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More "Casual" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... believe in presentiments. They attribute that curious feeling that something unpleasant is going to happen to such mundane causes as liver or a chill or the weather. For my own part, I think there is more in the matter than the casual observer might imagine. ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... to look as though Bud had deliberately resolved upon carrying a guilty conscience all the rest of his life. He had made absolutely no effort to trace the parents of Lovin Child when he was in town. On the contrary he had avoided all casual conversation, for fear some one might mention the fact that a child had been lost. He had been careful not to buy anything in the town that would lead one to suspect that he had a child concealed upon his premises, ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... Not content with a casual inspection, he particularly examined those papers which, in his dream adventure, he had believed to have been submitted to mysterious inspection. They showed no signs of having been touched. The casement curtains were drawn across the recess formed by the French windows, and sunlight streamed in ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... factories, brick-yards, foundries, timber-yards, docks, and railway works. On this occasion Yule, contrary to his custom, kept a journal, and a few excerpts may be given here, as affording some notion of his casual talk to those ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... but only a probability of such; it is an accident, not a property, of a man; like light, it can give little or nothing, but at most may show what is given; often it is but a false glare, dazzling the eyes of the vulgar, lending by casual extrinsic splendour the brightness and manifold glance of the diamond to pebbles of no value. A man is in all cases simply the man, of the same intrinsic worth and weakness, whether his worth and weakness lie hidden in the depths of his own consciousness, ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... name but "Bunker Bean!" Often he wrote good ones on casual slips of paper and fancied them his; names like Trevellyan or Montressor or Delancey, with musical prefixes; or a good, short, beautiful, but dignified name like "Gordon Dane." He liked that one. It suggested something. But Bean! ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... as though summoned by some purely casual flicker of the Superintendent's thin fingers another ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... mastered his weakness and boldly thrust his hand into his breast, withdrew it, and burst out into a wild hysterical laugh as he gave a casual glance at his hand before passing it cautiously into his left breast-pocket and bringing out, bit by bit, the fragments of the bottle of preparation which the doctor had dispensed, and that it had been his mission to deliver that afternoon. ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... had foreseen, tongues did wag—those tongues of the countryside, avid of anything that might spice the tedium of dull lives and brains. And, though no breath of gossip came to Winton's ears, no women visited at Mildenham. Save for the friendly casual acquaintanceships of churchyard, hunting-field, and local race-meetings, Gyp grew up knowing hardly any of her own sex. This dearth developed her reserve, kept her backward in sex-perception, gave her a faint, unconscious contempt for men—creatures always at the beck and call ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... not likely, he thought, that any of the neighbors could tell him where she had gone when she had not felt like giving him that much of her confidence. But he went down to Smith's, making casual inquiry, saying nothing about the note which she had left, not taking that to be ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... baulks of timber forming the staith was being hauled at by five women and two men! Two others were in a listless fashion leaning their shoulders against the boat itself. With the last 'Heave-ho!' at the shortened tackle the women laid hold of the nets, and with casual male assistance laid them out on the shingle, removed any fragments of fish, and generally prepared them for ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... of a reflective turn, on the—er— far-reaching consequences of events which, to the casual eye, might appear insignificant. An infant is born in the remote island of Corsica. Years roll on, and we find our gardens denuded of a bulb, the favourite habitat of which must lie at least eight hundred miles from Corsica as the crow flies. How unlikely was it, sir, that you or I, ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... sergeant," the New-UN orderly said. She was ushered into a small, comfortably appointed chamber adjoining the main conference hall, and the perfectly controlled coolness of her bearing was at its peak. To the casual glance of the orderly, perhaps, it flawlessly masked the vital convictions which had long seethed within her and made her the little known woman she was. The studied mask itself had made her the efficient Space officer she was. And at the moment she was glad for it, ...
— The Women-Stealers of Thrayx • Fox B. Holden
... anything so absurd! You must certainly go to the dinner. How like you! How casual of you! For a mere trifle to offend the man who might be of the greatest use ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... receiving accidental information that a party was out in quest of him, he returned home, and escaped the fate designed for him, which befell his patron the Archbishop.] In their excited imagination the casual rencounter had the appearance of a providential interference, and they put to death the archbishop, with circumstances of great and cold-blooded cruelty, under the belief, that the Lord, as they expressed it, had ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the extraordinary depth of his sentiments, and the fervor of his feelings. It may be added that these mental traits were not generally ascribed to him by casual or ordinary associates. He was, in manners and bearing, evidently not one who sought friendships or displayed to the general gaze the current of his thoughts. Consequently, of intimates he had but few, and was considered by those ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... fate reserved for me? Perhaps Welbeck would adopt me for his own son. Wealth has ever been capriciously distributed. The mere physical relation of birth is all that entitles us to manors and thrones. Identity itself frequently depends upon a casual likeness or an old nurse's imposture. Nations have risen in arms, as in the case of the Stuarts, in the cause of one the genuineness of whose birth has been denied and can never be proved. But if ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... I remember falling asleep myself whilst a poet was reading to me an ode on the beauties of Sherwood Park. These beauties too soon became familiar to my eye; and even the idea of being the proprietor of this enchanting place soon palled upon my vanity. Every casual visitor, all the strangers, even the common people, who were allowed once a week to walk in my pleasure-grounds, enjoyed them a thousand times more than I could. I remember, that, about six weeks after I came to Sherwood Park, I one evening escaped from the crowds of friends who filled ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... saves a reminiscence that means a good deal by means of a casual question. I asked the first of those two old New-Yorkers the following question: "Who, on the whole, seemed to you the most considerable ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Now the casual observer would say of the great orator: he has money; his family is not in want. But the statement would ...
— Snow on the Headlight - A Story of the Great Burlington Strike • Cy Warman
... boldly and there was a purpose in its course. Often it seemed to be on the point of recklessly running against the rocky shore, but always it sheered off in time, and though its advance was apparently casual it was moving down the ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... And they went to the opera. On Thursdays he drove to town, and, putting that fat chap and his horses up, met her in Kensington Gardens, picking up the carriage after he had left her, and driving home again in time for dinner. He threw out the casual formula that he had business in London on those two days. On Wednesdays and Saturdays she came down to give Holly music lessons. The greater the pleasure he took in her society, the more scrupulously fastidious he ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... painfully. "But these long-horns that's raised on salt-horse an' rawhide, maintains a jaw on 'em that makes iron an' granite seem right mushy. I didn't figure I'd recount the disturbance, aimin' to pass it off casual regardin' the disfigurin' of my profile. But if you-all witnessed the debate, I might as well go ahead an' oncork the details. In the first place, this warrior is a deputy that's out ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... the shore for the spot at which the bush road debouched, and this we eventually found with some difficulty, for, like everything else connected with the factory, it had been very carefully arranged with the object of screening it from casual observation. But once discovered, our difficulties in that respect were at an end, for we found that it ran down into a tiny indentation in the shore, just sufficiently spacious to accommodate two of ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... disappointment. But the longer she watched the grave, quiet face the more attractive it became. Certainly he was a handsome man, and, judging from the contour of head and features, an intellectual one. There was an absolute repose in the countenance which might have passed with casual observers for inertia, indifference; but to the practiced physiognomist it expressed the perfect peace of a mind and heart completely harmonious. The voice was remarkably clear and well modulated. His text was selected from the first and last chapters of Ecclesiastes, and consisted ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... of villages are not those distressing dump-heaps which they too often are in America. Yet there is no excessive air of trimness. The order and grooming seem a part of nature's processes. There is, too, a casual charm about the villages themselves, the graceful, accidental grouping of houses and gardens, which suggests growth rather than premeditation. The general harmony does not preclude, but rather comes of, the ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... And besides these casual visitors there are numberless creatures which have lived and multiplied there, ever since I first visited the pool. Tender red, olive-colored, and green seaweeds, stony corallines, and acorn-barnacles lining the floor, sea-anemones clinging to the sides, sponges tiny and many-colored hiding ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... jewelled hand, and with the other twirling a long and silken moustache. Handsome, graceful, and thoroughly inured to the public gaze, he fronted a small circle of gapers like an actor adroit to make the best of himself, and his tongue wagged fast enough to wag a man's leg off. At a casual glance he might have been taken for thirty, but his age was fifty and more—if you could catch him in the morning before he had ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... thus condensed into a small volume, like a fowl in the hands of the cook, and, above all, to be so completely deprived of its fur. Is this culinary procedure undertaken in respect of the larvae, which might be incommoded by the fur? Or is it just a casual result, a mere loss of hair due to putridity? I am not certain. But it is always the case that these exhumations, from first to last, have revealed the furry game furless and the feathered game featherless, except for the tail-feathers and the pinion-feathers ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... naturally brought their faces and lips together. They did this with the utmost gravity three times, and then embraced again, rocking on pivoted feet like a metronome. Alas! it was no momentary inspiration. The most casual and indifferent observer could see that it was the result of long previous practice and shameless experience. And as such—it was a revelation ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... CYNTHIA. Casual actions of this class That are done without intention Of a second end, to mention Here were out of place: I pass To another point: There 's no one Who with genius, or denied it,— Dowered with mind, but has applied it Some especial track to ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... things, as well as, in a few instances, some reading. Hall, however, actually surprised me. He spoke with a precision and knowledge of mechanics that would have done credit to a scholar, and with a simplicity that added to the influence of what he said. Some casual remark induced me to put in—"Vell, I might s'pose an Injin voult cut so das column, but I might not s'pose a vhite man could." This opinion gave the discourse a direction towards anti-rentism, and in a few minutes it caught all the attention of ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... atmosphere, till it acquires almost the black of ink; the unsunned portion of the paper remaining unaffected, or so slightly as to render it almost certain that what little action of the kind exists is due to the effect of casual dispersed light incident in the preparation of the paper. I have before me a specimen of paper so treated in which the effect of thirty seconds' exposure to sunshine was quite invisible at first, and which is now of so intense ...
— Photographic Reproduction Processes • P.C. Duchochois
... enough to the former Helen to leave no doubt it was herself. But a casual acquaintance ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... and he did not wish to read it, but he had to pretend to be interested in it, for the girl showed no desire to offer any more than the casual civilities of one stranger to another. He hoped that he might suddenly look up and find that she was regarding him intently ... she would hurriedly glance away from him with an air of pretty confusion ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... stream and disappears in its black shadows. The wind blows gently from the west: it is just strong enough to show the silver sides of the willow leaves. The sound of the weir, although so soft, is able to exclude the clacking of the mill and all intermittent, casual noises. For two hours it has filled my ears and brought a deeper repose than that of mere silence. It is not uniform, for the voices of innumerable descending threads of water with varying impulses can be ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... and anxiety of the passage, forgot all about the casual traveller from whom he had just parted. Little did he dream that that man carried in his breast the document upon which his fortune depended, and the obtaining of which would establish his mother and sister ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... during the days that immediately followed Teeny-bits' first appearance on the football field, more than one candidate for the team made it a point to be present in the shower-bath room in order that he might cast seemingly casual glances at the unusual mark. Some of the Ridgleyites were more open in their curiosity and did not hesitate to question Teeny-bits, but they all received answers similar to the one that Neil Durant had received. To Teeny-bits there was nothing strange ...
— The Mark of the Knife • Clayton H. Ernst
... along the lane which later debouched upon the main thoroughfare of Poketown, it was evident to the most casual glance that the old Day house was not the only dwelling far along in a state of decay. Poketown was ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... liked shells was a person above suspicion. Thus it was that two days later, after a casual checking of the bearded man's references, he invited Travail ...
— Made in Tanganyika • Carl Richard Jacobi
... Peter, I had come a little nearer to being actively aware that I was good-looking, only to anathematize the fact. Now, catching sight of my reflection in the mirror, I wondered eagerly whether I really were fair, and wished I had some higher authority to think so than the casual jokes of my sisters. It did not add to my presence of mind to find that my involuntary glance to the mirror had been intercepted—perhaps even my motive guessed at—he appeared to have a frightfully ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... shook hands, and exchanged casual remarks as if nothing were amiss, nor was the subject mentioned, except that Mrs. Arthuret contrived to get a ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... being hardly the word to apply to his few casual acquaintances,—were greatly surprised at this. Such an establishment seemed to them the last sort of thing a man of this type would have gone in for. He had seemed such a decent sort, too. Really, a few professed to be quite shocked—they said you never knew how the ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... to be on the "acting staff." Each new worker was pledged to secrecy, as surprise was to be the order of the day, and a certain portion of the grounds was marked off by placards bearing the announcement that "Trespassers would be persecuted!" A casual observer might have imagined a slip of the pen in this last word, but the girls knew better. It would be persecution, indeed, and of no light nature, which would be visited upon a willing violator of ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... missing man was obliged to confess that their most protracted and confidential conversation had been on the comparative efficiency of ship biscuits and soda crackers. Mr. Banks, who was known to have spoken to him, could only remember that one warm evening, in reply to a casual remark about the weather, the missing man, burying his ears further in the turned-up collar of his pea-jacket, had stated, "'It was cold enough to freeze the ears off a brass monkey,'—a remark, no doubt, sir, intended ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... dear?" His mother was speaking. "The one who shot so well?" Her voice was casual; her acting superb. And God! how they can ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... influence a life: a man whose opinion I esteemed, made of me the casual and trite remark, that 'my nature was one of which it was impossible to augur evil or good: it might be extreme in either.' This observation roused me into thought: could I indeed be all that was good or evil? had I the choice, and could I hesitate which to choose? But what was good and what was ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... its fellows and melts all humanity into one cordial heart of hearts. Domestic life, if it may still be termed domestic, will seek its separate corners, and never gather itself into groups. The easy gossip; the merry yet unambitious Jest; the life-like, practical discussion of real matters in a casual way; the soul of truth which is so often incarnated in a simple fireside word,—will disappear from earth. Conversation will contract the air of debate, and all mortal intercourse be chilled ...
— Fire Worship (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... two countries. He showed himself as clever in diplomacy as he was in finance, and important results followed in an incredibly short space of time. An understanding was reached, which on the surface expressed itself in a seemingly casual letter from Sir Edward Thornton to Secretary Fish of the 26th of January, 1871, communicating certain instructions from Lord Granville in regard to a better adjustment of the fishery question and all other matters affecting the relations of the United States to ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... Lady Jane, Dorothy passed into the courtyard and into the open air for the first time in nearly a week. She felt like a bird with clipped wings. The most casual inspection convinced her that there was no possible chance of escape from the walled quadrangle, in the center of which loomed the immense, weather-painted castle. The wall was high and its strength was as unbroken as in ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... visit. It was some minutes before he finally veered to the subject of women in athletics and from that to women in newspaper work and from that again to the women members of the Recorder's staff. In response to his somewhat too casual enquiry concerning Miss Lawson, Chic sat back ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... universally prone to the belief in omens, and the casual occurrence of certain contingent circumstances soon creates the easiest of theories. Should a bird of good omen, in ancient times, perch on the standard, or hover about an army, the omen was of good import, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII. F, No. 325, August 2, 1828. • Various
... enough. This, says Capt. Sueter, was apparently the only reason for de Son's failure, for his principles were distinctly sound, and he was certainly the first inventor of the mechanically propelled semi-submarine boat. After her failure de Son exhibited her for a trifle to any casual passer-by. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... birthplace were correct in their rating of his character and his qualities, again crossed Lorraine and entered Luxemburg, where he celebrated Easter. It was shortly after that festival, on April 17th, that a letter from Sigismund was delivered to him announcing in rather casual and off-hand terms that he was now in a position to repay the loan of 1469, made on the security of those Rhinelands. Therefore the Austrian would hand over at Basel 80,000 florins, 40,000 the sum received by him, 10,000 paid in his behalf to the Swiss, and 30,000 which ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... appearance of what they desired to be thought. In the courtyard a knot of servants gaped, nudged one another, but openly said nothing. Messire Heleigh, as they interpreted it, was brazening out an affair of gallantry before the countryside; and they esteemed his casual observation that they would find a couple of dead men on the common ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... takes place, the distress arising from a scarcity of provisions must fall hardest upon the least fortunate members of the society. This distress also must frequently have been felt by the women, exposed to casual plunder in the absence of their husbands, and subject to continual disappointments in their ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... Of those, where the departed roam, she falls, Here learns her destin'd path. Soon as the place Receives her, round the plastic virtue beams, Distinct as in the living limbs before: And as the air, when saturate with showers, The casual beam refracting, decks itself With many a hue; so here the ambient air Weareth that form, which influence of the soul Imprints on it; and like the flame, that where The fire moves, thither follows, so henceforth The new form on the spirit follows still: Hence hath it semblance, and is ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... "Billy Johnson" was not only a consummate scholar and a most stimulating teacher, but the sympathetic and discerning friend of the boys who were fortunate enough to be his private pupils. In his book of verses—Ionica—he made graceful play with a casual word which Charles Wood had let fall in the ecstasy of swimming—"Oh, how I wish I ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... having set a watch on your sister at the suggestion, and with the help of a casual Major of Foot, you might in decency reserve the word 'compromise' for home consumption; and further, that against adversaries so poorly sensitive to her feelings, your sister may be pardoned for putting her ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in this "happy land" earnestly invite the ladies to "pull away" at the mountains of cabbages which their sheds display, while little boys on the pavement offer what they playfully designate "a plummy ha'p'orth," of onions to the casual passenger. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 18, 1841 • Various
... vaguely impressed upon Helen that a significance less casual than the light words themselves lay in Carr's remark. She, too, looked at Howard. There was a frown in his eyes. Slowly, as his look met hers, a flush spread in his cheeks. Carr saw ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... monotonous tick, tock, tick, tock, like a metronome. Calhoun got up and made a casual examination of the ship's instruments. He turned on the vision screens. They were useless in overdrive, of course, Now they were ready to inform him about the normal cosmos as soon as the ship returned to it. He put away the coffee things. Murgatroyd ...
— The Hate Disease • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... daughter; my heart misgives me that there is something very much amiss with you. Not sickness, for your mamma, Max, and Gracie all make casual mention of you, and say directly that you are well; yet I have not seen a stroke of your pen ...
— The Two Elsies - A Sequel to Elsie at Nantucket, Book 10 • Martha Finley
... knowledge of how much of a given class of work can be done in a day from either their own experience, which has frequently grown hazy with age, from casual and unsystematic observation of their men, or at best from records which are kept, showing, the quickest time in which each job has been done. In many cases the employer will feel almost certain that a given job can be done faster than it has been, but he rarely ...
— Shop Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor
... only, during those three years had he shown a disposition to hark back on his old discreditable ways, and that was the result of a casual meeting with Gus one summer during the holidays, with whom, he afterwards confessed to Charlie, he was induced to forget for a time his better resolutions in the snares of a billiard-room. But the backsliding was repented of almost as soon as committed, and, to Charlie's anxious eyes, appeared ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... floor with a splintering crash, the incident attracted little more than casual glances from those ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... a woman, she lost her haunted look and gained some colour in her cheeks. She lost her mortal chill. Her clothing, the putting up of her hair made some difference, but loving entreaty all the difference in the world. To a casual glance there was nothing but refinement to distinguish her from her neighbours, to a closer one there was more than that. Her eyes, they said, had the far, intent, rapt gaze of a wild animal. They seemed to search minutely, reaching beyond our power of vision, to ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... richer to my boyish thought. There was no didacticism on his part; there was, on the contrary, a simplicity so great that I felt entirely at home with him; but he was so thoroughly a citizen of the world that I caught a glimpse of the world in his most casual talk. I got a sense of the largeness and richness of life from him. I did not know what it was which laid such hold on my mind, but I saw later that it was the remarkable culture of the man,—a culture made possible by many fortunate conditions of wealth, station, travel, and ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... where he got his exquisite elocution. He went abroad in his youth, and there were good trainers abroad, then. He must have studied thoroughly the speeches of Cicero and the Greek orators. Many casual phrases in his works, besides many quotations, show his familiarity ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... vanished from the loftier and more exposed sides of the hills. The farm-house or mansion-house, (for, from its size and appearance, it might have been the one or the other,) was a large but low building, and the walls of the out-houses were sufficiently strong to resist any band of casual depredators. There was nothing, however, which could withstand a more powerful force; for, in a country laid waste by war, the farmer was then, as now, obliged to take his chance of the great evils attendant upon that state ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... relapsed into silence, restrained from smoking for fear of a telltale spark or casual fragrance carried by the wind. It was a dark night, the hillsides stood blurry against a blue-black sky in which the stars glittered like metal points but failed to shed much light. Later, much later, toward morning, a moon ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... raising her buff calico a little on the congregation side, just enough to show an inch or two of petticoat. The petticoat was as modestly long as the frock itself, and disclosing a bit of it was nothing more heinous than a casual exhibition of good needlework. Deacon Baxter furnished only the unbleached muslin for his daughters' undergarments; but twelve little tucks laboriously done by hand, elaborate inch-wide edging, crocheted ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... was very busy arranging his affairs, and a casual looker-on would have seen nothing unusual in the face always so grave and cold. But to Tom Tubbs, casting furtive glances over his book and wondering at his employer's sudden activity, it was terrible in its dark, hard, unrelenting expression, while even his mother, upon ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... varieties of character impress my mind with a feeling, that they are due to a direct relation of the electric powers to the particles of the dielectric through which the discharge occurs, and are not the mere results of a casual ignition or a secondary kind of action of the electricity, upon the particles which it finds in its course and thrusts ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... somehow left me with an instinctive dislike for asking casual acquaintances the way to any place that I am seeking. The aversion is more or less justified by the fact that outside the police force very exceptional persons can direct you, especially if they know the way themselves. On my first visit ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... commented, and the boy blinked indifferently. He was used to stronger. "The casual Rex all over! Yes, boy, there's an answer." He scribbled rapidly, and the two lines ...
— A Good Samaritan • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... his hour before all men's gaze, and the obscurer duty may be the more substantial honor. So when I lift my eyes to look on yonder level ocean-floor, the fitful sunshine now glimmers white on one far-off sail, now on another; and yet I know that all canvas looks snowy while those casual rays are on it, and that the best vessel is that which, sunlit or shaded, best accomplishes its destined course. The officer is almost as powerless as the soldier to choose his opportunity or his place. Military glory ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... realise—the scene at Franick Castle, when Lady Dunstable, unsuspecting, should open the letter which announced to her the advent of her daughter-in-law, Elena, nee Flink—or should gather the same unlovely fact from a casual newspaper paragraph. As for interfering between her and her rich deserts, Doris vowed to herself she would not lift a finger. That incredibly forgiving young woman, Miss Wigram, might do as she pleased. ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... pleasures or small and occasional annoyances. A supreme pleasure or a supreme pain forces us to gather our complex vision together, forces us to make use of its apex-thought, so that we can embrace the ecstasy or fling ourselves upon the misery with a co-ordinated power. It is the little casual annoyances and reliefs of our normal days which are so hard to deal with in the spirit of philosophic art, because these little pleasures and pains while making a superficial appeal to the reason or the ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... never been beautiful she had always been interesting, and indeed she was (even when in the company of women far more beautiful than herself) always one of the first to whom men looked. This may have been partly accounted for by her very obvious pride, the quality that struck the most casual observer at once, but there was also an air of indifference, a look in the eyes that seemed to pique men's curiosity and stir their interest. It was not for lack of opportunity that she was still unmarried, but she had never discovered the man who had virtue and merit ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... nature to listen hour after hour to such platitudes. I believe they fall into a habit of half-wakeful sleeping, which carries them through the hours; but even that can't be pleasant. I look upon the Treasury Bench in July as a sort of casual-ward which we know to be necessary, but is almost too horrid to ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... has been changed to "from" (partially sheltered from the Southern sun). Chapter XVII: The spelling of Sommbernont has been changed to Sombernon. Chapter XX: The word casual has been changed to casualty (sent him home as a casualty). Chapter XXV: It is not clear if the printed word is trained or ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman
... was happily concealed by the darkness; his wife and her sister had both grown stout steadily as they grew older, but each insisted upon the other's greater magnitude and consequent incapacity for quick movement. A casual observer would not have been persuaded that there was a pound's weight ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... I heard some of our boarders talking on the floor below. Opening my door and listening eagerly I heard one of them say, in such a casual tone: ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... portion indicated by his honoured association with a distinguished society. He was proud in his modest way, if the paradox be permitted, when he produced his card, on which was engraved "Josiah Smith, F.R.S.A." Also it was known amongst his friends that casual references to his great work on "Underground England" were not displeasing to him. But, as he was wont to say, "The surest way of finding either mental or bodily recreation is to seek it in ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... now, was red lipped, his teeth a glistening white. Eyes very big, very black, very soft, very tender, smiling too. From the crown of his wide black hat to the tall heels of his dainty boots he was such a dandy as demanded more than a casual glance. ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... These casual comments did not seem to arouse any burning curiosity among the young men, and up to the day of Kalora's nineteenth anniversary they had not had the effect of bringing to the father any of those guarded inquiries which, under the oriental custom, are ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... brought low" and the feeble, bent, stricken man piped and wheezed and stammered his confused answers to the young man's questions, and stood paralyzed with unspeakable horror while the inspector glanced at the Carnine note and asked some casual question about it. When the bank closed that night, General Hendricks tried to write to his son and tell him the truth, but he sat weeping before his desk and could not put down the words he longed to write. Bob Hendricks found that tear-stained ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... spent by Thaddeus in the "noble pastime of snooping," as he called it. The house was searched by him in a casual sort of way from top to bottom for a clew to the mystery, but without avail. Several times he went below to the cellar, ostensibly to inspect his coal supply, really to observe the demeanor of Margaret, the cook. Barring an unusual pallor upon her cheek, she appeared ...
— Paste Jewels • John Kendrick Bangs
... speak, I should assuredly want time for the maturest reflection. In the first place, I know almost nothing about you. One would not engage a—a coachman—without more inquiry. How can a girl promise to trust her entire future to a man with whom she has but a casual acquaintance? Such things need consideration. I know my father would say so. And if he heard only the nicest things about you, I doubt if he would like to have you take me from him—especially now, when his ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... oftentimes the white-armed child Of thunder-bearing Jove, young Thebe, comes And droops above him with her short sweet sighs For Love distraught—for dear Love's faded sake That weeps and sings and weeps itself to death Because of casual eyes, and lips of frost, And careless mutterings, and ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... accomplished in my present condition, under any ordinary views of ambition. Indeed, labouring as I have been for many months past, under an almost total deprivation of sight, (the effect of exposure and anxiety of mind in the prosecution of geographical researches,) I owe it to the casual assistance of some of my friends, that I am at length enabled to lay these results before your Lordship and ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... he had a closer knowledge of prisons, Nekhludoff found out that all those vices which developed among the prisoners—drunkenness, gambling, cruelty, and all these terrible crimes, even cannibalism—were not casual, or due to degeneration or to the existence of monstrosities of the criminal type, as science, going hand in hand with the government, explained it, but an unavoidable consequence of the incomprehensible delusion that men may ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... party-day arrived; and Doctor Blimber said at breakfast, 'Gentlemen, we will resume our studies on the twenty-fifth of next month.' Mr Toots immediately threw off his allegiance, and put on his ring: and mentioning the Doctor in casual conversation shortly afterwards, spoke of him as 'Blimber'! This act of freedom inspired the older pupils with admiration and envy; but the younger spirits were appalled, and seemed to marvel that no beam ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... made casual reference to the "weak-kneed compromise," he simply voiced a personal opinion on a theme which was in the mind of every American, and one regarded with as many minds as there were men. That political measure of ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... hardly needs discussion here. Its importance is too obvious. It needs, however, more public discussion in England than it has hitherto received. The second method—operating at present only in a very casual and unsystematic way—ought, one would say, to be very systematically considered and dealt with by the modern States. For a nation to plant out large bodies of colonists on comparatively unoccupied lands, as in Africa or Australia ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... fast traveling pony sleighs with frequent exchange of horses. Officers and civil officials found this travel not unpleasant. The following story, taken from the Red Cross Magazine and adapted to this volume, will give the doughboy a pleasing recollection and the casual reader a vivid picture of ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... grief! There were many deeds of my life to which I had given but casual regret. When the minister would counsel us to confess our sins to God, I had knelt in the church and gone through the form; but here, where the height and depth and breadth of God's perfection dawned upon me, and grew hourly clearer, ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... country into areas of equal deficiency. The area most affected, as you can see, is longer east and west, than it is north and south. It is worst in the east, in fact in this very neighborhood. Even a casual glance at the map will show you that the center of the drought area, from an intensity standpoint, lies in Maryland, a ...
— The Great Drought • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... If the casual gods send inquiring strangers into my camp, let them (the intruders) be civil, please, or at least be male. Citizens I can at once wave away with a regretful nescio vos; foot-officers are decently reserved in their ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 29, 1917 • Various
... Callaway sat in a chair opposite the writer and told her freely of the incidents of slavery as she remembered them. To a casual observer it will come as a surprise to know the woman was blind. She is quite old, but her thoughts were clearly and ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... his own. There was in his manner and address something of what the French call liant. When the chances of residence made me his neighbour, an evening in his drawing-room, or half an hour's talk in casual meetings in afternoon walks on Wimbledon Common, was always a particularly agreeable incident. Some men and women have the quality of atmosphere. The egotism of the natural man is surrounded by an elastic medium. Mr. Greg was one of these ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... intelligible Why, And both, from severance, winning equal smart. So, with resigned and acquiescent heart, Whene'er your name on some chance lip may lie, I seem to see an alien shade pass by, A spirit wherein I have no lot or part. Thus may a captive, in some fortress grim, From casual speech betwixt his warders, learn That June on her triumphant progress goes Through arched and bannered woodlands; while for him She is a legend emptied of concern, And idle is the ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... sunset, and moonlight idealize the sacred hill, rising amid the palm-groves and rice-fields of a matchless valley, sweeping away in green undulations which break like emerald waves against the deepening azure and amethyst of the mountain heights. The solemn grandeur of Boro-Boedoer blinds the casual observer to many details which manifest the ravages of time, the ruthlessness of war, and the decay of a discarded creed. Headless and overthrown figures, broken tees, mutilated carvings, and shattered chapels abound, but the vast display of architectural features ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... repeatedly. It is of special significance on "total days." Those are the days when the Government, in the absence of fresh victories, adds the totals of prisoners taken for a given period, and as only the totals appear in the headlines the casual reader feels nearer a victorious peace. On the morning of March 13, 1916, most of the papers had "total" ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... of the results at which they have arrived, I may be pardoned for expressing my belief that this kind of investigation is often pursued with an exaggerated confidence. Plausible conjecture is too frequently mistaken for positive proof. Undue significance is attached to what may be mere casual coincidences, and a minuteness of accuracy is professed in discriminating between the different elements in a narrative which cannot be attained by mere internal evidence. In all writings, but especially in the writings of an age when criticism was unknown, ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... hundred yards, and, directed in some degree by a strong smell of sulphur, they applied their match to several places, with similar effect. These fires continue burning unceasingly, unless they are extinguished by accident. The phaenomenon was originally discovered by the casual rolling of lighted embers, from the top of the bank, whilst some persons were clearing it for cultivation; and, in the intensity and duration of the flame, it probably exceeds any thing of the kind that ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... that her spirit might follow him unhampered to the world of ghosts whither he was bound. Thus the twin barrows on Ogbury hillside bridge over for us two vast epochs of human culture, both now so remote as to merge together mentally to the casual eyes of modern observers, but yet in reality marking in their very shape and disposition an immense, long, and slow advance of human reason. For just as the long barrow answers in form to the buried human corpse and the chambered hut that surrounds and encloses it, so does the round barrow ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... officer only by consent of the men, stood apart by the bridge-head, gravely. They were all serious and self-contented, very unglamorous. It was like a business excursion on horseback, harmless and uninspiring. The uniforms were almost ludicrous, so ill-fitting and casual. ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... interest. His quiet air of authority among his fellows was like a birthright; it seemed assumed and accepted unconsciously. His face was smooth, and he was fuller in figure than the rest, but still sinewy and lank, though not awkward; his movements were too quick and decisive for that. With a casual glance Clayton had wondered what secret influence could have turned to spiritual things a man so merely animal-like in face and physique; but when the mountaineer thrust back his hat, elemental strength and seriousness were ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.
... accordingly came forth from the shop of Roberts, between whom and Johnson I have not traced any connection, except the casual one of this publication[478]. In Johnson's Life of Savage, although it must be allowed that its moral is the reverse of—'Respicere exemplar vita morumque jubebo[479],' a very useful lesson is inculcated, to guard men ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... that she was his—his very own! And only four nights ago he had been a rude stranger, too, criticising her every movement, and drinking too much port with annoyance over it all. And now his whole life was changed. He saw with new eyes, and heard with new ears, even his casual observation was altered and sharpened, so that he noticed the texture of the cloth and the quality of the glass, and the shape of the room and ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... McMaster, "History of the People of the United States", 7 vols. (1883-1912). McMaster has the more "modern" point of view and is excellent but dry, without any sense of narrative. Rhodes has a somewhat older point of view. For example, he makes only a casual reference, in a quotation, to the munitions problem of 1861, though analyzing with great force and candor such constitutional issues as the arrests under the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. The other strong points in his work are its sense of narrative, its freedom from hero-worship, ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... him, as he stood in the bar, swallowing some fiery liquid of dubious origin which the landlord had sold to him as brandy, to make a casual ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... know no details save that he had been "in business." But had he ever an affair of the heart? Just as in real life, when a stray allusion will occasionally escape from a person betraying something of his past history, so once or twice a casual remark of Mr. Pickwick's furnishes a hint. Thus Mr. Magnus, pressing him for his advice in this delicate matter of proposing, asked him had he ever done this sort of thing in his time. "You mean proposing?" said the great man. ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... meanness. This so eclipsed every other passion in the man, and loomed so bulkily and insistently in the foreground, that had he cherished a second vice no one would have observed it, and if he really did possess a casual virtue, it could scarcely have reared its head in ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... open questions urgently in need of answers. But I do not hope much from the answers of adults,—from the deaf and blind writers to the hearing and seeing children. The answers must come from the children themselves. We must listen to children's speech, to their casual everyday expressions. We must gather children's stories. Mothers and teachers everywhere should be making these precious records. We must study them not merely as showing what a child is thinking, but the way he is thinking and the way he ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... it is just heaven," observed Marcus, when he came downstairs to his wife; "the night before last, poor beggar, he was in the casual ward, and last night he had a few hours in some refuge. 'Fancy the casual ward for a gentleman's son,' he said to me so bitterly, 'and there was actually a barrister there too, and we fraternised.' It is just as I thought, ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... herself the further indiscretion of swallowing it grew to such proportions that at the age of fifteen she almost succumbed to its allurement. Even at this late date she could recall every detail of a seemingly casual conversation which she had held with the stalwart butcher boy who came daily to the kitchen door to deliver meat. The first day she merely had broached the subject of Sunday picnics; the second she had intrigued him into giving ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... doubt as to which of the two sorts of people—the easy and graceful, or the stiff and awkward—it is most agreeable to meet, either in business, in society, or in the casual intercourse of life. Which make the fastest friends, the truest men of their word, the most conscientious performers of their duty, ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... of the third asking, however, one in the congregation, a casual visitor and in no way personally concerned in the matter, found it of sufficient interest to make mention of it in a letter home, and so unwittingly played his little part in ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... also as the God of all men. At one time Judaism was certainly a missionary religion. But after the loss of nationality this quality was practically dormant. Belief was not necessary to salvation. 'The pious of all nations have a part in the world to come' may have been but a casual utterance of an ancient Rabbi, but it rose into a settled conviction of later Judaism. Moreover, it was dangerous for Jews to attempt any religious propaganda in the Middle Ages, and thus the pressure of fact came to the support of theory. Mendelssohn ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... is not a mere casual visitor at the palace-gate of the world, but the invited guest whose presence is needed to give the royal banquet its sole meaning, is not confined to any particular sect in India. Let me quote here some poems from a mediaeval poet of Western India—Jnandas—whose works are nearly forgotten, and ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... capricious, would have to be disgustingly full. Far be it at any rate from the present editor to bury these delightful creations under an ugly crust of parallel passages and miscellaneous erudition. The sheets, however, have been carefully read in order to prevent the casual errors which are wont to creep into frequently reprinted texts; and the editor hopes that if any such have escaped him, the escape will not be attributed to wilful negligence. A few obvious errors, in spelling of proper names, &c., which ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... former with easy hand collected, as it passed by him, whatever could add to his own stores, appropriated what he could assimilate, and levied subsidies of knowledge from all the accidents of social life and familiar intercourse. Even at the jovial board, and in the height of unrestrained merriment, a casual suggestion, that flashed a new light on his mind, changed the boon companion into the hero and the man of genius; and with the most graceful transition he would make his company as serious as himself. When the taper of his genius ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... are inseparably conjoined. When we reflect upon what human nature is, in the class from which so many of the members of The Army have been drawn, when we think how difficult it is to reconcile the hand-to-mouth existence of the casual labourer with any high standard of conduct, let alone of religion, General Booth's success, partial though it has been, is an astonishing fact. It implies a prodigious strength of character, and a genius for seeing what would appeal to large numbers ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... greatest obscurity, both in the present savage religions and in the scanty vestiges of pre-historic religion. But one point is clear. All savage religions are full of superstitions founded on luck. Savages believe that casual omens are a sign of coming events; that some trees are lucky, that some animals are lucky, that some places are lucky, that some indifferent actions—indifferent apparently and indifferent really—are ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... black billies and cloudy nose-bags are placed on the table. The men eat in a casual kind of way, as though it were only a custom of theirs, a matter of form—a habit which could be left off if ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... readers. In fact, this clever and talented assistant in some respects never had his match. He did not, as other reporters do, take down in short-hand what the speaker or reader said, but sat and heard the passing discourse like any other casual spectator: when over he would go home to his room, write out in full all that had been said on the occasion, and that entirely from memory. On a certain occasion I hinted to him my incredulity about his ability to report ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... fresh light had been thrown on the subject. Everything went on as usual within the school, and a casual observer would never have noticed the cloud which rested over that usually happy dwelling. A casual observer would have noticed little or no change in Annie Forest; her merry laugh was still heard, her light step still ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... calling almost all the frog's actions reflex or instinctive. During months of study of the reaction-time of the frog I was constantly impressed with the uniformity of action and surprised at the absence of evidences of profiting by experience. In order to supplement the casual observations on the associations of the green frog made in the course of reaction-time experiments, the tests described in this paper were made. They do not give a complete view of the associative ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... Louis XVI. that if he saw any alarming movement among the disaffected he would give him notice of it by the discharge of a cannon from Henri IV.'s battery on the Pont Neuf. On the same night a few casual discharges of musketry were heard from the terrace of the Tuileries. The King, deceived by the noise, flew to the Queen's apartments; he did not find her; he ran to the Dauphin's room, where he found the Queen holding her son in ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... sky. She looked as if she might be dreaming a maiden's dream of love. He hazarded a tentative remark. Her eyes moved, touched him indifferently, and passed back to the sky, and an unformed murmur, interrogation, acquiescence, casual response, anything he pleased to think it, escaped her lips. He watched her as he could when she was not looking at him. A loosened strand of her hair lay among the lupine roots, one of her hands rested, brown and upcurled, on a tiny weed ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... here in feverish haste they built a little cairn. Many flaky slabs of stone were lying about, and it did not take long to prop the largest of these against a rock, so as to make a lean-to, and then to put two side-pieces to complete it. The slabs were of the same colour as the rock, so that to a casual glance the hiding-place was not very visible. The two ladies were squeezed into this, and they crouched together, Sadie's arms thrown round her aunt. When they had walled them up, the men turned with lighter hearts to see what was going on. As they ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... shoemakers and Jingars [450] or saddlemakers and bookbinders have obtained a better position than the ordinary Chamars, and have now practically become separate castes; while, on the other hand, the Dohar subcaste of Narsinghpur have sunk to the very lowest stage of casual labour, grass-cutting and the like, and are looked down on by the rest of the caste. [451] The Korchamars are said to be the descendants of alliances between Chamars and Koris or weavers, and the Turkanyas probably have Turk ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... to be conducted on a very irregular plan, for it appeared that the casual afternoon caller always meant tea and sometimes dinner. This is all very well if the people happen to be agreeable and the food holds out, but even I, the least conservative of the three women, am conservative about invitations to ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... spend their money to see it a second or a third time, perhaps many times, and bring their friends to enjoy it with them. There are many more "repeaters" on occasions when attractions have real merit of one kind or another than the casual public dreams of. The show manager watches for them and spots them, and rejoices greatly when he finds them abundantly in evidence, night after night, for he knows then that he has displayed real showmanship in his selection of a cast, a ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... casual to be classified; rejoicings over the vanishing of winter and the return of spring (I, iv); praises of the Tibur streams, of Tarentum (II, vi) which he loved only less than Tibur, of the Lucretilis Groves (I, xvii) which overhung his Sabine valley, of the ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... subtly suggested if not openly dealt with, to her was a mystery over which she did not dare to ponder, terrible, yet too sacred to be degraded. Her feelings, concealed under an exterior of self-possession, deceptive to the casual observer, sometimes became molten, and she was frightened by a passion that made her tremble—a passion by no means always consciously identified with men, embodying all the fierce unexpressed and unsatisfied ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... close of the Middle Ages that lycanthropy was recognized as a disease; but it is one which has so much that is ghastly and revolting in its form, and it is so remote from all our ordinary experience, that it is not surprising that the casual observer should leave the consideration of it, as a subject isolated and perplexing, and be disposed to regard as a myth that which the feared investigation might prove ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... that a considerable increase of income (which he put down at L82,000) was required to cover the regular expenditure, but that a still greater sum was needed for casual expenses, for which in the state, as in every household, certainly a quarter of the sum reached by the regular expenditure was required. He therefore proposed that L600,000 should be at once granted him for paying off the debt, and that in future ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... day after day in his office in the Raleigh Block, trying to discover where his money had gone and how he could get some of it back. He was a widower, and found very little congenial companionship in this casual Western city. Lena's good looks and gentle manners appealed to him. He said her voice reminded him of Southern voices, and he found as many opportunities of hearing it as possible. He painted and papered her rooms for her that spring, and put ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... trenches are accurately marked, with their changes made from day to day. On the wall next to this map and at right angles to it, is a large-scale map of the entire region over which the squadron operates. On this map are numerous conventional markings which would have no meaning to the casual observer. ...
— Night Bombing with the Bedouins • Robert Henry Reece
... to you that I owe my most amiable reception at Coppet. It is no doubt to the favorable expectations aroused by your friendship that I owe my intimate acquaintance with this remarkable woman. I might have met her without your assistance—some casual acquaintance would no doubt have introduced me—but I should never have penetrated to the intimacy of this sublime and beautiful soul, and should never have known how much better she is than her reputation. She is an angel sent from heaven to reveal the divine goodness upon earth. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... adequate, even though its contents should be thoroughly mastered, to make every woman her own lawyer, in matters where she would otherwise require legal advice, but it is hoped that its statements are sufficiently plain and free from technical phraseology and legal terms, that even the casual reader may readily comprehend them, and be able to gain a general understanding of the law of ...
— Legal Status Of Women In Iowa • Jennie Lansley Wilson
... Dagaeoga, here is where the deer fell! Look at the little bushes broken and at the dark stain on the ground where its life flowed out. They dragged the body to the other side of the thicket, and cut it up there. Nothing could be plainer, the traces are so numerous. They were casual hunters, and it is not worth our while ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... above her trucks, on the wearer's treelike neck; weird serpents and smoke-breathing dragons writhed about his arms from wrist to shoulder, and a red star on the back of one gnarled hand kept watch and watch with a blue star on its opposite member. Barry chuckled audibly as, in a casual flourish, one great arm was half turned, showing the comparative white of the underarm upon which was blazoned a pair of gory hearts in collision, impaled on a harpoon apparently. Around this work of art a flamboyant motto announced to the world: "I ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... about the devices Tom had built in the forward end of the locomotive cab to understand, by any casual examination, if they were at all injured. But when he climbed down beside the track he saw at once that the forward end of the locomotive had received more than ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Locomotive - or, Two Miles a Minute on the Rails • Victor Appleton
... walked slowly up to Piccadilly, and climbed on top of a Chelsea omnibus, a dejected figure even to the casual eye. He was more than disappointed at the upshot of his wild speculations, and in himself for the false start that he had made. His feeling was one of positive shame. It was so easy now to see the glaring improbability of the conclusion to which ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... a grave, steady, reserved man, in an advanced period of life. To those with whom he had occasion to speak upon business, he appeared uncommonly well versed in all its forms. With others he held little communication; but in any casual intercourse, or conversation, displayed the powers of an active and well-informed mind. For some time before taking up his final residence at the castle, he had been an occasional visitor there, ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... glowed, pink-cheeked, star-eyed, in a frock of dull blue linen made with wide white pique collar and cuffs. Her hair waved and rippled and curled, despite its loose braiding, almost to her waist. Rosemary was simply going to the station to meet the 4:10 train, but nothing was ever casual to her; she met each hour expectantly on tip-toe and, as her mother had once observed, laughed and wept her way around the clock. Sarah smiled broadly—going to the station to meet Aunt Trudy had, for some inexplicable ...
— Rosemary • Josephine Lawrence
... condolence. Such particularly was the case when he met the funeral procession at Nain: it was that of a young man, represented in the simple and affecting language of the evangelist, as "the only son of his mother, and she was a widow." The meeting was apparently casual; but Jesus was instantly and deeply impressed with the circumstances: he in particular felt compassion for the weeping parent—addressed her in kind and gentle terms—remanded the spirit from its eternal ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... sail, and now we are at Corsica, Napoleon's home. Let us stop at Sardinia, with its wealth of tropical fruits; and we will even down to Sicily,—for this mimic ocean teems with subjects to delight the eye even of the most casual observer, with its majestic boundary of Alps and Apennines, and the velvet carpet of its romantic shores, while its broad breast is dotted with the sails of the picturesque craft whose rig is peculiar to ...
— The Duke's Prize - A Story of Art and Heart in Florence • Maturin Murray
... little the average general reader knows regarding the great Persian poet Saadi and his writings. His name is perhaps more or less familiar to casual readers from its being appended to one or two of his aphorisms which are sometimes reproduced in odd corners of popular periodicals; but who he was, when he lived, and what he wrote, are questions which would probably ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... of his jealousy even more effectually than he could have wished. He looked round and saw that everyone had thrown a casual glance of contempt upon Clyffurde and then turned away to murmur with scornful indifference: "I always mistrusted that man." Or: "The Comte ought never to have had the fellow in the house," while the words: "English spy!" and ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... stopped again, I could not help thinking what a tale of strange plotting the casual conversation suggested. New York, I knew, was full of high-class international crooks and flimflammers who had flocked there because the great field of their operations in Europe was closed. The war had literally dumped ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... childish gladness; and the flexible red lips curled in lines of orthodox Greek perfection, showing remarkable versatility of expression; while the broad, full, polished forehead with its prominent, swelling brows, could not fail to recall, to even casual observers, the calm, powerful face of Lorenzo de' Medicis, which, if once looked on, fastens itself upon heart and brain, to be forgotten no more. Her hair, black, straight, waveless as an Indian's, hung around her shoulders, and glistened as the water from the dripping ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... to hear she's a widow," said he. "She—she might strike a casual observer as somewhat young, ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... alone in the warm night air. He had been well treated by everybody, and there had been men present whose attention was a distinction in itself, and yet he felt an uneasiness which he found it difficult to trace back to any particular cause. He decided at last that he was annoyed to find that the casual mention of Holroyd's name should still have power to discompose him—that was a weakness which he ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... along the inner side of the wrist hem. This was, to the woman, the first subterfuge of decaying smartness. When a woman began to send her gloves to the laundry she was on her way down. Other evidences were not entirely lacking in the woman's dress, but they were not patent to the casual eye. Lady Muriel was still, to the observer, of the gay top current in ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... laconic and indifferent their attitude, their relationship was not solely that of officer and subordinate. The elder man, in his gruff way, was the friend of the man under him. The younger had acquired a respect that held something deeper than casual liking, and his face showed it now as he hesitated before breaking his news. Then ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... decomposition; and, excepting that the solid footsteps of the saintly guide, as they smote heavily on the floor of stone, broke the deadly silence, all was still. Stumbling and staggering along, directed only by the casual glimpses of light afforded by the moon, where it broke through the dilapidated roof of the vault, and served to discover only sights of woe, Larry followed. He soon felt that he was descending, and could not help wondering at the length of the journey. He began ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 342, November 22, 1828 • Various
... than a compendium of mush. His very description of the act of kissing is made up of sonorous gabble about heaving bosoms, red lips, electric sparks and such-like imaginings. What reason have we for believing, as he says, that the lungs are "strongly expanded" during the act? My own casual observation inclines me to hold that the opposite is true, that the lungs are actually collapsed in a pseudo-asthmatic spasm. Again, what is the ground for arguing that the lips are "full, ripe and red?" The real effect of the emotions that accompany kissing ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... and worldly experience Peter should not have fallen into it; but all men are children when they are sick, heart sick or body sick, and Peter was a very sick man at that minute. He had been addressed in such a frank and casual manner. His own brain shot off at queer tangents and led him constantly into unexpected places. The narrow side lane that opened up came into view so suddenly that Peter, with the innocence of a four-year-old, turned with military ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... with the red-headed vagrant, the following paragraph appeared in one of the local papers: "Pocklingham. In the casual ward of the Union house for this district a tramp, name unknown, died last night. He had been admitted on the previous evening, but, for some unexplained reason, it was not noticed until the next morning that he suffered from illness, ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... the sun, and the full day came, extremely hot and clear. Harry turned into a little restaurant, and spent half of his well-earned dollar for breakfast. Neither proprietor nor waiter gave him more than a casual glance. Evidently they were used to serving countrymen. Harry, feeling refreshed and strong again, paid for his food and ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler
... was observable on the eve of nearly every battle of the war. Whether it was due to the peculiar characteristics of the race, or to other causes, we shall not pause here to inquire; but the fact was plain to the most casual observation, and was never more striking than just before Fredericksburg, unless just ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... their separation. They found many opportunities, even in public, of carrying on their secret courtship. In the swimming turn of the waltz, hands clasped hands with more impassioned earnestness than the formula of the round dance required: in the casual meetings in the fashionable promenades of the beautiful summer ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... shade of linden trees, the drip of the fountain, the monumented corner where Goldsmith rests, awake even in the most casual and prosaic a fleeting touch of romance. And the wide steps with balustrades sweeping down in many turnings to the gardens, cause vagrant and hurrying steps to pause, and wander about the library and through the gardens, which lead with such charm of way to the open spaces ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... he planed his foot, so that no cracking of dry bushes should give warning of our approach. In fact, so well had the men improved under Fred's hints and observations, that they would have passed for old Indian hunters to a casual observer. ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... the army, and having been wounded in the leg while still a sous-lieutenant, had been pensioned, and had thus been interdicted from treading any further the thorny path that leads to glory. For the last fifteen years he had resided under the roof of Madame Bauche, at first as a casual visitor, going and coming, but now for many years as constant there as she ...
— La Mere Bauche from Tales of All Countries • Anthony Trollope
... future scenes of life, side by side; and, mutually supporting and supported, lengthen out the endearments, the ties, and the feelings of boyhood unto the extremities of existence. What a fine but a fond dream—alas, how wide of the cruel reality! The casual relation of a traveller may discover to us where one of them resided or resides. The page of an obituary may accidentally inform us how long one of them lingered on the bed of sickness, and by what ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... Monroe Doctrine on all these contentions and counter contentions is not at once evident to the casual observer.... Of course with changing times its meaning has changed also, for no one attempts to declare it to be as immutable as the law of the Medes and Persians. It is applied in various ways to meet varying ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... by the passage giving entrance to the hall. The eastern half was built when Nevile was master between 1593 and 1615, and the library designed by Sir Christopher Wren occupies the river frontage. To the casual observer this building is a comparatively commonplace one, built in two stories, but although it allows space for the arcaded cloister to go beneath it, the library above consists of one floor and the interior does not in the ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... in his library before a brisk wood fire with the day's papers in a heap on the floor beside him. In repose, the one dominant expression of the judge's face was pride, an austere pride, which manifested itself even in the most casual intercourse. Yet no man in Mount Hope combined fewer intimacies with a wider confidence, and his many years of public life had but augmented the universal respect in which ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... wife and child to the railway. They were going on a Christmas visit to East Chester deanery. He had been leaning back, not noticing the passers-by, not attending to the other inmates of the carriage, probably absorbed in the consideration of some law case. Such were the casual glimpses Ellinor had of one with whose life she had once ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the civil affairs were transacted by Opilius Macrinus, who, by his dexterity in business, had raised himself, with a fair character, to that high office. But his favor varied with the caprice of the emperor, and his life might depend on the slightest suspicion, or the most casual circumstance. Malice or fanaticism had suggested to an African, deeply skilled in the knowledge of futurity, a very dangerous prediction, that Macrinus and his son were destined to reign over the empire. The report was soon diffused through the province; and when ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... processes of investigation and comparison. But the largest part of science is found in its method of approaching the truth as compared with religion, philosophy, or disconnected knowledge obtained by casual observation. In many ways it is in strong contrast with speculative philosophy and with dogmatic theology, both of which lack sufficient data for scientific development. The former has a tendency to interpret what is assumed to have ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... foliage ceased to sing. The only sounds were those of the elements, and the world seemed to have returned to the primeval state that had endured for ages. It was the kingdom of fur, fin and feather, and, so far as the casual eye could have seen, man had ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... fundamental principle of one's life, around which all others properly arrange and subordinate themselves, is not, as a casual observer might think, and as he sometimes suggests, an argument against one's own growth and development, against the highest possible unfoldment of his entire personality and powers. Rather, on the other hand, is it one of the greatest reasons, one of the greatest arguments, in ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine
... who have fewest wants. As if, on the contrary, that action which he describes as the true element of man, were not directly connected with the incessant multiplication of wants. We may take this, however, as a casual lapse into the common form of moralists of ascetic ages. In substance the System of Nature is essentially a protest ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... head he classes; (1) Books of which few copies were printed; (2) Books which have been suppressed; (3) Books which have been almost entirely destroyed by casual fire, or other accident; (4) Books of which a large portion of the impression has been wasted—usually for want of success when published; (5) Volumes of which the printing was never completed; (6) Copies on large paper ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... contemplate the terrors of changing. Her second thought, "Who is to provide for the children?" She felt quite certain that that important point had never entered into their mother's calculations, and she felt distinctly annoyed with her sister for the abrupt and casual way in which she threw such a great responsibility on others' shoulders, and in her letter she ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... be—but perhaps they could give us a date. Suppose you come over to my house this evening and we'll send a letter off to their captain. And I'm sure"—Barclay threw the remark out in the most casual manner—"Mr. Upton will be glad to approach them for us ...
— The Jester of St. Timothy's • Arthur Stanwood Pier
... The memories of my forty days of happiness have in a manner colored all the rest of my life, memories that are all the fairer and fill the greater space in my thoughts because since then it has been my fate never to be understood. To this day there are scenes of no special interest for a casual observer, but full of bitter significance for a broken heart, which recall those vanished days, and the love ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... impressive personalities, active wills and all their faculties at the service of the will; but he belonged to those who like Wordsworth, like Coleridge, like Goldsmith, like Keats, have little personality, so far as the casual eye can see, little personal will, but fiery and brooding imagination. I cannot imagine him anxious to impress, or convince in any company, or saying more than was sufficient to keep the talk circling. Such men have the advantage that all they write is a part of knowledge, but they are ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... business, of which I could here give you full particulars, if it were worth while. She came from Liverpool to London over the Great Western Railway, and is now on her way to Paris. All this, of course, is obvious to the most casual observer, and so, my dear Smith, we may discuss our case with as much security as ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... straits! We go in with a flowing sail, and now we are at Corsica, Napoleon's home. Let us stop at Sardinia, with its wealth of tropical fruits; and we will even down to Sicily,—for this mimic ocean teems with subjects to delight the eye even of the most casual observer, with its majestic boundary of Alps and Apennines, and the velvet carpet of its romantic shores, while its broad breast is dotted with the sails of the picturesque craft whose rig is peculiar ...
— The Duke's Prize - A Story of Art and Heart in Florence • Maturin Murray
... the civil law of his native State, speaking French and Spanish, soon plunged in the vexatious land litigation of his generation. Mere casual occupancy gave little color of title to the commoner Mexicans. Now, the great grant owners are, one by one, cited into court to prove their holdings; many are forced ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... make their owner rich. To be rich, is to have more than is desired, and more than is wanted, to have something which may be spent without reluctance, and scattered without care, with which the sudden demands of desire may be gratified, the casual freaks of fancy indulged, or the unexpected ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... terrific aspects of nature and disdained mankind. Different indeed was the genial heart of Howell, who was at pains to hire lodgings in Paris with windows opening on the street, that he might study every passerby,[398] but who spoke of mountains in Spain in a casual way as "not so high and hideous as the Alps," or as "uncouth, huge, monstrous Excrescences of Nature, ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... to the knowledge of Anda, and seriously aroused his jealousy. Fearing conspiracy against his ambitious projects, he left his camp at Polo, and hastened to interrogate Villa Corta, who explained that he had only made casual remarks in the course of conversation. Anda, however, was restless on the subject of the succession, and sought the opinion of all the chief priests and the bishops. Various opinions existed. Some urged that the decision be left to the Supreme ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... hung about nonplussed for a few minutes, till Marie Louise came out. She had waited only to make sure that Tom and Polly got away. When she came down the steps she cast a casual glance at Jake and her sister, who came toward her eagerly. But she assumed that they were looking at some one else, for they meant nothing ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... many days at home, Beth found that her mother had made a new acquaintance, who came to the house often in a casual way like an intimate friend. He came in on the day of her arrival after dinner, and was introduced to Beth by her mother as "the doctor." Beth broke into smiles, for she recognised her long-ago acquaintance of the rocks, the doctor of her ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... unshored sea, And sudden disarrangement of the years. But now I know that nothing interferes With the fixed forces when a tired man dies; That death is only answerings and replies, The chiming of a bell which no one hears, The casual slanting of a half-spent sun, The soft recessional of noise and coil, The coveted something time nor age can spoil; I know it is a fabric finely spun Between the stars and dark; to seize and keep, Such glad romances as we read ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... tell him that I sent you—that you are my A.Z.—and he will understand. What you tell him is casual; your objective is to find out all about the standing of Shirley Wells. Shirley is surely a bankrupt, but is he a murderer? Are indictments pending? Can he be cleared of these charges? And what about the Wells National Bank? And where is Carson ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... be known that it was part of a house standing in a grimy, if not exactly sordid, London thoroughfare, was exceptionally clean and well-cared-for. A casual stranger, more particularly one of a Superior class to their own, on suddenly opening the door of that sitting-room; would have thought that Mr. and Mrs. Bunting presented a very pleasant cosy picture of comfortable married ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... poor old Bicky was always more or less on the rocks. To the casual and irreflective observer, if you know what I mean, it may sound a pretty good wheeze having a duke for an uncle, but the trouble about old Chiswick was that, though an extremely wealthy old buster, owning half London and about five counties ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... they did not clearly see the mode of its accomplishment. The General Government has seized upon none of the reserved rights of the States. AS far as any open warfare may have gone, the State authorities have amply maintained their rights. To a casual observer our system presents no appearance of discord between the different members which compose it. Even the addition of many new ones has produced no jarring. They move in their respective orbits in perfect harmony with the central head and with each other. But there is still an undercurrent ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... laugh with which Daddy read this was quite consistent with his responsive, emotional nature; so, too, were the ready tears that sprang to his eyes. He put the candle down unsteadily, with a casual glance at the sick man. It was notable, however, that this look contained less sympathy for the ailing "big brother" than his emotion might have suggested. For Daddy was carried quite away by his own mental picture of the helpless children, and eager only to relate his ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... began to cause very severe suffering—in portraying to himself the changes in Ida's mind and character from the hour of their first meeting, and it seemed to him very mysterious indeed that the thread of his life should have been caught in hers by that mere casual glance at the concert garden, and then that it should have been so strangely and intimately woven with hers only to be snapped at last in this untimely and meaningless fashion. He groaned, "its all ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... exchanging their goods for those eastern wares he had acquired. Buyers from the city and from the surrounding hills had come to him, to exchange their coin for his goods. He glanced back into the booth, satisfied with what he saw, then resumed his casual watch of the plaza. No one ...
— The Players • Everett B. Cole
... apartment, and while busying herself on pretence of setting it in order, talked in her garrulous way of the little incidents of daily life in the Chateau, and finished by a mention, as if it were casual, of the arrival of the wise woman of the city, who knew everything, who could interpret dreams, and tell, by looking in a glass or in your hand, things ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... you, Mr. Kirkwood!" at the end of the passage. But that would be no less than his deserts; he was not to forget that he was interfering unwarrantably; the girl was in her father's hands, surely safe enough there—to the casual mind. If her partnership in her parent's fortunes were distasteful, she ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... Doctor Timpany's school, where he was first placed by his aunt, Miss Honeyman, he was speedily removed to that classical institution in which Colonel Newcome had been a student in earlier days. My acquaintance with young Clive was at this school, Grey Friars, where our acquaintance was brief and casual. He had the advantage of being six years my junior, and such a difference of age between lads at a public school puts intimacy out of the question, even though we knew each other at home, as our school phrase was, and our families were somewhat acquainted. ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... enactments made at different times in the different States of Flatland, in order to minimize this peril; and in the Southern and less temperate climates where the force of gravitation is greater, and human beings more liable to casual and involuntary motions, the Laws concerning Women are naturally much more stringent. But a general view of the Code may be obtained ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... undertaker had retired. "When you go, I wish you would ascertain, particularly, what has been done with the child. If a neighbour has taken her home, make inquiry as to whether she will be retained in the family; or, better still, adopted. You can hint, in a casual way, you know, that her parents have left property, which may, some time or other, be valuable. This may be a temptation, and turn the scale in favour of adoption; which may save me a world of trouble ...
— True Riches - Or, Wealth Without Wings • T.S. Arthur
... The casual relation between the pioneer building and journey of the Griffin and these statistics cannot, of course, be established, but what no inspired human prophecy could have divined, or even the wildest dreaming of La Salle have imagined, is as sequential ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... during those three years had he shown a disposition to hark back on his old discreditable ways, and that was the result of a casual meeting with Gus one summer during the holidays, with whom, he afterwards confessed to Charlie, he was induced to forget for a time his better resolutions in the snares of a billiard-room. But the backsliding was repented of almost as soon as committed, ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... I referred to Abraham Lincoln—in a casual way—as one "inspired of God." I was taken to task for this and thrown upon my defense. Knowing less then than I know now of Mr. Lincoln, I confined myself to the superficial aspects of the case; to the career of a man who seemed to have lacked the ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... substitution of sounds from one's own language in speaking a foreign tongue, and the changes in voice-inflection, are more numerous and more marked if the man who learns the new language is uneducated and acquires it in casual intercourse from an ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... decision on some question of vital import. Sometimes, too, there are reasons, well known to all members of a Government but not yet in the knowledge of the public, which incline a Ministry to find a reason for resigning office in the result of some casual division which cannot be said to amount to a vote of want of confidence. Not many years have passed since a Liberal Government, which might have seemed to ordinary observers to be secure in its position, thought it well to accept ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... from the name of the occupation, and another rank, much higher, from the splendor of the domestic mnage. I warn the reader, therefore, (or, rather, my explanation has already warned him,) that he is not to infer, from any casual indications of luxury or elegance, a corresponding elevation ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... a parrot so strangely disguise itself and belie its ancestry? The reason is plain. It found a place for it ready made in nature. New Zealand is a remote and sparsely-stocked island, peopled by mere casual waifs and strays of life from adjacent but still very distant continents. There are no dangerous enemies there. Here, then, was a clear chance for a nightly prowler. The owl-parrot with true business instinct saw the opening thus clearly laid before it, and took to a nocturnal ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... mean—resulting in how many tricky deals and harmless tosses in the heather and the mud. But if you follow my lead there is plenty of pure joy in Old Andy, and the most and the best of it perhaps is to be found in the remarks of grooms, servant-girls and casual country folk, who as often as not have no kind of connection with the thread of the tale. "'If meself an' the Masther wasn't rowlin' rocks all the day yestherday, he would be within long ago,' replied the covert keeper." "If there is one ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 19th, 1914 • Various
... flowed a wide and sluggish river. Its unfamiliarity puzzled him. Slowly he followed it with his eyes, winding in wide sweeps among the bleak, bare hills, bleaker and barer and lower-lying than any hills he had yet encountered. Slowly, deliberately, without excitement or more than the most casual interest, he followed the course of the strange stream toward the sky-line and saw it emptying into a bright and shining sea. He was still unexcited. Most unusual, he thought, a vision or a mirage—more ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... following resolutions:—"That it appears to this house that the most notorious bribery and corruption were practised at the last election of members to serve in parliament for the borough of Penryn, and that such practices were not new or casual in the borough, the attention of the house having been called to similar practices in the years 1807 and 1819. That the said bribery and corruption deserved the most serious consideration of parliament. That leave ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... go to work for me, I don't want you to take it up as a casual experiment," went on the man of medicine. "I haven't any time for experiments. But, if you'll declare positively that you're going to make a useful man of yourself, and that you'll live up to what I expect of you, I'll take you on. I won't have an idler about my place, and I won't ...
— The High School Boys' Training Hike • H. Irving Hancock
... the coats of arms, the most casual examination makes it clear that they were painted by another hand than executed any part of the portraits. In all probability they were done after the canvases reached Spain, and the inscriptions and signatures would naturally have been added at the same time. Stuart would ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... of perpetual youth, has this time-table. Other time-tables that I buy become dissipated-looking wrecks in about a week. This book looks as fresh and new and clean as it did on the day when it first lured me into purchasing it. There is nothing about its appearance to suggest to the casual observer that it is not this month's Bradshaw. Its evident aim and object in life is to deceive people into the idea that ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... over a vast sweep of country—the Citadel of Nuremberg should seem to have bid defiance, in former times, to every assault of the most desperate and enterprising foe. It is now visited only by the casual traveler—who is frequently startled at the echo of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... She's not a woman! She's a Regimental Institution. I can't think what the men see in her to make such a fuss about! A plain, badly-made Irishwoman, who dresses abominably. And she's much too casual with all of them—especially with Theo, even if she did save his life ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... away before all was over, though he, as well as Henry, knew that to this Averil would never have consented. He had always been a great reader of travels, and he became absolutely eager in planning their life in the wild, as if where they were he must be, till the casual mention of the word 'rifle' brought him to sudden silence, and the consciousness of the condemned cell; but even then it was only to be urgent in consoling his brother, and crowding message on message for his sisters; begging Henry not to stay, not to consider him for a moment, but ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 'Autumn,' to which he gives the first place 'for its perfection,' one may remark that Keats did not entitle it an Ode, and the omission may be something more than casual. Certainly its three stanzas seem to me to exhibit very little of that progression of thought and feeling which I take to be one of the qualities of an ode as distinguished from an ordinary lyric. The line is notoriously hard to draw: but I suppose ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... not know all the circumstances, we have no ground to infer an uniformity. When neither Deduction, nor the Method of Difference, can be applied, the only way of inferring that coincidences are not casual, is by observing the frequency of their occurrence, not their absolute frequency, but whether they occur more often than chance would (that is, more often than the positive frequency of the phenomena would) account for. If, in such cases, we could ascend to the causes of the two phenomena, ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... only part of the whole interior of the building to which strangers can be admitted: those who desire to do so can attend mass there on Sundays. The casual visitor, when permitted to enter it, is not allowed to pass beyond the pillars which support the gallery of the choir above him; for if he advanced farther, the nuns who might then be occupying it, might see him ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... instant. He would have given a great deal to be able to just once shout a glad, cheerful, heart-felt "good morning" to Diggs—or to any one of the servants, for that matter—but custom and the surprising dignity of his employees compelled him to utter the greeting in a casual, bored manner, quite as if he did it automatically and always as if he was on the point of clearing his throat. He sorely missed Melissa's spontaneous, even vulgar "Morning, Mist' Bingle," and the rattle of cutlery and chinaware. Melissa had acquired ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... strand Of those, where the departed roam, she falls, Here learns her destin'd path. Soon as the place Receives her, round the plastic virtue beams, Distinct as in the living limbs before: And as the air, when saturate with showers, The casual beam refracting, decks itself With many a hue; so here the ambient air Weareth that form, which influence of the soul Imprints on it; and like the flame, that where The fire moves, thither follows, so henceforth The new form ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... to be alone with you. You are mine, are you not? Or, I should say, I am yours. Isn't it true? I spend my life in looking for opportunities to meet you. Our love is made up of chance meetings, of casual bows, of stolen looks, of slight touches—nothing more. We meet on the avenue in the morning—a bow; we meet at your house, or at that of some other acquaintance—twenty words; we dine somewhere at the same table, too far from each other to talk, ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... saw the posse skirting rapidly on his side of the river, behind him and close to the cliff. They rode at an easy lope, and he could see that their heads were bent to watch the ground. Even at this casual gait they would reach the point at which he and the gray must swing onto the floor of the valley before him unless he urged Molly to top speed. He must get there at a sufficient distance from them to escape close rifle fire, and certainly beyond point-blank revolver range. Accordingly ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... don other people's clothes! Yes, I remember how, during her stay here in the third and fourth moons of last year, she used to wear cousin Pao's pelisses. She even put on his shoes, and attached his frontlets as well round her head. At a casual glance, she looked the very image of cousin Pao; what was superfluous was that pair of earrings of hers. As she stood at the back of that chair she so thoroughly took in our venerable ancestor that she kept on shouting: ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... said that Fielding disregards probability, he certainly strains it considerably. Money is conveniently lost and found; the naivest coincidences continually occur; people turn up in the nick of time at the exact spot required, and develop the most needful (but entirely casual) relations with the characters. Sometimes an episode is so inartistically introduced as to be almost clumsy. Towards the end of the book, for instance, it has to be shown that Jones has still some power of resisting temptation, and he accordingly ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... and Babylonian kings when compared with the historical books of the Old Testament. For some centuries the inhabitants of Palestine were subject to periodical attacks from the warlike inhabitants of Mesopotamia, as even the most casual reader of the Bible is aware. When it became known that the accounts of these invasions formed a part of the records preserved in the Assyrian libraries, historian and theologian alike waited with breathless interest for ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... companions did to attend at propaganda meetings where one knew the speeches by heart beforehand. In this way, I was able, by the help of neutral interpreters, mostly English or American, to have many conversations with casual people whom I met in the streets or on village greens, and to find out how the whole system appears to the ordinary non-political man and woman. The first five days we spent in Petrograd, the next eleven in Moscow. During ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... problem, but how it was to be solved no one knew. There was, indeed, great speculation as to what might happen should another landing be attempted, but month after month passed without any indication of this, and the little population had settled down to a dull monotony. Except for a casual reference to the stirring times, the smugglers and their emissaries were apparently all but forgotten. The Preventive men were secretly as much on the alert as when the smugglers were most active. They purposely adopted an apparent indifference with the idea of luring the rovers into over-confidence. ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... for she did not fail to recognise the newcomer. She could see from a casual glance that it ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... with a stenographic report of your conversation of Thursday night with Mayor Poundstone. That will not be a long, hard row to hoe, Uncle Seth, for in addition to the stenographer, I have another very reliable witness, Judge Moore. Your casual disposal of my sedan as a bribe to the Mayor will be hard to explain and rather amusing, in view of the fact that Bryce Cardigan managed to frighten Mr. Poundstone into returning the sedan while you were ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... had finished eating, the range-rider turned in at the smoking compartment and enjoyed a cigar. He fell into casual talk with an army officer who had served in the Southwest, and it was three hours later when he returned to his own seat ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... The man's footsteps were so noisy on the echoing stones that he was unwilling to add the sound of his own. But when they had passed the turning and were in the darkness of the dark corner leading to the terrace, he made after them with such indifferent appearance of being a casual passenger on his way, as ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... a glance at the great panorama, busying himself in refolding the reeking saddle blankets and tightening girths, then lighted a casual cigarette. Terry, impatient of the necessary halt, paced the shadowed space restlessly after his first appreciation of the sun-drenched Gulf. He turned to the Macabebe with the first words they ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... right across the high road, and had to go some way round over rough ground and across a creek to avoid it. This did not excite any astonishment in the mind of the gentleman who drove us, and he seemed to think it was a casual alteration owing to the new line; but on a dark night the unexpected obstruction might prove inconvenient. When the top of the hill where the opals are to be found was reached, we all got out and set to work to pick up large and heavy stones with traces of opals in them, as well as ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... them out of sight of the lineman, and stopped at the shady avenue leading up to Nils Hansen's farmstead. Little Hans Nilsen had disappeared by the simple method of cutting across lots. Bettina's girlish instinct called for something more than the casual good-by which would have sufficed yesterday. She lingered, standing ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... among the list of accomplishments mentioned by those writers who pretend to know all about her," remarked Chilvers. "I have been forced to learn from a casual reading of society events that this remarkable heiress is without an equal as an equestrienne, that she paints, sings, drives a sixty-horse-power Mercedes with a skill and a courage which discourages the French chauffeurs, and does other athletic and artistic feats, but I have yet ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... sang and foraged among the trees; song-sparrows and chippies trilled from the fence at one side: bluebird and thrasher searched the ground, and paid in music for the privilege; pewees and kingbirds made war upon insects; and from afar came the notes of redwing and meadow-lark. Others there were, casual visitors, and of course it did not escape the squawks and ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... holding, as he did, that no good work could be adequately adjudged without a thorough knowledge of it, he was disinclined to be introduced to fresh musical names at all, on the bare chance, that might never occur, of what had been a casual acquaintanceship ripening into intimate friendship. He had in early days found time and opportunity to comprehend certain masters, Corelli, Handel, Haydn, Romberg, Mozart, and Beethoven, but Schubert, ...
— Cardinal Newman as a Musician • Edward Bellasis
... — N. friend, friend of one's bosom; alter ego; best friend, bosom friend, soulmate, fast friend; amicus [Lat.]; usque ad aras [Lat.]; fidus Achates [Lat.]; persona grata. acquaintance, neighbor, next-door neighbor, casual acquaintance, nodding acquaintance; wellwisher. favorer, fautor^, patron, Mecaenas; tutelary saint, good genius, advocate, partisan, sympathizer; ally; friend in need &c (auxiliary) 711. comrade, mate, companion, familiar, confrere, comrade, camarade^, confidante, intimate; old crony, crony; chum; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the branches more especially entitled to the public patronage a preference is obviously claimed by such as will relieve the United States from a dependence on foreign supplies, ever subject to casual failures, for articles necessary for the public defense or connected with the primary wants of individuals. It will be an additional recommendation of particular manufactures where the materials for them are extensively drawn from our agriculture, and consequently impart ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Madison • James Madison
... day was as rich in adventure as this; but this is not a bad sample. If Phil had been a prig or fresh or impertinent, she would not have been the idol of Main Street. A genius for being on the spot when events are forward must be born in one, and her casual, indifferent air contributed to a belief in Main Street that she was leagued with supernatural agencies. If there was a fire, Phil arrived ahead of the department; and if a prisoner broke out of jail, Phil knew it before the "Evening ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... pass through the little Cornish valley there is one tree on which my eye always dwells. It is of no greater size than many other trees in the valley, nor even, it may be to a casual glance, of any marked peculiarity; one might say, indeed, that in this alien environment, so far from its home on the other side of the world, it manifests a certain unfamiliar shyness, or a well-bred condescension to the ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... superb spot, and Burton was much inclined to stay right there and prospect the near-by mountains. So far as a mere casual observer could determine, this country offers every inducement to prospectors. It is possible to grow potatoes, hay, and oats, together with various small fruits, in this valley, and if gold should ever be discovered in the rushing mountain ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... with their hands, and Warwick fought with his rifle, and the native slashed again and again with the long knife that he carried at his belt. To a casual glance, a crocodile is wholly incapable of quick action. These two found him a slashing, darting, wolf-like thing, lunging with astounding speed through the muddied water, knocking them from their feet and striking at them ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... climax of the book. He meets Lucian the aged, who for a moment darkens his dawning faith, but that which has come to him has been no casual emotion, no forced or spectacular conviction. He does not leap to the recognition of Christianity at first sight, but very quietly realises and accepts it as that secret after which his pagan idealism had been all the time groping. The story closes amid ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... absolutely content to rest upon their old laurels, the fragrance of which can hardly ever be exhausted; but nevertheless that does not relieve them of the obligation of working up new problems in a new way. There is so much religious and other sentiment woven into their art that to the casual observer much of the pleasure of looking at the varied examples of applied art is spoiled by the necessity of having to read all of the longwinded stories attached to many of them. The freshness of youth, the spirit of progress, ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... fact, the law, that your power, your high commission, is inward—vital—formative, and casual. Bring all questions of choice or duty to this test, will it work at the heart of things, among the realities and forces? Try your own life by this; remember that mere external is falsehood and death. The letter killeth. Give up all that is only of the appearance—or even ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.
... essentially different in which men lend themselves to the propagation of defamatory anecdotes, the impulses are so various to an offence which is not always consciously perceived by those who are parties to it, that we cannot be too cautious of suffering our hatred of libel to involve every casual libeller, or of suffering our general respect for the person of the libeller to exonerate him from the charge of libelling. Many libels are written in this little world of ours unconsciously, and under many motives. ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... them, and at the paltry shilling a day which they received for the first really hard work they had ever done. They appeared to regard England as a miserly employer, exacting their last ounce of energy for a wretchedly inadequate wage. To the casual observer, theirs was not the ardor of loyal sons, fighting for a beloved motherland. Rather, it seemed that of irresponsible schoolboys on a long holiday. They said nothing about patriotism or the duty of Englishmen ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... of the Hydrophobic Skunk when we rode down Hermit Trail. The casual visitor to the Grand Canon first of all takes the rim drive; then he essays Bright Angel Trail, which is sufficiently scary for his purposes until he gets used to it; and after that he grows more adventurous and tackles Hermit Trail, which is a marvel of corkscrew convolutions, gimleting ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... progressing by excessively slow changes toward the solar and nebulous condition. Its history is a repetition of the solar, and a time must arrive when the surface, becoming incandescent, will be obscured only by casual dark pits in a brilliant atmosphere, a souvenir of the present darkness of the crust; yet during a certain period, within fixed limits of gravitating force and heat of mass, the human race may continue to exist; progressing, we may suppose, in force and fineness of organization. The race will perish, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... against the young laird and his associates a thousand-fold, which actually roused the party to temporary madness. They were, perhaps, a little excited by the wine and spirits they had swallowed; else a casual quarrel between two young men, at tennis, could not have driven them to such extremes. But certain it is that, from one at first arising to address the party on the atrocity of the offence, both in a moral and political point of view, on a sudden there were six ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... aristocracy seriously. It may be a mere patriotic bias, though I do not think so, but it seems to me that the English aristocracy is not only the type, but is the crown and flower of all actual aristocracies; it has all the oligarchical virtues as well as all the defects. It is casual, it is kind, it is courageous in obvious matters; but it has one great merit that overlaps even these. The great and very obvious merit of the English aristocracy is that nobody ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... groups of men who confronted much the same economic conditions. Between the farmer who tilled his sterile hillside acres in the interior of New England and the cultivator of the richer soil of the Piedmont in Virginia and the Carolinas, a greater identity of economic interests existed than the casual observer would have suspected. The feeling of hostility which circumstances bred in the followers of Daniel Shays toward the merchants of Boston was akin to that which the farmers of middle and western Pennsylvania ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... can explain away the vision as a matter of the technique of double exposure, double printing, trick-turning, or stopping down. And having reduced it to terms and shown the process, he expects us to become secular and casual again. But of course the sun itself is a mere trick of heat and light, a dynamo, an incandescent globe, to the man in the laboratory. To us it must be a fire upon ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... Secretary's Office; L200 for the Registrar of the Province; L620 for the Inspector General's Office; L620 for pensions to wounded officers; L400 for four clergymen; L50 for one minister of the Gospel; L200 for repairs to Government House; and L500 for casual and incidental expenses; an Act to establish a market in the town of Niagara; an Act to repeal, amend and extend the Act granting pensions to persons disabled in the service, and to the widows and children of persons killed in war; an Act granting L1,576 0s. 8d. for ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... Homer's time this familiar intercourse was a thing of the past—a tradition of a golden age that had passed away. Their forms were no longer seen, their voices no longer heard. In these later and more degenerate times the recognized modes of divine communication with men were by oracles, and by casual and unusual sights and sounds, as thunder and lightning, a sudden tempest, an eclipse, a flight of birds,—particularly of birds that mount to a great height, as these were supposed to know the secrets of the heavens,—the appearance or action of the sacrificial victims, or any strange ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... little bushes broken and at the dark stain on the ground where its life flowed out. They dragged the body to the other side of the thicket, and cut it up there. Nothing could be plainer, the traces are so numerous. They were casual hunters, and it is not worth our while ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... always pleased when strangers mistook him for a country gentleman, the owner of a landed property. He had a broad figure, and emphasised its breadth by wearing on his holiday loose jackets of rough tweed. He had strong, stout legs which looked well in knickerbockers and shooting stockings. A casual observer, not knowing the man, would have set him down as an ardent sportsman, and would have been perfectly right. The judge loved fishing, and was prepared to go long distances in the hope of catching salmon. He liked yachting, and owned a small cutter which was one of the crack ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... back into memory like as thou wert in the dayspring of thy fancies, with hope, like a fiery column before thee, the dark pillar not yet turned ... How have I seen the casual passer through the cloisters stand still, entranced with admiration, (while he weighed the disproportion between the 'speech' and the 'garb' of the mirandula,) to hear thee unfold, in deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Iamblichus [14] or ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... that will ensure healthy, worthy children. We must, therefore, sooner or later devise a system of scientific regulation of marriage, and it is at this point we stumble against the problem that has prompted the ebullitions of the wit and the sarcasm of the critic. A casual reference to the science immediately suggests to the layman an impossible or quixotic system of marriage by force. Even the word "eugenics" is associated in the minds of many otherwise estimable old ladies, and others who should ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... a wholesome rebellion is afoot, it has steadily and powerfully tended to straiten character, to make action mechanical, and to impoverish art. As if there were nothing admirable in a man save unbroken obedience to the letter of the moral law, and that letter read in our own casual and local interpretation; and as if we had no faculties of sympathy, no sense for the beauty of character, no feeling for broad ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... should be driven here, it was probable they went away again as soon as ever they could, seeing they had never thought fit to fix here upon any occasion; that the most I could suggest any danger from was from any casual accidental landing of straggling people from the main, who, as it was likely, if they were driven hither, were here against their wills, so they made no stay here, but went off again with all possible speed; seldom staying one night on shore, lest they ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... uncorked the whiskey bottle. He was still a trifle dubious about the transaction, but on the sound principles of doing all things thoroughly, poured out a liberal dose of raw, red liquor. Then, with his fingers clamped tightly about the bottom of the glass, the better to conceal its contents from any casual but inquisitive passer-by, he quickly filled it with soda and placed it before Blinky, accompanying the action with the sweetest of ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... finish which they lacked. It was an effect of keenness, of aliveness to the zest of the passing moment. He spoke of himself sometimes as a collector of impressions; and it was a true characterization. His slight, casual glance invariably took in more than the stare of other people; his nostrils quivered constantly, like those of a hound, as if they, too, were busy gathering impressions. It was a rather interesting face; a little vague in drawing about the chin and lips, but mobile, sensitive, vivid; distinctly ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... always been light, trifling, and tended to nothing but my casual amusement. I will not say, without a little vain ambition of showing some parts, but never with industry sufficient to make me apply to anything solid. My studies, if they could be called so, and my productions, were alike desultory. In my latter age I discovered the futility ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... much better off than in Poland. He would have been glad of such an income himself in those terrible first days of English life when he saw his wife and his two babes starving before his eyes, and was only precluded from investing a casual twopence in poison by ignorance of the English name for anything deadly. And what did he live on now? The fowl, the pint of haricot beans, and the haddocks which Chayah purchased for the Sabbath overlapped into ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... this; casual phrases of goodwill, spoken at a moment of conviviality, the outcome of genuine but perhaps not very deep feeling, except for that trifle of the kisses almost an ordinary accompaniment or conclusion of an evening's entertainment. I was a good fellow; ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... a casual examination on the part of one who had done considerable experimenting with explosives to disclose the fact that it had every characteristic of a dangerous bomb. Only the pulling out of the fuse had ...
— Tom Swift and his Big Tunnel - or, The Hidden City of the Andes • Victor Appleton
... Zwart Kop opened on Vaalkrantz as soon as the detached battery was seen to be in motion; and the other batteries came into action as they arrived from the Brakfontein demonstration. There was some annoyance from casual rifle fire and a Maxim posted on the heights S.E. of the loop, but it did not seriously interfere with the work of ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... casting a casual eye around, spied the poor mastless, derelict-looking little yacht, rolling about in the heavy tide-race that was taking her on to ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... all Hamilton supposed me to have taken was written: he himself, who read almost everything, knew nothing about it until after I did. I cannot prove what I say about my knowledge of Lambert: but the means of doing it may turn up. For, by the casual turning up of an old letter, I have {337} found the means of clearing myself as to Ploucquet. Hamilton assumed that (unconsciously) I took from Ploucquet the notion of a logical notation in which the symbol of the conclusion is seen in the joint ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... childlike resumption of hope as they gazed at this conclusive evidence of Nature's bounty. The gold had been there—THEY had only missed it! And if there, more could be found! Was it not a proof of the richness of Heavy Tree Hill? So strongly was this reflected on their faces that a casual observer, contrasting them with the thoughtful countenances of the real owners, would have thought them the lucky ones. It touched Barker's quick sympathies, it puzzled Stacy, it made Demorest more serious, it aroused Steptoe's active contempt. Whiskey Dick alone ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... certain! it was a miserable thing to have this awful forbidden ground of discourse; to guess at each other's thoughts, when eyes were averted, and cheeks blanched, and words stood still, arrested in their flow by some casual allusion. ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... lived in a time when men are slaughtered like pigs in massed formation; when their little boys are driven to war; when young girls—and widows!—are forced to bring more males into the world with the sanction of neither love nor marriage; when those too young for the trench or the casual bed wail incessantly for bread. Oh, no! The German man's day of any but legal dominion is over. Of course there is always the danger of spies and ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... after the Christmas recess Beverly made some casual allusion to this fact, and at once started a new and livelier interest. Why couldn't a party of girls be chaperoned there by one of the teachers, ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... previous to adoption, or it will involve this country in inevitable destruction. To talk of it, as a thing to be subsequently obtained, and not as one of your unalienable rights, is leaving it to the casual opinion of the Congress who shall take up the consideration of that most important right. They will not reason with you about the effect of this constitution. They will not take the opinion of this committee concerning its operation. ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... these early experiences on the formation of his opinions, Marshall himself has testified. "I am," said he on a certain occasion, "disposed to ascribe my devotion to the Union, and to a government competent to its preservation, at least as much to casual circumstances as to judgment. I had grown up at a time ... when the maxim, 'United we stand, divided we fall' was the maxim of every orthodox American; and I had imbibed these sentiments so thoroughly that they ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... the numbers of the court and cellar population, are taken from Dr. Duncan's evidence. He thinks, from extensive data in his possession, that the numbers, as given in this enumeration, are under the mark. And it is suggested that, possibly, casual lodgers have been omitted. Dr. Duncan then gives some further details which enable us more fully to understand what ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... facts, dates, names, places, accompanied with narrations, anecdotes, reflections and arguments, until the matter was thoroughly sifted and laid bare in all its parts and properties, to the understanding of the most casual observer. The tenacity and correctness of his memory was proverbial. Alas, for the man who questioned the correctness of his statements, his facts, or dates. Sure discomfiture awaited him. His mind was ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... of the Cathedral is 20,000 feet above the pavement, and a casual observer, by making a rapid mathematical calculation, would have readily perceived that this Cathedral is, at least, double the height of others that ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... impression to recall the number at the proper time. This would be the case also in spite of the most vivid presentation of the number by the one giving the order or the repetition of it by the person himself. If, however, the person says, even in a casual way, "Call up 1867," and the person addressed associates the number with the Confederation of the Dominion, there is practically no possibility of the number going out of his mind. An important mental condition for recall, therefore, is that ideas should be learned in as large associations, ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... duties, did it obtain, but the "new countries," as we called them then—the United States of America, the Cape Colony, Australia, and New Zealand—spent much of the nineteenth century in the frantic giving away of land for ever to any casual person who would take it. Was there coal, was there petroleum or gold, was there rich soil or harborage, or the site for a fine city, these obsessed and witless Governments cried out for scramblers, and ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... accidental about all Lamb's finest work. Poetry he seriously tried to write, and plays and stories; but the supreme criticism of the Specimens of English Dramatic Poets arose out of the casual habit of setting down an opinion of an extract just copied into one's note-book, and the book itself, because, he said, 'the book is such as I am glad there should be.' The beginnings of his miscellaneous prose are due to the 'ferreting' of Coleridge. 'He ferrets ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... dressing-room was an apartment which, on a casual survey, conveyed an impression that it was available for almost any purpose save the adornment of the feminine person. In its hours of perfect order nothing pertaining to the toilet was visible; even the inevitable mirrors with their ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... flying machines, a sporting type and an exploration type, will be gradually evolved within one or two generations, but the evolution will be costly and slow, and must be carried on by well-equipped and thoroughly informed scientific men; for the casual inventor, who relies upon one or two happy inspirations, will have ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... forgotten that the hall was public, and that the attention of many was being turned toward them. The girl was pretty, extremely so, with an entirely different style of beauty from Gracie Dennis; and a certain indescribable something in her face and manner would have told even the most casual observer that she moved in a different circle. It was not her dress, unless that was a little too pronounced for the place and hour; but quite young ladies in good society sometimes make ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... came trotting up the shoulder of a near incline, almost directly toward them. The dog watched them with a casual eye. They went by, sixty feet away. Nels was looking further on to where a big brown bear ambled along, making good time for one of her build—behind her, a yearling. Still Nels showed no inclination to leave ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... oaks, butternut, black walnut, all the hickories and even the chestnuts. When you take into consideration the fact, that no other hickory has such a fine record it makes me very enthusiastic over this variety in spite of the fact that it bears my name. Were you to classify this hickory from casual observation, you would think it is a pure shagbark, and it is only the extreme thinness of shell and the outside appearance pf the nut shell ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... dart into the guest room, stood in his tracks watching for her to emerge. She gave him one searching curious look as she sped past, and he realized in a flash that his glance should have been elsewhere, or at least more casual. ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... the family that would have met the casual eye of a stranger: a young professor in extremely comfortable circumstances, with a brilliant future and an enviable son, living in a fine old house administered by a younger sister, the favourite daughter of the town. Beneath the surface, however, and ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... thought of Him who fed Five thousand hungry men, With five small casual loaves of bread,— Would he were here again!— Dear God! hast Thou still miracles For ...
— Bees in Amber - A Little Book Of Thoughtful Verse • John Oxenham
... answer the question, and I have not the pluck—being a law-abiding citizen—to try for myself. But I do so want to know. I ask everyone. I ask my partners at dinner (when any dinner comes my way). I ask casual acquaintances. I would ask the officials themselves, only they are so preoccupied. But the words certainly set up a very engrossing problem, and upon this problem many minor problems depend, clustering round it like chickens ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 28, 1917 • Various
... variation or by the omission of a portion of the old design, to make a corresponding change in the name. Good illustrations of this custom are the minor alterations which have been made in the tree trunk of the "tree" pattern. These may be so slight as to be entirely unobserved by the casual admirer, yet they are responsible for at least three new names: "Pine Tree," "Temperance Tree," and "Tree of Paradise." A minor change in the ordinary "Nine Patch," with a new name as a result, is another striking example of how very slight an alteration may be in order ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... one day In a casual way "Although it is scarcely vital And I may be wrong, it appears to me That a frog with a voice like mine should be First class in a ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
... you," said Swan, in casual, disinterested tone. "I ain't got no gun on me, but I'm a better man without no gun than you are with one. I'm goin' to take my fifteen hundred sheep home with me, and you ain't ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... of the situations of this Government; that the line is perfectly easy to be defined to every man's understanding, though not reduced to a written rule, and the limits easily seen, where the King's recommendations cease to be the casual exertions of private favour, and begin to be systematic interferences with the power entrusted to his servants. Ask yourself which is ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... them unusual, every one of them a different story, and yet not difficult to read. These lessons gave meaning to trees and seasons. Such observations have always meant much to me, even when made in the most casual way in the midst of constraining activities. And now in this later day I come back to a bare twig with all the joy of youth. The records of the years are ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... your 'empties' for you," he said, shaking Judith's hand with a warmth that his casual greeting did not warrant. Judith surrendered the basket, but held on to ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... stream, cast a casual eye on the double track, and nodded. He was still in a fog of mystery, but the old man ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... got to this place in the road, he paused, and stooped over, as if tying the lace of his shoe, for it was his intention to pass himself off, if possible, as a casual passer-by, so that in case the mysterious man should be in the house, his suspicions would not be aroused by seeing the youth to whom he had written the note staring in ...
— Lost on the Moon - or In Quest Of The Field of Diamonds • Roy Rockwood
... Campbell and his clerk were quite ready to swear that they had had an interview concerning some diamond earrings with a lady, of whose identity with the accused they were perfectly convinced, and to the casual observer the question as to the time or even the day when that interview took place could make but little difference in the ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... while Jabez—well, Jabez was buoyant as a balloon, an' sent here an' there for nick-hacks an' jim-cracks an' such like luxuries. He got to callin' Hawthorn "Clarence" an' "my boy," an' kindry epithets, till even a casual stranger would 'a' knowed the' was a roarin' in the ol' man's head like a ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... about these seances which I think cannot fail to impress even the most casual observer, and this is the attractive charms which the Cabinet seems to possess for the aboriginal Indian. This child of nature appears to materialize with remarkable facility, and, having apparently doffed his characteristic phlegm in the happy hunting grounds, ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... second stage of the Argonne operation a captured German major, while in casual conversation with an American officer said: "We know defeat is inevitable. We know your First and Second armies are operating and that your Third army is nearly ready to function. We know there are more and more armies to follow. We can measure ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... caressing sympathy with which he was assured that his broken trunk could not be mended till the day after to-morrow; he had quite forgotten about the festas and the sympathy. That night the piazza on which he lodged seemed full of snow to the casual glance he gave it; then he saw that it was the white Italian moonlight, which he had ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... in a careless, casual way, watching her out of the corner of his eye. And she, taken off guard, betrayed in her features the secret that was a secret even from herself. He sprang up with a bound, sprang at her, caught her up out of her chair, the fingers of ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... night upon the hillside, the boy's passionate words, his almost wild desire to realize, to turn into actual life, the fantasies which were then only the creation of his fancy. How far had he realized them, he wondered? What did this alteration in his exterior denote? From a few casual and half-forgotten inquiries, Rochester knew that he was the son, or rather the orphan of working-people in the neighboring town. There was nothing in his blood to make him in any way the social equal of these men and women amongst whom he now sat with such ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... once only, during those three years had he shown a disposition to hark back on his old discreditable ways, and that was the result of a casual meeting with Gus one summer during the holidays, with whom, he afterwards confessed to Charlie, he was induced to forget for a time his better resolutions in the snares of a billiard-room. But the backsliding was repented of almost as soon ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... timber-merchant's business that day. To show their sense of the unimportance of the occasion, they walked quite slowly to the house, as if they were merely out for a ramble, and going to nothing special at all; or at most intending to pay a casual call and take a cup ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... knew what she was saying," I said to myself. "Her words were not casual," but not daring to ask her if she intended to make me her happiness, I spoke about the landscape. "You ask me why I like the landscape? Because it carries me back into past times when men believed in nymphs and in satyrs. I have always thought ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... appetites were spoiled by the parting which was about to take place, for we were not to see his Excellency any more, and to part from the prime minister of Nepaul is not like parting from any other man. Even were he only a casual acquaintance, it would cause a different feeling from that of bidding adieu to one who was to lead a peaceable life, and in all probability die in his bed; but when the chances are strongly against either of these suppositions, and when the friend whom ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... on the carpet; where, after he had admitted his visitor, his presence of mind coming back to it and suggesting that he couldn't pick it up without making it more conspicuous, he had thought, by some swing of the foot or other casual manoeuvre, ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... pro-slavery cause, that spies are often sent on board newly-arrived boats, to ascertain if missionaries are amongst the passengers. These spies, with Jesuitical art, introduce themselves by making apparently casual inquiries on leading topics of those they suspect, and if their end is subserved, basely betray them, or, what is more usual, keep them under strict surveillance, with a view to their being detected in disseminating abolition doctrines ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... to prepare him in some degree for the pleasures stored in eternity. Of St. Finian Labra we know little beyond that he was a native of Ely O'Carroll, then a part of Munster, and was a disciple of St. Brendan. But his spirit loiters around Innisfallen, and the most casual of travellers will tread lightly on the ground hallowed by his footsteps. The monastic remains are many, but by the enthusiastic antiquary alone can their fragments and chief features be traced. "The Annals of Innisfallen," which form one of the chief sources ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... don't, Mr. Hamilton. Nevertheless, you will sign that letter and your secretary will mail it—that is, after it has lain open upon your desk for casual inspection for a considerable length of time. One of my operatives will receive ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... nothing. She was thinking of her last interview with Eleanor, whom she had not seen for more than a casual moment since the day of Will's dinner, and wondering whether after all Ethel Hale was right about her, and she was wrong. It did seem amazingly as if Eleanor was giving up her old friends ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... her emotions, as though she had become a mere machine for doing right, like a clock that strikes punctually. Nevertheless, it caused her some surprise when he raised himself and said, in a voice that would have been casual on a ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... "secure what came," may be questioned; for unluckily it happens to be known, that his daughters were never taught to write; nor would he have been obliged, as is universally confessed, to have employed any casual visitor in disburdening his memory, if his daughter could have performed ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... dig his spade haphazard into the earth and by that act liberate a small stream which shall become a mighty river. Not less casual perhaps, certainly not less momentous in its consequences, was the first attempt, by some enterprising ecclesiastic, to enliven the hardly understood Latin service of the Church. Who the innovator was is ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... evident, to the most casual observer, that the quarrel which the Black Swan incident had occasioned between Thurston and his brother prefects had not yet been dismissed from the minds of either party. The former became more lax than ever in the discharge of his ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery
... along the margin of the stream and disappears in its black shadows. The wind blows gently from the west: it is just strong enough to show the silver sides of the willow leaves. The sound of the weir, although so soft, is able to exclude the clacking of the mill and all intermittent, casual noises. For two hours it has filled my ears and brought a deeper repose than that of mere silence. It is not uniform, for the voices of innumerable descending threads of water with varying impulses ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... At a casual glance in that uncertain light, any one over there, with his eyes dazzled by looking into the flickering firelight, might be deceived into believing that the prisoner still lay where ...
— The Boy Scouts' First Camp Fire - or, Scouting with the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... character and expression of the countenance are unquestionably fine, and the forehead especially is a striking and majestic feature. Much of the talent of the man may be inferred from his exterior; the moral qualities, however, may not equally be determined in this way; and to the casual observation of the stranger I can conceive from my own experience, that nothing may appear but what is open, placid, and alluring. Opportunities were afterwards afforded me of looking beneath this exterior of expression; it is the fire of a stove burning fiercely under ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... caught, above the half-curtains, of heads of passersby gave her idle imagination something to play with, but mostly because it was difficult otherwise to seem unconscious of the stares that converged toward her from every table occupied by a masculine patron, whether regular or casual—unless the patron happened to be accompanied by a lady, in which unhappy event he had to content himself with furtive, sidelong glances, not always furtive ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... best of bronze, a work of such strategical foresight, of such nicety of proportion, and of such enduring strength, that now after the lapse of probably twenty-five centuries its bold proportions can be traced by the most casual glance of the passer-by of the road that runs past, now that the sheep clamber and feed in its deep fosses, and daisies sprinkle ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... wiry-dispositioned red dogs, which accompanied their owners to work, being stowed away in pockets of overcoats until the dinner hour, when they were brought out to share their masters' meals, perchance chasing a casual rat in between times. Old men of to-day who remember these little "red tarriers" tell us that they were the originals of the present-day Brussels Griffons, and to the sporting propensities of the aforesaid miners is attributed the gameness which is such a characteristic ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... began to be haunted, not by a ghost, which would have been bearable as ghosts appear usually only in the nighttime, but by a queer little old woman in a red cloak, who supported herself with a crutch and looked like a wicked fairy. This, as the bishop ascertained by a casual question, was Mother Jael, the gipsy friend of Jentham, and the knowledge of her identity did not make him the easier in his mind. He could not conceive what she meant by her constant attendance on him; and but that he believed in the wisdom of letting sleeping dogs lie, he would ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... work of Mrs. Parker. The author herself has remarked that, beginning as a disciple of Mr. Herbert Spencer in regard to the religious ideas of the Australians—according to that writer, mere dread of casual 'spirits'—she was obliged to alter her attitude, in consequence of all that she learned at first hand. She also explains that her tribe are not 'wild blacks,' though, in the absence of missionary influences, they retain their ancient beliefs, at least the old people do; and, in a decadent ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... period contain items which, taken singly, make small impression on the casual reader but which, listed together, throw a strong light on the past and bring that mercenary figure, the trader, into so bold a relief that the design verges on the heroic. If we wonder, for instance, why the Scotch Highlanders who settled in the ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... hoof mark, perhaps a day old or more, in the soft bottom of a tiny billabong; a print I could hardly make out, leave alone identify as having been made by this beast or the other, even under the guidance of Ted's pointing finger. Yet for Ted that casual glance—no stooping, no close scrutiny—supplied an accurate and complete picture: the particular beast, its gait, occupation, and way of heading, and the period at which it had passed that way. Withal, it was true enough, ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... up from his chair. "Get your men out on the streets. Get 'em into bars, where they can pick up reactions to this. I want as good a statistical sampling as you can get in so short a time. It'll have to be casual; I don't want your men asking questions as though they were regular pollsters; just find out what ...
— Hail to the Chief • Gordon Randall Garrett
... a very good thing, too—when employed with intention," retorted her friend. "Did he just chance, now, in a casual way, to mention the other ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... in his father's casual drawl, "that I have anything to say to the specific charges against me. The Director has covered the ground better than I can. I have the feeling that if the actual work we have done out west, the actual acreage we have brought to profitable bearing won't speak to you people ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... actress would to a first night appearance. Remembering Lillian's advice to make the transition gradual from the frigid courtesy of my former meetings with Grace Draper to the friendly warmth we had planned for our campaign, I adopted the manner one would use to a casual but interesting acquaintance. ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... long interval, during which "Old John" ignored my existence almost as completely as before, he stopped me again as we met in a casual way, and describing the service on which the Rattlesnake was likely to be employed, said that Captain Owen Stanley, who was to command the ship, had asked him to recommend an assistant surgeon who ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... yellow in the blaze of the sun, the sandy dust was inches deep in the great road, cut by thousands of wheels. Flotsam and jetsam, wreckage, showed more and more. Skeletons of cattle, bodies not yet skeletons, aroused no more than a casual look. Furniture lay cast aside, even broken wagons, their wheels fallen apart, showing intimate disaster. The actual hardships of the great trek thrust themselves into evidence on every hand, at every hour. Often was passed a little cross, half buried ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... volume will be so very apparent to even the most casual observer, as to render an extended explanation here unnecessary. The author will therefore only say, that he has endeavored faithfully to perform what he was convinced was a much-needed service, not so much, perhaps, to the cause of music itself, as to some of its noblest devotees ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... going?" asked Agony, a little awed by Mary's casual tone as she spoke of the great journey. Evidently Mary had traveled much, for the prospect of going around the world did not seem to excite her in ...
— The Campfire Girls at Camp Keewaydin • Hildegard G. Frey
... (the Comet's) my attention was drawn to a number of casuarinas—those leafless, dark trees, which always make a sad impression on the traveller; even a casual observer will notice the dull, depressing sigh which comes from a grove of these trees when there is the ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... was neither deep nor broad, but perhaps the reverse, though singularly high. Indeed, it is quite uncommon to see a scull so round and tower-like in the formation, though I have met with them in individuals not at all distinguished for talents. I do not think a casual observer would find anything unusual in the exterior of Sir Walter Scott, beyond his physical force, which is great, without being at all extraordinary. His eye, however, is certainly remarkable. Grey, small, and without lustre, in his ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... point of calling the boy "Diavolo" in a casual way, as if he had forgotten the dispute, as early as possible after this, and found that Lady Adeline was right. Diavolo showed not the slightest sign of having heard, but he got out his books at once, and did his lessons ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... compared with the earlier singers, who expressed such naive dependence upon the Muse? We have been using the name Muse in this essay merely as a figure of speech, and is this not the poet's usage when he addresses her? The casual reader is inclined to say, yes, that a belief in the Muse is indeed dead. It would be absurd on the face of it, he might say, to expect a belief in this pagan figure to persist after all the rest of the Greek theogony has become a mere literary device to us. This may not be a reliable ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... books in which precious and interesting passages have been erased with printer's ink, or pasted over with slips of opaque paper, testifies to the frequency of these inquisitorial visitations.[132] Any casual acquaintance, on leaving a man's house, might denounce him as the possessor of a proscribed volume; and everybody who owned a book-case was bound to furnish the Inquisitors with a copy of his catalogue. Book-stalls lay open to the malevolence of informers. We possess an insolent letter ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... the slugs, no doubt, are more enthusiastic still. Therefore I do not recommend that idea, unless it be supplemented by some effective method of combating a grave disadvantage. My own may not commend itself to every one. Each spring I entrust some casual little boy with a pail; he brings it back full of frog-spawn and receives sixpence. I speculate sometimes with complacency how many thousand of healthy and industrious batrachians I have reared and turned out for the benefit of my neighbours. Enough perhaps, but certainly no more, remain ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... We don't all see the same things in the same way. Your mother's face looks very different to you from its look to a mere person passing in the street. Your own room has a totally different aspect to you from what it bears to a casual visitor. The things you specially love have a way of standing out and seeming prominent to you, but not, of course, to any one else. Then there are other differences in the look of the same things to different people which you ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... called them. He said that two of them could whip a dog, and that four of them could hold a man down; and except help come, they would kill him—'butcher him,' as he expressed it. Referred in a sort of casual way—and yet significant way—to 'the fact that the life policy in its simplest form is unknown in Lake Providence—they take out a mosquito policy besides.' He told many remarkable things about those lawless insects. Among others, said he had seen them ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... we misconstrue, and defeat The end of any good; When what should be our casual treat, We make ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... will make a good lawyer?" asked Mattie Tiffany. She turned full around at this, and the glance she threw into her husband's face showed more than a casual matchmaker's interest. ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... the remark in question was just one of those hasty, unconsidered, sweeping little judgments that one does pass in conversation about the action of a friend. One cannot—at least I cannot—so order my conversation that if a casual criticism is repeated without qualification to the person who is the subject of it, he may not be pained by it. The repetition of it in all its nakedness makes it seem deliberate, when it is not deliberate ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... who opened the door. Because the night was hot he had shed coat and shirt, and his fine torso, bare to the shoulders and at the neck, gleamed in the electric light. Willy Cameron had not seen him since those spring days when he had made his casual, bold-eyed visits to Edith at the pharmacy, and he had a swift insight into the power this man must have over women. He himself was tall; but Akers was taller, fully muscled, his head strongly set on ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Bruges and Ghent an embankment thrown up on each side of the road tells of possible patrols and casual shooting. It is the first visible intimation that ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... inquire," he said, "if you have any information direct or casual concerning a family named Cumberland which possesses ranch property in ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... you before that I will have nothing but 'Madelinette,' dear Cure," she replied, with a smile, and gave him her hand. She turned to Louis, who had risen also, and putting a hand on his arm pressed him gently into his chair, then, with a swift, almost casual, caress of his hair, placed on the table the basket of flowers she was carrying, and began ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... stone That rambles in the road alone, And doesn't care about careers, And exigencies never fears; Whose coat of elemental brown A passing universe put on; And independent as the sun, Associates or glows alone, Fulfilling absolute decree In casual simplicity. ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... either beginning or end, corresponding to Aristotle's very accurate definition of these notions? Completeness would therefore be altogether impossible. If, however, for the unity of a plurality of events nothing more is requisite than casual connexion, then this rule is indefinite in the extreme, and the unity admits of being narrowed or enlarged at pleasure. For every series of incidents or actions, which are occasioned by each other, however much ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... knowledge or experience, could not be as prudent and far-seeing as a man all his life acquainted with business. Mr. Murray had been a loser in the mines himself, but to a comparatively slight extent, and as he was an exceedingly rich man, he only regarded the matter as one of the casual losses incurred in business. But his old friend's losses troubled him deeply, and he resolved to do everything in his power to repair the effects of his well-meant, ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... to the meadow mushroom. It has this advantage over the former that the gills retain their white color and do not pass from a pink to a repulsive black. The halftone and the description ought to make the plant known to the most casual reader. ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... the next evening at eight o'clock, and it was not until six that the cook remarked, in the most casual manner, that his sister was coming down to see him off. She arrived half an hour late, and, so far from wanting to see the cabin again, discovered an inconvenient love of fresh air. She came down at last, at the instance ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... each state, the union of the several tribes was extremely loose and precarious. The barbarians were easily provoked; they knew not how to forgive an injury, much less an insult; their resentments were bloody and implacable. The casual disputes that so frequently happened in their tumultuous parties of hunting or drinking, were sufficient to inflame the minds of whole nations; the private feuds of any considerable chieftains diffused itself among their followers and allies. To chastise the insolent, or to plunder ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... fine day, Pastor John B. Jones, of the M.E. Church, drove up. He was invited in, most cordially. After some casual remarks, Pastor Jones introduced ...
— Around Old Bethany • Robert Lee Berry
... of an enormous population for there were endless rows, or rather groups of houses, crowded together, face to face, back to back, and side by side, giving the idea of a casual conglomeration of several villages. All these were scrupulously clean and neat, and fenced round with little bamboo rails. Nearly every house had a tiled roof, and all were of a superior class to the majority of those up country in the Peninsula. ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser
... in their discourses concerning the new "Dona Sol," but the casual reporters were, as always, indiscreet, and disguised the truth under little prevarications, fantastic and suggestive. After having read two or three of the articles, Esperance pushed them all aside. She took the name of all the critics, and wrote them little notes of thanks, while ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... as if on the wings of the wind. Before Farrar had a stage arranged to suit him and his camera ready, a dozen members of the company drifted in with a casual manner of having arrived accidentally. Fleming Lennox, leading man, appeared with Cliff Manderson, chief comedian for the Lunar border company. Baldy Cummings, the property man, strolled leisurely in to look over some costumes. ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... the Yankee said to Rachel? And since he had stopped her in the lane, what had Rachel been saying to the Yankee? Had she yet explained that the face he had seen at the window—supposing always that he had told her what he had seen—and why shouldn't he?—was not the face of a casual tramp or lunatic, but the face of a discarded husband, to whom all the various hauntings and apparitions at the farm ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... see, he hoped to get back to France before the worthlessness of his notes was discovered.) When he'd proved his qualifications, he got his job like a shot. They were only too glad of his services. Pretending to have been in American training-camps, it was easy to bring up my name in a casual way. Laughing that rather sinister laugh of his, which you will remember, Herter told a couple of flying chaps he had promised a girl to find Jim Beckett's grave. One of the fellows laughed too, and made a remark which set Herter thinking. Later, he was able to refer to the subject again, ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... to "self-deception," but this explanation is often mythical. Most people, in thinking about punishment, have had no more need to hide their vindictive impulses from themselves than they have had to hide the exponential theorem. Our impulses are not patent to a casual observation, but are only to be discovered by a scientific study of our actions, in the course of which we must regard ourselves as objectively as we should the motions of the planets or the chemical reactions ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... seems at length to have made its way to the minds of all that the disproportion between the public responsibilities and the means provided for meeting them is no casual nor transient evil. It is, on the contrary, one which for some years to come, notwithstanding a resort to all reasonable retrenchments and the constant progress of the country in population and productive power, must continue to increase under existing laws, unless we consent to give up or impair ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... handkerchief on the table and left. Ricky reached for the "clue." "Awfully casual about it, isn't he?" she said. "Just the same, I believe that this is a clue and I know what our visitor was after, too," she ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... inclination to masturbate, all kinds of local measures have been recommended to prevent manipulation and artificial stimulation of the penis or the vulva. But speaking generally, no great reliance can be placed in any of these local measures. Moreover, casual local stimulation, especially towards the end of the second period of childhood, has no very profound etiological significance. The chief stimuli giving rise to reflex excitement of the genital organs are of an organic nature, and are therefore but little influenced ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... historical repute are confined to the above account. There is, however, one unexplained feature, which reveals itself to even a casual reader. In their early opposition to Yamato aggression, the Yemishi—or Ainu, or Yezo, by whatever name they be called—displayed no fighting qualities that could be called formidable. Yet now, in the eighth century, they suddenly show themselves men of such prowess that the task of subduing them ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... shelves were full. The old standards were scope enough for his ambition. He ranged in them absolute, and 'fair in Otway, full in Shakspeare shone.' He succeeded to the old lawful thrones, and did not care to adventure bottomry with a Sir Edward Mortimer, or any casual speculator ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... Madame, for all her dignified title, being but a year the elder, and she scant of twenty. Charlotte, somewhat slighter and more delicately colored, was even of greater beauty than her sister, with much promise for the years to come. To the casual observer, though, especially when viewed apart, they seemed almost reflections one of the other. There was something of a loving guardianship in the attitude of the elder, of confiding trust in that of the younger, as ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... At first she solaced herself by allusions that Charles did not understand, then by casual observations that he let pass for fear of a storm, finally by open apostrophes to which he knew not what to answer. "Why did he go back to the Bertaux now that Monsieur Rouault was cured and that these folks hadn't paid yet? Ah! it ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... relations between purchaser and consumer an informal system of advertisement in turn rose to meet the need of publicity. At first the offer of the producer must have been brought to the trader's attention, and the trader's offer to the notice of the consumer, by casual personal contact, supplemented by local rumour. The gradual growth of markets and their development into periodical fairs, to which merchants from distant places resorted, afforded, until printing was invented, the only means of extended advertisement. In England, during the 3rd century, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... they were, and that he might enjoy it the more thoroughly without the restraint placed upon other men, was the sole reason that he had not altogether abandoned his profession. He never took any fee, nor did he ever accept any casual patient. But on certain days of the week, at certain hours, he was at home as a physician to certain of his lady acquaintances to whom he had already offered his services. The number was always few, for the invitations were ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... exposition, 'of' here is probably casual, not partitive, as the Authorised Version has it; 'travail' is not to be understood in the sense of childbirth, but of toil and suffering; 'soul' is equivalent to life. This fruit of His soul's travail is further ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... first day's journey, wrote Mr. Duffy in the Contemporary Review, the casual mention of Edmund Burke induced me to ask Carlyle who was the best talker he had met among notable ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... Judging from this casual intercourse, he represents a type very common among colonial volunteers, but not encouraged by our own military system—I mean that of the independent, intelligent, resourceful unit. If there are many like him in his corps, it accounts amply ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... instructions from Margaret—after she had been carefully taught the ways of the school by Bud himself—rang the big bell. Even then they entered reluctantly and as if it were a great condescension that they came at all, Jed and "Delicate" coming in last, with scarcely a casual glance toward the teacher's desk, as if she were a mere fraction in the scheme of the school. She did not need to be told which was Timothy and which was Jed. Bud's description had been perfect. Her heart, ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... shrewd enough to drop in before five. No one else came until after that hour had struck. He was studiously reserved and considerate. There was nothing in his manner to indicate that he was there as anything more than the most casual sipper of the beverage that society brews. It was left for her ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... Desdemona to return it, but, approaching the back-door of Desdemona's house, sees Othello and flies from him. Othello perceives the escaping Cassio, and this, more than anything, confirms his suspicions. Shakespeare has not got this, and yet this casual incident explains Othello's jealousy more than anything else. With Shakespeare, this jealousy is founded entirely on Iago's persistent, successful machinations and treacherous words, which Othello blindly believes. Othello's ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... money, too, certainly rich in comparison with the poor immigrants they employ,—what is thought in thy clear light of those who expect in exchange for a few shillings spent in presents or medicines, a few kind words, a little casual thought or care, such a mighty payment of gratitude? Gratitude! Under the weight of old feudalism their minds were padlocked by habit against the light; they might be grateful then, for they thought their lords were as gods, of another frame and spirit than theirs, and that they had no right ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... that rose to her lips, and stooped to brush something off the skirt of her dress. Her face was red when she raised it. She needed no further telling; she understood what his words implied as clearly as though it were printed black on white before her. But she spoke in a casual tone. ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... during that short drive, most unaccountably silent. Several times I made casual remarks. Once or twice I tried to learn from him what sort of a place this was to which we were bound. He answered me only in monosyllables. I was conscious all the time of a certain subtle but unmistakable change in his manner. Up to the moment of his suggesting ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in front of his soul. She accepted the movement as a signal of dismissal. She rose from her chair and quietly lowered and adjusted her veil. Yet through that lowered veil she stood looking down at Never-Fail Blake for a moment or two. She looked at him with grave yet casual curiosity, as tourists look at a ruin that has been pointed out ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... fate, (and that either an absolute necessity, and unavoidable decree; or a placable and flexible Providence) or all is a mere casual confusion, void of all order and government. If an absolute and unavoidable necessity, why doest thou resist? If a placable and exorable Providence, make thyself worthy of the divine help and assistance. If all be a mere confusion without any moderator, or governor, ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... woman, she lost her haunted look and gained some colour in her cheeks. She lost her mortal chill. Her clothing, the putting up of her hair made some difference, but loving entreaty all the difference in the world. To a casual glance there was nothing but refinement to distinguish her from her neighbours, to a closer one there was more than that. Her eyes, they said, had the far, intent, rapt gaze of a wild animal. They ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... Gilbert had not been pleasantly impressed with Hardy. But he soon saw that the man had a certain rugged strength, and there was no doubt he had suffered from the depredations of Mexico's casual visitors, and was ready to protect not only his own interests but those of any newcomers. He seemed to have the spirit of fair-mindedness; and he believed firmly in the possibilities of this magic land, particularly ...
— The Bad Man • Charles Hanson Towne
... or the casual dealer in pious phrases and occasional prayers, these revelations do not come. It is when the heart is set upon finding ...
— Standards of Life and Service • T. H. Howard
... resources, there are many casual references to conservation of specific minerals. Here we shall not go further than to introduce a brief discussion of the conservation of coal as illustrative of the general problem of conservation of ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... for good or evil fortune. The finest form of Discovery is one attended by Peripeties, like that which goes with the Discovery in Oedipus. There are no doubt other forms of it; what we have said may happen in a way in reference to inanimate things, even things of a very casual kind; and it is also possible to discover whether some one has done or not done something. But the form most directly connected with the Plot and the action of the piece is the first-mentioned. This, with a Peripety, will arouse either pity or fear—actions of that nature being what Tragedy ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... grateful to Providence for not having made his father, like the fathers of Vaughan and Dallas, a casual ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... convention in America, when the home brother and the navy could be jointly represented and a permanent organization could be effected. I say that these things were evident by midnight of March 15th for those who have attended many conventions know that from the casual word heard here and there, the whispered conference of a few leaders, and from the general tenor of discussions carried on by delegates gathered together in little groups, the spirit of the body politic ...
— The Story of The American Legion • George Seay Wheat
... not know. He will tell you when you see him, I suppose. I am only a casual acquaintance of his, and came on this errand to oblige him, solely because he seemed in great mental distress and was ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... one of the meetings of the International Congress of Fisheries," said the director, smiling. "We were waiting for the chairman or the speaker or somebody and in casual conversation the query arose as to who was the real master of the seas, in the same way that the lion is regarded as the King ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... not one rather have expected to hear him put all these travellers to shame by the authority of a man who had resided so long in the supreme situation of government,—to set aside all these wild, loose, casual, and silly observations of travellers and theorists? On the contrary, as if he was ignorant of everything, as if he knew nothing of India, as if he had dropped from the clouds, he cites the observations of every stranger who ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... hysteric laugh with which Daddy read this was quite consistent with his responsive, emotional nature; so, too, were the ready tears that sprang to his eyes. He put the candle down unsteadily, with a casual glance at the sick man. It was notable, however, that this look contained less sympathy for the ailing "big brother" than his emotion might have suggested. For Daddy was carried quite away by his own mental picture ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... same height) close up against the door, which it was just possible to shut. As, however, the door opened outwards, it was necessary for the gentleman occupying the foot of the table to sit out in the passage, much to the inconvenience of the casual passers-by. ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... for looking over some sheep, Nic walked about a mile out of his way going back, and had just finished his casual inspection when he came upon Brookes, gun on shoulder, who immediately stood his piece against a bush and began to examine some of the flock, throwing so much energy into the task that Nic felt suspicious, and a chill ran through him as he thought it possible that the man ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... Spanish governor of Louisiana reduced West Florida, which was thinly inhabited and almost undefended. The enemies of England hoped to break her power by destroying her commerce, but it was too large and various to be ruined by casual losses, and too carefully protected to incur a series of them. While the trade of France with the West Indies was almost ruined, the English Jamaica fleet reached home in safety a few days after the enemy left the Channel. Privateers and king's ships did so much damage ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... better off than in Poland. He would have been glad of such an income himself in those terrible first days of English life when he saw his wife and his two babes starving before his eyes, and was only precluded from investing a casual twopence in poison by ignorance of the English name for anything deadly. And what did he live on now? The fowl, the pint of haricot beans, and the haddocks which Chayah purchased for the Sabbath overlapped into the middle of next week, ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... rustic wicket, and take our leave of this celebrated scene, which has no doubt been formed by the slow operation of the streamlet in the course of many ages, insignificant as it may appear to a casual visitor in the middle of summer. The Chine of Blackgang is indebted for its origin to a similar cause: and this of Shanklin would have gone on rapidly increasing, had not the proprietor resorted to the aid of masonry, draining, piling, &c. to arrest in some ...
— Brannon's Picture of The Isle of Wight • George Brannon
... objects of the useful medium of literary communication afforded by the publication of "NOTES AND QUERIES," one appears to be a record of the casual notice of "some book or some edition, hitherto unknown or imperfectly described." I am induced therefore to inquire, whether the existence of an ancient MS. volume of Chronicles, which I have recently noticed in the little library ...
— Notes And Queries,(Series 1, Vol. 2, Issue 1), - Saturday, November 3, 1849. • Various
... instructed by Carlyle. His first revolutionism was as private and internal as feeling sea-sick. Thus, once more, he wrote against Mr. Gradgrind long before he created him. In The Chimes, conceived in quite his casual and charitable season, with the Christmas Carol and the Cricket on the Hearth, he hit hard at the economists. Ruskin, in the same fashion, would have told him that the worst thing about the economists ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... time, cannot possibly be known by the ignorant many, nor even by the philosophic few. The philosopher, not less than the peasant, may perish through the explosion of a steam engine, or the unsoundness of a ship, or the casual ignition of his dwelling; and that, too, without blame or punishment being involved in either case. On Mr. Combe's theory, it would seem to be necessary that every one should be a man of science, if he would ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... Gwen remorselessly. "You would have buried him alive if it hadn't been for me. You doctors are the most careless, casual creatures. It was me and the dog—so now Mr. Torrens knows what he has to ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... But the next day he encountered another. On his way to Paris, he stopped at Amiens to see Jules Verne. Here he found special difficulty in that the aged author could not speak English, and Bok knew only a few words of casual French. Finally a neighbor's servant who knew a handful of English words was commandeered, and a halting three-cornered ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... be touched by these random observations. It is a danger to which we are all of us exposed when we venture on general remarks in a society the circumstances of which we might have supposed were well enough known to us. Such casual wounds, even from well-meaning, kindly-disposed people, were nothing new to Charlotte. She so clearly, so thoroughly knew and understood the world, that it gave her no particular pain if it did happen that through somebody's thoughtlessness or imprudence she had her attention ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... a sportin' chance now and then before; but I was only kiddin' myself. Believe me, this gettin' married act is the big plunge. Uh-huh! Specially when it's done offhand and casual, the way ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... and Lady Jane, Dorothy passed into the courtyard and into the open air for the first time in nearly a week. She felt like a bird with clipped wings. The most casual inspection convinced her that there was no possible chance of escape from the walled quadrangle, in the center of which loomed the immense, weather-painted castle. The wall was high and its strength was as unbroken as in its earliest ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... and a gloomy night: The fears and dangers of darkness: Casual lights lead to error, ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... that the piece which formed the bottom of the frame was indeed detached at both corners and ready to fall away, but he pushed it back into position with his hand till it stuck in its place, and left little damage apparent to a casual observer. ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... that time afflicted with the gout. "Perhaps," said Mountnorris, who was present at table, "it was done in revenge of that public affront which my lord deputy formerly put upon him: but he has a brother who would not have taken such a revenge." This casual, and seemingly innocent, at least ambiguous expression, was reported to Stafford; who, on pretence that such a suggestion might prompt Annesley to avenge himself in another manner, ordered Mountnorris, who was an officer to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... order, glanced at it and at the seal, and perfectly satisfied with this gave a casual glance at that for the ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... drove back next morning to the booms. There he found enough to keep him occupied all that day and the next. As in those times the long distance telephone had not yet been attempted, he was cut off from casual communication with the village. Late in the afternoon he ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... long walk in the park before anyone came down the next morning, with only Jock for her companion, and she came to the breakfast table with a freshened look, though with a tremulous faintness in her voice, and she let Janet continue tea maker, scarcely seeming to hear or understand the casual remarks around her; but afterwards she said in a resolute tone, "Robert, I am ready whenever you ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... established, not merely because it nearly always does its work tolerably satisfactorily, but because in the simple matter of looks there is something inviting about the iron. It has a fair amount of loft, and it is deeper in the face than the cleek, and at a casual inspection of its points it seems an easy club to play with. On the other hand, being a little nearer to the hole, the average player deserts his iron for the mashie much sooner than I care to do. Your 10-handicap man ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... but Jaspar was perplexed with a doubt. He bethought himself that it was only in a casual glance he had observed Emily's ring. He had never examined it, and, after all, this might not be the one. There was certainly nothing strange in any lady dressed in black wearing a mourning ring. Again he turned ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... often sat and talked with whomever loafed. Natives frequented the parc hardly ever, but beach-combers, tourists, and sailors, or casual residents in from the districts, awaited there the opening of the stores or the post-office, or idled. The little park, or wooded strip of green, named after the admiral, and containing his monument, skirted the quay, and was between the establishment of Emile Levy, the pearl-trader, ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... most marvellous thoroughfare in the world, I think we are justified in assuming that there is little reason to doubt that the foreigners are entirely right in the matter, especially as their opinion coincides with that of every American who has ever made even a casual attempt to size up ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... of land of mine.' He looks every inch of six feet six then, and swells like a toad. To hear him you would think sixteen hundred and fifty acres of the cream of this county could be tied in a bandanna and carried on a walking stick, he is so casual about it. And those men fly around like buttons on a barn door to wait on him and it's 'Mister Bates this' and 'Mister Bates that,' until it turns my stomach. Vanity! He rolls in it! He eats it! He risks losing our land ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... the Belgian Red Cross hospital in Calais, and by others interested in the Red Cross work. It was a dormitory also for the English nurses from the ambulance. This explained, naturally, my being sent there, the somewhat casual nature of the furnishing and the odour of disinfectants. It does not, however, explain the lady of the wreath or the black ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... incidents of Grecian history, from the era of the Roman conquest to the commencement of what Mr Finlay, in a peculiar sense, calls the Byzantine empire. These incidents have nowhere been systematically or continuously recorded; they come forward by casual flashes in the annals, perhaps, of some church historian, as they happen to connect themselves with his momentary theme; or they betray themselves in the embarrassments of the central government, whether at Rome or at Constantinople, when ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... left flank of the French opposing the entry of the Germans from Belgian territory. The plea therefore that has been put forward that the British have now dealt the Germans 'a felon's blow' can only be put forward by persons who are either ignorant or heedless of what has been a matter of casual conversation all over England these last three years; and Sir Edward Grey himself was so convinced that the German Government knew what the consequences of a violation of Belgian neutrality would be that he informed Sir Francis Bertie on July ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... in India, the position should not be estimated by ability to get out of the room one's self, but by power to get rid of the snake. In fact, a very interesting illustration of the true theory of defence is found in a casual remark in a natural history about snakes—that comparatively few are dangerous to man, but that the whole family is protected by the fear those few inspire. If attacked by a dog, safety is not sought chiefly ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... the Anarchist party—was the amount of invective and hatred, which both factions ought properly to have expended on the common enemy, but which instead they spent most of their time in levelling at one another. A casual witness of these internal strifes might have imagined that the two parties were at the antipodes in their ideas and objects, rather than comrades and participators in a common belief. Their dissensions were alone forgotten in a common hatred of government and existing society. And even in their ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... train whirled him up to town, alone and pondering deeply, in a third-class compartment. That singed piece of cloth was incredibly valuable, and he could not defend himself from astonishment at the casual manner it had come into his possession. It was as if Fate had thrust that clue into his hands. And after the manner of the average man, whose ambition is to command events, he began to mistrust such a gratuitous and accidental success—just because it ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... go over with each patrol, before the camping trip, some simple exercise in bandaging and other "First Aid" exercises. In a book of the scope of this one it is not possible to give a full course of instruction in such matters, so it seems best to make only casual mention and leave details to the judgment of the ...
— How Girls Can Help Their Country • Juliette Low
... chanced to be in the vicinity. As a result, after much careful chaperonage, and even astute watching, of my manner towards her niece, Aunt Hannah had "slacked off" delightfully, evidently regarding me as one of those stolid and casual nonentities who, from lack of much interest in anything can safely be trusted anywhere and under ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... a single publication appeared that failed to reproduce a comment or criticism upon the subject; but, strangely enough, no single leader, writer or casual contributor remarked upon the oddness of the composition or the absence of the Infant from the Madonna's arms. In the course of time—that is to say, on the eleventh day—the matter passed from the public mind, a circumstance explainable perhaps ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
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