"Ghostly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a fire laid in the enormous fireplace, and in a few minutes we were steaming before a cheerful blaze. Within the radius of its light and heat, we were comfortable again. But the brightness merely emphasized the gloom of the ghostly corners. We talked in subdued tones, and I smoked, a box of Russian cigarettes which I found in a table drawer. We had decided to stay all night, there being nothing else to do. I suggested a game of ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the moody Elfin King, Who wonned within the hill, Like wind in the porch of a ruined church, His voice was ghostly ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... ghostly noises began to come from that room and mysterious whisperings fell out of the window and bumped ...
— You Should Worry Says John Henry • George V. Hobart
... of his associates. Then climbing softly in at the window, he lay down in the young fellow's bed. After waiting a little time, he fell to arousing the Archimandrite. His masters who were listening under the window, hearing him try to awake the ghostly man, begged ...
— The Story of Tim • Anonymous
... topographical engineer, has just been promenading the line of tents in his nightshirt, with a club, in search of some scoundrel, supposed to be the Adjutant, who has stuffed his bed with stove-wood and stones. Wilson, on seeing the ghostly apparition approach, ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... guardians of my Land of Promise. I hung one of them round my neck by a cord, and got much comfort and spiritual assistance from it. My faith grew livelier as my needs increased; the sacred figure received my confidences and seemed to impart ghostly counsels. I had a superstitious care to keep it always towards Tuscany, twisting the cord round so that the cross was on my back whenever I had occasion to face north instead of south. Before going to sleep I was careful to stand it up so that the image pointed ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... and night, tending him with the utmost solicitude and patience. It was in vain. He passed away in the middle of the night. She was alone, but with her own hands she fashioned a coffin and placed him into it, and with her own hands she dug a grave and buried him. Then turning from the ghostly spot with its melancholy community of dead and dying, she tramped through the dark and dew-sodden forest to Akpap, where, utterly exhausted, she threw herself on her bed as the land was whitening ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... was falling swiftly, layer on layer of twilight, as they turned to come back to the house. The steeple of the church rose up on their left, slender and ghostly against the yellow sky, out of the black yews and cypresses that lay banked below it. They stopped and looked at it a moment, as it aspired to heaven from the bones that lay about its base, like an eternal resurrection wrought ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... through the many thicknesses of intervening crystal, as in a haze that made them seem unreal and ghostly, I discerned the figures of eight ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... second book, "The Outdoor Girls at Rainbow Lake; Or, The Stirring Cruise of the Motor Boat Gem," there was a queer ghostly mystery on an island, but the girls were a match for it. As may be guessed from the title, the story has to do with boating, Betty having become the proud possessor of ...
— The Outdoor Girls in a Winter Camp - Glorious Days on Skates and Ice Boats • Laura Lee Hope
... night the sexton sought to sleep, But ere he slept himthought he heard a sound That caused his heart to throb, his flesh to creep— The ghostly knocking of his daily round— And, trembling, to his child he cried in fear: "Some one is ...
— Fleurs de lys and other poems • Arthur Weir
... know how far he is in earnest, and, to save his self-respect and character for canniness, he 'jocks wi' deeficulty.' He amuses himself with trying how far he can carry speculations on metaphysics (not yet reformed by himself) into the realm of the ghostly. He makes admissions about his own tendency to think that he has an immaterial soul, and that these points are, or may be, or some day will be, scientifically solved. These admissions are eagerly welcomed by Du Prel in his 'Philosophy of Mysticism;' but they are only part of Kant's ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... dance," and Lem, thankful for the respite, stepped out on the piazza, where a group of men were lounging and smoking. The air outside was sharp and invigorating; the moon was full, and in its cold, clear light the Peak glimmered white and ghostly. ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... the moon-misted sea came a procession of ghostly sails. Every ship seemed to bear troops of white-robed maidens and, as they floated past, they gaily waved their hands to me, calling for comradeship and understanding, a wide-open ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... drop metaphor. In the basement of the building you would find the press-room, with its steam engine, its furnaces, its presses, its dark demi-devils, and ghostly and ghastly gnomes and genii groping or flitting about amid the glare and gloom, begrimed and besmoked, seemingly at work at unhallowed yet supernatural toil, which toil, as if a punishment for sin, like that of Sisyphus, or the daughters of Danae ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... death of some member of the household visited. In Ireland legends of the banshee belong more particularly to certain families in whose records periodic visits from the spirit are chronicled. A like ghostly informer figures in Brittany folklore. The Irish banshee is held to be the distinction only of families of pure Milesian descent. The Welsh have the banshee under the name gwrach y Rhibyn (witch of Rhibyn). Sir Walter Scott mentions a belief in the banshee as existing in the highlands ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... A shudder of fear came over her, and then she was astonished at the fear; he might easily have done all that she had given him to do and returned by this time. Yet why did he pass the window in that ghostly fashion and show no sign of coming to the door? A moment or two that she sat seemed beaten out into the length and width of minutes by the throbbing of her nerves, usually so steady. She determined to steel herself against discomfort. If Toyner had done his work ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... the stain away with EDWIN DROOD'S worsted muffler, and dried the sides of the glasses upon the napkin intended for Mr. DIBBLE'S use. There was something of the wild resources of despair, too, in this man's frequent ghostly dispatch of the German after articles forgotten in the first trip, such as another cracker, the cover of the pepper-cruet, the salt, and one more pinch of butter; and so greatly did his apparent dejection of soul increase ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 17, July 23, 1870 • Various
... saw him there by the wall When I scarce had written the line, In the enemy's colors dressed And the serpent-standard of wine Writhing its withered length From his ghostly hands o'er the ground, And there by his shadowy breast The ...
— General William Booth enters into Heaven and other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... desolation of the forest weighed on him. His feet made no sound on the pine needles, and the slanting sun rays, striking through among the straight trunks, made a gray twilight in which objects at a distance glimmered indistinctly. There was nothing to break the ghostly stillness which, when there is no breeze, always broods over these ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... peace; the hostile families found themselves side by side in the soul-kindling atmosphere of a Revival Tea, where hymns were blended with a beverage that came of tea-leaves and hot water and took after the latter parent, and where ghostly counsel was tempered by garnishings of solidly fashioned buns—and here, wrought up by the environment of festive piety, Mrs. Saunders so far unbent as to remark guardedly to Mrs. Crick that the evening ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... rebellious thoughts, and shuddering at the night noises in the woods. The lapping of the water on the rocks below had a lonesome sound. She had not yet learned to hear its soft crooning lullaby. The wind rustled in the pine trees with a ghostly, mysterious sound. From somewhere in the woods came a mournful cry that sent the chills up and down her spine. It was only a whippoorwill, but Gladys did not know a whippoorwill from a bluebird. Then the frogs in a distant ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... on them, almost before Sergeant Archelaus could let out a cry—the stem, the grey-painted bows of a vast steamship, ghostly, towering up into night. A bell rang. High on the bridge—but the bridge soared into heaven—a pilot's voice called out in the Island tongue. As the great bows glided by, missing the boat by a few yards, the three men stared ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... short person, no longer young, with coal-black hair growing low on the forehead, and a round face that would have been nearly meaningless if the features had not been emphasized—italicized, so to speak—by the small-pox. Moreover, the brilliancy of her toilet would have rendered any ghostly hypothesis untenable. Mrs. Solomon (we refer to the dressiest Mrs. Solomon, whichever one that was) in all her glory was not arrayed like Miss Margaret on that eventful summer morning. She wore a light-green, shot-silk frock, a blazing red ...
— A Rivermouth Romance • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... to our feet and gripped our staves firmly. And at the prospect of a fight my terror died away. There was no ghostly fear about things of flesh and blood. You can strike a man, but who can ...
— In the Days of Drake • J. S. Fletcher
... said Mitchell, "I like this view of the works better than when the glare was fiercest? These heavy shadows and the amphitheatre of smothered fires are ghostly, unreal. One could fancy these red smouldering lights to be the half-shut eyes of wild beasts, and the spectral figures ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... have never seen the palace of Amsterdam, my dear sir? Why, there's a marble hall in that palace that will frighten you as much as any hall in Vathek, or a nightmare. At one end of that old, cold, glassy, glittering, ghostly, marble hall there stands a throne, on which a white marble king ought to sit with his white legs gleaming down into the white marble below, and his white eyes looking at a great white marble Atlas, who bears on his icy shoulders a blue globe as big as the ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and stood close together upon the immediate edge of the vacant plot, now several feet deep in snow, our figures throwing long shadows upon the ghostly purity of the covering. And we became aware that we were not watching so much as listening, for on the freshening easterly wind there was borne such a rumour as men are not often permitted to make or to hear. It could scarcely be called a noise; it was rather a terrible and confusing presence ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... months after the murder of her father, before the accusation was first brought against her. It is a gloomy place now, with its low black archway, its mouldy walls, its half rotten windows, and its ghostly court of balconies; one might guess that a dead man's curse hangs over it, without knowing how Francesco died. And he, who cursed his sons and his daughters and laughed for joy when two of them were murdered, rebuilt the little church just opposite, as a burial-place for himself and them; ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... ceiling, and the fact that she had caused the orange chiffon with which the neck and sleeves were trimmed to be dyed black (following the exquisite taste of Mrs. Titus Trout) only threw the splendour of the rest into more dazzling radiance. Kingfisher-blue would appear quite ghostly and corpse-like in its neighbourhood; and painful though that would be for Diva, it would, as all her well-wishers must hope, be a lesson to her not to indulge in such garishness. She should be taught her lesson (D.V.), ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... month, the waiting-women have been complaining to us of the ghostly noises by which my lady is nightly disturbed, and they say that they cannot continue to serve her. We have tried to soothe them, by saying that the devils should be exorcised at once, and that there was nothing to be afraid ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... still hang back, like one in a dream, Who vainly strives to clothe himself aright, That in great presence he may seemly seem? Why call up feeling?—dress me in the faint, Worn, faded, cast-off nimbus of some saint? Why of old mood bring back a ghostly gleam— While there He waits, love's ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... not at all. A rear room had evidently been to the old lady the whole of her habitation, serving as a kitchen, bedroom, and living-room combined. Except in this room there were no carpets what-ever. His steps sounded hollow and ghostly; the boards creaked and each time he opened a door he was oppressed by the same gloom of dankness and stagnation. There was no trace of ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... Over the Chiricahuas flared the evening star. The plain, self-luminous with the weird lucence of the arid lands, showed ghostly. Jed Parker, coming out from the lamp-lit adobe, leaned his elbows on the rail in silent company with his chief. He, too, looked abroad. His mind's eye saw what his body's eye had always told him were the insistent notes—the alkali, ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... to his lawyer's; and as he walked through the familiar streets each approaching face, each distant figure seemed hers. The obsession was intolerable. It would not last, of course; but meanwhile he had the exposed sense of a fugitive in a nightmare, who feels himself the only creature visible in a ghostly and besetting multitude. The eye of the metropolis seemed fixed on him ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... Constance as she walked beside the Master. She was thinking involuntarily of that absent word dropped by her uncle—"Oxford is a place of training"—and there was a passionate and troubled revolt in her. Other ghostly wills seemed to be threatening her—wills that meant nothing to her. No!—her own will should shape her own life! As against the austere appeal that comes from the inner heart of Oxford, the young and restless blood ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... inferior numbers of undisciplined and ill-armed militia, who did not possess so much as bayonets to their guns. They kindled fires along the levees, ate their supper, and then, as the evening fell, noticed a big schooner drop down the river in ghostly silence and bring up opposite to them. The soldiers flocked to the shore, challenging the stranger, and finally fired one or two shots at her. Then suddenly a rough voice was heard, "Now give it to them, for the honor of America!" and a shower of shell and ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... moon—just as there had been that night, only now it fell on a many bridged river across which were ghostly cypress trees, rising along the hillside to a strangely outlined church behind ruined fortifications. I was wondering, against my will, at what hour that moon rose over the distant New England village, which came before me in a vision that wiped out the wooded ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... his ghostly fashion, and they retraced at a better speed and less effort the path which had brought them to the canyon perch. Just as they were about to top the ridge behind the mustanger camp, the Pima held up a ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... within the sphere of our Savior's ministry, he could not, consistently with his general character, have failed to expose and condemn it. The oppression of the people by lordly ecclesiastics, of parents by their selfish children, of widows by their ghostly counsellors, drew from his lips scorching rebukes and terrible denunciations.[C] How, then, must he have felt and spoke in the presence of such tyranny, if such tyranny had been within his official sphere, as should have made widows, by driving their husbands to some flesh-market, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... in a yellow stain, And the clouds are flying before the wind, The leaves fall fast in a ghostly rain,— Summer ...
— The Rose-Jar • Thomas S. (Thomas Samuel) Jones
... of attracting notice; but now when he had just discarded the thought of a burglarious entry, knocking at a door seemed a mighty simple and innocent proceeding. The sound of his blows echoed through the house with thin, phantasmal [Footnote: Phantasmal: ghostly.] reverberations, as though it were quite empty; but these had scarcely died away before a measured tread drew near, a couple of bolts were withdrawn, and one wing was opened broadly, as though no guile or fear of guile were known to those within. A tall figure of a man, muscular ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... for the fate of La Touche nor sorrow for the fate of Bompard, all that seemed unreal, just as the darkness and terror of the night before seemed unreal. The real thing that touched her through everything was Expectancy. Expectancy, ghostly and attenuated, ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... writing; Pia, the old nurse, stood behind her chair; the oil was richly scented that she burned; the single light illumined only her, and covered with her shadow the low ceiling,—a shadow that seemed to hang above her like a pall ready to fall from ghostly fingers and smother her in its folds; the others lounged about the room and waited on her pen, in gloom they, their faces gleaming from that dusk demoniacly. It was a concealed room, entered by secret ways, unknown ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... must be beautiful. All true poetry is about beauty. It doesn't teach anything useful, or analyze anything, but it simply makes the reader feel a certain effect. When you read "The Raven" you hardly know what the poet is saying; but you feel the ghostly scene, and it makes you shudder; and there is a strange fascination about it that makes you like it, even if ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... any natives for a long time, the smoke of a fire was seen on the bank. Some shepherds were watching their flocks, and their dogs began to bark. The men gazed at the ferry-boat with wonder and alarm as it floated nearer, and no doubt thought that it was something ghostly, for they faced about and ran with the dust flying about their sheepskin sandals. I sent two men ashore, but it was quite impossible to catch up ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... the center of the transformed Exposition. Under the white light of the powerful projectors, details disappear, the structure is softened into a form almost ghostly. It becomes ethereal. All its daytime glitter gone, it seems really spiritual. The jewels hung over the upper portion do not flash out a diamond brilliance, as they might have been expected to do; rather they spread the light in a soft film about ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... brightly, giving to the dead whitened trees on the little island a peculiar ghostly appearance. The canoes soon grounded in the marsh grass, and, fastening them to paddles, stuck down in the mud, our hunters shouldered their fowling-pieces and trudged ahead through the mire. They had prepared themselves well for the trip and each wore a pair of rubber boots reaching to ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... And, though that place had been given for three hundred years to colder rites, the atmosphere of an earlier, more splendid faith seemed still to cling to it. A vague odour of a spectral incense hung about the pillars, a sweet, sad smell, and the shadows of ghostly priests in vestments of gold, and with embroidered copes, wound in a long ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... earth before us. The Parliament of living men, Lords and Commons united, what a miserable array against the Upper and Lower House composing the Parliament of ghosts! Perhaps the Pre-Adamites would constitute one wing in such a ghostly army. My brother, dying in his sixteenth year, was far enough from seeing or foreseeing Waterloo; else he might have illustrated this dreadful duel of the living human race with its ghostly predecessors, by the ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... over on the hearth, and the listener begins to hear the eerie noises in the house. At such times one's dreams become of importance, and people like to tell them and dwell upon them, as if they were a link between the known and unknown, and could give us a clew to that ghostly region which in certain states of the mind we feel to be more real ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... "As the ghostly adviser Of WILHELM our Kaiser I think this erection Is simply perfection. No censure can dim it, Because it's the limit In massive proportions And splendid distortions. To compare it with Ammon, Whose temple's at Karnak, Is the veriest ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 23, 1914 • Various
... herself how much she liked him and his ghostly brethren, whose preaching was always of peace, while the world was full of lurid hatred, strife, and division. She begged the baffled old man to keep her hand in his. He talked in Latinized Italian, and only appeared to miss the exact meaning of her replies when his examination ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... am rather inclined to hold, with another class of inquirers, that the origin of such marvels must be looked for in the mind of the seers; although I do not go the length of their scepticism, and deny the actual existence of the ghostly show, as a real and visible ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 331, September 13, 1828 • Various
... so sad and solemn, that things meant in jest are liable, by an overpowering influence, to become dreadful earnest,—gayly dressed fantasies turning to ghostly and ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... favour that was procured with difficulty; and would have been refused, had he not been an Englishman of rank: a nation with reason respected in every Austrian government—for he had refused ghostly attendance, and the sacraments in the Catholic way.—May his soul ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... mysterious reverence: it seems charged with all sorts of memories of old, bygone state. For here all the rank and fashion of Bath used to make its way of Assembly nights. Many years ago, there was here given a morning concert to which I found my way, mainly for the purpose of calling up ghostly memories of the Thrales, and Doctor Johnson, and Miss Burney, and, above all, of Mr. Pickwick. Though the music was the immortal "Passion" of Bach, my eyes were travelling all the while from one piece of faded rococo work and decoration. Boz never ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... to light a cigarette. No sound came from his companion. All round them spread the great common, with its old thorns, its clumps of fir, its hollows and girdling woods, faintly lit by a ghostly moonlight that was just beginning to penetrate the misty November dusk. The cheerful light of Dempsey's cigarette shone a moment in the gloom. Delane was conscious of an excitement which it took all his will to master. But he ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... night, and the Adventurer made extremely slow progress, a leadsman at the bow calling off the depth of water, and a huge light, rather ingeniously arranged, casting a finger of radiance along the ghostly shore line. With no marks of guidance on either bank, the wheelsman felt his uncertain passage upward, advancing so cautiously progress was scarcely noticeable, and I could frequently distinguish the ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... the Channel to the Vosges, there are hundreds of thousands of graves where British soldiers keep the ghostly bivouac of the dead. They gave their young lives on the soil of France to save France, and when the great result is finally accomplished, a grateful world will never forget that "fidelity even unto death" of the British soldier. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... dust, in a little dust, Earth, thou reclaim'st us, who do all our lives Find of thee but Egyptian villeinage. Thou dost this body, this enhavocked realm, Subject to ancient and ancestral shadows; Descended passions sway it; it is distraught With ghostly usurpation, dinned and fretted With the still-tyrannous dead; a haunted tenement, Peopled from barrows and outworn ossuaries. Thou giv'st us life not half so willingly As thou undost thy giving; thou that teem'st The stealthy terror of the sinuous pard, The lion maned with curl-ed puissance, The ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... It appeared ghostly in the dark, the big steel girders taking on weird and fantastic shapes. A train rushed across its span, roaring and throwing a shower of sparks high ...
— Bob Cook and the German Spy • Tomlinson, Paul Greene
... bitterness that Randolph took his seat in the crowded church. But this feeling, and even his attempts to discover Miss Eversleigh's face in the stately family pew fenced off from the chancel, presently passed away. And then his mind began to be filled with strange and weird fancies. What grim and ghostly revelations might pass between this dead scion of the Dorntons lying on the trestles before them and the obscure, nameless ticket of leave man awaiting his entrance in the vault below! The incongruity of this thought, with the smug complacency ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... and the parade ground was empty and ghostly. The marquis glanced about. He discovered D'Herouville leaning against a cannon, contemplating the escarps and bastions of the citadel. The marquis went forward, striking his heels soundly. D'Herouville ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... advantageous toward this particular brand of dream, why, there ain't no way of keeping a sufficient supply in camp. I goes up against her myself, an' wild licker she is. But one by one, the boys all gets to dreamin' that Burns has sorter floated afore them, accordin' to ghostly etiquette, an' pointed a ghostly finger at the ground. Which ain't so plumb exact, for no one supposes a mine to be up in the air. But different ones affirms that they can recognize the features of the landscape which the ghost of Burns frequents. As, however, they all ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... road, Stuart knew not. But following hard upon the mysterious disturbance which had aroused him it seemed to pour ice into his veins, it added the complementary touch to his panic. For it was a kind of low wail—a ghostly minor wail in falling cadences—unlike any sound he had heard. It was so excessively horrible that it ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... live, for lack of sustenance. And as it is necessary for to have this ploughing for the sustentation of the body, so must we have also the other for the satisfaction of the soul, or else we cannot live long ghostly. For as the body wasteth and consumeth away for lack of bodily meat, so doth the soul pine away for default of ghostly meat. But there be two kinds of inclosing, to let or hinder both these kinds of ploughing: the one is an inclosing to let or hinder the bodily ploughing, and the other ...
— Sermons on the Card and Other Discourses • Hugh Latimer
... it still," he said, "drip! drip! faster and plainer than ever. That ghostly dropping of water is the last and the surest of the fatal signs which have told of your father's and your brother's deaths to-night, and I know from the place where I hear it—the foot of the bed I lie on—that it is a warning to me of my own approaching ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... The ghostly world streamed by, silent-footed and mist-muffled. It was the hour when children are born and weary people die—the hour of new beginnings and ancient endings, when life and death, like soldiers ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... studio, and all full of mist; and the gallery that was his bedroom was up a little staircase at the farther end. In the middle of the floor was a tall structure of scaffolding, with a stage or two to stand on; and I could see the dim ghostly marble figure in the gloom. It had been jacked up on a heavy base; and as it would have taken three or four men to put it into position, and scarcely a stranger had entered the yard since I had been there, I knew that the figure must have stood for a long time. Sculpture's ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... Leopoldville and are comfortably installed in the Inspector's house. A kind of fete is held in the evening and a procession passes with lanterns on poles, but there is very little singing or noise of any kind and the whole affair is rather ghostly. ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman
... was about us was reflected by the westward cliffs. It showed a huge undulating plain, cold and gray, a gray that deepened eastward into the absolute raven darkness of the cliff shadow. Innumerable rounded gray summits, ghostly hummocks, billows of snowy substance, stretching crest beyond crest into the remote obscurity, gave us our first inkling of the distance of the crater wall. These hummocks looked like snow. At the time I thought they ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... prairie spread itself in long softly undulating billows to the eastern horizon, the hollows in shadow, the crests tipped with the silver of the rising moon. Here and there wreaths of mist lay just above the shadow lines, giving a ghostly appearance to the hills. "Now look this way," said Nora, and they turned about. Away to the west in a flood of silvery light the prairie climbed by abrupt steps, mounting ever higher over broken rocky points and rocky ledges, over bluffs of poplar and dark masses of pine and spruce, up to the ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... a sleek, contented man. Anything but a large chair by the fireside, and a family circle! Oh! the bore of going every day over the same exhausted subjects, to the same dull persons of respectability; yet that is the doom of all domesticity. Then pleasure! A wretched play—a hot opera, under the ghostly fathership of Mr. Monck Mason—a dinner of sixteen, with such silence or such conversation!—a water-party to Richmond, to catch cold and drink bad sauterne—a flirtation, which fills all your friends with alarm, and your ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various
... these pine woods at midnight, when a full moon, making brilliant the near-by lake, gave but a ghostly gloom in the deep, deep silence of the Cathedral; but, more impressive, I have often trodden through in a white fog, when the distance was misty and dim, and the aisles seemed longer and higher, and to lead one further ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... modestly wondering whether my utmost ingenuity would have enabled me to say anything that would have amused him half as much as this imaginary pleasantry, when I was startled by a sudden click in the wall on one side of the chimney, and the ghostly tumbling open of a little wooden flap with "JOHN" upon it. The old man, following my eyes, cried with great triumph, "My son's come home!" and we both went out to ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... with a laugh, defiantly, but none the less Jack read uneasiness in the manner of the man. It seemed to him that both were eager to turn back. Giant boulders, carved to grotesque and ghostly shapes by a million years' wind and water, reared themselves aloft and threw shadows in the moonlight. The wind, caught in the gulch, rose and fell in unearthly, sibilant sounds. If ever fiends from below walk the earth, this time and place ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... "Our journey is through ghostly deserts, sage brush and alkali, and rocks without form or color, a sad corner of the world. I confess I am not jolly, but mighty calm, in my distresses. My illness is a subject of great mirth to some of my fellow travellers, and I smile ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... ghastly on the land; Sheep do crowd; and herds Collecting, bellow pitifully bland. Quiet are the birds In ghostly trees that shiver not a sound: And leaves decayed ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... They were yapping now. They were never still. And with their yapping came the droning, hissing monotone of the aurora, like the song of a vast piece of mechanism in the still farther north. Toward this Wapi turned his bruised and beaten head. Out there, just beyond the ghostly pale of vision, was the ship. Fifty times he had slunk out and around it, cautiously as the foxes themselves. He had caught its smells and its sounds; he had come near enough to hear the voices of men, and those voices were like the voice of Blake, ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... the windows, she opened it and stepped out on a balcony, where the long strip of the Quai d'Orsay stretched below her, in gray and silent emptiness. On the swift, leaden-colored current of the Seine, spanned here and there by ghostly bridges, mysterious barges plied weirdly through the twilight. Up on the left the Arc de Triomphe began to emerge dimly out of night, while down on the right the line of the Louvre lay, black and sinister, beneath the towers and spires that faintly detached themselves against the growing saffron ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... out his pathetic lamentation over the sad condition of the world—so fluent, so musical, so touching, that Grimbart listened with wide eyes, unable, till it had run to the length of a sermon, to collect himself. It is true that at last his office as ghostly confessor obliged him to put in ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... latter had passed, and then quietly pursued his road. The more inquisitive who had ventured to steal after the apparition, swore deep and high that the Dwarf and his lights had gone hissing into the well that stood upon Twirling-stick Mike's land, and then the ghostly procession altogether ceased. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... sat at the head of the table, and mutely signed to the ladies to take the two vacant chairs, one on each side of him. His three sons and Balbus completed the party. Writing materials had been arranged round the table, after the fashion of a ghostly banquet: the butler had evidently bestowed much thought on the grim device. Sheets of quarto paper, each flanked by a pen on one side and a pencil on the other, represented the plates—penwipers did duty for rolls ...
— A Tangled Tale • Lewis Carroll
... sea, the immense uneasy sea that was to last ten days and nights before they got to the other side, hour after hour of it, hour after hour of tossing across it further and further away; and forlorn and ghostly as the ship felt, it yet, because on either side of it were still the shores of England, didn't seem as forlorn and ghostly as the unknown land they were bound for. For suppose, Anna-Felicitas inquired of Anna-Rose, who had been privately asking ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... into the darkling bush towards Werrina. The sun had disappeared before I left my father's side, and the track to Werrina was fifteen miles long. A strange drive, and a queer little numbed driver, creaking along through the ghostly bush, exactly as a somnambulist might, the most of his faculties in abeyance. Three words kept shaping themselves in my mind, I know, and then fading out again, like shadows. They never were spoken. My lips ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... the ghostly procession thrice tracks the four ambulatories of the cloisters, solemnly chanting a requiem for ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... fall deep upon the quiet fields where the dead rest. Squadrons of white clouds drift down the valley, as if to cover the sleeping heroes with a shroud of white. Above Sedan's heights appears the shining crescent of the moon and sheds a ghostly light over the wide field of death—the battlefield ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... bounds in the bosom as soon as day has knocked the shackles from a trembling mind. Although Coleman had slept but a short time he was now as fresh as a total abstainer coming from the bath. He heard the creak of battery wheels; he saw crawling bodies of infantry moving in the dim light like ghostly processions. He felt a tremendous virility come with this new hope in the daylight. He again took satis. faction in his sentimental journey. It was a shining affair. He was on active service, an active service ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... offers him a lotus blossom and bud. A tiny gazelle which was probably buried with her, like the pet gazelle discovered beside Queen Isiemkheb in the hiding-place at Deir el Bahari, is tied to one of the legs of the chair. This ghostly group is of heroic size, the rule being that gods are bigger than men, kings bigger than their subjects, and the dead bigger than the living. Horemheb, his mother, and the women standing before them, occupy the ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... gloomy. Heavy clouds gathered in the north, and wreaths of mist, like a hot vapor-bath, swayed over the crisply-foaming wavelets that curled the lustreless waters of the Mareotis Lake. The moon peeped, pale and shrouded, out of a russet halo, and ghostly twilight reigned in the streets, still heated by the baked walls of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... feet, and disposed them neatly beneath the arm-pits of the slain man.(2) In the same spirit, and for the same purpose, the Australian black cuts off the thumbs of his dead enemy, that the ghost too may be mutilated and prevented from throwing at him with a ghostly spear. We learn also from Apollonius Rhodius and his scholiast that Greek murderers used thrice to suck in and spit out the gore of their victims, perhaps with some idea of thereby partaking of their blood, and so, by becoming members of their kin, putting it beyond the power ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... juvenile patronisers—'Look to the right, and there you will see the lions a dewouring the dogs,' was asked—Which is the lion and which is the dogs?' to which query he replied, 'Vichever you please, my little dears, it makes no difference votsomnever.' For in exactly the same spirit do our ghostly exhibitors, they who set up the state puppet show meet the inquiries of the grown children they make so handsomely (again we are under an obligation to Lord Brougham) 'to pay for peeping.' Children of this sort would fain know what is meant by the doctrines ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... considerable powers of doing good or ill. The Nagas, Yakshas and Bhutas of India, the Nats of Burma, the Peys of Siam, the Kami of Japan and the Shen of China are a few items in a list which might be indefinitely extended. In many countries this ghostly population is as numerous as the birds of the forest: they haunt every retired spot and perch unseen under the eaves of every house. Theology has not usually troubled itself to define their status and ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... soundless or scarcely lapping along shore, fell back on its ebb, not rapidly as yet, but imperceptibly gathering speed. Below the Town Quay in the dark shadow lay the boats—themselves a shadowy crowd, ghostly, with a glimmer of white paint here and there on gunwales, thwarts, stern-sheets. Their thole-pins had been wrapped with oakum and their crews sat whispering, ready, with muffled oars. On the Quay, lantern in hand, the Major moved up and ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Their road often lay along the very edges of purple-black abysses. The echoes of their sharp gliding sleds cutting the ice, of the very patter of their dogs' feet, were magnified in volume in the clear air, and it seemed as though, in the hollow depths on every side, ghostly teams were following. Koolotah was white with fear. But ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... a curious fascination about Oldchurch. She never forgot it. The two great wide streets, High-street and Butcher-row, intersecting one another in the form of a cross: the two churches—the Old Church, gloomy and Norman, with its ghostly graveyard; and the New Church, shining white amidst a pleasant garden cemetery, beneath one of whose flower-beds her baby-brother lay: the two shops, the only ones she ever visited, the confectioner's, where ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... myself over the stile I passed round the village churchyard, where the moss-grown gravestones stood grim and ghostly in the white light, and out across the meadows down to where the waters of the Nene, rippling on, were touched with silver. The river-path was wide, running by the winding bank away to the fen-lands and beyond. As I gained the river's edge and walked beneath the willows ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... (nat beyng inspyred ghostly) without it be by the meane of the fyve (selle nest inspiree diuinement) ce se nest par le moien ...
— An Introductorie for to Lerne to Read, To Pronounce, and to Speke French Trewly • Anonymous
... which Irene had sat spellbound by Jules Defourcambault! The portraits of Irene, at least one of which would perpetuate her name! The glazed cases full of her collections!... The chief pieces of furniture and all the chairs were draped in the pale, ghostly sheeting. ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... small and dark and dreary, Ruggieri's being in one of the corner towers, with small windows cut in the wall, which is over two metres in thickness. From whatever reason, these apartments are the most weird and ghostly that we have seen, fitted up as they are with many memorials of Catherine, and two portraits of her, one in a rich costume, an extinguisher gown with pink underskirt and wide full sleeves bordered with a band of fur, each one ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... neighboring hill. The breeze started up again and a limb of a tree that rubbed against its neighbor produced a wailing sound as of some one in distress. We could see fantastic shapes out among the gnarled tree trunks and ghostly forms appeared in the velvety shadows and vanished again among the trees. The moon rose out over the rim of the eastern hills and seemed almost to pause as if some Oriental Magic was being wrought. A mist arose from the river and hovered over the valley below ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... in the face of this, he turned sick at the thought of going forward to the certain annihilation awaiting him in that ghostly wilderness of mist and wet and wreckage ahead. On the other hand, how in God's name could he keep from going, he asked himself, when the blood of innocents was calling on every side! He felt again the ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... of the leaves in the old registry book, and for a moment as he raised his eyes to the silent, white figure before the altar, he took her for a ghostly visitant; but Valmai, with a sudden inrush of recognition, clasped her hands, a faint exclamation escaped her lips, and the "Vicare du" knew it was no spirit who stood trembling before him. For a moment both were speechless—then pointing ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... old, When Ireland's coast the vessel nears, And Death were fairer to behold, To Tristan gives "the cup that clears." Straight to their fate the helmsman steers: Unknowing, each the potion sips.... Comes echoing through the ghostly years "Give me the philtre ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... benevolent at heart. Unfortunately, the royal conscience was at times committed to very different keeping; and that humility which, as we have repeatedly had occasion to notice, made her defer so reverentially to her ghostly advisers, led, under the fanatic Torquemada, the confessor of her early youth, to those deep blemishes on her administration, the establishment of the Inquisition, and ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... cosiness of antiquity quite overcame its sombre associations. But the back bedroom, with its two queerly-placed melancholy windows, staring vacantly at the foot of the bed, and with the shadowy recess to be found in most old houses in Dublin, like a large ghostly closet, which, from congeniality of temperament, had amalgamated with the bedchamber, and dissolved the partition. At night-time, this "alcove"—as our "maid" was wont to call it—had, in my eyes, a specially sinister and suggestive character. Tom's distant and ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 1 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... read. By Truth inspired, we numbers see Of each profession and degree, Gentle and simple, lord and cit, Wit without wealth, wealth without wit, 240 When Punch and Sheridan have done, To Fanny's[206] ghostly lectures run. By Truth and Fanny now inspired, I feel my glowing bosom fired; Desire beats high in every vein To sing the spirit of Cock-lane; To tell (just as the measure flows In halting rhyme, half verse, half prose) With more than mortal arts endued, ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... objects in the room. A flash of indignant intelligence filled the brain of the Barbarian! It seemed absurd!—impossible!—but it was true! It was a holiday excursion party of ghosts, being shown over Stukeley Castle by a ghostly Cicerone! And as his measured, monotonous voice rose on the Christmas morning air, it could be heard that he was actually showing off, not the antiquities of the Castle, but the ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... struggled out from behind her covering, and sent a shaft of light into the gloomy chamber, with its dark draping and heavy carved furniture. With the coming of the light Claverhouse, who was not unaccustomed to ghostly sights, for they were his heritage, raised himself in bed, and knowing no fear looked steadily. What he saw thrown into relief against the shadows was the figure of a hillman of the west, and one that in an instant he knew. The Covenanter was dressed in rough homespun ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... L. Strack, professor of theology at the University of Berlin, one of the foremost Christian authorities on theological and religious literature, commenting on this Goedsche-Retcliffe concoction, says that this tale of the ghostly convocation in the Jewish cemetery at Prague, discloses no real knowledge of Judaism, that the reference to mixed marriages indicates gross ignorance of actual Jewish thought, and that the Hebrew words supposed to have been employed by the ...
— The History of a Lie - 'The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion' • Herman Bernstein
... beside her after that perfect hour in which the old fox played with the tumultuous pack, at his ease, monarch of his domain, unmindful of silent watchers in the shadows, Richard told her of old Pete; he told her, too, of the traditions of a ghostly fox who now and then troubled the hounds, leading them into danger and ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... enough to startle Jolly Robin. But the moon-faced man paid not the slightest attention to the accident. There was something ghostly in the way he stood there, all in white, never moving, never once saying ...
— The Tale of Jolly Robin • Arthur Scott Bailey
... recorded only his virtues. But both his virtues and failings were of no greater weight now to a forgetful generation, which knew not the departed Joseph, than the drifted leaves in the garden alleys where the romance of the old still lingered in ghostly guise! "There were no birds in last year's nest," but the mysterious bungalow had been hastily arranged for the lovely successor to the vanished queen of a cobweb Paradise. The bungalow, itself, was adroitly constructed with a special reference to seclusion as well ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... beds. We saw many lights moving about as we drew near; and perhaps the most impressive scene on our route was our reception at this place. The flashing of torches and the beautiful radiance of blue lights (technically Bengal lights) upon the heads of our horses; the fine effect of such a showery and ghostly illumination falling upon flowers and glittering laurels, whilst all around the massy darkness seemed to invest us with walls of impenetrable blackness, together with the prodigious enthusiasm of the people, ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... gleamed from the darkness, tragic reminders of hard winters and scant pasturage, and Judith, with the Indian superstition that was in the marrow of her bones, read ghostly warnings in the empty eye-sockets of the grinning skulls that stared up at her. She dared not think of the dangers that the looming darkness might conceal, or of what she might find at her journey's end, or—"Whoa, Dolly! softly, girl. ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... sinner at his end, That knows his doom if he unshriven go, And losing hope of any ghostly friend, Sees Hell already gape, and feels ...
— Poems of Paul Verlaine • Paul Verlaine
... and yet contrived, perhaps all unknown to themselves, to leave them better men for their knowledge of him. He came, and he departed. Whence he came and whither he went no one enquired, no one seemed to know. He just moved through the twilight forests like a ghostly, beneficent shadow, supreme in his command of ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... breathin' corpses! How mothers weep over them! how wives kneel, and beat their hearts out on the rocky barriers that separate them from their hearts' love, their hearts' desire! How little starvin', naked children cower in their ghostly shadows through dark midnights! How fathers weep for their children, dead to them, dead to honor, to shame, to humanity! How the cries of the mourners ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... back his locks, and held his forehead to the moon. All the Monk's ghostly wrath was foiled by the one little last sweet word of his beloved, which made music in his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... that there is one GOD that made all thynges, bodily and ghostly, sene or vnsene, and hym thei honour: but not with any maner of Sacrifice or ceremonie. Thei make theim selues litle pupettes of silke or of felte, or of thrumme, like unto menne: whiche thei sette vp vpon eche side of their Tentes, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... seems to say this, the saying brings him no solace. What, "creaking like a ghostly cricket," it intends, he must perceive, since he ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... in no period could Soames be anything but dim. The fact that people are going to stare at him, and follow him around, and seem afraid of him, can be explained only on the hypothesis that they will somehow have been prepared for his ghostly visitation. They will have been awfully waiting to see whether he really would come. And when he does come the effect will of ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... location and could have put her hand right upon it had it been perfectly dark, which it was not. She arose, therefore, and, without taking a light with her, went into the parlour. A faint afterglow illumined the windows and suffused the room with an uncertain, dim, ghostly light which lent to all its objects that vague flatness from which the imagination carves what shapes it lists. As Gwen reached for the picture, a sudden conviction possessed her that her father stood just behind her in the exact spot where he had met his ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... down. The ghostly dark, Made ghostlier by its sheet of snow, Wailed round them its tempestuous wo, Like Death's announcing courier! "Hark There, heard you not the alp-hound's bark? And there again! and there! Ah, no, 'Tis but the blast that mocks ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... kingdom of the dead. Beside her, on a beautiful throne, sat Balder, pale and wan, crowned with a withered wreath of flowers, and close at hand was Nanna, pallid as her husband, for whom she had died. And all night long, while ghostly forms wandered restless and sleepless through Helheim, Hermod talked with Balder and Nanna. There is no record of what they said, but the talk was sad enough, doubtless, and ran like a still stream among the happy days in Asgard when Balder's smile was morning over the earth and the sight ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... why Rosalie looked less pretty than usual as she came in and joined her mother. Her white satin gown gave her a ghostly air, and the forget-me-not eyes had faint pink rims to them that were unbecoming. The mother had barely time to make these mental observations when Rosanne entered. To their surprise, she was still in her afternoon ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... of wind which rattled the window-pane now pushed, as with invisible and ghostly hand, a door which opened on the side of the bedroom, and as it swung mysteriously and gradually wide the doctor found himself looking into an adjoining chamber. All he could see clearly was a corner on which struck the shaft of light from the lamp, and lying on the floor ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... rose, and dressed mechanically, avoiding the mirror, and pinning her veil securely to her hair. She went downstairs slowly, clinging to the railing from sheer weakness. She was as frail and ghostly as ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... lifted her in his arms like a baby and carried her back through the ghostly rooms to his warm human sitting-room, and there he laid her tenderly down upon the couch and knelt ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... and poked the hard-coal fire till it glowed to him like a bed of jewels, all alive and stirred to their hot hearts; opals and topazes and rubies and cairngorms and the souls of blue sapphires and purple amethysts playing ghostly over the rest. He dropped into the chair and the tall, black-clothed figure fell into lax lines; his long fingers, the fingers of an artist, a musician, lay on the arms of the chair limply as if disconnected ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... beneath her trembling dome Essayed in vain her ghostly charm: Wealth shook within his ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... arms groaned like things in torment. The terror of these sights and sounds was too much for poor Abel; it nearly crazed him; and he set up a shriek that for a moment drowned the noise of the storm. It startled Paul; and when he looked at him, the boy's face was of a ghostly whiteness. The rain had drenched him to the skin; his clothes clung to his lean body, that shook as if it would come apart; his eyes flew wildly, and his teeth chattered against each other. The fears and torture of his mind gave something unearthly to his look, that made Paul start back. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... night about him began to fill with ghostly life. His shadow beckoned and grimaced ahead of him, and the stunted bush seemed to move. His eyes were alert and questing. Within himself he reasoned that he would see nothing, and yet some unusual instinct moved him to caution. At regular ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... course, that shadowy and futile geographical division known as the Township—but it is laid off utterly without regard to human consideration, and serves no purpose save as a means of defining voting boundaries and limiting the spheres of constables and sheriff's deputies—a mere ghostly phantom of a social entity that we need not ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... Melanesian chiefs lies entirely in the belief that they have communication with mighty ghosts, and wield that supernatural power whereby they can bring the influence of the ghosts to bear. If a chief imposed a fine, it was paid because the people universally dreaded his ghostly power, and firmly believed that he could inflict calamity and sickness upon such as resisted him. As soon as any considerable number of his people began to disbelieve in his influence with the ghosts, his power to levy fines was shaken. Again, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... the solitary spirit of the river used frequently to come and spend an evening with the fisherman, until quite a friendship sprang up between them. One evening this ghostly visitor appeared with a face covered with smiles and with a glad note of joy in his voice. No sooner had he sat down than he said, "This is the last evening I shall be able to spend with you. The long weary time ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... the heart of the primeval silence. The peak and the star swam apart from each other in the solemn spaces of the sky. Under the tent, which showed ghostly in the starlight, the man lay silent for hours, but when next he spoke his voice was ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray |
