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More "Eccentric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which I am really too familiar with.... Then I bought an evening paper, and read it all through, including advertisements. So I said to myself: "This is a nice result of all my trouble to resume company with some of my books!" However, as I have long since ceased to be surprised at the eccentric manner in which human nature refuses to act as one would have expected it to act, I was able to keep calm and unashamed during this extraordinary experience. And I am still walking up and down in front of my books and enjoying them ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... that was doubtless strengthened by Mr. Lincoln, whose homely but astute reasoning convinced him that the better and safer line of operations was overland against Lee's army wherever it might be encountered, and not through a widely eccentric movement by water to a secondary base on the James ...
— Heroes of the Great Conflict; Life and Services of William Farrar - Smith, Major General, United States Volunteer in the Civil War • James Harrison Wilson
... Sir Richard hears of an ALCHEMIST, who lives at the village of Lilley, midway between Luton and Hitchen. The whole of his interview with this eccentric personage, will doubtless be interesting ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 342, November 22, 1828 • Various
... soon have been effected. But Eugene never was friendly with your father from that time. I think he was jealous of old Grandfather's affection; thought the old man loved your father best. And then, as I have said, he was very eccentric and stubborn. Well, your father went away to college and graduated, and then—we were married. Grandfather Page was very angry with him for marrying me. He wanted him to marry somebody else. He told him he would disinherit him if he married me. I did not know this until ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... indignity as a wife ought to do,) "I cannot imagine how he could do such a thing by you, of all people in the world! The very last person whom one should expect to be forgotten!—My dear Mr. E., he must have left a message for you, I am sure he must.—Not even Knightley could be so very eccentric;—and his servants forgot it. Depend upon it, that was the case: and very likely to happen with the Donwell servants, who are all, I have often observed, extremely awkward and remiss.—I am sure I would not have such a creature as his Harry stand at our sideboard for any ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... more we think, the more we reflect, the more the difficulty opens on us of doing full justice to the mind of Hood. We soon discover that we are dealing, not with a mere punster or jester, not with a mere master of grimace or manufacturer of broad grins, not with an eccentric oddity in prose or verse, not with a merry-andrew who tickles to senseless laughter, not with a spasmodic melodramatist who writhes in fictitious pain, but that we are dealing with a sincere, truthful, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... same," sat the heiress presumptive of England, the Princess Elizabeth, "with her face forward, and the Lady Anne of Cleve, with her back forward:" both ladies were attired in crimson velvet. Then came "four ladies of estate riding upon horses"—the eccentric old Duchess of Norfolk; the Marchioness of Winchester; Gertrude, the long-tried Marchioness of Exeter; and Mary Countess of Arundel, niece of Lady Lisle. Both riders and horses were apparelled in crimson velvet. The third chariot, ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... appearance of resigned calm. "You may well ask," he said. "He is"—and his voice sank with shame—"a mere attendant upon the stage on which the flying-machines from Paris alight. He has—as they say in the romances—good looks. He is quite young and very eccentric. Affects the antique—he can read and write! So can she. And instead of communicating by telephone, like sensible people, they write ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... ask her very much more than its genuine value and next day all Paris knew of the transaction and flocked to the Opera to see her in the ornaments which had cost the Russian Duke his friendship for the bearer. But though eccentric, impulsive and domineering, no whisper had ever attached itself to her name. On her return to her native New York, was she not welcomed, feted, honored, besieged with invitations everywhere? People felt she was different from the girl who went away. She had been undecided, ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... one chance missed by his eccentric friend, which he described to me just before he left Italy. "I saw last night an old palazzo of the Doria, six miles from here, upon the sea, which De la Rue urged Fletcher to take for us, when he was bent on that detestable villa Bagnerello; which villa ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... was out of Chancery at last. For forty years, ever since the death of the old squire, no one had rightfully called the Hall his own. The heir had lived abroad, and had lived in such an exceedingly eccentric manner as to give ground for a suit de lunatico inquirendo, brought by another heir. With the consistency of judicial purpose which characterises such proceedings the courts appeared to have decided that though the natural possessor, the eccentric individual who lived abroad, ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... bit of the big river curved inward like the tongue of a friendly dog, lapping the shore at Athabasca Landing, there still remained Fingers' Row—nine dilapidated, weather-worn, and crazily-built shacks put there by the eccentric genius who had foreseen a boom ten years ahead of its time. And the fifth of these nine, counting from either one end or the other, was named by its owner, Dirty Fingers himself, the Good Old Queen Bess. It was a shack covered with black ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood
... whom he accused of purloining Father Pandoza's shoes, when the soldiers in their fury about the ammunition destroyed the Mission. At the time of its destruction a rumor of this nature was circulated through camp, started by some wag, no doubt in jest; for Ord, who was somewhat eccentric in his habits, and had started on the expedition rather indifferently shod in carpet-slippers, here came out in a brand-new pair of shoes. Of course there was no real foundation for such a report, but Rains was ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 1 • Philip H. Sheridan
... rebellion; it is sincerity, not antagonism. Whatever you believe to be true and false, that proclaim to be true and false; whatever you think admirable and beautiful, that should be your model, even if all your friends and all the critics storm at you as a crochet-monger and an eccentric. Whether the public will feel its truth and beauty at once, or after long years, or never cease to regard it as paradox and ugliness, no man can foresee; enough for you to know that you have done your best, have been true to yourself, and that the utmost power inherent in ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... he might. No one imagined old Mark Brownson had anything to will. But he was a very eccentric man; and the economical style of his establishment was likely one of ...
— Edna's Sacrifice and Other Stories - Edna's Sacrifice; Who Was the Thief?; The Ghost; The Two Brothers; and What He Left • Frances Henshaw Baden
... and cattle and lapsing into silence, frequently, that bore the signs both of expectancy and reflection. Young men and young women sat together on one side of the house whispering and giggling. Alone among them was the big and eccentric granddaughter of Mrs Bisnette, who was always slapping some youngster for impertinence. Jed Feary and Squire Town sat together behind a pile of books, both looking very serious. The long hair and beard of the old poet were now ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... eccentric in many ways, but his throne in philosophy and metaphysics was of international eminence; the university could hardly have afforded to lose him, and, moreover, a don has only to continue any of his bad habits long enough to make them a part of the British ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... past there was in a certain law school an aged and eccentric professor. "General information" was the old gentleman's hobby. He held it as incontrovertible that if a young lawyer possessed a large fund of miscellaneous knowledge, combined with an equal amount of common sense, he would be successful in life. So every year the professor put ...
— Toasts - and Forms of Public Address for Those Who Wish to Say - the Right Thing in the Right Way • William Pittenger
... went to Washington. They had constant communication with the Honorable Mr. Ele in regard to his colleague; for although they were entirely sure of Mr. Ele, they could not quite confide in Mr. Newt, nor help feeling that, in some eccentric moment, even his interest might ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... frame a system on his lines we should be at war with ordinary language and untrue to our own consciousness. And there have been a few both in mediaeval times and since the Reformation who have rebelled against the Aristotelian point of view. Of these eccentric thinkers there have been various types, but they have all a family likeness. According to them, there has been too much analysis and too little synthesis, too much division of the mind into parts and too little conception of it as a whole ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... a whole chapter of corroborating peculiarities can be recalled. It is wise to recall as many of these circumstances as possible and note them in order as they occurred, for the use of the physician. Strikingly eccentric letters should be saved. Odd arrangement of clothes, or the collecting of useless articles, should be noted in writing. Changes in character, alteration in ideas of propriety, changes in disposition, business or social habits, and great variation in the bodily health should ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various
... to account for his leadership and influence, we examine his personality; and here everything is interesting. Because of a few oft-quoted passages from Boswell's biography, Johnson appears to us as an eccentric bear, who amuses us by his growlings and clumsy antics. But there is another Johnson, a brave, patient, kindly, religious soul, who, as Goldsmith said, had "nothing of the bear but his skin"; a man who battled like a hero against poverty ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... the mark, and the first law stationer could put you to the blush. Rousseau, indeed, made some account of penmanship, even made it a source of livelihood, when he copied out the HELOISE for DILETTANTE ladies; and therein showed that strange eccentric prudence which guided him among so many thousand follies and insanities. It would be well for all of the GENUS IRRITABILE thus to add something of skilled labour to intangible brain- work. To find the right word ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... tested once while presiding over a party convention at Sonora for the nomination of candidates for legislative and county offices. Among the delegates was the eccentric John Vallew, whose mind was a singular compound of shrewdness and flightiness, and was stored with the most out-of-the-way scraps of learning, philosophy, and poetry. Some one proposed Vallew's name as a candidate for the Legislature. ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... ready response, and nothing loth the helmsman changed his course to follow the eccentric craft. She was evidently bound on some secret mission, for not otherwise would she thus tear through the darkness before the wind without ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... a degree that furnished matter of jesting to the various ateliers where he sojourned; but everywhere he disarmed his comrades by his modesty and by the patience and gentleness of a lamblike nature. The masters, however, had no sympathy for the good lad; masters prefer bright fellows, eccentric spirits, droll or fiery, or else gloomy and deeply reflective, which argue future talent. Everything about Pierre Grassou smacked of mediocrity. His nickname "Fougeres" (that of the painter in the play of "The Eglantine") was the source ...
— Pierre Grassou • Honore de Balzac
... a wretched worn object of a man, plodding by the eccentric light of a tallow dip through the day's telegrams. Poor wretch! he earns his pittance as thoroughly as any of us do. Again we drew blank. "Never heard of you." All we could get out of him was, "You had better bed down in the station and await events." ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... met Dan Leland, a classmate of mine, at the Harvard Club. He's a journalist, and he used to keep such eccentric hours that I had not run across him for a long time. We got to talking about modern French music, and discovered that we both had a very lively interest ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... care as imbeciles. If the fits are severe from an early age, arrest of mental development and imbecility follow. If the disease be very mild in character, and especially if it be petit mal, the victim may be very precocious, get "pushed" at school, and later become eccentric ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... Trouville, a book might be written on the costumes alone—on the suits of motley, the harlequins, the mephistopheles, the spiders, the 'grasshoppers green,' and the other eccentric costumes de bain—culminating in a lady's dress trimmed with death's heads, and a gentleman's, of an indescribable colour, after the pattern of a trail of seaweed. Strange, costly creatures—popping in and out of little wooden houses, seated, ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... are, Tanya, a fanatic Marxist; her brother, Tokarev, whose soul is a field for spiritual battles; and Varenka, a village school-mistress. There are several eccentric characters around them, such as Serge, a young apostle of a somewhat Nietzschean egoism, Antsov and others. Tanya is none other than Natasha of "Astray," with this great difference, however, that ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... are right, Mr Adlam. When a man travels with a handbag full of packs of cards one naturally would suspect that he was either very eccentric, or was a commercial traveller, with samples of his wares." His eyes twinkled. "It is a very old dodge that—an apparently unopened pack of cards, every one of which has been systematically marked, and then the wrapper with the revenue stamp ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... which habit gives That plain confession of a lack of wit; he offered combat The ass eats at my table, and treats me with contempt The grey furniture of Time for his natural wear You're the puppet of your women! What's an eccentric? a ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... and in English and Latin countries, the accents fall as a rule on the stressed syllables of the spoken tongue and on the regular beats of the music. The opposite is the case in Negro songs: here the rhythms are uneven, jagged, and, at a first hearing, eccentric, for the accents fall most frequently on the short notes and on the naturally unstressed beats, producing what we call 'syncopation' of a very intricate and highly developed order. The peculiarity of this syncopation is best explained to the layman by drawing attention to the way in which ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... the personage to whom it relates. The chapter (which has been written and printed for the reasons mentioned in the preface) is chiefly filled with the detailed conversation, or rather discourse, of a highly eccentric gentlewoman. ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... will appear from the following extracts, was much a martinet, and had a habit of expressing himself on paper with an almost startling emphasis. Personally, with his powerful voice, sanguine countenance, and eccentric and original locutions, he was well qualified to inspire a salutary ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... day, a monk chanced to pass by and stopped in surprise to find a ball going on. A score of goats were executing lively pirouettes like a ladies' chain, while the buck solemnly balance-ed, and the herder went through the figures of an eccentric pastoral dance. ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... incompetent essays in a wrong direction. That may not be at all our own opinion. We may think that, when a work contains many unforgettable phrases, it cannot be altogether devoid of literary merit. We may even see passages of a high poetry here and there among its eccentric contents. But when all is said, Walt Whitman is neither a Milton nor a Shakespeare; to appreciate his works is not a condition necessary to salvation; and I would not disinherit a son upon the question, nor even think ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pile of stone covered over with masses of ivy. Viewed from the harbor, the town presents a striking picture, and the most remarkable feature is the great colosseum on the hill. This is known as McCaig's Tower and was built by an eccentric citizen some years ago merely to give employment to his fellow townsmen. One cannot get an adequate idea of the real magnitude of the structure without climbing the steep hill and viewing it from the inside. It is a circular tower, pierced by two rows of windows, and ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... it seemed to him that his features had forgotten that he was supposed to be their owner and in control of them; he felt that they were slipping all over his face, regardless of his wishes. His head, as a whole, was subject to an agitation not before known by him; it desired to move rustily in eccentric ways of its own devising; his legs alternately limbered and straightened under no direction but their own; and his hands clutched each other fiercely behind his back; he was not one cohesive person, evidently, ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington
... of Nathan Hale!" murmured the eccentric gentleman. "I believe you. And you've been already attacked twice by some thug! You are positively ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Locomotive - or, Two Miles a Minute on the Rails • Victor Appleton
... generation of those whose religious ideas had been formed and governed by the influence of teachers like Hervey, Romaine, Cecil, Venn, Fletcher, Newton, and Thomas Scott. The fathers of the Evangelical school were men of naturally strong and vigorous understandings, robust and rugged, and sometimes eccentric, but quite able to cope with the controversialists, like Bishop Tomline, who attacked them. These High Church controversialists were too half-hearted and too shallow, and understood their own principles too imperfectly, to be a match for antagonists who were ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... seen anything like that dance. Many pretty premieres danseuses he had admired and applauded, charming and clever young women of France, of Russia, of Italy, and Spain: and they had roused him and all London to enthusiasm over dances eccentric, original, exquisite, or wild. But never had there been anything like this. Stephen had not known that a dance could move him as this did. He was roused, even thrilled by its poetry, and the perfect beauty of its poses, its poises. It must, he supposed, have been practised patiently, perhaps for ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... he preferred to the Analogy; and would not have men overlook some who are off the line, like Postel. But although he deemed it the mark of inferiority to neglect a grain of the gold of obsolete and eccentric writers, he always assigned to original speculation a subordinate place, as a good servant but a bad master, without the certainty and authority of history. What one of his English friends writes of a divine they both admired, might fitly ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... city, through which the young queen would pass on her arrival, conversation naturally turned upon the beauty of the bride, whereof the renown had spread throughout all Asia; and upon the character of the bridegroom, who, although not altogether an eccentric, seemed nevertheless one not readily appreciated from the ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... moment Beth saw nothing but a mad grotesquerie of horse and man, almost ludicrously unnatural, and crazed with eccentric motion. ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... relief, had taken the shy pale-faced girl to her eccentric heart with a suddenness and enthusiasm that had ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... to an extravagant pitch of fury, Newman Noggs jerked himself about the room with the most eccentric motion ever beheld in a human being: now sparring at the little miniatures on the wall, and now giving himself violent thumps on the head, as if to heighten the delusion, until he sank down in his former seat ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... conscience, and avoiding of all scruple and doubtfulness.' My father had been English, but my mother was Scotch, and she had sent me to my uncle, Deacon Abercrombie, to be entered as apprentice to his craft of the goldsmiths. He was a widower, lived alone, and was reputed to be eccentric, but as far as worldly gear was concerned the Deacon was a highly responsible citizen; as burgess, guild brother, and deacon of his craft he could hold his head as high on the causeway as any other, be he who he might, in ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... Demoiselle de Ronquerolles. Therefore, on her mother's side Clementine du Rouvre had the Marquis de Ronquerolles for uncle, and Madame de Serizy for aunt. On her father's side she had another uncle in the eccentric person of the Chevalier du Rouvre, a younger son of the house, an old bachelor who had become very rich by speculating in lands and houses. The Marquis de Ronquerolles had the misfortune to lose both his children ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... following year (1878), waiting to meet her husband on his return from the expedition to Midian, Gordon arrived there. He of course hastened to make the acquaintance of Burton's wife. He stayed a week at Suez, and during that time Isabel and he saw one another every day. She found him "very eccentric, but very charming. I say eccentric, until you got to know and understand him." A warm friendship sprang up between the two, for they had much to talk about and much in common. They were both Christian mystics (I use the term in the highest ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... mortgagees, and leave himself a pittance not much more than the wages of a gamekeeper. If his aunt, Lady Randolph, had not been so good to him it was uncertain whether he could have existed at all, and when the heiress, whom an eccentric will had consigned to her charge, fell in his way, all her friends concluded as a matter of certainty that Sir Tom would jump at this extraordinary windfall, this gift of a too kind Providence, which sometimes will care for a prodigal in a way which he is quite unworthy of, while ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... a trick dancer himself, and Grahame West, who was one of the best eccentric dancers in England, ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... the reserved right to pay obeisance to cheeks more rubicund, and figure lither and more agile, and as you demanded the last pound of patience and endurance on her part you could, with the emphasis of an Edwin Forrest or a Macready, have tapped the eccentric marriage document and have said: "It's in the bond!" If this modern Rebekah had understood beforehand where she was alighting she would have ordered the camel drivers to turn the caravan backward toward Padan-aram. Flirtation has its origin either ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... in Falmouth Bay, thinking then of taking our gold straight to the Bank of England, as eccentric lucky diggers—that night I thought would be the last for one or other of us. He locked her in her cabin. He posted himself outside on the settee. I sat watching him across the table. Each had a hand in his pocket, each had a pistol in that hand, and there we sat, with ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... the day, and occasionally shot forth lurid flames into the darkness of the night. We had a capital view of his volcanic performances from our hotel windows, and found it interesting to watch his eccentric ebullitions. Most of our fellow-travellers made the ascent, but as we did not intend to make any stay in Naples—my wife being anxious to pay a long-promised visit to her sister in Malta—we decided to ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... only an occasional snag in them. So bless you, my child. I do trust that the report which comes to me that you are going with the Prince of Wales, Mrs. H. Ward, and a Mr. Arthur Roberts to shoot kangaroos in Australia is at least exaggerated. These marsupials, though their appearance is sufficiently eccentric to suggest the conscientious objector, will—I am credibly informed—fight desperately in defence of their young. If I may venture to suggest, ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... thoughtfully, "it's no secret. Only he was queer, he was eccentric, and so I've always assumed he had a pretty bad time of it. That's why I never've talked ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... 'a detached and eccentric personality who had arisen on the outskirts; the world began to be conscious of him at ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... was all over, a Tombola came off in front of the church, and our three artists having purchased tickets for this Sunday lottery, in order to keep the day as the rest of the people did, and not render themselves liable to the censure of being eccentric, had an opportunity of seeing its beneficial working—for ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... "We were an eccentric family, especially in our peculiar aloofness from others. We clung desperately to one another long after the necessity was past. Neither eviction nor commerce could disband us. Only marriage or death could separate us. Though we were Catholics ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... strange condition that all cocks in the neighbourhood should first be killed; for the wizard, so the story runs, had a special aversion to Chanticleer on account of his having caused the repentance of St Peter by his crowing. In any case, the reigning Prince of Salerno gladly complied with the eccentric request, and at his command every cock in or near the place was accordingly slaughtered, with the solitary exception of one old rooster, who, being very dear to the heart of his aged mistress, was kept concealed beneath a tub and thus escaped the general holocaust. Throughout the livelong ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... age look upon this eccentric woman-worship with uncomprehending eyes. Perhaps we shall feel a little less bewildered when we meet it, stripped of courtly theories and mediaeval fashions, in some of the great men who are closely connected with our own period; in Michelangelo, in ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... importance which can be converted into a "good story." That a great man should perform a great task is immaterial. Noble deeds make no scandal, and are therefore not worth reporting. But if you can discover that the great man has a hidden vice, or an eccentric taste in boots or hats, there is "copy" ready to your hand. All things and all men must be reduced to a dead level of imbecility. The Yellow Press is not obscene—it has not the courage for that. Its proud boast is that it never prints a line that a father might not read to his daughter. It is merely ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... Moliere "un grand et habile picoreur;" and Boileau tells us that La Fontaine borrowed his style and matter from Marot and Rabelais, and took his subjects from Boccaccio, Poggius, and Ariosto. Nor was the eccentric Rabelais the inventor of most of his burlesque narratives; and he is a very close imitator of Folengo, the inventor of the macaronic poetry, and not a little indebted to the old Facezie of the Italians. ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... weight was booked, and Heaven I trust and believe did not weigh his gratitude in the balance of the sanctuary. For my unlearned reader is not to suppose there was anything the least eccentric in the man, or his gratitude to the Giver of health and all good gifts. Men look forward to death, and back upon past sickness with different eyes. Item, when men drive a bargain, they strive to get the sunny side of it; it matters ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... half of the last century, there lived in one of the villages on the outskirts of the moor on which the Cheese-Wring stands, a stonecutter named Daniel Gumb. This man was noted among his companions for his taciturn eccentric character, and for his attachment to mathematical studies. Such leisure time as he had at his command he devoted to pondering over the problems of Euclid: he was always drawing mysterious complications of angles, triangles, and parallelograms, on pieces of slate, and on ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... education so little prepared him for academic proprieties, that when he entered Trinity College, Oxford, in October 1840, a criticism of his military moustache by a fellow-undergraduate was resented by a challenge to a duel, and Burton in various ways distinguished himself by such eccentric behaviour that rustication inevitably ensued. Nor was he much more in his element as a subaltern in the 18th Regiment of Bombay Native Infantry, which he joined at Baroda in October 1842. Discipline of any sort he abhorred, and the one recommendation of the East India ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... that in eccentric lines, Tom brought into play all his acquired knowledge of a pilot's tricks in order to avoid being made a victim of this hot fire. He fully expected that, after all, the enemy would get him, but he was grimly determined ...
— Air Service Boys Flying for Victory - or, Bombing the Last German Stronghold • Charles Amory Beach
... sieges, shipwrecks, etc., cannibalism has been practiced as a last resort for sustaining life. When supplies have given out several Arctic explorers have had to resort to eating the bodies of their comrades. In the famous Wiertz Museum in Brussels is a painting by this eccentric artist in which he has graphically portrayed a woman driven to insanity by hunger, who has actually destroyed her child with a view to cannibalism. At the siege of Rochelle it is related that, urged by starvation, a father ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... plentiful in my enclosure towards the end of August and selects a certain lavender-border for her dormitory. At dusk, especially after a stifling day, when a storm is brewing, I am sure to find the strange sleeper settled there. Never was more eccentric attitude adopted for a night's rest! The mandibles bite right into the lavender-stem. Its square shape supplies a firmer hold than a round stalk would do. With this one and only prop, the animal's body juts out stiffly, at full length, with legs folded. It forms a right angle with ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... complete success. Again in 1815, with an army of only one hundred and twenty thousand men against an allied force of two hundred and twenty thousand, by his central advance on Charleroi and Ligny, he gained a most decided advantage over the enemy—an advantage lost by the eccentric movement of Grouchy: and even in 1813, his central position at Dresden would have secured him most decisive advantages, had not the faults of his lieutenants lost these advantages in the disasters of ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... respectively, with a piston stroke of 3 ft. The high-pressure cylinders are each fitted with a piston valve, and the intermediate and low-pressure cylinders with double-ported slide valves, all of which are worked by the usual double eccentric and link motion valve gear, by which the cut-off can be varied as required. All the shafting is forged of Siemens-Martin mild steel of the best quality, each of the three separate cranks being built up. The condensers are placed at the outsides of the engine room, and the air, feed, and bilge pumps ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... with a repressive frown. "As I understand it, the disease cycle seems to be connected somehow with the once-every-48-years conjunction of the four moons, which explains why the Darkovans are so superstitious about it. The moons have remarkably eccentric orbits—I don't know anything about that part, I'm quoting Dr. Moore. If there's an animal vector to the disease, we've never discovered it. The pattern runs like this; a few cases in the mountain districts, the next month a hundred-odd ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... were handy with the mason's tools, which led some wag to say that the Freezes were all born with stone hammers in one hand and a note-book in the other. Charles, the fourth son, was a half- brother and inherited the home farm. Charles was a great reader and was very fond of history. He was eccentric in some ways and would take long journeys on ...
— The Chignecto Isthmus And Its First Settlers • Howard Trueman
... indecorous dances—dances of such a character indeed that they would certainly not have been allowed in a theatre. And the beau monde rushed to see them at the houses of the bolder lady-entertainers, the eccentric and foreign ones like the Princess, who in order to draw society ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... attack a boar single-handed. Often enough you couldn't drag a word out of him for hours together; but then, on the other hand, sometimes, when he started telling stories, you would split your sides with laughing. Yes, sir, a very eccentric man; and he must have been wealthy too. What a lot ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... of imagination that prompts you to believe that you cannot write alone, that you must take alcohol into partnership, as it were. Even little people are ruled by imagination; how much more so a great faculty in which imagination must follow many morbid and eccentric tracks? And habit, no doubt, is the greatest of all forces, while it is undisturbed. But that old habit of yours has been shattered these last months. You made no attempt to resist before. You could resist ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... the history of this singular case may afford some hints and comfort to parents with children afflicted (as was my dear AUGUSTUS) with a disease so eccentric in its ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, January 18, 1890 • Various
... once an eccentric old coon, Who ate dynamite with a spoon, But when he got loaded The powder exploded— And now there's ...
— Poems for Pale People - A Volume of Verse • Edwin C. Ranck
... it, at each end of the row of pegs —in the face plate (when it passes from the exterior to the interior range of them) in giving the feed motion to the tool in; the slide rest, "turned" the segmental exterior of the eccentric hoops. This it did perfectly, as the change of position of the small shaft occurred at the exact time when the cut was at its termination,—that being the correct moment to give the tool "the feed, or advance for the taking of the next cut. ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... peasant will go for money, there was a sensation. This was augmented by his sketch, "Hard Labor"; and a still greater sensation ensued on the publication of his "'Tis Not a Matter of Habit" (known in book form as "The Eccentric Master"). In "Hard Labor" he set forth, contrary to all theoretical beliefs, that the peasants of villages which had belonged to private landed proprietors prior to the emancipation, were incomparably and incontestably ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... of his task Mr. Clegg met with some success. Mrs. Dyson, whose memory was certainly eccentric—she could not, she said, remember the year in which she had been married—was obliged to admit that she had been in the habit of going to Peace's house, that she had been alone with him to public-houses and places of entertainment, and that she and Peace had been photographed together during ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... less cowardice, than a sort of vague vexation at risking my life in so causeless a conflict. There was something absolutely ludicrous in standing up to be shot at, merely to square with the whim of this eccentric squatter; and to shoot at him seemed equally ridiculous. Either alternative, upon reflection, appeared the very essence of absurdity: and, having ample time to reflect, while awaiting the signal, I could not help thinking how farcical ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... was as much as Mendouca could do to get the sun for his latitude. By this time we had risen the stranger until we had brought her hull-up on the extreme verge of the horizon; and the nearer that we drew to her the more eccentric did her manoeuvres appear to be; she was heading all round the compass, and but for the fact that we could see from time to time that her yards were being swung, and some of her canvas hauled down ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... entitled him to a good deal of consideration from any kind-hearted woman; and thirdly, and perhaps principally, he had the reputation for saying and doing odd, out-of-the-way things; and a man who moves in an eccentric circle of his own is never on other people's plane, and therefore some allowance must ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... a tolerable sum of money. He was more attached to myself, I believe, than to any other person in the world, and I expected to inherit the most of his property at his death. He sent me, at six years of age, to the school of old Mr. Ricketts, a gentleman with only one arm and of eccentric manners—he is well known to almost every person who has visited New Bedford. I stayed at his school until I was sixteen, when I left him for Mr. E. Ronald's academy on the hill. Here I became intimate with the son of Mr. Barnard, a sea-captain, who generally sailed in the employ of Lloyd ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... more "the Rover is free!" SUGDEN is a name honourable behind and before the foot-lights. In the Courts of Law it is a Legal Light, and among Gas Companies the Sugden Burner is, we believe, justly famous. Whatever the announcement may or may not mean, all sons of Liberty will rejoice that this eccentric comedian is once more free, and on the stage he ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, February 27, 1892 • Various
... "I have known him for some years,— he is a very clever man, but I have never been able quite to make him out. I think he is a bit eccentric. He's just been telling me he believes ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... romantic glamour, had vanished now. He wondered what it was about her that he had at first found attractive. It was the spirit of the place, he decided, nothing more. With every step of the way there closed over him again his natural reserve, his unconquerable diffidence, his instinctive recoil from the eccentric in behaviour. Conventions were the breath of his young nostrils, and yet he was passing through an atmosphere, without, thank Heaven, his connivance or inclination, where it seemed to him the hardiest convention could not ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... over there, and tell those women to have that flag taken in and sent on board this ship. Don't touch it yourself: they put it out there, and they must take it in. That's a pretty piece of impudence, indeed—a rebel flag floating in the breeze in the face of a Federal vessel of war!" and the eccentric captain paced up and down his cabin, in a state ...
— Frank on a Gun-Boat • Harry Castlemon
... so. I am a friend to the missionary cause and have been so a great many years. How many times that wrong impression which I got from that old maid has passed through my mind, and how sorry I have always been for that prejudice. The father of Samuel J. Mills was a very eccentric man and anecdotes of him have been repeatedly told. I attended his church the summer I was in Torringford. He was the strangest man I ever saw, and would say so many laughable things in his sermon that it was next to impossible for me to keep from laughing out loud. His ...
— History of the American Clock Business for the Past Sixty Years, - and Life of Chauncey Jerome • Chauncey Jerome
... at once upon the more eccentric stages of the search. They went by way of the Great Northern to Portland, descending from snow to roses and drenching rains. At Pendleton, which is at the junction of three great roads, Paul sent tracers out through ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... Elliott at the lighthouse. At first Anne felt inclined to resent the intrusion of this long-haired, long-bearded eccentric into the familiar little circle. But Marshall Elliott soon proved his legitimate claim to membership in the household of Joseph. He was a witty, intelligent, well-read man, rivalling Captain Jim himself in the knack of telling a good story. They were all glad when he agreed ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... would sometimes allow her to link arms in the garden, but it was suffered with an air of amused tolerance. It was obvious that she very much preferred the society of Hilary, who was nearer her own age, and that she regarded intermediates as mere children. Diana, who was eccentric in her likes and dislikes, but very keen when she took a fancy to anybody, went through all the stages of longing, hope, elation, despair, and jealousy. When she saw Hilary received into supreme favour, the green-eyed monster swooped down and took possession ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... was at that time the most skilful goldsmith in Paris, and also one of the most ingenious as well as one of the most eccentric men of the age. Rather small than great, but broad-shouldered and with a strong and muscular frame, Cardillac, although considerably more than fifty, still possessed the strength and activity of youth. And his strength, which might be said to be something ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... young. Their daughter Joanna married Philip of Burgundy, son of Maximilian and Mary; but he died in 1506, at the age of twenty-eight. They had been recognized as the rulers of Castile. But the mind of Joanna, who had always been eccentric, became disordered, so that the government devolved on Ferdinand, her father. He placed her in the castle at Tordesillas, where the remainder of her life, which continued forty-seven years longer, was spent. Ferdinand was, in form, constituted by the Cortes (1510), ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... eclipsed by the portentous presence of the Volunteer Convention. One hundred and sixty delegates of corps attended on the appointed day. The Royal Exchange was too small to accommodate them, so they adjourned to the Rotunda, accompanied by mounted guards of honour. The splendid and eccentric Bishop of Derry (Earl of Bristol), had his dragoon guards; the courtly but anxious Charlemont had his troop of horse; Flood, tall, emaciated, and solemn to sadness, was hailed with popular acclamations; there also marched the popular Mr. Day, afterwards Judge; Robert ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... Spenser, for example, may not possess these weaknesses at all. Robert Louis Stevenson was passionately in love with the romantic in life and with romanticism in literature; but it did not make him eccentric, weak, or empty. His instinct for enduring romance was so admirably fine that it brought strength to the sinews of his mind, light and air and fire to his soul. Among the writers of our own day, it is Mr. Kipling who has written some of the keenest satire upon romantic foibles, while never ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... called John Mayrant; and after the man had come from the kitchen: "You may put the punch-bowl and things on the table, and clear away and go to bed. My Great-uncle Marston Chartain," he continued to me, "was of eccentric taste, and for the last twenty years of his life never had anybody to dinner but the undertaker." He paused at this point to mix the punch, and then resumed: "But for all that, he appears to have been a lively old gentleman to the end, and left ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... the evening receptions of the Schiller Society. Half apologetically she added that it was likely to be her last, for, frankly, she was bored to death. But she explained that she had to go to these affairs, as she found them useful in gathering material for literary use. She studied types and eccentric characters, and this seemed to her a capital hunting ground. Jefferson, who, as a rule, was timid with girls and avoided them, found this girl quite unlike the others he had known. Her quiet, forceful demeanour appealed to him strongly, and he ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... Temptations is so dear to the aged eyes of the gray-haired old gentlemen who occupy the front seats at the Grand Opera House. It is certainly a brilliant spectacle, though, like the ideal scene to which Mrs. NICKLEBY's eccentric and vegetarian lover once referred, it consists principally of "gas and gaiters." Not that it is exclusively an Old Folks' entertainment; for, as the critics say of portentously dull juvenile books, "it will be found as interesting to the young as to the old." Though the dullest ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 6, May 7, 1870 • Various
... happened was that he fell out of a tree and broke his neck. But the puzzle was, what could have induced him to get up there. It was a mysterious business, I must say. Here was this man—not an athletic fellow, was he? and with no eccentric twist about him that was ever noticed—walking home along a country road late in the evening—no tramps about—well known and liked in the place—and he suddenly begins to run like mad, loses his hat and stick, and finally shins up a tree—quite ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James
... appearance was most unprepossessing. He was very short, with a huge head and a remarkable shock of coal-black hair. Having hastily risen from bed, he had retained his pyjamas, but a long frock-coat hung nearly to his slippers, and in one hand he carried a pair of gloves, and in the other a huge eccentric silk hat of the true chimney-pot type. These were details, and one might have passed them over. But the man's face was sadly against him. He had the slyest eyes I have ever seen; that peculiar shifty glance which invariably sets one against an individual. And thus I became more and more convinced ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... find it. Another curious mark rarely wanting in the subjects of mental strabismus is an irregular and often sprawling and deformed handwriting. Many and many a time I have said, after glancing at the back of a letter, "This comes from an insane asylum, or from an eccentric who might well be a candidate for such an institution." Number Seven's manuscript, which showed marks of my corrections here and there, furnished good examples of the chirography of persons with ill-mated cerebral hemispheres. But the earlier ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... fiction,' says a very old proverb, which is certainly illustrated by the following tale of an eccentric ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... have done; but it is a name like that of him who burnt the Temple of Ephesus: God be merciful to me a sinner!" might now with all seriousness be said of the impression his Robbers made on the harmless townsfolk of Stuttgart. But how did Father Schiller at first take up this eccentric product of his Son, which openly declared war on all existing order? Astonishment and terror, anger and detestation, boundless anxiety, with touches of admiration and pride, stormed alternately through the solid honest man's paternal breast, as he saw the frank picture of a Prodigal Son ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... 20) are located beneath the cab deck (1, fig. 17). They are cast-iron construction and are driven by an eccentric on the driving-wheel axle (fig. 27). The airchamber or dome (1, fig. 27) imparts a more steady flow of the water to the boiler by equalizing the surges of water from the reciprocating pump plunger. A steam line (3, fig. 18), which heats the pump and prevents freezing in cold ...
— The 'Pioneer': Light Passenger Locomotive of 1851 • John H. White
... would be holding Hogmanay in Thrums to-night, how cartloads of kebbock cheeses had been rolling into the town all the livelong day ("Do you hear them, Elspeth?"), and in dark closes the children were already gathering, with smeared faces and in eccentric dress, to sally forth as guisers at the clap of eight, when the ringing of a bell lets Hogmanay loose. ("You see, Elspeth?") Inside the houses men and women were preparing (though not by fasting, which would ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... must be dated the career of Mr. Thompson as a star or leading actor and manager, at first in low comedy, so called, or eccentric drama, and later, in what he has made a classic New ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... of Brianchoil is a very small island with a few trees upon it, of which the boatman related a story that was new to me. He said an eccentric individual, many years ago, built his house upon it—but it was soon beaten down by the winds and waves. Having built it up with like fortune several times, he at last desisted, saying, "bought wisdom was the best;" since when it has been called the Island of Wisdom. ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... easy to see the attraction, for the players, of the series of star parts provided by the exciting story. You have first the eccentric, misjudged Swede, Heyst (the adapter makes him an Englishman, perhaps wisely, as our stage takes no account of Swedes), come from self-banishment on a far Pacific island—a complex Conradian personality. Then his arch-enemy, Schomberg, lieutenant of reserve, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... require any additional proof that the nobles amidst all these changes were still as dependent as ever on the arbitrary will or caprice of the Monarch, we have only to glance at their position in the time of Paul I., the capricious, eccentric, violent son and successor of Catherine. The autobiographical memoirs of the time depict in vivid colours the humiliating position of even the leading men in the State, in constant fear of exciting by act, word, or look the wrath of the Sovereign. As we read these ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... Ben didn't understand," continued Roger. "His father telegraphed that the estate was a decidedly curious one, and that was why the lawyers wanted him to come to Chicago immediately. He added that Mr. Enos had proved to be a very eccentric individual." ...
— Dave Porter and His Double - The Disapperarance of the Basswood Fortune • Edward Stratemeyer
... stood in its present position ever since the children could remember, and, indeed, it had been there before even Ida, the eldest of the three, was born. It had been left to Mr. Ormond by an eccentric old relative, who had given special instructions in his will that the chest should not be opened for twenty years after the date of his death. The children were never tired of speculating as to what would be found in ...
— Under Padlock and Seal • Charles Harold Avery
... trying to gain hope and courage by reflecting on the career of this eccentric man, when the buxom housekeeper reentered the library and announced that the physician had left. At the same time she opened a door and exclaimed: "This is the room; you gentlemen ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... her down, and ran along by the side of me, occasionally darting off on either hand to pick flowers to stick in my pockets. My pockets had always puzzled Weena, but at the last she had concluded that they were an eccentric kind of vase for floral decoration. At least she utilized them for that purpose. And that reminds me! In ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... which Mr Mitford, on his usual principle of being wiser than all the rest of the world, has taken under his especial patronage—pure oligarchy. This is closely, and indeed inseparably, connected with another of his eccentric tastes, a marked partiality for Lacedaemon, and a dislike of Athens. Mr Mitford's book has, I suspect, rendered these sentiments in some degree popular; and I shall, therefore, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... press took this up; two or three members of the House of Commons, wild, eccentric men, who would not betray their country to secure their re-election to some dirty borough, sided with outraged law; and by these united efforts a Commission was obtained. The Commission sat, and, being conducted with rare skill and determination, squeezed out of an incredible mass of ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... Englishman, an eccentric. We then advertised in the papers, we gave an account of our methods, we invented some attractive instances. But the great impetus was ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... too, has published a book of poems, but he, on the other hand, defies tradition to an eccentric degree. Originality is his sin. He strains after it in every line. I must confess I think much of the free verse he writes is really prose, and a good deal of it blank verse chopped up into odd lengths. He talks of assonance ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... go, Brooks," he said, firmly. "Don't you go refusing an invitation like that. Lord Arranmore is a bit eccentric, they say, and he isn't the sort of man to like refusals. You've ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... complete. It worked beautifully in moderate depths, but failed in blue water, from the difficulty of hauling it up if the line used were small, and from the difficulty of getting it down if the line used were large enough to give the requisite strength for hauling it up." One eccentric old sea captain proposed to sound the sea with a torpedo, or shell, which should explode the instant it touched the bottom. Another gentleman proposed to try it by the magnetic telegraph, and designed an instrument which ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... expected from a thoroughly modest, teachable, receptive, and at the same time most living, active, and aspiring mind,—a mind full indeed of native boldness, but yet restrained by judgment and good sense from the crudeness and temerity of self-will and eccentric impulse, and not trusting to its own strength till it had better reasons for doing so than the promptings ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... world they lived in was not only beautiful to the imagination, it was also reasonable, penetrable, and governable by the intellect. The ways of it and everything in it were regular and orderly, predictable, explicable not eccentric, erratic, baffling and inscrutable. Not only was Nature knowable; it was also through knowledge of it manageable, a realm over which man could extend his sway, making it ever a more and more habitable home. ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... it was plain that his madness took a somewhat eccentric turn; that, in fact, he was not ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... The eccentric miner lifted his hat, bowed very low, and sauntered back to his friends with the air of a monarch who had just indulged in some gracious act of condescension, while our friends, delighted beyond measure, hurried forward on ...
— Adrift in the Wilds - or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys • Edward S. Ellis
... his habits. Harcourt, Oxford's Chancellor, lent him a house whilst translating Homer. Sheffield, the Duke of Buckingham, had been an early patron, and after the duke's death, Pope, at the request of his eccentric duchess, the illegitimate daughter of James II., edited some of his works and got into trouble for some Jacobite phrases contained in them. His most familiar friend among the opposition magnates was Lord Bathurst, a man of uncommon vivacity and ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... Indian Civil! Philip was the only one he liked. I've heard him talk in the queerest way; he once said to me: 'My dear fellow, never let your poor wife know what you're thinking of! But I didn't follow his advice; not I! An eccentric man! He would say to Phil: 'Whether you live like a gentleman or not, my boy, be sure you die like one! and he had himself embalmed in a frock coat suit, with a satin cravat and a diamond pin. Oh, quite an original, I can ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... floating a long distance away. His evil genius suggested that it would be a good thing to paddle out to the buoy and back. Many men can drink champagne and show no sign, but few can drink success and remain sober. The eccentric airs assumed by noted authors prove the truth of this. De Plonville was drunk, and never suspected it. The tide, what little there is of it in the Mediterranean, helped him, and even the gentle breeze blew from the shore. He had some doubts ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... d. 1862). This eccentric American author and naturalist was born at Concord, Mass. He graduated at Harvard University in 1837. He was a good English and classical scholar, and was well acquainted with the literature of the East. His father was a maker of lead pencils, and he followed the business for a time, but ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... these fields more than once, Phil. And in those days, I didn't know what it was to have a nice suit of clothes and good food. But Professor Potts was kind to me, even if he was a bit eccentric." ...
— Dave Porter at Star Ranch - Or, The Cowboy's Secret • Edward Stratemeyer
... "She could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences with a keen interest in gimp and artificial protrusions of drapery," but Celia "had that common-sense which is able to accept momentous doctrines without any eccentric agitation." Both were examples of "reversion." Then, as an instance of heredity working itself out in character "in Mr. Brooke, the hereditary strain of Puritan energy was clearly in abeyance, but in his niece Dorothea it glowed alike through ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric. I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan. His religion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... where high play is carried on. In this mixed assemblage, which sporting habits and gambling, (that grand leveller of all distinctions,) have brought together, this man and your cousin Guy met frequently, and, from the constant allusion to the wonderful resemblance between them, your eccentric cousin, who, I must say, was never too select in his acquaintances, frequently amused himself by practical jokes upon their friends, which served still more to nurture the intimacy between them; and from this habit, Mr. Dudley Morewood, for such is his latest patronymic, must have enjoyed frequent ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... but chiefly in a hallucination that possesses him. He thinks that he is still the master of Lone as well as the Duke of Hereward. He thinks that he lives in London, and in the most Objectionable part of London, only to gratify my 'eccentric whim' of being a journalist. And he daily and hourly urges me to ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... stick!" exclaimed the eccentric man. "I'll not promise not to hide behind the fence, or something like that, though, Tom; ...
— Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon - or, The Longest Shots on Record • Victor Appleton
... him at fifty, in his fine hotel at Paris—a celebrity in politics and society. Dumas shows him in his old age, poor, self-exiled, and wellnigh forgotten by the world in which he had played so great a part. The brilliant and eccentric author of Henry III. was traveling in Switzerland in 1834, and on reaching Lucerne was informed that the hotel of The Eagle had the honor of sheltering no less a personage than one of his own literary idols—the great, the famous, the imposing M. de Chateaubriand. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... was! We ate it all by ourselves in the big empty restaurant, with half a dozen fascinated waiters eyeing us from the end of the room. They were probably speculating as to whether we were eccentric millionaires, or whether we had just escaped from some private lunatic asylum, but we were all far too cheerful to care what they thought. We ate, we drank, we laughed, we talked, with a reckless jubilant happiness that would have ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges
... morning, a protectionist champion presented himself, not in the guise either of a freeholder or farmer of the county, but in the person of a good-humoured, though somewhat eccentric printer, named Sparkhall, who had come from the celebrated locale of John Gilpin—Cheapside, and who having armed himself with a large blue bag fitted with elaborate treatises upon the corn laws, and among other pamphlets a recent number of Punch, ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... girls who were natives of Harlem. But he smiled at her, as though they were understanding friends, and once he said, but quietly, rather respectfully, "You have nice hair—soft." She lay awake to croon that to herself, though she denied that she was in love with this eccentric waster. ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... teachers like Hervey, Romaine, Cecil, Venn, Fletcher, Newton, and Thomas Scott. The fathers of the Evangelical school were men of naturally strong and vigorous understandings, robust and rugged, and sometimes eccentric, but quite able to cope with the controversialists, like Bishop Tomline, who attacked them. These High Church controversialists were too half-hearted and too shallow, and understood their own principles too imperfectly, ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... life the rich and eccentric possessor of acres sufficient to have made a duchy or a kingdom, and of money adequate to the maintenance of the dignity and power ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... not lost; and the amount—eighteen dollars—was right. The error was in making change. It was my own mistake. An eccentric old fellow, a farmer up in Martintown, had the money—the very same twenty dollar bill. He said he gave me a five dollar bill and I handed back the twenty dollar ...
— Under Fire - A Tale of New England Village Life • Frank A. Munsey
... in his time over the deserts and slept in Bedawee tents; one to whom the East is as a second mother, and in whose faith the Koran is necessary to really put the finishing touch to a true gentleman, sends us the following eccentric proverbs ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... was thus triumphant in his schemes of foreign policy and conquest, his domestic life was clouded with the deepest anxiety, in consequence of the declining health of the queen, and the eccentric conduct of his daughter, the infanta Joanna. We have already seen the extravagant fondness with which that princess, notwithstanding her occasional sallies of jealousy, doated on her young and handsome husband. [10] From the ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... would in the end turn out better than might have been expected, but above all, Krespel's generosity—which indeed cost him nothing—kept them all in good-humor. Thus were the difficulties overcome which necessarily arose out of this eccentric way of building, and in a short time there was a completely finished house, its outside, indeed, presenting a most extraordinary appearance, no two windows, etc., being alike, but on the other hand the interior ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... silly," snapped Lavinia. "My mamma says that way of hers of pretending things is silly. She says she will grow up eccentric." ...
— A Little Princess • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the part of Grayson. Most eccentric man," he continued. "Danby tells me—now really what a coincidence! Sir James, by all that is singular! Ah, my dear Sir James, I was thinking about you. Ah, Edgar, my boy, how ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... do your eccentric hay-makers prefer for the rest of their meals, if they lunch at three o'clock? I never heard anything ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... to be the Navy Yard, saw some English hulls, which had been built upon, and which, in spite of all this eccentric people could do to change their appearance, still looked ship-shaped. There were also some sharp-looking junks being built, which I was told were to be fitted out against the pirates; but, if what I afterwards learned be true, they were more likely to become piratical craft themselves; ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... is tawdry but cheerful; it is built entirely of wood, with an oil lamp fixed in the wall over the occasional table. The room is comfortably furnished, though in fussy and eccentric Victorian taste; stuffed birds, Highland cattle in oils, antimacassars, and wax fruit are unobtrusively in evidence. On the mantelpiece, an ornate chiming clock. The remains of breakfast on a ...
— Night Must Fall • Williams, Emlyn
... he was eccentric. People who are naturally queer or freakish are always hiding things. And I know it's silly of me, but I'm going to try ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... readiness into sterility and constraint, and renders his manner, by attending more to these details than to figures, dry and angular, which all comes from a wish to examine things too minutely; not to mention that very often he becomes solitary, eccentric, melancholy, and poor, as did Paolo Uccello. This man, endowed by nature with a penetrating and subtle mind, knew no other delight than to investigate certain difficult, nay, impossible problems of perspective, which, although they were ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... folks call an eccentric individual; feeling lonely in the world, and believing, from what I know of the laws of Hereditary Descent and your parents that you and your sister must possess the noblest natures; and believing that ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... of our club. First of all there was the argumentative and positive Jim Prior, who might properly be regarded as President of the club. Then came H.W. Fenno, Esq., the gentlemanly Treasurer of the National. He, however, seldom tarried after having once "put the party through." The eccentric "Old Spear" was generally present, seated in an obscure corner smoking a solitary cigar. Comical S.D. Johnson and his hopeful son George were usually on hand to enliven the scene; and so was Jim Ring, alias J. Henry, the best negro performer, next to Daddy Rice, in the United ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... was attempting a very extensive diversion, which, if successful, would have saved Valenciennes and the whole country beside. That eccentric personage, during the autumn and winter had been creating disturbances in various parts of the country. Wherever he happened to be established, there came from the windows of his apartments a sound of revelry and uproar. Suspicious characters in various costumes ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... pragmatical, foolish creature; and the more we look into him, the more we must despise him—Lords of the creation!—Who can forbear indignant laughter! When we see not one of the individuals of that creation (his perpetually-eccentric self excepted) but acts within its own natural and original appointment: is of fancied and self-dependent excellence, he is obliged not only for the ornaments, but for the necessaries of life, (that ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... of Freemasonry. I know of one highly-placed Persian gentleman who is a dervish, and also of a European gentleman of Oriental light and learning who has been admitted to the same order. A famous Prime Minister of Persia in past time, Haji Mirza Aghasi, was a well-known but rather eccentric dervish. My knowledge of this was the means, on one occasion, of averting a disagreeable display of violence by a gay sort of madcap, the relative of a post-house master, who had attached himself as groom to the stable ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon
... house, with a pitying shake of the head. He was not quite certain that he had done wisely, after all, in bringing his eccentric friend into the affair. He little reckoned how much more peculiarly Montague Shirley was to act for the remainder of ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... first day they met, Elma took most kindly to this new Miss Ewes, the strange and eccentric musical composer. The mistress of Dowlands was a distant cousin of Mrs. Clifford's own; so the family naturally had to call upon her at once; and Elma somehow seemed always to get on from the outset in a remarkable way with her mother's relations. At first, ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... the Hon. Montague Trimble; nothing better, apart from Mr. HARE's eccentric characters, has been seen on the stage for some considerable time. I hope the author is of the same opinion. Mr. FRED THORNE is capital as the Irish Member; and as Mrs. Hooley, an obtrusively Irish eccentricity of Thackerayan ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 5, 1891 • Various
... private school at Allesley, near Coventry, and in January, 1860, he went to Eton. There he boarded at the house of Mrs. Gulliver,[*] and was a pupil of William Johnson (afterwards Cory), a brilliant and eccentric scholar, whose power of eliciting and stimulating a boy's intellect has never ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... so suddenly dispersed. For one, and but one moment, they were all paralysed; no one attempted to get up and run away—then, as if by a simultaneous thought, they all threw themselves back, tossing their heels over their heads, and continuing their eccentric career. Mussulmen and Europeans all tumbled backwards, heels over heads, down the descent, diverging in every point of the compass, until they reached their respective situations at the bottom of the mount; while the cobra di capella ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... capacious receptacle of self. I do not claim for my father any peculiar quality in this respect, for I have often observed that many of those who (like giddy-headed horsemen that raise a great dust, and scamper as if the highway were too narrow for their eccentric courses, before they are fairly seated in the saddle, but who afterward drive as directly at their goals as the arrow parting from the bow), most indulge their sympathies at the commencement of their careers, are the most apt toward the close to get a proper command ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... said, "this cannot be true! You would not permit such an eccentric, uncivilized proceeding. Surely you will not offend our ...
— That Mother-in-Law of Mine • Anonymous
... Cagliostro with an accomplice of suitable depravity. In the course of his eccentric peregrinations among the continental cities, he had formed the acquaintance of a female, remarkable for her consummate loveliness and her boundless sensuality. Married to this Circe, the adventurer began to thrive ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... never been married," replied Mr. Forbes. "He is an elderly bachelor, and, I think is a bit lonely, now and then. But he is also a little eccentric. He desires no company, usually. It is most extraordinary that he should ask these girls. But I think he wants to see his two nieces, and he fears he cannot entertain them pleasantly unless they have other ...
— Two Little Women on a Holiday • Carolyn Wells
... There is an eccentric Mormon at Salt Lake City of the name of W.W. Phelps. He is from Cortland, State of New York, and has been a Saint for a good many years. It is said he enacts the character of the Devil, with a pea-green tail, in the Mormon initiation ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... apparatus. A stepped-back tier of white metal drawers flanked one side of the table, upon its various upper surfaces an array of gleaming surgeon's tools. In neat squads they lay there: long thin knives with straight and curved cutting edges; handled wires, curved into hooks and eccentric corkscrew shapes; scalpels of different sizes; forceps, clasps, retractors, odd metal claws, circular saw-blades and a variety of other unclassified instruments. Sterilizers were convenient to one side, a thin wraith of steam drifting up from them ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... those rumours to which local superstition has given rise. There is no reason whatever to suspect foul play, or to imagine that death could be from any but natural causes. Sir Charles was a widower, and a man who may be said to have been in some ways of an eccentric habit of mind. In spite of his considerable wealth he was simple in his personal tastes, and his indoor servants at Baskerville Hall consisted of a married couple named Barrymore, the husband acting as butler and the wife as housekeeper. Their ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... person eccentric: "Why does not his guardian angel look to him? He deserves one—may be ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... regard to my brother's most eccentric behaviour was doubtless correct,' she said. 'He wished to succour his wretched companion. Anywhere—it matters not to him what!—he allies himself with miserable mortals. He is the modern Samaritan. You should thank him for saving you an encounter ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to assent,—some fifteen thousand Scots were slain. True, her gallant general was no longer extant, though this was scarcely astounding when one considered the fact that he had voluntarily entered the melee quite unarmed. A touch of age, perhaps; Hastings was always an eccentric man: in any event, as epilogue, this Neville congratulated the Queen that—by blind luck, he was forced to concede,—her worthy secretary had made a prisoner of the Scottish King. Doubtless, Master Copeland was ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... particular reason for objecting to this fancy of his eccentric friend, he exchanged his soft cap for the sailor's straw hat, and they ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... MacDonald has been as successful here as in the earlier Independent Labour Party. But now the Labour Party having made Mr. MacDonald its chairman, it can do no more for him. He is but forty-five years old, his health is good, his talents are recognised; by his aversion from everything eccentric or explosive, the public have understood that he is trustworthy. We may expect to see Mr. Ramsay MacDonald a Cabinet Minister in a Liberal-Labour Government. It may even happen that he will become Prime Minister ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... the North, near the Canada line, there lived at that time an eccentric old man, whose name is still to be found here and there on the tattered parchments, written ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... nature was tested once while presiding over a party convention at Sonora for the nomination of candidates for legislative and county offices. Among the delegates was the eccentric John Vallew, whose mind was a singular compound of shrewdness and flightiness, and was stored with the most out-of-the-way scraps of learning, philosophy, and poetry. Some one proposed Vallew's name as a candidate for the Legislature. ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... furnished with less fleeting riches than many others. I was an incessant and indiscriminate reader of books. For the solid sciences I had no particular fancy, but with mental modes and habits, and especially with the eccentric and fantastic in the intellectual and spiritual operations, I was tolerably familiar. All the literature of the supernatural was as real to me as the laboratory of the chemist, where I saw the continual ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... a little curious that this eccentric old lady should have so well read his feelings towards Telly, but it pleased him just the same. When he had donned a suit of oilers, and Uncle Terry was pulling out of the little cove, Albert said, "That old lady is the most pious person I ever met, and with her it seems entirely sincere. ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... Abel—that there was something that Uncle Lawrence never talked about—many things indeed, of course, but still something in particular. Outside the family nothing was suspected. Lawrence Newt was simply one of those incomprehensibly pleasant, eccentric, benevolent men, whose mercantile credit was as good as Jacob Van Boozenberg's, but who perversely went his own way. One of these ways led to all kinds of poor people's houses; and it was upon a visit to the widow of the clergyman to whom Boniface Newt had given eight dollars ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... we will let Mr. Carlyle depict himself. Making allowance for some humorous play in describing a fellow-man so eccentric as his friend, Professor Teufelsdroeckh, this we think he does consciously and designedly in the fourth chapter of "Sartor Resartus," wherein, under the head of "Characteristics," he comments on the professor's Work on Clothes, and its effect ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... went in one direction, whilst Breaden and Warri took another. Before long, so complicated were the tracks, we separated. A more annoying job it is hard to imagine: round and round one goes following a track in all its eccentric windings, running off at right angles or turning back when its owner had chased a rat or a lizard; at length there is a long stretch of straight walking and one thinks, "Now, at last, he's done hunting and is making for home"; another disappointment follows ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... to Rose, very gently by her mistress, very gravely by her master, whether she would really be happy if she married this eccentric young gentleman with the band-box. Was it not possible that she might be happier with somebody rather less eccentric? And Rose replied that she knew her own mind; that she couldn't be happy at all with anybody else, ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... have yourself to thank for her having done so; did you never treat her with coldness, and repay her marks of affectionate interest with strange fits of eccentric humour?" ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... blue frock-coat? We've rubbed The newness off artistically. Worn With salt and pepper trousers, what a picture! We'll throw aside this heavy yellow stuff— Can Hamlet wear the clumsy clouts of Falstaff?— We'll pass to mantles, Prince. A splendid plaid, Demi-collar with simili-sleeves behind. Eccentric? Granted.—This, called the Rouliere: Sober, a large, Hidalgo-like effect; The very thing to woo a Dona Sol in. Excellent workmanship; a silver chain; the collar Of finest sable; made in our own workshops; Simple, but what a cut! The cut ...
— L'Aiglon • Edmond Rostand
... frocks are almost unbelievable. Why, one day when she was reading my palm, I noticed that her gown was drawn up a little on one side, and showed her petticoat beneath, with ruffles of Mechlin, real Mechlin on it. Some people say that she is a Spanish princess, or something of the kind—so eccentric that she tells fortunes just for the fun of it. Oh, Bobby, do, do ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... bound round with long blue ribbons fluttering in the wind; their dresses were dark-colored, open at the throat, revealing white embroidered chemisettes; their arms were bare to the elbow; and two enormous gold earrings of the most eccentric shape projected almost over their cheeks. Although in my voyage I tried to imitate Victor Hugo in admiring everything as a savage, I could not possibly persuade myself that this was a beautiful style ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... John Peter was eccentric, as all these later Nanjulians had been: a lean, stooping man, with a touch of breeding in his face, a weak mouth, and a chin dotted with tufts of gray hair which looked as if they had been affixed with gum and absent-mindedly. He was reputed to be a great reader, and ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... definite view of the eager youth who had been introduced to him in that ultra-legitimist salon. What Mills had learned represented him as a young gentleman who had arrived furnished with proper credentials and who apparently was doing his best to waste his life in an eccentric fashion, with a bohemian set (one poet, at least, emerged out of it later) on one side, and on the other making friends with the people of the Old Town, pilots, coasters, sailors, workers of all sorts. He pretended rather absurdly to be a seaman himself and ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... solid bodies which move in the sphere of the sun's activity, and that they describe an ellipsis so very eccentric, and so near to parabolas, that certain comets must take up above five hundred years ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... admitted against the right surface of the small piston, which it causes to effect an entire stroke corresponding to a half-revolution of the fly-wheel. The stroke completed, the slide-valve, actuated by an eccentric keyed to the driving shaft, returns backward and puts the cylinders, B and C, in communication. The steam then expands and drives the large piston to the right, so as to effect the second half of the fly-wheel's revolution. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... the Grand Lake, where, at the north end, is a great ledge of rock and sixty feet of water. There they stayed. All day long they ran about naked or swam; they were wanton, witch-like girls, liking eccentric ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... Arabian author enters on one of his digressions. Fearing, apparently, that the somewhat eccentric views of Mr. Somerset should throw discredit on a part of truth, he calls upon the English people to remember with more gratitude the services of the police; to what unobserved and solitary acts of heroism they are called; against what odds of numbers and of arms, and for ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... But I found traveling and living with such apparently unsympathetic creatures exasperating to a degree, and I did not wonder that the European whose lot had been cast in the interior, sometimes, on emerging into Western civilization, appears eccentric to his own countrymen. But ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... the concomitance of the relations existing between all the agents of gesture. This harmony is regulated by three states, namely: The tonic or eccentric state, the atonic or concentric state, and the normal state. It, therefore, remains for us to fix the three vital conditions of the static part of gesture. The vital condition of the static is based upon the knowledge of the nine ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... valley in the mountains, who shoots a gun which looks like the one for which I am searching. For a number of years this man of mystery, it seems, has been appearing and reappearing, according to Big Pete Darlinkel, my informant, but even Pete has never got in personal touch with this eccentric hermit. Neither have several detectives I have sent out there for that purpose. The detectives seem to be all right in towns or cities and are undoubtedly brave men, but something out there appears to frighten them ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... rogue is making game of us," said Poussin, coming close to the pretended picture. "I can see nothing here but a mass of confused color, crossed by a multitude of eccentric lines, making ...
— The Hidden Masterpiece • Honore de Balzac
... leaned in happier days, and lo! an avalanche of banknotes fell out of the much-maligned horse-hair, and the family was lifted from penury to wealth. Nothing more simple—or more natural. A prudent but eccentric ancestor had chosen this mode of putting by his savings, assured that, whenever discovered, the money ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... is first heard of in the 2nd century A.D., as an eccentric cult having many of the features of Christianity, especially the sense of Sin and the doctrine that the vicarious blood-shedding essential to remission must be connected with a New Baptismal Birth unto Righteousness. The Mithraists carried out this idea by the highly realistic ceremonies ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... getting there. The war was over long ago. A thousand things had happened of which he had not the remotest knowledge. And because he was a very normal, ordinary young man with a horror of anything queer and eccentric, the thought of that mysterious year filled him with dismay and roused in him a passionate longing to escape at once from everything which would remind him of his uncanny lapse of memory. If he were only back where ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... making no accusation," he interrupted; "indeed, I am more inclined to argue that they occupy an eccentric point within the circle rather than the true center. Still, we must not overlook one or two facts which you have duly emphasized in your report. The rivalry between Morrison and Farrell does supply, as you say, a motive for the ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... there, and had lived there for the past half-century. The prim, grey-haired, and somewhat eccentric old lady was a well-known figure to all on that country-side. Twice each Sunday, with her large-type Prayer-book in her hand, and her steel-rimmed spectacles on her thin nose, she walked to church, while she was one of the principal supporters of the village clothing-club and such-like ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... are now all adjusted so that they normally run concentric with the shaft, but weighted so that the center of gravity is slightly displaced from the center. The centrifugal strain due to this is balanced by helical springs. But when the speed increases the centrifugal force moves the ring into an eccentric position, when it strikes a trigger and releases a weight which, falling, closes the throttle and shuts off the steam supply. The basic principle upon which all these stops are designed is the same—the centrifugal force of a weight ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... doubted whether they fully realize the importance of the support which the extremists receive from outside India. I am not alluding to the moral countenance which the Hindu reaction has received from eccentric Americans and Europeans on the look out for any novel religious sensation, or which "advanced" politicians have derived from sympathetic members of Parliament and journalists in England[13], but ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... of "Brownsmith's Boy" embraces the home adventures of an orphan, who, having formed the acquaintance of an eccentric old gardener, accepts his offer of a home and finds that there is plenty of romance in a garden, and much excitement even in a journey now and then to town. In a half-savage lad he finds a friend who shows his love ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... a story so ardently that he almost made himself believe it: Some day, Mother and he would be crawling along the road and discover a great estate. The owner, a whimsical man, a lonely and eccentric bachelor of the type that always brightens English novels, would invite them in, make Father his steward and Mother his lady housekeeper. There would be a mystery in the house—a walled-off room, a sound of voices at night in dark corridors where ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... only one he liked. I've heard him talk in the queerest way; he once said to me: 'My dear fellow, never let your poor wife know what you're thinking of! But I didn't follow his advice; not I! An eccentric man! He would say to Phil: 'Whether you live like a gentleman or not, my boy, be sure you die like one! and he had himself embalmed in a frock coat suit, with a satin cravat and a diamond pin. Oh, quite an original, I ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... positively, of performance. Picking up a hat in the vestibule he came out with his friend, came downstairs, took his arm, affectionately, as to help and guide him, treating him if not exactly as aged and infirm, yet as a noble eccentric who appealed to tenderness, and keeping on with him, while they walked, to the next corner and the next. "You needn't tell me, you needn't tell me!"—this again as they proceeded, he wished to make Strether feel. What he needn't tell him was now ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... milk, Frank; and, as for that, I don't suppose that Mrs. Carbuncle can do me any harm. The man is a baronet, and the marriage would have been respectable. Miss Roanoke has been eccentric, and that has been the long and the short of it. What will be done, Frank, with all ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... can't help it; indirection is Walter's long suit," Mrs. Standish took up the tale. "First of all, you must know this aunt of ours is rather an eccentric—frightfully well off, spoiled, self-willed, and quite blind to her best interests. She's been a widow so long she doesn't know the meaning of wholesome restraint. She's got all the high knee-action of a thoroughbred ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... commercial metropolis act automatically and without any visible intervention of intelligence. For all that, their operations may be as essential as the other, in which the will-power sometimes gets into a deadlock, and sometimes telegraphs the most eccentric and incomprehensible orders. Puzzled by these contradictions, some philosophers have said that there may be somewhere outside of these two material centres another power that keeps affairs moving ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... mystification appeared on the broad brow of the waiter, but he was inured to eccentric gastronomic requests, and fulfilled this one with ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... quaint balcony staircase, like the approach to a Swiss chalet, leading down into the yard. In London these apartments were his sole domicile; though, to his friends, none of whom lived nearer to him than Bloomsbury, this seemed a piece of conduct too flagrantly eccentric—on a parity with his explanation of it, alleging necessity of living on the spot: an explanation somewhat droll, in the face of his constant lengthy absence, during the whole of the winter, when he handed ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... No more, it would seem, was the fascination. Rachel, indeed, owned to no such feeling, even in her inmost heart. But she did begin to blame herself, alike for her reception of advances which might well have been dictated by mere eccentric benevolence, and for her readiness now to put another construction upon them. And all this time she was threading the streets of Chelsea at a pace suggestive of a destination and a purpose, while in her mind she did nothing ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... yourself, Miss Van Arsdale; it is not among the possibilities that Mr. Grey has had any connection with this crime. He is an eccentric man, that's all." ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... newspapers during the past few months! the mysterious individual with whom Ganimard, our shrewdest detective, had been engaged in an implacable conflict amidst interesting and picturesque surroundings. Arsene Lupin, the eccentric gentleman who operates only in the chateaux and salons, and who, one night, entered the residence of Baron Schormann, but emerged empty-handed, leaving, however, his card on which he had scribbled these words: "Arsene Lupin, gentleman-burglar, ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... decoration; upon masses, not details; upon the use and shaping, not the ornamentation of features; and very few show half so plainly that mediaeval architects could realize this fact. We are too apt to think that Gothic art cannot be individual without being eccentric, or interesting without being heterogeneous ... but Salisbury is both grand and lovely, and yet it is quiet, rational, and all of a piece, clear and smooth, and refined to the point of utmost purity. No building in the world is more logical, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... that capacity, but as Sir Henry Thompson, certainly not the least distinguished surgeon of our day. In Lord Beaconsfield's last novel, 'Endymion,' we have a passing reference to one Wrentham lad, Sir Charles Wetherell, as 'the eccentric and too uncompromising Wetherell.' Assuredly the fame of another lad, Sir Henry Thompson, connected with ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... another semi-member of the household, to wit, Eradicate Sampson, an eccentric colored man, who owned a mule called Boomerang. Eradicate did odd jobs around the place, and the mule assisted his owner—that is when the mule ...
— Tom Swift Among The Diamond Makers - or The Secret of Phantom Mountain • Victor Appleton
... superstitions. It was on these roofs, too, that the planets were first maligned as wanderers, celestial tramps; and this gossip continued until recent years when at last it appeared that they are bodies of regular and irreproachable habits, eccentric in appearance only, doing a cosmic beat with a time-clock at each end, which they have never failed to ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... whether the fishing be open or closed, and a magistrate would feel as much aggrieved as anybody if the law were not laughed at when its observance would lay a penalty upon his stomach. At the hospitable board of this inn I made the acquaintance of a somewhat eccentric gentleman who lived alone in a large old house, where he pursued the innocent occupation of hatching pheasants with the help of hens. In almost every room there was a hen sitting upon eggs or leading about a brood of little pheasants. This gentleman was more sad than joyous, for he could not take ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... experts one turned out to be mad, the author of a monstrously absurd project; two were eccentric creatures. ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... No doubt, Ecelino used such things, and many worse, of which even the ingenuity of Signor P—— cannot conceive. But he is an eccentric man, loving the horrors of history, and what he can do to realize them he has done ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... that time the most skilful goldsmith in Paris, and also one of the most ingenious as well as one of the most eccentric men of the age. Rather small than great, but broad-shouldered and with a strong and muscular frame, Cardillac, although considerably more than fifty, still possessed the strength and activity of youth. And his ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... resort for sustaining life. When supplies have given out several Arctic explorers have had to resort to eating the bodies of their comrades. In the famous Wiertz Museum in Brussels is a painting by this eccentric artist in which he has graphically portrayed a woman driven to insanity by hunger, who has actually destroyed her child with a view to cannibalism. At the siege of Rochelle it is related that, urged by starvation, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... "An eccentric; bigoted, sullen and conceited," reflected Josie, in considering his character. "Capable of any cruelty or crime, but too cautious to render himself liable to legal punishment. The chances are that such a man would never do any great wrong, ...
— Mary Louise in the Country • L. Frank Baum (AKA Edith Van Dyne)
... feigning never to forgive her, watches over her in disguise, and acts as guardian angel to her reckless and sometimes brutal husband; and lastly, the other humours of a certain marvellously patient citizen who allows his wife to hector him, his customers to bully and cheat him, and who pushes his eccentric and unmanly patience to the point of enduring both madhouse and jail. Lamb, while ranking a single speech of Bellafront's very high, speaks with rather oblique approval of the play, and Hazlitt, though enthusiastic ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... when they predict at a given hour and place the passage of a comet, that most eccentric of celestial travelers? What do the naturalists think when they reveal the myriad forms of life concealed in a drop of water? Do they think they have invented what they see and that their microscopes and lenses make the law of nature? What ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... the pedantic young man of the house proposed to marry her. After this we discover that she has both a history and a will of her own. She leaves the Quakers, and goes as secretary to a lady who holds eccentric if broadminded views on every conceivable subject, and the change of atmosphere, however delightful in various ways, was too much for Margaret's peace of mind. The young Quaker was an obstinate wooer and followed her ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 2, 1917 • Various
... was a very shrewd observer and eccentric writer, and his narrative of his own life, and sketches of society in Ireland during his times, are exceedingly humorous and interesting."—N. Y. ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... my illness, a lovely bouquet of flowers had been left at my door. They came direct from the greenhouse, and were left without card, or sign of the giver. I had an eccentric little friend who was quite devoted to me, and was fond of keeping her left hand in darkest ignorance of the performances of its counterpart—the right hand—and I attributed this delicate and beautiful token of sympathy and affection to her; but, for some inexplicable reason, every morning ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... university. The boy had been all his life, as we have said already, brought up by his aunts (at Varvara Petrovna's expense) in a remote province, nearly six hundred miles from Skvoreshniki. As for Andreev, he was nothing more or less than our local shopkeeper, a very eccentric fellow, a self-taught archaeologist who had a passion for collecting Russian antiquities and sometimes tried to outshine Stepan Trofimovitch in erudition and in the progressiveness of his opinions. This worthy shopkeeper, with a grey beard and silver-rimmed spectacles, still ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... maid and went for a walk. As a companion Ottillie was certainly less congenial than the lofty and eccentric gentleman who had just taken his departure for Leipsic; but going out alone with a maid is such an eminently proper occupation for a young widow travelling abroad, that the knowledge that she was entirely above suspicion should have compensated ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... water. There are several methods available for operating the pins. The rising-holder bell may be made to actuate a train of wheels which terminate in a disc revolving horizontally on a vertical axis somewhere just below the catches; and this wheel may bear an eccentric pin which hits each catch as it rotates. Alternatively the carbide boxes may be made to revolve horizontally on a vertical axis by the movements of the bell communicated through a clutch; and thus each box in succession may arrive at a certain position where the catch is knocked aside by a fixed ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... her prim, high-throated gown, she represented—frankly—everything that he thought he most approved in woman. But nothing under the starry heavens at that moment could have forced him to lead her as a partner into that dazzling maelstrom of Mode and Modernity, because she looked "so horridly eccentric and conspicuous"—compared to the girls that he thought he ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... characters who are actually dangerous to society, a well-frequented watering-place generally exhibits for the amusement of the company, and the perplexity and amazement of the more inexperienced, a sprinkling of persons called by the newspapers eccentric characters—individuals, namely, who, either from some real derangement of their understanding, or, much more frequently, from an excess of vanity, are ambitious of distinguishing themselves by some striking peculiarity ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... often both wild and erroneous, his principles of action eccentric and strange, his views of life partial, and almost misanthropical; but not one opinion that he held could be stirred or modified by any worldly motive: he acted up to his principles of action; and, if any touch of misanthropy mingled with his view of mankind in general, ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... disappointed that his only son should choose to be what he called "an idler"—generous to a fault and always out of money, dressing in a careless and eccentric way, which both amused and annoyed his friends and caused him to be ridiculed by strangers, preferring to roam the streets of old Edinburgh scraping acquaintance with the fishwives and dock hands, rather than staying at home and mingling in the social circle to which ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... the seat of Lady Dowager Onslow, of whom the Princess purchased the whole property, was built by Mr. Bateman, uncle to the eccentric Lord Bateman. This gentleman made it a point in his travels to notice everything that pleased him in the monasteries abroad; and, on his return to England, he built this house; the bedchamber being contrived, like the cells of monks, with a refectory, and every ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 475 - Vol. XVII, No. 475. Saturday, February 5, 1831 • Various
... for her sake to do him the service he required. Of course I asked him to be seated, and assured him that I would do anything that lay in my power. Then he began talking about M. de Clinchain, and told me a funny story about that eccentric man and a little actress, when I heard a great noise in the anteroom. I was about to ring and inquire the cause, when the door flew open and in came Van Klopen, the ladies' tailor, with a very inflamed countenance. I thought ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... any suspicious craft had been seen lately, and, on hearing that a barque, flying British colours, had put in there only a day or two before, said that he had been sent out in chase of that barque, as she was commanded by a celebrated and rather eccentric pirate, ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... Coates, was awaiting me when I returned to the Abbey Inn. The postal deliveries in Upper Crossleys were eccentric and unreliable, but having glanced through the cuttings enclosed, I partook of a hasty lunch and sat down to the task of preparing a column for the Planet which should not deflect public interest from the known central figures in the tragedy ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... was very pleasant to be with Mary Datchet and to become, directly the door was shut, quite a different sort of person, eccentric and lovable, with scarcely any likeness to the self most people knew. He became less serious, and rather less dictatorial at home, for he was apt to hear Mary laughing at him, and telling him, as she was fond of doing, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... fairly judged by its more grotesque expression. Beneath the rough surface he was a man not only of very vigorous intellect and great learning, but of sincere piety, a very warm heart, unusual sympathy and kindness, and the most unselfish, though eccentric, generosity. Fine ladies were often fascinated by him, and he was no stranger to good society. On himself, during his later years, he spent only a third part of his pension, giving away the rest to ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... cooled, there would be no equinoctials or storms resulting from changes on one part of the surface from intense heat to intense cold; every part would have a twelve-hour day and night, and none would be turned towards or from the sun for six months at a time; for, however eccentric the orbit, we should keep the axis absolutely straight. At perihelion there would simply be increased evaporation and clouds near the equator, which would shield those regions from the sun, only to disappear again as the earth receded. "The only trouble," said Cortlandt, "is that we should have ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... breath of poesy, to the patriarchal purity of its views. But these pearls are not strung upon one string, they are not arranged in a complete system. They are imbedded here and there, in gay variety, in a vast mass of heterogeneous opinions and sentiments naive at times and at times eccentric. The reader becomes aware of the thoughts before they are consolidated. They are still in a fluid, mobile state, still in process of making. The same vivacious, versatile spirit is revealed in the Midrashim literature, directly continuing the Agada up to the end of the middle ages. These two ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... dullest had to admit that his elocution was excellent, and the manner of speech is keenly appreciated in America. In some of the Eastern towns, in New York especially, he had a certain success, the success of sensation and of novelty, such success as every large capital gives to the strange and eccentric. ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... singular audacity. She revealed them only to a small circle of intimates; most of the people who frequented her house had no startling theories to maintain, and regarded their hostess as a good-natured, rather eccentric woman, who loved society and understood how to amuse ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... in the counsels of the king, Frederick William IV, and at important moments exercised an influence on his political decisions. Yet that somewhat eccentric prince could not resist his inclination to make cheap jokes at Strauss's expense. After creating him court-chaplain, he said to Alexander von Humboldt: "A trick in natural history which you cannot copy! I have turned an ostrich (Strauss) into a bullfinch (Dompfaffer)"—in ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of Otis was waning. He had always been eccentric and unreliable, and now his intellect was threatened. An assault upon him had nearly ruined both his health and his reason. But his place had been taken by others. Samuel Adams, John Adams, Joseph Warren, and John Hancock were the men whose names were oftenest ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... first cab we found. We tossed for it, and he won, for which I thank the gods. Then, acting on the impulse of the moment, I came back to say something to you. A very unusual—very eccentric thing to do, no doubt. But when something involving great issues has to be done or said, I think the best plan is not to wait for a favourable opportunity. Don't you ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... says, indifferent honest, and at least not worse than an infidel in loving those of my own house. And I think that generally speaking, authors, like actors, being rather less commonly believed to be eccentric than was the faith fifty years since, do conduct themselves as amenable to the ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... aroused from the momentary shock caused by the revelation of this eccentric apartment by an unknown nauseous flavour in my mouth. I realised it was the cigarette to which I had helped myself from the beautifully chased silver casket I had taken from the mantelpiece. I eyed the thing and concluded it was made of the very cheapest tobacco, ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... of that party, has made us tolerably familiar with the men who composed it. They were a band of eccentric and mischievous spirits, bold of heart, ready of hand, and of boundless fidelity to one another. Professing to hold the most outrageous maxims, incessantly invoking Brutus and old Rome, and intermingling gallant with political intrigues, they suffered themselves to ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... little mind been so intensely delighted; but the manifestations of that delight were more suddenly terminated than commenced; for in the midst of his eccentric capers he, too, suddenly disappeared into the earth as if swallowed up by an earthquake! His misfortune was similar to that which had befallen his companion. Two pitfalls had been constructed close together, and Swartboy now ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... were informed that Mr. Thessaly was abroad. When he entertained, his guests arrived from whence no one knew, but usually in opulent cars, and thereby departed no one knew whither. Lower Charleswood was patient, for great men are eccentric; but in time Lower Charleswood to its intense astonishment and mortification realised that Jules Thessaly was not interested in "the county." Lower Charleswood beheld itself snubbed, but preferred to hide its wounds from the world, ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... good, but it is not remarkable. It will never overtake your intelligence. You have a fine power of work, but you are not by nature a student. You are not by nature, I think, a pianist. You would never find yourself. In the effort to do so, I'm afraid your playing would become warped, eccentric." He threw back his head and looked at his pupil intently with that one eye which sometimes seemed to see deeper than any two eyes, as if its singleness gave it privileges. "Oh, I have watched you very carefully, Miss Kronborg. Because you had ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... the gangue has not been crushed too fine, I think the Duncan pan will usually be found effective in saving the concentrates. In theory it is an enlargement of the alluvial miner's tin dish, and the motion imparted to it is similar to the eccentric motion ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... additional lots were received from one Christopher Hughes, and in the following year the entire estate was assigned by Rachel Stevenson to Charles Francis Adrian le Paulmier, Chevalier d'Amour, the French consul, the eccentric Frenchman, and the perpetuator of ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... "We are going away from the sun you know. Mars is not as close to it as we are on our planet—I mean the one we have just left—is ninety-two millions of miles from the sun, while Mars is one hundred and forty-one millions of miles away, though its orbit is so eccentric that distance varies about thirteen millions of miles. That is, it may be thirteen millions of miles more than its mean, or average, distance, so that at times it is as far away from the sun as one hundred ...
— Through Space to Mars • Roy Rockwood
... if I learn anything positive, Thad," he merely said; "and in the meantime we'll keep tabs on Brother Lu's eccentric actions, hoping to catch him off his guard," and later on Thad realized that these last words were ...
— The Chums of Scranton High Out for the Pennant • Donald Ferguson
... a character,—so eccentric! But really, I suppose, very hard to live with. It must have been quite a release for ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... his powers, Erik Dorn had become a startling, fascinating figure in the new world he had entered. The flattery of men almost as clever as himself, the respect, appreciation of political, literary, and vaguely social circles, of stolid men and eccentric acquaintances, were continually visited upon him. He was a personality, a figure to enliven dinner parties, throw a glamour and a fever into the enervated routine ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... of whatever is practically disappointing, of whatever is useless, of whatever is lying and unreliable, of whatever is unverifiable and unsupported, of whatever is inconsistent and contradictory, of whatever is artificial and eccentric, of whatever is unreal in the sense of being of no practical account. Here are pragmatic reasons with a vengeance why we should turn to truth—truth saves us from a world of that complexion. What wonder that its very name awakens loyal feeling! In particular ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... of the world holds most of such men as Magus, strange beings with a strange religion in their heart of hearts. The London "eccentric" always finds that worship, like life, brings weariness and satiety in the end; the Parisian monomaniac lives cheerfully in concubinage with ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... inquiries about the eccentric gentleman. Only when the subject was exhausted did he speak of his own concerns, relating quietly what he had learnt from ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... the headship of one Moises, fellow of Peterhouse. His predecessor had been Dawes, the well-known author of the "Miscellanea Critica"—an able scholar, but only an additional example of the frequent insufficiency of scholars to teach. Dawes was eccentric, and injured the reputation of the school. His predominant propensity while in Newcastle was bell-ringing. On his leaving that place he adopted a new taste, that of rowing. If Moises had any peculiar taste, it seems to have ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... still-room maid, and the embarrassment caused by her eagerness to learn the philosophy of "eujanics," were full of promise. It was confirmed by the appearance of Mr. AINLEY, whose manner reminded us of his many triumphs in the art of eccentric detachment. His part—the title-role—was that of Sir Geoffrey's faithful butler, on such familiar, though respectful, terms with his master that the two sipped port together in the former's room in broad daylight while discussing family matters. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various
... unprepared to meet them. He shut himself up in his chateau, and there, far from the pleasures for which he pined, far from the friends who had forgotten him, cursing God and man for his misfortunes, he lapsed into a misanthropy that rendered him nervous and eccentric almost to madness. He lived twenty years in this way, apparently taking no pleasure or interest in his son, whose youth was gloomy and whose education was entrusted entirely to the cure of a neighboring village. He died in 1765, ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... of the opinion that it is too exalted to need his worship. Moreover, he contends that the gods do not trouble themselves about mankind. This is, of course, not atheism in our sense; but Aristodemus's attitude is, nevertheless, extremely eccentric in a community like that of Athens in the fifth century. And yet it is not mentioned as anything isolated and extraordinary, but as if it were something which, to be sure, was out of the common, ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... trunks, or you sit in golden swings over a lake while swans swim with the food on trays on their backs—I am exaggerating, of course, but you know what I mean. Valerie says all that is in shocking taste, which of course it is. She never has anything eccentric, only splendid presents at her cotillons, and all the diplomats from Washington come over, and the whole tone of her house is exactly as it is at home, except that many of them are brighter and more amusing than ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... wonderful cup and saucer were brought, and they caused a diversion so complete that Mr. Smith and his eccentric move were not named again during the visit. Nor, indeed, much after it. "What is the use of discussing a hopelessly disagreeable subject?" said Eleanor to Alice's first offer of sympathy. To tell the truth, the mere ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... persons attached to you, which you will find no difficulty in doing, that the following classes of letters are destroyed—first, those that are inequitable; next, those that are contradictory; then those expressed in an eccentric or unusual manner; and lastly, those that contain reflexions on anyone. I don't believe all I hear about these matters, and if, in the multiplicity of your engagements, you have let certain things escape you, now is the time ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... Wernerian Society brought him into relation with that excellent ornithologist the elder Macgillivray, and enabled him to see and hear Audubon. Moreover, he got lessons in bird-stuffing from a negro, who had accompanied the eccentric traveller Waterton in his wanderings, before ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... at the present moment recall what the General's Christian name was. But I have no doubt he had one. He was eccentric, I admit. But only in later years. And that was the result of the Indian climate, and marriage, and indigestion, and other things of ...
— The Importance of Being Earnest - A Trivial Comedy for Serious People • Oscar Wilde
... foremost, therefore, on Platonic love, then on all dogmatizing philosophy, especially its two extremes of Stoicism and Pythagoreanism. Furthermore, he works implacably against religious fanaticism, and against all that to reason appears eccentric. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... comrades. They never suspected that under the rough exterior of this man, who attended the lectures so regularly, driving up in a capacious rustic sledge, drawn by a couple of horses, something almost childlike was concealed. They thought him an eccentric sort of pedant, and they made no advances towards him, being able to do very well without him. And he, for his part, avoided them. During the first two years he passed at the university, he became intimate with no one except ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... comprehensive language of Rawlins and that was doubtless strengthened by Mr. Lincoln, whose homely but astute reasoning convinced him that the better and safer line of operations was overland against Lee's army wherever it might be encountered, and not through a widely eccentric movement by water to a secondary base on the James ...
— Heroes of the Great Conflict; Life and Services of William Farrar - Smith, Major General, United States Volunteer in the Civil War • James Harrison Wilson
... lost; and the amount—eighteen dollars—was right. The error was in making change. It was my own mistake. An eccentric old fellow, a farmer up in Martintown, had the money—the very same twenty dollar bill. He said he gave me a five dollar bill and I handed back the twenty dollar ...
— Under Fire - A Tale of New England Village Life • Frank A. Munsey
... his arm protectingly around her, and said gently: "Poor child; it is cruel to make you suffer so. But rest assured Dr. Hartwell will never wound your feelings. I have heard that he was a very stern and eccentric man, though a remarkably learned one, yet I confess there is something in his manner which fascinates me, and if you will only be like yourself he will always speak kindly to you. But I am staying too long. Don't look so forlorn and ghostly. Positively I hate ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... to go to school," said her aunt. "Don't be eccentric. It isn't fashionable. I suppose you wish Clarence to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... which seemed to contradict the general impression that he was but a free-lance or a bushwhacker and operated on his own responsibility. The impression increased the terror his name excited throughout the countryside with his high-handed and eccentric methods of warfare, and perhaps he would not have resented it if he were ...
— The Raid Of The Guerilla - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... is probably safe to say that no denomination of Christians, however anti-prelatical or eccentric, would for a moment dream of adopting it, if, indeed, there be a single local congregation anywhere that could be persuaded to employ it. The characteristic of the devotions is lengthiness. The opening sentence of the prayer ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... that sort of recognition which is the subtlest form of flattery age can offer. Mr Smith seized opportunities to approach him on deck. His remarks were sometimes weird and enigmatical. He was doubtless an eccentric old gent. But from that to calling his son-in-law (whom he never approached on deck) nasty names behind his back ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... glad to avert what was uncommonly near a scuffle, even at the price of the captain's drunken ill-will. I do not think I have ever heard quite so much vile language come in a continuous stream from any man's lips before, though I have frequented eccentric company enough. I found some of it hard to endure, though I am a mild-tempered man; but, certainly, when I told the captain to "shut up" I had forgotten that I was merely a bit of human flotsam, cut off from my ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... district. Boys, it is true, are always a source of pleasure to the humorist and the scientific observer of mankind. They are scarcely our fellow-creatures, so to speak; they live in a world of their own, ruled by eccentric traditional laws. They have their own heroes, and are much more interested in Mr. Alan Steel or Lohmann than in persons like Mr. Arthur Balfour, whose cricket is only middling. They have rules of ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... Coulson was a Senior Fellow of University College. Lord Stowell informed me that he was very eccentric. He would on a fine day hang out of the college windows his various pieces of apparel to air, which used to be universally answered by the young men hanging out from all the other windows, quilts, carpets, rags, and every kind of trash, and this was ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... may see a joke when no one else sees it; he may see the point and avoid it. But wit is a sword; it is meant to make people feel the point as well as see it. All honest people saw the point of Mark Twain's wit. Not a few dishonest people felt it." The epigram, "Be virtuous, and you will be eccentric," has become a catchword; and everyone has heard Mark Twain's reply to the reporter asking for advice as to what to cable his paper, which had printed the statement that Mark Twain was dead "Say that the statement is greatly exaggerated." He has admirably ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... political life. Because we have insisted upon looking at government as a frame and governing as a routine, because in short we have been static in our theories, politics has such an unreal relation to actual conditions. Feckless—that is what our politics is. It is literally eccentric: it has been centered mechanically instead of vitally. We have, it seems, been seduced by a fictitious analogy: we have hoped for machine regularity when we needed human initiative and leadership, when life was crying that its inventive abilities ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... very eccentric," she remarked, departing from the subject. "I offered to bring her home with me in the carriage. I knew you would not mind the extra money. She has such a cold that I really wondered that she came at all in such a storm; ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... but feel a little upset by this tirade. Only that it was spoken by a seeming madman, he would have put it down to some eccentric exhibition of Scottish humour or impudence; but the gravity of the message—for it seemed nothing else—made such a reading impossible. He was, however, determined not to give in to ridicule, and although he had not yet seen anything ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... confess that the character of the Yellow-Crested Chat is a mystery to me. While listening to his strange medley and watching his peculiar actions, we are certainly justified in calling him eccentric, but that there is a method in his madness no one who ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [December, 1897], Vol 2. No 6. • Various
... Keimer a very eccentric looking individual, in a small office, with an old dilapidated press, and with a few worn-out types. He asked the young man a few questions, put a composing stick into his hands, and professed himself satisfied with his work. He then told Franklin that he could find no work for him immediately, ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... animal, there's a Monkey, which I am sure—(To himself, as Miss G. turns away indignantly). This Monkey doesn't seem very popular—there must be someone here who—I'll try the American Lady—they are generally eccentric. (To Mrs. HEBER K. BANGS.) I hope Fortune has been kind ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 10, 1892 • Various
... majority in their yielding to what we must believe to be a prejudice of party spirit, which has carried then even to the extent of intimating that the Secretary of the Treasury was party to the pranks of an eccentric woman who dropped a parcel of letters to set the local politicians of New Orleans agog—a woman who was called before the committee a long time as a witness, but who was neither called, examined, nor cross-examined ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... exclusiveness is wholly unknown. It is a society which includes every actor, whether he be Benedict or Hamlet, or the Ghost, or the Bandit, or the court-physician, or, in the one person, the whole King's army. He may do the "light business," or the "heavy," or the comic, or the eccentric. He may be the captain who courts the young lady, whose uncle still unaccountably persists in dressing himself in a costume one hundred years older than his time. Or he may be the young lady's brother in the white gloves and ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... is a cherishing warmth in the glory of light that surrounds the throne of Exhaustless Benevolence, and that the Deity cannot be worthily called upon by young hearts stricken by degrading fears, and fainting under a Moloch-inspired dread. Notwithstanding my eccentric life, I have ever been the ardent, the unpretending, though the unworthy adorer of the Great Being, whose highest attribute is the "Good." I have had reason ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... for a moment, then held it above the level of my face, and found I could read it quite easily. I struck a column of mean little advertisements. "A gentleman of private means is willing to lend money," I read. I knew that gentleman. Then somebody eccentric wanted to sell a Cutaway bicycle, "quite new and cost 15 pounds," for five pounds; and a lady in distress wished to dispose of some fish knives and forks, "a wedding present," at a great sacrifice. No doubt some simple soul was sagely examining these ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... master-spirit." But the very familiarity which their mighty fame has bred in us makes us indifferent; we grow weary of what every one is supposed to have read; and we take down something which looks a little eccentric, some worthless book, on the mere ground that we never heard ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... "Enough of him. Seems eccentric. I have to see a lot of buggy people. They don't take me in any more. But I'm keeping you and I'm in ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... his magnificent villa outside Florence. It was common knowledge that he had, during the war, invested a level million sterling in the War Loan, while he was constantly giving great donations to various charities. Somewhat eccentric, he preferred living abroad to spending his time in England, because, it was said, of some personal quarrel with another Member of the House of Commons which had arisen over a debate soon after he ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... as a Scotch terrier. At that time I was living in that blind alley of the Doyenne, now destroyed, where Gerard de Nerval, Arsene Houssaye and Camille Rogier were the heads of a little picturesque and artistic Bohemia, the eccentric mode of life in which has been so well told by others that it is unnecessary to relate it over again. There we were, right in the centre of the Carrousel, as independent and solitary as on a desert island in Oceanica, under the shadow of the Louvre, among the blocks of stone and the ...
— My Private Menagerie - from The Works of Theophile Gautier Volume 19 • Theophile Gautier
... the rich and eccentric possessor of acres sufficient to have made a duchy or a kingdom, and of money adequate to the maintenance of the dignity and power ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... is instantly netted and translated to the gridiron. The survivors, none the wiser, continue to steamboat about, intent on their own dinners, flashing their colors as they turn their armored sides in and out of the light. Eccentric nature has fitted these prototypes of navigation with all the modern improvements. Double and even triple sets of screws are common things in tails, and sometimes the fins, too, are duplex. As for me, I ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... him win his walk against Wood at Newmarket. (See Angelo's 'Reminiscences' (1837), vol. ii. pp. 37-44.) In July, 1809, Barclay completed his task of walking a thousand miles in a thousand hours, at the rate of one mile in each and every hour. (See, too, for an account of Barclay, 'The Eccentric ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... One eccentric gentleman of my acquaintance persists in predicting that any day there may be a general blow-up, and the whole concern, engineers, financiers, priests, soldiers, and flunkies, all go to smash. He evidently wishes to see it, though, as far as personal comfort goes, one would ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... expectations concerning him in such a funny fashion that Agatha was ready to die with laughing, and even Anne, who had insisted on having the children about her, was heard to laugh sometimes. She let little Brian climb about her sofa, and answered all sorts of eccentric questions from the others, never seeming weary. At last, when the sound of merry, young voices had died out of the house, and its large, lofty rooms grew solemn with the wailing of the wind, Anne had retreated to her dressing-room, ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... students. "In you, mademoiselle," he added in a tone yet lower, "I find the woman and the artist divorced. That is a vast advantage—an immense source of power. I am growing more certain of you; you are not merely cleverly eccentric as I thought. You have a great deal that no one can teach you. You have finished that—I wish to take it downstairs to show the men. It will not be jeered at, ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... the end of last season, the young and eccentric Earl of B-gn-gge laid a wager of twenty-five thousand pounds with a broken sporting patrician, the dashing Marquis of M-rt-ng-le, that he would pass a week under the roof of a celebrated and lovely young ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... in turn through the hollow crankshaft to the connecting-rod big ends and thence through small tubes, already noted, to the small end bearings. The oil pump has four pistons and two double valves driven from a single eccentric shaft on which are mounted four eccentrics. The pump is continuously submerged in oil; in order to avoid great variations in pressure in the oil lines there is a piston operated pressure regulator, cut in between the pump and the ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... remarkable speeches of that day was made by a young man, whose eccentric career was destined to amaze Europe. This was Charles Mordaunt, Viscount Mordaunt, widely renowned, many years later, as Earl of Peterborough. Already he had given abundant proofs of his courage, of his capacity, and of that strange unsoundness of mind which made ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... gun was raised to give it a shot, but its movements were so eccentric, that the best marksman would have found it a difficult task by daylight; there in the shadowy darkness it would have ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... Menton) around Cap Martin, up the mountain to old Sainte-Agnes, in the gorge of Saint-Louis, along the Boulevard du Garavan, and out to the Giardino Hanbury. You say giardino instead of jardin because Mortola is just across the Italian frontier. The eccentric Englishman chose this spot, without regard to political sovereignty present or future, as the best place to demonstrate the catholicity of the Riviera climate to tropical flora. I simply mention these drives; for you do not ride at Menton any more than you walk. The ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... the pleasant and eccentric details of these authors and actors, but leave it to the imagination of the intelligent reader to know what a crowd of brilliant bohemians might do in the evening of life talking, laughing and drinking to the memory of friends and ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... possessing it. She found her fate in an Englishman, who was the father of her only child, a daughter. She thought she had met in him a hero, a demi-god, a being of deep passion and original and creative mind; but he was only a voluptuary, full of violence instead of feeling, and eccentric, because he had great means with which he could gratify extravagant whims. Stella found she had made the great and irretrievable mistake. She had exchanged devotion for a passionate and evanescent fancy, prompted at first ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... I have just told you these lies?" She appealed to the prince, of a sudden, with the most childlike candour, and with the laugh still trembling on her lips. "Because when one tells a lie, if one insists on something unusual and eccentric—something too 'out of the way'' for anything, you know—the more impossible the thing is, the more plausible does the lie sound. I've noticed this. But I managed it badly; I didn't know how to work it." She suddenly ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... spilt milk, Frank; and, as for that, I don't suppose that Mrs. Carbuncle can do me any harm. The man is a baronet, and the marriage would have been respectable. Miss Roanoke has been eccentric, and that has been the long and the short of it. What will be done, Frank, with all the presents that ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... the hunter Woodley at once tightened rein, coming to a stop under the shadow of the roadside trees. Sitting in his saddle he watched the midnight wanderer, whose eccentric movements continued to cause him surprise. He saw the latter walk on to the little woodland cemetery, take stand by the side of a grave, bending forward as if to read the epitaph on its painted slab. Soon after kneeling down ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... it's rather good." Rosamond's interest was plainly forced. "Constance is getting on with them, is she? I must see them in the morning. How do you like her? I suppose you have heard that she is very eccentric. She refused to live in a perfect palace with an aunt of hers, merely because the aunt objected to her going to life class. Fancy her giving up such a life ...
— Miss Pat at Artemis Lodge • Pemberton Ginther
... were all together: David Wilmot, of Pennsylvania, then famous as the author of the "Provsio," short and corpulent in person, and emphatic in speech; Preston King, of New York, with his still more remarkable rotundity of belt, and a face beaming with good humor; the eccentric and witty "Jo Root," of Ohio, always ready to break a lance with the slave-holders; Charles Allen, of Massachusetts, the quiet, dignified, clear-headed and genial gentleman, but a good fighter and the unflinching enemy of slavery; Charles Durkee, of Wisconsin, ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... official had a moment of doubt. But he reflected that one is not a great artist without being eccentric; and his ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... this story of the Persian. I wanted, if there were still time, to find this valuable and eccentric witness. My luck began to improve and I discovered him in his little flat in the Rue de Rivoli, where he had lived ever since and where he died five months after my visit. I was at first inclined to be suspicious; but when the Persian had told me, with child-like candor, all that he knew ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... horizontally, appended by leathern thongs, covered with quills, which, when they move, make a round rattling noise, almost equal to that of many small bells. It seems doubtful, however, whether this part of their garb be intended to strike terror in war, or is only to be considered as belonging to their eccentric ornaments on ceremonious occasions. For we saw one of their musical entertainments, conducted by a man dressed in this sort of cloak, with his mask on, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... pattern to the contents, clothing a Quaker work or a book of sermons in sober drab, poetry in some flowery design, and sometimes contriving a sly piece of satire at the contents of some well-known author by their choice of its covering. One considerable convenience attended this eccentric mode of binding—the book became as well known by its dress as by its contents, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... these states the poet is the equable man, Not in him but off him things are grotesque, eccentric, fail of their full returns. ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... his having come to India two boats earlier than the Inspector, drew Rs. 500 a month more than he did, this being the Senior Inspector's Allowance. That he was reported on as lazy, eccentric, and irregular, made no difference to the fact that he was a fortnight senior to, and therefore worth Rs. 500 a month more than, the next man. The recipient regarded the extra trifle (L400 a year) as his bare right and merest due. The Inspector regarded it as an infamous piece of injustice and ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... them at intervals, weighted down with the dust; but again it rippled like a sail when an eccentric gust swept away ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... play the fool, make a fool of oneself, commit an absurdity. Adj. ridiculous, ludicrous; comical; droll, funny, laughable, pour rire, grotesque, farcical, odd; whimsical, whimsical as a dancing bear; fanciful, fantastic, queer, rum, quizzical, quaint, bizarre; screaming; eccentric &c. (unconformable) 83; strange, outlandish, out of the way, baroque, weird; awkward &c. (ugly) 846. extravagant, outre, monstrous, preposterous, bombastic, inflated, stilted, burlesque, mock heroic. drollish; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... of teachers like Hervey, Romaine, Cecil, Venn, Fletcher, Newton, and Thomas Scott. The fathers of the Evangelical school were men of naturally strong and vigorous understandings, robust and rugged, and sometimes eccentric, but quite able to cope with the controversialists, like Bishop Tomline, who attacked them. These High Church controversialists were too half-hearted and too shallow, and understood their own principles too imperfectly, to be a match for antagonists who were in deadly earnest, and put them ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... interesting and lively family, and after a preliminary half-hour of painful politeness, they thawed over schoolroom tea, and adopted her into their midst. Monty, the eldest, was an eccentric, clever lad in spectacles, fond of making scientific and chemical experiments, which generally ended in odours that caused the others to hold their noses and open the schoolroom windows, top and bottom. He had a philosophical mind and a ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... he was sadly in need of money. It was fortunate that his old friend, Mr. Harrison, Margie's dead father, had taken it into his head to plight his daughter's troth to him while she was yet a child. Mr. Harrison had been an eccentric man; and from the fact that in many points of religious belief he and Mr. Paul Linmere agreed, (for both were miserable skeptics,) he valued him above all other men, and thought his daughter's happiness would be secured by the union he ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... first began to fall into her fatal habit? He was not in reality thinking of her at all, but her conscience pricked her, though her pride kept her silent. It was such an unheard-of course for a person in her station, that none but fanatics could expect her to take it. Quixotic, irrational, eccentric, visionary, were words that flitted incoherently through her brain; but her tongue refused to utter them. Was Christ then so prudent, so cautious, so anxious to secure innocent indulgences and to grasp worldly ...
— Brought Home • Hesba Stretton
... have to do some time or other, Lady Mary," observed Mr. Cottrell, "unless you are setting up as an 'eccentric.' By-the-bye, Miss Sylla, of course you will see Beauchamp at Prince's. Tell him I have heard of a park hack worth his looking at. He was wanting one the ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... repress character, it also tends to harmonize it by the preventing of excess development of certain traits. The social person is on the whole well balanced, though he may be mediocre. On the other hand, the non-social person usually tends to unbalance in the sense that he becomes odd and eccentric. ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... differences, particularly during the time of the fifth Lord Byron, of eccentric and unsocial manners, suffered and even aided the dilapidations of time. The castellated stables and offices are, however, yet ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... as our woman-hater does, but I notice a few things about them; and one is, that their eccentricities all give way at the first offer of marriage. I believe they are only adopted in desperation, to get married. What beautiful woman is ever eccentric? catch her! she can get a husband without. That doctress will prescribe Harrington a wedding-ring; and, if he swallows it, it will be her last prescription. She will send out for the family doctor after ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... entresol at Didier's which was superbly styled the "Salle des Banquets." Fanchette and one or two of her colleagues being of the party, I fear we behaved in a disreputable manner. If Melford had looked on it would have blushed to the top of its decorated spire. We put the table aside and danced eccentric quadrilles. We shouted roystering songs. When Cazalet tried to sing a solo we held him down and gagged him with his own sandals. We flirted in corners. A goodly portion of Rosaria, a Spanish model born and bred in the Quartier Saint-Antoine, we washed in red wine. It was a memorable evening. ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... opportunity of hearing the particulars.' And, finally, Mrs. Bryanstone had heard of Miss Gardner's marriage with one of the Fotheringhams of Worthbourne, and only wanted Mrs. Martindale to strengthen her in the belief that it was the dear, eccentric Crusader. ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... been seen riding in Henry Dunbar's carriage, and from that moment he had become invested with a romantic interest. He was a reduced gentleman, who had seen better days; or he was a miser, perhaps—an eccentric individual, who wore shabby boots and shiny hats for ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... speech than the other she had more in affairs. While theoretically supporting this plan she did not commit herself to it. She knew how slender as yet was her hold upon the society she courted, and she would not risk an eccentric move. Her boat was still in shallow water, with hardly buoyancy enough to float a solitary occupant; if she should undertake to carry Mrs. Frankland, it would probably go fast aground. What she said to Mrs. Frankland with superficial ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... his own account to be making a very good income, too! Yet, artists being such eccentric, extravagant fellows, doubtless Nancy's modest little fortune would come in useful—so those about them ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... abetted the riots in Scotland. Of all men in the world Lord George Gordon was the most unfit to preside over a Protestant Association. He was a member of parliament it is true, but he was chiefly remarkable there for his eccentric habits, slovenly dress, and by a progressive insanity, which on some occasions partook of the nature of oratorical inspiration. He was, however, known to be firm in his hatred towards the Papists, and adverse to any relief being afforded to them. Thus, in May, 1779, when Burke presented his ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... the Devil's Ring—a sort of miniature Stonehenge in fact. I had seen it several times, and happened to have been present not long ago at a meeting of an archaeological society when its origin and purpose were discussed. I remember that one learned but somewhat eccentric gentleman read a short paper upon a rude, hooded bust and head that are cut within the chamber of a tall, flat-topped cromlech, or dolmen, which stands alone in the centre ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... communicate the fact to her legal adviser, on his representing to her that he must know, with an eye to the latitude of his defence, how the fact stood about that child. Put the case that, at the same time he held a trust to find a child for an eccentric rich lady ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... surprise no one, it did not appear to surprise Sir Rupert, if such an education made Helena Langley what ill-natured people called a somewhat eccentric young woman. Brought up on a manly system of education, having a man for her closest companion, learning much of the world at an early age, naturally tended to develop and sustain the strongly marked individuality of her character. Now, at three-and-twenty, ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... blind and unconscious way, enforcing the lesson that Price and Priestley had in mind. For the moment, they were unsuccessful. Cartwright, with his Constitutional Societies, might capture the support of an eccentric peer like the Duke of Richmond; but the vast majority remained, if irritated, unconvinced. It needed the realization that the new doctrines were part of a vaster synthesis which swept within its purview ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... little soul, was now the only link between me and my kinsman. I had a weekly interview with her. I learned that Mr. Flagg slept late, was seldom in during the day, and usually returned after midnight. A person with this eccentric scheme of life was not likely to be at home at such hours as I might find it convenient to call. Nevertheless, from time to time I knocked at the unresponsive door of his room. The two notes I had written to him ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Chancellor of the Exchequer would never see Godfrey's letter. It would be opened, I supposed, by some kind of clerk or secretary. He would giggle over it and show it to a friend. He would also giggle. Then unless the spelling was unusually eccentric the letter would go into the waste-paper basket. Nothing whatever ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... B. Johnston telegraphs the President that Grant has fallen back to Vicksburg, and, from information in his possession, will not stay there a day, but will proceed up the river. Gen. Johnston asks if this eccentric movement does not indicate a purpose to concentrate the enemy's forces for the ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... wife had left him to himself, for she was used to his violent and eccentric behavior whenever anything had crossed him; but now she peremptorily desired to be informed what had happened to him and he at once acceded. He had been unwilling to frighten them sooner than was needful, but they ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... learn the rudiments of printing in the office of the "Skowhegan Clarion," published some miles to the north of his native village. Here he passed through the dreadful ordeal to which a printer's "devil" is generally subjected. He always kept his temper; and his eccentric boy jokes are even now told by the residents ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... plunged at once into unmeasured and unrestrained dissipation; the singular mingling in her nature of the vices of both sexes; the unbridled licentiousness of the courtesan coupled with the devotion of a man for horses, wine, and fencing; in short, her eccentric character, as it would now be called, kept a passion alive which would else have quickly died away in his blase heart. Nothing would induce him to follow Jeannin's advice to leave Paris for at least a few weeks, ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - LA CONSTANTIN—1660 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... still more perceptible when speaking of the lives and characters of his socialists. Sometimes the reader receives the impression that an egregious vanity, an eccentric ambition, and perhaps a little touch of monomania, would complete the picture, and sufficiently explain that conduct, of a hero of socialism. At another time his enthusiasts assume a more imposing aspect. St ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... about by temporary circumstances which are not in the least likely to have permanent results. He has always had the eccentricity of genius; but, since his genius has been recognised, people have ceased to consider him eccentric. Now I must be off. But I will see him first. Will you show me his room?" "He is asleep," objected Aubrey. "Is it not a pity to ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... nose down into the cool depths of the great iron caldron, into which, from a hollow log, ran a musical drip of water. Dr. Lavendar and Danny, awaiting his pleasure, could hear a murmur of voices from the depths of the eccentric vehicle which put up a hood on such a day; when suddenly Dr. Lavendar's eye fell on the hind legs of the other horse. "That's Cipher's trotter," he said to himself, and leaning out, cried: "Hi! Cy?" At which the other horse was drawn in with a jerk, ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... that Hill was the man he represents himself to be, and he fairly challenges the test, his conduct only appears eccentric, according to routine. Unpatronised and unfriended men are depressed, among other calamities, with their quiescent modesty; but there is a rare spirit in him who dares to claim favours, which he thinks his right, in the most ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... among rare and curious and perplexing objects, sometimes finding some odd utilisable thing, sometimes deceiving themselves with fancied discovery, sometimes pretending to find. The world of every day laughed at these eccentric beings, or found them annoying and ill-treated them, or was seized with fear and made saints and sorcerers and warlocks of them, or with covetousness and entertained them hopefully; but for the greater part heeded them ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... me—I love to say asking, as if we could talk together—about Maclise. He is such a discursive fellow, and so eccentric in his might, that on a mental review of his pictures I can hardly tell you of them as leading to any one strong purpose. But the annual Exhibition of the Royal Academy comes off in May, and then I will endeavour to give you some notion of him. He is a tremendous creature, and might do anything. ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... is a Eugenic defence. It is not only openly said, it is eagerly urged, that the aim of the measure is to prevent any person whom these propagandists do not happen to think intelligent from having any wife or children. Every tramp who is sulky, every labourer who is shy, every rustic who is eccentric, can quite easily be brought under such conditions as were designed for homicidal maniacs. That is the situation; and that is the point. England has forgotten the Feudal State; it is in the last anarchy of the Industrial State; there is much in Mr. ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... Henderson. "We are going away from the sun you know. Mars is not as close to it as we are on our planet—I mean the one we have just left—is ninety-two millions of miles from the sun, while Mars is one hundred and forty-one millions of miles away, though its orbit is so eccentric that distance varies about thirteen millions of miles. That is, it may be thirteen millions of miles more than its mean, or average, distance, so that at times it is as far away from the sun as one hundred and ...
— Through Space to Mars • Roy Rockwood
... uncle who lived with him, a very eccentric, single-minded man, who was greatly distressed about the affair, and who became a messenger bent on making peace. He begged me to desist for Lowrie's sake, that I might not drive him to cover himself ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... Berton pere, who was playing Kean, had been received badly. I was wearing the eccentric costume of an Englishwoman in the year 1820. As soon as I appeared I heard a burst of laughter, and I stood still, rooted to the spot in the doorway. At the very same instant the cheers of my dear friends the students drowned the laughter of ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... one who sat in the further corner of the vehicle. "Where are you for, lady, please?" he asked repeatedly, and at last, "Will somebody ask the lady up the end where I'm to set her down?" to all of which the eccentric person addressed returned ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... giving the land to the peasants and making them pay rent to themselves?" he said. "If his mind was set on doing it, he could sell them the land through the bank. There would be some sense in that. Taking all in all, his act is very eccentric," said Ignatius Nikiforovitch, already considering the necessity of a guardianship, and he demanded that his wife should seriously speak to her brother of ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... tale, told with wild and compelling sweep, has remained so deep in oblivion, appears immediately on a glance at the original. The author, Charles Robert Maturin, a needy, eccentric Irish clergyman of 1780-1824, could cause intense suspense and horror—could read keenly into human motives—could teach an awful moral lesson in the guise of fascinating fiction, but he could not stick to a long ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... in diameter respectively, with a piston stroke of 3 ft. The high-pressure cylinders are each fitted with a piston valve, and the intermediate and low-pressure cylinders with double-ported slide valves, all of which are worked by the usual double eccentric and link motion valve gear, by which the cut-off can be varied as required. All the shafting is forged of Siemens-Martin mild steel of the best quality, each of the three separate cranks being built up. The condensers are placed at the outsides of the engine room, and the air, ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... the political discretion and unusual personal qualities of "Dom Pedro," his popularity became more and more marked as the years went on. A patron of science and literature, a scholar rather than a ruler, a placid and somewhat eccentric philosopher, careless of the trappings of state, he devoted himself without stint to the public welfare. Shrewdly divining that the monarchical system might not survive much longer, he kept his realm pacified by a policy of conciliation. Pedro II even went so ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... indefinable, subconscious associations, it is clearly impossible to suggest any principle of choice. The only general rule that can be laid down is that the key of the nomenclature, so to speak, may rightly vary with the key of the play—that farcical names are, within limits, admissible in farce, eccentric names in eccentric comedy, while soberly appropriate names are alone in place in serious plays. Some dramatists are habitually happy in their nomenclature, others much less so. Ibsen would often change a name three or four times in the course of writing a play, until at last he arrived ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... or more years before I matriculated at Oxford, Mr. Palmer, M.P. for Bath, had accomplished two things, very hard to do on our little planet, the Earth, however cheap they may happen to be held by the eccentric people in comets: he had invented mail-coaches, and he had married the daughter[1] of a duke. He was, therefore, just twice as great a man as Galileo, who certainly invented (or discovered) the satellites ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... seven or eight, and they were so pleased with the place that they stayed on, and were the only white people in the village, with the exception of a young Australian who had lost his money and went out there to try to grow vegetables, and a rather eccentric French artist who set up his studio in a sort of disused fort built on a high rocky plateau about a mile above the little settlement. He has gone back to France now, taking with him some really marvellous studies of the desert, so ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... were but two; in his eccentric course through the forest he had passed directly over their trail, and he had read the signs with an infallible eye. Now one was dead and the other like himself had an unloaded gun. The rest of his deed would be a ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... nations. Davy's dictum that "science knows no country" is perpetually exemplified in practice. And at the Royal Society, to match the great figures that were upon the scene a century before, there are such men as the eccentric Cavendish, the profound Wollaston, the marvellously versatile Priestley, and the equally versatile and even keener-visioned Rumford. Here, too, are Herschel, who is giving the world a marvellous insight into the constitution of the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... never think of doing that sort of thing again," he said. "Unless a person is naturally eccentric, the attempt to be so demoralises him, because there is nothing so demoralising as failure—except on one's own particular lines. Did you, for instance, jump on a horse and career barebacked through Menlo Park like a wild Indian,—a performance which your friend would probably ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... doorkeeper darted from his little room, but was hurled aside in a swift, mad tussle, and Elkan, after a blind, blood-red instant, found himself blinking and dripping in the centre of the stage, facing a great roaring audience, tier upon tier. Then he became aware of a pair of eccentric comedians whose scene he had interrupted, and who had not sufficient presence of mind to work him into it, so that the audience which had laughed at his headlong entrance now laughed the ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... vigorously. Stung to desperation the pony stood erect for an instant, pawing the air frantically with its fore hoofs, and then, as the quirt continued to lash its flanks, it lunged forward, snorting in apparent fright, made two or three eccentric leaps, splashing water high over Sheila's head, and then came to a sudden stop in the middle of ...
— The Trail to Yesterday • Charles Alden Seltzer
... on his own deck, whether he sail a coffin or a princely Indiaman of the old time. Sir Walter Besant is lord of his own East End, and of that innocent seraglio of delightful and eccentric young ladies to which he has been adding for years past Sir Walter Besant is chiefly remarkable as an example of what may be done by a steadfast cheerfulness in style. His creed has always been that fiction is a recreative art, and we ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... man of medium fame, but of real genius, whose delightful home was always open to him. Mrs. Fortescue probably knew all about Paul's eccentric menage, but she had been an opera-singer in her day, had known a good many open secrets of the kind, and was a woman of the world. It was not her business to pry into that kind of secret, and she liked the young fellow for many reasons. Considering what a fool he was, he had grown ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... concentric with the shaft, but weighted so that the center of gravity is slightly displaced from the center. The centrifugal strain due to this is balanced by helical springs. But when the speed increases the centrifugal force moves the ring into an eccentric position, when it strikes a trigger and releases a weight which, falling, closes the throttle and shuts off the steam supply. The basic principle upon which all these stops are designed is the same—the centrifugal force of a weight balanced by a spring ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... end of the long central aisle, adds by its simplicity of form to the magnificent unity of effect. The bearing-arches, which span it from bay to bay, being parti-coloured, with voussures of alternate white and a kind of grey or green, [134] being also somewhat flat at the keystone, and literally eccentric, have, at least for English eyes, something of a Saracenic or other Oriental character. Again, it is as if the architects—the engineers—who worked here, had seen things undreamt of by other Romanesque builders, the builders ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... vehement of the Whigs, was placed at the head of the Treasury; why, it is difficult to say. His romantic courage, his flighty wit, his eccentric invention, his love of desperate risks and startling effects, were not qualities likely to be of much use to him in financial calculations and negotiations. Delamere, a more vehement Whig, if possible, than Mordaunt, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and the frayed stand-up collar that would have sawn his head off but for the toughness of his hide. To do Paul honour he had arrayed himself in his best—a wondrously cut and heavily-braided morning coat and lavender-coloured trousers of eccentric shape, and a funny little billycock hat too small for him, and a thunder-and-lightning necktie, all of which he had purchased nearly twenty years ago to grace a certain, wedding a. which he had been best man. Since then he had worn the Nessus ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... are numerous, but perhaps the most eccentric example is to be found in Stanyhurst's rendering of Virgil, published in 1583. It is full of cant words, and reads like the work of a madman. This is a fair ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... extent. A young girl, Florence St. Vincent, afterward Mrs. Browne, represents, here, with dramatic exaggeration, of course, a type of young girl more or less familiar to all of us. In England she is not a type, but an eccentric personality, with which the audience must be made acquainted by easy stages. It was necessary, therefore, to introduce a number of preliminary speeches for her, before she came to the lines of the original version. After that, she ran ...
— The Autobiography of a Play - Papers on Play-Making, II • Bronson Howard
... quickly to restore warmth I muse upon my eccentric friend, and cannot help asking myself this question: Did he really replace the gilded image of the god Mercurius with the rest of the treasures? He seemed to do so; and yet I could not testify to the fact. Probably, however, he was as ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... was still screaming loudly, this time to Governor Hardy himself. Standing before his desk the eccentric scientist babbled his complaint of Vidac's rebuff and Roger's ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell
... pure white, and his brown eyes quick and radiant. He marched in and seated himself upon the settle, grasping a stout oaken stick in both hands, and gazing up into the Rector's face. His dress, no less than his manners, showed that notwithstanding the blunt and eccentric nature of his greeting, he was by ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... which led to the identification of this particular serpent with water were the result of a process of legend-making of so arbitrary and eccentric a nature as to make it impossible seriously to pretend that so tortuous a ratiocination should have been exactly followed to the same unexpected destination also in Crete and Western Europe, in Babylonia and ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... years. The first he called "The Roysterers," and they were supposed to dine twice a term in waistcoats decorated with R.D.C. buttons; the second he named "The Oddfish," a club which was intended to be eccentric, and from the extraordinary colours they adopted I should think they were aptly named. Their chief function was drinking, and although I never went to any of their carousals I believe they discharged it thoroughly. The third club which ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... Persons, with her, could no more sing—or dance—than the cat. She found the cat, in the way of metaphor, a mysteriously useful animal. But the very embroidery of Esther's mode of speech forbade her invoking that eccentric aid. Lydia was not eager to quarrel. She would have been horrified if circumstance had ever provoked her into a rash word to her father, and with Anne she was a dove of peace. But Esther by a word, it seemed, by a look, had the power of waking her to unholy revolt. ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... one imagined old Mark Brownson had anything to will. But he was a very eccentric man; and the economical style of his establishment was ...
— Edna's Sacrifice and Other Stories - Edna's Sacrifice; Who Was the Thief?; The Ghost; The Two Brothers; and What He Left • Frances Henshaw Baden
... reversed the verdict of Lord Tennyson's hero is less eccentric than appears. Few men who come to the islands leave them; they grow grey where they alighted; the palm shades and the trade-wind fans them till they die, perhaps cherishing to the last the fancy of a visit home, which is rarely made, more rarely enjoyed, and yet more rarely repeated. ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... been a reckless, hard-living race, with a stubborn, combative disposition. Most of them had found scope for their energies in wresting a few more barren acres from the grasp of moss and moor; but several times an eccentric genius had scattered to the winds what the rest had won, and Geoffrey seemed bent on playing the traditional role of spendthrift. There were, however, excuses for him. He was an ambitious man, and had ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... Fabre is little known and little appreciated. To tell the truth, folk regard him as eccentric; they have often surprised him in the country lying on his stomach in the middle of a field, or kneeling on the ground, a magnifying glass in hand, observing a fly or some one of those insignificant creatures in which no sane person ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... firmament, which was from east to west. All the fixed stars move in circles whose centre is the centre of the universe, but the courses of the planets (among which the moon is reckoned) depend on other circles, called eccentric, since their centre is elsewhere. Either the centre or the circumference of the circle in which the planet really moves is applied to the circumference of the eccentric circle, and in this way all the ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... about my personal appearance and eccentric habits, but I ignored them, feverishly thinking that this adventure would necessitate an early visit to my club. I had just decided what brand of cocktail would best meet the case when I felt a tap on my shoulder and looked up at a vast ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various
... Some years ago an eccentric man, when this expression was used to him, was known occasionally to interpret the words in their literal sense, and in more than one instance he had the credit of having adroitly made his court to ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... fault with this use of our flag, for in order not to seem eccentric I have swung around now and joined the nation in the conviction that nothing can sully a flag. I was not properly reared, and had the illusion that a flag was a thing which must be sacredly guarded against shameful uses ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... tradition. But this standpoint has been abandoned, and it is recognized that the human mind and the outside world are essentially alike the world over; that the mind everywhere acts on the same principles; and that, ignoring the local, incidental, and eccentric, we find similar laws of ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... and 251 show the first maturation mitosis as it usually appears in sections from mercuro-nitric material stained with iron-haematoxylin. The odd chromosome is always more or less eccentric and is attached by a spindle fiber to one pole. In Hermann material, considerably destained, the tetrads and the odd chromosome appear as in figures 252, 253, and 254, the tetrads being in position for a ...
— Studies in Spermatogenesis - Part II • Nettie Maria Stevens
... of the Northern Congressman was not refused by the vagrant, whose eccentric sorrow yet amused the ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... which of course is within that of the Earth, is not circular, but elliptical, and very eccentric, so elongated that at certain times of the year this planet is extremely remote from the solar focus, and receives only half as much heat and light as at the opposite period; and, in consequence, his distance from the ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... absorbed in some mechanisms there. Was it the glance cast in her direction that had caused him to delay his departure? Janet was seized by a sudden and rather absurd desire to retreat, but Canal Street being empty, such an action would appear eccentric, and she came slowly forward, pretending not to see her employer, ridiculing to herself the idea that he had noticed her. Much to her annoyance, however, her embarrassment persisted, and she knew it was due to the memory of certain incidents, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Lyrae is relatively long, being 12d 21h 47m, the orbit is sensibly eccentric, and the two spheroids are not so much elongated as was the case with RR Centauri. The mass of the system is enormous, one of the two stars being 10 times and the other 21 times as heavy as ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... detached and eccentric personality who had arisen on the outskirts; the world began to be conscious of him ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... admired by the contemporaries of the poet. Marini was a voluminous writer, and was not only extolled in his own country above its classic authors, and in France, but the Spaniards held him in the highest esteem, and imitated and even surpassed him in his own eccentric career. He had also innumerable imitators in Italy, many of whom attained a high reputation during their lives, and afterwards ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... with a pitying shake of the head. He was not quite certain that he had done wisely, after all, in bringing his eccentric friend into the affair. He little reckoned how much more peculiarly Montague Shirley was to act for ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... a combination of his former improvements, with the cover extending over top of the gate to prevent it from tilting, and an eccentric wheel working in cam yoke to open and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... island," says she, solemn and stiff-like; "my dear nephew is an eccentric, but we must take our bread as we find it on this earth, Mister Begg, and thankful for it too. Poor Ruth, now, she is dreadfully distressed and unhappy; but I tell her it will all come right in the end. Let her be patient a little while and she will have her own ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... face to face with the Citizen-Deputy. On a chair beside him lay a heavy caped coat, covered with the dust and the splashings of a long journey, but he himself was attired in clothes that suggested the most fastidious taste, and the most perfect of tailors; he wore with apparent ease the eccentric fashion of the time, the short-waisted coat of many lapels, the double waistcoat and billows of delicate lace. Unlike Deroulede he was of great height, with fair hair and a somewhat lazy expression ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... individuals there are many classes; and the majority of eccentric men constitute one class. If a man have very peculiar ways, we readily attribute to him a certain depth and force, and think that the polished citizen wants character in comparison. Probably it is not so. Singularity may be as shallow as the shallowest ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... not deserve praise. The reckless literary admirer of Shelley or Byron goes into ecstasies and cries, "Perish the slave who would think of these great men's vices!"—whereupon raw and conceited youngsters say, "Vice and eccentricity are signs of genius. We will be vicious and eccentric;" and then they go and convert ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... While some have thus wasted their energies in eccentric flights, vainly supposing that the learning of ages would give place to their whimsical theories; others, with more success, not better deserved, have multiplied grammars almost innumerably, by abridging or modifying ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... intrusted his interests to the care of Phillips; and now feeling, with the others, apprehensive for the result of the new expedition, he was anxiously awaiting the return of the absent trappers. Tomah, the eccentric young Indian, likewise had surprised the settlers by his sudden reappearance among them, in a suit of superfine broadcloth, hat and boots to match, gold watch, showy seals, and all the gewgaw etceteras ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... time to begin the campaign. She seized the tide of fortune at its flood, and spoke in English, making the most of the pretty, drawling Southern accent of the State after which she had been named, because American girls were privileged to be eccentric. ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... the local traditions and humours, by a population of more or less migratory labourers, which has led to a break of continuity in local history, more fatal than any other thing to the preservation of legend, folk-lore, close inter-social relations, and eccentric individualities. For these the indispensable conditions of existence are attachment to the soil of one particular spot by generation ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... very little about Bunch's new relatives. They decided that "Uncle Cornelius" was eccentric and rather interesting, but when they thought of "Aunt Flora" they both got ...
— You Can Search Me • Hugh McHugh
... of the row of pegs —in the face plate (when it passes from the exterior to the interior range of them) in giving the feed motion to the tool in; the slide rest, "turned" the segmental exterior of the eccentric hoops. This it did perfectly, as the change of position of the small shaft occurred at the exact time when the cut was at its termination,—that being the correct moment to give the tool "the feed, ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... attempts were made to remove Mr. Hooper's black veil or by a direct appeal to discover the secret which it was supposed to hide. By persons who claimed a superiority to popular prejudice it was reckoned merely an eccentric whim, such as often mingles with the sober actions of men otherwise rational and tinges them all with its own semblance of insanity. But with the multitude good Mr. Hooper was irreparably a bugbear. He could not walk the street with any peace ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and panels of gold, on which there were cartoons chased and beaten in, representing ships, and tall trees, doubtless cedars of Lebanon, and masons at work, and two men armed and in royal robes greeting each other with clasped hands; and so beautiful were the cartoons that the eccentric medalleur, Cellini, would have studied them long, if not enviously. Yet he who now peered into the receptacle scarcely glanced ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... disposition in the crusading ages—since it is related that the great leader Godfrey slew one of these bears, whom he found assaulting a poor woodcutter of Antioch; and the affair was considered a feat of great prowess, by those eccentric champions ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... in 1605, and re-edited and issued, with the author's name attached, in 1608, as A Nest of Ninnies. The fool referred to in the line quoted above is suspected to be not merely the imaginary representative of a type but the popular local Fool of Shakespeare's time, a fellow of brilliant parts, but eccentric, and, we must suppose, lacking in balance and common sense. We are told that one winter Lord Chandos's players visited Evesham, and Jack Miller, our Fool, became greatly attached to the company and in particular to Grumball the clown; indeed, so greatly was he enamoured ...
— Evesham • Edmund H. New
... at this guest whose demeanor was becoming more and more eccentric. "As if I didn't know ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... you so," answered Valentine. "It is on account of the eldest son. Miss Melcombe told me that he was a very eccentric character, and for many years before his death he made gardening his one occupation. He never suffered any one but himself to garden here, not even so much as to mow the grass. After he was dead the poor old grandmother locked it up. ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... when you thought I was a beggar, and—and Uncle Fred ought to have left you the money. It was on account of me that he didn't, you know. I really owed it to you. And after the way I talked to you—so long as I had the money—I—and, anyhow, its very disagreeable and eccentric and horrid of you to object to being ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... towns. Today, people who want an old house but cannot find it where they wish to live have learned that it is practical, financially and otherwise, to transplant an old structure to a new location. Once this was the sport of eccentric millionaires or of amply endowed museums. Now it is done for people of average incomes. The expense will about equal that of building a new house of the same cubical content and architectural detail. Sometimes ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... soon exhausted, and it was difficult to get the means of instruction in the company schools. An abridgment was made and published in a very few days by Thomas Worthington, a graduate of West Point in one of the earliest classes,—of 1827, I think,—a son of one of the first governors of Ohio. This eccentric officer had served in the regular army and in the Mexican War, and was full of ideas, but was of so irascible and impetuous a temper that he was always in collision with the powers that be, and spoiled his own usefulness. He was employed ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... and a number of noble mansions about it. My uncle received me very hospitably, and would have me come and make my home with him while I am in London. That is nice for me, and in many ways. He is a character, this old uncle of mine; something of an antiquary, a good deal of a hermit, a little eccentric, but stuffed with local knowledge, and indeed with knowledge of many sorts. I think he has taken a fancy to me somehow, Queen Esther; at any rate, he is very kind. He seems to like to go about with me and show me London, and explain to me what London is. He was ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... never came near the old place; and his one daughter, Mrs. Ralston, though she lived within ten miles of her father, was not on good terms with him. It was said that the old gentleman was queer and eccentric, and hard to please or manage; however that may be, it is certain that he lived a lonely life till he was well over eighty years of age. And he had died suddenly, not so very long before James Gilverthwaite came to lodge with us; and Mr. Michael being dead, unmarried, and therefore without family, ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... a great deal of trouble with their little dog, Woggs, a beautiful but eccentric Skye terrier that had been given them by Sir Walter Simpson. Both were tenderly considerate of animals, and when this little creature was ill with a cankered ear they took turns sitting up at night with him. She writes of him: "Woggs is ill-tempered, and obstinate, and rather sly, but ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... gateway was in the distance, but the present being a near view, shows the solidity, largeness of proportions, and the boldness of the building, to greater advantage. The appearance of the whole is extremely beautiful, although its newness and cleanness remind us of Mr. Bowles's eccentric observation, that "it looks as if it was washed every morning ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 486 - Vol. 17, No. 486., Saturday, April 23, 1831 • Various
... remarkably eager and somewhat eccentric pursuit of pleasure—that pursuit which is so universal yet so diverse among men, to say nothing about boys—Tommy Splint used to go about town like a jovial lion-cub ...
— The Garret and the Garden • R.M. Ballantyne
... the eccentric youth they had seen for the first time a few hours previous. He occupied a seat at a desk in a remote corner of the room. Propped up before him was a big volume full of cuts of machinery, and he was taking notes from it. A dozen ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... on a little trip, blessing everything from his baggage check to his suspender buttons," laughed the young inventor, as he recalled his eccentric acquaintance. "I shall be glad to see ...
— Tom Swift among the Fire Fighters - or, Battling with Flames from the Air • Victor Appleton
... as his mother had conveyed to him of the resources of his wealth. Her version had been adapted to his tender years and the delicacies of her position. The departed Nolan had become an eccentric godfather. Benham's manner was apologetic, and he made it clear that only recently had these facts come to him. He had never suspected that he had had this eccentric godfather. It altered the outlook tremendously. It was one of the reasons ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... presidential campaign he took an active and very useful part. Then he brought all the influences that he could use, and they were many, to bear upon President Arthur to make him attorney-general. Arthur was a strict formalist and could not tolerate the thought of having such an eccentric genius in his Cabinet. Storrs was not only disappointed but hurt that ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... the fancy takes one. When a person acts from no apparent motive in external circumstances, he is said to have a maggot in his head, to have a bee in his bonnet or, in French, "Avoir des rats dans la tete;" in Platt-Deutsch, to have a mouse-nest in his head, the eccentric behaviour being attributed to the influence of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various
... the "Skowhegan Clarion," published some miles to the north of his native village. Here he passed through the dreadful ordeal to which a printer's "devil" is generally subjected. He always kept his temper; and his eccentric boy jokes are even now told by the residents ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... married and never telling her a word about it beforehand. She said she was mortified to death to have to learn about my marriage from strangers—strangers—just accidentally. But there wasn't anything she didn't know: that you were a millionaire, but very eccentric and not given to going around like a rational being—in society; and that you had places around in different States and always made it a point not to know your neighbors, so you wouldn't have them come dropping in interfering ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... Ruth's is possible only to the morbid, the eccentric, or the unhealthy. Neither of them was morbid, neither eccentric, both abundantly well. Ruth saw the failure of it days before Bonbright had even a hint. After Dulac burst in upon her she perceived the game must be brought to an end; that their life ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... where the Gunpowder Plot conspirators met; Exeter House, where Lord Burleigh's wily son lived; and, finally, Exeter 'Change, where the poet Gay lay in state. Nor shall we forget Cross's menagerie and the elephant Chunee; nor omit mention of many of the eccentric old shopkeepers who once inhabited the 'Change. At Charing Cross we shall stop to see the old Cromwellians die bravely, and to stare at the pillory, where in their time many incomparable scoundrels ignominiously stood. The Nelson Column and the surrounding statues have ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... was quite conversant with all aristocratic intrigues, amid which she had constantly lived for five or six years. She made it her business, therefore, to amuse the good abbess with the worldly practices of the court of France, mixed with the eccentric pursuits of the king; she made for her the scandalous chronicle of the lords and ladies of the court, whom the abbess knew perfectly by name, touched lightly on the amours of the queen and the Duke ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... were elegant triflers, content to add the lustre of wit to their other charms. While Mme de La Fayette was gaining the plaudits of the urbane world for the delicatesse of "La Princesse de Cleves" and the eccentric Duchess of Newcastle was employing her genius upon the fantastic, philosophical "Description of a New World, called the Blazing World" (1668), women of another stamp were beginning to write fiction. With the advent ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... morning taken the liberty to assent,—some fifteen thousand Scots were slain. True, her gallant general was no longer extant, though this was scarcely astounding when one considered the fact that he had voluntarily entered the melee quite unarmed. A touch of age, perhaps; Hastings was always an eccentric man: in any event, as epilogue, this Neville congratulated the Queen that—by blind luck, he was forced to concede,—her worthy secretary had made a prisoner of the Scottish King. Doubtless, Master Copeland was an estimable scribe, and yet—Ah, ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... did not choose to enter. Having first gone into society upon this principle, however, and having been at once taken up and made much of by an extremely fashionable young woman afflicted with an elderly and eccentric husband, it was not likely that Brook would return to the threshold of the schoolroom for women's society. He went on as he had begun in his first "salad" days, and at five-and-twenty he had the reputation of having ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... Paquita la Sevillane, by Jan Diaz, was published in the Echo du Morvan, a review which for eighteen months maintained its existence in spite of provincial indifference. Some knowing persons at Nevers declared that Jan Diaz was making fun of the new school, just then bringing out its eccentric verse, full of vitality and imagery, and of brilliant effects produced by defying the Muse under pretext of adapting German, English, and ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric. I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan. His religion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... utterly unworthy of the accomplished mind of the writer; the philosophy consists of an unpardonable distorting of general truths, to suit the peculiarities of an individual, noble indeed, but proverbially morbid and eccentric. A striking instance of this occurs in the laboured assertion that poets make but sorry domestic characters. What! because Lord Byron is said to have been a bad husband, was (to go no further back for examples)—was Walter Scott a bad ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... her maid and went for a walk. As a companion Ottillie was certainly less congenial than the lofty and eccentric gentleman who had just taken his departure for Leipsic; but going out alone with a maid is such an eminently proper occupation for a young widow travelling abroad, that the knowledge that she was entirely above suspicion should have compensated ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... quantity could not be produced by the inhabitants, their habitations were reduced to ashes to detect the concealment. These seem to have been ordinary modes of proceeding under the military system; there were others more irregular and eccentric which the zeal of the soldiers frequently prompted them to ...
— The Causes of the Rebellion in Ireland Disclosed • Anonymous
... cannot at the present moment recall what the General's Christian name was. But I have no doubt he had one. He was eccentric, I admit. But only in later years. And that was the result of the Indian climate, and marriage, and indigestion, and ...
— The Importance of Being Earnest - A Trivial Comedy for Serious People • Oscar Wilde
... man who had made Warrimoo station, had all his life long been something of an eccentric; and yet, withal, a man who generally accomplished what he had set out to do, and one who had converted a modest competence into a handsome fortune. He had been an indiscriminate admirer of animals, and an interested student of ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... No one imagined old Mark Brownson had anything to will. But he was a very eccentric man; and the economical style of his establishment was ...
— Edna's Sacrifice and Other Stories - Edna's Sacrifice; Who Was the Thief?; The Ghost; The Two Brothers; and What He Left • Frances Henshaw Baden
... Very possibly." Chilcote laughed quickly and excitedly. "But what club is without its eccentric member? I am glad you spoke of that. I am glad you raised that point. It was a long time ago that I hit upon a reputation for moods as a shield for—for other things, and, the more useful it has become, the more I have let it grow. I tell you you might go down to ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... cried. "You do not know what an eccentric lot we are. I should not have been at all surprised if Charles had come home with some curiosity in the way of a bride, and I am only too profoundly grateful to find that he has made so sweet a choice. But, tell me, you will stay ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... been a butler in the service of a Mr. Marsh, an eccentric man who lived in one of the old downtown houses of the city. He was a retired banker with no family. The man lived alone. He permitted no servants in the house except the butler. Meals were sent in on order from a neighboring hotel and served by the butler as the man directed. He ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... you would only inform me that an eccentric gentleman of fortune had done—what eccentric gentlemen of fortune will sometimes do—educated ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... instrument more finely attuned; sober, humble, pure-minded, zealous, consecrated to the truth as he saw it, he labored in and out of season for the faith he held so dear; yet as the years went on, he noted that Ansel, notwithstanding his eccentric views, lived an honest, temperate, Godfearing life, talking no scandal, dwelling in unity with his brethren and sisters, and upholding the banner of Shakerism ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... systematic objectivity to my unsystematic reminiscences of many years. Of course, they abound with eccentric abnormities and startling phenomena. As I have devoted myself to psychotherapeutics, always and only from scientific interest, as a part of my laboratory studies and therefore have refused to spend any time on cases which offered no special ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... Tartaglia was destined to quit Milan without paying his respects to D'Avalos. There is not a word in his notes which gives the reason of this eccentric action on his part. He simply says that he is no longer inclined to go to Vigevano, but has made up his mind to return to Venice forthwith; and Cardan, probably, was not displeased at this exhibition of petulant impatience on the part of his guest, but was rather somewhat relieved to see Messer ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... It is a sound enough social principle to distrust that which is not understood, like the strain of temperament inarticulate but vaguely manifest in the Murchisons. Such a strain may any day produce an eccentric or a genius, emancipated from the common interests, possibly inimical to the general good; and when, later on, your genius takes flight or your eccentric sells all that he has and gives it to the poor, his fellow townsmen exchange shrewd nods ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... the square, she saw a great many people collected around a carriage of eccentric shape, upon the top of which stood a man dressed in red, who was holding forth. He was a quack dentist on his rounds, who was offering to the public full sets of teeth, opiates, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... to grow more accustomed to the eccentric evolutions of the young negroes, and presently one of them laughed aloud at the quaint ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... about seventeen, a rich, eccentric stranger named Blake arrived to take possession of the Castle of Ardfry. The new-comer, who was a musical amateur, presently discovered that there was a young genius in the neighbourhood. Struck by the beauty of Robert MacOwen's voice, Mr. Blake offered ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... one of the circle of my friends, who were the Venetian consul, the French consul (an eccentric but worthy man who kept a good cook), Pittoni, who kept an excellent table, thanks to his man who knew what was to his ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... mastacomys and the scales on the tail of the genus UROMYS. In the bestowal of a name he has favoured the latter genus. The animal has been introduced to the scientific world under the title UROMYS BANFIELDI, by Mr de Vis, who, referring to it as "eccentric," says, "The female first sent to us as an example of the species had no young with her, nor were her mammae much in evidence; consequently, the advent of a specimen caught in the act of carrying young was awaited with interest. Fortune at length favoured our correspondent with an opportunity ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... in the first cab we found. We tossed for it, and he won, for which I thank the gods. Then, acting on the impulse of the moment, I came back to say something to you. A very unusual—very eccentric thing to do, no doubt. But when something involving great issues has to be done or said, I think the best plan is not to wait for a favourable opportunity. Don't you ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... port wine; to the horror of our Italian servant, who lifted up his eyes at such a prescription for fever, crying, "O Inglesi! Inglesi!" the case would have been far worse, I have no kind of doubt, for the eccentric prescription gave the power of sleeping, and the pulse grew quieter directly. I shall always be ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... a resolute but eccentric man, resolved not to be disappointed in his calculations, or delayed in his voyage by the desertion of his crew, and boldly put to sea on the day appointed for sailing, trusting in his own unaided efforts and energies to manage the vessel on a passage across ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... Orleans for Offut; impressed with slavery; in Offut's store; fights Armstrong; later friendship with Armstrong; borrows a grammar; his honesty; loses situation; involved in border quarrels; his temperance considered eccentric; careless habits of dress; in the country groceries; coarseness of speech; his sympathetic understanding of the people; his standards dependent on surroundings; enlists in Black Hawk ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... other night, about lucky people. Barmer declared that he knew the man (of whom we had all of us heard) who was left a large fortune by an eccentric old gentleman whose hat he had picked up on a windy day at Brighton. A better and more original contribution to the discussion was that of Bastable, a retired Anglo-Indian. I give it as nearly as I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 10, 1916 • Various
... gaiety, was owned by Harris Stockton, who was reputed to be quite wealthy. But one day he had disappeared, saying good-bye to no one, and it was generally supposed he had gone abroad, as he was rather eccentric, and given to going ...
— The Young Firemen of Lakeville - or, Herbert Dare's Pluck • Frank V. Webster
... year Howard was teaching himself to do without things, and by and by he was able to live on green tea and a little bread and vegetables, with fruit now and then as a great treat. No wonder he was considered eccentric by ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang
... did not say the lockers were to be numbered in any numerical order, and he was surprised to find, when the work was done, that the figures had apparently been mixed up indiscriminately. Calling upon his clerk for an explanation, the eccentric lad stated that the notion had occurred to him so to arrange the figures that in each case they formed a simple addition sum, the two upper rows of figures producing the sum in the lowest row. But the most surprising point was this: that he had so ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... As matter of fact, none of them is now in existence, nor can we trace them, speaking broadly, beyond the tenth century. Here and there, indeed, may be a temple bearing the name of one of the sects, or grades of doctrine, and occasionally an eccentric individual who "witnesses" to the old metaphysics; but these are but fossils or historical relics, and ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... was much to be supplied in other departments of our literature, and especially he desired a really great History of England; but he was disposed to regard the roll of English poetry as made up, and as leaving place for little more except what was likely to be eccentric or imitational. ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... While the popular legend, in its coarsest shape, had, in its time, spread with the rapidity of a running fire through all countries, the great German poet's conception of it, two hundred years later, found no responding echo in either French or English bosoms. Here and there some eccentric genius may have taken it up, as, for instance, Monk Lewis, who, in 1816, communicated the fundamental idea to Lord Byron, reading and translating it to him viva voce, and suggesting to him, in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... recalled the prosier portions of the Lombard plain. Toulouse itself has a little of this Italian expression, but not enough to give a colour to its dark, dirty, crooked streets, which are irregular without being eccentric, and which, if it were not for the superb church of Saint-Sernin, would be ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... at intervals, weighted down with the dust; but again it rippled like a sail when an eccentric gust ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... personal effort could make way against the competition of mere brute millions. And then, all at once, I hit upon proverbs. The suggestion came in a rather peculiar fashion. It seems that there was an eccentric old poet on Long Island who spent many years in collecting all sorts of inanimate freaks, odds and ends, and rubbish. When he died they found among his treasures a purse made out of a sow's ear and a whistle made from a pig's tail. I saw my opportunity at once. The eccentric old ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... different from Mrs. Ellsworth's Mr. Smith," Annesley warned him, hastily. "He's middle-aged, eccentric, and not good-looking. He comes to England for his 'nerves' when he has worked too hard and tired himself out. I think he's rich; and once he was robbed in some big hotel, so he likes to stay at a plain sort of house ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... deviated from that stereotyped rule-so strictly observed by all our great authors-as to make my hero, who is what is curiously enough called a "Yankee Character," speak tolerably good English, instead of vulgar slang. In truth, so closely do "our great writers" adhere to this rule of depicting the eccentric American as a lean, scraggy individual, dressed most outlandishly, making splinters of the king's English, while drawling it with offensive nasal sounds, and violating the rules of common politeness in whatever he does, that when he goes abroad ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... told with wild and compelling sweep, has remained so deep in oblivion, appears immediately on a glance at the original. The author, Charles Robert Maturin, a needy, eccentric Irish clergyman of 1780-1824, could cause intense suspense and horror—could read keenly into human motives—could teach an awful moral lesson in the guise of fascinating fiction, but he could not stick to a long story with simplicity. His dozens of shifting scenes, ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... he had enough of it. In any event, it had had enough of him; and seven years afterwards, when he died of a fever, his ambition to stand in Washington's shoes died with him. While he lived on his Virginia farm, he was as impetuous and eccentric as when he had been in the army, and he must have been a very unpleasant neighbor. In fact, the people there thought he was crazy. This opinion was not changed when his will was read, for in that document ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... restrain or direct its operations. From this spirit it happens, that in every political association which is formed upon the principle of uniting in a common interest a number of lesser sovereignties, there will be found a kind of eccentric tendency in the subordinate or inferior orbs, by the operation of which there will be a perpetual effort in each to fly off from the common centre. This tendency is not difficult to be accounted for. It has its origin in the love of power. Power controlled ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... Caterpillars, too, in great plenty—miniature porcupines with fretful quills on end, and some naked even as they came into the world. This one, called the earth-measurer, has drunk himself green with chlorophyll so as to escape detection. Vain precaution! since eccentric motion betrays him to keen avian eyes, when, like the traveller's snake, he erects himself on the tip of his tail and sways about in empty space, vaguely feeling for something, he knows not what. ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... He had no acquaintances in whom it seemed likely that his ideal would be realized. He mentioned his views to his lawyers, and they smiled in their indulgent way. Messrs. Tongs and Ball had already learnt to respect their eccentric client. But it was difficult for their legal minds to regard the question of the appointment of a master and matron to the "Home" exactly in the light in which it presented itself to "Cobbler" Horn. He spoke of his ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... in all of them, saving perhaps that odd fellow who acted as spokesman. Brother—er—Copas? . . . He lectured me straightly enough, but there is always a disposition to suspect an eccentric." ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... relate, and which Teichman also mentions in his "Leaves of Memory of Goethe in Berlin," has been often related to me by Ludwig Tieck exactly in this manner. Teichman believes it was the poet Burman. But I remember distinctly that Ludwig Tieck told me that it was the eccentric savant, Philip Moritz, with whom Goethe made the acquaintance ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... by the influence of teachers like Hervey, Romaine, Cecil, Venn, Fletcher, Newton, and Thomas Scott. The fathers of the Evangelical school were men of naturally strong and vigorous understandings, robust and rugged, and sometimes eccentric, but quite able to cope with the controversialists, like Bishop Tomline, who attacked them. These High Church controversialists were too half-hearted and too shallow, and understood their own principles too imperfectly, to be a match for antagonists who were in ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... finished up at your horrid little war, and got fever at Targai. You must have known him. He calls it 'a muddle on the frontier,' and now he is writing a book about it, and about other muddles, and how to avoid them. But he has a quite eccentric dislike to titles and big properties; so he has shied really badly at mine. He has gone off to 'face it out' alone. Hence you find me sad instead ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... represent the original form of the passages quoted. If Justin's version were correct, whence did the Clementines get the [Greek: hudati zonti k.t.l.]? if the Clementine, then whence did Justin get the misconception of Nicodemus? But the Clementine version is in any case too eccentric to stand. ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... of whatever is instable, of whatever is practically disappointing, of whatever is useless, of whatever is lying and unreliable, of whatever is unverifiable and unsupported, of whatever is inconsistent and contradictory, of whatever is artificial and eccentric, of whatever is unreal in the sense of being of no practical account. Here are pragmatic reasons with a vengeance why we should turn to truth—truth saves us from a world of that complexion. What wonder that its very name awakens loyal feeling! In particular ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... influential Boston merchant. The lady, from all accounts, was undemonstrative and devoid of her husband's patriotic ardor, traits that did not tend to domestic felicity or lead, on the wife's part, to a commanding influence over her vehement and somewhat eccentric husband. The fruit of the union was one son and two daughters. The son entered the navy, but unhappily died in his eighteenth year. One of the daughters, the elder of the two, probably under the mother's influence, angered her father by espousing the English cause and ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... that to you, Mr. Robert Audley?" cried Alicia, passionately. "What do you care what becomes of me, or whom I marry? If I married a chimney-sweep you'd only lift up your eyebrows and say, 'Bless my soul, she was always eccentric.' I have refused Sir Harry Towers; but when I think of his generous and unselfish affection, and compare it with the heartless, lazy, selfish, supercilious indifference of other men, I've a good mind to run ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... was admitted. But his progress was slow. He applied himself diligently to the drawing of the human figure, and held on with the determination to succeed, as if with a resolute confidence in the result. He displayed none of the eccentric humour and fitful application of many youths who conceive themselves geniuses, but kept up the routine of steady application to such an extent that he himself was afterwards accustomed to attribute ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... possession, for I shall have to relate one of the most remarkable stories you have ever heard. So strange indeed are the circumstances connected with that old Service that I have kept them to myself, lest people should think me an eccentric musician. Our late Dean knew part of them and witnessed some of the things I shall tell you. The story will take some little time, but if you will come across to my house you shall hear it and also see the proofs ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... of him (whether the wiser or not) regained its supremacy. He remembered that the proprietor had told him that he should lock the door, and would come later to release him. He told himself that twenty things he had not thought of might explain the eccentric sounds outside; he reminded himself that there was just enough light left to finish his own proper work. Bringing his paper to the window so as to catch the last stormy evening light, he resolutely ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... by Coates, was awaiting me when I returned to the Abbey Inn. The postal deliveries in Upper Crossleys were eccentric and unreliable, but having glanced through the cuttings enclosed, I partook of a hasty lunch and sat down to the task of preparing a column for the Planet which should not deflect public interest from the known central figures in ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... about chuckling and poking old ladylike fun at all the more eccentric Pastels, and ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., November 8, 1890 • Various
... broke off. Cousin Julia was certainly absurd! She had always been regarded, indeed, by the California Pritchards as a singular, eccentric person, rather wanting in refinement and careless of social amenities—one from whom they were quite content to be separated by the "breadth of our great American continent." She had taken after her mother, who came from Nebraska—or some such place—and the family had considered it a pity ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... heart, still expecting to find corruption or ambition at the bottom. But none was to be found. Lord Oldborough was convinced of it—and surprised. Perhaps his esteem for Mr. Percy's understanding fell some degrees—he considered him as an eccentric person, acting from unaccountable motives; but still he respected him as that rarest of all things in a politician's eye—a really honest independent man. He believed also that Mr. Percy had some regard for him; and whatever portion it might be, it was ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... he found himself associated were very distasteful to him. In a new social movement, such as that of association as it took shape in 1849-50, there is certain to be great attraction for restless and eccentric persons, and in point of fact many such joined it. The beard movement was then in its infancy, and any man except a dragoon who wore hair on his face was regarded as a dangerous character, with whom it was compromising to be seen in any public place—a ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... moral qualities and effects; to the second belong the whole mass of the military force, its organisation, the proportion of the three arms, &c. &c.; to the third, the angle of the lines of operation, the concentric and eccentric movements in as far as their geometrical nature has any value in the calculation; to the fourth, the influences of country, such as commanding points, hills, rivers, woods, roads, &c. &c.; lastly, to the fifth, all the means of supply. The separation ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... altogether different plane from The War of the Worlds and those other gorgeous pot-boilers. It combines the alert philosophy and adroit criticism of the Tono Bungay phase with the luminous vision of Anticipations and the romantic interest of his eccentric books of adventure. The seer in Mr. Wells comes uppermost, and I almost think that when the history of the latter half of the twentieth century comes to be written it will be found not merely that he has prophesied surely, but that his visions have actually tended to shape the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 27, 1914 • Various
... disliked all eccentric departures from custom and routine; and he felt especially suspicious of the change proposed in the life of Agnes. With new interests to occupy her mind, she might be less favourably disposed to listen ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... warnings of ice-bergs to transatlantic liners, fell into the hands of a band of seal poachers. Things looked black for the lad for a time, but he found two good friends among the rough crew in the persons of Noddy Nipper and Pompey, an eccentric old colored cook, full of superstitions about ghosts. The Polly Ann, as the schooner was called, was wrecked and Jack and his two friends cast away on a lonesome spot of land called Skull Island. They were rescued from this place by Jack's eccentric, ...
— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton
... begins to learn as soon as it notices the resemblances in things and arranges them into groups. It will appear later that the mind does not follow a strictly logical method in gaining its groups, that it falls into natural errors and misconceptions; but in spite of these eccentric movements, the general trend is toward classifications and toward the language symbols that express them. In this power to associate, classify, and symbolize the products of experience in words is seen the marked difference between man and the animals. ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... passed, a member of the Citizens' Patrol, like her brother. Suddenly she heard a shot, and extinguishing the candles hastily she peered out of a window from behind the curtains. The sentry was pounding on a door opposite with the butt of his rifle. It was the home of an eccentric old bachelor who possessed a fine collection of ceramics and ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... to his eccentric master, and he never had any reason to repent. He got on even beyond his mother's most soaring hopes. The shop eventually became his own, and he lived a flourishing and respected tradesman. We need scarcely add that his mother had no further use for her mangle, and that ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... her only child, a daughter. She thought she had met in him a hero, a demi-god, a being of deep passion and original and creative mind; but he was only a voluptuary, full of violence instead of feeling, and eccentric, because he had great means with which he could gratify extravagant whims. Stella found she had made the great and irretrievable mistake. She had exchanged devotion for a passionate and evanescent ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... Europe to find a successor whose moral and intellectual character resembled his own, he could not have chosen better. Philip was not so sickly as his predecessor, but he was quite as weak, as indolent, and as superstitious; he very soon became quite as hypochondriacal and eccentric; and he was even more uxorious. He was indeed a husband of ten thousand. His first object, when he became King of Spain, was to procure a wife. From the day of his marriage to the day of her death, his first object was to have her near him, and ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... one hundred other cities, and yet it will remind you of none of them. It is very elongated, and spreads over a great deal of ground, apparently for personal inconvenience. Indeed, my son, it has the appearance of having been dropped down late of a Saturday night by some eccentric gentleman who had a large quantity of architectural odds and ends on hand, and had no other use for them. It has been famous always for its acute angles and broad avenues. The former, I have heard more than one person say, were skillfully arranged by a very accommodating French ...
— Siege of Washington, D.C. • F. Colburn Adams
... one of his household slaves named Paddy Whack, who threw somersaults round the drawing-room, walked on his hands, and afterwards threw himself several times from the highest part of the bridge, about twenty-four feet, into the river. After coffee we took leave of our eccentric but warm-hearted host, who, on shaking hands, insisted on our bloody dogships dining with him once more before we sailed. We promised to do so conditionally. Eighteen sail of merchant vessels had assembled, and we expected seven more. The surf had been high on ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... finances, when he had been caught in a "corner" on wheat and nearly crushed, had not dismayed her in the least. It was she who had counseled him to appeal to John Merrick, since the name and fame of the eccentric millionaire were familiar ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... board included an Austrian officer of engineers, a French Consul, and a Dalmatian professor. Besides the above, there was an Italian patriot, whose devotion to the 'Kingmaker' displayed itself in a somewhat eccentric fashion. With much mystery, he showed me a portrait of Garibaldi, secreted in a watchkey seal, while his waistcoat buttons and shirt studs contained heads of those generals who served in the campaign of the Two Sicilies. It was rather a novel kind of hero-worship, though, I fear, likely to be little ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... Dick-o'-the-Grange, though vulgar and eccentric, was by no means deficient in shrewdness and common sense—neither was he, deliberately, an unjust man; but, like too many in the world, he generally suffered his prejudices and his interests to take the same side. Having had his leg dressed, and been ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... the privilege of attending those of the Rev. Richard Harmony. Much learning, though it had not made Mr. Harmony mad, had, at least in conjunction with his natural tendencies, contributed to make him extremely eccentric; while to much perusal of Greek and Hebrew MSS., he probably owed his defective vision. These infirmities, instead of being regarded with sympathy, as wounds received by Mr. Harmony in the classical engagements in the various fields of literature, ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... the words of Blanche from Sir Tilton. The rooms had been deserted, save by those to whom a dish of gossip was as the essence of life, and who now listened with itching ears to Sir Tilton's reply, while they tried to remember the extent of the eccentric little bride's wealth. Whether she would buy a house in town; nearly all deciding that they would patronize ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... temperament, he had, with a kind of passionate curiosity, adopted the role of a Platonic lover, and the libertine in his character had been subdued by the love of the eccentric. He had converted this love into a kind of adoration. He placed Elise upon the altar, and worshipped her as a saint to whom he had turned from the turmoil and wild lust of life, and in the contemplation and worship of whom he could obtain forgiveness of all his ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... of the forest. Each succeeding Inca seemed desirous only to tread in the path, and carry out the plans, of his predecessor. Great enterprises, commenced under one, were continued by another, and completed by a third. Thus, while all acted on a regular plan, without any of the eccentric or retrograde movements which betray the agency of different individuals, the state seemed to be under the direction of a single hand, and steadily pursued, as if through one long reign, its great career of ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... Henrietta was delighted; for she had at one time begun to be seriously concerned for her father's health. But she was not a little amazed when she saw him lay aside his mourning, and exchange his simple costumes, suitable to his age, for the eccentric fashions of the day, wearing brilliant ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... in remarkable keeping with his eccentric life. A figure only four and a half feet high, hunchbacked, with projecting chest, legs small and uneven, arms longer than his legs; a huge head, showing only beneath the enormous white hat large, solemn eyes and a prominent nose; the rest of his face covered with a snowy semicircle of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... person of high degree or of public importance, and that his actions or sufferings are of an unusual kind. But this is not all. His nature also is exceptional, and generally raises him in some respect much above the average level of humanity. This does not mean that he is an eccentric or a paragon. Shakespeare never drew monstrosities of virtue; some of his heroes are far from being 'good'; and if he drew eccentrics he gave them a subordinate position in the plot. His tragic characters are made of the stuff we find within ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... First and last he was led into many unprofitable undertakings, and as a results, his patrimony, which was something, and his professional earnings which were considerable, were consumed. He was in debt usually, and he limited his expenses that he might meet his liabilities. He was eccentric. I have met him at evening entertainments arrayed in a dress suit with a bright red ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... expressions, which seem to belong to particular families, and by which one may sometimes discover the relationship. But the modification of leading characteristics in the individual is not so easily detected. Miss Dabstreak is eccentric, but the wild ideas which continue to flourish in the aesthetic cells of Chrysophrasia's brain are softened and made more gentle and delicate in Hermione, so that even if they were inconsequent they would not seem ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... Sometimes, too, at Savigny, in the evening, when the park, the avenues, the blue slates of the chateau, the red brick of the stables, the ponds and brooks shone resplendent, bathed in the golden glory of a lovely sunset, this eccentric parvenu would say aloud before his children, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... compassionate heart. Generous to a fault, he liked to be able to oblige his friends, or those who passed as such, while the charitable acts which he was constantly performing are too numerous to be remembered. He had a supreme contempt for money, but he spoiled the best sides of his strange, eccentric character by enjoying a display of its worst facets with a "cussedness" as amusing as it was sometimes unpleasant. Is it remarkable, then, that many people who only saw him in the disagreeable moods should judge him from an entirely false ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... these, there was yet another, phase of mannish existence to which he might agreeably be introduced. But when aspiring sycophants, members of the great mass of impecunious people of "family," found that this eccentric son of Prince Michael failed to appreciate the charms of a single member of the opera ballet (now indulging in the delights of their summer vacation, and expending part of their savings of fifteen rubles a week ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... in the person of Francis Arden, a handsome young Irishman with whom Borrow became acquainted in the coffee-room of an hotel, and with him obtained some knowledge of "the strange and eccentric places of London." When Arden burst out laughing one day Borrow said he would, perhaps, have joined if it were ever his wont to laugh, and his friends said that, though he enjoyed a joke, he did not seem to have the power of laughing. But in Borrow we expect contrarieties, ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... my true meaning, and of course in her heart she agreed with it. She was town-bred and therefore was intended for the town. Yet so strangely stubborn and eccentric is a woman's reasoning that she can feel resentment toward a man because he has brains enough to comprehend the same simple ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
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