"Eccentric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... eccentric genius, Charles Townshend, whom no system could contain, is whirled out of existence, our more artificial meteor, Lord Chatham, seems to be wheeling back to the sphere of business—at least his health is declared to be re-established; but he has lost his adorers, the mob, and ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... friends. Henrietta was delighted; for she had at one time begun to be seriously concerned for her father's health. But she was not a little amazed when she saw him lay aside his mourning, and exchange his simple costumes, suitable to his age, for the eccentric fashions of the day, wearing brilliant waistcoats and ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... first. Doctors were consulted: they talked of a shock to the nervous system; of great hope from time, and their patient's strength of mind; and of the necessity of acceding to her wishes in all things. Then, the advice of the aunt was sought. She was a woman of an eccentric, masculine character, who had herself experienced a love-disappointment in early life, and had never married. She gave her opinion unreservedly and abruptly, as she always gave it. "Do as Jane tells you!" said the old lady, severely; "that poor child has ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... exceptionally good; the wrist and forearm of the Venice figure are admirable. The Siena Baptist is nearly life-sized, and was made in 1457. He is the least introspective of the three, a mature strong man, and the oldest of the many Baptists Donatello made. The Berlin figure is the flushed eccentric, holding up the cup he used in baptizing. The figure is half the size of life, and was doubtless one of the numerous statuettes which crowned fonts. It has been suggested that this bronze, which is defective in several places, was commissioned ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... that rich widow Dunmore, whom we met at the Springs? Well, she's coming to remain in —— while Jennie is with us. It seems she has carried out one of her eccentric whims and taken some foundling to be her own child, and we are upholding her by admitting the girl to our house on ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... commented with a grin. Tom returned the grin. There wasn't any malice in it, nor any of the basic enmity and destructiveness of the stupid toward the bright, just a recognition that an E was an E. They had a vast respect for an E, but you couldn't get around it that some of them were—well, maybe eccentric ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... necessity of having this outlet upon the river in days when the life of a parish was a real one and the village was a true and self-sufficing unit. Next to them Fyfield does the same thing. Lower down, near Wallingford, the parish of Brightwell has added on a similar eccentric edge to the north and east so that it may share in the bank; but perhaps the best example of all in this connection is the curious extension below Reading. Here land which is of no use for human habitation—water meadows continually liable to floods—runs out from the ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... as much as know who her husband was? She was both married and divorced abroad. And we don't know anything more about her life since then; it is scarcely likely it has been blameless. Since she came here she has never once been to church. She has led a most eccentric life, and lately has been allowing a man of very evil reputation ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... lightsome efforts, such as the ribbon-backed chair, construction is always the first consideration. It is here perhaps that he differs most materially from his great successor Sheraton, whose ideas of construction were eccentric in the extreme. It is indeed in the chair that Chippendale is seen at his best and most characteristic. From his hand, or his pencil, we have a great variety of chairs, which, although differing extensively ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... so long alone she had grown eccentric in her ways, and very odd and decided in her views; but she kept a warm corner in her heart for her favourite brother and his children, who heartily returned their aunt's affection, though they stood a good deal in ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 355, October 16, 1886 • Various
... (Lat. v. fu'gere, to flee); centrip'etal (Lat. v. pet'ere, to seek); concen'trate; concentra'tion; concen'tric; eccen'tric; eccentric'ity. ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... of Triassic Age, and they contain a most remarkable assemblage of strange and eccentric forms, especially Anomodont reptiles resembling those found in the Karroo formation of ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... that made them tremble. Sometimes, too, at Savigny, in the evening, when the park, the avenues, the blue slates of the chateau, the red brick of the stables, the ponds and brooks shone resplendent, bathed in the golden glory of a lovely sunset, this eccentric parvenu would say aloud before his children, after ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... door a figure which drew a stare of surprise from Markeld, accustomed as he was to eccentric habiliment. It was arrayed in a long, mouse-gray frock coat and shiny black trousers; a hand gloved in lavender kid carried a top hat, while the other caressed, from time to time, the carefully-waxed mustachios and imperial adorning a countenance which was a singular mixture of craft ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... supplied in other departments of our literature, and especially he desired a really great History of England; but he was disposed to regard the roll of English poetry as made up, and as leaving place for little more except what was likely to be eccentric or imitational. ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... Racine; with all his love of music he could see nothing in Beethoven; he adored Italy, and, so soon as he was given his Italian consulate, he was usually to be found in Paris. As his life advanced he grew more and more wayward, capricious, and eccentric. He indulged in queer mystifications, covering his papers with false names and anagrams—for the police, he said, were on his track, and he must be careful. His love-affairs became less and less fortunate; but he was still sometimes successful, and when he was he registered ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... company consisted mostly of literary men—Cumberland, Turner, D'Israeli, Basevi, Prince Hoare, and Cervetto, the truly celebrated violoncello player. Turner was the most able and agreeable of the whole by far; Cumberland, the most talkative and eccentric perhaps, has a good sprinkling of learning and humour in his conversation and anecdote, from having lived so long amongst the eminent men of his day, such as Johnson, Foote, Garrick, and such like. But his conversation is sadly disgusting, from his tone of irony and detraction ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... of the voice, phrases and expressions, which seem to belong to particular families, and by which one may sometimes discover the relationship. But the modification of leading characteristics in the individual is not so easily detected. Miss Dabstreak is eccentric, but the wild ideas which continue to flourish in the aesthetic cells of Chrysophrasia's brain are softened and made more gentle and delicate in Hermione, so that even if they were inconsequent they would not seem offensive; ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... no good to learn my reason for making this request. Listen to this—it's important to you: There's an uncle of yours in America, your nearest relative, I believe. Of course you have heard your father speak of him. A most eccentric fellow! but a man of fine ability. He was a graduate of Oxford and a physician of great skill and learning. Thirty-five years ago he went to Canada and finally settled in a large town on one of the great lakes not far from the border. It was Detroit, I believe. Your father told me, shortly ...
— The Master of Silence • Irving Bacheller
... huge head and a remarkable shock of coal-black hair. Having hastily risen from bed, he had retained his pyjamas, but a long frock-coat hung nearly to his slippers, and in one hand he carried a pair of gloves, and in the other a huge eccentric silk hat of the true chimney-pot type. These were details, and one might have passed them over. But the man's face was sadly against him. He had the slyest eyes I have ever seen; that peculiar shifty ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... it has rendered the assumption of gaiters unhappily out of the question! But, possibly, my wish to have these legs of mine disguised by your pigments, strikes you as bizarre, if not positively eccentric? You will better understand my reasons after you have heard a confession which, though necessary, is, believe me, painful to make." And the good old man, after a short internal struggle, began the following narrative, which we reserve for a ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., February 7, 1891 • Various
... accommodations, neither could be isolated to fight her "black butterflies" alone. No inmate, though she were cousin to Hercules, could be given a room to herself; and the effect of this dual system on these two, possibly the most eccentric of the number, had proved disastrous in the extreme. Each had, in her own favorite fashion, "kicked over the traces," as the matron's son said in town-meeting (much to the joy of the village fathers), and to such purpose that, to continue the light-minded simile, very little ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... really engaged to him could be accounted for by a variety of reasons. But that she should write him a cool and semi-humorous letter, showing no more agitation than one of Bret Harte's heroes who is about to be hanged—that certainly capped the climax of eccentric behavior. And that, after her passionate protests! But hold on! What did she say yesterday that was so passionate? Curiously enough, he could not remember a word of what she had said. It began slowly to dawn upon him that, during the memorable scene, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... more than,—"Walk on;" and seizing the stole from the Taoist's shoulder, he flung it over his own. He did not, however, return home, but leisurely walked away, in company with the eccentric priest. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... and most active imagination. But that he wanted the sense of poetic fitness and melody, he might almost be supposed, with his reach and play of thought, to have been capable, as is maintained in some eccentric modern theories, of writing Shakespeare's plays. No man ever had a more imaginative power of illustration drawn from the most remote and most unlikely analogies; analogies often of the quaintest and most unexpected kind, but often also not only felicitous in application ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... and governing as a routine, because in short we have been static in our theories, politics has such an unreal relation to actual conditions. Feckless—that is what our politics is. It is literally eccentric: it has been centered mechanically instead of vitally. We have, it seems, been seduced by a fictitious analogy: we have hoped for machine regularity when we needed human initiative and leadership, when life was crying that its inventive ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... with me on the occasion bears it as strongly on his recollection. My servant Harris, who had shared my wanderings, and had continued in my service for eighteen years, led the advance with his companion Hopkinson; nearly abreast of them the eccentric Frazer stalked along, wholly lost in thought. The two former had laid aside their military habits, and had substituted the broad-brimmed hat, and the bushman's dress in their place, but it was impossible to guess how Frazer intended to protect himself from the heat or damp, so little ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... pleased, he continued these devotions every day, until at last his constant and singular absence from the regular services attracted the curiosity of a monk, who kept watch on him and reported his eccentric exercise to ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... the man who is supposed to be "the most eccentric, the most artificial, the most fastidious, the most capricious of mortals? -his mind a bundle of inconsistent whims and affectations-his features covered with mask within mask, which, when the outer disguise of obvious affectation was removed, you were still as ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... was a question into which his mother did not choose to enter. Having first gone into society upon this principle, however, and having been at once taken up and made much of by an extremely fashionable young woman afflicted with an elderly and eccentric husband, it was not likely that Brook would return to the threshold of the schoolroom for women's society. He went on as he had begun in his first "salad" days, and at five-and-twenty he had the reputation of having done more damage than any of his young contemporaries, while he had never ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... was out of Chancery at last. For forty years, ever since the death of the old squire, no one had rightfully called the Hall his own. The heir had lived abroad, and had lived in such an exceedingly eccentric manner as to give ground for a suit de lunatico inquirendo, brought by another heir. With the consistency of judicial purpose which characterises such proceedings the courts appeared to have decided that though the natural possessor, ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... American army. Perhaps he had had enough of it. In any event, it had had enough of him; and seven years afterwards, when he died of a fever, his ambition to stand in Washington's shoes died with him. While he lived on his Virginia farm, he was as impetuous and eccentric as when he had been in the army, and he must have been a very unpleasant neighbor. In fact, the people there thought he was crazy. This opinion was not changed when his will was read, for in that document ...
— Stories of New Jersey • Frank Richard Stockton
... Parsons, making the country of Dante fairly his own; Thackeray, with his brilliant interpretation of the comedie humaine; Emerson, who, oblivious of all the glories of art or the joys of nature, absorbed himself in writing transcendental letters to his eccentric, but high-souled aunt, Mary Moody Emerson; Ruskin, translating Italian art to Italy herself; Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe and his poet wife, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, in the first flush of their bridal happiness, when Mrs. Howe's impassioned love for the Seven-hilled City inspired ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... eccentric. I have to see a lot of buggy people. They don't take me in any more. But I'm keeping you and I'm in a hurry myself. ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... There is no reason whatever to suspect foul play, or to imagine that death could be from any but natural causes. Sir Charles was a widower, and a man who may be said to have been in some ways of an eccentric habit of mind. In spite of his considerable wealth he was simple in his personal tastes, and his indoor servants at Baskerville Hall consisted of a married couple named Barrymore, the husband acting as butler and the wife as housekeeper. Their evidence, corroborated ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... immense importance! which they will best fulfil by moving in the sphere assigned them by Providence: not comet-like, wandering in irregular orbits, dazzling indeed by their brilliancy, but terrifying by their eccentric movements and doubtful utility. That the sphere in which they are required to move is no mean one, and that its apparent contraction arises only from a defect of intellectual vision, it is the object of the ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... again on the grand Australian bush—the nurse and tutor of eccentric minds, the home of ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... of his having come to India two boats earlier than the Inspector, drew Rs. 500 a month more than he did, this being the Senior Inspector's Allowance. That he was reported on as lazy, eccentric, and irregular, made no difference to the fact that he was a fortnight senior to, and therefore worth Rs. 500 a month more than, the next man. The recipient regarded the extra trifle (L400 a year) ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... the next half-hour and I'll confess to a keen curiosity about Cyril Jernyngham. He was an amusing and eccentric scapegrace when I last saw him, though that is ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... noteworthy features of the Franklin movement was the constitution prepared by a committee, headed by the Reverend Samuel Houston of Washington County, and presented at the meeting of the Franklin legislature, Greeneville, November 14, 1785. This eccentric constitution was based in considerable part upon the North Carolina model; but it was "rejected in the lump" and the constitution of North Carolina, almost unchanged, was adopted. Under this Houston constitution, ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... seekers seeking, seeking among rare and curious and perplexing objects, sometimes finding some odd utilisable thing, sometimes deceiving themselves with fancied discovery, sometimes pretending to find. The world of every day laughed at these eccentric beings, or found them annoying and ill-treated them, or was seized with fear and made saints and sorcerers and warlocks of them, or with covetousness and entertained them hopefully; but for the greater part ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... "perhaps you have yourself to thank for her having done so; did you never treat her with coldness, and repay her marks of affectionate interest with strange fits of eccentric humour?" ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... a rate that, ere the sun rose up to cheer us, over forty miles of Winnipeg's icy expanse lay between us and the snowy bed where we had sought shelter and slept during the raging storm. After stopping at Dog's Head, where were a few Indians, under the eccentric chief, Thickfoot, onward we travelled, crossing the lake to what is called Bull's Head, where we camped for the night. The face of the cliff is here so steep that we could not get our heavy loads up into the forest above, so we were obliged to make our fire and bed in the ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... accept for their time less than they are worth, they make a donation to the corporation. Neither filching something for nothing out of the returns of the corporation, nor giving it a gratuity, is to be here assumed as existent, since we are not dealing with the phenomena of quasi-plunder or eccentric benevolence. The character of wages of management, as the reward for a high grade of labor, is recognized in business life, and the salary of the manager, whether he is a stockholder or not, is usually expressed in a definite sum of money and is gauged, crudely or accurately, according to his ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... apple. The man has run entirely to that feature; his moods, his emotions, his thoughts, his passions, his appetites, his beliefs, his doubts, his hopes, his fears, his resolves, his despairs, his defeats, his exaltations — all, all make themselves known subtly in the eccentric motions of ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... indebted to you for the introduction to your friend G—-. He is one of us; or rather, he moves in an eccentric sphere of his own, which crosses, I believe, almost all the orbits of all the classed and classifiable systems of London. I found him exactly what you described; and we were on the frankest footing of old friends in the course of the first quarter of an hour. He ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... A few recognised his clear good sense; the majority considered that if he said little it was because he had nothing worth saying. Because he went his own way and lived by his own rules he was considered eccentric; because he was sometimes absent-minded, and apt to become absorbed in his own thoughts, he was set down as unpractical; his literal accuracy of statement was construed as the mark of a narrow intellect, and his exceeding modesty served to keep him ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... dissipation; the singular mingling in her nature of the vices of both sexes; the unbridled licentiousness of the courtesan coupled with the devotion of a man for horses, wine, and fencing; in short, her eccentric character, as it would now be called, kept a passion alive which would else have quickly died away in his blase heart. Nothing would induce him to follow Jeannin's advice to leave Paris for at least a few weeks, although he shared Jeannin's ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - LA CONSTANTIN—1660 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... who was sitting by the window with Marya Dmitrievna, was that same aunt, her father's sister, with whom she had spent several years, in days gone by, at Pokrovskoe. Her name was Marfa Timofeevna Pestoff. She bore the reputation of being eccentric, had an independent character, told the entire truth to every one, straight in the face, and, with the most scanty resources, bore herself as though she possessed thousands. She had not been able to endure ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... give of his father's peculiarities. Though he never came to Shelby—the rupture between the two, if rupture it were, seeming to be complete—there were many who had visited him in his own place of business and put such questions concerning the judge and his eccentric manner of living as must have provoked response had the young man had any response to give. But he appeared to have none. Either he was as ignorant as themselves of the causes which had led to his father's habit ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... with plenty of character and (as we should say) no morals, still fascinates and amuses us as she fascinated and amused her contemporaries. They were great sentimental comedians, these Peters, Elizabeths, and Catherines who played their Tsarships as eccentric character parts, and produced scene after scene of furious harlequinade with the monarch as clown, and of tragic relief in the torture chamber with the monarch as pantomime demon committing real atrocities, not forgetting the ...
— Great Catherine • George Bernard Shaw
... he joined another eccentric character named Tom Lolar, an Indian of the Seneca tribe, whose lands in the long ago of Indian history bordered the blue waters of Lake Seneca in central New York. This peculiar pair proceeded to electrify certain ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... to slavery on principle, he cried "Hands off!" to any interference by the general government with the domestic institutions of the States. His speeches read better than most of his contemporaries'. They are interesting in their exhibit of a bitter and eccentric individuality, witty, incisive, and expressed in a pungent and familiar style which contrasts refreshingly with the diplomatic language and glittering generalities of most congressional oratory, whose verbiage seems to keep its ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... various quarters, a definite view of the eager youth who had been introduced to him in that ultra-legitimist salon. What Mills had learned represented him as a young gentleman who had arrived furnished with proper credentials and who apparently was doing his best to waste his life in an eccentric fashion, with a bohemian set (one poet, at least, emerged out of it later) on one side, and on the other making friends with the people of the Old Town, pilots, coasters, sailors, workers of all sorts. He pretended rather absurdly to be a seaman ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... record of her own unworthiness. But now, if she was to draw his soul to hers, she must move forward, she must surely commit some sacrifice, perform some deed. What deed could she perform? What sacrifice could she make that would win upon him, that would alter his relation towards her from one of eccentric friendship to one of affection that might even ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... of that I am sure," Honor said meditatively. "Some one has been in here since, and that 'some one' sympathises with me, that 'some one,' I feel, is my long-sought ideal. Has destiny changed its frown into a smile at last for this lone, eccentric girl, I wonder?" She dropped her hands negligently, still clasping the mysterious volume, and looked wistfully into the space before her. She was undergoing the change that comes over each of us as soon as we yield ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... lucid interval he had was that between his waistcoat and his breeches.' When he speaks he unbuttons his braces, and in his vehement action his breeches fall down and his waistcoat runs up, so that there is a great interregnum. He is half mad, eccentric, ingenious, with great and varied information and a coarse, vulgar mind, delighting in ribaldry and abuse, besides being an enthusiast. The first time he distinguished himself was in Watson's trial, when he and Copley were his counsel, and both made very able speeches. He was then a trading lawyer ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... title, intended to deceive even the elect, Messrs. FIELD & TUER have secured the copyright of the title London City, by the ingenious device of publishing, for one farthing each, five hundred copies of a miniature pamphlet bearing this title, and containing the explanation. The value of these eccentric farthing pamphlets may one day be thousands of pounds. Mem.—Twopence would be well invested in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 9, 1890. • Various
... rural communities tend to approach those of urban communities. Social conditions in the West tend to approach those in the East. Boston is not eccentric. It ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... those strange psychological problems which he afterwards treated with more fulness of power. The minister who, for an unexplained reason, puts on a black veil one morning in his youth, and wears it until he is laid with it in his grave—a kind of symbolical prophecy of Dimmesdale; the eccentric Wakefield (whose original, if I remember rightly, is to be found in 'King's Anecdotes'), who leaves his house one morning for no particular reason, and though living in the next street, does not reveal his existence ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... the commercial, social, and religious welfare of the community, they provided no adequate school system. Lanier was schooled "in small private one-roomed establishments, taught by a Mrs. Anderson, a Mr. Hancock, or by that dear old eccentric dominie, 'Jake' Danforth. One of these schools stood in a grove of oak and hickory-nut trees and was called the 'Cademy. Sidney was bright in studies, but while parsing, reading, writing, and figuring, he was also chucking ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... dissension among the people and confused their minds into rendering abnormal criticisms, making them indulge in eccentric vagaries and speculations on the artistic and intrinsic value of the monument. Some persons guessed at the value of the metal contained in the statue, while others reckoned the cost of the horse or that ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... marriage; life at Nether Stowey; editing 'The Watchman'; lecturing on Shakespeare; contributing to 'The Morning Chronicle'; preaching in Unitarian pulpits; publishing his 'Juvenile Poems', etc. etc.; and throughout eccentric, impetuous, original—with contagious enthusiasm and overflowing genius—but erratic, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... Lady Dowager Onslow, of whom the Princess purchased the whole property, was built by Mr. Bateman, uncle to the eccentric Lord Bateman. This gentleman made it a point in his travels to notice everything that pleased him in the monasteries abroad; and, on his return to England, he built this house; the bedchamber being contrived, like the cells of monks, with a refectory, ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 475 - Vol. XVII, No. 475. Saturday, February 5, 1831 • Various
... concluded that AEsop himself must have been a little Love beside his eminence. I understood now why he was so profuse in his generosity and decorations, for otherwise he might well have been taken for a stableboy. If the conclave took the eccentric whim of making him pope, Christ would never have an ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... ha,—he is pasitively a very eccentric bady, and there is a small tincture of a barbarous sart of wit in what he says; but it wants an immensity of correction, an infinitude of polishing; he is a mere son of nature, everything he says ...
— The Politician Out-Witted • Samuel Low
... when the signature was being put to the treaty of the triple alliance, the sovereign of most distinction in Europe, owing to the eccentric renown belonging to his personal merit, the czar Peter the Great, had just made flattering advances to France. He had some time before wished to take a trip to Paris, but Louis XIV. was old, melancholy, and vanquished, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Abt Voegler (1749-1814) came forward with his 'Simplification System,' one feature of which consisted in the abolition of excessive Mixture work. The worthy Abbe, who was a capable theorist and a gifted player, and possessed of an eccentric and, therefore, attractive personality, secured many followers, who preached a crusade against Mixture work. The success of the movement can well be measured by the amount of apologetic literature it called forth, and by the fact that ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... silence. The health of all classes of society who could rely upon good doctors was proposed and heartily drunk—princes, prelates, legislators, warriors, judges—but the catalogue was cut short before any eccentric person could propose the health of the one-roomed poor, of whom the city was excessively prolific. And then the Mayor addressed himself to the great business of the town hall. George listened with throat dry; by way of precaution he had drunk nothing during the ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... peculiar type of man. He goes about continually, and is thrown in with everybody. He is eccentric and quaint, but good-hearted. I wouldn't do the things he does for anything. He lowers himself sometimes—it's a great pity. He has very curious ideas about things and people; he receives a great deal about people from themselves (?), and ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... very particular curiosity about his movements, the man hurried back to his bed. Merton's eccentric conduct of late had become so generally remarked and discussed among the servants, that Sir Wynston's man was by no means surprised at the oddity of the visit he had just had; nor, after the first few moments ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... shoulders in a heavy, dirty-white coat, with huge cape and high collar, which hid the back of his head, such as was then in use by country carriers; but the garment was much too short for him, and his bare arms came out a foot beyond the end of the sleeves. The rest of his costume was even more eccentric, being nothing more or less than a coarse flannel petticoat, and his bare feet rested on the mat in ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... Hotel down the street. When they had played another tune they "struck" and in a body followed me to the hotel; and over glasses of "guid auld Scotch" we told tales of old Keighley until it really seemed that old times had come again. In chatting over some of the eccentric characters, we had many a laugh about Three Laps and Job Senior. But the time was flitting by fast, and my musical guests, it appeared, had not left word at the menagerie where they were going. Thus there was some justification for the line ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... planes, and perpetual-motion machines. The last-named contrivances, however, were only unsuccessful attempts to solve a problem which had effectually baffled hundreds of preceding inventors. His odd and eccentric contrivances often excited great wonder amongst the Killingworth villagers. He won the women's admiration by connecting their cradles with the smoke-jack, and making them self-acting. Then he astonished the pitmen by attaching an alarum to the clock of the watchman whose ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... so successfully enacted the part of a petitioner, I determined to try my luck once more, and accordingly hunted up the Honourable Mortimer, who had retired to his cabin. One of the hobbies of our somewhat eccentric "third" was the collection of choice weapons, several valuable specimens of which adorned his state-room. If he ever saw anything specially curious or choice in the shape of sword or pistol, he never rested until he had made it his own; ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... people at the time, and when the electric carriage began to cut its eccentric capers there was a rush for places of safety, while the air was filled with excited ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... I cannot at the present moment recall what the General's Christian name was. But I have no doubt he had one. He was eccentric, I admit. But only in later years. And that was the result of the Indian climate, and marriage, and indigestion, and other things of ...
— The Importance of Being Earnest - A Trivial Comedy for Serious People • Oscar Wilde
... know whether Josephine is prouder of Fred or of David. Certainly her mind is comparatively at rest regarding them both, notwithstanding my second troy is not quite like other people. I do not mean that he is boorish or eccentric, merely that he is bookish and self-absorbed. He takes no interest in his personal appearance, and he avoids every young woman except his sisters. Fred is dandified, keenly fond of the social interests of the day and of the other sex. I foresee ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... had tried to make up the loss to Dulcie by getting his only and elderly sister Hannah—"Aunt Hannah" as she was inevitably called by all who stayed at Holt Manor, and in fact by everybody who had seen her more than twice—to come and live with him. And there at Holt she had, in her eccentric way, ever since superintended domestic arrangements and mothered his beautiful little girl and her only brother, by this time an obstreperous boy of fourteen, at Eton and on his ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... persiflage as their own fee-simple, was really so extravagant that when I think of it now the whole story seems wildly incredible. Wilson and I were singled out to bear the whole burden of sin, though there were abundance of other criminals in the concern; and by and by, Wilson passing for being a very eccentric fellow, and I for a cool one, even he was allowed to get off comparatively scot-free, while I, by far the youngest and least experienced of the set, and who alone had no personal grudges against any of Blackwood's victims, remained under such ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... as Bonbright's and Ruth's is possible only to the morbid, the eccentric, or the unhealthy. Neither of them was morbid, neither eccentric, both abundantly well. Ruth saw the failure of it days before Bonbright had even a hint. After Dulac burst in upon her she perceived the game must be brought to an end; that their ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... he fell out of a tree and broke his neck. But the puzzle was, what could have induced him to get up there. It was a mysterious business, I must say. Here was this man—not an athletic fellow, was he? and with no eccentric twist about him that was ever noticed—walking home along a country road late in the evening—no tramps about—well known and liked in the place—and he suddenly begins to run like mad, loses his hat and stick, and finally shins up a tree—quite ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James
... old bachelor, very rich, and some people said very eccentric, though, in truth, his eccentricity was only indiscriminate generosity. He was very fond of children, boys especially; he often spoke of adopting some promising lad to inherit a portion of his great ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... indeed, there was no temptation to spend any longer time over it, as even the puddings and fiddles could scarcely keep the articles on the table. He had rung for his steward to clear away, to avoid that operation being performed by the eccentric movements of the billows, and was going towards the door of the cabin, when the ship received a tremendous blow, which made her quiver from stem to stern. At the same time loud cries reached his ears; he sprang on deck, when, glancing towards the bridge, he saw his second lieutenant alone ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... on the same evening, at twenty past eleven, he made another very eccentric and unexpected visit. The rain still persisted. Drenched to the skin, he walked into the little flat where the parents of his betrothed lived, in Third Street in Vassilyevsky Island. He knocked some time before ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... and critical gossip, but it helps little. But the uncivil, unavailable man, who is a problem and a threat to society, whom it cannot let pass in silence but must either worship or hate,—and to whom all parties feel related, both the leaders of opinion and the obscure and eccentric,—he helps; he puts America and Europe in the wrong, and destroys the skepticism which says, 'man is a doll, let us eat and drink, 'tis the best we can do,' by illuminating the untried and unknown. Acquiescence in the establishment and ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... had discovered a few particulars about her friend's dead wife. Millicent Fauncey had been the only child of a rather eccentric Suffolk squire, a man of great taste, known in the art world of London as a collector of fine Jacobean furniture, long before Jacobean furniture had become the rage. After her father's death his daughter, having let Wyndfell Hall, had wandered about ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... mill on the hill. Millers' men there are in plenty, but the miller is lacking. This is because steam mills belong to companies. Thus, with the passing of the windmill we lose also the miller, that notable figure in English life and tradition; always jolly, if the old songs are true; often eccentric, as the story of John Oliver has shown; and usually a character, as becomes one who lives by the four winds, or by water—for the miller of tradition was often found in a water-mill too. The water-miller's empire has been threatened less than that of ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... academic proprieties, that when he entered Trinity College, Oxford, in October 1840, a criticism of his military moustache by a fellow-undergraduate was resented by a challenge to a duel, and Burton in various ways distinguished himself by such eccentric behaviour that rustication inevitably ensued. Nor was he much more in his element as a subaltern in the 18th Regiment of Bombay Native Infantry, which he joined at Baroda in October 1842. Discipline of any sort he abhorred, and the one recommendation of the East ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... an uneducated, eccentric Tennessean, who was a celebrated hunter, Indian fighter, story teller, wit, and member of Congress three terms (where he opposed President Jackson, and refused to obey any party commanding him "to-go-wo-haw-gee," just at his pleasure) here lost his life. On the 27th of the ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... Probably that is the reason why the spectacle of the Twelve Temptations is so dear to the aged eyes of the gray-haired old gentlemen who occupy the front seats at the Grand Opera House. It is certainly a brilliant spectacle, though, like the ideal scene to which Mrs. NICKLEBY's eccentric and vegetarian lover once referred, it consists principally of "gas and gaiters." Not that it is exclusively an Old Folks' entertainment; for, as the critics say of portentously dull juvenile books, "it will be found as interesting to the young as to the old." ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 6, May 7, 1870 • Various
... threshold, and he always called her "Mrs. Ruan." The two little girls he adored, and they knew he was their uncle, though with the unquestioning faith of childhood they accepted that he lived alone in a little cottage like a working man because he was eccentric and mustn't be worried to live as father did. Ishmael was very fond of this brother—as fond as John-James' rigid taciturnity would let him be. John-James' chief peculiarity was displayed always during the week's holiday he took every year; on each day of this ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... to be only too glad to comply with this request, hoping earnestly that neither the property nor its owner should ever again be seen by her. She was in high spirits, believing that she was a much better manager of the plantation than her eccentric husband had ever been, and she had already engaged a man to take the place of Ben Greenway, who had been a sore trouble to her these many years. She was buoyed up and cheered by the belief that the changes she was making would be permanent, and that she would live ...
— Kate Bonnet - The Romance of a Pirate's Daughter • Frank R. Stockton
... a brief instant, her annoyance giving battle to her father's well-known desire. Curiosity in the end helped her decision. She must see the object of a charity so eccentric. ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... resumed her feeding. Then she leaped suddenly into the air and fell quivering on the snow, with an arrow up to the feathers in her side. The hunter did not rise. The animals near to the cow looked at her a moment, as if in surprise at her eccentric behaviour, and then went on feeding. Again the hunter bent his bow, and another animal lay dying on the plain. The guardian bull observed this, lifted his shaggy head, and moved that subtle index of temper, his tail. An ill-directed arrow immediately quivered in his flank. With a roar of rage ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... both have alike proclaimed the universality of a definite and predicable order and succession of events, the workers in biology have not only accepted all these, but have added more startling theses of their own. For, as the astronomers discover in the earth no centre of the universe, but an eccentric [48] speck, so the naturalists find man to be no centre of the living world, but one amidst endless modifications of life; and as the astronomers observe the mark of practically endless time set ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... and perhaps of a closest human brother, and must wear smiles before men and go on with life's work as if all were gladness within the heart. If we knew the inner life of many of the people we meet, we would be very gentle with them and would excuse the things in them that seem strange or eccentric to us. They are carrying burdens of secret grief. We do not begin to know ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller
... claim for my father any peculiar quality in this respect, for I have often observed that many of those who (like giddy-headed horsemen that raise a great dust, and scamper as if the highway were too narrow for their eccentric courses, before they are fairly seated in the saddle, but who afterward drive as directly at their goals as the arrow parting from the bow), most indulge their sympathies at the commencement of their careers, are the most apt toward the close to get a proper command of their ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... had "struck it rich," and he was now a very wealthy man; but he was broken in health, and he often feared for his reason. As Charles Merriwell had been eccentric and unfathomable all his life while poor, thus he remained now that he was rich. Of late he had been seized by a conviction that he could not live long, and it was his desire to make a will that would give almost his entire wealth to his son. But ...
— Frank Merriwell's Races • Burt L. Standish
... who provided the erratic equation. Her woman's mind was not only the directing intelligence, it was as eccentric as quicksilver, infinitely supple and corrupt, Oriental in its trickishness and impenetrability. Already it had conceived some project involving him which he could by no means divine or even guess at without ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... when besieged by Time, and Wyoming no longer regarded her as a phenomenon. She was just plain Martha Bumps, to whom many a rural community owed much. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that her singular customs of living were considered most eccentric by strangers who often laughed long and uproariously at the portable house. Three amused Vigilantes found in her the best theme material imaginable, and on the day when Mr. Crusoe reported having passed her house and her on the road from Elk Creek, they hastened ...
— Virginia of Elk Creek Valley • Mary Ellen Chase
... the direction of the moves of different chess pieces—king, queen, rook and bishop. Nothing came of that, whatever I did; the thing was as unreadable as ever. But there remained one chess-move to try—the eccentric move of the knight; the move of one square forward, backward or sideways, and then one square diagonally, or, as it has sometimes been more concisely expressed, the move to the next square but one of a different colour from that ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... neighbourhood were for a while his great patrons. At length, finding his audience tired of common sense, he tried, like other charlatans since his day, the effect of nonsense. His manner was theatrical, his style eccentric, and his topics varied between extravagance and buffoonery. The history of such performances is invariably the same—novelty is essential, and novelty must be attained at all risks. He now professed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... dispute, the Ptolemaic theory. According to that theory, as we have seen, the earth was supposed to lie immovable at the centre of the universe; the various heavenly bodies, including the sun, revolving about it in eccentric circles. We have seen that several of the ancient Greeks, notably Aristarchus, disputed this conception, declaring for the central position of the sun in the universe, and the motion of the earth and other planets about that body. But this revolutionary theory seemed so ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... fast friends. I had discovered the way of making jokes, and she had become intelligible. I found her a very nice, though flighty, little woman; and I believe she thought me gifted with the faculty of uttering eccentric epigrams in a grotesque tongue. Some of my remarks were flung about the table, and had the same success as uncouth Lombard carvings have with connoisseurs in naivetes of art. By that time we had come to be compare and comare to each other—the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... once while presiding over a party convention at Sonora for the nomination of candidates for legislative and county offices. Among the delegates was the eccentric John Vallew, whose mind was a singular compound of shrewdness and flightiness, and was stored with the most out-of-the-way scraps of learning, philosophy, and poetry. Some one proposed Vallew's name as a candidate for the Legislature. He rose to his feet with a clouded face, and in ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... its compensations in the political experience he extracted from it. It brought before him the main interests of European diplomacy: won him access to the principal intrigues and intriguers of a Court in transitionship, by the death of Frederick, from eccentric greatness to orderly mediocrity; habituated him to ministerial correspondence and reports, which, if disgustingly mean, were, at all events, systematic and prescient, and secured him—I could wish to say honestly—those ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... poems through in the order of their publication, we feel the power of the poppy more and more. At last the hand seems to lose its power and the will its control, though in flashes of sheer flame the imagination shows wild and beautiful as ever. His gorgeousness is beyond that of the Orient. The eccentric and arresting words that constantly amaze the ear, bring with them a sense of things occult yet dazzling, as if we were assisting at some mystic rite, in a ritual which demanded ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... 'Beauclerk possessed an exquisite taste, various accomplishments, and the most perfect good breeding. He was eccentric, often querulous, entertaining a contempt for the generality of the world, which the politeness of his manners could not always conceal; but to those whom he liked most generous and friendly. Devoted at one time to pleasure, at another to literature, sometimes absorbed in play, sometimes ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... existing between the Russians and the Austrians; and at the same time, symptoms of a misunderstanding between the Courts of London and St. Petersburg began to be perceptible. The First Consul, having in the meantime discovered the chivalrous and somewhat eccentric character of Paul I., thought the moment a propitious one to attempt breaking the bonds which united Russia and England. He was not the man to allow so fine an opportunity to pass, and he took advantage of it with his usual sagacity. The English ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... expect me home at Greenbushes to-night; but, after all, they are too much accustomed to my eccentric comings and goings to be the least uneasy at my absence; so I think I will please myself and stay, thank you, Uncle ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... one point of view the confutation of a celebrated but eccentric definition of poetry as a "criticism of life." If this were true it would be a greater work than "Paradise Lost," which must be violently strained to admit a definition not wholly inapplicable to the minor poem. If, again, Wordsworth and Coleridge are ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... always trusted, quite, You might not happen on it, though you might; Encores were usually objected to By chance. The next best thing that we could do Was in his carryall, to start together, And trust that somehow favoring wind and weather, With the eccentric progress of his horse, Would so far drift us from our settled course That we at least could lose ourselves, if not Find the mysterious object that we sought. So one blithe morning of the ripe July We fared, ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... eyes. It was no good trying to explain, no good trying to tell her the dough didn't mean a damn thing. She'd been a spacer's wife, and that was bad enough, but now she was a spacer's widow. And Oley? Oley's tomb revolved around the sun in an eccentric orbit that spun-in close to Mercury, then reached out into the asteroid belt, once every 725 days. When it came within rocket radius of Earth, it whizzed past at close ...
— Death of a Spaceman • Walter M. Miller
... blessing, to prove that there is a cherishing warmth in the glory of light that surrounds the throne of Exhaustless Benevolence, and that the Deity cannot be worthily called upon by young hearts stricken by degrading fears, and fainting under a Moloch-inspired dread. Notwithstanding my eccentric life, I have ever been the ardent, the unpretending, though the unworthy adorer of the Great Being, whose highest attribute is the "Good." I have ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... legendary element in the offer of a man who only a day before had appeared so shrewd and cautious. She drank in every word of the florist's detailed statement, and merely believed that in this city, among its inhabitants, there was an eccentric fellow who was willing to pay such a princely price for her flowers simply because he liked flowers and was pleased with the way she put them up. Though she had not been spoiled by fortune, the transformation that had suddenly taken place in her circumstances awakened in her not the ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... always done dismounted cavalry drill. We now started hammer and tongs at infantry drill, instructed by an officer and two N.C.O.'s from a neighbouring garrison battalion. We were all looking forward to becoming pukka infantry, as we had long realised that in our eccentric form as dismounted yeomanry we should only ...
— The Fife and Forfar Yeomanry - and 14th (F. & F. Yeo.) Battn. R.H. 1914-1919 • D. D. Ogilvie
... axis an angle of 89 deg. 59', we have an ellipse which no human eye, even when aided by an accurate pair of compasses, can distinguish from a circle. Decreasing the angle minute by minute, the ellipse becomes first perceptibly eccentric, then manifestly so, and by and by acquires so immensely elongated a form, as to bear no recognizable resemblance to a circle. By continuing this process, the ellipse passes insensibly into a parabola; and, ultimately, by still further diminishing the angle, into an hyperbola. ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... good humour nevertheless, the thoroughly popular humour of broad comedy and obvious farce—the humour that finds its account where absurd characters are placed in ridiculous situations, that delights in the oddities of the whimsical and eccentric, that irradiates stupidity and makes dulness amusing. How thoroughly wholesome it is too! To be at the same time merry and wise, says the old adage, is a hard combination. Dickens was both. With all his boisterous merriment, his volleys of inextinguishable laughter, he never makes ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... them is now in existence, nor can we trace them, speaking broadly, beyond the tenth century. Here and there, indeed, may be a temple bearing the name of one of the sects, or grades of doctrine, and occasionally an eccentric individual who "witnesses" to the old metaphysics; but these are but fossils or historical relics, and are generally ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... sensible conjecture. Yes, there is something in that. He certainly could not have carried about him 50,000 pounds in gold and as much in jewelry; it would have been the act of a madman, and Colonel Thorndyke, although eccentric and cranky, was not mad. But, on the other hand, he may have carried about a banker's passbook, or what is equivalent to it, for the amount that had been deposited with a native banker or agent, together with a receipt ...
— Colonel Thorndyke's Secret • G. A. Henty
... there resided a family, consisting of an old man, of the name of Beaver, and his three sons, all of whom were hard "pets," who had often laughed to scorn the advice and entreaties of a pious, though very eccentric, minister, who resided in the same town. It happened one of the boys was bitten by a rattlesnake, and was expected to die, when the minister was sent for in great haste. On his arrival, he found the young man very penitent, and anxious to be ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... Girard, whose wealth was earned in ships, a man most remarkable and eccentric, whose career was one of the great maritime romances. Though his father was a prosperous merchant of Bordeaux engaged in the West India trade, he was shifting for himself as a cabin-boy on his father's ships when only fourteen years old. With no schooling, barely able ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... of his friend's irregular doctrines, and hurried on; explaining to Plume, who accompanied him, that Michael Stein was a queer eccentric old man, but a thorough good royalist at heart. "Why he has two sons among the red scarfs," he ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... from night sportsmen, (13) pilots of vessels, and many others who make it their business to know such things. As to pushing the study of astronomy so far as to include a knowledge of the movements of bodies outside our own orbit, whether planets or stars of eccentric movement, (14) or wearing oneself out endeavouring to discover their distances from the earth, their periods, and their causes, (15) all this he strongly discountenanced; for he saw (he said) no advantage in these any more ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... they reached the head of the valley where stood the house or wooden cottage which had been the abode of Will's eccentric old relative. The scenery was savage and forbidding in the extreme. Lofty mountains rose on every side, and only a small portion of the land in the neighbourhood of the dwelling had been brought under cultivation. The house itself ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains - Wandering Will in the Land of the Redskin • R.M. Ballantyne
... who had made Warrimoo station, had all his life long been something of an eccentric; and yet, withal, a man who generally accomplished what he had set out to do, and one who had converted a modest competence into a handsome fortune. He had been an indiscriminate admirer of animals, and an interested student of the manners and customs of all the creatures of the wild. When ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... had some schooling at a Catholic school, under an eccentric Irish master whom he used to play tricks upon, and who used to thrash him impartially with the rest. When he left school, he became a clerk in a hardware store in his native village, and then in a dry-goods store. From the last place, he was ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... many and various causes. One author states: "Mental abnormality is always due to either imperfect or eccentric physical development, or to the effects of inborn or acquired physical disease, or to injurious impressions, either ante-natal or post natal, upon the delicate and intricate physical structure ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... women. The neon signs proclaimed that here one could buy beer, and that this was Fred's Place, and that was Sid's Steak Joint. Bowling. Pool. A store—still open for this shift's trade—sold fancy shirts and strictly practical work clothes and highly eccentric items of personal adornment. A movie house. A second. A third. Somewhere a record shop fed repetitious music to the night air. There was movement and crowding and jostling, but the middle of the street was almost empty save for the busses. There were some bicycles, but practically ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... for the foregoing observations is the unexpected success of a book which is of itself of so eccentric a character as to require some explanation. For its reception from the public, and the kindness and consideration with which it has been treated by the press, the author can ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland |
