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Fastness   Listen
noun
Fastness  n.  
1.
The state of being fast and firm; firmness; fixedness; security; faithfulness. "All... places of fastness (are) laid open."
2.
A fast place; a stronghold; a fortress or fort; a secure retreat; a castle; as, the enemy retired to their fastnesses in the mountains.
3.
Conciseness of style. (Obs.)
4.
The state of being fast or swift.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Fastness" Quotes from Famous Books



... land of freedom that enthralls me Is still the fastness of a secret king Who treads the dark like snow, of old king Sleep. He works with night, he has stolen death's tool frost That makes the breaking ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various

... the void and the darkness that is peopled by Mimir's brood, from the ultimate silent fastness of the desolate deep-sea gloom, and the peace of that ageless gloom, blind Oriander came, from Mimir, to be at war with the sea and to jeer at the sea's desire. When tempests are seething and roaring from the Aesir's inverted bowl all seamen have heard his shouting ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell

... naturally took the part of Edgar Atheling—whom he regarded as the rightful heir after Harold was killed—against William the Conqueror. He gave every support to the many who gathered together in the isle as to a fastness, and encouraged the plans of Hereward. When the cause of the English seemed hopeless, the monks endeavoured to persuade the soldiers to surrender; not being successful, they sent messengers to the king assuring him of their sorrow at having taken part against him, and promising to behave better ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ely • W. D. Sweeting

... March, 1306, Bruce was crowned king. His enemies immediately attacked and defeated him, and he was obliged to take refuge in the mountains of the Highlands. Here he was hunted like a wild animal, and was obliged to flee from one fastness to another. One of the most malignant of his enemies was Lord Lorn, a kinsman of the Red Comyn. At one time Bruce and his few followers were retreating through a narrow pass, when he was set upon by Lorn and a much superior force. Sending his followers ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot

... dim shapes passed to the left there came again the sight of the expanse across which the disarmed men in red had been marching. And then the black ruins, and then again the beleaguered white fastness of the Council. It appeared no longer a ghostly pile, but glowing amber in the sunlight, for a cloud shadow had passed. About it the pigmy struggle still hung in suspense, but now the red defenders ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells

... tints and hues which have been discovered, finality and perfection have not yet been reached. A good deal of popular prejudice has arisen against certain aniline dyes on account of their inferiority to many of the old dye-stuffs in respect to their fastness, but in recent years the manufacture of many which were under this disadvantage of looseness of dye, has entirely ceased, whilst others have been introduced which are quite as fast, and sometimes even faster than the ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin

... harmony with the little town, and adding a still greater look of old- worldness, are the arched walls of the old chateau-fort. As evening closes in, the fascination of the scene deepens; spire and roofs, shadowy hill and stern mountain fastness, are all outlined in pale, silvery tones against a pure pink and opaline sky, the greenery of near vine and peach-tree all standing out in bold relief, blotches of greenish gold upon a dark ground. I must describe our inn, the most rustic we had as yet met with, ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... sea of white lying below the rocky shores to which the castaways still clung. Through the marvellously clear air the smoke of the pastoral village of Poker Flat rose miles away. Mother Shipton saw it, and from a remote pinnacle of her rocky fastness hurled in that direction a final malediction. It was her last vituperative attempt, and perhaps for that reason was invested with a certain degree of sublimity. It did her good, she privately informed the Duchess. "Just you go out there and cuss, and see." She then set herself ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various

... completely. In more than two thousand combats, great and small, within three years, it has exhibited unvarying courage and resolution. Utilizing the lessons of the Indian wars it has relentlessly followed the guerrilla bands to their fastness in mountain and jungle, and crushed them. It has put an end to the vast system of intimidation and secret assassination, by which the peaceful natives were prevented from taking a genuine part in government under American authority. It has captured or forced to surrender substantially all ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Supplemental Volume: Theodore Roosevelt, Supplement • Theodore Roosevelt

... the great life struggle which is before them. Such boys are apt to do well in the world. Many, however, after being released from the stores, imitate the ways of the clerks and salesmen. They affect a fastness which is painful to see in boys so young. They sport an abundance of flashy jewelry, patronize the cheap places of amusement, and are seen in the low concert saloons, and other vile dens of the city. It is not difficult to predict the ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe

... Jerusalem before, yet now she gave an exclamation of joy as the ascending sunlight fell in floods of golden glory over the snowy towers and gold minarets of the City of David, secure on its summit of rugged fastness. "Who has not seen Zion knows not what beauty is!" she exclaimed. "Zion—fairest throughout the earth!" The veil which she had loosely bound about her head had fallen from her shoulders and the morning breeze touching her soft dark hair was moving it gently around her ...
— The Coming of the King • Bernie Babcock

... they made it for some time their head-quarters. It was at once the center from which they carried on their enterprises in all directions about the island, and the refuge to which they could always retreat when defeated and pursued. In the possession of such a fastness, they, of course, became more formidable than ever. King Ethelred determined to dislodge them. He raised, accordingly, as large a force as his kingdom would furnish, and, taking his brother Alfred as his second ...
— King Alfred of England - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... within the icy domes Of yon far Schreckhorn—ay, or higher, where, Veil'd since eternity, the Jungfrau soars, Still to the tyrant would I make my way; With twenty comrades minded like myself, I'd lay his fastness level with the earth! And if none follow me, and if you all, In terror for your homesteads and your herds, Bow in submission to the tyrant's yoke, Round me I'll call the herdsmen on the hills, And there beneath heaven's free and boundless roof, Where ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)

... Barbary pirates took a full bag of luckless Riverains on every raid. You comprehend the raison d'etre of the fortified hill towns, and Eze, perched on her cliff, has a new meaning as you look down on Villefranche. This fastness was held by the Saracens long after the crescent yielded elsewhere to the cross—and then became a frequent refuge for the descendants of the victors ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons

... settled down to business. He purchased stores of pasteboard, of paper, of printers ink, and a little machine to fold cartons. Thus equipped he retired to his fastness, and set dark-eyed Caterlina to work in a little box factory of his own; while clever Guiseppe ran the printing press, and Mafalda pasted. Cartons, piled flat, do not take up much room, ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... part of it, for frontiers in those very early days were even more elastic than those drawn by International Commissions. Anyway, there was Krok lording it over as much of Bohemia as he could control, from his fastness of Vy[vs]ehrad. Of Libu[vs]a's sisters, Kazi and Teta, nothing but their names is known even in legend; they passed into oblivion on Krok's demise, for he ordained that Libu[vs]a, his youngest daughter, should succeed him. Libu[vs]a, according to legend, was a model of ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker

... to seek Count Severan in his fastness, Calendau "enters, awestruck, into the stupendous valley, deep, frowning, cold, saturnine, and fierce; the daylight darts into this enclosure an instant upon the viper and the lizard, then, behind the jagged ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer

... sublime justice to a weak sense of compassion, I waved her back to her fastness until after ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene

... Swallowfield Park is an old English country home, a fastness still piled up against time; whose stately walls and halls within, and beautiful century-old trees in the park without, record great times and striking figures. The manor was a part of the dowry of Henry ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford

... wolves continued round the tree. It was in a dense part of the forest, through which the beams of the sun did not penetrate, or the creatures, disliking the bright light of day, would probably have retreated to their fastness. Hour after hour passed by, the air became unusually sultry and hot, even in the forest. Donald was growing, at the same time, very hungry, and though, as yet, he had rather enjoyed the adventure, he now began to feel seriously anxious about his safety. He had but a few bullets remaining, ...
— Janet McLaren - The Faithful Nurse • W.H.G. Kingston

... dark fastness, and of those who came none had ever shone with such blinding radiance of white ...
— Rosemary in Search of a Father • C. N. Williamson

... supposed that this prosperity was uninterrupted throughout Mr. Crittenden's business life. There were dark storms which threatened disastrous wreck, and nothing but stead-fastness of purpose and force of character brought him through. In 1836 the financial tornado swept over the land and stripped nearly every business man bare. When the storm was at its height Mr. Crittenden found himself with fifty thousand dollars of New York debts past due, and without ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin

... the unaccountable. So that when vanquished suitors withdrew discomfited and returned to renew an earlier allegiance or to swear a new one; when "that good child of old Marvin's" had withdrawn her pitiful little face and her disappointment into the remote fastness of settlement work; when her mother resigned all claims upon the victoria and loudly affirmed her preference for the brougham, then things in general—and Mr. Stevenson in particular—began to bore Miss Knowles, and she began to look forward, ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly

... remember your name; you are one of the greatest, wisest, coolest statesmen of any age; but the moment you come forth to the open, you are not so much a political leader as a warlike Scot at the head of his clan, and readier by far to make a dash into the neighbouring fastness than to wait for an attack. Are you and Jefferson going to fight straight through this session?—for if you are, I shall no longer yearn so much for the repose of Mount Vernon as for the ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton

... before them, on opposite sides of the little stream, the branches of which crept through the alder and gum thickets between them, and contributed to make the district almost as impenetrable to the uninitiated as a mountain fastness. The long log-cabin of the Cove-Millses, where room had been added to room in a straight line, until it looked like the side of a log fort, peeped from its pines across at the clearing where the hardly more pretentious home of Darby Stanley ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page

... lost my friend?" said Anne with a sigh. "If the operation is successful and Dick Moore finds himself again Leslie will retreat into some remote fastness of her soul where none of us can ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... feet now, gazing, white and trembling, at the fate which had overtaken him even in the fastness of the labyrinthine jungle. Instinctively he turned to flee; but Tarzan of the Apes reached out a strong hand and grasped him by ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... way led through the foothills parallel to the lofty range towering above. Often were they menaced by the savage denizens of this remote fastness, and occasionally Tarzan glimpsed weird forms of gigantic proportions amidst the ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... set about removing her child to a place of safety. She invokes the aid of Roqueblanc, an independent chieftain, who, spurred on by love for her, throws all his forces on to her side, offering at the same time his well-guarded fastness as a sanctuary for her boy. ("Castles.") Then the queen musters all her own troops and leads them into battle by the side ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne

... the long hill that leads to the gate Del Cambron. Above them towered the city of Toledo—silent and dreamlike. Concepcion had ceased singing now, and the hard breathing of the horses alone broke the silence. The Tagus, emerging here from rocky fastness, flowed noiselessly away to the west—a gleaming ribbon laid across the breast of the night. In the summer it is no uncommon thing for travellers to take the road by night in Spain, and although many ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman

... weapons as these, it requires at the present day great courage, great coolness, and very extraordinary steadiness of nerve to face a lion or a tiger in his mountain fastness, with any hope of coming off victorious in the contest. But the danger was, of course, infinitely greater in the days of Genghis Khan, when pikes and spears, and bows and arrows, were the only weapons with which the body of huntsmen could arm themselves for the combat. ...
— Genghis Khan, Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott

... kind, she had to meet him with all that was catlike and subtle and devilish at the command of a woman. She had to win him, foil him, kill him—or go to her death. She was no girl to be dragged into the mountain fastness by a desperado and made a plaything. Her horror and terror had worked its way deep into the depths of her and uncovered powers never suspected, never before required in her scheme of life. She had no longer any fear. She matched herself against this man. She anticipated him. And she ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey

... pig-tailed Chinese pirates worked side by side with border ruffians and broken men from Europe, talking together in a mixed dialect, mostly oaths, gambling, drinking, quarrelling and murdering like wolves; how the plumed hereditary lord of all America heard, in this last fastness, the scream of the "bad medicine waggon" charioting his foes; and then when I go on to remember that all this epical turmoil was conducted by gentlemen in frock coats, and with a view to nothing more extraordinary than a fortune and a subsequent visit to Paris, it seems to me, I own, ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson

... move. So lived the clansmen in cheer and revel a winsome life, till one began to fashion evils, that field of hell. Grendel this monster grim was called, march-riever {1e} mighty, in moorland living, in fen and fastness; fief of the giants the hapless wight a while had kept since the Creator his exile doomed. On kin of Cain was the killing avenged by sovran God for slaughtered Abel. Ill fared his feud, {1f} and far was he driven, for the slaughter's sake, from ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous

... of winter; Shaken from the frozen eaves Many an icy splinter. On the hillside, in the hollow, Weaving wreaths of snow: Now in gusts of solemn music Lost in murmurs low; Howling now across the wold In its shroudlike vastness, Like the wolves about a fold In some Alpine fastness, Hungered by the cold. ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various

... be in a buzz of girls and men once more for the first time in two weeks since I settled down to do my worst or best by Peter, with my Grandmother Nelson's garden-book locked up in the preserve-closet down in the darkest corner of the cellar, and Sam lost in the fastness of The Briers. ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess

... This fastness was called La Roque de Tayac, because the village of Tayac faces it on the other side of the river. Although only a few fragments of the masonry that was formerly attached to the rock remain, the chambers cut in the solid limestone are strange testimony of the habits and contrivances of England's ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... our boat we saw the fair face of that great rock Capri— already scarred and gashed by the gun emplacements and hiding-places that were to make it a fastness—we reckoned nothing of the imminent slaughter, though the fury of preparation hung about in puffs and clouds of dust at a hundred points amidst the grey; but, indeed, I made a text of that and talked. There, you know, was the rock, still beautiful for all its scars, with its countless windows ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... emotion Strike the ocean Of the poet's soul, erelong From each cave and rocky fastness, In its vastness, Floats ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... of the American Fur Company. These were the fearless and intrepid pioneers who so far from fleeing danger seemed rather to court it. Accounts of their adventures—now a struggle with a wounded bear, again the threatened perils of starvation when lost in some mountain-fastness—have long simultaneously terrified and fascinated both young and old. We all have pictured their dress—the coat or cloak, often an odd combination of several varieties of skins pieced together, with fur side in; breeches sometimes of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various

... in another quarter fought, When suddenly th' unhop'd-for news was brought, The foes had left the fastness of their place, Prevail'd in fight, and had his men in chase. He quits th' attack, and, to prevent their fate, Runs where the giant brothers guard the gate. The first he met, Antiphates the brave, But base-begotten on a Theban slave, Sarpedon's son, he slew: ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil

... blackbirds kept up a maddening chatter, and higher above, up in the hot sky, the omnipresent buzzards floated lazily, awaiting sight of possible carrion prey. Animals began to appear almost underfoot, coons and rabbits, disturbed for the first time in their fastness. Water holes appeared rarely, and the water in them was unfit for drinking. Despite the shade it ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen

... him with a force of opposition impossible to overcome. The minister was not an athletic man, yet he had considerable strength. He squared his elbows, set his mouth hard, and strove to push his way through into the room. The opposition which he met was as sternly and mutely terrible as the rocky fastness of a mountain ...
— The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural • Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

... remains of these works long subsisted, and were to be discerned in the river[6] down almost to the present times. The Britons had made the best of the situation; but the Romans plunged into the water, tore away the stakes and palisadoes, and obtained a complete victory. The capital, or rather chief fastness, of Cassibelan was then taken, with a number of cattle, the wealth of this barbarous city. After these misfortunes the Britons were no longer in a condition to act with effect. Their ill-success in the field soon dissolved the ill-cemented union of their councils. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... no means necessary to demand absolute fastness from any color. A color may "bleed" in milling, and therefore be very unsuitable for tweeds, and yet be most excellent for curtains and hangings, because of its fastness to light. So, too, a dye capable of yielding rich or delicate ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various

... of about a hundred miles separated this mountain fastness from the similar passes which guarded eastern Virginia along the line of the Blue Ridge. This debatable ground was sparsely settled and very poor in agricultural resources, so that it could furnish nothing for subsistence of ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox

... shortly after the above-mentioned events, the whole province of the New Netherlands 'was subjugated by the British; how that Wolfert Acker, one of the wrangling councillors of Peter Stuyvesant, retired in dudgeon to this fastness in the wilderness, determining to enjoy "lust in rust" for the remainder of his days, whence the place first received its name of Wolfert's Roost. As these and sundry other matters have been laid before the public in a preceding article, ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving

... believe the real explanation of these stories is to be found. There is no doubt that human victims, and even young maidens, were offered to these snake-gods; even the sunny mythology of Greece retains horrible traces of such customs, which lingered in Arcadia, the mountain fastness of the old and conquered race. Similar cruelties existed among the Mexicans; and there are but too many traces of it ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... but the marked increase in the number of moose may be one cause of this. Before the days of the Park the moose were almost exterminated throughout this region; but a few must have escaped slaughter in some inaccessible fastness, and under a careful and intelligent system of protection they have multiplied exceedingly. Man may not shoot them, and probably only unprotected calves have anything to ...
— Supplement to Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood

... out of this age of ours, this ripe prime of the human race, when Fear does not paralyse and mystery has lost its terrors. I at least would defend myself. Without further delay I determined to make myself arms and a fastness where I might sleep. With that refuge as a base, I could face this strange world with some of that confidence I had lost in realizing to what creatures night by night I lay exposed. I felt I could never sleep again until my bed was secure from them. I shuddered ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... practically impossible to color cotton and linen in a simple manner with any degree of permanency, because of the lack of chemical action between vegetable fibers and coloring matter. But the varied uses to which dyed articles are put make fastness of color absolutely necessary. A shirt, for example, must not be discolored by perspiration, nor a waist faded by washing, nor a carpet dulled by sweeping with a dampened broom. In order to insure permanency of dyes, an indirect method was originated which consisted of adding to the ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark

... Kensington High Street on the one side and from Holland Park Avenue on the other effectually preserves the atmosphere of old-world languor which envelops this retired spot. The hill, with its approaches so steep as to suggest to the imaginative the pathway winding up some rock-bound fastness of the Highlands, successfully defies organ-grinders and motor-buses and other aspirants to the membership in the great society for the propagation of street noises. As you near the summit, the ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams

... tribe of thousands this nation has dwindled down to less than two hundred wretched weaklings. Driven to this canyon fastness from their former dwelling-place by more warlike tribes, they have no coherent account of their wanderings or their ancestors. About all they can tell is that they once lived in cliff dwellings; that other Indians drove them ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith

... on his approach, and shook with fear if he looked at her. He made his love plain by logical formulas and proved his passion by geometrical permutations—by charts and diagrams. A seasoned widow might have broken up the icy fastness of his soul and melted his forbidding nature in the crucible of feeling, but this poor girl just wanted some one to hold her little hand and say peace to her fluttering heart. How could she go plump herself in his lap, pull his ears and tell him he was a fool? Finally, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard

... bodies—Andrew W——pe, Henry S——k, and Charles S——th, may recall to the memory of some people in Edinburgh still, three young men, who, with good education, fair talents, and graces from nature, might have played a respectable role in the drama of life, had it not been for a tendency to "fastness," a disease which seems to increase with civilisation. In their instance the old adage of Aristotle, simile gaudet simili, was exemplified to the letter; and the union confirmed in each a mind which, originally impatient of authority, fretted itself against ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various

... case, he would expect to remain safe from pursuit in a mountain fastness until either on horseback or by automobile he could work his way out of the country. With what he had unquestionably carried off he would not be a poor man. In some spot far away he could assume a new name, start in business and later be joined by ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd

... sobered robin, hunger-silent now. Seeks cedar-berries blue, his autumn cheer; The chipmunk, on the shingly shag-bark's bough Now saws, now lists with downward eye and ear, Then drops his nut, and, cheeping, with a bound 40 Whisks to his winding fastness underground; The clouds like swans ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... plucks up courage. The thought of Lady Ruth being miles away, mounted on a fast horse and speeding toward some desert fastness of the robbers, was one to almost paralyze his brain, for the chances of his doing anything to help her in such a case were ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne

... to De Launay or mademoiselle, the high gods must have laughed in irony as old Jim Banker raved and flung his hands toward their Olympian fastness. ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter

... canoas coming down the river; and with no small joy caused his men to try the uttermost of their strengths, and after a while two of the four gave over and ran themselves ashore, every man betaking himself to the fastness of the woods. The two other lesser got away, while he landed to lay hold on these; and so turned into some by-creek, we knew not whither. Those canoas that were taken were loaded with bread, and were bound for Margarita in the West Indies, which ...
— The Discovery of Guiana • Sir Walter Raleigh

... error is seldom expelled from philosophy by a single victory. It retreats slowly, defends every inch of ground, and often, after it has been driven from the open country, retains a footing in some remote fastness. The essences of individuals were an unmeaning figment arising from a misapprehension of the essences of classes, yet even Locke, when he extirpated the parent error, could not shake himself free from that which was its fruit. He distinguished two sorts ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... room is a relief," he said, waving a graceful hand in a neatly limited gesture, which everybody's eyes followed, his own included. "It is a relief and a retreat. The windows open, the blinds closed—that is as it should be. It is a retreat, a fastness, a bastion against the heat's assault. For me, a quiet room—a quiet room and a book, a volume in the hand, held lightly between the fingers. A volume of poems, lines metrical and cadenced; something by a sound Victorian. We have no ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington

... fastness rude Three lovely forms I see, And marvel why, in that solitude, So fair a ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins

... to her fastness in Frank's attic, while Julius repaired to Raymond's room, and found him as usual lying tranquil, with his mother's chair so near that she could hand him the cool fruit or drink, or ring to summon other help. Their time together seemed to both a rest, and Julius always liked to look at their ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge

... many "sleeps" from his friends with hordes of marauding hostiles intervening, and so induced him to remain with them in hiding until the rebellious tribes were driven from the reservations and Red Dog himself fled to their fastness. Then again had McGrath to remain in hiding, secreted by his humble friends, and there he lay when Winthrop's bugles sounded the charge and his own old troop came dashing in. He was so worn, ragged, and changed ...
— Under Fire • Charles King

... women assembled en masse. Mrs. Nesbit and Mrs. Fenn, Mrs. Dexter and Violet Hogan, she that was born Mauling met, if not as sisters at least in what might be called a great step-sisterhood; and even the silent Lida Bowman, wife of Dick, came from her fastness and for once in a year met her old friends who knew her in the town's early days before she went to South Harvey to share the red pottage of ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White

... that sort of scrupulousness is very ill-bred, if you'll excuse my saying so, Rose. We are not supposed to know anything about fastness, and wildness, and so on, but to treat every man alike and not be fussy and prudish," said Emma, settling her many-colored streamers with the superior air of a woman of the ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott

... from her brow. Her own room she kept as a last asylum, to which she would silently retreat when the torture became too intense for the repression of society, and there alone, with closed doors, she wrestled with her agony. The stubborn independence of her nature took refuge in this final fastness; and she prayed only that she might go down to death with the full ability to steady herself all the way, needing the help of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various

... meet, he first saw the lady who was to be his wife in the hunting-field. She was Miss Garscube of Garscube, an only child and an heiress. She was a fast young lady when as yet fastness was a rare development:—a harbinger of the fast period, the one swallow that presages summer, but does not make it—and as such much in the mouths ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various

... she granted him a castle, situated in a romantic position on the eastern coast of Scotland. It was called the Castle of Dunbar. It was on a stormy promontory, overlooking the German Ocean: a very appropriate retreat and fastness for such a man of ...
— Mary Queen of Scots, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... it was a good one, she went about the cabin seeing to the fastenings of doors and windows, wholly unafraid despite her solitude. There was but one way of approaching this, her fastness in the rocks, and the bridge, had been drawn up for the night. Safe she was as any Rhenish baron in his ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey

... by the majority, or because he always saved his conclusions for the most appropriate moment. Among any society there are many of this sort of people: some of them act upon their circle through sophistries; others through adamant, unalterable stead-fastness of convictions; a third group with a loud mouth; a fourth, through a malicious sneer; a fifth, simply by silence, which compels the supposition of profound thought behind it; a sixth, through a chattering, outward erudition; ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin

... calling their special attention to some products of the coal-tar industry which are free from these defects of aniline dyestuffs, and for which it is claimed that they far surpass logwood, fustic, cudbear, etc., as to fastness against light, and excellently stand fulling. We allude to the alizarine dyestuffs, which have long since been introduced and are largely employed in cotton ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various

... the Nicholas bridge and were driving out among the parks and estates that cover the small islands, set like jewels among the white fastness of the river Neva. Here and there the river was solid ice, in other places the thin ice was decorated with ...
— The Red Cross Girls with the Russian Army • Margaret Vandercook

... that he believed himself to be bolder than any general that ever lived, but he would never have dared to hold the position that Dumouriez took up. He was outnumbered, three to one. He had been outmanoeuvred, and driven from his fastness by the most enterprising of the allied generals; and his recruits refused to face the enemy. He never for a moment lost confidence in himself, for the time wasted at Verdun had given him the measure of his opponents. He summoned Kellermann, ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... of much adventure; escapes, far distant wanderings, strange company. Many months I spent in a mountain fastness with a wise Hebrew Rabbi, who taught me his sacred Scriptures; going back to the beginning of all things, before the world was; yet shrewd in judgment of the present, and throwing a weird light forward upon the future. A strange man; wise, as are all of that Chosen Race; and a faithful ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay

... at once, but stood pale and trembling, as if an icy wind had struck him, before her, she pulled the pricking vines loose from her dress, and came out. "How do you do, Lot?" she said, again. Still Lot did not answer, and after a minute she turned with impatient dignity as if to enter her fastness again; but ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... Dick was there. He liked these little parties, in which a good deal of wine could be drunk, and at which ladies were not supposed to be very stiff. The Major and the Captain, and Mrs. Leslie and Lady Eustace, were such people as he liked,—all within the pale, but having a piquant relish of fastness and impropriety. Dick was wont to declare that he hated the world in buckram. Aunt Harriet was triumphant in a manner which disgusted Emily, and which she thought to be most disrespectful to her father;—but in ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope

... struck down on the instant: not one being left to look to the bodies of the slain—neither to bury nor remove them. Like the battle-field, too, it becomes the haunt of wolves and other wild beasts; who find among the fallen trunks, if not food, a fastness securing them from the pursuit both of hound and hunter. Here in hollow log the black she-bear gives birth to her loutish cubs, training them to climb over the decaying trunks; here the lynx and red couguar choose their ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid

... and his companions had left their mountain fastness, as before described, they had appeared in different parts of the country and committed various depredations; some of their robberies having been accompanied with bloodshed and violence of a nature which so ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne

... opened the campaign auspiciously. He had with little difficulty taken Charlemont, the last important fastness which the Irish occupied in Ulster. But the great work of reconquering the three southern provinces of the island he deferred till William should arrive. William meanwhile was busied in making arrangements for the government and defence of England during ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... all Adonis, Attis, and their congeners, were but the 'half-gods' who must needs yield place when 'the Gods' themselves arrive—it yet lingered on; openly, in Folk practice, in Fast and Feast, whereby the well-being of the land might be assured; secretly, in cave or mountain-fastness, or island isolation, where those who craved for a more sensible (not necessarily sensuous) contact with the unseen Spiritual forces of Life than the orthodox development of Christianity afforded, ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston

... Porhoet was sitting among his books in the quiet, low room that overlooked the Seine. He had given himself over to a pleasing melancholy. The heat beat down upon the noisy streets of Paris, and the din of the great city penetrated even to his fastness in the Ile Saint Louis. He remembered the cloud-laden sky of the country where he was born, and the south-west wind that blew with a salt freshness. The long streets of Brest, present to his fancy always in a drizzle of rain, with ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham

... phrase which penetrated through the outer brain of the shorthand writer to the secret fastness where Hilda sat in judgment ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett

... WORK DONE WITH THE SAME.—In order to test the fastness of the dyes, untie the skeins and pour boiling water upon them, leave them to soak for about a quarter of an hour, soap and rub them lightly with the hand from end to end and rinse them out thoroughly in ...
— Encyclopedia of Needlework • Therese de Dillmont

... "she was a giddy creature." Miss Sibyl wrote a poem on her, entitled, "Warning to a young Lady against the Pleasures of the World." They all called her Sally; the other two sisters had no diminutive synonyms. Sally is a name indicative of fastness. But this Sally would not have been thought fast in another household, and she was now little likely to sally out of the one she belonged to. These sisters, who were all many years older than Sir Peter, lived in a handsome, old-fashioned, red-brick ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... bane wrung from an ox the high fastness of his two horns. "To me thy work seems worse by far, ruler of keels! than if ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson

... in an appearance soon after that. Hitherto Brimfield had travelled to Westplains to meet her rival, and this was the first time that the Blue had invaded the Maroon-and-Grey fastness. Hoskins did a rushing business that day, for Claflin had sent nearly her entire population with the team, and many of the visitors were forced to walk from the station. There was an insouciant, self-confident ...
— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour

... found himself listening to her as one would to a child, and then, a moment later, she would bring out some cynical scrap of wisdom, evidently the fruit of bitter experience, which sounded strange coming from her lips. Yet, despite the utter unconventionality, there was no hint of fastness about her, and even when she touched by implication on her way of life, she did so with a kind of frank simplicity, hiding nothing ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt

... exhilarating drive through the mountains to Tre'r Caeri, a British fastness on a stern bare height; crumbled dwellings amid their great protecting walls, with cairn and cromlech and mystic circles; where in old time the noise of battle clanged amid these grey hills, now sleeping in sunlight. And from Tre'r Caeri down into the rocky ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing

... and kneel, and make hand motions with a dexterity which nothing but long years of practice could ensure; and they drive on with their prayers in a style which, whatever may be the character of its sincerity, has certainly the merit of fastness. How to get through the greatest number of words in the shortest possible time may be a problem which they are trying, to solve. The great bulk of the congregation are calm and unostentatious, evincing a quiet demeanour in conjunction with a determined ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus

... ships had swung to their anchors I saw a boat put off, bearing a flag of truce, to summon the pirates to yield up their fastness. But this proposal evidently miscarried, for the boat returned shortly, without any motions being made towards a surrender. At the same time I saw the gate on the landward side of the fortress opened and a chieftain wearing a rich ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward

... Paris hat with a high cerise crown. She said it had once belonged to the fastest woman in South Africa, who had given it to her as a joke, but she did not mention the lady's name, nor say in what her "fastness" consisted. This was characteristic of visitors at Ho-la-le-la: they sometimes stated facts, but never talked scandal. When April asked them to call her by her own name, instead of "Diana," they did so without comment, accepting her as one of themselves, ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley

... in weaving is abak fiber. The dyes are vegetable, their fastness depending upon the duration of the boiling. The Manbo woman, unlike the Mandya women, and women of most other tribes in Mindano, has never developed the art of inweaving ornamental figures. The best she can do is to produce warp ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan

... demi-monde in dress leads to something in manner and feeling, not quite so pronounced, perhaps, but far too like to be honorable to herself or satisfactory to her friends. It leads to slang, bold talk, and fastness; to the love of pleasure and indifference to duty; to the desire of money before either love or happiness; to uselessness at home, dissatisfaction with the monotony of ordinary life, and horror of all useful work; in a word, to the worst forms ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous

... all the more necessary for him to babble when alone. True, in the early days his confidences are innocent enough. Pepys began to write in cipher some time before there was any purpose in it save the common prudence of a secretive man. Having built, however, this secret and solitary fastness, he gradually became more daring. He had discovered a room to the walls of which he dared speak aloud. Here we see the respectable man liberated. He no longer needs to be on his official behaviour, but may play the part of a small Nero, if he wishes, behind the ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd

... country must indeed astound thee," he observed, "having come from the dreary fastness of the outer Ice World. But come; we are now to pass the great retortii guarding the entrance into ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various

... fire of recollection of those days when Tarzan of the Apes had ruled supreme, Lord of the Jungle, over all the myriad life that trod the matted vegetation between the boles of the great trees, or flew or swung or climbed in the leafy fastness upward to the very apex of the ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... Early on the morning of the 26th captain M'Cune reached the fort in safety. In the afternoon of that day, the enemy practised a well devised stratagem for the purpose of drawing general Clay and his troops from their fastness. On the Sandusky road, just before night, a heavy firing of rifles and muskets was heard: the Indian yell broke upon the ear, and the savages were seen attacking with great impetuosity a column of men, who were soon thrown into confusion; they, however, rallied, and in turn the Indians gave way. ...
— Life of Tecumseh, and of His Brother the Prophet - With a Historical Sketch of the Shawanoe Indians • Benjamin Drake

... when he praises golden curls, Or when, from anointed heads, the royal crowns away he hurls. Yes, methinks 'tis heavenly rapture, which delights the happy man Whom his words to Elba's fastness or to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various

... Ireland. On the other hand, those who had hitherto opposed them in vain redoubled their efforts, and became exceedingly clamorous. Then it was that Lord North found it necessary to come out of his fastness, and to interpose between the contending parties. In this character of mediator, he declared, that, if anything beyond the first six resolutions should be attempted, he would oppose the whole, but that, if we rested there, the original ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... This piazza, though it had been the scene of a provision-market from time immemorial, and may, perhaps, says fond imagination, be the very spot to which the Fesulean ancestors of the Florentines descended from their high fastness to traffic with the rustic population of the valley, had not been shunned as a place of residence by Florentine wealth. In the early decades of the fifteenth century, which was now near its end, the Medici and other powerful families of the popolani ...
— Romola • George Eliot

... said, whose very names were forgotten in the frosts of earlier years, had dived into the icy waters of Surprise Lake and fetched lump-gold to the surface in both hands. At different times, parties of old-timers had penetrated the forbidding fastness and sampled the lake's golden bottom. But the water was too cold. Some died in the water, being pulled up dead. Others died later of consumption. And one who had gone down never did come up. All survivors had planned to return and ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London

... was good in our past moved me, and on that good I will take leave of you for a while. It's time to make an end of this long letter. I am going out for a breath here of the May air, in which spring is breaking through the dry fastness of winter with a sort of damp, ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... him the gay flower-beds upon which the creeper-covered house looked forth, into many a leafy nook and shrub-bound fastness the phantom little form ran happily. Where the trees grew tall and close above an undergrowth of shepherd's-parsley and blue-bell had been a favourite resort of the child's. When the eyes of the young man followed him there, and saw him stop beside the smooth trunk of a silver birch, ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann

... distress of their master (without being able to effect a deliverance for themselves by their own exertions). As regards others (his open enemies), they will come to thee with their auxiliaries if they behold thee put forth thy prowess. Uniting with them, seek refuge now in mountain fastness, waiting for that season when calamity will overtake the foe, as it must, for he is not free from disease and death. By name thou art Sanjaya (the victorious). I do not, however, behold any such indication in thee. Be true to thy name. Be my son. Oh, do not make thy name untrue. Beholding thee ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... care how fine a road you may put me on, I want to know where it comes out. My text declares it: "The redeemed of the Lord come to Zion." You know what Zion was. That was the King's palace. It was a mountain fastness. It was impregnable. And so heaven is the fastness of the universe. No howitzer has long enough range to shell those towers. Let all the batteries of earth and hell blaze away; they can not break in those gates. Gibraltar was taken, Sebastopol was taken, Babylon fell; ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage

... possibly occasionally irrigated by its overflow. The higher part of the level ground afforded a stance for an old house, of singular structure, with a terraced garden, and a cultivated field or two beside it. In former times, a Danish or Norwegian fastness had stood here, called the Black Fort, from the colour of a huge healthy hill, which, rising behind the building, appeared to be the boundary of the valley, and to afford the source of the brook. But the original ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... rebuild on the foundation of one hope, which all the legions in hell cannot shake. Between you and me the battle has only begun, and nothing but your death or my victory will end it. You have your revenge; I intend to enjoy mine. Though he burrow as a mole, or skulk in some fastness of Alaska, I will track and seize that cowardly miscreant, and when the law receives its guilty victim, you shall be freed from suspicion, freed from prison, and most precious of all boons, you shall be freed forever from the vile contamination of his polluting ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... moss festooned other monarchs of the forest, which seemed gloomy indeed as the girls gazed off into it. Now and then some creature of the woods, disturbed by the passage of the party, would take flight and scurry off, fly away or slink deeper into the fastness, according ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Florida - Or, Wintering in the Sunny South • Laura Lee Hope

... "Scarce one of them but will cross himself and say his prayers when he hears in his mountain fastness the matin or the ave maria bells sounding from the valleys. They will often confess themselves to the village priests, to obtain absolution; and occasionally visit the village churches to pray at some favorite shrine. I recollect an instance in point: I was ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving

... matters—iso or anthrapurpurine, and flavo-purpurine, leaving it to the dyers and printers to produce for themselves the intermediate shades by mixing the three colors; and he showed that by reason of the fastness of the shades produced by these coloring agents varying considerably, the blue shade (alizarine) being much faster then the orange shade (flavo-purpurine), consumers were in many instances losers by using mixtures of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883 • Various

... veiled, and to the left the grim fortress of Hohenasperg dominated the smiling, fruitful plain with frowning menace. Johanna Elizabetha's eyes sought the distant mound where she knew lay the prison fort; perchance Serenissimus would answer her pleadings by imprisonment in that dark fastness. ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay

... seen. The eyes of my spirit saw the place, the nerves of my spirit felt the chill of its remoteness. And even when I waked again, I could not be sure that I was Montagu Lane, an idle young man of the twentieth century, who had come for the gratification of a whim to this fastness where greater men had ventured in peril ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson

... been imprisoned on the Lake of Garda; but managing to escape in man's clothes to Mantua, she thence sent news of her misfortunes to Canossa. Azzo lost no time in riding with his knights to her relief, and brought her back in safety to his mountain fastness. It is related that Azzo was afterwards instrumental in calling Otho into Italy and procuring his marriage with Adelaide, in consequence of which events Italy became a fief of the Empire. Owing to the part he played at this time, the Lord of Canossa was recognised ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... on interminably, its dust-white line, with the rocky ridge through the middle, dipping and rising and getting nowhere. The horse grew nervous and shied repeatedly from sheer loneliness. The road entered a wood. Deep in its leafy fastness wild steers heard the beat of the horse's hoofs, laid back their ears and galloped into safer depths, bellowing with alarm. Steering gave up, as helplessly homesick as a baby, his head dropped forward on his chest in a settled melancholy, from which he did not rouse until ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young

... Molochath, which separated the Numidian territory from the Mauretanian—whither Jugurtha had conveyed his treasure-chest, and, just as he was about to desist from the siege in despair of success, fortunately gained possession of the impregnable fastness through the coup de main of some daring climbers. Had his object merely been to harden the army by bold razzias and to procure booty for the soldiers, or even to eclipse the march of Metellus into the desert by an expedition going still farther, this method of warfare might ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... evil diffused itself through the atmosphere. The air seemed lurid with the impending storm, for the situation was one of peculiar horror. The wealthiest city in Christendom lay at the mercy of the strongest fastness in the world; a castle which had been built to curb, not to protect, the town. It was now inhabited by a band of brigands, outlawed by government, strong in discipline, furious from penury, reckless by habit, desperate in circumstance—a crew which feared not God, nor man, nor Devil. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... force of the Indians was routed and dispersed, each family, or band of neighbors, fled in its own direction, and concealed itself in the fastness of the mountains. The Spaniards pursued them, but found the chase difficult amidst the close forests, and the broken and stony heights. They took several prisoners as guides, and inflicted incredible torments on them, to compel them to betray their countrymen. They ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving

... not for the circus, he imagined that the youthful couple had designed to utilize a round of the menagerie as a wedding tour. The same thought was in the minds of the metropolitan managers of the organization when presently the two young wildings from the mountain fastness were ushered into their presence, having secured an audience by dint of extreme persistence, aided by a mien of ...
— Una Of The Hill Country - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

... forts at the harbour's mouth. He would have planted his guns on the Giant's Grave. We know little of the history of that giant, except that he carried off the wife of another giant who lived on the Great Island opposite, and held her here in his fastness amid the pine trees against all efforts to wrest her from him. A huge rock that he hurled back in one of these fights is still to be seen on ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch

... its way into the closed fastness of the young man's mind. It had a horrible familiarity, like a ghastly parody on something known and dear. With a quick movement he leaned forward, peering over the shoulder of the ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... kings who swooped down on the plain would never have ventured up there. But when we choose the world for our portion, we lay ourselves open to the full weight of all the blows which change and fortune can inflict, and come voluntarily down from an impregnable fastness ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren

... seen, from time to time, when a rare lull cleared the air to a dim and misty grayness. Something terrifying in the cruel sting of the bitter wind that cut into the flesh like whip-lashes, and shrieked and howled in its unspent rage over that lonely and desolate mountain fastness. ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling

... forest has been of use to Jacques, not only warming him with fallen wood, but giving him shelter in days of sore trouble, when my lord of the chateau, with all his troopers and trumpets, had been beaten from field after field into some ultimate fastness, or lay over-seas in an English prison. In these dark days, when the watch on the church steeple saw the smoke of burning villages on the sky-line, or a clump of spears and fluttering pensions drawing nigh across the plain, these good folk gat them up, with all their household gods, ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson

... essayed the "sifters," but he could make little progress, and he did not see the man whose name was upon every lip, and who had just declared to the enterprising reporter who had penetrated to his fastness, "that he would never be taken alive." The several parties contented themselves with scouring the roads, watching the railroad, and searching the houses of sympathizers. This continued for a week, night and day. There was no result. ...
— The Hunted Outlaw - Donald Morrison, The Canadian Rob Roy • Anonymous

... were never seen again. The Mexicans held him in superstitious terror, believing that he could not be killed; and he passed another year in the cattle-land, known and feared now as the "Monarch of the Range," killing in the open by night, and retiring by day to his fastness in the near hills, where horsemen could ...
— Monarch, The Big Bear of Tallac • Ernest Thompson Seton

... refused to be drawn into decisive action until McClellan became involved in the swamps of the Chickahominy. Jackson, imitating like his superior the defensive strategy of Wellington and Napoleon, had fallen back to a zone of manoeuvre south of the Massanuttons. By retreating to the inaccessible fastness of Elk Run Valley he had drawn Banks and Fremont up the Shenandoah, their lines of communication growing longer and more vulnerable at every march, and requiring daily more men to guard them. Then, rushing from his ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson

... great fastness of Protestantism was a place of more importance. Eighty years before, during the troubles caused by the last struggle of the houses of O'Neil and O'Donnel against the authority of James the First, the ancient city of Derry had been surprised by one of ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... the same time she never beset him with crude flattery; the principal reason why the flirtation had stood the test of so many years was the fact that it only flared into active existence at convenient intervals. In an age when the telephone has undermined almost every fastness of human privacy, and the sanctity of one's seclusion depends often on the ability for tactful falsehood shown by a club pageboy, Youghal was duly appreciative of the circumstance that his lady fair spent a large part of the year pursuing ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki

... abetting the resistance of Ismail Beg. On the 21st of August the General arrived at Ajmir, and took the town on the following day. He then sat down to form the regular siege of the citadel, called Taragarh (a fastness strong by nature, and strengthened still more by art, and situated on an eminence some 3,000 feet above sea-level). Bijai Singh, in Rajput fashion, was ready to try negotiation, and thought that he might succeed in practicing upon ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene

... on all happy the host of the kinsmen In game and in glee, until one night began, A fiend out of hell-pit, the framing of evil, And Grendel forsooth the grim guest was hight, The mighty mark-strider the holder of moorland, The fen and the fastness."[10] ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... like homeless wild beasts they whimpered and rambled restlessly to and fro, seeking for they knew not what. Their forest fastness, their glorious hiding-place, was burning! What was all the rest of the city to them? It was not for them; it was as though there was no place of refuge left for them in all the world! Every moment a few of them slipped ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo

... looked into the eyes of the First Man and knew that God had made her to be his mate. Suddenly a white cliff loomed up on the beach before them and from its depths came a tremendous knocking, as though some one were endeavouring to escape from a hopeless fastness of stone. ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed

... insinuate nothing. I tell you plainly that I feel myself to be—not in a nobleman's castle, but in a brigand's fastness; and that I suspect my poor old servant has been foully ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth

... set off after a barbarous breakfast, driving our laden animals ever deeper into the mountain fastness, until it seemed that none of us could ever emerge, for I had ascertained that there was not a compass in the party. There was now a certain new friendliness in the manner of the two cow-persons toward me, born, it would seem, of their knowledge ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson

... characteristics of the fibres. Sufficient time must be allowed for the mordant to penetrate the fibre thoroughly. If the mordant is only superficial, the dye will be uneven: it will fade and will not be as brilliant as it should be. The brilliancy and fastness of Eastern dyes are probably due to a great extent to the length of time taken over the various processes of dyeing. The longer time that can be given to each process, the more satisfactory ...
— Vegetable Dyes - Being a Book of Recipes and Other Information Useful to the Dyer • Ethel M. Mairet



Words linked to "Fastness" :   gradualness, pace, defensive structure, immovableness, fixture, fixedness, citadel, fast, lodgement, looseness, rate, blockhouse, keep, secureness, hold, dungeon, fixity, speed, graduality, hurry, immovability, donjon, slow, bastion, defense, lodging, haste, lodgment, execution speed, stronghold, redoubt



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