"Luckless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... had never occurred to Mrs. Abbott that such a task as this might, even temporarily, be undertaken by herself; her one desire was to get rid of the luckless brats, that their vulgarity might not pain her, and the care of them ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... Villefranche over crags and through stone-paved and rock-lined ravines to the Moyenne Corniche, and then on to the higher mountain-slopes, and you can imagine how difficult it was to get away from raiders, and why the Barbary pirates took a full bag of luckless Riverains on every raid. You comprehend the raison d'etre of the fortified hill towns, and Eze, perched on her cliff, has a new meaning as you look down on Villefranche. This fastness was held by the Saracens long after the crescent yielded ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... millions of other Americans well know. I had seen something of cotton-mills in our Lowell, and I was eager, if not willing, to contrast them with the mills of Manchester; but such of these as still remained there were, for my luckless moment, inoperative. Personal influences brought me within one or two days of their starting up; one almost started up during my brief stay; but a great mill, employing perhaps a thousand hands, cannot start up for the sake of the impression desired by the ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... prayers!" commanded Rupe, and continued to twist the luckless finger until Penrod ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... bemoans and magnifies a mistake, which, whatever its baleful intent, has suffered in my rude inhospitable hands an 'untimely nipping in the bud,' and most ingloriously failed of consummation. After to-day the luckless incident of our acquaintance must vanish like some farthing rushlight set upon a breezy down to mark a hidden quicksand; for in my future panorama I shall keep no niche for mortifying painful days like this—and you, sir, amid the rush and glow and glitter of this ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... the luckless throng That here have found a quiet home; Or rising there, in lofty air, A snowy speck ...
— Within the Golden Gate - A Souvenir of San Fransisco Bay • Laura Young Pinney
... shouted as they tossed it, "Anty, anty over"; and the band on the other side, warned by the cry, caught the ball on the rebound if they could, and tore around the corner of the building, trying to hit with it any luckless wight on the other side, and so claim him for their own, and thus changing sides, the merry romp ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... O LUCKLESS bark! new waves will force you back To sea. O, haste to make the haven yours! E'en now, a helpless wrack, You drift, despoil'd of oars; The Afric gale has dealt your mast a wound; Your sailyards groan, nor can your ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... that rules my luckless lot, Has fated me the russet coat, An' damned my fortune to the groat; But, in requit, Has blest me with a random-shot O' ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... family of careless, noisy children there will be constant losing of thimbles and needles and scissors; but Aunt Esther was always ready, without reproach, to help the careless and the luckless. Her things, so well kept and so treasured, she was willing to lend, with many a caution and injunction, it is true, but also with a relish of right good will. And, to do us justice, we generally felt the sacredness of the trust, and were more careful of her things than of our own. ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... to haunt Hans; but he had one luckless notion, which was destined to cost him no little vexation. With the stock of the shop, he had inherited from his father a stock of old maxims, which, unluckily, had not got burnt in the fire with the rest of the patrimonial heritage. Among ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... Yet well the luckless wretch might shriek, Well might her paleness terror speak! For there were seen, in that dark wall, Two niches, narrow, deep, and tall; Who enters at such grisly door Shall ne'er, I ween, find exit more. In each ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... wonderful in this world. People are loudly asking, 'How, indeed, could Drona, that master of the science of arms, be vanquished?' Even thus all the warriors are speaking in depreciation of thee. Destruction is certain for my luckless self in battle, when three car-warriors, O tiger among men, have in succession transgressed thee. When, however, all this hath happened, tell us what thou hast to say on the business that awaits us. What hath happened, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... punished him. For the next two cases prove how dangerous it was becoming to be convicted or even suspected of heterodoxy. Parliament was beginning to understand its duty as Defender of the Faith as the Holy Inquisition has always understood it—namely, by the death of the luckless assailant. ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... marble-white, down-soft and dainty, A snow-dyed orb, where love increased by pleasure Full woeful makes my heart, and body fainty: Her fair (my woe) exceeds all thought and measure. In lines confused my luckless harm appeareth, Whom sorrow clouds, ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... of food passing his beak; a domestic fowl will do as much. One January I unwittingly shut a hen under the door of an outbuilding, where not a particle of food could be obtained, and where she was entirely unprotected from the severe cold. When the luckless Dominick was discovered, about eighteen days afterward, she was brisk and lively, but fearfully pinched up, and as light as a bunch of feathers. The slightest wind carried her before it. But by judicious feeding she was ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... spheres realize that the previous policy of connivance at the pogroms, which had been practised for a whole year, could not but disgrace Russia in the eyes of the world and undermine public order in Russia itself. As soon as this was realized, the luckless Minister, who had been the pilot of Russian politics throughout that terrible year, was bound to disappear from the scene. On May 30, Count Ignatyev was made to resign, and Count Demetrius Tolstoi was appointed Minister of ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... would luckless Odysseus have perished beyond what was ordained had not gray-eyed Athene given him some counsel. He rushed in and with both his hands clutched the rock whereto he clung till the ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... victory, and had often heard the guests of her patroness mention it with triumph; and she fancied their feelings would find a sympathetic chord in those of every British soldier. Unfortunately, M'Nab had fought throughout that luckless day on the side of the Pretender; and a deep scar that garnished his face had been left there by the sabre of a German soldier in the service of the House of Hanover. He fancied that his wound bled afresh ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... was offering to her kinsman was of the most cordial and pleasant kind. She fancied everything she did was perfectly right and graceful. She invited her husband's clerks to come through the rain at ten o'clock from Kentish Town; she asked artists to bring their sketch-books from Kensington, or luckless pianists to trudge with their music from Brompton. She rewarded them with a smile and a cup of tea, and thought they were made happy by her condescension. If, after two or three of these delightful evenings, they ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... [of November, 1629] the wind was S.S.W., with seemingly fine weather. Therefore, in the name of God, we weighed anchor and set sail from these luckless Abrolhos for the mainland on an East-north-east course, for the purpose of seeking there the skipper and four other men, who on the 14th last were with their boat cut off from ship by a storm, after which we had resolved to continue our ...
— The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606-1765 • J. E. Heeres
... Defend my father. Woe is me, I cannot! Hard deeds and luckless have ta'en place; one crime Drags after it the other in close link. But we are innocent: how have we fallen Into this circle of mishap and guilt? To whom have we been faithless? Wherefore must The evil deeds and guilt reciprocal Of our ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... excuses for failure were ever accepted. They knew terrible punishments were certain to follow when anyone was luckless enough to incur that ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... winter with "thack and rape;" his wife, too, superintended the dairy with a skill which she had brought from Kyle, and as the harvest, for a season or two, was abundant, and the dairy yielded butter and cheese for the market, it seemed that "the luckless star" which ruled his lot had relented, and now shone unboding and benignly. But much more is required than toil of hand to make a successful farmer, nor will the attention bestowed only by fits and starts, compensate for carelessness or oversight: frugality, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... throat, and there was an end of his dreams. Four other sleepers were despatched in like manner, without time given them to utter a syllable. After them went another, who had entrenched himself between two horses; then the luckless Grill, who had made himself a pillow of a barrel which he had emptied. He was dreaming of opening a second barrel, but, alas, was tapped himself. A Greek and a German followed, who had been playing late at dice; fortunate, if they had continued to do so a little longer; but they never counted ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... lay, condemned to death In gaol for murder, wholly innocent, Yet caught in webs of luckless circumstance;— Thou know'st how lies, of ...
— Last Poems • Laurence Hope
... utterly wretched than was Arthur Fenton, after the luckless day when Mr. Irons had lighted upon the presence of Mrs. Herman at the studio. He raged against himself, against chance, most of all against the unmannerly and coarse-minded fellow who had forced himself into the studio, and then persisted in imagining evil ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... returned home, where his first act was to smash the luckless hat and replace it with another. But it was some time before he recovered from the horrors of that near approach to extermination, and he passed a very wakeful ...
— The Woggle-Bug Book • L. Frank Baum
... eating, drinking, and sleeping. Cannibalism in its worst features prevails. Young women are prized as special delicacies, particularly girls' ears prepared in palm oil, and, in order to make the flesh more palatable, the luckless victims are kept in water up to their necks for three or four days before they are slaughtered and served ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... never hope to reach that desirable altitude, have really no foundation in fact, nor is it a fact, as sailors are apt to believe, that it is nurtured for their special benefit as a convenient handle for playing off practical jokes on the luckless possessors; the truth being that the "queue," now so universally prized amongst them, is a symbol of conquest forced upon them by their hated Tartar-masters. Previous to the seventeenth century the inhabitants ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... Black-eyed Susan, JERROLD'S greatest triumph, have passed away into the limbo of forgotten plays and can never return to us. Another drama had in it as one of the characters "a certain cowardly English traveller named Luckless Tramp," a name, I should have thought, quite sufficient in itself to swamp every possible chance of success; yet our forefathers seem to have had no difficulty ...
— Punch, Volume 156, January 22, 1919. • Various
... Ah, cruel snake! Ah, luckless doom of woes! Like a cropped summer rose, Or lily cut, she withers on the brake. Her face, which once did make Our age so bright With beauty's light, is faint and pale; And the clear lamp doth fail, Which shed pure splendour ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... some trouble again, if they could judge from the noise he was making. Immediately visions of rattlesnakes, and all manner of dangers connected with the forest trails, flashed into the mind of Thad. What could the luckless fat boy have stumbled into now? That bump of curiosity which he was pleased to term his "investigating spirit," must have led ...
— The Boy Scouts' First Camp Fire - or, Scouting with the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... Glugs quite well by sight. And they say, "Our test is the best by far; For a Glug is a Glug; so there you are! And they climb the trees when it drizzles or hails To get electricity into their nails; And the Glug that fails Is a luckless Glug, ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... dispose of what was left. "I have swallowed all I can, I cannot swallow more, it is a physical impossibility," he seemed to say; and his stern officer reiterated her commands with secret imperative signals. Luckless dog! but in mere humanity we came to the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... other companion than a hypochondriacal papa, whose ailings so monopolized his time and attention that a daughter's happiness sunk into insignificance? Little wonder that she should melt into tears at so undesirable a prospect, that she should pity herself and her luckless fate, and that, when fully realizing the depths of loneliness into which she was to be precipitated for five long, weary months, she should jump at the dismal conclusion that her doll was stuffed with the most inferior variety of saw-dust and wish ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... being, botched by Nature in the flesh, no less lamentably than Melrose in the spirit. The legal inquiry into Brand's flight and death was short and mostly formal; but the actual evidence—as compared with current gossip—of his luckless mother, now left sonless and husbandless, and as to the relations of the family with Faversham, hastened the melting process in the public mind. It showed a man in bondage indeed to a tyrant; but doing what he could to lighten ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... adventures.—Know, then, he is that most incongruous of all monsters—a Scotch Buck—how far from being buck of the season you may easily judge. Every point of national character is opposed to the pretensions of this luckless race, when they attempt to take on them a personage which is assumed with so much facility by their brethren of the Isle of Saints. They are a shrewd people, indeed, but so destitute of ease, grace, pliability of manners, and insinuation of address, ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... of the Tower'; 'The Lord Mayor of London'; 'Cardinal Pole,' which deals with the court and times of Philip and Mary; 'John Law,' a story of the great Mississippi Bubble; 'Tower Hill,' whose heroine is the luckless Catharine Howard; 'The Spanish Match,' a story of the romantic pilgrimage of Prince Charles and "Steenie" Buckingham to Spain for the fruitless wooing of the Spanish Princess; and at least ten other romances, many of them in three volumes, all appearing between ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... The luckless lover laughed, a reckless, demoniac peal. "Two can play at that game!" he told her. "You're so high and mighty that a Mertzheimer isn't good enough for you. But you better ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... was therefore very stuffy. I selected a bed with great care, and in due time got into it, quite delighted with my carefully-chosen position, and soon buried my nose in the pillow, full of peaceful hopes. Luckless mortal! scarce had my nose extracted the cold from its contact with the pillow-case, when a sound came rushing forth with a violence which shook not only me and my bed, but the whole cabin. The tale is soon told. I had built my nest at the muzzle of ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... a beauteous youth, But, luckless, in the wave his face beholding, Himself he fascinates, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... is so universally known that nothing need be said about it beyond reminding the reader that he was born, as Lyly is supposed to have been, in 1554; that he was the son of Sir Henry Sidney, afterwards Viceroy of Ireland, and of Lady Mary, eldest daughter of the luckless Dudley, Duke of Northumberland; that he was educated at Shrewsbury and Christ Church, travelled much, acquiring the repute of one of the most accomplished cavaliers of Europe, loved without success Penelope Devereux ("Stella"), married Frances Walsingham, and died of his wounds ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... from what I have observed of the London stage, I see it is the custom to daub for the galleries, or to creep through the business under cover of a cold, tame mediocrity. Without the slightest patronage from the court or substantial encouragement from the fosterers of literary merit, these luckless personages are expected to attempt the same exertions and intense study, which is rewarded, in foreign countries, by the most flattering and judicious attention; as well as by a pension, to cheer the infirmities of old age. Although tolerably well paid ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 531, Saturday, January 28, 1832. • Various
... spring morning. There was a creaking, now, and then the iron was seen to shiver and then bend, slowly, and once it was wrenched out of the horizontal, the motion was more and more rapid. Until, when the giant was done with his labor, the ends of the iron over-lapped around the necks of the two luckless brothers. Mac Strann stepped back and surveyed his work; the rest of the room was in silence, saving that the red-headed man was coming back to consciousness and now writhed and groaned feebly. He could not rise; that was manifest, for the ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... climbed a high rock, I caught sight of the glow of their bivouac fires. Imagination conjured up the shrieks of tortured victims, for we had all seen enough of late to know what would happen to any luckless straggler they might have caught and brought to make sport by the fires. But there was no imagination about the calls of Kagig's men, posted above us on invisible dark crags and ledges to guard against surprise. We slept in comfortable consciousness that a sleepless watch was being kept—until ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... Fifty luckless souls, more or less decently clothed in bodies, having been crowded upon the raft, the shore-line was cast off, and she drifted magnificently out into the stream, and stuck fast about a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... and goodwill that reigned in this household, even in the midst of so much that was terrible, was a great contrast to the anguish, terror, and ceaseless recriminations which made the Masons' abode a veritable purgatory for its luckless inhabitants. As the news of the spreading contagion reached her, so did Madam's terror and horror increase. As her husband had said long since, she sat in rooms with closed windows and drawn curtains, burned fires large enough to roast an ox, and half poisoned herself with ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... was no exaggeration whatever. Throughout the Mississippi valley there could be nothing more heartless than his treatment of the sable helots, whose luckless lot it was to have him for a master. Around his courts, and in his cotton-fields, the crack of the whip was heard habitually—its thong sharply felt by the victims of his caprice, or malice. The "cowhide" was constantly carried by himself, and his overseer. He had a son, too, who could ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... a vision in my dreams;— I saw a row of twenty beams; From every beam a rope was hung, In every rope a lover swung; I asked the hue of every eye That bade each luckless lover die; Ten shadowy lips said, heavenly blue, And ten ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... and faint and low, Like the sighing of an evening breeze, Comes through these painted lattices The ceaseless sound of human woe, Here, while her bosom aches and throbs With deep and agonizing sobs, That half are passion, half contrition, The luckless daughter of perdition Slowly confesses her secret shame! The time, the place, the lover's name! Here the grim murderer, with a groan, From his bruised conscience rolls the stone, Thinking that thus he can atone For ravages of sword and flame! Indeed, I marvel, ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... instructing the young suckers that cling to their sides in just notions of general social distinctions, nurture their young antipathies with pettish philippics against some luckless ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... pious Sisters, demoralised by the boatmen of the Loire, still edifies and scandalises the lover of happy badinage in verse; one is the young and unfortunate NICOLAS-JOSEPH-LAURENT GILBERT (1751-80), less unfortunate and less gifted than the legend makes him, yet luckless enough and embittered enough to become the satirist of Academicians and philosophers and the society which had scorned his muse; and the third is JEAN-PIERRE CLARIS DE FLORIAN (1755-94), the amiable fabulist, who, lacking La Fontaine's lyric genius, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... great affection for her, and intrusted her with the exclusive management of the culinary department, little negroes and all. His confidence in her was not misplaced, for from morning till night she was faithful to her trust, and woe to any luckless woolly head who was found wasting ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... in the afternoon, Rabourdin came home to dress for dinner, his wife presided at his toilet and presently laid before him the fatal memorandum which, like the slipper in the Arabian Nights, the luckless man was fated to meet ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... Themistocles, before his ocean-raid at Salamis, sacrificed three young men to Bacchus the Devourer. The Markerstown, in sailing out upon the great deep, immolated at least twelve, old and young, as a festive holocaust to Neptune the Nauseator. Here in their sacrificial crate were the luckless scapegoats, sad-eyed prey of the propeller. It was easy to see, at the first glance, that the Martyr was the central sun round which clustered the planets of propitiation. Born king, he asserted his kingship, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... comfortable to lie under during the cold winter nights. There was often a great deal of sport at the close of one of these social industrial gatherings. When the men came in from the field to supper, some luckless wight was sure to be caught, and tossed up and down in the quilt amid the laughter and shouts of the company. But of all the bees, the apple-bee was the chief. In these old and young joined. The boys around the neighbourhood, with their home-made apple-machines, of all shapes and designs, would ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... talons the under side of its wing, and with an unresisted power forces the bird to fall in a slanting direction upon the nearest shore. Pouncing downwards, the eagle is soon joined by his mate, when they turn the body of the luckless swan upwards, and tear it ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... and that, As boars or lions compassed round with pales On that day when kings gather to the sport The people, and have penned the mighty beasts Within the toils of death; but these, although With walls ringed round, yet tear with tusk and fang What luckless thrall soever draweth near. So these death-compassed heroes slew their foes Ever as they pressed on. Yet had their might Availed not for defence, for all their will, Had Teucer and Idomeneus strong of heart Come not to help, with Thoas, ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... as though at any moment through the forest aisles they might discover a giant form lumbering down upon them. They did not think it at all likely, as there had been no rumors for some time past of a grizzly having been seen in the locality, nor had the mutilated body of some luckless steer borne traces of his handiwork. Still it was "better to be safe than sorry," and their vigilance did not relax until they came out of the thicker forest onto a more scantily wooded plateau and saw before them the shining waters of the lake that ...
— Bert Wilson in the Rockies • J. W. Duffield
... of his death panic went through the markets like a hurricane; for it came at a luckless time. Prices tottered and crashed like towers in an earthquake. For two days Wall Street was a clamorous inferno of pale despair. All over the United States, wherever speculation had its devotees, went a waft of ruin, a plague of suicide. In Europe also not a few took with their ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... run between two hills," the Dutch called it Sleepy Haven Kill, hence Sleepy Hollow. "Far in the foldings of the hills winds this wizard stream," writes the grand sachem of all the wizards, who wove the romance of the headless horseman and the luckless schoolmaster so tightly about the spot that they are to-day part and parcel of it. The bridge over which the scared pedagogue scurried was some rods further up the stream than is the present crossing, for in those days the Post Road ran along the north side of the church, and the ...
— The New York and Albany Post Road • Charles Gilbert Hine
... indeed, in one way or other, as subordinate character or as heroine, this figure of a graceful feminine victim comes into nearly every novel. Virtuous heroes fare little better. Poor Colonel Chabert is disowned and driven to beggary by the wife who has committed bigamy; the luckless cure, Birotteau, is cheated out of his prospects and doomed to a broken heart by the successful villainy of a rival priest and his accomplices; the Comte de Manerville is ruined and transported by his wife ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... Priscilla, in an awful tone, pointing to where the luckless Terence is crawling home in the fond belief that he is defying all detection; whereupon Kit, with much presence of mind, looks scrutinizingly in just the opposite direction. "It is somebody carrying a gun. Good gracious! it is ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... shouts a gruff voice outside; and the entrapped sailors, overturning the lights, spring for doors and windows, in vain attempts to escape the fate in store for them. The press-gang seldom returned to the ship empty handed, and the luckless tar who once fell into their clutches was wise to accept his capture good-naturedly; for the bos'n's cat was the remedy commonly prescribed ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... from Little John. But right cunning was the shooting, for the men had spent a certain time in daily practice, and many were the shafts which sped daintily through the circle. Nathless now and again some luckless fellow would shoot awry and would be sent winding from a long arm blow from the tall lieutenant while the glade roared with laughter. And none more hearty a guffaw was given than came from the Sheriff's own throat, for the spirit of the greenwood ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... of which he was cashier. By May he had taken eleven hundred francs. In that fatal month Mariette started for London, to see what could be done with the lords while the temporary opera house in the Hotel Choiseul, rue Lepelletier, was being prepared. The luckless Philippe had ended, as often happens, in loving Mariette notwithstanding her flagrant infidelities; she herself had never thought him anything but a dull-minded, brutal soldier, the first rung of a ladder on which she had never intended to remain long. ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... tee-to-tum, marked with dice faces, can be manipulated so as to fall high or low, according to the betting, irrespective of the person who holds it, so long as he does not know the secret. There is a board with a dial face and a pointer on a print. The luckless "punters" cannot tell that it is controlled by a magnetic ring. Into these mysteries ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot
... sledge, and sent him sprawling on the snow; and then she wheeled the dogs around, and fairly made them fly again on the backward track to her father's hut, where she crawled once more into her nest of furs, and where the luckless Metak was ever afterwards content to let her stay, satisfied that he was ...
— Cast Away in the Cold - An Old Man's Story of a Young Man's Adventures, as Related by Captain John Hardy, Mariner • Isaac I. Hayes
... the roughs and the children who mocked his passage being actuated merely by impersonal malice. To his friends—if the few who were aware of his existence could be called friends—he was a Schlemihl (a luckless fool). ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the luckless captive was led away by his enemies to their neighboring village, which was situated at Messessaga Point, near the fortress. The warriors sadly bore, on a litter of branches, the body of their slain chieftain, leading beside it their pinioned ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... induced some luckless mortal to give to certain mysterious compounds the appellation of cosmetics! But here is an atonement; for even in our unmythical, unbelieving days, the god 'Terminus' is made to stand guard over every railway ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... to the drum beats growing fainter and fainter in the distance, and, after half a century had passed, he was still to her the young soldier in his brave, blue coat, who had kissed her for that long farewell. All that is left on Canadian soil to recall this gallant though luckless soldier is the low-ceiled cottage where his body was laid out, a small tablet on the precipice, which reads, "Here Montgomery fell, 1775," and another of white marble, in the courtyard of the military prison in the Citadel, recently erected by two patriotic American girls in memory of ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway
... is most catholic in his choice, taking his readers to soar in a balloon with the luckless Andree, to wander in African forests and Australian deserts, to seek for the North Pole with Nansen, and even to note such an up-to-date expedition as that of the 'Discovery' in the Antarctic Regions, to cite ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... two hundred thousand Indians in Espanola in 1492, and that in 1548 there were barely five hundred survivors. The same decrease had taken place in the other islands. But the work of Las Casas came in time to save the Indians on the mainland from the fate of the luckless islanders. ...
— Introductory American History • Henry Eldridge Bourne and Elbert Jay Benton
... so dignified, hastily and eagerly walked down the garden path, and for the first time since that luckless letter from the camp had reached her, she could look calmly and clearly at the position of affairs, and reflect on the measures which Ani must take in the immediate future. She told herself that all was well, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... in the audience chamber. It is a portrait of the luckless but noble Dom Pedro, Emperor of the Brazils. Given to Felix Babylon by Dom Pedro himself, it hangs there solitary and sublime as a reminder to Kings and Princes that Empires may pass away and greatness fall. A certain ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... the lovely, luckless Fatima, sitting at her cottage window, dreaming the dreams of girl-hood. She has received Bluebeard's message of love, and is awaiting his coming as the hero of her heart's romance. This "Traum" theme is almost precisely like the "Guileless Fool Motive" of "Parsifal," ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... extremity as that of his projected pilgrimage, provided a fleet of ships to transport him back to his own dominions, where, to complete the farce, he arrived just five days after the ceremony of his son's coronation as king of Portugal. Nor was it destined that the luckless monarch should solace himself, as he had hoped, in the arms of his youthful bride; since the pliant pontiff, Sixtus the Fourth, was ultimately persuaded by the court of Castile to issue a new bull overruling the dispensation formerly conceded, on ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... child is not known to be a human being till some time after its birth. And this is not uttered by some speculative philosopher in his closet, but by a medical practitioner on his daily rounds, tools in hand, as it were, to carry out his theory and break the skulls of any and all luckless babes that may come in his way in the exercise of what he calls his legitimate practice. How long after birth the child remains without becoming a human being, he does not pretend to know; they remain non-human ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... in that illustrious and luckless household was omnipotent, insulted the Princess in the most outrageous manner. Finding such daily slights and affronts unbearable, Madame complained to the Kings of France and England, who ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... heels, and vainly imploring assistance. Again and again she would dash by the applauding groups, adding the aggravation of her voice to the danger of her heels, until suddenly wheeling, she would gallop to Carter's Pond, and deposit her luckless freight in the muddy ditch. This practical joke was repeated until one Sunday she was approached by Juan Ramirez, a Mexican vaquero, booted and spurred, and carrying a riata. A crowd was assembled to see her ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... saddest and most tragic of all. We saw high up in the wall, frowning over the river, the window of the chamber from which she had thrown herself after slaying her recreant lover in her rage and despair. A weird story it is, but if the luckless maiden still haunts the scene of her blighted love, an observant sojourner who fitly writes of Ludlow in poetic phrase never saw her. "Nearly every midnight for a month," he says, "it fell to me to traverse the quarter of a mile of dark, lonely lane that leads beneath the walls of ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... on the railway-line. It rained without stopping all August; it was damp and cold; they had not carried the corn in the fields, and on big farms where the wheat had been cut by machines it lay not in sheaves but in heaps, and I remember how those luckless heaps of wheat turned blacker every day and the grain was sprouting in them. It was hard to work; the pouring rain spoiled everything we managed to do. We were not allowed to live or to sleep in the railway buildings, and we took refuge in ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... intimation from the misogamist German Professor that he had persuaded another of his old pupils to include a prize-symphony by Lancelot in the programme of a Crystal Palace Concert. This was of itself sufficient to turn Lancelot's head away from all but thoughts of Fame, even if Mary Ann had not been luckless enough to be again discovered cleaning the steps—and without gloves. Against such a spectacle the veriest idealist is powerless. If Mary Ann did not immediately revert to the category of quadrupeds in which she had started, it was only because of Lancelot's supplementary ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... line, now a speck; let us turn away, with the face to the Old. Amongst my fellow-passengers how many there are returning home disgusted, disappointed, impoverished, ruined, throwing themselves again on those unsuspecting poor friends who thought they had done with the luckless good-for-noughts forever. For don't let me deceive thee, reader, into supposing that every adventurer to Australia has the luck of Pisistratus. Indeed, though the poor laborer, and especially the poor operative from London and the great trading towns (who has generally more of the ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... humble and timid, scared like a luckless creature whom life never wearies of persecuting. She was becoming almost blind, and little Celine had to lead her. The girl's fair, thin face wore its wonted expression of shrewd intelligence, and even now, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... laughter drowned the words of the luckless second speaker, and some one yelled vociferously, "Neddie the fortune-teller! Don't tell me he's ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... instead here was Miss Marlowe thumping the desk and telling them they never used their brains. Five A sat at attention. Miss Marlowe, indignant, was apt to be interesting, but no one desired to be the luckless offender against whom her Irish wit might ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... ambassador, begging his interest with the Duke of Parma that they might obtain from that conqueror some odd-refuse town or so in: England, such as York, Canterbury, London, or the like—till the luckless Don Bernardino was ashamed ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... fault more his father's than his own. Marie stood before the prisoner, her arms crossed, her cheeks livid, her lips trembling. It was a terrible interview. This time it was she who threatened, the man who entreated pardon. Marie was deaf to his prayers, and the head of the luckless man fell bleeding at her feet, and her men threw the body into the sea. But God never allows a murder to go unpunished: James preferred the queen to her sister, and the widow of Charles of Durazzo gained nothing by her ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - JOAN OF NAPLES—1343-1382 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... peculiar wifeless condition?) there had been a constant coming and going of servants, first chosen, and then dismissed, by Maud. At last she suggested that her brother-in-law should engage a lady housekeeper, and the luckless James Tapster had even interviewed several applicants for the post after they had been chosen—sifted out, as it were—by Maud. Unfortunately, they had all been more or less of his own age, and plain, very plain; while he, naturally enough, would have preferred to see ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... that he thought he had better not go away again. Indeed it would be displeasing to God, "qui mit son corps pour son peuple sauver," if he, Joinville, abandoned his people. And he reports only in the briefest abstract the luckless "voie de Tunes," or expedition to Tunis. But of the earlier and not much less unlucky Damietta crusade, in which he took part, as well as of his hero's life till all but the last, he has written very fully, and in a fashion which is very interesting, though unluckily we have no manuscript representing ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... accoutred barbarian rolled in the dust. Another shot, another Gothic chief slain, and again a shout of triumph. Then the signal to shoot was given to the soldiers, and hundreds of bolts from Wild Ass and Balista were hurtling through the air, aimed not at Gothic soldiers, but at the luckless oxen that drew the ponderous towers. The beasts being slain, it was impossible for the Goths who were immediately under the walls and exposed to a deadly discharge of arrows from the battlements, to move their towers either backward ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... Denison found that Jacky had not deviated from the truth—the alligators did eat the ducks, the tiger and carpet-snakes and iguanas did crawl about the place at night-time and seize any luckless fowl not strong enough to fly up to roost in the branch of a tree, the hawks did prefer live poultry to long-deceased bullock, and those hens physically capable of laying eggs laid them on an ironstone ridge about a mile away from the house. He went there one day, found nine eggs, and saw ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... their funeral pyre Rise phoenix-wise and earth-sick spirits yearn For fragrant flower, and sward, and changeful trees, For storied rose, and sweet poetic morn, For sound of bird, and brook, and murmuring bees, For luckless fancies of illusion born, What time in dark we dwelt and framed our lore? Woe, woe, if then regretful we should mourn "What wisdom left we on that human shore!" For brooding kindness can a charm beget, Not duly won, and from Heaven's ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... by the head, pretty well convinces her that he is a first-flight man to hounds, and probably has appeared in silk on a racecourse. The match terminates as might be anticipated: Sylla, under the laudable impression that she is making her advantage in the weights tell, gallops her luckless mare pretty nearly to a standstill, and Lionel, though winning as he likes, good-naturedly reduces it to a half length, whereby his defeated antagonist lays the flattering unction to her soul that, had ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... the baying of a dog from the Red Farm, and he went on, muttering strange sixteenth-century curses, and ever and anon brandishing the rusty dagger in the midnight air. Finally he reached the corner of the passage that led to luckless Washington's room. For a moment he paused there, the wind blowing his long grey locks about his head, and twisting into grotesque and fantastic folds the nameless horror of the dead man's shroud. Then the clock struck the quarter, and he felt the time was come. He chuckled to himself, and ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... it is not possible to escape these "winged reptiles." They abound exceedingly in all sunny spots; nor in the shady lane do they not haunt every bush, and lie perdu under every leaf, thence sallying forth on the luckless wight who presumes to molest their "solitary reign;" they hang with deliberate importunity over the path of the sauntering pedestrian, and fly with the flying horseman, like the black cares (that is to say, blue ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 346, December 13, 1828 • Various
... quite the rage in Hadleigh. All the townspeople, and the resident gentry, and even the visitors, want their gowns made by the Miss Challoners. Their fit is perfect; and they have such taste. And——" But here the luckless Dick could ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... tire in untamed infamy of song, Lest, in some dismal Dunciad's future page, I stand the CIBBER of this tuneless age; Lest, in another POPE th' indulgent skies Should give inspired by all their deities, My luckless name, in his immortal strain, Should, blasted, brand me as a second Cain; Doom'd in that song to live against my will, Whom all must scorn, and yet whom none could kill. The youth, resisted by the maiden's art, Persists, and time subdues her kindling heart; To strong entreaty ...
— Inebriety and the Candidate • George Crabbe
... scalps, and winging home in a hurry to her baby, fed it upon green-fly. The baby did not feed nicely, and the picture of the glistening, corsleted devil queen-mother, with her lugubrious, mask-like face, and the wriggling, hanging sack babe, and the luckless, fool, helpless green-fly between them, was not a pretty one. Here maternity was not a Sunday-sermon subject, yet it ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... seemed full of it too. It influenced the conversation at meals, the habits of the household, the names of the pet animals, and even of the children. I was called Mary, in a fever of chivalrous enthusiasm for the fair and luckless Queen of Scotland, and Fatima received her name when the study of Arabic had brought about an eastern mania. My father had wished to call her Shahrazad, after the renowned sultana of the 'Arabian Nights' but when he called upon the ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... that scarcely seems a grave, Deck'd with the daisy, and each lowly flower, Time leaves no stone, recording of the knave, Whether of humble, or of lordly power: Fame says he was a bard—Fame did not save His name beyond the living of his hour— A luckless dower. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various
... nerve which good women have, she made him give her every detail of Lucy Passmore's story and of all which had happened from the day of their sailing to that luckless night at Guayra. And when it was done, she led Ayacanora out, and began busying herself about the girl's comforts, as calmly as if Frank and Amyas had been sleeping in their cribs ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... is; but everything hinges on the extraordinary fact that the hungry, thin, common, shiftless, luckless man at the very bottom is still a MAN. He will not be a thief, and he will die of hunger and cold, as poor fellows do almost every winter day, rather than take the food that society guarantees ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... guardian against lightning had been a vortex-magnet at the moment when a luckless wight had attempted to abate the nuisance of a "loose" atomic vortex. That wight died, of course—they almost always do—and the vortex, instead of being destroyed, was simply broken up into an indefinite number of widely-scattered new vortices. And one of these bits of furious, uncontrolled ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... Statesman subtle wiles ensure, The Cit, and Polecat stink and are secure: Toads with their venom, Doctors with their drug, The Priest, and Hedgehog, in their robes are snug! Oh, Nature! cruel step-mother, and hard, To thy poor, naked, fenceless child the Bard! No Horns but those by luckless Hymen worn, And those, (alas! alas!) not Plenty's Horn! With naked feelings, and with aching pride, He bears th' unbroken blast on every side! Vampire booksellers drain him to the heart, And ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... dead, Whispers each dear and venerated name Of the last victims ere the blessing came, Worthies, who through the lands that gave them birth Breath'd the strong evidence of growing worth; Parents, cut down in life's meridian day, And childhood's thousand thousand swept away; Life's luckless mariners! ye, we deplore Who sunk within a boat's length of the shore [A]. [Footnote A: So lately as the year 1793, the small-pox was carried to the Isle of France by a Dutch ship, and there destroyed five thousand four hundred persons ...
— Wild Flowers - Or, Pastoral and Local Poetry • Robert Bloomfield
... sweet Myrrha's tears: For love did scorn me in my mother's womb, And sullen Saturn, pregnant at my birth, With all the fatal stars conspir'd in one To frame a hapless constellation, Presaging Sophos' luckless destiny. Here, here doth Sophos turn Ixion's restless wheel, And here lies wrapp'd in labyrinths of love— Of his sweet Lelia's love, whose sole idea still Prolongs the hapless date of Sophos' hopeless life. Ah! said I life? a life far worse than death— Than death? ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... treated it with scorn,—"His child with her beauty would look much higher;" but be continued all the same to accept my assistance, and to sanction my visits. At length my slender purse was pretty well exhausted, and the luckless drawing-master was so harassed with petty debts that further credit became impossible. At this time I happened to hear from a fellow-student that his sister, who was the principal of a lady's school in Cheltenham, bad commissioned him to look out for a first-rate teacher ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... wanness, a yellowness. Yes, these things meant age! In such a spirit, perchance, did Elizabeth of England survey the reflection in her mirror, until all the glories of her reign seemed as nothing to her when weighed against this dread horror of fast-coming age. And luckless Mary, cooped up in the narrow rooms at Fotheringay, may have deemed captivity, and the shadow of doom, as but trifling ills compared with the loss of youth and beauty. Once to have been exquisitely beautiful, ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... numerous plots against the reformed religion. A long imprisonment in the Tower for his futile efforts to set Mary Queen of Scots at liberty, far from curing the dangerous schemes of this zealous partisan of the luckless Stuart heroine, only kept him out of mischief for a time. No sooner had he obtained his freedom than he set his mind to work to turn his house in Worcestershire into a harbour of refuge for the followers ...
— Secret Chambers and Hiding Places • Allan Fea
... how he helped me skin old Mort Washer?" And, changing his mind about entering the jessamine bower, Mr. Courtney, explaining with great glee the skinning of his friend Mort Washer, took the other path and the two strolled away without having seen or heard the luckless eavesdroppers. ...
— Five Thousand an Hour - How Johnny Gamble Won the Heiress • George Randolph Chester
... civil perturbation, And hast supported many a different party. Yet think not I deride: Many great characters of modern days, (The worthy vicars of convenient Brays) Have thought it no disgrace to change their side. And yet now many a luckless boat, How many a thoughtless, many a jovial crew, How many a young apprentice of no note; How many a maiden fair and lover true— Have passed down thy Charybdis of a throat, And gone, Oh! dreadful Davy Jones, to you! The coroner for Southwark, or the City, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... storms Laid a' my blossoms low, O! But luckless Fortune's northern storms Laid a' my ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... the red flame that burst from Wetzel's rifle came a sharp yelp of agony from the leader. He rolled over and over. Instantly followed a horrible mingling of snarls and barks, and snapping of jaws as the band fought over the body of their luckless comrade. ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... and on further search found ten more, lying, half-devoured, in different directions—the murder was now out. The sheep I had seen on the opposite shore was one of my own, which had taken to the water, and had thus escaped the fangs of the wolves. I saw two more of my luckless flock on a shoal more than a mile down the river, which—less fortunate than their companion—had been swept down by the current and drowned. Exactly a week afterwards, I had a similar number destroyed by the wolves. As far as I was ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... the truth about the great English rebellion. 'Pride's Purge,' the 'elective kingship without a veto of the 'New Model,' and the merciless mystification of Bradshaw, tell their own story. Steering to avoid the Scylla of Strafford, the luckless Parliamentarians ran the ship of State full ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... commenced to do the same, and after the brutes we raced, inhaling dust, expectorating mud, and cursed by every transport officer. Happy men, without horses to look after, were looting fowls and porkers, for the district was a good one; but such was not for us luckless Yeomen. Even when we got into camp we had to stand for nearly two hours in the dark, looking after the brutes till some more Yeomanry, the Roughs, relieved us, I cannot help it—it's the twelfth, ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... answers; and when he tried to gain access to the princesses, he was repulsed by their doorkeepers. At last: 'My infinite patience was exhausted. Leaving my books and writings, after the service of thirteen years, persisted in with luckless constancy, I wandered forth like a new Bias, and betook myself to Mantua, where I met with the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... It is a luckless young traveler who does not find himself or herself engaged in some romance, permanent or transient, which ever after sweetens or gilds the memories of the tour. Moreover Gard was at an age when youthful susceptibilities ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... at him, but sat gazing straight ahead, her shoulders bent as if she were crouching to receive a blow. He began in a low voice, and, as he spoke, it rose or fell as his words and the distant music prompted him. "Mine has been a luckless life," he said. "I have been a football of destiny, kicked and flung about, hither and yon. Again and again I have thought in my despair to lay me down and die. But something has urged me on, on, on. And at ...
— The Fortune Hunter • David Graham Phillips
... had not been long in bringing the luckless wight to life again, and he opened his eyes and gave an "ahem!" so vigorous and unexpected that Lina, frightened, replied ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... luckless speech, and bootless boast! For which he paid full dear; For while he spake, a braying ass Did ...
— The Diverting History of John Gilpin • William Cowper
... had evidently recovered consciousness, and was making feeble efforts to raise herself. Her large, blue eyes were looking at the moonlit scene round her with a scared and terrified look; they rested with a mixture of horror and pity on the Jew, whose luckless fate and wild howls had been the first signs that struck her, with her returning senses; then she caught sight of Chauvelin, in his neat, dark clothes, which seemed hardly crumpled after the stirring ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy |
