"Pitch" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... return to ourselves. The rain and bad roads made travelling so very wearisome, that before we had proceeded far it was unanimously agreed that we should halt and pitch our first encampment. "Pitch our first encampment! how charming!" exclaims some romantic reader, as though it were an easily accomplished undertaking. Fixing a gipsy-tent at a FETE CHAMPETRE, with a smiling sky above, and all requisites ready to hand, is one ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... any way. Now, the first thing you do after getting in, is to pull out that filling from the bolt sockets if you care to save yourselves, then pitch into the goods. Get the lightest and most valuable—silks, embroideries, rich laces, everything of that kind, but avoid the linens, cloths, and all that, as too heavy, and besides might be detected by the stamp. Lock and bolt the door after you when you go in, and you, Pratt, pocket the key; for ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... the factory—a street lighted by arc lamps so that the scene was adequately visible. As far as the main gates into the factory yards the street was in the possession of the police; beyond them surged and clamored the mob, not yet wrought to the pitch of attack. Bonbright thought of a gate around the corner. He would enter this and ascend to his office, whence he could watch the street from ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... Dr. Heinrich Hertz, a few years later, by a series of experiments, demonstrated the correctness of Maxwell's surmises. What are now called "Hertzian waves" are waves apparently identical with light waves, but of much lower pitch or period. In his experiments Hertz showed that, under proper conditions, electric sparks between polished balls were attended by ether waves of the same nature as those of light, but of a pitch of several millions of vibrations ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... obliged, by command of the Regent, in order not to implicate the French Government, to declare that they were thus employed without the sanction or knowledge of the Regent. Thus, even whilst Mr. Murray was raising the sanguine hopes of the Jacobites to the highest pitch, their evil star had again prevailed. They were, indeed, singularly unhappy in those in whom they placed confidence. Their schemes perpetually got wind: whether it were owing to the irresolution of some of their partisans, ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... tireless hunter. He may not have waited for the day when the young hunter should take his seat at the council and speak with those who will hear none but wise men. I had such a son. He went on the hunt with a band that never returned to the village." His voice rose above the pitch customary to a chief. It was almost cold in its intensity. "I found his body, my brother, the body of my son, at this place, killed by the white men, who talked to us of the love of their gods and their Chief-Across-the-Water. Here it was I found him, who died ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... other princesses, that the star on her forehead could turn night into day. The king listened silently, and when the boy had done, he said quietly: 'If I find that your story is not true I will have you thrown into a cask of pitch.' ...
— The Brown Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... wonder what fault they find with the administration of Ireland to-day in respect of its honesty or its centralization. What administration ever carried either honesty or centralization to a higher pitch than the Irish administration of Mr. Forster? What could be less successful? Those who have been most directly concerned in the government of Ireland, whether English or Irish, even while alive to the perils of any ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... as loud a pitch as he could possibly force his voice to—'gentlemen. Brother electors of the borough of Eatanswill. We are met here to-day for the purpose of choosing a representative in the room ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... consulted him and looked up to him. His simplicity of mind was contrasted with the savant's coldness of soul, and he was adduced as an instance that the gifts of God are absolutely free. All this created a deep division of feeling in the college. The mystics worked themselves up to such a pitch of mental tension that several of them died, but this only increased the frenzy of the others. M. Gosselin had too much tact to offer them a direct opposition, but for all that, there were two distinct parties in the college, the mystics acting under ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... was a fine start for his pitch—a fine start. He had half a mind to give it all up, here and now, and head on up to Catskill to enlist with Continental Hovercraft. His big scheme would wait for another day. Nevertheless, he fell ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... point. At close of play the regiment had made five without loss. This, on the Saturday morning, helped by another shower of rain which made the wicket easier for the moment, they had increased to a hundred and forty-eight, leaving the house just two hundred to make on a pitch which looked as if ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... 1842 he insulated a wire two miles long with hempen threads saturated with pitch-tar and surrounded with india-rubber. On October 18, during bright moonlight, he submerged this wire in New York Harbour, between Castle Garden and Governor's Island, by unreeling it from a small boat rowed by a man. After signals had been ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... and opened his mouth and his eyes: "Baron, you are taking the liberty of jesting with me." But when Eberhard indicated that he was quite serious, Carovius continued, blank amazement forcing his voice to its highest pitch: "But my dear Sir, your father has an income of half a million. A mere income! The ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... perfect this affair: Attend my counsel, and the secret share. When next the Sun his rising light displays, And gilds the world below with purple rays, The queen, Aeneas, and the Tyrian court Shall to the shady woods, for sylvan game, resort. There, while the huntsmen pitch their toils around, And cheerful horns from side to side resound, A pitchy cloud shall cover all the plain With hail, and thunder, and tempestuous rain; The fearful train shall take their speedy flight, Dispers'd, and all involv'd in gloomy night; ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... have brought a soul as warm and as living as yours was to such a pitch of indifference are ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... same place, and therefore we are entitled to draw the inference, that some of them are practising on our credulity, and are making us the dupes of their imagination, rather than the subjects of their experience. The expectations of moorish magnificence were raised to a very high pitch, by some of the inflated accounts of the wealth and splendour of the great city of central Africa; but these expectations were considerably abated by the description given of Timbuctoo by Adams and Sidi Hamet, a moorish merchant, ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... as the lawful successor and representative of that proctor, and bearing the old lady off (sometimes greatly affected) to his employer's office. Many captives were brought to me in this way. As to marriage licences, the competition rose to such a pitch, that a shy gentleman in want of one, had nothing to do but submit himself to the first inveigler, or be fought for, and become the prey of the strongest. One of our clerks, who was an outsider, used, ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... bring about this inward transformation. But nowhere else in the universe—above us or within us—has the moral significance of life come so full into sight, or the reality of actual divine fellowship, whether in our aspirations or in our failures, been raised to such a pitch of practical certainty as in the personal life and death and resurrection and steady historical triumph of Jesus Christ. He exhibits in living fulness, with transforming power, a Life which consciously ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... look for you here, aboard an innercent boat laid here between locks an' waitin' till the full of her cargo comes down to Tizzer's Green wharf or Ibbetson's? Next"—he checked off the items on his fingers—"there's the Mortimers. In duty to 'Ucks, I got to choose Mortimer a pitch where he'll draw a 'ouse. Bein' new to this job, I'd like your opinion; but where, thinks I, 'll he likelier draw a 'ouse than at Tizzer's Green yonder?—two thousand op'ratives, an' I doubt if the place has ever seen a travellin' theayter since it started to grow. Anyway, Mortimer ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... enough to explain, Larry," I said. "The effect, that is—for what the green ray is made of I don't know, of course. But what it does, clearly, is stimulate atomic vibration to such a pitch that the cohesion between the particles of matter is broken and the body flies to bits—just as a fly-wheel does when its speed gets so great that the particles of which it is ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... J. was a semolina-brained impostor, but I should never have conceived that even he, the jelly-faced chief of the chowder-heads, could have attained to such a pitch of folly as to inform me that "the Prix Montyon is not a medal, and cannot be worn at Court." These are his words. Did I ever say it was a medal? I remarked that the QUEEN had given me permission to ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, September 6, 1890 • Various
... entry stood two or three Moll Flanders looking husseys, who, it may be supposed, did not neglect a passing salute. Farther up the yard, were some half-dozen fellows, in parti-coloured dresses, (and not over particular about shoes and stockings) smoking their cutties, and gambling at pitch-penny. ...
— Sinks of London Laid Open • Unknown
... presented its incalculable significance; nor do I know any of his followers who have made any approach to an adequate use of it in their advocacy of his views. In preparing the present chapter, therefore, I have been particularly careful not to pitch too high my own estimate of its evidential value. That is to say, I have considered, both in the domain of structures and of instincts, what instances admit of being possibly adduced per contra, or as standing outside the general law that adaptive structures ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... not help acknowledging that they wished him well in all other respects, and could hardly blame him for his present undertaking. Sundry things had concurred to raise his character to the highest pitch, besides the greatness of the enterprise, and the conduct that had hitherto appeared in the execution of it. There were several instances of good nature and humanity that had made a great impression on people's minds, I shall confine ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... it muse be remembered, that they were committed by ignorant savages, who had been dragged from all they held most dear; whose patience had been exhausted by a cruel and loathsome confinement during their transportation; and whose resentment had been wound up to the highest pitch of fury by the lash of ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... latitude of 27 deg. 50' S., longitude 171 deg. 43' E. The calm continued till noon the next day, during which time we observed the variation to be 10 deg. 33' E. I now ordered the carpenters to work to caulk the decks. As we had neither pitch, tar, nor rosin, left to pay the seams, this was done with varnish of pine, and afterwards covered with coral sand, which made a cement far exceeding my expectation. In the afternoon, we had a boat ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... was much delighted at my Arrival into China, it cannot be thought strange, since there we find Knowledge as much advanc'd beyond our common Pitch, as it was pretended to be deriv'd from a more ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... come to my knee! Hark, how the rain is pouring Over the roof, in the pitch-black night, And the wind ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... the impression, all brilliant local color has been refused even where it might easily have been introduced, as in the figures; yet in the low minor key which has been chosen, the melodies of color have been elaborated to the utmost possible pitch, so as to become a leading, instead of a subordinate, element in the composition; the subdued warm hues of the granite promontories, the dull stone color of the walls of the buildings, clearly opposed, even in shade, to the gray of the snow ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... was in most of these things, even after no inconsiderable experience of society), the world soon discovered a true poet. He taught himself to write, by copying the letters of a printed book as he lay watching his flock on the hillside, and believed that he had reached the utmost pitch of his ambition when he first found that his artless rhymes could touch the heart of the ewe-milker who partook the shelter of his mantle during the passing storm. If "the shepherd" of Professor Wilson's "Noctes Ambrosianae" may be taken as a true portrait of James ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... in a courtyard full of gaudy parrots, singing birds in wicker cages and singing senoritas as gay as the parrots, on balconies above us. The entire menu was orange, or at least colored orange. It was really charming, and our spirits rose to almost a champagne pitch, though orange juice—diluted at that—was the only beverage served. (I believe that there is a Raisin Day, also, but on account of its horrid association with rice and bread puddings we have let ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... under the glowing skies of the East, among its thousand temptations, those of superior knowledge not being the least; in an age when the absurdities of the Roman church were, to an enlightened mind, at their absurdest pitch, fell readily into 'illumination.' Whether they literally worshipped the Oriental Baphomet, a figure with two heads, male and female, girt with a serpent, typifying the completest abnegation of all moral relations, and the rights of knowledge, no ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of a rainy autumn in a deserted Swiss hotel had thrown them for a fortnight into unwonted propinquity. They had walked and talked together, borrowed each other's books and newspapers, spent the long chill evenings over the fire in the dim lamplight of her little pitch-pine sitting-room; and she had been wonderfully comforted by his presence, and hard frozen places in her had melted, and she had known that she would be desperately sorry when he went. And then, just at the end, ...
— Autres Temps... - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... body pent Absent from Him I roam. Yet nightly pitch my moving-tent, A day's march ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... Outside, it was pitch dark. There was nothing there, it seemed, except a savage wind and stinging splotches of rain and the cry of the low tide on the sand. I felt my way up the Gut and out, sliding one foot before the other so as not to fall over the sea-wall. John Widger bumped ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... to pierce the murky air, dense with smoke from the burning pitch. There was no tread on the pavement—all was solemn as Death, who held such mad revel in the crowded graveyards. Through the shroud of smoke she could see the rippling waters of the bay, as the faint southern breeze swept its surface. It was a desolation ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... his hands, jumps up and down, grasps the shaking Daemones convulsively and communicates his excitement to the audience. It is a piece of thrilling theatrical declamation and must have wrought the spectators up to a high pitch. In general, the Rud. is a ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... figures are repressed or augmented until they look more like figures and less like sacks of barley, or wood planks. They are taught to sit down and stand up, and to cross, enter or leave a room like humans instead of colts, to pitch the voice in a low and gracious key, and to look upon slang as a luxury only to be enjoyed in the absence of those in temporary power. In fact the establishment is quite old-fashioned but infinitely charming, and has the reputation of having ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... Calabria, we find the woods of Locri praised by Proclus—woods that must have been of coniferous timber, since Virgil lauds their resinous pitch. Now the Aleppo pine produces pitch, and would still flourish there, as it does in the lowlands between Taranto and Metaponto; the classical Sila pitch-trees, however, could not grow at this level any more. Corroborative evidence can be ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... only her luck. Marriage or no marriage, she was incredibly happy. She even persuaded herself it was as well that she couldn't be married if that was to make her happier. She distrusted happiness carried to such a preposterous pitch. ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... character and habits." They suggested that "commonly the ill health that might exist arose from other causes than excessive study"; one attributed it to the use of confectionery, another to fashionable parties, another to the practice of "chewing pitch,"—anything, everything, rather than admit that American children of fourteen could possibly be damaged by working only two hours ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... mild voice rose to an unusual pitch and he said, "I will speak. I tell you that there is no reason to suppose they can possibly be hostile. They are small, yes, but that is only important because it is a reflection of the fact that their native worlds are ...
— Youth • Isaac Asimov
... leave, it seems to me," said the girl in an injured tone. "I wonder that you came at all." John's heart was singing hosanna. He, however, maintained his voice at a mournful pitch and said: "I must go. I can no longer endure to remain." While he spoke he moved toward his horse, and his head was bowed with real shame as he thought of the pitiable fool he had made of himself. Dorothy saw him going from her, and she called to ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... was aware of it, and appreciated it; but the other two seemed disposed to cut their jokes upon me; and them that do that, generally find, in the long run, I am upsides with them, that's a fact. A cat and a Yankee always come on their feet, pitch them up in the air as high and as often as ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... the von Tolb party Canon Mousepace gravitated decently but persistently towards a corner where the Duchess, still at concert pitch, was alternatively praising Ronnie's performance and the mulberry salad. Joan Mardle, who formed one of the group, was not openly praising any one, but she was paying a silent tribute to ...
— When William Came • Saki
... favours for Christians. The Portuguese had but recently sunk an Egyptian vessel off Calicut, commercial rivalries were bitter, and the harsh treatment of the conquered Moors in Spain had aroused religious antagonism to fever pitch and bred feelings of universal exasperation against the foes ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... of all sins. O king of men, they remember thy prowess on the field, and that of Arjuna, who taketh the lead in the field of battle. They remember Bhima wielding his mace when the sound of the conch-shell and the drum rises to the highest pitch. They remember those mighty car-warriors, the two sons of Madri, who on the field of battle career in all directions, shooting incessant showers of shafts on hostile hosts, and who know not what it is to tremble ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... "How she does pitch! There goes a wave slap over her bows. There's a man lying down, and a—chap—in a—cloak with a—Hurrah! It's Dob, by jingo!" He clapped to the telescope and flung his arms round his mother, then ran swiftly off; and Amelia was left to make her peace alone with ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... the scene, or of the speaker, to the lovely isles, and the inhabitants of noble promise, but withering for lack of knowledge; and finally closing his speech, when they were wrought up to the highest pitch, by an appeal that touched them all home; "for well did he know," said he, "that the universal brotherhood was drawn closest in circles nearer home, that beneath the shadow of their own old minster, gladness and mourning floated alike for all; and that all those who had shared in the welcome to ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... boat, a few boys were fishing in the dark green waters of the harbor - everything exactly as I can still see it to-day - my future dwelling-house already looked at me with familiar friendliness from out its cool, dark window-eyes; the doves cooed in the softly rustling elms; it smelled of pitch and tar and of the inevitable Dutch peat-smoke, which rose from the stove pipes of the fishing smacks lying in the harbor, where the fishermen's wives were cooking ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... To-morrow we are going to Rodaun, by train of course, not by the steam tram. The day after to-morrow, the 13th, Oswald has the viva voce exam for his matriculation. He says that in every class there are at least 1 or several swotters, like Verbenowitsch in ours, he says they spoil the pitch for the others, for, because of the swotters, the professors expect so much more of the others and sit upon them. This may be so in the Gymnasium, but certainly not at the High School. For though Verb. is always sucking up to the staff, they can't ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl
... verses, mostly quatrains of easy and seemingly inevitable structure. Heine learned the art of making them from the Magic Horn, from Uhland, and from Eichendorff, and he carried the art to the highest pitch of virtuosity. They are the forms of the German Folk-song, a fit vehicle for homely sentiments and those elemental passions which come and go like the tide in a humble heart, because the humble heart is single and yields unresistingly to their flow. But Heine's heart was not ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... matters. Thenceforth the princes were to be so supreme in spirituals as well as in temporals that their right to determine the religion of their subjects was recognised as a first principle of government. During the days of the Counter-Reformation, when religious enthusiasm was aroused to its highest pitch, the Catholic sovereigns of Europe fought not so much for the aggrandisement of their own power as for the unity of their kingdoms and the defence of the religion of their fathers, threatened as it ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... in this I am wiser than thou, that I have no need to ask what thy name is. Thy name is Skapti Thorod's son, but before thou calledst thyself 'Bristle-poll,' after thou hadst slain Kettle of Elda; then thou shavedst thy poll, and puttedst pitch on thy head, and then thou hiredst thralls to cut up a sod of turf, and thou creptest underneath it to spend the night. After that thou wentest to Thorolf Lopt's son of Eyrar, and he took thee on board, and bore thee out ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... of the "Cups," joyful though it sounds, was by the Athenians counted unlucky, because on that day they believed "the ghosts of the dead rose up." The sanctuaries were roped in, each householder anointed his door with pitch, that the ghost who tried to enter might catch and stick there. Further, to make assurance doubly sure, from early dawn he chewed a bit of buckthorn, a plant of strong purgative powers, so that, if a ghost should by evil chance go down his throat, it should ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... storekeeper. In the eyes of Mr. Farquhar Fenelon Cooke the apotheosis of the Celebrity was complete. The people of Asquith were not only willing to attend the house-warming, but had been worked up to the pitch of eagerness. The Celebrity as a matter of course was master of ceremonies. He originated the figures and arranged the couples, of which there were twelve from Asquith and ten additional young women. These ten were assigned to the ten ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... June has lit her splendid lamp In the broad meadow lush and damp, Where loves the brook in loops to loiter, And tufted vernal to pitch its camp! ...
— Song-waves • Theodore H. Rand
... "Pitch over the ball—the football!" they cried. In a second the ball was tossed over the ship's side, and a vigorous game ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... buildings, to the west—and in the direction of the village—were five miles of nothing in particular. A desolate wilderness of rolling sand-dunes, beach grass, huckleberry and bayberry bushes, cedar swamps, and small clumps of pitch-pines. Through this desert the three or four rutted, crooked sand roads, leading to and from the lights, turned and twisted. Along their borders dwelt no human being; but life was there, life in abundance. Ezra Payne, late assistant keeper ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... efforts to bring these discordant social elements together and to keep her salons full until the famous interview, constantly moved about, carried on ten different conversations at once, raising her soft, melodious voice to the purring pitch that distinguishes Oriental women,—a wheedling, seductive voice, and a mind as supple as her waist, opening all sorts of subjects, and, as convention requires, mingling fashions and sermons on charity, theatres ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... apparent intention, she had taken and kept the lead from the moment when she returned with Rex. She it was who had given the key, who had set and kept the pitch, and it was due to her that not one discordant note had been struck. Vaguely yet vividly she felt the emergency. Refusing to ask herself the cause, she recognized a crisis. Something was dreadfully wrong. She made no attempt to go beyond that. Of all the deep ...
— In the Quarter • Robert W. Chambers
... Someone whose "worm i' the bud" of their character has so completely spoilt its early flower on account of the "one ruinous vice" of "censoriousness," of perpetual nagging, and fault-finding developed to such a pitch that it has eaten out at last the fair heart of human forbearance and kindness which is the birthright of everyone. Such a person makes the true, free development of others in his proximity a harder task than God intended ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... less melancholy spectacle of the wreck. Her stem was above the first arc of the flood; she was broken in two a little abaft the foremast—though indeed she had none, both masts having broken short in her disaster; and as the pitch of the beach was very sharp and sudden, and the bows lay many feet below the stern, the fracture gaped widely open, and you could see right through her poor hull upon the farther side. Her name was much defaced, and I could not make out clearly whether she was called Christiania, ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of wages. But, after all, there is something in the demand for fair play and for the means of leading decent lives, which requires a better answer. It is easy, again, to say that all Socialists are Utopian. Make every man equal to-day, and the old inequalities will reappear to-morrow. Pitch such a one over London Bridge, it was said, with nothing on but his breeches, and he will turn up at Woolwich with his pockets full of gold. It is as idle to try for a dead level, when you work with such heterogeneous materials, as to persuade a homogeneous fluid to stand at anything but ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... of the book is supported on his left hand, while the other is held by an attendant angel, who turns the pages for the Christ-child. There is something very interesting on the page now open, and the angel points a slender finger to a particular passage. The child is wrought up to the highest pitch of excitement. He stretches out his legs and arms, his whole body stiffening in a tremor of joy. He fairly pants with eagerness for the treasure just beyond his grasp. Though not a pretty boy, he is so full of life that ...
— Correggio - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... cried the King, fiercely, as the Duke fell on his knee before him; for his temper had been wrought to a high pitch. ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... and he died on September 11, 1664. Lucy Hutchinson was not present when he died, but the message he sent to her was:—'Let her, as she is above other women, show herself on this occasion a good Christian, and above the pitch of ordinary minds.' ...
— Noble Deeds of the World's Heroines • Henry Charles Moore
... their time in cutting down the trees. They sawed the trees into timbers and boards. Some of it they split into staves to make barrels. They sent the staves and other sorts of timber to other countries to be sold. In South Car-o-li-na men made tar and pitch out of the ...
— Stories of Great Americans for Little Americans • Edward Eggleston
... with interest. "Go ahead, then, and I'll sit here and keep an eye on this chicken to see that he doesn't pitch ...
— Four Little Blossoms and Their Winter Fun • Mabel C. Hawley
... bet I'll pitch hay for her till sundown," he declared, when Lou had explained the situation to him. He dropped beside the tub the bundle of egg-soaked clothing which he carried, and added: "It is mighty good of her to ...
— Anything Once • Douglas Grant
... the children in duet, with all their childish interest in the marvelous excited to the highest pitch. ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... few strokes very strongly; and then he looked about him. The night was as dark as pitch. He could see a dim light from the ship behind him; the water rose and fell in a slow heavy swell; but which way the land lay he could not tell. But he said to himself that it was better to drown and be certainly with God, than in the den of robbers he had left. So he turned himself ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Mr. Pearse) no corps within our lines has been more deliberately shelled than the Imperial Light Horse, who were driven out of one camp by "Long Tom" of Pepworth's Hill, only to pitch their tents by the river bank within sight of "Puffing Billy's" gunners, who had got the range from Bulwaan to a nicety, so that they could pitch shell after shell into the new encampment. Even their "Long Tom" also still pounded at them by way of varying the monotony ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... congratulate herself on being "well out of it." Her safety was revolting and humiliating to Anne when she thought of Queenie and Cutler and Dicky, and Eliot and Jerrold and all the allied armies in the thick of it. She had left a world where life was lived at its highest pitch of intensity for a world where people were only half-alive. To be safe from the chance of sudden violent death ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... world, be it never so terrible and dreadful, move me at all to fear them. And hence it is that Christ counsels us to fear—"And I say unto you, my friends," saith he, "be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do." Aye, but this is a high pitch, how should we come by such princely spirits? well, I will forewarn you whom you shall fear, and by fearing of him, arrive to this pitch, "Fear him, which after he hath killed, hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, fear him" (Luke 12:4,5). Indeed ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... said, "you have nothing to do here. If you want to say a Pater noster, or an Ave Maria, there is plenty of room at home, and it is quite as good to say it there as in this monastery, which is now as dark as pitch." ...
— One Hundred Merrie And Delightsome Stories - Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles • Various
... learning that we were not pleased with our camping-place, invited us to pitch our tents under some trees near his cabin. And for one delightful month of the southern summer we brought into his life the strange sensation of voices fresh from the world he had discarded. The unwonted influence unlocked his memories and sent his ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... from an intensely funny situation—in fact, each laugh at dialogue is to some extent independent of the others. In the case of a funny situation there is a crescendo, and sometimes each outburst of laughter begins at the highest point reached by the outburst before it, till an intense pitch is attained; and, in fact, there is really no complete subsidence at all till the top of the climax is arrived at, but one is chuckling in ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... of September, Steve," he said, "and that'll give you time for the two weeks vacation that you ought to have. Then you can go back to Yale and pitch in till the next summer, when the same job'll be ready for you. After you're through college for good, if what you've learned about brokerin' ain't cured you of your likin' for it—if you still want to go ahead with it for your ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... to utter a word of it: for the life of him he could not think of anything but "Now I lay me down to sleep"—and confused and annoyed he stood unable to proceed. At this stage of affairs, Aunt Comfort's interest in Charlie's success had reached such a pitch that her customary awe of the place she was in entirely departed, and she exclaimed, "I'll give yer a start—'Our Farrer,'"—then overwhelmed by the consciousness that she had spoken out in meeting, she sank down behind a pew-door, completely ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... grunt, he arched his back again, stamping with all four feet, somewhat like the capers of a Mexican "broncho" when preparing to buck"; then he snorted once more, with such explosive force as seemed to shake the tree beside which we were hidden, as he looked about for something to pitch into. ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... as now, perhaps at Poschiavo and Pontresina. Afterwards, in order to reach Davos, the pass of the Scaletta rose before them—a wilderness of untracked snow-drifts. The country-folk still point to narrow, light hand-sledges, on which the casks were charged before the last pitch of the pass. Some wine came, no doubt, on pack-saddles. A meadow in front of the Dischma-Thal, where the pass ends, still bears the name of the Ross-Weid, or horse-pasture. It was here that the beasts ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... never marry the son of a slave. We have before mentioned that the mother of Vlademer was not the wife of his father. She was one of the maids of honor of Olga. This insult roused the indignation of Vlademer to the highest pitch. Burning with rage he marched suddenly upon Polotsk, took the city by storm, killed Rovgolod and his two sons and compelled Rogneda, his captive, to marry him, paying but little attention to the marriage ceremony. Having thus satiated his vengeance, he marched upon Kief, with a numerous ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... right, Wheatstone. It's the biggest thing you ever struck. Pitch 'em overboard in the morning. The Street is shaky about Argentine. There'll be h—-to pay before half past twelve. I guess you can safely go ten points. Lower yet, if Mavick's brokers begin to unload. I guess he will have to unless he can borrow. Rumor is a big thing, especially ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... anything but one's own deserving. I heard a great actor once say that we should never read criticisms of ourselves till a week after they were written—admirable counsel—but I confess I have not yet reached that pitch of self-restraint that would enable me to overcome my curiosity for seven days. It is, however, a state of equanimity to look forward to. In the meantime, content yourself with the recollection that ridicule ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... Sundays are not only to be found in old houses, but we all feel that Sunday quiet is likely to be the first thing sacrificed in the rush and bustle of modern life. But if we have no time to eat, we cannot keep up to working pitch, we lose vitality: if we have no time for spiritual food, our souls lose vitality, and unfortunately starvation of the soul is a painless process, so we may unconsciously be ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... a Venetian of the lower class, who amused him with her savagery and her wit. But, if Shelley may be trusted, there was a limit to his candour. There is abundant humour, but there is an economy of detail in his pornographic chronicle. He could not touch pitch without being defiled. But to do him justice he was never idle. He kept his brains at work, and for this reason, perhaps, he seems for a time to have recovered his spirits and sinned with a good courage. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... use, mother," he pronounced, without stirring, and splitting a long peg into two against his chest; "it's pitch-dark, isn't it?" So she gave it up again before she got to the door, but stood and listened; she thought she had heard a ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie
... of honor in the center of the room, and when the meal was over he was called upon for a story. These story-tellers became very expert in the practice of their art, and some of them could arouse their audiences to a great pitch of excitement. In the note that precedes the story "The Treason of Ganelon," in the volume "Heroes and Heroines of Chivalry," you can see how one of these story-tellers, or minstrels, sang aloud a story to the soldiers of William the ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... ye?" she cried, in a voice of such dramatic variety as only quick wits and warm feelings can give, it was so full at once of suppressed rage, humorous triumph, contemptuous irony, and infinite tenderness. And I need hardly say that it was raised to a ringing pitch that would have reached my ears had they been buried under twenty tarpaulins, "GOD bless ye for ivermore! Good luck to ye! fine weather to ye! health and strength to ye! May the knaves that would harm ye be made ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... may know how great is the task, and the confidence required to pitch into it, we announce, with a flourish, that Miss L. E. is about to attack that well-known Saurian Monster, termed GOSSIP! Considered as a Disease, she proposes to find the Cause and the Cure. Considered as a living and gigantic Nuisance (by far surpassing ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 26, September 24, 1870 • Various
... the descriptions. But there is very little of gentleness or compassion, in view of the protracted torments of the sufferers. We stand aghast in view of the miseries and monsters, furies and gorgons, snakes and fires, demons, filth, lakes of pitch, pools of blood, plains of scorching sands, circles, and chimeras dire,—a physical hell of utter and unspeakable dreariness and despair, awfully and powerfully described, but still repulsive. In each of the dismal abodes, far down in the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... to do I mused awhile, Still hoping to succeed; I pitch'd on books for company, And gravely tried to read: I bought and borrow'd everywhere, And studied night and day, Nor miss'd what dean or doctor wrote That happen'd in my way: Philosophy I now esteem'd The ornament of youth, And ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... a long breath, and wiped his brow. To make poor old Spruce hear was a powerful muscular exertion. Nebbie had been so much astonished at the loud pitch of his master's voice, that he had retired under a sofa in alarm, and only crawled out now as Spruce departed, with small anxious waggings of his tail. Walden patted ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... Gust. They marched straight to the tent in which they might expect to find him at that hour of the day, for though it would have been more comfortable for the entire party to remain aboard the ship, they had mutually decided that it would be safer for all concerned were they to pitch ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... other Union commanders had of overestimating the enemy. He always had a cheery word for his young officers, and when he was not poring over the maps with his lieutenant of engineers, Meigs, he was inspecting his troops, and seeing that their equipment and discipline were carried to the highest pitch. He was the very essence of activity and the army, although not yet moving, felt at all times the tonic ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... are often situated in inaccessible positions, and well protected by stockades. The territory which is acknowledged to belong to such a camp is extremely limited; its mere environs only are considered the actual property of the tribe, and a second can pitch its tents with a few hundred yards. These stockades, in fact, are more like store-houses than residences; ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... and I shall not be surprised if there should already be a brouillerie between the two courts about some or many of the nominations: and though the interest I thought of trying was the only one I could pitch upon, I do not, on reflection, suppose that a person just favoured has favour enough already to recommend others. Hereafter that may be better: and (" still more feasible method, I think, would be to obtain a promise against a vacancy; which, at this great open moment nobody ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... children had caught, the man came back, and he had fifteen of the handsomest trout I had ever seen on a string. He greeted us with a laugh and said this was the first stream he had ever seen where a man could take a long-handled shovel and pitch out all the fish he had a mind to. "It is wonderful to think of the amount of fish that has been taken out of that stream, and they would not be ...
— Chief of Scouts • W.F. Drannan
... Allen's resolution had been duly seconded, one Rogers, a publican, got up and said he had something to say. There was indescribable confusion, some crying, "Turn him out;" others "Pitch into 'em, Bill." Bill Rogers was well known as the funny man in Cowfold, a half-drunken buffoon, whose wit, such as it was, was retailed all over the place; a man who was specially pleased if he could be present in any assembly collected for any ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... as if nothing else were to be done or thought of. She began to wonder, it is true, why she did not wake up, and at what still more intolerable pitch of dizzy trouble her spirit would struggle out of the maze, and make her conscious that nothing of all this had actually happened. Of course it was not real; no such black, easterly day as this had yet begun to be; ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Latin poetry reaches a higher pitch of ethical sublimity than Cato's reply to Labienus when entreated to consult the oracle of Jupiter Ammon: [51] "What would you have me ask? whether I ought to die rather than become a slave? whether life begins here or after death? whether evil can hurt the good man? whether ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... alley rather than a street in which he might run upon soldiers at any moment, he moved quickly yet cautiously away from the inn. Behind him he could hear the voices of many men. They were raised to a high pitch by excitement. It was clear to Barney that there were many more than the original three—Prince Peter had, in all probability, enlisted the aid of ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... period;—WE have really no right to the BIG period, we modern men, who are short of breath in every sense! Those ancients, indeed, were all of them dilettanti in speaking, consequently connoisseurs, consequently critics—they thus brought their orators to the highest pitch; in the same manner as in the last century, when all Italian ladies and gentlemen knew how to sing, the virtuosoship of song (and with it also the art of melody) reached its elevation. In Germany, however (until quite ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... in London to an extraordinary degree during the whole of the eighteenth century. It reached a high pitch, but not its highest pitch, at the time when the watchword was Wilkes and Liberty. London was to witness bitterer work, bloodier work than anything which followed upon the Middlesex election and the imprisonment ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... pastures, where a horse or two cropped the short grass. At the railway bridge, which carried a branch mineral line over the path, they exchanged a brief volley of words with the working-lads who always played pitch-and-toss there in the dinner-hour; and the Sunday added to the collection of shawds and stones lodged on the under ledges of the low iron girders. A strange boy, he had sworn to put ten thousand stones on those ledges before he died, or perish ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... bombardment rose to a fiercer pitch of intensity the next day. The Mexicans seemed to have an unlimited supply of ammunition, and they rained balls and shells on the Alamo. Many of the shells did not burst, and the damage done was small. The Texans did not reply from the shelter of their walls ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... long boards joined together to form a V-shaped trough and drained by a pipe into the pit completes the whole. A pitch sufficient for rapid drainage should be ...
— Military Instructors Manual • James P. Cole and Oliver Schoonmaker
... luckily that a little before I had resolved upon this design, a gentleman had written predictions, and two or three other pieces in my name, which had rendered it famous through all parts of Europe; and by an inimitable spirit and humour, raised it to as high a pitch of reputation as it could possibly arrive at." The gentleman referred to is, of course, Swift, whose pamphlets on Partridge had been the ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... angle iron riveted on each side and riveted to the keelson. The superstructure consists of four legs of angle iron 2-1/2 inches by 2-1/2 inches by 5/16 inch, the upper ends of the legs being attached to a square flanged plate for supporting the lighting apparatus. Four wooden battens of pitch pine, 4 inches by 1-1/2 inches, and bolted on to each cant of the angle iron superstructure, with 7/8 inch ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... patrician was stripped and scourged in the public place of Constantinople. For some venial offenses, some defect of equity or vigilance, the principal ministers, a praefect, a quaestor, a captain of the guards, were banished or mutilated, or scalded with boiling pitch, or burnt alive in the hippodrome; and as these dreadful examples might be the effects of error or caprice, they must have alienated from his service the best and wisest of the citizens. But the pride of the monarch was flattered in the exercise of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... Dirty Dan out of the pool-hall and explained the situation to him. The knowledge that The Laird had, in his extremity, placed reliance on him moved Dirty Dan to the highest pitch of enthusiasm and loyalty. He pursed his lips, winked one of his piggy eyes craftily, and, without wasting time in words of assurance, set forth in search of the man he was to follow and protect. Presently he saw Donald entering the butcher shop; so he stationed himself across the ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... decorous island that admires the concrete. Imps have their freakish wickedness in them to kindle detective vision: malignly do they love to uncover ridiculousness in imposing figures. Wherever they catch sight of Egoism they pitch their camps, they circle and squat, and forthwith they trim their lanterns, confident of the ludicrous to come. So confident that their grip of an English gentleman, in whom they have spied their game, never relaxes until he begins insensibly ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... have taken to traverse my designs towards this young man, and towards yourself. I thank you for the hints you have thrown out before my appearance, the suddenness of which alone has prevented you from carrying your confidence to a pitch which would have placed my life and that of others at the discretion of a boy, who, when the cause of God and his country is laid before him, has not leisure to think of them, so much is he occupied with such a baby-face as thine." Alice, pale as death, continued motionless, with her eyes fixed ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... out of the kitchen would have delighted the heart of an epicure. But to see Phebe at her best, one should be at the farm during the busy haying season. It was her pride and delight to be considered "as good as any man," and she could "pitch a load" with a dexterity that even the two farm hands could not equal. These latter were brothers, and lived in a snug cottage a few rods away, said cottage being kept, like everything else on the farm, as "neat as a new pin," by Joe's wife, a brisk little woman, whose head scarcely ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... nothing. She heard a cry from the baby Carrie, and she hurried across the little garden to the house. At the same moment there was a shout of greeting from below, and Fenwick came into sight on the steep pitch of lane that led from the high-road to the cottage. Miss Anna strolled ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... rollers are fitted with sprockets and turned by a hand-forged chain. The comb plate, stamped "Standring," is hand filed, and is undoubtedly one of those made before the "teeth-cutting machine" was smuggled from England, for although one-third of the plate is quite regular, the size and pitch of the teeth in the remaining two-thirds are irregular. Part of this irregularity might be explained as having been caused by the hand-sharpening of a plate originally cut by machine, but the teeth in one 2-inch span not only vary ...
— The Scholfield Wool-Carding Machines • Grace L. Rogers
... had led him to pitch his tent in such a spot, can only be conjectured. He came thither directly from the city of Cincinnati, having lived in a hotel near by while he hurried the erection of this house. He came thither with his son, (his wife was dead), ...
— Tom, The Bootblack - or, The Road to Success • Horatio Alger
... their blood. And all the hosts of heaven shall melt away; and all their host shall fall down, as the blighted fruit from the fig tree. For my sword shall rush drunk from heaven: behold, upon Edom shall it descend. For it is a day of vengeance from Jehovah. Her streams shall be turned into pitch, and her dust into brimstone, and her whole land shall become burning pitch. It shall lie waste forever, and none shall pass through it. The pelican and the hedgehog shall possess it; the heron and the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... to such a pitch that she hardly knew what she was saying. She had been through a good deal in the last hour or two and Trenby realised it. Suddenly that grim determination of his to force her promise, to bind her his here and now, yielded to ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... at boiling pitch, the work was begun in real earnest, and as they darted in regular succession out of the shadow of the buttress across the clear stream of moonlight flowing down the flagstones, they appeared like a procession of figures thrown on a cloth by a magic-lantern. Mr. Hayes' white stocking ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... over a rare sight, a Stradivari Violin, the interior of which was intact from the maker's hands. Mr. Lott described the bass-bar to me. It was very low and very short, and quite unequal to support the tension of the strings at our concert pitch, so that the true tone of this Violin can never have been heard in England before it fell into Vuillaume's hands. I have known this Violin forty years. It is wonderfully preserved. There is no wear on the belly except the chin-mark; in the centre of the back a very little, just ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... A splendid time had been promised them by Mrs. Sherwood, who had made extensive preparations for their visit. The arrangements included a novelty which offered a very brilliant prospect to the party, and excited the imagination even of the older ones to the highest pitch. ...
— Haste and Waste • Oliver Optic
... masterpiece. The Professor pretends that he found such a one in Charles Street, which, in its dare-devil impudence of rough-and-tumble vegetation, beat the pretty-behaved flower-beds of the Public Garden as ignominiously as a group of young tatterdemalions playing pitch-and-toss beats a row of Sunday-school-boys with their teacher at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... stood clasped in each other's arms; then Rufinus freed himself, and set out to seek the abbess. Orion returned to the women, whose curiosity had been roused to a high pitch by seeing Rufinus disappear through the gate leading to the convent-garden. Dame Joanna could not sit still for excitement, and Pulcheria answered at random when Orion and Paula, who had an infinity of things to say or whisper to each other, now and then tried to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... defeat of Kossovo, taken refuge in the Bielopolje, the central valley of the principality, from the defeat of Dushan down, and he knew all the traditions of their early history. When the young men played at games of strength or skill, there were few who could pitch the stone so far or shoot so well, and perhaps those few had the tact not to let it be seen, so that he stood amongst his people as the model and type of all the heroic virtues. In spite of his great physical proportions he was nervous and excitable. ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... very dark," said she; still she went in with him through the stove and through the pipe, where it was as dark as pitch. ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... upon rough-hewn walls, showed down three steps the grated doors of the wine-cellars. Away to his right, down a narrow pitch-black tunnel, were the walls of the hypocausts behind which fires roared and ravened. Through these tunnels, in Summer, the furnaces were approached ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... and wrathful sunset had burned itself out on a brassy sky. The sun, a lurid ball of fire, had sunk in billows of blood-red cloud, and pitch blackness had fallen upon earth and sky and sea. Everything above and below breathed of speedy tempest, but the midnight was drawing near, and the ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... are preserved as national traditions to this very day, though exaggerated by Eastern fancy, and mingled with wilder romance, as they have been transmitted from one generation to another by the children of Ishmael, who still lead their flocks in the same valleys, and pitch their tents by the same fountains to which ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... his private diary three months before Trafalgar: "I went on shore for the first time since the 16th of June 1803; and, from having my foot out of the Victory, two years wanting ten days." During all this long spell of harassing duty he kept his fleet "tuned up" to the last pitch of perfection in scouting, manoeuvring, and gunnery, so as to be always ready for victorious action at ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... while his recall was being decided, before he knew of it himself, and long before his successor came, Genet's folly produced more trouble than ever, and his insolence rose to a higher pitch. The arming of privateers had been checked, but the consuls continued to arrogate powers which no self-respecting nation could permit, and for some gross offense Washington revoked the exequatur of Duplaine, consul at Boston. An insolent note ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... even under Dr. Legammon; and he didn't even give her much assurance that her child would get well at all. He especially excited Mrs. Maginnis's apprehension by saying, 'We must be hopeful, my dear madam.' Mrs. Maginnis, you know, is strung away up above concert-pitch, and this melancholy encouragement threw her into despair, and came near to making her a fit patient for the doctor's specialistic attentions in a private retreat. She couldn't bring herself to have the eyes operated on, or even to have electricity ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... returned, the coat sate quite correctly; the cushion evidently was not there. The astonishment of the children rose to the highest pitch, and there was no end to their conjectures. The Queen-bee imagined that there must be a hole in his pocket, through which the pincushion had fallen on the stairs. Petrea, in whose suggestion the joke originated, was quite dismayed about ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... Harry had no proper place at all. She was absurdly top-hampered and over-gunned. And, for all her thousand tons, she must have bucketed about in the chops of the Channel with the same sort of hobby-horse, see-sawing pitch that bothered Captain Concas in 1893 when sailing an exact reproduction of Columbus's flagship, the Santa Maria, across the North Atlantic to the great ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... the hospital cottages, the place was pointed out to us where the local followers of the Duke of Monmouth who were unfortunate enough to come under the judgment of the cruel Judge Jeffreys were boiled in pitch and their limbs exhibited on the shambles ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... He could distinguish now the roar of a great flock of mallards, circling round and round high overhead, scouting for danger. He could hear the sweet flute-notes of teal and pintails, and the raucous, cautious quack of some old green-head. A teal would pitch suddenly down to the water before him and rest there, erect and wary, painted in black upon the golden water. Another would join it and another. The cautious mallards, encouraged by this, would swing lower. The music of their wings seemed incredibly close; he would grip his gun hard, holding himself ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... is not likely to remain eternally at its present barbarous pitch. Mr. William Archer, who has won a new fame as student of that black problem, which is America's nemesis for her ancient slave-raiding, and who favours the creation of a Black State as one of the United States, observes: "It is noteworthy ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill
... words is in all cases inexplicable. The unheroic character of most men's minds, with their consequent intolerance of that heroic which they cannot understand, is constantly at work, too often with success, in taking down words of nobleness from their high pitch; and, as the most effectual way of doing this, in casting an air of mock-heroic about them. Thus 'to dub', a word resting on one of the noblest usages of chivalry, has now something of ludicrous about it; so too has 'doughty'; they belong to that serio-comic, mock-heroic ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... can't tell you the story without feeling as if my heart would break for the poor young lady.—'I went back to my room,' said my aunt, 'with my empty jug in my hand, and I sat down as if I had had a stroke, and I never moved till it was pitch dark and my fire out. It was a marvel to me afterwards that nobody came near me, for everybody was calling after me at that time. And it was days before I caught a glimpse of Miss Wallis again, at least ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald |
