"Ghostly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shining brightly, giving to the dead whitened trees on the little island a peculiar ghostly appearance. The canoes soon grounded in the marsh grass, and, fastening them to paddles, stuck down in the mud, our hunters shouldered their fowling-pieces and trudged ahead through the mire. They had prepared themselves well for the trip and each ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... of serrated fins surmounted all its length, from which, near the head, scarlet streamers floated like a mane. A moment thus it held its head erect, then sank below the surface. The boy sat with his eyes fixed upon the spot where he had seen this weird appearance, unknown and ghostly-seeming. ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... asleep, half-persuaded again to virtue, because of its superior comforts. The air about his head seemed full of ghostly "good business hands," each with its accusing forefinger pointed at him for that he had not learned to write one as ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... out; there came a brief moment of darkness, then the cab turned a corner, and the ghostly light of electric lamps played ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... be loosed and the golden bowl broken, rather than that the lonely life linger on, with its eyes fixed only on the past, which has become but a dim mirage where ghostly figures are seen walking but from which all warmth and light have fled. Happy indeed is he who, when the allotted years have been passed, and he lingers waiting on the stage for the signal which shall cause the curtain to fall forever on his little life ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... The ghostly presence of his life came to him. He cried out to her, made appeal to her, in sackcloth and ashes. And then, in some mysterious, heavenly way she was revealed to him afresh; not as an enemy whom he had offended, not ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the day And kissed Love's lips as he lay, And the watchers ghostly and grey Sped from ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the department to-day. He has a ghostly appearance. He is announced to speak in Richmond to-morrow; but I believe he starts for Georgia to-day. He may publish a letter. He had a long interview with ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... half-light—a stern, imposing, indeed an awful, figure, the herald of death, seen only by warriors about to die. The Fate theme sounds from the orchestra, and another melody, out of which nearly the whole scene is woven, is heard, and then, to a simple chord—supernatural, ghostly in its effect—she calls Siegmund. She tells him he is to die and go with her to Valhalla. He pleads in vain; she (simply, be it remembered, a part of her father's will) cannot understand why he should refuse to go where his father and so many famous warriors have ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... treadmill mechanics of a prisoner pacing a cell, without note of his surroundings, except of dim, moving figures with which he must avoid collision. The phantoms of his boyhood, bulky and stiflingly near, had a monstrous reality, yet the ghostly intangibility that mocked his sword-thrusts of tortured inquiry. At length his distraction centered on the fact that he and his father were to dine alone ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... Whistler very seldom leaves man out, although I believe there is one "Nocturne" wherein only the stars and the faint rim of the silver moon keep guard. But usually we see the dim suggestion of the bridge's arch, the ghostly steeples, lights lost in the enfolding fog, vague purple barges on the river, and ships rocking solemnly in the offing—all strangely mellow with peace, and subtle thoughts of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... went out. They watched but it did not come again. And the frowning, jungle-covered, storm beaten summit was enshrouded again in ghostly darkness. And the increasing gale beat the lake, and the driven rain assailed the few stragglers on the veranda with lashing fury. And across the black water, in that ghoul-haunted, trackless wilderness, could be heard the sound of timber being rent in splinters ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... than precepts. And I beseech that God, who hath honoured me so much as to call me to serve him at his altar, that as by his special grace he hath put into my heart these good desires and resolutions; so he will, by his assisting grace, give me ghostly strength to bring the same to good effect. And I beseech him, that my humble and charitable life may so win upon others, as to bring glory to my Jesus, whom I have this day taken to be my Master and Governor; and I am so proud of his service, that I will always observe, and ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton
... Italian lakes, the Fishers found themselves at the Hotel Splendide in Paris, surrounded by people from the States. It was a relief to Fisher, after his somewhat bewildering experience at Baden, followed by a surfeit of stupendous and ghostly snow peaks, to be once more among those who discriminated between a straight flush and a crooked straight, and whose bosoms thrilled responsive to his own at the sight of the star-spangled banner. It was particularly agreeable for him to find at the Hotel Splendide, in a party of Easterners who ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... east, west and south remained to be proved. The shelf-ice was seen to be securely attached to it and, near its point of junction with the undulating land-ice, we beheld the mountains of this mysterious land haloed in ghostly mist. ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... audible ripple that mounted into a silver cadence. Day was breaking now. The lifeless gray along the eastern horizon had changed to orange. Still following the trail, he emerged upon the bank of the Elk River, white like the woods with its ghostly ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... corpses! How mothers weep over them! how wives kneel, and beat their hearts out on the rocky barriers that separate them from their hearts' love, their hearts' desire! How little starvin', naked children cower in their ghostly shadows through dark midnights! How fathers weep for their children, dead to them, dead to honor, to shame, to humanity! How the cries of the mourners ascend to the ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... that at some very early time in the history of tribal and priestly initiations an attempt was made to impress upon the neophytes the existence and over-shadowing presence of spiritual and ghostly beings. Perhaps the pains endured in the various ordeals, the long fastings, the silences in the depth of the forests or on the mountains or among the ice-floes, helped to rouse the visionary faculty. The developments of this faculty among ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... of his talk left a space of silence into which the encompassing peace and radiance stole like an inflowing tide. None loved better than Roy the ghostly music of silence; but to-night his brain was filled with the music of ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... The ghostly Jarvis closed the door without so much as a click of the latch. Hastings advanced slowly toward the bed, his eyes not yet accustomed ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... a sodden plain, A lurid sunset sky, With clouds that fled and faded fast In ghostly phantasy; A field upturned by trampling feet, A field uppiled with slain, With horse and rider blent in death Upon ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... sleep. She tossed restlessly, thinking rebellious thoughts, and shuddering at the night noises in the woods. The lapping of the water on the rocks below had a lonesome sound. She had not yet learned to hear its soft crooning lullaby. The wind rustled in the pine trees with a ghostly, mysterious sound. From somewhere in the woods came a mournful cry that sent the chills up and down her spine. It was only a whippoorwill, but Gladys did not know a whippoorwill from a bluebird. Then ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... she never knew how long she sat there after the stones had been lifted away, holding in her lap those shreds of torn white doeskin. Still caught together, though in tatters, by long strings of shells and beads, they shone, a ghostly film of white from out the dimness. A breath, and the whole would have crumbled into dust. Yet the beads, she noticed, were still perfect as when strung by slim brown fingers centuries before. Only half believing it was ...
— Their Mariposa Legend • Charlotte Herr
... morne smiles on the frowning night, Checkring the Easterne Clouds with streakes of light, And darkenesse fleckel'd like a drunkard reeles, From forth dayes pathway, made by Titans wheeles. Hence will I to my ghostly Friers close Cell, His helpe to craue, and my deare hap to ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... of ghostly fears in which her life crouched, Michael's voice spoke to her also. She could hear his grave, low tones. "Think of ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... a tone that proclaimed a sudden inspiration, "I 'stump' you to go into the haunted house and make ghostly noises when the girls come along." Sahwah needed no urging to undertake a mission of this kind. Hand in hand the two stole across the road and climbed in one of the windows of the house. The door, locked years ago, was still holding its ground ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... is certain that the discontent of the people has its peculiar effect upon the city as the stranger sees its life, casting a glamour over it all, making it more and more ghostly and sad, and giving it a pathetic charm which I would fain transfer to my pages; but failing that, would pray the reader to remember as a fact to which I must be faithful in ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... obliged to go up to the attic to find the Dryad manuscript which had never been returned. Leighton came too, and for about half an hour they hunted in the flickering light of a candle. It was a strange, ghostly place, and Rickie was quite startled when a picture swung towards him, and he saw the Demeter of Cnidus, shimmering and grey. Leighton suggested the roof. Mr. Stephen sometimes left things on the roof. So they climbed out of the skylight—the night was ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... proceedings were gravely chronicled for grown persons and labelled true,—what were you to think of that? It may be remembered that when Mrs. Barlow asks Mrs. Veal any question the answering of which would seem to be inconsistent with her ghostly state, Defoe says, "However, she waived that;" and, waive not being at that time in the vocabulary of the young reader, she always imagined Mrs. Veal putting the question away from her, as it were, with a motion of her hand, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... submerge, and was clinging in moist tenuous swathes—like drawn-out cotton wool—along the ridge, half obliterating its face. From the valley in the rear it was already stealing in a thin white line up the slope like the advance of a ghostly column, with a stealthiness that, in spite of himself, touched him with superstitious significance. A warm perfume, languid and treacherous—as from the swamp magnolia—seemed to rise from the half-hidden marsh. An ominous silence, that ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... most impressive scene on our route was our reception at this place. The flashing of torches and the beautiful radiance of blue lights (technically Bengal lights) upon the heads of our horses; the fine effect of such a showery and ghostly illumination falling upon flowers and glittering laurels, whilst all around the massy darkness seemed to invest us with walls of impenetrable blackness, together with the prodigious enthusiasm of the people, composed a picture at ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... young men jump through the flames, and children are passed across the embers, in order to secure them good luck during the coming year. On this day, too, the Irish kings are supposed to rise from their graves and gather together a ghostly army of rude warriors to fight for their country. The wild cries of the shadowy host, the clashing of shields, and the sound of drums are said to have been heard during the period of the last ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... hail from the ship, a roar of orders, rattle of blocks and gear, the yards swung round and she layed up in the wind, while the ghostly glare of a blue light lit up the ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... waterfall echoing for ever among the black rocks and pools. The schoolboy knows but little of the history of the old Castle—but that little is of war, and witchcraft, and imprisonment, and bloodshed. The ghostly glimmer of antiquity appals him—he visits the ruin only with a companion, and at midday. There and then it was that we first saw a Starling. We heard something wild and wonderful in their harsh scream, as they sat upon the edge of the battlements, or flew out of the chinks and crannies. There ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... drum like that at the breaking up of a guard." The mental torture of the Squire and his family may be easier imagined than described. And before long matters grew much worse, when, becoming emboldened, the ghostly drummer laid aside his drum to play practical, and sometimes exceedingly painful, jokes on the members ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... not till possess'd of her he loved, And old, uncharming Catherine was removed. For sundry years before he did complain, 210 And told his ghostly confessor his pain. With the same impudence without a ground, They say, that look the Reformation round, No Treatise of Humility is found. But if none were, the gospel does not want; Our Saviour preach'd it, and I hope you grant, The Sermon ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... was ebbing, and when the boat was in the stream her speed doubled, and there was no need for using the oars. Swiftly and silently she drifted past the lights on the quay and the ghostly houses which ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... by themselves, which is as we have done. Yes, Sir, Peter continued, freeing himself from John and turning to Joseph, we've left this world behind us, or if not this world itself, the things of this world: our boats and nets, our wives and our children. All that Jesus calls our ghostly life we have thrown into the lake. My wife and children and mother-in-law are all there, and John and James have left their mother, Salome. But, said James, the neighbours will not be lacking to give her a bite if she wants something when she is hungry. She'll be getting men ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... his last gasp,' said Kendal, with a ghostly smile, and a reckless impulse to talk which seemed to him his salvation. 'He was never as vicious a creature as you thought him, and Miss Bretherton has had no difficulty in slaying him. But that hall was a masterpiece, Forbes! How have your ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... ago Isabella had a terrible fit of the toothake, and she walked with a long night-shift at dead of night like a ghost, and I thought she was one. She prayed for nature's sweet restorer—balmy sleep—but did not get it—a ghostly figure indeed she was, enough to make a saint tremble. It made me quiver and shake from top to toe. Superstition is a very mean thing, and should be despised ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... on the table in rows, as he had arranged them to show to a customer: wine-coloured mahogany, and golden satinwood; ebony black as jet; tulip-wood mottled like fine tortoiseshell; coromandel wood, striped black and white like the coat of a civet cat; ghostly basswood, shining white on dead white; woods of clouded grain, and woods of shining grain, grain that showed like the slanting, splintered lines of hewn stone, like moss, like the veins of flowers, the fringes of birds' ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... life was such as to require it, but could by no means justify you in addressing yourself to him." This was very hard upon Lady Lufton. She was endeavouring with all her woman's strength to do her best, and endeavouring so to do it that the feelings of the sinner might be spared; and yet the ghostly comforter whom she had evoked to her aid, treated her as though she were arrogant and overbearing. She acknowledged the weakness of her own position with reference to her parish clergyman by calling in the aid of Mr. Crawley; and, under ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... And eager whispers Echo round each cell The oft repeated legend, and re-dwell, With the same fondness that bespeaks delight In childhood's heart, when on some winter's night, As stormy winds low whistle through the vale, It shuddering lists the thrilling ghostly tale. It seems but now that blood was spilt, whose stain Proclaims the dastard soul—the bloody reign Of the Eighth Harry—vampire to his wife, Who traffick'd for his divorce with her life; So fresh, so moist, each ruddy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... carefully written down, and the thought of the text was exhaustively developed. But Mrs. Arnot was too far back to hear well. The poor man seemed weary and discouraged with the arid wastes of empty seats over which he must scatter the seeds of truth to no purpose. He looked dim and ghostly in the far-away pulpit, and in spite of herself his sermon began to have the aspect of a paid performance, the effect of which would scarcely be more appreciable than the sighing of the wind without. ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... how in his head only, hope still lingers, Who evermore to empty rubbish clings, With greedy hand grubs after precious things, And leaps for joy when some poor worm he fingers! That such a human voice should dare intrude, Where all was full of ghostly tones and features! Yet ah! this once, my gratitude Is due to thee, most wretched of earth's creatures. Thou snatchedst me from the despairing state In which my senses, well nigh crazed, were sunken. The apparition was so giant-great, That to a very dwarf my soul had ...
— Faust • Goethe
... stones again, Such light and colour with the south-west came. As I drank all that brightness up I saw A dark globe lapt in fold on fold of gloom, With all her hosts asleep in that cold tomb, Sealed by an iron law. And there amid the hills, Locked in an icy hollow lay the bones Of one that ghostly and enormous slept Obscure 'neath wrinkled ice and bedded stones. But as spring water the old dry channel fills, Came the south-west wind filling all the air. Then Time rose up, ghostly, enormous, stark, With cold gray light in cold ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... tingling shock as of fingers invisible,—the knowledge that the Face is not the memory of any one face, but a multiple image formed of the traits of many dear faces,—superimposed by remembrance, and interblended by affection into one ghostly personality,—infinitely sympathetic, phantasmally beautiful: a Composite of recollections! And the Voice is the echo of no one voice, but the echoing of many voices, molten into a single utterance,—a single impossible ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... not looking at the sky; his eyes were fixed on a ghostly shape moving close ahead of them and on the fitful gleam of a ship's lantern that tossed and glimmered in the dark. Dropping his paddle he put his hands to his mouth and lifted his voice in a long hail. The light bobbed and swung and an answering ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... steerage, I noticed scores of box coffins for the removal of corpses from the field to the North. There were quantities of spirits, consigned mainly to Quartermasters, but evidently the property of certain Shylocks, who watched the barrels greedily. An embalmer was also on board, with his ghostly implements. He was a sallow man, shabbily attired, and appeared to look at all the passengers as so many subjects for the development of his art. He was called "Doctor" by his admirers, and conversed in the blandest manner of ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... sitting-room. Against the grey, ghostly light of the window he could see Christine bowed over her typewriter. She was so still that she frightened him. All the terrors of night which lay in wait for him ever since his fathers dead hand had touched his door and opened it, rushed ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... tides. It has hardly any garden, and immediately to the right and the left of it the green down brims over the top of the cliff like the froth of ale over a silver goblet. To-night the tide is low, the sea is golden where the shallow waves break upon the sand, and ghostly green in the distance. When the tide is high, the sound and the sight of it seem to meet and make one thing. The waves press up the cliff then, and fall back on each other. Do you know the lines that are written on the face of a disappointed wave? To-night the clouds are like castles built on ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... like wintry rain down her furrowed cheeks. All the affections of a naturally warm and generous heart lingered round the young girl, who was still to her the little child whom she had cradled in her arms, and hushed into the stillness of awe by her ghostly legends. Helen, inexpressibly affected, leaned her head on Miss Thusa's pillow, and wept and sobbed audibly. She did not know, till this moment, how strong and deep-rooted was her attachment for this ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... the curtain, child. Yes, it is night. It was night then, when I awoke to feel That deadly chill, and see by ghostly gleams Of moonlight, creeping through the grated door, The coffins of my fathers all about. Strange, hollow clamors rang and echoed back, As, struggling out of mine, I dropped and fell. With frantic strength I beat upon the grate; It yielded to my ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... eaves. The chinook wind droned its spring song, and the bare boughs of the tree beside the cabin waved and creaked the time. Somewhere distantly a wolf lifted up his voice, and the long, throaty howl swelled in a lull of the wind. It was black and ghostly outside, and strange, murmuring sounds rose and fell in the surrounding forests, as though all the dormant life of the North was awakening at the seasonal change. She closed the window and ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... shadow spoke; For there was striving in its piteous tongue, To speak as when on earth it was awake, And Isabella on its music hung: Languor there was in it, and tremulous shake, As in a palsied Druid's harp unstrung; And through it moaned a ghostly under-song, Like hoarse night gusts ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... of his mouth. It seemed hours before he attempted to turn his face; at the very moment the match went out, and he disappeared, overwhelmed by the shadows, as if the walls and roof of the desolate house had collapsed upon his white head in ghostly silence. ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... scheme for getting the sheikh's tomb moved. I don't know who it is yet. Meanwhile my time and my head are so full, that in the few hours of the night I put aside for sleep, I dream queerer dreams than the visits of ghostly sheikhs. Apropos of dreams, do you know by chance a man who answers this description: elderly, stoutish, red face, gray hair, black moustache, pale eyes with sharp look in ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... woman had only come with me!" said the child, in a whisper. The shadows took on strange, ghostly shapes, and the tall pine-trees, so high that their topmost branches seemed to rest against the sky, sang softly ...
— Harper's Young People, January 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... Honeywood, the hero of the play, is, and remains throughout, a somewhat ghostly personage. He has attributes; but no flesh or blood. There is much more substance in the next character introduced—the inimitable Croaker, who revels in evil forebodings and drinks deep of the luxury of woe. These are the two chief characters; ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... benumbed state. It had all seemed a fantastic dream, but he had only to look around him to know that it was reality. Three or four battle lanterns were shining and they threw a ghostly light over the deck of the schooner, which was littered with spars and sails, and the bodies of men who had fallen before the fire of the sloop. Streams of blood flowed everywhere. He sickened and ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... chairs, and from its corner the tall clock looked down on them solemn and voiceless. There was no denying that it was scary, as Belle expressed it. What light there was seemed unreal, and the closed rooms when they peeped in were cheerless and ghostly. ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... appeared next, looking even more ghostly than usual. He sat down by Lady Holme, a little behind her. He seemed depressed, but the expression in his pale blue eyes when they first rested upon her made her thoroughly realise one thing—that ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... lingering domestic, rode to the town on the laird's best horse, and returned with the mid-wife en croupe. Daring the short space of his absence, the Tweed, which they must necessarily ford, rose to a dangerous height. Brownie, who transported his charge with all the rapidity of the ghostly lover of Lenore, was not to be stopped by this obstacle. He plunged in with the terrified old lady, and landed her in safety where her services were wanted. Having put the horse into the stable (where it was afterwards found in a woeful ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... Boleyn, Rocheford, Cromwell, Catharine Howard, Exeter, Montague, Lambert, Aske, Lady Salisbury, Surrey,—these, and hundreds of others, selected principally from the patrician order, or from the officers of the old church, might have led the ghostly array which should have told the monarch to die and to despair of redemption; while an innumerable host of victims of lower rank might have followed these more conspicuous sufferers from the King's "jealous rage." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... a crown of scarlet camellias, she was standing up to be married to Sir Victor Catheron with Mr. Charley Stuart as officiating clergyman, when the door opened, and the murdered lady of Trixy's story came stalking in, and whirled her screaming away in her ghostly arms. ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... eventful dinner in Bedford Place, the colonel, accompanied by his guests, had alighted at a dreary way station, crawled into a lumbering country stage, and with Chad on the box as pilot, had stopped before a great house with ghostly trailing vines and tall chimneys outlined ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... knew every shrub, tree, and stone within a mile of Fort Severn in any direction, after the summer spent there, and to-night he relied upon his recognition of inanimate objects to lead him aright. A ghostly spruce with a wedge-shaped bite out of its stiff foliage told him he was a hundred feet to the right; a flat-topped rock, suddenly stumbled upon, convinced him that for five minutes he had been walking ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... Irishman as plainly as he had ever seen him. The face, though, was white and bloodless. The ghostly figure moved with a heavy step, coming straight up the walk toward the building. Frank sat rooted to his chair. In the shadow of the piazza the figure seemed to turn, and was then lost to view. Merriwell threw ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... myself outside the house in the Weiss Thor I do not know. Whether the servitor, Sir Respectable, showed me out or not has quite passed from me. I only remember that I came upon myself waiting outside the gate of Bishop Peter's palace ringing at a bell which sounded ghostly enough, tinkling like a ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... pierce a ghostly way, The music underlying, And in the shades of falling day As in the distance dying, A little call will ...
— Poems of West & East • Vita Sackville-West
... no sooner had I quitted the ghostly governor than I hastened to my little upright friend. Tell him indeed I must not: honour, shame, principle, forbade. Yet to keep the good news wholly secret would be to render the severe covenant cruel. What could ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... warning of sight or sound, they suddenly discovered their craft to be surrounded by moving shadows. These were canoes headed across the stream, and instantly Donald turned his craft in the same direction, as though it belonged to the ghostly fleet. It was a terrible situation, and one in which the slightest mistake would prove fatal. Donald noticed Bullen's start on the discovery of their danger, and blessed him for the coolness with which he continued the noiseless dip of his paddle. His hope ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... Njedegorze was as a huge boiling caldron, from which arose twisted wreaths and coiling lengths of white vapor, faintly colored with gold and silvery blue. Dispersing in air, these mists took all manner of fantastic forms,—ghostly arms seemed to wave and beckon, ghostly hands to unite in prayer,—and fluttering creatures in gossamer draperies of green and crimson, appeared to rise and float, and retire and shrink, to nothingness ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... were split and rent asunder; enormous stones were splintered and calcined by the heat; and vast flakes having scaled from off the pillars, gave them a hoary and almost ghostly appearance. Its enormous extent was now for the first time clearly seen, and, strange to say it looked twice as large in ruins as when entire. The central tower was still standing, but chipped, broken, and calcined, like the rest of the structure, by the vehement ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... could identify the ghostly company of the valley, though not its scribe. That word "Cordova" gave the clue. A year ago one thousand hardy men had ridden into the capital from the north. Their leader was a fiery, black-whiskered little man with a plume in his hat and the buff sash of a brigadier ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... fruition of all desires. Thou art he that is adored in four ways.[112] Thou art a night-wanderer (like Vetala and others). Thou art he that wanders in the company of spirits. Thou art he that wanders in the company of ghostly beings. Thou art the Supreme Lord of even Indra and the other celestials. Thou art he that hast multiplied himself infinitely in the form of all existent and non-existent things. Thou art the upholder of both Mahat and all the innumerable combinations of the five primal elements. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... overpowered Odysseus at these sad words, and he sprang forward with arms outstretched to clasp his mother to his breast. Thrice he essayed to embrace her, and thrice his arms closed on emptiness,[1] while that ghostly presence still flitted before him like a shadow or a dream. "O my mother," cried Odysseus in deep distress, "why dost thou mock me thus? Come to my heart, dear mother; let me hold thee in mine arms once ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... will not share your breakfast,' said I. 'Wherefore not?' said Winifred, anxiously. 'Because,' said I, 'it is not proper that I be beholden to you for meat and drink.' 'But we are beholden to other people,' said Winifred. 'Yes,' said I, 'but you preach to them, and give them ghostly advice, which considerably alters the matter; not that I would receive anything from them, if I preached to them six times a day.' 'Thou art not fond of receiving favours, then, young man,' said Winifred. 'I am not,' said I. 'And of conferring favours?' 'Nothing affords me greater pleasure,' ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... their nests would commence their outcries, and from all parts they would assemble and flit about almost within reach of one's hand, making an awful noise, and in the dark shade of the forest their white gorgets had quite a ghostly look. The eggs are always three in number, of a beautiful shining blue-green, sometimes of a very long oval type. I have found the nests at Murree from the 3rd May to quite ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... forthwith published a terrific account of the ghostly crisis, mixed with denunciations of the Sadducee or Atheist who disbelieved; and to the book was added a preface, written by the four other clergymen who had assisted with their prayers, the character of which may be judged by a single extract. "The ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... of this, he turned sick at the thought of going forward to the certain annihilation awaiting him in that ghostly wilderness of mist and wet and wreckage ahead. On the other hand, how in God's name could he keep from going, he asked himself, when the blood of innocents was calling on every side! He felt again the "something strong within him ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... it will turn out? In this dream it was not me, but some other fellow, that was killed. It seems that this ghostly assassin tried his hand on some one else. And this reminds me of an old farmer in Illinois whose family were made ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... grew ever wilder, and the foliage each day spring-like. We were on a high hilly plateau between Hat Creek and the valley of Lake La Hache. We passed lakes surrounded by ghostly dead trees, which looked as though the water had poisoned them. There were no ranches of any extent on these hills. The trail continued to be filled with tramping miners; several seemed to be without bedding or food. Some drove little pack animals laden with ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... pace this pallid floor, The sparkling waves curl up the shore, The August moon is flushed and full; The soft, low winds, the liquid lull, The whited, silent, misty realm, The wan-blue heaven, each ghostly elm, All these, her ministers, conspire To fill my bosom with the fire And sweet delirium of desire. Enchantress! leave thy sheeny height, Descend, be all mine own this night, Transfuse, enfold, entrance me quite! ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... had such choice been vouchsafed her by kind Heaven, o'ermastering love will sweep her through all the heavens a sensuous fancy ever feigned; but the chances are that her idol lives only in the ghostly realm of dreams, else goes elsewhere to wive, and she marries not whom she would but whom she must— wedlock, thanks to her mistaken training, being the end and aim of her existence. Instead of an idol to adore, she secures some foolish eidolon whom she can scarce respect, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... marvellous, which surrounds them, and it is not unreasonable to ask whether they had, or had not, a foundation in fact, or whether they were solely the creations of an imaginative people. It is not, at least, improbable that these ghostly stories had, in long distant pre-historic times, their origin in fact, and that they have reached our days with glosses received ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... forested hills into the depths of which he looked with rapt eyes, seeing visions which that forest never held for any other gaze. Mayhap, adown those dim green aisles he previsioned the "ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir" with the tomb of Ulalume at the end of the ghostly path through the forest—the road through life that led to the grave where his heart lay buried. Through the telescope on that balcony he may first have followed the wanderings of Al Araaf, the star that shone for him alone. In the dim paths of the moonlit garden flitted before ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... the strange events of the evening, Paul Lanier lay awake all night after return from his visit with Agnes Randall. Longer he thought, deeper became the mystery. He mutters: "Not one weird circumstance alone, but such grouping of ghostly coincidents! Being ushered into the private room of Sir Charles was explained by Agnes, but why that fitful glare of lights? How came that copy of London Press, with underscored reference to the Thames murders, in possession of Sir Charles Chesterton? All this might concur in time and ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... city? When the White House, just visible from those tree-tops, shall have ceased, as it soon must do, to be the home of the chief magistrate, what future magician shall summon down those cheerless stairways the ghostly procession of dead Presidents, as our first literary necromancer marshaled the shades of royal governors across the threshold of the Province House? We turn from all this to speak of the practical affairs of to-day which await us in the city, with a reluctance ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... break the silence came to us, over no great stretch of water as it seemed, the sound of a creaking block, the fall of a yard on deck, and a voice raised in some sharp order. Then I thought I heard an anchor plunge, and there was silence. Very ghostly it seemed to hear these familiar sounds and to see naught, and it was the more so that we might by no means judge from which side of us, or fore or aft, the noises came, for fog will confuse all things, and save a driving snowstorm, I dread ...
— Wulfric the Weapon Thane • Charles W. Whistler
... Waltheof give to these schemes? Weighing the accounts, it would seem that, in the excitement of the bride-ale, he consented to the treason, but that he thought better of it the next morning. He went to Lanfranc, at once regent and ghostly father, and confessed to him whatever he had to confess. The Primate assigned his penitent some ecclesiastical penances; the Regent bade the Earl go into Normandy and tell the whole tale to the King. Waltheof went, with gifts in ...
— William the Conqueror • E. A. Freeman
... launch split her way swiftly toward the north. By the vague, ghostly shimmer of light upon the waters, a tense smile appeared on the steersman's lips. In his dark eyes gleamed the joy which to some men ranks supreme above all other joys—that of bending others to his ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... and hour, the talk of the little circle fell upon things ghostly and mysterious—strange happenings and prophetic dreams. Dorothea, who had a love of horrors, lent a suddenly attentive ear; but Jennie, though plainly fascinated, uttered a protesting plaint. "Oh, please stop! You don't know how you frighten me! Dorothea has ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... religious influences. Notwithstanding the independence exhibited by her in all secular affairs, in her own spiritual concerns she uniformly testified the deepest humility, and deferred too implicitly to what she deemed the superior sagacity, or sanctity, of her ghostly counsellors. An instance of this humility may be worth recording. When Fray Fernando de Talavera, afterwards archbishop of Granada, who had been appointed confessor to the queen, attended her for the first ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... fades on the Sphinx and the pyramids; all things in the ghostly scene grow visibly paler; for the moon as it rises becomes more silvery in the increasing chilliness of midnight. The winter mist, exhaled from the artificially watered fields below, continues to rise, takes heart and envelops the great mute ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... with a smile, "was when our reverend father was a princely young prelate of not more than thirty years of age, and when many fair ladies frequented the Castle for ghostly consolation. Need there was," he said with a downcast look, and a smile, half simple and half intelligent, "that these ladies, pained in conscience, who were ever lodged in the apartments now occupied by the noble Canoness, should have some space for taking the air, secure from the intrusion ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... conferred upon him, the responsibility laid upon his shoulders, are of the same kind as were theirs. We stand for a doctrine of Apostolic Succession, but it is not a succession dependent upon a ceremonial ordination dispensed by a privileged and ghostly class. It is a succession of gifts, of graces, of commission, of power, of victory. The true preacher is God's messenger. Does he stand before thousands—a man of learning, of eloquence, of far flung ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... him blinkingly all along the route. The tall black buildings rose up grimly into the night; the faces that flitted to and fro along the pavements, kept ever sliding past him, melting into the darkness; and the cabs and 'buses, still astir in the streets, had a ghostly air as they vanished in ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce
... "The Ghostly Passenger." This illustration of what is one of the best tales of mystery is equally picturesque and original. The five figures in front are truly remarkable. The elegant interesting figure of the woman, the fop with his hat ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... sometimes dressed in white flannel trousers, coat, and vest, and with white paper wrapped around his beaver hat! When he presented himself in this manner, riding horseback, with his dark eyes burning, he was said to have presented "a most ghostly appearance!" ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... It is the sea, it is the sea, In all its vague immensity, Fading and darkening in the distance! Silent, majestical, and slow, The white ships haunt it to and fro, With all their ghostly sails unfurled, As phantoms from another world Haunt the dim confines of existence! But ah! how few can comprehend Their signals, or to what good end From land to land they come and go! Upon a sea more vast and dark The spirits of the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... alkali deposits seemed like frost work. The storms had eaten some of the massive cliffs into forms of castles and there were galleries of arches and columns sculptured by the rain, stretching for miles on either side. At nightfall the scene was ghostly and imagination easily peopled the dark ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... glanced toward the window, where a frosted pattern of ivy showed like a delicate lacework on the small greenish panes. Another dropped; then another. Gradually he began to listen for the sound and to miss it when there came a long silence. One might easily imagine it to be the tapping of ghostly fingers—of the fingers of pretty Janet Merryweather—some quarter of a century earlier. Her daughter was hardly more than twenty now, he supposed, and he wondered how long the mad idyllic period had lasted before ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... fittest to create And to repay each other! Why rejoices Thy heart with hollow joy for hollow good? Why cowl thy face beneath the mourner's hood, Why waste thy sighs, and thy lamenting voices, Image of Image, Ghost of Ghostly Elf, That such a thing as thou feel'st warm or cold? Yet what and whence thy gain, if thou withhold These costless shadows of thy shadowy self? Be sad! be glad! be neither! seek, or shun! Thou hast no reason why! Thou canst ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... wildly to and fro, yet always hanging perpendicular by reason of a simple mechanism, the lantern threw out its bright beams, involving the vessel and the foam-clad boiling sea in a circle of light which ended in darkness profound, forming, as it were, a bright but ghostly chamber shut in with walls of ebony, and revealing, in all its appalling reality, the fury of the sea. What horrors lay concealed in the darkness beyond no one could certainly know; but the watch on board the Gull could form from past experience a pretty good conception of them, ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... doubts and fears of his little light, and would fain carry him off into purgatory ere it died out. But his saviours came: they were the ghosts of those great lights that founded the pillars of our Republicanism. Down they sat, in ghostly conclave, and with instruments in hand set about driving away the carrier devils and working the problem of Mr. Pierce's political policy. It was impossible!—not all the trigonometry of which they were ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... at a low table, writing; Pia, the old nurse, stood behind her chair; the oil was richly scented that she burned; the single light illumined only her, and covered with her shadow the low ceiling,—a shadow that seemed to hang above her like a pall ready to fall from ghostly fingers and smother her in its folds; the others lounged about the room and waited on her pen, in gloom they, their faces gleaming from that dusk demoniacly. It was a concealed room, entered by secret ways, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... not like about the cavern was that it had innumerable passages and windings about, and odd places, with dark holes, and ghostly-looking corners. I was not satisfied until I had explored them all, blocking up narrow little slits, and doing all I could to rout out anything that might be harbouring there. There was one passage very long and steep, the entrance ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... me first know what it is all about. Not to know anything at all makes me so unhappy. I see nothing but a dreadful darkness, and shadows that are moving about—Give me light, so that I may see clearly! Perhaps I know these ghostly shallows? ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... free, Wild days in Texas by the Rio Grande. And some men say when dusky night shuts down, Dark, cloudy nights without a kindly star, One sees dim horsemen skimming o'er the plain Hard by Mackenzie's trail; and keener ears Have heard from deep within the bordering hills The tramp of ghostly hoofs, faint cattle lows, The rumble of a moving wagon train, Sometimes far echoes of a frontier song; Then sounds grow fainter, shadows troop away,— On westward, westward, as they in olden time Went rangeing o'er the old Mackenzie Trail. ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... clear distance and sighed softly as he put the pouch back in his pocket, and, resting his arm on his knee and his chin in his hand, sat blowing clouds of smoke out of the shade into the sunshine, absently watching the ghostly shadows dance on the white dust of ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... of Westminster chimed midnight, that hour of picturesque ghostly tradition, when simple village maids shudder at the thought of traversing a dark lane or passing a churchyard, and when country folks of old-fashioned habits and principles are respectably in bed and for the most part ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... and stood close together upon the immediate edge of the vacant plot, now several feet deep in snow, our figures throwing long shadows upon the ghostly purity of the covering. And we became aware that we were not watching so much as listening, for on the freshening easterly wind there was borne such a rumour as men are not often permitted to make or to hear. ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... his seat in the crowded church. But this feeling, and even his attempts to discover Miss Eversleigh's face in the stately family pew fenced off from the chancel, presently passed away. And then his mind began to be filled with strange and weird fancies. What grim and ghostly revelations might pass between this dead scion of the Dorntons lying on the trestles before them and the obscure, nameless ticket of leave man awaiting his entrance in the vault below! The incongruity of this thought, with the smug complacency ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... music and light; sometimes the front door was opened and voices stole out to him; sometimes even through the closed door he heard the ghostly tinkling of some ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... Sin! Crime! He remembered the words of the girl who during these latter years had represented to him what there might have been of light in life. He remembered, and it seemed to him that he could meet that ghostly image which had risen from the black waters, without shrinking, almost contemptuously. Fate had mocked him long enough. It was time, ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... repeat the dialogue of the earlier scenes of the play. There is a good deal of dramatic force in the legs of Mr. MONTGOMERY, who plays "Macbeth," much animation in the feathers which Mr. STUDLEY'S "Macduff" wears in his hat, and a foreshadowing of ghostly peculiarities in the solemn stride of Mr. DE VERE'S "Banquo." We listen to these gentlemen with polite patience, waiting for the appearance of "Lady Macbeth." When at length that strong-minded female strides across the stage, we hail her with ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 33, November 12, 1870 • Various
... and tramples without ruth? And still she clings to Ida of her dreams, And sobs, Ah! let the world be what it seems! Then the shy nymph shall softly come again; The world, once more, make music for her pain. For, sitting in the dim and ghostly night, She fain would stay the strong approach of light; While later bards cleave to her, and believe That in her sorrow she can still conceive! Oh, let her dream; still lovely is her sigh; Oh, rouse her not, or she shall ...
— Primavera - Poems by Four Authors • Stephen Phillips, Laurence Binyon, Manmohan Ghose and Arthur Shearly Cripps
... Militant was properly backed up by the Flying Artillery. Their banner announced that they were 'for the reduction of Sebastopol,' and it is safe to say that they will certainly take that fortress, if they get a chance. If the Russians hold out against those four ghostly steeds, tandem, with their bandy-legged and kettle-stomached riders,—that gun, so strikingly like a joint of old stove-pipe in its exterior, but which upon occasion could vomit forth your real smoke and sound and smell of unmistakable brimstone,—and those slashed and blood-stained artillerymen,—they ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... sin," he repeated slowly, and the tone changed. "There is no sin in it!" he cried suddenly, in a low voice, that had a distant, ghostly ring ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... Black Watch's ghostly piper that plays proudly when the men of the Black Watch do well, and prouder ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... earthly place, Wanders among a mortal race? How were his footsteps led That still about his face Lingers a ghostly trace Of a secret influence shed By a Hand the world denies, In a land her most son flies, As a gift upon him thrust For an end he knoweth not, Yet will shine because he must, Shine and sing because he must Reap a wrong ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... destination was, long before we got there. In the centre of one of the glades, there is the shattered stump of what must at some time have been a most gigantic tree. It is called the Abbot's Beech, and there are so many ghostly stories about it, that I know many a brave soldier who would not care about mounting sentinel over it. However, I cared as little for such folly as the Emperor did, so we crossed the glade and made straight for the old broken trunk. As we approached, I saw that two men ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the moon in a yellow stain, And the clouds are flying before the wind, The leaves fall fast in a ghostly rain,— Summer is ...
— The Rose-Jar • Thomas S. (Thomas Samuel) Jones
... Rossignol's life this one seemed least likely to be chosen as her occasion for a flight. The walls were strictly guarded, and at midnight the moon spread its ghostly day over all visible earth. Besides, if the fortress was to be surrendered, there was immediate prospect of a ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... his burial, with bird and song and sweet-smelling flowers. The trees whispered to the grass, but the children sat with hushed faces. And yet it seemed a ghostly unreal day,—the wraith of Life. We seemed to rumble down an unknown street behind a little white bundle of posies, with the shadow of a song in our ears. The busy city dinned about us; they did not say much, those ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... wind long to drive us back on our cable, stern foremost, on to the wreck, which now loomed out huge and ghostly on the wild water. As we drifted down under her stern we were conscious, amidst the smoke of the burning tar-barrels and the spray of the waves which broke over her, of a crowd of faces looking over her sides, and fancied we heard a faint cheer too. ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... and the crests of all its lofty neighbors were brightly silvered by the descending sun. From Pilatus on the right, away to the green banks of Weggis and Vitznau on the left, the lake spread in blue and bronze, and by the opposite shore the water's calm was such that a ghostly Lucerne of the under-world lay upside down just beneath its level, and mocked reality above by the perfection of detail. Little bright-sailed boats danced here and there, a large steamer was gliding into the landing by the Gare, and ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... The ghostly world streamed by, silent-footed and mist-muffled. It was the hour when children are born and weary people die—the hour of new beginnings and ancient endings, when life and death, like soldiers changing guard, salute at the cross-roads of the new ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... little way off upon a slope he saw the shimmer of light, as if a chapel was lit up. He went towards it, and he saw a high wall that was broken down in many places, and an old grey chapel beyond, and the windows were shimmering with a ghostly light. As he came through the trees he saw they were all dead, with neither leaf nor twig upon them, their roots were crooked out of the ground as if they would throw his horse, and their limbs were stretched as if they ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... blamed if my suddenly aroused and somewhat bemused senses played tricks with me, and my startled imagination began to conjure up the gruesome stories I had heard of weird visitants, and ghostly beings, heard but seldom seen, on the East Anglian meres and broads? Then again came the remembrance of the shriek or cry I had fancied I heard earlier in the night, and with a shudder I thought: "How ghastly if it should be the drowned body of him whose ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... which seemed to brood over the place, the weird fantasies chasing each other through my unconsenting brain, annoyed me greatly, for I profess to hold my imagination pretty well under control, and to have but small concern for ghostly horrors. Shaking aside my nervousness, I began to whistle softly as I strolled up to examine the old fountain. But on noticing how lugubrious, how appropriate to the neighborhood and my feelings was the air that came to my lips, I laughed aloud. At the sudden sound of my voice I felt ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... outpost at the Point of Orleans; and, about eleven o'clock, the sentries descried through the gloom the ghostly outlines of the approaching ships. As they gazed, these mysterious strangers began to dart tongues of flame; fire ran like lightning up their masts and sails, and then they burst out like volcanoes. Filled as they were with pitch, tar, and every manner of combustible, mixed with fireworks, bombs, ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... Apaches for making signals. The cactus tree, like the eastern forest tree, is often found bored full of round, holes that are made by the Gila woodpecker. When the tree dies its pulp dries up and blows away and there remains standing only a spectral figure composed of white slats and fiber that looks ghostly in the distance. ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... studied every action. When the dinner was over, and the twilight coming on, he sometimes asked me to row him out on the lake to see the nightfall and watch the "procession of the pines," that weird and ghostly phenomenon I have ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... the skies with dazzling intensity, and heavy thunder rolled all around the half circle of the horizon. The darkness turned into a bluish gray, ghostly and full of threat. Adam Colfax went through his fleet, warning everybody to cover up the stores and to beware of ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... experience of this kind is still well remembered. It was a fine crisp March morning, and the sun had not yet shown himself among the distant tree-tops as we hurried along through the ghostly wood. Presently we arrived at a place where there were many signs of the animals. Then each of us selected a tree and took up his position behind it. The chipmunk caller sat upon a log as motionless as he could, and ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... there was a moon, and the blossom glistened ghostly, they went together to look at it. She saw the moonlight on his face as he waited near her, and his features were like silver and his eyes in shadow were unfathomable. She was in love with ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... these ghostly [fabulous, figurative] Scots? I will go bail they be wrapped of their foldings [plaids] fast asleep on some moor an hundred miles hence. 'Tis but Robin, the clown! that is so clumst [stupid] with ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... sleep—HOW, I don't know. Then Dad sat beside him, and for long intervals would stare silently into the darkness. Sometimes a string of the vermin would hop past close to the fire, and another time a curlew would come near and screech its ghostly wail, but he never noticed them. Yet he ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... whistling of the wind through its crannies and the creaking of its beams and rafters become strangely like the tones of the human voice, or thundering laughter, or heavy footsteps treading the deserted chambers. It is as if the echoes of half a century were revived. Such were the ghostly sounds that roared and murmured in our ears when I took leave of the circle round the fireside of the Province House and, plunging down the doorsteps, fought my way homeward against a ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and beautiful, as if they had never known a scandal or a tragedy, slept those old walls in the moonlight, which streamed also in long bars from window to window, across the ghostly gallery before mentioned. Ghostly enough in all conscience; and yet two little figures went trotting fearlessly down it, as they did every night at eight o'clock, between the two ancient apartments now converted ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... Brad had at once seen the possibilities of the situation and decided, with an unerring certainty, that as a jack-o'-lantern is naught by day, the pumpkin face must be cunningly veiled. He was a busy man that morning; for he not only had to arrange his own ghostly progress, but settle the elephant on its platform, to be dragged by vine-wreathed oxen, and also, at the doctor's instigation, to make the sledge on which the first Nicholas Oldfield should draw his wife into town. The ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... As the ship glided to her anchorage the crew stood about the deck in absolute silence, every man's heart in his face, the watch at its post, the others leaning on the bulwarks. Like statues they gazed on the shore. It seemed a phantom ship, blown from ghostly shores by the strength of hatred against the enemy, and love for the land of Eire; for no hope shone in their eyes, or in the eyes of Ledwith and his daughter, only triumph at their own light success. What a pity, thought Dillon, that at this ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... the sign-post, silhouetted against the sky, seemed no longer a gibbet, but a crucifix; past cottages stirring with unaccustomed life, unconscious of the unbidden guest that was soon to knock with ghostly ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... Charlotte not disapproving: the men of law proceed with their formalities. The doom is Death as a murderess. To her Advocate she gives thanks; in gentle phrase, in high-flown classical spirit. To the Priest they send her she gives thanks; but needs not any shriving, any ghostly ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... is not necessarily part of Penance. The Prayer Book lays great stress upon it, and calls it "ghostly counsel and advice," but it is neither Confession nor Absolution. It has its own place in the Prayer Book;[4] but it has not, necessarily, anything whatever to do with the administration of the Sacrament. Direction may, or may not, be good for the soul. It largely ...
— The Church: Her Books and Her Sacraments • E. E. Holmes
... in, different studios having different methods of accomplishing this. The point is that visions of this kind are obviously written into the scene proper, just as you would introduce any new character. If it is a ghostly visitor of some kind, you simply say: "Harding looks in horror (at whatever point of the room or location you desire). Vision of Blake, standing quite still and pointing an accusing finger at Harding." ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... impassioned of Virgil's eclogues, with its mystic, dissonant trumpets; even the blasphemies of "La Villanelle du Diable," and the sundown fires that beat through the close of "Hora mystica" are curiously bloodless and ghostly and unsubstantial. Pages of sustained music occur rarely enough in his music. The lofty, almost metaphysical, first few periods, the severe and pathetic second movement of the "Music for Four Stringed Instruments"; certain songs like "Le Son du cor," that have atmosphere ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... to men before Science came queening it through the universe, compelling all these fearful sights and great signs into her triumphal train, and commanding us to be no longer afraid of our own shadow. The sure and steadfast Moon, shuddering from the fullness of her splendor into wild and ghostly darkness, might well wake strange apprehensions. She is reeling in convulsive agony. She is sickening and swooning in the death-struggle. The principalities and powers of darkness, the eternal foes of men, ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... Counsellor at Law." His cerebral column stiffens as, from day to day, he meets members of the bar, who congratulate him upon his advent, and feels his importance as he waits from day to day for the visit of his first client, but collapses when he arrives and with ghostly dread salutes him and prepares to listen with a disturbed sense of an awful responsibility he is about to undertake. For, side by side with his client's statements there seem to appear in stately majesty all the adjuncts of the law: First, the inquisitive glance of the judge, like a judicial ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs |
