"Preternaturally" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and discover that when we have been in danger of being contented with moral failure we have been made ashamed and disgusted by it; that when we have been on the verge of yielding to temptation we have been strangely and almost preternaturally protected; that when sorrows have come which would have crushed our unaided strength we have experienced strange peace and have had undreamed-of strength; and that never for a moment have we found rest or peace except as they have come to us in hand with truth and right. A wider study shows ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... sand had far too hospitable a trick of holding on to you at every step to be to my liking. Besides, the sun, which had come out with summer insistence, chose that particular spot for its midday siesta, and lay there at full length, while the air was preternaturally still. It was a stupidly drowsy heat that gave no fillip ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... did; the issue of the combat being that the Valiant Soldier was slain by a preternaturally inadequate thrust from Eustacia, Jim, in his ardour for genuine histrionic art, coming down like a log upon the stone floor with force enough to dislocate his shoulder. Then, after more words from the Turkish Knight, rather too faintly delivered, and statements that he'd fight Saint George ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... from twelve times down to twice. (Hopeless, the only result being to render my mathematical powers acutely, preternaturally awake, so that I begin to estimate the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... dreams, and lived among his own radiant and shadowy creations. We need not, therefore, be surprised to find that, in the first place, his daughters ran wild, and neither liked nor understood their father; and that, in the second place, for the rendering of his thought he invented a system of preternaturally majestic diction, perfectly fitted for the utterance of his own conceptions, but, when divorced from those conceptions, so monstrously artificial in effect, that his imitators and followers, hoisting themselves on the Miltonic stilts, ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... marvellous brown driver, who seemed to be always going to perdition, but made the horses do apparently impossible things with absolute certainty; and the pretty tiny boy who came to help his uncle, and was so clever, and so preternaturally quiet, and so very small: then the road through the mountain passes, seven or eight feet wide, with a precipice above and below, up which the little horses scrambled; while big lizards, with green heads and chocolate bodies, looked pertly at us, and a big bright amber-coloured cobra, ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... up and listened. With preternaturally sharp senses she heard the movement of all the darkness that swirled outside. For a moment she lay still. Then she went to the window. She heard the sharp rain, and the deep running of water. She knew ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... her eye fell on little 'Lias, bent over his reading book. She forgot her arithmetic, she forgot where she was. She stared and stared, till Ellen, catching the direction of her eyes, looked and stared too. Little 'Lias was CLEAN, preternaturally, almost wetly clean. His face was clean and shining, his ears shone pink and fair, his hands were absolutely spotless, even his hay-colored hair was clean and, still damp, brushed flatly back till it shone in the sun. ...
— Understood Betsy • Dorothy Canfield
... towards a table on which her resurrected treasures were spread out to view, and Peggy dropped her chin with a preternaturally solemn expression, to avoid bursting into laughter. It was such a melancholy-looking bundle, and Mrs Asplin looked so proud of it, and it was so deliciously like the old vicarage way, to endeavour ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... the large room, and there was something so extraordinarily characteristic of her husband in those stooping shoulders, in the head hung a little forward, and in the preternaturally solemn voice, that Sheila had to bend a little over the bed to catch a glimpse of the sallow and keener face again. She sighed; and even on her own strained ear her sigh sounded almost like one ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... appearance most every day, and much the same ceremonies are gone through. For instance, there was a bead necklace—the light hollowed silver enamel—he wanted fourteen dollars for; he seemed rather glad finally to sell it for four, though you can't say he seemed glad; on the contrary, he seemed preternaturally gloomy and remarked that he and not we would eat bitterness because of this purchase. The funniest thing was once when, after getting sick of bargaining, we put the whole thing down and started to walk away. His movements and gestures would have made an actor celebrated—they are indescribable, ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey
... published Moments of Vision. These show a remarkable recovery of spirit, and an ingenuity never before excelled. With the passage of years Mr. Hardy, observing everything in the little world of Wessex, and forgetting nothing, has become almost preternaturally wise, and, if it may be said so, "knowing," with a sort of magic, like that of a wizard. He has learned to track the windings of the human heart with the familiarity of a gamekeeper who finds plenty of vermin in the woods, ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... time I had got beyond the nervous point, and had come round to perfect coolness and composure again, but preternaturally vigilant and keen. I was ready for any disclosures; not a sound was heard. In a few moments the trees alongshore were faintly visible. Every object put on the shape of a gigantic deer. A large rock looked just ready to bound away. ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... book I have endeavored to relate the story of a boy's early experiences in college life—a boy who was neither unnaturally good nor preternaturally bad, wholesome, earnest, impulsive, making just such mistakes as a normal boy would make, and yet earnest, sincere, and healthy. We all have known just such boys and are grateful that they are neither ...
— Winning His "W" - A Story of Freshman Year at College • Everett Titsworth Tomlinson
... inquiries concerning a small dog that, to judge by the prints in the road, had evidently followed the big, barefooted man who had fled from the Jeffrey precincts after the shooting. A rumor, too, was going the rounds that a detective, reputed preternaturally sharp, who had accompanied the sheriff to the scene of action, had examined these tracks in the road, and declared that the foot-print was neither that of a negro nor a tramp, but of a white man used to wearing shoes ...
— The Crucial Moment - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... molitur inepte, who never speaks vaguely, never wants a reason, and never loses sight of a reality, amply sustained. Here, then, is a local resource to the British tourist besides the imported one of the bull-dog. And it is remarkable that, except where the dogs are preternaturally audacious, a mere hint of the chermadion suffices. Late in our own experience too late for glory, we made the discovery that all dogs have a mysterious reverence for a trundling stone. It calls off attention from the human object, and strikes alarm into the caitiff's mind. He thinks the stone ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... expressionless, and he seemed very far away, untouched by the music. I almost doubted that he heard it. He made no remarks between whiles, betrayed no sign of approbation or displeasure. He seemed preternaturally serene, preternaturally remote. And while I watched him I wondered what his duties were. I had not seen him perform any. Mr. Pike had attended to the loading of the ship. Not until she was ready for sea had Captain West come on board. I had ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... floor of the piazza. A few birds, not yet thoroughly exhausted by the noonday heat, were chirping in the thick branches of the fruit-trees near, and the drowsy hum and chirp of insect life made such a sleepy undertone as could not fail to bring rest and quiet to any mind not preternaturally active. A more charming place could not have been devised, for a half-dreamy and lazy student of either sex to sit down in an easy chair with a pleasant book, read and muse until the flickering of the sunshine and the shadows on the floor began to be blended with the type ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... but all in vain. I have sat there, drenched by the salt sea-spray, and knew it not. I was called the little bookworm, the prodigy, the dream-girl, a name you have inherited, my darling Gabriella; and my father seemed proud of the reputation I had established. But while my imagination was preternaturally developed, my heart was slumbering, and my soul unconscious of life's ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... deeply because for them an idealized retrospect, and a retrospect besides being potently contrasted so deeply with the existing atmosphere, peaceful as if it had never known a storm—are stimulated preternaturally to those obstinate questionings which belong of necessity to a complex state of society, turning up vast phases of human suffering under all varieties, phases which, having issued from a chaos of agitation, carry with them too certain a promise ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... Committee had dealt kindly with Lightmark's Academy picture. When it was passed in review before these veterans, after a long procession of inanely smiling portraits, laboured, wooden landscapes, and preternaturally developed heroes, the expression of satiated boredom and damnation of draughts, which variously pervaded the little row of arbitrators, was for a moment dissipated. There was a movement of chairs, followed by an exchange of complimentary murmurs; and the picture was finally niched into a space which ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... experience of mankind. One class of dreams, which may be termed RETROSPECTIVE, is of frequent occurrence. These are characterized by the revival of associations long since forgotten. The faculty of Memory appears to be preternaturally exalted; the vail is withdrawn which obscured the vista of our past life; and the minutest events of childhood pass in vivid review before us. There can be no doubt that something analogous to this occurs ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... of the night I lay preternaturally awake, hearing the snoring and murmuring of my fellows in the mow ... hearing the horses as they crunched and whickered ... all the noises of the outside night came in at the open door of the mow. Even the hay began to annoy me as it ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... hearing distance, 'do not trouble to give so marvellous an exhibition for the benefit of this unworthy individual, who is the only observer of your illustrious dexterity! Indeed, your honourable condescension so fills this illiterate person with shame that his hearing is thereby preternaturally sharpened, and he can plainly distinguish many voices from beyond the Hoang Ho, crying for the Heaven-sent representative of the degraded Ti Hung to bring them more idols. Bend, therefore, your refined ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... a barge for summer waters, this peculiar ship I saw? It had a ruined dignity, a cumbrous grandeur, although its masts were shattered, and its sails rent. It hung preternaturally still upon the sea, as if tormented and exhausted by long driving and drifting. I saw no sailors, but a great Spanish ensign floated over, and waved, a funereal plume. I knew it then. The armada was long since ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... ululation. The women devoid of shawls had nothing around their necks to protect them from the cold, the dusky throats were exposed, and sometimes even the first hooks and eyes of the bodice were unnecessarily undone. The majority wore cheap earrings and black wigs with preternaturally polished hair; where there was no wig, the ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... all night on Tithes Bill. Not particularly lively. Towards midnight TANNER, preternaturally quiet since House met, suddenly woke up, and, a propos de bottes, moved to report progress. COURTNEY down on him like cartload of bricks; declined to put Motion, declaring it abuse of forms of House. This rather depressing. In good old times ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., February 7, 1891 • Various
... one—a' excellent time," said Joseph Poorgrass, straightening his back; for he, like some of the others, had a way of resting a while from his labour on such hot days for reasons preternaturally small; of which Cain Ball's advent on a week-day in his Sunday-clothes was one of the first magnitude. "Twas a bad leg allowed me to read the Pilgrim's Progress, and Mark Clark learnt All-Fours in ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... Hotel Bellevue. The royal party attended. The yodling was much praised, especially that of a good-looking young woman and her escort, a very tall man of cadaverous aspect, his shanks like the wooden stilts of the shepherds on the Bordeaux Landes. His face, preternaturally emaciated and fatigued, opened to emit an amazing yodel. When the Schuhplattltanz was reached he surprised the audience by an extraordinary exhibition. He threw his long legs about like billiard cues, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... star. The expectation was not fulfilled. The apparent shift of position of a star as viewed from opposite sides of the earth's orbit, from which the parallax might be estimated, is so extremely minute that it proved utterly inappreciable, even to the almost preternaturally acute vision of Herschel, with the aid of any instrumental means then at command. So the problem of star distance allured and eluded him to the end, and he died in 1822 without seeing it even in prospect of solution. His estimate of the minimum ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... finished dressing; consulting that witness moreover on this last opinion. WAS he looking preternaturally fit? There was something in it perhaps for Chad's wonderful eye, but he had felt himself for hours rather in pieces. Such a judgement, however, was after all but a contribution to his resolve; it testified unwittingly ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... face was hideously distorted; but in the course of a few minutes the convulsion ceased, and he began to recover his senses: his speech returned, and he soon rose, apparently well. During the struggle his strength was preternaturally augmented, and when it was over, he behaved with his usual firmness. "I conceive," says Colonel Stanhope, "that this fit was occasioned by over-excitement. The mind of Byron is like a volcano; it is full of fire, wrath, and combustibles, and when this matter comes to be ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... at the Yard this morning, and he told me he had come round to Bunner's view, that it was a case of revenge on the part of some American black-hand gang. So there's the end of the Manderson case. Holy, suffering Moses! What an ass a man can make of himself when he thinks he's being preternaturally clever!" He seized the bulky envelop from the table, and stuffed it into the heart of the fire. "There's for you, old friend! For want of you the world's course will not fail. But look here! It's getting late—nearly seven, and Cupples and I have an appointment ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... intuition. He limped through the thicket not unlike some awkward, shy quadrumane, stopping here and there to peer out through the openings over the marshes that lay beyond. His sight, hearing, and even the sense of smell had become preternaturally acute. It was the latter which suddenly arrested his steps with the odor of dried fish. It had a significance beyond the mere instincts of hunger—it indicated the contiguity of some Indian encampment. And as such—it meant danger, ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... state with regard to the world in which they lived. To see this we have only to picture to ourselves the condition of a man living in a savage, or only partially civilized state of society, with his mind preternaturally expanded to that of a Newton, and put into possession of the knowledge which he had on some of those subjects which the Bible touches on. How entirely out of harmony would he be with his fellow-men, and everything around him! and, how unable would he ...
— Thoughts on a Revelation • Samuel John Jerram
... who had been a friend of Sir Charles Abingdon, shook his head slowly. He was a tall, preternaturally thin Scotsman, clean-shaven, with shaggy dark brows and a most gloomy expression in his deep-set eyes. While the presence of his sepulchral figure seemed appropriate enough in that stricken house, Harley could not help thinking that it must have been far ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... picture of "St. Luke painting the Virgin." St. Luke has a monk's dress on, embroidered, however, smartly round the sleeves. The Virgin sits in an immense yellow-ochre halo, with her son in her arms. She looks preternaturally solemn; as does St. Luke, who is eying his paint-brush with an intense ominous mystical look. They call this Catholic art. There is nothing, my dear friend, more easy in life. First take your colors, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... existence of a restoring essence (or {physis}) penetrating through all creation; the agent which is constantly striving to preserve all things in their natural state, and to restore them when they are preternaturally deranged. In the management of this vis medicatrix naturae the art of the physician consisted. Attention, therefore, to regimen and diet was the principal remedy Hippocrates employed; nevertheless he did not ...
— Fathers of Biology • Charles McRae
... was lying in bed reading the Bible. When he was not getting into debt, or riding races, or playing polo, or loving Mrs. Avory, Toffy generally employed his spare moments in reading the Bible. He was a preternaturally grave young man, with large eyes and long eyelashes of which he was properly ashamed, being inclined to class them in his own mind with such physical disadvantages as red lips or curling hair. Miss Abingdon thought that he was generally misunderstood. ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... unconscious of a dull wrath revenging itself for many pin-pricks of Master Raoul's clever tongue. Endymion Westcote, like many pompous men, usually hurt somebody when he indulged in a joke, and for this cause, perhaps, had a nervous dislike of wit in others. Dull in taking a jest, but almost preternaturally clever in suspecting one, he had disliked Raoul's sallies in proportion as they puzzled him. The remembrance of them rankled, and this had ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... been turned loose to graze, under the guardianship of 'Ngulubi, the voorlouper, when the headman of the village, accompanied by some half a dozen minor dignitaries, and followed by ten women bearing baskets containing preternaturally skinny fowls, eggs, green mealie cobs, sugar cane, and calabashes of milk, emerged from the village and advanced upon the wagon. The men were unarmed, and the presence of the women with the baskets—the contents of which were of course a present to us—showed ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... enter it. I was more absorbed in that singular sensation of nightmare, such as one may feel equally when lost by land or by water, as if one's own position were all right, but the place looked for had somehow been preternaturally abolished out of the universe. At best, might not a man in the water lose all his power of direction, and so move in an endless circle until he sank exhausted? It required a deliberate and conscious effort to keep my brain quite cool. I have not the reputation of being of an ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... back in a minute—I can't hardly keep awake," he said. His voice, though feeble, was preternaturally clear. She heard every kind accent, every gentle tone even above the crackle of the fire without and the beat of the rain. "I think it's the limit," he went on. "I believe the tree got me—clear inside—but you must listen to everything ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... had in any sense of the word been her boy. His feelings for her had passed from the distrust of childhood to the lofty contempt of a schoolboy for all things preternaturally virtuous, finally settling down into the more tolerant contempt of manhood. The dead, however, have perforce to accept much affection which they scornfully ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... who sat beside her, the child woke with a start, and pushing back the mass of dishevelled hair revealed a sad little face, so thin that the cheek bones were painfully prominent, and pale to ghastliness. A pair of magnificent, dark brown eyes, with heavy sweeping lashes, looked preternaturally large in her woe-begone little countenance, and at this moment were filled with wondering admiration, mingled with fierce covetousness, as she stared at Serafina's mock jewels—and more especially at Isabelle's row ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... knew that Sally, his elder sister,—her own intimate friend,—had persisted in a correspondence with her brother against her father's wishes. And that, perhaps, was in his favor. At least, he had a good mouth and honest eyes. His neck, his hands, and his legs were preternaturally thin, and she wondered if the gap between his collar and his throat told a truthful story of South African fever. If so, the change had been appalling. However, neither bullets nor fever had reduced ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... his eyes, mournful as she had never known any eyes to be. He had taken off his hat and held it in his hand, and a light wind blew his thick hair about his forehead and temples. She, looking at him with senses preternaturally ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... producing larger bunches of flowers, and in having larger, rounder, and more heart-shaped leaves; Mr. AITON regards this as a variety of the crassifolia, we are inclined to consider it as a species under the name of cordifolia. The parts of fructification in the crassifolia are apt to be preternaturally increased. ...
— The Botanical Magazine, Vol. 6 - Or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... exceedingly keen competition. Besides fruit, flowers, and vegetables, the exhibits include such produce as butter and eggs, and my wife was very successful with these, but on one occasion was rather disappointed to find a beautiful dish of Langshan eggs, almost preternaturally brown and rich-looking, disqualified. The judges were not acquainted with the peculiarities of the breed—then a new one—and the reason for disqualification, as we afterwards discovered, was "artificially coloured." ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... the opening of the door. Mr. Fane-Smith started and almost trembled when, on turning round, he saw Erica. She was pale, but preternaturally calm looking, however, they all felt, as if in her father's death, she had received her ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... represent the front and back walls of an anther lobe, or rather of that portion of the anther which, under ordinary circumstances, produces pollen. In the malformed flowers no pollen is formed, at least in the more complete states of the malformation, but the walls of the anther lobe become preternaturally enlarged, and petaloid in texture and appearance. This change occurs in some semi-double rhododendrons and azaleas, in crocuses, and in a species of violet found at Mentone by ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... and filed decorously out the door with preternaturally solemn faces that broke into smiles the moment the ...
— Grace Harlowe's Second Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... Bostock looked uneasily first at Adam Tellwright, tall, spick and span, self-confident, clever, shining, with his indubitable virtues mainly on the outside. If ever any man of thirty-two in all this world was eligible, Adam Tellwright was. Decidedly he had a reputation for preternaturally keen smartness in trade, but in trade that cannot be called a defect; on the contrary, if a man has virtues, you cannot precisely quarrel with him because they happen to be on the outside; the principal thing is to have virtues. And then Mr Bostock looked uneasily at Ralph Martin, ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... just before we left that my wandering attention was directed toward the scene to which I alluded in my first paragraph. The greater number of the children were shouting at play in a neighboring field. The preternaturally happy invalid was smiling at the lovely woods beyond the terrace, woods where little princes had frolicked, and older princes had wooed and won. Mr. Jaccaci was still petting the beautiful little boy who looked ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... almost as pale as Eva's own, but pale brown, the tint of rich ivory. His eyes were preternaturally bright. And they never glanced my way, but flew straight to Eva, and rested on her very humbly and sadly, as her two hands gripped the arms of the chair, and she leant forward ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... parlor once more. On the other side of the grating, dim figures were moving. It was impossible to distinguish whether, behind the thick bars, three or five or twenty veiled women were flitting to and fro like startled ghosts. Indeed, none but Casanova, with eyes preternaturally acute to pierce the darkness, could discern that they ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... the real pleasures of all men in nature are worldly and sensual, if we judge from their practice; I say all men in nature, because devout Christians, who alone are to be excepted here, being regenerated and preternaturally assisted by the divine grace, cannot be said to be ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... the letter of a woman who has had more affaires than any man in London. She is preternaturally clever, my dear—Windlehurst would tell you so. The brilliant and unscrupulous, the beautiful and the bad, have a great advantage in this world. Eglington was curious, that is all. It is in the breed of the Eglingtons to go exploring, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... by this time come to the ass, the boy enfolded in his arms the creature's fuzzy head and gently stroked its preternaturally long ears. And the ass, for its part, responded to the caress by rubbing its head against the boy's breast and by most energetically twitching its scrag of a tail. Thus for a little time these friends manifested for each other their ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... self-righteousness latent in human nature comes out, or used to, in her earlier days, in the evening revelations. Here is a specimen, taken at random from the first month's sheaf. She and the Imp had come to my room for their devotions, preternaturally pious, both of them, though quite unregenerate. It was the Elf's turn to begin. She settled herself circumspectly, sighed ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... travel—that he was paying attention to a New York belle and heiress. Mrs. Hunter was soon possessed of these momentous rumors, and when, at last, weary from her morning labors, Mara sat down to their simple dinner, she saw that her aunt was preternaturally solemn and dignified. The girl expressed no curiosity, for she knew that whatever burdened her aunt's mind would soon be revealed with endless detail ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... finest feature of the banquet was, that nobody was half so much amazed by everything as John himself, who in his high delight was constantly bursting into fits of laughter, and then endeavouring to appear preternaturally solemn, lest the waiters should conceive he wasn't used to it. Some of the things they brought him to carve, were such outrageous practical jokes, though, that it was impossible to stand it; and when Tom Pinch insisted, in spite of the deferential advice of an attendant, ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... vanished in it as suddenly as she had appeared. He stared and listened; listened for some sound, but the silence round him was absolute—as though he had in a moment grown completely deaf as well as dim-eyed. Then his hearing returned, preternaturally sharp. He heard the patter of a rain-shower on the window panes behind the lowered blinds, and below, far below, in the artificial abyss of the square, the deadened roll of wheels and the splashy trotting ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... turning once or twice in the creaky old wooden bed. She was glad to feel that, unknown to him, she was his guardian angel. She began to think about the future, and almost to forget Andy and the possible and very great peril of the present, when, shortly before the hour of one, all her senses were preternaturally excited by the sound of a footfall. It was a very soft footfall—the noise made by a bare foot. Nora heard it just where the shadow was deepest. She stood up now; she knew that, from her present position, the ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... Annie Donohue's baby!" cried Celia, and shrieked the information into Lanse's ear. His expression of disfavour relaxed a degree, but he still looked preternaturally severe. Celia hobbled over to the baby, and sitting down in a rocking-chair, held out her arms. But Charlotte shook her head and motioned imperatively toward ...
— The Second Violin • Grace S. Richmond
... sense of hearing preternaturally sharpened, these poor men, who had given themselves up for lost, also listened; those who had lain down to die rising up and listening with every nerve acutely strained to catch the faintest sound. ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... of inquiry from all around, then bows and gestures and murmurs of disavowal. I alone remained irresponsive, for at that very moment every fibre of my being was strained to nervous rigidity. My senses were preternaturally at work. The marble column against which I was leaning with seeming carelessness, vibrated under my hand. Within its circular depths I could see Abdul descending stealthily and slowly, his one free arm pressing a silken bundle to his breast. Even ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... had closed the door behind her that it struck her that when she came into the room both the princess and Frau von Treumann were looking preternaturally bland. ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... bitter end," Mitchy loyally responded. "For how CAN, how need, a woman be 'proud' who's so preternaturally clever? Pride's only for use when wit breaks down—it's the train the cyclist takes when his tire's deflated. When that happens to YOUR tire, Mrs. Brook, you'll let me know. And you do make me wonder just now," he confessed, "why you're taking such particular precautions and throwing out such ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... achievement of the task is not preceded by any failure on the part of the hero, and the advantages derived therefrom are personal and spiritual, though we are incidentally told that he heals the Fisher King's father, and also the old King, Mordrains, whose life has been preternaturally prolonged. In the case of this latter it is to be noted that the mere fact of Galahad's being the predestined winner suffices, and the healing takes place before the Quest is ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... I wondered if some fiend were lurking by my side, who kept saying the words over and over in my ear. With that indescribable mixture of dulled and preternaturally sharpened sense which often marks the first moments of such distress, I walked slowly to my room, and in a short time had made all the necessary preparation for leaving home. I felt like a thief as I stole slowly down the stairs, with my travelling-bag in my hand. At ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... making the room and bed a little more like what they should be by means of the articles they had brought. Clara wonderingly saw that her little closet was stocked with supplies for days to come. Her mother's preternaturally brilliant eyes followed every movement, also, with a dumb but eager questioning. Tired Belle in the meantime had drawn a chair to the table, and with her head resting on her arms had dropped ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... wishing to pay for his coffee, he showed a face sufficiently remarkable to deserve description. The prominent feature was the enormous, beak-like nose—the nose of the fanatic which is not to be mistaken amongst thousands, with its high, arching bridge, its wide, sensitive nostrils, and its preternaturally sharp, down-turning point. But the rest of the priest's face was not in keeping with what was most striking in it. The forehead was not powerful, narrow, prominent—but rather, broad and imaginative. The chin was ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... he called himself upon the stage, was quite unlike his sister. He was short and plump, with a preternaturally solemn face, contradicted by small twinkling eyes. He motioned Joan to a chair and told her to keep quiet and ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... time her ear seemed preternaturally attuned to that rising and waning sound without her chamber. It seemed to come toward the door, pass it, move lightly away, and then turn and repass again. ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe
... afternoon in Lichfield, where upon Regis Avenue was to be met, in the afternoon, everyone worth meeting in Lichfield; and Stella drove there on fine afternoons, under the protection of a trim and preternaturally grave tiger; and the ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... changes, and as she walked down Regent Street and Bond Street she had stopped at the windows of more than one shop bearing the sign "Ladies' Tailor and Habit-Maker," and had looked at the tautly attired, preternaturally slim models, her large, honest hazel eyes wearing an anxious expression. She was trying to discover where seams were to be placed and how gathers were to be hung; or if there were to be gathers at all; or if one had to be bereft of every seam in a style so unrelenting ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... not move, but stood as if carved out of a block of hardened putty by the hand of an artistic drill-sergeant; listening, though, with his ears, which looked preternaturally large from the closeness of the regimental barber's efforts, and seeming to gape. Then he left his rifle in a corner, and ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... an instant his heart stood still with horror, then he sprang down into the flood. The water boiled up nearly to his arm-pits. With his feet he felt the great timber, fastened in the dike, on which his boy had been sitting. He peered through the dark, with straining eyes grown preternaturally keen. He could see nothing on the wide, swirling surface save two or three dark objects, far out in the marsh. These he recognized at once as his fish-tubs gone afloat. Then he ran up the dike toward the Point. "Surely," he groaned ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... sat down and gazed at a cartoon which represented a thin man with a preternaturally pale face, legs like sticks, and drooping hands full of toys—himself. Beneath it was written, ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... first day, and the second was very like it, so that it is not necessary to describe it in detail in order to produce an impression of profound dulness in the reader's mind. Lushington's hair continued to be as preternaturally smooth as before, his beard was as glossy and his complexion as blooming and child-like, and yet the look of pain that Margaret had seen in his face was there most of the time during those ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... aspect of the Roman intellect it is but justice that we should turn away to contemplate those situations in which that same intellect showed itself preternaturally strong. To face a sudden danger by a corresponding weight of sudden counsel or sudden evasion—that was a privilege essentially lodged in the Roman mind. But in every nation some minds much more than others are ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... letter!" I panted and plained, almost beside myself. I groped on the floor, wringing my hands wildly. Cruel, cruel doom! To have my bit of comfort preternaturally snatched from me, ere I had ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... moment that he had opened the trap, had been swift and as nearly noiseless as the difficulties of the task had permitted. Nevertheless, they had not been so silent as to escape the attention of the preternaturally acute Sin Sin Wa. Kerry found the place occupied only by the aged Sam Tuk. A bright fire burned in the stove, and a ship's lantern stood upon the counter. Dense chemical fumes rendered the air difficult to breathe; but the shelves, once laden with ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... these into species, even while for the present we hold the hypothesis of a further evolution in cool suspense or in grave suspicion. In respect to very many questions a wise man's mind rests long in a state neither of belief nor unbelief. But your intellectually short-sighted people are apt to be preternaturally clear-sighted, and to find their way very plain to positive conclusions upon one side or the other of every ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... correctness. This was not the case with a rather famous inscription made by a Frenchman. Monsieur Girardin, who inscribed a stone at Ermenonville in memory of our once famous poet Shenstone, was not stupid, but rather preternaturally clever. This inscription is above all praise for the remarkable manner in which the rhymes appeal to the eye instead of the ear; and moreover it shows how world-famous was that charming garden at Leasowes, near Halesowen, which is now ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... their stilt-like posts, and the ladies had spent some time in watching a quaint little native mother making efforts to at once ply the queer sticks which helped her in a strange sort of mat-weaving, and keep an eye upon a preternaturally solemn-faced infant, who, despite his gravity, seemed capable of quite as much mischief as the average enfant terrible ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... in tones of Prussian blue, but we must really think of him as of a man timid, and at the same time preternaturally wide-awake, who was determined at all risks not to be taken at a disadvantage. When he was an old man, when much communing with Mme de La Fayette had allayed his suspicion of mankind, La Rochefoucauld said to Mlle de Scudery, "I hope that clemency will come into fashion, and that we shall see ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... her appearance had given her a shock. She was so small and sallow and insignificant, and her short curly hair was parted on one side like a boy, and cropped quite closely behind. The baby was small and brown too, a tiny edition of herself, and they both had dark eyes that looked preternaturally solemn; Babs, indeed, wore an injured expression, and a puckered look of anguish spoke of the pangs of hunger and the delinquencies ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... to the church Sunday-school had already begun. There was Lovell Barlow looking preternaturally stiff in his best clothes, sitting with a class of young men. He saw us when we came in, and gave me a look of deep meaning. It was the same expression—as though there was some solemn, mutual understanding between ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various
... confidence in the words of Seth Moore. He could neither see him nor hear him, but he was sure that somebody besides himself was in the wood. Once more the soul and spirit of his great ancestor were poured into him, and for the moment he, too, was the wilderness rover, endowed with nerves preternaturally acute. ...
— The Scouts of Stonewall • Joseph A. Altsheler
... chokes, then coughs solemnly, and finally, lowering the fan, shows himself preternaturally grave, as a set-off ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... Doctor said with all the assurance and cheerfulness he could command. But she instinctively detected a slight shade of anxiety or uncertainty in his tone. The physician must be a consummate actor who can deceive a patient whose perceptions are preternaturally acute as were Feodora's. He saw that he had ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... Von Ritz became preternaturally active, masking every movement under his accustomed seeming of imperturbable calm. At last he brought his report to the King. "It signifies one thing which I had not suspected. Among the men whom I thought I could most implicitly trust, there is treason. How deep that cancer goes ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... very much awake. In fact, his sense of wakefulness seemed almost superhuman. His faculties were preternaturally alert, and he had a feeling of what might properly be called mental extension—it was not exaltation—- which seemed to widen his mental vision enormously. Problems which had puzzled him to desperation suddenly became as obvious ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... she marshalled her party for a little Canadian giro. There were her father and mother; and the inseparable twins, Gladys and Victoria, one of whom always laughed when the other was amused; and the three preternaturally important brothers, representing the triple-x output of Harvard, Yale and Columbia; and Aunt Euphemia van Benschoten, who had inherited the van Benschoten nose, a block on Fifth Avenue, and a pew in St. Mark's church (two of which possessions she was entitled ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... too young to be sent to school by day, or to remain in the family sitting-room at night, as her mother followed the good, healthy rule of early to bed and early to rise, seemed thrown by fate upon Miss Thusa's miraculous resources for entertainment and instruction. Thus her imagination became preternaturally developed, while the germs of reason and judgment lay latent ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... he, fiercely. It was impossible to resist; and Abel and Gabriel moved slowly toward the door. The former was furious at finding himself doomed in company with Gabriel. But he betrayed nothing. He was preternaturally calm. Hope, dismayed and pale, stood looking on, but saying nothing. Gabriel went quietly out of the room. Abel turned to the door, and bowed gravely ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... passion of the moment. With a mighty effort, a chattering scream and a preliminary downward cast, he impels himself with the ardour of flight—almost vertically—up above the level of the tree-tops. Then, after a momentary, thrilling pause, with a gush of twittering commotion and stiffened wings preternaturally extended over the back and flattened together into a single rigid fin, drops—a feathered black bolt from the blue—almost to the ground, swoops up to a resting-place, and with bowing head and jerking tail ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... answered. "What I was afraid of was that you would turn him out of doors, on sight, and so I tried to put in a good word for him. After this when I want you to board people, I'll ask you. I am sorry for your suffering. I suppose I have mostly lost my smell for bores; but yours is preternaturally keen. I shall begin to be afraid I bore you. (How ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... my father, and now my brother, now Mrs. Filmore or her husband, and now our German courier, whose stream of thought rushed upon me like a ringing in the ears not to be got rid of, though it allowed my own impulses and ideas to continue their uninterrupted course. It was like a preternaturally heightened sense of hearing, making audible to one a roar of sound where others find perfect stillness. The weariness and disgust of this involuntary intrusion into other souls was counteracted only by my ignorance of Bertha, and my growing passion for her; a passion enormously stimulated, ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... the pack-horse bell brought the men to their feet and they filed across to the house, a preternaturally silent aggregation that confirmed Ma Bailey's suspicion that ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... face was painfully thin, his eyes preternaturally bright. He spoke faintly, but his mind ...
— Phil the Fiddler • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... not go! Waiting is the only safe thing. Alessandro said, to wait here. He will come." The word "Alessandro" was plain. Yes, Alessandro had said, wait; Carmena was right. She would obey, but it was a fearful ordeal. It was strange how Ramona, who felt herself preternaturally brave, afraid of nothing, so long as Alessandro was by her side, became timorous and wretched the instant he was lost to her sight. When she first heard his steps coming, she quivered with terror lest they might not be his. ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... diagrams made roughly, and seen to grow under the lecturer's hand. In this manner you, at any rate, insure the co-operation of the student to a certain extent. He cannot leave the lecture-room entirely empty if the taking of notes is enforced; and a student must be preternaturally dull and mechanical, if he can take notes and hear them properly explained, and yet ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... down in my bed and reviewed the day, it seemed like a month of wonders. Uncle Silas was always before me; the voice so silvery for an old man—so preternaturally soft; the manners so sweet, so gentle; the aspect, smiling, suffering, spectral. It was no longer a shadow; I had now seen him in the flesh. But, after all, was he more than a shadow to me? When I closed my eyes I saw him before me still, in necromantic black, ashy with a pallor ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... Seven preternaturally long faces at this point started up like the Seven-sleepers. The Consistorial Councillor, a man still young but celebrated throughout all Germany for his oral and printed sermons, considered himself the one most insulted by such taunts. From the Alsatian Flitte there escaped an oath accompanied ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... time of year, and the exposed situation of the house, the night was almost preternaturally quiet. Throughout the vast open country all round us, not even a breath of air could be heard. The night-birds were away, or were silent at the time. But one sound was audible, when we stood still and listened—the cool ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... in her arms she bore a bundle of white linen, and that her form was singularly attenuated. So preternaturally thin and flexible was Elfride at this moment, that she appeared to bend under the light blows of the rain-shafts, as they struck into her sides and bosom, and splintered into spray on her face. There is nothing like a thorough drenching for reducing the protuberances of ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... is characteristic (Fig. 200). The enormous dome of the skull surmounts a puny and preternaturally old face; the eyes are pushed downwards and forwards by the pressure on the orbital plates, and the eyebrows are displaced upwards. The head rolls helplessly from side to side; the child moans and cries a great deal; and vomiting is often a prominent symptom. In most cases the intelligence ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... arm as she came out of the meeting-house the next Sunday, Ephraim's boys, preternaturally smooth of hair and shining of face, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... one very small room, which served him for bed and sitting room, in a small cottage upon the outskirts of the little secluded town of Briarwood. He looked extremely ill; his beautiful countenance was preternaturally pale; his large eyes far too bright and large; his form attenuated; and his voice so faint, husky, and low that it was with difficulty he could make himself heard, at least for any length ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... left the Marylebone Road that night it was nearly ten o'clock. He was quite sober, and looked preternaturally grave as he opened the little gate and stepped out into the frost-bound street. In the lighted aperture of the doorway behind him Cuckoo stood like a shadow half revealed peeping after him, and he turned and waved his hand to her. Then he walked away slowly, ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... The ticking of the little Swiss clock, the joyous warble of the thrushes, the soft rustle of the trees sounding preternaturally loud. Beatrix Stuart sat white to the lips, with anger, mortification, amaze, disappointment. Then she covered her face with her hands, and burst into a vehement flood ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... emerged, and snorted loudly, as though resenting the prospect of having to drag his additional weight back to the town. The driver sat motionless on the box, watching the caperings of the tipsy tin-miners through the half-open door: a melancholy death'shead of a man, with a preternaturally long white face, and a figure shrouded in a dark cloak, looking as though he might be Death itself, waiting for the carousers to drop dead of apoplexy before carrying them off in his funereal equipage. In reply to Barrant's question he informed him that the vehicle was destined for Penzance, ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... next day there called at Butler's office a long, preternaturally solemn man of noticeable height and angularity, dark-haired, dark-eyed, sallow, with a face that was long and leathery, and particularly hawk-like, who talked with Butler for over an hour and then departed. That evening ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... plowing; where we could hire a yoke of oxen if needed; where, in the proper season, we could buy a cow. He introduced me to a man whose specialty was cutting brush, because he had heavy, stooped shoulders and preternaturally long, powerful arms—a sort of anthropoid specimen who wielded a keen one-handed ax that cut a sizable sapling clean through at one stroke. He produced a carpenter properly qualified for repairs on ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... way of respect, and, however angry passions might rise, however turbulent the scene, he would never address it looking upon it with the naked eye. As his eye-glass was constantly tumbling out, and as search for it was preternaturally deliberate, it played an appreciable part in the prolongation of ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... a motherly interest in their affairs; and a melancholy old Frenchman blessed her with the enthusiasm of his nation, because she put a posy in the button-hole of his rusty coat, and never failed to smile and bow as he passed by. Yet Debby was no Edgworth heroine preternaturally prudent, wise, and untemptable; she had a fine crop of piques, vanities, and dislikes growing up under this new style of cultivation. She loved admiration, enjoyed her purple and fine linen, hid new-born envy, disappointed hope, and wounded pride behind a smiling face, ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... the "Arabian Nights." The method of allowing a number of persons consecutively to carry on the plot is very attractive, since it offers a way of introducing a personally interested narrator without making him preternaturally wise; and it also affords opportunity for the author to exhibit his skill in viewing events from all sides and through the minds of several very different persons. It is, however, open to most of the first person objections, and it is liable to produce a disjointed narrative; ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... had come round to Bunner's view, that it was a case of revenge on the part of some American black-hand gang. So there's the end of the Manderson case. Holy, suffering Moses! What an ass a man can make of himself when he thinks he's being preternaturally clever!' He seized the bulky envelope from the table and stuffed it into the heart of the fire. 'There's for you, old friend! For want of you the world's course will not fail. But look here! It's getting late—nearly seven, and Cupples ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... years of age, clean-shaved, with smooth iron-gray hair and bushy eyebrows, from beneath which shone a pair of preternaturally bright blue eyes. His face was of a strong, even, healthy red; he was stout, but rather thick and massive than corpulent; his hands were of the square type, with thick straight fingers and large nails, the great blue veins showing strongly through the white skin. He was dressed ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... bring carpet-bags and strange-looking packages of all sizes, and, to my great inconvenience, keep lifting up the foot-board, to deposit them in the "front boot." A solemn-looking man, whose nose is preternaturally red, holds carefully a silver-mounted whip. Passengers arrive, and climb to the roof of the coach, before and behind, until we are "full outside." Then the guard comes with a list, carefully checks off all our names, and retires to the booking office, from which ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... which she was the most conspicuous object, seemed to vanish from her eyes, or, at least, glimmered indistinctly before them, like a mass of imperfectly shaped and spectral images. Her mind, and especially her memory, was preternaturally active, and kept bringing up other scenes than this roughly hewn street of a little town, on the edge of the western wilderness: other faces than were lowering upon her from beneath the brims of those steeple-crowned hats. Reminiscences, the most trifling and immaterial, passages of infancy and ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... human intercourse." I do not think that Dr. Crothers could have known a Penguin Person when he wrote that. The Penguin Person is not a wit, there is no barb to his shafts of fun, no uneasiness from his preternatural cleverness, for he is not preternaturally clever. You never feel unable to cope with him, you never feel your mind keyed to an unusual alertness to follow him; you feel, indeed, a sense of comforting superiority, for, after all, you do take the world ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... among men, leads them to judge of what they do not know, and not to judge of what they do know. They, as St. Jude declares, blaspheme in what they know not, and corrupt themselves in what they know.[2] They are blind to what passes in their own homes, but preternaturally clear-sighted to all happening ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... whose intuitive powers have been preternaturally sharpened by a long course of sensation novels will probably leap to the conclusion that Batushka was a mysterious individual, very different from what he seemed—either the illegitimate son of some great ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... abundant measure of glory, though painfully earned; every body recollects the sort of electric effect produced upon this town the moment the news now under consideration arrived; the funds were raised preternaturally; one cannot indeed on looking back, account for it, how the omnium should have been up to twenty-eight at that time; there was a considerable elevation beyond that price during the course of that day; it rose to thirty and ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney
... their glasses in their hands. 'Michael Slavin, a' promised the lad a'd bear ye nae ill wull, but juist leave ye tae the Almichty; an' I want tae tell ye that a'm keepin' ma wur-r-d. But'—and here he raised his hand, and his voice became preternaturally solemn—'his bluid is upon yer han's. Do ye no' ...
— Black Rock • Ralph Connor
... possessed by a demon. His ravings, his narratives, were eagerly credited; and they were usually full of infernal visions, diabolical interviews, encounters with apparitions, and every thing that would naturally arise in a deranged and preternaturally sensitive mind from the chief conceptions then current concerning the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... advise you all to be preternaturally good and quiet all day," she said, looking back from the doorway. "That would have most effect with him, and he is going to be at ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... have been dozing. I am very weak, and oh! so miserable, so miserable and tired—tired. The rustle of the paper, tries my brain. My hearing seems preternaturally sharp. I will sit ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... aboard the English ship, and in the waist of her he had stood for a moment face to face with an old acquaintance—our chronicler, Lord Henry Goade. I imagine the florid countenance of the Queen's Lieutenant wearing a preternaturally grave expression, his eyes forbidding as they rested upon the renegade. I know—from Lord Henry's own pen—that no word had passed between them during those brief moments before Sakr-el-Bahr was hurried away by ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... The poor youth is become altogether too preternaturally dignified, too confounded sober, solemn and sedate for this ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... began to close over all the brightness of that long fatiguing day. The evening of the wedding, with its sense already of remoteness to the great event of the morning so much prepared for and looked forward to—with the atmosphere so dead and preternaturally silent which has tingled with so much emotion, with the inevitable reaction after the excitement—nothing could ever make this moment a cheerful one. It is something more than the disappearance of a member of the family, it is the end of ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... past, the present, and the future, before Hubert had uttered the last word of his whisper. He turned his eyes, with a very new and singular sensation, upon the quondam count, and found that gentlemen looking very hard at him, with, a preternaturally grave expression of countenance. Sir Norman knew well as anybody the varying moods of his royal countship, and, notwithstanding his general good nature, it was not safe to trifle with him at all times; so he repressed every outward sign of emotion whatever, and resolved to treat ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... of several Persons in the Neighbourhood, the Indictment being drawn up, according to the Form in such Cases usual. And pleading, Not Guilty, there were brought in several persons, who had long undergone many kinds of Miseries, which were preternaturally inflicted, and generally ascribed unto an horrible Witchcraft. There was little occasion to prove the Witchcraft, it being evident and notorious to all beholders. Now to fix the Witchcraft on the Prisoner at the Bar, the first thing used, was the ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... urchin, who might have been about thirteen years of age, became preternaturally grave all of a sudden, and, looking up earnestly in his questioner's face, said, "Really, Henry, you are becoming unreasonable in your old age, to ask me to give you a reasonable account of a thing, and at the ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... tobacco smoke, the room became intolerably hot, the level of the wine grew steadily lower in the decanters, and the boy's face took a strained, quivering look, his pallour increased, his dark, wide-opened eyes seemed preternaturally large. ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... limbs were somewhat chilled by the wetting they had received, but that troubled him very little, his whole thoughts, naturally, being centered upon the one of getting away from the Apaches. It seemed to him that his senses were preternaturally sharpened, and the rustling of a fallen leaf startled him into the belief that one of the redskins was crawling out upon the trunk; but a full half hour passed without presenting anything of a tangible nature, and hope became very strong in ...
— Through Apache Lands • R. H. Jayne
... sir; so you're Mr. Fairlegh, sir, our new young gent, sir?" (here the ludicrous expression predominated); "hope you'll be comfortable, sir" (here he nearly burst into a laugh); "show you into master's study, sir, directly" (here he became preternaturally grave again); and, opening the study door, ushered me into the presence of the ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... exclusion of all others, it would be, that the great want which mankind labors under at this present period is sleep. The world should recline its vast head on the first convenient pillow and take an age-long nap. It has gone distracted through a morbid activity, and, while preternaturally wide awake, is nevertheless tormented by visions that seem real to it now, but would assume their true aspect and character were all things once set right by an interval of sound repose. This is the only ...
— The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... had departed in the interval) a delicate-looking young woman, plain and poor, a widow evidently from the style of her shabby mourning and sad expression of face, bearing in her arms a weird and sickly-looking child, evidently a sufferer from spinal disease—an infant as to size, but preternaturally old ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... quite cheerful again when Aunt Chloe returned to clear the table, especially Jack, who was in the best spirits, with preternaturally bright eyes and a somewhat rare color on his cheeks. Aunt Chloe, who had noticed that his breathing was hurried at times, watched him narrowly, and when later he slipped from the room, followed him into the passage. He was leaning against ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... the wonder grow. A sound as of music first attracted his attention; and as he looked in at the window he saw the Duchess sitting at the feet of a real gipsy-queen: her head upturned—her whole being expanding—as the gipsy's hands waved over her, and the gipsy's eyes, preternaturally dilated, poured their floods of life into her own. Then the music broke up into words, and he knew what hope and promise that fainting spirit was drinking in: for he heard what the gipsy said. She was telling the young Duchess that she was ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... expanse of placid politeness. I knew just where the radiance, awakened by the luscious, swelling, crimson globes, faded into doubt, settled into certainty, glared into perplexity, fired into rage. I saw the grimace, suppressed as soon as begun, but not less patent to my preternaturally keen eyes. No one deceived me by being suddenly seized with admiration of a view. I knew it was only to relieve his nerves by making ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... the study of mythology or human origins. It is necessary to cease to be a man in order to do justice to a microbe; it is not necessary to cease to be a man in order to do justice to men. That same suppression of sympathies, that same waving away of intuitions or guess-work which make a man preternaturally clever in dealing with the stomach of a spider, will make him preternaturally stupid in dealing with the heart of man. He is making himself inhuman in order to understand humanity. An ignorance of the other world is boasted by many men of ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... been with me in my several meetings with the man who penned that message I leave to adjudge if it be the letter of a madman bent upon self-destruction by strange means, or the gibe of a preternaturally clever scientist and the most elusive being ever born of the land ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... just sat down to our evening meal, and were telling Peter all about our two great finds of the afternoon, when our guest, whose long and solitary life as a hunter had made his hearing preternaturally sharp, straightened himself in his chair, and holding up ...
— The Boys of Crawford's Basin - The Story of a Mountain Ranch in the Early Days of Colorado • Sidford F. Hamp
... flashed over the old gentleman's rosy face; then he became solemn, preternaturally solemn. Harley caught the expression and listened intently. Mrs. Bowdoin, pouring out cream as if it were coals of fire on his head, was ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... told him he was resolved to pass through Mesopotamia, where he had left a great many brave Roman soldiers; whereupon the Armenian went his way. As Crassus was taking the army over the river at Zeugma, he encountered preternaturally violent thunder, and the lightning flashed in the faces of the troops, and during the storm a hurricane broke upon the bridge, and carried part of it away; two thunderbolts fell upon the very place where the army was going to encamp; and one of the general's horses, magnificently caparisoned, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... suffocation. They mount into the clear sky and sustain there traverses of stone which you scarcely dare to contemplate. One hesitates to advance; a feeling comes over you that you are become infinitesimally small and as easy to crush as an insect. The silence grows preternaturally solemn. The stars through all the gaps in the fearful ceilings seem to send their scintillations to you in an abyss. It is cold and ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... ajar, a room was empty. Feeling his way forward, with the tips of his fingers, travelling rapidly, like a blind man, anxious lest Ursula should come upstairs, he found another door. There, with his preternaturally fine sense alert, he listened. He heard someone moving in bed. This would ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... an Indian can be taken off the guard. Years of danger have made the senses of the savages preternaturally acute, and they are as distant as the timid antelope of the plains. But, for all that, there was a boy within a dozen yards of a swarthy warrior whose senses were on the alert, and yet had ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... a flow of ideas at that time, the speaker had recourse to a not uncommon device among civilised orators: he cleared his throat, looked preternaturally wise, ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... old-fashioned carriage was waiting for them; they entered it and the driver, whipped up his horses. A drive of a half mile brought them to an ideal white cottage surrounded by porches and hidden in a tangle of vines. The door was opened for them by the Rev. John Langdon in person. He seemed a preternaturally grave young man to Anna and his clerical attire was above reproach. Any misgivings one might have had regarding him on the score of his youth, were more than counterbalanced by his ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... the dark area archway! His sight blurred for the moment, so increasing the blackness of impending horror; then, under the influence of this last applied stimulus, his sight grew preternaturally keen. He discerned one moving form—two—three; to his over-strained nerves there seemed a whole posse behind them. Oh, the Eyes, the Eyes that were so constantly on him! Could he never rid himself of them! He bent his head to the sleeting ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... melancholy. Pausanius says that after a while one who had gone through the ordeal could laugh; but Suidas tells us that those who returned from having made the descent never smiled again, and this gave occasion to a saying relative to a preternaturally grave personage, "He has consulted the oracle ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... flashed on the preternaturally-sharpened intellect of Magdalena. Her own immunity from pain confirmed the ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage |
