"Inhospitable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... walk, but were obliged to slide along them; and as for the stove, it was too bright and polished to be polluted with sea-coal, or stained by the smoke of any gross material fire — When we had remained above half an hour sacrificing to the inhospitable powers in the temple of cold reception, my friend Baynard arrived, and understanding we were in the house, made his appearance, so meagre, yellow, and dejected, that I really should not have known ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... occupied in crossing the steppe; the marches were long, depending on uncertain supplies of grass and water, which sometimes wholly failed them; food for man and beast had to be carried with the party, for not a trace of human habitation is to be met with in those inhospitable wilds.... The steppe is interspersed with tamarisk jungle and the wild willow, and in the summer with tracts of high grass." (Neumann, Pilgerfahrten Buddh. Priester, p. 50; V. et V. de H. T. 271-272; Wood, 232; Proc. R. G. S. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... surrounding hills were covered with woods and presented an inhospitable appearance. The choice was severely criticised, and de Kalb described it as a wilderness. But the position was central and easily defended. The army arrived there about the middle of December, and the erection of huts began. They were built of logs and were ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... mansion reared before me a closed and inhospitable front. The shutters of all the windows were fastened. Since the last rain no wheels had passed over the carriage-way. For all the signs of life visible, Cairncross might have ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... after scraping off the hair with a flint-knife. They swim and dive like ducks, and run up trees like monkeys. Though affectionate to their children, they are ruthless to the stranger, killing every one who happens to be cast away on their inhospitable shores. They have been accused of cannibalism, but this is open to doubt. The bodies of those they have killed have been found dreadfully mutilated, almost pounded to a jelly, but no ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... half being assembled below. For the lofty trim of the wintergreen-trees—the beauty of which may have been learned from the palms—allowed and invited another planting beneath them. Magnolias, when permitted to branch low, are, to undergrowth, among the most inhospitable of trees, but in this garden, where the sunlight and the breezes passed abundantly under such high-lifted arms and among such clean, bare stems, a congregation of shrubs, undershrubs and plants of every stature and breadth, arose, ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... shipped to Pennsylvania for smelting. This ore has special properties which render it more than usually valuable, and it is even claimed to be the best iron mine in the world. There is a strangely solitary and inhospitable appearance about this portion of the island, devoid as it is of all human habitations, and fringed either with long reaches of lonely snow-white beach or rugged brown rocks. The volcanic appearance ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... circumstances, the gourmands of the gunroom were most unfeignedly delighted at abandoning such an inhospitable region as that of "The Widespreading-sand Island," where they had to starve in the midst of plenty; so likewise was I, the only thing which I had to thank our sojourn off the province of Shan-tung for being the nickname Larkyns gave ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... the whole population crowded in to look at us. It was no fun at all Stephan stood cursing in German that he could not get near the fire to cook, and that he would not cook at all if the mob were not cleared out. This Dr. S. refused to allow, as it would be considered inhospitable. ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... step toward the place where her horse was tethered, and looked back regretfully. "It seems inhospitable to leave you like this. Will you not come ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... famed Hypanis, which once Cradled the Hun; from all the countless realms Between Imaus and that utmost strand Where columns of Herculean rock confront The blown Atlantic; Roman, Goth, and Hun, And Scythian strength of chivalry, that tread The cold Codanian shore, or what far lands Inhospitable drink Cimmerian floods, Franks, Saxons, Suevic, and Sarmartian chiefs, And who from green Armorica or Spain Flocked to the work of death." [Herbert's Attila, book i. ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... very atmosphere seems to be composed of a fine dust which, on the slightest wind, penetrates into the mouth and nose, whilst the soil affords no firm footing to the traveller. The march through this inhospitable region lasted 60 days, during which numbers of the soldiers perished from fatigue or disease. At length they emerged into the fertile province of Carmania. Whilst in this country Alexander was rejoined by Nearchus, who had arrived with his fleet at Harmozia (ORMUZ); but who subsequently ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... its cruel net around him. The stony wastes bore no fruit but briers and thorns. The dark ledges of rock thrust themselves above the surface here and there, like the bones of perished monsters. Arid and inhospitable mountain ranges rose before him, furrowed with dry channels of ancient torrents, white and ghastly as scars on the face of nature. Shifting hills of treacherous sand were heaped like tombs along the horizon. By day, the fierce heat pressed its intolerable burden on the quivering ...
— The Story of the Other Wise Man • Henry Van Dyke
... cause which keeps the Tibetan from being absorbed is the cold, inhospitable nature of his country. There is little to tempt the Chinese to emigrate into Tibet and consequently they never are there in sufficient numbers to influence the Tibetans around them. A similar cause has preserved some of the low-lying Shan ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... every well-conducted war, Harmony was left in peace, only one mild attempt being made a few days after the occupation of Pretoria, by the officer in command of the Montmorency Scouts, to obtain entrance for himself and fellow officers at Harmony's inhospitable door. ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... another city, but I think the state will keep them here as guests for a nice long time, Cleary. They say New York is inhospitable to strangers, but we occasionally pay for board and room from the funds of the taxpayers without a kick. We saved the day for the Van Clefts, all right. The paper told of a beautiful but quiet funeral ceremony, while the daughter has postponed ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... gloomy eye that she surveyed the Liverpool docks in the bleak dawn next morning, seated in her chair, Amelie beside her, a competent Atlas, bearing a complicated assortment of bags, rugs, and wraps. No, she had nothing to hope from these inhospitable shores; no welcoming eyes were there to greet hers. It was difficult not to cry as she watched the ugly docks draw near and saw the rows of ugly human faces upturned upon it—peculiarly ugly in colour the human ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... dangers and sufferings from cold and hunger, and the other evils attending a shipwreck on such an inhospitable shore and in such a climate, there is no mention of one single instance of murmuring, discontent, or disobedience ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... "With your friends at the mill of course. Very inhospitable not to offer you lunch. When are we to ...
— The Guilty River • Wilkie Collins
... was pushed forward with all possible expedition. The summer passed rapidly away. As winter drew near, a vast roof was built over the globe, and all was securely shut in from the inclemencies of that inhospitable season. All winter the hundreds of hammers, busily riveted the sheets of aluminum and zinc into place, and by spring the globe, the splendid creation that had existed in the brain of Dr. Jones, was an actuality. Language is inadequate to describe the sensations of the little company of promoters. ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... among themselves and strict exclusiveness could the Hanses for centuries maintain their position upon that inhospitable and thinly peopled shore. The novice, who usually entered the service of the Hansa at the age of twelve, was compelled to serve an apprenticeship of seven years, during which his duties consisted also ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... leather, till we ended by regarding a rat as a rarity, and deeming a mouse a delicacy of the season. As for vegetables, there would not have been a flowering plant in all Genoa, if tulip and ranunculus roots had not been bitter as aloes. These seem very inhospitable confessions, but I make them the more freely since I am about to treat you 'en Gourmet.' Come in now, and acknowledge that juniper-bark isn't bad coffee, and that commissary bread is not to be thought ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... message and the help, by cruising among the fleets on the fishing-grounds, and the organization of the Deep Sea Mission; when this work was done, "when the fight had gone out of it," Dr. Grenfell looked for another field, for yet another need, and found it on that barren and inhospitable coast the Labrador, whose only harvest field is ...
— Adrift on an Ice-Pan • Wilfred T. Grenfell
... leaves were shrivelled and blackened by veld fires. Also there were a few euphorbias, grey, naked-looking things that end in points like fingers on a hand, and among them some sparse thorn trees, struggling to live in an inhospitable soil. ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... of the London Basin is still capped by layers of such sandstone, as may be seen at Purfleet in Essex. The titanic sheep, or Grey Wethers, therefore, are merely a small residue of that widespread sandy deposit which once covered the whole of the south of England with its inhospitable sheet, and of which larger patches remain to-day in Surrey, Hampshire, and the Isle of Wight. But though the hand of Time and the buffets of the weather have been heavy on the Sarsens, the hand of man has likewise borne its ...
— Stonehenge - Today and Yesterday • Frank Stevens
... streams, heaps of abandoned baggage, and huge snow-drifts repeatedly blocked the line of march. The gaunt and desolate country, which the army had ravaged and pillaged during the summer's invasion, now grimly mocked the retreating host. It was a land truly inhospitable and dreary beyond description. Exhaustion overcame thousands of troopers, who dropped by the wayside and beneath the snows gave their bodies to enrich the Russian ground. The retreat became a rout and all would have ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... great waste of sand stretches. In the wet season, this tract of country is overflowed by the Indus. In the dry season it is a parched and bare desert, with its wells few and far apart. There were great difficulties met with in crossing this inhospitable plain, and the losses among the baggage animals were great; but the labors up to this point were as nothing, to those which had to be undergone on the way up the ...
— For Name and Fame - Or Through Afghan Passes • G. A. Henty
... heat had cooled a little, he gained their attention, and his bill became a law. If we had now in Congress a member so much interested for the rights of authors and artists, and at the same time so learned, so honored, and so persevering, we might hope that the inhospitable usage which makes the property of the American author in Great Britain and of the British author in the United States the lawful prize of whosoever chooses to appropriate it to ...
— A Discourse on the Life, Character and Writings of Gulian Crommelin - Verplanck • William Cullen Bryant
... eternal sufferings can make adequate retribution!—Equally iniquitous is the practice of robbing that country of its inhabitants; and equally tremendous will be the punishment. The voice of injured thousands, who have been violently torn from their native country, and carried to distant and inhospitable climes—the bitter lamentations of the wretched, helpless female—the cruel agonizing sensations of the husband, the father and the friend—will ascend to the throne of Omnipotence, and, from the elevated heights ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... the summer! To many this home on the island would have seemed an arid, inhospitable place, desolate and lost amid a cruel world of cliffs and waters. It was not so to Vere. For she entered into the life of the sea. She knew all its phases, as one may know all the moods of a person loved. She knew when she would find it intensely ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... to seaward, each ship acting for the best. Come, gentlemen, I do not wish to be inhospitable, but the Proserpine must be off. She has a long road before her; and the winds of this season of the year can barely be counted on for an hour ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... "How inhospitable of you to desert your friends so soon!" says she. "Why, you never come up till two, do you?—at least, so ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... part, which was square, and at the four corners stood four round towers. The house was built right on the river, just below a large mill-pond. I walked up to the door and pounded on it with my stick. It was shut, and looked as inhospitable as the rest of the place. After a moment's delay it was opened two or three inches, and the surly face of an old ...
— A Master of Mysteries • L. T. Meade
... been otherwise. In wandering over the plains of inhospitable Denmark, through honest Sweden, frozen Lapland, rude and churlish Finland, unprincipled Russia, and the widespread regions of the wandering Tartar, if hungry, dry, cold, wet, or sick, woman has ever been friendly to me, and uniformly so: and, to add to this virtue, ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... the post as laid out by him. In those days the Government did not provide very liberally for sheltering its soldiers; and officers and men were frequently forced to eke out parsimonious appropriations by toilsome work or go without shelter in most inhospitable regions. Of course this post was no exception to the general rule, and as all hands were occupied in its construction, and I the only officer present, I was kept busily employed in supervising matters, both as commandant and quartermaster, until July, when Captain D. ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... out nearly three minutes, now. Both ladies rose with grave dignity, conferred upon Laura a formal invitation to call, aid then retired from the conference. Laura remained in the drawing-room and left them to pilot themselves out of the house—an inhospitable thing, it seemed to her, but then she was following her instructions. She stood, steeped in reverie, a while, and then ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... your very sight is already hateful to me." And turning, with flushed cheek and gleaming eyes, she entered the cosy, cleanly-kept little cottage of her father. But she soon reflected that she had been guilty of an unpardonably inhospitable act in not asking the strangers to enter. Suddenly turning, she walked rapidly back, and overtook the crest-fallen wooer and his companion, and said in a voice from which every trace of ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... behaved admirably in their encampment at Fort Bridger under these trying privations. In the midst of the mountains, in a dreary, unsettled, and inhospitable region, more than a thousand miles from home, they passed the severe and inclement winter without a murmur. They looked forward with confidence for relief from their country in due season, and in this ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... a stone house with wide lawns and an inhospitable air of wealth and importunate rank; over the sward two peacocks swung, ambulating like caravals in a green sea; and one expected a fine lady to come smiling and glittering from the door. Oddly enough, though he had never seen the place before, it struck Harkless with a sense of familiarity. ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... roads, the jungles filled with poisonous plants and the terrible prickly underbrush and pointed grass, in which skulked the land crab and various reptiles whose bite or sting was dangerous; twenty miles of this inhospitable country lay between them and Santiago, their true objective. And somewhere on the road to that city they knew they were destined to meet a well-trained foe, skilled in all the arts of modern warfare, who would ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... and I think such People come over fast enough without such ostentatious Proclamations to give them new Encouragements: My Conduct always took a different Turn, and if I had liv'd a little longer, I had wrote a Treatise to prove Ireland, the most inhospitable and barbarous of all habitable Islands, and the very Piss-pot of the Western World. I even made it a Rule to rail at it all I could, to frighten such People from coming hither, lest hearing there was Corn in the Land, shou'd invite ...
— A Dialogue Between Dean Swift and Tho. Prior, Esq. • Anonymous
... Silent in inhospitable darkness, the Casa Viola seemed to have changed its nature; his home appeared to repel him with an air of hopeless and ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... it! Think of it! The grey, inhospitable skies, the rain-swept stage, the feeling of hopeless loneliness, as one traveller after another was greeted with loving exclamations, and borne away by friendly watchers; and then suddenly to feel your hand grasped, and laid tenderly on a protecting ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... morning, one of those uninhabited bays upon the coast of Brittany; more particularly I had a prescience of those twilights of the Antarctic winter when, in about the latitude of Magellan, we were to go in search of protection towards those sterile shores that are as inhospitable and as absolutely deserted as the ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... prouder branches with exuberance rude Point their green gems, their barren shoots protrude; Wound them, ye SYLPHS! with little knives, or bind A wiry ringlet round the swelling rind; 465 Bisect with chissel fine the root below, Or bend to earth the inhospitable bough. So shall each germ with new prolific power Delay the leaf-bud, and expand the flower; Closed in the Style the tender pith shall end, 470 The lengthening Wood in circling Stamens bend; The smoother ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... of modest buildings and huts which form the aboriginal settlement. The choice of the site for the settlement was influenced by the character of the country. Although but a short distance by sea from the port, it is isolated by its background of hard and inhospitable hills patched with almost impenetrable jungle. Few consigned there ever leave of their own motive, however earnest the longing may be. The home-sick realise that escape is difficult and, if successful, futile, for are not the ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... friend of Mr. Morris, and a friend of another friend of Mr. Morris's they called 'Major.'" It was not the first time he had heard such inhospitable suggestions from his uncle. ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Becquer opened his eyes upon this inhospitable world. Eight days later he was baptized in the church of San Lorenzo.[1] He was one of a family of eight sons, Eduardo, Estanislao, Valeriano, Gustavo Adolfo, Alfredo, Ricardo, Jorge, and Jose. His father, ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... that I lost my way last night; and though my poor servants would gladly have returned with me sooner than see me perish in the storm; yet rather would I have been found dead on the road, a reproach to the kings who have betrayed me, than have taken an hour's shelter in that inhospitable city." ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... fellow calmly in the face, "better men than you or I have begged their daily bread before now, and eaten it, too, with an honest conscience and a grateful heart, and more than once when night has overtaken me, weary of journeying along inhospitable roads, and I have been compelled to make my bed on the leaves under some hedge, I've remembered that the Son of God when on the earth to teach us the sweet lesson of charity, 'had not where to lay his head.' The lesson ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... removed from a desert. Here and there rise a few tents or reed huts belonging to the Montefik Arabs, a tribe of savage nomads and the terror of travellers. Europeans have succeeded in exploring that inhospitable country only under exceptional circumstances.[63] And yet it was there, between two or three thousand years before our era, that the intermingling of ideas and races took place which gave birth ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... cornice at the top, and immense stretches of sun-scorched wall relieved at wide intervals by small windows, heavily cross-barred. It has, above all, an extreme steepness of aspect; I cannot express it otherwise. The walls are as sheer and inhospitable as precipices. The castle has kept its large moat, which is now a hollow filled with wild plants. To this tall fortress the good Rene retired in the middle of the fifteenth century, finding it apparently the most substantial thing left him in a dominion which had included Naples and ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... with the Baron,' said Lord Rotherwood; 'he is grown inhospitable: he will not let me come here to-morrow—the first Christmas these five years that I have missed paying my respects to the New Court sirloin and turkey. It is too bad—and the Westons dining ...
— Scenes and Characters • Charlotte M. Yonge
... rechristened the Lounge, and then made doleful efforts to be light and airy over a game of bridge, whereat Dinky-Dunk lost fourteen dollars of his hard-earned salary and twice I had to borrow six bits from Peter to even up with Lady Allie, who was inhospitable enough to remain the winner of the evening. And I wasn't sorry when those devastating Twins of mine made their voices heard and thrust before me an undebatable excuse for trekking homeward. And another ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... the Castle authorities is one which I do not believe, for I am assured that at every period of the world's history there has been a North and a South Pole, which, surrounded as they were by snow-clad countries, icebergs, cold water and whales, were too remote and inhospitable to tempt the average civilian to ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... many years on that inhospitable shore, And day by day they learned to love each other more and more. At last, to their astonishment, on getting up one day, They saw a frigate anchored in the offing ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... basalt above, and of course all round to the Giant's Causeway it is finer still. Well may we, as the Bishop is always doing, give thanks that we were taken, by the Divine Hand guiding tide and current, to this milder and less inhospitable opening. ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... were in jeopardy, and when he reflected that he was under the roof of a bigoted and sanguinary prince, whose filthy dungeons resounded with the moans of heavily ironed, half-starved prisoners; among a people who detested foreigners; he, the only European who had ever passed over their inhospitable threshold, naturally felt uncomfortable. The Amir, it seems, had four principal wives, and an army of 200 men armed chiefly with daggers. Burton describes the streets of Harar as dirty narrow lanes heaped with garbage, and the houses as situated at the bottom of courtyards, closed by gates ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... are years, Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe Are brackish with the salt of human tears! Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow Claspest the limits of mortality, 5 And sick of prey, yet howling on for more, Vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore; Treacherous in calm, and terrible in storm, Who shall put forth on ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... to prevent it, sir, if he wishes it. Besides," he continued, with annoying blandness of tone, "it would be inhospitable; and I am too ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... than defeat. The humiliation of having gone to Albany, of being deserted by friend after friend, of enduring the taunts of an inhospitable press, and, finally, of having his place taken by one, who, in his opinion, had proven most faithless, was like the torture of an unquenchable fire. Lord Randolph Churchill, after his historic resignation as chancellor ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... breeze, I would take its bearings in the fast-ebbing twilight, thinking that it was for the last time. Vain hope. A night of fitful airs would undo the gains of temporary favour, and the rising sun would throw out the black relief of Koh-ring looking more barren, inhospitable, and ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... formation. It appears to have been formed in a vast oceanic basin of primary rock,—a Palaeozoic Hudson's or Baffin's Bay,—partially surrounded, mayhap, by bare primary continents, swept by numerous streams, rapid and headlong, and charged with the broken debris of the inhospitable regions which they drained. The graptolite-bearing grauwacke of Banffshire seems to have been the only fossiliferous rock that occurred throughout the extent of this ancient northern basin. The Conglomerate of Orkney, like that of Moray and Ross, varies from ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... and turned towards him, looking down at the little group with unfriendly eyes. "I don't want to seem inhospitable or unaccommodating, Mr. Burns," she told him, "but I fear that I must take these cattle back home with me. You probably will not want to ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... item stated that "Mrs. Thorne took tea at Sam Cotting's last evening," (the Cottings being notoriously inhospitable) and the picture showed Mrs. Thorne, a sour-faced woman, departing from the store with a package of tea. Then came the announcement that "Eph Hildreth got shot at West's hardware store," and there was a picture of West weighing ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... all, the marble god, the Greek, the Dane, the love-sick boy, the maiden foredoomed to death. But how short is the roll-call of these deathless ones! Through what raging floods of destruction have they lived, through what tempests have they been tossed, upon what inhospitable shores have they been cast up by the changing tides of time! Since they were called to life by the great, half-nameless departed, how often has their very existence been forgotten by all but a score in tens of millions? Has it been given to those embodied thoughts of transcendent ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... his family with crowns torn from the heads of other monarchs, lived to behold his own dear France itself in possession of his enemies, was made himself a wretched captive, and far removed from country, family, and friends, breathed his last on the distant and inhospitable rock ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... is your passport,' said Otto, turning to the Baronet. 'I regret it from my heart that you have met inhospitable usage.' ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... present. Monsieur Jausion cast a malicious glance at him over his spectacles as Clarissa Mirabel, decked in lace, rustled in, bowed smiling to the gentlemen, and then swept her gaze with cheerful calmness over the inhospitable room. From a frame in the centre of the wall the fat and ill-humored face of the King looked down upon her, as ill-humored as if each one of his subjects were especially repugnant to him. She forgot that it ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... once more to the Balkan Mountains. Snow covers alike the valley and the hill. It is the depth of that inhospitable season when combative men were wont, in former days, to retire into winter quarters, repose on their "laurels," and rest a while until the benign influences of spring should enable them to recommence the "glorious" ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... crackers and bread," murmured Irene, seeing reproof in her sisters' eyes, and feeling that she had been inhospitable to ...
— Tabitha's Vacation • Ruth Alberta Brown
... that travellers who were acquainted with the peculiar ways of the citizens of Sodom would either pass by that city without entering its inhospitable gates, or, if compelled by business to go into the town, would previously provide themselves with food; but even this last precaution did not avail them against the wiles of those wicked people: A man from Elam, journeying to a place beyond Sodom, reached the infamous city about ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... smoke. And you won't smoke either—not in here! I'm sorry to seem inhospitable, but we don't do things like that around here, and if you have to smoke you'll have to go ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... picturing the various scenes through which you must pass, from the first transport of joy on meeting till that painful anxious hour when you must bid adieu to your darlings, with faint hopes of ever seeing them again in this life; and then, what you may both have to pass through in those inhospitable regions.... ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... There were many miles between him and his destination. But he did not upbraid the ungracious driver; he only swung his two canes a little more briskly, and kept breast of the horses all the way, entering the town side by side with the inhospitable vehicles—a running reproach to the ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... idea of hopeless sterility is ever present to the mind, for these productions, in sandy soils at least, grow only where nothing else can vegetate. The horizon is flat, affording no relief to the eye from the dreary and inhospitable scene, which these solitudes present; and which extends over a great portion of the country, uninhabitable even by the aborigines. Yet here the patient labours of the surveyor have opened a road, although the stream of population must be confined to it, since it ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... belongs to the brachycephalic (short-headed) class of Retzius. Indeed the Finn-organization has generally been regarded as Mongol, though Mongol of a modified type. His color is swarthy, and his eyes are gray. He is not inhospitable, but not over-easy of access; nor is he a friend of new fashions. Steady, careful, laborious, he is valuable in the mine, valuable in the field, valuable oil shipboard, and, withal, ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... elevated promontory juts, with a south-easterly trend, into the ocean [about 51 deg. 57 min. N / 7 deg. 43 min. W]. Maps and admiralty charts call it Ram Head, but the real name is Ceann-a-Rama and popularly it is often styled Ardmore Head. The material of this inhospitable coast is a hard metamorphic schist which bids defiance to time and weather. Landwards the shore curves in clay cliffs to the north-east, leaving, between it and the iron headland beyond, a shallow exposed bay wherein many a ...
— The Life of St. Declan of Ardmore • Anonymous
... done, and I shall have no more to do with the trade of this inhospitable coast, you may be assured. My only hope and desire is once more to see you and your mother safe in England, where I can make you by sacred ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray
... overtake her, and in the inhospitable region where her brother had been surprised at his prayers, how could a lonely woman travel without protection? Doubt, apprehension flitted as ill-boding birds of night, flapping dusky wings to hide the signal beacon, which love and duty swung to and fro; ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... to sleep beneath the inhospitable roof of those whom he had considered as his parents; but on the following morning he took leave of them, after learning from them all that ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... a bleak and inhospitable mountain An insignificant stream winds its uncared way; Although inferior to the Yangtze-kiang in every detail Yet fish glide to and fro among its crannies Nor would they change their home for the ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... of the wrecked troops, after a sojourn of 55 days, sailed this day for Calcutta in the Agnes Lee, and bid adieu to this inhospitable island, in words very different from those of ...
— The Wreck on the Andamans • Joseph Darvall
... of Blue Beard and that unpleasant locked-up room of his, where the poor little wives hung all of a row? Well, I'm sorry to say, Dick, most men when they come to my age have a room of that sort. It's an inhospitable place. One doesn't invite one's friends to dine and smoke there. At least no gentleman does. I've met one or two persons who set the door open and rather gloried in inviting inspection—but they were blackguards and cads. They don't count. Still each of us is obliged to go in there sometimes ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... buy a pennyworth of clauvisses on the quay. Intoxicated by the atmosphere of travel that one breathes down there, the idea came into our minds of starting out, of going to seek our livelihood in some country where the sun shines, since the lands of mist were so inhospitable to us. But where to go? We did what sailors sometimes do in order to decide in what low hole they will squander their pay. You fix a scrap of paper on the brim of your hat. You make the hat spin on a walking-stick; when it stops ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... wealth. Russia throughout her history adhered to her hostility to the Jews, but expulsion became impossible with such vast numbers. It is estimated that Russia contains half the Jewish population of the world, notwithstanding that Russia proper from ancient times has been sternly inhospitable to the Jewish race, while Poland ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... to seem inhospitable, but I've decided I want Miss Fairfield to see the studio first under proper conditions. I want Alla to ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... were in Bulgaria: those grey crinkly masses beyond must be the Balkans. Crossing the Dragoman Pass, they came into an upward current of air that set the machine rocking, and Smith for the first time felt a touch of nervousness lest it should break down and fall among these inhospitable crags. Rodier planed downwards, until they seemed to skim the crests. The air was calmer here: the aeroplane steadied; and when the mountains were left behind they came still ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... No, sir; your oppressions planted them in America! They fled from your tyranny to a then uncultivated and inhospitable country, where they exposed themselves to all the evils which a wilderness, filled with blood-thirsty savages, could threaten. And yet, actuated by true English love of liberty, they thought all these evils light in comparison with what they suffered in their own country, and from ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... 1500, that they were consoled by the sight of land. The headland they saw, now known as cape St. Augustin, the most prominent point of Brazil, they named Santa Maria de la Consolacion. They found the natives warlike and inhospitable, treating with haughty contempt the hawks' bills and trinkets which were exhibited to them; and Pinzon and his weary messmates were fain to pursue their voyages, amid occasional conflicts whenever they landed, along the shores that stretched to the north. He discovered the mouth of the ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... There was evidently more than one way of looking at a question. The farm-houses seemed very low and mean to her, as she looked at them from the window. There were no fences, excepting now and then the inhospitable barbed wire. The door-yards were bleak to her eyes, without the ornamental shrubbery which every farmer in her part of the country was used to tending. The cattle stood unshedded in their corrals. The reapers and binders stood rusting in the ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... imperceptible to me would prevent them from eating at all. This fact was often useful to me, and when our Eskimo visitors threatened to eat us out of house and home we could put in a little pinch of salt, and thus husband our resources without seeming inhospitable. A man who tasted anything salty at our table would quickly bethink him that he had plenty of more palatable fare in his own house. On the score of what to eat I would reiterate what I have said about the ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... forefathers have taught him to be himself down the centuries, despite every obstacle. It is now as the last obstacle in the way of his racial expression that we as his host and guardian are pleasing ourselves to figure. It is as inhospitable host we are quietly urging denunciation of his pagan ceremonials. It is an inhospitable host that we are, and it is amazing enough, our wanting to suppress him. You will travel over many continents to find a more beautifully synthesized artistry than our redman ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... conception of his striking group, although he awards warm praise to certain portions of the picture. Still he says: 'It argues slight knowledge of human nature to suppose that melancholy resignation characterized those who at Delft-Haven embarked for a land of civil and religious liberty; wild and inhospitable, to be sure, but still a land of Freedom. There were other thoughts in the hearts of that noble band than those of sorrow. Even had they been leaving the country of their birth, they would not have ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... some queen. Then the sense of pleasure in every heart, with all the cares and troubles of life pushed into the background—at least for a while. These things are a glimpse of life to us poor folk who spend all our years in the endless chores of an inhospitable country. You can smile, Steve. You can sneer at Abe's saloon. But I tell you you haven't a right to just because these things don't mean a thing to you. There's nothing means anything to you ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... it would be easy to show that the parents of the pretty girls in the West emigrated from New England. And yet—such is the mystery of Providence—no one would expect that one of the sweetest and most delicate flowers that blooms, the trailing. arbutus, would blossom in this inhospitable climate, and peep forth from the edge of a snowbank ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... populations within either one of these subspecies; in south-central Arizona and western Texas the animals are said to occur only in the higher parts of the mountains. Consequently a given population is separated from another by low-lying territory inhospitable to the species Sylvilagus floridanus. This low-lying territory is inhabited by another species, Sylvilagus audubonii. More intensive collecting in the region concerned may, however, show a continuous distribution of the species Sylvilagus ...
— Comments on the Taxonomy and Geographic Distribution of Some North American Rabbits • E. Raymond Hall
... You came as a peace envoy, and one of my men shot at you. Of course, he did not understand the reason why you came, but that does not matter. I did not know your reason myself, and I know I have been very inhospitable." ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... wherever I went; and several times, by expressive signs, marking his impatience that I should be gone. I attempted in vain to sooth him by presents, but though he did not refuse them, they did not alter his behaviour. Some of the young women, better pleased with us than was their inhospitable chief, dressed themselves expeditiously in their best apparel, and, assembling in a body, welcomed us to their village, by joining in a song, which was far from harsh ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... applied on many occasions by those whose wit is not so perfect as their memory. This Diogenes (as every one will recollect) was citizen of a little bleak town situated on the coast of the Euxine, and exposed to all the buffets of that inhospitable sea. He lived at a great distance from those weather-beaten walls, in ease and indolence, and in the midst of literary leisure, when he was informed that his townsmen had condemned him to be banished from Sinope; ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... did not seem in the least more pleased when Ethel entreated her friend Laura not to take her bonnet, not to think of going away so soon. She came to see us the very next day, stayed much longer with us than usual, and returned to town quite late in the evening, in spite of the entreaties of the inhospitable Laura, who would have had her leave us long before. "I am sure," says clear-sighted Mrs. Laura, "she is come out of bravado, and after we went away yesterday that there were words between her and ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... said he; "drink by all means so long as it amuses you. I had far rather you exceeded than that I should appear inhospitable." ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... rum. I never before saw two men so grateful for a drink. Their faces positively shone with happiness. Certainly it must have seemed as if that rum had fallen out of the sky, the last thing those chilled and lonesome men could have hoped for out there in the inhospitable solitude. ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... the stranger. She gave just one look round the dreary saloon; but to Gustave's fancy that one look seemed eloquent. "Ah me!" it said; "is this the fairest home I am to find upon this inhospitable earth?" ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... life; that having been used to the "kind treatment"(?) of his master he would find himself unequal to the responsibilities of freedom; and that his migratory disposition would lead him into a climate too cold for him, where he would be welcomed to an inhospitable grave. ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... in the light, bounding, swaying life of a ship. But there are docks and docks. The ugliness of some docks is appalling. Wild horses would not drag from me the name of a certain river in the north whose narrow estuary is inhospitable and dangerous, and whose docks are like a nightmare of dreariness and misery. Their dismal shores are studded thickly with scaffold-like, enormous timber structures, whose lofty heads are veiled periodically by the infernal gritty night of a cloud ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... superior to it, passed through a cutting, and came out unexpectedly above the sea,—a most homesick sea, veiled in rain-mist, itself a disheartening drab. The cutting which ushered us somewhat proudly upon this inhospitable outlook proved to be the beginning of a pass sixty miles long, between the Hida-Shinshiu mountains and the ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... the great benefit your humble petitioner would derive by a speedy removal from this damp and foggy inhospitable Climate to a milder one; the atmostphere here his thoroughly prejudicial to your petitioners health and causes me to be a great Sufferer i am Suffering from asthma accompanied with bad attacks of Chronic bronchitis ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... indescribably bad, about the fifth of November; where, as had been predicted, a council of war determined that it was unadviseable to proceed farther this campaign. It would have been almost impossible to winter an army in that position. They must have retreated from the cold inhospitable wilderness into which they had penetrated, or have suffered immensely; perhaps have perished. Fortunately, some prisoners were taken, who informed them of the extreme distress of the fort. Deriving no support from Canada, the garrison was weak; in great want of provisions; and ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... other Jesuits came to this inhospitable island, Father Jacques de la Place and Father Nicholas Gondoin. They found only nine persons there, who were in charge of the storehouse. A year later, Father Claude Quentin, superior of the Canadian missions, came to assist his confrere, who had undertaken ...
— The Makers of Canada: Champlain • N. E. Dionne
... in Glasgow to-night," said Mr Parmenter, rising. "I hope you won't think it very inhospitable of us, Lady Margaret: but business is business, you know, and more so than usual in times ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... a long journey without water. This was the evening of the third day from Berber, and many of the poor brutes were showing signs of weakness. We resolved, therefore, to hurry on at once to the next well, that of Ariab; so we left the inhospitable wadi, and started at three in the morning on our next stretch ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... lad," said the captain sadly; "but as far as we can make out there is no chance for a human being to exist there. Any one wrecked in such an inhospitable place would certainly have taken to a sheltered spot under the cliffs, where he would be protected from the coldest ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... and found the giant lying dead; and they fell down, and kissed Medeia's feet; and watered their ship, and took sheep and oxen, and so left that inhospitable shore. ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... fell under the consideration of the house, was rendered necessary by the inhospitable perseverance of the publicans and inn-holders, who conceived themselves not obliged by law to receive or give quarters in their houses to any foreign troops, and accordingly refused admittance to the Hessian ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... so called to distinguish it from the other dormitory, Upper House, which stood a hundred yards higher on the hill, looked very uninviting. Its windows frowned dark and inhospitable and no light shone from the hall as they entered. Mr. Whipple paused and ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... found never discovered the place of the wreck upon which they reckoned. Instead, they drifted round Cape Howe, and found themselves off a desolate, inhospitable coast, without knowledge of their whereabouts, and with a scanty, rapidly diminishing stock of food. In fear of starvation seven of them resolved to desert their companions on this lonely island near Wilson's Promontory, and treacherously sailed ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... Think again. He moveth nigh: He holds the region: not with tone Of piping shepherd's rural minstrelsy, But belloweth his far cry, Stumbling perchance with mortal pain, Or else in wild amaze, As he our ship surveys Unwonted on the inhospitable main. ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... the King of the Gipsies; Ronda, romantic and picturesque; Cordova and its immense mosque and old Roman bridge; and so on to Madrid by a most comfortable and fast train; but the temperature all through Central Spain is extremely cold in winter. The country is inhospitable-looking, and the natives seem to have abandoned their picturesque national dress. One must now go to Mexico to see the cavalier in his gay and handsome costume. In Madrid I of course visited the splendid Armoury; also the National Art Gallery ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... the weak and the helpless had rights as well as their oppressors, and in this he succeeded to a marvellous extent. "My great desire," said he, "is to be a shelter to the people, to ease their burdens, and to soften their hard lot in these inhospitable lands." And again:— ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... vices had been let in by the Revolution, and the most rigid principles of religion shaken to the centre, before the understanding could be gradually emancipated from the prejudices which led their ancestors undauntedly to seek an inhospitable clime and unbroken soil. The resolution, that led them, in pursuit of independence, to embark on rivers like seas, to search for unknown shores, and to sleep under the hovering mists of endless forests, whose baleful damps agued their limbs, was now turned into commercial speculations, till ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... matter. They can afford the waste. Women cannot. If women succeed in achieving hard unyielding muscles in the wrong place they suffer atrociously in childbirth; for Nature, who is as old-fashioned and inhospitable to modern ideas as a Tory statesman, takes a vicious pleasure in punishing one sex every time it succeeds in approaching the peculiar level of the other, or which diverges from the normal in any way. Note how many artists, ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... of those instructions we carried out I leave untold. Certainly we could not have been less grateful as guests than Ben Gillam's men were inhospitable as hosts. A more sottish crew of rakes you never saw. 'Twas gin in the morning and rum in the afternoon and vile potions of mixed poisons half the night, with a cracking of the cook's head for withholding fresh kegs and a continual scuffle of fighters over cheating at cards. No marvel ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut |
