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More "Yawning" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... deep wells, and the lama attended his yawning pleasure; duly snapping fingers to head ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... as his eyes could see there was only a black void! Instead of the simple dozen feet mentioned by Bob, the yawning precipice extended perhaps a full hundred ...
— The Saddle Boys of the Rockies - Lost on Thunder Mountain • James Carson
... its great solemn functions the shop-girl would read with greedy envy, but the women who attended them would be half asleep behind their jewelled fans. It was typified to Montague by Mrs. Billy Alden's yachting party on the Nile; yawning in the face of the Sphinx, and playing bridge beneath the shadow of the pyramids—and counting the crocodiles and proposing to jump in by way of "changing ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... the course of the afternoon the boys took their turn in going up and helping to bring down wounded men. As the time went on several yawning gaps appeared in the walls. The court-yard was strewn with fragments of masonry, and the pages were ordered to keep under shelter of the wall of the castle unless summoned on duty. Indeed, the court-yard had now become a more dangerous ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty
... little articles he was accused of stealing at this place was an eight hundred dollar barouche, the property of Judge Ferguson, of that place. Again this noted thief was arrested and confined in the county jail to await trial. He was not anxious for trial, for he knew the "yawning pen" was waiting to receive him. For eleven months he remained in this jail, having his trial continued from term to term. When his case was called up for the first time he feigned sickness. The next time one ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... interesting. For this reason, observation of human acts is more likely to lead to motor expression. That the social instincts of the child reinforce the tendency to imitate is indicated by the fact that his early imitations are of human acts especially, as yawning, smiling, crying, etc. The same is further evidenced in that, at a later stage, when ordinary objects enter into his imitative acts, the imitation is largely symbolic, and objects are endowed with living attributes. Here blocks ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... urged him outside and across the yard in the direction of the black bulk of the barn. The rain was still coming down steadily, but neither of them noticed it at that moment. Old Jerry would have balked at the yawning barn door but for that same hand which was directing him and urging him on. His apprehension had now turned to actual fright which bordered close on panic, and he heard the boy's voice as though it came from ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... directly in front of him and remained standing for several minutes without sign from its occupant. It was one of those neat plain coupes, drawn by a single powerful horse, in which the flaneur figures a pale handsome woman buried among silk cushions and yawning as she sees the gas-lamps glittering in the gutters. At last the door opened and out stepped Richard de Mauves. He stopped and leaned on the window for some time, talking in an excited manner to a person within. At last ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... rent in a dozen places, he was covered in dust, one hand had been trodden upon. He could hear the shouts of his supporters, and once he heard shots. He could feel his strength giving way, feel his efforts wild and aimless. But no help came, and surely, irresistibly, that black, yawning opening came nearer. ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... near the graveyard I met one of the natives, who, by my orders, had been set round the kraals to watch the place, and noticed that he was rubbing his eyes and yawning. Clearly he had been asleep. I asked him if he had seen his mistress, and he answered that he had not, which under the circumstances was not wonderful. Without stopping to reproach him, I ordered the man ...
— Allan's Wife • H. Rider Haggard
... yew trees the path was a chasm of impenetrable gloom. Somewhere there were steps down to the right, a gap in the yew hedge. Denis, who headed the party, groped his way cautiously; in this darkness, one had an irrational fear of yawning precipices, of horrible spiked obstructions. Suddenly from behind him he heard a shrill, startled, "Oh!" and then a sharp, dry concussion that might have been the sound of a slap. After that, Jenny's voice was heard pronouncing, "I am going back to the house." Her tone was decided, and even as ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... Palace," said Second-Lieut. St. John, "isn't in it." And then, because his watch had ended, he handed over to another yawning subaltern and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov 21, 1917 • Various
... is the time, through deeds, to show that mortals The calm sublimity of gods can feel; To shudder not at yonder dark abyss, Where phantasy creates her own self-torturing brood, Right onward to the yawning gulf to press, Around whose narrow jaws rolleth hell's fiery flood; With glad resolve to take the fatal leap, Though danger threaten thee, to sink in ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... into the blackness of the desert night, he went, half a mile, perhaps. And then, halting the pony, he turned in the saddle and looked back, his head bent in a listening attitude. To his ears came the sharp bark of a coyote, very near. It was answered, faintly, from the vast, yawning distance, by another. Catherson stiffened, and lines of ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... the full blaze of your marvellous mistakes. I cannot have my countrymen tempted to those pleasures of intellectual pride which are the result of comparing themselves with you. The deep collapse and yawning chasm of your ineptitude leaves me upon a perilous spiritual elevation. Your mistakes are matters of fact; but to enumerate them does not exhaust the truth. For instance, the learned man who rendered the phrase in an English advertisement ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... been gained, perhaps two—each desperate foothold fraught with peril of a plunge into the yawning abysms to left and right—when suddenly he spied a figure on a twilit ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... Valencia, yawning prodigiously, came forth from the vaqueros' hut and glimpsed them just as Jack was bringing Solano to something like decent behavior before they started down ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... waiting, while the shadow moved curiously to and fro on the floor. Twice the head disappeared, and as suddenly returned, poised a moment, then, like an image moving across a screen, was gone. Instantly Tess sat straight up in bed. Perhaps one of the squatters needed her. She crept to the floor, yawning, tiptoed to the door, and unbarred it. Without pausing to cover her feet, she stepped outside, the fresh scent of May blossoms sweeping sweet to her nostrils. The warm night-wind, full of elusive odors, brushed her face like thready cobwebs, that ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... diving. None of us were divers. We'd had to muck about with the thing to get the way of it, and this was the first time I'd been deep. It feels damnable. Your ears hurt beastly. I don't know if you've ever hurt yourself yawning or sneezing, but it takes you like that, only ten times worse. And a pain over the eyebrows here—splitting—and a feeling like influenza in the head. And it isn't all heaven in your lungs and things. And going down feels like the beginning of a lift, only ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... at the door of the office-building for a word with Nelson, who was already yawning at his post. Without any suggestion other than the promptings of good-nature, he had turned out long before daybreak to relieve ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... midnight chime Ring out the yawning peal of time, When shrouded Paul, unlucky knave! Rose like a spectre from the grave; And cried, "Fair maiden, come with me. For I your ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr
... sinking man were on the crib. "Philip," he faltered. They lifted the boy out of his bed, and brought him in his night-dress to his father's side; and the father twisted about and took him into his arms, still half asleep and yawning. Then the mother, recovering from the stupidity of her surprise, broke into paroxysms of weeping, and fell over her husband's breast and kissed and ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... Nightcap books. They have pleased the children very much. I know this, because I have received a great many letters; such nice letters! telling me how the children laughed and cried, and not one single word in any of them to say that anybody put his mouth out of joint, yawning over the stories. Instead of that, they all want more; and this very day a sweet little girl came to see me to ask for more. She was not like poor Oliver Twist, asking for food for her body. Oh no! ...
— The Little Nightcap Letters. • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... is a bad water for a canoe, when there is much wind," put in Gershom, yawning after he had spoken, as if the effort fatigued him, "I wonder what we're all doing over on this side of the river! Whiskey Centre is a good enough country for me; I'm going back to look arter my casks, now ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... if you can," returned Jerry. "The minute my head touches the pillow I shall be dead to the world. You'll never keep awake. You are yawning now." ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... and, striding away, disappeared, while Ida shivered as she glanced about her. She could no longer see the shelter she had left, and she stood alone in the midst of a tremendous desolation of rock and snow, with the valley yawning, a vast dusky pit, beneath her feet. It was appallingly lonely, and she was numb with cold, while, since she was sure that she could not climb back to her companions unassisted, there was only one person on whom she could rely, and that was the packer, who had ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... theatre, and if she did not go mad under the ordeal, she would perhaps turn out very like the Lady of Greifenstein. The stage was always set; the scenery was always of the best and newest; the vacant boxes and the yawning pit were brilliantly lighted; the costumes were by the best makers; the stage manager was punctual and in his place; the curtain went up every day for the performance; but Frau von Greifenstein's theatre was silent and untenanted, ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... had finished she felt discouraged. In the result one might be pardoned for some uncertainty as to which was coffee-pot and which pepper-box. The cup and saucer seemed strangely like a circle in a hole. There was a yawning break in the paper from much erasure where the handle of the coffee-pot should have been. There were thumb marks and smears where nothing should have been. Emmy Lou looked at Hattie. Hattie looked worn out. She had her book upside ...
— Emmy Lou - Her Book and Heart • George Madden Martin
... beneath me yawning given Sign of convulsion; and tho' horrid rifts Sent up the moaning of unhappy spirits Imprison'd in her centre, with the heat Of their infolding element; had the angels, The watchers at heaven's ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... she called a "painting fever," and devised a scheme of Japanese decorations for the doors of the chalet which her husband thought might be made to produce a lot of money if they were nearer London. One of the panels had a woman yawning over a fire in the early morning, and the hypnotic effect of it kept the family and their guests yawning their heads off, so that Mrs. Stevenson decided the sleepy lady would be ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... the narrow verge of an awful precipice. Night, black, rayless night, enshrouded the yawning gulf below, save that, ever and anon, hideous and fleshless forms—skeletons wrought in lurid and undying flame—strode to and fro within the thick panoply of gloom; while, at intervals, howls of despair came up from its midst, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... yawning. "Hang it, I wish the captain would come. Do you know what o'clock it is? Not far ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... premonition, the presage of evil which I think comes strangely to us more often than we realize. Whatever it was, we had no time to act upon it. The tunnel-mouth which had caused Alan's apprehension was about a hundred feet away. It was a ten-foot, black yawning hole in the cliff. Perhaps Alan sensed a movement off there. As I turned to gaze, from the opening came a great hairy human arm! Then a ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... will not come amiss," he answered, yawning; "though it seems almost a pity to go to ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... north strikes full on the sail and raises the waves up to heaven. The oars are snapped; the prow swings away and gives her side to the waves; down in a heap comes a broken mountain of water. These hang on the wave's ridge; to these the yawning billow shows ground amid the surge, where the sea churns with sand. Three ships the south wind catches and hurls on hidden rocks, rocks amid the waves which Italians call the Altars, a vast reef banking the sea. Three the east forces from the deep into shallows and quicksands, ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... swift wits and decision of the girl, I hastened through the corridor, down the stairs, and into the hall. The Count and the long-nosed man were so buried in their game that neither looked up. A pair of varlets in attendance were yawning on a bench. Yawning in imitation, I passed with feigned listlessness to the terrace, went noiselessly along by the house-wall, and followed the wing to the end of the balustrade. I did not venture even to look toward ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... where the great trees linked branches as over a king's pathway; and then it turned a bend where the steep sides sank so suddenly that even the trees had no foothold and the bare space disclosed a view over boundless forests of dark green, and the vast, yawning canyons and distant rolling hills, to where, far-off, like some dream of the past, one caught glimpses of the endless plains covered with the autumn haze and ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... Chipmunk had dug his chamber underneath Farmer Green's pasture, he liked the inside of his house quite well. But the looks of the outside did not please him at all. He wanted a neat dooryard. And how could he have that, with that yawning hole through which he had pushed earth and stones, which still littered the grass a ...
— The Tale of Sandy Chipmunk • Arthur Scott Bailey
... millions each. Beneath the earth, thunders and crashings went on at the same time. Then, in every direction, the earth fissured and gaped and yawned wider than ever, and with blood-curdling roarings and crashings, a whole tenth part of the city tottered and fell into the yawning gulfs, with thousands ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... brilliant tints, and jackdaws flying in and out of their holes above. Deep beds of rich ferns clothed the lower slopes, and sheets of that delicate flower, the enchanter's nightshade, reared its white blossoms down to the bank of a little clear stream that came flowing from out of the mighty yawning arch of the cavern, while above the precipice rose sheer the keep of ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... awake and have had a good look to see what kind of morning it is, you will feel like yawning and stretching, and rubbing your eyes four or five times, before you jump out of bed; and it is a good plan to take plenty of time to do this, unless you are already late for breakfast or school. It starts your heart to beating and your lungs to breathing ...
— The Child's Day • Woods Hutchinson
... no recollection of placing there when he went to sleep. By degrees the events of the past night forced themselves upon his benumbed faculties, and he sat up. The sun was riding high; the door of the cabin was open. Stretching himself, he staggered to his feet, and looked in through the yawning crack at the hinges. He rubbed his eyes again. Was he still asleep, and followed by a dream of yesterday? For there, even in the very attitude he remembered to have seen her sitting at her luncheon on the previous day, with her knitting on her lap, sat Mrs. Sol Saunders! What did it mean? or had ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... down the turret steps. No matter! As I was saying, every man has his blind peril. He can see the thousand. He provides laboriously against them. He blocks every avenue of risk, he locks every dangerous door, and lo! there is the thousand-and-first right before him, yawning wide open, which he does not ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... walked the Thiergarten threadbare, sleep twelve hours out of twenty-four, do everything I've been told to do, with no result whatever except to grow duller." The young man yawned as he spoke. "Do excuse me; I've come to such a pass that I'm not able to look any one in the face without yawning. All things considered, I am afraid I shouldn't be any better off in heaven. I'm afraid I couldn't stand the people, there must be so many of them. I want ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... follow with my tripod, I started off down the hill into Biaches. Then the signs of the German retreat began to fully reveal themselves. The ground was absolutely littered with the horrible wastage of war; roads were torn open, leaving great yawning gaps that looked for all the world like huge jagged wounds. On my right lay the Chateau of La Maisonnette. The ground there was a shambles, for numerous bodies in various stages of putrefaction lay about as they ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... flagging was as immaculate as the floor of a church. Long rain-spouts, representing dragons with yawning jaws, directed the water towards the cistern, and on each window-sill of the castle a basil or a heliotrope bush bloomed, in ...
— Three short works - The Dance of Death, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, A Simple Soul. • Gustave Flaubert
... to meet in the distance, and to be blended with them into one vast purple and crimson heaving mass. Round us and before us, the waters curled up into giant waves, which flung high into the air ridges of white foam and then fell sheer down into a yawning gulf, only to rise again nearer and nearer to the quivering sides of our frail craft, which still pressed on—on to where we expected to meet with death rather than rescue, as we saw the ripped ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... that of a ready writer; and what with yawning, stretching, admiring my rings, and putting pen to paper, in the intervals of these more natural occupations, it was time to bathe and dress before my letters were completed. I set off to Russelton's abode in high spirits, and fully resolved ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to have been very greatly mitigated by humanity in practice, for it was really the law of the people; more terrible than Venetian -piombi- and chambers of torture was that series of living entombments which the poor man saw yawning before him in the debtors' towers of the rich. But the greatness of Rome was involved in, and was based upon, the fact that the Roman people ordained for itself and endured a system of law, in which the eternal principles of freedom and of subordination, of property ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... is required to produce conviction, and that a logic which is capable of grinding the stubbornest facts to powder (as every man's own logic always is) is powerless against so delicate a structure as the brain. Do what we will, we cannot contrive to bring together the yawning edges of proof and belief, to weld them into one. When Thor strikes Skrymir with his terrible hammer, the giant asks if a leaf has fallen. I need not appeal to the Thors of argument in the pulpit, the senate, and the mass-meeting, if they have ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... Fretted a path through its descending curves With its wintry speed. On every side now rose Rocks, which, in unimaginable forms, Lifted their black and barren pinnacles 545 In the light of evening, and its precipice Obscuring the ravine, disclosed above, Mid toppling stones, black gulfs and yawning caves, Whose windings gave ten thousand various tongues To the loud stream. Lo! where the pass expands 550 Its stony jaws, the abrupt mountain breaks, And seems, with its accumulated crags, To overhang the world: for wide expand Beneath the wan stars and descending moon Islanded seas, blue mountains, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... would be glad to hear the views of their friends. Then did one after another of these eight worthy men rise, and for six mortal hours they poured forth their views. I do not know whether it was most difficult to avoid laughter or yawning; but, indeed, Master Harry, it was a weary time. I dared not look at William, for he put such grave attention and worshipful reverence on his face that you would have thought he had been born and bred to the work. When the last of the ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty
... spectre band, his messmates brave, Sunk in the yawning ocean, While to the mast he lash'd him fast, And brav'd the storm's commotion: The winter moon upon the sand A silv'ry carpet made, And mark'd the sailor reach the land, And mark'd his murd'rer wash his hand, Where the green ...
— Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor
... to Carver House without her. Sahwah was still piecing together the events of the night before when the shrill ring sounded through the house again. It was the front doorbell. Sahwah jumped up and threw on her bathrobe and, yawning widely, ran downstairs. ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... to no habit of suspicion, and constitutionally cheerful, went to bed with her young son, thinking no evil. Midnight came, one, two o'clock; mother and child had long been asleep; nor did either of them dream of that danger which even now was yawning under their feet. The barrister had spent the hours from ten to two in drawing up his will, and in writing such letters as might have the best chance, in case of fatal issue to himself, for obtaining ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... her! Very faintly there began to stir within him the old fiery longing that she, and she alone, had ever waked within him. He would worship her to the last flicker of his dying soul. But the darkness was spreading, spreading, like a yawning of a great gulf at his feet. Already he was slipping over the edge. The light was fading out ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... frightened the people away, or whether the place and its accompaniments were too garish for such weather, we know not, but certainly it seemed to be avoided most cautiously; with the exception of some two or three dozen Sunday-strollers, yawning upon the Anglo-Greco-Pimlico-hightopoltical statue above mentioned. It was curious enough to hear the remarks made by some of these good folks upon this giant exotic—this Greek prototype of British prowess. 'Well, I ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... briskly through the afternoon sunshine along the mean village street. Here and there in front of their doorways sat the merchants yawning and talking, or watching pigs root in ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... snuffling the wreck before him. Recovering the wretched hat, Israel again beat a retreat, his wardrobe sorely the worse for his visits. Not only was his coat a mere rag, but his breeches, clawed by the dog, were slashed into yawning gaps, while his yellow hair waved over the top of the crownless beaver, like a lonely tuft of heather ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... then something odd happened. Perhaps it was the sight of the rifle, perhaps it recognised an enemy of its kind, but the lion which up until then had looked on the people of Tarascon with sovereign disdain, yawning in their faces, seemed to feel a stirring of anger. First it sniffed and uttered a rumbling growl, it stretched out its forefeet and unsheathed its claws, then it got up, raised its head, shook its mane, opened its huge maw and directed at ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... force to his words, he checked himself in an involuntary imitation of two half-length stretching and yawning figures on the mantel-shelf, who were represented as in one eternal state of weariness from the waist upwards; and hummed a fragment of a song. It was a Bacchanalian song, something about a Sparkling Bowl. He sang it with an assumption of a Devil-may-care voice, that made his face a thousand times ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... the public drawing-room, nearly two hours after he had left it, several curious eyes turned towards him. The card-players had finished their game and broken up into various groups. A few men were yawning and apparently meditating a retreat to the smoking-room. No one seemed particularly energetic, but the entrance of that tall soldierly figure struck a new note of interest in the languid assemblage. He seemed to bring—as it were—a breeze of vitality, a sense of freshness and energy ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... judgest of others by thine own evil heart. Thou, at least, art unrivalled in perfidy, and standest alone—a base deceiver in the garb of virtue and religion—like a deep pit whose yawning mouth ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... comes to me, I will send it along to you. Meanwhile, keep firing at them, Dad. Grey Town is yawning and rubbing its eyes. The town is beginning to realise what it is to be awake. In time it will be awake ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... the storm and the epoch of political mediocrities, an age like that of the government of Walpole in England; and no Chatham was found in Rome to infuse fresh energy into the stagnant life of the nation. Wherever we cast our eyes, chinks and rents are yawning in the old building; we see workmen busy sometimes in filling them up, sometimes in enlarging them; but we nowhere perceive any trace of preparations for thoroughly rebuilding or renewing it, and the question is no longer whether, but simply when, the structure will fall. ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... my father—ay, though I loved my people little, and they had driven me away, I grew sick at heart. Now we had come to a spot where there is a great rift of black rock, and the name of that rift is U'Donga-lu-ka-Tatiyana. On either side of this donga the ground slopes steeply down towards its yawning lips, and from its end a man may see the open country. Here Chaka sat down at the end of the rift, pondering. Presently he looked up and saw a vast multitude of men, women, and children, who wound like a snake across the plain beneath towards the ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard
... there, the wild waves sweep, Whilst we, betwixt them o'er the deep, In shatter'd tempest-beaten bark, With laboring ropes are onward driven, The billows dashing o'er our dark Upheaved deck—in tatters riven Our sails—whose yawning rents between The raging ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... marching—everything about us having apparently come to a dead stand-still. The most absurd rumors have been flying about all the forenoon, the members of the Twenty-Third having nothing to do in their yawning idleness but to toss them back and forth like shuttlecocks. Among other luminous reports—the more alarming the more likely to be believed—is one that the rebels have struck in upon our line of communication by the flank and taken Fort Washington, ensuring ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood
... and how to hold the reins, and keep the spirited beasts under control; and I told him how dangerous it was, if he did not keep the track. But, poor boy, when he found himself in charge of all that fire, and looking down into yawning space, he was frightened, and no wonder; and the horses soon knew I was not behind them, took the child's measure, left the track, and wrought all this havoc; he let go the reins—I suppose he was afraid of being thrown out—and held on to the rail. But he has suffered for it, ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... stentorian voice, to be this "jolly good fellow"? So say all of them. We have always listened with the most intense pleasure to the brilliant speech of our friend who has just sat down. When you thought we were yawning, we were drinking in his ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... up spirit, and dried her eyes. Then she took to yawning, and said Sunday was a dull day, and life itself ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... has.... Well, I'm not going to remind him! I suppose he means to stay downstairs, smoking, as usual, all the evening. Oh, if I could only make him ashamed of himself just once!... I know! Uncle JOHN'S phonograph! He can't help hearing that. (She winds it up, as JACK R. enters, yawning.) Dear me, this is an unexpected honour. (Softening slightly.) Have you come up to keep me ...
— Punch, Vol. 99., July 26, 1890. • Various
... clang had died away Maimie distinctly heard a voice say, 'So that's all right.' It had a wooden sound and seemed to come from above, and she looked up in time to see an elm-tree stretching out its arms and yawning. ...
— Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... her extremely busy, not-a-moment-to-lose manner Rose departed from the room. I lingered in an imaginary world full of tender light, of unheard-of colours, with a mad riot of flowers and an inconceivable happiness under the sky arched above its yawning precipices, while a feeling of awe enveloped me like its own proper atmosphere. But everything vanished at the sound of Dona Rita's loud whisper full of boundless dismay, such as to make one's hair stir ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... farm. Beside the dwelling house and stable and smoke-house, there were long ranges with granaries and storehouses and cattlesheds. But it all looked awfully poor and dilapidated. The houses had gray, moss-grown, leaning walls, which seemed ready to topple over. In the roofs were yawning holes, and the doors hung aslant on broken hinges. It was apparent that no one had taken the trouble to drive a nail into a wall on this ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... opinion was favourable, and Macquarie lost no time in commencing to construct a road over the mountains. The difficulties in his way were immense; for fifty miles the course lay through the most rugged country, where yawning chasms had to be bridged, and oftentimes the solid rock had to be cut away. Yet, in less than fifteen months, a good carriage highway stretched from Sydney across the mountains; and the Governor was able to take Mrs. Macquarie on a trip to the fine pasture lands beyond, where he founded ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland
... grew purple; he was so hot that his collar caved in and finally swooned upon his neck in soggy exhaustion, prostrate round his thunderings. Meanwhile, the people listened with an air of patience, yawning here and there, and gradually growing fewer. It was the old, old usual thing, made up of phrases that Ramsey had heard dinning away on a thousand such occasions, and other kinds of occasions, until they meant to him no more than so much sound. He was ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington
... like the lost souls in Dante's "Inferno." The momentarily quiet sea, too, had got up again, and was now covered with huge broken waves—raised aloft in pyramids one moment, and the next scooped out into yawning valleys, into which the vessel plunged, with a shock that made her timbers vibrate with the sledge-hammer thud of the bows meeting the billows full butt, the concussion causing columns of spray to be thrown up that came in over ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Cathedine a seat, and returned himself to ask Letty whether it was not time to go. He found, however, that she had been carried off by another partner, and could only resign himself to a fresh twenty minutes of boredom. He leant, yawning, against the wall, feeling the ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... an excellent memory for trifles," she returned, and rose yawning. "And now I think I'll go to bed—unless there's anything more you want to know about our tribal customs. Are you going to write a nature book about us: 'Head-hunting Among the ...
— Ladies Must Live • Alice Duer Miller
... fortress to its foundations. The garrison flew to arms, supposing it some assault of the enemy. The alarm proved to have been caused by the rupture of a portion of the wall, which, undermined by heavy rains, had suddenly given way, leaving a large chasm yawning toward the plain. ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... hours previous, had been a band of men eager to capture or slay the white strangers, was now only a yawning chasm. ...
— The Search for the Silver City - A Tale of Adventure in Yucatan • James Otis
... vast wilderness is interrupted by mountainous belts of sand and limestone, broken into confused masses; with precipitous cliffs and yawning ravines, looking like the ruins of a world; or is traversed by lofty and barren ridges of rock, almost impassable, like those denominated the Black Hills. Beyond these rise the stern barriers of the Rocky Mountains, the limits, as it were, of the Atlantic ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... single moment, lords! (He goes from one soldier to another.) Do you remember when we climbed a mountain's rocky slope, a savage wild beast closely tracked our steps, and when you, frightened, fell into a yawning chasm, I rescued you, and saved your life? You were most grateful then. Have you forgotten it?—Jerome, we once were cast away upon the Danube's craggy shore; we braved the waves, and saved our lives; we were bold swimmers, and we helped each other well!—Christophe, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... drew his dirk, and he rapped with the hilt of it loud and long at the door. A crying of children rose within, and, behold, I was a child again! I was a child again in Shira Glen, alone in a little chamber with a window uncurtained and unshuttered, yawning red-mouthed to the outer night My back was almost ever to the window, whose panes reflected a peat-fire and a face as long as a fiddle, and eyes that shone like coal; and though I looked little at the window yawning ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... biggest handful, and Williamson managed him with skill: some of them, especially Lal Khan, were very playful, running round and round their leaders and stopping to paw the ground: Khan Sahib, on the other hand, was bored, yawning continually: it was suggested that he was suffering from polar ennui! Altogether they reflected the greatest credit upon Lashly, who groomed them every day and took the greatest care of them. They were subject to the most violent fits of jealousy, being much disturbed if a rival got ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... sympathizing with the fascinating Pierrot whose heart was broken by the cruelty of the dainty jointed Doll, we were able to forget grim reality—to forget that the bonds that had held captive the great Fiend were being cut, and that he was yawning after his long sleep, and ...
— An Account of Our Arresting Experiences • Conway Evans
... mysteriously out of the shadows and came, yawning, toward the fire. He sat down on the edge of Madame's grey gown, ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... So Hugh arose, yawning, and stumbled heavily to the chamber, for he was still faint with sleep, which would not leave him till he had plunged his head into a basin of icy water. This done, he knelt and prayed as he had been bidden, with a very earnest heart, and ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... friend beyond, composed, satirical as ever, was clothed with a mask of scornful curiosity, as if he had been listening to something that had displeased him not a little. The goggle-eyed man was yawning. Shelton turned ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... day in full midsummer he brought me thither; and even now I see the Vale before me as in a picture; a marvellous place, well grassed, treeless, narrow, betwixt great cliff-walls of black stone, with a green river running through it towards a yawning gap and a huge force. Amidst that Vale was a doom- ring of black stones, and nigh thereto a feast-hall well builded of the like stones, over whose door was carven the image of a wolf with red gaping jaws, and within it (for we entered ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... "Good-night, all!" she said, yawning openly. She kissed her uncle's cheek, and Aunt 'Mira returned with warmth the caress with which she was favored. ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... lower slopes, it led through dense forests where the ground was so matted with fallen trees and over-rioting vines and brush that the way held always to the swaying branches high above the tangle; again it skirted yawning gorges whose slippery-faced rocks gave but momentary foothold even to the bare feet that lightly touched them as the three leaped chamois-like from one precarious foothold to the next. Dizzy and terrifying was the way that Om-at chose across the summit as he led them around the shoulder ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... for Old Long Since's sake, Home to your ancient seat! It needed only this to make My cup of joy complete; The weary waiting time is past; The yawning vacuum is mended; And here we have you back at last— Oh, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 3rd, 1920 • Various
... language. Many of us are but too familiar with the fatigue of reconstructing unwieldy sentences in which the clauses are not logically dependent, nor the terms free from equivoque; we know what it is to have to hunt for the meaning hidden in a maze of words; and we can understand the yawning indifference which must soon settle upon every reader of such writing, unless he has some strong ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... find consolation among the white-capped nurses, and the student, looking at his watch, stood up yawning. Then catching sight of Hastings, he smiled and bowed. Hastings walked ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... the White Mustang made him look dingy and slow. Nevertheless, it was a critical time in the wild career of that king of horses. He had been penned in a space two hundred by five hundred yards, half of which was separated from him by a wide ditch, a yawning chasm that he had refused, and behind him, always keeping on the inside, wheeled the yelling hunter, who savagely spurred his bay and whirled a deadly lasso. He had been cut off and surrounded; ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... his bed, tightly strapped as he was. The effects of the drug were wearing off. Sleepily he yawned—stretched, and blindly, his heavy eyes still closed, released the straps that held him in bed. Yawning widely he opened his eyes—with a sudden start sat upright—then, with an excellent imitation of an Indian on the warpath, he leaped from his bed, and started to run wildly across the floor. His eyes were raised to the place where ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... seat. Just for an instant his famous fingers seemed to flash with apparent inconsequence towards one bit of mechanism and another. Then like a huge, portentous pill floated on smoothest syrup the car slid down the yawning street ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... expanse of the earth's disc seemed like a vast funnel, yawning to receive the comet and its atmosphere, balloon and all, ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... the lost sheep from yawning gulfs: Is he a man, then, to desert his friends? Yet, whatsoe'er you do, spare me from council! I was not born to ponder and select; But when your course of action is resolved, Then call on Tell: you shall ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... in vain. He should understand that people like me will never accept his religion. With thy disposition thou mightst either hate the name Christian, or become a Christian immediately. I recognize, while yawning, the truth of what they say. We are mad. We are hastening to the precipice, something unknown is coming toward us out of the future, something is breaking beneath us, something is dying around us,—agreed! But we shall succeed in dying; meanwhile ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... The city stood near a stagnant lake, and a deep cavern; where was supposed to be the most compendious passage to the shades below: [577][Greek: ten eis hadou katabasin suntomon.] The lake was called the pool of Acherusia; near to which and the yawning cavern the Cyclopians chose to take up their habitation. They are said to have built [578]Tiryns; the walls of which were esteemed no less a wonder than the [579]pyramids of Egypt. They must have resided at Nauplia in Argolis; a place in situation not unlike Hermione above-mentioned. Near this ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... Mrs. Colfax, yawning, had taken a book and gone to bed. Still Virginia sat on the porch, while the frogs sang of rain, and the lightning quivered across the eastern sky. She heard the crunch of wheels in ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... country. Down below they could see the line of the railway, and the black yawning mouth of a tunnel. The station was out of sight. There was a great bridge with tall arches running across one ...
— The Railway Children • E. Nesbit
... the youngest, you fetch the mules while I make the fire for breakfast," said Roberts to his companion, yawning and rubbing his mosquito bitten hands ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... of this plan, and dragging the poor Corporal into the dark passage which he had traversed in going to the cellar, he seized a large iron ring, opened a trap door, and violently pushed his victim into the dark and yawning chasm. Then he shut down the trap door, securely fastened it ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... cheese, and five little withered apples, all huddled together on a small plate, and crowding one upon the other, as if each were trying to save itself from the chance of being eaten. Then there is coffee; and then there is bed. You don't mind brick floors; you don't mind yawning doors, nor banging windows; you don't mind your own horses being stabled under the bed: and so close, that every time a horse coughs or sneezes, he wakes you. If you are good-humoured to the people about you, and speak pleasantly, and look cheerful, take my word ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... rose. With the jump of the sun everything took on color and lost form, plain and hills swimming, seeming to be composed of vapor, the shapes of the mountains shifting every second, tenuous, smoky. The air was crisp, making the fingers tingle. The riders came from their bunk-houses, yawning, sloshing a hasty toilet at a trough with good-natured banter, hurrying on to the shack, where Joe tendered them the prodigious array of viands provided by Pedro, who waited himself on the three partners and the girl, at the ranch-house. The smell of bacon and hot coffee spiced ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... lovely time at your tea party. I'm going to send out invitations for a social gathering before long." She rose lazily to her feet, and carefully set her cup on the table. "I suppose Miss Ainslee will be sound asleep," she remarked, yawning. "Lighting the gas will awaken her and she will be cross. She goes to bed with ...
— Grace Harlowe's Third Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... eagerly. Then there was a knock on the door. Constance opened, and an icy blast swept into the room. The postman stood on the steps, his instrument for knocking (like a drumstick) in one hand, a large bundle of letters in the other, and a yawning bag across ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... hoarse wind sighs around the mouldering walls Of the vast theatre, like the deep roar Of distant waves, or the tumultuous rush Of multitudes: the lichen creeps along Each yawning crevice, and the wild-flower hangs Its long festoons around each crumbling stone. The window's arch and massive buttress glow With time's deep tints, whilst cypress shadows wave On high, and spread a melancholy gloom. Silent forever is the voice Of Tragedy and Eloquence. In climes Far ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... against number 84 in the curving line of box-stalls at Latonia. Down the sweep of whitewashed stalls the upper doors were yawning wide, and from many of these openings, velvet black in the sunlight, sleek snaky ...
— Blister Jones • John Taintor Foote
... Here we go, down the Saone. Cabin thirty feet by ten, papered and varnished in invitation of maple. Ladies knitting, netting, nodding, napping; gentlemen yawning, snoring; children frolicking; dogs whining. Overhead a constant tramping, stamping, and screeching of the steam valve. H. suggests an excursion forward. We heave up from Hades, and cautiously thread the crowded Al Sirat of ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... of a heart pulsing with dread, perhaps! Chet had no mind for explanations. Before him were a score of yawning clefts in a rocky floor; one was larger than the rest; there were figures whose white bodies glowed red in its reflected light as they floated on black wings high above; the light of those hidden fires blazed ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... for trifles," she returned, and rose yawning. "And now I think I'll go to bed—unless there's anything more you want to know about our tribal customs. Are you going to write a nature book about us: 'Head-hunting Among ...
— Ladies Must Live • Alice Duer Miller
... them, to feel everything that can go on within. And they made no effort about anything. They talked about the Red Cross campaign against tuberculosis, or big game hunting in Africa, or the unerring accuracy of steel-workers on the skeletons of skyscrapers, throwing red-hot rivets across yawning spaces and striking the bucket, held to receive them, every time. And their talk was as simple, as eager, as unaffected, as hers had been as she talked with Godmother about her blue silk dress. ...
— Everybody's Lonesome - A True Fairy Story • Clara E. Laughlin
... short time to get a snooze," complained Spider, yawning. "Why, you'd hardly get asleep before you'd have ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Afloat • George A. Warren
... Eustace beside his calm and comely partner. The first impression was one of disappointment. It looked so like a public dinner of middle-class people. There was no local character in costume or customs. Men and women sat politely bored, expectant, trifling with their napkins, yawning, muttering nothings about the weather or their neighbours. The frozen commonplaceness of the scene was made for me still more oppressive by Signora dell' Acqua. She was evidently satirical, and could ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... corners of Mexico that afternoon, and at an unheard-of place, with an unpronounceable name, it found Cornelius McVeigh, the centre of a group of gentlemen. The party had just emerged from the yawning mouth of a mine, and were resting in the sunshine and expelling the foul air from their lungs, whilst the young promoter of the western metropolis was explaining, from a sheet of paper covered with figures, the cost of base metal to the producer. The mine foreman suddenly interrupted his remarks ...
— Nancy McVeigh of the Monk Road • R. Henry Mainer
... and should be readily granted, that patient plodding is less piquant than the by-play of inertia and revolt. The spirit of Nietsche is doubtless even now yawning mightily at such tedious moralizing; fresh proof of the "dull, gloomy seriousness," the hopeless {6} stupidity of our sublunary virtue. I believe that Nietsche has frankly confessed the real grievance of his class of mischief makers. They are impatient and easily ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... they scream and shiver, While devils push them to the pit wide-yawning Hideous and gloomy, to receive them ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... propriety in speaking it.... For, let the words of a country be in part unhandsome and offensive in themselves, in part debased by wear and wrongly uttered, and what do they declare, but, by no light indication, that the inhabitants of that country are an indolent, idly-yawning race, with minds already long prepared for any amount of servility? On the other hand, we have never heard that any empire, any state, did not at least flourish in a middling degree as long as its own liking and care ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... with rare enthusiasm, and the former had drawn from the concealment of an inner pocket a diminutive copy of "The Merchant of Venice," from which he was reading aloud a disputed passage, when the faint trail they followed suddenly dipped into the yawning mouth of a black canyon. It was a narrow, gloomy, contracted gorge, a mere gash between those towering hills shadowing its depths on either hand. A swift mountain stream, noisy and clear as crystal, dashed from rock to rock close beside the more northern wall, while ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... know what a thorough gentleman is, I dare say," assented Mrs. Laudersdale, indifferently, with no spirit for repartee, breaking an egg and putting it down, crumbling a roll, and finally attacking a biscuit, but gradually raising the siege, yawning, and leaning ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... of us most liable to this ignominy remained unbelieving to the bitter end; even did he pretend to a yawning sort of interest in a book carelessly picked up. The Sullivans had been foiled at every turn, and now we were relieved from the covert but not less pointed ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... their carved supports and grey roofs (the latter looking like pendent, embroidered tablecloths), resembled, rather, bundles of old faggots. Likewise the customary peasants, dressed in sheepskin jackets, could be seen yawning on benches before their huts, while their womenfolk, fat of feature and swathed of bosom, gazed out of upper windows, and the windows below displayed, here a peering calf, and there the unsightly jaws of a pig. In short, the view was one of the familiar type. After ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... Anstrossi fired at another, and shot a hole in the awning. That made twenty-seven in one day. Also some monkeys. The hippos were delightful. They seemed so aristocratic, like gouty old gentlemen, puffing and blowing and yawning, as though everything ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... Hieroglyphics on one of the Obelisks here should begin to pace and gesticulate, and nod their bestial heads upon the granite tablets. The careless bystanders, the London ladies with their eye-glasses and look of an Opera-box, the yawning young gentlemen of the Guarda Nobile, and the laugh of one of the file of vermilion Priests round the steps of the altar at the whispered good thing of his neighbor, brought one back to nothing indeed of a very lofty kind, but still to ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... for the scene is glimmering on my sight again, and as it brightens you fade away. O, I should be loath to lose my treasure of past happiness, and become once more what I was then; a hermit in the depths of my own mind; sometimes yawning over drowsy volumes, and anon a scribbler of wearier trash than what I read; a man who had wandered out of the real world and got into its shadow, where his troubles, joys, and vicissitudes were of such slight stuff, that he hardly knew whether he lived, or only dreamed of living. Thank ...
— The Village Uncle (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... fluttering her wings and yawning. "When the coop blew away from the ship I clung fast to this corner, with claws and beak, for I knew if I fell into the water I'd surely be drowned. Indeed, I nearly drowned, as it was, with all that ...
— Ozma of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... and knew some of the farewell had been surely meant for him. He forgot the beautiful villas along the way, forgot to watch for the twinkling lights, or to care how the cottages looked at evening. Whenever the track veered toward the sea and gave a glimpse of gray sky and yawning ocean with here and there a point of light to make the darkness blacker, he seemed to know instinctively, and opening his eyes strained them to look across it. Out there in the blackness somewhere was his Starr and he might not go ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... is grand, but it is a single, solitary grandeur. Here, our vision encompasses a boundless expanse of dread, terrific sublimities; a sea of towering Alpine summits on every hand, with fearfully-yawning gulfs and chasms; tremendous precipices, over whose dizzy edges, as we look down, and down, and down into the abysmal depths of bright green valleys, starred over with tiny white cottages, and graced with winding rivers and waving fields ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... Bladud"—was written specially. It is quite in the vein of Elia's Roast Pig story, and very gaily told. He had probably been reading some local guide-book, with the mythical account of Prince Bladud, and this suggested to him his own humorous version. At the close, he sets Mr. Pickwick a-yawning several times, who, when he had arrived at the end of this little manuscript—which certainly could not have been compressed into "a couple of sheets of writing-paper," but would have covered at least ten pages—replaced it in the drawer, and "then, with a countenance of the utmost weariness, lighted ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... They were ill-rewarded for their pains, for never has a Home Rule debate produced fewer interesting moments. The CHIEF SECRETARY was so studiously restrained in explaining the merits of the Bill that the "yawning chasm" which, according to its opponents, the measure is going to create between Southern and Northern Ireland was to be observed in advance on the countenances of many of his listeners. Years ago Mr. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... stood by the great window, watching the pigeons on neighboring roof. Presently he returned to his table, withdrew the dancing figure with its graceful, wide flung arms, set it upon the squeaky revolving table once more, and studied it, yawning at intervals. ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... you feel so pleasantly sad. For a time she lay quiet, watching the slant, silvery threads and feeling mysteriously, fascinatingly, at peace. Then Poppy, who always slept at the foot of her bed, awoke with a tremendous yawning and stretching—exactly the kind of "exercises" that young Doc Alison prescribed for father, who hated to get up ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... ideas, I prepared myself with a pair of green spectacles, and called one fine morning, quite by accident, at the Ministerial hotel. I found D— at home, yawning, lounging, and dawdling, as usual, and pretending to be in the last extremity of ennui. He is, perhaps, the most really energetic human being now alive—but that is ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... and ice, having to cut steps with an axe that we had brought along, before reaching the top. The latter stage of this proceeding was like scrambling over the dome of the Washington Capitol with a great yawning cliff below, and was well calculated to try the nerve of any one except a competent mountaineer or a sailor accustomed to a doddering mast. A ravine was next reached, through which tumbled with loud noise and wild confusion, over broken rocks and amid some scant lichens and mosses, ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... of Deerbrook. But for this sickness would they have met—should they ever have understood each other again? This was a speculation on which they could not dwell—it led them too near the verge of the grave which was yawning for Matilda. Mrs Rowland would have been relieved, but the relief would have been not unmixed with humiliation, if she could have known how easily she was let off in this long conference. Not only can the happy easily forgive, but they are exceedingly apt to forget the ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... out of one of the tents, yawning and rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Then he sighted the strange canoe and was wide ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... rough, blowing in straight upon the land. Yesterday, the shore was strewn with hundreds of oxen, sheep, and pigs (and with bushels upon bushels of apples), in every state and stage of decay—burst open, rent asunder, lying with their stiff hoofs in the air, or with their great ribs yawning like the wrecks of ships—tumbled and beaten out of shape, and yet with a horrible sort of humanity about them. Hovering among these carcases was every kind of water-side plunderer, pulling the horns out, getting the hides off, chopping the hoofs with poleaxes, etc. etc., attended by no end ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... in, Miss Bellingham," I said as she shook my hand with cool civility, "to find your father yawning and me taking my departure. So I have my uses, you see. My conversation is the ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... say this, and saw that I was in a difficulty; and as one person when another yawns in his presence catches the infection of yawning from him, so did he seem to be driven into a difficulty by my difficulty. But as he had a reputation to maintain, he was ashamed to admit before the company that he could not answer my challenge or ...
— Charmides • Plato
... philosopher for some time, but tired of it most confoundedly, and very soon gave it up." "Pray, Sir," said Mr. Hume, "in what branch of philosophy did you employ your researches? What books did you read?" "Books?" said Mr. White; "nay sir, I read no books, but I used to sit whole forenoons a-yawning and poking the fire." Boswelliana, p. 221. The French were more successful than Mr. Edwards in the pursuit of philosophy, Horace Walpole wrote from Paris in 1766 (Letters, iv. 466):—'The generality of the men, and more than the generality, are dull and empty. They have ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... alone. Isthmuses are especially naked and rugged; the wave, which wears and mines them on either side, reduces them to the simplest form. Everywhere there were sharp relief ridges, cuttings, frightful fragments of torn stone, yawning with many points, like the jaws of a shark; breaknecks of wet moss, rapid slopes of rock ending in the sea. Whosoever undertakes to pass over an isthmus meets at every step misshapen blocks, as large as houses, in the forms of shin-bones, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... Nick," said Wilding, yawning; "you are dreaming already. Such a plan would be over elaborate for his lordship's mind. It would ask a villainy parallel ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... desired to see the view upon the other side before the day had faded. But it was night when I reached the summit; the moon was riding high and clear; and only a few grey streaks of twilight lingered in the west. A yawning valley, gulfed in blackness, lay like a hole in created nature at my feet; but the outline of the hills was sharp against the sky. There was Mount Aigoal, the stronghold of Castanet. And Castanet, not only as an active undertaking leader, deserves some mention among Camisards; for ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... drip upon my writing-desk, and soak the leather and swell the wood, and stain the ribbon and spoil the paper inside, and all because you were treacherous at the roof and let it? Have you not made a perfect rattery of yourself, yawning at every possible chink and crumbling at the underpinning, and keeping me awake night after night by the tramp of a whole brigade of the Grand Army that slaughtered Bishop Hatto? Whenever a breeze comes along stout enough to make an aspen-leaf tremble, don't you immediately ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the bright heaven I had so recently gazed upon and the abyss now yawning at my feet! But so it is in the Court and the world! I felt then the nothingness of even the most desirable future, by an inward sentiment, which, nevertheless, indicates how we cling to it. Fear on ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... glen extends two or three miles, until it melts into the softness of grove and meadow, in the rich landscape below. Then, again, on the opposite side, is Lumford's Glen, with its overhanging rocks, whose yawning depth and silver waterfall, of two hundred feet, are at once finely and fearfully contrasted with the elevated peak of Knockmany, rising into the ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... Kobuk, yawning, rose from his post by Ellen's tent, to greet her. Boreland and Kayak Bill had gone to bed in the smaller tent, and about the greying embers of their bonfire, rubber boots stood, like grotesque plants, each one drying upside down over a stake ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... along the summit of the cliffs. The twilight was gathering and the wind blew with perfect fury, which, combined with the black and stormy sky, gave the coast an air of extreme wildness. All at once, as we followed the winding path, the crags, appeared to open before us, disclosing a yawning chasm down which a large stream falling in an unbroken sheet was lost in the gloom below. Witnessed in a calm day, there may perhaps be nothing striking about it, but coming upon us at once through the gloom of twilight, with the sea thundering below and a scowling ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... craft like an egg-shell. Joe held his breath. It was the supreme moment. French Pete luffed straight into it, and the Dazzler mounted the steep slope with a rush, poised a moment on the giddy summit, and fell into the yawning valley beyond. Keeping off in the intervals to fill the mainsail, and luffing into the combers, they worked their way across the dangerous stretch. Once they caught the tail-end of a whitecap and were well-nigh smothered in the froth, ...
— The Cruise of the Dazzler • Jack London
... were yawning at a prodigious rate it was now concluded that the time had come to crawl under their blankets and get some sleep. This going to bed was never a very long-drawn-out operation with the scouts when in the open. Each boy would ...
— Boy Scouts on Hudson Bay - The Disappearing Fleet • G. Harvey Ralphson
... only one ugly thing in the whole palace, which was a little, drowsy, gray dwarf, left there by the fairy Prosperity. He kept yawning all day, and very often set the Prince yawning, too, only to look at him. This dwarf they called Satiety, and he followed the Prince ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... through and be saved the exertion of walking a considerable distance, then the horses were left in the shade while we scrambled down the steep hill-side covered with sharp-edged, broken rock, about mid-way down which is the mouth of the cave, yawning like a narrow, open well. Above this a stout windlass has been ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... fact besides— That in no wise the nature of all things For us was fashioned by a power divine— So great the faults it stands encumbered with. First, mark all regions which are overarched By the prodigious reaches of the sky: One yawning part thereof the mountain-chains And forests of the beasts do have and hold; And cliffs, and desert fens, and wastes of sea (Which sunder afar the beaches of the lands) Possess it merely; and, again, ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... The sleepy, yawning starboard watch were soon on deck, half-dressed, and snuffing the morning air very discontentedly. We of the larboard division went below to ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... came out quite as well as could be expected, the artist sleepy and a trifle disorganized, Mr. King in a sort of facetious humor that is more dangerous than grumbling, Mr. De Long yawning and stretching and declaring that he had not slept a wink, while Marion alighted upon the platform unruffled in plumage, greeting the morning like a bird. There were the usual early loafers at the station, hands deep in pockets, ruminant, listlessly observant. No matter at what ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... audience. Such inattention is practically saying that what the person is uttering is not worth attending to; and persons of real good-breeding always avoid it. Loud talking and laughing in a large assembly, even when no exercises are going on; yawning and gaping in company; and not looking in the face a person who is addressing you, are deemed marks ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... brought him home. The thing was not credible at first: that here, dead as a stone, lay the shell of that life that had been his own salvation. He studied intently the gray face, missed its habitual smile and for really the first time his gaze rested upon the yawning wound in ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... he found so dazzling blazed from sconces round the walls of a bedroom more handsome than any he had thought ever to see—unless perhaps upon a stage. The voice belonged to a young woman sitting up in bed and coolly covering him with the yawning muzzle of ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... every night for five and twenty years in an absolutely empty theatre, and if she did not go mad under the ordeal, she would perhaps turn out very like the Lady of Greifenstein. The stage was always set; the scenery was always of the best and newest; the vacant boxes and the yawning pit were brilliantly lighted; the costumes were by the best makers; the stage manager was punctual and in his place; the curtain went up every day for the performance; but Frau von Greifenstein's theatre ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... shine any brighter in the small hours, they were doing their best then. All looked pleasant and quite at home, even to the sentry at the corner; and there was nothing, you would say, to make one sad; but as I turned the corner I drew a breath of such yawning profundity that the old dog at the Florida House started up and growled impromptu. That dog had held a stout nigger all night in the yard, not long before; but fortunately he knew me, and after smelling, to make sure that all was right, he followed me into an out-house, when I rolled ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... ruins of Carthage saw not such a sight as presented itself to the afflicted people of San Francisco in the dim haze of the smoke pall at the end of the second day. Ruins stark naked, yawning at fearful angles and pinnacled into a thousand fearsome shapes, marked the site of what was three-fourths of the total area of ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... will make is known before hand. Neither is that of man. An eager aspirant to ecclesiastical preferment is not the less at liberty to refuse a proffered mitre, because all his acquaintances have a well founded assurance that he will accept. A wayfarer, with a yawning precipice before his eyes, may or may not, as he pleases, cast himself down headlong. Whether he will do so or not must always have been positively foreknown to Omniscience; but that fact in no degree affects his power of deciding ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... smoking, as usual, all the evening. Oh, if I could only make him ashamed of himself just once!... I know! Uncle JOHN'S phonograph! He can't help hearing that. (She winds it up, as JACK R. enters, yawning.) Dear me, this is an unexpected honour. (Softening slightly.) Have you come up to keep me ...
— Punch, Vol. 99., July 26, 1890. • Various
... downward. Just at dawn Alchise stopped at a gray campos under some pines and called. A voice from the hut answered him. The canvas flap was put back and an old Indian buck appeared, followed by several squaws and young bucks, yawning and staring. ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... and getting over the ground in a manner most surprising, Mark soon found himself on the edge of the great, yawning crater, into which his chum Jack had started to slide. I say started, for, fortunately, the lad had been saved from death ...
— Lost on the Moon - or In Quest Of The Field of Diamonds • Roy Rockwood
... possible by pressing it against the front of the helmet, closing the mouth and then making a strong effort at expiration so as to produce temporarily an extra pressure inside the throat, and so blow open the tubes; or by yawning or going through the motions thereof. If this does not act he must come up again Provided his ears are "open," and the air pumps can keep the pressure of air equal to that of the depth of the water in which the diver may be, there is nothing ...
— The Sewerage of Sea Coast Towns • Henry C. Adams
... at one stride the dawn was on us; with no flush of sunshine, but with a grey, steel-coloured ray that cut the darkness like a sword. I had managed to hoist myself again to the bowsprit, and, straddling it, had time in one glance aft to take in the scene of ruin. Yet in that glance I saw it—the yawning hole, the upheaved jagged deck-planks, the dark bodies hurled to right and left into the scuppers—by three separate lights: by the yellow light of the flames in the rigging, by the steel-grey light of dawn, and by a sudden white-hot flush as the lightning ripped ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... stared. The man behind the glass wall yawned again and again. He was helpless to stop it. If such a thing could be, he was in a paroxysm of yawning, though his eyes glared and he beat his fists together. The muscles controlling the act of yawning worked independently of the rage that should have made yawning impossible. And he was ashamed, and ...
— The Hate Disease • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... proclaim their "openings" in order to bring the world to the light! They go to the full length of the implications of their {44} fresh insight without ever dreaming that all the theological world will unite, across the yawning chasms of difference, to stamp out their "pestilent heresy," and to rid the earth of persons who dare to question the traditions and the ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... Shelton's friend beyond, composed, satirical as ever, was clothed with a mask of scornful curiosity, as if he had been listening to something that had displeased him not a little. The goggle-eyed man was yawning. Shelton ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... one of the graves). Heaven is weeping blood over your sins and your idolatry. Punishment shall be meted out, for those in authority have fallen into wrongdoing. Can't you see that the very graves are yawning for prey— ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... Betsinda would sit and watch them; and in this way she picked up a great deal of learn ing; for she was always awake, though her mistress was not, and listened to the wise professors when Angelica was yawning or thinking of the next ball. And when the dancing-master came, Betsinda learned along with Angelica; and when the music-master came, she watched him, and practiced the Princess's pieces when Angelica was away at balls and parties; and when the drawing-master came, she ...
— The Rose and the Ring • William Makepeace Thackeray
... other two, piercing him in the navel, and then falling on the ground, and lying stretched before him. The wounded man, fascinated and mute, stood looking at the adder's eyes, and endeavouring to stand steady on his legs, yawning the while as if smitten with lethargy or fever; the adder, on his part, looked up at the eyes of the man, and both of them breathed hard, and sent forth a smoke that ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... (47) describes twelve famous cities of Asia owing their sudden destruction to an earthquake occurring at night. We are told that "the usual means of escape by rushing into the open air was of no avail: the yawning earth swallowed up everybody: huge mountains sank down, level plains rose into hills, and lightning flashed throughout the catastrophe." Substitute "villages" for "famous cities," "hills" for "huge mountains," and we have, perhaps, as good an account as can be found in such few words ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... the mast in water and foam, panting. He rolled his despairing eyes around; the bulwarks fore and aft were all in ruins, with wide chasms, as between the battlements of some decayed castle; and through the gaps he saw the sea yawning wide for him. He dare not move: no man was safe a moment unless lashed to mast or helm. He held on, expecting death. But presently it struck him he could see much farther than before. He looked up: it was clearing ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... tall waves of many smaller rapids and suddenly, while I was having breakfast, which to save time is always taken in the prahus, I found myself near what appeared to be a rapidly declining kiham. A fathomless abyss seemed yawning before us, although the approach thereto was enticing, as the rushing waters turned into white foam and played in the strong sunlight. We passed a timid prahu which was waiting at one side of the course, ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... permanently standing in country where it never stood before, and sometimes the tufty herbage has changed into a sward. The flats that used in one season to show a succession of swamps, and in another a surface of bare dusty soil, rifted with yawning cracks, has often become good level turf, intersected with runnels cut by the hoofs of ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... a couple of yawning trunks, a litter of feminine apparel and of personal effects—the accumulation of a long term of years, for she was an inveterate hoarder—encumbering every available surface, the carpet included, Theresa Bilson stood as ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... change the subject," the March Hare interrupted, yawning. "I vote the young lady ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... said Von Halber, shaking his head; "he must be mad, or struck with blindness, and cannot see the yawning abyss at his feet." He awakened Trenck, and asked him how he had amused himself, during the long ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... his eyelids almost imperceptibly, said it was all very well for people who never made money to talk. He himself intended to live as long as he could. This was a hit at George, who was notoriously hard up. Bosinney muttered abstractedly "Hear, hear!" and, George yawning, the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... her; or bestowed his company upon her in some other dutiful fashion. But these filial attentions over, if he yawned with relief—why, he never did so in her presence, and would have been unable to understand that Lady Mary saw him yawning, in her mind's eye, as plainly as though he had indulged this bad habit under her very nose. He bestowed a portion of his time on his aunts in much the same spirit, taking less trouble to be affectionate, because they ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... fashion these; Leave no yawning gaps between; Think not, because no man sees, Such things ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Her assent was too eager, but she immediately corrected that error by yawning, "I don't suppose I'd ought to go, but if you ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... young ladies, yawning drearily in each other's faces, turned to go up to their rooms, a servant entered, ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... fairest and happiest scenes of human life—and which from day to day, and from year to year, with intolerant and interminable malignity, sends its thousands and tens of thousands of hapless victims into the ever-yawning and never-satisfied grave!"—[Loud and long applause.] The experience which they had had, that all the dangers, all the bloodshed and violence which were threatened, were merely imaginary, and that ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... this wormy circumstance? Why linger at the yawning tomb so long? O for the gentleness of old Romance, The simple plaining of a minstrel's song! Fair reader, at the old tale take a glance, For here, in truth, it doth not well belong 390 To speak:—O turn thee to the very tale, And taste the music of ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... information. I was encouraged, and went on gloriously from theme to theme of school declamation. I sat with Marius on the ruins of Carthage; I defended the bridge with Horatius Cocles; thrust my hand into the flame with Martius Scaevola, and plunged with Curtius into the yawning gulf; I fought side by side with Leonidas, at the straits of Thermopylae; and was going full drive into the battle of Plataea, when my memory, which is the worst in the world, failed me, just as I wanted the name of ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... home in an empty stomach, was expelled into spiritual darkness. He remembered that he had eaten nothing for almost twenty-four hours (having missed yesterday's dinner), and this thought carried him downstairs, where he begged a roll from a yawning negro cook in the kitchen. Coming up to his room again, he poured out a second cup of coffee, added a dash of cream, which he had brought with him in a handleless pitcher, and leaning comfortably back in the worn horsehair ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... love of Wisdom brought, Her truest lore, Self-knowledge, first I sought; Devoted here my worldly wealth, To win my chosen sons immortal health. Midst these dun woods, and mountains steep, Midst the wild horrors of yon desert deep, Midst yawning caverns, wat'ry dells, Midst long, sequestered aisles, and peaceful cells, No passions fell distract the mind, To Nature, Silence, and Herself consign'd. In these still mansions who shall bide, 'Tis mine, with Heaven's appointment, to decide; But, hither, I invite not all: ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... re-animating his dispirited followers, defying danger and death whilst he waved the national flag, and drove the enemy from their entrenchments, and blasted their glory. Others pointed him out whilst crossing the perpetual snows and yawning chasms of Mount St. Bernard, and then victorious on the plains of Marengo, where he won that battle which insured the peace and glory ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... before his ferocious enemy! 'Faith now has but little time to speak to the conscience—it is now struggling for life—it is now fighting with angels—with infernals—all it can do now is to cry, groan, sweat, fear, fight, and gasp for life.'[96] How desperate the conflict—the mouth of hell yawning to swallow him—man cannot aid the poor warrior, all his help is in God. Is it not a wonder to see a poor creature, who in himself is weaker than the moth, to stand against and overcome all devils—all the world—all his lusts and corruptions; or, if he fall, is it not a wonder to see him, when ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... round her sister, and rest her head on her shoulder, though how she kept on in the dark, dragged along as it were blindly up and up, she never could afterwards recollect; but at last pine torches came down to meet them, there was a tumult of voices, a yawning black archway in front, a light or two flitting about. Jean lay helplessly against her, only groaning now and then; then, as the arch seemed to swallow them up, Eleanor was aware of an old man, lame and rugged, who bawled ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... mattress, I believe," said Crandall, yawning. "Same old everything. Oh, but I'm lame! I'd no notion you chaps could play like this." He caressed a battered shin. "You've given us all ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... person capable of defeating Wilmet, and she managed to render her very uncomfortable before the end of the evening, when hours passed and still Felix did not come in; and Alda suggested, in the intervals of yawning, that Wilmet would soon learn how green it was to sit up, now that Felix had got out of leading- strings, and set up ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the stifling of helpless rage, the leering glance and jumping heart of envy.'' Darwin completes the description of fear: The heart beats fast, the features pale, he feels cold but sweats, the hair rises, the secretion of saliva stops, hence follows frequent swallowing, the voice becomes hoarse, yawning begins, the nostrils tremble, the pupils widen, the constrictor muscles relax. Wild and very primitive people show this much more clearly and tremble quite uncontrolled. The last may often be seen and may indeed ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... but yawning, when he knocked at her door. "There wasn't no call for you to come," she said, inhospitably; "the ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... colored suns were shining down upon the Land of the Mangaboos just as they had done ever since his arrival. The little man, having had a good sleep, felt rested and refreshed, and looking through the glass partition of the room he saw Zeb sitting up on his bench and yawning. So the Wizard went ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... foremost yak, which carried two large bundles of fuel, suddenly sank through the snow and disappeared. Fortunately he was held fast by his horns, a hind leg, and the faggots, and there he hung suspended over a dark yawning chasm. The snow had formed a treacherous bridge over a large crevasse in the ice, and this bridge gave way under the weight of the yak. We had all the trouble in the world to haul him ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... work sufficed. The stone fell inward, and we shouted with delight when we saw a yawning black hole before us, large enough for two stooping men to walk abreast. Captain Rudstone hurried upstairs with the glad news, and meanwhile Menzies and I ventured some distance into the passage, finding the ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... climax of the series of climaxes, and sat for a moment tense; then, flirting the cheap thing into a corner, he drew down his feet and stood up, stretching and yawning. Having relieved his cramped muscles, he drew out a tobacco pouch. But while in the act of opening it, he glanced at the alarm-clock on the book-shelves, and ended by replacing the pouch, ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... oyster house readily. As he entered the little, not over-clean place, he found himself the only customer. He gave his order, then picked up the local daily paper. As he ate, Jack found himself yawning. The drowsiness of Annapolis by night was coming upon him. Little did he dream how soon he was to discover that Annapolis, in some of its parts, can ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Middies - The Prize Detail at Annapolis • Victor G. Durham
... know," said the head, yawning vastly. "It depends on the country. I shan't go till after breakfast, anyhow. But I'm much too tired ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas
... just struck, in a ghostly and solemn manner, from a turret over the centre of the house, which I saw when I came in. A large dog has been woke, apparently by the sound of the bell, and is howling and yawning drearily, somewhere round a corner. I hear echoing footsteps in the passages below, and the iron thumping of bolts and bars at the house door. The servants are evidently going to bed. Shall I follow ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... lamentations; another hypocritically weeps at the funeral of one whose death at heart he rejoices for; here a gluttonous cormorant, whatever he can scrape up, thrusts all into his guts to pacify the cryings of a hungry stomach; there a lazy wretch sits yawning and stretching, and thinks nothing so desirable as sleep and idleness; some are extremely industrious in other men's business, and sottishly neglectful of their own; some think themselves rich because their credit is great, though they can never pay, ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... greater force to his words, he checked himself in an involuntary imitation of two half-length stretching and yawning figures on the mantel-shelf, who were represented as in one eternal state of weariness from the waist upwards; and hummed a fragment of a song. It was a Bacchanalian song, something about a Sparkling Bowl. He sang it with an assumption of a Devil-may-care ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... do. And Gordon? No." There was another reverie. Finally, he arose, knocked the ashes out of his pipe and stretched himself once more: "I've got to depend on myself, it seems to me. I must set my wits to work and astonish them all. But oh, if yawning were but a lucrative employment, how easily I could make money and be quit of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... Long Since's sake, Home to your ancient seat! It needed only this to make My cup of joy complete; The weary waiting time is past; The yawning vacuum is mended; And here we have you back at last— Oh, HERBERT, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 3rd, 1920 • Various
... slopes, it led through dense forests where the ground was so matted with fallen trees and over-rioting vines and brush that the way held always to the swaying branches high above the tangle; again it skirted yawning gorges whose slippery-faced rocks gave but momentary foothold even to the bare feet that lightly touched them as the three leaped chamois-like from one precarious foothold to the next. Dizzy and terrifying was ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... father prior," said the youth, yawning; "Nor have I much objection to taking arms, excepting that they are a somewhat cumbrous garb, and in February a furred mantle is more suiting to the weather than a steel corselet. And it irks me the more to put on cold harness in this nipping weather, that, would ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... cleverest of their devices, and the most puzzling to an enemy, was that, instead of one mouth only, there were three to choose from, with nothing to betoken which was the proper access; all being pretty much alike, and all unfenced and yawning. And the common rumour was that in times of any danger, when any force was known to be on muster in their neighbourhood, they changed their entrance every day, and diverted the other two, by means of sliding doors to the chasms and ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... such the storm of battle on this day, And such the frenzy, whose convulsion blinds To all save carnage, that, beneath the fray, An earthquake reeled unheededly away! None felt stern Nature rocking at his feet, And yawning forth a grave for those who lay Upon their bucklers for a winding-sheet; Such is the absorbing hate when ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... a lull o'er the mighty commotion, And dark through the whiteness, and still through the swell, The whirlpool cleaves downward and downward in ocean A yawning abyss, like the pathway to hell; The stiller and darker the farther it goes, Suck'd into that smoothness ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... way slowly and lingeringly from the stalls, so slowly that the lights were already being turned down and great shroud-like dust-cloths were being swaythed over the ornamental gilt-work. The laughing, chattering, yawning throng had filtered out of the vestibule, and was melting away in final groups from the steps of the theatre. An impatient attendant gave him his coat and locked up the cloak room. Comus stepped out under the portico; he looked at the posters announcing ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... of the Ministry, and was obliged to work seven hours a day, one or two hours of which were devoted to going wearily through a bundle of probably superfluous papers and documents. The rest of the time was given to other occupations as varied as they were intellectual; such as yawning, filing his nails, talking about his chiefs, groaning over the slowness of promotion, cooking a potato or a sausage in the stove for his luncheon, reading the newspaper down to the editor's signature, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... so as to throw its light upon the steps as they entered the gloomy receptacle of the departed. Eleanor half repented having ventured within its dreary limits, so much did the appearance of the yawning catacombs, surcharged with mortality, and, above all, the ghostly figure of the grim knight, affect her with dread, as she looked wistfully around. She required all the support her brother's arm could afford her; nor ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... was no more there: the bench was vacant, the garden deserted, the gateway yawning on ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... 18-1/2 Miles. Then for a mile or so the road hangs over the yawning chasm of the river. It is wide and in fine condition so we dash along to where, on the up trip, the first glimpse is gained of the Crystal Range, its two chief peaks, Pyramid and Agassiz, dominating the landscape from this side ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... breath, the boss suddenly ducked, and disappeared from the half-curtained window altogether. A moment later, he appeared outside his swinging door, yawning and stretching himself, as one who, wearied with the tedium of life indoors, would see what ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... do but sleep," she murmured, pushing back her rumpled curls and yawning prodigiously. "I wonder why it is I always have to wake up first," and then, her eyes happening to fall on Evelyn at this precise moment, she cried, "Oh, I saw you wink, Evelyn; you can't fool me! You're playing possum," and, springing quickly out of ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... while a few are left below to light the slow-burning matches attached to about a hundred charged bore holes. The rest of the miners are drawn up, and then begins the tremendous bombardment. I watched the progress of it from a stage projecting over the wild-looking yawning gulph. It was grand to hear the succession of explosions that filled the bottom of the mine far beneath me. Then the volumes of smoke, through the surface of which masses of rock were sometimes sent whirling up into the clear blue sky, and fell back again into the pit below. ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... Ah, it was from that I shrank. I could have faced pain and anxiety and heartbreak undauntedly, but I could not face that terrible, yawning, barren emptiness. I put my hands over my eyes to shut it out, but it pressed in upon my consciousness insistently, and would not ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... away towards the house, but stopped abruptly as Violet suddenly sauntered forth. She was yawning as she came. ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... as he finished tearing both ends free. I saw him bend the steel panel inward, crush it down with his thousand pounds of weight, and dash through the yawning hole into his ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... taken two stitches when she began laughing so hard she had to quit. Of course when Raggedy Ann laughed, all the other dolls laughed too, for laughter, like yawning, is very catching. ...
— Raggedy Andy Stories • Johnny Gruelle
... regard himself as if he had a sword laid upon his thigh, and Gehenna were yawning near him; as it is said (Solomon's Song, iii. 7, 8), "Behold the bed of Solomon (the judgment-seat of God), threescore valiant men are about it, of the valiant of Israel. They all hold swords, being expert in war (with ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... more amusing than the satisfaction with which Felicia Day awoke. The early sun was streaming in her eyes. She rubbed them drowsily and sat up in the middle of the narrow humpy bed. At the foot of the bed Babiche awoke too, yawning and stretching beautifully, reflexing her droll puppy body and wagging her ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... was now so near that I could see the yawning muzzles of her guns, while her high, curving sides seemed to tower over us. As I gazed, with my heart full of a pitiful fear for her, I saw a head appear above her quarter-railing, a very round head whereon ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... undistinguished to that unknown grave which gapes so mysteriously in some hidden recess of the universe, and silently swallows yearly the vast masses of printed paper which has done its brief work and been thrown by read or unread, forgotten. It is to assist in the rescue of a struggling author from this yawning abyss that the present article is sent forth, a plank ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of a nervous affection, and which is too frequently the consequence of the violent astringency of foreign tea taken injudiciously as a constant aliment:—A faintness, succeeded with a delusive vision of motes, mists, and clouds, falling backwards and forwards before the distempered sight—A yawning, gaping, stretching out of the arms, twitching of the nerves, sneezing, drowsiness, and contraction of the breast—Dulness, debility, distress, and dismay, with a great sense of weariness—A wan complexion, ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... observation had killed the theory of an earth disturbance. Anything of that nature must have brought the lake down. For the dislodgment began under its very shadow, and had even further deepened the yawning cavern beneath its bed. ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... of heaven and earth is felt—not by the slumbering city, only by that lonely watcher, brave and unshaken in his fanaticism. In the midst of silence, with no preluding sound, he is wrapped in sudden light. Through the roof, through the rent, wide-yawning, vast, white-blazing blue of heaven above, pours a wondrous descent, dread as the downrushing of stars. He has what he asked. Withdraw—forbear to look—I am blinded. I hear in that fane an unspeakable sound. Would that I could not hear it! I ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... with the sun and an unusual warmth lay over the island that made sleep heavy, and in the morning we assembled at a late breakfast, rubbing our eyes and yawning. The cool north wind had given way to the warm southern air that sometimes came up with haze and moisture across the Baltic, bringing with it the relaxing sensations that produced enervation ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... chateau, studio-rumors placing here a collection of original old masters. But we were grievously disappointed, finding nothing but black ruin and decay. The roof over the chancel is entirely open to the sky, and a wide-yawning crack extends down the rear wall to the ground, as if a lightning-stroke had riven it asunder. The canvas of the altar-piece has fallen like a covering over the altar, screening and preserving it, so that its beautiful marble and alabaster ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... it!" I gasped. I was indeed glad then that he held me by the arm, for it seemed to me as if I was falling down a yawning abyss which had ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... spectacles is apt to grow wearisome; and some of the spectators were yawning, and a few of the elder ladies resigning themselves to a quiet nap, their heads heavy with the ale of the morning meal, swaying from side to side, and endangering the stiff folds of the ruffs, which made a sort of cradle for their cheeks and chins. Lucy, however, knew nothing of fatigue; she ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... Lord" fully expected to see the earth open and engulf his impious judges in its yawning depths—but no such thing happened. His spirit grew uneasy, and, taking advantage of the Russian Government's appeal for missionaries to convert the Siberian peoples, he set forth to preach his own religion to them instead ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... [246] 'A yawning ruin hangs and nods in air:'—Here in one bed two shivering sisters lie, The cave of ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... rider was keeping him pressed close to the bank and face to face with the on-coming grizzly. At any instant the horse might disregard the guiding hand as well as the friendly words of encouragement, and in mad terror attempt to swerve suddenly around, and thus hurl itself and rider into the yawning abyss below. ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... hour later Miss Connie Brown, aged sixteen, who was yawning over a novel on the chaise-lounge of her bedroom, was electrified into action by the announcement that two gentlemen callers were waiting for her in the parlor. Miss Connie was in excellent health, weighing one hundred and sixty pounds, rather freckled, ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... Finance Bill was finished off, but not until the Government had experienced some shocks. The Corporation tax, intended partially to fill the yawning void which will be caused some day by the disappearance of E.P.D.—on the principle that one bad tax deserves another—was condemned with equal vigour, but for entirely different reasons, by Colonel WEDGWOOD and Sir F. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 4th, 1920 • Various
... of the grand illumination. Beatrix scarce spoke to him. When my Lord Duke went away, she practised upon the next in rank, and plied my young Lord Ashburnham with all the fire of her eyes and the fascinations of her wit. Most of the party were set to cards, and Mr. St. John, after yawning in the face of Mrs. Steele, whom he did not care to pursue any more; and talking in his most brilliant animated way to Lady Castlewood, whom he pronounced to be beautiful, of a far higher order of beauty than her daughter, presently took his ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... shoost—put on my trowsers," shouted a voice from the window, and the door was soon opened by the yawning landlord. ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... ever, and that you are far better rationed than you deserve. P.S.—We are officially informed that there are no Q.M.S.'s among the angels!)—to resume, Mahy did the gaby from one exasperated Q.M.S. right into the yawning arms of another. An enormous box was instantaneously bundled on to his shoulders, ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... deep repentance after Lord Newhaven's death, he had vowed that from that day forward he would never deviate again from the path of truth and honor, however difficult it might prove. But this frightful moment had come upon him unawares. He drew back instinctively, giddy and unnerved, as from a chasm yawning suddenly among the flowers, one step in front of him. He was too stunned to think. When he rallied they were standing together on the hearth-rug, and she was saying—he did not know what she was saying, for he was repeating over and over again to himself, ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... vain, The sky for ever lowers, for ever clouds remain. Impervious to the step of man it stands, Though borne by twenty feet, though arm'd with twenty hands; Smooth as the polish of the mirror rise The slippery sides, and shoot into the skies. Full in the centre of this rock display'd, A yawning cavern casts a dreadful shade: Nor the fleet arrow from the twanging bow, Sent with full force, could reach the depth below. Wide to the west the horrid gulf extends, And the dire passage down to hell descends. O fly ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... reasons partly explained on page 64, considerably higher. It moves downwards in inspiration, and upwards in expiration; and the more vigorously we breathe, the more marked are these movements. In the act of swallowing the voicebox rises quickly, and in yawning it goes down so completely that the whole windpipe may vanish into the chest, and even the part of ...
— The Mechanism of the Human Voice • Emil Behnke
... untouched by remorse;—she is strong in the consciousness that when all else is gone, her virtue will remain her beacon light to happiness. Anna, in the loss of that virtue, sees herself shut out from that very world that points her to the yawning chasm of her future; she feels how like a slave in the hands of one whose heart is as cold as his smiles are false, she is. Maria owes the world no hate, nor are her thougnts disturbed by such contemplations. Anna, with embittered and remorseful feelings-with dark and terrible ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... eminent of those who paid their homage to the author of " Evelina." The crowd of inferior admirers would require a catalogue as long as that in the second book of the " Iliad." In that catalogue would be Mrs. Cholmondeley, the sayer of odd things; and Seward, much given to yawning; and Baretti, who slew the man in the Haymarket ; and Paoli, talking broken English; and Langton, taller by the head than any other member of the club; and Lady Millar, who kept a vase wherein fools were wont to put bad verses ; and Jerningham, who wrote verses fit to be put into the vase ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... came on. Its polished sides reflected the varied lights of the forest. Its hated windows glistened. One door swung wide, as if yawning for a victim! ...
— The Poor Little Rich Girl • Eleanor Gates
... not less definite to any one who searches for it than the difference between (say) Hill Street and Pont Street, High Street Kensington and High Street Notting Hill, Fleet Street and the Strand. I have here purposely opposed to each other streets that have obvious points of likeness. But what a yawning gulf of difference is between each couple! Hill Street, with its staid distinction, and Pont Street, with its eager, pushful 'smartness,' its air de petit parvenu, its obvious delight in having been 'taken up'; High Street Notting Hill, down-at-heels and unashamed, with a placid smile on its ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... things can be wrong unless they hurt somebody, and we don't want to hurt anybody; and what's more, we jolly well couldn't if we tried. Let's get the Ingoldsby Legends. There's a thing about Abra-cadabra there,' said Cyril, yawning. 'We may as well play at magic. Let's be Knights Templars. They were awfully gone on magic. They used to work spells or something with a goat and a goose. ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... topsy-turvy. The valet de chambre had not dared to put the things in order, as if there reigned, amid the scattered packages and the yawning drawers, the majesty of the ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... Mr. Lavender had become excited to the point of fever, for, without intending it, Joe had laid bare to him a yawning chasm between his worship of public men and his devotion to the Press. And no sooner had his chauffeur finished than he cried: "Leave me, Joe, for I must ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... former earthquake, your imagination recalls that remote period when the mountains were split like lightning- riven oaks, and the great peaks swayed like trees in a blast and the roar of a thousand storms rolled away from the yawning gulf, into which precipices and forests went down with a deafening crash as ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... Liz," roared Charlie, "you goot-for-not'ing buckskin lummix, you com mit!" He flourished the halter rope at her. Lizzie flattened her ears, opened her mouth like a yawning snake, and ran at him. Old Charlie let out a whoop that brought the sheriff from Rattlesnake at full speed, and could be heard (so they say) all the way across the river to Wild Goose Flat, ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... close at hand. On every side were hills, shielding them from the view of any chance straggler from the Onondaga villages, unless he should clamber down the short slopes and search for them in the mist. A stream tumbled by, not a dozen yards from Menard and his yawning guardian. ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... unless taken by one of ourselves. As we drew near to the well, Chellalu pointed to it and said: "Amma! That is the way to Heaven!" This speech, which was in Tamil, considerably surprised me, as naturally we think of Heaven above the bright blue sky. The yawning gulf of the unfinished well suggested ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... not more susceptible of effective treatment in the young Verdi manner. The misfortune is that the book is a very excerebrose affair. The drama does not begin until the third act: the two first are yawning abysms of sheer dulness. Who wants to see that Radames loves Aida, that Amneris, the king's daughter, loves Radames, that Aida, a slave, is the daughter of the King of the Ethiopians, that Radames ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... art is autobiography. It is not, however, necessarily a revelation of the artist's actual self, but of a myriad of potential selves. Ah, our own potential selves! They are sometimes beautiful, often horrible, and always fascinating. They loom to heavens none too high for our reach; they stray to yawning hells beneath our ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... affectionately at her friend. In two sentences Grace had effectually bridged a yawning gap in Miriam's early high school days of which ...
— Grace Harlowe's Second Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
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