"Drowsing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Orchard of Palms by the mountains at set of sun left no sweet margin time of violet sky and drowsing earth between the day and night. The latter came early and swift; and against its glooming in the tent this evening the servants brought four candlesticks of brass, and set them by the corners of the table. To each candlestick there were four branches, ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... sticking through a tree Toward heaven still, And there's a barrel that I didn't fill Beside it, and there may be two or three Apples I didn't pick upon some bough. But I am done with apple-picking now. Essence of winter sleep is on the night, The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight I got from looking through a pane of glass I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough And held against the world of hoary grass. It melted, and I let it ...
— North of Boston • Robert Frost
... into a chair by the stove and drowsing after a while in a reactive sweep of exhaustion, awakened with a terrified jerk. A boy was banking the red-hot stove, his white face like and ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... to the University of Kansas, others to the old Southern universities, so rich in tradition, and still others to Annapolis or West Point; when one thinks of the snow glittering on the Rocky Mountain wall, back of Denver; of sleepy little towns drowsing in the sun beside the Mississippi; of Charles W. Eliot of Cambridge, and Hy Gill of Seattle; of Dr. Lyman Abbott of New York and Tom Watson of Georgia; of General Leonard Wood and Colonel William Jennings Bryan; of ex-slaves ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... the four men were already asleep—all but one of them, and he was drowsing; and Nick, in his character of Handsome, pretended to be angry at first. He pretended to refuse to give them the punch that had been sent to them until they begged so ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... the witch depart in her second semblance; how if she were abiding her at home in her wonted skin? So she came to the house even as she was, and opened the door, and looked in, quaking; but there was no image of a child of Adam therein, and no living thing, save the cat drowsing before the fire; wherefore Birdalone took the ring from her finger and went to the hearth, and stirred up the cat with her foot till he arose and fell to rubbing himself against her legs, and she ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... soothing murmur, like the breathing of some vast monster asleep. Condy's cigarette was a mere red point in the half-darkness. The smoke drifted out of the open window in long, blue strata. At his elbow Blix was leaning forward, looking down upon the darkening, drowsing city, her round, strong chin propped upon her hand. She was just close enough for Candy to catch the sweet, delicious feminine perfume that came indefinitely from her clothes, her hair, her neck. From ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... solemn, languid hour of noontide, when bird and beast were drowsing from the heat, I have stood in the shade and interrogated the forest upon its first violators and their descendants! But my demands remained unanswered; in its superb grandeur it does not interest itself in the tragic vicissitudes of animal or vegetable lives, it makes no ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... chasms scintillant with the treasures of the chemist, if not of the lapidary; outlooks that opened upon great seas of billowing forest, whence blue mountains peered up, sank and rose again like ocean monsters at play; glens where the she-bear suckled her drowsing cubs to the plash of yeasty waterfalls that leapt and whimpered to be in human service, but wherein the otter played all day unscared; crags where the eagle nested; defiles that echoed the howl of wolves ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... us sitting in the house in the wood, While the snails crawled about the window-pane And the mud floor, and not a soul to buy; Not even the wandering fool's nor one of those That when the world goes wrong must rave and talk, Until they are as thin as a cat's ear. But all that's nothing; you sit drowsing there With your back hooked, your chin upon ...
— The Countess Cathleen • William Butler Yeats
... evening visit, and the first horror of ineffectual drowsing had passed over me, when my door was flung violently open, and in rushed a man (plainly of the commercial species), hat on head and bag in hand. I perceived that the diligenza had just arrived, and that travellers were seizing ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... Our drowsing interest, in so far as it could be said to be fixed upon anything, was centered upon Hartwell's new figure, which stood on the block ready to be cast in bronze, intended as a monument for some American battlefield. ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... they have seen, outside, the free soil, the promised land which they want to reach. A hundred times if once have they dug at the foot of the rampart. There, in vertical wells, they take up their station, drowsing whole days on end while unemployed. If I give them a fresh Mole, they emerge from their retreat by the entrance-corridor and come to hide themselves beneath the belly of the beast. The burial over, they return, one here, one there, to the confines ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... oblivion drowsing love and pain Into dull slumber; still we can retell How young blithe valour broke the powers of hell; We grope for hands that will not stir again In ours, hear still in every carillon ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various
... Mr. Wilkins seemed to lose all wish for much active exercise, and rather sought a stimulus to his spirits and circulation in wine. But of this Ellinor was innocently unaware. He seemed dull and weary, and sat long, drowsing and drinking after dinner. If the servants had not been so fond of him for much previous generosity and kindness, they would have complained now, and with reason, of his irritability, for all sorts of things ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... raw with the harsh appetite of a Russian. There was the ghost of an odor of sleep about that whisky; but the sleep-specter did not appeal to Storri, who tossed off his drink and followed one dram with another, suspecting nothing. Five minutes later he was drowsing stertorously on a lounge. ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... with shirt open at the throat, his huge body sagged down in the chair that had been especially reinforced to sustain his weight, seemed to passing Coldriver village to be drowsing. Many people suspected Scattergood of drowsing when he was exceedingly wide awake and observant of events. It was part of his stock ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... when the clouds like folded sheep Were drowsing over the drowsy deep, And like a rose in a golden cradle Anwyl breathed on the breast ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... general in the middle. The three rusty cocked hats worn en bataille with a sinister forward slant barred the narrow street nearly right across. The overheated little town of grey stones and red tiles was drowsing away its provincial afternoon under a blue sky. The loud blows of a cooper hooping a cask reverberated regularly between the houses. The general dragged his left foot a little in the shade of ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... scene—a little country-side drowsing in the warm rosy twilight. Out by the river there were fields where men stood at their simple agricultural implements—stood at rest, staring curiously at the commotion ...
— The World Beyond • Raymond King Cummings
... along toward the green promontory crowned by Stevens Institute, still has a war-time flavour. The old Hamburg-American line piers are used by the Army Transport Service, and in the sunshine a number of soldiers, off duty, were happily drowsing on a row of two-tiered beds set outdoors in the April pleasantness. There was a racket of bugles, and a squad seemed to be drilling in the courtyard. Endymion and the Secretary, after sitting on a pier-end watching some barges, and airing their nautical views ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... the child,—drowsing in her arms,—to her quickly. "No," she said, and her thin, bony face looked almost fierce, "no, for if you did and they couldn't find her people, which you know as well as I do they couldn't, do you s'pose they'd give her back to us? They'd ...
— The Angel of the Tenement • George Madden Martin
... him with peculiar intensity. He looked at the horse, which stood sentinel-like, above the drowsing dog. Then he engaged the ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... Chiles went back into the cabin to check with the passengers. Most had been asleep or were drowsing. But one man confirmed that they were in their right senses. This passenger, Clarence McKelvie of Columbus, Ohio, told them (and a Project "Saucer" team later) that he had seen a brilliant streak of light flash past his window. It had gone too ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... the crimson noon of Wolf. Overhead the dim red ember of Phi Coronis, Wolf's old and dying sun, gave out a pale and heatless light. The pair of Spaceforce guards at the gates, wearing the black leathers of the Terran Empire, shockers holstered at their belts, were drowsing under the arched gateway where the star-and-rocket emblem proclaimed the domain of Terra. One of them, a snub-nosed youngster only a few weeks out from Earth, cocked an inquisitive ear at the cries and scuffling feet, then jerked his ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... smelling streets of the bazaars a man hurried that night, glancing behind frequently to see if by any mischance some one followed. He stopped at the house of Lal Singh, the shoemaker, whom he found drowsing over his ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... sand, powerful chiefs with large followings, who seemed more like the Arabs of her imaginings, and of whose lives she had the haziest idea. When not engaged in killing their neighbours she visualized them drowsing away whole days under the influence of narcotics, lethargic with sensual indulgence. The pictures she had seen had been mostly of fat old men sitting cross-legged in the entrance of their tents, waited on by hordes of retainers, and looking languidly, with ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... the best hater and the poorest fighter of all his cleaned-out clan, had come a great thought. He shook the drowsing man and roused him, and plied him with sips from a dipper of the unhallowed white corn whisky of a mountain still-house. And as he worked over him he told off the tally of the last four years: of the uneven, unmerciful war, ticking off on his ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... shall be nameless simmered in a tin cup on the back of the stove before her, and every now and then she broke her reverie to sip of it. It smelled sweet and pungent and suspicious, but, then—this was Christmas Eve. She was half drowsing when a brisk knock startled her into wakefulness. Thinking it was one of the neighbours in for a call she bade the visitor enter, without moving. There was a stamping of feet, and the door opened and a black ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... landlord went away very quietly. An hostler, presently appearing from somewhere, passed the broken windows, and we saw our rifleman go away with him, leading the three tired horses. We were still yawning and drowsing, stretched out in our hickory chairs, and only kept awake by the flies, when our landlord returned and set before us what food he had. The fare was scanty enough, but we ate hungrily, and drank deeply of the fresh small beer which he fetched in a ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... knows and loves thee, Idleness; For when his sheep are browsing, His open eyes enchant and bless A mind divinely drowsing; ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... saddle, and they jogged across the open. In the edge of the first timber they pulled up and looked backward at the cabin drowsing silently under its sentinel tree. Roaring Bill reached out one arm and laid ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... remains the same. For me, its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun, the pulsing of its surfbeat is in my ears. I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud rack. I can hear the spirits of its woodland solitudes, I can hear the splash of its brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of the flowers that perished twenty years ago. And these world wanderers that sit before ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... plainly the guard tent; it stood at the entrance to the camp, where a path turned in from the road. In front, under the shade of an oak, were two or three splint-bottom chairs. And chained to the oak by a staple driven into the trunk, drowsing in the heat of the summer mid-afternoon, lay ...
— Frank of Freedom Hill • Samuel A. Derieux
... he was just about to be ushered, he now noticed, for the first time, roused by the unexpected arrival of so belated a guest, the scattered pack of splendid effortless animals, the enormous footmen who were drowsing here and there upon benches and chests, until, pointing their noble greyhound profiles, they towered upon their feet and gathered in a circle round ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... returning consciousness that seemed to last even longer than the period of her wandering, but this also began to pass at length. The light grew stronger all about her, the mists rolled slowly away from her clogged brain, leaving only a drowsing languor that was infinitely restful ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... a rainy midnight a poor old horse, harnessed to a cab, was drowsing in front of a dingy restaurant from whence came the laughter of women and ...
— Romance of the Rabbit • Francis Jammes
... trains came into Quaker Bridge to-day; it was understood that there were washouts all along the line. Rachael sat in the dark, stuffy little sitting-room with the placid Barwick baby drowsing in her lap, and at last her face reflected the nervous uneasiness of the other women. Every time an especially heavy rush of rain or wind struck the unsubstantial little house, Mrs. Barwick said, "Oh, my!" in patient, hopeless terror, and the two young women looked at each other with a quick ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... homestead, which neither Jean nor Marie ever again expected to see, were made up into small packs, each one to be carried by one of the escorts. With a deep sigh Marie looked at the home of her happy youth, drowsing in the deep shadow of the oaks, and then mounted her horse. All that night she rode by her lover's side, and stole many a glance of admiring pride at his handsome, manly figure. When they were a couple of hours out, a dusky yellow appeared in the ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... keeping them on, and put out others when they feel like it? What, when you pretend that in the absence of serpents there are centipedes a span long, and spiders the bigness of bats, and mosquitoes that sweetly sing in the drowsing ear, but bite not; or that there are swamps but no streams, and in the marshes stand mangrove-trees whose branches grow downward into the ooze, as if they wished to get back into the earth and pull in after them the holes ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... and found Sam's mother's white cat drowsing on a desk in the library, the which coincidence obviously inspired the experiment of ascertaining how successfully ink could be used in making a clean white cat look like a coach-dog. There was neither malice nor ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... of sister Adeline and the doll's hair, but she was glad to hear the brief tale told again in the pleasant drowsing afternoon. ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... swayed backward and came forward again, a look of startled surprise on his face. He gasped, and his lips writhed in a grim smile. There was a shrinking together of the shoulders and a bending of the knees. He shook himself, as might a drowsing man, and straightened up. But the shrinking and bending began again, and he sank down slowly, quite slowly, to ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... draws near. Sometime in the night will come the jingle of silver bells, and the patter of tiny hoofs. Old Santa will halloo: "Whoa!" and come sliding down the chimney. The drowsing heads, fuddled with weariness, wrestle clumsily with the problem, "How is he to get through the stove without burning himself?" Reason falters and Faith triumphs. It would be done somehow, and then the reindeer would fly to the next house, and the next, and ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... summer he left the front door open. I was drowsing, when suddenly I heard him give a frightened yell. In the doorway stood a man and a woman. The man was the village pastor, and the woman, I soon learned, was my master's wife. For a moment my master stood looking ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... up so vigorously that he bumped his head. He chucked his papers beneath the pillow with his right hand, while the left was feeling for the side of the berth. "Land!" he bellowed to drowsing cabin-mates ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... wiping my mouth every little while, until there was no more blood coming from it. Presently I dropped off to sleep with my hand in hers. She awoke me after a while and gave me some warm milk. As I was drowsing off again, she spoke very ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... beginning to want to know Sally myself." Bruce let his eyes go drowsing toward the pale river up which the slow rain was beating, and talked foolishness idly: "Red-cheeked Sally! Freckled Sally! Roly-poly Sally! What's a Missouri girl ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... simply made as Summer (MACMILLAN). Of course at this time the art of EDITH WHARTON is no new discovery; but to my thinking she has never done better work than this tale of a New England village, and the wakening to love of the girl who was drowsing away her youth there. It is all, as I say, so simple, and written with such apparent economy of effort, that only afterwards does the amazing cleverness of Mrs. WHARTON'S method impress itself upon the reader. Charity Royall was a waif, of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 17, 1917 • Various
... of strange news. We had all sat together and thought, rather than uttered, the memories of the past: they weighed me down, but they were precious freights. When I looked once more, and for the last time, upon the darling village drowsing in the sunshine, I felt that I had learned the burden of the hearth: Not length of days is given, but the sweetness and strength thereof: their memory shall live even though the dead be dust. Out of the loam of this corrupting body springs heavenward ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and looked at it carefully before he stuck it into his pocket. He went, without a word, down the rocky slope, past the old drowsing mare, and across the foot-bridge. Two or three of the dogs, watching him as he reappeared on the opposite bank, affected a mistake in identity. They growled, then barked outright, and at last ran down and climbed the fence and bounded about it, baying ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... In the pastures, drowsing To the tinkling bells Of the brown sheep browsing; Sailors crying through the storm; Scholars at your study; hunters Lost amid the whirling winter's ...
— Second April • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... cuds let fall— Lie drowsing in the shade; In heated pool their lips to cool, Deer throng the woodland glade; A prey to heat, the city street Makes wanderers afraid; The cart must shun the midday sun, And thus has ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... feel the subtle stillness of the drowsing woodland; musing there, caressing his short, crisp mustache, he watched the purple grackle walking about in iridescent solitude, the sun spots waning and glowing on the grass; he heard the soft, garrulous whimper of waterfowl along the water's edge, ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... air, charged with a scent of meadow-sweet, of river and roses, closed on his senses, drowsing them. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... wherein true wisdom lies On living trees the sun are drinking; Those white clouds, drowsing through the skies, Grew not so ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... has shed his flowers Long since in golden showers. The elm has robed her height In green, and hangs maternal o'er the bright Starred meadows, and her full-contented breast Lifts and sinks to rest. Shades drowsing in the grass Beneath the hedge move but as the hours pass. Beech, oak and beam have all put beauty on In the eye of the sun. Because the hawthorn's sweet All the earth is sweet and the air, and the wind's feet. In the wood's green hollows ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... was. The trees in bloom; the soft fragrant air swaying the leaves gently; the singing birds; Mrs. Patten's lazy yellow cat drowsing in the sunshine; the chickens cackling in the tiny barnyard, opened up a panorama before the child's wondering eyes that could scarcely be eclipsed by heaven itself. Only one who has lain for months in a hospital ward with blank walls and a sea of sick faces, ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... have to stick it, though. After all, it won't always be hard times. Think of the long, sunny days drowsing along down the 'Trades,' of the fine times out there in 'Frisco, of joys of strenuous action greater than the shipping clerk will ever know, even if he should manage to hole out in three. Seventeen months! It will soon pass, and I'll be a free man when I get back to Glasgow again. ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... ceased to address me except with an occasional command. By reason of my youth, I was in bed and asleep before my companions arrived upstairs, and in the morning I was always routed up and packed about my business while they still were drowsing. But the fact that I had been cut off from my coevals by night, cut me off from them also by day—so that I was nothing to them, neither a boarder nor a day-scholar, neither flesh, fish nor fowl. The loneliness of my life was extreme, and that I always went home on Saturday ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... some time, Kessler intent on the evening flood of traffic, Margaret almost drowsing in the evening sunlight and the cool of the breeze in her hair. When Kessler pulled up at a drug store ...
— The Last Straw • William J. Smith
... eyes sleepily for a few minutes, and then turned over towards the wall, and prepared to slumber again. But before he had sunk to sleep he became further aroused by a very peculiar sound in the wall (as it seemed), close to which his bed was stationed; and instead of drowsing off again, he woke up with all his faculties on the alert, much as a watchdog does, and sitting up in bed he ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... without warning, Alice threw herself into her mother's arms, sobbing so loudly that in his room, close by, her father, half drowsing through the ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... interrogating? why myself and all drowsing? What deepening twilight-scum floating atop of the waters, Who are they as bats and night-dogs askant in the capitol? What a filthy Presidentiad! (O South, your torrid suns! O North, your arctic freezings!) Are those really Congressmen? are those the great Judges? is ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... wagon-tracks unwashed by not so much as a single drop from the cloudless heavens since their first impress on the sinking soil. Here and there along the right of way—a right no human being would care to dispute were the way ten times its width—some drowsing lizards, sprawling in the sunshine along the ties, roused at the sound and tremor of the coming train to squirm off into the sage-brush, but no sign of animation had been seen since the crossing of the big divide near Promontory. The long, winding ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... no good: anyone would think I was lame, the way I have to travel around after you with a cane. Because I've been constantly busy at the forum just for the last three days, trying to find some one to place a loan with, here you've been drowsing all the time at home, and your master living in a pig-pen, not a house. There now, ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... conceived and coddled first By some old shopkeeper in Nuremberg, His slippers warm, his children amply nursed, Who, with his lighted meerschaum in his hand, His nightcap on his head, one summer night Sat drowsing at his door. And mused, how grand If all of this could last beyond a doubt— This placid moon, this plump gemuthlichkeit; Pipe, breath and summer never going out— To vegetate through all eternity ... But no such everlastingness ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... ranch a triangle began to jangle. "Quim-a-do!" shrilled little Pete, and three or four lazy, drowsing forms began slowly to get to their feet and to shuffle away toward the doorless aperture in the adobe wall, the entrance to the dining-room of the stage and ranch people. Two men lingered, the two who were speculating as to the military connections of the young officer. One of them, after ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... Hillock, scrub that brushed against the horse's belly, unmetalled road where the whip-like foliage of the tamarisks lashed his forehead, illimitable levels of lowland furred with bent and speckled with drowsing cattle, waste, and hillock anew, dragged themselves past, and the skewbald was labouring in the deep sand of the Indus-ford. Tallantire was conscious of no distinct thought till the nose of the dawdling ferry-boat grounded on the farther ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... of quiet, which behind the scenes immediately precedes the end of an act, had begun to pervade the empty greenroom. Indeed, the place seemed to be drowsing off through very breathlessness amid that faint murmur which the stage gives forth when the whole troupe are raising the deafening ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... however, was accepted by many; and rumor carried it far beyond the borders of the village, so that after a while the nobility heard of it, and the burghers in the walled towns where beautiful tapestries were always drowsing into wonderful life on looms that could weave dreams. The result was that it grew quite fashionable to journey to the tree to make a test of one's character, as people go to physicians to have their blood examined. In the bright summer evenings long processions could be seen winding ...
— The Faery Tales of Weir • Anna McClure Sholl
... was no longer dark and cool, with its double sky-line of trees drowsing toward one another, like eyelashes, from the friendly cliffs. The cooing of the pigeons was gone forever. The muddied water from the great flume raced down through the ravine, turning many wheels, ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... unreasonable, absurd. It had come to him with the night and his absolute solitude in the night. It was not anger as yet. It was a faint, dawning sense of injury, but so faint that it did not rouse, but only touched gently, almost furtively, some spirit drowsing within him, like a hand that touches, then withdraws itself, then steals ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... the evening; the merchants and writers had gone earlier, and now but the officers and Brooks were left, and Mr. Spencer, superintending the removal of his vessels and fragments to the inn. The afternoon was sinking into the calm it ever has in this place, drowsing, mellowing; an air of trance lay all about, and even the pensioners, gathered at the head of the schoolroom near the door, seemed silent as his scholars to the ear of Brooks. He lifted the flap of his desk and kept it up with his head while he surveyed ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... night, clear and cold, and there along the Quai St. Michael, at the end of the street, was an army in retreat. They were Belgians, battered and worn out with their unbroken weeks of hopeless fighting; cavalrymen on their tired horses, artillerymen, heads sunk on their chests, drowsing on their lurching caissons; the patient little foot-soldiers, rifles slung across their shoulders, scuffling ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... his hat she bowed slightly to him, lifting at the same time her heavy eyelids and glancing at me. I had once seen that look before—in a spectacle of wild beasts when I happened to stand close to a drowsing tigress that twitched an eyelid and flashed a yellow eye at me. In that eye-shot on the verandah of the hotel in Vico Averso, the crossing of glances was like a challenge, and thrilled me as when one ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... was strong, began to come under the spell of it. But yesterday the spirit of the old world was still strong within me, yet how much things were now changing. The well-strung muscles loosening, the heart beating a slower measure, the busy mind drowsing off to listlessness. Was I, too, destined to become like these? Was the red stuff in my veins to be watered down to pallid Martian sap? Was ambition and hope to desert me, and idleness itself become laborious, while life ran to seed in gilded uselessness? Little did I guess ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... are geese, Dull drowsing by a weedy pool; But try the impression trick. Cool! Cool! Snow-slumbering ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... anxious for some adventures; adventures as heroic as his father often related before the fire on winter evenings. His mother might have thrown up her hands in despair had she seen the dreamy look in his large eyes. True, he was no longer drowsing on the settle, but as he swung along under the soft spring sky, he saw himself the hero of a hundred fantastic tales—the captain of a trading-vessel bound for the Indies; the commander of a company of daring youths of his own age, all ready to resist the Indians when they should seek ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... with the nurse in the hall; and, telling them that his mother was drowsing now, George went back to his own room, where he was startled to find his grandfather lying on the bed, and his uncle leaning against the wall. They had gone home two hours before, and he did not ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... drawing nearer to the mountains when one day the Arab lad, Ahmed, disappeared. It happened during the midday halt, when the rest of the party were drowsing. No one knew when he went or how, but he vanished as if a hand had plucked him off the face of the earth. It seemed unlikely that he would have wandered into the bush, but this was the only conclusion that they could come to; and they spent the ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... beautifully planned routine of shipboard passed on its accustomed course, and he began to suspect that his staff-captaincy was a sinecure. Down below he could see the passengers briskly promenading, or drowsing under their rugs. On the hurricane deck, aft, a sailor was chalking a shuffleboard court. It occurred to him that all this might become monotonous unless he found some actual part in it. Just then Captain Scottie appeared ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... sweep around the curve of the bluff along with the rush of the river. As he climbed he came to a warmer wave of air, and the dusk closed softly around him, as if nature were casting a friendly curtain over the drowsing earth; and the roar of the river came up to him, no longer angrily, but in ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... just rising, as a man stepped from his slender dug-out and drew half its length out upon the oozy bank of a pretty bayou. Before him, as he turned away from the water, a small gray railway-platform and frame station-house, drowsing on long legs in the mud and water, were still veiled in the translucent shade of the deep cypress swamp, whose long moss drapings almost overhung them on the side next the brightening dawn. The solemn gray festoons did overhang the farthest two or three of a few flimsy ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... said this was once a city of pleasure? And whether the pleasure was a blood-feast or an Agape, or a Platonic banquet where the flute-players and wine-cups and crowns crushed out the high disquisition and philosophic undercurrent—it was all one to soft Siena drowsing the days out on her hills. Her pleasures were fierce, and beautiful as fierce. But the burden of Tyre is always the same. And so the memories of a thousand ancient wrongs unpurged howl over the red city, as once howled the ships ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... to the pressure from the closing of the lead which was just ahead of us; and after satisfying myself that my mittens were where I could get them instantly, in an emergency, I rolled over on my bed of deerskins and settled myself to sleep. I was just drowsing again when I heard some one yelling ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... it. Full of movement. Nothing architectural about that," he said, glancing by way of contrast at the great Demeter drowsing from the furthest wall. "The silk ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... after tasks too closely plied, My Delia, drowsing near the harmless dame, All sweet surprise, will find me at her side, Unheralded, as if from heaven ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... becoming suddenly aware that it had gone, he rose from his knees and returned home mentally weary and sad at heart; but sitting on his bedside the remembrance that he was to meet Jesus in the morning at Capernaum called up the ghost of a departed ecstasy, and his head drowsing upon his pillow he ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... cattle browsing and drowsing; it was the first time Helen had harkened to a bellowing bull, the first time she had seen one of his breed with bent head pawing up grass and earth and flinging them over the straight line of his perfect back; she sensed his lusty challenge and listened breathlessly to the answering ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... Janina, pressing in her hands the bottle that she had secured on the previous night and she sat down, perhaps on the same bench on which she had sat that spring. It seemed to her that she was slowly drowsing away and that her thoughts were fading, for her consciousness had begun to disintegrate and she was already ceasing to feel and to know. Everything was falling away from her and dying, like the nature about her that also seemed to be burning out and ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... pews came together in twos, so that when Beth sat at the end of theirs, as she always did, the person in the next pew sat beside her with only the wooden partition between. One Sunday, when she was on her knees, drowsing through the Litany with her cheek on her prayer-book, she became aware of a boy in the next pew with his face turned to her in exactly the same attitude. He had bright fair hair curling crisply, a ruddy fair fat face, ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... But he was drowsing while I told him; and I lifted him up to Lin, who took him in his own blankets, where he fell immediately asleep. One distant whistle showed how far the late engine had gone from us. We left our car open, and I lay enjoying the cool air. Thus was I drifting off, when I grew aware of a figure ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... content, senorita," replied the Mexican, and he extended a slim, lazy hand towards the drowsing stallion. ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... There spun through her half-drowsing brain scenes of the Wild West Show they had attended this day. That was surely "outdoor stuff." Was there anything in what she had seen to-day to suggest a novel scheme for a ...
— Ruth Fielding in the Great Northwest - Or, The Indian Girl Star of the Movies • Alice B. Emerson
... stenching mist. Down by the shore of the Nares Sea, this world of the depths had seemed darkly sinister. But in the village now, I felt it less ominous. The scent of the flowers, the street lined in one place by arching giant fronds drowsing and nodding overhead—there seemed a strange exotic romance to it. The sultry air might almost ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... were half-closed, yet he was by no means drowsing. On the contrary, his mind was essentially busy, and the occasional puckering of his dark brows, and the tightening of his strong jaws, suggested that his thoughts were ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... suavity of yawning no more—that we dislocate our knuckle bones, and ruffle the symmetry of our visage, with a manual application; like the cleft blaze of a candle, drowsiness returns again. Well, then, what manner of reader is he that hath never sinned by drowsing in church time? Let him read on; and I'll realize by description what ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 266, July 28, 1827 • Various
... peaceful field drowsing in the sunshine, lazily touched by a wandering breeze, no one would suspect that any struggle was going on in the tiny hearts of the flowers and grasses. The lilies of the field have long ago been said to toil not, neither spin, and the ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... myriad spines ashock, The sea-egg ripples down the rock; An orange wonder daily guessed, From darkness where the cuttles rest, Moored o'er the darker deeps that hide The blind white sea-snake and his bride Who, drowsing, nose the long-lost ships Let down through darkness ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... it," she said frankly. It was impossible to doubt her. Her gray eyes roved here and there, drowsing, idle or alert, on each group, passing to the next with unconcealed enjoyment, and to Anthony were made plain the different values of her profile, the wonderfully alive expressions of her mouth, and the authentic distinction of face and form and manner that made her like a single flower amidst ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the men went ashore and cut a mast and sprit-sail boom for each canoe. They lashed the masts to the thwarts with tump-lines, and rigged the tarpaulins, used to cover the packs, into sails. Again the paddles were shipped, save those of the steersmen; and the crews lounged about, either smoking or drowsing. The men were weary. Last night they had danced both hard and long, with dusky maids—as all true voyageurs do on the eve of their departure. To voyageurs stern winds are blessings. Mile after mile the wild flotilla swept along. Sunshine danced upon the rippling waves that gurgled ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... August,—drowsing warm and blond Beside a wheat-shock in the white-topped mead, In her hot hair the yellow daisies wound,— O bird of rain, lend aught but sleepy heed To thee? when no plumed weed, no feathered seed Blows by her; and no ripple breaks the pond, That gleams like flint within its ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... who had been contentedly rocking and drowsing in the heat, paled with sudden terror and apprehension, and looked around her with ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... perfect morning of California early summer. No breath of wind stirred over the drowsing fields, from which arose the calls of quail and the notes of meadowlarks. The air was heavy with lilac fragrance, and from the distance, as he rode between the lilac hedges, Graham heard the throaty nicker of Mountain Lad ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... had wakened up to find the unsubstantial pageant faded, and my own conspicuousness exchanged for a happier obscurity. So, throughout the trying incidents of the evening I have recalled, the hope of waking up had never been entirely absent from my mind; and now, as I lay drowsing, with Pup beside me, and not a mosquito within three yards, it occurred to me that if I did n't get out of the difficulty by waking up, I would get out of it some other way. Philosophy whispered that all earth-born cares ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... the shadow of cloud Quicken the heavy summer to new birth Of life and motion on the drowsing earth; The huge elms stir, till all the air is loud With their awakening from the muffled sleep Of long hot days. And on the wavering line That marks the alternate ebb of shade and shine, Under the trees, a little group is deep In laughing talk. The shadow as it flows Across them dims ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... got into his throat and brought on a fresh fit of coughing. The wet year had played havoc with his chest and his lean shoulders shook with the paroxysms. An anxious look at the bed told him that Marion was drowsing, so he slipped to ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... If jarring interests and the greed of gold, The corn-rick's envy of the mined hill, The steamer's grudge against the spindle's skill,— If things so mean our country's fate can mould, O, let me hear again the shepherds trill Their reedy music to the drowsing fold! ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... were drowsing; the husband peacefully, the wife with troubled dreams. When the Baron spoke her eyes opened with a look, first eager and then distressful, but closed again. We put the old black woman temporarily into her room and Mrs. Smith hurried to our other neighbors, whence she was to despatch ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... shivered, sighed, hiccupped, and was dozing off again, when Henry Bird knocked him down, and he fell with a cry, which at last brought to the door the uneasy sleeper, who had been listening to him within, and trying to realize his presence, catching his voice in waking intervals, doubting it, drowsing when it ceased, and then catching it and ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... always arrive, sometime or other. I'll bet you a fiver—one of your own, if you like—that the rivers are in flood, and your people can't get across. Same with the Beaver Town coach. She was due at six o'clock, and here've I been drowsing like a more-pork on this couch, when I might have been in bed. An' to bed I go. If she comes in to-night, the driver can darn well stable the 'orses himself. ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... o'clock the wind rose and tugged at the tarpaulin and brought the swell higher. After dinner Alexander came back to the wet deck, piled his damp rugs over him again, and sat smoking, losing himself in the obliterating blackness and drowsing in the rush of the gale. Before he went below a few bright stars were pricked off between heavily moving masses ...
— Alexander's Bridge and The Barrel Organ • Willa Cather and Alfred Noyes
... Nobody does it. All normal South Carolinians come into the world with a native horror of paint and whitewash and they depart hence even as they were born. In consequence, towns like Appleboro take on the venerable aspect of antiquity, peacefully drowsing among immemorial oaks draped ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... Kings" had lived in their fine old house ever since the neighborhood could remember. The first and probably the wildest of them had come out from Virginia when Los Angeles was still a drowsing Spanish village, bringing with him an aged and excellent cellar and a flock of negro servants. Honor's Carmody grandmother could remember the picturesqueness of his entourage, of James King himself, the hard-riding, hard-drinking, soft-spoken cavalier with ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... learned that there was nothing to fear over there. He discovered that it was the noise the flock made when leaping down upon the ledge that alarmed Uncle Jerry Chuck. Drowsing in his underground chamber Uncle Jerry had thought there must be an earthquake. That was why his teeth chattered. That was why his nose twitched, when he peeped out of ...
— The Tale of Snowball Lamb • Arthur Bailey
... don't believe I want any tea after all, and I think I'll take these 'puppies' on home with me through the garden, for they are both dying to the world." As he spoke the parson rose to his feet and stood with the two drowsing babies in his arms, looking down at me as I stood with his cup of tea in my hand. And as he looked I felt my whole rebellious heart and mind laid bare and I knew that he knew that I was ready to fight him to the last ditch in the battle for possession of ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... "No matter. He'll be drowsing inside, where it's warm. Be a long time before he comes ...
— Millennium • Everett B. Cole
... money-making agent. These men are the hand by which it keeps its hold on the world,—or the market, perhaps I should say. They are intelligent and able; honorable too, we are glad to know, for the sake of the quiet creatures drowsing away their little remnant of life, fat and contented, driving their ploughs through the fields, or smoking on the stoops of the village houses when evening comes. I wonder if they ever cast a furtive glance at the world and life from which Rapp's will so early shut them ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... drowsing in the dark about the pipe, with the pack whimpering beside them, and did not know of his coming until, in a sudden lull, there came up through the open trap-door that led to the sitting-room stairs a ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... this stupidity, from all this cant of governments, and this hideous reiteration of hatred, this strangling hatred ..." he would say to himself, and see himself working in the fields, copying parchments in quaint letterings, drowsing his feverish desires to calm in the deep-throated passionate chanting of the endless offices ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... behind his cot, carefully out of his range of vision, her own gaze out across the drowsing countryside. A veil of haze was beginning to thicken, whole schools of crickets whirring ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... troublesome within the fold; but he might also prove more dangerous without. Verily, it was a triumph for the cause of righteousness! And after the final disposition, the good Archbishop had sat far into the night in the comfort of his sanctum, drowsing over his pleasant meditations on the rewards which his unflagging devotion to the cause of Holy Church was sure some day ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... must end war," he said, in that full whisper of his; "it is stupidity. With so many people able to read and think—even as it is—there is no need of anything of the sort. Gods! What have we rulers been at? . . . Drowsing like people in a stifling room, too dull and sleepy and too base toward each other for any one to get up and open the window. What haven't we ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... Lucile was sleeping naturally in a bunk against the upper wall of the room. She was snuggled deep in the interior of a mammoth deerskin sleeping-bag, while her garments were drying beside the kerosene stove. Marian was drowsing half-asleep by ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell
... taxi, so you'll cover more ground," the Dean suggested when he left them, but Kit could not resist the beaming smile of one of the old-time darky coachmen, who sat drowsing on the seat of an open victoria outside the Capitol grounds. He was dressed in an old Colonial blue livery, with a tall silk hat, curving out at the top like those ...
— Kit of Greenacre Farm • Izola Forrester
... was first in the line at Morgan's right hand as he turned from the fire with the branding iron red-hot in his hand. Near the Dutchman stood Morgan's borrowed horse, drowsing in the sun with head down, its weight on three legs, one ear set in its inherited caution to catch the least alarm. From the first moment of his encounter with these scoundrels Morgan had not lowered himself to address them a single word. Such commands as he had given them had ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden |
