"Drifting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... universities for the same sum of money? Of late Americans who love their country have been searching their own hearts. Merchants hitherto busied with commerce are asking themselves whither this country is drifting. Is Germany to compel us to become a vast military machine? This military question is a subject of discussion on the street cars and in the stores, at the dining room table. No articles in paper and magazine are so eagerly read and analyzed. The American ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... it seemed as though it was both our hearts. Harry said we had come to a place where we had to choose between owning an automobile or getting married. It was perfectly plain we couldn't do both. $e said he didn't want to influence me either way, but that there was no good drifting on and on, deceiving ourselves and thinking it would all come out right. Of course, when he put it to me like that the bubble wasn't in it—and so we towed home for the last time and Harry, went around to close out ...
— The Motormaniacs • Lloyd Osbourne
... overboard, and drank their fill once and forever. The wretched survivors drew lots, killed the man whom fortune designated, and satisfied their cravings with his flesh and blood. At last, as they were drifting helpless, with land in sight, an English vessel bore down on them, took them all on board, landed the feeblest, and carried the rest as prisoners to ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... when the water in mid-channel came up nearly to the body of the wagon, and the swift ripples deluded the eye into almost conviction that horses, vehicle, and all were not gaining an inch in forward progress, but drifting surely down. They came up out of the depths, however, with a tug, and a swash, and a drip all over, and a scrambling of hoofs on the pebbles, at the very point aimed at in such apparently sidelong fashion,—the wheel-track that led them up the bank and into ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... steps, we discovered that the northern sky, which we now faced (for we had walked out in a southerly direction), showed stormy symptoms, and very quickly afterward a severe gale of wind broke over the island and the desolate sea, and we found ourselves overwhelmed with drifting snow. ...
— 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
... my life was changed in a single night. Years of excitement could not have wrought such a miracle upon me. The next day, I seemed to have passed out of my former self into a new individual and a new state of existence. I was no longer alone! I was no longer drifting about, aimless and dreamy. There was work for me to do, and the interest I had in ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... it," exclaimed Paul. "We are on Thornton's. The steeples on the shore are Blankenburg, and those farther off are the Bruges steeples. We are about twelve miles to the eastward of the North Hinder, where there is a light-vessel. We have been drifting to the southward. We will tack now, and stand over to windward of ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... to see th' last man out, and it ne'er a bit bigger nor smaller in all them thousands and thousands o' years. Well, the fast-boats were out after a fish, and I were specksioneer in one; and we were so keen after capturing our whale, that none on us ever saw that we were drifting away from them right into deep shadow o' th' iceberg. But we were set upon our whale, and I harpooned it; and as soon as it were dead we lashed its fins together, and fastened its tail to our boat; and then we took breath and looked about us, and away ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... with Anthony Murphy, a railroad man who had been a passenger on the train, following him. They were in time to see the General, with three freight cars, swing around the bend and disappear. On the tender, a man arose, waved his arms and yelled. The yell came drifting back to them above the noise ...
— Tom of the Raiders • Austin Bishop
... being so. The moon has sunk to the level of the tree-tops, and the bosom of the river is in dark shadow; darker by the bank where the boat is now drifting. But little chance to distinguish an object in the water—less for one swimming upon its surface. And the river is deep, its current rapid, the "reach" they are in, full of dangerous eddies. In addition, it is a ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... left was most apparent, and the next day the drifting in that direction was to be continued. This movement in the presence of the enemy, who at all points was actively seeking an opportunity to penetrate our line and interpose a column between its right and left, was most dangerous. But the necessity for ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... he said, half as big as the area of the United States; and to clear it ships had to make a wide detour—for even in its thin outward edges a vessel's way was a good deal retarded and a steamer's wheel would foul sometimes, and there was danger always of collision with derelicts drifting in from the open sea to become a part of the central mass. Our own course, he further said, would be changed because of it; but we would be for a while upon what might be called its coast, and so I would have a chance ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... her destiny. She was unharmed, still young; she would forget and be happy; she would live to be a good wife and mother. Somehow the thought swelled his heart. His act, death-dealing as it had been, was a noble one, and helped him to hold on to his drifting hopes. Hardly once since Jennie had entered into his thought had those ghosts returned to ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... position, when he was only a tramp and she was the favored daughter of wealth; when he was an unbeliever and she was a worker in the church; loved her when he saw her losing her hold on the higher life and drifting with the current; loved her when she left home, and as he thought, honor behind. And he was forced to confess, in his own heart, that he loved her yet, in spite of the fact that their positions were reversed; that he was an ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... the southern lowlands like drifting snow—for they are beautifully white. In the nesting season, when many birds are allowed some special attraction in the way of plumage, bunches of long, slender, graceful plumes grow on their backs between the shoulders and ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... sky's o'ercast, The night is cold and loud the blast, The mingling snow comes driving down, Fast whitening o'er the flinty ground. Severe their lots whose crazy sheds Hang tottering o'er their trembling heads: Whilst blows through walls and chinky door The drifting snow across the floor, Where blinking embers scarcely glow, And rushlight only serves to show What well may move the deepest sigh, And force a tear from pity's eye. You there may see a meagre pair, Worn out with labour, grief, and care: Whose naked babes, in hungry mood, Complain of cold ...
— Cottage Poems • Patrick Bronte
... Olaf the King; And suddenly through the drifting brume The blare of the horns began to ring, Like the terrible trumpet shock Of Regnarock, ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... 'like' her so much. Then the pleasant intimate little lunch, after which Lady Cannon had called.... In the course of these meetings he had told her that he and Mrs Raymond had quarrelled, that she would never see him again. She had felt that he was drifting to her.... How strangely unlike love affairs in books hers had been! In all respectable novels it was the man who fell in love first. No-one knew by experience better than Hyacinth how easily that might happen, how very ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... have said that the war may assume another aspect, and be a short and bloody one. And to such a war—an anti-slavery war—it seems to me we are inevitably drifting. It seems to me hardly in the power of human wisdom to prevent it. We may commence the war without meaning to interfere with slavery; but let us have one or two battles, and get our blood excited, and we shall not only not restore any more slaves, but shall proclaim freedom ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... rising, and the snow was drifting; and it was evident that in many places the road would be obliterated, and I had a long stretch of prairie to travel over on which there was not a human habitation. It was dangerous to undertake it, and I ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... unanswered from generation to generation. As he meditated, his face lost its recently acquired harshness; his deep eyes grew sadder even than their wont; the look of a vast, ineffaceable weariness settled upon him. With face uplifted he continued to play, drifting through his own many forms of that unanswered question into final silence. Then, rising, he passed, a little unsteadily, into the inner room, and ate once more of the thick black paste ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... of the rear admiral was shot away, and, drifting toward the shore, a Canadian swam out into the stream and brought it in triumphantly. For many years the precious trophy was hung up in ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... those days of waiting, And nameless fears came drifting down the night. The tides swung in from sea, hung, and retreated, Bearing their secrets back beyond our sight; Till, like the sudden rending of a curtain, The East reeled with ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... and was fast drifting into the Land of Nod, when I was aroused by a sound something like the rattling ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume VIII, No 25: May 21, 1887 • Various
... crescent, glanced at the outline of the opposite bank, at the Terek, and at the now distinctly visible driftwood upon it. For one instant it seemed to him that he was moving and that the Terek with the drifting wood remained stationary. Again he peered out. One large black log with a branch particularly attracted his attention. The tree was floating in a strange way right down the middle of the stream, neither rocking nor whirling. It even appeared ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... the excited calls from those in the rowing craft, as it drifted toward the hut on shore—a palm leaf hut that seemed crudely made. Russ and Paul had ceased rowing at the sight of the motor boat, and now their own craft was merely drifting. ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms - Or Lost in the Wilds of Florida • Laura Lee Hope
... gradually rising. The three ladies sat each in her corner, saying little, and feeling that this drive was certainly a means to an end, and not an end in itself. Their pace had not been very quick from the first, but it became gradually slower, and the hard dry snow was drifting past the windows in clouds. At last they came to a stand altogether, and John appeared at the window like a white column and said, "My leddy, we'll hae ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... prospect was now at an end, but instead we had a compensating spectacle. For thick and fast the clouds came pouring into one chasm after another, drifting in all directions, here a mere transparent veil drawn across the violet hills, there a golden splendour as of some smaller sun shining on a green little world. At one moment the whole vast scene was blurred and blotted ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... war thar, or jest above thar, about sunset of a pleasant day, that we came drifting along with our flat-boat, or broad horn, as they were called in them days, when Captain Paul said he thought it would be a snug place just behind the pint, to tie up to them same big trees yet standin' thar as they did then. Ben, poor Ben and I concluded too, it ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... ourselves alone in a twilight world. The white face of the moon peered through a cleft in the mountain, and our own shadows crawled after us, large and dark on the grey ribbon of the road. But there was another shadow which moved, a small drifting shadow over which we had no control. Sometimes it was by our side for an instant as we crept up the hill, dragging our incubus, then it would fall behind and vanish, only to reappear again, perhaps on the ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... twins, little and big, came out of school the snow was coming down more thickly. The flakes were not so large, but there were more of them, and they blew here and there in the wind, drifting into piles that would make the shoveling off of walks hard ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at School • Laura Lee Hope
... the lieutenant, was nearly drowned, and had it not been for a black man, who took him on his back, he must have sunk. (This man he never lost sight of and left him a handsome legacy when he died.) We were drifting like a pig upon a grating, and as helpless as a sucking shrimp, when the signal was made to repair damages. We soon cut away all that was useless, and in twenty minutes we were under topsails as courses, ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... her borders or to prevent the incursions of banditti into our territory. In her fate and in her fortune, in her power to establish and maintain a settled government, we have a far deeper interest, socially, commercially, and politically, than any other nation. She is now a wreck upon the ocean, drifting about as she is impelled by different factions. As a good neighbor, shall we not extend to her a helping hand to save her? If we do not, it would not be surprising should some other nation undertake the task, and thus force us to interfere at last, under circumstances ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Buchanan • James Buchanan
... on the Pontic sea with a fair wind, and was already in sight of the Bosporus, and congratulating his fellow voyagers, as a man naturally would do in his joy at a manifest and sure deliverance; but all at once he saw himself abandoned by everybody and drifting about upon a small piece of wreck. While he was suffering under this anguish and these visions, his friends came to his bed-side and roused him with the news that Pompeius was attacking them. The enemy accordingly must of necessity ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... clouds with black, jagged teeth; a great mouth in a dead face wet with the tears of the weeping that can never be dried. It rained while we were there, and though rain doesn't matter to the Gray Dragon, it made the Pass more wild and grim if possible, filling it with gray, drifting ghosts: ghosts of the murdered clansmen; ghosts disappearing into dark, open doorways of rock castles, or falling on the green floor of the glen, to weep on the dim, faded purple of the sparse heather. The river into which the weeping cataracts shed their tears was black ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Sainte-Beuve's tracks, recalls the raffines, the fine-edged raillery of the best days of the monarchy. In this speech you discern an untrammeled but drifting life; a gaiety of imagination that deserts us when our first youth is past. The prime of the blossom is over, but there remains the dry compact seed with the germs of life in it, ready against the coming winter. Do you not see that these things are symptoms of something unsatisfied, of ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... taken across by fastening them down to the axles, attaching a rope to the end of the tongue, and another to the rear of each to steady it and hold it from drifting below the landing. It is then pushed into the stream, and the men on the opposite bank pull it over. I have passed a large train of wagons in this way across a rapid stream fifteen feet deep without any difficulty. I took, ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... looked nothing but dreaming; for she seemed to care about nothing—not even that she was old and worn, and withered and dying,—not even that, instead of sinking down in the west, into some deep bed of dim repose, she was drifting, haggard and battered, untidy and weak and sleepy, up and up into the dazzling halls of the sun. Did she know that his light would clothe her as with a garment, and hide her in the highest recesses of his light-filled ceiling? or was it only that she was dreaming, dreaming—sweet, cool, tender ...
— Gutta-Percha Willie • George MacDonald
... relevant to the question of the franchise. But they are even less steadfast in their doubts than in their pledges, and the question will, in the comparatively near future, probably be settled by importunity on the one side and mere drifting on ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... that, unless a miracle happened, or some almost superhuman feat of ingenuity and daring was accomplished, that day thirteen months hence would see the annihilation of every living thing on earth, and the planet Terra converted into a dark and lifeless orb, a wilderness drifting through space, the blackened and desolated sepulchre of the countless millions of living beings which ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... Once, when I touched upon it, he had cut me short, and I could see from his manner that all reference to it must henceforth be taboo. But I could not help sometimes recalling the picture of the boat with the solitary man on board of her, drifting upon the grey waste of sea, and I often wondered if Dirk Hartog had been able to obliterate that picture ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... murmured the shadowy shape, mixing itself up with the motes of a sunbeam and drifting out through the window. Then Richard fell to laughing in his sleep, and so awoke. He was still confused with the dream as he sat on the edge of his bed, pulling himself together ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the garden-gate to meet me, no longer the perversely tempting, sorrowful, wisp of white mist drifting in the complicated bad dream of existence: Neither did she look like a forsaken elf. I stammered out stupidly, "Again in the country, Miss ... Mrs.." She was very good, returned the pressure of my hand, but we were slightly embarrassed. ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... and loved was well within sight of humanity, and it was commonly brought nearer by some intrusive vestiges of man's work; the crescent moon drifting in the purple twilight, or "lamping" between the cypresses, is seen over Fiesole or Samminiato; the "Alpine gorge" above Lucca has its ruined chapel and its mill; the Roman Campagna has its tombs—"Rome's ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... Seated at the bottom of the boat drifting with the stream, they watched the final gleams of light quitting the tall branches. They approached the islands. The great russety masses grew sombre; all the landscape became simplified in the twilight; the Seine, the sky, the islands, the slopes ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... months, and he brought home a blacksnake whip as a souvenir, and it was believed that he had worked in the quartermaster's department, driving mules. "Let us talk about something enjoyable this beautiful day. How would you like to be out on a lake, or river, today, in a boat, drifting around, and forgetting ...
— Peck's Uncle Ike and The Red Headed Boy - 1899 • George W. Peck
... position are written in no book, are defined by no law, have settled themselves not in accordance with the recorded wisdom of any great men, but as expediency and the fitness of political things in Great Britain have seemed from time to time to require. This drifting of great matters into their proper places is not as closely in accordance with the idiosyncrasies of the American people as it is with our own. They would prefer to define by words, as the French do, what ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... rather to praise the English Constitution than to rail at the French. "I have made many enemies and few friends," Burke wrote sadly to the French princes who had fled from their country and were gathering in arms at Coblentz, "by the part I have taken." But the opinion of the people was slowly drifting to his side; and a sale of thirty thousand copies showed that the "Reflections" echoed the general sentiment of Englishmen. At this moment indeed the mood of England was singularly unfavourable to any fair appreciation of the Revolution across the Channel. Her temper ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... confine ourselves to the Asiatic continent, with its important peninsula of Europe, we find that in the vast desert of drifting human speech three, and only three, oases have been formed in which, before the beginning of all history, language became permanent and traditional—assumed, in fact, a new character, a character totally different from the original character of the floating ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... grouped together. After awhile I bent round towards the wind and, making a long sweep in that direction, bent again so as to bring the drift upon my right shoulder. No horses, no tracks, any where—nothing but a waste of white drifting flake and feathery snow-spray. At last I turned away from the wind, and soon struck full on our little camp; neither of the others had returned. I cut down some willows and made a blaze. After a while I got on to the top of the cart, and looked out again into the waste. Presently ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... this exchange had been effected the fog cleared up, and showed the revenue-cutter hove to for her boats, which had pulled back and were close on board of her, and the Happy-go-lucky about three miles in the offing; Lord B—- and his boat's crew were about four miles in shore, paddling and drifting with the tide towards Portland. As soon as the boats were on board, the revenue-cutter made all sail after the smuggler, paying no attention to the yacht, and either not seeing or not caring about the boat which was ...
— The Three Cutters • Captain Frederick Marryat
... almost every character, with a lad and a girl moving flittingly through them—laughing and kissing in the lanes among the brambles, drifting together ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce
... mariners, how few of our ancient consorts still remain in sight; and they, how torn and wasted, and, like ourselves, struggling to keep as long as possible off the fatal shore, against which we are all finally drifting! ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... was the hollow, melancholy, wild beast-howl of a fog-horn. We were drifting upon a tragic coast, where the great waves slipped up the cliffs noiselessly, to disappear upon the other side. At the time, I was talking to a person who had just been a sort of composite of several of my friends, but ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... certainly justified the gravest apprehensions of our travellers regarding the existence of others. Worse than the sunken reefs of the Southern Seas or the snags of the Mississippi, how could the Projectile be expected to avoid them? Drifting along blindly through the boundless ethereal ocean, her inmates, even if they saw the danger, were totally powerless to turn her aside. Like a ship without a rudder, like a runaway horse, like a collapsed balloon, like an iceberg in an Atlantic storm, like a boat in the Niagara rapids, she moved ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... there the dark bodies of the dogs darted, eager and intelligently busy. The two herders followed after, leaning on their long staffs. Over the hill passed the flock. Slowly the sounds of them merged into a murmur. It died. Only remained the fog of dust drifting through the trees, caught up by every passing current of air, light ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... exploration, hastened back to Stadacone, where he set about making preparations for spending the winter. A fort was hastily built at the mouth of the St. Croix. But the exiles were unready for the violent season that soon closed in upon them, almost burying their fort in drifting snow and casing the ships in an armour of glistening ice. Pent up by the biting frost, and eking out a wretched existence on salted food, their condition grew deplorable. A terrible scurvy assailed the camp, and out of a company ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... put it all in twenty words, but that would not be fair, and would not satisfy you. Since our marriage we have simply been drifting down the current, getting poorer and poorer, and also moving about from place to place—I mean since you lost sight of us. And at last it was impossible for us to go any lower, for we were destitute, and—it ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... organ-loft. He had been there through most of the service, and, as he sat on his stool in the corner, had watched the curious diamond pattern of light and dark that the clerestory windows made with the vaulting-ribs. Anyone outside would have seen islands of white cloud drifting across the blue sky, and each cloud as it passed threw the heavy chevroned diagonals inside into bold relief, and picked out that rebus of a carding-comb encircled by a wreath of vine-leaves which Nicholas Vinnicomb had inserted for ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... Drifting cloud and misty wreathes Are fill'd with light elysian; O'er reed and leaf the zephyr breathes— So fades the ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... of Ascher and nothing at all of his wife during the first two days of our voyage. My idea was that they stayed in their cabins—they had engaged a whole suite of rooms—in order to avoid drifting into an intimacy with Gorman and me. A millionaire would naturally, so I supposed, be suspicious of the advance of any one who was not a fellow millionaire. I was mistaken. Ascher was simply seasick. When he recovered, two days ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... softly, "sinking in mid-ocean, surrounded by fog. It had drifted far out of its course, and collided with a derelict. The captain ordered the band to play, the officers put on their dress uniforms and their white gloves. Another ship, that was drifting, too, signalled in answer to the music, ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... face of this company, to join together this man and this woman in holy matrimony." He went on through the beautiful service, while the light streamed in, bearing its fairy freight of colour and gold, and the swift patter of the Little People of the Forest rustled through the drifting leaves. ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... ride all over the hills without any attendants at all; so she felt very dull at her being shut up in this way. However, she bore it for a long while because it was the king's wish, but when time passed and there were no signs of the war drifting in the direction of the castle, she grew bolder, and sometimes strayed outside the walls, in the direction of ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Various
... country for a year or so, and have now come back again. Most of your chums have gone away or got married, or, worse still, signed the pledge—settled down and got steady; and you feel lonely and desolate and left-behind enough for anything. While drifting aimlessly round town with an eye out for some chance acquaintance to have a knock round with, you run against an old chum whom you never dreamt of meeting, or whom you thought to be in some other part of the country—or perhaps you knock up against someone ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson
... saw them fill the balloon with inflammable gas; how the brave four got into the car and everybody prophesied their destruction; and of the speechless thrill with which he saw at last the strange machine dart upwards and carry them swiftly higher and higher, until it was but a speck drifting across the clouds. ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... of squat square buildings their ship passed, decreasing speed and drifting lower with every moment. The lofty structures that were the nucleus of the strange city loomed closer. Now they were soaring slowly down a wide thoroughfare; and now, at last, they hovered above a great open square that was thronged ...
— The Red Hell of Jupiter • Paul Ernst
... the old battlements. Do men defend them still as we defended them? They are worn a little, the battlements,' and drifting nearer they peered anxiously. 'It is not by the hand of man that they are worn, our battlements. Only the years have done it and indomitable Time. Thy battlements are like the girdle of a maiden, a girdle that is round about her. See now the dew upon ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... he had no answer for it save that he must be taken care of, if not by others, then by himself; for the old man had saved him from drowning; had also saved him from an awful death on a March day when he fell into a great hole and was knocked insensible in the drifting snow; had saved him from brooding on himself—the beginning of madness—by compelling him to think for another. And sometimes, as he looked at the old man, his imagination had caught the spirit of the legend of the Indians, and he had cried out, "O soul, come back ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... as how we can tell that, Mr Poole, sir," said the boatswain. "I can't say as she's moving, for we are both in a sharp current, and she may be only drifting; but seeing the way as you made fast the end of that there cable, and then looped over bight after bight round them there fans, and twistened it all up tight, it seems to me that the screw must be fouled, and that every turn made it wuss and wuss. I say that ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... night in which he was drifting, light as a feather floating on the wind, John Aldous experienced neither pain nor very much of the sense of life. And yet, without seeing or feeling, he seemed to be living, All was dead in him but that last consciousness, which is almost the spirit; he might have been dreaming, ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... masculine names. In the university, talents of this order gained but slight recognition, and when Halfdan had for three years been preparing himself in vain for the examen philosophicum, he found himself slowly and imperceptibly drifting into the ranks of the so-called studiosi perpetui, who preserve a solemn silence at the examination tables, fraternize with every new generation of freshmen, and at last become part of the fixed furniture ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... parting kiss, O'er the mountains he is gane; And with him is a' my bliss, Nought but griefs with me remain. Spare my luve, ye winds that blaw, Plashy sleets and beating rain! Spare my luve, thou feathery snaw, Drifting o'er the frozen plain. ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... subjects which, from such a standpoint as his present one, seemed terrible enough. He had seen a good deal of the underneath life of London, had himself suffered bitterly, and he began to think of the city which now sheltered him as a city of lost souls drifting onwards to a mysterious and awful goal. Though he had thrown away in the moment of his revolt the shackles of his creed, the religious sense was still strong in him. In those dark days it became almost a torment. ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... Anglo-Saxon world the slumbering spirit of Cromwell's Ironsides has sprung to life, reminding the British Empire and the United States of their common ancestry. After a hundred and forty years of drifting apart, we stand side by side like our forefathers, the fighting pacifists at Naseby; like them, having failed to make men good with words, we will hew them into virtue with ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... than those that have sunk away? Nay, all this splendid civilization, what is it but a sparkling ripple in the calm eternity of God? Dwellings, stores, banks, churches, streets, and the restless multitudes, are but forms of life,—as it were a rack of cloud drifting across the mirror of absolute being. That which seems to you substantial is only spectral. And as the dress of the fop, and the smile of the coquette, is merely an appearance; so the wealth for which men strain in eager chase, and the fabrics which pride builds up, the anvils on which ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... board was the Grand Bank—a triangle two hundred and fifty miles on each side—a waste of wallowing sea, cloaked with dank fog, vexed with gales, harried with drifting ice, scored by the tracks of the reckless liners, and dotted with the sails of ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... a feeling of revulsion had seized Frank Merriwell. Of a sudden he had perceived whither he was drifting. He realized what false steps he had already taken, and he ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish
... time we were drifting merrily to leeward at a rate that I hated even to guess at, with the certainty, unless matters mended, of eventually piling up on the Spanish coast, then not far away, though I hadn't had sight of sun or stars in days, and didn't know within fifty miles where I was. Well, when I finally ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... another idea, captain," Ned said, just as they were about to push off. "As we saw when we were passing the ship we are drifting stern foremost. If we can fasten a long line to her stern we can hang on to it. They will not be able to see us if we are twenty fathoms astern. Then, if they anchor, and, as is likely enough, leave two or three men on board, we can haul ourselves ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... other people. He had received, as he owned, more than he could reasonably have expected, good measure pressed down and running over. The limit was now reached. He should practise restraint—leave the whole, affair where it stood. But the effect of this darkness, and of drifting, drifting, over the black water in the fine soundless rain, with its illusion of permanence, and of the extinction of to-morrow—and the retributions and adjustments in which to-morrow is so frequently and inconveniently fertile—enervated him, rendering him a ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... a landscape rose 470 More wild and waste and desolate than where The white bear, drifting on a field of ice, Howls to her sundered cubs with piteous rage ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... experience, supplied from memory of her brother's letters and conversations, contains some vivid supplementary details. The drifting away of the wreck put probably no effective distance between it and the ship; hence the necessity of ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... modern dietitians and food reformers; but we are far removed from the so-called "simple" and "plain" foods advocated by some well-meaning individuals. With the progress of civilization we are farther and farther drifting away from it. Even barbaric and beastly food ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... slips Before the moon, I creep beneath the trees, Even to the boughs whose lowest circling tips Whisper with the anemones Thick-strewn as though a cloud had made Its drifting way through spray and leafy braid And sunk with unremembering ease To humbler heaven upon the mossy heaps. And here a warmer flow Urges thy melody, yet keeps The cool of bowers; as might a rose blush through Its unrelinquished dew; Or bounteous heart that knows not woe, Put ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... first put "equal pay for equal work" into their platform, appeared in their late convention, under the lead of Sovereign, who declared that Gov. Altgeld "was one of the finest types of American manhood to-day." They seem to be drifting toward that phase of Socialism to which Alice Hyneman Rhine referred. There are no greater tyrants than some of the Labor organizations, and one evidence of this is the fact that they prevent the colored man from doing ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... bank of the river the Germans were at work. Barelegged, and armed with long poles, they waded carefully through the flooded fields towards the river to catch the drifting logs. ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... and leeward shore! "Should they, though reef'd, again their sails extend, Again in shivering streamers they may rend; Or, should they stand, beneath the oppressive strain, The down-press'd ship may never rise again; Too late to weather now Morea's land, [38] And drifting fast on Athens' rocky strand."— Thus they lament the consequence severe, Where perils unallay'd by hope appear: Long pondering in their minds each fear'd event, 380 At last to furl the courses they consent; That done, ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... Ethiop sand Long drifting down the Nile, Built up old Egypt's fertile land For many a hundred mile, So Pagan clans to Ireland came, And clans of Christendom, Yet joined their wisdom and their fame To ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... last over, and the children, made happy for one day at least, were slowly dispersing to their dreary homes, drifting away from the better influences good men and women had been trying to gather about them even for a little while. The children were beginning to leave the tables when Edith, who had been busy among ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... of the night fell upon Mildred Jocelyn's home after the return of her father. Feeling that there should be no more blind drifting toward he knew not what, he had employed all the means within his power to inform himself of the firm's prospects, and learned that there was almost a certainty of speedy failure. He was so depressed and gloomy when he sat down to dinner that his ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... late Emperor's cousin, had been duly installed, no word of what had taken place was breathed beyond the walls of the palace; for dangerous thoughts might have arisen had it been known that the State was drifting rudderless, a prey to the wild waves of sedition and lawless outbreak. The accession of a child to reign under the style of Kuang Hsu was proclaimed before it was publicly made known that his predecessor ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... which had engaged the forts in the most brilliant fashion was passing out, Bouvet was blown up by a drifting mine and sank in thirty-six fathoms north Erenkeui Village in less than ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Ethel thought how insufficient are those pictures of life that close with the fever-dream of youthful passion, and leave untold those years of the real burthen of manhood, and still more the tranquil brightness when toil has been overlived, and the setting sun gilds the clouds that are drifting away. ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... spurts of vigorous concentration. With real capacity and a liking for his work, this young man was certainly on his way to make a name; though, in the intervals of energy, no one gave a more complete impression of imperturbable drifting on the tides of the moment. Altogether, he was rather a paradox. He chose to live in that little Chelsea house which had a scrap of garden rather than in the Temple or St. James's, because he often preferred solitude; and yet he was an excellent companion, with many friends, who felt for ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... curiosity, showing little interest in either books or people. A petty fault-finder and stickler for trifles, devoid in youth of any wide designs on life, fond only of the more mechanical side of things, yet drifting as it were involuntarily into the possession of a world-formula which by dint of his extraordinary pertinacity he proceeded to apply to so many special cases that it made him a philosopher in spite of himself. ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... book is the perhaps too bold one—to map out a future for the Canadian nation, which has been hitherto drifting ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... confidence in him. The slightest thing alarmed them. When about one hundred and fifty leagues west of Ferro, they picked up part of the mast of a large vessel, and the crews fancied that she must have been wrecked drifting ominously to the entrance of those ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... these abandoned mountain farms Now drifting back to forests wild again, The long gray walls extend their clasping arms Pathetic monuments of ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... ambitions and one-sided longings, intolerable desires, etc. The same individual difference of susceptibility holds even for alcohol. With this recognition we came to lay stress again on the specific factors which make for the deterioration of habits, for tantrums with imaginations, and for drifting into abnormal behavior, ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... committed. He said that he had protested against them, and excused himself. From bad they went on to worse, and frequently quarrelling, murdered each other. The end was that this ship was cast away on a reef, one boat only escaping, and of the people in her, after she had been nearly a month drifting over the ocean, he alone survived. We who had been left alone on the Falklands had reason to be thankful that we had not gone off in the pirate ship. Had we done so, who among us could have said that we should have escaped the terrible fate which overtook our shipmates? From the time I learned the ...
— Mountain Moggy - The Stoning of the Witch • William H. G. Kingston
... The leader's thoughts were now in two places at once, and he was not far enough from the shore not to be able to cast a glance towards the Aimable, and to say to his lieutenants, as he saw the vessel drifting near shoal water, "If she keeps on in that course, she will soon be aground." Still, no time was to be lost. The parley with the Indians did not hinder them long, and soon they were on the way towards the village whither the captive had been taken. Just ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... time the car and the air ship were slowly drifting nearer to one another, drawn by that strange attraction which seems to affect inanimate things when in close neighborhood, and when they were not more than fifteen yards apart the personage we had been watching slowly lifted her arm, revealing a glittering bracelet, and, with ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... gloomy canyon, which was filled with the river's clammy, drifting mist. "Winter," she said, "will be terrible here. Then you are not going back to the coast or ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... shock to understand what had happened. Orienting himself he found he was gripping a brace of the open-mounted motor on one of the Waste Disposal Cylinders. About him he could see other odd items of the cargo, some clustering fairly closely, others just perceptibly drifting farther away. To one side, or "downwards" the Earth rolling vastly, pole over pole, and with her own natural rotation giving an odd illusion of slipping sideways ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... night of Tuesday, the fourth of September, the crew of Ribaut's flag-ship, anchored on the still sea outside the bar, saw a huge hulk, grim with the throats of cannon, drifting towards them through the gloom; and from its stern rolled on the sluggish air ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... his constitutional shyness kept him dumb, and how was he to venture to expostulate with his friend's wife upon such a subject? It seemed to be his duty to do something to prevent this lonely and sorrowful girl from drifting into a commonplace and degrading phase of sin. But how was he to begin? How could he even hint at such a suspicion? Besides, he could do nothing to remove her out of temptation. So long as Mrs. Bolton persisted in her angry refusal to follow his advice, she must be exposed ...
— Brought Home • Hesba Stretton
... over-excitement of the strong and active brain behind them. The Wonder gained a fresher bloom, and looked full enough of life to radiate vitality into a statue of ice. They had a boat of their own, in which they passed many delightful hours on the lake, rowing, drifting, reading, telling of what had been, ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... lady's presence—pervasive even during her actual brief eclipses—that subdued and silenced Mrs. Leath. The latter was, moreover, preoccupied about her stepson, who, soon after receiving his degree at Harvard, had been rescued from a stormy love-affair, and finally, after some months of troubled drifting, had yielded to his step-mother's counsel and gone up to Oxford for a year of supplementary study. Thither Mrs. Leath went once or twice to visit him, and her remaining days were packed with family obligations: getting, as she phrased it, "frocks and governesses" ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... late that night, and the sea-mist had turned to a drifting rain when the squire sitting reading in his library at the Court was startled by a sudden tapping upon the window ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... had upset in the middle of a lake, and had held hands across the upturned craft for several hours, eventually cutting holes in her ribs to stick their arms through and grasp hands lest the numbness of the cold water should overcome them. They were miles from shore, and the wind was drifting them down upon a little island. But when they got within a few hundred yards of the island, they realised to their horror that they would after all drift ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... to them the true nature of Hindu religious belief. He did the work very thoroughly. Passing lightly by the "windy moralities" of Brahmo Somaj teachers of the type of Keshub Chunder Sen, whom he left to "drifting Deans such as Stanley and Alford," he grasped the full significance of true orthodox Brahmanism, and under the pseudonym of Vamadeo Shastri wrote an essay which has "become a classic for the student ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... and Happiness are the objects which we have in view. In the tangled complications of modern existence one gets lost and bewildered, unless having very definitely in mind the objects for which we are striving. We would be like a ship drifting or sailing in a fog without a compass. We do not know whether we are attaining and accomplishing, or losing ground, unless we have definitely in mind an objective point or points with which to make comparisons of our ...
— A Jolly by Josh • "Josh"
... This expression is absolutely unintelligible, but in the context the ship is said to have returned to the south-east. It is used on a subsequent occasion apparently in the same sense, and perhaps means beating to windwards or drifting to leeward.—E.] ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... him, perceiving that my prospects bid fair to improve. For very few people can feel out of it without drifting into a self-regarding mood, and then they are the easiest prey imaginable. Undoubtedly a man like Zaluski, with his easy nonchalance, his knowledge of the world, his genuine good-nature, and the background of sterling ...
— The Autobiography of a Slander • Edna Lyall
... sun-set this mighty armament put out before a gentle south-west air, which died away at midnight, leaving them becalmed on a waveless sea. When morning dawned Britain lay on their left, and they were drifting up the straits with the tide. By and by it turned, oars were got out, and every vessel made for the spot which the events of the previous year had shown to be the best landing-place.[103] Thanks to Caesar's foresight the transports as well as the galleys could now be thus propelled, and such ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... the man himself; but set in the atmosphere of home, with son-ship and fatherhood, sisters and brothers, with the bereavements of years fully accomplished, and those of babyhood and boyhood,—a sweet and wholesome English home, with all the cloud and sunshine of the English world drifting over its roof-tree, and the soil of England beneath its stones, and English duties for the breath of its being. To add such a home to the household-rights of English literature is perhaps something from which Arnold would have shrunk, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... souls which had been united by a first impulse were drifting apart again. He felt that Dane, Minucci, and probably also Fare, wished, as did he himself, to initiate an intellectual movement, and that this Franciscan flash had come out of season and was out of place. It was all the more inopportune in that it was hot with living truth. For ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... cried old Abe, as he pointed out to sea. "There she is, blowing and drifting in fast. And right toward the Dolphin Rocks, too—the worst place on the beach!" They all gazed toward the doomed vessel, that was now much nearer shore. Blake even thought he could descry figures on deck, clinging ...
— The Moving Picture Boys on the Coast • Victor Appleton
... homeward- and the outward-bound, And touch the helm of passing minds And bid them steer as wistfully— Saying: "He did great work, until the winds And waters hereabout that night betrayed Him to the drifting death! His work went on— He would not be gainsaid.... Though where his bones are, ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... Nevertheless, I secretly made calculations and watched the vessel's course. Another day went by without a noontide observation; but, at midnight, I furtively obtained a lunar, by the result of which I found we were drifting close to the Cuba reefs, about five miles ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... that time the greater part of the enemy's ships ceased to fire; some of the lighter vessels were adrift, and the carnage on board their ships was dreadful the crews having been continually re-enforced. Soon after this, the Danish commodore's ship took fire, and drifting in flames before the wind, spread terror and dismay throughout their line. The ships a-head, however, with the crown-batteries, as well as the prizes made by the British, still continued to lire, and Nelson, humane as he was brave, being shocked ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... And now and then she heard what she knew to be the rush of a round shot far above her head, and following the sound saw a little silver fountain leap up into the sunshine and skim before the breeze; then glancing up the hill she saw the gray puff drifting, and presently felt the dull rumble of the air. At the root of the smoke-puffs, once or twice, she descried a stocky figure moving leisurely, and in spite of the distance and huddle of vapour could declare that it ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... the intrigues of ministers had, one after the other, served to break the bonds which fettered them, and in one generation they were able to regain that liberty of action of which they had been deprived for centuries. To this state of things Egypt had been drifting from the earliest times. Unity could be maintained only by a continuous effort, and once this became relaxed, the ties which bound the whole country together were soon broken. There was another danger threatening the country beside that arising from the weakening ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... and gay exquisite in themselves, yet never complete, fragments rather, as it seemed, of some theme yet to come, which they had hardly time to suggest before they were torn, as it were, from their roots and sent drifting down the stream, to reappear in new settings, richer combinations, and fairer forms; and these, I knew, were symbols of the lives and deaths ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... journey was but a sample of the travel and exposures of the year of labor, on which Brother Frink had entered. Amid the drifting snows of winter, and the copious rains of summer, he was compelled to traverse the dreary, and almost unbroken forests of his field, and on more than one occasion he found the night around his camp-fire ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... opening of the fight the ships of the van were fairly abreast of the fort, their guns leaping and thundering; and under the weight of their terrific fire that of the fort visibly slackened. All was now uproar and slaughter, the smoke drifting off in clouds. The decks were reddened and ghastly with blood, and the wreck of flying splinters drove across them at each discharge. The monitor Tecumseh alone was silent. After firing the first two shots, her commander, Captain Craven, ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... and incipient violence, Mirabeau, whose power in the Assembly was still unimpaired, wished to halt. He foresaw the future. No man in France had such clear insight and sagacity as he. He saw the State drifting into dissolution, and put forth his hand and raised his voice to arrest the catastrophe which he lamented. "The mob of Paris," said he, "will scourge the corpses of the King and Queen." It was then that he gave but feeble support to the "Rights of Man," and contended ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... variegated light fell upon the mass of gondolas a few rods up the Canal, and a moment later the huge structure of red, white, and green lamps, came drifting down-stream. It represented a great temple with dome-like roof topped by a crown of lights, glittering against the dark background of the night. As it drew nearer, the throng of boats in its path thinned a little, and broken reflections of the gleaming ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... with philosophy and wealth with content, and he would have come away charmed with the graciousness of his entertainment. And yet, if from any other country or region than the South, he would have departed with a feeling of mystification, as though he had been drifting in a counter-current and had discovered a part of the world sheltered and to some extent secluded from the general movement and ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... other channel they could see a bateau just disappearing behind a clump of trees. It was headed down-stream. Menard swung the canoe about, and they skirted the foot of the island. Instead of a single bateau there were some half dozen, drifting light down the river, with a score of coureurs de bois and voyageurs under the command of a bronzed lieutenant, Du Peron, a sergeant, and a corporal. The lieutenant recognized Menard, and both parties landed while the ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... with one stroke of which he severed the rope that held them to the spare anchor. This threw the whole weight of the Dazzler on the chain-anchor. In consequence she swung off to the left, and just in time; for the next instant, drifting stern foremost, the Ghost passed over the spot ...
— The Cruise of the Dazzler • Jack London
... her expression of them. She quoted Wells and Shaw, and he hated both. He was an idealist and a romantic, with a volume of poems in his pocket. She, it seemed, was still on a rising wave of rebellion, moral and social, like so many women; while his wave had passed, and he was drifting in the trough of it. He supposed she had dropped religion, like everything else. Well, the type didn't attract him. He believed the world was coming back to the old things. The war had done it—made people think. No doubt this girl had rushed through a lot of things already, and ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was a drifting in the heart of the canyon. Sunshine and butterflies drifted in and out among the trees. The hum of the bees and the whisper of the stream were a drifting of sound. And the drifting sound and drifting color seemed to weave together in the making of a delicate and intangible ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... drifting boat the Scout was headed down the river and in a few minutes they were off the colonel's landing. Here, the boys would have taken their boat and rowed home, but the colonel insisted on carrying them down to Creston, which was quickly done in ...
— The Boy Scouts Patrol • Ralph Victor
... of floral beauty was hidden, or was suddenly revealed, upon the tropic islands, through which the pinnace moved. And upon her deck what a bevy of human flowers—young women how lovely, young men how noble, that were dancing together, and slowly drifting towards us amidst music and incense, amidst blossoms from forests and gorgeous corymbi from vintages, amidst natural caroling and the echoes of sweet girlish laughter. Slowly the pinnace nears us, gaily she hails us, and slowly she disappears beneath the shadow of ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... whither she was drifting, and by pretended levity turned it into a joke. At one time she invited the old Spanish bishop to marry her to Dudley, and next day said she would never marry at all. But she never ceased to flirt with Dudley, who, when his intrigue with Spain fell through, cynically appealed to the French ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... all day long, things were passing. Now a string of barges drifting down to London, piled with lime or barrels of beer; then a steam-launch, disengaging heavy masses of black smoke, and disturbing the whole width of the river with long rolling waves; then an impetuous electric launch, and then a boatload of pleasure-seekers, ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... ribbon in their buttonholes, were idling. They were quiet, curious, dully waiting to see what this preposterous stroke might mean for them. In the heavy noonday air of the streets they moved lethargically, drifting westward to the hall where the A. R. U. committees were in session. Oblivious of his engagements, Sommers followed them, hearing the burden of their talk, feeling their aimless discontent, their bitterness ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... morning Mrs. Salisbury awakened with a dull headache. Hot sunlight was streaming into the bedroom, an odor of coffee, drifting upstairs, made her feel suddenly sick. Her first thought was that she COULD not have Sandy's two friends to luncheon, and she COULD not keep a shopping and tea engagement with a friend of her own! She might creep through the day somehow, but ...
— The Treasure • Kathleen Norris
... under water and look into the box. A cloth hood or eye piece to keep out the outside light will make it more effective. The best way to use a water telescope is to lie in the bottom of a boat which is drifting about, and to look through the telescope over the side. As you study the marvellous animal and plant life that passes along under you like a panorama, see to it that in your excitement you do not fall overboard as a boy friend of ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... in incense gloom, In drifting clouds and golden light;" Once I was shod with fire and trod Beethoven's path through storm and night: It is too late now to resume ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... this exodus was taking place, here and there a settler was drifting onto the Lower Brule, a "lucky number" who had come ahead of time—there was so much to do getting settled. And by these restless signs of change over the plains, we knew that ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... lying open on the snow and it was empty. Already material in the form of books and papers that had not been destroyed when the aircraft disintegrated on impact had been blown by winds over the ice-slope or into crevasses or covered by drifting snow. He pointed out that although the cockpit voice recorder had been located quite quickly when he was back at the crash site with the party from New Zealand on 2nd December the "black box" could not be found until later that evening after it had been decided to begin digging ...
— Judgments of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand on Proceedings to Review Aspects of the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Mount Erebus Aircraft Disaster • Sir Owen Woodhouse, R. B. Cooke, Ivor L. M. Richardson, Duncan
... a rare state about Master Teddy at the vicarage!" she said after they had plodded on another hundred yards, making but slow headway against the drifting snow and boisterous wind. "I made him angry by taking away his kitten, I suppose, and so he determined to make off to his gran'ma; for we missed him soon after the children's dinner. I thought he was in the study with Mr Vernon; but when I came to look he wasn't there, and so we all turned out ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... was being churned and trodden into hideous slush in which my feet slipped and stumbled. My coat and sailor's cap were covered with powdery flakes, and I had to hold my head down for fear lest the drifting moisture should wash any of the colouring off my face. So my feet carried me once more into Oxford Street. How well remembered was every house, every lamp-post, every flag of the pavement almost! I was on ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... during Shirley's two weeks' visit she and David were together, sometimes, through Mrs. Jim's contrivance, with others and often, by grace of their own ingenuity, alone, drifting carelessly down the most traveled stream of life. If Mrs. Jim's warning had awakened any doubts in Shirley's mind—and it had—the doubts were quickly laid by David's presence. She let herself drift; this in spite of certain very definite and very different plans which she had ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... side of the enclosure, for food and coal supplies, as well as for the handling of the numerous imports and exports of this wonderfully complete feudal domain. As the colony lay there basking in the sunshine of early spring, under its drifting streamers of smoke, it seemed an ideal picture of peaceful activities. Here a locomotive puffed, shunting cars; there, a steam-jet flung its plumes of snowy vapor into air; yonder, a steam hammer thundered on a ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... feeling for Will changed. He had worn me out. The love I had given him I lavished upon the child. Will's mother came to live with us—she had been drifting around miserably before—and while she failed me at the time of the divorce, yet she was a tower of strength to me during the baby's infancy. I was very fond of her and I think she sincerely liked me. But Will, her only son, could always make her believe black was white, as I ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... buffeted their faces, and the sun, that looked through veils of mist and smoke, gently warmed their aging frames and found itself again in their hearts. Perhaps it was there that the water- elms and watermaples chiefly budded, and the red-birds sang, and the drifting flocks of blackbirds called and clattered; but surely these also spread their gray and pink against the sky and filled it with their voices. There were meadow-larks and robins without as well as within, and it was no subjective plough that turned ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of her mind drifting back to that crazy notion of an evil spirit wandering to seek a home; as the hermit-crab, dispossessed of one shell, goes in search of another. After a lull which had looked for a moment like coming sleep, she said with an astonishing calmness:—"But do you not see, ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... direction of the explosion, though still traveling in the direction it had been pursuing, but backward now. Behind them the air was a gigantic pool of ionization. Tremendous fragments of what obviously had been a ship were drifting down, turning end over end. And those fragments of the wall showed them to be fully ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... the substitutes in the Languedoc battalion could not endure the strain any longer. They fired without orders and could not be stopped. At the same time Montcalm saw that his five little bodies of men were drifting apart. When the Canadian regulars had moved off, they had left the French flanks quite open. In consequence, the French battalions nearest the flanks kept edging outwards, the ones on the right towards their own right and the ones on the left towards their own left, ...
— The Passing of New France - A Chronicle of Montcalm • William Wood
... If a Bania is on the other side of a river you should leave your bundle on this side for fear he should steal it. If a Bania is drowning you should not give him your hand; he is sure to have some pecuniary motive for drifting down-stream. A Bania will start an auction in a desert. If a Bania's son tumbles down he is sure to pick up something. He uses light weights and swears that the scales tip up of themselves; he keeps his accounts in a character that no one but God can read; if you borrow from him your ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... O'Brien has for years, as a species of political outcast, been preaching the doctrine of conciliation, and has suffered in consequence, but his successful opponents have not gained the victory, for we are now rapidly drifting towards the total exclusion of several counties—the thing of all things they ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... the cliff to an apparently endless distance, until, as I gazed steadily on the extreme limit of my view, I saw the grey mist from the sea here and there break and roll up into great masses of slow-drifting cloud, in the intervals of which I caught the white gleam of sunlit snow. And these intervals continually closed up to open again in fresh places higher up, disclosing peak upon peak of a range of ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... shred of justice, good as far it goes, is utterly inadequate to meet the emergency of this hour. Men of every race and color may vote, but if the women are excluded our legislation will still lack that moral tone, for want of which the nation is to-day drifting toward ruin. There is no other name given by which the country can be saved but that of woman. "Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed." Women are governed, negroes are governed, and should give their ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... his father's boat, Tony did work far harder—hooking mackerel at dawn, in with a catch and out to sea again, or up on land hawking them round; out drifting all night; crabbing, lobster-potting, shrimping,[4] wrinkling,[5] or taking out frights,[6] wet and dry, rough and calm, day and night. "Aye, an' I be suffering from it now. Thees yer bellyache what thins me every summer an' wears a fellow out, don't come from nothing but tearing ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... Thus drifting afar to the dim-vaulted caves Where life and its ventures are laid, The dreamers who gaze while we battle the waves May see us in sunshine or shade; Yet true to our course, though our shadow grow dark, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... now that the weather is fine again. We had a whole day's rain (which Herodotus says is a portent here) and a hurricane from the south worthy of the Cape. I thought we should have been buried under the drifting sand. To-day is again heavenly. I saw Abd-el-Azeez, the chemist in Cairo; he seemed a very good fellow, and was a pupil of my old friend M. Chrevreul, and highly recommended by him. Here I am out of all European ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... penetrated by the nests of birds. An old, shining tree-trunk, half in and half out of the water. An island of gravel, long and narrow, in the centre of the river. Chips, blocks of wood, slabs, and other scraps of lumber, strewed along the beach; logs drifting down. The high bank covered with various trees and shrubbery, and, in one place, ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... pasture; in the wagon shed the two men, before a tin basin, plunged their arms into water, flung it on their faces, and puffed and sighed. The shed was cold, and redolent of earth. Outside, the odor of coffee, drifting from the house, mingled in the early morning air with clover and hay, cut in the fields, ...
— Autumn • Robert Nathan
... history, and its high price—$170—reached amid great excitement—is the highest on record. The speculation was something tremendous, and it has been through the speculation that the people who have been under the impression that the markets were drifting into a dull and uninteresting condition have had ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... snow—one by the mast, three amidships, and one in the stern sheets, steering. At least, he had a hand on the tiller: but the people had given over pulling, and the boat without steerage-way was drifting broadside-on towards the shore with the set ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... coldest night known for many years in any English winter. Snow lay deep upon the ground, and a few flakes were falling still from the cloudy sky, for it was in the second week of January. The wind was drifting it in gusty eddies down the long streets, and driving the drifts before it like whirling dust in an August storm. Not a cab was to be seen anywhere, not even a stray hansom crawling home from clubs or theatres; and Ernest set out with a rueful countenance to walk ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... overcast with dark clouds, and for several hours the snow fell unceasingly, and now the darkness of night was added to the gloomy scene. As the night set in, the snow continued to fall in a thick shower, and a strong easterly wind arose, which filled the air with one blinding cloud of drifting snow; and the lights in the scattered habitations, in the then primitive settlement of D. could scarcely be distinguished amid the thick darkness. It was a fearful night to be abroad upon that lonely and almost impassible road; and Mrs. W. fully realized the peril to which ...
— Stories and Sketches • Harriet S. Caswell |
