"Shifting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mile from the mouth of the river, some small canoes, belonging to the Kamtschadales, took up us and our baggage, and carried us over a spit of sand, which is thrown up by the rapidity of the river, and which they told us was continually shifting. When we had crossed this shoal, the water again deepened, and here we found a commodious boat, built and shaped like a Norway yawl, ready to convey us up the river, together ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... struck him as the wonderful feature in the mountain scenery was its everchanging and yet unchanging aspect. It was never twice like the same thing to him. Shifting and altering, advancing and retreating, fifty times a day, it was unalterable only in its grandeur. The lake itself too had every kind of varying beauty for him. By moonlight it was indescribably solemn; and before the coming on of a storm ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... lasts an interminable time. The grouping is admirable, every shifting of the crowd in the foreground produces a new and finished picture, with always the same background of the three high crosses and their agonizing burdens against that lurid sky. The impenitent Gestas curses and dies; the penitent Demas ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... she had no idea of shifting any blame from her own shoulders. She wished to punish Leucha, and punish her she would. Yes, the 'conspiracy' ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... speech is necessary to good conversation of any kind, and especially is it essential to discussion. One of the stupidest of conversational sins is quibbling—talking insincerely, just for the sake of using words, and shifting the point at issue to some incidental, subordinate argument on which the decision does not at all depend. It is the intellectually honest ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... common cause with these foul and noisome Izimu,"[1] said the king, shifting somewhat his ground. "These carrion dogs, who devour one another, even their own flesh ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... boatswain. "I only wish she had the wind freer. It will be no easy matter for that big ship, rigged as she is, to beat up this harbour, and when she is inside it is hard to say where she can bring up; for, with the wind shifting and veering about, there is no safe anchorage that I could ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... found that the old Byzantine model did not look like nature. They began, not by rejecting it, but by improving it, giving it slight movements here and there, turning the head, throwing out a hand, or shifting the folds of drapery. The Eastern type was still seen in the long pathetic face, oblique eyes, green flesh tints, stiff robes, thin fingers, and absence of feet; but the painters now began to modify and enliven it. More realistic Italian faces were introduced, architectural and landscape backgrounds ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... at the law. It would make a mockery of justice. It would place a premium upon crime and a handicap upon honesty and virtue. However bad the dishonest might be it would make them worse. It would necessarily lower the standard of their morality by shifting the burden of their sins to others. It would destroy personal responsibility, and personal responsibility is the basis of sound morals and ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... fully stocked, bitterness developed into hatred and warfare. Sheep herders were considered outcasts, and of no social account. To kill one was by some considered a kindness, for it ended the misery of a man who would go crazy watching the shifting, crawling maggots anyway. It was bad enough to be a cow milker, but to be a sheep herder was ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... the water in the ditch, and the east postern, "N," were each and all of them works of sufficient importance to be replaced, no matter what the cost, when destroyed by the subsidence of foundations probably insufficient when placed upon a footing of wet and treacherous London clay so near the shifting foreshore of the river. The great quay, or wharf, "Kaia Regis," "O," is first mentioned in 1228. The distinction of having been (albeit unconsciously) the founder of the present Zoological Society might well be claimed for Henry III., as, although Henry I. had a collection ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... not state what she wanted him to do. In place of that she whipped up her horse rather smartly, after a thoughtful silence, and joined Tilloughby, the three of them riding abreast. The next shifting, around a deep mud hole which only left room for an Indian file procession, brought Sam alongside Miss Josephine, and here he stuck for the balance of the ride, leaving Princeman to ride part of the time alone between the two couples, and part of the time to be the third rider ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... among special cases of devotion, the little, straight, light-haired, smiling woman, who was so long chief of the Dormitory Group, who was at nightfall wandering about with stray towels, sheets and pillows, always making arrangements in the shifting population for every one who came; hunting places for stray visitors, when we were crowded; puzzled and wearied oft—for no one knew at what hour of the day or evening visitors might come and we had oftentimes ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... this valley is the Platte river, a half a mile or more wide, with water from an inch to two feet deep, running over a sandy bottom and filled with numberless islands of shifting sand. The banks were lined with willows and cottonwood bushes and bordered in many places by green, grassy meadows, but trees were a rarity and for some two hundred miles we did not see one larger than ...
