"Hapless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... diverged from the trail, and conducted her lover to a table-crested rock that projected over a ravine or gulf, one hundred and fifty feet in depth, the bottom of which was strewed with misshapen rocks, scattered in rude confusion. With hearts nerved to a high resolve, the hapless pair awaited the arrival of their yelling pursuers. Conspicuous by his eagle plume, towering form and scowling brow, the daughter soon descried her inexorable sire, leaping from crag to crag below her. ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... population when such a calamity befalls them. Try to picture, then, the men, women, and even children, who were gathered in anxious groups around the mouth of the pit, eagerly waiting to see if any of their kindred were among the hapless victims; and when the brave rescue party would appear above the shaft, bearing in their arms the sufferers, wailing cries would rend the very air, as some poor woman recognised her son or her 'good man' in the crushed and mangled form they ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... despatches from the Front, for which the Public are eagerly waiting. Occasionally, by way of exhibiting his desire that not a moment shall be lost in communicating important information, he, about midnight, by preference an hour later, dumps down upon hapless newspapers just going to press the material for whole ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 2, 1914 • Various
... brought them within the last few hours had been so terrible, that even the better natures among the Hebrews did not think of curbing the thirst for vengeance. Even grey-bearded men of dignified bearing, and wives and mothers whose looks augured gentle hearts thrust back the few hapless foes who had succeeded in reaching the land on the ruins of the war-chariots or baggage-wagons. With shepherds' crooks and travelling staves, knives and axes, stones and insults they forced their hands from the floating wood, and the few who nevertheless reached ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the small-town gossip of a small town that was but little more than a memory now—telling how, because he would not volunteer, a hapless youth had been waylaid by a dozen high-spirited girls and overpowered, and dressed in a woman's shawl and a woman's poke bonnet, so that he left town with his shame between two suns; how, since the Yankees had come, sundry faithless females were friendly—actually friendly, this ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... thus it was with this our hapless crew; For on the third day there came on a calm, And though at first their strength it might renew, And lying on their weariness like balm, Lull'd them like turtles sleeping on the blue Of ocean, when they woke they felt a qualm, And fell all ravenously on their provision, Instead of ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... passion my heart was blown, Like an autumn leaf one hapless day. At my lady's window with tap and moan It burned and ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... in the "Scissors Boy", Alas! death seems quite near; Her trust betrayed, This hapless maid Sobs ...
— The Adventure of Two Dutch Dolls and a 'Golliwogg' • Bertha Upton
... hand, kept quite still. He had taken his feet out of the stirrups and was swinging his short legs carelessly to and fro. His eyes flashed scorn as he looked at the hapless lieutenant. ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... ruin of the peasants of these provinces [1] are the Zhyds. [2] As property-holders they are here second in importance to the landed nobility. By their commercial pursuits they drain the strength of the hapless White Russian people.... They are everything here: merchants, contractors, saloon-keepers, mill-owners, ferry-holders, artisans.... They are regular leeches, and suck these unfortunate governments [3] to the point of exhaustion. It is a matter of surprise that in 1812 they displayed ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... were stretched forth to fasten on the hapless Count, who, with vacillating step, like the bird under the eye of the basilisk, involuntarily, though with a perfect consciousness of his awful situation, and the fearful fate which awaited him, every moment drew ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... who the merits of the dead revere, Who hold misfortune's sacred genius dear, Regard this tomb, where Collins, hapless name, Solicits kindness with a double claim. Though nature gave him, and though science taught The fire of fancy, and the reach of thought, Severely doom'd to penury's extreme, He pass'd in maddening pain life's ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... on that hapless planet, Handsome and kind and true, Cry out, 'Hurry up!' O hang it! What else can a Wenus do? I suppose it was rather bad form, girls, But really we didn't care, For our planet was growing too warm, girls, And we wanted ...
— The War of the Wenuses • C. L. Graves and E. V. Lucas
... almost drank my breath away; And, to her passion bending, She clasped me close, with her lion claws My hapless body rending. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... news that he was already dead. The mournful cavalcade returned, bearing his remains, and a grave was dug in the wilderness. A tree close by, on which his initials were cut, formed the only memorial of the hapless explorer. ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland
... evil case that day, as were all souls, rich and poor, throughout that hapless land. For three weary years, there had been no drop of rain: the earth beneath their feet had been like iron, and the heavens above them brass; and Obadiah had found poverty, want, and misery, come on him in the midst of all his riches: he ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... the widow's tear, The hapless orphan's want supply, Guide to a blessed asylum here, And point ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... In every drop a torturing spirit flew, It pierc'd so deeply, and it burn'd so blue. Betwixt all this and Hero, Hero held Leander's picture, as a Persian shield; And she was free from fear of worst success: The more ill threats us, we suspect the less: As we grow hapless, violence subtle grows, Dumb, deaf, and blind, and comes when no man ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... gossamer wings were gone! Evidently they had been caught on a crooked stick as she fell to the ground and torn violently off, for there the remnants now hung, shrivelled and useless, flapping in the breeze. At this sight the hapless fairy threw herself by the side of the now withered Violet, and wept bitterly. When spring and the spring flowers were gone, and their work was ended, Violet and her sister fairies had been wont to spread their wings and fly back ...
— How the Fairy Violet Lost and Won Her Wings • Marianne L. B. Ker
... on Charles alone, and he was surrounded by councillors, so much the more pedantic and punctilious as they were incapable, and placed amidst pressing necessities with which in themselves they had no power to cope. It may easily be allowed, also, that to risk any hopes still belonging to the hapless young King on the word of a peasant girl was in itself, according to every law of reason, madness and folly. She would seem to have had the women on her side always and at every point. The Church did not stir, or else was hostile; the commanders ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... Goddess, what offended Power Enflamed their rage in that ill-omened hour; anger fatal, hapless Phoebus himself the dire debate procured, fierce To avenge the wrongs his injured priest endured; For this the god a dire infection spread, And heaped the camp with millions of the dead: The King of men the sacred sire defied, And for the King's ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... being alone in a solitary office, up stairs, of a building entirely unhallowed by humanizing domestic associations—an uncarpeted office, doubtless, of a dusty, haggard sort of appearance;—this it must have been, which greatly helped to enhance the irritable desperation of the hapless Colt. ...
— Bartleby, The Scrivener - A Story of Wall-Street • Herman Melville
... My once-dear Love!—hapless, that I no more Must call thee so. . . . The rich affection's store That fed our hopes, lies now exhaust and spent, Like sums of treasure unto bankrupts lent:— We that did nothing study but the way To love each other, with which thoughts the day Rose with delight to us, and with ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... was not a dry eye in that record assemblage. A most romantic incident occurred when a handsome young Oxford graduate, noted for his chivalry towards the fair sex, stepped forward and, presenting his visiting card, bankbook and genealogical tree, solicited the hand of the hapless young lady, requesting her to name the day, and was accepted on the spot. Every lady in the audience was presented with a tasteful souvenir of the occasion in the shape of a skull and crossbones brooch, a ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... sprawling, half lying over the heaped-up impediments of the big desk. The young soldier caught sight of the serious, sad face, the wistful humorous eyes, and he knew, with a thrill through all his body and an adoring throb in his breast, that it was the President—hapless heritor of generations of disjointed time. All thought of his errand, all thought of place and person, faded as he realized this presence. How long he would have remained in this mute adoration there is no telling. The restless, ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... have been guilty of leading him to think . . .?' she said, in a tone that writhed, at a second discussion of this hapless affair. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... housekeeper, and could ordain how many French plums and how many muscatel raisins were to be consumed in a given period. She could bring her powers of arithmetic to bear upon wax-candles, and torment the souls of hapless underlings by the precision of her calculations. She had an eye to the preserves; and if awakened suddenly in the dead of the night could have told, to a jar, how many pots of strawberry, and raspberry, and currant, and greengage were ranged ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... looked around them in dismay. Here were no happy homes, no smiling fields, no bustling colonists. The island was deserted. What had become of the inhabitants was not easy to guess. Not even their bones had been left, as in the case of the hapless fifteen, though many relics of their dwelling-places were found. The only indication of their fate was the single word "Croatan" cut into the ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... the Cyclops seek mine; and if you ask me whether my love for Acis or my hatred of Polyphemus was the stronger, I cannot tell you; they were in equal measure. O Venus, how great is thy power! this fierce giant, the terror of the woods, whom no hapless stranger escaped unharmed, who defied even Jove himself, learned to feel what love was, and, touched with a passion for me, forgot his flocks and his well-stored caverns. Then for the first time he began to take some care of his appearance, and to try to make himself agreeable; he harrowed those ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... had she become a typical belle, and the aggressive society girl who captures and amuses herself with her male admirers with the grace and sang froid of a sportive kitten that carefully keeps a hapless mouse within reach of her velvet paw. The pale and saint-like image which he had so long enshrined within his heart, and which had been created by her devotion to her mother, also faded utterly away in the presence of the ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... dismay, for the savage outcry burst forth the next moment with more ferocity than ever, and as it died away a single voice shouted in a tone of command some words, to which the rest responded by such a yell as later on curdled the blood of the hapless settlers at Deerfield and ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... flames be doom'd thy hapless fate, To atoms thou wouldst quickly turn: My pains may bear a longer date; For should I live, and should she hate, In endless ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... I have reached one conclusion. I opine that the hapless prophet has no sort of time with that lady. I opine that he will soon wish himself in Paradise. For if Almighty God ever created a female ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... on the trail, and within a mile discovered that the hapless wolf was Blanca. Away she went, however, at a gallop, and although encumbered by the beef-head, which weighed over fifty pounds, she speedily distanced my companion who was on foot. But we overtook her when she reached the rocks, for the horns of the cow's head became caught and held ...
— Lobo, Rag and Vixen - Being The Personal Histories Of Lobo, Redruff, Raggylug & Vixen • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... of hap may cheer my hapless chance? What sighs, what tears may countervail my cares? What should I do, but still his death bewail, That was the solace of my life and soul? Now, now, I want the wonted guide and stay Of my desires and of my wreakless thoughts. My ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... the man who went to seek one filthier than she was? How could he ever find one filthier?' inquired Rashid, reverting to Suleyman's unfinished story of the foolish woman and her husband and the hapless cow, when we lay down to sleep that evening in the village guest-room. I also asked to hear the rest of that instructive tale. Suleyman, sufficiently besought, raised himself upon an elbow and resumed the narrative. Rashid and I ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... here we know not. Neither do we know what induced him to make another move. But we soon find him pushing still farther back into the wilderness, with his hapless family of sons and daughters, dooming them, in all their ignorance, to the society only of bears and wolves. He now established himself upon a considerable stream, unknown to geography, called ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... half-a-crown," said one, in a dreadful voice. "Mr. BURROWES irregular in his attendance at Chapel, gated at eight," roared a second. "Mr. BURROWES persistently disorderly, sent down for the term," shouted a third; and then they all began to caper round the hapless man whom the Fairy Queen had betrayed into their power. They taunted him and reviled him. "You have mined our homes, poisoned our fathers' happiness, undermined the trusting confidence of our mothers. You have been a bad man. You must perish!" and thus the dreadful chorus went on while the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 27, 1890 • Various
... Majesties' plans? Should Monsieur d'Angremont be induced to divulge their names they will inevitably be lost—their only hope is in immediate flight," says Adrienne, looking from the King, sunk in resigned silence, to the frantic, hapless Queen, and ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... shreds. "Find the seamless raiment!" they yelled to one another. The unbelievers stood aside; the believers did nothing, in a palsy of amaze; the poor woman, to whom her toil and pride in it had hallowed the stuff, sank down staying herself on her hands from the floor, in hapless despair. Her moaning and sobbing filled the place after the tumult of destruction had been stricken silent. "Oh, I don't care for the miracle," she kept lamenting, "but what are my children going to wear this winter? Oh, what will ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... being thus suddenly despoiled of everything, he retired to Cassandrea. His wife Phila, in the passion of her grief, could not endure to see her hapless husband reduced to the condition of a private and banished man. She refused to entertain any further hope, and, resolving to quit a fortune which was never permanent except for calamity, took poison and died. Demetrius, determining still to hold on by the wreck, went off to Greece, and ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... the Revolutionary War, the Indians were as slow to lay down their arms as they had been after the French War. In each case they fought the victors, as far as they could get at them in the persons of the hapless backwoodsmen and their wives and children. These backwoodsmen did not change greatly, in their way of life, during that long Indian war of forty years. They were of the hardy English, Welsh, and Scotch-Irish stock ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... many wretched daubers shiver and shake in the ague-fit of alternate hopes and fears, waste and pine away in the atrophy of genius, or else turn drawing-masters, picture-cleaners, or newspaper-critics; how many hapless poets have sighed out their souls to the Muse in vain, without ever getting their effusions farther known than the Poet's Corner of a country newspaper, and looked and looked with grudging, wistful ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... harp, "drawing iron tears down Pluto's cheek," won his mistress half way to the upper light, and would have wholly redeemed her had he not in impatience looked back. The grim king of Hades, yielding to passionate entreaties, relented so far as to let the hapless Protesilaus return to his mourning Laodameia for three hours. At the swift end of this poor period he died again; and this time she died with him. Erus, who was killed in battle, and Timarchus, whose soul was rapt from him in the cave of Trophonius, both ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... within and without the house, met, and, by the force of sympathetic similarity, mixed in an instant, carrying away in their course, like floating straws, the strongest doubts that remained in the mind of the most sceptical man in Christ's Kirk, of the hapless daughter of Wat Webster having been carried off by the Devil. The town was in the greatest commotion; terror and pity were painted on every face; but the feelings of the public held small proportion, indeed, to the agony which overtook Wat Webster and ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... and 1905 and was now an accomplished and serviceable barrister's clerk) soon set to work to chum up with other clerks in this clerical hive and get for his master small briefs, small chances for defending undefended cases in which hapless women ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... The sufferings of this hapless crowd were acute. Provisions were hard to obtain at the way stations. The water supply gave out. A little child died of exposure, and the heart-broken mother held the lifeless body twenty-four hours on her lap. There was no room to lay it to one side. ...
— A Woman's Part in a Revolution • Natalie Harris Hammond
... Hapless one! with heart filled with sorrow, Lonely amid thy mates, Thy spirit sullen to the end Thou shalt behold the fondling mothers. A lonely wanderer everywhere, Cursing thy fate at all times, Thou the bitter reproach shalt hear... Forgive ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... for a rescue!" ordered Tom, who had also, through a window in the floor of the pilot house, seen the hapless motor boat. The men in it were frantically waving their hands to those on the airship. "I'm going down as close as I dare," went on Tom. "You watch, and when it's time, have Koku drop from the stern a long, knotted rope. That will be a sort of ladder, and ...
— Tom Swift and his Great Searchlight • Victor Appleton
... god, Moloch, the wretchedness of Hamilcar's slaves are presented with every ghastly detail, with every degrading trick of expression. Picture after picture of misery and foulness arises and pursues us as the grim witches pursued the hapless Tam O'Shanter, clutching us in ghastly arms, clinging to us ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... how soon The sad brief summer of thy joys hath fled: How sorrows Friendship for thy hapless doom, Thy beauty faded, and thy hopes all dead. Oh! 'twas that beauty's power which first destroy'd Thy mind's serenity; its charms but led The faithless friend, that thy pure love enjoy'd, To tear the beauteous blossom from its bed. How reason shudders at thy frenzied air! ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... every student of English literature must be familiar with the noble tale in verse which Dryden has founded on this part of the 'Decameron.' We all of us have followed Theodore, and watched with him the tempest swelling in the grove, and seen the hapless ghost pursued by demon hounds and hunter down the glades. This story should be read while storms are gathering upon the distant sea, or thunderclouds descending from the Apennines, and when the pines begin to rock and surge beneath ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... have described, and deported as a free emigrant to Australia (where he is welcomed), for L.25. Thus, even in an economical light, the reforming of the youth is a great gain. Magistrates are everywhere impressed with the hopelessness of a mere judicial treatment of these hapless children. They come back to the dock at almost regular intervals; severity is of no avail with a poor wretch who, on being discharged from jail, finds all honest employment denied to him. It is by reform ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various
... Dear, hapless Princess! She said to me, in one of her confidential conversations on these matters, "The Queen has been so cruelly deceived and so much watched that she almost fears her own shadow; but it gives me great pleasure that Her Majesty had been herself ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... this interesting but hapless girl, I proceeded to the house of Steffani. I heard from one of his mother's gondoliers that he had returned to Venice three days before, but that, twenty-four hours after his return, he had gone away again without any servant, and nobody ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... madman. The name of the Earl of Rags was bestowed upon him, and the miserable companions of his wretched plight were never tired of tempting him to recount his adventures, for the sake of entertaining themselves by teasing that which they supposed to be his hapless mania. ...
— Stolen Treasure • Howard Pyle
... two. You can have one of mine," cried Peace, forgetting wisdom, discretion, everything, in her great pity for this hapless bit of humanity. ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... "Whence hapless Monsieur much complains at Paris Of wrongs from Duchesses and Lady Maries."—Dunciad, B. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... blow with such emphasis that Solomon's equanimity was seriously disturbed. He dashed forward with what speed he could command, Mr. Peabody holding on, in a sort of panic, till he was a hundred yards away. Then he stopped suddenly, lowering his head, and his hapless rider was thrown over it, landing some distance in advance. Solomon looked at him with grim humor, if a donkey is capable of such a feeling, and, apparently satisfied, turned and walked complacently back ...
— The Young Adventurer - or Tom's Trip Across the Plains • Horatio Alger
... either arm, "Spread out," he cried, "The meshes, that I take the lioness And the young lions at the pass: "then forth Stretch'd he his merciless talons, grasping one, One helpless innocent, Learchus nam'd, Whom swinging down he dash'd upon a rock, And with her other burden self-destroy'd The hapless mother plung'd: and when the pride Of all-presuming Troy fell from its height, By fortune overwhelm'd, and the old king With his realm perish'd, then did Hecuba, A wretch forlorn and captive, when she saw Polyxena first slaughter'd, and her son, Her Polydorus, on the ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... "as to the whereabouts of the burn-brae on which be the graves of Bessy Bell and Mary Gray." Whether he actually visited the spot, near the Almond Water, ten miles west of Perth, is left uncertain. The pathetic story of these two hapless maidens, and the fine old song founded on it, had made it to him ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... bench, had grown rigid in the posture described above—his mouth awry, his eyes gleaming. So this is what has happened! In a few weeks after the death of the hapless Cara he is active and triumphant; he hurls his lariat on the golden calf and captures new millions. A demi-god! A Titan! The king of markets! He sweeps forward in seven-league boots over roads, at the crossing-points of which are Americans ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... improvident maidens, "give us of your oil, for our lamps are gone out." The more thoughtful, and therefore more fortunate watchers, while they pitied their sisters, were afraid to part with any portion of their own stores, lest they should be left in the same hapless condition ere the procession should close: "Go to them that sell, and buy for yourselves." Alas, this was now the only alternative! Away went those foolish virgins at the dead of night on the hopeless errand of buying oil for immediate ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... of the hapless bank book? It was sent to Jim as he had demanded; and we may suppose that he drew the money and spent it. At any rate, when he next made his appearance at the old Squire's, two years later, he ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... keenly, when, besides this secondary and, so to speak, historical merit, it exhibits such veracity in the portraiture of emotion, as, whatever be its drawbacks, whatever its little temptations to ridicule, distinguishes the hapless, and, when all is said, the noble and pathetic ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... skies with acclamation, Stun the woods and waters round— Till the echoes of our gathering Turn the world's admiring gaze To this act of duteous homage Scotland to her poet pays. Fill the banks and braes with music, Be it loud and low by turns— This we owe the deathless glory, That the hapless ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... a cell adjoining that which the hapless queen had occupied that Madame Roland was cast. Here the proud daughter of the emperors of Austria and the humble child of the artisan, each, after a career of unexampled vicissitudes, found their paths to meet but a few steps from the scaffold. ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... charities, that would not let anyone in our midst perish from want of necessary food and fuel. When she recovered from her illness, one relative, a widow now present in court, had from her own narrow means supplied the money to rent and furnish a small schoolroom, and this most hapless of women was once more put in a way to earn daily bread for herself and children. Nine years passed, during which she enjoyed a respite from the persecutions of the plaintiff. In these nine years, by strict attention to business, untiring industry, she not only paid off the debt ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... all Letta's doing! The more hopeless the struggle felt, the more hapless did Letta's fate appear to Robin, and the more furious did the spirit within rise above its disadvantages. In the whirl of the fight the pirate's head chanced for one moment to be in proximity to a large iron block. ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... duty in desperation. There was but little firing—the defenders nursing their slender stock, the savages biding their time. When night shut down the latter became bolder, and taunted cruelly those destined to become so soon their hapless victims. Twice the maddened men fired recklessly at those dancing devils, and one pitched forward, emitting a howl of pain that caused his comrades to cower once again behind their covers. One and all these frontiersmen ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... as closely as their steeds would allow them. But though they tarried till the flames had abated, and little was left of the noble grove but a collection of charred and smoking stumps, nothing was seen of the fiend or of the hapless girl he had carried off. It served to confirm the notion of the supernatural origin of the fire, in that it was confined within the mystic circle, and did not extend farther ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... tears—each one is yours, is wept for you! Oh, if to soften that proud will of yours this hapless woman must needs open all her weak heart to you, if she must needs tell you that she lives only in your life and dies in your death, her lip will brace itself even to that pitiful confession! Ah me! these poor cheeks have been so blanched ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... powerful, bullying, a man whose self-aggrandizement knew no limit, whose merest whim was his law, whose will must not be thwarted. Year by year his vaqueros drove down the Wall herds of fat cattle, their brands blurred, insolently raw and careless. Many a hapless man had stood and seen his own stock go by in Courtrey's band and dared not open his mouth. In fact Courtrey had been known to stop and chat with such a one, smiling his evil smile and enjoying the ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... those petty shifts and miserable falsifications whereby the birds of prey thrive on the flesh and blood of hapless pigeons. Now the dovecotes were fluttered by a new destroyer—a gentlemanly vulture, whose suave accents and perfect manners were fatal to the unwary. Henceforth Horatio Cromie Nugent Paget flourished and fattened upon the folly of his fellow-men. As promoter of joint-stock companies that never ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... and exclaimed, "Well-away and woe is me, O my lover, O Khudadad, do these eyes look upon thee in sudden and violent death? Are these thy brothers (the devils!) whom thy courage hath saved, the destroyers of thee? Nay 'tis I am thy murtheress; I who suffered thee to ally thy Fate with my hapless destiny, a lot that doometh to destruction all who befriend me." Then considering the body attentively she perceived that breath was slowly coming and going through his nostrils, and that his limbs were yet warm. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... the hapless wretch, looking about him with an expression that denoted the consciousness of danger, though it was not possible he could comprehend the precise mode of his execution. I went to him, and pressed his hand, pointing upward, as much as to say his whole trust was now in the Great Spirit. The Indian ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... heard crying—"Number 5 will be burned alive! Number 5 will be burned alive! Is there no possibility of saving the life of Number 5?" The Doctor falls down before the barricado, and is stretched all his hapless length fainting on the floor. At last the door is burst open, and landlord, landlady, chambermaid, and boots—each in a different key—from manly bass to childish treble, demand of Number 5 if he be a murderer or a madman—for, gentle ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... (mine often partook of his infantine mutton, in company with little Clara and the poor young heir of Newcome) in the room which had been called my lady's own, and in which her husband had locked her, forgetting that the conservatories were open, through which the hapless woman had fled. Next to this was the baronial library, a side of which was fitted with the gloomy books from Clapham, which old Mrs. Newcome had amassed; rows of tracts, and missionary magazines, and dingy quarto volumes of worldly travel and history which ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... this, and for the sins of the house of Israel. What is the transgression of Jacob? is it not Samaria? and what are the high places of Judah? are they not Jerusalem?" The doom pronounced against Samaria was already being carried out, and soon the hapless city was to be no more than "an heap of the field, and as the plantings of a vineyard; and I will pour down the stones thereof into the valley," saith the Lord, "and I will discover the foundations thereof. And all her graven images ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... put an end unto my theme, There was an end of Ismail, hapless town, Far flashed her burning towers o'er Danube's stream, And redly ran his blushing waters down. The horrid warwhoop and the shriller scream Rose still; but fainter were the thunders grown; Of forty thousand that had manned the wall Some hundreds breathed, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... been extinguished and from the folds of whose garments its flint and tinderbox had been taken, had now been completely trussed up, and lay helpless and perforce silent against the wall of the shed. From the time when the hapless man first felt the grip of the Gujarati upon his throat scarcely five minutes ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... should be crazy enough to obey that impulse, what would happen? Why, the king's guards would be upon me in a second, and I should be hacked to pieces by their terrible bangwans in the drawing of a single breath, while probably an even worse fate would befall my hapless followers! No, of course, the idea was madness, the act an impossibility; yet when a few minutes later I saw the tall induna, Logwane—Mapela's friend—led forth and mercilessly done to death, I could not refrain from leaning toward the ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... as gently as I could, for her hapless condition appealed to me in spite of my well founded prejudices against her; and seeing she was growing incapable of response, I drew her up on the bed ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... distress and misery breathed from those hopeless and agonizing features! There was not only natural sorrow there, occasioned by the disappearance of her daughter, but the shame which resulted from her fall and her infamy; and though last not least, the terrible apprehension that the hapless girl had rushed by suicidal means into the presence of an offended God, "unanointed, unaneled," with all her sins upon her head. Her clothes were hanging from the branches of a large burdock* against the wall, and from time to time the father cast his eyes upon them with a look in which might ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... Argyle endeavour to prevail upon the honest and simple clansmen to renounce their allegiance to their chief, and to become his vassals.[81] Every species of indignity and of plunder was inflicted upon these hapless, but faithful Highlanders in vain; a "monster," as he is termed, "bearing the stamp of human appearance, named Sir Neill Campbell," in vain chased the poor inhabitants to the hills, and there exhibited ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... When the bright Seraphim with joy prolong Through all eternity that thrilling song— The heathen's universal jubilee, A music sweet, O Saviour Christ, to Thee— Say, 'mid those happy strains, will not one note,— Sung by a hapless nation once remote, But now led Home by tender cords of love, Rise clear through those majestic courts above? Yes! from amid the tuneful, white-robed choirs, Hymning Jehovah's praise on golden lyres, One Hallelujah shall for evermore Tell of the Saviour's ...
— With the Harmony to Labrador - Notes Of A Visit To The Moravian Mission Stations On The North-East - Coast Of Labrador • Benjamin La Trobe
... fall'n. Whom answer'd then Pallas caerulean-eyed. Oh Jove, Saturnian Sire, o'er all supreme! And well he merited the death he found; 60 So perish all, who shall, like him, offend. But with a bosom anguish-rent I view Ulysses, hapless Chief! who from his friends Remote, affliction hath long time endured In yonder wood-land isle, the central boss Of Ocean. That retreat a Goddess holds, Daughter of sapient Atlas, who the abyss Knows to its bottom, and the pillars high Himself upbears which sep'rate earth from heav'n. His daughter, ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... their trifling weight Through all my frame a weary aching leaves; For long I struggled with my hapless fate, And stayed and toiled till it was dark and late— Yet these ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... vain On radiant wings drew near; The hapless moth in vain grew wroth - The fair rose leaned to hear The deep-voiced stranger's low refrain That thrilled ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Harrington, returning to the hapless Luke, "has had every advantage. I suppose he will try to explain matters when he comes. I could explain ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... time, however, came when the nation could no longer suffer the barbarities of bygone periods to be continued. Accordingly, in 1608 a complaint was made to the Scottish Privy Council against persons in power for so torturing the hapless women that they died amid smoke and flame, blaspheming the Most High, and uttering imprecations against ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... to his room, and every restorative applied; but even the skill of Julien, well versed as he was in the healing art, was without effect. More than an hour passed, and still he lay like death; and no sound, no sob, broke from the torn heart of his hapless child, who knelt beside his couch; her large dark eyes, distended to even more than their usual size, fixed upon his face; her hands clasped round one of his; but had she sought thus to give warmth she would have failed, for the hand of the living was cold and damp as that ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... his eyes began to roll, In pleasing memory of all he stole— How here he sipped, how there he plundered snug, And sucked all o'er like an industrious bug. Here lay poor Fletcher's half-eat scenes, and here The frippery of crucified Moliere; There hapless Shakespeare, yet of Tibbald sore, Wished he had blotted for ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... girl sat wide-eyed, silent; the elder's gaze was upon her, but her thoughts, remote, centred on the hapless mother of such ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... of torture for the hapless prisoners came laggingly to an end at last when, about half an hour after daybreak, the lashings which had confined their limbs all through the hours of darkness were loosed, and they were allowed to scramble to their feet and walk to and fro for a few minutes before partaking ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... is he whose card-rack or mantelpiece (I was going to say groans, but) laughingly rejoices in respectful well-worded invitations to luxuriously-appointed tables. I count not him, hapless wretch! as one who, singling out "a friend," drops in just at pudding-time, and ravens horrible remnants of last Tuesday's joint, cognizant of curses in the throat of his host, and of intensest sable on the brows of his hostess. No struggle there, on the part of the children, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 21, 1841 • Various
... As ladies will, She sometimes wearies of her wooer; A goddess, yet a woman still, She flies the more that we pursue her; In short, with worst as well as best, Five months in six, your hapless poet Is just as prosy as the rest, ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... Adieu, Maria!—adieu, poor hapless damsel!—some time, but not now, I may hear thy sorrows from thy own lips—but I was deceived; for that moment she took her pipe and told me such a tale of woe with it, that I rose up, and with broken and irregular steps walk'd softly ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... great, the wise, If I have failed to please thine ear, thine eyes; My sorrowing spirit, torn by countless fears, Each sound forbiddeth save the voice of tears. With power to please thee wouldst thou me inspire?— Recall from exile now my hapless sire.” ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... impressions of it. You, with your brute preferences for literality, will not understand this, and I suppose you would say I ought to have got a purer and higher joy out of the little passage of drama, which followed, and I don't know but I did. It was nothing but the notion of a hapless, half-grown girl, who has run away from the poorhouse for a half-holiday, and brings up in the dooryard of an old farmer of the codger type, who knew her father and mother. She at once sings, one doesn't know why, 'Oh, dear, what can the matter be,' ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... Mississippi was the life of the enterprise, the condition of its growth and of its existence. Without it, all was futile and meaningless; a folly and a ruin. Cost what it might, the Mississippi must be found. But the demands of the hour were imperative. The hapless colony, cast ashore like a wreck on the sands of Matagorda Bay, must gather up its shattered resources, and recruit its exhausted strength, before it essayed anew its desperate pilgrimage to the "fatal river." La Salle during his explorations had found a spot which he thought well fitted ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... at the cruel feast, By death's rude hands in horrid manner drest; Such grief as sure no hapless woman knew, When thy pale image lay before my view. Thy father's heir in beauteous form arrayed Like flowers in spring, and fair, like them to fade; Leaving behind unhappy wretched me, And all thy little orphan-progeny: Alike the beauteous face, the comely air, ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... door behind him. He mentally reiterated his determination to engage "Parthrick," as Mrs. Maloney's eldest son was called by his devoted mother. The youth should enter upon his functions the very night after, and if the ghost of the hapless George Talboys should invade these gloomy apartments, the phantom must make its way across Patrick's body before it could reach the inner chamber in which the proprietor of ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... snares are set, the plot is laid, Ruin awaits thee,—hapless maid! Seduction sly assails thine ear, And gloating, foul desire is near; Baneful and blighting are their smiles, Destruction waits upon their wiles; Alas! thy guardian angel sleeps, Vice clasps her hands, ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... some sunny autumn afternoon you may see the rival classes of perhaps a hundred men each, drawn up on the Green in battle and motley array, the latter consisting of shirt and pants, unsalable even to the sons of Israel, and huge boots, perhaps stuffed with paper to prevent hapless abrasion of shins. The steps of the State House are crowded with the 'upper classes,' and ladies are numerous in the balconies of the New-Haven Hotel. The umpires come forward, and the ground is cleared of intruders. There is a dead silence ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... wicked King and his castle attendants, who, seeing the predicament of the giant, fitted arrows to their strong bows, preparing to shoot the hapless fellow. ...
— The Magic Soap Bubble • David Cory
... children were playing in the arroyo bed. Their voices came with a stifled sound. There was nothing else to hear save the far-off moaning of a wild dove somewhere up Gonzales canyon. The echo was like a soft, sad voice. It sounded like the mournful cry of one who, looking out of heaven, saw her hapless little daughter bereaved and abandoned, and was moved, even among the blessed, to a ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... Elizabeth had fallen asleep long before, full of years and honors—than his young heir, Osborn Fitz-Henry, displayed the cognizance of his old house, mustered his tenantry, and set foot in stirrup, well nigh the first, to withdraw it the very last, of the adherents of the hapless Charles. So long did he resist in arms, so pertinaciously did he uphold the authority of the first Charles, so early did he rise again in behalf of the second, that he was noted by the Parliament as an incorrigible and most desperate malignant; and, had it not been that, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... a thoughtful pace And slow, the young Ernestus took his place; Like Bernheim, graced with an illustrious birth, But hapless Sweden was his native earth. His father sunk by death's untimely doom, His youthful mother followed to the tomb, And to a honour'd friend's paternal care Bequeath'd her only hope, her infant heir. With wary steps had Harfagar pass'd o'er The ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... unfinished breakfast, much to the vexation of Mrs. Medler, a faded lady with everything about her in the extremest stage of limpness, who washed the breakfast-things with her own fair hands, in consideration of the multitudinous duties to be performed by that hapless solitary damsel who in such modest households is usually ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... after Dan had left the district—did exact information as to the fate of the hapless girl reach our ears. Wethera told of the tragedy. Duckbill had followed her tracks from the house towards the mountain, had overtaken her, and, since she had fought frenziedly, had "killed her alonga head little bit," not intending ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... these long evenings, Calyste sat between his mother and the little Breton girl, observed by the rector and Charlotte's aunt, who discussed his greater or less depression as they walked home together. Their simple minds mistook the lethargic indifference of the hapless youth for submission to their plans. One evening when Calyste, wearied out, went off suddenly to bed, the players dropped their cards upon the table and looked at each other as the young man closed the door of his chamber. One and all had ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac |
