"Drifting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... memory. The East was in her brain, the glow of the skies, the gleam of the desert, the swish of the Nile, the cry of the sweet-seller, the song of the dance-girl, the strain of the darabukkeh, the call of the skis. She saw again the ghiassas drifting down the great river, laden with dourha; she saw the mosque of the blue tiles with its placid fountain, and its handful of worshippers praying by the olive-tree. She watched the moon rise above the immobile Sphinx, she looked down on the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Union gunboats and three rams were now disabled; the latter drifting down with the current under the guns of Fort Pillow. Those remaining were five in number, and only two gunboats, the Benton and Carondelet, were actually engaged, the St. Louis just approaching. The enemy now retired, ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... We are drifting away from our old-fashioned homes; fathers have grown too busy, mothers have delegated their God-given work to others. We have lost instead of gained. Wherever the homes are full of weakness the government is in danger. The homes of our country ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... distance only 35,000,000 of miles sunward of them, a morning star of hope, our own warmer planet, green with vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with glimpses through its drifting cloud wisps of broad stretches of populous country and ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... that their produce would suffice to meet all claims for the year. She was standing at the window casting the matter over in her mind, with great satisfaction, when her attention was suddenly caught by some heavy, black clouds with white borders, drifting at a great rate across the Summer sky. 'It is a hail-storm!' she exclaimed in dismay, and quickly throwing up the window, she leaned out. Her eyes rested upon a frightful mass of wild storm-clouds, covering the western horizon, and approaching ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... Morton, 'you may at this moment be drifting on the Euphrates, or pondering on the site of Alexandreia Eschate. It is you who owe me an account of yourself; nevertheless, I am prompted to write, if only to tell you that I have just got the complete set ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... Texan and the ranger watched a dust-cloud drifting to the south. In it was hidden the ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... affairs!" she stormed. "What sort of a ship is this? There's that colored man upstairs asleep under the wheel; the Doctor asleep down here; and you making pot-hooks in a copy-book with a pencil! Expect the ship to steer herself to Brazil? We're just drifting around the sea like an empty bottle—and a week behind time as it is. What's ...
— The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... His right! He folded the scrap of paper in his hand. As his nervous fingers took it in, limp and blotted, so his soul took in the mean temptation, lapped it in fancied rights, in dreams of improved existences, drifting and endless as the cloud-seas of color. Clutching it, as if the tightness of his hold would strengthen his sense of possession, he went aimlessly down the street. It was his watch at the mill. He need not go, need never go again, thank God!—shaking off the ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... its course five hundred and sixty islands, without counting islets, drifting or stationary, forming a kind of archipelago, and yielding of themselves ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... singing, drifting from one sweet love song into another. Once she looked up at Spencer Morgan. He rose quickly and went to her side, looking down at her with a ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... same that his brilliance will not altogether overshadow your memory of others. I should not like to think that we were drifting apart. Still, if it should be so, I must resign myself. I could still be happy in thinking ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... settlers and people here in those days, who had come cram full of stories about the salt desert yonder and what it hid. They said that the old mission fathers who first came here to travel about among the Indians discovered an old city there, half buried in the drifting sand, and beyond it two great hills. They said that there was a great treasure in the city, left by the old people who had lived there, and that the hills beyond were of solid gold, waiting for any one who would risk all there ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... as a blank to Hare; the morning like a drifting of hazy clouds before his eyes. He felt himself moving; and when he awakened clearly to consciousness he lay upon a couch on the vine-covered porch of a cottage. He saw August Naab open a garden gate to admit Martin Cole. ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... standing about on deck, we saw the little brig drifting by us, hove to under her fore topsail double reefed; and she glided by like a phantom. Not a word was spoken, and we saw no one on deck but the man at the wheel. Toward morning the captain put his head out of the companion-way and told the second mate, who commanded our watch, to look ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... winds run warm on the waves of the grass that lifts like a scented sea. No sound of the surf, no sob of the tides; but the drone of the drowsy bee Is drawing me out from the purple shades to wade in the daffodils, Where the long green billows go drifting by to lap the feet of ...
— England over Seas • Lloyd Roberts
... their lamps showing like those shooting sparks which dart at times through embers. A red lantern, on a level with the dam of the Mint, cast a streamlet of blood, as it were, into the water. Something huge and lugubrious, some drifting form, no doubt a lighter which had become unmoored, slowly descended the stream amid the reflections. Espied for a moment, it was immediately afterwards lost in the darkness. Where had the triumphal island sunk? In the depths of that flow of water? Claude still gazed, gradually ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... 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 ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... view over the rugged and chaotic masses of the stupendous chain, and the vast deserts which stretch away far from its eastern base; while on all sides are broken ridges and chasms and ravines, with masses of piled-up rocks and uprooted trees, with clouds of drifting snow flying through the air, and the hurricane's roar battling through the forest at our feet adding to the wildness of the scene, which is unrelieved by the slightest vestige of animal or ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... figure at his side. He reached over, tucked in the robes more closely about their feet, and spoke one word to Midnight. The horse, noble animal that she was, bounded forward. The ice, glassy and firm, stretched out far ahead. It was a raw, midwinter day and the wind drifting in from the north-east presaged a storm. But the magnificent beast, black as a raven's wing, did not mind it. With head low, tail almost touching the dash-board, and eyes sparkling with animation, she clipped along ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... 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 would be ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... operating in connection with the thought-forces is one with that great law of the universe,—that like attracts like. We can, by virtue of our ignorance of the powers of the mind forces and the prevailing mental states,—we can take the passive, the negative, fearing, drifting attitude, and thus continually attract to us like influences and conditions from both the seen and the unseen side of life. Or, by a knowledge of the power and potency of these forces, we can take the positive, ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine
... hemisphere, destined to put a new heart into our semi-barbarian theology, politics, manners, literature, and law. And especially do I rejoice, that having defrauded the feminine element of its due share in practical affairs for so many ages, and found ourselves, as a natural consequence, drifting toward barbarism with all our wealth and wisdom, we are compelled at last to learn that justice to woman is simply mercy ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... new group of ideas comes upon the stage, there may arise contradictions, discords, and a sense of lurking absurdity which will tend to disrupt thought logically at the same time that the processes of nutrition and the oncoming of new dreams tend to supplant it mechanically. Such drifting categories have no mutual authority. They replace but do not dominate one another, and the general conditions of life—by conceiving which life itself might be surveyed—remain ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... love of finery and joy in receiving presents, are the principal motives that lead girls into illegal relations. And what I want to make plain is this: a characterless girl, irresponsible, without care for the future, drifting, snatching at pleasure, taking the easiest course—this is the girl who bears a child illegitimately and this is the girl incapable of ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... a top, facing the 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 four feet ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... half-hour at a time, his arms folded on the rail, his eyes fixed vaguely on the wintry current, a steel-gray stretch of sliding, slipping water down which the rough white ice cakes came floating, drifting silently, relentlessly, unendingly, to crash against the stone piers of the bridge. In that same way, out of the gray, bleak perspective of his thoughts, the doubts came floating, drifting down upon him with the same relentlessness, ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... warning for thousands and tens of thousands of women who have not yet glimpsed the Gates of Despair, but are drifting towards them and will surely pass through them, as I did, unless they understand the perils that surround and beset ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... she faltered. "I cannot tell why, but I have a distinct distrust of the future, a feeling that we are drifting apart." ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... which the epidemic produced the Banner seemed drifting steadily towards Bloomah and her mates. They started Monday morning with all hands on deck, so to speak; they sailed round Tuesday and Wednesday without a black mark in the school-log. The Thursday on which they had so often split was passed under full canvas, and if they ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... and held fast in a perpendicular direction, they will offer a broad surface towards the side, and thus, by acting like the leeboards of a river-barge, or the keel of a ship, prevent the balsa from drifting sidewise or dead to leeward. But while these guaras serve the purpose of a keel, they also perform the important duty of a rudder, the rationale of which every sailor will understand, upon considering the effect which must follow upon pulling either up the guara in the bow or that ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... thoughtfully, smoothing them with his hand; put them into their little bundle; and placed it tenderly in his breast again. The face was gone from the door. I still saw the snow drifting in; but nothing else ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... three in the afternoon, and continued without intermission through the whole night. The vessels, drifting together, struck on the shoal called the Nek, near Wydeness. In the heat of the action the occurrence was hardly heeded. In the morning twilight, John Haring, of Hoorn, the hero who had kept one thousand soldiers at bay upon the Diemer dyke, clambered on board the 'Inquisition,' ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... voice, without a sound, Shall dwell beside Pomona, on the sea, And speak the 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
... in shrouds of drifting clouds, I watch the phantom's flight, Till alien eyes from Paradise Smile on me as I write: And I forgive the wrongs that live, As lightly as I wipe Away the tear that rises here; And ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... couldn't forbear joining in the roar of approbation that went up from the American contingent. An Englishman who was with our party insisted that I opened my arms a yard and a half to give strength to my applause. I said I didn't regret it. We poor expatriated wanderers had been drifting about for months with no other emotion than homesickness, but we had a lively one then. The Filipino audience at first sat amazed at the outburst; but their sympathies are quick and keen, and in an instant they realized what it meant to ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... last Sunday, and travelled on to Albany, through three hundred miles of flood, villages deserted, bridges broken, fences drifting away, nothing but tearing water, floating ice, and absolute wreck and ruin. The train gave in altogether at Utica, and the passengers were let loose there for the night. As I was due at Albany, a ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... the sweep of the great river, with Indian-haunted land stretching for leagues on every side. A mere handful of troops was quartered there, technically two companies of infantry, yet numbering barely enough for one; and this in spite of rumors daily drifting to us that the Sacs and Foxes, with their main village just below, were already becoming restless and warlike, inflamed by the slow approach of white settlers into the valley of the Rock. Indeed, so short was the garrison of officers, that the harassed commander had ventured ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... not allowed for the drifting of the ship. That second shell was meant to demolish the chart-house and clear the bridge of its occupants. Striking high and forward, it had robbed the Andromeda of her last chance. Now she was rolling in the full grip of the ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... A great snowstorm, visible on three sides of your wide-windowed room, loading the evergreens, blown in fine powder from the great chestnut-tops, piled up in ever accumulating masses, covering the paths, the shrubbery, the hedges, drifting and clinging in fantastic deposits, deepening your sense of security, and taking away the sin of idleness by making it a necessity, this is an excellent ground to your day by ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... investigation it was but a step to sublimity itself. His soul seemed separate from his body; he was dispassionate, superhuman, all-seeing and all-comprehending. Now he could see men as winged ants, crossing each other, nearing, drifting apart, interweaving, floating in a cloud, blown high, blown low by wafts of air; and here, presently, came one Manvers, and there, driven by ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... not only these agreeable and lovely folk in pleasant habitations whom the Irish made, but also spirits of another sort, of lesser powers and those chiefly malignant, having no fixed dwelling-place, homeless in the air and drifting with it, embodying the venomous and deadly elements of the earth and the angers and cruelty of the sea, and the hypocrisy of them all—demons, some of whom, like the stepmother of the children of Lir, have been changed from men or women because of wicked doings, but the most part born of ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... 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 ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Buchanan • James Buchanan
... within twenty feet of the Kentigern she swung broadside on, ceasing all headway and drifting into position ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... Florence, now in Rome; living together in Alsace, drifting to Paris; and, when the Revolution drove them from the French capital, seeking refuge in London, where we find the uncrowned Queen of England chatting amicably with the "usurper" George in the Royal box at the ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... 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 ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... group 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 ...
— The Red Hell of Jupiter • Paul Ernst
... strike; the hero is Etienne Lantier (La Fortune des Rougon and L'Assommoir). In a moment of passion Lantier had struck one of his superiors, and having been dismissed from his employment as an engineer, found it difficult to get work, till, after drifting from place to place, he eventually became a coal-miner. The hardships of the life and its miserable remuneration impressed him deeply, and he began to indoctrinate his comrades with a spirit of revolt. His influence grew, and he became the acknowledged ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... That is a lie, child. Let a man drink ten barrels of rum a day, he is not a drunken skipper until he is a drifting skipper. Whilst he can lay his course and stand on his bridge and steer it, he is no drunkard. It is the man who lies drinking in his bunk and trusts to Providence that I call the drunken skipper, though he drank nothing but the waters of ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... when my heart is full of grief Or when my heart is merry; Come with the falling of the leaf Or with the redd'ning cherry. Come when the year's first blossom blows, Come when the summer gleams and glows, Come with the winter's drifting snows, And ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... drops of rain to fall. Even then the obstinate weather refused to quite yield, wrapping its cloak, as it were, around it in bitter enmity. But in a day or two white clouds lit up with sunshine appeared drifting over from the southward, and that was the end. The old pensioner came to the door for his bread and cheese: 'The wind's in the south' he said, 'and I hopes she'll stay there' Five dull yellow spots ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... was smooth, the sun shining brilliantly. I suppose the colonel would tell you, that seas may be too smooth; anyhow I saw the fact now. There had been not wind enough during the night to make our sails of any use; a current had caught us, and we had been drifting, drifting, till now it appeared we were drifting straight on to a line of rocks which we could see at a little distance; made known both to eye and ear: to the former by a line of white where the waves broke upon the rocks, and to the latter by the ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... and south coasts of Sweden, and in the Skagerrak south-east of Norway, navigation is interfered with by ice only in severe winters, and then the ice is usually drifting, compact sea-ice being very rare. Between Stockholm and Visby navigation usually ceases at the end of December and begins again about the 10th of April. During very severe winters the Aland Sea is covered with thick ice available for traffic. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... my attention was that which represented the monster steamer complete, with all its appendages and complement of passengers, in its majestic flight through the air. Below it were the drifting clouds. Its course lay quite above the storms and hurricanes and conflicting wind-currents which vex the lower strata of the atmosphere, where it comes in contact with the earth's uneven surface, and is kept in motion by the contractions and expansions of alternate cold and heat, and is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... since the girl bitterly disliked him, and he, in the strength of the insular and Puritan side of his nature, disapproved of her. It was the pleasure of the hour, no one looked beyond that in Revonde, and Rallywood had fallen into the universal habit of drifting. ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... bringing the wheel close around, he swung the bow of the Francois into the side of the Englishman. But, as the sailors scampered to the bulwarks with cutlass and with dirk, a sheet of flame burst from the port-holes of the drifting Nonsuch. ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... to represent Chinese objection to British opium as the sole cause of the "Opium War'' of 1840, for the indignities to which foreign traders and foreign diplomats were continually subjected in their efforts to establish commercial and political relations with the Chinese were rapidly drifting the two nations into war. Still, it was peculiarly unfortunate and it put foreigners grievously in the wrong before the Chinese that the overt act which developed the long- gathering bitterness into open rupture was the righteous if irregular ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... plain in these days that we were nearing a most critical decision, and Nationalist opinion was profoundly uneasy. Many men were drifting back to Redmond's view, and recoiled from the prospect of dividing the Convention once more into its original component parts—Nationalists on the one side, Unionists on the other. It was proposed that on the Wednesday Nationalists should meet and, if possible, concert joint action; if ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... death it was. The maiden was immolated on the altar of superstition, and the people of Ruedesheim were awestruck as they thought of the pathetic form drifting down the river. Nor did posterity fail to remember the story, and down to recent times the boatmen of the neighbourhood, when seeing the Rhine wax stormy at the place where Minna was drowned, were wont to whisper that her soul was walking abroad, ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... 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 made ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... helplessly drifting; and then, to my surprise—can you "find" that you've lost a thing? Well, I don't know how else to express it. I found that I'd lost the path. If I'd only been able to remember whether the hotel were north or south, ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... out from her. Nebulous obscurity occupies space. Through the drifting fog without the gramophone blares over coughs ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... efficiency, of gameness, of going the limit, Weaver stood head and shoulders above his neighbors. She had lifted her gaze to meet his, quite sure that her answer was not in doubt, but now her heart was beating like a triphammer. She felt herself drifting from her moorings. It was as though she were drowning forty fathoms deep in those calm, ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... war continues long after our recognition of the South, whether it will be possible for us to avoid drifting ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... 