"Irregular" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Frazer was preparing to undress Lady Mary, Miss Campbell, her governess, came into the nursery, and taking the little girl by the hand, led her to an open balcony, and bade her look out on the sky towards the north, where a low dark arch, surmounted by an irregular border, like a silver fringe, was visible. For some moments Lady Mary stood silently regarding this singular appearance; at length she said, "It is a rainbow, Miss Campbell; but where is the sun ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill
... like that produced by a toothed wheel passing under a spring catch, and which can be heard at the distance of several yards: I noticed this sound at Rio de Janeiro, only when two of these butterflies were chasing each other in an irregular course, so that it is probably made during the courtship of the sexes. (2. See my 'Journal of Researches,' 1845, p. 33. Mr. Doubleday has detected ('Proc. Ent. Soc.' March 3, 1845, p. 123) a peculiar membranous sac at the base of the front wings, which is probably connected with ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... this stately edifice bespoke the magnificence of its ancient possessors and the taste of its present master. It was irregular, but built of the best materials, and in the tastes of the different ages in which its various parts had been erected; and now in the nineteenth century it preserved the baronial grandeur of the thirteenth, mingled with the ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... to a country gentleman once upon a time, or to more than one; men who built on a bit here and there once in a hundred years, until finally we have this charmingly irregular and dilapidated whole. You go up three steps into Mrs. Heaven's room, down two into mine, while Phoebe's is up in a sort of turret with long, narrow lattices opening into the creepers. There are crooked little stair-cases, passages that branch off into other passages and lead nowhere in particular; ...
— The Diary of a Goose Girl • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... his right arm and they start up the center aisle, with the six other women following in irregular order, and the five other ushers scattered among the women. The leading usher is tortured damnably by doubts as to where the party should go. If they are aunts, to which house do they belong, and on which side are the members of that house to be seated? What if they are not ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... was around a projection of the rambling, irregular structure, which made the angle wherein ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... the irregular sobbing breaths of the girl there was silence. The Indian woman crouched beside the tortured young thing and rocked the dark head, held close against her bosom, while she crooned a ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... you've given the old fellow,' murmured Vanyusha, 'he'll never have enough! A regular old beggar. They are all such irregular people,' he remarked, as he wrapped himself in his overcoat and took his ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... poem expresses it, 'like a fire to heather set,' that covers a solitary hill with smoke, and illumines it at the same time with dusky fire. His tutor, or, I should say, Mr. Pembroke, for he scarce assumed the name of tutor, picked up about Edward's room some fragments of irregular verse, which he appeared to have composed under the influence of the agitating feelings occasioned by this sudden page being turned up to him in the book of life. The doctor, who was a believer in all poetry which was composed by his friends, and written ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... Pont Neuf which I have lived to see built. Not far from me on my right—indeed within a stone's throw—the bulky mass of the Louvre rose dark and shapeless against the sky. Only a narrow open space—the foreshore—separated me from the water; beyond which I could see an irregular line of buildings, that no doubt ...
— The House of the Wolf - A Romance • Stanley Weyman
... was called, and at once proceeded into the foretop, accompanied by Dyer, where the pair again carefully reconnoitred their surroundings. From this elevation it was seen that the four islets occupied the south-eastern extremity of a shoal, or bank, of somewhat irregular shape, widening out from a point at its eastern extremity, to a width of some twenty-five miles at the spot occupied by the islets, and stretching away in a westerly direction to the very verge of the horizon, and possibly farther still. The four islets lay in a group, about four ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... their way over this irregular pile of rubbish; but found it a dangerous undertaking, as the blocks on which they placed their feet yielded to their weight, and slipping from their beds, threw them on the sharp edges of the stones—a proceeding they did not at all relish. ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... movement, are liable, like those of the lower animals, (65. Messrs. Murie and Mivart in their 'Anatomy of the Lemuroidea' ('Transact. Zoolog. Soc.' vol. vii. 1869, pp. 96-98) say, "some muscles are so irregular in their distribution that they cannot be well classed in any of the above groups." These muscles differ even on the opposite sides of the same individual.) to incessant variability. If then the progenitors of man inhabiting any district, especially one undergoing some change in its conditions, ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... red paper hearts which have been cut into several irregular pieces into an envelope and distribute to each gentleman guest, who selects a lady for a partner and at a signal they begin putting the pieces together to form the heart. The couple first getting the pieces together in perfect ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain
... of blood on the stones and an irregular trail of footprints proved to Jean that the gunman was hard hit. Here he had fallen, or knelt, or sat down, evidently to bind his wounds. Jean found strips of scarf, red and discarded. And the blood drops failed to show on more rocks. In a deep forest of spruce, under silver-tipped ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... was sitting outside his door. The vicarage which he inhabited was a straggling, irregular, but picturesque building,—humble enough to suit the means of the curate, yet large enough to accommodate the vicar. It had been built in an age when the indigentes et pauperes for whom universities were founded ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book V • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... grass divided into areas, bordered with box: this was succeeded by a declivity which led to a valley, wherein were several cities. We passed some of them, and entered into one of a considerable size: its streets were irregular, and so were the houses, which were built of brick, with beams between, and plastered. In the places of public resort were consecrated buildings of hewn lime-stone; the under-structure of which was below the ground, and the super-structure ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... approach the mountains are covered with dense forest, stagnant morasses, and trim tea-gardens, we one morning awake to find that over the horizon to the north hangs a long cloud-like strip, white suffused with pink—level on its lower edge but with the upper edge irregular in outline. No one who had not seen snow mountains before would suppose for a moment that that strip could be a line of mountain summits. For there is not a trace of any connection with the earth. Between it and the earth is nothing but blue haze. And it is so ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... her action, we should extend it through immensity itself; we should regard nothing as impossible, but should expect to find all things—supposing that all things are possible—nay, are. Doubtful species, then, irregular productions, anomalous existences will henceforth no longer surprise us, and will find their place in the infinite order of things as duly as any others. They fill up the links of the chain; they form knots and intermediate ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... limited, their field of operation so contracted, that our large commerce and travel are dependent, in most parts of the world, on British steam mail lines for correspondence and transport, or on the slow, irregular, and uncertain communications of sailing vessels. The question here naturally suggests itself: Have we progressed in ocean steam navigation in a ratio commensurate with the improvements of the age, or of our own improvement in every thing else? And has the Government of the country ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey
... and shadowed breadth of the belt of forest she saw gleams of a sunlit clearing. And crossing this space to the border of trees she peered forth, hoping to espy Glenn at his labors. She saw an old shack, and irregular lines of rude fence built of poles of all sizes and shapes, and several plots of bare yellow ground, leading up toward the west side of the canyon wall. Could this clearing be Glenn's farm? Surely she had ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... gently down as they entered the triangular field where the grass grew green and long—whiteness of sand gleaming in irregular patches between the clumps of coarse blades; but to her this poor turf was something precious associated with that island sanctuary, restful and strange, and she drew a long breath with a sense of suppressed pleasure; for sometimes the water, ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... solution has gone on to a very considerable extent. Where the draining streams have approached their baselevel, scarcely an outcrop of conglomerate is seen. Where the areas of conglomerate lie near faster falling streams, the irregular masses of ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... way, but with the word "dying," she became the heroic center of her hurrying thoughts. She saw her in the dim room with Doris and the nurse and doctor, each agonizingly intent on the slow, faltering heart-beats and the fitful, irregular breathing. As her swift mind galloped on to the end, and the subdued sounds of grief caught her inner ear, another face began to print itself rapidly on that quick-moving scene—Doris, white and haggard, looked into her eyes, and she felt ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... far as the means of judging are left us, seem to have been right; but his life was, it seems, irregular, negligent, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... by no means rare in the history of Asia, where the various centres of civilization are, in an economical sense, so isolated from each other that the welfare of the population is nearly always absolutely dependent on the irregular: and apparently capricious bounty of nature. For the three years following the dreadful misery above described, harvests of unprecedented abundance were gathered in. Yet how inadequate they were to repair the fearful damage wrought by six ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... yards in circumference, eighteen inches high, and shaped like a dome. It was formed entirely of sand scraped up by the bird with its feet. Under the centre of the dome, and below the level of the surrounding ground was an irregular oval hole, about eighteen inches deep, and twelve in diameter. In this, the eggs were deposited in different layers among sand and leaves; on the lower tier was only one egg, on the next two, at a depth of four or five inches from the ground. All the eggs were placed upon their smaller ends, and ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... was method in that irregular tapping. A signal, a talk in code! But he could not read it. Nor dare he lift his voice in shouted communication through the wall—Spulvedo, and bullets, hung over him. One experience of being shot at while unarmed and helpless was sufficient. It would ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... Philippus; and again he walked up and down the room, while Horapollo took the letter. Both faces of the tablets were covered with irregular, up-and-down lines of writing to the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... suddenly a quite different impression of the fellow. It was as if his khaki had fallen off, and he had stepped out of his own shadow, a live and quivering creature. His pinched clean-shaven face seemed to have an irregular, wilder, hairier look, his large nervous brown eyes darkened and glowed; he jerked his shoulders, his arms, his whole body, like a man suddenly freed from cramp or a ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... planting shrubs and flowers. He found The Hollies a ramshackle place, and left it even more so, but with a new note of artistry and several unexpectedly charming vistas. Thus, the big double window opened straight into an irregular garden which merged insensibly into a sloping lawn bounded by a river-pool. The bank on the other side of the stream rose sharply and was well wooded. Above the crest showed the thatched roofs or red tiles of Steynholme, which was a village in the time of William ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... the cave an irregular one, running in somewhat of a semicircle and with a flooring that was comparatively level. It was dry and fairly comfortable, and once beyond the fury of the storm the lads dismounted and proceeded to make ...
— The Rover Boys at Big Horn Ranch - The Cowboys' Double Round-Up • Edward Stratemeyer
... of the English landscape is the hedgerow that divides the fields and marks the course of the roadways. Nowhere but in England does the landscape present such a charming picture of "meadows trim with daisies pied," "russet lawns and fallows gray," spread out like a map, divided with irregular lines of green. Nowhere else is the traveller's path guarded on either hand with a rampart of delicate primroses, sweet-breathed violets, golden buttercups fit for fairy revels, honeysuckles in whose bells the bee rings a delighted peal, and luscious-fruited blackberry-bushes. Nowhere else is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... throughout, in continuous octosyllabic couplets. But, in the text, the couplet plays also a much larger part than it does in the Lay, and where it is dropped the substitute is not usually the light and extremely varied medley of the earlier poem, so much as a sort of irregular (and sometimes almost regular) stanza arrangement, sets of (usually three) octosyllables being interspersed with sixes, rhyming independently. The batches of monorhymed octosyllables sometimes extend to even ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... that some species of stork—say the marabou, for instance—might fairly claim brevet rank as judge, after the example of the adjutant. The elevation of a beak to the bench might be considered an irregular piece of legal procedure; but, bless you, it's nothing unusual with a stork. Put any bench with something to eat on it anywhere within reach of a stork's beak in this place, and you shall witness that same elevation, precedent ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... like a wheelbarrow, walking on his hands, with a hammer in his mouth. He is a young man in a neat suit of blue serge, clean shaven, dark eyed, square fingered, with short well brushed black hair and rather irregular sceptically turned eyebrows. When he is manipulating the car his movements are swift and sudden, yet attentive and deliberate. With Tanner and Tanner's friends his manner is not in the least deferential, but cool and reticent, ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... stretched canvas, to keep the water from breaking into the boats at sea. We made tents of the boats' sails; and when it was dark, we set the watch, and went to sleep. In the night we were disturbed by the irregular behaviour of one Connell, which led us to suspect he had stole our wine, and got drunk; but, on further inquiry, we found that the excruciating torture he suffered from thirst led him to drink salt water; by which means he went mad, and died in the ...
— Voyage of H.M.S. Pandora - Despatched to Arrest the Mutineers of the 'Bounty' in the - South Seas, 1790-1791 • Edward Edwards
... found a spot of blood that was repeated at irregular intervals for a mile or so. Pard was grunting now, but Douglas rowelled him and pushed on until he saw the antelope kneeling in the lee of an outcropping of rock. It struggled to its feet and fell again, its beautiful head ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... having reached the basaltic rock at an elevation of 16,805 feet, and with exhausting labor we traveled upon it until toward evening, when we came to that immense yawning abyss, the crater. The mouth was about three miles in circumference, of a very irregular form. Into this we entered, and soon arrived at the house which was to be our lodging for the night. This house was a curiosity in its way; as it was not built like any other house, and could not be, on account of the rarity of the atmosphere at this elevation of 17,125 feet, and the impossibility ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... were dragging, and his square shoulders bowed under the burden of the knapsack, whose height and big irregular outline seemed almost fantastic. Twice ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... Too ill for any real study, his musical instincts drove him to the organ, and we find him playing for occasional services at Eastham Parish Church at the age of nine. After his father's death, when he was about fourteen, he spent a couple of years in irregular attendance at school, and at the time of his confirmation was persuaded that by superhuman effort of will his physical disabilities might be disregarded and a life of some value be worked out. Then began the desperate struggle that gradually overcame every obstruction ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... proceedings; it was, besides, necessary to be unceasingly on the watch for scurrilous articles against Napoleon in the Hamburg 'Corespondent'. I shall frequently have occasion to speak of all these things, and especially of the most marked emigrants, in a manner less irregular, because what I have hitherto said may, in some sort, be considered merely as a summary of all the facts relating to the occurrences which daily ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... setting generally to work. The expenses of the household were to be reduced to the scale of Henry VII., or the early years of Henry VIII.; the garrisons at Berwick and Calais were to be placed on a more economical footing, the navy reduced, the irregular guard dismissed or diminished. Bribery was to be put an end to in the courts of Westminster, at quarter sessions, and among justices of the peace; "the laws were to be restored to their authority without suffering any matters to be ordered otherwise than as the laws ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... later, Jimmy Sears had washed the dirt from the interior of an irregular circumference that touched his ears and his chin and his hair. Until the twilight fell he stayed in the conning-tower in the Penningtons' barn, and watched his home through a crack between two boards. When he saw his father leave the house for town ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... was a huge granite block, rotted from long exposure to the elements, seamed and scarred and cracked. The action of the eternally moving sand had worn an irregular-shaped concave into its southern wall, so that the summit overhung the side. The man on the summit was lying flat on his stomach, leaning far over, still shooting downward. The other man, who was standing at the base, was flattened against it, facing the concave side, shooting ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... this way, early in the thirteenth century. Plans like this, in which the chapels grow out of the central space, instead of being planned from the first in relation to it, are imperfectly cruciform; but are highly characteristic of the irregular methods of development pursued by the builders ...
— The Ground Plan of the English Parish Church • A. Hamilton Thompson
... all kinds of knowledge, whether procured by study or observation, which bore upon his theories; impatient of the scanty aliment of the day, "his impetuous ardor threw him into the study of the fathers of the Church, the Arabian Jews, and the ancient geographers"; while his daring but irregular genius, bursting from the limits of imperfect science, bore him to conclusions far beyond the intellectual vision of his contemporaries. If some of his conclusions were erroneous, they were at least ingenious ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... attractive, aristocratic-looking girl, Shirley Rossmore had no serious claims to academic beauty. Her features were irregular, and the firm and rather thin mouth lines disturbed the harmony indispensable to plastic beauty. Yet there was in her face something far more appealing—soul and character. The face of the merely beautiful woman expresses nothing, ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... the big irregular features. In the steady eyes he saw something that forced instant credence to the stories told of the Major's resourceful bravery under difficult situations, a bravery which had made the name of Bronner famous in a service made up ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... wet saws eating their way into the marble bowlder, and the irregular quick taps of the seventy or eighty mallets were not suspended as Richard took his stand beside a tall funereal urn at the head of the principal workshop. After a second's faltering he rapped smartly on the lip of the ukrn with ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... desired to regulate a traffic which had already commenced, by inducing the Government to countenance it. His object was undoubtedly to make it easier for the colonists to procure the blacks; but it must have occurred to him that his plan would diminish, as far as possible, the miseries of an irregular transfer of the unfortunate men from Africa. (See Bridge's Jamaica, Appendix, Historical Notes on Slavery. The Spaniards had even less scruple about their treatment of the negroes than of the Indians, alleging in justification that their own countrymen sold them to the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... exerted on this fairy erection, and Verona itself had, perhaps, in its palmiest days, seldom exhibited a display of more luxuriant elegance. The audience, too, so totally different from the mingled, ill-dressed, and irregular assemblage that fills a city theatre; blooming girls and showy matrons, range above range, feathered and flowered, glittering with all the family jewels, and all animated by the novelty of the scene ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... over work, worry, excitement, hurried or irregular meals, or inherited. It shows itself in all sorts of symptoms and they must be met as they come. Diet the same as for general dyspepsia, never eat when you are ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... they reached the old gatehouse again, and saw through its archway the narrow little street with its irregular outlines in bold relief against ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... in 1820 in Derby, the son of a schoolmaster. He came of Nonconformist ancestry of most marked individuality. His early education was irregular and inadequate. Before he reached the age of seventeen his reading had been immense. He worked with an engineer in the period of the building of the railways in the Midlands. He always retained his interest in inventions. ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... much has been done, within and without, to conceal or adorn its primitive rudeness. It is of irregular, picturesque form, with verandas round three sides of it, to which the grape-vine has been trained, with glossy leaves that clamber up to the gable roof. There is a large garden in front, in which many English ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... made to receive freight on board, when the insurgents seized the vessel, carried off the thousands of pesos and other property on board, poured petroleum on the woodwork, and hauled down the American flag. The American gunboat Pampanga, patrolling this coast, seeing there was something irregular, hove to and endeavoured to get a tow-line over the Saturnus, but was beaten off by the insurgents' fire from shore. The insurgents then brought field-pieces into action and shelled the Saturnus, setting her on fire. The vessel ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... connexion by a branch with the Grand Junction canal. It lies on a slight eminence in a fertile tract called the Vale of Aylesbury, which extends northward from the foot of the Chiltern Hills. Its streets are mostly narrow and irregular, but picturesque. The church of St Mary, a large cruciform building, is primarily Early English, but has numerous additions of later dates. The font is transitional Norman, a good example; and a small pre-Norman ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... and there were the two little tents, one that sheltered Kepple and one that awaited him, and beyond, in an irregular line, glowed the ruddy smoky fires of the men. One or two turbaned figures still flitted about, and there was a voice—low, monotonous—it must have been telling a tale. Further, sighing and stirring ever and again, were tethered ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... at night. She had just returned from one of these hasty visits, and, finding that Hal was as attentive as anyone could be, she threw herself, weary and anxious, into an armchair beside Clara's bed. The crimson face was turned toward her, the parched lips parted, the panting breath labored and irregular. The victim was delirious; the hazel eyes, inflamed and vacant, rested on Beulah's countenance, ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... warned only by the favorable aspect of the heavens, as he had often done before, went a-fishing that afternoon, and his company thenceforth was known to old and young, grave and gay, as "The Shad," and by the youths of this vicinity this was long regarded as the proper name of all the irregular militia in Christendom. But, alas! no record of these fishers' lives remains that we know, unless it be one brief page of hard but unquestionable history, which occurs in Day Book No. 4, of an old trader of this town, long since dead, which shows pretty plainly what constituted a ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... concerning the life breath, offer some difficulty. The surface meaning is harsh and irregular breathing; the deeper meaning is a life of harsh and ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... an hour at the gate, we were told by the returned warder to pass the threshold, and remounting guided our mules along the main street, a narrow up-hill lane, with rocks cropping out from a surface more irregular than a Perote pavement. Long Guled had given his animal into the hands of our two Bedouins: they did not appear till after our audience, when they informed us that the people at the entrance had advised them to escape with the beasts, an ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... Asura, Vritra, by the wielder of the thunderbolt, (the Kurus), O Dhananjaya, becoming cheerless, gave up all hopes of victory. Desirous of saving themselves, all of them fled away from battle. Some kings fled, riding on cars borne along irregular course without Parshni drivers, and divested of standards and banners and umbrellas, and with their Kuvaras and boxes broken, and all their equipments displaced. Others, struck with panic and deprived of their senses, themselves striking the steeds of their cars with their feet, fled precipitately. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... there was no attempt at good military formation. At route step and in irregular columns, the regiment moved forward by platoons. Unknown officers stood along the way to direct, for the regiment's platoon leaders had no ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys with Pershing's Troops - Dick Prescott at Grips with the Boche • H. Irving Hancock
... determined and unscrupulous character, had turned his own weapons against him, and maintained an opposition patrol of hired gladiators and wild-beast fighters. The Senate quite approved, if they did not openly sanction, this irregular championship of their order. The two parties walked the streets of Rome like the Capulets and Montagues at Verona; and it was said that Milo had been heard to swear that he would rid the city of Clodius if he ever got the chance. It came at last, in a casual meeting ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... are lauded by some: I cannot see that they surpass or equal those of the northern. Some, of course, are the same. The southern cross is a very great delusion. It isn't a cross. It is a kite, a kite upside down, an irregular kite upside down, with only three respectable stars and one very poor and very much out of place. Near it, however, is a truly mysterious and interesting object called the coal sack: it is a black patch in the sky distinctly darker than ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... have done this before the next general election, but the alarming state of distress in Ireland forced him to do it now. I must, however, leave him to explain to you fully himself the peculiar circumstances of the present very irregular state of affairs. His majority was not a certain one last year, for on Maynooth, upwards of a hundred of his followers voted ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... glimmer of a suspicion that the cause celebre occupying the attention of this august assembly was anything but a pleasant fiction from beginning to end, and he had been wondering to himself whether such performances, conducted in the irregular style which he had witnessed, could be of any good. However, coming as a guest (for the master of the house was always a visitor on such occasions), he deemed it best not to interfere just then. He would give Arthur a little friendly advice ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... was not easy in those days. Passenger-steamers were few, irregular, and secret. The passport regulations were exceedingly rigorous, and even Mr. Verrinder's influence could not speed ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... power of assimilation, there is much of the speech of England which has never become connatural to the Anglican people; and its grammar has passively suffered the introduction of many syntactical combinations, which are not merely irregular, but repugnant. I shall not here inquire whether this condition of English is an evil. There are many cases where a complex and cunningly-devised machine, dexterously guided, can do that which the congenital hand fails to accomplish; but ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... of animation into the woebegone faces around the cabin table. Mahood pretends that he is all right, and plays checkers with the captain with an air of assumed tranquillity which approaches heroism, but he is observed at irregular intervals to go suddenly and unexpectedly on deck, and to return every time with a more ghastly and rueful countenance. When asked the object of these periodical visits to the quarter-deck, he replies, with a transparent affectation of cheerfulness, ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... the people to vote as they choose, that I would now degrade myself by voting one way if the slavery clause be voted down, and another way if it be voted up? I care not how that vote may stand.... Ignore Lecompton; ignore Topeka; treat both those party movements as irregular and void; pass a fair bill—the one that we framed ourselves when we were acting as a unit; have a fair election—and you will have peace in the Democratic party, and peace throughout the country, in ninety days. The people want a fair vote. They will never be satisfied ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... read a great part of the book. What he read during these two years he told me, was not works of mere amusement, 'not voyages and travels, but all literature, Sir, all ancient writers, all manly: though but little Greek, only some of Anacreon and Hesiod; but in this irregular manner (added he) I had looked into a great many books, which were not commonly known at the Universities, where they seldom read any books but what are put into their hands by their tutors; so that when I came to Oxford, Dr. Adams, now ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... best place to say that I did not lose my Virgil after all. Here it is on the table as I write, still the dearest of all my books. On each side of the healing an irregular curve of teeth-marks cuts into the yellowing parchment. Dear, brave Cherry-Cheeks sent it home by the hands of a vagrom pedlar, laboriously and exactly writing on the package the inscription she found on ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... of the cliff below us ran irregular tiny ledges; buttresses ended in narrow peaks; "chimneys" ran down irregularly to the talus. Here were supposed to dwell ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... fancy in the ordinary things of ornament and grace, a judgment in proportions of all kinds, and a general good taste in most of those subjects which make the amusement and delight of the ingenious people of the world. Let such gentlemen as these be as extravagant as they please, or as irregular in their morals, they must at the same time discover their inconsistency, live at variance with themselves, and in contradiction to that principle on which they ground their highest pleasure and entertainment. ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... to her colonies; with despair by those who dreamed of an honorable and abiding union between the two peoples; and with applause by those who admired any protest against injustice, however vehement and irregular. ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... objectionable that this "irregular person, this man of solitary study," should, by his work and by the magic of his teaching, assume a position so unique and so disproportionate. Others regarded the novelty of placing the sciences at the disposal of young girls as a heresy ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... hastened onwards. Not one of us uttered a word. It was as if we had agreed to be silent at these moments. We felt as though wrapped in the heavy veil of dark-ness, and no sound was heard but the short, irregular breathing of the porters, and the cadence of their quick, nervous footsteps upon the stony soil of the path. One felt sick at heart and ashamed of belonging to that human race, one part of which makes ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... contents in their crafty, gingery dissimulation so defied definition that I never knew whether they were animal, vegetable, or mineral; two or three hideous Chinese idols, "for luckee," and a diabolical fire-work with an irregular spasmodic activity that would sometimes be prolonged until the next morning. In return, I gave him some apparently hopeless oral lessons in English, and certain sentences to be copied, which he did with marvelous precision. I remember one instance when this peculiar ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... free from the chance of being seen. Norton was coming up, mounting the deep-worn steps in the cliff side. He had gone for water; he had not been out of sight nor away five minutes. And yet when she looked up to see him coming through the irregular doorway she had decided. ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... summer months the 'pastour', in his brown cape, and his black long-bearded ram lead hither flocks, whose flowing wool sweeps the turf. Nothing is heard in these rugged places but the sound of the large bells which the sheep carry, and whose irregular tinklings produce unexpected harmonies, casual gamuts, which astonish the traveller and delight the savage and silent shepherd. But when the long month of September comes, a shroud of snow spreads itself from the peak of the mountains down to their base, respecting only this deeply excavated ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... a man first, the wound is clean cut and germ free and it will heal rapidly. If, however, it strikes something first, and bounces off (ricochets) and then strikes a man, it will be knocked into an irregular shape and, therefore, cause a ragged wound with much bruising. What is more important, such a bullet will carry germs into the wound from the object struck, and almost surely some shreds ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... will be seen upon the map, on the coast of France, adjoining the English Channel. The Channel is here irregular in form, but may be, perhaps, on the average, one hundred miles wide. The line of coast on the southern side of the Channel, which forms, of course, the northern border of Normandy, is a range of cliffs, which are almost perpendicular toward the sea, and which frown ...
— William the Conqueror - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... might properly be considered the crater of the volcano. It was four or five acres in extent, irregular in contour, and so filled with gases and vapors that one could not see the bottom, while the jagged boundary on the farther side came out to view only at intervals, when the ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... the surgeon replied, relieved that his irregular confidence had resulted in the conventional decision, and that he had not brought on himself a responsibility shared with her. "You had best step into the office. You can do ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... Judah, Mr Henry Arthur Jones tackled two questions and strikes have been treated more than once—notably in George Moore's clever, interesting, uneven work, The Strike at Arlingford. Much further back there was Man and Wife, an attack upon the system of irregular marriages still existing in Scotland and some of the States of the Union. Probably there have been some other native works touching more or less directly upon questions of legislative reform within my time, but it is difficult to remember all of them; yet there are many burning matters to-day ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... back the sect had been divided into Mormons proper and so- called Israelites, I never could hear why. A few years since there came a visiting missionary of the name of Williams, who made an excellent collection, and retired, leaving fresh disruption imminent. Something irregular (as I was told) in his way of 'opening the service' had raised partisans and enemies; the church was once more rent asunder; and a new sect, the Kanitu, issued from the division. Since then Kanitus and Israelites, like the Cameronians and the ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of a few years he had applied to him perhaps thirty times for his services in the unraveling of similar problems at home and abroad. Sometimes Trent, busy with work that held him, had refused; sometimes he had been forestalled in the discovery of the truth. But the result of his irregular connection with the Record had been to make his name one of the best-known in England. It was characteristic of him that his name was almost the only detail of his personality known to the public. He had imposed ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... this island was quadrilateral, but the sides were so irregular that it was much more nearly a triangle, the comparison of the sides exhibiting these proportions: The section of the right bank of the Shelif, seventy-two miles; the southern boundary from the Shelif to the chain ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... intolerable in other circumstances, I would ride about for hours at a stretch. On arriving at a hill, I would slowly ride to its summit, and stand there to survey the prospect. On every side it stretched away in great undulations, wild and irregular. How gray it all was! Hardly less so near at hand than on the haze-wrapped horizon, where the hills were dim and the outline blurred by distance. Descending from my outlook, I would take up my aimless wanderings again, and visit other elevations to gaze on the same landscape from another ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... which he here looks forward, took place at Watier's, of which club he had lately become a member; and, as it may convey some idea of his irregular mode of diet, and thus account, in part, for the frequent derangement of his health, I shall here attempt, from recollection, a description of his supper on this occasion. We were to have been joined by ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... of the ragdealer's hovel were formed of stakes paid with pitch, and the wall opposite to that built of the bathing-houses was constructed of thick, irregular rocks and curved outward with a swelling like that of a church presbytery. Within, this curve corresponded to a hollow in the manner of a wide vaulted niche occupied by ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... traffic is great and constant, may well be understood to be considerable, particularly when it is remembered that ordinary regular traffic is interfered with constantly by numerous excursion, special, and other irregular trains, in the midst of which, also, time must be provided for the repair and renewal of the line itself, the turning of old rails, laying down of new ones, raising depressed sleepers, renewing broken chairs, etcetera,—all which is constantly going on, and that, too, at parts ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... the United States, the methods of cultivation pursued in Brazil are exceedingly primitive and irregular. No such thing as ploughing or preparing of ...
— The Story of the Cotton Plant • Frederick Wilkinson
... up and down the deck in this desultory way, describing the while a series of irregular ellipses, Six Bells was struck forwards, and the marine stationed by the taffrail at once shouted out in ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... seemed very quiet and deserted as Molly and Sylvia entered the dark, irregular Bridge Street, and the market-place was as empty of people as before. But the skeps and baskets and three-legged stools were all ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... hills, I extract a few general remarks from the Physical and Political Geography of Assam. The Shillong plateau consists of a great mass of gneiss, bare on the northern border, where it is broken into hills, for the most part low and very irregular in outline, with numerous outliers in the Lower Assam Valley, even close up to the Himalayas. In the central region the gneiss is covered by transition or sub-metamorphic rocks, consisting of a strong band of quartzites ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... Whom wrong or insult seems to gall and shame That he doth thirst for vengeance, and such needs Must doat on other's evil. Here beneath This threefold love is mourn'd. Of th' other sort Be now instructed, that which follows good But with disorder'd and irregular course. "All indistinctly apprehend a bliss On which the soul may rest, the hearts of all Yearn after it, and to that wished bourn All therefore strive to tend. If ye behold Or seek it with a love remiss and lax, This cornice after just repenting lays Its penal torment on ye. Other ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... mother, frightened, and the worn-faced mother came to the porch and shaded her eyes to look. She passed on the word with a call that traveled from house to house. So that, when Bull entered the long, irregular street of Halstead, he found it lined on either side by children, old men, women. It was almost as though they had heard of the thing he had come to do and ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... that the singular analogy which Geologists think they discover between successive periods of Creation, and the Mosaic record of the first Six Days, is no difficulty to those who hesitate to identify those Days with the irregular Periods of indefinite extent. Rather was it to have been expected, I think, that such an analogy would be found to subsist between His past and His present working, when, 6,000 years ago, GOD arranged the actual system of things in Six Days.—Neither need ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... was revealed. There were irregular stone steps leading down into the blackness. A piece of candle, stuck in a crude wooden holder, lay upon the topmost. Dr. Cairn, taking a box of matches from his pocket, very quickly lighted the candle, and with it held ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... night. I should think it a degree of presumption to make the necessary preparations without knowing the state of your health. Should this account prove favourable, I still think it best to delay it, as the stage is very irregular in its return. That of Saturday did not arrive till Sunday morning; it brought an unfavourable account of the roads. Thus you probably would not partake, nor would I wish spectators to check my vigilance, or divide that attention which is ever ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... government of the island of Sardinia. Through the short time of his administration here, he was overwhelmed with vexations only a little more endurable than the physical distresses which had weighed him down at Venice. During the war, justice had been administered in a grossly irregular manner. Hence, people had taken the law into their own hands, and retaliation had completed the round of wrong-doing. The taxes were collected with great difficulty. The higher class exhibited an invincible ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... her third siege in a fever of anxiety. Vaudreuil had disposed a thousand men, under De Ramezay, at the new stone fort at Chambly to check the invasion by land, and strengthened the city with all available forces, regular and irregular. The habitants of the long Cote de Beaupre had hidden away their goods, and flocked within the walls of the city with all the provisions they could transport. Prayers for deliverance rose unceasingly ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... I came down to the cabin and heard young A——'s schemes for the future. His highest picture is a commission in the Prince of Vizianagram's irregular horse. His eldest brother is tutor to his Highness's children, and grand vizier, and magistrate, and on his Highness's household staff, and seems to be one of those Scotch adventurers one meets with and hears of in queer ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... column, and had to press back, while the right companies were swinging round to bring the whole line parallel with the flank of the Guard; yet, though the answering fire of the Frenchmen was broken and irregular, so deadly was it—the lines almost touching each other—that, in three minutes, from the left front of the 52nd one hundred and fifty men fell! When the right companies, however, had come up into line with the left, Colborne ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... see that Ellen did not take her nonsense in her usual smooth good-natured way. She flushed and said nothing. Thereafter Christina kept a strict censorship over Bruce's letters, and was slightly troubled to find that they were rather irregular. Ellen's answer always went back the very next day, and Christina could not help seeing that her sister was anxious and worried until another came. And occasionally a wearisome time elapsed ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith
... White, tipped with yellow, nodding in a 1-sided raceme. Two scale-like sepals; corolla of 4 petals, in 2 pairs, somewhat cohering into a heart-shaped, flattened, irregular flower, the outer pair of petals extended into 2 widely spread spurs, the small inner petals united above; 6 stamens in 2 sets; style slender, with a 2-lobed stigma. Scape: 5 to 10 in. high, smooth, from a bulbous root. Leaves: Finely cut, thrice ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... vital centers in the brain controlling the heart and breathing apparatus, are paralyzed by the poison. There is often drowsiness and stupor, and the breathing is labored and the pulse weak and irregular, ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various
... and irregular currents adds, of course, very much to the difficulty of determining the true direction of the flood-tide, the latter being generally much the weaker of the two, and therefore either wholly counteracted by the current, or simply tending to ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... to which Lord Buckingham was exposed by this disturbing prospect (some people went so far as to cast the horoscope of an Irish revolution), and by the delays in the receipt of intelligence, owing to the imperfect and irregular means of communication existing between the two countries, betrayed him into some expressions of impatience, against which Mr. Grenville remonstrated with his habitual temperance and good sense, throwing out at the same time some sound suggestions as to the course it was desirable the Lord-Lieutenant ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham |
