"Spelt" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the theme as he was to propose it, I accompanied him thither, where we found Mr. Medlar and Dr. Wagtail disputing upon the word Custard, which the physician affirmed should be spelt with a G, observing that it was derived from the Latin verb gustare, "to taste;" but Medlar pleaded custom in behalf of C, observing, that, by the Doctor's rule, we ought to change pudding into budding, because it is derived from the French ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... chocolates. The thanks tend to stiffen a child's style; but in any case a letter is the occasion of a sudden self-consciousness, newer to a child than his elders know. They speak prose and know it. But a young child possesses his words by a different tenure; he is not aware of the spelt and written aspect of the things he says every day; he does not dwell upon the sound of them. He is so little taken by the kind and character of any word that he catches the first that comes at random. A ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... to my relations, I have taken a step that will surprise you. It is no other than writing a letter to Mr. Solmes himself. I sent it, and have his answer. He had certainly help in it. For I have seen a letter of his, and indifferently worded, as poorly spelt. Yet the superscription is of his dictating, I dare say, for he is a formal wretch. With these, I shall enclose one from my brother to me, on occasion of mine to Mr. Solmes. I did think that it was possible to discourage ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... Ghoul-like he bent over the pages of delicate writing, the intimate, passionate cry of a soul seeking for its mate. They were no ordinary love-letters. Mostly they were beyond the comprehension of the creature who spelt them out word for word, seeking all the time to appraise their exact monetary value to himself. But for what he had heard he would have found them disappointing. As it was, he gloated over them. ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... reason, thought the anxious peruser; musing, dreaming, putting together divers shreds of correspondence and testing them with her intimate knowledge of Diana's character, Lady Dunstane conceived that the unprotected beautiful girl had suffered a persecution, it might be an insult. She spelt over the names of the guests at the houses. Lord Wroxeter was of evil report: Captain Rampan, a Turf captain, had the like notoriety. And it is impossible in a great house for the hostess to spread her aegis to cover every dame and damsel present. She has to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... I'm not—that is so far as Socialists have gone. I describe myself as a 'Humanist.' Socialism as we had it before the war was synonymous with revolution. Its creed, 'Revolution before evolution,' spelt destruction and anarchy. It aimed to get what it wanted by force instead of striving to get it by constitutional means. I broke with them just there—and yet—and yet," he mused, as if to himself, "they were hounded down as ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... exactly as the letter K, but erroneously spelt in our maps Key or Ki) is long and narrow, running in a north and south direction, and consists almost entirely of rock and mountain. It is everywhere covered with luxuriant forests, and in its bays and inlets the sand is of dazzling ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... Even in the days of printing language takes a long time to crystallize down into accepted forms, correct and incorrect. You may see Dutchess with a t at Blenheim, well within the eighteenth century, and forgo has only recently decided to give up its e. In the days of manuscripts men spelt pretty much as they pleased, making very free even with their own names; and uncritical copyists, caring only to reproduce the word, and not troubling about the exact orthography of their original, did nothing to check the ever-growing ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... of "Krishna" is by Sir William Jones, and by many others written "Crishna," and I have seen it spelt "Cristna." The resemblance it bears, when thus written, to "Christ" is apparent only, there is no etymological similarity. Krishna is derived from the Sanscrit "Krish," to scrape, to draw, to colour. Krishna means ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... sound dollar "Kirsh hajar" or "Riyal hajar" (a stone dollar; but the word is spelt with the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... down and corrected all the words. "I don't wonder your cheeks are so red," she said severely. Pocahontas sat up straight and blushed, but made no excuses. It is not strange that Lota, who really spelt very nicely for a little girl of her age, should have ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... a good voyage for that season, with fair winds and clear skies for the most part. 'Twas a stout ship and a steady, with generous breadth of beam, and kept by the master as clean and bright as his porringer. He was Emperor aboard her. He spelt Command with a large C, and when he inspected, his jacks stood to attention like man-o'-war's men. The John mounting only four guns, and but two of them ninepounders, I expressed my astonishment that he had ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... She spelt it, adding 'Of course.' He thought it was somehow a very romantic name. He decidedly liked the name. He was by no means sure, however, that he liked the girl. He liked her appearance, though she was freckled; she was unquestionably stylish; she ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... for in the lull of the wind they could hear the short, crisp spit of the spark as it spelt ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... begins to be briske, and play like other ladies, and is quite another woman from what she was. It may be, it may make the King like her the better, and forsake his two mistresses my Lady Castlemaine and Stewart. [Spelt indiscriminately in the MS Stuart, Steward, ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... first move. Your next is as follows. Every rustic-cottage contains gruesome china-ornaments and excruciating-cheap German-prints of such subjects as "The Tryst" (always spelt "The Trist" on the German print), "The Saylor's Return," "The Warior's Dreem," "Napoleon at Arcola," and so forth. Point to a china-ornament and say, "I never knew cows in this part of the country were blue and green." Then after you've exhausted the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 22, 1892 • Various
... traced to the beginning of the fourteenth century. The modern game differs little from that which the old pictures describe, except in the shape of the trap which holds the ball. But the most ancient of all games of this nature is golf, or goff (as it used to be spelt), which was played with a crooked club or staff, sometimes called a bandy. Scotsmen are very fond of this game, which has lately migrated into England and found many admirers. It was probably introduced into ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... here would not scan but for the elided "e" in "souv'raine" at the end of the line. In some editions "ils" is found and souveraine is spelt normally. Ils and els for a feminine plural existed in the ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... agricultural country, Bulgaria grows wheat, maize, barley, rye, oats, millet, spelt, rice (around Philippopolis), potatoes, grapes, tobacco, mulberries (there is a silk industry), and roses. This cultivation of roses for the production of attar of roses is an almost exclusively Bulgarian industry. Most of the genuine attar ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... preponderance of that despicably common stamp, the French twenty-five centimes. And here joining them in stealthy review, I found the C and the CH; then something of an A just following; and then a terminal Y. Here was also the whole name spelt out to me; it seemed familiar, too; and yet for some time I could not bridge the imperfection. Then I came upon another stamp, in which an L was legible before the Y, and in a moment the word leaped up complete. Chailly, that was the name; Chailly-en-Biere, ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... in 1457, and his work was so popular that numerous copies of the manuscript were made. The treatise on coat-armour, or 'cootarmuris,' as it is quaintly spelt, which comprises the third part of the 'Book of Saint Albans' (first printed in 1486), is, for the greater part, a literal translation of the second half of the fourth book of the 'De Studio Militari' as printed by Bysshe. Ames, in his 'Typographical Antiquities,' ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... While they spelt through my passport by their dim lantern I opened the Yedo parcel, and found that it contained a tin of lemon sugar, a most kind note from Sir Harry Parkes, and a packet of letters from you. While I was attempting to open the letters, Ito, the policemen, and ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... the name should be spelt Headwork, and that they were all lawyers. But I gave him as good as he sent for ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... deal table, propped against the wall on account of a broken leg, the ragged curtain stretched across the window, the new shelf that he had made out of a box. He studied, with fresh interest, the coloured almanacs on the wall, and spelt out, with amiable derision, the Scripture text over the door. He felt vaguely that he ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... —Dream ought to be spelt with a capital letter, being, I think, evidently personified as the god of dreams. See ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... Their name, their years, spelt by the unletter'd Muse, The place of fame and elegy supply, And many a holy text around she strews, That teach the ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... ix., p. 305.).—For a familiar mention of this word (commonly spelt Bothie), your correspondent may be referred to the poem of The Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich, a Long-Vacation Pastoral, by Arthur Hugh Clough, Oxford: Macpherson, 1848. The action of the poem is chiefly carried on at the Bothie, the situation of which ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 236, May 6, 1854 • Various
... in Anaho is what concerns us here. The devil-fish, it seems, were growing scarce upon the reef; it was judged fit to interpose what we should call a close season; for that end, in Polynesia, a tapu (vulgarly spelt 'taboo') has to be declared, and who was to declare it? Taipi might; he ought; it was a chief part of his duty; but would any one regard the inhibition of a Beggar on Horse-back? He might plant palm branches: it did not ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... capture of Domme appears to have been 1347. The men who treasonably delivered up the place were afterwards hanged by the French party when they regained possession of the stronghold. In 1369 the English again invested the rock, this time under the command of Robert Knolles. (Tarde, who spelt all English names as he had heard them pronounced in the country, writes Robert Canole.) The place was then so well defended, and success appeared so far off to the partisans of Edward III., that the siege was raised in despair at ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... pleasure. It had been raining, and the wet pavements shone with long, blurred yellow glints from the thousands of lights above. Down the street they could see a huge blazing theater sign, with the name of a popular actress spelt in letters of fire. ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... her flowers to put upon her desk! But, oh, dear! she didn't know enough, she feared. For all that she had graduated at the Academy, she never dared to write a letter without looking up all the hard words of it in the dictionary, to see how they were spelt;—and parsing! and doing sums!— oh, gracious! she never could teach school,—that was out ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... their years, spelt by th' unletter'd Muse, The place of fame and elegy supply: And many a holy text around she strews, That teach the rustic moralist ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... out a mile in front we waited watching on the hill. Time passed slowly, for the sun was hot. Suddenly it became evident that one of the advanced troops was signalling energetically. The message was spelt out. The officer with the troop perceived Dervishes in his front. We looked through our glasses. It was true. There, on a white patch of sand among the bushes of the plain, were a lot of little brown spots, moving slowly across the front of the cavalry outposts towards an Egyptian squadron, ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... and that I have therefore thought it best to avoid the use of a special font of type containing the proper diacritical points; while to the rest I venture to present the plea that the time has passed when Vijayanagar needs to be spelt ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... would, for three months. I don't know as I was wise, but I thought it was maybe my duty for three months. I'm tired of seein' the Clightville folks called 'Glimpses' an' us called 'Dabs' in that Meadville Mixture, an' last week you remember how they spelt it wrong an' called us 'Dubs,' which is far from my idea of politeness. It was being mad over that as much as anythin' that made me up an' tell Mr. Kimball as I'd take Elijah an' take care of him ...
— Susan Clegg and a Man in the House • Anne Warner
... bugbear on the whole is Berchte or Perchte (the name is variously spelt). She is particularly connected with the Eve of the Epiphany, and it is possible that her name comes from the old German giper(c)hta Na(c)ht, the bright or shining night, referring to the ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... mirth could be only too easily excited, his wildest shouts and most frantic gesticulations were like efforts to throw off a load at his heart. Time hung heavy on his hands, and he would lie rolling and kicking drearily on the floor, watching with some envy his little sister as she spelt her way prosperously through 'Little Charles,' or daintily and distinctly repeated her hymns. 'Nothing to do' was the burthen of his song, and with masculine perverseness he disdained every occupation suggested to him. Sophy might boast of his obedience and quiescence, ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... peeped through the hair on his faitures— That he liked the appearance of Paddy Malone. Wid him I agreed to go up to his station, Saying abroad in the bush you’ll find yourself at home. I liked his proposal, and ’out hesitation Signed my name wid a X that spelt Paddy Malone. Oh, Paddy Malone, you’re no scholard, Ohone! Sure, I made a cris-crass that spelt ...
— The Old Bush Songs • A. B. Paterson
... animals entirely controlled by it. This wonderful brain also made possible the communication and tradition of his experiences and ideas through articulate speech by which means his successors in each generation were able to keep and develop the slowly spelt lessons of ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... word is spelt variously by different writers thus: Cabala, Cabbala, Kabbala, Kabbalah, Kabalah. I adopt the first spelling as being the one employed in the ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... Karawl, as the Thierrys would have spelt it, was glorious among the names of the most powerful chieftains of the Northmen who conquered Gaul and established the feudal system there. Never had Carol bent his head before King or Communes, the Church or ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... gaybels and a pulpyt, and three payr of stayrs," in its meeting-house,—a liberal supply of the now fashionable y's. We read of "pinakles" and "pyks" and "shuthers" and "scaffills" and "bimes" and "lynters" and "bathyns" and "chymbers" and "bellfers;" and often in one entry the same word will be spelt in three or four different ways. Here is a portion of a contract in the records of the Roxbury church: "Sayd John is to fence in the Buring Plas with a Fesy ston wall, sefighiattly don for Strenk and workmanship as also to mark a Doball gatt 6 or 8 fote wid and to hing it." Sefighiattly ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... might well appeal to her. A whisper had reached her to the effect that, hard and unsympathetic as her Aunt Mercy was, romance at one time had place in her life—a romance which left her the only sufferer, a romance that had spelt a life's disaster for her. To the adamantine fortune-teller was attributed a devotion so strong, so passionate in the days of her youth that her reason had been well-nigh unhinged by the hopelessness of it. The ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... and walking have been very winter like since the above hotch-potch, pothooks & trammels. I went to Mrs. Whitwell's last wednessday—you taught me to spell the 4 day of the week, but my aunt says that it should be spelt wednesday. My aunt also says, that till I come out of an egregious fit of laughterre that is apt to sieze me & the violence of which I am at this present under, neither English sense, nor anything rational may be expected of me. I ment to say, that, I ...
— Diary of Anna Green Winslow - A Boston School Girl of 1771 • Anna Green Winslow
... been a candidate for the accident ward or, failing that, the bridewell and an appearance in the court next day before Mr Tobias or, he being the solicitor rather, old Wall, he meant to say, or Mahony which simply spelt ruin for a chap when it got bruited about. The reason he mentioned the fact was that a lot of those policemen, whom he cordially disliked, were admittedly unscrupulous in the service of the Crown and, as Mr Bloom put it, recalling a case or two in the A division in ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... other of setting people right if he thought them wrong. I could not assert myself against his version of Howels's name, for my edition of his letters was far away in Ohio, and I was obliged to own that the name was spelt in several different ways in it. He perceived, no doubt, why I had chosen the form liked my own, with the title which the pleasant old turncoat ought to have had from the many masters he served according to their many minds, but never had ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Rhys Davids in J.R.A.S. 1892, pp. 8-9. The name is variously spelt. The P.T.S. print Sammitiya, but the Sanskrit text of the Madhyamakavritti (in Bibl. Buddh.) has Sammitiya. Sanskrit dictionaries give Sammatiya. The Abhidharma section of the Chinese Tripitaka (Nanjio, 1272) contains a sastra belonging ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... their name denotes, were of French descent—Huguenots. Like many other emigrants, they yielded, in the course of a generation or two, to a barbarous mispronunciation of their patronymic, which came to be spoken of as if spelt "Malmsey." ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... we used was not very good, and there were a number of spelling inconsistencies. For instance "gipsy" is sometimes spelt "gipsey" and sometimes "gypsy". And the unfortunate Mr Deering is sometimes spelt "Dearing" and sometimes "Dereing". I hope we have ironed these things out, as well as making the hyphenation more consistent throughout ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... inscriptions in various tongues over the graves of mariners from distant countries who had met with their death on this rocky coast! Had not Sheila herself pointed out to him, with a sad air, how many of these memorials bore the words "who was drowned;" and that, too, was the burden of the rudely-spelt legends beginning "Hier rutt in Gott," or "Her under hviler stovit," and sometimes ending with the pathetic "Wunderschen ist unsre Hoffnung." The fishermen brought the coffin to the newly-made grave, the women ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... up from the table a letter in a strange, ill-spelt, scrawly hand, and opened it mechanically. But his face brightened as he began to read. I append a portion of it with a ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... at any rate, and between authors I may allow myself so much freedom as to leave it pending. We are both Scots besides, and I suspect both rather Scotty Scots; my own Scotchness tends to intermittency, but is at times erisypelitous—if that be rightly spelt. Lastly, I have gathered we had both made our stages in the metropolis of the winds: our Virgil's "grey metropolis," and I count that a lasting bond. No place so ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to go without a consort, he becomes furious and mad, killing every living creature, be it man or beast: and in this state is called ronkedor, an object of greater terror to a traveller than a hundred wild ones."—P. 142. In another passage, p. 164, he is called runkedor, and I have seen it spelt elsewhere ronquedue, WOLF does not give "ronkedor" as a term peculiar to that section of the island; but both there and elsewhere, it is obsolete at the present day, unless it be open to conjecture that the modern term "rogue" is a modification ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... the names in this book (even outside quoted passages) are inconsistently spelt. I have chosen to retain the original spelling treating these as author error rather ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... comparatively?" saw his face in its momentary bitterness as he frowned, pen in hand, out of the window. He was waiting to sign the letters before he went out to a committee meeting, and she thought she was annoying him by her slowness. She spelt comparatively anyhow, and with the wholehearted wrongness to which she and the typewriter, both bad spellers, often attained in conjunction, hastily finished and laid the letters before him. Called back to work and ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... boast of a lion, in the person of Monsieur Amedee-Sylvain de Soulas, spelt Souleyas at the time of the Spanish occupation. Amedee de Soulas is perhaps the only man in Besancon descended from a Spanish family. Spain sent men to manage her business in the Comte, but very few Spaniards settled there. The Soulas ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... Mesopotamia dispelled it, and made it easier not only to release a portion of our white garrison in India for active service elsewhere, but to recruit a large force of Indians for the Empire's work in other climes. Bagdad was a tremendous blow to German ambitions. The loss of it spelt ruin to those hopes of Eastern conquest which had prompted the German intrigues in Turkey, and it was certain that the Kaiser, so long as he believed in ultimate victory, would refuse to accept the loss of Bagdad as final. Russia's withdrawal as a belligerent ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... gown, was a citizen of Augsburg, living for a while in the same street with the honoured Augsburg painter, Hans Burgkmair, and occasionally working with him on large commissions. That he was a native of Augsburg, and the son—as is generally believed—of "Michel Holbain" (Augsburg commonly spelt Holbein with an a), leather-dresser—I myself cannot feel so sure as others do. There is no documentary evidence to prove that the Michael Holbein of Augsburg ever had a son, and there is both documentary and circumstantial evidence to prove that the descendants of Hans Holbein ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... perhaps in remembrance of Fulke Greville's heroine (for he knew his Elizabethans rather well for a man of those days), and no doubt also with a secret joy to think that the last syllables of her Christian name and surname in a way spelt the appellation, fell in love with the boy and made his fortune. But for her Crabbe would probably have subsided, not contentedly but stolidly, into the lot of a Doctor Slop of the time, consoling himself with snuff (which he always loved) and schnaps (to which we have ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... intensely interested in the dog's success; so sorry for his blunders, so triumphant in his lucky hits. And then the child calmed the hasty irritable old man so sweetly, and corrected the dog so gently, and talked to the animal; told it how much they relied on it, and produced her infant alphabet, and spelt out "Save us." The dog looked at the letters meditatively, and henceforth it was evident that he took more pains. Better and better; he will do, he will do! The child shall not starve, the cross shall not be sold. Down drops the curtain. End ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... impossible to identify the lady mentioned in this story, her name being spelt in so many ways in the various MSS. of the Heptameron. It is given as Roncex in the copy here followed, as Roubex in a copy that belonged to Louis XVIII., and as Roncci in the De Thou MS., whilst Boaistuau printed ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. II. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... them. It was said that Addison might have written his without going out of England. By the excessive vulgarisms so plentiful in these volumes, one might suppose the writer had never stirred out of the parish of St. Giles. Her Latin, French, and Italian, too, are so miserably spelt, that she had better have studied her own language before she floundered into other tongues. Her friends plead that she piques herself on writing as she talks: methinks, then, she should talk as she would write. There are many indiscretions too in her work of which she will perhaps be told ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... behind the curtain it spelt disgrace, that the eldest grand-daughter—at the ripe age of twenty-two—should be neither wife nor mother. It would need a very advanced suitor to overlook that damning item. Doubtless a large dowry would be demanded by way of compensation; and, before all, caste must be restored. ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... faces of servants with mops of black hair peeped at you from above; the click of billiard balls came to your ears, and ascending the steps, you would perhaps see in the first sala, very stiff upon a straight-backed chair, in a good light, Don Pepe moving his long moustaches as he spelt his way, at arm's length, through an old Sta. Marta newspaper. His horse—a stony-hearted but persevering black brute with a hammer head—you would have seen in the street dozing motionless under an immense saddle, with its nose almost touching ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... and forget how I used to scold you about your writing and spelling, and just write me two or three lines. I think I would rather have them badly spelt than not, because then I shall be sure they are yours. And never mind about capitals; I was a fool to say such a deal about them, for a man does just as well without them. A letter from you would do a vast to keep me patient all these days till ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. II • Elizabeth Gaskell
... letter was that Inger had written and spelt it all herself. Isak was not so learned but that he had to get it read for him down in the village, by the man at the store; but once he had got it into his head it stayed there; he knew it off by heart when he ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... wrote,—"gayly-dressed people, tricked off in smart finery, and larking like a lot of Ramsgate tradesmen on the public road. One of the impudent creatures made a trumpet of his great ugly fist and spelt out the name of the hotel at which they were stopping, and then put his hand to his ear, as if to listen for the response. Expecting me to tell them anything about myself! But I flatter myself that I was a match for them. I just got out my umbrella and shot it up in their very faces as ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... hats, bunnets, umbrells, fans, canes, parasols, turbans, long robes, and short ones, gay ones, bright ones, feathers, sedan chairs, bijous, rollin' chairs, Shacks—or that is how Josiah pronounced it. I told him that they wuz spelt S-h-e-i-k-s. ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... went off very sound asleep—so sound you might have took him for a image—he heard what passed between Uncle Moses and Michael, whose name has been spelt herein so that you should think of it as Sapps Court did; but ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... Lincoln telegraphed the right letter to a young lady by putting his finger with a significant smile to his eye. Many years later, however, and after his entrance into public life, Lincoln himself spelt apology with a double p, planning with a single n, and very with a double r. His schooling was very irregular, his school days hardly amounting to a year in all, and such education as he had was picked up afterwards by himself. His appetite for mental food, however, was always strong, ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... these denominations; that must have been, then, their form of literature. But still times change; and their next descendants, the George Washingtons and Daniel Websters, will at least be clear upon the point. And anyway, and however his name should be spelt, this Irvine Lovelands was the most ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sudden the mystery of the syllables was revealed to him, and he began to read. This was a great joy. From that moment he could read, and the meaning of the words, spelt out with such great pains, became ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... worth while bringing a scandal on the community for the sake of ten shillings? It will be in all the papers, and Shadchan will be spelt shatcan, shodkin, shatkin, chodcan, shotgun, and goodness knows ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... at his father and put his hands together. He wanted his father to ask a blessing. The father made the boy understand he did not know what to say, then the poor little fellow began to cry. At last he thought of a plan, he would ask the blessing himself; and so he spelt on his fingers the blessing he had learnt at the Institution, and got his friends to spell on their fingers after him letter by letter and word by word, and thus overcame the difficulty in which ...
— Anecdotes & Incidents of the Deaf and Dumb • W. R. Roe
... his card by an orderly acting as footman, the soul of Joan of Arc was speaking by the aid of the saucer. The soul of Joan of Arc had already spelt letter by letter the words: "They well knew each other," and these words had been written down. When the orderly came in the saucer had stopped first on b, then on y, and began jerking hither and thither. This jerking was caused by the General's opinion ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... In the two earliest editions spelt trapanned, that is, entrapped. In later editions its spelling was influenced by the word trepan, ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... a kind of insult to the vanquished: and, besides, the example of a hero should be held out to his countrymen rather than to their enemies. You must take care to have the word caused, in the last line but one, spelt rightly, and ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... and her daughter (spelt Alys) had looked from afar off at the magnificent villa of this notable hostess, and had read enviously the paragraphs in London and Riviera papers describing her entertainments, not missing one of the long list of names attached. Then one day they had come across ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Franklin found that electricity—that strange power of which lightning is the visible sign—could be carried along upon metal wire. It has since been made out how to make the touch of a magnet at one end of these wires make the other end move so that letters can be pointed to, words spelt out and messages sent to any distance with really the speed of lightning. This is the wonderful electric telegraph, of which you see the wires ...
— Young Folks' History of England • Charlotte M. Yonge
... already used in these pages, there are half a dozen words spelt ko and as many as fourteen spelt ko, but all have a different ideograph. When the prolongation of the educational course by the ideographs is dwelt on, it is wholesome for us to remember Professor Gilbert Murray's declaration that "English spelling entails ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... feel a good deal like a young housekeeper. I wonder how soon you go back to Northampton? How queer it must be to be able to float round! It is a pity you could not float to New York, and get a good hugging from this old woman. We expect 250 ministers here in May at general assembly (I ought to have spelt it with a big G and a big A). My dear child, what makes you get blue? I don't much believe in any blue devils save those that live in the body and send sallies into the mind. Perhaps I should, though, if I had not a ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... usually made sad havoc of the names of places. Hentzner spelt Gray's Inn and Lincoln's Inn phonetically as Grezin and Linconsin, and so puzzled his editor that he supposed these to be the names of two giants. A similar mistake to this was that of the man who boasted that ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... names, their years, spelt by th' unlettered Muse, The place of fame and elegy supply: And many a holy text around she strews, That teach the ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... poverty would thus have begun immediately after his resignation of the lucrative post of Master of the Mint and before he had received his pensions. 'He who does not beg receives nothing,' he says, and later on in the same poem 'If hard work and merit spelt success I would have enough to live on and give and leave in my will' (III. 382-3). The general tone of these verses is more in accordance with that of his later plays[71], and the occasion was more probably that in which he composed the Templo de Apolo, ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... journey to go to meetin'. But the boy went. He sot up, lookin' beautiful, by the side of me on the back seat of the Democrat; his uncle Josiah sot in front; and Ury drove. Ury Henzy, he's our hired man, and a tolerable good one, as hired men go. His name is Urias; but we always call him Ury,—spelt U-r-y, Ury,—with the emphasis ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... nothing so far, for there was nothing to sneer at. In the same dark hour, however, there was a printer who was (I suppose) so devoted to this Government that he could think of no Gray but Sir Edward Grey. He spelt it "Grey" by a mere misprint, and the whole tale was complete: first blunder, second blunder, ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... Peden, the Covenanter, was undoubtedly on the Border in the 'killing times,' and is said to have escaped from the hunters when preaching on Peden Pike by intervention of a mist, but as in old maps this rounded hill west of Otterburn is spelt Paden, the derivation seems doubtful. Peden's Cleuch on the north side of Carter seems undoubtedly ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... a reef off Point Danger they discovered a bay, which Cook called Morton Bay after the Earl of Morton, P.R.S.; now wrongly spelt as Moreton Bay. Here, from the colour of the water, they supposed a river emptied into the sea; the surmise was correct, for they were at the mouth of the Brisbane River. At the same time some curiously-shaped hills ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson
... forfeits in a queer educational fashion. First of all Mr. Stevens left the room, presumably to think. When he came in again he went over to Miss Conklin and asked her to spell "forgive." After a moment's pause she spelt it correctly. He retired slowly, and on his return stopped again in front of Miss Conklin with the word "reconciliation." She withstood the test triumphantly. Annoyed apparently with the pains she took, Mr. Stevens, on his next entrance, turned to a pretty, quiet girl named ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... This spelt romance to Jed Burns, superintendent of operations, though he would never have admitted it. He was a bachelor; always would be one. Hard-working, hard-drinking, at odd times a plunging gambler, he lived for nothing but oil and the atmosphere of oil fields. From one boom ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... moisture, age, houseleek, and grass, had in some places suffered damage from the encroachment of two cows, whose appetite this appearance of verdure had diverted from their more legitimate pasture. An ill-spelt and worse-written inscription intimated to the traveller that he might here find refreshment for man and horse,—no unacceptable intimation, rude as the hut appeared to be, considering the wild path he had trod in approaching it, and the high and waste mountains which rose in desolate ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... retained as originally set out except that of the central character who name was spelt in the original as 'Baltazar'; Balthazar is the modern Anglicised version of the same name. The cast list has been newly compiled from the text of the play, rather than by reference to the one ...
— The Noble Spanish Soldier • Thomas Dekker
... through vistas, Donald saw a man approaching them on a lumbering run. It was Big Jerry. His beard and clothing were dishevelled, and, as he drew near, his deep, gasping breaths became audible. From his ghastly gray and working face his deep eyes looked forth with an expression which spelt pain of body and ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... They were so called because set round with variously-coloured stones, in some way resembling the motley costume of harlequin. To these succeeded "regard-rings," the stones selected so that the initial of the name of each spelt altogether the ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... triumphantly to this stage of success. Unfortunately, when all seemed favourable for the spread of the movement, though not in opposition to the National League but as a sort of auxiliary force, moving in step with it, the disastrous Split occurred. It spelt ruin for our organisation because I think it will not be denied that the workers are the most vehement and vital elements in the national life, and they took sides more violently than any other section of the population. After trying for a little while to steer the Democratic ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... uniformity has been made. The instinct of language demands regular grammar and correct spelling: these are imprinted deeply on the tablets of a nation's memory by a common use of classical and popular writers. In our own day we have attained to a point at which nearly every printed book is spelt correctly ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... it to refer to the Emperor Claudian, till a lad one day spelt it out: "Beneath this stone reposeth Claud Coster, tripe-seller, of Impington, as doth his consort Jane." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 351 - Volume 13, Saturday, January 10, 1829 • Various
... and tell you very simply about Mrs. Gustus, because she prided herself on simplicity. Spelt with a capital S, it constituted her Deity; her heaven was a severe and shadowless eternity, and plain words were the flowers that grew in her Elysian fields. She had simplified her life and her looks. Even her smile was shorn of all accessories like dimples ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... picturesque woman, and a fluent talker, and she held a tolerably high station among the Parvenus. Her English was fair enough, as a general thing—though, being of New York origin, she had the fashion peculiar to many natives of that city of pronouncing saw and law as if they were spelt sawr ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... favorite companion, the commodore chose Master Robert Juet, of Limehouse, in England. By some his name has been spelt Chewit, and ascribed to the circumstance of his having been the first man that ever chewed tobacco; but this I believe to be a mere flippancy; more especially as certain of his progeny are living at this day, who write ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... happy he whose name has been well spelt In the despatch: I knew a man whose loss Was printed Grove, although his name ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... Godmother, Flora, Would insist upon shorter and more intelligible names for her modern offspring. By bright Aurora, I can't go on worshipping at your floral shrine if the ritual is polyglot gibberish, and what's more, I won't, Ma'am. In the word (queerly spelt) of which you seem very fond, I earnestly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 18, 1892 • Various
... Koorookh angrily, he with a heavy eye sulking, and keeping the sullen feathers close upon his poll. Now, she thought, 'There is in this a meaning and I will fathom it.' So she counted the letters in the name of her betrothed, that were thirteen, and spelt them backwards, afterwards multiplying them by an equal number, and fashioning words from the selection of every third and seventh letter. Then took she the leaf from a tree and bade Koorookh fly with her ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... any of us. So we were polite at a distance, like Englishmen everywhere. Even I, who, by virtue of my cloth, might have been supposed to make advances, was shy of beginning. I was young in those days, and for one thing spelt Rome always with ...
— The Priest's Tale - Pere Etienne - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • Robert Keable
... justice, have construed a little harmless scolding into a riot, which is in law an outrageous breach of the peace committed by several persons, by three at the least, nor can a less number be convicted of it. Under this word rioting, or riotting (for I have seen it spelt both ways), many thousands of old women have been arrested and put to expense, sometimes in prison, for a little intemperate use of their tongues. This practice began to decrease in the year 1749.] them ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... a word with, but you have got to do it if you wish to be considered up to date. The Czech language is difficult to pronounce, a fact of which the Czechs seem rather proud. Pilsen, which is known to us chiefly (and rightly) for its good beer, is now spelt Plzen; this, however, makes little difference to the pronunciation, and happily none at all to the quality of the beer. The Czechs are just a bit sparing of vowels; they prefer a good fat cluster of consonants, as, for instance, in Vltava, Brno, and other such pretty names, but then you simply insert ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... venture to say we shall hear nothing more of that scheme of hers. A reputable inmate, truly, and a pleasant eclaircissement (this was one of his French words, and pronounced by him with his usual accuracy, precisely as it is spelt)—a pleasant eclaircissement—whenever that London excursion and its creditable circumstances ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... it, and so on. If I do, I'll give you a silk dress and set you up in a book-store. But here's a queerer thing yet. Des Violets is the way Mr. Gabriel's own name is spelt, and his father and mine—his mother and—Well, some way or other we're sort of cousins. Only think, Georgie! isn't that—I thought, to be sure, when he quartered at our house, Dan'd begin to take me to do, if I looked at him sideways,—make the same fuss that he does, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... half-way down the cliff-side, and the boy at his earnest wish had been given charge of it. On weekdays, as a rule he hoisted two flags—an ensign on the gaff, and a single code-flag at the mast-head; but on Sundays he usually ran up three or four, and with the help of the code-book spelt out some message to the harbour. Sometimes, too, if an old friend happened to take up her moorings at the red buoy below, he would have her code-letters hoisted to welcome her, or would greet and speed her with such signals ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... crisis that the fiance of Sonia Danidoff had attracted the attention of Charley, whose friend, the young engineer Andral, was the protege of the man whose awful pallor and distracted air spelt tragedy. ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... ''Tan't spelt right—and why couldn't the feller just as well use the 'good old English' word viz., ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... more than once when I had held my breath in vain. But this is the unvarnished record of an odious hour, and it passed without further aggravation from without; only, as I drove to Sloane Street, the news was on all the posters, and on one I read of "a clew" which spelt for me a doom I was grimly ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... if I had written 'cholera' at length, they would have been puzzled by it; so I wrote it in a simple way, that should pass current with every one. Truth itself loses its value if people don't understand it. What does it signify how I spelt the word cholera, so long as the efficacy ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... find the name spelt indiscriminately Bonaparte and Buonaparte. Napoleon, when young, wrote it both ways. It is spelt Bonaparte in the entry of his baptism in the Register of Ajaccio, which was solemnised (by-the-bye) two years after his birth, the dates being ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... collection to Innocent, saying that as they were found in her part of the house she might keep them. No one—not even Robin—knew how much she had loved and studied these old books, or how patiently she had spelt out the manuscripts; and no one could have guessed what a wide knowledge of literature she had gained or what fine taste she had developed from her silent communications with the parted spirit of the Sieur Amadis and his poetical remains. She had even arranged her room as she thought ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... their hands, on which they had written their names. He had a number of these, some very curious; among others, that wild soldier, man of fashion and wit among the reformers, Ulric von Huetten's autograph on Erasmus' beautiful folio Greek Testament, and John Howe's (spelt How) on the first edition of Milton's Speech on Unlicensed Printing.[25] He began collecting books when he was twelve, and he was collecting up to his last hours. He cared least for merely fine books, though he enjoyed, no one more so, fine type, good binding, ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... gabble; no folly, no absurdity, no induction of French education upon the abstract idea of men and women; no similitude nor dissimilitude to English? Why, thou cursed Smellfungus! your account of your landing and reception, and Bullen (I forget how you spell it,—it was spelt my way in Harry the Eighth's time), was exactly in that minute style which strong impressions INSPIRE (writing to a Frenchman, I write as a Frenchman would). It appears to me as if I should die with joy at the first landing in a foreign ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... of William Feilding, third Earl of Denbigh, by his first wife, Mary, sister of John, first Baron of Kingston, in the peerage of Ireland. Lady Mary was, therefore, a relation of the novelist, Henry Fielding, whose surname was spelt differently because, he explained, his branch of the family was the only one ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... Supervisor. The master had been struck with the size of the black type in which this placard was printed, and with a shrewd perception of its value to the round wandering eyes of his smaller pupils, allowed it to remain as a pleasing example of orthography. Unfortunately, although subdivided and spelt by them in its separate letters with painful and perfect accuracy, it was collectively known as "Wally," and its general import productive of ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... "shakhat," a modern word which occurs in Spitta Bey's "Contes Arabes Modernes," spelt with the palatal instead of the dental, and is translated there ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... Delacour," said the manager. "I begged her to marry me. Over and over again I asked her. But she said I could do without her, and Delacour couldn't. They fell in love with each other at this very play when it was first put on. I saw it coming, and it spelt disaster for her. But it was the real thing; and when the real thing comes, we all have to knock under to it. It doesn't come often. Most of us are quite incapable of it. I have only seen it once or twice. ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... poll-tax, and this time everybody over fifteen was required to pay 1s. Of course, the thing was impossible. In many parishes the mere returns of population were not filled in; numbers evaded payment—which spelt ruin—by leaving their homes. L22,000 was ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... moment Louis' hang-dog face—none the handsomer for the mark of the Syndic's cane—spelt refusal. Then he changed his mind. He nodded sulkily. "Very well," he said. "But it is raining, and I have no great wish to—Hush! What is that?" He raised his hand in the attitude of one listening and his eyes sought his ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... it "Suth-ark." "Suthark!" John said vaguely. "Do you mean Southwark?..." He pronounced the name as it is spelt. ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... condemnation. The Bible, and the Declaration of Independence are certainly unsafe. The preamble to the North Carolina law declares, that the Alphabet has a tendency to excite dissatisfaction; I suppose it is because freedom may be spelt out of it. A storekeeper in South Carolina was nearly ruined by having unconsciously imported certain printed handkerchiefs, which his neighbors deemed seditious. A friend of mine asked, "Did the handkerchiefs contain texts from scripture? or quotations from ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... imagination; but it is of no use. No doubt your head aches, trying to make something of my description. If there is here and there one that can make anything intelligible out of my talk about the Great Secret, and who has spelt out a syllable or two of it on some woman's face, dead or living, that is all I can expect. One should see the person with whom he converses about such matters. There are dreamy-eyed people to whom I should say all these things with a certainty of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... before me. Not thou, not like to thee. Dear me, if it were possible The Times should ever see How very far the times have moved (Spelt with a little "t"). ...
— Are Women People? • Alice Duer Miller
... not like you at all, Bebee," said the good old man, as she knelt at his feet on the bricks of his little bare study, where all the books he ever spelt out were treatises on ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... arraigning the conduct implies no doubt as to the intellect. It should be legibly written, so that it may be read with comfort; but no more than that. Caligraphy betokens caution, and if it be not light in hand it is nothing. That it be fairly grammatical and not ill spelt the writer owes to his schoolmaster; but this should come of habit, not of care. Then let its page be soiled by no business; one touch of utility ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... and, contemplating it with a despondent air, would declare it to be the most difficult word in the English language to pronounce. 'Ow you say 'im?' 'Penknife,' I explained. He would bid me write it down; then having spelt it, he would, with much effort, and a sound like sneezing - oh! the pain I endured! - slowly repeat 'Penkneef.' I gave it up at last; and he was gratified with his success. As my explosion generally occurred about five minutes ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... the old tone with which she spelt her way through the sacred words? Hardly: here it could be perceived that in her secret heart there was doubt and mistrust. Do what she would her eyes frequently became so dim that it was necessary to pause and wipe her glasses; and when she had finished ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... books did not 'clasp in,' that which old philosophies have 'not dreamt of,'—the lore of laws not written yet in books of man's devising, the lore of that of which man's ordinary life consisteth is here, uncollected, waiting to be spelt out. ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... presence of the Count, and after trying a little to school my nerves, I found a soft quietude come over me. Here I am, sitting at a little oak table where in old times possibly some fair lady sat to pen, with much thought and many blushes, her ill-spelt love letter, and writing in my diary in shorthand all that has happened since I closed it last. It is the nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance. And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... the home people, even Peter wrote, a most characteristic epistle with only about half the words wrongly spelt, and finishing with a spirited drawing of the Scotia attacked by pirates, an abject figure crouching in the bows being labelled "You!" How I miss that young brother of mine! I ache to see his nubbly features ("nubbly" is a portmanteau word and exactly describes them) ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas |
