"Onlooker" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... resorts, camps, private residences, fishermen's camps, etc.; fishing-boats, row-boats, launches, motor-boats, and yachts ply to and fro in every direction, unconsciously vying with each other to attract the eye of the onlooker. The pure blue of the Lake, with its emerald ring and varying shades of color, added to by the iridescent gleam that possesses the surface when it is slightly rippled by a gentle breeze, contrasting with the active, vivid, moving boats ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... onlooker and in-listener at these boarding-house battles was Kedzie. By now she was weary of her present occupation—of course! She was tired of photographs of herself, especially as they were secured at the cost of long hours of posing under the hot skylight of a photograph gallery. Miss Silsby gave ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... deep wonder in his eyes. In all her exquisite plumage she had alighted in this dull place, filling it with freshness. And an onlooker would have gathered that the young artist and the beautiful lady who wrote were the best of merry chums, the silent man in the background a ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... no! the engine must be run at varying speeds, while the mechanics hold back the machine. This operation alone took three or four minutes, and all that the pilot proposed to do was to circle the aerodrome two or three times. An onlooker asked a mechanic if there were anything wrong with that particular machine. "No!" was the reply; "but our ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... being merely an onlooker, he ran up to Nevada, where the new gold-mining boom was fairly started—"just to try a flutter," as he phrased it to himself. The flutter on the Tonopah Stock Exchange lasted just ten days, during which time his smashing, ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... as she had told her that very morning, she looked like a woman who had gone through all the trials of rearing a young family on insufficient means. Now she was here she meant to have it out with Eve. She was going to abandon her role of sympathetic onlooker. She was going to delve below the surface, and learn the reason of ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... comfortable to disturb. At least, that was what the ground squirrels thought. And if one of those busy little fellows ever paused to stare curiously at Benny when he was having a nap in the warm sunshine, Benny Badger had only to awake and turn his head toward the onlooker to make him scamper for home as ...
— The Tale of Benny Badger • Arthur Scott Bailey
... appropriated the knowledge and experience which the Italian and German schools had been slowly amassing for centuries. Technique, form, counterpoint—all these they found ready made to their hand, and borrowed them unstintingly. Had they done this and no more, the onlooker might have dismissed them as clever plagairists, and probably no one would have paid them any further attention. But they had other means at their disposal. Their country contained a treasure-house of native ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... I am. As an onlooker, of course you see me more clearly than I see myself, and your judgment of me is probably right. No doubt I am terribly guilty. [Listens] I think I hear the carriage coming. I must get ready to go. [He goes toward the house and then stops] You dislike me, doctor, and you ...
— Ivanoff - A Play • Anton Checkov
... dance. It was a wonderful performance, sensuous and weirdly unusual. He had never seen a dance exactly like it before. The violin notes sounded like actual words, and the dancer answered them with responsive movements of her limbs, so that without speech the onlooker saw a love-drama enacted before his eyes. Chaldea—so he interpreted the dance—swayed gracefully from the hips, without moving her feet, in the style of a Nautch girl. She was waiting for some one, since to right and left she swung with a delicate hand curved ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... thought—nor now betrayed what she was thinking. Her eyes were glued to her plate. But the impression made on the others, not excepting the dependent buckeens who sat at the board a little apart and took no part in the talk, was so apparent that an onlooker must have laughed at their bewilderment. Even Uncle Ulick, whom a steady good humour had steered clear of many a brawl—so that a single meeting on Aghrim racecourse made up the tale of his exploits—stared vacantly ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... series of happenings that have absorbed their anxious and amused attention, and the point of departure for a new phase of existence offering infinite possibilities in the way of speculation. But even for the casual onlooker a wedding furnishes a pleasant arrest of the ordinary course of life, and lets in upon the dull grey of the commonplace certain gleams of glory from the golden days of glowing youth, or from beyond the mysterious planes of experience yet ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... thus the struggle goes on, good-naturedly, yet with a fierceness of energy that is exhausting in its wild excitement; exhausting to the onlooker, as well as the participant. When the unlucky bird is all dismembered, and the racers smeared from head to heels with blood, and it seems impossible to divide the pieces any smaller, then, and not till then, ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... the sort." Simpson's answer was very testy. "What call have you to interfere with the Magdalens?" His anger rose from a cause perhaps more explicable to an onlooker than to himself. ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... to make the heart of any onlooker turn sick, and a shudder passed through the frame of the trader as he gazed at the scene ...
