"Erratic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of women advance like the fleas, by erratic leaps and bounds, They owe their escape to the height or depth of their first ideas, and any interruption of their plans rather favors their execution. But they operate only within a narrow area which it is easy for the husband to make still narrower; and if he keeps ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... contact with a flower-vase, which had been sent in many pieces over the sward; at the second it had met with some stone coping; and at the third it had turned over in complete dissolution, and Jack was free to tear up the turf with his hoofs, until finally his erratic course was stopped by the small boy who was responsible for the animal's behaviour. The arrival of Hubert and Emily saved the small boy from many a cuff and the donkey from a kick or two; and Jack stood amid the ruin he had created, as quiet and as docile ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... a few moments. "No," he decided. "Cantwell may be erratic, and he certainly has a treacherous temper, and some mean ways. But this was hardly the sort of trick he'd go ...
— The High School Pitcher - Dick & Co. on the Gridley Diamond • H. Irving Hancock
... in name but in nothing else, the least said the better. He was born in London, but spent his childhood in Aberdeen, under the alternate care or negligence of his erratic mother. At ten he fell heir to a title, to the family seat of Newstead Abbey, and to estates yielding an income of some L1400 per year,—a large income for a poet, but as nothing to a lord accustomed to make ducks and drakes of his money. In school and college ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... position, so far at least as any hope is in my mind of rather amateurish experiments being of much help. I may seem unsympathetic in saying frankly what I feel. But amateurish or no, you are curiously erratic. Why, if you really were the Dr Ferguson whose part you play so admirably you could scarcely spend a more ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... will not be difficult to advance to the suburban square with sufficient variety in house plans to content those who are willing to yield small personal whims. Hitherto the erratic fancy of would-be tenants, the dissatisfaction with the arrangements provided, has made building en masse difficult. As long as the builder was called upon to suit those who had lived in houses of their own for many years his task was difficult, but now he will ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... the Rue du Canal, one could get glimpses of the gardens in Faubourg Ste.-Marie standing in silent wretchedness, so many tearful Lucretias, tattered victims of the storm. Short remnants of the wind now and then came down the narrow street in erratic puffs, heavily laden with odors of broken boughs and torn flowers, skimmed the little pools of rain-water in the deep ruts of the unpaved street, and suddenly went away to nothing, like a juggler's butterflies or a ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... a public meeting in Carthage practically defied him. He, however, secured a force of about two hundred men, with which he marched into Nauvoo, greatly to the indignation of the Hancock County people. His stay there was marked by incidents which showed how his erratic course in recent years had deprived him of public respect, and which explain some of the bitterness toward the county which characterizes his "History." One of these was the presentation to him of a petticoat as typical ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... come in to tell you that we believe that you and your erratic roommate are going to save a desperate situation for us," resumed the captain of the Navy team. "Not that we were destitute of good players before. But we lacked enough of different kinds to make a strong, all-around eleven. Now we've a team that we're not ...
— Dave Darrin's Third Year at Annapolis - Leaders of the Second Class Midshipmen • H. Irving Hancock
... intimate relation with humanity; and by teaching us that law and order, and a definite scheme of development, regulate even the strangest and wildest manifestations of individual life, she prepares the student to look for a goal even amidst the erratic wanderings of mankind, and to believe that history offers something more than an entertaining chaos—a journal of a toilsome, ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... closest imprisonment! His liberty gone, his freedom contracted to a few cubic feet, his space diminished almost to the mould of his body, the great wild philosopher created his own liberty, made it out of his own love of it. Like a live, erratic shuttle he went to and fro, unweaving, unravelling, unwinding, drawing out the knot of confinement, flinging out, radiating and spreading and breathing out space in all directions, by multitudinous motion of disentanglement! ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... the Gipsy to Robert in bewilderment. This was not the dazzling figure in gauzes and satins and jewels she had expected, a capricious lady of a foreign and Southern nobility, whose whimsical and erratic fancy was occasionally amused by a change of role. This was a daughter of the long, brown path, who afoot and light-hearted took naturally to the open road, with the tanned cheek, white teeth, and ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... a sea where mine own impotency might have some excuse; not in a sullen, weedy lake, where I could not have so much as exercise for my swimming. Therefore I would fain do something, but that I cannot tell what is no wonder.' 'Though I be in such a planetary and erratic fortune that I can do nothing constantly,' he confesses ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... both in its positive and negative qualities. He, more than any of his confreres, is a product of culture. Unlike the greater number of them, he has no special talent, or pet object of enthusiasm, or erratic tendencies. He is a trained critic, and is "nothing if not critical." His coolness is a real coolness, not the effect of any "toning down" for the occasion, as we may suspect to have been the case with Mr. Froude and Mr. Goldwin Smith. His knowledge is accurate, his judgments are sound, his taste ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... greatly out of the common course of nature. From time to time the historic and philosophic gravity of the last six books of the Annals suffers great eclipses by his leaving aside weighty affairs of State to descend into petty descriptions of the erratic conduct of Messalina, with her extravagant lewdness (XI. 26-8), Nero, with his abominable pollutions (XVI. 37), and that Emperor's mother, Agrippina, with her monstrous incest (XIV. 2). These matters, ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... opposition, the same extravagant and often inconsistent animosity to every phase of conservative policy, and the same fiery zeal in advocating every measure which he has espoused, that have ever characterized his erratic career. The witty author of "The Bachelor of the Albany" has tersely, and not without a certain spice of truth, described him as "a man of brilliant incapacity, vast and various misinformation, and immense ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... of truth. He shows us that among the sharks and harpies of Wall Street there are phases of honor and generosity—that the arrogance or coldness of a bank-officer may have a rational foundation—that feelings as intense are awakened in common business pursuits as in the most dramatic and erratic lives. In this just treatment of character,—this avoiding of the old saint and angel system of depicting men,—KIMBALL is truly pre-eminent, and under it even the casual SOL DOWNER strikes us with an individuality and a force not inferior to that ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... fortnight or so, Dr. Griswold began to be very erratic. He had a divorce case going on in Philadelphia. He went off, assuring me that everything was in order, and never returned. The foreman came to me saying that there was no copy, and nothing ready, and everything needed. Here was indeed a pretty kettle of fish! For I at that time ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... Skidmore were Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright of the "Free Enquirer," a paper advocating all sorts of extreme social and economic doctrines. It was not strange, therefore, that the new party was at once connected, in the public mind, with all the erratic vagaries of these Apostles of Change. It was called the "Fanny Wright ticket" and the "Infidel Ticket." Every one forgot that it aimed to be the workingman's ticket. The movement, however, was supported by "The Working Man's Advocate," ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... Mrs. James can be induced to take any excursions without Barrie," said Somerled: which meant that he didn't intend to leave Edinburgh while the girl was in it and at the mercy of her erratic parent. I thought he was anxious Barrie should understand that he was not going to desert her. Perhaps she did understand, for she is quick in penetration; but her own pride, and loyalty to Mrs. Bal, kept her from ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... to kill the sting of it By frankly forfeiting the Prince and town. "Bidden," says she, "but as one low of rank, And go I will not so unworthily, To sit with common dames!"—A flippant friend Writes then that a new planet sways to-night The sense of her erratic lord; whereon The fair Fitzherbert ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... him that he would dine at some cheap, even dubious, restaurant lower down in the city, where the erratic chefs from all countries of the world spread their national cookery for the omnivorous American. Something might happen there out of the routine—he might come upon a subject without a predicate, a road without an end, a question without an ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... this erratic strain, he suddenly heard the voice of some human being at the back of the rocks, giving vent to ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... the largest ecclesiastical edifice in America, and notable for its simple grandeur. With its ancient walls girdling the heights first seen by Jacques Cartier, with its numerous churches and convents, illustrating the power and wealth of the Romish religion, with its rugged, erratic streets creeping through hewn rock, with its picturesque crowd of red-coated soldiers of England mingling with priests and sisters in sombre attire, or with the habitants in etoffe du pays,—the old city of Quebec, whose history went back to the beginning of the seventeenth century, was ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... tax th' bachelors ye tax valor. Whin ye tax th' bachelors ye tax beauty. Ye've got to admit that we're a much finer lookin' lot iv fellows thin th' marrid men. That's why we're bachelors. 'Tis with us as with th' ladies. A lady with an erratic face is sure to be marrid befure a Dhream iv Beauty. She starts to wurruk right away an' what Hogan calls th' doctrine iv av'rages is always with thim that starts early an' makes manny plays. But th' Dhream iv Beauty figures out that she can wait an' take ...
— Mr. Dooley Says • Finley Dunne
... from Mississippi with the brilliant record of his achievements in the Mexican war, already ambitious to succeed Mr. Calhoun as the leader of the extreme South, but foiled in his Disunion schemes by his eloquent but erratic colleague, Henry S. Foote. William H. Seward of New York was for the first time taking position under the National Government, at the age of forty-nine, and Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, five years younger, was beginning his political ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... the slow Maratta spoils, And hardier Sic erratic toils, While both their ease forego; For ease, which neither gold can buy, Nor robes, nor gems, which oft ...
— Quaint Gleanings from Ancient Poetry • Edmund Goldsmid
... of the shining marks which disasters at sea seem invariably to involve have lived to tell the Lusitania's tale. Vanderbilt, the sportsman, is gone. Genial Charles Klein, the playwright, is gone. That erratic American literary genius, Elbert Hubbard, is gone, and with him a wife to whom he seemed particularly devoted. And Charles ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... differences, that children were neglected or that patriotism languished, although the first seven years of that experiment were years of decimating war, and the remaining twenty-three of poverty and recuperation—conditions most conducive to discontent and erratic legislation. ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... erratic, also. When father wanted to sit by the Student's Lamp and read his Scribner's, she would decide to hammer the Piano and do ...
— More Fables • George Ade
... would really be a good thing that we should all go over the house together and make certain that this rather erratic burglar did not, after all, carry anything ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... first, the legal counsel for the accused were more than a match for the managers. Randolph's erratic course culminated in an impassioned but incoherent speech which closed the argument for the prosecution and left the outcome hardly in doubt. Not one of the articles of impeachment received the two-thirds majority which was necessary to convict. The eighth article, ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... the well-known Cascade des Pelerins[91]) descends from behind the promontory h: its natural or proper course would be to dash straight forward down the line f g, and part of it does so; but erratic branches of it slide away round the promontory, in the lines of escape, k, l, &c. Each row of trees marks, therefore, an old torrent bed, for the torrent always throws heaps of stones up along its banks, on which the ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... me are adopted, viz., effective regulations with regard to the buffalo, the Indians taught to cultivate the soil, and the erratic Half-breeds encouraged to settle down, I believe that the solution of all social questions of any present importance in the North-West Territories will have ...
— The Treaties of Canada with The Indians of Manitoba - and the North-West Territories • Alexander Morris
... shoulders of the chamber containing the charge. Arrived there, a smart rap with the ramrod moulded it to the grooves. But it also flattened the top, and forced the bottom partly into the chamber. Thus misshapen at birth, the bullet was cast upon the world to an erratic and fruitless career. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... word,"—he said, to his fidus Achates, Marius Longford,—"I am enduring a great deal for the sake of the Vancourt millions! To follow an erratic girl like Maryllia from one Continental resort to another was bad enough,-but to stay here in tame, highly respectable country dullness is a thousand times worse! Why on earth, my good fellow, could you not have found ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... with a great clamor they rushed straight at them and repulsed them, so that most of these vehicles turned in the direction of the elephants. In their backward career they threw their own contingent into confusion,—for their erratic course terrified and dispersed the men marshaled close to them,—and a heavy rain which now came up rendered weak the detachment of archers and slingers. A heavy, all-enveloping mist succeeded, which was of no hindrance to the Romans, who had the upper hand and were fighting at close ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... at me. This is what you do not know—that, in three generations, every woman of my race has—gone wrong. ... Every one! and I am beginning—with such a marriage! ... deliberately, selfishly, shamelessly, perfectly conscious of the frivolous, erratic blood in me, aware of ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... The memorial and erratic clock of Our Square was just striking seven of the following morning, meaning approximately eight-forty, when my astonished eyes again beheld Martin Dyke seated on my bench, beautifully though inappropriately clad in full evening ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... with a genius so unstable, so erratic? Nothing, apparently, but to let him qualify for orders, and for this he is too young. Thereupon ensues a sort of 'Martin's summer' in his changing life,—a disengaged, delightful time when 'Master ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... said the minister. "She's a good woman if a little erratic, and a sovereign means a large part of ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... difference between random and fugitive desires and those more fundamental desires that express truly the nature of a man. Desires organized and harmonized gain great strength, and are enabled to overcome and expel from the mind erratic impulses, the obedience to which may easily be followed by regret. Action taken without a clear foresight of consequences, with an imperfect conception of the relation of means to ends, is blind and irrational action. Reason, as bringing ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... but not to his wickedness—Aristotle Miracles and strange events have concealed themselves from me My humour is no friend to tumult Nosegay of foreign flowers, having furnished nothing of my own Not believe from one, I should not believe from a hundred Nothing is so supple and erratic as our understanding Number of fools so much exceeds the wise Opinions we have are taken on authority and trust Others adore all of their own side Pitiful ways and expedients to the jugglers of the law Prepare ourselves against the preparations ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Essays of Montaigne • David Widger
... resolutely refused to abandon his monkey wrench, although he consented to carry the automatic to Riggins in the pilot-house. The estimable Riggins had been steering a somewhat erratic course, for he found it impossible to keep his eye on the lubber's mark while the bound quartermaster glared balefully at him from the floor. Indeed Riggins had been pondering his fate should that husky Teuton ever get the upper hand again; hence, ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... fortunate had been the escape of the Projectile. And from a danger too the most unlikely and the most unexpected. Who would have ever dreamed of even the possibility of such an encounter? And was all danger over? The sight of one of these erratic bolides 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 ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... dwindled, and now the man stands before me exquisitely understood, a perfect piece of logic. All that seemed discordant and discrepant in his nature has now become harmonious and inevitable; the strangest and most erratic actions of his life now seem natural and consequential (I use the word in its grammatical sense) contradictions are reconciled, and looking at the man I see the pictures, and looking at the pictures I see ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... do New York over, and they kept at it faithfully and successfully until 1811. Then began the laying out of streets according to numbers and fixed measurements, instead of by picturesque names and erratic cow-path meanderings. Gouverneur Morris, Simeon de Witt and John Rutherford were appointed by the city to take charge of this task, and, as one writer points out, they did not do it as badly as they might have done, nor as ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... felt a qualm of conscience. The child really was too simple to be made game of. Besides, he felt sure that she had spoken the truth, so far as she herself was concerned. She didn't know where her erratic aunt had gone; and any further questioning would only frighten her without winning him the knowledge he sought. He therefore took the parcel back, said some soothing words and made his way across the walk to his taxi. But the number he gave the chauffeur was that of the house ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... affair, they sometimes regretted it. Reviewing was carried on in small type, in the backs of certain magazines. Most of it was verbose and much of it was worthless as criticism. The belated recognition of the critical genius of Poe was due to the company he kept. He was a sadly erratic reviewer, as often wrong, I suppose, as right, but the most durable literary criticism of the age came from his pen, and is to be found in a review, a review of ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... prairies which have been opened up to civilisation within two decades of years, and offer large possibilities of power and wealth in the future development of the New Dominion. It is a region remarkable for its long rivers, in places shallow and rapid, and extremely erratic in their courses through ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... brought the action of the tides to their careful attention. The tide, they found, behaved ire an erratic manner. Instead of two regular flows a day there was but one. And at the ebb more than two miles of beach and sea-bottom lay exposed below the spot where they had landed at the flood. Stern analyzed the probable cause ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... their appeal readily, and for five years were busily engaged in bringing proofs of the new science before the commission. These were M. de Foissac, M. Dupotet, M. Chapelain, and M. de Geslin. It would be but an unprofitable, and by no means a pleasant task to follow the commissioners in their erratic career, as they were led hither and thither by the four lights of magnetism above mentioned; the four "Wills-o'-the-Wisp" which dazzled the benighted and bewildered doctors on that wide and shadowy region of metaphysical inquiry — the influence of mind over matter. It will be better to state ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... in wild confusion were the denizens of this underground colony; their six little legs carrying their curious globular bodies backward and forward over the disturbed area from which the stone had been removed. At first the movements of the ants were extremely erratic and purposeless. Panic and alarm appeared to be the order of the day during the few minutes which elapsed after removal of the stone. But soon the eye could discern movements of purposive kind on the part of the alarmed residents. There was "racing and chasing" in all directions: ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... numerous and often remarkable. Here are the ones that the Nautilus's nets most frequently hauled on board: rays, including spotted rays that were oval in shape and brick red in color, their bodies strewn with erratic blue speckles and identifiable by their jagged double stings, silver-backed skates, common stingrays with stippled tails, butterfly rays that looked like huge two-meter cloaks flapping at middepth, toothless guitarfish that were a type of cartilaginous fish closer to the shark, trunkfish known ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... necessary to protect her from the robber tribes of the desert. While the practicability of the enterprise was still being anxiously discussed by her Turkish advisers, Lady Hester received a visit from a certain Nasar, son of Mahannah, Emir of the Anizys [Footnote: Dr. Meryon's somewhat erratic spelling of Oriental names is followed throughout this memoir.] (the collective name given to several of the Bedouin tribes ranging that part of the desert), who told her that he had heard of her proposed expedition, and that he came to warn her against attempting ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... hard. But drink never affected him except to make him more grimly tenacious in whatever he had deliberately and soberly resolved. Drink did not explain—neither wholly nor in any part—this conduct of his. It, and the more erratic vagaries to follow, will seem incredible conduct for a man of Norman's character and position to feeble folk with their feeble desires, their dread of criticism and ridicule, their exaggerated and adoring notions of the master men. In fact, it was the ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... intensely Southern in all his convictions and affections. His fiery soul found congenial spirits among the generous, hotblooded people of the Gulf States, whose very faults had a sort of charm for this impulsive, generous, erratic, gifted, man. He made his way back to his New England hills, where he is waiting for the sunset, often turning a longing eye southward, and now and then sending a greeting ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... Isaac M. Singer had become a client of Jordan & Clark in New York City. He was an erratic genius, and had taken up various occupations without much success, besides having invented valuable mechanical devices which had brought him no profit. The form of sewing-machine that he invented, and which has ever since been ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... benediction,—then, turning away, he entered his own room and shut the door. Babette, grown strangely serious, turned to her brother and held out her hand, moved by one of those erratic impulses which often take ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... fluttering with fear as they stepped along beneath the gloom of the trees, which even when not in leaf cast dense shadows around them. It was in truth a weird spot: owls hooted dismally about them, bats flitted here and there in their erratic flight, and sometimes almost brushed the faces of the boys with their clammy wings. The strange noises always to be heard in a wood at night assailed their ears, and mingled with the quick beating of their own hearts; whilst from time to time a long unearthly ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... You and I are one. Whatever is mine is yours. I don't swear to make you a regular, unfailing allowance worthy of the new position you're going to have, because you see I do business with several countries, and my income's erratic; I'm never sure to the day when it will come or how much it will be. But there's nothing you want which you can't buy; remember that. And when we begin life in London, you shall have a standing account at as many shops ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... and seemed on the verge of tears. The labor of his entire life, the great victories won with don Ramon, that political power which had been so carefully built up and sustained over decades, was about to crumble to ruins; all because of a light-headed, erratic boy who had handed to the first skirt who came along everything that belonged to him and everything that belonged to his friends ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... psychologist. Such players include J. C. Parke, Wallace F. Johnson, and Charles S. Garland. The first type of player mentioned merely hits the ball with little idea of what he is doing, while the latter always has a definite plan and adheres to it. The hard-hitting, erratic, net-rushing player is a creature of impulse. There is no real system to his attack, no understanding of your game. He will make brilliant coups on the spur of the moment, largely by instinct; but there is no, mental power of consistent thinking. It is an ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... winding that he speedily disappeared from sight. The boy, who was compelled to sit still and await his return, at perhaps the most dangerous portion of the road, felt anything but comfortable over the erratic proceeding of his friend. But, fortunately, the latter had been gone but a short time when he reappeared, hurrying forward as if somebody was ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... from twenty and fifteen-hundredths to eighteen and sixty-five hundredths cents, closing at a loss for the day of 275 points. The first sale of December on Monday was at seventeen and four-tenths cents, or 125 points lower; and after numerous erratic variations, the price broke to sixteen cents, a drop of six and one-quarter cents in less than two weeks. Business on that day was of enormous volume, in round numbers 412,000 bags; and approximately $1,500,000 was ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... outpost of empire came tidings of war in August, 1914. Great excitement and enthusiasm prevailed. News was very slow in getting through: the mails, usually a month in transit, became very erratic. But the colony eagerly undertook a share in the burden of the Empire; L2,250 was voted towards the war-chest; L750 was collected on behalf of the Prince of Wales's Fund. Detached, though keen, interest changed, however, as the weeks passed, to intimate alarm. The Governor, Mr. Allardyce, ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... along? "Perchance imagination fills thy mind, "With groves, and dwellings of celestial gods, "And temples richly deck'd with offer'd gold, "Where thou shall pass. Far else;—thy journey lies, "Through ambushes, and savage monsters' forms. "Ev'n shouldst thou lucky not erratic stray, "Yet must thou pass the Bull's opposing horns; "The bow Haemonian, by the Centaur bent; "The Lion's countenance grim; the Scorpion's claws "Bent cruel in a circuit large; the Crab "In lesser compass curving. Hard the task "To rule the steeds with ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... played the same course together, day in and day out, for four weeks. He was my partner in our foursome. Rather a helpful partner at times, I must admit, although he hasn't been at the game long enough to be a really experienced golfer. Fairly long off the tee, but erratic with the brassie, and not all dependable when it came to short iron work. However, as a rule we held ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford
... the conscious design of attracting him she must be acquitted, for she acted under the force of a strong attraction exercised by him. Her mind was not entirely engrossed in the pleasures, and what she imagined to be the duties, of her station. She had a considerable, if untrained and erratic, instinct toward religion, and exhibited that leaning toward the mysterious and visionary which is the common mark of an acute mind that has not been presented with any methodical course of training worthy of its abilities. Such a temperament ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... follow and to trace, geographically, the erratic course of Cabeza de Vaca with any degree of certainty. His own tale, however authentic, is so confused[12] that it becomes utterly impossible to establish any details of location. We only know that, in the year A.D. 1536, he and his associates finally met with ...
— Historical Introduction to Studies Among the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico; Report on the Ruins of the Pueblo of Pecos • Adolphus Bandelier
... glacier stream of the Lombards, and the following one of the Normans, left their erratic blocks, wherever they had flowed; but without influencing, I think, the Southern nations beyond the sphere of their own presence. But the lava stream of the Arab, even after it ceased to flow, warmed the whole of the Northern air; ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... they have no right to follow strangers. A player who is nervous is easily put off his game, especially if those watching him are so ill-bred as to make audible remarks. Those playing matches of course expect an audience, and erratic and nervous players ought not to go into tournaments—or at least not in two-ball foursomes where they are ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... made the subject of various opinions both here and abroad. We are not among those who are prepared to enter the lists as their champion. The translator himself remarks in relation to Consuelo: "That it has not found fit translation before, was doubtless owing to prevailing impressions of something erratic and bizarre in the author's way of living, and to a certain undeniable tone of wild, defying freedom in her earlier writings." The censure of the moral portion of the community is thus softly and mercifully expressed: We will not at ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... were constantly changing their places, and as it were wandering about the sky. It is certain that the Babylonians at a very early date distinguished from the fixed stars those remarkable five, which, from their wandering propensities, the Greeks called the "planets," and which are the only erratic stars that the naked eye, or that even the telescope, except at a very high power, can discern. With these five they were soon led to class the Moon, which was easily observed to be a wandering luminary, changing her place among ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... spinning yarns, peddling the latest funny story, explaining to his house why his expense account should be passed without those querulous protests, and generally comporting himself according to his own erratic and sometimes pyrotechnical ideas. And when Jimmy breezed westward again and heard that the Judge of the Fourth Judicial District was his double he chuckled, laughed, and finally beat his plump legs at what ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... a most erratic craft. She might have done well enough upon a park lagoon if safely anchored, but upon the bosom of a mighty ocean she ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... if, on your nightly rambles, you find one of the large night moths winging its silent flight over the moonlit glade, resting for an instant on a mullein-stalk, then dancing away in his erratic flight, like some ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... her father's house being Chun," replied the maiden agreeably. "In addition to the erratic but now repentant animal that has thus, as it were, brought us within the same narrow compass, he possesses a wooden plough, two wheel-barrows, a red bow with threescore arrows, and a rice-field, and is therefore a person ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... erratic. A few obvious misprints have been corrected, but in general the original spelling has been retained. Accents in the French phrases are inconsistent, and have not ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... Jovial f. Natural f. Mercurial f. Celestial f. Lunatic f. Erratic f. Ducal f. Eccentric f. Common f. Aethereal and Junonian f. Lordly f. Arctic f. Palatine f. Heroic f. Principal f. Genial f. Pretorian f. Inconstant f. Elected f. Earthly f. Courtly f. Salacious and sporting f. Primipilary f. Jocund and wanton f. Triumphant f. Pimpled f. Vulgar f. Freckled ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... more harm thereby than we him. For our trench mortars were in an experimental stage, made locally by the R.E., and constructed of thin gas-pipe iron and home-made jam-pot bombs, whose behaviour was always erratic, and sometimes, I regret to say, fatal to the mortarist. (Poor Rogers, R.E., a capital subaltern, was killed ...
— The Doings of the Fifteenth Infantry Brigade - August 1914 to March 1915 • Edward Lord Gleichen
... man, and somewhat erratic in his ways, so the constable retired, and came back in his own garb, which he had carried out with him. "I think, Miss Hill," he said, "that Mr. Toner's clothes are now dry enough for him to wear them with safety. What do you think, ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... out in Beaulieu," he cried; "they shall not say it of me that I came back in rags. Look, here is a watch which I shall return to you, for it is mine; and, like its owner, it is erratic in ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... THE ARISTOCRATIC LIFE seemed at first most like a clue to White. Benham's erratic movements, his sudden impulses, his angers, his unaccountable patiences, his journeys to strange places, and his lapses into what had seemed to be pure adventurousness, could all be put into system ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... poor acting certainly. She affected fright, as the child expected. She cowered dismayed. "Oh, oh!" she cried, watching his erratic approach. "What is that?" She pretended flight, but sank into a chair, apparently overpowered. She gazed down at the child with the lifted hands of horror as he clasped the folds of her gown, his eyes shining with fun, his teeth glittering between his red lips, his laughter rippling with ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... was wet to the knees when he crossed the burn. A mile farther on, he reached another that was worse and they had to work back along the crumbling sides of its channel to find a place to cross. After this their progress was marked by erratic curves, and Foster was soon splashed with black peat-mud and green slime. By and by they came to a broad level, shut in by a ridge on its other side, and picked their way carefully between clumps of rushes and curious round holes filled with dark-colored water. The ground was very ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... pay of Congressmen. He made speeches in support of all these "reforms," but did not succeed in securing the discharge of a soldier, a sailor, a diplomatist, or a clerk, neither did he reduce the appropriations one single cent. The erratic Mr. David Crockett was then a member of the House, but had not attracted public attention, although the Jackson men were angry because he, one of Old Hickory's officers in the Creek War, was a devoted adherent of Henry Clay for the Presidency. One of his colleagues in the Tennessee ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... conformation of the country. The three ramifications mentioned, of which the Duthumi forms the first link, are separated by immense longitudinal plains. These elevated summits consist of rounded cones, between which the soil is bestrewn with erratic blocks of stone and gravelly bowlders. The most abrupt declivity of these mountains confronts the Zanzibar coast, but the western slopes are merely inclined planes. The depressions in the soil are covered with a black, rich loam, on which there is a vigorous ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... husband, on their voyage to America deeply affected Mrs Browning. "Was she happy in anything?" asks her sorrowing friend. The first person seen on Italian soil when Browning and his wife disembarked at Leghorn was the brilliant and erratic Irish priest, "Father Prout" of Fraser's Magazine, who befriended them with good spirits and a potion of eggs and port wine when Browning was ill in Florence, and chided Mrs Browning as a "bambina" for her needless fears. ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... pasture wealth— Erratic wanderings through dead'ning lands, Where sly old brambles, plucking me by stealth, ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... erratic fancy visions come to me of Clancy Gone a-droving 'down the Cooper' where the Western drovers go; As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing, For the drover's life has pleasures that ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... innumerable pigeons, "Allah's announcers,"[1] swirled in clouds from the arcades, mosques, and minarets surrounding the Haram, and from the Ka'aba itself, and began winging erratic courses all about the Forbidden City. Men, birds, and animals alike, all shared the terror of this unheard-of outrage when—according to ancient prophesy—the Great Devils of Feringistan should ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... not in the patiently marching Una to be a creative thinker, yet she did hunger for self-mastery, and ardently was she following the erratic gibes at civilization with which young Walter showed his delight in having an audience, when the brown, homely Golden ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... practical procedure for the preparation of this ester. The materials are cheap, the experimental procedure simple, and the product obtained is free from objectionable traces of benzyl chloride. Unfortunately the method has been found to be extremely erratic in regard to yield (10-95 per cent), as well as in regard to purity of the product (87-97 per cent ester).[1] As a result of the present study,[2] causes for variations are fully accounted for and the procedure has been converted into a ...
— Organic Syntheses • James Bryant Conant
... Blue Goose in the morning, a white-winged, erratic craft, skimming the sparkling, land-locked harbours of girlhood. She returned, and already the first lifting swells beyond the sheltering bar were tossing her in their arms. She had entered the ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... you only that under the ground is a bulky esculent, which some months hence will be put into a negro pot, and boiled and eaten, with an utter absence of poetry, or of anything but appetite and salt. It is plain that in this case solid usefulness stands no chance with erratic and rather loose-mannered brilliancy. And yet some kinds of yam in flower diffuse a fragrance more exquisite, I am persuaded, than comes from any vineyard. So that, after all, their homely prose has some flavor of poetry, which, when African ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... upon them the room was filled with the soft sound of singing, started by the minister, perhaps, or was it his wife? It was unaccompanied, "Abide with me, Fast falls the eventide, the darkness deepens, Lord with me abide!" Even Laurie joined an erratic high tenor humming in on the last verse, and Opal shuddered as the words were sung, "Hold thou thy cross before my closing eyes, Shine through the dark and point me to the skies." Death was a horrible thing to her. She never wanted to be reminded of death. It was a long, long way ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... unable to explain certain evils in life, refuses to believe anything. That is the case with Van Dorn, a very bad man. Stepfather Joe is always conservative on that subject. Deviate as much as he may, he never disbelieves. Aunt Patty, too, erratic as she is, holds a conservative position on ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... began to gain on Christ Church at once, and were very soon within half-a-length of them, but I had no breath to use for shouting, and not having a rattle I could make no row at all; moreover I am an erratic runner, so whenever I looked at the boats I kicked or ran into somebody, and I could not retort when they said things to me. I pounded along as far as the Long Bridges, which was really quite a long way, and when I stopped I was sure that we should catch Christ Church. I stood away from ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... and not return perhaps for days. His comings and goings were very erratic, and Dick tried to think that if the man were there he would have lent him ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... the pity of it," he ejaculated. "Farnham's away, after all. You know what an erratic fellow he is? Well, he got tired of business, and not dreaming you would come, ran into town to dine with some people who had asked him the other day. The fact is, I fancy there's a fair lady in the case. But he did say something about looking you up at the Savoy, if he had time, ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... as angry as a hungry lion which has just had a long expected dinner suddenly snatched away from it; but the worse he became the louder M'Allister shrieked with laughter. The latter was now simply rolling about the room—for it could not be termed walking, it was so erratic—holding his sides and laughing, whilst the tears were chasing each other down his cheeks. He kept trying to speak, but had no sooner stuttered out the words, "Heh, mon! heh, mon!" than he was off again into another wild paroxysm of laughter, and ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... general education in boyhood. Early left an orphan by his father's death, he had inherited his business, and for some years he carried it on prosperously, living with his mother and sisters. But before he was two-and-twenty his naturally erratic disposition asserted itself, and he chafed under the restraints and monotony of life in a small provincial town. He sold up his business at a great loss, well-nigh ruining his family, had it not been for his mother's small private means; and with his share of the proceeds of the sale he travelled ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... from one crossing to the next, from the needle to the twig, from the twig to the branch, from the branch to the bough and from the bough, by a no less angular path, to go back home. It is useless to rely upon sight as a guide on this long and erratic journey. The Processionary, it is true, has five ocular specks on either side of his head, but they are so infinitesimal, so difficult to make out through the magnifying-glass, that we cannot attribute ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... (my friend and I returned in time for a late dinner), I wandered among the Roman remains of the place by the light of a magnificent moon, and gathered an impression which has lost little of its silvery glow. The moon of the evening before had been aqueous and erratic; but if on the present occasion it was guilty of any irregularity, the worst it did was only to linger beyond its time in the heavens, in order to let us look at things comfortably. The effect was admirable; it brought back ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... declared Shirley, "that is, she thinks she is, and she has lots of money and a poor head for managing it. In fact, I have always thought her erratic. You see," went on Shirley, supporting herself by "linking" into the accommodating arms extended, "Dol Vin fetched her out here from the city so that she could practice her howling. She was cast for a part with a wild scream in it, and every time she attempted ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... consider the millions of comets around us, and when we remember how near some of these have come to us during the last few years, who will undertake to say that during the last thirty thousand, fifty thousand, or one hundred thousand years, one of these erratic luminaries, with blazing front and train of dbris, may not have come in collision with ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... came from Launceston. This was soon followed by "The Gazette" of George Arden, and that again by "The Herald" of George Cavenagh. All three had, I think, the common prefix of "Port Phillip". "The Gazette", after a brief career, under its very able but rather erratic owner, went to the wall. "The Patriot", under Boursiquot, who had succeeded the overworked Fawkner, was, somewhat later, bought up by the "Argus", under Wilson and Johnston, in succession to Kerr. The Herald, when quitted after an excellent and timely sale ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... but Errington's heart sank. Thelma had gone!—gone, most probably, for one of those erratic journeys across the Fjord to the cave where he had first seen her. She would not come back, he felt certain; not even at her father's request would that beautiful, proud maiden consent to alter her plans. What an unlucky destiny was his! Absorbed in disappointed ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... those models of form in verse which include rime, or whose cadences are informal, is set down as an imitator of Walt Whitman. When I was young, Walt Whitman seemed to have been established as a strange, erratic, and godless person, whose indecencies were his principal stock in trade. Emerson's practical repudiation of him had had its effect, and the very respectable—that is, gentlemen of the class of the vestrymen of Grace ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... receive them, near the Jesuits College (at Cote de St. Michel); in 1667, they settled on the northerly frontier of Sillery, [195] in Notre Dame de Foy [now St. Foye]; restless and scared, they again shifted they quarters on the 29th December, 1693, and pitched their erratic tents at Ancienne Lorette, which place they also abandoned many years afterwards to go and settle at Jeune or Indian Lorette, where the remnants of this once warlike race [196] (the nobles amongst Indian tribes) exist, now crossed with their ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... The arches forming the left-hand middle distance are finely depicted; correct as far as local traditional art will inform us, and of considerable value in such a work as ballast, substance, in steadying the erratic fancies or emotions of the painter. Criticism must justly deal with the figures of the Jewish rabble. The attitudes are telling, but over angular and rather vulgar. The populace, I may remark, are too excited; such sustained, extravagant attitudes, whether in a picture of large or ...
— Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes • J. Atwood.Slater
... a brilliant but erratic personage, living sumptuously, even though her revenues from Sweden came in slowly, partly because the Swedes disliked her change of religion. She was surrounded by men of letters, with whom she amused herself, and she took to herself a lover, the Marquis Monaldeschi. She thought that at ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... any number of pigeonholes of human existence, she thought wilful and most obstinate because she could not shape him to live in her pigeonhole, which was the only one she knew. She could not follow the flights of his mind, and when his brain got beyond her, she deemed him erratic. Nobody else's brain ever got beyond her. She could always follow her father and mother, her brothers and Olney; wherefore, when she could not follow Martin, she believed the fault lay with him. It was the old tragedy of insularity ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... Mount Kelso; more than that, they were seen only on the slopes of the range, none of them being observed on the crest itself, perhaps on account of the cold, strong gale that was blowing across the snowy heights. A nighthawk was sailing in its erratic course over the peaks—a bit of information worth noting, none of these birds having been seen on any of the summits fourteen thousand feet high. These matters are perhaps not of supreme interest, yet they have their value as studies in comparative ornithology and ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... this power of gravitation that makes everything upon the earth tend to the centre? How does it reach out its invisible hands toward the erratic meteor-stones, arrest them in their swift course, and draw them down to the earth's bosom? It is a power. We know ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... could be accomplished by the naked eye. His observations agreed with those of Tycho Brahe, and won for Maestlin the professorship of astronomy in the University of Heidelberg. No man had so clearly proved the supralunar position of a comet, or shown so conclusively that its motion was not erratic, but regular. The young astronomer, though Apian's pupil, was an avowed Copernican and the destined master and friend of Kepler. Yet, in the treatise embodying his observations, he felt it necessary to save his ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... little for individuals. He did not believe (as some one has said) that the history of mankind is the history of its great men. Great men with him were but larger atoms, obeying the same impulses with the rest, only perhaps a trifle more erratic. With them or without them, the course of things would have been much ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... the race-track favourite of the season. Being feminine, she was erratic in her gaits, and there were a few heavy losers about town who had believed she could be true. The reporters ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... they roll do but swell the rich revenues of his praise. Lamb's popularity shows no sign of waning. Even that most extraordinary compound, the rising generation of readers, whose taste in literature is as erratic as it is pronounced; who have never heard of James Thomson who sang The Seasons (including the pleasant episode of Musidora bathing), but understand by any reference to that name only the striking author of The City of Dreadful Night; ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... the poetic Raggles in an erratic and singular way. It seemed to him that he had drunk cold tea and that the city was a white, cold cloth that had been bound tightly around his brow to spur him to some unknown but tremendous mental effort. And, after all, he came to shovel snow for a livelihood; ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... about the school arm in arm, sat next to each other at tea, and wrote each other private little notes. St. Elgiva's smiled again, but the girls by this time were accustomed to Marjorie's very impulsive and rather erratic ways, and did not take ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil |
