"Flitting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was visible, as in so many of his contemporaries. With a vivid and artistic pen he described the wood and park of Aachen and the Kaiser's brilliant hunt[39]; the great forest grove, the grassy meadows with brooks and all sorts of birds flitting about, the thicket stocked with many kinds ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... declared James, making an attempt at a bow that was defeated by the fact that he was lying on his back and found the exploit too difficult to achieve. "I also seem to see you flitting around the house under those pink decorations. You'll run ...
— Ethel Morton at Rose House • Mabell S. C. Smith
... sorceress transformed herself that she might fly to her paramour. According to some of the Scotch stories, the witch, after bestriding her broomsticks must repeat the magic formula, Horse and Hattork! The flitting of these ill-omened night-birds, like nearly all the general superstitions relating to witchcraft, mingles itself and is lost in a throng of figures more august.[110] Diana, Bertha, Holda, Abundia, Befana, once beautiful and divine, the bringers of blessing while men slept, became ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... to Red Rose Lane, beneath the blossomed ale-poles, Light along his arm she lay, a moment, leaping down: Then she waved "farewell" to him, and down the Lane he watched her Flitting through the darkness ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... during the lifetime of this Henri Fourdrinier, the son of Admiral Fourdrinier, that the family fled from France to Groningen, in Holland. In all probability this flitting took place during those endless civil wars which disturbed France at that time. Possibly at the time when the heavy taxes imposed on the people made it almost impossible to live. The "Fronde" was ravaging the country too, in 1648, and for four years later. Of course it is ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... engaged, Clo got the chance she'd waited for. Delicately, stealthily, like the "mouse" she called herself, she extracted the door key from O'Reilly's pocket. So far, so good. But the next deed would try her mettle. Lightly as a flitting shadow the small fingers moved over the man's waistcoat, from the belt line to the breast. She could feel his heart thump, and almost started, but ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... she shifted her needle her glance went flitting over the waste before her. This time there was more life in sight. Far away Kirsty descried something of the nature of man upon horse: to say how far would have been as difficult for one unused to the flat moor as for a landsman to reckon distances at sea. Of the people ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... was a glorious legend trailing its storied length through the Highlands; when in every opening valley there lay purple shadows whereon we painted castles; when the corridors and shaded walks of the "United States" were like a fairy land, with flitting skirts and waving plumes, and some delicately gloved hand beating its reveille upon the heart; and when every floating film of mist along the sea, whether at Newport or Nahant, tenderly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... book, and the black dwarf at his feet jealously guarding his slumber. So she trimmed his silver lamp for him afresh, so that it burned with a yet more wonderful brilliance, laid a cluster of sweet flowers beside him, and then gladly flitting from the gloomy rock, spread her glistening wings, and darted up into the air; up, up, far above the tops of the lofty trees, flashing like a bright vision through the now darkening night. She passed the silver moon, which was shining calmly down upon the world she had just left; ...
— How the Fairy Violet Lost and Won Her Wings • Marianne L. B. Ker
... the salon, the visitor actually found himself obliged to close his eyes for a moment, so strong was the mingled sheen of lamps, candles, and feminine apparel. Everything seemed suffused with light, and everywhere, flitting and flashing, were to be seen black coats—even as on a hot summer's day flies revolve around a sugar loaf while the old housekeeper is cutting it into cubes before the open window, and the children of the house crowd around ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... peace. During those lonely days when he had wandered afar from human converse, and was surrounded only by objects of desolation and gloom, he had passed through as many phases of strange, unnatural experience as there were flitting smoke-wreaths eddying ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... of the body take part at the same time, contracting and relaxing in turn, like so many springs, of which each either drives forward or holds back a part of the machine. In fact, while your eyes and thoughts are fixed on the butterfly which is flitting away from you through the air, there is going on within you such an unheard-of outlay of efforts as could never be got out of our idlers if the terrible steward did not lash ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... little ways to compliment Florrie who chattered with a gayety which partook of excitement. In ten minutes he went his way, drawing her musing eyes after him. Until he had reached his own door and turned it at the Casa Blanca the two girls on Struve's veranda were silent. Florrie's thoughts were flitting hither and yon, bright-winged, inconsequential, fluttering about Jim Galloway, deserting him for Roderick Norton, darting off to Elmer Page, coming home to Florrie herself. As for Virginia, conscious of a sort of dread, she was oppressed ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... instrument, her lips parted, her eyes bright with the pleasure of the melody, her hands clasped, and her breath coming quickly. She was all absorbed with the music. All unknowingly Marcia had placed herself where the light from the window fell full across her face, and every flitting expression as she followed the undulant sounds was visible. The young man gazed, almost as much pleased with the lovely face as Marcia was with ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... immediate bustle, for time was flitting, and much remained to be done. The five owners of the iceboats proceeded to dismantle them, which was not a tedious proceeding. The masts were unstepped and hidden in a place by themselves. The sails were taken into the cabin of Abe, where they ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren
... never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming, And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor; And my soul from out that ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... him to a neighboring sunny parlor, where ivy embowers all the walls, and the sun lies all day. There he revived a little, danced up and down, perched on a green spray that was wreathed across the breast of a Psyche, and looked then like a little flitting soul returning to its rest. Towards evening he drooped; and, having been nursed and warmed and cared for, he was put to sleep on a green twig laid on the piano. In that sleep the little head drooped—nodded—fell; and little ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... satellite habitable, possessed of gravital force only slightly under Earth's, despite its twelve-hundred-mile diameter, and of an atmosphere merely a trifle rarer; but they had gone no further. They had noticed the forms of certain strange animals flitting through the satellite's jungles, but had not investigated. It was Carse who captured one of the creatures and saw the commercial possibilities of the pointed seven-inch horn that grew on its head, and who named it phanti, after ...
— Hawk Carse • Anthony Gilmore
... practiced this exercise enough, but before you start another I want you to write a summary of just how successful you were in controlling the flitting impulses of the mind and will. You will find this an excellent practice. There is nothing more beneficial to the mind than to pay close attention to its own ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont
... the Becket drive. It had grown dark now, save for the half-moon; the last chafer was booming by, and a bat flitting, a little, blind, eager bat, through the quiet trees. He got out to walk the last few hundred yards. A lovely night, silent below her stars—cool and dark, spread above field after field, wood on wood, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... clover on which the light fell in sheets of radiance; with other spots so dim that for ages no shoot had sprung from the deep black mould; blown to and fro across this wagon-road, odours of ivy, pennyroyal and mint, mingled with the fragrance of the wild grape; flitting to and fro across it, as low as the violet-beds, as high as the sycamores, unnumbered kinds of birds, some of which like the ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... him and her father; there was the firing on the handsome young American from the walls; there was the visit to the Sarpys; there was the night ride back to the town; there was the dazzling magnificence of the Governor's ball. And through all this she saw the weird form of Batoche, flitting in and out, silent, mysterious, terrible. She saw the yearning, anxious, loving face of Roderick Hardinge. She saw Zulma leaning towards her, and, as it were, growing to her with a sister's fondness. The spell of Zulma's affection appeared to her like the embrace of a ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... and burned at his own heart, sensibly affected Glyndon. As he stood aloof and gazing on them, the young man felt once more that he was young. The memory of all he had been content to sacrifice spoke to him like the sharp voice of remorse. The flitting forms of the women in their picturesque attire, their happy laughter ringing through the cool, still air of the autumn noon, brought back to the heart, or rather perhaps to the senses, the images of his past time, the "golden shepherd hours," ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... saw some large bats with white heads flitting around in zigzag flights—assuredly new ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... was the fourteenth year of Kwanei (1637). As now, the summer heat was stifling. To seek relief this Shimo had left the house, to stroll the neighbourhood close by. Thus idly engaged, listening to the song of the suzumushi, watching the fireflies flitting over the tops of the suzuki grass, and bending to cull a few lilies to arrange in the hanaike, the presence of a stranger was felt. Ah! He was indeed a handsome man. Not too young to seem a callow youth to the eyes of Shimo's sixteen years; not too old to look on her merely as one of different ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... broke and the beads were scattered all over the floor, the green kerchief slipped off, and Lyubka was transformed into a red cloud flitting by and flashing black eyes, and it seemed as though in another second Merik's arms and legs would ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... sat down before the maw Of a wide outlet, fathomless and dim To wild uncertainty and shadows grim. There, when new wonders ceas'd to float before, And thoughts of self came on, how crude and sore The journey homeward to habitual self! A mad-pursuing of the fog-born elf, Whose flitting lantern, through rude nettle-briar, Cheats us into a swamp, into a fire, 280 Into the bosom of a ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... the house. There were too few; and it needed but the first night's dinner to prove that the cook was third rate, though Lady Dauntrey carefully referred to him as the chef. In addition to this person, occasionally seen flitting about in a dingy white cap, there was a man to wait at table and open the door—a man, Dodo said, with the face of a sulky codfish; and a hawk-nosed, hollow-cheeked woman to "do the rooms" and act as maid to the ladies, ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... likely to occur by now, if we were to take Winesburg, Ohio as a social photograph of "the typical small town" (whatever that might be.) Anderson evokes a depressed landscape in which lost souls wander about; they make their flitting appearances mostly in the darkness of night, these stumps and shades of humanity. This vision has its truth, and at its best it is a terrible if narrow truth—but it is itself also grotesque, with the tone of the authorial voice and ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... his books, in search of some suggestion of how to approach Letty; his glance fell on a beautifully bound volume of verse—a selection of English lyrics, made with tolerable judgment—which he had bought to give, but the very color of which, every time his eye flitting along the book-shelves caught it, threw a faint sickness over his heart, preluding the memory of old pain ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... must, however, so he gathered a few of his effects and prepared for a flitting—where he hardly knew when he set out, but he chanced to alight in the domicile of some elderly friends, who were delighted to give him house and table room in their ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... spirit of mortal be proud? Like a fast-flitting meteor, a fast-flying cloud, A flash of the lightning, a break of the wave, He passes from life to ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... was curious to know if a policeman was a desirable person for a girl to marry? She saw this question now, not as being prompted by a laudable, an almost scientific curiosity, but as the interested, sly speculation of a schemer hideously accomplished in deceit. Mary could see that memory flitting back through her mother's brain, and it tormented her. Nor was her mother at ease—there was no chair to sit upon, she had to stand and listen to all this while he spoke, more or less at his ease, from the bed. If she also had been sitting down she might have been mistress ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... slightly as the car, apparently motionless, tilted imperceptibly against the western breeze; the only other movement was the faint pulsation of the huge throbbing screw in the rear. To the left stretched the limitless country, flitting beneath, in glimpses seen between the motionless wings, with here and there the streak of a village, flattened out of recognition, or the flash of water, and bounded far away by the low masses of the Umbrian hills; ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... delightful to have them? It will add ever so much to the life of the post," said Mrs. Turner, with visions of hops and parties innumerable flitting through her pretty head. It was a week since the —th had broken camp and marched away. Already they were far across the Platte and up out of reach of all telegraphic communication somewhere among the breaks of the South Cheyenne, and right in ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... out the flame of joy, and locked the door. A little dry sob came from her. The hay-fields and Cyril, with shirt unbuttoned at the neck, pitching hay and gazing at her while she dabbled her fork in the thin leavings. The bright river, and their boat grounded on the shallows, and the swallows flitting over them. And that long dance, with the feel of his hand between her shoulder-blades! Memories so sweet and sharp that she almost cried out. She saw again their dark grassy courtyard in the Abbey, and the white owl flying over them. The white owl! Flying ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the window, and stood looking out thoughtfully into the darkness. Her brain was busy with the numerous schemes that were flitting through it. ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... your meaning, Thad," Davy replied, without showing the least concern, for he was a fearless chap; "which is, that they've got the boat, and could chase after me if they thought I was going to get 'em in a peck of trouble by flitting. Never you fear, I'll keep low down, ...
— The Boy Scouts' First Camp Fire - or, Scouting with the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... Marion at an extremity of perturbation and regret, and went, as I had promised and arranged, to Effie, who was waiting for me in apartments near Orpington. I remember her upon the station platform, a bright, flitting figure looking along the train for me, and our walk over the fields in the twilight. I had expected an immense sense of relief where at last the stresses of separation were over, but now I found I was beyond measure wretched and perplexed, full of the profoundest persuasion of irreparable ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... from the river, up the smooth lawns, between the trees, towards Castel Ventirose, a flitting ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... though, for there was always something fresh to see—huge butterflies of wondrous colours flitting through the more open glades, strange vegetable forms, beautifully graceful bamboos, clustering in the moister parts, where some stream ran unseen amidst the dense undergrowth, while at last they reached a river of ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... sent from St. Domingo against the buccaneers, who thenceforward became the masters and lord proprietaries of Tortuga. Nor were the buccaneers longer exclusively composed of adventurous Frenchmen. Visions of golden cities in the New World had been flitting before the eyes of the English for a century before, and had not even been eclipsed by the signal failures of Sir Walter Raleigh in the reigns of Elizabeth and James. Indeed the expeditions of the gallant knight, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... more than two inches deep, and the trees which covered it by millions had all died as soon as they attained a height of fifteen or twenty feet. Swarms of ill-omened turkey-buzzards were the only living creatures visible "like foul lemures flitting in the gloom." ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... certain small collier lying in the downs, awaiting a fair wind to carry her into the port of London. This collier (a schooner) was named the "Butterfly," perhaps because the owner had a hazy idea that there was some resemblance between an insect flitting about from flower to flower and a vessel sailing from port to port! Black as a chimney from keelson to truck, she was as like to a butterfly as a lady's hand is to ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... to worship seemliness, This model of a child is never known To mix in quarrels; that were far beneath Its dignity; with gifts he bubbles o'er As generous as a fountain; selfishness May not come near him, nor the little throng Of flitting pleasures tempt him from his path; The wandering beggars propagate his name. Dumb creatures find him tender as a nun, And natural or supernatural fear, Unless it leap upon him in a dream, Touches him not. To enhance the wonder, see How arch his notices, how nice his sense Of ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... never entered into all this, and yet he knew he would miss it all; why, he would even miss the daily scrimmage on Bannister Field; the noisy shower-room, with its clouds of steam, and white forms flitting ghostlike. He would miss the ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... steaming samovar to meditate in solitude and quiet, while the rays of the declining sun shone on the gilded eikon in the corner of the room, and on the chromo-covered walls. When darkness fell, and the simmering music of the samovar had gradually died away; when the flitting swallows in the room had ceased their chirp, and settled down upon the rafters overhead, we ourselves would turn in under our fur-lined coats upon the ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... way, deviating as the tombs compelled, toward the entrance. To his surprise, all was still there, and though a lamp burned in the little stone lodge, it was certainly untenanted. The gate was ajar; there was no fear of the tenants flitting out bodily for a ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... watched-the restless ocean, she realized that it would not be many days before it would break its bonds. The ice would then float away to points unknown. Little gasoline schooners would go flitting here and there like sea-gulls, and then would come the hoarse voice of the Corwin, mail steamer for Arctic. She would take that steamer to Nome. Would the boy be back by then, or would she carry the mysterious letter with ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell
... more eagerly than the priest himself, for her reply. None came. I thought she gave a flitting look toward me, and so I shrugged my shoulders and thrust myself again into ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... Joan could describe with a touch of humour that eventually brought a smile to Doris's face. She took for granted that it had been in Chicago, and when Joan told of flitting away from the young doctor who had saved her, ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws taken in the largest sense, being growth ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... whistle, at first low, rising and falling, and then gradually becoming more distinct. It came nearer and nearer till it seemed to fill the air all about, and then, looking upward, they saw dark forms flitting ...
— Frank Merriwell's Bravery • Burt L. Standish
... the world seemed abandoned to them alone, so empty, so still were the white villages flitting by; so empty, so still the great parkway of the Fells stretching away and away like an enchanted forest under the snow, like the domain of some sleeping king. And the flakes melted silently into the black waters. And the wide avenue to which ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... closed in the image of an owl, I hurried to the cliffs of Donegal, And saw, creeping on the uneasy surge, Those ships that bring the woman grain and meal; They are five days from us. I hurried east, A grey owl flitting, flitting in the dew, And saw nine hundred oxen toil through Meath, Driven on by goads of iron; they too, brother, Are full five days from us. ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... In leafy bushes, Singing sweet songs to the hot summer sky. In and out twitting, Here and there flitting, Happy in life as the long ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... sped he by the path he found Dug by his uncles underground. The warder elephant he saw Whose size and strength pass Nature's law, Who bears the world's tremendous weight, Whom God, fiend, giant venerate, Bird, serpent, and each flitting shade, To him the honour meet he paid With circling steps and greeting due, And further prayed him, if he knew, To tell him of his uncles' weal, And who had dared the horse to steal. To him in war and council tried The warder ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... once remarked to me, "habitually to pursue a definite train of thought, and to pursue it to a finish, instead of flitting indolently from one uncompleted topic to another, as the newspaper reader is so apt to do. Still, there is no harm in a daily paper—so long as you ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... all the influences of the revealing night, fairly disembodied, in her detached and flitting presence, the scene woke dim, coiled memories of an infancy that stirred and pained her even as it left her forever, and frightened longing for the motherhood that life was holding for her. No longer ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... how quick the days are flitting! I mind me of a time that's gone, When here I'd sit, as now I'm sitting, In this same place,—but not alone. A fair young face was nestled near me, A dear, dear face looked fondly up, And sweetly spoke and smiled to cheer me! There's no one now to ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... Brun's portrait of herself and her child we see in full career the Greek ideals that were come upon France—a France weary of light trifling with life, and of mere butterfly flitting from flower to flower. ...
— Vigee Le Brun • Haldane MacFall
... carriage-wheels, and tramcars, bells of bicycles and horns of motors. The scene was as gay as any Paris boulevard, and far more picturesque because of the older, Eastern civilization in the midst of, though never part of, an imported European life—the flitting white and brown figures, like thronging ghosts outnumbering ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... two thousand of them, and took from them their congregations of goods and wares, wearing apparel, pots, pans, and gridirons, and other furniture, wherewith they had burdened themselves like bearers at a flitting. My house was stript to a wastage, and every thing was taken away; what was too heavy to be easily transported was, after being carried some distance, left on the road. The very shoes were taken off my wife's feet, and "ye'll no be a refuse to gi'e me that," said ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... had long ceased to dine at home, in despair; and now we resolved to take another house, in which there were other servants. But even then, it was a sore struggle to part with the flower of serving- women, who was set over the vacated house to put it in order after our flitting, and with whom the imprudent Paron settled the last account in the familiar little dining-room, surrounded by the depressing influences of the empty chambers. The place was peopled after all, though we had left it, and I think the ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... of commands, the neigh of horses and the rumbling of cannon wheels. The Army of the Ohio was passing to the exposed flank of the Army of the Tennessee and at dawn it would all be in line. He also caught flitting glimpses of the Tennessee, and of the steamers loaded with troops still crossing, and he heard the boom of the heavy cannon on the gunboats which still, at regular and short intervals, sent huge shells curving into the forest toward the camp of the Southern army. ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... face and hands that looked as if they had been unwashed for a month—who did not know A from B, and despised those who did. While these reflections, combined with a thousand ludicrous images, were flitting through my mind, my strange ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... crimson flaunt the hollyhocks, Where, lithely poised along the garden walks, His little maid enamoured blithe outvies The dipping butterflies In motion — ah, in grace how grown the while, Since he was wont to render to her eyes His knightly court, or touch with flitting smile Her father's ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... representative of the compromising sex looms to my mind's eye, I should add, but as the creature of an hour, in spite of her having been domiciled with us; whereas I think of Mademoiselle Delavigne as flitting in and out on quick, fine, more or less cloth-shod feet of exemplary neatness, the flat-soled feet of Louis Philippe and of the female figures in those volumes of Gavarni then actual, then contemporaneous, which ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... snorting of the steamer, the rattling of the chain through the hawse-hole; and on deck, and under the quarter, strange gleams of red light amid pitchy darkness, from engines, galley fires, lanthorns; and black folk and white folk flitting restlessly ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... knew no respite save temporary insensibility? He began to think that it did not, and with a shrug of his shoulders and a faint sigh, he turned away. He was about to resume his solitary watch, for he could not sleep on such a night, when his eye was attracted by a flitting shadow weaving to and fro astern; it seemed to be soaring upon the face of the waters; was it some broad-winged sea-bird following in their wake? He watched it as it drew near, growing larger and larger every moment. No! it was ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... pleasant moon, that tips The tree tops of the hillside, fly The flitting bats; the twilight slips, In firefly spangles, twinkling by, Through which he comes: Their happy lips Meet—and one star leaps in ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... fixedly and gravely towards the steppe where it lies scoured with the scudding breeze, and at another moment fall to scanning the faces of the persons around her, and, at another, frown anxiously, or send a smile flitting across her comely lips as she bends her head, until her features are concealed. Next, the head is raised again, for the eyes have taken on another phase, and become dilated with interest, while a sharp furrow is forming between the slender eyebrows, ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... dinner-time on the soft, dry spines that made an elastic carpet everywhere. Domsie used to say there were two pleasant sights for his old eyes every day. One was to stand in the open at dinner-time and see the flitting forms of the healthy, rosy sonsie bairns in the wood, and from the door in the afternoon to watch the schule skail till each group was lost in the kindly shadow, and the merry shouts died away in this quiet place. Then the Dominie took a pinch of snuff and locked the door, ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... gall, reflecting from its sphered surface a world of grief, of agony. The characters pass before us like shadows thrown from a magic lantern, showing only their profiles, and but rarely their entire forms. Flitting rapidly o'er our field of vision, they leave us but a few lines, but so true to nature, so deeply significant, that we are able to produce from these shifting and evanescent shadows a complete and rounded image. Thus we are enabled to form a vivid conception of every character—we ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... springing, And the merry thrush is singing; When the swallows come and go, On light wings flitting to and fro— Thou wilt think ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... which puzzled me here: droves of pretty girls, between twelve and twenty, flitting past the windows, on "the front," every few minutes; sometimes two by two, sometimes four or five together. I thought I had never seen so many young girls. There were enough for the girl population of a large city, ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... the closet door, Missy read the stanza a second time—a third. And, back again at her work, fingers dawdled while eyes took on a dreamy, preoccupied expression. For phrases were still flitting through her head: "we pass and speak one another".. . "then darkness again, ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... on a nearby bush, poured forth a tumbling torrent of silvery melody. Behind him, on the fence, a meadow lark answered with liquid music. About him on every side, in the soft sunlight, the bluebirds were flitting here and there, twittering cheerily the while over their bluebird tasks. And a woodpecker, hard at work in the orchard shade, made himself known by the ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... as marble, and brilliant as a polished sword. Surrounded by a gang of children, some grown to maturity, men and women, and others only infants, the poor patriarch sat pale and sickly at the family board; and the melancholy shade that kept flitting over his countenance, though he smiled and rose to greet us, told of some blight that had fallen on his hopes; for he resumed his seat apart, and crossing his thin hands on his lap, gave no other notice of his presence than an occasional sigh, uttered deeply and involuntarily. ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... in truth, only seeming; for although she never looked directly at him, she subjected his image, which was constantly flitting across the retina of her eye, to the closest scrutiny, and no act or expression of his escaped her. She was piqued by the fact that he showed no disturbed consciousness of her presence, and that his glance was occasionally as free and natural towards her as towards any other guest ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... set, it was presently so dark that lights had been brought in and fifty tapers in the silver candlesticks added to the heat. The lightning flashes glared in at the curtained windows like a flitting lamp, and the roar of the thunder shook the panes which rattled and clanked in their leaden frames. The reverend Prior called on the blessed saints whose special protection this house had never neglected to secure, and crossed himself. We all did the same, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... passing before you (1) a swarm of fireflies; (2) the intestines of the dead person; (3) many heads of the dead person; (4) many arms of the dead person; (5) many legs of the dead person; (6) the entire body passing before you; (7) shadows flitting before you; and finally (8) the Buso. But no one yet has been brave ...
— Philippine Folk-Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss, Berton L. Maxfield, W. H. Millington,
... the course of the latter process many flitting thoughts and affections arise and deeds are half-wittingly done which are not of the soul's true character; and in entire agreement with this, we read of the alchemical process, in the highly esteemed "Canons" of D'ESPAGNET: "Besides ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... first of all the women he had loved, now flitting through his revery, to stand out. But if she was more strongly imprinted on his memory than a host of others whose allurements had been less spurious and more seductive, the reason must be ascribed to her healthy ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... their silver bowers leave, To come to succour us that succour want! How oft do they with golden pineons cleave The flitting skyes, like flying Pursuivant, Against fowle feendes to ayd us militant! They for us fight, they watch and dewly ward, And their bright Squadrons round about us plant; And all for love, and nothing for reward. O! Why should heavenly God ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... smile that meant something beyond a mere act of prudence well done. Then she went down to the library and began an eager search for a certain book. She found it at length, the "David Copperfield" in the "Charles Dickens" edition of the great novelist's works. For the next hour or so she was flitting over the pages with the cipher telegram spread out before her. A little later and the few jumbled, meaningless words were coded out into a lengthy message. Christabel read them over a few times, then with the aid of a vesta she reduced the whole ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... Peninsular fame go up a Spanish hillside with greater spirit and dash than these, their descendants, facing the slope of Vaalkranz. In open order they moved across the plain, with a superb disregard of the crash and patter of the shrapnel, and then up they went, the flitting figures, springing from cover to cover, stooping, darting, crouching, running, until with their glasses the spectators on Swartz Kop could see the gleam of the bayonets and the strain of furious rushing men upon the summit, as the last Boers were driven from their trenches. ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the Sault Sainte Marie, popularly called the Soo, to witness our landing; men of all ages and complexions, in hats and caps of every form and fashion, with beards of every length and color, among which I discovered two or three pairs of mustaches. It was a party of copper-mine speculators, just flitting from Copper Harbor and Eagle River, mixed with a few Indian and half-breed inhabitants of the place. Among them I saw a face or two quite familiar ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... let the Iowa congressman have every opportunity to display his social shortcomings in contrast with the accomplished Russian, and Jack Turner, the most elegant man in the army; the next day would be time enough for a telegram and a sudden flitting. Yet in the midst of her plans for Tommy's discomfiture she was assailed by a queer regret and reluctance. Tommy's fascination had affected even a professional critic of life; he had been so amusing, so willing, so trusting, so useful, that her chill interest had warmed into ...
— Stories of a Western Town • Octave Thanet
... gems for which men still search secretly in hidden nooks of the Alcazar; the murder of the young Master of Santiago, who came to Pedro as an honoured guest; the love story of Maria de Padilla, whose spirit, the guardian whispered, could be seen to this day flitting in moonlight and shadow along her favourite garden walks, or trailing white robes through ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... to the conclusion that your wife's soul was flitting. Please God, she may yet live to bear you other children, ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... seen from the boat. A more solitary place I could not have imagined; no sign of human life, or its neighborhood, betrayed itself; overhead was a vast dome of sky, with a few white-winged sea-gulls flitting across it, and uttering their low, wailing cry. The roof of sky and the two round outlines of the little hills, and the deep, dark ravine, the end of which was unseen, formed the whole of ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... times, three hundred years ago, the seafarers from Bristol City looked out from the prows of their vessels in the grey of the morning, and wot not rightly whether the land they saw might be Jerusalem or Madagascar, or if it were not North and South America. "And there be certaine flitting islands,'' says one, "which have been oftentimes seene, and when men approached near them they vanished.'' "It may be that the gulfs will wash us down,'' said Ulysses (thinking of what Americans ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... the fact to his wife and Henley in the dining-room. They all went to the porch and waited for the now-hidden carriage to round the bend. For a short distance Ned's battered silk top-hat and the tip of his whip flitting along above the tasselled corn-stalks which intervened between the house and the road were the only evidence of the vehicle's approach, and then it turned sharply ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... wise, holy man, has dwindled into a couple of captives, one of them blind and both of them paupers on an idolatrous monarch's bounty. The country is desolate, the bulk of the people exiles, and the poor handful, who had been left by the conqueror, flitting like ghosts, or clinging, like domestic animals, to their burnt homes and wasted plains, have been quarrelling and fighting among themselves, murdering the Jewish ruler whom Babylon had left them, and then in abject terror have ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... But the butcher was flitting, and all his beds were taken down. Or else he didn't like our look. As a parting shot, we had "These gentlemen ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... seemed confusion to me now; but poor, broken hearted Nannie I remember. She stood at a distance. Not a sound was uttered, and I took up my watch with the others, to watch that precious life ebbing away. The soft flitting backward and forward of nurses, a word now and then from the great man who held not only the life of Sara in his hands, but, it seemed to me, the life of my beautiful Diana, only broke the intense silence. The night came on and we ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... draped in white and it moved about rhythmically, bending slowly from side to side; and then with the graceful ethereal lightness it leapt and whirled in a dance. In the profundity of the distance all was lost but the grace of it, the fairy-like flitting to and fro; and, as Denver watched, the tears leapt to his eyes at the thought of ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... pleasant it is to sit in this sheltered copse, listening to the fine creaking of the wind amongst the branches, the most unearthly of sounds, with this gay tapestry under our feet, and the wood-pigeons flitting from tree to tree, and mixing the deep note of love ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... detours it had to make are not to be counted. The geographers seem to have given up the attempt; for I found no map represent the infinite contortion of its course. A fact will say more than any of them. After we had been some hours, three if I mistake not, flitting by the trees at this smooth, break-neck gallop, when we came upon a hamlet and asked where we were, we had got no farther than four kilometres (say two miles and a half) from Origny. If it were not for the honour of the thing (in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... friends in the hall below. All was silence in the dimly-lighted room, whilst the sound of the gavotte, the hum of distant talk and laughter, and the rumble of an occasional coach outside, only seemed to reach this palace of the Sleeping Beauty as the murmur of some flitting spooks ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... seemed to stand still and look into mine wistfully. "They turned me out of my bunk in the middle watch to look at her sinking," he pursued in a reflective tone. His voice sounded alarmingly strong all at once. I was sorry for my folly. There was no snowy-winged coif of a nursing sister to be seen flitting in the perspective of the ward; but away in the middle of a long row of empty iron bedsteads an accident case from some ship in the Roads sat up brown and gaunt with a white bandage set rakishly on the forehead. Suddenly ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... all is calm and fresh and still, Alone the chirp of flitting bird, And talks of children on the hill, And bell of wandering ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... day dreams merged into vague pictures flitting through her drowsy brain, she heard the plaintive, trembling voice of Morty Sands's mandolin, coming nearer and nearer, and his lower whistle taking the tune while the E string crooned an obligato; he passed the house, went down the street to the Mortons' and came back ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... perhaps to be renewed; the stern basaltic cliff-walls supporting the island and prolonged in black jags through the glassy azure of the transparent sea; the gigantic headlands forming abutments for the upper arch; the chequered lights and shades and the wavy play of sunshine and cloudlet flitting over the face of earth; the gay tenements habited in white and yellow, red, green, and, not unfrequently, blue; the houses built after the model of cigar-boxes set on edge, with towers, belvederes, ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... her saddest hours were passed, sure that in the cares and employments of her loved plants she would find solace and consolation. It was at this window Kate now sat with Nina, looking over the vast plain, on which a rich moonlight was streaming, the shadows of fast-flitting clouds throwing strange and fanciful effects over a space almost wide ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... lolling in a low cane chair, fatigued by her drive, and longing aloud for tea; and Evadne was flitting about with her hat in her hand, laughing and talking more than any of us. She was wearing an art gown, very becoming to her, and suitable also for such sultry weather, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... to him naught save a flitting breath * And an eye whose babe ever wandereth. There remains not a joint in his limbs, but what * Disease firm fixt ever tortureth. His tears are flowing, his vitals burning; * Yet for all his tongue still he silenceth. All foemen in pity beweep his woes; * Ah for freke ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... the reverse. What a fairy-world is this opening out beneath our feet, with its golden glowing squares and circles and palaces, with its lamplit gardens and pagodas! and who are these gay and beautiful beings flitting hither and thither, and passing from one bright garden to another on the stream of pleasure? If this many-coloured, passionate dream be really human life, let us hasten to be down amongst it once more! And, after all, is not this ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... time Euphra was speaking, Hugh was being perplexed with that most annoying of perplexities — the flitting phantom of a resemblance, which he could not catch. He was forced to dismiss it for ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... use, and took an abundant quantity of gold and silver and precious stones, and giving them to some trusty servants sent them before him to the island. At the appointed year's end the citizens rose and sent him naked into exile, like those before him. But the other foolish and flitting kings had perished miserably of hunger, while he who had laid up that treasure beforehand lived in lusty abundance and delight, fearless of the turbulent citizens, and felicitating himself on his wise forethought. Think, then, the city this vain and deceitful world, the citizens the principalities ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... came, but at last she did come. I caught sight of her far away beyond the temple gate, flitting through the unholy brightness of the pillared courts like a white moth at night and seeming quite as small. She approached; now she was as a ghost, and then drawing near, changed into a living, breathing, lovely woman. I opened ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... reason, I know, but is rather natural, after all. What my deeds have been, you will be apt to ask. Why, all manner of idleness, which is the most interrupting, you know, of all things. The Hedleys have been flitting backwards and forwards, staying, some of them, for a month at a time in London, and then going, and then coming again; and I have had other visitors, few but engrossing 'after their kind.' And I have been getting well—which is a process—going ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... a long silence, as the two of them gazed into the fire. Then Marie-Louise reached up a thin little hand to Anne's warm clasp. "That's always the way, isn't it? It is a sort of game, with Love always flitting away to—another girl." ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... the old woman had so suddenly become rich. Thinking there was no good reason why she should not herself be equally fortunate, she washed clothes at the pool, keeping a sharp lookout for birds until she managed to hit and maim one of a flock that was flitting over the water. She then took the disabled bird home, and treated it with care till its wing healed and it flew away. Shortly afterward it came back with a seed in its beak, laid it before her, and again took flight. The woman quickly planted the seed, saw it come up and spread ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... Gyp and Jerry thought of nothing but the Everett party. Isobel, flitting here and there like a pretty butterfly, divided her enthusiasm. She indulged in a patronizing attitude—she would go, of course, to the Everetts', though it was a kids' party and she'd probably be ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... grass grows between the shrubs, and the sand silvers whitely to the moon, one sees them whisking to and fro on innumerable errands of seed gathering, but the chief witnesses of their presence near the spring are the elf owls. Those burrow-haunting, speckled fluffs of greediness begin a twilight flitting toward the spring, feeding as they go on grasshoppers, lizards, and small, swift creatures, diving into burrows to catch field mice asleep, battling with chipmunks at their own doors, and getting down in great numbers toward the lone juniper. Now owls do not love water greatly ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... almond-trees' carnival. Others were before me. An Osmia in a black velvet bodice and a red woollen skirt, the Horned Osmia, was visiting the flowers, dipping into each pink eye in search of a honeyed tear. A very small and very modestly-dressed Halictus, much busier and in far greater numbers, was flitting silently from blossom to blossom. Official science calls her Halictus malachurus, K. The pretty little Bee's godfather strikes me as ill-inspired. What has malachurus, calling attention to the softness ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... joy in the world. I am studying about insects in Zoology, and I have learned many things about butterflies. They do not make honey for us, like the bees, but many of them are as beautiful as the flowers they light upon, and they always delight the hearts of little children. They live a gay life, flitting from flower to flower, sipping the drops of honey-dew, without a thought for the morrow. They are just like little boys and girls when they forget books and studies, and run away to the woods and the fields to gather wild-flowers, or wade in the ponds ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... all summer, in the sound of the sea, And at night, under the full of moon, in calmer weather, Over the hoarse surging of the sea, Or flitting from briar to briar by day, I saw, I heard at intervals, the ...
— Birds Illustrated by Colour Photography, Vol II. No. 4, October, 1897 • Various
... faded from her eyes, and a hysterical smile began to twitch her set lips. She still gazed at him. The wind howled drearily in the chimney; all that was economic, grim, and cheerless in the room seemed to gather as flitting shadows around that central figure. Suddenly she arose with such a quick rustling of her skirts that he lifted his eyes with a start; for she was standing immediately before him, her hands behind her, her handsome, audacious ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... a flock of snow-birds came flitting through the air. As was very natural, they avoided Violet and Peony. But—and this looked strange—they flew at once to the white-robed child, fluttered eagerly about her head, alighted on her shoulders, ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... little different to what you were. Your face has changed too. You were always beautiful, but now your face has gained in beauty, although I should have said that would be impossible. You were so—oh, I don't know how to describe it—so illusive, like a streak of fairy gold flitting through life, but now you are so steadfast and so dear—such a strength to me in my weakness. So thoughtful and so tender to me when I have been thrown a helpless log upon ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... shore, While flitting sea-fowl round me cry, Across the rolling, dashing roar, I'll westward turn my wistful eye: Happy thou Indian grove, I'll say, Where now my Nancy's path may be! While through thy sweets she loves to stray, Oh! tell me, does she muse ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 429 - Volume 17, New Series, March 20, 1852 • Various
... sun was clear of the horizon, the little party was again upon the march, but now going with the wariness of a sable. They no longer went Indian file, but flitting singly from tree to tree, from covert to covert, Grom picking up the old trail of the fugitive, the rest of the party keeping him in view and peering ahead for some sign of the unknown Terror. The red woman in her flight had left a sharp trail ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... striking the head that was bending over him. Two lightning streaks flashed from his hand, separated by a brief interval. The first flitting blaze of fire made him see a familiar face.... Was it really Karl, the doctor's factotum?... The second explosion aided his memory. Yes, it was Karl, with his features disfigured by a black gash in the temple.... The German pulled himself up with an ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... retired, jealous of her brother, and not much disposed to have him stolen out of the house. Louisa was more companionable, and with his mother would sit with Hawthorne after tea; and there was an old maiden aunt flitting about in the little garden, apparently as recluse as the rest. With these feminine members of the household Elizabeth Peabody made friends, and though a year elapsed in the process, she then had her reward in receiving Hawthorne and his sisters, ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... twelve chains of iron. Katoma went up to him. No sooner had he managed to seat himself than the magic horse leaped up from the ground and soared higher than the forest—higher than the standing forest, lower than the flitting cloud. Firm sat Katoma, with one hand grasping the mane; with the other he took from his pocket an iron chunk, and began taming the horse with it between the ears. When he had used up one chunk, he betook himself to another; when two were used up, he took to a third; when three were used up, the ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... feature, with the same hair and complexion, but with more intelligence in her eyes than the man, who looked heavy and dogged. A dark woman, whom I subsequently discovered to be lame, sat in a corner, and two or three swarthy girls, from fifteen to eighteen years of age, were flitting about the room. I also observed a wicked-looking boy, who might have been called handsome, had not one of his eyes been injured. 'Jews,' said I, in Moorish, to Hayim, as I glanced at these people and about the room; 'these are not Jews, ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... and thrust your tongue out of your mouth. You hear the creaking of machinery. It is a moment of intense suspense. Gradually a glimmer of light—an inch—a flood! The shield passes from the opening; the gun runs out. A flash, a roar—a mad reeling of the senses, and crimson clouds flitting before your eyes—a horrible pain in your ears, a sense of oppression on your chest, and the knowledge that you are not on your feet—a whispering of voices blending with the concert in your ears—a darkness ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... one may look at this complete darkness and not note the dancing lights in it. After you see them, the glint of the fireflies flitting hither and thither, starring the meadows as thickly as distant suns star the sky, making a milky way of the brookside and flashing comet-like along the dry upland, is singularly vivid. They sparkle, these northern fireflies of ours, with ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... their hiding-places, just for a "look see," and forty miles back they would cheerfully tramp, chattering all the way over what they had seen. Shake a stick at them as they stand chattering about your camp-fire, and the gloom of the landscape will be filled with tall, flitting ghosts, bounding like deer, with great springy strides which one cannot but envy. They have splendid vigour and fine bodies, but they are accustomed to being beaten and robbed without protest or resistance by every chance foreigner who enters ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... her smiling at the tall white girl on the Laconia, I had thought for an instant that Biddy and her stepdaughter might be in flight together. O'Brien was a drunkard, as well as a demagogue; and not long after Brigit's flitting with him there was a scandal about the accepting of bribes from politicians on the opposing side, apparently his greatest enemies; but a minor scandal compared to what came some years afterward. O'Brien's name ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... which they are withdrawn from their pouches as the moth departs (B). At this time they are in the upright position shown at C, but in a few seconds bend determinedly downward and slightly towards each other to the position D. This change takes place as the moth is flitting from flower to flower. At E we see the moth with its tongue entering the nectary of a subsequent blossom. By the new position of the pollen clubs they are now forced directly against the stigma (E). ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... excellent: "When the big-thumbed sheriff-officer and the blind man of the twenty-four fingers shall be together in Barra, Macneill may be making ready for the flitting." It is said that the same seer prophesied thus of the Strathpeffer wells: "The day will come when this disagreeable spring, with thick-crusted surface and unpleasant smell, shall be put under lock and key, so great will be the crowd of people ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... the ground, as they advanced with heads thrown forward and their serpent-like eyes flitting from side to side. Manifestly they were expecting to discover certain parties along the trail itself. There may have been something in the peculiar sound of the rifle, which raised their suspicions, though it is hard to ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... time sunset had entirely faded from the sky, and a few stars were beginning to twinkle faintly; but the rising moon, herself invisible, threw a lovely silver brightness over the river and made a flitting sail glimmer out snowy white as it went silently with a zigzag course up the stream. Between the river and the cottage every object began to be visible with that cold distinctness of outline which belongs to clear moonlight,—every rail of the garden fence, every ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... I tell you," stammered Joe. "It's been with me two days. I couldn't bring myself to speak of it—thought you'd only laugh. I saw it a couple of times, flitting through the bush ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... the back row of the stalls. He is a rival manager, and he is explaining in a voice loud enough to be heard by the first rows of the pit, the precise age of your leading lady. Now look down! There is a young girl flitting about the stalls. She is an actress, not very successful. But to-night she is as busy as a bee. She is crabbing your play. Yesterday her opinion on the subject was of no value, and it will be again of no value to-morrow. But as one of the limited audience on a first night, ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... his mother, with an expression akin to disgust flitting across her pale face. "How can you use that word after what has happened, and especially now that you are working among those vulgar factory people, and living with that profane old creature who goes by the name of 'Jerry Growler.' To think that ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... wondered. Men were no longer as they had been. Even the God to whom I prayed was different. As I write the sounds and shadows of that night are in my soul again. I see its gathering gloom. I hear its rifle shot which started all the galloping hoofs and swinging lanterns and flitting shadows and hysterical profanity. In the morning they found the robber's footprints in the damp dirt of the road and measured them. The whole countryside was afire with excitement and searching the woods ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... Pale ghost, flitting yonder! With drooping head you wander. Deep in thought you ponder Why I stay from thee; Cease those hands to beckon, Vain, vain, may you reckon; Alas! I cannot ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... that not only man's pain, but man's defiance, had been haunting her, and he guessed what persons and memories had been flitting through her mind. But he dared not talk lest she should exhaust herself. Presently, seeing a volume of Augustine's Confessions, her favourite book, lying beside her, he took it up, turning ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... surprise was the only bit of affectation he had indulged in that night. The fantasy flitting through Stampoff's brain was not hidden from him; but he wanted ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... fairly accustomed to seeing numerous air-ships moving in all directions across the sky in the daytime, but it still seems strange to us to see the lights of the air-ships flitting ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... move. It was as if he had been stopped by a ditch. He dismounted, and found not a ditch, but an open pit; and he could not drive round it, because there was deep water on all sides. Presently he saw a light flare up like a torch, and then another, till many of them were flitting about everywhere. In consternation, the farmer cried out, "Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, what's going on here tonight?" The horse sprang forward, as if somebody had stuck a pin into him, and the farmer had only just time to tumble on the sledge, when they ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... nevertheless there was enough truth in it to prove very conclusively to the bold minds of the age that tremendous profits—"purchases" they called them—were to be made from piracy. The Western World is filled with the names of daring mariners of those old days, who came flitting across the great trackless ocean in their little tublike boats of a few hundred tons burden, partly to explore unknown seas, partly—largely, perhaps—in pursuit of Spanish treasure: Frobisher, Davis, Drake, and a ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... other side. Diana put her head out of the door, and there, seven miles away to the west and north, she could see where a low, hovering, light smoke cloud told of the big city to which it owed its origin. Over the bay sails were flitting, not swiftly, for the air was only very gently stirring; but they were many, near and far, of different sizes and forms; and the mighty tide was rushing in with wonderful life and energy in its green waves. Diana's senses were like those of a person ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... "It was merely a flitting thought," she responded, her repose still shaken; "it was purely out of absent-mindedness that I came so near to voicing it. It was nothing, believe me. ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... listened to Peter's tales of olden times; and here that she had dreamed dreams of her father, and built many a castle in the air. She was glad when she saw that this beloved garden was casting its charm upon her friend. It was looking very lovely in the afternoon sunshine. Butterflies were flitting amongst the flowers, and the hum of bees and many insects made the air musical with sound of happy life. A gorgeous dragon-fly sailed past them, wheeling round as if to show its wonderful glittering colours ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... dinner sent up to her room, they told me, and would be down presently. There was a good deal of flitting about going on. Maids on mysterious errands shot up and down stairs. Old Mr. Gunton-Cresswell, looking rather wry, was taking cover in his study when I arrived. Mrs. Gunton-Cresswell was in ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... city. It is a graceful and luxurious home that you possess. The holly and the laurel gladden its lawn in winter; and bowers of blossoms sweeten it through all the summer. You know each day of your return from the town, where first you will catch sight of that graceful figure flitting like a shadow of love beneath the trees; you know well where you will meet the joyous and noisy welcome of stout Frank, and of tottling Nelly. Day after day and week after week they ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... leaf ghosts that had all day long been flitting in, were darkening with the sunset and filling the room with twilight dimness. Deep in a crimson couch and haloed with the last brightness, lay the long, white outlines of a reclining figure. A handful of Japan ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... subject. Instead, therefore, of getting my grand reward for finding the old man's daughter, the whole covey of them, no better than a set of swindlers, took leg-bail, and made that very night a moonlight flitting, and Johnny Hammer, honest man, that had wrought from sunrise to sunset for two days, fitting up their place by contract, instead of being well paid for his trouble, as he deserved, got nothing left him but a ruckle of his own good deals, all ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... his keen sight, which he did not fail to use continually, noticed some flocks of birds of prey flitting ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... presently it was ascertained that Betsey Lane was neither making a visit to her friends the Deckers on Birch Hill, nor to any nearer acquaintances; in fact, she had disappeared altogether from her wonted haunts. Nobody remembered to have seen her pass, hers had been such an early flitting; and when somebody thought of her having gone away by train, he was laughed at for forgetting that the earliest morning train from South Byfleet, the nearest station, did not start until long after eight o'clock; and if Betsey had designed to be one of the passengers, ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... with a chest rounded to the deep draughts of night air which he was drinking, and a heady elation in the currents of his veins. She had slipped in and out of the room as he had talked with the patriarch, after supper, flitting like some illusive shadow of shyness. He had had hardly a score of words with her, but the future would plentifully mend ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... mean cousins from the country, love-stricken policemen, or gentlemen in mufti from Knightsbridge Barracks; but people who have an occult right on the premises; the uncovenanted servants of the house; gray women who are seen at evening with baskets flitting about area-railings; dingy shawls which drop you furtive curtsies in your neighborhood; demure little Jacks, who start up from behind boxes in the pantry. Those outsiders wear Thomas's crest and livery, and call him "Sir;" those ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... groups of living statuary, strange and grotesque. Anxious faces-faces half painted, faces hectic of dissipation, faces waning and sallow, eyes glassy and lascivious, dishevelled hair floating over naked shoulders;—the flashing of bewitching drapery, the waving and flitting of embroidered underskirts, the tripping of pretty feet and prettier ankles, the gesticulating and swaying of half-draped bodies-such is the scene occasioned by the ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... passed since Maddy's flitting. The skimped delaine was sadly rusty,—Miss Wimple very poor. The profits of the Hendrik Athenaeum and Circulating Library accrued in slow and slender pittances. A package of envelopes now and then, a few lead pencils, a box of steel pens, a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... the church, the child's eyes wandered over the frescoed walls, with the sunshine flitting like the fringe of a spirit's robe across it, and up the dim aisle to the great marble pulpit, with a kind of bewildered awe, for he had seen nothing of the like before, unless it might be in some dim, half-forgotten ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... family parlor, looking out into the garden, and sometimes, when I sit alone at evening, I dream that I am sitting at that window, enjoying the long English twilight. I seem to see one very dear to me, flitting lightly about among the flowers, singing low, and smiling to herself, because her heart is made so glad by their beauty and their fragrance. And the flowers seem to know her, and bend to her and claim relationship with her—the roses for her bloom, the lilies for her white dress and ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... would, ere many weeks, be sweeping over this exposed coast; and already the summer-guests were flitting from the large hotels, although the cottagers would probably hold their ground for some little time longer. But what would it matter to us if we should be left the very last of the summer-residents upon the Point, so long as dear aunt and uncle Rutherford were to be with ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... buttercups, and at length the cooler regions show the familiar ferns, violets, and primroses of the temperate zone. The weird silence of the jungle is emphasised by an occasional cry of a wild bird, flitting among the tall tree tops, or the crash of a bough, dragged down by the weight of some climbing rattan. A walk up a boulder-strewn slope reaches the old crater, or Solfatara, almost surrounded by steep walls of rock. Boiling and wheezing springs, fast-forming ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... seminary even over Saturday and Sunday, except once each month. Miss Weldon does not approve of pupils coming back and forth. I think she is quite right. This flitting about gives a most unsettled feeling. You will not know where you belong, and we'll have none of ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird |
