"Mistake" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... recalled that of his mother; and we might carry the sad analogy still farther in his increasing pallor, and the slow and not strong pulse which always characterized him. This would perhaps be a mistake. It is difficult to reconcile any idea of bloodlessness with the bounding vitality of his younger body and mind. Any symptom of organic disease could scarcely, in his case, have been overlooked. But so much is certain: ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... patient as he was, had had a tiger's temper at bottom. Durgin had seen it roused once or twice, and even received a chance sweep of the paw. Richard liked Durgin's rough wit as little as Durgin relished Richard's good-natured bluntness. It was a mistake, that trying to pick up the dropped thread ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... note to the First Consul as soon as it was written. He speedily returned. "All's right!" said he. "He has directed me to say it was entirely a mistake!—that he is now convinced he was deceived! that he is sorry for the business, and hopes no more will ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... that his mistake lay in having appealed to persons more or less familiar with his past, and to whom the visible conformities of his life seemed a final disproof of its one fierce secret deviation. The general tendency was to take for the whole of life the slit seen between ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... reason existed for this anomaly, and the Maori scale was for a long time looked upon as something quite exceptional and outside all ordinary rules of number-system formation. But a closer and more accurate knowledge of the Maori language and customs served to correct the mistake, and to show that this system was a simple decimal system, and that the error arose from the following habit. Sometimes when counting a number of objects the Maoris would put aside 1 to represent each 10, and then those so set aside ...
— The Number Concept - Its Origin and Development • Levi Leonard Conant
... alacrity. But if they thought that their little manoeuvrings were going to blind Mrs. Bennett, or spare her feelings, they made a mistake. They had yet to learn that no single thing happened in Dorsham 'street,' no single person went up it or down, without the fact being known sooner or later—generally on the instant—to every dweller therein; and for four strangers, newly come to live in the place, to expect to escape ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... it in his power, but desired not to touch it. Miriam was content so long as vengeance on the Trevlyns had been taken. She wanted not the gold herself so long as it was hidden from them. But the secret was one that must not die, and to young Robin it has been intrusted. And if I mistake me not, he has other notions regarding it, and will not let it lie in its hiding place for ever. He is sharp and shrewd as Lucifer. He knows by some instinct that I suspect and that I watch him, and never has he betrayed aught to me. But sure am I that the secret ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... objects, which had sailed, wind and current borne, from the unknown lands across the Atlantic. Columbus, of course, was not actually the first to feel convinced of the possibility of gaining India by sailing to the West; the theory had been held by Aristotle, Seneca, Strabo, and others. The sole mistake Columbus made in his calculations was concerning the size of the world. He had overestimated the extent of the Continent of Asia, and underestimated the extent of the Atlantic Ocean; he seems to have been convinced that a very few days' sailing to the west of Madeira would bring him ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... interest. I even feel sometimes,' she laughed, 'as if it would be a pleasure to look after him, take care of him. I think it would not have been a bad thing for him to have married a woman a little older than himself. But you, Edith, you're so young. You see, you might have made a mistake when you married him. You were a mere girl, and I could imagine some of his ways might irritate a very ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... or rather those entrusted with its administration, may through mistake or wilfulness do injustice to some of its subjects. It has often done so in the past and the future is not free from the danger. The very possession of power excites a desire to use it, and it is an admitted characteristic of our human nature that ...
— Concerning Justice • Lucilius A. Emery
... pessimism—the pessimism of Buddha, which looked for redemption only in the annihilation of just those more nobly constituted minds who did not allow themselves to be forced by the hereditary authoritative belief to mistake a ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... "wild-orbed anarch" snapped his fingers at it, and even everyday Mrs. Grundy laughed it to scorn. Projected with the most alluring and satisfying expectations, the feast has dwindled to the memory of a sad mistake in the mind of every man that assisted at it. Planned as a sort of coronation ceremony, its completed performance unaccountably wore the complexion of belated obsequies irreverently disturbed by the ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... your hearts, 'It was easy for Abraham to believe God. I should have believed of course in his place. If God spoke to me, of course I should obey him.' My friends, there is no greater and no easier mistake. God has spoken to many a man who has not believed him, neither obeyed him, and so he may to you. God spoke to Abraham, and he believed him and obeyed him. And why? Because there was in Abraham's heart something which there is not ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... of it is capitally written. Scarcely less popular in Germany than 'Czar und Zimmermann' is 'Der Wildschuetz' (The Poacher), a bustling comedy of intrigue and disguise, which owes its name to the mistake of a foolish old village schoolmaster, who fancies that he has shot a stag in the baronial preserves. The chief incidents in the piece arise from the humours of a vivacious baroness, who disguises ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... this letter tempted Vizard to show it to Ina. He soon found his mistake. She kissed it, and ordered him off. He remonstrated. She put on, for the first time in Denmark, her marble look, and said, "You will lessen my esteem, if you are cruel to your sister. Let her name the wedding-day at once; and you must ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... officers may ruin the best men, and the popularity of the Army with the classes from which its ranks are drawn depends very largely upon the behaviour of our subalterns and captains. No one likes to be neglected, and the great mistake made by so many officers, but never by Baden-Powell, is their apparent indifference to the soldier's welfare "out of hours." In a cavalry regiment, for instance, for the greater part of the year the men have ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... If I mistake not, our passport was examined by the papal officers at the last custom-house in the pontifical territory, before we traversed the path through which the Roman army marched to its destruction. Lake Thrasymene, of which we took our last view, is ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... beautiful love, you must not move or speak until you have heard me through, and then I shall await your verdict. I know you think it so strange that I have not been to you before. I have been the victim of a miserable mistake. The day I entered this city I walked past here to catch a glimpse of you, perhaps. As I neared the door, I beheld seated on the steps that pretty little girl that I afterward saw with you. I stopped, spoke to her, and asked her name. Constance, she told me, ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... really loved him and no other, and the happiness of her life depended upon eliciting a return of affection. Such conduct was completely beyond my comprehension. Had I seen it depicted in a novel, I should have thought it unnatural; had I heard it described by others, I should have deemed it a mistake or an exaggeration; but when I saw it with my own eyes, and suffered from it too, I could only conclude that excessive vanity, like drunkenness, hardens the heart, enslaves the faculties, and perverts the feelings; ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... whether there can be a Providence in all this disappointment. I think not. I just made a great mistake coming out here, and I have suffered for it. Ye gods, what a winter it has been—disillusioning, dull, hideously ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... occupancy of the home had become impossible. Whether such a change was in reality contemplated could never be determined; the old man's death removed the occasion. Mrs. Dagworthy survived him little more than half a year. So there, said Dunfield, was a mistake well done with; and it was disposed to let ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... questions, that he kept his eyes firmed on his plate, looking embarrassed, and answered in monosyllables. He asked him the reason of this, upon which M. de Florentin told him that it was extremely distressing to him to see him under such a mistake. 'How can you know that, supposing it to be the fact?' said M. de ———, 'Nothing is more easy to prove,' replied M. de St. Florentin. 'You may imagine that, as soon as I was informed of the Marquis de ———'s ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 2 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... a system of roads, only sufficiently wide to admit of the native two-wheeled carts, with sidings every half mile to enable them to pass when meeting. Our usual English mistake has been made, in the only two metalled highways that the engineers have constructed in Cyprus, "that everything must be English;" thus we have two costly roads of great width from Larnaca to Lefkosia, and from Limasol to Platraes, which are entirely unsuitable to the requirements of the ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... where the carriage was drawn up. Rain, about the profoundest I had ever witnessed, was falling. Though near to midsummer, the night had been unusually dark to begin with, and from the increasing rain had become much more so. We could see nothing; and at first we feared that some mistake had occurred as to the station of the carriage—in which case we might have sought for it vainly through the intricate labyrinth of the streets in that quarter. I first descried it by the light of a torch, reflected ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... plump young matron with the contented look which belongs to mothers of happy little families. "I remember if you don't for you made our nights and days miserable hearing you, and then it was all a mistake." ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... Rossbach to Quebec, that thy Harlot might take revenge for an epigram,—crowd round thee in this hour? Thy foul Harem; the curses of mothers, the tears and infamy of daughters? Miserable man! thou 'hast done evil as thou couldst:' thy whole existence seems one hideous abortion and mistake of Nature; the use and meaning of thee not yet known. Wert thou a fabulous Griffin, devouring the works of men; daily dragging virgins to thy cave;—clad also in scales that no spear would pierce: no spear but Death's? A Griffin not fabulous but real! Frightful, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... the first time a genuine train of dogs. There was no mistake about them in shape or form, from fore-goer to hindermost hauler. Two of them were the pure Esquimaux breed, the bush-tailed, fox-headed, long-furred, clean-legged animals whose ears, sharp-pointed and erect, sprung from a head embedded in thick ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... hurt me;—that is the truth. I have been at my business long enough. Another system has grown up which does not suit me. I feel that they all can put their fingers in my eyes. It may be that I am a fool, and that my idea of honesty is a mistake." ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... when generalized and reduced to a system is not unmanageably large. They present themselves as a finite body of dogma which may be mastered within a reasonable time. It is a great mistake to be frightened by the ever-increasing number of reports. The reports of a given jurisdiction in the course of a generation take up pretty much the whole body of the law, and restate it from the present point of view. We could ...
— The Path of the Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... offered anything else that would so have touched her. How she had longed to do something for Flukey those last hours in the graveyard! But Flea wanted no mistake. Did the gentleman understand how terribly ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... they, in fact, crossed and interlaced one another in so many ways that it is not always easy to disentangle the one from the other—that there are several names which one is in doubt whether to place on one side of the line or the other. But still it would be a great mistake to confound the two parties. There was a different tone of mind in the typical representatives of each. They worked for the most part in different spheres, and, though their doctrines may have accorded in the main, there were many points, especially ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... and reflected from the wet pavements; the clothes of passing people run from blue-black to brown and dull red against the glow, and there's a girl's scarlet hat and an emerald green signboard—choice of tints and no mistake—we will take the lot for a first illustration, and in London perhaps, we will get another street scene or two, and so on; as we go south and east we will pick up pictures along the road—from Edinburgh to Mandalay with coloured pictures all the way, notes of the outside of ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... the engine of our boat! Any other boat can come into the Channel and he don't take any notice, but let my boys be out late and Bounder, lying asleep on the floor, will start up at the chugging of the launch and make for the dock. He never makes a mistake." ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... dame. But what if she Has made mistake, and thread of gold Is not enough to draw our son From out the Ogre's cruel hold? Canst think of nought, your Majesty? Of nothing else? Must we stand here And powerless lift no hand to speed The rescue of our ...
— The Little Colonel's Hero • Annie Fellows Johnston
... called to any mistake he had committed, he would see and admit it as quickly and unreservedly as if it had been made by anybody else, and with a smile which expressed the exact opposite of that feeling which most men are apt to show under like circumstances. His ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... girl whose hair became entangled in a flying-belt and whose body was snatched up and whirled mercilessly about. Only then is the engine working on its bed-plate brought to a standstill. The steam of the boiler, the breath of the people, keeps up, but it is withheld from the engine until the mistake can be rectified and the girl rescued. The law of mercy, the divine law, now asserts itself. This law, being the law of God, is higher than the law of man. Some of those who believe in the man-law ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the mistake of throwing the town Beadle over the churchyard wall, and is, consequently, in hiding, ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... he glanced down the letter sheet: "'Nothing, I assure you, my dear Horn, has made so great a stir in literary circles as this "Raven" of Poe's. I am sending it to you knowing that you are interested in the man. If I do not mistake I first met Poe one night at your house.' And a very extraordinary night it was, St. George," said Richard, lifting his eyes from the sheet. "Poe, if you remember, read one of his stories for us, and both Latrobe ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... rejoined hastily, a little annoyed that I had not been quicker to observe so obvious a fact. "I see your point. You mean that the frame-maker hung the thing upside down and Jeffrey never noticed the mistake?" ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... every step Mr. Wilkins was taken farther and farther away from Lady Caroline. He believed in his wife now and trusted her, but on this occasion he thought she was making a terrible mistake. In the drawing-room sat Mrs. Fisher by the fire, and it certainly was to Mr. Wilkins, who preferred rooms and fires after dark to gardens and moonlight, more agreeable to be in there than out-of-doors if he could have brought Lady Caroline safely in with him. As it was, he went ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... friend Fagan was trying to do for twelve years, and ruined himself over it in the ind. He put up at Murphytown in the Conservative interest, and the divil a vote did he get, except one, and that was a blind man who signed the wrong paper be mistake, Ha! ha!" The major laughed boisterously at his own anecdote, and mopped ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... other British colonies wherein a certain number of Irishmen began to settle at the time of the present investigation, no details can yet be furnished. It is easy to suppose, however, without fear of mistake, that the spiritual destitution and state of more or less open persecution which we have found existing in America and Australia, prevailed also at the Cape Colony, at Natal, in Guiana, Labuan, Ceylon, etc. A very different spectacle is about to be unfolded ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... when I do a grain of corn Has served me since I first was born. Now I am thin, pray let me be, I'll serve your children yet, you'll see." Thus to the cat spoke the poor mouse. The other answered, "You mistake, When unto me this tone you take; You might as well talk to the deaf, As to so old a cat as I, And through your tricks I spy, Die! you can go and chatter to the fates, My children will be ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... idea," said Sam; "I think it's some time or other in the evening, but this perpetual daylight confuses me. You know that when you and Grant were away last week after the gulls, I went to bed on Thursday forenoon at ten o'clock by mistake, thinking it was ten at night. How I ever came to do it I can't tell, but I suppose that I had sat so long stuffing that great eagle for Grant that my brains had got obfuscated. It was cloudy, too (not unlike what it is just now), so that I could ...
— Chasing the Sun • R.M. Ballantyne
... on us, varied as it is by glees, screamed out by four voices all in different keys; solos, squeaked out by stout gentlemen, and roared by pale lanky lads of eighteen; duets by young ladies, who accidentally set out on discordant notes, and don't find out the mistake till they come to the finale; with occasionally a psalm crooned by worthy sexagenarians, guiltless alike of ear and voice, but who, seeming to think it a duty to add their mite to the inexpressible dissonance, perform the same to the unmixed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... Byron and Shelley, a reformer. He drew his first inspiration from Grecian mythology and the romantic world of Spenser, not from the French Revolution or the social unrest of his own day. It is, however, a mistake to say that he was untouched by the new human impulses. There is modern feeling in the following lines which introduce us to the ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... mistake in not long ago making all new levies general service corps; and we have committed one not less grave in restricting the admissions into our corps to high-caste men: and encouraging the promotion of high-caste men to the ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... again. "'Twas a mistake. Mistakes will happen," and he dropped the silver piece back ...
— The Thirteen Little Black Pigs - and Other Stories • Mrs. (Mary Louisa) Molesworth
... ill; and to me, the Greek Oinos, among others, it was evident that now had arrived the alternation of that seven hundred and ninety-fourth year when, at the entrance of Aries, the planet Jupiter is enjoined with the red ring of the terrible Saturnus. The peculiar spirit of the skies, if I mistake not greatly, made itself manifest, not only in the physical orb of the earth, but in the souls, imaginations, and meditations ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... is my king, York, I do not mistake; But thou mistakes me much to think I do.— To Bedlam with him! is the man ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... Jack, mopping at his face with his handkerchief, "it's in my mind that we have made a cursed mistake for once—the fellow is ...
— The Honourable Mr. Tawnish • Jeffery Farnol
... all the trouble he knew he would get into, Paul made the grave mistake people often make when once they have done wrong. To cover the first fault they commit another, and so start on what is often a long road of sin and misery, rather than courageously face at once the blame and punishment they deserve. The rest of the drive he did not enjoy at all, though it ...
— Paul the Courageous • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... thought I was just lying, when I wasn't. I've wondered a good deal about that. By gracious, it makes a man feel funny to frame up a yarn out of his own think-machine, and then find out he's been telling the truth all the while. It's like a fellow handing out a twenty-four karat gold bar to a rube by mistake, under the impression it only looks like one. Of course they believe it! Only they don't know I just merely ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... mistake. A ship's boat was perched high and dry on the north side of the cape. Even as they scrambled towards it Jenks understood how it had ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... mistake you not a whit, my lord; For fates and oracles [of] heaven have sworn To royalize the deeds of Tamburlaine, And make them blest that share in his attempts: And doubt you not but, if you favour me, And let my fortunes and my valour sway To some [85] direction in your martial deeds, The world will ...
— Tamburlaine the Great, Part I. • Christopher Marlowe
... came in later, carrying perfected machines and getting no recordings, it was all written off as a mistake in the first experiment. A planet such as Warlock is too big a find to throw away when there was no proof of occupancy. And the settlement ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... "No mistake!" she said; and the sweetness Monty prophesied began to show itself. The change in her voice was too swift and pronounced to be convincing. "I did scream. I was, in pain. It was kind of you to come. Since you are here I would like you to talk ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... Fewbanks shot—murdered!" Inspector Seldon gave expression to his surprise in a long low whistle which travelled through the telephone. Then he added, after a moment's reflection, "There must be some mistake. He is away." ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... "You mistake me for someone else, I am afraid," he said, and his voice was the voice of the man I had met in Geneva—that I would have sworn to in any court of law, "It is rather remarkable," he went on, his eyes still set on mine, "that Mr. Osborne, to whom Lord Easterton has just ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... answer. I will not marry anybody until I am cleared of this trouble about the five-pound note; and whether I am cleared or not, I shall never marry you, for I don't love you. I found out to-night it was all a mistake, and what I thought was love was not. I don't love you, Jim, and I never wish to see you again. Please don't come to dinner to-morrow, and please don't ever try to see me. This is final. I don't love you; that is ...
— Good Luck • L. T. Meade
... four of the skirmishers had ceased to advance, and this naturally discouraged the others, who were aware, of course, that their movement was only a feint. The siege had now lasted about half an hour, and I had begun to fancy that Moore's theory of the attack was a mistake, and that he had credited the enemy with more generalship than they possessed, when a perfect storm of fire broke out beneath us, from the rooms where Moore and his company were posted. Dangerous as it was to ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... Rebels posted their divisions, how our forces were stationed, how we attempted to outflank them, how they left their original positions to protect the assailed outpost, how the battle raged and was decided around that point, and how a single mistake caused our first repulse, and, for lack of subsequent generalship, produced the shameful and disastrous rout. Russell's description is far less clear and concise. "Carleton" confirms McDowell's military scholarship, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... of the analyst's assistant, the sodium hydroxide solution was used with phenolphthalein as an indicator in cold solution in making the analyses. The concern manufacturing this material sells 600 tons per year, and when the mistake was discovered it was estimated that at the end of a year the error in the use of indicators would either cost them or their customers $6000. Who would lose and why? Assuming the impure NaOH used originally in making the titrating solution ...
— An Introductory Course of Quantitative Chemical Analysis - With Explanatory Notes • Henry P. Talbot
... according to my fancy. Of many of the events here set down, I was an eye-witness, and what I did not see myself, I learnt from the mouth of Oroonoko. When I made his acquaintance I was living in that part of our South American colony called Surinam, which we lately ceded to the Dutch—a great mistake, I think, for the land was fertile, and the natives were friendly, and many Englishmen had set up sugar plantations, which they worked by means of negroes. Most of these slaves came from that part of Africa known as Coromantien. The Coromantiens, being very warlike, were ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... back, calm, all but cold: but determined not to betray herself, let him do what he would. Perhaps it was all a mistake, a fancy. At least she would not degrade him, and herself, by showing suspicion. It would be dreadful, shameful to herself, wickedly unjust to him, to accuse him, were he innocent ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... alleged to the contrary, since what we there render balm or balsam, denotes rather that turpentine which we now call turpentine of Chio, or Cyprus, the juice of the turpentine tree, than this precious balm. This last is also the same word that we elsewhere render by the same mistake balm of Gilead; it should be rendered, the ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... answers, 'but because he delivered a speech and that kind of speech naked in the Forum.' Of course this man has become acquainted in the fuller's shop with all minute matters of etiquette, that he should detect a real mistake and be able ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. III • Cassius Dio
... the son of her husband's brother Amphion, incited to it by the envy of his wife, who had six children, while herself had only two, but through mistake she slew her own son Itylus, and for her punishment was transformed by Jupiter into ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... other end than I set out for?" said Martin. "There's no telling with these endings that go of themselves. We mean one thing, but they mistake our meaning and show us another. Like the simple maid who was sent to fetch her lady's slippers and her lady's smock, ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... reader will find an elaborate essay on the popular poetry of the Ukraine in the Foreign Quarterly Review, Vol. XXVI. No. 51. It was evidently written by one of the Polish exiles in England. In it, however, a singular mistake is made as to the derivation of the appellation of the Zaporoguean Kozaks. Porog does not mean "Island" in any ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... I know that I ought to stay where I am," she said, breaking out, almost with rage, and speaking with quick, eager voice. "I am not such a fool as to mistake what I should be if I left my husband, and went to live with that man as his mistress. You don't suppose that I should think that sort of life very blessed. But why have I been brought to such a pass as this? And, as for female purity! Ah! What was their ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... "Matsushima," Ito's flagship, and did terrible execution. Ito, in his report, says that the incident occurred at 3.26 p.m., and that the shell came from the "Ting-yuen," but this appears to have been a mistake. The shell dismounted a 5-inch gun, seriously damaged two more, and exploded a quantity of quick-firing ammunition that was lying ready near the guns. According to the Japanese official report, forty-six men were killed or badly wounded. Unofficial ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... a Prince of Russia, and by some mistake find myself your passenger instead of spending the night in my own house. Where are ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... single felicitous word in poetry, toward making a perfect picture to the mind of the reader! It often invests an inanimate object with almost actual life, and makes the landscape a sentient thing. Here are a few lines that live in our memory—from PROCTOR, BARRY CORNWALL, if we do not mistake—which are eminently in illustration of this. The poet is sitting at night-fall upon a green meadow-bank, with his little daughter by his side, looking at the setting sun, and the twilight exhalations colored by ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... always arrange the little details as they want them arranged, according to what makes the most exciting story, and they never pay the smallest attention when you come in with a just, mathematical face and say: "You haven't got it quite right there. There's a little mistake here...." ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... OXIA}{GREEK SMALL LETTER NU}, as such, is unconnected with all separation or juxtaposition, as well as with all succession, all relation to space or time, all coming into existence, and all change. It is, however, a mistake to suppose that he recognised it as ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... salient. So vague and difficult of identification was this line of posts that Captain Cruttwell, when visiting them for the first time, nearly walked into the German lines while trying to establish connection with D Company, until warned of his mistake by a shower of rifle-grenades. The whole sector, indeed, closely resembled the crater areas, which the experiences of the Somme were to render familiar. The first week in this dreary spot passed uneventfully; the enemy guns and minenwerfer, the latter of the largest calibre, whose explosion ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... not have been a cause of despair. Beauty will always come back if it is left alone. People had been swept off their feet with delight at what machinery could do, and they expected beauty to come out of it as a product at the same pace as everything else. It was not a mistake to expect it from any source, but from this particular source it could only come with time. There is evidence that it is on the way. And yet though the results of crude mechanical industrialism spoilt the outward appearance of the whole of the Victorian age, the earlier part at least of that time ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... gentlemanlike young Frenchman of my acquaintance. After dancing, the lady finding herself rather warm, applied for her handkerchief, with which she wiped her forehead, and returned it to the gentleman, who again put it into his pocket. He then danced, but not with her; and, being also heated, he, by mistake, took out the lady's handkerchief, which, when applied to his face, produced, as he fancied, such an effect on him, that, though he had previously regarded her with a sort of indifference, from that moment she engaged all his attention, and he was unable to ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... also pinned on to the box, which the device in question was intended to illustrate, there could be no mistake; the verses, indeed, being a replica of an original poem, preserved in the Bobo-Nellonian archives and entitled, "Sarah's forget-me-nots," wherewith the reader ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... making reservations where confession might implicate others. An artless boy might easily have been gulled by the portly presence, the unctuous voice, and eyes that twinkled merrily through gold-rimmed glasses; but no man of mature age can remember such a gross mistake without ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... the time of impression, you intend to retain only until the time of recall, the material tends to slip away after that time. If, however, you impress with the intention to retain permanently the material stays by you better. Students make a great mistake when they study for the purpose merely of retaining until after examination time. Intend to retain facts permanently, and there will be ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... Have you remarked how all our court fops admire her for her brilliant complexion, which perhaps, after all, is not wholly her own; and for blunders, which are truly original, and which they are such fools as to mistake for wit: I have not conversed with her long enough to perceive in what her wit consists; but of this I am certain, that if it is not better than her feet, it is no great matter. What stories have I heard of her sluttishness! No cat ever dreaded water so much as she does: fie upon her! Never to ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... were the operations of this bank that people stood astonished and had nothing to say. The amount of their accommodations was enormous. Those who at first considered it a mushroom concern soon discovered their mistake; for the Brandon Bank had connections in London which seemed to give the command of unlimited means, and any sum whatever that might be needed was at once advanced where the security was at all reliable. Nor was the bank particular about security. ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... she was a little astonished. However, she said nothing, but left the place without asking for any more work. In fact she forgot all about it. She had an idea that everything was all wrong, and that idea engrossed her mind entirely. There was no mistake about the sum paid, for the lady clerk had referred to the printed table of prices when she calculated the amount due. But something was wrong, and, at the moment, Euphemia could not tell what it was. She ...
— Rudder Grange • Frank R. Stockton
... need, now as then, Thee, God, who mouldest men; And since, not even while the whirl was worst Did I,—to the wheel of life With shapes and colours rife, Bound dizzily,—mistake my end, ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... mistake in paying for something she had bought, and gave the young man six cents too much. He did not notice it at the time, but after his customer had gone he saw that she had overpaid him. That night, after the store was closed, Lincoln walked ...
— The Beginner's American History • D. H. Montgomery
... a great mistake to keep this from me," said she, gravely. Then she pondered profoundly; then she turned to her son and said, "Why, Edward, this is the very young lady who was wrecked in the Pacific Ocean, and cast on a desolate island. We have all read about ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... combined In one firm bond of harmony. The gaze, light-soaring, felt uplifted then, When first the cedar's slender trunk it viewed; And pleasingly the ocean's crystal flood Reflected back the dancing form again. Could ye mistake the look, with beauty fraught, That Nature gave to help ye on your way? The image floating on the billows taught The art the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... but four are of the date of the present year. The court tenders its sincere sympathy to the accused, and its deep regret that he, an innocent man, through an unfortunate mistake, has suffered the undeserved humiliation of imprisonment and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... understand him, but noticed that a singular gravity seemed to overtake the two jocular men on the middle seat, and the lady looked out of the window. He came to the conclusion that he had made a mistake about alluding to his clothes and his size. He must try and behave more manly. That opportunity seemed to be offered two hours later, when the stage stopped at a ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... Frank. "There's been a fearful mistake somewhere. This fellow has downed a French plane thinking that it ...
— Army Boys on the Firing Line - or, Holding Back the German Drive • Homer Randall
... be a mistake. She has no consort; besides we do not expect our Esperanza home for six months ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... the upright Merle, as if there must have been some mistake. Surely no right-thinking person could implicate him ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... been acting with my usual foolish impetuosity. I have entirely misunderstood Lady Susan, and was on the point of leaving the house under a false impression of her conduct. There has been some very great mistake; we have been all mistaken, I fancy. Frederica does not know her mother. Lady Susan means nothing but her good, but she will not make a friend of her. Lady Susan does not always know, therefore, what will ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... the chief causes of the war of 1803. The first Consul, like the Czar Alexander I, despised the Addington Cabinet. He could not believe that men who were laughed at by their own supporters would dare to face him in arms. Twice he made the mistake of judging a nation by its Ministers—England by Addington in 1803, Spain by Godoy in 1808. Both blunders were natural, and both were irreparable; but those peoples had to pour forth their life blood to recover the position from which weakness and folly allowed them to slide. Politics, ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... me explain to you now the system of work we had agreed upon, and each slightest detail of which was perfectly familiar to us from constant manipulation, so that mistake or mishap, from any conceivable cause, was ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... on the point of hooking on to her, when unfortunately, one of my Lieutenants, looking out through a port and seeing the two ships so close together, took it into his head that there was some mistake, as he could not think that—under the circumstances—I had any intention of boarding; and so, of himself, ordered the ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... discourage from anything? The wise man has recourse to the books of the ancients, and from thence picks nothing but subtleties of words. The fool, in undertaking and venturing on the business of the world, gathers, if I mistake not, the true prudence, such as Homer though blind may be said to have seen when he said, "The burnt child dreads the fire." For there are two main obstacles to the knowledge of things, modesty that casts a mist before ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... young Lady! What with a mad Husband collapsed by debaucheries into stupor of insanity; what with a Doctor, gradually a Prime Minister, Struensee, wretched scarecrow to look upon, but wiser than most Danes about; and finally, with a lynx-eyed Step-sister, whose Son, should Matilda mistake, will inherit,—unfortunate Matilda had fallen into the awfulest troubles; got divorced, imprisoned, would have lost her head along with scarecrow Struensee had not her Brother George III. emphatically intervened,—Excellency ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... have known enough at least to have a few thousand dollars of insurance on that amount of property, but I had never seen a fire before in a city and thought it folly to insure, and did not find out my mistake until it was too late. During the next six months I had a number of offers of money to build a brick hotel on my lots, but I could not think for a moment of borrowing the money ...
— Thirty-One Years on the Plains and In the Mountains • William F. Drannan
... the fault of my training. Ever since I can remember I've been taught to be on my guard, lest the men shouldn't like me." In her new freedom she looked back tranquilly upon the struggle she was at last emancipated from, and philosophized about it. "What a mistake mothers make in putting worry about getting a husband into their daughters' heads. Believe me, Grant, that dread makes wretched what ought to be the happiest time of ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... Dog said it was a great comfort to sit back in the shade at such times, and watch Mr. Man pump, and hear him say all the things that he used to say to Mr. Dog himself when he had made some little mistake or had come home later than usual. He said he had never prized anything in his life so much as he had that car, which was what Mr. Man ...
— Hollow Tree Nights and Days • Albert Bigelow Paine
... again, finding that it was the wrong one; how, when the word "to the right-about" was given, he invariably found himself grinning in the face of his left-hand man, unless by good chance the latter had made the same mistake as himself, when he became suddenly inspired with the hope that he had, for a wonder, hit off the right thing. He soon found his hopes disappointed by being summoned to repeat the movement, with a caution to do it correctly. Then, ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... cried Lilias's sister gladly. "I knew you would say so. You see now how absurd it was to mistake me for her, and what a difference there is between us! I knew quite well ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... actin' all these years like we have for, then?" inquired Bill. "Seem's if I'd been lab'rin' under a mistake f'r some time past. When your ma an' me was a-roughin' it out there in the old log-house, an' she a-lookin' out at the Feb'uary stars through the holes in the roof, a-holdin' you, a little baby in bed, we reckoned we was a-doin' of it to sort o' better ourselves in a property way. ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... terrible mistake. This weight of years had a perennial novelty for the poor sufferer. He never grew accustomed to it, but, long as he had now borne the fretful torpor of his waning life, and patient as he seemed, he still retained an inward consciousness that these ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the sentinel on the hill commanded an unusually wide sweep of vision, he himself was conspicuous, and the others had been as quick to discover him as he was to detect them. Both parties, therefore, were aware of the presence of the other, and neither was likely to make a mistake ...
— The Story of Red Feather - A Tale of the American Frontier • Edward S. (Edward Sylvester) Ellis
... touch of perfection is given in the presence of whitish spots which look exactly like the discolorations produced by lichens on leaves. An old entomologist, Mr. Jenner Weir, confessed that he repeatedly pruned off a caterpillar on a bush in mistake for a superfluous twig, for many brownish caterpillars fasten themselves by their posterior claspers and by an invisible thread of silk from their mouth, and project from the branch at a twig-like angle. ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... "No mistake about his having been here," said the doctor, taking out a box of matches, which, to his astonishment, was snatched from his fingers by Watty, who dropped upon his knees, struck and shaded a match, applied it to the light stuff, which blazed up at once, and then began to fan it with his bonnet ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... a party of the Irish horse, which had broken through one of the regiments and were now on their return. They were mistaken for English, and allowed to gallop up to the Duke, who received two severe wounds in the head; but the French troops, now sensible of their mistake, rashly threw in their fire on the Irish while they were engaged with the Duke, and, instead of saving, shot him dead ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... hold. Nearly all the city was upon the bay; the rowing clubs in uniform pulled off with favoured members of their respective clubs on board. The crews feathered their oars in double-quick time, and their pulling, our "stroke" declared, was "a caution, and no mistake." Just before getting alongside, we passed Captain Wilson in the port-boat, who told us that the prize taken was the Sea Bride, and that there was no difficulty in hearing from Captain Semmes himself the whole story of the capture. We passed the Federal barque Urania at her anchorage, and that ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes |
