"Hearsay" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the floors were taken up, and the whole garden was dug out of recognition in a search for documents that might have proved that his son, or himself, or any other member of his family had been in correspondence with the two Republics. All this kind of thing was done on hearsay evidence, behind which lay personal motives. Had the settlement of the country been left entirely in the hands of Lord Kitchener, nothing approaching what I have related could have occurred. Unfortunately for ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... also puzzled the landlady, as she had no reasonable grounds for her wild statements. Nevertheless, she made a determined attempt to substantiate them by hearsay evidence. "Mr. Berwin," said she in significant tones, "lives all alone in ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... glowing coal at my heart. I see myself now at the end of my journey; my toilsome days are ended. I am going to see that head that was crowned with thorns, and that face that was spit upon for me. I have formerly lived by hearsay and faith, but now I go where I shall live by sight, and shall be with him in whose company I delight myself. I have loved to hear my Lord spoken of; and whenever I have seen the print of his shoe in ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... he said angrily. 'But can you prove it? Can you prove it? Mind you, I will take no hearsay evidence, sir. Now, there is Turenne's agent here—you did not know, I dare say, that he ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... 'naeve it was that he was damnably proud.' In serious illustration of the charge, Aubrey repeats a tale related by an old attendant, who had seen the Lord High Admiral in the Privy Garden wipe with his cloak the dust from Ralegh's shoes 'in compliment.' Aubrey's description of Ralegh is all hearsay; since he was not born till 1627. He may have been told anecdotes by members of the family; for his grandfather was a Wiltshire neighbour of Sir Carew Ralegh, and he was himself a schoolfellow of Sir Carew's grandchildren. But he was utterly uncritical, and his bare assertion would carry little ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... being assembled, the prisoner was placed at the bar and the trial began. It was an eminently irregular trial, looking at it from a legal point of view, for the verbal evidence all was hearsay. But it also was extra-legal in that it was brief and decisive. Brown gave his testimony in the shape of a repetition of the story that Jaune had told him had been told by Mr. Badger Brush's groom; and when this was concluded, Jaune produced the jacket, razors, shears, and ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... Giovanni da Serravalle, bishop of Fermo, completed a Latin prose translation of the Commedia, a copy of which, as he made it at the request of two English bishops whom he met at the council of Constance, was doubtless sent to England. Later we find Dante now and then mentioned, but evidently from hearsay only,[53] till the time of Spenser, who, like Milton fifty years later, shows that he had read his works closely. Thenceforward for more than a century Dante became a mere name, used without meaning by literary sciolists. Lord ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... printed by Pynson, as well as that mysterious volume ycleped 'The Nigramansir,' said to be by John Skelton the poet-laureate who lived under five kings and died in 1529. Many of Skelton's works, perhaps even the majority of his writings, are known to us by title and hearsay alone; but who shall say that his 'Speculum Principis,' or 'the Commedy Achademios callyd by name,' which he himself mentions, are lost beyond all hope of recovery? 'The Nigramansir' was actually seen by Thomas Warton, ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... Australia, gives it as his opinion that about four-fifths of the land in that colony were bad. However, he had never been more than three weeks in it nor above fourteen miles from its chief town, so his judgment was formed principally upon hearsay. Others, probably, have gone into the contrary extreme of praising the soil too highly, and truth may, as usual, lie ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... help of a number of ladies who understood the children of the poor and knew how to pass judgment on books proposed for their reading. It was definitely understood that every book should be read by the reviewers from cover to cover. We would not depend upon advertisements, hearsay, or vague recollections of books read by ourselves years ago, but every book should be read from beginning to end with the immediate question in view of the admission of the book to the little libraries to be read ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... very fortunate: They spoiled us to our hearts' content. Grandma Deborah's methods I know only from hearsay, for I was very little when she died. Grandma Rachel I remember distinctly, spare and trim and always busy. I recall her coming in midwinter from the frozen village where she lived. I remember, as if it were but last winter, the immense shawls and wraps which we unwound from about her person, her ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... this early era and are valuable for local identification, but quite worthless for authentic data on the period preceding their own lives. This does not impair the value of their records of the time in which they lived. It simply means that they had no data but hearsay on ...
— The "Adventurers of England" on Hudson Bay - A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North (Volume 18 of the Chronicles of Canada) • Agnes C. (Agnes Christina) Laut
... beautiful head of hair, streaming down in curls to her feet, and brilliant as a sunbeam, that she was universally called the Fair One with Golden Locks. A neighbouring king, having heard a great deal of her beauty, fell in love with her upon hearsay, and sent an ambassador with a magnificent suite to ask her in marriage, bidding him be sure and not fail to bring the princess home with him. The ambassador did his best to fulfil the king's commands, and made as fair a speech as he could to ...
— Bo-Peep Story Books • Anonymous
... the dreadful persecution arising from the (real or supposed) murder of little Hugh, Lincoln had been comparatively quiet from such tumults; and Bertha was too young to know anything about it but from hearsay. Wondering if some fresh commotion was going to arise, and anxious to be safe at home before it should begin, Bertha quickened her steps. There were only three more streets to cross, one of which was a dark, narrow ...
— Our Little Lady - Six Hundred Years Ago • Emily Sarah Holt
... the data used by the authors of more pretentious works are second-hand or hearsay; the author of this treatise, however, has no confidence in the accuracy of such material, therefore he has not made use of any such data. His material has been thoroughly sifted, and the reader may depend upon the absolute truth of the ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... things rare, That heaven's air in this huge rondure hems. O! let me, true in love, but truly write, And then believe me, my love is as fair As any mother's child, though not so bright As those gold candles fix'd in heaven's air: Let them say more that like of hearsay well; I will not praise that ...
— Shakespeare's Sonnets • William Shakespeare
... "Hearsay," the Captain said gruffly. "And that was in a declared war." And then he wondered just how valid the distinction was. There were, he supposed, sadists on both sides. And then it came down to who committed the first cruelty and just how ...
— Decision • Frank M. Robinson
... decision, and the common opinion, corroborated, it was declared, by surest testimony, was that Mr. Thomas had been to the theatre. There was not a tittle of evidence to support this story, but everybody was certain it was true. Everybody repeated it, and constant repetition will harden the loosest hearsay into a creed far more unshakable than faith ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... it rich, and didn't know what to do with his money. All this was told me by Mixer, who had been there, settling up matters, and likewise that Fagg was sweet upon the daughter of the proprietor of the aforesaid hotel. And so by hearsay and letter I eventually gathered that old Robins, the hotel man, was trying to get up a match between Nellie Robins and Fagg. Nellie was a pretty, plump, and foolish little thing, and would do just as her ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... all the teachers left the Institute and began the hunt for schools. I learn from hearsay (for my mother was mortally afraid of firearms) that the hunting of ducks and bears and men is wonderfully interesting, but I am sure that the man who has never hunted a country school has something to learn of the pleasures of the chase. I see now ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... words. In all his extended hearsay knowledge of strikes he never had heard of anything like this. There was nothing heroic in it at all. He had expected a conference, and, instead, he was ignominiously handled and ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... ignorance, saying that where you come from men know what is proper. And Jimgrim, having truly made the pilgrimage to Mecca, will confound them likewise, having knowledge, whereas most of these rascals only know by hearsay." ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... craze' sometime, or such part of it as has to do with my family history, and you shall read it if you like. I should set down my child-hood and my boyhood memories, together with such scraps of village hearsay as seem reliable. You were not so much younger than I, but I was in the thick of the excitement, and naturally I heard more than you, having so bitter a reason for being interested. Jacob Cochrane has altogether ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the other beasts ungarmented. Nay, I am no cold-blooded theorist, no thick-hided dogmatist; nor am I a chastely simple young man mooning in virginal innocence. My generalisations have been tempered in the heats of passion, and what I know I know, and without hearsay. ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... effect at the time. In some minds a belief in the truth of that attack lingered long afterwards—but not in the minds of those who could distinguish between honest conviction, based upon actual knowledge, and pre-conceived opinions, based upon hearsay and a superficial acquaintance with men ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... not have ventured to write this from hearsay, nor could I conceive it possible, until I was obliged to put this remedy in practice upon my own wife, who was seized with the same disorder, and then I was compelled to have a still nearer view of this strange disorder. I at first thought that a whip would be of some service, ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... letter,—I know all. Alice, sit down and hear me,—it is you who have to learn from me. In our young days I was accustomed to tell you stories in winter nights like these,—stories of love like our own, of sorrows which, at that time, we only knew by hearsay. I have one now for your ear, truer and sadder than they were. Two children, for they were then little more—children in ignorance of the world, children in freshness of heart, children almost in years—were thrown together by strange vicissitudes, more ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book X • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... conceive that a man of serious age and of high functions should have degraded himself to the level of a Peeping Tom in this way; all the French historians, nevertheless, repeat the story though on the merest hearsay evidence. And they also relate, with more apparent truth, how a double treachery was committed upon the unfortunate prisoner by stationing two secretaries at these openings, to take down her conversation with ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... learned that there were more ruins "a little farther along." In this country one never can tell whether such a report is worthy of credence. "He may have been lying" is a good footnote to affix to all hearsay evidence. Accordingly, I was not unduly excited, nor in a great hurry to move. The heat was still great, the water from the Indian's spring was cool and delicious, and the rustic wooden bench, hospitably covered immediately after my arrival with a soft, woolen poncho, seemed most comfortable. Furthermore, ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... guess there'd been rumors of gold or silver, and some one, believing the stories, made a map, maybe by hearsay, maybe at first hand. Maybe he talked too much, and some other fellow knocked him on the head ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders on the Great American Desert • Jessie Graham Flower
... could extract. She saw Miss Crawford alone, but her tiding melted into the vaguest second-hand hearsay. The inquiry had only produced a ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... formed, is to expect that sounds should be visible, or colours audible; and to make the ears do the office of all the other senses. Which is all one as to say, that we might taste, smell, and see by the ears: a sort of philosophy worthy only of Sancho Panza, who had the faculty to see Dulcinea by hearsay. And therefore he that has not before received into his mind, by the proper inlet, the simple idea which any word stands for, can never come to know the signification of that word by any other words or sounds whatsoever, ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... namely, 'circumstantial evidence,' in which the evidence if accepted still leaves room for a process of more or less doubtful inference; and 'makeshift evidence,' such evidence as must sometimes be accepted for want of the best, of which the most conspicuous instance is 'hearsay evidence.' Book vii. deals with the 'authentication' of evidence. Book viii. is a consideration of the 'technical' system, that namely which was accepted by English lawyers; and finally Book ix. deals with a special point, namely, the exclusion ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... Wouldn't it be a sweet spectacle to see two middle-aged women, one fat and one lean, stumping the country on a campaign for young love—subjects in which we are versed only by hearsay and a stray novel or so!" I said all this and ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... {28} scarcely gives leisure to the moralist to say so much, but that he (laden with old mouse-eaten records, authorizing {29} himself, for the most part, upon other histories, whose greatest authorities are built upon the notable foundation of hearsay, having much ado to accord differing writers, and to pick truth out of partiality; better acquainted with a thousand years ago than with the present age, and yet better knowing how this world goes than ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... in consequence, against anything you write in my favour (and never was anything published more favourable than the Arctic paper). Lyell had difficulty in preventing Dawson reviewing the "Origin" (356/3. Dawson reviewed the "Origin" in the "Canadian Naturalist," 1860.) on hearsay, without having looked at it. No spirit of fairness can be expected from so ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... was a mild epidemic of typhoid this summer, breaking out in those quarters of the town where moderate conveniences (as Mrs. Garland called them) were matters of hearsay only, and the efficient and undermanned Health Department, fighting hard, did not have the law to drive home orders where they would do the most good. But the doctor of the Dabney House needed no epidemic to keep him occupied, so acceptable was his ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... determined to pave the way for his new marriage by the death of Anne Boleyn. Morris, Weston, Brereton, and Smeton, were tried; but no legal evidence was produced against them. The chief proof of their guilt consisted in a hearsay from one Lady Wingfield, who was dead. Smeton was prevailed on, by the vain hopes of life, to confess a criminal correspondence with the queen;[**] but even her enemies expected little advantage from this ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... my affection for you spurned! My happiness, my dear Miss Goodwin—my happiness for life depends upon the result of this interview. I know—but I should not say so—for in this instance I must be guided by hearsay—well, I know from hearsay that your heart is kind and affectionate. Now I believe this; for who can look upon your face and doubt it? Believing this, then, how can you, when you know that the happiness of a man who loves you beyond the power of language to express, is at stake, depends ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... observe that all the discrepancies in the story of the 'warning' are not more numerous, nor more at variance with each other, than remote hearsay reports of any ordinary occurrence are apt to be. And we think it is plain that, if Lord Lyttelton WAS Junius, Mr. Coulton had no right to allege that Junius went and hanged himself, or, in any other way, was ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... never had any real existence. For that very reason she has been so hard to kill. Nothing is so long-lived as a chimera, nothing so difficult to lay as a ghost. From her first appearance, or rather mention, in literature, Mrs. Grundy has been a mere hearsay, a bugaboo being invented to frighten society, as "black men" and other goblins have been wickedly invented by nurses to frighten children. In the old play itself where we first find her mentioned by name, she herself never comes on the stage. She is only referred to in frightened ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... weird seizure I was unfortunately away from home, on a loathsome visit to an aunt; and my account is therefore feebly compounded from hearsay. It was an absence I never ceased to regret—scoring it up, with a sense of injury, against the aunt. There was a splendid uselessness about the whole performance that specially appealed to my artistic sense. That it should have been Selina, too, ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... authors' notice is a quotation in one of the last century books from von Mandelslo of impregnation at six; but a careful search in the British Museum failed to confirm this statement, and, for the present, we must accept the statement as hearsay and without ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... would know of thee the certainty of these things and hear from thine own lips how thou didst gain this abundant wealth. I have summoned thee before me that I might be assured of all such matters by actual hearsay: so fear not to tell me all thy tale; I desire naught of thee save knowledge of this thy case. Enjoy thou to thy heart's content the opulence that Almighty Allah deigned bestow upon thee, and let thy soul have pleasure ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... Burgundians rode to the court right proudly, after the custom of their land. Many bold Huns marvelled much what manner of man Hagen of Trony might be. The folk knew well, from hearsay, that he had slain Siegfried of the Netherland, the starkest of all knights, Kriemhild's husband. Wherefore many questions were asked concerning him. The hero was of great stature; that is certain. His shoulders ...
— The Fall of the Niebelungs • Unknown
... laugh. "Naturally you do not take my meaning. Obviously you think I am not a competent witness, that I know nothing except by hearsay. You are, extraordinary as it may seem, quite wrong. My testimony would be of nothing but what I myself ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... later one of Nelson's field men brought into the bank a youth who owned some property in the latter state. This yokel was a sick man; he was thin and white; he had a racking cough, and he knew nothing about oil except from hearsay. All he knew was that he would die if he didn't get to a warmer, drier climate; but the story he told caused Henry Nelson to stare queerly at his field man. That very night ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... all over this continent and in foreign parts, and it is a physical impossibility to bring them together. They do not know one another, and very few of them know much about the affairs of the concern, and if they know anything of the candidates that may be suggested, it is generally only by hearsay. ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... some secret service; not to mention the chance of conflict with a vessel of superior power—no improbable occurrence before the battle of Trafalgar. Information about relatives on board men-of-war was scarce and scanty, and often picked up by hearsay or chance means; and every scrap of ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... greater possibilities of corruption in the United States, is contained in a statement of the fact that a very few thousand dollars would at one time have sufficed to prevent Mr. Bryan from becoming the Democratic candidate for the Presidency in 1896. This is not mere hearsay, for I am able to speak from knowledge which was not acquired after the event. Nor for one moment is it suggested that Mr. Bryan himself was thus easily corruptible, nor even that those who immediately nominated him could have been purchased for ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... the story with, "My mother said they used to make up a new broom and when the couple jumped over it, they was married. Then they gave the broom to the couple to use keeping house." John was evidently embarrassed. "Laney," he said, "that was never confirmed. It was just hearsay, as far as you know, and I wouldn't ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... Educated men, learned men even, are to be found among Nihilists; these go further, in that they are men of action. The movement is, properly speaking, a derivative from Nihilism—though they are only known indirectly, and by hearsay, for they never advertise their doings in the papers. They go straight to the point. For them, it is not a question of showing that Pushkin is stupid, or that Russia must be torn in pieces. No; but if they have a great desire for anything, they ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... of mankind to take for truth without further investigation any assertion that has often been reiterated. Most people are prone to believe that an assertion made by a thousand hearsay witnesses is true, overlooking the possibility of their drawing from a common false source. But it is surprising that an author like Prof. Arthur T. Hadley should fall into such an error. In his otherwise excellent work, "Railroad Transportation, Its History ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... clearly comprehended them, has, so far, a knowledge of zoology, which is real and genuine, however limited it may be, and which is worth more than all the mere reading knowledge of the science he could ever acquire. His zoological information is, so far, knowledge and not mere hearsay. ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... disappeared from the house, and sometimes did not return for a long time. He had given up interfering in the affairs of his family for two years now, and knew nothing about them but what he gathered from hearsay. ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... upon our own experience, is more firm than that which we grant to the hearsay evidence of moralists; but t happy those who, according to the ancient proverb, can profit by ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... Tom to the great land of Hearsay, in which are no less than thirty and odd kings, beside half a dozen Republics, and perhaps more by ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... as the murmurs became louder. At this point a sharp-faced lawyer from Belfast got to his feet and objected that the gentleman from Elkington was wasting the time of the House, indulging in hearsay. His remarks were not germane, etc. The Speaker rapped again, with a fine show of impartiality, and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... them upon the day of his triumph. He recollected, too, his vexation on that day at not seeing Rose Salterne. Why, he had never seen her since. Never seen her now for six years and more! Of her ripened beauty he knew only by hearsay; she was still to him the lovely fifteen years' girl for whose sake he had smitten the Barnstaple draper over the quay. What a chain of petty accidents had kept them from meeting, though so often within a mile of each other! "And what a lucky one!" said ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... obscure and hearsay evidence, Gerard Vossius (de Poetis Graecis, c. 6) and Le Clerc (Bibliotheque Choisie, tom. xix. p. 285) mention a commentary of Michael Psellus on twenty-four plays of Menander, still extant in Ms. at Constantinople. Yet such classic studies seem ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... judge them. Sometimes, though not always, they forgive. One should not judge anybody. Margaret knew that, but she was a human being. She thought her mother a worldly woman. The fact that she was false as Judas was not apparent to this girl whose knowledge of Iscariotism was as hearsay as ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... directions, and yet hardly any one has ever taken the trouble, or obtained the permission, to make a careful examination in precisely the one place where information was most likely to be found. The very existence of the manuscripts at Dux was known only to a few, and to most of these only on hearsay; and thus the singular good fortune was reserved for me, on my visit to Count Waldstein in September 1899, to be the first to discover the most interesting things contained in these manuscripts. M. Octave Uzanne, though he had not himself visited Dux, had indeed ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... will do her much good. If I were a Legislator, I would order every man, once a week or so, to lock his lips together, and utter no vocable at all for four-and-twenty hours: it would do him an immense benefit, poor fellow. Such racket, and cackle of mere hearsay and sincere-cant, grows at last entirely deafening, enough to drive one mad, —like the voice of mere infinite rookeries answering your voice! Silence, silence! Sterling sent you a Letter from Clifton, which I set under way here, having added the address. ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... are tender, and rough is the earth below. But if thou wilt I shall swear the great oath by my father's head, that neither I myself am to blame, nor have I seen any other thief of thy kine: be kine what they may, for I know but by hearsay." ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... and constantly appeared before the Privy Council and the Lords of Trade, each time doing all the damage that he could. He had undoubtedly got much of his information from prejudiced sources or from hearsay, and he was as eager to retail it as had been the Massachusetts authorities to blast the moral character of the King's commissioners. He denounced the "old faction" as cunning, deceptive, overbearing, and disloyal; he called the clergy proud, ignorant, imperious, and ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... existence of God," said Father Payne; "that at best is only a generalisation from an immense range of facts, and a special interpretation of them. But the amazing thing in the world is the vast number of people who are content to believe important things on hearsay, because, on the whole, they love or trust the people who teach them. The word 'believing,' when I use it, doesn't mean that a good man says it, and that I can't disprove it, but a sort of vital assent, so that ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... five or six years of his life there, diligently trading in every big and little thing that had money in it; so we are compelled to assume that many of the folk there in those said latter days knew him personally, and the rest by sight and hearsay. But not as a CELEBRITY? Apparently not. For everybody soon forgot to remember any contact with him or any incident connected with him. The dozens of townspeople, still alive, who had known of him or known about him in the first twenty-three years of his life were in the same unremembering ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... for the prisoner waived the objection to this as hearsay evidence, because the counsel for the Crown assured them they would call Betty Binfield herself ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead
... work and Horton was probably at such times in Wall Street. It did not occur to the mountaineer that the other was intentionally avoiding him. He knew of Wilfred only through Adrienne's eulogistic descriptions, and, from hearsay, liked him. ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... such a thought in him: but my imagination is at a loss in presence of those vague charges, which have commonly been brought against me, charges, which are made up of impressions, and understandings, and inferences, and hearsay, and surmises. Accordingly, I shall not make the attempt, for, in doing so, I should be dealing blows in the air; what I shall attempt is to state what I know of myself and what I recollect, and leave ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... holy than libraries, incomes, and the visits of royalty? As to visions of truth that make a man sigh with joy, and enlarge his heart with more than human tenderness—how many of those men had ever found such treasure in the fields of the church? How many of them knew save by hearsay whether there be any Holy Ghost! How then were they to warn other men from the dangers of following in their footsteps and becoming such as they? Where, in a general ignorance and community of ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... 1890, reproduces the diary in full of Haswell for both voyages. It is from Haswell that the fullest account of the Indian plots are obtained; but at the time of the discovery of the Columbia, Haswell was on the little sloop Adventure, and what he reports is from hearsay. His words in the entry of June 14 are; "They (the Columbia) had very disagreeable weather but . . . good success. . . They discovered a harbor in latitude 46 degrees 53 minutes north. . . . This is Gray's Harbor. Here they were attacked by ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... eager to be at the Count's on the strength of mere hearsay, at this moment were a besieging force of luxury, coquettishness, elegance, and beauty. The financial world, proud of its riches, challenged the splendor of the generals and high officials of the Empire, so recently gorged with orders, titles, and honors. These ...
— Domestic Peace • Honore de Balzac
... public ways Washington threw his influence in favor of religion, and kept what he really believed a secret, and in only one thing did he disclose his real thoughts. It is asserted that before the Revolution he partook of the sacrament, but this is only affirmed by hearsay, and better evidence contradicts it. After that war he did not, it is certain. Nelly Custis states that on "communion Sundays he left the church with me, after the blessing, and returned home, and we sent the carriage ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... national affairs was abandoned; the Irish party, as well as the Conservatives, were of one mind in backing up the Government, no matter what postponement of questions that were vital a month ago, their cohesion entailed; the Emperor had written no letter at all. But through the nebulous mists of hearsay, there fell solid the first drops of the imminent storm. Even before Michael had left Sylvia that afternoon, Germany had declared war on Russia, on Sunday Belgium received a Note from Berlin definitely stating that ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... rage, he began to investigate. Gradually he learned the story (from sailors in wine-shops and general hearsay) of the mysterious schooner that had twice saved Code Schofield from actual capture, and had aided him on one or ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... and no faith in the gossip and hearsay-anecdotes of the early Fathers, Irenaeus not excepted. "Within less than a century of St. John's time." Alas! a century in the paucity of writers and of men of education in the age succeeding the Apostolic, must be reckoned more than equal to five centuries since ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... go by? My brain. That is the only light I have from nature, and if there be a God, it is the only torch that this God has given me by which to find my way through the darkness and the night called life. I do not depend upon hearsay for that. I do not have to take the word of any other man, nor get upon my knees before a book. Here, in the temple of the mind, I go and consult the God—that is to say, my reason—and the oracle speaks to me, and I obey the oracle. What should I obey? Another man's oracle? Shall I take ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... give something to be sure on this point, one way or the other. Let us wait till the dance is over, and observe them more carefully. Horensagen ist halb gelogen! Hearsay ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... Ben Jonson told Drummond that one child perished in the flames. But he was speaking after an interval of twenty-one years, and, of course, from hearsay. Spenser's misery was exaggerated by succeeding poets, who used him to point a moral, and from the shelter of his tomb launched many a shaft of sarcasm at an unappreciative public. Giles Fletcher in his "Purple Island" (a poem which reminds us of the "Faery Queen" by the supreme tediousness ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... time to spare for loftier studies, became perforce a practical man. He adopted (how should he have done otherwise?) the language, errors, and opinions of the Parisian tradesman who admires Moliere, Voltaire, and Rousseau on hearsay, and buys their works, but never opens them; who will have it that the proper way to pronounce "armoire" is "ormoire"; "or" means gold, and "moire" means silk, and women's dresses used almost always to be made of silk, and in their cupboards they locked up silk ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... capital being quoted at five millions of francs. Thus the five working mines are reduced to four, while the 'Izrah' and others are coming on (May 1882).]) I had thus an opportunity of gathering much hearsay information, and was able to compare opinions which differed widely enough. I also had long conversations with Mr. A. A. Robertson, lately sent out as traffic-manager to the Izrah, and with Mr. Amondsen, the Danish sailor, ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... that they are human. Malbihn's boys had been no exception to the rule and as many of them had been with him at various times during the past ten years there was little about his acts and life in the African wilds that was not known directly or by hearsay ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... home Father Dan talked of the business that had brought me back, saying I was not to think too much of anything he might have said of Lord Raa in his letters, seeing that he had spoken from hearsay, and the world was so censorious—and then there was no measuring the miraculous influence that might be ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... through the economic, social and moral demands of Pennsylvania, Illinois, or California. The value of all of these in his thought is the relation which he holds individually to any one. The circle of his interests grows by the widening of his knowledge. The law of his being is to accept nothing on hearsay. He must prove all things and cleave only to that which he finds true. This, however, is the path to missionary ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... known till the people had got home from Brent, and then but by hearsay, till the sheriff's men had proclaimed me ...
— A Thane of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... fragrant odors, too, as connected with smelling, and hearing, and sight. Appetites attended by reason are all those whatsoever which men exercise from a persuasion: for many things there are which they desire to behold, and possess, on hearsay and persuasion. Now, as the being pleased stands in the perception of a certain affection, and as imagination is a kind of faint perception, there will attend on him who exercises either memory or hope a kind of imagination of that which is the object of his memory or hope; but if so, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... for the way we acquitted ourselves in the baseball games lately played. She has a healthy regard for the proper bringing up of boys, though she has never been married herself, and therefore knows them only from hearsay. She is interested in the projected gymnasium, and means to invest some of her means in the enterprise, believing that it will pay enormous dividends to the young people of this community. But you mustn't ask me for her name, because I am not at liberty to mention ...
— Jack Winters' Campmates • Mark Overton
... Sodom and Gomorrah by hearsay, Regine," interrupted Herbert, sarcastically. "You have lived in Burgsdorf ever since your marriage; you ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... helpful. Their idea seemed to be- -if the rudimentary thing she unearthed from their consciousness could be called an idea—that they would not mind repenting if they could see anything of which to repent. Of sin, as sin, they had no apparent knowledge, either by sight, by hearsay or by actual acquaintance. They sat stolidly in their little chairs, eyes roving to the windows, the blackboard, the pictures; they clubbed together and fished a pin from a crack in the floor during one of Mary's most thrilling appeals; finally they appeared so bored by the whole ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... we do not submit to be beaten to death by them, we are bad creatures and of course must be damned, &c. If any man wishes to hear this doctrine openly preached to us by the American preachers, let him go into the Southern and Western sections of this country—I do not speak from hearsay—what I have written, is what I have seen and heard myself. No man may think that my book is made up of conjecture—I have travelled and observed nearly the whole of those things myself, and what little I did not get by my own observation, I received from those among the whites and ...
— Walker's Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life - And Also Garnet's Address to the Slaves of the United States of America • David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet
... observation. Of the underground chambers I can only speak from the report, for the keepers of the building could not be got to show them, since they contained, as they said, the sepulchres of the kings who built the labyrinth, and also those of the sacred crocodiles; thus it is from hearsay only that I can speak of the lower chambers. The upper chambers, however, I saw with my own eyes, and found them to excel all other human productions. The passage through the houses, and the various windings of the path across the courts, excited in me infinite admiration, as I passed from ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... lips of truthful and credible witnesses;" but we must add that the greater part of the kingdoms and towns spoken of by Marco Polo he certainly did visit. We will follow the route he describes, simply pointing out what the traveller learnt by hearsay, during the important missions with which he was charged by Kublai-Khan. During this second journey the travellers did not follow exactly the same road as on the first occasion of their visit to the Emperor of China. They had lengthened ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... but idle and frequently fatuous hearsay to repeat of these early years, save this only, that Richard did not show the slightest musical precocity. Nor need this surprise us. Mozart, Bach, Beethoven were brought up in households where music was ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... endowments might not be spared for such a purpose; to contemplate, calmly, the necessity of beginning at the beginning; to consider for themselves where the Christian Religion most needs and most suggests immediate help and illustration; and not to decide on any theory or hearsay, but to go themselves into the Prisons and the Ragged Schools, and form their own conclusions. They will be shocked, pained, and repelled, by much that they learn there; but nothing they can learn will be one- thousandth part so shocking, painful, ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... the trial the witness of the act dies. He was the sole witness. There is no other testimony to be had. Under our system of practice, those to whom the statement was made cannot be allowed to testify to it. Such testimony would be "hearsay." It would put before the jury two questions, first whether such a statement was really made, and then whether, if made, it was true. The law of evidence says that they ought not to be perplexed ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD
... Mr. Davager, I can tell you nothing more about him, except what is derived from hearsay evidence, which is always unsatisfactory evidence, even ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... are insulted, and scenes of violence enacted that give the unhappy locality where they have landed the aspect of a town taken by assault and given up to pillage. I am not now describing altogether from hearsay; I have witnessed something of what ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... Knox by hearsay only, I believe the matter of this paper will be somewhat astonishing. For the hard energy of the man in all public matters has possessed the imagination of the world; he remains for posterity in certain traditional ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Mermaid Tavern (so called, like other inns, from its sign). A well-known poetical letter of the dramatist Francis Beaumont to Jonson celebrates the club meetings; and equally well known is a description given in the next generation from hearsay and inference by the antiquary Thomas Fuller: 'Many were the wit-combats betwixt Shakspere and Ben Jonson, which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war: Master Jonson, like the former, was built far higher in learning; ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... thus far of Eugene Field has been based upon what the lawyers call hearsay or documentary evidence. It has for the most part been directly heard or confirmed from his own lips. In the early days of our acquaintance the stories of his life in Denver were rife through every newspaper office and green-room in the ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... believes that one can recall experiences of their very early years which they have actually learned from hearsay, from countless repetition ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... with a decent cremation at the end of it assured to every eugenically born citizen. No more. But I have long ceased to regret that others use their own eyes whether clear or dim. Better the merest glimmer of light perceived thus than the hearsay of the revelations of others. And by the broken fragments of a bewildered hope a man shall eventually reach the goal and rejoice in that dawn where the morning stars sing together and the sons of God shout for joy. It must come, for it ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... the glories of the land from a hunter who wandered into Kentucky by chance and returned to North Carolina to tell of it among his neighbors. Two years afterwards, in 1769, when a man of forty, Boone came to see for himself the things that he knew by hearsay, and he found that the half had not been told. But among other surprises in store for him was falling into the clutches of an Indian hunting party which ambushed him and the friend who was with him. They both escaped, and soon afterwards Boone's brother and a neighbor, ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... that whosoever worships God by hearsay, as others tell him, and knows not what God is from light within himself; or that thinks God is in the heavens above the skies, and so prays to that God which he imagines to be there and everywhere, but from ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... was at the time in Italy—and Karasowski speak only from hearsay, we cannot do better than accept George Sand's account, which contains nothing improbable. In connection with this migration to the south, I must, however, not omit to mention certain statements of Adolph Gutmann, one of Chopin's pupils. Here is the substance ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... far as Syria, partly by capture and partly by exacting money, as has been set forth in the preceding narrative. And his purpose was to lead the army straight for Palestine, in order that he might plunder all their treasures and especially those in Jerusalem. For he had it from hearsay that this was an especially goodly land and peopled by wealthy inhabitants. And all the Romans, both officers and soldiers, were far from entertaining any thought of confronting the enemy or of standing in the way of their passage, but manning their strongholds as each one could, they thought it ...
— History of the Wars, Books I and II (of 8) - The Persian War • Procopius
... misunderstandings of which in the old days I had no idea except from hearsay. Though I am ashamed of it, I will describe one that occurred the ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... as a portion of Lake Michikamau, some years ago was explored and correctly mapped; but the other rivers that flow to the eastward have either been mapped only from hearsay or not at all. Of the several rivers flowing into Ungava Bay, the Koksoak alone has been explored. This river, which is the largest of those flowing north, rises in lakes to the westward of Lake Michikamau. Next to the Koksoak, the George is the best known of the ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... inured to toil in time of war; for hunting is an image of a martial life, and Xenophon was much in the right of it when he affirmed that hunting had yielded a great number of excellent warriors, as well as the Trojan horse. For my part, I am no scholar; I have it but by hearsay, yet I believe it. Now the souls of those brave fellows, according to Gripe-men-all's riddle, after their decease enter into wild boars, stags, roebucks, herns, and such other creatures which they loved, and in quest ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais |
