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More "Facility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Russian—how she did; she graciously replied, "Cherasvwechiano khorasho pakornashae vass blagadoroo," and the distinguished American retired with a proud consciousness of having done his duty. I was not very much enlightened as to the state of the bride's health; but, judging from the facility with which she rattled off this tremendous sentence, we concluded that she must be well. Nothing but a robust constitution and the most excellent health would have enabled her to do it. Convulsed with laughter, ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... have been discovered: but he has been more and better: he has caught the spirit of M. DE TOCQUEVILLE, has understood the sentiment he meant to express, and has clothed it in the language which M. DE TOCQUEVILLE would have himself used, had he possessed equal facility in ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... at liberty to go now, and we will do all we can to help you. I have instructions to set you on your way to the front as soon as you care to go, and every facility will be given you to take all the pictures of your own troops you wish. I regret exceedingly ...
— The Moving Picture Boys on the War Front - Or, The Hunt for the Stolen Army Films • Victor Appleton
... insouciance, gaiety, facility, in accepting life. Caesar never ceased being amazed. She spent her days working, talking, singing. The slightest diversion enchanted her, the most insignificant gift ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... thing about it is, also, their facility in paying themselves off with words. A metaphysical school of the North, impregnated to some extent with fog, has fancied that it has worked a revolution in human understanding by replacing the word Force with the ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... exists too close an intimacy between the pugilist and the politician, Mr. Krone will bet twenty drinks with any one of his customers that he can prove such doctrines at fault. He can secure the election of his favorite candidate with the same facility that he can make an hundred paupers per week. You may well believe him a choice flower in the bouquet of the corporation; we mean the corporation that banquets and becomes jubilant while assassins ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... through the odour of Dumas in the books, but people swore the contrary with great foolish oaths worth nothing. Maquet prepares historical materials, gathers together notes, and so on, but Dumas writes every word of his books with his own hand, and with a facility amounting to inspiration, said my informant. He called him a great savage negro child. If he has twenty sous and wants bread, he buys a pretty cane instead. For the rest, 'bon enfant,' kind and amiable. An inspired negro child! In debt at this moment, after all ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... With amazing facility he mastered his task. Among other things, he had to count newspapers. It was before the day of the machine enumerator, and the work had to be done by hand. Charles developed such extraordinary swiftness that patrons in the ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... keep in memory the historical poems, give attention to the science and practice of medicine, and train their pupils in knowledge. These were not priests; they were the "learned men" of Peru, and the government allowed them every facility for study and for communicating instruction. How much they knew of astronomy it is not easy to say. They had knowledge of some of the planets, and it is claimed that there is some reason to believe they used aids to eyesight in studying the heavens, such as some ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... of this view the authoress proceeds to point out that the decollete constantly reappears in feminine clothing, never in male; that missionaries experience great difficulty in persuading women to cover themselves; that, while women accept with facility an examination by male doctors, men cannot force themselves to accept examination by a woman doctor, etc. (These and similar points had already been independently brought forward by Sergi, Archivio ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... furnished with most of the machinery necessary for ship building, will be competent to the supply of the two selected by the Board as the best for the concentration of materials, and, from the facility and certainty of communication between them, it will be useless to incur at those depots the expense of similar machinery, especially that used in preparing the usual metallic ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Jackson • Andrew Jackson
... Quentin. Towards midday they arrived—M. Gustave Babin, of L'Illustration, Paris—and M. Eugene Tardeau, of the Echo de Paris. I presented these gentlemen to the General, who kindly extended every facility to them. ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... remember that in the course of three sea-voyages which he had performed he had had opportunities of seeing how a ship was managed—opportunities of which, no doubt, with his great activity of mind, he had availed himself most thoroughly. The facility with which he could assume a new function, and do its duties as if he had been accustomed to it all his life, was one of the most remarkable things about him. His chief regret in taking the new burden was, that it would limit his ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... some people seem born with the facility to speak, but it is also true that the ability, like other abilities, is developed by practice. Most of those who speak well now, began with embarrassment, self-consciousness, and an imperfect command of words. Friends can be counted on to understand if at first your ...
— An Interpretation of Friends Worship • N. Jean Toomer
... not only, my friends, in this increasing and mutual dependence of interest that we have formed new bonds. Those bonds are both material and mental. Every improvement in the navigation of a river, every construction of a railroad, has added another link to the chain which encircles us, another facility for interchange and new achievements, whether it has been in arts or in science, in war or in manufactures, in commerce or agriculture, success, unexampled success has constituted for us a common and proud memory, and has offered to us ...
— Speeches of the Honorable Jefferson Davis 1858 • Hon. Jefferson Davis
... however, seemed inspired by a new ambition, and set himself to imitate one of Juvenal's Satires. Encouraged by his unexpected facility, he projected and composed an original poem. Its success, when published, surpassed that of any work previously written in the Danish language. Judicious critics heartily commended it, and some even looked upon it as introducing a new era in the national literature. It was also published ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... dimensions; for instance, the "brazen seas" which were set up before each sanctuary, either for the purpose of receiving the libations, or for the prescribed rites of purification. As is often the case among half-civilized peoples, the goldsmiths worked in the precious metals with much facility and skill. We have not, succeeded up to the present in finding any of those golden images which the kings were accustomed to dedicate in the temples out of their own possessions, or the spoil obtained from the enemy; but ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... solely because they have the utmost chemical stability. We are burning up their substance with every breath in order to have delicacy of feeling and thought. What were a wooden body worth? Substances are valuable to us according to their fineness and facility of change. Even iron is mobile in all its particles. We call it solid, but it is not. We lift our eyes from this writing and behold the tumbling surf of the great Pacific sea. Line after line of its billows are charging on ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... in these negotiations, wrote a letter to his king just after the treaty was concluded, in which he uttered this notable prophecy: "This federal republic is born a pygmy. A day will come when it will be a giant, even a colossus, formidable in these countries. Liberty of conscience, the facility for establishing a new population on immense lands, as well as the advantages of the new government, will draw thither farmers and artisans from all the nations. In a few years we shall watch with grief the tyrannical existence of this same colossus." The letter ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... are circumstances, however, the knowledge of which they cannot conceal, and which go far to exhibit pretty clearly the actual state of matters: such as, First, the facility with which they raise large sums of cash prompt' at public auctions. Second, the winding up of the estates of deceased persons. (Peter Newland, a liberated African, died a short time before I left the colony: and his estate realized, in houses, merchandise, and cash, upward of fifteen hundred pounds.) ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... teeth and purge and bleed all the grown people once a month to keep their health sound, he knows everybody, and by constant contact with all sorts of folk becomes a master of etiquette and manners and a conversationalist of large facility. There were plenty of carriers, drovers, and their sort, ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... debts, to whom the French willingly gave credit, the English name at that period having stood extremely high in the estimation of the French, but having sustained several losses on account of their too great facility in giving credit, they determined to make such of the English as they could attract, pay a portion towards what they had been mulcted by their runaway country-people. The French are not alone in that respect, ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... thought a frightened cat would scarcely have squeezed herself into it from the hot pursuing dogs. But what will not fear enable a man to do? Captain Snipes, big as he was, slipped into it with the facility of a weasel through the chinks of a chicken-coop; but lost every thread and thrumb of his shirt; and moreover, got his hide so scratched and torn by the briers, that the blood trickled from him fast as gravy ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... in most favor in western Canada. Graces do not count for much in the west, nor does the assumption of ability carry a man as far as it sometimes does in older communities. As Stirling had once said, when they want a chopper in that country they make him chop, and facility in posing is of very little service when one is called on to grapple with virgin forest ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... gained the head of his division. He learned everything with such extreme facility that he had a great deal of time to himself. The doctor therefore thought that it would be better for him to utilize his evenings by taking a course at the "Slodjskolan," the great industrial school of Stockholm. It ...
— The Waif of the "Cynthia" • Andre Laurie and Jules Verne
... eminently signalized at the masquerade, where he discovered his acquaintance through their disguises, with such wonderful facility, as has afforded the family an inexhaustible topick of conversation. Every new visitor is informed how one was detected by his gait, and another by the swinging of his arms, a third by the toss of his head, and another by his favourite phrase; nor ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... complete absence of any control or test whereby to check the truth of the discovery, is not very onerous. The doctrine "que tout est au mieux" was therefore preached with fresh vigour, and examples of that illuminating principle were discovered with a facility that Pangloss himself might have envied, till at last even the spectators ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... passed more cheerfully than might have been expected. He had by this time begun to talk Polish with some facility, and was able to understand the stories that the men told, as they sat round the fire; sometimes tales of adventures they themselves had gone through, sometimes stories of the history of Poland, its frequent internal wars, and its struggles ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty
... at him (not at his work, for the child had made him promise not to do so) and began to marvel at his absorption, his intentness, the evident facility with which he worked: the little figure leaning over the great dish on the bare board of the table, with the oval opening of the window and the blue sky beyond it, began to grow sacred to him with more than the ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... instances a painful undertaking. Every movement was a work of deliberation. Having by much care, and with some anxiety, made good our descent to the top of the secondary hills, we took our way down one of the steepest banks, and slid forward with great facility in a sitting posture. Towards the foot of the hill, an expanse of snow stretched across the line of descent. This being loose and soft, we entered upon it without fear; but on reaching the middle of it, we came to a surface of solid ice, perhaps a hundred yards ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... insensible growth in families, which trammel nearly every mind in densely peopled countries, and more especially in places where commerce is languidly carried on. Perhaps also in some measure it may be owing to the greater facility the poorer classes have in all colonies of earning a livelihood, which, by freeing their minds from anxiety on that score, leaves some room for ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... and in guild and craft life; in pursuance of this theory, the Jews were accorded a recognized and distinct status; (2) furthermore, the Jews were an economic necessity in the times when a ban was laid on money-lending, and they constituted an important economic facility at a little later period when capital could indeed be worked but when rivalry and hatreds rendered communication uncertain.[6] To the maintenance of Jewish solidarity and the preservation of things Jewish qua Jewish, sacrifices ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... with a dangerous flash of interest in his eyes. "You've an undeniable facility, John, with ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... the acquaintance of people with a feeling of hostility rather than with the more usual sensation of friendly curiosity. He was shy, and even with his best friends could not lessen his reserve. Some persons are able to form close intimacies with admirable facility, but James felt always between himself and his fellows a sort of barrier. He could not realise that deep and sudden sympathy was even possible, and was apt to look with mistrust upon the appearance thereof. He ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... the same time, that Mrs. Bronson's social facility, which was really her great refuge from importunity, a defence with serious thought and serious feeling quietly cherished behind it, had its discriminations as well as its inveteracies, and that the most marked of all these, perhaps, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... been on the watch, suddenly appeared with three pair of handcuffs, and applied them with a degree of prompt facility that surprised himself and quite ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... on father, and was duly taken out to the honey house. He ate the whole pound. 'Will you have some more?' asked father. 'Don't care if I do,' said the neighbour. So father set out another pound comb, which the neighbour proceeded to put out of sight with a facility fully equal to that with which he demolished the first. 'Have some more,' said father. 'Thanks,' said the neighbour, 'but maybe I've had enough.' I used to wonder how the man ever did it, but I guess ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... read and write, and was instructed with the same facility in all the sciences that became ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 3 • Anon.
... discipline, and the only resource of the Finance has been in the wild projects of an empty Exchequer. Whether the United States will be the more prosperous for this conquest, is a question of time alone. Whether the facility of the conquest may not make the multitude frantic for general aggression,—whether the military men of the States may not obtain a popularity and assume a power which has been hitherto confined to civil life,—whether the attractions of military career ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... me that he came of Dutch blood on his mother's side, and so got his name of Elzevir; and that he could once speak in Dutch as readily as in English, only that his mother dying when he was yet a boy he lost something of the facility. ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... with the rays they have borrowed from him. Our wit (as you call it) is but reflection or imitation, therefore scarce to be called ours. True wit, I believe, may be defined a justness of thought, and a facility of expression.... However, this is far from a complete definition; pray help me to a better, as I doubt ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... archipelago of 2,300 islands; Diego Garcia, largest and southernmost island, occupies strategic location in central Indian Ocean; island is site of joint US-UK military facility ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the least assist him by translating it into Italian, for I did not speak a word of the language myself; but I suggested that the man would understand French. The waiter, however, had understood English. Waiters do understand all languages with a facility that is marvellous; and this one now suggested that Mrs. Greene should follow him up-stairs. Mrs. Greene, however, would not move till she had seen that her boxes were all right; and as Mrs. Greene was also a pretty woman, I found myself bound to ...
— The Man Who Kept His Money In A Box • Anthony Trollope
... densities, when mixed in liquid and subjected to rapid vertical oscillation, range themselves by order of weight, the heavier sinking and not allowing passage to lighter matter, the new sieve offers the advantages of a single and simple instrument, with increased facility for treating poor "dirt." Finally, as I shall show, the country is prepared by nature to receive a tramway; and the distance to the sea does not exceed fourteen ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... great importance to the trade of Calcutta, is the facility with which powerful steamers can now be procured, to tow ships up and down the Hooghly. Any one who has gone up and down this river, must be aware of the dangerous nature of its navigation, owing to the many ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson
... educated to turn indifferently with right or left hand, it may make little difference, as far as the actual turning is concerned, whether he starts to work at the upper or lower end of the staff, but unfortunately there are few among us who are so skilled as to use the graver with equal facility with either hand, and it is therefore an advantage to start with the upper end, as you can thus finish a greater portion of the work more readily. You can readily see that when you come to reverse your staff and use the wax chuck, that by starting ...
— A Treatise on Staff Making and Pivoting • Eugene E. Hall
... to turn good into evil, seeing Solomon complained long since: and that the very age of the world renders it every day after other more malicious; I must leave the professors to their easy ways of reprehension, than which there is nothing of more facility. ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... interesting to the outside world. Great souls are seldom congenial,—popular impression to the contrary notwithstanding. Minds of a feather flock together; but minds of gold are apt to remain apart, each sufficient unto itself. It is in sports, pastimes, business, politics, that men congregate with facility; in literary and intellectual pursuits the leaders are anti-pathetic in proportion to their true greatness. Now and then two, and more rarely three, are united by bonds of quick understanding and sympathy, but men of profound convictions attract ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... a nice and difficult thing in education, to proportion a child's vocabulary exactly to his knowledge, dispositions, or conformation; our management must vary; some will acquire words too quickly, others too slowly. A child who has great facility in pronouncing sounds, will, for that reason, quickly acquire a number of words, whilst those whose organs of speech are not so happily formed, will from that cause alone, be ready in forming a copious vocabulary. Children who have many companions, ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... have taken for granted in him: just to show you that in a beastly vulgar age you had, and small wonder, a beastly vulgar imagination. He sank thus, surely, in defiance of insistent vulgarity, half his consciousness of his advantages, flattering himself that mere facility and amiability, a true effective, a positively ideal suppression of reference in any one to anything that might complicate, alone floated above. This would be quite his religion, you might infer—to cause his hands to ignore in whatever contact any opportunity, ...
— The Outcry • Henry James
... similar reply on a different occasion by Renault, and other coincidences arising from the subject. I need hardly remind the gentlest reader, that such coincidences must be accidental, from the very facility of their detection by reference to so popular a play on the stage and in the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... constant and careful employment. His correspondence both at home and abroad was immense. Yet no letter was unanswered. One of the best-bred men of his time, Washington deemed it a grave offence against the rules of good manners and propriety to leave letters unanswered. He wrote with great facility, and it would be a difficult matter to find another who had written so much, who had written so well. General Harry Lee once observed to him, "We are amazed, sir, at the vast amount of work you get through." Washington answered, "Sir, I rise at four o'clock, and ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... the Baconian hypothesis, I would not weigh heavily on bookless Will's rusticity and patois. Accepting Ben Jonson's account of his "excellent phantasy, brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility . . . ," accepting the tradition of his lively wit; admitting that he had some Latin and literature, I would find in him a sufficiently plausible mask for that immense Unknown with a strange taste for furbishing up older plays. I ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... thing as seasonable in grief as in joy; as decent being added unto actions of greatest weight and solemnity as being used when men most sequester themselves from action. The reason hereof is an admirable facility which music hath to express and represent to the mind, more inwardly than any other sensible means, the very steps and inflections of every way, the turns and varieties of all passion ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... facility of my disposition, so often and so frankly chronicled in these Confessions—the openness to be led whither any one might take the trouble to conduct me—the easy indifference to assume any character which might be pressed upon me, by chance, accident, or design, assisted by my share of three ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... catching the current under her lee bow, was breasted up to her course in a way that showed she would come out to windward of the island again without any difficulty. This whole evolution was made with the greatest facility, not a sheet being touched, the sails trimming themselves, the rudder alone controlling the admirable machine. The object appeared to be a reconnoissance. When, however, the Scud had made the circuit of the entire island, and had again got her ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... these were applying the principles of their former education to new sets of circumstances; but, as you will remember, by far the larger portion of our number were of the combatants of the army, and the facility they displayed in adopting the profession of arms affords an admirable addition to the argument by which it has been heretofore maintained that the general education of our college was best for all who could obtain ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser
... surprising things in the history of American art is the facility with which men of all trades turned to portrait painting, apparently as a last resort, and managed to make a living at it. During the first half of the last century, the country seems to have been overrun with wandering portrait painters, whose only equipment for the art was some paint ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... merchantmen and men of war, men who have received a collegiate education, and have known one case, on board of an English line-of-battle ship, the Superb, of a dissenting minister, a foretopman, who could clear away a foul topsail-clewline, or explain an obscure passage in Scripture, with equal facility and address, and was both a smart ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... over the Rob Roy lamp, and in six minutes the contents of the tin are quite hot. Soup takes less time, and steak perhaps a little more, depending on the facility of circulation of the materials in the tin and the amount of wind moderating the heat. The preserved meat or soup has been thoroughly cooked before it is sold, and it has sauce, gravy, and vegetables, and the oxtail has joints, all properly mixed. Therefore, in this speedy manner ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... ends, they seldom quit the view of their objects in detail, to go far in the road of general inquiries. They measure the extent of their own abilities, by the promptitude with which they apprehend what is important in every subject, and the facility with which they extricate themselves on every trying occasion. And these, it must be confessed, to a being who is destined to act in the midst of difficulties, are the proper test of capacity and force. The ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... not easily put off," said he, with firmness. "I am moved to remark upon the astonishing facility with which you speak English. ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... therefore, expected would have resulted from the intended infringement of the Proclamation was an enormous influx of money in the shape of fines into the Colonial Treasury; as no one doubted the extreme facility which existed for ascertaining exactly, in the case of persons registered and indentured to specific plantations, the names and abodes of at least the chief offenders against the proclamation. Accordingly, ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... slept the next night well. He did not trouble himself about Voltaire's criticisms. He was willing to take advantage of the ignorance of the age in many things; and if his plays pleased others, not to quarrel with them himself. His very facility of production would make him set less value on his own excellences, and not care to distinguish nicely between what he did well or ill. His blunders in chronology and geography do not amount to above half a ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... Correggio he had been sent to find. It was undoubtedly genuine, and he asked to be instructed by cable. The price was forty thousand dollars. With one eye closed, and the other keenly regarding the inkstand, Mr. Thorndike decided to pay the price; and with the facility of long practice dismissed the Correggio, and snapped his mind ...
— Once Upon A Time • Richard Harding Davis
... shoulders, and Big Waller and Gibault fell to work upon the flanks. March Marston seized his axe, and hastening into the bluff felled a dead pine and kindled a fire. As for Bertram, he sat down to sketch the whole with a degree of prompt facility and gusto, that showed the habit had become ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... satisfactorily explained, by attributing a certain resistance due to cohesion or friction preventing a gradual change of level, but producing it suddenly by the jar of the earthquakes. May we not inquire also, whether the facility with which the earth seems moved by this destructive agent, does not point to the same solution as the irregularity of the ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) program, which helped bring down the country's $300 million debt burden. In August 2005, Sao Tome signed on to a new 3-year IMF Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF) program worth $4.3 million. Considerable potential exists for development of a tourist industry, and the government has taken steps to expand facilities in recent years. The government also has attempted to reduce price ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... man tossed off the potion with the facility of long experience, shutting up the dish with his thumb and finger, as if it were ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... horsepower and adopt purely mechanical means of traction and conveyance, we can almost wholly abolish disease-bearing dust from our streets, and ultimately from all our highways; while another kind of dust, that caused by the imperfect combustion of coal, may be got rid of with equal facility so soon as we consider pure air, sunlight, and natural beauty to be of more importance to the population as a whole than are the prejudices or the vested interests of those who produce ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... domestic uses, yet it might be used for many ordinary purposes which could scarcely be attained by any other means. The slightest adulteration of spirits, or any other liquid of known quality, may be instantly detected by it; and it is recommended by its cheapness, the great facility of its manipulation, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 490, Saturday, May 21, 1831 • Various
... the tyrant or the liberty of the people may be dependent. Nations, companies, and individuals have expended years of time and millions of money in testing every conceivable contrivance which offered a hope of improvement in precision, force, facility of loading or firing, or any of the minute details which contribute to render the weapon ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... could hear that the bishop spoke French fluently, but with a strong foreign accent. This facility, however, enabled him to converse with ease on every subject, and to hold intercourse directly with our general, a matter of no small moment to either party. It is probable that the other clergy did not possess this gift, for assuredly their manner toward ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... born, whistle through the air. For a mightily strange thing it is that, though I had ever a rooted horror at the thought of my father's office itself, and from my childhood never for a moment intended to exercise it, nevertheless I had always the most notable facility in cutting things. Never to this day have I a stick in hand, when I walk abroad among the ragweed waving yellow on the grassy pastures below the Wolfsberg, but I must need make wagers with myself to cut to an inch at the heads of the tallest and never miss. ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... time the virus of his theories was working. For it must be remembered that L—— was very new to New York, very young, and never having had much of anything he was no doubt slightly envious of the man's material facility, the sense of all-sufficiency, exclusiveness and even a kind of petty trade grandeur with which he ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... situation of these States; the number of rivers with which they are intersected, and of bays that wash there shores; the facility of communication in every direction; the affinity of language and manners; the familiar habits of intercourse;—all these are circumstances that would conspire to render an illicit trade between them a matter of little difficulty, ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... colorless. All the young animals that have this swelled membrane see more distinctly than their parents or brethren. They, therefore, have an advantage over them in the struggle for life. They can obtain food more easily; can find their prey, and escape from their enemies with greater facility than their kindred. This thickening and rounding of the membrane goes on from generation to generation by natural variation; natural selection all the while "picking out with unerring skill all the improvements, through countless generations," until at length it is found ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... peculiar case. That Tom Furnival should be made to give up seeing that nasty woman who lived at Hamworth, and to give up also having letters from her,—that at present was the extent of her moral sentiment. His wicked iniquity she could forgive with a facility not at all gratifying to Miss Biggs, if only she could bring about such a result as that. So she merely grunted in answer ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... primarily to South Africa. Proceeds from membership in a common customs union with South Africa form the majority of government revenue. Although drought has decreased agricultural activity over the past few years, completion of a major hydropower facility in January 1998 now permits the sale of water to South Africa, generating royalties for Lesotho. The pace of privatization has increased in recent years. In December 1999, the government embarked on a nine-month ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... country, gives me an opportunity of sending you a cipher to be used between us, which will give you some trouble to understand, but once understood, is the easiest to use, the most indecipherable, and varied by a new key with the greatest facility, of any I have ever known. I am in hopes the explanation enclosed ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... day, and now one slow analytic, very attentive or adhesive reading does it. But memory seems to me the most physical of intellectual powers. Bodily ease and freshness have much to do with it. Then there is great difference <of facility in method. I used to commit sentence by sentence. Now I take the idea of the whole, then its leading divisions, then its subdivisions, then its sentences." [Footnote: James, Psychology, ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... the wood a beautiful variegated appearance when they get it smoothed. So that the more knotted and gnarled a log of mahogany is, the better. It makes the more beautiful wood. But in pine, it is not beauty, but facility of working, which is the great object. So they always want to get pine as smooth and straight-grained as possible. So that one of these trees that grow detached, in the fields, would not be of much value for lumber. It has so many branches, that the boards made ...
— Forests of Maine - Marco Paul's Adventures in Pursuit of Knowledge • Jacob S. Abbott
... left entirely unattended, and thus afford every facility for a trick of this kind. Visiters enter, look at furniture, and depart unheeded and unseen. Should any one wish to purchase, or to inquire the price of an article, a bell is at hand, and this ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... letters as ever (the average although we certainly have no Lambs, and perhaps no Walpoles or Southeys to raise it, would probably be higher), but because the conditions that call for and develop the epistolary art have largely passed away. With our modern facility of communication, the letter has lost the pristine dignity of its function. The earth has dwindled strangely since the advent of steam and electricity, and in a generation used to Mr. Edison's devices, Puck's ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... Granada, Life of Columbus, Life of Washington, etc., etc. For easy elegance of style, Irving has no superior, perhaps no equal, among the prose writers of America. If Hawthorne excels him in variety, in earnestness and in force, he is, perhaps, inferior to Irving in facility and grace, while he can make no claim to that genial, lambent humour which beams in almost every page of Geoffrey Cravon. ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... one down, and handling it with the indescribable facility possible to none save a practical ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... from their easy victory over the Scots and Picts, with what facility they might subdue the Britons themselves, who had not been able to resist those feeble invaders, were determined to conquer and fight for their own grandeur, not for the defence of their degenerate allies. They sent intelligence to Saxony of the fertility and riches of Britain; and represented ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... case, anything tending to embarrass was now felt by us. Mr. Stuart and Morgan held up well, but I felt myself getting daily weaker and weaker. I found that I could not rise into my saddle with the same facility, and that I lost wind in going up a bank of only a few feet in height. I determined, however, on mature consideration, to examine the plain, and to satisfy myself before I should turn back, as to the fact of the ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... lake, watching for such small fish or water-reptiles as might chance to pass by its lonely station. A brief debate took place betwixt Raoul and the hawk-merchant on the best mode of starting the quarry, so as to allow Lady Eveline and her attendants the most perfect view of the flight. The facility of killing the heron at the far jettee or at the jettee ferre—that is, upon the hither or farther sid of the pool— was anxiously debated in language of breathless importance, as if some great and perilous enterprise was ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... early age; but made so little progress in his studies, that he was more than once upon the point of abandoning them in despair; but he was endowed with extraordinary perseverance. As he advanced to middle age, his mind expanded, and he learned whatever he applied himself to with extreme facility. So remarkable a change was not, in that age, to be accounted for but by a miracle. It was asserted and believed that the Holy Virgin, touched with his great desire to become learned and famous, took pity upon his incapacity, and appeared to ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... hesitation in deciding that the first was the most tenable ground; but, from the peculiar circumstances of the case, it merited consideration, if the principle could be saved, whether facility in the provision might not result from a compliance. An attentive examination of the subject and papers, however, soon convinced me that to furnish all the papers would be highly improper, and that a partial delivery of them ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... no son, though a vague image came back to her of a strong and graceful boy's form dancing across the garden, at play, years before. Her mind therefore fastened upon one of the sisters, who, she knew, had shown great facility in writing: indeed, Hawthorne used at one time to say that it was she who should have been the follower of literature. Full of this conception, she went to carry her burden of gratitude to the author, ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... their truth, however great, of a like nature with the foregoing. The contrary of every matter of fact is still possible, because it can never imply a contradiction, and is conceived by the mind with the same facility and distinctness, as if ever so conformable to reality. That the sun will not rise to-morrow, is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise. We should in vain, therefore, ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... record in which there was still greater facility of ghost-production than Nicolai evinced. One patient could, for instance, by thinking of a person, summon his apparition to join the others. He could not, however, having done this, subsequently banish him. The sight is the sense most easily and frequently tricked; next, the hearing. In some ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... music at sight, are cases as remarkable as they are familiar. Among bodily acts, dancing, gymnastic exercises, ease and brilliancy of execution on a musical instrument, are examples of the rapidity and facility acquired by repetition. In simpler manual operations the effect is, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... pulpit religion ignores the crimes of parents to their children. I'm not conventionally religious, but I seem to remember that Christ indirectly said something pretty strong on the subject. But the pulpit folk show a wonderful facility for ignoring the awkward things Christ said. In about three years' time I'm going to turn my guns on the Church. They've sneered at me ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... the same tongue—slowly, it is true, and haltingly; but none the less in excellent French, such, though, as a little child might use. Thereafter they spoke a little French each day, and My Dear often marveled that the girl learned this language with a facility that was at times almost uncanny. At first Meriem had puckered her narrow, arched, little eye brows as though trying to force recollection of something all but forgotten which the new words suggested, and then, to her own astonishment as well as to that of her teacher she ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... observed, that, at some courts in Germany, there were academies for the pages, who are the sons of gentlemen, and receive their education without any expence to their parents. Dr Johnson said, that manners were best learnt at those courts. 'You are admitted with great facility to the prince's company, and yet must treat him with much respect. At a great court, you are at such a distance that you get no good.' I said, 'Very true: a man sees the court of Versailles, as if he saw it on a theatre.' He said, 'The ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... Horatio Hornblower." That man doubtless would have died of stomach ulcers before winning his second stripe. It is not a matter of, "How do I look to someone else?" but of, "What do I know about myself?" The kind of work which one likes best and does with the greatest facility, the avocational study which is pursued because it provides greater delight than an encharged responsibility, the talent which one had as a youth but was dropped because of the press of making a living, the ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... considerable," returned Bob, reverting to his old language with wonderful facility, "w'en Number 666 don't know 'im. Yes, in me, Robert Frog, Esquire, of Chikopow Farm, Canada Vest, you be'old your ancient henemy, who is on'y too 'appy to 'ave the chance of axin your parding for all the trouble he gave you, an' ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... brush of an artist, that I might paint you some pictures of Tartarin during his three days aboard the Zouave on the voyage from Marseilles! But I have no facility with the brush, and mere words cannot convey how he passed from the proudly heroic to the hopelessly miserable in the course of the journey. Worst of all, while he was groaning in his stuffy bunk, he knew that a very merry party of passengers were enjoying themselves in ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... man, perjuring himself with a readiness and facility most unbecoming in a student desiring letters of probation from the Protesting and Covenant-keeping Kirk ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... put himself such questions was precisely part of the attaching play of her iridescent surface, the shimmering interfusion of her various aspects; that of her youth with her independence—her pecuniary perhaps in particular, that of her vivacity with her beauty, that of her facility above all with her odd novelty; the high modernity, as people appeared to have come to call it, that made her so much more "knowing" in some directions than even he, man of the world as he certainly was, could pretend to be, though all on a basis of the most unconscious and instinctive and luxurious ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... houses out of such castles in the air put even the most tried patience to a severe test No blank in tradition presents so wide a chasm, but that this system of smooth and downright invention will fill it up with playful facility. The eclipses of the sun, the numbers of the census, family-registers, triumphs, are without hesitation carried back from the current year up to the year One; it stands duly recorded, in what year, month, and day king Romulus went up to heaven, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... twofold: partly because the different substitutes for the mother's milk, taken for the most part from the vegetable kingdom, are less easy of digestion than the milk, and partly because, even were they digested with the same facility, they do not furnish the elements necessary to ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... few more remarkable narratives in history than that of the facility and enthusiasm with which the Anglo-Saxons, a people conservative then as now to the degree of extreme obstinacy, accepted Christianity and the new learning which followed in the train of the new religion. After a few lapses into paganism ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... really grand. Its characters are very different from the Ganges and Burrumpooter, its waters being much more confined to one bed, and comparatively speaking becoming seldom spread out. Generally speaking it is deep and the stream is not violent. It appears to me to afford every facility for navigation; in one or two places troublesome shallows are met with, and in several places the channel near the banks is impeded by rocks. It is only in the upper defile, or Kioukdweng, that the navigation is during the rises of the river dangerous, and at times ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... marriage. For the Divorce Court and all its works and ways he had nothing but detestation. He ranked it, with our gin-palaces, among the blots on our civilization. From Goethe, perhaps a curious authority on such a subject, he quotes approvingly a protest against over-facility in granting divorce, and an acknowledgment that Christianity has won a "culture-conquest" in establishing the sacredness of marriage. Man's progress, he says, depends on his keeping such "culture-conquests" as these; and of all attempts to undo these conquests, give back what we have won, and ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... has no authority, and so what is there written can be despised with the same facility as it was said; although we may say that the soul takes with itself these powers, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... is a very important influence among those which tend to produce insubordination and other serious faults among servants. Every housekeeper must have observed that a marvellous facility of intercommunication exists among the servant classes, and more particularly among the Irish. There seems to be some mysterious method at work, whereby the troubles and bickerings of each mistress with ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Raleigh and Jonson have both recorded their opinions of it, but no one has characterized it more happily than his friend, Sir Tobie Matthews, "A man so rare in knowledge, of so many several kinds, endued with the facility and felicity of expressing it all in so elegant, significant, so abundant, and yet so choice and ravishing a way of words, of metaphors, of allusions, as perhaps the world hath not seen since it was a world."—"Address to the Reader" prefixed to ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... pelvis and hind limbs of a crocodile, a three-toed bird, and an ornithoscelidan are represented side by side; and, for facility of comparison, in corresponding positions; but it must be recollected that, while the position of the bird's limb is natural, that of the crocodile is not so. In the bird, the thigh-bone lies close to the body, and the metatarsal bones of the foot (ii., iii., iv., ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... servitude were explained, often to their astonishment and horror.[161] Often the private examination of the prisoner confounded him with amazement: a gentleman, whom he had never seen before, unravelled with facility the mystery of his life. If he had been often in prison; if his brother had been transported; if his sweetheart had been deserted; whether he had been a pest to the lords of the manor, or to the parish, by poaching or bastardy: his whole life was read by his inquisitor, with supernatural clearness. ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... hundred feet from the surface, for pumping wells; in the valley of Oil Creek the same stratum was reached at about half that depth. In all these wells, whether successful as oil wells or not, a strong body of salt water was obtained, that added greatly to the facility of separating the oil by its increased gravity. Hitherto the business had been pursued with advantage and profit to those who were engaged. The demand was steady and prices remunerative, and visions of untold ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... work with, native ability, cultivated by a thorough education, and supported by just views and sound principles. Energy of character and feeling helped him also; warming as he proceeded, he threw himself fully into his subject, and went on with a facility surprising to himself, and far surpassing the most sanguine expectations of his friends. As for his opponents, they had anticipated very little from him. We give a sketch of ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... construction and arrangement of parts, whereby the device may be readily drawn from place to place, the crane or derrick frame adjusted in any desired position within the scope of its movement, friction avoided, and the whole apparatus manipulated with the greatest facility. ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... great creative epochs who, with peculiar facility, seem to embody the purpose of their age and to yield themselves as ready instruments to its design. When time is ripe they appear, and are able, with perfect ease, to carry out and give voice ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... and custom may be distinguished in philosophical language. We may say that custom makes the habit. Custom does not imply any skill or special facility. A habit is a channel whereby the energies flow, as otherwise they would not have flowed, freely and readily in some particular direction. A habit, then, is a determination of a faculty for good or for evil. It is something intrinsic in a man, a real modification of his being, abiding in him in the ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... history. It was most aptly worded, drafted by the master hand of Franklin. It recited the fact that the province had always been ruled by Quakers who were opposed to war, but that now it had become necessary to allow men to become soldiers and to give them every facility for the profession of arms, because the Assembly though containing a Quaker majority nevertheless represented all the people of the province. To prevent those who believed in war from taking part in it ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher
... the Japanese had lost only one man from disease to every four from bullets. Now the Japanese, as usual, had not worked out any of the principles of medical science, sanitation, and hygiene which enabled them to make this remarkable record, but they showed their characteristic facility in taking the white man's inventions and getting as much or more—more in this case—out of them ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... too much a man of action and of thought to be prodigal of words. And she knew that a facility in making pretty speeches is in nine cases out of ten merely the refuge of those who desire to conceal ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... family marks; facility (to judge by these imprudent marriages) being at once their quality and their defect; but in the case of Charles, a man of exceptional beauty and sweetness both of face and disposition, the family fault had quite grown to be a virtue, and we find him in consequence the drudge and milk-cow of his ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... de Vigny first as a writer, it is evident that he wished the public to regard him as different from the other romanticists of his day; in fact, in many respects, his method presents a striking contrast to theirs. To their brilliant facility, their prodigious abundance, and the dazzling luxury of color in their pictures of life he opposes a style always simple, pure, clear, with delicacy of touch, careful drawing of character, correct locution, and absolute chastity. Yet, even though he had this marked regard for ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... there shall be no more wars and there will be none. Nor am I ignoring the complexities of the situation; but I believe that all the details, the first step once taken, would settle themselves with unexpected facility through the medium of international tribunals. Of course this will be called visionary: but whosoever is tempted so to call it, let him read history in the records of contemporary writers and see how visionary all great forward movements in the progress ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... Pleasanton replied with his battery but the shots fell very short. The enemy supposed to have come from direction of Hunter's Mill returned toward Vienna. He states that the country beyond his picket lines affords every facility for such attacks, and that the commanding general must expect them to be frequent so long as the enemy continues in large force in his front and wishes to divert attention from other movements, that from the opposite hills his camp ...
— A Virginia Village • Charles A. Stewart
... introduced him. He began to take private lessons in dancing and singing, and as he possessed a certain natural grace, invisible when he was out of humor, but always appearing when he wanted to please, and a certain facility of imitation as well, he was soon able to dance excellently, and sing with more or less dullness a few songs of the sort fashionable at the time. But he took so little delight in music or singing for its own ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... only say that Mr. Filipowski's Table is used with ease, as I have found upon trial; and that its extent, as compared with other tables, and particularly with other FIVE-FIGURE tables, of the same kind, will recommend it. I desire to confine myself to testifying to the facility with which this table can be used: comparison with other forms, as to RELATIVE facility, being out of the question on so short ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 71, March 8, 1851 • Various
... Department was averse to progress along whatever line, by expressing unqualified delight. He had Armitage ordered to the Torpedo Station at Newport to carry on experiments forthwith, and instructed the superintendent of the station to give the inventor every facility for carrying on his work. Two months had already elapsed and the work was at the stage when a destroyer and a practice torpedo boat had been detached from regular duty and ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... stock? it is the farmer's chance. [7] Or would your citizen serve on foot? It is husbandry that shall give him robustness of body. Or if we turn to the toil-loving fascination of the chase, [8] here once more earth adds incitement, as well as furnishing facility of sustenance for the dogs as by nurturing a foster brood of wild animals. And if horses and dogs derive benefit from this art of husbandry, they in turn requite the boon through service rendered to the ...
— The Economist • Xenophon
... husband thinks your plan of lecturing a very good one, and sure to succeed, for the Americans are fond of that kind of instruction. We remember your English was pleasant, and if you have been practicing since, you have probably gained facility in expression, and a little foreign accent would be no drawback. You might give your lectures in several cities, but he would like very much if you could give a course at the Lowell Institute at Boston, an establishment which pays very highly. . ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... printed words. There are men who, without being original or inventive, have still, through strong understanding and culture, much to say that will profit their contemporaries; men of a certain mental calibre, of talent, activity, will, cleverness, of verbal facility and of prominent ambition and in most cases of audacity, and who by discipline and labor attain to a style which for their purposes is effective. Of this class Jeffrey, Brougham, Macaulay are conspicuous examples. Theirs are not winged minds. They keep ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... grasp the connection of musical ideas and the manner in which they should be worked out, and as this exercise implied the rewriting of many passages in order to adapt them for the piano, he gradually attained facility in expressing his own musical thoughts on paper without first playing them on an instrument. Thus, without assistance from anybody, he worked on alone, very often till far into the night, to perfect himself in this important ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... It is Spanish—so they said. We discovered it at the head of a column of odds and ends in the Picayune, the first day; heard twenty people use it the second; inquired what it meant the third; adopted it and got facility in swinging it the fourth. It has a restricted meaning, but I think the people spread it out a little when they choose. It is the equivalent of the thirteenth roll in a 'baker's dozen.' It is something thrown in, gratis, for good measure. The custom originated in the Spanish quarter of the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and anxious attention with which I have collected and arranged the materials of which these volumes are composed, will hardly be conceived by those who read them with careless facility[60]. The stretch of mind and prompt assiduity by which so many conversations were preserved[61], I myself, at some distance of time, contemplate with wonder; and I must be allowed to suggest, that the nature of the work, in other respects, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... savings banks have been used, even by the humblest classes, proves that he was as much mistaken in this as he was in many of the views which he maintained. There are thousands of persons who would probably never have thought of laying by a penny, but for the facility of the savings bank: it would have seemed so useless to try. The small hoard in the cupboard was too ready at hand, and would have become dissipated before it accumulated to any amount; but no sooner was a place of ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... and his attacks were bludgeon blows rather than home thrusts. Of the lighter graces and social gifts he had scant store. Indeed, his private life displayed no redeeming feature. Everyone disliked him, but very many feared him, mainly, perhaps, because of his facility for intrigue, his power of bullying, and his great influence at Court. As we have seen, the conciliatory efforts of the monarch had hitherto averted a rupture between Pitt and Thurlow. But not even the favour of George III could render the crabbed old Chancellor endurable. ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... of Cipriani de Lloseta that had he not been a Count he would have been a great musician. He had that singular facility with any instrument which is sometimes given to musical persons in recompense for voicelessness. The Count spoke like one who could sing, but his throat was delicate, and so the world lost a great singer. Of most instruments he spoke with a half-concealed contempt. ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... is an amusement worthy of a man, and this noble taste has been extensively developed since the opportunities of travelling have of late years been so wonderfully improved. The facility with which the most remote regions are now reached, renders a tour over some portion of the globe a necessary adjunct to a man's education; a sportsman naturally directs his path to some ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... humorous part of the criticism is this. After stating that Ponderevo acknowledges himself to be a liar, a swindler, a thief, an adulterer, and a murderer, Claudius Clear then proceeds: "He is not in the least ashamed of these things. He explains them away with the utmost facility, and we find him at the age of forty-five, not unhappy, and successfully engaged in problems of aerial navigation" (my italics). Oh! candid simplicity of soul! Wells, why did you not bring down the wrath of God, or at least make the adulterer fail in the problems ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... a most commanding one,—the crown of a long mountain ridge, studded with pine-copse and cork-trees, presenting every facility for light-infantry movements; and here and there gently sloping towards the plain, offering a field for cavalry manoeuvres. Beneath, in the vast plain, were encamped the dark legions of France, their heavy siege-artillery planted against the doomed fortress, while clouds ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... trunk, and some of the best and most refined researches of modern chemists have been made by means of an apparatus which might with ease be contained in a small travelling carriage, and the expense of which is only a few pounds. The facility with which chemical inquiries are carried on, and the simplicity of the apparatus, offer additional reasons, to those I have already given, for the pursuit of this science. It is not injurious to the health; the modern chemist ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... is grand sport, but there are many denizens of a city who have been reared in the districts of fresh-water streams, lakes and ponds, who have not had the opportunities of cultivating salt-water sport, and who even when surrounded with every facility for its pursuit, would still be elated at finding some well-stocked stream near at hand. Anglers, as a rule, are unable to go far a-field in search of fresh-water fishing, and for six years past it ...
— Black Bass - Where to catch them in quantity within an hour's ride from New York • Charles Barker Bradford
... and Frenchmen were able to converse in this common medium. French Francis understood, for it was the language in use in the court and among the upper classes in England. Italian he picked up naturally during his residence, and spoke it with the facility of a native. He could now converse freely in Latin, and had some knowledge of German. At the same school were many lads of good Venetian families, and it was here that he had first made the acquaintance of Matteo Giustiniani, who was now ...
— The Lion of Saint Mark - A Story of Venice in the Fourteenth Century • G. A. Henty
... have had him done in the wilderness, of stones into bread, compared to this, will scarce deserve the name of a miracle: though, indeed, to speak pro- perly, there is not one miracle greater than another; they being the extraordinary effects of the hand of God, to which all things are of an equal facility; and to create the world as easy as one single creature. For this is also a miracle; not only to produce effects against or above nature, but before nature; and to create nature, as great a miracle as to contradict or transcend her. We do too narrowly define the power of God, restraining ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... importance to the trade of Calcutta, is the facility with which powerful steamers can now be procured, to tow ships up and down the Hooghly. Any one who has gone up and down this river, must be aware of the dangerous nature of its navigation, owing to the many mud ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson
... with separate sexes, facility in preventing crosses is an important element of success in the formation of new races,—at least, in a country which is already stocked with other races. In this respect enclosure of the land plays a part. Wandering savages ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... (we are familiar enough with the Gascon now to say with a marvelous facility for lying) Croustillac formed his plan of campaign against De Chemerant, who still, sword in hand, stood on the threshold and said for the second time, "What is it, your highness? what has happened? I thought I heard a cry and struggle, and an ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... brushes and drew and painted with a facility which denoted a true talent. She wrote and found her handwriting clear and elegant. She looked at the countless books which were ranged round the room and knew that ...
— Old French Fairy Tales • Comtesse de Segur
... Buonaparte's friends, and put under lock and key in their candidate's house—"to make you entirely free; you were not free where you were," said the instigator of the stroke, when called to explain. To the use of fine phrases was now added a facility in employing violence at a pinch which likewise remained characteristic of Buonaparte's career down to the end. Nasica, who alone records the tale, sees in this event the precursor of the long series of state-strokes which culminated on the eighteenth Brumaire. There ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... the present writer has been struck dumb with wonder at the facility with which men will fill in chasms in their information with conjecture; will guess at the motives which have prompted actions; will pass their censures, as if all secrets of the past lay out on an open scroll before them. He is obliged to ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... and these confined their visits to the detached outlayers of the rock, from whence they would gaze on the workmen with that look of curiosity so remarkable in this animal. Mr. Stevenson was desirous of protecting them, in hopes of taming them, so as to gain that facility of studying their habits which was afforded at Small's Lighthouse, off the coast of Pembrokeshire, a favourite resort of seals, where, by gentle treatment, they had become so tame and familiar as to eat bread out of the ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... week if you like! You have wonderful facility when you choose. And what else? Here, I'll pour out the ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... mysterious manner? Had he not sought refuge where no human being would think of seeking refuge, namely, in that old, dilapidated ruin, where, when his pursuers were so close upon his track, he had succeeded in eluding their grasp with a facility which looked as if he had vanished into thin air, or as if the very earth had opened to receive him bodily ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... animals that have this swelled membrane see more distinctly than their parents or brethren. They, therefore, have an advantage over them in the struggle for life. They can obtain food more easily; can find their prey, and escape from their enemies with greater facility than their kindred. This thickening and rounding of the membrane goes on from generation to generation by natural variation; natural selection all the while "picking out with unerring skill all the improvements, through countless generations," until at length it is found that the membrane ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... on stone, from which impressions can be taken much more expeditiously and economically than from metal. The process depends upon the following principles:—First, the facility with which calcareous stones imbibe water; second, the power of oily substances to repel water. When drawings are executed upon the stone with crayons composed of oily materials, and the surface of the stone is washed over with water, the moisture is imbibed by the stone, ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... insects and birds moreover differs in the form of the trajectory in space; in the inclination of the plane in which the wings beat; in the role of each of the two alternating (and in an inverse sense) movements that the wings execute; as also in the facility with which the air is decomposed during these different movements. As the wings of a fly are adorned with a brilliant array of colors, we can follow the trajectory or figure that each wing writes in the air. It is of the form of a figure of eight (Fig. 9), first ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... appointed at Runnymede, between Windsor and Staines; a place which has ever since been extremely celebrated, on account of this great event. The two parties encamped apart, like open enemies; and after a debate of a few days, the King, with a facility somewhat suspicious, signed and sealed the charter which was required of him. This famous deed, commonly called the "Great Charter," either granted or secured very important liberties and privileges to every order of men in the kingdom: to the clergy, to the barons, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... say not, Godfrey; that is to say, you know it, but you have lost a good deal of the facility of speaking it. You have always got on fairly enough with it when we have spoken it occasionally during your holidays since we have been in England, and in a very few weeks you will find that it has completely come back to you. You spoke it as you did English, indeed better, when you ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... undermined by the action of the waves, and it would be necessary to create an entirely new front by sinking a foundation for a sea-wall some yards in advance of the present face. There would be no engineering difficulty in the formation of a boat-harbour, to combine by extensive pile-jetties the facility of landing in all weathers. A very cursory view of Larnaca exhibited a true picture of its miserable financial position. The numerous stores kept by Europeans were the result of a spasmodic impulse. There was no wholesome trade; those ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... executed it under You, at the same time that it heightened Her Majesty's Favour to all who had the Happiness of having it convey'd through Your Hands: A Secretary of State, in the Interests of Mankind, joined with that of his Fellow-Subjects, accomplished with a great Facility and Elegance in all the Modern as well as Ancient Languages, was a happy and proper Member of a Ministry, by whose Services Your Sovereign and Country are in so high and flourishing a Condition, as makes all other Princes and Potentates powerful or ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... the Officers of the Zoological Society, and to the Officers of the Zoological Department of the British Museum, my sincere thanks are due for the kindness and promptness with which every information has been given, and every facility afforded ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... feverish, and threw upon me that anxious eye which we often find in patients who are under the first access of a serious disease; as if nature, while she kept her secret from the understanding, communicated it to the feelings, whose eloquence, expressed through the senses, we can often read with great facility. I knew, in an instant, that he was committed, by a relentless hand, to suffering, in all likelihood, in the form of a fever. He told me he was Colonel P——, and that, having been very suddenly taken ill, he had become alarmed for himself, and sent for me to administer to him ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... did not forget from time to time to jog the memories of his friends, the professors of the medical college, that they might afford his protege every facility and assistance in the ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... undertaking. Every movement was a work of deliberation. Having by much care, and with some anxiety, made good our descent to the top of the secondary hills, we took our way down one of the steepest banks, and slid forward with great facility in a sitting posture. Towards the foot of the hill, an expanse of snow stretched across the line of descent. This being loose and soft, we entered upon it without fear; but on reaching the middle ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... means compulsory, and in case a member finds himself too busy for activity, he may merely enjoy the free papers which reach him, without taxing himself with literary labour. For those anxious to contribute, every facility is provided. In some cases negotiations are made directly between publisher and contributor, but the majority are accommodated by the two Manuscript Bureaus, Eastern and Western, which receive contributions in any quantity from the non-publishing ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... himself down upon knees, with handkerchief to eyes. The meaning was to indicate his grief at being late with his promised article for the "New Monthly," and his begging pardon thereupon. He had great facility for taking off likenesses, and it is said was once suspected of being the "H. B." whose lithographic drawings of eminent or remarkable persons startled society a few years ago by their rare graphic power and their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... the ornaments of their altars, and in the imposing ceremonial of their worship. The bishop became a great worldly potentate, and the strictest union was formed between the Church and State. The greatest beneficent change which the Church effected was in relation to divorce,—the facility for which disgraced the old Pagan civilization; but Christianity invested marriage with the utmost solemnity, so that it became a holy and indissoluble sacrament,—to which the Catholic Church, in the days of deepest degeneracy has ever clung, leaving to the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... The facility of action depends upon habit. In proportion as the actions of life become a habit, they will be easily performed, and performed with pleasure. The capacity to establish habits is the consequence of the power given us to promote our own welfare. This capacity is designed to ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... would not be called well furnished from its having a larger number of chairs and tables of one kind than were needed, but from its having a separate article for each distinct use. The more power we have of discriminating the nicer shades of meaning, the greater facility we possess of giving force and precision to our expressions. Our own language possesses great advantages in this respect; for being partly derived from the Teutonic, and partly from the Latin, we have a large number of duplicates from ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various
... acknowledged advantages, it may be questioned whether there is not one drawback to the introduction of guano. It is used with less profit in direct connexion with lime, than with most kinds of manure; and its facility of application, and quick return, has induced many to give up the lime entirely, if not also to some extent, to neglect the resources of the farm. Others again, in improving poor land, advise the ...
— Guano - A Treatise of Practical Information for Farmers • Solon Robinson
... rural feeling. They possess a quick sensibility to the beauties of nature, and a keen relish for the pleasures and employments of the country. This passion seems inherent in them. Even the inhabitants of cities, born and brought up among brick walls and bustling streets, enter with facility into rural habits, and evince a tact for rural occupation. The merchant has his snug retreat in the vicinity of the metropolis, where he often displays as much pride and zeal in the cultivation of his flower-garden, and the maturing of his fruits, as he does in the conduct of his ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... Washington, etc., etc. For easy elegance of style, Irving has no superior, perhaps no equal, among the prose writers of America. If Hawthorne excels him in variety, in earnestness and in force, he is, perhaps, inferior to Irving in facility and grace, while he can make no claim to that genial, lambent humour which beams in almost every page of Geoffrey Cravon. ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... this time sufficiently mastered the art of penmanship to enter the events of the day in my journal with facility, which I seldom failed to do. My notes are, however, far too numerous to be copied. I therefore write out only such as I deem most likely to be interesting ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... sometimes, uneasily, of the Platonic Socrates, that, as he says of the Sophist, or of himself perhaps en caricature, in the Euthydemus, "Such is his skill in the war of words, that he can refute any proposition whatever, whether true or false"; that, in short, there is a dangerous facility abroad for proving all things whatever, equally well, of which Socrates, and his presumable allotment of truth, has ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... heedless insouciance which distinguished him, or rather with the selfish facility with which he threw a share, and a large share, of his burdens upon others, he had comforted himself with the thought that Lena would surely contrive some way of helping him; would, in spite of her declarations to the contrary, apply to Colonel Rush, guarding ...
— Bessie Bradford's Prize • Joanna H. Mathews
... of boys and dogs, they spent much time. This was their Broadway, and at the same time their point of outlook, where they might survey the landscape and decide when and where to enter their secluded domain. How admirable the facility with which these mysterious beasts pass up or down high fences! Ladders or stairs are superfluous. How can one possibly walk several steps down a perpendicular board without falling headlong to the ground? And still more strange,—how can one leap squarely ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... scorching heat of the day, the icy dew of the nights, dashing like a hero or a fool among the Turkish sabres or the Bedouin bullets. During the forty days of the voyage he had never left the interpreter Ventura; so that with his admirable facility he had learned, if not to speak Arabic fluently, at least to make himself understood in that language. Therefore it often happened that, when the general did not wish to use the native interpreter, Roland was ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... through their parts with a lifeless facility that turned his tragedy, he imagined, into a neat piece of machinery and left it without any glow of emotion whatever. Now and then the ease with which they recited their words was interrupted by forgetfulness and the player, whose memory had ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... youthful in manner; but they, each and all, were labeled "low comedian." Certainly, a rare intelligence gleamed from this man's eyes, but that is an attribute not often lacking in humorists who command high salaries because of their facility in laughter-making. This man, too, had the wide, thin-lipped, mobile mouth of the actor. His ivory-white, wrinkled forehead and cheeks, the bluish tint on jaws and chin, his voice, his perky air, the very tilt of his straw hat, were eloquent ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... a sudden inspiration, Alexander arose and warmly pressed the hand of Napoleon, who was then half-dozing at his side.[199] On the surface, indeed, everything was friendship and harmony. With urbane facility, the Czar accompanied his ally to the battlefield of Jena, listened to the animated description of the victor, and then joined in the chase in a ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... place on Monday, at half-past four, having left Philadelphia at six in the morning. We have just terminated a second engagement there very successfully. If the roads and carriages are bad, and the land-traveling altogether detestable, the speed, facility, and convenience of the steamboats, by which one may really be conveyed from one end to another of this world of vast waters, are very admirable. Vast waters indeed they are! We came down the Delaware on Monday, and (open your Irish eyes!) sometimes it was six, sometimes ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... situated apartment, his new club expenses, his polo outfit, and his occasional associations with the after-theater clique, which centered at The Avon, caused the debit column to mount with astonishing facility. Furthermore, through his Western associations he had an opportunity to pick up two half-broken polo ponies at bargain prices. He had practically decided to buy them. Their keep would be a serious item. He must have more money. How to get it? Harder work was ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... it in their own quiet way without many words. Much had happened, but neither Pelle nor Ellen were in a hurry. Neither of them had a facility in speaking, but they found their way to an understanding through the pauses, and drew nearer to one another in the silences. Each knew what the other had suffered without requiring to have it told: time had been at work ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... quality can be attained by reading writers who possess it: be it, for example, persuasiveness, imagination, the gift of drawing comparisons, boldness or bitterness, brevity or grace, facility of expression or wit, unexpected contrasts, a laconic manner, naivete, and the like. But if we are already gifted with these qualities—that is to say, if we possess them potentia—we can call them forth and bring them to consciousness; we can discern to what uses they ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... indeed if elegancy of style proceedeth, and English pens maintain that stream we have of late observed to flow from many, we shall, in a few years, be fain to learn Latin to understand English, and a work will prove of equal facility in either". Milton, both in his verse and prose, has carried this affectation to such a degree, as not only to be frequently beyond a meer English apprehension, but even beyond that of an ordinary proficient in the learned languages. Yet, ...
— The Fourth Book of Virgil's Aeneid and the Ninth Book of Voltaire's Henriad • Virgil and Voltaire
... journal); one horse, and six camels. It appears strange to me that they did not take more horses. As they had been living on horseflesh so much they would have increased their available food, in addition to the facility of ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... the station at Ariopolis was regarded by the Greeks as a public testimony against the errors of the Greek Church, and as an honest and consistent movement. Mr. Benjamin took the place of Dr. King in his absence, as a preacher, and found unexpected facility in so doing. It was a tribute to the Greek mind, that Mr. Benjamin commenced translating Butler's ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume I. • Rufus Anderson
... developed under happy conditions. In England, where most flowers are deeper hued than with us, the heal-all is rich purple. What is the secret of this flower's successful march across three continents? As usual, the chief reason is to be found in the facility it offers insects to secure food; and the quantity of fertile seed it is therefore able to ripen as the result of their visits is its reward. Also, its flowering season is unusually long, and it ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... first trial with a sudden facility of expression, which, surprising him as he went on, ended in rousing in him some vague suspicion of himself. He left the table, and bathed his head and face in water, and came back to read what he had written. The language was barely intelligible; ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... leave to anticipate the happiness of sharing in some degree, that patronage of science and literature, which it has ever been your delight to afford. This will give facility to our expressions; direct and encourage us in our arduous employments; assist us to form the man, and thereby give efficacy to the diffusion ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... opinion. Many of them can neither read nor write, and are forced to keep their accounts in their memory, or by means of ingenious hieroglyphics, intelligible only to the inventor. Others can decipher the calendar and the lives of the saints, can sign their names with tolerable facility, and can make the simpler arithmetical calculations with the help of the stchety, a little calculating instrument, composed of wooden balls strung on brass wires, which resembles the "abaca" of the old Romans, and is universally used in ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... air that set me a-smiling, Joseph Runnles, my bedfellow, the little silent man of whom I have spoken, drew out of his pocket the parts of a flute, and putting them together, set it to his lips and accompanied Joe through the next stanza, picking up the tune with a facility that spoke well for ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... deep initiation in the corrupting school of Indian politics could have produced the facility with which, as occasion required, he could belie his own recorded assertions, turn hostilely round upon his own expressed opinions, disclaim the proxies which he himself had delegated, and, in short, get rid of all the inconveniences of personal identity, by never acknowledging ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... sightless through life. A person under such total privation of vision, must be exempt from those phantasms or Ideas, that are connected with, or are the residuary contingents on visual perception: yet the blind acquire speech, when young, with equal facility, as the children who enjoy sight; but visible objects must, to them, be abstract or complex terms, as all such necessarily are, that cannot be the objects of perception. The other sensitive organs, and especially the touch, to a limited extent, become the substitutes for visual defect, although they ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... difficult," says he, "to explain the excesses of the savage, it is also difficult to understand the extent of the greed, the hypocrisy and the rascality of those who supply them with these drinks. The facility for making immense profits which is afforded them by the ignorance and the passions of these people, and the certainty of impunity, are things which they cannot resist; the attraction of gain acts upon them as drunkenness ...
— The Makers of Canada: Bishop Laval • A. Leblond de Brumath
... confident that the foregoing general ruling will enable junior and inexperienced officers, temporarily employed on famine duty, to classify appropriately and with facility as denticulate or edentulous all individuals afflicted with dental hiatus, mal-conformation and labefaction, without further reference ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 12, 1919 • Various
... gratify, them frequently with this spectacle. The exhibitions were no longer confined to funerals; they formed an integrant part of every election, and were found more powerful than merit in opening a way to office. The utter demoralization of the Roman people, and the facility with which the tyranny of the emperors was established, unquestionably was owing, in a great degree to the pernicious prevalence of these ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... love of success led him to play tricks and cheat in order not to "fall into the pit." At other times, if the conversation languished, he proposed that each person should tell a story; and when no Boccaccio-like facility inspired the company, he sometimes launched out into one of those eerie and thrilling recitals, such as he must often have heard from the improvisatori of his native island. Bourrienne states that Bonaparte's ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... such "rash and unbecoming acts." It can scarcely be denied that Sadanobu exercised his power in an extreme and unwise manner on this occasion. A little recourse to tact might have settled the matter with equal facility and without open disrespect to the Throne. But the Bakufu prime minister behaved after the manner of the deer-stalker of the Japanese proverb who does not see the mountain, and he thus placed in the hands of the Imperialist party a weapon which contributed materially to the overthrow ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... has, when a neutral, accorded to vessels of other States at war the liberty to use the British flag as a means of protection against capture, and instances are on record when United States vessels availed themselves of this facility during the American civil war. It would be contrary to fair expectation if now, when conditions are reversed, the United States and neutral nations were to grudge to British ships the liberty ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... was the beginning of one of the sentences I composed while I paced my room, thinking out my letter to The Times. I rejected that sentence. I rejected scores of others. They were all too vehement. Though my facility for indignation is not (I hope) less than that of my fellows, I never had written to The Times. And now, though I flattered myself I knew how the thing ought to be done, I was unsure that I could do it. Was I beginning too late? Restraint was the prime effect ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... it would be were we to take up the subjects as accident might dictate. The tendency to periodical and associated activity sometimes becomes so strong, that the faculties seem to go through their operations almost without conscious effort, while their facility of action becomes so much increased as ultimately to give unerring certainty where at first great difficulty was experienced. It is not so much the soul or abstract principle of mind which is thus changed, as the organic medium through which mind is ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... cases it may be necessary that a whole people, or even the whole of humanity, should be in one group, but only up to a certain point, and only until this point is reached. Naturally no individual is bound to a group, nor one group to another; binding and loosing go on perpetually, and with the same facility as molecules in living organisms unite ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... this book if I had had to rely exclusively upon enquiries made only during my stay among the Mafulu villages, without having the benefit of five years' observation by the Mafulu Fathers of the Mission. And, notwithstanding this additional facility, my notes on these questions will be found to involve puzzles and apparent inconsistencies; and there is no part of the book which should be read and accepted with greater reserve and doubt as to possible ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... many let not to affirm that the greedy corruption of the promoters on the one side, facility in dispensing with good laws and first breach of the same in the lawmakers and superiors and private respects of their establishment on the other, are the greatest causes why the inferiors regard no good order, being always so ready ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... designer and engraver, whose portrait of RUBENS is of great life and beauty, and Rembrandt, who was not less masterly in engraving than in painting, as appears sufficiently in his portraits of the BURGOMASTER SIX, the two COPPENOLS, the ADVOCATE TOLLING, the goldsmith LUTMA, all showing singular facility and originality. Contemporary with Rembrandt was Cornelis Visscher, also designer and engraver, whose portraits were unsurpassed in boldness and picturesque effect. At least one authority has accorded to this ...
— The Best Portraits in Engraving • Charles Sumner
... Lockhart's married life were so intimately connected with the life of Scott as to need no chronicle here. The young advocate, with many of the qualities essential to the making of a great lawyer, lacked one most needful to his branch of the profession, facility as a public speaker; his extreme shyness would account for this. As he said at the farewell dinner given to him by his friends in Edinburgh: "You know as well as I, that if I had ever been able to make a speech, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... being greater than the full strength of the navy when the United States entered the war. The destroyers upon their first arrival were based on Queenstown, which has been the base of the operations of these best fighters of the submarines during the war. Every facility possible was provided for the comfort and recreation of the officers and men engaged ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... strange facility for comfort without work which characterizes some people, found resting-places ready made. They managed to steal away night after night and sleep in the sweet security of a haystack, a barn, a stable, a porch, or, if fortune favored them, in some ...
— Detailed Minutiae of Soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 • Carlton McCarthy
... paraphernalia of polytheism impossible. People constantly moving from place to place could not be cumbered with idols. The Elohim were, therefore, a convenience for travellers and an unidolatrous monotheism a necessity which the absence of vehicles imposed. On the other hand, given every facility, it is presumable that the result would have been the same. Mythology is the mother of poetry. Idolatry is the father of art. Neither could appeal to a people to whom delicacy was an unknown god. Had it been known and a fetish, they could not ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... labor and force, but by ingenuity and enterprise, he will take pleasure in administering his little government. He will watch, with care and interest, the operation of the moral and intellectual causes which he sets in operation, and find, as he accomplishes his various objects with increasing facility and power, that he will derive a greater and greater pleasure ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... of preparing any kind of plan, that he walked straight to the door and opened it. If the porter had asked him: "What do you want?" perhaps he would simply have handed him the hatchet. But, the same as on the previous occasion, the porter was absent, and this gave the young man every facility to replace the hatchet under the bench, exactly where he had found it. Then he went upstairs and reached his room without meeting a soul; the door of his landlady's apartments was shut. Once home again, he threw himself on his ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... imagination of the Indians. Love of story telling. Appreciation of style. Power and resources of their languages. Facility in acquiring foreign languages. Native writers in the English tongue. In Latin. In Spanish. Ancient books of Aztecs. Of Mayas, ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... island, the people have a character peculiar to themselves, that prevents foreigners and foreign influence from producing those baneful effects that are so evident in many nations, where they come and depart with more facility, and where a greater similarity in manners and in character enable them to act a conspicuous and a very dangerous part, in the cases of misunderstanding ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... drawers for a month past, and the impulse to perform that operation was now become resistless. During her absence the talk passed into Caroline's hands. She took it up with ease; she fell into her best tone of conversation. A pleasing facility and elegance of language gave fresh charm to familiar topics; a new music in the always soft voice gently surprised and pleasingly captivated the listener; unwonted shades and lights of expression elevated the young countenance with character, ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... of simple manhood, and the universal human traits which form the bond of union between man and man,—which form the basis of society, of the family, of government, of friendship,— are quite overlooked; and the credit is given to some special facility, or to brilliant and lucky hit. Does any one doubt that the great poets and artists are made up mainly of the most common universal human and heroic characteristics?—that in them, though working to other ends, is all that construct the soldier, the ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... and, although he was nearing the Psalmist's age-term of man, he agreed to "collaborate." The Frenchman used to take the pen at midnight when returning from "social pleasures," and work till 4-5 a.m. As he had prodigious facility and spontaneity he finished his part of the task in two winters. Some of the tales in the suite, especially that of "Maugraby," are attributed wholly to his invention; and, as a rule, his aim and object were to diffuse his spiritual ideas and to write treatises on moral perfection under the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... some facility in this exercise, he will be required to repeat the movement ten times, and finally, by using dummy cartridges, he may, by degrees, gain the necessary quickness and dexterity for the execution of the rapid fire required in ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... the story do nothing to atone for the principals. The lacrimose stoop-to-folly-and-wring-his-bosom Mme. de Tourvel is merely a bore; the ingenue Cecile de Volanges is, as Mme. de Merteuil says, a petite imbecile throughout, and becomes no better than she should be with the facility of a predestined strumpet; her lover, Valmont's rival, and Mme. de Merteuil's plaything, M. le Chevalier Danceny, is not so very much better than he should be, and nearly as much an imbecile in the masculine way as Cecile in the feminine; ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... was far advanced, it is actually on record that Emmy took a night and received company with great propriety and modesty. She had a French master, who complimented her upon the purity of her accent and her facility of learning; the fact is she had learned long ago and grounded herself subsequently in the grammar so as to be able to teach it to George; and Madam Strumpff came to give her lessons in singing, which she performed so well and with such a true voice that the Major's windows, ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... has assurance, coolness, self-possession, a voice that is peculiar to himself, facility of speech, wit occasionally, the quality of imperturbability, all the accessories of a great orator. The only thing he lacks is talent. He wearies the Chamber, wherefore the Ministers do not consider themselves bound to answer him. He talks as long as everybody keeps quiet. He fences with the ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... characteristically grouped than in any other case which has been recorded in this country, so it has also in all probability occurred, that more individuals had been in contact with him during his illness and after his death, as the facility in obtaining persons to attend the sick, rub their bodies, &c., must be vastly greater in the army than in ordinary life; so that in such cases it is not a question of one or two escaping, but of many, which is always the ...
— Letters on the Cholera Morbus. • James Gillkrest
... Croke, to ascertain what might be the legal impediments. Impediments, obstacles, difficulties! But who had asked for them? The application had been for facilities. Of course, Mr. C.S. Croke, as instructed, and with all the facility of any lawyer worth his salt, duly found the required impediments; and so the disturbing enemy was defeated, and the Government left ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... them is a greater facility to fall, and therefore the Diuell at the first took that aduantage, and set vpon Eue in Adams ...
— A Treatise of Witchcraft • Alexander Roberts
... original. The fact that they are manifestly separate and independent transcriptions, furnishes good evidence of the genuineness and authenticity of the original manuscripts, though it is not now known where they are, if still in existence. In making a new copy for the press every facility was granted by the Librarians of the Advocates' Library, with their well-known courtesy and liberality; and much aid was rendered by David Laing, Esq., a gentleman thoroughly conversant with Scottish ecclesiastical literature, and generously ready to communicate to ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... mediation, but found them in the midst of their guilty terrors, while the rage which had hurried them on to murder began, with all but Hatteraick, to sink into remorse and fear. Glossin was then indigent and greatly in debt, but he was already possessed of Mr. Bertram's ear, and, aware of the facility of his disposition, he saw no difficulty in enriching himself at his expense, provided the heir-male were removed, in which case the estate became the unlimited property of the weak and prodigal father. Stimulated by present gain and the prospect of contingent advantage, he accepted ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... found upon trial; and that its extent, as compared with other tables, and particularly with other FIVE-FIGURE tables, of the same kind, will recommend it. I desire to confine myself to testifying to the facility with which this table can be used: comparison with other forms, as to RELATIVE facility, being out of the question on so short ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 71, March 8, 1851 • Various
... him. The French Lady who [under Roucoulles] has had charge of his learning hitherto, cannot speak of him without enthusiasm. 'C'est un esprit ange'lique (a little angel),' she is wont to say. He takes up, and learns, whatever is put before him, with the greatest facility." [Van Loen, Kleine Schriften, ii. 27 (as cited ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... the meanness of the word fish distaste you, for it will afford us good gold as the mines of Guiana or Tumbata, with less hazard and charge, and more certainty and facility. ...
— The Bounty of the Chesapeake - Fishing in Colonial Virginia • James Wharton
... A great facility in submitting to other People's Censure is sometimes as faulty as a great roughness in rejecting it: for there is no Composure so every way accomplisht, but what would be pared and clipped to nothing if a man would follow the advice of every finical ...
— The Present State of Wit (1711) - In A Letter To A Friend In The Country • John Gay
... build houses out of such castles in the air put even the most tried patience to a severe test No blank in tradition presents so wide a chasm, but that this system of smooth and downright invention will fill it up with playful facility. The eclipses of the sun, the numbers of the census, family-registers, triumphs, are without hesitation carried back from the current year up to the year One; it stands duly recorded, in what year, month, and day king Romulus went up to heaven, and how king Servius Tullius ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... easy to find or to conceive governments more mild and indulgent than these Church sovereignties; but good government is as nothing, when the rights of man take possession of the mind. Indeed, the loose rein held over the people in these provinces must be considered as one cause of the facility with which they lend themselves to any schemes of innovation, by inducing them to think lightly of their governments, and to judge of grievances, not by feeling, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... me," she said through her teeth, "with any further recital of what you 'are going' to do. You seem to have a fatal facility in that line. Your record of accomplishment is pathetically weak. And—oh, what a fool I've been! I believed. Even after ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... long, tubular passage was deserted. Here the centrifugal gravity was less than it had been in the hold. A weird place, this central tube, where every direction was down, and a man could walk on his ceiling, his floor, his walls with equal facility. No top nor bottom—just a long, smooth tube with ...
— In the Orbit of Saturn • Roman Frederick Starzl
... goods. This was, perhaps, a school for shoplifters. In addition to her other accomplishments, the queen of the shoplifters was a "Fagin," educating others to the tricks of her trade, taking advantage of their lack of facility in ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... amuses them, though by a passion mixt with pain, does in the main give them a sensible pleasure. And this pleasure is here encreased by the nature of the objects, which being sensible, and of a narrow compass, are entered into with facility, and are ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... when he invokes the "soft Lydian airs" of voluptuous leisure. From this time henceforward for half a weary year, from the bell-call of morning twilight to half-past seven in the evening, with brief intermissions for two hasty meals, the operatives will be confined to their tasks. The proverbial facility of the Yankees in despatching their dinners in the least possible time seems to have been taken advantage of and reduced to a system on the Lowell corporations. Strange as it may seem to the uninitiated, the working-men and women here contrive to repair to their ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... R. Peel mentioned to me to-night a very remarkable example of his [the duke's] perhaps excessive precision. Whenever he signs a draft on Coutts's, he addresses to them at the same time a note apprising them that he has done so. This perfect facility of transition from one class of occupation to their opposites, and their habitual intermixture without any apparent encroachments on either side, is, I think, a very remarkable evidence of self-command, and a mental power of singular utility. Sir Robert is also, I conceive, a thrifty dealer ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... choice and arrangement of his words would have sufficed to make his essays classical. For never, not even by Dryden, not even by Temple, had the English language been written with such sweetness, grace, and facility. But this was the smallest part of Addison's praise. Had he clothed his thoughts in the half French style of Horace Walpole, or in the half Latin style of Dr. Johnson, or in the half German jargon of the present day, his genius would have triumphed over all faults of manner. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... scores of puzzles while another person, equally clever, cannot invent one "to save his life," as we say. The explanation is very simple. The expert knows an idea when he sees one, and is able by long experience to judge of its value. Fertility, like facility, comes by practice. ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... the two parties vibrating in the scale, according as corrupt calculators looked to the extent of Godoy's present power, or to the probability of Ferdinand's accession, the eyes of both were turned to the hazardous facility of striking a balance by calling in support from the Tuileries. Napoleon, on his part, regarding the rival factions with equal scorn, flattered himself that, in their common fears and baseness, he should find the means of ultimately reducing the whole Peninsula ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... same manner as in grafting trees, the capacity of one species or variety to take on another is incidental on generally unknown differences in their vegetative systems; so in crossing, the greater or less facility of one species to unite with another is incidental on unknown differences in their reproductive systems. There is no more reason to think that species have been specially endowed with various degrees of sterility ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... nearer I could hear that the bishop spoke French fluently, but with a strong foreign accent. This facility, however, enabled him to converse with ease on every subject, and to hold intercourse directly with our general, a matter of no small moment to either party. It is probable that the other clergy did not possess this gift, for assuredly their manner toward us, inferiors of the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... high altitude nuclear tests in the 1950s and 1960s, and until late in 2000 the atoll was maintained as a storage and disposal site for chemical weapons. Munitions destruction is now complete, and cleanup and closure of the facility is progressing. ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... any other place he knew, the gift of accommodating itself to each man's humour. His own, at the moment, lent it a festive readiness of welcome that might well, in a disenchanted eye, have turned to paint and facility. So frank an appeal for participation—so outspoken a recognition of the holiday vein in human nature—struck refreshingly on a mind jaded by prolonged hard work in surroundings made for the discipline of the senses. As he surveyed the white square set in an exotic coquetry of architecture, ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... the engineman stands. This platform is so situated that all orders can be distinctly heard by the engineman, and so that he shall be protected from the heat radiated by the steel that is being forged. All the maneuvers of the hammers are effected with most wonderful facility and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 303 - October 22, 1881 • Various
... noises of the street below came into collision with the clatter of plates and knives and forks. The heat was intense, the cloths were not clean, neither were the hands of the two waiters who rushed about with a certain litheness and facility ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... wind of doctrine," like clouds which, possessing no solidity, are driven in every direction through the atmosphere. Persons of this description are easily persuaded by a plausible reasoner, that his opinions are true, and with equal facility submit to the next artful sophist, who avows even contrary sentiments. The natural effect of this inconstancy will be, a disregard of ALL truth, and a ready admission of every sceptical principle. When the mind is in ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... natural advantages of our State; the situation of our principal seaport; the facility that the Sound affords for an intercourse with the East, and the noble Hudson which bears upon its bosom the wealth of the ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... the subject of a royal patent which he had received from James, and which was afterwards (though still fruitlessly) confirmed by Charles, for his Hymns. Indeed, Wither, though a man of very high character, seems to have had all his life what men of high character not unfrequently have, a certain facility for getting into what is ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... there was a grand stir, and many gracious bows, and some cordial, but dignified, shake-hands. The rooms were crowded; yet space in the ball-room was well preserved, so that the royal vision might range with facility from its golden chairs to the beauteous beings, and still more beautiful costumes, displaying with fervent ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... carnotite was federal property. It was stolen from a loading platform at our Grand Junction facility. We know this, because there is no record of any transaction, and we can identify the source by the ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... for my own part, I do not think it has been yet clearly established that all these acknowledged differences are incompatible with the same authorship. If the Iliad were written in youth, the travels of the poet, the change of mind produced by years and experience, the facility with which an ancient Greek changed or remodelled his pliant mythology, the rapidity with which (in the quick development of civilization in Greece) important changes in society and manners were wrought, might all concur in producing, from the mature ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... air, and the fish in their dart through the sea; that transforms the falling stream into fire, light, and music; that embalms upon a piece of plate the tenderest tones of the human voice; that treats disease with disease; that supplies a new ear with the same facility that it replaces a blown-out tire; that reaches into the very grave itself and starts again the silent heart—surely such an age may be allowed to think for itself ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... difficult at first, but he soon reached a point where the inclination was not so steep, and where he could progress with much more ease and facility. In this way he in time reached the upper level, and, believing himself out of range of his phantom pursuer, had time to look about for ...
— In the Pecos Country • Edward Sylvester Ellis (AKA Lieutenant R.H. Jayne)
... time when physical force or brute strength gave pre- eminence. The savage chief occupied his position by virtue of his muscle, of his courage, on account of the facility with which he wielded a club. As long as nations depend simply upon brute force, the man, in time of war, is, of necessity, of more importance to the nation than woman, and as the dispute is to be settled by strength, by force, those who have the strength and force naturally settle ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... of dividing this long-continued dialogue into chapters, for the greater facility of reference, and as periods in the history, where the reader may conveniently rest in his progress ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... explain that adjustment of our State and National governments which Englishmen seem to find so hard to understand. Nothing shows his peculiar powers to more advantage than just such interruptions. Then he displays his felicitous facility of illustration, his familiar way of bringing a great question to the test of some parallel fact that everybody before him knows. An American state-question looks as mysterious to an English audience as an ear ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... of death," Satan repeated, "and he who plays upon it dies at once. But," he added cheerfully, "that need not worry you. I noticed a marvelous facility in your arm work. Your staccato and spiccato are wonderful. Every form of bowing appears child's play to you. It will be easy for you ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... slenderness. His face in repose had the outline of the more youthful guardsman-type—regular, finely-cut, impassive to hardness. When he talked, or followed with interest the talk of others, it revealed almost an excess of animation. Then one noted the flashing subtlety of his glance, the swift facility of his smile and comprehending brows, and saw that it was not the guardsman face at all. His skin was fresh-hued, and there was a shade of warm brown in his small, well-ordered moustasche, but his hair, wavy and worn longer than the fashion, seemed black. There were perceptible veins of grey in ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... was ill-provided with stone and timber, she had every facility for procuring the useful and precious metals. They were not, of course, to be found in her alluvial plains, but metals are easy of transport, especially to a country whose commerce has the command of navigable highways. The ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... was a young girl only beginning life. Storms were not yet, and she was putting out her wings in the sunshine. Her father set her to translate 'Adele et Theodore,' by Madame de Genlis (she had a great facility for languages, and her French was really remarkable). Holcroft's version of the book, however, appeared, and the Edgeworth translation was never completed. Mr. Day wrote a letter to congratulate Mr. Edgeworth on the occasion. It seemed horrible to Mr. Day that a woman ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... "To produce facility in the review of these proceedings, the documents referred to are all herewith delivered, and are in bundles, marked agreeably to the heads under ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... young men in France offer a great resource in country quarters. Drawing, in which most of them have attained a facility, if not excellence, enables them to fill albums with clever sketches; and their love of the fine arts leads them to devote some hours in most days ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... politics, a certain facility is necessary, to which must be added ambition and a thirst for glory. The last is the most ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... became unnerved and agitated, and on re-examining the parts the testicles were found in the scrotum. When he found that there was no chance for escape he acknowledged that he was an impostor and gave an exhibition in which, with incredible facility, he pulled both testes up from the bottom of the scrotum to the external abdominal ring. At the word of command he could pull up one testicle, then another, and let them drop simultaneously; he performed other like feats ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... crazy. I don't blame the girl. She's young, pretty, silly, and doubtless in love. Harrie has fatal facility in making love. This mamma person has a good deal of money; no sense, and large social ambitions. She's determined to get there. If only fools died as soon as they were born there would be hope for humanity. A fat fool ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... which, coming from stentorian lungs, found a ready echo in every jutting rock and space of wood for a mile round. The musician went on merrily from verse to verse of his forest minstrelsy as he continued to approach; describing in his strain, with a ready ballad-facility, the numberless pleasures to be found in the life of the woodman. Uncouthly, and in a style partaking rather more of the savage than the civilized taste and temper, it enumerated the distinct features of each mode of life with much ingenuity and in stanzas smartly ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... relate to taste. It is even commonly supposed that this delicate and aerial faculty, which seems too volatile to endure even the chains of a definition, cannot be properly tried by any test, nor regulated by any standard. There is so continual a call for the exercise of the reasoning facility; and it is so much strengthened by perpetual contention, that certain maxims of right reason seem to be tacitly settled amongst the most ignorant. The learned have improved on this rude science, and reduced ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... and, save for one or two splendid episodes, a less remarkable achievement than Ferishtah. All the burly diffuseness which had there been held in check by a quasi-oriental ideal of lightly-knit facility and bland oracular pithiness, here has its way without stint, and no more songs break like the rush of birds' wings upon the dusty air of colloquy. Thrusting in between the lyrics of Ferishtah ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
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