"Precarious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... probably the confusion incident to the Philistine victory contributed to it. The result was that, though David's designation by Samuel to the kingship was universally known, and his candidature had been popular, he had seven years of precarious sway over this mere fraction of the nation. We read of no impatience on his part. He let events shape themselves, or, rather, he let God ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... for nothing can be an answer to hope, or the passion of the mind for unknown good, but experience.—The forest of Arden in As You Like It can alone compare with the mountain scenes in Cymbeline: yet how different the contemplative quiet of the one from the enterprising boldness and precarious mode of subsistence in the other! Shakespeare not only lets us into the minds of his characters, but gives a tone and colour to the scenes he describes from the feelings of their imaginary inhabitants. He at the same time preserves the utmost propriety of action ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... Nial was a great benefactor to his countrymen, by arranging matters between people, at variance in which he was much helped by his knowledge of the law, and by giving wholesome advice to people in precarious situations, in which he was frequently helped by the power which he possessed of the second sight. On several occasions he settled the disputes in which his friend Gunnar was involved, a noble, generous character, and the champion ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... alert. He thrilled with the thought that in all probability he would have a commendatory letter from the Admiral to send to his father and that a duplicate would be published to the fleet. As for his position in the house, that was hourly growing more precarious. So far as he could gather, almost every one but the Prince and the Wellington boys knew his identity, and it certainly could not be long before this ignorant minority would be wiped out. There must be action, and quick action. With the Prince away ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... hands heard him, and there was a general snigger all round, the captain's very composure having given confidence to all. The men believed that he would not have taken things so quietly unless he had some sure hope of our speedy release from such a precarious position. ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... first commenced in Cilicia, having in truth but a precarious and obscure beginning, but gained life and boldness afterwards in the wars of Mithridates, where they hired themselves out, and took employment in the king's service. Afterwards, whilst the Romans were embroiled in their civil wars, being engaged against one another even ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... languished. Neither were the tidings from the theatre of war of a cheering character. The terrible losses suffered by Grant's army in the battles of the Wilderness spread general gloom. Sherman seemed for a while to be in a precarious position before Atlanta. The opposition to Lincoln within the Union party grew louder in its complaints and discouraging predictions. Earnest demands were heard that his candidacy should be withdrawn. Lincoln himself, ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... absence of lime in the soil, and the cost of applying it artificially, prohibit the cultivation of all grain, and restrict the produce of the land to potatoes and other vegetables. Nevertheless, many small settlers earn a good subsistence, although this has latterly been rendered precarious by the appearance ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... these have been times for careful adjustment of our economy from the artificial impetus of a hot war to constructive growth in a precarious peace. While building a new economic vitality without inflation, we have also increased public expenditures to keep abreast of the needs of a growing population and its attendant new problems, as well as our added international responsibilities. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Dwight D. Eisenhower • Dwight D. Eisenhower
... He understood fully his precarious situation; he knew that these men had already condemned him to death. The quiet repression they imposed on themselves told him as much. But his gaze passed calmly from one to another, without the least shrinking. ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... of his trials. But Mr. Keene was not despondent, nor were his trials of a sort which might not easily be tempered by something like industry on his own part. He was frankly idle. He loved better than simple work the precarious excitement of prospecting—an occupation which, except in isolated and accidental instances, cannot be pursued to any good save with the aid of science ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... from his visitor Solon an opinion that he is the happiest of mankind. The latter, after having twice preferred to him modest and meritorious Grecian citizens, at length reminds him that his vast wealth and power are of a tenure too precarious to serve as an evidence of happiness; that the gods are jealous and meddlesome, and often make the show of happiness a mere prelude to extreme disaster; and that no man's life can be called happy until the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... awkward situation could hardly be imagined than that of a privy councillor forced to listen to and reply to his sovereign, while each fresh gambade of his unmanageable horse placed him in a new and more precarious attitude—his violet robe flying loose in every direction, and nothing securing him from an instant and perilous fall save the depth of the saddle, and its height before and behind. Dunois laughed without restraint; while the King, who had a private mode of enjoying ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... consider the natural circumstances which give rise to such a style. Suppose a nation of builders, placed far from any quarries of available stone, and having precarious access to the mainland where they exist; compelled therefore either to build entirely with brick, or to import whatever stone they use from great distances, in ships of small tonnage, and for the most part dependent for speed on the oar rather than the sail. The labor and cost ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... a gospel, indeed, one that needs no church for its promulgation, and no ceremonial for the enhancement of its impressiveness. It is a gospel, moreover, that is based upon no foundation of precarious logic, but finds its premises in the healthy instincts of the natural man. It is no small thing to have thus found the way, and to have helped others likewise to find the way, out of the mists of superstition, through ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... participated in the gains as well as the guilt of slavery, would the remembrance of its palmy days be otherwise than one of regret. We Negroes, on the other hand, after a lapse of time extending over nearly two generations, could be indebted only to precarious tradition or scarcely accessible documents for any knowledge we might chance upon of the sufferings endured in these Islands of the West by those of our race who have gone before us. Death, with undiscriminating hand, had gathered [10] in the human ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... there were crowds of destitute refugees from Turkey, Bulgaria and Servia to be provided for, and the native population, owing to the rise in the cost of living {90} and to unemployment, also stood in urgent need of relief. At the same time, customs and other receipts became more and more precarious owing to the Allies' constant interference with the ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... Sluice, through which the waters of the South Holland Drain entered the estuary. At that point a great mass of silt had accumulated, which tended to choke up the mouths of the rivers further inland, rendering their navigation difficult and precarious, and seriously interrupting the drainage of the whole lowland district traversed by both the Old and New Nene. Indeed the sands were accumulating at such a rate, that the outfall of the Wisbeach River threatened to become ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... others longer and more alarming, rendering Marie more and more determined to keep her fatal secret from him; for it appeared to her that any stronger emotion than customary would be followed by those attacks; and as her love for him seemed to increase in intensity with the anxiety his precarious health occasioned, so did her dread of occasioning him aught of grief. But how fruitless are our best and wisest resolutions! One little hour, and every thought ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... experiment, in any age or history, to countenance so monstrous a supposition? The thing is, at first sight, so gross and palpable, that no discourse about it can make it more apparent. And yet these shameful beggars of principles give this precarious account of the original of things; assume to themselves to be the men of reason, the great wits of the world, the only cautious and wary persons, that hate to be imposed upon, that must have convincing evidence ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... I slept very heartily, for some of my father's soldier training is in my veins, and on the eve of a hard or precarious work I am always able to get sound rest. My father often said that on the night before a battle in which he would stand seventy-seven chances of being killed he always slept like a dog in front ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... Creator intended that we should be affected with anything, he did not confide the execution of his design to the languid and precarious operation of our reason; but he endued it with powers and properties that prevent the understanding, and even the will; which, seizing upon the senses and imagination, captivate the soul before the understanding is ready either to join with them, or to oppose them. It is by a long deduction, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... of the worst-regulated habits are constantly engaged in this exciting and precarious trade; and serious demoralisation is engendered amongst the villagers by the idle and dissolute adventurers who resort to Saffragam. Systematic industry suffers, and the cultivation of the land is frequently neglected whilst its owners are absorbed ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... large proportion of the people now residing in the Far West are descendants of emigrants who came by the precarious means afforded by ox-team conveyances. For some three-score years the younger generations have heard from the lips of their ancestors enough of that wonderful pilgrimage to create among them a widespread demand for ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... its old reputation, and its external beauties, which have enabled it, in a certain degree, to resist the centralising tendency, and have hitherto always supplied it with a succession of eminent men. But now that London is at our door, how precarious is our hold of them, and how many ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... of the common man is past. On the open countryside one man is as good as another, or nearly as good. The earlier aristocracy had a precarious tenure of strength and audacity. They were tempered—tempered. There were insurrections, duels, riots. The first real aristocracy, the first permanent aristocracy, came in with castles and armour, and vanished before the musket and bow. But ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... the end of the row of desks nearest to him and dragged himself slowly up. But there he hung irresolute. His heavy brows were drawn, but the eyes beneath had a frightened, hunted look. They glared at Green with a defiance so precarious that ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... youth had been taught music, then served as valet, could read and write, had read—so much I could discover—some few trashy books, and existed now, as many do exist in Russia, without a farthing of ready money; without any regular occupation; fed by manna from heaven, or something hardly less precarious. He expressed himself with extraordinary elegance, and obviously plumed himself on his manners; he must have been devoted to the fair sex too, and in all probability popular with them: Russian girls love fine talking. Among other things, he ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... typhoon, or from any other reason, or—the brothers Quick escaped. But here is a list of the men who were aboard when she sailed from Hong-Kong. She was, I have already told you, a low-down tramp steamer, evidently picking up a precarious living between one far Eastern port and another—a small vessel. Her list includes a master, or captain, and a crew of eighteen—I needn't trouble you with their names, except in two instances, which I'll refer ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... Travel had been precarious before; but now its difficulties were infinitely increased. The clay sub-soil to the rubble turned slippery and adhesive. On the sides of the mountains it was almost impossible to keep a footing. We speedily became wet, our hands puffed and purple, our ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... Travers had not fully indorsed his encomiums of the girl. She had felt that no really nice girl would travel so far on so precarious an errand, particularly when she was alone. And how could one tell, coming from America, how her sympathies really lay? She might be of German parentage—the very worst sort, because they spoke American. It was easy ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... as it was to corruption, and elected, on a narrow franchise, by an uneducated constituency. Burnet, the typical Whig, had protested against such limitations as should quite change the form of our government, and render the crown titular and precarious. ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... time, food could scarcely be procured on any terms. Frequently had those settlers to go from fifty to one hundred miles with hand sleds or toboggans through wild woods or on the ice to procure a precarious supply for their famishing families. The privations and sufferings of some of those people almost exceed belief. The want of food and clothing in a wild, cold country, was not easily dispensed with or soon remedied. Frequently in the piercing cold of winter a part of the family ...
— First History of New Brunswick • Peter Fisher
... his legs seemed flighty and precarious. Those two glasses of claret were proving a little too much—they had set his brain a-dancing. But this he kept to himself. She noticed the high spirits, but supposed them merely an invalid's delight in getting ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... while they are data, and this is the epistemological basis of all our knowledge of external particulars. (The meaning of the word "external" of course raises problems which will concern us later.) We do not know, except by means of more or less precarious inferences, whether the objects which are at one time sense-data continue to exist at times when they are not data. Sense-data at the times when they are data are all that we directly and primitively know of the external world; hence in epistemology the fact that they are ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... whom Don Francesco had called "not exactly a liberal." He tallied with that description. A wicked old face! He was blear-eyed, brown as a mummy, and so fat that his legs had long ago ceased to be any use save as a precarious support while standing. He rode, in gorgeous apparel, on a milk-white donkey which was led by two pretty choristers in blue. Attached to the end of a long pole, a green umbrella of Gargantuan proportions, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... were seized; and a report getting abroad that all were to be thus treated, they flew to arms, and quitting the city in great numbers, took up their quarters in the mountains, and strengthened themselves so much as to render the fate of Batavia itself precarious. ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... apparently was declining in energy and health, and his income was very small. She worked long hours over her fancy work, but the prices paid for it at the shops were so small that she felt with a growing despondency it was but a precarious means of support. Their first month in the old mansion was drawing to a close, and they had been compelled to draw slightly on the small sum of ready money still remaining after paying for their summer's board. They still had a few articles in storage, having retained them in hope of moving, ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... more before I could help either her or him. If she would only get well enough for me to talk to her, I knew what to say; and I did all I could to console Max. But I could not easily allay his anxiety or my own; it was impossible to conceal from him that she was in a precarious state, and that unless the power of sleep returned to her there was danger of actual brain-fever; in her morbid condition one knew not what to fear. Perfect quiet, patience, and tenderness were the only means ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... chamber in which I dwelt in Besancon, and where we spent so many pleasant hours in the discussion of philosophy! Do you remember it? But that is now far away. Will that happy time ever return? Shall we one day meet again? Here my life is restless, uncertain, precarious, and, what is worse, indolent, illiterate, and vagrant. I do no work, I live in idleness, I ramble about; I do not read, I no longer study; my books are forsaken; now and then I glance over a few metaphysical ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... on the assumption of its objective character. Had Plato fixed his mind, not on the ideal nature of good, but on the subjective consciousness of happiness, that would have been found to be as transient and precarious as pleasure. ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... pain and hardship must result in great part from the belief. If I regard myself as irresistibly subject to an automatic Nature, whose wheels may bruise or crush me at any moment, I know not why or how I could be cheerful, even in such precarious health or prosperity as might fall to my lot; and there could certainly be no reassuring aspect to my adverse fortune. But if I believe that under a fatherly Providence there can be no suffering without its ministry ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... without their being subject to the inspection of others, and, indeed, we have sometimes the mortification to hear of the arrival of letters from America in the sea-ports, which, notwithstanding, never reach us. Our opportunities of information thus become very precarious, and I am much afraid, that the same cause will frequently interrupt our ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various
... how often, in those years, have the dark doors opened for the young as for the old! William Mainwaring died first, careworn and shamebowed; the blot on his name had cankered into his heart. Susan's life, always precarious, had struggled on, while he lived, by the strong power of affection and will; she would not die, for who then could console him? But at his death the power gave way. She lingered, but lingered dyingly, for three years; and then, for the first time since William's death, she smiled: that ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Memoirs, writing on 23rd of May, says: "The King prayed that he might live till the Princess Victoria was of age, and he was very nearly dying just as the event arrived. He is better, but supposed to be in a very precarious state. There has been a fresh squabble between Windsor and Kensington about a ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... poorest of the inhabitants of Scotland, and at a period when their daily meal must have been always scanty, and frequently precarious, one luxury seems to have established itself, which has unaccountably found its way into every part of the world. We mean tobacco. The inhabitants of Scotland, and especially of the Highlands, are notorious for ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII. F, No. 325, August 2, 1828. • Various
... Princess, to be followed in quick succession by Homo Sum, The Sisters, The Emperor, and all that long line of brilliant pictures of antiquity. He began his series of tales of the middle ages and the dawn of the modern era in 1881 with The Burgomaster's Wife. In 1889 the precarious state of his health forced him to resign his chair at ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Department, and that perhaps we might do with a servant's set of bedroom furniture. Do with a set! He was a gloomy man with (I should judge) some internal pain. I tried to tell him that there was quite a lot of middle-class people like myself in the country, people of limited or precarious means, whose existence he seemed to ignore; assured him some of them led quite beautiful lives. But he had no ideas beyond wardrobes. I quite forgot the business of shopping in an attempt to kindle a little ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... changes of fortune, the cause of the great-king appeared by no means lost through the defeat of Tigranocerta; whereas the position of Lucullus was very difficult, and, if peace should not now take place and the war should be judiciously continued, even in a high degree precarious. ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... is hampered by those rules, traditions or scruples which limit the activity of British joint stock banks. They are free to launch into speculations which, to the sober judgment of our own financiers, must seem wild and precarious, but to which success has affixed the hall-mark of approval. Each of the six banks is a centre of German home industries and also of the foreign transformations of these. To mention an industry is almost always to connote some one of the six. Before the war broke ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... to hear Dick say this, for although we were at present much better off than we might have been, I was fully alive to our precarious situation. Even should the weather prove fine, we might not reach the shore for many a day, and our provisions and water would not hold out long, while, should it come on to blow, they might be lost, and we should be starved, even if the raft should hold together and we had ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... interfered in 1745, and inflicted severe penalties on the keepers of such tables. This was the ruin of Nash's gambling speculation; and for the remaining sixteen years of his life he depended solely on the precarious products of the gaming table. He died at Bath, in 1761, in greatly reduced circumstances, being represented as 'poor, old, and peevish, yet still incapable of turning from his former ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... was supposed to render the measure of domestic emancipation dangerous, if not impracticable. Yet those who had the misfortune to be subjected to this evil, would willingly have commuted a species of precarious and artificial property for any other more substantial in itself, and more consonant with their own moral feelings. It has since been the frequent effort of Southern legislation to diminish the quantity of the evil, which, it is was supposed, could not wholly be removed. Hence their concurrence ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... precarious and dangerous ways of making a fortune, I should think that went ahead," he said, still laughing. "What an idea now! Shouldn't you suppose people with common sense would have some faint idea of the immense expenses to be ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... by the heavy foot-falls, leaps about her master's legs, and gives a spring into his narrow lap, as he takes his chair, maintaining her precarious position by fastening her claws tightly in his broadcloth, to the no small danger of the limbs beneath, and purrs her perfect satisfaction. Oh! it's a good thing to get home! There's not so comfortable a place on the face of the earth, as the spot we call our own, with the objects that meet our ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... silence succeeded these words. Cuchillo began to feel that he was acting the part of the hare, who takes refuge in the teeth of the hounds; but he endeavoured by a great show of assurance to make the best of a position which was more than precarious. ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... censorious Sabbatarians discovered that the day he was employed one hour "doing her breast with 1/8th drill" was Sabbath, which in one who belonged to a strict Scottish Covenanter family, betokened a sad fall from grace. When we consider that his health was then precarious, that he was debarred from chemical experiments, and depended solely upon mechanical subjects; that in all probability it was a stormy day (Sunday, February 3, 1811), knowing also that "Satan finds mischief still for idle hands to do," we hope our readers will pardon him for yielding ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... feet in width, with an inclination of about 20 deg.N. 51 deg.E. As soon as I had gratified the first feelings of curiosity, I descended, and each man ascended in his turn; for I would only allow one at a time to mount the unstable and precarious slab, which it seemed a breath would hurl into the abyss below. We mounted the barometer in the snow of the summit, and, fixing a ramrod in a crevice, unfurled the national flag to wave in the breeze where never flag waved before. During our ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... how shall it come to pass in the face of the Pharaoh's denial and the might of Egypt's arms? Thou art young and so am I, but both of us remember Rameses. There has been none like him. He overthrew the world, did he not? And it was a hard task and a precarious and a long one, when he but measured arms with mortals. Is it not a problem worthy the study to ponder how he might have fared in battle ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... wooings; but as his good luck would have it, it was at the very edge of the shelf that he collapsed. Disengaging his victorious antlers, the conqueror thrust viciously and evisceratingly at the victim's exposed flank. The latter was just struggling to rise, with precarious foothold on the loose-turfed brink of the steep. As he writhed away wildly from the goring points, the bushes and turf crumbled away, and he fell backwards, rolling and crashing till he brought up, battered but whole, in a sturdy ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... people have lost all faith in the tottering Yuan Shi-kai who is discredited and attacked by the whole nation for having sold his country. If Japan gives Yuan the support, his Government, though in a very precarious state, may possibly avoid destruction. Yuan Shi-kai belongs to that school of politicians who are fond of employing craftiness and cunning. He may be friendly to us for a time, but he will certainly abandon us and again befriend the other Powers when the European war is at an end. ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... is—and no one knew this fact more thoroughly, or would have acknowledged it more frankly, than Mr Arnold himself—that criticism has, of all literature that is really literature, the most precarious existence. Each generation likes, and is hardly wrong in liking, to create for itself in this province, to which creation is so scornfully denied by some; and old critics are to all but experts (and apparently to some of them) as useless as ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... weeks the boy wandered about the wharves, picking up a precarious livelihood by sucking molasses out of the casks discharged from West India ships, and occasionally regaling himself upon stray oranges and lemons found floating in the docks. He passed his nights sometimes ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... undetermined, dubious, wavering, precarious, undecided, irresolute; questionable, involved; ambiguous, enigmatical, problematical, equivocal, vague, indefinite. Antonyms: certain, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... had flinched before this accusation, which meant that he was a police-spy employed by a detective, he might have repented it. But Micky was no coward, and stood his ground; all the more firmly that he fully grasped the man's precarious position, in the very house where he had been once before captured. He answered resolutely:—"I could snitch upon you this minute, master, if I was to choose. But you aren't no concern of mine, further than I've got ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... score of religion or morality; and without any feeling of exultation, because, whatever may have been their temporary success, I am well aware how much their reputation depends upon the caprice of fashion; and I have already mentioned the precarious tenure by which it is held, as a reason for displaying no great avidity in grasping ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... constructed and situated. The occupants of the quarter are accounted for by the existence there of many houses of the same character, for which trade has no use, and which can only be rented by the poorer kinds of industry, of a precarious or ignominious nature. ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... by Nature. This is one of the remnants of ignorance certain religions have left: but it's odd that men who don't believe in Easter should still believe this. For the facts are of course this is a hard and precarious world, where every mistake and infirmity must ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... in his figures. Fifteen paid the penalty for their crimes that night; but two reached the shore: Starkey to be captured by the redskins, who made him nurse for all their papooses, a melancholy come-down for a pirate; and Smee, who henceforth wandered about the world in his spectacles, making a precarious living by saying he was the only man ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... Ohio, then inconsiderable, as one man. Their confidence in Washington scarcely restrained them from rushing to the seizure of New Orleans, when the treaty of San Lorenzo El Real, in 1795, stipulated for them a precarious right of navigating the noble river to the sea, with a right of deposit at New Orleans. This subject was for years the turning-point of the politics of the West; and it was perfectly well understood ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... of the parish were simple-hearted and respectable; but the denizens of the hamlet, after receiving the wages of the harvest time, eked out a precarious existence in the winter, and watched eagerly and expectantly for the shipwrecks that were certain to happen, and upon the plunder of which they surely calculated for the scant provision of their families. The wrecked goods supplied them with the necessaries of life, and the rended planks ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... to me, for it's the last chance you'll have. I have you absolutely at my mercy. I've caught you! You are trapped!" There was no doubting that the girl believed what she said, and the Senator's affairs were in a sufficiently precarious state to ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... class place in strong relief the passions and tendencies which render the endurance of the political system which we have established here, and of the connection with the mother-country, uncertain and precarious. They elicit a manifestation of antipathy between races and of jealousy between the recently united provinces, which is much to be regretted. This measure of indemnity to Lower Canada is, however, the last of the kind, and if it be once settled satisfactorily, a formidable stumblingblock will ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... This precarious guaranty, the fruit of an unsteady and purely political combination which may undergo the most unexpected alterations, cannot assure a stable situation, because it is not in itself the constitution ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... water. While the American vessels in the river above Fort Mifflin, the name given to the fort on Mud Island, rendered it difficult to forage in Jersey, Washington hoped to render his supplies on the side of Pennsylvania so precarious as to compel him to ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... never go back to that!" I cried, jumping up. "I'll sooner earn a precarious livelihood by turning fisherman in this island! Any labor will be preferable to that daily renewing torture." I seized my violin in a desperate clutch, and feverishly leant over the wall, where I could hear the dirge-like boom of the breakers in the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... basking in the sun, with their young. As soon as they are alarmed by the sight of their enemies, they scuttle away, and make for the sea[4]. It is on the great deep that the Esquimaux, driven by hunger, chiefly seeks his precarious food. In his light canoe, which is made of seal-skins stretched over a slight framework of wood, he hunts, in all weathers, for his prey, especially for the ...
— Kalli, the Esquimaux Christian - A Memoir • Thomas Boyles Murray
... of nations was, in that age, so imperfect and precarious, that the revolutions of the North might escape the knowledge of the court of Ravenna, till the dark cloud, which was collected along the coast of the Baltic, burst in thunder upon the banks of the Upper Danube, ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... Hypnotism maintains a precarious hold, simply through juggling with the words, "Suggestion" and "Hypnosis." The professional hypnotist, yielding as he must to the public fear and condemnation of Hypnotism, advocates Just a little of it! under the false title "Suggestion," for ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... given his order for Lady Baltimore so lamely that the girl behind the counter had come to his aid. And what could it have been that he had begun to tell her to-day as I was leaving the place? Was the making of that cake again to be postponed on account of the General's precarious health? And what had been the nature of the insult which young John Mayrant had punished and was now commanded to shake hands over? Could it in truth be the owner of the Hermana whom he had thrashed ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... Numa in the shoulder, knocking him from his precarious hold upon the frantically plunging horse. Freed of the weight of both girl and lion the pony raced ahead toward safety. Numa tore and struck at the missile in his shoulder but could not dislodge it. Then he ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Between him and the grave there was seldom anything more than a single suspender and the hope of a meal which would at the same time support life and make it insupportable. He literally picked up a precarious living for himself and an aged mother by "chloriding the dumps," that is to say, the miners permitted him to search the heaps of waste rock for such pieces of "pay ore" as had been overlooked; and these he sacked up and sold at the Syndicate Mill. He became a member ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... in Japan. Ito, who had the room next to mine, suggested that robbery was quite likely, and asked to be allowed to take charge of my money, but did not decamp with it during the night! I lay down on my precarious stretcher before eight, but as the night advanced the din of the house increased till it became truly diabolical, and never ceased till after one. Drums, tom-toms, and cymbals were beaten; kotos and samisens screeched and twanged; geishas (professional women with the accomplishments ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... Jellyband was peremptory. He had other views for his buxom daughter, his only child, who would in God's good time become the owner of "The Fisherman's Rest," than to see her married to one of these young fellows who earned but a precarious livelihood with ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... be a precarious business; but in 1704 there came a second venture in journalism, The Boston News-Letter, which proved to be a more lasting enterprise because it refrained from criticizing the authorities. Still the public interest languished. When Franklin's brother, James, began to issue his New ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... tight and coated with ice; the cases of provisions, the medicine chests, the canvas bundle of sails, boat-covers, and tents unwieldy and of enormous weight; the footing on the slippery, uneven ice precarious, and more than once a man, staggering under his load, broke through the crust into water so cold that the sensation was ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... of 1794 the position was somewhat as follows. The British had secured all the French colonies in the West Indies, excepting Guadeloupe. In Hayti they held nearly all the coast towns, and maintained an intermittent blockade over the others; but their position was precarious owing to the thinness of their garrisons, the untrustworthiness of their mulatto auxiliaries, and the ravages of disease. It seems probable that, with ordinary precautions and some reinforcements, the garrisons might have held out ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... removed to Greville Cross for the more ready furtherance of our guilty plan; under pretence that the health of the unfortunate Theresa required change of air. On their arrival they found it easy to impress the servants of the establishment with a belief of her precarious state, and the nature of her malady afforded them a plausible pretext for secluding her from their observation and attendance. Accustomed to receive from Alice a daily account of her declining condition, the announcement of her death excited no surprise. In a few ...
— Theresa Marchmont • Mrs Charles Gore
... friends with disrespect and reproach, under the thin disguise of cold civility and humiliating advice. Oh to be a sturdy savage, (p. 130) stalking in the pride of his independence, amid the solitary wilds of his deserts, rather than in civilized life helplessly to tremble for a subsistence, precarious as the caprice of a fellow-creature! Every man has his virtues, and no man is without his failings; and curse on that privileged plain-speaking of friendship which, in the hour of my calamity, cannot reach forth the helping-hand ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... They had been out on this expedition four days already, and had faced great dangers without getting a single chamois. They were brave and patient men, and as they earned their living by chamois hunting—one of the most dangerous and precarious ways of earning a living—had been ready and prepared for a certain amount of risk. But four days in the mountains, with nothing but dried meat for food, added to the intense cold and exposure, not to speak of risking their lives several times a day, was about as much as any man ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... mind what you have been, here you are, and as I have only one more handkerchief and your own looks as if it had been sea-bathing, you had better dry your eyes and be jolly for the next two hours." This was a precarious speech, but Mae only laughed at it, and dried her eyes quickly. "But I have one thing to say to you," she said, ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... however, they knew the truth, which is that artificial abortion, even under the best hospital conditions, is a precarious undertaking, so frequently leading to invalidism as never to be 'safe'; if, moreover, we spread the truth about Russia's legalized abortions, and put a stop to the false reports circulated by ill-informed enthusiasts regarding the ease and safety of skilled induced ...
— Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Various Aspects of the Problem of Abortion in New Zealand • David G. McMillan
... an excellent idea, Tom Hunter thought to himself, and it had worked perfectly, exactly as he had planned it ... so far. But now, as he clung to his precarious perch, he wondered if it had not worked out a little too well. The first flush of excitement that he had felt when he saw the Scavenger blow apart in space had begun to die down now; on its heels came the unpleasant truth, the realization that only the easy part lay behind him so ...
— Gold in the Sky • Alan Edward Nourse
... be influenced by the King of Poland, who must be determined by Russia, considering his views upon Poland, which, by the by, I hope he will never obtain; I mean, as to making that crown hereditary in his family. As for his sons having it by the precarious tenure of election, by which his father now holds it, 'a la bonne heure'. But, should Poland have a good government under hereditary kings, there would be a new devil raised in Europe, that I do not know who could lay. I am sure I would not raise him, though on my own ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... accustomed to follow their manner of living, might have been supposed to ill relish the life of their parents, when grown up, have quitted their comfortable abodes, females as well as males, and taken to the same savage mode of living, where the supply of food was often precarious, their comforts not to be called such, and their lives perpetually in danger. As a proof of the little personal safety which they enjoyed, a young woman, the wife of a man named Ye-ra-ni-be, both of whom had been brought up in the settlement ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... The thrifty bishop, who foresaw the advent of troublous times in the Netherlands, however, took care in the letters by which he sent his thanks, to instruct the King to secure the money upon crown property in Arragon, Naples, and Sicily, as matters in the provinces were beginning to look very precarious. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... obstacles were almost insurmountable. Of these her ill-health was chief. She could not consent, she said, to dim the prosperities of his career by a union with her future, which she characterized as a precarious thing, a thing for making burdens out of—but not for his carrying. In exchange for the "noble extravagancies" of his love she could bring him only "anxiety and more sadness than he was born to." This ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... life of the girl he loved. So, he moved downward with increasing slowness, as the curve of the rock grew more pronounced. At each step, he made sure that his feet still clung. Then, when still two yards from the edge, he found the footing too precarious for further walking, even with the rope. A glance over his shoulder showed that Uncle Dick had halted a rod above. He looked closely and saw that the brim of the cliff was smooth a little to the right. ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... years after leaving college he had clung to a clerkship in a Dolton mercantile establishment before he felt justified in marrying Hannah, the daughter of Elmer Wench, when the mercantile establishment amalgamated with a rival—and Edward's services were no longer required. During the succession of precarious places with decreasing salaries he had subsequently held a terrified sense of economic pressure had gradually crept over him, presently growing strong enough, after two girls had arrived, to compel the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... watch below. There is nothing so sweet to the foremast mariner as his sleep; for it is the most precarious of all his enjoyments: on the other hand, perhaps, it is the most treacherous companion ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... not one of right but of might, and it was settled as all such questions invariably are. But Strongbow had a master at the other side of the Channel, who had his own views of these complications. His tenure, however, was somewhat precarious. His barons, always turbulent, had now a new ground for aggression, in the weakness to which he had exposed himself by his virtual sanction of the murder of St. Thomas of Canterbury, and he was fain to content himself with a strong injunction commanding all his English subjects then in ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... reminder of the uncertainty of Court favour, or an instance whence I might learn the lesson of modesty, and so stand in less danger of presuming on my new and precarious prosperity, I had it in this episode, and in the demeanour of the company round me. On the circle breaking up in confusion, I found myself the centre of general regard, but regard of so dubious a character, the persons who would have been the ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... Aracynthus, forms a rich agricultural country. The northern and eastern regions are broken by an extensive complex of chains and peaks, whose rugged limestone flanks are clad at most with stunted shrubs and barely leave room for a few precarious mule-tracks. These heights often rise in the frontierranges of Tymphrestus, Oxia and Corax to more than 7000 ft.; the snow-capped pinnacle of Krona attains to 8240 ft. A few defiles pass through this barrier to the other side of the north Greek ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... japanned case, in which he presumably deposited the spoils of his skill. Freeman's shot had not only smashed and extinguished the lantern which served as bait for the game, but had also given the professor a disagreeable reminder that the tenure of human life is as precarious as that of the silly moth which allows itself to be lured to destruction by shining promises ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... the Floridas being at first the entire cession contemplated, even without the island of New Orleans. The chancellor, Robert R. Livingston, had been appointed as our minister to France at a time when the affairs of that country were in a somewhat precarious condition. Napoleon, then only 34 years old, was dictator, surrounded by enemies. President Jefferson wrote Livingston to make the best terms he could with Napoleon, either for the mouth of the river, site ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... frequently than elsewhere. In its chill and humid climate animal life is preserved with difficulty: half the goats died in one season, and sheep perish: vegetation, except in its coarsest or most massive forms, is stunted and precarious. The torrents, which pour down the mountains, mingle with decayed vegetable matter, and impregnated with its acids discolour the waters of the harbour; and the fish that approach the coast, often rise on the waves, and ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... to his country's service, to the thorough doing of the work given him to do, and only afterwards to the consequences of failure to his own fame and fortunes. At that moment the choice before him was either to follow out an indication, slight, but as far as it went clear, which, though confessedly precarious, promised to lead to a great and decisive result, such as he had lately urged upon the King of Naples; or to remain where he was, in an inglorious security, perfectly content, to use words of his own, that "each day passed without loss to our ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... "This precarious state and the approaching dissolution of his greatness are strikingly displayed in the dialogue of ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... blacks varies with the season of the year, and the supply is irregular and often precarious. Shellfish and fish are alone obtainable all the year round—collecting the former is exclusively a female occupation, but fishing is chiefly practised by the men. Fish are either killed with a plain ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... is so much the more fortunate and singular as our Government is far from being content with the mutinous spirit (as Bonaparte calls it) of the Government of Naples, which, considering its precarious and enfeebled state, with a French army in the heart of the kingdom, has resisted our attempts and insults with a courage and ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... are meagre and stunted; it scants them both in food and drink. Its miserliness is deep-set: artesian wells sunk a thousand feet through its dull grey sands bring up only a brackish yellow water; a precarious rye and barley ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... they are genuinely anxious to do their duty by the country. Now observe." (As a matter of fact he said "obsairrve.") "How is this energy and ability expended? About half of it—fifty per cent—goes in devising means to baffle the assaults of the Opposition and so retain a precarious hold on office. Sir, it's just ludicrous! Instead of concentrating their efforts upon—upon—I want a ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... indignant protests. He looked somewhat like a gigantic gull himself, his slim white figure outlined against the darkness of the cliff. He cried back to the startled birds reassuringly in their own language, but the commotion continued; and presently, finding precarious foothold on a narrow ledge halfway up, he stopped to wipe his forehead and laugh with merriment unfeigned. He was plainly in love with life—one in whose eyes all things were good, but yet who loved the hazard of ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... had negotiated that precarious succession of knobs and notches and accumulated a fresh set of bruises, "why don't you get busy? How much wiser are you now? Where's ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... was declared to be so precarious that sentries were stationed at every entrance of the castle, to prevent so much as the lightest footstep from being heard by the noble patient. He was passing a crisis, and, during the transition, not a soul must be admitted ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... them, to wade on frail stilts. A canoe would be tied to a toy jetty, and on the jetty a sad woman and several naked children would stand, with no show of emotion, to watch us go by. Behind them was the impenetrable foliage. I thought of the precarious tenure on earth of these brown folk with some sadness, especially as the day was going. The easy dominance of the wilderness, and man's intelligent morsel of life resisting it, was made plain when we came suddenly upon one of his little ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... thus seek in marriage—and the seeking is visible no less in the kitchen wench who aspires to the heart of a policeman than in the fashionable flapper who looks for a husband with a Rolls-Royce—is, by a curious twist of fate, one of the underlying causes of their precarious economic condition before marriage rescues them. In a civilization which lays its greatest stress upon an uninspired and almost automatic expertness, and offers its highest rewards to the more intricate forms thereof, they suffer the disadvantage of being less capable of it than men. Part of this ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... stable to the trucking stable, and from the trucking stable to the last remaining decrepit boarding and liveries of the remote West Side. The tragedy of the horse is the tragedy of all who loved them. Danny was one of these tragedies, but he still picked up a precarious living by doing odd jobs at Mulqueen's and acting as a veterinary when called upon, and he could generally be found either loafing in the smelly little office or smoking his T D pipe on the ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... purpose. 3. Trefoils; and 4, ordinary wall decoration continued into the spandril space, as in Plate XIII., above, from St. Pietro at Pistoja, and in Westminster Abbey. The Renaissance architects introduced spandril fillings composed of colossal human figures reclining on the sides of the arch, in precarious lassitude; but these cannot come under the ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... their instincts of abhorrence. The most important of the Scottish professorships—those which are fundamentally morticed to the moral institutions of the land—are upon the footing of Oxford tutorships, as regards emoluments; that is, they are not suffered to keep up a precarious mendicant existence, upon the alms of the students, or upon their fickle admirations. It is made imperative upon a candidate for admission into the ministry of the Scottish Kirk, that he shall show a certificate ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... or beast does not have to be instructed in her maternal duties: they are instinctive with her; it is of vital importance to the continuance of the species that they should be. If it were a matter of instruction or acquired knowledge, how precarious it would be! ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... lived the precarious life of a strolling player. He was poorly paid, and often reduced to abject poverty by lack of engagements, or by ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... the Protectorate trials there is little to say, other than has been said of many earlier cases. By far the larger number of those accused, as we have already pointed out, were charmers and enchanters, people who made a penny here and twopence there, but who had at best a precarious existence. Some of them, no doubt, traded on the fear they inspired in their communities and begged now a loaf of bread and now a pot of beer. They were the same people who, when begging and enchanting failed, resorted to stealing.[40] In one of the Yorkshire depositions ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... remnant of respect to the Church, made him shudder at the idea of seeing a contemptible agent invested with the same hat which he himself wore as a crown, and seated as high as himself, except as to the precarious position of minister. Speaking, therefore, in an undertone to the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... negroes love instead of fear him. And yet, notwithstanding the proof he has produced, the whole district of planters look upon him with suspicion, consider him rather a dangerous innovator, and say, that while his foolish system cannot be other than precarious to the welfare of the state, time will ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... Soloman is an old rogue, but he is not a fool. He cannot help seeing that the position of the king is precarious, and, were he to cause your arrest, he might get little thanks and no profit, while he would be incurring the risk of the vengeance of Charles, should he ever become master of the town. Did he have ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty
... his enemies would have agreed with him in this view; they would, indeed, have thought it extremely precarious for Laramie to be caught in any place he could not escape from unseen. But Laramie was temperamentally a gambler with fortune and he put aside the worries that occasionally weighed on his friends. Standing at his one small ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... house of worship in Providence, and at the end of almost a century "there had not existed in the whole colony more than eight or ten churches of any denomination, and these were mostly in a very feeble and precarious state."[107:1] ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... quoted, solemnly, openly and unforgettably declares the secret wishes of the militarists; and we may be surprised to consider how many safeguards of democracy, how many rights of free thought and free speech, how many of the precarious limitations of sweating and child-labour and wage-slavery have been quietly suppressed since the beginning of the war. But if war is ultimately unprofitable for the nation as a whole, it might be argued that Trade itself must ultimately be involved in the national loss. The answer is ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... none the less forcing itself upon the general intelligence that they are true, and that we must readjust our ideas to the new situation. This world of ours appears to be separated by a slight and precarious margin of safety from a most singular and unexpected danger. I will endeavour in this narrative, which reproduces the original document in its necessarily somewhat fragmentary form, to lay before the reader the whole of the facts up to date, prefacing my statement by saying that, ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... being under way again, Rex looked about for the rest of the train, but in vain. After a halt of a minute or so he decided that they were lost and would have to stay lost, the situation being too precarious, in this land of policemen, with one hundred and ninety pounds of noisy uncertainty on his hands, to risk any unnecessary movement. Billy kept every breath of time alive and varied. Within two minutes of the first adventure he managed to put his elbow clearly and forcibly into a small ...
— A Good Samaritan • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... urged, that a crew of fifteen or twenty men could not have lain hidden upon the coast, when so close a search took place immediately after the destruction of their vessel; or, at least, that if they had hid themselves in the woods. their boats must have been seen on the beach;—that in such precarious circumstances, and when a retreat must have seemed difficult, if not impossible, it was not to be thought that they would have all united to commit a useless murder, for the mere sake of revenge. Those who held this opinion, supposed, either that the boats of the lugger ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... was brought up before the magistrate the approach to the court was thronged. His friends, mostly ladies, were all eager, you see, to watch the dashing society man in so terrible a position. There was universal sympathy for Lady Arthur, who was in a very precarious state of health. Her worship of her worthless husband was well known; small wonder that his final and awful misdeed had practically broken her heart. The latest bulletin issued just after his arrest stated that her ladyship was not expected to live. She was then in a comatose condition, ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... would not have missed on any account. The leaning Tower is a curiosity in itself sufficient to induce a stranger to make a long journey to visit it. Here the King of Etruria lived and was hourly expected to set out for Leghorn. But his health, as it was believed, was in so precarious a State that it was sometimes reported that he would not go at all. The Queen, indeed, was in a very critical state, and were it not that her children, she being an Infanta of Spain, are entitled to a certain sum of money by no means small, provided they were born in Spain, it would ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... of possession, seeing that they are often difficult of attainment and always precarious, we must be moderate in their pursuit and make the most of such as fall to our lot. Contentment here is everything, and contentment is the result of an even balance between desire and fulfilment, the former being always in our power and the latter generally beyond our control. To such ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... called for frequent soaking. In midafternoon I passed a second village, as somnolent as the belly-gorged zopilotes that half-jumped, half-flew sluggishly out of the way as I advanced. Here was a bit of fairly flat and shaded going, with another precarious hammock-bridge, then an endless woods with occasional sharp stony descents to some brawling but most welcome stream, with stepping-stones or without. Thus far I had seen barely a human being all the day, but as the shades ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... and they allow them to have all the influence of reality. Whether they prove true or false, they are sources to the superstitious of unhappiness. With Mrs. S. there appeared to be an indefinable impression, which might have arisen from the precarious state of her health and from the fact that the period of her fifth confinement was rapidly hastening, and it was doubtful if she could endure the trials of such an occurrence in her weak and debilitated condition. But, ...
— Daughters of the Cross: or Woman's Mission • Daniel C. Eddy
... unfortunate accident clouded their happiness, and brought an end to their prosperity. In crossing Broadway at its most crowded part, the husband and father was run over by a loaded dray, and so seriously injured that he lived but a few hours. Then the precarious nature of their prosperity was found out. Mr. Hoffman had not saved anything, having always lived up to the extent of his income. It was obviously impossible for them to continue to live in their old home, paying ...
— Paul the Peddler - The Fortunes of a Young Street Merchant • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... the brandy and water logic had perfectly convinced me that this was far too precarious ground on which to conclude that the miracles of the New Testament had ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... answer. But she did not dare to equivocate as to her precarious state. And where the use, when a few hours would probably ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... Bolton walked in, ordered supper; a hot one was served up, and then the others all rushed in through the gap, after him, and eat and drank in spite of Brooks's teeth." A state of affairs which goes far to explain why the club was in a precarious condition. ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... trooper who, having been wounded and left behind in Glasgow, his term of service having expired, had on his recovery married the daughter of the woman who had nursed him. He was earning a somewhat precarious living by giving lessons in the use of the rapier, and in teaching German; and gladly accepted the offer to move out to Kilgowrie, where he was established in a cottage close to the house, where his wife aided in the housework. He became a companion of Fergus in his walks and rambles and, ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty
... conclusion, to say to you with equal frankness that, were it necessary, an army of one hundred thousand Americans would soon be among you, and that the United States, if forced to terminate by arms their differences with you, would not do it in an uncertain or precarious, or, still less, in a dishonorable manner. It would be an insult to the intelligent people of their country to doubt their knowledge of your power. The system of forming guerrilla parties to annoy us will, I assure you, produce only evil to this country ...
— General Scott • General Marcus J. Wright
... be farmed. At the same time, the urban population must have communications with the outside world, by which regular supplies can come in. This will make the settlers independent of wild life for necessary food; and wild life, in any case, would be too precarious if exploited in the usual way. The traders in wild-animal products, as well as the naturalists, sportsmen and tourists, are interested in keeping the rest of the country well stocked. So that, one way and another, the human and wild-animal life ...
— Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... its volume of ice and water, at the distance of a few feet from where we stood. The rock felt to me as though it vibrated, and a large mass did in fact lately give way, soon after a party had retired from the precarious stance. It is limestone, full of ugly fissures and rents. A narrow wooden staircase conducts adventurous travellers to the bottom of the Fall, where a sort of entrance is generally effected to a short distance under the sheet, and for which performance ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 583 - Volume 20, Number 583, Saturday, December 29, 1832 • Various
... husband in the heart of the world she means to conquer; she all but succeeds, she just fails. Her campaign and its untimely end are to be pictured; it is an interlude to be filled with stir and glitter, with the sense of the passage of a certain time, above all with intimations of insecurity and precarious fortune; and it is to lead (this it must do) to a scene of final and decisive climax. Such is the effect to be drawn from the matter that Thackeray has stored up—the whole hierarchy of the Crawleys, Steyne, Gaunt House, always with Becky in the midst and to the fore. Up to a point it is precisely ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... "the indispensable outlets for its own productions" only by attaching itself firmly to "the Atlantic side of the Union." "Any other tenure ... whether derived from its own separate strength, or from an apostate and unnatural connection with any foreign power, must be intrinsically precarious." And the admission of Tennessee as a State in the year 1796 may have been hastened by an ill-defined fear that the people of the West might not ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... be thus established. The basis of analogy on which Clifford sought to rear an inference of cosmical extent, was restricted to the one instance of mind as known upon one planet; and, therefore, it is hard to imagine a more precarious use of that precarious method which is called by logicians simple enumeration. Indeed, even for what it is worth, the inference may be pointed with quite as much effect in precisely the opposite direction. For we have seen how little ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... not wanton, because the village that had to be supplied with food was large, and, just previous to the hunt, they had been living on somewhat reduced allowance. Even the blackbirds, shot by the brown-bodied urchins before mentioned, had been thankfully put into the pot. Thus precarious is the supply of food among the Red-men, who on one day are starving, and the next ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne
... once more review our experience with the usurer. As an outcast he offers his support to other outcasts, and is in turn supported by them. The pawnbroker and the pickpocket are closely allied: without the pawnshop, pocketpicking would offer but a precarious living; without the picking of pockets, many pawnshops would find it impossible to meet expenses. The salary loan shark often works hand in glove with the professional gambler; each procures victims for ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... month of February, during my absence, Lady Cochrane, tired of the crowded villages occupied by the liberating army, undertook a journey into the interior, in the hope that change of air might prove advantageous to our infant child, which was in a precarious state of health. She performed the journey on horseback, under the intense heat of a vertical sun, across a desert, impeded by the precipitous beds of torrents which intersect the country in every direction. On her arrival at Quilca, she was most hospitably received ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... I am quite willing to tell you how things really are. I don't wish it to be spoken of, but it is a relief to trust some one. I saw Sir James Dawson when in town. He is the first oculist in England. He told me that my sight was in a precarious state, and that if matters turned out unfavorably it is possible, nay probable, that I may become quite blind. On the other hand, he gives me a prescription which he thinks and hopes will avert ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... however, of his incessant toil, Lamarck's position continued to be most precarious. He lived by his pen, as a publisher's hack, and it was with difficulty that he obtained even the poorly paid post of keeper of the king's cabinet of dried plants. Like most other naturalists he had thus to contend with incessant difficulties ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... particularly sensitive ones, and no doubt my somewhat precarious, wandering life had done much to sharpen them. At all events, I was able to hear that which did not reach the ears of other men less favoured in this regard, and now I caught a word or two spoken ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson |
