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More "Looker" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this he does by the way in which he performs it. The fact that a painting represents certain trees and hills is here only secondary; the primary fact is what the artist has succeeded in making the on-looker feel. ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... warmth in the sun, shelter among the trees, and a sort of companionship in my own thoughts. I well remember that I exchanged but two sentences that day with any living being: not that I felt solitary; I was glad to be quiet. For a looker-on, it sufficed to pass through the rooms once or twice, observe what changes were being wrought, how a green-room and a dressing-room were being contrived, a little stage with scenery erected, how M. Paul Emanuel, in conjunction ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... better heart. Precious in the sight of the Lord of humanity, the Psalms tell us, is the death of his saints. It had need to be precious; for it is very costly, when by the stroke, a mother is left desolate, and the peace-maker, and peace- looker, of a whole society is laid in the ground with Caesar ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... trains are due, the basket brigade is reinforced by the carpet-bag battalion; and a crowd of home-coming or out-going travellers is a never-ending source of sympathetic and imaginative study to the leisurely looker-on. What an anachronism that word "carpet-bag" has become, by the way! I saw not long ago on the ferry-boat a genuine and literal specimen, which carried back my thoughts for a generation to the day when bags were really made of carpet and the most fastidious social Bourbon did not disdain ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... Blithers is to be there soon, and the stupid Prince who will not be tempted by millions, and it is even possible that the extraordinary Miss Blithers may take it into her head to look the place over before definitely refusing to be its Princess. I may find some amusement—or entertainment as an on-looker ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... floor, changed the background drapery for the afternoon model, rearranged the easels into afternoon position, and brought out glasses and plates for the ladies, who lunched in the anteroom. And then a looker-on in a Parisian atelier des dames would readily have understood the words, "He's gone, girls!" even were that looker-on deafer than the deafest old woman who ever mistook a thunder-clap for one of her lord's champion snores. In the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... quite at home in their parts. The story consisted in the attempts of a young prince to obtain the hand of a young princess; and the dialogue was constantly interrupted by an actor who appeared to be a looker-on, but who made his remarks upon what passed, so as to excite bursts of laughter from the audience. He was the Jack Pudding, or wit of the piece, and several of his jokes were not very delicate. At all events, he was the Liston of the company, for ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... one of a hundred testimonies,—"with regard to Lord Byron's features, Mr. Mathews observed, that he was the only man he ever contemplated, to whom he felt disposed to apply the word beautiful" (Memoirs of Charles Matthews, 1838, ii. 380). The looker-on or the consoler computes the magnitude and the liberality of the compensation. The sufferer ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... you, miss; Hirlanday; that's me.... You picked a good looker this toime, Yank. But wait till Oi git to Paree. Oi clane up a good hundre' pound on this job in bonuses. What part d'ye come ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... good looker all right. When he was in condition his muscles stood out in bunches all over him. And he was the strongest-looking brute I ever saw in Alaska, also the most intelligent-looking. To run your eyes over him, you'd think he could outpull three dogs of his own weight. Maybe he ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... in the cemetery on the evening of the "Day of the Dead" was one calculated to make an impression not to be readily forgotten by any mere looker-on who witnessed it. Nor was that presented by the road from the gate to the cemetery less remarkable in its way. It is an ugly, disagreeable bit of road, between high walls, deep with mud in wet, and with dust in dry weather, as was the case on the present occasion, and without the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... silenced. I could not but reflect what a strange manner of man this was, to be living unremarked there as a private merchant, and to be so feared by a whole city; and if I was disappointed, in my character of looker-on, to have the matter end ingloriously without the firing of a shot or the hanging of a single millionaire, philosophy tried to tell me that this sight was truly the more picturesque. In a thousand towns and different epochs I might have had occasion to behold the cowardice and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pupil, but always leaves him sorry when the lesson is over. And as for history, no other teacher is for a moment comparable to it: no other can make the dead heroes of the world rise up and shake the dust of the ages from their bones and live and move and breathe and speak and be real to the looker and listener: no other can make the study of the lives and times of the illustrious dead a delight, a splendid interest, a passion; and no other can paint a history-lesson in colors that will stay, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... life. Afterwards, when I had come to know him, I heard him sum up every person there with extraordinary point and sparkle. Often since then, eager to hear more of my friend, I have asked men who met him casually for a report of him. So often they have said, "He was a looker-on at life. He came in and sat down and looked on. He gave nothing in return. He never talked, he only listened. I never got much out of him. I never got to the real Synge. I was never conscious of what he felt. Sometimes I felt that there ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield
... poetical affairs," says Pope, in 1713, "I am content at present to be a bare looker-on.... Cato was not so much the wonder of Rome in his days, as he is of Britain in ours; and though all the foolish industry possible has been used to make it thought a party play, yet what the author once said of another may ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... man stops in his backward journey. Will he give over? has his strength deserted him? is the thought that seizes every on-looker. But no—with renewed effort he begins again his slow retreat, till at last a sigh of relief comes from the whole watching multitude. Morico with his burden has reached a spot of safety. What will he do next? They watch in breathless suspense. ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... from affiliating a tree—perhaps the greatest moral lesson anyhow from earth, rocks, animals, is that same lesson of inherency, of what is, without the least regard to what the looker-on (the critic) supposes or says, or whether he likes or dislikes. What worse—what more general malady pervades each and all of us, our literature, education, attitude toward each other, (even toward ourselves,) than a morbid trouble about seems, (generally ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... on-looker, Ivan's behavior would have seemed commonplace enough. But he was moving through shadowy heavens, star-lit vaults, to which he had just attained, wherein he floated, the equal of those whom he had hitherto worshipped: an inhabitant ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... puts out her bare slim foot, and playfully pushes back the little kid who attacks her in fun, pushes it again and again each time it skips forward, and in so doing the shepherdess bends her toes as gracefully as if she wished some looker-on to admire their slender form. Once more the kid springs forward, and this time with its bead down. Its brow touches the sole of her foot, but as it rubs its little hooked nose tenderly against the girl's foot, she pushes it back so violently that the little beast starts away, and ceases ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... seems simply beyond possibility, it is no mere power upon paper. It acts and leaves its mark; it binds fast and overthrows for good. But when, put at its highest, it is confronted with the "giant evil" which it is supposed to be sent into the world to repel, we can only say that, to a looker-on, its failure seems as manifest as the existence of the claim to use it. It no more does its work, in the sense of succeeding and triumphing, than the less magnificent "Establishments" do. It keeps some check—it fails on a large scale ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... There was a looker-on who lived to erect a throne in the place of the one that fell that day, and to be the next sovereign who reigned at the Tuileries. In 1813 Napoleon told Roederer that he had watched the scene from a window on the Carrousel, and assured him that he ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... that comes in from the shop to greet us. Must have been quite a good looker once, from the fine face and the still slim figure. But her hair has been frosted up pretty well, and there's plenty of trouble lines around the eyes. No, we couldn't see Mr. Pedders. She was sorry, but he didn't see anyone. If there was ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... trembled always with the awful consciousness of an immortal nature, and about whom fell alternately the shadows of hell and the splendors of heaven? We gather, indeed, from his record that he was not an idle on-looker in the time of England's great struggle for freedom, but a soldier of the Parliament in his young years, among the praying sworders and psalm-singing pikemen, the Greathearts and Holdfasts whom he has immortalized in his allegory; but ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... old, mangy, toothless and deserving of nothing better, my dear father," replied the fair young man, and his glances at the white beard, scanty locks and mumbling mouth of the ancient gentleman had an unpleasantly personal quality. To the casual on-looker it would have seemed that an impudent boy deliberately insulted a harmless benevolent old gentleman. To the fair young man, however, it was well known that the old gentleman's name was famous across Northern and Eastern Africa for monstrous villainy ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... this unmelodious vocalist to respect us by permitting him to believe us surveyors in another sense than as we were. One would not be despised as an unpractical citizen, a mere looker at Nature with no immediate view to profit, even by a freckled calf-driver of the Upper Connecticut. While we parleyed, the sketch was done, and the pageant had ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... by the surrounding disease, and the stricture itself, even if found by any chance, is generally of so impassable a kind, that it must be confessed there are few operations in surgery more irksome to a looker-on than is the fruitless effort made, in such a state of the parts, by a hand without a guide, to pass perforce a blunt pointed instrument like a catheter into the bladder. In some instances the stricture is slightly pervious, the urine passing in small quantity ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... give you a little advice. Give up the idea. They say that lookers-on see most of the game, and so far as I am concerned I'm certainly the looker-on of this party. The Duchess doesn't care a ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and work quietly at pure science. You have got into a whirlpool, and should stroke vigorously at the proper angle, not attempt to breast the whole force of the current, nor yet give in to it. Do take the counsel of a quiet looker on and withdraw to your books and studies in pure Natural History; let modes of thought alone. You may make a very good naturalist, or a very good metaphysician (of that I know nothing, don't despise me), but you have neither time ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... the whirling dances, the rich dainties, the breath of the exotics, the waltz-music, the common contact, the emulation of dress, the unseasonable hours, the twice-breathed air, the everlasting drams. "I saw Florimonde going the round of her half dozen parties the other night," wrote a "looker-on in Venice" toward the close of the last season. "What a resplendent creature she was, the hazel-eyed beauty, with the faintest tinge of sunset hues on her oval cheeks! Her dress was of that peculiar tarnished shade of pink—like yellow sunshine suffusing a pale rose—which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... my vial and voice, learning to sing "Fly boy, fly boy," without book. So to my office, where little to do. In the Hall I met with Mr. Eglin and one Looker, a famous gardener, servant to my Lord Salsbury, and among other things the gardener told a strange passage in good earnest.... Home to dinner, and then went to my Lord's lodgings to my turret there and took away most of my books, and sent them home by ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... time on various pretexts while they waited for details of Lone's adventure. Delirious young women of the silk-stocking class did not arrive at the Sawtooth every morning, and it was rumored already amongst the men that she was some looker, which naturally whetted their ...
— The Quirt • B.M. Bower
... these gave us a farewell ball. As several companies of the French army were stationed there, we met a large number of officers at the ball. I had always supposed the French were graceful dancers. I was a quiet "looker on in Vienna," so I had an opportunity of comparing the skill of the different nationalities. All admitted that none glided about so easily and gracefully as the Americans. They seemed to move without the least effort, while the English, the French, and ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... exert more strength and constancy in oppressing, than I can show in suffering every thing that can or shall be imposed upon me. Your lordship, in the beginning of your letter, makes me a player, and yourself a looker on: and me a player of my own game, so you may see more than I: but give me leave to tell you, that since you do but see, and I do suffer, I must of necessity feel more ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... slouching figure of a man, with longish grizzled hair and a sleepy eye—a strange, remote creature, who seemed to take very little notice of what was passing before him. From various indications, however, in the conversation, David had gathered that this looker-on must be the former prix ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... school as he had been at home; and in every party at taw, or trap ball, or any other innocent diversion in which he happened to be engaged, he was always remarkable for disturbing the game by his frivolous disputes: Nay, when he was only a looker on, he would betray his wrangling impertinent temper, by calling out, such a one does not play fairly; such a one counts too many; and such a one goes in before his turn. The usual reward he received for his trouble was, a handsome drubbing, sometimes from his master, ...
— Vice in its Proper Shape • Anonymous
... the ball merely as a looker-on, and perhaps you might smile at me as you pass by with your different partners, so that people would say I ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... have one, as they know down there young Henley was lately married. Any good-looker, with an easy conscience, will do. You could ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... dignity, by being open to being induced to join in such things occasionally in an elderly way, without any attempt to disguise deficiencies. But that is the most that ought to be attempted. Perhaps the best way of all is to subside into the genial and interested looker-on, to be ready to applaud the game you cannot play, and to admire the ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... dime novels with books and tracts. The minister, one morning in the pulpit, solemnly opened his Bible, and unexpectedly beholding a most ludicrous picture, laughed outright, to the great scandal of every looker-on. ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... takes it with the freshness of a stranger. But if not so keen as this, the current word of French comedy is of the same quality of language. When of the fourteen couples to be married by the mayor, for instance, the deaf clerk has shuffled two, a looker-on pronounces: "Il s'est empetre dans les futurs." But for a reader who has a full sense of the several languages that exist in English at the service of the several ways of human life, there is, from the mere terminology of official France, high or low—daily ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... thing to hear a man cry. A woman can sob from the top of her palate, or her lips, or anywhere else, but a man cries from his diaphragm, and it rends him to pieces. Also, the exhibition causes the throat of the on-looker to ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... dangerous pursuit. Whatever it might occur to them to try, he would carefully show them how to do it, explain the risks, and then either share the danger himself or, if that were not possible, stand aside and wait the event with that unhappy courage of the looker-on. He was a good swimmer, and taught them to swim. He thoroughly loved all manly exercises; and during their holidays, and principally in the Highlands, helped and encouraged them to excel in as many as possible: to shoot, to fish, to walk, to pull an oar, ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... grass in front of this line of watch-boxes, awaiting the moment when work should be cut out for their Sagacities. These were admirably trained to their vocation, as I had an opportunity of judging whilst a looker-on here. On the occasion of a small flight, a couple of long shots were made, and a duck winged slightly: it made a good downward slant, and fell forty yards from the shore into the Seneca: at the same moment in dashed four ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... not fear anything," she whispered confidently. "To-night, as I looked down, it seemed to me that as a looker-on I saw more, perhaps, of the real significance of it all than you who were there. It is a new force, you know, which has come into politics, a new Party. I suppose historians will call to-night, the fusion of Parties which is going to happen, an extraordinary triumph for Mr. Foley. ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... unmanageable; and there is also a third kind, which is akin to both, and is under the dominion of opposite principles. The one is of the body, and has no regard for the character of the beloved; but he who is under the influence of the other disregards the body, and is a looker rather than a lover, and desires only with his soul to be knit to the soul of his friend; while the intermediate sort is both of the body and of the soul. Here are three kinds of love: ought the legislator to prohibit ...
— Laws • Plato
... silent for a while, tossing uneasily in his blanket. "Say, there's something I want to tell you," he blurted out at last. "I'm certainly good and ashamed of myself! There's a girl down the shore, her name is Julia; she's not a bad-looker for a breed. She came around my cabin sometimes. I was kind of lonesome, you see; and ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... the tall one, though. She's alive all the way from her runover heels to the wiggly end of the limp feather that flops careless like over one ear. She's the long-waisted, giraffe-necked kind; but not such a bad looker if you can forget the depressin' costume. It had been a blue cheviot once, I guess; the sort that takes on seven shades of purple about the second season. And it fits her like a damp tablecloth hung on a chair. Her runnin' mate is all in black, and you could tell by the puckered ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... right instant. To that I must respond with the time-honored formula, "Not prepared." The reader may believe, if he will, that the bird is aware of the imitative quality of the notes, and amuses itself by heightening the delusion of the looker-on. My own more commonplace conjecture is that the sounds are produced by snappings and gratings of the big mandibles ("He is gritting his teeth," said a shrewd unornithological Yankee, whose opinion ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... say not. And you can't get gay with her, either. Most girls of her age and as good a looker as she is don't object to a little ragging: they're used to it and they like it—but not her. She isn't fishing for boxes of candy or invitations to dances. That line of talk means good-by and no sale where she is. Business and just business, that's all there ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... attainable by one of his fortune and standing. What use he made of his experiences, Lansing, who had always gone into his own modest adventures rather thoroughly, had never been able to guess; but he had always suspected the prodigal Fred of being no more than a well-disguised looker-on. Now for the first time he began to view him with another eye. The Gillows were, in fact, the one uneasy point in Nick's conscience. He and Susy from the first, had talked of them less than of any other members ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... man, at a loss to catch the drift of these appeals, by reason of their all being spoken in a succession so rapid as to make a single blurred sentence. "Hold on! What's wrong? And where did the pup come from? He's a looker, all right a cute little cuss. ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... with brown hair, sorter coppery in the sun, and grey eyes that grow dark when she's interested. About twenty-three or four, I should say. She's a good-looker, all right; and not a bit ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... sitting-room—or she would have remained in it for the whole night! I am alone, and very anxious. Pray let me see you measure out the laudanum; I want to have something to do with it, even in the unimportant character of a mere looker-on.—R.V." ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... because I'm a good looker. I have had a good many other names, but I've forgotten what they are. The police know. It's ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... absurdly laughable. Life in this wonderful valley was something in the nature of a tragic farce. The worst thing was that the farce of it all could only be detected by the looker-on. There was no real farce in these people, only tragedy—a ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... all right!" the Inspector assured them, with the easy optimism of the looker-on in domestic tragedy; "your father will see there was nothing else ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... head threateningly as it advanced. Again the widow's shrieks resounded. This time Holcroft was about to come to the rescue, when the beleaguered woman made a dash for the top of the nearest fence, reminding her amused looker-on of the night of her arrival when she had perched like some strange sort of ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... action of the others, asked, "Master, is it I?" So, to-day, there is real betrayal of the Saviour by some who take His name upon them and before the world profess to be His followers. If Judas had been an outsider and had sold for money the knowledge he had gained as a looker-on his name would not have become, as the name of Judas has, a synonym for all that is base and contemptible; and the Christian world would have been without the benefit of that glaring act of perfidy that has sounded its ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... make it in a day and a half," the stranger said. "I'll ride in with you. My name's Gardner. I run a store and hotel at Sweetwater, but I feel that I want to get out on the prairie now and then, and as a horse was missing I went after him. A looker, isn't he?" ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... me like that afore," she murmured. "Round har they jes' say, 'Kate, you'd be a rippin' good looker ef it warn't fer that red hair o' yourn.' An' they've said it so much that I've come to hate my ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... colors, noise and screaming, Music and sights, past any dreaming, The rattle of wheels going late and early,— All draw the looker-on into the ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... least,' retorted the friar; and then he blamed the duke for leaving the cause of Isabel in the hands of him she had accused, and spoke so freely of many corrupt practices he had observed, while, as he said, he had been a looker-on in Vienna, that Escalus threatened him with the torture for speaking words against the state, and for censuring the conduct of the duke, and ordered him to be taken away to prison. Then, to the amazement of all present, and to the utter confusion of ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... off and scatter'd her proud branches, Nero. Drusus; and Caius too, although re-planted. If you will, Destinies, that after all, I faint now ere I touch my period, You are but cruel; and I already have done Things great enough. All Rome hath been my slave; The senate sate an idle looker on, And witness of my power; when I have blush'd More to command than it to suffer: all The fathers have sate ready and prepared. To give me empire, temples, or their throats. When I would ask 'em; ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... the earnings of the operatives, the father of Robert Peel noticed that one of his spinners always drew full pay, as his machine never stopped. "How is this, Dick?" asked Mr. Peel one day; "the on-looker tells me your bobbins are always clean." "Ay, that they be," replied Dick Ferguson. "How do you manage it, Dick?" "Why, you see, Meester Peel," said the workman, "it is sort o' secret! If I tow'd ye, yo'd be as wise as I am." "That's so," said Mr. ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... can't turn off the wather up there as we can the cock in the kitchen sink. Still, there's compinsations always, glory be! An' what will ye plaze have wid yer tay, Miss?" turning to Joyce with great respect in look and tone. In spite of all her familiarity with her upstairs, she now, with a looker-on, proceeds to treat "her young lady" as though she were a stranger ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... the duke Dare no more stretch this finger of mine than he Dare rack his own; his subject am I not, Nor here provincial. My business in this state Made me a looker-on here in Vienna, Where I have seen corruption boil and bubble Till it o'errun the stew: laws for all faults, But faults so countenanc'd that the strong statutes Stand like the forfeits in a barber's shop, As much in mock ...
— Measure for Measure • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... cursed unexpectedly by the god owning a bull for his vehicle, Indra, with joined hands and shaking from head to foot, addressed that fierce god of multi-form manifestations, saying, 'Thou art, O Bhava, the over-looker of the infinite Universe!' Hearing these words the god of fiery energy smiled and said, 'Those that are of disposition like thine never obtain my grace. These others (within the cave) had at one time been like thee. Enter thou this cave, therefore, and lie there for some time. The ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... up Alonzo D. Pawling. He's a fly guy, Angy. What a man says at a little supper for four, with a peach pulling his Depews and a good looker sticking gardenias in his buttonhole, ain't what he's likely to say next day ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... that nothing that did happen would have happened, as is her sincere conviction, had she been free to observe and guide the course of events, is what neither the writer of this history nor any other human looker-on can say. We are all disposed to believe that certain possibilities would have changed the entire face of history had they ever developed, and that life would have been a different thing altogether had not So-and-So got ill, or gone on a journey, or even been so ill-advised as ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... has occurred to me that this same Somebody was no such obscurity as, let us say, the Monk John of Glastonbury, who told the excavators just where to look for the buried chapel of Edgar, king and saint. I suspect that my informant was some one who knew more about Elfrida than any mere looker-on, monk or nun, and gossip-gatherer of her own distant day; and this suspicion or surmise was suggested by the ...
— Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn • William Henry Hudson
... admitting," continues Paley, "that we know nothing of the proper internal constitution of a gland, or of the mode of its acting upon the blood; then our situation is precisely like that of an unmechanical looker-on who stands by a stocking loom, a corn mill, a carding machine, or a threshing machine, at work, the fabric and mechanism of which, as well as all that passes within, is hidden from his sight by the outside ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... Nature gives no reply, for both points of view, being equally real, are equally natural; and no one natural reality per se is any more emphatic than any other. Accentuation, foreground, and background are created solely by the interested attention of the looker-on; and if the small difference between the genius and his tribe interests me most, while the large one between that tribe and another tribe interests Mr. Allen, our controversy cannot be ended until a complete philosophy, accounting ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... many a homely witticism, finally opened the package, which proved to be a sample bottle of baby food. At sight of it they howled like Apaches, and Henry was again forced to receive their congratulations. Judith, who had been an interested on-looker without joining in the merriment, now detected in the tenor of their humor a tendency towards breadth. In an instant her manner was official; rapping the table with her ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... went on, her eyes deepening with awe. What did it mean? Somewhat disturbed, Balder got also on his feet. As he did so, Gnulemah crouched before him, holding out her hands like a suppliant. An on-looker might have fancied that the would-be God had found his worshipper ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... grandly, like the clouds which float through the western sky, and the mother-o'-pearl flocks which sometimes form and dissolve there. There we worked, revising mythology, rounding a fable here and there, and building castles in the air for which earth offered no worthy foundation. Great Looker! Great Expecter! to converse with whom was a New England Night's Entertainment. Ah! such discourse we had, hermit and philosopher, and the old settler I have spoken of—we three—it expanded and racked ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... wishing to be tied to the office, as it yielded him no revenue that would reward him for the confinement, he made a post-office of his hat. Whenever he went out, the letters were placed in his hat. When an anxious looker for a letter met the postmaster he found also the post-office, and the public official, taking off his hat, looked over and delivered the mail wherever the public might find him. He kept the office until it was discontinued, or was ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... the lesson of life too well, saw the whole pattern with too great clarity. This alone would have relegated him to the background, for it is the frame of mind which, when it is temperamental from the outset, makes the looker-on at life; while when it is attained it creates the person to whom other people come for sympathy and help in matters that seem to them enormously important, even while they appeal to the wider view ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... have come to Mrs. Brockett's straight away. You mayn't think so now, because Mrs. Brockett is alarming at first, and we none of us—" she looked round her with a little laugh—"can strike the on-looker as very cheerful company. But really Madame has a heart of gold—you'll find that out in time. She's had a terribly hard time of it herself, and I believe it's a great struggle to keep things going now. But she's helped all kinds of people ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... discovered that, to stay in the village a looker-on while the love affair of Madeline and Cordis progressed to its consummation, was going to be too much for him. Instead of his getting used to the situation, it seemed to grow daily more insufferable. Every evening the thought that they were together made him feverish and restless ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... that he had upon several occasions remonstrated with the Apostle Peter upon the irritability of his temperament! In regard to later periods of history, he spoke with the careless ease of an every-day looker on; and told anecdotes that the researches of scholars afterwards fully verified. His predictions were, indeed, most startling; and the cotemporaneous evidence is very strong and explicit, that he did foretell the time, place, and manner of the death of Louis ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... musketry, loud pamphleteering and Frankfort parliamenting and palavering; Germany too will scale the sacred mountains, how steep soever, and, by talisman of ballot-box, inhabit a political Elysium henceforth. All the Nations have that one hope. Very notable, and rather sad to the humane on-looker. For it is sadly conjectured, all the Nations labor somewhat under a mistake as to England, and the causes of her freedom and her prosperous cotton-spinning; and have much misread the nature of her Parliament, and the effect of ballot-boxes and ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... his back was going to be turned upon royalty. He still wore the ragged, patched dressing-gown he always worked in. The painting of Master Betty was amusing at first, but it seemed, in the end, to be but a prolonged and tedious business to the not artistic looker-on. He must divert himself somehow. Certainly Northcote's appearance was comical. Suddenly the painter felt a twitching at his collar. He turned, frowned angrily, but said nothing. The prince persevered. Presently he touched lightly the painter's ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... down to read. Otto, the youngest, seeing a group of students passing the house, ran out on to the lawn and called them in,—two boys, and a girl with red cheeks and a fur stole. Claude had made for a corner, and was perfectly content to be an on-looker, but Mrs. Erlich soon came and seated herself beside him. When the doors into the parlour were opened, she noticed his eyes straying to an engraving of Napoleon which hung over the piano, and made him go and look at it. She told him it was a rare engraving, and she showed him ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... I thank you?" says the young man, fervently, his whole face transformed. He seizes her hands and presses his lips to them in what seems to the looker-on at the other end of the room an impassioned manner. "You have managed that we ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... thought and meaning. He is a native of Fez, and has lived long in Algiers. He has served in the war against the French under Abd-el-Kader, and has only been two years in Bornou and in Kuka, and once in Zinder. He is here as the nather, "looker-on;" one who watches over the interests of the country, particularly in its foreign relations. To speak plainly, he is a spy of the Sheikh of Bornou over the authorities of Zinder, including the Governor. All the people say, "Without ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... Doubtless these men have the feelings of humanity, and love their wives and offspring like others; but it is so essential a part of their training to suppress the exhibition of such emotions, that it is seldom the mere looker-on has occasion to note them. Peter, however, had neither wife nor child; or if they existed, no one knew where either was to be found. The same mystery shrouded this part of his history as veiled ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... or an original thinker he was not. Incapable of employing base means to attain worldly success, his honourable failure left a certain bitterness in his spirit; he regarded the life around him as a looker-on, who enjoyed the spectacle, and enjoyed also to note the infirmities of those who took part in the game which he had declined. He is neither a determined pessimist, nor did he see realities through ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... travestied and occupied, men, women and children wearing the costumes of the period represented. Among the corporations figured the Peintres-verriers, or painters on stained glass, their car proving especially attractive to one small looker-on. ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... by absence, to winne remorse by lamentable reports, and reconciliation by friends intreatie. Finally by sequestering themselues for a time fro the Court, to be able the frecher & cleerer to discerne the factions and state of the Court and of al the world besides, no lesse then doth the looker on or beholder of a game better see into all points of auauntage, then the player himselfe? and in dissembling of diseases which I pray you? for I haue obserued it in the Court of Fraunce, not a burning feuer or a plurisie, ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham
... been in troubles: we hope he is not LIKE in the Bielfeld Portrait;—otherwise, how happy that we never had the honor of knowing him! Indeed, the Crown-Prince's Household generally, as Bielfeld paints it in flourishes of panegyric, is but unattractive; barren to the modern on-looker; partly the Painter's blame, we doubt not. He gives details about their mode of dining, taking coffee, doing concert;—and describes once an incidental drinking-bout got up aforethought by the Prince; which is probably ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... sensations it seemed nothing. The real disaster lay in the fact that it put him definitely off the football team. All his work, all his sacrifice of time and ease, all his hopes of winning honor and glory under the colors of the old college had vanished utterly. Henceforth, he could be only a looker on where he had so fondly figured himself as a contender. His face was white as ashes, and the coach shrank from the look of abject ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... half, boned the turkey, and went on her way quite elated with the brilliancy of her talents in financiering! There's one merit in meanness, if it disgusts the looker-on, it never fails to carry a pleasing sensation to the bosom ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... would have "cut" that short one instead of merely stopping it, or blocked that simple ball that went straight on and bowled the wicket. Everything that is well and gracefully performed appears easy to the looker-on. But that ease and grace, whether in the racehorse or in the man, has only been acquired by months and years ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... drawn Josiah's money. He was insolent. You need have no anxiety about it—it is all over. I only mention it because I want you to feel that our creeds of conduct in life are not always our masters, and sometimes ought not to be. Let that comfort you a little. You know that to have been a silent looker-on at the return to slavery of a man to whom we owed so much was impossible. My wonder is that for a moment you could have hesitated. It makes me comprehend more charitably the attitude of the owners of men. Now, dear, we ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... rise and fall to our right and left, its blue waters dwindling away until they meet the deeper blue of the sky—are all beautiful beyond description. Lovely though this scenery may be in autumn, and its deeper coloring of green in the summer, how dazzled must be the looker on in beholding it in its ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... drawled; "mebbe I wouldn't go that far. Mostly I don't care for a handsome man, anyway. I wouldn't say he's ugly, an' I won't say he's handsome. I'd light on a spot about halfway between them two extremes. I'd say he ain't a bad looker. That would ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... deduced Anisty. "Novice, poor little fool!—or she wouldn't have wasted time searching here for the jewels. Good looker, though—from what little he"—with a glance at Maitland—"gave me a chance to see of her. Seems to have snared him, all right, if she did miss the haul.... Little idiot! What right has a woman in this business, anyway? ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... pastime of a life. These are enviable natures; people shut in the house by sickness often bitterly envy them; but the commoner man cannot continue to exist upon such altitudes: his feet itch for physical adventure; his blood boils for physical dangers, pleasures, and triumphs; his fancy, the looker after new things, cannot continue to look for them in books and crucibles, but must seek them on ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... easy for a looker-on To counsel peace between a man and wife, But were he in the broil himself involved, Philosophy were physic all too weak To cure the wounds made by a rasping tongue, Which time doth canker as the cancer grows Until at last the surgeon with his knife Alone ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... job!" said Seth, taking up the thread of the story. "I've been in a vessel as sprung a leak, and where the hands were pumping day and night, with nary a spell off, so as to kip a plank atween us and the bottom of Davy Jones's looker; but, never, in all my born days, have I seed sich pumpin' as went on ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... ignorant of what had chanced, With eager haste and joyful shouts advanced, 100 And called their lord Actaeon to the game: He shook his head in answer to the name; He heard, but wished he had indeed been gone, Or only to have stood a looker-on. But, to his grief, he finds himself too near, And feels his ravenous dogs with fury tear Their wretched master, panting in ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... flagrant offences on the part of druggists in certain no-license towns—offences not only against the liquor laws, but also against the laws of decency and humanity—brought before the board of pharmacy, would appall the public if they were known. The Looker-On has seen the record of several of these druggists as transcribed from the police courts and they are very black records. One druggist after selling liquor over and over again to one customer, and several times getting him completely intoxicated, finally deposited ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... all the elements that make strong bodies and teachable souls. It is not alone the present with which we deal. Out of the future comes a demand as instant, and justice to-day bears its fruit in larger life for other days to come. For this must be two awakenings. One for the looker-on in the struggle who has no eyes for what lies still in shadow. The other for the worker, who must join the army already aroused, realizing its limitations, reaching out for training and larger opportunity, and seeking with the eagerness ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... part of onlooker. Of these Penelope was one. Evenly her life had slipped along with its measure of work and play, its quiet family loves and losses, entirely devoid of the alarums and excursions of which Fate shapes the lives of some. Hence she had developed the talent of the looker-on. ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... not if I size her up correct. She's a good-looker, all right; she was pointed out to me one night in the hotel dining-room. It was easy to see where she was stuck! She couldn't keep her eyes off a tall, good-looking fellow, that I was told was the senator from ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... towze you Ioynt by ioynt, but we will know his purpose: What? vniust? Duk. Be not so hot: the Duke dare No more stretch this finger of mine, then he Dare racke his owne: his Subiect am I not, Nor here Prouinciall: My businesse in this State Made me a looker on here in Vienna, Where I haue seene corruption boyle and bubble, Till it ore-run the Stew: Lawes, for all faults, But faults so countenanc'd, that the strong Statutes Stand like the forfeites in a Barbers shop, As ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... A looker-on would have wondered why he did this, and would have gazed ahead to see what there was to induce him to make so wild a rush in a dangerous place. But he would have seen nothing but rugged path, tree-top, and ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... and the enemy was not to be allowed to vaunt himself too much; so that I gained some experience of the hardships of that arm of the service, and found out by practical participation what is meant by a cavalry charge. To a looker-on nothing can be finer. To the one who charges, or is supposed to charge,—for the horse seemed to me mainly responsible,—the details are somewhat cumbrous. Now in one of these charges some of us captured ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... Crestwick, grinning. "Not long ago I thought I'd make a sportsman; one of Gladwyne's kind. The ambition doesn't so much appeal to me now. But I want to be rather more than a looker-on. Can't you let me put something ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... beholder, observer, looker-on, onlooker, witness, eyewitness, bystander, passer by; sightseer; rubberneck, rubbernecker [U.S.]. spy; sentinel &c (warning) 668. V. witness, behold &c (see) 441; look on &c (be present) 186; gawk, rubber [Slang], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... ought to've known you," he said, eagerly, and a warmth of light changed the gray shade of his face. "You're the girl Carley! You're almost like my—my own girl. By golly! You're some looker! It was good of you to ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... De Froilette answered. "I am but a looker-on, with certain business interests which politics might affect, and therefore I take some notice of politics. Perhaps I see more clearly than some, my lord—the lookers-on often do; and I am convinced that British policy is ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... day has put an extinguisher on this noted festival, which was one of the most noted days in the Mexican calendar. Crowds flocked to it to gamble, to dance, and to adore the most holy Saint Augustine. To a looker-on it was hard to say whether it was the devil or the saint whom the people had come to worship. The chief business of high-born dames seemed to be to make a display of their taste in dress, and to set off the ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... apparently the leader of the trio, was a big, unwieldy boy of sixteen, a year older and considerably larger than Bob and Joe. His eyes were close together, and he had a look of coarseness and arrogance that denoted the bully. Buck Looker, as he was called—his first name was Buckley—was generally unpopular among the boys, but as he was the son of one of the richest men of the town he usually had one or two cronies who hung about him for what they could get. One of these, Carl Lutz, an unwholesome looking boy, somewhat ...
— The Radio Boys' First Wireless - Or Winning the Ferberton Prize • Allen Chapman
... speech all above the foot was ankle, and all below the chin was chest; but now the female bosom is less the subject of a revelation than the feature of an exposition, and charms that were once reserved are now made the common property of every looker on. A costume which has been described as consisting of a smock, a waistband, and a frill seems to exceed the bounds of honest liberality, and resembles most perhaps the attire mentioned by Rabelais, "nothing before and nothing behind, with sleeves of the same." Not very ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... gentleman who went to the Coast for pleasure and lost a leg on Lagos Bar. Now I have not lost any portion of my anatomy anywhere on the Coast, and therefore have no personal prejudice against the place. I hold a brief for no party, and I beg the more experienced old coaster to remember that "a looker on sees the ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... overcome it by himself, and he cannot. He hardly knows the sort of enemy he has to conquer. Every woman seems to him enclosed in a bell-glass, fine as gossamer, but he cannot break it. He feels himself drawn, but he cannot approach. His heart is yearning; yet he says to himself, no, I do not love. A looker-on calls him inconstant, uncertain, capricious. He is not so; he is bound by viewless fetters, nor does he know where to strike the chain ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... Cunningham, G. W. Medley, J. Medley, C. T. Smith, A. Simons and H. E. Bird. Three of these, remarkable for ingenuity and sudden surprises had familiar appellations. One was termed "The Snake," another that "Old Serpent," I was "The enemy of the human race." A well known looker on who used to lean over the board and talk a great deal was called "The Coroner" because it was said he not only held an inquest on the board, but also ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... assented cordially. "I wasn't prepared for quite such a looker. She doesn't seem to have brought with her that proud and haughty expression she had in ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... the llyn, and we had scarcely begun when I noticed Sinfi's face peeping round a corner of the little gorge. Winnie's back being turned from the llyn she did not see Sinfi, who gave me a sign that her part of that performance was to be looker-on. ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... and pleasure, and this, half the time, with a temptation to go wrong that could no more be seen by themselves, than the stream that runs in the next valley can be seen by us through yonder mountain', though any looker on might have discovered it as plainly as we can discover the parch that are ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... fortunate chance for a looker-on, happened to be in the Turkish capital at the time when the populace were all exulting at the capture of Acre. It was admitted that the British squadron had done more in rapidity of action, and in effect of firing, than it was supposed possible for ships to accomplish, and all was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... professional habit, or due to a natural craving for exactness, but in either case it is a voucher for the work, which is meant for all comers—for the passer-by, for the indifferent, and even for my country's foes. My wish is that the veriest looker-on, idly turning these pages, may be confronted only with documents whose authenticity will be self-evident, if he is willing to see, and whose ignominious tale will reach his heart, if ye ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... or rarely take shape in words is, to the unbiassed looker-on, only an exasperating feature in their tyranny. While it saves the conscience of the tyrant,—if such tyrants have any,—it makes doubly sure the success of their tyranny. And probably nothing short of revelation from Heaven, in shape ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... pausing in the open doorway, regarded the mixed assembly with a half smile, not wanting a certain superciliousness which in other circumstances would have provoked instant observation. Now, however, the full swing of common enjoyment rendered every one blind to what the looker-on took no trouble to conceal. Nor did he at all lower his disdainful regard, when a veteran clad in a sort of military undress, arose from the opposite side of the tables, and waving a wine-cup in his hand, drew on himself ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray
... and Sciences, that we live in retrospect, and doat on past achievements. The accumulation of knowledge has been so great, that we are lost in wonder at the height it has reached, instead of attempting to climb or add to it; while the variety of objects distracts and dazzles the looker-on. What niche remains unoccupied? What path untried? What is the use of doing anything, unless we could do better than all those who have gone before us? What hope is there of this? We are like those who have been to see some noble ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... we fell into the deep hollow of the mountain," said Content, in a pause of the discourse; "since which time, neither eye nor ear of any has had trace of thy movements, until we met thee at the postern, stationed like a looker-out on ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... customer in this town. It was Beaver City. You know how the stores are all built around three sides of a public square. I was out scouting for a looker. I dropped into one man's store—he was a Republican, but he said to me, 'Heavens alive! How do you expect me to buy any goods this year? Why, Bryan's going to be elected sure's your born, and this whole country is going to the devil. I'm a Republican and working against ...
— Tales of the Road • Charles N. Crewdson
... this world in which he had no place—even to a mere looker-on. How fair was this mansion, in its setting of April green and bloom, which had once owned him as its young—its future master. Above it Hope stretched her shining wings, but the hope was not for him. For him the closed door and the closed ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... a good-looker she was—wrapped in a striped blanket, saw me pick up one of the stockings that was pretty chunky and heavy about the toe, and ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... see how matters fadge; Your Milliscent must needs be made a Nune. Well, sir, we are the men must ply this match: Hold you your peace, and be a looker on, And send her unto Chesson—where he will, I'll send me fellows of a handful hie Into the Cloysters where the Nuns frequent, Shall make them skip like Does about the Dale, And with the Lady prioress of the house ...
— The Merry Devil • William Shakespeare
... seen his comrades chase off several flocks of enemy aircraft that endeavored to interrupt the deadly work of the observers. As yet his anticipated chance had not come. He was beginning to feel impatient. Could it be that he must stay there almost up among the clouds, and only be a "looker-on?" ...
— Air Service Boys Over The Enemy's Lines - The German Spy's Secret • Charles Amory Beach
... of a recent trip he had made to Yokohama. He said a great foreign fleet was visiting the port. The festivities and the gaieties were unending. He had been only a looker-on, but a deeply-interested observer. ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... could get into the back of the car and not be specially noticed. She got off at a musical school. As we had been the only two people in the elevator, I took a chance, and said to the man running it, 'Some looker!'" ...
— The Sheridan Road Mystery • Paul Thorne
... daily slaughter of thousands. Humanity had got used to war. War was no longer a novelty. People read of great battles in which unprecedented numbers of men were slain, and wondered how much of truth was in the reports. War no longer horrified the distant on-looker. The sufferings of the Belgians were of greater interest to the people of America than the sufferings of the poor devils in the trenches or on the battle lines. A vast wave of sympathy was sweeping the land and purses were touched as never before. War was on parade. ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... and the smile grew at sight of the even rows of strong white teeth. Why shouldn't Billy like that face? was her unvoiced query. Other men had liked it. Other men did like it. Even the other girls admitted she was a good-looker. Charley Long certainly liked it from the way he made ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... horses in the first row, C for cows in the second, and D for donkeys in the third." Put the letters down rapidly as you talk, leaving one square vacant in the third row, as if by accident, and some looker-on will be sure to say words to this effect, "There is one donkey missing," when you reply at once, ...
— Harper's Young People, July 6, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... long, yet in that short distance the cavalcade was greeted with enough applause to satisfy the most ambitious. All vehicles encountered en route were drawn aside, and the drivers doffed their caps as they watched it pass. As the balloon swayed solemnly from side to side, an imaginative on-looker might have fancied that it was ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... reception at the Riggs to Mrs. Annie Besant, of London, and in his letter regretting that absence from the city would prevent his attendance, ex-Secretary of the Treasury Hugh McCulloch said: "I am sorry I can not see you often. I have been for many years a 'looker on' and I appreciate the work which you have done for the benefit of the race. You have not labored in vain and you have the satisfaction of knowing that your good work will follow you." She accepted a cordial invitation to dine at his home and received assurance ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... impossible, of course, that she should say what she did without some movement of the organ in her breast, but how much share this organ had in her utterances I never could make out. How much was due to the interest which she as a looker-on felt in men and women, and how much was due to herself as a woman, was always a ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... row?' I said, none too gentle. She gave a start, seemed to come out of her trance, and opened her eyes. Say! They were big and black and beautiful. Believe me, she was some looker- -" ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... a sudden brilliant and dazzling flash, that must have been as fierce as the display of lightning when the bolt hits close at hand. And while those at the fire were schooled to repress their natural alarm, evidently the same could not be said of a looker-on not counted in the bill; for there was a hoarse cry of alarm from the bushes across the way, and the sound of crashing seemed to tell of ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... who are in the game. I never espoused any party with violence, and am resolved to observe an exact neutrality between the Whigs and Tories, unless I shall be forced to declare myself by the hostilities of either side. In short, I have acted in all the parts of my life as a looker-on, which is the character I intend to preserve ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... appeal from the women of New Orleans. It was laid carefully by, with a lock of hair, bearing the inscription, "To Mary Looker, from her cousin Jane. Please send this appeal to all our male friends ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... has surrendered himself to it, "united" with it, the patriot knows his country, the artist knows the subject of his art, the lover his beloved, the saint his God, in a manner which is inconceivable as well as unattainable by the looker-on. Real knowledge, since it always implies an intuitive sympathy more or less intense, is far more accurately suggested by the symbols of touch and taste than by those of hearing and sight. True, analytic thought follows swiftly upon the contact, the apprehension, ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... brightened a little, for the prospect of disguising her true feelings in the presence of Lord Reckage and Pensee appealed to that genius for mischief which animated the whole current of her life. To baffle the looker-on seemed not merely a great science, but the one game of wits which could never lose its interest. She was not insincere. She thought that lies, as a rule, were clumsy shifts, and abominable. Even in the moments when she was most thoroughly conscious of her talent ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... in the Bielfeld Portrait;—otherwise, how happy that we never had the honor of knowing him! Indeed, the Crown-Prince's Household generally, as Bielfeld paints it in flourishes of panegyric, is but unattractive; barren to the modern on-looker; partly the Painter's blame, we doubt not. He gives details about their mode of dining, taking coffee, doing concert;—and describes once an incidental drinking-bout got up aforethought by the Prince; which is probably in good part fiction, though not ill done. These fantastic ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... was ordered into the trenches! This was so novel an experience to the men that they took to it pleasantly, and for two days did their work with a will. It must have been amusing, however, to an on-looker of muscle, in whose hands the pick or spade is a toy, to watch with what a brave vigor hands unused to toil seized and wielded the implements of the earth-heaver; and how after a dozen or two of strokes and the sweat began to drop, the blows of the pick grew daintier, ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood
... the grain. To use the language of a gratified looker-on, an old and experienced farmer, ...
— Obed Hussey - Who, of All Inventors, Made Bread Cheap • Various
... the Arts and Sciences, that we live in retrospect, and doat on past atchievements. The accumulation of knowledge has been so great, that we are lost in wonder at the height it has reached, instead of attempting to climb or add to it; while the variety of objects distracts and dazzles the looker-on. What niche remains unoccupied? What path untried? What is the use of doing anything, unless we could do better than all those who have gone before us? What hope is there of this? We are like those who have been to see some noble monument of ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... neutralised. Whether it is the case that nothing that did happen would have happened, as is her sincere conviction, had she been free to observe and guide the course of events, is what neither the writer of this history nor any other human looker-on can say. We are all disposed to believe that certain possibilities would have changed the entire face of history had they ever developed, and that life would have been a different thing altogether had not So-and-So got ill, ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... Henry had a stanch friend and an admirer against all comers, and in Henry Mike had a friend and admirer no less loyal; but their friendship was one for which an on-looker might have found it less easy to give reasons than for that of Henry and Ned. Mike and Henry loved each other, it would appear, less for any correspondence in dispositions or tastes, as just because they were Mike and Henry. Right away down in their natures there was evidently some central ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... rode twenty miles in a wagon to Freshwater Lake, which was our destination. The house where we stayed was kept by a half-breed guide named Sarpo, and with him lived his two sons and his second wife, who was a young white girl, and not a bad looker at that. ...
— Billy Baxter's Letters • William J. Kountz, Jr.
... harpooneer. At any rate, I made up my mind that if it so turned out that we should sleep together, he must undress and get into bed before I did. .. Supper over, the company went back to the bar-room, when, knowing not what else to do with myself, I resolved to spend the rest of the evening as a looker on. Presently a rioting noise was heard without. Starting up, the landlord cried, That's the Grampus's crew. I seed her reported in the offing this morning; a three years' voyage, and a full ship. Hurrah, boys; now we'll have the latest news from the Feegees. A tramping of sea boots was ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... mangy, toothless and deserving of nothing better, my dear father," replied the fair young man, and his glances at the white beard, scanty locks and mumbling mouth of the ancient gentleman had an unpleasantly personal quality. To the casual on-looker it would have seemed that an impudent boy deliberately insulted a harmless benevolent old gentleman. To the fair young man, however, it was well known that the old gentleman's name was famous across Northern ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... chap and would make a husband for a woman to be proud of. Besides, Milly has got nought but herself to offer. She's dependent on Jane for the clothes on her back, so Bewes would be a lot higher than she might ever have hoped to rise. She ain't the only pebble on the beach even as a good-looker." ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... one more. I take it from Saint Simon, that clever on-looker at the Court of Louis XIV. whose memoirs are famous. His ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... a depressed looker-on at the proceedings, buried her head in her mother's apron and cried as if she herself were the victim. The little boys, no longer little, were hardened to punishment, as they were often in disgrace for their wild pranks, but the idea ...
— The Golden House • Mrs. Woods Baker
... contemplation to shut out the memory of the silent on-looker at the fence. She had swung about discourteously "back to" her. "I guess," contemplated Margaret, "my days 'll be long enough in the land! I guess so, for I honor my mother enough to live forever! That makes me think—I guess I better go in and kiss ...
— The Very Small Person • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... could carry bobbins to better advantage than a clumsy man in meridian life. Nat carried them as if he were made on purpose for the business. It was difficult to tell which he did best, carry bobbins or speak pieces. He did both, as a looker-on said, "in apple-pie order," which means, I suppose, about as well as they could be done ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer
... lest I might not have found the ship. What he said to her, I do not know. I only remember that she came to me, saying, "I am afraid of that man: I wish that we could go home soon." This meeting with a man who makes friendly offers of service may seem a small matter to the mere looker-on; but it ceases to be so when one knows his motives: and, since that time, I have had but too many opportunities to see for what end these offers are made. Many an educated girl comes from the Old World to find a position ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... watcher had the courage to go down a few steps after him. At first nothing was to be seen, for the candle-light had vanished. A dim light, however, entered by the long, narrow windows which flank the hall door, and after a moment the on-looker could see that the hall was empty. He was marvelling at this sudden disappearance of the steward, when, to his horror, he saw a body fall upon the hall floor within a few feet of the door. The watcher cannot say whether he ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... on the safety of the looker, I left, at recess in one of my overcoat pockets, a package containing a jeweled pin that had been repaired for my mother. Now, sir, on going down to my coat, I found the pin missing from ...
— The High School Freshmen - Dick & Co.'s First Year Pranks and Sports • H. Irving Hancock
... at the familiar use of the first name. "She's never had a show. Preston wasn't much except as a looker. The first time she came in here I could see how things stood. But you couldn't budge her from him—jest like ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... wanted to look at it that way. Enough to get you a decent-looking outfit, such an outfit as you ought to have to land a good job. I know, and everybody else knows, that clothes do count no matter what we say to the contrary. I'll bet you're some looker when you're dolled up! Please," she continued "just try it ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... but a looker-on at chess sees more of the game than the player; and I have been looking at your last few moves in the game of life, without taking part with you, and I see you will be checkmated soon, if you do not alter your tactics. I can't blame you, nor ...
— Life in London • Edwin Hodder
... the fighting man, and to learn to revere and worship him—that is the only serious thing. I wish to express my worship and reverence to that gallant company, and to convey to those who are left my most sincere thanks for all their marvellous kindness to me, a mere looker on. ...
— An Onlooker in France 1917-1919 • William Orpen
... that winning-looker who really didn't interest you?" suggested Smith in tones made slightly acid by memory of his half ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... that the mass will never appreciate it—in reply to which it is sufficient to say that the critic himself is one of the mass and could not be distinguished from others of the mass by his very own self were he a looker-on. ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... he assented cordially. "I wasn't prepared for quite such a looker. She doesn't seem to have brought with her that proud and haughty expression she had ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... he had done wisely. Bernard had, in his time, vexed Felix's soul by idleness and amusement, but he had been one betted upon, not himself given to betting. He loved football and cricket for their bodily excitement, not the fictitious one of a looker on, or reader of papers, and it struck him that Wilfred knew a good deal too much about this more dangerous side of ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... importance in the scene, and made a blank in it, ridiculously disproportionate in its extent, when he retired. The gambols of a piece of cloth upon the dyer's pole had far more interest for the moment than all the changing motion of the crowd. Yet even while the looker-on felt angry with himself for this, and wondered how it was, the tumult swelled into a roar; the hosts of objects seemed to thicken and expand a hundredfold, and after gazing round him, quite scared, he turned into Todgers's again, much more rapidly than he came out; and ten to one he told ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... but it does not follow that all who nod are Burleighs. He who habitually says nothing, must be content if he be regarded as having nothing to say, and it is only a lack of grace on his part which precludes the confession. In this broad 'Vienna' of human effort, the mere 'looker-on' cannot be tolerated. It is part of our duty to be nonsensical and ridiculous at times, for the entertainment of the rest of the world. If we are never to open our mouths until the unsealing of the aperture is to give evidence of a present Solomon, ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... music mad," a looker-on near the boys said to another. "At the opera every night unless serious affairs keep him away! There you may see him nodding his old head and bursting his gloves with applauding when a good thing is done. He ought to have led an orchestra or played a 'cello. He is too ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... feast was at its height, when Aurora, confused with the richness and multiplicity of her impressions, and aware of a happy fatigue, withdrew from her guests to be for a few minutes just a quiet looker-on. She chose as her retreat a spot at the curve of the stairs, where she felt herself in the midst of everything and yet isolated. Her back was toward the persons going up and down; she leaned on the sloping balustrade, and breathed and ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... church. Mrs. Hanway-Harley cast her vote delicately, saying she would have it expressly understood that she only gave it as a view. She hoped no one would feel in any sense bound thereby; she had not been, speaking strictly, a party to this marriage, nothing in truth but a looker-on, and therefore it did not become her to assume an attitude of authority. Mrs. Hanway-Harley would only say that churches were the conventional thing and studies ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... his ease. There is not the slightest indication of his being incommoded by the numerous objects about him; no confusion of ideas, no distraction of mind, no mental distress of any kind; but, on the contrary, in the midst of so much to see and to learn, the young looker-on is not only at his ease, but appears to be delighted. The reason of this is, that he is not by any external force compelled to attend to all that he sees; and Nature within directs him to attend to ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... at Madeira she had not seen a great deal of Vereker Sarle. He had dropped back quietly from the crowd that ringed her in, and become a looker-on, sometimes barely that, for he was a great poker-player, and spent much time in the smoke-room with one or two hard-looking citizens who were plainly not drawing-room ornaments. April had missed him, with a little pain in her heart, for instinct told her that he ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... connection with Burr; that from him he had every thing to expect, if he would come over to him. To Doctor Linn of New Jersey, they have offered the government of New Jersey. See a paragraph in Martin's Baltimore paper of February the 10th, signed, 'a looker on,' staling an intimacy of views ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... justly.' 'Boldly at least,' retorted the friar; and then he blamed the duke for leaving the cause of Isabel in the hands of him she had accused, and spoke so freely of many corrupt practices he had observed, while, as he said, he had been a looker-on in Vienna, that Escalus threatened him with the torture for speaking words against the state, and for censuring the conduct of the duke, and ordered him to be taken away to prison. Then, to the amazement of all present, ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... glory, others to money; and there are some few who, taking no account of anything else, earnestly look into the nature of things: and these men call themselves studious of wisdom, that is, philosophers; and as there it is the most reputable occupation of all to be a looker-on, without making any acquisition, so in life, the contemplating things, and acquainting oneself with them, greatly exceeds ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... leaves his house at all he goes out for a walk, the same as in old times, to indulge the tastes he had under the old regime, those of a talkative, curious on-looker and friendly stroller, of a Parisian safe in his well run town. "Yesterday evening," writes a man who feels the coming Reign of Terror, "I took my stand in the middle of the right alley of the Champs-Elysees;[3372] it was thronged with—who do you think? ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... who was apparently the leader of the trio, was a big, unwieldy boy of sixteen, a year older and considerably larger than Bob and Joe. His eyes were close together, and he had a look of coarseness and arrogance that denoted the bully. Buck Looker, as he was called—his first name was Buckley—was generally unpopular among the boys, but as he was the son of one of the richest men of the town he usually had one or two cronies who hung about him for what they could get. One of these, Carl Lutz, an unwholesome looking ...
— The Radio Boys' First Wireless - Or Winning the Ferberton Prize • Allen Chapman
... her place as his counselor and friend? The idea of some personal advantage was, of course, at the bottom of it; but it was clear, not only to sage Mrs. Basil, but even to Harry—since even a moderately skillful looker-on sees more of the game than the best player—that in any contest of wits Solomon would have small chance with his new friend. The opinion of Mrs. Basil was, that some new speculation, in some manner ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... seen Dick twice since her refusal of him, and both times her manner, exactly like what it had always been to him, had put him at his ease, so that a looker-on would never have dreamed of that episode under the pines when she nearly broke his heart. Billy, however, was more conscious. He had not seen Jerrie since he took her home in his dog-cart, and his face was scarlet and his manner nervous ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... beside the talkers a shabby, slouching figure of a man, with longish grizzled hair and a sleepy eye—a strange, remote creature, who seemed to take very little notice of what was passing before him. From various indications, however, in the conversation, David had gathered that this looker-on must be the ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sort of costume, and appeared quite at home in their parts. The story consisted in the attempts of a young prince to obtain the hand of a young princess; and the dialogue was constantly interrupted by an actor who appeared to be a looker-on, but who made his remarks upon what passed, so as to excite bursts of laughter from the audience. He was the Jack Pudding, or wit of the piece, and several of his jokes were not very delicate. At all events, he was the Liston of the ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... herself of the excuse afforded her by a fan to administer a couple of raps. While Ch'un Ling traces, in a absent frame of mind, the outlines of the character Ch'iang, a looker-on appears on the scene. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... the day seems light to them, looking forward to the hour when they sit together in John's old shabby dining-room above the counting-house. Yet a looker-on might imagine such times dull to them; for they are strangely shy of one another, strangely sparing of words—fearful of opening the flood-gates of speech, feeling the ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... Sixth held dress parade—the first since our march from Columbia; but I, on duty that day as one of the 'reserve guard,' was merely a looker-on. I was never prouder of the old regiment; it went through with the manual of arms so well—and then there were so many spectators present from other regiments. Orders were given to prepare for a thorough inspection of arms and equipments at ten o'clock ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... bullet had not touched the brain. Then the vindictive and resolute beast came back to the tree and again reared up against it; this time to receive a bullet that dropped her lifeless. Mr. Whitney then climbed down and walked to where the cub had been sitting as a looker-on. The little animal did not move until he reached out his hand; when it suddenly struck at him like an angry cat, dove into the bushes, ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... an immediate sense of relief. It was puzzling that the man's exit should have been so rapid and noiseless, but the door behind Mr. Lavington was screened by a tapestry hanging, and Faxon concluded that the unknown looker-on had merely had to raise it to pass out. At any rate, he was gone, and with his withdrawal the strange weight was lifted. Young Rainer was lighting a cigarette, Mr. Balch meticulously inscribing his name at the foot of the document, Mr. Lavington—his ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... Half a dozen Retrievers, of a mixed breed, lay lounging on the grass in front of this line of watch-boxes, awaiting the moment when work should be cut out for their Sagacities. These were admirably trained to their vocation, as I had an opportunity of judging whilst a looker-on here. On the occasion of a small flight, a couple of long shots were made, and a duck winged slightly: it made a good downward slant, and fell forty yards from the shore into the Seneca: at the same moment in dashed four dogs after it, helter-skelter: there was a little sea on, ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State, they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful, and the more ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... singularly amusing, had it not bordered upon profanity. This was no less an assertion than that he had upon several occasions remonstrated with the Apostle Peter upon the irritability of his temperament! In regard to later periods of history, he spoke with the careless ease of an every-day looker on; and told anecdotes that the researches of scholars afterwards fully verified. His predictions were, indeed, most startling; and the cotemporaneous evidence is very strong and explicit, that he did foretell the time, place, and manner of the death of Louis XV, several years ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... she asked after a minute's silence—a minute during which she was horribly conscious that her changing countenance might readily have betrayed to any looker-on how deeply ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... when the young men of the vicinity said: "Dat Johnson goil is a puty good looker." About this period her brother remarked to her: "Mag, I'll tell yeh dis! See? Yeh've edder got teh go teh hell or go teh work!" Whereupon she went to work, having the feminine aversion ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane
... year ended August 31st. To a stranger looking on as I close its accounts, there might be nothing visible but an array of figures "dry as dust." But if that on-looker could count the heart-beats, as I draw near to making up the balance, could watch the rising tide of feeling, could hear the out-burst of thanksgiving sounding through the chambers of the soul, and now ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 11, November, 1889 • Various
... in its present signification. The praestigiator threw dice or put coins on a table, then passed them into a small vessel or box, moved the latter about quickly and adroitly, till finally, when you thought they were in a certain place, the coins turned up somewhere else: "The looker-on is deceived by such innocent tricks, being often inclined to presume the sleight of hand to be nothing more or less ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... called the political contests of Tortirra struggles of interests. In nothing is this more clear (to the looker-on at the game) than in the endless disputes concerning restrictions on commerce. It must be understood that lying many leagues to the southeast of Tortirra are other groups of islands, also wholly ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... not pretend," he said, "that he was there by accident; but I maintain that he was there simply in the capacity of a looker-on. He stands, in fact, precisely in the same position that any member of the general public might do, who had been present as a spectator at any sort of riot. It is unquestionably a very unwise action on the part of any individual to attend a meeting of any ...
— Through Russian Snows - A Story of Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow • G. A Henty
... Harvey walked westward. He had no reason for hurry; as usual, the tumult of the world's business passed him by; he was merely a looker-on. It occurred to him that it might be a refreshing and a salutary change if for once he found himself involved in the anxieties to which other men were subject; this long exemption and security fostered a too exclusive regard ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... exercise in the endeavor to ferret out the various series of events which lie entangled in the confused and apparently unrelated successions of incidents which pass before his observation. When he sees something happen in the street, he will not be satisfied, like the casual looker-on, merely with that solitary happening; he will try to find out what other happenings led up to it, and again what other happenings must logically follow from it. When he sees an interesting person in a street-car, he will wonder where that person has come from and ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... be better to have one, as they know down there young Henley was lately married. Any good-looker, with an easy conscience, will do. You could coach her on ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... resolved to observe an exact neutrality between the Whigs and Tories, unless I shall be forced to declare myself by the hostilities of either side. In short, I have acted in all the parts of my life as a looker-on, which is the character I intend to ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... with heathen foes. And thus the first resolution of the Budget got quietly through, which was exactly what the Chancellor of the Exchequer wanted; whereupon there might have been observed, perhaps, by a close looker-on, a sinking of one of Sir William's eyelids, which might have suggested in a lesser mortal the wink of the man who takes off the mask when the comedy is over. Sir William is ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... life. Let him not be afraid of ennui from idleness. He has a great love of the country and country pursuits, and that is all-sufficient. Age cannot wither it, nor custom stale its infinite variety. And it is so much better to be a looker-on than an actor in life. Aristotle, in the last chapter of his 'Nicomachean Ethics,' sets himself to consider what can be the happiness of the gods; and he finds nothing in which he can put it but ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... through infusion of celestial powre The duller earth it quickneth with delight, And life-full spirits privily doth powre Through all the parts, that to the looker's sight They seeme ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... Mrs Macintyre. 'A game is a game; a charade is a charade. While the acting proceeds no looker-on must interfere except under my intense displeasure. In fact, my dear Leucha, after what I have said, I shall write to your mother asking her to remove you from the school, unless you promise not to make any fuss or show any fear to-night. Go back ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... watched—sympathetically, of course, but with a certain amount of amusement—the duel between you and Bernadine. It has been against your country and your country's welfare that most of his efforts have been directed, which perhaps accounts for the equanimity with which I have been contented to remain a looker-on. It is apparent, my dear Baron, that in most of your encounters the honors have remained with you. Yet, as it has chanced, never once has Bernadine been struck a real and crushing blow. The time has come when this and more must happen. It is no longer a matter ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... intelligent Catholics, he shows that among them also the process of theological solution has been going on. Like Protestants who still profess creeds which they do not believe, these intelligent Catholics have to resort to strange devices—to devices which to a looker-on appear uncandid if not insincere,—in order to patch up a truce between their reason and their faith. This insincerity is the blight of the present age. It is far more serious than indifferentism, or than the open mockery of the 18th century philosophers. So long as ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... a looker-on might have observed that, even before the curtain rose, there was unusual animation among the audience. People were restless who were never known to be restless before. The ladies' fans fluttered with abnormal rapidity. All appeared to be inhaling ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... it was decided. We made fashion to plaster up the envelope so as not to show a casual looker that it had been tampered with, and I footed it to Portree in the patched trews of the messenger, not with the lightest heart in the world. The first redcoat I met directed me to the inn where the Duke had his headquarters, and I was presently ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... was audible. The wind did not move the leaves. The swallows skimmed along he ground one after another without a cry, and their silent flight made a sad impression upon the heart of the looker-on. "Here I am, then, at the bottom of the river," again thought Lavretsky. "And here life is always sluggish and still; whoever enters its circle must resign himself to his fate. Here there is no use in agitating oneself, no reason why one should give oneself ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... and they would not blow hot and cold in the manner prescribed for all the coffee-room politicians in London. In the interior, the hubbub and confusion of the republic of letters was meanwhile exceedingly amusing to the looker-on; we were of all parties and shades of opinion: the proprietor of the King's Head was an ultra Tory, and swore by George III. as the best of sovereigns—the Crown Hotel was very loyal, but more moderate—the Bell Inn would give a strong pull for the Church—whilst the Cross-Keys ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... little pause—rather an intense little pause; and then—"Isn't that the girl who set 'em all by the ears yesterday?" asked the young man, pointing to the morning paper. "They say she's a good-looker." ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... hurry. That's why he needed a good dose o' rye. Say, that feller means marryin' that gal. I've heard tell he's got it all fixed with her. I've heard tell she's dead sweet on him. Wal, I ain't sure but wot it's natural. He's a good looker; so is she. An' he's a bright boy. Guess he's got the grit to look after a gal good. He's a pretty scrapper. ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... the statues in the first act. Against a backing of black velvet the three white figures, carefully posed, strongly lighted, stand out so marble-like that when they slowly turn their faces and point to their chosen master, the effect is uncanny enough to chill the looker-on. ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... anything pastoral about the tall one, though. She's alive all the way from her runover heels to the wiggly end of the limp feather that flops careless like over one ear. She's the long-waisted, giraffe-necked kind; but not such a bad looker if you can forget the depressin' costume. It had been a blue cheviot once, I guess; the sort that takes on seven shades of purple about the second season. And it fits her like a damp tablecloth hung on a chair. Her runnin' mate is all in black, and you could tell by the puckered seams and ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... that she and six other "ladies" of like instincts meet daily for tea and scandal at the Gymkhana and, for three solid hours, pull to pieces the reputations of all and sundry their acquaintances, reminding the amused on-looker, by their voices, manner, and appearance, of those strange birds the Sat Bai or Seven Sisters, who in gangs of seven make day hideous ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... all; for there she tried on hat after hat—not ugly bonnets but cleverly arranged creations for an old lady that seemed to remove the lines from her face and made her feel that perhaps, after all, she could take a part and share in the beautiful things of this new beautiful world, instead of a mere looker on. ...
— Drusilla with a Million • Elizabeth Cooper
... of a constant feast. Not wishing to be tied to the office, as it yielded him no revenue that would reward him for the confinement, he made a post-office of his hat. Whenever he went out, the letters were placed in his hat. When an anxious looker for a letter met the postmaster he found also the post-office, and the public official, taking off his hat, looked over and delivered the mail wherever the public might find him. He kept the office until it was discontinued, ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... OVER-LOOKER. Generally an old master appointed by owners of ships to look after everything connected with the fitting out of their vessels when in harbour ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... sailor sprung aside with an oath, forced from him by his terror; and from every looker-on there broke a groan. They all shrunk away and stood staring with blanched faces. Such a piteous sight as it was, lying doubled up, with the rope pinioning the miserable limbs, the teeth locked, and the ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... myself," said the new on-looker, dropped back in his chair, and met the eyes of the pearl's owner ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... that particular kind of life. Afterwards, when I had come to know him, I heard him sum up every person there with extraordinary point and sparkle. Often since then, eager to hear more of my friend, I have asked men who met him casually for a report of him. So often they have said, "He was a looker-on at life. He came in and sat down and looked on. He gave nothing in return. He never talked, he only listened. I never got much out of him. I never got to the real Synge. I was never conscious ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield
... kingdoms' fear. While single he stood forth, and seem'd, although Each had an army, as an equal foe; Such was his force of eloquence to make The hearers more concern'd than he that spake: Each seem'd to act that part he came to see, And none was more a looker-on than he; So did he move our passions, some were known To wish, for the defence, the crime their own. Now private pity strove with public hate, Reason with ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... deep hollow of the mountain," said Content, in a pause of the discourse; "since which time, neither eye nor ear of any has had trace of thy movements, until we met thee at the postern, stationed like a looker-out on his watch." ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... go," she returned. "I see Mullins crossing the bridge. If David comes I will make an excuse for your absence;" and Elizabeth nodded and turned away. Dinah's heart was very heavy as she stood looking down upon the Pool. It is the looker-on who sees most of the game, and weeks ago she had vainly tried to open Elizabeth's eyes to ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... loss to know in which division to place myself. If I join the young people, my gravity proves a hindrance to their games and flirtations; if I stay with the elders, I must play the role of a looker-on in things I have no knowledge of. The only games of cards I know are the burro ciego, the burro con vista, and a little tute ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... as possible of the Tory influence, which is menaced by the Bill, and the other wants to court the democratic spirit, which vivifies its party, and erect a new and auxiliary influence on the ruins of the ancient establishments. Any mere looker-on must perceive through all their wranglings that these are the arriere-pensees of ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... wish this were so; but thou hast much the best of the matter, even in the way of amusement, reverend pilgrim, though to the looker-on it would seem otherwise. The difference between us, pious Conrad, is just this—that thou laughest in thy sleeve without seeming to be merry, whereas I yawn ready to split my jaws while I seem to be dying with fun. Your often-told joke is a bad companion, and gets at last to be ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... on this deal," he had then volunteered. "This horse that you just traded for is a looker when he is rested, and he can run like hell. You can go your pile on him. Just burn out that lazy S brand and run on your own. You can hold him easy, then. I like a feller that rides a double-rigged saddle ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... she is a looker. And a flirt from the drop of the hat! Had the last dance with her. Which reminds me I better hurry and down my booze and get back. I'm going to rope her ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... Audrey, Captain Cunningham, G. W. Medley, J. Medley, C. T. Smith, A. Simons and H. E. Bird. Three of these, remarkable for ingenuity and sudden surprises had familiar appellations. One was termed "The Snake," another that "Old Serpent," I was "The enemy of the human race." A well known looker on who used to lean over the board and talk a great deal was called "The Coroner" because it was said he not only held an inquest on the board, but also sat ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... cared for her? From his vantage-ground of the looker-on, with his unnaturally sharpened sensitiveness, he knew perfectly how matters stood and ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... miserable looks and strange abstracted ways to-day. Oh! how easy Hester would have found it to make him happy! not merely how easy, but what happiness it would have been to her to merge her every wish into the one great object of fulfiling his will. To her, an on-looker, the course of married life, which should lead to perfect happiness, seemed to plain! Alas! it is often so! and the resisting forces which make all such harmony and delight impossible are not recognized by the bystanders, hardly by the actors. But if these resisting forces ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... all generous public movements, but he was not fond of working in associations, though he liked well enough to attend their meetings as a listener and looker-on. His study was his workshop, and he preferred to labor in solitude. When he became famous he paid the penalty of celebrity in frequent interruptions by those "devastators of the day" who sought him in his quiet retreat. ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... were at the very utmost verge of human happiness! Yet even under these circumstances the perverse creatures would run away. Indeed, to run away seemed to be a characteristic of the race like their black skin and kinkling hair! It would have seemed, to an uninformed on-looker, that they actually desired to escape from the paternal institution which had thrown around their lives all these blissful and beatifying circumstances. But we know it was not so. It was only the inherent perversity of ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... fly to Europe and meet a far-off friend. The looker-on sees the body in bed, but the supposed 90:18 inhabitant of that body carries it through the air and over the ocean. This shows the possibilities of thought. Opium and hashish eaters men- 90:21 tally travel far ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... let that rabble enter! Mow down four or five hundred of them with cannons and the rest would run away." On August 10, when the tocsin sounds, he regards the people and the king with equal contempt; he rushes to a friend's house on the Carrousel and there, still as a looker-on, views at his ease all the occurrences of the day.[1124] Finally, the chateau is forced and he strolls through the Tuileries, looks in at the neighboring cafes, and that is all: he is not disposed to take sides, he has no Jacobin or royalist inclination. His features, even, are so calm ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... brain and the judgment. I felt the excitement of it throbbing in my pulses. The gloomy, half-lit auditorium seemed full of strange suggestions. I felt in real and actual touch with the great things that throbbed beneath. I was no longer an auditor—a looker-on. I ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... looker, the seer, the 'maker-see'; the reporter, the painter of the scenery and events of the soul. And if the sense of vision is our noblest, and we instinctively express the acts of intelligence in terms drawn from physical vision, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... curious contrast to the present state of things, that during the long reign of George II. government was simply a game. Half a dozen powerful men were the players. The king was merely the looker on, the people knew no more of the matter than the passers by through Pall-Mall know of the performances going on within the walls of its club-houses. It must shock our present men of the mob to hear of national ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... poor little fool!—or she wouldn't have wasted time searching here for the jewels. Good looker, though—from what little he"—with a glance at Maitland—"gave me a chance to see of her. Seems to have snared him, all right, if she did miss the haul.... Little idiot! What right has a woman in this business, anyway? Well, here's one thing that will never ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... Street, in a gents' glove department. A gents' glove department requires careful dressing on the part of its clerks, and the manager, in selecting them, is particular about choosing "lookers," with especial attention to figure, hair, and finger nails. Gertie was a looker. Providence had taken care of that. But you cannot leave your hair and finger nails to Providence. They demand coaxing with a bristle brush and ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber
... means to-morrow," said King. With the advantage of looker-on and a very deep experience of Northerners, he had noted that Ismail was lying and that Saunders was growing doubtful, although both men concealed the truth with what was very close to ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... for exactness, but in either case it is a voucher for the work, which is meant for all comers—for the passer-by, for the indifferent, and even for my country's foes. My wish is that the veriest looker-on, idly turning these pages, may be confronted only with documents whose authenticity will be self-evident, if he is willing to see, and whose ignominious tale will reach his heart, if ye ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... himself to be treated so. He would take just one glance at the shady side of city life, to satisfy his curiosity, and have something to talk about at home, and would then start on his return. He would merely be a looker on. ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... Kildare had her second interview with a man who wanted, not herself, but one of her children. It made her feel very old, as if she were becoming a looker-on at ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... kind to him thus far. After a little further talk, in which the accepted point of view of the on looker at the great game was made still more painfully evident for the unwilling listener, the men went away. For a long time after they had gone, Blount sat crumpled in the depths of the big chair, chewing his extinct cigar and staring absently at the row of books ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... the perpetual employment of two junior start-up societies to ridicule them and their authors as unworthy their established post in the commonwealth of wit and learning. Their own consciences will easily inform them whom I mean; nor has the world been so negligent a looker-on as not to observe the continual efforts made by the societies of Gresham and of Will's {64}, to edify a name and reputation upon the ruin of ours. And this is yet a more feeling grief to us, upon the regards of tenderness as well as of justice, when we reflect on their proceedings ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... time-honoured fashion of the clown, a bladder swinging on the end of a stick, or ladle; in some parts, even to-day, he is observing custom if he has a cow's tail on the other end: this to be used also to whack the unsuspecting looker-on. ...
— The Morris Book • Cecil J. Sharp
... the existing set of rules simply appals the Radical. Yet oddly enough, this injustice itself appeals rather to the comparative looker-on than to the heavily-handicapped players in person. They, poor creatures, dragging their log in patience, have grown so accustomed to regarding the world as another man's oyster, that they put up uncomplainingly for the most part ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... Then he was, somehow, in that grotesque position that is only absurd to the on-looker, on his knees beside her. His terrible self-consciousness was gone. He only knew that, somehow, some way, he must prove to her his humility, his love, his terrible fear of losing her again, his hope that together they might make up ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... their Oxford doings to her, and their plans: and she listens eagerly and advises. To me the strange thing is, as she manages it, that her interest does not tie her down to sharing their opinions. She speaks always as a looker-on, and they recognise this. She keeps her own mind, just as she has always held to her own view of her marriage. I have never heard her complain, and to her husband she is an angel: yet I am sure (without being able to tell you why) that her heart ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... had got used to war. War was no longer a novelty. People read of great battles in which unprecedented numbers of men were slain, and wondered how much of truth was in the reports. War no longer horrified the distant on-looker. The sufferings of the Belgians were of greater interest to the people of America than the sufferings of the poor devils in the trenches or on the battle lines. A vast wave of sympathy was sweeping the land and purses were touched as never before. War was on parade. The world ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... built up a pretty good business here, but I'll have to quit and leave you some day, and reckon you won't be satisfied to stop at the hotel all your life. You're smart and a looker, and I guess you want to go out and see the world. That's all right, and you'll be able, as far as dollars count; but I can't go with you and you ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... Love to the looker-on may be blind, unwise, unworthily bestowed, a waste, a sacrifice, a crime; yet none the less is love, alone, the one thing that, come weal or woe, is worth the loss of every other thing; the one supreme ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... tree—perhaps the greatest moral lesson anyhow from earth, rocks, animals, is that same lesson of inherency, of what is, without the least regard to what the looker-on (the critic) supposes or says, or whether he likes or dislikes. What worse—what more general malady pervades each and all of us, our literature, education, attitude toward each other, (even toward ourselves,) than a morbid trouble about seems, (generally ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... thinks just as punky as that, and then we settles it that I'm to hike over and take a squint, anyway. I gets him to give me a line on what kind of a looker the warden was, and he throws me a couple of tens for campaign expenses. I was just stowin' away the green stuff as I goes through the outside office, and Piddie's ...
— Torchy • Sewell Ford
... to talking of a recent trip he had made to Yokohama. He said a great foreign fleet was visiting the port. The festivities and the gaieties were unending. He had been only a looker-on, ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... both of which I have had to take a share, now from the compulsion of my office, now from the leading of my own heart, and now from that destiny which, including both, so often throws the man who supposed himself a mere on-looker, into the very vortex of events—that destiny which took form to the old pagans as a gray mist high beyond the heads of their gods, but to us is known as an infinite love, revealed in the mystery of man—I say before I begin, it is fitting that, in the absence of a common friend to do that ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... the sun, shelter among the trees, and a sort of companionship in my own thoughts. I well remember that I exchanged but two sentences that day with any living being: not that I felt solitary; I was glad to be quiet. For a looker-on, it sufficed to pass through the rooms once or twice, observe what changes were being wrought, how a green-room and a dressing-room were being contrived, a little stage with scenery erected, how M. Paul Emanuel, in conjunction ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... which could not have failed the notice of a looker-on this night in Antioch. Nearly everybody wore the colors of one or other of the charioteers announced for the morrow's race. Sometimes it was in form of a scarf, sometimes a badge; often a ribbon or a feather. ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... du Tillet has a lot of money; he wants to marry him to Malvina; but du Tillet is shy of Nucingen. To a looker-on, the ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... are as men that look sometimes into a glass, and presently forget their own shape and favor. As for business, a man may think, if he win, that two eyes see no more than one; or that a gamester seeth always more than a looker-on; or that a man in anger, is as wise as he that hath said over the four and twenty letters; or that a musket may be shot off as well upon the arm, as upon a rest; and such other fond and high imaginations, to think himself all in all. But when all is done, the help ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... said Seth, taking up the thread of the story. "I've been in a vessel as sprung a leak, and where the hands were pumping day and night, with nary a spell off, so as to kip a plank atween us and the bottom of Davy Jones's looker; but, never, in all my born days, have I seed sich pumpin' as went on in that ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... partly in joy, partly in appreciation, and the smile grew at sight of the even rows of strong white teeth. Why shouldn't Billy like that face? was her unvoiced query. Other men had liked it. Other men did like it. Even the other girls admitted she was a good-looker. Charley Long certainly liked it from the way he ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... by his own exertions and behaviour; that, in fact, every one who rules himself to decency and sobriety of conduct, and attention to his duties, comes over to our ranks; it may not be always as a master, but as an over-looker, a cashier, a book-keeper, a clerk, one on the side of ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... least, not if I size her up correct. She's a good-looker, all right; she was pointed out to me one night in the hotel dining-room. It was easy to see where she was stuck! She couldn't keep her eyes off a tall, good-looking fellow, that I was told was the ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... to stay in the village a looker-on while the love affair of Madeline and Cordis progressed to its consummation, was going to be too much for him. Instead of his getting used to the situation, it seemed to grow daily more insufferable. Every evening the thought that they were together made him feverish and restless till ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... desires run in that groove, Jack, my lad; I'm quite content to play the part of looker-on. But this storm is grand, and it's splendid to see how the little vessel shakes the water off her and rushes through it all. But I did want some calmer weather; we haven't done a bit of fishing since we left ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... occasion quarrels and swearing, he proposed some little innocent diversions, capable of entertaining the mind, without stirring up the passions. But seeing that, in spite of his endeavours, they were bent on cards and dice, he thought it not convenient to absent himself, but became a looker on, that he might somewhat awe them by his presence; and when they were breaking out into any extravagance, he reclaimed them by gentle and soft reproofs. He shewed concernment in their gains, or in their losses, and offered ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... her face grew grave, and, after a thoughtful pause, she said, "I believe those cannot be quite happy who feel that they have nothing to do in the world. Better be the poorest drudge, with powers fitted to your station, than to be as I am, an idler—a mere looker-on at ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... at the top of the big barn-like building used for storing wool. The mirador was so high that standing on it one was able to see even over the tops of the tall plantation trees, and to protect the looker-out there was a high wooden railing round it, and against this the tall flag-staff was fastened. When my father went up to the look-out a terribly violent thunderstorm was just bursting on us. The dazzling, almost ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... had no attraction for each other: they had not a thought or feeling in common; and they seldom met without a certain sparring, which, to the looker-on, must have betrayed how ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... Fear in plenty. What would have Great Cloud, our father, He the Smoke-nose, he the Big Fish? They not cheat us, we not murder. Pale-faces like the leaves of forests: Many squaws with paint and feathers— None like Makochawyuntaker, The World-looker, wife of Black Hawk. Much skull, but few scalp in Congress. Talk much—very great tongue-warriors. Tomahawk could end the tongue-fight. Hrumph! I like not these pale-faces, Makpialutah mourns for battle, Red Cloud thirsts for blood of Pawnees, Red Cloud ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 12 , June 18,1870 • Various
... civilizing the wild Indians of the forest and the prairie—going far in advance of the settler, whose advent they have but too much cause to dread. I care not what may be the form of belief which the on-looker may hold—whether it be in unison or in antagonism with that faith preached by these men; but he is only a poor semblance of a man who can behold such a sight through the narrow glass of sectarian feeling, holding' opinions foreign to his own. He who has travelled through the ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... by lamentable reports, and reconciliation by friends intreatie. Finally by sequestering themselues for a time fro the Court, to be able the frecher & cleerer to discerne the factions and state of the Court and of al the world besides, no lesse then doth the looker on or beholder of a game better see into all points of auauntage, then the player himselfe? and in dissembling of diseases which I pray you? for I haue obserued it in the Court of Fraunce, not a burning feuer or a plurisie, or a palsie or the hydropick and swelling gowte, or any ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham
... Ioynt by ioynt, but we will know his purpose: What? vniust? Duk. Be not so hot: the Duke dare No more stretch this finger of mine, then he Dare racke his owne: his Subiect am I not, Nor here Prouinciall: My businesse in this State Made me a looker on here in Vienna, Where I haue seene corruption boyle and bubble, Till it ore-run the Stew: Lawes, for all faults, But faults so countenanc'd, that the strong Statutes Stand like the forfeites in a Barbers shop, As much ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... into a hoss larff—for these Upper Ten folks, Samivel,—betwixt you and me and the pump, my boy,—ain't got no more manners than hogs. The child was voted an ongfong terriblee—but it wor a fack. I had went down into the sink room, as a mere looker-on in Veneer, and I seen one of my employees a making such botchwork of openin', hagglin' up his hands, and misusin' the oysters, than I off coat, tucked up sleeves, and went to work, and rolled 'em off amazin'—I tell you. The past rushed back on me—the familiar feel of ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... brilliant brow, * And her cheek shows the rosiest afterglow: And when both appear to the looker-on, * The skyline star ne'er for shame will show: An the leven flash from those smiling lips, * Morn breaks and the rays dusk and gloom o'erthrow. And when with her graceful shape she sways, * Droops leafiest Ban-tree[FN289] for envy low: Me her sight suffices; naught crave I more: ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... has not yet made up her mind to accept me. You are to understand, however, that I have proposed to Herman Mordaunt, with my father's knowledge and approbation, and that the affair is in petto. You can judge for yourself of the probable termination, being a better judge, as a looker-on, than I, as a party interested, of Anneke's manner ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... cause is good, I know it; and whatsoever happens, all the powers on earth can never exert more strength and constancy in oppressing, than I can show in suffering every thing that can or shall be imposed upon me. Your lordship, in the beginning of your letter, makes me a player, and yourself a looker on: and me a player of my own game, so you may see more than I: but give me leave to tell you, that since you do but see, and I do suffer, I must of necessity feel more than ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... of the latter seemed to thrill the looker like an electric shock. She stopped short,—so suddenly that those who immediately followed her had a narrow escape from collision. Her face was heavily veiled, and beneath that veil was but one eye, yet in the same swift glance with which she comprehended the ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... infinite fund of anecdote and of character-study which eventually made him the most sought-for boon companion that ever crossed the lobby of a legislature or of a state capital hotel in Missouri, Colorado, or Illinois. He was a looker-on in the legislative halls, and right merrily he lampooned everything he saw. Nothing was too trivial for his notice, nothing so serious as to escape ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... fame and fortune: for, as St. James saith, they are as men "that look sometimes into a glass, and presently forget their own shape and favor." As for business, a man may think, if he will, that two eyes see no more than one; or, that a gamester seeth always more than a looker-on; or, that a man in anger is as wise as he that hath said over the four-and-twenty letters; or, that a musket may be shot off as well upon the arm as upon a rest; and such other fond and high imaginations, to think himself ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
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