— On the Trail of Pontiac • Edward Stratemeyer
... attention and to his surprise he saw, not a dozen feet away, a tall lank man leaning against a tree in an attitude so adhesive that he might have been a fungus growth or sprig of destroying mistletoe. It never occurred to Truedale that this indifferent onlooker could be interested in him, but he might be utilized in the emergency, so ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... his own slim brown fingers, a quick smile swept across his face, and he said, "You not speak loud." Then they all laughed together, and the Professor, who had been a silent but absorbed onlooker, was soon chatting away with the two boys, as if he, too, were but sixteen years old, with all the world ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... amusing marvels of New York. A girl neither rich nor so endowed by nature as to be able to press upon the world any special claim to consideration as a beauty, her enterprise, and the daring of her tactics, had been the delight of many a satiric onlooker. In her schooldays she had ingenuously mapped out her future career. Other American girls married men with titles, and she intended to do the same thing. The other little girls laughed, but they liked to hear her talk. All information regarding ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... by Kolberg to serve as his second, and the former readily agreed to this; for on the one hand he liked to play the role of an onlooker in such an affair, and on the other he deemed it prudent to put Kolberg under a new obligation; all the more as the repaying of his loans seemed ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... the details we have just been examining. For the same reason mat making is illustrated edgeways. If the loom were an upright one the two women weavers would have had their backs turned towards the onlooker as can be seen in Fig. 9. Any doubt on the matter has however been set aside by Prof. John Garstang's extremely interesting discovery of a wooden model depicting a group of women spinning and weaving which he illustrates in his work, The Burial Customs of Ancient Egypt, ...
— Ancient Egyptian and Greek Looms • H. Ling Roth
... one particular was the photograph. If it were at all a likeness, the woman who gazed frankly out upon the onlooker from the card-mount must have been a striking creature indeed. It was an amateur production, for the detectives were baffled in that no professional photographer's signature or studio was appended. Across a corner of ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... occasional whizzing of the enemy's bullets, the thud of a hit and the dropping, weltering in his blood, of a man here and there, watched from our firing lines the combat enlisted and fascinated the attention with barely a suggestion of danger to the onlooker. Few will ever see again so great and brave a show. A vast army, with a front of three miles, covering an undulating plain—warriors mounted and afoot, clad in quaint and picturesque drapery, with gorgeous barbaric display of banners, burnished metal, and sheen of steel—came ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... persecution of this poor man affect her, that an onlooker would have been compelled to seek the cause in some yet deeper sympathy than that commonly felt for the oppressed, even by women. And such a sympathy existed, strange as it may seem, between the beautiful girl (for many called her a bonnie lassie) and this "tatter of humanity". ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... there is a great commotion; the children are restless, they neither work nor go in quest of materials. The onlooker gets an impression of a tired class, about to become disorderly. After a few minutes the most perfect order reigns once more; the children are promptly absorbed in work again; they have chosen new and more ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... die at all if there were an alternative, were overwhelming him with streams of words and promises. Suddenly two of them jumped into the car and began to untie his arms and feet. Grim, looking swiftly to right and left, saw Jeremy and pounced on him so fiercely that an onlooker might have guessed another fight to the death was under way. Too excited to say what he had in mind, ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... sidewise, and the bishops darting obliquely, and the rooks charging straightforward, and the pawns laboriously hobbling from square to square, each at the player's will. There is no discernible order, all to the onlooker is manifestly in confusion: but to the player there is a meaning in the ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... every man was admitted to the council, and the words of the common soldier and sailor were listened to as attentively as the words of any of the gentlemen. An onlooker would have been sorely puzzled to decide from outward appearance which of the battered, travel-worn band was its leader. The fire lighted up a ring of gaunt, brown, bearded faces, and the pairs of eyes that centred on each speaker's face in turn had little of hope or animation ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... close to his house; partly, too, for a reason which moved many others to be spectators of the ceremony; a subconsciousness that, though the couple might be happy in their experiences, there was sufficient possibility of their being otherwise to colour the musings of an onlooker with a pleasing pathos of conjecture. He could on occasion do a pretty stroke of rhyming in those days, and he beguiled the time of waiting by pencilling on a blank page of his prayer-book a few lines which, though kept private then, may be ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... grove of Dundee, Yamhill county, thrills the soul of the onlooker with its beauty, present fruitfulness, and great promise. Lying on a magnificent hillside, the long rows of evenly set trees—healthy, luxurious in foliage, and filled with nuts—present a picture of ...
— Walnut Growing in Oregon • Various
... life sped along. It was not very significant, perhaps, or it would not have seemed so to the casual onlooker, but life is measured by its inward rather than its outward processes, and Kate felt herself ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... off their coats and were sparring at each other wickedly, shouting all the time, while Mac-an-Ward was making a tumultuous peace. The commotion and the strife, or the illusion of strife, increased. "Oh," an onlooker cried, "the tinkers are murdering ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... enterprise was being carried on with a will Evelyn was merely an indifferent onlooker. True she belonged to one squad of the candy makers, but she usually managed to be absent when they worked. Apparently she was not interested in the financial affairs of the Harlowe House Club. For a week or more after the check ...
— Grace Harlowe's Return to Overton Campus • Jessie Graham Flower
... and back again—curiously, it almost seemed suspiciously. Both noticed it; both flushed slightly. Scarborough shook hands with her, bowed to the little boy with a formality and constraint that might have seemed ludicrous to an onlooker. He went toward his horse; Gardiner and his mother took the course at right angles across the field in the direction in which the towers of the Eyrie could be seen above the tree-tops. Suddenly the boy said, as if it were the conclusion ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... and how little the quotations found in works of reference are to be trusted. The turns of the book-market are as sudden and strange, as delicate and mysterious, as those of a Bourse; and the steadfast and keen onlooker alone can keep pace with them—not he always; ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... onlooker that pantomime in the darkness would have seemed utterly grotesque. I tasted the fragrant, heavy wine and waited—waited in an agony of suspense—my ears strained desperately to catch the least sound from below. But a profound silence enveloped the schooner, broken only by ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... but the Governor did not proceed with his proposed investigation. No explanation was given, but to the onlooker it was clear that one of two reasons, or perhaps both, was the cause of silence on the part of the chief lawmaking body of the state—either the lifted curtain would reveal "the pot calling the kettle black," or so extensive and noxious a mass of corruption was known to exist that no means ...
— Woman Suffrage By Federal Constitutional Amendment • Various
... stood still, tears silently making their way down his face. Giving the reins to Georgiana, Mr. Jefferson jumped out and gently examined the small hand, the middle finger of which, as the onlooker could plainly see, was badly distorted and somewhat swollen. The skin, however, did not seem to ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... war work by an onlooker, and a slight sketch of Miss Macnaughtan's character, may form an ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... the most amusing spectacles of to-day is the attitude of the American press toward the revolution. It is also a pathetic spectacle. It compels the onlooker to be aware of a distinct loss of pride in his species. Dogmatic utterance from the mouth of ignorance may make gods laugh, but it should make men weep. And the American editors (in the general instance) ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... day was a most happy one. But no onlooker could fully understand the deep, rich joy of looking into those happy faces. Only those who had watched over and prayed with them from the beginning could at all enter into this peculiar feeling; and many earnest prayers ascended ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe
... alone has never failed to chain the interest of the onlooker. The furious galloping of the Indian braves—Sioux, Arapahoe, Brule, and Cheyenne, all in war paint and feathers; the free dash of the Mexicans and cowboys, as they follow the Indians into line at break-neck speed; the black-bearded Cossacks of the Czar's light ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... them off and keep them in the corner by the yards. They raced hither and thither like mad things, cutting wild capers as they fled; backed and twisted and dodged, and occasionally bellowed as they bolted, much as a naughty child might bellow. To an onlooker there was something distinctly funny ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... God!... Did people think it was amusing to be an onlooker of world-tragedy?... One of them remembered a lady of France with a small boy who had fled from Charleville, which was in flames and smoke. She was weak with hunger, with dirty and bedraggled skirts on her flight, and she had heard that her husband was ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... least, is the view an honest onlooker will take of our position. A common-sense Nonconformist minister, wishing to teach his people and to get at facts, studies the English Prayer Book. This is his conclusion: "Free Churchmen," he writes, "dissent from much of the teaching of the Book of Common Prayer. In {53} the service of ...
— The Church: Her Books and Her Sacraments • E. E. Holmes
... vanities. He told me of the Emperor's new projects. I began to criticize them, but remembered my rules and my benefactor's words—that a true Freemason should be a zealous worker for the state when his aid is required and a quiet onlooker when not called on to assist. My tongue is my enemy. Brothers G. V. and O. visited me and we had a preliminary talk about the reception of a new Brother. They laid on me the duty of Rhetor. I feel myself weak and unworthy. Then our talk turned to the interpretation of the seven ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... several platforms, and stretching away far into a dim and distant background; but even they could not record the impressive stillness of the vast multitude, its orderliness, which required the presence of not a single policeman, its spirit of almost religious solemnity which struck every observant onlooker. No profusion of superlative adjectives can avail to reproduce such scenes, any more than words, no matter how skilfully chosen, can convey the tone of a violin in the hands of a master. Even the mere number of those who took part ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... in the stern-sheets, and then, all else being ready, those who were to take part in the expedition were mustered for inspection prior to being dispatched on what was likely enough to prove a dangerous errand. But little recked any of us of possible danger; on the contrary, if an onlooker had judged only by the satisfied smirk which our countenances wore, it might have been supposed that we were all bound ashore for a day's ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... little over the middle height and rather heavily built; nothing to make you uncomfortable until you saw his face. That solemn countenance never responded when he laughed, and stood coldly by when he was on fire; he might have winked for an eternity, and still the onlooker must have thought himself mistaken. In his boyhood the mask had descended scarce below his mouth, for there was a dimple in the chin to put you at ease; but now the short brown beard had come, and he was for ever hidden ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... among them oppose religious organizations, not because these organizations are religious, but because they have an antipathy for all forms of social organization. It does not take an open-eyed onlooker long to discover that social organizations of all kinds are infested with many evils. Social machinery is never perfect in its construction or operation. It is always getting out of gear; there is endless friction and clatter and confusion; it takes ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... outcome of his affair with Ten Spot. The latter had come to the Kicker office as an enemy looking for an opportunity to kill. He had left the office, perhaps not a friend, but at least a neutral, sympathetic onlooker, for according to Hollis's interpretation of his words at parting he would take no further part in Dunlavey's campaign—at least he would do no ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... element is essentially necessary to a people in order that the people should not feel itself to be a mere onlooker, but should realise that it is a part and an important part of the body social, and that the words "You are the nation, defend it," have a meaning. Otherwise the argument of the anti-patriot demagogues would be just. "What is the good of fighting for one set of masters against another ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... men had arrived in the room. They exhibited that Southern vivacity which is a trifle tiresome to the onlooker, and they all listened to themselves while they spoke. The Neapolitan and two or three of his friends were introduced to Caesar; but they showed him a certain rather ostentatious ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... was taken as a great joke. He bought a beautiful little farm a few miles away, on the banks of the river Rhone, overlooking the city of Geneva and the lake. It was an ideal spot, and rightly he called it "Delices." Here he was going to end his days amid flowers and birds and books and bees, an onlooker and possibly a commentator on the times, but not a doer. His days of work were over. Of the world of strife he had had enough—thus ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... got into the wagon and became a mere onlooker, my point of view changed. The exhilaration of action had disappeared. I was a cowboy no longer. The cattle in the morning had been stupid foolish creatures, dangerous in their blind strength, which must be made to do what one willed. Now they were poor, dumb, persecuted beasts which must ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... Lane was nominated as the Democratic and Non-Partisan candidate for Governor of California. At the Democratic Convention at Sacramento, an onlooker described the excitement among the delegates before a selection was made, "Throughout the night until late afternoon of the second day, without any clear solution of the problem, came the roll-call of the counties, then a wild ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... As a matter of fact, she was glad when any casual onlooker confirmed her own secret hopes as to the seriousness ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... were struggling to glare coldly into a pair of amiably smiling blue eyes. It was a battle of one against an opponent who had no idea battle was intended. From the vantage ground of only partial understanding a pair of dark eyes looked on, smiling with the wisdom which is ever the claim of the onlooker. ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... a mere onlooker, I feel sorry for the Arabs," I said. "It has been their country for several hundred years. They didn't even drive the Jews out of it; the Romans attended to that, after the Assyrians and Babylonians had cleaned up nine-tenths of the population. And ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... William's agent at Hamburg had prevented foreigners from investing in the Scots company. English colonists had been forbidden to aid the Scottish adventurers. Two hundred thousand pounds, several ships, and many lives had been lost. "It is very like 1641," wrote an onlooker, so fierce were the passions that raged against William. The news of the surrender of the colonists increased the indignation. The king refused (November 1700) to gratify the Estates by regarding the Darien colony as a legal enterprise. ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... was wearing the gown that had hung in the Count's closet. A button had been torn off, and the gown gaped open. Her right hand was almost completely obscured by a dense cloud of smoke. Obviously she had just fired a pistol directly at the onlooker. ...
— The Eyes Have It • Gordon Randall Garrett
... child with him!" another sharp-eyed onlooker shouted exultantly; for although they knew nothing of the tie that bound the stranger to the crippled girl he had gone to save, they could appreciate the heroism at its true value, and were ready to honor the ...
— Jack Winters' Baseball Team - Or, The Rivals of the Diamond • Mark Overton
... with dancing steps and smiling faces, and lips of laughter and song, the sight of them was enough to lighten the heart of an onlooker and bring to his mind the shepherds and shepherdesses of old, who surely could not have been merrier nor a whit ...
— Peggy-Alone • Mary Agnes Byrne
... real Government; there, clothed in a highly different, but again suitable garniture of passions, instincts, and equally unconscious as to real aim, is the accursed-looking ending (temporary ending) of Order, Regulation, and Government;—very dismal to the sane onlooker for the time being; not dismal to him otherwise, his hope, too, being steadfast! But here, at any rate, in this poor Norse theatre, one looks with interest on the first transformation, so mysterious and abstruse, ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... mere onlooker the panorama of the street was of unusual interest. The avenue was ablaze with bunting, which hurrying thousands pointed out to their companions, while every street-corner had its little group of citizens, discussing with feverish energy and gestures of ill-concealed disquietude ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... in that of the silent onlooker, and drew him into the little hut of rough-hewn timber which was dignified by the name, printed in white letters over the ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... supposition that the Englishwoman was his wife, his treatment of myself was certainly not warranted, and I was not the man to play zero. I could not disguise the fact, however, that any onlooker would have pronounced me to be ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Namur on Monday morning August 24, 1914. He was accompanied by Field Marshal Baron von der Goltz, recently appointed Governor General of Belgium. Previous to the former Balkan War he had been employed in reorganizing the Turkish army. An onlooker in Namur thus describes the German Field Marshal:—"An elderly gentleman covered with orders, buttoned in an overcoat up to his nose, above which gleamed ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... young squire drew forth the loudest plaudits of approval from his associates, and his own exertion alone carried the game every time on the one side, and that so far as all I along to count three for their one. The hero's name soon ran round the circle, and when his brother Robert, who was an onlooker, learned who it was that was gaining so much applause, he came and stood close beside him all the time that the game lasted, always now and then putting in a cutting remark ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... more public offices; the occasional reappearances, so earnestly anticipated by her subjects, and hedged with something of a divinity more than regal; the incomparable majesty of personal bearing which has taught so many an onlooker that dignity has nothing to do with height, or beauty or splendour of raiment; and, mingled with that majesty and unspeakably enhancing it, the human sympathy with suffering and sorrow, which has made Queen Victoria, as none of her predecessors ever was or could ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... crowds of well-dressed women, most of them with pet dogs, and others with male friends led like lambs to the slaughter. The spectacle of a man in silk hat out shopping with a lady friend is always a pitiable one. His very look craves the sympathy of the onlooker, especially if he be ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... endure the same game on herself. The next time she was invited out the mistress took care to make up the card-tables before she arrived; so that Sylvie was reduced to wandering from table to table as an onlooker, the players glancing at her with scornful eyes. At Madame Julliard senior's house, they played whist, a ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... the onlooker, and in accordance with the general misinterpretation of the law of karma, he will be thought to have reaped a "bad" karma, while as a matter of reality, he will be making very rapid strides on the path to godhood. Said a famous Japanese ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... nurses. But there is no cancer hospital so large and populous as Kalawao and Kalaupapa; and in such a matter every fresh case, like every inch of length in the pipe of an organ, deepens the note of the impression; for what daunts the onlooker is that monstrous sum of human suffering by which he stands surrounded. Lastly, no doctor or nurse is called upon to enter once for all the doors of that gehenna; they do not say farewell, they need not abandon hope, on its sad threshold; they but go for a time to their high calling, and can ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... marksmen. The French infantry, well intrenched, suffered scarcely any loss. It was in brilliant sunshine that the fire broke out, and the conflagration was so fierce that the empty building sent up little smoke. The flames scarcely showed in the bright light, and to the onlooker, it seemed as if some rapid leprous disease was eating up the building. The situation was horrible for the Germans, either to be trapped and to perish in the flames, or to face the withering French infantry fire without any opportunity to fight back. Less ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... view—I mean real objects, motives. I give money to a beggar whose case is one to inspire pity. My motive, my "vital" object, may be to relieve the man. But it may equally well be to get rid of him, to gratify my self-feeling by becoming the dispenser of bounty, or to inspire admiration in the onlooker. The intention, as I have used the word above, is to relieve the beggar, with such consequences of the act as may be foreseen at the time. Within the limits of this intention, the motive may vary widely, and may, in a given instance, ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... of the pursuer's presence; always he could see the picture of Spurling's uplifted face and the pleading that was in his eyes as the assailant, with his back turned towards the onlooker, poised the axe above his head. That he might not share that fate he broke away into the greyness, tripping over snow ridges, falling into drifts, and bruising his body against the trunks of trees in the madness of his flight. His huskies added to ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... it, and with his mother as model made numerous experiments in the effects of light and shade. He seems to have been the very first artist who could draw a part of the form, leaving all the rest in absolute blackness, and yet give the impression to the casual onlooker that he sees the figure complete. Plain people with no interest in the technique of art will look upon a "Rembrandt," and go away and describe things in the picture that are not there. They will declare to you that they saw them—those obvious things which one fills in at once ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... dreams the scene Billy Falstar had so luridly described was enacted again and again, until he felt as if he, Jude, had been the onlooker. ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... lifted to the black ridge of roof where the sun had vanished. There was enchantment about her sleep, as though in the very midst of them she had begun to live a new, mysterious life of her own. She had been the shadowy onlooker. She became ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... would mean a rehearsal tonight—this minute, in fact, when every one's tired and cold." Her voice was soothing, very low. But the gentle tones carried their message to every one there. The mortal cleverness of such an appeal struck Duncan sharply, as an onlooker. ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... lowest step, when the Doctor saw Blaine raise his hand to his lips. A short, sharp blast of a whistle pierced the air, and in an instant a dozen men had sprung out of the darkness and leaped upon the two surprised miscreants. Then ensued a struggle, brief but awful to the onlooker in its silent, grim ferocity, as the two separate knots of men battled each about their central orbit. The scuffle of many feet on the hard-packed road, the mutter of curses, the dull thud of blows, the hoarse, strangulated breathing of men fighting against ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... glanced up from his book, had an ample view of the square, for the crowd had thinned. The punishment of the stocks was no such rare spectacle in Port Nassau; and five hours is a tedious while even for the onlooker—a very long while indeed to stand weighing the fun of throwing a handful of filth against the cost of a thrashing. The men-folk, reasoning thus, had melted away to their longshore avocations. The women, always more patient—as to their nature the show was more piquant than ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... as good as his word. It was very interesting to an onlooker to see the way the different parties took it. Mrs. Tremain seemed to be partly amused with the boy, and think it all rather good fun. Glendenning scowled somewhat, and tried to be silent; but, finding that made no particular difference, began to make allusions to the extreme youth of young Howard, ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... across the Weald, has not wondered what this country, lying between the two great chalk ranges, might be, what is its nature and its history and what part it has played in the great story of England. For even to the superficial onlooker it seems to differ essentially not only from the great chalk Downs upon which he stands, but from any other part of England known to him. It lies, thickly sprinkled with scattered and isolated woodlands, a mighty trench between the heights, not a vast plain but an uneven lowland diversified ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... the first of Deveny's intimates to leave the group. His face sullen, his eyes venomous, he walked across the street to the First Chance, and stood in the doorway, beside Balleau, who had been an interested onlooker. ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... most exasperating way, and to an onlooker it would have been exceedingly absurd, since it seemed as if the man and his companions were off oh the great mere with its open spaces of water and islands of reeds, and lanes through them like so many little crooked canals, ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... a half-page illustration of two girls and a boy, grouped, evidently, in an old-fashioned roomy attic, and holding a council of some sort. The girl who was talking faced the onlooker, while the backs of the other two ...
— The Cruise of the Dazzler • Jack London
... Record. Senator Allen of Nebraska quoted more than thirty authorities, ranging from the Pandects of Justinian to enlivening doggerel poetry. Feeling ran high. In the West, Jones, Allen and others were looked upon as heroes; in the East, as villains. To a satirical onlooker it seemed that the nation had become insanely obsessed with ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... the Carthusians would have touched Ralph if he had been a mere onlooker, as it touched so many others, but he had to play his part in the tragedy, and was astonished at the quick perceptions of Cromwell and his determined brutality towards these peaceful contemplatives whom he recognised as a danger-centre against ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... procession of Eight Hours Day in Melbourne. The day was wintry and dismal. Early rains had threatened the dispersal of the patient crowds which lined the roads; the pavements were muddy and the sky was lowering. The march of the trades bodies did little to dispel the gloom of the day for the one onlooker concerning whose sentiments I am authorised to speak. The vast crowd gave each trade a reception as it passed, and sometimes the marchers passed below the Treasury windows and cheered the governor. There was plenty ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... kinsman of his own. And then, after we had spoken long together, Thorgils was sent for, and he told the tale of the end of Morgan plainly and in few words, yet in such skilful wise that as he spoke I could seem to see once more our hall and myself and Elfrida at the dais, even as though I were an onlooker. ...
— A Prince of Cornwall - A Story of Glastonbury and the West in the Days of Ina of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... opposite him, over the door, was the figure of a man embroidered in green tunic and leggings with a hat drawn over his face and with a finger laid on his lip, as though he had cause to be silent, or to wish others so. The man had a forked beard and a kind of secret smile, as if he mocked the onlooker; and he seemed unpleasantly natural to the boy, as though he divined his thought. He was half minded to put the stone back; but the secrecy of the thing pleased him. Moreover as he held the stone to the light, it ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... spend some small part of my time in this college that I intend to become a priest. Marry and bring up children, or enter the Church! There is nothing between, so you say, having regard for my Catholicism. But there is an intermediate state, the onlooker. However strange it may seem to you, I do assure you that no man in the world has less vocation for the priesthood than I. I am merely an onlooker, the world is my monastery. ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... came to a stop, they were besieged by a crowd of blue-coated girls. It was afternoon recreation, and the whole school was abroad. The welcome that she received, would have led an onlooker to infer that Patty had been gone three months instead of three days. She and her two postilions descended, and ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... onlooker remembered this sight of her, the deep spiritual eyes, the symmetry of form and fold, the perfect carriage. Fair wishes flew ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... carried out, the only difference consisting in the mode of execution; some of the unfortunate wretches being secured to the crucifixion tree in one way, some in another; but it was very difficult for a mere onlooker to decide which of the plans adopted inflicted the most suffering. These victims, it should be explained, were doomed to remain fastened to the tree until death should ensue from hunger, thirst, exposure, and the ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... anything but harmonious with the pretty blue costume stormed across her face. "I won't have her along!" she muttered. "I simply won't!" She turned slowly and, as she turned, effaced every trace of temper with a dexterity which might have given an onlooker a poorer opinion of her character than perhaps the facts as to human nature justify. The countenance she presently revealed to those upper windows was sunny and sweet. No one was visible; but the horizontal slats in one of the only closed pair of shutters and a vague suggestion of movement ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... recreation in discussing with the inhabitants the Great War, of which he found some of them had heard. "Them there Zett'lins," said one old woman, "I almost shruk as I heerd the mucky varmints a-shovellin' on the coals—dare, dare! How my pore heart did beat!" And an onlooker, who had seen a bomb drop near a church, informed the visitor that it "fared to him like the body of the chach a-floatin' away—that it did and all! It made a clangin' like a covey of lorries with their innards broke loose." Another inhabitant said that he had two boys fighting. "One ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... blue, markers representing five hundred dollars apiece. Hahn laid the fingers of his right hand lightly across the top of the case, the fingers of his left hand curled about it. It had come down to the last turn of the deal again. Every player and onlooker knew what the three cards were—a queen, a five and a deuce. The checking-board showed that the queen had lost twice and won once, the five had won three times and the deuce had won twice and lost once. Most of the players shifted their bets accordingly, the queen ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... master and myself as we walked away from the crowded pavement, the onlooker surely suspected us of intoxication. I felt that the falling shades of evening were sympathetically drunk with God. When darkness recovered from its nightly swoon, I faced the new morning bereft of my ecstatic ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... to ascertain that no onlooker was near. As soon as the sleigh was 'round the corner of the street I hailed a public conveyance and directed the driver to take ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... prevalent, universally jurant, feeling of Hope, could be a unanimous one. Far from that! The time was ominous: social dissolution near and certain; social renovation still a problem, difficult and distant even though sure. But if ominous to some clearest onlooker, whose faith stood not with one side or with the other, nor in the ever-vexed jarring of Greek with Greek at all,—how unspeakably ominous to dim Royalist participators; for whom Royalism was Mankind's palladium; for whom, with the abolition ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... ground at the cliff top. Then he set his horse at a gallop, raising his bridle hand and striking his heels into the flanks of the beast. And each of his movements, each of the movements of his horse, was profoundly interesting, and held the attention of the onlooker in a vice, as if the fates of worlds depended upon where he was carried and how soon he reached his goal. A string of camels laden with wooden bales met him on the way, and this chance encounter seemed to Domini ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... shrink from reasonable responsibility towards his female impedimenta, any inquiry as to the absence of Lady Borrodaile was met by reference to Sophia. In short, where other attractive husbands brought a boring wife, Lord Borrodaile brought an undecorative daughter. While to the onlooker nearly every aspect of this particular young woman would seem destined to offend a beauty-loving, critical taste like that of Borrodaile, he was probably served, as other mortals are, by that philosophy of the senses which brings in time ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... queried Good Indian inanely, as is the habit of the onlooker when the scene shouts forth eloquently its explanation, and questions are almost ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... their previous offers. The price for the coral rose and rose. Soon a large sum was offered for it, and still the bids kept rising. Rosalind and Maggie were once more alone in the field, and now any onlooker could perceive that it was not the desire to obtain the pretty ornaments, but the wish for victory ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... the Pendletons, however, were at all satisfied to have Pollyanna merely an onlooker in their pastimes, and very strenuously they urged her to join them. They would not take no for an answer, indeed, and Pollyanna very frequently found the way opened ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... cannot honestly say that I was very sensitive to our losses. I do not remember suffering because there was no jam on my bread, and no new dress for the holidays. I do not know whether I was hurt when some of our playmates abandoned us. I remember myself oftener in the attitude of an onlooker, as on the occasion of the attachment of our furniture, when I went off into a corner to think about it. Perhaps I was not able to cling to negations. The possession of the bread was a more absorbing fact than the loss ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... I have stood so much as a placid onlooker that I have not had the hardihood even to suggest how people so much more experienced and wise in those things than I should work out the details even of those plans with which I have had ...
— Random Reminiscences of Men and Events • John D. Rockefeller
... cry there was a strange subsidence which made the onlooker rub his eyes. It seemed as though the whole mass of fighting men had partially sunk into the ground. Then the splendid truth burst upon us—the whole nation was kneeling at the feet of their ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... throws her arms round him and kisses the pretty little fellow tenderly with, "There, run away for a moment, darling; we're not quite ready for you." It is this sweet and all-pervading womanliness of Miss Terry's which fascinates the onlooker. Suddenly, from some dark recess, her voice floats out with an eminently practical suggestion, a shrewd idea as to effect, some playful query. It comes from every quarter of the theatre, and is marvellously thrilling, with all the subtle ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... purblind, but some are blinder than others who use the various means available for sharpening their eyesight. As an onlooker it seems to me safe to say that the lenses recommended by both the "radicals" and their vivid opponents rather tend to increase than diminish our ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... garments, clutching a pike, and donning the famous cap of red woollen, which had been the emblem of the emancipation of a slave in ancient Rome. One night at the Jacobin Club, Robespierre mounted the tribune, dressed with his usual elaborate neatness, and still wearing powder in his hair. An onlooker unceremoniously planted on the orator's head the red cap demanded by revolutionary etiquette. Robespierre threw the sacred symbol on the ground with a severe air, and then proceeded with a discourse of much austerity. Not that he was averse ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... all by that manner of efficiency and intelligence which seems so integrally American. A well-dressed throng, well-fed, amiable and animated, looking ever forward, the resistless tide of affairs that gave it being bore it onward; it passed the onlooker as a strong current passes flotsam in a back-eddy, with no pause, no turning aside. Acutely he felt his aloofness from it, who had no part in its interests and scarcely any comprehension of them. The sunken look, the leanness of his young face, seemed suddenly ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... — N. spectator, beholder, observer, looker-on, onlooker, witness, eyewitness, bystander, passer by; sightseer; rubberneck, rubbernecker [U.S.]. spy; sentinel &c (warning) 668. V. witness, behold &c (see) 441; look on &c (be present) 186; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... to the Jugurtha and Catiline of Sallust, we find something of the same sad tone, but it does not ring true like Livy's exordium; Sallust was a man of altogether coarser fibre, and seems to be rather assuming than expressing the genuine feeling of a saddened onlooker. In one of his earliest poems, written perhaps after the Perusian war of 41 B.C.[583] even the lively Horace was moved to voice the prevailing depression, fancifully urging that the Italian people should migrate, like the Phocaeans of old, to the far west, ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... of an onlooker Captain Dieppe's circumstances afforded high spirits no opportunity, and made ordinary cheerfulness a virtue which a stoic would not have disdained to own. Fresh from the failure of important plans; if not ...
— Captain Dieppe • Anthony Hope
... somewhat out of my line of work. Self-preservation is not theft; let us ease our conscience with this sophism . . . Ha! the ladder. Those twenty louis were well spent. This is droll, good heart. An onlooker would swear that this is an assignation. Eh well, Romeo was a sickly lover, and lopped about like a rose in a ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... legends—Araxes should have been the lover of this very Ziska- Charmazel, and that you, who are the living portrait of Araxes, should suddenly become enamored of the equally living portrait of the dead woman! You must own, that to a mere onlooker and observer like myself, it seems a ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... Belt line car. Another man waited alongside of them, a quiet little youth in a grey suit whom Evan had seen as an onlooker in the crowd. ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... country and his own surroundings—months in which he acquired the habit of reading an English newspaper two days old and being quite satisfied with it, when everything else also had two days' less importance than it would at home, and gradually he tasted the delights of the detached onlooker who need do nothing but warn, criticise, prophesy, protest. With absolute sincerity to himself he attributed this attitude which Fate had assigned to him as entirely owing to his having had to leave England on his wife's ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... "society" folk,—the laugh civil-sniggering, which is just a tone between the sheep's bleat and the peewit's cry. But no one laughed in response, and no one spoke. Some heavy spell was in the air like a cloud shadowing a landscape, and an imaginative onlooker would have been inclined to think that this imperceptible mystic darkness had come in with Tom o' the Gleam and was centralising itself round him alone. Brookfield, seeing that his lordly patron was inclined to talk, and that he was evidently ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... vices and faults of our friends. The same thing which I call in myself prudence I call in you meanness. The same thing which you call in yourselves generous living, you call in your friend filthy sensualism. That which, to the doer of it, is only righteous indignation, to the onlooker is passionate anger. That which, in the practiser of it, is no more than a due regard for the interests of his own family and himself in the future, is, to the envious lookers-on, shabbiness and meanness in money matters. That which, to the liar, is only prudent diplomatic reticence, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... The onlooker might have feigned ends and objects of forethought, as we do in the case of the water that seeks its own level, or in that of the vacuum which nature abhors. But the particles of matter would have remained unconscious of their collocation, and all nature would ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... much through being an onlooker," the Prince reflected. "There go the spirit of Russia and the spirit of Germany. You dabble in these things, my friend Dorminster. Can you guess what they are met for—for whom ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the dark flood now thickening under the fierce cold. Toward midday a cutting wind began to blow, and by three it was a hurricane. At that instant the heavier bridge gave way, and all upon it were engulfed. An onlooker declared that above storm and battle a yell of mortal agony rose which rang in his ears ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... throws himself at full length upon the ground, clinging to the shrubs around him and scarcely daring to glance upward at the sky. Besides the precarious position in which the men are placed, fierce winds that seem to shake the very foundations of the mountain cause thrills of terror to the onlooker. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... the others, as well as in the work as a whole, we have a body of principles which should govern high art-work, as well as new ideas as to what should constitute the equipment of the painter, and that not only as regards the technique of his art, but in the effect to be produced on the onlooker in viewing the skilled work of one who, above all accomplishments, should be lovingly and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... Annie's preference of the society of Brownie to that of Auntie might have been tolerably clear to an onlooker, without word spoken. For to Annie and her needs, notwithstanding the humble four-footedness of Brownie, there was in her large mild eyes, and her hairy, featureless face, all nose and no nose, more of the divine than in the human form of Auntie Meg. And there was ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... he be able to mentally visualize anything approaching "brilliant accomplishments" in the face of one of these fiascos. Whether these "turns" be due to sudden obstinacy, to some feeling of injury inflicted either by myself or the onlooker—to what on earth such tempers be due I cannot tell! but I have put up with this sort of thing for two hours at a stretch sometimes, keeping my self-control till at length I have had to rush out of the room—relinquishing every hope of victory for ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann |
