"Shifting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... correctness of his surmise, because of their noble mien. If he suffered any disappointment in hearing proof of their identity, it was immediately nullified by the joy his artist-soul took in the stately Hebrew woman. He forgot the mission that urged him to the temple and, permitting the shifting, restless crowd to surround him, he lingered, thinking. This proud disdain must mark his goddess of stone in the Arabian hills, this majesty and power; but there must be youth and fire in the place of ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... to do with that. And don't you go a waving your precious hand, for it gives me such a turn to think you've let go, and have only got one hand to hold on with, and just turning the corner too, and the pony a shaking its tail, and shifting about with its back legs, till how you don't slip off on one side ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... sharp knife and the corner of the panel. You go through the panel because that is thinnest, of course in the corner nearest the key, and you use a knife when you can, because it makes least noise. But it does take minutes, and even I can remember shifting the electric torch from one hand to the other before the aperture was large enough to receive the hand and wrist ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... picture, with the rivulets swelling larger at certain seasons, but seldom drying up entirely at any time. In the main the streamlets and rivers keep pretty much the same direction and volume one year after another, but then there is also a quiet shifting of these currents. Some grow larger, and others diminish gradually until they fade out entirely. In one of the regions from which they take their source a tree disease may cause a decline; in another, a hurricane may ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... [FN324] This shifting theatre is evidently borrowed by Galland from Pliny (N. H. xxxvi., 24) who tells that in B. C. 50, C. Curio built two large wooden theatres which could be wheeled round and formed into an amphitheatre. The simple device seems to stir the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... poor, dumb, patient stream went winding and winding along through its shifting pathway; in some places its waters were parted, and then again, lower down, they would meet once more. I could see that the stream from year to year was finding itself new channels, and flowed no longer in its ancient track, but I knew that the springs which ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... board of my own: you will oblige me by going on board and taking her safely into port. It is the least return you can make for my kindness. In those dresses, gentlemen, you will not be able to do your duty; oblige me by shifting and putting on these.' Corbett handed a flannel shirt, a rough jacket and trousers to Messrs. Hautaine, Ossulton, Vaughan, and Seagrove. After some useless resistance they were stripped, and having put on the smugglers' ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... apparently neglected; so numerous and so irregularly scattered, without apparent regard for fields, that when we were told these were graves we could not give credence to the statement, but before the city was reached we saw places where, by the shifting of the channel, the river had cut into some of these mounds, exposing brick vaults, some so low as to be under water part of the time, and we wonder if the fact does not also record a slow subsidence of the delta plain under the ever ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... the table that I happened to be standing against with as much force as I could muster. It slid softly along the carpeting before coming to a halt a few inches from the glass wall. It made no noise or jarring of the floor, but the sudden shifting of weight in the room caused the tower to sway once more, as it had when I had run up ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... was ever shifting and becoming more and more lovely and fascinating, and the paradise was more extensive than ...
— Policeman Bluejay • L. Frank Baum
... the Isles of Shoals the most hopeless spot upon its surface. One gets close to the heart of these things; they are almost as precious as Picciola to the prisoner, and yield a fresh and constant joy such as the pleasure-seeking inhabitants of cities could not find in their whole round of shifting diversions. With a bright and cheerful interior, open fires, books and pictures, windows full of thrifty blossoming plants and climbing vines, a family of singing birds, plenty of work, and a clear head and quiet conscience, it would go hard ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... playing upon him, so that every hour in his life is unique, changed altogether by a stray word, or glance, or touch. The truth of these relations experience gives us; not the truth of eternal outlines effected once for all, but a world of fine gradations and subtly linked conditions, shifting intricately as we ourselves change; and bids us by constant clearing of the organs of observation and perfecting of analysis to make what we can of these. To the intellect, to the critical spirit, these subtleties ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... story of Dickens's boyhood, as told by himself, is not more pathetic—nor is its outcome more beautiful—than what we know of our guest's experiences—his orphanage, his few years' meagre schooling, his work as a boy in all sorts of shifting occupations, the attempt to make a learned blacksmith of him, his final apprenticeship to iron-moulding, at which he worked on the East Side from his eighteenth to his twenty-first year. As Dr. Griswold put ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... that were ranging somewhere near by. Of course he cared, and for all the years to come he never forgot that sight. For a mile beyond him the landscape seemed blotted out by a sea of gleaming horns and shifting hoofs—a moving mass that seemed to swim into the sky. It was a great possession—a herd like that—and Norton found himself marvelling at the strange fact that he and his parents, travelling in luxurious Pullmans, and living in a great city, were poor ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... brass knob can be placed to distinguish the king from the commons. The chessmen are of two sizes, the white larger than the black, so that I have no trouble in following my opponent's maneuvers by moving my hands lightly over the board after a play. The jar made by shifting the men from one hole to another tells me ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... largely due to the fact that the community was a shifting one, and few had any near relatives about them, for, although the victim might have friends, they seldom held him in such esteem as to be willing to take up his quarrel when there was a bullet hole through him. Relatives, however, are often more difficult to deal with than are friends, ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... clumsy horse through a gap in the hedge, he galloped along the sodden field tracks to the shifting scene of commotion. Three or four idle louts, a couple of children, and a farm-laborer were running by the swollen margin of the mill-stream, yelling forlornly, pointing at an object that showed itself now and again in the swirling center of the current. ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... her will she looked at Burke, and found him looking her over with such a shrewd eye that she looked away, and then looked back again to find that his gaze was still upon her. He had made his living since he was a child by his faculty for sizing people up, and at his first glimpse of Mrs. Baxter's shifting glance he had sized her up; so that now, when she remarked with an amiability at once ponderous and shaky that it was a very fine day, he replied in exactly the same tone, "It is that," and began to walk about the ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... gave her an uncanny feeling, together with the natural impulse to compare the two eyes. Accordingly she shifted her own eyes from one eyeball to the other in the man's face. The accent which this shifting impulse had received by the disagreeable feeling evidently forced her to repeat this movement with everyone. At first it became half a play, but soon a disturbing habit and finally an intolerable impulse. Whenever she talked with ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... considerable time. But the platform, except upon direct flight, was seldom level, for it was a frail, unstable little vehicle! To handle it was more than a question of the controls. We balanced, and helped to guide it, with the movement of our bodies—shifting our weight sidewise, or back, or forward to make it dip as the controls altered the gravity-pull in its ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... also joined the revellers. They passed from group to group, with aimless curiosity, pausing sometimes by the artificial ponds and sometimes by the dainty groups of dancers, whose satin and whose pearls glimmered faintly in the shifting moonlight, for the night was cloudy. At last they too were tired of the revel, they wandered towards a more secluded place and made for the avenue which Pierrot had sought. On their way they passed through a ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... marked the transition of the United States from a peace to a war basis are comprehensible unless we remember that the President was constantly working to overcome the forces of decentralization, and also that the military programme was always on an emergency basis, shifting almost from week to week in accordance with ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... Howel, shifting his legs from one knee to the other, in order to be more convenient to listen, or, if necessary, to object. "What can Italy possess, that England does not enjoy ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... she had three and a half feet of water in her hold. A portion of her diminished crew was sent to the pumps, while every officer, man and boy, was employed in fishing the masts and spars, knotting and splicing the rigging, and shifting the sails. The two ships lay close together, drifting with the tide. The prize was won, but it was a question whether she would be kept. They were close in with the French coast; and should any other of the enemy's ships be in the neighbourhood, it was certain that they would be sent to look ...
— The Rival Crusoes • W.H.G. Kingston
... blood. With that sudden inconceivable twist of dreams, he saw the black pit of the tramp-steamer and felt the hell-heat in his face. Again, he was in the Andes, toiling with his girders over unspeakable chasms. A shifting glance at the old billiard-room in the club, the letter, and his subsequent wild night of intoxication, the one time in his life when he had drunk hard and long. Back to the Indian deserts and jungles. And he heard ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... motion of the chair as it quivered slightly back and forth in place of the swinging seesaw with which she was wont to wear the hours away. The snuff-brush was brought into more fiercely active commission, but she said nothing till Mary Carmichael was within a few inches of her. Then, shifting the snuff-brush to a position more favorable to enunciation, she said: "Howdy? Ye be Miz Yellett's gov'ment, ain't ye?" There was something threatening in her aspect, as if the office of governess to the Yelletts ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... with the pencil of nature, or of art? Do we indeed paint life as it is, or as it is not? Cast thine eyes, reader, over the ephemeral circle of passing and fortuitous events; view the change of contingencies; mark well the varied and shifting scenery in the great drama of time;—seriously contemplate nature in her operations; minutely examine the entrance, the action, and the exit of characters on the stage of existence—then say, if disappointment, ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... they travelled, man and beast hanging their heads with fatigue, when they saw on the road, coming towards them, a great multitude of lights, bobbing up and down, as if all the stars of heaven were shifting their places. Neither Don Quixote nor Sancho felt much at their ease at this strange spectacle, and both pulled up their beasts, and waited trembling. Even Don Quixote feared he knew not what, and the hair stood up on his head, ...
— The Red Romance Book • Various
... dance on hot ploughshares like a Turk dervise, But, unable to pay proper duty where owing Was reduced to that pitiful method of showing it: For though the moment I began setting His saddle on my own nag of Berold's begetting, (Not that I meant to be obtrusive) She stopped me, while his rug was shifting, By a single rapid finger's lifting, And, with a gesture kind but conclusive, And a little shake of the head, refused me— 760 I say, although she never used me, Yet when she was mounted, the Gipsy behind her, And ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... influence of the current. In Von Feilitzsch's balance, however, the compensating magnet was placed end on to the needle, and its directive action was diminished at will, not by turning it round on its center, but by shifting it to a greater distance along a linear scale below it. The form now given by Hughes to the balance is one of so great compactness and convenience that it will probably prove a most acceptable addition to the resources of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... vanished music. Lucrezia scarcely breathed. Her face was flushed, for she was struggling against an impulse to laugh, which almost overmastered her. After a minute she heard the dog's short bark again, then a man's foot shifting on the terrace, then suddenly a noise of breathing above her head close to her hair. With a little scream she shrank back and looked up. A man's face was gazing down at her. It was a very brown and very masculine face, roughened ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Bassompierre loaded with chains, passed before him, making signs of farewell; at last, as he slept, he instinctively put his hand to his head to stay the passing dream, which then seemed to unfold itself before his eyes like pictures in shifting sands. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... guests at luncheon had listened to Courtlandt without sound or movement beyond the occasional rasp of feet shifting under the table. He had begun with the old familiar phrase—"I've ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... nearly deserted entrance to the Biltmore Hotel. Here he stood for a moment, and then sat down heavily on a damp board amid some debris of construction work. He rested there for almost half an hour, his mind a shifting pattern of surface thoughts, chiefest among which were that he must obtain some money and get home before he became too sodden to ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... want 'er dern money!" Dick Wrinkle snarled, his glance shifting unsteadily. "I don't need anybody's cash. I've got a thousand dollars in my ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... the shifting of technical standards, more simplicity reigns in methods of teaching at this very moment. The reason is that so much more is expected in variety of technic; therefore, no unnecessary time can be spared. If a modern ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... few seconds the counter was strewn with silks at most enticing figures, and the clerk showed them off to such advantage, gathering them so dexterously into elegant folds, shifting them so skillfully in the brilliant gas-light, persuading the lady, in the mean while, in such a clever, lawyer-like way: "These cost us in Paris three times the money I am offering them for, and they are but ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... grey-headed statesman, who had contrived, by shifting and trimming, to maintain his post at the steerage through all the changes of course which the vessel had held for thirty years, "I thought Sir William would hae verified the auld Scottish saying, 'As soon comes the lamb's skin to market ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... watched, resting again while she gazed after him. He moved backward and forward. He marked a place with a stone. He came well back from it and seemed to remove his wrist watch. He laid it on a boulder and stamped on it. He stamped again and again, shifting it between stampings. Then he pounded it with a small rock. He stood up and came back, trailing something which glittered golden ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... drawn near, and while the matron delivered her explanation, with an uneasy sorting and shifting of words, a quick signal of intelligence passed between her hearers. "You see?" Amherst's eyes exclaimed; "I see—they have sent her away because she told you," Bessy's flashed back in wrath, and his answering look did not ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... the economy since 1991, with the steepest annual decline occurring in 1994. In 1995-97 the pace of the government program of economic reform and privatization quickened, resulting in a substantial shifting of assets into the private sector. The December 1996 signing of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium agreement to build a new pipeline from western Kazakhstan's Tengiz oil field to the Black Sea increases prospects for substantially ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... know about that," said Hamilton doubtfully, "but when I get thoroughly sick of myself, and wish I was dead, I sometimes stave off putting a shot through my silly head by getting a pencil and paper, and shifting my thoughts out of the beastly world I know, into—well, it's hard to explain. But I get sort of notions, don't you see, and they seem to run best in verse. I write 'em when the fit's on me, and I burn 'em when the fit's through; and you'll hardly think it, ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... Burn being at length worked out, the pit was ordered to be "laid in," and old Robert and his family were again under the necessity of shifting their home; for, to use the common phrase, they must "follow the wark." They removed accordingly to a place called Jolly's Close, a few miles to the south, close behind the village of Newburn, where another coal-mine belonging to the Duke of ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... was probably being enacted, or had already been enacted by the sea. He was devoured by an anxiety which he could not share and ought not to show because it was caused by the knowledge which he was solemnly pledged to conceal. This remark of Hermione gave him a chance of shifting it from the shoulders of the truth to the shoulders of a lie. He remembered the morning of sirocco, his fear, his passion of tears in the boat. The memory seemed almost to make the lie he was going ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... silence, Herr Korner lifted his great mug and emptied it slowly. A wind was rising, bearing with it song and laughter from distant groups, —Teutonic song and, laughter. The moonlight trembled through the shifting leaves. And Stephen was filled with a sense of the marvelous. It was as if this fierce duel, so full of national significance to a German, had been fought in another existence, It was incredible to him that the unassuming ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... rocking about in evident pain, and moaning and fretting just as sick children do. Gradually its attention got fixed on the strange antics going on. The Ojah kept muttering away, quicker and quicker, constantly shifting the bone and cups and other articles on the cloth. His body was suffused with perspiration, but in about half an hour the child had gone off to sleep, and attended by some dozen old women, and the anxious father, was borne off in triumph ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... boat off, and both of the voyagers took the oars to get the craft clear of the ship, which was accomplished in a few minutes. Then the Frenchman stepped the mast, which had been carefully adjusted on board of the ship, while Christy rigged out the shifting bowsprit. In half an hour they had placed the spars and bent on the sail, for everything had been prepared for expeditious work. The sails filled, and the skipper took his ...
— Fighting for the Right • Oliver Optic
... keeps us supplied with all we want. Look!" she cried suddenly, pointing to a small island which loomed directly ahead of them, looking in the grey mist of evening like only a darker shadow against the shifting background. "That's our island—see? And there's the light," she added, as a sudden beacon flashed out at them, sending a ruddy light ...
— Billie Bradley on Lighthouse Island - The Mystery of the Wreck • Janet D. Wheeler
... had died nearly out in the night, was rising again. It was directly in our teeth and shifting the loose snow unpleasantly. We had not gone far when one of the trailing Eskimos came running after us and shouting to our driver to stop. We halted, and when he overtook us he called the attention of Philippus to a high mountain known as ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... plantation homesteads and dietary is drawn mainly from the writer's own observations in post-bellum times in which, despite the shifting of industrial arrangements and the decrease of wealth, these phases have remained apparent. Confirmation may be had in Philip Fithian Journal (Princeton, 1900); A. de Puy Van Buren, Jottings of a Year's Sojourn in the South (Battle Creek, Mich., ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... even as also he is known," and he hastily concludes that so it will be beyond the grave. It is because men imagine that eternity is only a very long space of time, filled up, as time here is, with dim, indistinct apprehensions, with a constantly shifting experience, with shallow feelings and ever diversified emotions, in fine, with all the variety of pleasure and pain, of ignorance and knowledge, that pertains to this imperfect and probationary ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... without naming the place or the persons, a story in which they were brought out in a singular manner. He was there fifteen or twenty years since, a guest at Verplanck's table. He describes the June sunshine which played through the shifting branches of tall elms on the smooth oaken floor of the old dining room, the plate of antique pattern on the sideboard and the portraits of revolutionary heroes on the walls. As they sat down to dinner, ...
— A Discourse on the Life, Character and Writings of Gulian Crommelin - Verplanck • William Cullen Bryant
... foreign to our subject to enter into the details of diplomatic arrangement, which, by shifting about peoples and territories from one ruler to another, sought to reach a political balance peacefully. The cardinal points of each nation's policy may be shortly stated. The Spanish cabinet and people objected to any solution which dismembered the empire. The ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... It is to Provencal shepherds that the Herald Angel appears; it is Provencaux who compose the bregado, the pilgrim company, that starts for Bethlehem; and Bethlehem is a village, always within easy walking distance, here in Provence. Yet it is not wholly simplicity that has brought about this shifting of the scene of the Nativity from the hill country of Judaea to the hill country of Southeastern France. The life and the look of the two lands have much in common; and most impressively will their common character be felt by one who walks ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... that there will be witnessed in the United States a gradual shifting of live stock centers. During the past half century, the great central West has been noted for the production of live stock, particularly for beef, mutton and wool, as an incident of its pioneer development. Already the production of large herds ...
— The Young Farmer: Some Things He Should Know • Thomas Forsyth Hunt
... Shifting my aim slightly, I pulled the trigger. The .375 Bonanza went off with a sound like an atom bomb in a telephone booth, and the slug whiffed between her arm and her body and drilled a crater in ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... mentality which inspires these attacks so wasteful in lives of soldiers, so ineffectual in their general result. In the records of this struggle along the courses of the two little rivers I have notes of upward of 100 attacks in considerable force, of which not a single one resulted in shifting the imperturbable Russian infantry from a trench, but each of which has been accompanied by ghastly loss ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... guns. This we quickly did. As we moved out a few shells skimmed over the kopjes and lobbed themselves where our lines had been. By this time our field guns and cow gun were well at it, and the Boers were shifting a bit. We dismounted, lined the kopje we had ridden up to, and watched the work of our gunners. Presently from half up the hill in front of us, I saw a flickering white flash and pom-pom-pom-pom-pom-pom went Delarey's gun of that name, followed by ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... perplexity and fear of the evil spirit who seemed so busy in his sheepfold, beheld a vision of an angel, who bade build the bridge where he himself had so kindly transported the materials; for there alone was sure foundation amid the broad sheet of shifting sand. All do not know how Bishop Grandison of Exeter proclaimed throughout his diocese indulgences, benedictions, and "participation in all spiritual blessings for ever," to all who would promote the ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... participate in the completion and testing of the carriage. At the time of his departure several units on the carriage were incomplete. A carburetor had not been built, nor had a satisfactory burner or belt-shifting device. Charles had experimented with various shifting levers just before leaving Springfield: however, as he reported later, he did not succeed in designing a workable mechanism.[15] Frank Duryea, now left to finish the work unassisted, continued the experiments with the ...
— The 1893 Duryea Automobile In the Museum of History and Technology • Don H. Berkebile
... The shifting wind brought quite a snow-storm, that covered us over about three inches deep. My company being very cold, I advised to stop at a house, the dim light of which was so tempting to the shivering company. I went to the door and asked permission to enter, giving our number, ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... the dog, then impulsively shifting the whip to her left hand, held out the right. And very gravely the Sagamore pup laid one paw in her dainty white ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... the Lizard on our lee. Wind south-south-west and the cargo shifting a point to the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... it'll get done by somebody. If this chap fails to do it, it'll be done by some other chap.... Will you come into Holyhead with me and enquire about trains? There's a rumour that a whole lot of them have been taken off. They're shifting ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... public, the large staff engaged in the interior of the building was able to cope with the extensive work before them practically without interruption, as throughout the whole of the department, gas is still laid on, and, beyond the shifting of one or two desks to within reasonable distance of gas jets, no inconvenience was caused after the burners and fittings—somewhat out of order through non-usage—were put to rights. The public hall, however, suffered most, as, when thus robbed of the electric light at one of the busiest ...
— The King's Post • R. C. Tombs
... prodigious hollow sea, such as I had never seen before on this coast; and this day a monstrous great fish, which I think is called a gobarto[318], put up his head to the steep-tubs where the cook was shifting the victuals, whom I thought the fish would have carried away. The 21st, being in lat. 18 deg. N. we had a counter-sea from the north, having in the same latitude, on our last voyage, encountered a similar sea from the south, both times in very calm weather. The 24th we had sight ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... in sitting are often due to a false sense of rest. Muscles not acting harmoniously tend to completely collapse. Many people sit without true rest, and are continually shifting their position in ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry
... play through all its shifting scenes; now laughed, now sighed, now felt the hot blush of shame as he listened to the atrocious mockery of everything which, from the time he had been an infant on his mother's knee, he had been taught to regard as good and pure. He ...
— Life in London • Edwin Hodder
... well. The warrior whose eye is open can see his enemy," said Magua, once more shifting his ground, when he found himself unable to penetrate the caution of his companion. "I have brought gifts to my brother. His nation would not go on the warpath, because they did not think it well, but their friends ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... lesson, for Peary's achievement became, under the skillful touch of that teacher, a type of all human achievement. I wish that I could reproduce that lesson for you—how vividly she pictured the situation that confronted the explorer,—the bitter cold, the shifting ice, the treacherous open leads, the lack of game or other sources of food supply, the long marches on scant rations, the short hours and the uncomfortable conditions of sleep; and how from these that fundamental lesson of pluck and endurance and courage came forth ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... pursuing, was induced to send the challenge to the Sun newspaper which led to the debate in the preceding pages. It is not improbable that while thinking on the points he proposed to defend, his naturally acute mind perceived their fallacy, as there was a gradual shifting of his position from the subject of the original challenge, till on the last evening of the debate he ended with the astonishing announcement that on the Tuesday following he would deliver a lecture against gambling in the same place. Since then, he has delivered ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... commenting on the existing abuses of kicking and dirty ball playing in the League arena, he says: "If the club owners would take the initiative in enforcing decorum upon their players, upon pain of fine or suspension, instead of shifting the burden and onus upon the umpire, the problem of order at ball games would be solved at once. But the majority of magnates and managers, while openly, hypocritically, deploring dirty ball playing, secretly wink at it and ...
— Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1895 • Edited by Henry Chadwick
... tried experiments on the Satellites of Jupiter. He found that he could delay the eclipse 16 minutes by going to the other side of the earths orbit; in fact he found he could make the eclipse happen when he liked by simply shifting his position. Finding that credit was given him for determining the velocity of light by this means he repeated it so often that the calendar began to get seriously wrong and there were riots, and Pope Gregory had to set ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... talked he had come closer to her and stood beside the shelf rock, one foot resting on it. At her question he suddenly looked down at the foot, shifting it nervously, while a flush started from above the blue scarf at his throat and ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... toiled on, backing and shifting their belabored trains, until the monster at last threatened the city with ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... The light of the sun during the Arctic summer is reflected by the atmosphere, and produces that mellow, golden, rapturous light that hangs like a veil of enchantment over the land of Mizora for six months in the year. It was followed by six months of the shifting iridescence of ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... Venice the Adriatic weds in vain, [21] And Death sits brooding o'er Campania's plain; O'er Baltic shores and through Hercynian groves, Stirring the soul, the mighty impulse moves; Art plies his tools, arid Commerce spreads her sail, And wealth is wafted in each shifting gale. The sons of Odin tread on Persian looms, And Odin's daughters breathe distilled perfumes; Loud minstrel Bards, in Gothic halls, rehearse The Runic rhyme, and "build the lofty verse:" The Muse, whose liquid notes were wont to swell To the soft ...
— Eighteen Hundred and Eleven • Anna Laetitia Barbauld
... a sound of busy splashing came to their ears, which promptly made them forget their fatigue. Shifting themselves very slowly and with utter silence, they found that the place of ambush had been most skilfully chosen. In perfect hiding themselves, they commanded a clear and near view of the new dam and ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... begins the cliffs to scale 450 To silence leaving the deserted vale, Up the green mountain tracking Summer's feet, Each twilight earlier call'd the Sun to meet, With earlier smile the ray of morn to view Fall on his shifting hut that gleams mid smoking dew; 455 Bless'd with his herds, as in the patriarch's age, The summer long to feed from stage to stage; O'er azure pikes serene and still, they go, And hear the rattling thunder far below; Or lost ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... missiles above us; but, as nobody in our immediate neighborhood was hurt, we at length voted the performance of the artillery to be, on the whole, rather fine. During intermissions, while the scenes were shifting, as it were, we began to feel a disposition to talk and joke over ...
— "Shiloh" as Seen by a Private Soldier - With Some Personal Reminiscences • Warren Olney
... it seemed to Richard more or less like a rapidly shifting series of pictures, all wonderfully coloured. The first was that of the electric light of the big car's interior shining on the faces of Uncle Rufus and Aunt Ruth, on Mr. Kendrick and Hugh Benson—the latter a little pale but quite composed. Hugh had owned that he felt seriously inadequate for the ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... he spoke, and shifting his pistol so as to cover now one, now another of the group, he reached the tavern-porch. Some one opened the door of the barroom, which swung inwards. The highwayman strode directly to the bar, and there stood, facing the open door, while he ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... see it lighting up the overhanging haze as it moved swiftly from place to place beyond the horizon line. At one time, there were three or four such areas of bright water north of us, but as they were below the curve of the earth's convexity we could not see them, and traced them only by the shifting belts or patches ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... infection of our mental strife, Which, though it gives no bliss, yet spoils for rest; And we should win thee from thy own fair life, Like us distracted, and like us unblest. Soon, soon thy cheer would die, Thy hopes grow timorous, and unfix'd thy powers, And thy clear aims be cross and shifting made; And then thy glad perennial youth would fade, Fade, and grow old at last, and die ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... were out of water, and that within a hundred yards of the place the boat was running past. Standing on a short distance, or far enough to give himself room, the mate put his helm down, and tacked the boat. The flapping of the sail, and the little movement of shifting over the sheet, awoke Rose, who was immediately apprized of the discovery. As soon as round, the boat went glancing up to the spars, and presently was riding by one, Jack Tier having caught hold of a topmast-shroud, ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... ascending vapors,—Naples and the adjoining villages at its base gleaming in the distance like a fringe of pearls on a regal mantle. Nearer by, the picturesque rocky shores of the island of Capri seem to pulsate through the dreamy, shifting mists that veil its sides; and the sea shimmers and glitters like the neck of a peacock with an iridescent mingling of colors: the whole air is a glorifying medium, rich ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... lit up, regarded her from his new position, which, with the shifting of the candles, for the first time afforded him a full view of her face. "How many years have passed since first we met!" she resumed, in a voice which she mainly endeavored to maintain at its former pitch of composure, and eying him ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... the attention of the mind of man. It is a very long trail, rough and unblazed, wandering over the continents of the earth. Those who have travelled it came in contact with the mysteries of an unknown world. They faced the terrors of the shifting forms of the earth, of volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, storms, and ice fields. They witnessed the extinction of forests and animal groups, and the changing forms of lakes, rivers, and mountains, and, indeed, ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... firebox went up the chimney all night, and fell in showers on deck. Every now and again a spark would burn through the "Wagga rug" of a sleeping shearer, and he'd wake suddenly and get up and curse. It was no use shifting round, for the wind was all ways, and the boat steered north, south, east, and west to humour the river. Occasionally a low branch would root three or four passengers off their wool bales, and they'd ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... and the sails swung round to take the wind, which, for the last hour, had been shifting to the south-east. In half an hour we were up in the mouth of the channel. It was a rather narrow opening, not more than thirty-five or forty rods in width, with considerable ice floating about. We were in some doubt ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... the completion of the dive, and saw his hostess, a few feet above the water, bend her head forward, straighten out her arms and lock the hands to form the arch before her head, and, so shifting the balance of her body, change it from the horizontal to the ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... by which he had lowered himself from the extreme tip of the mizzen yard-arm, sent him dropping into the sea with a faint despairing scream; but, the first mate and lookout man led them a fine dance, up the shrouds on one side and down on the other, and shifting from the mizzen to the mainmast, and from that to the foretop again by sliding down the stays, or catching hold of the falls and halliards when the pursuit grew too hot—until both parties, the hunters and the hunted alike, paused for a moment ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... most brothers," said Miss Jewell, shifting along the locker and placing her hand affectionately on ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... down into the empty cow-pastures, and there all her uneasiness returned. There, where every tuft, if one can only see it, is clothed with beauty and variety, she saw merely an ugly field. And the wind, which is ever shifting there, swept whistling by them and whispered of ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... prime significance both in decoration and in organization—it, to a great extent, takes the place occupied elsewhere by the totem, and it is not always identical with the eponymous object of the clan, though this may be an accidental result of shifting social relations (new combinations of clans, or a borrowing of ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... he home, And kept shifting the sack about; And when at last he came to his door, There was old Mother ...
— All About the Little Small Red Hen • Anonymous
... Delano again glanced at Don Benito, but the latter's eyes were averted; while abruptly and awkwardly shifting the subject, he made some peevish allusion to the calm, and then, without apology, once more, with his attendant, withdrew to the opposite bulwarks, ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... our use. Those vast volumes of water rest on the surface of a whirling sphere travelling through space at fearful speed. The slightest derangement, the slightest lack of balance in our motion round the sun, the slightest shifting of the poles, and mountains of water miles high would sweep over the continents and wipe out—not only one small city—but the entire human ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... is not put forward as the poet's theme. His theme is man, in the two contrasted moods of joyous emotion, or grave reflection. The shifting scenery ministers to the varying mood. Thomson, in the Seasons (1726), sets himself to render natural phenomena as they truly are. He has left us a vivid presentation in gorgeous language of the naturalistic calendar ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... the stranger's black eyes upon herself. He, too, wished to know why she stayed in Mexico, but in his sharp, shifting look there was a penetration quite different from that of the guileless Michel. He bestrode a magnificent horse that seemed made for armor, whereas he himself would surely have been crushed under ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... wind's voice, whose speech she did not understand. Suddenly they were within the Palace garden, with its winding, torchlit walks, and the terraces at the side; suddenly again, they had mounted the Palace steps, and the doors were open, and she was confronted with lights and music and shifting, dazzling figures. She stood still, clasped her hands, and gave Haward a piteous look. Her face, for all its beauty and its painted roses, was strangely the child's face that had lain upon his breast, ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... next feller is. He will wonder why he happens to be himself and the next feller HIMSELF. He wonders where himself leaves off and the rest of the world begins. I been that way myself—all wonderized, so that I felt jest like I was a melting piece of the hull creation, and it was all shifting and drifting and changing and flowing, and not solid anywhere, and I could hardly keep myself from flowing into it. It makes a person feel awful queer, like seeing a ghost would. It makes him feel like HE wasn't no solider than a ghost himself. ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... construction is bad. This calamity does not often occur in fine novels, but in really good work another calamity does occur with far too much frequency—namely, the tantalising of the reader at a critical point by a purposeless, wanton, or negligent shifting of the interest from the major to the minor theme. A sad example of this infantile trick is to be found in the thirty-first chapter of Rhoda Fleming, wherein, well knowing that the reader is tingling for the interview between Roberts and Rhoda, the author, unable ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... The colored people are wedded to associations, and when you destroy these you destroy half of the happiness of their lives. They make a home, and are so fond of it that they prefer it, squalid though it be, to the comparative ease and luxury of a shifting, roaming life. Well, the emancipated slaves, in coming North, left old associations behind them, and the love for the past was so strong that they could not find much beauty in the new life so suddenly opened to them. Thousands of the disappointed, huddled ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... weakling's symbol of a power That spins the luminous girdle of Saturn in sure hands, And frames the awful face of God in the shifting boreal light. My soul is destiny and immortality; It flashes in the eyes of the tempest, glows along The phosphorescent billows where the hand of the Almighty Is laid for a moment on the breast of the sea, And the sea smiles; My ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... assumed a form singularly beautiful. It might have been compared to a crest of gigantic feathers, the diadem of the mountain, high arched, and drooping downward, with the hues delicately shaded off, and the whole shifting and tremulous as the plumage on a warrior's helm. The glare of the flame spread, luminous and crimson, over the dark and rugged ground on which they stood, and drew an innumerable variety of shadows from crag and hollow. An oppressive and sulphureous exhalation served to increase ...
— Zicci, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... thousands of colored people were moving northward. "Exoduses" have been before; Kansas still remembers the exodus from Tennessee of forty years ago; but this latest exodus had no one starting-point nor any single destination. It was a vast shifting of Negro populations from below Mason and Dixon's line, and it swept northward toward all the great industrial centers. Its cause and consequences make a remarkable story, for which there is no room ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... no pains in preparing these medicines. They did not, shifting all responsibility, run to a chemist or apothecary with a little slip of paper; with their own hands they picked, pulled, pounded, stamped, shredded, dropped, powdered, and distilled, regardless of expense, or trouble, or hard work. Truly they deserved to be cured. They ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... epoch in his life. After the lapse of thirty years, when Ootacamund had long enjoyed the advantage of a book-club and a circulating library, the tradition of Macaulay and his novel still lingered on with a tenacity most unusual in the ever-shifting society of an ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... trappings of toil are for one hour loosened by the hands of imaginative sympathy. What happiness a single theatre can contain! And those of maturer years, or of more meditative temperament, sitting at the pantomime, can extract out of the shifting scenes meanings suitable to themselves; for the pantomime is a symbol or adumbration of human life. Have we not all known Harlequin, who rules the roast, and has the pretty Columbine to himself? Do we not ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... the dim background of haze, With the shreds of platoons inward scudding, and fainter their batteries blaze; As the mist curtain falls all is blank; as it lifts, a wild picture out glares, A wild shifting picture of battle, and dread our warm hopefulness shares; But never the braves of the 'White Star' have sullied their fame in defeat, And they will not to-day see the triumph pass by them ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... Around the house he flits, shifting and shadowy, over the ground he once paced in ringing armour—armed still, but his very armour a shadow! It cannot keep out the arrow of the cock's cry, and the heart that pierces is no shadow. Where now is the loaded axe with which, ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... place of colonies one spends much more, having to consume on the garrison all the income from the state, so that the acquisition turns into a loss, and many more are exasperated, because the whole state is injured; through the shifting of the garrison up and down all become acquainted with hardship, and all become hostile, and they are enemies who, whilst beaten on their own ground, are yet able to do hurt. For every reason, therefore, such guards are as useless as ...
— The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... when in mountain-glades the trees Dash storm-tormented boughs together. Oft Tydeides clutched at Aias' brawny thighs, But could not stir his steadfast-rooted feet. Oft Aias hurled his whole weight on him, bowed His shoulders backward, strove to press him down; And to new grips their hands were shifting aye. All round the gazing people shouted, some Cheering on glorious Tydeus' son, and some The might of Aias. Then the giant swung The shoulders of his foe to right, to left; Then gripped him 'neath the waist; with one fierce ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... see his steady military step, his erect posture, his compressed lips, his firmly-knitted brow, and his eye full of fire, I cannot help thinking, Sir, they would all feel somewhat queer. There would be, I imagine, not a little awkward moving and shifting in their seats. They would expect soon to hear the roar of the lion, even if they did ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... his designs in a stage soliloquy, disguised himself in a tow wig and beard, and a railway rug turned up with yellow calico; and the scene shifting to the palace, he introduced himself to the Elderly Princess as the greatest ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... humour and in no genial mood, and was about passing without any courtesy of the sort, when the stranger, without taking the pipe from his mouth, raised the bottle, and with it beckoned him familiarly, while, with a sort of lurch of the head and shoulders, and at the same time shifting his seat to the end of the bench, he pantomimically invited him to share his seat and his cheer. There was a divine fragrance of whiskey about the spot, and Bob half relented; but he remembered his promise just as he began to waver, ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... struggle which would have done credit to any fencing school in Europe. Rupert Holliday was as active as a cat, and was ever on the move, constantly shifting his ground, advancing and retreating with astonishing lightness and activity. At first he was too eager, and his instructor touched him twice over his guard. Then, rendered cautious, he fought more carefully, although with no less quickness than before; and for some minutes there was no advantage ...
— The Cornet of Horse - A Tale of Marlborough's Wars • G. A. Henty
... on deck till eight bells (8 P.M.), when the starboard-watch go below, and we, the larboard-watch, have the first night-watch—just as they had it last night, and will the next after. There is very probably plenty of work to do in shifting and trimming sails and rigging till eight bells again strike (12 P.M.), and then we summon the other watch with: 'Starbowlings, ahoy!' and go below in turn; and so ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... way in which one can maintain himself among the shifting currents {150} of popularity. It comes and goes like a tide. The man who tries to lean on it is simply swept by the rising tide into self-conceit, and then stranded by the ebb of that same tide on the flats of despair. Popularity is as fickle as the April winds, and one can trust it ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... the family) that the mere payment of his creditors cost the honourable Baronet several hundreds yearly; but this was a delight he could not forego; he had a savage pleasure in making the poor wretches wait, and in shifting from court to court and from term to term the period of satisfaction. What's the good of being in Parliament, he said, if you must pay your debts? Hence, indeed, his position as a senator was not a ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sound, under the guidance of which every writer is content to remain who has been strictly trained in the study of good models. But in this way, as a stylist, he has lost his most valuable possessions, and stands condemned to remain reclining, his life long, on the dangerous and barren shifting sand of newspaper style—that is, if he do not wish to fall back into the Hegelian mire. Nevertheless, he has succeeded in making himself famous for a couple of hours in our time, and perhaps in another couple of hours people will ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... say to you." He flung open the door into the hall and, taking the general by the arm, fairly dragged him from the room and into the one opposite. The lieutenant and his men looked on in amazement, shuffling their feet and shifting their rifle butts noisily ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... asked, for Jude had risen and was awkwardly shifting from foot to foot. "Well, so long! ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... from solar harms Had she to spread; with shifting arms She dodged him from the sun; Mother and sister both in heart, She did a gracious woman's part, ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... it, shooting away from her with all the sail he could pack; and had he taken Armstrong's advice to have gone before the wind, he had probably escaped; but keeping his tacks down, either by the wind's shifting, or ill steerage, or both, he was taken aback with his sails, and the Swallow came a second time very nigh to him. He had now, perhaps, finished the fight very desperately, if death, who took a swift passage in a grape shot, had not interposed, ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... academies and dictionary-makers, and journalists; you must have a language like that which your own Burns, whom I read of in Chateaubriand, used; or like the brave, old, mellow tongue—unchanged for centuries—stuffed with the strangest, quaintest, richest, raciest idioms and odd solemn words, full of shifting meanings and associations, at once pathetic and familiar, homely and graceful—the language which I write in, and which has never yet been defiled by calculating men of science or jack-a-dandy litterateurs.'" The above sentences may be taken ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... which were originally banded ought to remain bright, and those which originally remained bright ought to become banded during the rotation of the analyzer. The general effect to the eye will consequently be a general shifting of the bands through one-fourth of the space ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall |