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 Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... deadly portent, the long-banished Stars and Stripes flying against the frowning sky. Oh! for the Mississippi! for the Mississippi!" (an iron-clad vessel nearly completed, upon which great hopes had been based by the Confederates). "Just then she came down. But how? Drifting helplessly, ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... this time, liked to get on the leeward side of as many pipes as possible, and as near as he could to the smokers. He said that this kept away the mosquitoes. There he would sit, with the smoke drifting full in his face, both hands in his pockets, talking about Quebec, and debating the comparative merits of a boy or a girl as an addition to ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... world, orbiting out beyond Mars, would be for them. Osmium, iridium, uranium. The rich, metallic guts of a planet exposed for easy mining. Thousands of prospectors, hopeful characters, and men brutalized by the life in space, were already drifting around in ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... that all slaveholding was a sin, and when public opinion at the North was evidently drifting to this doctrine, then the planters grew indignant and enraged. It became unpleasant for a Northern merchant or traveller to visit a Southern city, and equally unpleasant for a Southern student to enter a Northern college, or a planter to ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... blowing many a drifting thing From circling cove down to the unsheltered sea; Thou blowest to the sea my blue sail's wing, Us to a new love-lit futurity: Out to the ocean fleet and float; Blow, blow my ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... stoic asceticism which had come to influence his action of late, held him back. But now, here and alone, the immediately provoking cause of passion removed, reaction against the strain of all that had very sensibly set in. He felt strangely astray, as though drifting at hazard upon the waters of an unquiet, mist-blinded sea. He was conscious of a deep-seated preoccupation regarding some matter, which he was alike unable to forget or to define. Formless images perplexed his vision. Formless thoughts pursued one another, as with the hurry of rumoured calamity, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... in a veiled, clever, discreet and insinuating manner. But each word of the holy woman in cornet made a breach in the indignant resistance of the courtesan. Then the conversation drifting somewhat, the woman with the hanging rosary spoke of the Convents of her Order, of her Superior, of herself, and of her lovely neighbor, the dear Sister Saint-Nicephore. They had been called to Havre to nurse in the Hospitals hundreds ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... climate and animal life and their possibilities of survival brought about by the erosion of topsoil. Paul Sears, in his Deserts on the March, has told the story. It can be summed up in four words: deforestation, overgrazing, erosion, drifting sands. ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... drifting away from her mother. It was quite easy to say, "Because George Emerson has been bothering me, and if he hears I've given up Cecil may begin again"—quite easy, and it had the incidental advantage of being true. But she could not say it. She disliked confidences, for they might lead ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... thoughts wandered like that, and I ate and, from my pocket flask, washed my dry eating down, the weather changed with a swiftness familiar enough among the Scottish mountains. The heavens passed behind a veil of drifting clouds, through which the sun flared in red, angry bursts. The elements had declared hostilities, and when I looked down into the valley, two thousand feet beneath me, I saw a great thunderstorm on the march, the ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... sky drifting down to the sea. The night, Old, ugly, and stern, Lies upon the water, Quivering in the twilight Like a ...
— Precipitations • Evelyn Scott
... if water never had been so still before. It appeared impossible that anything uncanny should hide beneath that lovely mirror; and yet when some floating wisp of reeds suddenly coiled itself around my neck, or some unknown thing, drifting deeper, coldly touched my foot, it gave that undefinable sense of shudder which every swimmer knows, and which especially appeals to the imagination by night. Sometimes a slight sip of brackish water would enter my lips,—for I naturally tried to swim as low as possible,—and then would ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... them passed much time in Europe. They lived just on the verge of that Old World from which we are drifting away so swiftly. They were familiar with many varieties of men and fortune. Their lot brought them into contact with personages of whom we read only in books, who seem alive, as I read in the Virginians' letters regarding them, whose voices I almost fancy I hear, as I read the yellow pages ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... spirit in all hands that made 'em honor him as if he'd been a admiral—that lad, alone with the second mate and one seaman, was left, of all the beatin' hearts that went aboard that ship, the only living creeturs—lashed to a fragment of the wreck, and drifting on the stormy sea." ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... moment knew me as I came, And lighten'd up, and trembled into love; The next were darkened by my hand! Ah me! Ye will not look upon me in that world. Yet thou, perchance, art happier, if thou go'st Into some land of wind and drifting leaves, To sleep without a star; but as for me, Hell hungers, and the restless Furies wait. Then the dark Curse, that sits upon the towers, Bow'd down her awful head, thus satisfied, And I fled forth, a ...
— Primavera - Poems by Four Authors • Stephen Phillips, Laurence Binyon, Manmohan Ghose and Arthur Shearly Cripps
... itself was of constant interest; and hundreds of craft were passed or met. Here a full-rigged sailing vessel lazily drifting with the wind; there a giant little tug puffing in the opposite direction with a string of barges in tow loaded ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... they expected to return to Tripoli, a heavy fog drifting from the southwest rested over the sea, and though conditions were not ideal, they ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... in love, Carried her child across the square; Her face was a dim drifting flame To which her pyre of hair Was a column of ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... light possible, because the air was filled with falling snow, he followed the herd, as it wound snakelike down the easiest descents, making for the more sheltered small canyons that opened out upon the flat. "Cattle drifting before the wind," read the script; and now Luck saw them coming, their snow-whitened backs humped to the driving storm, heads lowered and swaying weakly from side to side with the shambling motion of their feet. They were drifting before the wind, just ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... in Walter Sayers' office was from the beginning something different, apart from the young woman from Iowa who had been drifting from office to office, moving from rooming house to rooming house on Chicago's North Side, striving feebly to find out something about life by reading books, going to the theatre and walking alone in the streets. In the new place her life at once began to have ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... as I was drifting into slumber, Silvia remarked: "Only one of the things I heard and read about ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... and I seem to be drifting towards a vista which is coming to look, as it sloughs the shadow of night, ever clearer and clearer. It is a vista of white huts, silvery trees, a red church, and dew-bespangled earth. And as the sun rises he reveals to us clustered, transparent clouds which, like thousands ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... hot haze of a July morning a dromon, as certain merchant vessels of that time were called, might have been seen drifting before a light breeze into St. George's Bay at Beirut, on the coast of Syria. Cyprus, whence she had sailed last, was not a hundred miles away, yet she had taken six days to do the journey, not on account ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... and like so many shadows moved cautiously forward, with a motion more like drifting than walking, their ears alert, their eyes strained, their ...
— Army Boys in the French Trenches • Homer Randall
... the famous establishment of Girolamo Magagnati, so delicate and intricate was the work that had been ordered from him; and the gondoliers, meanwhile, in their splendid liveries, held converse with other gondoliers in lazily drifting barks, with hatchments of other noble houses embroidered on their sleeves; and their tones were strident and quarrelsome, or self-complacent and patronizing, as the quality of the silken sashes which displayed ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... trees were there to invite the birds in summer; nor, so far as I could see, any berry-bearing shrubs such as birds enjoy, nor any weed patches to attract the flocks of Whitethroats and Juncos that come drifting southward with ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... therefore to no result, for this among other reasons, because they are only kindled by a part of the whole, and are exchanged for positive aversion when the real heaven of heaven is presented to your thoughts. Many a man who, by the set of his whole life, is drifting daily nearer and nearer to that region of outer darkness, is conscious of an idle wish for peace and joy beyond the grave. In common matters a man may be devoured by vain desires all his lifetime, because he will not pass beyond wishing to acting accordingly. 'The desire of the slothful killeth ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... music!" they would exclaim, and then they had to sail on, for they had their work to do. And again, when nightfall came, and the bird sang, and the boats came drifting home on the tide, ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... rosy and placid round about me in perfect dream splendor. I was six hours on my way instead of three, as before, and they were hours full of light and sunny bliss. My little city lay as sweetly pensive in the bright glow of sunlight as a drifting isle of the blessed. The round, leafy, blue-gray crowns of the trees with the little belfry peaking out above them, appeared as if tranquilly floating above the sparkling ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... the men turned to aim at Rohan, he was no longer visible. They fired at random at the hole in the cliff, and after filling the great cavern with drifting smoke and echoing thunder, they fled for their lives, wading, swimming ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... but surely the North and the South were drifting apart. At first the discussion had been political, but now it was growing more and more personal and bitter. The disputed questions were slavery and States' Rights. A preliminary cloud in the sky was the fanatical ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden
... Greek agkura, which Vossius considers is from ogke, a crook or hook), an instrument of iron or other heavy material used for holding ships or boats in any locality required, and preventing them from drifting by winds, tides, currents or other causes. This is done by the anchor, after it is let go from the ship by means of the cable, fixing itself in the ground and there holding the vessel ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the above title. My very respectable reader, you're smart, very smart indeed, but let me assure you that you haven't discovered from the float which I have placed on the surface, which way my string is drifting, so, if you get on a string ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 14, July 2, 1870 • Various
... of those sudden changes of New Brunswick, had become cold and chilly. The sun looked red and lurid through the heavy masses of fog clouds drifting through the sky; this fog, which comes all the way from the Banks of Newfoundland, and which is particularly disagreeable sometimes along the Bay shore and in St. John, in opposition to the general ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... sleepy train (the London express never stops at Clinton) jerked through the deep valleys, heavy with woods, golden brown at their heart, the low hills carrying, on their horizons, white drifting clouds that flung long grey shadows. Seymour felt suddenly as though he could never return to London again exactly as he had returned to it before. "That period of my life is over, quite over.... Some one is taking me down here now—I know that I am being compelled to go. But ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... and drifting out of door and windows. The atmosphere cleared. Belllounds sagged against the wall, pallid, with protruding eyes of horror on the scene before him. The dark-skinned little man lay writhing. All at once a tremor stilled ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... 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 ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... to the use of the word "drifting" in this connection. It is used absolutely without any intention of slurring the Towne-Halsey system or in the least detracting ...
— Shop Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor
... has happened since I went away, I for my own humble part am heartily pleased, for it will clear the air. If we are to have democracy, as I suppose we are, let us go into it with our eyes open. I don't like drifting among cataracts, hiding the reality from ourselves by forms which are not allowed either sense or power. That I suppose to be Lord Salisbury's feeling. I greatly admired his speech in Cannon Street, which reminded me of a talk ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... cross-legged on a tailor's stool did not suit the lad, and he took it out of his master by snowballing him thoroughly one winter's day. Next a barber undertook to teach him his trade; but Peder ran away and was drifting about the streets when the King came to Norway. The boy saw the splendid uniforms and heard the story of the beautiful capital by the Oeresund, with its palaces and great fighting ships. When the King ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... little vessel had taken refuge with many others from an intensely violent gale and drifting snow in Yarmouth Roads, they saw lights disappear, as vessel after vessel foundered. My father, after having done all that was possible for the safety of the ship, went to bed. His cabin door did not shut closely, from the rolling of the ship, and the man who was sentry that night ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... Mississippi bottoms, proud of those broad acres granted him by letters-patent of the King; the gay, volatile, passionate Creole of the town, one day a thoughtless lover of pleasure, the next a truculent wielder of the sword; the daring smugglers of Barataria, already rapidly drifting into open defiance of all legal restraint; together with the quiet market gardeners of the Cote-des-Allemands, formed a heterogeneous population impossible to please and extremely difficult ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... by a perennial drifting polar icepack that, on average, is about 3 meters thick, although pressure ridges may be three times that thickness; clockwise drift pattern in the Beaufort Gyral Stream, but nearly straight-line movement from the New Siberian Islands (Russia) to Denmark Strait (between Greenland and Iceland); ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... threatened continuously the storm still held off. They expected every morning to wake up and find the snow drifting, but the sun always showed, although dim and obscured by vapors. Will still led the horses and mules down to the grass every morning, and, every night, led them back to the new stone stable. The valley began to wear ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... with the current instead of striving to stem it, the Ark made much more rapid way than during the time that it was drifting toward the ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... 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
... thought to arouse the others but then concluded to look for the boat first. Perhaps it had only broken away and was drifting close by. If so he would bring it back and fasten it securely without ...
— Young Hunters of the Lake • Ralph Bonehill
... truth of their statements. If they had taken the trouble to refer to Sir T. Shepstone's despatches, they would have found that the ground on which the Transvaal was annexed was, not because the majority of the inhabitants wished for it, but because the State was drifting into anarchy, was bankrupt, and was about to be destroyed by native tribes. They would further have found that Sir T. Shepstone never represented that the majority of the Boers were in favour of Annexation. What he did say was ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... mute, for the plate revealed a terrible sight. The entire nose of the gigantic craft had been sheared off in two immense slices as though clipped off by a gigantic sword, and even as they stared, fascinated, at the sight, the severed slices were drifting slowly away. Swinging the view along the plane of cleavage, Stevens made out a relatively tiny ball of metal, only fifty feet or so in diameter, at a distance of perhaps a mile. From this ball there shot a blinding plane ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... returning steamer, listening to the monotonously related story of the man's bereavement, John Baird had felt that Fate herself had knit their lives together. He had walked the deck alone long hours that night, and when the light of the moon had broken fitfully through the stormily drifting clouds, it had struck upon a ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett |
