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More "Inability" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... went on for several nights, when Father Deveaux finding that my midnight devotions were rather too much for me, was so obliging as to prescribe another species of pious exercise, in a letter which he wrote to me with his own hand. The holy father, after deeply regretting my inability to keep awake, informed me that he had a new act of penitence to suggest to me by the performance of which I might still hope to expiate my sins. He then, in the plainest terms, advised me to have recourse ...
— A Fair Penitent • Wilkie Collins
... [*]It was an inability to discover and execute these concealed curves which give certain of the modern imitations of the Parthenon their unpleasant impressions of harness ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... we had just been reading and discussing. "Did you read that! Did you see the reference to stabilizing the industry? STABILIZING! It ought to be spelled stable-izing, for they lead all the donkeys into stalls and tie them up and let them kick." He stopped momentarily for sheer inability ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... himself as a great force, a granary on which the city depended for life; it pleased him to think of thousands of people, men, women and children, waiting for his loaves or perhaps suffering through the inability to buy them. ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... 1914-15, he was credited with being a personal emissary and friend of the kaiser, bearing letters of credit estimated to vary between $50,000,000 and $100,000,000. The figure probably was exaggerated in view of the acknowledged inability of the German interests in the United States to command anything like the lesser sum named to acquire all they wanted—control of the munition plants. His initial efforts appeared to have been directed to a wide advertising campaign to sway ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... Every day the woman in the glass grew more repulsively powerful and sombre, more dreadfully like that portrait which George hated. She knew he couldn't stand her when she looked like that. Looking like that, and George's inability to stand her, and the celebrity that made her so absurd, she put it all down to the peculiar malice and mischief of the thing that had been, as she said, "tacked on" to her, the thing they ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... "This inability to assist us is really very singular. I had hoped, after Dr. Thornton's report, that we might at last count with some certainty upon arriving at fresh results as to the actual murder. I can see from what you tell me you're a young lady of intelligence—much above the average—and great ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... not affect to consider Hiram Doolittle a perfect empiric in his profession, being in the constant habit of listening to his treatises on architecture with a kind of indulgent smile; yet, either from an inability to oppose them by anything plausible from his own stores of learning, or from secret admiration, Richard generally submitted to the arguments ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... window to call again for help; he realized with a horrible shrinking that that hammer-like fist was again striking out for his face; he was conscious of a sickening impulse to run, a humiliating and overwhelming sense of his inability to cope with this brute and of even his ignorance how to try; yet most of all he felt the determination to defend Edith or to die in the attempt. In a wild and futile fashion he dashed against his assailant, striking blindly ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... connived at, such sales, have by the Company's agents, been frequently seized and imprisoned, confined in irons, fined considerable sums of money, flogged, and deprived, in the most ignominious manner, of what they esteem most valuable, their castes. Weavers also, upon their inability to perform such agreements as have been forced from them by the Company's agents, universally known in Bengal by the name of Mutchulcahs, have had their goods seized and sold on the spot, to make good the deficiency: and the winders of raw silk, called Nagaards, have ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... what they meant; the Indian's fear of telegraph instruments, and his inability to understand electricity, were known to every operator ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... Obj. 3: Further, inability to secure a proffered pleasure causes affliction. But if children had not full strength in the use of their limbs, they would often have been unable to procure something pleasurable offered to them; and so they would have been ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... for the most part, earn. After lingering, in the sickness of hope deferred, at several of the German courts, his destination was at last fixed for Paris. His chance of success as a courtier was probably diminished by the blunt though kindly frankness of his opinions, and by his inability to stoop to unworthy means of rising. He had also many rivals to encounter, particularly those of the more slender school of Italian melody; and few of the public had knowledge or independence enough to forsake the inferior favourites that were ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... thus associating them together in its legislation; and after prescribing the punishment that may be inflicted on the slaves, proceeds in the following words: "And to punish such free negroes and mulattoes by penalties not exceeding twenty dollars for any one offence; and in case of the inability of any such free negro or mulatto to pay any such penalty and cost thereon, to cause him or her to be confined to labor for any time not exceeding six calendar months." And in a subsequent part of the same section, the act authorizes the corporation "to prescribe ...
— Report of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Opinions of the Judges Thereof, in the Case of Dred Scott versus John F.A. Sandford • Benjamin C. Howard
... to excuse himself with an embarrassed air, as though his inability to appreciate the delights of the table was a failing he despaired of curing. But, as he said, he had too many other things ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... light unto my paths. And so it was until other knowledge, the rudiments of which he had himself endeavoured to impart to me, threw glimmerings across my way and I passed through a distracted period of inability to distinguish the signals of danger from those of safety. Much the same thing has happened to many others and assistance has sometimes been found in compromise and accommodation. Thus the statement about 4004 ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... where they met, drank vile liquors, and, under the maddening influence of absinthe and alcohol, plotted their crimes and atrocities of every description. This man, another Quasimodo in point of hideous aspect, had been dismissed from the detective service because of his inability to keep sober, but he had not forgotten the resources of his profession, and money lavishly bestowed upon him made him Captain de Morcerf's most obedient and faithful slave. Cash in hand rendered him indefatigable and the prospect of obtaining ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... loves and admires all that is great and noble in the history of that famous republic, and can have no hereditary bias as to its ecclesiastical or political theories, may at least attempt the task with comparative coldness, although conscious of inability to do thorough justice to ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... born as to regard expulsion from it as the greatest of all punishments,—thus being much like those serfs who, in some other countries, are legally bound to the land, and are sold with it; and they are forever in debt, the consequence of reckless indulgence, and of that inability to think of the morrow which is the most prominent characteristic of the inferior races of men. This has caused the existence of the system of peonage, of which so much has been said in this country, in the attempts that have been made ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... itself have supplied a reason for his inability to travel abroad and meet Cardan as he had agreed to do; but the real cause of his change of plan was doubtless the condition of public affairs in Scotland at the beginning of 1552. In the interval of time between Cassanate's first letter to Cardan and the end of 1551, ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... agricultural chemicals, pesticides; salinization, water-logging of soil due to poor irrigation methods; Caspian Sea pollution; diversion of a large share of the flow of the Amu Darya into irrigation contributes to that river's inability to replenish the Aral Sea; desertification natural hazards: NA international agreements: party to - Ozone Layer Protection; signed, but not ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Seemed to Be Raised by the Demands of Great Station House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand I Can't Spare That Man, He Fights! Idealization Which So Easily Runs into the Commonplace If Slavery Is Not Wrong, Nothing Is Wrong Ignored the Insult, but Firmly Established His Superiority Inability to Say "No" as a Positive Weakness Leave Us to Take Care of Ourselves Let Us to the End Dare to Do Our Duty as We Understand It Lincoln-Shields Duel Lost Townships Manifested His Courage to Stand Alone Marriage, Murder Case National Bank No Hanging ...
— Widger's Quotations from Abraham Lincoln's Writings • David Widger
... weakness, though, and look at him even as she had answered at noon; but, in the middle of dinner, while she yet strove against the physical inability, her resolution was disturbed by a strange occurrence. A wild scream of fear and horror came ringing from the nursery. Without a thought for anything but that it was Roddy's voice, Christine sprang from the table. Down the long passage and into the nursery she ran, and, almost ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... catch the fine warmth of her voice, and his inability to see handicapped him more at that moment than at any time ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... certainly a novel one, and could not in ordinary circumstances have been accepted. But it is also novel to charge an historian of the highest character and repute with inability to speak the truth, or to distinguish between truth and falsehood. Freeman, signing himself "Mr. Froude's Saturday Reviewer," replied in The Pall Mall Gazette. The challenge he left to the editor of The Saturday, who contemptuously refused ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... quickly brought a low table from an inner room, and with deft hands placed the steaming soup and broiled fish before him. The knife and fork were a concession to Merrit's inability to wield the chopsticks, and sitting on his heels was Merrit's concession to the inability of the house to provide ...
— Little Sister Snow • Frances Little
... positive means of liquidating them, on the strength of a contingency which, if he could but be taught to believe it, is of all earthly anticipations the most remote and uncertain. A passion for unnecessary expense is, under different circumstances, frequently repressed by an inability to procure credit; but it is the curse and bane of Mr. Omnium's nephew, and Miss Saveall's niece, that so far from any obstacle being opposed to their prodigality, almost unlimited indulgence is offered, nay, actually pressed upon them, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... satisfy ourselves that the wine-and brandy-drinking into which men and women are enticed at dinner-parties and fashionable entertainments is a fruitful source of evil. The effect upon body and mind after the indulgence is over is seen in headaches, clouded brain, nervous irritation, lassitude, inability to think, and sometimes in a general demoralization of both the physical and mental economy. Where there is any chronic or organic ailment the morbid condition is increased and sometimes severe attacks ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... some clothing and boots from the Tibetans, and the pigtail that I needed to make me pass for a Tibetan I intended to make myself, out of the silky hair of my yaks. To avoid betraying myself by my inability to speak Tibetan fluently, I thought of pretending ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... large differences to pay, caused much of this trouble to the brokers. Men with limited means had plunged into what they considered a certain speculation, and when pay-day arrived and the account was against them, they were obliged to confess their inability to scrape together the required funds. For instance, at the time Zumalacarregui was expected to die, a principal, a person who could not command more than L1,000, "stood," as the Stock Exchange phrase runs, to make a "pot of money" by the event. ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... he sang them, with words of abuse in the meantime; but gradually his hoarseness grew better. He did not send word of his inability to appear in the evening, but sang, and better than ...
— How to Sing - [Meine Gesangskunst] • Lilli Lehmann
... stole over him. He knew that the moment for Presents was approaching; he knew that very shortly he would have to kiss and be kissed by a multitude of persons, that he would have to say again and again, "Oh, thank you, thank you so much!" that he would have his usual consciousness of his inability to thank anybody at all in the way that they expected to be thanked. Helen and Mary never worried about such things. They delighted in kissing and hugging and multitudes of words. If only he might have ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... Ill health, inability for prolonged mental application, shut out the future correspondent, to his great grief, from all thoughts of attempting a collegiate course. While incapacitated from mental or physical labor he obtained a surveyor's compass, and more ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... would call for a treat. It so happened that to-night none of my cronies were present. When the landlord found that I was still unable to settle the 'old score,' as he termed it, he abused me in no measured terms; but I still lingered in sight of the coveted beverage; and knowing my inability to obtain it my appetite increased in proportion. At length I approached the bar, and begged him to trust me for one more glass of brandy. I will not wound your ears by repeating his reply; and he concluded ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... relief. His speech was delivered in a faint voice, and with every symptom of physical exhaustion. He was heard with the most profound attention and respect. His predictions, unfortunately, came to pass. His dissolution was hastened by his inability to procure an assent to his views in the house, and by the consequences which he ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... though he would suggest that the unfortunate man was not quite right in his head, in order to arouse if not sympathy, at any rate indulgence towards the madman. The governor shrugged his shoulders, opened and shut his eyes, regretted his inability to do anything, but made some sort of promise in the end. "Tous les egards... certainement, tous les egards," the soft, pleasant words flowed through his scented moustache. "But you know the ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... smiling face, the while she fought one of the mental battles which seemed to meet her on every step of the road to recovery. She had been so much occupied grieving over the serious financial loss which her inability to work would involve, that she had taken little thought of the pleasures from which she was debarred; but, after all, she was but a girl, and a girl with a keen capacity for enjoyment, and it was a very ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... leaders preceding the final break. The awful shadow of the cross grows deeper and darker across His path. The hatred of the opposition leader gets constantly intenser. The conditions of discipleship are more sharply put. The inability of the crowds, of the disciples, and others to understand Him grows more marked. Many followers go back. He seeks to get more time for intercourse with the twelve. He makes frequent trips to distant points on ...
— Quiet Talks on Prayer • S. D. (Samuel Dickey) Gordon
... column of figures when others are talking. Habit and effort may reduce such disability, but in some instances it will never even approximately eliminate it. Such persons may be very efficient employees, and their inability to concentrate in the presence of distractions should be respected. Every business man is careful to locate every piece of machinery where it will work best, but equal care has not been given to locating men where they may work ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... This inability may either be concealed by meeting demands to the full, until it issue in bankruptcy, or in some form of national debt;—or it may be concealed during oscillatory movements between destructiveness and productiveness, which result on the whole in stability;—or it may be manifested by ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... contrary extreme into which many teachers are apt to run, and that is, to condemn every thing which is vehement and forcible as theatrical. It is an old trick to depreciate what we can not attain, and calling a spirited pronunciation theatrical, is but an artful method of hiding an utter inability of speaking with force and energy. But though school-boys ought not to be taught those nice touches which form the greatest difficulties in the profession of an actor, they should not be too much restrained from ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... hills, and unrolled itself upon brook, glade, and tarn, and the spring breeze was not powerful enough to raise the veil, though from the wild sounds which were heard occasionally on the ridges, and through the glens, it might be supposed to wail at a sense of its own inability. The route of the travellers was directed by the course which the river had ploughed for itself down the valley, the banks of which bore in general that dark grey livery which Sir Aymer de Valence had intimated to be the prevalent ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... recapitulation of the sufferings endured by the Spaniards on their retrograde march to Quito. They took a more northerly route than that by which they had approached the Amazon; and, if it was attended with fewer difficulties, they experienced yet greater distresses from their greater inability to overcome them. Their only nourishment was such scanty fare as they could pick up in the forest, or happily meet with in some forsaken Indian settlement, or wring by violence from the natives. Some sickened and sank down by the way, ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... and, never being based upon any original choice of foundation or direction, they were exercised on whatever object chance might place in their way. Hence, whilst he sometimes reached the brilliant in speech because that was spontaneous, he fell below the commonplace in action, from inability to guide incipient effort. He had a quick comprehension and considerable force of character; but, being without the power to combine them, the comprehension became engaged with trivialities whilst waiting for the will to direct it, and the force wasted itself in useless ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... for the fact that PETER materializes after his death, it is written with plausibility and great care. The psychic phenomena are treated as though real, and our sympathy for PETER when he returns is a human sympathy for the inability of a spirit to get his message across. The theme is not etherealized; one does not see through a mist dimly. There was not even an attempt, in the stage production of the piece, which occurred at the Belasco Theatre, New York, on October 17, 1911, to use the "trick" of gauze ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm • David Belasco
... was supposed (perhaps falsely) to be the bad military administration of your only army. Secondly, and much more, by your apparent inability ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... other girl's inconsiderate mother whom you may find comfortably seated in a good position for criticism, and to make her suppose that you are an old rider, keep silence. Do not criticise your horse or his equipments, do not profess inability to mount, but when you master says "Now!" step forward and stand facing in the same direction of your horse, placing your right hand on the upper pommel of the two on the left ...
— In the Riding-School; Chats With Esmeralda • Theo. Stephenson Browne
... playing, confusion in playing, inability to follow when accompanying, accentuating too roughly or with lack of precision, all these faults have their origin in the child's muscular and nervous control, in lack of co-ordination between the mind which conceives, the brain which orders, the nerve which transmits and the ...
— The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze • Emile Jaques-Dalcroze
... Afghanistan is extremely poor, landlocked, and highly dependent on foreign aid, agriculture, and trade with neighboring countries. Much of the population continues to suffer from shortages of housing, clean water, electricity, medical care, and jobs. Criminality, insecurity, and the Afghan Government's inability to extend rule of law to all parts of the country pose challenges to future economic growth. It will probably take the remainder of the decade and continuing donor aid and attention to significantly raise Afghanistan's living ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... mystery? The outcome of it all for Hugh was the resolution that for himself, at all events, his business was to disregard the temptation to formularise his position. With one's limited vision, one's finite inability to touch a thought at more than one point at a time, one must give up all hope of attaining to a perfected philosophical system. The end was dark, the solution incomprehensible. He must rather live as far as possible in a high and lofty ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... splendid ecstasy! If you want to call hunger, continual envy, and the inability to live otherwise, ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... Instead, the words that came seemed to him somehow banal and commonplace. "I love you. I want to be with you all the time. When we are together things grow strange and desirable." Amorous mediocrities! So he edited them into a further banality and thus concealed his inability to give lofty utterance to his emotions by amusing himself with deliberately cheapened insincerities. "Saving my linguistic face," he thought suddenly, and ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... suspected things were going wrong for some time, and spoken of his suspicions to me repeatedly. He has just come back from a private meeting of the Redcross shareholders. He says in consequence of some additional losses in South America, I think, and inability to realize capital there, the bank cannot meet two or three heavy calls at home. I daresay I am not telling you rightly, for I don't understand business, and I don't suppose ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... and caused him to pause as if spell-bound in the centre of the room. No—his gaze was riveted upon a female form that reclined upon a sofa; and now we are almost inclined to throw down our pen in despair, for we are conscious of our inability to describe such a glorious perfection of womanly beauty as met the enraptured gaze of a man, whose sensual nature amply qualified him to appreciate such ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... Federal Constitution so as to make effective the disapproval by the President of particular items in appropriation bills, the enactment of statutes in regard to the filling of vacancies in the Presidential office, and the determining of vexed questions respecting Presidential inability are measures which may justly ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... given away if she had remained with him another instant. Danglar's wife! It was dark here in the alley-way, and she did not know where it led to. But did it matter? And she stumbled as she went along. But it was not the physical inability to see that made her stumble—it was a brain-blindness that fogged her soul itself. His wife! Gypsy ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... noticed in examining their hands that few could move the forefinger without the second finger; indeed the fingers appeared useless as independent members of the hands. In connection with this may be mentioned their apparent inability to distinguish colours or count numbers, due alone to their want of words to express ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... wholly indifferent respecting the circulation of this protest; he merely wished to show the Emperor that he was better informed of passing events than Regnier, and to afford Napoleon another proof of the inexperience and inability of the Grand Judge in police; and Fouche was not long in receiving the reward which he expected from this step. In fact, ten days after the publication of the protest, the Emperor announced to Regnier the re-establishment of the Ministry of ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... history a beautifully organized constitutional system; to contend that the most absolute monarchy in existence has maintained itself for centuries, without encountering a single serious insurrection, in a nation whose distinguishing characteristic is its inability to endure a ruler; to treat the introduction of a totally different and far more complex system of government, the product elsewhere of elements that have no existence in Russia, and of long struggles ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... pronouncing the a in scatter as we do in skater, (one who skates,) I have no conception of what it meant; for if it meant that only the time of the syllable was prolonged, the vowel retaining the same sound, I must confess as ut er [sic—KTH] an inability of comprehending this source of quantity in the Greek and Latin as in English."—Walker on Gr. and L. Accent, Sec.24; Key, p. 331. This distinguished author seems unwilling to admit, that the consonants occupy time in their ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... but grieve at suffering the whole burthen of this clamorous imposition to fall upon the soft-hearted Mr Arnott, whose inability to resist solicitation made him so unequal to sustaining its weight: but when Mrs Harrel was again able to go on with her account, she heard, to her infinite surprise, that all application to her brother had proved fruitless. "He will not hear ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... two things that won't mix—metaphysics and natural science. It is full of word-splitting and conjuring with terms, and abounds in natural history facts. The style is wonderful, but the logic is not strong. He enlarges upon the inability of the intellect to understand or grasp Life. The reason is baffled, but sympathy and the emotional nature and the ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... in his dreams, and a beautiful "Sleeping Youth" was actually discovered beneath the descending Selene, thus completing the composition and verifying the assumption as to its subject. That the recumbent youth was not at once recognised as intended to represent Endymion is due to the inability of the scientific mind to grasp more than one idea at a time, for the features bore so marked a resemblance to those of Antoninus Pius that it was rightly considered a portrait of that Emperor in his youth. Only recently have ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... virtues of his brother Joseph. He who had been the victorious general crossing the Alps now found himself the Alp, with a dozen victorious generals crossing him; he who had been the gunner was now the target, and his present inability to express his feelings in language which his tormentors could understand, for he had not yet mastered the French tongue, kept him in a state of being which may well ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... the steepest ups and downs. As before, not only was the scenery that unfolded itself, as we rose from the valley of the Rio Chico, of great beauty, but it increased in beauty the farther north we travelled. And I can not but regret again my inability to give some idea, however faint, of these mountains and valleys and rivers, especially of those that paraded themselves before us on the second ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... have achieved congruity by use or custom. Consonance is an immediate and fundamental impression,—psychologically an ultimate fact. That it is ultimate is emphasized by Stumpf in his theory of Fusion. Consonance is fusion, that is, unitary impression. Fusion is not identical with inability to distinguish two tones from each other in a chord, although this may be used as a measure of fusion. Consonance is the feeling of unity, and fusion is the mutual relation of tones ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... unable to move anything except my fingers and toes. I did not appear to be hurt in the least, and my senses, instead of being dulled by the shock, seemed to be preternaturally sharp, and I realized in a moment that if this inability to move remained with me for five minutes I was a dead man—dead, not from the shock, but by drowning. I gazed up through that clear green water, and I could see the ripples on the surface slowly subsiding after my plunge into the tub. It reminded me of looking into an ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... school, he made a violent struggle against his physical inability to study. He sat gripped, making himself pale and ghastly in his effort to concentrate on the book, to take in what he had to learn. But it was no good. If he beat down his first repulsion, and got like a suicide to the stuff, he ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... service were spent by the grown-up Jewish soldiers amidst extraordinary hardships. They were beaten and ridiculed because of their inability to express themselves in Russian, their refusal to eat trefa, and their general lack of adaptation to the strange environment and to the military mode of life. And even when this process of adaptation was finally accomplished, the Jewish soldier was never promoted ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... in the great questions of the day, only sought how to elude them, and to leave time, that inscrutable master, to settle them in his place. His indecision brought him to a state of impotence, and he ended by inability to do anything but dodge and lie, like his mother, and even with his mother. Whilst he was getting his sister married to the King of Navarre and concerting his policy with Coligny, he was adopting towards the three principal personages who came to talk over those affairs ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... some moral worth still left in me. But if I did not mean to kill the man—if his death was my misfortune as well as his—and if (as frequently happens) I am nevertheless troubled by remorse, the true cause lies in my own inability fairly to realize my own motives—before I look to results. I am the ignorant victim of false remorse; and if I will only ask myself boldly what has blinded me to the true state of the case, I shall find ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... inability to share my love with any other. The incident of Veronica had made that clear; but now that she chose to deny herself to me she seemed rather to wish than otherwise that I should seek adventures, experiences elsewhere. And ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... this unique faculty for yielding a melodious representation of the most intense moments of stationary emotion, was his inability to deal with a dramatic subject. The first episode of S. Catherine's execution, when the wheel was broken and the executioners struck by lightning, is painted in this chapel without energy and with a lack of composition that betrays the master's indifference to his subject. Far different is the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... due to forage poisoning, caused by the eating food infested with poisonous moulds. The symptoms are inability to swallow (paralysis of the muscles of deglutition) and paresis of the hind and forequarters. When the symptoms become advanced, treatment is of little avail. However, further troubles can be prevented by ascertaining the food which is infested with this mould. Ofttimes, ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... did useful work which none other could do in the University. That this was acknowledged was proved by his re-election, early in 1876: but his third term of three years was a time of weakened health. Repeated absence from his post and inability to fulfil his duties made it obviously his wisest course, at the end of that term, to ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... of the Brigadier the British tars were sweating and muttering imprecations at their inability to put a ...
— The Boy Allies with the Victorious Fleets - The Fall of the German Navy • Robert L. Drake
... But next, while we may deny this universal distribution of political wisdom, we may, if we are sufficiently under the sway of modern ideas about collective psychology, believe that it is necessary to poke up the political indifference and inability of the common man as much as possible, to thrust political ideas and facts upon him, to incite him to a watchful and critical attitude towards them, and above all to secure his assent to the proceedings of ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... of the political earthquake that was to shake the country made itself audible beyond denial on that morning of March 27th, when the news spread through England that, in view of the disorganized state of the Persian army and the Shah's consequent inability to suppress the open insurrection of the border tribes in the north-eastern districts of Meshed, Russia, with a great show of magnanimity, had come to the rescue by despatching a large armed force from her military station at Merv across the Persian frontier ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... Its main difficulty. The main difficulty in producers' cooeperation is to get and retain managerial ability of a high order. Failure to do this results in inability to maintain and keep in repair the equipment and to pay the ordinary returns to the passive investment, and financial failure follows. There is no touchstone for business talent, no way of selecting it with any certainty in advance ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... from a modern confusion of thought with regard to the realms of the Divine and the Human that the amazing inability arises, on the world's part, to understand the respective principles on which the Catholic Church acts in these two and utterly separate departments. The world considers it reasonable for a country to defend its material possessions by the sword, but intolerant and unreasonable ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... effect. He betrayed his race nowadays by little more than his colour, a certain high-pitched intonation of his voice and an extraordinary skill in the game of polo. There had been a time of revolt against discipline, of inability to understand the points of view of his masters and their companions, and of difficulty to discover much sense in ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... brilliant future, or at least that the certainty of his consent to such a second union would momentarily please her. It was hard to say why he had spoken. It had been an impulse such as the most selfish people sometimes yield to when their failing strength brings upon them suddenly the sense of their inability to resist any longer the course of events. The vanity of man is so amazing that when he is past arrogating to himself the attention which is necessary to him as his daily bread, he is capable of so demeaning his manhood as to excite interest in his ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... "Inability to locate you until after somewhat exhaustive inquiries had been made explains the failure to notify you by wire in time to permit of your attending the funeral of your father and brother, which took place in this city on the eighth instant, and was marked ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... comprised in the following lines, which have every appearance of significance; and which, I have not the least doubt, bear as close application as those already explained: but, as yet, I must acknowledge an inability to understand the allusions. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 74, March 29, 1851 • Various
... dimensions. The door of the air-tight stove has to be opened, under such circumstances, you may well suppose! So it happened that our young man had been obliged, from an early period, to do something to support himself, and found himself stopped short in his studies by the inability of the good people at home to furnish him the present means of support ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... in Western New York, and have been found to answer a good purpose; and so it may be said of the sole-pipes. Indeed, it is believed that no instance is to be found on record in America of the failure of tile drains, from the inability of the water to ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... able to find out what the charges were on which he was recalled from his lucrative appointment, although repeated applications were made to the Governor who recalled him for a trial. All the subsequent Governors have professed their inability to give him the information, which, had such charges actually been framed, must have been found in the archives, so that no doubt can now exist but that this villanous trick was trumped up by the Governor to serve his own family by the bestowal ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... was in this first interview the sole effort of Napoleon to develop in the mind of Alexander the sentiments of anger and weariness by which he had been inspired by the selfishness which he imputed to Great Britain and the inability and weakness which he recognized in Prussia, and to engage the Russian emperor to become friendly with the only power which could offer him a glorious and profitable alliance. In the mind of the emperor, we have already ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... long time observed by others that all sorts of heavy bodies (allowance being made for the inability of retardation which they suffer from a small power of resistance in the air) descend to the earth FROM EQUAL HEIGHTS in equal times; and that equality of times we may distinguish to a great accuracy ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... power; and he would not abuse his power. The eyes in which love had once blazed like flame were now quiet and steady as stars. She trembled. Her dread of Armand was increased by a nightmare sensation of restlessness and utter inability to move; she felt as if she were turned to stone. She lay passive in the grip of fear. She thought she saw the light behind the curtains grow to a blaze, as if blown up by a pair of bellows; in another moment the gleams of flame grew brighter, and she fancied ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... defilement from his soul; Jasper wanted so to bury it there, so deftly, so cleverly to hide it within his very heart of hearts, that it should not appear to dishonor him in the eyes of his fellow-men. Of the final judgment and its disclosure he never thought. It was his inability to cover up the secret; it was his ever-growing knowledge that the garment was neither long enough nor broad enough to wrap it round, that caused his anxiety from day to day. In spite of his cheerful and ruddy face he was feeling quite worn and old. If this continues, if ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade
... to Tony's inability to balance the chafing-dish on Cristoforo Colombo's back—they filed from the gateway, an imposing cavalcade. The ladies were on foot, loftily oblivious to the fact that three empty saddles awaited their pleasure. Constance, a gesticulating officer at either hand, was vivaciously talking ...
— Jerry • Jean Webster
... went away. There had been no particular consequences of Johnny Simms' inability to remember what was right and what was wrong. But Holden felt like a normal man about men whose wives look patient. Even psychiatrists feel that it is somehow disreputable to illtreat a woman who doesn't fight back. This ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... which greeted the startling words had subsided, he spoke briefly of their immense natural advantages, in the event of war, the inability of England to gain any permanent advantage, and finally of the vast resources of the country, and its phenomenal future, when the "waves of rebellion, sparkling with fire, had washed back to the shores of England the wrecks of her power, her ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... well as to picturesquely lurid verbal illustration. But this was different; the language of these men was crammed with filth for filth's sake, and flat, pointless profanity. I have no doubt that my inability to avoid expressing disgust made them worse than ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... a curious sensation of weakness and emptiness in my head—as if it were hollow, and a strange disinclination, almost inability, to speak or think. Suddenly this passed away, and the events which I have related in the previous chapters rushed back upon my memory ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... that immediate judgment concerning numerous cases involving situations of this kind would be overhasty. It is often said that a witness was able to see this or that under such and such illumination, or that he was unable to see it, although he denies his ability or inability. The only solution of such contradictions is an experiment. The attempt must be made either by the judge or some reliable third person, to discover whether, under the same conditions of illumination, anything could be seen at the place in question ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... he belonged, he had received an intimation from the local "boss" that if Dumont's name were anywhere printed in connection with the case he would be held responsible. Thus it came to pass that on the morning of the filing of the decree the newspapers were grumbling over their inability to give the eagerly-awaited details of the great scandal. And Herron was Catonizing against ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... nearly converted to her side as the journey grew hotter and heavier, seeing her maintain her pace as well as himself, if not better, that he found himself stumbling every few yards sheerly through his inability to keep his eyes from her. He was bursting to talk; there was yet a problem unsolved in his mind; and when a stretch of level glade gave him ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... proposed modifications in the Draft Law with the Imperial Government or its representatives, before they were submitted to the Raad. The objection to the adoption of this course, which, according to Mr. Fischer's statement,[95] the Pretoria Executive did in fact make, was their inability to "recognise the right of the British Government to be consulted on the franchise, which was an internal matter." This objection, however, as Lord Milner pointed out to the members of the Pretoria Executive, both directly through ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... to her that she had never felt her poverty till now. Bitterly did she regret her inability to help them. From the abundance that had blessed her youth and middle age a mere pittance had been saved, scarcely enough to maintain herself, and altogether insufficient to enable her to gratify her ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson
... practical application of the microscopical examination of the surface, I would refer to two species of Amphipoda, classed by Leach under the name of Gammarus Locusta, from his inability to assign them any separate specific characters. In the structure of their integuments, however, these two forms will be found to exhibit ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... our people stood in. One day it rained in that plain a great shower of hail as big as oranges, which caused many tears, weaknesses, and vows.' The wanderer ventured as far as the Missouri, and would have gone still farther eastward but for his inability to cross the swollen river. Cooperating parties explored the upper valleys of the Rio Grande and Gila, ascended the Colorado for two hundred and forty miles above its mouth, and visited the Grand Canon of the same river. ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various
... said Sanders. "Mildred is strangely constituted. If she loves this man, her love can be more deadly to the choice of her heart than her hate to one she abhors. The impatience of restraint you speak of and her very inability to brook opposition can be turned to good account now." And old Sanders again tapped in the rhythm of a ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... occasionally a fit of savage feeling against Elgar took hold of him, but his mood remained that of one who watches life's drama from a point of vantage. Sitting close by Cecily's side, he had been made only more conscious of their real remoteness from each other—of his inability to give her any kind of help. He wished she had not come to him, for he saw she had hoped to meet with warmer sympathy, and perhaps she was now more than ever oppressed with the sense of abandonment. ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... intelligence from being fantastical. There must inevitably have been an element of broad farce in the veriest tragedy into which she might have been brought at that time, an element which was rendered all the more conspicuous by her own inability to perceive at the moment that she was behaving ridiculously, and making others ridiculous. But the bishop himself was not conscious of any absurdity or loss of dignity. It was only the inconvenience that he felt just then. For he was fresh ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... Robert is a fair example of the worst type of men of the Norman-Angevin blood. Not bad in intention, and not without abilities, he was weak with that weakness most fatal of all in times when the will of the ruler gave its only force to law, the inability to say no, the lack of firm resisting power. The whole eleventh century had been nourishing the growth, in the favouring soil of feudalism, of the manners and morals of chivalry. The generation to which William ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... dawn, we tossed about, unable to sleep. After agreeing that it was the mattress, we took the covering and pillows and lay down on the floor, falling into a deep slumber almost instantly. "Well, wouldn't that jar your eccentric," said Dave to me the next morning, speaking of our inability to sleep in a bed. "I slept in one in Ogalalla, ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... groups and people. Art in social relationships is contingent on broad sympathies and extended relationships, and it is contingent as well on ability to work for social ends while remaining in large measure disregardful of the personal stakes involved. Because of our inability to lose our personal attachment for our own work, because of what it may yield us in personal ways, the world never yet has experienced the joy and creative possibility of associated effort And because it has not we have still to experience ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... no doubt that there was actual mental disturbance. Lady Palliser sent for the local medical man, who had very little difficulty in diagnosing the case. Sleeplessness, restless nights, tossing from side to side, an utter inability to keep still, horrible dreams, impaired vision, clouds floating before the eyes,—these symptoms Mr. Fosbroke heard from the wife. The patient himself was obstinately silent about his sensations, declared that there was nothing the matter ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... interference of his family was unendurable. If her remonstrances proved futile, to do what she considered due to herself as mistress of her own establishment, and try not to notice the annoyances of others. Beulah felt and acknowledged her inability to advise the young wife in the difficult position in which she was placed, and closed by assuring her that only her own good sense, guided by sincere love for her husband, could rightly direct her course. She was warmly attached to Pauline, and it was with a troubled heart ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... week that followed we confess our inability to write. That it was a very delightful one was evident to all. The only sorrow that tinged its brightness and bliss was the fact that soon the ice would be all gone, the boats would be arriving, and then the home trip of these three ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... very cowardly and sinned by this inability to like the gloomy burden, and one day I came upon this out of Jeremiah: "As for the prophet, or the priest, or the people, that shall say, The burden of the Lord, I will punish that man and his house . . . because ye say, The burden of the Lord, ...
— The Golden Fountain - or, The Soul's Love for God. Being some Thoughts and - Confessions of One of His Lovers • Lilian Staveley
... account than my own. Cut off from her usual resources, she has no amusement but wandering about the house; and if her other causes of uneasiness be not augmented, they are at least rendered more intolerable by her inability to fill up her time.—This does not arise from a deficiency of understanding, but from never having been accustomed to think. Her mind resembles a body that is weak, not by nature, but from want of exercise; and the number of years she has passed in a convent ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... Bangs, and requested the father of the deceased to give him his security, said Bangs well knowing the parent to be in low circumstances, and about seventy-five years old, and the mother about the same age. The father refused to comply, stating his inability to answer so great a demand without suffering immediate distress. The said Bangs then declared that if he did not comply, it was in his power to arrest the body of the deceased. The father still refused, ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 5: Some Strange and Curious Punishments • Henry M. Brooks
... It is unhappily the case that the British Ministers must have given their pledge to the Catholic Party in Ireland with the conscious knowledge of their inability to carry it out. For over them all was their King, George III., still with the Royal privilege of dismissal for his Ministers, and resolutely, fiercely resolved not to grant Catholic emancipation. Pitt relieved his conscience by a two-years' resignation, but he ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender
... note from Lucy saying that she deeply regretted her inability to accept, but they were extremely busy making preparations to spend the season at Saratoga, had already engaged their rooms and could not draw back; beside that Gertrude and Kate had set their hearts on going. "However," she added, "she would send Phil in her place, ...
— Elsie's children • Martha Finley
... prejudice is the preservation of tradition; its disadvantage is the inability which it brings to an individual or to a nation to adapt life to the change of circumstance. It is, therefore, at once both the vice of youth and of age. Youth is prejudiced by upbringing; age is prejudiced because it cannot adapt itself to the ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... Further, inability to secure a proffered pleasure causes affliction. But if children had not full strength in the use of their limbs, they would often have been unable to procure something pleasurable offered to them; and so they would have been afflicted, which ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... having to see it that he kept it securely in his pocket, and contented himself with gay-pictured postcards which he had purchased in Brest, on which he inscribed a few non-committal sentences, always reminding them of the censor, and his inability to say what he would, and always ending, "Remember me to my friend, and tell her I have forgotten nothing but cannot write at present for reasons which I ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... five or six years, in all its essential features, is known far beyond the limits of the county, to every single person in the country. I will merely make use of one general observation—that I by no means share in the opinion that has been expressed as to the inability to deal with this state of things. On the contrary, I entertain the most perfect confidence that it is in the power of those who are intrusted with the duty of maintaining the public peace to re-establish ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... of Spiridion, ... do you remember?... 'Tout ce que l'homme appelle inspiration, je l'appelle aussi revelation,' ... if there is not something too self-evident in it after all—my sole objection! And is it not true that your inability to analyse the mental process in question, is one of the proofs of the fact of inspiration?—as the gods were known of old by not being seen to move their feet,—coming and going in an equal sweep of radiance.—And still more wonderful than the first transient great light you speak of, ... and ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... accordingly, when some thirty hours after the painful episode recorded in the last chapter he awoke from a state of coma in the ring at Jersey City to discover that Mr. Lew Lucas had knocked him out in the middle of the third round, should have been one of quiet contentment. His inability to block a short left-hook followed by a right to the point of the jaw had ameliorated ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... impetuous action without reflection, upon first impressions and imperfect knowledge, was notorious, as was his constitutional inability to admit that he had been in the wrong. Once aroused, he was a fierce combatant, using any weapon that came to hand, inquiring only whether it would hurt his opponent. When obliged to see that he had judged wrongly, his silence was ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... either member of the proposition is impossible. It is impossible, for no such postulate as inability or faithlessness can be laid against the ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... outsider. He gathered this by intuition rather than from conversation; for conversation naturally tabooed such questions, and was carried on in the loud and cheerful tones peculiar to people of good breeding. Shelton had never been able to acquire this tone, and he could not help feeling that the inability made him more or less an object of suspicion. The atmosphere struck him as it never had before, causing him to feel a doubt of his gentility. Could a man suffer from passion, heart-searchings, or ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... clothes had been reduced in our struggle when we were first seized were drenched. Half naked and wounded, we were alternately numbed with cold and burning with fever. A guard encircled us, having with them two watch-dogs tied to pegs. The soldiers were apparently so confident of our inability to escape that they drew their heavy blankets over their heads and slept. One of them in his slumber moved and pushed his sword outside the blanket in which he had rolled himself tight. This inspired me with the idea ...
— An Explorer's Adventures in Tibet • A. Henry Savage Landor
... injurious character of most of this legislation is best proved by the notable inability to effectively enforce its application. The chartered companies were continually complaining of the infringement of their monopolies by private adventurers, and more than one of them failed through inability to crush out this illegal ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... is concerned man and woman are unlike; each is the complement of the other; the difficulty in comparing them lies in our inability to decide, in either case, what is a matter of sex, and what is not. General differences present themselves to the comparative anatomist and even to the superficial observer; they seem not to be a matter of sex; yet they are really sex differences, though the connection eludes our observation. ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... absence—from the identification of Waife with William Losely, to Lady Montfort's visit to Fawley, which had taken place two days before, and of which she had informed Lionel by a few hasty lines, stating her inability to soften Mr. Darrell's objections to the alliance between Lionel and Sophy; severely blaming herself that those objections had not more forcibly presented themselves to her own mind, and concluding with expressions of sympathy, and appeals to fortitude, in which, however brief, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and preparing linen made in Brabant, whole streets were levelled with the ground, and more than five hundred houses destroyed. At The Hague, at Delft, and in other towns, many inhabitants had been induced to pull down their houses, from inability to keep them in repair or pay the taxes. The preservation of the dikes, requiring an annual expense of six hundred thousand pounds sterling, was everywhere neglected. The sea inundated the country, and threatened to ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... straight line from the centre to the circumference of that vast assemblage of wrecks I constantly would find vessels of newer build; and so at last, upon the outermost fringe, would come to the wrecks of ships belonging to my own day. But one weak point in my calculations was my inability to hold to a straight line, or to anything like one—because I had to advance from one wreck to another as they happened to touch or to be within jumping distance of each other, and therefore went crookedly upon my course and often fairly had to double on it. And another weak point was ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... due to soften the feeling here. Yet just on the eve of a settlement that would have been unsatisfactory to many of our people, Germany announced the policy that we had condemned as illegal, and that plainly is illegal. The trouble in Berlin is an utter inability to see anything wrong in the attack on the Lusitania, or to appreciate the sense of horror that was stirred in this country by it. The idea seems to be that the policy of frightfulness could be extended to the high seas without in any way shocking the American ...
— Germany, The Next Republic? • Carl W. Ackerman
... of my division soon put in an appearance, and assured me that the loss would not be very disastrous to us nor of much benefit to the enemy, since the cattle were so poor and weak that they could not be driven off. A reconnoissance in force verified the Commissary's statement. From its inability to travel, the herd, after all efforts to carry it off had proved ineffectual, had been abandoned by ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... requires a corresponding expense to maintain it, otherwise its effect is lost, and many a worthy owner of a costly mansion has been driven to sell and abandon his estate altogether, from his unwillingness or inability to support "the establishment" which it entailed; when, if the dwelling were only such as the estate required and could reasonably maintain, a contented and happy home would have remained to himself and family. It behooves, therefore, the American builder to examine well his premises, to ascertain ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... type, you are sure it is well worth knowing. So when, perhaps, I have been able to discover a little of its "subliminal self," the tables will be turned, and you will be eager to make its acquaintance. Then it will be my chance to offer you sage and unaccepted advice as to your inability to cope with the climate and its entourage. I too shall be able to prophesy unheeded a shattered constitution and undermined nerves. To be sure, old Jacques Cartier had such a poor opinion of the ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... BRAIN—STUNNING.—This may be caused by a blow or a fall.—Symptoms. Cold skin; weak pulse; almost total insensibility; slow, weak breathing; pupil of eye sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller, than natural; inability to move; unwillingness to answer when spoken to. These symptoms come on directly after the accident.—Treatment. Place the patient quietly on a warm bed, send for a surgeon, and do nothing else for ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... are just what one would expect from a Sub-Consciousness, whose thoughts have no central I to keep them in order. (Compare Goethe's explanation of the obscenities of Ophelia.) Sometimes, too, there are Obstructive Associations, which account for its inability to make up its want of mind; and as there are usually several persons at table, the result is complicated by their separate Sub-Consciousnesses. In brief, table-turning is a method of interrogating your Sub-Consciousness. It is, so to speak, objective introspection. ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... for the little children of the asylums, when I had been at this work all my life, and constantly during three years past. But I told him I was thankful to get the five hundred dollars, and could waive their notions of woman's inability very comfortably. He assented to all the selections I made, and I arranged to return home with the fifteen orphans and forty laborers, who wished to go to Cleveland, Ohio, where their friends had gone for work and ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... the coal industry is still going on to the great detriment of the wage earners, the owners, and especially to the public. With deposits of coal in this country capable of supplying its needs for hundreds of years, inability to manage and control this great resource for the benefit of all concerned is very close to a national economic failure. It has been the subject of repeated investigation and reiterated recommendation. Yet the industry seems never ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... rolling very near a broken dog-kennel, there leapt forth a large fierce dog, who, but that his chain was of the shortest, would have given him a disagreeable salute. As it was, the dwarf remained upon his back in perfect safety, taunting the dog with hideous faces, and triumphing over him in his inability to advance another inch, though there were not a couple of feet ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... escalated after both countries attained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. By May 1994, when a cease-fire took hold, Armenian forces held not only Nagorno-Karabakh but also a significant portion of Azerbaijan proper. The economies of both sides have been hurt by their inability to make substantial progress toward a ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... age was more courted both by men and women. There was no one who in his youth had suffered fewer troubles from those causes of trouble which visit English young men,—occasional impecuniosity, sternness of parents, native shyness, fear of ridicule, inability of speech, and a general pervading sense of inferiority combined with an ardent desire to rise to a feeling of conscious superiority. So much had been done for him by nature that he was never called upon to pretend to anything. Throughout the county those were the lucky men,—and ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... growing strength. By strength, I mean strength of body, no less than strength of mind, so closely are our body and mind connected with, each other. The helplessness of childhood, which presses upon it every moment, the sense of inability to avoid or resist danger, which makes the child run continually to his nurse or to his mother for protection, cannot but diminish, by the mere growth of the bodily powers. The boy feels himself to be less helpless than the child, and in that very proportion ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... Pulteney's motion for a secret committee was lost by three voices only. We are told that the speeches were very brilliant, and Sir R. Walpole particularly distinguished himself. He might have been tormented by his enemies, but not by the stone, (the excuse assigned in the letter for his inability to attend the king), for Horace left him at one o'clock in the morning, after the debate had terminated, "at supper all alive and in spirits," and he even boasted that he was younger than his son. The next struggle was on the 28th of Jan., on the Chippenham election, when the minister ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.03.23 • Various
... "One of the strongest reasons for my remaining out of town," he writes, "is to escape the frequency of invitations at late hours, which consume so much precious time, and with the perpetually mortifying consciousness of inability to return the civility in the same manner." The republican simplicity, not to say poverty, forced upon American representatives abroad, was a very different matter in the censorious and unfriendly society of London from what it had been ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... mischievous combination of everything false, ill-tempered, malignant, and irritating. It is at present exercising itself upon the financial arrangements of our Government, and uttering prophecies, falsified before they have come to our knowledge, about the inability or the unwillingness of our loyal people to furnish the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... who had lost his memory mastered himself with an effort. His horror had surged up just now and overwhelmed him altogether, but the extraordinary quiet of the other man and his apparently frank inability to understand what was the matter brought him down again to reality. Subconsciously, too, he perceived that it would be a relief to himself to put his developing feeling ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... theme of his was his supposed inability to shine on occasions when I had introduced him to friends of mine, and was particularly anxious to show him off to advantage, and then, again, the unrelenting fate that would swiftly overtake him if he ventured to put himself forward. I ...
— In Bohemia with Du Maurier - The First Of A Series Of Reminiscences • Felix Moscheles
... on the Vanderbilt were unexpectedly prolonged by the inability of the officers to get the necessary supplies on board, but two days after she was on the Knickerbocker, a Sanitary Commission Transport, and on her way to White House Landing where in company with ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... a fierce and warlike temper, was shown in the first youthful exploit of Rodrigo. His father Diego, when too old to bear arms, was grossly insulted by an enemy, the Count of Gormaz. Diego wept and raged at the insult put upon him and his inability to resent it. Moved deeply by his father's grief, Rodrigo determined to avenge the insult to the ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... enthusiastic support and bitter anathematization of the measures he proposed. What seems obvious is that many graduates sympathized with his purposes but were alienated by his methods. His strength lay chiefly in the force of his appeal to democratic sentiment; his weakness in complete inability to conciliate opponents. ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... him; he sang them, with words of abuse in the meantime; but gradually his hoarseness grew better. He did not send word of his inability to appear in the evening, but sang, and better than ...
— How to Sing - [Meine Gesangskunst] • Lilli Lehmann
... melancholy, indisposition to study, forgetfulness, despondency, weakness in the back and private organs, no confidence in one's own abilities, a desire for seclusion from society; whites, hysterics, and inability to look any one in the face. Sometimes the muscles are relaxed, limbs tremble, the skin is sallow and dry, ...
— Treatise on the Diseases of Women • Lydia E. Pinkham
... in nervous perturbation. The butler stepped up and delivered his message: the queen regretted her inability to receive the count. Rischenheim nodded, and, standing so that the door could not be shut, asked Bernenstein whether he knew where ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... the borough-owner, but the Prime Minister. Here he more than recovered lost ground, if indeed he had lost any. Pitt expressed his sense of the compliment, and said that this could be managed, unless the young member came to differ absolutely from his patron. Canning then frankly confessed his inability to follow Pitt in maintaining the Test Act. Equally frank and cordial was the reply, that he (Pitt) did not claim exact agreement, especially on "speculative subjects," but only "a general good disposition towards ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... songs have another excellent quality. They show all through that splendid unconsciousness of the soldier, that inability in him to see himself from without, or to pose as civilians always think and say ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... willingness to assist the confederates in the defence of their fatherland, but represented the imminence of the danger to Thessaly, and demanded an immediate supply of forces. "Without this," they said, "we cannot exert ourselves for you, and our inability to assist you will be our excuse, if we provide for ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... by, six weeks went by, eight weeks went by, and we were farther away from sailing than ever. Explain it? Who?—me? I can't. It is the one thing in all my life that I have backed down on. There is no explaining it; if there were, I'd do it. I, who am an artisan of speech, confess my inability to explain why the Snark was not ready. As I have said, and as I must repeat, it was inconceivable ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... persistent praise of his opponent appealed to the sense of humor in his rural audience, to whom his inability to own a carriage was by ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... the manifold things of earth, creating unity and inwardness, and makes the heart grow and become green by interior love, and makes loving devotion flourish, and makes us bear the fruits of gratitude and love, and preserves these fruits eternally in the humble pain of our inability to praise and serve ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... and, looking round, saw Fakrash the Jinnee standing at his elbow, smiling down on him more benevolently than ever, and with a serene expectation of being warmly welcomed and thanked, which made Horace rather ashamed of his own inability to ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... world, and that it was to such that Christ referred, when He said, He "came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." This was made into an assertion that the coming of Christ was unnecessary. Inability to accept unauthorized definitions and unscriptural theories of Scriptural doctrines, was construed into a denial of those doctrines. My endeavor to strip religious subjects of needless mystery, was represented as an attempt ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... shyness stole over him. He knew that the moment for Presents was approaching; he knew that very shortly he would have to kiss and be kissed by a multitude of persons, that he would have to say again and again, "Oh, thank you, thank you so much!" that he would have his usual consciousness of his inability to thank anybody at all in the way that they expected to be thanked. Helen and Mary never worried about such things. They delighted in kissing and hugging and multitudes of words. If only he might have had his presents by himself ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... had a talk with the village headman. He was elected for one year, he told me, by the people of the hamlet, comprising about forty families. He confessed his inability to read or write, but his face was intelligent and his bearing showed dignity and self-respect. Petty disputes and breaches of the peace were settled by him according to unwritten custom and his native shrewdness; ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... happens, on a grander scale, in the mercantile world, it produces what is called a panic. One man's inability to pay his debts ruins another man, who, in turn, ruins someone else, and so on, until failure after failure makes even the richest capitalists tremble. Public confidence is suspended, and the smaller fry of merchants are knocked over ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... predecessors, a pauvre Sire enough. He had thought more of his amusements than of the troubles of his country; but a wild and senseless gaiety will sometimes spring from despair as well as from lightness of heart; and after all, the dread responsibility, the sense that in all his helplessness and inability to do anything he was still the man who ought to do all, would seem to have moved him from time to time. A secret doubt in his heart, divulged to no man, had added bitterness to the conviction of his own weakness. Was he indeed the heir ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... and suffering, to accomplish the only legitimate and avowed end of war, a safe and honourable peace? But no termination of a struggle is entitled to be called either the one or the other, which, resulting merely from the experience of common exhaustion and mutual inability, leaves the parties to grumble over the relics of their animosity, and to brood on their misfortunes, till new means and spirits be produced to resume the conflict. There is much wisdom in the language which a deceased statesman used, when he spoke of "making peace ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... into the naive question, "Well, did his father drown?" before the meaning of the little parable struck her. She began to laugh, with her gay, sweet inability to resent a joke made at her own expense. "Don't you think you are a good hand at sermon-making!" she mocked him. "It's all very well to preach, but just you tell me what you would have ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... of the right hand. "Times have changed since then, but I noticed in examining their hands that few could move the forefinger without the second finger; indeed the fingers appeared useless as independent members of the hands. In connection with this may be mentioned their apparent inability to distinguish colours or count numbers, due alone to their want of words ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... Liberty, possibly the secretary of that body, which owned its inability to put anything in writing, had provided a penny bottle of ink and a sticky-looking, red pen-holder. The speaker took up the pen suspiciously, and laid it down again. He rubbed his finger and thumb together. His suspicions had apparently been justifiable. It was a sticky one! Then he lapsed into ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... be so—because in any other path of life they would be equally disorderly and improvident. The want of system is not to be attributed to their profession. The evil which we deplore arises in the first instance only from an inability to ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... send others as evangelical laborers, but he tried with the greatest seriousness to abandon the glory of the provincialate, in order that he might be employed personally in an expedition so much to divine service, and his inability to accomplish it cost him many a bitter sob. He became a sea of tears, when he thought of the distant kingdoms (also almost in sight) of Japon, Borney, Sumatra, Tunquin, Cochinchina, Mogol, Tartaria, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... Dorothy in solemn charge, and compel that obtuse maiden to what redounded to her good. Mrs. Hanway-Harley doubted neither the propriety nor the feasibility of establishing a censorship over Dorothy's heart, should the young lady evince a blinded inability to see her ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... and which later writers, in their matter of fact way, have explained by the residence of Plato at Megara. Socrates disclaims the character of a professional eristic, and also, with a sort of ironical admiration, expresses his inability to attain the Megarian precision in the use of terms. Yet he too employs a similar sophistical skill in overturning every conceivable ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... are conscientiously endeavouring, with varying degrees of wisdom and success, to lead forward their people in the line of self-government. But both love of power and a conviction of the inability of the infant Church to wisely control its affairs, combine to render this transfer of power from the mission to the native Church a very slow matter—more slow than seems wise to many besides the leaders of the native Church themselves. It is a significant ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... not answer that question,—a carefulness which touched even Petronius somewhat, for, with all his inability to feel the difference between good and evil, he had never been an informer; and it was possible to talk with him in perfect safety. He changed the conversation again, therefore, and began to praise Plautius's ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... hast such a misgiving aspect, an aspect rather inviting rejection than carrying persuasion with it; and art such an hesitating, such a humming and hawing caitiff; that I shall attribute my failure, if I do fail, rather to the inability and ill looks of my advocate, than to my cause. Again, thou art deprived of the force men of our cast give to arguments; for she won't let thee swear!-Art, moreover, a very heavy, thoughtless fellow; tolerable only at a second rebound; a horrid dunce at the impromptu. ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... be able to have any idea of the ugliness of the setting, the hideous costumes, the screaming colors. He was only shocked by the vulgarity of the people, their gestures and attitudes, their unnatural playing, the inability of the actors to take on other souls than their own, and by the stupefying indifference with which they passed from one role to another, provided they were written more or less in the same register. Matrons ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... travelling-cap he wore hid it from me. Yet if I had seemed to know the girl's face, I was certain I knew the man's. But as I could see, so I could remember, neither. And there was an absolute torture in this which I can't explain to you,—in this inability, and in my inability to wake them from ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... away almost sick with the feeling of inability to remember all the movements of draperies and colours; this country needs a Philip and a Velasquez in ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... darkness, and frightened horribly the wild things, the red squirrels and chipmunks that live in wayside fences in the Ohio country. Clara hated the machine and began to hate all machines. Thinking of machinery and the making of machines had, she decided, been at the bottom of her husband's inability to talk with her. Revolt against the whole mechanical impulse of her generation began to take ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... its terms, an order must be definite and must be the expression of a fixed decision. Ambiguity or vagueness indicates either a vacillation or the inability to formulate orders. (382) ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... observed that he was much irritated, with the irritation natural to old age and extreme bodily feebleness, at his inability to grant a friend's request for some token of remembrance for his father. No sooner did he see Miss Herschel, the loving companion and fellow-worker of so many years, than he characteristically employed her ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... my arms to their utmost extent; but my body, not following the movement, still wanted poise, and recoiled into a grotesque attitude. My teacher, for lack of basic principles to guide him, was unable to correct my awkwardness; and, vexed at his inability which he wished to conceal, fell back on blaming my ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... regiment and artillery, and another, with all Captain Hearsey's Frontier Police, are in pursuit of him. Four others have committed similar outrages on our officers and sepoys and their families, and the Government declares its utter inability to enforce obedience or grant any redress, without a larger force than they have to send. Great numbers of the same class are plundering and burning villages, and robbing and murdering on the highway, and laughing at the impotency of the sovereign. ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... home, she immediately entered a list of complaints against me as long as the moral law, including my failure to wash her clothes properly, and her inability to break my head for it; the last indictment seemed to be the heaviest she could bring against me. I was in the shadow of the doorway as the woman raved, while Mr. Mitchell listened patiently until the end of his wife's grievances reached an appeal to him to whip me with ...
— From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or Struggles for Freedom • Lucy A. Delaney
... consultation of his judgment is his own example; and as matters go with him, so they must of necessity do with all the world besides dangerous and intolerable folly! For my part, I consider some men as infinitely beyond me, especially amongst the ancients, and yet, though I clearly discern my inability to come near them by a thousand paces, I do not forbear to keep them in sight, and to judge of what so elevates them, of which I perceive some seeds in myself, as I also do of the extreme meanness ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... and Ralph began to grow weary of the inconsequence of the debaters, and their entire inability to hold to the salient points; but he still kept his hand on the rudder of the discussion, avoided the fogs of the supernatural and religious on the one side towards which the little old man persisted in pushing, and, on ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... seducing and hellish spirits? Try not to entertain such awful suspicions. As to the cause of these lamentable failures, I can only suppose that the Lord wishes to make us, who wrongly prophesied, sensible of our inability to foretell ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... Bouchard. "I would not trust an Iroquois, saving he was dead and buried in consecrated ground." And he wagged his head as if to express his inability to pronounce in ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... usual in such cases, the news came in through the kitchen, and most officers heard it at the breakfast-table from the lips of their better halves, who could hardly find words to express their sentiments as to the inability of their lords to explain the new phase of the situation. When the first sergeant of Company B came around to Captain Armitage with the sick-book, soon after six in the morning, the captain briefly directed him to transfer Lieutenant Jerrold on the morning report from present ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... part of these demons to impede its celebration; and the most renowned saints found it necessary on such occasions to acknowledge their dependence on the strong arm of the military class, by seeking the aid of warriors and heroes. The inability of holy men, who had attained the utmost limit of spiritual power, to cope with the spirits of evil, and the superiority of physical force in this ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... There were two for Hilary. One in the well-known home writing, and the other a long envelope addressed in a strange hand. She opened this first. It contained three manuscripts, and a printed notice to the effect that the editor of the Blue Magazine much regretted his inability, owing to lack of space, to make use of the enclosed, for the kind offer of which ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... imperfect drain is the best. The very leather- parings and bits of thread that had drifted from the work-bench into the front yard, and seemed to have taken root there like some strange exotic weed, were a delight to him. Dutton's inability to move about as in former years sometimes irked him, but everything else was pleasant. He resolved to make the best of this one misfortune, since without it he would never have been treated with such kindness and consideration. The constant employment he found at ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... their heads of luxuriant hair reflected in the sunshine every tone of gold, and black, and brown. Some had beautiful eyes, others a beautiful nose, others a beautiful mouth and figure: few, if any, had all. A difficulty of arranging their lips in this crude exposure to public scrutiny, an inability to balance their heads, and to dissociate self-consciousness from their features, was apparent in them, and showed that they were genuine country ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... into the main of it; like a house that hath convenient stairs and entries, but never a fair room. Therefore, you shall see them find out pretty looses in the conclusion, but are no ways able to examine or debate matters. And yet commonly they take advantage of their inability, and would be thought wits of direction. Some build rather upon the abusing of others, and (as we now say) putting tricks upon them, than upon soundness of their own proceedings. But Solomon saith, Prudens advertit ad gressus suos; stultus ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... were back again in Count Anteoni's garden. She looked once more through the glasses, and heard the four cries of the Mueddin, and saw the pacing figure in the burning heat, the Arab bent in prayer, the one who watched him, the flight. And she was indignant with herself for her strange inability to govern her mind. It seemed to her a pitiful thing of which she ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... Inability to do the things you professed to do involved grave risk of making intimate acquaintance with the gang. If, for example, you were a skipper and navigated your vessel more like a 'prentice than a master hand, ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... property or professional incomes, is a most monstrous inequality—indefensible on every principle of justice or expedience, and the long continuance of which can only be explained by the well known and proverbial supineness of that class of men, and their inability to rouse themselves to any combined or general effort, even for matters in which their own vital interests are concerned. The Poor's Rate, it is well known, is, especially in England, a very heavy burden. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... hysterical agitation, that Marian and Clara were almost entirely occupied in nursing her, and trying to soothe her. In this work they were little successful. Marian had no hold on her affection, no power of talking soothingly, though most anxious to do what she could, and distressed excessively by her inability to be a comfort in the painful scenes which she was obliged to witness. She almost thought her presence made things worse, and that Mrs. Lyddell wished her away; but poor Clara was so entirely helpless and frightened, clung to her in so imploring a way, ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... days. Then she talked, but her speech was raving and incoherent. Finally she lost all power of motion and of sensibility in the parts below the head and could not swallow. From thenceforth she could not be persuaded to take food. Six months afterwards she regained the use of her limbs, but the inability to swallow remained and she acquired a great loathing for all kinds of meat and drink. The secretions and excretions appeared to be arrested. Nevertheless she was very industrious, employing her time in running ...
— Fasting Girls - Their Physiology and Pathology • William Alexander Hammond
... said he, contracting his brows above the document. Not for the first time Annapla regretted her inability to read, as she craned over his shoulder to see what evidently created much astonishment ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... resolved, upon the day succeeding this adventure, to restore to my benefactor the credentials with which be had been pleased to entrust me. Satisfied of the truth of my commission, I could only deplore my inability to execute it faithfully. In spite of what had passed at the cottage-door, the doctrines which I had advocated there lost none of their character and influence upon my own mind. Falling from the lips of others, they dropped with conviction into my own ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... lashings of both bundles and disclosed the Austrian and the woman, gagged and tied, both almost unconscious from inability to breathe, but not ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... Government suffered inconvenience and embarrassment enough during the war in consequence of the inability of manufacturers to use this patent, and that its further extension will operate prejudicially to its interest by compelling it to pay to parties already well paid a large royalty for altering its revolvers to ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... unlike the care-free Dolly to worry about anything she had done, but it was like her, too, to accuse herself unsparingly once she began to realize that she might possibly be in the wrong. It was Dolly's old misfortune that was grieving her now; her inability to forecast consequences before they came along to ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Mountains - or Bessie King's Strange Adventure • Jane L. Stewart
... necessarily cease, and all that were not wisely planned must fall, dragging down others in their ruins. For months before the failure of Jay Cooke, business had been dangerously near this margin. His failure, caused by his inability to find a market for Northern Pacific, merely ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... mental perspective, but he frequently lacks in the simplest rudiments of the immediate subject-matter which he is supposed to teach. The examination papers written by applicants for certificates to begin rural school teaching often betray a woful ignorance of the most fundamental knowledge. Inability to spell, punctuate, or effectively use the English language is common. The most elementary scientific truths are frequently unknown. A connected view of our nation's history and knowledge of current events are not always possessed. The great world of literature is too often a closed book. ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... thrown anywhere in the vicinity of an iron ship, the powerful magnetism developed within it instantly attracted it to the vessel, which was destroyed by the ensuing contact and explosion. Two ironclads meeting on the ocean need each to fire but one shell to be both destroyed. The inability of iron battle-ships to withstand this improvement in artillery had already set the naval architects of the world upon the work of constructing warships which would not attract the magnetic shell—which was effective even when laid on the bottoms of ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... forward hastily and invited him in a most friendly manner to remain with them during the day, and to pass it in a cheerful and convivial spirit. Jalaladdeen endeavoured to excuse himself by pointing to his mean garb, intimating his inability to mix in such society; but his objections were of no avail. He was conducted to the table in a most courteous manner, and seated with them. The slaves waited on him, and placed before him viands with which he was at once pleased ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... convincing and tranquillizing in Anna's immovable conviction; the prince felt his inability to oppose her, and was ashamed of his feminine fears in the face of her ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
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