"Eccentric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... will, after long dissertations, tell you that they have not said just what they would like to say; there is always a subtle, lurking something still unexpressed, which something is the real essence of the matter, and which your penetration is expected to divine. In their writings they are eccentric, vague, labyrinthine, pretentious, transcendental,[35] and frequently ungrammatical. These men, if write they must, should confine themselves to the descriptive; for when they enter the essayist's domain, which they are very prone ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... carefully observed, were either disregarded as meaningless or repressed as being naughty. No greater mistake could be possible; and this at last is beginning to be understood. The first struggles of a young consciousness to express itself externally are nearly always eccentric, and often seem perverse. But this is nothing more than we ought to expect. The oddities of a child's conduct are in reality nothing else than direct expressions of character, uncurbed by the conventions which regulate the demeanor of adults, or direct ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... work like yeast In brain cells, and his mind shot forth a line To make a larger thinking circle, say About a great invention, heaven or God, Then John would be abnormal, till this line Shot round and joined, became a larger circle. This is the secret of eccentric genius, The man is half a sphere, sticks out in space Does not enclose co-ordinated thought. He's like a plant mutating, half himself Half something new and greater. If we looked To John's heredity we'd find this change Was manifest in mother or in father About the self-same period ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... many of the remarks of our eccentric host, but the more I saw of him the more I was surprised that a man of his information should have thus secluded himself from the world. We had just time to give Ellen an account of our adventures, when he expressed his wish that we should hang ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... 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
... Julia cross it, dressed in riding costume. She went into the stable and came out again after a few moments. A groom brought her her horse, and assisted her in mounting. The man, accustomed to Julia's somewhat eccentric manners, saw apparently nothing alarming in that fancy for an early ride. Monsieur de Lucan, after a few minutes of excited thought, took his resolution. He directed his steps toward the room of the Count de Moras. To his extreme ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... him, for that gentleman had succeeded in putting the affairs of the wholesale drug business on a firm foundation, and there was no more trouble about getting the supplies of cinchona bark to market. The natives seemed to have taken kindly to the eccentric man, or perhaps it was the reputation of Tom Swift and his electric rifle that ...
— Tom Swift and his Big Tunnel - or, The Hidden City of the Andes • Victor Appleton
... shop-keeper did not ask her very much more than its genuine value and next day all Paris knew of the transaction and flocked to the Opera to see her in the ornaments which had cost the Russian Duke his friendship for the bearer. But though eccentric, impulsive and domineering, no whisper had ever attached itself to her name. On her return to her native New York, was she not welcomed, feted, honored, besieged with invitations everywhere? People felt ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... other all of our lives, and, although I have always regarded you as eccentric, I never saw you so completely off your balance before. The idea of you, with your proud family name, your vast wealth in land and negroes, intending to marry one of them, is a mystery I cannot solve. Do explain ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... almost in the garden, and all her ideas as to the sort of life a respectable German lady should lead have got into a sad muddle since she came to me. The people round about are persuaded that I am, to put it as kindly as possible, exceedingly eccentric, for the news has travelled that I spend the day out of doors with a book, and that no mortal eye has ever yet seen me sew or cook. But why cook when you can get some one to cook for you? And as for sewing, the maids will hem the sheets better and quicker than I could, ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... that can forget, or be insensible to, the inimitable nameless graces and varied traits of nature and of old English character in it—to his unpretending virtues and amiable weaknesses—to his modesty, generosity, hospitality, and eccentric whims—to the respect of his neighbours, and the affection of his domestics—to his wayward, hopeless, secret passion for his fair enemy, the widow, in which there is more of real romance and true delicacy than in a thousand tales of knight-errantry—(we perceive the ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... the frayed stand-up collar that would have sawn his head off but for the toughness of his hide. To do Paul honour he had arrayed himself in his best—a wondrously cut and heavily-braided morning coat and lavender-coloured trousers of eccentric shape, and a funny little billycock hat too small for him, and a thunder-and-lightning necktie, all of which he had purchased nearly twenty years ago to grace a certain, wedding a. which he had been best man. Since then he had worn the Nessus shirt of a costume ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... Californian women: so reserved, shrinking yet dignified, ever on their guard. Dona Chonita changed so swiftly from the typical woman of her race to an houri, almost a bacchante,—only an extraordinary refinement of nature kept her this side of the line,—that an American would be tempted to call her eccentric." ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... certainly rather eccentric behaviour. I was merely going on the idea that if the silver had been taken by persons who did not want it—who merely took it for a blind, as it were—then they would naturally be anxious ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... striking illustrations of this neglected truth is Thomas Carlyle. How often has it been said that Carlyle's matter is marred by the harshness and the eccentricities of his style? But Carlyle's matter is harsh and eccentric to precisely the same degree as his style is harsh and eccentric. Carlyle was harsh and eccentric. His behaviour was frequently ridiculous, if it were not abominable. His judgments were often extremely bizarre. When you read one of Carlyle's fierce diatribes, you say to yourself: ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... the lever, i, is articulated is eccentric, and is provided on the side opposite the lever with a needle, k, revolving on a dial. The object of this arrangement is to regulate the machine according to the thickness ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various
... Louis's customers all so eccentric as Miss Dunlap. Phoebe Snow, for instance, was very easy to entertain, and the Northwestern took to his custody like a hungry urchin to a barbecue. He gave them each one night a week, and in a short time all his evenings were ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... Channing, most eccentric of the transcendentalists, was not to be found at the School or the evening symposia. He had married a sister of Margaret Fuller, but for years he had lived alone and done for himself, and his oddities had increased upon ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... our godmother, aunt Lindsay. She is not really our aunt, though we call her so, and I'm named Nancy after her; but she knew dear mamma when she was a girl, and she is the only person except mamma that we ever heard call papa "Jack." Aunt Lindsay is quite an old lady, and she's very eccentric. She lives in a big old house in Boston, and very seldom comes to New York; but twice a year, on our birthday and at Christmas, she sends us a letter and a present,—generally a book,—and Fee and I have to write ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... unrelieved by the faintest trace of man. A large fish, apparently one of the huge cat-fish of the Mississippi, blundered against Marquette's canoe with a force which seems to have startled him; and once, as they drew in their net, they caught a "spade-fish," whose eccentric appearance greatly astonished them. At length, the buffalo began to appear, grazing in herds on the great prairies which then bordered the river; and Marquette describes the fierce and stupid look of the old bulls, as they ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... Phenomena of this eccentric kind always accompany periods of intellectual change. Most men live and think by habit; and when habit fails them, they are like unskilful sailors who have lost the landmarks of their course, and have no compass and no celestial charts by which to steer. In the years which preceded the French ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... two types, dikes and massive sheets or masses. The dikes are parallel to the strike of the inclosing sandstone as a rule, and appear to have their courses controlled by it on account of their small bulk. The large masses break at random across the sandstone in the most eccentric fashion. No dislocation can be detected in the sandstones, either in strike or dip, yet of course it must exist by at least the thickness of the intrusive mass. That this thickness is considerable is shown by the coarseness of the larger trap masses, which could occur only ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... now rather with him than Percival, we leave the latter to mount his cabriolet, and we proceed with Mr. Mivers's mercurial guest on his eccentric way through the throng. There was an odd mixture of thoughtful abstraction and quick observation in the soliloquy in which this gentleman indulged, as ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a little curious that this eccentric old lady should have so well read his feelings towards Telly, but it pleased him just the same. When he had donned a suit of oilers, and Uncle Terry was pulling out of the little cove, Albert said, "That old lady is the most pious person I ever met, and with her it seems ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... Anthony. Youth appreciates that sort of recognition which is the subtlest form of flattery age can offer. Mr Smith seized opportunities to approach him on deck. His remarks were sometimes weird and enigmatical. He was doubtless an eccentric old gent. But from that to calling his son-in-law (whom he never approached on deck) nasty names behind his back was a ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... and eccentric personality who had arisen on the outskirts; the world began to be conscious of ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... 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 of the ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... systematic objectivity to my unsystematic reminiscences of many years. Of course, they abound with eccentric abnormities and startling phenomena. As I have devoted myself to psychotherapeutics, always and only from scientific interest, as a part of my laboratory studies and therefore have refused to spend ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... no doubt, was almost as much distracted as her father's house to hear of these strange discussions and of the incredible purpose of the bonne douce fille, whose qualities everybody knew and about whom there was nothing eccentric, nothing unnatural, but only simple goodness, to distinguish her above her neighbours. In the meantime her voices called her continually to her work. They set her free from the ordinary yoke of obedience, always so strong ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... and execrable men. Horrors were enacted which have hardly been surpassed by the monsters of the Mongol dynasties. In that fatal list of monarchs one is reduced to apologizing for a Tiberius, who only attained thorough detestableness toward the close of his life; and for a Claudius, who was only eccentric, blundering, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... and mercurial temperament, he had, with a kind of passionate curiosity, adopted the role of a Platonic lover, and the libertine in his character had been subdued by the love of the eccentric. He had converted this love into a kind of adoration. He placed Elise upon the altar, and worshipped her as a saint to whom he had turned from the turmoil and wild lust of life, and in the contemplation and worship ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... St. Louis Suffrage Association urged George Francis Train to come to the aid of women in Kansas, and always ready to champion a new and unpopular cause, he telegraphed his willingness to win the Democratic vote and pay his own expenses. Knowing little about him except that he was wealthy, eccentric, and interested in developing the Union Pacific Railroad, Susan turned tactfully to her Kansas friends for advice, although she herself welcomed his help. They wired him, "The people want you, the women want you";[199] and he came into the state in a burst of glory, speaking ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... was raised to give it a shot, but its movements were so eccentric, that the best marksman would have found it a difficult task by daylight; there in the shadowy darkness it would have ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... were already getting uncomfortably warm, and the little man was nervously anxious to see his farm. So were the nieces, for that matter, who were always interested in the things that interested their eccentric uncle. Besides Patricia Doyle, whom we have already introduced, these nieces were Miss Louise Merrick, who had just celebrated her eighteenth birthday, and Miss Elizabeth—or "Beth"—De Graf, now well past fifteen. Beth lived in a small town in Ohio, but ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... going to do," Lanstron remarked to a member of the staff council who said something complimentary to him. Compliments from subordinates to superiors had not received Partow's favor and, therefore, not Lanstron's. Eccentric old Partow had once disparaged the Napoleonic idea as a fetich which had nothing to do with modern military efficiency, and he had added that if Napoleon were alive to-day nobody would be so prompt ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... to adopt this proposal. Mr. Hunt, the radical member for Preston, and Lord Morpeth, strenuously supported the motion, and Sir Charles Wetherell most bitterly and vehemently denounced it. The baronet's speech was one of the most eccentric pieces of vituperative declamation ever delivered within the walls of parliament. He nicknamed the bill "Russell's purge!" which afforded much amusement to honourable and right honourable gentlemen on his side of the house, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... came from church, and noticed her precarious footing; and, with the grave dignity with which he did everything, he relieved her of her burden, and steered along the street by her side, carrying her baked mutton and potatoes safely home. This was thought very eccentric; and it was rather expected that he would pay a round of calls, on the Monday morning, to explain and apologise to the Cranford sense of propriety: but he did no such thing: and then it was decided that he was ashamed, and was keeping out of sight. ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... anything like that dance. Many pretty premieres danseuses he had admired and applauded, charming and clever young women of France, of Russia, of Italy, and Spain: and they had roused him and all London to enthusiasm over dances eccentric, original, exquisite, or wild. But never had there been anything like this. Stephen had not known that a dance could move him as this did. He was roused, even thrilled by its poetry, and the perfect beauty of its poses, its poises. It must, he supposed, have been practised patiently, ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... a very kind-hearted simple man," the Baronet said "eccentric, but he has been more than thirty years away from home. Of course you will call upon him to-morrow morning. Do everything you can to make him comfortable. Whom would he like to meet at dinner? I will ask some of the Direction. Ask him, Barnes, for next ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... who left the church on account of my expulsion, was Samuel Methley, of Mirfield, near Huddersfield. He was rather eccentric in some respects; but he was an honest, earnest, kind, and Christian man. He had had little or no school instruction, and he had nothing that could be called learning, or high intellectual culture; but he was a man of great faith, of much love, and much prayer. His affection and reverence for ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... also (another rare chance) have been laid open to us. The great array of facts about extinct animals and plants is shown to be consistent with, and to be largely explained by, descent with modification, and to be incomprehensible on any other view. The eccentric contrasts and parallelisms displayed in the geographical distribution of plants and animals, the striking effects of barriers such as mountains, deserts, and seas, the phenomena of dispersion of living creatures, the indications ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... was tested 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 ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... 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 ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... intercourse. The west parlour and all the rooms on that side of the house, which had been unused for so many years, were opened up again, and delivered over to the care of Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Wynne, who kept their own establishment there, thus avoiding the necessity of interfering with Meurig Wynne's eccentric habits, and still enabling them to meet round the cheerful hearth in the ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... another hourly in his fancy, he is startled at the least approach to the romantic in others; and, determined by his own sense in every thing, commends you to the guidance of common sense on all occasions.—With a touch of the eccentric in all which he does, or says, he is only anxious that you should not commit yourself by doing any thing absurd or singular. On my once letting slip at table, that I was not fond of a certain popular dish, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... as he was generally called, was something of a character in Millbay and its immediate neighbourhood, for, in addition to being admittedly the best builder of ships in all Devon, he was a bit of an eccentric, a man with bold and original ideas upon many subjects, a man of violent likes and dislikes, a bachelor, an exceedingly shrewd man of business, and—some said—a miser. He was turned sixty years of age, and of course had ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... miser, to say that it was a codicil to his will, and that the money was all for Mrs. Wood. Why he had not left it to her in the will itself seemed very puzzling, but his lawyer (whom the Woods consulted about it) said that he always did things in a very eccentric way, but generally for some sort of reason, even if it were rather a freaky one, and that perhaps he thought that the relations would be less spiteful at first if they did not know about the money, and ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... winter's evening two horsemen might have been seen—." The new story has to begin: "Late on a winter's evening two aviators will be seen—." The movement is not without its elements of charm; there is something spirited, if eccentric, in the sight of so many people fighting over again the fights that have not yet happened; of people still glowing with the memory of tomorrow morning. A man in advance of the age is a familiar phrase enough. An age in advance of the age is ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... other men; he has been knocked about by passion and circumstance. All his life he has had a dislike for iron rules and common-place maxims. There is something of the gipsy in his nature. He is to some extent eccentric, and he indulges his eccentricity. And the misfortunes of men of letters—the vulgar and patent misfortunes, I mean—arise mainly from the want of harmony between their impulsiveness and volatility, and the staid unmercurial world with which they are brought ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... and Mr. GLADSTONE. The character of the evil genius of the plot, Lord Rufus Doldrum, is partly modelled on ALCIBIADES, but in its main lines is reminiscent of Mrs. EDDY and Major WINSTON CHURCHILL. On the other hand the eccentric Lord Wymondham, who creates a sensation by appearing at a Cabinet meeting in accordion-pleated pyjamas, is understood to be an entirely imaginary personage. The novel, which has been running in Wanamaker's Weekly, will shortly be ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 19, 1916 • Various
... inadvertency, however, Mr. Chaplin's eccentric person was missing from the screen. In spite of that, though, Han managed to enjoy the evening. Afterwards Perry suggested light refreshments and they set out in search of a lunch counter. But anyone who knows Plymouth will realise the hopelessness of their search. After roaming around ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... slight mystification appeared on the broad brow of the waiter, but he was inured to eccentric gastronomic requests, and fulfilled this one with his ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... admirably kept, and the frequent turns were simultaneously made by both dancers, accompanied by the same eccentric gestures. At each successful pass, the screams of delight uttered by the spectators, and their shouts of applause, rang through the room, exciting the performers to fresh exertions; the noise increased by the loud clang of ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... 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 be given ...
— The Fife and Forfar Yeomanry - and 14th (F. & F. Yeo.) Battn. R.H. 1914-1919 • D. D. Ogilvie
... at Dr. Bushnell's house. The Doctor is a very unassuming man, and a very original but somewhat eccentric thinker. He had lately published a sermon on Roads, a sermon on the Moral Uses of the Sea, a sermon on Stormy Sabbaths, and a sermon on Unconscious Influence,—all treated in a very striking manner. He ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... and where am I to get a second? I have no friends. Nonsense!" I cried, lashing myself up more and more. "It's of no consequence! The first person I meet in the street is bound to be my second, just as he would be bound to pull a drowning man out of water. The most eccentric things may happen. Even if I were to ask the director himself to be my second tomorrow, he would be bound to consent, if only from a feeling of chivalry, and to ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... Forbes' death chamber. Uppermost in my mind was the manner in which I had been brought here. For it was he, approaching me through the medium of letters and messengers, who had begged, implored me to help him against Orcon, the eccentric planet of my own discovery, the planet which belonged to a solar system at the other end of the Universe from ours. Because of my knowledge of Orcon, with its bubbling seas, its brooding nightmares, and lastly, its queer conduct toward Earth, he had wanted to take me ...
— The Winged Men of Orcon - A Complete Novelette • David R. Sparks
... before them, bearing a huge tray of bouillon and sandwiches, with which he was striking the most eccentric angles; and Blythe discovered that she was preposterously hungry. And while her nose was still buried in her cup, she espied over its rim a pair of legs planted well apart, in the cause of equilibrium, and the big, pleasant voice of Mr. Grey made itself ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... 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 harness ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... with the author's name attached, in 1608, as A Nest of Ninnies. The fool referred to in the line quoted above is suspected to be not merely the imaginary representative of a type but the popular local Fool of Shakespeare's time, a fellow of brilliant parts, but eccentric, and, we must suppose, lacking in balance and common sense. We are told that one winter Lord Chandos's players visited Evesham, and Jack Miller, our Fool, became greatly attached to the company and in particular to Grumball ...
— Evesham • Edmund H. New
... Gordon arrived there. He of course hastened to make the acquaintance of Burton's wife. He stayed a week at Suez, and during that time Isabel and he saw one another every day. She found him "very eccentric, but very charming. I say eccentric, until you got to know and understand him." A warm friendship sprang up between the two, for they had much to talk about and much in common. They were both Christian mystics (I use the term in the highest sense); and though they differed on many points of ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... their antics revived the lagging spirits of the gangs. There is an unsuspected capacity for mimicry in what are called savage men. I have seen Red Indians give excellent pantomimic entertainments, and aborigines in other lands exhibit high mumming talent. In the railroad battalion there was an eccentric negro who was a very king of jesters. From the Sirdar and the Khalifa downwards—for he was an ex-dervish and had played pranks in Omdurman—none escaped a parodying portrayal of their mannerisms. He imitated the tones of their voice and twisted and contorted his face and body to resemble the ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... had been disposed of and Shafto's room inspected and criticised, his companion still lingered talking. To Salter, the proverbially eccentric, this new-comer appeared to be an intelligent young fellow whom he would like and take to. There was no superior "just out from London to the back of God-speed" air about him. On the contrary, he appeared to be genuinely interested in his surroundings and insatiable for information. It struck ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... not so much in that capacity, but as Sir Henry Thompson, certainly not the least distinguished surgeon of our day. In Lord Beaconsfield's last novel, 'Endymion,' we have a passing reference to one Wrentham lad, Sir Charles Wetherell, as 'the eccentric and too uncompromising Wetherell.' Assuredly the fame of another lad, Sir Henry Thompson, connected with Wrentham, ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... komforto. Ease, at sengxene. East oriento. Easter Pasko. Easterly orienta. Easy facila. Eat mangxi. Eatable mangxebla. Eaves defluilo. Ebb (and flow) forfluo (kaj alfluo). Ebony ebono. Ebriety ebrieco. Ebullition bolado. Eccentric stranga. Ecclesiastic ekleziulo. Ecclesiastical eklezia. Echo ehxo. Eclipse mallumigxo. Ecliptic ekliptiko. Eclogue eklogo. Economical sxparema. Economics ekonomio. Economise sxpari. Economist ekonomiisto. Economy sxparemo. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... A, also receives the eccentric, E, of the slide valve, the rod, e, of which is jointed to the slide valve rod through the intermedium of a cross-head, e, analogous to that of the pistons, and which, like the latter, runs on guides held ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... described a little vaguely as the 'old Oxford science.' Once, at least, a glamour of romance has been shed over the son of a tailor, and it becomes imaginable that even the chalker of unfinished coats may in the future be posed as heroic. There is still, however, a profession which no eccentric novelist has ever ventured to represent as other than entirely contemptible. The commercial traveller is beneath satire, and outside the region of sympathy. If he appears at all in fiction or on the stage, he is irredeemably vulgar. He is never heroic, ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... enough that, at any rate, this room had been occupied, and that recently,—and, if his taste in furniture could be taken as a test, by an eccentric occupant to boot. My own first impression was that there was someone, or something, living in it still,—an uncomfortable odour greeted our nostrils, which was suggestive of some evil-smelling animal. Sydney seemed to ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... and acted on principle, to run any risk of that situation becoming his own. An ambitious timeserver like Lomenie, or a contented adherent of use and wont like Morellet, might well regard such considerations as the products of a weak and eccentric scrupulosity. Turgot was of other calibre, holding it to be only a degree less unprincipled than the avowed selfishness of the adventurer, to contract so serious an engagement on the strength of common hearsay and current ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... left the house, with a pitying shake of the head. He was not quite certain that he had done wisely, after all, in bringing his eccentric friend into the affair. He little reckoned how much more peculiarly Montague Shirley was to act for the remainder of ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... time of Mr. Thorpe's marriage to Miss Goodworth, however, the connection between the junior Goodworths and Blyths began to grow less intimate—so far, at least, as the new bride and Valentine were concerned. The rigid modern Puritan of Baregrove Square, and the eccentric votary of the Fine Arts, mutually disapproved of each other from the very first. Visits of ceremony were exchanged at long intervals; but even these were discontinued on Madonna's arrival under Valentine's roof: Mr. Thorpe being one of the first of the charitable friends of the family ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... Damon here to bless the submarine and his liver and collar buttons a few times," put in Mr. Sharp, who brought in another bundle. He referred to an eccentric individual Who had recently made an airship voyage with himself and Tom, Mr. Damon's peculiarity being to use continually such expressions as: "Bless my soul! Bless ...
— Tom Swift and his Submarine Boat - or, Under the Ocean for Sunken Treasure • Victor Appleton
... that we English, like the Americans, have too much good sense to worry about drama. There are a certain number of cranks and faddists who get an unholy delight out of eccentric plays, but they are few in the Anglo-Saxon countries, where good sense reigns. We only take fairy tales seriously when we are children; we never get intoxicated by ideas; this is where we differ from the Continentals. Art is all very well in its way and in ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... place who could have written such a letter. What would a New York society man, whose compliments are as extravagant as meaningless, think of it? Truly he doesn't know the world, and isn't like it. I supposed him an awkward, eccentric young countryman, that, from his very verdancy, would be difficult to manage, and he writes to me like a knight of olden time, only such language seems Quixotic in our day. The foolish fellow, to idealize poor, despised, faulty Edith Allen into one of the grand ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... ways and eccentric circles, like the aerial paths of homing sea-birds, I came at last to the spot I had set out for, consciously; yet it surprised me to find I had ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... great musician," Mrs. Vanderlyn said, speculatively. "They go everywhere in Germany. No doors are closed to them. It wouldn't be at all surprising for a musician to travel as he's doing. Such people are eccentric, and often so foolishly improvident. Something about music makes them so. But they worship them in Germany. They know ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... The feed-pump eccentric-shaft of this engine, which was very poor and flaky, suddenly gave out about five in the afternoon, and I had to stop in a hurry, and that sweet invisible mechanism which had crooned and crooned about my ears in the air, and followed ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... fled without a purpose. Many miles down that same stream there dwelt a gold-digger in a lonely hut. His name was Paul Bevan. He was an eccentric being, and a widower with an only child, a daughter, named Elizabeth—better ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne
... of medium fame, but of real genius, whose delightful home was always open to him. Mrs. Fortescue probably knew all about Paul's eccentric menage, but she had been an opera-singer in her day, had known a good many open secrets of the kind, and was a woman of the world. It was not her business to pry into that kind of secret, and she liked the young fellow for many reasons. Considering what a fool he was, he had grown to an ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... idle friends, it was a long time before any of them discovered that he was engaged in practical business. In his own home he was not questioned, and he said nothing. The Saracinesca were considered eccentric, but no one interfered with them nor ventured to offer them suggestions. If they chose to allow their heir absolute liberty of action, merely because he had passed his twenty-first birthday, it was their own concern, and his ruin would be upon their own heads. No one cared to risk a savage ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... or more years before I matriculated at Oxford, Mr. Palmer, M.P. for Bath, had accomplished two things, very hard to do on our little planet, the Earth, however cheap they may happen to be held by the eccentric people in comets: he had invented mail-coaches, and he had married the daughter[1] of a duke. He was, therefore, just twice as great a man as Galileo, who certainly invented (or discovered) the satellites of ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... is the world's eccentric round of joy complete When happy tourist-traveler, no more to roam, His fascinating, thrilling story shall repeat To impecunious, luckless multitudes ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... tete-a-tete with the Colonel, and took care that even old Getchen, my housekeeper, now deceased, should not trouble me during my work. I had substituted for the wearisome lever of the old fashioned air-pumps, a wheel arranged with an eccentric which transformed the circular movement of the axis into the rectilinear movement required by the pistons: the wheel, the eccentric, the connecting rod, and the joints of the apparatus all worked admirably, and ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... greatly exercised about the two "preposterous names," as he called them, which in a moment of eccentric impulse he had given to these children of nature. He ventured to hint as much to Mrs. Hopkins. The good dame was vastly surprised. She thought they was about as pooty names as anybody had had given 'em in the village. And they was so handy, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... about seventeen, a rich, eccentric stranger named Blake arrived to take possession of the Castle of Ardfry. The new-comer, who was a musical amateur, presently discovered that there was a young genius in the neighbourhood. Struck by the beauty of Robert MacOwen's voice, Mr. Blake offered to take the youth into his own household, ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... Indian dress, and seated in a chair that was once my grandfather's; but since some months goes by the name of Henry James's, for it was there the novelist loved to sit - adds a touch of poesy and comicality. It is, I think, excellent, but is too eccentric to be exhibited. I am at one extreme corner; my wife, in this wild dress, and looking like a ghost, is at the extreme other end; between us an open door exhibits my palatial entrance hall and a part of my respected staircase. ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 to his wife for ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... he established upon the wreck of John Brougham's Lyceum, often rise in memory, crowned with a peculiar light. Lester Wallack, in his peerless elegance; Laura Keene, in her spiritual beauty; the quaint, eccentric Walcot; the richly humorous Blake, so noble in his dignity, so firm and fine and easy in his method, so copious in his natural humour; Mary Gannon, sweet, playful, bewitching, irresistible; Mrs. Vernon, as full of character as the tulip is of colour or ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... foolish creature; and the more we look into him, the more we must despise him—Lords of the creation!—Who can forbear indignant laughter! When we see not one of the individuals of that creation (his perpetually-eccentric self excepted) but acts within its own natural and original appointment: is of fancied and self-dependent excellence, he is obliged not only for the ornaments, but for the necessaries of life, (that is to say, for food ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... enacted are generally composed by persons in the spiritual condition. We have many good farces; and an unending source of material for amusing plays is found in the relationship between the spirit world and earth, and the eccentric conditions growing out of that relationship. For instance, there is a laughable comedy being enacted at my theatre, depicting the adventures of a pious merchant, who, after the toils and cares of life, becomes a ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... of the genus UROMYS. In the bestowal of a name he has favoured the latter genus. The animal has been introduced to the scientific world under the title UROMYS BANFIELDI, by Mr de Vis, who, referring to it as "eccentric," says, "The female first sent to us as an example of the species had no young with her, nor were her mammae much in evidence; consequently, the advent of a specimen caught in the act of carrying young was awaited with interest. Fortune at length favoured our correspondent with an ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... Parnassus; and porches of the Stoics. There is seen the surveyor of all arts and sciences Aristotle, to whom belongs all that is most excellent in doctrine, so far as relates to this passing sublunary world; there Ptolemy measures epicycles and eccentric apogees and the nodes of the planets by figures and numbers; there Paul reveals the mysteries; there his neighbour Dionysius arranges and distinguishes the hierarchies; there the virgin Carmentis reproduces in Latin characters all that Cadmus collected in ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... in some extreme, uncompromising, eccentric work, written for the complete renovation of man, a new establishment of truth, little else, after all its tempest of thought has swept over the mind, than another confirmation of old, and long-settled, and temperate ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... gangue has not been crushed too fine, I think the Duncan pan will usually be found effective in saving the concentrates. In theory it is an enlargement of the alluvial miner's tin dish, and the motion imparted to it is similar to the eccentric motion of that ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... jests are to be traced to a few originals, perhaps the many eccentric tales of Jack on horseback may be found in a very old anecdote of a certain Venetus insuetus ac nescius equitare—a Venetian unaccustomed to and ignorant of riding, who, when mounted on horseback, having inadvertently spurred ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... gun. He always carried his powder loose in the tail pocket of his coat. He usually had in his mouth a short dudeen; but in an evil moment he put the dudeen, lighted, in the pocket among the powder. Mr. Lowry was an eccentric man. ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... that had been promised to the "afflicted circle," they came to them duly, and from London too. And they were rich gifts also; but such a collection of odd and grotesque articles, certainly are not often got together. Master Raymond had commissioned an eccentric friend of his in London to purchase them, and send them on; acquainting him with the peculiar circumstances. There were yellow birds, and red dragons, and other fantastic animals, birds and beasts. But they came from London ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... of witches without making any pretensions to the art, merely because they are deformed or ill-looking. Persons esteemed witches or wizards are generally eccentric characters, remarkably wicked, of a ragged appearance and forbidding countenance. The way in which they are made is either by direct communication with the familiar spirit during the days of their fasting, or by being instructed by those skilled ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... movement with his eccentric eyebrows, then turned on his heel. Paul sprang after him, angry in spite ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... about the illogical and 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 Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... to prophesy the hid eclipse, The coming of eccentric orbs; To mete the dust the sky absorbs, To weigh the sun, and fix the hour each ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... astonished gaze back to Sir Philip; yes, unmistakably it was on Margrave that his look was fixed. Impossible to associate crime with the image of that fair youth! Eccentric notions, fantastic speculations, vivacious egotism, defective benevolence,—yes. ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the province, but to the opening up of arteries of communication, of which Yonge and Dundas Streets—still well-known names—were the most noted. The founder of an important settlement in the west, an eccentric Irishman of noble ancestry, Colonel Thomas Talbot, was a member of the Lieutenant-Governor's staff, and eventually made his home in the western part of the province, where he became a useful and influential pioneer. Among ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... name she had chosen for the house on coming to live there some years before. What it exactly meant she could not have explained, but it sounded distinguished and out of the common, without being reprehensibly eccentric. Hence ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... of his examination of abnormal mental states, offers a classification of types of psychopathic personalities. He distinguishes six groups: the excitable, the unstable, the psychopathic trend, the eccentric, the anti-social, and the contentious. In psychoanalysis a simpler twofold division is frequently made between the introverts, or the "introspective" and the extroverts, or ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... eccentric physician, who is a sympathetic fellow-sinner to the most depraved of his patients, going through it all "with a grimly humorous hope that some good, in some unseen direction, may come of it." The waif, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... work fails to account for his leadership and influence, we examine his personality; and here everything is interesting. Because of a few oft-quoted passages from Boswell's biography, Johnson appears to us as an eccentric bear, who amuses us by his growlings and clumsy antics. But there is another Johnson, a brave, patient, kindly, religious soul, who, as Goldsmith said, had "nothing of the bear but his skin"; a man who battled like a hero ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... only at play that we can observe, from moment to moment, all the phases of despair; from time to time there occur new ones—strange, eccentric, or terrible. After having lost quietly, and even with serenity, half his fortune, the father of a family staked the remainder, and lost it without a murmur. Facere solent extrema securos mala.(9) The bystanders looked at him; his features changed not; only ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... Crusoe' and the 'Pilgrim's Progress.' He had not the insight to see in these comparatively commonplace narratives the essential truth of the enduring masterpiece. He was seeking an outward and visible sign; he saw nothing unusual, abnormal, eccentric, in these books, nothing novel, nothing that cried aloud for recognition; and so he past by on the other side. These books seemed to him in nowise raised above the common; they were to be enjoyed in some measure, but they evoked no high commendation; and the contemporary critic never ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... peeps in. She is a pretty, lively girl of sixteen. She wears her long, dark hair open. Her costume is slightly eccentric: the skirts white and short, the bodice cut in triangular shape at the neck, the sash long and gay. Her arms are bare above the elbows. Around her neck she wears a coloured ribbon from which a crucifix ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... writes of the reception given by his contemporaries to his "physio-philosophical ideas." "They spoke of his wild and eccentric fancies, and the expression 'Darwinising' (as employed, for example, by the poet Coleridge when writing on Stillingfleet) was accepted in England nearly as the antithesis ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... mental development and imbecility follow. If the disease be very mild in character, and especially if it be petit mal, the victim may be very precocious, get "pushed" at school, and later become eccentric or insane. ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... unrevealed. You yourself might be so ill-advised as to tell the whole story in the end. Of course, I would try to prevent you, and as far as the trial is concerned, I think I could use means to prevent you. But if the result was unfavourable—and knowing what eccentric things juries do, we must recognise the possibility of an unfavourable verdict—you might consider it advisable to disclose everything in the hope of having the conviction ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... right mismanagement of one's affairs, with hints on the best method of bringing about a meeting of creditors. Among the chapters are the following: "The Way to Carey Street;" "How to settle things on one's Wife;" "Eccentric Bankrupts who have subsequently paid ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various
... himself a learned man, to the complaint of his rustic parishioners, that for all his erudition no "immediate language of the Holy Ghost" was ever to be heard from him. On the whole the Rev. John Coleridge appears to have been a gentle and kindly eccentric, whose combination of qualities may have well entitled him to be compared, as his famous son was wont in after- life to compare him, ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... It is a society which includes every actor, whether he be Benedict or Hamlet, or the Ghost, or the Bandit, or the court-physician, or, in the one person, the whole King's army. He may do the "light business," or the "heavy," or the comic, or the eccentric. He may be the captain who courts the young lady, whose uncle still unaccountably persists in dressing himself in a costume one hundred years older than his time. Or he may be the young lady's brother in the white ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... chalet, leading down into the yard. In London these apartments were his sole domicile; though, to his friends, none of whom lived nearer to him than Bloomsbury, this seemed a piece of conduct too flagrantly eccentric—on a parity with his explanation of it, alleging necessity of living on the spot: an explanation somewhat droll, in the face of his constant lengthy absence, during the whole of the winter, when he handed the ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... of the grotesque pair and their early extravagances; and Muggleton's letters cover a period of forty years, during all which time he was going in and out among the artisans and small traders of the city, obstinately asserting himself in season and out of season, and leaving behind him in his eccentric chronicle such a minute and faithful picture of London life among the middle— the lower middle—class during the last half of the seventeenth century as is to be found nowhere else. The reader must be prepared for the ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... hard to explain. Perhaps it is easier to understand when we remember that the planets thus formed must necessarily have been rotating in eccentric orbits when they were first born, and these planets came too near the sun while gaseous, or nearly so, and Mars lost much of its matter, while the other, which now exists only ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... revolutionary propensities. He took up residence in the West Indies, but was compelled to leave on account of his violent denunciation of slavery. He went to Philadelphia, but finding slavery there, retired to a cave, where he lived a most eccentric life, refusing to eat food or wear clothes which had been secured at the expense of animal life, or produced by slave labor. He made frequent excursions, however, from his cave to denounce slavery, his favorite subject being "Deliverance to the Captive." He usually succeeded ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... the reader. It has been said that the happiest individuals, like nations during their happiest periods, have no history. In the case of my aunt, it was not only that her course of life was unvaried, but that her own disposition was remarkably calm and even. There was in her nothing eccentric or angular; no ruggedness of temper; no singularity of manner; none of the morbid sensibility or exaggeration of feeling, which not unfrequently accompanies great talents, to be worked up into a picture. Hers was a mind well balanced on ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... and when on the Tuesday she and Fritzing moved into Creeper Cottage they were objects of the intensest interest to the entire country side, and the report of their riches, their recklessness, and their eccentric choice of a dwelling had rolled over the intervening hills as far as Minehead, where it was the subject of many interesting comments ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... going away from the sun you know. Mars is not as close to it as we are on our planet—I mean the one we have just left—is ninety-two millions of miles from the sun, while Mars is one hundred and forty-one millions of miles away, though its orbit is so eccentric that distance varies about thirteen millions of miles. That is, it may be thirteen millions of miles more than its mean, or average, distance, so that at times it is as far away from the sun as one hundred and fifty-four millions ...
— Through Space to Mars • Roy Rockwood
... if to extract some personal meaning from his words, and then turned her head away. The clergyman addressed him with what was like a respectful toleration of the drolleries of a gifted but eccentric man, the flavour of whose talk he was ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... New Yorker of good parts who, to save an inheritance of seven millions, starts out to spend a fortune of one million within a year. An eccentric uncle, ignorant of the earlier legacy, leaves him seven millions to be delivered at the expiration of a year, on the condition that at that time he is penniless, and has proven himself a capable business man, ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... to Socrates, who was a kind of Greek combination of Dr. Paley and Dr. Franklin, indicates a very different impression of him from what would generally be expressed of a poet, certainly what would not have been placed on the grave of an eccentric, erratic will-o'-the-wisp genius, however distinguished. Moreover, the pious author of good Mistress Hall's epitaph records the fact of her being "wise to salvation," as a more especial point of resemblance to her father than even her being "witty above ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... the poet is the equable man, Not in him but off him things are grotesque, eccentric, fail of their full returns. ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... vol. i. p. 456. The simplicity with which Carlyle attempts to avert the just indignation of the Irish, by saying that the garrison "consisted mostly of Englishmen," coupled with his complacent impression that eccentric phrases can excuse crime, would be almost amusing were it not that he admits himself to be as cruel as his hero.—vol. i. p. 453. A man who can write thus is past criticism. If the garrison did consist mainly of Englishmen, what becomes of the plea, that this ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... sooner than put up with any more stabs from the rugged earth, casts itself on air. For a hundred and twenty feet the water is bright, in the novelty and the power of itself, striking out freaks of eccentric flashes, and even little sun-bows, in fine weather. But the triumph is brief; and a heavy retribution, created by its violence, awaits below. From the tossing turmoil of the fall two white volumes roll away, with a clash of waves between them, and sweeping ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... created by humorous scenario writers would be surprised to learn that our hero—for such he is to be—was young, sound of wind and limb, and at the present moment comfortably clothed in a coon-skin coat. The latter touch might be accounted for by such persons on the basis of an eccentric city cousin generously disposed to casting off his garments when only half worn, but the other two points must convince them of the faithlessness of the whole account, and their acquaintance with the young man will accordingly end with ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... portion of Aston park wall, keeping it on your right hand, and some time after cross the river Tame over Perry-bridge, when there is a road to the left which conducts you to Perry hall, an old moated mansion, within a small park; the property and residence of John Gough, Esq. who is an eccentric character. In the winter he courses with his tenants, who are all of them subservient to him; and during summer, having some deer, he disposes of the venison. If any of the neighbouring gentry send him an order for a haunch or a neck, he waits until further orders arrive; ...
— A Description of Modern Birmingham • Charles Pye |
