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More "Abstracted" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his natural self, with abstracted intervals, in which he lashed the helm to finger a distant rope, with such speed that the movements seemed simultaneous. Once he vanished, only to reappear in an instant with a chart, which he studied, while steering, with a success that its reluctant folds seemed to render impossible. Waiting ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... had said her father at monotonously regular intervals, "a maiden should be as straight as a fir-tree,"—she only seemed to fall into even more attractive lines than when she didn't. And now that Anna-Rose alone had the charge of looking after this abstracted and so charming younger sister, she felt it her duty somehow to convey to her while tactfully avoiding putting ideas into the poor child's head which might make her conceited, that it behoved her to conduct herself ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... now turned away the conversation to other subjects; but from his abstracted manner it was evident that Mrs. Hart was still foremost ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... than usual, as she entered the house, and for some reason, unknown even to herself, she did not acquaint her parents with the interview. She endeavoured to occupy her mind by busying herself with the little household affairs, but her manner was abstracted, so feigning exhaustion she went to her room, at an earlier hour than usual. She slept, but not that deep, quiet, undisturbed slumber that wraps in oblivion all the senses. She dreamed strange dreams, in which she saw strange faces, but the one face was ever there, ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... said Patty, smiling, "but I've been introduced to him. Just as I was leaving Marie's to-day, he came in. But he was very abstracted in his manner. He merely bowed, and without a word he went straight on to the piano and began fussing with ...
— Patty's Suitors • Carolyn Wells
... Mathematical entities do not subsist as realities; because they would be in some sort good if they subsisted; but they have only logical existence, inasmuch as they are abstracted from motion and matter; thus they cannot have the aspect of an end, which itself has the aspect of moving another. Nor is it repugnant that there should be in some logical entity neither goodness nor form of goodness; since the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... only way of restraining popular fury. Fear is the incentive and justifier of cruelty. Man is rarely disposed gratuitously to torment his fellow-creatures. The world has indeed produced Roman, Mahommedan, and Indian, despots, who seemed to receive pleasure from the sufferings of their victims, abstracted from every other consideration; but these instances have been too rare to permit us to consider such an infernal propensity as a just characteristic of human nature. Mercy is more grateful to the feelings of even bad men than rigorous punishment; but as it cannot with safety ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... from the Rue de Normandie to the Rue de Richelieu, Pons drew from the abstracted Schmucke the details of the story of the modern prodigal son, for whom Death had killed the fatted innkeeper. Pons, but newly reconciled with his nearest relatives, was immediately smitten with a desire to make a match between Fritz Brunner and Cecile de Marville. ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... A.D.C. was not deluded and later, on the flight back to Washington, he observed that General O'Reilly was unusually abstracted and pensive, lost in thought. But since a major does not ask a lieutenant general about ...
— The Golden Judge • Nathaniel Gordon
... be observed, are horizontal beds remaining, which give a measure of what had been abstracted by some cause, which is our present subject ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... chance if they would be arranged correctly. Such a mode of marking would, however, have its advantages, for it would enable those who were in the secret to unravel the mystery of the true proprietorship of any valuable article unfairly abstracted. The shields in Fig. 13 are filled with monograms less elaborate, but bearing a sufficient affinity to those alluded to, to aid in ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... from the Prince, she returned, silent and abstracted, with Vogotzine. She saw Andras depart with a mournful sadness, and a sudden longing to have him stay—to protect her, to defend her, to be there if ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... Friendship, th' abstracted union of the mind, Which all men seek, but very few can find; Of all the nations in the universe, None can talk on't more, or understand it less; For if it does their property annoy, Their property ...
— The True-Born Englishman - A Satire • Daniel Defoe
... humanistic answer is easy. If triangles and genera are of our own production we can keep them invariant. We can make them 'timeless' by expressly decreeing that on THE THINGS WE MEAN time shall exert no altering effect, that they are intentionally and it may be fictitiously abstracted from every corrupting real associate and condition. But relations between invariant objects will themselves be invariant. Such relations cannot be happenings, for by hypothesis nothing shall happen to the objects. I have tried to show in the last chapter ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... a member of any community, or what is called a social creature, but merely as a spectator, who entertains himself with the grimaces of a jack-pudding, and banquets his spleen in beholding his enemies at loggerheads. That I may enjoy this disposition, abstracted from all interruption, danger, and participation, I feign myself deaf; an expedient by which I not only avoid all disputes and their consequences, but also become master of a thousand little secrets, which are every day whispered in my presence, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... luncheon, was abstracted—frightened—silent, for the most part; talking only two or three sentences during that sociable meal, by fits and starts; and he laughed once abruptly at a joke he did not hear. He also drank ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... influence had been a tower of strength in every undertaking. It was not without a struggle that he brought himself to look this inexorable fact in the face. Marcia and his sister-in-law heard him as he paced the room through the night; they had noticed his abstracted and downcast air the preceding evening; and at breakfast the few words that escaped from between his firm-set lips were sufficiently ominous. It was the first morning that Marcia had appeared at the table, and in her feeble condition the apprehension of danger ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... to them; the timber-merchant spoke, and continued his buying; Grace merely smiled. To justify his presence there Winterborne began bidding for timber and fagots that he did not want, pursuing the occupation in an abstracted mood, in which the auctioneer's voice seemed to become one of the natural sounds of the woodland. A few flakes of snow descended, at the sight of which a robin, alarmed at these signs of imminent winter, and seeing that no ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... he had parted also from that process of self-exploration that they had started together, but now he awakened to find it established and in full activity in his mind. Something or someone, a sort of etherealized Martineau-Hardy, an abstracted intellectual conscience, was demanding what he thought he was doing with Miss Grammont and whither he thought he was taking her, how he proposed to reconcile the close relationship with her that he ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... for another package Craig saw a chance, reached over and abstracted two or three of the broken pieces of glass, then turned with his back to the postman and ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... were on her bare, scarlet feet in the yellow mustard water. But that unbeautiful colour combination did not disturb her. She did not even see her feet. She was seeing a pair of bright dark eyes smiling intimately into her own. Presently, with a dreamy, abstracted smile, she opened the tablet, poised the pencil, and began to write. But she was scarcely conscious of any of this, of directing her pencil even; it was almost as if the pencil, miraculously, guided ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... in eluding Lady Elizabeth. She called the day after the funeral, begging especially to see Mrs. Martindale. She looked absent and abstracted, while Lord Martindale was talking to her, and soon entreated Violet to come with her ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... there. Lucy at the tea-table was the only one who was at all isolated. She was bending over her cups and saucers, supplying now one and now another, listening to a chance remark here and there, giving an abstracted smile to the person who might chance to be next to her. What was she thinking of? Not of Jock, who had only got a smile a little more animated than the others. Mr. Derwentwater did not know anybody in this company. He stood on the outskirts of it, with ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... gone. She was conversing with her partner, but without the soft animation that usually shone out upon her countenance. And when she was brought back to her seat Molly noticed her changed colour, and her dreamily abstracted eyes. ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... same legajo, there is a letter from the city of Manila, dated June 2, 1576, which also contains an account of the affair of the pirate Limahon. It is endorsed thus: "Let it be abstracted in a report. Done." The abstract of the letter follows, and is doubtless the work of one of the royal clerks or secretaries. Certain instructions and remarks of the king or council appear in the margin of the abstract. ...
— The Philippine Islands 1493-1898, Vol. 4 of 55 - 1576-1582 • Edited by E. H. Blair and J. A. Robertson
... any figure at all, and I was all eyes for the marchioness, whose name was Charlotte. I was profoundly impressed by her that I was quite abstracted during dinner. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... another motive for the murder, and a motive which carried with it the additional complication that the thief had some motive in trying to keep its disappearance secret as long as possible by locking the jewel-case after the jewels had been abstracted. If Hazel Rath had not stolen the necklace, the whole of the facts took on new values. It was quite true that the mystery of Hazel Rath's actions on the night of the murder, her subsequent silence after the recovery of the brooch and the handkerchief and the revolver in her mother's ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... nephew, Warner Powell, who had been compelled to leave Chicago years before on account of having yielded to a similar temptation. She knew that he was hard up for money, and it was possible that he had opened the table drawer and abstracted the pocketbook. As to Luke Walton, she was not at all affected by the insinuations of her niece. She knew that Mrs. Tracy and Harold had a prejudice against Luke, and that this would make them ready to believe ...
— Luke Walton • Horatio Alger
... he sat alone in the vast empty room before a fire of English cannel coal, taking his hot whiskey and lemon in slow, absent-minded gulps. Patches of deep colour lay flat under his cheek-bones, his sunken abstracted eyes ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... nobleman addressed himself for admittance; but Faustus immediately objecting the tenderness of his constitution, discouraged his desires with words of some harshness; "Go," said he, "and first learn to live in the world abstracted from its pleasures. Who can well suppose, that you on a sudden, relinquishing a life of softness and ease, can take up with our coarse diet and clothing and can inure yourself to our watchings and fastings?" The saint, with downcast eyes, modestly replied: "He, who hath inspired me with the ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... Shakspeare, has received a pension of L100 a year from the Royal Literary Pension Fund. Another pension, of the same amount, has been granted to Mr. JAMES BAILEY, the translator of Facciolati's Latin Lexicon, and one of the most accomplished scholars of the day. So, entirely, however, had Mr. Bailey abstracted himself from the great literary world, that when the announcement was made of the pension conferred upon him "in consideration of his literary merits," not one of the literary journals, not even the Athenaeum, was able to tell who the recipient was; but all declared that they knew ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... be uninjured by the water; and these she was enabled to transport to the strand by means of several journeys backward and forward between the shore and the wreck. The occupation was not only necessary in order to provide the wherewith to sustain life, but it also abstracted her thoughts from a too painful contemplation of her position. It was long past the hour of noon when she had completed her task; and the shore in the immediate vicinity of the wreck was piled ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... by the wonders of the fine arts, do not present death under a formidable aspect. It is not altogether like the ancients, who engraved dances and games upon their sarcophagi; but the mind is abstracted from the contemplation of a coffin by the masterpieces of genius. They recall immortality, even upon the altar of death; and the imagination animated by the admiration which they inspire, does not feel, as in the north, ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... a late hour he went across the hall to the libraries in search of a book with which to pass away the time, as he was unable to sleep. He had no definite book in mind and wandered aimlessly through both rooms, reading titles in an abstracted manner, until he came at last face to face with the ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... stupid of me; I half remembered it afterwards. I should have explained it, but it scarcely seemed worth while. I did know another Major Graham might be joining us at Funchal, for that very day I had been entrusted with letters for him. But I was abstracted that evening, Anne. I was trying to persuade myself I didn't care for what I now know I care for more than for ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth
... the ideas of those particular things I have perceived, and of variously compounding and dividing them. I can imagine a man with two heads, or the upper parts of a man joined to the body of a horse. I can consider the hand, the eye, the nose, each by itself abstracted or separated from the rest of the body. But, then, whatever hand or eye I imagine, it must have some particular shape and colour. Likewise the idea of a man that I frame to myself must be either of a white, or a black, or a tawny, a straight, or a crooked, a tall, or a low, or a middle-sized man. ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... the crew—four gentlemen, in round-about jackets—are busy with their fishing-lines. But, with an inward antipathy and a headlong flight, do I eschew the presence of any meditative stroller like myself, known by his pilgrim staff, his sauntering step, his shy demeanor, his observant yet abstracted eye. From such a man, as if another self had scared me, I scramble hastily over the rocks, and take refuge in a nook which many a secret hour has given me a right to call my own. I would do battle for it even with the churl ...
— Footprints on The Sea-Shore (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... probably gone to fetch the kitten, and would quickly return with it. She walked slowly round and round, keeping well away from that part of the room where Mrs. Willis sat. Presently she found a very choice little china jug, which she carefully abstracted with her small fingers from a cabinet, which contained many valuable treasures. She sat down on the floor exactly beneath the cabinet, and began to play with her jug. She went through in eager pantomime a little game ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... it was;' and then there was an abstracted pause. 'I have been writing to Lord Ilbury, your trustee,' he resumed. I ventured to say, my dear Maud—(for having thoughts of a different arrangement for you, more suitable under my distressing circumstances, I do not ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... relations have no connection with the plan of this work, which it would swell beyond due bounds: But the following brief account of his geographical description of the east, as it existed in the thirteenth century, and as abstracted by J. R. Forster, in his Voyages and Discoveries in the North, have been deemed worthy of insertion, together with the observations or commentaries of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... to be alone, you seemed so abstracted," she said, lamely; and then, as they came out into the sunlight in the circle, she began talking of the garden as she would to any visitor; of its beginnings, its growth, and its future, when her father's plans should have ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... debts of the deceased, without limitation. This makes a branch of the law of Scotland, known by the name of vitious intromission: and so rigidly was this regulation applied in our courts of law, that the most trifling moveable abstracted mala fide, subjected the intermeddler to the foregoing consequences, which proved, in many instances, a most rigorous punishment. But this severity was necessary, in order to subdue the undisciplined nature of our people. It is extremely remarkable, that, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... would destroy their hopes. They seemed under the conviction that the will was in the bureau; and if they had been men otherwise than merely what, as the world goes, are called honest, they might have abstracted the document; for the generous Rachel never even looked at their proceedings, grieved as she was at the death of her father. They ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... his story that Tim had taken the wallet, abstracted thirty dollars of the money, and then, when school was about to be dismissed, had thrust the wallet into ...
— The Boat Club - or, The Bunkers of Rippleton • Oliver Optic
... one occasion found that a petty larceny committed on the received text of the poet, by taking away a superfluous b, made all clear, perhaps I may be allowed to restore the abstracted letter, which had only been misplaced and read brags, with, I trust, the like success? Be it remembered that Pistol, a braggadocio, is made up of brags and slang; and for that reason I would also read, with Hanmer, bull-baiting, instead of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... only so much as is thought, 'God' only so much as is God. Which thought? Which God?—are questions that have to be answered by bringing in again the residual data from which the general term was abstracted. All those data that cannot be analytically identified with the attribute invoked as universal principle, remain as independent kinds or natures, associated empirically with the said attribute but devoid of ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... for the children's bed out of an old surplice which had been excommunicated the previous Easter; she heard the newcomer's voice through the partition, started, and went quickly to her husband, who was where he ought to have been, in his study. At her entry he looked up with an abstracted gaze, having been lost in meditation over a little schooner which he was attempting to rig for their youngest boy. At a word from his wife on the suspected name of the visitor, he resumed his earlier occupation of inserting a few strong sentences, full of the ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... door, softly undid the bolt, and found the door locked, and the key missing. He had not observed that during his repast, and ere his suspicions had been aroused, his host, in replacing the bar, and relocking the entrance, had abstracted the key. His fears were now confirmed. His next thought was the window—the shutter only protected it half-way, and was easily removed; but the aperture of the lattice, which only opened in part like most cottage casements, was far too ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... but at last she brought in the coffee, and then I heard her making her rounds, closing the shutters on the ground floor, and locking the front door—at least, trying to do so. I had already locked and bolted it. Then she locked the scullery door on the outside, abstracted the key, and I heard her step on the brick path, and the click of the ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... that old Dubois had mastered years ago. To seem to know all, to betray no surprise, to refuse to hurry—itself a confession of miscalculation; by attention to these simple rules, Dubois had built up a steady reputation from the days when he had been a promising junior officer, a still, almost abstracted young man, deliberate but ready. Even then men had looked at him and said: 'He will go far.' Through fifty years of peace he had never once been found wanting, and at manoeuvres his impassive persistence ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... Again Du Sang appeared abstracted. He looked up at the giant lineman, who, in spite of his own size and strength, could have crushed him between his fingers, and hitched his chair a little, but got no further toward an answer and paid no attention whatever to ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... publications somewhat approaching it in the concentration and dissemination of news from the world at large, that our countrymen owe that superior intelligence and citizen-of-the-world character which distinguish them from the insular Briton, self-important Frenchman, or abstracted German. ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... of the starch in cold water, affords a convenient means of separating the flour from the other materials, by which it may be abstracted from the tubers when in the greatest abundance, and be preserved unchanged for the use of man. This is done by simply rasping down the potatoes over a seirce, and passing a current of water over the raspings. The ...
— The Church of England Magazine - Volume 10, No. 263, January 9, 1841 • Various
... Record of Events from the boy's inner pocket. He knew nothing of the springs that opened the lids, so, after a curious glance at it, he secreted the box in the folds of his sash and continued the search of the captive. The Character Marking Spectacles were next abstracted, but the Turk, seeing in them nothing but spectacles, scornfully thrust them back into Rob's pocket, while his comrades laughed at him. The boy was now rifled of seventeen cents in pennies, a broken pocket knife and a lead-pencil, the last article ...
— The Master Key - An Electrical Fairy Tale • L. Frank Baum
... listened to a sensuous-looking man, a man who was not a master of his own body, any more than I could to a precentor, who coming to sing the prayers at college chapel dedication, I saw get drunk on sherry which he abstracted from the banquet table just before the service. Never shall I forget, at the meeting of the Studd brothers, the audience being asked to stand up if they intended to try and follow Christ. It appeared a very sensible question to me, but ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... shall stay here," said Dr. Dean, "underneath this remarkable stone carving of your warrior-prototype, Monsieur Gervase. You seem very much abstracted. I asked you before if you were not well; but you ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... for a few moments, toying with his cigar in an abstracted manner, then continued in the same ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... corner of his eyes, slowly opened the little betel-box. He had dreamed dreams at school of returning to the lama as a Sahib—of chaffing the old man before he revealed himself—boy's dreams all. There was more drama in this abstracted, brow-puckered search through the tabloid-bottles, with a pause here and there for thought and a muttered invocation between whiles. Quinine he had in tablets, and dark brown meat-lozenges—beef most probably, but that was not his business. ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... in the pilot's hands. Hugh joined Madame Hayle and the two commodores at the derrick post. The same shrewd texas tender who had once abstracted the weapons of the twins from their stateroom set a second chair beside the captain's. Hugh offered the two seats to the commodores, but both declined. They of Vicksburg and the Bends watched the gorgeous October sunset beyond ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... for a good while, in one of his abstracted moods; and, thinking the lesson was over for that day, I was about to leave the room. He arose, and, going to the window, stood looking out into the night—I quietly watching him, and wondering of what he was so busily thinking. ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... that Andrew, who had been absent for some time, and had only returned just in time for supper, looked worried and abstracted, and replied almost at random to any questions ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... me,' said Mr Merdle. 'What is the—what have I—what may you have to complain of in me, Mrs Merdle?' In his withdrawing, abstracted, pondering way, it took him some time to shape this question. As a kind of faint attempt to convince himself that he was the master of the house, he concluded by presenting his forefinger to the parrot, who expressed his opinion on that subject ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... also to sadden Raoul: on their arrival at Sonores he had perceived, hidden behind a screen of poplars, a little chateau which so vividly recalled that of La Valliere to his mind that he halted for nearly ten minutes to gaze at it, and resumed his journey with a sigh too abstracted even to reply to Olivain's respectful inquiry about the cause of so much fixed attention. The aspect of external objects is often a mysterious guide communicating with the fibres of memory, which in spite of us will arouse them at times; this thread, like ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... head from my plane of vision. As I step to the other side of the table, I find that sleep has overtaken him in an overt act of hoary wickedness. The very pages I have devoted to an exposition of his deceit he has quietly abstracted, and I find them covered with cabalistic figures and wild-looking hieroglyphs traced with his forefinger dipped in ink, which doubtless in his own language conveys a scathing commentary on my composition. But ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... emulation of Leander and Don Juan, he swam, I hear, to the opposite shores the other day, or some world-shaking feat of the sort: himself the Hero whom he went to meet: or, as they who pun say, his Hero was a Bet. A pretty little domestic episode occurred this morning. He finds her abstracted in the fire of his caresses: she turns shy and seeks solitude: green jealousy takes hold of him: he lies in wait, and discovers her with his new rival—a veteran edition of the culinary Doctor! Blind to the Doctor's great national services, deaf to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... about me again, and saw the letter-writing going on with the most curious composure. Perfectly abstracted in the midst of the crowd; while great casks were swinging aloft, and being lowered into the hold; while hot agents were hurrying up and down, adjusting the interminable accounts; while two hundred strangers were ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... to the inorganic world, in what we spoke of as its waste; and that finally, when the animal ceased to exist, the constituents of its body were dissolved and transmitted to that inorganic world whence they had been at first abstracted. Thus we saw in both the blade of grass and the horse but the same elements differently combined and arranged. We discovered a continual circulation going on,—the plant drawing in the elements of inorganic ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Grecian Chronology, and the Trojan War, upon which his Friend Telephus had been declaiming; and for this purpose seems to have composed the ensuing Ode at table. It concludes with an hint, that the unpleasant state of the Poet's mind, respecting his then Mistress, incapacitates him for abstracted themes, which demand a serene and collected attention, alike inconsistent with the amorous discontent of the secret heart, and with the temporary exhilaration of the spirits, produced by the occasion on which they were met. This must surely be the meaning of Horace ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... evil, but in the good only which it is appointed to produce. Remember, therefore, that he, to whom the punishment of another is sweet; though his act may be just with respect to others, with respect to himself it is a deed of darkness, and abhorred by the Almighty.' HAMET, who had stood abstracted in the contemplation of the new injury he had suffered, while OMAR was persuading him not to revenge it, started from his posture in all the wildness of distraction; and bursting away from OMAR, ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... noticed that Alfred Blumenthal appeared abstracted, as if continually occupied with grave thoughts. One day, as he stood leaning against the window, gazing on the stars and stripes that floated across the street, he turned suddenly and exclaimed: "It is wrong to be staying here. ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... were, and it was doubtful for some time whether the murderer would be convicted, Mrs. Harris said, plaintively, "Oh, do hang somebody!") Mr. Sampson did not think so, apparently, but sat on the sofa by the window, dull and abstracted. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... have accumulated was with him at the time of his death. Following, nevertheless, the advice of our excellent pastor, a reward of fifty dollars was advertised, and just one week from the fatal day the body was brought to our now desolated home. But the wallet, with its contents, had been abstracted. The little fund my mother had always managed to keep on hand was too small to meet this heavy draft of the reward in addition to that occasioned by the funeral, so that, when that sad ceremony was over, we found ourselves beginning ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... might have done by the sheriff's departure, had not his mind been full of strange thoughts. Pete Williamson began to regard his brother with suspicion, and there seemed some ground for his feeling. Jim was unnaturally quiet and abstracted; he had been a great deal with the sheriff before that official's departure, and yet did not seem to be on as free and pleasant terms with him as before. So Pete slowly gathered a conviction that the sheriff was on the track of a large reward from the bank injured by the counterfeiter; that Jim ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... stayed. After they were gone, we sat in my room and talked over many matters. His spirits were not as buoyant as usual, and I felt an undefinable anxiety which I did not mention. When he said that mother was more abstracted than ever, he sighed. I asked him how many years he thought I must waste; eighteen had ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... abstracted, businesslike air. He really left her nothing to do but enjoy his company, while he went ahead and did precisely as ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... taking as much interest in cross-country walks and athletics as he did in his studies. Hester was thinking of these matters while Helen and Robert were talking. She had been sitting with her eyes upon the floor, listening in a half abstracted fashion. She raised her eyes suddenly to find Robert Vail's eyes fixed on her in scrutiny. Her cheeks grew crimson ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... English in the most lively manner, and gesticulating with his hands and shoulders as only a Frenchman can. But notwithstanding the animation with which he was conversing, I could not help noticing that his eyes were all over the ship, not in an abstracted fashion, but evidently with the object of thoroughly "taking stock" of us. It struck me, too, that his English was too broken to be quite genuine—or rather, to be strictly correct, that it was not always broken to ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... could succeed with none but infidels. However, it had the most happy effect upon the son of the Lady Wortley Montague, who, at her return to England, communicated the experiment to the Princess of Wales, now Queen of England. It must be confessed that this princess, abstracted from her crown and titles, was born to encourage the whole circle of arts, and to do good to mankind. She appears as an amiable philosopher on the throne, having never let slip one opportunity of improving the great talents she received from Nature, nor of exerting her beneficence. It is ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... But wit, abstracted from its effects upon the hearer, may be more rigorously and philosophically considered as a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike. Of wit, thus defined, ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... enough to long to see it closer, and to hold it in my hand. But I was ashamed of this fascination—ashamed, I mean, to have any one know that I could be moved by such a childish impulse; so, instead of taking the box itself, which might easily be missed, I simply abstracted the tiny vial, and, satisfied with its possession, carried it about till I got to my room. Then, when the house was quiet and my room-mate asleep, I took it out and looked at it, and feeling an irresistible desire to share my amusement with my cousin, I stole to her ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... substance and theme are thus briefly abstracted is, at this moment, making a noise in the world. It is ascribed by report to two bishops—not jointly, but alternatively—in the sense that, if one did not write the book, the other did. The Bishops of Oxford and St. David's, Wilberforce and Thirlwall, are the two ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... of necessity. He also brought the pliers which cut the wire blinds, and the material used for concealing the broken strands subsequently. Hussein was really an excellent confederate, and I was furious when I heard that he was dead. You know how the diamonds were abstracted from the house?" ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... you sell the liberty of a man, you have the power only of alluding to the body: the mind cannot be confined or bound: it will be free, though its mansion be beset with chains. But if, in every sale of the human species, you are under the necessity of considering your slave in this abstracted light; of alluding only to the body, and of making no allusion to the mind; you are under the necessity also of treating him, in the same moment, as a brute, and of abusing therefore that nature, ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson
... later that she had been surprised at Cherry's quietness; Cherry had looked pale and abstracted, and had not seemed ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... the world wisdom.' Laputa was speaking English in a strange, thin, abstracted voice. 'There would have been no king like me since Charlemagne,' and he strayed into Latin which I have been told since was an adaptation of the Epitaph of Charles the Great. 'Sub hoc conditorio,' he crooned, 'situm est corpus Joannis, ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... report. Mr. Hartley listened with an abstracted air, for his thoughts were upon the defalcation of the man ...
— The Telegraph Boy • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... old sorrel horse, leaning forward in a most unmilitary seat, and wore a sun-browned cap, dingy gray uniform, and a stock, into which he would settle his chin in a queer way, as he moved along with abstracted look. He paid little heed to camp comforts, and slept on the march, or by snatches under trees, as he might find occasion; often begging a cup of bean-coffee and a bit of hard bread from his men, as he passed them ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... make an exhibition. A "Lyon of Barbary" was in Boston in 1716; and I believe the "lyons hair," which was "cut by the keeper" and sent by Wait Winthrop to be placed as a strengthening tonic under the armpits of his sickly little grandchild, was abstracted from this very lion. In 1728 another lonely king of the beasts made the round of all the provinces on a cart drawn by four oxen, with as much eclat as if he had been a whole menagerie. He lodged in New London in Madam Winthrop's barn, and "put up" elsewhere at the very best taverns, as became ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... present war, the results of chemical investigations upon the pathology of the blood in scurvy were not only contradictory, but meager, and wanting in that careful detail of the cases from which the blood was abstracted which would enable us to explain the cause of the apparent discrepancies in different analyses. Thus it is not yet settled whether the fibrin is increased or diminished in this disease; and the differences which exist in the statements of different writers appear to be referable to the neglect of ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... a very pleasant man; but he is very silent and abstracted, as I suppose a poet should be. My sister Carrie is here, and they have quite got up a flirtation together; however, I don't suppose ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... his infamous design, and the manner it had been carried into execution. How Don Antonio, returning from the wars in Mexico, with his band of piratical adventurers, had landed in a boat upon the beach at Ensenada—how he had entered the chateau, and with the help of his two subordinate villains had abstracted the Countess and her infant—himself Fabian—how the assassination of the mother had been committed in the boat, and the child only spared in the belief that the murderer's steel was not necessary—in the belief that ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... her children with redoubled fondness, and, anxious to provide for them, affection gives a sacred, heroic cast to her maternal duties. She thinks that not only the eye sees her virtuous efforts from whom all her comfort now must flow, and whose approbation is life; but her imagination, a little abstracted and exalted by grief, dwells on the fond hope that the eyes which her trembling hand closed may still see how she subdues every wayward passion to fulfil the double duty of being the father as well as the mother of her children. Raised to heroism by misfortunes, she represses the first faint dawning ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... so rare," said M. de V—, "that, when I leave Versailles, I sometimes stand still in the street to see a dog gnaw a bone."[2301] Man, in abandoning himself wholly to society, had withheld no portion of his personality for himself while decorum, clinging to him like so much ivy, had abstracted from him the substance of his being and subverted ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... so small a catastrophe, after all, and yet it called up a look of each unmistakable vexation to that naturally tranquil and abstracted countenance, that a spectator of the scene repressed a smile which had risen to his lips and came ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... profound interest to Dick, and from his retreat at the far end of the table, where he sat disregarded, his crimes tacitly ignored for the time being, he listened eagerly. When Gable kicked him to attract his attention, and gleefully exhibited a handful of loaf sugar that he had slyly abstracted from the basin, the small boy frowned the old man down ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... to perform the duties of tea-maker in a rather abstracted manner. As she kept on filling up cups of tea, she also glanced from time to time at the letter which gave ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... something bulky at the belt. It was a revolver in a holster. Stripping off the weapon, he once more ran his hands over the fellow's body and, in a trousers' pocket, found a handful of bullets, which he abstracted. ...
— The Radio Boys with the Revenue Guards • Gerald Breckenridge
... Frau von Graevenitz superintended the washing up of the plates, knives, and forks; then going to the house door she fastened it securely, taking the key with her. While the old woman was occupied at the house door, Wilhelmine slipped up the stairs, with the noiseless tread of a cat, and abstracted the key from her mother's bedroom door, then passing to her attic she undressed, and, wrapping her bedgown round her, lay down on her bed. The stolen key she tied firmly in a knot of her hair, close to her head, well hidden by her thick ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... moody and abstracted, still looked on ahead, some of his senses seemed yet on guard. His head turned at the slightest sound of the forest life that came to him. If a twig cracked, he heard it. If a green nut cut by some early squirrel clattered ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... colorless character, sweet and passive. A month after her marriage she had expectations of becoming a mother. All this was quite in accordance with ordinary views. M. de Nueil was very nice to her; but two months after his separation from the Marquise, he grew notably thoughtful and abstracted. But then he always had been serious, his ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... had abstracted from the inn the timeworn pack of cards, thick with the grease of five years' contact with half-wiped-off tables, started a game of ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... Jim Smith, in appropriating his uncle's wallet, abstracted therefrom a five-dollar bill before concealing it ...
— Hector's Inheritance - or The Boys of Smith Institute • Horatio Alger
... criticize old ground, and talk of past diggers' mistakes, and second bottoms, and feelers, and dips, and leads—also outcrops—and absently pick up pieces of quartz and slate, rub them on their sleeves, look at them in an abstracted manner, and drop them again; and they would talk of some old lead they had worked on: "Hogan's party was here on one side of us, Macintosh was here on the other, Mac was getting good gold and so was Hogan, and now, why the blanky blank weren't we on gold?" And the mate would always ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... were useless. He looked about the room and went through an empty chest of drawers in vain, but at last, on some shelves in the closet where his clothes had hung, he found several large sheets of coarse white paper. The shelves were covered with it loosely for the sake of cleanliness. He abstracted one of these sheets, and cut it into squares of the ordinary note-paper size, and he sat down and wrote a brief letter to Richard Hartley, stating where he was, that Arthur Benham was there, the O'Haras, and, he thought, Captain Stewart. He did not write the names out, but ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... yellowish grains; but under the microscope these grains are found to consist entirely of minute blood-vessels forming a compact plexus, or fold. These vessels secrete the milk from the blood. The milk is abstracted from the blood in the glandular part; the tubes receive and deposit it in the reservoir, or receptacle; and the sphincter at the end of the teat retains it there until ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... of Fouilly-les-Oies, never dreaming that on their return to Montfermeil, Palaiseau, or Sartrouville, they would find their salon converted into a pigstye, their furniture smashed, and their clocks and chimney-ornaments abstracted. Of course the M. Durand of to-day knows what happened to his respected parents; he knows what to think of the good, honest, considerate German soldiery; and, if he can help it, he will not in any similar ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... my hand, and bade her good-bye. "Farewell, child," said the old woman, "and God bless you!" I then moved along the bridge until I reached the Southwark side, and, still holding on my course, my mind again became quickly abstracted ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... wholesale scale, more especially with respect to domesticated productions, by printed enquiries, by conversations with skilful breeders and gardeners, and by extensive reading.' 'When,' he added, 'I see the list of books of all kinds which I read and abstracted, including whole series of Journals and Transactions, I am surprised at my industry[131].' In September 1854 the Barnacle work was finished and 10,000 specimens sent out of the house and distributed, and then he devoted himself to arranging his 'huge pile of notes, ...
— The Coming of Evolution - The Story of a Great Revolution in Science • John W. (John Wesley) Judd
... look for thanks, for not long since he must have received a considerable supply, which she had abstracted from the income of the possessions entrusted ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... were alone, and very gently he took her hand in his. "Don't you worry," he soothed. "Some time, after we get home, perhaps you will come to New York, and then I'll show you Broadway. It's better than anything you can get over here, anyway! Here, I have your handkerchief," and he abstracted a filmy little square, all lace and no center, from his pocket and ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... now and then, and was not abashed when he saw that she dropped her eyes when they met his, because he saw her silence and abstraction increase, and something like a blush steal into her cheeks. So he pretended to be as much downcast and abstracted as she was, and went on with his glances, till he once found her, poor thing, looking at him to see if he was looking at her; and then he knew his prey was safe, and asked her, with his eyes, "Do you forgive me?" and saw her stop dead in ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... gave his caller a polite glance and handshake—evidence of merest surface interest in him, of amiable patience with an intruder. Norman saw in the neatness of his clothing and linen further proof of the girl's loving care. For no such abstracted personality as this would ever bother about such things for himself. These details, however, detained Norman only for a moment. In the presence of Hallowell it was impossible not to concentrate ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... took the shape of a blank cheque with his signature upon it. The advocate, fanning himself with it in an abstracted manner, went on to advise the greatest candour in the witness-box. "Beware of irritation, dear sir," he said. "The Judge will plant a banderilla here and there, you may be sure. That is his method. You learn more from an ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... bearing earth gave her a calm that took no heed of passing hours. Even her father, the abstracted man of affairs, nodded to dusty people along the road; to a jolly old man whose bulk rolled and shook in a tiny, rhythmically creaking buggy, to women in the small abrupt towns with their huge red elevators and their ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... I received the morning of my arrival, and they gave me real comfort after so long a privation. I now trust that, in a few weeks, we shall be re-united, no more to part! It is my firm intention to remain, for some time at least, entirely abstracted from active service. If I can do so, and retain the command of the ship, well and good; if not, I shall ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez, Vol. I • Sir John Ross
... own practices. They set out at first in their conception of things from the level of the vulgar. They applied themselves diligently to the unravelling of what was unknown; wonder mingled with their contemplation; they abstracted their minds from things of ordinary occurrence, and, as we may denominate it, of real life, till at length they lost their true balance amidst the astonishment they sought to produce in their inferiors. They felt a vocation to things extraordinary; ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... constantly that feeling. So much the more affecting was it, when the sanity of his perceptions and his remembrances returned; but these intervals were of slower and slower occurrence. In this condition, silent or babbling childishly, self- involved and torpidly abstracted, or else busy with self-created phantoms and delusions, what a contrast did he offer to that Kant who had once been the brilliant centre of the most brilliant circles for rank, wit, or knowledge, that Prussia afforded! A distinguished person from Berlin, who had called upon him during ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... 'don't know twelve times,' can dance to her perfect admiration; when I see that she likes ease of manners—and all sorts of men without an idea in their heads have that—while I turn all colors when I speak to her, and am clumsy, and abrupt, and abstracted, and bad at repartee—Uncle Teddy! sometimes (though it seems so ungrateful to father and mother, who have spent such pains for me)—sometimes, do you know, it seems to me as if I'd exchange all I've ever learned for the power to make ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... Eily received him with rapture and affection, and every other feeling was banished from his mind. But in the course of the evening she remarked that he was more silent and abstracted than she had ever seen him, and that he more frequently spoke in connection of some little breach of etiquette, or inelegance of manner, than in those terms of eloquent praise and fondness which he was accustomed to lavish upon ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... and she seemed so offended when he asked if she had told his name to anyone that he felt compelled to believe she knew nothing of the matter. Gussie was too much enraptured with her own valentine to take much note of Plaisted's abstracted manner, for even the sight of Gussie's pretty face did not put aside the memory ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... feast too." "No," answered others, "it seems that this stranger has our uncle's hat, shoes, and stick, but uncle himself isn't here." Meantime, covered dishes were brought in for the feast. Then the stranger saw what nobody else could perceive, that the good food was abstracted from the dishes with wonderful quickness, and worse put in its place. It went just the same with the jugs and bottles. Then the stranger asked for the master of the house, greeted him politely, and said, "Don't be offended ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... for a thousand pounds invested in merchandise is unproductive so many days as the transport is tedious. That part of the capital of an individual which is employed in the carrying of his goods to and from market, is so much abstracted from his means of producing more of the article in which he exerts his ingenuity and labour, whether it ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 20, No. 567, Saturday, September 22, 1832. • Various
... indulge the thought-exploded sig, When, slowly wandering at the close of day, Light emanations from th'abstracted eye, With transient beauty in the ...
— Elegies and Other Small Poems • Matilda Betham
... ordinary talk ensued, in which Cardross scarcely joined. The young man was not himself at all—silent, abstracted; and there was an expression in his face which almost frightened his mother, so solemn was it, yet withal so ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... brows in a frown, and said no more; but he was almost silent at supper, and ate with an abstracted air. At quarter to eight he flung down the magazine he had been reading, and ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... having naturally a pleasurable feeling connected with his own reputation as a skilful and fearless horseman. But, though the chases were in those days longer than they are at present, small was the amount of time really abstracted from that which he had disposable for general purposes; amongst which purposes ranked foremost his literary pursuits. And, however much he transcended the prevailing conception of his order, as sketched by satiric and often ignorant ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... strangely quiet at night. There was no playing of golf in the hallways, no rolling of bats down the stairs, no shouting, no laughter; a man who made any noise was in danger of a serious beating. Even the greetings as the men passed each other on the campus were quiet and abstracted. They ceased to cut classes. Everybody attended, and everybody paid close attention even to the ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... anticipate their reply. They would attribute any morality, they might be supposed to have, to the Supreme Being, whose will having been discovered by means of the scriptures, and of religious impressions upon the mind, when it has been calm, and still, and abstracted from the world, they have endeavoured to obey. But there is no doubt, that we may add, auxiliary causes of this morality, and such as the Quakers themselves would allow to have had their share in producing it, under the same influence. The ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... Minor and Syria—through every island of the Mediterranean. Search Philo-Judaeus, the same result is found. But why? Upon what theory? What great purpose is working, is fermenting underneath? What principle, what law can be abstracted from this antagonist or centrifugal motion outwards now violently beating back as with a conflict of tides the original centripetal motion inwards? Manifestly this: the incubating process had been completed: the ideas ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... the type may seem defective in the point that it is at best but a fragment of humanity, an abstraction or a combination of abstracted qualities. There was never such an athlete as our Greek sculptor's, never a pagan god nor Virgin Mother, nor a hero equal to Homer's thought, so beautiful, brave, and courteous, so terrible to his foe, so loving to his friend. And yet is it not thus that life is known to us actually? does not this ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... all right! Nice dogs, nice dogs!" he was answering and persuading, when a stern call from the depths of Miss Lavinia's room, the door of which Rose Mary had left ajar, abstracted her from Everett's arm on the instant and sent her ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... recorded on tape. They went inside. The boy Hod, and the younger girl Mal lay on their stomachs on the floor, doggedly working at what would be lessons. Zani sat in a chair with a book before her and her hand seemingly shielding her eyes. Her expression was abstracted. ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... true that the English have less humour than the Americans, or whether it's just another kind of humour," said the girl. She had a quiet, abstracted way of talking as if she were thinking aloud. "I used to imagine they had less, and yet, when you come to think of it, Dickens and Thackeray and Barrie, and so many other of the humourists we admire most are Britishers. Besides, I ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... received him with rapture and affection, and every other feeling was banished from his mind. But in the course of the evening she remarked that he was more silent and abstracted than she had ever seen him, and that he more frequently spoke in connection of some little breach of etiquette, or inelegance of manner, than in those terms of eloquent praise and fondness which he was accustomed to lavish upon her. The next day he returned ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... never played. Sometimes she sat with Miss Brewer in the outer chamber, silent and abstracted, while her visitors amused themselves in the two other rooms; sometimes she seated herself at the piano, and played soft, plaintive German sonatas, or Leider ohne Worte, for an hour at a time; sometimes she moved ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... often suffered to pass unpursued by suspicion; because he that would watch her motions, can never be at rest; fraud and malice are bounded in their influence; some opportunity of time and place is necessary to their agency; but scarce any man is abstracted one moment from his vanity; and he, to whom truth affords no gratifications, is generally inclined to seek ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... asleep he was very nearly so. Suddenly he was aware that there was something moving in or near the hut. He looked up, and just at the entrance he saw a huge brown monster, his eyes looking curiously in, while with its paws it had abstracted one of the fish which had been hung up to the doorpost to keep cool. The stick which Philip had used as a poker was in a flame, so, springing up, he dashed it into the face of the intruder—a big bear—grasping his axe ready for action should ...
— The Log House by the Lake - A Tale of Canada • William H. G. Kingston
... occurred what he had dreaded most and probably thought he had escaped. She had stared at him, at the stewardess, at the walls, with abstracted, vacant, and bewildered, but always undimmed and unmoistened eyes. A sudden convulsion shook her whole frame, her blank expression broke like a shattered mirror, she threw her hands over her eyes and fell forward with ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... he had been marvellously understanding. Ever and again his words had seemed to pierce right through what she had been saying to what she had been thinking. And she recalled with peculiar comfort a kind of abstracted calculating look that had come at times into his eyes, as though his thoughts were going ever so much deeper and ever so much further than her blundering questionings could possibly have taken them. He weighed every word, he had a guarded way ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... merely as he is an object of the understanding, which forms a complex idea of power, wisdom, justice, goodness, all stretched to a degree far exceeding the bounds of our comprehension, whilst we consider the Divinity in this refined and abstracted light, the imagination and passions are little or nothing affected. But because we are bound, by the condition of our nature, to ascend to these pure and intellectual ideas, through the medium of sensible ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... and Lydia fried them, with the daintiness and skill that seemed to have been born in her. She laid an envelope at her father's plate and when he sat down, silent and abstracted, without heeding the fish, she shook her head at Lizzie who ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... early hour, and retired to their respective apartments. Emily was shown to hers by a nun of the convent, whom she was glad to dismiss, for her heart was melancholy, and her attention so much abstracted, that conversation with a stranger was painful. She thought her father daily declining, and attributed his present fatigue more to the feeble state of his frame, than to the difficulty of the journey. A train of gloomy ideas haunted her mind, till ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... far too pretty for that, of course, and Arthur Chamberlain often longed to tell her how pretty she really was, but her abstracted air ...
— The Runaway Skyscraper • Murray Leinster
... hid themselves straightway in the precincts of the cabin. Elizabeth stood still where she had first placed herself on the deck, in a cold abstracted sort of carelessness, conscious only that her protector was standing by her side, and that she was not willing to lose sight of him. The vessel, and her crew, and their work before her very eyes, she could hardly be said to see. The sloop got clear of the wharf and edged ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... seen such a look before, and yet he could not remember how or where. It was as if this boy, who was quite a stranger to him, had the eyes of an old friend or an old enemy. And the boy would give him no peace; he seemed profoundly indifferent to what was going on, or rather abstracted from it in a superior contemplation, beating gently with his feet against the bars of the chair, and holding his hands folded on his lap. But, for all that, his eyes kept following the Doctor about the room with a thoughtful fixity ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... police office, he found a large crowd assembled; a young thief had just been brought in, charged with having abstracted a gentleman's pocket-book from his coat pocket, in Chatham Street. What was Frank's surprise at recognizing in the prisoner, the same boy who had been his companion in the Dark Vaults, on the proceeding night! The lad did not know Frank, ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... the lady, they passed round the house to the court, and across the court to a door in one of the gables. It was a low, narrow door, but large enough for the man that stood there—a little man, with colorless face, and quiet, abstracted look. His eyes were cold and keen, his features small, delicate, and regular. He had an erect little back, and was dressed in a long-tailed coat, looking not much of a laird, and less of a farmer, as he stood framed in the gray stone ...
— The Elect Lady • George MacDonald
... earnest and long-continued thought. Or, perchance, his sensitive temperament was invigorated by the loud and piercing music, that swelled heavenward, and uplifted him on its ascending wave. Nevertheless, so abstracted was his look, it might be questioned whether Mr. Dimmesdale even heard the music. There was his body, moving onward, and with an unaccustomed force. But where was his mind? Far and deep in its own region, busying itself, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Ogilvie, in an abstracted tone. "By the way, if you are going back to town, may I make use of your carriage? There are several things I want to order for my bazaar. It is to be in about a fortnight now. You will remember that you ...
— Daddy's Girl • L. T. Meade
... paper in an abstracted fashion. For some seconds he held it in his fingers as though weighing the advisability of sending it. Then his abstraction passed, and he summoned the man on ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... to fondle him, he never neglected the opportunity of pocket-picking. He would pull out letters, and quickly take them from their envelopes. Anything eatable disappeared into his mouth immediately. Once he abstracted a small bottle of turpentine from the pocket of our medical officer. He drew the cork, held it first to one nostril, then to the other, made a wry face, recorked it, and returned ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... said Terry, with an assumption of gentle patience, "if you will excuse my referring to what I know must be a painful subject, would you mind telling me if the suspicion has ever crossed your mind that your brother Jefferson may have returned secretly, have abstracted the bonds from the safe, and, two weeks later, quite accidentally, have met Colonel Gaylord alone in ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... paid for out of pilfered money. Ten years ago this rhetorical remark would have been sneered at as demagogic. To-day everybody knows that it is simply the fact. Yet we continue to eat with entire unconcern the dinners that have, as it were, been abstracted from the dinner-pails of the poor. I cannot conduct an investigation into the business history of every man who asks me to his house. And even if I know he has been a crook, I cannot afford to stir up an unpleasantness by attempting in my humble way to make him feel ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... be a drag on anyone "If I practise hard," he murmured, "I shall master it." Immoral to hurt anybody but himself. Little things are all big with the past Lived in thoughts about events rather than in events themselves Love for open air and facts Low opinion of human nature Man abstracted, faintly contemptuous of other forms of life One's got to draw the line." "Ah!" said Cecilia; "where?" Pabulum of varying theories of future life Pass out of the country of the understanding of the young People do miss things when they are old! Perversity which she found so conspicuous ...
— Quotations from the Works of John Galsworthy • David Widger
... king, in the form of Duryodhana. Thou knowest it not in consequence of thy folly. Listen now to the words of the Poet (Sukra) which I will quote. They that collect honey (in mountains), having received what they seek, do not notice that they are about to fall. Ascending dangerous heights, abstracted in the pursuit of what they seek, they fall down and meet with destruction. This Duryodhana also, maddened with the play at dice, like the collector of honey, abstracted in what he seeketh, marketh not the consequences. Making enemies of these great ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Part 2 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... and trivial fool, the brainless fop; The staid and sober priest and minister; And she who worshiped at proud fashion's shrine; The mental giant, serious and sad; The thoughtful student and philosopher; And some of intellect diminutive; The man of letters, with abstracted mien, And he whose every thought was on the toil Which made his bare existence possible; The blushing maiden, pure and innocent; The stately grandam, dignified and gray; The matron, with the babe upon her breast; The silly superannuated flirt, Who nursed her waning ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... scarcity, so it was not occasioned by indolence, he bore with much composure. But, if a cheat were attempted to be practised upon him, by sending him the poorest fish, or if any part of his share was abstracted, if a porpoise or a halibut was hidden, or the head of a finback sunk, with a buoy attached to it, or the fin of a whale buried in the sand, he showed most terrific symptoms of wrath and anger, and never failed to make the Indians ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... has been in any Circumstance of Glory and Triumph. At such a time the Mind of the Prosperous Man goes, as it were, abroad, among things without him, and is more exposed to the Malignity. But I shall not dwell upon Speculations so abstracted as this, or repeat the many excellent Things which one might collect out of Authors upon this miserable Affection; but keeping in the road of common Life, consider the Envious Man with relation to these three Heads, His Pains, His Reliefs, and ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... at rest. What is more peaceful than the single eye? And what more free than he that desireth nothing upon earth? Therefore must a man rise above every creature, and perfectly forsake himself, and with abstracted mind to stand and behold that Thou, the Creator of all things, hast among Thy creatures nothing like unto Thyself. And except a man be freed from all creatures, he will not be able to reach freely after Divine things. Therefore few are found ...
— The Imitation of Christ • Thomas a Kempis
... fretting about all my seasons without an offer worth accepting has driven me out of my senses. Sometimes I think so, too." And Margaret lapsed into abstracted, ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... back to catch my train, I suddenly found that I had been in an abstracted mood, for I was still standing with my ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... defiance. When she grew up she showed, therefore, the stronger nature of the two, and her father, as was his wont, gave way. He laughed at his little tyrant, whose great delight was to ruffle his thick curling hair. When, in his half-abstracted way, the old gentleman would tell her stones which threatened to end unpleasantly, she would scold him well; but when, from some cause or other, he was really displeased with her, it affected her so much that the impression remained for a long time. Her nature was bright and joyous, ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... unbound. Thanks to the intimation of the interpreter, he was aware of the fate in reserve for him, and resolved that he would never be carried alive to Waughcotomoco. Their route lay through an unprimed forest, abounding in thickets and undergrowth. During the whole of the march, Kenton remained abstracted and silent; often meditating an effort for the recovery of his liberty, and as often shrinking from the ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... have suspected that under his calm, abstracted, philosophical look, this dog, so serious that he was almost melancholy, and despised all frivolity, nursed an overmastering, strange, never to be suspected passion, absolutely contrary to his ...
— My Private Menagerie - from The Works of Theophile Gautier Volume 19 • Theophile Gautier
... them swiftly onward. A group of friends, who had collected on the shore to witness their departure, gradually dispersed, till, at length, a single individual only remained, whose eyes still followed the track of the vessel, though his countenance wore that abstracted air, which shewed his thoughts were detached from the passing scene. He seemed quite unconscious of the silence that succeeded this transient bustle, and a low murmur, which soon begun to spread along the shore, was equally disregarded. Suddenly a confused sound of many voices ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... would be a kind of sacred pleasure in knowing that she had helped to perfect sounds which touched the hearts and senses of so many listeners. She had looked forward to this concert so long. And she sat scarcely breathing, abstracted from consciousness of those about her, soft and still, radiating ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... he cried, "do you wish to be run over," and with that the horse started. Leslie set off in chase, shouting for the man to stop; but the farmer, paying no heed to his cries, soon left him far behind with the abstracted linchpin in his hand. He sat down on a bank by the road side and burst into tears. What should he do? How could he remedy what he had done? What would the consequences be? The wheel might come off, the farmer be ...
— Leslie Ross: - or, Fond of a Lark • Charles Bruce
... matter and form, with Aristotle, corresponds to the opposition between the element of generality and the element of particularity. Matter is indeterminate; form is determinate. Matter, abstracted from form, in thought, is entirely without predicate and distinction; form is that which enters into the definition of every subject, and without which it could not be defined. Matter is capable of the widest diversity of ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... into a dusty side street, Merton dropped the reins and lighted the filched cigar. Other Gashwiler property was sacred to him. From all the emporium's choice stock he would have abstracted not so much as a pin; but the Gashwiler cigars, said to be "The World's Best 10c Smoke," with the picture of a dissipated clubman in evening dress on the box cover, were different, in that they were pointedly hidden from Merton. He cared ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... hospitable officer, of whom it could well be said that "he had a teapot in his soul," poured out two cups of tea with an abstracted air, pushed one towards Hansie with his right hand, while he slowly stirred his ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... brings us to the night before the wedding. The lovers are alone, and, for lovers, extremely taciturn—for their thoughts are doubtless far into the bright future, o'er which no cloud is floating. The countenance of Ursula beams with happiness, yet her manner is somewhat abstracted—she is evidently agitated. At ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... alarmed him, I could not tell; but in the morning we all observed a remarkable change in his deportment. His ardour was gone; he walked the deck with a slow and measured pace, apparently in deep thought; and, contrary to his usual manner, was silent and melancholy, abstracted, and inattentive to ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... blot, eh, very low down?" Trench answered in an abstracted voice. Feversham did not ask him to explain what his allusion meant, nor could Trench have disclosed why he had spoken it; the words had come back to him suddenly with a feeling that it was somehow appropriate that the vision which was the last thing to meet Feversham's ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... from her into the crowd of silver willows beside the brook, she stood looking after him with the abstracted gaze of one who dwells not in the world of objects, but in the ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... was the effect produced upon the doctor, who merely raised his dark eyes in an abstracted gaze, gave a careless and rather contemptuous nod of recognition, and then turned to examine one of the richly-inlaid cabinets which adorned the saloon. All these various phases of sympathy, attraction, or contempt flickered like a sunbeam into Captain Brand's reflecting brain, ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... himself, his thoughts being busy with the approaching crisis of his fortune, and drawn away to the other matters which he has in hand, and partly because in her trance of wonder at what he is relating she seems abstracted and self-withdrawn from the matter of his discourse. His own absent-mindedness on this occasion is aptly and artfully indicated by his broken and disjointed manner of speech. That his tongue and thought are not beating time together ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... pace the room with a weary abstracted look,—he was much worn by watching,—and, seeing that he was in no mood for words, I took up a book which lay upon the table. It chanced to be one of Alger's, which somebody had lent to the Doctor before Harrie's illness; it was a marked book, and I ran ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... had acted as gaudsman to Burns, and who lived sixty years afterwards, had a distinct recollection of the turning-up of the mouse. Like a thoughtless youth as he was, he ran after the creature to kill it, but was checked and recalled by his master, who, he observed, became thereafter thoughtful and abstracted. Burns, who treated his servants with the familiarity of fellow-labourers, soon after read the poem ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... he recovered from the fit of meditation into which he was thrown by the sight of the marvellous banquet aforesaid, was to the Colosseum; but his account of the wonders of this celebrated place of resort, perhaps from his faculties still being in some measure abstracted, is less full than might have been expected. The ascending-room (which the Persian prince describes as "rising like an eagle with large wings into the atmosphere, till, after an hour's time, it stopped ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... Louvre—Christ and his Disciples—is said to have been, at some unknown time, abstracted from its frame, and a modern copy substituted. The picture has been valued at L20,000. and it is surmised that it has found a hiding-place in England. Harlowe's Kemble Family is also missing at the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 362, Saturday, March 21, 1829 • Various
... and read next, said a few things under his breath about Germans—crude short things not worth repeating—and jerking his thumb towards the intent Fritzing, winked at a detective who was standing near. The detective did not need the wink. His bland, abstracted eyes were already on Fritzing, and he was making rapid mental notes of the goggles, the muffler, the cap pulled down over the ears. Truly it is a great art, that of running ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... punished, stole a glance at her now and then, and was not abashed when he saw that she dropped her eyes when they met his, because he saw her silence and abstraction increase, and something like a blush steal into her cheeks. So he pretended to be as much downcast and abstracted as she was, and went on with his glances, till he once found her, poor thing, looking at him to see if he was looking at her; and then he knew his prey was safe, and asked her, with his eyes, "Do you forgive me?" and saw her stop dead in her talk to her next neighbor, and falter, and drop ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... everything is but beginning to arrange itself, and though I would seem to have little to do with aught beside my own thoughts, still I cannot but partake of the ferment around me. My mind will not be abstracted. I must observe, and think, and feel, and content myself with catching glimpses of things which may be wrought out hereafter. Perhaps it will be quite as well that I find myself unable to set seriously about literary occupation for the present. It will be ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... climbed up the back of the ghari, taken the two petarahs between which he was lying, and made off into the country. We had been driving at the usual pace, about six miles an hour, and it proves the practised skill and agility of the goojars, who, with such ease, had abstracted the boxes from under the very nose of my servant. There was nothing for it but to continue my journey regretting the loss of my personal effects, but still fortunate in one respect—that the loot was safe ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... stimulus is for some time abstracted from the whole body, or from any part, the excitability accumulates, or, in other words, if the body has been for some time exposed to cold, it is more liable to be affected by heat afterwards applied. Of this also you may be convinced by ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... cause the insertion of an item in the mortal warrant forming the exception to a peaceful conclusion with the Father's forgiveness. He felt as if he would surely die during the night past, and his mind became so abstracted about what he had done in his life,—what was to come, how negro property had been treated, how it should be treated,—that, although he had opinions now and then widely-different, it had left a problem which would take him all his life-time to solve,—if he should live ever so long. And, too, ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... Monday, the day on which Melmotte had offered his full confidence to his proposed son-in-law. On the following Wednesday three gentlemen met together in the study in the house in Bruton Street from which it was supposed that the letter had been abstracted. There were Mr Longestaffe, the father, Dolly Longestaffe, and Mr Bideawhile. The house was still in Melmotte's possession, and Melmotte and Mr Longestaffe were no longer on friendly terms. Direct application for permission to have this meeting in this place had been formally made to ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... other to Bauldie); a couple of toy rifles—not things for kids, mark you, but long rifles with bayonets, and which could fire caps; a tent, which was in reality an old carriage cloth from Peter's yard; and a kettle for boiling water—I mean cooking the game—which Jock Howieson abstracted from his kitchen. Each boy had to visit his home on pretence of returning for a book, and bring away the necessary articles of war and as much food as he could steal from the pantry; and then everything, axes included, and, ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... come. One of the smaller wheels I found in a state of neglect and dilapidation as to its outer case, and thinking it a good opportunity to discover something as to the meaning of the system in general and of "Um mani panee" in particular, I quietly abstracted the inner contents, in full assurance that it would never be missed; that the wheel itself would go round as merrily as ever, and that, as far as the prayers were concerned, there were still sufficient left behind, considering the reduced state of the monasteries, ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... is abstracted from a letter of my friend Mr. Power, surgeon, at Bosworth in Leicestershire, on examining the body of an elderly lady who died of this disease, March 29, 1793. "On opening the abdomen I found a large cyst attached to the left ovarium by ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... seized by Vritra, their liquid property left them. At this Indra became highly enraged and again smote him with his thunderbolt. And he (Vritra) smitten by the thunderbolt by the most powerful Indra betook himself to the Jyoti (luminous matter) and abstracted its inherent property. The luminous matter being overwhelmed by Vritra and its property, colour and form being thereby lost, the wrathful Indra again hurled his thunderbolt at him. And thus wounded again by Indra of immeasurable power, Vritra entered all on a sudden into the Vayu (gaseous matter). ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... a passage leading out of Mill-street, Blackfriars. He was found to have received a severe wound, presumably with a knife, in the left side, and had lost a considerable amount of blood, but, although weak, was still living. His watch and purse had not been abstracted, a fact which points to the conclusion either that the wound was inflicted by a companion in a drunken brawl, or that the thief was disturbed in his operations before the completion of the work. The young ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... recovered her self-possession. She drank her tea in abstracted silence, and at last she said: "I'm going out there, Cassie; you'll have to look after things. I'll get some of the boys ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... have no objection to my placing in the proper hands particulars—which, you will find, have been abstracted from your notebook—of the manner in which this parcel of diamonds reached Hatton Garden! I have the letter from your agent in Cape Town, addressed to the firm, and I have one signed 'Geo. Imer,' addressed to you! Finally, I am a telephone subscriber, and De Beers' number is Bank 5740! ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... the empire of words and general knowledge is more durable in proportion as it is abstracted and attenuated, it is less immediate and dazzling: if authors are as good after they are dead as when they were living, while living they might as well be dead: and moreover with respect to actual ability, to write a book is not the only proof of taste, sense, or spirit, as ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... man. When engaged in traffic, the intelligence of his face appeared lively, active, and flexible, though uncommonly acute; if the conversation turned on the ordinary transactions of life, his air became abstracted and restless; but if, by chance, the Revolution and the country were the topic, his whole system seemed altered—all his faculties were concentrated: he would listen for a great length of time, without ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... live at close quarters with him for a year and know him no better than she did now. At the end of a week she regarded him as an unknown quantity. A man of one idea, extraordinarily concentrated, methodical, abstracted, without friends, no outside interests whatever. That is all she could gather. Silent, yet hardly secretive, he merely gave her the impression that he had nothing he wished to impart. He was not curious about other people, ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... sprawling hand, which looked at first sight so large and legible, but on closer examination turned out to be so baffling. You had to hold it at some distance off to make anything out of it, and look at it in an abstracted general manner much as you would look at a view. Treated thus, scattered words began to leap into being, and when you had got a sufficiency of these, like glimpses of the country seen by flashes of lightning, you could hope to get a collective idea ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... his box, they were at once confiscated, and distributed among the most deserving of the Doctor's people. Some of the watchmen also accused him of having entered into my store-room, and of having abstracted two or three gorah of domestics from my bales, and of having, some days afterwards, snatched the keys from the hands of one of my men, and broken them, lest other people might enter, and find evidences of his guilt. As Asmani was proved to be another of the "moral idiots," Livingstone ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... parlors, as it were, and it was doubtful for some time whether the murderer would be convicted, Mrs. Harris said, plaintively, "Oh, do hang somebody!") Mr. Sampson did not think so, apparently, but sat on the sofa by the window, dull and abstracted. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... have we of factious Day, To cast, in envy of thy peace, Her balls of discord in thy way: Here Beauty's day doth never cease; 450 Day is abstracted here, And varied in a triple sphere. Hero, Alcmane, Mya, so outshine thee, Ere thou come here, let Thetis thrice refine thee. Love calls to war; Sighs his alarms, Lips his swords are, The field ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... course Tess was less restless and abstracted, going about her business with some self-assurance in the thought of acquiring another horse for her father by an occupation which would not be onerous. She had hoped to be a teacher at the school, but the fates seemed to decide otherwise. Being mentally older than her ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... swift motion swung to the office door in the faces of the two clerks, the grinning roundness of the younger, and the half-abstracted bewilderment of the elder. Then she placed her back against it, and took her hand from her brother's arm. "Now, then, pick them up, every ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... her son's feelings which struck him at times as exaggerated. He thought of the delightful secret back in his own mind; there was no reason for talking any more about the rod until he bought it; he would manage to replace the dollar abstracted from ...
— The Blossoming Rod • Mary Stewart Cutting
... heard my voice, she came and led the way to the back room where the kittens were in the lower drawer of an unused bureau, and uttered one or two funny little noises, intimating that matters were not altogether as they should be, according to established rules of propriety. I understood, abstracted four of the five kittens, and disappeared. When I came back she had settled herself contentedly with the remaining kitten, and from that time on was ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... of drawers in vain, but at last, on some shelves in the closet where his clothes had hung, he found several large sheets of coarse white paper. The shelves were covered with it loosely for the sake of cleanliness. He abstracted one of these sheets, and cut it into squares of the ordinary note-paper size, and he sat down and wrote a brief letter to Richard Hartley, stating where he was, that Arthur Benham was there, the O'Haras, ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... Urquhart, who was always doing so, rode over to Redford to see if he could help her pack. He wondered at her abstracted manner, and her sudden change of mind concerning the piano and wardrobe and other things. Having laboriously packed books and pictures, she now proposed to unpack half of them. She wanted to see what room she would have in her cottage first. In fact, it seemed to ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... In this abstracted mood he passed Foundation's gloomy portals and Laloo standing in his door gazing down the road, and took the leafy path ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... was the pet name given to the little girl—was three years old Coupeau, on coming in, found his wife in a state of great excitement. She refused to give any explanation, saying, in fact, there really was nothing the matter, but she finally became so abstracted that she stood still with the plates in her hand as she laid the table for dinner, and her husband ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... the accused in the house of his uncle. From this search they almost immediately returned with the well-known steel-bound, russet leather pocket-book which the old gentleman had been in the habit of carrying for years. Its valuable contents, however, had been abstracted, and the magistrate in vain endeavored to extort from the prisoner the use which had been made of them, or the place of their concealment. Indeed, he obstinately denied all knowledge of the matter. The constables, also, discovered, between the bed and sacking of the unhappy ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... I like to come to your place. Your Aunt Maria is so straight out, nothing false about her. I like her. But now I bet you're thinking of how many berries you can eat," she added as she noted the child's abstracted look. ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... of illustrious names whose contradictory systems have created suspicion and distaste in the student. The science that has been improperly termed Metaphysics, ought to be considered a branch of human physiology, not abstracted from, but in this state of existence, connected with the phenomena of life. The citations on the reverse of the Title-page, to which many more might have been added, clearly shew that the doctrine of words being the elements of Thought, did not ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... in the determination of the moisture content of low pressure steam, Mr. Pigott says, "the ordinary standard perforated pipe sampler is absolutely worthless in giving a true sample and it is vital that the sample be abstracted from the main without changing its direction or velocity until it is safely within the sample pipe and entirely isolated from the rest of ...
— Steam, Its Generation and Use • Babcock & Wilcox Co.
... face rather long than oval. His features, not regularly handsome, were set off by a profusion of silky brown hair, that curled naturally. The expression of his countenance was one of exceeding sweetness and innocence. His blue eyes were very large and prominent. They were at times, when he was abstracted, as he often was in contemplation, dull, and as it were, insensible to external objects; at others they flashed with the fire of intelligence. His voice was soft and low, but broken in its tones,—when anything much interested him, harsh and immodulated; and this peculiarity he never ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... and he did his duty by him, as he saw it, faithfully. It was not in the least his fault that he did not see that under the broad white brow and sunny ringlets was a brain in which, like the sky in a dew-drop, a whole world was reflected, with ever changing pageantry, and that the abstracted expression in the boy's eyes that he thought could only mean that he was "hatching mischief," really indicated that the creative faculty in budding genius was ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... seemed to be gratified by this, though he made no remark to that effect and continued to preserve his abstracted look and quiet demeanor. So Sweetwater waited, and while waiting managed to steal a glimpse at the small object to which his professional friend ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... glory; see me circulate amid crowd, radiating affability and laughter, liberal with my sweetmeats and cigars. I say unblushing things to hobbledehoy girls, tell shy young persons this is the married people's boat, roguishly ask the abstracted if they are thinking of their sweethearts, offer Paterfamilias a cigar, am struck with the beauty and grow curious about the age of mamma's youngest who (I assure her gaily) will be a man before his mother; or perhaps ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... noiseless step she lifted aside the curtain of skins that guarded it, and stood at the entrance. Light as was her step, it awakened the sleeper; she raised herself on her arm, and looked up with a dreamy and abstracted air as Catharine, stretching forth her hand, in tones low and tremulous, thus addressed her ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... you what these three did, but I haven't told you yet what Elizabeth Ann did. And it is worth telling. As Cousin Ann stepped in, glancing suspiciously from her sober-faced and abstracted parents to the lamb-like innocence of old Shep, little Elizabeth Ann burst into a shout of laughter. It's worth telling about, because, so far as I know, that was the first time she had ever laughed out heartily in all her life. For my part, I'm half surprised ...
— Understood Betsy • Dorothy Canfield
... of the seer, as some believe, which hallucinates itself, by the aid of points de repere? {70b} Or is there a blending of the soul's operations with the divine inspiration? Or are demons in some way evolved out of something abstracted from living bodies? He seems to hint at some such theory of 'exuvious fumes' from the 'circle,' as more recent inquirers have imagined. The young appear to be peculiarly sensitive to vapours, invocations, and other magical methods, which affect the human constitution, ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... Byzacena. It was to him that the young nobleman addressed himself for admittance; but Faustus immediately objecting the tenderness of his constitution, discouraged his desires with words of some harshness; "Go," said he, "and first learn to live in the world abstracted from its pleasures. Who can well suppose, that you on a sudden, relinquishing a life of softness and ease, can take up with our coarse diet and clothing and can inure yourself to our watchings and fastings?" ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... the Postilion, still with his gaze abstracted, "supposin' I was to place a guinea down on that there anvil o' yours—would that 'elp you to remember where ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... suppose the most unfavorable case possible: that the whole amount borrowed and destroyed by the Government was abstracted by the lender from a productive employment in which it had actually been invested. The capital, therefore, of the country, is this year diminished by so much. But, unless the amount abstracted is something enormous, there is no reason in ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... believe that she willfully drove over every rut and thank-you-ma'am on the road, scattering us generously over the tonneau, and finally, when Aggie, who was the lighter, was tossed against the top and sprained her neck, eliciting a protest from us. She replied in an abstracted tone, which showed where her ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... of laughter burst forth as hat gradually tilted forward, and GORST, deftly catching it by brim on tip of his nose, balanced it for fifteen seconds by Westminster Clock. Chairman seized opportunity of abstracted attention to put question, and when GORST, recapturing MACARTNEY'S hat, had fixed it again on summit of his head, division was called; too ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 27, 1893 • Various
... gentle courtesy. Gabrielle saluted the baron with a smile, and signed to him to continue his discourse, as she took her place near the knight Biorn, full of watchful kindness. Sintram stood by the hearth, abstracted and melancholy; and the embers, as he stirred them, cast a strange glow over his ...
— Sintram and His Companions • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... done by the sheriff's departure, had not his mind been full of strange thoughts. Pete Williamson began to regard his brother with suspicion, and there seemed some ground for his feeling. Jim was unnaturally quiet and abstracted; he had been a great deal with the sheriff before that official's departure, and yet did not seem to be on as free and pleasant terms with him as before. So Pete slowly gathered a conviction that the sheriff was on the track of a large reward from ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... institutions, and accidental influences of climate or custom, from the sprightliness of infancy to the despondence of decrepitude. He must divest himself of the prejudices of his age or country; he must consider right and wrong in their abstracted and invariable state; he must disregard present laws and opinions, and rise to general and transcendental truths, which will always be the same; he must, therefore, content himself with the slow progress of his name; contemn the applause of his own time, and commit his claims ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... Edmonton, had there been such a commotion caused by an equestrian performance. To make a long story short, the captain reached the station in ample time; an explanation ensued; a handsome apology was tendered to the patrol, and a present equally handsome was forwarded, together with the abstracted property, to the joint owner of the horse ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... moment, he could take no part, though he could not doubt that Baboushka would denounce him—a stranger, and the principal in the duel with canes. His cloak would help toward the identification and unless the hag's crew had abstracted it, it would be forthcoming, ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... with the withered arm was watching my face. I looked about me, trying to remember what had happened, and for a space I could not recollect. I rolled my eyes into the corner, and saw the old woman, no longer abstracted, pouring out some drops of medicine from a little blue phial into a glass. "Where am I?" I asked; "I seem to remember you, and yet I ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... all off laughing; but in a minute they checked themselves, and passed the back of their hands across their mouths to compose that unlucky feature, and then some would try to fix their eyes on the rafters of the ceiling, in a manner which was decorous if rather abstracted from the business in hand. Most of these were young farmers, with whom Philip had nothing in common, and from whom, in shy reserve, he had withdrawn himself when he first came in. But now he wished himself ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... be with us long?" inquired the shoeman, after trying on the shoes and cursing out Peter, the adenoidic clerk, in an abstracted, hopeless manner. ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... together of parts, each remains isolated; if one be abstracted the others remain as they were, while in an organic union they combine to a whole, and if one be withdrawn the whole is destroyed, or at least vitally impaired. This furnishes us with a criterion for the technical construction of every work of art, ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... and peevish when any thing occurred to disturb the quiet monotony of his existence, and apparently unconscious that his little Helen had grown from a child to a woman. His mind was wholly wrapped up in his studies, even at his meals it was abstracted, and he retired hastily to his closet. Helen had no inclination to disturb the serenity of his life, until it became absolutely necessary that he should be made acquainted with her engagement to me; and I had been too thoughtless of all but my own happiness to intrude upon his ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... tell how much you are missed among us. I really do not know who would make a greater blank if he were abstracted. As for myself, I have been all lost since you have been away in all that relates to literary matters, to say nothing of the almost daily aid, comfort, and refreshment I imbibed from your luminous presence. Do come among us ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... morning Cyril noticed that Nellie was silent and abstracted at breakfast-time. She went out marketing with her mother afterwards, and at dinner her mood had changed. She talked and laughed more than usual. There was a flush of excitement on her cheeks, and he drew the conclusion that in the morning ...
— When London Burned • G. A. Henty
... Petrea draw him into all kind of controversial subjects, in order to make him, during the contest, somewhat forgetful of "the object." He did not become abstracted; and it was particularly observable that the Master had much less desire for disputation than the Candidate had had; and when Mrs. Gunilla took the field against him more than once with a whole host of monads and ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
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