"Semi" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... determined by competition, by the nature and number of labourers taking part in the competition. In the masculine category I met but one class of competitor: the bread-winner. In the feminine category I found a variety of classes: the bread-winner, the semi-bread-winner, the woman who works for luxuries. This inevitably drags the wage level. The self-supporting girl is in competition with the child, with the girl who lives at home and makes a small contribution to the household expenses, and with ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... Negro girls who found it once difficult to obtain good jobs at domestic service have leaped into popularity. The market for labor has taken up all the slack. There is a demand for all, for skilled workers, unskilled, semi-employables, Negroes. The employment agencies cannot meet the demand. Construction camps which formerly relied on Italian or Polish laborers now seek to secure an alternative supply of Negroes. Formerly the big contractor in the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... fallen, or the wretch was whirled away from her sight in the dense undistinguishable mass of slayers and slain. Yes, she had begun, and she must follow to the end.... And, after all, what were the lives of those few semi-brutes, returning thus a few years earlier to the clay from which they sprang, compared with the regeneration of a world?.... And it would be over in a few minutes more, and that black writhing heap be still for ever, and the curtain fall .... And then for Venus ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... can have no adequate motives for consulting any interests but his own. Still there are motives for making us consult the happiness of others, namely, the purely social motive of Sympathy or Benevolence, and the semi-social motives of Love of Amity and Love of Reputation. [He does not say here whether Sympathy is a motive grounded on the pleasure it brings, or a motive irrespective of the pleasure; although from other places we may infer that he inclines to the ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... disadvantage with an English orchestra by reason of his ignorance of the language. It may be true, as he said, that the language of music "is understood all over the world," but one cannot talk to an orchestra in crotchets and semi-breves. ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... kidnapped; how search was at once instituted; how, late that same evening, after running down various vain clues, my superior, the Reverend Doctor Tubley, arrived at Hatchersville aboard a special train, accompanied by a volunteer posse of his parishioners and other citizens and rescued me, semi-delirious and still fettered, as my captors were on the point of removing me, a close prisoner, to the Branch State Asylum for the Insane at Pottsburg, twenty miles distant, in the deluded expectation of securing a reward for my ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... curtains of green silk covered with brilliant designs called "ramages"—possibly because the birds of gay plumage there depicted were supposed to sing. The folds of these immense curtains were so stiff that in the semi-darkness they might have been taken for some metal fabric. On the green velvet hanging, adorned with gold fringes, which covered the foot of this lordly couch the superstition of the Comtes d'Herouville had affixed a large crucifix, on which their chaplain placed a fresh branch ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... when light and nicely risen, divide the dough into pieces, and round them to the proper shape with the hands; place them, in a layer of flour about two inches thick, on wooden trays, and let them rise again; when this is effected, they each will exhibit a semi-globular shape. Then place them carefully on a hot-plate or stove, and bake them until they are slightly browned, turning them when they are done on one side. Muffins are not easily made, and are more generally ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... that time in Ireland a small number of extreme patriots who rather admired Malcolmson because they thought he was going to fight against England, and despised Gorman because they knew he was not. These men had enrolled themselves in a semi-military organisation and called themselves the National Volunteers. Gorman and his friends did their best to suppress them and kept all mention of their existence out of the English papers as far as possible. It surprised me to hear him speak in a casual ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... account of the martins, for I had just before been utterly perplexed by noticing just such a proceeding as you describe: I counted seven, one day lately, visiting a single nest and sticking dirt on the adjoining wall. I may mention that I once saw some squirrels eagerly splitting those little semi-transparent spherical galls on the back of oak- leaves for the maggot within; so that they are insectivorous. A Cychrus rostratus once squirted into my eyes and gave me extreme pain; and I must tell you what happened to me on the banks of the Cam, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... influence, Alphonse Daudet was appointed by the Duke de Morny to a semi-sinecure; and he has recorded how he told his benefactor before accepting the place that he was a Legitimist and how the Duke smilingly retorted that the Empress was also. Although it was as a poet that Daudet made his bow in the world of letters, his first appearance ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... Tom's departure from home were not favorable to his father. There was a drought of considerable duration, which made the crops smaller than usual, and thus materially decreased the farmer's income. When the semi-annual interest became due, with the most energetic effort Mark Nelson had got together but thirty-six dollars towards it, leaving ...
— The Young Miner - or Tom Nelson in California • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... fun of me," exclaimed the young lady, delighted that he should be in the humor to do so, yet speaking in that semi-reproachful tone which ladies sometimes adopt when the other sex makes their costume the object of remark, "I can make myself as fine as I can be by that time, of course! But how is it about Sophie? Won't she be able ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... semi-autonomy of the county courts and the justices of the peace remained. A system of state courts was provided for, its judges also elected by the assembly. Property qualifications for voters and for office holders continued in force. No clergymen were ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... hand and skill, and continues: "Their figures are generally superb; and I have never felt so much pleasure in gazing at the finest statue as at these living illustrations of the beauty of the human form." Elsewhere he says[31]: "Their whole aspect and manner were different [from the semi-civilized Indians]; they walked with the free step of the independent forest-dweller ... original and self-sustaining as the wild animals of the forest ... living their own lives in their own way, as they had done for countless generations before America was discovered. ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... perhaps inwardly regretting that it should have been made—Durham that afternoon presented himself at the proud old house beyond the Seine. More than ever, in the semi-abandonment of the morte saison, with reduced service, and shutters closed to the silence of the high-walled court, did it strike the American as the incorruptible custodian of old prejudices and strange social survivals. The thought of what ...
— Madame de Treymes • Edith Wharton
... hand, and so Hazel made believe over her breakfast, quite successfully, and carried on her mental fight of questions the while with no success at all. So on through the day, until dinner time brought Mr. Falkirk; so on, with a semi-consciousness, through all the evening's talk; and when at length Wych Hazel went to her room again, it was with all the trouble of last night, and a day's worry additional. She knew what she wanted,she did not seem to know how to get ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... be done. Flesh and Blood were bought and sold in those days, and it did not much matter about the colour. By that strange Laxity which then tempered the severity of the Laws, I was permitted, for many days after my Fate was settled, to remain in a kind of semi-Enlargement. I suppose that Mr. Shapcott gave bail for me; but I was taken into his Family, and treated with the most Loving Kindness, till the fearful intelligence came that I, with two hundred other Convicts, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... their beloved leader. His troops were mercenaries—that is, they fought for pay in a cause which in no way concerned them—but personal affection for their general supplied in them the place of the patriotism which inspires modern soldiers, and transformed these semi barbarous tribesmen into troops fit to cope with the ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty
... with his officers, during which Hillson had not spared his hits at his less experienced superior, Captain Crutchely came to a decision, which might be termed semi-prudent. There is nothing that a seaman more dislikes than to be suspected of extra-nervousness on the subject of doubtful dangers of this sort. Seen and acknowledged, he has no scruples about doing his best to avoid them; but so long as there is an uncertainty connected ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... yearning for a native American antiquity; for in its indulgence one cannot but regard himself and his contemporaries as cumberers of the ground, delaying the consummation of that hoary past which will be so fascinating to a semi-Chinese posterity, and will be, ages hence, the inspiration of Pigeon-English poetry and romance. Let us make much of our two hundred and fifty years, and cherish the present as our golden age. We healthy-minded people in the horse-cars are ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... could be heard, by retiring backwards down the street towards the river; and I found his voice distinct till I came near Front-street, when some noise in that street obscur'd it. Imagining then a semi-circle, of which my distance should be the radius, and that it were fill'd with auditors, to each of whom I allow'd two square feet, I computed that he might well be heard by more than thirty thousand. This reconcil'd ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... absurdities formerly supported by custom or superstition. Students of ethnology relate that among savage tribes almost every conceivable position was advocated for women in labor. Subsequently it became customary to have delivery take place in specially constructed chairs which are still used in semi-enlightened countries. With civilized nations at present women are always delivered in bed; yet national peculiarities still prevail. Some physicians favor what is known as the English position, in which the ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons
... to see you, sir," she said rather breathlessly, and I followed her. In the semi-darkness of the stairs I passed the three men who had been with Krebs, and when I reached the open door of his room he was alone. I hesitated just a second, swept by the heat wave that follows sudden shyness, embarrassment, a sense of folly it ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... The semi-centennial of painless surgery was celebrated, in 1896, in Boston, New York, London, and other cities, and the credit of its discovery was universally awarded to William T. G. Morton. About the same time it happened that the Massachusetts ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... Mademoiselle Louison to her carriage, he said: 'Yes, this is the consequence of letting one's self be persuaded to dine with these semi-savages. One is never sure of the company he ...
— Norse Tales and Sketches • Alexander Lange Kielland
... water-tight compartment. I sat at luncheon (at a hotel) with Lansing, Secretary of State; Lane, Secretary of the Interior; Gregory, Attorney-General; Baker, Secretary of War; Daniels, Secretary of the Navy; and Sharp, Ambassador to France; and all the talk was jocular or semi-jocular, and personal—mere cheap chaff. Not a question was asked either of the Ambassador to France or of the Ambassador to Great Britain about the war or about our foreign relations. The war wasn't mentioned. Sharp and I might have come from Bungtown and Jonesville and not from France ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... crossing the dead hands, and covered the face with a blanket stripped from a bunk. The brief burst of flame died down, leaving the room in semi-darkness. The miner was conscious only of a feeling of dull rage, a desire for revenge. The shot had been clearly intended for himself. The killing of Jose had been a mere accident. In all probability the murderer had crept away believing he had succeeded ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... illustrious and rival families, prominent above all others. Their origin was lost in the remoteness of antiquity. Their renown had been accumulating for many generations, through rank, and wealth, and power, and deeds of heroic and semi-barbarian daring. As these three families are so blended in all the struggles of this most warlike period, it is important to give a brief history of their ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... notch. Flowers 6 in. long, and about the same across the top; tube covered with soft hairs and short deep-red scales, which are enlarged towards the top, where they spread out, and form, along with the petals, a large rosette of several whorls, arranged as in a semi-double rose, the centre being occupied by a brush-like cluster of greenish stamens, with the radiating stigma standing erect in the middle. It is to be regretted that the flowers are not more freely ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... as he laid down the letter, "there are one or two things about that communication to which I wish to draw your attention. First of all, it is the composition of a vulgar and illiterate, or, at any rate, semi-illiterate person. I don't think its phrasing and illiteracy are affected; I think it has been written in its present colloquial form without art or design, by whoever wrote it; it is written, phrased, expressed, precisely as a vulgar, coarse sort of person would speak. That is the first ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... The substitution is not a happy one from a literary point of view, but I have made it deliberately and for the following reason: The idea that intermittent and pernicious fevers are engendered by putrid emanations from swamps and marshes is one of those semi-scientific assumptions which have contributed most to lead astray the investigations of scientists and the work of public administrations. This idea, so widespread and so well established by the traditions of the school, is radically false. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various
... whisking noise; flames elongated, and bent themselves about with a quiet roar, but no crackle. Banks of smoke went off horizontally at the back like passing clouds, and behind these burned hidden pyres, illuminating the semi-transparent sheet of smoke to a lustrous yellow uniformity. Individual straws in the foreground were consumed in a creeping movement of ruddy heat, as if they were knots of red worms, and above shone imaginary fiery faces, tongues hanging from lips, glaring ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... "Metals, semi-metals, and distinguished philosophers," said Edmund; and Marian, who in days of old had read "Mansfield Park," laughed as she used ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... base of the treated object is the point of contact. It remains partially unaffected because it is closest to the 'gravetostatic field center', which I guess is the Earth's center of attraction. This plane of 'semi-treated' atoms can be forced through an object, if it is moved horizontally, but its 'untreated' aspect prevents the subject wearing the device from falling ...
— The Untouchable • Stephen A. Kallis
... the Amazon. It is about six feet long, and no less than five feet in circumference at its thickest part. It is a perfectly smooth, and what we may call dumpy fish, of a leaden colour, with a semi-circular flat tail, and a large mouth with thick fleshy lips resembling those of a cow. There are stiff bristles on the lips, and a few scattered hairs over the body. It has two fins just behind the head; and ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... dragons and goblins all night long," said Hughes, the second footman, shoving a big chair into position. Chairs from all parts of the house had been brought to the drawing-room and arranged in a semi-circle in front of the huge fireplace, at one corner of which stood Mr. Bingle's reading lamp, accurately placed at the edge of a costly little Italian table. There were big chairs and little chairs, soft chairs and hard ones, ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... instructive minutiae of lineament and meaning detected, in the "off-guard" of private intercourse, by the eye of a great painter and a lifelong student of physiognomy. We glance from the rugged Blucher to the wily Metternich, and from the philosophic Humboldt to the semi-savage Platoff. The dandies George IV. and Alexander are here, but Brummel is left out. The gem of the collection is Pius VII., Lawrence's masterpiece, widely familiar by engravings. Raphael's Julius II. seems to have been in the artist's mind, but that work is not improved ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... rarely public-school men, that sculptors couldn't ride straight to hounds to save their lives, but clearly these imbecilities were mere afterthoughts; the average man hated the artist from a deep instinctive dread of all that was strange, uncanny, alien to his nature; he gibbered, uttered his harsh, semi-bestial "faugh," and dismissed Keats to his gallipots from much the same motives as usually impelled the black savages to dismiss the white man on ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... the outskirts of a group, to the discussion upon the probabilities or improbabilities of the service taking place in the absence of the Prince, stood Magdalena. She was attired in her usual dark semi-monastic dress; but to this was now added the scrip, wallet, and tall crossheaded staff of the wandering pilgrim. As the prevailing opinion appeared to be that the Ober-Amtmann would attend, at all events, at the celebration of the church rites intended to be performed, Magdalena ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... her red coarse little hands, which did not seem to belong to those gracile arms, she held a dripping clout. In front of her, on a half-dried space of clean, shining floor, stood Mrs. Lessways, her head wrapped in a flannel petticoat. Nearer to the child stretched a small semi-circle of liquid mud; to the rear was the untouched dirty floor. Florrie was looking up at her mistress with respectful, strained attention. She could not proceed with her work because Mrs. Lessways had chosen this moment to instruct ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... successful sheep farmer to me; "and we must do this all the time, else our flocks will go back." "It is more profitable to keep fewer sheep of the best kind than more not quite so good. It is more profitable to keep a few sheep always in good condition than many with a period of semi-starvation for them in the fall," said another; and added, "I would rather, if I were to begin over again, spend my money on a breed worth six dollars a head, than one worth two or three dollars, and I would rather not keep sheep at all than not fence." ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... a black bird about as large as a thrush, with long thin legs and a slender semi-circular beak, which he uses in seeking in holes of trees for the insects on which he feeds. In the tail are four long black feathers tipt with white. These feathers are much valued by the natives as ornaments for the hair on great occasions. . . . The natives attracted the birds ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... been passed as purely Welsh Acts—the Sunday Closing Act, and the Intermediate Education Act. In Parliament, the voice of Wales is weak even though unanimous; it can be outvoted by the capital or by four English provincial towns. Until quite recently its semi-independence—due to geography and past history— was looked upon as a source of weakness to the Empire rather than of strength. Its love for the past appeals to the one political party, its desire for progress to ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... commenced this exasperated and semi-poetic fury, shaking her fist under the nose of the impassable hunter, "you are not even a woman. Your friends the Delawares are only women, and you are their sheep. Your own people will not own you, and no tribe of redmen would have you in their wigwams; you skulk among petticoated warriors. ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... on. The real Missal, with which all illuminated books used to be confounded, is of rare occurrence, but I have given a collation of it also. Besides these devotional or religious books, I must mention chronicles and romances, and the semi-religious and moral allegories, such as the "Pelerinage de l'Ame," which is said to have given Bunyan the machinery of the "Pilgrim's Progress." Chaucer's and Gower's poetry exists in many MSS., as does the ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... think, and the morning was warm and pleasant, when there gently sailed into the secretary's room, through the open window, a wasp. I saw him come in, and I do not think I ever beheld a more agreeable or benignant insect. His large eyes were filled with the light of a fatherly graciousness. His semi-detached body seemed to quiver with a helpful impulse, and his long hind legs hung down beneath him as though they were outstretched to assist, befriend, or succor. With wings waving blessings and a buzz of cheery greeting, he sailed around the room, now dipping here, now there, and then circling ...
— The House of Martha • Frank R. Stockton
... semi-diablerie have been immortalised by Burns; and the "Kirn," or Harvest Home, the wind-up of the season, the epitome of the lyric joyousness of the whole year. Hence it is that under an exterior, to strangers so reserved, austere, and frigid, they all ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... walled up, it was discovered that the capitals were all perfect, and that this exquisite and grand construction, the mutilation and concealment of which it is utterly impossible to account for, was, in fact, made up of five arches, the interior and smallest supported by the two semi-columns already described, and each of the others increasing in span as it approached the front upon square and circular shafts alternately, the faces of each arch being beautifully decorated with the choicest Norman ornaments. Of the four lateral arches, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Hereford, A Description - Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • A. Hugh Fisher
... redressed by the degradation of the bulk of the English lords themselves into a middle class as they were pushed from their place by the foreign baronage who settled on English soil; and this social change was accompanied by a gradual enrichment and elevation of the class of servile and semi-servile cultivators which had lifted them at the close of this period into almost complete freedom. The middle class which was thus created was reinforced by the upgrowth of a corresponding class in our towns. Commerce ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... islands lies in the North Pacific, and forms a semi-circle, extending from Japan to the island of Formosa. The inhabitants number under three millions, perhaps. The two principal islands of the group are known as Great and Little Loo-Choo. It is to the latter that the following remarks must be understood ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... replaced 'Waxhaw' with 'Warsaw'—two very different regions. Names are particularly prone to error, not only by Simms, but from the whole revolutionary era in the South—many of the people were only semi-literate, if literate at all, and many of the names have been spelled several, even a dozen ways—sometimes even by the individual named. For all this, the errors of Simms are generally minor, ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... pairlous for perilous is of the same kind, and is nearer Shakespeare's parlous than the modern pronunciation. One other Gallicism survives in our pronunciation. Perhaps I should rather call it a semi-Gallicism, for it is the result of a futile effort to reproduce a French sound with English lips. Thus for joint, employ, royal, we have jynt, emply, r[)y]le, the last differing only from rile ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... of the 'Book of the Thousand Nights and A Night,' first into the French by Galland, about 1705, and presently into various English versions, exerted an immediate influence on French, German, and English romance. The pseudo-Oriental or semi-Oriental tale of home-manufacture sprang into existence right and left with the publishers of London and Paris, and in German centres of letters. Hope's 'Anastasius, or Memoirs of a Modern Greek,' Lewis's 'The Monk,' the German Hauff's admirable 'Stories ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... announcements were pasted on to the Skeaton walls of the coming of a pierrot troupe ... "The Mig-Mags." There was a gay picture of fine beautiful pierrettes and fine stout pierrots all smiling together in a semi-circle. Then on another hoarding it was announced that the Theatre Royal, Skeaton, would shortly start its summer season, and would begin with that famous musical ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... immense impression, and if I had a theatre I should certainly stage "Les Aveugles." There is, by the way, a magnificent scenic effect in it, with the sea and a lighthouse in the distance. The public is semi-idiotic, but one might avoid the play's failing by writing the contents of the play—in brief, of course—on the programme, saying the play is the work of Maeterlinck, a Belgian author and decadent, and that what happens in it is that an old man, who leads about ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... wave, over every kind of matter, in giving it vibratory movement; first, and most intense, in the voice and throat of the bird, which is the air incarnate; and so descending through the various orders of animal life to the vibrating and semi-voluntary murmur of the insect; and, lower still, to the hiss or quiver of the tail of the half-lunged snake and deaf adder; all these, nevertheless, being wholly under the rule of Athena as representing either breath or vital nervous power; and, therefore, also, in ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... which had accumulated upon them from the fumes of the volcano. The floor of the crater was black as jet, being covered by the molten lava, which had gradually spread over it. The surface of this lava lay in wave-like corrugations, like the hide of a rhinoceros, showing that it was or had been semi-fluid. In the centre rose a great, black, rounded cone, like the cupola of an immense blast furnace. This cone was about fifty feet high, and there was an opening at the top eight or ten feet in diameter, which glowed with a furious heat, and emitted quietly, but ...
— Rollo in Naples • Jacob Abbott
... he forgot that there are drinkers and drinkers, he forgot that the cool-headed men were not tainted by heredity, nor were their brains so delicately poised that the least grain of foreign matter introduced in the form of vapour could cause semi-insanity. And thus the sacrifice of Society—and the Exchequer—goes to the tomb amid contempt, and hissing, and scorn; while the saddest thing of all is that those who loved him most passionately are most glad to hear the clods thump on his coffin. I believe, if you let me keep a youngster ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... and Progress of the Potter's Art.—Chapters I., Bodies. China and Porcelain Bodies, Parian Bodies, Semi-porcelain and Vitreous Bodies, Mortar Bodies, Earthenwares Granite and C.C. Bodies, Miscellaneous Bodies, Sagger and Crucible Clays, Coloured Bodies, Jasper Bodies, Coloured Bodies for Mosaic Painting, ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech
... easy one to broach to his somewhat forbidding friend, as he discovered when the latter arrived about half an hour later. Derek had been attending the semi-annual banquet of the Worshipful Dry-Salters Company down in the City, understudying one of the speakers, a leading member of Parliament, who had been unable to appear; and he was still in the grip of that feeling ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... psalm-singers practise, which may be justly deemed the lowest class of counterpoint, or singing in several parts, cannot be acquired, in the coarse manner in which it is performed in the churches, without considerable time and practice. It is therefore scarcely credible, that a people, semi-barbarous, should naturally arrive at any perfection in that art, which it is much doubted, whether the Greeks and Romans, with all their refinements in music, ever attained, and which the Chinese, who have been ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... truth about Patterson's movements," said the tall Lieutenant. "The day before we left we were ordered to be ready to move in the morning, with three days' cooked rations. We were told that our Regiment was assigned a place in the advance, and it was semi-officially rumored that a flank attack would be made upon Winchester. At this day the whole affair appears ridiculous, as Johnston had at that very time left Winchester, leaving only a trifling show of force, and he never, at his best, had ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... jutting rocks that hung over the edge of the water. A number stood on the fence at unequal distances all around; but the principal assemblage of these frightful representatives of their former deities was at the south-east end of the enclosed space, where, forming a semi-circle, twelve of them stood in grim array, as if perpetual guardians of 'the mighty dead' reposing in the house adjoining.... Once they had evidently been clothed, but now they appeared in the most indigent nakedness.... The horrid stare of these idols, the tattered garments ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... writings, and his power of tracing effects to remote and underlying causes, show sufficiently what he might have done in the field of history, had not higher voices called him. His adaptation to the life in Samoa, and his assumption of the semi-patriarchal character in his own sphere there, were only tokens of the presence of the same traits as have ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... attendance to a friend, in 1592, "we play at tables, dance—and keep Christmas". Elizabeth had been brought to Hampton Court shortly after the marriage of her sister with Philip, in the hope that she might be turned to their way of religion, but though she was for a time a sort of semi-prisoner in the Palace it became one of her favoured places of residence after her accession. Here she toyed with the idea of matrimony and entertained wooers or their ambassadors, and here she held high state and ...
— Hampton Court • Walter Jerrold
... up without the approbation of public officers appointed ad hoc. One of the curses of the XIXth century is the increased skill of the midwife and physician, who are now able to preserve worthless lives and to bring up semi-abortions whose only effect upon the breed is increased degeneracy. Amongst the Greeks and ancient Arabs the Malthusian practice was carried to excess. Poseidippus ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... Europe. And, with all the joy we have in the new burst of a nation's song, there is no doubt that it is ever best uttered when it is grounded on the lines of classic art. Here is a paramount reason for the strength of the modern Russian school. With this semi-political cause in mind it is less difficult to grasp the paradox that with all the growth of intercommunication the music of Europe moves in more detached grooves to-day than two centuries ago. The suite in the time of Bach is a special type and proof of a blended breadth and unity of musical ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... By a manner, by wearing spectacles, and brushing his hair back in two semi-circles from his forehead, Mr. John Brodrick contrived to appear considerably more important ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... paragraph over and ponder it well. It appeared in an English newspaper, the semi-official organ of the European point of view. There is nothing veiled or hidden in the attitude of the ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... Where could the virtue of man find more everlasting foundation than in the seeming injustice of God?" Strange that the man who has written these words should have spent all his school life at a Jesuit college, subjected to its severe, semi-monastic discipline; compelled, at the end of his stay, to go, with the rest of his fellows, through the customary period of "retreat," lasting ten days, when the most eloquent of the fathers would, one after the other, deliver sermons terrific to boyish ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... from a little weasel-face, pallid and semi-transparent as the half-boiled white of an egg; two slits of eyes looked out of it, mild blue in tint, but appallingly malignant in expression; and the owner, an insignificant young man, was completely hidden ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... monotheism converted the stately mansion into a Pandemonium peopled with fiends. To the monotheist an "ex-god" was simply a devilish deceiver of mankind whom the true God had succeeded in vanquishing; and thus the word demon, which to the ancient meant a divine or semi-divine being, came to be applied to fiends exclusively. Thus the Teutonic races, who preserved the name of their highest divinity, Odin,—originally, Guodan,—by which to designate the God of the Christian, [95] were unable to regard the Bog ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... where the semi-enlightened Christian betrays the weakness of his faith. While the sun shines, and the sweet gospel story reads to him like some tender Arcadian idyl, all love and promise, he is firm in his allegiance; but when the dark hour comes, he turns his face to the wall, with anger and disappointment ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... half an hour they were ready to advance and meet the Governor; this they did in a large semi-circle; in their front were about twenty braves on horseback, galloping about in circles, shouting, singing and going through various picturesque performances. The semi-circle steadily advanced until within fifty yards of the Governor's tent, when a halt was made and further peculiar ...
— The Treaties of Canada with The Indians of Manitoba - and the North-West Territories • Alexander Morris
... hedges, a clump of cypress trees, and half the river Teverone.—Finis. Dame Nature desired me to put in a list of her little goods and chattels, and, as they were small, to be very minute about them. She has built here three or four little mountains, and laid them out in an irregular semi-circle; from certain others behind, at a greater distance, she has drawn a canal, into which she has put a little river of hers, called Anio; she has cut a huge cleft between the two innermost of her four hills, and there she has left it to its own disposal; which ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... them the blessing in Aniwan, but I feared to set them alaughing by so strange a manifestation of the "tongues." Worst of all, it had been announced that I was to address them in the afternoon; but who would come to hear a Missionary that stuck in the benediction? The event had its semi-comical aspect, but it sent me to my knees during the interval in a very fever of prayerful anxiety. A vast audience assembled, and if the Lord ever manifestly used me in interesting His people in ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... a slippery projecting rock, its base yet submerged, they came upon the loveliest of lovely little beaches, in shape almost a semi-circle, the water forming the bisector and the frowning red cliffs the arc. Near the centre of the half- circle stood two tall pinnacles of red granite. Behind them yawned an entrance about five feet high and under this Max bent his tall head. Roger ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... time I have frequently spoken on this subject with competent authorities, and nearly all have admitted that the present condition of the clergy is highly unsatisfactory, and that the parish priest rarely enjoys the respect of his parishioners. In a semi-official report, which I once accidentally stumbled upon when searching for material of a different kind, the facts are stated in the following plain language: "The people"—I seek to translate as literally as possible—"do not respect the clergy, but persecute them with derision and reproaches, ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... a good idea of the appearance of a modern Hope-Jones console. The stop-keys will be seen arranged in an inclined semi-circle overhanging and just above the keyboards. Fig. 9 shows a console on the Bennett system. Figs. 10 and 11, hybrids, the tilting tablet form of stop-keys being used ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... is weathered and toned by the southerly gales which blow down the Gut from the open sea. Those same winds see to it that Alexandra Square does not smell squalid, however it may look. At its worst it is not so depressing as a row of discreet semi-detached villas. It is, I should imagine, a pretty accurate mirror of the lives that are lived in it—poor men's lives that scarcely anybody fathoms. If one looks for a moment at a house where people have starved, or are starving.... ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... practice may increase the material prosperity of an individual, but it lowers the prosperity of the nation by reducing the number of citizens. Moreover, as birth control is not a prevailing vice amongst semi-civilised peoples, the adoption of this practice by civilised nations means that the proportion of civilised to uncivilised inhabitants of the world will be reduced. If birth control had been extensively practised in the past the colonisation of the British Empire would have been a physical ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... While it was yet dark in the house, I left my bag in the bedroom and crept gently down the stairs to the basement, where the porter-hostler was sleeping in a box of rags. I suppose the poor wretch had not long finished his multifarious duties, for I could arouse him only to a state of semi-consciousness, and could get no information from him. I then went up to the front door, carefully turned the key and stepped out on the piazza which ran along the front of the hotel. Another shock was in store for me. A man posted on the other side of the ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... desperately to it, took one more step and stopped with a smothered shriek. The rail had snapped under her hand and had gone tumbling down into the abyss. She heard it as it struck, or thought she did, and for a moment stood breathless and fearing to move, the world and all it held vanishing in semi-unconsciousness from heart and mind. What was she but a trembling atom floating in an unknown void on the fathomless sea of eternity! Then, as her mind steadied, she began to feel once more the ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... abandoned, owing to the utter carelessness of the Pagan natives as to matters relating to religion. When I left North Borneo in 1887, their only station which appeared to show a prospect of success was one under Father PUNDLEIDER, amongst the semi-Chinese of Bundu, to whom reference has been made on a previous page. But these people, while permitting their children to be educated and baptized by the Father, did not think it worth their while to join the ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... decided that Mr Whittlestaff should give up all idea of the diamond-fields, and in so doing he allowed himself to be brought back to a state of semi-courteous conversation with his happy rival. "Well, yes; you may write to her, I suppose. Indeed I don't know what right I have to say that you may, or you mayn't. She's more yours than mine, I suppose." "Turn her out! I don't know what makes you take such ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... purity of conception and dignity of treatment and arrangement. Seville at this time was the richest city in the Spanish empire. Its commerce with all Europe, and especially with Spanish America, was at its height. The Guadalquivir was alive with its shipping. Its palaces of semi-Moorish origin were occupied by a wealthy and luxurious nobility. The vast cathedral had been finished a century before. The tower "La Giralda," three hundred and forty feet in height, is to this day one of the greatest marvels in Christendom, ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... luncheon-dejeuner, and then ordered a carriage, a comfortable landau and pair. I meant to lead my follower a fine dance, starting with the innocent intention of giving myself and my belongings an airing. It was a brilliant day, the Southern sun struck with semi-tropical fervour, the air was soft and sleepy in the oppressive heat. I brought out the baby undeterred, and installed it, slumbering peacefully, on Philpotts's knees in the seat before me, and lying back with ostentatious indifference, drove off in ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... them, and dripping heavily with the moist atmosphere. An ancient cross stood in the graveyard, of a date probably anterior to that of the main building. A relic or commemoration, it might be, of some holy man who had there ministered to the semi-barbarous hordes, aboriginal converts to the ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... foundationers. They crowded round her at all hours; a glance from her eyes was sufficient to compel them to do exactly what she wished. They ceased to be attentive to their lessons; they were often discovered in school in a state of semi-drowsiness; they were rebellious and impertinent to their teachers—in short, they were in ...
— The Rebel of the School • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... tribes from distant parts of the island, also for making acquaintance with the products of the country and the manufactures of the people. It was a sort of museum and centre of commerce combined, with all the varied incidents, comical, semi-tragic, and otherwise, for which markets in general are ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... narrative, and dramatic poetry he accomplished very little, though the success of his 'Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady' and 'Eloisa to Abelard' must be carefully weighed in this connection. On the other hand, it may well be doubted if he can ever be excelled as a master in satire and kindred semi-prosaic forms. He is supreme in epigrams, the terse statement of pithy truths; his poems have furnished more brief familiar quotations to our language than those of any other writer except Shakspere. For this sort of effect his rimed couplet provided ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... adventurous life of Law, and the equivocal means by which he appeared to live, playing high, and always with great success, threw a cloud of suspicion over him wherever he went, and caused him to be expelled by the magistracy from the semi-commercial, semi-aristocratical ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... mother crept furtively down to the gate and asked, in a foreigner's dialect, if they would send her a copy of the photograph. The correspondent carelessly indulgent, promised it. As the buggy swung away, the father came from behind an apple tree, and the two semi-humans watched it with its burden of glorious strangers until it rumbled across the bridge and disappeared. The correspondent was elate; he told the photographer that the Eclipse would probably pay fifty dollars for the ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... Dufferin in 1860, a Christian governor was placed over the Lebanon in a semi-independent position. Since then the terraced mountain has been marvellously developed, and every foothold has been planted with vines and figs and mulberries. The industrious peasantry, comparatively safe from Turkish rapacity, have cultivated ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... child in the Lowell mills, later taught school in Illinois, was one of the editors of Our Young Folks, and wrote a most fascinating autobiography called A New England Girlhood. Several of her poems are still used in schools. The one that follows is, perhaps, the most popular of these. It is semi-dramatic, and the three voices of the poem can be easily discovered. Miss Larcom's finest poem is the one entitled "Hannah ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... there first." He fumbled in his pockets, but fruitlessly. "No matter. You'll find a buckskin purse, with some scads in it, in the bag. So long." And before Randolph could thank him, he lurched away again into the semi-darkness of the wharf. ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... each of the different Sunday Schools in Moonstone to give a concert on Christmas Eve. But this year all the churches were to unite and give, as was announced from the pulpits, "a semi-sacred concert of picked talent" at the opera house. The Moonstone Orchestra, under the direction of Professor Wunsch, was to play, and the most talented members of each Sunday School were to take part in the programme. ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... All this in a semi-conscious fleetness swept across his mind, that was bent on reaching the river, and on that woman holding a drowning child. At the bend in the river, ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... Albumen of egg, one drachm; rhigolene, four ounces; oil of peppermint, two ounces; colodion and chloroform, each one ounce. Mix. Agitate occasionally for twenty-four hours, and by gelatinization a beautiful and semi-solidified, opodeldoc-looking compound results, which will retain its consistency and hold the ingredients intimately blended for months. Apply by smart friction with the hand, or gently with a soft brush or mop along the course ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... the reorganization of the State for the reason that otherwise his enemies would have got the government into their own hands. It is unfair to judge him by the semi-democratic constitution of the beginning of the year 1495, which was neither better nor worse ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... began to murmur semi-coherent plans for the future, in which she detected the word ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... perturbations and preparations of history. The North and the South, the East and the West had been mingled together; the heated and heaving mass had been tempered by the leaven of Christianity:—and had all this been done only to produce an octo-syllabic metre in praise of fantastic and semi- barbaric sentiments and exploits? Had there been such commotions of the universe only for a song? Surely these first creations of art, these first attempts at literature, these first carvings of a rude spiritual intensity, were only such as the Greeks may have forgotten ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... Plutarch, to whom, in this instance, we are compelled chiefly to resort, is a most equivocal authority. Like most biographers, his care is to exalt his hero, though at the expense of that hero's countrymen; and though an amiable writer, nor without some semi-philosophical views in morals, his mind was singularly deficient in grasp and in comprehension. He never penetrates the subtle causes of effects. He surveys the past, sometimes as a scholar, sometimes as a taleteller, sometimes even as a poet, but never as a statesman. Thus, we learn ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the extremities. The bowl is sometimes a very small brass plate, and sometimes an earthen cup-shaped contrivance, with the top closed or decked over, having only a tiny hole in the center. Into this little aperture the opium, in a semi-liquid state, after being well melted in a lamp flame, is thrust by means of a fine wire or needle. The drug is inserted in infinitesimal quantities. It is said that all the Chinese smoke opium, although all do not indulge to excess. Some seem to be able to use the drug without ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... treatment more or less from her childhood; she has been slapped and banged about at home, and therefore thinks comparatively little of a blow from her husband's hand. The man does not mean it so brutally as it appears to outsiders. This semi-wife-beating is ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... approval. "We shall consider you one of the family, my dear Miss Robbins," she told her. "Marian, take my things up-stairs." She gave her bonnet and cape to her granddaughter and led the way to the semi-darkened parlor where she established herself in a haircloth rocking-chair while Miss Dorothy seated herself upon ...
— Little Maid Marian • Amy E. Blanchard
... semi-nude in an age which has begun to discover that the nude in sculpture is very immoral; who discuss "Tue-la" in a generation which decrees Moliere to be coarse, and Beaumont and Fletcher indecent; who have the Journal pour Rire ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida |
