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Onlooker   /ˈɔnlˌʊkər/   Listen
Onlooker

noun
1.
Someone who looks on.  Synonym: looker-on.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Onlooker" Quotes from Famous Books



... when, from the scores of hotels, resorts, camps, private residences, fishermen's camps, etc.; fishing-boats, row-boats, launches, motor-boats, and yachts ply to and fro in every direction, unconsciously vying with each other to attract the eye of the onlooker. The pure blue of the Lake, with its emerald ring and varying shades of color, added to by the iridescent gleam that possesses the surface when it is slightly rippled by a gentle breeze, contrasting with the active, vivid, moving boats of differing sizes, splashed with ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James

... to be paid to public, and even to parochial, opinion. The life of the votary of the Law is lived under strict and constant surveillance; and a man learns at last to value himself as his conduct is valued by a critical onlooker, and to make it the business of his life to produce "results" which can be weighed and measured by conventional standards, rather than to grow in grace,—with silent, subtle, ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes

... the more radical among them oppose religious organizations, not because these organizations are religious, but because they have an antipathy for all forms of social organization. It does not take an open-eyed onlooker long to discover that social organizations of all kinds are infested with many evils. Social machinery is never perfect in its construction or operation. It is always getting out of gear; there is endless friction and clatter and confusion; it takes ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden

... upon the lowest step, when the Doctor saw Blaine raise his hand to his lips. A short, sharp blast of a whistle pierced the air, and in an instant a dozen men had sprung out of the darkness and leaped upon the two surprised miscreants. Then ensued a struggle, brief but awful to the onlooker in its silent, grim ferocity, as the two separate knots of men battled each about their central orbit. The scuffle of many feet on the hard-packed road, the mutter of curses, the dull thud of blows, the hoarse, strangulated breathing of men ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander

... One onlooker says: "Were it not for the fact that the soldiers in charge of the city do not hesitate in shooting down the ghouls the lawless element would predominate. Not alone do the soldiers execute the law. On Wednesday ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various

... never failed to chain the interest of the onlooker. The furious galloping of the Indian braves—Sioux, Arapahoe, Brule, and Cheyenne, all in war paint and feathers; the free dash of the Mexicans and cowboys, as they follow the Indians into line at break-neck speed; ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore

... has still another psychological effect which must not be disregarded from a social point of view. It awakes to an unusual degree the impulse to imitation. The seeing of rhythmic movements starts similar motor impulses in the mind of the onlooker. It is well known that from the eleventh to the sixteenth century Europe suffered from dancing epidemics. They started from pathological cases of St. Vitus' dance and released in the excitable crowds cramplike impulses to imitative movements. But we hear the same story of instinctive ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg

... the wheels, clear out to the capstan and jack-staff, slept the deckhands, except a few on watch, a few more who with eager crouchings, snapping fingers, and soft cries gambled at dice in the red glare of the furnaces, and one who had become an amused onlooker of the Hayle twins—the negro who, six hours before, by merely putting out a hand ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable

... ter dat guy," commented a sweater-clad onlooker, as they dragged Samson into a doorway to await the wagon. "He was goin' ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck

... To the onlooker, it does seem a happy circumstance that there has just been, for seven critical years, at the head of American affairs the strenuous advocate of the strenuous life. I read through his Messages the warning that in the struggle for preeminence the ultimate victory will lie with those nations ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett

... first evening when the lovers met, in April 1826, an observer, watching them as they talked, reflected that Bulwer's "bearing had that aristocratic something bordering on hauteur" which reminded the onlooker "of the passage, 'Stand back; I am holier than thou!'" The same observer, dazzled, like the rest of the world, by the loveliness of Miss Wheeler, judged that it would be best "to regard her as we ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... real climb was to begin. Nor was it until he saw the tall figure halt under an overhanging rock, which seemed to jut right out over his head, and look up for the course he must take in the final climb, that Buck's actual danger came home to the onlooker. He was very little more given to realizing personal danger than Buck himself, but now a sudden apprehension for the ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum

... James Earle Fraser's "End of the Trail." Imagine the effect of that fine work silhouetted against the sky out near Fort Point, on a western headland, with the animal's head toward the sea, so that it would be evident to the onlooker that the Indian had reached the very end of the trail. It would play a wonderful part in the ...
— Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts • Juliet James

... condemnation, and of the few, the very, very few, saved as by fire. He saw Jarvis Barrow sitting motionless, sternly agreeing, and beyond him Jenny Barrow and then Elspeth and Gilian. Out of kirk, in the kirkyard, he gave them good day. He studied to keep strangeness out of his manner; an onlooker would note only a somewhat silent, preoccupied laird. He might be pondering the sermon. Mr. M'Nab's sermons were calculated to arouse alarm and concern—or, in the case of the justified, stern triumph—in the human breast. White Farm made no quarrel ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston

... universally jurant, feeling of Hope, could be a unanimous one. Far from that! The time was ominous: social dissolution near and certain; social renovation still a problem, difficult and distant even though sure. But if ominous to some clearest onlooker, whose faith stood not with one side or with the other, nor in the ever-vexed jarring of Greek with Greek at all,—how unspeakably ominous to dim Royalist participators; for whom Royalism was Mankind's palladium; for whom, with ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... faculty, that it should not have that redemption of its body for which unwittingly it groaned. And the man was one of those childlike natures which may indeed go a long time without discovering this or that external fault in themselves, patent to the eye of many an inferior onlooker—for the simple soul is the last to see its own outside—but, once they become aware of it, begin that moment to set the thing right. At the same time he had not enough of knowledge to render it easy ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald

... extravagances in his name—the games, the surmises, the wild statements that had had Chris Liggett as their inspiration? If she did, she gave no sign of it beyond the bright flush with which she greeted her oldest acquaintance in this group. Christopher sat down, content to be a listener and an onlooker, as he sipped his tea, but Norma saw that his wife's look of white fatigue made him uneasy, and immediately said that she ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris

... Thus, to the onlooker, and in accordance with the general misinterpretation of the law of karma, he will be thought to have reaped a "bad" karma, while as a matter of reality, he will be making very rapid strides on the path to godhood. Said a famous Japanese ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad

... offers little excitement to the onlooker; and all that can be done here is to give a slight sketch of the various directions in which Moorman's energies went out. The first task that lay before him was to organise the new department which had been put into his hands, to make English studies a reality ...
— Tales of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman

... a bomb in the room it could hardly have created more consternation. The incredulity on the faces of the men around him would have been amusing to an onlooker, but to Micky the whole ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres

... and begged for air. Their requests were all denied. The captain trusted no man. He treated them as if they were hounds. Wainwright stood by the captain's side, smoking the inevitable cigarette, his eyes narrowly watching Cameron, when the order was given; but no onlooker could have told from Cameron's well trained face whether he had heard or not. Well he knew where those orders had originated, and instantly he saw a series of like torments. Wainwright had things ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill

... cards, I did not join in the game, but became more and more interested in it as an onlooker. I was a little surprised, however, to find that in a very short while, comparatively, our friend Crook had lost L30 or L40; and as this was the greater part of his allowance for travelling expenses, it placed him ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton

... which he found some of them had heard. "Them there Zett'lins," said one old woman, "I almost shruk as I heerd the mucky varmints a-shovellin' on the coals—dare, dare! How my pore heart did beat!" And an onlooker, who had seen a bomb drop near a church, informed the visitor that it "fared to him like the body of the chach a-floatin' away—that it did and all! It made a clangin' like a covey of lorries with their innards broke loose." Another inhabitant said that he ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch

... amiably smiling blue eyes. It was a battle of one against an opponent who had no idea battle was intended. From the vantage ground of only partial understanding a pair of dark eyes looked on, smiling with the wisdom which is ever the claim of the onlooker. ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum

... the most amusing spectacles of to-day is the attitude of the American press toward the revolution. It is also a pathetic spectacle. It compels the onlooker to be aware of a distinct loss of pride in his species. Dogmatic utterance from the mouth of ignorance may make gods laugh, but it should make men weep. And the American editors (in the general instance) are so impressive about it! The old "divide-up," "men-are-not-born-free-and-equal," propositions ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London

... a great commotion; the children are restless, they neither work nor go in quest of materials. The onlooker gets an impression of a tired class, about to become disorderly. After a few minutes the most perfect order reigns once more; the children are promptly absorbed in work again; they have chosen ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori

... on the subject. Having spoken it, he gave his attention to the meal before him, and concluded it with a deliberate disregard for Kelly's depressed countenance that an onlooker ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell

... God!... Did people think it was amusing to be an onlooker of world-tragedy?... One of them remembered a lady of France with a small boy who had fled from Charleville, which was in flames and smoke. She was weak with hunger, with dirty and bedraggled skirts on her flight, and she had heard that her husband was in ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... Next, the young Bacon took up the study of law, and mastered that abstruse science. From that day to the end of his life he was daily in close contact with lawyers and judges; not as a casual onlooker in intervals between holding horses in front of a theatre, but as a practicing lawyer—a great and successful one, a renowned one, a Launcelot of the bar, the most formidable lance in the high brotherhood ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain

... and encouraging shouts occur, I think, as instinctive responses to relief from hunger, rescue from fear, gorgeous display, instinctive acts of strength and daring, victory, and other impressive instinctive behavior that is harmless to the onlooker. Similarly, frowns, hoots, and sneers seem bound as original responses to the observation of empty-handedness, deformity, physical meanness, pusillanimity, and defect. As in the case of all original tendencies, such behavior is early complicated and in the end much distorted, by training; but ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman

... fittingly inexpressive expression, (look into, look at the curves of, the blossom-like cavity of the opened mouth) is beautiful, but not altogether virile. The eyes, the facial lines which they gather into one, seem ready to follow the coming motion of the discus as those of an onlooker might be; [289] but that head does not really belong to the discobolus. To be assured of this you have but to compare with that version in the British Museum the most authentic of all derivations from the original, preserved till lately at the Palazzo Massimi in Rome. Here, the vigorous ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... many things, much depends upon the way that illusions are cherished. When this dramatic sense is bestowed upon a heavy-handed, imperceptive, egotistical person, it becomes a terrible affliction to other people, unless indeed the onlooker possesses the humorous spectatorial curiosity; when it becomes a matter of delight to find a person behaving characteristically, striking the hour punctually, and being, as Mr. Bennet thought of Mr. Collins, fully as absurd as one had hoped. It then ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson

... of her war work by an onlooker, and a slight sketch of Miss Macnaughtan's character, may form an appropriate conclusion ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan

... most;" and how frantically they cheer him! He is a priest surrounded by devotees."[31113] In the Jacobin club, when he delivers his "amphigory," there are sobs of emotion, "outcries and stamping of feet almost making the house tumble."[31114] An onlooker who shows no emotion is greeted with murmurs and obliged to slip out, like a heretic that has strayed into a church on the elevation of the Host.—The faster the revolutionary thunderbolts fall on other heads, so does Robespierre mount higher and higher in glory and ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... whereon the pieces move diversely: the knights leaping sidewise, and the bishops darting obliquely, and the rooks charging straightforward, and the pawns laboriously hobbling from square to square, each at the player's will. There is no discernible order, all to the onlooker is manifestly in confusion: but to the player there is a meaning in the disposition ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell

... there unconsciously crooning her song, strong and unquestioned at the centre of her own universe. And Gudrun felt herself outside. Always this desolating, agonised feeling, that she was outside of life, an onlooker, whilst Ursula was a partaker, caused Gudrun to suffer from a sense of her own negation, and made her, that she must always demand the other to be aware of her, to be in ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... very interesting and pretty, is quite mirth-provoking to the onlooker, especially if indulged in by a number of swimmers. Unlike the vast majority of tricks performed in the water, it does not call for ability to float well, the only qualification being that one must be a ...
— Swimming Scientifically Taught - A Practical Manual for Young and Old • Frank Eugen Dalton and Louis C. Dalton

... big nugget, fist-size, yellow as no gold any onlooker had ever seen. Shunk Wilson gasped. Half a dozen, catching one glimpse, made a break for the door. They reached it at the same moment, and, with cursing and scuffling, jammed and pivoted through. The judge emptied the contents ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London

... you persist that a command of the English language is part of our inheritance, one can only reply that beauty is almost always dumb. Male beauty in association with female beauty breeds in the onlooker a sense of fear. Often have I seen them—Helen and Jimmy—and likened them to ships adrift, and feared for my own little craft. Or again, have you ever watched fine collie dogs couchant at twenty yards' distance? As she passed him his cup there ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... and swollen, and lashing restlessly from side to side, each muscle tense and strung, and an undulating movement perceptible like the motions of a huge snake, a crouching tiger at bay is a sight that strikes a certain chill to the heart of the onlooker. When he bounds forward, with a roar that reverberates among the mazy labyrinths of the interminable jungle, he tests the steadiest nerve and almost ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis

... with a hat drawn over his face and with a finger laid on his lip, as though he had cause to be silent, or to wish others so. The man had a forked beard and a kind of secret smile, as if he mocked the onlooker; and he seemed unpleasantly natural to the boy, as though he divined his thought. He was half minded to put the stone back; but the secrecy of the thing pleased him. Moreover as he held the stone to ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson

... back to the upper air presently, followed by a cheer from the mine force below. The miners had watched Steering perform one of those supernatural feats of strength and endurance that an onlooker can never explain afterward. Usually the performer knows that the thing was a matter of ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young

... supporters in the House; with evasions, silences, sneers, angry refusals, hasty promises given to-day (when Ministers were frightened) and broken to-morrow; with a whole series of discreditable tongue-in-the-cheek tricks of Parliamentary procedure; till at last the onlooker must have wondered at and felt grateful for our British phlegm; surprised that so little actual harm was done (except to the bodies of the Suffragists), that no Home Secretary or Police Inspector or magistrate, no flippant talker-out of would-be-serious Franchise Bills was assassinated, ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston

... had his adversary's measure to a fraction. He was dealing with him almost as he chose, and the onlooker knew that it could only be moments before the other finally "squealed," and dropped the murderous ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum

... every one's tired and cold." Her voice was soothing, very low. But the gentle tones carried their message to every one there. The mortal cleverness of such an appeal struck Duncan sharply, as an onlooker. ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris

... in a pensive mood. The last evening of the voyage was being celebrated with a dance on deck, but Edwardes, who had remained somewhat of a recluse during the passage over, was content to play the part of the onlooker. ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck

... it swung along at the good old regular gait, one excited onlooker hurled a well-filled wallet—the only sign left him for ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock

... quarter-deck tramp, backwards and forwards beneath the window on the clean pavement of the High Street, which broadened out to the harbour. He went down to meet the boats, where he was ever a welcome onlooker, and he never came back without fish for which no payment ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman

... spectator is embraced in the common-sense essential of being an onlooker and nothing more. Silence is golden. Advice and comment, should you profess to know anything about the game, are brazen. Be considerate; do not interfere with the comfort of the players. As at billiards, the stroke should be made in ...
— The Complete Bachelor - Manners for Men • Walter Germain

... heavy shell fire, dog-tired, without sleep or food, could without adequate artillery preparation perform a feat which later required a Division of fresh troops, after one of the most carefully planned and destructive bombardments at that time known? The Brigade could but have failed, and to the onlooker it seemed a tragic blunder, but to those who have read the pathetic story of a tragic day, the title given by "The Student in Arms" of "The Honour of the Brigade" alone provides the excuse for an operation which ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman

... whole province that is thus grasped by the eye, sometimes in the summer haze but a few miles; always this scenery inspires the onlooker with a sense of completion and of repose, and at the same time, I think, with ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc

... does not make mistakes does not do anything. He is an onlooker and a sneerer. Mein Fraulein does much, and the mistakes not yet are many. The good God is helping her, and He in her heart puts wonder as to why things be as they be, and love that she may try them to better ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher

... being merely an onlooker, he ran up to Nevada, where the new gold-mining boom was fairly started—"just to try a flutter," as he phrased it to himself. The flutter on the Tonopah Stock Exchange lasted just ten days, during which time his smashing, wild-bull game played ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London

... along. It was not very significant, perhaps, or it would not have seemed so to the casual onlooker, but life is measured by its inward rather than its outward processes, and Kate felt herself being enriched by ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie

... had studied them in two American universities, under Sidney Webb in London, and in four universities of Germany. I found that I had no fundamentals which could be called good tools with which to begin my analysis of this riot. And I felt myself merely a conventional if astonished onlooker before the theoretically abnormal but manifestly natural emotional activity which swept over California. After what must have been a most usual intellectual cycle of, first, helplessness, then conventional cataloguing, some rationalizing, some moralizing, and an extensive feeling ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker

... in the grand stand and died breathlessly away. McWilliams was setting a pace it would take a rare expert to equal. He was a trick rider, and all the spectacular feats that appealed to the onlooker were his. While his horse was wildly pitching, he drank a bottle of pop and tossed the bottle away. With the reins in his teeth he slipped off his coat and vest, and concluded a splendid exhibition of skill by riding with his feet out of the stirrups. He had been smoking a cigar when he mounted. ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine

... why she moves!" marveled an onlooker. "That tug looks like a water bug 'itched ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling

... here before the eyes of all Spruce Beach? And have it made perfectly plain to every onlooker that I am not welcome here?" cried the woman ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Spies - Dodging the Sharks of the Deep • Victor G. Durham

... at varying speeds, while the mechanics hold back the machine. This operation alone took three or four minutes, and all that the pilot proposed to do was to circle the aerodrome two or three times. An onlooker asked a mechanic if there were anything wrong with that particular machine. "No!" was the reply; "but our governor's very ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton

... unfortunate in being placed before the public in a moment of spiritual undress. Everybody is ridiculous and preposterous every day, only the public does not see it, and therefore the acts are not ridiculous and preposterous. The conduct of the lovers is always absurd to the onlooker, but the onlooker has no business to look on—he is a false note in a beautiful symphony, and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard

... morning, in the plentitude of his success, lounging in a wicker chair on the shady lawn of the Hotel de l'Europe. He wore white buckskin shoes—I begin with these as they were the first point of his person to attract the notice of the onlooker—lilac silk socks, a white flannel suit with a zig-zag black stripe, a violet tie secured by a sapphire and diamond pin, and a rakish panama hat. On his knees lay the Matin; the fingers of his left hand held ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke

... nevertheless. Mr. Moore has written novels that are full of faults. These faults have been exposed mercilessly, for Mr. Moore has made many enemies. But he has always possessed an artistic conscience and an immense courage. He answered his critics briskly enough at the time, but an onlooker of common sagacity could perceive that the really convincing answer was held in reserve—that, as they say in America, Mr. Moore "allowed" he was going to write a big novel one of these days, and meanwhile we had better hold ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... adopt other methods of making the paper known to the public. Some make a point of earning a copy to read in the street car or train whenever possible. Anyone who tries this will find many and many a pair of eyes diverted to the picture or the appearance of a publication with which the onlooker is not familiar. Ardent partisans of the Journal always mention it in reports and speeches at meetings and even in debates. They are usually persons who have been converted to the principle of equal suffrage by a stray copy of the Journal ...
— The Torch Bearer - A Look Forward and Back at the Woman's Journal, the Organ of the - Woman's Movement • Agnes E. Ryan

... was serene, almost happy, as though there were no cares in his life. All our party stared at him with greedy curiosity. In every misfortune of one's neighbour there is always something cheering for an onlooker—whoever he may be. Our ladies gazed in silence, their companions distinguished themselves by their wit and their superb equanimity. One observed that his was the best way out of it, and that the boy could not have hit upon anything more sensible; another ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... by Kolberg to serve as his second, and the former readily agreed to this; for on the one hand he liked to play the role of an onlooker in such an affair, and on the other he deemed it prudent to put Kolberg under a new obligation; all the more as the repaying of his loans seemed as ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg

... much did the persecution of this poor man affect her, that an onlooker would have been compelled to seek the cause in some yet deeper sympathy than that commonly felt for the oppressed, even by women. And such a sympathy existed, strange as it may seem, between the beautiful girl (for many called her a ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald

... The onlooker might have feigned ends and objects of forethought, as we do in the case of the water that seeks its own level, or in that of the vacuum which nature abhors. But the particles of matter would have remained unconscious of their collocation, ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana

... Michael's head. Nor had Michael thought about the man at all, much less attempted any analysis of him. Something had been wrong with that hand—the perfunctory way in which it had touched him under a show of heartiness that could well deceive the onlooker. The feel of it had not been right. There had been no warmth in it, no heart, no communication of genuine good approach from the brain and the soul of the man of which it was the telegraphic tentacle and transmitter. In short, the ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London

... in mock protest. "I am a quiet onlooker at the game. I am amused, naturally. You must understand," he said to Lily, "that this is a matter of a principle with your father. He believes that he should serve. My whole contention is that the people don't want to be ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... cannot be said that your Majesty is involved in this lack of the success we all hoped for. Though you are nominally the chief Commander of our Armies it is known that in the actual operations your Majesty has played the modest part of an onlooker rather than a director. Formerly, that is before the breaking out of the War, you were a great planner of plans, and it was understood that, in case of war, you would lead your armies in the field and prove that a Hohenzollern can do anything. But now you have recognised your ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 3, 1916 • Various

... her with "Bunnie" hugs, and then from the shelter of her arms cast quick, questioning glances across the fireplace. There was in their glance a keenness, a curiosity, almost amounting to awe, which would at once have arrested the attention of an onlooker. It was not in the least the smiling glance of recognition which is accorded to a member of the household on meeting again after one of the short separations of the day; it resembled far more the half-nervous, half-pleasurable shrinking from an introduction to a stranger, about whom was ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey

... reckoned time, exchanged confidences, and arranged experiences, informed him that the night was yet young, and that his friend would not yet be arrived. He sat there so still and so long, that if it had not been for his resolute head and the blunt spires of his ears, he would have appeared to an onlooker below as no more than a humpy finial on an otherwise regularly built wall. Now and again the last inch of his tail twitched slightly, like an independent member, ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson

... continuous stream of men and horses, of guns and ambulances, passed through the streets to their respective camping grounds. These well fagged troops by their fitness, even more than by their numbers, astonished many an onlooker who was by no means a "raw Kaffir"; and one old Dutchman expressed the thought of many minds when he said, "You seem able to turn out soldiers by machinery, ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry

... vanity then which emerges as the most distinct of national traits, a vanity so egregious, so childish, so grotesque, that the onlooker is astounded. The Andalusians have a passion for gorgeous raiment and for jewellery. They must see themselves continually in the brightest light, standing for ever on some alpine eminence of vice or virtue, in full ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham

... the picture. With the pleasure of recognition he notes what the artist has here represented, and he is interested in the situation. This is a peasant, and he is sowing his grain. So the onlooker stands and watches the peasant in his movement, and he thinks about the sower, recalling any sower he may have read of or seen or known, his own sower rather than the one that Millet has seen and would show to him. This man's ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes

... typical rationalists in much the same way as 'freedom of the press' might affect a veteran official in the russian bureau of censorship; or as 'simplified spelling' might affect an elderly schoolmistress. It affects him as the swarm of protestant sects affects a papist onlooker. It appears as backboneless and devoid of principle as 'opportunism' in politics appears to an old-fashioned french legitimist, or to a fanatical believer in the divine right of ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James

... head, for a swift instant I could see the light of day through its emerald body; then down would go my head, and I would clutch the board with all my strength. Then would come the blow, and to the onlooker on shore I would be blotted out. In reality the board and I have passed through the crest and emerged in the respite of the other side. I should not recommend those smashing blows to an invalid or delicate person. There is weight behind them, and the impact of the driven water is like ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London

... man who had called himself Andy, lying now at ease upon his bed of leaves, one great arm underneath his head, the injured hand nursed upon his broad breast. Those big eyes which had so appalled Kerry upon a first view yesterday were closed. The onlooker noted with a sort of wonder how sumptuous were the fringes of their curtains, long and purple—black, like the thick, arched brows above. To speak truly, Kerry, although he was a respectable member of the police force, had ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden

... child with him!" another sharp-eyed onlooker shouted exultantly; for although they knew nothing of the tie that bound the stranger to the crippled girl he had gone to save, they could appreciate the heroism at its true value, and were ready to honor the other for ...
— Jack Winters' Baseball Team - Or, The Rivals of the Diamond • Mark Overton

... government lacked energy and perseverance. So all things just remained on the old footing; the piratic fleet was the only considerable naval power in the Mediterranean; the capture of men was the only trade that flourished there. The Roman government was an onlooker; but the Roman merchants, as the best customers in the slave market, kept up an active and friendly traffic with the pirate captains, as the most important wholesale dealers in that commodity, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... scene Billy Falstar had so luridly described was enacted again and again, until he felt as if he, Jude, had been the onlooker. ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock

... feet, wiping his brow and steadying himself against the bench with a shaking hand; then he walked quietly to the door and went out. Apparently, I was not the only onlooker who had been interested in his doings, for, as the door swung to after him, Superintendent Miller rose from his seat and went out ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman

... orders; I saw men leap out of cover for the mere sake of defiance, and fall shot through and smashed by a score of bullets. I saw a number of Bulgarians in the hands of the surgeon, several quite frightfully wounded, refuse chloroform merely to impress the English onlooker, some of their injuries I could scarcely endure to see, and I watched a line of infantry men go on up a hill and keep on quite manifestly cheerful with men dropping out and wriggling, and men dropping out and lying still until ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells

... have stood so much as a placid onlooker that I have not had the hardihood even to suggest how people so much more experienced and wise in those things than I should work out the details even of those plans with which I have had the honour ...
— Random Reminiscences of Men and Events • John D. Rockefeller

... or not, I elected for the easier course. I think I would act similarly if placed in the like predicament tomorrow or next day. After all, there is nothing so very remarkable in a lady taking a morning swim that an involuntary onlooker should be shocked or scandalized by it. You and I were strangers to each other. Were we friends, we might have ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy

... the view an honest onlooker will take of our position. A common-sense Nonconformist minister, wishing to teach his people and to get at facts, studies the English Prayer Book. This is his conclusion: "Free Churchmen," he writes, "dissent from much of the teaching of the Book of Common Prayer. In ...
— The Church: Her Books and Her Sacraments • E. E. Holmes

... remnant of aristocratic traditions, almost a pauper, but possessing one attribute of nobility,—absolute self-control. When his house burned he stood with his ankles crossed, leaning on his cane, the only onlooker who was not excited. For months I imitated that pose, using sticks and rakes and fork handles. The result was that when I taught school, a scream, a broken desk, or unusual noise outside reminded me of my old aristocrat in time to ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen

... month of the session the floor of the House began steadily to grow more and more tumultuous. To an unpolitical onlooker, leaning over the gallery rail, it was often an incomprehensible Bedlam, or perhaps one might have been reminded of an ant-heap by the hurry-and-scurry and life-and-death haste in a hundred directions at once, quite without any distinguishable ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington

... with those who suffer for the truth. And we are sometimes too apt to count all that love of common fairness, and that hatred of foul play, as a sure sign of some sympathy with the hated truth itself. When an onlooker says 'Don't revile,' we are too ready to set down that expression of civility as at least the first beginning of true religion. But the religion of Jesus Christ cuts far deeper into the heart of man than to the dividing asunder of justice and injustice, ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte

... shyly to a fat old lady. Her gesture was unmistakable. The woman rummaged in her chain pocket-book and dropped a silver quarter into Tania's outstretched hands. The next onlooker was more generous. Tania's eyes shone as she felt the size and weight of a ...
— Madge Morton's Victory • Amy D.V. Chalmers

... it canned milk? 'Cause if it was you don't need to worry. I've got about a dozen cans out there on the toboggan. Wait and I'll get it." He turned to the Indian who had been a silent onlooker. "Come on, Joe, crawl into your outfit. While I get the grub and blankets off the toboggans, you rustle the wood and water—and go kind of heavy on the wood, 'cause, believe me, there ain't any thermometer going to tell us how ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx

... on the subject of Dunaghee, that was given to her in a broad Scottish dialect. The whole scene, which an instant before had impressed her as one of beauty and peace, suddenly focussed itself round the dark figure, and grew sinister in its aspect. At that moment, nothing would have persuaded the onlooker that the hastening figure was ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird

... overboard, in a lump—sticks and all—blame me if I didn't.' 'That's what I was thinking to myself,' would answer wearily another battered and bandaged scarecrow. And, mind, these were men without the drilled-in habit of obedience. To an onlooker they would be a lot of profane scallywags without a redeeming point. What made them do it—what made them obey me when I, thinking consciously how fine it was, made them drop the bunt of the foresail ...
— Youth • Joseph Conrad

... difficult than on the frontier, and more elemental. I was present, in the first year of the war, in a house where the King and Queen of the Belgians were guests, where great generals and great statesmen had gathered on great and earnest and desperate business. I was only an onlooker, and I noticed what every one else was too absorbed to see. As the evening progressed, I realized that pomp and ceremony had died with the youth of France. King, generals, statesmen met as human men pitting their wits against one another, desperately struggling ...
— The Log-Cabin Lady, An Anonymous Autobiography • Unknown

... morning, she looked like a woman who had gone through all the trials of rearing a young family on insufficient means. Now she was here she meant to have it out with Eve. She was going to abandon her role of sympathetic onlooker. She was going to delve below the surface, and learn the reason of ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum

... and Monte grubbed hungrily for every look she vouchsafed him, for every word she tossed him. She had been more than ordinarily vivacious, spurred on partly by Beatrice and partly by Peter. Monte had felt himself merely an onlooker. That, in fact, was all he was. That was all he had been ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett

... the man's motives, not without fair cause. They were, he thought, as plain to him as they were hidden from the girl. Bower counterfeited the genuine surprise on Helen's face with admirable skill; but, to the startled onlooker, peering beneath the actor's mask, his stagy artifice ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy

... visit he used to come often and entertain me with the news and gossip of the town. I have never met a more interesting man. He was an onlooker of life rather than an actor, an ironical cynic, chuckling with sardonic humour. The secret of his charm lay perhaps in a certain whimsical outlook and in an original turn ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine

... carrying on scandalous flirtations; till it becomes a happy thing, if the certain ruin she is bringing on her husband's head is cut short by the needful interference of Sir Cresswell Cresswell? There are cases in which tarring and feathering would soothe the moral sense of the right-minded onlooker. And even where things are not so bad as in the case of which we have been thinking, it remains the social curse of this age, that people with a few hundreds a year determinedly act in various respects as if ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd

... of 1902, Lane was nominated as the Democratic and Non-Partisan candidate for Governor of California. At the Democratic Convention at Sacramento, an onlooker described the excitement among the delegates before a selection was made, "Throughout the night until late afternoon of the second day, without any clear solution of the problem, came the roll-call of the counties, then a wild stampede for the young City and County Attorney of San Francisco, ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane

... performance; it is, of course, difficult to realize that the points at which people are important to us are not those at which they are important to themselves. However I made progress at last. The poor man's was a sad case; the sadder because only with constant effort could the onlooker keep its sadness disengaged from its absurdity, and remember that unattractiveness does not exclude misery. The wife in a marriage of interest is the spoiled child of romancers; scarcely any is rude ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope

... about worldly vanities. He told me of the Emperor's new projects. I began to criticize them, but remembered my rules and my benefactor's words—that a true Freemason should be a zealous worker for the state when his aid is required and a quiet onlooker when not called on to assist. My tongue is my enemy. Brothers G. V. and O. visited me and we had a preliminary talk about the reception of a new Brother. They laid on me the duty of Rhetor. I feel myself weak ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... insisted, "and at the same time I shall ask Mr. Pierson to offer himself for personal search if Captain Masterson yet retains suspicion of his honesty;" she glanced towards Pierson, who smiled slightly, and bowed without speaking. Then she turned to Delaven, who had been a surprised onlooker of ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan

... thoroughly, and young soldiers had gone through it in drill a hundred times, the real thing was somehow different. Men stumbled over each other and forgot what to do first. Corporals swore and threatened; but to an onlooker the work of packing would have seemed to go by magic. At the end of the ten minutes the barrack-yard was full of men lined up, ready for marching, and soldiers of all nations thanked their gods for finding that the cartridges served out to them from the magazine were not blank ones. ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson

... face lit up with a quick appreciation, and the flash of his eyes as he looked at her would have told any onlooker that he felt here was a girl in a thousand, a girl with an angel spirit, if ever such a one walked ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill

... immediately made themselves clear. Firstly, he was viewing the world through literature—through works of fiction in some cases, through guide-books in more. Everything was a spectacle, with himself quite outside as an onlooker; and nothing was a spectacle until it had been ranged and appraised in print. Secondly, if he was outside of things, America was still farther outside; it existed as a remote province not yet drawn into the activities and interests of the "world." He ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller

... of my time in this college that I intend to become a priest. Marry and bring up children, or enter the Church! There is nothing between, so you say, having regard for my Catholicism. But there is an intermediate state, the onlooker. However strange it may seem to you, I do assure you that no man in the world has less vocation for the priesthood than I. I am merely an onlooker, the world is my ...
— Celibates • George Moore

... are open, but they see only that which the soul is pleased to notice on its way. It will climb like a squirrel to the roof, walk along narrow ridges at a giddy height. It will open windows and lean out over black depths, or play with keen-edged weapons as if they were toys. And the onlooker, in his waking senses, shudders at the sight, realising that it is the soul stealing ...
— The Song Of The Blood-Red Flower • Johannes Linnankoski

... couple became daily more marked. I was the onlooker of a very curious and clever game. Spiritualistic seances were held frequently, at which the Emperor and Empress assisted. In Petrograd the monk also continued the weekly receptions of his "disciples," chief among them being Madame Golovine and the Princess Paley. ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux

... An interested onlooker and in-listener at these boarding-house battles was Kedzie. By now she was weary of her present occupation—of course! She was tired of photographs of herself, especially as they were secured at the cost of long hours of ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes

... absorbed did he become in watching the dance. It was a wonderful performance, sensuous and weirdly unusual. He had never seen a dance exactly like it before. The violin notes sounded like actual words, and the dancer answered them with responsive movements of her limbs, so that without speech the onlooker saw a love-drama enacted before his eyes. Chaldea—so he interpreted the dance—swayed gracefully from the hips, without moving her feet, in the style of a Nautch girl. She was waiting for some one, since to right and left she swung with a delicate hand curved behind her ear. ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume

... master and myself as we walked away from the crowded pavement, the onlooker surely suspected us of intoxication. I felt that the falling shades of evening were sympathetically drunk with God. When darkness recovered from its nightly swoon, I faced the new morning bereft of my ecstatic mood. But ever enshrined ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda

... the pursuer's presence; always he could see the picture of Spurling's uplifted face and the pleading that was in his eyes as the assailant, with his back turned towards the onlooker, poised the axe above his head. That he might not share that fate he broke away into the greyness, tripping over snow ridges, falling into drifts, and bruising his body against the trunks of trees in the madness of his flight. His huskies added to ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson

... existence; to the relatives and friends it is at once the consummation of a series of happenings that have absorbed their anxious and amused attention, and the point of departure for a new phase of existence offering infinite possibilities in the way of speculation. But even for the casual onlooker a wedding furnishes a pleasant arrest of the ordinary course of life, and lets in upon the dull grey of the commonplace certain gleams of glory from the golden days of glowing youth, or from beyond the mysterious planes of experience ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor

... a cheap and melodramatic bit of acting, and any unprejudiced onlooker must have seen the agony in her face, but Joyselle was blinded by his own pain and fled from the room ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten

... from the corner trolley, and were hovering about the door self-assertively. It was most apparent to an onlooker that this was a good opportunity for an introduction, but the two young people were entirely oblivious. The man touched his hat gravely, a look of great admiration in his eyes, and said, "Good night" like a benediction. ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill

... this simple-minded old man was more precious to Mr. Tryan than any mere onlooker could have imagined. To persons possessing a great deal of that facile psychology which prejudges individuals by means of formulae, and casts them, without further trouble, into duly lettered pigeon-holes, the Evangelical curate might seem to be doing simply what all other men like to do—carrying ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot

... of the manufacturing population of Ulster in the welfare of the Roman Catholic agricultural majority is not merely that of an onlooker, nor even that of the other parts of the United Kingdom, but something more. It is obvious that the internal trade of the country depends mainly upon the demand of the rural population for the output of the ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett

... to take in the details that I have described before I was enveloped in the folds of the fog. I mean this quite literally, for I am firmly convinced that an onlooker from behind would have seen the grey masses fold in like a sheet when I drove against them. It must have looked as if a driver were driving against a canvas moving in a slight breeze—canvas light and loose enough to be held in place by the resistance of the ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove

... mornin' Dave an' me an' these yere aliens lines out for the hills. They've got ponies, an' wagons, an' camp- outfit to that extent a casooal onlooker might think they aims to be ...
— Wolfville • Alfred Henry Lewis

... low-hung sky blazed with stars, and great white owls went flapping silently away before us.—I am riding in a long sleigh to the north beneath a wondrous moon to witness a performance of Lord Dundreary at the Barker school-house.—I am a neglected onlooker at a Christmas tree at Burr Oak. I am spelled down at the Shehan school—and through all these scenes runs a belief that I am leaving the district never to return to it, a conviction which lends to every experience a peculiar ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... first of Deveny's intimates to leave the group. His face sullen, his eyes venomous, he walked across the street to the First Chance, and stood in the doorway, beside Balleau, who had been an interested onlooker. ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer

... the first line again, so suddenly that an onlooker might have thought that everyone of them had been shot, and as Dennis found himself in a bed of stinging nettles close to the ruins of a cottage, with the corporal and the commandant on either side of him, he caught ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry

... appeal would not prevent me mining the coal on the property, pending the hearing of the case in the higher court. Judge Lindman has appointed a receiver, who is bonded; and the work is to proceed under his direction. I am here merely as an onlooker." ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer

... the players, pointing to his glass of whiskey standing at his elbow, and turning to an onlooker, said, "Just run along the deck and see if any ice has come aboard: I would like some for this." Amid the general laughter at what we thought was his imagination,—only too realistic, alas! for when he spoke the forward deck was covered with ice that had tumbled ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley

... the American onlooker, however, accustomed to flaming extras and the plethoric discussion in public of the most intimate affairs, state and personal, to witness the acquiescence of emotional Italians in this complete obscurity about their fate and that of their children ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick

... church at New Utrecht. When a sufficient number of Whig prisoners were collected there they would be marched under guard to a prison ship. One old Whig named Smith, while being conducted to his destination, appealed to an onlooker, a Tory of his acquaintance, to intercede for him. The cold reply of his neighbor was, "Ah, John, you've been a great rebel!" Smith turned to another of his acquaintances named McEvers, and said to him, "McEvers, its hard for an old man like me to have to go to a prison! ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge

... bearded man, perhaps the watchman of the closed theatre, passed along the sidewalk, going east. It was Trencher's impression that the man had gone on by without halting. However, on that point he could not be sure. What the onlooker had seen—if indeed there were an onlooker—could have been only this: Two men, one fairly tall and dressed in a sprightly fashion, one short and dark, engaged in a vehement but whispered quarrel there in the cloaking shadow close up to the locked double doors of the Jollity; a sudden ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb

... by a single child. He was the chosen "fox" of another primary room, and had the fair colouring and sturdy frame which matched his Swedish name. He was naturally dramatic. It was easy to see that he instinctively visualised everything, and this he did so strongly that he suggested to the onlooker every ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant

... from the East had stopped to change tires in a desolate region of the far South. "I suppose," he remarked to a native onlooker, "that even in these isolated parts the bare necessities of life have risen tremendously ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous

... first shot," thought the inspector delightedly, as he moved away so as not to attract the attention of any chance onlooker. ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts

... coronation ceremony took place in Westminster Abbey. Afterward the Queen made a royal progress and was greeted by immense crowds of her people with the utmost loyalty and enthusiasm. In her journal she described it as the proudest day of her life. Mrs Jamieson, an onlooker, wrote of ...
— Queen Victoria • E. Gordon Browne

... come straight from insult and mockery in another court, and that after a night of mental agony. Observe how completely the relative position of judge and Prisoner are reversed, at least, to the eyes of the onlooker. Jesus calmly questions Pilate, calmly tells him of the limit of his power, and calmly claims the kinship for himself—there of all places—in the Roman governor's residence, speaking to this governor himself, knowing that it ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.

... out of harrowing earthquakes, robberies, murders or other dreadful spectacles, which were originally accompanied on the part of the onlooker by trembling, perspiration and palpitation of the heart, when lived over again in memory, are again accompanied by all these bodily activities. Your memory of a hairbreadth escape will bring to your cheek the pallor that marked it ...
— The Trained Memory • Warren Hilton

... luckily, the Order has not been extended to journalists. Regarding it, however, from the standpoint of the onlooker, we think that the L. G. B. has gone ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 21, 1914 • Various

... Take, then, your pleasure as you may be severally minded; but, if you take my advice, you will find pastime for the hot hours before us, not in play, in which the loser must needs be vexed, and neither the winner nor the onlooker much the better pleased, but in telling of stories, in which the invention of one may afford solace to all the company of his hearers. You will not each have told a story before the sun will be low, and ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio

... gazed upon the face of death. The gentle dignity and peace of the once wild boy awed and thrilled the onlooker. He was dressed in his Continental uniform that was unsoiled by battle's breath, albeit, an ugly hole in the breast showed where the gallant blood ...
— Then Marched the Brave • Harriet T. Comstock

... a hive. Maurice Guest, who had come out among the first, lingered to watch a scene that was new to him, of which he was as yet an onlooker only. Here and there came a member of the orchestra; with violin-case or black-swathed wind-instrument in hand, he deftly threaded his way through the throng, bestowing, as he went, a hasty nod of greeting upon a colleague, a sweep of the hat on an obsequious pupil. ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson

... and immediate loss of the Garden of Eden. It might have been less of an enigma to old Lady Arabella, to whom the jigsaw puzzle of human motives and impulses was always a matter of absorbing interest, and who, as more or less an onlooker at life during the last thirty years, had become an adept in the art of fitting the pieces of the ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler

... an onlooker would have seemed interminable, the two men faced each other. Up from the street came the ring of a heavy hammer on a sweet-voiced anvil, as Jim Donovan, the blacksmith, sharpened anew the breaking ploughs which were battling ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge

... bargain. We venture, we lose or we win; only this is somewhat out of my line of work. Self-preservation is not theft; let us ease our conscience with this sophism . . . Ha! the ladder. Those twenty louis were well spent. This is droll, good heart. An onlooker would swear that this is an assignation. Eh well, Romeo was a sickly lover, and lopped about like a rose in a ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath

... Shockley from the hotel, and while McAlpin and Lefever inspected and discussed the horses—for the condition of which McAlpin, as foreman of Kitchen's barn, was responsible—Kate stood, listener and onlooker. Everything was new and interesting. Four horses champed impatiently under the arc-light swinging in the street, and looked quite fit. But the stage itself was a shock to her idea of a Western stage. Instead of the old-fashioned ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman

... though his store consists merely of samples like the outfit of a commercial traveler; yet a commercial traveler who knows his business can so arrange his samples on the table of his room in a hotel that they give the onlooker an idea of the vastness and wealth of the warehouses from which they ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr

... forth the loudest plaudits of approval from his associates, and his own exertion alone carried the game every time on the one side, and that so far as all I along to count three for their one. The hero's name soon ran round the circle, and when his brother Robert, who was an onlooker, learned who it was that was gaining so much applause, he came and stood close beside him all the time that the game lasted, always now and then putting in a cutting remark ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg



Words linked to "Onlooker" :   watcher, spectator, viewer, looker, witness



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