"Prodigious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... on one side with General Washington at the head, and the French on the other with Count Rochambeau (ro-shong-bo). The captive army, about seven thousand in number, with slow step, shouldered arms, and cased colors, marched between them. A prodigious crowd, anxious to see Cornwallis, had assembled, but the haughty general, vexed and mortified at his defeat, feigned illness, and sent his sword ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... mistress inadvertently drop a word in your praise, will immediately take alarm, and fearing your being more in favour than themselves, will seldom stick at trifles to prevent it, by pretending to take a prodigious liking to you, and poisoning your mind in such a manner as to destroy all your confidence, &c. in your employers; and if they do not immediately succeed in worrying you away, will take care you have no comfort while you stay: be most cautious of those who profess most: not only beware of ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... each of the states in the Union. When you have time, calculate how many miles of stone wall might be constructed with ninety-two million cubic feet of stone. It is only by comparison that we can comprehend the stupendous bulk of these magnificent monuments, and realize the prodigious amount of labor that ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... his father died. And immediately, his relations conspired against him, led by his maternal uncle. And they laid a plot, and seized him at night, and bound him when he was asleep: for they dared not attack him when he was awake, for fear of his courage and his prodigious strength. And they deliberated over him, as he lay bound, what they should do with him: and some of them were for putting him to death, then and there. But the prime minister, who was in the plot, persuaded them to let him live: saying to himself: In this ...
— An Essence Of The Dusk, 5th Edition • F. W. Bain
... York, if a Congressional majority should take a fancy to substitute for this power the combinations of their genius, however superior it may be supposed to be; if they imagined they could submit this prodigious mechanism to its supreme direction, unite all its resources in their own hands, and decide when, where, how, and on what conditions everything should be produced, transported, exchanged, and consumed? Ah! though there may be much suffering within your bounds, though ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... necessity to be in society.[2181] Their luxury, indeed, differs from ours. With the exception of a few princely establishments it is not great in the matter of country furniture; a display of this description is left to the financiers. "But it is prodigious in all things which can minister to the enjoyment of others, in horses, carriages, and in an open table, in accommodations given even to people not belonging to the house, in boxes at the play which are lent to friends, and lastly, in servants, much more numerous than nowadays." Through ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... vestibule into an inner court. Perhaps the strongest impression I got at Chambord came to me as I stood in this court. The woman who admitted me did not come with me; I was to find my guide somewhere else. The specialty of Chambord is its prodigious round towers. There are, I believe, no less than eight of them, placed at each angle of the inner and outer square of buildings; for the castle is in the form of a larger structure which encloses a smaller one. One of ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... a short, stout man, in drab-coloured breeches, and gaiters to match; a black coat and waistcoat; he wore a large watch-chain, with a prodigious bunch of seals, alternated by small keys and old-fashioned mourning-rings. His complexion was pale and sodden, and his hair short, dark, and sleek. The bookseller valued himself on a likeness to Buonaparte; ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... If any weare a Crosse, Feather or Glove Or such prodigious signes of a knit Faction, Table their names up; at our Court-gate plant Good strength to barre them out if once they swarme: Doe this upon ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... alone, she raised her clasped hands invoking the aid of the Sangre de Cristo, of the Virgin of Lluch, patron saint of the island, and of the powerful San Vicente Ferrer, who had wrought so many miracles when he ministered in Majorca—a final and prodigious saint, who might avert the monstrosity her master contemplated! Let a rock from the mountains fall and forever close the way to Valldemosa; let the carriage upset, and let Don Jaime be carried home on a stretcher by four men—anything rather than ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... strength, he delivered a discourse, pointing to the conclusion that Sir Edmondbury Godfrey had been sacrificed to the catholic conspiracy, and instigating his hearers to seek revenge. Sir Roger North tells us the crowd in and about the church was prodigious, "and so heated, that anything called papist, were it cat or dog, had probably gone to pieces in a moment. The catholics all kept close in their houses and lodgings, thinking it a good composition to ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... gazed upon their work. Fishing and the cleaning and cooking of their catch filled the morning; and if, indeed, the cleaning is something the mind would mercifully pass over, those chiefly concerned were satisfied and ate with prodigious appetite. ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... miserable grasses, with Centaurea calycitropes and solstitialis, were the principal plants I could find." A mineralogical examination of the rolled stones presents peculiar interest. In the Little Crau, the mouth of the Durance, are found prodigious numbers of green and crystalline rocks, granite and variolite brought down from the Alps of Briancon, but nine-tenths of the pebbles of the Great Crau are white quartz brought from the great chain ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... had what farmers call a long head; was excellent in working out the sum for himself; in arguing his case and convincing you fairly and firmly. Then it turned out that he was a great worker; had prodigious faculty of performance; worked easily. A good worker is so rare; everybody has some disabling quality. In a host of young men that start together and promise so many brilliant leaders for the next age, each fails on trial; one by bad health, one by conceit, ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... claim. There must be an agreement in writing clearly stating what proportion—a tenth, a third, or a half—the agent will be entitled to. The negotiation is a very delicate and difficult one, requiring prodigious presence of mind, and an amount of duplicity which would make the most astute diplomatist turn pale with envy. Occasionally, the heir suspects the truth, sneers at the proposition, and hurries off to claim the whole of the inheritance that belongs to him. ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... agility was to the last degree astonishing. He has leaped through a window on the stage, when pursued by the clown, full thirteen feet high. Whenever he was in the play-bills in Dublin, he attracted crowded houses. One night, when he had a prodigious leap to perform, the persons behind the scenes who were to have received him in a blanket, were not prepared in time, and of course he fell on the boards, and was miserably bruised. He then took a most ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... heir to the title and estates attaching to the earldom. He was bound to add that the demeanour of Mrs. Bloor and her sister Rosa Day in the witness-box, was such that, if the case were not of such prodigious importance, and if it had not been contradicted by all surrounding circumstances, their statement, which they had given with firmness and without hesitation, would have obtained credence. It was, however, ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... of the great writers; but in the world's literature he is at best but first among the lesser lights, and there is no sign that Matthew Arnold attributed to him a higher importance. Or take the case of Swift. The literary talents of this unhappy man were indeed prodigious: he performed feats to which we cannot say that any other would have been equal: he is as unique as Shakespeare,—though, of course, in a vastly lower way. But did he contribute one great thought or one grand and salutary imagination to the world's stock? Not to my knowledge. Did he shed light ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... Cyaneae Petrae, or Symplegades, were two rocks in the mouth of the Euxine Sea, said to meet together with prodigious violence, and crush the passing ships. ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... Mecca I met a Hoopoe of my acquaintance who told me so wonderful a tale of the marvelous Kingdom of Sheba in Arabia that I could not resist the temptation to visit that country of gold and precious stones. And there, indeed, I saw the most prodigious treasures; but best of all, O King, more glorious than gold, more precious than rare jewels, I saw Queen Balkis, ...
— The Curious Book of Birds • Abbie Farwell Brown
... be said of the characters of the pair of friends; but this one thing is precisely the hardest to make clear to ninety-nine readers out of a hundred in this forty-seventh year of the nineteenth century, perhaps by reason of the prodigious financial development brought about by the railway system. It is a little thing, and yet it is so much. It is a question, in fact, of giving an idea of the extreme sensitiveness of their natures. Let us borrow an illustration ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... a large building, most profusely illuminated with gas, and exhibiting prodigious colored placards having inscribed on them nothing but the name of Barrymore. The cab came suddenly to a standstill; and looking out to see what the obstacle might be, I discovered a huge concourse of men and women, drawn ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... bids by Gould's agents in the Gold Room were 165 for five millions or any part. We had a paper-weight at the transmitter (to speed it up), and by one o'clock reached the right quotation. The excitement was prodigious. New Street, as well as Broad Street, was jammed with excited people. I sat on the top of the Western Union telegraph booth to watch the surging, crazy crowd. One man came to the booth, grabbed a pencil, and attempted to write a message to Boston. The ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... (as we all feel) upon dread realities, how can you seriously thrill in sympathy with the spurious and fanciful sublimities of the classical poetry—with the nod of the Olympian Jove, or the seven-league strides of Neptune? Flying Childers had the most prodigious stride of any horse on record; and at Newmarket that is justly held to be a great merit; but it is hardly a qualification for a Pantheon. The parting of Hector and Andromache—that is tender, doubtless; but how many passages of far deeper, far diviner tenderness, are to be found in Chaucer! ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... all of her own. Yet Steve toiled to the limit of his endurance, and each day, at sundown, flung himself upon his blanket, spread beneath the stars, dog-tired, fairly trembling with weariness. But he soon developed a prodigious appetite, and, after the first few weeks, slept each night like a dead ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... little. The hair on his temple was beginning to turn grey and his sallow cheeks were thinner. But he was the same hairy unkempt creature of prodigious finger nails and disreputable garments, still full of strange oaths and picturesque fancy, and still smoking his pipe ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... this feeling rests. Her work may have no immediate or present influence on the states of her own country that are now unhappily under the curse, and may indeed for a time aggravate its horrors; but it is a prodigious accession to the constantly accumulating mass of views and evidence, which by reason of its force must finally prevail." [Cheers.] The Lord Provost proceeded to say, that they had now assembled chiefly to do honor ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... in the wheel for so vast a change as war dethroned, viz., that you see no cause, though you should travel round the whole horizon, adequate to so prodigious an effect. What could do it? Why, Christianity could do it. Aye, true; but man disarms Christianity. And no mock Christianity, no lip homage ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... publisher credibly informs me that it has not yet appeared—I beg and entreat the public to state which it likes best, the life of Abershaw, or that of Sell, for which latter work I am informed that during the last few months there has been a prodigious demand. My old friend, however, after talking of Abershaw, would frequently add that, good rider as Abershaw certainly was, he was decidedly inferior to Richard Ferguson, generally called Galloping Dick, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... King's wish that the grounds of the little "porcelain house" at Trianon be chosen as the scene of the second fete, which took place a week later. In an open-air enclosure, decorated by "a prodigious quantity of flowers," the guests listened to the "Eglogue de Versailles," composed for the occasion by Lully, leader of the Petits-Violons, Louis' favorite Court orchestra. Afterwards all the nobles and their fair companions returned to sup at Versailles in a wood where the Basin of the ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... cherubs was crying in every variety of vocal key. Every one of their affectionate parents was talking at the top of her voice. Every one of their little elder brothers was screaming, squabbling, and tumbling down in the passage with prodigious energy and spirit. The mothers of England—and they only—can imagine the deafening and composite character of the noise which this large family party produced. ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... assigned him was prodigious. He was invested with power almost absolute, not merely over the peninsula which now retains the name of Florida, but over all North America, from Labrador to Mexico; for this was the Florida of the old Spanish geographers, and the Florida designated in the commission ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... (who favours the juster side, and is always ready for the support of those, who approach so near his own divinity; sacred and anointed heads) could have turned the fortune of the battle to the royal side: it was prodigious to consider the unequal numbers, and the advantage all on the Prince's part; it was miraculous to behold the order on his side, and surprise on the other, which of itself had been sufficient to have confounded them; yet notwithstanding all this unpreparedness ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... worked the very souls out of his sailors. The rumors that he frightfully abused them were not current, however, until he took the Sea Witch and showed the world the fastest ship under canvas. Low in the water, with black hull and gilded figurehead, she seemed too small to support her prodigious cloud of sail. For her there were to be no leisurely voyages with Captain Bob Waterman on the quarter-deck. Home from Canton she sped in seventy-seven days and then in seventy-nine—records which were ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... doing most of the complaining are not deliberately striving to sabotage the national war effort. They are laboring under the delusion that the time is past when we must make prodigious sacrifices—that the war is already won and we can begin to slacken off. But the dangerous folly of that point of view can be measured by the distance that separates our troops from their ultimate objectives ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... In that prodigious monument of learning and labor, Mr. Fleay's Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama, the common attribution of these two plays to Heywood is impeached on the aesthetic score that "they are far better than his other early work." I have carefully endeavored ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... last despising the danger, precipitated themselves into the waves to receive us in their arms. We then saw a spectacle that made us shudder. We had already doubled two ranges of breakers; but those which we had still to cross raised their foaming waves to a prodigious height, then sunk with a hollow and monstrous sound, sweeping along a long line of the coast. Our boat sometimes greatly elevated, and sometimes ingulfed between the waves, seemed, at the moment, of utter ruin. ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... as he was concerned. It was broken at length by the following symphony of sounds—an elderly man's voice roaring, a woman's voice uttering a considerable number of very powerful screams on a rather low but still resounding note, a loud thump, a crash of glass, a prodigious clattering, as of utensils made in some noisy material falling from a height and rolling vigorously in innumerable directions, two or three bangs of doors, and the peculiar patter of rather large and flat feet, unaccustomed to any rapid exercise, moving ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... of an isosceles triangle. The broken place in the iron plates was so perfectly defined that it could not have been more neatly done by a punch. It was clear, then, that the instrument producing the perforation was not of a common stamp and, after having been driven with prodigious strength, and piercing an iron plate 1 3/8 inches thick, had withdrawn itself by a ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... called her his "little friend." There was scarcely a concert of merit that she did not attend or a musician of mark whose playing she did not know, and, though fastidiousness saved her from squirming in adoration round the feet of those prodigious performers, she perched them all on pedestals, men and women alike, and now and then met them at her aunt's ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... February 9. His situation was one of unprecedented gloom. The day before he had reported that his troops, who had been in line of battle for two days at Hatcher's Run, exposed to the bad winter weather, had been without meat for three days. A prodigious effort was made, and the danger of starvation for the moment averted, but no permanent improvement resulted. The armies of the Union were closing in from every point of the compass. Grant was every day pushing his formidable left wing nearer the only roads by which Lee could ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... a prodigious frown, Billy ignored the interruption, though he took advantage of her suddenly upright position to encircle her neatly with a barrel hoop, as if she were the iron peg in a game of quoits—"enables me to put the fact before you in a few short, sharp, well-chosen ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... leads has aroused her. She is no longer the impassive Silence; she has found her fire. I hear of her as the charm of a brilliant court, as the soul of a nation of intrigue. Of her beauty one does not speak, but her talent is called prodigious. What impels me to ask the idle question, If it were well to save her life for this? Undoubtedly she fills a station which, in that empire, must be the summit of a woman's ambition. Delphine's Liberty was not a principle, but a dissatisfaction. The Baroness Stahl is vehement, is ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... ragged; but as the tide rises, and the waves begin to wash over it, the coral worms protrude themselves from holes which were before invisible. These animals are of a great variety of shapes and sizes, and in such prodigious numbers, that, in a short time, the whole surface of the rock appears to be alive and in motion. The most common worm is in the form of a star, with arms from four to six inches long, which are moved about with a rapid motion in all directions, probably to catch food. Others are so sluggish, that ...
— Account of a Voyage of Discovery - to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great Loo-Choo Island • Captain Basil Hall
... retired, was worth about a hundred thousand dollars. If he had been a lover of money, I am confident that he could and would have accumulated one of the largest fortunes in America. He had nothing to do but continue in business, and take care of his investments, to roll up a prodigious estate. But not having the slightest taste for needless accumulation, he joyfully laid aside the cares of business, and spent the whole remainder of his life in the services of his country; for he gave up his ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... ambassadors, dukes, warriors in armor provided with magic arms and with balsams like the famous one of Fierabras, good Castilians and bad strangers. All the characters are antipodal to Philippine realities and with the semblance of the real and true being from unknown lands and prodigious races. The same is true with the scene of activities; wonderful lands, Palestine, the kingdom of Navarra, the Empire of Great Kahn, the Palace of Macedonia, and not only are they ignorant of, and do they falsify, the face of the earth, but the planetary system itself suffers a radical change. ...
— The Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera
... some against her back, some against her sides, in every direction. I myself never saw quite so many employed; but I was present, and was myself assisting, when eighteen swords were pushed at once against various parts of her body. Although the force with which this prodigious succor was administered caused deep indentations in the flesh, she never received the slightest wound. It often happened that her convulsions caused the flesh to react under the pressure of the sword-points, so as forcibly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... pressure of the more condensed mass, gigantic spurts and mountains of the white-hot matter of the sun rush upwards at a rate of fifty or a hundred miles a second, Sometimes they reach a height of a hundred, and even two hundred, thousand miles, driving the red-hot hydrogen before them in prodigious and fantastic flames. Between the black veins over the disk, also, there rise domes and columns of the liquid fire, some hundreds of miles in diameter, spreading and sinking at from five to twenty miles a second. The ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... roads prodigious trains of dust rose hundreds of feet in the air, and drove like vast caravans with the wind. So powerful was the blast that men hesitated about going out with carriages, and everybody watched feverishly, ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... 30th of July, 1541, the Tartar army appeared upon the southern banks of the Oka, crowning all the heights which bordered the stream. Immediately they made an attempt to force the passage. But the Russians, thoroughly prepared for the assault, repelled them with prodigious slaughter. Night put an end to the contest. The Russians were elated with their success, and waited eagerly for the morning to renew the strife. They even hoped to be able to cross the river and to sweep the camp of their foes. The fires of their bivouacs blazed ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... freedom and of human improvement answers spontaneously, that nothing but a clear necessity can justify any tax at all upon such subjects, and that the tax should be reduced, in all cases, to the very lowest practicable rate. The experience of the British government, the prodigious increase of correspondence produced by cheap postage, and the immense revenue accruing therefrom, demonstrate that TWO CENTS is not below the rate which the government can afford to receive. Let the people understand that ...
— Cheap Postage • Joshua Leavitt
... baggage from Europe to Asia. Ferdinand watching the cat's jump, prepares to turn those 400,000 bayonets of his against the Kaiser. So wags my world in the might-be; very much "might-be" for the Navy are turning down the "to be" for the third time of asking. Three times the Sibyl makes her prodigious offer: May—August—September a new world ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... spent on dress by both sexes, and the courtiers' doublets, or jackets, were of the most costly silks and velvets, elaborately puffed and slashed. During the latter part of the period the pointed shoes, which had formerly been of prodigious length, suddenly began to grow broad, with such rapidity that Parliament passed a law limiting the width of the ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... who set them, before the life was well out of them, in the frying-pan. After which, the maidens, as pre-arranged, addressed them to catch some of the finest fish, and cast them on to the table before the King, and Count Guy, and their father. The fish wriggled about the table to the prodigious delight of the King, who in like manner took some of them, and courteously returned them to the girls; with which sport they diverted them, until the servant had cooked the fish that had been given him: which, by Messer Neri's command, were set before the King rather as a side-dish ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... throw the hot iron in wherever there was a chance, pleading at the same time for peace and harmony. Then if he could only get the priests at "cat-tails" with the court, which was easy enough, why, the prospect would be prodigious. Every thing must be taken in time and season; and if the lawyers were renegades, and he could get them at splits with both, he could then get some ambitious leader (one with more self-love than patriotism) ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... What a prodigious bore this race was going to be! The wind was blowing up his legs, and his light spring overcoat was far from ample. The seats were too close together and were of a granite hardness; but he and Lily were wedged into the back ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... invention of gunpowder, that a cannon ball, if it strikes a man, will kill him. To a thorough grasp of this remarkable discovery, he adds a highly evolved faculty for physical geography and for the calculation of times and distances. He has prodigious powers of work, and a clear, realistic knowledge of human nature in public affairs, having seen it exhaustively tested in that department during the French Revolution. He is imaginative without illusions, and creative without religion, loyalty, patriotism or any of the common ideals. Not that ...
— The Man of Destiny • George Bernard Shaw
... mystic choirs sustain, No wizard fiends blind with prodigious spell. The mortal earth shall serve him as domain Whether he mount to ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... was finished, it was only natural that they should go to the principal hotel and eat a prodigious luncheon, and then Hawtry proposed that they should sally out for a ramble ...
— Jack Archer • G. A. Henty
... He showed prodigious activity. All the extraordinary life that was in him leaped and sang in his veins. He rushed back and forth, uttering continuous shouts, whirling each torch until it made a perfect circle of fire. Doubtless to the ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... one of ours is multi-marvellous, for he can do anything. He speaks Swedish, Danish, Russian, German, and excellent English. He has been a blacksmith, butcher, fireman, greaser, tinsmith, copper-smelter, and now, endlich, enfin, at last, a donkeyman. His frame is gigantic, his strength prodigious. On his chest is a horrific picture of the Crucifixion in red, blue, and green tattoo. Between the Christ and the starboard thief is a great triangular scar of smooth, shiny skin. One of his colossal knees is livid with scars. He tells me the story like this, keeping time ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... certainly were a queer lot of little creatures. Not a curry-comb had touched their hides since they were born, nor had the shears ever been near their manes or tails. Their coats were long, thick, and filled with dirt; their manes and tails of prodigious length, and matted together in inextricable knots. They were of all colours, and within certain limits of all sizes. Brown, bay, black, piebald, grey, and sorrel. There was no lack of variety; and Mr. Lloyd and Bert wandered up and down the long line as they stood tethered ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... "The prodigious force with which he was endowed," says Sulte, "had made of him an exceptional being in the eyes of the soldiers," and when he returned to Canada after West Indian service of eleven years[14] a little before the war of 1812, he was already the hero of the French-Canadians. ...
— An Account Of The Battle Of Chateauguay - Being A Lecture Delivered At Ormstown, March 8th, 1889 • William D. Lighthall
... inheritance. Hitherto, there had been a great disparity in the condition of high and low: certain properties, descending from eldest son to eldest son, had become enormously large, and were generally ill managed; while prodigious numbers of people had no property at all, and were dependents on feudal superiors. The country was undoubtedly in a bad condition, and some modification of the law was desirable. Reckless of consequences, the system as it stood was utterly swept away, and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 424, New Series, February 14, 1852 • Various
... for beleaguering Duenaburg and Riga. There were pontoons and bridge material in abundance; one thousand three hundred and fifty field-pieces, and eighteen thousand horses to draw them. The commissary stores were prodigious, and there were thousands of ox-wagons to transport them. The cattle were eventually to be slaughtered and eaten. In various convenient strongholds there were, besides, stores for four hundred thousand men for fifty days. Knowing Russia, he had prepared to conquer streams and morasses, to ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... high-walled and many-windowed that it was quite cool and dusky down below, and only a strip of sun showed far up along the roofs of one side. Here and there a wheelbarrow went strolling through these streets too, and we saw at least one family marketing. From a little square window a prodigious way up came, as we passed, a cry with custom in it, and a wheelbarrow paused beneath. Then down from the window by a long, long rope slid a basket from the hands of a young woman leaning out in red, and the vendor took the opportunity of sitting down on his barrow handle till it arrived. ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... great battles in the present war, on the water at least, may be decided by these silently moving, dinky sized, almost imperceptible submarines which carry the ever-destroying torpedoes. And the loss of lives will be more prodigious ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... after Trinity Sunday in 1431, being then about nineteen years of age, the Maid of Arc underwent her martyrdom. She was conducted before mid-day, guarded by eight hundred spearmen, to a platform of prodigious height, constructed of wooden billets supported by occasional walls of lath and plaster, and traversed by hollow spaces in every direction for the creation of air-currents. The pile "struck terror," says M. Michelet, "by its height;" and, as usual, the English purpose in this is viewed as one ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... equipment, whistling "Tipperary"; sections of an Army Service train cursing good-humouredly at their mules; a battery of artillery thundering along at a clean, rhythmical trot which, considering what they were like in their slovenly jogging and bumping three months ago, afforded me prodigious pleasure. On the passing of these last-mentioned I felt inclined to clap my hands and generally proclaim my appreciation. Indeed, I did arrest a fresh-faced subaltern bringing up the rear of the battery who, having acquaintance with ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... we delight to see beautify her beauty with rich robes and set it off with jewels, though now fantastically masquerading in a garb of tatters, wholly unfit for her to handle. I recognized her, over and over again, in the groups round a door-step or in the descent of a cellar, chatting with prodigious earnestness about intangible trifles, laughing for a little jest, sympathizing at almost the same instant with one neighbor's sunshine and another's shadow, wise, simple, sly, and patient, yet easily perturbed, and breaking into small feminine ebullitions ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the mischief arising from the study of words is prodigious, we must not consider it as the only cause of darkening the splendours of Truth, and obstructing the free diffusion of her light. Different manners and philosophies have equally contributed to banish the goddess from our realms, and to render our eyes offended with her ...
— An Essay on the Beautiful - From the Greek of Plotinus • Plotinus
... upon, or no, he cannot tell; but I perceive the certainty of peace is blown over. To Charing Cross, there to see the great boy and girle that are lately come out of Ireland, the latter eight, the former but four years old, of most prodigious bigness for their age. I tried to weigh them in my arms, and and them twice as heavy as people almost twice their age; and yet I am apt to believe they are very young. Their father a little sorry fellow, and their mother an old Irish woman. They have had four children of this bigness, and four ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... degree of excitement and enthusiasm, sharpened by revenge, which supported the gallant crew of the Caesar, and enabled them to perform such prodigious labour during the last seven days, had now subsided. The incessant fatigue which they had endured, both of body and mind, their long abstinence from their natural sleep, and the sudden change from bustle to inactivity, threw the whole of the men into such a state of languor and debility, that they ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez. Vol II • Sir John Ross
... be admitted, that our industry was indebted to the war, and to our conquests, for its progress, and its prodigious increase. The war, by depriving us of the products of the English manufactories, had taught us, to manufacture for ourselves. The continual prohibition of these articles protected our rising manufactures from the danger of competition; and allowed ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... Mafra is prodigious; it contains a palace, convent, and most superb church. The six organs are the most beautiful I ever beheld, in point of decoration: we did not hear them, but were told that their tones were correspondent to their splendour. Mafra is termed the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... first came in sight they made a prodigious clattering in their speech and held their arms over their heads. They spoke so quick that I could not catch one single word they uttered. We recollected one man whom we had formerly seen among the party of the natives that came to us in 1777, and who is particularised in the account of Captain ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... could reach there spread before them a savage sylvan scene. It wanted, perhaps, undulation of surface, but that deficiency was greatly compensated for by the multitude and prodigious size of the trees; they were the largest, indeed, that could well be met with in England; and there is no part of Europe where the timber is so huge. The broad interminable glades, the vast avenues, the quantity of deer browsing or bounding ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... Custom has a prescriptive right to talk nonsense. The barbarous enigmatical jargon of the ancient adepts continued for above a century to be the only chemical language of men of science, notwithstanding the prodigious labour to the memory, and confusion to the understanding, which it occasioned: they have but just now left off calling one of their vessels for distilling, a death's head, and another a helmet. Capricious analogy with difficulty yields to rational arrangement. ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... so far advanced that we could, in a certain sense, regard it as practically completed. The Heidelberg professor declared that he had mastered the tongue of the ancient Aryans. His delight was unbounded. With prodigious industry he set to work, scarcely stopping to eat or sleep, to form a ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... like her mother's. Father's treacherous ally the chauffeur never even looked at "The T Room." Sometimes Father wondered if the chauffeur knew just where the house was; perhaps he had never noticed it. He planned to wave and attract the chauffeur's attention, but in face of the prodigious Mrs. Carter he never dared to carry ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... had killed her child, out of her life, but she had succeeded in saying to God, "Thy will be done!" She had said it at first as a mere formula, had repeated it obstinately again and again, without meaning it at all, but trying to mean it, meaning to mean it. She had made a prodigious, a truly heroic effort to conquer her powerfully rebellious nature, and, in this effort, she had been helped by Father Robertson. He knew of the anger which had overwhelmed her when her mother had died, of how she had wished to hurt God. He knew that, with bloody sweat, she had ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... marched through the wintry forest and at length, in "solitude unprofaned as yet by the pettiness of man," they beheld the "imperial cataract"—the "thunder of water," as the Indians called it—or, as Hennepin described it, that "vast and prodigious cadence of water which falls down after a surprising and most astonishing manner, insomuch that the universe does not afford its parallel, those of Italy and Switzerland being but sorry patterns." To this priest, Hennepin, we owe the first description and picture ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... the case of Benjamin Walsh, M.P., a member of the Stock Exchange, occasioned a prodigious sensation. Sir Thomas Plomer employed him as his broker, and, buying an estate, found it necessary to sell stock. Walsh advised him not to sell directly, as the funds were rising; the deeds were not prepared, and the advice was accepted. Soon after, Walsh said the time to sell was come, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... not known, at least once in his life, what it is to lose some precious thing; and after hunting through his papers, ransacking his memory, and turning his house upside down; after one or two days spent in vain search, and hope, and despair; after a prodigious expenditure of the liveliest irritation of soul, who has not known the ineffable pleasure of finding that all-important nothing which had come to be a king of monomania? Very good. Now, spread that fury of search over five years; put a woman, put a heart, put love in ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... was out of sight, he sank back upon his rustic bench, like a man exhausted, and breathed a prodigious sigh. He was absurdly pale. All the same, clenching his fists, and softly pounding the table with them, he muttered exultantly, between his teeth, "What luck! What incredible luck! It's she—it's she, as I 'm a ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... were to settle before we went from Paris. As my husband did not care to venture all our fortune in one bottom, so our goods, money, and plate were consigned to several merchants, who had been his intimates many years, and he took notes of a prodigious value in his pocket, besides what he gave me to take care of during our journey. The last thing to be considered was, how we should go ourselves, and what equipage we should take with us; my thoughts were wholly taken ...
— The Fortunate Mistress (Parts 1 and 2) • Daniel Defoe
... Illinois, was one of the prominent Republican orators. He was a man of considerable brains and a good deal of body, and his style of utterance was of the hyper-intense school. On one occasion he begun his speech at the top of a voice of most prodigious compass, and kept on in the same strain, which, mildly described, might be characterized as a roar. When some waggish member on the Southern side cried, "Louder!" the effect upon the audience was convulsing. There stood Lovejoy, with his coat off ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... Unconquered, The Intrepid, or The Dissonant, The Sterile, The Insipid, The Obtuse, The Astray, The Stunned, and they were all devoted to one purpose, namely, the production and the perpetuation of twaddle. It is prodigious to think of the incessant wash of slip-slop which they poured out in verse; of the grave disputations they held upon the most trivial questions; of the inane formalities of their sessions. At the meetings of a famous academy in Milan, they placed in the chair a child just able to talk; a question ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... he dwelt until such time as he went forth with Higelac on his fatal expedition against the Frisians, who were backed by a strong alliance of Chauci, and Chattuarii, and Franks; and there Higelac fell, and his army perished. Beowulf, by prodigious swimming, reached his home again, where now was a young widowed queen and her infant son. She offered herself and her kingdom to Beowulf; he preferred the office of the faithful guardian. At a later time the young king fell in battle, and ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... crossed the island to all sides. There was no one part of it better than another; it was all desolate and rocky; nothing living on it but game birds which I lacked the means to kill, and the gulls which haunted the outlying rocks in a prodigious number. But the creek, or straits, that cut off the isle from the main land of the Ross, opened out on the north into a bay, and the bay again opened into the Sound of Iona; and it was the neighborhood of this place that I chose to be my home; though if I had thought upon the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... the Atlantic ports of the United States. Nevertheless, whoever desires to form an opinion upon the future history of the Philippines, must not consider simply their relations to Spain, but must have regard to the prodigious changes which a few decades produce on either ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... and the cold was more intense than it had been for eighty years, procured them some fleeting popularity. The gratitude of the Parisians for the succour their Majesties poured forth was lively if not lasting. The snow was so abundant that since that period there has never been seen such a prodigious quantity in France. In different parts of Paris pyramids and obelisks of snow were erected with inscriptions expressive of the gratitude of the people. The pyramid in the Rue d'Angiviller was supported on a base six feet high by twelve broad; it rose to the height of fifteen feet, and was terminated ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... and when the Prince protested that there could not possibly be found space for them all on the table, offered to put them all into a glass bottle no bigger than his thumb. Some of Francatelli's quantities are also prodigious, as, for instance, when to make a simple glaze he calls for three pounds of gravy beef, the best part of a ham, a knuckle of veal, an old hen, and ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... Zealand. They were at the time I write of, the only wild quadrupeds in the land, except rats (for which I believe the country is also indebted to Captain Cook), but together they made up for no end of absentees by their prodigious powers ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... the subject. He took pleasure in dilating upon the substantial unity that subsisted between them and denominations which, in externals, were separated from them by a very wide interval. 'There is a prodigious difference,' he would say, 'between the external form of one of your Presbyterian Churches in Scotland, and a Church in Italy; yet the doctrine ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... is it, then, that the immense bulk of a seventy-four moves so easily in the water? One would think that its prodigious weight would make it stick fast, and ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... confident he had not given his consent to them, but would have hindred them if he could, with his owne safety, to which he was alwayes enough indulgent: if he had some infirmityes with other men, they were waighed downe with wounderfull and prodigious abilityes and excellencyes in ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... big cats, wild boars, scorpions, and other poisonous vermin with which the place was swarming, arrived without mishap at the place that had been so carefully described to me—a circular clearing of about twenty feet in diameter, surrounded on all sides by rank grass of a prodigious height, trolsee shrubs, kulpa and tamarind-trees. Quickly concealing myself, I waited the coming of ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... night attack was, strategically speaking, of prodigious value. The hostile hordes that were advancing to the south with the intention of overrunning the Colony of Natal were summarily disposed of, their treatment at the hands of Colonel Kitchener and his small force being such that they preferred not to try conclusions with him again for some ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... clambered up by the bowsprit shrouds. Some of the men in the other boats, seeing what he was doing, followed his example. They were unnoticed. A fierce fight was raging on the quarter-deck, and the shouting was prodigious. When some thirty men were gathered Will led the way aft. Their arrival was opportune, for the attacking party, under the lieutenant, had been vastly outnumbered by the pirates, and although fighting stoutly, had been penned against the bulwark, ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... impressive than it is instructive. It illustrates the prodigious impetuosity of that tide of conquest which within so few years from the discovery of the American continents not only swept over the regions of South and Central America and the great plateau of ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... nobles guarded by soldiers whose accoutrements ranged from the musket to the morion; of the Moharum, when the Mohammedan celebrates the New Year. But what would you have? A sketch is a sketch. We have got only to the heart of India: the head and the whole prodigious eastern side are not yet reached. It is time one were ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... island with a volcanic peak in the centre, they saw a cataract, of prodigious height, descending from the mountain-side. The Admiral called this island Guadaloupe, in fulfilment of a promise to the monks of the convent of Guadaloupe in Estremadura to call some newly-discovered place ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... there lived a mighty hunter, whose name was 'Grim-face,' Feeling a desire one day for a little venison, he took his bow, and went into the woods; where he soon killed a deer. As he was carrying the deer home, he came upon a wild boar of prodigious proportions. Laying the deer upon the earth, he fixed and discharged an arrow and struck the boar, which instantly rushed upon him with a roar louder than the last thunder, and ripped the hunter up. He fell like a tree cut by the axe, and lay dead along with the boar, ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... OR CARRICK. A large ship of burden, the same with those called galleons. Hippus, the Tyrian, is said to have first devised caracks, and onerary vessels of prodigious bulk for traffic ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth |
