"Babel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Holland, he overlooked the fact that it was first necessary for him to learn Low Dutch. I overlooked the same fact, but it gave me no trouble whatever. There was no united Germany then, and my pupils disagreed continually about the pronunciation of their own language, which seemed, like that of Babel, intelligible to nobody. I composed their quarrels by confining their minds to English solely, and harmony was ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... then commenced, awful and terrible, between the Kurus and the Pandavas, both of whom were inspired with the desire of winning great fame. A perfect Babel of voices of the shouting warriors was incessantly heard there, O royal Bharata, as they addressed one another by name. He who had anything, by his father's or mother's side or in respect of his acts or conduct, that could furnish matter for ridicule, was in ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... an account from Whitchurch, in Shropshire, that the Dissenters there having prepared a great quantity of bricks to erect a spacious conventicle, a destroying angel came by night and spoiled them all, and confounded their Babel in the ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... subject in hand are constantly interpolated. In the Practice of Arithmetic he turns aside to treat of the marvellous properties of certain numbers, of the motion of the planets, and of the Tower of Babel; and in the treatise on Dialectic he gives an estimate of the historians and letter-writers of the past. But here Cardan did not sin in ignorance; his poverty and not his will consented to these literary outrages. He was paid for his work by the sheet, ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... the Inverness Wool Fair heeds rain no more than thistledown. Hardly a man has thought it worth his pains to envelop his shoulders in his plaid, but stands and lets the rain take its chance. There is a perfect babel of tongues; no bawling or shouting, however, but a perpetual gruff susurrus of broad guttural conversation accentuated every now and then by a louder exclamation in Gaelic. Quite half of the throng are discoursing in this language. It is possible to note the ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... altering the course a hair's breadth we slipped by each other within an oar's length. A drawling, sardonic hail came out of her. Instantly, as if by magic, our dozing pilots got on their feet in a body. An incredible babel of bantering shouts burst out, a jocular, passionate, voluble chatter, which lasted till the boats were stern to stern, theirs all bright now, and, with a shining sail to our eyes, we turned all black ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... I observe in this knight of Gotham, this Sir Arthur, a more cordial kind of yearning toward our young prince of Babel land than formerly; a sort of desire to be more intimate with him, of which by the by the youth is not very prompt to admit, and an effort to treat him with more respect himself, by way as it were of setting a good example to others. If my conjectures are right, the threats of the old muckworm ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... used to be, and I am certain that they have brought many evils in their train. I have no fancy for handing over this beautiful country to be torn and fought for by speculators, tourists, politicians and teachers, whose voice is as the voice of Babel, just as those horrible creatures in the valley of the underground river tore and fought for the body of the wild swan; nor will I endow it with the greed, drunkenness, new diseases, gunpowder, and general demoralization which chiefly mark the progress ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... things necessary to happiness could be added to them. Of themselves, they are insufficient to meet the wants of the heart. Instead of being discontented with my plain home, I shall prize it the more highly in consequence of my visit to this great Babel. Do not think I am ungrateful to my dear uncle and to his wife for their efforts to amuse me and make me happy. I should not be ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... rushes were rather against the general finish of the pictures, causing in some places an unsightly smudge or a blotchy appearance. In one page the Tower of Babel was disfigured by this very injudicious haste, and the bricks and the builders were wholly indistinguishable for a sad blotch of ochre; still, the title page made up for all such defects: "To my dear sister, Esther, from ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... perhaps, the greatest master in this art. The world he glorified by showing in how many ways it could serve reason and beauty was but a simple world, and an equal genius in these days might be distracted by the Babel about him, and be driven, as poets now are, into incidental dreams. Yet the ideal of mastery and idealisation remains the same, if any one could only attain it: mastery, to see things as they are and dare to describe ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... on to the story of Babel: I can conceive nothing more a priori probable than the account we read in Scripture. Briefly consider the matter. A multitude of men, possibly the then whole human family, once more a fallen race, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... the ranks, discipline was lost. There was no way in which it could be maintained in a vast body of isolated individuals, lacking every necessity, walking on their own, without understanding why; for in this disorderly mass there ruled a veritable babel of tongues. A few regiments, mainly those in the Guard, held together. Almost all the troopers of the cavalry, having lost their horses, were formed into infantry battalions, and those of their officers who still were mounted were made into ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... of the sorrows of our life that we were prevented (by business) from being present at the building of the Tower of Babel. To say nothing of the great knowledge which we should have acquired of the ancient languages, it would have been jolly to have marked the foreman of the works swearing at the laborers in Syriac, while they answered him in Hebrew, Chaldee, and the Chinese tongue. However, as a next best thing, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 7, May 14, 1870 • Various
... then, I saw in vision a vast Jacob's ladder towering upward to the clouds, mile after mile, league after league; the consequence of which would be, that I should be expected to run up and down this ladder, like any fatigue party of Irish hodmen, carrying hods of mortar and bricks to the top of any Babel which my wretched admirer might choose to build. But I put a stop to this villainy. I nipped the abominable system of extortion in the very bud, by refusing to take the first step. The man could have no pretense, you know, for expecting me to climb the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... her weary head against the rail, and, despite the hunger which tormented her, fell fast asleep. She knew nothing more; heard none of the busy sounds of loading the luggage, now constantly arriving, and was peacefully dreaming, when a girlish voice from the dock pierced through the babel and the dream: ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
... Protestant, and the Protestant became a Roman Catholic! Dr. Lancelot Andrewes, chairman of one of the two companies that met at Westminster, was probably the most learned man in England. They said of him that if he had been present at the tower of Babel he could have interpreted for all the tongues present. The only trouble was that the world lacked learning enough to know how learned he was. His company had the first part of the Old Testament, and the simple dignity of the style they used shows how scholarship ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... A babel of talk broke out in the great hall, and with it some vivas and clapping of hands, for Hugh had spoken boldly and well; moreover, the spectators read truth in his grey eyes. A dark figure in priest's robe—it was that of Father ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... building into the brilliant light of outdoors, and Gilbert had just helped his companion down the steep, rickety steps, when a new sound arose above the babel of the fair, and quenched for a moment even the scream of the bagpipes. It came from the highway, a hoarse "honk, honk," strange, and yet, to Gilbert, familiar. An astonished stillness fell over the group around the gate. The ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... Tower. To the right, another forest of masts, and a maze of buildings, from which, here and there, shot up to the sky chimneys taller than Cleopatra's Needle, vomiting forth huge wreaths of that black smoke which forms the canopy—occasionally a gorgeous one—of the more than Babel city. Stretching before me, the troubled breast of the mighty river, and, immediately below, the main whirlpool of the Thames—the Maelstrom of the bulwarks of the middle arch—a grisly pool, which, with its ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... who have known Lord Byron, and studied his life, compare him to this type, it may well be asked whether such persons be in their right understanding. The famous tower of Babel, and all the confusion ensuing, rise up ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... the contrary, is a thousand times more life and color. Before you, shining in the sun, is a long glistening line of GUTTER,—not a very pleasing object in a city, but in a picture invaluable. On each side are houses of all dimensions and hues; some but of one story; some as high as the tower of Babel. From these the haberdashers (and this is their favorite street) flaunt long strips of gaudy calicoes, which give a strange air of rude gayety to the street. Milk-women, with a little crowd of gossips round each, are, at this early hour of morning, selling the chief material of the ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to the conscientious and exhaustive Villani, [Footnote: Cronica. Lib. I. c. vii.] was built by a grandson of Noah, Attalus by name, who came into Italy in order "to avoid the confusion occasioned by the building of the Tower of Babel." [Footnote: "per evitare la confusione creata per la edificazione della torre di Babel," etc.] Noah and his wife had, however, already made a visit to Tuscany, soon after the Deluge; so that it is not remarkable that "King Attalus" should have felt inclined to visit the estates ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... Titan began to lift, and ahead, and on either hand, could be seen, through the fog, a field of ice, which arose in an incline to a hundred feet high in her track. The music in the theater ceased, and among the babel of shouts and cries, and the deafening noise of steel, scraping and crashing over ice, Rowland heard the agonized voice of a woman crying from the bridge steps: "Myra—Myra, ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... universal temple of industry and art, the valhalla of the heroes of commerce, the fane of the gods of science—the caravansery of the world. That Exhibition brought together the ends of the earth,—long- estranged human brethren sat down together in pleasant communion. It was a modern Babel, finished and furnished, and where there was almost a fusion, instead of, a confusion, of tongues. The "barbarous Turk" was there, the warlike Russ, the mercenary Swiss, the passionate Italian, the voluptuous Spaniard, ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... most of all do you appreciate the character of the Grand Palaver when you step into its rotunda. Aladdin's enchanted palace was nothing to it. It has a vast ceiling with a hundred glittering lights, and within it night and day is a surging crowd that is never still and a babel of voices that is never hushed, and over all there hangs an enchanted cloud of thin blue tobacco smoke such as might enshroud the conjured vision of a magician of ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... writings; he has backed up many, and lifted the hearts of many, by pure thought; he means what he says. Yet, what is altogether lighter than vanity? The human heart, answers the religionist. What is altogether deceitful upon the scales? The human heart. What is a Vanity Fair, a mob, a hubbub and babel of noises, to be avoided, shunned, hated? The world. And, lastly, what are our thoughts and struggles, vain ideas, and wishes? Vain, empty illusions, shadows, and lies. And yet this man, with the inspiration ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... the Red Sea into the Indian Ocean we have to pass through the Straits of Babel-Mandeb, which means the Gate of Affliction or Tears, because of the numerous wrecks there have been here. Then we stop at Aden, where the passengers going on to India change to another P. & O. steamer, the Salsette, which is waiting for ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... religion and have had this birth and this Sabbath-peace within themselves will stop contending over outward, external things, which make separations but do not minister to the spirit; they will give up the Babel-habit of constructing theological {43} systems,[18] they will pass upward from elements to the essence, they will stop building the city-walls of the Church out of baptism and the supper, which furnish "only clay-plastered walls" at best, and they will found the Church ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... everywhere could see to which spot on the surface it pointed. Or, had they been devout men, they would have listened for heavenly voices—it is always your devout man who tries to hear other things than the babble of the Babel in which he lives—they, too, could have heard the angelic chorus like the shepherds in the fields and on the hillsides ...
— A Little Book for Christmas • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... There was a delay, during which a Babel of tongues was let loose, and then Miss Lyberg's seven guests were heard noisily leaving the house. Two minutes later, there was a knock at our door and Miss Lyberg appeared, her eyes blazing, her face flushed and the expression of the hunted ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... will in this country, there is a Babel of tongues. In this instance our special coachman was a Bohemian, speaking his own language—a very different dialect from the Slovacks who were the "beaters" for our hunt. The gamekeepers, or rather the foresters ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... declarations were to a large extent contravened in the ensuing civil strifes, and their application to real life was rendered infinitely more difficult by that predominance of the critical over the constructive faculties which marred the efforts of the revolutionary Babel-builders. Indeed, such was the ardour of those enthusiasts that they could scarcely see any difficulties. Thus, the Convention in 1793 allowed its legislative committee just one month for the preparation ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... awoke the audience as it were, and instantly there arose a babel of sounds that rent the very skies. "His daughter! He says that she is his daughter! Nam owns ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... whole of my world behind me, and go into the fishing boats for her. I love her, sir, as you never can love any woman. Do you think I would have given Maggie a heartache, or let Maggie slip beyond my ken, for all the honor and glory in the world, or for a pulpit as high as the Tower of Babel?" ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... mellowness of time. The seed is sown, and the harvest must come; and our children's children, on the world's jubilee morning, shall all go with their sickles to the reaping. Then shall the curse of Babel be revoked, a new Pentecost come, and the language they shall speak shall be the language of Britain. Frenchmen, and Danes, and Scots; and the dwellers on the shores of the Mediterranean, and in the regions round about; Italians, and Indians, and Moors; there shall appear unto them cloven ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... point we have a little comment from high authority. Said Charles the First, writing to Buckingham, "The Fleming painter prides himself on being able to pass for an Englishman, but his English is so larded with French, Dutch and Italian that we think he must have been employed on the Tower of Babel." ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... rivet with gigantic piles, Thorough the centre their new-catched miles, And to the stake a struggling country bound, Where barking waves still bait the forced ground, Building their watery Babel far more high, To reach the sea, than those to scale the sky! Yet still his claim the injured ocean laid, And oft at leap-frog o'er their steeples played, As if on purpose it on land had come To show them what's their mare liberum. A daily deluge over them does boil; The earth ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... now, with one general Babel of information about deceased—nobody offering to read the riot act or seeming to discountenance the insurrection or disapprove of it in any way—but the head twin drowned all the turmoil and held his own ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... deluge is that the pyramidal mound, the temple of Cholula (a sacred city on the way between the capital and the seaport), was built by the giants to escape drowning. Like the tower of Babel, it was intended to reach the clouds, till the gods looked down and, by destroying the pyramid by fires from heaven, compelled the builders to abandon ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... his pulse and appetite failed; his spirits sunk into a uniform gloom. In April 1796 he wrote—"I fear it will be some time before I tune my lyre again. By Babel's streams I have sat and wept. I have only known existence by the pressure of sickness and counted time by the repercussions of pain. I close my eyes in misery and open them without hope. I look on the vernal day ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... of pleading affections, the loud cry of desires and instincts that roar for their food like beasts of prey, the querulous complaints of disappointed hopes, the groans and sobs of black-robed sorrows, the loud hubbub and Babel, like the noise of a great city, that every man carries within, must be stifled and coerced into silence. We have to take the animal in us by the throat, and sternly say, 'Lie down there and be quiet.' We have to silence tastes and inclinations. We have to stop ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Austrian dialect and my Lower-Saxon are so different that, till you have practised, you are not mutually intelligible in them. Accordingly we were not. A by-stander would have split with laughing at the Babel we made of it; each catching only a word here and there, and guessing the rest. This Princess was so tied to her etiquette, she would have reckoned it a crime against the Reich to speak to me in a foreign language; for she ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Paris we were sorrowful and wrapped in thought. This Babel is not our home. Emile casts a scornful glance towards the great city, saying angrily, "What a time we have wasted; the bride of my heart is not there. My friend, you knew it, but you think nothing of my time, and you pay no heed to my sufferings." With steady look and firm voice I reply, ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... angry crowd of men was surging, all talking at once, so that nothing could be made out of the babel of shouts, except when some person with unusually good lungs made himself heard in a denunciation of one ...
— Ted Strong's Motor Car • Edward C. Taylor
... delivered with the full force of the old skipper's quarter-deck voice, had the effect of completely upsetting the already tense nerves of the majority in the circle. Two or three of the women began to cry. Chairs were overturned. There was a babel of cries and confusion. The light ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... on neutral ground, I do more strongly and sincerely believe than I ever have in my life,—and that is saying a great deal,—that institutions such as this will be the means of refining and improving that social edifice which has been so often mentioned to-night, until,—unlike that Babel tower that would have taken heaven by storm,—it shall end in sweet accord and harmony amongst ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... against the window glass in a dreary little way for some minutes, he looked round, and inquired in a general way, and not as if it had any special application, whether she didn't think 'that the tower of Babel was a great ...
— Harper's Young People, January 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... Rosamond was on the pavement and had rushed into the house; and while he was signing to a man to take the horse's head, she was out again, the gaslight catching her eyes so that they glared like a tigress's, her child in her arms, and a whole Babel of explaining tongues behind her. How she did it neither she nor Raymond ever knew, but in a second she had flown to her perch, saying hoarsely, "Drive me to Dr. Worth's. They were drugging her. I don't know whether I was in time. No, not a word"—(this to those behind)— ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and rising in marvellous domes and spires, and crowned by four bronze animals, which he felt sure must be the creatures called horses with which Pharaoh had pursued the Israelites to the Red Sea. And hard by rose a gigantic tower, like the Tower of Babel, leading the eye up and up. His breast filled with a strange pleasure that was almost pain. The enchanted temple drew him across the square; he saw a poor bare-headed woman going in, and he followed her. Then a wonderful golden gloom fell upon him, and a sense of arches and pillars and soaring ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the same gloomy streets, without loitering in his task; he had raised treasures and images one above another; he had strengthened the base and heightened the summit of this precious and sacred heap; he had repaired and rebuilt, whenever it crumbled and fell, this new Babel that he longed to rear to the Olympus of the temple roof, with a resolute patience and perseverance that no ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... majestic deportment and Sara's brisk importance, her girlish airs and graces; but I was too sad at heart to indulge in my usual satire. Everything seemed stupid and tiresome; the hum of voices wearied me; the showroom at Marshall and Snelgrove's seemed a confused Babel,—everywhere strange voices, a hubbub of sound, tall figures in black passing and repassing, strange faces reflected in endless pier-glasses,—faces of puckered anxiety repeating themselves in ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... as Mr. T. G. Pinches points out, in his Old Testament in the Light of the Records from Assyria and Babylonia, that just as in Genesis it is stated that "the beginning of his (Nimrod's) kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh," so Merodach is stated, in the cuneiform records, to have built Babel and Erech and Niffer, which last is probably Calneh. The Hebrew scribes would seem to have altered the name of Merodach in two particulars: they dropped the last syllable, thus ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... they found grotesque-looking houses, lit up with large paper lanterns of gaudy colours, with Chinese inscriptions or monsters on them, and long rows of Chinese characters up and down the door-posts or over the windows. Crowds of people swarmed along the streets, and strange cries, in a Babel of languages, resounded in their ears, and every variety of Eastern figure flitted about them, from the half-naked Couli to the well-clothed Chinese in a loose white jacket like a dressing-gown, the Arab merchant in his flowing robes, and the Javanese gentleman in smart ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... when the Polisson ranged up abeam of us the second time, and we hove-to. It was evident the French recognised us, and the clamour that succeeded must have resembled that of Babel, when the people began first to converse without making themselves understood. Knowing we had no small boat, Monsieur Gallois lost no time, but lowering a yawl of his own, he came alongside of us in person. As I had commanded the three Frenchmen to remain below, he found no one ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... morning. And now I was in the midst of a whirl and a roar—a confused babbling at the base of Babel's tower. And as I walked up a street I thought that a tornado had broken loose and that I was in the center of it. I called a hackman, for my reading taught me what to do, and I told him to drive me to the Rookery. He rattled away and came within one of being upset by other ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read
... him to the hilltop. The officer spoke a few words in a quiet tone to the boys who were at the summit, and instantly every sled stopped. Not so the tongues. Babel broke loose. Some went off in silence; others crowded about the officer, expostulating, cajoling, grumbling. It was "the first snow;" they "always slid on that hill;" "it did not ...
— Santa Claus's Partner • Thomas Nelson Page
... when I began to fancy that I was spirally climbing the Tower of Babel in a dream, I was brought to fact by alarming noises, stoppage, and the driver saying that "it couldn't be done." I got out of the car and suddenly forgot that I ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... brotherhood—the brotherhood of those who have consistently labored to cheer, to bless and to elevate mankind. Turner called himself the "author" not the artist of his pictures; and indeed, writing and painting are but different forms of that one eternal language of which not even Babel could confound the significance. There is hardly a single work in this Exhibition which does not illustrate the close connection between ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... babel of sounds, of groans, of weeping. The ship's surgeon himself seemed paralysed before the sight of the carnage around him. You looked along the length of the vessel, and it was as though you looked ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... every Literate employed in the store. Four or five men in ordinarily vivid-colored business suits were obviously expostulating about something. As he landed and threw back the transparent canopy, he could hear a babel of voices, above which Feinberg was crying: "Unfair! Unfair! Unfair to ...
— Null-ABC • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... some of his descendants still reside in the town of Teopisca, where they are known as Votans. He is sometimes referred to as Lord of the Sacred Drum, and he is said to have seen the great wall (which must have been the Tower of Babel), and to have divided this land among the Indians, and given to each tribe ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton
... that in which she lived. In fact, it was headed for the city from the open country beyond. His astonishment was great, therefore, when the car came to a sudden stop at the base of the tower, and the occupants fairly tumbled out in a gale of merriment and talk. In the babel of sounds Miss Wycliffe's voice detached itself, by its peculiar quality rather than by its power, causing his heart to vibrate as a string trembles ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... exceptional or peculiar about them. His hatred of mumbo-jumbo and priestcraft was but a part of his steady love of freedom and sincerity. His linguistic mania had less of a philological basis than he would have us believe. Impatience that Babel should act as a barrier between kindred souls, an insatiable curiosity, prompted by the knowledge that the language of minorities was in nine cases out of ten the direct route to the heart of the secret of folks that puzzled him—such were the motives that stimulated a hunger ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... shut to in his face, according to the Malay custom. Then he begged admittance very humbly, and after paying a fee of five dollars, was admitted. His followers rush in first—such a clatter! Greetings, welcomes, jokes, and laughter, make a Babel of noise; everybody speaking at once. Then a cloth was laid down for the bridegroom to pass over, and he was pulled with apparent reluctance into the room, panting and shutting his eyes as if exhausted. His head was wreathed ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... volume of Manchester, but could not read it; it was much too learned for me, and seemed rather an account of Babel than Manchester, I mean in point of antiquity.(207) To be sure, it is very kind in an author to promise one the history of a country town, and give one a circumstantial account of the antediluvian world into the ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... in a land where the city man has destroyed the home. The American has shown no great genius for the domestic virtues. He has hauled down the homes of his ancestors, has builded in their stead vast apartment-houses and tenement buildings—steam-heated Towers of Babel. Into each of these he has packed the population of a European market-town, has left the children to grow up on the roofs and staircases, the babies to find a blessed release through rickety fire-escapes. When a fit of reform has touched him, he has stirred ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... nobody asks me why or how I am "superior." The artless natives at once perceived the fact, recognised me as a god, and worship me (do not shudder, my good Dean) with floral services. In Te-a-Iti (vain to look for it on the map!) I have found my place—a place far from the babel of your brutal politics, a place where I am addressed in ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... a confused babel of voices in the direction of Marlborough; but only the empty house, echoing 'Julia!' answered him. Not that he waited long for an answer; something in the dreary aspect of the evening struck cold ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... A babel of voices came up from below. They were deep with fierce protest. The trouble was gaining in seriousness. Kars leaned out of the box. He could see nothing of what was going on. He abruptly drew back, ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... above the cypresses, their reflections quivering in the lucid waters of the Golden Horn; where the yellow Tiber flows under broken bridges and over imperial glories; where the huts are squatted by the Niger, under the palm-trees; where the Northern Babel lies, with its warehouses, and its bridges, its graceful factory-chimneys, and its clumsy fanes—hidden in fog and smoke by the dirtiest river in the world—in all the cities of mankind there is One Home whither men of one family may resort. ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... bystanders, so boldly Dick declared his innocence; but at the same time a throng of accusers arose upon the other side, crying how he had been found last night in Sir Daniel's house, how he wore a sacrilegious disguise; and in the midst of the babel, Sir Oliver indicated Lawless, both by voice and gesture, as accomplice to the fact. He, in his turn, was dragged from his seat and set beside his leader. The feelings of the crowd rose high on either ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... aristocracy which does not regard wealth won by ancient thievery as better than money modernly earned in a commonplace way? But among a gentry so numerous and so democratic, in spite of itself, as that of our American Babel, exclusiveness works discomfort mainly to the exclusive. The Hilbroughs are agreeable Americans, their suppers are provided by the best caterers, their house has been rendered attractive by boughten taste, and the company one sees there is not ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... midnight son has waned at Keeley's. No longer a road-house on the incandescent road to dawn, there is something hangdog about its very waiters, moving through the easy maze of half-filled tables; an orchestra, sheepish of its accomplishment, can lift even a muted melody above the light babel of light diners. There is a cabaret, too, bravely bidding for the ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... or Scot where he is gone!' cried Malcolm. 'No Babel! O Patie, I have been far fallen! I have done you in heart a grievous wrong! but if I have turned back in time, it is his doing ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... roadstead; and the Councillor, before whose eyes the Herostratic [*] event of 1801 still floated vividly, agreed entirely with the others in abusing the rascally English. With other topics he was not so fortunate; every moment brought about some new confusion, and threatened to become a perfect Babel; for the worthy Bachelor was really too ignorant, and the simplest observations of the Councillor sounded to him too daring and phantastical. They looked at one another from the crown of the head to the soles of the feet; and when matters grew to too high a pitch, then ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... wept by the waters Of Babel, and thought of the day When the foe, in the hue of his slaughters, Made Salem's high places his prey, And ye, Oh her desolate daughters, ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... the birth of towns is quite different. Here are no plantings of trembling poverty under lordly walls, but bold pioneering, forecasting agriculture and commerce; no Babel building, with "Go to, let us build here a Cleveland or a Cincinnati," but rather, "Here for the present we will abide." If, however, serfdom and mediaevalism were absent in New World town-planting, so also were aestheticism or any appreciation ...
— Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam • Hubert Howe Bancroft
... to induce each dog to do its best, the owner, or more probably the trainer stands beyond the winning post, and frantically waves a towel or very stout rag. Accompanied by a babel of noise, the race is started, and in less time than it takes to write it the competitors reach the goal, one and all as they finish taking a flying leap at their trainer's towel, to which they hold on with such tenacity that they are swung round in the air. The speed at which they are ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... trades. The cries of the water-carrier and vender of sweet-meats mingled with those of the inevitable beggar who asked alms for the love of God; invoking blessings or curses upon the head of him who gave or refused him a centavo. Babel reigned. Donkies brayed, geese and turkeys hissed and gobbled, chickens cackled and fighting-cocks, tethered by the leg, strutted and crowed, while brown children of all sizes and ages laughed and screamed as they chased one another ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... you, like the idle wind through an archway, because you are not listening for His voice. If we kept down the noise of that 'household jar within'; if we silenced passion, ambition, selfishness, worldliness; if we withdrew ourselves, as we ought to do, from the Babel of this world, and 'hid ourselves in His pavilion from the strife of tongues'; if we took less of our religion out of books and from other people, and were more accustomed to 'dwell in the secret place of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... was begun at once, amidst a babel of opinions. It was a fond illusion amongst the boys that resin so applied deadened the effects of the cane. It had been tried scores of times without in the least mitigating the agony of Ham's cuts, but the faith of youth is not easily shaken; so Ted's spirits revived wonderfully, and Dick developed ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... and singers. It was even said that they acquired the habit of eating and drinking in time to the music. They were waited upon for the most part by foreigners, who spoke broken English, and what with the babel of tongues, the din of the music and the constant popping of corks, for alcohol had not yet been prohibited, the scene ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 17, 1917 • Various
... presented itself he drove the arrow straight to its mark. As the gaily plumaged creature fluttered to earth its companions and the little monkeys set up a most terrific chorus of wails and screaming protests. The whole forest became suddenly a babel of hoarse screams ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... can never be fully learned." Most of us can master one section of a language concerning which those who use it vernacularly declare "Only Allah wotteth its entirety", but we lack as yet the means to study it as a whole. Older by long ages than Babel's fabulous Tower, and covering a continuous area from Eastern Arabia to the Maghrab al-Aksa (western Mauritania), from Chaldaea in the North to southern Zanzibar, it numbers of potential vocabulary 1,200,000 words all of which may be, if they are not, used, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... and females of all sorts came trailing to me, bowing down to my feet, kissing my hands and crying out I was a saint and all the rest of it, and one even saw a halo round my head. It was too crowded in the prayer-room. I took a bigger room, and then we had a regular tower of Babel. The devil got hold of me completely and screened the light from my eyes with his unclean hoofs. We all behaved as though we were frantic. I read, while the old maids and other females sang, and then after standing on their legs for twenty-four hours or longer without ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... comparative seclusion, than in the overcrowded town, an opinion with which my own completely coincided. And this opinion was strengthened to absolute conviction when, as the sun sank behind the western mountains and the soft, tropical night settled down upon the valley, our ears were assailed by a perfect babel of sound emanating from the town, which, even at the distance of half a mile, rendered sleep almost impossible. What it would have been like to be lodged in the midst of the storm ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... went on; the wind piled up steadily in violence; and the sea rose till the sodden vessel rode it with a very babel of shrieks, and groans, and complaining sounds. Toward morning, a terrific squall powdered up against them and hove her down, and a dull rumbling was heard in her bowels to let them know that once more ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... screaming, bawling, gesticulating, as if one were about to strangle the other; the whole, to an uninitiated eye, a confusion, a Babel, which it seems absolutely impossible to reconcile to the notion of quiet mercantile transactions, the purchase and sale of shares and stocks. As Alain gazed bewildered, he felt himself gently touched, and, looking round, ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... base of an iron pillar. Deserted immediately by their deliverer, the pointers made overtures to two elderly ladies, standing bewildered in the crush, to be repulsed with umbrellas, and then sit down upon their tails in despair. Their forlorn condition, left friendless amid this babel, gets upon their nerves, and after a slight rehearsal, just to make certain of the tune, they lift up their voices in melodious concert, to the scandal of the two females, who cannot escape the neighbourhood, and regard the pointers with horror. Distant friends, ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... been detained down-town all day in the whirl of our New York Babel, and had not yet been home. He would hand ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... all three carts were neatly interlocked, and their respective drivers were engaged in a war of words that beggared Babel. ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... Solomon, and pronounce it Nebuchadnezzar." Its antiquity is so great that one legend calls it the "language of the angels," and another says that Tubal brought it to Spain before the lingual disaster at Babel! And still another relates that the devil once tried to learn it, but that, after studying it for seven years and learning only three words, he gave it ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele
... said one to another at Babel,—"Go to, let us build us a city and a tower whose top shall reach unto heaven," they typified a remarkable trait of the human mind,—a desire for a tangible and material exponent of itself in its most heroic moods. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... a nest of winding alley-ways and blind bat and rat holes, where weird smells and strange unlisted poisons and prophecies were born. In its midst, tight-packed in a roaring babel-din of many-colored markets, stood a stone-walled palace, built once by a Hindu king to commemorate a victory over Moslems, added to by a Moslem Nizam, to celebrate his conquest of the Hindus and added to once again by the Honorable ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... enjoyed by its neighbor, Park street. It is a narrow, crooked thoroughfare. The sidewalk is almost gone in many places, and the street is full of holes. Some of the buildings are of brick, and are lofty enough for a modern Tower of Babel. Others are one and two story wooden shanties. All are hideously dirty. From Canal to Chatham street there is not the slightest sign of cleanliness or comfort. From Franklin to Chatham street there is scarcely ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... in October, a four-seated fly might have been seen at the door of Putnam's hotel, on the roof of which was being piled a Babel of luggage, the inside being already full. Into another vehicle, our party—i.e., three of us—entered, and ere long both the carriages were on the banks of the river, where the steamer was puffing away, impatient for a start. The hawsers were soon ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... shaped and consolidated to defy the elements, as the towering palm or the tapering pine! Well, we had the satisfaction for a time of claiming the tallest structure in the world; and now that the new Tower of Babel which has sprung up in Paris has killed that pretention, I think we shall feel and speak more modestly about our stone hyperbole, our materialization of the American love of the superlative. We have the higher civilization among us, and we must ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... eighteenth of March was created general by the Commune, and gathered round him in guise of staff the most illustrious, or least ignoble, of those foreign parasites and vagabonds, who have made of Paris a grand occidental Bohemian Babel. These soldiers of fortune, most of whom had been "unfortunate" at home, formed the marrow ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... scattered them from there over all the earth; and they stopped building the city. Therefore they named it Babel, which means Confusion, for there Jehovah confused the language of all the people on the earth and scattered them ...
— The Children's Bible • Henry A. Sherman
... before quoted; "they threatened the enemy to his nose, and would have taken the fort if the officers had shown any spirit. They found it hard to bring them off. At the end we broke up with the confusion of Babel, and went ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... brother; Rome's great sire forgot his mother, When he slew his gallant twin, With inexpiable sin. See the giant shadow stride O'er the ramparts high and wide! When the first o'erleapt thy wall, Its foundation mourned thy fall. 80 Now, though towering like a Babel, Who to stop his steps are able? Stalking o'er thy highest dome, Remus claims his ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... applaud the brave Sulpiz Boisseree, who is indefatigably employed in a magnificent series of copper-plates to exhibit the cathedral of Cologne as the model of those vast conceptions, the spirit of which, like that of Babel, strove up to heaven, and which were so out of proportion to earthly means that they were necessarily stopped fast in their execution. If we have been hitherto astonished that such buildings proceeded only so far, we shall ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... sun and the joy of the vintage itself, where the girls dance among the vines under the burden of the grapes, and the little children play with the dogs, and the goodman tastes the wine. Or again, in the fresco of the Tower of Babel: think if you can of all the mere horror of the confusion, and the terror of death, but in a moment you will forget it, remembering only that heroic Republic which amid her enemies built her splendid city, her beautiful Duomo, her Tower like the ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... among the tents the smoke of the fires hangs heavy over the camp; there is the familiar sound of the bubbling rice pots, the smell of pungent curry, the babel of many oriental tongues, and you seem to be back in the very heart of India itself. We gather with the reverent Sikhs for their religious worship. They meet morning and evening for their prayer service, and turn out almost in a body for the weekly Sunday meeting. ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... as our luggage, by numbers of naked skeleton-like Hindus, Parsees, Moguls, and various other tribes. All this crowd emerged, as if from the bottom of the sea, and began to shout, to chatter, and to yell, as only the tribes of Asia can. To get rid of this Babel confusion of tongues as soon as possible, we took refuge in the first bunder boat and ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... into the house and seized a gun, and was making off with it, when one of the teachers caught hold of him. I, seeing the teacher with the chief, thought something was wrong, and went to them. We quieted him, and did our best to explain to him that we were no fighters, but men of peace. The babel all round us was terrible. By-and-by a request was made to me to give the chief from the other side a present, and get him away. I said, "No; had he come in peace, and as a chief, I would have given him a present, but I will not do so ...
— Adventures in New Guinea • James Chalmers
... the valuable portraits of the Medicean family with Picino and Poliziano, in the fresco of the "Tower of Babel" at Pisa. ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... either lucky or unfortunate enough to have none, wanting to open them as soon as possible with the new comers. What with these and pistol practice and rifle shooting from upper casements across the river, in order to expend spare ammunition, the European quarter was a very Babel all day long, and we were not sorry to escape the turmoil and get under weigh to new scenes as ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... dispersion of mankind at Babel, we behold, through the mists of the surrounding gloom, the various tribes into which the race had by that event become divided, subsisting at first by the spontaneous fruits of the earth, and by the chase. Then they became herdsmen, tillers of the soil, and traffickers, ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... I have spoken of an English Sunday in the country and its tranquillizing effect upon the landscape; but where is its sacred influence more strikingly apparent than in the very heart of that great Babel, London? On this sacred day the gigantic monster is charmed into repose. The intolerable din and struggle of the week are at an end. The shops are shut. The fires of forges and manufactories are extinguished, and the sun, no longer obscured by murky clouds of smoke, pours ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... Sometimes, however, the change is enjoyable, as you cannot fail to be amused at the eccentricities of your neighbours; perhaps finding your own weaknesses reflected in them. Often you will find a dozen nationalities represented, and a perfect Babel-like talk, each little exclusive party, like crows, intent only ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... at four tables, taking their places where chance or fancy led them, late comers having to fit in wherever they could find room. A babel of tongues in various languages reigned round the tables, amid which the rattle of knives and forks and plates and the popping of corks made a subdued hubbub. Gorla Mustelford, the motive for all this sound and movement, this chatter of guests and scurrying of waiters, sat motionless ...
— When William Came • Saki
... exist. If he sees it, it does exist so far as he is concerned. There is no more a universal community of sensation than of thought. When I am at work my own thought is more real than any impression received through the sense organs. It is louder than the babel of voices or the strains of instrumental music, and more conspicuous than any object upon which the eye may fall. These external impressions are admitted or shut out at will. I then know that my thought is as real as my senses, that the images of thought are as perceptible ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... parents sent With other cattle to the city went; Where having cast his coat, and well pursued The methods most in fashion to be lewd, Return'd a finish'd spark this summer down, Stock'd with the freshest gibberish of the town; A jargon form'd from the lost language, wit, Confounded in that Babel of the pit; Form'd by diseased conceptions, weak and wild, Sick lust of souls, and an abortive child; Born between whores and fops, by lewd compacts, Before the play, or else between the acts; Nor wonder, ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... accounted such.—I know not specially what your operations in this quarter are to be; but whatever they are, or the arrangements necessary for them, surely it is here that you must alight again in the big Babel, and deliberately adjust what farther is to be done. Write to us what day you are to arrive; and the rest is all ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... susceptible, exploitable, hysterical, non-resistant to external suggestion. Devoid of stamina, such folk become mere units in a mob. "The habit of crowd-making is daily becoming a more serious menace to civilization," writes Everett Dean Martin. "Our society is becoming a veritable babel of gibbering crowds."(3) It would be only the incorrigible optimist who refused to see the integral relation between this phenomenon and the indiscriminate breeding by which we recruit ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... bill of fare was worrying Averil, Leonard was told by Aubrey, that his father had brought home a fossil Tower of Babel, dug up with some earth out of a new well, three miles off, with tidings of other unheard-of treasures, and a walk was projected in quest of them, in which Leonard was invited to join. He gladly came to the early dinner, where he met reduced numbers—the Ernescliffes being at Maplewood, ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... about whom he says nothing, "because he has not observed in them anything worth speaking about." The courtships are varied between abrupt embraces soon after introduction, and discussions on Hebrew, Babel, "Christian-deism," and the binomial theorem. In the most inhospitable deserts, his man or boy[10] is invariably able to produce from his wallet "ham, tongue, potted blackcock, and a pint of cyder," while in more favourable circumstances ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... He winks when he prays, and thinks he knows the way so now to heaven, that he can find it blindfold. Latin he accounts the language of the beast with seven heads; and when he speaks of his own country, cries, he is fled out of Babel. Lastly, his devotion is obstinacy; the only solace of his heart, contradiction; ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... fair, Berbera is a perfect Babel, in confusion as in languages: no chief is acknowledged, and the customs of bygone days are the laws of the place. Disputes between the inland tribes daily arise, and are settled by the spear and dagger, the ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... in their opinions with respect to these ruins. Some affirm that they are the remains of the Tower of Babel, others that they are those of ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... little glade beside which Madam Rothsay and Edith Hester had been left helplessly bound by their captors. From the moment of the girl's brave effort to warn the camp, these two had listened with straining ears to the babel of sounds by which the whole course of the tragedy was made plain to them. They shuddered at the volleys, at the screams of the wounded, and at the triumphant yells of the victors. They almost forgot their own wretched ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... itself audible amidst the babel of noise. That slow rattle is of all the sounds of war the one ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... a babel of conversation floated from the parlour to the hall, where Lloyd watched and waited. Her father waited with her, but he had a newspaper. Lloyd wondered how he could read while such an important search was going on. She did not know that he had little faith in the dog's ability to find his master. ...
— The Little Colonel's Hero • Annie Fellows Johnston
... so much a pyramid as a pagoda of pyramids. It would suggest houses built by mammoths out of mountains; the cities reared by elephants in their own elephantine school of architecture. And New York does recall the most famous of all sky-scrapers—the tower of Babel. She recalls it none the less because there is no doubt about the confusion of tongues. But in truth the very reverse is true of most of the buildings in America. I had no sooner passed out into the suburbs of New York on the way to Boston than I began to see something else quite contrary ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... me start, I'th' name of Rabbi-Abraham, what art? Syriack? or Arabick? or Welsh? what skilt? Up all the brick-layers that Babel built? Some conjurer translate, and let me know it, 'Till then 'tis fit for a West Saxon Poet. But do the brotherhood then play their prizes? Like murmurs in religion with disguises? Out-brave us with a name in rank and ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... the everyday circle of society, in which the literary and scientific rarely— the rest never—break through the spell of personality;—where Anecdote reigns everlastingly paramount and exclusive, and the mildest attempt to generalize the Babel of facts, and to control temporary and individual phenomena by the application of eternal and overruling principles, is unintelligible to many, and disagreeable to more;—to leave this species of converse—if converse it deserves to be called—and pass an entire day with Coleridge, ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... castle falls crumbling into the tarn. There are other possible tales on such terms, never yet imagined, to be born to-morrow. Great structures may become in sort villains, as in the old Bible narrative of the origin of the various languages. The producer can show the impious Babel Tower, going higher and higher into the sky, fascinating and tempting the architects till a confusion of tongues turns those masons into quarrelling mobs that become departing caravans, leaving her blasted and forsaken, a symbol of every Babylon that ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... some were clasping each other to their hearts, in agonizing silence, and praying in secret that the Great Ruler of all might preserve and happily restore them again to the idols of their affections; some had mounted their noble steeds, or were leading them forth for the purpose—and all was in Babel-like confusion. ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... riotous board—I noted the flushed faces and rapid gesticulations of my guests, and listened to the Babel of conflicting tongues. I drew a long breath as I looked—I calculated that in two or three minutes at the very least I might throw down the trump card I had held so patiently in my ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... river, rude peasants of the Medoc, and becloaked and befeathered squires of the court, all jostling and pushing in an ever-changing, many-colored stream, while English, French, Welsh, Basque, and the varied dialects of Gascony and Guienne filled the air with their babel. From time to time the throng would be burst asunder and a lady's horse-litter would trot past tow torch-bearing archers walking in front of Gascon baron or English knight, as he sought his lodgings ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle |
