"Impedimenta" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The carriage doors opened and a myriad ants swarmed to the various boats. At the Havre boat I took the fore, he the aft gangway. Thousands passed over, men and women, vague human forms encumbered with queer projecting excrescences of impedimenta. They all seemed alike—just a herd of Britons, impelled by irrational instinct, like the fate-driven lemmings of Norway, to cross the sea. And all around, weird in the conflicting lights, hurried gnome-like figures mountainously ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... periodicals, and rather than be forced to the final resort of the unaccompanied traveler, she welcomed the advent of an acquaintance possessed of volubility of an ejaculatory, eruptive variety. After many gentle jets and spurts of gossip much remained to be told, as the lady hastily gathered up her impedimenta preparatory to alighting at ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... rope, ice-axe, Baedeker, goggles, corkscrew, crampons and other impedimenta of the expert Alpinist, Ralph seated himself beside ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 5th, 1914 • Various
... at a later date than the main body of the school, and was reached by a flight of steps from the playground. The room below it was used for coats and hats and other impedimenta the boys might bring with them, each boy having his own peg and place on the shelf for bag or lunch basket. They passed through this room on their way to the laboratory, and so it would be easy for Taylor to take ...
— That Scholarship Boy • Emma Leslie
... writing of other letters, the general reorganizing of that minute polity, the life of Justine Brent. She smiled a little to think how easily she could be displaced and transplanted—how slender were her material impedimenta, how few her invisible bonds! She was as light and detachable as a dead leaf on the autumn breeze—yet she was in the season of sap and flower, when there is life and song ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... inside and slid down the smooth glass to the bottom of the sphere, then turned to take the cans of food and other impedimenta from Cavor. The interior was warm, the thermometer stood at eighty, and as we should lose little or none of this by radiation, we were dressed in shoes and thin flannels. We had, however, a bundle of ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... the conviction that they had been seeing some hard and trying service, many of them with frosted fingers, toes, or ears, and thinking they deserved rather well of their country for having finally rounded up a thousand warriors with all their families, ponies, and unsavory impedimenta, and the general so informed them, and leaving a command of eight companies, equally divided among the horse and foot, to occupy the cantonments on the Chasing Water and thereafter keep the Indians in check, he hastened away to attend to important ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... Tetuanui mansion by diligence, and despatched my bags to me by the same carrier. I sent with her my love to the Tetuanui clan, and some delicacies from the Maison des Varos for the half-blind Haamoura. The diligence did not run farther than Taravao, and the next day, with my impedimenta in the cart, and with a boy to drive it, I turned my back on the road to Papeete, and began the jog trot to the famous, but hardly ever ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... of various patterns, lined the way; there were many swollen carcasses underfoot, and not infrequently pedestrians crossed mud-holes by stepping from one to another, holding their breaths and battling through swarms of flies. Much costly impedimenta strewed the roadside—each article a milestone of despair, a monument to failure. There were stoves, camp furniture, lumber, hardware, boat fittings. The wreckage and the wastage of the stampede were enormous, and every ounce, ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... one can use an empty 38-caliber cartridge, either cutting off the base or drilling out the priming aperture to admit the screw. This type of arrow we use for rough practice, shooting tin cans, trees, boxes, and other impedimenta. It makes a good shaft for birds, ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... burst over Antwerp the following night was gathering fast when we arrived on Tuesday morning. Army motor-trucks loaded with dismantled aeroplanes, and the less essential impedimenta screamed through the streets bound away from, not toward, the front. The Queen, that afternoon, was seen in the Hotel St. Antoine receiving the good-bys of various friends. Consuls suddenly locked ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... July arrived, and the battle began, it was ordered that all soldiers carry three days' rations. The heat was intense, the fight exceedingly hot, and marching through the jungle extremely difficult. The consequence was that the soldiers threw aside all impedimenta in order to fight more effectively, and, of course, the rations went with the blankets and the overcoats. The man who held on to a canteen and haversack was fortunate; very many abandoned the haversack, and a considerable number abandoned everything except rifle and ...
— The Gatlings at Santiago • John H. Parker
... strange to come into the martial display of Athens and find the old war still going on, see the numbers of worn soldiers weighed down with all the impedimenta of "fighting order" coming home on leave or returning to the front, to see the Turkish prisoners of war jobbing at the station and on the streets, to see the handsome Evzones, the soldiers of the King's bodyguard, strutting together in fine style along the cobbled ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... been all life and activity, making the Malays smile at his restlessness, as he passed among them resting his hand first on one, then on another brawny shoulder, to get right forward to the sharply-pointed prow, and sit there looking up the river; while his uncle rearranged some of the packages and impedimenta ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... as mobile as possible, I made the strictest possible orders in relation to wagons and all species of incumbrances and impedimenta whatever. Each officer and soldier was required to carry on his horse or person food and clothing enough for five days. To each regiment was allowed but one wagon and one ambulance, and to the officers of each company one ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... ready for action on the flanks as well as front. It was now the 18th of August and Sherman devoted the next week to the accumulation of supplies, the removal of sick and wounded to the rear, getting rid of impedimenta, and general preparation for a fortnight's separation from his base. My position had been selected with reference to this plan, as a pivot upon which the whole of the army except the Twentieth Corps should swing across the railways south ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... plotted, and Dam completed the burnishing of his arms, spurs, buckles, and other glittering metal impedimenta (the quantity of which earned the Corps its barrack-room soubriquet of "the Polish Its"), finished the flicking of spots of pipe-clay from his ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... her impedimenta, "the patronne has told me that you have paid for my lodging and my nourishment. I am very grateful, Monsieur. And if you will accept this costume it will be a ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... shouting of jocular advice from the male passengers the Fall of Rome was warped into Chadwick's Landing and the waiting groups came aboard. As they streamed on, bearing bundles and boxes and all the impedimenta of excursions, those already on board congregated on the after-deck to distinguish familiar faces. A few persons had come down to the landing merely to look ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... to sixty rounds complete on each limber; these limbers were strong, with very good wheels and broad tyres (a great contrast to the wretched little gun wheels we had to get along with at one time) and on them there was room also for gun's crew's great-coats, leather gear, gun telescopes, and other impedimenta, ...
— With the Naval Brigade in Natal (1899-1900) - Journal of Active Service • Charles Richard Newdigate Burne
... assured, cannot be filled and got off within an hour short of two months. I enclose you a copy of the requisition, in some hope that it is not genuine—that you have never seen it. My dear General, this expanding and piling up of impedimenta has been, so far, almost our ruin, and will be our final ruin if it is not abandoned. If you had the articles of this requisition upon the wharf, with the necessary animals to make them of any use, and forage for the animals, you ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... satisfaction of the authorities, we were marched off to our quarters. The party to which I was attached was escorted to a stable which was of the ordinary single floor type, characteristic of these islands, with a row of horse-boxes and a loft for the storage of hay and other impedimenta above. The horse-boxes measured ten feet square and had only been cleaned out perfunctorily. The raw manure was still clinging to the walls, while the stalls were wet from the straw which had been recently removed. Indeed in some stalls it ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... dictating his poems to a friend who was transcribing them for him. Mrs. Browning had completed some seven thousand lines of "Aurora Leigh," but not one of these had yet been copied for publication. Various hindrances beset them, but finally in June they left for England, their most important impedimenta being sixteen thousand lines of poetry, almost equally divided between them, comprising his manuscript for "Men and Women," and hers for "Aurora Leigh," complete, save for the last three books. The change was by no means unalloyed joy. To give up, even temporarily, their "dream-life of Florence," ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... preparations having been completed, and a sacrifice of three precious weeks having been duly offered to the inexorable genius who presides over public correspondence, we reduced our impedimenta to the smallest possible compass, and with about a hundred pounds to commence life with, all in two shilling pieces, that being the only available coin of the realm in this our second century of British administration, we ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... calls with her mother, and in between the calls Mrs. Hilbery had rushed into shops and bought pillow-cases and blotting-books on no perceptible method for the furnishing of Katharine's house. Katharine had a sense of impedimenta accumulating on all sides of her. She had left her at length, and had come on to keep an engagement to dine with Rodney at his rooms. But she did not mean to get to him before seven o'clock, and so had plenty of time to walk all the way from Bond Street to the Temple if she wished it. ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... dress of the inhabitants (or the absence thereof), the children of both sexes being frequently attired after the manner of our revered First Parents before they made the acquaintance of the fig tree, while the adults also dispense generally with trousers, shoes, and stockings, and other impedimenta of our ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... had absorbed so much of my time that, as yet, I had paid no attention to the crooked figures on the verst posts as we passed them in rapid succession; but in time the sun began to burn my head and back, the road to become increasingly dusty, the impedimenta in the carriage to grow more and more uncomfortable, and myself to feel more and more cramped. Consequently, I relapsed into devoting my whole faculties to the distance-posts and their numerals, and to solving difficult mathematical problems for reckoning the time when we should arrive ...
— Boyhood • Leo Tolstoy
... suit," suggested Chapa, untying it from around her waist where she had been wearing it as a sort of sash, with all her impedimenta stuck into the folds. So Gladys changed to the bathing suit, and Chapa fixed the wet bloomers on a stick which they could carry between them, so they would be dry by the time they reached ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... passed, as Miss Bussey had predicted, in a fluster. Mary was running after dress makers, John after licenses, Cook's tickets, a best man, and all the impedimenta of a marriage. The intercourse of the lovers was much interrupted, and to this Miss Bussey attributed the low ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... irregularity as the most puritanic of the bourgeoisie. Part and parcel of his fastidiousness, some said—others, that from his Eton days he had always been a lazy beggar. As though to show that he did not shrink from reasonable responsibility towards his female impedimenta, any inquiry as to the absence of Lady Borrodaile was met by reference to Sophia. In short, where other attractive husbands brought a boring wife, Lord Borrodaile brought an undecorative daughter. While to the onlooker nearly every aspect ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... gateway of stone. Here the mountain had been torn asunder, and two palisades of gray-green rock rose grim and terrible for hundreds of feet, while between them, dashing over boulders and trees and the impedimenta of ages, a little stream rushed along in the eternal night at their base. Far away to the west, range upon range piled themselves against the intense blue sky. Beyond a rustic gate, standing across the path that ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... who have no idea of being there. Lines of carts conveying stores, clothing, trunks and miscellaneous belongings were soon pouring towards the British Legation, and long before nightfall the spacious compounds were so crowded with impedimenta and masses of human beings that one could hardly move there. It was a memorable and ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... sawyers. encumbrance, incumbrance[obs3]; clog, skid, shoe, spoke; drag, drag chain, drag weight; stay, stop; preventive, prophylactic; load, burden, fardel[obs3], onus, millstone round one's neck, impedimenta; dead weight; lumber, pack; nightmare, Ephialtes[obs3], incubus, old man of the sea; remora. difficulty &c. 704; insuperable &c. 471; obstacle; estoppel [Law]; ill wind; head wind &c. (opposition) 708; trammel, tether &c. (means of restraint) 752; hold back, counterpoise. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... first body of soldiers sent from Warchester, and there was a memorable scene when the jaunty ranks filed through the streets to the station. By the time the men reached the train they discovered that they could never make war laden down as they were by knapsacks filled with the preposterous impedimenta ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... about great men whose biographies I was reading ... and about Steele's Zoology I was studying, committing all the Latin nomenclature of classification to heart, with a curious hunger for even the husks and impedimenta of learning.... ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... claim which was legally required for its maintenance, and returned to his horse. In replacing his things in his saddle-bags he came upon the slipper, and for an instant so complete was his preoccupation in his later discovery, that he was about to throw it away as useless impedimenta, until it occurred to him, albeit vaguely, that it might be of service to him in its connection with that discovery, in the way of refuting possible false claimants. He was not aware of any faithlessness to his momentary romance, any more than ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... circuitous. He had taken his own advice and studied the link. This done, the intricate and fascinating subject of nervous dyspepsia had claimed his undivided attention. When he had finished his prolonged interview with Blandford Sikes, sidling back to the waiting-room to gather up various impedimenta, he had encountered the unfortunate clergyman whom he had kept waiting. Marcus Harding was the man. They exchanged only a couple of words, but the sight of the flaccid bulk, the hanging cheeks and hands, the eyes in which dwelt a sort of faded ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... could be effected there, and the fleet ran past it, as it had run by Vicksburg. Ten miles farther down the river a landing place was found at Bruinsburg. By daylight, on the 1st of May, McClernand's corps and part of McPherson's had been ferried across, leaving behind all impedimenta, even the officers' horses, and fighting had already begun in rear of Port Gibson, about eight miles from the landing. The enemy made a desperate stand, but was defeated with heavy loss. Grand Gulf was evacuated that night, ...
— Ulysses S. Grant • Walter Allen
... 1818, when beginning the Mass in D. All sorts of circumstances and influences were required to isolate him from the world to enable him the better to do his appointed work. Probably no other musician ever made so complete a surrender of all impedimenta for the sake of his ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... the front lines the troops became more numerous. There were motor trucks and ox teams and all the impedimenta of a small army and always there were wounded men walking or being carried toward the rear. He had crossed the railroad some distance back and judged that the wounded were being taken to it for transportation to a base hospital and possibly ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... provisions. He came back, hauling them in a little sleigh. It was much like those made for the delight of the small boy in every land of snow. It had a box painted red and two bobs and a little dashboard. They used it for the transportation of boy and impedimenta. In the deep wilderness beyond the Adirondacks they found a cave in one of the rock ledges. They were twenty miles from any post-office but shortly discovered one. Letters in cipher were soon passing between them and their confederates. They learned there was no prospect of getting ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... burning building waiting for the blankets to come into which we were to jump. Now that I look back at it I think we must have been a funny sight, for while we stood there we threw on our jackets over our night-dresses and held the rest of our belongings in our hands. With all the rest of her impedimenta Nyoda had rescued her camera, Nakwisi her spy-glass and I my note-book, and they gave us an odd, jaunty tourist appearance which must have been amusing. Well, the people came running with blankets and held them for us to jump and we jumped, although ...
— The Campfire Girls Go Motoring • Hildegard G. Frey
... also were in full sight; for the world of music, as well as the world of sport and youth, I was deliberately opening for myself, also in exchange for that closed world of affairs which I had abandoned. Indeed, all manners of the impedimenta of a well-to-do Japanese-cared-for bachelor were in evidence. To me, each object was familiar and was cherished. I had never felt need to apologize to any gentleman for my quarters or their contents—or to any woman, for no woman had ever seen my ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... are low, running along the wall. There is an armchair before the bright fire, which is on your right. There is a sofa. And in the middle of the room is an enormous double writing table piled tidily with much appropriate impedimenta, blue books and pamphlets and with an especial heap of unopened letters and parcels. At the table sits TREBELL himself, in good health and spirits, but eyeing askance the work to which he has evidently just returned. His sister looks in on him. She is dressed ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... still his portfolio under his arm, but his smooth-shaven friend had relieved him of the two bundles of books, and stood slightly apart while the rest of the new-comer's belongings were being piled into a huge mound of impedimenta in the hall. Dolores expected the confident smile of the blonde man to disappear rapidly from his face. But it did not disappear. He said something to the office clerk which Dolores could not catch; ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... operations. For two days previous the Chinese hands had been getting out the deck-tubs, tackles, gaffs, spades, and the other shark-fishing gear that had been stowed forward. The sails were lowered and gasketed, the decks cleared of all impedimenta, hogsheads and huge vats stood ready in the waist, and the lazy indolence of the previous week was ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... and announced that he was sent to look for it. His qualifications consisted apparently in his having coal-mined. But he seemed confident of detecting the quicker combustion sort, until he asked for necessary impedimenta. It seems that no good collier can detect an H.E. or any sort of mine without a pail of water, and a hole about 2,000 feet deep, and a pulley, and a rope ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 15, 1916 • Various
... acquaintances, are there not, who burden themselves by over much comfort, or, what comes to the same thing from my point of view, with too much fuss and fad as to their impedimenta? Some anglers whom I meet really never appear to be happy unless staggering along like Issachar "couching down between two burdens." Half of the gear is mere ballast, never produced for actual service from one year's end to the other, but always carried with patience ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... Boulogne, where another was getting together, ships were building of every kind: floating fortresses of wood, light pinnaces and yawls for carrying the swift van of an army, and heavy barges for the impedimenta of war. A mighty flotilla, gathering from the Scheldt to the Garonne, from Toulon and Rochefort to Calais and Antwerp, to bear a vast invading army to the ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... Chancellorsville, through the woods, up every side road and forest path, pours a stream of fugitives. Ambulances and oxen, pack-mules and ammunition-wagons, officers' spare horses mounted by runaway negro servants, every species of the impedimenta of camp-life, commissary sergeants on all-too-slow mules, teamsters on still-harnessed team-horses, quartermasters whose duties are not at the front, riderless steeds, clerks with armfuls of official papers, non-combatants of all kinds, mixed with frighted ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... that all arrangements were made for their welfare in the village, and that tents were unnecessary as the natives could build thatch huts in half an hour while on the trip, so the impedimenta of the party was light. Canteens and cartridge belts were donned, medicine cases, mosquito nets, binoculars and blankets stowed away, and the three men shook hands with the two boys. Jerry said that the ...
— The Pirate Shark • Elliott Whitney
... clear and pleasant, and she took care that on this occasion it was particularly low and clear and pleasant. As they came under the white cliffs the young man put his book of poetry away, and when at last the train stopped beside the boat, he displayed a graceful alacrity with the impedimenta of Miss Winchelsea and her friends. Miss Winchelsea hated nonsense, but she was pleased to see the young man perceived at once that they were ladies, and helped them without any violent geniality; and how nicely ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... disgrace, did I not tell you how I would punish you before the whole school next time?" said Madame, evidently with some excitement, as she opened the girl's drawers behind, and pinned up the tail of her chemise with all the rest of the impedimenta round the victim's waist, till at last they had a very fair view of Rosalie's lovely little pink-lipped cunt, upon which the incipient growth of soft down was only just beginning to be perceptible, and another delightful item displayed to view was her tight wrinkled little bum-hole, ...
— The Power of Mesmerism - A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts and Fancies • Anonymous
... back along the track littered with their impedimenta, while the doctor and the others began to try and reduce the loads of the mules in ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... happier. How many kinds of food I do not need, nor cooks to cook them, how much curious clothing nor tailors to make it, how many books that I never read, and pictures that are not worth while! The farther I run, the more I feel like casting aside all such impedimenta—lest I fail to arrive at the far ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... the big change that must come to lives that really get into war as soldiers. Even we were for ever pinching ourselves to see if we were dreaming, as we rode through the strange land, filled with warlike impedimenta, and devoted exclusively to the science of slaughter. By rights we should have been sitting in our offices in Wichita and Emporia editing two country newspapers, wrangling mildly with the pirates of the paper mills to whom our ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... carried out his instructions promptly. No excuse would be accepted. There was a rush to obey. The sick and wounded were carried to the left bank as well as everything which was not actually required for combat. That is to say all the impedimenta of the army. In this way the streets and the bridge were soon completely clear. The bridge was strengthened and the cavalry and guns brought back to the right bank and located in a suburb furthest from the enemy; and then, to improve his means of retreat, the prudent general ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot |
