|
|
|
More "Freak" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... But I'll tell YOU something. Such friendships as you speak of are only possible where the woman is old—or ugly—or abnormal, in some way: a man-woman, or a clever woman, or some other freak of nature. Now, our women are, as a rule, sexually healthy. They know what they're here for, too, and are not ashamed of it. Also, they still have their share of physical attraction. While yours—good God! I wonder you manage to keep ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... not that kind of people. You're not a real mountain man. You're not like Zavier or the men at Fort Laramie. You're Napoleon Duchesney just as I'm Susan Gillespie. Your people in St. Louis and New Orleans were ladies and gentlemen. It was just a wild freak that made you run off into the mountains. You don't want to go on living that way. That part of your life's over. The rest ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... gray wolf's skin, which he had drawn over his body in such a manner as to let its tail dangle down behind. It was in this unique costume that I last saw him, and as he was a tall man, with rather prominent features, the spectacle was the more striking. From this freak of dress he has been commonly called, for some time, My-een-gun, or the Wolf. He had been drinking at Point aux Pins, six miles above the rapids, with Odabit and some other boon companions, and in this predicament embarked in his canoe, to come to the head ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... the Beresina itself. The mimic Russia was so startlingly real, that several of his old comrades recognized the scene of their past sufferings. M. de Sucy kept the secret of the drama to be enacted with this tragical background, but it was looked upon as a mad freak in several circles of ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... of his labors, indeed. But latterly even these scenes had palled; and it came to him with a faint shock of surprise that he was beginning to remember with relief those few occasions on which such talks had ended, by reason, truly, of some mere wanton freak, in unconditional release.—Preposterous indeed that the only acts of his life hitherto viewed with self-contempt, were beginning to seem the only ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... the King of the Gypsies, born in 1693, was the son of the Rector of Bickley, near Tiverton. It is related that to avoid punishment for a boyish freak he, with some companions, ran away and joined the gypsies. After a year and a half Carew returned for a time, but soon rejoined his old friends. His career was a long series of swindling and imposture, ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... the kind! You did something for Amy Carringford—the pauper! You were spoons with her then, and you wanted to get her to my party. You begged an invitation for her and then dressed her up. like a freak so she could ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... because they no doubt had me enchanted; for I swear to thee by the faith of what I am that if I had been able to climb up or dismount, I would have avenged thee in such a way that those braggart thieves would have remembered their freak for ever, even though in so doing I knew that I contravened the laws of chivalry, which, as I have often told thee, do not permit a knight to lay hands on him who is not one, save in case of urgent and great necessity in defence of his ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... gleam of pity or devotion in those lurid, upturned faces. To many of them it was a show, a spectacle; to others a terrible nightmare, to others a cruel freak of Providence, calling ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... Bill, after passing the Commons, was opposed and modified by the Lords, Defoe suddenly appeared on a new tack, publishing the most famous of his political pamphlets, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, which has, by a strange freak of circumstances, gained him the honour of being enshrined as one of the martyrs of Dissent. In the "brief explanation" of the pamphlet which he gave afterwards, he declared that it had no bearing whatever upon the Occasional Conformity Bill, pointing to his former writings on the subject, in which ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... illustrates the wastefulness of young men about town. A number of these budding aristocrats were dining at St. Alban's Tavern and found the noise of the coaches outside jar upon their sensitive nerves. So they promptly ordered the street to be littered with straw, and probably cared little that the freak cost them fifty ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... his modesty's bump was so large a lump (Nature, they said, had taken a freak) That its summit stood far above the wood Of his ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... hoped to see her ere I died; To kneel for pardon, and implore one kiss, Pledge to my soul that in the coming heaven We should not meet as strangers, but rejoin Our hearts and lives so madly sundered here, Through fault and freak of mine. But it is well! ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... Girl (Mermaid Series, Middleton's Plays, volume ii), somewhat idealizing her, however. She seems to have belonged to a neurotic and eccentric stock; "each of the family," her biographer says, "had his peculiar freak." As a child she only cared for boys' games, and could never adapt herself to any woman's avocations. "She had a natural abhorrence to the tending of children." Her disposition was altogether masculine; "she was not for mincing obscenity, but would talk freely, whatever came uppermost." ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Not only is de Dondi's the earliest clock of which we have a full and trustworthy account, it is also far more complicated than any other (see figs. 1, 2) until comparatively modern times! Moreover, it was not an exceptional freak. There were others like it, and one cannot therefore reject as accidental this process of degeneration that occurs at the very beginning of the certain history of the ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... stimulating and unfailingly devoted animal is that it is personified greed on four legs. There are two or three horses of unusual intelligence, which no doubt our friend the Hun would long since have devoured, but which, even though hunting is over, are by some odd freak of sentiment or even of loyalty still kept alive. There are rabbits. And there is a bird in a cage against the wall of a small yard. This bird is a chaffinch, which a friend had brought ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 25, 1917 • Various
... best God loves to jest With children small, a freak Of heavenly hide and seek Fit For ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... on her way out to California, you see," Ellsworth began again; "down at El Paso she took a sudden freak for coming up here to see about the climate—lots of folks go West nowadays, you know, even in the spring. I'll warrant she's sick of the trip by now. A good climate has to have dust to season it. One of the mules went lame—thought ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... deposit round the edges of this pool were very pretty, and the bubbles as they ascended took the most lovely colours—emerald, purple, etc., turning into aqua-marine before breaking on the surface; but the odour was like terribly bad eggs. These hot springs are a curious freak of Nature, boiling and bubbling up within three feet of a cold water lake; in fact, we sat down and placed one hand in cold water and the other in hot. This was ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... distinctions, how dangerous sometimes that secondary mental power which multiplies them. It sobers and clarifies human thinking a little, perhaps, to reflect on how thin a line separates the sublime and the ridiculous, the saint and the sensualist, the martyr and the fool, the genius and the freak. ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... Meredith convalesced at Darjeeling in the care of Nurse Dalton—the identity of whose name with that of the doctor being generally understood at Muktiarbad to be a mere freak of coincidence—his family in Surrey waxed strong and healthy in the glorious summer weather. Baby Douglas, who lived out of doors, had cheeks like a damask rose, while his mother gained gracious curves which added to her already radiant beauty. Even ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... taken that rare and extraordinary form. The mirage of their own caravan, rising, was reflected, mirrored, by some freak of the desert sun and air, upon the fine sand blown in the air at a distance from the train. It was, indeed, themselves they saw, not knowing it, in a vast primordial mirror of the desert gods. Nor did the discovery of the truth lessen the feeling of discomfort, of apprehension. The laughter ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... be safe to say," says John Burroughs, "that there is a species of smilax with an unsavory name, that the bee does not visit, herbacea. The production of this plant is a curious freak of nature.... It would be a cruel joke to offer it to any person not acquainted with it, to smell. It is like the vent of a charnel-house." (Thoreau compared its odor to that of a dead rat in a wall!) "It is first cousin to the trilliums, ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... however reassured him. His clothes were drying nicely, and did not seem to be losing any of their former generous proportions. So in time Landy might hope to be garbed in his proper attire as became a scout, and not an Arab or a "side show freak," such as ...
— Afloat - or, Adventures on Watery Trails • Alan Douglas
... came to his call. Some freak of the moonlight still kept the shadowy head in view, while its owner remained completely hidden, unconscious, perhaps, that any part of his reflection was showing. Ned did not know what to do. After waiting a long time, and, seeing that the shadow did not move, he edged his way partly ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... favorites. Fear of his mother was the only thing that had kept him from frequenting Cupido's shop—the rendezvous of the city's gayest set, a hotbed of gossip and practical jokes, a school of guitar playing and love songs that kept the whole neighborhood astir. Besides, Cupido was the freak of the city, the sharp-tongued but irresponsible practical joker, who was forgiven everything in advance, and could enjoy his idiosyncrasies and speak his mind about people without starting a riot against ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... gates fresh troops of horsemen dash down the wide causeway that crosses the narrow river. With equal speed the camp of the Crusaders, fully roused, is pouring forth its thousands, and King Baldwin sees, with the joy of a practised warrior, that the foolish freak of a thoughtless little maiden has brought about a great and glorious battle. The rescued Isabelle is quickly given in charge of a trusty squire, who bears her back to camp, and then, at the head of the forward battle, the boy Crusader bears down upon the Saracen ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... that." She stood still with her hands clasped, thinking. The officer at her side, looking down at her, was thinking also. He was fighting a slight mental struggle, a sort of combat he was quite unused to. Should he let the child go on in this wild freak? He knew the cottage by the sea; the peasant home would be dreadful to her. He knew that by that same day after to-morrow, life in lower Italy, with the dirty, coarse people about her would be a burden. Yet he hesitated. He fought the battle in this way: Should he not stand a better chance if ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... the best he knew. And the measure came up to the Supreme Council for the final touches, while Tods patrolled the Burra Simla Bazar in his morning rides, and played with the monkey belonging to Ditta Mull, the bunnia, and listened, as a child listens, to all the stray talk about this new freak of the Lord Sahib's. ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... ball. The haughty and heated spirits of the gentlemen led them to demand an immediate inquiry into the cause of what they deemed an affront to their host and to themselves; but Lady Ashton, recovering herself, passed it over as the freak of a crazy wench who was maintained about the castle, and whose susceptible imagination had been observed to be much affected by the stories which Dame Gourlay delighted to tell concerning "the former family," so Lady ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... worriedly, "Major, sir, you sure you're checked out on that thing? I've been asking around, like, and they put these duels on Telly here, just like we got fracases back home. This here Captain Rakoczi's got one whopper of a reputation. He's quick as a snake. Kinda like a freak. He can move faster than ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... she confessed, what really gave a certain hope, that the pair had been in the habit of murmuring against "sister" so much that, considering poor Vera's propensity to strong language, it was quite possible that Hubert might think her cruelly oppressed, and for a freak carry her off to his ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... by the answer which, without saying a word, the chevalier made to it. And in fact, the blushes which empurpled his cheeks spoke better than the best speeches of the Greek and Latin orators, and were well understood. At this sweet sight, the countess, to make sure that it was not a freak of nature, took pleasure in experimentalising how far the virtue of her eyes would go, and after having heated her slave more than thirty times, she was confirmed in her belief that he would bravely die for ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... streets, and the men were dressed in all the outrageous, outlandish, idolatrous, extravagant, thunder-and-lightning costumes that ever a tailor with the delirium tremens and seven devils could conceive of. There was no freak in dress too crazy to be indulged in; no absurdity too absurd to be tolerated; no frenzy in ragged diabolism too fantastic to be attempted. No two men were dressed alike. It was a wild masquerade of all imaginable costumes—every struggling ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... like herself, 'a great believer.' In January, 1597, Ralegh condoled as a most loving comrade with Cecil on gracious Lady Cecil's death. His letter exhorting to implacability testifies to the closeness of their league against Essex. The Earl's fiery anger had burnt against both alike. Had his mad freak of treason succeeded, both would ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... For the senseless freak which had produced these effects Wentworth is not responsible. [15] It had, in fact, thrown all his plans into confusion. To counsel submission, however, was not in his nature. An attempt was made to put down the insurrection by the sword: but the King's military means and military ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... wished to please her, and it is but a harmless freak," answered Mistress Audley, "though I acknowledge that her Indian costume ...
— The Settlers - A Tale of Virginia • William H. G. Kingston
... Lanning's coming to Los Toros a mad freak, whereas it was in reality a very clever stroke. Hal Dozier would have been on the road five hours before if he had not been held up in the matter of horses, but this is to tell ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... which require constant and sustained attention, for any absence of mind might cause great misfortunes. He thus almost forgot the trifling circumstance which had made him uneasy, and which he thought might after all have only been a freak of the imagination. Giving himself up to the sweets of a kind of continual apotheosis, he mounted his horse in the great courtyard, attended by noble pages, and surrounded ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... my sleep has been disturbed by strange, wild dreams. I see the warm ocean currents which wash our shores, shifted westward by some strange freak of nature, and a land far north of us, now ice and snow, turned into greenland; while our whole land is enshrouded in death dealing cold and ice and snow and preceding this, the waters creep up and engulf our city. The mountain on which the great ship rests sinks ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... matter: "Law, young man, is a jealous mistress; she allows no divided affection." Are my affections divided? I think not, and I certainly do not confess any such thing to M. Mouillard, who has not yet forgotten what he calls "that freak" of a Degree in Arts. He builds some hopes upon me, and, in return, it is natural that I should build a few ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... discernment and delicate intuitions, had been deceived by this girl's specious exterior. She had brought away from her interview of the morning the impression that Rena was a fine, pure spirit, born out of place, through some freak of Fate, devoting herself with heroic self-sacrifice to a noble cause. Well, he had imagined her just as pure and fine, and she had deliberately, with a negro's low cunning, deceived him into believing that she was a white girl. The pretended confession of the brother, in which he had spoken ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... did not denote a certain tolerance, not unmixed with contempt, as though, indeed, they were willing to accept the fact that he was of their acquaintance, but desired at the same time to emphasize the fact that he was outside the freemasonry of their class—a freak, whom they acknowledged on sufferance, as they might have done a wonderful lion-tamer, or a music-hall singer, or a steeplejack. He knew very well that there was not one of them who accepted his qualifications, notwithstanding the approval of their womankind, ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... modern style of these regiments as they were before the last freak of the War Office. What they may be now, I do not know; nor is the knowledge important, for the style I have used will probably be most familiar to my readers. "My Uncle Toby," it will be remembered, was of Leven's regiment. There exists a letter from Schomberg to Lord Leven, especially ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... Some freak of the fancy has mastered you. I know nothing of the documents. How could I, a woman, do such ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... clothes-dealer on the first story, and a seller of indecent prints on the second, Samanon carried on a fourth business—he was a money-lender into the bargain. No character in Hoffmann's romances, no sinister-brooding miser of Scott's, can compare with this freak of human and Parisian nature (always admitting that Samanon was human). In spite of himself, Lucien shuddered at the sight of the dried-up little old creature, whose bones seemed to be cutting a leather skin, spotted with all sorts of little green and yellow patches, like ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... most difficult tasks of the bidder is to accurately estimate the number of tricks the combined hands of his partnership can reasonably be expected to win. It sometimes occurs, especially in what are known as "freak" hands, that one pair can take most of the tricks with one suit declaration, while with another, their adversaries can be equally successful. This is most apt to happen in two-suit hands, or when length in Trumps ...
— Auction of To-day • Milton C. Work
... only saw my aunt at stated hours. These occurred twice a day; once about noon she came to my nursery, and once after her dinner I was taken to her. She never caressed me, and seemed all the time I staid in the room to fear that I should annoy her by some childish freak. My good nurse always schooled me with the greatest care before she ventured into the parlour—and the awe my aunt's cold looks and few constrained words inspired was so great that I seldom disgraced her lessons or was betrayed ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... for, on one occasion, when rain prevented a contemplated progress to Hosho-ji, he sentenced the rain to imprisonment and caused a quantity to be confined in a vessel.* To the nation, however, all this meant something very much more than a mere freak. It meant that the treasury was depleted and that revenue had to be obtained by recourse to the abuses which Go-Sanjo had struggled so earnestly to check, the sale of offices and ranks, even in perpetuity, and the inclusion of great tracts of State ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... rapid and kept on for about six miles making twenty in all from El Vado, when we camped on a heavy talus on the left. The following morning, October 18th, we had not gone more than a mile when we came to a singular freak of erosion, a lone sandstone pinnacle on the right, three hundred or four hundred feet high, the river running on one side and a beautiful creek eight feet wide on the other. We named these Sentinel Rock and Sentinel Creek and camped there for Beaman to get some photographs. ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... freak, we have partly lost the power of restraint and guidance. We distinguish an unlooked-for figure in our visionary scene. Among those ancestral people there is a young man, dressed in the very fashion of to-day: he wears a dark frock-coat, almost ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and sparse of flesh in the mountain-desert. It was the more surprising to Pierre to see this young fellow with the marvelously delicate-cut features. By some freak of nature here was a place where the breed ran to ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... Mr. President, according to Military Science it is our duty to guard against every possible or supposable contingency that may arise. For example, if under any circumstances, however fortuitous, the Enemy, by any chance or freak, should, in a last resort, get in behind Washington, in his efforts to capture the city, why, there the fort is ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... Peter was round at the stables, gentlemen, he was urging his nephew to prolong his visit, and asked what sudden freak was taking him off. Mr. Levison replied that unexpected business called him to London. While they were talking, the coachman came up, all in a heat, telling that Hallijohn, of West Lynne, had been murdered by young Mr. Hare. I remember Sir Peter said he could not believe it; and that ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... after such visions of human infirmity and of death, to ride over the plain to the Seldja gorge, an astonishing freak of nature. I was twice within its towering walls of rock; the first time on horseback, accompanied by a young Tripolitan miner, and in the evening; yesterday again, in the torrid ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... understand you correctly?" said I; "or are you only playing off some new freak upon me? Answer me frankly one question, and I shall be better able to comprehend the meaning of your mysterious menace. Are you—but I know it is absurd, I feel that the question is very ridiculous, only that your reply to it will, perhaps, set ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... is altogether a freak of Nature, and the wonder to me is how, being so tender, it lives here at all. You see how small and delicate a thing it is. They say it is blind, but you observe it is not; although the creatures live mostly underground. They also say that the chlamyphorus truncatus—which is the grand ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... "Why, here's a portrait of So-and-so." And yet the likeness was absolutely accidental. Black assured me that the artist knew nothing of the original disagreeable man, and had never even seen him. It was all a freak of the long ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... about to close the window and turn away, when something caused her to lean out, regardless of the rain, and stare fixedly at a window in the opposite wall. Was she mistaken? Did her eyes deceive her? Was it possibly some freak of the darkness or the storm? It had been only for an instant, and it did not happen again. But in that instant she was almost certain that she had seen a faint streak of light from a crack at the side of one ...
— The Dragon's Secret • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... "It's a freak, yes, but with hands and feet. That's the living skeleton, but if he keeps on eating the way he's been doing lately the boss will have to change the bills and bill him as the ...
— The Circus Boys on the Flying Rings • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... what backward sweep of memory had brought the matter fresh to his mind, or what freak had caused him to desire that I should recount it; but I hasten, before another cancelling telegram may arrive, to hunt out the notes which give me the exact details of the case and to lay ...
— The Adventure of the Devil's Foot • Arthur Conan Doyle
... negro, our teachers make him resemble as far as possible the profile of Antinoeus, and then say, 'We have done our utmost; if, nevertheless, we fail to make the negro beautiful, then we ought not to introduce into our pictures such a freak of nature, the squat nose and thick lips, which are so unendurable to the eyes.'" True idealism treats everything after its own kind, making it more intensely itself than it is in the play of nature; the athlete is more heroically ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... Mr. Cassidy as the first skylarkish pair showed in the doorway. His manner was drolly that of a showman exhibiting a rare freak, newly captured. "Come a-runnin'!" ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... machine, the very opposite of one in fact, a natural sovereignty, I believe. The really rigid and mechanical thing is the charter behind which Tammany works. For Tammany is the real government that has defeated a mechanical foresight. Tammany is not a freak, a strange and monstrous excrescence. Its structure and the laws of its life are, I believe, typical of all real sovereignties. You can find Tammany duplicated wherever there is a social group to be governed—in trade unions, in clubs, in boys' gangs, ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... deal about the Ross family in those talks with Jan. She was very frank about her affairs, told him what money she had and how it was invested. That the old house in Gloucestershire was hers, left directly to her and not to her father, by a curious freak on the part of his aunt, one Janet Ross, who disapproved of Anthony's habit of living up to whatever he made each year by his pictures, and saving ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... a separate personality.' Otfried also pointed out, as we both say, that at Brauron, in Attica, Artemis was served by young maidens called [Greek] (bears); and he concluded, 'This cannot possibly be a freak of chance, but the metamorphosis [of Kallisto] has its foundation in the fact that the animal [the bear] was sacred to ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... keep them in his pocket. The meeting was at a stand, when little Dr. Radcliffe, who was sore to his heart's core with his petty loss, jumped up and declared that he had a series of resolutions to offer. There was a world of unconscious humor in his freak,—unconscious, because his resolutions were intended to express his spite, not only against Mr. Belcher, but against the villagers, including Mr. Snow. He began by reading in his piping voice the first resolution passed ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... dreamy and mournful, and deeply sunk in their orbits—looked out at you, and (in my case, at least) took your attention captive at their will. Add to this a quantity of thick closely-curling hair, which, by some freak of Nature, had lost its colour in the most startlingly partial and capricious manner. Over the top of his head it was still of the deep black which was its natural colour. Round the sides of his head—without the slightest gradation of ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... A freak of fancy set him wondering where and when in the future a beautiful girl with red hair might march along some splendid aisle. Never mind! He became aware of ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... implicitly when it came to tracking. If the merman said that the snake-devil had a definite goal in view, he was right. But the scout was still a little bemused by a monster who was able to have any goal except the hunting and devouring of meat. Either the one who fled was a freak among its kind or—There were several possibilities which could answer that "or," and none of them were very pleasant ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... over three thousand miles away, heard every word he said and heard the music of the phonograph too. A ship two thousand miles out on the Atlantic heard the same record, and so did another ship in a harbor in Central America. Of course, the paper said, that was only a freak, and amateur sets couldn't do that once in a million times. But it did it that time, all right. I tell you, fellows, that wireless telephone is a wonder. Talk about the stories of the Arabian Nights! ...
— The Radio Boys' First Wireless - Or Winning the Ferberton Prize • Allen Chapman
... is a kind of "wild justice" even in smoking-room disclosures. But whatever our bad or good fortune may have been, it is not to be supposed for a moment that any of us enjoy such an enchanting revelation as comes to a young girl who, by nature's kind freak, has been made beautiful. Daisy Medland was radiant as she turned from Norburn's pale thoughtful face and careless garb to Dick Derosne, the outward perfection of a well-born, well-made, well-dressed Englishman, bowing, smiling, and debonair. Daisy liked Norburn very much—how ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... had been intimately acquainted with Boulanger when he was a political recluse in Jersey; and one afternoon he drove me to the charming villa the General had occupied, situated in an ideal spot on the coast. The villa was most solidly built, and of picturesque architecture—the freak of a rich Parisian merchant, who had spared no pains or money over it. The work both inside and out was that of the best artists Paris could supply. It was magnificently furnished—a museum of beautiful objects, and curious ones, ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... exercise—besides, he has not commanded my attendance. He will not, therefore, be surprised at my absence. I tell you, Roger,—I must go! Who would have expected the King to take it into his head to visit The Islands without a moment's warning! What a freak!" ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... Amendment, since, should it arrive at woman's estate, it will, of course, be entitled to a double vote. How will it be should one end go Republican and the other Democratic? To send a duplex woman into the world seems to be a very unnecessary freak of Nature, seeing that there is enough of duplicity ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 34, November 19, 1870 • Various
... enough, while we have one bird who, though he is classed with the oscines, passes his life in almost unbroken silence. Of course I refer to the waxwing, or cedar-bird, whose faint, sibilant whisper can scarcely be thought to contradict the foregoing description. By what strange freak he has lapsed into this ghostly habit, nobody knows. I make no account of the insinuation that he gave up music because it hindered his success in cherry-stealing. He likes cherries, it is true; and who can blame him? But he would need to work hard ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... Rio Negro slope south-east. The whole line of the Casiquiare is infested with myriads of tormenting insects. A few miserable groups of Indians and half-breeds have their small villages along its southern portion. It is thus seen that this marvellous freak of nature is not, as is generally supposed, a sluggish canal on a flat tableland, but a great, rapid river which, if its upper waters had not found contact with the Orinoco, perhaps by cutting back, would belong entirely to the Negro branch of the Amazon. To the west of the Casiquiare there ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... imitates the extreme grade of infantiloid constitution. The infantiloid is a sort of enlarged and lengthened child. The feminoid is ostensibly a man, with a good deal of woman in him. The infantiloid is a quite general type, but of course when typical is a freak, recognized and treated as such. How far the eunuchoid may deviate from the normal is suggested by the following ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... flood, and it was the same with a tortoise found in Italy scarcely thirty years ago. Dr. Carl, in a work published at Frankfort[5] in 1709, took up another theory, and, such was the general ignorance at the time, he used long arguments to prove that the fossil bones were the result neither of a freak of nature, nor of the action of a plastic force, and it was not until near the end of his life that the illustrious Camper could bring himself to admit the extinction of certain species, so totally against Divine ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... his freak of mercy. Thereafter, when the need arose, he walked the floor under the piercing battery of Adam's eyes, blazing forth a fury that, in the circumstances, with his sense of the ridiculous upper-most, could not be real. He raved and swore when he ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... within, a fireless hearth; a room with but one window, and that containing only one whole pane of glass; not an article of furniture to be seen, save an old painted pine-wood cradle, which had been left there by some freak of fortune. This, turned upon its side, served us for a seat, and there we impatiently awaited the arrival of Moodie, Wilson, and a man whom the former had hired that morning to assist on the farm. Where they were all to be stowed might have puzzled a more sagacious brain than mine. It ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... England than in what any Scot could do with them in Scotland. And so, though Lord Digby, Endymion Porter, and some others still spoke manfully for Montrose with the King, he is found back in Carlisle, late in July, with only his little band of Scottish adherents. Then ensued the strangest freak of all. With this very band he set out again distinctly southwards, as if all thought of entering Scotland were over, and nothing remained but to rejoin the King at Oxford. The band, however, had been but ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... head exploited his natural capacities out of all proportion, getting such an outrageous share of the money they all made together, for doing what was natural to him, and what he enjoyed doing. Take himself for instance. If by some freak, he could make more money out of being one of the hands, would he go down in the ranks, stand at a machine all day and cut the same wooden shapes, hour after hour: or drive a team day after day where somebody ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... that this terrific object was a freak of fancy on the part of some old-world sculptor, and that its presence had suggested to the Kukuanas the idea of placing their royal dead under its awful presidency. Or perhaps it was set there to frighten away any marauders who might have designs upon the treasure chamber ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... turning the little case over and over in his hands, again examining the clasps of it. His next freak was to snatch his pistol and look to the priming. I burst out laughing, for his antics seemed absurd. My laughter cooled him, and he made a great effort to regain his composure. But I ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... given birth to a freak of nature. The animal's face is almost human in appearance, it has neither eyes nor nostrils, but a nose like ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 2nd, 1914 • Various
... and alone, that Henrietta Temple mused over this freak of destiny. It was in vain to conceal it, her thoughts recurred to Ferdinand. They might have been so happy! Why was he not true? And perhaps he had sacrificed himself to his family, perhaps even personal distress had driven him to the fatal deed. Her kind feminine ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... itself against Banks at Strasburg, swerved to the east about New Market, with a suddenness that made it dizzy. Straight across its path now ran the strange and bold wall of the Massanuttons, architectural freak of Nature's, planted midway of the smiling Valley. The army groaned. "Always climbing mountains! This time to-morrow, I reckon, we'll climb it back again. Nothing over on the other side ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... perceived, possessed a remarkable acuteness of vision. They could see the odor emanating from flowers and fruit. They described it to me as resembling attenuated mist. They also named other colors in the solar spectrum than those known to me. When I first heard them speak of them, I thought it a freak of the imagination; but I afterward noticed artists, and persons who had a special taste for colors, always detected them with greater readiness. The presence of these new colors were apparent to all with whom I spoke upon the subject. When I mentioned my own inability to discern ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... morning Robin came downstairs to find the house deserted except for the noiseless butlers who stared at her as though she were some strange freak. Apparently no one stirred before noon, for Tom, coming in from the garage, greeted her with a pleasant: "Say, you're an early bird, aren't you?" and then directed one of the butlers to bring her some breakfast in ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... By the uneven heart-throbs, and the freak Of bounding pulses that stand still and ache, While new emotions, like strange barges, make Along vein-channels their disturbing course; Still as the dawn, and with the dawn's swift force— Thus ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... correspondence was no fictitious one, a freak of disordered nerves or imagination, but sane and actual, both brother and sister could convincingly have affirmed. And this although time—as time is usually figured—had neither lot nor part in it. Such projections of personality ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... will observe, that I stand by no means secure; and besides the chance of my cousin's reappearance—a certain event, unless he is worse than I dare hope for—I have perhaps to expect the fantastic repugnance of Clara herself, or some sulky freak on her brother's part.—In a word—and let it be such a one as conjurers raise the devil with—Harry ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... in the enjoyment of every comfort and every luxury that refinement could devise and wealth furnish. He was a favourite child. His parents emulated each other in pampering and indulging him. Every freak was pardoned, every whim was gratified. He might ride what horses he liked, and if he broke their knees, what in another would have been deemed a flagrant sin, was in him held only a proof of reckless spirit. If he were not ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... much to show it to Clarence, to talk to him, and feel his sympathy. He never retired much before midnight, and it was scarcely ten minutes' walk. She would get back before her father returned, and no one would know. Seizing her hat, she went quietly out. It was a freak, but then Beth had freaks now and then. A great black cloud drifted over the moon, and made everything quite dark. A timid girl would have been frightened, but ...
— Beth Woodburn • Maud Petitt
... "To what strange freak do I owe this visit from the Princess of Helium, who, two days ago, with rare consideration for my pride, assured me that she would prefer Tal Hajus, the green ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... as with these latter, not only are there variations for inheritance, class, locality, and so on, but there are here and there cases of out and out exception—which from all we can see must be assigned to some external force in operation on the individual. We call them "freak" occurrences, only because we cannot see the wider law or causes at work. When we meet them in sufficient numbers, we make new tables to cover them as far as we can, again in general only. Other causes still elude us, though they must have ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... I have not yet had an opportunity to question them. Some freak of the girl's, I should guess. The young teacher to whom I give house-room informs me that they were excited last night by an appearance of the Northern Lights—a very fine display, he tells me. I regret that, being asleep, I missed it. He suggested ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... all his other sons and all his possessions put together. Clarence, whom I will not describe, as he will, I trust, show himself more effectually by his actions, was like his mother in disposition, or so, at least, she made herself happy by thinking; but by some freak of nature he was like his father in person, and carried his mouse's heart in a huge frame, somewhat hulking and heavy-shouldered, with the same roll which distinguished Mr. Copperhead, and which betrayed something of the original ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... stroke with the whip, which I nearly repented, for he kicked up with his hind legs, and had not I seized the after part of the saddle I should have gone over his forecastle. I held on until he righted. After this freak, which was nearly knocking up my cruise, we jogged on steadily until we came to a narrow street, down which he turned in spite of all my endeavours to prevent him, and again hove to at the door of ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... the rascal, forgetting his trade is To make men and women impartially smart, Will only shoot at pretty young ladies, And never takes aim at a bachelor's heart. The results of this freak—or whatever you term it— Should cover the wicked young scamp with disgrace, While ev'ry young man is as shy as a hermit, Young ladies are ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... said Chip, getting on his feet again. "I've always had the name of being something of a freak—I don't wonder you want to exhibit me to your—friends." He went down the hill to the bunk house, holding the unlighted cigarette still ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... undisguised, irrepressible pleasure that had been caused by my unexpected tribute to the absolute truthfulness of her character. Again I heard her piquant laugh; then her sweet, vibratory voice as she sang hymns that awakened other than religious emotions, I fear. By an odd freak of fancy the flowers seemed an embodied strain from Chopin's nocturne that she had played, and the different shades of color the rising ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... with Dr Beddington, who had charge of the asylum, was not sure that he would be pleased with their freak, and earnestly dissuaded his intended ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... got riled, but, not wishin' to raise a racket, I spat my chew out. I don't know how it come, but, I guess, bein' riled, I jest didn't take notice wher' I dumped it, till, kind o' sudden-like, I found I wus inspectin' the vitals o' that side-show-freak's gun. Sez he, in a nasty tone, which kind o' interrupted the deac'n's best langwidge, an' made folks fergit to fetch the 'A-men' right, 'You dog-gone son of a hog——' But I didn't wait fer no more. I sees then what's amiss. My chaw had located ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... happy portrait. The little one was nestled in her arms, and she herself was just looking up with a bright smile of happiness and pride. That look came full at the spectator, and perhaps it was because it was so very lifelike that I had (ever since I could remember) indulged a curious freak of childish sentiment by nodding to the picture and saying, "Good-morning, mamma," whenever I came into the room. Such little superstitions become part of one's life, and I freely confess that I salute that portrait still! I remember, too, ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... anyway you play it, if you are disposed to be fat. No man living, who isn't a freak, can persist always in one diet. Nor can any man who has anything else on his mind be always exercising—especially after he has reached forty years of age, when there are so many better things to do and ...
— The Fun of Getting Thin • Samuel G. Blythe
... of a confounded millionaire soap-boiler," commented Mr. Blunt through his clenched teeth. "A man absolutely without parentage. Without a single relation in the world. Just a freak." ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... as they stepped from their canoe. Among the natives, who were mostly as dark of skin as Africans, was a sprinkling so different that the inference was that they belonged to some other race, or that nature was accustomed to play some strange freak in this almost unknown part ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... end, The old wrong righted, the estates restored, And my promotion, with the ink not dry! Those fairies which neglected me at birth Seemed now to lavish all good gifts on me— Gold roubles, office, sudden dearest friends. The whole world smiled; then, as I stooped to taste The sweetest cup, freak dashed it from my lip. This very night—just think, this very night— I planned to come and beg of you the alms I dared not ask for in my poverty. I thought me poor then. How stript am I now! There's not a ragged mendicant ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... with hereditary totemism, the rise of their isolated belief in spirit-haunted sacred stones, encroached on and destroyed the hereditary character of their totemism. The belief in CHURINGA NANJA is an isolated freak, but it has done its work, while leaving traces of an earlier state of things, as we have shown, both among the Kaitish ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... out completely for an hour by some freak of the memory, comes back to him, and he sees his sullen, morbid boyhood changing into something worse still, until by slow degrees he became what he is now—dissipated, ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... of the wrecked fort followed and among other interesting sights the guide pointed out the trail of the famous freak shot that killed the cow. The shell went first through a glass window, then through the wall at the back of the room, into a second chamber, where, without exploding, it had amputated a hind ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... letters, when he says that he has something to tell that is "so strange that I should never have mentioned it, even to my friends, had it not been corroborated... so unreal that I hesitated to speak of it, fearing that it was some freak of the imagination." ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... that after this hideous insult not one of us will speak," declared one of the group. "But I for one would like some light on the insane freak that prompted this performance. As you are at the head of this peculiar community, we'd like ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... no hand puts back, Trick as we may! My friend, you are forty-three This very year in the world— [JOSEPHINE breaks out sobbing again.] And in vain it is To think of waiting longer; pitiful To dream of coaxing shy fecundity To an unlikely freak by physicking With superstitious drugs and quackeries That work you harm, not good. The fact being so, I have looked it squarely down—against my heart! Solicitations voiced repeatedly At length have shown the soundness of their shape, And left me no denial. You, at times, ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... Frank Churchill was a little shaken the following day, by hearing that he was gone off to London, merely to have his hair cut. A sudden freak seemed to have seized him at breakfast, and he had sent for a chaise and set off, intending to return to dinner, but with no more important view that appeared than having his hair cut. There was certainly no harm in his travelling sixteen miles ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... have stated, they have heard that he gave sound advice, and was a good and profitable man to consult. Was it not a strange freak on the part of God, who plays sometimes jokes on us, to have granted so many perfections to a ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... hantu. Perhaps you can explain it, being a youngster without theories. The point is, of what follows, how much, if any, was a dream? Where were the partition lines between sleep and waking,—between what we call Certainty, and—the other thing? Or else, by a freak of nature, might a man live so long—Nonsense!—Never mind; ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... "party," so to speak, who begins to find out that some young wag of the company is "chaffing" him? Have you ever tried the sarcastic or Socratic method with a child? Little simple he or she, in the innocence of the simple heart, plays some silly freak, or makes some absurd remark, which you turn to ridicule. The little creature dimly perceives that you are making fun of him, writhes, blushes, grows uneasy, bursts into tears,—upon my word it is not fair to try the weapon of ridicule upon that innocent young victim. The ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... is a wolf, at this time of year they are tame, and would never attack two people." Thus Riasantzeff sought to reassure her, while secretly annoyed at Yourii's childish freak. ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... is once more on the Freak Dinner stunt. All our exclusive citizens will recall the Perambulator Parade Dinner, in which Last-Trick Todd, at his palatial home at Pilgrim's Pond, caused so many of our prominent debutantes to look even younger than their years. Equally elegant and more miscellaneous ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... hardly anybody except his entertainers and the Doctor. One would have said, to look at him, that he was not at the party by choice; and it was natural enough to think, with Susy Pettingill, that it must have been a freak of the dark girl's which brought him there, for he had the air of a ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... was right. In ten minutes I knew, that a sudden freak on the part of the girl he was engaged to had released him, without fault of his own, and that with this release new life had entered his veins, for the conflict was over and love and duty were ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... Convivial meetings were all the vogue, and the tavern was the universal rallying-place of good-fellowship. And then Goldsmith's intimacies lay chiefly among the Irish students, who were always ready for a wild freak and frolic. Among them he was a prime favorite and somewhat of a leader, from his exuberance of spirits, his vein of humor, and his talent at singing an Irish song and telling ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... do you mean? Even a woman can't take a freak all about nothing! You must have some reason for it, and I'm sure I've done nothing to offend you. I wrote only today to my sister to tell her to come up next month to our wedding, and I've been as affectionate and happy ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... quite right, Quatermain. I had that foolish fancy, a lover's freak, I suppose. When we married the curtain was removed although the brass rod on which it hung was left by some oversight. On my return to England after my loss, however, I found that I could not bear ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... visitor is provided with a voting ticket, which he hands to the lady of his admiration, and which counts towards the prize. Each young lady also receives 5 per cent. on what she sells at her bar. The places are awarded by lot; and, by a freak of fortune, the two most attractive demoiselles happened to come together. These were Numbers One and Fourteen. The former young lady—who desires to be known by her number only, true genius being ever modest—was ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... that by some strange freak of fate a miracle had saved him, but when he realized the ease with which the girl had, single-handed, beaten off twenty gorilla-like males, and an instant later, as he saw them again take up their dance about him while she addressed them in a singsong monotone, which bore every evidence ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... her strong inclination to sit down was owing to want of exercise, and the heaviness of her eyelids a freak of imagination; so, speedily smoothing her ruffled plumage, she ran down to tell her father ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... present living was presented to me, about eighteen months since, by the deceased baronet. I must further, in justice to myself, explain that I immediately after the introduction, sought an elucidation of the mystery from Sir Harry; and he then told me that, in a freak of youthful passion, he had married Miss Dalston in the name of Grainger, fearing his uncle's displeasure should it reach his ears; that his wife had died in her first confinement, after giving birth to a still-born child, and he now wished ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... that, these, those. The pronominal adjectives which precede the article, are all, both, many, such, and what; as, "All the world,"—"Both the judges,"—"Many a[336] mile,"—"Such a chasm,"—"What a freak." In like manner, any adjective of quality, when its meaning is limited by the adverb too, so, as, or how, is put before the article; as, "Too great a study of strength, is found to betray writers into a harsh manner."—Blair's Rhet., p. 179. "Like many an other poor wretch, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... host. His head was not anointed with the ceremonial oil, as was the custom in houses of this character when the guest was honored as an equal or desirable addition to the family gathering. Clearly He was regarded as a curiosity or "freak" rather than as a friend, and had been invited in such a spirit. But He said nothing, and passed over the slight. And the meal passed along smoothly ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... I. "Good-evening! You will excuse me, but I am not very well to-night." And so at last I got rid of him, still brandishing his pencil and his note-book. My troubles may be bad to hear, but at least it is better to hug them to myself than to have myself exhibited by Wilson, like a freak at a fair. He has lost sight of human beings. Every thing to him is a case and a phenomenon. I will die before I speak to him again ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... foreign influence received and borne as a yoke"—(that of the Italian Renaissance) "because no living generative force was there to throw it off—with results too often dreary beyond measure; and, finally, we shall meet this strange freak of nature, a soil without artistic initiative bringing forth the greatest initiator—observe, I do not say the greatest artist—the greatest initiator perhaps since Lionardo in modern art—except it be ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... in for, anyhow?" said Creviss angrily. "Can't this freak that comes here in a dress suit and tries to lord it over us take care ...
— Ted Strong's Motor Car • Edward C. Taylor
... on among the most enthusiastic followers of Colonel Arnold. The concluding part of the history is written in the blood of our brave and gallant general; and now, in the closing scene of the drama, I find myself, by a singular freak of fortune, thrown again in your company, in a place where I had little dreamed of ...
— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson
... toward Lockley. Big trucks and little ones; passenger cars in between them; a few motorcyclists catching up from the rear by riding on the road's shoulders. They were closely packed, as if by some freak the lead had been taken by great trucks incapable of the road speed of those behind them, yet with the frantic rearmost cars unable to pass. There was a humming and roaring of motors that filled the air. They plunged toward Lockley's miniature ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... of his hair or one of his gloves, I am sure,—while Heaven knows that I could not get up enthusiasm enough to cross the room if at the other end of it all Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey were condensed into the little china bottle yonder."[4] It was thus no mere freak of juvenile taste that took shape in these early Byronic poems. He entitled them, with the lofty modesty of boyish authorship, Incondita, and his parents sought to publish them. No publisher could be found; ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... With inconceivable caprice, she was fixing her affections upon a worthless adventurer, a miserable coxcomb, the Duke de Lauzun, who was then disgracing by his presence the court of the Louvre. This singular freak, an additional evidence that there is no accounting for the vagaries of love, astonished all the courts of Europe. Monsieur then turned to the Princess Charlotte Elizabeth of Bavaria. The alliance was one dictated by state policy. Monsieur ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... town, already very extensive, were being perfected, and to our eyes they looked impregnable. We did not then realize how useless it is to attempt to defend a town, and, unfortunately, our ignorance was not limited to civilians. It is a curious freak of modern war that a ploughed field should be stronger than any citadel. But, as I say, these things were hidden from us, and our allies gave the finishing touches to their trenches, to the high entertainment of the Angels, as Stevenson would have told us. If only those miles of trench and acres ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... sixteen when you were born, and, having had my head shaved during my illness, my hair grew out the bright gold you see it now, instead of the dark brown it had hitherto been. A strange freak of nature, but a providential aid to the disguise I wished to maintain. I wrote to Cuthbert, informing him of your birth, praying his speedy return, but no reply came; and again and again I repeated the petition. At length I was answered by the return of all ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... perhaps, see as I do—that to carry out the spirit of your father's will would be better than to follow so closely the letter of it. But you are still very young, and Jock is younger; and, fortunately, you can afford to indulge a freak of this sort. I shall let Mr. Rushton know that I withdraw all opposition. And now, give me a kiss, and let us forget that there ever was any controversy between us—it never went further than a controversy, did it, darling?" Sir ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... adj[obs3].; exception, peculiarity; infraction of law, breach, of law, violation of law, violation of custom, violation of usage, infringement of law, infringement of custom, infringement of usage; teratism[obs3], eccentricity, bizarrerie[obs3], oddity, je ne sais quoi[Fr], monster, monstrosity, rarity; freak, freak of Nature, weirdo, mutant; rouser, snorter* [U.S.]. individuality, idiosyncrasy, originality, mannerism. aberration; irregularity; variety; singularity; exemption; salvo &c. (qualification) 469. nonconformist; nondescript, character, original, nonesuch, nonsuch[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... if our plans be not baulked by some latterday Railwayman-unionist freak, We'll make a bold bid for freedom ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 1st, 1920 • Various
... hung Wild thorn and bramble, in confusion flung Amid the startling crevices—like sky, Through gloom of clouds, that sweep in thunder by. A cataract fell over, in a streak Of silver, playing many a wanton freak; Midway, and musical, with elfin glee It bounded in its beauty to the sea, Like dazzling angel vanishing away. In sooth, 'twas pleasant in the moonlight gray To see that fairy fountain leaping so, Like one that knew not wickedness ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... the wall of the side-gulch, keeping to the rock as much as possible. He turned into a cleft, stopping at a rock whose almost flat surface was level with his feet, a great mass of granite that some freak of weathering or convulsion of earthquake had split almost in half. Into the crevice a wild grape-vine ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... are positively ridiculous, and do violence to every rule of art and law of taste. Usually when an oriental—for it is equally true of China, Japan and Turkey—adopts European dress he selects the same colors he would wear in his own, and he looks like a freak, as you can imagine, in a pair of green trousers, a crimson waistcoat, a purple tie, a blue negligee ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... a broidery freak'd with tissue of images olden, 50 One whose curious art did blazon valour of heroes. Gazing forth from a beach of Dia the billow-resounding, Look'd on a vanish'd fleet, on Theseus quickly departing, Restless in unquell'd passion, a feverous heart, Ariadne. Scarcely her eyes yet seem their seeming ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... specialized in anything, it was in life. Having twenty-five thousand a year of his own he might have continued in that path indefinitely, but for two influences. One was an irruptive craving within him to take some part in the dynamic activities of the surrounding world. The other was the "freak" will of his late and little-lamented uncle, from whom he had his present income, and his future expectations of some ten millions. Adrian Van Reypen Egerton had, as Waldemar once put it, "—one into the mayor's chair with a good name ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... success. The men came around him and pawed him, and felt the dents in the armor, and tried the weight of it by holding up one of his arms, and handled him generally as though he were a freak in a museum. "Let 'em alone," said Hefty to Miss Casey, "I'm not sayin' a word. Let the judges get on to the sensation I'm a-makin,' and I'll walk off with the prizes. The crowd is ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... necessary condition of human life, and all his sophistry in confusing it with the abstract sense of obligation. It is, perhaps, scarcely fair to call attention to such a mere argumentative and literary freak; but there is something so comical in a defence of debt, however transparent, proceeding from a man to whom never in his life a bill can have been sent in twice, and who would always have preferred ready-money payment to receiving a bill at all, that ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... blotted out completely for an hour by some freak of the memory, comes back to him, and he sees his sullen, morbid boyhood changing into something worse still, until by slow degrees he became what ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... a century, the writing of many books, and the building up of a justly great and world-wide reputation between the two writings) strikes me as a singular, and, in a way, pleasing literary coincidence; singular, as a freak of subconscious memory for words, pleasing, as a verification in mature life of the writer's comparatively youthful observations of natural phenomena. I wonder if the author, or any others among his almost innumerable readers, have chanced to light ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... "What freak is this?" Sir Ralph said, angrily, when they entered. "Your mother has been anxious about you for the last two hours, and I myself was beginning to think that some ill must have befallen you. Why, what has happened to you, Albert, there is blood on ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... appeal to an Anglo-Saxon populace, which in its art must have something to catch hold of, like the tannin in its overdrawn tea. It loved to stand before this poster and pick out the easily recognized characters and argue (as Sypher, whose genius had suggested the inclusion of the freak had intended) what the hairy creature could represent, and, as it stood and picked and argued, the great fact of Sypher's Cure sank deep into their souls. He remembered the glowing pride with which he had regarded this achievement, the triumphal progress he made in a motor-car around the London ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... tenant of a large tract of country in Ulster, under one of the guilds or public companies of the city of London. From this branch of the family came Major John Whistler, father of the distinguished engineer, and the first representative of the family in America. It is stated that in some youthful freak he ran away and enlisted in the British Army. It is certain that he came to this country during the Revolutionary War, under General Burgoyne, and remained with his command until its surrender at Saratoga, when he was taken prisoner of war. Upon his return ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... devil! it is not the place for a man like you, a man who plays with crowns and scepters as a Bohemian plays with his balls; it is not the place of a serious man, I said, to be shut up in a box like some freak of natural history; for you must understand it would make all your enemies ready to burst with laughter, and you are so great, so noble, so generous, that you must have many enemies. This secret is enough to set ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... waiting to meet me, was Father Knickerbocker himself! I know not how it happened, by what queer freak of hallucination or by what actual miracle—let those explain it who deal in such things—but there he stood before me, with an outstretched hand and a smile of greeting, Father Knickerbocker himself, the Embodied ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... clergyman awaited his arrival in an adjoining parlor. O'Leary enters the room, where he finds, sitting at the table, with the whole correspondence before him, his brother friar, Lawrence Callanan, who, either from an eccentric freak, or from a wish to call O'Leary's controversial powers into action, had thus drawn him into a lengthened correspondence. The joke, in O'Leary's opinion, however, was carried too far, and it required the sacrifice of the correspondence and the interference of mutual friends; ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... curious freak, cap. You'll be interviewed by all the scientific folk in the kingdom, and I shouldn't wonder if you are not summoned to appear, and give evidence, before a select committee of the Royal Society. Four points ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... thinking. The officer at her side, looking down at her, was thinking also. He was fighting a slight mental struggle, a sort of combat he was quite unused to. Should he let the child go on in this wild freak? He knew the cottage by the sea; the peasant home would be dreadful to her. He knew that by that same day after to-morrow, life in lower Italy, with the dirty, coarse people about her would be a burden. Yet he hesitated. He fought the battle in this way: Should he ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... sky and the earth below! Over the house-tops, over the street, Over the heads of the people you meet, Dancing, Flirting, Skimming along. Beautiful snow! it can do nothing wrong. Flying to kiss a fair lady's cheek; Clinging to lips in a frolicsome freak; Beautiful snow, from the heavens above, Pure as an angel and ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... Spanish flag, and was manned by Spaniards. They were phenomenally fast vessels, and simply laughed at the efforts of ships of the squadron to overtake them; but they had been caught in calms on three or four occasions, and boarded by means of boats; when, by a curious freak of fortune, if the boarding party happened to be British, it always proved to be the American that they had boarded; while, if the boarders happened to be American, it was the Spaniard that they found themselves meddling with. Thus, as there was no treaty existing between ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... prevailing genius of architecture still enforced a certain calmness and continence in the statue. As soon as the statue was begun for itself, and with no reference to the temple or palace, the art began to decline: freak, extravagance, and exhibition took the place of the old temperance. This balance-wheel, which the sculptor found in architecture, the perilous irritability of poetic talent found in the accumulated dramatic materials to which the people were already wonted, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... the most modest and deprecatory way. The man who expresses an opinion, or even a doubt, on this subject, contrary to the ruling traditions, will have a swarm of angry critics buzzing about him. He will be called a heretic, a heathen, a cold-blooded freak of nature. As for the woman who hesitates to subscribe all the thirty-nine articles of romantic love, if such a one dares to put her reluctance into words, she is certain to be accused either of unwomanly ambition or ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... basket, full of cold fowls, salad, and wines; she also was in a new spring hat of purple, which made her rosy old face look like a china aster. Lavinia reposed upon the other seat; and the infants insisted on sharing the driver's seat, up aloft, that they might enjoy the prospect, which freak caused Flabeau's boy to beam and blush till his youthful ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... been over the road can be a safe or sympathetic guide. Tolstoi realized he could not be of service to the people he would uplift unless he lived among them, shared their trials and experienced their needs. The time has gone by when the musician and composer was considered a sort of freak, knowing music and nothing else. We know the great composers were men of the highest intelligence and learning, men whose aim was to work out their genius to the utmost perfection. Nothing less than the highest ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... develop and were fertile. Some of them presented a peculiarity in growth of the cotyledons and germ, both of which grew and protruded beyond the involuere before the nuts were ripe, indicating that the germ had not come to a state of rest during its usual period in the nut. This freak appeared in only eight of the nuts, a larger number having normally ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Fourth Annual Meeting - Washington D.C. November 18 and 19, 1913 • Various
... Giobbe's wealth of sculptured frieze and floral scroll; the Ponte di Paradiso, with its Gothic arch; the painted plates in the Museo Civico; and palace after palace, loved for some quaint piece of tracery, some moulding full of mediaeval symbolism, some fierce impossible Renaissance freak of fancy. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... these wilds, I was one of about threescore of men who for three days traversed them in search of the dead. Then was the scenery of the mountains impressive, much beyond what can well be spoken. The bridal that loses the bride through some wayward freak of the fair may be sad enough; so also the train, in its dark array, that conveys the familiar friend to the chamber where the light of nature cannot come. But in this latter case, the hearts that still beat, necessarily know that their part is resignation, and suspense and anxiety mingle ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... report," the Papal Secretary was saying earnestly. "America seems rife with modernism. Free-masonry, socialism, and countless other fads and religious superstitions are widely prevalent there. Nor do I underestimate their strength and influence. And yet, I fear them not. There are also certain freak religions, philosophical beliefs, wrung from the simple teachings of our blessed Saviour, the rapid spread of which at one time did give me some concern. The Holy Father mentioned one or two of them ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... my horse and scrambled down on foot after Smith. I found him gathering berries and bushes as though his very soul were mad with botany; but as I had seen nothing of this in him before, I asked what strange freak ...
— A Ride Across Palestine • Anthony Trollope
... professed that the fugitive Adminius had ceded to him the kingship of the whole island, and sent home high-flown dispatches to that effect. He had no fleet, but drew up his army in line of battle on the Gallic shore, while all wondered what mad freak he was purposing; then suddenly bade every man fill his helmet with shells as "spoils of the Ocean" to be dedicated in the Capitol. Finally he commemorated this glorious victory by the erection of a lofty lighthouse,[126] probably at the entrance of ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... progress of a bill in Committee, but they enable him to delay it grievously. We divided seventeen times, and between every division this vexatious Irishman made us a speech of apologies and self-condemnation. Of the two who had supported him at the beginning of his freak one soon sneaked away. The other, Sibthorpe, stayed to the last, not expressing remorse like Shaw, but glorying in the unaccommodating temper he showed and in the delay which he produced. At last the bill went through. ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... love to her a la Voltaire, for she bought drawings of him which she never even looked at. He was, otherwise, a good young fellow, with a widowed mother to maintain; and the capital she has left is large enough to permit of such a freak of fancy——" ...
— Major Frank • A. L. G. Bosboom-Toussaint
... laugh at this freak of the old man's fancy, but to her surprise Humfrey coloured up, and looked so much out of countenance that a question darted through her mind whether he could have any such step in contemplation, and she began to review the young ladies of the neighbourhood, and to decide on each in turn ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... resemblance, there was a scrubby growth of weeds or lichen upon it, which against the sun looked for all the world like the wool on a colossal negro's head. It certainly was very odd; so odd that now I believe it is not a mere freak of nature but a gigantic monument fashioned, like the well-known Egyptian Sphinx, by a forgotten people out of a pile of rock that lent itself to their design, perhaps as an emblem of warning and defiance to any enemies who approached the harbour. Unfortunately we were never able to ascertain ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... tell you all these details, to you so paltry, and try to describe the vision of green with which my prophetic gaze clothes this bare rock—on which top some freak of nature has set up a magnificent parasol pine—it is because in all this I have found an emblem to ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... house on horseback. She was a fat, clumsy woman, and got on and off her horse with difficulty. Isaac knew that all the family were absent; but when he saw her come ambling along the road, he took a freak not to tell her of it. He let down the bars for her; she rode up to the horse-block with which every farm-house was then furnished, rolled off her horse, and went into the house. She then discovered, for the first time, that there was no one at home. After resting awhile, ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... returned to Val de Cire, and her husband, who had not expected her for some time, blamed her for a freak. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... when he heard of this freak of the Dey. He wrote to O'Brien,—"I frankly own, I would have lost the peace, and been myself impaled, rather than have yielded this concession. Will ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... said Mr. Hawley. "He's got the freak of being a popular man now, after dangling about like a stray tortoise. So much the worse for him. I've had my eye on him for some time. He shall be prettily pumped upon. He's a damned bad landlord. What business has an old county man to come currying favor ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... queer phase of life was dawning upon him! what a strange mission was coming to him from over the seas! what freak had destiny taken to send him his nephew's letter with its interesting detail, and this other one, on the same night! Guy's letter brought back an old friend in the freshness and vigor of his youth, with hand uplifted ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... Digby, Endymion Porter, and some others still spoke manfully for Montrose with the King, he is found back in Carlisle, late in July, with only his little band of Scottish adherents. Then ensued the strangest freak of all. With this very band he set out again distinctly southwards, as if all thought of entering Scotland were over, and nothing remained but to rejoin the King at Oxford. The band, however, had been but two days on their march when they ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... said there was? By the way, is not this freak of yours of going out into the roads to smoke, as you say, alone, rather a slight on your guest? Here is Mr. Wilde; how very amusing! we all seem to be drawn ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... care about that, so long as it does the business," replied Bumpus; and so the amateur doctor continued to dab each bite with the lavender-colored fluid until the patient looked as though he might be some strange freak intended ...
— The Boy Scouts' First Camp Fire - or, Scouting with the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... may not take your hand, sir, until you know me for what I am. There are none worse. I have been through the mire of hell itself. I have dishonorably betrayed a kinsman in the hope of gold. I had thought to kill. Only a freak of fate has stayed my hand. And there is more that ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... isolation and independency. Let him make the most of his individuality; yet, as Aristotle said, "Man is a political animal;" his nature apart from the nation is incomplete; sundered from that to which he belongs he seems a freak. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... knife had sculptured it. No hand had given a support to its uplifted arm. Even the dog which followed us appeared deceived, for he barked furiously at the strange intruder. There was to me a singular fascination in this solitary freak of nature; and, surrounded though I was by immeasurably greater wonders, I turned again and again to take a farewell look at this dark, slender figure, raising its hand, as if in threatening gesture to ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... confused. Their inquiry has ignored the age of the parents at marriage—or, better still, at the births of their respective children—and has assumed that the number of the family was the all-important point: a good example of that idolatry of number as number which is the "freak religion" of the biometrician. Supposing that the conclusion reached by this method be a true one—which it would need more credulity than I possess to assert—we must conclude that, somehow, primogeniture, as such, affects ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... for a month," he gave prompt explanation. "Under the latest law freak turned out at Albany, I'm too young to drive a motor vehicle safely on the public roads unless I have a licensed chauffeur alongside of me. Oh, ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... before this, two sturdy Englishmen and their sister had come to the New World, with a good deal of energy and some money. The freak that led them up the river to this place was their love of beautiful scenery. Land was cheap, and at first they tried farming, but presently they started a carpet factory, their old business, and being ingenious men, they made some improvements. Ralph Stanwood, another Englishman, ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... how calmly he is sleeping! Is it but a freak of the lamplight, or is there a smile upon his lips? Eustace takes the lamp and bends over him to see; and as he bends he hears Frank whispering in his dreams his mother's name, and a ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... band, were marching through Germany to cooeperate with the Austrians on the French frontiers. The more polished Germans were astonished at the barbaric character of their allies. A Russian officer, in a freak of passion, shot an Austrian postilion, and then took out his purse and enquired of the employer of the postilion what damage was to be paid, as coolly as if he had merely killed a horse or a cow. Even German law was compelled to wink at such ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... as he tells us, his "love was tried to some purpose." He became the victim of an extraordinary temptation—"a freak of fancy," Mr. Froude terms it—"fancy resenting the minuteness with which he watched his own emotions." He had "found Christ" and felt Him "most precious to his soul." He was now tempted to give Him up, "to sell and part with ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... Us'd him so like a base rascallion, That old Pyg — (what d'y' call him) malion, That cut his mistress out of stone, Had not so hard a-hearted one. 330 She had a thousand jadish tricks, Worse than a mule that flings and kicks; 'Mong which one cross-grain'd freak she had, As insolent as strange and mad; She could love none, but only such 335 As scorn'd and hated her as much. 'Twas a strange riddle of a lady: Not love, if any lov'd her! Hey dey! So cowards never use their might, But against such as will ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... these tiny pieces of earth, surrounded by thousands of miles of sea, the nearest land a group of islets like unto them, is found the gigantic tortoise, and in only one other place in the wide world, the Galapagos group of islands in the South Pacific. How, or by what strange freak of Dame Nature these curious reptiles, sole survivals of another age, should come to be found in this lonely spot, is a deep mystery, and one not likely to be unfolded now. At any rate, there they are, looking as if some ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... that the timorous-hearted among the witnesses turned their heads away. Those who were more resolute—or as the case might be, more morbid—and who continued to look, were made aware of a freak of physics which in accord, I suppose, with the laws of horizontals and parallels decrees that a man cut off short from life by quick and violent means and fallen prone upon the earth, seems to shrink up within himself and to ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... of the yellow-white sun ahead and wondered that such a relatively stable, inactive star could have produced such a tremendously energetic plasmoid that it could still do the damage it had done so far out. It had been a freak, of course. Such suns as this did not normally produce such energetic ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... and Irving Berlin, reading the signs of the times, decides to write The Blue Laws Blues. Fashions of thought change; other fashions, also. A girl who was born without hips or eyebrows and who in childhood was regarded as a freak, now finds herself, at the age of eighteen, exactly in the mode, thus proving that all things come to those who wait. Czecho-Slovakia is discovered. The American forces spent three days taking Chateau-Thierry and three years trying to learn to pronounce it. Ireland undertakes to settle ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... gratefully, and he began to sound me about Therese, but found my lips as tightly closed as the lid of a miser's coffer. I told him she was a child when I made the acquaintance of her family at Bologna, and that the resemblance between her brother and myself was a mere accident—a freak of nature. He happened to catch sight of a well-written manuscript on the table, and asked me if that superb writing was my secretary's. Costa, who was present, answered in Spanish that he wrote it. Gama overwhelmed him with compliments, and begged me to send Costa to him to copy some letters. I ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... to the ordinary shoe is another curious freak of fashion. If the Almighty in perfecting the human foot had found a high heel necessary it would have been provided. The artificial heel, especially the very high heel commonly used on shoes worn by women, is an insult to Nature, to the Creator. Some day, when we are ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... feared him, they were amiable in the main towards each other. There were certain members of the Family who might be described as perennial. They were of the nature of established institutions. Such were Stumpy, the freak-legged dachshund-setter; James Edward, the wild gander; Butters, the woodchuck; Melindy and Jim, the two white cats; Bones, the brown owl, who sat all day on the edge of a box in the darkest corner of the cabin; and Ananias-and-Sapphira, the green parrot, so named, as MacPhairrson was wont to ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... a strange freak for him to take, when he expressed his wish to join the mountain boys, and Ethan could ...
— The Hero of Ticonderoga - or Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys • John de Morgan
... Captain Prescott. Some freak of the fancy has mastered you. I know nothing of the documents. How could I, a ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... think that the fellows will return, and if they do we must treat them as before," he observed. "The chances are that in a short time they will be all fast asleep. They attacked us in a drunken freak more than with ...
— The Two Whalers - Adventures in the Pacific • W.H.G. Kingston
... I was vexed from your experience to hear of such foolish proceedings at Bridge of Allan, contrary to canon and to common sense.... The green part of the dress which caused your wonder, naturally enough, is not a freak of new vestments, but is a foolish way which the Glenalmond students have adopted of wearing the hood, which our Bishops (not without diversity of opinion) had granted for those who had been educated at our College. It is a hood lined with green (Scottish thistle colour), and they have ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... creek bank. A yard or two farther and the brown horse and his burden must have gone over the terrible drop, as straight as a plumb-line, on to the awful rocks below. We could see where the brown had torn up the turf as he struck all four hoofs deep into it at once. Indeed, he had been newly shod, a freak of Jim's about a bet with a travelling blacksmith. Then the other tracks, the long score on the brink—over the brink—where the frightened, maddened animal had made an attempt to alter her speed, all in vain, and had plunged over the bank and ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... sense that his father's grave in Woodlawn was supposed to be sacred to him and to his mother, was overlooked in the silent contemplation of what an even less sophisticated person might have been justified in describing as a "freak." Nothing was farther from his mind, however, than the desire or impulse to be disrespectful. And yet, as he was about to turn away from this sombre pile, he leaned over and struck a match on one of the huge boulders. As he was conveying the lighted sulphur match,—with which Dowd's ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... at the moment of perpetrating the cruel joke, I felt that I wouldn't have missed the sight for anything. I was really extremely proud of my achievement, although conscious that I should have to pay dearly bye-and-bye for my freak in the way of "pandies" and forced abstention from food; but I little thought of the stern Nemesis at a later period of my life Providence ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... distorted. For, in the darkness of the hall, he heard the child crying and lamenting. He stopped and listened to it like a man who resolutely faces his destruction. And, as so many times, he asked himself; "Is this a freak of my imagination, a trick of my nerves?" No, the sound was surely real, was close to him. It thrilled in his ears keenly. He could not doubt its reality. Yet he acknowledged to himself that he could not actually locate it. Only in that respect ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... thinks, slovenly; but he is not slovenly: you could not have taken any more decision from him just then; you have had as much as is good for you: he paints over a great space of his picture forms of the most rounded and melting tenderness, and suddenly, as you think by a freak, gives you a bit as jagged and sharp as a leafless blackthorn. Perhaps the most exquisite piece of subtle contrast in the world of painting is the arrow point, laid sharp against the white side and among the flowing hair of Correggio's Antiope. It is quite singular how ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... plainly heard in the telegraph office adjoining. Friday morning the operator, a capable and long-suffering young woman, came over to complain to the doctor that she really found it impossible to carry out the duties of her office, if the feeble-minded Delilah Freak was to be incarcerated only six inches distant from her ear. It seems that Delilah spends her days yelling at the top of her lungs, and Miss Dennis states that she prefers to take telegraphic messages down in competition ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... this very simple process are, if we consider closely, simply numberless. The scientist must make acts of faith, certainly reasonable acts, yet none the less of faith, for all that: first, that his fly is not a freak of nature; next, that his lens is symmetrically ground; then that his observation is adequate; then that his memory has not played him false between his observing and his recording that which he has seen. These acts are so reasonable ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... to be seen for leagues. One of the arreoros, or muleteers, with me, a native of Madrid, remarked on the solitude of the spot, adding, with a sigh, "This was a different place when first I visited it." Within about half a mile from where we were then conversing was an astonishing freak of Nature. In the midst of the plain were about one hundred naked rocks rising abruptly from the surface, in detached groups, some of which were as high as St. Paul's, and many appeared like the spires of a cathedral. Pointing to these eminences, the muleteer went on ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... [FN240] This freak is of course not historical. The tale- teller introduces it to enhance the grandeur and majesty of Harun al-Rashid, and the vulgar would regard it as a right kingly diversion. Westerns only wonder that such ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... and two coolies are going up to Gujerat where the famine is. I inclose a snapshot of the party. My effacement by the coolie is merely a photographic freak—his grin is the broadest part of him, poor fellow. In the autumn I go down to Bombay. I am deep in bacteriology, which reminds me of father and the first time I met you, ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... a good joke," he remarked, "to call upon others to uphold the dignity of one who is always at some freak or other to ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... Perchance the two species of unfortunates may comfort one another. Here are Quakers with the instinct of battle in them; and men of war who should have worn the broad brim. Authors shall be ranked here whom some freak of Nature, making game of her poor children, had imbued with the confidence of genius and strong desire of fame, but has favored with no corresponding power; and others, whose lofty gifts were unaccompanied with the faculty ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was a perpetual slamming of doors and creaking of timbers. The villainous little craft appeared to be in constant hesitation whether it would go to pieces or not; and I believe has since taken that freak into its head. The captain, as seamanlike a fellow as ever crossed my eyes, kept up our confidence, however, even in the most ugly moments; although it could not be denied that our expedition was something like a visit to the northern seas in a ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... intercepted letters to the countess. Still he had to calculate on the various injuries Nevil had done to his constitution, which had made of him another sort of man for a struggle of life and death than when he stood like a riddled flag through the war. That latest freak of the fellow's, the abandonment of our natural and wholesome sustenance in animal food, was to be taken in the reckoning. Dr. Gannet did not allude to it; the Bevisham doctor did; and the earl meditated with a fury of wrath on the dismal chance that such a folly as this of one ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... with more than adequate enthusiasm; if Marchmont were converted to him, who could still be obstinate? The two men began to talk, May falling more and more into silence. She did not accuse Marchmont of deliberate malice, but by chance or the freak of some mischievous demon everything he said led Quisante on to display his weaknesses. She knew that Marchmont marked them every one; he was too well bred to show his consciousness by so much as the most fleeting glance at her; yet she could have met such a glance ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... the sixteenth century a foreign influence received and borne as a yoke"—(that of the Italian Renaissance) "because no living generative force was there to throw it off—with results too often dreary beyond measure; and, finally, we shall meet this strange freak of nature, a soil without artistic initiative bringing forth the greatest initiator—observe, I do not say the greatest artist—the greatest initiator perhaps since Lionardo in modern art—except it be ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... latterly even these scenes had palled; and it came to him with a faint shock of surprise that he was beginning to remember with relief those few occasions on which such talks had ended, by reason, truly, of some mere wanton freak, in unconditional release.—Preposterous indeed that the only acts of his life hitherto viewed with self-contempt, were beginning to seem the only ones ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... man cracked enough to make freak wills and not cracked enough to have them disputed on the ground of insanity. What did you do to him at Marvis Bay? ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... walls, and she ran from one to another rejoicing over them. There was even a further surprise. Years ago an artist cousin had sketched her portrait in pastel crayons upon the color-wash of the wall. It had been done as a mere artistic freak, but like many such spontaneous drawings it had been an admirable likeness and a very pretty picture. It bore her name, "Ingred," in flourishy letters underneath. The whole of this had now been protected with a sheet of glass and enclosed by a frame. A table in the ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... little Cyclops, with one eye Staring to threaten and defy, That thought comes next—and instantly The freak is over, The shape will vanish, and behold! A silver Shield with boss of gold, 30 That spreads itself, some Faery bold In fight ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... who sacrificed his own conscience to the capricious will or freak or fancy of a sovereign was accorded a low place in the estimate of the Precepts. Such an one was despised as nei-shin, a cringeling, who makes court by unscrupulous fawning or as cho-shin, a favorite who steals his master's affections by means of servile compliance; these ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... ad-agency tradetalk, 'house freak'] A hacker occupying a technical-specialist, R&D, or systems position at a commercial shop. A really effective house wizard can have influence out of all proportion to his/her ostensible rank and still not have to wear a suit. Used esp. of Unix wizards. The ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... fancy in this freak, we have partly lost the power of restraint and guidance. We distinguish an unlooked-for figure in our visionary scene. Among those ancestral people there is a young man, dressed in the very fashion of to-day: he wears a dark frock-coat, ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... once more on the Freak Dinner stunt. All our exclusive citizens will recall the Perambulator Parade Dinner, in which Last-Trick Todd, at his palatial home at Pilgrim's Pond, caused so many of our prominent debutantes to look even younger than their years. Equally elegant and more miscellaneous ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... queer freak of our human nature, that those who use the Bible in a dead, foreign language, unsuited for use in our public schools, should call our English version of the scriptures a sectarian book, and then oppose its use in our ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... where a pile of great timbers and plank had been cast up by the angry waters during a recent storm. There, resting on top of the heap of lumber and timbers, was a fine skiff apparently sound and whole. By some curious freak of the storm it had been gently deposited there and left to rest while great ships had been sorely wrenched and even wrecked. The boys lost no time in removing the skiff with Wyckoff's help. To drag it ...
— Boy Scouts in Southern Waters • G. Harvey Ralphson
... whispering of two women, and felt two young, two timid hands on which his head was resting. He soon recovered consciousness, and by the light of an old-fashioned Argand lamp he could make out the most charming girl's face he had ever seen, one of those heads which are often supposed to be a freak of the brush, but which to him suddenly realized the theories of the ideal beauty which every artist creates for himself and whence his art proceeds. The features of the unknown belonged, so to say, to the refined and ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... gardeners could never twist and torture a plant into freak beauty more surely than the German system of government would compress the governed into a sham civilization. Australia would fight again sooner than that a German establishment should offend our sense of justice and menace our peace near ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... the class wished to have their profiles cut in silhouette by a wandering artist of the scissors, and interchanged by all the thirty-eight. Hawthorne disapproved the proposed plan, and steadily refused to go into the Class Golgotha, as he styled the dismal collection. I joined him in this freak, and so our places were left vacant. I now regret the whim, since even a moderately correct outline of his features as a youth would, at this ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... have stooped to punish, and to cook a sprat have passed all Paris through the net. But remembering the days when I myself attended the College of Burgundy, I set the freak to the credit of some young student, and, shrugging my shoulders, dismissed it from my mind. An instant later, however, observing that the fragments of the snowball were melting on the seat and wetting ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... of infantiloid constitution. The infantiloid is a sort of enlarged and lengthened child. The feminoid is ostensibly a man, with a good deal of woman in him. The infantiloid is a quite general type, but of course when typical is a freak, recognized and treated as such. How far the eunuchoid may deviate from the normal is suggested by the following description ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... it is some school-girl freak," Thorne went on. "Naturally, Miss Crawford must be very anxious, but don't make up your mind to the worst till ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... and inoculated himself again in the arm with the poisonous cocaine, and right in front of all the five people in the library, too,—the Earl, Thorneycroft, Launcelot, Tooter, and Hicks,—who stared at him as if he were a dime-museum freak; which indeed he ...
— The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons • James Francis Thierry
... credit and for the welfare of the empire of which they are the guardians. But if, from whatever cause, they are unwilling to recall the noble lord, then I implore them to take care that he be immediately ordered to return to Calcutta. Who can say what new freak we may hear of by the next mail? I am quite confident that neither the Court of Directors nor Her Majesty's Ministers can look forward to the arrival of that mail without great uneasiness. Therefore I say, send Lord Ellenborough back to Calcutta. There at least he will find persons ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... so to speak, Is, my child, an awful freak; For if you get him in a stew, He'll blush quite red and glare at you. Yet if you eat much lobster salad, It will make you ...
— Poems for Pale People - A Volume of Verse • Edwin C. Ranck
... absurdity, has closed a most lofty soul within that little miserable carcass. For wielding his sword and keeping his word, he is a perfect Don Quixote in decimo-octavo. He shall be taken care of.—But, oddsfish, my lords, is not this freak of Buckingham too ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... fitness. The discovery of the interpolated tales contained in this MS. (which has thus presumably lain unnoticed for a whole century, under, as one may say, the very noses of the many students of Arabic literature who would have rejoiced in such a find) has, by a curious freak of fortune, been delayed until our own day in consequence of a singular mistake made by a former conservator of the Paris Bibliotheque, the well-known Orientalist, M. Reinaud, who, in drawing up the Catalogue of the Arabic MSS. in the collection described (or rather misdescribed) ...
— Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp • John Payne
... rude sports in vessels of the King; but I do not remember to have known any more serious result than the settlement of some ancient quarrel, or some odd freak of nautical humour, which has commonly proved as harmless as it has ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... News-Record staff was that their journal was too "respectable," too intelligent, to be widely read; that the "yellow journals" grovelled, "appealed to the mob," drew their vast crowds by the methods of the fakir and the freak. They professed pride in the News-Record's smaller circulation as proof of its freedom from vulgarity and debasement. They looked down upon the journalists of the popular newspapers and posed as the aristocracy ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... however, the Bill, after passing the Commons, was opposed and modified by the Lords, Defoe suddenly appeared on a new tack, publishing the most famous of his political pamphlets, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, which has, by a strange freak of circumstances, gained him the honour of being enshrined as one of the martyrs of Dissent. In the "brief explanation" of the pamphlet which he gave afterwards, he declared that it had no bearing whatever upon the Occasional Conformity ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... melody the words of "The Village Coquettes;" while the quaint humour of Harley excited roars of laughter through the whimsicalities of "Is She His Wife?" and "The Strange Gentleman." Trifles light as air though these effusions might be, the radiant bubbles showed even then, as by a casual freak which way with him the breeze in his leisure hours was drifting. A dozen years or more after this came the private theatricals at Tavistock House. Beginning simply, first of all, with his direction of his children's frolics in the enacting of a burletta, ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... followed along the ridge, meaning to watch from that elevated station the course she would take; although, indeed, he would not have been surprised if he had seen nothing, no trace of her in the whole nearness or distance; in short, if she had been a freak, an illusion, of a hard-working mind that had put itself ajar by deeply brooding on abstruse matters, an illusion of eyes that he had tried too much by poring over the inscrutable manuscript, and of intellect that was mystified ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... delightful comedy, The Roaring Girl (Mermaid Series, Middleton's Plays, volume ii), somewhat idealizing her, however. She seems to have belonged to a neurotic and eccentric stock; "each of the family," her biographer says, "had his peculiar freak." As a child she only cared for boys' games, and could never adapt herself to any woman's avocations. "She had a natural abhorrence to the tending of children." Her disposition was altogether masculine; "she was not for mincing obscenity, but would talk ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... altered his whole career. 'Tis with almost all of us, as in Monsieur Massillon's magnificent image regarding King William, a grain de sable that perverts or perhaps overthrows us; and so it was but a light word flung in the air, a mere freak of a perverse child's temper, that brought down a whole heap of crushing woes upon that family whereof Harry Esmond formed ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... dimensions, found difficulty in accommodating at one and the same time my bodily members and the Latin language. Even my "Caesar" caused me less misery at this period than did the problem of the proper disposal of my hands and feet. Do what I would they were hopelessly (by some singular freak of nature) in my way. The breeding of all the Bolingbrokes would have been taxed to its utmost, I believe, to behave for a single instant as if they did ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... she contemplated some idle freak that might try his gallantry, perhaps his purse. But she was in earnest, if ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... is hard, and there was little mercy shown for JOANNA's freak. Her husband had slain her. That was all. She with her flashes, her gaiety, her laughter, was consigned to dust. But in Sir JOHN's note-book it was written that, "The hob-nailed boot is but a bungling weapon. The drawing-room poker ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, October 18, 1890 • Various
... how the Chartists have fired this part of the country. One misty day, a week ago, I was on the hill; I thought I had it to myself, when suddenly I heard a voice cry sharply, 'Shoulder arms.' I could see no one, and after a moment I put it down to a freak of the wind. Then all at once the mist before me blackened, and a body of men seemed to grow out of it. They were not shadows; they were Thrums weavers drilling, with pikes in ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... the curious looking stranger. He seemed to be a three-legged creature at first sight, but on coming nearer you would have seen that 'twas really naught but a poorly clad man, who for a freak had covered up his rags with a capul-hide, nothing more nor less than the sun-dried skin of a horse, complete with head, tail, and mane. The skin of the head made a helmet; while the tail gave ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... on while the boy carried out his freak, for such they judged his bit of reconnoitring to be. Cautiously George crept towards the mill, the sloping roof of which came almost down to the very hill side. Tying a wisp of long grass and weeds round each boot, he crawled noiselessly ...
— With Marlborough to Malplaquet • Herbert Strang and Richard Stead
... and treatment was reached, the prevailing genius of architecture still enforced a certain calmness and continence in the statue. As soon as the statue was begun for itself, and with no reference to the temple or palace, the art began to decline: freak, extravagance, and exhibition took the place of the old temperance. This balance-wheel, which the sculptor found in architecture, the perilous irritability of poetic talent found in the accumulated dramatic materials to which the people were already wonted, and which had ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... returned, bringing his mother from Madame Desroches's, the concierge told him of Philippe's freak,—how he had called intending to wait, and gone away ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... You did something for Amy Carringford—the pauper! You were spoons with her then, and you wanted to get her to my party. You begged an invitation for her and then dressed her up. like a freak so she could ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... full of tender solicitude, was, Brigit thought, almost divinely beautiful as she watched it. And by some curious freak of the down-falling light only his head and shoulders were visible, and seemed almost to be floating in the gloom. Never had he been so handsome, and never so pitilessly remote. He had forgotten her; he had forgotten love; he ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... even in the most modest and deprecatory way. The man who expresses an opinion, or even a doubt, on this subject, contrary to the ruling traditions, will have a swarm of angry critics buzzing about him. He will be called a heretic, a heathen, a cold-blooded freak of nature. As for the woman who hesitates to subscribe all the thirty-nine articles of romantic love, if such a one dares to put her reluctance into words, she is certain to be accused either of unwomanly ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... that way. Don't reproach me when I am in such need of—of friendship. One of these days you may know me better, but now you can regard me only as a freak. Yes, ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... on board of King Magnus's ship. King Magnus received him in a friendly way, and bade him welcome. King Harald answered, "I thought we were come among friends; but just now I was in doubt if ye would have it so. But it is a truth that childhood is hasty, and I will only consider it as a childish freak." Then said King Magnus, "It is no childish whim, but a trait of my family, that I never forget what I have given, or what I have not given. If this trifle had been settled against my will, there would soon have followed' some other discord like it. ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... something else.... I was still thinking of it when I looked at the Eclipse again. It would have been hard to find a craft of more delicate, graceful lines. They often said he had a flair for ships and women. A shifting current, some freak of the wind and tide, was making her twist and pull at her anchor, and for a moment the sun struck clean on her broadside. A gaping hole between decks had connected two of her ports in ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... come on for two years. The law's delays have been proverbial in all countries and at all eras; and the law of imperial Rome was not likely to be free from this reproach during the reign of Nero, a man of such frivolity that any engagement of pleasure or freak of caprice was sufficient to make him put off the most important call of business. The imprisonment, it is true, was of the mildest description. It may have been that the officer who brought him to Rome spoke a good word for the man who had saved his life during the voyage, ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... "You're freak mutants who can capture a battleship. Maybe you will take Athena and Earth from us. But"—the animation of hatred returned to his face—"What good will it do you? Did you ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... and the herds of the ranchman. Bears are very capricious in this respect, however. Some are confirmed game, and cattle-killers; others are not; while yet others either are or are not accordingly as the freak seizes them, and their ravages vary almost unaccountably, both with the ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... consideration is inseparably connected with that of her husband, and after paying the full price for it, she finds that she is to lose it, for no reason of which she can feel the cogency. She has sacrificed her whole life to it, and her husband will not sacrifice to it a whim, a freak, an eccentricity; something not recognised or allowed for by the world, and which the world will agree with her in thinking a folly, if it thinks no worse! The dilemma is hardest upon that very meritorious class of men, who, without possessing talents which qualify ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... minutes after the fixed time, and was told that a respectable clergyman awaited his arrival in an adjoining parlor. O'Leary enters the room, where he finds, sitting at the table, with the whole correspondence before him, his brother friar, Lawrence Callanan, who, either from an eccentric freak, or from a wish to call O'Leary's controversial powers into action, had thus drawn him into a lengthened correspondence. The joke, in O'Leary's opinion, however, was carried too far, and it required the sacrifice of the correspondence and the interference ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... the lengthing twine, Bait harmless hooks, and launch a leadless line! Their shadows on the stream, the sun behind— Egregious anglers! are the fishes blind? Gull'd by the sportings of the frisking bleak, That now assemble, now disperse, in freak; They see not deeper, where the quick-eyed trout, Has chang'd his route, and turned him quick about; See not those scudding shoals, that mend their pace, Of frighten'd bream, and silvery darting ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... influence received and borne as a yoke"—(that of the Italian Renaissance) "because no living generative force was there to throw it off—with results too often dreary beyond measure; and, finally, we shall meet this strange freak of nature, a soil without artistic initiative bringing forth the greatest initiator—observe, I do not say the greatest artist—the greatest initiator perhaps since Lionardo in modern art—except it be his contemporary ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... the Christ and the evangelists have left us of the mighty God. Caliban will persist in the belief that the visible system was created in Setebos's moment of being ill at ease and in cruel sportiveness. Nature is a freak of a foul mind. But Caliban's god is not solitary. How hideous were the Aztec gods! They were pictured horrors. Montezuma's gods were Caliban's. Caliban's Setebos was another Moloch of the Canaanites, or a ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... the ground. Alexander the Great is said to have followed the festive example of his royal predecessor, and to have drunk deep in the majestic halls of Persepolis. It has been supposed by some that he caused the splendid palaces there to be set on fire in a drunken freak. ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon
... sighed, "I am by profession a manicurist, but some freak of nature gave me the power of keeping my mouth closed, of looking as though I knew a good deal, but of saying so little. Now, messieurs, what could a poor girl know in the way of secrets for which that young man would ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... safe to say," says John Burroughs, "that there is a species of smilax with an unsavory name, that the bee does not visit, herbacea. The production of this plant is a curious freak of nature.... It would be a cruel joke to offer it to any person not acquainted with it, to smell. It is like the vent of a charnel-house." (Thoreau compared its odor to that of a dead rat in a wall!) "It ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... breezy bachelorhood, which is almost essential to the literature of adventure. With all his faults, and all his triumphs, he stands for the great mass of natural manliness which must be absorbed into art unless art is to be a mere luxury and freak. An appreciation of Scott might be made almost a test of decadence. If ever we lose touch with this one most reckless and defective writer, it will be a proof to us that we have erected round ourselves ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... his whole career. 'Tis with almost all of us, as in M. Massillon's magnificent image regarding King William, a grain de sable that perverts or perhaps overthrows us; and so it was but a light word flung in the air, a mere freak of perverse child's temper, that brought down a whole heap of crushing woes upon that family whereof Harry Esmond ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... Friday as much a hermit as yourself. I wanted air and quiet, having been much fatigued on my nephew's amendment, trying to dissuade him from making the campaign with his militia; but in vain! I now dread hearing of some eccentric freak. I am sorry Mr. Tyson has quite dropped me, though he sometimes comes to town. I am still more concerned at your frequent disorders-I hope their chief seat is unwillingness ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... belongs to the race of people who cut hands off children, and outrage women; and now, when our Empire calls for men to go out and stop these devilish things, you sit here and let this traitor insult your country. You are all braver than I am, too; I am only a joke to most of you, a freak, a looney,—you have said so,—but I ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... Bluff stands old Chimney Rock. It is a curious freak of nature, and a famous landmark on the trail. It covers perhaps twelve acres, and rises coneshaped for two hundred feet to the base of the spire-like rock, the "chimney," that rests upon it and rises a ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker
... we attempted to climb to the mouth of the crater. The mountain sheered down at an angle of from seventy-five to eighty degrees, and its smooth, slippery sides afforded absolutely no foothold. Anything more barren than this rocky freak of nature it would be difficult to conceive. Only a few tufts of wild herbs were to be seen upon the whole island, and these seemed to have ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... she called her husband's "freak" as to the election, she said to him on the morning of the meeting ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... When he put his arms round my neck, and looked into my eyes, as if to read there the troubles I dared not tell, I felt that I still had something to love. But even that pleasant emotion was chilled by the reflection that he might be torn from me at any moment, by some sudden freak of my master. If he had known how we loved each other, I think he would have exulted in separating us. We often planned together how we could get to the north. But, as William remarked, such things are easier said than done. My movements were ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... wind and weather, and, to complete the resemblance, there was a scrubby growth of weeds or lichen upon it, which against the sun looked for all the world like the wool on a colossal negro's head. It certainly was very odd; so odd that now I believe it is not a mere freak of nature but a gigantic monument fashioned, like the well-known Egyptian Sphinx, by a forgotten people out of a pile of rock that lent itself to their design, perhaps as an emblem of warning and defiance to any enemies who approached the harbour. Unfortunately we ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... for infinite advancement. The idea, therefore, that "death ends all" nips in the bud this grand conception of man's greatness, and blights forever that which is noblest and truest in his nature. To regard this life as the ne plus ultra of man's development, is to charge nature with a freak of folly, and an abortion in her best works. Men may laud human virtue for human virtue's sake; but if man is but the moth of a day, the fire-fly whose phosphorescent light flashes for a moment and then goes out in eternal night, his virtues are ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... a hard stone. It is true a small light one might be made, but let any one see how the hammers of their iron bevel over and round in the faces with a little work, and he will perceive that only a wild freak would induce any sensible native smith to make a mass equal to a sledge-hammer, and burden himself with a weight for what can be better performed by a stone. If people are settled, as on the coast, then they gladly ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... him; Who by means of quick proofs—no revises—long coaches— May do a few Villas before Scott approaches. Indeed if our Pegasus be not curst shabby, He'll reach, without foundering, at least Woburn Abbey. Such, Sir, is our plan—if you're up to the freak, 'Tis a match! and we'll put you in training next week. At present, no more—in reply to this Letter, A line will oblige very ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... stones into the wilderness, and then abandoned their plan. The lower millstone paved the hearth, the upper, the diameter of its shaft-hole increased by chipping to the size of a musk-melon, had been set by some freak of the farmer-architect's heavy fancy as a coping on the top of the big stone shaft. From thence, as Lady Hannah Wrynche had said in one of her descriptive letters, dated from "My Headquarters at the Seat of War," it dominated the ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... given the modern style of these regiments as they were before the last freak of the War Office. What they may be now, I do not know; nor is the knowledge important, for the style I have used will probably be most familiar to my readers. "My Uncle Toby," it will be remembered, was of ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... the Anti Mal de Mer Belt Co., National Drug and Chemical Co., St Gabriel Street, Montreal, Canada. Bad sailors take note! On this steamer were also, as honoured guests, Jim Jeffries, the redoubtable, going to his doom; "Tay Pay" O'Connor; and Kessler, the "freak" Savoy Hotel dinner-giver; also, by the way, a certain London Jew financier, who gave me a commission to go to and report on the ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... bump was so large a lump (Nature, they said, had taken a freak) That its summit stood far above the wood Of his hair, like a ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... sort," returned Mrs. Forbes, and recounted her grievances. "She's the oddest child in the world," she finished, "and her last freak is that she doesn't want to ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... so startlingly real, that several of his old comrades recognized the scene of their past sufferings. M. de Sucy kept the secret of the drama to be enacted with this tragical background, but it was looked upon as a mad freak in several ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... was afterward learned, {304} abounded with hidden caves and underground passages. By some curious freak of nature, the volcanic hummocks contained no less than four natural fortifications of varying sizes, which, supplemented by very slight efforts on the part of the Indians, had been turned into defensive works of ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... of year," he said. "Folks expect no better from that reckless, harum-scarum Joe Raymond. He'll drown himself some day, there's nothing surer. This mad freak of starting off down the shore in November is just of a piece with his usual performances. But you shouldn't ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... have their profiles cut in silhouette by a wandering artist of the scissors, and interchanged by all the thirty-eight. Hawthorne disapproved the proposed plan, and steadily refused to go into the Class Golgotha, as he styled the dismal collection. I joined him in this freak, and so our places were left vacant. I now regret the whim, since even a moderately correct outline of his features as a youth would, ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... abuse, Than headlong dubb'd, to own himself a Muse, Unless to spread Poetick Honours so As should a Muse give each St. George's Show? A Mode of Glory might Parnassus fit, Tho our Sage Prince knows few he'd Knight for Wit. And thus this Freak is left upon the File, Or as 'tis written in this Poet's Stile. Next, as in Course, to Jotham we'll descend, Thoughtful it seems which Side he'll next befriend, As thinking Brains can caper to and fro, Before they jump into the Box they'd go. And ...
— Anti-Achitophel (1682) - Three Verse Replies to Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden • Elkanah Settle et al.
... fleck flick cake sock deck meek flock pack yoke slick shock poke track hack dock snake neck stuck clack sleek strike crack freak pluck truck stroke brake drake shake black struck sneak spoke ...
— The Beacon Second Reader • James H. Fassett
... looking daggers at his opponent, and Quince not quite easy even under the protection of Titania, Tom had just removed the frying-pan from the fire with its residuary grease still bubbling. Quince having deposited his load, was about to sit down, when a freak came into Tom's head, which, however, he dared not put into execution himself; but "a nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse," says the proverb. Winterbottom stood before Tom, and Quince with his back to them. Tom looked at Winterbottom, pointing slily to the frying-pan, and then to the hinder ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... appear very pleasing to the stiff, etiquette-loving fine lady, and it was without any great surprise that we heard, some time afterwards, of the marriage being broken off, in consequence, it was said, of some wild freak of Doughby's. We were asking one another for the particulars of this rupture, which neither of us had heard, when the Kentuckian made his reappearance in the cabin. He had changed his dress, and, taking him altogether, was by no means an ill-looking fellow. His light blue gingham ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... some fatal cross or blight. He saluted hardly anybody except his entertainers and the Doctor. One would have said, to look at him, that he was not at the party by choice; and it was natural enough to think, with Susy Pettingill, that it must have been a freak of the dark girl's which brought him there, for he had the air of ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... outside the music-room door, beside Claire and the still stupefied Milo. The Jap took up his position back of them, alert and tense as a fox terrier. The three Secret Service men in the front doorway stood at attention, yet evidently wondering at the prisoner's queer freak. ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... first edition, by a strange and distressing freak of the imagination, I took the 'old struggler' out of Lockhart ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... down the centre, and with a curiously wrinkled or folded surface. The two halves of the brain, called hemispheres (though more nearly the shape of a coffee-bean), are alike; and each one, by some curious twist, or freak, of nature, receives messages from, and controls, the opposite half of the body—the right half controlling the left side of the body, while the left half controls the right side of the body. Thus an injury or a hemorrhage on the left ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... which was startled by stray hogs breaking at a dead run through the bushes, and that the horse bolted and ran away. And the man died from concussion of the brain. That would have happened if we had had a road of the first class, twenty feet wide, instead of this little seven-foot freak you all are so ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... another rejoicing over them. There was even a further surprise. Years ago an artist cousin had sketched her portrait in pastel crayons upon the color-wash of the wall. It had been done as a mere artistic freak, but like many such spontaneous drawings it had been an admirable likeness and a very pretty picture. It bore her name, "Ingred," in flourishy letters underneath. The whole of this had now been protected with a sheet of glass and enclosed by a frame. A ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... were burned over in this way and scores of wounded who might have recovered perished in slow torture. I remember a deep ravine a little to the left and rear of the field I have described, in which, by some mad freak of heroic incompetence, a part of an Illinois regiment had been surrounded, and refusing to surrender was destroyed, as it very well deserved. My regiment having at last been relieved at the guns and moved over to the heights above this ravine for no obvious purpose, I obtained leave ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... on his radio and cried for help. It was a bare hundred miles or less to that wonderful world below, but there was the Heaviside layer, and the weak signals beat but feebly against it. All that seeped through by some instant's freak of transmission was a fragment of incoherent babble to reach the uncomprehending ear of an Arkansas ham and give that gentleman uneasy sleep for ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... electrics, from the Greek word elektron, signifying amber. This great discovery was the starting-point of the modern science of electricity. That feeble and mysterious force which had been the wonder of the simple and the amusement of the vain could not be slighted any longer as a curious freak of nature, but assuredly none dreamt that a day was dawning in which it ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... but it is doubtful if he felt it acutely. Nature was gradually dulling his sensibilities with that wonderful anaesthetic of hers, which is so much kinder to the patient than it is to his watching friends. After the first wild freak of selling the house, he showed, for a long time, no marked signs of mental impairment, beyond his lack of interest in the things which he had once cared about—even in the growth of the city he loved. And in a lonely and unoccupied man, sixty-five years of age, this was not unnatural. ...
— The Story of a New York House • Henry Cuyler Bunner
... destroyed it as a specimen, and had broken three of the teeth, but I counted eight, and secured five poison-fangs, the two most prominent being nearly an inch in length. The poison-fangs of snakes are artfully contrived by some diabolical freak of nature as pointed tubes, through which the poison is injected into the base of the wound inflicted. The extreme point of the fang is solid, and is so finely sharpened that beneath a powerful microscope it is perfectly smooth, although the point of the finest needle is rough. ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... been a clever fellow a very clever fellow in the eyes of his father. Bernard Amedroz knew that he himself was not a clever fellow, and admired his son accordingly; and when Charles had been expelled from Harrow for some boyish freak in his vengeance against a neighbouring farmer, who had reported to the school authorities the doings of a few beagles upon his land, Charles had cut off the heads of all the trees in a young fir plantation his father was proud of the exploit. When he was rusticated ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... dreaming, Captain Prescott. Some freak of the fancy has mastered you. I know nothing of the documents. How could I, a woman, ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... in so much as mine, if it comes to money; and perhaps I am not so much worse off than Wildeve. There is nobody so poor as these professional fellows who have failed; and if you shouldn't like my redness—well, I am not red by birth, you know; I only took to this business for a freak; and I might turn my hand to ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... right, anyhow," broke in Madeline despondently. "I was dreaming about castles in Italy instead of tackling the business in hand. If I had thought more I should have known that some freak would seize the opportunity to rake up old scores. Don't feel so bad, Betty. It was my fault, and I'll make it up to her somehow. Come and help me tell Christy that she's a trump, and that I truly wanted ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... them. There's nothing else so lean and fine produced on the globe to-day. I was next door to them at Pozieres and saw them fight. Lord! Such men! Now and then you had a freak, but most looked ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... which we have hitherto obtained, but, as we have explained, a study is not complete if it confine itself to these two answers. When we know the law and the cause of an object submitted to our study, we further look for the end designed. This is no freak of our fancy, but the direct result of the constitution of our understanding. The universe is the creation of God. What is the design of the creation? I answer: the design of the creation is the happiness of spirits. Nature is ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... Frenchman, that was made with glee; We found the first so pleasing to our mind, That to another both were well inclined, And thoroughly resolved more fun to seek. That's right, replied the doctor, have your freak; The lady howsoe'er I now could name. The scholar answered, that to me's the same; I care not what she's called, Nor who she be: 'Tis quite enough that we so well agree. By this time I'm convinced her loving spouse. Possesses what an anchorite might rouse; And if a failure any where ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... is said to be in a state of mental aberration, which is only another name for insanity or folly, whether it be momentary or permanent of its nature. A human being, in such a condition, stands on the same plane with the animal, with this difference, that the one is a freak and the other is not. Morals, good or bad, have no ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... that red-headed boy," she said. "My goodness me, Nance! what a freak he is," and Jennie burst into laughter at the remembrance of Scorch O'Brien. "John and I took him to luncheon and John couldn't eat ...
— A Little Miss Nobody - Or, With the Girls of Pinewood Hall • Amy Bell Marlowe
... a couple of years, but brought few returns, except in Russia. Wagner became despondent and almost convinced he ought to give up trying to be a composer. People called him a freak, a madman and ridiculed his efforts at music making. And yet, during all this troublesome time, he was at work on his one humorous opera, "Die Meistersinger." On this he ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... forgive the odd freak of a man—a criminal, let us say—who makes a confidant of the man set to hunt him down, I beg leave to be, sir, ...
— Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... a mirage?" Tom asked. "Some freak air current reflecting from another island and superimposing over this one?" Then he answered himself. "No. I guess it isn't. There aren't ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... effort of Elizabeth to check the spread of Puritanism was no mere freak of religious bigotry. It sprang from a clear realization of the impossibility of harmonizing the new temper of the nation with the system of personal government which had done its work under the Tudors. With the republican and anti-monarchical theories indeed that Calvinism had ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... of life. With that renunciation the power of creating significant form becomes the inexplicable gift of the occasional genius. Here and there an individual produces a work of art, so art comes to be regarded as something essentially sporadic and peculiar. The artist is reckoned a freak. We are in the age of names and catalogues and genius-worship. Now, genius-worship is the infallible sign of an uncreative age. In great ages, though we may not all be geniuses, many of us are artists, and where there are many artists art tends ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... of unimpeachable ladies and gentlemen"; and really you have made of the author one of the good people of his own book! That is a malicious revenge for his "tedious accuracy," is it not? And you dare to speak of his "hypnotic power of illusion which is so essentially a freak element in his mode of expression that even in portraying the tubby, good-natured, elderly gentleman in this story he refines upon his vitals and sensibilities until the wretched victim becomes a sort of cataleptic." Now that is ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... on to assimilate a novel idea, and, in consequence, are choosing your words badly," he said. "It was not a freak marriage. Although I may have broken the laws of the State of New York by using a license issued to some other person, Lady Hermione and I are legally husband and wife, and no power on earth can dissolve the union without the expressed consent of ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... very opposite of one in fact, a natural sovereignty, I believe. The really rigid and mechanical thing is the charter behind which Tammany works. For Tammany is the real government that has defeated a mechanical foresight. Tammany is not a freak, a strange and monstrous excrescence. Its structure and the laws of its life are, I believe, typical of all real sovereignties. You can find Tammany duplicated wherever there is a social group to be governed—in trade unions, in clubs, in boys' gangs, in the Four Hundred, ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... put him into a book! Of course it would not do to copy a model, raw, like' that, but he fell to studying his traits, trying to see the common humanity exhibited in him. Was he a type or was he a freak? This was, however, too dangerous ground until ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... in no light mood that I gave up my faith in God, and Christ, and immortality. The change in my views was no headlong, hasty freak. It was the result of long and serious thought—of misguided, but honest, conscientious study. And hence I have sometimes thought, and am still inclined to think, that God had a hand in the matter—that He led me, or permitted me to wander, along that strange ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... dwarf! Neither within nor without a freak exhibition had I seen so small a human being! A kind of supernatural dread gripped me by the throat at sight of it. As it turned with animal activity and bounded into my bathroom, I caught a three-quarter view of the creature's swollen, incredible ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... This Bacchic freak seems still preserved: for a recent traveller, Sir George Mackenzie, has noticed the custom in his Travels through Iceland. "His host having filled a silver cup to the brim, and put on the cover, then held it towards the person who sat next to him, and desired him to take off the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... exclaimed ironically, "In order to present an ideal head of a negro, our teachers make him resemble as far as possible the profile of Antinoeus, and then say, 'We have done our utmost; if, nevertheless, we fail to make the negro beautiful, then we ought not to introduce into our pictures such a freak of nature, the squat nose and thick lips, which are so unendurable to the eyes.'" True idealism treats everything after its own kind, making it more intensely itself than it is in the play of nature; the athlete is more heroically ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... undisturbed tomb in the Osiris temenos, where also was a strangely shaped three-sided pottery bowl, similar in shape to a stone bowl of the same period, but otherwise unknown in antiquity. This three-sided bowl may be regarded as a freak of the workman rather than as having any particular value along the line of evolution of pottery forms; and it is interesting to note that bowls of this form have been quite recently made by the modern English potters in South ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... House, the property of Dr. Phene; the house cannot be seen from the street in summer-time. The oldest part is perhaps Tudor, and the latest in the style of Wren. One wall is decorated with fleurs-de-lys. In the garden was grown the original moss-rose, a freak of Nature, from which all other moss-roses have sprung. In the grounds was discovered a subterranean passage, which Dr. Phene claims fixes the site of Shrewsbury or Alston House. It runs due south, and indicates the ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... remarkable freak was perpetrated on the body of Capt. Broady. He was standing, when in an instant he was thrown to the ground with great force, and he lay there quivering as if life were the same as extinct. Col. Barlow saw him fall and ordered his body taken to the rear. ...
— Personal Recollections of the War of 1861 • Charles Augustus Fuller
... of Rome as the final court of ecclesiastical appeal for the realm. Already wielding the full powers of secular justice in his capacity of Chancellor and of president of the royal Council, Wolsey wielded the full power of spiritual justice in his capacity of Legate. His elevation was no mere freak of royal favour; it was the result of a distinct policy. The moment had come when the Monarchy was to gather up all government into the personal grasp of the king. The checks which had been imposed on the action of the sovereign ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... stores of raillery, of "malice," and would vex, tease, pique me sometimes about what she called my "bizarreries anglaises," my "caprices insulaires," with a wild and witty wickedness that made a perfect white demon of her while it lasted. This was rare, however, and the elfish freak was always short: sometimes when driven a little hard in the war of words—for her tongue did ample justice to the pith, the point, the delicacy of her native French, in which language she always attacked me—I used to turn upon her with my old decision, and ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... torches and lights in the sconces were kindled for the ball. The haughty and heated spirits of the gentlemen led them to demand an immediate inquiry into the cause of what they deemed an affront to their host and to themselves; but Lady Ashton, recovering herself, passed it over as the freak of a crazy wench who was maintained about the castle, and whose susceptible imagination had been observed to be much affected by the stories which Dame Gourlay delighted to tell concerning "the former family," so Lady Ashton named the Ravenswoods. The obnoxious picture was immediately removed, ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... for him whether I am on land or on sea. Some day, somewhere, I shall hear news of him. I wish you to remember that if ever you need a friend, you have only to let me know. I am ashamed to think that I have let this strange freak of circumstance find Robert Morton's daughter for me. I should have looked you up years ago. Do you know what a fellow's chum means to him when he is a boy at school?" Captain Moore queried, less seriously. "Don't you think a man ought to wish to do ...
— Madge Morton's Secret • Amy D. V. Chalmers
... direction of affairs, and to have left his energetic wife to follow her own will about details. There was no doubt in that lady's mind as to the methods to be pursued. Her husband had been culpably weak, and had allowed himself to be swayed by the freak of a boy who hated work and wanted an excuse for idleness. Honore must be brought to reason, and be taught that "the way of transgressors is hard," and that people who refuse to take their fair share of life's labour must of necessity suffer ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... the popular practice, amongst men as well as women, of hiring the Hammam for private parties and picnicking in it during the greater part of the day. In this tale the bath would belong to the public and it was a mere freak of the bride to bathe with her bridegroom. "Respectable" ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... feathers. Everything else was absolutely natural. No knife had sculptured it. No hand had given a support to its uplifted arm. Even the dog which followed us appeared deceived, for he barked furiously at the strange intruder. There was to me a singular fascination in this solitary freak of nature; and, surrounded though I was by immeasurably greater wonders, I turned again and again to take a farewell look at this dark, slender figure, raising its hand, as if in threatening gesture to some ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... plans be not baulked by some latterday Railwayman-unionist freak, We'll make a bold bid ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 1st, 1920 • Various
... with a front tooth is Show Low," began Slim, speaking like a lecturer in a freak-show. "The one without a front tooth is Fresno, a California product. This yere chap with the water-dob hair is Sage-brush Charley. It makes him sore when you call him ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... echoed with a sensation of relief: then, after all, her secret had not been guessed: it was truly some freak of the Queen's, and she turned ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... before I reached home. But I was clear in my mind about one thing. I meant to present myself at the office in the morning, and if the chance were given me, to apprentice myself for a while. It was indeed a strange freak of destiny, that he should have been confronted by me with the same appeal that I had heard him make so short a time ago. Perhaps it were better called a strange freak of my caprice, for though of course my position was not premeditated, the words that I said to him were necessarily ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... almost submerged us. I caught Helena to the cabin-top to keep her drier from it, and the two boys also sprang to a point of safety. Mrs. Daniver, less agile, was caught by Peterson and Williams and held to the rail, wetted thoroughly. And by some freak of the wind, at that instant came fully the roar of the surf. We of the ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... actually descended, turning himself over and over till he came to the bottom." This story was told with such gravity, and with an air of such affectionate remembrance of a departed friend, that it was impossible to suppose this extraordinary freak an invention of Mr. Langton.' It must have been in the winter ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... pretty well that I won't hold that seat. What worries me is the fool use that some people will make of a freak election as a forerunner of doom. However, as I was saying about the Conference—I hope to get such a reasonable endorsation of Canada's stand on the main issues that our party here can work to victory advantage in the next election. I may as well be honest. Arthur Meighen, ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... ought to be prepared to find, as in point of fact we do find, within the main body of Judaism, and not merely as a freak of occasional eccentrics, distinct mystical tendencies. These tendencies have often been active well inside the sphere of the Law. Mysticism was, as we shall see, sometimes a revolt against Law; but it was often, ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... not in his mind when he started from the monastery; neither had he thought of it on the way, or of the dark history it had helped him to; in a freak, he took the seat he had formerly occupied, placed his arm along the coping of the parapet, and closed his eyes. And strange to say, the conversation of that day repeated itself almost word for word. Stranger still, it had now a significancy ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... was a broidery freak'd with tissue of images olden, 50 One whose curious art did blazon valour of heroes. Gazing forth from a beach of Dia the billow-resounding, Look'd on a vanish'd fleet, on Theseus quickly departing, Restless in unquell'd passion, a feverous heart, Ariadne. Scarcely ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... the critic to agree with Stuart's handling. To make his impressions fit with the pictures, the critic supposed that Stuart painted a smaller portrait of Jaudenes and started one of his wife, which through some freak of temper he left (as he frequently did) with only the head and part of the background finished. These being brought to Spain, some artist there finished the lady's portrait, painted from Stuart's original a companion piece of her husband, and added ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... shrill cry, as if to attract his attention; and then, after circling in the air above his head, came fluttering down, and lighted upon the gate-post at his elbow. It was Dorothy's parrot. But what did it mean by this unusual freak of familiarity? Paul spoke to the bird, which pleased it; and when he put out his hand to smooth its feathers, the parrot lifted its wings, and with a loud cackle exhibited a note which had been carefully tied beneath one of them. Henley relieved the animal ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... Harry, "what is all this about? It seems to me Rose ought to have had enough of her little friend by this time. What freak is this she has taken about the country, and a change ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... What most fortunate fate has thrown us together again? A very pleasant freak of destiny, truly. I left you last with an uncomfortable old gentleman, who was particularly obstinate in his opinions about the seignorial system, as I remember. He was right, my young friend, in condemning that system, eh? Perfectly right. I left it in disgust. ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... frequenting Cupido's shop—the rendezvous of the city's gayest set, a hotbed of gossip and practical jokes, a school of guitar playing and love songs that kept the whole neighborhood astir. Besides, Cupido was the freak of the city, the sharp-tongued but irresponsible practical joker, who was forgiven everything in advance, and could enjoy his idiosyncrasies and speak his mind about people without starting a riot against him. He was, for instance, the one person in Alcira who scoffed ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the Yuba, the gold had settled down and lay thick among the gravel. But most of the parties were sinking, and it was a long way down to the bed-rock; for the hills on both sides sloped steeply, and the Yuba must here at one time have rushed through a narrow gorge, until, in some wild freak, it brought down millions of tons of gravel, and resumed its course seventy ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty
... And I feel that our work in connection with the unraveling of the mystery and overcoming the enemy or enemies is but begun. It's a cinch that the thing is organized by human minds and is not any sort of a freak of the elements. Our work is cut out for us, all right, and I wish you would stick to George and me through ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... Alicia, impatiently, "that is not at all unlike my lady to have taken this silly freak into her head. I dare say she was afraid we should go into her rooms, and pry about among her pretty dresses, and meddle with her jewelry. It is very provoking, for the best pictures in the house are in that antechamber. There is her own ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... died from Edgar Crandall's face; he pulled his hat over the flaming helmet of hair. "I might have known such things ain't true," he said; "it was just a freak that saved Alec. There's no chance for a man, for a living, in these dam' mountains. They look big and open and free, but Greenstream's the littlest, meanest place on the earth. The paper-shavers own the sky and air. Well, I'll let the ground rot, ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... bleached cloth, and setting the trenchers (all the Mowbray plate had long ago gone in the King's service), wondering anxiously, meantime, what could have become of Walter, with many secret and painful misgivings, though she had been striving to persuade her mother that he was only absent on some freak of his own. ...
— The Pigeon Pie • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that, which of them would herself have dared ridicule in order to save him from ridicule? And in what light should he regard this suddenly prompted action on her part, which seemed to him so bewildering at the time, but which she appeared to look on as only a sort of half-humorous freak of friendship? ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... Story" and "The Cruise of the Jasper B." This satire on the azure-pedalled coteries of Washington Square has perhaps received more publicity than any other of Marquis's writings, but of all Don's drolleries I reserve my chief affection for Archy. The cockroach, endowed by some freak of transmigration with the shining soul of a vers libre poet, is a thoroughly Marquisian whimsy. I make no apology for quoting this prince of blattidae at some length. Many a commuter, opening his evening paper ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... took a step toward her. At that, she looked around for some place to hide in, the animal instinct of flight arising first, and darted from her brother into the graveyard. Rice beheld this freak with quizzical surprise, but he had noted the disappearance of more than one maid through that gate, and was glad to have ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... boyish freak, perpetrated rather in thoughtlessness than malice: but the tone of the answer, however simple the words, manifestly breathed revenge. Richard de Clare was not an ill-natured boy. But he had been taught from his babyhood that a Jew was the scum of the ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... What freak of criticism can induce a man who has written such poetry as this, to discard it, and say it is not poetry? Mr. Arnold is privileged to speak of his own poems, but no other critic could speak so ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... is in the Dismal Swamp that Lake Drummond was discovered, by whom I do not know, but is said to have been found by a man named Drummond, whose name it bears; that will make no difference with me, the question is, how came it there? Was it a freak of nature, or was it caused by warring of the elements, is a question for the consideration of those who visit it? That it was the effect of fire caused by lightning setting fire to the turf, or some dead tree, there can be no doubt. At what time in the Christian ...
— The Dismal Swamp and Lake Drummond, Early recollections - Vivid portrayal of Amusing Scenes • Robert Arnold
... the true Cavalier, gay, devil-may- care in disposition, but by some freak of fate a clergyman of Dean Prior, in South Devon, a county made famous by him and Blackmore. Here, in a country parish, he lived discontentedly, longing for the joys of London and the Mermaid Tavern, his bachelor establishment consisting of an old housekeeper, a cat, a dog, a goose, a tame ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... after the boy, who was walking up the street, and she couldn't help thinking how very little it was, and how she hoped he would have given her more. She looked at the little broom he had ruined, and everything seemed sadder than before. Then, by some strange freak, her mind ran off to the gardens where her mother slept, as it always did when darkness gathered round her, and she longed, more than ever before, to throw herself on the ground there, and quietly sleep a long, long time. During the whole day she had received but a few pennies; ...
— The Angel Children - or, Stories from Cloud-Land • Charlotte M. Higgins
... just then for praising a play at a little Boulevard theatre, prompted perhaps by a wish to appear original that besets us all, or due to some freak of fashion. The countess showed some signs of a wish to see the floured face of the actor who had so delighted several people of taste, and I obtained the honor of taking her to a first presentation of some wretched farce or other. A box scarcely cost five francs, but I had not a brass farthing. ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... impossible to avoid contrasting this beautiful account of elegant dissipation with the noted freak of Sir Charles Sedley, to whom it is addressed. In June 1663, being in company with Lord Buckhurst and Sir Thomas Ogle, in a tavern in Bowstreet, and having become furious with intoxication, they not only exposed themselves, by ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... "I know you will not be afraid," he said, "and if Anderton gets through it may not be long before help arrives. Also it must be remembered that we may be disturbing ourselves unnecessarily. That," he nodded towards the arrow—"may be no more than the malicious freak of some hunter returning home, and ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... from what I saw and heard, was, that, the artist, by some unaccountable freak of fate, or perhaps in some fit of enthusiastic and fanciful passion, had been induced to unite himself with a person altogether beneath him, and that the natural result, entire and speedy disgust, had ensued. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... on perfunctorily, feeling that she was not carrying her audience with her, and longing for the time when she could take her letter away and have it all to herself. If she stopped now, Christine, in this sudden new freak of distrustfulness, would be ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... a streak of light in the western sky, whether caused by the low-hanging, mist-hidden moon or a freak reflection of the coming dawn. Against that patch of brightness the northern headland of Lost Island loomed up high and barren save for its one tall tree. But it was neither headland nor tree that caught Jerry's attention and caused the gasp ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... out of the window. Oh, yes, of course I know you will reimburse me, but that isn't the question; and, anyway, it's the opinion of your friends, old man, that you will not be worse off for a little abstinence from fleshly pleasures. You are positively a freak in this famine-cursed city ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... stick, banged, reloaded, banged again, reloaded and banged yet again. I took up a stick and presented it—bang! With amazing verisimilitude Beppo rolled over—shot through the heart. Really, for a moment I had a mad apprehension that in some occult way, some freak of hypnotic suggestion, I had actually wrought the child harm. I stood there breathlessly triumphant and wondering whether it was now my business to rush in and scalp the defenceless prisoners. I became aware of a head and a stick ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... the alarm will go out, and eventually some weapon will be brought out to stop us. But if we work quickly, there's a good chance that we can finish everything before Leider is able to step in with some devilish freak instrument. Take it easy until we've got the clubs, and then cut loose for all you're worth. Captain Crane, it's a great pity you're a woman. In all this ...
— The Winged Men of Orcon - A Complete Novelette • David R. Sparks
... Hermit witnessed an amusing performance. Some strange freak seemed to possess the porcupine, for he slowly circled the tree behind which the lynx crouched, stopping every few steps to sniff at the bark or to peer up into the branches. For a moment the big cat held his ground, but the sight of the queer apparition bearing ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer
... Monotremes. These Monotremes may be called half-bird and half-mammal. One of the most characteristic of their family is the Ornithorhynchus, or Duck-bill, which the early naturalists first thought was a fraud of the taxidermists, or bird-stuffers, and then, when finally convinced, deemed it a "freak-of-nature." But it is not a freak creature, but a "connecting-link" between the two great families of creatures. This animal presents a startling appearance to the observer who witnesses it for the first time. It resembles a beaver, having a soft furry coat, but also has a horny, flat bill ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... the "Colored American" is correct in the stand taken, and is supported by the well-thinking colored people of the entire country. The word "Afro-American" grew out of a freak at Chicago, and is only generally used by the "Age" and a few others; and as far as its application is concerned, it can never be acceptable, and will die a natural death, without even a struggle ...
— Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading • Various
... a look at that old picture; got up, as you say, on a chair to do so. Wasn't that the freak of an idle man, wandering, he hardly knows why, from room to room in an old ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... civilly, and bowed, to this strange freak of an introduction; and, of course, I rose and Curtsied low, and waited his commands to sit again; which were given instantly, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... no, or none, some, this, that, these, those. The pronominal adjectives which precede the article, are all, both, many, such, and what; as, "All the world,"—"Both the judges,"—"Many a[336] mile,"—"Such a chasm,"—"What a freak." In like manner, any adjective of quality, when its meaning is limited by the adverb too, so, as, or how, is put before the article; as, "Too great a study of strength, is found to betray writers into a harsh manner."—Blair's ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... from hevin' it, 'kase they 'spise him more'n ye. An' hyar she's runned off an' married old Tom Kittredge's gran'son, Josiah Kittredge's son—when our folks 'ain't spoke ter none o' 'em fur fifty year—Josiah Kittredge's son—ha! ha! ha!" He laughed aloud in tuneless scorn of himself and of this freak of froward destiny and then fell to wringing his hands ...
— His "Day In Court" - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... one came from the skipper of an express freighter. He blasted off this morning and ran through this so-called dirt. He thought it was just a freak of nature but reported it to be on ...
— On the Trail of the Space Pirates • Carey Rockwell
... pet opportunity in those glad days was when some freak of manner in friend or visitor suggested a new game. We used to wish, sometimes, that these kind people understood how much pleasure they were giving to the artless babe who was studying them with such interest, while they, all unconscious of ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... heard yer Leddieship laugh at that auld rhyme," replied the servitor. "Fear naething for a madman's freak. But it's true that three oaks by its side are blasted, riven and laid on the earth, and ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... satisfaction, which you may or may not be able to understand, that this cabin and everything in it is the work of my hands—of stuff I've packed in here with all sorts of effort from the outside. Maybe I'm a freak. But I'm proud of this place. Barring the inevitable lonesomeness that comes now and then, I can be happier here than any place I've ever struck yet. This ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... the Ponte di Paradiso, with its Gothic arch; the painted plates in the Museo Civico; and palace after palace, loved for some quaint piece of tracery, some moulding full of mediaeval symbolism, some fierce impossible Renaissance freak of fancy. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... marriage she dressed herself in her best garments and put on all her ornaments. Then she told her parents she was going to meet her little lover, the chieftain of the green plume, who was waiting for her at the Spirit Grove. Supposing she was going to act some harmless freak, they let her go. When she did not return at sunset alarm was felt; with lighted torches the gloomy pine forest was searched, but no trace of the girl was ever found, and the parents mourned the loss of a daughter ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... to England from my second sojourn in West Africa, I discovered, to my alarm, that I was, by a freak of fate, the sea- serpent of the season, I published, in order to escape from this reputation, a very condensed, much abridged version of my experiences in Lower Guinea; and I thought that I need never explain about myself ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... world. But the interest is not what is commonly called philosophic, it is personal. Because the Revolution is the dominant fact in modern history, therefore people suppose that the doings of this or that provincial lawyer, tossed into temporary eminence and eternal infamy by some freak of the revolutionary wave, or the atrocities committed by this or that mob, half drunk with blood, rhetoric, and alcohol, are of transcendent importance. In truth their interest is great, but their importance is small. What we are concerned to know as students of the philosophy ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... and ended abruptly, as if in a freak of the upheaval a tornado had picked up the end of a canyon somewhere, turned it over several times in transit and finally dropped it bottom side up on the desert, breaking it open when it fell and letting ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... beyond the furious race of white-capped billows that poured from the great river for miles into the sea. Then they turned and made for the group of half-submerged mountains and scattered rocks that Nature, in some freak of fury, had thrown into the throat of Seven Islands Bay. That was a difficult passage. The black shores were swept by headlong tides. Tusks of granite tore the waves. Baffled and perplexed, the wind flapped and whirled among the cliffs. Through all this the little boat buffeted bravely on till ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... measures, however obnoxious, crammed down its throat. This Government has lost ground in public opinion, they were daily falling lower, and these predestinated idiots come and bolster them up just when they most want it. Tavistock acknowledged to me that they were unpopular, and that this freak had been of vast service to them; consequently they are all elated to the greatest degree. The Tories are sulky and crestfallen; moderate men are vexed, disappointed, grieved; and the Radicals stand grinning by, chuckling at the sight of the Conservatives (at least those who so call themselves, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... few freak clothes make you feel, don't they? Mr. Robert begins cuttin' up at once, and even Ferdie shows signs of wantin' to indulge in frivolous motions, if he only knew how. The reg'lar movie people gets the idea this is ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... she returned to Val de Cire, and her husband, who had not expected her for some time, blamed her for a freak. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... breathless attention of every one. In a few moments he had won a sum variously estimated at from eighty to a hundred thousand dollars. A rumor went round the room that it was a concerted attempt to "break the bank" rather than the drunken freak of a Western miner, dazzled by some successful strike. To this theory the man's careless and indifferent bearing towards his extraordinary gains lent great credence. The attempt, if such it was, however, ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... Hazen had really said that they should have the cattle. I replied in the affirmative, and added that I had been directed to bring the cattle to them. I followed this up with a very dignified inquiry, asking why his young men had treated me so. The old wretch intimated that it was only a 'freak of the boys'; that the young men wanted to see if I was brave; in fact, they had only meant to test me, and the whole thing was ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... a menace. The only thing that had escaped destruction in that shattering blast was the strange head-piece the thing had worn. Either the small shining globe was practically indestructible, or else it had been spared by some odd freak of the explosive, for it still blazed in baleful opalescence atop the ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... there except to taste the brew; a proceeding which would have been deemed humorous but for the air of stern rigidity which that auctioneer's face preserved, tending to show that the eccentricity was a result of that absence of mind which is engendered by the press of affairs, and no freak of fancy ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... in sight; For Providence, that dealt him one long night, Had given, in pity to the blooming boy, Feelings more exquisitely tuned to joy. Fond to excess was he of all that grew; The morning blossom sprinkled o'er with dew, Across his path, as if in playful freak, Would dash his brow, and weep upon his cheek; Each varying leaf that brush'd where'er he came, Press'd to his rosy lip he call'd by name; He grasp'd the saplings, measured every bough, Inhaled the fragrance that the spring months throw Profusely round, till his young heart confess'd ...
— May Day With The Muses • Robert Bloomfield
... two natural objects east of the Rocky Mountains that he thought entitled to the epithet "sublime" were Niagara Falls and the Natural Bridge; and as for scenery, he did not know of any more noble and refined than this region of the Blue Ridge. Take away the Bridge altogether, which is a mere freak, and the place would still possess, he said, a charm unique. Since the enlargement of hotel facilities and the conversion of this princely domain into a grand park, it has become a favorite summer ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... with more or less conviction and indignation. But, whatever might chance to be the truth about that, it was plain that the duchess had something to say for herself when she declined to receive the lady. Her refusal was no idle freak, but a fixed determination, to which she would probably adhere. And, in fact, adhere to it she did, even under some ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... Told her he was a great admirer of her ladyship once on a time—a boyish freak—that sort of thing! Pretends all the gilt is off the gingerbread now. Wish I had been there when Sir Hamilton turned up at the Towers, ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... breadth of the tracks, too, surprised him not a little. They were much deeper and broader than those caused by any species of cart he had yet seen or heard of in the country, and the width apart was so great, that he began to suspect he must have mistaken a curious freak of nature for the tracks of a gigantic vehicle. Following the track for some distance, he came to a muddy spot, where the footprints of men and horses became distinctly visible. A little further on he passed the mouth of what appeared to be a cavern, and, ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... "What freak is this?" quoth Stuyvesant grim. Quoth Herman, "'Twas a charger brave— Like my first bride in eye and limb— A wedding-gift; indulge the whim! And from his back to plunge, I crave, A bridegroom, in ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... said it, Pearl laughed, and began to dance up and down, with the humorsome gesticulation of a little imp, whose next freak might be to fly up ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... humor was not of a kind to comprehend this freak of Vere's, was for once really taken aback. There were two sliding doors to the cabin, one opening into the bows of the launch, the other into the stern. He got up, looking very grave and rather confused, and opened the former. The wind rushed in, carrying with it spray from the sea. ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... The freak memory is not worth striving for, but a good working memory decidedly is. Your power as a speaker will depend to a large extent upon your ability to retain impressions and call them forth when occasion demands, and that sort of memory is ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... grave in Woodlawn was supposed to be sacred to him and to his mother, was overlooked in the silent contemplation of what an even less sophisticated person might have been justified in describing as a "freak." Nothing was farther from his mind, however, than the desire or impulse to be disrespectful. And yet, as he was about to turn away from this sombre pile, he leaned over and struck a match on one ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... account than the Human. The Horse, the Hound, the Pheasant, the Bag-fox, and, fifthly, Man, were there the gradations of rank; and a compound being—half man, half brute—was, by a not unparalleled freak of fortune, the master of all. Carew had never fed his mares with human flesh, but there was a legend that he had rubbed a friend over with anise-seed, and offered that dainty morsel to his dogs. The victim was snatched ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... Jebel el-Murayt'bah ("of the Little Step") is lumpy grey granite of the coarsest elements, whose false strata, tilted up till they have become quasi-vertical, and worn down to pillars and drums, crown the crest like gigantic columnar crystallizations. We shall see the same freak of nature far more grandly developed into the "Pins" of the Shrr. It has evidently upraised the trap, of which large and small blocks are here and there imbedded in it. The granite is cut in its turn by long horizontal dykes of the hardest quadrangular basalt, occasionally ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... but to hear you say so, makes me feel like a man. Then I shall do for my mother what you did for yours, and get Josephine out of that school-teaching freak of hers. She has actually gone and done it, Scheffer.... Worth money, eh? Then I shall do some things as well as others, ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the lad could see the bonfire still blazing, casting the foreground in all the deeper shadow from its flickering light; and, never did he regret anything more in his life than the sudden impulse which had led him into so dangerous a freak, as ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... there, declared with so much violence against it, that I was obliged to submit, and to accept of another lodging, about twelve doors off, which Mrs. Moore recommended. And all the advantage I could obtain was, that Will., unknown to my spouse, and for fear of a freak, should lie ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... or was it changed by a freak of my brain? I cannot tell, but I felt as though I had been suddenly awakened. It seemed as though a change had taken place in the motion of the schooner, which was sliding along on the surface of the quiet sea, with a ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... and a hundred old codgers who are so broken into the office system that they think they are perfectly happy—don't know how much fun in life they miss. Still, they're no worse than the adherents to any other paralyzed system. Look at the comparatively intelligent people who fall for any freak religious system and let it make their lives miserable. I suppose that when the world has no more war or tuberculosis, then offices will be exciting places to work in—but not till then. And meantime, if the typical business man ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... the dominant race of Pellucidar. By a strange freak of evolution her kind had first developed the power of reason in that world ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Tyrant's frenzies, rancour, spites, He knew as little as men's claim on rights. A kindness for old servants, early friends, Was constant in him while they served his ends; And if irascible, 'twas the moment's reek From fires diverted by some gusty freak. His Policy the act which breeds the act Prevised, in issues accurately summed From reckonings of men's tempers, terrors, needs:- That universal army, which he leads Who builds Imperial on Imperious Fact. Within his hot ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... whose first sewing-machine was smashed by a Boston mob; with McCormick, whose first reaper was called "a cross between an Astley chariot, a wheelbarrow, and a flying-machine"; with Morse, whom ten Congresses regarded as a nuisance; with Cyrus Field, whose Atlantic Cable was denounced as "a mad freak of stubborn ignorance"; and with Westinghouse, who was called a fool for proposing "to stop a railroad ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... the west end of the nave, with which it is connected by an arch, low at first, but loftier as time goes on, until, in later Gothic churches, its height frequently is nearly that of the whole nave. The remaining three walls are usually external, and clear of the aisles. But sometimes, owing to a freak of planning, or, more frequently, owing to the conditions of the site, the tower is, as at Bibury, at the west end of one of the aisles. At Gedling in Nottinghamshire the tower and spire are at the end of the ...
— The Ground Plan of the English Parish Church • A. Hamilton Thompson
... wrecked fort followed and among other interesting sights the guide pointed out the trail of the famous freak shot that killed the cow. The shell went first through a glass window, then through the wall at the back of the room, into a second chamber, where, without exploding, it had amputated a hind leg of the milch cow whose loss is still mourned by two ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... a tiny dwarf! Neither within nor without a freak exhibition had I seen so small a human being! A kind of supernatural dread gripped me by the throat at sight of it. As it turned with animal activity and bounded into my bathroom, I caught a three-quarter view of the creature's swollen, incredible head—which was nearly as large ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... lengthwise by a great groove down the centre, and with a curiously wrinkled or folded surface. The two halves of the brain, called hemispheres (though more nearly the shape of a coffee-bean), are alike; and each one, by some curious twist, or freak, of nature, receives messages from, and controls, the opposite half of the body—the right half controlling the left side of the body, while the left half controls the right side of the body. Thus an injury or a hemorrhage on the left ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... on a small flat car. The propelling power is furnished by two husky natives who stand on either side of the bench and literally shove the vehicle along with long sticks. It is like paddling a railroad canoe. This transportation freak is technically called a maculla. The strong-armed paddlers were able to develop an astonishing speed. I think that this is the only muscle-power railroad in the world. Light engines are employed for hauling ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... with Flora for a time. Come, come, Mr. Holland, you ought, and you shall know all; then you can come to a judgment for yourself. This way, sir. You cannot, in the wildest freak of your imagination, guess that which I have now ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... was a boyish freak, perpetrated rather in thoughtlessness than malice: but the tone of the answer, however simple the words, manifestly breathed revenge. Richard de Clare was not an ill-natured boy. But he had been taught from his babyhood that a Jew was the scum ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... name of Gibbon Wakefield will probably be remembered as long as the history of Australia and New Zealand is read, the man himself was, during most of his active career, under a cloud. The abduction of an heiress—a mad freak for which he paid by imprisonment and disgrace—deprived him of the hope of ordinary public distinction. For many years he had to work masked—had to pour forth his views in anonymous tracts and letters, had to make pawns of dull men with respectable names. This ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... jealous mistress; she allows no divided affection." Are my affections divided? I think not, and I certainly do not confess any such thing to M. Mouillard, who has not yet forgotten what he calls "that freak" of a Degree in Arts. He builds some hopes upon me, and, in return, it is natural that I should build a ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... every trifling freak fellows were to be telling the monitors, we had better inaugurate at once the ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... or so, she did not chance to meet the poet on the boulevard; and since she wished to conquer her tenderness for him, one cannot doubt that all would have been well but for the Editor of L'Echo de la Butte. By a freak of fate, the Editor of L'Echo de la Butte was moved to invite monsieur Tricotrin to an affair of ceremony two days previous to the wedding. What followed? Naturally Tricotrin must present himself in evening dress. ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... instance, the only available forest fire was one to the south of the Ohio River. For all I know, soot from a very great fire south of the Ohio might fall in Montreal, Canada, and conceivably, by some freak of reflection, light from it might be seen in Montreal, but the earthquake is not assimilable with a forest fire. On the other hand, it will soon be our expression that profound darkness, fall of ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... them came up to me. I had heard this stranger speak, and did I think he could hold an audience? I gave assurance; he was a man of dignity, and would do them credit. They were afraid the newspapers would represent him as a freak, but of course their meeting would hardly fare very well in the papers anyhow. One of them asked, cautiously, how much of an extremist was he? Labor leaders were having a hard time these days to hold down ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... the greatest romantic actress in America! This man Douglass has got you hypnotized. Honestly, there's something uncanny about the way he has queered you. Brace up. Send him whirling. He isn't worth a minute of your time, Nellie—now, that's the fact. He's a crazy freak. Say the word and I'll fire him and ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... young, and such a wonderful musician. The men were more cold-blooded. They could not see that Bud's good looks or the haunting melody of his voice had any bearing whatever upon his winning a race. They called him a fool, and either refused to bet at all on such a freak proposition as a lame horse running against Skeeter, or bet against him. A few of the wise ones wondered if Jeff and his bunch were merely "stringing the kid along "; if they might not let him win a little, just to make him more ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... reflections, "if you do not know that what seems most improbable is what is most likely to be true. This maid is certainly not one of the flute-players or the like. Who knows what incomprehensible whim or freak may have brought her here? At any rate, it will be easier for her to keep her eyes open than it is ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... not very uncommon, nor, without a proper distinction of circumstances, to be condemned either as naughty or nonsensical. Howbeit, this, though far from the most aggravated, is perhaps the strangest instance on record of marital delinquency, and, moreover, as remarkable a freak as may be found in the whole list of human oddities. The wedded couple lived in London. The man, under pretence of going a journey, took lodgings in the next street to his own house, and there, unheard of by his wife or friends and without the shadow of a reason for such self-banishment, ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... as they had appeared on the night of that escapade, I realized that the real romance of life is made by memory, and that for these two old friends to be able thus to recall together across all those years that laughing freak of their young blood was still more romantic than the original escapade. But as I went on looking at Irene, with the bloom of her immortal youth upon her, I grew jealous of the General's share in that historic night. Well, never mind, it is I who take her to the theatre nowadays—and, after ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... with decision, yet kindly. Never should the event be made matter of public remark, nor should a letter or line of the former correspondence be rudely exposed. Let oblivion rest on the whole transaction. But so painful an issue should, if possible, be averted. For no freak of fancy, still less for the gibes and jests of others, should so important a connection be frustrated. The cause should be one that sober judgment will approve, to ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... coming out of the dining-room Lila caught sight of Bea waiting at the elevator door. Dodging three seniors, a maid with a tray, and a man with a truck full of trunks, she made a dash for the new arrival who in a sudden freak of perversity danced tantalizingly just ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... stood in the pelting rain and howling wind, with the roaring sea below him. Was it all a dream, or was this only another freak of capricious fate, which doomed him to eternal misery. The storm roared and the hungry sea ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... each, either, every, much, neither, no, or none, some, this, that, these, those. The pronominal adjectives which precede the article, are all, both, many, such, and what; as, "All the world,"—"Both the judges,"—"Many a[336] mile,"—"Such a chasm,"—"What a freak." In like manner, any adjective of quality, when its meaning is limited by the adverb too, so, as, or how, is put before the article; as, "Too great a study of strength, is found to betray writers into a harsh manner."—Blair's Rhet., p. 179. "Like many an other poor wretch, I now ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... me hungry to look at them and beseeched of me to lift the orange petticoat I had on with the sunray pleats that there was nobody he said hed kneel down in the wet if I didnt so persevering he would too and ruin his new raincoat you never know what freak theyd take alone with you theyre so savage for it if anyone was passing so I lifted them a bit and touched his trousers outside the way I used to Gardner after with my ring hand to keep him from doing worse where it was too public ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... shelter between violent showers, and pedal vigorously against the stiff breeze. The prevailing weather is stormy, and inky clouds gather in massy banks at all points of the compass, culminating in violent outbursts of thunder and lightning, wind and rain. Occasionally, by some unaccountable freak of the elements, the monsoon veers completely around, and blowing a gale from the north, hustles me along over the cobbly surface at ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... than tease your uncle?" In it all Chip had found two subjects of wonderment: first, the strange egoism of this middle-aged woman who could see nothing in the expansion of her husband's affections but what was stolen from herself; and then, the extraordinary freak of marital loyalty that could keep a man like Emery Bland, with his refinement and his knowledge of the world, true to a woman whom he had once loved, no doubt, in a youthful way, but who was now his inferior by every token of character. A good enough woman she ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... up to a week or two ago I greatly liked the life I led. You said it would kill you in a month. Was it only last May that you pranced in the drawing-room in Grosvenor Street inveighing against 'the whole beastly show,' as you called it—the freak fashions, the ugly eccentric dances, the costly pageant balls, the shouldering, the striving, the worship of money, the gambling, the self-advertisement—all the abject vulgarity of it? And my set, the artistic, soulful literary set, you said was the worst of all: you actually described ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... speak, who begins to find out that some young wag of the company is "chaffing" him? Have you ever tried the sarcastic or Socratic method with a child? Little simple he or she, in the innocence of the simple heart, plays some silly freak, or makes some absurd remark, which you turn to ridicule. The little creature dimly perceives that you are making fun of him, writhes, blushes, grows uneasy, bursts into tears,—upon my word it is not fair to try the weapon of ridicule upon that innocent young victim. The awful objurgatory ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... entire saddle stock, and these three were the last left of the entire bunch. Now a little boy or girl, and many an older person, thinks that a spotted horse is the real thing, but practical cattle men know that this freak of color in range-bred horses is the result of in-and-in breeding, with consequent physical and mental deterioration. It was my good fortune that morning to get a good mount of horses,—three sorrels, two grays, two coyotes, a black, a ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... his ears to all the coarser or finer cynicism, and congratulate himself when the clown becomes shameless right before him, or the scientific satyr speaks out. There are even cases where enchantment mixes with the disgust—namely, where by a freak of nature, genius is bound to some such indiscreet billy-goat and ape, as in the case of the Abbe Galiani, the profoundest, acutest, and perhaps also filthiest man of his century—he was far profounder ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... I'm on my way, with fifty dollars' worth of freak posies in a box, and instructions to stick around Thundercaps as long as I can, with my eyes wide open and my ears stretched. Mr. Robert figures I'll land there too late for the night train back, anyway, and after that I'm to use my bean. If ...
— On With Torchy • Sewell Ford
... advantage which render the union of Scotland and Ireland with England a necessity apply with even more force to the several States of our Union. To let one, or two, or half a dozen of them break away in a freak of anger or unjust suspicion, or, still worse, from mistaken notions of sectional advantage, would be to fail in our duty to ourselves and our country, would be a fatal blindness to the lessons which immemorial history has been ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... in northern New England, why should not a poet or a painter come to his full growth here just as well? Yes, but if the gorgeous tree-flower is rare, and only as if by a freak of Nature springs up in a single spot among the beeches and alders, is there not as much reason to think the perfumed flower of imaginative genius will find it hard to be born and harder to spread its leaves in the clear, cold atmosphere of our ultra-temperate zone ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... automobilism of this great trial one can hardly overestimate it. There is no place here for the freak machine or scorching chauffeur, such as one has found in many great events of the past. A great touring contest over such a course would be bound to have important results in many ways. The ordinary class of circuit is a very ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... "patronage" of all the clowns and boors That squint their little narrow eyes at any freak of yours, Do leave them to your prosier friends,—such fellows ought to die When rhubarb is so very scarce and ipecac ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... returned George. 'These English folk might not thole to see my father's son in their hands without winning something out of him, and I saw by what passed the other day that thou and thy father would stand by me, hap what hap, and I'll never embroil him and peril the lady by my freak.' ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... And won at Rome encouragement from man Only because they stayed at home and span; While PERICLES in Attic Greek expressed The view that those least talked about were best. There were exceptions, but the normal Greek Regarded SAPPHO as a dangerous freak, And CLYTEMNESTRA for three thousand years Was pelted with unmitigated sneers, Till RICHARD STRAUSS and HOFMANNSTHAL combined To prove that she ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 8, 1914 • Various
... that freak," said the jester. "There be a dozen tailors and all the Queen's tirewomen frizzling up a good piece of cloth of gold for the lion's mane, covering a club with green damask with pricks, cutting out ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... wed the chinless moon-struck fool Sprung from five hundred years of idiocy Who now besought her hand; would force her bear Some heir to a calf's tongue and a coronet, Whose cherished taints of blood will please his friends With "Yea, Sir William's first-born hath the freak, The family freak, being embryonic. Yea, And with a fine half-wittedness, forsooth. Praise God, our children's children yet shall see The lord o' the manor muttering to himself At midnight by the gryphon-guarded gates, ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... for the welfare of the empire of which they are the guardians. But if, from whatever cause, they are unwilling to recall the noble lord, then I implore them to take care that he be immediately ordered to return to Calcutta. Who can say what new freak we may hear of by the next mail? I am quite confident that neither the Court of Directors nor Her Majesty's Ministers can look forward to the arrival of that mail without great uneasiness. Therefore I say, send Lord Ellenborough back to Calcutta. There at least he will ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... I charged them with it," replied Paul. "I knew there was something up when they got ahead on that jump. Then I asked if I might take a look at that freak engine, and they allowed me to do so. I smelled camphor the minute I stepped aboard. They even had not sense enough to hide the bottle, and it's against the present racing rules on this lake to doctor gas. So I taxed them with ...
— The Motor Girls On Cedar Lake - The Hermit of Fern Island • Margaret Penrose
... was on her way out to California, you see," Ellsworth began again; "down at El Paso she took a sudden freak for coming up here to see about the climate—lots of folks go West nowadays, you know, even in the spring. I'll warrant she's sick of the trip by now. A good climate has to have dust to season it. One of the ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... sitting in his study at midnight on the date named he had heard the Gipsy song from "Il Trovatore," which had been a favourite of his boy's, and being unable to trace the origin of the music, had finally thought that it was a freak of his imagination. The test connected with the quick-step had reference to a tune which the young man used to play upon the piccolo, but which was so rapid that he never could get it right, for which he was ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... more beautiful and more easily understood than most of Michael Angelo's allegorical figures. Nevertheless, I used sometimes, when looking at these four figures, to think that they had been created merely as architectural auxiliaries, and that their expression was an accident or a freak of the artist's fancy, rather than the expression of some particular thought: at other times I saw as much in them as most enthusiasts do—enough, I have no doubt, to astonish their great author himself. I believe that very few people really experience rapturous sensations ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... lady considerably; and she awoke her other daughters. Next, she learned from the maid that Aglaya had gone into the park before seven o'clock. The sisters made a joke of Aglaya's last freak, and told their mother that if she went into the park to look for her, Aglaya would probably be very angry with her, and that she was pretty sure to be sitting reading on the green bench that she had ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... hour before our melancholy-looking guest had fully improved the opportunity with which a benignant Providence had supplied him,—a freak in which, one might conclude, she seldom indulged. He ceased to eat, and sat for a moment gazing pensively at the dishes. It seemed to me—but in this I may possibly be mistaken—that a darker shade of ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... put on all her ornaments. Then she told her parents she was going to meet her little lover, the chieftain of the green plume, who was waiting for her at the Spirit Grove. Supposing she was going to act some harmless freak, they let her go. When she did not return at sunset alarm was felt; with lighted torches the gloomy pine forest was searched, but no trace of the girl was ever found, and the parents mourned the loss of ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... insanity, for, on one occasion, when rain prevented a contemplated progress to Hosho-ji, he sentenced the rain to imprisonment and caused a quantity to be confined in a vessel.* To the nation, however, all this meant something very much more than a mere freak. It meant that the treasury was depleted and that revenue had to be obtained by recourse to the abuses which Go-Sanjo had struggled so earnestly to check, the sale of offices and ranks, even in perpetuity, and the inclusion ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... Quatermain. I had that foolish fancy, a lover's freak, I suppose. When we married the curtain was removed although the brass rod on which it hung was left by some oversight. On my return to England after my loss, however, I found that I could not bear to look upon this lifeless likeness of one who had been taken from me so cruelly, and I ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... I think this freak of Law-less's may enable me to get rid of my rival—this Mr. Lowe Brown—and I should take it as the greatest kindness if you would go with him, and keep him in order; of course I must not be seen at all in ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... Tom simply; "I got the reputation of being kind o' queer, anyway, and they'll just say I had a freak. You can see for yourself," he added, "that it wouldn't be good for us to go back together—even if my foot was ...
— Tom Slade with the Colors • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... coffin and proceeds to fill it with some heavy substance which has been smuggled into the carriage under the pall. He screws the lid down and presently makes his way along the footboard to the next compartment. An athlete in good condition could do that; in fact, a sailor has done it in a drunken freak more than once. Mind you, I don't say that murder was intended in the first instance; but will presume that there was a struggle. The thief probably lost his temper, and perhaps Mr. Skidmore irritated ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... were laughing at the strange, ungirlish freak, And the boy was scared and panting, and so dashed he could not speak; And, "Miss, I have good apples," a bolder lad did cry; But she answered, "No, I thank you," from the ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... multiplied on all sides, "what would I not give for a full moon and a clear sky, just now. Bet your life, Dick, there are some very queer scenes being enacted all round us at this moment, had we but light to reveal them. I have come to the conclusion that this swamp is unique in many respects. By some freak of nature, things here are entirely different from what they are elsewhere. Even the vegetation is new and strange to me; and I am convinced that it is also the home of many forms of animal life unknown elsewhere. The exasperating part of the whole thing is that most of the creatures inhabiting ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... in his protest against this unexpected freak of fortune, for Sylvia seized the paper and read the paragraph aloud with such happy emphasis amid Prue's outcries and his father's applause, that Mark began to feel that he really had done something praiseworthy, and that the "daub" was not so ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... time a remarkable freak was perpetrated on the body of Capt. Broady. He was standing, when in an instant he was thrown to the ground with great force, and he lay there quivering as if life were the same as extinct. Col. Barlow saw him fall and ordered his body taken to the rear. This was done by a number of men, who remained ...
— Personal Recollections of the War of 1861 • Charles Augustus Fuller
... age, Mildred Carr had never known a single touch of love: she had not even felt particularly interested in her numerous admirers, but now this marble Galatea had by some freak of fate found a woman's heart, awkwardly enough, without the semblance of a supplication on the part of him whom she destined to play Pygmalion. And, when she examined herself by the light of the flame thus ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... them bluffs, to whar I hed a good look-out erlong the north trail. I laid out thar all night. The storm come up, an' I mighty nigh froze, but snuggled down inter ther snow an' stuck. When yer onc't get a killin' freak on, yer goin' through hell an' high water ter get yer man. Thet's how I felt. Well, just 'long 'bout daylight an outfit showed up. With my eyes half froze over, an' ther storm blowin' the snow in my face, I could n't see much—nuthin' ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... goes back ten degrees to convince a petty king of a barbarous people that he is not going to die of a boil; fire refused to burn; water positively declined to seek its level, but stands up like a wall; grains of sand become lice; common walking-sticks, to gratify a mere freak, twist themselves into serpents, and then swallow each other by way of exercise; murmuring streams, laughing at the attraction of gravitation, run up hill for years, following wandering tribes from a pure love of frolic; prophecy becomes altogether easier than history; the sons of God become enamored ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... might be worse. Don't blame you for feeling him a freak, but the schools in Jersey are footy affairs. If you want a fair sample of a school you'd have to try England proper. We've messed about here long enough. ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... people—and doubtless very honest, decent people, too—attributed those inexplicable emerald circles to supernatural agency; if, indeed, anything connected with the "good folks" or "men of peace" could properly be called supernatural in times when a belief in fairies and every sort of fairy freak and frolic was deemed the most correct and natural thing in the world. Did not these circles, it was argued, appear in the course of a single night? In the sequestered woodland glade, nor herd nor milkmaid could see anything odd or unusual as the sun went down, and lo! ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... had grumbled at first at the labor which this freak of his masters entailed. But as the work went on and he saw how snug and comfortable was the result, he took a pride in it, and the time was not far off when its utility was to become manifest. Indeed, later on in the winter the greater portion ...
— Jack Archer • G. A. Henty
... that night FitzHugh looked us up, an' Joanne thought she'd been dreamin'. He didn't have any help, but his intention was to finish us alone—murder us asleep—when Joanne cried out. Joe says it was just a devil's freak that took 'im to the top of the mountain alone that night. He saw our fire an' came ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... wipe out the disgrace you have cast upon yourself and your family," added the major warmly. "I induced your officers to look upon it as a freak of a boy, and by returning to your duty you can soon wipe ...
— Taken by the Enemy • Oliver Optic
... deeply interested. "I've understood that tremendous prices were being paid out for that scarce skin; but is Cale meaning to try and raise black or silver foxes for the market? I was told by several people that they considered the silver fox only a freak, and that they would never breed true to species. How about ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... concerning his, Dayton's, conversation with Louis Napoleon, points to Europe being likewise menaced by revolutionists. Unnecessary spread-eagleism, and an awful want of any, even diplomatic, tact. I hope that Mr. Dayton, who has so much sound sense and discernment, will keep to himself this freak of ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... in Hyde Park, I suppose," he said to himself, "or in one of his pirate's caves. What a story he could write if he had the talent. What a freak of chance which set him down here amongst us—well born and educated and yet as much a prisoner as the poorest. Some day we shall hear of him—I am convinced of it. We shall hear of Alban Kennedy and claim his acquaintance as wise people do when a ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... whispered Sah-luma to his companion,—"how yon aged fool wears upon his breast the Symbol of his own Prophecy? 'Tis the maddest freak to thus display his death-warrant!—Only a month ago the King issued a decree, warning all those whom it might concern, that any one of his born subjects presuming to carry the sign of Khosrul's newly invented Faith should surely die! ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... next week. I have been here since Friday as much a hermit as yourself. I wanted air and quiet, having been much fatigued on my nephew's amendment, trying to dissuade him from making the campaign with his militia; but in vain! I now dread hearing of some eccentric freak. I am sorry Mr. Tyson has quite dropped me, though he sometimes comes to town. I am still more concerned at your frequent disorders-I hope their chief seat is ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... Clotilda," she interrupts; "remember there is a wide difference between us. Do not cross Uncle; he is kind, but he may get a freak into his ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... "About a singular freak of Nature, a curious effect of chance. Do you know, now, in what kind of soil that man of self-denial, that poor one in spirit, ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... was two live specimens in one. When I asked why it was impossible to catch the animal, he informed me that it had eight legs with which to run. Four of the legs came out of the back, and, when tired with using the four lower ones, it just turned over and ran with the upper set. I did not see this freak, so add the salt to your taste, ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... looked quite "skeery," doubtless taking the old captain and his black charger for quite a different individual! It was some time before order and decorum were restored, as it was much easier for the judge to order Captain Maguire to be arrested for his freak, than to do it, "Bonny Doon" not being disposed to let any man approach her head or heels. They shut the captain up, finally, for contempt of court, and fined him twenty dollars, but he escaped the disagreeable attitude of sustaining the suit of an enemy. At another time, the captain, ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... in a lengthy corridor in the rear building, where there were no great signs of life. Through a door I could see a long room filled with ornaments, pictures, furniture, rugs, and all the vast freak collections of a property room. Along the side of the hallway itself was a line of steel lockers of ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... would have run no slight risk in so doing. But Francis had no desire to be caught, and perhaps imprisoned for a considerable time, until he was able to convince the council that his share of the night's work had been merely the result of a boyish freak. With two strokes of his oar, therefore, he swept the boat's head round, thereby throwing their pursuers directly astern of them; then he and Giuseppi threw their whole weight into the stroke, and the boat ...
— The Lion of Saint Mark - A Story of Venice in the Fourteenth Century • G. A. Henty
... a city of people given over to the meditative, if sympathetic, silence. It was an artificial city sprung from the sterile seeds of legislature, and thriving on the arid food of Bills. It was a mere habitation of governments. It was a freak city created coldly by an act of Solomonic wisdom. Before 1858 it was a drowsy French portage village, sitting inertly at the fork of the Ottawa and Rideau rivers, concerning itself only with the lumber trade, almost inattentive to the battle which Montreal and Quebec, Toronto ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... writing of himself, often uses these three letters in playful allusion to a freak of his trusty henchman Tom Purdie, who, in his joy on hearing of the baronetcy, proceeded to mark every sheep on the estate with a large letter "S" in addition to the owner's initials, W.S., which, according to custom, had already been stamped ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... and he not one for attack. But though reason argued well, it did not dislodge his longing. He would have been perfectly happy to have braved her indignation for a single glance at her face. He walked back, lighting his pipe. Who could she be? What peculiar whimsical freak had sent her singing past his window at one o'clock of the morning? A grand opera singer, returning home from a late supper? But he dismissed this opinion even as he advanced it. He knew something about grand opera singers. They attend ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... And they soon after reached the hermitage of Arishtanemi, son of Kasyapa. And saluting that great Muni, so constant in austerity, they all remained standing, while the Muni, on his part, busied himself about their reception. And they said unto the illustrious Muni, 'By a freak of destiny, we have ceased to merit thy welcome: indeed, we have killed a Brahmana!' And the regenerate Rishi said to them, 'How hath a Brahmana come to be killed by you, and say where may be he? Do ye all witness the power of my ascetic practices!' And they, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... impartially consider the career of this potentate, that he was by no means of a sane mind. In short, to speak plainly, he was mad, and deserved a strait-waistcoat as richly as any straw-crowned monarch in Bedlam. A single instance, in my opinion, fully substantiates this. I allude to his absurd freak at Frederickshall, when, in order to discover how long he could exist without nourishment, he abstained from all kinds of food for more than seventy hours! Now, would any man in his senses have done this? Would Louis XVIII., for instance, that wise ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 290 - Volume X. No. 290. Saturday, December 29, 1827. • Various
... once finding myself, by some freak of mocking destiny, in a house in which two bores had established fortified camps. On the first night, we all became so dazed with intolerable dulness, that our powers of resistance faded away to the vanishing point. Both bores sallied out from their ramparts, laid ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 3, 1892 • Various
... his arrival in an adjoining parlor. O'Leary enters the room, where he finds, sitting at the table, with the whole correspondence before him, his brother friar, Lawrence Callanan, who, either from an eccentric freak, or from a wish to call O'Leary's controversial powers into action, had thus drawn him into a lengthened correspondence. The joke, in O'Leary's opinion, however, was carried too far, and it required the sacrifice of the correspondence ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... flower, after having touched them all at first with that heavenly timidness, the shadow of Proserpine's; and gilded them with celestial gathering, and never stops on their spots, or their bodily shape, while Milton sticks in the stains upon them, and puts us off with that unhappy freak of jet in the very flower that without this bit of paper-staining would have been the most precious to us of all. "There is pansies, that's ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... Clemence's "strange freak," as they called it in the little village, was not condemned by every one. There were a few liberal-minded ones, who saw at once how the case stood, and resolved to uphold the girl in her course, though they feared for ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... summer;—for all the English orchises are here: that which so curiously imitates the dead oak leaf, that again which imitates the human figure; the commonest but most pretty bee orchis, and the parallel ones which are called after the spider, the frog, and the fly. Strange freak of nature this, in a lower order of creation, to mimic her own handyworks in a higher!—to mimic even our human mimicry!—for that which is called the man orchis is most like the imitation of a human figure that a child might cut from colored paper. ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... cause I did not understand. Then, too, I was threatened with the wretched condition of an object of common curiosity. If I was going to be gazed at by this officer and his men,—if I was to be regarded as a freak,—my way certainly did not ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... suddenly bounded forward; but as Grant followed he could see that the cause was the example of Phemie, who had, in some mad freak, dashed out in a frantic gallop. A half-dozen of the younger people hilariously accepted the challenge; the excitement was communicated to the others, until the whole cavalcade was sweeping down the slope. Grant was still at Mrs. Ashwood's side, restraining ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... shuddered slightly, and by a singular freak of my brain pictured to myself Monsieur Georges—Georges—my husband—in a cotton night cap and a dressing-gown. The vision flashed across my mind in the midst of the storm. I saw him just as plainly as if he had been there. It was dreadful. The nightcap came over his forehead, down ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... as the name indicates, consists of two sets of planes, one above the other. There are some triplanes, but they have not been very successful, and there are some freak aeroplanes built with as many as ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis
... to speak in that way of your client you would be very angry with me. Besides, what does it all amount to? Will the old gentleman say that he gave the letter into his son's hands, so that, even if such a freak should have come into my client's head, he could have signed it and sent it off? If I understand, Mr Longestaffe says that he locked the letter up in a drawer in the very room which Melmotte occupied, ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... ledges or among the hanging roots near the tops of embankments, and on the rafters or beams of old buildings. The nests are made of mud, moss and grass, lined with feathers. The four or five eggs measure .75 x .55. Occasionally, eggs will be found that have a few minute spots of reddish brown. Freak situations in which to locate their nests are often chosen by these birds, such as the brake beam of a freight car, in the crevices of old wells, hen houses, etc. The birds are one of the most useful that we have; being very active and continually on the alert for ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... creaked and wobbled past apricot hedges and detached houses and huts, and got into an open country without a tree, but here and there a stunted camel-thorn. The soil was arid, and grew little food for man or beast; yet, by a singular freak of nature, it put forth abundantly things that here at home we find it harder to raise than homely grass and oats; the ground was thickly clad with flowers of delightful hues; pyramids of snow or rose-color bordered the track; yellow and crimson stars bejewelled ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... from Edgar Crandall's face; he pulled his hat over the flaming helmet of hair. "I might have known such things ain't true," he said; "it was just a freak that saved Alec. There's no chance for a man, for a living, in these dam' mountains. They look big and open and free, but Greenstream's the littlest, meanest place on the earth. The paper-shavers own the sky and air. Well, I'll ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... other edge of the avenue the action is a little different. The midshipman, full of youthful freak, determines on having his "lark." He sees the chance, and cannot restrain himself. As Calderon sweeps past, he draws his dirk, and pricks the Californian's horse in the hip. The animal, maddened by the pain, springs upward, and then shoots ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... the affairs of their dioceses, and a sort of courts were gradually formed, where these pompous ecclesiastics gave audience, and received the homage of a cringing multitude" (p. 123). Superstition performed its maddest freak in the Stylites, men "who stood motionless on the tops of pillars;" the original maniac being one Simon, a Syrian, who actually spent thirty-seven years of his life on pillars, the last of which was forty cubits ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... occasion ordered a sumptuous entertainment there, in which he alone took part. This rustic Sardanapalus returned from Italy so passionately charmed with the scenery of that beautiful country that, by a sudden freak of enthusiasm, he spent four or five millions in order to represent in his park the scenes of which he had pictures in his portfolio. The most charming contrasts of foliage, the rarest trees, long valleys, and prospects ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... By a curious freak of nature, the tendency of the channel of the Mississippi is always toward one or the other of its banks, being influenced by the direction of its bends. The principle is one of nicely regulated refraction. ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Arcadia was for many years after his death one of the most popular books in the country. His prose, as prose, is not equal to his friend Raleigh's, being less condensed and stately. It is too full of fancy in thought and freak in rhetoric to find now-a-days more than a very limited number of readers; and a good deal of the verse that is set in it, is obscure and uninteresting, partly from some false notions of poetic composition which he and his ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... wealth. Nor in the vain luxury of New York can we detect anything save the signs of age. It is only in modern America that the mad extravagance of Nero's Rome may be matched. There the banquet of Trimalchio might be presented without surprise and without reproach. It differs from what are known as "freak dinners" only in the superiority of its invention and in the ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... Leddieship laugh at that auld rhyme," replied the servitor. "Fear naething for a madman's freak. But it's true that three oaks by its side are blasted, riven and laid on the earth, and yet ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... inspiration of the Scriptures must be interpreted with this fact in mind. To find in these words of Paul the guarantee of the inspiration and infallibility of the books of the collection which are translated from the Hebrew, and not those which are written in Greek, is a freak of exegesis not more violent than fantastic. We know that Paul read and used some of these apocryphal books, and there are several of the books in our Hebrew Bible that he never quotes or refers to in the remotest way. The attempt which is often made to show ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... me, upon your honor, that when this freak of yours is over, and the bug business (good God!) settled to your satisfaction, you will then return home and follow my advice implicitly, ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... of the lightest. This descent on the Champs—Elysees had been a freak on Elise's part, who wished to do nothing so banal as take her companion to the Palais Royal. But the restaurant she had chosen, though of a much humbler kind than those which the rich tourist commonly associates with this part of ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Shirakawa's piety amounted to a species of insanity, for, on one occasion, when rain prevented a contemplated progress to Hosho-ji, he sentenced the rain to imprisonment and caused a quantity to be confined in a vessel.* To the nation, however, all this meant something very much more than a mere freak. It meant that the treasury was depleted and that revenue had to be obtained by recourse to the abuses which Go-Sanjo had struggled so earnestly to check, the sale of offices and ranks, even in perpetuity, and the inclusion of great tracts of State ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... dollars! Gentlemen from city and country rushed to Genin's store to buy their hats, many of them willing to pay even an extra dollar, if necessary, provided they could get a glimpse of Genin himself. This singular freak put thousands of dollars into the pocket of "Genin, the hatter," and yet I never heard it charged that he made poor hats, or that he would be guilty of an "imposition under fair pretences." On the contrary, he is a gentleman of probity, and of the ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... positive, so is it also deficient in the accidental properties of all the animals in its tribe, for it has no locomotion, stability, or endurance, neither goes to pasture, gives milk, chews the cud, nor performs any other function of the horned beast, but is a mere creation of the brain, begotten by a freak of the fancy and nourished by a conceit of ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... concerned for the safety of the poor lunatic. There was no knowing what mad freak might seize her at any moment; no one was within call, and that being the only boat there, there was no way of reaching her until she should return to the shore of her own accord; if indeed, she was capable of managing the boat so as to reach the land ...
— Elsie's children • Martha Finley
... existence and imposes itself on all. Constance had the strangest sensations in that bed, whose heavy dignity of ornament symbolized a past age; sensations of sacrilege and trespass, of being a naughty girl to whom punishment would accrue for this shocking freak. Not since she was quite tiny had she slept in that bed—one night with her mother, before her father's seizure, when he had been away. What a limitless, unfathomable bed it was then! Now it was just a bed—so she had to tell herself—like any other bed. The tiny ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... in those glad days was when some freak of manner in friend or visitor suggested a new game. We used to wish, sometimes, that these kind people understood how much pleasure they were giving to the artless babe who was studying them with such interest, while they, all unconscious of their real use, imagined probably she ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... charges to answer. He was accused of founding a new sect, a society for laziness; he was accused of holding strange opinions, opposed to the teaching of the Lutheran Church; he was accused of being a sham Christian, a sort of religious freak; and now he undertook the task of proving that these accusations were false, and of showing all fair-minded men in Germany that the Brethren at Herrnhut were as orthodox as Luther, as respected as the King, and as pious as good old Dr. ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... away from his native Alabama, that he has had but the most limited advantages of education, and that he has shared the portion of his race in hardship, poverty and toil. He does not know why he wrote these poems. It is an amazing thing that he should have done so—a freak, we may call it, of the wind of genius, which bloweth where it listeth and singles out one in ten thousand to find a fitting speech for the dumb thought and ...
— Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt • William James Edwards
... more than the choice of a foreign subject did the pretense of foreign authorship prove the servility of feeling prevailing at that time among the educated classes. This was in the first place, to be sure, the result of the freak that led Cooper originally to begin writing a novel; but it was a freak that would never have been carried out, after publication had been decided upon, had he not been fully aware of the fact that the least recommendation of a book to his countrymen would be the knowledge that it was composed ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... that strange wooing sped. Suffice it to say that at the expiration of an hour Maude Glendower had promised to be the wife of Dr. Kennedy when another spring should come. She had humbled herself to say that she regretted her girlish freak, and he had so far unbent his dignity as to say that he could not understand why she should be willing to leave the luxuries which surrounded her and go with him, a plain, old-fashioned man. Maude Glendower scorned to make him think that it was love which actuated her, and ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... some news for you," went on young Crawford, "did you know that Sam Redding has entered that freak motor boat he's been building in the yacht club regatta? He's out ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Eagle Patrol • Howard Payson
... it were turned upside down. Decorative painting in this sense may easily be carried so far as to seem incongruous and inept, in spite of its superficial attractiveness. The peril that threatens it is whim and freak. Some of Monticelli's, some of Matthew Maris's pictures, illustrate the exaggeration of the decorative impulse. After all, a painter must get his effect, whatever it be and however it may shun the literal and the exact, by rendering things with pigments. ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... d'y' call him) malion, That cut his mistress out of stone, Had not so hard a-hearted one. 330 She had a thousand jadish tricks, Worse than a mule that flings and kicks; 'Mong which one cross-grain'd freak she had, As insolent as strange and mad; She could love none, but only such 335 As scorn'd and hated her as much. 'Twas a strange riddle of a lady: Not love, if any lov'd her! Hey dey! So cowards never use their might, But against such as will not fight; 340 So some diseases have been found Only ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... with the valet he had already interviewed at Deepbrow. It was the result of his inquiry to which he referred when we met him at Scotland Yard to-night. Captain Vane had a large mole on his shoulder and a girl's name, together with a small device, tattooed on his forearm—a freak of his ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... on the tip of the tail states it to be sold by Fitch of Regent Street. The bait secures its amount of flat-fish; for that evening, Captain de Camp was more than usually lucky—he caught enough at ecarte to clear himself;—a freak of fortune that caused no asperity in the noble breast of Brown; for here are his own thoughts in his own words:—"December 26th, Wednesday (Boxing-day).—My dear friend, De Camp, has this day given us all tokens of the warmest attachment—sadly wanting to do something for me—'Colonial,' ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... Europe, Ishmael? you and the judge? Well, Merlin did start off at a tangent yesterday from Tanglewood. I suppose he is pining after his child, and has taken a sudden freak to rush over and see her. And as you are the staff of his age, of course, he would not think of undertaking so long a journey without the support of your company. Am I ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... scornful smiles and keen cutting jests had mortally offended many a partizan; and when positive work was to be done, Simon with all his fierceness and cruelty was far more to be depended on than Henry, who might at any time fly off upon some incalculable freak. To Richard's boyish recollection, if Simon had been the most tyrannical towards him in deed, Henry had been infinitely more annoying and provoking in the ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... which, among all her possessions, she most valued; but it had hitherto been reserved for summer occupation, or for perhaps two or three weeks at Easter, when the spring was exceptionally fine. The sudden determination to spend the coming winter in the house near Grasmere was considered a curious freak of Lady Maulevrier's, and she was constrained to explain her ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... my attendance. He will not, therefore, be surprised at my absence. I tell you, Roger,—I must go! Who would have expected the King to take it into his head to visit The Islands without a moment's warning! What a freak!" ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... cracked enough to make freak wills and not cracked enough to have them disputed on the ground of insanity. What did you do to him at Marvis ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... still softer shade than Combeferre. His name was Jehan, owing to that petty momentary freak which mingled with the powerful and profound movement whence sprang the very essential study of the Middle Ages. Jean Prouvaire was in love; he cultivated a pot of flowers, played on the flute, made verses, loved the people, pitied woman, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... game, anyway you play it, if you are disposed to be fat. No man living, who isn't a freak, can persist always in one diet. Nor can any man who has anything else on his mind be always exercising—especially after he has reached forty years of age, when there are so many better things to do and time is valuable, and the real idea of how to live has just begun ...
— The Fun of Getting Thin • Samuel G. Blythe
... fight with the crocodile; and coming straight from the encounter, had in some way connected the children with its conquered enemy. Murtagh's shout might have freshly incensed it; or, what to Saloo seemed more probable than all, the seizure of the child might be a wild freak suddenly striking the brain ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... steadily on their course. They knew that through those dismal portals they were to arrive at the most magnificent country in the world; they knew that awful screen concealed loveliness itself. It was a coquettish freak of nature, when dealing with European curiosity, as it came eagerly bounding to the Atlantic wave, to herald it through an avenue so sombre as to cause the wonders of the great valley of the Mississippi to burst with tenfold more force upon the bewildered gaze of those who, by the endurance ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... his worldly prospects, because they had led from the way of integrity; and early in the summer had gone to seek employment amongst the lumbering centres of the Ottawa. And away back there he had been tracked and joined by his faithful henchman, Dan Murphy. This strange freak on Scotty's part had no effect on Danny's warm heart. What cared he that his chum preferred working in the bush to a college education? That mattered little, so long as they were together. For had Scotty turned Mohammedan and gone ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... either one of these parts of the mind, mental disease results. The psychic is over-intensified in the emotional and intuitional functions of his mind, thus rendering his common sense states uncommon, and according to the degree of over-activity, he is either a "freak," a creature of "temperament," a "genius" ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.
... the time of occurrence, which has nevertheless turned and altered his whole career. 'Tis with almost all of us, as in Monsieur Massillon's magnificent image regarding King William, a grain de sable that perverts or perhaps overthrows us; and so it was but a light word flung in the air, a mere freak of a perverse child's temper, that brought down a whole heap of crushing woes upon that family whereof Harry ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... its way, stretched the sycamore tree into which Zaccheus climbed. Ah how barren and empty the way looked now! - with Him no longer here. For a moment, so looked my own path before me, - the dusty, hot road; the desolate pass; the barren mountain top. It was only a freak of fancy; I do not know what brought it. I had not felt so a moment before, and I did ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... rest of the Miamis, and by the side of Little Turtle, in the victories the Northwestern Indians gained over Harmar and St. Clair, and during the last battle he killed several soldiers with his own hand. Afterwards, by some wayward freak of mind, he became harassed by the thought that perhaps he had slain some of his own kinsmen; dim memories of his childhood came back to him; and he resolved to leave his Indian wife and half-breed children and rejoin the people of his own ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... followed; "yes, what a difference between this monster, nay, between the other girls and Eva! She was, doubtless, born in the same poverty, in similar circumstances, and yet they are like day and night. What a soul has been given to Eva! what inborn nobility! It must be, really, more than a mere freak ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... What was it? I groped in vain for some clue. The pebble worried me, and I made a peevish gesture to throw it away. No! Whatever it was, I must not do that, rather wash it, wash it. Yes! that was what we used to do. But where was the batea, for now by some strange freak I was back in Brazil, and must have my batea. We washed our gravel for diamonds in that wooden ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... in this crusade I was called crazy and a "freak" by my enemies, but now they say: "No, Carry Nation, you are not crazy, but you are sharp. You started out to accomplish something and you did. You are a grafter. It is the money you are after." Jesus said: "John came neither eating ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... led the unresisting young man to the coupe, Maximilian and the guides following the pair at a short distance in order to guard against any unforeseen freak on the part of poor Massetti. There was no occasion for their services, however, and the Viscount was soon safely installed in the coupe with Valentine upon one side of him and her ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... feel his sympathy. He never retired much before midnight, and it was scarcely ten minutes' walk. She would get back before her father returned, and no one would know. Seizing her hat, she went quietly out. It was a freak, but then Beth had freaks now and then. A great black cloud drifted over the moon, and made everything quite dark. A timid girl would have been frightened, ...
— Beth Woodburn • Maud Petitt
... sort of key and arguing that in the measure that its dream is based on true self-knowledge there must be a reality corresponding to it—a valid argument enough, supposing the locksmith to act on the usual lines and not to be indulging in a freak. ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... caretaker, messenger-boys, porters and the like. Never surely had been such wild doings in that sedate and reputable place of business—doings in which gross absurdity and ingenious cruelty went hand in hand; while, by some queer freak of the imagination, poor Pascal Pelletier, of hectic and pathetic memory, appeared as leader of the revels, at which the Lady of the Windswept Dust, sad-eyed, inscrutable of countenance, her dragon-embroidered scarf drawn closely about her ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... hardly understands herself to-night. That scene with her hostess has upset her mentally and bodily, and created in her a wild desire to get away from herself and from Baltimore at any cost. Some idle freak has induced her to use Beauclerk (who is detestable to her) as a safeguard from both, and he, unsettled in his own mind, and eager to come to conclusions with Joyce and her fortune, has lent himself to the wiles of his whilom foe, and is permiting himself to be charmed ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... I should like to know myself," I confessed candidly. Then I added with pardonable mendacity: "I think I must have been taken for somebody else, if it was anything more than a desperate freak ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... how he lay there in the grass, wet-cheeked but no longer sobbing, listening to the sound and wondering that he had been able to hear it on the beach of Ringmanu. Some freak of air pressures and air currents, he reflected, had made it possible for the sound to carry so far. Such conditions might not happen again in a thousand days or ten thousand days, but the one day it had happened ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... bailiffs—an onyx box and the returned engagement-ring. The box she had concealed in her pocket; and when alone at night, she drew it out and looked at its precious contents. There were all sorts of poison in it. By some odd freak, Athalie had bought it in one of her Italian journeys, and while it was in her possession she thought she could defy the world. She imagined herself able to destroy her own life at any moment, and this idea made her feel as a ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... "death ends all" nips in the bud this grand conception of man's greatness, and blights forever that which is noblest and truest in his nature. To regard this life as the ne plus ultra of man's development, is to charge nature with a freak of folly, and an abortion in her best works. Men may laud human virtue for human virtue's sake; but if man is but the moth of a day, the fire-fly whose phosphorescent light flashes for a moment and then goes out in eternal night, his virtues are but the tales of the hour ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... music-room door, beside Claire and the still stupefied Milo. The Jap took up his position back of them, alert and tense as a fox terrier. The three Secret Service men in the front doorway stood at attention, yet evidently wondering at the prisoner's queer freak. ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... custom, belief, and rite, rests upon a solid basis of historic fact; customs which are strange and irrational to this age are not in consequence to be considered the mere worthless following of practices which owe their origin to accident or freak; beliefs which do not belong to the established religion are not in consequence to be considered as mere superstition; rites which were not established by authority are not in consequence to be classed as mere specimens of popular ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... Cash began to conserve his enthusiasm, "there's nothing so sure as an assay. And it was too dark in the hole to see how much was uncovered. This may be just a freak deposit. There may not be any real vein of it. You can't tell until it's developed further. But it ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... portrait and the dress and accessories in the companion piece did not seem to the critic to agree with Stuart's handling. To make his impressions fit with the pictures, the critic supposed that Stuart painted a smaller portrait of Jaudenes and started one of his wife, which through some freak of temper he left (as he frequently did) with only the head and part of the background finished. These being brought to Spain, some artist there finished the lady's portrait, painted from Stuart's original a companion piece of her husband, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... farce, or freak, or whatever you call it, to end?' said I, as Harriot pulled me into the dark passage along ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... staircase is, the Nude is; thou art painted by a freak. And I think that he has knocked thee to the middle of next week. He will paint thee (till this fashion shall expend its foolish force), Something like a rabid dog,—a little larger than a horse. Semblance? Likeness? Scorned of Cubists! This th' evangel that he ...
— The Re-echo Club • Carolyn Wells
... the vessel was in no way delayed by this little freak, as there was no cargo down. Captain Macgregor, however, had not been seen for several days, and the vessel was nearly ready for sea. The proper agencies were instructed to have him brought aboard, drunk or sober, so he landed aboard drunk, and gave ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... horrible. It was—we blush to tell it—it was to stop short in the road, and teach some very wicked words to a knot of little Puritan children who were playing there, and had but just begun to talk. Denying himself this freak, as unworthy of his cloth, he met a drunken seaman, one of the ship's crew from the Spanish Main. And here, since he had so valiantly forborne all other wickedness, poor Mr. Dimmesdale longed at least to shake hands with the tarry black-guard, and recreate himself with a few improper jests, such ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... that half glove upon his right hand? Finger stalls, wrist straps, even mittens were common enough, useful, and necessary at times; but the stranger's glove was not a mitten, and it had no fellow for the left hand. Perhaps, thought Desmond, it was a freak of the wearer's, on a par with his red feather and his vivid neckcloth. Desmond, as he walked on, found himself hoping that the visitor at the Four Alls would remain for a ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... arm with the poisonous cocaine, and right in front of all the five people in the library, too,—the Earl, Thorneycroft, Launcelot, Tooter, and Hicks,—who stared at him as if he were a dime-museum freak; which indeed he was, to a ...
— The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons • James Francis Thierry
... haste, though, they generally find time to stare at any woman who crosses their path. Why should not a woman go to the City? She has as much right there as man, and yet if she is in the least degree superior to the flower girls (?) who surround the Royal Exchange, she is looked on as a freak of nature, a positive curiosity, and is followed by every pair of ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren
... could make a map worth fifty dollars as well as the map-makers, and this gave the young man practice. Hope, kindled into such a flame, led the young man in a march of improvement that even continued in his dreams, for he often dreamed out some combination of colors, some freak of lettering, that elicited everybody's admiration. ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... sure," the latter ventured to remark cautiously, "that ye're prudent in what ye have done? Remember ye have asked no pairson at a' to dine with ye as yet,—it's a vera sudden an' exceptional freak o' hospitality." ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... it comprehensible. She drank at every sentence, getting no more from it than the gratification of her thirst. His father, at least, was a man of title, a baronet. What was meant by estates not entailed? What wild freak of fate put this noble young man in the power of an eccentric parent, who now caressed him, now made him an outcast? She heard of the sum that was his, coming from his dead mother to support him just one hundred pounds annual! Was ever fate ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... manner. The confidence expressed in this outburst, the vitality, the masculine attitude he took were producing their effect. "You don't believe in what I saw or in my fears. Perhaps you are right. I am ready to acknowledge this; I will try to look upon it all as a freak of my imagination if you will promise to forget these dreadful days, and if people, other people, will leave me alone and not print ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... he presented his stick, banged, reloaded, banged again, reloaded and banged yet again. I took up a stick and presented it—bang! With amazing verisimilitude Beppo rolled over—shot through the heart. Really, for a moment I had a mad apprehension that in some occult way, some freak of hypnotic suggestion, I had actually wrought the child harm. I stood there breathlessly triumphant and wondering whether it was now my business to rush in and scalp the defenceless prisoners. I became aware of a head and a ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... connected by an arch, low at first, but loftier as time goes on, until, in later Gothic churches, its height frequently is nearly that of the whole nave. The remaining three walls are usually external, and clear of the aisles. But sometimes, owing to a freak of planning, or, more frequently, owing to the conditions of the site, the tower is, as at Bibury, at the west end of one of the aisles. At Gedling in Nottinghamshire the tower and spire are at the end of the north aisle. The tower of St Michael's, Cambridge, is at the west end ...
— The Ground Plan of the English Parish Church • A. Hamilton Thompson
... to speak of this adventure as a most remarkable answer to prayer. He had prayed for Suleiman before starting, and had also asked for guidance for himself, and God heard him. It has sometimes been represented as a mad freak on Gordon's part to put himself into the lion's den in this way, but it was nothing of the kind. Suleiman was in revolt, supported by a splendid army. Gordon was absolutely at his mercy, for he could not rely on his troops. It was only Gordon's daring courage that intimidated Suleiman, and made ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... "Come, there is no mistake here, Harry; and it is only another freak of fortune, who is now in good humour ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... Titian, Duerer, Thorwaldsen and Benvenuto Cellini in one presents an engaging figure. His domestic life makes very pleasant reading. We find no dark holes and corners in the career of one who may be said to have remained a boy to the end, at fifty as at five full of freak and initiative, clingingly attached to a devoted and richly-endowed mother, and the ebullient spirit of a happy home. With his rapidly increasing fortune, the historic house in the Rue Dominique became an artistic, musical and dramatic centre. His fetes were ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... should be gone upon alone, because freedom is of the essence; because you should be able to stop and go on, and follow this way or that, as the freak takes you; and because you must have your own pace, and neither trot alongside a champion walker, nor mince in time with a girl. And then you must be open to all impressions and let your thoughts take colour ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... reflected that at any rate I was saved from submitting Miss Francis to vulgar publicity. Everything is for the best—Ive seen a hundred instances to prove it. Perhaps—who knew—something might yet happen to make it possible for me to profit by the freak growth. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... and not even an insect could be heard. I recollected the danger of becoming lost in such a place, and therefore I fixed my eye upon one of the tallest pinnacles of the opposite mountain. It rose sheer upright from the woods below, and by an extraordinary freak of nature sustained aloft on its very summit a large loose rock. Such a landmark could never be mistaken, and feeling once more secure, I began again to move forward. A white wolf jumped up from among ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... to tell him very little. Let him suppose it a mere freak, but a secret one, until the morning comes: then let him know that there is urgent reason for your getting Provis aboard and away. You ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... the project of getting a peep at the history of China in Chinese characters—as with many others I could mention, which strike the fancy only at a distance; for as I came nearer and nearer to the point—my blood cool'd—the freak gradually went off, till at length I would not have given a cherry-stone to have it gratified—The truth was, my time was short, and my heart was at the Tomb of the Lovers—I wish to God, said I, as I got the ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... utter destruction of every generous and admirable quality in the boy, or a rapid unbalanced development of those socialistic tendencies, the seeds of which were sown by his mother and nurtured in the hard experience of his early days. Besides this, Peter's interest in the boy was probably a mere freak, or at the best, sprang from a desire to serve his cousin, unless by any remote chance he had stumbled on a ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... is a freak who attends to the labours, Small and domestic, that make up the home: Pays all the calls and leaves cards on the neighbours, Leaving his wife ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 1, 1914 • Various
... impressed by the many things which Ben Greenway had said about his master's present most astounding freak, and hoping in his heart that repentance and a suitable reparation might soon give this hitherto estimable man an opportunity to return to his former place in society, he said as little as he could against the name and fame of this once respected fellow-citizen. When ...
— Kate Bonnet - The Romance of a Pirate's Daughter • Frank R. Stockton
... They spake not thus,—(their patron here) When they were proud to break his bread, To watch his faintest smile, and fear His latent frown; they did not speak Of vices, follies, meanness: then A crime in him, had been, "the freak Of youth," ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 381 Saturday, July 18, 1829 • Various
... disfavor in the countenance of the other disappeared and was replaced by an expression which indicated that he regarded such liberality as something in the nature of a freak. ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... pushed on among the most enthusiastic followers of Colonel Arnold. The concluding part of the history is written in the blood of our brave and gallant general; and now, in the closing scene of the drama, I find myself, by a singular freak of fortune, thrown again in your company, in a place where I had little dreamed ...
— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson
... "Here's a wonderful freak of nature, been standing over there for ages untold; and I settle down beside those Cliffs because I can see there will be something in them for my children in days to come. But then, without warning, my baby grows suddenly up and rears her head, and declares 'Those Cliffs must furnish me ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... the tower, the clock struck twelve with a very deep intonation, and immediately some chimes began to play, and kept up their resounding music for five minutes, as measured by the hand upon the dial. It was a very delightful harmony, as airy as the notes of birds, and seemed a not unbecoming freak of half-sportive fancy in the huge, ancient, and solemn church; although I have seen an old-fashioned parlor-clock that did precisely the same ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... 'Rapahoe such a derned freak as thet thar would be a reg'ler snap fer ther boys. They'd hev more fun with him then a funeral. Somehow, this yere place seems dead slow, an' it makes me long ter go back whar thar is a little sport now ...
— Frank Merriwell's Bravery • Burt L. Standish
... frighten us!" exclaimed the King. "Don't let all those whimsies trouble you further, or you will give birth to some monstrosity, some freak of nature." His Majesty was a true prophet. The Queen was delivered of a fine little girl, black as ink from head to foot. They did not tell her this at once, fearing a catastrophe, but persuaded her to go to sleep, saying that the child had been taken ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... shade of opinion, from the straightest orthodoxy to the wildest heresy, and many persons whose church was a church of one member only. A great variety of dialect and of costume was noticed; a great deal of confusion, eccentricity, and freak appeared, as well as of zeal and enthusiasm. If the Assembly was disorderly, it was picturesque. Madmen, madwomen, men with beards, Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come-outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-day Baptists, Quakers, Abolitionists, Calvinists, Unitarians, and philosophers, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... milk, butter, cheese, tea, or meat appeared. Even salt was considered a useless luxury, and spice entirely forbidden by these lovers of Spartan simplicity. A ten years' experience of vegetarian vagaries had been good training for this new freak, and her sense of the ludicrous supported her ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... tailor had got an influence over the girl when she was a child, was doubtless in pursuit of money, and must be paid. The folly of a child might be forgiven, and the Earl would persevere. No one would know what had occurred, and the thing would be forgotten as a freak of childhood. The Countess had succumbed to the policy of all this;—but she was not deceived by the benevolent falsehood. Lady Anna had been over twenty when she had been receiving lover's vows from this man, ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... I'll tell YOU something. Such friendships as you speak of are only possible where the woman is old—or ugly—or abnormal, in some way: a man-woman, or a clever woman, or some other freak of nature. Now, our women are, as a rule, sexually healthy. They know what they're here for, too, and are not ashamed of it. Also, they still have their share of physical attraction. While yours—good God! I wonder you manage to ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... anticipated. Egremont had been brought up in the enjoyment of every comfort and every luxury that refinement could devise and wealth furnish. He was a favourite child. His parents emulated each other in pampering and indulging him. Every freak was pardoned, every whim was gratified. He might ride what horses he liked, and if he broke their knees, what in another would have been deemed a flagrant sin, was in him held only a proof of reckless spirit. If he were not a thoroughly selfish and altogether ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... "You come take him away. You not let him do it? Oh, Mr. Blake, a long time I your friend; you helpful me I helpful you, I be your man. Not the Deep Place, not the—aiee-ee," and his voice trailed off in a dolorous howl as some freak of the draught caused the voice of the pit ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... she had no need to ask the question. She had heard of Anne Hamilton's extraordinary freak and had suggested that for the protection of the interests of Anne's relatives she had better be put under proper restraint. Still, she asked the question. One would have said from the deadly monotony of Lady Drummond's voice that she could not get any expression into it. Yet she could ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... him whether I am on land or on sea. Some day, somewhere, I shall hear news of him. I wish you to remember that if ever you need a friend, you have only to let me know. I am ashamed to think that I have let this strange freak of circumstance find Robert Morton's daughter for me. I should have looked you up years ago. Do you know what a fellow's chum means to him when he is a boy at school?" Captain Moore queried, less seriously. "Don't you think a man ought to wish to do something for that fellow's ...
— Madge Morton's Secret • Amy D. V. Chalmers
... happened that without seeking fame, fame came to him. All over the Missouri Valley, men knew that Grant Adams, a big, lumbering, red-polled, lusty-lunged man with one arm burned off—and the story of the burning fixed the man always in the public heart—with a curious creed and a freak gift for expounding it, was doing unusual things with the labor situation in the Harvey district. And then one day a reporter came from Omaha who uncovered this bit of news in ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... one day when I was in Africa, and was hiding behind a clump of broom, when I noticed that one bush was different from the rest. They were plain, but it was mottled in two distinct shades of the same colour. It was evidently a freak, a disease of some sort, as such variations generally are, but it was uncommonly pretty all the same. I had never seen anything of the kind before, and, without conceit, I may say that I know a good deal more about plants than the ordinary professional gardener. Well, I examined ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... play excited the breathless attention of every one. In a few moments he had won a sum variously estimated at from eighty to a hundred thousand dollars. A rumor went round the room that it was a concerted attempt to "break the bank" rather than the drunken freak of a Western miner, dazzled by some successful strike. To this theory the man's careless and indifferent bearing towards his extraordinary gains lent great credence. The attempt, if such it was, however, was unsuccessful. After winning ten times in succession the luck ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... to suspect that by some freak of fortune his little friend had indeed stumbled upon the truth. Dreux was leaning back in his ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... to say that after this hideous insult not one of us will speak," declared one of the group. "But I for one would like some light on the insane freak that prompted this performance. As you are at the head of this peculiar community, we'd like ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... teeming millions to make happy with his money. All sorts of schemes had passed through his mind. He had a sense of power which the mere possession of the money had never given him. He began to understand why millionaires make freak wills. At one time he had toyed with the idea of selecting someone at random from the London Directory and bestowing on him all he had to bequeath. He had only abandoned the scheme when it occurred to him that he himself would not be in a position to witness the recipient's ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... current. At each attempt they strained to the utmost with the paddles, and each time, with hearts nigh to bursting from the effort, they were played out and swept back. They succeeded finally by an accident. In the swiftest current, near the end of another failure, a freak of the current sheered the canoe out of Churchill's control and flung it against the bluff. Churchill made a blind leap at the bluff and landed in a crevice. Holding on with one hand, he held the swamped canoe with the other till Antonsen dragged himself out of the water. Then they pulled ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... lived with a spinster sister to whom his specimens were the bane of her life. As the car rolled swiftly along, he occupied his time by peeping into the bag at frequent intervals to see that none of the specimens, by some freak ...
— The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone • Richard Bonner
... Supreme Council for the final touches, while Tods patrolled the Burra Simla Bazar in his morning rides, and played with the monkey belonging to Ditta Mull, the bunnia, and listened, as a child listens to all the stray talk about this new freak of the ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... when she turns on her heel and comes to look for us. I expect that Master Taunton knew, well enough, that we should be picked up again; but he guessed that the admiral would not be pleased at losing a day, by our freak, and that the matter is not likely to improve the favor in which we may stand with him and ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty
... embankments, and on the rafters or beams of old buildings. The nests are made of mud, moss and grass, lined with feathers. The four or five eggs measure .75 x .55. Occasionally, eggs will be found that have a few minute spots of reddish brown. Freak situations in which to locate their nests are often chosen by these birds, such as the brake beam of a freight car, in the crevices of old wells, hen houses, etc. The birds are one of the most useful that we have; being very active and continually on the alert for insects and beetles ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... of manhood are made interesting for the ordinary man, and in this way only the higher arts are universal. Beside this art, however, founded on the variations which are a condition and effect of all vigorous life, there is another art—sometimes confounded with it—founded on the freak of nature, in itself a mere sign of atavism or disease. This latter art, which is occupied with the antics of the freak, is of interest only to the variation from ordinary minds, and, for this reason, is ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... the tracks, too, surprised him not a little. They were much deeper and broader than those caused by any species of cart he had yet seen or heard of in the country, and the width apart was so great, that he began to suspect he must have mistaken a curious freak of nature for the tracks of a gigantic vehicle. Following the track for some distance, he came to a muddy spot, where the footprints of men and horses became distinctly visible. A little further on he passed the mouth of what ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... but how would he get the fun out of doing a thing like that? No, we have to look either for a freak or a poor neglected child. Now, True Treds, take your ...
— The Girl Scouts at Sea Crest - The Wig Wag Rescue • Lillian Garis
... flosserfize 'Bout what it wuz held up the skies, An' how God made this earthly ball Jest simply out er nawthin' 'tall, An' 'bout the natur, shape, an' form Of nawthin' that he made it from. Then, ef his wife sh'd ask the freak Ef he wouldn't kinder try to sneak Out to the barn an' find some aigs, He'd never move, nor lift his laigs; He'd never stir, nor try to rise, ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... turbine-wheels, sewing-machines, and in public opinion; but not in divine causes.... A silent revolution has loosed the tension of the old religious sects, and in place of the gravity and permanence of those societies of opinion, they run into freak and extravagance.... In creeds never was such levity: witness the heathenisms in Christianity,—the periodic revivals, the millennium mathematics, the peacock ritualism, the retrogression to popery, the maundering of Mormons, the squalor of mesmerism, the ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 3: New-England Sunday - Gleanings Chiefly From Old Newspapers Of Boston And Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... an hour! it was a sudden freak of mine." (My father shook his head with contemptuous incredulity.) "Sir!—Abel Fletcher—did I ever tell you a lie? If you will not believe me, believe your own son. Ask Phineas—No, no, ask him nothing!" And he came in great distress to the ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... Will you? To-morrow, satisfy your friend. I take the subjects for his corridor, Finish the portrait out of hand—there, there, And throw him in another thing or two If he demurs; the whole should prove enough To pay for this same Cousin's freak. Beside, What's better and what's all I care about, 240 Get you the thirteen scudi for the ruff! Love, does that please you? Ah, but what does he, The Cousin! what does ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... could not have taken any more decision from him just then; you have had as much as is good for you; he paints over a great space of his picture forms of the most rounded and melting tenderness, and suddenly, as you think by a freak, gives you a bit as jagged and sharp as a leafless blackthorn. Perhaps the most exquisite piece of subtle contrast in the world of painting is the arrow point, laid sharp against the white side and among the flowing hair of Correggio's Antiope. ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... among his hearers, and by some freak of memory the name of the town of which the Dago had been used to speak, the town which was now a dream to be forgotten, came to his lips. He ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... who was walking up the street, and she couldn't help thinking how very little it was, and how she hoped he would have given her more. She looked at the little broom he had ruined, and everything seemed sadder than before. Then, by some strange freak, her mind ran off to the gardens where her mother slept, as it always did when darkness gathered round her, and she longed, more than ever before, to throw herself on the ground there, and quietly sleep a long, long time. During the whole day she had received but a few pennies; ...
— The Angel Children - or, Stories from Cloud-Land • Charlotte M. Higgins
... perhaps by thousands of years of wind and weather, and, to complete the resemblance, there was a scrubby growth of weeds or lichen upon it, which against the sun looked for all the world like the wool on a colossal negro's head. It certainly was very odd; so odd that now I believe it is not a mere freak of nature but a gigantic monument fashioned, like the well-known Egyptian Sphinx, by a forgotten people out of a pile of rock that lent itself to their design, perhaps as an emblem of warning and defiance to any enemies who approached the harbour. Unfortunately we were ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... you're a gentleman, sir. Gone steerage in a bit of a freak; but now you've told him you'd prefer to be called by your proper name. ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... cunningly, with the trunk of a tree for the support of the bed, by Odysseus (odyssey, XXIII. 177-204), is, according to Noack, an exception, a solitary freak of Odysseus. But we may reply that the thalamos, the separate chamber, is no freak; the freak, by knowledge of which Odysseus proves his identity, is the use of the tree in the construction of the bed. [blank space] ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... kept mainsail and boom from being blown straight ahead. The boom end swung outboard till it dragged in the seas as she rolled. Only by a miracle and the stoutest of standing gear had she escaped dismasting. Now, with the mainsail broaded off to starboard, and the jib by some freak of wind and sea winged out to port, the sloop drove straight before the wind, holding as true a course as if the limp body on the cockpit floor laid an invisible, controlling hand ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... public interest, all this was perfectly natural, and not altogether unpardonable. Those who intrust a petulant, hot-blooded, ill- informed lad with power, are more to blame than he for the mischief which he may do with it. How could it be expected of a lively page, raised by a wild freak of fortune to the first influence in the empire, that he should have bestowed any serious thought on the principles which ought to guide judicial decisions? Bacon was the ablest public man then living in Europe. He was near ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... no farther in his protest against this unexpected freak of fortune, for Sylvia seized the paper and read the paragraph aloud with such happy emphasis amid Prue's outcries and his father's applause, that Mark began to feel that he really had done something praiseworthy, and that the "daub" was not so ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... it. She does not know the Author of any thing that is told her, but can readily repeat the Matter it self; therefore, though she exposes all the whole Town, she offends no one Body in it. She is so exquisitely restless and peevish, that she quarrels with all about her, and sometimes in a Freak will instantly change her Habitation. To indulge this Humour, she is led about the Grounds belonging to the same House she is in, and the Persons to whom she is to remove, being in the Plot, are ready to receive her at her own Chamber ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... thuddingly. And at last, came a giant swell that almost submerged us. I caught Helena to the cabin-top to keep her drier from it, and the two boys also sprang to a point of safety. Mrs. Daniver, less agile, was caught by Peterson and Williams and held to the rail, wetted thoroughly. And by some freak of the wind, at that instant came fully the roar of the surf. We of the Belle Helene ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... women's suffrage comes to be, and Irving Berlin, reading the signs of the times, decides to write The Blue Laws Blues. Fashions of thought change; other fashions, also. A girl who was born without hips or eyebrows and who in childhood was regarded as a freak, now finds herself, at the age of eighteen, exactly in the mode, thus proving that all things come to those who wait. Czecho-Slovakia is discovered. The American forces spent three days taking Chateau-Thierry and three years trying to learn to pronounce it. Ireland undertakes to settle ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... fertile. Some of them presented a peculiarity in growth of the cotyledons and germ, both of which grew and protruded beyond the involuere before the nuts were ripe, indicating that the germ had not come to a state of rest during its usual period in the nut. This freak appeared in only eight of the nuts, a larger number having ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Fourth Annual Meeting - Washington D.C. November 18 and 19, 1913 • Various
... marvellous results. The logical design is little more than ostensible; and Sir Thomas, though he knew it not himself, is really satisfied with any line of inquiry that will bring him in sight of some freak of nature or of opinion suitable to ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... coincidence in time, the insidious and unidentifiable terrain deception of a classic whiteout situation. They had encountered that type of visual illusion which makes rising white plateaux appear perfectly flat. This freak of polar weather is known and feared by every polar flier. In some Arctic regions in the Canadian and in the north European winter, it is responsible for numbers of light aircraft crashes every year. Aircraft fly, in clear air, directly into hills and mountains. ...
— Judgments of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand on Proceedings to Review Aspects of the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Mount Erebus Aircraft Disaster • Sir Owen Woodhouse, R. B. Cooke, Ivor L. M. Richardson, Duncan
... did not budge until I had unraveled them every one. Mrs. Jones declared there was no reason for the disappearance of Tom; his aunt Quincy said her flightiness had driven him to it; and Cousin Jack, Mrs. Tom's adviser, thought it just a freak after much dissipation, for Tom had been acting queerly for months before he did the vanishing act. The three were talking either from spleen or the wish to hide the truth. When there was no trace of Tom after a month of ordinary searching much of the truth came out, and I discovered the rest. Plain ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... saying earnestly. "America seems rife with modernism. Free-masonry, socialism, and countless other fads and religious superstitions are widely prevalent there. Nor do I underestimate their strength and influence. And yet, I fear them not. There are also certain freak religions, philosophical beliefs, wrung from the simple teachings of our blessed Saviour, the rapid spread of which at one time did give me some concern. The Holy Father mentioned one or two of them to-day, in ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... women in garments as harmonious in form and color almost as the music that was thrilling at least some of us; some of them fair enough, I fancied, to be walking in a better world than ours; then, by some strange freak of the imagination, I fell to thinking of the poverty and sorrow, and breaking hearts all about us, until the music seemed to change to a minor chord; and away back of all other sounds I seemed to hear the sob and moan of ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... by a great groove down the centre, and with a curiously wrinkled or folded surface. The two halves of the brain, called hemispheres (though more nearly the shape of a coffee-bean), are alike; and each one, by some curious twist, or freak, of nature, receives messages from, and controls, the opposite half of the body—the right half controlling the left side of the body, while the left half controls the right side of the body. Thus an injury or a hemorrhage ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... they willed over the face of the globe, I had almost made myself one with those for whom Italian sculptors drove the chisel and Reynolds plied his brush. But that name, so unwisely given, called to my mind the figure on the camel, and I was sure that by some strange freak of conjury Penelope must see it too; and worse, that other, the girl in the pugree, and behind them, discreetly placed, Doctor Todd, uncomfortably balancing on his giant beast, and Mrs. Todd taken inopportunely as she was mopping her brow. ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... actress in America! This man Douglass has got you hypnotized. Honestly, there's something uncanny about the way he has queered you. Brace up. Send him whirling. He isn't worth a minute of your time, Nellie—now, that's the fact. He's a crazy freak. Say the word and I'll fire him and his ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... campaign that is being waged against our country by a clever and powerful enemy. And I feel that our work in connection with the unraveling of the mystery and overcoming the enemy or enemies is but begun. It's a cinch that the thing is organized by human minds and is not any sort of a freak of the elements. Our work is cut out for us, all right, and I wish you would stick to George and me through the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... drum convokes the elves at the noon of night on Cro' Nest top, and, clambering out of their flower-cup beds and hammocks of cobweb, they fly to the meeting, not to freak about the grass or banquet at the mushroom table, but to hear sentence passed on the fay who, forgetting his vestal vow, has loved an earthly maid. From his throne under a canopy of tulip petals, borne on pillars of shell, the king ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... that just such a freak Is the crude and preposterous poem Which merely abounds in a torrent of sounds, With no depth of reason ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... existed in Japan. He replied as follows: "I have tried to find what is known in Japan about the history of the Japanese waltzing mice, but I am sorry to say that the results are wholly negative. I cannot find any account of the origin of this freak, either authentic or fictitious, and, strange as it may seem to you, no study of the mice in a modern sense has been made, so you may consider the literature on the mouse in the Japanese language as absolutely nil." In explanation of this somewhat surprising ignorance of the ...
— The Dancing Mouse - A Study in Animal Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... to Los Toros a mad freak, whereas it was in reality a very clever stroke. Hal Dozier would have been on the road five hours before if he had not been held up in the matter of horses, but this is to tell the story out ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... great despair about his mistress, who has taken a freak of——. He began a letter to her, but was obliged to stop short—I finished it for him, and he copied and sent it. If he holds out, and keeps to my instructions of affected indifference, she will lower her colours. If she don't, he will, at least, get rid of her, and she don't ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... the hotel, in my room. Some freak of fortune placed her in the apartment opposite. Knowing what presumably brought her to Algiers, the desire to have revenge upon you, I entertained a feeling of almost contempt for a woman who could so forget her sex and seek a man who loved her not. If it were I ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... yourself. I wanted air and quiet, having been much fatigued on my nephew's amendment, trying to dissuade him from making the campaign with his militia; but in vain! I now dread hearing of some eccentric freak. I am sorry Mr. Tyson has quite dropped me, though he sometimes comes to town. I am still more concerned at your frequent disorders-I hope their chief seat ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... peculiarities—the snarling habit and that high-pitched animal voice, for instance—which made him a being different from others—one separate and far apart? Was he, so admirably formed, so complete and well-balanced, merely a freak of nature, to use an old-fashioned phrase—a sport, or spontaneous individual variation—an experiment for a new human type, imagined by Nature in some past period, inconceivably long ago, but which she had only now, too ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... that, undoubtedly, by some strange freak of fortune Thad must have seen the other gloating over his prize; and recognizing the skates, for they were well-known to him, he had beckoned to the policeman who happened to be near by, with the result that Nick was nabbed before he ...
— The Chums of Scranton High at Ice Hockey • Donald Ferguson
... Lincoln Asylum, the remoteness of that institution from the great centre of life, and the want of authority in its author, would no doubt have prevented its acceptance for years by the physicians of the great county asylums so long wedded to old habits. It was for some time treated as the freak of an enthusiastic mind, that would speedily go the way of all such new-fangled notions; and no doubt it would, had not an irresistible impulse been given to it by the installation of Dr. Conolly at Hanwell, where, with a noble ardour, he at once set to work to carry ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... Through some strange freak of atavism the father of the boy bred back, and was more or less of a Stone-Age cave-dweller. He was a butcher by trade, in the little town of Waldorf, a few miles from Heidelberg. A butcher's business then was to travel around and kill the pet pig, or sheep, or cow that ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... asserted confidently. "And he may have some medical knowledge that will just shake the puzzle into place, and explain the whole mystery to us. It seems to me a most remarkable thing that these two strange affairs should have happened in exactly the same place. That it is some strange freak of nature I have no doubt, but I am absolutely at a loss to think what ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... "I heard of that freak," said the jester. "There be a dozen tailors and all the Queen's tirewomen frizzling up a good piece of cloth of gold for the lion's mane, covering a club with green damask with pricks, cutting out green velvet and gummed silk for his garland! In sooth, these graces have left me so ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... season was opened by Sheridan's "Rivals," followed by Allingham's "Fortune's Freak." Then came "Hamlet," which infinitely surpassed all my expectations. Kemble's Hamlet was amazing, and Miss Smithson's Ophelia adorable. From that very night, but not before, I knew what the theatre was. I had seen for the first time real men and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... his own solitary delectation and on one occasion ordered a sumptuous entertainment there, in which he alone took part. This rustic Sardanapalus returned from Italy so passionately charmed with the scenery of that beautiful country that, by a sudden freak of enthusiasm, he spent four or five millions in order to represent in his park the scenes of which he had pictures in his portfolio. The most charming contrasts of foliage, the rarest trees, long valleys, and prospects the most picturesque ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... say that. I hope that this new idea of his is only a freak. He will soon tire of his task of censor of morals. Meanwhile, we are to be most guarded in our conversation. And ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... the press? What spreads The fame of your existence, once a week, From the Pacific Mail dock to the Heads, Warning the people you're about to wreak Upon the human ear your Sunday freak?— Whereat the most betake them to their bed Though some prefer to slumber in the pews And nod assent ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... even the epoch of far-back history's phantom dream. From this encampment I can only liken Mount Olga to several enormous rotund or rather elliptical shapes of rouge mange, which had been placed beside one another by some extraordinary freak or convulsion of Nature. I found two other running brooks, one on the west and one on the north side. My first encampment was on the south. The position of this extraordinary feature is in latitude 25 degrees 20' and longitude ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... that he was by no means of a sane mind. In short, to speak plainly, he was mad, and deserved a strait-waistcoat as richly as any straw-crowned monarch in Bedlam. A single instance, in my opinion, fully substantiates this. I allude to his absurd freak at Frederickshall, when, in order to discover how long he could exist without nourishment, he abstained from all kinds of food for more than seventy hours! Now, would any man in his senses have done this? Would ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 290 - Volume X. No. 290. Saturday, December 29, 1827. • Various
... be eighteen for a month," he gave prompt explanation. "Under the latest law freak turned out at Albany, I'm too young to drive a motor vehicle safely on the public roads unless I have a licensed chauffeur alongside of me. ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... restored, And my promotion, with the ink not dry! Those fairies which neglected me at birth Seemed now to lavish all good gifts on me— Gold roubles, office, sudden dearest friends. The whole world smiled; then, as I stooped to taste The sweetest cup, freak dashed it from my lip. This very night—just think, this very night— I planned to come and beg of you the alms I dared not ask for in my poverty. I thought me poor then. How stript am I now! There's not a ragged mendicant one meets Along ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... streak of light in the western sky, whether caused by the low-hanging, mist-hidden moon or a freak reflection of the coming dawn. Against that patch of brightness the northern headland of Lost Island loomed up high and barren save for its one tall tree. But it was neither headland nor tree that caught Jerry's attention and caused the ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... the spruits ran red with it, if only they could win their way to where their half-starved comrades waited for them. But nothing happened. Hours passed and nothing happened. An occasional shell from the big gun plumped among them. One, through some freak of gunnery, lobbed slowly through a division, and the men whooped and threw their caps at it as it passed. The guns on Swartz Kop, at a range of nearly five miles, tossed shells at the monster on Doornkloof, and finally blew up his powder ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... right, Quatermain. I had that foolish fancy, a lover's freak, I suppose. When we married the curtain was removed although the brass rod on which it hung was left by some oversight. On my return to England after my loss, however, I found that I could not bear to look upon this ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... other papers the world can read if it choose to waste its time; at any rate, I am not going to lock them up and have the worry of a key preying on my mind. I should only lose it as I lost the other one. Now, by a freak of fortune, the key of Jaffery's flat remained in the suit-case wherein I had flung it at Havre, until it was fished out by Franklin on my ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... eighteen for a month," he gave prompt explanation. "Under the latest law freak turned out at Albany, I'm too young to drive a motor vehicle safely on the public roads unless I have a licensed chauffeur alongside of me. Oh, ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... red and black that we saw dropping in here by now, everybody would have said: 'See how wise that young man was, to follow the bent of his nature!' But having ended no better than I began they say: 'See what a fool that fellow was in following a freak of his fancy!' ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... but neither Herbert nor the housekeeper took much notice of it. The latter was somewhat surprised at this new freak on the part of Abner, as he had never tried to deprive any of Herbert's predecessors of tea or coffee. But the fact was, Mr. Holden disliked Herbert, and was disposed to act the petty tyrant over him. He had neither forgotten nor forgiven the boy's spirited defiance when they first met, nor his refusal ...
— Try and Trust • Horatio Alger
... you promise me upon your honor, that when this freak of yours is over, and the bug business (good God!) settled to your satisfaction, you will then return home and follow my advice implicitly, as that of ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... that sort of work? Is there one great man in history who gave to the future without getting anything from the past? The bare scientific fact is that no man escapes the tuition of society. The crank does not escape. The freak does not escape. They miss the highest traditions of society only to become victims of lower traditions. Whether such a man have genius or the illusion of genius, it is his tragic fate to have the best that he can do lie far below the best that ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... or less straight away across the mountainous waste lay Lund, halfway up a canyon that led to higher reaches in the hills, rich in silver, lead, copper, gold. Silver it was that Casey had found and sold to the men from Tonopah, and it was a freak of luck, he thought whimsically, that had led him and his Ford away over to Starvation Mountains to find their stake when they had probably been driving over millions every day that they made the stage trip ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... Sah-luma to his companion,—"how yon aged fool wears upon his breast the Symbol of his own Prophecy? 'Tis the maddest freak to thus display his death-warrant!—Only a month ago the King issued a decree, warning all those whom it might concern, that any one of his born subjects presuming to carry the sign of Khosrul's newly invented Faith should surely die! And that ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... out, on which they had founded their orders for the first assorted cargo ever to be sent from America to Edomo. Bill of particulars there was, stretching down the long tissue-paper in exquisite chirography. But by some freak of the "total depravity of things," the translated order for the assorted cargo was not there. John Coram, in his care to fold up the Japanese writing nicely, had left on his own desk at Shanghae the more intelligible English. ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... of manhood, Ted soothed his wounded soul by appearing in collars of an amazing height and stiffness, and ties which were the wonder of all female eyes. This freak was a sort of vengeance on his hard-hearted mother; for the collars drove the laundress to despair, never being just right, and the ties required such art in the tying that three women sometimes laboured long before—like Beau Brummel—he turned from a heap of 'failures' with the welcome ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... the warrior king, testily, "I can never believe in that freak of Kama Deva." He spoke feelingly, for the thing had happened to himself more than once, and on no occasion ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... the evening sky lighted up the vast rift for a while, and Bart forgot his hunger in the contemplation of this strange freak of nature, of a river running below in a channel whose walls were perfectly perpendicular and against which in places the rapid stream seemed to beat and eddy and swirl, while in other parts there were long stretches of pebbly and rocky shore. For as far as Bart could judge, ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... "Singular freak on the part of Grayson. Most eccentric man," he continued. "Danby tells me—now really what a coincidence! Sir James, by all that is singular! Ah, my dear Sir James, I was thinking about you. Ah, Edgar, ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... street. I now thought myself in the fair way, and I gave him a stroke with the whip, which I nearly repented, for he kicked up with his hind legs, and had not I seized the after part of the saddle I should have gone over his forecastle. I held on until he righted. After this freak, which was nearly knocking up my cruise, we jogged on steadily until we came to a narrow street, down which he turned in spite of all my endeavours to prevent him, and again hove to at the ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... Seated on a huge rock, he told the boys about the shaping and clothing of the earth, foundation stones, mountains and hills, lakes, ponds, and rivers, the beginning of vegetable life, the variation and place of the freak, the forest and its place in the world's progress, the alternation of the forest crop, man and his neighbors. Another afternoon the boys went into the woods and while they squatted on Nature's mattress of fragrant pine needles (see illustration, page 230), he told about leaves and their work, ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... is, that this terrific object was a freak of fancy on the part of some old-world sculptor, and that its presence had suggested to the Kukuanas the idea of placing their royal dead under its awful presidency. Or perhaps it was set there to frighten away any marauders who might have designs upon the treasure chamber beyond. I cannot ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... make fun of anything that I have seen in this country!" replied the Hunter. "I now rejoice that a mad freak brought me here to these woods and fields, for otherwise I should probably never have learned to know the region; for it has very little reputation abroad, and there is, in fact, nothing here to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... could have been more utterly unforeseen, and yet, in reviewing all the steps which led to the ultimate catastrophe, Rickman said to himself that nothing would have been more consistent and inevitable. It came about first of all through a freak, a wanton freak of Fate in the form of a beardless poet, a discovery, not of Jewdwine's nor of Rickman's but of Miss Roots'. That Miss Roots could make a discovery clearly indicated the finger of fate. Miss ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... 'Prince Polozov's' drawing-room was a fact perfectly well known to its mistress; the whole point of her entry had been the display of her hair, which was certainly beautiful. Sanin was inwardly delighted indeed at this freak on the part of Madame Polozov; if, he thought, she is anxious to impress me, to dazzle me, perhaps, who knows, she will be accommodating about the price of the estate. His heart was so full of Gemma that all other women had absolutely ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... a wondrous freak of chance, so perfect, yet so rough, A whim of Nature crystallized slowly in granite tough; The thick spires yearned towards the sky in quaint harmonious lines, And in broad sunlight basked and slept, like a grove ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... the rising bank he had climbed so laboriously before, Ross miscalculated and tumbled back, rolling down into the mud of the reed bed. Mechanically he wiped the slime from his face. The tree was still anchored there; by some freak the current had rammed its rooted end up on a ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... afraid, ma'am, that she's anything like me," he assured her quite good-temperedly; "nobody ever believes she's my daughter, except me and the old woman. She's a little lady, she is. Freak o' ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... price this fall." Well, we found that half of them could be saved and that the terrific hailstorm had extended over only two vineyards—the path of the storm not half a mile across in either direction, a curious freak, but one that in ten minutes took away ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... Douglass has got you hypnotized. Honestly, there's something uncanny about the way he has queered you. Brace up. Send him whirling. He isn't worth a minute of your time, Nellie—now, that's the fact. He's a crazy freak. Say the word and I'll fire him and his misbegotten ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... the little case over and over in his hands, again examining the clasps of it. His next freak was to snatch his pistol and look to the priming. I burst out laughing, for his antics seemed absurd. My laughter cooled him, and he made a great effort to regain his composure. But ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... by a mere freak, by something analogous to a sporting proposition. He was thinking of writing a historical romance of the times of Peter the Great, but the task seemed formidable, and he felt no well of inspiration. One evening, the 19 March 1873, he entered a room where his ten-year-old boy had been reading aloud ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... feeling that she was not carrying her audience with her, and longing for the time when she could take her letter away and have it all to herself. If she stopped now, Christine, in this sudden new freak of distrustfulness, would be ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... else could he get at me? Surely the very fiend himself, if he happened to be in a high arctic latitude, would not indulge his malice so far as to follow its trail into the tropic of Capricorn. And what was to be got by such a freak? There was no Golden Fleece in Gombroon. If the fiend or my brother fancied that, for once they were in the wrong box; and there was no variety of vegetable produce, for I never denied that the poor little ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... was gay again. But all were not there—for the first time one was missing from the circle round the Christmas table. Jem, of the steady lips and fearless eyes, was far away, and Rilla felt that the sight of his vacant chair was more than she could endure. Susan had taken a stubborn freak and insisted on setting out Jem's place for him as usual, with the twisted little napkin ring he had always had since a boy, and the odd, high Green Gables goblet that Aunt Marilla had once given him and from which ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... something more than a freak, or a mere geographical adaptation, in taking together, and at the last, the contributions of the three peninsulas which form the extreme south of Europe. For in the present scheme they form, as it were, but an appendix to the ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... collection that shall show future ages who it was that built up our finances, and furnished the sinews of war. Some may look upon this move as a mercenary one, but with me it is a passion. It is not simply a freak, it is a desire ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... waged against our country by a clever and powerful enemy. And I feel that our work in connection with the unraveling of the mystery and overcoming the enemy or enemies is but begun. It's a cinch that the thing is organized by human minds and is not any sort of a freak of the elements. Our work is cut out for us, all right, and I wish you would stick to George and me through the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... which is the house next door to the hotel itself, that we once had for three years running, and just as quiet and snug now as it was then. I don't think I shall return before the 20th or so, when the number is done; but I may, in some inconstant freak, run up to you before. Preliminary despatches and advices shall be forwarded in any case to the fragrant neighbourhood of Clare-market and the Portugal-street burying-ground." Such was his polite designation of my whereabouts: for which nevertheless he had secret ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... pounds and sometimes barely ten. The fox is known by its bright, sandy-red coat, black ears and paws, its white throat, and the white tip at the end of the tail. At a distance the fox's ears and tail look very large. The silver or black fox is a mere color freak with black coat and white tail tip. Red foxes are found throughout the heavily timbered parts of North America north of ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... at that old picture; got up, as you say, on a chair to do so. Wasn't that the freak of an idle man, wandering, he hardly knows why, from room to room in an old and ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... steadily southward, by the strange freak of the antarctic current, came in view of the lookouts on the ships, who had been posted as soon as the boys were missed. The boats were at once despatched, and headed for the little ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... of all his other sons and all his possessions put together. Clarence, whom I will not describe, as he will, I trust, show himself more effectually by his actions, was like his mother in disposition, or so, at least, she made herself happy by thinking; but by some freak of nature he was like his father in person, and carried his mouse's heart in a huge frame, somewhat hulking and heavy-shouldered, with the same roll which distinguished Mr. Copperhead, and which betrayed something ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... in her chamber and alone, that Henrietta Temple mused over this freak of destiny. It was in vain to conceal it, her thoughts recurred to Ferdinand. They might have been so happy! Why was he not true? And perhaps he had sacrificed himself to his family, perhaps even personal ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... illusions about herself, and had never attempted to curb the obstinate self-will and haughty pride that had characterized her. She thought of it curiously, her mind going back over the last few months that had changed her whole life. The last mad freak for which she had paid so dearly had been the outcome of an arrogant determination to have her own way in the face of all protests and advice. And with a greater arrogance and a determination stronger than ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... task, the Emperor heard, with some surprise but with no dismay, the news of Prussia's armaments and disaffection. At first he treats it as a passing freak which will vanish with firm treatment. "Remain at Berlin as long as you can," he writes to Eugene, March 5th. "Make examples for the sake of discipline. At the least insult, whether from a village or a town, were it from Berlin itself, burn it down." The chief ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... despair about his mistress, who has taken a freak of——. He began a letter to her, but was obliged to stop short—I finished it for him, and he copied and sent it. If he holds out, and keeps to my instructions of affected indifference, she will lower her colours. If she ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... Chartists have fired this part of the country. One misty day, a week ago, I was on the hill; I thought I had it to myself, when suddenly I heard a voice cry sharply, 'Shoulder arms.' I could see no one, and after a moment I put it down to a freak of the wind. Then all at once the mist before me blackened, and a body of men seemed to grow out of it. They were not shadows; they were Thrums weavers drilling, with ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... Ferdinand was guilty of such monstrous perjuries and cruelties that the reader ought to be warned not to think of him as a saturnine and Machiavellian Italian. He was a son of the Bourbon Charles III. of Spain. His character was that of a jovial, rather stupid farmer, whom a freak of fortune had made a king from infancy. A sort of grotesque comic element runs through his life, and through every picture drawn by persons in actual intercourse with him. The following, from one of Bentinck's despatches of 1814 (when Ferdinand had just heard that Austria had promised ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... fancy, there came before me Vaness's well-dressed person, panting, pale, perplexed; and beside him, by a freak of vision, stood the old darky's father, bound to the live-oak, with the bullets whistling past, and his face transfigured. There they stood alongside the creed of pleasure, which depended for fulfilment on its waist measurement; ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... and arrived at Lambach, a small city built upon a hill. We left the next day at noon, and on ascending the hill after crossing the Traun, had an opportunity of seeing the portrait on the Traunstein, of which the old landlord told us. I saw it at the first glance—certainly it is a most remarkable freak of nature. The rough back of the mountain forms the exact profile of the human countenance, as if regularly hewn out of the rock. What is still more singular, it is said to be a correct portrait of the unfortunate Louis XVI. The landlord said it was immediately ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... "Yes, it's a whimsical freak of fortune which has sent men from a little island in the Atlantic to administer the land of the Pharaohs," remarked Cecil Brown. "We shall pass away again, and never leave a trace among these successive races who have held the country, for ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Adminius had ceded to him the kingship of the whole island, and sent home high-flown dispatches to that effect. He had no fleet, but drew up his army in line of battle on the Gallic shore, while all wondered what mad freak he was purposing; then suddenly bade every man fill his helmet with shells as "spoils of the Ocean" to be dedicated in the Capitol. Finally he commemorated this glorious victory by the erection of a lofty lighthouse,[126] probably at the entrance ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... Big trucks and little ones; passenger cars in between them; a few motorcyclists catching up from the rear by riding on the road's shoulders. They were closely packed, as if by some freak the lead had been taken by great trucks incapable of the road speed of those behind them, yet with the frantic rearmost cars unable to pass. There was a humming and roaring of motors that filled the air. They plunged toward Lockley's ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... ice: An allusion, apparently, to the ice-palace built by the Empress of Russia, Catherine II, "most magnificent and mighty freak. The wonder of the North," Cowper called it. Compare Lowell's description of the frost work with Cowper's similar description in The Task, in ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... the neck, short and thick, the forelegs disproportionately small but very sturdy; and the whole animal was built on a slope towards the hind quarters which seemed to equal in massiveness all the rest of the body. One would have said that the horse was a freak meant by nature for the climbing of hills. And to glance at it no man could suppose that those ponderous limbs might be moved to a gallop. However, Haw-Haw Langley well knew the powers of the ugly ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... persuaded that the white wrist was a "promise of better things above and below," or he proposed marriage as a mere freak, intelligible enough when ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... wool and feathers instead of incense, put foul water into the holy-water basins; they sung ludicrous and indecent parodies to the tunes of church hymns; they violated whatever vestments belonging to the abbey they could lay their hands upon; and playing every freak which the whim of the moment could suggest to their wild caprice. At length they fell to more lasting deeds of demolition, pulled down and destroyed carved woodwork, dashed out the painted windows, and in ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... but he is not slovenly: you could not have taken any more decision from him just then; you have had as much as is good for you: he paints over a great space of his picture forms of the most rounded and melting tenderness, and suddenly, as you think by a freak, gives you a bit as jagged and sharp as a leafless blackthorn. Perhaps the most exquisite piece of subtle contrast in the world of painting is the arrow point, laid sharp against the white side and among the flowing hair of Correggio's Antiope. It is quite singular how very little contrast ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... the returned engagement-ring. The box she had concealed in her pocket; and when alone at night, she drew it out and looked at its precious contents. There were all sorts of poison in it. By some odd freak, Athalie had bought it in one of her Italian journeys, and while it was in her possession she thought she could defy the world. She imagined herself able to destroy her own life at any moment, and this ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... continues more feebly the style of poetry initiated a century before him by Ausonius. Boethius wrote his fine treatise On the Consolation of Philosophy half a century after the extinction of the Empire of the West. By a strange freak of history, it was at the Greek capital that Latin scholarship finally faded away. Priscian and Tribonian wrote at Constantinople; and the Western world received its most authoritative works on Latin grammar and Roman law, not from the Latin ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... difficult for them to think of the despised grub-rider in the light of a rival, so they decided it was just a freak of coquettishness ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... that were glad to be aroused, the news that had come from Poteet's. Across the broad plateau of Pullium's Summit the wild tidings flew, until, reaching the western verge of the mountain, they dived down into Prather's Mill Road—a vast gorge which takes its name from the freak of a drunken mountaineer, who declared he would follow the stream that rushed through it until he found a mill, and was never heard ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
... records his own sufferings. He says, in one of his books, "At this time I acquired this accursed habit of solitude." It has been said that the Hawthorne family were, in the earlier generation, afflicted with shyness almost as a disease—certainly a curious freak of nature in a family descended from robust sea-captains. It only goes to prove how far away are the influences which control ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... was hurling itself against Banks at Strasburg, swerved to the east about New Market, with a suddenness that made it dizzy. Straight across its path now ran the strange and bold wall of the Massanuttons, architectural freak of Nature's, planted midway of the smiling Valley. The army groaned. "Always climbing mountains! This time to-morrow, I reckon, we'll climb it back again. Nothing over on the other side but ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... Nature's a dial whose shade no hand puts back, Trick as we may! My friend, you are forty-three This very year in the world— [JOSEPHINE breaks out sobbing again.] And in vain it is To think of waiting longer; pitiful To dream of coaxing shy fecundity To an unlikely freak by physicking With superstitious drugs and quackeries That work you harm, not good. The fact being so, I have looked it squarely down—against my heart! Solicitations voiced repeatedly At length have shown the soundness of their shape, And left me no denial. You, at times, My dear one, have ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... when we attain to years of responsibility. She had been a presence in his father's household when Mr. Britling was a boy. Then she had been called "Jane," or "Cousin Jane," or "Your cousin Wilshire." It had been a kindly freak of Mr. Britling's to ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... sudden came the barking of a dog in greeting, and the bray of a hungry mule, and he found himself close upon a cabin, and by a freak of fortune it proved to be his own, and he was ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... chambermaids, can't speak anything else! Where the very beggars beg, and the commonest people swear, in French! Oh! it's inexpressibly delightful. Why, the dogs understand it, and the horses—"everybody," as Kurz Pacha said to me, the morning after our arrival (for he insisted upon coming, "it was such a freak," he said,) "everybody rolls in a luxury of French, and, according to the boarding-school standard, ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... whoever said there was? By the way, is not this freak of yours of going out into the roads to smoke, as you say, alone, rather a slight on your guest? Here is Mr. Wilde; how very amusing! we all seem to be drawn out towards the ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... seem, this freak struck Madam Conway favorably. Arthur Carrollton knew that Maggie was unlike any other person, and the joke, she thought, would increase, rather than diminish, the interest he already felt in her. So she made no objection, and in a few days it was on its way to England, ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... impressions and feelings in the absence of facts, to believe that no other head than his ever concocted the crime. Still, from the manly sincerity with which his young client spoke, he felt inclined to impute the act to a freak of boyish malice and disappointment, rather than to a spirit of vindictive rancor. He entertained no expectation whatsoever of Connor's acquittal, and hinted to him that it was his habit in such cases to recommend his clients to be prepared for the worst, without, at the same ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... stopping all communication for several weeks, until it was his sovereign will and pleasure that people might receive their letters and travel across the country as before. Now what an unaccountable freak was this! It was like the madness of a reasonable being. If I recollect right, it was when Captain Owen was on the east coast of Africa, some of his party who landed were attacked by elephants, who threw them down ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... strength come, I wondered, in one who from his face appeared to be old? Was there perchance, after all, some truth in the legend of Samson and did it dwell in that gigantic beard and those long locks of his? It was impossible to say and probably the man was but a Herculean freak, for that he was as strong as Hercules all the stories that I heard afterwards of his feats, left little room ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... had some definite object in view," said Harley, "or it may have been merely a freak of his client. Is there anything characteristic about the topmost ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... every one. In a few moments he had won a sum variously estimated at from eighty to a hundred thousand dollars. A rumor went round the room that it was a concerted attempt to "break the bank" rather than the drunken freak of a Western miner, dazzled by some successful strike. To this theory the man's careless and indifferent bearing towards his extraordinary gains lent great credence. The attempt, if such it was, however, was unsuccessful. After winning ten times in succession ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... depth and breadth of the tracks, too, surprised him not a little. They were much deeper and broader than those caused by any species of cart he had yet seen or heard of in the country, and the width apart was so great, that he began to suspect he must have mistaken a curious freak of nature for the tracks of a gigantic vehicle. Following the track for some distance, he came to a muddy spot, where the footprints of men and horses became distinctly visible. A little further on he passed the mouth of what appeared to be a cavern, and, ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... by other physical peculiarities—the snarling habit and that high-pitched animal voice, for instance—which made him a being different from others—one separate and far apart? Was he, so admirably formed, so complete and well-balanced, merely a freak of nature, to use an old-fashioned phrase—a sport, or spontaneous individual variation—an experiment for a new human type, imagined by Nature in some past period, inconceivably long ago, but which she had only now, too late, found time to carry out? Or ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... Attractive for Show Purposes than those of Modern Make," and, singular to relate, the affirmative was placed in the hands of Mr. Barnum, while to Noah had fallen the task of upholding the virtues of the modern freak. It is with the party on mere pleasure bent that we have to do upon this occasion. The proceedings of the debating-party are as yet in the hands of the official stenographer, but will be made public as ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... than that, which of them would herself have dared ridicule in order to save him from ridicule? And in what light should he regard this suddenly prompted action on her part, which seemed to him so bewildering at the time, but which she appeared to look on as only a sort of half-humorous freak of friendship? ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... cost money and were hard to get. She explained how she had searched the camp for new magic carpets, finding a "poetry-book" by Longfellow, and a book of American history, and a story called "David Copperfield," and last and strangest of all, another story called "Pride and Prejudice." A curious freak of fortune—the prim and sentimentally quivering Jane Austen in a coal-camp in a far Western wilderness! An adventure for Jane, as well as ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... force and nervous energy fascinated Lord Emsworth. As for Mr. Peters, nothing like the earl had ever happened to him before in a long and varied life. Each, in fact, was to the other a perpetual freak show, with no charge for admission. And if anything had been needed to cement the alliance it would have been supplied by the fact that they were ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... anomalousness &c adj.^; exception, peculiarity; infraction of law, breach, of law, violation of law, violation of custom, violation of usage, infringement of law, infringement of custom, infringement of usage; teratism^, eccentricity, bizarrerie^, oddity, je ne sais quoi [Fr.], monster, monstrosity, rarity; freak, freak of Nature, weirdo, mutant; rouser, snorter [U.S.]. individuality, idiosyncrasy, originality, mannerism. aberration; irregularity; variety; singularity; exemption; salvo &c (qualification) 469. nonconformist; nondescript, character, original, nonesuch, nonsuch^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... been sweeping the whole of the rest of the British coasts, and driving the steam-drifters into harbour. Hence the price of fish: quotations very high; business nil, or next door to it. Our bay however, by a fortunate freak of the weather, has been amply calm for our little undecked drifters, though squalls off land have made sailing tricky in the extreme. We have seen the snow on the distant hills but none has fallen here. We have had the ground-swell, rolling in from outside, ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... eyes, the gloss from their hair; they get 'peculiar.' And people laugh at them—and I don't wonder!" Then passionately, "Look at me! Mature! Unmarried! Childless! Where in Nature do I belong? Nowhere! I'm a freak!" ...
— Apron-Strings • Eleanor Gates
... Through a queer freak of fate, Thad Brewster and his comrades of the Silver Fox Patrol find themselves in somewhat the same predicament that confronted dear old Robinson Crusoe; only it is on the Great Lakes that they are wrecked instead of the salty sea. You will admit that those Cranford scouts are a ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... they enable him to delay it grievously. We divided seventeen times, and between every division this vexatious Irishman made us a speech of apologies and self-condemnation. Of the two who had supported him at the beginning of his freak one soon sneaked away. The other, Sibthorpe, stayed to the last, not expressing remorse like Shaw, but glorying in the unaccommodating temper he showed and in the delay which he produced. At last the bill ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... other errands were done, and Meg and her mother busy at some necessary needlework, while Beth and Amy got tea, and Hannah finished her ironing with what she called a 'slap and a bang', but still Jo did not come. They began to get anxious, and Laurie went off to find her, for no one knew what freak Jo might take into her head. He missed her, however, and she came walking in with a very queer expression of countenance, for there was a mixture of fun and fear, satisfaction and regret in it, which puzzled the family as much as did the roll of bills she laid before her mother, saying ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... characters who tangled me at the start. But I did not budge until I had unraveled them every one. Mrs. Jones declared there was no reason for the disappearance of Tom; his aunt Quincy said her flightiness had driven him to it; and Cousin Jack, Mrs. Tom's adviser, thought it just a freak after much dissipation, for Tom had been acting queerly for months before he did the vanishing act. The three were talking either from spleen or the wish to hide the truth. When there was no trace of Tom after a month of ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... every, much, neither, no, or none, some, this, that, these, those. The pronominal adjectives which precede the article, are all, both, many, such, and what; as, "All the world,"—"Both the judges,"—"Many a[336] mile,"—"Such a chasm,"—"What a freak." In like manner, any adjective of quality, when its meaning is limited by the adverb too, so, as, or how, is put before the article; as, "Too great a study of strength, is found to betray writers into a harsh manner."—Blair's Rhet., p. 179. "Like many an other poor wretch, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... say, the odd little freak of substitution only endeared the twins to the people of Mount Mark ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... have heard that he gave sound advice, and was a good and profitable man to consult. Was it not a strange freak on the part of God, who plays sometimes jokes on us, to have granted so many perfections to ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... is, Bess, I waited as long as I could for you to come over this side to look after me, that I might cease wandering and settle down. As you know, I've tried my hand at a good many occupations, often for the freak of the thing, but always with a reserve force for doing the right thing at last, and somehow I've mostly made bread and cheese and a little more. The gold fever was over long before I reached Australia, but I had ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... Dame Markham, in stomacher and farthingale and ruff, with quite a look of alarm on their countenances, which was reflected from that of another of the old Markhams—all appearing either angry or startled at such a freak being played ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... the bush!" Robert heard him say. "There can't be! The place has no people and we know there are no big wild animals on the islands in these seas! It's some freak of the wind ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... In ten minutes I knew, that a sudden freak on the part of the girl he was engaged to had released him, without fault of his own, and that with this release new life had entered his veins, for the conflict was over and love and duty were now ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... Coleville, catching her by the waist, "what is this wild freak of yours? Have you ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... kept her indoors, she amused herself with a new freak. Making friends everywhere, as became The Queen of Hearts, she even ingratiated herself with the sour old housekeeper, who had predicted so obstinately that she was certain to run away. To the amazement of everybody in the house, she spent hours in the kitchen, ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... the qui vive for a genius of so riotous an order as this, and all the wealthy families of Newport vied with one another for the privilege of being first to welcome him to our shores, not because he was a freak, mind you, but "for art's sweet sake." Mrs. Gushington-Andrews offered twenty-five hundred dollars for him as a week-end guest, and Mrs. Gaster immediately went her bid a hundred per cent. better. Henriette, in order to outdo every one else, promptly put in a ...
— Mrs. Raffles - Being the Adventures of an Amateur Crackswoman • John Kendrick Bangs
... the bookman's trivial adventures and discoveries. They would be worse than trivial indeed if they led him to forget or ignore that by which Goldsmith earned his immortality, or to regard Traherne merely as a freak in the history of literary reputations, and not primarily as the writer ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... confounded millionaire soap-boiler," commented Mr. Blunt through his clenched teeth. "A man absolutely without parentage. Without a single relation in the world. Just a freak." ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... I intend to outstay you," he said, in answer to her glance. "You were here first; it's your turn to go now. But about this latest freak of Mrs. Brenton: where do you ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... had the idea that female beauty of lip had been attained by the 'Ornithorhynchus paradoxus' alone. This custom prevails throughout the country of the Maravi, and no one could see it without confessing that fashion had never led women to a freak more mad. We had rains now every day, and considerable cloudiness, but the sun often burst through with scorching intensity. All call out against it then, saying, "O the sun! that is rain again." It was worth noticing that my ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com
|
|
|
