"Sheer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is that sheer chance has made us privy to an important secret. Now then, if the crew of this underwater boat have a personal interest in keeping that secret, and if their personal interest is more important than the lives of three men, I believe that our very ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... clear, I could detect a refinement of the soul, and true womanly honor in Mrs. Larkum that the other lacked. I was glad to notice that Mrs. Larkum's tears had ceased to flow so profusely. There was an occasional moistening of the eye from sheer joy; for she too had got her experience brightened of late. She was finding it easier to trust in the Lord, and be glad in Him now that she had got a stronger arm than her own to lighten her burdens. ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... thinking of going on such a day as this? It would be a sheer impossibility. Why, the carriage would be blown over, and if it wasn't, no horses would ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty
... hands, and by sheer force of will seemed to pull herself together. These nervous women have often an ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... happened to the manufacturer, as he was sitting alone on the doorstep one afternoon and sleepily contemplating the world, to see a strange young man come down the hill who asked the way to the town hall. Huerlin was civil out of sheer boredom, went a couple of streets with the stranger, answered his questions, and was presented for his trouble with two cigars. He asked the next wagon-driver for a light, lit one of them, and returned to his shady place ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... friend with the understanding heart no less than a brother dear," as Homer said? More impossible. An unknown enemy, then, had stolen the fleet order from Themistocles? But what man had hated Glaucon? One answer remained,—unwittingly the athlete had offended some god, forgotten some vow, or by sheer good fortune had awakened divine jealousy. Poseidon had been implacable toward Odysseus, Athena toward Hector, Artemis toward Niobe,—Glaucon could only pray that his present welcome amongst the Persians might not draw down ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... violation of integrity as a direct falsehood. Equivocation is often falsehood. Deception in all forms is opposed to integrity. Mock manners, pretended emotions, affectation, policy plans to secure attention and respect are all sheer falsehoods, and in the end injure her who is guilty of them. Respect and affection are the out-growth of confidence. She who secures the firmest confidence will secure the most respect and love. ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... care to secure everything to herself, for her own life, when the father of this girl (a child at that time) died- -of sheer helplessness; no other disorder—and then He renewed the acquaintance that had once subsisted between the mother and Him. He had been put aside for the flaxen-haired, large-eyed man (or nonentity) with Money. He could overlook that for Money. ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... watched the whole proceeding. He could only hold on to a sail and, by the sheer strength of his hands and arms, save himself from being carried overboard, as sea after sea swept over them. He strained his eyes until it seemed as though they would burst, to follow the movements of that ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... the silent water. And then, when one hand was loosed in the struggle, she twisted it through his long hair, and dragged back his head till his eyes were nearly starting from their sockets. Anastasia Bergen had hitherto been a sheer woman, all feminine in her nature. But now the foam came to her mouth, and fire sprang from her eyes, and the muscles of her body worked as though she had been trained to deeds of violence. Of violence, Aaron Trow had known much in his rough life, but never ...
— Aaron Trow • Anthony Trollope
... sheer mine in that capacity," said the falconer, while he knotted the kerchief in two or three double folds around his sunburnt bull-neck, calling out at the same time, "Master Roland, Master Roland, make haste! we must back ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... all the time poring over his dear classic authors but for the fortunate intervention of the young members of the Myhrman family, seven in all, who frequently would storm into his room and carry him off by sheer force to their boisterous frolics. To one of these playmates, Anna Myhrman, the youngest daughter of the family, he soon became attached by ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... years. The entire solar system is gradually losing its internal heat, and must inevitably die of sheer inanition. The time is coming when the sun will drift through space, a black star in the midst of dead worlds. Perhaps the system will fall together, perhaps it will run against a star. In either case there would probably be a 'new ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... anger seemed to have possessed him, in presence of this free, independent, exacting woman—this woman who, worst of all, had just beaten him at the game of all games he prided himself on playing well. And despite his every effort, she saw through the veil of sheer, perfunctory courtesy; and seeing, ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... With a yell of sheer terror which came quicker than even his sense of pain, the man leaped back, dropping as he did so the rope which held back the iron door. I jumped for it, but was too late, for the cord ran like lightning through the pulley-block, and the ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... people of the South-West, and were, unaided, fully competent to fight their way to the ocean over any obstacles which the powers behind Mr. Slidell could interpose. In the mere matching of local strength, it was sheer folly for the States of the lower Mississippi to attempt to control the mouth ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... volcanic activity associated with the Atlantic Mid-Ocean Ridge Saint Helena: rugged, volcanic; small scattered plateaus and plains Ascension: surface covered by lava flows and cinder cones of 44 dormant volcanoes; ground rises to the east Tristan da Cunha: sheer cliffs line the coastline of the nearly circular island; the flanks of the central volcanic peak are deeply dissected; narrow coastal plain lies between The Peak and ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Irish, and something like a settlement of these ancient distresses, and there seems no power, no conscience, no sanity in any of us, sufficient to save it from this cantankerous bitterness, this sheer wicked mischief of mutual exasperation.... Just when Ireland is getting a gleam of prosperity.... A murrain ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... for more than thirty years he devoted a considerable part of his time to works of charity and benevolence. He visited successively cities and towns so far remote from each other, as Bayonne and Marseilles, Bagneres and Lyons. He placed his talents at the service of the public from motives of sheer benevolence, for the large collections which were made at his recitations were not of the ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... they who have a land! Passion rooted deeply as the foundations of the hills: a man may adore one woman, but in adoring his land the aggregation of all men's love for all other women overwhelms him and accentuates to a fuller emotion. It is unselfish, impersonal, sheer sentiment clarified at its white heat from all interest and deceit, the noblest joy, the noblest sorrow. Bold should they be, and pure as the priests who bore the ark, that dare to call themselves patriots. And those, Lenore, who live to see their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... liberal as possible to secure their confidence ourselves. We are in St. Mary's paying the highest rate of wages in the island; 1s. 8d. currency per day nett, with allowances, are generally offered; I am giving here, from sheer necessity, 2s. 6d. currency per day, without charging any rent in the mean time. In the present state of things when so few estates are doing anything at all, I have much satisfaction in saying that the people here, on ——, a good proportion of them were at work last week, and ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... not plead lost lands or exile for taking part in such massacres as Wyoming or Cherry Valley, but, long since an ally of the Indians, he was now at the head of a Tory band that murdered and burned from sheer pleasure. ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... girl of the Michigan woods; a buoyant loveable type of the self-reliant American. Her philosophy is one of love and kindness towards all things; her hope is never dimmed. And by the sheer beauty of her soul, and the purity of her vision, she wins from barren and unpromising surroundings those rewards of ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... In itself the sheer creation of such a country—larger far than Great Britain and Germany, as rich as Illinois and Manitoba—would appeal at once to American commerce and industry, but you have only begun to grasp the significance of Manchuria when you compare it to the creation of such an empire ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... and Mikah who were milling about confusedly in the dark, kicked Mikah again out of sheer malice and hatred of all mankind, and led them towards the ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... killing bows and arrows of theirs? What causes respectable parents to take up their carpets, set their houses topsy-turvy, and spend a fifth of their year's income in ball suppers and iced champagne? Is it sheer love of their species, and an unadulterated wish to see young people happy and dancing? Psha! they want to marry their daughters; and, as honest Mrs. Sedley has, in the depths of her kind heart, already arranged a score of ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of showing what it could do. And this feeling evoked sympathy in the breasts of the Irish of the South and West; and they said to them of Ulster, "Rather than see your army wasted we will ourselves raise one for you to shoot at." And this they did, in part for sheer joy of the chance of a fight, and in part for admiration of the sportsmanship of a people that had defied a British Government. And though some joined the new Volunteers for love of Home Rule, and with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 24, 1914 • Various
... WOLF'S-BANE 1.25 "We hesitate to say how many years it is necessary to go back in order to find their equals in sheer poetic originality."—Evening ...
— Women and War Work • Helen Fraser
... attack of millions of sandflies on a hot sunny day will appreciate my feelings. About one o'clock we got as a diversion from our tormentors a great fright. A boat's crew of a gun-boat lying about a mile distant from our retreat landed, and out of sheer idleness set fire to the grass about a hundred yards from ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... and capered about him, while he stood and looked at her rather puzzled. He did not see anything to laugh at, and did not yet comprehend that here was a creature so joyous by nature that she must laugh and dance about from sheer spontaneous delight. ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... When a ship at anchor is laid in a proper position to keep clear of her anchor, but is forced by the wind or current out of that position, she is said to break her sheer. Also, for a vessel to break her sheer, or her back, means destroying the ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... Queen laid her head upon the pillow which covered the casket, and soon Marie saw her fall asleep through sheer fatigue. She then rose, and, seating herself in a great, tapestried, square armchair, clasped her hands upon her knees, and began to reflect upon her painful situation. Consoled by the aspect of her gentle ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... topic of the lost boy, Harry, is introduced, and later on a boy who had been found by the natives of a Pacific island, comes into the story, being the person who found one of the ship's company who had been lost overboard in heavy weather. The latter had made his way ashore by sheer grit and determination (being a Sandwich Islander). They realise Harry is originally an English boy, and take him on board, and away from his savage masters who had been using ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... sheer rubbish," she said lightly. "You remind me of that absurd play, The Chinese Honeymoon, when the bride took her bridesmaids with her." She laughed; she took Christine's hand and dragged her to her feet. "You might ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres
... that surprised the latter no more than it did his white friends, he drove the head of the weapon sheer through one of the assailants, who went over backward with a screech that drowned all ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... rose hastily and went to the window to look out. This window was in a kind of circular tower projecting from the side of the building, such as one often sees in old Norman architecture;—it overhung not only a wall of dizzy height, but a precipice with a sheer descent of some thousand feet; and far below, spread out like a map in the distance, lay a prospect of enchanting richness. The eye might wander over orchards of silvery olives, plantations with their rows of mulberry-trees supporting the vines, now in the first tender spring green, scarlet ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... anxious wits were driven hard. He had drawn to Mr. Frost every splinter of power he could command by barter, and thrown in his own State delegation in the House by sheer stress of that machine which he had upreared for his own defense at home. It was not enough; even the subtraction of two State delegations from the standards of the foe, by the adroit scheme, applied to each delegation, of dragging one of its members forward to be a candidate for Speaker, was not ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... dropping her hand. She wondered, vaguely distressed; and he went on presently: "As a plain matter of fact, I don't know much. It's an astonishing discovery for me, but it's a fact that I am not your mental, physical, or spiritual equal. In sheer, brute strength perhaps I am, and I am none too certain of that, either. But, and I say it to my shame, I can not follow you; I am inferior in education, in culture, in fine instinct, in mental development. You chatter in a dozen languages to your sisters: ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... were hospitably received by the inhabitants, who regaled them freely with their peculiar and very delicious food; after partaking of which, however, the comrades of the hero refused to leave the country, and it was only by sheer force that he at length succeeded in bringing them back to ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... or yielding. The ice broke on the instant; and so rapidly was he moving that a hole twelve or fifteen feet long was torn by the sheer force with which he went against it. As he fell through, he went under once, but luckily came up in the hole he had made, and got his hands and arms on the edges of the ice, which, however, kept bending down and breaking off. The breaking and his fall ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... Caucasus the path of barbarism; this is why the Turks who took the former course could found an empire, and those who took the latter have remained Tartars or Turcomans, as they were originally; because the way of the Caucasus was a sheer descent from Turkistan into the country which they occupy, but the way of the Aral was a circuitous course, leading them through many countries—through Sogdiana, Khorasan, Zabulistan, and Persia,—with ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... stood on the plain outside the City walls, and Lalun's house was upon the east wall facing the river. If you fell from the broad window-seat you dropped thirty feet sheer into the City Ditch. But if you stayed where you should and looked forth, you saw all the cattle of the City being driven down to water, the students of the Government College playing cricket, the high grass and trees that fringed the river-bank, ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... change the scene of their inaction. Yet it is unquestionably true that quite a large proportion of those who went North in this fashion were men honestly seeking remunerative employment, or persons who left through sheer desperation. In the second stage of the movement the club organizations, special parties and chartered cars did most perhaps to depopulate little communities and ...
— Negro Migration during the War • Emmett J. Scott
... the people and their desires, if public officers are really the servants of the people, and if political promises and professions have any binding force, our failure to give the relief so long awaited will be sheer recreancy. Nothing should intervene to distract our attention or disturb our effort, until this reform is accomplished by ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... example need not be followed by everyone; but it must be allowed that—at least as long as he was in his tree—he was neither dawdling, grumbling, spending money, nor otherwise harming himself, and perhaps his fellow creatures, from sheer want of employment. ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... flat where the bushes grew sparsely along the tiny arroyo now gone dry, the herd had stopped from sheer exhaustion, and were already nibbling desultorily upon the tenderest twigs. This was what Luck wanted in his scene, though the cattle must be moved into the location he had chosen where was just the background effect he wanted to get, with the bare mesa showing ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... a long time to rest and get back some of his breath before he ventured to the very mouth of the open sewer. As soon as he was sure that the bats had abandoned the chase, he threw himself down and closed his eyes from sheer weariness and exhaustion. Then, with returning strength and hope, he raised himself on his two hind legs, and looked ...
— Bumper, The White Rabbit • George Ethelbert Walsh
... peculiar convincing force of these brief representations. They take so little a while to read, and yet in that little while the subject is so repeatedly introduced in the same light and with the same expression, that, by sheer force of repetition, that view is imposed upon the reader. The two English masters of the style, Macaulay and Carlyle, largely exemplify its dangers. Carlyle, indeed, had so much more depth and knowledge of the heart, his portraits of mankind are felt and rendered ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in mathematics, and those that assert there are, are infinite ruffians, ignorant, lying blackguards. There is no differential calculus, no Taylor's theorem, no calculus of variations, &c. in mathematics. There is no quackery whatever in mathematics; no % equal to anything. What sheer ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... as a controversialist, his first object is to refute and convince. The graces of poetry are never for a moment allowed to interfere with the full development of an argument. Much of the poem is a chain of intricate reasoning hammered into verse by sheer force of hand. The ardent imagination of the poet struggles through masses of intractable material which no genius could wholly fuse into a metal pure enough to take perfect form. His language, in the fine prologue to the fourth book of the poem, ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... black and inhospitable even in the sunlight. The rock walls rose sheer, the roofs slanted rakishly, the signs scratched on the rock by facetious riders were pointless and inane. Lone picked his way through the crooked defile that was marked MAIN STREET on the corner of the first huge boulder and came abruptly into the road. Here he turned ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... these as proof that Breitmann, as I have depicted him, is not a contradictory character, I cannot refrain from a word of praise as to the energy and patience with which the German "under a cloud" in America bears his reverses, and works cheerfully and uncomplainingly, until, by sheer perseverance, he, in most cases, conquers fortune. In this respect the Germans, as a race, and I might almost say as individuals, are superior to any others on the American continent. And if I have jested ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... my sausage-stick. I never would have believed that so much could have come from it; but much, of course, depended on what hands it fell into. I became very much agitated, and I wept, as a little mouse can weep, from sheer pleasure. ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... be it said, en passant, is sheer obstinacy. The marchesa is obstinate to folly, and full of contradictions. Besides, there is another powerful motive that influences her—she hates Count Nobili. Not that he has ever done any thing personally to offend her; of this he is incapable—indeed, he has ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... to see the German quail at the frightful precipice and sheer wall before him, but the Hapsburg was primarily a Tirolean mountaineer, and he measured the rock with ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sheer fatigue, she did drowse, and when the wheels of Maurice's cab grated against the curb, ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... few alterations, and to Blue Bonnet's great joy Miss Clyde took both—and yet another; a sheer white linen lawn with a pink silk slip, which called forth all the ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... tense flank trembling round the barbed wound, Hateful; and fiery with invasive eyes And bristling with intolerable hair Plunged, and the hounds clung, and green flowers and white Reddened and broke all round them where they came. And charging with sheer tusk he drove, and smote Hyleus; and sharp death caught his sudden soul, And violent sleep shed night ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... certain enjoyment. The slowness of the tempo made it possible for Keith to keep in tune by leaning very close to the boy sitting next to him. Even the reading of the gospels and other recurring features of the service could be borne. But when the sermon began, Keith fell into sheer agony. The other boys seemed capable of letting the words of the preacher drop off them as water drops off the oily feathers of a water-fowl. But one of Keith's characteristics was that he had to listen to anything said loudly enough in his ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... start of recollection, he paused a moment and leaned forward to look at her more closely. "By the way, I had a shot at your friend to-day," he said, "the lady who looks like an old picture and does verse. Why on earth did she take to poetry?" he demanded impatiently. "I hate it—it's all sheer insanity." ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... to no one," the plucky boy in the boat made answer, and with a parting shot and a laughing "Farvl!" he leaped from the sinking boat into the dancing Maelar water. Striking boldly out, he swam twice round the boat in sheer bravado, defying the enemy; now ducking to escape the pursuing stream, or now, while floating on his back, sending a return shot with telling force against the men at the pump—for he still ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... and more pitiable companions never perhaps occurred to him. Yet he could not help feeling the want of that excitement which, singularly enough, was most conducive to that calm equanimity for which he was notorious. He looked at the gloomy walls that rose a thousand feet sheer above the circling pines around him; at the sky, ominously clouded; at the valley below, already deepening into shadow. And, doing so, suddenly he heard his ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... never comes the ship to port Howe'er the breeze may be; Just when she nears the waiting shore She drifts again to sea. No tack of sail, nor turn of helm, Nor sheer of veering side. Stern-fore she drives to sea and night Against the wind ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... modesty, she had said she could not bear for us to see her in the trunk hose. Now that fruition seemed about to crown her hopes she was happy to her heart's core; and when once to herself wept for sheer joy. It is little wonder she was happy. She was leaving behind no one whom she loved excepting Jane, and perhaps, me. No father nor mother; only a sister whom she barely knew, and a brother whose treatment of her had turned her heart against him. ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... of course its relation to death that more than anything else has made it necessary that war should appeal to art, and take an aesthetic form, and without the aid of the aesthetic, war could not maintain itself in the world. As a sheer fulfillment of duty war could not survive. By the strength of its aesthetic appeal war must control and overcome the ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... returned to the benches of evening school. He learned to write his beautiful copper-plate hand, and knocked the bottom out of arithmetic and geography. Then came sheer erudition—the nature of chemical elements, stars in their courses, kings of England with their Magna Chartas and habeas corpuses. Nor content even then, he must needs grapple with Roman emperors and Greek republics, and master the fabled lore concerning gods and goddesses, cloven-footed ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... the pair had lived together for twenty years, there had been little intercourse of thought between them, and none of sentiment. Strange had, indeed, throughout shut his nephew, not merely from his heart, but also from his confidence, at first out of sheer neglect, and afterwards, as the lad grew towards manhood, from deliberate intent. For, by continually brooding over his embittered life, he had at last impregnated his weak nature with the savage cynicism which embraced even his one comrade; and the child he had originally chosen as a solace ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... of Madam Taylor, I suppose, of which he had probably heard famous mention, but which I would have believed to have been a longing for Roberta, Marquise of Grez and Bye, if I had heard it so spoken, with an English or Russian or French accent, to me in a robe of tulle or sheer linen. "And may I not return immediately after that supper to that Club of Old Hickory for conversation with you and my Uncle, the General Robert?" I ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... to avenge himself. For, not having store enough in his own land to recruit his forces—so heavy was the blow he had received—he went to Britain, calling himself an ambassador. Upon his outward voyage, for sheer wantonness, he got his crew together to play dice, and when a wrangle arose from the throwing of the cubes, he taught them to wind it up with a fatal affray. And so, by means of this peaceful sport, he spread the spirit of strife through the whole ship, and the ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... Year's day, 1887, he laid down his pen to resume it again no more. He was forced to this by sheer exhaustion; his body was wasted to a skeleton, and it was clear to all that the end was near. Having suffered much for several days, but without a murmur, on the evening of Jan. 5 he requested all his family to come to his bedside, and while ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... The body vaporized first, leaving for a fraction of a second the fierce head and the powerful legs apparently supporting themselves in the air. Then part of the head went, and the rest fell to the ground. But sheer momentum carried the green smoky vapor on, so that it surrounded first the old man, then several of the girls, and after them, Bradley himself. They were all yelling, all but Bradley, who put away his gun and muttered to himself in relief, and then the wind began to ...
— Divinity • William Morrison
... just yonder where the blue cloak caught the sunlight, there was a sheer bank and how the lapping water had cut into it, gouging it out year after year so that the loose soil above was always ready to crumble and spill into the lake. The wearer of the bright garment stirred and stood up, her back ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... even wink at it," replied his foe. "Still further," continued the warlike mountaineer in sheer desperation, "you must not even ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... fully as common; which is properly called false theory; conclusions drawn, by way of deduction, from properties of some one agent which is known or supposed to be present, all other co-existing agents being overlooked. As the former is the error of sheer ignorance, so the latter is especially that of semi-instructed minds; and is mainly committed in attempting to explain complicated phenomena by a simpler theory than their nature admits of. As when one ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... snapdragons, and dahlias, this floral blaze being backed by crusted grey stone-work remaining from a yet remoter Casterbridge than the venerable one visible in the street. The old-fashioned fronts of these houses, which had older than old-fashioned backs, rose sheer from the pavement, into which the bow windows protruded like bastions, necessitating a pleasing chassez-dechassez movement to the time-pressed pedestrian at every few yards. He was bound also to ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... that box was made for a special occasion; as indeed were all the preparations of the tomb and all belonging to it. Queen Tera did not trouble herself to guard against snakes and scorpions, in that rocky tomb cut in the sheer cliff face a hundred feet above the level of the valley, and fifty down from the summit. Her precautions were against the disturbances of human hands; against the jealousy and hatred of the priests, who, had they known of her real aims, would have tried to baffle them. From her point ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... to escape into that wilderness and wandering alone among the peaks, he shuddered. He came back and studied the sleeper. Something about the nonchalance with which Sinclair had gone to sleep under the very eye of his prisoner affected John Gaspar strangely. Doubtless it was sheer contempt for the man he was guarding. And, indeed, something assured Jig that, no matter how well he employed the next eight hours in putting a great distance between himself and Sour Creek, the tireless riding of Sinclair would more ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... he read the following night, was a much less discouraging work. It told of defeat, but of how glorious a defeat! The escape from Elba, the landing in France and the march to Paris, conquering, where he passed, by the sheer magnetism of his personality! His spirit bounded as he read of this and of the frightened exit of that puny usurper before the mere rumour of his approach. Then that audacious staking of all on a throw of the ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... which the poison does not affect. There are several mammals immune to snake- bite, including various species of hedgehog, pig, and mongoose—the other mammals which kill them do so by pouncing on them unawares or by avoiding their stroke through sheer quickness of movement; and probably this is the case with most snake-eating birds. The mongoose is very quick, but in some cases at least—I have mentioned one in the "African Game Trails"—it permits itself to be bitten by poisonous snakes, treating the ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... of the gods or not was, in ancient times, the cause of much dispute; it is, of course, not atheism in our sense, but it is certainly evidence that belief in the gods is shaken. The first view, on the other hand, is sheer atheism. Plato consequently reckons with this as a serious danger to the community; he mentions it as a widespread view among the youth of his time, and in his legislation he sentences to death those who fail to be converted. It would seem certain, therefore, that there was, in reality, something ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... M. Asquith, son of the former British Premier, is one of the gallant men attached to the Hood battalion. He has been through the thick of many fights, and has been wounded more than once, escaping death through sheer good fortune. ...
— Some Naval Yarns • Mordaunt Hall
... suffered through the marvelous mechanical development of machines and devices whose sole purpose has been to multiply gross output. Necessary as sheer volume of production has been, it has remained for very recent years to witness a renewal of interest in the beauty of printing, as determined by the principles ...
— Applied Design for Printers - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #43 • Harry Lawrence Gage
... hardly conscious of them and overcome them in the course of the evening. Yet the public, even critics, usually forget this fact and condemn an entire performance for faults which are due at the beginning to sheer nervousness. ...
— Caruso and Tetrazzini on the Art of Singing • Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini
... three other men their chance to gain an entrance at the rear of the wall in the garden, and creep up unawares. It was probably sheer accident that led all three of them along the far side of the house, but it was fortunate for Jeremy and me, for otherwise cold steel between our shoulder-blades would likely have been our first ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... think she was a little sister, by the way I try to speak, and if she only knew how I struggle to suffocate the passion that rises within me, when she looks up so earnestly out of her big dreaming eyes; it is sheer folly and I'll go mad if it must continue—and yet—if uncle ever suspected my love he would separate us then and there. But it is dangerous dust I am flinging in his eyes by being free and easy with her in this way. In a little while more I won't be able to trust myself, and God help me ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... victims I had led into the trouble, and he had our wheelbarrows all picked out for us, and a nice large pile of sand for us to play with when fate interceded in our behalf. The poor man nearly cried out of sheer anguish of soul, and I can't justly blame him. It's hard lines to have a nice fat extra duty party go ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... stories, and smoked till the room was blue, comforting themselves with hot Scotch and general good-fellowship. Mark Twain always had a genuine passion for billiards. He was never tired of the game. He could play all night. He would stay till the last man gave out from sheer weariness; then he would go on knocking the balls about alone. He liked to invent new games and new rules for old games, often inventing a rule on the spur of the moment to fit some particular shot or position on the table. It amused ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... which they have doomed to progress still remain as is Guayra, their towns deserted, with but the broken spire of some old church emerging from the verdure of the tropics, as the St. Paul's Rocks rise sheer out of the sea. If there is charm in the unknown, there is at least as great a charm in the forgotten, and the Salto de Guayra is one of the most forgotten corners of the earth. To this wild place Father Mendoza proposed to lead the Indians from the Reductions of San Jose and ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... was able to remember episodes of an entire month, bringing them up one by one, grouping them together, and connecting together all those little matters which had preceded or followed some important event. She succeeded by sheer force of attention, by force of memory and of concentrated will power in bringing back to mind almost completely her two first years at Peuples. Distant memories of her life came back to her with a singular facility, bringing a kind of relief; but the later ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... made perfect by a passion that has stolen upon her unawares, and which she could not acknowledge, even to herself, without blushing to death. By this preposterous doctrine, the defeat and enslavement of the man is made glorious, and even gifted with a touch of flattering naughtiness. The sheer horsepower of his wooing has assailed and overcome her maiden modesty; she trembles in his arms; he has been granted a free franchise to work his wicked will upon her. Thus do the ambulant images of God cloak their shackles proudly, and divert the ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... entranced, comfortable, but not sublime, content to drink in the sunny sweetness of the summer day, happy only from the pleasant sense of being, tangling each other in silly talk out of mere wantonness, purling up bubbles of airy nothings in sheer effervescence of animal delight; falling into periodic fits of useful knowledge, under the influence of which we consulted our maps and our watches in a conjoint and clamorous endeavor to locate ourselves, which would no sooner be satisfactorily accomplished than something ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... among civilians—to be welcome in the village houses—and generally to experience peace time conditions again. This may not seem to amount to very much, but it meant a lot then. And it certainly had a fine effect on the morale of the Battalion. It was a sheer relief to be out of sound of the guns, to forget the mud, the exhaustion, mental and physical, the weary night watches, ...
— The Seventeenth Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow Chamber of Commerce Battalion) - Record of War Service, 1914-1918 • Various
... Fontanges, bursting with impatience, stood with Newton, at the head of the men. When the collision of the two vessels took place, the Windsor Castle, conned so as not to run down the pirate, but to sheer alongside, stove in the bulwarks of the other, and carried away her topmasts, which, drawn to windward by the pressure on the back-stays, fell over towards the Windsor Castle, and, entangling with her rigging, prevented the separation of ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... he printed up that afternoon was the most horrible collection of mince-pie dreams that ever a sane man run afoul of. Rosy used one of the grass huts for a dark room; and while he was developing them plates, they could hear him screaming from sheer fright at being shut up alone with 'em ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... and held on the same course until abreast of the perch, which was only a forked stick. The men came aft and hauled in the mizzen sheer. Chambers put up the helm. The mizzen came across with a jerk, and the sheet was again allowed to run out. The jib came over with a report like the shot of a cannon, and at the same ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty
... the doctor replied. "Drive that gypsy lassie out of the town before the soldiers reach it. She is firing the men to a red-heat through sheer devilry." ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... sheer fool's luck led him to a hamlet whose mean auberge served him bread and cheese with a wine singularly thin and acid. Here he enquired for a guide, but the one able-bodied man in evidence, a hulking, surly animal, on learning that Duchemin wished to visit Montpellier-le-Vieux, ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... having digested the necessary matter, always poured itself forth in writing so copiously that his revision was chiefly devoted to reducing the over-abundance. He never shrank from any of the drudgery of preparation, but I think his own part of the work was sheer pleasure ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the news reached them that the brig had put into Salcombe range. It is a wild-looking yet land-locked harbour on the Devonshire coast. Black rocks rise sheer up out of the water on either side of the entrance, and give it a particularly melancholy and unattractive appearance. One of the owners had come round in the brig, but he had landed and taken a post-chaise back towards London. In the morning the brig ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... roar of an automatic close beside him in the melee as Milton remembered at last through the red haze of his fury the weapon he carried, but before either Randall or Lanier could reach their own weapons a new wave of crocodilian forms had poured onto them that by sheer pressing weight held ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... stiffness and stretching made him uncouth, he grew angry. He resented his captivity, chafed at his being limited like that, did not understand how it had come about. It had come about through love, through sheer sheltering love. She had placed a crystal cup above him to keep him safe, and he had sat safe beneath it all these years, fearing to stir, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... she reeled from sheer weakness as she said the words. Amelius held her up, and looked round him. They were close to a stall at which coffee and slices of bread-and-butter were sold. He ordered some coffee to be poured out, and ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... what is called a Magellanic jacket, and a pair of trowsers. The jacket is made of a thick woollen stuff, called Fearnought, which is provided by the government. We saw, from time to time, a great number of penguins, albatrosses, and sheer-waters, seals, whales, and porpoises: And on the 11th, having passed Falkland's islands, we discovered the coast of Terra del Fuego, at the distance of about four leagues, extending from the W* to S.E. by S. We had here five-and-thirty fathom, the ground soft, small slate stones. As we ranged ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... they had climbed to the loftiest known turret, they would have found it swathed in a garment of clinging vapour, affording no refreshment to the eye, and no hope to the heart. There was one lofty tower that rose sheer a hundred feet above the rest, and from which the fog could have been seen lying in a grey mass beneath; but that tower they had not yet discovered, nor another close beside it, the top of which was never seen, nor could be, for the highest clouds of heaven clustered continually ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... and, in fact, doing always the right thing at the proper time and in the best possible manner. I used to be rather proud of saying that it was necessary for strangers to know me for some time before they liked me. I am almost ashamed now not to have had sense enough to see that this arose from sheer awkwardness and stupidity on my part; from the absence of address, and a careless disregard of the rules of society, which necessarily induce a want of self-confidence, a bashful reserve, annoying to sensible people ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... a combination of the single cane and bow system, and the horizontal arm training, which I first tried on the Concord from sheer necessity; when the results pleased me so much that I have adopted it with all strong-growing varieties. The circumstances which led me to the trial of this method were as follows: In the summer of 1862, when my Concord vines ...
— The Cultivation of The Native Grape, and Manufacture of American Wines • George Husmann
... write the possessive of nouns," hardly expecting, we suppose, that the "condition" of a noun will be sounded or written; and they speak of "a noun in the singular with a plural application," in which expression singular must be taken to mean singular form to save it from sheer nonsense. ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... waited purposely until February was dead. Cynics may say that this was only wisdom, in that a damnatory notice from me might have inspired that unhappy month to an unusually brilliant run, out of sheer wilfulness. I prefer to think that it was good manners which forbade me to be disrespectful to her very face. It is bad manners to speak the truth to the living, but February is dead. ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... travel was ever able to deter him from doing what his humanity had bidden him do. From place to place, through nineteen States, he had traveled, sowing as he went the seeds of his holy purpose, and watering them with his life's blood. Not Livingstone nor Stanley on the dark continent exceeded in sheer physical exertion and endurance the labors of this wonderful man. He belongs in the category of great explorers, only the irresistible passion and purpose, which pushed him forward, had humanity, not geography, as their goal. Where, in the ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... returned to their forests. The natives whom I had taken with me from Goa had proved so lazy and morose that nearly the whole task of making the path through the forest had fallen upon the Igorots. From sheer laziness they threw away the drinking water of which they were the porters; and the Igorots were obliged to fetch water from a considerable distance for our bivouac on the summit. In all my troublesome marches, I have always done better with Cimarrons than with the civilized ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... Convent, and from sheer wantonness I was making my Waler plunge and curvet across the road as I tickled it with the loop of ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... glistened. He was silent for sheer swelling of heart. He gulped down something—and went ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... a weary and fruitless search for game, but late in the afternoon the youth came upon a slight, sheer descent, along the foot of which ran a shallow but broad creek, beyond which was a little grass-grown valley, where were feeding a fine herd of the little deer. They were feeding in the direction of the creek and the wind blew from them to the hunter, so that no rumor of their danger was ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... me, moved by his agonies Through naysaying the drug they had offered him. It brought the end. And when he had breathed his last The woman went. I saw her never again . . . Now glares my moody meaning on you, friend? - That when you talk of offspring as sheer joy So trustingly, you blink contingencies. Fors Fortuna! He who goes fathering Gives ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... good fish in the sea as were ever caught," cried the girl in sheer bravado, brushing away ...
— The Little Gray Lady - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... a lot since I got away. I've realized since, more than I did then, that it must have taken just sheer pluck on all their parts to see it through as they did. Of course, my young sisters couldn't understand all it meant, but my kid brother's read a heap, as I easily found out when we talked about it, and I know he had to do a few swallowings ...
— The Whistling Mother • Grace S. Richmond
... further adventure during this day's journey, than buying bread and cheese from sheer hunger, at a little wooden tavern by the road-side, whose shelves were covered with glittering rows of bottles of brandy and mezcal. At some of the Indian huts also we bought various branches of pltanos, that most useful of fruits, and basis of the food of the poor inhabitants ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... born in rather sordid conditions, lift herself through sheer determination to the better things for which ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... Ebeneezer's dooryard, and the newly acquired bossy cow mooed unhappily in her improvised stable. Harlan had christened the cow "Maud" because she insisted upon going into the garden, and though Dorothy had vigorously protested against putting Tennyson to such base uses, the name still held, out of sheer appropriateness. ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... undressed, denuded, unveiled, exposed, undraped, in puris naturalibus; unadorned, bald, meager, unembellished, uncolored, unvarnished; empty, destitute, unfurnished; threadbare, pileworn, napless; meer, alone, sheer. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... had alarmed or excited its interest. And he did not try to establish more than a casual contact as they made their way down the bank to the edge of the stream, Sssuri splashing in ankle-deep for the sheer pleasure of feeling liquid curl about his ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... unendurable to my weakened nerves. Had it not been for the return, now and then, of the pains I had suffered in my delirium, mercifully less and less violent, which made the periods of their absence hours of comparative pleasure, I think I should have grown into a hopeless nervous invalid from sheer ennui. I had never been ill that I remember since the days of my childish maladies, and I fretted as only such an one can and must fret under the irksome novelty of pain, ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... was not yet in sight, because the front of White Face, though apparently a sheer and awful precipice when viewed from the valley, was in fact wrinkled with gullies and buttresses and bucklings of the tortured strata. But the sound of his coming was now quite intelligible to her. That softly ponderous tread, that careless displacing of stones, those undisguised sniffings and ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... put fires out and remain here till the conditions change altogether for the better. It is sheer waste of coal to make further attempts to break through as ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... account. With a hazy idea that something had passed which he had not heard, he caused a diversion by sending Mrs. Church indoors for a pack of cards, and solemnly celebrated the occasion with a game of whist, at which Mrs. Church, in partnership with Mrs. Banks, either through sheer wilfulness or absence of mind, contrived to lose ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... strongly against the distrust with which, in sheer perplexity of mind, Mr. Brock blindly regarded him. He had written to a savings-bank in a distant part of England, had drawn his money, and had paid the doctor and the landlord. A man of vulgar mind, after acting in this manner, ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... life. The college should not be expected to pay much attention to the cultivation of the imagination and the emotions. These faculties, to which literature makes appeal, are not, it was said, under the control of the will, and you cannot cultivate or strengthen them by sheer resolve or strenuous exertion. The first condition of any real appreciation of literature, so ran the argument, is spontaneous enjoyment of it; and you cannot command a right feeling for literature or for anything else. ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... in the world an industry which, for sheer pictorial magnificence, rivals the modern manufacturing of steel. In the first place, the scale of everything is inexpressibly stupendous. To speak of a row of six blast furnaces, with mouths a hundred feet above the ground, and chimneys rising perhaps another ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... sometimes the more daring chiefs converted these detached peaks and masses of rock, numbers of which you can see as you come up the Ghaut by railway, into almost impregnable fortresses. Many of these masses of rock rise as sheer up from the hillside as walls of masonry, and look at a short distance like ruined castles. Some are absolutely inaccessible; others can only be scaled by experienced climbers; and, although possible for the ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... the door, he sprang across grasping his flask, but Sweyn dashed between, and caught him back irresistibly, so that a most frantic effort only availed to wrench one arm free. With that, on the impulse of sheer despair, he cast at her with all his force. The door swung behind her, and the flask flew into fragments against it. Then, as Sweyn's grasp slackened, and he met the questioning astonishment of surrounding ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman
... reckoned with. He could now easily believe the stories he had heard about the tremendous strength of the giant. And it was easy to see how he kept control over the members of the squatter clan by sheer force of character. ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... can find no such thing as a pure conception of wedded love in our old dramatists. In Massinger, and Beaumont and Fletcher, it really is on both sides little better than sheer animal desire. There is scarcely a suitor in all their plays, whose abilities are not discussed by the lady or her waiting-woman. In this, as in all things, how transcendant over his age and his rivals was ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... the moment before she is actually overtaken by the breaking crest of the wave, she is apt to refuse to answer her helm, and he who is steering her loses all control over her; she seems to be seized with a perverse determination to take a broad sheer one way or the other, with disastrous results, despite a hard-over helm, and then the only thing to be done to retrieve the situation is to effect a lightning shift of helm against all your past experience ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... thither, observing the surgeon with languid interest. Another nurse, much younger, without the "black band," watched the surgeon from the foot of the cot. Beads of perspiration chased themselves down her pale face, caused less by sympathy than by sheer weariness and heat. The small receiving room of St. Isidore's was close and stuffy, surcharged with odors of iodoform and ether. The Chicago spring, so long delayed, had blazed with a sudden fury the last ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... climbing, and in a short time reached the crest. I sprang upon the summit, and another step would have precipitated me into an immense snow field five hundred feet below. To the edge of this field was a sheer icy precipice; and then, with a gradual fall, the field sloped off for about a mile, until it struck the foot of another lower ridge. I stood on a narrow crest, about three feet in width, with an inclination of about 20 deg. N., 51 deg. E. As soon as I had gratified ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... was Madelon Hautville, in a sheer white gown, which she had fashioned for herself out of an old crape shawl which had belonged to her mother, and cunningly wrought with great garlands of red flowers. She was going to Burr Gordon's wedding, not knowing the lateness of the hour; for her brother Richard had played ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... out, for the amazed old gentleman was mechanically drinking his whiskey out of sheer fright. The rest had forgotten their drinks. "Not one swallow," the boy continued. "No, you'll not put it down either. You'll keep hold of it, and you'll dance all round this place. Around and around. And don't you spill any. And I'll ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... was not there, nor anywhere else in their wanderings, which at last from sheer necessity in the way of ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... gave an indescribable sentiment of pathos and of age to the scenery. Suddenly the boat rounded the corner of the three steps, each five hundred feet high, in which Cape Eternity climbs from the river, and crept in under the naked side of the awful cliff. It is sheer rock, springing from the black water, and stretching upward with a weary, effort-like aspect, in long impulses of stone marked by deep seams from space to space, till, fifteen hundred feet in air, its vast brow beetles forward, and frowns with a ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... altogether, and, through inexperience and in his anxiety to catch up, increased the revolutions of the engines not wisely but rather too much. The next thing that happened was that the squall cleared, and he found himself almost on top of her, and had to put the helm over and sheer out of line to avoid a collision. At the same time he reduced speed to drop back into station. Sometimes he reduced more than he should, with the consequence that the next astern nearly bumped him, while the leader shot ahead and vanished into ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... work which one does out of sheer preference. Work never made an actress and work never made a singer where innate talent for these arts was lacking. Nature, the true maker of every famous name, bestows ninety per cent and man, if he hustles, can provide the other very necessary ten. ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... easy to order the men down the cliffs, but not so easy for them to obey, for the rocks were almost perpendicular at the place, and descended sheer into the water. ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... danger to the Dutch navigators of ancient days; hectoring their tub-built barks in a most unruly style; whirling them about, in a manner to make any but a Dutchman giddy, and not unfrequently stranding them upon rocks and reefs. Whereupon out of sheer spleen they denominated it Hellegat (literally Hell Gut) and solemnly gave it over to the devil. This appellation has since been aptly rendered into English by the name of Hell Gate; and into nonsense ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... seventy-five Irishmen and Americans made as much noise with their guns as a Boer commando of a thousand men usually did, and the result was that the cavalry wheeled about and returned into Ladysmith. Botha and his men, dropping out of their saddles from sheer exhaustion and hunger, came up from Colenso a short time after the cavalry had been driven back and made their memorable journey to Joubert's new headquarters at Glencoe. It was one of the few instances where the foreigners were of any really great assistance ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... succession of rolling terraces. Now he slid along the trough of a bank of snow. One thought was comforting; he was escaping from those strange brown men. Shots had rung out. Bullets whizzed past him, one fairly burning his cheek. It was with a distinct sense of relief that he at last bumped over a sheer drop of six feet to a gentler incline where he was quite ...
— Panther Eye • Roy J. Snell
... a moment with the girl's bundle. And with his return one glance showed him how nearly his plans were upset. Jessie was clasping Jamie in her arms, kissing him hungrily, tears streaming down her cheeks, while, out of sheer sympathy, little Vada was clinging to her mother's skirts, her small face buried in amongst them, sobbing as ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... ages, and see whether man has been so strikingly similar to us of the present day. There are manias and mysteries of the Middle Ages whose history is smothered in darkness; lost to us out of sheer incapacity to be understood from any modern standpoint of sense or feeling whatever. What do you make out of that crusade of scores of thousands of unarmed, delirious Christians, who started eastward to redeem the holy sepulchre; all their faith ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... again, heading straight for what looked like a sheer wall of black rock a thousand feet or more in height, up a path so steep that Robertson and I got out and walked, or rather scrambled, in order to ease the bearers. Billali, I noticed, remained in his litter. The convenience of the bearers did not trouble him; he only ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... said, with fond glistening eyes. He ate little or nothing, and sighed, and said "Good Percival!" when his friend laughed at him. After dinner, he took Laura by the hand, and asked her if she would be "so sweet as to play to him." She complied, through sheer astonishment. He sat by the piano, with his watch-chain resting in folds, like a golden serpent, on the sea-green protuberance of his waistcoat. His immense head lay languidly on one side, and ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... to throw himself into the river from sheer love befo' marriage," said Solomon, "an' two weeks arter the woman had taken him, to fall out with her because she'd put too much shortenin' in ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... never—never to have anything to do with him. Play grandly, honourably. Be not, of course, cast down at losing; but above all, be not eager at winning, as mean souls are. And, indeed, with all one's skill and advantages, winning is often problematical; I have seen a sheer ignoramus that knows no more of play than of Hebrew, blunder you out of five thousand pounds in a few turns of the cards. I have seen a gentleman and his confederate play against another and HIS ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... crept along it till he reached the still sinking man: he caught him by the arm at once, and started to haul him out. Anstey's strength was well known in the regiment, and perhaps he was the only man who could have dragged out the General by sheer force of arm, but he did it somehow, and the cheers of the men simply rent the air as they saw their ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... exercise its increased purchasing power on some new thing. If so, the supply will adapt itself accordingly, and the values of things will continue to conform to their cost of production. At any rate, it is a sheer absurdity that all things should fall in value, and that all producers should, in consequence, be insufficiently remunerated. If values remain the same, what becomes of prices is immaterial, since the remuneration of producers does not depend on how much money, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... with uninterrupted energy she again turned toward the southeast for another military adventure. Rumania still held fast to her neutrality. In Bulgaria the Central Powers were to succeed in gaining a fourth ally, which in sheer military advantage was probably worth more than the accession of Italy to her enemies. Though Russia had won her freedom for Bulgaria in '76, no sentiment drew her to Russia's assistance when Russia was losing. No statesmanship is more matter of fact than that of the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... pause. Then his voice rang again, cheery, confident, unexcited, "Hold fast; I'm going to get you out of this. I can't get to you on this side; the rock is sheer. I'll have to leave you now and cross the rift high up and come down to you on the other side by ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young
... get the money. For this enterprise he obtained support in England and set out on his exacting adventure. On the voyage his crew mutinied. Armed with cutlasses, they told Phips that he must turn pirate or perish; but he attacked the leader with his fists and triumphed by sheer strength of body and will. A second mutiny he also quelled, and then took his ship to Jamaica where he got rid of its worthless crew. His enterprise had apparently failed; but the second Duke of Albemarle and other powerful men believed in him and helped him to make another trial. This ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong |
