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More "Erratic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... will not be difficult to advance to the suburban square with sufficient variety in house plans to content those who are willing to yield small personal whims. Hitherto the erratic fancy of would-be tenants, the dissatisfaction with the arrangements provided, has made building en masse difficult. As long as the builder was called upon to suit those who had lived in houses of their own for many years his task was difficult, but now he will ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... the Rue du Canal, one could get glimpses of the gardens in Faubourg Ste.-Marie standing in silent wretchedness, so many tearful Lucretias, tattered victims of the storm. Short remnants of the wind now and then came down the narrow street in erratic puffs, heavily laden with odors of broken boughs and torn flowers, skimmed the little pools of rain-water in the deep ruts of the unpaved street, and suddenly went away to nothing, like a juggler's butterflies or a ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... a public meeting in Carthage practically defied him. He, however, secured a force of about two hundred men, with which he marched into Nauvoo, greatly to the indignation of the Hancock County people. His stay there was marked by incidents which showed how his erratic course in recent years had deprived him of public respect, and which explain some of the bitterness toward the county which characterizes his "History." One of these was the presentation to him of a petticoat as typical ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... come in to tell you that we believe that you and your erratic roommate are going to save a desperate situation for us," resumed the captain of the Navy team. "Not that we were destitute of good players before. But we lacked enough of different kinds to make a strong, all-around eleven. Now we've a team that we're not ...
— Dave Darrin's Third Year at Annapolis - Leaders of the Second Class Midshipmen • H. Irving Hancock
... intimate relation with humanity; and by teaching us that law and order, and a definite scheme of development, regulate even the strangest and wildest manifestations of individual life, she prepares the student to look for a goal even amidst the erratic wanderings of mankind, and to believe that history offers something more than an entertaining chaos—a journal of a toilsome, ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... closest imprisonment! His liberty gone, his freedom contracted to a few cubic feet, his space diminished almost to the mould of his body, the great wild philosopher created his own liberty, made it out of his own love of it. Like a live, erratic shuttle he went to and fro, unweaving, unravelling, unwinding, drawing out the knot of confinement, flinging out, radiating and spreading and breathing out space in all directions, by multitudinous motion of disentanglement! ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... the Gipsy to Robert in bewilderment. This was not the dazzling figure in gauzes and satins and jewels she had expected, a capricious lady of a foreign and Southern nobility, whose whimsical and erratic fancy was occasionally amused by a change of role. This was a daughter of the long, brown path, who afoot and light-hearted took naturally to the open road, with the tanned cheek, white teeth, and ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... a sea where mine own impotency might have some excuse; not in a sullen, weedy lake, where I could not have so much as exercise for my swimming. Therefore I would fain do something, but that I cannot tell what is no wonder.' 'Though I be in such a planetary and erratic fortune that I can do nothing constantly,' he confesses ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... both in its positive and negative qualities. He, more than any of his confreres, is a product of culture. Unlike the greater number of them, he has no special talent, or pet object of enthusiasm, or erratic tendencies. He is a trained critic, and is "nothing if not critical." His coolness is a real coolness, not the effect of any "toning down" for the occasion, as we may suspect to have been the case with Mr. Froude and Mr. Goldwin Smith. His knowledge is accurate, his judgments are sound, his taste ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... greatly out of the common course of nature. From time to time the historic and philosophic gravity of the last six books of the Annals suffers great eclipses by his leaving aside weighty affairs of State to descend into petty descriptions of the erratic conduct of Messalina, with her extravagant lewdness (XI. 26-8), Nero, with his abominable pollutions (XVI. 37), and that Emperor's mother, Agrippina, with her monstrous incest (XIV. 2). These matters, ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... opposition, the same extravagant and often inconsistent animosity to every phase of conservative policy, and the same fiery zeal in advocating every measure which he has espoused, that have ever characterized his erratic career. The witty author of "The Bachelor of the Albany" has tersely, and not without a certain spice of truth, described him as "a man of brilliant incapacity, vast and various misinformation, and immense ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... of truth. He shows us that among the sharks and harpies of Wall Street there are phases of honor and generosity—that the arrogance or coldness of a bank-officer may have a rational foundation—that feelings as intense are awakened in common business pursuits as in the most dramatic and erratic lives. In this just treatment of character,—this avoiding of the old saint and angel system of depicting men,—KIMBALL is truly pre-eminent, and under it even the casual SOL DOWNER strikes us with an individuality and a force not inferior to that ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... fortnight or so, Dr. Griswold began to be very erratic. He had a divorce case going on in Philadelphia. He went off, assuring me that everything was in order, and never returned. The foreman came to me saying that there was no copy, and nothing ready, and everything needed. Here was indeed a pretty kettle of fish! For I at that time ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... Skidmore were Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright of the "Free Enquirer," a paper advocating all sorts of extreme social and economic doctrines. It was not strange, therefore, that the new party was at once connected, in the public mind, with all the erratic vagaries of these Apostles of Change. It was called the "Fanny Wright ticket" and the "Infidel Ticket." Every one forgot that it aimed to be the workingman's ticket. The movement, however, was supported by "The Working Man's Advocate," ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... Mrs. James can be induced to take any excursions without Barrie," said Somerled: which meant that he didn't intend to leave Edinburgh while the girl was in it and at the mercy of her erratic parent. I thought he was anxious Barrie should understand that he was not going to desert her. Perhaps she did understand, for she is quick in penetration; but her own pride, and loyalty to Mrs. Bal, kept her from ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... to kill the sting of it By frankly forfeiting the Prince and town. "Bidden," says she, "but as one low of rank, And go I will not so unworthily, To sit with common dames!"—A flippant friend Writes then that a new planet sways to-night The sense of her erratic lord; whereon The fair Fitzherbert ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... him that he would dine at some cheap, even dubious, restaurant lower down in the city, where the erratic chefs from all countries of the world spread their national cookery for the omnivorous American. Something might happen there out of the routine—he might come upon a subject without a predicate, a road without an end, a question without an ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... this erratic strain, he suddenly heard the voice of some human being at the back of the rocks, giving vent to ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... the largest ecclesiastical edifice in America, and notable for its simple grandeur. With its ancient walls girdling the heights first seen by Jacques Cartier, with its numerous churches and convents, illustrating the power and wealth of the Romish religion, with its rugged, erratic streets creeping through hewn rock, with its picturesque crowd of red-coated soldiers of England mingling with priests and sisters in sombre attire, or with the habitants in etoffe du pays,—the old city of Quebec, whose history went back to the beginning of the seventeenth century, was ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... tax th' bachelors ye tax valor. Whin ye tax th' bachelors ye tax beauty. Ye've got to admit that we're a much finer lookin' lot iv fellows thin th' marrid men. That's why we're bachelors. 'Tis with us as with th' ladies. A lady with an erratic face is sure to be marrid befure a Dhream iv Beauty. She starts to wurruk right away an' what Hogan calls th' doctrine iv av'rages is always with thim that starts early an' makes manny plays. But th' Dhream iv Beauty figures out that she can wait an' take ...
— Mr. Dooley Says • Finley Dunne
... from Mississippi with the brilliant record of his achievements in the Mexican war, already ambitious to succeed Mr. Calhoun as the leader of the extreme South, but foiled in his Disunion schemes by his eloquent but erratic colleague, Henry S. Foote. William H. Seward of New York was for the first time taking position under the National Government, at the age of forty-nine, and Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, five years younger, was beginning his political ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... the slow Maratta spoils, And hardier Sic erratic toils, While both their ease forego; For ease, which neither gold can buy, Nor robes, nor gems, which oft ...
— Quaint Gleanings from Ancient Poetry • Edmund Goldsmid
... of the shining marks which disasters at sea seem invariably to involve have lived to tell the Lusitania's tale. Vanderbilt, the sportsman, is gone. Genial Charles Klein, the playwright, is gone. That erratic American literary genius, Elbert Hubbard, is gone, and with him a wife to whom he seemed particularly devoted. And Charles ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... differences, that children were neglected or that patriotism languished, although the first seven years of that experiment were years of decimating war, and the remaining twenty-three of poverty and recuperation—conditions most conducive to discontent and erratic legislation. ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... erratic, also. When father wanted to sit by the Student's Lamp and read his Scribner's, she would decide to hammer the Piano and do ...
— More Fables • George Ade
... would really be a good thing that we should all go over the house together and make certain that this rather erratic burglar did not, after all, carry anything ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... first, the legal counsel for the accused were more than a match for the managers. Randolph's erratic course culminated in an impassioned but incoherent speech which closed the argument for the prosecution and left the outcome hardly in doubt. Not one of the articles of impeachment received the two-thirds majority which was necessary to convict. The eighth article, ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... the well-known Cascade des Pelerins[91]) descends from behind the promontory h: its natural or proper course would be to dash straight forward down the line f g, and part of it does so; but erratic branches of it slide away round the promontory, in the lines of escape, k, l, &c. Each row of trees marks, therefore, an old torrent bed, for the torrent always throws heaps of stones up along its banks, on which the ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... me are adopted, viz., effective regulations with regard to the buffalo, the Indians taught to cultivate the soil, and the erratic Half-breeds encouraged to settle down, I believe that the solution of all social questions of any present importance in the North-West Territories will have ...
— The Treaties of Canada with The Indians of Manitoba - and the North-West Territories • Alexander Morris
... shoulders of the chamber containing the charge. Arrived there, a smart rap with the ramrod moulded it to the grooves. But it also flattened the top, and forced the bottom partly into the chamber. Thus misshapen at birth, the bullet was cast upon the world to an erratic and fruitless career. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... word,"—he said, to his fidus Achates, Marius Longford,—"I am enduring a great deal for the sake of the Vancourt millions! To follow an erratic girl like Maryllia from one Continental resort to another was bad enough,-but to stay here in tame, highly respectable country dullness is a thousand times worse! Why on earth, my good fellow, could you not have found ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... with a great clamor they rushed straight at them and repulsed them, so that most of these vehicles turned in the direction of the elephants. In their backward career they threw their own contingent into confusion,—for their erratic course terrified and dispersed the men marshaled close to them,—and a heavy rain which now came up rendered weak the detachment of archers and slingers. A heavy, all-enveloping mist succeeded, which was of no hindrance to the Romans, who had the upper hand and were fighting at close ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... at me. This is what you do not know—that, in three generations, every woman of my race has—gone wrong. ... Every one! and I am beginning—with such a marriage! ... deliberately, selfishly, shamelessly, perfectly conscious of the frivolous, erratic blood in me, aware of ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... The memorial and erratic clock of Our Square was just striking seven of the following morning, meaning approximately eight-forty, when my astonished eyes again beheld Martin Dyke seated on my bench, beautifully though inappropriately clad in full evening ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... with a genius so unstable, so erratic? Nothing, apparently, but to let him qualify for orders, and for this he is too young. Thereupon ensues a sort of 'Martin's summer' in his changing life,—a disengaged, delightful time when 'Master ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... said the minister. "She's a good woman if a little erratic, and a sovereign means a large part of ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... difference between random and fugitive desires and those more fundamental desires that express truly the nature of a man. Desires organized and harmonized gain great strength, and are enabled to overcome and expel from the mind erratic impulses, the obedience to which may easily be followed by regret. Action taken without a clear foresight of consequences, with an imperfect conception of the relation of means to ends, is blind and irrational action. Reason, as bringing ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... but not to his wickedness—Aristotle Miracles and strange events have concealed themselves from me My humour is no friend to tumult Nosegay of foreign flowers, having furnished nothing of my own Not believe from one, I should not believe from a hundred Nothing is so supple and erratic as our understanding Number of fools so much exceeds the wise Opinions we have are taken on authority and trust Others adore all of their own side Pitiful ways and expedients to the jugglers of the law Prepare ourselves against the preparations ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Essays of Montaigne • David Widger
... resolutely refused to abandon his monkey wrench, although he consented to carry the automatic to Riggins in the pilot-house. The estimable Riggins had been steering a somewhat erratic course, for he found it impossible to keep his eye on the lubber's mark while the bound quartermaster glared balefully at him from the floor. Indeed Riggins had been pondering his fate should that husky Teuton ever get the upper hand again; hence, ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... fortunate had been the escape of the Projectile. And from a danger too the most unlikely and the most unexpected. Who would have ever dreamed of even the possibility of such an encounter? And was all danger over? The sight of one of these erratic bolides certainly justified the gravest apprehensions of our travellers regarding the existence of others. Worse than the sunken reefs of the Southern Seas or the snags of the Mississippi, how could the Projectile be expected to avoid them? Drifting along blindly through ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... dwindled, and now the man stands before me exquisitely understood, a perfect piece of logic. All that seemed discordant and discrepant in his nature has now become harmonious and inevitable; the strangest and most erratic actions of his life now seem natural and consequential (I use the word in its grammatical sense) contradictions are reconciled, and looking at the man I see the pictures, and looking at the pictures I see ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... do New York over, and they kept at it faithfully and successfully until 1811. Then began the laying out of streets according to numbers and fixed measurements, instead of by picturesque names and erratic cow-path meanderings. Gouverneur Morris, Simeon de Witt and John Rutherford were appointed by the city to take charge of this task, and, as one writer points out, they did not do it as badly as they might have done, nor as ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... felt a qualm of conscience. The child really was too simple to be made game of. Besides, he felt sure that she had spoken the truth, so far as she herself was concerned. She didn't know where her erratic aunt had gone; and any further questioning would only frighten her without winning him the knowledge he sought. He therefore took the parcel back, said some soothing words and made his way across the walk to his taxi. But the number he gave the chauffeur was that of the house ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... affair, they sometimes regretted it. Reviewing was carried on in small type, in the backs of certain magazines. Most of it was verbose and much of it was worthless as criticism. The belated recognition of the critical genius of Poe was due to the company he kept. He was a sadly erratic reviewer, as often wrong, I suppose, as right, but the most durable literary criticism of the age came from his pen, and is to be found in a review, a review of ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... prairies which have been opened up to civilisation within two decades of years, and offer large possibilities of power and wealth in the future development of the New Dominion. It is a region remarkable for its long rivers, in places shallow and rapid, and extremely erratic in their courses through ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... brought the action of the tides to their careful attention. The tide, they found, behaved ire an erratic manner. Instead of two regular flows a day there was but one. And at the ebb more than two miles of beach and sea-bottom lay exposed below the spot where they had landed at the flood. Stern analyzed the probable cause ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... their appeal readily, and for five years were busily engaged in bringing proofs of the new science before the commission. These were M. de Foissac, M. Dupotet, M. Chapelain, and M. de Geslin. It would be but an unprofitable, and by no means a pleasant task to follow the commissioners in their erratic career, as they were led hither and thither by the four lights of magnetism above mentioned; the four "Wills-o'-the-Wisp" which dazzled the benighted and bewildered doctors on that wide and shadowy region of metaphysical inquiry — the influence of mind over matter. It will be better to state ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... in wild confusion were the denizens of this underground colony; their six little legs carrying their curious globular bodies backward and forward over the disturbed area from which the stone had been removed. At first the movements of the ants were extremely erratic and purposeless. Panic and alarm appeared to be the order of the day during the few minutes which elapsed after removal of the stone. But soon the eye could discern movements of purposive kind on the part of the alarmed residents. There was "racing and chasing" in all directions: ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... numerous and often remarkable. Here are the ones that the Nautilus's nets most frequently hauled on board: rays, including spotted rays that were oval in shape and brick red in color, their bodies strewn with erratic blue speckles and identifiable by their jagged double stings, silver-backed skates, common stingrays with stippled tails, butterfly rays that looked like huge two-meter cloaks flapping at middepth, toothless guitarfish that were a type of cartilaginous fish closer to the shark, trunkfish known ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... necessary to protect her from the robber tribes of the desert. While the practicability of the enterprise was still being anxiously discussed by her Turkish advisers, Lady Hester received a visit from a certain Nasar, son of Mahannah, Emir of the Anizys [Footnote: Dr. Meryon's somewhat erratic spelling of Oriental names is followed throughout this memoir.] (the collective name given to several of the Bedouin tribes ranging that part of the desert), who told her that he had heard of her proposed expedition, and that he came to warn her against attempting ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... hard. But drink never affected him except to make him more grimly tenacious in whatever he had deliberately and soberly resolved. Drink did not explain—neither wholly nor in any part—this conduct of his. It, and the more erratic vagaries to follow, will seem incredible conduct for a man of Norman's character and position to feeble folk with their feeble desires, their dread of criticism and ridicule, their exaggerated and adoring notions of the master men. In fact, it was the ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... intensely Southern in all his convictions and affections. His fiery soul found congenial spirits among the generous, hotblooded people of the Gulf States, whose very faults had a sort of charm for this impulsive, generous, erratic, gifted, man. He made his way back to his New England hills, where he is waiting for the sunset, often turning a longing eye southward, and now and then sending a greeting ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... Isaac M. Singer had become a client of Jordan & Clark in New York City. He was an erratic genius, and had taken up various occupations without much success, besides having invented valuable mechanical devices which had brought him no profit. The form of sewing-machine that he invented, and which has ever since been ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... benediction,—then, turning away, he entered his own room and shut the door. Babette, grown strangely serious, turned to her brother and held out her hand, moved by one of those erratic impulses which often take ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... fluttering with fear as they stepped along beneath the gloom of the trees, which even when not in leaf cast dense shadows around them. It was in truth a weird spot: owls hooted dismally about them, bats flitted here and there in their erratic flight, and sometimes almost brushed the faces of the boys with their clammy wings. The strange noises always to be heard in a wood at night assailed their ears, and mingled with the quick beating of their own hearts; whilst from time to time a long unearthly ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... You and I are one. Whatever is mine is yours. I don't swear to make you a regular, unfailing allowance worthy of the new position you're going to have, because you see I do business with several countries, and my income's erratic; I'm never sure to the day when it will come or how much it will be. But there's nothing you want which you can't buy; remember that. And when we begin life in London, you shall have a standing account at as many shops ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... and seemed on the verge of tears. The labor of his entire life, the great victories won with don Ramon, that political power which had been so carefully built up and sustained over decades, was about to crumble to ruins; all because of a light-headed, erratic boy who had handed to the first skirt who came along everything that belonged to him and everything that belonged to his friends ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... psychologist. Such players include J. C. Parke, Wallace F. Johnson, and Charles S. Garland. The first type of player mentioned merely hits the ball with little idea of what he is doing, while the latter always has a definite plan and adheres to it. The hard-hitting, erratic, net-rushing player is a creature of impulse. There is no real system to his attack, no understanding of your game. He will make brilliant coups on the spur of the moment, largely by instinct; but there is no, mental power of consistent thinking. It is an ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... winding that he speedily disappeared from sight. The boy, who was compelled to sit still and await his return, at perhaps the most dangerous portion of the road, felt anything but comfortable over the erratic proceeding of his friend. But, fortunately, the latter had been gone but a short time when he reappeared, hurrying forward as if somebody was ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... from twenty and fifteen-hundredths to eighteen and sixty-five hundredths cents, closing at a loss for the day of 275 points. The first sale of December on Monday was at seventeen and four-tenths cents, or 125 points lower; and after numerous erratic variations, the price broke to sixteen cents, a drop of six and one-quarter cents in less than two weeks. Business on that day was of enormous volume, in round numbers 412,000 bags; and approximately $1,500,000 was ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... outpost of empire came tidings of war in August, 1914. Great excitement and enthusiasm prevailed. News was very slow in getting through: the mails, usually a month in transit, became very erratic. But the colony eagerly undertook a share in the burden of the Empire; L2,250 was voted towards the war-chest; L750 was collected on behalf of the Prince of Wales's Fund. Detached, though keen, interest changed, however, as the weeks passed, to intimate alarm. The Governor, Mr. Allardyce, ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... along? "Perchance imagination fills thy mind, "With groves, and dwellings of celestial gods, "And temples richly deck'd with offer'd gold, "Where thou shall pass. Far else;—thy journey lies, "Through ambushes, and savage monsters' forms. "Ev'n shouldst thou lucky not erratic stray, "Yet must thou pass the Bull's opposing horns; "The bow Haemonian, by the Centaur bent; "The Lion's countenance grim; the Scorpion's claws "Bent cruel in a circuit large; the Crab "In lesser compass curving. Hard the task "To rule the steeds with ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... played the same course together, day in and day out, for four weeks. He was my partner in our foursome. Rather a helpful partner at times, I must admit, although he hasn't been at the game long enough to be a really experienced golfer. Fairly long off the tee, but erratic with the brassie, and not all dependable when it came to short iron work. However, as a rule we held ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford
... the conscious design of attracting him she must be acquitted, for she acted under the force of a strong attraction exercised by him. Her mind was not entirely engrossed in the pleasures, and what she imagined to be the duties, of her station. She had a considerable, if untrained and erratic, instinct toward religion, and exhibited that leaning toward the mysterious and visionary which is the common mark of an acute mind that has not been presented with any methodical course of training worthy of its abilities. Such a temperament ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... follow and to trace, geographically, the erratic course of Cabeza de Vaca with any degree of certainty. His own tale, however authentic, is so confused[12] that it becomes utterly impossible to establish any details of location. We only know that, in the year A.D. 1536, he and his associates finally met with ...
— Historical Introduction to Studies Among the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico; Report on the Ruins of the Pueblo of Pecos • Adolphus Bandelier
... glacier stream of the Lombards, and the following one of the Normans, left their erratic blocks, wherever they had flowed; but without influencing, I think, the Southern nations beyond the sphere of their own presence. But the lava stream of the Arab, even after it ceased to flow, warmed the whole of the Northern air; ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... they have no right to follow strangers. A player who is nervous is easily put off his game, especially if those watching him are so ill-bred as to make audible remarks. Those playing matches of course expect an audience, and erratic and nervous players ought not to go into tournaments—or at least not in two-ball foursomes where they are ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... made the subject of various opinions both here and abroad. We are not among those who are prepared to enter the lists as their champion. The translator himself remarks in relation to Consuelo: "That it has not found fit translation before, was doubtless owing to prevailing impressions of something erratic and bizarre in the author's way of living, and to a certain undeniable tone of wild, defying freedom in her earlier writings." The censure of the moral portion of the community is thus softly and mercifully expressed: We will not at ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... were constantly changing their places, and as it were wandering about the sky. It is certain that the Babylonians at a very early date distinguished from the fixed stars those remarkable five, which, from their wandering propensities, the Greeks called the "planets," and which are the only erratic stars that the naked eye, or that even the telescope, except at a very high power, can discern. With these five they were soon led to class the Moon, which was easily observed to be a wandering luminary, changing her place among ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... spinning yarns, peddling the latest funny story, explaining to his house why his expense account should be passed without those querulous protests, and generally comporting himself according to his own erratic and sometimes pyrotechnical ideas. And when Jimmy breezed westward again and heard that the Judge of the Fourth Judicial District was his double he chuckled, laughed, and finally beat his plump legs at what ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... a most erratic craft. She might have done well enough upon a park lagoon if safely anchored, but upon the bosom of a mighty ocean she ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... if, on your nightly rambles, you find one of the large night moths winging its silent flight over the moonlit glade, resting for an instant on a mullein-stalk, then dancing away in his erratic flight, like some ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... her father's house being Chun," replied the maiden agreeably. "In addition to the erratic but now repentant animal that has thus, as it were, brought us within the same narrow compass, he possesses a wooden plough, two wheel-barrows, a red bow with threescore arrows, and a rice-field, and is therefore a person ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... Jovial f. Natural f. Mercurial f. Celestial f. Lunatic f. Erratic f. Ducal f. Eccentric f. Common f. Aethereal and Junonian f. Lordly f. Arctic f. Palatine f. Heroic f. Principal f. Genial f. Pretorian f. Inconstant f. Elected f. Earthly f. Courtly f. Salacious and sporting f. Primipilary f. Jocund and wanton f. Triumphant f. Pimpled f. Vulgar f. Freckled ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... more harm thereby than we him. For our trench mortars were in an experimental stage, made locally by the R.E., and constructed of thin gas-pipe iron and home-made jam-pot bombs, whose behaviour was always erratic, and sometimes, I regret to say, fatal to the mortarist. (Poor Rogers, R.E., a capital subaltern, was killed ...
— The Doings of the Fifteenth Infantry Brigade - August 1914 to March 1915 • Edward Lord Gleichen
... man, and somewhat erratic in his ways, so the constable retired, and came back in his own garb, which he had carried out with him. "I think, Miss Hill," he said, "that Mr. Toner's clothes are now dry enough for him to wear them with safety. What do you think, ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... out in Beaulieu," he cried; "they shall not say it of me that I came back in rags. Look, here is a watch which I shall return to you, for it is mine; and, like its owner, it is erratic in ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... THE ARISTOCRATIC LIFE seemed at first most like a clue to White. Benham's erratic movements, his sudden impulses, his angers, his unaccountable patiences, his journeys to strange places, and his lapses into what had seemed to be pure adventurousness, could all be put into system ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... poor acting certainly. She affected fright, as the child expected. She cowered dismayed. "Oh, oh!" she cried, watching his erratic approach. "What is that?" She pretended flight, but sank into a chair, apparently overpowered. She gazed down at the child with the lifted hands of horror as he clasped the folds of her gown, his eyes shining with fun, his teeth glittering between his red lips, his laughter rippling with ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... was wet to the knees when he crossed the burn. A mile farther on, he reached another that was worse and they had to work back along the crumbling sides of its channel to find a place to cross. After this their progress was marked by erratic curves, and Foster was soon splashed with black peat-mud and green slime. By and by they came to a broad level, shut in by a ridge on its other side, and picked their way carefully between clumps of rushes and curious round holes filled with dark-colored water. The ground was very ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... pay of Congressmen. He made speeches in support of all these "reforms," but did not succeed in securing the discharge of a soldier, a sailor, a diplomatist, or a clerk, neither did he reduce the appropriations one single cent. The erratic Mr. David Crockett was then a member of the House, but had not attracted public attention, although the Jackson men were angry because he, one of Old Hickory's officers in the Creek War, was a devoted adherent of Henry Clay for the Presidency. One of his colleagues in the Tennessee ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... conformation of the country. The three ramifications mentioned, of which the Duthumi forms the first link, are separated by immense longitudinal plains. These elevated summits consist of rounded cones, between which the soil is bestrewn with erratic blocks of stone and gravelly bowlders. The most abrupt declivity of these mountains confronts the Zanzibar coast, but the western slopes are merely inclined planes. The depressions in the soil are covered with a black, rich loam, on which there is a vigorous ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... husband, on their voyage to America deeply affected Mrs Browning. "Was she happy in anything?" asks her sorrowing friend. The first person seen on Italian soil when Browning and his wife disembarked at Leghorn was the brilliant and erratic Irish priest, "Father Prout" of Fraser's Magazine, who befriended them with good spirits and a potion of eggs and port wine when Browning was ill in Florence, and chided Mrs Browning as a "bambina" for her needless fears. ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... pasture wealth— Erratic wanderings through dead'ning lands, Where sly old brambles, plucking me by stealth, ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... innumerable pigeons, "Allah's announcers,"[1] swirled in clouds from the arcades, mosques, and minarets surrounding the Haram, and from the Ka'aba itself, and began winging erratic courses all about the Forbidden City. Men, birds, and animals alike, all shared the terror of this unheard-of outrage when—according to ancient prophesy—the Great Devils of Feringistan should ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... not in the patiently marching Una to be a creative thinker, yet she did hunger for self-mastery, and ardently was she following the erratic gibes at civilization with which young Walter showed his delight in having an audience, when the brown, homely Golden ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... practical procedure for the preparation of this ester. The materials are cheap, the experimental procedure simple, and the product obtained is free from objectionable traces of benzyl chloride. Unfortunately the method has been found to be extremely erratic in regard to yield (10-95 per cent), as well as in regard to purity of the product (87-97 per cent ester).[1] As a result of the present study,[2] causes for variations are fully accounted for and the procedure has been converted into a ...
— Organic Syntheses • James Bryant Conant
... Blue Goose in the morning, a white-winged, erratic craft, skimming the sparkling, land-locked harbours of girlhood. She returned, and already the first lifting swells beyond the sheltering bar were tossing her in their arms. She had entered the ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... you only that under the ground is a bulky esculent, which some months hence will be put into a negro pot, and boiled and eaten, with an utter absence of poetry, or of anything but appetite and salt. It is plain that in this case solid usefulness stands no chance with erratic and rather loose-mannered brilliancy. And yet some kinds of yam in flower diffuse a fragrance more exquisite, I am persuaded, than comes from any vineyard. So that, after all, their homely prose has some flavor of poetry, which, when African ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... upon them the room was filled with the soft sound of singing, started by the minister, perhaps, or was it his wife? It was unaccompanied, "Abide with me, Fast falls the eventide, the darkness deepens, Lord with me abide!" Even Laurie joined an erratic high tenor humming in on the last verse, and Opal shuddered as the words were sung, "Hold thou thy cross before my closing eyes, Shine through the dark and point me to the skies." Death was a horrible thing to her. She never wanted to be reminded of death. It was a long, long way ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... unable to explain certain evils in life, refuses to believe anything. That is the case with Van Dorn, a very bad man. Stepfather Joe is always conservative on that subject. Deviate as much as he may, he never disbelieves. Aunt Patty, too, erratic as she is, holds a conservative position on ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... began to gain on Christ Church at once, and were very soon within half-a-length of them, but I had no breath to use for shouting, and not having a rattle I could make no row at all; moreover I am an erratic runner, so whenever I looked at the boats I kicked or ran into somebody, and I could not retort when they said things to me. I pounded along as far as the Long Bridges, which was really quite a long way, and when I stopped I was sure that we should catch Christ Church. I stood away from ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... and not return perhaps for days. His comings and goings were very erratic, and Dick tried to think that if the man were there he would have lent him ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... the pity of it," he ejaculated. "Farnham's away, after all. You know what an erratic fellow he is? Well, he got tired of business, and not dreaming you would come, ran into town to dine with some people who had asked him the other day. The fact is, I fancy there's a fair lady in the case. But he did say something about looking you up at the Savoy, if he had time, ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... as angry as a hungry lion which has just had a long expected dinner suddenly snatched away from it; but the worse he became the louder M'Allister shrieked with laughter. The latter was now simply rolling about the room—for it could not be termed walking, it was so erratic—holding his sides and laughing, whilst the tears were chasing each other down his cheeks. He kept trying to speak, but had no sooner stuttered out the words, "Heh, mon! heh, mon!" than he was off again into another wild paroxysm of laughter, and ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... general education in boyhood. Early left an orphan by his father's death, he had inherited his business, and for some years he carried it on prosperously, living with his mother and sisters. But before he was two-and-twenty his naturally erratic disposition asserted itself, and he chafed under the restraints and monotony of life in a small provincial town. He sold up his business at a great loss, well-nigh ruining his family, had it not been for his mother's small private means; and with his share of the proceeds of the sale he travelled ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... from one crossing to the next, from the needle to the twig, from the twig to the branch, from the branch to the bough and from the bough, by a no less angular path, to go back home. It is useless to rely upon sight as a guide on this long and erratic journey. The Processionary, it is true, has five ocular specks on either side of his head, but they are so infinitesimal, so difficult to make out through the magnifying-glass, that we cannot attribute ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... (my friend and I returned in time for a late dinner), I wandered among the Roman remains of the place by the light of a magnificent moon, and gathered an impression which has lost little of its silvery glow. The moon of the evening before had been aqueous and erratic; but if on the present occasion it was guilty of any irregularity, the worst it did was only to linger beyond its time in the heavens, in order to let us look at things comfortably. The effect was admirable; it brought back ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... declared Shirley, "that is, she thinks she is, and she has lots of money and a poor head for managing it. In fact, I have always thought her erratic. You see," went on Shirley, supporting herself by "linking" into the accommodating arms extended, "Dol Vin fetched her out here from the city so that she could practice her howling. She was cast for a part with a wild scream in it, and every time she attempted ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... consider the millions of comets around us, and when we remember how near some of these have come to us during the last few years, who will undertake to say that during the last thirty thousand, fifty thousand, or one hundred thousand years, one of these erratic luminaries, with blazing front and train of dbris, may not have come in collision with ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... came from Launceston. This was soon followed by "The Gazette" of George Arden, and that again by "The Herald" of George Cavenagh. All three had, I think, the common prefix of "Port Phillip". "The Gazette", after a brief career, under its very able but rather erratic owner, went to the wall. "The Patriot", under Boursiquot, who had succeeded the overworked Fawkner, was, somewhat later, bought up by the "Argus", under Wilson and Johnston, in succession to Kerr. The Herald, when quitted after an excellent and timely sale ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... but Errington's heart sank. Thelma had gone!—gone, most probably, for one of those erratic journeys across the Fjord to the cave where he had first seen her. She would not come back, he felt certain; not even at her father's request would that beautiful, proud maiden consent to alter her plans. What an unlucky destiny was his! Absorbed in disappointed ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... those models of form in verse which include rime, or whose cadences are informal, is set down as an imitator of Walt Whitman. When I was young, Walt Whitman seemed to have been established as a strange, erratic, and godless person, whose indecencies were his principal stock in trade. Emerson's practical repudiation of him had had its effect, and the very respectable—that is, gentlemen of the class of the vestrymen of Grace ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... receive them, near the Jesuits College (at Cote de St. Michel); in 1667, they settled on the northerly frontier of Sillery, [195] in Notre Dame de Foy [now St. Foye]; restless and scared, they again shifted they quarters on the 29th December, 1693, and pitched their erratic tents at Ancienne Lorette, which place they also abandoned many years afterwards to go and settle at Jeune or Indian Lorette, where the remnants of this once warlike race [196] (the nobles amongst Indian tribes) exist, now crossed with their ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... The arches forming the left-hand middle distance are finely depicted; correct as far as local traditional art will inform us, and of considerable value in such a work as ballast, substance, in steadying the erratic fancies or emotions of the painter. Criticism must justly deal with the figures of the Jewish rabble. The attitudes are telling, but over angular and rather vulgar. The populace, I may remark, are too excited; such sustained, extravagant attitudes, whether in a picture of large or ...
— Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes • J. Atwood.Slater
... a brilliant but erratic personage, living sumptuously, even though her revenues from Sweden came in slowly, partly because the Swedes disliked her change of religion. She was surrounded by men of letters, with whom she amused herself, and she took to herself a lover, the Marquis Monaldeschi. She thought that at ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... any number of pigeonholes of human existence, she thought wilful and most obstinate because she could not shape him to live in her pigeonhole, which was the only one she knew. She could not follow the flights of his mind, and when his brain got beyond her, she deemed him erratic. Nobody else's brain ever got beyond her. She could always follow her father and mother, her brothers and Olney; wherefore, when she could not follow Martin, she believed the fault lay with him. It was the old tragedy of insularity ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... Mount Kelso; more than that, they were seen only on the slopes of the range, none of them being observed on the crest itself, perhaps on account of the cold, strong gale that was blowing across the snowy heights. A nighthawk was sailing in its erratic course over the peaks—a bit of information worth noting, none of these birds having been seen on any of the summits fourteen thousand feet high. These matters are perhaps not of supreme interest, yet they have their value as studies in comparative ornithology and ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... this power of gravitation that makes everything upon the earth tend to the centre? How does it reach out its invisible hands toward the erratic meteor-stones, arrest them in their swift course, and draw them down to the earth's bosom? It is a power. We know ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... could be accomplished by the naked eye. His observations agreed with those of Tycho Brahe, and won for Maestlin the professorship of astronomy in the University of Heidelberg. No man had so clearly proved the supralunar position of a comet, or shown so conclusively that its motion was not erratic, but regular. The young astronomer, though Apian's pupil, was an avowed Copernican and the destined master and friend of Kepler. Yet, in the treatise embodying his observations, he felt it necessary to save his ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... little for individuals. He did not believe (as some one has said) that the history of mankind is the history of its great men. Great men with him were but larger atoms, obeying the same impulses with the rest, only perhaps a trifle more erratic. With them or without them, the course of things would have been much ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... the race-track favourite of the season. Being feminine, she was erratic in her gaits, and there were a few heavy losers about town who had believed she could be true. The reporters ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... they roll do but swell the rich revenues of his praise. Lamb's popularity shows no sign of waning. Even that most extraordinary compound, the rising generation of readers, whose taste in literature is as erratic as it is pronounced; who have never heard of James Thomson who sang The Seasons (including the pleasant episode of Musidora bathing), but understand by any reference to that name only the striking author of The City of Dreadful Night; ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... the poetic Raggles in an erratic and singular way. It seemed to him that he had drunk cold tea and that the city was a white, cold cloth that had been bound tightly around his brow to spur him to some unknown but tremendous mental effort. And, after all, he came to shovel snow for a livelihood; ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... about the school arm in arm, sat next to each other at tea, and wrote each other private little notes. St. Elgiva's smiled again, but the girls by this time were accustomed to Marjorie's very impulsive and rather erratic ways, and did not take ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... meanwhile, had quitted her mother's side, and was playing at her own will about the market-place. She made the sombre crowd cheerful by her erratic and glistening ray, even as a bird of bright plumage illuminates a whole tree of dusky foliage by darting to and fro, half seen and half concealed amid the twilight of the clustering leaves. She had an undulating, but oftentimes ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the tragedy. The old man had always been cranky and erratic, and he'd played the despot on Hikihoho so long that he'd got the idea in his head that there was nothing wrong with the king—or the princess either. When Armande was eighteen he sent for her. He had slews and slathers of money, as Yankee ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... approached the table, stopping just outside the area of illumination shed by the shaded lamp. But since Victor continued to smoke absently, paying no attention, Nogam resigned himself to wait with entire patience: the perfect pattern of a servant tempered by long servitude to the erratic winds of employers' whims; efficient, assiduous, mute ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... position. The boat was in charge of Mr. John Rowland and Mr. Robert English, both of Yale. It created quite a furor among the passengers on our great ship, when she stopped in mid-ocean, as it appeared to them, and lowered an erratic doctor over the side on to a midget, whose mast-tops one looked down upon from the liner's rail. The sensation was all the more marked as we disappeared over the rail clinging to two large pots of geraniums—an importation which we regarded as very ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... than the levity of the others, I fear they did not prevent me feeling an almost equal tide of affection towards the sleepy acumen and ingrained sense of humour of Ida, the second girl and book-reader for the family: or Violet, a veritably delightful child, with a temper as formless and erratic as ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... and here and there, as they passed along, they would sweep into their own herd the bullocks of the victims whose lands they passed. If detected on the spot, they gave up their prey. They were in the right in moving their own cattle, and were not responsible for the erratic tendencies of other animals. If successful, they either sold their stolen beasts to butchers on the road, or got them home to Boolabong. There were dangers, of course, and occasional penalties. But there was much success. It was supposed, also, ...
— Harry Heathcote of Gangoil • Anthony Trollope
... Because of his own vagrant airs they had called him "El Pajarito" when he first drifted south over Mexican trails,—but happy erratic tunefulness was smothered for him temporarily. Over the vast land of riches, smiling in the sun, there brooded the threats of Indian gods chained, inarticulate, reaching out in unexpected ways for expression through the dusky devotees at hidden ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... been doubtful, for the Boston Church was predominantly Hutchinsonian; but the ministers as a body supported Winthrop and Wilson, and the old magistrates were returned in the election of 1637. The victory was a crucial one. The erratic Vane went off to England; Cotton returned to his first allegiance; and when the cause of all the trouble was cited to appear before the court in the fall of the same year, the decree of banishment was a foregone conclusion. Like Luther ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... aren't going!" Miss M'Gann protested regretfully. "I want to ask so many questions. I am so glad to see you. I feel that I know you very well. Mr. Dresser, your intimate friend, has spoken to me about you. Such an interesting man, a little erratic, like a genius, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... us!' What prayer can wild, unrestrained, unheeding Genius utter with more fervency? I own Genius is rarely in love. There is an egotism, almost a selfishness, about it, that will not stoop to such common worship. Women know it, and often prefer the blunt, honest, common-place soldier to the wild erratic poet. Genius, grand as it is, is unsympathetic. It demands higher—the highest joys. Genius claims to be loved, but to love is too much to ask it. And yet at this time Sheridan was not a matured Genius. ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... your father, a genius in his way, and a little mad, perhaps. Leave him to me, Monsieur, and it will be quite all right. Last night, it was so sudden, that I was frightened for a moment. I should have remembered he is erratic and apt to change his mind. I should have guessed why he changed it. It is you, Monsieur. You have had a bad effect upon him. You have made him turn suddenly grotesque. What did you do to ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... looked at him keenly; looked also at the erratic movements of the gun, and reconsidered his ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... ship to be put over to a trawler in sight. With the seas so swift and ponderous I completely forgot the cold wind in watching the two lively ships being manoeuvred till they were within earshot. When the engines were stopped the steering had to be nicely calculated, or erratic waves brought them dangerously close, or else took them out of call. Our new friend had not seen "our lot," but had left a fleet with an unknown house-flag ten miles astern. We ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... was nothing like it at the time, and nothing exactly like it has been attempted since. The nearest approach to it among its predecessors was the Observator, a small weekly journal written by the erratic John Tutchin, in which passing topics, political and social, were discussed in dialogues. Personal scandals were a prominent feature in the Observator. Defoe was not insensible to the value of this element to a popular journal. ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... be helpful. The voice may win or destroy confidence, the statement may by its firmness overcome counter-motives or by its uncertainty reinforce them. Even hand or arm movements by their motor suggestion may focus the desires of the customers, while unskillful, erratic movements may scatter the attention and lead to an inner oscillation ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... dinner), I wandered among the Roman remains of the place by the light of a magnificent moon, and gathered an impression which has lost little of its silvery glow. The moon of the evening before had been aqueous and erratic; but if on the present occasion it was guilty of any irregularity, the worst it did was only to linger beyond its time in the heavens, in order to let us look at things comfortably. The effect was admirable; it brought back the impression ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... who stood on the threshold, listening and looking up at the sky above the clearing. His hair was white, his figure a little bent, and there was an anxious look upon his face, a permanent expression rather than one caused by any tardy arrival this evening. The man he waited for was too erratic in his goings and comings to make a few hours', or even a day's, delay ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... reddish brown of the land can be seen numerous grey spots; these are erratic boulders of granite. Through glasses one could be seen perched on a peak at least 1300 feet above ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... Republic of Cyprus under government control has a market economy dominated by the service sector, which accounts for 78% of GDP. Tourism, financial services, and real estate are the most important sectors. Erratic growth rates over the past decade reflect the economy's reliance on tourism, which often fluctuates with political instability in the region and economic conditions in Western Europe. Nevertheless, the economy in the area under government control grew by an average of 3.6% ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... this famous woman, by Miss Thomas, is the only one in existence. Those who have awaited it with pleasurable anticipation, but with some trepidation as to the treatment of the erratic side of her character, cannot fail to be pleased with the skill by which it is done. It is the best production on George Sand that has yet been published. The author modestly refers to it as a sketch, which it undoubtedly is, but ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... opportunity however was not taken. Indeed it is scarcely surprising that the signs of the times should have been misread. Maurice had helped Charles against the Schmalkaldic League before; yet everything depended on his discarding the apparently erratic politics of his past career, and displaying in full measure the organising and military genius of which he had given promise, though it still remained to be conclusively proved. He did in fact ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... Of the conscious design of attracting him she must be acquitted, for she acted under the force of a strong attraction exercised by him. Her mind was not entirely engrossed in the pleasures, and what she imagined to be the duties, of her station. She had a considerable, if untrained and erratic, instinct toward religion, and exhibited that leaning toward the mysterious and visionary which is the common mark of an acute mind that has not been presented with any methodical course of training worthy of its abilities. Such a temperament could not fail to be powerfully influenced ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... the stranded machine was the work of an instant for the erratic professor, and he extended his hand to Peggy. With a supreme effort she pulled herself together and accepted his proffered help. But agitated as she: was, she did not fail to notice a surprising fact, and that ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... notable monument—the Lewknor. Near by is the beautiful West Dean Park. Mid-Lavant church is Early English but boasts a Norman window. The name of this village perpetuates a phenomenon which is becoming more rare each year. At one time erratic streams would make their appearance in the chalk combes in the head of the valley and combining, cause serious floods or "lavants." For some unknown reason the flow of water is gradually becoming smaller and of late years it ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... sacredness, which religion sometimes gives when shining out through a peculiarly congenial natural temperament,—yet we must confess we are as much interested and impressed with its effects in those wilder and more erratic temperaments, such as Bellamy, Backus, and Moody, where genius and passion were so combined as to lead to many inconsistencies. This book is a record of how manfully many such men battled with themselves, repairing the faults of their hasty and passionate hours by the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... being perhaps as varied and as vivid, but also as purposeless and unsystematized as the visual images in a kaleidoscope; such fantasy (often loosely called imagination) appears in dreaming, reverie, somnambulism, and intoxication. Fantasy in ordinary usage simply denotes capricious or erratic fancy, as appears in the adjective fantastic. Imagination and fancy differ from fantasy in bringing the images and their combinations under the control of the will; imagination is the broader and higher term, including fancy; imagination ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... practical religious turn to his master's speculations. His teaching is closely in accordance with that of Tauler, whom he quotes as an authority, and whom he joins in denouncing the followers of the "false light," the erratic ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... kata tropon oimai archaion,] placed, says he, as I imagine, according to some antient rule and method; which pillars were supposed to represent the seven planets. If then these exterior stones related to the [707]seven erratic bodies in our sphere, the central monument of Hippos must necessarily have been designed for the Sun. And however rude the whole may possibly have appeared, it is the most antient representation upon record, and consequently the most curious, of ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... army depended upon his private exertions. I respected this style of mule; and, had I possessed a juicy cabbage, would have pressed it upon him with thanks for his excellent example. The histrionic mule was a melodramatic quadruped, prone to startling humanity by erratic leaps and wild plunges, much shaking of his stubborn head, and lashing out of his vicious heels; now and then falling flat and apparently dying a la Forrest; a gasp—a squirm—a flop, and so on, till the street was well blocked up, the drivers all swearing ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... welfare of man for its object. It is a system so uniform, exalted and pure, that the loftiest intellects have acknowledged its influence, and acquiesced in the justness of its claims. Genius has bent from his erratic course to gather fire from her altars, and pathos from the agony of Gethsemane and the sufferings of Calvary. Philosophy and science have paused amid their speculative researches and wondrous revelations to gain wisdom from her teachings and knowledge ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... the possession, perhaps, of so many virtues, gifts, testimonials, and certificates she had no chin, no eyebrows, and no eyelashes. Her eyes were weak and watery; her spectacles strong and thick; her nose indeterminate, wavering, erratic; her ears large, her teeth irregular and protrusive, her mouth unfortunate and not ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... does sound erratic!' said Miss Kennedy, drawing a long breath. 'I hope he will confine all new-fangled notions ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... radiantly than a silver service, and give him the spirit of the tropics and the Rhine, whose fruits are on other tables. The golden light that transfigures talent and illuminates the world, and which we call genius, is erratic and erotic; and while in Milton it is austere, and in Wordsworth cool, and in Southey methodical, in Shakespeare it is fervent, with all the results of fervor; in Raphael lovely, with all the excesses of love; in Dante moody, ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... Marquess would fling about his wagers until he frequently stood to win or lose L50,000 on a single race. If he had always kept his head under the intoxication of this wild gambling he might perhaps have made another fortune equal to that he had inherited. But his wagering was as erratic as himself, and his gains were punctuated by heavy losses which began to make inroads on even his ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... continued applause, due to a double back somersault and two appropriate remarks fired off in midair (this was his great psychic moment), to make a little speech and sing a song. His speech, though syntactically erratic, was delivered in a loud, frank way that won everybody's heart, and ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... intense that nothing was heard save the hum of two great "bumblebees" that darted in and out among the trees and flew at erratic angles above our heads, the negroes came forward and stretched their necks over each other's shoulders, peering curiously at the little mounds of powder that lay before them, at the innocent-looking ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... and staggered back. Tony reasoned: "If that was the third door the next behind me must be the second, and on the right;" but Tony took not into consideration that he had reversed the direction of his erratic wobbling. He lunged across the hall—not because he wished to but because the spirits moved him. He came in contact with a door. "This, then, must be the second door," he soliloquized, "and it is upon my right. Ah, Benito, this ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... hours lamenting the loss of the huge antarctic bird. He consoled himself later, however, by shooting a beautiful little snow petrel, which he stuffed and mounted and presented to Ben Stubbs, who was quite mollified by the kind-hearted, if erratic, professor's gift. ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... night. Her low spirits were succeeded by gay ones; the Princess had never looked more truly regal, nor had the Prince ever more passionately wooed her. Girls who did not belong to the society always flocked into the theater to see the rehearsals. Maggie's mood scarcely puzzled them. She was so erratic that no one expected anything from her but the unexpected: if she looked like a drooping flower one moment, her head was erect the next, her eyes sparkling, her voice gay. The flower no longer drooped, but blossomed with renewed vigor. After reading ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... to stand up. This, I managed, at the second attempt; but I was very tottery, and peculiarly weak. It seemed to me, that I was going to be ill, and I made shift to stumble my way toward the house. My steps were erratic, and my head confused. At each step that I took, sharp pains shot through ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... flutter-budget you are, Patty," said Nan, appearing at the doorway, and pausing to watch Patty's erratic movements. ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells
... my dear! It has not struck anyone but yourself as anything the least out of the way." Mrs. Pellew then explains to her daughter, not without toleration for an erratic judgment—to wit, her husband's—that that gentleman has got a nonsensical idea into his head that old Mrs. Marrable is not quite.... Oh no—not that she is failing, you know—not at all!... Only, perhaps, not so clear as.... Of course, very old ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... it appeared above the trees, there came the cracking report of a shotgun, and they saw the bird collapse in mid-air and sheer downward across the hog-back. But it did not land there; the marksman had not calculated on those erratic gales from the chasm; and the dead pigeon went whirling down into the viewless gulf amid flying vapours mounting from ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... Edward Livingston, a native of New York, then secretary of state, was published in a cheap and convenient edition. To the readers of such literature Greeley's peaceable secession seemed like the erratic policy of an eccentric thinker, and its promulgation, especially when it began giving comfort and encouragement to the South, contributed not a little to the defeat of its author for the United States Senate in the ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... solutions. The processes are qualitatively understood and it is usually possible to ascertain with reasonable accuracy the conditions of depth of water, relation to shore line, climate, nature of erosion, and other similar factors; yet the vast scale of some of these deposits, and their erratic areal and stratigraphic distribution, present unsolved problems as to the precise combinations of factors which ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... Gipsy to Robert in bewilderment. This was not the dazzling figure in gauzes and satins and jewels she had expected, a capricious lady of a foreign and Southern nobility, whose whimsical and erratic fancy was occasionally amused by a change of role. This was a daughter of the long, brown path, who afoot and light-hearted took naturally to the open road, with the tanned cheek, white teeth, and merry eyes ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... If you could have foreseen that those spoons and forks would have soon passed, - by a mysterious system of loss which undergraduate powers can never fathom, - into the property of Mr. Robert Filcher, the excellent, though occasionally erratic, scout of your beloved son, and from thence have melted, not "into thin air," but into a residuum whose mass might be expressed by the equivalent of coins of a thin and golden description, - if you could but have foreseen this, then, infatuated but affectionate parent, you would ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... the chimney-corner smoking his pipe, and making severe mental comments upon the conduct of Parliament, then in session, of whose erratic proceedings he was reading an account in a small but highly seasoned newspaper. Sammy shook his head ominously over the peppery reports, but feeling it as well to reserve his opinions for a select audience at The Crown, ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... imperfect drill of the camel corps, and, it must be added, the exaggerated fear of the Mahdi's power. When it was attempted to quicken the slow forward movement of the unwieldy force confusion ensued, and no greater progress was effected than if things had been left undisturbed. The erratic policy in procuring camels caused them at the critical moment to be not forthcoming in anything approaching the required numbers, and this difficulty was undoubtedly increased by the treachery of Mahmoud Khalifa, who was the chief contractor we employed. Even when the camels were procured, ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... their scientific crews. Fathers went rowing to and fro with argosies of pretty children, who gave them gay good morrows. Sometimes they met fanciful nutshells manned by merry girls, who made for shore at sight of them with most erratic movements and novel commands included in their Art of Navigation. Now and then some poet or philosopher went musing by, fishing for facts or fictions, where other men catch ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... assays, or as the case may be, analyses, are usually made of every sample and their average taken. In the case of erratic differences a ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... spark of life was not so quickly quenched; its blazing torch might waver, wane, and wax again. In the chill, dark hour when the life-lamp flickers most, he wakened to hear the sweet, sweet music of a dog's loud bark; in a minute he heard it nearer, and yet again at hand, and Skookum, erratic, unruly, faithful Skookum, was bounding around and barking madly at ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... each pursuing the bent of its own nature, and going its own way. We have the whole menagerie within us—the tiger, the ape, the peacock, the ass, the goose, the sheep the hyena, and all the rest. And we have been letting these animals rule us. Even our Intellect is erratic, unstable, and like the quicksilver to which the ancient occultists compared it, shifting and uncertain. If you will look around you you will see that those men and women in the world who have really accomplished anything worth while have ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... to Rory's, for the look on his face told only of a dogged resolution to continue sinning against the light. He knew that his own contumacy in this respect would land his soul in perdition, and he deliberately let it go at that. Brave old Rory! Never does erratic man appear to such advantage as when his own intuitive moral sense rigorously overbears a conscientiousness warped by some fallacy which ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... nothing more to say. Pixie was Pixie. As well try to move a mountain from its place, as persuade that sweet, loving, most loyal of creatures to draw back from a solemn pledge. Something might be done with Stanor perhaps, or, failing Stanor, through that erratic person, his uncle. She must consult with Geoffrey and Bridgie, together they might insist upon a period of waiting and separation before a definite engagement was announced. Pixie was still under age. Until her twenty-first birthday her guardians might safely demand ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... everybody friendly with you is afraid of you. You've got so much property and stuff here they're plumb afraid of you. I'm a poor man, Barb—don't never expect to be anything else, and I don't give a hang for anybody," averred the erratic surgeon, "and nobody gives ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... was as if the devil was in him, for he sprang here and sprang there, now thrusting and now cutting, catching blows on his shield, turning them with his blade, stooping under the swing of an axe, springing over the sweep of a sword, so swift and so erratic that the man who braced himself for a blow at him might find him six paces off ere he could bring it down. Three pirates had fallen before him, and he had wounded Spade-beard in the neck, when the Norman giant sprang at him ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... inseparable from the rapid accumulation of national power; but since power is the most dangerous of gifts until men have learned to control it, these changes seem at first to have no specific aim or direction. Henry V—whose erratic yet vigorous life, as depicted by Shakespeare, was typical of the life of his times—first let Europe feel the might of the new national spirit. To divert that growing and unruly spirit from rebellion at home, Henry led his army abroad, in the apparently impossible attempt to gain for himself ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... had been an easier task for William the Silent to steer his course, notwithstanding all the perversities, short-comings, brow-beatings, and inconsistencies that he had been obliged to endure from Elizabeth and Henry. Genius, however capricious and erratic at times, has at least vision, and it needed no elaborate arguments to prove to both those sovereigns that the severance of their policy from that of the Netherlands was impossible without ruin to the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... rest the remains of Iturbide, first emperor of Mexico, whose tomb bears the simple legend: "The Liberator." None more appropriate could have been devised, for through him virtually was Mexican independence won, though his erratic career finally ended ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... "ki-yip-yapping"—again and again, as if endeavouring to convey some insidious message. George continued to stare at the pictures. Gad! what a strange fantastic mind the man must have! he mused—what rotten, erratic desecration to shove pictures indiscriminately together like that! . . . Lack of space was no excuse. Millet's "Angelus," "Ally Sloper at the Derby," a splendid lithograph of "The Angel of Pity at the Well of Cawnpore," Lottie Collins, scantily attired, in ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... the craft's erratic course, as it swung loggily westward and headed toward that yawning abysm from which they had all ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... flows through bewitching scenery until by another great horseshoe bend it winds around the ruins of Goodrich Castle, reared upon a wooded cliff, with Goodrich Court near by. The latter is a modern imitation of a mediaeval dwelling, constructed according to the erratic whims of a recent owner. This Court once contained the finest collection of ancient armor in England, but most of it has been transferred to the South Kensington Museum. Goodrich Castle was once a formidable ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... Spellings are sometimes erratic. A few obvious misprints have been corrected, but in general the original spelling has been retained. Accents in the French phrases are inconsistent, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... most eloquent of his disciples, Fenelon, then Archbishop of Cambrai, seemed to him to have fallen into dangerous errors. He had adopted the mystic doctrine of Quietism, which had been made known to him first by an erratic woman, Madame Guyon. Bossuet determined that the eloquent archbishop must be compelled to recant. A number of works were published by him in support of his position, the most important one being his 'Relation ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... moved. The erratic Arizona breezes twisted the dust of their going. Senor Johnson watched them dwindle. With them seemed to go the joy in the old life. No longer did the long trail possess for him its ancient fascination. He had become a ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... tongue; and to Doggie these tears were healing dews of Heaven's distillation. By degrees he learned the many arts of war as taught to the private soldier in England. He could refrain from shutting his eyes when he pressed the trigger of his rifle, but to the end of his career his shooting was erratic. He could perform with the weapon the other tricks of precision. Unencumbered he could march with the best. The torture of the heavy pack nearly killed him; but in time, as his muscles developed, he was able to slog along under the burden. He even learned to dig. ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... of credit and shares, and that he had no ready money—a fact borne out by the testimony of his shipmates. The night he arrived was spent in an orgy on board ship, which he did not leave until the early evening of the next day, although, after his erratic fashion, he had ordered a room at a hotel. That evening he took ashore a portmanteau, evidently intending to pass the night at his hotel. He was never seen again, although some of the sailors declared that they had seen him on the wharf WITHOUT THE PORTMANTEAU, and they had drunk together at ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... "That is a very good book," said he; "I assure you it is a very good book." Then all at once addressing Abbe Boileau, "Doctor, do you think that St. Augustin was as clever as Rabelais?" He was ill, however, and began to turn towards eternity his dreamy and erratic thoughts. He had set about composing pious hymns. "The best of thy friends has not a fortnight to live," he wrote to Maucroix; "for two months I have not been out, unless to go to the Academy for amusement. Yesterday, as I was returning, I was seized in the ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... satisfy their idea of studies from the life. Their schemes of colour are limited to harmonies in crimson lake, cobalt and gamboge, their skies are very blue, their grass arsenically green, and their perspective as erratic as that ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... mile or two of the Hudson in the vicinity of Nyack. From the great city it was navigable by power craft as far as Bridgeboro and even above at full tide, but a mile or two above the boys' home town it narrowed to a mere creek, winding its erratic way through a beautiful country where intertwined and overarching boughs formed dim tunnels through which the canoeist passed with no sound but the swishing of his own paddle. The boys had never before canoed to the river's source, though ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... is based upon a hypothetical identity of soul in different successive bodies—a hypothesis which can never be proved, and which contradicts the universal consciousness. Until that erratic Englishwoman, Mrs. Besant, appeared, no one claimed to possess the first intimation, through consciousness or memory, of a previous existence in another body. Ancient rishis and a few others were said by others ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... called across the erratic width that separated the rapidly moving vehicles, "if you've got power enough tuh 'rest people and keep 'em in jail for the rest of their lives, marryin' ain't much worse, and yuh kin do ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... was able to observe that expectation, with Roderick, took a form which seemed singular even among his characteristic singularities. If redemption—Roderick seemed to reason—was to arrive with his mother and his affianced bride, these last moments of error should be doubly erratic. He did nothing; but inaction, with him, took on an unwonted air of gentle gayety. He laughed and whistled and went often to Mrs. Light's; though Rowland knew not in what fashion present circumstances had modified ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... with me last month. In fact, we played the same course together, day in and day out, for four weeks. He was my partner in our foursome. Rather a helpful partner at times, I must admit, although he hasn't been at the game long enough to be a really experienced golfer. Fairly long off the tee, but erratic with the brassie, and not all dependable when it came to short iron work. However, as a rule we held ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford
... there are more angles. Thief though he be, he has fair language,—not florid or rhetorical, but terse and very much to the point. If bred as a divine, he would have held his place among the "brilliants" of the time, and been as original, erratic, or outr as any. What a fortune lost! It is part of the fatality for the man not to know it, at least in time. Even villany would have put him into his proper place, but for that film over the mental vision. "If rogues," said Franklin, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... like Dave,' observes Enright, comin' in on the pow-wow. 'Lynchin's, to have weight an' be a credit to us, ought not to be erratic. A lack of reg'larity about 'em would shake our standin' ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... down stairs with her head wrapped in a pink knitted "nubia," and stroll back and forth along the gravelled walk, her gaunt figure passing into the dusk of the cedar avenue and emerging like the erratic shadow of one ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... engineer. "We were doomed to execute a series of right-angled triangles all through our erratic course. From the Alkali Desert—or rather, Three Forks Camp, which was our halting-place—we made for the Rocky Mountains, so as to reach the Yellowstone River on this side. And that was where we had such ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... she was a brilliant but erratic personage, living sumptuously, even though her revenues from Sweden came in slowly, partly because the Swedes disliked her change of religion. She was surrounded by men of letters, with whom she amused herself, ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... the sacred edifice, what was it within, and at that particular portion of it known by the designation of the Chapel of the Virgin Mary, at which I beheld, questioning my own senses, my unaccountable friend, this exceedingly erratic baron—upon his knees—in solemn prayer! Yes, kneeling in low humility, and praying audibly, with a devotion and an awful earnestness that could not be surpassed. He remained upon his knees, and he persevered ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... cook, as much as Aunt Chloe,—cooking being an indigenous talent of the African race; but Chloe was a trained and methodical one, who moved in an orderly domestic harness, while Dinah was a self-taught genius, and, like geniuses in general, was positive, opinionated and erratic, to ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... boyhood. Early left an orphan by his father's death, he had inherited his business, and for some years he carried it on prosperously, living with his mother and sisters. But before he was two-and-twenty his naturally erratic disposition asserted itself, and he chafed under the restraints and monotony of life in a small provincial town. He sold up his business at a great loss, well-nigh ruining his family, had it not been for his mother's small private means; and with his share of the proceeds of ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... over the bog. They were like small balls of bluish fire, which projected themselves with hops and jerks across the most inaccessible parts of the bog, starting always, so far as could be told, from where a little stagnant moisture still remained. They moved with an erratic velocity, so to speak, appearing and reappearing at distances of several hundred yards. There wasn't the ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... apartments of his friend Cintio Aldobrandino, nephew of the new pope Clement the Eighth, where his hopes now seemed to be raised at once to their highest and most reasonable pitch; but fell ill, and was obliged to go back to Naples for the benefit of the air. A life so strangely erratic to the last (for mortal illness was approaching) is perhaps unique in the history of men of letters, and might be therefore worth recording even in that of a less man than Tasso; but when we recollect that this poet, in spite of all his weaknesses, and notwithstanding ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... root from which the Christian apologetic sprang, and the former philosophic methods had themselves fallen in disrepute, that the necessity of accommodating the remedy to the disease began to be recognized here and there, and of framing an argument that would appeal to the perverse and erratic mind of the day, rather than to an abstract and perfectly normal mind, which, if it existed, would "need no repentance." That a given medicine is the best, avails nothing if it be not also one which the patient is willing ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... She's erratic, impulsive and human, And she blunders,—as goddesses can; But if she's what they call the New Woman, Then I'd like ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... unconcerned. It maddened me to think I cared so much for a man who cared nothing about wrongs and injustices, who could sit contentedly at home while other men sacrificed themselves. My dear, I'm afraid I'm an erratic person, a woman whose heart and head are nearly always ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... friend of Biot after 1807, author of a "Treatise on Differential Logarithms," and especially of a "Theory of Perpetual Motion," four volumes, quarto, with engravings, Paris, 1825; lived, in 1840, No. 9 rue du Val-de-Grace. Being very near-sighted and erratic, the prey of his thieving servant, Madame Lambert, his family thought that he needed a protector. Being instructor of Felix Phellion, with whom he took a trip to England, Picot made known his pupil's great ability, which the ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... whole earth—or at least that portion of it—for his own; so, when he was constrained to make a choice, he settled himself in the wider, more fertile coulee, which he thereafter called the Flying U. While it is good policy to locate as near as possible to the source of those erratic little creeks which water certain garden spots of the northern range land, it is also well to choose land that will grow plenty of hay. J. G. Whitmore chose the hay land, and trusted that providence would insure the water supply. Through all these years Flying U creek had never ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... the invitation to tea given by my hostess, who stood speechless with amazement at the erratic taste that would forego tea for the sake of a bird song, and we started at once up the road, where I had seen the bird perched in a ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... reminds me of another unusual character with whom we were brought in contact in these bridge-building days. This was Captain Eads, of St. Louis,[26] an original genius minus scientific knowledge to guide his erratic ideas of things mechanical. He was seemingly one of those who wished to have everything done upon his own original plans. That a thing had been done in one way before was sufficient to cause its rejection. ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... engagements were, she said, much too important for the "likes of she" to know anything about them. When was Bozzle likely to be at home? Bozzle was never likely to be at home. According to her showing, Bozzle was of all husbands the most erratic. He might perhaps come in for an hour or two in the middle of the day on a Wednesday, or perhaps would take a cup of tea at home on Friday evening. But anything so fitful and uncertain as were Bozzle's appearances in the bosom of his family was not to be conceived ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... Thursday, the 18th; across by a short cut, wading the Shenandoah River, and then on through Asby's Gap, in the Blue Ridge, that same night; still on, in the same direction, to a station on the Manassas Gap railroad, known as Piedmont, which is reached by the next (Friday) morning,—the erratic movements of Stuart's Cavalry entirely concealing the manoeuvre from the knowledge ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... river was extremely erratic, zigzagging through the riven, rocky barrier which formed the ancient dam at the foot of the lake; and one minute they were swept to right, the next to left, while at every angle there was a whirlpool which threatened ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... The erratic motions of the Indian and his horse entangled both with the flying cattle. All at once the nimble steed became so crowded on every side that his only escape from being gored to death was by a tremendous bound which he made over ...
— Cowmen and Rustlers • Edward S. Ellis
... bean-patch. Presently he got up and stepped into the house, drank some coffee, and came out again. He sat down on the bench and took mental stock of his own belongings. He had a few dollars in silver, his erratic watch, and his gun. Suddenly he bethought him of his saddle. The sun made his head swim as he stepped out toward the corral. Yes, his saddle and bridle hung on the corral bars, just where he had left them. He was about to return to the shade of ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... which I took my stand, steadying myself by grasping the royal stay in my left hand. The motion away out there, at the far extremity of that long spar, was tremendous; so much so, indeed, that seasoned as I was to the wild and erratic movements of a ship in heavy weather, the sinkings and soarings and flourishings of that boom-end, as the vessel plunged and staggered down toward the wreck, made me feel distinctly giddy. The wait was not a very long one, however, and in less than five minutes I found ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... or two of the shining marks which disasters at sea seem invariably to involve have lived to tell the Lusitania's tale. Vanderbilt, the sportsman, is gone. Genial Charles Klein, the playwright, is gone. That erratic American literary genius, Elbert Hubbard, is gone, and with him a wife to whom he seemed particularly devoted. And Charles ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Artillery Company of Boston, the oldest military organization of the United States, and died at Boston, leaving a large estate and a very remarkable will, of which he made Governor Winslow an "overseer." He was an erratic,—but valuable, citizen. ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... crossing to the next, from the needle to the twig, from the twig to the branch, from the branch to the bough and from the bough, by a no less angular path, to go back home. It is useless to rely upon sight as a guide on this long and erratic journey. The Processionary, it is true, has five ocular specks on either side of his head, but they are so infinitesimal, so difficult to make out through the magnifying-glass, that we cannot attribute to them any great power of vision. Besides, what good would those short-sighted ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... thereto by the mad attempt of Lord Camelford several years before. He was full of energy and robust health, bountiful and generous to the poor of the parish, a practical philanthropist, possessed of great intelligence and a genuine love for his kind; but withal somewhat flighty and erratic, of impetuous temper, deficient in tact and discretion, and given to revery and theorizing. He was, in short, a bundle of contradictions, some of his idiosyncrasies being doubtless inherited from his father, who was a generous and high-minded but unpractical man. ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... is the writing produced by two hands conjointly and is usually erratic, and at first sight, hard to connect with the ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... case," returned her brother, "surely he might have run to sixpence for a telegram. For a steady-going fellow Mark is about as erratic as they're made." ...
— Enter Bridget • Thomas Cobb
... counterpart in the lives of the Essenes and Therapeutae. Though we have no record of Christ being brought into contact with these communities (for John the Baptist appears to have been a solitary and erratic preacher) it is probable that their ideals were known to him and influenced his own. Their rule of life may have been a faint reflex of Indian monasticism. But the debt to India must not be exaggerated: much of the oriental ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... battery is now preferably joined across the mains in parallel with the dynamo. The cells take the peaks of the load and thus relieve the dynamo and engine of sudden changes, as shown in fig. 21. Here the line current (shown by the erratic curve) varied spasmodically from 0 to 375 amperes, yet the dynamo current varied from 100 to 150 amperes only (see line A). At the same time the line voltage (535 volts normal) was kept nearly constant. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... those of Tycho Brahe, and won for Maestlin the professorship of astronomy in the University of Heidelberg. No man had so clearly proved the supralunar position of a comet, or shown so conclusively that its motion was not erratic, but regular. The young astronomer, though Apian's pupil, was an avowed Copernican and the destined master and friend of Kepler. Yet, in the treatise embodying his observations, he felt it necessary to save his reputation for orthodoxy by calling the comet ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... not knowing what to do with their prisoner, the Government shipped him to Caprera. Personally he was perfectly free; no conditions were imposed; but nine men-of-war were despatched to the island to sweep the seas of erratic heroes. In spite of which, Garibaldi escaped in a canoe on ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... young man quite erratic Who lived all alone in an attic, He wrote magazine verse That made editors curse, But his friends thought it ...
— Poems for Pale People - A Volume of Verse • Edwin C. Ranck
... sea where mine own impotency might have some excuse; not in a sullen, weedy lake, where I could not have so much as exercise for my swimming. Therefore I would fain do something, but that I cannot tell what is no wonder.' 'Though I be in such a planetary and erratic fortune that I can do nothing constantly,' he confesses later in the ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... it was Soapy Stone and young Cullison that interested Flandrau most. The former played like a master. He chatted carelessly, but he overlooked no points. Sam had the qualities that go to make a brilliant erratic player, but he lacked the steadiness and ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... room was filled with the soft sound of singing, started by the minister, perhaps, or was it his wife? It was unaccompanied, "Abide with me, Fast falls the eventide, the darkness deepens, Lord with me abide!" Even Laurie joined an erratic high tenor humming in on the last verse, and Opal shuddered as the words were sung, "Hold thou thy cross before my closing eyes, Shine through the dark and point me to the skies." Death was a horrible thing to her. She never wanted to be reminded of death. ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... though erratic and vulgar, instituted wholesome reforms in the teaching of languages, and promulgated theories which, under later reformers, ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... not the time or means to do so even if our interests, political or otherwise, should prompt us to try it. From discussion of the partisan attacks on and defense of the administration's course of action toward Russia in 1918-19, both of which are erratic and acrimonious, we ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... arduous nature of the work he is called upon to perform. There he stands, close behind the catcher and batsman, where he is required to judge whether the swiftly-thrown ball from the pitcher, with its erratic "curves" and "shoots," darts in over the home base, or within the legal range of the bat. The startling fact is never considered that several umpires have been killed outright while occupying this dangerous ...
— Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1895 • Edited by Henry Chadwick
... work sawing industriously at one tune which did good service throughout the entertainment; there was a little furious and erratic reel-dancing, and much loud laughter, and good-natured, even if somewhat personal, jest. The room was one of two which formed the house; the walls were of log; the lights the cheery yellow flare of great pine-knots flung one after the other upon ...
— Lodusky • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... wounded mortally in the head, with blood streaming over his face and blinding his sight, was utterly unable to control his horse, who gallopped hither and thither at his own caprice, misleading many troopers who followed in his erratic career. A cavalier, armed in proof, and wearing the famous snow-white plume, after a hand-to-hand struggle with a veteran of Count Bossu's regiment, was seen to fall dead by the side of the bannerman: The Fleming, not used to boast, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Major C.A.L. Yate, of the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, dealt with the "intensity" of the war strain, of which he himself had acute experience. "Under such conditions," he wrote, "marksmen may achieve no more than the most erratic shots; the smartest corps may quickly degenerate into a rabble; the easiest tasks will often appear impossible. An army can weather trials such as those just depicted only if it be collectively considered in that healthy state of ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... as high as thirty-five miles an hour have been made in America. Such high-speed boats must be assembled with infinite care, owing to the fact that the mechanism they carry is more or less erratic in its action, and unless it is well ...
— Boys' Book of Model Boats • Raymond Francis Yates
... hastened on to the foot of the knoll, where a lakelet, fringed by aspens and poplars, afforded them good camping ground. With astonishing speed the arrangements for the night were made; every man exerted himself. The horses were unharnessed, the erratic ones hobbled, the tents pitched, and the travellers assembled round the blazing fires which were quickly lighted to dry ...
— The Frontier Fort - Stirring Times in the N-West Territory of British America • W. H. G. Kingston
... the creature, realising that again it was being cheated, started in pursuit. With leaps and bounds that seemed erratic and purposeless, it gradually diminished the distance between itself and the running man. Once it alighted on the outstanding branch of a gnarled tree, then from thence it took shelter in a clump of shrubs, then across the ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... bellow. That, too, seemed considerably further away. Then the distant siren sounded, and after that there was silence again. But the silence lasted only a moment, for before anyone could hazard a conjecture as to the Follow Me's erratic behaviour, Phil's ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... Prince and town. "Bidden," says she, "but as one low of rank, And go I will not so unworthily, To sit with common dames!"—A flippant friend Writes then that a new planet sways to-night The sense of her erratic lord; whereon The ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... circle. Through the whole of this time she was under heavy fire, and is reported to have been struck more than one hundred times by heavy shells, in spite of which she later returned to her position in column and continued the fight. In the course of her erratic maneuvers, while not under control, she circled around the Warrior and received so much of the fire intended for that ship as to justify the belief that her accident saved the Warrior from immediate destruction ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... flashing glimpses as he was destined to have later so bewildered him that he reacted obstinately to his original estimate of her,...just a child under the influence of her family or some of those friends of hers who had always hated him...erratic and irresponsible like all women...a man never could understand women because there was nothing to understand...merely a bundle ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... made the acquaintance of Van den Ende, a teacher of Greek and Latin, an erratic, argumentative rationalist, who had his say on all topics of the time, and fixed his place in history by being shot as a revolutionary, just outside the walls ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... others who live in the land of the pack rat relate stories innumerable of the absurd but industrious doings of these eccentric creatures. The ways of the pack rat are so erratic that I find it impossible to figure out by any rules known to me the workings of their minds. Strange to say, they are not fiends and devils of malice and destruction like the brown rat of civilization, ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... of human comprehension than those of the sister element. The latter are frequently subject to the direct and manifest influence of the former, while the effects produced by the ocean on the air are hid from our knowledge by the subtle character of the agency. Vague and erratic currents, it is true, are met in the waters of the ocean; but their origin is easily referred to the action of the winds, while we often remain in uncertainty as to the immediate causes which give birth to the breezes ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... the habits of his erratic life; the traditions of his fathers and his passion for the chase are still alive within him. The wild enjoyments which formerly animated him in the woods, painfully excite his troubled imagination; and his former privations appear to be less keen, his former perils less ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... who had loved him so madly, and on whom he had expended a temporary passion, was in her ardent nature and erratic genius much better suited to his tastes; and yet it had not taken him long to tire of her, beautiful as she had been. And were ever such bitter and cruel words addressed to a wronged woman, even though she had ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... steadily, gradually dropping at times into little depressions of Euphuistic manners and intervals of "sensibility" but climbing, with the advance of science and the emancipation of thought to an ideal—the personal, original interpretation of life. The nineteenth century showed curiously erratic variations of the curve. From its beginning till 1815, Sulphitism was upon the increase, while from that year till 1870 there was a sickening drop to the veriest depths of bromidic thought. Then the Bromide infested the earth. With his black-walnut furniture, his jig-saw and turning-lathe ...
— Are You A Bromide? • Gelett Burgess
... the erratic reasoning of the defendant, the following passage, intimating that the assassination of President McKinley was a part of a conspiracy to elevate Colonel Roosevelt to a permanent control of the destinies of the ...
— The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey
... not agree," Fred was saying. "The correlation is erratic; it makes no statistical sense. Malone, ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... was a spectator of the quarrel, began to laugh, with a nervous laughter that seemed to rasp her throat. For some time past she had been gloomier and more erratic than ever, invariably showing red eyes ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... lived with her son Orion and his wife, in Keokuk, where she was more contented than elsewhere. In these later days her memory had become erratic, her realization of events about her uncertain, but there were times when she was quite her former self, remembering clearly and talking with her old-time gaiety of spirit. Mark Twain frequently ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Brettison was one of the most erratic and enthusiastic of beings. Being very wealthy, and living in the simplest way, money was no object; and he would go off anywhere, and at any cost, to obtain a few simple and rare plants for his ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... private sector, yet the state still plays a major role in basic industry, banking, transport, and communication. The most important industry - and largest exporter - is textiles and clothing, which is almost entirely in private hands. In recent years the economic situation has been marked by erratic economic growth and serious imbalances. Real GNP growth has exceeded 6% in many years, but this strong expansion has been interrupted by sharp declines in output in 1994, 1999, and 2001. Meanwhile, the public sector fiscal deficit has regularly exceeded 10% of GDP - due ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... employed, and he had been paid by the day instead of by the month as was the custom. He had worked also for Carl Douglas at the Bar Nothing; back and forth, for one or the other as work pressed. He was too erratic to be depended upon except from day to day; too prone to saddle his horse and ride to town and forget to return for a day or two days or a week, as the mood seized him or his money ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... since the Conquest have been chiefly pumice, coarse-grained and granular trachyte, and reddish porphyroid trachyte. The roads leading to Quito cut through hills of pumice-dust. On the plain of Inaquito and in the valley of Esmeraldas are vast erratic blocks of trachyte, some containing twenty-five cubic yards, having sharp angles, and in some cases a polished, unstriated surface. M. Wisse does not consider them to have been thrown out of Pichincha, as La Condamine and others have judged. It is ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... To Boldwood women had been remote phenomena rather than necessary complements—comets of such uncertain aspect, movement, and permanence, that whether their orbits were as geometrical, unchangeable, and as subject to laws as his own, or as absolutely erratic as they superficially appeared, he had not deemed ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... but angered, and whirling about, he brought down his gun with spiteful violence on the writhing body. The reptile struck again, but it was already wounded to that extent that its blow was erratic, and, though it came near reaching the hand of Jack, it missed ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... Chad has been an eagerly sought objective for expanding boundaries. Twenty years ago it was divided among the native states of Bornu, Bagirmi and Kanem; today it is shared by British Nigeria, French Sudan, and German Kamerun. The erratic northern extension of the German boundary betrays the effort to ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... Denny's chin as he had been. And yet, even while he hesitated, feeding his imagination upon the choicest of premonitory tit-bits, he knew he meant to go ahead. He was magnifying the unfathomed peril that existed in his erratic, hair-trigger old brain alone merely for the sake of the complacent pride which resulted therefrom—pride in the contemplation of ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... Fordyce was a large stout person, of imposing presence, and she delivered herself of this admirable sentiment most impressively; but though her son quite agreed with her, and wished with all his heart that the girl of his choice were a little less erratic and self-willed, he was wise enough to know that any attempt at coercion would be the very last thing to make her ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... Nietzsche. The alliance between art and morality was dissolved. The imagination scorned all fetters and, in its craving for novelty and contempt of convention, became the organ of individual caprice and licence. In Nietzsche—that strange erratic genius—at once artist, philosopher, and rhapsodist—this philosophy of life found brilliant if bizarre utterance. If Schopenhauer reduces existence to nothing, and finds in oblivion and extinction its solution, (b) Nietzsche seeks rather to magnify life by striking the note of a proud ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... discovery of the right thing to do, for quite other motives than our high intellectual desire. There are ugly rebels and born rascals, cheats by instinct, and liars to women, swinish unbelievers who would compromise us with their erratic pursuit of a miscellaneous collection of strange fancies and betray us callously at last. Because a man does not find the law pure justice, that is no reason why he should fake his gold to a thieves' kitchen; because he does not think the city a sanitary ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... industrious or enterprising individuals generally shun; and in the successive scales of advancement, in which the steady immigrant effects his rise, it is left to members of the lowest scum; who prefer the freedom of this erratic life, to the more settled conformities of ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... and fifteen-hundredths to eighteen and sixty-five hundredths cents, closing at a loss for the day of 275 points. The first sale of December on Monday was at seventeen and four-tenths cents, or 125 points lower; and after numerous erratic variations, the price broke to sixteen cents, a drop of six and one-quarter cents in less than two weeks. Business on that day was of enormous volume, in round numbers 412,000 bags; and approximately $1,500,000 was put up in margins. For the next three ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... the matter. It might be a good thing to go into it now that there was an unexpected lull in the wild rush that she had made to get into life. There had been something rather erratic about Martin's comings and goings during the last week. She hadn't spoken to him since the night at ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... seemed to notice it, the brake was travelling at a furious rate, and swaying about from side to side in a very erratic manner. It would have been the last carriage, but things had got a bit mixed at the Blue Lion and, instead of bringing up the rear of the procession, it was now second, just behind the small vehicle containing Rushton ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... Russia, Napoleon unexpectedly received encouragement, as he thought, from within the United States through the medium of the eccentric editor of the "New York Tribune". We shall have occasion to return later to the adventures of Horace Greeley—that erratic individual who has many good and generous acts to his credit, as well as many foolish ones. For the present we have to note that toward the close of 1862 he approached the French Ambassador at Washington ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... powers signed the secret treaty of Verona, November 22, 1822, as a revision, so they declared in the preamble, of the Treaty of the Holy Alliance, which had been signed at Paris in 1815 by Austria, Russia, and Prussia. This last mentioned treaty sprang from the erratic brain of the Czar Alexander under the influence of Baroness Kruedener, and is one of the most remarkable political documents extant. No one had taken it seriously except the Czar himself and it had been without ...
— From Isolation to Leadership, Revised - A Review of American Foreign Policy • John Holladay Latane
... faultless French, that the clerk who did the English for the establishment had just gone to dinner and would be back in an hour—would Monsieur buy something? We wondered why those parties happened to take their dinners at such erratic and extraordinary hours, for we never called at a time when an exemplary Christian would be in the least likely to be abroad on such an errand. The truth was, it was a base fraud—a snare to trap the unwary—chaff ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of course, for everybody who has mixed with women and who possesses a gleam of intelligence knows that they are extraordinary, just as he knows, or ought to know, that if they were not bizarre and mystifying, complex and erratic, they would be less ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... consonant remained unaffected (e.g., do, food, move, fool). Whatever the upshot, we may be reasonably certain that when the "phonetic law" has run its course, the distribution of "long" and "short" vowels in the old oo-words will not seem quite as erratic as at the present transitional moment.[154] We learn, incidentally, the fundamental fact that phonetic laws do not work with spontaneous automatism, that they are simply a formula for a consummated drift that sets in at a psychologically exposed ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... by the gate where the syringa and lilac bushes leaned over and arched the way, and the honeysuckle climbed about the fence in a wild pretty way of its own and flung sweetness on the air in vivid, erratic whiffs. ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... thought transference, occurs on both the physical and the mental plane. On the physical plane it is more or less spontaneous and erratic in manifestation; while on the astral plane it is as clear, reliable and responsive to demand as is ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... Liane Delorme who provided the erratic equation. Her woman's mind was not only the directing intelligence, it was as eccentric as quicksilver, infinitely supple and corrupt, Oriental in its trickishness and impenetrability. Already it had conceived some project involving him which he could by no means divine or even guess ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... must admire the consistent fidelity and patriotism of the English race, as compared with the uncertain and erratic methods of the German people, their mistrust, and suspicion.... In spite of numerous wars, bloodshed, and disaster, England always emerges smoothly and easily from her military crises and settles down to new conditions and surroundings in her usual ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... Wynter! Gone at last!" staring at the shaking signature at the end of the letter that speaks so plainly of the coming icy clutch that should prevent the poor hand from forming ever again even such sadly erratic characters as these. "At least," glancing at the half-read letter on the cloth—"this tells me so. His solicitor's, I suppose. Though what Wynter could want with a solicitor—— Poor old fellow! He was often very good to me in the old days. I don't believe I should have done even as much as ...
— A Little Rebel • Mrs. Hungerford
... attained to them could not always explain, not account for the phenomena they created, so that the mightiness of their own deceptions deceived themselves; and they often believed they were the masters of the Nature to which they were, in reality, but erratic and wild disciples. Of such was the student in that grim cavern. He was, in some measure, the dupe, partly of his own bewildered wisdom, partly of the fervour of an imagination exceedingly high-wrought and enthusiastic. His own gorgeous vanity ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book I. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... a little while a child; and now An amorous youth; then for a season turned Into a wealthy householder; then, stripped Of all his riches, with decrepit limbs And wrinkled frame, man creeps towards the end Of life's erratic course; and, like an actor, Passes behind Death's curtain out ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... the idea amusing, therefore our payment. One of our editors will work your manuscript into less-erratic typescript for eventual publication. ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... for a year past, since his niece had attained the age of fourteen, he had been worrying himself and the elders of the family to have the marriage solemnized, "before the little devil shall have time to get some other notion into her erratic head," he said. All were opposed to him, holding over his head the only rod he dreaded, ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... in erratic spurts. "The bubble is all blooming, sir. All around inside there are big yellow and purple growths. It started up above, and—and spread around. First there was just a clouding over of the sky, sir, ...
— The Sky Trap • Frank Belknap Long
... at noon of Thursday, the 18th; across by a short cut, wading the Shenandoah River, and then on through Asby's Gap, in the Blue Ridge, that same night; still on, in the same direction, to a station on the Manassas Gap railroad, known as Piedmont, which is reached by the next (Friday) morning,—the erratic movements of Stuart's Cavalry entirely concealing the manoeuvre from ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... was once a young man quite erratic Who lived all alone in an attic, He wrote magazine verse That made editors curse, But his friends thought it fine ...
— Poems for Pale People - A Volume of Verse • Edwin C. Ranck
... of 1811, Shelley's movements were more than usually erratic, and his mind was in a state of extraordinary restlessness. In the month of May, a kind of accommodation was come to with his father. He received permission to revisit Field Place, and had an allowance made him of 200 pounds a year. His uncle, Captain Pilfold ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... now your thoughts from this ball of earth to all those glorious luminaries that adorn the high arch of heaven. The motion and situation of the planets, are they not admirable for use and order? Were those (miscalled ERRATIC) globes once known to stray, in their repeated journeys through the pathless void? Do they not measure areas round the sun ever proportioned to the times? So fixed, so immutable are the laws by which the unseen Author of nature actuates the universe. How vivid ...
— Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists • George Berkeley
... sentinels proclaimed. Simultaneously Buto, the rhinoceros, scrambled to his short legs and charged furiously. Haphazard charges Buto, the rhinoceros. With his weak eyes he sees but poorly even at short distances, and whether his erratic rushes are due to the panic of fear as he attempts to escape, or to the irascible temper with which he is generally credited, it is difficult to determine. Nor is the matter of little moment to one whom Buto charges, for if he be caught and tossed, ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the endless turn and twist of the erratic Missouri; warping over rapids and sticking on sand-bars; running by banks undermined by the flood; shaving here a shore and hugging there a bar; after the tie-ups to clean the boilers, or to get wood, or to wait for the high winds to abate; after perils by water and danger from roving ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... it happened that both boys were firing together, the position of the Yankee plane allowing this unusual demonstration. And as to which of them was responsible for the bullet that sent the Boche downward in erratic circles, like a wounded duck, he trying desperately to gain an even keel before it was too late, was always fated to be a little bone of contention between Tom ...
— Air Service Boys Flying for Victory - or, Bombing the Last German Stronghold • Charles Amory Beach
... of this famous woman, by Miss Thomas, is the only one in existence. Those who have awaited it with pleasurable anticipation, but with some trepidation as to the treatment of the erratic side of her character, cannot fail to be pleased with the skill by which it is done. It is the best production on George Sand that has yet been published. The author modestly refers to it as a sketch, which it undoubtedly ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... overview: Economic affairs are affected by the division of the country. The Greek Cypriot economy is prosperous but highly susceptible to external shocks. Erratic growth rates in the 1990s reflect the economy's vulnerability to swings in tourist arrivals, caused by political instability in the region and fluctuations in economic conditions in Western Europe. Economic policy is focused on meeting the criteria for admission ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... of Tycho Brahe, and won for Maestlin the professorship of astronomy in the University of Heidelberg. No man had so clearly proved the supralunar position of a comet, or shown so conclusively that its motion was not erratic, but regular. The young astronomer, though Apian's pupil, was an avowed Copernican and the destined master and friend of Kepler. Yet, in the treatise embodying his observations, he felt it necessary to save his reputation ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... socialist is very largely right. He shows that under free individual competition there is a perpetual waste of energy. Competing rivals cover the same field. Even the simplest services are performed with an almost ludicrous waste of energy. In every modern city the milk supply is distributed by erratic milkmen who skip from door to door and from street to street, covering the same ground, each leaving his cans of milk here and there in a sporadic fashion as haphazard as a bee among the flowers. Contrast, says the socialist, ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... brilliant but erratic Earl of Peterborough, had been engaged for two years, after the unsatisfactory inquiry into his conduct in Spain by the House of Lords in 1708, in preparing an account of the money he had received and expended. The ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... In closing this erratic dissertation on the Annuals, we may remark, that an interesting article might be written, descriptive of the reformation which gradually elevated the art of engraving to perfection—a history of its emerging from the inanities which flaunt in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 396, Saturday, October 31, 1829. • Various
... The Avenger was erratic and uncertain in her voyages. She evidently sailed to the principal islands of the South Seas, and did business with them all. From one of these voyages, Henry, her captain, returned with a wife—a dark-haired, ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... a spectator of the quarrel, began to laugh, with a nervous laughter that seemed to rasp her throat. For some time past she had been gloomier and more erratic than ever, invariably showing red eyes and a ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... yet bashful looks. Then the men seemed to fling them off and go at it entirely on their own account, yet keeping up a sort of revolving course round their partners, like satellites encircling their separate suns. Presently the men grew furious; rushed about the circle in wild erratic courses, leaped into the air, and while in that position slapped the soles of their ...
— Chasing the Sun • R.M. Ballantyne
... measures suggested by me are adopted, viz., effective regulations with regard to the buffalo, the Indians taught to cultivate the soil, and the erratic Half-breeds encouraged to settle down, I believe that the solution of all social questions of any present importance in the North-West Territories will ...
— The Treaties of Canada with The Indians of Manitoba - and the North-West Territories • Alexander Morris
... the character of his country's literature for a century; but his influence was finally lost in the growing Italian and German taste. The principal names of this period are those of Lucidor, a wild, erratic genius; Mrs. Brenner, the first female writer of Sweden, whose numerous poems are distinguished for their neat and easy style; and Spegel (d. 1711), whose Psalms, full of the simplest beauty, give him a lasting place in the literature of the ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... Quite as erratic is a much smaller bird, the yellow throated warbler, whose baby ways I have seen at the South. One of these bantlings no bigger than the end of a thumb will easily keep its parent frantically ...
— In Nesting Time • Olive Thorne Miller
... to ancient streams of lava congealed by the cold, an opinion which has not been generally received. Other astronomers have seen in these inexplicable rays a kind of moraines, ranges of erratic blocks thrown out at the epoch of ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... her. I don't know that I should have done so, if the doctor hadn't told me certain things. But the fact is, she wasn't always quite to be trusted in emergencies. She was a little—what do you call it?—erratic, that's the word. The doctor is even convinced that she was largely responsible for your father's relapse. There! I had not meant to ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... in all his convictions and affections. His fiery soul found congenial spirits among the generous, hotblooded people of the Gulf States, whose very faults had a sort of charm for this impulsive, generous, erratic, gifted, man. He made his way back to his New England hills, where he is waiting for the sunset, often turning a longing eye southward, and now and then sending a ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... I, "I took some of them." But I could not well explain the capricious way in which I had endeavored to guard against the germs of malaria, and to call my own attention to the threatening germs of erratic fancy. ...
— A Bicycle of Cathay • Frank R. Stockton
... the training chambers had not prepared him for the surface of Pyrrus. There was the basic similarity of course. The feel of the poison grass underfoot and the erratic flight of a stingwing in the last instant before Grif blasted it. But these were scarcely noticeable in the crash of ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... deliberations of the Pickwick Club over "Bill Stubbs, His Mark" pale before this; and Dickens in his most expansive moods never conceived anything more funny than the long, solemn discussion between the erratic Hebrew scholar and the eminent medical professor at New Haven over the "pores" of the statue, which one of them thought "the work of minute animals," which the other thought "elaborate Phenician workmanship," which both thought exquisite, and which the maker of the ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... considerable space of uneven ground crossed and recrossed by the narrow-gauge tracks upon which the sand and grit trucks ran, avoiding one or two localities where steam shot upward from the ground in a witch-like and erratic manner, with short angry hisses and chopping sounds that suggested danger, and finally stood before the door designated "OFFICE" in plain lettering. Joyce looked around at her companion with a ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... way of indicating places survives, it is a pretty distinct itinerary over great part of the actual principality. I have followed most of its tracks on foot myself, and nobody who wants a Welsh guide-book can take a pleasanter one, though he might easily find one much less erratic. It may thus have, to superficial observers, a positive and prosaic flavour as compared with the romantic character of the other three. But this distinction is not real. The tones are a little subdued, as was likely to be the case with an elderly gentleman of ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... calmly and casually, buttoning her glove in a leisurely fashion as she passed on her way; and the maid responded unsuspiciously, for the coming and going at Wolfer House were always somewhat erratic. ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... essential rightness which has claim to the first and decisive consideration. For much that is irregular in the arrangement and sequence of the subject-matter, some blame fairly attaches to our assailant. The erratic manner in which lie launches his injurious statements against the hapless Blacks, even in the course of passages which no more led up to them than to any other section of mankind, is a very notable feature of his anti-Negro production. ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... few deep breaths, and then, on again. So far, the road has been tolerable, almost level and free from obstructions. But now it begins to rise, and is so rugged withal that we have to slow our speed and pick our way. Farther on it is the dry bed of a torrent, cumbered with loose stones and erratic blocks, among which we have ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... at bat the visitors did not do as much. Perhaps Frazer managed to tighten up, and pitch better ball. He was very erratic, and could never be depended on to do consecutive good work. In every other inning the heavies could not seem to gauge his work at all, and he mowed them down. Then they would come at him again like furies, and knock his offerings ...
— The Chums of Scranton High Out for the Pennant • Donald Ferguson
... dear Doctor, are like the rest of this world's so-called 'learned' men; they work in one groove, and are generally content with it. Sometimes an unusually brilliant brain conceives the erratic notion of working in several grooves, and is straightway judged as mad or fanatic. It is when these comet-like intelligences sweep across the world's horizon that we hear of a Julius Caesar, a Napoleon, a Shakespeare. But archaeologists are ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... the mining industry. This sector, mostly on the strength of diamonds, has gone from generating 25% of GDP in 1980 to 39% in 1994. No other sector has experienced such growth, especially not agriculture, which is plagued by erratic rainfall and poor soils. The unemployment rate remains a problem at 25%. Hampered by a still sluggish diamond market in 1994, GDP grew ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... for you. But we know one thing for certain: he 's uneasy. I have a far lighter task for you, though, than following the erratic ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... me particularly to look you up, and 'take care of' you ... you made a hit with him ... but he's very much concerned about you—thinks you're too wild and erratic." ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... criminal, and the very announcement of whose coming had made the clerk turn pale, had proved to be a practical, harmless, and jovial philosopher, vain of his eloquence, a bohemian whose existence depended upon his ability to turn a compliment; in short, a somewhat erratic genius. ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... Echauffourees, also a Zephyr, who had his nickname from the marvelous changes of costume with which he would pursue his erratic expedition, and deceive the very Arabs themselves into believing him a born Mussulman; a very handsome fellow, the Lauzun of his battalion, the Brummel of his Caserne; coquette with his kepi on one side of his graceful head, and his mustaches soft as a lady's hair; whose paradise ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... even the average German official—wedded as he may be to his rank or his title, anxious as he may be to preserve an outward decorum in exact keeping with the precise shade of his public status—is often the most delightfully unconventional, good-natured, unsophisticated, and even erratic being in the world, as soon as he has left the cares of his office behind him. Germany is the classic land of queer people. It is the land of Quintus Fixlein, Onkel Braesig, Leberecht Huehnchen, and the host of Fliegende Blatter worthies; ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... Now of all the erratic cue performers I ever watched, Pinckney gets the medal. There's times when he can nurse 'em along the cushion and run up quite a string, and then again I've seen him play a game any duffer'd be ashamed of. But I begins to smell out ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... manners and habits of a people whose position is so adverse to improvement could hardly be expected to present anything strikingly different from other erratic bands of the Northwest. There is indeed a remarkable conformity in the external habits of all our Northern Indians. The necessity of changing their camps often to procure game or fish, the want of domestic animals, ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... creature, realising that again it was being cheated, started in pursuit. With leaps and bounds that seemed erratic and purposeless, it gradually diminished the distance between itself and the running man. Once it alighted on the outstanding branch of a gnarled tree, then from thence it took shelter in a clump of ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... uncertain of all. It denotes an over-sensitive, over-cautious, timid person. It also indicates a highly nervous, easily excited individual, one who has little control over himself or his temper, who is easily put out over trifles, and liable to do the most erratic things, or fly off at a tangent when irritated. Such people are always in trouble, generally fighting or quarrelling with those about them and over things that are of no consequence. They are likewise so easily wounded in their feelings, that even a look or an imagined slight will put ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... the dream of a face. You have been watched, as star-men watch a star That leaves its way, returns and leaves its way, Until the exploring watchers find, can trace A hidden star beyond their sight, whose sway Draws the erratic star so long observed— So have ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... Ireland's Case; Meaning thereby the case of his shop,- Of curate, vicar, rector, bishop, And all those other grades seraphic, That make men's souls their special traffic, Tho' caring not a pin which way The erratic souls go, so they pay.— Just as some roguish country nurse, Who takes a foundling babe to suckle, First pops the payment in her purse, Then leaves poor dear to—suck its knuckle: Even so these reverend rigmaroles Pocket the money—starve ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... the 'Alliance' in her present intended voyage to America." But Silas Deane supported Landais, who ordered Jones off the vessel and set sail for America. On the voyage, his mental faculties becoming more erratic, the officers took the command from him and entrusted it ...
— The Story of Commodore John Barry • Martin Griffin
... Erratic Chancres (Fig. 38).—Erratic chancre is the term applied by Jonathan Hutchinson to the primary lesion of syphilis when it appears on parts of the body other than the genitals. It differs in some respects from the hard chancre as met with on the penis; it is usually larger, ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... the projects devised by the wit of man to open up for this fiend fields of exertion great enough for the absorption of its tireless energies, and none of them is more hopeful than the great world of books, if the demon is docile enough to be coaxed into it. Then will its erratic restlessness be sobered by the immensity of the sphere of exertion, and the consciousness that, however vehemently and however long it may struggle, the resources set before it will not be exhausted when the life to which it is attached shall have faded away; and hence, ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... yet lost the habits of his erratic life; the traditions of his fathers and his passion for the chase are still alive within him. The wild enjoyments which formerly animated him in the woods painfully excite his troubled imagination; and his former privations appear to be less keen, his former ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... form over the bog. They were like small balls of bluish fire, which projected themselves with hops and jerks across the most inaccessible parts of the bog, starting always, so far as could be told, from where a little stagnant moisture still remained. They moved with an erratic velocity, so to speak, appearing and reappearing at distances of several hundred yards. There wasn't the slightest doubt of ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... engaged in bringing proofs of the new science before the commission. These were M. de Foissac, M. Dupotet, M. Chapelain, and M. de Geslin. It would be but an unprofitable, and by no means a pleasant task to follow the commissioners in their erratic career, as they were led hither and thither by the four lights of magnetism above mentioned; the four "Wills-o'-the-Wisp" which dazzled the benighted and bewildered doctors on that wide and shadowy region of metaphysical inquiry — the influence of mind over matter. It ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... had a sure, accurate drop-kicker!" reflected Captain Butch hopelessly. "One who could be depended on to average eight out of ten trials, we'd have a fighting chance with Ballard. Deke Radford is a wonder. He can kick a forty-five-yard goal, but he's erratic! He might boot the pigskin over when a score is needed from the forty-yard line, and again he might miss from the twenty-yard mark. Oh, for a kicker who isn't brilliant and spectacular, but who can methodically ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... Arrived there, a smart rap with the ramrod moulded it to the grooves. But it also flattened the top, and forced the bottom partly into the chamber. Thus misshapen at birth, the bullet was cast upon the world to an erratic and fruitless career. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... churches. The first named contains a notable monument—the Lewknor. Near by is the beautiful West Dean Park. Mid-Lavant church is Early English but boasts a Norman window. The name of this village perpetuates a phenomenon which is becoming more rare each year. At one time erratic streams would make their appearance in the chalk combes in the head of the valley and combining, cause serious floods or "lavants." For some unknown reason the flow of water is gradually becoming smaller and of late years it ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... made the coffee strong, but she made it very quickly; she had a wonderfully quiet, efficient way of accomplishing things. The coffee stimulated Marie and steadied the erratic ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... disregards those models of form in verse which include rime, or whose cadences are informal, is set down as an imitator of Walt Whitman. When I was young, Walt Whitman seemed to have been established as a strange, erratic, and godless person, whose indecencies were his principal stock in trade. Emerson's practical repudiation of him had had its effect, and the very respectable—that is, gentlemen of the class of the vestrymen ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... speeches in support of all these "reforms," but did not succeed in securing the discharge of a soldier, a sailor, a diplomatist, or a clerk, neither did he reduce the appropriations one single cent. The erratic Mr. David Crockett was then a member of the House, but had not attracted public attention, although the Jackson men were angry because he, one of Old Hickory's officers in the Creek War, was a devoted adherent of ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... mountains had sprung up like veritable jacks-in-the-box. Von Buch, whom his friend and fellow-pupil Von Humboldt considered the foremost geologist of the time, died in 1853, still firm in his early faith that the erratic bowlders found high on the Jura had been hurled there, like cannon-balls, across the valley of Geneva by the sudden ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... all," said he, "I can't trust them. Patricia is too erratic and too used to having her own way. Jack will try to break off with her now, of course; but Jack, where women are concerned, is as weak as water. It is not a nice thing to do, but—well! one must ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... extremes; alternate; have as man phases as the moon. Adj. changeable, changeful; changing &c 140; mutable, variable, checkered, ever changing; protean, proteiform^; versatile. unstaid^, inconstant; unsteady, unstable, unfixed, unsettled; fluctuating &c v.; restless; agitated &c 315; erratic, fickle; irresolute &c 605; capricious &c 608; touch and go; inconsonant, fitful, spasmodic; vibratory; vagrant, wayward; desultory; afloat; alternating; alterable, plastic, mobile; transient &c 111; wavering. Adv. seesaw &c (oscillation) 314; off and on. Phr. a rolling stone gathers no moss; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... gets a certain "technique" of its own, acting in certain ways on certain occasions, and in other ways on other occasions; and frequently assuming a perfectly definite form of movement with certain persons—a certain sweep or an erratic manner of pointing to letters which it maintains uniformly so long as that person has his or her hands on the board. Occasionally the ouija will assume a different personality, according to the communicating intelligence, and not according to the person having his hands on the board. Just as raps ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... quick look within the vehicle. The colonel had "rousted" up somewhat. Buffeted from side to side by the erratic and violent movements of the horses, he was trying to maintain his balance by frantically clinging with both hands to the ...
— Bart Stirling's Road to Success - Or; The Young Express Agent • Allen Chapman
... been the lot of Tom and his companions to take part in such a novel hunting scene as that in which they were now participating. With the airship moving quickly about, darting here and there under the guidance of the young inventor, the erratic movements hither and thither of the buffaloes could be followed exactly. Wherever the mass of the herd went the airship ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle • Victor Appleton
... hills, and in the bright moonlight Phil did not use his flashlight at all, except to investigate other round black blotches that made a line parallel to the prints. As he went on he found his quarry's steps coming more closely together: becoming erratic. Soon they showed as painful drags in the sand, a laborious hauling of one foot after the other.... Phil put away his light ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... mere appearance. To vulgar minds real depth is incomprehensible; it is perhaps for that reason that the populace is so prone to admire what it cannot understand. Monsieur and Madame d'Hauteserre, impressed by the habitual silence and erratic habits of the young girl, were constantly expecting some extraordinary ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... him keenly; looked also at the erratic movements of the gun, and reconsidered his ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... pelting rain, which half-blinded him, swinging from side to side like a rapid and erratic pendulum, his torn hands paining him severely and his lungs panting from his exertions and panting from the very air which the wind sometimes blew into his mouth with strangling force, he finally ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... steamer, unable to land during a protracted norther. These storms are terrific in violence. It is not a straight out-and-out gale, an honest tempest, such as one sometimes meets at sea, and with which an experienced mariner knows how to cope. A norther is an erratic succession of furious squalls with whirlwinds of sand, the wind blowing from several points at the same time. When a norther blows, work is suspended in the city, and the streets are deserted until the fury of the blast has subsided. This ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... individuals. He did not believe (as some one has said) that the history of mankind is the history of its great men. Great men with him were but larger atoms, obeying the same impulses with the rest, only perhaps a trifle more erratic. With them or without them, the course of things would have ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... a trace of Indian blood in her. Her manners were unfinished, her character was primitive, but Prescott thought she was as good a consort as Jernyngham deserved. The latter had a small wheat farm lying back on the prairie, but his erratic temperament prevented his successfully working it. Prescott was not a censorious person, and he had a liking and ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... diplomatist. Perhaps a little natural reserve of character might have been the beginning of it, but the habit had certainly grown from Daisy's experience of her mother's somewhat capricious and erratic views of her movements. She could not but find out that things which to her father's sense were quite harmless and unobjectionable, were invested with an unknown and unexpected character of danger or ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... stirred the proud land-holders to fury. They hated Gracchus with a bitter hatred, and began to plot secretly for his overthrow. About this time Attalus, king of Pergamus, moved by some erratic whim, left his estates by will to the city of Rome. Those who had been deprived of their lands claimed these estates, to repay them for their outlays in improvement. Gracchus opposed this, and proposed to divide this property among the plebeians, ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... you liberals, And navigators into realms intellectual, You sailors through heights imaginative, Blown about by erratic currents, tumbling into air pockets, You Margaret Fuller Slacks, Petits, And Tennessee Claflin Shopes— You found with all your boasted wisdom How hard at the last it is To keep the soul from splitting into cellular ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... Greek mythology is still the creed of a fragment of humanity existing somewhere in the mountains of Syria. At all events, since the late Sir Robert Peel placed it beyond the power of the governor and company to indulge in dangerous or erratic courses, it is abundantly manifest that to doubt of the perfect stability of the Bank of England is tantamount to questioning the infallibility of arithmetic. In the vaults and coffers of this huge establishment there is at present—as we learn from the published weekly-returns, a device of Sir ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 420, New Series, Jan. 17, 1852 • Various
... places, and as it were wandering about the sky. It is certain that the Babylonians at a very early date distinguished from the fixed stars those remarkable five, which, from their wandering propensities, the Greeks called the "planets," and which are the only erratic stars that the naked eye, or that even the telescope, except at a very high power, can discern. With these five they were soon led to class the Moon, which was easily observed to be a wandering luminary, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... down the room, looking as angry as a hungry lion which has just had a long expected dinner suddenly snatched away from it; but the worse he became the louder M'Allister shrieked with laughter. The latter was now simply rolling about the room—for it could not be termed walking, it was so erratic—holding his sides and laughing, whilst the tears were chasing each other down his cheeks. He kept trying to speak, but had no sooner stuttered out the words, "Heh, mon! heh, mon!" than he was off again into another wild paroxysm ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... finish that had brought him fame. Francois, the younger son, was not forgotten though, and the father bethought him of some useful industry at which he might earn a living, and decided on clockmaking as the most suitable. Now mark the erratic workings of fate. The eldest son, from whom so much was expected, proved a comparative failure, inasmuch as that, instead of progressing, his work was distinctly inferior to that of his father.[1] Francois, on the other hand, became tired of clockmaking ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George
... M. D., the most brilliant, and original of all American students of the brain, whose lectures always excited a profound interest in his hearers, and, in comparing notes with him, I found my own original observations well sustained by his. Though erratic in some of his theories, he was a bold student of nature, and the accidental destruction of his manuscript by fire, when too late in his life to repair the loss, was a destruction of much that ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... the sheaf of papers rather fascinated the watcher outside the window—somehow Jack conceived the idea that there before him was spread all the incriminating evidence needful to bring the erratic career of this amazing man to an abrupt end—to put a stop to the mammoth illegal operations he had so long conducted in secret and by which he had impudently flaunted all the powers in Washington, just as though ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... the landscape were a ragged tree stump, and what looked like the remains of a broken fish basket over the horizon, all very distant—and a dozen shell-bursts and the bark of an unseen machine-gun, all very close—the determination was apt to be a trifle erratic. Still, the points were marked down, where each handful believed and trusted itself to be. The next business was to fill up certain gaps. An order was dispatched to the supports. They were to send ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... Pallastown were increasingly infrequent. But there was one time when he almost had come specially to see Ramos' new bubb, still under wraps, supposedly. Well—that erratic character had it out on a long test run. Damn him! As usual, time was crowding Nelsen. He had to get back on the job. He had just a ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... of widely different temperament. Henry, even as a little boy, was sturdy, industrious, and dependable. Sam was volatile and elusive; his industry of an erratic kind. Once his father set him to work with a hatchet to remove some plaster. He hacked at it for a time well enough, then lay down on the floor of the room and threw his hatchet at such areas of the plaster as were not in easy reach. Henry would have worked steadily ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... died out on wall and ceiling; high through the glass roof above, a shoal of rosy clouds paled to saffron, then to a cinder gray. And the first night-hawk, like a huge, erratic swallow, sailed into view, soaring, tumbling aloft, while its short raucous cry sounded incessantly ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... the popular fancy, especially in Paris, where he was best known, as erratic: as once when, by a stroke of financial sleight-of-hand, he got the young Government of Russia into a tight place, then refused them a loan, except on condition of the lease to him of the Kremlin: and for three months squalid old Moscow was ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... benevolence in Miss Euphemia Dundas to lead him to suppose that she could not be so munificent, and solicitous of secrecy. Besides, how could she have learned his situation? He thought it was impossible; and that impossibility compelled an erratic hope of his present liberty having sprung from the goodness of Miss Beaufort to pass by him with ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... Variorum Monograph," 4to, containing thirty metrical versions in English, announced as about to be published at Philadelphia in 1866 by Charles Lukens. Quaere whether this be the same as Henry Clay Lukens ("Erratic Enrico"), who published "Lean 'Nora" (Philadelphia, 1870; New York, 1878), a title suggestive of a humorous intention, but a book which I ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... hyaline and are closely approximated, giving the impression of a tight-fitting crenulate casing about the lower half. The cirri are sharply pointed, much broader at the base, and the two sets are so placed that, looked at from above, they have the appearance of a twisted cord. (Fig. 31 b.) Movement erratic; sometimes the animal swims steadily forward with mouth in front; again it shoots across the field of the microscope, either backward or forward or sideways, through the action of its powerful cirri. It is often quiet, usually mouth downward, and is held in place by adhesion ...
— Marine Protozoa from Woods Hole - Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission 21:415-468, 1901 • Gary N. Galkins
... of Poole Harbour are salt as the sea outside though fed by the rivers Frome and Puddle, and so of course its best aspect is when the tide is full. The erratic ebb and flow is more pronounced here than at Southampton and there are longer periods of high than low water. Brownsea Island, that occupies the centre of this inland sea, with its wooded banks of dark greenery ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... their common center in about fifty-eight years, while the third star revolves with the other two, around a center common to all three, in a period of six or seven hundred years. But the movements of the third star are erratic, and inexplicable except upon the hypothesis advanced by Seeliger, that there is an invisible, or dark, star near it by whose attraction its motion ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... very small changes have been made to this version: Italics have been converted to capitals. The British 'pound' symbol has been converted to 'L'; but in general the author's erratic spelling, punctuation ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... frittering away his undeniable abilities upon a number of hastily adopted projects, crudely conceived, and remorselessly abandoned when the temperature of his enthusiasm lowered, or any unlooked-for difficulties appeared in his path. How the erratic and desultory nature of his mind was fostered and aggravated by Hayley's mischievous efforts has already been shown. That the glowing eulogium pronounced by Flaxman upon his friend's productions will be endorsed by modern critics is hardly ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... the mountain side, a flurried arrival in the chapel, where Will and his father had already hung up their hats on the rail at the back of their seat, did not tend to mitigate the old man's annoyance at his son's erratic ways. ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... extensive peregrinations of Ferdinand de Soto, are merely the fugacious names of the caciques or sachems who happened at the time to rule over the various tribes of savages which were visited by Soto in his singularly erratic expedition. One point only in the whole course of his wanderings can be ascertained with certainty, the Bay of Espirita Santo on the western coast of Florida, in about lat. 28 deg. N. and long. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... turned to the right, and followed the stream into the rocks. The course was so winding that he speedily disappeared from sight. The boy, who was compelled to sit still and await his return, at perhaps the most dangerous portion of the road, felt anything but comfortable over the erratic proceeding of his friend. But, fortunately, the latter had been gone but a short time when he reappeared, hurrying forward as if somebody was ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... have been corrected. Punctuation in this book is somewhat erratic; in general, this has not been altered from the original. However, when punctuation clearly follows a specific pattern, punctuation has ...
— The Candy Maker's Guide - A Collection of Choice Recipes for Sugar Boiling • Fletcher Manufacturing Company
... well pleased. The last thing he desired was co-operation from the Rabbit-Hutch and association with the band of erratic, happy-go-lucky Bohemians that peopled it. "You're laying out a good deal of work for yourself," he ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... unaffected (e.g., do, food, move, fool). Whatever the upshot, we may be reasonably certain that when the "phonetic law" has run its course, the distribution of "long" and "short" vowels in the old oo-words will not seem quite as erratic as at the present transitional moment.[154] We learn, incidentally, the fundamental fact that phonetic laws do not work with spontaneous automatism, that they are simply a formula for a consummated drift that sets in at a psychologically exposed point and gradually worms its way through ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... colonial establishment on the island of Tortuga, which was principally inhabited, as we have seen before, by buccaneers in all their various grades and stages, from beef-driers to pirates. The French authorities undertook to supply these erratic people with the goods and provisions which they needed, and built storehouses with everything necessary for carrying on the trade. There were plenty of purchasers, for the buccaneers were willing to buy ...
— Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts • Frank Richard Stockton
... right of "calling students to the bar,"[A] also of "disbarring" a barrister for questionable practices,—a right exercised by Gray's Inn in 1864 in the case of the late erratic but brilliant Dr. Kenealy, counsel for the notorious Tichborne "claimant." From their decision no court, as such, can give relief. The disbarred one has only the right of appeal to and review by certain of the judges. The Inns neither ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... robber tribes of the desert. While the practicability of the enterprise was still being anxiously discussed by her Turkish advisers, Lady Hester received a visit from a certain Nasar, son of Mahannah, Emir of the Anizys [Footnote: Dr. Meryon's somewhat erratic spelling of Oriental names is followed throughout this memoir.] (the collective name given to several of the Bedouin tribes ranging that part of the desert), who told her that he had heard of her proposed expedition, and that he came to warn her against attempting to cross the ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
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