"Fabulous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Champlain figured bravely in its story in a brave and romantic era of the world, and that it was he who saw its importance as a commanding point of the great waterway that struck deep into the heart of the rich dominion—though he did think that dominion was a fragment of the fabulous Indies with a door into the ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... huge antediluvian-looking tortoises, after much straining, were landed on deck. They seemed hardly of the seed of earth. We had been broad upon the waters for five long months, a period amply sufficient to make all things of the land wear a fabulous hue to the dreamy mind. Had three Spanish custom-house officers boarded us then, it is not unlikely that I should have curiously stared at them, felt of them, and stroked them much as savages serve civilized guests. But instead of three custom-house ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... to pay efficient teachers, to establish the various faculties that go to form a university worthy of its name? Have we not a state-university marvellously well equipped and for which our Provinces are yearly spending fabulous sums? Why not take advantage of our own money that goes in taxes for the support of ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... forty gold a month, or eighty trade, and he was beginning to put on flesh. Also, his attitude toward mere contract coolies had become distinctively aristocratic. The manager offered to raise him to sixty fold, which, by the year, would constitute a fabulous fourteen hundred and forty trade, or seven hundred times his annual earning on the Yangtse as a two-legged horse at one- fourteenth of a gold cent ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... in an edition of 250 copies at $15.00). Keleher is a lawyer; Stanley is a priest. Harvey Fergusson in his historical novel Grant of Kingdom, New York, 1950, vividly supplements both. Keleher's second book, The Fabulous Frontier, Rydal, Santa Fe, 1945, illuminates connections between ranch lands and politicians; principally it sketches the careers of A. B. Fall, John Chisum, Pat Garrett, Oliver Lee, Jack Thorp, Gene Rhodes, and other New ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... Vance, raising his eyebrows to the highest arch of astonishment, and lifting his nose in the air towards the majestic moon,—"three pounds!—a fabulous sum! Who has three pounds to throw away? Dukes, with a hundred thousand a year in acres, have not three pounds to draw out of their pockets in that reckless, profligate manner. Three pounds!—what could I not buy ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... ovens in the old building by the Church of the Descalzas, and the business began to yield fabulous profits. Being a devotee of the life of pleasure, Marti died three or four years after the business had been established, and Don Matias continued his gallinaceous evolutions until he was utterly ruined, and had pawned everything he possessed, ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... unexpectedly find in a grave antiquarian law-dictionary! probably derived from Pliny's description of a people whom some travellers had reported to have found in this predicament, in their fright and haste in attempting to land on a hostile shore among savages. To account for this fabulous people, it has been conjectured they wore such high coverings, that their heads did not appear above their shoulders, while their eyes seemed to be placed in their breasts. How this name came to be introduced into the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... face. Even this failed, and he found himself compelled to meet the fixed and stern gaze of the colossal priest, who was on horseback, and bore in his huge right hand a whip, that might, so gripped, have tamed a buffalo, or the centaur himself, if he were not fabulous. ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... to warn the soul of Terry Lute from the reefs of evil practices. And after that, and through the years since then, Terry Lute labored to fashion a man of himself after the standards of his world. Trouble? Ay, trouble—trouble enough at first, day by day, in fear, to confront the fabulous perils of his imagination. Trouble enough thereafter encountering the sea's real assault, to subdue the reasonable terrors of those parts. Trouble enough, too, by and by, to devise perils beyond the common, to find a madcap way, to disclose a chance worth daring ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... that uncontrollable and yet vague longing, so characteristic of the great period of fantasy. The suggestion that the wealth of the East, exciting the greed of the western nations, led to the Crusades, is an absolutely indefensible idea. Doubtless, rumours of the fabulous treasure of the Orient had stirred the imagination of Europe, appealing far less, however, to the cupidity of the individual than to his desire for something strange, new and incredible. It was impossible ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... Interest was charged on money by the month. Indeed, conditions changed so fast that no man pretended to estimate them beyond thirty days ahead, and to do even that was considered rather a gamble. Real estate joined the parade of advance. Little holes in sand-hills sold for fabulous prices. The sick, destitute, and discouraged were submerged beneath the mounting tide of vigorous optimism that bore on its crest the strong and able members of the community. Every one either was rich or expected soon to be so. Opportunity awaited every man at every corner. Men who ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... the window, over a pipe and a cup of cold tea. Anton would stand at the door, his hands crossed behind his back, and would begin a deliberate narrative about old times, those fabulous times when oats and rye were sold, not By measure, but in large sacks, and for two or three roubles the sack; when on all sides, right up to the town, there stretched impenetrable forests and untouched steppes. "But now," grumbled the old man, over whose head eighty years ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... covered with another blanket, served to support a splendid brass lamp with a green silk shade, for which I had paid a fabulous sum in Salisbury town. It also held some books, brushes, and other necessaries. A shelf underneath displayed a little brass kettle and other paraphernalia for making tea, while my other books were arranged ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... pressure to which they are subject; the merchant, with a careless air, gives a slight push with his fist to the bottom of the crown, to raise it up, smooths the front upon his knee, and presents to your eyes an object at once whimsically fantastical, which recalls confusedly to your memory those fabulous head-dresses favored by box-keepers, aunts of opera dancers, or duennas of provincial theaters. Further on, at the sign of the Gout du jour, under the arcades of the Rotunda, elevated at the end of the wide opening which separates ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... when I consider to what they may lead: had your early representations been attended to and produced their proper effect, you would probably not have to boast of the most brilliant success, with the most inadequate means, which history records. There is something so fabulous in the report of a handful of troops, supported by a few raw militia, leaving their strong post to invade an enemy of double numbers in his own fortress, and making them all prisoners without the loss of a man, that, although your report may be sanctioned by Sir George ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... sumptuous Versailles. The King himself would occasionally appear in ballets performed by some exclusive company of the court. There was always feasting toward and sweet music composed by Lulli, and they were amazed and interested by the dazzling jets of water from the fountains that had cost such fabulous sums. Court beauties were admired together with the Guards surrounding the King's person in such fine array. Rumours of the countless servants attached to the service of the court gave an impression that the power of France could never fail. Patriotic spirit ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... were evidences of fabulous wealth. The facades of the buildings fronting upon the avenue within the wall were richly carven, and about the windows and doors were ofttimes set foot-wide borders of precious stones, intricate mosaics, or tablets of beaten gold bearing bas-reliefs ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... attracted little attention. But when it announced that these masterpieces had always been kept in private galleries, and seen only by the favored few; that the public had never been allowed to get any closer to them than to read of the fabulous prices paid by their millionaire owners; and that now the magazine would open the doors of those exclusive galleries and let the public in—public curiosity was at once piqued, and over one hundred and fifty thousand ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... of the Restoration of 1814, the still greater miracle of Napoleon's return in 1815, the portents of a second flight of the Bourbons, and a second reinstatement (that almost fabulous phase of contemporary history), all these things took the Marquis by surprise at the age of sixty-seven. At that time of life, the most high-spirited men of their age were not so much vanquished as worn out in the struggle with the Revolution; ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... principals, that Mr. Drysdale's orders had been executed to his satisfaction. He had also some very beautiful new stuffs with him, which he should like to submit to Mr. Drysdale, and without more ado began unfolding cards of the most fabulous ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... time, being that of Don Quixote and of the Inquisition, accounts for the childish credulity on one side and the unparalleled ferocity on the other. The search for El Dorado, whether it was believed to be a fabulous country of gold, or an inaccessible mountain, or a lake, or a city, or a priest who anointed himself with a fragrant oil and sprinkled his body with fine gold dust, must always remain one of the blackest pages in the history of the white race. The great heart of humanity ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... logic; the old wall, reason; the old main stay of thought, good sense, break down, fall and crumble before their imagination, set free and escaped into the limitless realm of fancy, and advancing with fabulous bounds, and nothing can check it. For them everything happens, and anything may happen. They make no effort to conquer events, to overcome resistance, to overturn obstacles. By a sudden caprice of their flighty imagination they become princes, emperors, or gods, are possessed of all the wealth ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... something supernatural, such as invulnerability. In one of Asbjrnsen's tales, there is a story about a troll-bird, told by a man named Per Sandaker, who "was supposed to be strong in stories about troll-birds." In the story referred to, there is a woodgrouse (tiur) which has become known as a fabulous animal (fabeldyr) throughout the whole neighborhood. "One might just as well shoot at a stone,' said Per, with the greatest conviction"; for he had shot at the bird and made the feathers fly, without being able to injure it. Later, on the hunting-trip on which Per was telling about ...
— The Relation of the Hrolfs Saga Kraka and the Bjarkarimur to Beowulf • Oscar Ludvig Olson
... remember, too, that I ran away in the night when Maugis d'Aigremont stormed Storisende? and was never heard of any more? and that all this, too, took place a long, long while ago? Yet we have met as three fine young fellows, here on the beach of fabulous Leuke. I put it to you fairly, King Jurgen: now how could this conceivably have come about unless ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... demonstrative syllogism; so the dialectician, the topical syllogism; and the sophist, the sophistical, that is, the apparent and deceitful; the rhetorician, the enthymeme, and the poet, the example, which is the least worthy of all. So the subject of poetry is the feigned fable and the fabulous, and its means or instrument is ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... of property which obstruct cultivation and the productive employment of labour," Wallace ascertained many years later that no single part of the land so enclosed had been cultivated by those to whom it was given, though certain portions had been let or sold at fabulous prices for building purposes, to accommodate summer visitors to the neighbourhood. Thus the unfortunate people who had formerly enjoyed home, health, and comparative prosperity in the cottages scattered over this common land had been obliged to migrate ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... Arnheim. 1678-1741. Was a pupil of Caspar Netscher of Heidelberg, whose little pictures are of fabulous value. Although he was so excellent a painter he was proud of Margaretta, whose pictures were much admired in her day. Her "Musical Conversation" is in the Museum of Schwerin. Her "Cleopatra" and "Semiramis" are in the Gallery ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... to Peru the rivers all bear down treasures of a wealth perfectly inestimable. Emigration must necessarily continue to flow and increase. Gold digging is soon learned, and there will be an immense demand for every kind of labour at almost fabulous prices. ...
— Handbook to the new Gold-fields • R. M. Ballantyne
... before hope began to revive in the hearts of the English merchants. The new country produced at least valuable sealskins. There was always the chance, too, that a lucky discovery of a Western Passage might bring fabulous wealth to the merchant adventurers. It thus happened that not many years elapsed before certain wealthy men of London and the West Country, especially one Master William Sanderson, backed by various gentlemen of the court, decided to make another venture. ...
— Adventurers of the Far North - A Chronicle of the Frozen Seas • Stephen Leacock
... as the panther, or "painter," remained equally motionless. It looked precisely as if he suspected that something was in the wind and had slipped up to this point to listen for some evidence of what it was. Fred, who had heard fabulous stories of the "smelling" powers of all wild animals, feared that the cougar would scent him out, but he showed no evidence of ...
— In the Pecos Country • Edward Sylvester Ellis (AKA Lieutenant R.H. Jayne)
... Destitute Orange-Girls, the Neglected Washerwomen, and the Distressed Muffin-Men. But she shook her head; and then, looking up at me with eyes like a SAINT'S (if our PRIVILEGES permitted us to believe in these fabulous beings of the Romish superstition), she said, "Ah, no! I have always been in the wrong. The beautiful address of the Bishop of Barchester has awakened me, and convinced me that the PATH does not lie through Fancy Fairs. I have to begin ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... talent are self-supporting, and that he who cannot live by the exercise of his own hand or brain, does not altogether deserve success. The feeling was even stronger than usual about this period, because of the repeated announcements of fabulous sums earned by book-makers, including the notoriously helpless poets. It was well known that Sir Walter Scott had made a large fortune by his verses and novels; that Moore got L3,000 for his 'Lalla Rookh,' and Crabbe ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... of these are related in the 'Narratives of the School;'— about the burning of the ancestral shrine of the sovereign , and a one-footed bird which appeared hopping and flapping its wings in Ch'i. They are plainly fabulous, though quoted in proof of Confucius's sage wisdom. This reference to them is more than enough. 5 ay, G, . 6 Ana. XII. ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) • James Legge
... seemed strange, however, that in the evening of life riches should have come to him—riches from a distant kinsman who, living, had hardly noticed the obscure scholar and parson. Five thousand pounds a year was fabulous wealth to a man whose income heretofore had numbered as many hundreds. And—alas! his son was dead. Not that the parson loved his daughters the less because they were girls, but as the cadet of an ancient family he had a Tory squire's prejudice in favour ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... circumspection from the Four Dispensations, into five-and-thirty compositions, that the most scrupulous amongst the various religious sects in this country, about admitting pictures into churches, must acknowledge them as truths, or the Scriptures fabulous. Those are subjects so replete with dignity, character, and expression, as demanded the historian, the commentator, and the accomplished painter, to bring them into view. Your Majesty's gracious complacency and commands ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... appetite, or a passion, but a great means of intellectual development." Of course Solomon did not know this, nor Sappho, nor Catullus, nor the fashioners of those "sentiments" of the Middle Ages which brought about the half-fabulous Courts of Love itself, nor Chaucer, nor Spenser, nor Shakespeare, nor Donne. It was reserved for—but one never names ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... glass of whiskey which was never far from his elbow after banking hours, while the young one cultivated the local excess of continual tea. And all this time the rascally Stingaree ranged the district, with or without his taciturn accomplice, covering great distances in fabulous time, lurking none knew where, and springing on the unwary in the last places in ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... type known as "medium," and her measurements even went the required 38-25-42 standard a little better. She had been at Zizzbaum's two years, and knew her business. Her eye was bright, but cool; and had she chosen to match her gaze against the optic of the famed basilisk, that fabulous monster's gaze would have wavered and softened first. Incidentally, she ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... blackamoor white. Are not our old historical assurances everywhere asserted? Has it not been proved to us that crooked-backed Richard was a good and politic King; and that the iniquities of Henry VIII are fabulous? whereas the agreeable predilections of our early youth are disturbed by our hearing that glorious Queen Bess, and learned King James, were ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... an adventure worthy a place in the varied career of that royal bandit. This fabulous event formed but a link in a long chain of marvels. Yes, Borgia has been here, a torch in one hand, a sword in the other, and within twenty paces, at the foot of this rock, perhaps two guards kept watch on land and sea, while their master descended, as I am about to descend, dispelling ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the mountains here mentioned are fabulous and others it is impossible to identify. Sugriva means to include all the mountains of India from Kailas the residence of the God Kuvera, regarded as one of the loftiest peaks of the Himalayas, to Mahendra in the ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... Jenneh, he was loaded with kindness and attentions by the Moors, to whom he had told the fabulous tale about his birth in Egypt, and abduction by ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... O'Gorman, "The Roman Catholics," p. 375. The atrocity of such a plot seems incredible. We should have classed it at once with the Maria Monk story, and other fabulous horrors of Dr. Brownlee's Protestant Society, but that we find it in the sober and dispassionate pages of Bishop O'Gorman's History, which is derived from original sources of information. If anything could ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... a persistent rumor that upon the Moon, mineral riches of fabulous wealth were awaiting discovery. The thing had already caused some interplanetary complications. The aggressive Martians would be only too glad to explore the Moon. But the U.S.W.[2] definitely warned them away. The Moon was World Territory, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... police, those good-natured, deferential beings so given to saluting and grinning, with whom, save for occasional episodes not unconnected with the speed laws,—Dunny says libelously that my progress in an automobile resembles a fabulous monster with a flying car for the head, a cloud of smoke and gasoline for the body, and a cohort of incensed motor-cycle men for the tail,—I had lived on the ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... the historic Emerald Throne, a wonderful golden seat so thickly encrusted with beautiful green gems as to appear entirely constructed of them. Some of the stones were of enormous size, beautifully cut, of amazing brilliance and fabulous value. Above, was suspended a golden representation of a crocodile—the god Zomara. Lolling lazily among the pink silk cushions was a woman, tall, thin-faced and ascetic, with a complexion white as my own, high cheek bones, small black, brilliant eyes, and hair plentifully ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... to restrain, and which they attempted to organise. We see by their writings that they believed in many horrible imputations. As time went on, it appeared that much of this was fable. But it also became known that it was not all fabulous, and that the Albigensian creed culminated in what was known as the Endura, which was in reality suicide. It was the object of the Inquisition that such people should not indeed be spared, but should not perish ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... arrangement—decidedly the worse for the walk; cheeks a little warmed up with the sun, and perhaps other things; grave eyes, where the woman was but beginning to supplant the child; a mouth as sweet as it could be, in all its changes; and a hand and foot that were fabulous. So the mistress of Chickaree went in to receive her first instalment ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... shaken from a lion's mane. And thus in fact the mysterious architect plays at hide-and-seek with his worlds. 'I will hide it,' he says, 'and it shall be found again by man; I will withdraw it into distances that shall seem fabulous, and again it shall apparel itself in glorious light; a third time I will plunge it into aboriginal darkness, and upon the vision of man a third time it shall rise with a ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... him in her book? She felt now that she had been too lenient, not bitter enough, not sufficiently pitiless. Such a man was entitled to no mercy. Yes, it was all clear enough now. John Burkett Ryder, the head of "the System," the plutocrat whose fabulous fortune gave him absolute control over the entire country, which invested him with a personal power greater than that of any king, this was the man who now dared attack the Judiciary, the corner stone of the Constitution, the one safeguard of the people's ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and, being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... extend now the authority of the United States over the great Philippine Archipelago is to fence in the China Sea and secure an almost equally commanding position on the other side of the Pacific—doubling our control of it and of the fabulous trade the Twentieth Century will see it bear. Rightly used, it enables the United States to convert the Pacific Ocean almost into an ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... but their business was to demonstrate that they could write well, and make an impression upon mankind thereby; and in what manner of writing they thought they were able to exceed others, to that did they apply themselves, Some of them betook themselves to the writing of fabulous narrations; some of them endeavored to please the cities or the kings, by writing in their commendation; others of them fell to finding faults with transactions, or with the writers of such transactions, and thought to make a great figure by so doing. And ...
— Against Apion • Flavius Josephus
... gentleman was the agent of a rich corporation of Hamburg merchants who wished to purchase all the available land in Samoa for the purpose of founding a colony, the principal industry of which would be cotton-growing. Cotton was bringing fabulous prices in Europe, and the corporation had already made purchases of land both in Fiji and Tahiti, and were using ...
— John Frewen, South Sea Whaler - 1904 • Louis Becke
... and the faintest suspicion of genius is enough to render a financier an object of suspicion to the money market. But it is conceivable in the odd freaks of things that we may yet see the advent of the Poet-Capitalist. It is almost impossible to say what new opportunities the possession of fabulous resources might not add to the fancy of a dreamer or to the speculations of a philanthropist. It is not till after a little thought that we realize how materially the course of human progress is obstructed ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... his bank, when rumour accused him of burning the court-house that he might sell his abstracts to the county at a fabulous price, he called a public meeting to hear his defence, and repeated to his townsmen that query, "Who carried the flag?" adding in a hoarse whisper: "And yet—great God!—they say that the little corporal is an in-cen-di-ary. Was this great ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... vast fortune awaited them on the other side of the continent, and the most fabulous tales of the abundance of gold were circulated and believed. In some cases the parties consisted only of men who had clubbed together and purchased a waggon, and started, leaving their wives and families behind them. In others ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... many thousands of feet below the surface. We have nothing on our Earth that can compare with this terribly imposing sight, and as I was studying the expansive waste I could more readily understand how large numbers of human beings could be destroyed by such fabulous quantities of boiling lava as were capable of being thrown from this pit. There is no doubt that the lava and ashes hurled from this crater alone would send a withering blast of death-dealing for ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... needless vehemence. "All poppycock! Look at it sanely for a minute, and you'll see that all the yarns of pirate gold-including Captain Kidd's—are rank idiocy. In the first place. the pirates never seized any such fabulous sums of money as they were credited with. The bullion ships always went under heavy man-o'-war escort. When pirates looted some fairly rich merchant ship there were dozens of men to divide the plunder among. And they sailed to the nearest safe port to blow it all ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... not only books, but persons being ever at hand to solve doubts and clear up difficulties. I do by no means advise you to throw away your time in ransacking, like a dull antiquarian, the minute and unimportant parts of remote and fabulous times. Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote. And a general notion of the history of France, from the conquest of that country by the Franks, to the reign of Louis the Eleventh, is sufficient for use, consequently ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... revealed a new chamber secreted with art, or ostentatiously displayed; the gold and silver, the various wardrobes and precious furniture, surpassed (says Abulfeda) the estimate of fancy or numbers, and another historian defines the untold and almost infinite mass by the fabulous computation of thousands of thousands of pieces of gold."—Gibbon's Decline ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Anonymous
... 1867, he concluded that he was able to support a wife, and accordingly married the widow of an old friend (Dr. Thompson) who had shared his varying fortune of former years when he little dreamed of the vast wealth that awaited him. This lady is one of the best hands to help a man spend a fabulous income, of which we are aware. She lives in Paris, where she gives the most expensive of entertainments. When General Grant was in France he was her guest. She supports a private railway carriage to use at her pleasure, and it would almost exceed belief to describe the cost ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... ordinary rescue of Peter; and the raising of Lazarus will be only a similar glorification of a commonplace feat of artificial respiration, whilst others will scoff at it as a planned imposture in which Lazarus acted as a confederate. Between the rejection of the stories as wholly fabulous and the acceptance of them as the evangelists themselves meant them to be accepted, there will be many shades of belief and disbelief, of sympathy and derision. It is not a question of being a Christian or not. A Mahometan Arab will accept ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... the captain, laughing; "but that is just the point. Gold has turned up in all directions near the valley, and why should we not find it there? Besides, there is a pretty fair bit of land under cultivation, and vegetables fetch fabulous prices at the diggin's; in addition to which there are a good many cattle on the ground, and provisions of all kinds are as good as gold just now—so, you see, I think that even if we don't find more of the dust on it, there is some chance that you may raise the ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains - Wandering Will in the Land of the Redskin • R.M. Ballantyne
... to the Society for Piratical Research, under the patronage of his gracious Majesty, the King of this Island. You behold before you a committee of that Society; the Committee on Doubtful and Fabulous Tales, sometimes called for the sake of brevity, from the initials of its title, the Daft Committee. As Third Vice-President of the Society for Piratical Research, I have the honour to be Chairman of the Daft Committee. The seat ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... History" in the last century has not deigned to preserve any particulars of the private life of these gallant soldiers; but one can fancy them of an evening at a table furnished with clumsy magnificence, and drinking bad claret bought up from the English merchants of Calcutta at fabulous prices; not fighting over again the battle of Lakhairi, but rather discussing the relative merits of the slopes of the Alps and the cliffs of the Atlantic; admitting sorrowfully the merits of the intermediate vineyards, or trilling to the bewilderment of their country-born ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... has worked long hard hours to bring up his family, rather than accept fabulous offers for a theatrical tour of America. He refused these offers through ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... you there are no ways but the way to which you are accustomed. That is sanity to you, and all else is madness. You have a map of life which is like your maps of the world—with all the safe known places marked by their familiar names, and outside you have drawn childish pictures of fabulous beasts, and written, "This is a desert." But I tell you I have gone into these deserts, and found good green grass there, and sweet spring water, and delightful fruits. And beyond them I have seen great mountains and stormy seas.... And I shall go back some ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... ponderous mass on the sole of his foot: and I believe that the stone, with a deeply indented foot-mark on it, is, like the bricks in Jack Cade's chimney, "alive at this day to testify." Legendary lore and fabulous ballads aside, it would indeed be strange if something interesting to the antiquary does not turn up in such a mine as this. It is curious, however, that in all the operations antecedent to covering Great Britain with, as it were, a network of iron, so very few discoveries ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... the calm retort. Then, as if to turn the subject, he continued lightly: "It is a fair scene, and a fabulous one." ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... and the Piazza Signoria was filled with a vast concourse of people. Every spare foot of space was taken. Platforms had been erected and seats sold for fabulous prices. Every window was ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... pavilions of silk in flowing draperies, on some of which the entire Fatihah was superbly embroidered. Over the pavilions arose enormous aigrettes of green and black feathers. Such were the mahmals, containing, among other things of splendor and fabulous value, the Kiswah which the Sultan was forwarding to the Scherif of Mecca to take the place of the worn curtains then draping the Tabernacle or ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... these men were disabled by wounds or long service, but the greater portion were idle scamps, who cared not for the hard blows and sufferings of a campaign, liking better to hang about taverns drinking, at the expense of those to whom they related fabulous tales of the gallant actions they had performed. Many, too, wandered over the country, sometimes in twos or threes, sometimes in large bands, robbing and often murdering travelers or attacking lonely houses. When in one part or another their ill deeds became too notorious, the sheriffs would ...
— Saint George for England • G. A. Henty
... dazzling proposal for Guentz to enter the factory and occupy a leading position there. Compared with the modest pay of a captain, the suggested salary of fifteen thousand marks seemed positively fabulous. ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... much of the fabulous sums of money lavishly given for the education of the Freedmen of the South, has been squandered upon experiments, which common sense should have dictated were altogether impracticable. Perhaps this was sequential in the early stages of the work, when ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... nothing about jute. But he did read, almost every morning in the daily newspapers, how one person or another had made enormous purchases of linen, or of cloth, or of motor chassis, paying fabulous sums on the nail and walking off almost immediately with colossal profits; and every time Bones read such an account he wriggled in his chair ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... thoughtful kindness, for which I must ever be grateful. I can find it in my heart even to forgive the reporters who have left little of what I have said or done unnoted, and when they have failed in this, have invented fabulous histories of things which I never did and sayings which I never uttered. Sometimes when I have been questioned as to my impressions and views of America, I have been tempted to say with an Englishman who was hard pressed by his constituents ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... been quite an authority in drawing-room theatricals and charades at "The Maples," and with her magnificent powerful voice, what a pity she could not go on the stage! She had read in novels of girls offering themselves to a manager and realizing fabulous sums, and eighteen pounds a year seemed to be her net value in the governess market. Then Harry might go to sea for a year or two,—they were both so young,—and by that time things might look brighter, or ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... an allusion to a copper boat, a marvel of magic like Cinderella's slipper, persuades him that the ancient Irish had forestalled the modern dockyards in the making of metal ships. The man who doubted, let us say, our fabulous ancient kings running up to Adam, or found but mythology in some old tale, was as hated as if he had doubted the authority of Scripture. Above all no man was so ignorant, that he had not by rote familiar arguments and statistics to drive away amid ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... translations were called for. The people, wrote an Englishman in 1539, "have now in every church and place, almost every man, the Bible and New Testament in their mother tongue, instead of the old fabulous and fantastical books of the Table Round . . . and such other whose impure filth and vain fabulosity the light of God hath abolished there utterly." In Protestant lands it became almost a matter of good form to own the Bible, ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... so well pleased with any written remains of the ancients as with those little aphorisms which verbal tradition hath delivered down to us under the title of proverbs. It were to be wished that, instead of filling their pages with the fabulous theology of the pagans, our modern poets would think it worth their while to enrich their works with the proverbial sayings of their ancestors. Mr Dryden ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... that he must blame for his loss. If he had taken possession of the insect at first, instead of following it "in its independent ways," nothing of all that would have happened, and he would possess that admirable specimen of African manticores, the name of which is that of a fabulous animal, having a man's head and a ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... sweet notes that all the air seemed quivering with music, and the leader of the bird choir was a certain wonderful songster that Andreas had named the Kronprinz, and for which he repeatedly had refused quite fabulous sums. Andreas himself had bred the Kronprinz, and had given him the education that now made him such a wonder among birds, and that made him also of such great value as an instructor of the young birds whose musical education was still to be gained. After ...
— An Idyl Of The East Side - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... They bought of the Eskimo what furs they wanted and paid as little for them as possible. A little thread, calico, tea, tobacco, and a few glass beads were given in exchange for the soft and shining skins which in civilized centers would sell for a fabulous sum. ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... all Histories of extraordinary Conceptions from these Intrigues, or by Women without actual Copulation, are equally fabulous with those of the Engendring of Men: It would be as surprizing to find a Man with a teeming Belly, as to see a Woman increase there ...
— Tractus de Hermaphrodites • Giles Jacob
... because not unusual; it seemed natural that women of the privileged classes should be of manly character, inferior in nothing but bodily strength to their husbands and fathers. The independence of women seemed rather less unnatural to the Greeks than to other ancients, on account of the fabulous Amazons (whom they believed to be historical), and the partial example afforded by the Spartan women; who, though no less subordinate by law than in other Greek states, were more free in fact, and being trained to bodily exercises in the same manner with men, gave ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... the publication of that letter of Andrew Jackson was to trump up a shadow of argument for a pretended reaennexation of Texas to the United States, by a fabulous pretension that it had been treacherously surrendered to Spain, in the Florida treaty of 1819, by our government,—meaning thereby the Secretary of State of that day, John Quincy Adams,—in return for greater ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... This fabulous creature was one of those destructive monsters of which many ravaged Greece in the age of fable. It had the body of a man and the head of a bull, and so great was the havoc it wrought among the Cretans that Minos engaged the great artist Daedalus to construct a den from ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... familiar operas. I also knew many of the contralto arias, like Perlate de Amour in Faust and other contralto numbers of the different operas that we gave. I was engaged at $20 per week, which seemed to me a fabulous sum, for I was without any means. These were strenuous days, sometimes fourteen hours in the theatre a day, singing one opera and practicing a new one. I was not unhappy as I was doing something to help along the good work of regaining ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... appropriately to the more fantastic kinds of narrative, while stories of the deliverance of a house from a pestilent goblin are much more capable of sober treatment and verisimilitude. Dragons are more easily distinguished and set aside as fabulous monsters than is the family of Grendel. Thus the story of Grendel is much better fitted than the dragon story for a composition like Beowulf, which includes a considerable amount of the detail of common experience and ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... butcher—for did they not own thirty thousand feet apiece in the "richest mines on earth"! Who cared if their credit was not good with the grocer, so long as they revelled in mountains of fictitious wealth and raved in the frenzied cant of the hour over their immediate prospect of fabulous riches! But at last the practical necessities of living put a sudden damper on their enthusiasm. Clemens was forced at last to abandon mining, and go to work as a common labourer in a quartz mill, at ten dollars a week and board—after flour had soared to a dollar a pound ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... laugh he began scooping the gems, hap-hazard, into the pockets of his torn, battle-stained uniform. Jewels of fabulous price escaped his fingers, like so many pebbles in a sand-pit, and fell clicking to the golden floor. With shaking hands the major dredged into the pit before him, mad with ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... secondarily to secure any other valuable mining properties which might happen to be on the market. A promoter, whose acquaintance he had formed soon after leaving St. Paul, had poured into his ear such fabulous tales of a mine of untold wealth which needed but the expenditure of a few thousands to place it upon a dividend-paying basis, that, after making due allowance for optimism and exaggeration, he had thought it might be worth his while to stop off and investigate. The ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... estimates are, as will be seen, very vague and doubtful, so that we must still admit with Bacon that, "touching the length and shortness of life in living creatures, the information which may be had is but slender, observation is negligent, and tradition fabulous. In tame creatures their degenerate life corrupteth them, in wild creatures their exposing to all ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... You could buy a whole harem of fair Circassians for what one of those little square boxes costs. A lady whose entrance caused no sensation would feel bitterly disappointed. As a rule, she knows little about music, and cares still less, unless some singer is performing who is paid a fabulous price, which gives his notes a peculiar charm. With us most things are valued by the money they have cost. Ladies attend the opera simply and solely to see ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... Brosses, whose words I abridge, "though not learned in antiquity, could not have been ignorant that there were great conquerors before Cyrus; as Ninus and Sesostris. But as their reigns belonged rather to the fabulous ages, Sallust, in entering upon a serious history, wished to confine himself to what was certain, and went no further back than the records of Herodotus and Thucydides." Ninus, says Justin. i. 1, was the first to change, through inordinate ambition, the veterem et quasi ...
— Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jurgurthine War • Sallust
... of civilization, that are unfavourable to the spirit of poetry. We not only stand in less awe of the preternatural world, but we can calculate more surely, and look with more indifference, upon the regular routine of this. The heroes of the fabulous ages rid the world of monsters and giants. At present we are less exposed to the vicissitudes of good or evil, to the incursions of wild beasts or "bandit fierce", or to the unmitigated fury of ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... beautifully wrought that it must be of immense value. The curtains and upholstery of the chairs and sofas and the hangings of my bed are of the costliest and most beautiful fabrics, and must have been of fabulous value when they were made, for they are centuries old, though in excellent order. I saw something like them in Hampton Court, but they were worn and frayed and moth-eaten. But still in none of the rooms is there a mirror. There is not even a ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... those uncultivated Tartars, without any regular training in the art of composition. His Book indeed, owing to the endless errors and inaccuracies that had crept into it, had come for many years to be regarded as fabulous; and the opinion prevailed that the names of cities and provinces contained therein were all fictitious and imaginary, without any ground in fact, or were (I might rather say) ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... I am not a simpleton. I have now been pleading five years in criminal courts: I have had to dive down into the lowest depths of society; I have seen strange things, and met with exceptional specimens, and heard fabulous stories"— ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... many of the philosophic naturalists, now so much talked of, shall be forgotten, or only remembered to have their quaint theories laughed at, and their fabulous descriptions turned into ridicule. Fortunately for Wilson, he was too poor and too humble to attract their patronage until his book was published. Fortunately for him he knew no great Linneus or Count Buffon, else the vast stores which he had been at so much pains to ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... properly Quetzalcoatl, was the divinity who is fabled to have taught the natives of Anahuac all the useful arts, including those of government and policy, he was white-skinned and dark-haired. Finally he sailed from the shores of Anahuac for the fabulous country of Tlapallan in a bark of serpents' skins. But before he sailed he promised that he would return again with a numerous progeny. This promise was remembered by the Aztecs, and it was largely on account of it that the Spaniards were enabled to conquer ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... he turned toward Montague to explain that "Ysabel" was the pseudonym of a young debutante who had fallen under the spell of Baudelaire and Wilde, and had published a volume of poems of such furious eroticism that her parents were buying up stray copies at fabulous prices. ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... days when the impeachment trial was front-page news everywhere, The Revolution proclaimed it as a political maneuver of the Republicans to confuse the people and divert their attention from more important issues, such as corruption in government, high prices, taxation, and the fabulous wealth being amassed by the few. This of course roused the intense disapproval of Wendell Phillips, Theodore Tilton, and Horace Greeley, all of whom regarded Johnson as a traitor and shouted for impeachment. ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... there must be in this country some secret method of gaining vast fortunes gradually dawned on the minds of the people. This method, they argued, must be outside the laws of the land which they themselves had made, and they were confronted with the fact that the possessors of these fabulous fortunes were creating a power not recognized by their Government and which practically placed the Government in the hands of the fortune-owners. They realized that in some way the magic of this fortune-making was connected ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... being the case, and so distinct is the evidence of the practice of oil-painting in antecedent periods, that of late years the discoveries of the Van Eycks have not unfrequently been treated as entirely fabulous; and Raspe, in particular, rests their claims to gratitude on the contingent introduction of amber-varnish and poppy-oil:—"Such perhaps," he says, "might have been the misrepresented discovery ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... what), which could be transacted by myself alone; in which I could have no help; which imposed a constant strain on the attention, memory, observation, and physical powers; and which involved an almost fabulous amount of change of place and rapid railway travelling. I had followed this pursuit through an exceptionally trying winter in an always trying climate, and had resumed it in England after but a brief repose. Thus it came to be ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... but were helpless. Many of them agreed that though in theory such things were explainable, science was as yet far from any known means of bringing them about in actuality. Insurance companies spent fabulous sums on investigation, and, failing to get results, raised their premiums ...
— The Einstein See-Saw • Miles John Breuer
... of a date posterior to the age of Ossian, there is a class of compositions called Ur-sgeula,[5] or new-tales, which may be termed the productions of the sub-Ossianic period. They are largely blended with stories of dragons and other fabulous monsters; the best of these compositions being romantic memorials of the Hiberno-Celtic, or Celtic Scandinavian wars. The first translation from the Gaelic was a legend of the Ur-sgeula. The translator was Ierome Stone,[6] schoolmaster of Dunkeld, and ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... amore, and has produced two goodly volumes, with a few "Arabesque" sketches and tales founded on popular traditions. His study was THE ALHAMBRA, which must have inspired him for his task. To quote his own words: "how many legends and traditions, true and fabulous; how many songs and romances, Spanish and Arabian, of love and war, and chivalry, are associated with this romantic pile." The Governor of the Alhambra gave Mr. Irving and his companion, permission ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 549 (Supplementary issue) • Various
... controls of the sleek ship, and while Astro, Sid, and Kit went below to the power deck, he began to figure their speed at a D-30 rate. He used a pencil at first, scribbling on a piece of paper, but the answer he reached was so fabulous, he put the ship on automatic gyro control and climbed to the radar deck where he checked the figures on the electronic calculator. When the result was the same, ...
— Treachery in Outer Space • Carey Rockwell and Louis Glanzman
... however, were still curious, surmising that in all this there was probably no fabulous treasure of the legends, but some fine windfall of a more serious and palpable sort than the devil's bank-bills, and that the road-mender had half discovered the secret. The most "puzzled" were the school-master ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... remunerative spectacular representation is what the most celebrated colonial impresario, Mr. R S. Smythe, calls a 'one-man show.' Mr. Archibald Forbes and Mr. R. A. Proctor both made fabulous sums out of their trip to the colonies; and if Arthur Sketchley failed, it was purely for want of a good agent. In Adelaide, which, as a Puritan community, looks somewhat askance at opera and drama, the popularity of good lectures is ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... darkness, and the piratical appearance and unaccountable pauses of the gondoliers. Was not this Venice, and is not Venice forever associated with bravoes and unexpected dagger-thrusts? That valise of mine might represent fabulous wealth to the uncultivated imagination. Who, if I made an outcry, could understand the Facts of the Situation—(as we say in the journals)? To move on was relief; to pause was regret for past transgressions mingled with good resolutions for the future. But I felt ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... unenviable reputation throughout the world. Every time one walked on Pacific street with any money in pocket he took his life in his hand. "Guard Your Own!" was the accepted creed of the time and woe to him who could not do so. Gold was thrown about like water. The dancing girls made fabulous sums as commissions on drinks their consorts could be persuaded to buy. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent nightly in the great temples devoted to gambling, and there men risked on the luck of a moment or the turn of a painted ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... world are rich at the cost of our suffering and our poverty. That troubles you not at all: you have sophistries and to spare to reassure you: the sacred rights of property, the fair struggle for life, the supreme interests of that Moloch, the State and Progress, that fabulous monster, that problematical Better to which men sacrifice the Good,—the Good of other men.—But for all that, the fact remains, and all your sophistries will never manage to deny it: "You have too much to live on. We have not enough. And we are as good as you. And some of us are better ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... position, so as not to be in anyone's way, and watch Lindstrom. He's the man — he produces hot cakes with astonishing dexterity; it almost reminds one of a juggler throwing up balls, so rapid and regular is the process. The way he manipulates the cake-slice shows a fabulous proficiency. With the skimmer in one hand he dumps fresh dough into the pan, and with the cake-slice in the other he removes those that are done, all at the same time; it seems almost more ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... who is thus terrify'd with the Imagination of Ghosts and Spectres much more reasonable than one who, contrary to the Reports of all Historians sacred and prophane, ancient and modern, and to the Traditions of all Nations, thinks the Appearance of Spirits fabulous and groundless: Could not I give myself up to this general Testimony of Mankind, I should to the Relations of particular Persons who are now living, and whom I cannot distrust in other Matters of Fact. I might here add, that not only the Historians, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... I wish all manner of success to your friend the artist, and laurels of the weight of gold while of the freshness of grass—alas! an impossible vegetable!—fabulous as the Halcyon! ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... came the jocund Spring in Killingworth, In fabulous days, some hundred years ago; And thrifty farmers, as they tilled the earth, Heard with alarm the cawing of the crow, That mingled with the universal mirth, Cassandra-like, prognosticating woe: They shook their heads, and doomed with dreadful words To swift ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... through the slums. It sung on the wires to the rail-heads at the coast. It reached the wealthy headquarters at Seattle. Thence it journeyed on the wings of cable and wire to every corner of the world. And the message only told the fabulous stories of the new strike on Bell River. The world was left all unconcerned with ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... not a penny in his estimation—while there was Miss Dunstable in the world to be won? His own six or seven thousand a year, quite unembarrassed as it was, was certainly a great thing; but what might he not do if to that he could add the almost fabulous wealth of the great heiress? Was she not here, put absolutely in his path? Would it not be a wilful throwing away of a chance not to avail himself of it? He must, to be sure, lose the de Courcy friendship; but if he should then ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... of him and proud of themselves, and delighted that they had been the first to carry out the idea of a Rummage Sale, which had been brought to them by a visitor from western New York, who explained its workings, and gave almost fabulous accounts of the money made by such sales. The village had intended to have one, but District No. 5 was ahead, with the result that many of the villagers joined in, glad to be rid of articles which had been stowed ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... there, stared—until suddenly she grew afraid, and suddenly with a shudder she wrapped the package up again. These were the stones for whose fabulous worth the woman whose personality she, Rhoda Gray, had usurped, had murdered a man; these were the stones which were indirectly the instrumentality—since but for them Gypsy Nan would never have existed—that made her, ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... her bow in one hand; while, with the other, she is drawing an arrow from her quiver, which is suspended at her shoulder. Her legs are bare, and her feet are adorned with rich sandals. The goddess, with a look expressive of indignation, appears to be defending the fabulous hind from the pursuit of Hercules, who, in obedience to the oracle of Apollo, was pursuing it, in order to carry it alive to Eurystheus; a task imposed on him by the latter as one of ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... the bier, professedly in conversation with the deceased. He asks, what person killed you? If the corpse say no one, the inquest ceases; but if it states that some person has, the bier moves round, the corpse is said to produce the motion, influenced by kuingo (a fabulous personification of death). If the alleged murderer be present, the bier is carried round by this influence, and one of the branches made to touch him. Upon this a battle is sure to ensue either immediately, or in the course of a day ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... These fabulous geese made no sound when he picked them up with lead-lined gloves and put them in his bag, also lined with lead-leaf. They were not even aware of him. Laboratory-bred, retort-shaped, their protoplasm a blend of silicon-carbon, unconscious even that they lived, they munched upon lead and other elements, ...
