"Drifting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... are ye wandering aye 'twixt porch and porch, Thou and thy fellow—when the pale stars fade At dawn, and when the glowworm lights her torch, O Beadle of the Burlington Arcade? —Who asketh why the Beautiful was made? A wan cloud drifting o'er the waste of blue, The thistledown that floats above the glade, The lilac-blooms of April—fair to view, And naught but fair are these; and such, I ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... the proper time! All gentle ministrations to his comfort, the moving of his pillows, the things cooked by his mother's own hands, her watch to play with—all came back, as if the tide of life had set in the other direction, and he was fast drifting back into childhood. What sleep he had was filled with alternate dreams of suffering and home-deliverance. He recalled how different his aunt had been when he was ill: in this isolation her face looking in at his door would have been ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... the others. None of them had given her the consolation she sought. She did not want to be told of the past. If Hugh was gone forever, then with him had gone all her love of living, her courage, all her better self. She wanted to be lifted out of the despair, the dazed aimless drifting from day to day, longing at night for the morning, and in the morning for the fall of night, which had been her life since his death. If somebody could assure her that it was not all over, that he was somewhere, not too ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... had parted; so that the boat, drifting fast to leeward, was out of sight by morning. Reduced, after this, to great extremities, the boat touched, for fruit, at an island of which they knew nothing. The natives, at first, received them kindly; but ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... daughter, Whence at last we circled back [137] Till we crossed our Stirling track. So our little journey ended, Gladness and instruction blended — Not a care to spoil our pleasure, Not a thought to break our leisure, Drifting on from Sussex hedges Up through Yorkshire's fells and ledges Past the deserts and morasses Of the dreary Border passes, Through the scenes of Scottish story Past the ...
— Songs Of The Road • Arthur Conan Doyle
... upon us in white billows blotting out everything. We spread a sheet on the ground to preserve any marks of the campers, but the drifting wind drove us indoors and we were compelled to cease searching. All night long Eric and I sat before the roaring grate fire of the hunting-room, he leaning forward with chin in his palms and saying few words, I offering futile suggestions and uttering mad threats, but both utterly ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... where they never do anything except read and talk. I'll wager, right now, you'll find fifty of Dick's latest, uncatalogued books in their cabins. They have the run of the library, as well, and you'll see them drifting in and out, any time of the day or night, with their arms full of books—also, the latest magazines. Dick says they are responsible for his possessing the most exhaustive and up-to-date library on philosophy on the Pacific Coast. In a way, they sort of digest such things for ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... surface covered by a perennial drifting polar icepack that averages about 3 meters in thickness, although pressure ridges may be three times that size; clockwise drift pattern in the Beaufort Gyral Stream, but nearly straight-line movement ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... idle impressions of the great American hotel, gained by sitting for the first time in its gallery and gazing on its drifting crowds with thoughts equally drifting. The first impression is of something enormous and rather unnatural, an impression that is gradually tempered by experience of the kindliness and even the tameness of so much of that social order. But I should ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... that be possible!—and never a hint drifting through the hotels of any blue man! Yet the intimate life of old inhabitants is not paraded before the overrunning army of a season. I felt vaguely flattered that this exclusive resident had hitherto noticed me and condescended ...
— The Blue Man - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... Frames that prayer so dear to me, Taught me at my mother's knee: "Now I lay me down to sleep," (Passing to Eternal rest On the loving parent breast) "I pray the Lord my soul to keep;" (From all danger safe and calm In the hollow of His palm;) "If I should die before I wake," (Drifting with a bated breath Out of slumber into death,) "I pray the Lord my soul to take." (From the body's claim set free Sheltered in the Great to be.) Simple prayer of trust and truth. Taught me in my early youth— Let ...
— The Kingdom of Love - and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... slowly sped the tiny boat; long gentle strokes touched the water; and presently the oars lay idle in their locks,—they were unconsciously drifting. The water dipped and lapped about the sides; the tender woman's voice across the water stole to them, singing of love; their eyes met—and ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... indulged in a nap after supper, expecting to wake up in time for the spectacle. But by ten o'clock, when I went to the beach again, all was over, and everybody had gone home. Over the water I saw something like a long swarm of fire- flies,—the lanterns drifting out to sea in procession; but they were already too far to be distinguished except as points of colored light. I was much disappointed: I felt that I had lazily missed an opportunity which might never again return,—for ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... to her own initiative. Carl's drifting theories of social structure concerned for the most part the wages of workmen and the ridiculousness of class distinctions. Reared in the farming district, the amateur college, the garage, and the hangar, ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... flight into the region of speculative politics, we hasten to add that the ideal condition we have pictured has never been reached. The British Parliament has perhaps most nearly approached it, but already shows signs of retrogression. America and the Australian colonies are drifting further away from it. Already political philosophers are shaking their heads and predicting the failure of popular government. The cry everywhere is for a stronger executive. Party organization is breaking down; small factions actuated by self-interest hold the balance of ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... coming generations of dwellers in the country — no bluebird in the spring! What will the farm-boy date from? But the fear was groundless: the birds are regaining their lost ground; broods of young blue-coats are again seen drifting from stake to stake or from mullen-stalk to mullen-stalk about the fields in summer, and our April air will doubtless again be warmed and thrilled by this lovely harbinger of spring. — ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... called her moods, and he brought her salts, and undid her cloak and bonnet, and kissed her once or twice, while his father, who was hot because she was hot, said it was like an August day all over the house, and opened a window, but shut it almost immediately, for a cloud of snow came drifting in, and Mrs. Geraldine knew she should get neuralgia in such a ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... on and walking the decks. This homeless wanderer on havenless seas recks little of log-book or transit. Unlike sure-winged passage-bird, he knows not his journey's issue. So perverse have been fate's courses that this high-strung, assertive mariner hesitates to direct life's drifting argosy. There are looks of indecision, tense resolve, and helpless perplexity. Eagerly scanning the arched blue, he notes stellar assurance. Hushed as by cradle-song, ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... its navy and its commerce, and nautical phraseology is thereby daily becoming more habitual with all classes of the lieges than of erst. Even our parliamentary orators, with a proper national bias, talk of swamping a measure, danger ahead, taking the wind out of an antagonist's sails, drifting into war, steering a bill through the shoals of opposition or throwing it overboard, following in the wake of a leader, trimming to the breeze, tiding a question over the session, opinions above or below the gangway, and the like, so rife of late in St. Stephen's; even when a member ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... lulled the wind,-the summer storm soon died; The shattered clouds went eastward, drifting slow; From the low sun the rain-fringe swept aside, Bright in his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... little Judith that the Great Mystery had shown truths, hid to man, to the trees, the streams, the hills; and the clouds that shaped themselves, drifting hither and yon, were the Great Mystery's passing thoughts. But he had deprived all these things of speech, as he did not trust them fully, and they could only speak to man in dreams, or in some passing mood, when they could communicate ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... is penetrated by the nests of birds. An old, shining tree-trunk, half in and half out of the water. An island of gravel, long and narrow, in the centre of the river. Chips, blocks of wood, slabs, and other scraps of lumber, strewed along the beach; logs drifting down. The high bank covered with various trees and shrubbery, and, in one place, ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... corners and in front of the newspaper offices little knots of men, wearing bits of white ribbon in their buttonholes, were idling. They were quiet, curious, dully waiting to see what this preposterous stroke might mean for them. In the heavy noonday air of the streets they moved lethargically, drifting westward to the hall where the A. R. U. committees were in session. Oblivious of his engagements, Sommers followed them, hearing the burden of their talk, feeling their aimless discontent, their bitterness at the grind of circumstances. This prodigal country ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... ground is thick with sleet, and still it falls! The atmosphere is plunging like the sea Against the woods, and pouring on the night The roar of breakers, while the blinding spray O'erleaps the barrier, and comes drifting on In lines as level as the window-bars. What curious visions, in a night like this, Will the eye conjure from the rocks and trees And zigzag fences! I was almost sure I saw a man staggering along the road A moment since; but instantly the shape Dropped from my sight. Hark! Was not that a ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... speak the homeward- and the outward-bound, And touch the helm of passing minds And bid them steer as wistfully— Saying: "He did great work, until the winds And waters hereabout that night betrayed Him to the drifting death! His work went on— He would not be gainsaid.... Though where his bones are, no ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... was not slow to observe the unconscious drifting of Job away from the church and toward the schoolma'am. Jane did not notice it till Dan hinted to her that the only reason Job had cared for the church was because she went there, and now that Miss Bright had come he had dropped her and the church both. Which was so ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... man, Melchior, And I shall live but little more Since I am old and feebly move. My kingdom is a burnt-up land Half buried by the drifting sand, So hot Apollo shines above. What could I bring but simple myrrh White blossom of the cordial fire? Hail, Prince of Souls, and ...
— Forty-Two Poems • James Elroy Flecker
... Oh drifting steam disperse and die, Oh tower stand shrouded toward the south,— Fate heard afar my happy cry, And laid her ...
— Rivers to the Sea • Sara Teasdale
... th' east'ard, an' keep free o' th' bad ice; the's sure t' be bad ice handy t' th' Kenemish," had been Mark Blake's parting injunction. So George kept well to the eastward as, hour after hour, we forged our way on through the bending, drifting snow. At length we came upon land, but what land we did not know. The storm had abated by this time, and a fresh komatik track was visible, which we proceeded to follow. On all sides of us ice was piled in heaps as high as a house. We had been travelling altogether about ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... steadfast as a wall. Presently the substitutes in the Languedoc battalion could not endure the strain any longer. They fired without orders and could not be stopped. At the same time Montcalm saw that his five little bodies of men were drifting apart. When the Canadian regulars had moved off, they had left the French flanks quite open. In consequence, the French battalions nearest the flanks kept edging outwards, the ones on the right towards their own right and the ones on the left towards their own left, ...
— The Passing of New France - A Chronicle of Montcalm • William Wood
... was fast drifting out into the Indian Ocean, far away from the haven Desmond desired to make. How long was this going to last? Whither was he being carried? Without chart or compass he could take no bearings, set no true course. It was a dismal prospect, and Desmond, glowing as he was with the excitement ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... there for any particular purpose. I was on a holiday. I'd been on a big job up in Colorado and was rather done up, and, as there were some prospects in New Mexico I wanted to see, I hit south, drifting through Santa Fe and Silver City, until I found myself way down on the southern edge of Arizona. It was still hot down there—hot as blazes—it was about the first of September—and the rattlesnakes and the scorpions were still as active as crickets. I knew a chap that had a ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... with foam, and the waves were tossing themselves up in prodigious heaps; the crests, as fast as they were formed, being seized and hurled away by the wind in a mass of driving spray, which went scudding over the water like drifting snow in a ...
— Rollo on the Atlantic • Jacob Abbott
... surface, thus evading the opaqueness or distortion caused by the ripples. One did not need this invention ordinarily, for the water was as clear as air when undisturbed, and the garden of the sea gods was a brilliant and moving spectacle below my drifting canoe. One must be a child again to see all of it; the magic shapes, the haunting tints, the fairy forms. The gardener who had directed the growth of the aquarium believed in kelpies, undines, and mermaids, and had ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... were overtaken and a parley ensued. The leader's thoughts were now in two places at once, and he was not far enough from the shore not to be able to cast a glance towards the Aimable, and to say to his lieutenants, as he saw the vessel drifting near shoal water, "If she keeps on in that course, she will soon be aground." Still, no time was to be lost. The parley with the Indians did not hinder them long, and soon they were on the way towards ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... submission. Such efforts as only infinite love and wisdom could devise, were made to convince him of his error. The spirit of discontent had never before been known in heaven. Lucifer himself did not at first see whither he was drifting; he did not understand the real nature of his feelings. But as his dissatisfaction was proved to be without cause, Lucifer was convinced that he was in the wrong, that the divine claims were just, and that ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... square spread and grew just as the yellow one had done while she counted, until Teddy seemed drifting off into endless green spaces. Then the Counterpane Fairy clapped her hands and he saw that he was hovering over ...
— The Counterpane Fairy • Katharine Pyle
... natural caprice these beds of rustling verdure were cut in an infinity of well-defined geometric forms. Seen from an eminence and at a distance, this arrangement gave a singular effect. In the midst of these native garden-beds were cut distinct and narrow alleys, where the drifting sands were packed like artificial paths. It is unnecessary to add that the soft footways, notwithstanding their advertisement of verdure and shade, proved to be ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... peace, I tell you. On my word, it is as well, though, that you have had it out with me here in the meadows. Listen: there is no harm in the drifting hither. What ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler
... stopped me one morning, on my way to fish in the river. 'Amelius,' she said, 'don't go to the fishing-house; Mellicent is waiting for you.' I stared at her in astonishment. She held up her finger at me: 'Take care, you foolish boy! You are drifting into a false position as fast as you can. Have you no suspicion of what is going on?' I looked all round me, in search of what was going on. Nothing out of the common was to be seen anywhere. 'What can you possibly mean?' I asked. 'You will only laugh at me, ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... drew. Hers were like dark whirlpools, and he felt himself drifting helplessly, irresistibly. He dropped his hands upon the railing and gripped; the illusion of fighting a current was almost real to him. Every fiber in his body cried out ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... speaking of Redmond. Her last conversation with me revealed her thoughts, and awakened feelings which I thought I had buffeted down. The tone of Harry Lothrop's note perplexed me, and I found myself drifting back into an old state of mind ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... to the window, he drank in all the zest and glory of green fields and blue skies with woolly clouds drifting over the tingling air. Joyfully he turned for a plunge in cold water and the unspeakable crockery set met his eye. Then he remembered. A shadow fell across the room; the day went into eclipse. Mechanically, ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... guard of suppliant hands! Look down benign on us who crave Thine aid—whom winds and waters drave From where, through drifting shifting sands, Pours Nilus to the wave. From where the green land, god-possest, Closes and fronts the Syrian waste, We flee as exiles, yet unbanned By murder's sentence from our land; But—since Aegyptus had decreed His sons should wed his brother's seed,— Ourselves we tore from bonds abhorred, ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... all your learning solve this riddle for me!" I exclaimed. "Can all the Martian women be like this? She is beautiful of body and strangely warm and winning to the touch, but as cold of heart as the drifting snow that suffocates a poor lost lamb. She has had a strange influence over me; a puzzling, baffling attraction. A suggestion of something delicate and subtlely charming, which, when one seeks to seize and to define, ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... The snooper was drifting aimlessly about, avoiding the parked vehicles. Conn used the manual control to set it down and deactivate it, then got out and ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... I should judge that nature had endowed you with a fine bump of drift, Humphrey. But has it not been rather well cared for? The trouble with drifting is, so say the preachers, that it ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... opened the door Sara heard faint little cries and tinkling laughter, drifting back from the hill where the children still played and frolicked in the snow. Presently Avrillia shut the door and came back to her place at ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... exciting, nevertheless, when the water in mid-channel came up nearly to the body of the wagon, and the swift ripples deluded the eye into almost conviction that horses, vehicle, and all were not gaining an inch in forward progress, but drifting surely down. They came up out of the depths, however, with a tug, and a swash, and a drip all over, and a scrambling of hoofs on the pebbles, at the very point aimed at in such apparently sidelong fashion,—the wheel-track ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... Guisborough, lying near the shelter of the hills, to the broad sweep of the North Sea, this piece of Yorkshire seems so small that one almost expects to see the Cheviots away in the north. But, beyond the winding Tees and the drifting smoke of the great manufacturing towns on its banks, one must be content with the county of Durham, a huge section of which is plainly visible. Turning towards the brown moorlands, the cultivation is exchanged for ridge beyond ridge of total desolation—a ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... the tavern during the afternoon. She could not help it, for she was full of news, and her aversion to the premises was fast drifting from her. In her heart she loved the strange old woman with the kindly eyes and rugged manner. Her talk was all of young John Keene's return, and she confided with happy tears stealing down her cheeks that his marriage with Miss Trevor would ...
— Nancy McVeigh of the Monk Road • R. Henry Mainer
... walked rapidly along, clinging to the arm of the tall fellow who strode silently beside her. A cheerfulness had come over Sam. He felt he had accomplished something—something he had set out to accomplish. He again thought of his mother and drifting into the notion that he was on his way home from work at Freedom Smith's, began planning the evening ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... It comprehends all mystery, secret power and divinity. Awe and reverence are its due, and it is as unlimited in manifestation as it is in idea. All life is Wakan; so also is everything which exhibits power, whether in action as the winds and drifting clouds; or in passive endurance, as the boulder by the wayside. For even the commonest sticks and stones have a spiritual essence which must be reverenced as a manifestation of the all-pervading mysterious power ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... and Philip was outside. It had stopped snowing, and the clouds were drifting away from under the moon. Crouched low, his pistol level at his side, he ran swiftly in the direction from which the shot must have come. The moon revealed the dark edge of the forest a hundred yards ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... to the neighbourhood of the capital—perhaps to Toledo itself. Larralde had, however, hitherto failed to come near her, and the news of the day reported an increasing depression in the ranks of the Carlists. Indeed, that cause seemed now at such a low ebb that the franker mercenaries were daily drifting away to more promising scenes of warfare, while some cynically accepted commissions in the ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... glistening moonlit water, the beating of birds' wings, rising startled from among the reeds in the salt-water pools; they could see the faces of the lovers, pale, close together, rapt in oblivious forgetfulness, drifting into the unknown. ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... the west wind held its breath. The flames crawled, ate their way instead of leaping hungrily. The smoke rose in dun clouds above the burning area and settled in gray vagueness all through the woods, drifting in wisps, in streamers, in fantastic curlings, pungent, acrid, choking the men. The heat of the fire and the heat of the summer sun in a windless sky made the valley floor a sweat-bath in which the loggers worked stripped to undershirts and ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Rodney, Henry's feeling towards her had become rather complex; equally divided between an impulse to hurt her and an impulse to be tender to her; and all the time he suffered a curious irritation from the sense that she was drifting away from him for ever upon unknown seas. On her side, directly Katharine got into his presence, and the sense of the stars dropped from her, she knew that any intercourse between people is extremely partial; from the whole mass of her feelings, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... drifting afar to the dim-vaulted caves Where life and its ventures are laid, The dreamers who gaze while we battle the waves May see us in sunshine or shade; Yet true to our course, though our shadow grow dark, We'll trim our broad sail as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... carrying a baby and a bundle of clothes. Great, wet flakes of snow were drifting down, and she bent forward over the child to shelter ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... forty-five minutes past 12, the Venerable and Pompee hauled to the wind on the starboard tack; at 1h. cut the sheet-cable, and slipped the end of the kedge hawser, and spring on the sheet-anchor,—got the boats ahead to tow,—found the ship drifting under the island fort, which did us considerable injury,—the rocks close under the lee-bow,—cut away the best bower-anchor to check her head, and bring her broadside to bear, it being calm; at twenty minutes past 1, a light ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez, Vol. I • Sir John Ross
... suppose, being carried onward by one mighty and irresistible stream. We may combine our strength and skill and make the best use of the surrounding forces. This is working and steering to the chosen goal. Or we may rest on our oars and let the stream take us where it will. This is drifting, and we shall certainly be carried on somewhere; but we may be badly bruised or even shipwrecked in the process, and in any case we shall have contributed nothing to the advance. Some few may even waste their strength in trying ...
— Progress and History • Various
... although it seemed as if water never had been so still before. It appeared impossible that anything uncanny should hide beneath that lovely mirror; and yet when some floating wisp of reeds suddenly coiled itself around my neck, or some unknown thing, drifting deeper, coldly touched my foot, it gave that undefinable sense of shudder which every swimmer knows, and which especially appeals to the imagination by night. Sometimes a slight sip of brackish water would enter my lips,—for I naturally tried to swim as low as possible,—and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... to touch the living afterward; that from the Towers of Silence nothing proceeds which can carry harm to the outside world. These are just claims, I think. As a sanitary measure, their system seems to be about the equivalent of cremation, and as sure. We are drifting slowly—but hopefully—toward cremation in these days. It could not be expected that this progress should be swift, but if it be steady and continuous, even if slow, that will suffice. When cremation becomes ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... look in his brother's face, and determined to break up the meeting. The opportunity for which he was waiting occurred in another minute. He was asked as a moderate politician to decide between two guests, both members of Parliament, who were fast drifting into mere contradiction of each other's second-hand opinions. In plain terms, they stated the matter in dispute: "Which of our political parties deserves the confidence of the English people?" In plain terms, on his sides Randal answered: "The party that lowers the ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... Deep" Emma Hart Willard Outward John G. Neihardt A Passer-by Robert Bridges Off Riviere du Loup Duncan Campbell Scott Christmas at Sea Robert Louis Stevenson The Port o' Heart's Desire John S. McGroarty On the Quay John Joy Bell The Forging of the Anchor Samuel Ferguson Drifting Thomas Buchanan Read "How's My Boy" Sydney Dobell The Long White Seam Jean Ingelow Storm Song Bayard Taylor The Mariner's Dream William Dimond The Inchcape Rock Robert Southey The Sea Richard Henry Stoddard The Sands of ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... quite lose consciousness. It seemed that I was frozen, and drifting off half into a nightmare sleep. Great metal arms were gathering Mary and me from the ground. Lifting ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... notched home on our chosen star. At this level the lower clouds are laid out, all neatly combed by the dry fingers of the East. Below that again is the strong westerly blow through which we rose. Overhead, a film of southerly drifting mist draws a theatrical gauze across the firmament. The moonlight turns the lower strata to silver without a stain except where our shadow underruns us. Bristol and Cardiff Double Lights (those statelily inclined beams over Severnmouth) are dead ahead ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... approval of reviewers; instead of doing real kingly work to be approved of by the gods! Our "Government," a highly "responsible" one; responsible to no God that I can hear of, but to the twenty-seven million gods of the shilling gallery. A Government tumbling and drifting on the whirlpools and mud-deluges, floating atop in a conspicuous manner, no-whither,—like the carcass of a drowned ass. Authentic Chaos come up into this sunny Cosmos again; and all men singing Gloria in excelsis to it. In spirituals ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... indifferently almost, therefore, over the plateau below the first range of hills, his instrument-case in hand, drinking from his brandy-flask now and then, to keep down nausea. The night was clear,—a low, wan moon peering from the west, a warm wind from the river drifting the heavy billows of smoke away from the battle-field. He picked his steps with difficulty, unwilling to tread upon even the dead: they lay in heaps here, thrown aside by the men who were removing the wounded. The day was lost: ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... were charging the atoms of the ship's beryl-steel hide with the same hazy force that had trapped and held the gangster ship in a mighty vise. Thus charged, no material thing could penetrate them. The greatest meteor would be crushed to drifting dust without so much as scarring that wall of mighty force ... meteors traveling with a speed and penetrative power that no gun-hurled projectile could ever ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... a fascinating pursuit. But it is a pleasure to be indulged in with caution; for one thing, you are certain to come across crocodiles. Now a crocodile drifting down in deep water, or lying asleep with its jaws open on a sand-bank in the sun, is a picturesque adornment to the landscape when you are on the deck of a steamer, and you can write home about it and frighten your relations on your behalf; but when you are away among the swamps in ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... am learning already. But, you and I are drifting from my task. I wish that you would take me to call on Miss Marigold, in my present lack of disguise. I do not care for that ancient garb any longer. It was stretching the chances rather far, but thanks to the darkness, the champagne, and good fortune, I succeeded in impersonating ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... this experience, supplied from memory of her brother's letters and conversations, contains some vivid supplementary details. The drifting away of the wreck put probably no effective distance between it and the ship; hence the necessity of 'sailing away' ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... and twelve o'clock, and walked across the platform, with the snow drifting in his face, toward the pier and the lower end of the town. The clock of St. Michael's Church was striking twelve as he crossed the quaint old square in which that edifice stands, and groped his way through the narrow streets leading ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... because the wind is blowing over an ice-floe," said her father, pointing to a large field of ice which seemed to be drifting slowly toward them. ...
— Gerda in Sweden • Etta Blaisdell McDonald
... could get the best view of the "Hole in the Wall"—a huge, arch-like opening through a jutting headland to the west of me. I went around to look at it, when I saw a sight that made me stop short in dismay. This was nothing less than the flat, drifting outward around the point. The swell and suction of the water around the rock must have pulled her loose—and I was a prisoner! At first my only feeling was one of annoyance. Then a thought flashed into my mind that made me dizzy with fear. The tide would be high that ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... his saying, with a tinge of polite regret in his tone, that he was sorry I had not put on a uniform overcoat with shoulder straps on it, before boarding the car; because, as he took pains to explain, in the event of our cable parting and of our drifting over the Allies' lines and then descending, he might possibly escape, but I should most likely be shot on the spot as a spy before I had a chance to explain. "However," he added consolingly, "those are possibilities most remote. The rope is not likely to break; ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... drifting aimlessly from group to group and dallying of set purpose. If I had read Colonel Tarleton's glance aright, the moments were growing diamond-precious; but as yet neither half of my errand was done. ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... was installed a diamond-drill outfit of rods, pump, etc. Fourteen borings were completed in the river. Considerable difficulty was found in holding the pile-driver against the current, the material in the bottom being very soft, and several borings were lost owing to the drifting of the pile-driver. Each boring was continued, and the depth of several was more than 250 ft. below the surface of the water. The borings on land were mostly core borings, and were generally made with the chilled ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • Charles M. Jacobs
... "It is the drifting air," explains Fridrik Halldersson, he who has been in the Northern seas. "As the wind buffets the air, it looks blue against the white of the snow. 'Tis the air that ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... the Thunder Bird was bathed in its glow. Cliff's profile emerged clear-cut from the dusk as he gazed toward the east. Johnny, too, glanced that way, but he was not thinking then of the wonderful effect of the rising moon upon the drifting world below. He was wondering just why this trip to-night should be ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... and he was up again, beating the water with his hands, and looking out, with wild and glaring eyes that showed him some black object he was drifting close upon. The hull of a ship! He could touch its smooth and slippery surface with his hand. One loud cry, now—but the resistless water bore him down before he could give it utterance, and, driving him under it, carried away ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... of the canoe by this time was checked, and it was drifting with the current. The two young men had no desire for a nearer approach to the ...
— The Ranger - or The Fugitives of the Border • Edward S. Ellis
... trees had a silvery sheen on them, and the mist on the plain looked like drifting snow; the river, in which the stars were reflected, and which had a sheen as of mother-of-pearl, was gently rippled by the wind. The air was soft and sweet, and Caravan inhaled it almost greedily, and thought that he could perceive a feeling of freshness, of calm ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... keeping clear of the mills and drifted till day light. His eyes were almost closed by the swelling of his forehead. Soon after he discovered a castle high up on the banks on one side of the river, the inhabitants of which he stirred up by a blast on his bugle as he was drifting helplessly. A boat shot away from shore and picked him up. The boat contained an Austrian officer and two soldiers. The officer informed him that the castle to which he was being conveyed, was the fortress Komorn. His wounds were quickly dressed by the surgeon ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... and three old women on a bench, a man and a maid with a book and a parasol, a seagull drifting high in the wind, and a distant, tremendous meeting of sea and sky. Down on the wet sand stood a girl being wooed ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... foeman's challenge Only in a far halloo; Till the silence once more settled O'er the gorges of the glen, Broken only by the Cona Plunging through its naked den. Slowly from the mountain-summit Was the drifting veil withdrawn, And the ghastly valley glimmered In the gray December dawn. Better had the morning never Dawned upon our dark despair! Black amidst the common whiteness Rose the spectral ruins there: But the sight of these ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... which I spoke above; here there is half a fathom of water at low tide, many rocks, and a bank at the mouth; for vessels, if kept in the main river, where there are strong currents and tides, and ice in the winter, drifting along, would run the risk of being lost; especially as there is a sandy point extending out into the river, and filled with rocks, between which we have found, within the last three years, a passage not before discovered; but one must go through cautiously, ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 2 • Samuel de Champlain
... really the same soup, just as almost all puddings are, or may be, called cabinet pudding? The one word "Julienne" covers all the watery, chill and tasteless, or terribly salt, decoctions, in which a few shreds of vegetables appear drifting through the illimitable inane. Other names are given at will by the help of a cookery-book and a French dictionary; but all these soups, at bottom, are attempts to be Julienne soup. The idea of looking on soup "as a vehicle for applying to the palate certain herbal flavours," is remote indeed ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... Mrs. Haviland, who had been drifting comfortably along on a tide of words, stopped, a little at a loss. "I hope I don't have to defend your own husband to you, Rachael," ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... the rear admiral was shot away, and, drifting toward the shore, a Canadian swam out into the stream and brought it in triumphantly. For many years the precious trophy was hung up in ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... Mr. Colcord's The Drifting Diamond, critics throughout the country had a great deal to say on the pictures of the sea which it contained. Mr. Colcord was compared to Conrad, to Stevenson, and to others who have written ...
— Sight to the Blind • Lucy Furman
... find a reason. I have been accustomed to mix with people who read and think and write, and to discuss things freely with them, and I cannot forget for a single hour of my waking life that the old order has changed, and that we are drifting I know not whither. I do not wish to ignore this in the pulpit, and yet to avoid offending I am compelled to do so—to withdraw myself from the vexed present and look only at ancient things through ancient eyes. I know that you can understand ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... my program. But you are in my power and you have no hope of escape. I am unexpectedly provided with more subjects for my experiments. You will...." His words became hazy and unintelligible, for the hapless reporter was drifting off into a numb oblivion. He had long since lost the power to move a muscle. Out of the corner of an eye, just before he lost consciousness altogether, he perceived Handlon lying upon the floor still puffing at the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... suggestion after luncheon was ended, and Masters and Fred Caunter had left the room. Then the conversation showed signs of drifting back to sentimentality. Sir Walter saw it coming in their eyes, and sought to head them off by inquiring concerning their ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... then beating intermittently, now and then pausing. Occasionally, as the combatants spurred together, checked, wheeled, and recovered, they would be hidden for a moment in a misty veil of dust, which, again drifting down the wind, perhaps revealed them drawn a little apart, resting their panting horses. Then, again, they would spur together, striking as they passed, wheeling ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... imagining that there was anything ridiculous or funny about his story, he regarded it as a really important matter, and admired its two heroes as men of transcendent genius in finesse. To me, the spectacle of a man drifting serenely along through such a queer yarn without ever smiling, was exquisitely absurd. As I said before, I asked him to tell me what he knew of Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, and he replied as follows. I let him go on in his own way, ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... had soared above the reach of earthly intercession, and to the foreigners who stood around, it would have been a senseless form. And there they left him in his unquiet sepulchre; but it matters little, for we know that while the unconscious clay is "drifting on the shifting currents of the restless main," nothing can disturb the hallowed rest of the immortal spirit. Neither could he have a more fitting monument, than the blue waves which visit every coast; for his ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... me also as a man who seeks rather to be instructed than amused. In those salons I did, last year sometimes, however, meet Rochebriant—as I sometimes still meet you; but of late he has deserted such sober reunions, and I hear with pain that he is drifting among those rocks against which my own youth was shipwrecked. Is ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... arches of the facade; and all that glorious harmony into which the temple rises, of marble scrolls and leafy exuberance airily supporting the statues of the saints, was a hundred times etherialized by the purity and whiteness of the drifting flakes. The snow lay lightly on the golden globes that tremble like peacock-crests above the vast domes, and plumed them with softest white; it robed the saints in ermine; and it danced over all its work as if ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... doesn't matter,' he answered,—'for me nothing matters. Thank you a thousand times! Good-night!' The rain was coming down faster than ever and I stepped back into the shed, covering the child up so that the drifting wet should not beat upon it. He came after me and kissed it again, saying 'Good- night, poor little innocent, good-night!' three or four times. Then he went off quickly and sprang into his saddle and in the blur of rain I saw horse and man turn away. He waved his hand once ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... tower, through the thick plate glass, the three people in the shore boat made out the carroty-topped head and freckled, good-humored, honest, homely face of Eph Somers. The boat lay on the water, under no headway, drifting slightly with the wind-driven ripples. Then Eph raised the man-hole cover of the top of the conning tower, thrusting out his head to ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Middies • Victor G. Durham
... further explanation of who our captured knights were, now—I mean in case she should ever get to explaining who they were. My interest was gone, my thoughts were far away, and sad. By fitful glimpses of the drifting tale, caught here and there and now and then, I merely noted in a vague way that each of these three knights took one of these three damsels up behind him on his horse, and one rode north, another east, the other south, to seek adventures, and meet again and lie, after year and day. Year ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... together, and then the wanderers said good-bye to Perez. And soon he was gone with his bright blue sash, drifting homewards with the Segre, well paid yet singing a little sadly as he drifted; for he had been one of a quest, and now he left it at the edge of adventure, near solemn mountains and, beyond them, romantic, near-unknown ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... came and we were drifting about in the Adriatic Sea, the sailors about midnight thought that they were nearing land. So they took soundings and found one hundred and twenty feet of water; and when they had gone a little farther they found ninety feet. Fearing that we might be wrecked on the rocks, they threw out four ...
— The Children's Bible • Henry A. Sherman
... gliding fog-bank as a snake is drawn from the hole, They bellow one to the other, the frighted ship-bells toll, For day is a drifting terror till I raise the shroud with my breath, And they see strange bows above them and the two ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... along one side of the wreck, as far as his air-hose would permit him to go, and was satisfied that he had found the lost mail ship. The sand was already drifting against her sides, but she ...
— Boy Scouts in a Submarine • G. Harvey Ralphson
... and was read from notes at the speakers' stand. With the possible exception of his Tremont Temple lecture, delivered in Boston in 1856, it was the only one of his public addresses so carefully prepared and so dispassionately delivered. In his opinion the principles of free government were drifting away from old landmarks. The times were out of joint, the people were demoralized. The causes which afterward led to the great revolt in the Republican ranks in 1872 were already marked in the quick perception of Toombs, and this admirable state paper was framed to put the ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... While drifting, after the war ended, many old American friends came abroad for a holiday, and among the rest, Dr. Palfrey, busy with his "History of New England." Of all the relics of childhood, Dr. Palfrey was the most sympathetic, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... Lord Selkirk decided to throw in his lot with the Hudson's Bay Company. Why he did this will subsequently appear. At first, one might have judged the step unwise. The financiers of London believed that the company was drifting into deep water. When the books were made up for 1808, there were no funds available for dividends, and bankruptcy seemed {29} inevitable. Any one who owned a share of Hudson's Bay stock found that it had not earned him a sixpence during that year. The company's business was being cut down by the ...
— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood
... hall. Other men came, who wanted money, and went grumbling away, with voices which rose higher in complaint as they went further from the house. Thorbeorn himself was often away, and used to come back more silent and proud than he had gone out. The winter set in with wind and drifting snow. Darkness drew closer about the country; the sky was lemon colour, the fells were black. It was the time of great fires, and long festivals within-doors; but Thorbeorn's ...
— Gudrid the Fair - A Tale of the Discovery of America • Maurice Hewlett
... for so many months had been centres of feverish activity. The enemy submarines were withdrawn from our shipping routes and merchant ships could traverse the sea in safety except for the occasional danger of drifting mines. "What is to be the future of the airship?" is the question which is agitating the minds of innumerable people ...
— British Airships, Past, Present, and Future • George Whale
... happy cowboy outside roared a grotesque ballad. He gazed at the interior of a rough shack built of pine boards, with bunks constructed in tiers on both sides. There were figures in them—Western cowboys, perhaps. Then it seemed, somehow, that the voice drifting from the outside was strangely familiar. Back at Bannister College, where he remembered he had gone in the dim and dusty past, he had often heard that same fog-horn voice, roaring songs of a less blood-curdling ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... her own all day, how she had friends coming often in the evening, friends who would love Marie, but whom she never need to see except when her heart desired. And she told of the lovely lawn, with its pavilions and pergolas and crevices and vines, and of the canyon drifting away down to ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... not a ripple on the sea last night. I saw a couple of steamers far out, and a sailing ship that had hove to, and the fisher-boats drifting ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... came my feeling for Will changed. He had worn me out. The love I had given him I lavished upon the child. Will's mother came to live with us—she had been drifting around miserably before—and while she failed me at the time of the divorce, yet she was a tower of strength to me during the baby's infancy. I was very fond of her and I think she sincerely liked me. But Will, her only son, ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... the Starr Ranch. He passed a group of riders drifting some yearlings toward town. A man spoke to him. He did ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... preparations! The launching of canoes upon the wave! The signalling and shouting!— Death and disaster flouting— The anxious haste, the strife, a human life to save Across the boiling surges, Each man his light bark urges, Though death is in the error of a stroke; And paddling, poising, drifting, O'er the floes the light shell lifting, The gallant fellows reach the whirling pack: And from the frightful danger, They save the worn-out stranger. And oh, to see the nursling in his arms! And oh, the pious caring, The sweet and tender ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... another dull wilderness of bricks and mortar, its silence broken only by the heavy, regular footfall of the policeman, or the songs and shouts of some belated party of revellers. A dull wrack was drifting slowly across the sky, and a star or two twinkled dimly here and there through the rifts of the clouds. Holmes drove in silence, with his head sunk upon his breast, and the air of a man who is lost in thought, while I sat beside him, curious ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... was what they said. But the skirmishers were now drifting into town. Orders snapped from man to man through the dark. The crackle of small-arms fire came sporadically, to be followed by the heavier boom-boom as cannon balls from Fort Clay ricocheted through the streets, the Yankees being forced back ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... Throw out the Life-line! Throw out the Life-line! Some one is drifting away; Throw out the Life-line! Throw out the Life-line! Some one ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... at first sight, but he realized that it was very beautiful, and then commenced to note details with observant eyes. There was a sawmill beside the river, for he could faintly hear a strident scream and see the blue smoke drifting in gauzy wisps across the hill. The square log-house which stood some little distance from the lake looked well built and substantial, and the road that wound through the green oblong had been skilfully laid with rounded strips sawn off the great fir-trunks. Sleek ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... stoop. The moon was higher and the ivy shadows were deeper. I sat at her side and we watched a little cloud tilt at the drifting moon and go asunder quite ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... boat had, indeed, vanished from her moorings. On the bronze current, nothing moved but three fishing-boats drifting down, with the smoke, toward the marsh and the bend of the river, and a small junk that toiled up against wind and tide, a cluster of naked sailors tugging and shoving at her heavy sweep, which chafed its rigging of ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... waste words on a man who could ask such a question as that. He lifted a large purple forefinger, with a broad white nail at the end of it, and pointed gravely to a printed Bill, posted on the wall behind him. The drifting foreigner drifted ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... from the barn boss, de Spain took refuge in riding. The season was drawing on toward winter, and rain clouds drifting at intervals down from the mountains made the saddle a less dependable escape from the monotony of Calabasas. Several days passed with no sight of Nan and no word from her. De Spain, as the hours and days went by, scanned ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... all but the most stalwart spirits: Canada quite lost to the cause; Arnold's army in full, though orderly, retreat from that province; a powerful British fleet just arriving in New York harbor, three or four ships drifting in daily, and now forty-five sail all at ...
— Revolutionary Heroes, And Other Historical Papers • James Parton
... put to rest on the southern slope of the ridge beside my camp, where the sunshine chases the shadows around the birch tree, where the murmur of the waves comes in rhythm to the robin's song, and where the red deer play on moonlight nights. Neither will I fear the snows of winter that come drifting over the bay, driven by the wind that whines through the naked tree tops, nor the howl of the hungry wolf, for what had no terror for me in life need not have afterward. And if the lessons that I learned at my mother's knee be true; if there be that within me that lives on, I am sure that ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... her sort chose to marry an illiterate apprentice of her uncle's, Thomas Lincoln, whose name in the forest was spelled "Linkhorn." He was a shiftless fellow, never succeeding at anything, who could neither read nor write. At the time of his birth, twenty-eight years before, his parents—drifting, roaming people, struggling with poverty—were dwellers in the Virginia mountains. As a mere lad, he had shot an Indian—one of the few positive acts attributed to him—and his father had been killed by Indians. There was a "vague ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... drifting to ruin, Katherine," he answered hoarsely. He was an abandoned hulk, with anchorage gone and no hand at the helm—broken, blind, rolling ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... although the snow almost blots it out. There it is right in the northwest. I can just make it out. The herd is drifting south of it now. Better get over on your point, and head them up this ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... this he looked about, but the raft was nowhere to be seen except for a few pieces of wood drifting about. ...
— Kernel Cob And Little Miss Sweetclover • George Mitchel
... Chaldean embroideries. This is very probable, and would account for his poetical design on the shield of Achilles, in which his own inspiration dictated the possibilities of the then practised arts of Asia, of which the fame and occasional glimpses were already drifting westward. (Plate 5.) ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... her vehicle, when she tumbles over an object which, when torches are brought, was found to be the corpse of the suppliant rebuker of a few hours previous, alongside of which lay the unconscious form of his daughter, half buried in the drifting snow. 'Mon Dieu,' exclaimed Madame de Pean, 'Il ne dormira pas de la nuit, c'est bien sur.' This tragic event is narrated with thrilling effect, in the author's best style." ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... on, drifting into something sophisticated, with a suggestion of waltz rhythms running through it. There was a stir of movement in the room, and the sound of windows opening and shutting, once, and then again. Judith did not turn her head to see who had ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... autumn, melancholy and sinister, as you find her only in such low-lying immemorial drifting places of leaves, and oozy sinks of dank water. For the moors autumn is the spring come back in purple, and in golden woods and many another place where the year dies happily, she smiles like a widow ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... opportunity for studying his fellow-creatures; but it did not go very deep into his mind. He lived for some time in a confused glamour and glitter; surrounded by the fascinating specious life of the store, but drifting merely superficially upon it. The great place, with its columns of artificial marble and white censers of upward-shining electricity, glimmered like a birch forest by moonlight. Silver and jewels and silks and slippers flashed all about him. It was a marvellous education, for he ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... of us children. I got one girl very low now. She's in Memphis. I been in Arkansas 45 years. I come here jes' drifting looking out a good location. I never had no dealings with the Ku Klux. I been farming all my life. Yes, I did like it. I never owned a home nor no land. I never voted in my life. I had nine children of my own but only my girl ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Arkansas Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... was drifting back over all the events of the past few months, when a shadow passed over the curtain at the window. She stole to the door and placed her ear to the latch. From that position she could plainly ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... pensioners on man, and not unwisely improving this elevated tract for their habitation. They nibbled what was for them; I nibbled what was for me. Once or twice in the night, when I looked up, I saw a white cloud drifting through the windows, and filling the whole ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... population. One reason for this more rapid growth of the cities is that since the eighties the majority of our immigrants have flocked to the cities rather than to the rural districts. Another reason, however, is that the country people have been drifting to the towns and cities. This cityward drift has an important bearing upon the character ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... North Sea grimly prowling, Treading his dear Revenge's deck, Watched, with the sea-dogs round him growling, Galleons drifting wreck by wreck. "Fetter and Faith for England's neck, Faggot and Father, Saint and chain,— Yonder the Devil and all go howling, Devon, O Devon, in wind ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... cattle. Few of the homesteaders were permanent. They stayed their eight months—if they could stick it out—and left at once. Their uneasy stay on the land was like the brief pause of migratory birds or the haphazard drifting of tumble weeds that go rolling across the plains before the wind, landing against a barbed-wire fence or any other ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl |
