"Fencer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... separated the final words brought a sinking sensation at the pit of his stomach, and the discomfort of a fencer, dueling in the dark—a swordsman who recognizes that his cleverness is outmatched. His question came ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... Practice of this kind should form a part of every naturalist's daily routine. After a certain time, it need not be consciously done. The movements of thought and action will, indeed, become as automatic as those which the trained fencer ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... affection for him, and was only too glad to spend most of his holidays with us in Scotland. They never really got on together at all. Cyril thought him a bear, and he thought Cyril effeminate. He was effeminate, I suppose, in some things, though he was a very good rider and a capital fencer. In fact he got the foils before he left Eton. But he was very languid in his manner, and not a little vain of his good looks, and had a strong objection to football. The two things that really gave him pleasure were ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... The fencer who demanded a contest according to the rules of fencing was the French army; his opponent who threw away the rapier and snatched up the cudgel was the Russian people; those who try to explain the matter according ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... of a pursuit,' he said to me, laughing; it would almost appear as if he took a pride in his incapacity and lack of moral courage. The results of his dilettanteism are to be seen in every field; he is a bad fencer, a second-rate horseman, dancer, shot; he sings - I have heard him - and he sings like a child; he writes intolerable verses in more than doubtful French; he acts like the common amateur; and in short there is no end to the number of the things that he does, and does badly. His one ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... each side drew on their gloves, settled the long visors of their caps well over their eyes, took their blunt rapiers in hand and stepped forward. The witnesses of each party, also gloved, stood on the left of the combatants, it being their duty to watch the blades, and to see whether either fencer backed down the ground. The umpire took out his pocket-book and pencil and stop-watch, and placed himself where he could look across the fighting. The armed fighters stood up face to face at half the length of the room, a novice supporting the right ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... my sword miss him? These rogues that are most weary of their lives Still 'scape the greatest dangers. A pox upon him; all his reputation, Nay, all the goodness of his family, Is not worth half this earthquake: I learn'd it of no fencer to shake thus: Come, I 'll forget him, and go drink some ...
— The White Devil • John Webster
... sober man among the crew struck a match and rolled his body over to show the granger's battered hands. The others were not convinced by this evidence, nor softened in the least. He was a granger, anyhow, a fencer of the range, an interloper who had come into their ancient domain like others of his grasshopper tribe to fence up the grazing lands and drive them from the one calling that they knew. If for no other reason, he deserved hanging for ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... of the grand duke, a friend of her serene highness, liked everywhere, a fine shot and a great fencer, and rides a horse as if he were sewn to the saddle. And all the ladies admire him because ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... kindly. "If you wish to get rid of the masher," said he, "I can show you a way;" and throwing himself into the position of a fencer, he made a lunge with his right ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... shall I be her page? Me-thinks I should make a pretty page, and hand a chased goblet as gracefully as any monkey that ever bent his knee in a lady's chamber. Well! at any rate, there is this chance to be kept back, as the gambler does his last trump, or the cunning fencer ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... corkscrew, one of the best I ever drew. By the way what incomparable whiskey that was of Monkhouse's. But if I am to write a letter, let me begin, and not stand flourishing like a fencer ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... by finding that he alone, of all her school, seemed thoroughly and instinctively to comprehend her every word, and chilled by the disagreeable suspicion that he was only playing with her, and her mathematics and geometry, and meta-physic and dialectic, like a fencer practising with foils, while he reserved his real strength for some object more worthy of him. More than once some paradox or question of his had shaken her neatest systems into a thousand cracks, ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... grinned. "Why, look here," they said to Patsy, "he'd punch you full of holes. Why he's a fencer. You can't fight him with swords. He'd kill ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... nation the Americans are fond of athletics, which are taught in the schools. There are splendid gymnasiums, and boys and girls are trained in athletic exercises. Athletics are all in vogue. It is fashionable to be a good "fencer." All the young dance. I believe the Americans stand high as a nation in all-around athletics; at least they are far ahead ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... defection from her ranks is viewed in the light of a catastrophe. She had called on Mrs. Bennington the second, armed with all those subtle cruelties which women of her caliber know so well how to handle. And behold! she met a fencer who quietly buttoned the foils before the bout began. She had finally departed with smiles on her lips and rage in her heart. This actress, whom she had thought to awe with the majesty of her position in Herculaneum, was not awed at all. It was disconcerting; ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... made a name for himself in the House of Deputies on account of his great speech in favor of the murderers of Marshal Brune; the second, Gaston de Ferrette, was related to the first families of the kingdom; he had accompanied the Duke of Angouleme to Spain, and was known as an expert fencer. He was hardly twenty years of age, but had already come out victorious in ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... the door, I halted for the space of an eye-flick, and spilled the scent over my hand and arm as far as the elbow. Then I rushed in among the gamblers, suddenly and without warning, stepping like a fencer in the sword-dance and crying "Amok! Amok!" till the coins danced upon the gaming tables. All the gamblers stayed their hands from the staking, and some seized their dagger hilts. Then I cried aloud three times, ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... do you good. Why, then, should you swallow a vile mess which you are certain must do you harm? Fall upon your sword, as Tully—I mean Brutus—or some of those old Romans, were wont to do when the Game was up! In the first place, I should like to see the man, howsoever expert a fencer, who could so tumble on his own blade and kill himself. 'Tis easier to swallow a sword than to fall upon one, and the first is quite as much a Mountebank's Trick as t'other. Blow your brains out! A mighty fine climax truly, to make a Horrible Mess all over the floor, and ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... pulling the harpooneer oar, he had thrown aside his black jacket, and displayed his naked chest with the whole part of his body above the gunwale, clearly cut against the alternating depressions of the watery horizon; while at the other end of the boat Ahab, with one arm, like a fencer's, thrown half backward into the air, as if to counterbalance any tendency to trip; Ahab was seen steadily managing his steering oar as in a thousand boat lowerings ere the White Whale had torn him. All at once the outstretched arm gave a peculiar motion and then remained fixed, ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... she struck savagely. But with the skill of a fencer he met the blow and broke it, seizing ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... up, meeting the priest's eyes, and, remembering his words spoken under the lee of the wall of the Hotel de la Plage, he laughed as a fencer may laugh who has been touched beyond doubt ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... consequence of the noise of the frequent discharge of their guns affecting the right ear. This is a very convenient infirmity for gentlemen who indulge in slightly aggressive remarks, but when they are hit back never seem to be conscious at all of the riposte,—the return thrust of the fencer. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... frightened even Nan. The quick step to the side and back—poising himself like a fencer—his revolver restrained a moment in its sheath by an eager right arm, as if at any instant it might leap ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... looking out to sea. When they drew near to the orchestra, who were singing and drumming away, they halted and formed in two lines facing the spectators. They now all assumed the familiar attitude of a fencer on guard, one foot and arm advanced, the other foot and arm drawn back, and lunged to right and left as if they were stabbing something with the long ribs of the coco-nut leaves which they held in their hands. This manoeuvre they repeated several times, the orchestra ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... highly developed, highly educated American girl of to-day, a marvellous compound of intense energy and languorous grace. She had done as brilliantly at Vassar as Nitocris had done at Girton and London, and she had also rowed stroke in the Ladies' Eight, and was champion fencer of the College. Yet as far as her physical presence was concerned, she was just a "Gibson Girl" of the daintiest type—fair-skinned, blue-eyed, golden-haired—her hair had a darker gleam of bronze in it in certain lights—exquisitely ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... made, for both sides were using the rifle. An officer stood among the French skirmishers—a tall, lean man with a mantle over his shoulders—and as our fellows came forward he ran out midway between the two parties and stood as a fencer would, with his sword up and his head back. I can see him now, with his lowered eyelids and the kind of sneer that he had upon his face. On this the subaltern of the Rifles, who was a fine well-grown lad, ran forward ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... excellent Parliamentary fencer. I bow to your correction and admit that I have never seen you before. But your voice reminds me of a voice I heard very recently under remarkable circumstances. It was my good fortune to help a lady in distress a little time back. If she had told me more I might have aided ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... attitude of a lunging fencer, to reach after his oilskin coat; and afterwards he staggered all over the confined space while he jerked himself into it. Very grave, straddling his legs far apart, and stretching his neck, he started to tie deliberately the strings of his sou'-wester ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... soon realized that it was necessary to give impetus to the IXth Corps, and the LIIIrd Division was put in on 8th-9th. By this time the LIVth Division was available as general reserve. Unfortunately, the LIIIrd Division broke in my hand, leaving me like a fencer with rapier broken, and by the time the LIVth Division arrived the remaining troops of the Corps were too tired and disorganized for ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... rapier, saber, scimiter, brand, curtana, claymore, smallsword, glaive, broadsword, cutlass, Damascus blade, spadroon, creese. Associated Words: scabbard, sheathe, unsheathe, forte, hilt, sheath, foible, foil, fence, fencer, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... splendid," cried Carrbroke one day, "only I don't like him. He puts me out of heart. I used to think that I was a good fencer, but when I cross swords with him I feel quite a baby. You are lucky to have some one like that to give you lessons. Why, ...
— The King's Esquires - The Jewel of France • George Manville Fenn
... an instant of rigid silence, and then Syme in his turn fell furiously on the other, filled with a flaming curiosity. The Marquis was probably, in a general sense, a better fencer than he, as he had surmised at the beginning, but at the moment the Marquis seemed distraught and at a disadvantage. He fought wildly and even weakly, and he constantly looked away at the railway line, almost as if he feared ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... in my day, something of a fencer, and my knowledge of the foils stood me in good stead now. With a tremendous thwack I knocked Morgan’s club flying over the snow, and, as we grappled, Bates yelled from the house. I quickly found that Morgan’s wounded arm was still tender. He flinched at the first grapple, ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... Dujarier had the choice of weapons. The privilege, however, was not worth much to him. He had never handled cold steel, while his adversary was an expert fencer, and he was also such a poor marksman that he could not have made sure of hitting a haystack at twenty yards. Still, he reflected that, although de Beauvallon was unlikely to miss him with a rapier, he might possibly ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... soon see, my cunning fencer with words, whether I know how to follow your advice, and how sternly I can exercise that virtue denied to me by an assassin. Will any one accuse me now of injustice if I punish the accursed brood that has grown up in this den ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... passe with him, rapier, scabberd, and all: and he giues me the stucke in with such a mortall motion that it is ineuitable: and on the answer, he payes you as surely, as your feete hits the ground they step on. They say, he has bin Fencer to the Sophy ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... Gary. "I have got more than my match. But I know who will plague people worse than a puzzle, if she gets well educated. There's a pair of gloves, you little fencer." ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... catching fish, that is to say, How to make a man that was none to be an Angler by a book, he that undertakes it shall undertake a harder task than Mr. Hales, a most valiant and excellent fencer, who in a printed book called A Private School of Defence undertook to teach that art or science, and was laughed at for his labour. Not but that many useful things might be learned by that book, but he was laughed at because that art was not to be taught by words, but practice: and ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... Evasio Mon," returned Sarrion sharply. And Juanita rather drew back as a fencer may flinch who has ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... and you have learned what it is to draw a true line, I shall be able to make manifest to you,—and undisputably so,—that the day's work of a man like Mantegna or Paul Veronese consists of an unfaltering, uninterrupted, succession of movements of the hand more precise than those of the finest fencer: the pencil leaving one point and arriving at another, not only with unerring precision at the extremity of the line, but with an unerring and yet varied course—sometimes over spaces a foot or more ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... Maupassant also desired to write in metrical lines. However, he never liked this collection that he often regretted having published. His encounters with prosody had left him with that monotonous weariness that the horseman and the fencer feel after a period in the riding school, or a ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... and one day he took up a foil and defied the Neapolitan marquis to a combat. Dragon accepted and was thoroughly beaten, while the duke went off in triumph, for he might say from henceforth that he was the best fencer ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... years, he was no match for an American bear, which is not so easily settled, and so Bruin seemed determined to let him know; he immediately dropped the pig with a growl, and erecting himself on his hind legs, prepared to give battle. Tom tried to keep him off with the rail, but a bear is a good fencer, and a few strokes of his great paws soon left the boy without defence. The deadly hug of the angry animal seemed unavoidable, when a shot from Uncle John, which sent a bullet through the left eye into the very brain, stretched the bear ...
— The Young Emigrants; Madelaine Tube; The Boy and the Book; and - Crystal Palace • Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick
... one reply she was not expecting. For direct abuse, for sarcasm, for dignity, for almost any speech beginning, 'What! Jealous of you. Why—' she was prepared. But this was incredible. It disabled her, as the wild thrust of an unskilled fencer will disable a master of the rapier. She searched in her mind and found that ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... unquestionable art-abilities, that he was courtly in manner, an accomplished fencer and dancer, with a graceful figure and a handsome face; that he possessed an exquisitely modulated voice; and large, lustrous expressive eyes—the light in which seemed to ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... to be, as much "in Society" as is possible for a mere literary man. I do not, in fancy, see him wooing a Maid of Honour. He was a man's man, a peer might be interested in him as easily as in a jockey, a fencer, a tennis-player, a musician, que scais-je? Southampton, discovering his qualities, may have been more interested, interested in ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... a better fencer and a better shot than I am," Marsh replied, shrugging his shoulders, "and I daresay than any of us. We are apt ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... respect and admiration for his master became no less. He had the attractiveness of extreme and unscrupulous capability. It gave Ralph the same joy to watch him as he found in looking on at an expert fencer; he was so adroit and strong and ready; mighty and patient in defence, watchful for opportunities of attack and merciless when they came. His admirers scarcely gave a thought to the piteousness of the adversary; they were absorbed ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... with a vague laugh. In conversation with Dora she invariably felt clumsy and unable to protect herself, like a stout fencer conscious of many vulnerable outlying points. She did not understand this girl, and never knew which was carte and which tierce. "So ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... had physically felt the steel of his blade slide gratingly once more down from her parry. Her mental attitude had been so entirely that of a fencer, on the alert, watchfully defensive against the quick-flashing attack of the opponent, that she had an instant's absurd fear of letting him walk behind her, as though she might feel a thrust in the back. "How ridiculous of me!" she told herself with an inward laugh of genuine ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... sir," said Doom meaningly; "I ken the carriage of a fencer's head; your eye's fast, your step's light; with the sword I take it Drimdarroch is condemned, and your practice with the pistol, judging from the affair with the Macfarlanes, seems pretty enough. You propose, or I'm mistaken, to make yourself ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... girlhood. 'She has the spirit of four great parishes,' says the wit in the comedy, 'and a voice that will drown all the city.' If a gallant stood in the way, she drew upon him in an instant, and he must be a clever swordsman to hold his ground against the tomboy who had laid low the German fencer himself. A good fellow always, she had ever a merry word for the passer-by, and so sharp was her tongue that none ever put a trick upon her. Not to know Moll was to be inglorious, and she 'slipped from one company to another like a fat eel between a Dutchman's ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... vagrant. I am not so ignorant of the laws of my country, but that I know the description of those who fall within the legal meaning of this odious term. You must give me leave to inform you, friend, that I am neither bearward, fencer, stroller, gipsy, mountebank, nor mendicant; nor do I practise subtle craft, to deceive and impose upon the king's lieges; nor can I be held as an idle disorderly person, travelling from place to place, collecting monies by virtue of ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... another power without promptitude, another promptitude without power. We must all feel the common sense of this, and can readily see how it applies to a general in the field, to a pilot in a storm, to a sportsman, to a fencer, to a debater. It is the same with an operating surgeon at all times, and may be at any time with the practitioner of the art of healing. He must be ready for what are called emergencies—cases which rise up at your feet, and ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... the force and training of habit—his left hand automatically came up in the first position of the fencer and the duelist, and as it came up and the fingers slackened about the parakeet, the long whip lashed out and curled around Osterbridge Hawsey's hand. The parakeet ducked into encircling fingers, Osterbridge Hawsey let out a piercing scream, more of rage than of pain, and opened ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... That fencer explained afterwards to Dave's party that he "seen what you coves was up to," and that's why he called the inspector back. But he told them that after they had told their yarn—which ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson
... other hand, sobered by pain, and nerved by the fixed consciousness that Muriel's safety now depended absolutely on his perfect coolness, fought with the calm skill of a practised fencer. Happily he had learned the gentle art of thrust and parry years before in England; and though both weapon and opponent were here so different, the lesson of quickness and calm watchfulness he had gained in that civilized school stood him in good stead, even now, under such adverse circumstances. ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... L. Sudre, "Les allusions a la legende de Tristan dans la litterature du moyen age", "Romania", xv. 435 f. Tristan was famed as a hunter, fencer, wrestler, ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... garments a la mode; Because, said he, the wretch will feel inspired With new conceptions when he's new attired; He'll sleep through half the day, let business go For pleasure, teach a usurer's cash to grow; At last he'll turn a fencer, or will trudge Beside a ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... best defence is attack. This old established doctrine of naval warfare is the orthodox doctrine also of aerial warfare. A mobile force confined to one place by losing its mobility loses most of its virtue. The fencer who does nothing but parry can never win a bout, and in the end will fail to parry. The recognition of this doctrine in relation to aerial warfare was gradual. When the Royal Flying Corps was established and the question of ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... at this time was in brilliant correspondence with the ideal which imagination might form of a youthful poet. Perfect in all bodily proportions, an accomplished fencer, with delicate flowing hair, and beautiful features through which genius, still half in slumber, shed its mystic glow, he was all that the imagination of Greece saw in the ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... looked up with a queer little smile. He admired the girl's spirit. It was the smile of the fencer on ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... for some time. The thunder was constant, and the play of the lightning was like the dazzle of a fencer's sword. Mingled with the thunder came the slap of frothing water and the whine of bending trees. The wind was ice to ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... refuse credit. Already nearly a ryo[u] is due to this Echigoya. It has been the bad luck to support him and his family during the past six months." Said Kuma—"Thus maimed, to hold his own in quarrels he must be a notable fencer as well as brawler. Was the wound so received?"—"Iya! That is not known. Some quarrel at the New Year's festivities probably was the cause. Before that time he was sound enough." She laughed. "He has two friends; Kahei San and Miemon San. They are ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... duel which was to be the result. His passionate friendship for Lincoln was so strong that it prevented the nervousness which usually precedes a first duel, above all when he who appears upon the ground has all his life neglected practising with the sword or pistol. To a fencer, and to one accustomed to the use of firearms, a duel means a number of details which remove the thought of danger. The man conceives the possibilities of the struggle, of a deed to be bravely accomplished. That is sufficient to inspire him with a composure which absolute ignorance ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... be the foil of darkest night to the burning star of your skill.' This is no flattery; Hamlet believes Laertes, to whose praises he has listened (218)—though not with the envy his uncle attributes to him—the better fencer: he expects to win only 'at ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... after some search found another, of similar size, untrimmed. She held out the latter to Anthony. He accepted it with a look of surprise. Then she walked into the path in front of him, stood stiff and straight, her small heels together, and made him the fencer's salute. "On ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond
... against duelling, I myself should have demanded satisfaction from him, for this attack upon the honour of my family, but I am at present Anne's only protector. It is many years since I have drawn a sword, while de Tulle is noted as a fencer, and has had many affairs, of which he has escaped the consequences owing to royal favour. Therefore, were I to challenge him, the chances are that I should be killed, in which case my daughter would become a ...
— In the Irish Brigade - A Tale of War in Flanders and Spain • G. A. Henty
... as they could out of the fort, as Aeneas did to his father Anchises, in the time of the conflagration of Troy. When Panurge perceived them, he said to Pantagruel, Sir, yonder are the giants coming forth against you; lay on them with your mast gallantly, like an old fencer; for now is the time that you must show yourself a brave man and an honest. And for our part we will not fail you. I myself will kill to you a good many boldly enough; for why, David killed Goliath very easily; and then ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... a feeble opponent; whereas, on the contrary, it is ruin to him; for he can not display his own powers but through something of a corresponding power in the resistance of his antagonist. A brilliant fencer is lost and confounded in playing with a novice; and the same thing takes place in playing at ball, or battledore, or in dancing, where a powerless partner does not enable you to shine the more, but reduces you to mere ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... trigger, his shot went wild. Before he could shoot again or bring his club into action. Brice was upon him. Gavin smote once and once only with the willowy metal strip. But he struck with all the dazzling speed of a trained saber fencer. ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... and at the parallel bars, or the fixed bar, he is the despair of his instructors. How will he supply this deficiency? Simply by the power of his will. All physical games do not require physical strength, and he became an excellent shot and fencer. Furious at his own weakness, he outdid the strong, and, like Diomede and Ajax, brought back his trophies laughing. A college courtyard was not sufficient for him: he needed the Bellevue woods, while he waited to have all space, all the sky, at his disposal. ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... later on it happened that I took counterfeits for pure gold. The French women, and for the matter of that, my own countrywomen, of whatever class and in spite of all their virtues when young, remind me of my fencing lessons. As the fencer has his hour of practice with the foils so as to keep his hand in, so women practise with sentimental foils. As a mere youth, fairly good looking, I was sometimes invited to a passage of arms, and as I took the matter seriously, received many a scratch. They were not ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... the most formidable of athletes. One thing that invariably amused me was his inordinate love of uniforms. He would always stop when he saw a soldier or the picture of one, and his love of arms was little short of a mania. He was an expert fencer and a dead shot besides. (Pardon the parenthesis, but I feel it my duty to warn you that nobody fights a duel in this little ...
— The Princess Elopes • Harold MacGrath
... threw him down. Another of the men turned on Logan with a loud guttural oath, and was raising a pistol. Logan knew the voice at last—knew the Jesuit now. 'Rien ne va plus!' he cried, and lunged, with all the force and speed of an expert fencer, at the fellow's face with the point of the rod. The metal joints clicked and crashed through the man's mouth, his pistol dropped, and he staggered, cursing through his blood, against the wall. Logan picked up the ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... parted at eight o'clock; but Lord Byron stepping into an empty chamber, and sending the drawer for Mr. Chaworth, or calling him hither himself, took the candle from the waiter, and bidding Mr. Chaworth defend himself, drew his sword. Mr. Chaworth, who was an excellent fencer, ran Lord Byron through the sleeve of his coat, and then received a wound fourteen inches deep into his body. He was carried to his house in Berkeley-street,—made his will with the greatest composure, and dictated a paper, which they say, allows it was a fair duel, and died at nine ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... shooting practices conducted by the officers—with the old muzzle-loaders which were the army weapons at the time. I was very delighted one day when Mr. Hagemeister, the fencing-master, one of the many splendid old Holstein non-commissioned officers holding the rank of lieutenant, said I was "A smart fencer." ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... the best polo-player, the best fencer, the best athlete of his day at College, possessing more than his share of the vigour of youth and glory of life, had, for over ten years, never moved without help from the sofa on which he lay, and the strange scar and a certain weakness in the ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... was at the door. He bowed her out with ceremony, watched her cross the hall, then sharply turned his head. Green was watching her also, but, keen as the twist of a rapier in the hand of a practised fencer, his eyes ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... blades crossed again with the same sound like song, and the men went to work again with the same white and watchful faces. Evan, in his impatience, went back a little to his wildness. He made windmills, as the French duellists say, and though he was probably a shade the better fencer of the two, he found the other's point pass his face twice so close as almost to graze his cheek. The second time he realized the actual possibility of defeat and pulled himself together under a shock of the sanity of anger. He narrowed, and, so to speak, tightened his operations: he fenced ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... some manners. So the four went out of the town to Nicholas Bayard's woods, where, after a few passes with rapiers, the dark-eyed gentleman was disarmed, and admitted, with no good grace, that Harry was the better fencer. Harry left New York that afternoon, having learned that his antagonist was Mr. John Colden, son of the postmaster of New York. His grandfather ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... man fences well, and another is but an indifferent hand at it, it is clear that the first will run the other through the body; but, if the other knows nothing at all about it, why then, Peter, the case is not quite so clear: because the good fencer is almost as much puzzled by your ignorance as you are by his skill, and you become on more equal terms. Now, Peter, I've made up my mind that I'll run that fellow through the body, and so I will, as sure as I am ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... in which the comic is free from all adulteration. Nor do we offer it, either, as an explanation. We prefer to make it, if you will, the leitmotiv which is to accompany all our explanations. We must ever keep it in mind, though without dwelling on it too much, somewhat as a skilful fencer must think of the discontinuous movements of the lesson whilst his body is given up to the continuity of the fencing-match. We will now endeavour to reconstruct the sequence of comic forms, taking up again the thread that leads from the horseplay of a clown ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... no one, I think. I have judged, I fancy, more by seeing you flourish your walking-stick than anything else. You are a fencer, are you not?" ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... accusation should not speak again. Yet he gave me a hard fight. It was for his life that he now wielded sword, and he was not now taken by surprise as he had been in our former meetings, or unsteadied by a desire of making a great flourish before a lady. He now brought to his use all his training as a fencer. He had a strong wrist and a good eye, despite the dissolute life that he had led. For some minutes our swords clashed, our boots beat the ground, and our lungs panted as we fought in the moonlight. I was anxious to have the thing over quickly, lest the noise we made might reach the ears of mademoiselle, ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... dwelt so largely on the turbot's size, Or raised with such applause his wondering eyes; But to the left (O treacherous want of sight) He poured his praise;—the fish was on the right. Thus would he at the fencer's matches sit, And shout with rapture at some fancied hit; And thus applaud the stage machinery, where The youths were rapt aloft and ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... Rodolphe (1807-73): entered a college at Bienne at the age of ten, and from 1822 to 1824 he was a student at the Academy of Lausanne. Agassiz afterwards spent some years as a student in the Universities of Zurich, Heidelberg, and Munich, where he gained a reputation as a skilled fencer. It was at Heidelberg that his studies took a definite turn towards Natural History. He took a Ph.D. degree at Erlangen in 1829. Agassiz published his first paper in "Isis" in 1828, and for many years devoted himself chiefly to Ichthyology. During a visit to Paris he became acquainted with ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... shall have the rabble here in a minute. Be quiet, my dear fellow; I warrant D'Artagnan is no better fencer than yourself." ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... lazily and met Rufus's sombre gaze; they held a laughing challenge, the easy challenge of the practised fencer who condescends to try a ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... more than six inches long, held in his teeth. And so he awaited the charge until the bull was within actual arm's-reach, when with a swift rise from the chair and a turn of his body quick as that of a fencer's supple wrist, he bent and stuck the teeth-held banderilla in the bull's shoulder ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... Plainly he did not mean to encourage blood lust unless necessary to the work in hand. Don Diego sulkily made the sign of the cross at the Name, and Don Ruy noted that the good father was good on the parry—and if he could use a blade as he did words, he would be a rare fencer for sport. One could clang steel all day and no one be ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... arrived back at his House. The boarding Houses at St Austin's formed a fringe to the School grounds. The two largest were the School House and Merevale's. Tony was at Merevale's. He was walking up from the station with Welch, another member of Merevale's, who had been up to Aldershot as a fencer, when, at the entrance to the School grounds, he fell in with Robinson, his fag. Robinson was supposed by many (including himself) to be a very warm man for the Junior Quarter, which was a handicap race, especially as an injudicious Sports Committee had given him ten yards' start ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... rock was smooth enough for good footing. They had no seconds, unless the shadows upon the hills and the mountain eagles answered for such. Ian was the highly trained fencer, adept of the sword. Glenfernie's knowledge was lesser, more casual. But he had his bleak wrath, a passion that did not blind nor overheat, but burned white, that set him, as it were, in a tingling, ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... fingers, all this with the naive satisfaction of a ditch-digger. His conversation always turned on feats of strength and before the two artists he strutted as if he belonged to another race, talking of his prowess as a fencer, of his triumphs in the bouts, of the weights he could lift with the slightest effort, of the number of chairs he could jump over without touching one of them. Often he interrupted the two painters when they were eulogizing the great masters of art, to tell them of the latest victory of some celebrated ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... three men revolving around her. Landis on his feet and well would have been nothing; either of these men would have killed him. But Landis sick she might balance in turn against them both. Nelly had the instincts of a fencer; ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... I see imprinted in thy brows A fortunate but froward governance. And though thy rival Marius, mated late By backward working of his wretched fate, Is fall'n; yet, Sylla, mark what I have seen Even here in Rome. The fencer Spectacus Hath been as fortunate as thou thyself; But when that Crassus' sword assayed his crest, The fear of death did make ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... and if it hold, I shall so hunt your insolence: 'tis sharp, I'm sure, and if I put it home, 'tis ten to one I shall new pink your Sattins; I find I have spirit enough to dispose of it, and will enough to make ye all examples; let me toss it round, I have the full command on't. Fetch me a native Fencer, I defie him; I feel the fire of ten strong spirits in me. Do you watch me when my Uncle is absent? this is my grief, I shall be flesh'd on Cowards; teach me to fight, I willing am to learn. Are ye all gilded flies, nothing but shew in ye? why stand ye gaping? who now touches her? ...
— The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher - Vol. 2 of 10: Introduction to The Elder Brother • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... this time. The master was a fencer, and something of a boxer; he had played at singlestick, and was used to watching an adversary's eye and coming down on him without any of those premonitory symptoms by which unpractised persons show long beforehand ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... one may object, that the pain and terror of dying so infinitely exceed all manner of imagination, that the best fencer will be quite out of his play when it comes to the push. Let them say what they will: to premeditate is doubtless a very great advantage; and besides, is it nothing to go so far, at least, without disturbance or alteration? ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne |
