"Eccentric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this series, like the story of Lyonesse and of Parson Dodge and the Spectre Coach, have their beginning in historical fact; yet into the latter story has been woven a tale that is centuries older, in origin, than the days of the eccentric priest of Talland. ...
— Legend Land, Volume 2 • Various
... than in any of the former assemblies of the people. It was composed of the lowest as well, and probably in as great proportion, as of the superior ranks and orders, and all had an equal voice. No eccentric or irregular motions were suffered to take place. All seemed to have been the plan of a few, it may ...
— Tea Leaves • Various
... miniature Stonehenge in fact. I had seen it several times, and happened to have been present not long ago at a meeting of an archaeological society when its origin and purpose were discussed. I remember that one learned but somewhat eccentric gentleman read a short paper upon a rude, hooded bust and head that are cut within the chamber of a tall, flat-topped cromlech, or dolmen, which stands alone in the ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... Berkenmeyer had him subscribe to the Loonenburg Church constitution. His parish included the congregations at Rheinbeck, Camp, Staatsburg, Ancrum, and Tar Bush. The capriciousness with which Hartwick, who remained an eccentric bachelor all his life, performed his pastoral duties soon gave rise to dissatisfaction. Complaints were lodged against him with Berkenmeyer, who finally wrote against him publicly. In 1750 Muhlenberg conducted a visitation in Hartwick's congregations, and reports as follows: "He went to Pennsylvania ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente
... to be anything but a woman. I do not think any one ever mistook me for a man, unless it may have been some stranger who slightly glanced at me while passing along the street or the highway. I adopted male attire as a measure of convenience in my business, and not through any wish to appear eccentric or to pass for one of the male sex; and it has ever been my rule to dress with the least possible ostentation consistent with due neatness. I have never had cause to regret my adoption of male attire, and never expect to return to a female ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... unruffled surface of the lake it spins upwards with inconceivable velocity, and with the strangest contortions. In vain the terrified cockatoos strive to avoid it; it sweeps wildly and uncertainly through the air, and so eccentric are its motions that it requires but a slight stretch of the imagination to fancy it endowed with life, and with fell swoops is in rapid pursuit of the devoted birds, some of whom are almost certain to be brought screaming to ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... thin meshes of white hair escaping through the border of the high fox-skin cap. The complexion was bronze and the face beardless. This last feature is said to be characteristic of low vitality, but it is also frequently distinctive of eccentricity, and Batoche was clearly eccentric, as the expression of his eyes showed. They were cold grey eyes, but filled with wild intermittent illuminations. The reflection of the fire-light ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... electro-magnets, whose bobbins have a resistance of no more than 10 ohms, and which are united in series. The interrupting plate, P, against which the style, s, rests at each vibration, is capable of a forward movement, or one of recoil, by the aid of a screw, V, and of an eccentric movement which is produced by a small handle, m, and during which its plane remains invariable. This arrangement permits the point of contact of the style and plate to be varied without changing the precision with which the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... away from Buckingham is Whaddon Hall, formerly a seat of the Dukes of Buckingham, but best known as the residence of Browne Willis, an eccentric antiquary, whose person and dress were so singular that he was often mistaken for a beggar, and who is said "to have written the very worst hand of any man in England." He wore one pair of boots for forty years, having them patched when they ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... her longings to be up and doing, and yet the ever difficult question between charitable works and filial deference necessarily detained her, and perhaps all the more because it was not so much the fear of her mother's authority as of her horror and despair, that withheld her from the decisive and eccentric steps that she was always feeling impelled to take. Gentle Mrs. Curtis had never been a visible power in her house, and it was through their desire to avoid paining her that her government had been exercised over her two ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sound along an eccentric course to its haunt, finding nothing more than the empty shell of a huge sea urchin, which in accord with a whim of the sea had floated and was now held aloft slantwise to the lips of the wind, firm in the branching tines of stag's-horn coral. A rustic ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... here an eccentric quality of humor, a daemonic conceit that reach the height of other classic expression of ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... thinking to what she had become an unwilling accomplice, for she never imagined that more than an evening's visit was intended by Shargar, which in itself seemed to her strange and improper enough even for such an eccentric boy as ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... proclaim it possible and prove it so, and to philosophize on the profoundest questions of the human reason, was irrepressible. This he did with an air of matured conviction and with the impact of conscious moral authority, but in terms as strikingly eccentric as the thoughts were lofty and inspiring, and in execrable French, the declaimer being known as minus habens in his studies and utterly incapable. All this was the very make-up of folly; and Brother Hecker was no doubt ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... in fact just what might be expected from a thoroughly modest, teachable, receptive, and at the same time most living, active, and aspiring mind,—a mind full indeed of native boldness, but yet restrained by judgment and good sense from the crudeness and temerity of self-will and eccentric impulse, and not trusting to its own strength till it had better reasons for doing so than the promptings of vanity ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... with me on the occasion bears it as strongly on his recollection. My servant Harris, who had shared my wanderings, and had continued in my service for eighteen years, led the advance with his companion Hopkinson; nearly abreast of them the eccentric Frazer stalked along, wholly lost in thought. The two former had laid aside their military habits, and had substituted the broad-brimmed hat, and the bushman's dress in their place, but it was impossible to guess how Frazer intended to protect himself from the heat or damp, ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... stranger in a city singularly picturesque. From what I had once called myself, "The Amateur Parisian," I grew (or declined) into a water-side prowler, a lingerer on wharves, a frequenter of shy neighbourhoods, a scraper of acquaintance with eccentric characters. I visited Chinese and Mexican gambling-hells, German secret societies, sailors' boarding-houses, and "dives" of every complexion of the disreputable and dangerous. I have seen greasy Mexican hands pinned to the table with a knife ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... your own ease and taste (if you have any), for nothing is so vulgar as to suit your convenience in these matters, as you should remember that you dress to please others, and not yourself. We have heard of some eccentric individuals connected with noble families, who have departed from this rule; but they invariably paid the penalty of their rashness, being frequently mistaken for men of intellect; and it should not be forgotten, that any exercise of the mind is a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... monastic life if not peculiar? And ought not the deeds of a monk to be as eccentric as he is himself? It was a sign from God that caused me to ascend here; it is a sign from God that ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... tea-time; Mr. Norham with a secretary and a valet, much preoccupied, and chewing the fag-end of certain Cabinet deliberations in the morning; Flaxman's charming sister, Lady Helen Varley, and her husband; his elder brother, Lord Wanless, unmarried, an expert on armour, slightly eccentric, but still, in the eyes of all intriguing mothers, and to his own annoyance, more than desirable as a husband owing to the Wanless collieries and a few other trifles of the same kind; the Bishop of Markborough; Canon ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... mademoiselle," he added in a tone yet lower, "I find the woman and the artist divorced. That is a vast advantage—an immense source of power. I am growing more certain of you; you are not merely cleverly eccentric as I thought. You have a great deal that no one can teach you. You have finished that—I wish to take it downstairs to show the men. It will not be jeered ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... settle once and for all the question whether the administration of the bequest has evinced evidence of insanity or not. A recent Royal Commission left the matter undecided. I do not, however, wish to criticise trustees, but to defend the memory of Miss Browne (who may have been eccentric in private life) from such a charge, because her testamentary dispositions were a trifle aesthetic. The will was un-English in one respect: 'no inscription of my name shall be placed on such erection.' Was that the clause which proved her hopelessly mad? The erection was to be Gothic. ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... to anything long, but every night for a week she gave Pete lessons in reading, writing, and arithmetic. His reading was laborious, his spelling was eccentric, his figuring he did on the tips of his heavy fingers, and his writing he executed with his tongue in his cheek and his ponderous thumb ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... for Calais and crossed the Channel to Dover. This time the eccentric strip of water was as calm as a pond at sunset. No jumpy, white-capped billows, no flying spray, no seasick passengers. Tarpaulins were a drag ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... must have thought me an eccentric to carry so large a sum, and I know he thought that Jacqueline and I had just been married, for I saw him smile over the entry that he made in ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... been the wedding, but no Madame Valiere. She had accepted the invitation, had given notice of her arrival; one had awaited the midnight train. The family was still wondering why the rich aunt had turned sulky at the last hour. But she was always an eccentric; a capricious and ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... his eccentric, red-painted mount. He clipped his safety-belt, plugged in his suit air-supply to the space wagon's tanks, and ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... the possession of the British, and Washington proposed to recover it by the united action of his army and the French fleet. After several weeks of rough campaigning, Washington was compelled to abandon his purpose, because the eccentric D'Estaing resolved to take his fleet to Boston ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... and the game is up, for the trochaic beat has been suggested. The eccentric scansion of the groups is an adornment; but as soon as the original beat has been forgotten, they cease implicitly to be eccentric. Variety is what is sought; but if we destroy the original mould, one of the terms of this variety is ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of getting there. The war was over long ago. A thousand things had happened of which he had not the remotest knowledge. And because he was a very normal, ordinary young man with a horror of anything queer and eccentric, the thought of that mysterious year filled him with dismay and roused in him a passionate longing to escape at once from everything which would remind him of his uncanny lapse of memory. If he were only back where he belonged in the land of wide spaces, ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... John, my eccentric assistant, could abide no possible rival, insulted every man engaged to help him, occasionally indulging in a free fight after too frequent visits to the cider barrels of my next neighbor, so he ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... et Juliette. Les deux freres ("Brothers of Corse"), JEAN and EDOUARD, excellent respectively as Romeo and Friar Laurent. EDWARD looked the reverend, kind-hearted, but eccentric herbalist to the life, singing splendidly. But Brother JOHN, in black wig, black moustache, and with pallid face, look so unhealthy a Romeo that his appearance must have first excited Juliet's pity, which we all know is akin to love. My advice to JOHNNIE DE RESZKE ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 11, 1892 • Various
... exclusively either a concentric or eccentric system. All my works go to show the eternal influence of principles, and to demonstrate that operations to be successful must be applications ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... duty to give to the people of St Ewold's the best clergyman he could select for them he could not give the preference to Mr Crawley, because Mr Crawley, in spite of all his zeal and piety, was a man so quaint in his manners and so eccentric in his mode of speech as not to be the best clergyman whom he could select. "What is my old friend Thorne to do with a man in his parish who won't drink a glass of wine with him?". For Ullathorne, ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... depends on circumstances disclosed to Laplace by analysis; circumstances which on the surface do not seem capable of exercising so great an influence. If instead of planets all revolving in the same direction, in orbits but slightly eccentric and in planes inclined at but small angles toward each other, we should substitute different conditions, the stability of the universe would be jeopardized, and a frightful chaos would pretty certainly result. The discovery of the actual conditions ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... fixed. A longitudinal missile must rotate with its axis coincident with its line of flight as it leaves the barrel, or else every rotation will throw the point into wider circles, until finally it becomes more eccentric than a round ball. It is a mistaken notion that a conical missile is more accurate in flight than a round; on the contrary, hunters always prefer the ball for short shots,—and a "slug," as the longer missile is called by them, is well known to err ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... of "Brownsmith's Boy" embraces the home adventures of an orphan, who, having formed the acquaintance of an eccentric old gardener, accepts his offer of a home and finds that there is plenty of romance in a garden, and much excitement even in a journey now and then to town. In a half-savage lad he finds a friend who shows his love and fidelity principally by pretending ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... morning, a protectionist champion presented himself, not in the guise either of a freeholder or farmer of the county, but in the person of a good-humoured, though somewhat eccentric printer, named Sparkhall, who had come from the celebrated locale of John Gilpin—Cheapside, and who having armed himself with a large blue bag fitted with elaborate treatises upon the corn laws, and among other pamphlets a recent number of Punch, forthwith travelled ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... with a sigh, "how I wish I didn't wish they weren't coming! If they are fearfully eccentric, all the neighbourhood will be talking about it in a week, and thinking it funny we have such relations. One can't explain to every one that they really are ladies and gentlemen ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... may find before an English mansion—a noble expanse of lawn and sward, with boscage sufficient to agreeably diversify it. After traversing the open plain, the road led through a grove of young ebony trees, where guinea-fowls and a hartebeest were seen; it then wound, with all the characteristic eccentric curves of a goat-path, up and down a succession of land-waves crested by the dark green foliage of the mango, and the scantier and lighter-coloured leaves of the enormous calabash. The depressions were filled with jungle of more or less density, ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... as we are obliged to remain here; and as for the piano, why it will enable the ladies to beguile an hour or two; but it is a queer present to make under the circumstances, and the man who made it is certainly a bit of an eccentric." ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... is said to have first driven the Duke into retirement, and rendered him shy and eccentric, with an especial objection to the society of ladies, although he had once been a gay, if not dissipated, young gentleman, fond of the turf. He rode a race at Trentham Hall, the seat of his brother-in-law, the Marquis ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... deceitful and favour is vain—qualities which are calculated to wear well. Queen Adelaide's goodness and kindness, her unselfish, unassuming womanliness and devout resignation to sorrow and suffering, did more than gain and keep the heart of her bluff, eccentric sailor-prince. They secured for her the respectful regard of the nation among whom she dwelt, whether as Queen or Queen-dowager. The Archbishop of Canterbury could say of her, after her husband's death, "For three weeks prior to his (King William's) dissolution, ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... religious grace, Bettine the fulness of instinctive impulse; Gunderode is the ideal, Bettine nature; Gunderode throws herself into the river because the world is all too narrow, Bettine lives and follows out every freakish fancy, till the enchanting child degenerates into an eccentric and undignified old woman. There is a medium somewhere. Philip Sidney found it; others had it ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... a scamp of the first water goes without saying, insinuating yourself into an eccentric old man's confidence in hopes to be his heir! I dare say, Amy is his daughter, and you will have to work for a living after all, and serve you right, too. But have a good time while you can, and I'll help you after ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... published in 1801, is Maria Edgeworth's one early example of a novel not placed in Irish surroundings, but dealing with fashionable life. Issued just a year after the appearance of her first Irish tale, "Castle Rackrent," it betrays entirely the influence of the novelist's autocratic and eccentric father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, with whom the daughter had been previously collaborating. No one could be less suited than he to advise about fiction, yet to his daughter his advice was almost the equivalent ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... models for the students, and proposed several of those in the Orleans collection. This recommendation was not relished, and in 1799 Barry was expelled from the academy, soon after the appearance of his Letter to the Dilettanti Society, a very amusing but eccentric publication, full of enthusiasm for his art and at the same time of contempt for the living professors of it. After the loss of his salary, a subscription was set on foot by the earl of Buchan to relieve him from his difficulties, and to settle him in a larger house to finish his picture ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... was an eccentric trapper. No one knew his real name, and it is within the realm of probability that ...
— The Hero of Ticonderoga - or Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys • John de Morgan
... spied bobbing in the sea was not exactly in the wake of the battleship, for those who rushed to the port rail could see it quite well. It wabbled about in a most eccentric way, as though the submarine attached to it had risen just as the Kennebunk passed and had received the full force ...
— Navy Boys Behind the Big Guns - Sinking the German U-Boats • Halsey Davidson
... their peculiarly Roman ways of thought; but these patriots in literature, while rewarded with the highest praise, did not exert a proportionate influence on the development of the national mind. They remained like comets moving in eccentric orbs outside the regular and observed motion ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... was a combination of his former improvements, with the cover extending over top of the gate to prevent it from tilting, and an eccentric wheel working in cam yoke to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... apparently unsympathetic creatures exasperating to a degree, and I did not wonder that the European whose lot had been cast in the interior, sometimes, on emerging into Western civilization, appears eccentric to his own countrymen. ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... I replied, and we started to find Smith and Spalding. We found them, and it was settled that they should go with us for a month among the mountains. Everybody knows Smith, the good-natured, eccentric Smith; Smith the bachelor, who has an income greatly beyond his moderate expenditures, and enough of capital to spoil, as he says, the orphan children of his sister. By way of saving them from being thrown upon the cold world with a fortune, he declares he will ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... Disraeli's genuine love of talent is refreshing. He dwells fondly upon the effervescence of genius which drives men to kick over the traces of respectability and strike out short cuts to fame. If at bottom his heroes are rather eccentric than original, they have at least a righteous hatred of all bores and Philistines, and despise orthodoxy, political economy, and sound information generally. They can provide you with new theories of politics and ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... the first cab we found. We tossed for it, and he won, for which I thank the gods. Then, acting on the impulse of the moment, I came back to say something to you. A very unusual—very eccentric thing to do, no doubt. But when something involving great issues has to be done or said, I think the best plan is not to wait for a favourable opportunity. Don't you ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... Cumberland, to whom the habits of the poet Wordsworth and his eccentric friend Coleridge were a mystery, had decided that they must be terrible scoundrels. One sage had seen Wordsworth looking fixedly at the moon; another had overheard him muttering in some strange language. Some thought him a conjuror; ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... trace of man. A large fish, apparently one of the huge cat-fish of the Mississippi, blundered against Marquette's canoe with a force which seems to have startled him; and once, as they drew in their net, they caught a "spade-fish," whose eccentric appearance greatly astonished them. At length, the buffalo began to appear, grazing in herds on the great prairies which then bordered the river; and Marquette describes the fierce and stupid look of the old bulls, as they stared at the intruders through the tangled mane which nearly ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... September. Neither has been seen since that day, so far as any one knows. The earth seems to have swallowed them. The authorities are searching the mountains and are making every effort to find Jones or his body. He is known to be eccentric and at first not much importance was attached to his actions. That is all we can tell you at present. There may be developments to-morrow. It looks bad—terribly bad. We—we had the utmost confidence in Jones. My God, I wish I could ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... the outlying streets, and established himself in it, with all his books and scientific odds and ends. And of books and odds and ends he had many—for he was a man of some considerable learning ... 'an out-and-out eccentric,' as his neighbours said of him. He positively passed among them for a sorcerer; he had even been given the title of an 'insectivist.' He studied chemistry, mineralogy, entomology, botany, and medicine; he doctored ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... myself when I compared my position with his. The berth where he and seven others eat their daily bread is hardly bigger than my cabin, except in height—and, of course, he has to sleep in a hammock. My friend is rather an eccentric character, and, being missed in the ship, was discovered the other day reading in the main-top—the only place, as he said, sufficiently retired for study. And this is really no exaggeration. If I had no cabin I should take to drinking in ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... house, where half the blinds were down, and all was suggestive of neglect and decay. She had spent some pleasant afternoons in the splendid gardens and conservatories with Mrs. Swinton in the old days, but her one recollection of the eccentric old man was not very encouraging. She remembered how keenly he had eyed her, like a valuer summing up the points of a horse, and how glad she had been to escape his penetrating scrutiny. Others were present on that occasion. She was to ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... publicist, as comedian and tragedian, showed itself to perfection. He gave a free rein to his imagination in his placards, in which he affected the proverbial language of the moujik, made himself a peasant, more than a peasant, in his eccentric style, to excite patriotism. He published pamphlets against the French, and the coarser his language the more effect ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... wearing crescents in their caps, with the inscription, "Rather Turkish than Popish;" renowned far and wide, as much for their ferocity as for their nautical skill; the appearance of these wildest of the "Sea-beggars" was both eccentric and terrific. They were known never to give nor to take quarter, for they went to mortal combat only, and had sworn to spare neither noble nor simple, neither king, kaiser, nor pope, should they fall into ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... before they reached the head of the valley where stood the house or wooden cottage which had been the abode of Will's eccentric old relative. The scenery was savage and forbidding in the extreme. Lofty mountains rose on every side, and only a small portion of the land in the neighbourhood of the dwelling had been brought under ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains - Wandering Will in the Land of the Redskin • R.M. Ballantyne
... and eccentric personality who had arisen on the outskirts; the world began to be conscious of him at ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... vivid as that which we receive from the characters of our own associates, are to be reckoned by scores. Yet in all these scores hardly one character is to be found which deviates widely from the common standard, and which we should call very eccentric if we met it in real life. The silly notion that every man has one ruling passion, and that this clue, once known, unravels all the mysteries of his conduct, finds no countenance in the plays of Shakspeare. There man appears as he is, made up of a crowd of passions, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... cousin and the aunt, during which I learned that said cousin sees me every Sunday in St. Stephen's. Oho! thought I, at the "every." The aunt was very anxious to know who that strange, wild man was? (didn't I wish Samuel in Tophet!). Of course, in reply, I drew it strong about eccentric genius and my never having known him before, and a good deal that was perhaps "strained to the extremest limit ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... half-alligator creature, such as they read of in the Beadle novels. I knew one trapper who was a student of numismatics, another who devoted his spare time to astronomy, and several traders and trappers who were men of considerable culture, though they are generally men who are a little morbid or eccentric in their mental structure. All Edwards's natural abilities, which were sufficient to have earned him distinction had he been "in civilization," were concentrated on the pursuits of his wild life, and such a man always ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... consulting Parliament, can by secret treaty saddle the nation with the most perilous obligations, and give away all such portions of the empire as do not rest on Statute. The prerogative of mercy, too, would enable an eccentric Sovereign, aided by an obsequious Minister, to open the jails and let all the convicted criminals in the land loose upon society.[22] But criticism which proves too much in effect ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... shivering with the cold, he remained some minutes, attempting in vain, with straining eyes, to pierce through the gloom of the night, when a flash of lightning, which darted from the zenith and continued its eccentric career until it was lost behind the horizon, discovered to him the object of his research. But a few moments did he behold it, and then, from the sudden contrast, a film appeared to swim over his aching eyes, and all was more intensely, more horribly dark than before; but to the ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... aimed at a reputation for elegance, for wit or for the deadly thrust in verbal fence which played so large a part in the game of politics; every one that refused to float was either an outcast from the best society, or was striving to win an eccentric reputation for national obscurantism and its imaginary accompaniment of ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... propensity by trying to hire her to give a dozen or more lectures on 'Government' in the Atlantic cities, but I could not engage her at any price, although I am sure the speculation would have been a very profitable one. I never saw this eccentric woman again; she died at a very advanced age, October 1, 1854, ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... hair was so closely cropped that it looked like a silver cap. He was a little restless and fidgety in his movements, too, and had ways that appeared singular to strangers, but I always regarded his habits respectfully. Clever men, I thought, were often eccentric; and I was quite angry with my mother when she used to say, "Geoff was an old bachelor, and he wanted a wife to polish him; I should like to see any woman dare ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Falmouth Bay, thinking then of taking our gold straight to the Bank of England, as eccentric lucky diggers—that night I thought would be the last for one or other of us. He locked her in her cabin. He posted himself outside on the settee. I sat watching him across the table. Each had a hand in his pocket, each had a pistol in that hand, and there we sat, with our four eyes ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... whim was respected. The fact that he should have given the best part of his life since he left Oxford to roving about foreign countries was lamented; but this roving temper was regarded as only an eccentric manner of sowing those wild oats which youth must in some wise scatter; and it was hoped that with ripening years he would settle down and spend his days in the home of his ancestors. He might come home at any time, he had informed Mrs. Mawley in his last ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... thymo-centric are often encountered. Life treats them badly. Misunderstood and misjudged, they are the hopeless misfits of society. If the pituitary and the thyroid can enlarge to compensate for their defects, they may become the queer brilliants, the eccentric geniuses of the arts and sciences. Should they not, mental deficiency and delinquency are their portion. Epilepsy, then, is sometimes their mode of escape from the terrors of an utterly foreign world. Should they survive all other hazards, suicide may still ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... reserved yet more indecorous dances—dances of such a character indeed that they would certainly not have been allowed in a theatre. And the beau monde rushed to see them at the houses of the bolder lady-entertainers, the eccentric and foreign ones like the Princess, who in order to draw society ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... an absurdity. Adj. ridiculous, ludicrous; comical; droll, funny, laughable, pour rire, grotesque, farcical, odd; whimsical, whimsical as a dancing bear; fanciful, fantastic, queer, rum, quizzical, quaint, bizarre; screaming; eccentric &c (unconformable) 83; strange, outlandish, out of the way, baroque, weird; awkward &c (ugly) 846. extravagant, outre, monstrous, preposterous, bombastic, inflated, stilted, burlesque, mock heroic. drollish; seriocomic, tragicomic; gimcrack, contemptible &c (unimportant) 643; doggerel; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... more original and more impulsive, thus far less "groovy," than the people among whom her lot was cast. There were even censorious folk in Witanbury who called her eccentric. She was generous-hearted, easily moved to enthusiasm, tenacious of her opinions and prejudices. She had remained young of heart, and her fair, curling hair, her slight, active figure, and delicately-tinted skin, gave her sometimes an almost girlish look. Those who met her for the first time were ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... correspondents. Figure to yourself a bald-headed personage, about forty years of age, near seven feet high, deaf as a post, stammering and making convulsive efforts to express a sentence of five words, which, after all, his gibberish made unintelligible. His dress was as eccentric as his person was singular, and his manners corresponded with both. He called himself Baron von Bulow, and I saw him afterwards, in the autumn of 1797, at Paris, with the same accoutrements and the same jargon, assuming ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... information as to his habits. Harcourt, Oxford's Chancellor, lent him a house whilst translating Homer. Sheffield, the Duke of Buckingham, had been an early patron, and after the duke's death, Pope, at the request of his eccentric duchess, the illegitimate daughter of James II., edited some of his works and got into trouble for some Jacobite phrases contained in them. His most familiar friend among the opposition magnates was Lord Bathurst, a man of uncommon vivacity and good-humour. He was born four years before Pope, ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... Exeter House, where Lord Burleigh's wily son lived; and, finally, Exeter 'Change, where the poet Gay lay in state. Nor shall we forget Cross's menagerie and the elephant Chunee; nor omit mention of many of the eccentric old shopkeepers who once inhabited the 'Change. At Charing Cross we shall stop to see the old Cromwellians die bravely, and to stare at the pillory, where in their time many incomparable scoundrels ignominiously stood. The Nelson ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... preach a fine sermon than wear a fine coat. He was celebrated for his common-sense way of exhibiting the principles of religion. He would speak just what he thought, and as he felt. He somehow got the name of being an eccentric preacher, as every man, I believe, does who never prevaricates, and always acts and speaks as he thinks. Somehow or other, Elder Blunt had heard of Sister Scrub, and that infirmity of hers, and he resolved to cure her. On his first ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... While that eccentric genius, Charles Townshend, whom no system could contain, is whirled out of existence, our more artificial meteor, Lord Chatham, seems to be wheeling back to the sphere of business—at least his health is declared to be re-established; but he has lost his adorers, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... colours, stood gazing in open-mouthed astonishment and infinite delight at some rudely constructed booths and shows, outside of which, clown and paillasse were rivalling each other in the broad humour of their lazzi. Parties of students, easily recognizable by their eccentric and exaggerated style of dress, and the loud tone of their conversation, were seated outside the cafes and ice-rooms, or circulating under the trees, puffing forth clouds of tobacco smoke; and on the road round the allee, open carriages, smart ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... the half-brother of that Prince Albert of Prussia, who is now Regent of the Grand Duchy of Brunswick. Old Prince Albert of Prussia, his father, was married to the eccentric and half-crazy Princess Marianne of the Netherlands. Not long after the birth of the present Prince Albert, she lost her heart to such an extent to a chamberlain in her household that her husband was ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... given over for the most part to his beloved books. He seldom went away. The monotony of his daily round was broken only by the occasional receipt of a parcel of musty volumes, which he had ordered to be bought for him at some sale. He was a man of varied learning, full of remote information, eccentric from his solitariness, but with a great sweetness of nature. His life was simple, ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... education of a cook should commence in the cradle. If this point received the attention which it deserves from sanitarians, there would be fewer digestive organs out of order, and consequently fewer police reports, and a vast diminution of eccentric degradation, and moping madness and suicide, and horrors ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... Stanley, on!" Murthley Castle, the seat of Sir William Stewart, and the beautiful grounds which front and surround it, will excite the admiration of the traveller and pay him well for a moment's pause to peruse its illuminated pages opened to his view. The baronet is regarded as an eccentric man, perhaps chiefly because he has built a splendid Roman Catholic chapel quite near to his mansion and supports a priest of that order mostly for his own spiritual good. Near Dunkeld, Birnam Hill lifts its round, dark, bushy head to the height of over 1,500 feet, grand ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... to pay me for my beautiful images?" asked the Italian, in some trepidation for his money, it being difficult to say which of all these eccentric young savages was the ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... on market days, when she came to the village for her weekly provisions, none of my parishioners ever held any intercourse with her. She was evidently insane, and although she did harm to nobody, yet she often caused considerable alarm and wonderment by her eccentric behavior. It is, as you must know, often the case in intermittent mania that its victims are insane upon some particular subject, some point upon which their frenzy always betrays itself,—even when, with regard to other matters, they conduct themselves like ordinary people. ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... with a repressive frown. "As I understand it, the disease cycle seems to be connected somehow with the once-every-48-years conjunction of the four moons, which explains why the Darkovans are so superstitious about it. The moons have remarkably eccentric orbits—I don't know anything about that part, I'm quoting Dr. Moore. If there's an animal vector to the disease, we've never discovered it. The pattern runs like this; a few cases in the mountain districts, the next month a hundred-odd ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... but his master; because it reproduced too readily, and carried too far, the grotesque imaginings to which great humourists are prone; which lie indeed deep in their nature; and from which they derive their genial sympathy with eccentric characters that enables them to find motives for what to other men is hopelessly obscure, to exalt into types of humanity what the world turns impatiently aside at, and to enshrine in a form for eternal homage and love such whimsical ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... seeming expansion of his powers, Erik Dorn had become a startling, fascinating figure in the new world he had entered. The flattery of men almost as clever as himself, the respect, appreciation of political, literary, and vaguely social circles, of stolid men and eccentric acquaintances, were continually visited upon him. He was a personality, a figure to enliven dinner parties, throw a glamour and a fever into the enervated routine ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... reaches Penang, but a Chinese gentleman acts as pilot across some rocking boats, with only a faint flare from expiring torches to light the way, and starts the cringing coolies, with true politeness to the "foreign devils," but manifest wonder at their eccentric customs. Chinese womanhood, painted, bedizened, and tottering on the pink and gold hoofs which cause a sickening shudder to the Western spectator, indicates the barrier of prejudice to be surmounted before China can mould national ideals into ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... was very pleasant to be with Mary Datchet and to become, directly the door was shut, quite a different sort of person, eccentric and lovable, with scarcely any likeness to the self most people knew. He became less serious, and rather less dictatorial at home, for he was apt to hear Mary laughing at him, and telling him, as she was fond of doing, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... signal to come nearer. When Zashue rejoined the group they all greeted the Queres in the same manner, and the one who was still holding Hayoue's hand began to pull him along, urging him to go to the village with them. The adventurers from the Rito felt that they might be welcome. Zashue even made an eccentric, ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... asked to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa oration at Cambridge. This was the opportunity for which he had been waiting. The mystic and eccentric young poet-preacher now speaks his mind, and he turns out to be a man exclusively interested in real life. This recluse, too tender for contact with the rough facts of the world, whose conscience has retired him to rural Concord, pours out a vial of wrath. ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... their preparations for landing, and had changed their eccentric clothing for apparel which was more suited to making their appearance in society. Bart had insisted that they should go to his house, and wait until they might decide what to do; and the boys ...
— Lost in the Fog • James De Mille
... rather eccentric man, for once forgetting to bless something. "I'm in trouble, boys, and I need ...
— Tom Swift and His Giant Telescope • Victor Appleton
... was once my grandfather's; but since some months goes by the name of Henry James's, for it was there the novelist loved to sit - adds a touch of poesy and comicality. It is, I think, excellent, but is too eccentric to be exhibited. I am at one extreme corner; my wife, in this wild dress, and looking like a ghost, is at the extreme other end; between us an open door exhibits my palatial entrance hall and a part of my respected staircase. All ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... advice—not in a professional spirit, but as between man and man—I should warn you against wasting your time and fortune upon a useless pursuit. If Mrs. Holbrook has vanished from the world of her own free will—a thing that often happens, eccentric as it may be—she will reappear in good time of her own free will. If she has been the victim of a crime, that crime will no doubt come to light in due course, without any efforts ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... was more attractively repulsive than the sea-lion. It was such a luxury to hate him. He was such a counter-irritant, such a stimulant; such a flavor he gave to life. We are always on the lookout for the odd, the eccentric, the whimsical. We pretend that we like the orderly, the beautiful, the pleasant. We can find them anywhere—the little bits of scenery that please the eye, the pleasant households, the group of delightful people. Why ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... necessary to the novel, though not necessary to it alone, which Defoe, Addison, and Swift, each in his several way, worked mightily to supply: and that was a flexible business-like "workaday" prose style. Not merely so long as men aimed at the eccentric and contorted styles of Euphues and the Arcadia, but so long as the old splendid and gorgeous, but cumbrous and complicated pre-Restoration style lasted, romances were possible, but novels were not. You might indeed ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... fiction,' says a very old proverb, which is certainly illustrated by the following tale of an eccentric nobleman's life. ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... this eccentric kind always accompany periods of intellectual change. Most men live and think by habit; and when habit fails them, they are like unskilful sailors who have lost the landmarks of their course, and have no compass and no celestial charts by which to steer. In the years which ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... company schools. An abridgment was made and published in a very few days by Thomas Worthington, a graduate of West Point in one of the earliest classes,—of 1827, I think,—a son of one of the first governors of Ohio. This eccentric officer had served in the regular army and in the Mexican War, and was full of ideas, but was of so irascible and impetuous a temper that he was always in collision with the powers that be, and spoiled his own usefulness. He was employed to furnish ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... grow in stature and knowledge. By Jove! you are too big to wear my cast-off suits now. My valet will bless the increase of your outward man, and I don't think you have at all profited by the circumstance. Where the deuce did you get that eccentric turn-out? It certainly does not remind one ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... [Meditatively.] I cannot at the present moment recall what the General's Christian name was. But I have no doubt he had one. He was eccentric, I admit. But only in later years. And that was the result of the Indian climate, and marriage, and indigestion, and other things of ...
— The Importance of Being Earnest - A Trivial Comedy for Serious People • Oscar Wilde
... been disposed of and Shafto's room inspected and criticised, his companion still lingered talking. To Salter, the proverbially eccentric, this new-comer appeared to be an intelligent young fellow whom he would like and take to. There was no superior "just out from London to the back of God-speed" air about him. On the contrary, he appeared to be genuinely interested in his surroundings and insatiable ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... a special object of public regard and admiration at the time. His eccentric manners, his frank and honest air, his Roman simplicity of dress and demeanor, made him conspicuous; and his interposition to save the lives of the captured garrison of Pelusium, and the interest which he took in rendering such distinguished funeral honors to the enemy whom his army had ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... Emperor, his waistcoat pockets were lined with leather, so that he could take a handful of snuff at a time; he used to ride at full gallop up the staircase of the orangery at Versailles. Authors and artists ended in the workhouse, the natural close to their eccentric careers; they were, every one of them, atheists into the bargain, so that you had to be very careful not to admit anybody of that sort into your house, Joseph Lebas used to advert with horror to the story of his sister-in-law Augustine, who married the artist Sommervieux. Astronomers ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... character!" cried Mr Monckton, "yet of uncommon capacity, and full of genius. Were he less imaginative, wild and eccentric, he has abilities for any station, and might fix and distinguish himself almost where-ever ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... de Mirabeau, was born at Bignon, near Nemours, on March 9, 1749, and died at Paris on April 2, 1791. His father was a most eccentric and tyrannical representative of the French aristocracy, and Honore, a younger son, inherited something of his violent temperament, but was endowed with real genius. Entering the army, young Mirabeau soon displayed an erratic disposition by eloping with ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... have yourself to thank for her having done so; did you never treat her with coldness, and repay her marks of affectionate interest with strange fits of eccentric humour?" ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... food, he of course made his own garments—and what garments they were! Many years ago I used to see, strolling about St. James's Park, a huge hairy gentleman, with a bludgeon in his hand, and clothed with a bear's skin to which the head and paws were attached. It may be that this eccentric individual is remembered by some of my readers, but I assure them that he was quite a St. James's Park dandy compared with my hermit. He wore a pair of gigantic shoes, about a foot broad at the toes, made out of thick cow- hide with the hair on; ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... storehouse of treasures which no eyes but his ever behold. He is said to have the finest collection of pictures in the south of England, though nobody ever sees them to judge; pictures, fiddles and furniture are his hobby, and he is undoubtedly very eccentric. Nor can one deny that there has been considerable eccentricity in his treatment of his son. For years Sir Bernard paid his debts, and the other day, without the slightest warning, not only refused to do so any more, but absolutely stopped the lad's allowance. ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... not lost; and the amount—eighteen dollars—was right. The error was in making change. It was my own mistake. An eccentric old fellow, a farmer up in Martintown, had the money—the very same twenty dollar bill. He said he gave me a five dollar bill and I handed back the ...
— Under Fire - A Tale of New England Village Life • Frank A. Munsey
... round and round till I tell you to stop." The philosophic cabman did not regard me as eccentric, for he whipped up his horse cheerfully. When we had slid down the steep incline and got free of the precincts of that hateful station, I breathed more freely and collected my wits. Carlotta sucked her sticky thumbs and wiped them ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... seems to have been somewhat eccentric, and was very fond of dogs, of which he kept a considerable number. He had very strong views upon psychical subjects. He was a believer in spirit-return, and many witnesses have attested that he frequently spoke of his own return after death. Among these psychic ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... dances on a tub and rides a tricycle at a circus. Nothing of this sort has been attempted with the ostrich, but much might be done. He would make a first-rate bicyclist, and could get through much of the business of the "eccentric comedian." A couple of them would go to make a capital knockabout act. High kicks of the very highest, floor-strides of the very longest—and there would be a world of opportunities in the neck. No end of possibilities ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... to pay obeisance to cheeks more rubicund, and figure lither and more agile, and as you demanded the last pound of patience and endurance on her part you could, with the emphasis of an Edwin Forrest or a Macready, have tapped the eccentric marriage document and have said: "It's in the bond!" If this modern Rebekah had understood beforehand where she was alighting she would have ordered the camel drivers to turn the caravan backward toward Padan-aram. ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... will," said the Doctor firmly, "and at once. But this must be a private matter between us two. Let those who like consider the act eccentric; I shall have it done, and I look to you to take no one else into your confidence over ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... he came after his own hat quickly but cautiously, with burning eyes. The hat had seemed at first to droop and dawdle as in ostentatious langour on the sunny lawn; but the wind again freshening and rising, it went dancing down the garden with the devilry of a pas de quatre. The eccentric went bounding after it with kangaroo leaps and bursts of breathless speech, of which it was not always easy to pick up the thread: "Fair play, fair play... sport of kings... chase their crowns... quite humane... ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... Raven thoughtfully, "it's no secret. Only he was queer, he was eccentric, and so I've always assumed he had a pretty bad time of it. That's why I ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... to recover herself. That Cyrus Redgrave should still take an interest in her was decidedly more gratifying than the eccentric compliment of Felix Dymes. She strove to forget the humiliation of having been found standing in a public place, waiting for a tram-car. In Redgrave's manner no change was perceptible, unless, indeed, he spoke with more cordiality, which must be prompted by kind feeling. ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... laid hold of me in this eccentric fashion, have never loosened their grip. I have no pretension to be an expert in either subject; but the turn for philosophical and historical reading, which rendered Hamilton and Guizot attractive to me, has not only filled many lawful leisure hours, and still more sleepless ones, with ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Diana, Mars, and Venus, are supposed to have respectively predominated. Our author did not venture to assign a patron to the last years of the century, though the expulsion of Saturn might have given a hint for it. The music of the Masque is said to have been good; at least it is admired by the eccentric author of John Buncle.[46] The Prologue and Epilogue to "The Pilgrim," were written within twenty days of Dryden's death; [47] and their spirit equals that of any of his satirical compositions. They afford us the less ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... of the sexes is sweet, though shameful. So poignant is the sweetness that the accompanying shame is ignored, with open eyes. There is no hatred, or only among a few eccentric persons." ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... too, at Savigny, in the evening, when the park, the avenues, the blue slates of the chateau, the red brick of the stables, the ponds and brooks shone resplendent, bathed in the golden glory of a lovely sunset, this eccentric parvenu would say aloud before his children, ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... she understood my true meaning, and of course in her heart she agreed with it. She was town-bred and therefore was intended for the town. Yet so strangely stubborn and eccentric is a woman's reasoning that she can feel resentment toward a man because he has brains enough to comprehend the same simple ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... knowing all those within were to be searched I took a hasty resolution, born of my confidence in the Princess. It may be said here that the lady whom I escorted on that memorable night was known throughout the kingdom for her eccentric tastes, and noted for never meddling with intrigues of either state or love. Her passion lay with her dogs and horses, the hunt, and not in the ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... reversed the verdict of Lord Tennyson's hero is less eccentric than appears. Few men who come to the islands leave them; they grow grey where they alighted; the palm shades and the trade-wind fans them till they die, perhaps cherishing to the last the fancy of a visit home, which is rarely ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson |
