"Abnormally" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... went low until they were mere pencil points of blue illumination in the gloom. The eery look of the place was intensified by the darkness and silence of the abnormally early nightfall. The fantastic crags stood ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... surely admit that, when the pinch came, and when perfectly formed stoats were dying for want of food, the one-footed animal, referred to by Mr. Mivart, would be among the first to succumb; and the same remark will apply to his abnormally toothed hares and rheumatic monkeys, which might, nevertheless, get on very well under favourable conditions. The struggle for existence, under which all animals and plants have been developed, is intermittent, and exceedingly irregular in its ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... platform is erected which seems to be an attempt to make a two storey building of the hut. The women are here either quite nude or wear a small piece of cloth or grass below the waist; the men however all have a loin cloth. All the people seem to be of fine physique and the proportion of children is abnormally high. The first night we stop at a trading post of the Dutch Company on the French side of the river and are hospitably received by ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman
... "Yes; but abnormally developed in a single direction. His one object is to out-manoeuvre in a game of desperate and immoral chances. The tactical spirit in him has none of the higher ambition. It has felt itself in the degree only that stops ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... his cousin, slightly heavy with wine, went to bed. Clarges, abnormally wakeful, tried to read Bell's Life which lay before him and waited until Bovey was fast asleep. They occupied the same room, a large double-bedded one, which opened into a bathroom and parlour en suite. When he was perfectly certain ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... closer examination, presented some unusual particulars, frightening them, as everything unusual frightens even those domestic animals on Earth best acquainted with man and most accustomed to his caprices. I noticed that all were female, and their abnormally large udders suggested that they were domestic creatures kept for their milk. Not being able to see a path through the field, I went straight forward, endeavouring to trample the pasture as little as I could, but being surprised ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... face with the statues of Goethe and Schiller on their native soil would kindle the sparks of interest in German literature that she supposed every well-taught child possessed, into the roaring flame of enthusiasm. She could not believe that Letty had no sparks. One of her children being so abnormally clever, it must be sheer obstinacy on the part of the other that prevented it from acquiring the knowledge offered daily in such unstinted quantities. She had no illusions in regard to Letty's person, and felt that ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... on two rose-trees, which, to all appearances, were both in equally good condition. They daily blessed one and cursed the other, with the result that at the end of a month the anathematized plant had withered up from the roots, while the other was in an abnormally flourishing condition. Nor are we entirely without scientific backing even in such a case as this; for Professor Bose tells us in his work on the "Response of Metals," that not only can they be poisoned by certain chemicals, so as to deprive them of their normal qualities, but ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... knowledge where she listed; her further faculty flashed forth fine rays at unexpected intervals to cheer her, and her hungry heart also began to seek satisfaction. For Beth was by nature well-balanced; there was to be no atrophy of one side of her being in order that the other might be abnormally developed. Her chest was not to be flattened because her skull bulged with the big brain beneath. Rather the contrary. For mind and body acted and reacted on each other favourably, in so far as the conditions of her life were favourable. Such congenial intellectual ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... any rate in the name of the publication which tells of work that did come. Thackeray's mind was at all times peculiarly exercised with a sense of snobbishness. His appreciation of the vice grew abnormally, so that at last he had a morbid horror of a snob—a morbid fear lest this or the other man should turn snob on his hands. It is probable that the idea was taken from the early Snob at Cambridge, either from his own participation in the work or from his remembrance ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... had an air of thinking it quite natural he should leave many simple folk, tasting of him, as simple as ever he found them, and that he very seldom talked about the newspapers, which, by the way, were always even abnormally vulgar about him. Of course he may have thought them over—the newspapers—night and day; the only point I make is that he didn't show it while at the same time he didn't strike one as a man actively on his guard. I may add that, touching ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, has told the story of these early years in considerable detail and with apparent sincerity. De Quincey was not a sturdy boy. Shy and dreamy, exquisitely sensitive to impressions of melancholy and mystery, he was endowed with an imagination abnormally active even for a child. It is customary to give prominence to De Quincey's pernicious habit of opium-eating, in attempting to explain the grotesque fancies and weird flights of his marvellous mind in later years; yet it is only fair to emphasize the fact that the later achievements ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... he felt must be made. For a movement on the part of either of the ponies, or a check of the rein to keep them from stretching down their necks to graze, would have been enough. But they remained abnormally still, and at last, to the satisfaction and relief of both, the Boer vedette moved off at a trot, leaving the pair of listeners once more free ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... throughout the world, because of the inability of the "Standard Oil"-Amalgamated-City Bank fraternity to prevent the collapse of the price of copper, the metal, from the high price of seventeen cents to the low one of eleven cents per pound. "Cornering" the metal market, forcing the price to an abnormally high figure and maintaining it there had, notwithstanding the many emphatic statements to the contrary, absolutely no part in any of our original plans, and the success or failure of our project was in no way dependent upon any price for copper, ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... Mr. Cossey," he said very quietly, for it was one of his peculiarities to become abnormally quiet in circumstances of real emergency, "and then I think that we may close this painful interview. When first I knew you I did not like you. Afterwards, through various circumstances, I modified my opinion ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... the night, of the inanimate and imponderable black walls, and of herself, were exquisitely and abnormally keen. She saw him there, bowed under his burden, gloomy and wroth and sick with himself because the man in him despised the coward. Men of his stamp were seldom or never cowards. Their lives did not breed cowardice or baseness. Joan knew the burning in ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... say that that would be a most favourable condition for watching small signs. He knows that while we fixate a point with the centre of our eye we are most sensitive to slight movement impressions on the side parts of our eye, and that this sensitiveness is often abnormally heightened. Just when the child is looking steadily into our face or to the ceiling, the outside parts of her sensitive retina may bring to her the visible unintentional signs from her sister or mother. The untrained observer is also usually ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... Professor, straddling his malleable fingers across the young man's bumpy brow—"In this head we find Ideality large—abnormally large, in fact; thurby indicating—taken in conjunction with a like development of the perceptive qualities—language following, as well, in the prominent eye—thurby indicating, I say, our subject as especially endowed with a love for the ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... little things would be said in her presence that would set her a-thinking—little things such as what the Professor has just said. She may easily have been abnormally sensitive on the point—made more prone to reflection than usual—by last night's momentous announcement. Anyhow, she resolved to talk to Tishy about her parentage as soon as they should get back to the drawing-room, where they were practising. All the ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... the region is prepossessing. It is a rolling surface sinking towards the Atlantic, in parts broken by hills and dwarf chains, either detached or pushed out by the Ghats; a land of short and abnormally broad rivers, which cannot, like the Congo, break through the ridges flanking the Central African basin, and which therefore are mere surface drains of the main ranges. The soil is mostly sandy, but a thin coat of rich vegetable ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... through the first perilous season of youth, so abnormally safe from youth's most wonted peril,—to this would-be pupil of realism, this learned adept in the schools of a Welby or a Mivers,—to this man, love came at last as with the fatal powers of the fabled Cytherea; and with that love all the realisms ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... facts, however, such studies do make clear. First, the supposition that "the increases in ability due to a given amount of progress toward maturity are closely alike for all children save the so-called 'abnormally-precocious' or 'retarded' is false. The same fraction of the total inner development, from zero to adult ability, will produce very unequal results in different children. Inner growth acts differently according to the original nature that ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... in a normal condition, they nearly all had some defect of vision. Squinting was frequently to be noticed among them, and nearly invariably unevenness of the eyes. Cataract was common at a comparatively early age, and they knew no remedy for it. An abnormally marked discoloration of the upper part of the iris was constantly to be noticed even in young people. Among the healthiest I never saw one man or woman with extraordinary powers of vision such as are most common among savage tribes of Asia and Africa. The diseased condition of their blood was also ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... she made her way through a deep gorge at night. It was now about the middle of February. A full moon shone at its best. The weather was ideal. Journeying was abnormally pleasant. Under favorable conditions, during times of peace, the trip she was taking would have been a delightful outing. Just now things were different. Small garrisons of American soldiers had ...
— The Woman with a Stone Heart - A Romance of the Philippine War • Oscar William Coursey
... to Alfred's being insane and abnormally irritable, and under a pecuniary illusion, as stated in his certificate: and to his own vast experience. But the fire of cross-examination melted all his polysyllables into guesswork and hearsay. ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... of skill in his own particular department; and on the estates in the country, which were steadily growing bigger, and were tending to be worked more and more on capitalistic lines, labour, both skilled and unskilled, was increasingly required. Thus the demand for labour was abnormally great, and had been created with abnormal rapidity, and the supply could not possibly be provided by the free population alone. The lower classes of city and country were not suited to the work wanted, either by capacity or inclination. ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... the tastes and objects of pursuit of persons who have left behind them the fancies of their novitiate, and possess the means of purchasing a description of literature which is abnormally costly, and might prove more so, were the buyers more numerous. The editions of the Prayer-Book fall under this section, and are almost innumerable, being tantamount to Annuals, and of many years we possess ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... nothing like this. Even the oldtimers who'd been on Zarathustra since the first colonization said so. There'd be some simple explanation, of course; something that would amaze him at his own obtuseness for not having seen it at once. Maybe the abnormally dry weather had something to do with it. Or increase of something they ate, ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... French and music thoroughly, and attained to such proficiency in the classics that she could not only write Latin but think in Latin. She took a great delight in reading, and, of course, read omnivorously, with a special preference for history, poetry, and politics. Her inquisitive and abnormally active mind early began its inquiries into the mysteries of religious faith, but as these were not conducted in a patient or reverent spirit, it is no wonder, perhaps, that they proved unsatisfactory. She got hold of ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... believed most then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales. They seem to me to be the entirely reasonable things. They are not fantasies: compared with them other things are fantastic. Compared with them religion and rationalism are both abnormal, though religion is abnormally right and rationalism abnormally wrong. Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense. It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth; so for me at least it was not earth that criticised ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... to see her often again, during a much later phase, the mid-most years of that Boston Museum which aimed at so vastly higher a distinction than the exploded lecture-room had really done, though in an age that snickered even abnormally low it still lacked the courage to call itself a theatre. She must have been in comedy, which I believe she also usefully and fearlessly practised, rather unimaginable; but there was no one like her in the ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... with which she has ever been afflicted. The period between 1854 and 1856 saw great commercial activity. Vast sums of money had been spent in constructing railways. This outlay, three bountiful harvests, and the abnormally high prices of farm products caused by the Crimean War, combined to make a period of almost unexampled prosperity—a prosperity more {54} apparent than real. The usual reaction followed. Peace in Europe, coinciding with a bad ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... note almost of tragedy concluded the feast. A tall and elderly man, gaunt, with sunken cheeks, silver-white hair, complexion curiously waxen, and big, dark eyes, left the table where he had been sitting with a few Americans and came over towards them. His advance was measured, almost abnormally slow. His manner would have been melodramatic but for its intense earnestness. He stood at their table for a few seconds before speaking, his eyes fixed upon Jocelyn Thew's in a curious, almost ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... young 'squire was not at home. His mother indicated a willingness to convey any message to him upon his return; but Jeb, always contemptuous of women, was in a state of elusive subtlety. Someone in town had lent wings to his already abnormally developed caution in the matter of the application for the appointment of the "gyardeen" for his weak-minded sister-in-law, and had hinted that he might have to swear to her mental condition if ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... of the horses to the other. She saw the dilated pupils, the abnormally full forehead, the few coarse hairs growing just above the eyelid, and they told her ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... happened when you were twelve?" queried Gantry. He was not abnormally curious, but Blount's communicative mood was unusual enough to warrant a ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... behind at once. This makes one suspect the stork's honesty. The pelican has a good beak and wings, and pays for them, like an honest bird, out of its legs, just as the ostrich pays for its neck and legs out of its wings. But the stork is abnormally lucky in beak, neck, legs, and wings together, and even then has material left to lay out in superfluous knobs and wens to hang round its neck, which leads to a suspicion that many of its personal fittings belong properly to some other bird. I've a notion ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... school life run the risk of chorea; children suffering from the after-effects of diseases such as rheumatic or scarlet fever, who need particularly to avoid over-exertion or too violent exercise; children of such marked general debility that their power of resisting disease is abnormally low—all these, if neglected, tend to become qualified candidates for the physically defective schools. If they could attend a school designed to suit their needs, they would in many cases be quite able to return, after varying periods, to their places in the ordinary schools. The open-air ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... torturer, with the hardly more humane post of gaoler. This man, like all his fellows, had been chosen for his physical strength, and his indifference to the sight of pain; and the calling, which he had pursued for years, had rendered the natural ferocity of his character abnormally brutal. He was, moreover, an Oriental official,—a class of worthies who require more supervision to restrain them from thieving, than do even the Chinese coolies in a gold mine, where the precious metal winks at one in the flickering ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... I am sick of this business anyway. At first, Slavatsky just planned to give us abnormally keen brains, but lately he has been talking of setting himself up as Emperor of the World, and I am sick of it. I think I would have broken with him and told all I ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... processes were easy. We became very good friends. He was a genial fellow, capable as I have said of taking or making a joke, yet his moods were prevailingly serious, and he had already hitched his waggon to a star. Abnormally purposeful perhaps, a cropping out no doubt of heredity, he had set a high mark for himself and was already striving toward it. In an autobiographical fragment he says, referring to his early surrender of his powers ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... for some time longer and had paid pennies to see a curious compound animal, a sort of ox, sheep, horse, donkey and goat rolled into one, and an abnormally fat woman, more decently clad than the life-size coloured picture of her in the window had led them to imagine, they invaded the love of an eating-house. They stepped within the threshold firmly enough, but then stood hesitant. The place gave them a general ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... arrangement is only found in man and the anthropoid apes, the gorilla, chimpanzee, orang, and several species of gibbons. The fine short hairs on the body become developed into "thickset, long, and rather coarse dark hairs," when abnormally nourished near old-standing inflamed surfaces.[32] The fine wool-like hair or so-called lanugo with which the human foetus, during the fifth and sixth months, is thickly covered, offers another proof that man is descended from an animal which was born hairy, and remained so during life. This ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... sound, than I had ever before seen teeth in a human head. The expression of his smile, however, was by no means unpleasing, as might be supposed; but it had no variation whatever. It was one of profound melancholy—of a phaseless and unceasing gloom. His eyes were abnormally large, and round like those of a cat. The pupils, too, upon any accession or diminution of light, underwent contraction or dilation, just such as is observed in the feline tribe. In moments of excitement the orbs grew bright to a degree almost inconceivable; seeming to emit luminous ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... individual in the community, he is apt to be called a "nut." As ordinarily used this is a term of derision, but the more one studies the value of the nut the more he is impressed with the idea that this isn't a good word to apply to an abnormal individual, unless he happens to be abnormally good. The nut is one of the best of the products of nature. It is one of the oldest of foods, and among certain animals it is almost the only food depended upon ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... supply of domestic monazite of lower grade than the imports, but is dependent under normal conditions on supplies from Brazil and India. The American deposits are chiefly in North and South Carolina, and have been worked only during periods of abnormally high prices or of restriction of imports. Known reserves are small and the deposits will probably never be important producers. During the war, however, the United States became the largest manufacturer of thorium nitrate and gas mantles and exported these products in considerable quantity. An ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... was thoroughly enjoying the peaceful silence of the camp. "That man is an exaggerated schoolmaster, with all the faults of the species abnormally developed. If I once open out on him, he will learn more truth about himself in ten minutes than he ever heard in his life before. What an unbearable prig he has grown to be." Thus ran Yates' thoughts as he swung in his hammock, looking up at ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... customs examination had been thorough beyond parallel. Not even the steerage and second-cabin passengers had escaped; everybody's belongings had been combed fine by a corps of inspectors whose dutiful curiosity had been abnormally stimulated by the prospect of a ten-thousand-dollar reward. Not a few passengers had been obliged to submit to the indignity of personal search—Staff and Alison in their number; the latter for no reason that Staff could imagine; ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... animals in the ark," said Miss Child, who had not chosen her own name, or else had shown little taste in selection, compared with the others. But she was somehow different, rather subtly different, from them in all ways; not so elaborately refined, not so abnormally tall, not so startlingly picturesque. "One always thinks of the ark animals in a procession, poor dears—showing off their fur or their stripes or their spots or ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... of conveying by any words the impression which this figure makes upon anyone who looks at it. I recollect once showing the photograph of the drawing to a lecturer on morphology—a person of, I was going to say, abnormally sane and unimaginative habits of mind. He absolutely refused to be alone for the rest of that evening, and he told me afterwards that for many nights he had not dared to put out his light before going to sleep. However, the main traits of the figure ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James
... temporary insanity, nervous disorders, pains resembling rheumatism, hay fever, heart troubles, mental symptoms, nervous chills, morbid forebodings and mild mania, there lurks the abnormal activity of the psychic or "thought body" caused by thoughts and feelings acting abnormally upon the vital centers of the nervous ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.
... is impossible to account for the present state of Sun Tzu's text, a few suggestive facts maybe brought into prominence: (1) Chap. VIII, according to the title, should deal with nine variations, whereas only five appear. (2) It is an abnormally short chapter. (3) Chap. XI is entitled The Nine Grounds. Several of these are defined twice over, besides which there are two distinct lists of the corresponding variations. (4) The length of the chapter is disproportionate, being double that of any other ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
... Finally the talk with his sister had excited his imagination, and driven sleep from his eyelids. In vain he turned and twisted in his bed, or paced the floor of his chamber. He was not only awake, but abnormally awake, with every nerve highly strung, and every sense at the keenest. What was he to do to gain a little sleep? It flashed across him that there was brandy in the decanter downstairs, and that a glass might act as ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... directed to the shapes of these various members and organs. The ears of a child might suggest the ears of a dog or of a lion or of a swine, and similarly the nose, mouth, lips, hands, or feet might present a peculiar appearance. A single member or the features in general might be small or abnormally large. All these peculiarities meant something; and since few if any children are born without presenting some peculiarities in some part of the body, it would seem as though the intention of the compilers of the series was to provide a complete handbook for the interpretation ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... a large number of faculties combined in different proportions. The germs of all knowledge exist in some form and degree in every mind. When one faculty predominates we say the individual has talent for that particular thing. If the faculty is abnormally developed we say he is a genius, but all things exist as possibilities in every mind. Nature puts no limitations on man. Whatever his limitations, they are self imposed, nature is not a party ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... of Nature's doing," he said. "It's just the abnormally hard rock that is bothering us. Only for that we'd be all right, though we might have petty difficulties because of the mean acts of Blakeson & Grinder. But I ...
— Tom Swift and his Big Tunnel - or, The Hidden City of the Andes • Victor Appleton
... are commonly practised. It is a very common practice to feed horses accustomed to hard work the same ration when idle for a few days as when working. The blood of horses cared for in this way may become abnormally rich in albuminoids. The suddenness of the attack, occurring shortly after the animal is given exercise, indicates auto-poisoning. This may be due to the blood in the portal vessels and the liver capillaries, charged with nutritious and waste products ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... in. Soon there was a light on the ground floor. The door opened. A very stout man, barefooted, who had struggled into a pair of abnormally tight riding-breeches, ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... of a curiously wild exhilaration; a quickening of the pulse; an abnormally rapid breathing. I stooped to touch Drake; sparks leaped from my outstretched fingers, great green sparks that crackled as they impacted upon him. He gave them no heed; but stared with fascinated eyes upon ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... of thought, also that at times it has an influence upon our general feelings, but I do not admit that it can have any direct influence upon the body." Here is one who has allowed herself to be long given to grief, abnormally so—notice her lowered physical condition, her lack of vitality. The New York papers within the past twelve months recorded the case of a young lady in New Jersey who, from constant grieving over the death of her mother, died, fell dead, ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... had been high, abnormally so for June, now underwent an abrupt change, and a chill current of air, sweeping down on me from the rear, made my teeth chatter. I involuntarily shrank back from the window, and, as I did so, to my utter astonishment it disappeared, ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... other reasons undesirable to satisfy the property instinct by the possession, say, of slaves or of freehold land, one supposes that a good deal of the feeling of property may in the future be enjoyed even by persons in whom the instinct is abnormally strong, through the collection of shells ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... insufficient for more than one person; still, I could not comprehend why there were three staterooms for these four persons. I was, just at that epoch, in one of those moody frames of mind which make a man abnormally inquisitive about trifles: and I confess with shame that I busied myself in a variety of ill-bred and preposterous conjectures about this matter of the supernumerary stateroom. It was no business of mine, to be sure; but with none the less pertinacity did I occupy myself in attempts to resolve ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... else in London, I believe, and enjoy an old port afterwards which those delightful sinners, our grandfathers, would have sat over half the night, and been pulled out from under the table in the morning perchance. I am not abnormally partial to the pleasures of the table, but I have found a good dinner in combination with first-rate port, rationally dealt with, an ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... upon his face or head, but, to make up for it, the skin, which was a saffron yellow, was an amazing mass of wrinkles. The cranium, and, indeed, the whole skull, was so small as to be disagreeably suggestive of something animal. The nose, on the other hand, was abnormally large; so extravagant were its dimensions, and so peculiar its shape, it resembled the beak of some bird of prey. A characteristic of the face—and an uncomfortable one!—was that, practically, it stopped short at the mouth. The mouth, with its blubber lips, came immediately ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... a little greyhound, but it sickened and died. Remembering that a comrade-in-arms possessed a Turkish dwarf with an abnormally large head, he cast about to procure some such monstrosity for her amusement. He sent her jewellery—necklaces torn by his soldiers from the breasts of ladies in surrendered towns, rings wrested ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... is a phrase in which the words are associated abnormally. The car does not sleep. It is a specially constructed car in which the passengers ...
— Compound Words - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #36 • Frederick W. Hamilton
... on the rocks. The heights here had a purple-red sheen from the starlight. We had seen frequent evidence of the storm; and it showed here. Rocks were abnormally piled in drifts; smooth areas showed, where the pebbles, stones and boulders had been swept away ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... Pomerania. There was reasonable ground for doubt and caution; the artistic groups that foregathered at the little restaurant contained so many young women with short hair and so many young men with long hair, who supposed themselves to be abnormally gifted in the domain of music, poetry, painting, or stagecraft, with little or nothing to support the supposition, that a self-announced genius of any sort in their midst was inevitably suspect. On the other hand, there was the ever-imminent danger of entertaining, and snubbing, an angel unawares. ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... lithe, with an unusually long stride. They may—and he casts a shuddering look over his shoulder as the thought strikes him—they may be nothing human—they may be the patter of a wolf! A huge, gaunt, hungry wolf! an abnormally big wolf! a wolf with a gallop like that of a horse! The driver was new to these parts; he had but lately come from the Baron's establishment in St. Petersburg. He had never been in this wood after dark, and he had never seen a wolf save in the Zoological Gardens. The atmosphere now ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... not wish to meet just now. He was too direct a questioner, and had said and looked things about Nanette that made her dread him. She knew that, however austere and commanding he might be when acting under his own convictions, he was abnormally susceptible to uxorial views, and the way to win the captain's sympathies or avert his censure, was to secure the kindly interest of his wife. Mrs. Hay knew that he had sent couriers off by the Rawlins ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... on Bala, for the summer was so abnormally wet that these lines would have been true of any part of England. I suppose everybody is more or less interested in the weather, but the custom of alluding to the obvious, as an opening to conversation, is probably a survival from the time when everyone was directly interested in ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... by the climate, the nature of the country, and probably by intermarriage. In the scale of standard human races the Raots stood extremely low, as can be judged from the accompanying photographs. The women, as will be seen, had abnormally small skulls with low foreheads, and although they looked devoid even of a glint of reason, they were actually fairly intelligent. They had high cheek-bones; long, flattish noses, broad and rounded as in the Mongolian type. The chin was in most instances ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... centre of vision; and as a matter of fact we do get double images, but the prejudiced intelligence perceives them as one. The drunken man is thus your only true seer. Genius, which has always been suspected of affinity with drunkenness, is really a faculty for seeing abnormally—that is to say, veraciously. Andrew Lang, who thinks that all children have genius, is thus partially justified; for till they have been taught to see conventionally, they see with fresh insight. Hence the awkwardness of their questions. ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... its way to Lord Earlybird, he saw the absurdity of sending it. Who was he that he should venture to set aside all the traditions of office? A Pitt or a Peel or a Palmerston might have done so, because they had been abnormally strong. They had been Prime Ministers by the work of their own hands, holding their powers against the whole world. But he,—he told himself daily that he was only there by sufferance, because at the moment no one else could be found to take it. In such a condition should he not have been bound ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... ratio. For when an emphysematous lung shall fully occupy the right thoracic side from B to L, then G, the liver, will protrude considerably into the abdomen beneath the right asternal ribs, and yet will not be therefore proof positive that the liver is diseased and abnormally enlarged. Whereas, on the other hand, when G, the liver, is actually diseased, it may occupy a situation in the right side as high as the fifth or sixth ribs, pushing the right lung upwards as high as that level; and, therefore, ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... beats in a normal way and the circulation of the blood takes place as it should; the lungs are carrying out their functions, as also the stomach, the intestines, the liver, the biliary duct, the kidneys and the bladder. If at the present moment any of them is acting abnormally, that abnormality is becoming less every day, so that quite soon it will have vanished completely, and the organ will have recovered its normal function. Further, if there should be any lesions in any of these organs, they will get better from day to day and will soon be entirely ...
— Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion • Emile Coue
... quite thin,—a little gray. The epidemic had burthened him with responsibilities too multifarious and ponderous for his slender strength to bear. The continual nervous strain of abnormally protracted duty, the perpetual interruption of sleep, had almost prostrated even his will. Now he only hoped that, during this brief absence from the city, he might find renewed strength to ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... earnestly, "I never knew but one man who saw when his wife needed coaling, and attended to her wants. When he died (for the gods loved him), it was found that his shoulder-blades were abnormally large—at least so the doctors said, but I knew all the time that ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... what hearty meals the woodpigeon makes, it is not surprising that it should sometimes throw up pellets of undigested material. This is not, however, a regular habit, as in the case of hawks and owls, and is rather, perhaps, the result of some abnormally irritating food. ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... trees that induce abnormally short or long growths, the dwarf or other monstrous forms, the variegations in leaf-coloring, etc., etc., are not available for classification, for they may appear in any species, in fact in any genus of Conifers. These variations are artificially multiplied for commercial and decorative purposes. ...
— The Genus Pinus • George Russell Shaw
... there wasn't a sign of life in the hole. The observation—if one could call so short a glimpse at so abnormally acting ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... talk, there was no need for Harvey to tell his mother about it; and Cheyne naturally took the same point of view. But Mrs. Cheyne saw and feared, and was a little jealous. Her boy, who rode rough-shod over her, was gone, and in his stead reigned a keen-faced youth, abnormally silent, who addressed most of his conversation to his father. She understood it was business, and therefore a matter beyond her premises. If she had any doubts, they were resolved when Cheyne went to Boston and brought back a new diamond ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... the transmitters and receivers were whining there more dolefully than usual. Several of them, sensitive to the weather, were out of tune, and as Mr. Bell had trained his ear to sounds until it was abnormally acute, he was tuning the springs of the receivers to the pitch of the transmitters, a service he always preferred to perform himself. To do this he placed the receiver against his ear and called to Watson, who was in the adjoining room, to start the current through the electromagnet of ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... the horrors of punishment in hell, and the wrath of an outside Creator and Judge, and his desire is aimed at escape from this wrath through "election" and God's grace. But he is a Puritan endowed with a psychopathic temperament sensitive to the point of disease and gifted with an abnormally high visualising power. Hence his resemblance to the mystics, which is a resemblance of psychical temperament and not of ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... be hard to return; that is what he tried to make Mademoiselle Afchin understand, but she replied only by prolonged groans. He strove to comfort her, to amuse her, but what form of distraction could be made to appeal to that abnormally apathetic nature? And then, could he change the skies of Paris, give back to the wretched Levantine her marble-tiled patio, where she used to pass long hours in a cool, delicious state of drowsiness, listening to the plashing of the water in the ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... are related to each other as are the positive and negative electricities of the Leyden jar. Let the inducing pole be N.; the S. of the bar will be attracted by it and bound, while the N. of the bar becomes abnormally free and active. On moving the bar from the pole the bound magnetism is released and a part becomes residual magnetism. Now when the residual balances the free magnetism which is of opposite name, we are on Gary's neutral line. ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various
... better than to get him down," I suggested; "he's most abnormally keen at ferreting out a mystery that promises any news—if any one can learn the truth about those bonds, ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... of Graves' disease present a counterpart of emotional exhaustion. That the emotions in Graves' disease are abnormally acute is illustrated by my personal observation of the death of a subject of this disease from fear alone. Whatever the exciting cause of this disease, the symptoms are the same; just as in fear, the phenomena are the ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... the Bottom Level, and he made no suggestion that we go off and wait for him to bring it up. I didn't suggest it, either. After all, it was his jeep, and he wasn't our hired pilot. Besides, I was beginning to get curious. An abnormally large bump of curiosity is part of every ...
— Four-Day Planet • Henry Beam Piper
... this girl did not seem abnormally anxious for the mere plaudits or the notoriety part of the stage-struck's fever, nor was she alight with that fire called genius which will burn a hole through all obstacles till it reaches its goal; she appeared rather to regard the stage as a means to an end—a ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... terribly slow. Every step hurt fearfully. The Creek bed was full of roots and snags, and briers, and vines trailed across it. These caught and tore our bare feet and legs, rendered abnormally tender by the scurvy. It seemed as if every step was marked with blood. The vines tripped us, and we frequently fell headlong. We struggled on determinedly for nearly an hour, and were perhaps a mile from ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... there might be time for a little drive before going back to the house for dinner. The face of the young lady beside him was still slightly pale, and the thought came to him that it would be very well for her if her mind could be diverted from the abnormally inspiriting ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... without affecting the other parts. In hemiplegia, for instance, one half of the nervous system is paralyzed, while the other half is all right. In the stages of hypnotism we will now consider, the will portion of the brain or mind seems to be put to sleep, while the other faculties are, abnormally awake. Some explain this by supposing that the blood is driven out of one portion of the brain and driven into other portions. In any case, it is as though the human engine were uncoupled, and the ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... people. Throughout Europe many men, who lived years ago, are reverenced as Saints, and, who, from the accounts given of them, were demented. Why, it is even claimed that there is but one step from the abnormally gifted ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... slowly our steamer ploughed her way south through the abnormally high swell. None of the anchorages on the west coast could be touched, and everywhere we saw brown woods, leafless as in winter, and damaged plantations; and all the way down to Vila we ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... jumps Tom on the bar overhead with a long pething-pole, like an abnormally long and heavy alpenstock, in his hand; he selects the beast to be killed, stands over it in breathless . . . silence, adjusts his point over the centre of the vertebra, and with one plunge sends the cruel point with unerring aim ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... the condenser is charged the fibers have their ends at different potentials, so a current passes to equalize them and energy is lost. This current increases the capacity. One condenser made of paper boiled in ozokerite took an abnormally large current and heated rapidly. At a high temperature it gave off water, and the power wasted and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... possible. That was all,—I hate this stuffing a house with half-fading flowers, it always suggests a funeral to me, with the banked-up mantels for coffins. It's horrid, I know, but I can't help it. However, if I am writing in this vein it's time I stopped. My letter is abnormally long as it is—I hope the right number of stamps will be put on it. Forgive me for mentioning it, my dear, but we always have to pay double postage due on your epistles. I don't mind at all—they are quite worth it—only I thought you might ...
— The Smart Set - Correspondence & Conversations • Clyde Fitch
... tendency of long inheritance. The converse of this is expressed in the words "That the struggle between Natural Selection on the one hand, and the tendency to reversion and variability on the other hand, will in the course of time cease; and that the most abnormally developed organs may be made constant, I see no reason to doubt" ("Origin," page 121). Certainly not, if, as I doubt not, the word "constant" is intended to bear a relative signification; but to say that constancy can ever ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... in a middle-class apartment house, and call it various names, and it may drive you to cafe life and affinities and alimony. You may have it wherever you are shunted into a backwater of life, and lose the sense of being borne along in the full current of progress. Be sure that it will make you abnormally sensitive to little things; irritable where once you were amiable; glum where once you went whistling about your work and your play. It is the crystallizer of character, the acid test of friendship, the final seal set upon enmity. It will ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... hanging to be warmed, there was a lace-hung cradle swinging in its place, and in a lace-draped basket silver and gold boxes and velvet brushes and sponges such as he knew nothing about. He had not been in such a place before, and felt awkward, and yet in secret abnormally moved, or it ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... clubs and homes and Pullmans, and steamer-chairs with captains of industry, and marvelled at how little travelled they were in the realm of intellect. On the other hand, I discovered that their intellect, in the business sense, was abnormally developed. Also, I discovered that their morality, where business ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... to regulate the quantity of grapes borne in a vineyard and so be made somewhat helpful in preventing alternate bearing. Abnormally large crops are usually followed by partial crop failure and biennial bearing sometimes sets in, but the large crop may be reduced by pruning and the evil consequences wholly or partly avoided. It ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... Canada. (At that date the dryness of Canada was atmospherical only.) Curiously enough, a spark leaving the body produces the same shock as one entering it, and no electricity whatever can be generated with bare feet. One of the footmen at Ottawa must have been an abnormally high-strung young man, for should one inadvertently touch silver dinner-plate he handed one, a sharp electric shock resulted. The children delighted in one very pretty experiment. Many books for the young have their bindings plentifully adorned ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... needed to know more of the horror and the tragedy of it. We needed to keep that close and intimate to us as a right perspective for our future adventures. He believed it to be our duty as aviators to anticipate every kind of experience which we might have to meet at the front. His imagination was abnormally vivid. Once he discussed the possibility of "falling in flames," which is so often the end of an airman's career. I shall never again be able to take the same whole-hearted delight in flying that I did before he was so horribly eloquent upon the subject. He often ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... nothing about its cause. The nervous system of the higher animals is so complicated, so intricate, that it is hard to understand its derangement. The human nerve dies when isolated. It is killed by the shock of removal, and responds for the moment abnormally and therefore deceptively. But, if we study the simplest kind of a nerve,—and the simplest is that of a plant,—we may hope to understand what occurs when a hand or a foot cannot be made to move. To find out that plants have nerves, to induce paralysis in ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... huddled figures sat, formless and immovable, less like human beings than ghosts come back in the depths of night to find themselves denied an entrance into life, and drooping disconsolate. His footsteps sounded abnormally loud, thrown back from the houses, buffeted between their frowning fronts, as if they were maliciously determined to reveal his presence, wanted him to know that they too were leagued against him. He stumbled over the sidewalk's coping to the grass and stole to a bench ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... to repeat every summer under the arches of the Pont du Gard—the monument of antiquity which of all, excepting only the Maison Carree at Nimes, most excited his enthusiastic admiration, all contributed to put him into an abnormally cheerful and convalescent humour. ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... many things, these citizens were abnormally alive to all matters relating to courtship, and popular as she believed Berrie to be, Mrs. McFarlane could not hope that her daughter would be spared—especially by the Beldens, who would naturally feel that Clifford had been cheated. She sighed deeply. "Well, nothing can be done ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... a familiar one in the card-room of the Rag and Bobtail, at the bow-window of the Jeunesse Doree. Tall and pompous, with a portly frame and a puffy clean-shaven face which peered over an abnormally high collar and old-fashioned linen cravat, he stood as a very type and emblem of staid middle-aged respectability. The major's hat was always of the glossiest, the major's coat was without a wrinkle, ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... brain—is exceeded, just as nature frequently forms monstrosities in which ONE ORGAN is developed at the expense of the others. Such a monstrosity, if it reaches the highest degree, is called GENIUS, which at bottom is caused only by an abnormally rich and powerful brain. This organ of perception, which originally and in normal cases looks outward for the purpose of satisfying the wants of the will of life, receives in the case of an abnormal development such vivid and such striking impressions from ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... drew nearer the market-place the progress became yet slower, for the crowd seemed suddenly and abnormally swelled. There was a great shouting of voices, too, in front, and the smell of burning came distinctly on the breeze. The man riding beside Robin turned his head and called out; and in answer one of the others riding behind pushed ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... excluded. If he applies to a parent for permission to use it he probably runs his head against a blank wall of ignorance; for hypnotism, to most people, means a dangerous power by which an unscrupulous, strong-willed Svengali dominates an abnormally weak-willed Trilby whose will continues to grow weaker until the subject becomes a mere automaton; and most of us would rightly prefer that a boy should be his own master—even if he were rushing to headlong ruin—than that he should be the mere puppet of ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly
... means uncommon among plants and the lower forms of animal life. The snail, the oyster, the earth-worm, and the common tape-worm, are examples of true hermaphrodites. So-called human hermaphrodites are usually individuals in whom the sexual organs are abnormally developed so that they resemble those of the opposite sex, though they really have but one sex, which can usually be determined with certainty. Only a very few cases have been observed in which both male and female ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... on her with a shock, thrilling, terrible, yet not altogether unpleasant. She rose, her hands clenched at her sides and her eyes abnormally wide as they stared in the same direction as the eyes of the two horses held. Yet for all her preparation she nearly fainted when a voice sounded directly behind her, a pleasantly modulated voice: "Look this way. I am here, in front of ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... do in such cases? Where the woman's libido is normal or near normal, then naturally it should be normally gratified. But if the libido seems to be abnormally strong and the demands for sexual gratification are too frequent, then the woman should be treated and sexual gratification should not be indulged in, because in such cases, as a rule, sexual gratification only adds fuel to the fire, and the woman's demands ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... the opinion that the original inquisitiveness about the sexual secret is abnormally transformed into morbid over subtlety; and yet can still furnish an impulsive power for legitimate thirst ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... himself and quite beneath his breath, and of course not meant to reach me. But one of the curious concomitants of my state was that all my senses, and especially my hearing, had become most abnormally acute. A whisper far away was now to me like a loud remark made in ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... and began my study of opium-eaters with the belief that none of them were hopeless. Experience has taught me that there is a point beyond which any constitution—especially one so abnormally sensitive as the opium-eater's—can not endure keen physical suffering without death from spinal exhaustion. I once heard the eminent Dr. Stevens say that he made it a rule never to attempt a surgical operation if it must consume more than an hour. Similarly, I have come to the conclusion ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... that of healthy blood, yet this coagulum is not composed or well elaborated fibriae, for it is soft and loose, and contains an unusually large number of colorless blood corpuscles, while the red corpuscles form an abnormally small proportion of it. We can understand, therefore, that such a constant deficiency in capacity for organization must unfavorably affect the ordinary nutritive processes; and that there will be a liability to the deposit of imperfectly vitalized matter, instead of the normal elements ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... days saw Stephen abnormally restless. She had fairly well made up her mind to test her theory of equality of the sexes by asking Leonard Everard to marry her; but her difficulty was as to the doing it. She knew well that it would not do to depend on a chance meeting for an ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... of his class not once; And his aunt repeatedly dubbed him "Dunce." But, "Give him a chance," said his father, Joi. "His head is abnormally large for a boy." But his aunt said, "Piffie! It's crammed with bosh! Why, he don't know the rivers and mountains of Gosh, Nor the names of the ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... words which have the true Spartan tang: "Nov. 3, 1794. Stormy, wind N. E. Churned. Seven in the evening a son born." Two days later the November wind shifted. "Nov. 5, 1794. Clear, wind N. W. Made Austin a coat. Sat up all day. Went into the kitchen." The baby, it appears, had an abnormally large head and was dipped, day after day, in rude hydropathy, into an icy spring. A precocious childhood was followed by a stern, somewhat unhappy, but aspiring boyhood. The little fellow, lying prone with his brothers before the firelight of the kitchen, reading English ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... keenly alive to every slight impression of kindness or of coldness;—and the intense longing for love, which had been the pulse of her inmost being since her earliest infancy, and which had filled her with such passionate devotion to her father that her grief at his loss had been almost abnormally profound and despairing, made her feel poignantly every little incident which emphasised, or seemed to emphasise, her own utter loneliness in the world; and she was just now strung up to such a nervous tension, that she would almost have consented to wed Lord ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... glad you liked my address. The students were abnormally quiet for the first half-hour, and then made up for their reticence by a regular charivari for the rest of the time. However, I was consoled by hearing that they ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... resulted in what we now know to be an incorrect plan. The work done last spring makes it plain (fig. 3) that the Principia fronted—in normal fashion—the main street of the fort (gravel laid on cobbles) running from the north to the south gate. But, abnormally, the frontage was formed by a verandah or colonnade: the only parallel which I can quote is from Caersws, where excavations in 1909 revealed a similar verandah in front of the Principia[2]. Next to the verandah stood ...
— Roman Britain in 1914 • F. Haverfield
... Her skin is pale, and in her cheeks there is the barest bit of rose, like a flame seen through ivory. Her eyes are large, and their blue is almost primary. Her face is a perfect oval. Her lips are full and abnormally red. Her slender, conical hands are always active like those of a child, and she wears but little jewelry. Her gowns come from Paquin's and seem almost a part of ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... laughing. Perhaps laughter was somewhat rare in that old garden. Tamzine, who was weeding at the far end, lifted her head in a startled fashion and walked past us into the house. She did not look at us or speak to us. She was reputed to be abnormally shy. She was very stout and wore a dress of bright red-and-white striped material. Her face was round and blank, but her reddish hair was abundant and beautiful. A huge, orange-coloured cat was at her heels; as she passed us he bounded ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... in the main pursued, and Mckinlay describes the country crossed as first-class pastoral land. As it was then the dry season of the year, immediately preceding the rains, it proves what an abnormally severe season must have been encountered by Sturt when that explorer was turned back on his last trip in much the same latitude. On the 27th of February, the wet season of the tropics set in; but fortunately the party found a refuge ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... lurk; and it may be that when overcome by the horror of the fate that befell his friend, and when oppressed by the awful dread of the unknown, he grew to attribute, both at the time and still more in remembrance, weird and elfin traits to what was merely some abnormally wicked and cunning wild beast; but whether this was so or not, no man ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... the diversion of capital in a way which none but abnormal circumstances could justify. In the year 1846 when the superintendent of the South Carolina company made his recommendation, slave prices were abnormally low and cotton prices were leaping in such wise as to make probable a strong advance in the labor market. By 1855, however, the price of slaves had nearly doubled, and by 1860 it was clearly inordinate. The special occasion for a company to divert its funds or increase its ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... man standing out there gazing in at me. I think I have never had so startling a realization. It was a man in white doeskin trousers and blue blazer jacket, with a jaunty linen cap on his head. An abnormally tall, muscular man. And his smooth-shaven, black-browed face with the reflection from the restaurant window lights upon it, reminded me of the apparition we had ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... physical characteristics which indicate distinctions of race among the inhabitants of Japan, there are peculiarities common to a majority of the nation at large. One of these is an abnormally large head. In the typical European the height of the head is less than one-seventh of the stature and in Englishmen it is often one-eighth. In the Japanese is it appreciably more than one-seventh. Something of this may be attributed to smallness ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... circumstances were reversed, what would I be doing?" He could find but one honest answer. "No doubt I'd be trying to get out of it, and if I didn't, it'd be because I couldn't see or make a way." To his abnormally sensitized nerves the whole business began to exude a distinct, nauseating odor. "Rotten—that's the God's truth," thought he. "Father ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... messages. It is a remarkable fact that habitual inattention to a sound or sight makes one practically deaf or blind to it; and that close attention persisted in makes one's ears and eyes almost abnormally keen and quick. Love's ears and eyes are ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... an appearance of uncertainty and unsafeness.... Men seldom take to wife a girl who has too small a waist, whether natural or artificial." "In architecture, a pillar or support of any kind is called debased and bad in art if what is supported be too heavy for the thing supporting, and if a base be abnormally heavy and large for what it upholds. The laws of proportion and balance must be understood. In a waist of fifteen inches both are destroyed, and the corresponding effect is unpleasant to the eye. The curve of the waist is coarse and immoderate, utterly opposed to what Ruskin has shown to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... Aunt Barbara Brodie had done exactly as Rahal Ragnor anticipated. The boat had made the journey in an abnormally short time. A full sea, and strong, favourable winds, had carried her through the stormiest Firth in Scotland, at a racer's speed; and she was at her dock, and had delivered all her passengers when Conall Ragnor arrived at his warehouse. ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... home. They both deeply desired a family. The wish is normal to both man and woman, normal in a happy marriage, and theirs was unusually happy; it was almost abnormally keen in both Frances and Gilbert. Few men have so greatly loved children. As a schoolboy his letters are full of it—making friends with Scottish children on the sands, with French children by the medium of pictures. Later he was writing ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... have successfully seized the grieved and startled buffalo by the tail, but they are not here to testify to the circumstances. They are dead, abnormally and extremely dead. ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... the New York market are not often less attractive than those in London, so that American floating capital is not generally employed in the English market, but it does occasionally come about that rates become abnormally low here and that bankers send away their balances to be loaned out at other points. During long periods of low money, indeed, it often happens that large lending institutions here send away a considerable part ...
— Elements of Foreign Exchange - A Foreign Exchange Primer • Franklin Escher
... softened by eyelashes of abnormal length, both on the upper and lower lid. The powerful, gracefully-curved eyebrows extend far into the temples, where they end into a fine point, from the nose, over which they are very frequently joined. The iris of the eye is abnormally large, of very rich dark velvety brown, with jet black pupils, and the so-called "white of the eye" is of a much darker tinge than with Europeans—almost a light bluish grey. The women seem to have wonderful control over the muscles of the eyelids ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... Septimus Searle Lingard has seldom walked the streets of any town. Though not actually much over sixty, you would have said he must be a thousand; his abnormally long, narrow, shaven face was so thin and gaunt and hollowed, and his tall, upright figure was so painfully fragile, that his black broadcloth seemed almost too heavy for the worn frame inside it. And nothing ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... there are the symptoms. Call it hysteria, or what you will. I call it an injustice on the part of the Higher Power. I suppose that is blasphemy, but I am forced to it. Can that girl help the longings for her rights, her longings which are abnormally acute because of her over-fine nervous system? Those longings, situated as she is, can never be satisfied in any way except for her own harm. Meantime she eats her own heart, since she has nothing else, and heart-eating produces all kinds of symptoms. I ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... great deal of interest in her husband after their first child is born. The Laird's wife was normally intelligent, peacefully inclined, extremely good-looking both as to face and figure, despite her years, and always abnormally concerned over what the most inconsequential people in the world might think of her and hers. She had a passion for being socially "correct." Flights of imagination were rarely hers; on the few occasions when they were, her thoughts had to do with an advantageous marriage for Jane and Elizabeth, ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... visit, the climax came. It came in the shape of a call from a certain young woman with unnaturally pink cheeks and abnormally yellow hair; a young woman who wore high heels and cheap jewelry; a young woman whom Miss Polly knew very well by reputation—but whom she was angrily amazed to meet beneath the roof of ...
— Pollyanna • Eleanor H. Porter |
