same time we had counted also the children born from ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... North as well as the South, long before my day, or my father's or grandfather's day; and, born under that law a slave-holder, and the descendant of slave-holders, raised in the heart of the cotton section, surrounded by negroes from my earliest infancy, "I KNOW whereof I do speak"; and it is to tell of the pleasant and happy relations that existed between master and slave that I write this story ...
— Diddie, Dumps, and Tot • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... the various countries through which they passed, pursue their perilous journeys into remote places, until, like the knight in the Arabian tale, they succeeded in snatching a memorial from every shrine they visited. For my own part, I have been conscious from my earliest youth of the existence of this desire to explore distant regions, to trace the varieties exhibited by mankind under the different influences of different climates, customs, and laws, and to investigate with unwearied solicitude the moral and physical distinctions that separate ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... VOLTAIRE, WITH SOMETHING OF ANSWER (First of certain intercalary Prose Pieces).—Wilhelmina has been writing to Voltaire before, and getting consolations since Kolin; but her Letters are lost, till this the earliest ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... since that night, had possessed me. What was ambition henceforth to me? The most selfish amongst us must have some human being to whom to refer—with whom to connect—to associate—to treasure the triumphs and gratifications of self. Where now was such a being to me? My earliest friend, for whom my esteem was the greater for his sorrows, my interest the keener for his mystery, Reginald Glanville, was a murderer! a dastardly, a barbarous felon, whom the chance of an instant might convict!—and ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