— A Gold Hunter's Experience • Chalkley J. Hambleton
... suppose they're doing over here?" Joan drew a little nearer as she spoke, her horse shifting to keep by ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... the most considerable of them has vanished, all but a fragment. Small as is the whole body of verse attributed to him, not all is clearly his. Dr. Hannah, and other ardent admirers of his muse, have been unable to satisfy themselves whether he really wrote False Love and True Love, with its shifting rhythm, and its bewitching scattered phrases; the Shepherd's fantastically witty Description of Love, or Anatomy ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... deliberation he scrutinised the uncouth, unkempt figure and unshaven face of Razumihin, who looked him boldly and inquiringly in the face without rising from his seat. A constrained silence lasted for a couple of minutes, and then, as might be expected, some scene-shifting took place. Reflecting, probably from certain fairly unmistakable signs, that he would get nothing in this "cabin" by attempting to overawe them, the gentleman softened somewhat, and civilly, though with some severity, emphasising every syllable ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the purpose of primary intellectual education? I apprehend that its first object is to train the young in the use of those tools wherewith men extract knowledge from the ever-shifting succession of phenomena which pass before their eyes; and that its second object is to inform them of the fundamental laws which have been found by experience to govern the course of things, so that they may not be turned out into ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... have done damned well according to your own point of view. You have aimed at getting the supreme power, and you have got it all right." Rudd had lost his nervousness now, he was shifting his feet a little, but the sentences flowed easily. "I am a weak head, I know, and you have managed to smash me quite easily. It wasn't very hard, although you pretend you are the devil ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... hopeless spot upon its surface. One gets close to the heart of these things; they are almost as precious as Picciola to the prisoner, and yield a fresh and constant joy such as the pleasure-seeking inhabitants of cities could not find in their whole round of shifting diversions. With a bright and cheerful interior, open fires, books and pictures, windows full of thrifty blossoming plants and climbing vines, a family of singing birds, plenty of work, and a clear head and quiet conscience, ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... present era; and, nine times out of ten, the thing we believe to be new is in reality as old as the world itself. In one sense the whole of history is a vast transition. No period stands alone; the present is in every age merely the shifting point at which the past and the future meet. All things move onwards. But the movement sometimes takes the form of a cataract, at others of an even and almost imperceptible current. This is really another way of saying that the usually slow and gradual course of change is, at certain stages, ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... she rose and straightened the bed. Shifting the pillow she found beneath it the purse she had placed there before going to sleep. Excitement and exhaustion had driven it out of her head. She felt quite remorseful when the remembrance of the chivalrous young ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... of an imperial, centralism. What is to guard against this centralism? Not universal suffrage, for that tends to create it; and if the government is left to it, the government becomes practically the will of an ever shifting and irresponsible majority. Is the remedy in written or paper constitutions? Party can break through them, and by making the judges elective by party, for short terms, and re-eligible, can do so with impunity. In several of the States, the dominant majority have ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... of a prayer addressed to a power stronger than man, and magic became a religion. Its rites developed side by side with the canonical liturgies, and frequently encroached on them.[61] The only barrier between them was the vague and constantly shifting borderline that limits the neighboring domains of ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... goes he that knows no end of his journey. I have passed the very utmost bounds of shifting. I have no course now but to hang myself: I have lived since yesterday two a clock of a spice-cake I had at a burial: and for drink, I got it at an Ale-house among Porters, such as will bear out a man, if he have no money indeed—I mean out of their companies, for they are ...
— The London Prodigal • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... gazing imperturbably upon the group; and as he sat in the shadow, his dark hair and eyes and suit of sables made him, in that society, the black thread of mystery which he weaves into his stories; while the shifting presence of the Brook Farmer played like heat lightning around ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... with it to make a set at once. Usually, there are four bags to a set, but any number of persons from two to eight can play at bean-bags. Each player holds two, flinging to his opponent the one in his right hand, and rapidly shifting the one in his left to the right, so as to leave the left hand free to catch the bag which is thrown at him. A set of these bags would be a nice present for some of you little girls to make for your small brothers; and there are various ways of ornamenting the bags gayly and prettily. The real ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... the rubbernecks betook themselves away, but Pisen-face Lynch did not shoot. He stood in the street, shifting his feet uneasily, and Wunpost opened the vials ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... her! And in my madness I accused her of putting it there to ruin me. And some one (a man) said slowly, 'She is impossible!—quite impossible!' That one memory stands out like a little oasis in a desert of mirage and shifting sand, and thirst. I should know the room again if I saw it. There was a window opening into a little paved courtyard with a fountain in it, and doves drinking. But I shall never see it again. And the drug became alive like ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... back. Tie 'em good and firm. Take your time. Make a job of it. That's it. Now, then, hitch the loose ends round that scrub-oak. That's right. Now go into the house, and slip into your overalls. We'll be shifting ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... distance longer than it really was. The sun, which was now high in the heavens, beat down with terrific force upon our heads, and as we had on only our sea-caps, which afforded little or no protection, we felt the heat greatly. We found some comfort, however, by shifting our packs onto our heads. Aboh, who saw how much we suffered, offered to relieve us of them. He carried my pack and his own on his head, and another on his shoulders, with perfect ease. I bethought ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... between those shifting rocks, The new Symplegades[338]—the crushing Stocks, Where Midas might again his wish behold 660 In real paper or imagined gold. That magic palace of Alcina[339] shows More wealth than Britain ever had to lose, Were all her atoms of unleavened ore, And all her pebbles from Pactolus' ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... who was master in his own clan, Van Rycke, displaying no interest at all in the shifting mass of lower rank Salariki, marched straight on to the door of the enclosure. Two or three of the younger warriors got to their feet, their brilliant cloaks flicking out like spreading wings. But when Van Rycke did not even lift an eyelid in their direction, they made no ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... had drawn near, and while the matron delivered her explanation, with an uneasy sorting and shifting of words, a quick signal of intelligence passed between her hearers. "You see?" Amherst's eyes exclaimed; "I see—they have sent her away because she told you," Bessy's flashed back in wrath, and his answering look did ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... soon shall he deplore Thy broken faith, thy altered mien: Like one astonished at the roar Of breakers on a leeward shore, Whom gentle airs and skies serene Had tempted on the treacherous deep, So he thy perfidy shall weep Who now enjoys thee fair and kind, But dreams not of the shifting wind. Thrice wretched they, deluded and betrayed, Who trust thy glittering smile and Siren tongue! I have escaped the shipwreck, and have hung In Neptune's fane my dripping vest displayed With votive tablet on his altar laid, Thanking the sea-god ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... liberty in the time of Charles V., drew in one day from the teeming workshops twenty thousand fighting men. He met the usual fate of all Spanish patriots, shameful and cruel death. His palace was razed to the ground. Successive governments, in shifting fever-fits of liberalism and absolutism, have set up and pulled down his statue. But his memory is loved and honored, and the example of this noblest of the comuneros impresses powerfully to-day the ardent young minds of ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... he was crying—words lost in all the confusion of sound and movement—stuck in his throat. Moisture came to his eyes.... He turned a little.... Came into range of his vision a tiny streak of shifting crimson. He looked. ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... frequent opening of cottage doors, and the sudden flashes of fire and candle light that followed revealed always some white, fearful face thrust out into the black night, in the hope of hearing the shouts of the home-coming men. Joan could not keep away from the door; and the yawning of Denas, her shifting movements, her uncontrolled sleepiness, irritated Joan. In great anxiety, companionship not perfectly sympathetic is irritating; mere mortals quiver under its infliction. For Denas could not perceive any special reason for unusual fear; she ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... shifting from the abstract to the understandably personal, old Reinhardt saw his opportunity. "Ach, womens, beautifool and goot womens!" he cried in his thick, kindly voice. "Dey are abofe being types. To every good man, dey can be only ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... however, had not disappeared from the scene. He was merely shifting to the part of it that interested him most. Cautiously he stole out along the further side of a ridge of land, toward the rickety old house ...
— The Submarine Boys for the Flag - Deeding Their Lives to Uncle Sam • Victor G. Durham
... took off their plaited hair girdles, joined them together, and then the band was passed round a likely tree, knotted round one of the wearers' loins, and the next minute he was apparently walking like a monkey up the tree, shifting the band dexterously and going on and on till he reached the crown of leaves and the fruit, which he began screwing off and pitching down into the sand, where they were caught up, the pointed end of a club-handle inserted, and the great husk wrenched off. Then a few chops with a ...
— King o' the Beach - A Tropic Tale • George Manville Fenn
... staring down on her, white as chalk under a black mustache and staring goggles, and another face, Delia's, white too, with eyes more strained and terrible than the goggles themselves. One second that look swept her and Miss Honey, and then, shifting, fell upon the General strapped securely into his carriage. Even as Caroline caught her breath, he flew by her like an arrow, his blue eyes round with surprise under a whirl of white parasol, the wicker body of the perambulator swaying and lurching. With that breath still in ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... 1765) of lighting the stage by means of a flaming line of footlights, and ranged his lamps above the proscenium, out of sight of the audience. Before his lamps he placed slips of stained glass—yellow, red, green, blue, and purple; and by shifting these, or happily combining them, was enabled to tint his scenes so as to represent various hours of the day and different actions of light. His 'Storm at Sea with the loss of the Halsewell, East-Indiaman,' was regarded as the height of artistic ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... to congratulate them," exclaimed Harry; "I wouldn't miss that on any account; if we pull hard we shall be able to get up to them—eh, Mr Jefferies? They will be some time repairing damages and shifting the prisoners, and they are not likely to make sail ...
— Adrift in a Boat • W.H.G. Kingston
... over cracks, ridges and jagged, broken blocks, we came, by diverging to the south-west, to the junction between shifting pack and fast bay-ice, and even there, we afterwards shuddered to find, it was at least forty-five miles, as the ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... bolted for the town. The laughing shout that followed him into the Warwick road seemed not to die away, but to linger in the air like the drowsy hum of bees—a hum that came and went at intervals upon the shifting wind, and grew by littles, taking body till it came unbroken as a long, low, distance-muffled murmur from the south, so faint as scarcely to ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... confirmed me in the impression. But a moment later I doubted; so natural was the posture into which the man fell, and so stupid the look of inquiry which he turned first on me and then on Maignan. As he stood before me, shifting his feet and staring about him in vacant wonder, I began to think that I had made a mistake; and, clearly, either I had done so or this young man was possessed of talents and a power of controlling his features beyond the ordinary. He unslung ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... know as it would do you any good, prob'ly it wouldn't," said Druse shyly, shifting the glass from one hand to the other, "but I used to stroke Ma's head lots, when she had a chance to set down, and ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... as if unhearing. Harvey D. walked to the opposite wall and straightened a picture, The Reading of Homer, shifting its frame precisely one ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... possessed of a kind of exact unity, with all its parts and members one and homogeneous. Yet very plainly it is not this. It is a whole, but a whole in a state of constant flux. Its factors and elements are eternally shifting. It is not one, but many generations. Each of the seven ages of man is neighbour to all the rest. The column of the veterans is already staggering over into the last abyss, while the column of the newest recruits is forming with all its nameless and uncounted hopes. To each its tradition, ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... reduced to that pitiful method of showing it: For though the moment I began setting His saddle on my own nag of Berold's begetting, (Not that I meant to be obtrusive) She stopped me, while his rug was shifting, By a single rapid finger's lifting, And, with a gesture kind but conclusive, And a little shake of the head, refused me— 760 I say, although she never used me, Yet when she was mounted, the Gipsy behind ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... demise, limitation; conveyancing[obs3]; transmission &c. (transference) 270; enfeoffment[obs3], bargain and sale, lease and release; exchange &c. (interchange) 148; barter &c. 794; substitution &c. 147. succession, reversion; shifting use, shifting trust; devolution. V. transfer, convey; alienate, alien; assign; grant &c. (confer) 784; consign; make over, hand over; pass, hand, transmit, negotiate; hand down; exchange &c.(interchange) 148. change hands, change hands from ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... surrounded him. He was a man of some thirty years of age, as dry and tough as leather, of grave and pedantic mien, the skin of his forehead twisted into innumerable small wrinkles, his lips pressed firmly together, his bright reddish-grey eyes apparently fixed, but, in reality, perpetually shifting their restless glances from the men by whom he was surrounded, to some chests that lay upon the deck before him, and again from the chests to the men; his whole lean, bony, angular figure in a position that made it difficult to conjecture whether he was going to pray, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... upon a flock of several thousand sheep, belonging to the Mexican government. As usual, the flock was under the charge of a Mexican family, living in a small covered waggon, in which they could remove from spot to spot, shifting the pasture-ground as required. In that country, but very few individuals are employed to keep the largest herds of animals; but they are always accompanied by a number of noble dogs, which appear to be particularly adapted to protect and guide the animals. These dogs do not ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... German offensive onward to the Marne, Somme, and Ypres salient in March-June, 1918, was received by the shifting garrison of Brussels with little enthusiasm. Would it not tend to prolong the War? The German advance into France was spectacular, but it was paid for by an appalling death-roll. The hospitals at Brussels ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... join. In addition there is another set of gears which tilt the drum to make the concrete flow out of the discharge end. The inside of the drum is provided with steel plate deflectors, which plow through and pick and drop the concrete mixture shifting it back and ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... longitudinal designs; and the examination of the leaf-like forms leads him to the conclusion, that their appearance always depends on "the unaltered condition or the greater prominence of certain parts of this fundamental design." There is to be observed a shifting of the third band, so that in conjunction with the fourth, which is curved, it forms the mid-rib of the leaf. Eimer finds the cause of this phenomenon in the alteration of the form. The leaf-like form results from an acumination and elongation of the wings, which in ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... scheme for new modelling ships-of-war?" said the Doctor, shifting the subject; "it will be a great thing for our infant navy, if we succeed. Since our last conversation on that subject, Captain, at odds and ends of time, I have thought over the matter, and have begun a ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... door opened. Shifting his eyes he discovered a dim shadow in the opening. Whoever it was stood motionless until a low, clear voice ...
— Mary Louise in the Country • L. Frank Baum (AKA Edith Van Dyne)
... others sit down, except Matthew. Father Dempsey, about to ask Corny to proceed, remembers Matthew and turns to him, giving him just a crumb of graciousness]. Sit down, Mat. [Matthew, crushed, sits down in disgrace, and is silent, his eyes shifting piteously from one speaker to another in an intensely mistrustful effort to understand them]. Go on, Mr Doyle. We can make ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... furtive smile that often ran across his lips, he pulled out a flat bottle, and all took an acquaintanceship swallow, while the Clallams explained their journey. "How many air there of yu' slidin' down the hill?" he inquired, shifting ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... and if I had been horrified by the black town, my delight with the noble scenery beyond it was in proportion. I stood at the open window, with the moor breeze blowing my hair into the wildest elf-locks, rapturously excited as the great hills unfolded themselves and the shifting clouds sent shifting purple shadows over them. Very dark and stern they looked in shade, and then, in a moment more, the cloud was past, and a broad smile of sunshine ran over their face, and showed where cultivation ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... procured at the vintner's in exchange therefor, grew a bit playful. He suddenly flung open the door and cried, "Steigen Sie auf." If I had comprehended his meaning involuntarily I would have obeyed, but luckily my brain has a slow shifting language gear. By the time it began dawning upon me that we had been told to vacate the car Marie had fixed me with her eyes and gripped me like a vise with her hand so that I knew that I was to stay put. One man involuntarily ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... back; so we stood up and began sparring. I played very steadily and light at first to see whether my suspicions were well founded, and in two minutes I was satisfied. My opponent tried every dodge to bring on a rally, and when he was foiled I could see that he was shifting his glove. I stopped and insisted that his gloves should be tied, and then we ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... was a little shifting of groups. Julie saw that Montresor and Captain Warkworth were together by the fireplace, that the young man with his hands held out to the blaze and his back to her was talking eagerly, while Montresor, looking outward into the room, his great black head bent a little towards ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Matukus streaming up the slope in a rough extended order, and not more than a hundred yards away. Cocking the Winchester I turned and opened fire on them. I don't quite know how many I missed, but I do know that I never shot better in my life. I had to keep shifting myself from one enemy to the other, firing almost without getting a sight, that is, by the eye alone, after the fashion of the experts who break glass balls. But quick as the work was, men fell thick, and by ...
— Maiwa's Revenge - The War of the Little Hand • H. Rider Haggard
... feature of society. The world is like a magic lantern, or the shifting scenes in a pantomime. TEN YEARS convert the population of schools into men and women, the young into fathers and matrons, make and mar fortunes, and bury the last generation but one. TWENTY YEARS convert infants into lovers, and fathers and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 341, Saturday, November 15, 1828. • Various
... getting heavier with every mile, and at last we reached a long stretch of sandy road which the motors could not pull through. With every one except the driver out of the car, and the engine racing, we pushed and lifted, gaining a few feet each time, until the shifting sand was passed. It meant two hours of violent strain, and we were well-nigh exhausted; a few miles farther, however, it had all to be done again. Where the ground was hard, there was such a chaos of ruts and holes that our arms were ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... intellect, and, as it were, claimed him for their interpreter. After wanderings through various parts of Europe, and a period of studious leisure in Paris, he chose Holland for his place of abode (1629), and though often shifting his residence, little disturbed save by the controversies of philosophy and the orthodox zeal of Dutch theologians, he gave his best hours during twenty years to thought. An invitation from Queen Christina to the Swedish court was ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... should be regular celebration of the Holy Mass, and that there should be no interference therewith, nor any dissuasion of any one from turning a Catholic, also on pain of death. All the places named are in the Valley of Luserna, and the object was a wholesale shifting of the Protestants of that valley out of nine of its communes and their concentration into five higher up. In vain were there remonstrances at Turin from those immediately concerned. On the 17th of April, 1655, the Marquis di Pianezza entered the doomed region with a body of troops, mainly ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... with Verses. The Temple was filled with Votaries, who applied themselves to different Diversions, as their Fancies directed them. In one part of it I saw a Regiment of Anagrams, who were continually in motion, turning to the Right or to the Left, facing about, doubling their Ranks, shifting their Stations, and throwing themselves into all the Figures and Countermarches of the most ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... over again; only, here being no fear of restraining keepers, the wild beasts were a little more free in their movements. It is impossible to convey, in words, any idea of the hideous phantasmagoria of shifting limbs and faces which moved through the evil-smelling twilight of this terrible prison-house. Callot might have drawn it, Dante might have suggested it, but a minute attempt to describe its horrors would but disgust. There are depths in humanity which one ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... you to," you will certainly sow the seeds of rebellion. No self-respecting child will accept such a reason. If at least you make an appeal to your superior judgment, and say, "Mother knows best," there would be something gained. For now you are shifting the basis of the child's conduct from your position of power over her to the highest authority within our reach, namely, good judgment. The child is thus learning to obey not a person, but ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... body and soul, while he talked. Those eyes were of the changing foam-streaked grey-green of leaping Northern seas; in the glass shone a hot ruby that seemed the very heart of the South, beating for him who had courage to respond to its pulsation. The twin lights, the shifting grey and the steadfast red, mastered the Water Rat and held him bound, fascinated, powerless. The quiet world outside their rays receded far away and ceased to be. And the talk, the wonderful talk ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... realms this frame mayst bear, On thy all-powerful, thy impetuous tide; But the free spirit that within doth bide Nor for thy might, nor any might doth care: Not varying here its course, nor shifting there, Upon the favouring gale it joys to glide; Plying its wings toward the laurel's pride, In spite of sails or oars, of sea or air. Monarch of floods, magnificent and strong, That meet'st the sun as he leads on the ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... was the clutch on his throat maintained. Both hands left it quickly, one shifting to his head to turn and press it roughly cheek to floor. Simultaneously he was aware of the other hand fumbling about his neck, and then of a touch of metal and the sting of a needle driven into the flesh beneath ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... then, indeed, as they stood together at the side of the vessel, David leaning heavily against it, his words would fail him altogether, and he would be left staring stupidly, the great black eyes widening, the lower lip falling—over the shifting brilliance of the sea. ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... socially expedient to encourage each woman to have her own three children, instead of shifting the burden upon the shoulders of some other. If such activities of nursing and caring for the very young can be pooled, so much the better. Doubtless some women who find them distasteful would be much more ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... who young Premium informed me was the Chilian minister, and who was listening with great attention to a dissertation from Captain Tropic, the celebrated traveller, on the feasibility of a railroad over the Andes, I observed a great sensation among those around me; every one shifting, and shuffling, and staring, and assisting in that curious and confusing ceremony called 'making way.' Even Premium appeared a little excited when he came forward with a smile on his face to receive an individual, apparently a foreigner, and ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... and both were silent, looking out at the long flares of the constantly passing automobile headlights, shifting in vast geometric demonstrations against the darkness. Now and then a bicycle wound its nervous way among these portents, or, at long intervals, a surrey or buggy plodded ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... for the moment passed over him that he had chosen to set his life up in stone, like to Donato's, in the face of Florence, rather than to weave its light and tangled skein out from the breaths of the wandering winds and the sands of the shifting shore. ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... a-meanin' that," said Jim Cal, patiently but uneasily shifting from the right foot to the left. "I'll admit—an' I reckon everybody on the place will say the same—that she's always give you mo' reason than another to believe she'd have ye. Not but what that's Jude's way, an' she's hilt out sech hopes to a-many. What pesters me is how you two would ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... a party of the men to fire at the covering party of seamen who were standing by the boats in the cove and who were unprotected, while his men were concealed behind the masses of rocks. Many fell, wounded or killed; and Vanslyperken, after shifting about from one position to another, ordered the wounded men to be put into his boat, and with two hands he pulled off as he said to procure more ammunition, leaving the remainder of his detachment on shore, to do ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Wilton," said Thatcher, impressed, and shifting the quid of tobacco in his lantern jaws. "Of ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... down the inner bark of red and white oak to the consistency of molasses; apply as a plaster, shifting it once a week; or, burn red-oak bark to ashes; sprinkle it on the sore till it is eaten out; then apply a plaster of tar; or, take garget berries and leaves of stramonium; simmer them together in equal parts of neatsfoot oil and the tops of hemlock; mix well together, ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... stages, while the validity of its working laws in application to essential cases is still undetermined, must, of course, expect 'bickerings.' But philological mythologists are actually trying to base one science, Mythology, on the still shifting and sandy foundations of another science, Phonetics. The philologists are quarrelling about their 'equations,' and about the application of their phonetic laws to mythical proper names. On the basis ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... assumption that a genuine advance in our knowledge of "truth" is really possible; though possible along quite different lines from the old absolute dogmatic metaphysical ones. But the scepticism of Montaigne throws doubt upon every human attempt to get behind the shifting flowing stream of sense impressions. The rough and ready clue which it offers to the confusions of life is not drawn from any individualistic "point d'appui" of pseudo-psychological personal vision, as are these modern clues to the ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... its course changes little; its waters are clear, and they become icy cold as they approach the sea and mingle with the tide which flows into the great Gulf of St. Lawrence from the Arctic regions. The Mississippi, on the other hand, is a turbid, warm stream, flowing through soft lands. Its shifting channel is divided at its mouth by deltas created from the vast quantity of soil which the river carries in its current. On the low-lying, forest-clad, northern shore of the Gulf of Mexico it was not easy to find the mouth of the Mississippi by approaching it from the sea. ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong
... more painful, being far enough from the hedge to get a clear view into the recess if anything attracted his notice. Why the shepherd hated rabbits was because the sheep would not feed where they had worn their runs in the grass. Not the least movement was possible now—not even that little shifting which makes a position just endurable: the heat seemed to increase; the thought of Ulysses could hardly restrain the almost irresistible desire ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... hosts of friends pulling him hither and yon, proposing this and that, laughing and chatting gayly. Where were they now? Not all weak and false, but the shadow of circumstances had drifted them apart. We do not always cease to love or like when separation ensues; and in this shifting, changing life, people drop out, yet are not quite forgotten. Some of the young fellows whom fortune had buffeted had found a place in active, stirring life: he, with his education, refinement, accomplishments, ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... wanderings did indeed reveal themselves to her neighbours confusedly and dispersedly in her fitful and capricious narrative, like glimpses of a landscape caught through a shifting mist. As this sometimes distorts the objects that loom within it, so Mad Bell's statements were occasionally misleading. Once, for example, she threw the Quigley family into most distracted concern by her accounts ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... Mr. Deputy?" asked Rnine. "Mathias de Gorne has committed no offence against the law. There's nothing criminal in trampling the soil around a well, in shifting the position of a revolver that doesn't belong to you, in firing three shots or in walking backwards to one's father's house. What can we ask of him? The sixty thousand francs? I presume that this is not M. Vignal's intention and that he does ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... place of C. and accordingly the other Lines are to be reckoned: Sometimes likewise we find the Bass Cliff is removed to the middle Line, and upon such removal, that Line is F, &c. and tho' this manner of Shifting the Cliff is troublesome, yet Custom and Practice having made the knowing of them necessary, you ought to be very well understanding in the manner of them, if you would be well skilled ...
— The School of Recreation (1696 edition) • Robert Howlett
... he was strictly confined during the voyage, had a window in the stern, and he, too, had therefore some change of prospect. He gazed eagerly at every shifting picture of the land; but most eagerly when he found himself off Cap Samana. With his pocket-glass he explored and discovered the very point of rough ground on the height where he stood with Christophe, less than six months before, ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... thing than a city crowd, all eyes and morbid curiosity. But Mr. Trimm didn't see the staring eyes on that ride to the Grand Central. What he saw was many shifting feet and a hedge of legs shutting him in closely—those and the things on his wrists. What the eyes of the crowd saw was a small, stout man who, for all his bulk, seemed to have dried up inside his clothes so that they bagged ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... keep their time; and very shortly the four horses clattered down the hill into the village. I got up behind, for McC——, the guard, was an old friend of mine; and after the usual salutations and strapping of portmanteaus, and shifting down into places, as McC—— knows everything, I began to ask him if he knew anything of ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... of Mr. Morris with the president exhibits a faithful picture, drawn by the hand of a master, of the shifting revolutionary scenes which with unparalleled rapidity succeeded each other in Paris. With the eye of an intelligent, and of an unimpassioned observer, he marked all passing events, and communicated them with fidelity. He did not mistake despotism for freedom, ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... passions, which might have worked havoc in the state, to the good of the township or the parish. The American legislators have succeeded to a certain extent in opposing the notion of rights, to the feelings of envy; the permanence of the religious world, to the continual shifting of politics; the experience of the people, to its theoretical ignorance; and its practical knowledge of business, to the ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... sort!" snapped the gentleman addressed as Sir Henry, shifting his posture a little so as to enable the young man to lean against his shoulder. "Haven't you eyes in your head, Willsden? Cannot you see for yourself that this gentleman has merely ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... of forty-three days, from the Rapidan to the James River, the army had to be supplied from an ever-shifting base, by wagons, over narrow roads, through a densely wooded country, with a lack of wharves at each new base from which to conveniently discharge vessels. Too much credit cannot, therefore, be awarded to the quartermaster ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... onslaught on the Beckenham house, bothered very little about his personal surroundings and possessions. I forget now when the change came and he began to spend. Some accident must have revealed to him this new source of power, or some subtle shifting occurred in the tissues of his brain. He began to spend and "shop." So soon as he began to shop, he began to shop violently. He began buying pictures, and then, oddly enough, old clocks. For the Chiselhurst house he ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... It was just a few shacks and a Mexican gambling-house when I saw it. Maybe it isn't there any more, at all. You know—those places! People build them and then go away, and in a year there isn't a thing, just desert again and shifting sand and maybe the little original old ranch by the one spring." He swept the table-cloth with his hand, as if sweeping something into oblivion, and his eyes sought again the spoon. "It's queer, that business. Men and women go out to lonely places and build houses, and for a while everything ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... before the war, knew that no one walked Unter den Linden but American tourists and German shopkeepers from the provinces, with their fat wives. But this Michigan Boulevard, unfinished as Chicago itself, shifting and changing daily, still manages to take on a certain form and rugged beauty. It has about it a gracious breadth. As you turn into it from the crash and thunder of Wabash there comes to you a sense of peace. That's the sweep of it, and the lake just beyond, for Michigan avenue ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... reputation. Great precaution is necessary in crossing it, constant sounding, and calm weather. It is formed by a line of sandhills under the water, whose northern point crosses that to the southward, and across which there is a passage, whose position varies with the shifting sands, so that the pilots are chiefly guided by ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... often have Catholics involved themselves in hopeless contradiction, sacrificed principle to opportunity, adapted their theories to their interests, and staggered the world's reliance on their sincerity by subterfuges which entangle the Church in the shifting sands of party warfare, instead of establishing her cause on the solid rock of principles! How often have they clung to some plausible chimera which seemed to serve their cause, and nursed an artificial ignorance where they ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... dim room a sinister thought had seized upon him, oppressing and paralysing him; a vague foreboding that his fate would resemble that of this pale woman. But he chased the dark clouds away. His star did not vary in its light as does the shifting and drifting human mind; it was like the sun, ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... aim at coloring a word, a phrase, or at best a temporary situation. There is little flow of natural, fervent melody. What the composer accomplished with tune, characteristic but fluent, eloquent yet sustained, in "Cavalleria Rusticana," he tries to achieve in "Iris" with violent, disjointed shifting of keys and splashes of instrumental color. In this he is seldom successful, for he is not a master of orchestral writing, that technical facility which nearly all the young musicians have in the same degree that all pianists have finger technic. His orchestral ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... finger of each hand, the other fingers serving to support the tube. As it is almost always necessary to follow rotating and heating a tube by blowing it, the hands should be so placed that it will be easy to bring the right-hand end up to the mouth without shifting the hold on the glass. For this reason the left hand grasps the glass with the palm down, and the right hand with the palm turned toward the left. If there is any choice, the longer and heavier part of the tube is usually given to the left hand, ...
— Laboratory Manual of Glass-Blowing • Francis C. Frary
... with the greatest difficulty that Albert could afford his charge any aid, and they must both soon have perished if the storm had been long protracted. But fortunately, the wind shifting, the clouds were soon dispersed, and the ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... intellectual combatants a fairer field and a milder temper. The English genius showed itself as practical, matter-of-fact, and moderate. Supernatural Christianity was attacked and defended; against the assault on the miracles the defense was really a shifting of the ground, and an insistence as by Butler on an ethical order in the observed workings of the world, which gives a sort of analogue and support to the Christian scheme of future retribution. ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... explained meanwhile that Frank had made the big centre-table of plank, and the book-shelves as well. "He likes to tinker at such things," she said. "Whenever he gets blue or cross I set him to shifting the dresser or making a book-shelf, and he cheers up like mad. He's a regular kid anyway—always doing the things ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... crossing Westminster Bridge—old Thames marched all a-glitter. I watched his passage gratefully. It was that of a never-ending band. Playing all the way, too, but silently. Yet, the music was there. The pity was that one could not hear it. The pomp, the swagger, the swing of the Guards, the shifting movement, the bright array—all these were unmistakable. The very lilt of the air made itself felt. Very cheery. Certainly, the river ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... The feet of the pilgrims who bathe in it sink into the mud as they wade out waist-deep, and if they venture beyond the shelter of the bank the whirling eddies threaten to sweep them away. The fords are treacherous, with shifting bottom and changing currents. The poets and prophets of the Old Testament give us a true idea of this uninhabitable and unlovable river-bed when they speak of "the pride of Jordan," "the swellings of Jordan," where the lion hides among the reeds in his secret lair, a "refuge ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... gazed upon it with an air of profound meditation, and put together whatever she had been able to pick up of natural history on the roofs, the yard, and the garden. Her thoughts were reflected in her shifting glance, and I was able to read in it the result of her examination: ...
— My Private Menagerie - from The Works of Theophile Gautier Volume 19 • Theophile Gautier
... forgiveness unto him. And this is to do as the prophet Jeremy bids; to wit, "only to acknowledge our iniquities," to acknowledge them and to stand in them at the terrible bar of God's justice, until mercy takes them out of the way; not shifting our shoulders or conscience of them, by doing, or promising to do, either this or that good work, only acknowledge, acknowledge only. And the reason of this kind ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... beauty in general is his pursuit, how foolish would he be not to recognize that the beauty in every form is one and the same," [Footnote: Symposium, Jowett translation, Sec.210.] is made by Shelley the justification of his shifting enthusiasms, which the world so harshly censured. In ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins |
