"Average" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of Segni is San Bruno; and, to do him honor, every other male baby born in the town is called Bruno; so our artist, in his walks around town, heard this name howled, cried, screamed, shrieked, called, and appealed to, on an average once in five minutes, through the hours when the male inhabitants were about and awake. This similarity in names was, by no means, accompanied by similarity in appearance, for there were more light-haired ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... fever which drives everyone to the Vatican or to Monte Cavallo, according as the scarlet-robed assembly is held in one or the other of these two palaces: it is, in fact, because the raising up of a new pontiff is a great event far everybody; for, according to the average established in the period between St. Peter and Gregory XVI, every pope lasts about eight years, and these eight years, according to the character of the man who is elected, are a period either of tranquillity or of disorder, of justice or ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Fellows - A prying, spying, inquisitive clan, Who have gone upon much of the self-same plan, Jotting the labouring class's riches; And after poking in pot and pan, And routing garments in want of stitches, Have ascertained that a working man Wears a pair and a quarter of average breeches! ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... the Directors of the French Government learned that the young general they had placed in command of the Army of Italy was made of very different material from the average general who obeyed their orders. Napoleon treated them haughtily, and made demands rather than requests from them. He had already exceeded his powers many times and had treated with the rulers and the commanders ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... harmonious, however unlike they seem. These varieties are lost sight of at a little distance, at a little height of thought. One tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future. If I can be firm enough to-day to do right and scorn ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... else; but now that you have returned, I have no doubt, after the first excitement is over, that he will rally. Still man is born to die, Mr Wilmot, and your uncle has already lived beyond the threescore years and ten allotted to the average age of man. Depend upon it, everything shall be done which can protract a life so ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... be tastes and preferences notably absent from the mind of the average young man, our volunteers usually regard their experience in Camp of Instruction as among the most unpleasant of ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... bondage, and none but those whose names are recorded. This is a blunder of the same sort as if he should mistake the list of the British peerage for a census of all the families of Great Britain, and calculate the average duration of human life by the ages of the Duke of Wellington and Lord Palmerston. But here we have a wonderful instance of the providence which often makes objectors refute themselves. The chapter on Judah's family (II.) shows that in forty-two years Judah had grandchildren ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... take with me on my hunt the same two natives whom I had had the year before. My head man's name was Fedor Deerinhoff. He was about forty years of age, and had been a noted sea otter and bear hunter. In size he was rather larger than the average of his race, and absolutely fearless. Many stories are told of his hand-to-hand encounters with these big bears. I think the best one is of a time when he crawled into a den on his hands and knees, and in the dark, and at close quarters, shot three. He was unable to see, and the bears' ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... spring favoured the advance of the Russian army through the mountains. In the north of India the temperature kept at an average of 68 degrees F., and day after day the sun streamed down from a cloudless blue sky upon the broad plains of the Punjab, through the bright green of which the Russian troops, in their white summer uniforms, pushed on ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... idiosyncrasies, and tacitly agree to give his political aspirations a "letting alone." For, with character and ability unquestioned for the discharge of duties, the vote polled for him usually falls far short of the average of that polled by his party for other candidates ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... above the average height, and rather stout, with head, shoulders and face that indicated strong character. In personal appearance his grandson Robert much resembled him. He was fifty-five years of age when he came to Nova Scotia. His wife was eight ...
— The Chignecto Isthmus And Its First Settlers • Howard Trueman
... accompanies genius. On first meeting with him I took him for a clergyman, and told him of it later. He felt rather flattered than otherwise by the mistake, and I have no doubt that his modest nature would at once refer to points on which the average clergyman would probably be his superior. Some artists are lost in admiration of their own works, so that the way to please them is to praise what they have done themselves; but the way to please Leslie ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... spite of long bridge table, lobby divan, and table-d'hote seances, "tea" where the coffee was served with whipped cream and the tarts built in four tiers and mortared in mocha filling, the Bon Ton hotel was scarcely more than an average ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... The amount of sugar produced by each tree in a year varies from different causes. The yearly product varies from 2 lbs. to 4 lbs. for each tree[V]." The sap is most abundant from young trees, but less charged with sugar. The average produce is five per cent. of sugar. The richer the sap is in saccharine matter, it is so much the more profitable to extract it, as in such a case it is nearly pure from all mucilaginous matter, or free acid, and may be consolidated by the ...
— The Church of England Magazine - Volume 10, No. 263, January 9, 1841 • Various
... Massachusetts, a northern state, has provided for a qualified suffrage by the adoption of an educational test. But compared with the Mississippi provision that of Massachusetts is as modest and simple as the average Mississippi school house. ...
— The Disfranchisement of the Negro - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 6 • John L. Love
... Cincinnati, upon whom will be conferred the degree of Ph.G. at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, has earned the highest average ever attained by any woman graduate of that institution. Out of one hundred and eighty-four graduates of this year, only six obtained the highest rating of "distinguished." Miss Gordon was one of the six. She was the only woman in her class, and had to contend ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... of gray chalcedony. Three are very sharply pointed, and have probably been used as perforators. Average width 1 inch, average length ...
— Illustrated Catalogue of a Portion of the Collections Made During the Field Season of 1881 • William H. Holmes
... idea of the place that Mme. de Sevigne holds in the opinion of the average Frenchman, we quote the ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... use in saying how pretty it was, so we resorted to the other note, of disparagement. I remarked that I should not think a pink sunbonnet would be ravishingly becoming to the average Snake River complexion, as ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... An average audience never gets its money's worth unless some one is hurt doing some daring act. Pa suggested that they have some one pretend to be hurt in every act, and have them picked up and carried out on stretchers with ...
— Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus • George W. Peck
... largest of these caverns, consists of a labyrinth of chambers and winding galleries whose total length is said to be as much as thirty miles. One passage four miles long has an average width of about sixty feet and an average height of forty feet. One of the great halls is three hundred feet in width and is overhung by a solid arch of limestone one hundred feet above the floor. Galleries at different levels are connected by well-like pits, some of which measure two hundred ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... fond of speculating on the most abstruse and unattainable points of science and philosophy. You would be astonished at the number of men among the captains and traders of these parts who have more than an average amount of literary and scientific taste; whereas among the naval and military officers and various Government officials very few have any such taste, but find their only amusements in card-playing and dissipation. Some of the most intelligent and best ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... this month has never fallen below forty-five. One of the established churches of the city with a membership five times as large as ours has an average of ten to its prayer meetings. We have fifteen or twenty. We have also organized a Y.P.S.C.E. and a Bible class. It is the purpose of this class to study Biblical biographies. We have studied so far the lives of Joseph, Moses, ...
— The American Missionary, October, 1890, Vol. XLIV., No. 10 • Various
... heroines are more expansively endowed than would be thought genteel in our country, where cryptogams are so much in fashion, nevertheless there is always something very tremendous about him, and very often much that is sublime, pathetic, and moving. I defy any one of the average amount of imagination and sentiment to stand long before the Descent from the Cross without being moved more nearly to tears than he would care to acknowledge. As for color, his effects are as sure as those of the sun rising in a tropical landscape. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... scarcely spoken to him at all, as he had been morosely silent to her. She had been shocked, frightened by his violence, yet she knew that his violence had been honest violence, perpetrated because he believed her welfare demanded it. She did not feel toward him the aversion that the average girl might have felt for one who precipitated her into such a scene.... She was accustomed to violence and ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... a properly arranged manual of the shark tribe (sold by the Museum publisher, who ought to have his little shop close by the porter's lodge), both father and son must have been much below the level of average English man and boy in mother wit if they did not go out of the room by the door in front of them very distinctly, and—to themselves—amazingly, wiser than they had come in by ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... and annoyance beyond calculation. Just imagine a Scotland Yard detective with such a delicate business to do. We have no Hamards here, no French geniuses who can reconstruct crimes by a kind of special sense. Can you not see the average detective blundering about with his ostentatious display of the obvious; his mind, which never traced a motive in its existence, trying to elucidate a clue? Well, it is the business of the Law to detect and punish crime. Let the Law ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... fairly typical. The average was relatively inexperienced, the sort you'd expect on the type of assignment that was often used as advanced training. I managed to single out several possibles—men who might crack, depending upon the gravity of the ...
— Attrition • Jim Wannamaker
... was Shismakoff, and he had proven himself not only kindly and generous, but self-sacrificing and noble. Along with these good and somewhat unusual qualities, he possessed more than average good looks and abundant patience. He it was who now in the hospital faithfully attended Michaelovitz, as ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... pretty good rough estimate I reckon there are at least from 15,000 to 20,000 Gipsies in the United Kingdom. Apart from London, if I may take ten of the Midland counties as a fair average, there are close upon 3,000 Gipsy families living in tents and vans in the by-lanes, and attending fairs, shows, &c.; and providing there are only man, wife, and four children connected with each charmless, cheerless, wretched abodes called domiciles, this ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... of removing and replacing the gravel, for the cutting of the crop and securing the plant, are considered. By this mode of management, sea-kale is said to have been cut which measured ten, eleven, and even twelve inches in circumference, and that each blanching-pot on the average afforded a dish of it twice in the season. The blanching-pots for this use are somewhat of the same shape and size as the large bell-glasses commonly employed in market gardens for raising tender vegetable crops, ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... reading book in school which must be adapted to the average mind, these stories will be found suitable for classes from the fifth or sixth school year to the highest grade ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift
... are really the lost red eyes of day, and the sunflower is the vice-regent of the sun. Lastly, there is this value about the colour that men call colourless: that it suggests in some way the mixed and troubled average of existence, especially in its quality of strife and expectation and promise. Grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing to some other colour; of brightening into blue, or blanching into white, or breaking into green or gold. So we may be perpetually reminded of the indefinite ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... TIMED. Teachers are seeking now as never before to understand the soil in which the living seed of God's Word is to be cast. Nothing can be more important than this. The author deals largely with the every day problems of the average home and Sunday School, thus rendering the highest service to the great army of ordinary teachers and mothers. While this book will be hailed with joy by all such, it will nevertheless command a place by the side of the highest ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... was repaired, the submarine party pushed northward at an average rate of ten miles an hour. It was two days before any further adventure crossed their path. But each hour of the journey had its new thrill and added charm. Now, with engine in full throb, they were scurrying along narrow channels of dark water, and ...
— Lost In The Air • Roy J. Snell
... he was in China with the intention of obtaining a concession, and he had nearly accomplished his object when he spoilt everything by his blunt speech. He said he had not come to China for any philanthropic purposes, but that he was in the country to make money. We all know that the average business man is neither a Peabody nor a Carnegie, but it was quite unnecessary for this gentleman to announce that his sole object was to make money ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... of mine—it would be awful to carry out such an undertaking anywhere but under the protection of ancestral traditions—I have operated Richard Hall out of my inmost being with the utmost cruelty, on an average of every two hours, for this week Jane and I have been in New York; and I have still got ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... continued until 1641, no notice being taken who or what I was:' and in this time he burned some of his books, which treated of things he did not approve, and which he disliked to practise; for this man really had a conscience as good as the average, or even better: he was driven into solitude by the reproaches of it—or, perhaps, by the scoldings of a wife who 'was of the nature ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... advantage, the Morality is in general a synonym for what is uninteresting. The characters born of abstractions are too often bloodless, like their parents. The Morality under a changed name was current a few years ago in the average Sunday-school book. Incompetent writers of fiction today often adopt the Morality principle in making their characters unnaturally good or bad, mere puppets who do not develop along the line of their own emotional ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... dawdling, lack-energy way that is positively irritating to watch. The agriculturist has in consequence plenty to do to keep his eye on them, and in the course of the day he walks over his farm half-a-dozen times at least. Very few ordinary working farmers walk much less than ten miles a day on the average, backwards ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... the ground, they are usually hollow, and consequently bulged there, while the tulip springs boldly out of the ground a solid shaft of clear, clean, and sweetly-fragrant wood, sixty or seventy feet of the bole being often entirely without limbs, with an average diameter of from three to five feet. I found a stump in Indiana nearly eight feet in diameter (measured three feet above the ground), and a tree in Clarke County, Kentucky, of about the same girth, tapering slowly to the first branch, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... square-ended pins in the bottom, the wires passing over sharp edges near both ends. The tuner is able, on turning a pin, to tension its strings till it gives any desired note. Readers may be interested to learn that the average tension of a string is 275 lbs., so that the total strain on the frame of a grand piano is anything between 20 ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... The average American is nothing if not patriotic. "The Americans are filled," says Mr. Emil Reich in his "Success among the Nations," "with such an implicit and absolute confidence in their Union and in their future success that any remark other than laudatory is inacceptable to the majority of them. We ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... over the letter of my friend, and I am now able to perceive that it is built upon a number of most ingenious fallacies. The chief fallacy appears to be this—that he insists that the race must always count for more than the individual, and that the individual must fall in line and step with the average conventions of the race at the expense of his own well-being, or be judged a ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... from a first-class house to a second class, then a third class, then lower and lower, until she ends in some vile dance-hall, compared to which the orthodox hell is a paradise. Five years altogether Is the average life in this business. ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... had particularly suffered: its bones were laid bare. It had not been restored, but it was ready to do any business that fell to be done, though closed on that afternoon. We turned a corner, and came upon the church. The work on the church was well up to the reported Teutonic average. Of its roof only the rafters were left. The windows were all smashed, and their lead fantastically twisted. The west door was entirely gone; a rough grille of strips of wood served in its stead. Through this grille one ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett
... great conjuror; but at that moment, like Audrey, "he thanked the gods he was not poetical." If there be any one thing more than another to make an "every-day man" content with his average lot, it is the exhibition of ambitious inferiority, striving for distinction it can never attain; just given sufficient perception to desire the glory of success, without power to measure the strength that can achieve it; like some poor fly, which beats its head against ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... is to acc'rately discover the Donna Anna; so we makes a line for the padre. In Mexico, the priests is the only folks who saveys anythin'; an', as if to make up for the hoomiliatin' ignorance of the balance of the herd, an' promote a average, these yere priests jest about knows everythin'. An' I has hopes of this partic'lar padre speshul; for I notes that, doorin' them times when Spencer an' the Donna Anna is dazzlin' one another at the Plaza Perdita, the padre is sort o' keepin' cases ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... as to class work, also made a division into lessons impracticable. Each teacher will soon discover about how much matter her class, if she uses the class method, can take each day. Probably the average section will require about 2 days to cover; the longest sections, 5 days. The entire course should easily be covered in one year with recitations of about 25 minutes daily. Two 50-minute periods a week give a better division of time and also ought to finish the course ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... The average horse on grain should be allowed from 10 to 12 pounds of good hay a day. It is a mistake of many to think that horses at light work can be kept entirely on hay. Such horses soon become potbellied, fall off in flesh, and do not thrive. The same is true of colts; unless the ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... complained of being nervous and easily awakened at night; consciousness was clear; she was well oriented; no hallucinations or delusions could be elicited. Intellectually she appeared to be above the average negro in intelligence; she read and wrote, spelled correctly and used good English. Her memory was good for both past and recent events. Throughout her entire sojourn here she was oriented to time, place and person; except for having stated at ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... believe that Mark learned to be "glum" when he saw the Lariat approaching with his sheaf of rhymes. We may believe, too, that he was "generally writing." He contributed fifty-three letters to the Alta during that five months and six to the Tribune. They would average about two columns nonpareil each, which is to say four thousand words, or something like two hundred and fifty thousand words in all. To turn out an average of fifteen hundred words a day, with continuous sight-seeing besides, one must be generally writing during any odd ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... at first against the French colonies, afterward against the English colonists (the German prisoners generally settled in the country), induced the Germans to emigrate in such great numbers that, from 1770 to 1791, twenty-four emigrant ships on an average arrived annually at Philadelphia, without reckoning those that landed ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... feet, scaling Olympus, making a ladder of mankind, outlasting its own activity for ever in a final and fixed glory more splendid than its own bright path. The really great man gathers power in action, the average successful man ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... cited. The New York Times became Russell's most vicious critic, labelling him "Bull Run Russell," a name which stuck, and beginning its first article on his sins "The terrible epistle has been read with quite as much avidity as an average President's message. We scarcely exaggerate the fact when we say, the first and foremost thought on the minds of a very large portion of our people after the repulse at Bull's Run was, what will Russell say?" Ibid., p. 297. As to his recall Russell afterwards ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... saddles like jockeys, lances held straight out before them, and furiously goaded their strange mounts with curious hooks. Nelson was vastly relieved to get a glimpse of Alden far in the lead, almost beside the Atlantean Prince. His podoko was evidently better than the average. ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... pleasures, busyness, importance and immediacy of that life in which they stand; books of smiling or heroic temper, to excite or to console; books of a large design, shadowing the complexity of that game of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger-back not least. But the average sermon flees the point, disporting itself in that eternity of which we know, and need to know, so little; avoiding the bright, crowded, and momentous fields of life where destiny awaits us. Upon the average book a writer may be silent; he may set it down to his ill- hap that when ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his note-book. "I'll tell you what I wrote down, practically from her dictation. 'A tall man—taller than the average Englishman. A loosely-hung fellow; (he doesn't care for any kind of sport, I gather). Thirty five years of age; (seems a bit old to have married a girl—she won't be twenty till next month). He has big, strongly-marked features, and a good deal of fair hair. Always wears an old ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... pupils which dilated until they all but covered the blue iris; the eyes of an emotional nature, an imaginative mind. Her other features, though delicate, were not exceptional, but the tout ensemble was such that her looks would have been considered above the average even in a country where pretty girls were plentiful. In her present surroundings, and by contrast with the womenfolk about her, she was regarded as the most beautiful of her sex. Her manner, reserved ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... 'ave transpired which made me learn The size and meanin' of the game. I did no more than others did, I don't know where the change began; I started as an average kid, I ...
— Over the top with the 25th - Chronicle of events at Vimy Ridge and Courcellette • R. Lewis
... registers of Lisbon and Cadiz, that the importation of gold and silver into Europe, is five millions sterling annually. He has not taken it on a single year, but on an average of fifteen succeeding years, from 1763 to 1777, both inclusive; in which time, the amount was one thousand eight hundred million livres, which is seventy-five ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... heartbreaking. Now, I do not suppose that our Lord intended any special significance to be attached to these varying numbers. Rather they were simply suggested by the cast of the parable in which they respectively occurred. A hundred sheep is a fair average flock; ten pieces of silver are the modest hoard of a poor woman; two sons are a family large enough to represent the contrast which is necessary to the parable. But still we may permissibly look at this varying proportion ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the houses of his friends who would hide him. The man who is known to have committed that crime—Francesco Paoli—escaped to New York. We are looking for him to-day. He is a clever man, far above the average—son of a doctor in a town a few miles from Naples, went to the university, was expelled for some mad prank—in short, he was the black sheep of the family. Of course over here he is too high-born to work with his hands on a railroad or in a trench, and not educated ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... Alma; don't hit a fellow when he's down, you know. I don't suppose I have more conceit than the average young man; but then, on the other hand, I am not such a fool, despite appearances, as not to know that I am considered by some people as quite an eligible individual. I am not a pauper exactly, and your father knows that. I don't think I have many very bad qualities. I don't ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... or assault its scarps and frowning bastions; neither is one obliged to force with clamor and blaring trumpets and glittering gorgets the drawbridge and portcullis. Rather the pathway lies through one of those many little doors, obscure, yet easily accessible, latchless and boltless, to which the average person gives no particular attention, and yet which invariably lead to the very heart of this Castle Delectable. The whimsical chatelaine of this enchanted keep is a shy goddess. Circumspection has no part in her affairs, nor caution, nor ...
— Hearts and Masks • Harold MacGrath
... long voyages—the time required. The average progress of a ship in the eighteenth century was not more than fifty miles a day. Nowadays we may expect as much as four hundred miles in a full powered steamer, and not less than one hundred and fifty in a ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... because he could make more money than at anything else and that gave him a chance to keep his family in Ohio in comfort. He was mighty fond of his family. Besides, the job gave him more time with the wife and kids than the average man gets. When he was at home, he was at home three months on end at times. That's better than the ordinary man. A man in a city, for example, leaves home early and gets home late, and then he's too grouchy what with ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... jobbers and hunters after preferment, pluralists who built fortunes and endowed families out of the Church, or country gentlemen in orders, who rode to hounds and shot and danced and farmed, and often did worse things. Its average was what naturally in England would be the average, in a state of things in which great religious institutions have been for a long time settled and unmolested—kindly, helpful, respectable, sociable persons ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... naturally gave false information regarding Cecily's age; this was an inevitable consequence of the step we had taken. You know my opinions on laws and customs: for the multitude they are necessary, and an infraction of them by the average man is, logically enough, called a sin against society; for Cecily and myself, in relation to such a matter as our becoming man and wife, the law is idle form. Personally, I could have wished to dispense with ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... he raked in! I used to figure it up, just for the joy of envyin' him, I reckon. An average twenty-wagon outfit, first and last, would bring him in somewheres about fifty dollars—and besides he had forty-rod at four bits a glass. And outfits at that time were ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... discredited by the notoriety of his vices, and, towards the last, is compromised by his connections with the Court. No other is of sufficient eminence to have any influence; there is too much of average and too little of superior talent.—Their self-esteem is, moreover, as yet too strong to allow any concessions. Each of these improvised legislators has come satisfied with his own system, and to submit ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... said to have reigned about the middle of the twelfth century, as the traditionary accounts attribute a period of about 400 years between the commencement of his reign and the decease of Huana Capac in 1529, which would place the origin of the monarchy about the year 1129, allowing an average of 30 years to each of 13 successive reigns. The traditions of such ancient matters among an ignorant people are little to be depended on; and even admitting the series of kings to be right as to number, the ordinary average of twenty years to each of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... damp and wild,— A stunted, not too pretty, child, Beneath a battered gingham; Such things, to say the least, require A Muse of more-than-average ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... their predecessors for more than nine hundred years. As maple was the sacred wood in the Roman ritual, maple only was used for the holy fire. The size of the pieces used and their shape was also a matter of immemorial ordinance. Each piece was about a cubit long, about the length of the forearm of an average adult, measured from elbow to finger-tips. Each piece must be wedge-shaped, with the bark on the rounded side and the other two sides meeting at a sharp edge where had been the heart of the trunk or branch from which it had been cut. Each piece must have been clean cleft with ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... Bugis trader takes a few days more to rest and refresh himself, before he begins looking round for a return cargo, which usually consists of opium, iron, steel, cotton yarn, cotton goods, gold thread, &c. He seldom or never takes money away with him. On an average, two hundred of these boats come to Singapore in the fall of the year, each manned by about thirty men. Their crews are not allowed to land armed with the kriss or any other weapon; a wise precaution, ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson
... are they who make the look of the artificial world. They are man generalised; as units they inevitably lack something of interest; all the more have they cumulative effect. It would be well if we could persuade the average man to take on a certain human dignity in the clothing of his average body. Unfortunately he will be slow to be changed. And as to the poorer part of the mass, so wretched are their national customs—and the ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... two Guineas in my pouch for all my Fortune. Many a Lord Mayor of London has begun the World, 'tis said, with a yet more slender Provision (I wonder what Harpy Hopwood had to begin with?) and Eighteenpence would seem to be the average of Capital Stock for an Adventurer that is to heap up Riches. Still I seemed to have made my Start in Life's Voyage a great many times, and to have been very near ending with it more than once—witness the Aylesbury Assizes. Thus I felt rather Despondency ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... me?" he went on, enthusiastically, "In other words, your assignment, Jameson, for the next month is to do nothing except follow your friend Kennedy. Start in right now, on the first, and cross-section out of his life just one month, an average month. Take things just as they come, set them down just as they happen, and when you get through give me an intimate picture of the ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... essentially John-esque. I am as positive as if I had called for a comparison of experience, that every wife who reads this could furnish a parallel sketch from life. The average John is impervious to glance or gesture. I know one who is a model husband in most respects, who, when a danger-signal is hung out from the other end of the table, draws general attention ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... been the veriest coquette living, she could not have devised a more effectual charm to a man of Eben Williams's temperament. He had come out unscathed from many sieges which had been laid to him by women. He knew very well the ordinary methods, the atmosphere of the average wooing or wooable woman, and he was proof against them all. He was thirty years old and he had never yet been in love. But this woman, who treated him with the same easy, unconscious frankness with which men ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... he remarked. "He's away off ahead of the average run. You mark me—he'll be top hand with this outfit in no time at all." Then he observed the girl's expression. "What is it, Pet?" he inquired. "What's ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... of the informal sector, accurate economic measures are difficult to obtain. A large percentage of the population derive their living from agricultural activity, often on a subsistence basis. The formal economy grew by an average of about 3% annually in 1995-97, but GDP declined slightly in 1998 and 1999. On a per capita basis, real income has stagnated at 1980 levels. Most observers attribute Paraguay's poor economic performance to political uncertainty, corruption, lack of progress on structural ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Captain Zeb, summing up the situation, "he started about ten year astern, but he'll beat her on the run into the cemetery, now you mark my words. Annabel's temper's cal'lated to keep any average chap drivin' on that course, bows under. There's a three-reef breeze blowin' off ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... highland castle or shooting-box was crammed with the 'elite' whose delight is to kill innocent birds and animals,—of the latest fool-flyers in aeroplanes,—in short, no fashionable jabberer of social inanities could have beaten me in what average persons call 'common-sense talk,'—talk which resulted after a while in the usual vagueness of attention accompanied by smothered yawning. I was resolved not to lift the line of thought 'up in the air' in the manner whereof I had often ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... she, "some women may be able to forget. It's the easiest way—maybe most of them do it. The average woman lives that way. But I can't, Curly; I can't—it isn't in my blood. Women like me have got to follow their own hearts, Curly—no ...
— The Man Next Door • Emerson Hough
... sources of happiness more acute than that of the average. She took an intense and keen enjoyment in life itself. Everything interested her, amused her. She was never bored. She so much enjoyed the mere spectacle of life that she never required to be the central figure. When she had to play the part of a mere spectator it didn't depress ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... till a bright lad suggested that there might be a little desert-scrub about if we looked for it. He was quite right; there was a little, a very little. About one bush to the half-mile was the average, and usually under a boulder at that. Every morning we rode forth and scoured the desert for that elusive scrub. As we had, by the process known in the army as "wangling," acquired sufficient tents and marquees for a battalion, there was a large quantity ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... those heavy pails of syrup down to the house, where the liquid was strained while still hot. The reduction of it to sugar was done upon the kitchen stove, from three hundred to five hundred pounds being about the average annual yield. ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... childhood Mrs. Murphy has shown a remarkable aptitude for literary work, and when quite a little girl at school, frequently took the highest average for composition. She commenced to write for the press at an early age and while in this county contributed poetry to the columns of the local newspapers and some of the journals of ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... plot of Demos is concerned with Richard Mutimer, a young socialist whose vital force, both mental and physical, is well above the average, corrupted by accession to a fortune, marrying a refined wife, losing his money in consequence of the discovery of an unsuspected will, and dragging his wife down with him,—down to la misere in its most brutal and humiliating shape. Happy endings and ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... this necessary step, meat prices on July 1 will be from 3 to 5 cents higher than their average present levels; butter will be at least 12 cents a pound higher, in addition to the 5 cents a pound increase of last fall; milk will increase from 1 to 2 cents a quart; bread will increase about 1 cent a loaf; sugar will increase over 1 cent a pound; cheese, ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Harry S. Truman • Harry S. Truman
... sense of position. In a certain way I sometimes feel somewhat ashamed for the pianist profession when I hear players, even those with manifest technical proficiency, commit flagrant mistakes against elementary rules of accentuation and phrasing, such as, for instance, an average violinist acquainted with good bowing is accordingly prevented from making ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... composed of oxygen and nitrogen. In the absence of experiment, we should never think of ascribing to this scant and varying constituent any important influence on terrestrial radiation; and yet its influence is far more potent than that of the great body of the air. To say that on a day of average humidity in England, the atmospheric vapour exerts 100 times the action of the air itself, would certainly be an understatement of the fact. Comparing a single molecule of aqueous vapour with an atom of either of ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... volume gives a capital description of life in the Navy in days of the old three-decker, and many interesting particulars of the naval warfare in the revolutionary period, including the battle of the "glorious first of June." It differs from the average boys' story in one important respect. The hero, instead of gaining a title and a fortune, refuses to rise above the class in which he was born, and attains no higher rank than that of a warrant-officer. The author skilfully introduces little touches and incidents, ...
— True Blue • W.H.G. Kingston
... shake it. Against Church and Soviet, as against sage and hermit and anarchist, the territorial state still holds its own over the whole civilized world; and the latest construction of idealism at Geneva, misnamed though it is, is but an association of such states, far larger indeed in average size, but of the same kind and composition as those upon which the Greek philosopher fixed as the true object of political study and the most effective and enduring agency for securing a ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... day after the death of General Taylor, Mr. Fillmore appeared in the Representatives' Hall at the Capitol, where both houses of Congress had met in joint session, took the oath of office, and immediately left. The new President was then fifty years of age, of average height, florid features, white hair, shrewd, gray eyes, and dignified yet courteous manners. He had risen from the humble walks of life, by incessant toil, to the highest position in the Republic. Always animated by an indomitable spirit and by that ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... humorous, acute, malicious, a hundred vivid and expressive things, but last and least of all beautiful. Almost all the faces about these crowded tables—young or old, plain or handsome, distinguished or average—have the same look of quiet authority: it is as though all "nervosity," fussiness, little personal oddities, meannesses and vulgarities, had been burnt away in a great flame of self-dedication. It is a wonderful example of the rapidity with which purpose models the human ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... presence you are a child of wrath, a hopeless imbecile, and a black sheep all in one, and yet—how you hate him and how you long to see some brave young David come along and hit him with a sling shot! Such a man as he, is fitted to bring the average human to the dust as quickly and as surely as a well aimed bullet brings ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... DAWSON SCOTT'S novel, but I confess to having grown a little restive at its appearance on the top of each of 352 pages. "Episodes in the Life of Richard and Catharine Blake" is the alternative title, and to the average human reader possibly a more significant one. The Caddis-Worm is quite in the modern manner, having no plot—or what has been contemptuously called "anecdote." I have, however, a more genuine grievance against Mrs. DAWSON SCOTT, and it is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 22, 1914 • Various
... somewhat afraid and with which he was vastly bored. On his staff there were five famous men, and he had made every one of them. At first it amused him to manufacture celebrities. He found he could take an average reporter from the daily press, give him a "line" to follow, a trust to fight, a vice to expose,—this was all in that good time when people were eager to read about their own wickedness,—and in two years the reporter would be recognized as an authority. Other people—Napoleon, ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... we will begin with what seems to us incontestable. In the first place, but that it has been questioned, we should say that there could be no question of the surpassing ability which the book displays. It is far beyond the power of the average clever and practised writer of our days. It is the work of a man in whom thought, sympathy, and imagination are equally powerful and wealthy, and who exercises a perfect and easy command over his own conceptions, and over the apt and vivid language which ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... a halo; good cheer radiated from him in ceaseless waves. His glance was direct and compelling and his smile invited confidences; he seemed almost too young and entirely too artless for his surroundings. The average observer would have pitied him for a lamb among wolves, and the pity would have been misplaced, for Al Engle was older than he looked by several sinful semesters and infinitely wiser than he had any honest right to ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... the most part we ally words and music. The timbre of a voice, singing tones without words, might carry a message to the sensitive, just as the inflection of a voice may be exquisite joy or suffering to a lover: but it would be insufficient to move the average hearer to any response. The reason is that there is always a dual process at work in mind: there is the sense-perception of the actual sound, and a brain-recognition of its meaning. This latter must be supplied by the hearer himself from his own ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... Having shown that the average colon is a fertile breeding ground for all kinds of poisonous germs, and that they are conveyed into the circulation by the interchange of fluids in that organ, it may be interesting to explain how these germs are conveyed to, and deposited in the ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... The average housewife pours down the sink drainpipe the juices from all the vegetables which she cooks; she little realizes that she thus drains away the health of her family. Cook vegetables with just sufficient ...
— The International Jewish Cook Book • Florence Kreisler Greenbaum
... foil, against which Luigi's silent devotion showed to the best advantage, Romanzo Caukins' dogged persistence in telling her on an average of once in two months that he loved her and was waiting for a satisfactory answer, served its end. For six years, while Romanzo remained at Champ-au-Haut, the girl teased, cajoled, tormented, amused, and worried the Colonel's eldest. Of ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... fine mats on the floors, and everything scrupulously clean. I counted upon one hillside forty-seven terraces from the bottom to the top. These are divided vertically, so that I think twenty-five feet square would be about the average size of each patch; and as the division of terraces is made to suit the ground, and hence very irregularly, the appearance of a hillside in Japan is something like that of a bed-quilt of irregular pieces. The terrace-walls are overgrown with vines, ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... who mean to be head-gardeners before they are thirty, and eliminate woman from their lives as a dangerous obstacle to the successful career, pay a heavy penalty when they do fall in love. The average irresponsible young man who has hung about North Street on Saturday nights, walked through the meadows and round by the mill and back home past the creek on Sunday afternoons, taken his seat in the brake for the annual outing, shuffled ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... American navy. Steam navigation had been fully established some years before. As all my readers no doubt know, the first successful steamboat in this country was the Clermont, made by Robert Fulton, which ascended the Hudson in the summer of 1807. The average speed of the pioneer boat was about five miles an hour, so that the trip occupied more than thirty hours. This great invention was a novelty, and, like many others of a similar nature, it required considerable time for it to come into use. The first western ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis
... the community an increase of skill and courage. We say in the community: we fully believe that the unequalled turnip which every now and then appears in the newspapers is a sufficient presumption that the average turnip is growing bigger, and the whole crop heavier. All who know the history of the quadrature are aware that the several increases of numbers of decimals to which [pi] has been carried have been indications of a general ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... years later, 1772, the Baron published this excellent abridgment of it, freed from arbitrary ideas; and by its clearness of expression, facility, and precision of style, rendered it most suitable for the average student. ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... average would have reached one thousand had it not been for the Monon. Miss Day, the young lady there, had a vocabulary limited to "Hello," "Too high," and "Good-by," and it became particularly galling to learn that the fellow at James ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... the word mammal, the word animal has been used throughout as having a better defined meaning to the average child. A conscientious effort to avoid technical terms and descriptions has been made that there may be nothing to confuse the young mind. Clarity and simplicity have been the objects kept constantly ...
— The Burgess Animal Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... is necessary, and that is, that morality is not absolute but relative. Strictly speaking, no man is moral. God alone is absolutely moral. Nor can we compare the morality of one man with the average morality of mankind in general. To estimate a certain man's morality of conduct we must compare his conduct with the degree of the sense of responsibility which exists within him, and also his power of control over his conduct. The murderous act of ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... and receiving calls. Every one professed to have had a very good time, though the Earthworm to be sure had not succeeded in making a single call, he moved so slowly. The Bee was through long before noon, and boasted of it. "Prompt is my word," said he, "I made fifty calls, at an average of fifteen calls ...
— Seven Little People and their Friends • Horace Elisha Scudder
... upon deeply established Christian reverences and faiths. It secures for its authority the persistent but perplexed faith in the Bible which the average Protestant inherits and for those who believe in it the force of this authority is no wise weakened by the fact that by every sound canon of Biblical interpretation it is illicit. Its very dogmatism is an asset. It ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... the average farmer sets about his house and buildings unproductive oaks, elms and maples, with scarcely a question of a thought that there are as handsome shade trees that will produce pleasure and profit as well. On our lawns and about our door ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... an average about fifteen hours a day, the house-work not occupying much of our time. I was then only nineteen years old, and it hardly seems possible that the boys of the present day could pass through such ...
— History of the American Clock Business for the Past Sixty Years, - and Life of Chauncey Jerome • Chauncey Jerome
... now refer to your true mark," and he drew forth a little book as he spoke and carefully examined the record. "Ah, yes," he murmured, not lifting his eyes from the page on which he had placed a forefinger. "Ah, yes. It is as I fawncied. Your average for the term in your recitations is what brings you below. It is true you are two above the required mark in your examination, but you are three below in your recitation work, and that, I regret exceedingly to say, brings you still one point below the mark necessary to pass ...
— Winning His "W" - A Story of Freshman Year at College • Everett Titsworth Tomlinson
... here enumerated, were allowed to drift down stream with the current, being steered by long sweeps hung on pivots. The average speed was about three miles an hour, but the distances made were considerable, from the fact that in the earliest days they were, from fear of Indians, usually kept on the move through day and night,—the crew taking turns at the sweeps, that the craft might not be hung up on shore or entangled ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... sent away fourteen thousand men, chiefly of Greek or other non-Roman-Catholic religion, over whom the Catholic priest had neither control or influence. From Warsaw, every Saturday during fifty-two weeks, an average of four hundred men, women, and children were deported, all separated from their natural guides and protectors. From Liefland, north of the Dwina, were sent off, in one month, thirty-five hundred of the better educated and comfortable ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... psychological experiment he had ever dared to make. The magnitude of the thing, when he stopped to think of it, was a little appalling, but his faith was equally large. He did not consider his philosophy at all supernatural. He had brought it down to the level of the average ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood
... An average space of six feet or more on both sides will be sufficient. Under no circumstances, however well the sides be guarded, should the crown of the magazine, if it can be avoided, be less than four feet ...
— Ordnance Instructions for the United States Navy. - 1866. Fourth edition. • Bureau of Ordnance, USN
... the average British citizen beyond everything is the match between England and Scotland, which is to be played next Saturday at Twickenham, the Grand National, which is to be run next week at Liverpool, and Mrs. Bamberger's divorce, which fills the ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... prepared specially for this display by the best workmen in the country. Substantially all the food and game fish were shown. In preparing this collection no attempt, with one exception, was made to show abnormally large specimens. The intention was to show the average fish true to life in color, size and contour. Both fresh and salt water species were represented. The collection, which is undoubtedly the best in the country, comprised the ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... of the home selected, it has been shown in a number of cities that a house priced slightly above the average cost of homes in the community attracted the larger number of visitors. The public apparently likes to visit a home costing more than the average, because of a desire to see and admire better things. Demonstration Homes, therefore, may range in price ...
— Better Homes in America • Mrs W.B. Meloney
... mesmerized, as I am. Delilah has such a queenly way of ruling her world. All the men on board trail after her. But she makes most of them worship from afar. As for the women, she picks the best, instinctively, and the ice which seems congealed around the heart of the average Britisher melts before her charm, so that already she is playing bridge with the proper people, and having tea with the inner circle. Even with these she seems to assume an air of remoteness, which seems to set her apart—and it is this air, Grace ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... prodigious on which Jack Carleton had ever looked. He saw the corners of the mouth move back on the cheeks until it seemed they must touch the ears. Perhaps the chief smiled so seldom that the few served to bring up the "general average" of those ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... the life of the average business man by way of example. Such a man will rise early, sleep late, and eat the bread of carefulness, if he means to succeed. He will probably live—or be said to live—in some suburb more or less remote from the roaring centre of affairs. The first light of the winter dawn will see him ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson |
