"Stark" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stark naked in the Morning at Sunrising, and bound to a Post, so that he could not stir Hand nor Foot, but as he was mov'd; and was placed with his Face Eastward against the Sun. In the Afternoon they turned his Face toward the West, that ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various
... front in that region two lines deep the line had been smashed. That crowded hour of stark fighting had cracked the boasted invincible line of Hindenburg and sent the foe flying in confusion toward their third and most formidable line. Thousands of prisoners and scores of guns were among ...
— Army Boys in the French Trenches • Homer Randall
... was fretished; and the Abbot durst not speak to them. I called them all before me, and forgot their names, but took from every man the keys of his office, and made new officers for my time here, perchance as stark knaves as the others. It shall be expedient for you to give him a lesson and tell the poor fool what he should do. Among his monks I found corruption of the worst sort, because they dwell in the forest from ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... luck. Poljensio, who was washing sponges on the platform outside, and had for this reason not been at his brother's house, where he slept, when that domicile was searched, was called in, and while his official master rested, was made to strip himself stark naked, and turn his few slight garments—the clothing of a Moro is always an uncertain quantity—inside out to show that nothing was ...
— Anting-Anting Stories - And other Strange Tales of the Filipinos • Sargent Kayme
... about him, he did not see and could not feel. And so as the century is old the booming tide is full, and John Barclay in his power—a bubble in the Divine consciousness, a mere vision in the real world—stands stark mad before his phantasm, dreaming that it is all real, and chattering to his ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... in a whisper. She clenched her hands and leapt from the chair, fighting down her grief and with such a stark horror in her beautiful eyes that from my very soul I longed to be ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... from the shed, Sunbeam shied violently. Looking to one side, she beheld in the shadow of a mass of scrub-oaks the body of a horse lying stark and still. Close beside the head was a dark spot in ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... think she could have gone mad? People sometimes do go stark mad suddenly. Because, if so, and if you could be mistaken in thinking you saw her in ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... 'Ermitaj' and when they were all good and drunk, one of Vladimir's guests, Prince Galitzin, bet the host the price of the supper and a champagne bath for all, that he could induce the famous danseuse Mshinskaya to descend the stairs stark naked and walk among the tables below without ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... a loathsome link, between a living man and his skeleton; and not only a link between them, but a grim caricature of both. Some have been coated with varnish. They glisten infamously. Picture a decrepit and rather gaunt relative of your own, writhing in a fit, stark naked, and varnished ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... to her stark with anguish, yet in utter submission. Her every word cut him to the heart so sharply that he felt he should die. She did not so much as notice his suffering and continued delightedly to revenge herself on him for the annoyance of ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... which ran west before us was not a pleasant one. Across its horizon hung a pall of factory smoke; and unlovely hamlets, each with its gaunt pit-head gear and stark brick chimney, sprinkled the bare fields between, for hedgerows were scanty and fences of rusty colliery rope replaced them. Yet it was a wealthy country, and bred keen-witted, enterprising men, who, uncouth ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... been talking myself hoarse, showing up their injustice, saying all a man could say to bring them to reason, and not an inch could I move them. I do believe Philip has driven my father stark mad with these abominable stories of his sister's, which I verily believe she ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the honour of Clan Diarmaid I took the name Munro. My cousin here cares to have none of his immediate relatives make a living by steel at any rank less than a cornal's, or a major's at the very lowest Frankfort, and Landsberg, and the stark field of Leipzig were the last I saw of foreign battles, and the God's truth is they were my bellyful. I like a bit splore, but give it to me in our old style, with the tartan instead of buff, and the target for breastplate and taslets. ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... by this, or was it chance, She past my way. Up started from my side The old lion, glaring with his whelpless eye, Silent; but when she saw me lying stark, Dishelmed and mute, and motionlessly pale, Cold even to her, she sighed; and when she saw The haggard father's face and reverend beard Of grisly twine, all dabbled with the blood Of his own son, shuddered, a twitch of pain Tortured her mouth, and o'er ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... Did you ever read that garrulous, pleasant history? He tells his story like an old man, past political service, bragging to his sons on winter evenings of the part he took in public transactions when "his old cap was new." Full of scandal, which all true history is. No palliatives; but all the stark wickedness that actually gives the momentum to national actors. Quite the prattle of age and outlived importance. Truth and sincerity staring out upon you perpetually in alto relievo. Himself a party man, he makes you a party man. None of the cursed philosophical Humeian ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... The note brought him stark awake and eager for the conference. He had begun to drowse after a good home dinner and sixty hours without sleep, but this acted like an electric shock. He was keen and alert, for he knew that this was the night ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... "I may now bid farewell to life, these cursed witches will convey me to the pantry or cellar of some nobleman, and there leave me, to pay with my neck for their robberies; or they will abandon me stark naked, to freeze to death upon the sea-brink of old Shire Caer, {3} or some other cold, distant place;" but on reflecting that all the old hags whom I had once known had long been dead and buried, and perceiving that these people took pleasure in holding or waving me ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... put poison into some of the apples, hoping that Sir Gawaine would eat one and die. But by ill fortune it befell that the good Knight Sir Patrise took a poisoned apple, and in a few moments he lay dead and stark in his seat. At this sight all the Knights leapt to their feet, but said nothing, for they bethought them that Queen Guenevere had made them the dinner, and feared that ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... of June, Gone like the rose the winter through, Save in the ribbed anatomy Of ebon line the moonlight drew, Stark on the snow, of tower or tree, Like letters of a dead ...
— The Lonely Dancer and Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... Caroline stands stark still: she opens wide her eyes which are already considerably widened by amazement. Being inwardly epileptic, she says not a word: she merely gazes at Adolphe. Under the satanic fires of their gaze, Adolphe turns half way round toward the dining-room; but he asks himself whether ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... thousand devils, I have discovered a new torture for her heart. She thought to solace her life with a love-episode! Sweet little epicure that she was! She shall have her little crooked lover, shan't she? Oh, yes! She shall have him, cold and stark and livid, with that great, black, heavy hunch, which no back, however broad, can bear, Death, sitting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... under the fascination of a moonlit Midsummer Eve, to imagine, when she chanced upon a gentleman in fancy dress of the right period, that at last she had realised her dream of a hero of romance; but she was stark Midsummer-mad to suppose, when she met him early next morning with his costume unchanged, that he would keep it on till he came to tea with the family, and then, still wearing it, waft her ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... to the Long-hoary, the Grandfather, yesterday, his ears would have been deaf to them; and now that thou speakest them to the Sea-eagle, this joyous man on the Glittering Plain, he cannot do according to them, for there is no other land than this which can hold him. Here he is strong and stark, and full of joy and love; but otherwhere he would be but a gibbering ghost drifting down the wind of night. Therefore in whatsoever thou mayst do within this land I will stand by thee and help thee; but not one inch beyond it may my foot go, whether it be down into the brine of ...
— The Story of the Glittering Plain - or the Land of Living Men • William Morris
... had previously been very light, and the vessel had scarcely any steerage way on her. To my intense satisfaction I noticed that it was now almost a stark calm. ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... doing, his shoulders came brusquely in contact with one of them, which happened to be unfastened, and it swung open, revealing to his gaze two stark-white white boys, one of them holding an enormous pistol and both staring at him in stupor of ultimate horror. For, to the glassy eyes of Penrod and Sam, the stratagem of the young colored man, thus dropping ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... alacrity. "Your word is enough. And while Alden finds wherewithal to feed and quench his thirst, John Howland shall bring a mantle or cloak from my house to throw about him, for it is not seemly that our people should see us entertaining a man stark as ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... have to use rather far-fetched words) which are so essential to good hosts and hostesses. A different standard is looked for now, by the rising generations knocking at the doors, behind which the dignified past is lying as stark as King ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... histories of Peire de Maenzac, of Guillaume de Caibestaing, of Geoffrey Rudel, of Ulrich von Liechtenstein, of the Monk of Pucibot, of Pons de Capdueilh, and even of Peire Vidal and Guillaume de Balaun, survive to prove it was a serious thing, a stark and life-disposing reality. En cor gentil domnei per mort no passa, as Nicolas himself declares. The service of domnei involved, it in fact invited, anguish; it was a martyrdom whereby the lover was uplifted ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... and swords of the iris flowers along the terrace edge—his favourite flower that had the night's own colour on its curving crumpled petals. He turned round to the house. Big, unlighted, not a soul beside himself to live in all that part of it. Stark loneliness! He could not go on living here alone. And yet, so long as there was beauty, why should a man feel lonely? The answer—as to some idiot's riddle—was: Because he did. The greater the beauty, the greater the loneliness, for at the back of beauty was harmony, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... has a number of circumstances to combine with those general ideas, and to take into his consideration. Circumstances are infinite, are infinitely combined, are variable and transient: he who does not take them into consideration is not erroneous, but stark mad; dat operam ut cum ratione insaniat; he is metaphysically mad. A statesman, never losing sight of principles, is to be guided by circumstances; and judging contrary to the exigencies of the moment, he may ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... curiously and as he looked he saw him start and stare with wide-opened eyes into the dim corners of the tent. Ballantyne had forgotten Thresk's presence. He stood there, his body rigid, his mouth half-open and fear looking out from his eyes and every line in his face—stark paralysing fear. Then he saw Thresk staring at him, but he was too sunk in terror to resent ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... case is one where the diagnosis lay between hysteria and epilepsy. The symptoms were as follows: The patient had attacks in which she became unconscious, gasped, and spittle ran from her mouth. She also bit her tongue. She becomes stiff, eyes stark, and is left tired and weak. These attacks were first noticed about five years ago. Since then she has had about five similar attacks, the last three coming within five months. The last two were within a day of each other and frightened her so she came to the hospital. ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... within sight, no country ever has. But since the advent of "freedom" it is scarred and wounded; great scar-patches stretch here and there where woods have been felled by the avarice illumined in the souls of landowners; hundreds and thousands of bare poles stand stark and stiff against the river light which have been glorious pyramids of leaf shedding welcome shadows on the river path; and many a bold round hill like the ballons of the Vosges, once rich of grass as they, now shorn of wood, and even of undergrowth, lift a bare stony ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... senior doctor before making the splendid plunge. She did not want to have Larry buy her anything more and she didn't want Doctor Philip and Margery to think her stark mad to go behaving like a princess before the princess purse was actually in her hands. But she had to have pretty things, a lot of them, had to have them quick. Did the doctor mind very much advancing her some money? He could keep ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... of the fence, an old and long neglected apple orchard, a tumble-down log barn, and the wreck of a house with the fireplace and chimney standing stark and alone, told the story. The place was one of those old ranches, purchased by the Power Company for the water rights, and deserted by those who once had called it home. From the gate, ancient wagon tracks, overgrown with weeds, ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... had the said glass been there set up, nothing more would have been wanting, in order to have taken a man's character, but to have taken a chair and gone softly, as you would to a dioptrical bee-hive, and look'd in,—view'd the soul stark naked;—observed all her motions,—her machinations;—traced all her maggots from their first engendering to their crawling forth;—watched her loose in her frisks, her gambols, her capricios; and after some notice of her more solemn deportment, consequent upon such frisks, &c.—then ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... a dozen people following, all awe-stricken and silent. When they came to the door, they peeped in over each other's shoulders at the two poor children, stretched out stiff and stark, the colour of death, their jaws dropped, their glazed eyes shining between the half-closed ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... idea of the passage, as well as to the obscure individual expressions. Most strikingly, then, he goes on to say, carrying out the allusion, 'and that he shall stand at the last upon the dust.' Little did it boot the murdered man, lying there stark, with the knife in his bosom, that the murderer should be slain by the swift justice of his kinsman-avenger, but Job felt that, in some mysterious way, God would appear for him, after he had been laid in the dust, and that he would somehow share in the gladness of His ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... without a token from her multiplied he came in as well for hours—and these indeed mainly on the bench of desolation—of sitting stiff and stark in presence of the probability that he had lost everything for ever. When he passed the Royal he never turned an eyelash, and when he met Captain Roper on the Front, three days after having been introduced to him, he "cut him dead"—another privileged consequence ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... several days the B. B.'s studied severely; United States histories were in great demand, and the pages of Shakespeare were turned over for inspiration. Each boy was to compile his own speeches, and many hurried consultations were held over back fences, and in haylofts; one boy, who represented General Stark, selected Hamlet's 'to be or not to be.' A companion objected to the lines as inappropriate, but General Stark replied, "Well, I know the piece because I've spoken it in school, and I ain't going to ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... just the man needed to do that job at Bennington. I went as messenger to Portsmouth and heard John Langdon, the speaker of the New Hampshire assembly, pledge his property to fit out Stark. That's the kind of ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane
... a curious picture within that gloomy chamber underground. The miner lying stark, stretched to his full great length, appearing enormous in the flickering candle-light, and the child, white-faced, big-eyed, but steady as a veteran, wiping the blood from the ragged ...
— The Mascot of Sweet Briar Gulch • Henry Wallace Phillips
... in a child's garden! The only place where it might fitly grow is by the side of the road that led Childe Roland to the Dark Tower: between the bit of "stubbed ground" and the marsh near to the "palsied oak," with its roots set in the "bog, clay and rubble, sand and stark ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... as the companion of the darkest hour of her life, as the one who saved her from death. You—good Lord!—do you pretend to put yourself in comparison with me? You, with your other affairs, and your conscious falsity to her, with me! Why, but for me, she would be drifting down the river, and lying stark and dead on the beach of Anticosti. That is what I have done for her. And what have you done? I might laughed over the joke of it before I knew her; but now, since I know her, and her, when you force me to say what you ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... celebration, attempted in Dickinson, took place last Monday. It exceeded the anticipations of all and proved to be a grand success—a day that will long be remembered. The day dawned bright and cool. Early in the morning people began to arrive and by ten o'clock the largest crowd ever assembled in Stark County lined the principal streets. The train from the west brought a number of Medora people, amongst them Hon. Theodore Roosevelt, the orator ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... own glorious country precipitated herself upon the foe? The blood of England, Scotland, and of Ireland, flowed in the same stream, and drenched the same field. When the chill morning dawned, their dead lay cold and stark together;—in the same deep pit their bodies were deposited; the green corn of spring is now breaking from their commingled dust; the dew falls from heaven upon their union in the grave. Partakers in every peril, in the glory shall we not be permitted to participate; and shall we be told as ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... housings bright are trailed amid their gore; Dark blood is on their manes and sides, all deeply clotted o'er; All vainly now the spur would strike these cold and rounded flanks, To wake them to their wonted speed amid the rapid ranks: Here the bold riders red and stark upon the sands lie down, Who in their friendly shadows slept throughout the halt at noon. Oh, Allah! who will give me back my terrible array? See where it straggles 'long the fields for leagues on leagues away, Like riches from a spendthrift's hand flung prodigal to earth. Lo! steed ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... cab, Clay was already in the right-hand control seat and was running down the instrument panel check. The sergeant lifted the hatch door between the two control seats and punched on a light to illuminate the stark compartment at the lower front end of the car. A steel grill with a dogged handle on the upper side covered the opening under the hatch cover. Two swing-down bunks were racked up against the walls on either side and the front hull door was without an inside handle. This was the patrol ...
— Code Three • Rick Raphael
... the frozen dead Whom earth in the earth we lay, While the bearers softly tread, And the mourners kneel and pray; From thy semblance, dumb and stark, The soul has taken its flight— Out of the finite dark, Into the ...
— Three Unpublished Poems • Louisa M. Alcott
... groaning in the kitchen, for she needed help to streak the corpse, and the family had lived so close and solitary, that she knew of no one at hand to whom to apply, and she feared that the dead would become stark and cold, before she could find help; Jacob was not within, he had gone to London, to fetch a Doctor of their own creed, and was not likely to ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... side, but obviously to see the killing he was certain would take place. He smirked greasily up into the face of Wolf Larsen, who seemed not to see him. But the Cockney was unabashed, though mad, stark mad. He turned to ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... carronades— still unsecured, with their rammers and sponges flung down on the deck beside them, shot lying in the scuppers, overturned wadding-tubs, cutlasses, pistols, boarding-pikes, strewed all over the deck, and— horrible sight—several dark, silent figures lying stark and still in pools of blood, just as they had fallen in the fight. The ship's davits were empty, both her gigs having been lowered to facilitate the transfer of the plunder to the brigantine; her long-boat also was in the water, ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... they were ordered into the "brig," a jail-house between two guns on the main-deck, where prisoners are kept. Here they laid for some time, stretched out stark and stiff, with their arms folded over their breasts, like so many effigies of the Black Prince on his monument ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... is in the agony of that recurring spiritual conflict from which only David's song can deliver him; and when the boy-shepherd has crept his way into the darkness of the tent, he sees the monarch with arms outstretched against its poles, dumb, sightless, and stark, like the serpent in the solitude of the ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... thought. She looked here, she looked there; in the bed, in the washstand drawer, under the cushions of the only chair, even in the grate and up the chimney; but she found nothing—nothing! She was standing stark and open-mouthed in the middle of the floor, when the others entered, but recovered herself at sight of their surprise, and, explaining what had happened, set them all to search, sister, nephew, ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... ability to defend myself, as well as my dangerousness in attack. You are to use the sword with the goad point set in it; so that, if you succeed in hitting me, you will tear a long slash in my hide; for I am going to fence with you in my skin only, stark; mother-naked as I was born. I shall use the unaltered sword and you will have on your fencing-tunic, so that if I hit you, it won't hurt you nearly as much as a hit from you will ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... was flooded in moonlight and the birch trees wavered their stark shadows across it like supplicating arms. Suddenly I heard the soft padded sound of snow falling upon snow, to slowly perceive a figure, the slender figure of a young child attempting to arouse itself ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... left on my mind by my experiences in the Great Republic. It may well be that a long list of inconsistencies might be made out for any country, just as for any individual; but so far as my knowledge goes the United States stands out as preeminently the "Land of Contrasts"—the land of stark, staring, and stimulating inconsistency; at once the home of enlightenment and the happy hunting ground of the charlatan and the quack; a land in which nothing happens but the unexpected; the home of Hyperion, but no less the haunt of the satyr; always the land of promise, but not invariably ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... and over another summit to Yucca Pass Casey dreamed, while the stark, scarred buttes on either side regarded him with enigmatic calm. Since the first wagon train had worried over the rough deserts on their way to California, the bleak hills of Nevada had listened while prospectors dreamed aloud and cackled over their ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... sent for, and all possible efforts made to rouse him, but in vain. About sunset the pulse ceased to beat, and it was only a lump of lifeless clay that lay there so still and stark. This was his death—the mystery of his life went back beyond my knowledge of him, and will only be ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... known as "the squaw campaign." Hand was a competent officer, but was much pestered, at Fort Pitt, with the machinations of tories, who were numerous among the borderers. Succeeded at Fort Pitt in 1778, by Brig.-Gen. Lachlan McIntosh, Hand in turn succeeded Stark in command at Albany. We find him, in 1779, actively engaged on Sullivan's campaign against the New York Indians, and in 1780 he became adjutant general. A member of congress in 1784-85, he was in 1790 a member of the constitutional convention of Pennsylvania, and died at Rockford, Lancaster ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... after waiting a day and burying his dead, drew off from the field, and we, remaining there, were able to claim the victory, which, however, my son, was one of a kind which was scarce worth winning. It was a sad sight to see so many men stretched stark and dead, and these killed, not in fighting with a foreign foe, but with other Englishmen. It made us all mightily sad, and if at that moment Lord Essex had had full power from the Parliament to treat, methinks that the quarrel could have been settled, all being mightily ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty
... the world be growing dark, And twilight cool thy potent day inclose! The sun, beneath the round earth sunk, still glows All the night through, sleepless and young and stark. Oh, be thy spirit faithful as the lark, More daring: in the midnight of thy woes, Dart through them, higher than earth's shadow goes, Into the Light of which thou art a spark! Be willing to be blind—that, in thy night, The Lord may bring his Father to ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... beside him in an instant, and saw at his feet Bignold worn to a skeleton, with eyes starting from his head and fixed on Grassette in agony and stark fear. ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... stark fiscal facts of the 1960's clearly demonstrates where the primary blame for rising prices ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... heads, the old medicine-men, the great-grandmothers of the tribes, huddling in the frowzy, foul-smelling tepees, were legends of no such bitter, biting cold as this. Cattle lying here and there stark and stiffened, hardy ponies, long used to Dakota blizzards, even some among the Indian dogs had succumbed to its severity, while over at the agent's, behind double-listed doors and frost-covered ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... light now fell full on her face. Had she deliberately challenged me to look into her secret mind if I could? Anything like the stark insensibility of that young girl to every refinement of feeling, to every becoming doubt of herself, to every customary timidity of her age and sex in the presence of a man who had not disguised his unfavorable opinion of her, I never met with in all my experience of the world ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... flock is not the same thing as a number of sheep. On the stark, wild headlands of the White Mountains, as many as thirty Bighorn are known to run in loose, fluctuating hordes; in fenced pastures, two to three hundred; close-herded on the range, two to three thousand; but however artificially augmented, the flock is always a conscious adjustment. There ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... visited him. He was just alone again, that was all—alone, as in reality he had always been alone, without having the sense or power to see or to acknowledge it. All he had said had been the mere flotsam of the moment, and now it stood stark and irrevocable between himself ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... over the largest colony in the world, consider themselves so precious they quarantine everything and everybody but lunatics. Why not quarantine lunatics? Are they not dangerous? Did not a whole city go mad? Stark, staring, raving mad—Mad Melbourne—and yet a Maltese terrier is quarantined in the same port ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... the Crimson Cliffs for a second time, we left the "Lady Franklin" and "Sophia," in a stark calm, to do their best. Fewer ships, the faster progress; and heartily did all cheer when, at midnight, we turned to the N.W., leaving the second division to do their work in Wolstenholme Sound. So ended the memorable 14th of August: it will be, doubtless, ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... rebellion. He felt Murrell was bent on committing him to an aggregate of crime he would never have considered possible, and all for love of a girl—a pink-cheeked, white-faced chit of a girl—disgust boiled up within him, rage choked him; this was the rotten spot in Murrell's make-up, the man was mad-stark mad! ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... climbed the frowning escarpments of the Coast Range, gave himself up to the spell of a region which is still potent with the charm of the wilderness untamed. There had always lingered in his receptive mind a memory of profound beauty, a stark beauty of color and outline, an unhampered freedom, opportunity as vast as the mountains that looked from their cool heights down on the changeful sea and the hushed forests, brooding in the ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... where the shadow foemen Hang about us grim and stark, Broken spars and shredded canvas, We are racing ...
— Ballads of Lost Haven - A Book of the Sea • Bliss Carman
... life. Even on a holiday he can't take it easy like other folks. He has some writing on hand just now—a paper of sorts which he has undertaken to have ready by a certain time, and it appears to his benighted intellect that a holiday is an excellent opportunity of getting it through. Mad, you see; stark, staring mad, but an excellent fellow all the same. One of the very best. I have a large experience of men, but I've never met one to compare with him for all-round goodness and simplicity of heart. We all have ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... hair like spun black glass, circled with faint tracery of stars. A black glass belt bound her narrow waist like clasped hands, and her robe, stark white, bore an ugly embroidery across the breasts, the flat sprawl of a conventionalized Toad God, Nebran. Her features were delicate, chiseled, pale; a Dry-town face, all human, all woman, but set in an alien and ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... time to waste in argument. Here were Jim Barlow and Monty Stark shaking either hand and bidding a hasty good-by, while Molly Breckenridge was fairly dancing up and down in her anxiety lest the lads should also be left on board, as Alfaretta ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
... father was the minister, lies on a hillside above the little bay of Caple, and looks squarely out on the North Sea. Round the horns of land which enclose the bay the coast shows on either side a battlement of stark red cliffs through which a burn or two makes a pass to the water's edge. The bay itself is ringed with fine clean sands, where we lads of the burgh school loved to bathe in the warm weather. But on long holidays the sport was to go farther afield among the cliffs; for there there were many ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... were clustering thickly all round the edges of the Boer main position, and the day was spent in resting the weary men, and in determining at what point the final assault should be delivered. On the right front, commanding the Boer lines on either side, towered the stark eminence of Spion Kop, so called because from its summit the Boer voortrekkers had first in 1835 gazed down upon the promised land of Natal. If that could only be seized and held! Buller and Warren swept its bald summit with their field-glasses. It was a venture. But all war is a venture; ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... drunk sometimes and get on the niggers and beat them up. He would have them stark naked and would be beating them. Then old missis would come right out there and stop him. She would say, 'I didn't come all the way here from North Carolina to have my niggers beat up for nothin'.' She'd take hold of the cowhide, and he would have to quit. My father had both ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... on our sixteenth day out from the reef, in latitude 1 degree 42 minutes north, the wind showed signs of failing us; and by sunset, that night, it had fallen stark calm, with a rapidly subsiding swell; yet the sky was clear, the barometer high, and, in short, there was every indication that we were booked for a long spell of calm weather before we should find ourselves to the southward of the Equator. So indeed it proved; for I believe I ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... that he could not crawl half a mile. And yet he wanted to live. It was unreasonable that he should die after all he had undergone. Fate asked too much of him. And, dying, he declined to die. It was stark madness, perhaps, but in the very grip of Death he defied Death and refused ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... events, that he had had enough of it, as he looked along the deck and saw numbers of the men who had been slightly hurt binding up each other's wounds. Several lay stiff and stark, whose bodies were dragged on one side, while not a few, severely hurt, had been carried below to the cockpit, where the surgeon and his mates had ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston
... Bert caught a peculiar gleam in the watery old eyes that were enlarged so enormously by the thick lenses. It was fear of the supernatural that lurked there, stark terror, almost. ...
— Wanderer of Infinity • Harl Vincent
... Nevertheless I laid the boat close to the rocks and beckoned to them to approach but none of them would come within 200 yards of us. They were armed in the same manner as the people we had seen from Restoration Island; they were stark naked, their colour black, with short bushy hair or wool, and in their appearance were similar to them in every respect. An island of a good height bore north half west four miles from us, at which I resolved ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... North Berwick Law a league or less to sea, About its feet the breakers beat, abune the sea-maws flee, There's castle stark and dungeon dark, wherein the godly lay, That made their rant for the Covenant through mony a weary day. For twal' years lang the caverns rang wi' preaching, prayer, and psalm, Ye'd think the winds were soughing wild, when a' the winds were calm, There wad they ...
— Ban and Arriere Ban • Andrew Lang
... who turned their arms against each other. So when Judah came to some rising ground, on which stood a watch-tower commanding a view over the savage grimness of 'the wilderness,' it saw a field of corpses, stark and stiff and silent. Three days were spent in securing the booty, and on the fourth, Jehoshaphat and his men 'assembled themselves in the Valley of Blessing,' and thence returned a joyous multitude praising ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... where the bank shelves over; we had better tie the horses up, dress, and eat some breakfast," said John, almost cheerfully; and accordingly they proceeded towards it. Suddenly John, who was ahead, started back with an exclamation of fear, and the horses began to snort, for there, stark and stiff in death, already swollen and discoloured by decomposition—as is sometimes the case with people killed by lightning—the rifles in their hands twisted and fused, their clothes cut and blown from their bandoliers—lay the two Boer murderers. ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... on talking in her polite Virginia way, not admitting their stark need or her own remissness, until Jake arrived with the hamper, as if in direct answer to Mrs. Shimerda's reproaches. Then the poor woman broke down. She dropped on the floor beside her crazy son, hid her face on her knees, ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... the chauffeur, in stark silhouette against the leading glow, bent toward the tube, and nodded rapidly. And to the deep-throated roar of an unmuffled exhaust, the heavy car leaped, like a spirited animal stung by whip and spur, and settled into a stride to which what had gone ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... that was there before it—having been rebuilt indeed upon Saxon foundations in the days of William Rufus—yet lies among its ancient elms. Farther on, situate upon the slope of a vale down which runs a brook through meadows, is the stark ruin of the old Nunnery that was subservient to the proud Abbey on the hill, some of it now roofed in with galvanised iron sheets ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... everything you just said. Alpha Centauri, Arcturus, Vega, anywhere we wanted to go—and I could go along! It wouldn't be long, either. We had Lijinsky back with us after his rejuvenation, directing the Project, we had Keller and Stark and Eddie Cochran—great men, the men who had pounded Starship Project into reality, took it out of the story books and made the people of this country want it bad enough to pay for it. Those men were back now—new men, rebuilt bodies, with ...
— Martyr • Alan Edward Nourse
... with a grey, swirling mist, blurring the outlines of the furniture and the figure of the man who stood there silently in the doorway. Then the mist cleared away, and she could see his eyes bent on her with an expression of such stark bitterness and despair and longing that it hurt her to look at him. Was this her lover—who had left her in such fierce scorn and anger only a few short months ago? This man whose face was worn and ravaged with an intensity of suffering such as she had not ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... of the House, we pass'd over a prodigious wide and deep Swamp, being forc'd to strip stark-naked, and much a-do to save our selves from drowning in this Fatiegue. We, with much a-do, got thro', going that Day about five Miles farther, and came to three more Indian Cabins, call'd in the Indian Tongue, Hickerau, ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... the enemy's first-rate, the "Achille," Blown to a thousand atoms!—While on fire, Before she burst, the captain's woman there, Desperate for life, climbed from the gunroom port Upon the rudder-chains; stripped herself stark, And swam for the Pickle's boat. Our men in charge, Seeing her great breasts bulging on the brine, Sang out, "A mermaid 'tis, by God!"—then rowed And ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... stark mad; he stamped, foamed, and raved like one in a phrenzy: he swore the painter should suffer the most cruel death that could be invented, unless he drew another full as good as the former, for if but the least grace ...
— A Museum for Young Gentlemen and Ladies - A Private Tutor for Little Masters and Misses • Unknown
... contrivance has ever been designed that is comparable to the hand in flexibility, deftness, adaptability, or power of prehension. It can pick up a needle or a cannon-ball at will. Its touch is as light as a feather or as stark as a catapult. It can be as gentle as mercy or as harsh as battle. It can soothe to repose or rouse to fury. It can express itself in the gentle zephyr or in the devastating whirlwind. Its versatility ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... to his grave." Nevertheless, his fiery nature kept him for a time with the Americans, and at the very outset he showed his independent spirit, having characteristically refused to "wait for proper orders." From New Hampshire came Stark, the hero of the frontier wars. And from all the towns came the militia leaders, who, gathering their companies into regiments, began the loose organization and crude subordination which should make of the crowd ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... John Stark, a hero of two wars, and survivor of a third, and at his death the last but one of the American generals of the Revolution. He was born in the adjoining town of Londonderry, then Nutfield, in 1728. As early as 1752, he was taken prisoner by the Indians while hunting in the wilderness near Baker's ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... frozen moat, where the osiers, stood stark and stiff in their winter nakedness, was a group of dark figures waiting for them with horses. In the pallid moonlight Myles recognized the well-known face of Father Edward, the Prior ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... before them. No words could have spoken more plainly than that disheveled figure looking out with haggard eyes upon the assembled family. Before that living picture of Remorse the rest were dumb. It was easy to see that the Marquise's feet were stretched out stark and stiff with the agony of death; and Moina, leaning against the door-frame, looking into their faces, spoke ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... endeavored to seize the figure that came bounding ahead of it. But Jim dodged them all. Failing in their attempt to intercept him, these newcomers joined the chase, and the fugitive, once the first frenzy of excitement had died in him, heard their footsteps gaining on him. He was stark mad by now; black terror throttled him. Then some one fired a shot; that shot was followed by others; there came a scattered fusillade, and with a mighty leap Jim McCaskey fell. He collapsed in midair; he was dead ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... of The Blood; slower to bless than to ban; Little used to lie down at the bidding of any man. Flesh of the flesh that I bred, bone of the bone that I bare; Stark as your sons shall be—stern as your fathers were. Deeper than speech our love, stronger than life our tether, But we do not fall on the neck nor kiss when we come together. My arm is nothing weak, my strength ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... stark ruin. This man had drawn into his hands every penny she possessed, and was utilizing it for the furtherance of his own nefarious business. She had an idea—vague as yet, but later taking definite shape—that if she might ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... lake, sufficiently large to carry provisions and to resist hostile attacks, but could only obtain a canoe. It was long and narrow, hollowed-out of the trunk of a single tree. She carried Bombay, Gaetano, two Belooch soldiers, and a captain, with twenty stark-naked savage sailors. In this Speke set out on the 3rd of March, 1858, while Burton, too sick to move, remained at Ujiji. Speke and his attendants had moved but a short distance along the shore, when a storm came on, and they had to camp ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... even two weeks since the last one was shot outside the Japanese lines at night, and now there is nothing but regular soldiery encamped around us. This last Boxer was a mere boy of fifteen, who had stripped stark naked and smeared himself all over with oil after the manner of Chinese thieves, so that if he came into our clutches no hands would be able to hold him tight. The most daring ones have always been ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... stalketh the strong Wind, Wrapping the clouds about him, close and dark, Rifting Creation's soul, for rage is blind,— No pity hath he for the Earth all stark, Shivering beneath the loose and drifting snow, A scanty shroud to hide ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... a far deeper and more lasting influence upon him, than his father's supposed death. Hitherto he had only been able to imagine him as he had looked in life, but now the vision of him stretched at full length, stark and pale like the dead Pellicanus, often rose ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... where stark and cold he lay, Beneath the gallows-tree, And every one did point and say, ''Twas there he died ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... nevertheless, if we will give credit to Procopius and Agathias, the Persians were never wont to bury their Dead Bodies, so far were they from bestowing any Funeral Honours upon them. But, as these Authors tell us, they exposed them stark naked in the open fields, which is the greatest shame our Laws do allot to the most infamous Criminals, by laying them open to the view of all upon the highways: Yea, in their opinion it was a great unhappiness, if either Birds or Beasts did not ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow
... soul, it is thou also that must bear the blame. It made Cain stark mad to consider that he had not looked to his brother Abel's soul. How much more will it perplex thee to think, that thou hadst not a care of thy own? And if this will not provoke thee to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... they came creeping over the grass toward her, in their van the fading glow. All at once, as it were out of the twilight, the sunlight settled momentarily on the field at the bottom of the hill before her. Stark upright and in serried rows stretched the waste of last year's cornfield, the withered stalks touched with a passing glory, standing quite proudly erect and then—blue-gray darkness. A mellow waste delivering a valedictory! ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... total number killed by the Nipe in the last decade, but nowhere were men banding together to put a stop to that sort of death. Accidental death was a known factor, almost a friend; the Nipe was stark horror. ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... uncertain labors. The small groups of Indians through which we had passed, in the course of the day, had evidently been startled by sheer astonishment, into a sort of passive and involuntary hospitality, but maintained a stark apprehensive reserve in most of their answers to our questions. They spoke a peculiar dialect of the Maya, which I had never heard before, and had great difficulty in comprehending, although several of the ...
— Memoir of an Eventful Expedition in Central America • Pedro Velasquez
... four sorry objects, stark-naked save for their vests, and with putties bound round their feet to replace their boots, staggered into camp. They were the four troopers of the Mount Nelson Light Horse which had furnished the Intelligence officer's flanking party. As the Tiger had surmised, they ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... pursuest me further I run stark mad, If you have more hurt Dukes or Gentlemen, To lye here on your cure, I shall be desperate, I know the trick, and you shall feel I know it, Are ye so hot that no hedge can contain ye? I'le have thee let blood in all the ...
— Rule a Wife, and Have a Wife - Beaumont & Fletcher's Works (3 of 10) • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... glittered with the inscription, "Gregory Sartorius, M.D." Beside the gate a mimosa shook out its yellow plumage against the sky. Mimosa—in February! ... New York, reflected Esther, was in the clutch of a blizzard. She could picture it now, with its stark ice-ribbed streets, its towering buildings, a mausoleum of frozen stone and dirty snow. As for flowers—why, even a spray of that mimosa in a frosty florist's window would be absurdly expensive; ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... perhaps, was plaiting pandanus-leaf to make a hat, and an old woman was sitting on her haunches smoking a pipe. Then I saw Ata. She was suckling a new-born child, and another child, stark naked, was playing at her feet. When she saw me she called out to Strickland, and he came to the door. He, too, wore nothing but a . He was an extraordinary figure, with his red beard and matted hair, and his great hairy chest. His feet ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... you! Don't you see Mrs. Ammidon! Oh—" her speech rose in a choked exclamation. Edward Dunsack had turned the key and was crossing the room with a dark twisted face, his eyes stark and demented. Taou Yuen, swung round toward the advancing figure, heard a long fluttering breath behind her. Perhaps Nettie Vollar had died of fright. The terror in her own brain dried up before an overwhelming realization—she had betrayed ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... cowers, and the night's heart quickens: Full fain would the day be dead And the stark night reign in his stead: The sea falls dumb as the sea-fog thickens And ...
— Poems and Ballads (Third Series) - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... he sent Colonel Baum, with a detachment of the army to seize a magazine of stores at Bennington. When within a few miles of that place, however, Baum learned that the Americans were strongly entrenched. He, therefore, halted, and sent to Burgoyne for a reinforcement. But the American General Stark, who had a large body of Vermont Militia under his command, in addition to his ordinary New Hampshire corps, now determined to be the assailant. With only 500 regulars and 100 Indians, Colonel Baum did not consider it prudent to fight a body vastly superior in ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... afternoon you blush because the housemaid has mislaid the Bible. Did you ever read of the stargazer who fell into an open well at the street corner? Like him, you may be a great astronomer, a great politician, a great theologian, a great defender of the faith even, and yet may be a stark fool just in keeping the doors and the windows of your own heart. 'You shall see a poor soul,' says Dr. Goodwin, 'mean in abilities of wit, or accomplishments of learning, who knows not how the world goes, nor upon what wheels its states turn, who ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte |
