"Vagary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... privileges! How respectable are they! how cordially do men prize them, when a woman knows how to render them estimable." I fear ——- will be convinced of this but too late. I am glad to find, however, that the idea so often urged (in vain) by me, is not a mere vagary of my own brain, but is supported by so ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... retrieve his buffoon's reputation, for he was really very much in love, and very serious in his desire to be married in quite the ordinary way. With a rather lack-lustre eye he noticed the amusement of his friends at his last vagary; but when Winifred Ames entered the ballroom a nervous vivacity shook him, as it has shaken ploughmen under similar conditions, and for just a moment he felt ill at ease in the lonely lunacy of his flowered waistcoat and olive-green knee-breeches. He danced with her, then ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... Hood, and daughter of Ezra Goddard. It is now given to the public without addition or alteration, and with but a slight abridgment. A strange and startling story it certainly is. Perhaps the reader will cast it aside at once as a worthless fiction,—the idle vagary of an excited brain. The compiler, of course, cannot vouch for its truth, but would respectfully invite the attention of the reader to the following testimonials presented by those who have known the narrator. The first is from Edward P. Hood, with whom Mrs. Richardson ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... By an odd vagary of temper the love of these bleak hills blazed up fiercely in his heart. Never before had he felt so keenly the nameless glamour of his own heritage. He had not been back six months and yet he had come to accept all things as matters of course, the beauty of the place, its sport, its memories. ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... been without a pang that Harald Kaas had done this, his face and manner had shown it for a long time and still did so; but he had expected that a roar of laughter would greet his extraordinary vagary. This was evident from the composure with which he had carried his wife out; and still more from the glance of gratified revenge with which he looked round him afterwards. But there was only dead stillness, succeeded by weeping, sobbing, and indignation. ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... had more than the shadow of knowledge as to his wife's happiness in the changed order. The episode, as he deemed it, in which she had been given a partnership with him, hardly remained in his memory. When he thought of it at all, he smiled over it as over the vagary of one among a woman's innumerable varying moods. But he thought of it very rarely, for his time was absorbed in the desperate struggle to find a way out from the destruction that loomed very close at hand. In the end, he decided not to reject the offer made by Morton in behalf ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... out. Perhaps he had felt a stone. A tiny, creeping, chilly shudder went up his back. Then he remembered, he felt, he saw his little attic room, in the old home back among the wheat-hills of the Northwest. Six thousand miles away! He would never see that room again. What unaccountable vagary of memory had ever recalled it to him? It faded out of ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... crept above the eastern horizon line! And yet I believe that in the final shaping-up the best thing for each one comes to all of us. Else the universe is without a plan and Love unwavering and eternal is only a vagary of the dreamer. ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... has its say, every prejudice its voice, and every prejudice and side and vagary even has the philosophical reason given for it, and the charitable explanation applied to it. She analyzes the religious motives without obtrusive criticism or acrid cynicism or nauseous cant—whether of the orthodox ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... because the subjective bias that discriminates between them is the cause of their being beautiful at all. The principle of personal preference is the same as that of human taste; real and objective beauty, in contrast to a vagary of individuals, means only an affinity to a more prevalent and lasting susceptibility, a response toa more general and fundamental demand. And the keener discrimination, by which the distance between beautiful and ugly things is increased, far from being a loss of aesthetic insight, is a ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... is his own arbiter, has both the requisite intelligence and the moral ability to control his own destiny; secondly, they place the source and criterion of this power in collective wisdom, not in individual vagary and not in divine revelation. They assert, therefore, that the law of the group, the perfected and wrought out code of human experience, is all that is binding and all that is essential. To be sure, and most ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... It was a vagary of Mr. Shrimplin's that ten reckless years of his life had been spent in the West, the far West, the West of cow-towns and bad men; that for this decade he had flourished on bucking broncos and in gilded bars, the admired hero of a variety of deft ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... by no vagary of chance that the demand of women for the higher education came simultaneously with the change from the old industrial home to the new, more purely domestic home. (It may be a higher, nobler type of home. We are not here ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... after a first and second Vagary she would Accept of me returning her Victorious Kindness and Good Will ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... if he meant that his triumph should culminate on this final night of the year, his year. He laughed Julian's astonishment at this vagary aside, sat down and wrote the two notes of invitation, and then went ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... imagination, predilection, caprice, humor, inclination, supposition, conceit, idea, liking, vagary, conception, image, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... evil spirits, even at so great a distance." [320] We have reached three general conclusions. First, when the moon is occulted by the earth it is believed to be devoured by some evil demon, or by wolves or dogs. This is the superstitious vagary of the Hindoos, the Chinese, Asiatics generally, Europeans, Africans, Americans, and Polynesians. Secondly, a lunar eclipse is the precursor of some dreadful calamity to the inhabitants of the earth. This notion is also traceable in every quarter of the globe. And ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... irresistible without vagary, now became the fire's progress. Terrible in its absolute precision, in its measured advance down the wind, this implacable river of flame rolled down the city. Far ahead of the actual fire itself ran its fatal forerunner, ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... consist, fire being the true, and night the phenomenal. From such an unsubstantial and delusive basis it would not repay us, even if we had the means of accomplishing it, to give an exposition of his physical system. In many respects it degenerated into a wild vagary; as, for example, when he placed an overruling daemon in the centre of the phenomenal world. Nor need we be detained by his extravagant reproduction of the old doctrine of the generation of animals from miry clay, nor follow his explanation ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... vagary was in the shape of a fog while they were off the Dorsetshire coast, and with the fog there was its companion, ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... of Daddy John's power was revealed. He who had so remorselessly driven her to bed now showed no surprise or disapprobation at her frivolity. It was as if her wish to beautify herself received his recognition as an accepted vagary of human nature. ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... king,—yet laughing-half to view The strangeness and vagary of the feat: Laughing indeed! with twenty minds to call From his inner bed-chamber the Forty forth, Who watched all night beside their monarch's bed, With naked swords and torches in their hands, And test this lover's-knot with steel and fire; But with a thought, "To-morrow ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... of some calmness, he felt that his first duty was to remove the coin from their possession. But how was it to be done? He could not disclose his knowledge of its baleful properties. It would be set down as the vagary of a disordered brain; nobody would entertain it for an instant. His object must be accomplished, if at all, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... 1879 he startled the learned doctors by a reference in a prize poem to the Philippines as his "patria," fatherland. This political heresy on the part of a native of the islands was given no very serious attention at the time, being looked upon as the vagary of a schoolboy, but again in the following year, by what seems a strange fatality, he stirred the resentment of the friars, especially the Dominicans, by winning over some of their number the first prize in a literary contest celebrated in ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... convincing these barbarians that their prisoners were not of some hated, hostile tribe. Evidently the tradition of the outer world had long since perished as a belief among them. The patriarch's faith in it had come to be considered a mere doting second childhood vagary, just as the tradition of the Golden Age was held to be ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... definable, about our craft, that constantly, suggested the idea that we were standing on nothing, or, at best, nothing better than dissolving quicksands, which were liable at any moment wholly to slide away and leave us; and it required some strength of mind to resist the vagary, and prevent it from effecting a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... to last this double shore is a petrified history of two nations, mutually shadowed by a mad vagary of fate with the lust of conquest, which makes them fly at each other's throats ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... after her, wrinkling his forehead for a moment, as if he had discovered some new vagary in femininity to puzzle him. Then he resumed his patrol with the slow stride of the master mariner. Hue and Cry raised dim bulk in the harbor jaws, showing no glimmer of light. It was barren, treeless, a lump of land which towns had thrust from ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... warning that Mr. Tubbs was "simply furious"—and had said something about "standing this vagary about as long as he could," which did not mean much to Robin, not half so much as Beryl's own ill-temper, for the tutor had taken the annoyance of Robin's high-handed absentedness out on the remaining pupil. With Beryl cross ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... in vogue in England during this first quarter of the nineteenth century explain every vagary in America. There fashionable and educational authorities had hitched their wagon to the literary star, Miss Edgeworth, and the followers of her system; while the religiously inclined pinned their faith also upon tracts written by Miss Hannah More. In this still ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... each of her thin, withered cheeks. He heard her footstep mounting her bedroom staircase, but no clue to the mystery of her purchase offered itself to mitigate his surprise. Had she not been his housekeeper now for six years, and during that time not so much as a trace of any vagary of mind had ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... The blind themselves laughed in the face of Hauey when he offered to teach them to read. How pitiable is the cramped sense of imprisonment in circumstances which teaches men to expect no good and to treat any attempt to relieve them as the vagary of a disordered mind! But now, behold the transformation; see how institutions and industrial establishments for the blind have sprung up as if by magic; see how many of the deaf have learned not only to read and write, but ...
— Optimism - An Essay • Helen Keller
... almost necessarily gave to astronomy. The observation that the lower principle, e.g. mechanics, is always seen in the higher, e.g. in the phenomena of life, further tended to perplex them. Plato's doctrine of the same and the other ruling the courses of the heavens and of the human body is not a mere vagary, but is a natural result of the state of knowledge and thought at which ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... consciousness; but when at the hospital he seemed very deaf and stupid. He was discharged perfectly cured twenty weeks after the occurrence. The scientific explanation of this amazing escape from this most eccentric vagary of the electric fluid is given,—the fact that the wet condition of the man's clothing increased its power of conduction, and in this way saved his life. It is said that the electric current passed down the side of Orman's body, causing everywhere a sudden production of steam, which by ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... went to church! A cranky, visionary, talkative man, he was in Mr. Drake's eyes. He set him down as one of those mystical interpreters of the Word, who are always searching it for strange things, whose very insight leads them to vagary, blinding them to the relative value of things. It is amazing from what a mere fraction of fact concerning him, a man will dare judge the whole of another man. In reality, little Polwarth could have carried big Drake to the top of any hill Difficulty, up which, in his ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... was set to keep A little flock of goats or sheep; He thought the task too solitary, And took a strange perverse vagary: To call the people out of fun, To see them leave their work and run, He cried and screamed with all his might,— "Wolf! wolf!" in a pretended fright. Some people, working at a distance, Came running in ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... of this journal had got hold of his story, and had made her reporter's Story of it, which she imaginatively cast in the shape of an interview with Hewson. But worse than this, and really beyond the vagary of the wildest nightmare, she gave St. Johnswort as the scene of the apparition, with all the circumstances of the supposed burglary, while tastefully disguising Hewson's identity in the figure ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... proposition was regarded as the harmless hobby of an amiable man, from which a little knowledge of practical politics would soon dismount him."[45] Most members of Congress thought the reform a mere vagary, and that it was brought forward at a most inopportune time.[46] Mr. Jenckes was the pioneer of the reform, according to Curtis, who says that he "powerfully and vigorously and alone opened the debate in Congress."[47] He drew the amendment to the appropriation bill in 1871 that became the law, and ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... locket which contained her dead lover's hair with a gesture with which all who knew her were very familiar. Mr. Landale never could resist a thrust at the faithful foolish bosom always ready to bleed under his stabs, yet never resenting them. Inexplicable vagary of the feminine heart! Miss Sophia worshipped before the shrine of her younger brother, to the absolute exclusion of any sentiment for the elder, whose generosity and kindness to her were yet as ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... Life he turned aside to his last literary vagary—No Abolition of Slavery; or the Universal Empire of Love, 1791. This long-lost brochure has this year been rediscovered, but it will add little interest to his life, as its main tenets had long been known. A writer in the ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... have shocked you," said the captain, "but you must remember that that is only a poor heathen's ignorant vagary. Please say nothing about ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... accompanied by her husband, and looking divinely pretty beneath the wealth of her golden, reddish curls, slightly besprinkled with powder, and tied back at the nape of her graceful neck with a gigantic black bow. Always dressed in the very latest vagary of fashion, Marguerite alone among the ladies that night had discarded the crossover fichu and broad-lapelled over-dress, which had been in fashion for the last two or three years. She wore the short-waisted classical-shaped gown, ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... again wondering, with Cuckoo, mightily at Valentine's vagary of desire. She touched his hand ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... contentious, irresponsible enthusiasts whom only intimidation could manage. They seemed to be balanced, prepared, ready at the least whisper in the wind to scatter madly, each in his own direction, after a vagary, albeit ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... be amiss with Mr. Hooper's intellects," observed her husband, the physician of the village. "But the strangest part of the affair is the effect of this vagary even on a sober-minded man like myself. The black veil, though it covers only our pastor's face, throws its influence over his whole person and makes him ghost-like from head to foot. Do you not ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... occult and exotic, delights in the aroma of Khalid's cigarettes and Khalid's fancy. And that he might feel at ease, she begins by assuring him that they have met and communed many times ere now, that they have been friends under a preceding and long vanished embodiment. Which vagary Khalid seems to countenance by referring to the infinite power of Allah, in the compass of which nothing is impossible. And with these mystical circumlocutions of ceremony, they plunge into an intimacy which is bordered by the metaphysical on one side, and the physical ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... would have reformed is, that servants should be restrained from throwing themselves out of place on every idle vagary. This might be remedied were all contracts between master and servant made before a justice of peace, or other proper officer, and a memorandum thereof taken in writing. Nor should such servant leave his or her place (for men and maids might come under the same regulation) ...
— Everybody's Business is Nobody's Business • Daniel Defoe
... so far, that for more than a year he dispensed entirely with a minister of finance, and divided the functions of that office among three of the clerks: no bad preparation for a national bankruptcy, we must allow—yet the protecting powers viewed this political vagary of his majesty with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... his own particularly, were such unaccountable beings that a vagary more or less could not more hopelessly perplex his misunderstanding of them. With a "Tut! tut!" of impatience, he took the paper from her ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... have found that you can bear to pass half your time with an antediluvian, without discovering any ennui or disgust; though his greatest merit towards you is, that he is not one of those old fools who fancy they are in love in their dotage. I have no such vagary; though I am not sorry that some folks think I am so absurd, since it ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... cordial invitation to enter, he accepted the invitation and was shown into the salon: where he seated himself—a left-handedness of which he would have been incapable had he been less perturbed—in Madame Jolicoeur's own special chair. An anatomical vagary of the Notary's meagre person was the undue shortness of his body and the undue length of his legs. Because of this eccentricity of proportion, his bald head rose above the back of the chair to a height approximately identical with ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... they called her. Virginia had been nurse in turn to all the children of Rudolph Musgrave's parents; and to the end of her life she appeared to regard the emancipation of the South's negroes as an irrelevant vagary of certain "low-down" and probably "ornery" Yankees —as an, in short, quite eminently "tacky" proceeding which very certainly in no way affected her vested right to tyrannize over the ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... preoccupied gaze at the floor, he said, "I've called to ask you, doctor, quite privately, a question that troubles me. I've a daughter, Grace, an only daughter, as you may have heard. Well, she's been out in the dew—on Midsummer Eve in particular she went out in thin slippers to watch some vagary of the Hintock maids—and she's got a cough, a distinct hemming and hacking, that makes me uneasy. Now, I have decided to send her away to some seaside ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... brink of a fresh-water brooklet, which flows across the beach, becoming shallower and more shallow, till at last it sinks into the sand, and perishes in the effort to bear its little tribute to the main. Here some vagary appears to have bewildered us; for our tracks go round and round, and are confusedly intermingled, as if we had found a labyrinth upon the level beach. And here, amid our idle pastime, we sat down upon almost the only stone that breaks the surface of the sand, and were lost in an unlooked-for ...
— Footprints on The Sea-Shore (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... turn of expression is no vagary, but perfectly germane to the subject, and accurate in application, we propose to prove to those who love coincidences and analogies sufficiently to fish them out of a little ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... now that he was being guided by fate. He then became confused in mind—dazed, as it were. In odd vagary, as his ice-raft floated on down the river, he peopled the darkness about him with imaginary foes, and "squared off" at them pugnaciously. His blood warming with this exercise, he began delivering in grandiloquent tones the address which ...
— Chums of the Camp Fire • Lawrence J. Leslie
... usual ghastliness was heightened by the lather, which lather, again, was intensified in its hue by the contrasting sootiness of the negro's body. Altogether the scene was somewhat peculiar, at least to Captain Delano, nor, as he saw the two thus postured, could he resist the vagary, that in the black he saw a headsman, and in the white a man at the block. But this was one of those antic conceits, appearing and vanishing in a breath, from which, perhaps, the best regulated mind ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... a moment's hesitation, and then, with the absurd vagary of a crowd, they broke into loud laughter and slouched back to work, two of them dragging the cause of the outburst to the water-faucet, where they held his head under the stream until he began to sputter and squirm. Before those at the gangway had noticed ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... appearance of these two eminent persons was in singular contrast. Warwick, though richly and even gorgeously attired,—nay, with all the care which in that age was considered the imperative duty a man of station and birth owed to himself,—held in lofty disdain whatever vagary of custom tended to cripple the movements or womanize the man. No loose flowing robes, no shoon half a yard long, no flaunting tawdriness of fringe and aiglet, characterized the appearance of the baron, who, even in peace, gave his address ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... listener's internal life, and might be suspected or laughed at. A truthful traveller, who should have seen some extraordinary creature in the likeness of a sea-serpent, would have no fear of mentioning it; but the same traveller, having had some singular presentiment, impulse, vagary of thought, vision (so-called), dream, or other remarkable mental impression, would hesitate considerably before he would own to it. To this reticence I attribute much of the obscurity in which such subjects are involved. ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... in this frame of spirit the whole day: calm, kind attentive—half matronly, and half girlish. The three who had been longest acquainted with her expected every instant to see her capricious spirit break out in some whimsical change or sportive vagary. But their fears were quite unnecessary. Undine continued as mild and gentle as an angel. The priest found it all but impossible to remove his eyes from her; and he often said to ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... we came on the last house of the village, which was standing intact, and entered in conversation with the owner, a very old man. He attributed the safety of his house to its being slightly removed, and to a vagary of the wind. He was alive because he was not a Christian and had not been called into the church. The details of his story of the occurrence tallied exactly with the others, as ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... shoulder and the rear wall of a collar of pearls for my observation throughout the evening, as she leaned forward talking eagerly with a male personage across the table. This was a prince, ending in "ski": he permitted himself the slight vagary of wearing a gold bracelet, and perhaps this flavour of romance drew the lady. Had my good fortune ever granted a second meeting, I should not ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... and exhaustion, D'Arnot watched from beneath half-closed lids what seemed but the vagary of delirium, or some horrid nightmare from which ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... forever troubled by the reformer seeking to make the crooked places of life straight and its rough places plain. He made as many mistakes as another man; in his pages you may light upon error or vagary; but you will find nothing to make you doubt his entire sincerity, his desire to speak truth, his passion for helping ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... going, for example, to have given you the great out-lines of my uncle Toby's most whimsical character;—when my aunt Dinah and the coachman came across us, and led us a vagary some millions of miles into the very heart of the planetary system: Notwithstanding all this, you perceive that the drawing of my uncle Toby's character went on gently all the time;—not the great contours of it,—that ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... to Fort Sumter when a fresh difficulty arose for Lincoln, but one which enabled him to become henceforth master in his Cabinet. The strain of Seward's position upon a man inclined to be vain and weak can easily be imagined, but the sudden vagary in which it now resulted was surprising. Upon April 1 he sent to Lincoln "Some Thoughts for the President's Consideration." In this paper, after deploring what he described as the lack of any policy so far, and defining, in a way that does not matter, his attitude as to the forts ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... women could not make all men do what they wanted them to do—against their wills. Perhaps they couldn't. Perhaps they could. There are more ways of coercing them than by brute force. But in any case what has this preposterous vagary to ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... little hole right under the very spot on which he sat lay one of the zigzag crackers. Its first crack caused the chief, despite his power of will and early training, to bound up as if an electric battery had discharged him. The second crack sent the eccentric thing into his face. Its third vagary brought it down about his knees. Its fourth sent it into the gaping mouth of the cheeky one. At the same instant the squibs and candles burst forth from all points, pouring their fires on the naked shoulders of the red men with a hiss that the whole serpent race of America might ...
— The Prairie Chief • R.M. Ballantyne
... implore. I implore you not to do this fantastic, this incredible, this unheard-of thing. I will go on my knees to you. I will entreat you, not for my sake, but for your own sake, for the sake of your dead father and mother, to put this ruinous vagary from you, to abandon this preposterous journey, and to stay quietly here in Sampaolo. Then, if you must open up the past, if you must get into communication with your distant cousin, I 'll ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... this inquiry. It may afford to those who have experienced any positive visitation from another world a very comforting and indisputable proof. To most sane people it is a humiliating and ludicrous vagary. ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... wanting to a man, if he wants that. Shelley denied the commonly received Divinity, as all the world knows,—an Atheist of the most unpardonable stamp,—and has suffered in consequence; his life being considered a life of folly and vagary, and his punishment still enduring, as we may perceive from the tone and philosophy of his biographers, or rather his critics, who, not being able to comprehend such a simple savage, present his character as an oddity and a wonder,—an extravaganza ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... raiding had been extraordinarily successful. If only they could collect on undisturbed for another six months at the same rate, and then get their spoils down to the coast and shipped, the pair of them stepped into a snug competence at once. But this latest vagary of his partner's seemed to promise disruption of the whole enterprise. He did not see how Kettle could possibly carry out this evangelizing scheme, on which he had so suddenly gone crazed, without quite neglecting his other ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... that of a native woman, the woman had shrunk away, mysterious, frightened at the idea, while her father, in the name of servile respect, opposed such an unheard of union. Febrer's idea was that of a mad man; the mingling of the rooster and the gull, the vagary of the extravagant friar which so amused the peasants. Thus had men willed in former times when they founded society and divided it into classes, and thus it must ever be. It is useless to rebel against ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... animal was now a good fifty yards farther up-stream, having evidently been delayed by some vagary of the struggling ice. He was now sitting up on his haunches on a floe, and staring silently at the volleying cloud which marked the Falls. The woodsman was aware of a curious fellow feeling for the great beast which, not five minutes ago, had been raging for his ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... our perilous passage. Then I was rewarded by a sight seldom accorded to humans. It was worth all the fatigue, cold, and bruises, for that appallingly illogical cloud cap took a new vagary. It split and lifted a little, and there, not three hundred yards away, in the twilight of that cold wet cloud, on that mountain in the sky, were two bull elk in deadly combat. Their far branching horns were locked together, and they swayed now this ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... whole day, quiet, kind, and attentive—at once a little matron and a tender, bashful girl. The three who had known her longest expected every moment to see some whimsical vagary of her capricious spirit burst forth. But they waited in vain for it. Undine remained as mild and gentle as an angel. The holy father could not take his eyes from her, and he said repeatedly to the bridegroom: "The goodness of heaven, sir, has intrusted a treasure ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... these principles. The majority of them were accepted unhesitatingly in the past by Betterton, Garrick, Edmund Kean, the Kembles, and notably by Phelps. They are recognised principles to-day in the leading theatres of France and Germany. But by some vagary of fate or public taste they have been reckoned in London, for a generation at any rate, ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... vagary of a mind at great tension, his senses became particularly acute for a single moment. He saw the silver-pierced vault of the sky, smelled the fragrance of the plains borne on the gentle wind, and heard the rustle ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... This vagary is explained by the fact that the social chasm separating them from all Americans is, to their limited vision, so infinitely great that it is impossible for them to see and to understand the niceties that the Americans draw between the butcher of New York and the dry-goods ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... our furniture, unless we are absolutely positive that our eyes, ears, and nerves are not being cleverly fooled by some skilled and unscrupulous show-man, or that we are not self-deceived by some temporary vagary of our brains ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... clutches of some sharp-witted enemy and be lead on into unseemliness of speech. The scoffs of critics and the ready-made gibes and jeers of the mob were to her gospel truth; her husband's genius was a vagary to be stoutly endured. So for many years she was inclined to pose as one to be pitied—and so she was. That she suffered at times can not be denied, yet God is good, and so has put short limit on the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... apartment—it was difficult to keep Llewellyn Stanhope away from even that door in his pursuit of her signature—considered the vagary life had become for her, it was so whimsical, and the mystery of her secret which was so solely hers. Alicia knew, of course; but that was much as if she had written it down on a sheet of perfect notepaper and locked it up in a drawer. Alicia did not speculate about it, and the whole ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... position compromised. Blood will tell, as my father said; and I stuck to it gallantly: all afternoon I continued selling that infernal stock, all afternoon it continued skying. I suppose I had come (a frail cockle-shell) athwart the hawse of Jay Gould; and, indeed, I think I remember that this vagary in the market proved subsequently to be the first move in a considerable deal. That evening, at least, the name of H. Loudon Dodd held the first rank in our collegiate gazette, and I and Billson (once more thrown upon the world) ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... you, my august and gentle empress, you will not sacrifice an innocent woman to a momentary jealous vagary!" ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... to, in face of all pleading, urging, or inducements. He refused even to be led, and stood very pleasantly viewing the surrounding landscape till with a sudden jerk he would resume his usual trot. The children finally accepted Brownie's one vagary, and when they were driving home among other vehicles, and Brownie suddenly stopped and raised his right ear, a sign which meant, "I shall not move till I wish to," they only laughed, and others about them knowing the ways of little donkeys, ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... in the way of agricultural machinery. He first introduced a steam engine for farming purposes in a district containing a million of acres. That, too, at the outset, was a fantastic vagary in the opinion of thousands of solid and respectable farmers. They insisted the Iron Horse would be as dangerous in the barn-yard or rick-yard as the very dragon in Scripture; that he would set everything on fire; kill the men who had care of him; burst and blow up ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... three—the first soldier, because he had been condemned—the second, who had lost his way, because he was the cause of his companion's death—and the executioner, because he had disobeyed his orders. He had but to pretend to be greatly grieved at his vagary, to have the act lauded as an instance of Roman virtue. I look upon the famed Brutus, when he thought it a matter of conscience to witness, as well as order, his sons' execution, to have been a vain unfeeling fool or a madman. Let us have no prate about conscience ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... Another curious vagary of the war that obtains now is the sudden disappearance of the copper sou or what ranks with our penny. Why it is scarce no one seems to know. The generally accepted explanation is that the copper has flown to the trenches where millions ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... boy; why, he never knew. It might be that under the hurry and preparation of Martha Yarrow on that day some deeper meaning did lie, which his instinct had discerned: more probably, however, it was but the sickly vagary of a child grown old ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various |
