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More "Startle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... friend, I am enabled to offer a metrical translation. In judging it we should bear in mind that it was not written by a gnostic or by a pantheistic philosopher, but by a poet who felt all these doubts and problems as his own, without any wish to convince or to startle, only uttering what had been weighing on his mind, just as later poets would sing the doubts and sorrows of ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... words excitedly, as Don clung to him and held him back, gazing wildly all the time at the disturbed water, as the great fish swiftly approached, till, just as it was within a few yards, the shallowness of the water seemed to startle it, making it give quite a bound showing half its length, and then diving down with a kind of wallow, after which the occupants of the boat saw the wooden pole go trailing along the surface, till once more it was snatched, as ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... Brown objected. "As for unexpected—just watch me startle 'em! My sight's fixed at four ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... the Versailles army began to make its way into Paris, and the Commune, seeing its fantastic and terrible power about to pass away, tried to startle the world by its excesses. Orders were sent at once to Mazas to send the archbishop, the priests, Senator Bonjean, suspected spies, and sergents de ville to that part of the prison of La Roquette reserved for condemned criminals. ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... comprehensiveness; the mental decrepitude it occasions he dignifies with the appellation of repose; and, on the strength of comprehensiveness and repose, is of course qualified to take his seat beside Shakspeare, and chat cosily with Bacon, and wink knowingly at Goethe, and startle Leibnitz with a slap on the shoulder,—the true Red-Republican sign of liberty in manners, equality in power, and fraternity in ideas! These men, to be sure, have a way of saying things which he has not yet caught; but then their wide-reaching thoughts are his as well as theirs. Imitating ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... monarch to despoil his friend, and to annihilate a friendship of years, and obligations of such serious moment; but, to their surprise and delight, they found his ears open to any tales they chose to bring; and having, in a lucky hour, fixed on an accusation likely to startle such a mind, they found all ready ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... its hair as raven black as that of any young savage. It stood like some woodland elf in the maze of heavy sleepiness, at each harsh word from the camp, sidling shyly closer to our hiding-place. We dragged forward till I could have touched the child, but feared to startle it. ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... he kissed her as nearly on the mouth as possible, clinging to a half-lit cigar the while, just before she whipped around into the hotel drive. She avoided a collision with one of the stone posts narrowly enough to startle him into releasing her,—he hadn't realized the turn was so close—and stopped at the lighted carriage door with a jerk that left him no option but to get ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... the foaming lips were still. "O maiden," said AEneas, "me no more Can danger startle, nor strange shape of ill. All have I seen and throughly conned before. One boon I beg,—since yonder are the door Of Pluto, and the gloomy lakes, they tell, Fed by o'erflowing Acheron,—once more To see the father whom I loved ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... much, my dear Dorothy, that the time will be long ere any but fortified places will be safe abodes. It is a question in my mind whether it would not be better to seek refuge for you—. But stay; let me suggest my proposal, rather than startle you with it in sudden form complete. You are related to the Somersets, ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... Edison's leap to fortune was sudden and spectacular, as have been most of his accomplishments since. Those who do really great things along the lines of physical improvement, or concerning the inception of large enterprises are apt to startle the public and to surprise thoughtful people almost as though some impossible ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron
... commonplace and familiar objects take on another character. The trees group themselves differently; they draw closer together, as if in fear. The very silence has another quality than the silence of the day. And it is full of half-heard whispers—whispers that startle—ghosts of sounds long dead. There are living sounds, too, such as are never heard under other conditions: notes of strange night-birds, the cries of small animals in sudden encounters with stealthy foes or in their dreams, a rustling in the dead leaves—it may be the leap of a wood-rat, ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... our hearts a-blazing in every chink, With coals for food and water to drink, We plunge up the mountain and traverse the moor, And startle the grouse in our daily tour. We yell at the deer in their lonely glen, Shoot past the village and circle the Ben, We flash through the city on viaducts high, As straight as an arrow, ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... woman, in face of existing prejudices, speak the simple truth in regard to the social wrongs of her sisters, as Mrs. Love had done, asking no leave of the Convention, and making no apology for her sincere words, however they might startle false delicacy, he felt bound as a man, and in the name of man, to offer her the tribute ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... window, and the height of the sun seemed suddenly to startle her. Her more gentle look suddenly vanished and one of irritability swiftly ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... But the crowd is not present to be interested in rats, nor are the reporters there to write about rats, nor is the chairman presiding so as to refer to the stowaway's paper on rats. For the chairman has his own Red Tape Rats to let loose with which to startle the audience and nobble the Press. The next day the report of the lecture is not headed "The Hon. Babbling Brook on Rats," but runs "An Admiral of the Fleet on Naval Reform," or "A Field Marshal with a Grievance," ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... man whom you could neither neglect nor trifle with; who was addressing your intellect in weighty words, fathoming your intentions, and detecting your inclinations and prepossessions, and leading you in some given direction with gentle but irresistible force. He would often startle you with the boldness of his propositions, but never till he had contrived, somehow or other, to predispose you in favour of that view of the case which he was presenting. He had a most seductive smile; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... more likely! We were so cold that a race seemed the only chance of getting warm! I hope we didn't startle you too much!" ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... undaunted toils, Sails unknown seas to unknown soils, With various wonders feasts his sight: What stranger wonders does he write! We read, and in description view Creatures which Adam never knew: For, when we risk no contradiction, It prompts the tongue to deal in fiction. Those things that startle me or you, I grant are strange; yet may be true. 10 Who doubts that elephants are found For science and for sense renowned? Borri records their strength of parts, Extent of thought, and skill in arts; How they perform the law's decrees, And save the state the hangman's fees; And ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... a plash And turbid streak upon the streamlet's face, Betray the water-rat's swift dive and path Across the bottom to his burrow deep. The moss is plump and soft, the tawny leaves Are crisp beneath my tread, and scaly twigs Startle my wandering eye like basking snakes. Where this thick brush displays its emerald tent, I stretch my wearied frame, for solitude To steal within my heart. How hushed the scene At first, and then, to the accustomed ear, How full of ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... Gadol so much as the manner in which I received his confidences. He half expected to startle me by his boldness, but was himself confounded by my words. I told him that in my country self was the chief consideration, self-preservation the law of nature; death the King of Terrors; wealth the object of universal search, poverty the worst of evils; ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... the Englishman's voice seemed to startle Maurice out of his reverie. He pulled himself together, walked firmly up to the table and resting his hand upon it, he faced the other man with a sudden gaze made up partly of suddenly conceived resolve ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... breath," said the pilot, in low, soothing tones, but in a manner so sudden as to startle Griffith, at whose elbow they were unexpectedly uttered. "Let us forget, young man, everything but the number of lives that depend, this night, on your exertions ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... another aspect of this matter which would perhaps startle those who think that all piety and orthodoxy reside in the rural districts; and that is, that the city, as it is, affords far greater encouragements to well developed piety than the country; and that if the church were fully awake to her duty towards young men, and actually ...
— Amusement: A Force in Christian Training • Rev. Marvin R. Vincent.
... the easiest of all Atlee's missions, for Brumsey was the weakest and most transparent of all imbecile Whigs. A junior diplomatist of small faculties and great ambitions, he wanted to do something, not being clear as to what, which should startle his chiefs, and make 'the Office' exclaim: 'See what Sam Brumsey has been doing! Hasn't Brumsey hit the nail on the head! Brumsey's last despatch is the finest state-paper since the days of Canning!' Now no one knew the short range of this man's intellectual tether ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... for the perception of the hearing save the dull thread of many thousand feet and the rough rattle of an occasional carriage. Rarely, the harsh tones of a peasant, or the clear voices of a knot of strangers, unused to such oppressive silence, startle the ear, causing hundreds of eager, half-suspicious, half-wondering eyes to turn in ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... contributes much to distinct pronounciation. It is not common to give a strong, full and clear radical stress, yet this abrupt function is highly important in elocution, and when properly used in public reading or on the stage "will startle even stupor into attention." It is this tone that prompts children to obedience, and makes animals ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... very dark here, and I can see enough to startle me as it is," came the astonished rejoinder. "What on earth have you been doing, Henri; and what's the meaning of this get-up? Of course, it's a disguise; but, ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... relation which has been shown to exist between criminality and household occupations. Nothing, indeed, which recent investigation has established ought to startle the American woman more. Contrary to public opinion, it is not the factory and shop which are making the greatest number of women offenders of all kinds; it is the household. In a recent careful study of over 3000 women criminals, the Bureau of Labor found ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... rivers sustained, and the earth must have become for the most part plain, or stagnant marsh. But the feeding of the rivers and the purifying of the winds, are the least of the services appointed to the hills. To fill the thirst of the human heart for the beauty of God's working—to startle its lethargy with the deep and pure agitation of astonishment,—are their higher missions. They are as a great and noble architecture, first giving shelter, comfort, and rest; and covered also with mighty sculpture and painted legend. It is impossible to examine, in their connected ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... stranger almost should do more than we ourselves could) that the appraisements made by our officers were not above half of what he had been offered for one of them, and did make it good by bringing a gentleman to give us L700 for the Wildboare, which they valued but at L276, which made us all startle and stop the sale, and I did propose to acquaint the Duke of York with it, and accordingly we did agree on it, and I wrote a severe letter about it, and we are to attend him with it to-morrow about it. This afternoon my Lord Anglesey tells us ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... surrogate's room Lady Constantine managed, at the last juncture, to state her errand in tones so collected as to startle even herself to which her listener replied also as if the whole thing were the most natural in the world. When it came to the affirmation that she had lived fifteen days in the parish, she ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... knowledge of history; it is almost heart-searching from its knowledge of human nature; it has almost supernatural charity from its freedom from littleness and prejudice; it has almost the repose of faith, because nothing can startle it; it has almost the beauty and harmony of heavenly contemplation, so intimate is it with the eternal order of things and the ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... we did not startle you," he said. "I thought my note would partly prepare you for this meeting. We expected to find you in the Frying Pan district. When you did not appear there we tuned our radio locator to your heart beats and in that way located ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... an architect, you're a critic," he said to him early in their accidental acquaintance. "Now, I want to experiment on you. I want you to see Irving to-night and write your impressions of it. I have a notion you'll startle my readers." ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... "But startle ye not when the tempests blow? Have you no dread of a wily foe? Do you not tremble, when the serpents hiss Mid leaves that the zephyr alone ...
— Victor Roy, A Masonic Poem • Harriet Annie Wilkins
... good sense to guide her and her pupil to his castle in Bedfordshire by the help of Father Martin through any tangles of the White and Red Roses that might await her, as well to her real principle for avoiding actual evil, though she might startle monastic proprieties. ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... natural instinct, and these sudden lapses from virtue which startle a small portion of community and afford a filthy kind of pleasure to the other part, are but the outgrowths of mental unchastity. "Filthy dreamers," before they are aware, become filthy in action. The thoughts mold the brain, as certainly as the brain molds ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... loved dramatic situations in real life quite as well as in make-believe, planned to conceal her radiance until her first appearance on the stage, when she would startle them all, and especially Lysander, with her dazzling loveliness. She stood in a shadow of the wings with her coat wrapped about her. Except for Jerry, waiting to do her humble part, she was alone. She listened to the ceaseless chatter ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... which began to startle Dorsenne was only augmented during dinner, so much the more so as, on discussing the conditions of that arrangement he hoped to bring about, the recollection of his terrible youth filled the thoughts and the discourse of the former duellist. Was it, indeed, the same personage ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Did I startle you? I 'm so sorry," said Miss Sandus, coming up to her. "Yes, Don Antonio has arrived. I saw him as he disembarked at his native railway-station. I was ordering a book at Smith's. And such luggage, my dear. Boxes and bags, bags and boxes, till you could n't count them; ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... of time, to influence me, was the New Testament, and in particular the Gospel according to St. Matthew. I believe it would startle and move any one if they could make a certain effort of imagination and read it freshly like a book, not droningly and dully like a portion of the Bible. Any one would then be able to see in it those truths which we are all courteously supposed ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to startle strangers to hear "The Hardy Norseman," "The Cuckoo," and such-like songs from the lips of little Chinese boys. Every Saturday evening they came to the house to practise the hymns and chants for Sunday; I had an harmonium in the dining-room. On these occasions ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... pleasant to talk to him and see his handsome young face full of admiration; to startle him by showing her talent, so pleasant that the whole of the summer afternoon had passed before she thought of the time; and he was equally confused, for Dr. Hervey's dinner-hour was over. And yet they both agreed it was the most pleasant ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... the mob opened fire on the soldiers. This appeared for a moment to startle the captain and his men. But it was only for a moment. Then he coolly gave the command: "Ready! aim! fire!" The company obeyed to the instant, and poured a volley of bullets into that part of the mob which was trying to batter down the ...
— The Red Record - Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... "What could you expect when prowling amongst the graves in a church-yard so lone and solitary, like a goule, on a damp November night? I saw you from Mr. Osborne's going toward it, and determined to startle you—and I ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... every man must see that these are all questions which can arise only after a revolution. They presuppose the breaking up of the government. While the Constitution lasts, they are repressed; they spring up to annoy and startle us ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... Mr. Narkom will lend us his motor to hurry us there? Could, eh? That's good. I think I'd like to have a look at that lion and, if you don't mind, an introduction to the parties concerned. No! don't fear; we won't startle anybody by revealing my identity or the cause of the visit. Let us say that I'm a vet, to whom you have appealed for an opinion, regarding Nero's queer conduct. All ready, Mr. Narkom? Thanks—then let's ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... no other eyes than his could possibly have detected in the darkness; sometimes the distressful plaint of a hungry coyote, hunting for what it never seems to find—for he is always prowling and hunting—would rouse the echoes and startle the "tenderfoot" with the suddenness and nearness of its uncanny call. But for the rest all was still. And he paced to and fro ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... the wrist, and nailed against the oak as a warning to malefactors—extended itself in a kind of grim appeal to everybody. It seemed to possess strange fascinations for all seafaring folk; and when there was a man-of-war in port the rat-tat-tat of that knocker would frequently startle the quiet neighborhood long after midnight. There appeared to be an occult understanding between it and the blue-jackets. Years ago there was a young Bilkins, one Pendexter Bilkins—a sad losel, we fear—who ran away to try his fortunes before the mast, and fell overboard in a gale off Hatteras. ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... let me sink to earth. With no officious mourners near: I would not mar one hour of mirth, Nor startle ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... one of exaltation. I felt as a seeing man might do, with padded feet and noiseless clothes, in a city of the blind. I experienced a wild impulse to jest, to startle people, to clap men on the back, fling people's hats astray, and generally revel in my ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... Federalism as unwise, unpatriotic, and dangerous to the liberty of the citizen and to the growth of the country; and with equal force he opposed the influence of the French Revolution, maintaining that deeds of violence were unnecessary to startle the public into the knowledge that suffering exists, and that bad laws and bad social conditions result in hunger and misery. If he had been a great orator he would have charmed the conservatives who hated Federalism and dreaded ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... enough to startle you, lad. I should say the best thing you could do would be to take a good strong tumbler of ...
— When London Burned • G. A. Henty
... it over,' said Yule. He was in visible agitation and his voice shook. 'The idea may well startle you at first. It will seem to you that I propose to make away with your property before you have even come into possession of it.' He laughed. 'But, in fact, what I have in mind is merely an investment for your capital, and that an admirable one. Five ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... we already know, and demand the full truth. We'll use every advantage against him—first make sure to have him alone with us three, and then suddenly exhibit our knowledge and follow it up with questions. We'll startle the secret from him. I'll threaten, if necessary—I'll put the worst possible construction on the facts we possess, and drive him to tell all in self-defence." Florence was scarlet with suppressed energy ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... Power make colossal strides over the continent? "There is no North." A sordid, truckling, cowardly, compromising spirit, is everywhere seen. No insult or outrage, no deed of impiety or blood, on the part of the South, can startle us into resistance, or inspire us with self-respect. We see our free coloured citizens incarcerated in Southern prisons, or sold on the auction-block, for no other crime than that of being found on Southern soil; and we dare not call for redress. Our commerce with the South ...
— No Compromise with Slavery - An Address Delivered to the Broadway Tabernacle, New York • William Lloyd Garrison
... a white throat and band on the wing. They sail through the air without any effort, wings outspread and beak wide open, and thus glean their harvest of winged insects as they skim along. Oftentimes their sudden swoop will startle you ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... The night was very dark, and the ivy-clad ruin could barely be distinguished; presently, a burst of music from the band was immediately followed by a remarkably strong beam of light, which shot into the darkness with such effect as to fairly startle those present. Then it rested on the grey walls of the huge pile, bathing in brightness the massive stones and clinging ivy, the respective colours of each being vividly apparent. But the most striking feature was yet to come. ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... fell; soap and water explored unwonted territories: the harshest attendants began practising pleasant looks and kind words on the patients, to get into the way of it, so that it might not come too abrupt and startle the patients visibly under the visitors' eyes: something like actors working up a factitious sentiment at the wing for the public display, or like a racehorse's preliminary canter. Alfred's heart beat with joy inexpressible. ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... These observations are not made in a corner; there is no low intrigue; no secret machination. I am on the people's own ground; to them I appeal concerning their own rights, their own liberties, their own intent, in adopting this Constitution. The voice I have uttered, at which gentlemen startle with such agitation, is no unfriendly voice. I intended it as a voice of warning. By this people, and by the event, if this bill passes, I am willing to be judged, whether it be not a ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... a great deal to startle your commercial New Yorker. The small tailor, standing in his doorway, seemed in no way surprised at the spectacle of Archie, whom he had seen pass at a conventional walk some five minutes before, returning like this at top speed. He assumed ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... entrust the purification of Paris to the sagacity of popular instinct. "In loose and disconnected phrases" they address the people: "Rouse yourselves, and act according to your inclinations, as my indications might only startle those you should strike down and thereby allow them to escape!" Varlet proposes, on the contrary, a plan of public safety, very full and ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... of the heat of the weather, the performances of Dick and Jack upon strong venison essence and roast gazelle were enough to startle any housekeeper of small income and an anxiety about the state of the butcher's bill. But of course the outdoor life and constant exertion produced a tremendous appetite; and as Mr Rogers noted the change in Dick, whose palate had to be tempted only a short time back, he felt thankful ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... from idleness or curiosity, while they strive to find evil in everything, they do not comprehend that others still believe in the good. Therefore they have to be so nonchalant as to stop their ears, lest the hum of the busy world should suddenly startle them from sleep. The father allows his son to go where so many others go, where Cato himself went; he says that youth is but fleeting. But when he returns, the youth looks upon his sister; and see what has taken place in him during an hour passed in the society ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... home of democracy; to America, the Christian, the civilized! What will the answer be? Already we can hear the faint responses, as yet vague and indistinct, the drowned murmurings of the wiser tongues. These must grow into a national anthem whose echo will challenge the powers of the world and startle them into the consciousness of the ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... her day [Note 1.]— and now and then an extra one on Thursday or Saturday. I do not think anything would persuade her to have an assembly, or play cards, on a Friday. But on a Sunday evening she always has her rubber, to Flora's horror. It does not startle me, because I remember it always was so when I lived with her at Carlisle: nor Annas, because she knew people did such things in the South. I find Grandmamma usually spends the winter at the Bath: but ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... up, keeping Nana behind her skirts, lest the child should call out and startle her father, who was at that moment on the extreme edge. She saw the soldering iron and the tiny flame that rose as he carefully passed it along the edges of the zinc. Gervaise, pale with suspense and fear, raised her hands mechanically ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... differing much in sound from those which continued to startle the night, rang suddenly out of the distance. It arose from a spot on the confines of the orchard, and was sharp in tone—sharp almost as the human cries which followed it. Then the distant lights hastened towards the theatre of ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... purpose it is necessary to make use of terms which may alarm some consciences, and to state questions which run the risk of startling sincerely religious persons. But there is no help for it, if we are to combat the adversaries on their own ground; and because it is thus only that, while we startle a few, we can prove to all that the torrent of negations is but a passing rush of waters, which, fret as they may in their channel, shall be found to have left not so much as a trace of their passage upon ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... the situation is governed by Art. 19, the text of which has been several times set out in your columns, of the old Convention of 1799. This may startle those who are acquainted with what occurred at The Hague in 1907, and I have seen no reference to what must be the gist of the German argument on the point. They no doubt argue that the old Convention remains unrepealed by No. xiii. of The Hague, because ...
— Letters To "The Times" Upon War And Neutrality (1881-1920) • Thomas Erskine Holland
... shop. Whatever makes men feel young is great—a great war or a love-story. And in the darkest of the books of God there is written a truth that is also a riddle. It is of the new things that men tire—of fashions and proposals and improvements and change. It is the old things that startle and intoxicate. It is the old things that are young. There is no sceptic who does not feel that many have doubted before. There is no rich and fickle man who does not feel that all his novelties are ancient. There is no worshipper of change who does not feel ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... hunter, as would the massive eight-day clock with its grotesquely painted face, delineating not only the hours and days but the lunar months, and possessing a sonorous chime which just now struck eight with a boom as deep as that of a cathedral bell. The sound appeared to startle the old farmer with a kind of shock, for he rose from his chair and grasped his stick, looking about him as though for the moment uncertain ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... have lived since a child in America, and am alien to the traditions and customs of the old country, and even of the seat to which my fathers belong. I have brought with me from the far West many peculiarities of speech and thought that may startle my kinsfolk. But I certainly shall not address my uncle as 'Hoss!' nor shall I say 'guess' oftener than ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... gives perpetual warning of those smouldering forces ever ready to devastate the surrounding country. Subterranean activity increases during the rainy season, and tremors of earthquake occasionally startle the equanimity of those unused to the perils of existence on this thin crust of Mother Earth, for Java's teeming soil and population rest upon an ominous fissure of the globe's surface, and twelve of the forty-five volcanos ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... artist may be as haughtily isolated from true human love as the man of science, and the fellowship with his kind which Paracelsus needs can be poorly learnt from such a distracted creature as Aprile. It is indeed Aprile's example and the fate which has overtaken him rather than his wild words which startle Paracelsus into a recognition of his own error. But the knowledge that he has left love out of his scheme of life is no guarantee that he will ever acquire the fervour and the infinite patience of love. The whole scene, with its extravagant poetic beauties ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... Ringtail. As he slept, he dreamed of walking in the forest and of hearing the distant barking of dogs. Louder and louder grew the sound until suddenly he awoke to find that it had not all been a dream. So close at hand as to startle him, he heard a wild clamor in which he could distinguish Pal's excited voice. Leaping from his hammock he quickly rounded the corner of the cabin and beheld a weird sight. A torch borne in the hand of a tall man cast a flickering light over a melee of dogs, leaping and barking ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer
... However, he did startle the poor old parish clergyman effectually by calling on him to publish the banns of marriage between Dermot Edward St. Glear Tracy and Lucy Percy Alison, both residing in this parish. He evidently thought we were in hiding from someone who knew of some just cause or impediment; but whereas we certainly ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... an event which gave my thoughts quite a new turn, and seemed to startle even Carmilla's ...
— Carmilla • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... faults proceeding from the weakness and blindness of the Decadence—the faults of men too blind to read his art aright, too weak to stand on their own feet without him—would be either stupid or malicious. If at the close of the sixteenth century the mannerists sought to startle and entrance the world by empty exhibitions of muscular anatomy misunderstood, and by a braggadocio display of meaningless effects—crowding their compositions with studies from the nude, and painting ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... well. She's mad, you know,—mad as a hatter,—and no one can ever guess what freak may come next. One always feels that she'll do something sooner or later that will startle all the world." ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... at it, as if they had never seen it before, and then one of them turned on me quickly, as if to startle me. "Vous etes une ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... white moonshine. The great Piazza of Siena is famous, and though in this day of multiplied photographs and blunted surprises and profaned revelations none of the world's wonders can pretend, like Wordsworth's phantom of delight, really to "startle and waylay," yet as I stepped upon the waiting scene from under a dark archway I was conscious of no loss of the edge of a precious presented sensibility. The waiting scene, as I have called it, was in the shape of a shallow ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... jingle of alliteration or rhyme, which assisted their circulation, and were probably struck off extempore; a manner which Swift practised, who was a ready coiner of such rhyming and ludicrous proverbs: delighting to startle a collector by his facetious or sarcastic humour, in the shape of an "old saying and true." Some of these rhyming proverbs are, however, terse ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... forth again to startle them. "The ox knoweth his owner," he cried, "the ass his master's crib; but Israel doth not know, my people doth ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... remained for a short while—until satisfied that Tiburcio was yet alive. Then a bright thought seemed to startle him; for a voice had spoken to him from within, stronger than the voice of conscience. It was that of personal interest. Cuchillo knew the rare qualities of Tiburcio—his talents as a rastreador, or tracker—his daring prowess in Indian ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... almost in my ear, she whispered, "This is delightful—is it not so? Pray, just hearken to Nicholas: 'With that I fired.' 'Then we tried the covert.' 'The lock jammed.' 'Forty-four brace.' Listen to the huntsmen! Shall we startle them with the horn, tra-la?" And she thrilled with laughter in my ear there in the blissful dark, till I had to put that over ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... arrives it finds a voice as surely as the flower ready to bloom opens its petals. And if there be two lovers equally sincere, both are likely to feel at the same moment the same impetus to revelation. Besides which, Fate of any kind seeks the unusual and the unexpected; it desires to startle, and ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... stairs, with stealthy tread, To the belfry chamber overhead, And startle the pigeons from their perch On the sombre rafters, that round him make Masses ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... waves. Large poles twisted with fir branches, stuck thickly around the lake, gave to the waters the becoming Helvetian gloom. And here, beside three cows all bedecked with ribbons, stood the Swiss maidens destined to startle the shades with the Ranz des Vaches. To the left, full upon the sward, which it almost entirely covered, stretched the great Gothic marquee, divided into two grand sections—one for the dancing, one ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... nothing less than the truthful treatment of material," says Howells. He sometimes insists on considering "honesty" and "realism" as synonymous terms. His primary object is not merely to amuse by a pleasant story or to startle by a horrible one. His object is to reflect life as he finds it, not only unusual or exceptional life. He believes that it is false to real life to overemphasize certain facts, to overlook the trivial, and to make all life dramatic. He says that the realist in fiction "cannot look upon human ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... "well-to-do class" began by regarding their kinsmen d'outre mer with contemptuous dislike; then they looked upon them as a country squire would regard a junior branch which has emigrated and has thriven by emigration; and now they are welcomed in Society because they amuse and startle and stir up the duller depths. But however warm may be private friendship between Englishmen and Anglo-Americans there is no public sympathy nor is any to be expected from the present generation. "New England does not understand Old England and never will," the reverse being equally the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... never knows what tiny thing will startle him to such ancestral and impersonal tears. Piles of superb masonry will often pass like a common panorama; and on this grey and silver morning the ruined towers of the cathedral stood about me somewhat vaguely like grey clouds. ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... We have not been our own makers: it is no fault in you that nature has placed him above you, and, surely, it is no fault in him; and would you punish him on account, and only on account, of his pre-eminence! If you have read this book you will startle with horror at the thought: you will, as to public matters, act with zeal and with good humour, though the place you occupy be far removed from the first; you will support with the best of your abilities others, who, from whatever circumstance, may happen ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... uncharitable in his judgment of them; and thus having really a low opinion of so many of them he could indulge his vindictive rancor without stint; his invective, always powerful, will sometimes startle us by its venom, and we shall be pained to see him apt to make enemies for a good cause ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... let me hence to hell alive descend; Or die the death I dread no less than hell, Sew'd in a sack, and plunged into a well, Ere I my fame by one lewd act disgrace, Or once renounce the honour of my race. 590 For know, sir knight, of gentle blood I came; I loathe a whore, and startle at the name. But jealous men on their own crimes reflect, And learn from thence their ladies to suspect: Else why these heedless cautions, sir, to me These doubts and fears of female constancy This chime still rings in every lady's ear, The ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... poetical than any natural hand without it. In the sublime of sacred poetry, "Who is this that cometh from Edom? with dyed garments from Bozrah?" Would "the comer" be poetical without his "dyed garments?" which strike and startle the spectator, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... Days Engagement is apt to startle an Imagination, which has not been raised and qualify'd for such a Description, by the reading of the ancient Poets, and of Homer in particular. It was certainly a very bold Thought in our Author, to ascribe the ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... created much annoyance to his party for a very brief period—just as other votes given from the usual motives—sometimes right and honorable—sometimes wrong and corrupt—usually do. In his case, however, there was something calculated to startle and alarm all those who knew and were capable of appreciating the stainless honor and hereditary integrity of the family. The M'Mahon's, though inoffensive and liberal in their intercourse with the ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... him. "Here, don't startle me; I've got a weak heart," he observed, with a grin. "You say it as if you meant it. ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... rigid Calvinist. His sermons were gloomy, and so long that he occasionally would startle the congregation by calling out to some culprit, "Sit up there, how daur ye sleep i' the kirk." Some saw-mills in the neighbourhood were burnt down, so the following Sunday we had a sermon on hell-fire. The kirk was very large and quaint; a stair ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... then follows a long account of a poisoning case in Paris, and some songs from a cafe chantant, interspersed with illustrations of the broadest kind. But let us not be too critical; we have seen many things in France which would startle Englishmen, but nothing, we venture to say, more harmful in its tendency, than the weekly broad-sheet of crime which is spread out over our own land (to the number, the proprietors boast, of at least a hundred ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... if accidentally injured by any of these things, it would become very angry and bring sickness or death to the people. The relatives must also be very careful at this time not to make any loud or harsh noises that may startle or anger the shade." We have seen that in like manner after killing a white whale these Esquimaux abstain from the use of cutting or pointed instruments for four days, lest they should unwittingly cut ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... from under Slip the crumbling banks for ever: Like echoes to a distant thunder, They plunge into the gentle river. The river-swans have heard my tread, And startle from their reedy bed. O beauteous birds! methinks ye measure Your movements to some heavenly tune! O beauteous birds! 'tis such a pleasure To see you move beneath the moon, I would it were your true delight To sleep by day and ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... the passages, and neither did her aunt or Tetchen tread with feet as light as that. She sat up, and then the knock was repeated,—very low and very clear. She still paused a moment, resolving that nothing should frighten her,—nothing should startle her. No change that could come to her would, she thought, be a change for the worse. She hastened up from off the bed, and stood upon the floor. Then she gave the answer that is usual to such a summons. "Come in," she said. She spoke low, but with clear voice, so that her ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... is carried by Matter. In most cases sound reaches the ear through the air; but air is not the only medium through which sound is carried. A loud noise will startle fish, and cause them to dart away, so we conclude that the sound must have reached them through the water. An Indian puts his ear to the ground in order to detect distant footsteps, because sounds too ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... utter and wonderful kindness of my friends. I felt so selfish and so surprised at the goodness they showed me. Again, I saw something of the mystery of pain. My own was so trivial compared with that which some others had to bear. Yet I had enough to startle me that such a fact should be permitted on earth at all. I don't suppose we can understand its meaning; but my consolation was that it is not necessarily a sign of God's displeasure—that the highest life was a life of suffering, that the Son ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... absolutely nothing. And we sat talking of other things till he rose to go away. And then, at the very moment he was mounting on his camel, he turned, and came back. And he said: Listen! Thou art hiding from me something that maybe I could startle thee by guessing: but no matter. Keep thy secret: but listen to a piece of good advice, which may serve thee at a pinch. If ever thou wouldst have a woman prize thee, never let her see that thou settest ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... this point of view, the restrictions which may be applied will less startle the friends of truth and justice; they will see in them nothing more than a concession to existing circumstances, dictated solely by the interest of the nation; and if care is taken to limit this concession so that it may never become dangerous; if, in establishing a barrier ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... where to begin—events have moved so swiftly, and such incredible things have happened. Even now I am in a daze, for history is being made every hour—history for Mexico, for you, and for me. I bring you good news and bad news; something to startle you and set your brain in a whirl. I planned to send a messenger ahead of me, and then I said: 'No, this is a crisis; therefore no tongue but mine shall apprise her, no hand but mine shall comfort her. Only a coward shrinks from the unpleasant; I shall ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... my last" (he wrote), "that the discoloration of my skin had begun. The complexion which you were once so good as to admire, has disappeared for ever. I am now of a livid ashen color—so like death, that I sometimes startle myself when I look in the glass. In about six weeks more, as the doctor calculates, this will deepen to a blackish blue; and then, 'the saturation' (as he calls ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... I go to wreak thy murder. Hissing fire of flaming stead, Groan of spear-carles, wail of women, Soon shall startle through the night. Then on Mosfell, Kirtle-Wearer, Eric waits the face of Death. Freed from weary life and sorrow, Soon we'll kiss ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... haste was necessary, but did not dare show it. Above everything we must not be precipitate; not startle the Robot. At worst, if Tugh should return, I could seize this weapon at my feet and turn ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... complexity of those perpendicular streets anything may dwell or happen, and it is in one of them, I believe, that the inquirer may find the offices of the Club of Queer Trades. It may be thought at the first glance that the name would attract and startle the passer-by, but nothing attracts or startles in these dim immense hives. The passer-by is only looking for his own melancholy destination, the Montenegro Shipping Agency or the London office of the Rutland Sentinel, and passes through the twilight passages as one passes ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... lips. I did not start. I had been dreadfully given to starting for a long time,—so much so that I was quite ashamed sometimes, for I would even cry out,—I who had always been so sharp on feminine affectations before; but now it seemed as if nothing could startle me. I only opened my eyes; and there was my great big huge bear looking down on me, with something in his eyes I had never seen there before. But even his presence could not ripple the waters of my deep rest. I gave him half a smile,—I knew it was but ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... tone—the sudden, the almost fierce action—the peculiar abruptness of the apostrophe—the whitely-robed, the almost spiritual elevation of figure—all so dramatic—combined necessarily to startle and surprise; and, for a few moments, no answer was returned to the unlooked-for speech. But the effect could not be permanent upon minds made familiar with the thousand forms of human and strong energies. Munro, after ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... when a thousand thunders war therein An angry war among the heavy clouds. And at the sound the wicked tremble sore, For now they know an awful doom at hand, And quail to find no rescue from its power. The robber drops the plunder from his hand; The lusty startle at the mighty sound, And from their beds of sin turn wildly forth; And from his game the gambler leaps amazed And terror-struck; whereas the drunkard wakes— The sotted drunkard—from his stupid sleep, And feels the awful terrors of the hour. But ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... "public distrust of news is the most notable feature in journalism of recent years," and that the influence of the daily Press on the public mind has hardly ever been at a lower ebb. This frankness is characteristic of a book which on nearly every page contains something to startle or amuse. The author's experiences on his first day in London, including an encounter with a sausage-seller (more friendly than CLEON'S rival); his negotiations for the purchase of The Times, and his offer of the editorship to Lord CURZON, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 10th, 1920 • Various
... minister. Hitotsubashi Harunari was generally known as Wagamama Irikyo (the Wayward Recluse*). His most intimate friends were the shogun's father-in-law, Shimazu Ei-O, and Ikeda Isshinsai. The latter two were also inkyo and shared the tastes and foibles of Harunari. One of their greatest pleasures was to startle society. Thus, when Sadanobu was legislating with infinite care against prodigality of any kind, the above three old gentlemen loved to organize parties on an ostentatiously extravagant scale, and Sadanobu naturally shrank from seeing the title of o-gosho conferred on ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... and take his hand. Begin squeezing soft-like, and press harder till he opens his eyes. Don't startle him," ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... unmirthful laugh. "I'll tell you what, we know little enough here in America, either in the towns or in the cities," he said rapidly. "We are all on the rush. We are all for action. I sit still and think. If I wanted to write I'd do something. I'd tell what everyone thought. It would startle people, frighten them a little, eh? I would tell you what you have been thinking this afternoon while you walked here on this railroad track with me. I would tell you what your mother has been thinking at the same time and what she would like to say ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... things still more surprising Shall on Friday next be told, Things to startle and delight thee, When I've ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... disclosure of his relation to her; and not even by the long deferring of her hope to see him yet again, had she come to pretermit her vigilance. She did not intend to avoid him altogether, only to take heed not to startle him into any recognition of her in the presence of his mother. But when she saw him approaching the house, her courage failed her, and she fled to avoid the danger of betraying both, herself and him. She was in truth ashamed of meeting ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... times I would quite forget myself, and sit staring into vacancy, till Mr. Davies, lifting his nose from his volume, would note my absence and call on me by name, and thump his desk, and startle me with some question on the matter we were supposed to have in hand. A mighty matter, truly, the name of some emperor or the date of some campaign—matter infinitely less real than the name of the ship that was leaving the ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... third-rate English Colony in Paris—all his faults exaggerated, none of his good qualities even hinted at. The good British public has so long been used to look upon him as a minotaur that it will perhaps startle and amuse it to be told that he had many ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... was moved by a desire to startle Meldon. She was really engaged on quite an innocent novel, but she chose to pretend that she was going ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... conceived in this reach-me-down fashion will scarcely have the breath of life in it. If, on the other hand, in the course of his legendary, romantic, or historical reading, some character should take hold upon his imagination and demand to be interpreted, or some episode should, as it were, startle him by putting on vivid dramatic form before his mind's eye, then let him by all means yield to the inspiration, and try to mould the theme into a drama. The real labour of creation will still lie before him; but he may face it with ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... thin mist was drifting across the country, getting lost in valleys where it piled up into fleecy mounds, getting caught in tree-tops where it fluttered like tattered banners. Every now and then, with the suddenness of our approach, we would startle an aged shepherd, muffled and pensive as an Arab, strolling slowly across moorlands, followed closely by the sentinel goats which led his flock. The day had been strangely mystic. Time seemed a mood. I had ceased to trouble about where I was going; that I knew my ultimate ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... be a beaver," answered Miss de Haldimar, in a voice so deep and full of meaning, that it made her cousin startle and turn paler even than before. "Nay, Clara, dearest, command yourself, nor give way to what may, after all, prove a groundless cause of alarm. Yet, I know not how it is, my heart misgives me sadly; for I like not the motions of this animal, which are ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... told they were to die, that some companion had confessed, or that some loved one had ceased to exist;—and all these crises of feeling and anxiety, of surprise and despair, induced with a fiendish deliberation, to startle honor into self-betrayal, wring from exhausted Nature what conscious rectitude would not divulge, or agonize human love ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... faces in the city are to be seen on this street. Women clad in the richest attire pass you with unquiet face and wistful eyes, and men who are envied by their fellows for their "good luck," startle you by the stern, hard set look their features wear. The first find little real happiness in the riches they have sold themselves for, and the latter find that the costly pleasures they courted have been gained at ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... the Jury, whom, it would seem, nothing in this world had power to startle, astonish, or discompose, ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... Seemed to its kindred thousands grown; A rampart all assaults to bear, Till time to dust their frames should wear; A wood like that enchanted grove In which with fiends Rinaldo strove, Where every silent tree possessed A spirit prisoned in its breast, Which the first stroke of coming strife Would startle into hideous life: So dense, so still, the Austrians stood, A living wall, a human wood! Impregnable their front appears, All horrent with projected spears, Whose polished points before them shine, From flank to flank, one brilliant line, Bright as the breakers' splendors run Along ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... movement. There was something so strange and uncanny about it—for I by this time knew the ground well enough to be fully aware that there ought not to be any moving thing there—that I stopped playing and sprang to my feet so suddenly that my movement appeared to startle Ama, who uttered a little cry of alarm, or surprise, and made as though she too ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... the hunter travels against the wind. Otherwise he finds the buffalo as shy and difficult to approach as most game, and many along spoil of crouching and crawling has been made to no purpose—a single sniff of the approaching enemy proving enough to startle the game, and send ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... slipped out of the little garden gate at Sidon to meet that outcast! Do you wonder that as the years passed and YOU were happy, I did not choose to be so forgotten? Do you wonder that when YOU shut the door on the past I managed to open it again—if only a little way—that its light might startle you?" ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... her a source of puzzling surprises. While she was from the South, she was not Southern in speech, sentiments, ideas, or ideals. Her voice was not Southern and, while she elided final consonants, her intonation was not of the South. Indeed she would startle him every now and then by dropping some archaic word or old form of expression that made him think of Chaucer. Her feeling toward the negro was precisely what his was, and once when he halted in some stricture on the Confederacy and ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox
... the woman sitting in the scow, and he saw that she was fast asleep; his tale having no power to startle her senses, ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... to take the empty plate and cup and set them back on the table, but I feared to startle her in my approach, for she was still sitting with averted head. I made a little noise with the things to draw her attention, set them down, ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... little dear; really, you startle one almost into spasms," continued the heartless and beautiful one. "I have a very strong, high spirit, and a will; no iron ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... his courtship, for he believed that he had a clear field before him, and he was too sagacious to startle Clara by overmuch energy. Meantime he began to be conscious that an influence from her was reaching his spirit. He had hitherto considered her a child; one day he suddenly recognized her as a woman. ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... that of his own country. The existence, almost under the shadow of the flag of the freest institutions the earth ever knew, of a government as purely despotic as that of the autocrat of Russia is a monstrous fact that must startle the most indifferent observer. ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... the almost fierce action—the peculiar abruptness of the apostrophe—the whitely-robed, the almost spiritual elevation of figure—all so dramatic—combined necessarily to startle and surprise; and, for a few moments, no answer was returned to the unlooked-for speech. But the effect could not be permanent upon minds made familiar with the thousand forms of human and strong energies. Munro, after ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... Chapel, with the skulls of its Doric frieze and the unpunishable cherub over its portals, looks serenely to the sunsets; Harvard, within whose ancient walls we are gathered, and whose morning bell has murdered sleep for so many generations of drowsy adolescents, is at its post, ready to startle the new-fledged freshmen from their first uneasy slumbers. All these venerable edifices stand as they did when we were boys,—when our grandfathers were boys. Let not the rash hand of innovation violate ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser
... "Mohawk," suddenly uttered, was sufficient to startle a New Brunswick Indian. The late Edward Jack upon asking an Indian child, "What is a Mohawk?" received this reply, "A Mohawk is a bad Indian who kills people and eats them." Parkman describes the Mohawks as the fiercest, the boldest, yet most ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... I turn away from such a voice? What if some of her doctrines may startle my untutored and ignorant understanding? . . . If she is the appointed teacher, she will know best what truths to teach. . . . The disciple is not above his master . . . or wise in requiring him ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... forwards, which left more disciplined and plodding competitors far behind. The list, indeed, which he has left on record of the works, in all departments of literature, which he thus hastily and greedily devoured before he was fifteen years of age, is such as almost to startle belief,—comprising, as it does, a range and variety of study, which might make much older ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... wood rings with our voices shrill, That startle the sleeping bird! To-morrow eve must the voice be still, And the step must fall unheard. The Briton lies by the blue Champlain, In Ticonderoga's towers, And ere the sun rise twice again, Must they and ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... sand did not startle him more than that strange lonely cry startled me. Indeed, as between the two of us, I had rather the worse of it: for Crusoe, at least, knew that he was dealing with a reality, while I could not be certain that I was not dealing with a bit of a dream in which there ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... relief of thinking that she'd been able to get help in just an ordinary fashion. Of course, if he or I had known what a risk she was running we'd have been half wild with anxiety about her. So you see it really was hard for you not to scream or do anything to startle that man." ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Mountains - or Bessie King's Strange Adventure • Jane L. Stewart
... unwilling to startle his proselyte, by insisting upon any topic which appeared particularly to jar with his habits or principles; and he blended his mirth and his earnest so dexterously, that it was impossible for Nigel ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... "Lord, how you startle me, sir!" said Gillian; then continued, turning to Philip Guarine, "Your friend is a ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... illumined. The whole book by noble gestures and inclinations renders many words unnecessary. English sense has toiled, but Hindoo wisdom never perspired. Though the sentences open as we read them, unexpensively, and at first almost unmeaningly, as the petals of a flower, they sometimes startle us with that rare kind of wisdom which could only have been learned from the most trivial experience; but it comes to us as refined as the porcelain earth which subsides to the bottom of the ocean. They are clean and dry as fossil truths, which have been exposed to the elements for thousands of ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... boundary. You have been watching them creeping up in a large semicircle toward the forbidden ground. As long as they are on their own run let them alone, give them not a moment's anxiety of mind; but directly they reach the boundary, show yourself with your dog in your most terrific aspect. Startle them, frighten them, disturb their peace; do so again and again, at the same spot, from the very first day. Let them always have peace on their own run, and none anywhere off it. In a month or two you will find the sheep begin to understand your meaning, and it will then be very ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... these pictures, the floors of the houses are much more wonderful. They are marvels of art. Not only are flowers and running vines and complicated designs there laid in mosaics, but pictures that startle with their life-like beauty. There are many of these, but perhaps the finest of all is the one found in the same house with the Dancing Faun. It represents a battle. A squadron of victorious Greeks is rushing upon part of a Persian army. The latter are ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... ambition is not to perform feats which startle the world and give him fame, but rather to live the life of the moderate and harmonious one; yet how often for lack of true discernment he fails! This middle path is not, however, hidden from the sincere and pure; even common men and women may ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... at an hour fixed upon before hand. They can be commanded less by artists than by other men, for they are all more or less struck by some sacred malady whose paralyzing torpor they must shake off, whose benumbing pain they must forget, to be joyous and amused by those pyrotechnic fires which startle the bewildered guests, who see from time to time a Roman candle, a rose-colored Bengal light, a cascade whose waters are of fire, or a terrible, yet quite innocent dragon! Gayety and the strength necessary to be joyous, are, unfortunately things ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... revolution. It is urged by advocates of this doctrine, quite truly, that all political events are brought about by minorities, since the majority are indifferent to politics. But there is a difference between a minority in which the indifferent acquiesce, and a minority so hated as to startle the indifferent into belated action. To make the Bolshevik doctrine reasonable, it is necessary to suppose that they believe the majority can be induced to acquiesce, at least temporarily, in the revolution ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... startle you?" David enquired. "He is not troubling us. I'm not afraid of him. In fact, I feel inclined to go and have a talk ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... had wrenched back. The Pinto drove against the gray and crashed down. It lay kicking as the larger horse hit out with forefeet, bringing them heavily down on the Pinto. The Pinto let out a cry of rage and pain that seemed to startle even Shiloh. The gray backed away from his writhing enemy and stood shivering, his head outstretched, nostrils distended. Drew fired for the second time and the helpless kicking ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... to me. I am going to say something which will startle you. All these quiet years, all the time which has gone by and left only a dim memory of a certain man to you, have been spent by me smothering down regrets, stifling my youth, crushing what would have made me joyous and womanly—for Philip Arnold has not been remembered at all dimly by ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... the thought away from him and soon was listening to Killigrew's tales of Paris, some of which were so obviously meant to startle him that he kept to himself the fact that they succeeded. Awkwardness died between them, and when he turned in up the new drive—still only half-made, but the whole scheme of it clear—Ishmael could glow at the other's admiration of ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... top of my voice: I wished to startle and put them to flight. My followers shouted in chorus; but our voices reached not ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... content ourselves with the environments of evil and forego forever the voice that calls us away to partake of things which shall be as wine and honey to the soul, frightens me; startles me as the sudden thunder of the surf might startle one who ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... recluse of the Rue Lafitte, who I believe has been most malignantly traduced by the third-rate English Colony in Paris—all his faults exaggerated, none of his good qualities even hinted at. The good British public has so long been used to look upon him as a minotaur that it will perhaps startle and amuse it to be told that ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... Prussian military philosophy, dating back as far as Frederick II., but intensified by the exhortations of press and professors during our own times. The mind of the average kindly German citizen has been debauched and yet again debauched until it needed just such a world crisis as this to startle him at last from his obsession and to see his position and that of his country in its true relation with humanity ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... hope I did not startle you when I came aboard. And I said things I should not have said in the presence of a lady. But believe me, senorita, I ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... saw an apple fall, he found In that slight startle from his contemplation— 'Tis said (for I'll not answer above ground For any sage's creed or calculation)— A mode of proving that the earth turn'd round In a most natural whirl, call'd "gravitation"; And this is the sole mortal who could grapple, Since Adam, with a ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... your pardon, Miss Richards," he exclaimed, stopping short, and regarding her with apparent surprise, while he lifted his hat to her with great politeness, "I hope I did not startle you." ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... message the orderly had brought. He answered strangely, saying he had received orders to go at once to Ripley on the stage; that he might be gone several days. There was nothing about all that to startle a soldier's daughter, but Dupont kept his hand on my father's arm, urging him to hurry. The actions of the man aroused my suspicions. I knew my father was acting paymaster, and I could perceive the outlines ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... talking, and talking of himself above all; who is not ashamed to attribute to himself all sorts of mad inconsistent humours, and to contradict himself on every page, if thereby he can only win your eye, or startle your curiosity, and induce you to follow him. After so long and grave a discussion, suddenly it occurs to him that it is time for a little miscellaneous confidential chat about himself, and those certain oddities ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... the Circle C riders handcuffed Dutch and tied him to a horse. Soon the posse was off again, having left the prisoner in charge of one of the men. They swung round in a wide half circle, not wishing to startle their game until the proper time. The horses pounded up hills, slid into washes, and plowed through sand on a Spanish trot, sometimes in the moonlight, more often in darkness. The going was rough, but they could ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... may commend his poor soul to God. Then he is indeed between heaven and earth. He knows that the slightest shift of the ladder—and a single false step may shift it—will dash him helplessly down to certain death. Stop the clang of the bells beneath him, it may startle him! The spectators far below on the earth involuntarily clasp their hands breathlessly; the jackdaws, who have been driven from their last place of refuge by the ascending figure, caw as they flutter wildly ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... yet not so near as to startle her friend. A tall brass candlestick, with a lighted tallow candle in it, stood on the table in the parlor window; but the room in which Letty sat was unlighted save by the fire on the hearth, which gleamed brightly behind the quaint andirons—Hessian ...
— The Romance of a Christmas Card • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... intended prey (the sharpness of Mr. Godwin's pen cut the legal cords with which it was attempted to bind them), it might have done so sooner, and with more lasting effect. The world do not know (and we are not sure but the intelligence may startle Mr. Godwin himself), that he is the author of a volume of Sermons, and of a ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... above her head in a stern effort at self control, and then flung them down with an irrepressible moan—"it is simply that I am hungry, and thirsty, and cold, and tired and I want to go back to my old home, to my only home in the heart of the man I love. My poor child, do I startle you by talking in this passionate lawless, way? You invited my confidence, and it is such a relief to give it to you. To every one else in the world I must keep up the desolate show of appearing heartless and lifeless, incapable of compassion, of suffering and yearning. But with you, ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... when he contrives to kill two at one time. He does not like to do it, but there is money in it, you know; and he pockets his unholy blood money without a squirm. Don't prosecute him; if you do, he will make revelations that will startle ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... and positively nothing to do but have a good time for three solid weeks in the wilderness. The pestiferous telephone can not play the earwig on board this ship; the telegraph, with metallic tick, can not once startle us by precipitating town tattle; the postal service is cut off; wars and rumors of wars, the annihilation of a nation, even the swallowing up of a whole continent, are now of less consequence to us than the possibility of a rain-shower this afternoon, ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... day I had the luck to startle him out of his reserve. Miss Kit came down to the yard that morning, and for the first time for more than a week ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... own door. He realized that he was somewhat out of breath. The night had fallen and the house revealed but little light from the front. Through the door he could see that the dining-room was lighted. He tried the door stealthily and entered with caution. It would not do to startle Sylvia. ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... glad to be alive, was in a playful mood, full of attractive grace. Renine, lest he should startle her, refrained from alluding to the compact into which they had entered at his suggestion. She told him how she had left La Mareze and said that she had not heard ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... you astonish me. Nay, you startle me—for a question like that implies a doubt in you whether I have not actually ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... consequence is, that let one arrive starved at an inn, one can obtain nothing till such hours as those who are not starving desire to eat;—and if one is foredone with travel, weary, and wanting rest, the pitiless alarum-bell, calling those who may have had twelve hours' sleep from their beds, must startle those who have only just closed their eyes for the first time, perhaps for three nights,—as if the whole traveling community were again at boarding-school, and as if a private summons by the boots or chambermaid to each apartment would ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... are that, it may be said in their favour that they startle us into thought. And truly Mr. Chesterton is invaluable as a quickener and stimulator of the minds of his readers. Moreover, by adopting the method of paradox, he has undoubtedly done one remarkable thing. He has proved what an astonishing number of paradoxical surprises ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... brought her nearer the destiny into which this man was forcing her. Food choked her, and she ate but little. Occasionally, with staring eyes, she would fall into a reverie, from which his least word would startle her to a shiver of apprehension. This she always controlled after the first ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... uttered in a very low voice, but they produced sound enough to startle Meg Merrilies, who led the van, and who, having already gained the place where the cavern expanded, had risen upon her feet. She began, as if to confound any listening ear, to growl, to mutter, and to sing aloud, and at the same time to make a bustle among some brushwood which ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... of all Atlee's missions, for Brumsey was the weakest and most transparent of all imbecile Whigs. A junior diplomatist of small faculties and great ambitions, he wanted to do something, not being clear as to what, which should startle his chiefs, and make 'the Office' exclaim: 'See what Sam Brumsey has been doing! Hasn't Brumsey hit the nail on the head! Brumsey's last despatch is the finest state-paper since the days of Canning!' Now no one knew the ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... moved a mite. That is one of the peculiarities of the boy, you can't surprise him: nothin' seems to startle him. ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... be with the nervous little seed-pods of the touch-me-not, which children ever love to pop and see the seeds fly, as they do from balsam pods in grandmother's garden, they still startle with the suddenness of their volley. Touch the delicate hair-trigger at the end of a capsule, and the lightning response of the flying seeds makes one jump. They sometimes land four feet away. At this rate of progress a year, and with the other ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... Kalliope must have been on the watch, for she ran down to open the door to them, and the gladness which irradiated her face as Sir Jasper's first 'All right,' lighted up her features, which were so unlike the shop-girl prettiness that Mr. White expected as quite to startle him. ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... more ordinary practice of kissing—there is the "ceremonial kiss"—the kissing of hands, or of feet and toes, which still survives in Court functions—whilst the Viennese and the Spaniards, though they no longer actually carry out their threat, habitually startle a foreigner by exclaiming—"I kiss your hands." The Russian Sclavs are the most profuse and indiscriminate of European peoples in their kissing. I have seen a Russian gentleman about to depart on a journey "devoured" by the kisses of his relations and household retainers, male ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... meaning, as crisp and fresh as just-minted bank-notes. They should have no taint of flatness or insipidity. They should show not the faintest trace of wear. With them, one might hope, now and then, to startle the imagination, to set it running in channels which are strange and delightful to it. For there is something new under the sun: aerial adventure; and the most lively and unjaded fancy may, at first, need direction toward the realization of this fact. ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... colors. Every lady will remember the scene where he rushes to the heroine's home and implores her to return with him to the bedside of his dying wife. The sudden announcement that his wife—whom he had thought in a good state of health—is dying, is surely enough to startle even a miser out of his niggardliness, much less a hero; and yet what do we find Vasher doing? The heroine, in frantic excitement, has to pass through his smoking room, and on the table she sees—what? "A half-smoked cigar." He was in the middle ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... occasional meals during holiday week. Then, with Miss Molly and her father, and Herr and Frau Deichenberg, there will be a nice little party here at home. Those boys, Jim and Len, have appetites that will startle you. Oh, yes; we have lots to eat, Chloe, but—well, you ...
— Dorothy's Triumph • Evelyn Raymond
... laughed a little. "But we can remedy that, can't we, Amy? But you might hint at what I'm expecting of her. I don't want to startle her." He came and sat down beside her. "You are always a great dear about doing ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... is one of the most powerful instances of analysis, and may be taken as a symbol of the whole work. And the depiction of the sportsman's feelings when he brings down a wounded bird, half shame and half rage, will startle and impress every man ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... rising, bore an equally bright testimony to her countless virtues. Every nation, tribe, and kindred, mourned after its own fashion; and how soundless was the mourning of all! My own tread, though slow and upon smooth-rolled paths, seemed to startle, because it formed the sole break to a silence otherwise total. Not only the winds, but the very fitful, wandering airs, were that afternoon, as by common consent, all fallen asleep in their various ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... and night and dawn, and sudden fire. Janet was bald to the heart inhabiting me then, as if quite shaven. She could speak her affectionate mind as plain as print, and it was dull print facing me, not the arches of the sunset. Julia had only to lisp, 'my husband,' to startle and agitate me beyond expression. She said simple things—'I slept well last night,' or 'I dreamed,' or 'I shivered,' and plunged me headlong down impenetrable forests. The mould of her mouth to a reluctant 'No,' and her almost invariable drawing in of her breath with a 'Yes,' surcharged ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... not see? It is a device of the Senate to startle our friends from Bosphorus. The faggots and straw blaze up fiercely round the wall; then, when all is confusion, the substance in the sealed vessels escapes and at once puts out the fire, and the laugh is with us. Our friends from Bosphorus know ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... like the surf of a far-off sea. Away to the side, with a stretch of sunburnt grass between, lay the river. Let Bertrand keep to the winding road and all was well. Gallop how he might Grey Roland would wear him down, but let him swerve, let the fluttering of a bird startle him aside, and Ursula de Vesc's prophetic ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... piteously as she, such was the contagion of hysterical terror. Then, with one accord, we lifted up our voices, weak with weeping, in a thin screech. I said "Help! help! help!" she cried, "Murder! murder!" and "Cap'n Ga-a-tes!" We made enough noise to startle the dogs in the house-yard and at the stables, and brought from the nearer "quarters" and corn-field a gang of negroes, of all sizes and ages, all running at the top of their speed, and the faster as they descried us. It would have been excruciatingly funny at any other time, ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... these ladies had remained with them as long as at one time seemed probable. Charlotte's light intervention had thus become a cause, operating covertly but none the less actively, and Fanny Assingham's speech, which she had followed up a little, echoed within him, fairly to startle him, as the indication of something irresistible. He could see now how this superior force had worked, and he fairly liked to recover the sight—little harm as he dreamed of doing, little ill as he dreamed of wishing, the three ladies, whom he had after all entertained for a ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... stagnant, its further development is arrested. The activity of the higher faculties of the mind are in abeyance, but not destroyed. It needs the electric shock of contact and conflict with foreign races to startle the race out of its fatal repose and start it on new lines of progress by demanding, on pain of death, or at least of racial subordination, the introduction of new elements into its social order by a renewed exercise of the constructive imagination. For without such action of the constructive imagination ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... affair seriously. When he returned with the axe she was hugely alarmed lest he harm himself by his awkward way of carrying it, and gave him much wholesome advice in her most maternal manner. After all of which she would catch his eye, and they would both laugh to startle ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... he thought of the whole performance; but a friend of the lean man, who sat just in front of Arick, tells me what seemed to startle him most. The first thing was when two of the officers came out with blackened faces, like minstrels, and began to dance. Arick was sure that they were really black, and his own people, and he was wonderfully surprised to see them dance in this new ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... within, and stubborn 'facts' without, would be found. He has created a God after his own mind; if he could but have created a universe also after his own mind, we should doubtless have been relieved from all our perplexities. But, unhappily, we find in it, as I imagine, the very things which so startle Mr. Newman in the Scriptural representations of the divine character and proceedings. Is he not, like all other infidels, peculiarly scandalized, that God should have enjoined the extermination of the Canaanites? and yet does not God do still more ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... one's experience is a much larger and older thing than the experience which mere memory records. It is that which one has lost; and one of the greatest mysteries of art lies in the fact that a picture, or a sudden music, or a page in a book, will sometimes startle one into the consciousness of having heard, seen, known, felt the emotion before, elsewhere, beyond ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... satirist. During four-and-thirty years Bourdaloue distributed, to those who would take it, the bread of life—plain, wholesome, prepared skilfully and with clean hands, never varying from the evenness and excellence of its quality. He does not startle or dazzle a reader; he does what ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... gayly. "What could you expect when prowling amongst the graves in a church-yard so lone and solitary, like a goule, on a damp November night? I saw you from Mr. Osborne's going toward it, and determined to startle you—and I think ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... in the matter of uniform and equipment. The officers may write to the papers demanding the heads of the Horse Guards in default of cleaner redress for grievances; the men may break loose across a country town and seriously startle the publicans; but neither officers nor men have it in their composition to mutiny after the continental manner. The English people, when they trouble to think about the army at all, are, and with justice, absolutely assured that it is absolutely trustworthy. Imagine for a moment ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... manner seemed to startle Mr. Locke Harper; he threw towards her one of his flashing, ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... means believe it. So that if I were interpreter of the late omens, I should rather see them pointed at the vices which prevail; at the corruptions of the public morals, which are fouler than aught I had so much as dreamed of before I was myself a witness of them, and may well be supposed to startle the gods from their rest, and draw down their hottest thunderbolts. But I will not say more, when there must be so many able to do so much better in behalf of what I must still believe to be a good cause. Let me entreat the Emperor, before he condemns, to hear. There ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... strange old gentleman whose eccentricity had become the nucleus for a thousand fantastic stories. Some of these fables—to my shame be it spoken—might possibly be traced back to mine own veracious self; and if any passages of the present tale should startle the reader's faith, I must be content to bear the stigma of ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the belief in the inevitableness of yet denser and more multitudinous agglomerations in the future is so widely diffused, that at first sight it will be thought that no other motive than a wish to startle can dictate the proposition that not only will many of these railway-begotten "giant cities" reach their maximum in the commencing century, but that in all probability they, and not only they, but their water-born prototypes in the East also, are destined to such a process of ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... with voices shrill, That startle the sleeping bird; To-morrow eve must the voice be still, And the step must fall unheard. The Briton lies by the blue Champlain, In Ticonderoga's towers, And ere the sun rise twice again, The towers and the lake ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... JANE! I wish you wouldn't come and startle me with your horrid telegrams—there, give it to me. (Reading.) "Wife down, violent influenza. Must come without her, TOOMER." (Resentfully.) Again! and I know she's had it twice since the spring—it's too tiresomely inconsid—no, it isn't—it's the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 21, 1893 • Various
... playground of cranks of all varieties, and the plain common-sense man seems to shrink from being vocal in such company. It is a pity. The plain common-sense man should believe in himself a little more. The result would perhaps startle his modesty. And he should begin instantly on the resumption of Parliament. He will of course be told that he is premature. But no matter. When he gets up and makes a row he will be told that he is premature, until Sir Edward Grey is in a position to announce in the icy ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... belonged to the abnormal conditions of an island where black and white were in relations impossible in the countries from which the white man had come. It did not even startle Dyck that all the planters, and the people generally in the island, from the chief justice and custos rotulorum down to the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... hearts a-blazing in every chink, With coals for food and water to drink, We plunge up the mountain and traverse the moor, And startle the grouse in our daily tour. We yell at the deer in their lonely glen, Shoot past the village and circle the Ben, We flash through the city on viaducts high, As straight as an arrow, my ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... it. Nurse Lucy was lying down with a bad headache, she knew; but the farmer was still in the kitchen. She heard him moving about now, though he had said he was going off to the orchard. She would steal in softly and startle him, ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... great pride in the sonorous tones of his voice, and loved nothing more dearly than to steal up behind a man and startle the unsuspecting one by giving a very loud "Hem." It was a "Hem," however, which helped to make the actor's winding-sheet, for one fine day he repeated the trick, burst a blood-vessel, ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... there are the transport-wagons, with their long span of oxen straggling all across the road, and a nervous bullock precipitating himself under your horse's nose. The driver, too, invariably takes the opportunity of a lady passing him to crack his whip violently, enough to startle any horse except Scotsman. Then when you have passed the place where the wagons most do congregate, and think you are tolerably safe and need only look out for ruts and holes in the street, lo! a furious galloping behind you, and some half dozen of the "gilded youth" of Maritzburg dash past ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... He will never marry, but has devoted himself to the problems of the Secret of the World, in which he too believes, though his studies have led him far more scientifically than me; and yet in his hours of thought, I know that a vision of beauty and a sweet voice will often startle him, and he rises then into scenes of his loftiest, grandest ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... now that to say in thine ear that may possibly startle thy preceptions, shock thy wishes, and for the moment interfere with thy store of tragick recollection. I would have thee imagine with me, that Macbeth, stifling all murderous intent, and all disloyal thought, had honestly gone down at ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... with the lowest and most resigned submission, fate having decreed you sole arbiter of the productions of human wit in this polite and most accomplished age. Methinks the number of appellants were enough to shock and startle any judge of a genius less unlimited than yours; but in order to prevent such glorious trials, the person, it seems, to whose care the education of your Highness is committed, has resolved, as I am told, to keep you in almost an universal ignorance of our studies, which ...
— English Satires • Various
... is not worth attending to. The difficulty of the language, fear of some great intoxication among the Indians; finally, the apprehension lest my younger children should be caught by that singular charm, so dangerous at their tender years; are the only considerations that startle me. By what power does it come to pass, that children who have been adopted when young among these people, can never be prevailed on to readopt European manners? Many an anxious parent I have seen last war, who at the return of the peace, went to the Indian villages where they knew their children ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... something in the utmost genial and kind in his look and way; he was not a person from whom one would keep back anything he wanted to know; as also evidently he was not one to ask anything he should not. The request did not even startle Eleanor. She looked thoughtfully over the heaving sea while ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... had felt the Adventist infection, and did not want to commit himself. So he turned to Mrs. Anderson. She answered like a seraph every question put to her—the conventional questions never pierce the armor of a hypocrite or startle the conscience of a self-deceiver. Mr. Hall congratulated her in his most official tone (a compound of authority, awfulness, and sanctity) on her deep experience of the things that made for her everlasting peace. He ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... idleness or curiosity, while they strive to find evil in everything, they do not comprehend that others still believe in the good. Therefore they have to be so nonchalant as to stop their ears, lest the hum of the busy world should suddenly startle them from sleep. The father allows his son to go where so many others go, where Cato himself went; he says that youth is but fleeting. But when he returns, the youth looks upon his sister; and see what has taken ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... was absolute, a couple or more of prairie-wolves lurking in the vicinity, without the faintest note of prelude, would startle the calm of night with their peculiar commingling of barks, howls and wails,—a racket all their own. It was the habit of these night prowlers of the desert to come as near to the camp as their acute sense of safety permitted, and there, sitting on their haunches, ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... At the edge of a clearing enclosed by a worm fence I came to a row of slave-cabins. Mongrel dogs barked through the fence, and in one angle of it a young white man with long straight hair showed himself so abruptly as to startle my horse. Only the one cabin was lighted, and thence came the rhythmic shuffle of bare-footed dancers while the fiddle played "I lay ten dollars down." There were three couples on the floor, and I saw—for ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... then, not too often. He did not mean to startle any one with his purpose, but to let it grow gradually. Still, at the last assembly of the season, his attentions were somewhat pronounced. It was partly her doings, she was sheltering herself from ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... the day. The former version was the more generally accredited, from Robespierre's known hatred to Danton, to whom Saint Just said, in his accusation—"Mirabeau, who meditated a change of dynasty, appreciated the force of thy audacity, and laid hands upon it. Thou didst startle him from the laws of stern principle; we heard nothing more of thee until the massacres of the Champ-de-Mars. Thou didst support that false measure of the people, and the proposition of the law, which had no other object than to serve for a pretext ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... art. It may be the golden sunset or the breezy noon, the solemn breadth of twilight, or the silvery freshness of morn—the something of colour, of form, of light and shade, floating rapidly away, that makes the meanest and most commonplace view at times startle us with wonder at its beauty, when treated ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... whether a month hence he will be rich or poor, whether in a year's time he may not be rowing an Algerian galley under the lash of the slave-driver. Above all do not teach him this, like his catechism, in cold blood; let him see and feel the calamities which overtake men; surprise and startle his imagination with the perils which lurk continually about a man's path; let him see the pitfalls all about him, and when he hears you speak of them, let him cling more closely to you for fear lest he should fall. "You will make him timid and cowardly," do you say? We shall see; let ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... statement; furthermore, the same authority, has described—in his Etudes et Portraits—the enormous travail of Maupassant in pursuit of style—he, seemingly, the most spontaneous writer of his generation. His books offend, delight, startle, and edify thousands of readers. That they have done absolute harm we are not prepared to say; book wickedness is, after all, an academic, not a vital question. If all the wicked books that have seen the light of publication had wrought the evil predicted of them the earth ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... not like the thoughts of a ghostly visitor: and the reputation of conversing with the dead might be almost as inconvenient as that of dealing with the devil. For the present, then, farewell! I will never startle you with too sudden an apparition; but you may learn to behold my disappearance ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... swift and sudden it went on to the end. She had come on board the yacht that first night to startle it with her beauty and her voice; last night, silent and stately, she had slipped through the evening like a dream; now she stood before him a dazzling creature of the morning: yesterday she was Penseroso; to-day she was Allegro; what would ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... man's dominion Hath broken Nature's social union, And justifies that ill opinion Which makes thee startle At me, thy poor earth-born companion, ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... ivy-clad ruin could barely be distinguished; presently, a burst of music from the band was immediately followed by a remarkably strong beam of light, which shot into the darkness with such effect as to fairly startle those present. Then it rested on the grey walls of the huge pile, bathing in brightness the massive stones and clinging ivy, the respective colours of each being vividly apparent. But the most striking feature was yet to come. ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... their way thither. As they came up to the house a woman came out, gazed intently at John and, with a scream of terror, ran back into the house. It was one of Martha's maids. John stood irresolute, fearing that his sudden appearance might startle the other inmates when, suddenly, Mary appeared at the door, looking pale but resolute. She, too, gazed fixedly at John; and her lips moved, but ...
— For the Temple - A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem • G. A. Henty
... same queer wavering movement. There was something so strange and uncanny about it—for I by this time knew the ground well enough to be fully aware that there ought not to be any moving thing there—that I stopped playing and sprang to my feet so suddenly that my movement appeared to startle Ama, who uttered a little cry of alarm, or surprise, and made as though she too would ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... horribly discordant bell Shall startle slumber; and all men agree That whatsoever other things may be A cause of sorrow, ...
— The Scarlet Gown - being verses by a St. Andrews Man • R. F. Murray
... doubts enter into the mind at first almost imperceptibly: they exist only as vague indistinct surmises, and by no means take the precise shape or the substance of a formed opinion. At first, probably, they even offend and startle by their intrusion: but by degrees the unpleasant sensations which they once excited wear off: the mind grows more familiar with them. A confused sense (for such it is, rather than a formed idea) of its being desirable that their doubts should prove well founded, and ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... with what we already know, and demand the full truth. We'll use every advantage against him—first make sure to have him alone with us three, and then suddenly exhibit our knowledge and follow it up with questions. We'll startle the secret from him. I'll threaten, if necessary—I'll put the worst possible construction on the facts we possess, and drive him to tell all in self-defence." Florence was scarlet with suppressed energy ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... he knelt upon his side, and she remained on hers, both trembling; but at last the King, dreading to startle her away, rose softly and went round the Pond to where he ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... enough, and whether venomous or not it was enough to startle the watcher, as a serpent some seven or eight feet in length came into sight, travelling through the undergrowth, with its scales ever changing in tint as its folds came more or less into connection with the light that ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... sounds which oft have raised me, whilst they awed, And sent my soul abroad, Might now perhaps their wonted impulse give, Might startle this dull pain, and make it ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... were charging the bunch intrepidly. Others made shift with flat sirup-cans with pebbles inside. A few, like Pink and the Silent One, flapped their slickers till their arms ached. Anything, everything that would make a din and startle the cattle out of their lethargy, was pressed ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower
... see you!" threw down a stone from the battlement, which leapt, crashing down the face of the rock close beside them. Great was their relief when a loud laugh from above told them that the sentry had been in jest, and had but tried to startle his comrade; then the two sentries, conversing as they went, moved away to another part ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... darting down the vista of the brook, Proclaims the scared kingfisher, and a plash And turbid streak upon the streamlet's face, Betray the water-rat's swift dive and path Across the bottom to his burrow deep. The moss is plump and soft, the tawny leaves Are crisp beneath my tread, and scaly twigs Startle my wandering eye like basking snakes. Where this thick brush displays its emerald tent, I stretch my wearied frame, for solitude To steal within my heart. How hushed the scene At first, and then, to the accustomed ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... which told her this. Was this the girl who had never spoken of her past life in the hearing of any one—who had never named father or mother or home, except perhaps to little Marjorie? Mrs Esselmont was a wise woman. She would have liked well to hear more, but she asked no question to startle her into silence again. ...
— Allison Bain - By a Way she knew not • Margaret Murray Robertson
... that the proceedings may not be interrupted," said Mr Morgan; and then everybody looked towards the open door: the sight they saw there was enough to startle the calmest spectator. Elsworthy, who was seated close by, sprang from his stool with a low resounding howl of amazement, upsetting his lowly seat, and staggering back against the wall, in the excess of his wonder and consternation. The judges themselves forgot their ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... lads. Ye must hold on," he said, in an eager but subdued voice. "Doubtless it would be pleasant to vent our feelings in a hearty cheer, but it would startle the old gentleman inside. Get along with you, and let us get ready a ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... Engagement is apt to startle an Imagination, which has not been raised and qualify'd for such a Description, by the reading of the ancient Poets, and of Homer in particular. It was certainly a very bold Thought in our Author, to ascribe the first Use of Artillery to the Rebel Angels. But as such a pernicious Invention may ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... making a sudden move, I took his picture. All was as merry as a marriage bell, and might have continued so but for that puppy Sim. That is the trouble with skunks; they will lose their manners if startled, and dogs startle skunks. ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... replied the artist, laying down his weapons and grasping Gibault's proffered hand with a sigh of evident relief, "I am well, excellently well. You did, indeed, startle me by your sudden appearance; but no harm is done, and where none was intended no apology is necessary. You are a Frenchman, ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... ledge, neither of the boys spoke, lest their voices should startle him, and make him fall; but now, they both cried ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... this is true, the prophet's aspirations are founded on the facts of human nature too, and judgments do sometimes startle those whom kindness had failed to touch. It is an awful thought that human nature may so steel itself against the whole armoury of divine weapons as that favour and severity are equally blunted, and the heart ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... Alan would be pleased; but the Highlandman's vanity was ready to startle at a less matter ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... respect of an excitable youth starving in the pursuit of a fine art against the violent opposition of his family. Only when Mendelssohn, at the age of seventeen, visited Paris in 1825, did Cherubini startle every one by praising a young composer ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... ordinary tests in spelling, grammar, and punctuation. I do not hesitate to say that if twenty of the most honoured and popular women-writers were asked to sit for an examination in these simple branches of learning, the general result (granted that a few might emerge with credit) would not only startle themselves but would provide innocent amusement for the rest of mankind. Of course I make no reference here to the elegances and refinements of written language. My charge is that not the mere rudiments ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... a more than usually violent quarrel between Pedro and Raoul, their father came suddenly upon them in a retired portion of the castle grounds. The sight was enough to startle even a man so used to shedding human blood as had been the ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... home—the strangest home-going,—for by this time her mission and her aspirations could no longer be hid, and rumour must have carried the news almost as quickly as any modern telegraph, to startle all the echoes of the village, heretofore unaware of any difference between Jeanne and her companions save the greater goodness to which everybody bears testimony. No doubt, it must have reached Jacques d'Arc's cottage even before she came back with the kind ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... lads," the captain ordered, "she is going to give us a broadside. When it is over start one of those sea beggar songs you picked up at Brill; that will startle them, and they will think we are crowded with men and going to ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... was enough to startle Jolly Robin. But the moon-faced man paid not the slightest attention to the accident. There was something ghostly in the way he stood there, all in white, never moving, never once saying ...
— The Tale of Jolly Robin • Arthur Scott Bailey
... I was but indifferently communicative and had little news to give them, the peasants fell to gossiping among themselves, and they were presently joined by the girl, whose name, it seemed, was Giovannozza. She came to startle them with the rumour of a fresh miracle attributed to the ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... husband, as First Lord of the Bedchamber, she should have a suite of apartments appropriated to her use in the Louvre; but in a few days, when he had accustomed her to converse freely with him upon the subject, Henry put a leading question which must, after all these gracious promises, have tended to startle Mademoiselle de Montmorency, by demanding to know if she personally desired the marriage, as, should it be otherwise, she need only confess the truth with frankness, when he would break off the match, ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... orchards, when she takes her annual holiday in the Highlands of Scotland, the land which is peculiarly dear to her. No sounds of widows weeping for their slain husbands and sons—no fierce battle-cries—no terrible wailings over slaughtered families and ruined homes—startle the still air. But, instead, the children sing the national anthem, as if they knew all that it means; and wherever, on this or the other side of the Tweed, the dear familiar face, with its crown of silvering hair, is seen, the people cry, ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... America, either in the towns or in the cities," he said rapidly. "We are all on the rush. We are all for action. I sit still and think. If I wanted to write I'd do something. I'd tell what everyone thought. It would startle people, frighten them a little, eh? I would tell you what you have been thinking this afternoon while you walked here on this railroad track with me. I would tell you what your mother has been thinking at the same time and what she would ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... Enterprises man must have felt a twinge of premonition even as he took it up, but the effect was still enough to startle him. "Bureau of Economic ...
— Subversive • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... her work, getting up from time to time to turn the roast which she had impaled upon a sharp stick above the glowing coals, the bride had a stream of shy callers, of the little people of the woods. She sat very still, so as not to startle them, and there is much curiosity among these people ...
— Old Indian Days • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... and I used him sore, So you never shall startle Frankie more, Without capsizing Earth and her waters. ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... ourselves almost opposite to it, and then began to keep watch. What we should see pass up the avenue we could only surmise, but our suppositions certainly did not lead us to imagine in the faintest degree the sight which before long was destined to completely startle us. ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... head of you that would startle you," thought Dick,—this was before the red-haired girl had brought him under the guillotine,—but he only said, "I am very sorry," and harrowed Torpenhow's soul that evening with blasphemies against Art. Later, insensibly and to a large extent against ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... "How you did startle me!" cried Dan in a hoarse whisper. "But I'm awfully glad you've come." Dan's face was perfectly white, and he was trembling visibly. "Kitty, what can I do? I have been such a—such a fool; worse than a fool. Look!" holding up a paper partly burnt, ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... all is—how even the most commonplace and familiar objects take on another character. The trees group themselves differently; they draw closer together, as if in fear. The very silence has another quality than the silence of the day. And it is full of half-heard whispers—whispers that startle—ghosts of sounds long dead. There are living sounds, too, such as are never heard under other conditions: notes of strange night-birds, the cries of small animals in sudden encounters with stealthy foes or in their dreams, a rustling ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... human body; that a light has been found which can penetrate, so as to make a photographic record, through everything from a purse or a pocket to the walls of a room or a house, is news which cannot fail to startle everybody. That the eye of the physician or surgeon, long baffled by the skin, and vainly seeking to penetrate the unfortunate darkness of the human body, is now to be supplemented by a camera, making all the parts of the human body as visible, in a way, as the exterior, appears ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... ears of the son, and the audible sobs seemed to startle the solemn spirit of the hour and the place. "What would she say," he thought, "if she heard me declare I had robbed ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... fire a gun the noise would likely startle them, and the first impulse of the savages would be to extinguish ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... "nature" to help it; but the artificial dagger is more poetical than any natural hand without it. In the sublime of sacred poetry, "Who is this that cometh from Edom? with dyed garments from Bozrah?" Would "the comer" be poetical without his "dyed garments?" which strike and startle the spectator, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... perpetually speaks in Society. And then she remembered Carey's eyes. They were ugly eyes. She had always thought them ugly. Yet, now and then, there was something in them, something to hold a woman—no, perhaps not that—but something to startle a woman, to make her think, wonder, even to make her trust. And the scene which had just occurred, with all its weakness, its fatuity, its maundering display of degradation and the inability of any self-government, had not somehow destroyed ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... that," said Miss Ingate. "It wouldn't startle me to hear that he knew you were intending to come. All I know is that Miss Foley's been here for several days. Not a soul knows except me and Aguilar. And it seems to get safer every day. She does venture ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... quite forget myself, and sit staring into vacancy, till Mr. Davies, lifting his nose from his volume, would note my absence and call on me by name, and thump his desk, and startle me with some question on the matter we were supposed to have in hand. A mighty matter, truly, the name of some emperor or the date of some campaign—matter infinitely less real than the name of the ship that was leaving the harbour or the sunlight on the incoming sail. And I would answer at ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... The baroness lay back in an armchair gasping for breath; the baron ran hither and thither, bringing all manner of things and completely losing his head; Julien walked up and down looking very troubled, but really feeling quite calm, and the Widow Dentu, whom nothing could surprise or startle, stood at the foot of the bed with an expression suited to the occasion ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... aren't so silly," he said. "The water-hens would scatter away, I daresay, if you threw stones. But Papa doesn't like us to startle them, so it would ...
— The Christmas Fairy - and Other Stories • John Strange Winter
... judge. Lord Vargrave's utter incapacity to comprehend political morality, his contempt for all the objects of social benevolence, frequently led him into the avowal of doctrines, which, if they did not startle the men of the world whom he addressed (smoothed away, as such doctrines were, by speciousness of manner and delivery), created deep disgust in those even of his own politics who read their naked exposition in the daily ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book III • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... friend, you astonish me. Nay, you startle me—for a question like that implies a doubt in you whether I have not actually ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... the centre of merry pleasure parties in gay Paris. A young dude, driving my four-in-hand, and yet a criminal, waiting in hourly expectation a telegram announcing success in a great plot which, when it exploded, was destined to startle the business world, and to hurl me from the summit of happiness, where I was reveling, apparently free from care, to the misery of a dungeon, banishing the happy smiles from my face and the joyous ring from my voice, ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... his finest renditions grew "out of tune and harsh." In depicting the pathetic frenzy of Lear, such actors as he and Kean, when at their best, can surpass all rivals; and the grotesque, darkly-powerful ideals of Richard and Shylock are precisely those in which they will startle us to the last, gathering new, though fitful, expressions of hate and scorn, as their own natures sink from ethereal to grosser atmospheres. The mouth catches most surely the growing tendency of a soul; and on the lips of the elder Booth there sat a natural half-sneer of pride, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... her broncho threw up his head and gave a tremendous neigh. The sound startled her, as these things will startle the strongest when all is profoundly silent. But what followed was more startling still. Not one, but half a dozen echoes at least responded, and, with a thrill, the girl sat up. The next moment she had spurred her horse and charged, regardless of the thorns, into the ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... metrical translation. In judging it we should bear in mind that it was not written by a gnostic or by a pantheistic philosopher, but by a poet who felt all these doubts and problems as his own, without any wish to convince or to startle, only uttering what had been weighing on his mind, just as later poets would sing the doubts and sorrows ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... the adjoining room, sat the mothers and aunts in plush chairs, surveying M. Knaak through their lorgnettes, as he bowed forward, grasped the hem of his frock-coat with two fingers of each hand, and with springy legs demonstrated the various steps of the mazurka. But when he had a mind to completely startle his audience, he would suddenly and without cogent reason leap high in the air, cut pigeon-wings with bewildering rapidity, trilling with his feet, so to say, whereupon he would return to this ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... says: 'The sun has tome out. I think God knows I want to go out to walk, and so He has sent the sun out.' There's a child who has faith enough to put us all to shame. A vision of angels wouldn't startle him in the least. When his poor little friend died, and we had to tell him, he inquired, fixing on me those earnest blue eyes, 'Did papa see the angels when they took away Joe?' And when I answered 'No' (for I never try to deceive him by picturesque fictions, I ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... sensation, slime-oozings and cosmic bulks, all mixed with pearls of faith, love of woman, imagined dignities, frightened surmises, and pompous arrogances, and of the stuff builds himself an immortality to startle the heavens and baffle the immensities. He squirms on his dunghill, and like a child lost in the dark among goblins, calls to the gods that he is their younger brother, a prisoner of the quick that is destined to be as free ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... specimens of the art era from which the Greeks had just emerged appeared at much later periods of their history; but these creations, as in the case of the Centaur, were usually representations of what were believed to be historical facts, rather than fantastic creations designed by the artist to startle the beholder. The Greek still gratified his passion for beauty of detail, while he was pursuing his new-born purpose of copying nature. It was not long before he found that nature, however skilfully copied, could be perfectly mirrored to the eye of the beholder only when presented as she appears ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... sight, though unseen by Frado. They paused to see what she was about to do. Should she by any mishap lose her footing, she must roll into the stream, and, without aid, must drown. They thought of shouting; but they feared an unexpected salute might startle her, and thus ensure what they were anxious to prevent. They watched in breathless silence. The willful sheep came furi- ously leaping and bounding far in advance of the flock. Just as he leaped for the dish, she suddenly jumped to one side, when ...
— Our Nig • Harriet E. Wilson
... questions; at other times told they were to die, that some companion had confessed, or that some loved one had ceased to exist;—and all these crises of feeling and anxiety, of surprise and despair, induced with a fiendish deliberation, to startle honor into self-betrayal, wring from exhausted Nature what conscious rectitude would not divulge, or agonize human love into ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... of things among the Proberts, it needn't nevertheless startle us to learn, was such as to make it impossible for Gaston to proceed to the celebration of his nuptial, with all the needful circumstances of material preparation and social support, before some three months should have expired. He chafed however but moderately under this ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... volume of a trilogy called The Sensationalists, three books giving the history for a few years before the war, during and immediately after the war, of a group of sensation-mongers, emotion-hunters or whatever you like to call them, whose principle and practice it was to startle the world by the extravagance of their behaviour, speech, dress and thought and, in the other sense of the word, sensationalism, to live on the excitement of new experiences. Such people have always existed and always will exist, receiving perhaps undue attention from the world ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... thoughts can go no further than our own: so impossible it is for us to enlarge our very guesses beyond the ideas received from our own sensation and reflection. The supposition, at least, that angels do sometimes assume bodies, needs not startle us; since some of the most ancient and most learned Fathers of the church seemed to believe that they had bodies: and this is certain, that their state and way of ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... and over again! What a pity that she is at her old Marshal's now! We would have had a good laugh! So that old woman wants to take the bread out of my mouth. I will startle her ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... and Priscilla quickly moved to the mother's side, but great joys do not kill even though they startle, and presently the white white face was raised with a smile almost of heaven illuminating it, ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... choir) frequently assisted him by playing the organ at the services on Sunday. It was at this Church and in connection with this organ that Hope-Jones did his first great work in connection with organ-building. The improved electric action, movable console and many other matters destined to startle the organ world, were devised and made by him there, after the day's business and the evening's choir rehearsals. He had voluntary help from enthusiastic choirmen and boys, who worked far into the night—on some occasions all night. ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... the hostages, if aware of pursuit, would wreak instant death. But now, as their lieutenant advanced to the shack, the men behind, while trying their utmost to gain, sent forward yell upon yell to startle the Indians into dropping their captives and ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... those faults has been previously suggested. The chief of his faults, a certain uncontrollable brutality of speech and gesture when he was strongly roused, was destined to cling to him all through his life, and to startle with the blaze of a volcano even the last quiet years before his death. But any one who wishes to understand how deep was the elemental honesty and reality of his character, how profoundly worthy he was of any love that was bestowed upon him, need only study one ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... wild journey. Over the lonely, snow-topped mountains, through the gloomiest gorges the route would lie. Here the whistle of the engine would be answered by the cry of the condor, or deep in the lonely pine forest would startle some ambling grizzly bear. It was in the days when the settler was still subject to attacks by marauding Indians, and civilisation had only a slight foothold among ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... of you that would startle you," thought Dick,—this was before the red-haired girl had brought him under the guillotine,—but he only said, "I am very sorry," and harrowed Torpenhow's soul that evening with blasphemies against Art. Later, insensibly and to a large extent against ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... ever-burning Gedeh, quiescent now save for the blue curl of sulphurous smoke, which gives perpetual warning of those smouldering forces ever ready to devastate the surrounding country. Subterranean activity increases during the rainy season, and tremors of earthquake occasionally startle the equanimity of those unused to the perils of existence on this thin crust of Mother Earth, for Java's teeming soil and population rest upon an ominous fissure of the globe's surface, and twelve of the forty-five volcanos on this island of terror and beauty are still moderately ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... whole market-place presented to the Boy a picture of desolation which chilled him. He was about to turn away with a last cursory glance at the other solitary figure, when something suddenly occurred which arrested his attention. It seemed to startle him too, for he sprang back, with prompt agility, into a dark doorway behind him, from whence he watched what followed with the keenest interest, being careful, however, to conceal himself the while. ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... the needle into the wrist of the American and shot the plunger home, all in a single movement so swift and deft that the drug was delivered before the pain could startle ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... the house, making certain arrangements so rapidly as to startle the languid Hili-lites. In ten or fifteen minutes they had removed to the cellar all the necessary furniture of a comfortable room, including a bedstead for Lilama, and another for her two maids. Three lamps were taken to the ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... mention that she walked with a cane, having had a severe attack of rheumatics since her arrival in "the great Norrurd," and at every step she hit the pavements in such a manner as to startle the rising generation of Abolitionists, and it had the good effect of preventing any of them from calling out to her, "Where did you get your face painted, you black nigger, you?" which would otherwise ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... harmless habitants, who had been all expatriated and banished from their native waves. Large poles twisted with fir branches, stuck thickly around the lake, gave to the waters the becoming Helvetian gloom. And here, beside three cows all bedecked with ribbons, stood the Swiss maidens destined to startle the shades with the Ranz des Vaches. To the left, full upon the sward, which it almost entirely covered, stretched the great Gothic marquee, divided into two grand sections—one for the dancing, one ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... doctor, from the very nature of his being, could not spend an evening except at cards. Nikolay Parfenovitch Nelyudov had been intending for three days past to drop in that evening at Mihail Makarovitch's, so to speak casually, so as slyly to startle the eldest granddaughter, Olga Mihailovna, by showing that he knew her secret, that he knew it was her birthday, and that she was trying to conceal it on purpose, so as not to be obliged to give a dance. He anticipated a great deal of merriment, many playful ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... 1883, a striking young Frenchman, who said he was a nobleman, came to Little Missouri with a plan ready-made to build a community there to rival Omaha, and a business that would startle America's foremost financiers, the citizens of the wicked little frontier settlement, who thought that they knew all the possibilities of "tenderfeet" and "pilgrims" and "how-do-you-do-boys," admitted in some ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... distress, the expiring faction was revived, and united, and perpetuated, by the labors of a monk; and the name of James Baradaeus [129] has been preserved in the appellation of Jacobites, a familiar sound, which may startle the ear of an English reader. From the holy confessors in their prison of Constantinople, he received the powers of bishop of Edessa and apostle of the East, and the ordination of fourscore thousand bishops, priests, and deacons, is derived from the same inexhaustible source. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... you, my Beloved. This precaution is necessary, for though you know it not, you are under the command of vulgar prejudices: The Business on which I must be employed this night, might startle you from its singularity, and lower me in your opinion. Tell me; Are you possessed of the Key of the low door on the western side ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... mind death-like. Mary had not been sheltered from taking part in scenes of suffering; she had seen sickness and death in cottages, as well as in her own home, and she had none of the fanciful alarms, either of novelty or imagination, to startle her in the strange watch that had so suddenly been thrust on her but what did fill her with a certain apprehension, was the new and lofty beauty of expression that sat on that sleeping countenance. 'A nice boy,' 'rather ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I said: "Now, Cameron, you may turn on the gas, but do so very slowly. Mrs. Smiley seems in deep sleep, and we are warned not to startle her." ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... "He'll startle you mair afore you're done wi' him," the atheist said maliciously. "I ken the ways o' thae ministers preaching for kirks. Oh, they're cunning. You was a' pleased that Mr. Dishart spoke about looms and webs, but, lathies, it was a trick. Ilka ane o' thae young ministers has a sermon about looms ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... philosophical speculation on the one hand, and the obstinate survival of Christianity on the other, necessitate—if men of spiritual intuitions who are not poets and artists are to earn their living. There was nothing you could say to Chrysostom Trotter, provided you said it reverently, that would startle him. He knew all that long ago and far more. For, though obliged to trade in this backwater of belief, he was in many respects a very modern mind. You were hardly likely to know your Herbert Spencer as intimately as he, and all the most exquisite literature of doubt was upon his shelves. ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... white in that light. It was circling the pond where the water-lilies grew and was swaying to and fro as if dancing to some strange measure. Its skirts were caught up on either side by the hands resting upon its hips and the apparition was enough to startle nerves that had not already been tried by the ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond
... is not to perform feats which startle the world and give him fame, but rather to live the life of the moderate and harmonious one; yet how often for lack of true discernment he fails! This middle path is not, however, hidden from the sincere and pure; even common men and women may know it, though in its highest reaches it ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... devil, trials, temptations, the wind, lightning, burglars, and a thousand other things. Their days are haunted by fear of this thing or that. Their peace is marred and their hearts are troubled. For all this, trust is the cure. I do not mean to say that if you trust, nothing will ever startle you or frighten you, or that you will never feel physical fear in time of danger; but in such times trust will bring to us a consciousness that the Lord knows and cares, and that his helping ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... gain Admittance 'mongst the law-instructed train, Who, in the Temple and Gray's Inn, prepare For clients' wretched feet the legal snare; Dead to those arts which polish and refine, Deaf to all worth, because that worth was mine, Twice did those blockheads startle at my name, And foul rejection gave me up to shame. To laws and lawyers then I bade adieu, And plans of far more liberal note pursue. 100 Who will may be a judge—my kindling breast Burns for that chair which Roscius once possess'd. ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... exclaimed. "Wait! Oh, I'm so excited I'm all mixed up! She's had an awful spell, but she's better now; but you mustn't startle her. Something's the matter with her heart. It was beating ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... Then, again, I learnt the utter and wonderful kindness of my friends. I felt so selfish and so surprised at the goodness they showed me. Again, I saw something of the mystery of pain. My own was so trivial compared with that which some others had to bear. Yet I had enough to startle me that such a fact should be permitted on earth at all. I don't suppose we can understand its meaning; but my consolation was that it is not necessarily a sign of God's displeasure—that the highest life was a life of suffering, that the Son of Man was a ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... work, getting up from time to time to turn the roast which she had impaled upon a sharp stick above the glowing coals, the bride had a stream of shy callers, of the little people of the woods. She sat very still, so as not to startle them, and there is much curiosity among ...
— Old Indian Days • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... part to overcome the dulness and sameness that brood over the "land of Mizraim." Where nature is most tame and commonplace, man is tempted to his highest flights of audacity. As in the level Babylonia he aspired to build a tower that should "reach to heaven" (Gen. xi. 4), so in Egypt he strove to startle and surprise by gigantic works, enormous undertakings, enterprises that might have seemed wholly beyond his powers. And these have constituted in all ages, except the very earliest, the great attractiveness of Egypt. ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... of first-rate, excellence. How does such a whole stand as compared with a building of strange, and at first sight, unintelligible outline, formed by the juxtaposition of two parts, each of admirable merit in itself, but which startle by their absolute contrast in every way? Chartres was made, Le Mans eminently grew; and different minds will be differently inclined in the comparison between a single harmonious work of art and a union of two buildings widely differing in date, style, and proportion. But, on ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... had read that the police bullied suspected persons in this way. If you make a guilty person believe that you know him to be guilty, you can also get him to confess if you startle him sufficiently. It occurred to me that this was what these men were doing, especially as they had not been sure of me when I ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... acknowledged leader of the herd, who bore the name of the "Broncho," on account of her wildness, her glaring red eyes and her branching horns, with an angry toss of her head to shake the water from her eyes, lifted her voice in one long, angry, rolling bellow that seemed to startle the whole herd. It had in it defiance, and determination. Like the leading spirit among the leprous men who sat at the gate of Samaria, the "Broncho" gathered up the feeling of the meeting in one long soul-stirring, racuous bawl, which, interpreted, meant, ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... us, "Watrin, the present colonel of the 6th, does not care for fighting; perhaps he will resign me the command amicably. I will go and find him alone, so as to startle him the less, and will join ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... a source of puzzling surprises. While she was from the South, she was not Southern in speech, sentiments, ideas, or ideals. Her voice was not Southern and, while she elided final consonants, her intonation was not of the South. Indeed she would startle him every now and then by dropping some archaic word or old form of expression that made him think of Chaucer. Her feeling toward the negro was precisely what his was, and once when he halted in some stricture on the Confederacy and started to ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox
... men, life would have probably appeared to Jukes an unentertaining and unprofitable business. He was not alone in his opinion. The sea itself, as if sharing Mr. Jukes' good-natured forbearance, had never put itself out to startle the silent man, who seldom looked up, and wandered innocently over the waters with the only visible purpose of getting food, raiment, and house-room for three people ashore. Dirty weather he had known, of course. He had been made wet, ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... through a phase, and one not altogether natural to her, and which readily passed away with the abnormal conditions that had occasioned it. She was by no means one of those dreamy, thoughtful, often melancholy children who startle us by the precocious grasp of their intellect, by their intuitive perception of truths which we had deemed far above their comprehension. Madelon's precocity was of quite another order. In her quick, ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... itself upon the events of the evening. Price? Price? Every man, he had been told, had his price. Every man and woman. He uttered a sound. It might have been a laugh, but it lacked mirth. It startled his alert horse. It almost seemed to startle the quiet night itself. What was his price? All he knew about price was its payment. He had only been called upon to pay. And he had paid! My God, he had paid! All that had been his. All the wealth, ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... order of time, to influence me was the New Testament, and in particular the Gospel according to St. Matthew. I believe it would startle and move any one if they could make a certain effort of imagination and read it freshly like a book, not droningly and dully like a portion of the Bible. Any one would then be able to see in it those truths which we are all courteously supposed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... said thoughtlessly, that her cries would startle the horses, never dreaming that this would indeed be the case. But, much to his alarm, he noticed that their speed was increasing with every instant of time. It broke upon him all too soon that they were indeed running away, and that the driver was ...
— Pretty Madcap Dorothy - How She Won a Lover • Laura Jean Libbey
... in this forest, and she was startled by a cough behind her. It was only Pats, not wishing to startle her by a sudden presence. His face seemed flushed, and even thinner than before; and about his mouth had come a drawn and sensitive look. But her eyes rested coldly upon him as they would rest upon any repugnant object that she ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... Budget. (A little later the war cut the project short.) "I am going for a walk up to the mountains," he said. "I can do my thinking best when I am out walking alone." Afterward I wondered what new revolution to startle the landed aristocracy of Britain he devised on that summer day by himself among the mountains. Curiously enough, Lloyd George does not like exercise for his own sake, but he enjoys it when he has a mental task in hand; ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... shadow of clouds drifting over a harvest-field; while his attendants, on whom the name of the sixth knight seemed to produce an effect almost electrical, hung in suspense upon their master's looks. But when Rowena spoke, the sound of her voice seemed to startle him from his silence. ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... Clodomiro again beside her. She had not heard him, and turned in anger that he dare startle her. ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... one reads Turgenieff's stories with the knowledge that they were composed—or rather that they came into being—in this way, one can trace the process in every line. Story, in the conventional sense of the word—a fable constructed, like Wordsworth's phantom, 'to startle and waylay'—there is as little as possible. The thing consists of the motions of a group of selected creatures, which are not the result of a preconceived action, but a consequence of the qualities of the actors."—And yet, for the writer who, like Turgenieff, works ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... sight; A lovely Apparition, sent To be a moment's ornament; Her eyes as stars of Twilight fair; Like Twilight's, too, her dusky hair; But all things else about her drawn From May-time and the chearful Dawn; A dancing Shape, an Image gay, To haunt, to startle, and ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... thinking a good deal about it, and I have a proposal to make which may at first startle you, but it appears to me that it is our only, and our best, resource. The few hundred pounds which you have left are of no use in this country, except to keep you from starving for a year or two; but in another country ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... startling, I would rather you kept it till to-morrow,' said Agatha; 'I have had quite enough to startle me already.' ...
— The Carved Cupboard • Amy Le Feuvre
... could release him and frighten him away before Festus returned, there would not be quite such odds against her. She accordingly unhooked the horse by reaching over the bank, and then, pulling off her muslin neckerchief, flapped it in his eyes to startle him. But the gallant steed did not move or flinch; she tried again, and he seemed rather pleased than otherwise. At this moment she heard a cry from the cottage, and turning, beheld her adversary approaching round ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... don't know about that," said Miss Ingate. "It wouldn't startle me to hear that he knew you were intending to come. All I know is that Miss Foley's been here for several days. Not a soul knows except me and Aguilar. And it seems to get safer every day. She does venture about the house now, though she never goes into the garden ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... said Poppy, her fingers trembling violently, and the large dish which she was washing nearly slipping out of them. "Lor, miss, you do startle me. I was in the dumps, and you are for all the world like the sun coming out. Why, deary me, the back scullery ain't by no means such a bad sort of place when you're in ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... hear your opinions regarding the antiquity of our race: geologists are daily becoming bolder and more unhesitating in their assertions on the subject; and we are fast drifting toward conclusions that seem to startle the religious world, and threaten to upset our confidence in that Book which we have been accustomed to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... trader, laughing quietly. "That was merely to startle you out of your, pardon me, unreasonable obstinacy. You must believe me it was the only thing possible that you should accompany us, for if you were a whiskey runner then it was better for us that you ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... rather a stirring sight," I said so sharply to Miss Brande that she started. I meant to startle her, but did not succeed as far as ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... time before I was heard; but at length the door was opened, and I was accosted by an Englishman, who, in a strange compound of French and English, asked, "What the devil I meant by all that uproar?" Determining to startle my old friend the major, I replied, that "I was aide-de-camp to General Picton, and had come down on very unpleasant business." By this time the noise of the party within had completely subsided, and from a few whispered sentences, and ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... with a white throat and band on the wing. They sail through the air without any effort, wings outspread and beak wide open, and thus glean their harvest of winged insects as they skim along. Oftentimes their sudden swoop will startle you ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... malefactors—extended itself in a kind of grim appeal to everybody. It seemed to possess strange fascinations for all seafaring folk; and when there was a man-of-war in port the rat-tat-tat of that knocker would frequently startle the quiet neighborhood long after midnight. There appeared to be an occult understanding between it and the blue-jackets. Years ago there was a young Bilkins, one Pendexter Bilkins—a sad losel, we fear—who ran away to try his fortunes ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... after I saw how darkness and fancy can combine to startle one who wakes suddenly from sleep, for the man who had been Mr Raydon's companion on the previous day suddenly made his appearance silently at the door and walked in, his deerskin moccasins making no sound as he came towards us. He was ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... the nature of public trust, nor, indeed, did the community at large. Men in power then ruled more for their own ends than in these latter times; and use and wont sanctioned and sanctified many doings, from the days of our ancestors, that, but to imagine, will astonish and startle posterity. Accordingly, when Mr Pittle, after a lingering illness, was removed from us, which happened in the first year of my third provostry, I bethought me of the consequences which had ensued from his presentation, and resolved within myself to act ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... not in the door, where he had left it; but this did not startle him. His thoughts appeared to be still abstracted by the subject which had occupied them since the affray, and he was walking mechanically about the office. He went to the safe as much from the force of habit as for any reason, for ...
— Make or Break - or, The Rich Man's Daughter • Oliver Optic
... feeling of humanity. And much good to them with this wise man of theirs; let them enjoy him to themselves, love him without competitors, and live with him in Plato's commonwealth, the country of ideas, or Tantalus' orchards. For who would not shun and startle at such a man, as at some unnatural accident or spirit? A man dead to all sense of nature and common affections, and no more moved with love or pity than if he were a flint or rock; whose censure nothing escapes; that commits no errors himself, but has a lynx's ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... arose to give her assistance, but Marian shook her head at her, with a kindly look, that seemed to say, "Do not startle her—she is used only to me lately," and bore her out of sight into ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... of course. As the tree of knowledge sprouts and expands within him, shooting out leaf after leaf of practical experience, the succession of surprises dulls his faculty of wonderment. It takes a great deal to startle a boy. ...
— The Master Key - An Electrical Fairy Tale • L. Frank Baum
... complete surrender of self to the impression, whether spiritual or sensual, of the moment. It is a quality, perhaps, in which the young poet is richer than the mature, his very inexperience making him more venturesome in those leaps of language that startle us with their rashness only to bewitch us the more with the happy ease of their accomplishment. For this there are no existing laws of rhetoric, for it is from such felicities that the rhetoricians deduce and codify their statutes. It is something which ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... perhaps done more than any woman of this century, not confessedly devoted to our cause, to elevate the condition of her sex, and disseminate liberal ideas as to their needs and culture. The first part of her career was one of those brilliant successes which startle us into surprise and admiration. It was checked midway by the publication of her life of Charlotte Bronte, the best and noblest of her works. Checked, because condemned, in that instance, without a hearing. She could never afterward feel the elastic pleasure, which was natural to her, in composing ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... from official criticism. I have not taken space to mention certain episodes of the more recent intercourse of these ladies, and must content myself with tracing them, lightly, in their consequences. These may be summed up in the remark, which will doubtless startle no one by its freshness, that two imperial women are scarcely more likely to hit it off together, as the phrase is, than two imperial men. Since that party at Miss Birdseye's, so important in its results for Olive, she had had occasion to approach Mrs. Farrinder more nearly, and those ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... disturbing thoughts; and we may be in a mood to enjoy to the full every beauty we see. England will then seem to us a veritable garden, the greenness of everything, the trimness of the hedges, the sheets of purple hyacinths, and some still remaining primroses, will startle us with joy, though we have long been aware of their beauty. This time we both know and enjoy the Natural Beauty. We see from this instance the distinction between knowing Natural Beauty and enjoying ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... truism and for maintaining a paradox. A 'truism' is not useless so long as its truth is not admitted. It would be the greatest of achievements to enunciate a law self-evident as soon as formulated, and yet previously ignored or denied. Was this the case of Malthus? Or did he really startle the world by clothing a commonplace in paradox, and then explain away the paradox till nothing but the ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... up stairs into the kitchen, an' flung him down against the wall. I got one glance out into the hall, an' didn't care no more what become o' him. You was facin' the whole mob of 'em, swingin' a gun barrel, an' I knew where I belonged. But damned if that feller didn't startle me. He was up like a flash to his feet, an' I thought he was trying to get me. But he wasn't. When I run to you, he wasn't two steps behind, an' may I be jiggered, sir, if he didn't jump in there on your right, an' fight like a wild man. That's all I saw, just the first glimpse. ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... the omnipotent Convention sits enthroned in the theater, converted into an Assembly room. It carries on its deliberations daily, in grand style. Its decrees, received with blind obedience, startle France and upset all Europe. At a distance, its majesty is imposing, more august than that of the Republican senate in Rome. Near by, the effect is quite otherwise; these undisputed sovereigns are serfs who live in trances, and justly so, for, nowhere, even ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... and that the people are hospitable, genial, and cultivated, and that Kauai, though altogether different from Hawaii, has an extreme beauty altogether its own, which wins one's love, though it does not startle one into admiration like that of the Hawaiian gulches. Is it because that, though the magic of novelty is over it, there is a perpetual undercurrent of home resemblance? The dash of its musical waters might be in Cumberland; its swelling uplands, with their clumps of trees, might be in Kent; ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... not from his worse but his better nature, it seems as if there could be no warning to him from within of his danger: for even the impassioned joy which he draws at times from the works of nature, and from those of her mightier sons, and which would startle him from a dream of unworthy passion, serves only to fix the infatuation:—for those deep emotions, proving to him that his heart is uncorrupted, justify to him all its workings, and his mind, confiding and delighting in itself, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... though her eyes were cast down too, upon the dainty shoe she generally was so mindful of. Absorbed in thought, she stood there, heedless alike of the tea and John (although he called to her, and rapped the table with his knife to startle her), until he rose and touched her on the arm; when she looked at him for a moment, and hurried to her place behind the teaboard, laughing at her negligence. But, not as she had laughed before. The manner and the ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... enough here in America, either in the towns or in the cities," he said rapidly. "We are all on the rush. We are all for action. I sit still and think. If I wanted to write I'd do something. I'd tell what everyone thought. It would startle people, frighten them a little, eh? I would tell you what you have been thinking this afternoon while you walked here on this railroad track with me. I would tell you what your mother has been thinking at the same time and what she would like to say ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... was broken up; all the world appeared shattered by the blow that had fallen on her, and nothing could startle her now. She felt dimly that some stupendous catastrophe had taken place; yet it did not appear unnatural. A strange sense of unreality possessed her; everything seemed an illusion, as if she were a shadow in a land of shadows. The thought came to her that she was dead, and that ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... without it. In the sublime of sacred poetry, "Who is this that cometh from Edom? with dyed garments from Bozrah?" Would "the comer" be poetical without his "dyed garments?" which strike and startle the spectator, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... heresy, the independence of Francis, who had scattered his friars in all the four corners of the globe without trying to gain a confirmation of the verbal and entirely provisional authorization accorded him by Innocent III.—all these things were calculated to startle the clergy. ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... easiest of all Atlee's missions, for Brumsey was the weakest and most transparent of all imbecile Whigs. A junior diplomatist of small faculties and great ambitions, he wanted to do something, not being clear as to what, which should startle his chiefs, and make 'the Office' exclaim: 'See what Sam Brumsey has been doing! Hasn't Brumsey hit the nail on the head! Brumsey's last despatch is the finest state-paper since the days of Canning!' Now no one knew the short range of this man's intellectual tether better than Lord ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... Germans came, Brussels was an imitation Paris— especially along the inner boulevards she was Paris at her best. And her great parks, her lakes gay with pleasure-boats or choked with lily- pads, her haunted forests, where your taxicab would startle the wild deer, are the most beautiful I have ever seen in any city in the world. As, in the days of the Second Empire, Louis Napoleon bedecked Paris, so Leopold decorated Brussels. In her honor and to his own glory he gave her new parks, filled in her moats along her ancient ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... to engage the wonder at any price; that it would startle the naturalists, wake up the whole scientific world, draw in the masses, and make $20,000 for the Museum. Barnum told him that he thought well of the speculation, only he did not like ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... fell asleep thinking of Ringtail. As he slept, he dreamed of walking in the forest and of hearing the distant barking of dogs. Louder and louder grew the sound until suddenly he awoke to find that it had not all been a dream. So close at hand as to startle him, he heard a wild clamor in which he could distinguish Pal's excited voice. Leaping from his hammock he quickly rounded the corner of the cabin and beheld a weird sight. A torch borne in the hand of a tall man cast a flickering light over a melee of dogs, leaping ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer
... mob opened fire on the soldiers. This appeared for a moment to startle the captain and his men. But it was only for a moment. Then he coolly gave the command: "Ready! aim! fire!" The company obeyed to the instant, and poured a volley of bullets into that part of the mob which was trying to batter down the ...
— The Red Record - Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... figure of rhetoric, which he had learned from a famous preacher in Manila, Padre Damaso wished to startle his audience, and in fact his holy ghost was so fascinated with such great truths that it was necessary to kick him to remind ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... narrative of the horrid barbarities exercised by the Spaniards on the innocent and unoffending natives of America. Indeed, the barbarities were such, that they would scarce seen credible from their enormity, and the victims so many, that they would startle belief by their numbers, if the facts were not indisputably ascertained, and the circumstances admitted by their own writers, some of whom have even gloried in their inhumanity, and, as Roman catholics, ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... under the tent of a circus; and you may be sure Arick was a very proud person when he passed them all by and entered the hall with his ticket. I wish I knew what he thought of the whole performance; but the housekeeper of the lean man, who sat just in front of him, tells me what seemed to startle him the most. The first thing was when two of the officers came out with blackened faces like Christy minstrel boys and began to dance. Arick was sure that they were really black and his own people, and he was wonderfully surprised to see them dance this new European style of dance. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... gruff greeting. "Ye needn't startle one out of his senses. Why can't ye knock in ...
— Rod of the Lone Patrol • H. A. Cody
... section of the tapestry that, when it came to Paris, had power to startle Napoleon, ever superstitious, ever ready to read signs. The star over Harold's head reminded him of the possible brevity ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... so silly," he said. "The water-hens would scatter away, I daresay, if you threw stones. But Papa doesn't like us to startle them, so it would ...
— The Christmas Fairy - and Other Stories • John Strange Winter
... event really was, it stood as a symbol of the whole miserable situation to me. It was just enough to startle me into contempt for myself. That night Breck came stealing down to me along the dark roads in his quiet car about eleven-thirty. I knew he had been to the Jackson dinner and was surprised to find he had changed into street ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... apple fall, he found In that slight startle from his contemplation— 'T is said (for I 'll not answer above ground For any sage's creed or calculation)— A mode of proving that the earth turn'd round In a most natural whirl, called 'gravitation;' And this is the sole mortal who could grapple, Since ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... Vera, Nina, Lawrence, and I started for the theatre. I can't say that I was expecting a very pleasant evening, but the deathlike stillness, both of ourselves and the town did, I confess, startle me. Scarcely a word was exchanged by us between the English Prospect and Saint Isaac's Square. The square looked lovely in the bright moonlight, and I said something about it. It was indeed very fine, the cathedral like a hovering purple cloud, the old ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... good fellow," replied the artist, laying down his weapons and grasping Gibault's proffered hand with a sigh of evident relief, "I am well, excellently well. You did, indeed, startle me by your sudden appearance; but no harm is done, and where none was intended no apology is necessary. You are ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... and carried many a weary mile for just such an emergency, were charging the bunch intrepidly. Others made shift with flat sirup-cans with pebbles inside. A few, like Pink and the Silent One, flapped their slickers till their arms ached. Anything, everything that would make a din and startle the cattle out of their lethargy, was pressed ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower
... Mountain Nymph, sweet Liberty; And if I give thee honour due, Mirth, admit me of thy crue To live with her, and live with thee, In unreproved pleasures free; To hear the Lark begin his flight, And singing startle the dull night, From his watch-towre in the skies, Till the dappled dawn doth rise; Then to com in spight of sorrow, And at my window bid good morrow, Through the Sweet-Briar, or the Vine, Or the twisted Eglantine. While the Cock with lively din, Scatters the rear of darknes thin, And to ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... into the mind at first almost imperceptibly: they exist only as vague indistinct surmises, and by no means take the precise shape or the substance of a formed opinion. At first, probably, they even offend and startle by their intrusion: but by degrees the unpleasant sensations which they once excited wear off: the mind grows more familiar with them. A confused sense (for such it is, rather than a formed idea) of its being desirable that their ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... door—trickling noiselessly down the knots of the carved oak. Still I stood and watched it, and it crept on slowly, slowly, like a living thing, and growing as it came, to my very feet. I cannot say how long I might have stood there, fascinated by it, had not something suddenly occurred to startle me into my senses again; for full upon the back of my right hand fell, with a sullen, heavy sound, a second drop of blood. It stung and burnt my flesh like molten lead, and the sharp, sudden pain it gave me shot up my arm and shoulder, and seemed in an instant ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... tired, and came down, to finish the morning by helping himself to about a teaspoonful of chlorate of potassium, which he placed in his trousers-pocket, not from any intention of taking it to purify his blood, but to drop in pinches in the kitchen fire and startle Elizabeth. ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... thing to keep the same sense of surprise in one's home town that one would have in a strange city. You will find much to startle you if you keep your eyes open. Yesterday, for instance, I was lucky enough to meet a gentleman who had stood only a few feet away from Lincoln when he made the Gettysburg Speech. Then I found that in a certain cafeteria ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... To startle him back into hiding would have only deferred my getting truly rid of him, so I was most tiptoe and diplomatic in my doings. Finally, a paper bag, put into a likely nook with some sentimentally preserved wedding-cake crumbled into it, crackled to me of his arrival. In a brave moment I ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... razors at once; and three hair-brushes, and half a dozen toothbrushes, and a small collection of combs, and four or five little glass bottles, looking as though they contained poison,—all with silver tops. I can only suppose you desired to startle the weak mind of the chambermaid. I have put them all up; but remember this, if they are taken out again you are responsible. And I will not put up your boots, George. What can you have wanted with three ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... such petty escapades as these, we would we might seduce the reader into an utter debauch of spelling. But a sudden Maenad dance of the letters on the page, gleeful and iridescent spelling, a wild rush and procession of howling vowels and clattering consonants, might startle the half-won reader back into orthodoxy. Besides, there is another reader—the printer's reader—to consider. For if an author let his wit run to these matters, he must write elaborate marginal exhortations to this authority, begging his mercy, to let the little flowers of ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... sorry man's dominion Has broken Nature's social union, An' justifies that ill opinion Which makes thee startle At me, thy ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... got up, nor moved a mite. That is one of the peculiarities of the boy, you can't surprise him: nothin' seems to startle him. ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... promiscuously to grasp and hold on to branches, and leaving her extremely little one to look out for itself. This it seemed quite capable of doing, for no limpet ever stuck to a solid rock with greater tenacity than did that infant to the maternal waist throughout the chase. The hubbub appeared to startle the whole monkey race, revealing the fact that troops of other monkeys had, unobserved, been gazing at the strangers in silent wonder, since the time of ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... camera focussed on the spot of path beside the rosebush, drew a stifled, impatient breath. "I'm going to scream at her in a minute," she thought, "or fall in a faint. I wonder which would startle ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... goods in Cap'n Abe's store did not so much startle the visitor, as the figure that rose from behind the counter, where he was stooping at ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... the use of thinking of it now, Sitting alone and listening to the clock! She'd best make haste and knit another row. Three hours at least must pass before his knock Would startle her. It always was a shock. She listened—listened—for so long before, That when it came her hearing ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... thinking of these and other things he fancied that he could hear the footfall of a man on the road leading up to his house—a byway, which led scarce anywhere else; and therefore a tread was at any time more apt to startle the inmates of the homestead than if it had stood in a thoroughfare. The footfall came opposite the gate, and stopped there. One minute, two minutes passed, and the pedestrian did not proceed. Christopher Swetman got out of bed, and opened the casement. ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... me that she will kill herself," I answered, thinking that this resolve would startle Henriette. But when she heard it a disdainful smile, more expressive than the thoughts it conveyed, flickered on her lips. "My dear conscience," I continued, "if you would take into account my resistance and the seductions that led to my fall ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... curse you. But singing — My singing fatefully ringing Till startled and dumb You falter, the sum Of your crime shall reveal — This do I prophesy . . . O Heart wrung dry, Awake! Startle the world with thy cry: Ethiopia shall not die! Otto ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... to see if he were asleep. He lay silently; through his eyelashes he could see her outlined in the soft light from the hall. She was coming in to see if he was tucked in. In a moment he would jump up and startle her with a hug, as she leaned over him. ...
— Native Son • T. D. Hamm
... met her gaze was enough to startle the bravest man. The head and shoulders of a hideous Sioux warrior were within six feet of where she was kneeling. The Indian was still struggling but he could get no farther, and, as it was, ...
— The Story of Red Feather - A Tale of the American Frontier • Edward S. (Edward Sylvester) Ellis
... past few days he had been cleaning skins, among them the skin of the bear from which I had saved him at Taimur. Now, Maitland was a born pantomimist, continually inventing practical jokes; and perhaps to startle me with a false alarm in the very skin of the old Bruin which had so nearly done for him, he had thrown it round him on finishing its cleaning, and so, in mere wanton fun, had crept on deck at the hour of his watch. The head of the bear-skin, and the fog, must have ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... objections this indeed is chief To startle reason, stagger frail belief: We grant, 'tis true, that Heaven from human sense Has hid the secret paths of Providence: But boundless wisdom, boundless mercy may Find even for those bewilder'd souls a way. If from His nature foes may pity claim, 190 Much more may ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... us emotions we could not dream. The opening of those heavenly gate for them startles and flutters our souls with strange mysterious thrills, unfelt before. The glimpse of glories, the sweep of voices, all startle and dazzle us, and the soul for many a day aches and ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... Never in the history of the stage has there been assembled a mob more wonderful than that. These children knew mobs! A mob to them was a daily sight, and their reproduction of it was a thing to startle you with its realism. Never was it absurd; never was there a single note of artificiality in it. It was Hogarthian in ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... possible that his eyes had gone bad on him, or that his mind had slipped out of its normal groove and was tricking him with weirdly absurd hallucinations. So what happened in almost that same breath did not startle him as it might otherwise have done. It was for a brief moment simply another assurance of his insanity; and if the mountains had suddenly turned over and balanced themselves on their peaks their gymnastics would not have frozen him into a more speechless stupidity than did ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... grieved at the shock, that Minnie had received, "did thee startle her by so suddenly claiming her in the street? Would it not have been better for thee to have waited and found out where she lived, and ...
— Minnie's Sacrifice • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... in quick succession, a heavy crushing pressure, either on the limbs or body, which had the effect, not only to startle them from their sleep, ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... you gave me the necessary instructions, but there is no hope of coping with the miners unless five thousand troops, with cannon, are on the ground. That will startle government, you may depend," ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... fellowship with his kind which Paracelsus needs can be poorly learnt from such a distracted creature as Aprile. It is indeed Aprile's example and the fate which has overtaken him rather than his wild words which startle Paracelsus into a recognition of his own error. But the knowledge that he has left love out of his scheme of life is no guarantee that he will ever acquire the fervour and the infinite patience of love. The whole scene, with ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... in real life quite as well as in make-believe, planned to conceal her radiance until her first appearance on the stage, when she would startle them all, and especially Lysander, with her dazzling loveliness. She stood in a shadow of the wings with her coat wrapped about her. Except for Jerry, waiting to do her humble part, she was alone. She listened to the ceaseless chatter in the ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... feeling?—Not revenge! High Heaven shall hear, and earth regret, my wrongs. Hot indignation burns within my soul. I'll do some dreadful thing!—I know not what; Some deeds, as horrid as the shame I feel, Shall startle nature, and alarm the world. Then hence, like lightning, let me furious fly, To hurl destruction at my foes on high; Pull down oppression from its tyrant seat, Redeem my glory, ...
— The Earl of Essex • Henry Jones
... her, in his absent-minded, startled way. He had never understood her since she was first put into his hands, aged six months, a fluffy bundle of motherless babyhood. She never ceased to startle him. She was an enigma beyond any puzzle in mathematics he had ever brought his mind to ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... look, and then stood quite still, shrinking a little to one side, as if she expected a blow. Something in that frightened, sidewise attitude made him hesitate to tell her of Benjamin Wright; she hardly knew the old gentleman, but it would startle her, the doctor reasoned. And yet, when very carefully, almost casually, he said that Mr. Wright had had a slight shock—"his life is not in danger just now," said William, "but he can't speak;"—she lifted her head and looked at him, drawing ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... sufficiently for her crime. But how can any punishment be devised or imposed for such a huge panorama of sorrow? I think she has already punished herself horribly, and will continue to do so. My prayer is that what we have gone through will startle the world into some new realization of the sanctity of life—all life, animal as well as human. Don't you find that a visit to a zoo can humble and astound you with all that amazing and ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... you startle me, sir!" said Gillian; then continued, turning to Philip Guarine, "Your friend is a hasty ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... first appeared in sight, and as George peered beyond the projecting point of the ledge, he threw up his hands and burst out in laughter. Angel was in the boat, imitating Harry in the building operation. The sudden appearance did not startle him in the least, nor did he stop beating his lullaby, after he noticed the broad ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay
... I. And that is what I must find out. I have my suspicions. My dear, don't let me startle you, but have you ever thought that it might possibly ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... Paul here claims to be giving a new revelation made to him directly by Christ. 'By (or, "in") the word of the Lord' cannot mean less than that. The question arises, in regard to verse 15, whether Paul expected that the advent would come in his lifetime. It need not startle any if he were proved to have cherished such a mistaken expectation; for Christ Himself taught the disciples that the time of His second coming was a truth reserved, and not included in His gifts to them. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... that to me—but keep your eyes open while you are on board. Perhaps we may discover something that we overlooked there to-day. Wireless on the 'Sister Sue'! I don't understand it at all. Be very careful that you do not wake up the others when you go in. Make sure that you don't fall over a cot and startle the girls." ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls by the Sea - Or The Loss of The Lonesome Bar • Janet Aldridge
... understand you," said Hester, who would not hold out her hand, and who was standing up in a very stiff, shy, and angular position. "I think you were very rude to startle me, and make personal remarks the very moment I ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... and even now, when recounting, as he often did, the scenes of the battle field, his eye would burn with savage fire, lighting up his whole countenance with the fiercest kind of bravery, and often with a hideous yell that would startle our very souls, he would burst from the room and bound over the fields and forest, with the fleetness of a deer—making the woods ring with his frightful war-cry, until the blood seemed ready to curdle in our veins. He had also been ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... last surmise the oldest Rover boy was sadly mistaken. Many things of which he and his cousins did not dream were to occur, not only to startle and annoy them, but also to place them in ...
— The Rover Boys on Snowshoe Island - or, The Old Lumberman's Treasure Box • Edward Stratemeyer
... back to him, and Forrester didn't make a sound, not wanting to startle the Goddess. She was totally unclad, her glorious body shining in the light of the room, her blue-black hair unbound and falling halfway down her gently curved back. But she must have heard him somehow, for she turned, and for half a ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... hour. (There was a chime) Lunar Projects Placement is here to serve you. Plastics-chemists, hydroponics specialists, machinists, mechanics, metallurgists, miners, helpers—all are urgently needed. The tax-free pay will startle you. Free subsistence and quarters. Here at Serene, at Tycho Station or at a dozen other ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... He glanced over it at breakfast. He told me he was going to startle the world as it had never been since the ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... he departed on the errand when Bill Quigley, who lay at my feet, created a diversion. I jumped—yes, and I freely confess that I yelled—with startle and surprise, when I felt his paws clutch my ankles and his teeth shut down on the ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... having occasion to ask the mate (he stood by my side) to take a compass bearing of the Pagoda, I caught myself reaching up to his ear in whispers. I say I caught myself, but enough had escaped to startle the man. I can't describe it otherwise than by saying that he shied. A grave, preoccupied manner, as though he were in possession of some perplexing intelligence, did not leave him henceforth. A little later I moved away from the rail to look at the ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... news wherewith to startle the parish. And Mrs. Carradyne, a martyr to belief in ghosts and omens, grew to dread the chimes with ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... but not loudly enough to startle a bird which came flitting from tree to tree in advance of the approaching soldiers, and checked its flight in one of the low branches of a great overhanging chestnut, and then kept on changing its position ...
— !Tention - A Story of Boy-Life during the Peninsular War • George Manville Fenn
... woman, busy at her wheel, with two children playing on the ground before her, were the objects that now presented themselves. The uncouthness of my garb, my wild and weatherworn appearance, my fusil and tomahawk, could not but startle them. The woman stopped her wheel, and gazed as if a spectre had ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... seemed to stand still. She was pale to the lips, and he could see, even in the darkness, her eyes grow and startle. ...
— The Fortune Hunter • David Graham Phillips
... his door to see if he were asleep. He lay silently; through his eyelashes he could see her outlined in the soft light from the hall. She was coming in to see if he was tucked in. In a moment he would jump up and startle her with a hug, as she leaned ...
— Native Son • T. D. Hamm
... franchise; there, you will find a free Church, a free school, free land, a free vote, and a free career for the child of the humblest born in the land. My countrymen who work for your living, remember this: there will be one wild shriek of freedom to startle all mankind if that American Republic should ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... of several of the males; the superb robes they wear; the expression of their faces and their figures; the details of hair, stuffs, ornaments, jewels; the refinement and feminine taste of the whole, are enough to startle our interest if we recognize what meaning they ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... might gather it unhindered as it bloomed in the white moonshine. The great Piazza of Siena is famous, and though in this day of multiplied photographs and blunted surprises and profaned revelations none of the world's wonders can pretend, like Wordsworth's phantom of delight, really to "startle and waylay," yet as I stepped upon the waiting scene from under a dark archway I was conscious of no loss of the edge of a precious presented sensibility. The waiting scene, as I have called it, was in the shape of a shallow ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... minutes after I saw how darkness and fancy can combine to startle one who wakes suddenly from sleep, for the man who had been Mr Raydon's companion on the previous day suddenly made his appearance silently at the door and walked in, his deerskin moccasins making no sound as he came towards us. He was ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... as he happened to be placed, and trust that the guards would pass by without noticing them. And while they were waiting in breathless alarm they got a new cause of fright. One of the soldiers of the castle, willing to startle his comrades, suddenly threw a stone from the wall, and cried out, "Aha, I see you well!" The stone came thundering down over the heads of Randolph and his men, who naturally thought themselves discovered. If they had stirred, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... Conseil, whom nothing could startle, saw it as a perfectly natural thing to fall asleep under the waves and wake up under a mountain. But Ned Land had no idea in his head other than to see if this cavern offered ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... Review said: "The title of Dr. Walsh's book, The Thirteenth Greatest of Centuries, will startle many readers, but we respectfully commend to the open-minded his presentation of that great epoch. A century that witnessed such extraordinary achievements in architecture, in arts and crafts, in education, and in literature and law, as did the Thirteenth, is not to ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... a grave surprise. What had he said to startle Birkenshead so utterly out of himself? The color had left his face at the first mention of this beach; his very voice was changed, coarse and thick, as if some other man had broken out through him. At that moment, while Doctor Bowdler ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... along one of those tracks a herd of deer were seen trotting one day about two bow-shots from the party. With characteristic eagerness Oliver Trench hastily let fly an arrow at them. He might as well have let it fly at the pole-star. The only effect it had was to startle the deer and send them galloping into the ...
— The Crew of the Water Wagtail • R.M. Ballantyne
... question was taken, in either house, before they adjourned. But, in the progress of the discussion in both houses, some doctrines were uttered which are calculated to startle the friends of the Union. Giddings justified the kidnappers, and contended that, though the act was legally forbidden, it was not morally wrong! Mr. Toombs brought home the practical consequences of this doctrine to the member from Ohio in a most ...
— Personal Memoir Of Daniel Drayton - For Four Years And Four Months A Prisoner (For Charity's Sake) In Washington Jail • Daniel Drayton
... hopes and the folly of friendship?" inquired Adrien, so coldly as to startle both the company and Lord Standon himself, who not being in Lady Constance's confidence, was naturally at a loss for the reason of this sudden anger on the part of Leroy. He drew back in surprise, but any further reference to ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... myself, as my two gun-bearers were staggering under the weight of the deer, and the spare guns were carried by my tracker. We were proceeding slowly along, when the tracker, who was in advance, suddenly sprang back and pointed to some object in the path. It was certainly enough to startle any man. An enormous serpent lay coiled in the path. His head was about the size of a very small cocoa-nut, divided lengthways, and this was raised about eighteen inches above the coil. His eyes were fixed upon us, and his forked tongue played in and ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... them up. "Did I startle you, Miss Ward? I did not mean to. I did not know you were in the house. I thought the girls had gone to ...
— Grace Harlowe's Return to Overton Campus • Jessie Graham Flower
... Chief of Police acquainted him with the matter of the youth and carefully described his house and said to him, "Needs must thou bring him to us in the front of morning, but do thou be courteous in thy dealing and show him comradeship and startle him not nor cause him aught of fear." After this Ja'afar dismissed the Wali and returned to his own quarters. And when the morning morrowed the Chief of Police, having chosen him as escort a single Mameluke, made for the house of the youth, and when he had reached it knocked ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... urged by advocates of this doctrine, quite truly, that all political events are brought about by minorities, since the majority are indifferent to politics. But there is a difference between a minority in which the indifferent acquiesce, and a minority so hated as to startle the indifferent into belated action. To make the Bolshevik doctrine reasonable, it is necessary to suppose that they believe the majority can be induced to acquiesce, at least temporarily, in the revolution made by the class-conscious minority. This, again, ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... rend the skies; fill the air; din in the ear, ring in the ear, thunder in the ear; pierce the ears, split the ears, rend the ears, split the head; deafen, stun; faire le diable a quatre[Fr]; make one's windows shake, rattle the windows; awaken the echoes, startle the echoes; wake the dead. Adj. loud, sonorous; high-sounding, big-sounding; deep, full, powerful, noisy, blatant, clangorous, multisonous[obs3]; thundering, deafening &c. v; trumpet-tongued; ear-splitting, ear-rending, ear- deafening; piercing; obstreperous, rackety, uproarious; enough to ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... light green waistcoat and a sky-blue coat. There was not even a fly in the room to intrude on us in our privacy; there were no cocks and hens in the yard to cackle on us in our privacy; nobody walked past the outer passage, or made any noise in any part of the house, to startle us in our privacy; and a steady rain was falling propitiously to keep us in our privacy. We dined in our retired situation on some rugged lumps of broiled flesh, which the landlady called chops, and the servant ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... agony of terror she watched Garth's steady, downward progress. She felt as though she must scream out to him to hurry—hurry! Yet she bit back the scream lest it should startle him, every muscle of her body rigid with the effort that her ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... much discussed. I myself have heard much of him—but of things connected with another part of his character. It is true that he is in favour with great personages. It is because they are aware that he has observed much for many years. He is light and ironic, but he tells truths which sometimes startle ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... scarcely have the breath of life in it. If, on the other hand, in the course of his legendary, romantic, or historical reading, some character should take hold upon his imagination and demand to be interpreted, or some episode should, as it were, startle him by putting on vivid dramatic form before his mind's eye, then let him by all means yield to the inspiration, and try to mould the theme into a drama. The real labour of creation will still lie before him; but he may face it with the hope of producing a live ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... dawn, and sudden fire. Janet was bald to the heart inhabiting me then, as if quite shaven. She could speak her affectionate mind as plain as print, and it was dull print facing me, not the arches of the sunset. Julia had only to lisp, 'my husband,' to startle and agitate me beyond expression. She said simple things—'I slept well last night,' or 'I dreamed,' or 'I shivered,' and plunged me headlong down impenetrable forests. The mould of her mouth to a reluctant 'No,' and her almost invariable ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... properly employ such as are abstract. The reason for this is clear to any one who conceives of an art of mobile color, not as a moving picture show—a thing of quick-passing concrete images, to shock, to startle, or to charm—but as a rich and various language in which light, proverbially the symbol of the spirit, is made to speak, through the senses, some healing message to the soul. For such a consummation, "devoutly to be wished," natural forms—forms abounding in every kind of association ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... and day, Over and over, score upon score, Wherein to live, and love, and pray, And suck the ripe world to its rotten core? Yet do you reek if my reign be done? E're I pass ye crown the newer one! At ball and rout ye dance and shout, Shutting men's cries of suffering out, That startle the white-tressed silences Musing beside the fount of light, In the eternal space, to press Their roses, each a nebula bright, More close to their lips serene, While ye wear ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... what he supposed they were after—with the design of breaking the terrible truth to me as gently as possible. But I had now better than half divined it, and his communication did not startle me. ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... up within them. These doubts enter into the mind at first almost imperceptibly: they exist only as vague indistinct surmises, and by no means take the precise shape or the substance of a formed opinion. At first, probably, they even offend and startle by their intrusion: but by degrees the unpleasant sensations which they once excited wear off: the mind grows more familiar with them. A confused sense (for such it is, rather than a formed idea) of its being desirable that their doubts should prove well ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... calculations of the French Staff, the total number of armed men upon which Germany would be able to draw for all purposes would exceed 7,000,000." [Footnote: The British Army, p. 161.] This and other forecasts may startle those readers whose curiosity tempts them to read the volume again in 1917. But the work produced no practical result except to put Dilke into the front rank of army reformers. The Government took no action to remedy the military weakness which everyone recognized. ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... Oh, I'm so excited I'm all mixed up! She's had an awful spell, but she's better now; but you mustn't startle her. Something's the matter with her heart. It was beating like a ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... ordered, "she is going to give us a broadside. When it is over start one of those sea beggar songs you picked up at Brill; that will startle them, and they will think we are crowded with men and going ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... another lamp. The first words of his visitor had startled him into forgetting that the room was dark—perhaps, as the interview went on, he was glad of the obscurity into which his face was thrown. And the sounds of the low-toned conversation did not startle Nan from her slumber all at once. She had heard several sentences before she realized where she was and what she was listening to, and then very natural feelings kept her silent ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... to Philip that possibly the whole story was an elaborate imposture, not told with any base motive, but merely from a wish to impress, startle, and amaze. Athelny had told him that he was at Winchester; but Philip, sensitive to differences of manner, did not feel that his host had the characteristics of a man educated at a great public school. ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... liberty and enjoying the benefit of British protection at the same time. Many were the auguries that the experiment would result in political and economic failure, but the good results to all concerned proved to be so far-reaching as to startle even its most sanguine advocates. The extension of privileges and rights operated upon the natives as a magical incentive to labour and emulation for the improvement of their economic condition; people who had before preferred an indolent, semi-nomadic existence betook themselves more to agricultural ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... going up to Town?" he asked her presently. His voice seemed to startle her. She returned evidently with difficulty from thoughts of her own. He would have given ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... stated. The well-known lawyer had been interviewed. He had told the reporter that the contents of Field's letter were surprising beyond words and that as soon as he had made full preparations some arrests would follow that would startle the country. The lawyer, whose name was withheld for obvious reasons, was a man whose integrity was beyond question. He had no intention of using the funds willed him by Field, for he and Field had grown up together in a little New England town. The ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... were uttered in a very low voice, but they produced sound enough to startle Meg Merrilies, who led the van, and who, having already gained the place where the cavern expanded, had risen upon her feet. She began, as if to confound any listening ear, to growl, to mutter, and to sing aloud, and at the same time to make a bustle among some ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Was this the girl who had never spoken of her past life in the hearing of any one—who had never named father or mother or home, except perhaps to little Marjorie? Mrs Esselmont was a wise woman. She would have liked well to hear more, but she asked no question to startle her into silence again. After a little ...
— Allison Bain - By a Way she knew not • Margaret Murray Robertson
... quite enough to startle and alarm them, for Nanahboozhoo was also much feared, as he sometimes did ...
— Algonquin Indian Tales • Egerton R. Young
... twelve—it was a good thing for Fred that the sound was loud enough to startle him—he put back the volume of travels with a sigh of regret, found, with some trouble, the book Mrs. Marshall wanted, and ran all the way home to make up for ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... of that one little cloud is lost in the wide brightness of a summer sky. The traveller jogs on contented and unthinking, till the hoarse roar of stormy winds, or the first big drops of the thunder-shower, startle him with a sudden consciousness of the ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... purple, and with each petal decorated by an "eye" exactly like those on the great Cecropia or Polyphemus moths, so that their effect is that of a flock of gorgeous butterflies come to rest. They hover over the meadows poised. A movement would startle them to flight; only the proper movement ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... he might. Not that he was afraid—you may be pretty sure of that; but to hear this quiet, bashful lad, who looked as if he had nothing in him, coolly propose to hold a lighted shell in his arms to see if it would go off, and ask him to stand by and watch it, was enough to startle anybody. However, he wasn't one to think twice about accepting a challenge; so he folded his arms and stood there like a statue. The young officer lighted the fuse, and it began ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... of merry pleasure parties in gay Paris. A young dude, driving my four-in-hand, and yet a criminal, waiting in hourly expectation a telegram announcing success in a great plot which, when it exploded, was destined to startle the business world, and to hurl me from the summit of happiness, where I was reveling, apparently free from care, to the misery of a dungeon, banishing the happy smiles from my face and the joyous ring from my ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... the same," he said to the man behind the bar, and then to me with a kind of explosive snap: "By George, I'm in a good mind to resign this rotten job!" That didn't startle me. I had been in the business long enough to know that the average newspaper man is forever threatening to resign. Most of them—to hear them talk—are always just on the point of throwing up their jobs and buying a good-paying country ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... in an Indian forest. There are actually few birds. As you brush through the long grass and trample the tangled undergrowth, putting aside the sprawling branches, or dodging under the pliant arms of the creepers, you may flush a black or grey partridge, raise a covey of quail, or startle a quiet family party of peafowl, but there are no sweet singers flitting about to make the vaulted arcades of the forest echo ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... believed her capable even of miracles. In some way or other she must have discovered the state of my desires towards Agnes. She had written, or something. She and Agnes had been plotting together by letter to startle me, and perhaps telegraphing. Agnes had fibbed in telling me that she could not possibly come to Bursley for Christmas; she had delightfully fibbed. And my mother had got her concealed somewhere in the house, or was momentarily ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... Dinah was really walking at her usual pace, with a light quiet step. Now she was beginning to wind along the path up the hill, but Adam would not move yet; he would not meet her too soon; he had set his heart on meeting her in this assured loneliness. And now he began to fear lest he should startle her too much. "Yet," he thought, "she's not one to be overstartled; she's always so calm and quiet, as if she was ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... trumpet extend the sense of the unbearable beyond all possible bounds. Thus, sir, the circulation of the blood and the fluids of the body will not give me pause; you shall hear them flow with the impetuosity of cataracts; you shall perceive them so distinctly as to startle you; the slightest irregularity of the pulse, the least obstacle, is striking, and produces the same effect as a rock against which the waves of ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... a few words respecting the state of Spain, though what I communicate will probably startle you, as in England you are quite in the dark respecting what is going on here. At the moment I am writing, Cabrera, the tiger-friar, is within nine leagues of Madrid with an army nearly ten thousand strong; he has beaten the Queen's troops in several engagements, ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... her feet, with a faint cry. "I wish you wouldn't startle me," she said, irritably, sinking back on the sofa. "Any sudden alarm sets my heart beating as if ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... done little more than drift down the channel. The boys resigned themselves to their fate. Now and again the fog shut down. Wild cries of sea-birds were about them. Now and then the leap of a great dolphin feeding in the tide splashed alongside, to startle them yet more. Each moment, as they knew, carried them farther and farther from their friends, and deeper and deeper into dangers whose ...
— The Young Alaskans • Emerson Hough
... preaching that the cathedral was filled to overflowing with the crowds that came to listen to him. Little by little, as they could bear it, he opened the truth to his hearers. He was careful not to introduce, at first, points which would startle them and create prejudice. His work was to win their hearts to the teachings of Christ, to soften them by His love, and keep before them His example; and as they should receive the principles of the gospel, their superstitious beliefs and practices ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... with her back to him, and Forrester didn't make a sound, not wanting to startle the Goddess. She was totally unclad, her glorious body shining in the light of the room, her blue-black hair unbound and falling halfway down her gently curved back. But she must have heard him somehow, for she turned, and for half a second ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... "It is a secret loop-hole, and it isn't here except in times of great duress. See! I can close it." The oblong blotch abruptly disappeared, only to reappear an instant later. I was beginning to understand. Of course it was in the beleaguered east wing! "I hope I didn't startle you a moment ago." ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... Jack and the Gold Dust maverick His first impulse was to call out and warn her to keep away from the horses—that both were dangerous for men to fool with, much less was it safe for a woman to undertake familiarities with them. His next thought was that his sudden appearance would only startle the girl and—well, cause a lot of useless talk. He ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... clattering of hoofs was heard, and looking toward the sound, I perceived the Chancellor cantering down the road. When abreast of the carriage he dismounted, and walking up to it, saluted the Emperor in a quick, brusque way that seemed to startle him. After a word or two, the party moved perhaps a hundred yards further on, where they stopped opposite the weaver's cottage so famous from that day. This little house is on the east side of the Donchery ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... people sings out for justice everybody's bound to hearken, and say how as you wants a warrant agin him for bigamy, and show them the marriage lines. Don't you be put down, and don't you spare him. If you don't startle him you'll niver get northing out ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... excitedly, as Don clung to him and held him back, gazing wildly all the time at the disturbed water, as the great fish swiftly approached, till, just as it was within a few yards, the shallowness of the water seemed to startle it, making it give quite a bound showing half its length, and then diving down with a kind of wallow, after which the occupants of the boat saw the wooden pole go trailing along the surface, till once more it was snatched, as ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... Soft wispering 'wakes the blushing May: Sweet are the hours, yet not so sweet As when my blue-eyed maid I meet, And hear her soul-entrancing tale, Sequester'd in the shadowy vale. The mellow horn's long-echoing notes Startle the morn commingling strong; At eve, the harp's wild music floats, And ravish'd silence drinks the song; Yet sweeter is the song of love, When Emma's voice enchants the grove, While listening sylphs repeat the tale, Sequester'd ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... to and fro through the room with a cautious tranquillity which nothing could startle; she prepared her decayed roots for food with a patient attention which nothing could divert. Lost, through the aggravated miseries of her position, to recent grief and present apprehension, she could still instinctively perform the simple offices of the ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... were still talking he put his saddle bags over his arm, opened the shutter its full width, and dropped quietly to the ground outside, remembering to take the precaution of closing the shutter behind him, lest the sudden inrush of cold startle the Leffingwells ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... manage to take me round behind the scenes, so to speak, if Mr. Narkom will lend us his motor to hurry us there? Could, eh? That's good. I think I'd like to have a look at that lion and, if you don't mind, an introduction to the parties concerned. No! don't fear; we won't startle anybody by revealing my identity or the cause of the visit. Let us say that I'm a vet. to whom you have appealed for an opinion regarding Nero's queer conduct. All ready, Mr. Narkom? Then let's ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... additional shock to the prejudices he had already offended, Sterne felt impelled to vindicate what he considered the genuine moral worth underlying the indiscretions of the offender. What, then, could better suit him than to compose a novel in which he might give full play to his simious humour, startle more hideously than ever his straighter-laced neighbours, defiantly defend his own character, and caricature whatever eccentric figure in the society around him might offer the most tempting butt ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... woodland, and yet are too much shaded and overgrown by young trees to give proper pasturage, when they made delightful harbors for the small wild creatures which yet remain, and for wild flowers and berries. Here you send an astonished rabbit scurrying to his burrow, and there you startle yourself with a partridge, who seems to get the best of the encounter. Sometimes you see a hen partridge and her brood of chickens crossing your path with an air of comfortable door-yard security. As you drive along the narrow, grassy road, you ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... about the house, making certain arrangements so rapidly as to startle the languid Hili-lites. In ten or fifteen minutes they had removed to the cellar all the necessary furniture of a comfortable room, including a bedstead for Lilama, and another for her two maids. Three lamps were taken to the cellar, lighted, and oil sufficient for ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... included in the story of literature. The one book for which he is famous is called Leviathan, or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth (1651). It is partly political, partly a philosophical book, combining two central ideas which challenge and startle the attention, namely, that self-interest is the only guiding power of humanity, and that blind submission to rulers is the only true basis of government.[179] In a word, Hobbes reduced human nature to its purely animal aspects, and then asserted confidently that there ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... success, condone the unprincipled ambition of a Frederick, so- called the Great, and exalt him into a hero; or find in the cold heart and mean sordid soul of a Turner an ideal, because one of those strange physiological freaks that now and then startle the world, the artist's temperament and artist's skill, were his beyond those of any man of his age. But as our object here is to attempt placing her before the reader as asserting and illustrating the highest life of humanity, as a true preacher of the doctrine of the Cross, even ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... of lunacy. The conductor came down the car, picking out Troubletonians with his undeceivable eye, and leaned toward us with outstretched fingers. Mr. Riley rose to his whole gaunt height at a jerk, and laid his hand on the official's arm with a fierce, bony gripe, which seemed to startle him as if it were the clutch ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... on a street-corner in the last hour of sunlight, had wiped his brow and taken his cane down from under his arm to start again, when somebody, coming noiselessly from he knew not where, asked, so suddenly as to startle him: ...
— Madame Delphine • George W. Cable
... not have a slave to till my ground, To carry me, to fan me while I sleep And startle when I wake, for all the wealth That sinews bought ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... had been forced into an alliance with one he hated, rather than had just made a voluntary engagement with the woman he loved. My soul shuddered at this commencement of a contract which I had dared to make unsanctioned by my father's consent. At length my sighs seemed to startle my husband; and suddenly turning round, he cried, 'Therese, this marriage must not be told to the palatine. I have been precipitate. It would ruin me with my family. Refrain, only for one month, and then ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... dressing-gown and looked for it anxiously in vain. Perhaps Elizabeth might remember where it was last seen. She hurried to her. Elizabeth had a sitting-room and bedroom at the end of the corridor, and Mrs. Gaddesden went into the sitting-room first, as quietly as possible, so as not to startle her daughter. ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Majesty," she called in a low tone, that she might not startle him; but the answer for which she waited in breathless suspense did not come, and now the anxious dread that filled her sisterly heart forced from her lips the cry, "Carlos!" and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... necessarily be real cannons. I don't think our funds would run to real cannons. Besides, what good would they be when we had them? But you've got the main idea all right. Our game is to pull off something which will startle the blessed British public, impress it with the fact that we're just as desperate as ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... "God bless my soul, if you frightened him into giving up a quid of tobacco like that you sure did startle him some!" He kicked Stevens' lost property out with the toe of his boot and turned to Joanne, showing her the fresh bread and marmalade. "Mrs. Otto sent these to you," he said. "And the ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... gray and green and steely blue; and just that, and some homely magic of his own, hint the commerce of another world with man's discarded domain. Men and women are asleep, and as in an early walk you may startle the hares at their play, or see the creatures of the darkness—owls and night-hawks and heavy moths—flit with fantastic purpose over the familiar scene, so here it comes upon you suddenly that you have surprised Nature's self at her mysteries; ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... quasi-dramatic representation of character. Why should we venture on the assertion that if adopted by the writers of the Old Testament it would make them guilty of falsehood?...There is nothing that need startle us in the thought that an inspired writer might use a liberty which has been granted without hesitation to the teachers of mankind in every age and country." [Footnote: Art. ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... decided to ascertain from the servants what the lady's future movements might be; and, thus informed, to startle her by anonymous warnings, conveyed through the post, and claiming their answer through the advertising channel of a newspaper. Here was the certainty of alarming her, coupled with the certainty of safety to himself! Little did Mrs. Glenarm dream, when she capriciously ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... insensibly have been either famished or poisoned. In this spiritual distress, the expiring faction was revived, and united, and perpetuated, by the labors of a monk; and the name of James Baradaeus [129] has been preserved in the appellation of Jacobites, a familiar sound, which may startle the ear of an English reader. From the holy confessors in their prison of Constantinople, he received the powers of bishop of Edessa and apostle of the East, and the ordination of fourscore thousand bishops, priests, and deacons, is derived from the same inexhaustible source. The speed of the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... away from them as possible, preferably to some mountain region, beside a cool and dashing brook, where a party of adventurous young climbers from a summer hotel or the lonely trout fisherman may startle it from its mossy nest on ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... this plea may seem, it had a powerful effect. Columbus was even accused of a design to cast off all allegiance to Spain, and either make himself sovereign of the countries he had discovered, or yield them into the hands of some other power: a slander which, however extravagant, was calculated to startle the jealous mind ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... come and gone. Gerald and Aurora Blank will be over for Christmas dinner, and will drop in for occasional meals during holiday week. Then, with Miss Molly and her father, and Herr and Frau Deichenberg, there will be a nice little party here at home. Those boys, Jim and Len, have appetites that will startle you. Oh, yes; we have lots to eat, Chloe, but—well, you ...
— Dorothy's Triumph • Evelyn Raymond
... his strength to be of any avail; our roots were the growth of years, and, besides, we clasped him so tightly—for unity is indeed strength—that at last the cowardly fellow roared aloud with mingled pain and fright; perhaps he thought to startle us, and make us lose our hold. But we knew better than that—we only gripped him the faster; but the noise aroused Dash, who came bounding to the spot (he was always unchained at night), and, flying at Mr. Reynard's throat, he soon pinned ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... test. We screw everything up to that. Idle gallantry in a fiction, a dream, the passing pageant of an evening, startles us in the same way as the alarming indications of profligacy in a son or ward in real life should startle a parent or guardian. We have no such middle emotions as dramatic interests left. We see a stage libertine playing his loose pranks of two hours' duration, and of no after consequence, with the severe eyes which inspect real vices with their bearings ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... exhortations of press and professors during our own times. The mind of the average kindly German citizen has been debauched and yet again debauched until it needed just such a world crisis as this to startle him at last from his obsession and to see his position and that of his country in its true ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... go into the Joys like this: most of them cannot endure me. But I have here the thick veil with which I cover myself when I visit happy people.... (She unfolds a long veil and wraps herself in it carefully.) Not a ray of my you! must startle them, for there are many Happinesses that are afraid and are not happy.... There... like this, even the ugliest and coarsest of them will have ...
— The Blue Bird: A Fairy Play in Six Acts • Maurice Maeterlinck
... one hill Will scanned the country with his field-glass, and remarked that some deer were headed our way, and that we should have fresh venison for dinner. He directed us to ride down into the valley and tarry there, so that we might not startle the timid animals, while he continued part way up the hill and halted in position to get a good shot at the first one that came over the knoll. A fawn presently bounded into view, and Will brought his rifle to his shoulder; but much to our surprise, instead of firing, dropped ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... there is something still more thrilling—the thought that Girlie may grow to be like me (like what you think me), and that in the time to come she may startle you with undescribable resemblances, in her voice or smile, or laugh, to her mother in heaven, so that some day, perhaps, years and years hence, when she is quite grown up, she may touch your arm and you ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... poetical catch-words, all exaggeration, and everything comprehended in Pegasus-flights. He is true—and does not everything lie in this one word? He opens our eyes to the beauty which lies under our feet like the daisy in the meadow. He calls everything by its true name. He never intends to startle, deceive, or dazzle any one. He seeks no admiration for himself. He only shows mankind how beautiful everything is which man's hand has not yet spoiled or broken. Is not a dew-drop on a blade of grass more beautiful than a pearl set in gold? Is not a living ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... again, I learnt the utter and wonderful kindness of my friends. I felt so selfish and so surprised at the goodness they showed me. Again, I saw something of the mystery of pain. My own was so trivial compared with that which some others had to bear. Yet I had enough to startle me that such a fact should be permitted on earth at all. I don't suppose we can understand its meaning; but my consolation was that it is not necessarily a sign of God's displeasure—that the highest life was a life of suffering, that the Son of Man was a 'Man of Sorrows.' Everything seems ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... the time of the reformation of LUTHER in the sixteenth century, and with no other epoch. The great truths then promulgated, of which "justification by faith" was the cardinal one, electrified the whole world, as the loud roaring of a lion would startle the passer-by. These were immediately responded to by the multitudinous errors of the Anabaptists and others, who thought to set up the kingdom of GOD in this world, and before the resurrection, by putting to death the ungodly and ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... blustering heroes of the municipality would not listen to this reasoning; they were too careful of the lives of the citizens, the nuns included; down the edifices must come. The Commune of Paris over again. The ladies of Cadiz, those who pass to and fro, prayer-book in hand, in the streets, and startle the flashing sunshine with their solemn mantillas, were wroth with the municipality. They saw through its designs, and they resolved to defeat them. To the number of some five hundred they formed a procession, and marched four deep to ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... for a whole year and carefully tended unless it could be exorcised or frightened away. The usual recipe, the same as for the riddance of changelings, was to brew beer in egg-shells, and this performance was supposed so to startle the spectral dog that he would fly with his tail between his legs, exclaiming that, although as old as the Behmer, or Bohemian forest, he had never before beheld such an ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... the evening as well. To make certain of this, a gun was charged and "sighted" while there was yet light; and at nine o'clock a shell was sent hurtling through the shades of night. Its effect, of course, was not observable; but if it were to startle the enemy as much as the gun's boom did the whole of us, C. J. R. and his unseasonable "compliments" must have fallen foul of ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... creeping like a ghost among the ricks. Not even a rustle betrayed her as she came up to Tom from behind. He still knelt where she had left him, looking up to her window, which gleamed like a dead eye in the moonlight. She stood for a moment, afraid to move, lest she should startle him, and he should call out, for the slightest noise about the place would bring Godfrey down. The next moment, however, Tom, aware of her presence, sprang to his feet, and, turning, bounded to her, and took her in his arms. Still possessed by the one terror of making ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... caution, never making a sudden move, I took his picture. All was as merry as a marriage bell, and might have continued so but for that puppy Sim. That is the trouble with skunks; they will lose their manners if startled, and dogs startle skunks. ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... birds of the neighbourhood—red-breasts, white-throats, black-caps, nightingales, fig-peckers of all sorts. And when a numerous company of them was gathered together Leo XIII, seated out of sight and watching, would suddenly clap his hands and startle the birds, which flew up and were caught by the wings in the meshes of the nets. All that then remained to be done was to take them out of the nets and stifle them by a touch of the thumb. ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... They read the local papers with interest, discussed the question at public meetings, sent a man to England to obtain all available information concerning it, and with a push and energy which would startle the town today, they set to work to obtain a charter from the Kentucky Legislature, then in its session of 1829-30, asking for a railroad from Lexington, Kentucky, to some point on ...
— A Pioneer Railway of the West • Maude Ward Lafferty
... young and I used him sore, So you never shall startle Frankie more, Without capsizing Earth and her waters. ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... must confess, much more like a sort of mechanical demon that would hurry us to the infernal regions than a laudable contrivance for smoothing our way to the Celestial City. On its top sat a personage almost enveloped in smoke and flame, which, not to startle the reader, appeared to gush from his own mouth and stomach as well as from the ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... change except in the matter of uniform and equipment. The officers may write to the papers demanding the heads of the Horse Guards in default of cleaner redress for grievances; the men may break loose across a country town and seriously startle the publicans; but neither officers nor men have it in their composition to mutiny after the continental manner. The English people, when they trouble to think about the army at all, are, and with justice, absolutely assured that it is absolutely trustworthy. Imagine for a moment their ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... replied, "and I'm sorry, Ada, but cannot help it now. This will I say, however: I had no wish or intention to hear when I hid myself. My desire was only to startle thee and Hilda, and before I thought what thou wert talking of the thing was out, and now I have got it I cannot ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... dressing, the conduct. It was then that the back hair was braided and the front curled more and more beautifully every day, and that the calico dresses became stiffer and stiffer, and the white crochet lace collar broader and lower in the neck. At thirteen she was beautiful enough to startle one, they say, but that was nothing; she spent time and care upon these things, as if, like other women, her fate seriously depended upon them. There is no self-abnegation like that of a ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... of war at Chicago, Illinois, being released, and the great conspiracy in the North once fairly inaugurated, the capture of the steamer Michigan was to be one of the combined movements that were to startle the country, and aid the conspiracy in overturning the authority of the United States Government, With the "Michigan" in their hands, the conspirators would have a powerful auxilliary in their pernicious designs upon the country, and be able to render effective aid to the ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... be a moment's ornament; Her eyes as stars of Twilight fair; Like Twilight's, too, her dusky hair; But all things else about her drawn From May-time and the cheerful Dawn; A dancing Shape, and Image gay, To haunt, to startle, and waylay. ...
— What Great Men Have Said About Women - Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 77 • Various
... sees the first uncertain glimmer of the light, 'rising and falling with the waves, like a torch in the bark of some fisherman,' which is the shining star of a new world. Bruce is caged in Abyssinia, surrounded by the gory horrors which shall often startle him out of his sleep at home when years have passed away. Franklin, come to the end of his unhappy overland journey - would that it had been his last! - lies perishing of hunger with his brave companions: each emaciated figure ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... not as serious as it sounds, for the shots were not to be directed at the rustlers but fired in the air to startle the cattle. In cutting out, or, rather, in separating from those who had stolen them the steers from Diamond X, it was necessary to get the animals on the run. They could then more easily be driven ...
— The Boy Ranchers at Spur Creek - or Fighting the Sheep Herders • Willard F. Baker
... said the pilot, in low, soothing tones, but in a manner so sudden as to startle Griffith, at whose elbow they were unexpectedly uttered. "Let us forget, young man, everything but the number of lives that depend, this night, on ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... with parted lips. He seemed afraid to breathe lest he startle away some hesitant hope. "I?" ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... to the rescue by introducing a new topic of conversation, that of a European tenor that was soon expected to startle New York. Daisy went to the piano, and played softly, talking in whispers to Roseleaf, who leaned feverishly over her shoulder. But she made no allusion to Hannibal, and he did his ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... excellence. How does such a whole stand as compared with a building of strange, and at first sight, unintelligible outline, formed by the juxtaposition of two parts, each of admirable merit in itself, but which startle by their absolute contrast in every way? Chartres was made, Le Mans eminently grew; and different minds will be differently inclined in the comparison between a single harmonious work of art and a union of two buildings widely differing in date, style, and proportion. But, on the other hand, it ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... his inquiries about American oysters, as marvellous stories, which he did not believe, had been told him of their great size. We apologized—although we had taken care that the largest specimens to be procured should startle his unwonted vision when he came to the table—for what we called the extreme smallness of the oysters, promising that we would do better next time. Six bloated Falstaffian bivalves lay before him in their shells. I noticed that he gazed at ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... system are not yet extinct. You may hear, for instance, resounding along the corridors such an order as—"Petrusha! Petrusha! Stakan vody!" ("Little Peter, little Peter, a glass of water!") shouted in a stentorian voice that would startle the Seven Sleepers. ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... a conference while the Circle C riders handcuffed Dutch and tied him to a horse. Soon the posse was off again, having left the prisoner in charge of one of the men. They swung round in a wide half circle, not wishing to startle their game until the proper time. The horses pounded up hills, slid into washes, and plowed through sand on a Spanish trot, sometimes in the moonlight, more often in darkness. The going was rough, but they could ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... adjectives, sparkling with bright and vivid meaning, as crisp and fresh as just-minted bank-notes. They should have no taint of flatness or insipidity. They should show not the faintest trace of wear. With them, one might hope, now and then, to startle the imagination, to set it running in channels which are strange and delightful to it. For there is something new under the sun: aerial adventure; and the most lively and unjaded fancy may, at first, need direction toward ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... head so quickly as to startle her. "I have nothing to say to him; and I'll never put my foot on board this craft. I've been ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... and ability of General Sherman were not fully appreciated until the second year of the war. He had not aimed to startle the country at the outset of his military career with any of the brilliant performances attempted by many officers who were heard of for a day and never afterwards. With the true instinct and discipline of a soldier, he ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... out. I do not doubt that some day she'll murder her husband or her mother, or startle the world by some newly-invented crime; but that only makes her the ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... spoiling what might be a good story. That I cannot help; and I write with the firm conviction that any effort on my part to arrange these facts in such order that the tale should show dramatic force, or startle him with unexpected issues of event, would only procure derision for its writer, and might even obscure the only end he has at heart, that of giving a complete grasp of the facts, as nearly as may be in the order ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... may be with the nervous little seed-pods of the touch-me-not, which children ever love to pop and see the seeds fly, as they do from balsam pods in grandmother's garden, they still startle with the suddenness of their volley. Touch the delicate hair-trigger at the end of a capsule, and the lightning response of the flying seeds makes one jump. They sometimes land four feet away. At this ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... likeness flashed upon Lynde suddenly, as it had done in the grove the previous day, that it now had the power to startle him. At the present moment it did not even seriously annoy him. In an idle, pensive way he noted the coincidence of the man leading the mule. The man was Morton and the mule was Mary! Lynde smiled to himself at the reflection that Mary would probably not accept the analogy with very good grace ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... to the delinquencies of Bay State Gas as the screaming of eagles to the chirping of crickets. From its birth this great enterprise went hand-in-hand with fraud and financial dishonor, and the facts I shall proceed to reveal are so formidable in their indictment as to startle even those calloused to the trickery of ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... breeding by little conventional rules not observed by the American Colonel. He had a slight nasal twang, and introduced "sir" with redundant ceremony in addressing Englishmen, however intimate he might be with them, and had the habit (perhaps with a sly intention to startle or puzzle them) of adorning his style of conversation ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Louise pears," I thought; and I was about to run and shout at them, for I knew that would startle them away; but on second thoughts I felt as if I should like to catch some of them, and turning, I ran softly back up the path, meaning to ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... Bill is much less ambitious." It is. And it is introduced by one who knows and dreads, as much as any of us, the dangerous and unballasted condition into which we have drifted; introduced with, as it were, apology, as if he feared that, unambitious though, it be, it will startle the nerves of Parliament. On a question so vast and vital you are bound to startle by any little measure. Nothing but an heroic measure would arouse debate on a scale adequate to reach and stir the depths of our national condition, ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... the tales told me of the passage of news from South to North Africa during the recent war were not so extravagant as they seem at first hearing, I would set them down here, well assured that they would startle if they could not convince. In the south of Morocco, during the latter days of my journey, men spoke with quiet conviction of the doings of Sultan and Pretender in the North, just as though Morocco possessed a train or telegraph service, or a native newspaper. It does not seem unreasonable ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... effort he forced himself into an appearance of composure. He feared that he might startle and offend her if he gave expression to the ardors that throbbed in his heart and brain. "She must be tired and nervous," he thought, "and I will try to speak and ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... accurate copies of those which were accepted by the Councils before our Christian era? Can anything be done to trace the rise of the legends and marvels of Sakyamuni's history, which were current so early (as it seems to us) as the time of Fa-hien, and which startle us so frequently by similarities between them and narratives in our Gospels? Dr. Hermann Oldenberg, certainly a great authority on Buddhistic subjects, says that "a biography of Buddha has not come down to us from ancient times, ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... fervent heat, choked with the ruins of nations, and the limbs of its corpses tossed out of its whirling, like water-wheels. Bat-like, out of the holes and caverns and shadows of the earth, the bones gather, and the clay heaps heave, rattling and adhering into half-kneaded anatomies, that crawl, and startle, and struggle up among the putrid weeds, with the clay clinging to their clotted hair, and their heavy eyes sealed by the earth darkness yet, like his of old who went his way unseeing to the Siloam Pool; shaking off one by one the dreams of ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... of perceiving things without them than what we have, yet our thoughts can go no further than our own: so impossible it is for us to enlarge our very guesses beyond the ideas received from our own sensation and reflection. The supposition, at least, that angels do sometimes assume bodies, needs not startle us; since some of the most ancient and most learned Fathers of the church seemed to believe that they had bodies: and this is certain, that their state and way of existence is ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... instructions did not a little startle the Scots members of Parliament, and even the Ministry; and there were likewise many private letters written to them by their friends, assuring them of the highest resentment if they did not perform what was desired and expected of them. Had these members been endued with a public spirit ...
— The Jacobite Rebellions (1689-1746) - (Bell's Scottish History Source Books.) • James Pringle Thomson
... of which the pith is in the final sentences: '"But," I think I hear some one say, "after all, friend Howe, was not the supposititious case, which you anticipated might occur, somewhat quaint and eccentric and startling?" It was, because I wanted to startle, to rouse, to flash the light of truth over every hideous feature of the system. {86} The fire-bell startles at night; but if it rings not the town may be burned; and wise men seldom vote him an incendiary who pulls the ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... so far lost her head as to do anything which would bore her or cause her to appear at less than an alluring advantage. When she could invent a particularly unique and inspiring shred of a garment to startle the public with, she danced for some noble object and intoxicated herself with the dazzle of light and applause. She found herself strung to her highest pitch of excitement by the air raids, which in the midst of their terrors had the singular effect of exciting many ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... could be done. Albinia had a dim hope that the sense of responsibility, and dread of that hard will and selfish temper, might so rise upon Lucy as to startle her, but then, as Mr. Kendal observed, if she should decide against him, she would have used him so extremely ill, that they should feel nothing ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... began. And swift and sudden it went on to the end. She had come on board the yacht that first night to startle it with her beauty and her voice; last night, silent and stately, she had slipped through the evening like a dream; now she stood before him a dazzling creature of the morning: yesterday she was ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... wan, an' more thin that, that th' town humorist has named him th' orange-peel hero, an' he'll go to his grave with that name. Th' war is over an' th' state iv war exists. If ye saw a man fall fr'm th' top iv a tin-story buildin' 'twud startle ye, wanst. If it happened again, 'twud surprise ye. But if ye saw a man fall ivry fifteen minyits ye'd go home afther awhile f'r supper an' ye wuddent even mintion it ...
— Mr. Dooley's Philosophy • Finley Peter Dunne
... recounting, as he often did, the scenes of the battle field, his eye would burn with savage fire, lighting up his whole countenance with the fiercest kind of bravery, and often with a hideous yell that would startle our very souls, he would burst from the room and bound over the fields and forest, with the fleetness of a deer—making the woods ring with his frightful war-cry, until the blood seemed ready to curdle in our veins. ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... further dosing and experimentation along the materialistic lines of the 'regular' school, of curtailing their liberties, and forcing their necks under the yoke of medical tyranny, should come to them with the insistence of a clarion call, and startle them into such action that the subtle evil which lurks behind this proposed legislative action would be dragged out into the light and exterminated! To permit commercialism and greed, the lust of mammon, and ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... Man and his Dwelling-Place is likely, after the shock of the first grand theory, that Man is dead and the Universe living, to receive with comparative coolness any further views set out in the book, however strange, I should say that probably, the third Book, 'Of Religion,' would startle him more than anything else in the work. Although this Book stands third in the volume, it is first both in importance and in chronology. For the author tells us that his views Of Religion are not deduced from the theoretical ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... of this roaring hive of men and women striving to feed and clothe and house themselves came a flash of vivid lightning in the murky sky,—the bomb of the anarchist. That was enough to startle even the Milly Ridges,—spitting forth its vicious message only a mile or two from where the very "nicest" people had their homes! The sodden consciousness of the city awoke in a hideous nightmare of fear. The newspapers were filled with the ravings of excited ignorance. ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... to herself, "now I will wait and startle these girls from Tabeaue as they come along." And so she sank low down in the water, so that only her dark head showed ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... That would startle Luke, He thought. But Luke said, "We all wanted to, very much. But that would have been foolish, Master. Then we would not have had all the other things. And besides, there would not have been enough ...
— The Worshippers • Damon Francis Knight
... and fro through the room with a cautious tranquillity which nothing could startle; she prepared her decayed roots for food with a patient attention which nothing could divert. Lost, through the aggravated miseries of her position, to recent grief and present apprehension, she could still instinctively ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... to give her assistance, but Marian shook her head at her, with a kindly look, that seemed to say, "Do not startle her—she is used only to me lately," and bore her out of sight into ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... excited state of mind he fancied so. His light went out; he had no more matches. As he groped his way to the steps, or where he thought they were, something touched him on the shoulder. It was enough to startle any man, and he cried out in alarm. There was a faint, squeaking noise and a fluttering, then the thing touched his cheek and he smelt a deathlike odor. Thoroughly alarmed he groped out. He felt the ...
— The Rider in Khaki - A Novel • Nat Gould
... when you have gotten your roman letter as good as the best that has been, I do not think you will find much scope for development of it; I would therefore put in a word for some form of gothic letter for use in our improved printed book. This may startle some of you, but you must remember that except for a very remarkable type used very seldom by Berthelette (I have only seen two books in this type. Bartholomew, the Englishman, and the Gower, of 1532), English black-letter, since the days of Wynkin de Worde, has been always ...
— The Art and Craft of Printing • William Morris
... did not startle Elinor, did not make her heart beat, did not open new complications and vistas in life, would be a thing impossible. Pippo Lord Lomond! Pippo, whom she had feared to expose to his father's influence, whom she had ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... Yes, things were always ending. Now he was different than the night he had lain beside Rachel and whispered, "You have given me wings." But how? He felt the same. Change came like that. Leaving one the same. He would write things from Europe that would startle. He could write.... But, something unspoken in the night. He must say it to himself.... "You must love her...." Then that was it. He no ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... to find it interesting. He changed colour several times, and looked hard at the two reprobates before him. But their weather-and-dust-beaten countenances conveyed no information to his mind. Their voices certainly did startle him with something like a familiar sound; but might not this be part of the deep dissimulation dwelt upon with so much ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... to determine the precise moment when to shoot is usually a nice decision. Perhaps he can gain another dozen yards on his prey. On the other hand, by moving closer he may startle them and lose his chance. With so much at stake Tom felt for the second time in his life the palsy ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... from physical agony would come to the criminal, if the dream of dying should startle him from the dream of suffering. The paradise of Spirit would come to Jesus, in a spiritual sense of Life and [15] power. Christ Jesus lived and reappeared. He was too good to die; for goodness is immortal. ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... to Judy, and left him outside so he wouldn't startle the house. Where is my girl—where is ...
— Judy • Temple Bailey
... witch & if she would not he would tear her in pieces, then she again shreekt out now saith shee I see him & lookt wistly & said there he is just at this time to my apearance there seemed to dart in at ye west window a sudden light across ye room wch did startle and amase me at yt present, then she tould me yt she see ye deuill in ye shape of a white dogg, she tould me that ye deuill apeared in ye shape of these three women namly goody Clawson, goody Miller, & ye woman ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... George peered beyond the projecting point of the ledge, he threw up his hands and burst out in laughter. Angel was in the boat, imitating Harry in the building operation. The sudden appearance did not startle him in the least, nor did he stop beating his lullaby, after he noticed the broad smiles that ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay
... so swiftly, and such incredible things have happened. Even now I am in a daze, for history is being made every hour—history for Mexico, for you, and for me. I bring you good news and bad news; something to startle you and set your brain in a whirl. I planned to send a messenger ahead of me, and then I said: 'No, this is a crisis; therefore no tongue but mine shall apprise her, no hand but mine shall comfort her. Only a coward shrinks from the unpleasant; I shall lighten her distress and awaken ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... his tears, took a step into the loggia, and in a low voice, very soft and tremulous, as if trying not to startle ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... intolerant, acrid, flinging out at old-fashioned views, giving quite unnecessary challenges, arguing with imaginary antagonists. It has ever seemed to me, although I suppose that history is against me, that if it be laid on any one to advocate a new view that will startle people, he ought of all men to be conciliatory and persuasive; but Carmichael was, at least in this time of fermentation, very exasperating and pugnacious, and so he drove the Rabbi to the only hard action of his life, wherein the old ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... Has broken Nature's social union, An' justifies that ill opinion, Which makes thee startle At me, thy ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... "I'll tell you what, we know little enough here in America, either in the towns or in the cities," he said rapidly. "We are all on the rush. We are all for action. I sit still and think. If I wanted to write I'd do something. I'd tell what everyone thought. It would startle people, frighten them a little, eh? I would tell you what you have been thinking this afternoon while you walked here on this railroad track with me. I would tell you what your mother has been thinking at the same time and what she would like ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... noiselessly down the knots of the carved oak. Still I stood and watched it, and it crept on slowly, slowly, like a living thing, and growing as it came, to my very feet. I cannot say how long I might have stood there, fascinated by it, had not something suddenly occurred to startle me into my senses again; for full upon the back of my right hand fell, with a sullen, heavy sound, a second drop of blood. It stung and burnt my flesh like molten lead, and the sharp, sudden pain it gave ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... and then the rattling of the reel would keep P——'s excitement alive, and as he gradually wound up the line, the salmon, making another start, would threaten to run away with every inch of tackle. Warily the Norwegian rowed, scarcely dipping his sculls in the water, lest their splash should startle the most timid of fish; but his cautious conduct made no impression on P——, for I could still see him motion angrily to the ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... May 21, the Versailles army began to make its way into Paris, and the Commune, seeing its fantastic and terrible power about to pass away, tried to startle the world by its excesses. Orders were sent at once to Mazas to send the archbishop, the priests, Senator Bonjean, suspected spies, and sergents de ville to that part of the prison of La Roquette reserved for condemned criminals. Paul and his friend the other Seminarist ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... and the movement which accompanied them, combined to startle Lily out of the state of tranced subservience into which she had insensibly slipped. Light comes in devious ways to the groping consciousness, and it came to her now through the disgusted perception that her would-be accomplice ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... whirling, like water-wheels. Bat like, out of the holes and caverns and shadows of the earth, the bones gather, and the clay-heaps heave, rattling and adhering into half-kneaded anatomies, that crawl, and startle, and struggle up among the putrid weeds, with the clay clinging to their clotted hair, and their heavy eyes sealed by the earth darkness yet, like his of old who went his way unseeing to Siloam Pool; shaking off one by one the dreams of the prison-house, hardly hearing ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... replied she gayly. "What could you expect when prowling amongst the graves in a church-yard so lone and solitary, like a goule, on a damp November night? I saw you from Mr. Osborne's going toward it, and determined to startle you—and I ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material," says Howells. He sometimes insists on considering "honesty" and "realism" as synonymous terms. His primary object is not merely to amuse by a pleasant story or to startle by a horrible one. His object is to reflect life as he finds it, not only unusual or exceptional life. He believes that it is false to real life to overemphasize certain facts, to overlook the trivial, and to make all ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... Germany and Austria) or Jules Cambon (former French Ambassador to Germany, the United States and Spain) probably could excel Mr. Gerard in revelations of entertaining diplomatic history and gossip. Count von Bernstorff, former Ambassador to the United States, too, I imagine might startle us with a diary of his ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... and a plash And turbid streak upon the streamlet's face, Betray the water-rat's swift dive and path Across the bottom to his burrow deep. The moss is plump and soft, the tawny leaves Are crisp beneath my tread, and scaly twigs Startle my wandering eye like basking snakes. Where this thick brush displays its emerald tent, I stretch my wearied frame, for solitude To steal within my heart. How hushed the scene At first, and then, to the accustomed ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... light flap of a coiled-up rope striking against the bulwarks with the slight, easy roll of the ship. I was therefore particularly careful not to make the faintest splash, as I drew up alongside, lest the unaccustomed sound should reach the ear of and startle some individual not yet completely overpowered by the drink he had swallowed. Fortunately for me, the gangway ladder had not been hauled up, and I was consequently free to board the ship well aft, thus greatly lessening the risk of detection; I had, therefore, ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... even here we have few masters, and our critics know and care little for style; they are entirely preoccupied with plot and incident and situation. What we lack is true originality, tranquil force; we are all occupied in trying to startle and surprise, to make a sensation. How little the Greeks cared for that! It was beauty and charm, delicate colour, fine subtlety of which they were, in search; they held all things holy, yet nothing solemn. Their dignity was not a pompous dignity, but the dignity ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... need to startle them. By the fact they've got a light, I take it that they're up. ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher
... have felt a twinge of premonition even as he took it up, but the effect was still enough to startle him. "Bureau ...
— Subversive • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... We know to be glad of life as we were gods Timelessly glad of deity; yea, to enjoy Fleshly, spiritual Being till the swift Torrent of glee (as hurled star-dust can change Dim earthly weather to a moment like the sun,) Doth startle life to self-adoring godhead,— Divine body of Power and divine Burning soul of Light and self-desire. And having given ourselves all to amazement, We are made like a prophesying song Of life all joy, a bride in the arms ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... you begin to turn the action, or bite of the wind, will cause the ends of the planes to the right to be unduly elevated, much more so than if the air should be calm. This raising action will be liable to startle you, because up to this time you have been accustomed to flying ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... whit of timidity about him, nor was he the least impertinent. He was frankly interested and wanted to know what was being said. He received the dime and the pennies with a pleasant grin and a (grandmother prompted) "Thank you". But the gift didn't startle him. Dimes must have been a fairly usual part of his life. But a few minutes before the interviewer left she dropped her pencil. It was new and long and yellow. The child's eyes clung to it as he returned ...
— Slave Narratives: Arkansas Narratives - Arkansas Narratives, Part 6 • Works Projects Administration
... occupied her broncho threw up his head and gave a tremendous neigh. The sound startled her, as these things will startle the strongest when all is profoundly silent. But what followed was more startling still. Not one, but half a dozen echoes at least responded, and, with a thrill, the girl sat up. The next moment she had spurred her horse and charged, regardless of the thorns, into ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... six weeks of this before the boy's dreadful secret was revealed to Winona; six weeks before he appeared to startle her with one eye radiating the rich hues of a ripened eggplant. It had been simple enough. He had seen his chance to step in and punish Spike, and he had stepped—and Spike's ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... and the columns of the newspapers. Mr. Michelet's subject, and his late researches, lead him into details, moral and physical, which among ourselves are seldom mixed up with themes of general talk. The coarsest of these have been pruned away, but enough perhaps remain to startle readers of especial prudery. The translator, however, felt that he had no choice between shocking these and sinning against his original. Readers of a larger culture will make allowance for such a strait, will not be so very frightened at an amount of plain-speaking, ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... thing about you that is comforting," I sniffed. "You said precisely the same thing to me at three o'clock this morning. You never startle me ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... as First Lord of the Bedchamber, she should have a suite of apartments appropriated to her use in the Louvre; but in a few days, when he had accustomed her to converse freely with him upon the subject, Henry put a leading question which must, after all these gracious promises, have tended to startle Mademoiselle de Montmorency, by demanding to know if she personally desired the marriage, as, should it be otherwise, she need only confess the truth with frankness, when he would break off the match, and procure for her an alliance ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... about her drawn From May-time and the cheerful dawn; A dancing shape, an image gay, To haunt, to startle, and waylay." ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... creaked whenever he went along the passages, and neither did her aunt or Tetchen tread with feet as light as that. She sat up, and then the knock was repeated,—very low and very clear. She still paused a moment, resolving that nothing should frighten her,—nothing should startle her. No change that could come to her would, she thought, be a change for the worse. She hastened up from off the bed, and stood upon the floor. Then she gave the answer that is usual to such a summons. "Come in," she said. She spoke low, but with clear voice, so that her word ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... then that the back hair was braided and the front curled more and more beautifully every day, and that the calico dresses became stiffer and stiffer, and the white crochet lace collar broader and lower in the neck. At thirteen she was beautiful enough to startle one, they say, but that was nothing; she spent time and care upon these things, as if, like other women, her fate seriously depended upon them. There is no self-abnegation like that ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... refuse any assistance to the expedition of which it may stand in need; to reject all letters that may be sent from the parties connected with it, and, in fine, to hold no communication whatever with the steamers or the brig, does it not startle you, that jealousy and selfishness can go so far? Believe me, I blush at the reflection of a crime so hideous and un-English like as this?" In a postscript, John Lander says, "The fact of the merchants' instructions to the masters of their vessels may be safely depended on. Nothing can be more true. ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... they to reach him with their bullets? That was the next question that came under consideration. The odd shot had been fired as an experiment. It was fired in the hope that it might startle the bear, and cause him to shift his quarters—if only a little—so that some part of his body might be exposed; and while the izzard-hunter was discharging his piece, the others had stood watching for a chance. None was given ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... Gaskell. Mrs. Gaskell has perhaps done more than any woman of this century, not confessedly devoted to our cause, to elevate the condition of her sex, and disseminate liberal ideas as to their needs and culture. The first part of her career was one of those brilliant successes which startle us into surprise and admiration. It was checked midway by the publication of her life of Charlotte Bronte, the best and noblest of her works. Checked, because condemned, in that instance, without a hearing. She could never afterward feel the elastic pleasure, which was natural to her, in ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... space to mention certain episodes of the more recent intercourse of these ladies, and must content myself with tracing them, lightly, in their consequences. These may be summed up in the remark, which will doubtless startle no one by its freshness, that two imperial women are scarcely more likely to hit it off together, as the phrase is, than two imperial men. Since that party at Miss Birdseye's, so important in its results for Olive, she had had occasion to approach Mrs. Farrinder more nearly, and those ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... restless man in all Europe than the kaiser. It is related of him at the Court of Berlin that when on one occasion he inquired of his brother, Prince Henry, if he could suggest to him anything new wherewith to startle both his own subjects and the world in general, the sailor prince, with a merry laugh, proposed that his majesty should remain perfectly quiet, without saying or doing anything, for an entire week! That, he assured his imperial brother, would amaze and dumbfound the ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... Jr., was actually returning to old Bannister; and he was bringing "The Prodigious Prodigy," whatever that was, with him. Knowing the cheery Senior's intense love of doing the dramatic and his great ambition to startle his Alma Mater with some sensational stunt, they could hardly wait for old Dan Flannagan's jitney-bus to roll up ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... and then, not too often. He did not mean to startle any one with his purpose, but to let it grow gradually. Still, at the last assembly of the season, his attentions were somewhat pronounced. It was partly her doings, she was sheltering herself from other rather ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... story of literature. The one book for which he is famous is called Leviathan, or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth (1651). It is partly political, partly a philosophical book, combining two central ideas which challenge and startle the attention, namely, that self-interest is the only guiding power of humanity, and that blind submission to rulers is the only true basis of government.[179] In a word, Hobbes reduced human nature to its purely animal aspects, and then asserted confidently that there was nothing more to study. ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... as Don clung to him and held him back, gazing wildly all the time at the disturbed water, as the great fish swiftly approached, till, just as it was within a few yards, the shallowness of the water seemed to startle it, making it give quite a bound showing half its length, and then diving down with a kind of wallow, after which the occupants of the boat saw the wooden pole go trailing along the surface, till once more it was snatched, as ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... it was the only remnant in the world which had any interest for him; and he could on the instant have clasped her to his breast, and covered her pale face with his tears. But how was he to act? A sudden announcement might startle and distress her. ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... only the dog's nose we need, not his legs. An ideal canine for an archer would be one having the olfactory organs of a hound and the reasoning capacity of a college professor. With him one could trail animals, yet not flush them; perceive the imminence of game, yet not startle it; run coyotes, wolves, cougars, and bear, yet never confuse their scent nor abandon the quest of one for that of another. But as it is, no dog seems capable of doing all things, so we need specialists. ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... did a thunder-clap Cause emotion, startle Thyrsis locked with Chloe in his lap, As my word and gesture (down I flung my cards to join the pack) Fired the man of arms, whose visage, ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... aunts in plush chairs, surveying M. Knaak through their lorgnettes, as he bowed forward, grasped the hem of his frock-coat with two fingers of each hand, and with springy legs demonstrated the various steps of the mazurka. But when he had a mind to completely startle his audience, he would suddenly and without cogent reason leap high in the air, cut pigeon-wings with bewildering rapidity, trilling with his feet, so to say, whereupon he would return to this ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... that haste was necessary, but did not dare show it. Above everything we must not be precipitate; not startle the Robot. At worst, if Tugh should return, I could seize this weapon at my feet ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... are taken to pieces in all their parts, and all these parts are likened to some other things. "His abundance," says Mr. Craik, "is often oppressive; it is like wading among unmown grass." And he drowns us in words. His abundant and incongruous adjectives may sometimes, perhaps, startle us unfairly, because their associations and suggestions have quite altered; but very often they are the idle outpouring of an unrestrained affluence of language. The impression remains that he wants a due perception ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... felt how removed is the foregoing from any thing like an effort, on the preacher's part, to startle his audience with the far-fetched and unexpected. It must, however, be admitted that Bossuet was not always—as, of our Webster, it has well been said that he always was—superior to the temptation to exaggerate ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... opposite side of the lane, so that their hurried approach did not startle the strangers; but Phoebe, looking up at the sound of the footsteps, saw a face she knew looking wistfully, eagerly at her, with evident recognition. Phoebe had a faculty quite royal of remembering faces, ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... to hear your opinions regarding the antiquity of our race: geologists are daily becoming bolder and more unhesitating in their assertions on the subject; and we are fast drifting toward conclusions that seem to startle the religious world, and threaten to upset our confidence in that Book which we have been accustomed to regard ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the words his whole expression changed, and so suddenly as to startle me. He sprang up from the ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... sparkling with bright and vivid meaning, as crisp and fresh as just-minted bank-notes. They should have no taint of flatness or insipidity. They should show not the faintest trace of wear. With them, one might hope, now and then, to startle the imagination, to set it running in channels which are strange and delightful to it. For there is something new under the sun: aerial adventure; and the most lively and unjaded fancy may, at first, need direction toward the realization of this fact. Soon it ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... strange, either, every thing considered, after all we have gone through. Why, Jack, you will hardly believe me when I tell you that I scarcely sleep without dreaming of Hunston. And what is there wonderful in that, after all that has taken place? It was enough to shake the strongest nerves, to startle the ...
— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng
... borne on wanton wing, Soft wispering 'wakes the blushing May: Sweet are the hours, yet not so sweet As when my blue-eyed maid I meet, And hear her soul-entrancing tale, Sequester'd in the shadowy vale. The mellow horn's long-echoing notes Startle the morn commingling strong; At eve, the harp's wild music floats, And ravish'd silence drinks the song; Yet sweeter is the song of love, When Emma's voice enchants the grove, While listening sylphs repeat the tale, ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... Fearing to startle the little mother, whose frightened eyes were fixed upon us, we announced our mutual discovery by a single movement of the hand, and walked quietly past without pausing. Not until we reached the open fields at the end did my comrade whisper, "a cuckoo," and our hearts, if not our lips, ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... Christianity on the other, necessitate—if men of spiritual intuitions who are not poets and artists are to earn their living. There was nothing you could say to Chrysostom Trotter, provided you said it reverently, that would startle him. He knew all that long ago and far more. For, though obliged to trade in this backwater of belief, he was in many respects a very modern mind. You were hardly likely to know your Herbert Spencer as intimately as he, and all the most exquisite literature of doubt was upon his shelves. ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... there; the reflexion, in sacred image or ideal, of its flocks, and orchards, and wild honey; the dangers of its hunters; its weariness in noonday heat; its children, agile as the goats they tend, who run, in their picturesque rags, across the solitary wanderer's path, to startle him, in the unfamiliar upper places; its one adornment and solace being the dance to the homely shepherd's pipe, cut by Pan first from the sedges ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... was never quite sure what kept him from doing it. He thought at the time it was herself, a sort of wall of purity and loveliness that surrounded her and made her sacred, so that he felt he must go slowly, must not startle her nor make her afraid of him. It never occurred to him that the wall might be surrounding himself. He had entirely forgotten that first visit to Gila in the Mephistophelian garments, with the red light filling all the unholy atmosphere. ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... poem, of any confessedly great poet from Homer to Milton, or from Aeschylus to Shakespeare; and to strike out (in thought I mean) every instance of this kind. If the number of these fancied erasures did not startle him, or if he continued to deem the work improved by their total omission, he must advance reasons of no ordinary strength and evidence, reasons grounded in the essence of human nature. Otherwise, I should not hesitate to consider him as a man not so much proof against ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... I do not pray for anybody or any party to commit outrages, still I do pray, and that earnestly and constantly, for some terrific shock to startle the women of this nation into a self-respect which will compel them to see the abject degradation of their present position; which will force them to break their yoke of bondage, and give them faith in themselves; which ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... the luck to startle him out of his reserve. Miss Kit came down to the yard that morning, and for the first time for more than a ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... upon Phoebe, as though it had been something visible to startle her. It shook off her old English self for a moment, and she leaped to her ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... considering the following statistics. The progressive increase of the expenditures for the leading armies and navies of the world during the last quarter of a century is a fact of such gravity as to startle every thoughtful student of economic problems. It may be briefly indicated by dividing the time from 1881 to 1905 into five-year periods, and noting the disbursements of several great nations for army and navy purposes during the first and last of those periods. From the first to the last ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... ours—tossing it up, catching it again—easily as a child plays with its party-coloured ball. His mere book-knowledge was not much to boast of, though early in life he must have received a fair education. He had a smattering of the ancient classics, sufficient, perhaps, to startle the unlearned. If he had not read them, he had read about them; and at various odds and ends of his life he had picked up acquaintance with the popular standard modern writers. But literature with him was the smallest stripe in the party-coloured ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... had retired. I came for my scissors, and finding you here alone, thought I would startle you, but you have not told me yet ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... already observed) is far more common on the bricks than black. Thus the general tone of their coloring is quiet, not to say sombre. There is no striving after brilliant effects. The Assyrian artist seeks to please by the elegance of his forms and the harmony of his hues, not to startle by a display of bright and strongly-contrasted colors. The tints used in a single composition vary from three to five, which latter number they seem never to exceed. The following are the combinations of five hues which occur: brown, green, blue, dark yellow, and pale yellow; ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... seas to unknown soils, With various wonders feasts his sight: What stranger wonders does he write! We read, and in description view Creatures which Adam never knew: For, when we risk no contradiction, It prompts the tongue to deal in fiction. Those things that startle me or you, I grant are strange; yet may be true. 10 Who doubts that elephants are found For science and for sense renowned? Borri records their strength of parts, Extent of thought, and skill in arts; How they ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... man about it; but he seemed to think that he was not responsible for the cow's voice. I then told him to take her away; and he did, at intervals, shifting her to different parts of the grounds in my absence, so that the desolate voice would startle us from unexpected quarters. If I were to unhitch the cow, and turn her loose, I knew where she would go. If I were to lead her away, the question was, Where? for I did not fancy leading a cow about till I could find somebody who was ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... on that day than to-day; and as though there were a larger Presence of God in the upper room than in the room in which you sit, is a distinct mistake and folly. We may not have the sound as of a rushing mighty wind, nor the crowns of fire; there is no miracle to startle and arrest: but the Holy Spirit is with the Church in all the old gracious and copious plenitude; the river is sweeping past in undiminished fulness; though there may not be the flash of the electric spark, the atmosphere is as heavily charged as ever with ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... surprising Shall on Friday next be told, Things to startle and delight thee, When I've crossed thy ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... single tone of her voice. Her natural conception was so fine, that the merest commonplace often received a living spirit from her lips. I have seen a single glance from her powerful eye hush an audience—I have seen her acting sometimes even startle and bewilder the actors beside her. There is perhaps a genius for every art, and hers was the genius of the stage—a faculty of instant communication between the speaker and the hearer, some unaccountable sympathy, the power to create which belongs to but one in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... adventurers of this period, Drake was the one whose name conveyed the greatest terror to the Spanish colonists. This was evident in all parts of the Continent. Thus the impetuosity of his attacks and incursions in the neighbourhood of the Guianas and Venezuela was sufficient utterly to startle ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... People often wonder, 'How do you catch So-and-so? He is so shy! I have invited and invited, and he never comes.' We never invite, and he comes. We take no note of his coming or his going; we do not startle his entrance with acclamation, nor clog his departure with expostulation; it is fully understood that with us he shall do just as he chooses; and so he chooses to ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... not startle me either. I had an idea of that all along. It is why I played my cards so quietly, why I did not accomplish in England everything I had a chance to accomplish. I did not ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... securely fixed there for his strength to be of any avail; our roots were the growth of years, and, besides, we clasped him so tightly—for unity is indeed strength—that at last the cowardly fellow roared aloud with mingled pain and fright; perhaps he thought to startle us, and make us lose our hold. But we knew better than that—we only gripped him the faster; but the noise aroused Dash, who came bounding to the spot (he was always unchained at night), and, flying at Mr. Reynard's throat, he soon pinned ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... city. That night the bleaching skeleton of the venerable patriot Hermano was taken down from the gibbet where it had hung so long, by hands that left the revolutionary banner waving proudly in its place. This was an event to startle the viceroy. It was followed by other events. In a few days more and the sounds of insurrection were heard throughout the province—the city still moving secretly—sending forth supplies and intelligence by stealth, but unable to raise the standard of rebellion, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... on Jacques called out anxious protests from men like rollicking Soldier Joe, who said to her one night, "Blanche, there's a devil in Jacques. Some day you'll startle him, and then he'll shoot you as cool as he empties the pockets of Freddy Tarlton ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... what he said, and grunted so savagely as to startle the king, who involuntarily shrank away ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... the top of my voice: I wished to startle and put them to flight. My followers shouted in chorus; but our voices reached not the ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... of the path, and mountains all around. In that landscape he has no companion; yet he cannot but be haunted, as he goes, by towers upon which he surely looked, and by the sharp memory of bugle-notes that still seem to startle his hearing. ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... of Twilight fair; Like Twilight's, too, her dusky hair; But all things else about her drawn From May-time and the cheerful Dawn; A dancing Shape, an Image gay, To haunt, to startle, and way-lay. ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of their conversation or not. But after one or two ineffectual efforts, he cast the paper from him, in despair, and rising, walked his room again. To an orderly who entered on business relating to his regular duty, he spoke so brief and abruptly as to startle the man, who understood him only in his better and calmer moods. Again was his cup of bliss, ...
— The Heart's Secret - The Fortunes of a Soldier, A Story of Love and the Low Latitudes • Maturin Murray
... collecting the pennies for the Holiday Fund Savings Bank from the children who came weekly to her house. She noticed on three consecutive Mondays that one little lad deliberately helped himself to a new envelope from her table. Not wishing to frighten or startle him, she allowed this to continue for some weeks, and then one day, having dismissed the other children, she asked him quite quietly why he was taking the envelopes. At first he was very sulky, and said: ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... entered the chamber of the Sangraal, Rowena IV was arranging the red samite cover around the Grail. She jumped when she saw him. "Marry! fair sir, ye did startle me. Methinketh ye be ...
— A Knyght Ther Was • Robert F. Young
... this late day, no such excitement can be created by any human invention, but the sight of a creature speeding over the country, impelled by steam, and bearing such a grotesque resemblance to a gigantic man, could not but startle all who should see ...
— The Huge Hunter - Or, the Steam Man of the Prairies • Edward S. Ellis
... by advocates of this doctrine, quite truly, that all political events are brought about by minorities, since the majority are indifferent to politics. But there is a difference between a minority in which the indifferent acquiesce, and a minority so hated as to startle the indifferent into belated action. To make the Bolshevik doctrine reasonable, it is necessary to suppose that they believe the majority can be induced to acquiesce, at least temporarily, in the revolution made by the class-conscious minority. ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... irrevocably bound. Frank holds you fast. One of these days, when you are most peaceful and content in your bondage, scarcely recognized, there may come a stately tread, a fiery eye, a glowing heart, to startle you from your quiet ease; and when you bound, trembling and breathless in their mighty sway, you may feel the chain—before so light—wearing its way deep into your throbbing heart. May you never wake ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... ever did more than their position required, and Lady Rathforlane is a truly careful mother. Of course some things might startle you stay-at-home people; but ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... heat of the weather, the performances of Dick and Jack upon strong venison essence and roast gazelle were enough to startle any housekeeper of small income and an anxiety about the state of the butcher's bill. But of course the outdoor life and constant exertion produced a tremendous appetite; and as Mr Rogers noted the change in Dick, whose palate had to be tempted only a short time ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... struck twelve—it was a good thing for Fred that the sound was loud enough to startle him—he put back the volume of travels with a sigh of regret, found, with some trouble, the book Mrs. Marshall wanted, and ran all the way home to make up for ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... to give an idea of the imperious tone and stern look of the princess, as she pronounced these words which were calculated to startle a girl, until now accustomed to live in a great measure as she pleased: yet, contrary perhaps to the expectation of Madame de Saint Dizier, instead of answering impetuously, Adrienne looked her full in the face, and said, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... hoofs was heard, and looking toward the sound, I perceived the Chancellor cantering down the road. When abreast of the carriage he dismounted, and walking up to it, saluted the Emperor in a quick, brusque way that seemed to startle him. After a word or two, the party moved perhaps a hundred yards further on, where they stopped opposite the weaver's cottage so famous from that day. This little house is on the east side of the Donchery road, near its junction with that to Frenois, and ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... protest. If we could be patient under the load of a mere worldly life; if we could bear that burden as the beasts bear it; then, like beasts, we might bend all our thoughts to the earth; and no call from the great Heavens above us would startle us from ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... dropping down dead in his chamber. And, in general, he makes abundant use of that apprehension of death, which is far stronger in the uneducated than in the more refined, as a source from which he may gather thunderbolt after thunderbolt with which to startle the indifferent and hardened heart. What matter though the sentiment to which he appeals be a perverted sentiment? what matter how severely wrenched out of its normal channel? if through this tortuous channel something of the divine ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... formidable means something that excites fear, but it is neither sudden nor violent in its action. A dreadful thing would excite fear or dread, and might act violently, but not suddenly. A shocking thing would startle us because it was both violent and sudden. Does formidable appear to be the right word by which to characterize ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... as the road is with the goal it reaches in the end. She exists independently of us, but yet she exists to suggest to us what we may become, to awaken in us dim longings and desires, to surprise us into confession of our inadequacy, to startle us with perceptions of an infinitude we do not possess as yet but may possess; to make us feel our ignorance, weakness, want of finish; and by partly exhibiting the variety, knowledge, love, power and finish of God, to urge us forward in humble ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... injection of hot coffee. Having emitted this pronouncement, the great specialist from Manchester Square left. It was one o'clock in the morning. By one of those strange and futile coincidences which sometimes startle us by their subtle significance, the specialist met Theodore Racksole and his captive as they were entering the hotel. Neither had the least suspicion of the ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... north, forced by their jocular Colonel to a night march, swept through the arches and wheeled upon the grassy esplanade. Was it a trick of the soldier who in youth had danced in the ken in Madrid that he should thus startle the hosts of his regiment, and that passing through the town, he should for a little make his men move like ghosts, saying no word to any one of the aghast natives, but moving mechanically in the darkness to the rattle ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... well why—not to startle these bandits whom you have for so long a time promised ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... he said. "You think the Lord has made you an actress, don't you? All you need is a chance at a leading part, in order to startle ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... you a shock. You've seen yourself for so long in the dull minds of the people about you, that if I were to tell you how you seem to me, it would startle you. But you must see that you astonish me. You must feel when ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... sorrow's companion, reflection, made her more and more capable of comprehending a very subtle and intricate character. There is no secret for discovering the human heart like affliction, especially the affliction which springs from passion. Does a writer startle you with his insight into your nature, be sure that he has mourned; such lore is the alchemy of tears. Hence the insensible and almost universal confusion of idea which confounds melancholy with depth, and finds but hollow inanity in the symbol of a laugh. ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... go to prison? He thought he could bear it. A man must stand by his opinions—even through sacrifice. It would startle the public into attention. Such outrages on the freedom, on the ancient rights of Englishmen, must not pass without protest. Yes—he felt it in him to be a martyr! They would hardly refuse him a ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Peter Champneys," said the boy with the golden eyes, shyly. "I hope I didn't startle you? It's my butterfly's fault. You see, I never know where I've got to follow him, or what I'm going to find when I ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... regard my husband. Ten to one I shall never have the chance again; but n'importe. Moreover, I was aware that Henry knew so little of me he could hardly be conscious to whom he was writing. Why, it would startle him to see me in my natural home character; he would think I was a wild, romantic enthusiast indeed. I could not sit all day long making a grave face before my husband. I would laugh, and satirise, and say whatever came ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... will my micracoustic ear trumpet extend the sense of the unbearable beyond all possible bounds. Thus, sir, the circulation of the blood and the fluids of the body will not give me pause; you shall hear them flow with the impetuosity of cataracts; you shall perceive them so distinctly as to startle you; the slightest irregularity of the pulse, the least obstacle, is striking, and produces the same effect as a rock against which the waves of a torrent ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... the world. If it had then glutted its maw with its intended prey (the sharpness of Mr. Godwin's pen cut the legal cords with which it was attempted to bind them), it might have done so sooner, and with more lasting effect. The world do not know (and we are not sure but the intelligence may startle Mr. Godwin himself), that he is the author of a volume of Sermons, and of ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... holly hock plate and charged mother with the crime. Then the Tono Sama killed her. He wanted her for his concubine; and so came to hate her and easily took the tale. It was not her fault. She said this—then went away."—"Whither?" Sampei's tone was so abrupt and harsh to startle the child into quiescence. He pointed to the house altar on its stand—"Mother just went away; into the Butsudan.... And she hasn't come back—to Bo[u]chan." He ended in a wail and childish weeping. ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... was a strange child. He had a Norseman's taste for the fabulous and fantastic, and although he never heard a tale of Necken or the Hulder, he would often startle his mother by the most fanciful combinations of imagined events, and by bolder personifications than ever sprung from the legendary soil of the Norseland. She always took care to check him whenever he indulged in these imaginary flights, and he at last came to look upon ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... shadow of the menhir, enlarged to a monstrous size, across her path. A few yards further on lay the senseless form of the Breton horseman, and it was clear to Annette that Jean of Kerdual had purposely stayed the rider by throwing the shadow across the road to startle his horse. ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... which perhaps is a good thing, as we have had no fever, and though our wounds are somewhat sore, we have almost ceased to think of them. There, I can see by the light that the fire is burning up inside. Now we will go in. Keep a little way behind me; it would startle him were you ...
— At Aboukir and Acre - A Story of Napoleon's Invasion of Egypt • George Alfred Henty
... the room, closing the door behind her as she went. She did not want to be obliged to go over the details of the story which she had heard; she had made her statement, one which she knew must startle and horrify her son, with his high ideals of womanly purity, and she left him to review the situation in silence. It was several hours before the ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Ah! do you not see? It is a device of the Senate to startle our friends from Bosphorus. The faggots and straw blaze up fiercely round the wall; then, when all is confusion, the substance in the sealed vessels escapes and at once puts out the fire, and the laugh is with us. Our friends from ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... reformation of LUTHER in the sixteenth century, and with no other epoch. The great truths then promulgated, of which "justification by faith" was the cardinal one, electrified the whole world, as the loud roaring of a lion would startle the passer-by. These were immediately responded to by the multitudinous errors of the Anabaptists and others, who thought to set up the kingdom of GOD in this world, and before the resurrection, by putting to death the ungodly and sparing ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... one unpleasant thing about the Matalettes, both father and daughter, and that was, the ease with which one could startle them. ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... thoughts; and we may be in a mood to enjoy to the full every beauty we see. England will then seem to us a veritable garden, the greenness of everything, the trimness of the hedges, the sheets of purple hyacinths, and some still remaining primroses, will startle us with joy, though we have long been aware of their beauty. This time we both know and enjoy the Natural Beauty. We see from this instance the distinction between knowing Natural Beauty and enjoying it. I am not claiming more than that knowing Natural Beauty—being ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... at her, in his absent-minded, startled way. He had never understood her since she was first put into his hands, aged six months, a fluffy bundle of motherless babyhood. She never ceased to startle him. She was an enigma beyond any puzzle in mathematics he had ever brought ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... through the long grass and trample the tangled undergrowth, putting aside the sprawling branches, or dodging under the pliant arms of the creepers, you may flush a black or grey partridge, raise a covey of quail, or startle a quiet family party of peafowl, but there are no sweet singers flitting about to make the vaulted arcades of the forest ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... fitful transitions from mood to mood, his wild bursts of laughter, his passion of tears, Hamlet or Hamlet's gravedigger, Lear or Lear's fool, would have startled the readers of the "Spectator" as they would startle the group in ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... Twice more did Cleveland startle the country with his extraordinary decision of character. In the summer of 1894, a great railroad strike, centering at Chicago, occasioned an outbreak of violence, which the governor of Illinois did nothing to quell. The President, therefore, declaring ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... often, on the road he was amused at the feeling he had of knowing her. So might it be had he come across an old acquaintance who did not recognize him. It was a feeling wrought with excitement and danger; he might some day startle her by taking ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... of her collected treasures and curiosities, which derived added value from the splendid setting which Philibert de Lorme seemed to have planned on purpose for this museum, occupied her for several months, giving her leisure to meditate one of those decisive steps that startle the public, ignorant of the motives which, however, it sometimes discovers by dint of ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... of the Night Startle sun's radiance ... And ye, the Rhine's Water-born Nymphs, are lashed and swept ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... men," answered Ah Ben; "and as I have already said, may be developed slowly, through the exercise of the will, or suddenly, as in some great physical shock, and of a necessity comes to all in the event called death. Were I to tell you how I acquired this knowledge, Mr. Henley, it would startle you, far more than any exhibition of the power itself. No, I can not tell you; at least, not at present; perhaps some day you may be better prepared to ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... limited beings God can express His idea only in fragments. We can bring together apparent contradictions in those fragments whereby a greater truth is suggested. If we do this in a sudden or incongruous manner we startle the unprepared and arouse the cry of paradox. But if we will not do it we shall miss ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... exclaimed Gertrude admiringly. "You're just storing up ideas and information to startle ...
— Ethel Morton at Rose House • Mabell S. C. Smith
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