— Rastignac the Devil • Philip Jose Farmer
... was warm and sunny. He and Alice had arrived early at the spaceport to enjoy the holiday excitement preceding the takeoff. It was something they had both dreamed of since they were kids—a vacation in the fabulous domed cities and ruins ...
— The Memory of Mars • Raymond F. Jones
... thoroughfare to watch them pass, or to accompany them, running beside their horses. She divined at once, by the passionate curiosity their entry aroused, that he had misspent his leisure in spreading through the city lying reports of their immense importance and fabulous riches. ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... struggle—who fight with sun and enemy—who pass years of long exile and gallant endurance in the service of our empire in India. Agency houses after agency houses have been established, and have flourished in splendour and magnificence, and have paid fabulous dividends—and have enormously enriched two or three wary speculators—and then have burst in bankruptcy, involving widows, orphans, and countless simple people who trusted their all to the keeping of these ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Rubens, with garlands, horns of plenty, fringes, vases, statues, gildings, lavishly distributed on every side. In the middle stands a massive and marvellous table of jasper and silver-gilt, laden with candlesticks, glass, gold and silver plate and fabulous viands. Around the table, the biggest luxuries of the Earth sit eating, drinking, shouting, singing, tossing and lolling about or sleeping among the haunches of venison, the miraculous fruits, the overturned jars and ewers. ...
— The Blue Bird: A Fairy Play in Six Acts • Maurice Maeterlinck
... with scarlet silk; and the charro elegance beneath was black and resplendent. All told, he was a very outburst of glitter; breeches, jacket, sombrero, saddle, stirrups, and bridle; not of silver, but of gold. Good carbines for his vagabond Inditos, magnificence for himself, these had come from that fabulous theft of the bullion convoy. And he had arrayed himself this rainy day to dazzle a princess of the Blood. So now he wielded his sword with a conscious flourish, glancing toward the window to see if ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... his mythical forms; we hear also the fabulous genealogy of the Phaeacian rulers, the meaning of which has been above set forth. They, too, Arete and Alcinous, have come from the Cyclops, and have made the same journey as Ulysses, though in a different manner. It must be remembered that he has had his struggle ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... Bismarck had grown with that wonderful rapidity so characteristic of the western town. The advent of the iron horse had opened up new and hitherto undreamed of possibilities. Real estate, which had previously no fixed value whatever, was now in demand at almost fabulous prices. Stores and dwellings sprang into being, hotels and churches were built, school houses and even banking institutions flourished with a vigor that seemed ...
— The Burglar's Fate And The Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... twenty-eight years of age, arrived there. The purpose of his coming was no different from that of the other gentlemen-adventurers who were bent on acquiring speedy fortunes in a land of supposed riches that formed the theme of fabulous and alluring tales, which often enough had but slender foundation in fact. As his father had already acquired properties in the island, it is probable that Bartholomew came to assume the direction of them. There is nothing to show that he was at that ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... that time in control of the Scythian, Sarmatic and Germanic tribes from the frontiers of Persia up to the Rhine. But the pleasure one feels when one thinks to find in the mythologies of the gods some trace of the old history of fabulous times has perhaps carried me too far, and I know not whether I shall have been any more successful than Goropius Becanus, Schrieckius, Herr Rudbeck and the Abbe de ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... drive away an evil genius who guards the nuptial chamber of an Assyrian princess, and who has strangled seven bridegrooms in succession, as they approached the nuptial couch. But the romantic and fabulous strain of this legend has induced the fathers of all Protestant churches to deny it a place amongst the writings sanctioned by divine origin, and we may therefore be excused from entering into discussion on such ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... may say that the advance of civilization, as it is carried forward for ever on the movement continually accelerated of England and France, were it less stealthy and inaudible than it is, would fix, in every stage, the attention of the inattentive and the anxieties of the careless. Like the fabulous music of the spheres, once allowed to break sonorously upon the human ear, it would render us deaf to all other sounds. Heard or not heard, however, marked or not marked, the rate of our advance is more and more portentous. Old ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... more than they could count, Scent, from a most ingenious little fount, More beer, in little kegs, Many dozen hard-boiled eggs, And goodies to a fabulous amount. ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... to this work, equally contain nothing but inaccurate or fabulous reports, with regard to the abdication of Napoleon. Certain historians have been pleased, to represent Napoleon in a pitious state of despondency: others have depicted him as the sport of the threats of M. Regnault ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... The fabulous wealth of the fabled city had been almost constantly in his mind since Waziri had recounted the strange adventures of the former expedition which had stumbled upon the vast ruins by chance. The lure of adventure may have been quite as powerful a factor in urging ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... without any further attempt to colonize the country, and abandoning the poor malefactors on the island to a terrible fate. [Footnote: The story is told by Lescarbot (p. 38, ed. 1609), which he subsequently embellished with some fabulous additions in relation to a visit to the island of Sable by Baron de Leri, in 1519 (Ed. 1611, p. 22), even before the date of the Verrazzano letter.] There is therefore no acknowledgment, in the history of this enterprise, of the pretended discovery. The next act of the regal ...
— The Voyage of Verrazzano • Henry C. Murphy
... creature has been named) is a fabulous bird, 'the chief of the 360 classes of the winged tribes.' It is mentioned in the fourth Book of the second Part of the Shu, as appearing in the courtyard of Shun; and the appearance of a pair of them has always been understood ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... about everywhere and pursue everyone with an infallible system, an ingenious invention, a gigantic scheme. They have calculated everything and only want a millionaire or an influential person to realize their idea - to reform the world and make it happy or to amass fabulous riches. ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... Music, but for the effectual Relief also of successive Thousands, from Misery, Famine, and Confinement: Concordia res parvae crescunt. ORPHEUS, we are told, built the Walls of Thebes, by the irresistible Powers of Harmony: Be this true or fabulous; how many Iron Gates have we not seen open, to the persuasive Charities of this tuneful Society! how many gloomy Cells vacated by their Charms! This elegant Society, by moderate Loans, Interest-free to the industrious Poor, prevents many such from ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke
... the son of Bjornolf, the son of Grim Hairy-cheek, the son of Kettle Haeing, the son of Hallbjorn Halftroll. (3) "Baltic side." This probably means a part of the Finnish coast in the Gulf of Bothnia. See "Fornm. Sogur", xii. 264-5. (4) "Wild man of the woods." In the original Finngalkn, a fabulous monster, half ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... in Beyrout, which, for many successive years, was inhabited by a Christian family. It is of great extent, and was of yore fitted for the dwelling of a prince. The family had, indeed, in early-times been very rich; and almost fabulous accounts are current of the wealth of its founder, Fadlallah Dahan. He was a merchant; the owner of ships, the fitter-out of caravans. The regions of the East and of the West had been visited by him; and, after undergoing as many dangers and adventures as Sinbad, he had ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... are rejected as spurious by Cardinal Baronius;[21] yet a former Pope had expressed his belief in their authenticity;[22] and the ingenious idea of miraculous vegetation might have been easily applied to them. But to trace the other parts of this real or fabulous history, and more especially their insertion in the Iron crown of Lombardy, would require, though ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 580, Supplemental Number • Various
... thrown from her carriage, and when picked up her life was extinct. As there were no injuries found upon her body, it was generally supposed that the shock brought on an attack of heart-failure. Subsequently the disconsolate parents ordered from Italy a monument costing a fabulous sum of money for those days, which was placed over the grave of their only daughter in Greenwood Cemetery, where it still continues to command the admiration of sightseers. This tragic incident occurred in February, 1845, on the eve of the victim's ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... goods on two-wheeled go-carts and pulled out blithely enough, only to stall at the first spot where the great round boulders invaded the trail. Whereat they generalized anew upon the principles of Alaskan travel, discarded the go-cart, or trundled it back to the beach and sold it at fabulous price to the last man landed. Tenderfeet, with ten pounds of Colt's revolvers, cartridges, and hunting-knives belted about them, wandered valiantly up the trail, and crept back softly, shedding revolvers, cartridges, ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... insisted upon making him prisoner. And three years later, when Mr Grattan and a party of his comrades landed in England, in all the glories of velvet waistcoats, dangling Spanish buttons of gold and silver, and forage caps of fabulous magnificence, they could hardly fancy that they belonged to the same service as the red-coated, white-breeched, black-gaitered ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... bold attempt, and very boldly has Schiller executed it. He has stopped at no middle point. He has not scrupled to represent the fabulous miracles of a superstitious age as actually taking place before us. Johanna gives proofs of her faculty of second-sight; she sees, while at the camp of the Dauphin, the death of Salisbury before Orleans; she performs ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... busy fingers of mantua- makers, while anxious fathers reluctantly loosened their purse- strings. Carriages and camelias were thenceforth in demand; white kid gloves were kept on the store counters; and hair-dressers wished that, like the fabulous monster, they could each have a hundred hands capable of wielding the curling-tongs. When the evening arrived, hundreds of carriages might be seen hastening toward the spacious portico of the White House, under which they drove and sat down their freights. In ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... Maitland were intended to consume the formidable machines of the English. Thus, at a fabulous siege of York, by Sir William Wallace, the same mode ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... their accounts appear to be purely fabulous, but not more so perhaps than similar traditions, to be found in the history ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... migration reminds us of the fabulous expeditions of Xerxes. The Genoese, Venetian, and Greek fleets were chartered to transport these swarms of Crusaders by the Bosporus or Dardanelles to Asia. More than four hundred thousand men were concentrated on ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... Simurgh, a fabulous Eastern bird, endowed with reason and knowing all languages. It had seen the great cycle of 7000 years twelve times, and, during that period, it declared it had seen the earth wholly without inhabitant seven times.—W. Beckford, Vathek (notes, 1784). This does not ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... find a clear case of the offering of religious worship to a totem as totem. There are the ceremonies performed by the Australian Warramunga for the purpose of propitiating or coercing the terrible water snake Wollunqua.[925] This creature is a totem, but a totem of unique character—a fabulous animal, never visible, a creation of the imagination; the totem proper is a visible object whose relations with human beings are friendly, the Wollunqua is savage in nature and often hostile to men. He appears to be of the nature of a god, but an undomesticated one—a demon, ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... had long possessed the minds of the people. During the disturbances under the Duke of Ossuna many fabulous tales had been told about them. Genuino had then, as now, brought them forward. Not only freedom from taxes was contained in them, but an equality of power between the people and the nobility in the affairs of the town, by increasing the votes of the first, and by ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... Crates, Eratosthenes, Aristarchus, and Apollodorus, the grammarians, all wrote concerning the poetry, the birth, and the age of Homer."—See Coleridge's Introd., p. 57. "Yet, for aught that now appears, the life of Homer is as fabulous as that of Hercules; and some have even suspected, that, as the son of Jupiter and Alcmena has fathered the deeds of forty other Herculeses, so this unfathered son of Critheis, Themisto, or whatever dame—this Melesigenes, Maeonides, Homer—the blind schoolmaster, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... had fallen to Brewster. The owner had, for the time, preferred Italy to St. Augustine, and left his estate, which was well located and lavishly equipped, in the hands of his friends. Brewster's lease covered three months, at a fabulous rate per month. With Joe Bragdon installed as manager-in-chief, his establishment was transferred bodily from New York, and the rooms were soon as comfortable as their grandeur would permit. Brewster was not allowed to take advantage of his horses ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... general appearance is good, they have a martial air, and, as far as I can judge, they go through their manoeuvres pretty well. It would be difficult to recognize in them the old soldier of the Pope, the fabulous personage whose duty it was to escort processions, and to fire off the cannon on firework nights; the well-to-do citizen in uniform who, if the weather looked threatening, mounted guard with an umbrella. The Holy Father's army would present ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... commercial value, and had winced more than he triumphed when Susy produced her allusion to Marius. His book was to be called The Pageant of Alexander. His imagination had been enchanted by the idea of picturing the young conqueror's advance through the fabulous landscapes of Asia: he liked writing descriptions, and vaguely felt that under the guise of fiction he could develop his theory of Oriental influences in Western art at the expense of less learning than if he had ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton |
