"Fifties" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... unconventionality was of course an offence to many; to Englishmen, who were dreaming in the fifties of a kind of industrial millennium, with Cobden as the prophet and Macaulay as the preacher of a new gospel of commercial prosperity and universal peace and progress, Borrow's pre-railroad prejudices and low tastes appeared obscurantist, dark, squalid, unintelligible. ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... jamming in below, filling all available space, seats, aisles and standing room. Mr. Moody talked again a few minutes, and then asked those who would be Christians to rise. This time he knew he had made his meaning clear. They got up in clumps, in groups, by fifties! Mr. Moody said, "I turned and said to the minister, 'What does this mean?' He said, 'I'm sure I don't know.'" Then the minister said to Mr. Moody, "What'll I do with these people? I don't know what to do with them; this is something new." And ...
— Quiet Talks on Prayer • S. D. (Samuel Dickey) Gordon
... my best novel—the novel into which I put the most of myself, the only novel I wrote with tears of emotion. Mrs. Oliphant says that Jeanie Deans is more real to her than any of her own creations, and probably it is the same with me, except for this one work. From an old diary of the fifties, when my first novels were written I take this extract:—"Queer that I who have such a distinct idea of what I approve in flesh-and-blood men should only achieve in pen and ink a set of impossible people, with an absurd muddy expression ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... discoveries. The Delawares never trust to broken branches, unless it is in friendly times, and on an open trail. As for the beeches, and pines, and hemlocks, why, they are to be seen on all sides of us, not only by twos and threes, but by forties, and fifties, and hundreds." ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... acted to tie in with the Federal security regulations. The juvenile delinquent gangs had begun to realize the value of science. Teen-age hoodlums armed with homemade pistols were dangerous enough in the Fifties; add aimed rockets and remote-control bombs to their armories, and you have an almost uncontrollable situation. Something had to be done, and various laws controlling the sale of scientific apparatus had been passed by the fifty states. And—as with their liquor and divorce laws—no two ...
— Damned If You Don't • Gordon Randall Garrett
... serenity of carriage was well set off by the costume of the early fifties—a low collar, above which her neck rose like a flower stem; flowing sleeves; full skirts with many silken petticoats that whispered and rustled; low sandalled shoes, their ties crossed and recrossed around ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... at the 'Sixties,'" she said. "I finished the 'Fifties' last Easter." So they evidently do ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn
... intended for Wilkin, a later Serjeant and well-known in the 'fifties, and whose style and manner is reproduced. We could not ask a better junior in a "touch and go" case. He was as ready to take advantage of any opening as was the late Lord Bowen, when he was ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... this friendship I must mention the friendship with Carlyle. Carlyle had some intercourse with my father in the 'fifties.' My father, indeed, had thought it proper to explain, in a rather elaborate letter after an early conversation, that he did not sympathise with one of Carlyle's diatribes against the Church of England, though ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... would greatly aid him in making the destiny credible. Fifty pounds, as he well knew, would melt away from him like snow. The last fifty pounds of a thousand always goes quicker than any of the nineteen other fifties. ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... was responsible for his illusions, if one may call them illusions. Mr. Carver was a shy, sensitive man well along in his fifties, with a wife twelve years his junior. He pretended to cultivate his small farm in Merrytown, but as a matter of fact he lived off of a comfortable income left him by his very capable father. He spent most of his time reading the eighteenth-century essayists, John ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... organizations, to render the entire list of songs, with a mellow smoothness, an inspiring swing of rythm, and a well rounded tone of perfection, which was really quite surprising. These vocalists, scattered through the fifties and hundreds of farm workers in the hay, harvest, corn and cotton fields; the nursery, gardens, orchards and vineyards; the dairy, mills, factories and packing-houses; the brick works, mines and quarries; the workshops of the store, and the assembly meetings of the co-operators; became ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... host. It was not until the third day, when the Athenians arrived (23) and were duely drawn up beside them, whilst Pausanias neither attacked nor offered battle, that at length the confidence of the Thebans took a larger range. Pausanias, on his side, having summoned his generals and commanders of fifties, (24) deliberated whether to give battle or to content himself with picking up the bodies of Lysander and those who fell with him, ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... artist, you know; but now he's got hold of his money, it's all off. He's going to start a bandbox theater in Chicago, elevate the drama, all that sort of thing. And that studio apartment of his up in the Fifties would be the very thing for you two. Wants to unload the lease and furnishings. Oh, Waddy has excellent taste in rugs and old mahogany. And it will be a rare bargain; I shall see to that. What ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... heart and experience, Mrs. Humphrey wrote a number of poems. Her work in later years has been only prose. Her novel, "The Squatter Sovereign" is an historical romance of pioneer days, the settlement of Kansas in the fifties. ...
— Kansas Women in Literature • Nettie Garmer Barker
... them the example of the Pilgrim Fathers who left their native land to obtain political and religious liberty. Furthermore, some Negroes like Martin R. Delaney, who had at first fearlessly opposed the colonization of the blacks in Africa, began during the fifties to promote the emigration of the free people of color to other parts. Many of this persuasion went to Canada West and some ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... the article on Georgia's doubly gifted son, Sidney Lanier, poet and musician, are given through the kind permission of Professor Edwin Mims and of Doubleday, Page & Company, publishers of Mrs. Clay's "A Belle of the Fifties." ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... career in the fifties of the past century, as I did, and who survive till now, as very many do, have been observant, if inconspicuous, witnesses of one of the most rapid and revolutionary changes that naval science and warfare have ever undergone. It ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... where dawn was a glittering carpet, rolled From sky to shore on level and endless seas, Hardly their eyes discerned in a dazzle of gold That here in fifties, yonder in twos and threes, The ships they sought, like a swarm of drowning bees By a wanton gust on the pool of a mill-dam hurled, Floated forsaken of life-giving tide and breeze, Their oars broken, their sails for ever furled, For ever deserted the bulwarks ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... the urchins, black and white, flew away, flinging up their heels in delight and shouting: "Bully for you, Uncle David! We'll come again next year, not for twenty-fives but fifties." ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... speeches which he deemed necessary were finished, he had followed the girl into a spacious room, furnished in the large gay style of the fifties, brilliantly lit, as if for a festival, and warmed by a log fire of generous dimensions. Having led him in, listening silently the while, and put her additional lamp upon the table, she now spoke, with no empressement, almost with ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... husband. And some people noticed that Lincoln did not come home at week-ends during term-time as often as he might. Perhaps it meant something; perhaps it did not. But there could be no doubt that the jovial itinerant life of the circuit was the life for him—at least in the early 'fifties. That it was, and also that he was becoming known as a lawyer, is evinced by his refusal of a flattering invitation to enter a prosperous firm ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... in his late fifties, was also a Scotsman. "It was remarked of him," wrote Dr. Johnson many years later, "that he was the only Scot whom Scotchmen did not commend."[3] Scotsmen considered him a renegade. They felt that he had repudiated his country in changing his distinctively Scots name, perhaps also ...
— Critical Strictures on the New Tragedy of Elvira, Written by Mr. David Malloch (1763) • James Boswell, Andrew Erskine and George Dempster
... offered in some of the most evanescent and worthless developments of contemporary literature,—some of them, indeed, worse than worthless,—I think of a remark made to me by a college friend of mine who will be remembered by the Yale men of the fifties for his keen and pithy judgments of men and things. Being one day in New Haven looking for assistant professors and instructors, I met him; and, on my answering his question as to what had brought me, he said, "If at any time you want a professor of HORSE SENSE, call ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... fifties, and three ten dollar bills in the lot. Twenty-seven bills in all, representing eight hundred and ten dollars. Folding the money carefully and placing it in a safe pocket, he noticed a sign across the street. "SHOES," it said. He glanced at his own, then limped slowly across when the traffic ...
— Wanted—7 Fearless Engineers! • Warner Van Lorne
... beautiful—a kind, cordial, intimate, above all, to satisfy his present craving, it was a lady-like adieu—the adieu of a delicate and elegant woman, who had hardly left her anchorage by forty to sail into the fifties. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Dutchman than life itself, but it could and did extend the blessing of political and religious freedom to a greater number of people. Love of liberty brought about the disestablishment of the Church, and love of toleration made Holland follow this measure in the fifties by the emancipation ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen: and some shall run before his chariots, 12. And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots. 13. And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers. 14. And he will take your fields, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the Fifties. Benicia Seminary. Genesis of Mills College. Distinguished Pioneers. ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... Minister of Internal Affairs. Spawn had mentioned him to me. A South American. A man in his fifties. Thin and darkly saturnine, with iron-gray hair, carefully plastered to cover his half-bald head. He sat listening to the President's harangue, twirling the upturned waxen ends of his artificially black mustache. A wave of perfume enveloped ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... sometimes hear very enthralling accounts of it. An old sea captain whom I met on the pier at Southampton, in reply to my inquiry, said: "Yes! I have seen the phantom ship, or at any rate a phantom ship, once—but only once. It was one night in the fifties, and we were becalmed in the South Pacific about three hundred miles due west of Callao. It had been terrifically hot all day, and, only too thankful that it was now a little cooler, I was lolling ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... the fishery, and as the smackmen made frequent visits the business rapidly increased. The establishment of a cannery at Oceanville, about 1860, also caused a considerable development of the fishery. The fishery was started at Isle an Haute about 1855, and at Swan Island in the early fifties. ...
— The Lobster Fishery of Maine - Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission, Vol. 19, Pages 241-265, 1899 • John N. Cobb
... said Jane, stiffly, "to discuss thirties or forties or fifties either, which are no business of ours. There's one gentleman, and him a marquis, as chose her over the heads of two beauties ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... government. With organized Cabinets coordinating and controlling their policy the provinces went ahead much faster than when Governor and Assembly stood at daggers drawn. The forties and especially the fifties were years of rapid and sound development in all the provinces, and especially in Canada West. Settlers poured in, the scattered clearings; widened until one joined the next, and pioneer hardships gave way to substantial, if crude, prosperity. Education, notably ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... out and saw the well without a drop of water. He now began to quarrel with them, saying, "Have I not told ye, 'I am not able to bear you myself alone'? Ye have rulers of thousands, rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens, princes, chiefs, elders, and magnates, let these attend to your needs." Israel, however, said: "All rests with thee, for it is thou who didst lead us out of Egypt and brought 'us in unto this evil place; ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... at this period assumed vast proportions that verged upon the sublime. Pies were made by forties and fifties and hundreds, and made of everything on the earth and under ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... fifties I traveled from the North Yuba River to San Bernardino on different roads, and made many acquaintances and friends. I can truly say that I found many of these early comers who were the most noble men and women of the earth. They were brave ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... coming in from the east, but not with the gay assurance of those who came from the south and west—no, these others came in covered wagons, blood-soaked and suffering. They came at first in little parties of eight or ten, and then they came in fifties, in hundreds, and one day a thousand maimed and dying men were carted ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... set akimbo, he straightened his back And said: "'Twuz one night in the fifties I know; Ther' kem up the trail frum the gulch jist below A youngish-like feller; but steppin' so slow I heartily pitied him even before I saw his pale brow and heerd the sharp hack Of his troublesome cough, and plain enough lack Of more'n enough power to bring ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... was not. No lonely death for me. I was bobbing it. You are swept off by dozens at a time there—by fifties in a cave. It's more cheerful." Then he seemed to remark something which he thought she ought to know. "Jimmy. You heard her? Now Macartney and I are both called James. But who ever made a Jimmy of him?" She was annoyed with him—the man seemed to ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... possessing two secondary boys' schools of first-rate importance—Christ's College Grammar School in the South Island, and the Wanganui Collegiate School in the North. Both were founded in the early 'fifties, and endowed with lands which now yield a substantial revenue. Both embody the best traditions of English public-school life. Wanganui has the larger number of boarders; Christ's College of day-boys. The old alumni of these institutions have become a power in the land, and, of late years, ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... office also, the utmost economy was always studied. The increase in the annual appropriations for which I asked was so small that, when I left the office in 1877, they were just about the same as they were back in the fifties, when it was first established. The necessary funds were saved by economical administration. All this was done with a feeling that, after my retirement, the satisfaction with which one could look back on such a policy would be enhanced by a feeling on the part of the representatives ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... forsooth, the producers and venders of it will lose their profits if it be abandoned? Shall the intellect, and health, and comfort, and wealth, and lives of hundreds and thousands of our fellow citizens, be sacrificed yearly; and widows and orphans be multiplied by scores and fifties, in every section of this wide-spreading country; and one of the prominent auxiliaries of intemperance,—and consequently of crime, and insanity, and eternal woe—be cherished; and twenty-five millions ...
— A Disquisition on the Evils of Using Tobacco - and the Necessity of Immediate and Entire Reformation • Orin Fowler
... VIOLET, MRS., b. Indiana. Came to California in early fifties. Wrote sketches and poems for newspapers and magazines. Made selection of poems to which Bret Harte's name was attached, known as "Outcroppings." Address: 1034 Vallejo St., San ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... late in the afternoon as he was closing up, Barrent received an unusual-looking caller. He was a man in his fifties, heavy-set, with a stern, swarthy face. He wore a red ankle-length robe and sandals. Around his waist was a rawhide belt from which dangled a small black book and a red-handled dagger. There was an air of unusual ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... a nice, clean bomb. Nothing but helium, radiation, and heat. In the early nineteen fifties, such a bomb had been constructed by surrounding the LiH with a fission bomb—the so-called "implosion" technique. But all that heavy metal around the central reaction created all kinds of radioactive residues which had a tendency to scatter ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the boy, so far as satisfying the multitude, it was a dead failure. Then Jesus comes to the rescue. He is apt to come when there is a dead lift. He commands the people that they sit down "in ranks, by hundreds and by fifties," as much as to say: "Order! order! so that none be missed." It was fortunate that that arrangement was made; otherwise, at the very first appearance of bread, the strong ones would have clutched it, while the feeble and the modest would have ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... met Whistler as a boy in Washington in the fifties, when he himself was an attach of the British Legation, took the credit for bringing Whistler and his wife together. His story was denied by Mrs. Whistler's relatives, but is interesting enough to ...
— Whistler Stories • Don C. Seitz
... the Gila the southern boundary, but the Gadsden Purchase placed it farther south, as now marked. A number of expeditions concerned in this and railway surveys traversed Arizona in the early fifties under Whipple, Sitgreaves, Emory, and others, and the country began to be scientifically known outside of the canyons and their surroundings. John R. Bartlett was appointed Boundary Commissioner, and he spent considerable ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... stranger seal-meat and blubber and the "Chief" from the great ship had presented her with a piece of cloth as red as the new-spilt blood of the seal. This grandmother-in-Ice-Land is without shadow of doubt the very child to whom M'Clure gave a piece of red flannel far back in the early fifties while prosecuting his double search for the Northwest Passage and the lost Franklin. We have M'Clure's record of the incident and the little girl's questioning wonder,—"Of what animal is this the skin?" Thus does history manifest itself on the other side ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... full of interest and excitement and opportunity, and what young Clemens saw and heard and divined during the years when he was going up and down the mighty river we may read in the pages of 'Huckleberry Finn' and 'Pudd'nhead Wilson.' But toward the end of the fifties the railroads began to rob the river of its supremacy as a carrier; and in the beginning of the sixties the Civil War broke out and the Mississippi no longer went unvext to the sea. The skill, slowly and laboriously acquired, was suddenly rendered useless, ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... lurched onward through the waste, and presently on either side the way I saw other such mounds and crosses, by twos and threes, by fifties, by hundreds, in long rows beyond count. And looking around me on this dreary desolation I knew that one day (since nothing dies) upon this place of horror grass would grow and flowers bloom again; along this now desolate ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... we are bound individually, even the very humblest and meanest of us, to care. The field is vast, and white for the harvest. Now, for the love of Christ, in the name of honor, for very shame's sake, where we counted our laborers by tens, let us number them by fifties,—where there were hundreds, let ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... as he explained; sang "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys Are Marching" at Grand Army entertainments, and always as an encore dragged "Ma" out to sing with him "Dear, Dear, What Can the Matter Be." She was a skinny, sharp-eyed, shy little woman in her late fifties when the trouble came. She rose at every annual meeting of the church to give a hundred dollars but her voice never lasted until she got through announcing her donation, and she sat down demurely, blushing and looking ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... middle fifties, gray and careworn, but with alert blue eyes and a gentle mouth. He smiled at Ruth as she turned away from the bed, smiled with both his mouth and eyes; and she knew that here would be a man of heart as well as of science. She went out ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... late Fifties, when leaving the farm in Illinois he came at sixteen to New York and found a job as time clerk in one of the ship yards along the East River. They are all gone now, but then they were humming and ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... are done up in fifties, . . . the three-rouble notes in nineties, the twenty-five and hundred roubles in thousands. You count out seven thousand eight hundred for Varlamov, and I will count out for Gusevitch. And mind you don't make a ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... weeks there was not much order in their way of traveling; but on March 27th the Saints were more perfectly organized. Brigham Young was sustained as president of the whole camp. Then captains were appointed over hundreds, over fifties, and over tens. Clerks were chosen to keep the records, etc., and men were called to see to the buying and distributing of the food. Thus every one had something to do and everything was done ...
— A Young Folks' History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints • Nephi Anderson
... father were dead, and that under the will of the latter he was to receive a legacy of seven thousand pounds. Meanwhile, Gordon appears to have made no attempt to win any of the prizes that were the common reward of pluck and industry in the Australia of the fifties. He joined the mounted police force of South Australia, but, impatient of its discipline, soon left it, and for long afterwards was content with the rough employment of ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... was smiling and blushing, sheepishly and happily, while Mr. Brotherton was mentally calculating that he would be in his middle fifties before a possible little girl of his might be putting on her first long dresses. It saddened him a little, and he turned, rather subdued, and called into the alcove to the Judge ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... Frank. "Your paper will no doubt be a curiosity to the folks at home." As he spoke, he produced the dollar, and the butternut drew out of his capacious pocket a huge roll of bills—tens, twenties, and fifties, enough to have made him independent if it had been good money—and selecting a five-dollar bill, handed it to Frank, who thrust it ...
— Frank on the Lower Mississippi • Harry Castlemon
... In the early fifties, when the growth of anti-slavery sentiment and the constant drain of fugitive slaves into the North had so alarmed the slaveholders of the border States as to lead to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, a young ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... superintendent, {133} a large stride forward was taken in this department. The engines now employed in hauling these long and heavily-ladened tourist trains are mighty monsters compared with what appeared "powerful" enough to travellers in the fifties and sixties. Readers turning to the illustrations on another page may see at a glance the difference between "then" and "now" both in the coaching and the locomotive departments. Even the contrast between the engines as originally constructed ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... devoid of the sentiment of ancestor worship and sacredness of family continuity which we have been taught to associate with the Oriental. And yet there is always a current of suspicion in one's mind that he is not really revealing his inmost heart. When a bachelor in his late fifties tells us how glad he is never to have had a son, we ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... be seen in flocks of twenties and fifties. They were exceedingly wary, not permitting the canoe to approach within rifle range. Clouds of ducks, and some Canada geese, as well as brant, kept up a continuous flutter as they rose from the ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... question been the only question, and by the end of 'fifties our land lay sick and shaking with it like a traveller who has thrown himself down at night beside a pestilential swamp, and in the morning finds the fever through the marrow of his bones. "Only muzzle the Abolition fanatics," said the South, ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... the midst of my medical schooldays and in the unrestraint of Adirondack holidays twenty years ago that I first met Dr. Janeway. As I look back at this first memory I can see a vigorous, well-built man a little way on in the fifties, dressed for a mountain climb or a game of golf. His fine, firm-featured face would have struck one as rather stern if one happened to miss that blessed kindliness which always lighted his steady eyes. Though dressed for outing, it was not difficult ...
— Some Personal Recollections of Dr. Janeway • James Bayard Clark
... administration, we lose sight of that simple scheme of domestic superintendence which Jacob established among his sons. The princes of tribes, and the heads of families, were converted into captains of thousands, of hundreds, and of fifties; regulating their movements by the sound of the trumpet, and passing their days of rest amid the vigilance and formality of a regular encampment. But no sooner did they convert the sword into a ploughshare, and the spear into a pruning-hook, than they unanimously returned to ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... that time nearly seventy per cent have come from non-Teutonic countries, such as Russia, Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Greece. The period of maximum immigration for the Irish to this country was the forties and fifties; the period of maximum immigration for the Germans was the fifties and eighties; and for the English, the seventies and eighties. But the period of maximum immigration for the Italians can scarcely as yet be reckoned by decades at all. The Italians first began coming in numbers exceeding ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... silent; he was in the upper fifties, but long absence from the sun had pinched his face into the white mask of ...
— The Angel of Lonesome Hill • Frederick Landis
... trifles in your hands, gentlemen, you are not to suppose that men who are trained to look in at one end of a thirty-two pounder, loaded with grape, while the match is put to the other, will so much as wink at their report, though you fired them by fifties. What say you, boys, is a pistol ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... candidate for the National Legislature, but he suffered from the disadvantage of living at the small end of the district, and the prize was carried off by George F. Hoar, afterwards United States Senator; but going to Congress in the seventies was not what it had been in the fifties and sixties, when the halls of the Capitol resounded with the most impressive oratory of ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... out a living. The happy cow-punchers on ranches far and near still earned and instantly spent the high wages still paid them. With their bodies full of youth and their pockets full of gold, they rode into town by twenties, by fifties, and out again next morning, penniless always and happy. And then the Four-ace Johnstons would sit card-playing with each other till the innocents should come to ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... English, was named after Shakopee Indian Chief, (Little Six), who with his band, had a village just across the river. He died and was buried there in the fifties. I saw the dead body in the winter, which they had elevated on a platform, held up by four slender poles, about eight feet high. In the trees near the camp, they had something that looked like a closed umbrella. They had a number of these to drive ...
— Old Rail Fence Corners - The A. B. C's. of Minnesota History • Various
... "Reason is the highest principle!" Reason! Never do I hear this word without recalling Dr. Saul Ascher, with his abstract legs, his tight-fitting transcendental-grey long coat, his forbidding icy face, which could have served as frontispiece for a textbook of geometry. This man, deep in the fifties, was a personified straight line. In his striving for the positive, the poor man had, by dint of philosophizing, eliminated all the splendid things from life, such as sunshine, religion, and flowers, so that there remained nothing for him but the cold ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... convention signed in 1850 later developed discord as to the British claim of a protectorate over the Atlantic end of the proposed canal at San Juan del Nicaragua. But Britain was again at war in Europe in the middle 'fifties, and America was deep in quarrel over slavery at home. On both sides in spite of much diplomatic intrigue and of manifestations of national pride there was governmental desire to avoid difficulties. At the end of the ten-year period Britain ceded to Nicaragua ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... respects when she alighted from the muddy buckboard sent to the railway to meet her; they were her husband's old friends, Colonel Hyssop and Major Brent, white-haired, purple-faced, well-groomed gentlemen in the early fifties. The third member was out in the ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... only to be got rid of when dishonestly acquired at great risk and loss. A note for a mere five pounds may pass through scores of hands before being stopped at the bank. Tens, so the experienced in such matters will tell you, are a little difficult. Twenties are inquired into rather carefully. Fifties are positively dangerous to handle in this way. Hundreds are, except after great lapse of time, almost impossible; and as for a thousand, a man might almost as well steal a white elephant as a bank-note of that value, except that it will cost him nothing for keep, unless ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... art, and it becomes more of an art with the general decline of spirit. For it takes two to make a quarrel. Time was when you turned to the handiest human being, and with small care or labour had the comfortable warmth you needed in a minute or so. There was theology, even in the fifties it was ample cause with two out of three you met. Now people will express a lamentable indifference. Then politics again, but a little while ago fat for the fire of any male gathering, is now a topic ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... exhausted lady was helped over the stone stile that led to the churchyard. Highly picturesque was the grey structure outside, but within modernism had not done much; the chancel was feebly fitted after the ideas of the "fifties," but the faded woodwork of the nave was intact, and Magdalen still had to sit in the grim pew ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... fell behind, so as to cause no disorder in the flanks, and then led on outside the flanks; 22. and whenever the sides of the square opened, they filled up the centre, if the opening was narrow, by companies; if rather wide, by fifties; if very wide, by twenty-fives;[160] so that the centre was always full. 23. If, then, it was necessary to pass any defile or bridge, they were not thrown into confusion, but the captains and companies went over in succession;[161] ...
— The First Four Books of Xenophon's Anabasis • Xenophon
... we not say, than this imitation of the Florentine arti of the Middle Ages was the Working Men's College, founded in London in the fifties by that other earnest Christian Socialist, F.D. Maurice, in which Ruskin lectured gratuitously, took charge of the drawing classes, and hied off to the country with its members to sketch from nature and otherwise instruct and entertain them. Yet good in many respects came of the Guild of St. George, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... three startling lines in Mrs. Fowler's forehead, and Gabriella observed suddenly that there were tiny crow's feet around her blue eyes where the whites were flecked ever so faintly with yellow. Though she was well into the mid-fifties, her carefully preserved skin had kept the firmness and the texture of youth, and she still flushed easily and unbecomingly as she had done ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... her predicament; she wanted to find a man who was a minister in Centralia and she didn't know his name. Reassured, they gathered round interestedly. Was he young or old? Katie cautiously placed him in the forties or fifties. Then they guessed and reckoned that it couldn't be either the Reverend Lewis or that new fellow at the Baptist. Was he—would she say he was one to be kind of easy on a fellow, or did she think he took his ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... the schooner on stormy days, when they lay up in the foc'sle or sat on the cabin lockers, while spare eye-bolts, leads, and rings rolled and rattled in the pauses of the talk. Disko spoke of whaling voyages in the Fifties; of great she-whales slain beside their young; of death agonies on the black tossing seas, and blood that spurted forty feet in the air; of boats smashed to splinters; of patent rockets that went off wrong-end-first and bombarded the trembling crews; of cutting-in and ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... to its original movement by hundreds and fifties; but I had been able in the meanwhile to draw two conclusions. In the first place, Bellairs had made his last advance with a smile of gratified vanity; and I could see the creature was glorying in the kudos of an unusual position and secure of ultimate success. In the second, Trent had once more ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... from the Western Base in Queen Mary Land to Hobart was two thousand three hundred miles, through the turbulent seas of the fifties and forties. It was the end of a perilous voyage when the 'Aurora' arrived in Hobart with nine tons ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... story you sent for Belvy," Jim wrote. "We've heard it read and reread, and the more it's worn with reading the fresher it gets in our minds. As I size up the effect on the population, we folks in the forties and fifties got more fun out of it than anybody except the folks in the seventies and the five-to-twelve-year-olds. Some of the thirteen and fourteen-year-olds were inclined to think at first that it wasn't quite grown up enough for ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... himself known at the General's residence at about eight thirty on the evening that he received the assignment. In the magnificent library he was greeted by the distinguished traveller and connoisseur, a tall, erect gentleman in the early fifties, with a nearly white moustache, and a bearing so soldierly that one perceived in him scarcely a trace of the National Guardsman. His weather-beaten countenance lit up with a charming smile of interest when the reporter made ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... will not be destroyed. Country people have not yet got into the habit which may be called slur-reading. They really read. The circulars at present delivered in the country are counted by ones and twos where suburban residents get scores and fifties. Almost the only firms who have found out the value of circulars in the country are the great drapery establishments, and their enterprise is richly rewarded. The volume of business thus transacted and brought to ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... conspiracy—supplying out of its banks and trust companies the public's money for the gamblers to make the game with. Then began the artful process of working up the market; stocks gradually climbed higher and higher. Amalgamated ascended from the forties into the fifties and the sixties and even into the eighties; steel assumed the appearance of life and grew from ten slowly upward into the twenties and thirties. Every day in the Stock Exchange hundreds of thousands of shares changed hands back and forth ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... that all should sit down by companies upon the green grass. Now there was much grass in the place. And they sat down in ranks, by hundreds, and by fifties. And he took the five loaves and the two fishes, and looking up to heaven, he blessed, and brake the loaves; and he gave to the disciples to set before them; and the two fishes divided he among them all. And they all ate, and were filled. And they took up broken ...
— His Life - A Complete Story in the Words of the Four Gospels • William E. Barton, Theodore G. Soares, Sydney Strong
... turned him—not simply into a poet, for he was a poet by nature, but into one of the most subtle, deliberate, patient, and exquisite craftsmen who have ever written in verse. The process was a long one; La Fontaine was in his fifties when he wrote the greater number of his Fables—where his genius found its true expression for the first time. But the process was also complete. Among all the wonderful and beautiful examples of masterly craftsmanship in the poetry of France, ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... his prestige in our eyes as a martyr to science, but he himself was longing for something else. "They have forgotten me! I'm no use to anyone!" broke from him more than once. This intensified depression took special hold of him towards the end of the fifties. Varvara Petrovna realised at last that it was a serious matter. Besides, she could not endure the idea that her friend was forgotten and useless. To distract him and at the same time to renew his fame she carried him off to Moscow, where she had fashionable acquaintances in the literary ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Early in the fifties there was living in Moscow, in very straitened circumstances, almost in poverty, the numerous family of the Princes Osinin. These were real princes—not Tartar-Georgians, but pure-blooded descendants of Rurik. Time, however, had dealt hardly with them. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... six weeks along the docks as roustabout for money to take him back into the hills whence came the big fortunes and the bigger tales of fortunes. For six years he worked over the gravelly benches of the California creeks for vagrant particles of gold. Then, in the late fifties, he joined a mad stampede to the Frazer River gold-fields in British Columbia, still wild over its first knowledge of silver sulphurets, he was drawn back by the ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... said Woods. "You counted out twenty fifties without a word. I'll pay it back some day. That thousand saved me and—well, they were piling my furniture out on the sidewalk when I got back to ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... has not degenerated; teeth still good and eyes good, in spite of his fifties; still that amazing imagination which brings nearer and enlarges all objects with the power of a telescope. He remains the same man as he of whom the brave Commander Bravida used ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... Browning became much interested in the reports which reached her—many of these from America—of the "rapping spirits," who in the 'fifties were busy in instructing chairs and tables to walk in the way they should not go. "You know I am rather a visionary," she wrote to Miss Mitford, "and inclined to knock round at all the doors of the ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden |
