"Hair's-breadth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... winter, and the hour midnight, walk out on yonder waste, and travel forth through these wild mountains, as lonely and unaided, though far more helpless, than when I first met your husband in the valley of Glendearg. But while I remain here, I will not see you err from the true path, no, not a hair's-breadth, without making the old ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... a trembling hair's-breadth of a tragedy. The two at the fire sprang up as one man; and the bound that set the hunter afoot brought his long rifle to his shoulder. But that the Indian was the quicker, Richard's life would have paid the penalty of his slip, I think. At the trigger-pulling instant the Catawba thrust ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... Whizz came a flint, apparently out of the air, and missed Mr. Marvel's shoulder by a hair's-breadth. Mr. Marvel, turning, saw a flint jerk up into the air, trace a complicated path, hang for a moment, and then fling at his feet with almost invisible rapidity. He was too amazed to dodge. Whizz it came, and ricochetted from a ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... weight of rock is, by an accident of Nature, so exactly equalized, as to keep it poised in the nicest balance on the one little point in its lower surface which rests on the flat granite slab beneath. But perfect as this balance appears at present, it has lost something, the merest hair's-breadth, of its original faultlessness of adjustment. The rock is not to be moved now, either so easily or to so great an extent, as it could once be moved. Six-and-twenty years since, it was overthrown by artificial means; and was then lifted again into its former position. This is the ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... a deep unearthly voice was heard inside the hut. Every one trembled, and there ensued a silence so oppressive as to suggest the idea that all present were holding their breath, and afraid to move even by a hair's-breadth. ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... many hair's-breadth escapes we may have had while these thoughts passed through my brain. I had closed my eyes. So preoccupied was I that but for the constant rush of air against my face I might, for aught I knew, have ...
— James Pethel • Max Beerbohm
... little ape!" and the king turned upon the soldier in wrath, and cried, forgetting his own decree, "What do you mean by bringing such a dirty, vulgar-looking, pert creature into my palace? The dullest soldier in my army could never for a moment imagine a child like THAT, one hair's-breadth like ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... sinking, in moments of repose, to an [156] expression of high-bred melancholy, the face was one that looked, after all, made for suffering,—already half pleading, half defiant, as of a creature you could hurt, but to the last never shake a hair's-breadth from ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... that you know me! Lo, the moon's self! Here in London, yonder late in Florence, Still we find her face, the thrice-transfigured. Curving on a sky imbrued with color, Drifted over Fiesole by twilight, Came she, our new crescent of a hair's-breadth. Full she flared it, lamping Samminiato, Rounder 'twixt the cypresses and rounder, Perfect till the nightingales applauded. Now, a piece of her old self, impoverished, Hard to greet, she traverses the house-roofs, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... height with Paradou; full-girdled, point-device in every form, with an exquisite delicacy in the face; her nose and nostrils a delight to look at from the fineness of the sculpture, her eyes inclined a hair's-breadth inward, her colour between dark and fair, and laid on even like a flower's. A faint rose dwelt in it, as though she had been found unawares bathing, and had blushed from head to foot. She was of a grave countenance, rarely smiling; yet it seemed to be written upon every part of her that she rejoiced ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... imaginary claims of a few acres of soil our duty and privilege as liegemen of Truth. Our true country is bounded on the north and the south, on the east and the west, by Justice, and when she oversteps that invisible boundary-line by so much as a hair's-breadth, she ceases to be our mother, and chooses rather to be looked upon quasi noverca. That is a hard choice, when our earthly love of country calls upon us to tread one path and our duty points us to another. We must make as noble and becoming an election ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... at her suspiciously once or twice, without moving her head by so much as a hair's-breadth. But she seemed really and truly asleep, and for a moment Margaret was amazed that anyone could think of sleep in that enchanted room. But then she remembered that it was different—Hennie was Hennie, and she was she, and it was for her that the ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... no," replied the old woman, cautiously, not wishing to depart a hair's-breadth from the truth. "She allowed herself to be betrayed into saying 'yes,' but fled from the house because she didn't want to have him. She told me, with tears in her eyes, that she repented having said 'no' ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie
... seen crushed like an egg-shell must have been the Whatnot. Oh, if he had only been a little closer, or if the fog had not been so thick! The boat was almost certain to have been the Whatnot though, and in that case the brave swimmer, who had missed safety by a hair's-breadth must ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... Part of the hair was gone from one side of my head, dashed off by the foot of the brother's horse, that had just thus narrowly missed dashing out my few brains. That is all, gentlemen. The dream-prophecy was fulfilled within that hair's-breadth (excuse the bad pun), by a succession of circumstances that were not arranged by human motion and could not have been expected from anything in the past; and until some one can explain or reason away the coincidence, I shall not give up my belief ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... father. "Take courage. Not one hair of our heads can fall to the ground without His permission. All that happens to us is the will of God, and what more can we wish? Do not be frightened into saying anything but what is strictly true. If they threaten you, or if they hold out promises, do not depart a hair's-breadth from the truth. Keep your conscience free from offence, for a clear conscience is a soft pillow. Perhaps they will separate us, and I shall no longer be with you to console; but if this should happen cling more closely to your heavenly Father. He is a powerful protector ...
— The Basket of Flowers • Christoph von Schmid
... Quesada (for here there is some difference of opinion among the authors who write on the subject), altho from reasonable conjectures it seems plain that he called himself Quixana. This, however, is of but little importance to our tale; it will be enough not to stray a hair's-breadth from the truth ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... to gain their end recoil at nothing; devoured by raging ambition and accustomed from his earliest years to conceal his most ardent desires beneath a mask of careless indifference, he marched ever onward, plot succeeding plot, towards the object he was bent upon securing, and never deviated one hair's-breadth from the path he had marked out, but only acted with double prudence after each victory, and with double courage after each defeat. His cheek grew pale with joy; when he hated most, he smiled; in all the emotions of his life, however strong, he ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - JOAN OF NAPLES—1343-1382 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... and we waited in the carriages, sorry not to be with them. The red coats looked well against the background; the dogs, all of the same pattern, were rushing about in groups with their tails in the air; but while our eyes were following them the fox ran right under our noses, within a hair's-breadth of our wheels. Of course the dogs lost the scent, and there was a general standstill until another fox was routed out, and off they flew again. Der alte Herr is very much thought of in these parts; he was the only one who dared oppose the House of Peers in Berlin in the question of war with Austria ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... why should a young woman go riding with a man whose hands, arms, and attention are entirely taken up with wheels, levers, and oil-cups? He can't even press her foot without running the risk of stopping the machine by releasing some clutch; if he moves his knees a hair's-breadth in her direction it does something to the mechanism; if he looks her way they are into the ditch; if she attempts to kiss him his goggles prevent; his sighs are lost in the muffler and hers in the ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... no breastplate, and whose wisdom it is, therefore, to keep out of the conflict. Or, this: That the whole universe, her own sex and yours, and Providence, or Destiny, to boot, make common cause against the woman who swerves one hair's-breadth out of the beaten track. Yes; and add (for I may as well own it, now) that, with that one hair's-breadth, she goes all astray, and never sees the world in its true ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... it seemed like to split my skull open, and my stomach was stirred by most distressing qualms, and my weakness was such that I could not ease the sore muscles of my body by moving by so much as a hair's-breadth from the cramped position in ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... was absolutely shocked; he held up his hands, began a declamation on the rules of evidence, and uttered so many Pharisaical platitudes that I only escaped annihilation by a hair's-breadth. He ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... nobly at the significance of the whole, slurring the details. She had built up the forehead low and wide, thrown out the eyebones as a shelter for the slightly prominent eyes; saved the short, straight line of the nose by a hair's-breadth from a tragic droop. But she had scamped her work in modelling the close, narrow nostrils. She had merged the lower lip with the line of the chin, missing the classic indentation. The mouth itself she had left unfinished. Only a little amber mole, verging on the thin rose of ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... With many hair's-breadth escapes, the expedition now passed through the rapids or "great shoot." The river here is one hundred and fifty yards wide and the rapids are confined to an area four hundred yards long, crowded with islands and rocky ledges. They found the Indians living along the banks of the stream ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... to screw my courage up to the point. There were two windows on each side of the door and two rows of five above, fourteen in all, and every window had its little curtains rigged up exactly alike to a hair's-breadth. If any one of them had been an inch awry I should have known it, and would have felt less ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... language, as he has made his own moulds of rhythm, and that he is apt, when a thought or a sensation which he has already expressed recurs to him, to use the mould which stands ready made in his memory, instead of creating language over again, to fit a hair's-breadth of difference in the form of thought or sensation. That is why, in this book, in translating a 'roundel' of Villon which Rossetti had already translated, he misses the naive quality of the French which Rossetti, in a version not in all points so faithful ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... note the concurrent relaxation of all sense of property. From applying for help to kinsmen who are scarce permitted to refuse, it is but a step to taking from them (in the dictionary phrase) "without permission"; from that to theft at large is but a hair's-breadth. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... saying that they formed a St. Andrew's Cross, or letter X. I hope the compositor will choose a good large X; in which case the point of intersection, the locus of conflux and intersection for these four diverging arms, will finish the reader's geographical education, by showing him to a hair's-breadth where it was that Domrmy stood. These roads, so grandly situated, as great trunk arteries between two mighty realms,[Footnote: And reminding one of that inscription, so justly admired by Paul Richter, which ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... greater than one's fellows is the offered reward of hell, and involves no greatness; to be made greater than one's self, is the divine reward, and involves a real greatness. A man might be set above all his fellows, to be but so much less than he was before; a man cannot be raised a hair's-breadth above himself, without rising nearer to God. The reward itself, then, is righteousness; and the man who was righteous for the sake of such reward, knowing what it was, would be righteous for the sake of righteousness,—which yet, however, would not be perfection. ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... that down because I could not speak to tell what was to be done with it, when we didn't know that that book had really been the saving of my life. That hair's-breadth deviation of the bullet made ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... German—and civil wars between them ensued; how, through the folly of the clergy, who vainly looked for protection from relics instead of the sword, the Saracens ranged uncontrolled all over the south, and came within an hair's-breadth of capturing Rome itself; how France, at this time, had literally become a theocracy, the clergy absorbing everything that was worth having; how the pope, trembling at home, nevertheless maintained an external power by interfering with domestic life, as in ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... sphere of sense, ( see our second diagram;) and in doing so, they would necessarily assume a totally different aspect from that of sensations. They would be real independent objects: and (what is the important part of the demonstration) they would acquire this status without overstepping by a hair's-breadth the primary limits of the sphere. Were such phraseology allowable, we should say that the sphere has understepped itself, and in doing so, has left its former contents high and dry, and stamped with all the marks ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... there was a defect, in the shape of a flaw, in the very heart of the stone. Even with this last serious draw-back, however, the lowest of the various estimates given was twenty thousand pounds. Conceive my father's astonishment! He had been within a hair's-breadth of refusing to act as executor, and of allowing this magnificent jewel to be lost to the family. The interest he took in the matter now, induced him to open the sealed instructions which had been deposited with the Diamond. Mr. Bruff showed this document to me, with the other papers; ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... Emmy had not moved mentally by a hair's-breadth. All her expansion, if expansion it could be called, had taken form in her house and garden. I had not been a week under her roof before I found that Mr. Kingston occupied exactly the same position in her life as he had ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... questioned by his chief, dared not tell his thought. He recognized Goupil. Goupil, he fully believed, was the only man capable of carrying a persecution to the very verge of the penal code without infringing a hair's-breadth upon it. ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... Whigs felt that they were placed in an embarrassing attitude. They must either vote for what they did not believe, or, by voting against the bill, incur the odium which always attaches to the party that fails by a hair's-breadth to come to the defense of the country when ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... Peel assumed the direction of affairs. Lord Palmerston has never been sufficiently called to account for his long, most disgraceful, and perilous neglect of our serious differences with America; and which had brought us to within a hair's-breadth of a declaration of war, which, whatever might have been its issue, (possibly not difficult to have foreseen,) would have been disastrous to both countries, and to one of them utterly destructive. It is notorious that within the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... is measured by the apparent change in its position, as seen from different points of the earth's surface or orbit. But this great Light stands steadfast in our heaven, nor moves a hair's-breadth, nor pours a feebler ray on us, whether we look up to it from the midsummer day of busy life, or from the midwinter of death. These opposites are parted by a distance to which the millions of miles of the world's path among the stars are but a point, and yet the love of God ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... which it appears that the Knight, when heartily set in for sleeping, was not easily disturbed V In which this Recapitulation draws to a close VI In which the Reader will perceive that in some Cases Madness is catching VII In which the Knight resumes his Importance VIII Which is within a hair's-breadth of proving highly interesting will interest the Curiosity of the Reader IX Which may serve to show, that true Patriotism is of no Party X Which showeth that he who plays at Bowls, will sometimes meet with Rubbers ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... bound to collapse under the impact; up the corresponding ascent as hard as the four Walers could lay leg to the ground; off the track, tearing through the scrub on two wheels, righting again to shave a big tree by a mere hair's-breadth; it certainly was a fine exhibition of nerve and of recklessness redeemed by skill, but I do not think that elderly ladies would have preferred it to their customary jog-trot behind two fat and confidential old slugs. One wondered how the harness held together ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... people really behave in absurd situations and under comically trying circumstances is quite funny enough for him; and if he exaggerates a little and goes beyond the absolute prose of life in the direction of caricature, he never deviates a hair's-breadth from the groove human nature has laid down. There is exaggeration, but no distortion. The most wildly funny people are low comedians of the highest order, whose fun is never forced and never fails; they found themselves on fact, and only burlesque what they have seen ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... hotch-potch of ages and races, a breath of wind from the Desert, bringing over the seas to their Parisian rooms the musty smell of a Turkish bazaar, the dazzling shimmer of the sands, the mirage, blind sensuality, savage invective, nervous disorder only a hair's-breadth away from epilepsy, a destructive frenzy—Samson, suddenly rising like a lion—after ages of squatting in the shade—and savagely tearing down the columns of the Temple, which comes crashing down on himself ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... exaltation of his mood had brought on one of his rare fits of boastfulness. "It is a tricky place, though. The least swerve, and we'd never ha' come up again. But I can measure distances to a hair's-breadth-always could." ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... mesmerised sovereign was placed in her left hand as it hung at her side, with the palm turned slightly outwards. The hand and arm were immediately paralyzed — fixed with marble-like firmness." No general stupor having occurred, she was requested to move her arm; but she could not lift it a hair's-breadth from her side. On another occasion, when in a state of delirium, in which she had remained three hours, she was asked to describe her feelings when she handled any magnetised object and went off into the stupor. She had never ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... what cannot be helped. Papa has explained everything to me, and you will only wound him further if you do not comply with his wishes. He is very resolute; and, in a matter of this kind, you could not move him a hair's-breadth. Please do just what he asks now, and let time make future ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... tumbling over it, of a seemingly ever approximating something "not quite proper," while, like a skilful posture-maker, balancing betwixt decorums and their opposites, he keeps the line, from which a hair's-breadth deviation is destruction; hovering in the confines of light and darkness, or where "both seem either"; a hazy uncertain delicacy; Autolycus-like in the play, still putting off his expectant auditory with "Whoop, do me no harm, good man!" But, above all, ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... were able to describe in minutest detail how it all came to be? It would be mere words. We know no more what an electric current really is than what the aurora borealis is. Happy is the child.... We, with all our views and theories, are not in the last analysis a hair's-breadth nearer ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... it had blown them fairly off their legs, would not have startled them. But the effect, such as it was, was sufficient to disconcert the aim of Jim Scraggs, who fired at the same instant, and missed the nail by a hair's-breadth. ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... in it, which they both knew to be different from his bearing towards others. The difference was too minute in its expression to be perceived by others, but they knew it to be there. A mere trick of his evil eyes, a mere turn of his smooth white hand, a mere hair's-breadth of addition to the fall of his nose and the rise of the moustache in the most frequent movement of his face, conveyed to both of them, equally, a swagger personal to themselves. It was as if he had said, 'I have a secret power in this quarter. I ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... The Westfield fellows look nervously at the signal-board, as if by watching it they could make our figure grow less. But, no! Another two, from my bat this time, and then a single. Only two to win! The next ball gets past my comrade's bat, and skims within a hair's-breadth of his bails. ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... only myself," he said, "I—perhaps, I might have found it easier. But there were the men, my men. You could not alter your plans by one hair's-breadth to save their gallant lives. I can't get over that. I never shall. You left us to die like rats in a hole. But for a total stranger—a spy, a Secret Service man—we should have been cut to pieces, every one of us. You did not, I suppose, send that ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... the life of a sailor—a life so full of vicissitude and enterprise, of hair's-breadth escapes, of contact with wild men and wild usages, and of intercourse with a form of nature so vast, so fluctuating, so mysterious, and so terribly sublime as the ocean, which, in its calm and silence, forms an emblem of all that is peaceful and profound, and, in its tempestuous ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... nestling in the crook of his elbow, one hand clinging to a morsel of his shirt; while he leaned above her, half-sitting, half-lying on the extreme edge of the bed, not daring to shift his strained position by so much as a hair's-breadth; till overwhelming weariness had its way with him, and he slept also, his head fallen back against ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... were—why then, I should really have seen Medea; I might see her again; speak to her. The mere thought sets my blood in a whirl, not with horror, but with... I know not what to call it. The feeling terrifies me, but it is delicious. Idiot! There is some little coil of my brain, the twentieth of a hair's-breadth out ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... proceedings might so far be dismissed, as the Attorney-General, Mr. Rufus Isaacs, dismissed them, as being "a demonstration admirably stage-managed, and led by one of great histrionic gifts." The threats of the use of force, said the Attorney-General, would not turn them aside by a hair's-breadth. Mr. Asquith, equally vigorous in his speech, was less decisive in his conclusions. Speaking at Ladybank on October 5th, he denounced "the reckless rodomontade of Blenheim, which furnishes forth the complete grammar of anarchy." But he was careful to point out that ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... through the jungle, now the prey of hope, now of despair. They had experienced adventures by the score, though none of them were of sufficient importance to be narrated here, and more than once they had come within a hair's-breadth of being compelled to retrace their steps. They rode upon the small wiry ponies of the country, their servants clearing a way before them with their parangs as they advanced. Their route, for the most part, lay through jungle, in places so dense that it was well-nigh impossible ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... that he renders to every man according to his work, and compels their obedience, nor admits judicial quibble or subterfuge. God will never let a man off with any fault. He must have him clean. He will excuse him to the very uttermost of truth, but not a hair's-breadth beyond it; he is his true father, and will have his child true as his son Jesus Christ is true. He will impute to him nothing that he has not, will lose sight of no smallest good that he has; will quench no smoking flax, ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... was that whisper, like the mutter of an earthquake miles below the soil. And yet, like the earthquake-roll, it had in that one moment jarred every belief, and hope, and memory of his being each a hair's-breadth from its place.... Only one hair's-breadth. But that was enough; his whole inward and outward world changed shape, and cracked at every joint. What if it were to fall in pieces? His brain reeled with the thought. He doubted his own identity. The very light of heaven had ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... disconnected the air-hose between the car and the engine, tying the ends up with a stout cord so that the connection would not seem to be broken. Next he crawled under the Naught-seven and deliberately bled the air-tank, setting the cock open a mere hair's-breadth so that it would leak slowly but surely until the pressure ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... "elemental war"—a sea-coast—than to put a child and its nurse in foreground, the child crying because it has lost its hoop, or some such thing? It is according to his truth of space, that distances should have every "hair's-breadth" filled up, all its "infinity," with infinities of objects, but that whatever is near, if figures, may be "pink spots," and "four dashes of the brush." While with Poussin—"masses which result from the eclipse ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... beginning he told the tale, the I—I—I's flashing through the records as telegraph-poles fly past the traveller. Maisie listened and nodded her head. The histories of strife and privation did not move her a hair's-breadth. At the end of each canto he would conclude, 'And that gave me some notion of handling colour,' or light, or whatever it might be that he had set out to pursue and understand. He led her breathless across half the world, speaking as he ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... Monsieur," assented Calvert, though somewhat dubiously, as he noted the breadth of the roughened surface, and mentally calculated that to miss the clear jump by a hair's-breadth would ensure a hard, perhaps dangerous, fall. 'Twas no easy jump under ordinary circumstances; weighted down by skates the ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... that it had to be recalled in some degree. 'I said nothing of him, Hester. I call that pitch which I believe to be wrong, and if I swerve but a hair's-breadth wittingly towards what I believe to be evil, then I shall be touching pitch and then I shall be defiled. I did not say that he was pitch. Judge not and ye shall not be judged.' But if ever judgment was pronounced, and a verdict given, and penalties awarded, ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... an air of either too much carelessness or too much labour. Mr. Jeffrey's excellence, as a public speaker, has betrayed him into this peculiarity. He makes fewer blots in addressing an audience than any one we remember to have heard. There is not a hair's-breadth space between any two of his words, nor is there a single expression either ill-chosen or out of its place. He speaks without stopping to take breath, with ease, with point, with elegance, and without "spinning the thread ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... meaning quite that in this case. But, because the law says a man is a blackguard, when I'd stake my life he's nothing of the kind, it doesn't alter my opinion one hair's-breadth. The verdict may have been—probably, almost certainly, was—the only verdict that could be given to meet the facts of the case. But still, it is possible that it was not a just verdict—labelling as a ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... exceptions. Now the mechanical laws are so definite in their purposes, that no exceptions ever take place in that department; if there is a certain quantity of nebulous matter to be agglomerated and divided and set in motion as a planetary system, it will be so with hair's-breadth accuracy, and cannot be otherwise. But the laws presiding over meteorology, life, and mind, are necessarily less definite, as they have to produce a great variety of mutually related results. Left to act independently of ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... the immemorial piles be swung A skyey hair's-breadth from their rooted base, Back to the central anchorage of space, Ah, then again, as when the race was young, Should they behold the ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... hands. If it is some comfort to have hold of a human friend, think that a friend who is more than man, a divine friend, has a hold of you, who knows all your fears and pains, and sees how natural they are, and can just with a word, or a touch, or a look into your soul, keep them from going one hair's-breadth too far. He loves us up to all out need, just because we need it, and He ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... he seemed to have put them to keep them out of mischief; and he twinkled as if he were still thinking of the andirons. And every now and then he glanced at his wife sideways out of his brilliant sapphire eyes, without moving his head a hair's-breadth. ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... had so many adventures, old top, that I couldn't tell 'em to you. Jakey and I have Robinson Crusoe tearing his hair from jealousy. Kiddo, this last week has been a whole sea story; in itself— just one hair's-breadth escape after ...
— Roy Blakeley's Adventures in Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... impetuosity and fury into his work that I thought the whole must fly to pieces; hurling to the ground at one blow great fragments three or four inches thick, shaving the line so closely that if he had overpassed it by a hair's-breadth he ran the risk of losing all, since one cannot mend a marble afterwards or repair mistakes, as one does with figures of clay and stucco." It is said that, owing to this violent way of attacking his marble, Michelangelo sometimes ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... his chiefs in the fight against the Mima and Khawabir Arabs; it was in the plain of Fafa, and a very hot day. The enemy had charged us, and had forced back the first line, and their spears were falling thick around us; one came within a hair's-breadth of Gordon, but he did not seem to mind it at all, and the victory we won was entirely due to him and his reserve of 100 men. When the fight was at its worst he found time to light a cigarette. Never in my life did I see ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... the royal house of Stanley which I uphold, who hoped to humble Charlotte of Tremouille into so base a composition. I would rather have starved in the darkest and lowest vault of Rushin Castle, than have consented to aught which might diminish in one hair's-breadth the right of my ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... dear fellow, there is hope for you yet. If a man once gets sentimental, he desires to be normal above all things, for he has a crazy intuition that it is the normal which women really like, being themselves but a hair's-breadth from the commonplace. I suppose it is only another of the immortal errors with which ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... I am,' returned the other, leaning his arm upon the chimney-piece, and turning a haughty look upon the occupant of the easy-chair, 'the man I used to be. I have lost no old likings or dislikings; my memory has not failed me by a hair's-breadth. You ask me to give you a meeting. ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... deep-grasping, scarcely spent 'Twixt continent and continent: Such quiet souls have never known Thy truer inspiration, thou Who lov'st to feel upon thy brow Spray from the plunging vessel thrown, Grazing the tusked lee shore, the cliff That o'er the abrupt gorge holds its breath, Where the frail hair's-breadth of an If Is all that sunders life and death: These, too, are cared for, and round these Bends her mild crook thy sister Peace; These in unvexed dependence lie Each 'neath his space of household sky; O'er them clouds ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... and wounded his right shoulder." Andrew did not say that it was only a hair's-breadth escape of his own life. "Neither knew he ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... called on to sell 'his brass pans' without being supplied, on the part of the State, with what might appear, to him, any respectable reason for it, putting his life in peril, and coming off, with a hair's-breadth escape, of all his future usefulness, if he were bold enough to question the proceeding; a state of things in which a poor law-reader might feel himself called upon to buy a gown for a lady, whose gowns were none of the cheapest, at a time when the state of his finances might render ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... which would have stopped a man. So, in her sore need, had Anne Silvester won the sympathy which had given her a place, by the farmer's side, in the vehicle that took him on his own business to the market-town. And so, by a hair's-breadth, did she escape the treble risk of discovery which threatened her—from Geoffrey, on his way back; from Arnold, at his post; and from the valet, on the watch for ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... gone down in her," he said in a grave and impressive tone, looking him full in the face. "It is far too serious a matter for you to speak of so lightly. Just think, man, we've only been saved by a hair's-breadth ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... forearm of steel—all these were only men, following the sea because they knew no better. And the mate who would wade into a mob of twenty with swinging fists, and the navigator who could calculate to a hair's-breadth where they were by observing the unimaginable stars—they were not of the craft of Noah, they were men who knew their job ... just men ... as a ticket-clerk on a railroad is ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... spy. James Grahame of Montrose has enough knowledge of the polite arts of war to know the difference between a spy in his camp in a false uniform and a scout taking all the risks of the road by wearing his own colours. In the one case he would hang us offhand, in the other there's a hair's-breadth of chance that he might keep us ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... height, the canoe stood up almost vertically on her stern. Baggage and men all slid down in a heap. The next thing I saw, when the canoe righted herself, was that we were going down the rapid sideways and at a really vertiginous pace. We managed to clear by a mere hair's-breadth two great rocks which stood in the way. Had we struck a rock on that particular occasion we certainly should have all been killed. As luck would have it, before we knew what was happening we were shot into the whirlpool under the rapid, and there we turned round upon ourselves ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... no'the,' said he, raising his face from his labours. 'Mr Hay, you'll have to watch your dead reckoning; I want every yard she makes on every hair's-breadth of a course. I'm going to knock a hole right straight through the Paumotus, and that's always a near touch. Now, if this South East Trade ever blew out of the S.E., which it don't, we might hope to lie within half a point of our course. Say we lie within a point of it. That'll ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... difficulty is, never anywhere to have an unnecessary leaf. Over the arch on the right, you see there is a cluster of seven, with their short stalks springing from a thick stem. Now, you could not turn one of those leaves a hair's-breadth out of its place, nor thicken one of their stems, nor alter the angle at which each slips over the next one, without spoiling the whole as much as you would a piece of melody by missing a note. That is disposition ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... remained where he left them, no danger would have been encountered, but, as we have shown, they moved up stream and came within a hair's-breadth of being wiped from the face of the earth before their ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... I force and fit matters a little: I leave some men out of my list whom I should like to have in it;—Benozzo Gozzoli, for instance, and Mino da Fiesole; but I can do without them, and so can you also, for the present. I catch Luca by a hair's-breadth only, with my 1400 rod; but on the whole, with very little coaxing, I get the groups in this memorable and quite literally 'handy' form. For see, I write my lists of five, five, and seven, on bits of pasteboard; I hinge my rods to these; and you can brandish the school of 1400 in ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... to fire his gun, for the reason that the report was likely to be heard by more dangerous enemies. His purpose was to refrain from doing so, unless forced to shoot in self defense, and his pride would not permit him to deviate a hair's-breadth from the path in order to escape the ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... perceive that this same man, like all his fellows, is a maimed god who walks the world dependent upon many wise and evil counsellors. He must measure, to a hair's-breadth, every content of the world by means of a bloodied sponge, tucked somewhere in his skull, a sponge which is ungeared by the first cup of wine and ruined by the touch of his own finger. He must appraise all that he judges with no better instruments than two bits of colored ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... questionable spot was what it looked to her mistress, or what she herself doubted it. When she had once made up her mind in the negative, no foolish attempt of mine could overpersuade her—could make her trust our weight on it a hair's-breadth. In a bog the greenest spots are the most dangerous, and Zoe knew it: the matted roots might be afloat on a fathomless depth of water. Backed by my uncle, she soon taught me to be as much afraid of those green spots as she was herself. I had learned ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... hour moving my feet—a hair's-breadth at a time—till they were so that I could sleep in comfort; and I was awakened several times during the night by angry snarls from the Dog—I suppose because I dared to move a toe without his approval, though once I believe ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... little pale-blue butterfly, like a periwinkle-petal come to life, fluttered over Barnes's grim, upturned face, and went dancing gaily out across the shining water, joyous in the sun. In its dancing it chanced to dip a hair's-breadth too low. The treacherous, bright surface caught it, held it; and away it swept, struggling in helpless consternation against this unexpected doom. Before it passed out of Barnes's vision a great trout rose and gulped it down. Its swift fate, ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... the existence of another class of maxims of even greater weight, which dwell on the subtle influence of women, and of its illimitable consequences. "If the nose of Cleopatra," remarks the most famous of these aphorists—Pascal—"had been a hair's-breadth longer, the fortunes of the world would have been altered." Has the influence of the sex decreased since the days of the dusky ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... She did not know how hard the new millstone was, and hoped to treat him in her usual fashion; but she was soon to discover that this fence was too high to jump over, and that the youth would not sacrifice a hair's-breadth of his rights. If she gave him a single bad word without cause, he gave her a dozen back; and if she lifted her hand against him, he caught up a stone or a log of wood, or anything else which happened to come to hand, and cried out, "Don't dare to come ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... troops, when they saw him return as victor from the side opposite to that by which he had set forth, welcomed him with boundless joy. The fate of the town, which had ventured to thwart the plans of the master of the world and had brought him within a hair's-breadth of destruction, lay in Caesar's hands; but he was too much of a ruler to be sensitive, and dealt with the Alexandrians as with the Massiliots. Caesar—pointing to their city severely devastated and deprived of its granaries, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... the gods were offended at my presumption and determined by one hair's-breadth shift to destroy the balance of my whole structure. They're a jealous lot, the gods. I didn't understand, at that time, how great must have been the amusement which ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... disputed my right to use the highway," said he, in tones that could not have been steadier if he had been ordering the boatswain's mate of the Sumter to pipe sweepers. "Captain, drop that revolver on the floor without moving your hand a hair's-breadth." ...
— Marcy The Blockade Runner • Harry Castlemon
... are always suspect when seen in print. I have no wish to exaggerate by a hair's-breadth about Finn. His whole nature bade the Wolfhound follow his friend. The Master said, "Stay there!" And there was no mistaking his meaning. Finn crouched down. His body did not touch the floor; his weight rested on his outstretched legs, though his position appeared to be that of lying. There he crouched; ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... and its phenomena, is but half executed, unless such an object be found. For though we have associated the visual sensations (colours) with something different from themselves, still vision clings to them without a hair's-breadth of interval and pursues them whithersoever they go. As far, then, as we have yet gone, it cannot be said that our vision is felt or known to be distanced from the fixed stars even by the diameter of a grain of sand. The synthesis of sight and colour is not yet discriminated. How, then, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... manifestation of anger, Cherokee took up the pursuit again, running on the inside of the circle White Fang was making, and striving to fasten his deadly grip on White Fang's throat. The bull-dog missed by a hair's-breadth, and cries of praise went up as White Fang doubled suddenly out of danger ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... And, sir, if the Senate will take any heed of the opinion of one so humble as myself, I will say that I believe Mr. Webster, in that speech, went to the very verge of the public sentiment in the non-slaveholding States, and that to have gone a hair's-breadth further, would have been a step too bold even for ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... such force that I could do nothing against it; once I had to leap down a not inconsiderable waterfall into a deep pool below, and my swag was so heavy that I was very nearly drowned. I had indeed a hair's-breadth escape; but, as luck would have it, Providence was on my side. Shortly afterwards I began to fancy that the rift was getting wider, and that there was more brushwood. Presently I found myself on an open grassy ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... him, Thusnelda, for the duke is your declared favorite; you dare not reproach him were he never so insolent, for you are just as much so, and not a hair's-breadth better. Come, go up and see ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... pushing back the limits of our knowledge of the material universe. They have during the last eighty years made an enormous addition to the sum of that knowledge, but they have not, since Democritus, taken away one hair's-breadth from the Mystery which lies behind. In fact, their labors have in many ways deepened this Mystery. We can appeal confidently to any candid man to say, for instance, whether Darwin's theory of the origin of life and the evolution of species ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... La Robe Noire leaped into the air like a wounded rabbit. An arrow whizzed past my face and glanced within a hair's-breadth of the Indian's head. Both men were dumb with amazement. Such treachery would have been surprising among the barbarous tribes of the Athabasca. The Sault was the dividing line between Canada and the Wilderness, between the east ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... 'nothing was more seductive than secrecy. The contradictions in his conduct entangled him in embarrassments, in which his declarations, if always true in the sense he privately gave them, were only a hair's-breadth removed from actual, and even from intentional, untruth.'—Whether traceable to descent, or to the evil influence of Buckingham and the intriguing atmosphere of the Spanish marriage-negotiations, this defect in political honesty is, unquestionably, ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... spoke I thought how Elzevir had gone to shoot her father, and only failed of it by a hair's-breadth, and yet she spoke so well I thought he never really meant to shoot at all, but only to scare the magistrate. And what a whirligig of time was here, that I should have saved Elzevir from having that blot on his conscience, and then ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... is religion. And you and I are Christians just in the measure in which that coincidence of wills is true about us, and not one hair's-breadth further, for all our professions. Wheresoever my will diverges from Christ, in that particular I am not His man; and 'Christian' simply means 'Christ's man.' I belong to Him when I think as He does, love as He does, will as He does, accept ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... reason of the epoch that witnessed their birth; and indeed there is no graver or more disturbing problem before the moralist or sociologist than that of determining whether all his efforts can hasten by one hour or divert by one hair's-breadth the decisions of the great anonymous mass which proceeds, step by step, towards its ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... by something more than a hair's-breadth, Morty. You should have been a novelist. Give you a spike and a cross-tie and you'd infer a whole railroad. But you pique my curiosity. Where are these American royalties of yours ...
— A Fool For Love • Francis Lynde
... of the instruments is a task of great nicety. If they are out of trim only a shadow of a shade of a hair's-breadth, the desired accuracy is interfered with, and they have to be re-adjusted. Temperature is of course an important element in their condition, and a slight sensibility may do mischief. The warmth of the observer's body, when approaching ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... his mother's esteem. But Lucy's a wise mother. She moves with her finger on her lip. And that, mind you, without coddling. She'll risk him to the hair's-breadth—and never a word. But she won't risk herself. Not she! Why, she might be wanted! But there it is. Women can do these things, God knows how! It's men who make a ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... now, as evening approached, three-parts of the stack were gone. Only once had he ventured to the edge of his shelter and looked out. A pair of grinning jaws crashed against the outlet, and snapped within a hair's-breadth of his nose. It was his first sight of a terrier, and he realized that to ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... the Proudies, but they are absolutely truthful, real, living portraits. The situations are not very striking, but then they are perfectly natural. And the characters never say or do a thing which oversteps by a hair's-breadth the probable and natural ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... a French officer in front of their line, whom he disarmed by a clever sword trick which he had learned from a master of arms in the French service. A French soldier missed Claverhouse's head by a hair's-breadth, while he, swerving, struck down another on his right. Carlton had disappeared, Hales had been wounded, but in the end escaped with his life. Collier and Claverhouse were now in the open space behind the first line of the French cavalry, and they could see more than ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... Henderson's nice, old-fashioned methods and materials afforded possibility for. Twenty times a day, during the few that intervened between its fitting up and Mr. Armstrong's occupation of it, she darted in, to settle a festoon of fringe, or to pick a speck from the carpet, or to move a chair a hair's-breadth this way or that, or to smooth an invisible crease in the counterpane, or, above all, to take a pleased survey of everything once more, and to wonder how the minister ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... human mind is never more open to the dazzling effects of beauty, splendour, and gaiety than when it has been wrapt in the profoundest sorrow? Are the confines of joy and anguish so close? Is there but a hair's-breadth intervention of some invisible nerve, some slender web of imagination, between mirth and melancholy? The Irish are a handsome race, and none more enjoy, or are more fitted by nature or temper, for all the ornamental displays of society; a Castle ball was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... other, "I cannot, with exactness, say that I did. It would be difficult, indeed, for me to describe the manner in which we arrived at this most satisfactory conclusion. Miss Raybold is a mistress of expression, and, without moving a hair's-breadth beyond the lines of maidenly reserve which always environ her, she made me aware, not only that I desired to propose marriage to her, but that it would be well for me to do so. There were objections to this course, which, as an honest man, I ...
— The Associate Hermits • Frank R. Stockton
... again they came within a hair's-breadth of destruction. The eddying, seething surface of the swift rushing river seemed to hurl its debris toward their little craft in fiendish malevolence. Ice cakes crashed together on every hand, water-logged tree-butts snagged ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... of that," answered James, confidently, still continuing to throw the stones; "I can come within a hair's-breadth of her, and not touch her. ...
— Frank, the Young Naturalist • Harry Castlemon
... omniscient eye, that seemed never to blink nor to grow weary. This same eye could keep its watch, also, over the entire establishment, with no need of the huge body to which it was attached moving a hair's-breadth. Was it Nitouche, the head-cook, who was grumbling because the kitchen-wench had not scoured the brass saucepans to the last point of mirrory brightness? Behold both Nitouche and the trembling peasant-girl, together with the brasses as evidence, all could be brought at an instant's call, ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... She had watched the flash and swing of the axe, with its edge like the finest razor. She had seen the standing muscles like whipcord writhing under sunburnt flesh as they served the lethal weapon. She had noted every blow, how it was calculated to a hair's-breadth, and fell without waste of one single ounce of power. And then the amazing result. The fallen tree stretched out on the exact spot and in the exact direction ready for the hauliers to bear straight away ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... wife ranged itself with fervent intensity on the side of his weaker self. Forgotten were the horrors of the guillotine, the calls of the innocent, the appeal of the helpless; forgotten the daring adventures, the excitements, the hair's-breadth escapes; for those few seconds, heavenly in themselves, he only remembered her—his wife—her beauty and her ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... France; to which we constantly return for illustration. France, with its keen intellect, saw the truth and saw the falsity, in those Protestant times; and, with its ardor of generous impulse, was prone enough to adopt the former. France was within a hair's-breadth of becoming actually Protestant. But France saw good to massacre Protestantism, and end it in the night of St. Bartholomew, 1572. The celestial Apparitor of Heaven's Chancery, so we may speak, the Genius of Fact and Veracity, had left his Writ of Summons; ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... faith,—it is very evident he had no 'calling or election' such as he pretended, . . I wonder Jeremy Bentham's conclusive book on the subject is not more universally known. Paul's sermonizing gave rise to a thousand different shades of opinion and argument, —and for a mere hair's-breadth of needless discussion, nation has fought against nation, and man against man, till the very name of religion has been made a ghastly mockery. That, however, is not the fault of Christianity, but the fault of those who PROFESS to follow it, like ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... been brought within a hair's-breadth of death, and the long months during which he could do nothing but lie down or sit in a heap after his accident had, ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... the solid rock had quivered and resounded under the blow, but its vibrations were nothing more than those of the rigid metal; the base was unshaken and, except for an instant, the column had not been deflected a hair's-breadth. ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... and eliminate errors and display the light of the purest faith.' Well might the faithful study and labour to such ends! For, while the offence remained ambiguous, there was no ambiguity about the penalty. One hair's-breadth from the unknown path of truth, one shadow of impurity in the mysterious light of faith, and there shall ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... of hope. Handsome, to begin with; decidedly well-looking, all say, and of graceful presence, though hardly five feet seven, and perhaps stouter of limb than the strict Belvedere standard. [Height, it appears, was five feet five inches (Rhenish), which in English measure is five feet seven or a hair's-breadth less. Preuss, twice over, by a mistake unusual with him, gives "five feet two inches three lines" as the correct cipher (which it is of NAPOLEON'S measure in FRENCH feet); then settles on the above dimensions from unexceptionable authority (Preuss, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... presence in the house; but she ought to know. What if a sound from his voice should chance to come down the passage-way, as I often had heard it? I watched the doors painfully, to see that not one was left open a hair's-breadth, until the time Miss Axtell went up to her own room. Talking rapidly, giving her no time to speak, I went on with her. Safely ignorant, I had her at last where ears of mortals could not intrude. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the smallness of the target there were but few misses. Shots were judged to a hair's-breadth, and the judging was perfectly fair. Strangely enough I managed to win a sack of meal and a barrel of vinegar. As these were of no use to me, I exchanged them for fifteen shillings and a hundred Westley ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... romantic little chap, and he likened the immobile old heathen to the genius of the Siwash race, gazing calm-eyed upon the hosts of the invading Saxon. The hours swept along, but Imber did not vary his posture, did not by a hair's-breadth move a muscle; and Dickensen remembered the man who once sat upright on a sled in the main street where men passed to and fro. They thought the man was resting, but later, when they touched him, they found him stiff and cold, frozen to death in the midst of the ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... with tales of the thieves and outlaws who then, and indeed for many later generations, infested Bagshot heath, and the wild moorland tracks around. He seemed to think that the travellers had had a hair's-breadth escape, and that a few seconds' more delay might have revealed the weakness of the rescuers and have been ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Man of the River-bend burst out laughing and urged them to stop. "Great indeed is your witlessness!" said he. "With the poor remaining strength of your declining years you will not succeed in removing a hair's-breadth of the mountains, much less the whole vast mass of rock and soil." With a sigh the Simpleton of the North Mountain answered:—"Surely it is you who are narrow-minded and unreasonable. You are not to be compared with the widow's ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... familiar with that form of address, must have been slumbering, for she never turned or moved a hair's-breadth or gave a symptom of intelligence. Now, at length it transpired that the social leader ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... broad palm, while he discoursed in a dispassionate manner to the two excited little boys who were making futile rushes for the apricots. The governess and Rachel were looking on. Rachel had arrived at Westhope the day before from Southminster. "Take your time, my son," said Dick, just eluding by a hair's-breadth a charge through a geranium-bed on the part of the eldest boy. "If you are such jolly little fools as to crack your little skulls on the sun-dial, I shall eat them both myself. Miss Turner says you may have them, so you've only got to take them. I can't keep on offering them ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... did not turn Takauji by a hair's-breadth from his purpose. His army had not marched many miles westward before he despatched a message to the entrenchments in Hoki offering his services to the Emperor, who welcomed this signal accession of strength and commissioned Takauji to attack ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... that man's life lies all within this present, as 't were but a hair's-breadth of time; as for the rest, the past is gone, the future yet unseen. Short, therefore, is man's life, and narrow is the corner of the earth ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... contemn. But if they gain it fairly, under the forms of the Constitution, it is the duty of all good citizens to submit. Our Southern opponents, we acknowledge, committed some "irregularities"; but nobody can assert, that, in dealing with them, we deviated, by a hair's-breadth, from the powers intrusted to the Government by the Fathers of the Republic. While the country is convulsed by a rebellion unprecedented in the whole history of the world, we are compelled by our principles ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... Miscellany.' In 1745, to the surprise of many, he joined the standard of Prince Charles, and wrote a poem on the battle of Gladsmuir, or Prestonpans. When the reverse of his party came, after many wanderings and hair's-breadth escapes in the Highlands, he found refuge in France. As he was a general favourite, and as much allowance was made for his poetical temperament, a pardon was soon procured for him by his friends, and he returned to his native country. His health, however, originally ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... without a gap. But if the locomotory pads grip only on one side progress becomes impossible. When placed on the smooth wood of my table, the animal wriggles slowly; it lengthens and shortens without advancing by a hair's-breadth. Laid on the surface of a piece of split oak, a rough, uneven surface, due to the gash made by the wedge, it twists and writhes, moves the front part of its body very slowly from left to right and right to left, ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... costliness; its pavement was a mosaic of wonderful beauty, and there were four twisted pillars made out of stalactites. Perhaps the best way to form some dim conception of it is to fancy a little casket, inlaid inside with precious stones, so that there shall not a hair's-breadth be left unprecious-stoned, and then to conceive this little bit of a casket iucreased to the magnitude of a great church, without losing anything of the excessive glory that was compressed into its original small compass, but all its pretty lustre made sublime by the ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... intermits the beating of his fateful wings, flew by; the centuries rolled on; the Roman invaders came; the Norsemen and Saxons came, the Norman conquerors came, and each left their mark, deep and lasting, on the people and on the land—but they could not check by one hair's-breadth the perennial flow of the springs in the Hot Swamp, or obliterate the legend on which is founded ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... military criminal, on the plea that the forgiveness of such a misdeed would be contrary to all precedent, and would constitute a very bad example. Those unbending principles by which Germany had risen to her high place would not yield a hair's-breadth for all the supplications of a man who had betrayed his trust, though he were old and broken down, harmless, and even, perhaps, somewhat to be pitied. The law was not made for the young rather than ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... fire of our Maxim disconcerted them—and although we afterward found that five round shot had passed through our sails, only one struck our hull, while, by what seemed like a miracle, the bullets all missed our bodies, though in many cases by only the merest hair's-breadth. For perhaps half a minute the fire of the pirates was maintained with the utmost fury, and then all in a moment it died away to a few ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... promised the orphans, en bloc, that those who passed through an entire year without once falling into falsehood should have a treat or festival of their own choosing. On the eventful day of decision, those orphans, male and female, who had not for a twelve-month deviated from the truth by a hair's-breadth, raised their little white hands (emblematic of their pure hearts and lips), and were solemnly counted. Then came the unhappy moment when a scattering of small grimy paws was timidly put up, and their ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... was altogether superb. The great ship swung round with a majestic sweep, and as we waited breathlessly, the torpedo passed right under our bow, missing the ram by a hair's-breadth. The reaction was nigh intolerable; the men waited for some seconds silent as the voice-less; then their cheers rang away over the seas in a great volume of sound, which must have re-echoed down in the ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... lunge at the "old man" and missed him by a hair's-breadth when he felt two great hairy arms encircle him from behind and the hot breath of one of his horrible opponents whistling savagely in his ear. He tried to lunge backwards at the creature, but toppled ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... the shadow of approaching death. Indeed, at one time I had no hope that I could live to complete my task. No man who writes thus, on the verge of another world, would willingly swerve by so much as a hair's-breadth from what he believes to be the truth. But human nature and human limitations remain the same from the beginning to the end of life, and I am fully conscious of the fact that the soundness of my judgments ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... of the alphabet,—the love labial,—the limping consonant which it takes two to speak plain. Indeed, he scarcely let her say a word, at first; for he saw that it was hard for her to conceal her emotion. No wonder; he had come within a hair's-breadth of losing his life, and he had been a very kind friend and a very dear companion ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... hair's-breadth escape have I had!—Such a one, that I tremble between terror and joy, at the thought of what might ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... imperious—a woman habitually, proudly used to being obeyed. She divined that all the pride, blue blood, wealth, culture, distinction, all the impersonal condescending persuasion, all the fatuous philanthropy on earth would not avail to turn this man a single hair's-breadth from his downward career to destruction. Her coming had terribly augmented his bitter hate of himself. She was going to fail to help him. She experienced a sensation of impotence that amounted almost to distress. The situation assumed a tragic keenness. She had set forth to ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... make her forget herself and him, telling her story after story which she could not but find the more interesting that for the time she was quieted from self, and placed in the humbler and healthier position of receiving the influence of another. For one moment, as he was narrating a hair's-breadth escape he had had from a company of Tartar soldiers by the friendliness of a young girl, the daughter of a Siberian convict, she found herself under the charm of a certain potency of which he was himself altogether unconscious, ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... always be the better for vigilant supervision, and for whatever outside pressure can be brought to bear against it. Such pressure will never be too great, nor will it retard progress a hair's-breadth in the hands of that very limited class who are likely materially to advance knowledge by ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... while painting these with the most scrupulous fidelity, was nevertheless always attentive to the significance and import of what he painted. Courbet was a pure pantheist. He was possessed by the material, the physical, the actual. He never varies it a hair's-breadth. He never lifts it a fraction of a degree. But by his very absorption in it he dignifies it immensely. He illustrates magnificently its possibilities. He brings out into the plainest possible view its inherent, integral, aesthetic quality, independent of any extraneity. No painter ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... Domenico Morosini, Doge of Venice, he founded the Campanile of S. Marco with much consideration and judgment, having caused the foundation of that tower to be so well fixed with piles that it has never moved a hair's-breadth, as many buildings constructed in that city before his day have been seen and still are seen to have done. And from him, perchance, the Venetians learnt to found, in the manner in which they do it to-day, the very beautiful and very rich edifices that every day are being built so magnificently ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari
... have neither the right nor the disposition to advise the people of Kansas in a matter so emphatically their own. But there is another way of coming to this arbitrament,—inevitable, if they deviate a hair's-breadth from the strict line of law,—should they deem there is no other remedy for their wrongs. The admirable Constitution just framed at Leavenworth, one well worthy of a free people that has been tried as with fire, will be adopted before these lines are before the public eye. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various |
