"Precarious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... so-called humour led him to make these low appeals to the witless. And even as he looked the cross-eyed man entered the scene. Garbed in the weirdly misfitting clothes of a waiter, holding aloft a loaded tray of dishes, he entered on roller skates, to halt before Baird with his uplifted tray at a precarious balance. ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... written for the most part during my college life, and all of them before the age of nineteen. Some have found their way into schools, and seem to be successful. Others lead a vagabond and precarious existence in the corners of newspapers; or have changed their names and run away to seek their fortunes beyond the sea. I say, with the Bishop of Avranches, on a similar occasion, "I cannot be displeased to see these children of mine, which I have ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... several successive years been seriously affected by the red rust, and a neglect of other products suitable to the soil and climate, added in too many cases to careless and intemperate habits, have until lately rendered the position of many of the small farmers a very precarious one. Last year, however, was more favourable, and they to a great extent recovered themselves. The lesson of the past has not been altogether lost; they have also been much assisted by the new Land Regulations, ...
— Explorations in Australia • John Forrest
... they laid so solemn claim. In their decisions they favored, so far as they dared, every interest, class or person powerful enough to help or hurt them in an election. Holding their high office by so precarious a tenure, they were under strong temptation to enrich themselves from the serviceable purses of wealthy litigants, and in disregard of justice to cultivate the favor of the attorneys practicing before them, and before ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... of the chiefs has been much curtailed of late, owing to the extensive cessions of territory to Sarawak and the British North Borneo Company, and their hold on the rivers left to them has become very precarious, since the warlike Kyans passed under Raja BROOKE'S sway. This tribe, once the most powerful in Borneo, was always ready at the Sultan's call to raid on any tribe who had incurred his displeasure and revelled in the easy ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... streams of the silver of Peru and the gold of Brazil have been attracted by the Vatican, the revenues of the cardinals, the fees of office, the oblations of pilgrims and clients, and the remnant of ecclesiastical taxes, afford a poor and precarious supply, which maintains, however, the idleness of the court and city. The population of Rome, far below the measure of the great capitals of Europe, does not exceed one hundred and seventy thousand inhabitants; [74] and within the spacious enclosure of the walls, the largest portion of the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... not a little drunkenness to this picture of high life; but German, or French, or Spanish, if you can see out of your palace-windows beyond the trim-cut forest vistas, misery is lying outside; hunger is stalking about the bare villages, listlessly following precarious husbandry; ploughing stony fields with starved cattle; or fearfully taking in scanty harvests. Augustus is fat and jolly on his throne; he can knock down an ox, and eat one almost; his mistress Aurora von Koenigsmarck is the loveliest, the wittiest creature; ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sleuth-hound of the sea tore towards the Hoorn, for such she was. Rounding under her squat counter, and reversing engines, the Capella brought up within fifty yards of the submarine before the astonished Germans could realize their precarious plight. ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... Under this method we think of the individual as individual or of his work as a concrete case of production. One phase of this is the individual's estimate of his own powers. We may inquire what is the man's appreciation of his own worth. This is precarious because of two difficulties. There is an egotistical element in individuals. It is inherent as a historical agent of self-preservation. Most of us are like primitive groups. The ethnologist expects to find every tribe or horde of savages claiming ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... make a proposition of this kind. In former times, Francesca was the Croesus of the party, Salemina came second, and I last, with a most precarious income. Now I am the wealthy one, Francesca is reduced to the second place, and Salemina to the third, but it makes no difference whatever, either in our relations, our arrangements, or, for that matter, ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... social advantage that women thus seek in marriage—and the seeking is visible no less in the kitchen wench who aspires to the heart of a policeman than in the fashionable flapper who looks for a husband with a Rolls-Royce—is, by a curious twist of fate, one of the underlying causes of their precarious economic condition before marriage rescues them. In a civilization which lays its greatest stress upon an uninspired and almost automatic expertness, and offers its highest rewards to the more intricate forms thereof, ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... dock-laborers; they are often taken on only for half a day at a time, and in this way their work is precarious, and, except for the most steady-going and respectable, at many periods of the year very hard to get. Almost all the men either work at the docks, or take to a sea-faring life. Thus sailors are coming and going, and there is scarcely a family belonging either to high or low who has not ...
— A Girl of the People • L. T. Meade
... been so much rain that it was heavy wading through the padi, and it was quite dark when we reached the jungle, in which the rain had made the footing very precarious, and in darkness we forded the swollen stream, and stumbled along the shore of the Perak, where fireflies in thousands were flashing among the bushes—a beautiful sight. When we reached the bank of the ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... He must press on this marriage at once. Delay would only be worse. His situation here was precarious. If he were to linger too long, the Carlists might rally, and he would be besieged. Before that could happen he must have Katie for his wife, and then retreat as fast as possible. He could not defer the marriage till they ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... flows over the ice with a continually renewing surface of the smoothest texture. Carrying a mercurial barometer that one dare not intrust to a sled on one's back over such footing is a somewhat precarious proceeding, but there was no alternative, and many miles were thus passed. Up the Toklat, then up its Clearwater Fork, then up its tributary, Myrtle Creek, to its head, and so over a little divide and down Willow ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... and walked out of the gymnasium unnoticed. This was the first time he had heard the particulars concerning that game, although on Saturday the surprising information had been telephoned to Oakdale that Wyndham had been barely able to squeeze out a precarious victory on her own grounds. As Eliot had stated, the Clearporters were batters to be feared, and Phil was now in no condition to be unruffled by this menace to ...
— Rival Pitchers of Oakdale • Morgan Scott
... despatch. The Dutch are like to do nothing this year; their affairs draw to a crisis, and it is to be hoped, that it will prove favorable to our friends. The Emperor is occupied in ecclesiastical and civil changes, his health is in a precarious state, and he runs the risk of losing entirely his sight. The motions of Russia indicate a war with the Porte no longer Sublime. The Empress negotiates loans in Holland and at Genoa. I have taken measures to be informed of their success. The King of Great Britain, as ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various
... were seriously wounded. The enemy was posted just behind the town; batteries were placed along the levee at numerous places; several boats had been destroyed, and the transportation of supplies was getting quite precarious, but the surrender of Port Hudson put a stop to their amusement. We landed at night, slept on our arms, and woke up in the morning close to the ...
— History of the 159th Regiment, N.Y.S.V. • Edward Duffy
... in the scene as he balanced a precarious way to his seat, felt every hypercritical sense rising in revolt. Even the prosaic but admirably efficient table utensils repelled him. "They are so useful, so abominably enduring," he thought. The mahogany trimmings of doors and ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... sign,' said Sam; 'if you'd said you meant to be vun o' these days, I should ha' looked upon you as bein' safe. You're in a wery precarious state.' ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... dismissed from office; the secretary and linguist having been a pupil and friend of the writer, he perused their political obituary with much regret. However, office holding in the far East is not only an equivocal honor, but a precarious means of subsistence, which, as the aspirants fully understand, one can somewhat economize his commiseration. Why, they are used to it in that strange country. The last mail brings intelligence of the degradation of one hundred and ten office holders of all grades, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... There is nothing so sweet to the foremast mariner as his sleep; for it is the most precarious of all his enjoyments: on the other hand, perhaps, it is the most treacherous companion the ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... inshore, while occasionally a few fish were to be caught in the waters of their little harbour. Most of them also cultivated patches of ground on the sides of the valley which opened out at the further end of the gorge, but, except potatoes, their fields afforded but precarious crops. ...
— Michael Penguyne - Fisher Life on the Cornish Coast • William H. G. Kingston
... principle. Both theories assume that man, having devised certain epithets, later came to misunderstand them and to build up histories on the misunderstanding. Both thus rest the immense mass of human religious customs and beliefs, which form so large a part of human history, on the precarious foundation of passing fancy and inadvertence, and they must be put into the same category with the naive theory, once popular, that religion is the invention of priests who sought to control men ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... intention. All his life, from this and other causes, he must have read in the spirit of one liable to sudden interruption; like a dragoon, in fact, reading with one foot in the stirrup, when expecting momentarily a summons to mount for action. In such situations, reading by snatches, and by intervals of precarious leisure, people form the habit of seeking and unduly valuing condensations of the meaning, where in reality the truth suffers by this short-hand exhibition, or else they demand too vivid illustrations of the meaning. Lord Chesterfield himself, so brilliant ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... on, square after square, with Peter listening gravely, his head bent. And square after square it was borne in on him what a precarious future stretched before this girl beside him, how very slender her resources, how ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... pleased, because he would no longer be dependent upon precarious rains filling the hogshead, but would have a whole tankful of water—an ocean in the back-room—to sail his ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... not. They, who bear a cheerful and unreproaching conscience into solitude, surely must increase the measure of their own enjoyments. They quit the poor, precarious, the dependent pleasures, which they borrowed from the world, to draw a real bliss from that exhaustless source of true delight, the fountain of a pure ...
— The Stranger - A Drama, in Five Acts • August von Kotzebue
... as the cheese-bearer at a christening looks out for some one to give the cheese to. The cheese-getter on this occasion was Doctor Lotion, who was going to visit old Jackey Thompson, of Woolleyburn. Jackey being then in a somewhat precarious state of health, and tolerably advanced in life, without any very self-evident heir, was obnoxious to the attentions of three distinct litters of cousins, some one or other of whom was constantly 'baying him.' Lotion, though a sapient man, and somewhat grinding in his ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... the former full of yawning cracks and holes, the party pushed on, subsisting on precarious pools of muddy water and fast-sinking native wells; until, on the 3rd of September, Flood, the stockman, who was riding ahead, held up his hat and called aloud to them that a large creek was ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... there is a very simple explanation of the loss by Darwin of his powers of enjoyment of music and poetry, a loss which he evidently greatly deplored. His scientific undertaking was so gigantic, and, at the same time, his health was so broken and precarious, that he felt his only chance of success lay in utilizing, for the tasks before him, every moment that he was free from acute suffering and retained any power of working. Consequently, when the self-imposed ...
— The Coming of Evolution - The Story of a Great Revolution in Science • John W. (John Wesley) Judd
... there is the further difficulty that two individuals must be chosen for each mating, and superficial examination of them does not insure that they belong to the same group—their germ plasm cannot be inspected. Hence selection of biparental forms is a precarious process, now going forward, now backwards, now standing still. In time, however, the process forward is almost certain to take place if the selection is from a heterogeneous population. Johannsen's work was simplified because he started with pure lines. In fact, had he not done ...
— A Critique of the Theory of Evolution • Thomas Hunt Morgan
... national credit there; for though I am an enemy to the using our credit but under absolute necessity, yet the possessing a good credit I consider as indispensable, in the present system of carrying on war. The existence of a nation having no credit is always precarious. The credit of England is the best. Their paper sells at par on the exchange of Amsterdam the moment any of it is offered, and they can command there any sum they please. The reason is, that they never borrow, without establishing taxes for the payment of the interest, and ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... of Permian and Triassic Tocosauria that we have found in the last two decades are, for the most part, very imperfectly preserved. Very often we can make only precarious inferences from these skeletal fragments as to the anatomic characters of the soft parts that went with the bony skeleton of the extinct Tocosauria. Hence it has not yet been possible to arrange these important fossils with any confidence in the ancestral ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... of the tall shot-towers on that bank of the Thames. The bridges themselves have long been posts of observation, from which a large portion of the river-side property is watched. Not long ago there was a pieman on Londonbridge, who eked ont a precarious existence by keeping a good look-out ...
— Fires and Firemen • Anon.
... had given Grindelwald a sinister but rather alluring reputation among a large circle of untravelled friends as a place where the insolence of birth and wealth was held in precarious check from breaking forth ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... went into society. Probably he might have endorsed, if he had been asked, the great principle which somebody or other has formulated, that the most expensive way of living is staying in other peoples houses. At any rate his condition was rather precarious till 1835, when Lord John Russell and Lord Lansdowne obtained for him a Civil List pension of three hundred pounds a year. In his very last days this was further increased by an additional hundred a year ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... passing, evanescent, fleeting, cursory, short-lived, ephemeral; flying &c. v.; fugacious, fugitive; shifting, slippery; spasmodic; instantaneous, momentaneous[obs3]. temporal, temporary; provisional, provisory; deciduous; perishable, mortal, precarious, unstable, insecure; impermanent. brief, quick, brisk, extemporaneous, summary; pressed for time &c. (haste) 684; sudden, momentary &c. (instantaneous) 113. Adv. temporarily &c. adj.; pro tempore[Lat]; for the moment, for a time; awhile, en passant[Fr], in transitu[Lat]; in a short time; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... castles at a later date. The churches were heavy and mournful. Good men hid themselves, trying to escape from the miserable world, and sang monotonous chants of death and the grave. Agriculture was at the lowest state, and hunting, piracy, and robbery were resorted to as a means of precarious existence. There was no commerce. The roads were invested with vagabonds and robbers. It was the era of universal pillage and destruction. Nothing was sacred. Universal desolation filled the souls of men with despair. What state of society could be worse than that of England under ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... to raise a superstructure at once attractive and solid.' - That's piling it up mountaynious, ain't it? - 'The students were no longer dispersed through the streets and lanes of the city, dwelling in insulated houses, halls, inns, or hostels, subject to dubious control and precarious discipline.' - That's stunnin', isn't it? just like those Times fellers write. - 'But placed under the immediate superintendence of tutors and governors, and lodged in comfortable chambers. This ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... the bough that impeded his view, and saw how precarious was her hold. He dared not so much as call to her, or shout to frighten the monster away, lest, her attention being for an instant distracted, she might turn her head, lose her balance, and fall backwards ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... Germany, the press was either legally or practically free. Holland and Switzerland are no more; and, since the commencement of this prosecution, fifty imperial towns have been erased from the list of independent States by one dash of the pen. Three or four still preserve a precarious and trembling existence. I will not say by what compliances they must purchase its continuance. I will not insult the feebleness of States, whose unmerited fall I do most ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... of the common man is past. On the open countryside one man is as good as another, or nearly as good. The earlier aristocracy had a precarious tenure of strength and audacity. They were tempered—tempered. There were insurrections, duels, riots. The first real aristocracy, the first permanent aristocracy, came in with castles and armour, and vanished before the musket and bow. But this is the second aristocracy. The real ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... just this moment, a choice of two things to say when next she should speak—a choice of two ways of looking into his face. A mountaineer, standing on the edge of a crevasse, deciding whether to try to leap across and win a precarious way to the summit, or to turn back and confess the climb has been in vain, is confronted by a choice like that. If ever the leap was to be made, it must be made now. The rainbow bridge across the crevasse, the miracle of motherhood, ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... could do so sooner," he continued; "but you see by how precarious a tenure I hold my control over these people; therefore I must be cautious, for your sake as well as my own, or they would make little of murdering both of us, especially as the fellow who would have cut your throat this morning has many friends amongst ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... that if I had my time over again it's not a tenant-farmer I'd be. I'd follow one of the learn'd professions." The proprietress gently replied that even in the learned professions there were losses as well as gains, and perhaps he would have found professional life as precarious as farming. "Ah, my lady, how can that be then?" replied the son of St. Patrick. "If you're a lawyer—win or lose, you're paid. If you're a doctor—kill or cure, you're paid. If you're a priest—heaven or hell, you're paid." Who can imagine an English farmer pleading the case for an abatement ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... they knew the truth, which is that artificial abortion, even under the best hospital conditions, is a precarious undertaking, so frequently leading to invalidism as never to be 'safe'; if, moreover, we spread the truth about Russia's legalized abortions, and put a stop to the false reports circulated by ill-informed enthusiasts ...
— Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Various Aspects of the Problem of Abortion in New Zealand • David G. McMillan
... step he was well aware. Not merely could Artemisia, if recaptured, receive any form whatsoever of brutal punishment, but he, as the abettor of her flight, would be liable to a heavy penalty. Slave property was necessarily very precarious property, and to aid a slave to escape was an extremely heinous crime. "So many slaves, so many enemies," ran the harsh maxim; and it was almost treason to society for a freedman to aid a servant to ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... this swaggerer Mme. de Vaubadon received a certain Ollendon, a Chouan of doubtful reputation, who was said to have gone over to the police through need of money. Mme. de Vaubadon, since her divorce, had herself been in a precarious position. She had dissipated her own fortune, which had already been greatly lessened by the Revolution. She was now reduced to expedients, and seeing closed to her the doors of many of the houses ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... Hotel de Ville by means of the people, but I opposed it with arguments too tedious to mention. M. de Bouillon was for engaging entirely with Spain, but I convinced Marechal de La Mothe and M. de Beaufort that such measures would in a fortnight reduce them to a precarious dependence on ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... submissively to their yoke; the Spaniards began to work in earnest on their farms; and there descended upon island affairs a brief St. Martin's Summer of peace before the final winter of blight and death set in. The Admiral, however, was obviously in precarious health; his ophthalmia became worse, and the stability of his mind suffered. He had dreams and visions of divine help and comfort, much needed by him, poor soul, in all his tribulations and adversities. Even yet the cup ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... in the low seat of the chair she was sitting on an old cheese box. Suddenly she arose to go in the house to "see if dem cabbages is a-burnin'," and when she returned she carefully adjusted the box before resuming her precarious perch in the old rocking chair. When she was sure that her feet were in a sunny spot, she began ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... research that the natural order of the world includes telepathy, and the range of the miraculous has been correspondingly reduced without detriment to the argument for the divinity of Christ, now rested on less precarious ground. ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... strengthen and illumine the second, whose government will thus become more intelligent and benign: the first truth will teach us to profit by all that the second does not include. And if we allow it to sadden our heart or arrest our action, we have not sufficiently realised that the vast but precarious space it fills in the region of important truths is governed by countless problems which as yet are unsolved; while the problems whereon the second truth rests are daily resolved by real life. The first truth is still in the dangerous, feverish stage, through which all truths must ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... Shetland?-Yes, several. Mr. Harrison had one up in December which succeeded very well, and there is one out from Scalloway just now at Faroe; but it is not considered that it will be extensively or generally continued, the fishing is so precarious. ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... boat the business appeared yet more precarious than from the ship, she stood so high over us, swung down so swift, and menaced us so perpetually with her plunging and passaging upon the anchor cable. I began to think I had made a fool's bargain, that it was merely impossible Catriona should ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is regarded with contempt and aversion by pastoral nomads and is resorted to for a livelihood only when they lose their herds by a pest or robbery, or find their pasture lands seriously curtailed, nevertheless nomadism yields such a precarious and monotonous subsistence that it is not infrequently combined with a primitive, shifting tillage. The Kalmucks of the Russian steppes employ men to harvest hay for the winter feeding. The Nogai Tartars practice a little ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... he did not see why the work and wages of a public office should be less honourable than those of any other profession. To him, with his ideas, there was no profession so honourable, as certainly there were none which demanded greater sacrifices or were more precarious. And he did believe that such an article as that would have the effect of shutting against him the gates of that dangerous Paradise which he desired to enter. He had no great claim upon his party; and, in giving ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... now beginning to differentiate itself from the ecclesiastical profession, and to become a definite vocation in its various branches. Crowds of students flocked to the seats of learning, and, as travelling scholars, earned a precarious living by begging or "professing" medicine, assisting the illiterate for a small fee, or working wonders, such as casting horoscopes, or performing thaumaturgic tricks. The professors of law were now the most influential members of the Imperial Council and of the various ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... was conducting, and when that crisis arrived they lost their heads and blundered in trying to deal with it. They did not perceive the whirlpool toward which they were heading. They thought that they could safely expose what was precarious to a strain, and secure the substance of a real victory without having to overcome actual resistance. Had they put an extreme ambition for their country aside, and been careful in their language to others, they might have attained a considerable success without a shot being fired. ...
— Before the War • Viscount Richard Burton Haldane
... times of great emergency or for purposes of high national importance. Independently of the exigency of the case, many considerations of great weight urge a policy having in view a provision of revenue to meet to a certain extent the demands of the nation, without relying altogether on the precarious resource of foreign commerce. I am satisfied that internal duties and excises, with corresponding imposts on foreign articles of the same kind, would, without imposing any serious burdens on the people, enhance the price of ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 3) of Volume 2: James Monroe • James D. Richardson
... were drifting to other camps, few of the shacks were rebuilt. Of the six thousand that had been, scarcely threescore remained. A few trappers ran their lines out from the town, a few men had placer claims in the old diggings, two or three woodsmen made precarious livings as guides for such wealthy men as came to hunt moose and caribou, and Bradleyburg's course was run. The winter cold had triumphed at last, and its curse was over the city from October till June. The spruce forest, cleared ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... always "intended" to rule, and that no other outcome could even be considered by Nature. This is one of the remnants of ignorance certain religions have left: but it's odd that men who don't believe in Easter should still believe this. For the facts are of course this is a hard and precarious world, where every mistake and infirmity must be paid for ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... July the Marquis de St. Caux and the little body of royalists who still remained faithful to the king became more and more anxious; the position of the royal family was now most precarious; most of the troops in Paris had been sent to the frontier, and those left behind were disorganized and ready to join the mob. Two out of the three Swiss battalions had been sent away and but one remained at the Tuileries. Of the National Guard only the battalion of Filles St. Thomas and ...
— In the Reign of Terror - The Adventures of a Westminster Boy • G. A. Henty
... excellent school, where I was educated for Cambridge. Meanwhile I had been devoting all possible time to music; for I had determined to become a composer, and I was looking forward, after taking my degree, to completing my musical education abroad; but my mother's health was precarious, and, when the time came, she found herself unequal to making the journey, and the change of habits and surroundings that it implied. We lived very quietly in Liverpool for three or four years; then she died, and, after I had settled our affairs, I found myself in possession ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... of reason, when it takes the form of an inference from induction. For the last step of the inductive process, the creation of its supposed universal, is, when compared with the real standard of universality acknowledged by reason, an incomplete and more or less precarious process; "it gets out of facts something more than what they actually contain"; and it can give no reason for itself but what the common faith derived from experience can give, the anticipation of ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... be got here are precarious, as they consist chiefly of wild fowl, and may probably never be found in such plenty as to supply the crew of a ship; and fish, so far as we can judge, are scarce. Indeed the plenty of wild-fowl made us pay less attention to fishing. Here are, however, plenty ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... was wholly in fish, lumber, and furs, which, there being no money, the settlers were ready enough to barter for West India goods. But the outlet for the product of the country was, in its unsettled condition, uncertain and precarious, and the young traders were no better off than before. One transaction only is remembered, the advance by Gallatin to the garrison of supplies to the value of four hundred dollars; for this he ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... was of the utmost importance to get safely over the precarious part of the 'road' before the seasonal going-out of the sea-ice. To wait until all the ice should go out and enable the ship to sail to Hut Point would have meant long uncertainty and delay. As it happened, the Road broke up the day after the ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... Y.D. and his daughter. Tompkins' soul yearned for a cooking berth that could be occupied the year round. Work in the railway camps had always left him high and dry at the freeze-up—dry, particularly, and a few nights in Calgary or Edmonton saw the end of his season's earnings. Then came a precarious existence for Tompkins until the scrapers were back on the dump the following spring. A steady job, cooking on a ranch like the Y.D.; if Tompkins had written the Apocalypse that would have been his picture of heaven. ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... raid my position became extremely precarious, for I was now on the black list and being searched for. While previously my connection with the Mission had been a protection, now it was just the opposite. I could not very well remain in our apartment ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... of the body. There is no distinction on the face of our experiences; one is vivid indeed, and one dull, and one pleasant, and another agonising to remember; but which of them is what we call true, and which a dream, there is not one hair to prove. The past stands on a precarious footing; another straw split in the field of metaphysic, and behold us robbed of it. There is scarce a family that can count four generations but lays a claim to some dormant title or some castle and estate: a claim not prosecutable in any court of law, but flattering to the ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... understood, although he had escaped from prison and had found shelter and sanctuary in the cathedral, that he was yet in an extremely precarious position. The murmur of voices told him that people were in the church, and he had no doubt that the odor came ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... opening-up country beyond; so it is more profitable to drive a wagon than to till a farm. Every beast with four legs is wanted to drag building materials or provisions. The supply of beef becomes daily more precarious and costly, for the oxen are all "treking," and one hears of nothing but diseases among animals—"horse sickness," pleuro-pneumonia, fowl sickness (I feel it an impertinence for the poultry to presume to be ill), and even dogs set up a peculiar and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... even by her physical beauty. Her love for her child, for instance, impressed him powerfully, and he always gazed upon her with softer eyes when he saw her caressing or nursing the little fatherless creature, whose health was now delicate and precarious. It is difficult to say whether he was absolutely in love with Alice; the phrase is too strong, perhaps, to be applied to a man past fifty, who had gone through emotions and trials enough to wear away freshness from his heart. His feelings ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... shall see any more of the Indians," said Bart, as they climbed up amongst the rocks to what looked almost like a gateway formed by a couple of boldly scarped masses, in whose strata lines various plants and shrubs maintained a precarious existence. ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... said of Coleridge's motto, Sermoni propriori, this is more proper for a sermon than for a dinner-table. But birthdays, after all, gentlemen, are serious things; and as the chance of many more of them becomes precarious, and the approaching birthday of the nation begets in all of us, I should hope, something of a grave and meditative mood, it would be an indecorum to break in upon it too suddenly with the licensed levity of festival. You are waiting to hear other voices, and I trust my example of gravity ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... be able to count on a couple of whom neither one is a blank. Yes, I really believe we should be more than twice the success we are now; at least," she added with a smile, "if there's that amount of room for improvement. I don't know how you feel; a man's popularity is so much less precarious than a girl's—but I know it would furbish me up tremendously to reappear as a married woman." She glanced away from him down the long valley at their feet, and added in a lower tone: "And I should like, just for a little while, to feel I had something in life of my very own—something ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... hair, and his diminutive face, both in features and expression, is uncommonly like one end of a cocoa-nut. What a sad lot for these children to be left thus—perhaps even turned adrift by their parents, to wander about the streets, and pick up, here and there, a precarious crumb! And now, as I turn round, I see three others, apparently in the same wretched outcast condition—two boys and a girl. The elder boy seems not to care much about it; he has, no doubt, become more accustomed ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... the homes of the great and gay were her constant resort, the child's home was becoming sadder, and her existence and that of her parents more precarious and penurious day by day. From my grandfather's first arrival in London, his chest had suffered from the climate; the instrument he taught was the flute, and it was not long before decided disease of the lungs rendered that industry impossible. He ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... us toil and interrupt our happiness. Let me continue to live as I have done; and after I have passed to the good or evil spirit, from off the wilderness of my present life, the subsistence of my children may become so precarious as to need and embrace the assistance of ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... to a very clear decision. First of all he would defeat the cunning Anderson at his own game; then he would rescue his countrymen from their unfortunate and precarious condition; and, finally, he would return to Marjorie to claim his reward. Altogether he had spent an advantageous and a delightful afternoon. He was ready to enter the meeting ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... First, because their own position was so precarious that a breath would send it tottering. Secondly, because Billy might happen to inconveniently remember all the sums of money he had "loaned" them time and again. Actual necessity might tend to waken his memory. For ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... assistance; the uncertainty of what Mr. de Tilly may have determined before he had received your letter. Such are, my dear General, the many reasons which from a pretty certain expedition have lately made a precarious one. Under these circumstances, indeed, there must always be more or less danger in going down the Bay, and venturing the low country about Portsmouth. Being unacquainted with the answer you have received from Count de Rochambeau ...
— Memoirs, Correspondence and Manuscripts of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... vertebrates or back-boned animals succeed the insects. Beginning with the fishes, we find that in late autumn they mostly seek some deep pool in pond or stream at the bottom of which the water does not freeze. Here the herbivorous forms eke out a precarious existence by feeding upon the innumerable diatoms and other small plants which are always to be found in water, while the carnivorous prey upon the herbivorous, and so maintain the struggle for existence. The moving to these deeper ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... a last touch of horror to the thought of this precarious annular gangway in the sea, that even what there is of it is not of honest rock, but organic, part alive, part putrescent; even the clean sea and the bright fish about it poisoned, the most stubborn boulder burrowed in by worms, the lightest dust ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fancy's dream, I lay beside a rapid stream, I saw my first come gliding by, Its airy form soon caught my eye; Its texture frail, and colour various, Like human hopes, and life precarious. Sudden, my second caught my ear, And filled my soul with constant fear; I quickly rose, and home I ran, My whole was hissing in ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... decided character which history ascribes to him. There is no doubt that he made his visit to the white men in perfect good faith; though Pizarro was probably right in conjecturing that this amiable disposition stood on a very precarious footing. There is as little reason to suppose that he distrusted the sincerity of the strangers; or he would not thus unnecessarily have proposed to visit them unarmed. His original purpose of coming with all his force was doubtless to display ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... a precarious position. After showing himself so weak in the face of the long and ruthless British provocations, he has to play the strong man with Germany. Otherwise he will lose what prestige he has left, and he knows that in the background the pretender to the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... had well begun to think what it could mean, Gibbie appeared on the opposite side of the loch, high above its level, on the top of the rocks forming its basin. He began instantly a rapid descent towards the water, where the rocks were so steep, and the footing so precarious, that Oscar wisely remained at the top, nor attempted to follow him. Presently the dog caught sight of Donal, where he stood on a lower level, whence the water was comparatively easy of access, and starting off at ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... read—so much I could discover—some few trashy books, and existed now, as many do exist in Russia, without a farthing of ready money; without any regular occupation; fed by manna from heaven, or something hardly less precarious. He expressed himself with extraordinary elegance, and obviously plumed himself on his manners; he must have been devoted to the fair sex too, and in all probability popular with them: Russian girls love fine talking. Among other things, he gave me to understand ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... end of February England was startled by the news that King William had been thrown from his favourite steed Sorrel, at Hampton Court, and was lying in a precarious state, his collar-bone broken. A week or two later came the tidings of William's death, and of the proclamation of the Princess Anne ...
— With Marlborough to Malplaquet • Herbert Strang and Richard Stead
... daring! Who thy dreadful peril sharing Shall, to save thee, tempt the terrors of the flood That roaring, leaping, swirling, And continuously whirling, Threats to whelm in frightful deeps thy tender form! The helpless soldiers, standing On a small precarious landing, Think of nothing but the child and her despair, When a voice as from the Highest,— To the child he being nighest— Falls "Quick-march!" upon the ear of Sergeant Neill. O blessed sense of duty! ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... sufferings, he would have arisen from his bed and gone in pursuit of the ravisher, had he not been restrained by his more considerate relatives, who represented to him the folly and danger of his undertaking such a hopeless task, in his precarious state of health. Overcome by their united persuasions, as well as by a consciousness of his own bodily weakness, he contented himself with his uncle's assurance that every effort would immediately be made to discover the whereabouts of poor Fanny, ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... cases to reach the Supreme Court. See also Stewart v. B.& O.R. Co., 168 U.S. 445 (1897). Even today the obligation of a State to furnish a forum for the determination of death claims arising in another State under the laws thereof appears to rest on a rather precarious basis. In Hughes v. Fetter, 341 U.S. 609 (1951), the Court, by a narrow majority, held invalid under the full faith and credit clause a statute of Wisconsin which, as locally interpreted, forbade its courts to entertain suits ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... Harvard Divinity School and began their career as Unitarian ministers. It may be partly accounted for by the fact that at the beginning of the nineteenth century literature offered but a precarious opportunity to men of talent and genius. The respect then accorded to ministers, the wide influence they were able to exert, and the many intellectual opportunities offered by the profession, naturally attracted many young men. During the first part of the nineteenth ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... partizanship of the court. I am told that, in May 1849, "The Republican hordes commanded by the adventurer Garibaldi, after the battle with" (defeat of?) "the Royal Neapolitan troops at Velletri, had occupied a precarious position in the neighbouring towns," and a good number of these troops were stationed at Valmontone, under the command of the so- called Colonel De Pasqualis; that at this period, when "an accusation sent to the commanders of these freebooters was sufficient to ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... town to supply themselves with provisions; and they were not long in beginning to ask themselves if there was any reason why they should not be, as well as their neighbors, absolutely free. The position of the partizans of Austria soon became so precarious that they found it safe to ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... on his own ground, except in carriage and appearance, and whom no one regarded as specially gifted. Still, in his own county, among his own friends, and in a society where education and culture eke out a precarious, interloping existence, and are regarded with distrustful curiosity, Lord Wilfrid Maine lived and died, and was mourned ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... perhaps some relative, forced into this current of emigration, and obliged from necessity, in the evening, probably, of a long life, to abandon his State and friends, and the home of his fathers and childhood, to seek a precarious subsistence in the supposed El ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... Wales shall constitute a separate State, and the right of Great Britain to manage British affairs will not prevent the dismemberment of England. Home Rule, such as it is for England, means at best a totally different thing from Home Rule for Ireland. In the case of England it means a limited and precarious control of legislation for Great Britain by British members of Parliament. In the case of Ireland it means the real and substantial and exclusive government of Ireland by an Irish Ministry and ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... providential measures belongs the state of isolation and of precarious subsistence, in which, by the Divine will, the first fathers had to live, in respect to their neighbours, in that same land which was yet promised to them as a perpetual inheritance; whereby they were brought to learn from the beginning that the great work, which ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio |
