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More "Rambling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... forte," Cooney replies cheerfully. "If you'd try to follow both those cornets instead of rambling along by yourself, ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch
... place of appointment next day, and so was Miss Vera. A carriage was called, and we were driven rapidly to a house just on the edge of the city—a fine, rambling old house, set far back in beautiful grounds and surrounded by an iron fence. Heavy iron gates swung open harshly, and closed after us with a clanging, dismal sound. I clung to Lilly's arm, feeling very nervous, but her courage seemed to rise ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... marble steps. She lived there winters, but as soon as the first warm days came she packed all her handsome dresses into her trunks, and started for her house in the country, a lovely spot on the shore of the bay. There she spent the pleasant summers, rambling over her beautiful grounds, resting under the shade trees, or sailing on the bay. Now, she was not selfish and cold-hearted, if she was a rich lady; she truly loved the Lord Jesus, and loved to do his will. So it happened that while Mrs. Holmes ...
— Sunshine Factory • Pansy
... individual pews and seats. If they belonged to a family of five hundred each, and if every one of them had to go to Church every Sunday, they would want their respective seats, Prayer Books, footstools, and all that sort of thing. They don't like to see strangers rambling about, in search of a resting place; they are particularly solemn-looking, and give symptoms of being on the border of some catastrophe, if an unknown being shows any disposition to enter their pews. And some of them would see ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... manner very displeasing to me, and because he would so far forget himself as to chase, and even, if it will be credited, to tickle me. My uncles, who remained bachelors to the end of their lives, earned a comfortable living; E. by teaching, A. as 'something in the City', and they rented an old rambling house in Clapton, that same in which I saw the greyhound. Their house had a strange, delicious smell, so unlike anything I smelt anywhere else, that it used to fill my eyes with tears of mysterious pleasure. I know now that this was the odour of cigars, tobacco being a species of incense tabooed ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... most of the Seminoles," explained Charley. "They come in to the outlying towns at rare intervals to exchange their venison and skins for ammunition and cloth, and it's wonderful how quickly they pick up the language. But I am rambling. The question before us is, shall we abandon all our things and run away with a fair chance of escaping with whole skins, or stay and fight it out with the certainty of being killed, sooner ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... mineral baths of Ischia chiefly congregate. One of its old-established inns is called La Piccola Sentinella. The first sight on entrance is an open gallery, with a pink wall on which bloom magnificent cactuses, sprays of thick-clustering scarlet and magenta flowers. This is a rambling house, built in successive stages against a hill, with terraces and verandahs opening on unexpected gardens to the back and front. Beneath its long irregular facade there spreads a wilderness of orange-trees and honeysuckles and roses, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... of course you don't," she said soothingly. "But this will be very simple. I thought of a rambling, rustic stairway outside the house, in the back yard. You know the sun parlor was an afterthought, only one story high with a flat roof. So the rustic stairway could go up to the roof of the sun parlor, and I could make ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... little stronger. "E McGinnis won't talk to you. He says the foggy, rambling way that review was conducted was a disgrace. He says why don't you get on with what you have to do instead of bothering people. He says not to waste any more of his time unless you can come up with something he doesn't already know. He says he doubts you'd know what that was even if it hit you ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... the bagpipes led on the bourrees up to ten at night. Now these dancing days are over. 'Il n'y a plus de jeunesse,' said Victor the garcon. I hear of no great advance in what are thought the essentials of morality; but the bourree, with its rambling, sweet, interminable music, and alert and rustic figures, has fallen into disuse, and is mostly remembered as a custom of the past. Only on the occasion of the fair shall you hear a drum discreetly in a wine-shop or perhaps one of the company singing the measure while the ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... So much the Chancellor hath got the better of him. Upon the 'Change my brother, and Will bring me word that Madam Turner would come and dine with me to-day, so I hasted home and found her and Mrs. Morrice there (The. Joyce being gone into the country), which is the reason of the mother rambling. I got a dinner for them, and after dinner my uncle Thomas and aunt Bell came and saw me, and I made them almost foxed with wine till they were very kind (but I did not carry them up to my ladies). So they went away, and so ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... call of the giant, the wolf-dog, trotting beside the lazy team, swerved and nipped at the horses' heels. The pace became a jogging trot. Soon they were in view of the long, smooth mound of sawdust leading to the squat, rambling saw shed. A moment more and the bunk house, its unpainted clapboards blackened by the rain and sun and snows, showed ahead. A half-mile, then Ba'tiste left the wagon and, Barry following him, walked toward the mill and ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... groves of verdant trees, forming a striking group, all backed by the blue range of some distant sierra. The main group shades off into a fringe of jacales—the squalid habitations of the peones, and of the city's poor and outcast, with rambling, dusty roads bordered by hedges of prickly pear, or nopales; picturesque, quaint, the roads ankle-deep in white adobe dust, which rises from beneath our horse's hoofs and covers us with an impalpable flour upon traversing the environs of the place. Clattering over the cobble-paved streets, ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... musketeer, but his features had been ravaged by anxiety, and his hair was white, though he was only forty-four years of age. And what memories arose at the sight of that sorrowful lady leading that infirm, aged man, for those who had known the young couple, all tenderness and good looks, rambling along the secluded paths of Janville, amid the careless delights ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... at the end of every sentence of news came a fresh direction as to some crochet commission which I was to execute for her. Miss Matilda Jenkyns (who did not mind being called Miss Matty, when Miss Jenkyns was not by) wrote nice, kind, rambling letters, now and then venturing into an opinion of her own; but suddenly pulling herself up, and either begging me not to name what she had said, as Deborah thought differently, and SHE knew, or else putting in a postscript to the effect that, since writing the above, she had been talking over ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... as usual. They expected to fall in with some venda, or wine-shop, where they could obtain the refreshment they should require before returning, and Dick Needham was sent back with an order for the boat to come for them at the appointed hour. After rambling to a considerable distance, they began to feel hungry, but in vain they searched for a venda. Fortunately at this juncture they fell in with an Englishman on horseback, to whom they ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... building is nothing—a pseudo-Gothic monstrosity, built about 1830," laughed Delia; "but there are some old remains and foundations of the abbey. It is a big, rambling old place, and I should think dreadfully in want of doing up. My grandfather was a bit of a miser, and though he was quite rich, he never spent a ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... for the title-page of Robin Hood is a fair example of its kind. The Norfolk gentleman's "Last Will and Testament" turns out to be a rambling rhymed version of the Two Children in the Wood. In the first of its illustrations we see the dying parents commending their babes to the cruel world. The next is a subject ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... for he did not dare in the darkness to move from the spot where he had seated himself. At first an eerie feeling of indefinable fear oppressed him, but this passed away as the busy thoughts went rambling back to home and the days of comparative innocence gone by. Forgetting the dark surroundings and the threatening dangers, he was playing again on the river banks, drinking liquorice-water, swimming, and rescuing kittens with Charlie Brooke. Anon, he was wandering on the sea-beach ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... I think I rather hoped he would kill me, and then perhaps I might go where Marjory was. I did not cry for help, and it would have been useless if I had done so, for the schoolroom was a long way from the kitchen and offices of that rambling old house. ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... caught the perplexed expression of their faces; and by the time they arrived at Abermouth, she was as much delighted with all the new scenery as they were, and found it hard work to resist their entreaties to go rambling out on the seashore at once; but Elizabeth had undergone more fatigue that day than she had had before for many weeks, and Ruth was ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... when the convalescents had been for two months drinking in the grand old Devon air, Nic was rambling through the combe with Pete, both pretty well strong again, ...
— Nic Revel - A White Slave's Adventures in Alligator Land • George Manville Fenn
... off, and Salomon, its owner and chauffeur, shabby and sulky as usual, was giving the car a few last oily caresses which should have been bestowed long ago in the privacy of the garage. Have I forgotten to mention in these rambling notes that Somerled's Vedder regards our Salomon with a silent yet plainly visible contempt, akin to nausea? Whenever they happen to be thrown together for a few minutes I see the smart-liveried Vedder criticizing with his mysterious eyes the mean ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... balmy sort shall rise, And, with its fragrant blossoms, scent the skies! Then round this little favour'd isle, I'll bring, With gentle windings, yonder silver spring; While eglantine and thorn shall interpose Their hedge, a rampart 'gainst invading foes— Lest sheep and rambling goats the place annoy, And spoil the promise of our future joy. Oh then approach, ye favour'd of the loves! Come and dwell here ye gentle turtle doves! On yonder spreading branches, perch'd on high, With coos repeated greet the lover's sigh! Then sportive sparrows round ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... a wide, rambling frame house; wherever they showed between the clambering vines which encircled it, its clapboards glistening white and its shutters vividly green. The few leaves still left upon the vines were scarlet, while behind the low roof ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... were permitted to bloom in the pure breath of heaven—where the trees were yet rooted to the earth, and filled as of old, with the music of summer birds. On the very centre of the island stood an old mansion house, the residence of its proprietor before the paradise became city property. It was a rambling old building, with wings of unequal length shaded with magnificent willows, and surrounded by shrubbery, and pretty lawns, interspersed with fine old trees. Terraces beautifully lifted from the water's edge; and gravel walks, bordered with the thickest and heaviest ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... down on the floor of the valley did they see the ranch houses. There were several, a big, rambling adobe with white-washed walls, barns and smaller outbuildings, all making a sizeable group. They stood in an oak grove at the opposite side of the valley, close to the common bases of Barlow's peaks. The two men stopped ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... First, her father died. He had a farm at Wydcombe, and people thought he was well off; but when they came to reckon up, he only left just enough to go round among his creditors; so Miss Euphemia gave up the house, and came into Cullerne. She took this rambling great place because it was cheap at twenty pounds a year, and lived, or half lived, from hand to mouth, giving her niece (the girl you saw) all the grains, and keeping the husks for herself. Then ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... somewhat subsided. "Whence came the inspiration of Moses?" flew up to his mind almost as soon as he opened his eyes on the sunlit world. He threw open the protrusive casement of his bedroom to the balmy air, tinged with a whiff of salt, and gazed pensively at the white town rambling down towards the shining river. Had God indeed revealed Himself on Mount Sinai? But this fresh doubt was banished by the renewed suspicion which, after having disturbed his dreams in nebulous distortions, sprang up ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the direction indicated, and presently he arrived at the end of the village, where in an old orchard he found a low, rambling, dilapidated barn, before which clusters of soldiers in blue lounged around smoking fires. As he drew closer he saw that most of them seemed fixed in gloomy abstraction. A few were employed at some task of hand, and several bent ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... the rambling old Hotel des Bains, with its balconies, gardens, and little rooms, the wanderers reposed for a time. A Polish countess, with her lover, daughter, and governess, conferred distinction upon the house. An old Hungarian ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... torpor of mind, pain of body, and extreme disgust to the subject which besieged me while writing that part of my paper; which part being immediately sent off to the press (distant about five degrees of latitude), can not be corrected or improved. But from this account, rambling as it may be, it is evident that thus much of benefit may arise to the persons most interested in such a history of opium—viz., to opium-eaters in general—that it establishes for their consolation and encouragement the ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... although that author highly approved of what he saw, he alleged his own want of leisure and ability to complete such an enterprise; and this was fortunate: we should otherwise have had, instead of the rambling spirit which charms us in the volumes of Vasari, the verbose babble of a declaimer. Vasari, however, looked round for the assistance he wanted; a circumstance which Tiraboschi has not noticed: like Hogarth, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... forgotten in a sudden delirium of the senses; and for what seemed to him like half an hour Ralph waited, asking himself what his wife could be doing all that time, thinking that perhaps it was not Lennox after all, but some rambling vagrant who had knocked at the door, and that he had better go down and rescue his wife. He would have done so had he not been afraid of a sudden draught, and while wondering what was happening he dozed away, ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... as "Book II" in the Junius MS., are characterized by considerable imaginative power and vigour of expression, but they show an absence of literary culture and are somewhat rambling, full of repetitions and generally lacking in finish. They abound in passages of fervid religious exhortation. On the whole, both their merits and their defects are such as we should expect to find in the work of the poet celebrated by Baeda, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... for our gratifications to moral sources. The dreariness and desolation of our landscape, the short gloomy days and darksome nights, while they circumscribe our wanderings, shut in our feelings also from rambling abroad, and make us more keenly disposed for the pleasures of the social circle. Our thoughts are more concentrated; our friendly sympathies more aroused. We feel more sensibly the charm of each other's society, ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... phrases in the poem," says Scudder, "and more than all the veil of the season hangs tremulously over the whole, so that one is gently stirred by the poetic feeling of the rambling verses; yet, after all, the most enduring impression is of the young man himself in that still hour of his life, when he was conscious, not so much of a reform to which he must put his hand, as of the love of beauty, and of ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... mistress of Elmhurst among her flowers, Silas Watson walked slowly and thoughtfully along the paths until he reached the extreme left wing of the rambling old mansion. Here, half hidden by tangled vines of climbing roses, he came to a flight of steps leading to an iron-railed balcony, and beyond this was a narrow stairway to the rooms in the upper ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces • Edith Van Dyne
... can learn to think. At the same Time, our Nobility and Gentry set their Lands excessively high, get their Rents paid to a Penny, have as little fear of Wars or Taxes as of Famines, and live as well (rambling, and squandering their Fortunes all over the World) as any People whatever, without one uneasy Thought, as to the Circumstances of those Crowds of their Countrymen that are starving here. The Truth is, few Men are sick of other People's ...
— A Dialogue Between Dean Swift and Tho. Prior, Esq. • Anonymous
... whether he will tell her anything about Clive's mother; how she must have loved Uncle Newcome! Rambling happily from one subject to another Ethel commands: "Next year, when I am presented at Court, you must come, too, sir! I insist upon it, you ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... Antiochus being thus made King by the friendship of the King of Pergamus reigned powerfully over Syria and the neighbouring nations: but carried himself much below his dignity, stealing privately out of his palace, rambling up and down the city in disguise with one or two of his companions; conversing and drinking with people of the lowest rank, foreigners and strangers; frequenting the meetings of dissolute persons to feast and revel; clothing himself like the Roman candidates and officers, acting their ...
— Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John • Isaac Newton
... a gold watch to Chet," Mrs. Bradley told them. "It is really a very beautiful watch, Chet, and worth a good deal of money. And to Billie—" She paused for emphasis and Billie wriggled impatiently. "And to Billie she left her rambling ...
— Billie Bradley and Her Inheritance - The Queer Homestead at Cherry Corners • Janet D. Wheeler
... greeted eye and ear was characteristic of "the woods," even to the swans, geese, ducks, and other water-fowl which sported on the clear surface of the pond; while the noise of traffic in the mighty metropolis was so subdued by distance as to resemble the deep-toned roar of a great cataract. A stranger, rambling there for the first time would have found it difficult to believe that he was surrounded on ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... The rambling diary continues: "To-day Longfellow sent us half a dozen bottles of wine, and after them came a note saying he had sent them off without finding time to label them. 'They are wine of Avignon,' he added, 'and should ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... away from our subject farther than we intended at starting; but an essay on legs could hardly avoid the rambling tendency which naturally belongs to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... enjoyments. The State has taken in hand a more dangerous class—perhaps the most dangerous—in India, viz., the Thugs, and is teaching them useful trades and honest industry with most encouraging results. Before the Government tackled them, they were idling, loafing, rambling, and robbing all over the country, alike to our Gipsies; now they have settled down and become useful and good citizens. In Norway the Gipsies are put into prison, and there kept till they have learnt to read and write. In Hungary ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... was born on December 14, 1840, in the rambling one-story shack that accomodated the fifteen slaves of his Old Marster, [HW: Harry] Beattie Goforth, on a farm in Claiborne County, North Carolina. His tall frame is slightly stooped, but he is not subjected to the customary infirmities of the ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Tennessee Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... a low, plain, oblong house, covered with grey stucco, against which flamed the orange of its lichened roof. It had been built in Queen Anne's time, and enlarged and stuccoed over about fifty years ago. It was a good, solid house, less rambling than Ansdore, but the kitchens ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... direct and business-like manner, estimating things for what they are worth by the plain rule of common- sense. He keeps the main object of his argument ever in view, without allowing himself, like the garrulous chroniclers of the period, to be led astray into a thousand rambling episodes that bewilder the reader ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... without the shabbiness of exterior that distinguishes the old part of London, being of light-colored stone; but I never saw anything that so much came up to my idea of a swarming city as this narrow, crowded, and rambling street. ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the whole bluff must have burned up, and gone off in a blaze of glory. That dome, which looked like a great cone, roofed in with milk-pans set on edge, was the crowning glory of a new tabernacle—not the one built without hands, for it took a great many hands to build this great, rambling affair, besides the cottages and tents and long, open stoops, that look out on the ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... folk. Their ideas and ours as to what constituted a good road differed beyond the possibility of harmonizing. When they said that a road was good they meant that it was straight, level, and businesslike. When they said that a road was bad they meant that it was rugged, rambling and picturesque. So, to their bewilderment, whenever we had a choice of good or bad roads, we always chose the bad. And, to get at what we really wanted, we learned to inquire which was the worst road to such and such a place. That ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... and rambling, and confused; in short, the letter of a fool. I had to wade through plenty of vulgar sentiment and lamentation, and to lose time and patience over maudlin outbursts of affection, and nauseous kisses inclosed in circles of ink. However, I contrived to extract the ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... temple. Buddhism being in a decadent state in China, and the temples being in a still further state of decay, it was an easy matter to arrange things with the priests. The temple selected was a large, rambling affair, with many compounds and many rooms, situated in the heart of the city, and near the newly opened offices of the newly established firm, the nucleus of this coming trade centre of China. A hundred dollars Mex. rented it for a ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... were both women,—De Sevigne in France, and Lady Wortley Montague in England; yet, how utterly inferior are De Sevigne's feeble sketches of court life, and vapid panegyrics on the "adorable Grignan;" or the Englishwoman's rambling details of travels and tribulations, to the pungent pleasantry and substantial vigour of Walpole! The Frenchwoman's sketches are like her artificial flowers, to the freshness of the true. Lady Mary's slipshod sentences and coarse voluptuousness are equally inferior to the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... is dark," said Jock, "you can't see the red always; and then you go rambling and wandering about, and hit yourself against the trees, and get up to the ankles in the wet grass and—don't like it at all." He laughed himself a little, with a laugh that was somewhat like a growl at his own abrupt conclusion, ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... that style," said the American. "Nice rambling ark, two stories high, and no two rooms on the same level. Architect built right out into the country till he got tired, and then turned round and came back. Obliged to have a valet to show you to your room whether you're sober ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... more than enough. You are an undefended prisoner. You have not the advantage of counsel, or I would not have allowed you to go on so long. You would have done yourself more good by trying to refute the very serious accusation brought against you, than by rambling into a long statement of your wrongs against society. We all have our troubles to bear, and you must bear your share of them without offending against the laws of your country—the equal laws that are made for rich ...
— The Tables Turned - or, Nupkins Awakened. A Socialist Interlude • William Morris
... from their rambling soon after the end of hop-picking, and hold a kind of informal fair on the village green with cockshies, swings, and all the clumsy games that extract money from clumsy hands. It is almost the only time of the year when the labouring people have any cash; their weekly wages ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... the suns of twenty lustrums have cast their shadows, but we begrudge every moment not spent in fossicking round the old buildings. We seek for threads which shall unite this mid-summer day to all the days of glamour that are gone. In a rambling building, forming the back of a hollow square, we come across the mouldy remains of a once splendid museum of natural history, the life work of one Captain Bell of the Old Company. It gives us a sorry feeling to look at these specimens, now dropping their glass eyes and exposing their cotton-batting ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... Ireland, threw up his commission, and took orders in the church. But instead of adopting the quietude which would have been suitable for his new profession, the clerical robes seem to have made him more intractable than the military uniform. After some months of rambling and romance in Ireland, he rushed over to England again, resolving to conquer or die at her feet; but the lady still rejected him, and, being alarmed at his violence, threatened to appeal to Lord ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... walked Ardea around and about through the fragrant summer wood of the upper creek valley, retracing, in part, the footsteps of the boy whose fishing had been spoiled and the little girl who was to be bullied into submission; and so rambling they had come at length to the old moss-grown foot-log which had been a newly-felled tree in the former time. Tom went first across the rustic bridge, holding the hand of ecstatic thrillings, and pausing in mid-passage that ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... an expanse of many months, during which I was rambling over the States;—reporting this speaker and that;—studying "life and character" in every way—from the inspection of negro camp- meetings, where coloured saints expounded doctrinal views that would have made Wilberforce ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... a long ascent across the face of the cape, then turning abruptly to wind back again, but always creeping upward until an open space showed the station far below and a rambling stone building at the edge of ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... comparative anatomy he had been developing. The spectacled hunchback had repeated it, with noisy appreciation, had tossed it towards the fair-haired student with an evident provocation, and had started one of these vague, rambling discussions on generalities, so unaccountably dear to the student mind all the ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... at finding the place empty of her cheerful presence. Be looked at his watch; it was nearly four o'clock. She ought to be home by half-past four or five, anyway. He glanced sidelong at Jim and quietly slackened his pace a little. Jim was telling one of those long, rambling tales of the little happenings of a narrow life, and Lite was supposed to be listening instead of thinking about when Jean would return home. Jim believed he was listening, and drove home the point ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... rambling, without being squat, the square upthrusts of towers and of towers over-topping towers gave just proportion of height without being sky-aspiring. The sense of the Big House was solidarity. It defied earthquakes. It was planted for a thousand years. The honest concrete was overlaid by a cream-stucco ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... a long rambling answer in the broadest Cumberland dialect—told me all that I most wanted to know. I gave the poor woman a trifle, and returned ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... dear Bertie, that when I wrote you a rambling disconnected sort of letter about three weeks ago, I wound up by saying that I might have something more interesting to tell you next time. Well, so it has turned out! The whole game is up here, and I am off upon a fresh line of rails altogether. Cullingworth is to go one way and I ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... peasant from the Penamacor district. Out of his rambling tale one or two certainties emerged. McNeill—the celebrated McNeill—was a prisoner; he had been taken on the 14th somewhere in the pass above Penamacor, and conveyed to Sabugal to await the French marshal's return. His ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... ecstasy—that of the man who is doing the kind of thing that he can do. Dickens, like every other honest and effective writer, came at last to some degree of care and self-restraint. He learned how to make his dramatis personae assist his drama; he learned how to write stories which were full of rambling and perversity, but which were stories. But before he wrote a single real story, he had a kind of vision. It was a vision of the Dickens world—a maze of white roads, a map full of fantastic towns, thundering coaches, clamorous ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... a row of cook-shacks like the one I had been in, and several stores and saloons. The lumber-camp was a little town. A rambling log cabin attracted me by reason of the shaggy mustangs standing before it and the sounds of mirth within. A peep showed me a room with a long bar, where men and boys were drinking. I heard the rattle of dice and the clink of silver. Seeing the place was ...
— The Young Forester • Zane Grey
... Edinburgh, and being desirous of witnessing the operations in a coal-mine, a friend recommended him to visit Killingworth pit, where he would find one George Stephenson, a most intelligent workman, in charge. My father was introduced to Mr. Stephenson accordingly; and after rambling over the underground workings, and observing the pumping and winding engines in full operation, a friendship was made, which afterwards proved of the greatest service to myself, by facilitating my being placed as a pupil at the ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... it seemed to his companion that he was talking to himself, so aimless and desultory were his pathetic reminiscences. He called her Sheila, though Eyre had never heard her name. He spoke of her father as though Eyre must have known him. And yet this rambling series of confessions and self-reproaches and tender memories did form a certain sort of narrative, so that the young fellow sitting quietly in the boat there got a pretty fair notion ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... instead of rambling and straggling over a large subject, each sermon seized a single thought, or definite view, or real difficulty or objection, and kept closely and distinctly to it; and at the same time treated it with a largeness and grasp and ease which only a full command over much beyond it could ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... violence. The Liberal members asked for a complete exoneration of Mr. Brown. A supporter of the government was willing to exonerate Brown if Macdonald were allowed to escape without censure. A majority of the committee, however, took refuge in a rambling deliverance, which was sharply attacked in the legislature. Sir Allan MacNab bluntly declared that the charge had been completely disproved, and that the committee ought to have had the manliness to say so. Drummond, a member of the government, also said that the attack had failed. The ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... If not an active participant in her father's crime, she still felt herself in a measure responsible for it. He had determined to grow rich and powerful for her sake. More than once, in the empty rambling talk which he poured forth in a turgid stream during their infrequent meetings, he had told her so, with extravagant phrase and gesture. And so, at last, she had come to share his punishment in a hundred secret, unconfessed ways. She ate scant food, slept on ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... afraid. "Somehow I hadn't expected that at all, hadn't planned on it. I suppose it was childish of me; but I've been taking things for granted, on the strength of the past, and—and—" Of a sudden the rambling tongue halted. The eyes opened wide, unnaturally wide; and in their depths was again that new look of terror, but now magnified. "Tell me that you don't mean it, Elice, really," he pleaded. "I was just beginning to live and ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... been a genuine one or at all likely to be to her advantage, it was then too late to be of any use. These particulars, we believe, were enough to invalidate any process in strict law; but the name of law seems ridiculous altogether as applied to this rambling and cruel cross-examination in which was neither sense nor decorum. The reader will understand that there were no witnesses either for or against her, the answers of the accused ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... boats to see what sort of a country it was. We found it a very good one; fresh water easy to come at, but no cattle that we could see, or inhabitants; and we were very shy of searching too far after them, lest we should make such another journey as we did last; so that we let rambling alone, and chose rather to take what we could find, which was only a few wild mangoes, and some plants of several kinds, which we ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... During which strange rambling speech Effie was partly insensible; yet she heard enough to afford her clouded mind a glimpse of her condition, and of the meaning of what was said to her. For a time she kept staring into his face as if she had doubts of his real personality; nor could she find words to ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... the house had an immensely large rambling loft at top, I made no other discoveries. It was moderately well furnished, but sparely. Some of the furniture—say, a third—was as old as the house; the rest was of various periods within the last half-century. ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... Dick; "that is very true; and no doubt if we remain here long enough that is what will happen. But this Inquisition seems to be a rambling old pile of a place, and I cannot help thinking that it must contain many an obscure, little-used recess or cupboard in which we might find at least temporary safety and concealment until the small hours of ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... he was yet a freshman at Christ Church, his younger brothers and sisters were likewise variously employed with their education, the boys at the celebrated schools of Sunbury and Westminster, the girls in the seclusion of a large school-room in the rambling house in Grosvenor Square. And that the learning for which they all strove was of a comprehensive nature, moreover, that those of their party who had already entered the gay world never disdained to share such labours, is shown in a letter written many years ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... time rambling along the beach, and, as pleasure seekers generally do, passed the day comfortably, looking at anything and everything that came in our way. By no means sea-faring men, having mainly been accustomed to village life, we had some misgivings when we boarded the s.s. St. Magnus at ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... into the land, the deep blue of its channel distinct from the shallow waters and the swamps from which a startled crane rose like an arrow shot across the vault of the sky. To the right, surrounded by its gardens and orchards, stood a house, long, low, large and rambling, the more solid successor to the rough wooden edifice which had been among the first to rise when this state of Virginia had become a colony for cavaliers from England. Flowers trailed over the wide porch and shone in patches ...
— The Light That Lures • Percy Brebner
... we are rambling over the hills,—those of Nature's rearing, and others formed by the accumulation of refuse brought up from the mine. We discover and secure some fine specimens of the metal; sundry of the knowing ones, after mysterious interviews with rascally-looking miners, appear with curious bits of ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... After rambling leisurely about for some time, reading the iscriptions on the various monuments which attracted my curiosity, and giving way to the different reflections they suggested, I sat down to rest myself on a sunken tombstone. A winding gravel-walk, overshaded by an avenue ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... off, and his tongue lolling out. We brought off Captain Lute B. Irvine. Lute was shot through the lungs and was vomiting blood all the while, and begging us to lay him down and let him die. But Lute is living yet. Also, Lieutenant Woldridge, with both eyes shot out. I found him rambling in a briar-patch. About fifty members of the Rock City Guards were killed and nearly one hundred wounded. They were led by Captains W. D. Kelley, Wheless, and Steele. Lieutenant Thomas H. Maney was badly wounded. I saw dead on the battlefield a Federal General ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... the arch, and occupied three sides of a quadrangle. It was very old, and very irregular and rambling. The windows were uneven; some small, some large, some with heavy stone mullions and rich stained glass; others with frail lattices that rattled in every breeze; others so modern that they might have been added only yesterday. ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... attempted, but hardy little ponies, cows, goats, sheep, and pigs were feeding, and picking their way about in the marshy mead below, and a small garden of pot-herbs, inclosed by a strong fence of timber, lay on the sunny side of a spacious rambling forest lodge, only one story high, built of solid timber and roofed with shingle. It was not without strong pretensions to beauty, as well as to picturesqueness, for the posts of the door, the architecture of the deep porch, ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Hermippus the Eumolpid, first citizen of Eleusis, stood to the east of the temple. On three sides gnarled trunks and sombre leaves of the sacred olives almost hid the white low walls of the rambling buildings. On the fourth side, facing the sea, the dusty road wound east toward Megara. Here, by the gate, were gathered a rustic company: brown-faced village lads and lasses, toothless graybeards, cackling old wives. Above the barred gate swung a festoon of ivy, ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... good your thinking you can get out of telling me by rambling off on other subjects. I'm grim and resolute and relentless, and I mean to get this story out of you if I have to use a corkscrew. Fillmore's wife, you ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... a good-sized, rambling house, with verandas for dining, and bedrooms for sleep. We found him on his largest table, lying flat on his back, and contemplating, in the eternal and perplexing way of the Polynesians. The Daibutsu, ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... now again made off, and, after much rambling, I at last seated myself near the card-table : but Mrs. Cholmondeley was after me in a minute, and drew a chair next mine. I now found it impossible to escape, and therefore forced myself to sit still. Lord Palmerston and Sir Joshua, in a few ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... moment that I am past the age of romance, for I am in a fine situation for mysterious and imaginary horrors, could I but feel again as I did at gay sixteen; but, alas! ces beaux jours sont passes! and here I am on the top of a dreary black mountain, in a rambling old inn which looks like a ci-devant hospital or dismantled barracks, in a bed-room which resembles one of the wards of a poor-house, one little corner lighted by my lamp, and the other three parts all lost in black ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... doctrines, much resorted to in former days. Another sect of philosophers do declare, that certain fiery particles exhale constantly from the earth, which, concentrating in a single point of the firmament by day, constitute the sun, but being scattered and rambling about in the dark at night, collect in various points, and form stars. These are regularly burnt out and extinguished, not unlike to the lamps in our streets, and require a fresh supply of exhalations for the ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... a wappenshaw, with a Sheffield gardener's knife, which he happened to have with him, for prize! When at last Yule emerged from the wilds and on 25th March marched into Prome, he was taken for his own ghost! "Found Fraser (of the Engineers) in a rambling phoongyee house, just under the great gilt pagoda. I went up to him announcing myself, and his astonishment was so great that he would scarcely shake hands!" It was on this occasion at Prome that Yule first ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... bewitching sweetness he sang the remaining stanza, and then paused with his fingers idly rambling over the keys, as if in doubt what next ...
— The Launch Boys' Adventures in Northern Waters • Edward S. Ellis
... his habits were noticeable. He was especially fond of rambling by moonlight, of inventing wonderful tales, of occupying himself with strange, and sometimes dangerous, amusements. At the age of thirteen he went to Eton. In this little world, that determined opposition to whatever appeared ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... intention of bringing dinner parties down, and that he had made his arrangements with an evident exclusion of any such idea. He had thought two women servants enough. For the rest, leaving parties out of consideration, the house had a rambling supply of old furniture, suiting it well enough; it looked pretty, and quaint, and cool; and Dolly for her ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... the 29th, the third night from their last camp, Eyre took the first watch to look after the horses, as this was necessary every night to prevent them rambling too far. ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... blazonry, or set forth as the sources from whence it was developed. Fables and anecdotes, having reference to less remote eras, were produced in great variety and in copious abundance. The presence in blazon of animated beings of whatsoever kinds, whether real or fabulous, led to rambling disquisitions in the most ludicrously unnatural of imaginary Natural History. From every variety also of inanimate figure and device, the simplest no less than the more elaborate, after the same fashion some "moral" was sought to be extracted. The ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... be a long, long story that they would tell, all about the ages; and it would vary wonderfully little, much less perhaps than we think; and the repetitions rambling on and on in the evening, as the old belfry spoke and the cottages gathered below it, might sound so soothing after the boom of shells that perhaps you would nearly sleep. And then with one's memory tired out by the war one might never remember ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... told Ebenezer that he was entirely too good-natured. And they went their own ways, grazing and rambling aimlessly about ...
— The Tale of Pony Twinkleheels • Arthur Scott Bailey
... timber trees at last, such as I have not seen for a long time, the Tuscan spirit of mutilation being so great, that every thing till now has been pollarded that would have passed twenty feet in height: this is done to support the vines, and not suffer their rambling produce to run out of the way, and escape the gripe of the gatherers. I have eaten too many of these delicious grapes however, and it is now my turn to be sick—No wonder, I know few who would resist a like temptation, especially as the inn afforded but a sorry dinner, ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... sight of the house, a low, rambling Jacobean building, did he attempt to take cover. He scrambled up a tree and got astride of a wall. A swift survey by his electric torch of the ground on the other side revealed a jungle of ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... accustoms a number of men who, in their loose and precarious conditions of life, are driven irregularly hither and thither by different individual needs and desires, to act under one impulse with one feeling for one object. It introduces order and connection, at least occasionally, into the rambling, fluctuating life of the hunting tribes. It is, besides wars, perhaps the only factor that makes their solidarity vitally perceptible to the adherents of a primitive tribe, and it is at the same time one of the best preparations for war, for the gymnastic ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... afresh. 'They do say some of them old nurses are not over-good to babies, and they think 'em such a lot of trouble, poor little motherless dears! And there's Poppy, too; she's been ever such a good little girl to me, and she'll feel so lonesome-like in that big, rambling place. I don't suppose they'll let her be with the babies, for all she loves ...
— Poppy's Presents • Mrs O. F. Walton
... no comparison with the tranquil happiness of domestic life. If her own experience has not yet taught her this truth, she has in its favor the testimony of one, who has gone through the various scenes of business, of bustle, of office, of rambling, and of quiet retirement, and who can assure her, that the latter is the only point upon which the mind can settle at rest. Though not clear of inquietudes, because no earthly situation is so, they are fewer in number, and mixed with ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... had once come up to the town before its mouth, four miles away, became impassably silted up. It was a bright, clean, little town, but there were few signs of trade in it, and Spargo had been quick to notice that in the "Yellow Dragon," a big, rambling old hostelry, reminiscent of the old coaching days, there seemed to be little doing. He had eaten a bit of lunch in the coffee-room immediately on his arrival; the coffee-room was big enough to accommodate ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher
... speaker, and had only that instant terminated his reply. This fact alone should be conclusive. But it is confirmed by other weighty considerations which leave no place for doubt: Thus, Elihu's style is toto coelo different from that of the other parts of the poem: artificial, vague, rambling, prosaic, and strongly coloured by Aramaic idioms, while his doctrinal peculiarities, particularly his mention of interceding angels, while they coincide with those of the New Testament, are absolutely unknown to Job and his friends. Moreover, if Elihu had indeed formed one of the dramatis ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... experienced the discomfort of walking the fells of Cumberland and Westmoreland, which at most seasons of the year resemble an enormous wet sponge, often combined with the real danger of bog and morass, will appreciate the better conditions met with in Sussex hill rambling. Where the chalk is uncovered it becomes exceedingly slippery after a shower, but there is rarely a ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... Cross Roads the first chamber is Breckinridge Gallery, a long, rambling hall in which are combined the attractions already passed and those yet to come, but having no striking feature predominating to give special character other than the grandeur of extreme roughness, which is also ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... your rambling, houseless sailor is commonly a great liar—at least so have I always found him. Most of their log-books will not do to read; or, for that matter, to be written out, in full. But if this man's name is really Daggett, he must come from the Vineyard. There are Daggetts there in scores; ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... hour's rest, passed by the boy in rambling round it, I gave the word for starting again. The Indian took the lead, following the still visible traces of a footpath. The hut, hardly large enough to hold three persons, seemed more like a temporary shelter than a settled dwelling; ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... Haddam. Though largely ecclesiastical, its author— a college A. M.—realizes the value of statistics in references to population, necrology, taxes, militia, farming, and other industries, and weaves them into his rambling story. ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... to fight our way against this biographer, who takes a rambling and revolutionary view of all the chief transactions of the time. In this spirit, he denies or doubts the necessity of the French war. We deny that it was possible to avert it. It may be true, that if England had been faithless ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... Pois'd by their wings the eastern gales they pass, Which started with them: but their burthen light, Small felt the pressure on the chariot seat: Not what the steeds of Sol had felt before. As ships unpois'd reel tottering through the waves, Light and unsteady, rambling o'er the main; So bounds the car, void of its 'custom'd weight, High-toss'd as though unfill'd. This quick perceiv'd, Fierce rush the four-yok'd steeds, and quit the path Beaten before, and tread a road unknown. Trembling the youth nor knows to pull the reins Which side, nor ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... them, and the young men explored further until they found a stately, rambling mansion where a theatrical landlord with much rubbing of his hands brought them glasses ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... a time. I was glad, though, when Cora Belle's home became a part of our beautiful picture. It is situated among great red buttes, and there is a blue lake back of the house. Around the lake is a fringe of willows. Their house is a low, rambling affair, with a long, low porch and a red clay roof. Before the house is a cotton-wood tree, its gnarled, storm-twisted branches making it seem to have the "rheumatiz." There is a hop-vine at one end of the porch. It had not come ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... it's perdition—I could only keep myself alive by rambling up and down this d-d vault, and thinking about the merry rouses we have had ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... of horse-racing and liked to travel over the country, his equipages comprising anything from a two-wheeled buck-board to a fine coach and even down to our rambling Concord stages. He was a reckless horseman ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... deem My verse intrudes on this sad theme; For sacred was the pen that wrote, "Thy father's friend forget thou not:" And grateful title may I plead, For many a kindly word and deed, To bring my tribute to his grave:- 'Tis little—but 'tis all I have. To thee, perchance, this rambling strain Recalls our summer walks again; When, doing naught—and, to speak true, Not anxious to find aught to do - The wild unbounded hills we ranged, While oft our talk its topic changed, And, desultory as our way, Ranged, unconfined, from grave to gay. Even when it flagged, as oft will ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... night-attack by the assassin occurred—a story never satisfactorily unravelled; it was a constant pleasure there to feel that one was looking at the fine crags which Shelley loved, so nobly weather-stained and ivy-hung, that one was threading the same woodland paths, and rambling on the open moorland where he so often paced. The interest, the inspiration of the process comes from the fact that one sees how genius transmutes the dull elements of life, those elements which are in reach of all of us, into thoughts rich and strange. I often think ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... precautions against gas. The North Valley mines were especially "gassy," it appeared. In these old rambling passages one smelt a stink as of all the rotten eggs in all the barn-yards of the world; and this sulphuretted hydrogen was the least dangerous of the gases against which a miner had to contend. There ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... very numerous upon the salt lake, and the pool where we got our water. In these excursions, we found the inhabitants had often deserted their houses to come down to the trading place, without entertaining any suspicion, that strangers, rambling about, would take away, or destroy, any thing that belonged to them. But though, from this circumstance, it might be supposed that the greater part of the natives were sometimes collected at the beach, it was impossible to form any accurate computation of their number; as the continual resort ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... success was procured by despicable and dastardly arts. He had doubtless some genius, and his 'Birks of Invermay,' and 'William and Margaret,' shall preserve his name after his clumsy imitation of Thomson, called 'The Excursion,' and his long, rambling 'Amyntor and ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... new to the reader. Her statement under oath to the magistrate was the same in effect that she had made to Judge Merlin. And although it was rather a rambling narrative, mixed up with a good deal of bitter invective against the accused, and gratuitous advice to the bench, and acute suggestions of the manner of retribution that ought to be measured out to the culprits, yet still the shrewd magistrate managed to get from it a tolerably clear ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... whatever cause may be at the bottom of it; and Mr. COWELL, in the very entertaining volume before us, has added another proof of the correctness of Herr TEUFELSDROeCKH'S flattering conclusions. His narrative is rambling, various, instructive, and amusing. He plunges at once in medias res; and being in himself an epitome of his class; of their successes, excitements, reverses and depressions; he paints as he goes along a most graphic picture of the life of an actor. We shall follow his own desultory ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... the place of appointment next day, and so was Miss Vera. A carriage was called, and we were driven rapidly to a house just on the edge of the city—a fine, rambling old house, set far back in beautiful grounds and surrounded by an iron fence. Heavy iron gates swung open harshly, and closed after us with a clanging, dismal sound. I clung to Lilly's arm, feeling very nervous, but her courage seemed to rise with the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... asked me, one night, if I should not like to see Richmond. He had got permission to go into town on the next day. The Captain readily granted me leave of absence for twenty-four hours, and Bellot and I spent the day in rambling over the town. We saw the State House, and the Confederate Congress in session, and wandered down to the river and took a long ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... Of these vast, rambling mansions numerous descriptions have been handed down to our day. The following, written in 1774, is an account recorded in his diary by the tutor, Philip Fithian, in the family of a ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... sat round the fire, Mrs. Cadurcis began telling Venetia a long rambling ghost story, which she declared was a real ghost story, and had happened in her own family. Such communications were not very pleasing to Lady Annabel, but she was too well bred to interrupt her guest. When, however, the narrative was finished, and Venetia, by her observations, ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... evening—when she wakened in the dusk at his side in the automobile and stared bewildered at the dim outline of the low, rambling brown house tucked away among shrubbery under a load of vines—how quick he had been to reassure her, to explain that a friend of his, who had expected to come here with his bride, had had to go to Mexico ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... permitting them expression when they conflicted with his own philosophic calm. She had been used all her life to living in European fashion. Very well. Ah Chun gave her a European mansion. Later, as his sons and daughters grew able to advise, he built a bungalow, a spacious, rambling affair, as unpretentious as it was magnificent. Also, as time went by, there arose a mountain house on Tantalus, to which the family could flee when the "sick wind" blew from the south. And at Waikiki he built a ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... the quaint arrangements of the rambling building, and their yet quainter fittings. Here, a cabinet, painted and carved in a sentimental but vicious style; there, an equivocal-looking chapel, studded with enamels and mother-of-pearl, with miniatures on ivory wrought out in relief, like those on old-fashioned ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... extremity. The entrance was dexterously contrived, particularly when the fortress consisted of a single house, to present as much difficulty as possible to a besieger. It was always at some height in the wall, and was reached by a winding, or rather rambling, stairway leading from the drawbridge, and often running round a considerable part of the wall. One or more gates in the course of this stair could be closed at pleasure. A large and imposing portal admitted the visitor to a small tower occupied by the guards, ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... impulses into action that he failed to heed just where he was going. At any rate before he realized it there he was in the fashionable section of the village, walking along between rows of bare and stately elms and great rambling houses glimpsed from behind high ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... week in Somerset. The right June weather put me in the mind for rambling, and my thoughts turned to the Severn Sea. I went to Glastonbury and Wells, and on to Cheddar, and so to the shore of the Channel at Clevedon, remembering my holiday of fifteen years ago, and too ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... each surmounted by a "pyathat." Within the walls are the palace of the King, and many other buildings of highly ornate and purely Burmese character. Many of them have lately been destroyed by fire; but what will interest us most is the rambling but most picturesque palace, the lofty "pyathat" which is erected over Thebaw's throne being the finest in the country, and so much admired by the Burmans as to be called "the ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly
... manufactures. I find I have anticipated already, and taken up from Boccace before I come to him; but there is so much less behind; and I am of the temper of most kings, who love to be in debt, are all for present money, no matter how they pay it afterwards: besides, the nature of a preface is rambling; never wholly out of the way, nor in it. This I have learn'd from the practice of honest Montaigne, and return at my pleasure to Ovid and Chaucer, of whom I have little more to say. Both of them built on the inventions of other men; yet since Chaucer had ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... of the nomads wanted land, and had means to back their desire. Rambling leisurely over the station paddocks, with the county map for reference, these people saw where the most eligible allotments were, and presently picked the eyes out of the run; in some cases, shifting straight from their camps to their selections. ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... persons he would be likely to care for. There prevailed a general conception of him as cold, unsociable. He certainly walked about a good deal alone—you met him on the sands, on the cliffs, in the stiff little streets, rambling aimlessly, seldom with a companion. But to me it was patent that he played the solitary from necessity, not from choice—from the necessity of his temperament. A companion was precisely that which above all things his heart coveted; only he didn't know how to set about annexing ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... spirit and example of Napoleon and the magic word Empire. No longer could the harpsichord charm or the strings of the viol allure. The music-books gathered dust in the alcove, and the "Iliad" stood unopened on the shelf. Instead of rambling in the woods, or strolling on the banks of the Ohio, or galloping to Marietta clad in a crimson cloak, or giving banquets or balls to entertain the admiring gentry of Belpre, Madam Blennerhassett spent busy days and anxious nights working and planning for a potential greatness, a prospective ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... his thoughts, and rather obstinately, too—he knew that the time would pass more quickly in the old castle than anywhere else. At forty years of age, the idea of beginning again the wandering life he had led so long, rambling from one country and capital to another, now spending a year at a University and then six months in Paris, or a winter in St. Petersburg, never settled, never at home, though at home everywhere—the mere thought was painfully repugnant. To live with Greif and Hilda in their ancient home, ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... slim, slip-shod housekeeper, at midnight ferreting over a rambling old house in the country, startling at fancied witches and ghosts, yet intent on seeing every door bolted, every smouldering ember in the fireplaces smothered, every loitering domestic abed, and every light made dark. This is the master-at-arms ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... pleases, and yet with a gloomy misanthropical air, as of total abandonment. They are rusted and abrased. From their ancient jaws we hear the husky, jangling chimes, musical and melancholy, the disorderly rambling notes and tunes of a gigantic musical box. Towards the close of some summer evening, as the train flies on, we see the sun setting on the grim walls of some dead city, and on the clustered houses. Within the walls are the formal rows of trees planted in regimental ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... great friends as could be, and would go in swimming together where there was a bit of sandy strand along the East River above Fort George, and that in the most amicable fashion. Or, maybe the very next day after he had fought so with his fellows, he would go a-rambling with them up the Bowerie Road, perhaps to help them steal cherries from some old Dutch farmer, forgetting in such adventure what a thief his own grandfather ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... was exerting his energies for the welfare of the nation, my mother was giving her life to her children. Sons and daughters were welcomed into the Owen homestead, and the wide halls and great rooms of the rambling country house rang with the voices of children. Three of these little ones slipped back to Heaven before the portals had closed. The stricken parents with blinded eyes met only the rayless emptiness of unbelief. May God help the mother, fainting beneath a bereavement greater ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... buildings altogether on the island; the largest, a kind of general storehouse, being built upon the beach just above high-water mark, so as to be easy of access from the water; whilst the remaining three, consisting of a dwelling for Giuseppe and his principal officers, a long, rambling barrack-like structure for the men who might happen to be left on shore, and a cook-house, were all erected on the top of the hill. The schooner naturally attracted a great deal of attention. She was dismantled, all to her lower masts, and was hove right ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... the gallery. That was well lighted and had a cushioned seat against the wall. Groups were sitting together or rambling about. And a great circular room, down stairs lighted by a magnificent chandelier whose prisms seemed in constant motion and rayed off every imaginable color with a ...
— A Modern Cinderella • Amanda M. Douglas
... been rambling over by Dumbarton and Inverary, and running a drunken race on the side of Loch Lomond with a wild Highlandman; his horse, which had never known the ornaments of iron or leather, zigzagged across before ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... I have been rambling over the southern part of the island, and looking at the traces of habitations there. There are several enclosures,—the largest perhaps thirty yards square,—surrounded with a rough stonewall of very mossy antiquity, built originally broad and strong, ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... from her lips by an unexpected diversion. A by-road on her right hand descended from the fields into the highway at the point where she stood, and down the track a bull was rambling uncertainly towards her and Elizabeth, who, facing the other way, did ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... my men about the quiet old place, and myself hunted up an office-room on one of the rambling streets that wandered beneath the trees. I was well toward the finish of my morning's work when I heard the voice of my sentry challenge, and caught an answering word of indignation in a woman's voice. I stepped ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... saw nothing of the sort. But he made a long, rambling speech in honour of the woman who had inspired him in his work—that was the ...
— Hedda Gabler - Play In Four Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... to the fighting point, as he freely professed, until goaded into action by sheer desperation. He had "got enough," as he said, "of the everlasting Injuns, and of Kentucky, where there was such a shocking deal of 'em that a peaceable trader's scalp was in no more security than a rambling scout's;" and cursing his bad luck, and the memory of the friend who had cajoled him into ruin, difficulty, and constant danger, his sole desire was now to return to the safer lands of the East, which he expected to effect ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... to their joy, at no very late hour, They reach'd the Owl's residence, Ivy-clad-Tower. But what were their feelings, when after such rambling, They still must encounter fresh clawing and scrambling? The sage Bird of Night had long chosen her station Aloft, where she sat in profound meditation: The clustering Ivy her lone dwelling shaded, [p 20] Which no glaring Sun-beam had ever pervaded; Within it, the Stranger ...
— The Peacock and Parrot, on their Tour to Discover the Author of "The Peacock At Home" • Unknown
... lot of rambling stuff to his sister and to me, sometimes of one thing, sometimes of another, on purpose to amuse his sister, and every now and then would turn it upon the old story, directing it to me. 'Poor Mrs. Betty,' says he, 'it ...
— The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c. • Daniel Defoe
... her task of conversion. The first thing she did was to order some dried sweetmeats—not a bad beginning, as they were palatable; but as she happened to be very ignorant, and unaccustomed to theological disputes, her subsequent arguments did not go down as well as the fruit. After a rambling discourse of about an hour, the old lady felt tired, and felt as if she had done wonders. Amine was then introduced to the nuns, most of whom were young, and all of good family. Her dormitory was shown to her; and expressing ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... autumn sank into November, November winds and mists into a muffled, gray-roofed, white-floored December. And still the laird of Glenfernie lived with the work of the estate and, when that was done, and when the long, lonely, rambling daily walk or ride was over, with books. The room in the keep had now many books. He sat among them, and he built his fire higher, and his candles burned into late night. Whether he read or did not read, he stayed among them and drew what restless ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... not gone above a league when I fell in with a scattered platoon of the mob, who were rambling along as if on a party of pleasure; tossing their pikes and clashing their sabres to all kinds of revolutionary songs. I was instantly seized, as a 'courier of the Aristocrats.' Their sagacity, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... leave St. Petersburg when he received a letter from Deulin. The Frenchman wrote from Cracow, and mentioned in a rather rambling letter that Wanda was staying with a relative in that ancient city. He also thought it probable that she would make a stay in England pending the ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... which was a low, plain, oblong house, covered with grey stucco, against which flamed the orange of its lichened roof. It had been built in Queen Anne's time, and enlarged and stuccoed over about fifty years ago. It was a good, solid house, less rambling than Ansdore, but the ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... owners had so altered it by pulling down and building on, that, when it passed into the possession of Hartley Parrish, little else than the open fireplace in the lounge remained to tell of the original farm. It was a queer, rambling house of only two stories whose elongated shape was accentuated by the additional wing which ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... was always a dull time at the Blue Goose. Morrison slept late. Elise was either with Madame or rambling among the hills. Only Pierre, who seemed never to sleep, was to be ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... surrounded with a grove of trees; its theatre, certainly magnificent, and its wide spaces, not to be called squares. The new town is all space; and if in space consists grandeur, it cannot be denied that there is a great deal of it; but, to me, these wide, rambling places appeared ungraceful and slovenly, wet and exposed in winter, and glaring and dusty in summer. The splendid theatre stands in one corner of a great space, from which several wide streets diverge: some old and dark, some new. The best street, the Rue du Chapeau Rouge, ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... Marlowe, of whom Conrad seems perhaps unduly fond, lights his pipe and passes the beer and utters breezy and bracing sentiments, I can enjoy with unmitigated delight all the convolutions and overlappings of his inverted method of narration—of those rambling "advances," as Mr. Follet calls them, to already consummated "conclusions." In the few occasional passages where Marlowe assumes a moralising tone and becomes bracing and strenuous I fancy I detect the influence of ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... of Alpine, nay, High Sierran, trees? You will find all the well-known, and several rare and entirely new species in this region. This field alone could well occupy a student, or a mere amateur tree-lover a whole summer in rambling, ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... of the commonest courtesies of life. They thought it pride—it was but an effect—an irremediable effect of the utter sinking of his sad and broken spirit. The only distraction in which he eventually took pleasure, or sought to indulge, was rambling through the wild passes of the chain of wooded hills, which almost encircles the Kentuckian capital, and extends for a considerable distance in a westerly direction. The dense gloom of these narrow vallies he had remarked on his entrance by the same route, and feeling them ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... break of day we made the land, at the entrance of a small river and close to some find old ruins. It was the very spot where I had intended to go with the Padre. There were a few wild horses rambling in the neighbourhood; I cleaned my gun, loaded it again, and killed one; but not before the tired and hungry crew, stretched on the strand, proved by their nasal concerts that for the present their greatest necessity was repose after their fatigues. There were ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... man owned a large rambling Mansion. The pillars were rotten, the galleries tumbling down, the thatch dry and combustible, and there was only one door. Suddenly, one day, there was a smell of fire: the old man rushed out. To his horror he saw that the ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... then! But it shall not depart into oblivion unchronicled. One who has sat under its roof-tree, one who remembers well its rambling rooms and wild garden, will take the pen to write down a page of its story. It is only an episode, one of many; but the others are fading away, or already buried in dead memories under the sod. It was a quaint, picturesque old place, stretching back from ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... change in the geological structure of the plains the character of the landscape likewise altered. While rambling up some of the narrow and rocky defiles, I could almost have fancied myself transported back again to the barren valleys of the island of St. Jago. Among the basaltic cliffs I found some plants which I had seen nowhere else, but others I recognised ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... fallen into rambling ways with this visit of hers, of which she makes so much, as if nobody had ever been in a great house but herself. She is going to Hamley Hall next week,—getting ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... the sap showed signs of boiling over. Others of the house party soon joined them. The sun had come out brightly now, and luncheon, brought from the house, was eaten and enjoyed. Then followed more rambling about the wood. The ground showed bare where the snow had melted on an occasional sandy knoll, and there was a search for wintergreen leaves. It was announced that all must be at the house again in time for an early dinner, since the great work of "sugaring-off" was to be the event of the night. ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... flock to shun." The fox the lessons strictly heeded. At first he boggled in his dress; But awkwardness grew less and less, Till perseverance gave success. His education scarce complete, A flock, his scholarship to greet, Came rambling out that way. The new-made wolf his work began, Amidst the heedless nibblers ran, And spread a sore dismay. The bleating host now surely thought That fifty wolves were on the spot: Dog, shepherd, sheep, all homeward fled, And left a single sheep in pawn, Which Renard seized when they were gone. ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... fall, although once or twice he had had glimmerings of sense sufficient to make the authorities send for the nearest magistrate, in hopes that he might be able to take down the dying man's deposition of the cause of his death. But when the magistrate had come, he was rambling about being at sea, and mixing up names of captains and lieutenants in an indistinct manner with those of his fellow porters at the railway; and his last words were a curse on the 'Cornish trick' which had, he said, ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... slipped by thus; and no feeling within him rose to sufficient strength to force him out of a passive attitude. Then by the merest chance his granny stated in one of her rambling epistles that Lady Constantine was coming to live again at Welland in the old house, with her child, now a little boy between three and ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... and laid her head wearily down on the window-sill. What a Hermes is thought! Like a vanishing dream fled the consciousness of surrounding objects, and she was with Eugene. Now, in the earlier years of his absence, she was in Heidelberg, listening to the evening chimes, and rambling with him through the heart of the Odenwald. Then they explored the Hartz, climbed the Brocken, and there, among the clouds, discussed the adventures of Faust and his kinsman, Manfred. Anon, the arrival of the Grahams disturbed the quiet of Eugene's life, ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... egotistic, harsh, cruel, uncompromising; youth that is so crude, so ignorant of life, so slow to understand! She had Constance. Yes, but it would be twenty years before Constance could appreciate the sacrifice of judgment and of pride which her mother had made, in a sudden decision, during that rambling, starched, simpering interview with Miss Aline Chetwynd. Probably Constance thought that she had yielded to Sophia's passionate temper! Impossible to explain to Constance that she had yielded to nothing but a perception of Sophia's complete inability to hear reason and wisdom. ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... up a little slab for a tombstone; and she hangs flowers upon it, and ties them there with a bit of ribbon. You can scarce play all that day; and afterward, many weeks later, when you are rambling over the fields, or lingering by the brook, throwing off sticks into the eddies, you think of old Tray's shaggy coat, and of his big paw, and of his honest eye; and the memory of your boyish grief comes upon you; and you say with tears, "Poor Tray!" And Bella too, in her sad sweet tones, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... aspect of desolation and pity-my-sorrows so common at the faded resorts of the unhappy South, yet a pleasant rurality is impressed on the entertainment. The principal hotel is a vast building, curiously rambling in style: the dining-room, for instance, is a house in itself, planted in a garden. Here, when the family is somewhat small and select, will be presented the marvels of Old Dominion cooking—the marrowy flannel-cake, the cellular waffle, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... regularly returned after some hours absence. As the daylight increased we had frequent opportunities of seeing him in company with a she-wolf, with whom he kept up an almost daily intercourse for several weeks, till at length he returned no more to the ships; having either lost his way by rambling to too great a distance, or what is more likely, perhaps, been destroyed by the male wolves. Some time after a large dog of mine, which was also getting into the habit of occasionally remaining absent for some ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... the lookout, saw a cloud of dust rising above these rambling, tree-lined lanes instead of from the white, direct way, a deep flush of mortification tinged her face. She understood his circumspection, but wisely refrained ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... pretty well cured of my rambling to sea; yet I could wish my boat, which had cost me so much trouble and pains, on this side the island once more, but which indeed was impracticable. I therefore began to lead a very retired life, living near a twelvemonth in a very contented manner, wanting for nothing except conversation. ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... darkness, as we did, I was unable to see but little, except as the nearer moon, in her wild and ceaseless hurtling through the Barsoomian heavens, lit up little patches of the landscape from time to time, disclosing walled fields and low, rambling buildings, presenting much the appearance of earthly farms. There were many trees, methodically arranged, and some of them were of enormous height; there were animals in some of the enclosures, and they announced their presence by terrified ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... alleged hiding-place of Batavsky's rubles, and while seemingly only rambling over the wild country, he was studying the diagram that the old man had given him and trying to locate the hiding-place ...
— The Boy Nihilist - or, Young America in Russia • Allan Arnold
... emphatically true of these themes," I remarked, after a long rambling talk, half reverie, half reason, "that language conceals the ideas, or, rather, the imaginations they evolve; for the word idea implies something more tangible than vagaries which the Greek poet would ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the worst. "Hiram," was the whispered reply. She opened the door, and he told her that meanwhile the side door had been locked, and that he knew no other way out from the great rambling house whither he rarely ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... was a low, rambling building, still it was a high jump, even for a man, and Locke was astounded that they should attempt such a thing, even in their ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... young man took to rambling among the picturesque regions of the Sarthe, the banks of which are much frequented by sketchers who come to Alencon for points of view. Windmills are there, and the river is gay in the meadows. The shores of the Sarthe are bordered with beautiful trees, well grouped. Though the landscape ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... but rich instead, I'd take you to one of the fashionable hotels. You are out of place here, in this rambling old ruin." ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... reverberation of approval throughout the room in answer to Stephen's plea. So unanimous was the demonstration that Anderson took alarm. The air of democracy was revealing itself in their instinctive enthusiasm. And while nothing might result from Stephen's rambling remarks, still it would afford them consolation that their side of the question had been aired. To a man they voiced their approval of the privilege ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... known men risk imprisonment for desertion, on hearing that a parson was going the voyage, or that the vessel was to sail on a Friday. If any of them were asked their reason for holding such opinions, they would no doubt make a long, rambling statement of accidents that had happened, and the wild wrath that follows in the wake of a ship sailing on the forbidden day! These prejudices still survive in a modified form. The younger generation of seamen do not ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... of Words.— The syntax— or order of words— of the oldest English was very different from that of Norman-French. The syntax of an Old English sentence was clumsy and involved; it kept the attention long on the strain; it was rumbling, rambling, and unpleasant to the ear. It kept the attention on the strain, because the verb in a subordinate clause was held back, and not revealed till we had come to the end of the clause. Thus the Anglo-Saxon wrote (though in ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... at length before the rambling structure which was the abode of Romola Borria. The lamp was extinguished, probably beaten out long before by the pelting rain. Only a pale glow emanated from the place, this from a tiny upstairs window, covered over with oiled paper, and the ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... with the stolid patience of a Mississippi clam-fisher, was thinking at express speed. Her mind was of that highly developed type where a hint sets in motion a score of related cognitions, and a word here and there in Moss's rambling remarks instructed her like a flash of light. She was at school, in a high sense, and improving her time. The sketch was expanding into a carefully studied portrait bust and ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... which I had inherited was a narrow strip, consisting mostly of sand, and extending for rather over two miles round the coast of Mansie Bay, in Caithness. Upon this strip there had been a rambling, grey-stone building—when erected or wherefore none could tell me—and this I had repaired, so that it made a dwelling quite good enough for one of my simple tastes. One room was my laboratory, ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... over my rambling remarks, that I classed "Ivanhoe" as the second historical novel of the century. I dare say there are many who would give "Esmond" the first place, and I can quite understand their position, although it is not my own. I recognize the beauty of the style, the consistency ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the least learned among their countrymen, only weighed the pupils down, and cramped their hands, their eyes, and their imaginations; drove them away from natural beauty, which, thank God, is fresh and attainable by us all, to-day, and yesterday, and to-morrow; and sent them rambling after artificial grace, without the proper means of judging ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... John's first feeling was that he had misunderstood the directions she had given him. Before him, inclosed by a high fence over the horizon of which he could see the tops of queer structures, stood the rambling studio of the Peerless Pictures, Inc., one of the largest motion picture producing concerns in the capital of filmdom. At one side of a large open gateway, near an oddly shaped sentry box, was a fat, red-faced man tilted back in ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... units were reorganised, all batteries were increased to six guns, and there was plenty of work to keep everyone busy. The narrator of these rambling notes, after a period of two years' service with the Brigade, here transferred his allegiance to the sister howitzer battery of the Division, known as "The Grey Battery," from the fact that all the horses were of that colour. Sentiment ran strong for ...
— Three years in France with the Guns: - Being Episodes in the life of a Field Battery • C. A. Rose
... a young man of about twenty-two years of age, at the time he suffered. Having a tolerable genius when a youth, his friends put him apprentice twice, but to no purpose, for having got rambling notions in his head, he would needs go to sea. There, but for his unhappy temper, he might have done well, for the ship of war in which he sailed was so fortunate as to take, after eight hours sharp engagement, a Spanish vessel ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... succession was the rule, testament the exception, is proved by Taylor, (Elements of Civil Law, p. 519-527,) a learned, rambling, spirited writer. In the iid and iiid books, the method of the Institutes is doubtless preposterous; and the Chancellor Daguesseau (Oeuvres, tom. i. p. 275) wishes his countryman Domat in the place of Tribonian. Yet covenants before successions is ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... eagerness to be off, and Salomon, its owner and chauffeur, shabby and sulky as usual, was giving the car a few last oily caresses which should have been bestowed long ago in the privacy of the garage. Have I forgotten to mention in these rambling notes that Somerled's Vedder regards our Salomon with a silent yet plainly visible contempt, akin to nausea? Whenever they happen to be thrown together for a few minutes I see the smart-liveried Vedder criticizing with his mysterious ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... days. Another sect of philosophers do declare, that certain fiery particles exhale constantly from the earth, which, concentrating in a single point of the firmament by day, constitute the sun, but being scattered and rambling about in the dark at night, collect in various points, and form stars. These are regularly burnt out and extinguished, not unlike to the lamps in our streets, and require a fresh supply of exhalations ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... evergreen thicket. The trees were cut down after his death: they were gone when I first visited the village and by chance found a lodging in the house, and congratulated myself that I had got the quaintest, old rambling rooms I had ever inhabited. I did not know that I was in Elijah Raven's house, although his name had long been familiar to me: it only came out one day when I asked my landlady, who was a native, to tell me the history of the place. She remembered how as a little ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... chiefly congregate. One of its old-established inns is called La Piccola Sentinella. The first sight on entrance is an open gallery, with a pink wall on which bloom magnificent cactuses, sprays of thick-clustering scarlet and magenta flowers. This is a rambling house, built in successive stages against a hill, with terraces and verandahs opening on unexpected gardens to the back and front. Beneath its long irregular facade there spreads a wilderness of orange-trees and honeysuckles and roses, verbenas, geraniums and ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... stone used in their construction; it is still known to the Hopituh as Tebvwuki, the Fire-house. Here some fighting occurred, and the Bears moved westward again to the head of Antelope (Jeditoh) Canyon, about 4 miles from Keam's Canyon and about 15 miles east from Walpi. They built there a rambling cluster of small-roomed houses, of which the ground plan has now become almost obliterated. This ruin is called by the Hopituh "the ruin at the place of wild gourds." They seem to have occupied this neighborhood for a considerable period, as mention is made of two or ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... of consciousness. In spite of myself, a veil now and then fell over my mind, and after wandering for years, as it seemed, in some distant world, I awoke with a shock, to find myself in the steamy halls of the bath, with a brown Syrian polishing my limbs. I suspect that my language must have been rambling and incoherent, and that the menials who had me in charge understood my condition, for as soon as I had stretched myself upon the couch which follows the bath, a glass of very acid sherbet was presented to me, and after drinking it I experienced instant relief. Still the spell was not wholly ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... the change at Tynemouth is that which has taken place at Whitley, another of our favourite summer resorts, on the delightful Northumbrian coast. What Whitley is now I do not know; but when I last saw it, more than a dozen years ago, it had become a rambling, ugly, ill-built town, chiefly given over to lodging-house keepers, though redeemed by its fine stretch of hard sand. Very different was the Whitley with which I first made acquaintance in 1849. There was no lodging-house in the place; nothing but a sequestered village, which could not boast ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... habits were noticeable. He was especially fond of rambling by moonlight, of inventing wonderful tales, of occupying himself with strange, and sometimes dangerous, amusements. At the age of thirteen he went to Eton. In this little world, that determined opposition to whatever appeared to ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... took him up to Stephen's room herself when they reached the nice old rambling farm-house set in the wide, white, snowy landscape. Father Marshall had taken the car to the barn, and Bonnie was hurrying the dinner ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... the grayest gloom golden palaces rose before him, silver pavements shone beneath his feet, jewelled gates unfolded on golden hinges turning, and he wandered forth into a fair country. What need of sunshine and bloom for one who saw in the deepest darkness a "light that never was on sea or land"? Rambling out into the pleasant woods of Dulwich, through the green meadows of Walton, by the breezy heights of Sydenham, bands of angels attended him. They walked between the toiling haymakers, they hovered above him in the apple-boughs, and their bright wings shone like stars. For him there was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... struck the eye with more of contrast to the professor's small and nervous hand. Large, rounded, and rambling, it filled the page with few and ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... a grandfather or a father-in-law who was exactly like Scrooge, his cheerfulness was not shared. Indeed, the lecture as a whole lacked something of his firm and elastic touch, and towards the end he found himself rambling, and in a sort of abstraction, talking to them as if they were his fellows. He caught himself saying quite mystically that a spiritual plane (by which he meant his plane) always looked to those on the sensual or Dickens plane, not merely austere, but desolate. He said, quoting Bernard ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... the city is probably obtained from the crest of Buena Vista Park, which is not the highest of the fourteen good-sized hills in San Francisco but the one from which the most unobstructed views are to be obtained. Tourists and other visitors to San Francisco who enjoy walking will find, rambling over ...
— Fascinating San Francisco • Fred Brandt and Andrew Y. Wood
... head of a foreign observer at a midnight mass. Asceticism, though it may not justify error, is a truth in itself, it is the essence extracted of the scourge, flesh vanquished; and it stands apart from controversy. Those monks of the forested mountain heights, rambling for their herbs, know the blessedness to be found in mere breathing: a neighbour readiness to yield the breath inspires it the more. For when we do not dread our end, the sense of a free existence comes back to us: we have the prized gift to infancy ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... up to it, but I'm told it's a big, rambling old place called Dalehurst Grange, approached through sloping meadows and backing on to the woods. It would be easy for a man to see any one in the house coming from the front and slip away into the undergrowth. Malley's gone ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... locked itself into the cellar of a rambling cottage, cried through the grating, where the father stood madly brandishing a pitchfork. An old, bald-headed man was sobbing all alone on a dung-heap; a woman in yellow had fainted in the market-place and her husband ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... This miniature palace, sheltered within the fort walls, yet standing by itself in its own garden, remote from the rambling pile of buildings occupied by Partab Singh and his court, would make an ideal Residency. Not for a solitary man, of course, but the Resident at Agpur could well afford to marry. Gazing down into the ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... human figure, though no pledges be given concerning the anatomy within. Many an Italian palace has a false front in itself magnificent. We may chance to observe, however, that it overtops its backing, perhaps an amorphous rambling pile in quite another material. What we admire is not so much a facade as a triumphal gateway, set up in front of the house to be its ambassador to the world, wearing decidedly richer apparel than its master can afford at home. This was not ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... settle with her son, who soon built her a rudely-constructed but sufficiently habitable hut, which, in after years, was inclosed, and greatly improved; so that it at last assumed the dimensions of a rambling picturesque cottage, whitewashed, brilliant, and neat in its setting of ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... began a long rambling speech, in which he pretended not to know what things are and what are not wonderful. The Boy Hunters young gentleman fell headlong into the quagmire of definitions, but the oldest sister, who had her own ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... cruise, the morning after Bob's arrival; but as soon as he heard that she had again dropped anchor in the bay, he took a boat and went out to her; and returned on shore with Jim Sankey, who had obtained leave for the afternoon. The two spent hours in rambling about the Rock, and talking of old times at Tulloch's. Both agreed that the most fortunate thing that ever happened had been the burglary at Admiral Langton's; which had been the means of Jim's getting into the navy, and Bob's coming out ...
— Held Fast For England - A Tale of the Siege of Gibraltar (1779-83) • G. A. Henty
... well if he heard what Marcella had to say to him? He could not go to the house, for it would be disagreeable to encounter Moxey; but, if he wrote, Marcella would speedily make an appointment. After an hour or two of purposeless rambling, he decided to ask for an interview. He might learn something that really concerned him; in any case, it was a final meeting with Marcella, to whom he perhaps owed this ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... that you are rambling through the country, denotes that you will be oppressed with sadness, and the separation from friends, but your worldly surroundings will be all that one could desire. For a young woman, this dream promises a ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... contrary religion; besides, as I undertook this journey in obedience to her, I considered myself as living under her direction, which was more flattering than barely to continue in the neighborhood; to sum up all, the idea of a long journey coincided with my insurmountable passion for rambling, which already began to demonstrate itself. To pass the mountains, to my eye appeared delightful; how charming the reflection of elevating myself above my companions by the whole height of the Alps! To see the world is an almost irresistible temptation to a Genevan, accordingly ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... always been a bower of delight to Olga's vivid fancy. The house, long, low, and rambling, stood well back from the cliffs in the midst of a garden which to her childhood's mind had always been the earthly presentment of Paradise. Not the owner of it himself loved it as did Olga. Many were the hours she had spent there, and not one of them but ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... Egremond Ratcliffe, his youngest brother, had already completed his disastrous destiny. This unfortunate gentleman, it will be remembered, was rendered a fugitive and an outlaw by the part which he had taken, at a very early age, in the Northern rebellion. For several years he led a forlorn and rambling life, sometimes in Flanders, sometimes in Spain, deriving his sole support from an ill paid pension and occasional donations of Philip II., and often enduring ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... knowledge of much of the science of Europe, its institutions and manners. That after the death of this friend, he had renewed his wanderings; and having been detained in this village by a fit of sickness for some weeks, he was warned that it was time to quit his rambling life. This place being recommended to him, both by its quiet seclusion, and the unsophisticated manners of its inhabitants, he determined to pass the remnant of his days here, and, by devoting them to the purposes ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... the cheerful fire, the friends talked in rambling fashion until drowsy, when they wrapped their blankets around them and lay down to sleep. Some risk was involved in the proceeding, inasmuch as the fire was likely to attract wild animals to the spot, but providentially none disturbed the young pioneers, who ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... man held up his left hand, the second finger of which was monstrously swollen. At the same time he began a rambling, disjointed history of the coming and ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... stood on a rambling street in an old waterside town, and from the windows of my room I could see the topmasts of sailing ships thrusting upward above gray roofs. Small marvel that my head should be filled with the ways of the sea and the wonder of it, or that I should spend long hours dreaming ...
— Us and the Bottleman • Edith Ballinger Price
... and a little mad; but to me absorbingly interesting,' was my reply, 'And in the hope that it may prove so to others, I shall use it as a strange, rambling introduction to a recital of romantic events which have occurred in and about the great city since the breaking out of the rebellion, having to do with patriotism and cowardice, love, mischief, and secession, and bearing the title ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... observed by all that the most interesting periods or situations for rambling are not those which most abound with exciting scenes and objects. There must be a certain dearth of individual objects that draw the attention, intermingled with occasional remarkable or mysterious sights and sounds, to yield an excursion its greatest interest. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... Bardas, the uncle of the Emperor Michael III. The catastrophe of the romance is mentioned by two writers of the twelfth century. One is the anonymous author of a description of Constantinople, who was a cotemporary of Zonaras. The other is John Tzetzes, who wrote a rambling work consisting of mythological and historical notices in Greek political, civil, or profane verse, as it may be called, (versus politici)—the epic poetry of modern Greece; correctly compared by Lord Byron to the heroic ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... would willingly pass again through the whole of a gone-by career. And this, properly considered, is one of our greatest blessings; stifling much of vain regret, and teaching us to "look forward" to the future. We have always had, if we may so call it, a domestic rambling propensity; a desire to see "dwellings," not so much for their pictorial as their, so to say, personal celebrity: and sometimes, as on our visit to Barley Wood, this longing comes upon us at the wrong season, when a cheerful fire at "home" would be a meet companion. It is now ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... consisted of a rambling stone house, an old-fashioned garden, and beyond the garden ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
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