"Surroundings" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a curious, smothered sensation at first, as I looked on the desolate surroundings—the pale, sad-faced mother, the blind grandfather, and ragged children. A dull fire was smouldering in the cooking stove, and beside it sat the grandfather, the baby on his knee, vainly trying to extract consolation from its own puny fist. As I looked at him closely I saw that Mr. Bowen had ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... beautiful, inspiring, and elevating. I do not believe that any person is educated so long as he lives in a dirty, miserable shanty. I do not believe that any person is educated until he has learned to want to live in a clean room made attractive with pictures and books, and with such surroundings as are elevating. In a word, I wish to say again that education is meant to give us that culture, that refinement, that taste, which will make us deal truthfully and sympathetically with our fellow men, and will make us see what is beautiful, elevating, and inspiring ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... straps betokened one in authority. Outside, the sun was shining brightly, while a sound of measured tramping and an occasional order in commanding tones, indicated something of military precision in the surroundings. ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... joints must be varied to suit the disposition of the animal, the nature and location of the injury, the length of time intervening between the infliction of the wound and the first attention given, and the surroundings in which the patient ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... sincere. She would, without any very poignant regret or sense of martyrdom, had her very comfortable income been cut down to a tenth of what it was, have gone to live in a four-roomed cottage with one servant. But she would have left that four-roomed cottage at once for even humbler surroundings had she found that her straitened circumstances did not permit her to keep it as speckless and soignee as was her ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson
... back. Its hollowness seemed symbolic, for it has only the outward semblance of divinity and is deaf to all human entreaties. On that same day we visited the temple of Hachiman, the god of war, most spacious and impressive in its park-like surroundings of ancient trees and noble gateways, but fearful in its accompanying images of revenge and slaughter. Humanity needs compassion in the Godhead. The Japanese have felt this, and they have invented a goddess of mercy, Kwannon ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... his bulky old mother working at the spoiled ham and of the negro women in the street moving to and from the infected well filled Peter Siner with its terrible pathos. Although he had seen these surroundings all of his life, he had a queer impression that he was looking upon them for the first time. During his boyhood he had accepted all this without question as the way the world was made. During his ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... self-reliant American. Her philosophy is one of love and kindness towards all things; her hope is never dimmed. And by the sheer beauty of her soul, and the purity of her vision, she wins from barren and unpromising surroundings ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... Chateaubriand to Ma soeur, te souvient-il encore), sung in this little town of the Brie district, must have been to the ears of a Breton maiden the touchstone of imperious memories, so faithfully does it picture the manners and customs, the surroundings and the heartiness of her noble old land, where a sort of melancholy reigns, hardly to be defined; caused, perhaps, by the aspect of life in Brittany, which is deeply touching. This power of awakening a world of grave and sweet and tender memories by a familiar and ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... when suddenly the destination was reached. The lady knocked at the side door of a splendid gate set in a long stretch of wall. So much Rokuzo could see through the damp stream from his brow; and that the surroundings were very rural. A rattling of the bar and he turned eagerly to the gate. Its opening gave a vision of beauty. Clean swept was the ground beneath the splendid pine trees; graceful the curves of the roofs of the villa seen beyond; and still more beautiful, and little more mature than his companion, ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... her hand in her companion's as she spoke. Yes, there was little doubt of it, Ruth was lovable. One forgot her low birth, her low surroundings, when one looked at her. Susy had heard of those few people of rare character and rare natures who are, as it is expressed, "Nature's ladies." There are Nature's gentlemen as well, and Nature's ladies and Nature's gentlemen are above mere external circumstances; they are above the mere ...
— The Rebel of the School • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... rather well; he had a reputation for that sort of thing, and to-night he did his best. He pictured himself to his audience on the verge of suicide from melancholia, and assured them that this fate had been averted only through his dislike of being found lifeless amid such untidy surroundings. He decked the narrative with touches of drollery, and was rewarded with the grins that overspread the faces of his hearers. Ailworth nodded appreciatingly, now and then, and Doak even slapped his knee once and giggled aloud. Satherwaite left out all mention of Phil's sister, naturally, ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... have the ribald slang of the free-and-easy neighborhood at her tongue's end and be destitute of delicacy as a young cow might be expected; but we are hardly prepared to see one grown up among such surroundings so unutterably stupid as not to know when her companions are "guying" her. Trilby croaking "Ben Bolt" for the edification of les trois Angliches were a sight worthy of a lunatic asylum. It was even more ridiculous ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... lady-like; they may have a style that you haven't, but that style is not always to their advantage. It is true that I do not find many young ladies in your little village that I wish you to take as models, but the fault is in them, as well as in some of their surroundings. You have music, you have books, you have perfection of beauty in shore and sea, you have the Holy Spirit, the ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... wall of exclusion which his fellow workers built about themselves, and as they had shown no desire for his company, he retaliated by showing still less for theirs, with the result that he found himself very much alone and apart from the life of his new surroundings. ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... she could not appreciate the daily trials and troubles of the poor. These opinions were more generally shared by the good temperance folk of the neighborhood and in the town. They only saw a tall, grey-haired woman, standing amidst the surroundings of a ramshackle inn of the country road, and taking toll from the rougher classes that passed to and fro. But had they probed farther into her life they might have unearthed the beautiful from ...
— Nancy McVeigh of the Monk Road • R. Henry Mainer
... that he had never really known the Major until he saw him here. The Major was excellent at all times and places, but in this club he became an edition de luxe of himself. He made his headquarters here, keeping his suite of rooms all the year round; and the atmosphere and surroundings of the place seemed to be ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... Beautiful surroundings in a school can be quite as important a part of our education as the textbooks through which we toil. We are made up of body, mind, and spirit, and the developing soul needs satisfying as much as the physical or mental part of us. Long years afterwards, though we utterly forget ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... without him; he's the one reliable element in this rather haphazard household. But his very orderliness has had an effect on him. Have you ever considered what it must be like to go on unceasingly doing the correct thing in the correct manner in the same surroundings for the greater part of a lifetime? To know and ordain and superintend exactly what silver and glass and table linen shall be used and set out on what occasions, to have cellar and pantry and plate-cupboard under a minutely devised and undeviating administration, to be noiseless, impalpable, ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... I dined at Bougival, and then I spent the evening at a boatmen's ball. Decidedly everything depends on place and surroundings. It would be the height of folly to believe in the supernatural on the ile de la Grenouilliere[1] ... but on the top of Mont Saint-Michel? ... and in India? We are terribly under the influence of our surroundings. I shall return ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... but for the present they contented themselves with improving their house and surroundings. Other bears, cougars, and wolves came at night and prowled around the Annex, but it was secure against them all, and Dick and Albert never troubled themselves again to keep awake and watch for ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... grants no leave of absence. But he had not escaped. Jimmie had halted him, tripped him by the heels, and set him again to thinking. Within the half-hour that followed those who rolled past saw at the side of the road a car with her engine running, and leaning upon the wheel, as unconscious of his surroundings as though he sat at his own fireplace, a young man who frowned and stared at nothing. The half-hour passed and the young man swung his car back toward the city. But at the first road-house that showed a blue-and-white ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis
... days there were in abundance at Melbourne, and from these alone such a writer could have made a sufficiently striking story. But he concluded that he could make his picture at once truer and more vivid when the surroundings of the old settlements had become a full reality to his mind. Messrs. Clarson, Massina and Co. readily contracted with the young novelist for the first publication of the story in their monthly, the Australian Journal, and made him an advance of money. Off he went with characteristic confidence, ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... the architecture, the surroundings, and the people were as far removed from anything American as could well be imagined, we really—for some minutes—were lost to all consciousness of being in that ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler
... (these being the medical names for this condition). Sometimes this is an inherited characteristic. There is no doubt, however, that most of these children acquire the habit by bad sanitary and hygienic surroundings. These children do not as a rule get enough fresh air. They are kept indoors most of the time in stuffy, overheated, badly ventilated rooms, unless the weather is absolutely perfect. The windows in their bedrooms are always ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... writing with the careless fluency of a man who draws his pay by the column. He is delineating with skill and rapidity. The reporters' room is gloomy and desolate. Mr. Scalper is a man of sensitive temperament and the dreariness of his surroundings depresses him. He opens the letter of a correspondent, examines the handwriting narrowly, casts his eye around the room for ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... daughter is any happier with her piano, and her piles of cheaply illustrated literature and translations of French novels, and her smatterings of science learned in normal schools, since she has learned too often to despise her father and mother and brother, and her uneducated rural beau, and all her surroundings, with poverty and unrest and aspiration for society eating out her soul. The happiness produced merely by intellectual pleasures and social frivolities is very small at the best, compared with that produced by the virtues ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... person, is passing strange; and that he should have survived and escaped to relate them, is, perhaps, yet stranger. That they were all experienced substantially as related, none will doubt, when the minute details of name, date, place, and surroundings are found to be ...
— Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army • William G. Stevenson
... races—Negroes, Hamites, Semites, Iranians, Indo-Aryans, and a long list of Mongoloid tribes. Here is a psychological effect of environment. The dry, pure air stimulates the faculties of the desert-dweller, but the featureless, monotonous surroundings furnish them with little to work upon. The mind, finding scant material for sustained logical deduction, falls back upon contemplation. Intellectual activity is therefore restricted, narrow, unproductive; while ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... ten years had secretly adored Juliet Bissell with all the intensity of a soul made single of purpose by the vast, brooding immensity of his surroundings. So long as he might be near her, serving her in many little ways, he had been, in a manner, content ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... the idyllic isle of Corfu must have seen, gleaming white amidst its surroundings of dark green under a sky of the deepest blue, the Greek villa which was erected there by Elizabeth, Empress of Austria. It is called the Achilleion. In its garden there is a small classic temple in which the Empress ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine
... live on terms of the next intimacy, shows how precariously the distinction is grounded. The pig is the main element of animal food among the islands; and I had many occasions, my mind being quickened by my cannibal surroundings, to observe his character and the manner of his death. Many islanders live with their pigs as we do with our dogs; both crowd around the hearth with equal freedom; and the island pig is a fellow of activity, enterprise, and sense. ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Paris, London and Rome. Crimes had been spoken of which made the murder for which Oliver Hilditch had just been tried seem like a trifling indiscretion. Hard though his mentality, sternly matter-of-fact as was his outlook, he was still unable to fully believe in himself, his surroundings, or in this woman who had just dropped a veil over her ashen cheeks. ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... with the barrenness of our souls can God deal with His quickening breath, but with our difficulties as well: with those things in our surroundings that seem the ...
— Parables of the Cross • I. Lilias Trotter
... light, Nina had ample opportunity for observing that her companion was quite as good-looking in detail as in general effect; and the rhythmic inflection of his voice—he spoke in French—she thought truly attuned to his surroundings. He was one of those who, like Italy itself, give to strangers only the suggestion of their meaning, and he interested Nina chiefly as a new ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... boarders. I look it, don't I?" she challenged, with a flourish of her hands toward her surroundings. "Surely, never was a boarding-house mistress's task quite like mine! And you should have heard Aunt Polly's dire predictions of what summer boarders would ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... better part of the English people. Their pernicious example is bearing most abundant and bitter fruit in the depraved morals of what are called the "lower classes" of society, and their misdeeds are repeated in less fashionable quarters, with less brilliant surroundings. Against this swelling tide of corrupting influence the press of England is now raising its warning voice, and the statements which are publicly and unreservedly made, and the predictions which are confidently given, are ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... local members with his idle, easy smile. He seemed to stand aloof from his new neighbours and their insular interests. He was, it appeared, a cultured man, and perhaps found none in this wild island who could understand his thoughts. His attitude towards his surroundings was, in a word, the usual indifferent attitude of the Frenchman in exile, reading only French newspapers, fixing his attention only on France, and awaiting with such patience as he could command ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... strange what two months at Thornwood had done for the Doctor. He had been brought there unconscious, a serious, middle-aged professor, who had run in the same groove for twenty years. The same surroundings, the same people, the same monotonous, daily routine had rendered him as rusty and faded as the text-books he lived with. Nothing short of a collision could have jolted him out of his rut, and the collision ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... Marty was in the room. Not so gorgeous as in his wedding-attire, he was still an exceedingly fine young animal. He was not so magnificently defiant as before, but he scowled at his unaccustomed surroundings under his ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... in manifold places, ever possesses the twofold characteristics, and hence does not share the imperfections due to those places, scriptural texts illustrate its purity in the midst of inferior surroundings by comparing it to the sun reflected in water, mirrors, and the like. Compare e.g., 'As the one ether is rendered manifold by jars and the like, or as the one sun becomes manifold in several sheets of water; ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... her spirits a little, is chattering gayly, and monopolizing Sir Adrian to the best of her ability, whilst Miss Delmaine is strangely silent, and seems lost in a kind of pleased wonder as she gazes upon all her charming surroundings. ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"
... to make our surroundings as international as possible, and as, happily, the French flag does not demand any very great skill in its formation, we soon had the tri-color stuck up everywhere; whilst in the most conspicuous positions French mottoes shewed out from the greenery. The wording of these latter ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... was a goldsmith who lived in a certain village where the people were as bad and greedy, and covetous, as they could possibly be; however, in spite of his surroundings, he was fat and prosperous. He had only one friend whom he liked, and that was a cowherd, who looked after cattle for one of the farmers in the village. Every evening the goldsmith would walk across to the cowherd's house and say: 'Come, let's go ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Various
... they take a last look at a friend's face. The parting with the mammy was especially bitter. It brought the break-up home as few things had done. And when Mr. and Mrs. Graeme reached their new home with its strange surroundings, her absence ...
— Mam' Lyddy's Recognition - 1908 • Thomas Nelson Page
... physical pleasure in his surroundings possessed his thoughts; then gradually, in a state between waking and sleeping, the curious boughs above took fantastic shapes and were interwoven before his eyes with his earlier memories. There was a great tester ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... these remarks more fitting close than by describing briefly the surroundings which set their impress upon the character of the men whose lives I have attempted to portray. The picture is full of meaning, dignity, and simplicity. In this time "Canetuckee" was still a part of Virginia. The grounds on which, as boys, they played were held by their fathers under what is ...
— Pioneer Surgery in Kentucky - A Sketch • David W. Yandell
... feet. The village of Goathland has thrown out skirmishers towards the heather in the form of an ancient-looking but quite modern church, with a low central tower, and a little hotel, stone-built and fitting well into its surroundings. The rest of the village is scattered round a large triangular green, and extends down to the railway, where there is a station named after ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... wished to wed the daughter of the chief of the crew; but when the lover pleaded his cause with all the eloquence at his command, and painted in piteous words the misery the gentle girl had endured in the midst of her unhallowed surroundings, the kind-hearted ecclesiastic relented, and forthwith despatched Brother Lawrence to examine and counsel the maid, hear her confession, and absolve her from her offences, and then, if all seemed well, to perform the rite of betrothal, which was almost as binding as the marriage service ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... in what she told him about the little house. But she was mistaken if she thought to surprise him. He was picturing her there at her domestic duties and thinking that no small or mean surroundings could dwarf her soul's stature. Hadn't the hideous official room that held her been heaven to him?—the singing of the naked gas-jets the ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... known many years before. [263] Tulay signifies bridge in Tagalog, and probably this place derives its name from the bridge spanning the rivulet, which forms a natural division between this village and the Jolo ex-mural western suburb. Just across the bridge, in most unattractive surroundings, stands a roofed rough pile of wooden planks—the residence of the Sultan. At a few paces to the left of it one sees another gloomy structure, smaller and more cheerless than the royal abode—it is the domicile of Hadji Butu, the ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... the common misfortune of those just entering life to find in it less than their ideal. But in this respect Camors was born under a particularly unfortunate star, for he found in his surroundings—in his own family even—only the worst side of human nature; and, in some respects, of those very opinions to which he ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... that I tell you nothing of the village doings here, the little church sociables and a thousand commonplace details that go to make up the sum of existence amid such surroundings? It is because I do not really live among them. My mind is alien to these narrow margins of society and religion. But it is always of the little forest that I tell you, as if that were my real home, as indeed it is. And it is the dearer to me ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... the efficiency of the staffs now employed in the various public galleries and museums. He had seen them arrive late and leave early—he meant arrive early and leave late—and could not sufficiently admire their willingness to put up with the dismal surroundings of pictures ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... coming, and also particularly who was not coming. These details would be of great interest to her, for grandmother knew well all the persons named from Heidi's description, and had entered with deep sympathy into all that the child had told her of her life and surroundings in Frankfurt. Heidi paid her visit in the early afternoon, for she could now go alone again; the sun was bright in the heavens and the days were growing longer, and it was delightful to go racing down the mountain over the dry ground, with the brisk May wind ...
— Heidi • Johanna Spyri
... horses' hoofs echoed down the mountain road. His nurse and messenger were coming. He decided at once to move Mary to his own house. She must regain consciousness in new surroundings or her chance of survival would be slender. To awake in this miserable cabin, the scene of the tragedy she had witnessed, might be instantly fatal. Besides she must not yet know that the brute who ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... A solidly furnished, sober apartment; about it that subtle atmosphere of dignity one finds but in old rooms long undisturbed, where one seems to read upon the walls: "I, Joy and Sorrow, twain in one, have dwelt here." One item only there was that seemed out of place among its grave surroundings—a guitar, hanging from the wall, ornamented with a ridiculous blue bow, ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome
... seen to it that her personal appearance harmonized with the new surroundings. She dressed herself and her young daughter with careful appropriateness. There was no display, no purchase of gewgaws—merely garments of good quality, such as became people in easy circumstances. She impressed upon her husband that this was ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... her sleeves rolled up, and, approaching Don Quixote, began to soap his face and beard. Don Quixote thought this must be a custom after all ducal meals, so he submitted in amazement and stretched out his legs comfortably, that he should not appear out of place in such surroundings. When his face was all lathered, the barber maiden pretended there was no more water in the jug; and by this time the lather had worked its way into the knight's eyes, and he sat there making the most fierce and ludicrous faces until the water finally arrived. Then the Duke, in order that Don ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... of my new surroundings for some little time, I felt that I must begin to look for quarters. I was anxious, if possible, to find a lodging in one of the cottages, and then, after a good night's rest, I would carefully select a good subject for my picture. I called at several houses, where I noticed a card ...
— Christie, the King's Servant • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... the beginning of the type, we may, I think, explain its development and aggravation; but we cannot in the least explain why the incipient type of curious characters broke out, if I may so say, in one place rather than in another. Climate and 'physical' surroundings, in the largest sense, have unquestionably much influence; they are one factor in the cause, but they are not the only factor; for we find most dissimilar races of men living in the same climate and affected by the same surroundings, and we have ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... at the hands of the tall, scholarly-looking man, with large, clear, impersonal eyes, who carried on his practice high up in a great block of buildings in a small faded room with coarse coffee-coloured curtains at its smudgy windows. The character of his surroundings added a great deal to her abhorrence of his attentions ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... helplessly, trying to understand herself and her surroundings. There was, in truth, something singularly alien in her mother's attitude. She seemed on the defensive, not wishing to be too closely studied. "Her manner is not even affectionate—only friendly. It is as if I were only an embarrassing visitor," the girl thought. Aloud ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... The earliest result of thought is the recognition of an individual object as such, that is to say as distinguished and marked off from the mass of its surroundings. No doubt the first impression produced Upon the nascent intelligence of an infant is that of a confused whole. It requires much exercise of thought to distinguish this whole into its parts. The completeness of the recognition of an individual object is announced by attaching a name to it. ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... herself in the way of Helen and she on their arrival at the school, with the sole object of getting them pledged to this society, the girl from the Red Mill could not fail to appreciate the good-natured attempts of the Upedes to make them both feel at home in their new surroundings. They must be grateful ...
— Ruth Fielding at Briarwood Hall - or Solving the Campus Mystery • Alice B. Emerson
... was politely cordial to Frank and Kitty. Her manner was at once quietly assured and quietly unassuming, although on her entrance her eyes had seemed furtively observant, as one who found herself among strange, if interesting, surroundings. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... the officer of the deck read them by the light of the lantern, Marcy improving the opportunity to make a hasty inspection of his surroundings. He didn't see much except the big guns which had aided in the reduction of the forts along the coast, the quartermaster on the bridge, and a few men lying on deck, apparently fast asleep, but he took note of the fact that everything was as neat as his ...
— Marcy The Blockade Runner • Harry Castlemon
... which our story opens, Major Hester and his wife walked, hand in hand, beyond the palisades of their fortress home, enjoying the marvellous beauty of their surroundings and talking of many things. Already had this wilderness home become very dear to them; for, representing years of toil and privation as it did, it was their very own and the heritage of their boy, now two years of age, who toddled behind them in charge of a ruddy-cheeked Scotch nurse. While they ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... it, nor one single flower that "wastes" its sweetness on the desert air, but acknowledges this inexhaustible and spendthrift source. Its evidence lies strewn so thick, so prodigally, about our world, that not one among us, whatever his surroundings and conditions, but sooner or later must encounter at least one marvellous instance of its uplifting presence. Some at once acknowledge the exquisite flash and are aware; others remain blind and deaf, till some experience, probably ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... often results from a faulty adaptation of the individual to his surroundings, or from an excess of mysticism, but it may also be merely a question of temperament ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... in a hay-loft, where he was so happy at roughing it and being uncomfortable that he could scarcely close an eye. The amateur outcast lay dreamily watching the silver spears of moonlight thrust through the roof of the barn, and extracting such satisfaction from his cheerless surroundings as would have astonished a professional tramp. "Poverty and hardship are merely ideas after all," said Lynde to himself softly, as he drifted off in a doze. Ah, Master Lynde, playing at poverty and hardship is one thing; but if ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... papers from "Where the Forest Murmurs"; or in the way of "W.S.," as "Literary Geography" is. In this last-named book, Scott and Stevenson, among others, are put against the background that inspired their work, as in "Iona" certain stories are imagined so as to fit their surroundings and certain legendary history narrated that is fitting to these surroundings with an appropriateness almost too exact to be believable. In "Iona," because he loved the island that inspired its writing beyond any other of the places he loved greatly, is to be found some of his very best work, ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... hanging foliage assumed an emerald sheen, the hundreds of crutches covering the vault resembled an inextricable network of dead wood on the point of reflowering. And the darkness was rendered more dense by so great a brightness, the surroundings became lost in a deep shadow in which nothing, neither walls nor trees, remained; whilst all alone ascended the angry and continuous murmur of the Gave, rolling along beneath the gloomy, boundless sky, now heavy with a ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... censure. On the other hand, we give the highest praise to those who have chosen the good amidst strong temptations to evil, and bestow the severest censure on those who have done evil with virtuous surroundings and influences. Now our judgment of others must of necessity be derived from our own consciousness, and if we regard and treat them as freely willing beings, it can only be because we know that our own wills ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... tool-house and proceeded with it to a certain well-known heap in the corner of the kitchen garden, full of vivacious worms of a ruddy hue, for which fish of all descriptions had a decided predilection. Even now, whenever I smell a similar odour to that which emanated from the heap, the garden and its surroundings are vividly recalled to my mind. I quickly filled a box, which I kept for the purpose, with wriggling worms. It had a perforated ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... features of solemnity and grandeur, filling the mind with exalted contemplations, and the imagination with inspiring and ennobling apparitions. Surroundings that contribute a quality of awfulness embrace in such scenes the soul of the traveller, and hold him in their tremendous thrall. Mean or flippant ideas may not enter here; but the man puts off the smaller part of him, as the Asiatic puts off his sandals on entering the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... its gloomy coast guarded by numberless black reefs, recalls that of Brittany, the same resemblance strikes the traveller who pushes towards the interior of the country, through its deep and smiling bays; and Halifax Bay in particular, when its fresh and verdant surroundings are lighted up by brilliant sunshine, leaves nothing to be desired in the way of charm. I saw it thus when I arrived, in all the excitement of a regatta, with the peculiar feature of a race for birch-bark canoes, paddled with incredible vigour by Mic Mac squaws, or Indian ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... from his bed, folded the blanket into the usual tight square, which he fastened on his back, and took a look at his surroundings. There was no human presence save his own, but innumerable tracks showed him that the hills were full of game. Then sharp hunger assailed him, and he ate another portion of the wild turkey, calculating that enough would be left for several ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... unspeakably ridiculous) to confront the sombre figure of a rather tall and strikingly handsome girl, who, as she stood with her hand on the knob of the door, saluted me with a formal bow. In an instantaneous glance I noted how perfectly she matched her strange surroundings. Black-robed, black-haired, with black-grey eyes and a grave, sad face of ivory pallor, she stood, like one of old Terborch's portraits, a harmony in tones so low as to be but a step removed from monochrome. Obviously a ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... a beautiful home, and congenial work, this period of home tutelage does not seem to have been altogether happy. His sister in commenting on this period said, "The fact was, poor boy, he had outgrown his social surroundings. They were absolutely good, but they were narrow; it could not be otherwise; he chafed under them." Furthermore, the youth, before he had found his real work as a poet, was restless, irritable, and opinionated; and an ever-present cause of friction was the fact that there ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... the steps again and crossed the square, and for the next half-hour Zaidie was busy taking photographs of the pyramid with its ghastly surroundings, and a few general views of this strange ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... friends. Nevertheless, its fame spreads slowly, and each year new discoverers flock in growing numbers to the one little hotel and its ramshackle bath-house, so that the community once absolutely and viciously utilitarian begins to take timid account of its aesthetic surroundings, and here and there a little log-cabin (as appropriate to this land as the chalet to the Alps) is built beside the calling ripples of the river, while saddled horses, laden burros in long lines, and now and then a vast yellow or red ore-wagon ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... pig pen!" he had barked at the janitorial force. "And even if they are Illiterates, these children aren't pigs; they deserve decent surroundings. This school will be cleaned, immediately, from top to bottom, and ...
— Null-ABC • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... earth's perplexing mysteries were solved; and daily joys and daily pains only acquired importance through their bearing upon the joys and pains of eternity; and celestial light, flowing through her pure thoughts, reflected its mellow glory upon her humblest surroundings, and tinged them ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... the work and his surroundings were strange to him, Harold did many useless things and ran many unnecessary risks. But his knowledge grew with experience. Privations he had in plenty; and all the fibre of his body and the strength of his resolution and endurance were now and again taxed to their utmost. But with a man of his ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... to the padres and their guest consisted of as many plats as a first-class hotel in Paris usually supplies, and cooked with nearly as much skill, though the surroundings were by no means equal. I feel assured also that the padres, besides being tasteful in their potages and entrees, do not stultify their ideas for lack of that element which Horace, Hafiz, and Byron have praised so much. The champagne—think of champagne ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... therefore, to the surroundings of Constantinople, with little more than 2,000 square kilometres, and a population which is rather hard to estimate, but which is that only of the city and the surroundings—perhaps a million and a half men. In Asia Minor Turkey loses the territory of the Sanjak ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... the white easy-chair beside the window, and near the porcelain stove. She was dressed in a deep mourning wrapper of black bombazine, and an inside handkerchief and undersleeves of white linen. Her pallid face and plain hair, and the severe, funereal black and white of her surroundings, made a very ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... surroundings have an unusual amount of piquancy. Mr. Maxwell is very pleasant, strong, both physically and mentally, clever and upright, educated at Oxford and Lincoln's Inn, but brought up in the Straits Settlements, of which his father was chief-justice. He is able, combative, dogmatic, well-read and ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... sufficiently severe punishment to deter them from a renewal of the attack. Also Mr. Lilburn's pursuit keeping up the delusion that troops were at hand, had greatly frightened and demoralized them. So the barricades were presently taken down, and gradually the dwelling and its surroundings resumed their usual aspect of ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... impart to them a knowledge of the One in whom we live and move and have our being. My mother accepted the task gladly, for in spite of a certain narrowness of view—the natural but deplorable result of her earlier surroundings—she was one of the most truly pious women whom I have ever known; unfortunately for herself and us she had been trained in the lowest school of Evangelical literalism—a school which in after life both my brother and myself came to ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... October, while he and his party lay encamped under a gigantic sycamore-tree, he began to feel a contentment and comfort to which he had long been a stranger, and he was enabled to regard his surroundings ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... her as he would have followed a ghost. She moved a chair from the wall without the least noise, and he dropped upon it. As he looked at her his identity seemed slipping away—seemed to be slipping into an atmosphere connected with her and her surroundings. She brought him some water which she dipped from a pail near by, and held the cocoa-nut dipper which ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... Virgils have been singing the man ever since. But who ever sings the woman? Occasionally a Debora or a Joan of Arc, a kind of a female monstrosity, comes to the front and receives recognition, but their conspicuousness is due more to the low level of their surroundings, than to their individual pre-eminence. They were out of their spheres in what gave them notoriety, and they have been so voted by universal consent through the ages. It was not specially to their credit that they successfully commanded armies, but it was to the unutterable shame of the men of ...
— The Heroic Women of Early Indiana Methodism: An Address Delivered Before the Indiana Methodist Historical Society • Thomas Aiken Goodwin
... ornaments and rich jewels that were occupied in the same, for I have seen in procession about the hall forty-four rich copes of one settle worn, besides the candlesticks and other necessary ornaments to the furniture of the same." Such were the sumptuous surroundings in which "children of the chapel" were wont sometimes to perform ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... to all that we know of heredity, the conviction prevails among the laity that the character of a child depends greatly upon the mother's surroundings during pregnancy: this is the doctrine of maternal impressions. As is usual with superstitions, this one emphasizes the unfavorable possibilities and holds that the unborn child may be affected by the mother's unhappy thoughts or maimed by her mental distress if she is exposed to unpleasant ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons
... the "Melting-pot." When we use this term we mean that many races from all over the earth have gathered along the banks of the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans to find a new home and begin a new career amidst more favorable surroundings than were to be found in the country of their birth. It is true, Mesopotamia was much smaller than our own country. But the fertile valley was the most extraordinary "melting-pot" the world has ever seen and it continued to absorb new tribes for almost two thousand years. The story of each ...
— Ancient Man - The Beginning of Civilizations • Hendrik Willem Van Loon
... half-timber houses. All, if tastefully and skilfully designed and placed, have their special points of beauty and excellence, and all may in the hands of an architect of ability be made to harmonize with our modern ways of living and the surroundings in which they ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Vol. 1, No. 10, October 1895. - French Farmhouses. • Various
... forward to Thursdays with pleasurable anticipation. He enjoyed the sense of authority which it gave him to herd these poor outcasts to and fro among the surroundings which were an every-day commonplace to himself. Also he liked hearing the sound of his own voice as it lectured in rolling periods on the objects of interest by the way-side. But even to Keggs there was a bitter ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... away now, promising to satisfy her in the fullest manner once she were out of these forbidding surroundings. I led her to the sacristy and seating her upon the settle I ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... lover of adventure, of strange by-ways, errant tracts (as seen in his Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey through the Cevennes—seen yet more, perhaps, in a certain account of a voyage to America as a steerage passenger), lofty mountain- tops, with stronger air, and strange and novel surroundings. He would fain, like Ulysses, be at home in foreign lands, making acquaintance ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... not neglected. He found, or made, business for himself; had "never so much to do or so little pleasure in doing it." The discomfort of London lodgings was before long exchanged for the more congenial surroundings of a house by the water-side in Warwick Crescent, which he occupied until 1887, two years before his death. The furniture and tapestries of Casa Guidi gave it an air of comfort and repose. "It was London," writes Mrs Ritchie, referring to her visits of a later date, "but ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... our worst cases below out of the persistent rain, and making them in a measure comfortable, the wind shifted and subsided to a gentle breeze from the north-eastward, the weather cleared, the rain ceased, and about half-an-hour later the day broke gloriously, and we were able to get a view of our surroundings. ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... Joe's getting on!" he thought; and then his mind dwelt again upon their surroundings, and as his eyes wandered from spot to spot he felt that they ought to go no farther, but ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... address to you. I only propose to say, as I did on yesterday, when your worthy mayor and board of aldermen called upon me, that I thought much of the ill feeling that has existed between you and the people of your surroundings and that people from among whom I came, has depended, and now depends, upon ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... and offense. Arriving at the office next day, Roland found a scene of desolation, in the middle of which, like Marius among the ruins of Carthage, sat Jimmy, the vacant-faced office boy. Jimmy was reading an illustrated comic paper, and appeared undisturbed by his surroundings. ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... that for his sake she will be cheerful and bright, and with her and the girls with him, he will feel as if at home. The doctor told me that the mind has a great influence over the body, and that a man with cheerful surroundings had five chances to one as against one amongst strangers, and with no one to brighten him up. I have no doubt that as soon as he gets a little stronger he will arrange what is to be done with the brig, but I am sure it will be a long time before ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... it be said that those who are unable to cope nobly with their perilous surroundings know how they ought to deal ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... were all together there more than once, and Coningsby had written a great deal there. We built later on a sort of summer library—a big room on the edge of a beautiful ravine—to which reference is made in later letters. Some of the happiest days of our lives were spent in these lovely surroundings, and the memory of those blue summer days, amid the fragrance of miles of pine-forest, often recurs to Coningsby as he writes from ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... exalted standpoint we might gaze upon the active life of towns, upon the labourers working their lands from the Atlantic to the Euphrates, and upon the men who go down to the sea in ships and do their business in great waters. We should perceive their occupations and amusements, their material surroundings, their various dress and manners, their methods of travel, the degree of their personal safety and liberty. Then we should descend to earth in the middle of Rome itself, and become for the time being inhabitants of that city, privileged to take part in its public ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... made that one cannot tell the difference, and is disposed to give the preference to the latter as evincing greater ingenuity than the mere patient chiselling of the quarry-stone. The pools are symmetrical, in conformity to the style of their surroundings, their overflows curved, the successive falls being about two feet after the first dash nine hundred and twenty feet from the balcony level. Each side of the cascade is flanked by six small pools in which are spouting and spray jets. The course ends in a pool which may be described ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... declined. The "sporting character" might deign to relax amid proper and fitting surroundings, but not in the sacred precincts of his office. So the ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... on, into the valley, eyeing my surroundings curiously in the shadowless light that filtered through the shifting roof of fog. Foolishly, I expected to discover Incan artifacts. The crumbled red stones should have warned me. They were, I think, harder than metal, yet they had been here ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner
... among the old maid's visible possessions this one was particularly stimulating to the covetous desires of the two old lovers. Yet, far from producing revenue, the house was a cause of expense. But it is so rare to find in the very centre of a provincial town a private dwelling without unpleasant surroundings, handsome in outward structure and convenient within, that Alencon shared the envy ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... qualities of a nature to impose a given form or class of forms upon its products, as have wood, bark, bone, or stone. It is so mobile as to be quite free to take form from surroundings, and where extensively used will record or echo a vast deal of ...
— Origin and Development of Form and Ornament in Ceramic Art. • William Henry Holmes
... den, reflecting the loves of a genuine boy with red blood in his veins, there often assembled a number of lads who always felt very much at home amidst such surroundings; but Toby would allow of no rough-house scuffling in his quarters, to annoy his mother, and get on her nerves. When the fellows dropped in to have a chat and lounge in his easy chairs amidst such exhilarating surroundings they were ...
— Jack Winters' Baseball Team - Or, The Rivals of the Diamond • Mark Overton
... resumed Suzanne. "I, too, am a philosopher, and I live amid surroundings which do not please me. I, unfortunately, lost my mother when I was very young, and although my father is very kind, he has been obliged to neglect me a little. I see around me people who are millionaires or who aspire to ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... the doom he felt disposed to launch, like a burning and fizzing thunder-bolt from a hand which was, in reality, not at all excited; and like most other people who possess such an unrevealed power, it pleased him very much when he persuaded his surroundings that it was an impulse of rage which moved him. He had been at the Meeting at the Music Hall, "to hear what those fellows had to say for themselves." Contempt, unbounded but wrathful, was the feeling in his mind towards "those fellows;" ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... livened up greatly with bits of description portraying the speaker and his surroundings, particularly when they harmonize or contrast with his character or the ideas expressed. An excellent device for presenting the spirit of an interview—giving an atmosphere, as it were—is to interpolate at intervals in the story personal ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... was well advanced when the boy saw, from his surroundings, that he was close to the spot where the deer stood when Herbert fired at it with his long-range rifle. There was the rock, ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... anxious from the first for the effect upon Ormond. In the stress of any danger, she gave me to understand, he always behaved very well, but out of its immediate presence he was full of all sorts of gloomy apprehensions, unless the surroundings were cheerful. She could not imagine how he came to take the place, but when she told ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... motionless in the stern-sheets. We covered her with all the available garments, and, even in the midst of our own griefs, could not help feeling that the suddenness of her double desolation had made her perfectly unconscious of our dreary surroundings. ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... not follow her. He stood motionless in the solitude of the pine forest, erect in the pathway, unconscious of his surroundings, like the hero of a legend subjected to an enchantment. Then he passed a hand over his face, as if awakening from a dream, collecting his thoughts. His audacious words stung him with remorse, Margalida's ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez |
