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More "Desperate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... She made a desperate gesture, and stood staring at the blue Mayfield hills where, perhaps at that moment, painted Mohawk scouts ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... more solitary than herself. He had not her robust body. Disease and anxiety had worn him away while he was hopelessly besieging Quebec. In that last hour before the 13th of September dawned, General Wolfe was groping down river toward one of the most desperate military attempts in the ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... take this resolution so suddenly? There was time, all the time in the world, and having once neglected the thing at the very start, it was curious that she should now, at this late date, make her desperate resolve. Preston had not been worse, more difficult to handle. In fact, when the two women had grown used to his case, the management had been simple enough. He had thought she was inured to the disgust and the horror—placid ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... as he had wiped out the little garrison at Navidad. A friendly cacique, Guacanagari, who had been the ally of the Admiral from the first, gave him information of this plot, and the danger was seen by Colon's acute mind to be desperate indeed. He had only a small force, torn by jealousy and private quarrels, and a defensive fight at this stage of his enterprise would almost surely be a losing one. The territory of Caonaba included the most mountainous and inaccessible part of the island, where ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... to its culmination by the English centered on the west coast near the seat of perhaps the oldest and most interesting culture of Africa. It came at a critical time. The culture of Yoruba, Benin, Mossiland, and Nupe had exhausted itself in a desperate attempt to stem the on-coming flood of Mohammedan culture. It has succeeded in maintaining its small, loosely federated city-states suited to trade, industry, and art. It had developed strong resistance toward the Sudan state builders toward the north, as in the case of the fighting Mossi; but ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... young Kentuckian at once on his mettle. Inasmuch as he was putting forth every effort to rejoin his companion, there was good reason for fearing a collision with the red men. He had been in several desperate affrays with them, and, like a sensible person, he spared no exertion to escape all ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... anybody been observing him closely at the moment, to turn visibly paler as her carriage approached his. As far as any clear thought had been in his mind, or any power of thinking possible to him, his latest idea in reference to her had been a desperate resolve that he would never speak to her again. And now, again, as he saw her, in a new avatar of loveliness, he once again knew that to keep such a ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... made a snatch at the pony's bridle. And he caught him a good one too, right over the face, he said, that made him drop down in the mud a jolly sight quicker than he had jumped up; but it was a good half-a-mile before he could stop the pony. Maybe that in his desperate endeavours to get help, and in his need to get in touch with some one, the poor devil had tried to stop the cart. Also three boys confessed afterwards to throwing stones at a funny tramp, knocking about all wet and muddy, and, it seemed, very drunk, ...
— Amy Foster • Joseph Conrad
... wheels; Thus oft the Grecians turn'd, but still they flew; Thus following, Hector still the hindmost slew. When flying they had pass'd the trench profound, And many a chief lay gasping on the ground; Before the ships a desperate stand they made, And fired the troops, and called the gods to aid. Fierce on his rattling chariot Hector came: His eyes like Gorgon shot a sanguine flame That wither'd all their host: like Mars he ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... completely astray. Learning from these sources that, not much more than thirty years ago—in 1840,—the first ship-load of British emigrants landed in New Zealand; that since then the colony had struggled for bare life against many and great difficulties; that it had had to wage several desperate wars with the aborigines; had had its financial and legislative troubles; and was still so very very young, we were naturally prepared to find Auckland a rude, rough, and inchoate settlement, pitched down in the midst of a ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... did so he would leave the country and sail for America. She probably disbelieved him; she knew him to be weak, but she overrated his weakness. At all events the rejected one arrived and Clement Searle departed. On a dark December day he took ship at Southampton. The two women, desperate with rage and sorrow, sat alone in this big house, mingling their tears and imprecations. A fortnight later, on Christmas Eve, in the midst of a great snowstorm long famous in the country, something happened that quickened their bitterness. A young woman, battered and chilled by the ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... out-station, became a station by the removal thither from Aleppo of Mr. and Mrs. Eddy. No objection to their residence was made by the people, though it was not four years since they had combined in a desperate attempt to drive all Protestants from the village. The missionaries were visited ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... became known an attempt would be made to rob them. Gold will incite many men to commit any crime, and with the vast recesses of the Rocky Mountain spur behind them, the criminals might be ready to take desperate chances. ...
— Klondike Nuggets - and How Two Boys Secured Them • E. S. Ellis
... Guilford Campaign, 1781.—Cornwallis now made a desperate attempt to capture the Americans, but Greene and Morgan joined forces and marched diagonally across North Carolina. Cornwallis followed so closely that frequently the two armies seemed to be one. When, however, the river Dan was reached, ...
— A Short History of the United States • Edward Channing
... is our disease, the Abolition of Slavery is our remedy. Our bayonets only cupped and scored the patient, our war-measures in and out of Congress only worked dynamically against other war-measures far more dogged and desperate than our own. The sentence of Emancipation is the specific whose operation will be vital, by effecting an alteration in the system, and soon annihilating that condition of the blood which feeds our fevers and rushes in disgusting blotches to the face. "No,"—a Northern minority still says,—"every ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... made by the accident grew into a lurking fear which often haunted her as time wore on. She never knew at what moment she might fly apart herself. That it was a distressing experience she knew from the look on old Jeremy's face and the desperate pace at which he set off to have ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... fire preparatory to an attack, he knows that he runs a very great risk of being killed while he is deploying, and suspects that he is being thrown away to gain ten minutes' time. He may either deploy with desperate swiftness, or he may shuffle, or bunch, or break, according to the discipline under which he has ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... away in haste, and indeed all the rest left Jonathan; but a few there were, in number about fifty, who staid with him, and with them Mattathias, the son of Absalom, and Judas, the son of Chapseus, who were commanders of the whole army. These marched boldly, and like men desperate, against the enemy, and so pushed them, that by their courage they daunted them, and with their weapons in their hands they put them to flight. And when those soldiers of Jonathan that had retired saw the enemy giving way, they got ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... men to follow him Jethro galloped at full speed toward the Arabs, and with a shout flung himself upon them, clearing his way through them with his ax. He was but just in time. A desperate conflict was raging across the camels. At one point several of the Arabs had broken into the square, and these were opposed by Amuba, Chebron, and one of the men, while the others still held back the Arabs on the ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... The fingers seized me with a death-grip, and as I was thrown off my balance, I struggled to free myself, went under, made a desperate effort which brought me up again, and recovering myself a little, I tried hard to swim ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... when Tom in his airship loaded with fire-extinguishing chemicals headed for the blaze. And this, also, was the desperate situation that confronted Mary Nestor and her uncle, Barton Keith, as well as Amos Field and Jason Melling. Those unscrupulous and cowardly men were in a veritable panic of fear, which contrasted strangely with the calm, resigned attitude ...
— Tom Swift among the Fire Fighters - or, Battling with Flames from the Air • Victor Appleton
... you bade us! Phil. Ay—meet cause for chiding, That a poor desperate wretch, maddened with pain, Should talk as madmen do! Chor. Come, then, with us. Phil. Never! oh—never! Hear me—not if all The lightnings of the thunder-god were made Allies with you, to blast ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... unhappy, and the thought made the elder girl desperate. This led her to a plan: Lounsbury must be asked to forgive their father and come again—must be told of ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... inspiring weeks, the man lived, so far as a man can live, in his Yesterdays. In the cool shade of the orchard that once was an enchanted wood; under the old apple tree ship beside the meadow sea; on the hill where, astride his rail fence war horse, the boy had directed the battle and led the desperate charge and where the man had dreamed the first of his manhood dreams; in the garden where the castaway had lived on his desert island; in the yard near mother's window where the boy had builded the brave play house for the little girl next door; ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... dreadful stage of Christ's mission, to make Him doubt His divine Sonship, or, failing such, to taunt or anger the dying Savior into the use of His superhuman powers for personal relief or as an act of vengeance upon His tormentors? To achieve such a victory was Satan's desperate purpose. The shaft failed. Through taunts and derision, through blasphemous challenge and diabolical goading, the ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... chair, smoking quickly. She held one of the dogs on her knee and talked rubbish to it. Hamel watched her, leaning back in his carved oak chair, and he found it hard to keep the pity from his eyes. The woman was playing a part, playing it with desperate and pitiful earnestness, a part which seemed the more tragical because of the soft splendour of their surroundings. From the shadowy walls, huge, dimly-seen pictures hung about them, a strange and yet impressive background. Their small round ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Prison was enveloped in flames; the Mansion House and the Bank were attacked. But the troops were killing and dispersing the rioters on Blackfriars Bridge; a desperate conflict between the horse and the mob was going on near the Bank. What a night! The whole city seemed to be abandoned to pillage—to destruction. Shouts, yells, the shrieks of women, the crackling of the burning houses, the firing of platoons toward St. ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... from Stettin was a miserable one. It was desperate work packing the thousand things which had gathered together during the quarter of a century in careless profusion. It was heart-breaking to be obliged to leave behind the stores of wood, coal, and potatoes in the cellar, the cranberry jam in the storeroom, which the Markers, in their grandeur ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... 2,000 men each, with sixteen pieces of artillery and fifty-two rockets, advanced to the attack across the sacred burial grounds. Three of the hill forts were carried with slight loss. At the fourth fort desperate resistance was encountered. After this fort had succumbed to a bayonet attack the Chinese rallied in an open camp one mile to the rear. Intrenchments were thrown up with remarkable rapidity. The British troops, led by the Royal Irish Fusiliers, ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... was backing the Montgomery street venture, regarded Harpending a trifle quizzically. "Once," he said, "you tried to be a pirate, Asbury.... Oh, no offense," he laid a soothing hand upon the other's knee. "But tonight I need a desperate man such as you. Another like Benito. We're going to raid ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... voice of desperate self-repression that she spoke these last words, while she looked away from Deronda toward something at a distance from her on the floor. She was seeing the whole event—her own acts included—through an exaggerating medium ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... was really desperate, but Tish's face forbade questions. Aggie ventured to observe that perhaps it would be better to unlock the door and release the girl, but Tish only gave ...
— More Tish • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... hanged!" growled Robert. "What business can you have with me that wouldn't wait till morning? Look here, I'm desperate!" ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... stood tall and imperious in the waning afternoon light. She was bereaved mother, anguished wife; she was a dreamer driven out of the temple of the dream, and what she had to do was desperate. Her voice came hard ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... scientifically demonstrated fact of the physical and moral degeneration of a considerable part of the British working people doubtless suggests to many persons such pessimistic conclusions. "It is hopeless in our view," the New Age concludes, "to expect that the poor and ignorant, however desperate and however numerous, will ever succeed in displacing their wealthy rulers. No slave revolt in the history of the world has ever succeeded by its own power. In these days, moreover, the chances of success are even smaller. One machine gun is equal ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... on the day (it would seem) of the arrival of the sentence. Convocation, which was still sitting, hurried through a declaration that the pope had no more power in England than any other bishop.[263] Five years before, if a heretic had ventured so desperate an opinion, the clergy would have shut their ears and run upon him: now they only contended with each other in precipitate obsequiousness. The houses of the Observants at Canterbury and Greenwich, which had been implicated with the Nun of Kent, ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... we came to Aldebaran," Hagen went on, "I was in contact with a dying world out there at the edge of space. Those people are desperate. And they are weary of life, having seen too much of it. They have agreed to go with me. Why, this sun and these worlds are piddling trifles. With that invention we could go from sun to sun. Space would ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... of man finds higher and higher powers. Once he throttled his game, and often perished in the desperate struggle; then he trapped it; then pierced it with the javelin; then shot it with an arrow, or set the springy gases to hurl a rifle-ball at it. Sometime he may point at it an electric spark, and it shall be his. Once he wearily trudged his twenty miles a ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... cadets of the Polaris unit raced down the Academy field toward the mercuryball, a plastic sphere with a vial of mercury inside. At the opposite end of the field, three members of the Arcturus unit ran headlong in a desperate effort to reach ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell
... Conant's sent a telegram, in a desperate hurry. I suspected it meant something important. Who is she, O'Gorman, and why did the Chief cut under us by planting Sarah Judd ...
— Mary Louise • Edith van Dyne (one of L. Frank Baum's pen names)
... last point that I mused especially. The housing problem is hard, doubtless; but nobody, my mind protested as I surveyed the crescent, nobody is driven to so desperate a solution of it as this! There are tents, there are caves, there are hollow trees...and there are people who prefer—this! Yes, 'this' is a positive taste, not a necessity at all. I swept the bay with a searching eye; but heads on the surface of water tell nothing ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... Blacks, were we ever to become constitutionally dominant in our native islands, would emulate in savagery our Haytian fellow-Blacks who, at the time of retaliating upon their actual masters, were tortured slaves, bleeding and rendered desperate under the oppressors' lash—and all this simply and merely because of the sameness of our ancestry and the colour of our skin! One would have thought that Liberia would have been a fitter standard of comparison in respect of a coloured ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... Saturday—yes, DOLLY, yes— From that evening I date the first dawn of my bliss; When we both rattled off in that dear little carriage, Whose journey, BOB says, is so like Love and Marriage, "Beginning gay, desperate, dashing, down-hilly, "And ending as dull as a six-inside Dilly!"[1] Well, scarcely a wink did I sleep the night thro'; And, next day, having scribbled my letter to you, With a heart full of hope this sweet fellow to meet, I set out ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... escaped the contagious habit of speaking in a hushed whisper, suddenly began, in a loud and cheery manner, to tell us something of the history of Graywater Park, which in his methodical way he had looked up. It was a desperate revolt, on the part of his strenuous spirit, against the phantom of gloom which threatened to obsess ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... serving the new khedive, Gordon longed for rest. The first year of his rule, during which he had done his own and other men's work, the long marches, the terrible climate, the perpetual anxieties, had all told upon him. Since then he had had three years of desperate labor, and had ridden some 8,500 miles. Who can wonder that he resented the impertinences of the pashas, whose interference was not for the good of his government or of his people, ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... strength enough in the child and her vehement struggles to free herself to hinder Michel in his desperate haste. He was obliged to stand still for a minute or two to pacify her, speaking in his quiet, patient voice, ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... As men who were with mankind foes, And with despite and envy fired, Into the cloister had retired; Or who, in desperate doubt of grace, Strove, by deep penance, to efface 455 Of some foul crime the stain; For, as the vassals of her will, Such men the Church selected still, As either joy'd in doing ill, Or thought more grace ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... and his foot on the stair. Would he come in as he always did? or would he remember her complaint of being tired, a complaint she so seldom made? It was as a blow to Elinor when she heard his step go on past her door: and yet she was glad. Had he come in there was a desperate thought in her mind that she would call him to her bedside and in the dark, with his hand in hers, tell him—all that there was to tell. But it was again a relief when he passed on, and she felt that she was spared ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... was lost for a couple of hours: the negligence of General Melas, who trusted too much to the advantages he had gained, and the audacity of General Desaix, restored the victory to the French arms. While the fate of the battle was almost desperate, Bonaparte rode about slowly on horseback, pensive, and looking downward, more courageous against danger than misfortune, attempting nothing, but waiting the turn of the wheel. He has behaved several times in ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... and he rode forth to the dark lake. Down and down he dived till he came to the cave of the water-witch whom he killed after a desperate struggle. Hard by on a couch lay the body of Grendel. Drawing his sword he smote off the ogre's head. Swimming up with it he reached the surface and sprang to land, and was greeted by his faithful thanes. Four of them were needed to carry ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... Crimean conflict followed, with an escort of Tartars and with carriage horses which at times seemed to fly over the ground. General de Kotzebue knew every foot of the soil and was, of course, a splendid host on such an occasion. On this first day the field of the desperate Alma fight was gone over carefully and on the succeeding morning the ruined ramparts and redoubts of the once great Fortress of Sebastopol—not as yet restored—were visited and studied. The Cemetery of Cathcart's Hill was visited and here there were ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... least three persons of our little party—upon Laura, who had any thing but respect for him; upon Warrington, whose manner toward him showed an involuntary haughtiness and contempt; and upon the timid and alarmed widow, who dreaded lest he should interfere with her darling, though almost desperate projects for her boy. And, indeed, the major, unknown to himself, was the bearer of tidings which were to bring about a catastrophe in the affairs of all ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Squadron, was off the entrance to the harbor. Six days later, when Schley's squadron was reinforced by the powerful fleet of Admiral Sampson, Cervera's last chance of escape vanished, and there was nothing left for him to do but assist the forts and the garrison to defend the city to the last, or make a desperate and almost hopeless attempt to break through the line of ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... any Forerunner, or other manifest Hurt, than only a decay in Strength; and who being asked concerning their Condition, answered, that they were not sensible of any Disorder, which for the most part denoted a desperate Case, and an approaching Death; but the Number of these were very small in Comparison of such as ...
— A Succinct Account of the Plague at Marseilles - Its Symptoms and the Methods and Medicines Used for Curing It • Francois Chicoyneau
... poor enough while his father lived, when he died the returns from his irregular odd jobs no longer came in to supplement his wife's sewing, and add an occasional day or two of fuller meals, in consequence of which they were oftener than ever hungry and cold, and in desperate trouble about the rent of their room. Tembarom, who was a wiry, enterprising little fellow, sometimes found an odd job himself. He carried notes and parcels when any one would trust him with them, he split old boxes into ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... name of your country, ... of any intentions of this nature. But were it otherwise, ... They would prepare themselves with apprehension, indeed, but without dismay—with regret, but with firmness—for one of those desperate struggles which have sometimes occurred in the history ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... secret, and soon several of mother's most intimate friends had heard of my expedition, and in their minds, as in hers, my early marriage was assured. Did not the proof of it lie in the fact that I was pushing my building with desperate haste? Was this not done in order to make room for my bride?—No other reason was sufficient to account for the astounding improvements which I had planned, and which were going forward with ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... not show the least excitement after his desperate contest. He had attended to it as a matter of business, and when over he suffered it to pass out of his mind. He took out his watch and noted ...
— Driven From Home - Carl Crawford's Experience • Horatio Alger
... our approach, but only increased their noise, so we were obliged to displace them forcibly from their nests; and this ejectment was not produced without a considerable struggle on their parts; and, being armed with a formidable beak, it soon became a scene of desperate warfare. We had to take particular care to protect our hands and legs from their attacks: and for this purpose each one had provided himself with a short stout club. The noise they continued to make during our ramble through their territories the sailors said was, ...
— The Book of Enterprise and Adventure - Being an Excitement to Reading. For Young People. A New and Condensed Edition. • Anonymous
... safely in the fourth inning, but did not score. In the fifth, with two out, Doyle batted safely, but failed to score. In the sixth the Bostons made their first runs on Speaker's triple to left field and Lewis' out. If Snodgrass, in making a desperate effort to catch the fly, had permitted the ball to go to Devore the chances are that Speaker's hit would have resulted in an out, so that New York ...
— Spalding's Official Baseball Guide - 1913 • John B. Foster
... driven up close enough, and the Tyrolese, who were nearly one hundred strong, burst with cheers from behind them, and rushing forward in loose array, but with desperate resolution, using the butt-ends of their rifles, fell with savage impetuosity upon the Bavarians, who were thunderstruck at this ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... hope on the chance of saving my foot. The great surgeon received me, as he did and does everybody, with the greatest kindness, and for twenty months I lay in one or other ward of the old place under his care. It was a desperate business, but he saved my foot, and here I am.' There he was, ladies and gentlemen, and what he was doing during that 'desperate business' was singing that he was ...
— Courage • J. M. Barrie
... a distant location, yet the person to whom the letter was addressed might be miles from a government post-office, and it might not be safe for him to present himself for a letter, lest he should be recognised as a desperate man, and letters were liable to be opened and their desperate projects exposed. To avoid this danger, they established a line of communication, extending from Toronto, Canada, to New Orleans. Not precisely direct, but ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... clump of this timber, flat on his belly, lay Peter. The love of adventure was in him, and today he had sallied forth on his most desperate enterprise. For the first time he had gone alone to the edge of Clearwater Lake, half a mile away; boldly he had trotted up and down the white strip of beach where the girl's footprints still remained in the sand, and defiantly he had ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... scout crept, quarter-way now along from the stern of the massive bulk that loomed above it, and within fifty feet of the third clamp in the rack. Touchy work, maneuvering into it, with the ZX-1 yawing as she was, and the need for haste desperate. Chris's hands were glued to the stick: his nerves were as tight as violin strings. Then, when only ten feet from the rack clamp, he gave a startled jump ...
— Raiders Invisible • Desmond Winter Hall
... not require these desperate measures. The British general would be compelled to risk a battle on equal terms, or to manifest a conscious inferiority to the American army. The depreciation of paper money was the inevitable consequence of immense emissions without corresponding taxes. ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... they had raised the devil from attic to cellar; Mrs. Farren was in tears, Howker desperate. Not one out of the fifteen servants considered necessary to embellish the Seagrave establishment could do anything with them after Kathleen Severn's ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... Denis had just become a midshipman on board the Serapis, and we learn from these 'Notes' that he was to take part in the great fight which ended in the capture of that ship by Paul Jones, after the most bloody and desperate duel in the long and glorious record of the British Navy. Captain Pearson, who commanded the Serapis, reported his defeat to the Admiralty in a letter of which 'Mr. Thackeray seems to have thought much,' and, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... Fifth Edition. 'It is a perfectly enchanting story of love and chivalry, and pure romance. The Count is the most constant, desperate, and modest and tender of lovers, a peerless gentleman, an intrepid fighter, a faithful friend, ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... of Tristram grew more desperate day by day. His strength, quite prostrated, no longer permitted him to be carried to the seaside daily, as had been his custom from the first moment when it was possible for the bark to be on the way homeward. ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... For three months desperate attempts were made by the Consolidated to make the new bonds attractive to the public, but less than one hundred thousand dollars was subscribed. Bobby was tabulating the known results of this subscription with much satisfaction one morning when ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... to her about it," he continued, in a low tone, "till the night we parted. She is very modest, you must know, and I never dared to speak to her before, but I became desperate that night, and told her all, and she confessed her love for me. Oh, Petroff, if I could only have had one day more of—of—but the sergeant would not wait. I had to go to the wars. One evening in paradise is but a ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... when, after being dragged a hundred yards or so, and half choked by the thick dust, he managed to scramble to his feet, he pulled with frenzied, convulsive strength on the off-side rein. The horses swerved to the fearful saw on their jaws, and pulled nearly into the left-hand hedge. Acton's desperate idea was to overturn the carriage into the hedge before the horses could reach the bridge, for he felt he could no more pull them up than he dare let them go. There was just a chance for the lady if she were overturned into the bank or hedge, but none whatever if she were ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... I'm not dull; I've a task that's exciting: Ten years have I fought 210 With a foe: Sleep his name is. And I can assure you That when I have taken An odd cup of vodka, The stove is red hot, And the smuts from the candle Have blackened the air, It's a desperate struggle!' ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... Knockfergus an account of the cattle that he had driven, and the wives and bairns that he had slain. Like swarms of angry hornets, these avenging savages drove their stings in the now maddened and desperate Shane on every point where they could fasten; while in December the old O'Donel came out over the mountains from Donegal, and paid back O'Neill with interest for his stolen wife, his pillaged country, and his own long imprisonment and exile. The ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... confidence. The physicians attend; the case of the patient is carefully examined; a consultation is held; they are unanimously agreed that the symptoms are critical, but that the case, with proper and timely relief, is so far from being desperate, that it may be made to issue in an improvement of his constitution. They are equally unanimous in prescribing the remedy, by which this happy effect is to be produced. The prescription is no sooner made known, however, than ...
— The Federalist Papers
... Nabopolassar, the viceroy in Babylon, who had revolted, and gained his independence. The Median ruler had subdued Armenia, and established his control as far as the Halys, making a treaty with Lydia. Now ensued the desperate conflict on which hung the fate of the Assyrian Empire. Nineveh was taken (606 B.C.) by the Medes under Cyaxares, and the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar, the son of Nabopolassar. The Grecian story of Sardanapalus burning himself on a lofty bier, is a myth. Assyria was divided ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... ceased to horrify the quiet room, she had flung herself at Reddin, a pattern of womanly obedience no longer, but a desperate creature fighting in that most intoxicating of all crusades, the succouring ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... And to the guard he cries, Who straight march up, and forth the two friends go To find the chief. All creatures else below Lay wrapt in sleep, forgetting toil and care; But sleepless still, in presence of the foe, Troy's chosen chiefs urge council, what to dare, Whom to AEneas send, the desperate ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... at all times a desperate antagonist, where the hunting-knife and dogs are the only available weapons. The largest that I ever killed, weighed four hundredweight. I was out hunting, accompanied by my youngest brother. We had walked through several jungles without success, but ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... we say in the face of the desperate Battle the People are making for their Hearths and Homes that the time has come for every HONEST MAN, trader and otherwise, to extend a helping hand to the MEN in the GAP. You may ask, How will that be done? The ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... I have described them you may find it in your heart to feel sorry for me. The book is finished. That of itself has left me with a sense of loss, as if I had put away from me something that had been a part of me. Then—I am going blind. Do you know what that means, the desperate meaning? To lose the light out of your life—never to see the river as I saw it this morning? Never to see the moonlight or the ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... And look not after credit, we shall cure that, Your bended honesty we shall set right, Sir, We Surgeons of the Law do desperate Cures, Sir, And you shall see how heartily I'le handle it: Mark how I'le knock it home: be of good chear, Sir, You give good Fees, and those beget good Causes, The Prerogative of your Crowns will carry the matter, (Carry it sheer) ...
— The Spanish Curate - A Comedy • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... Gundry stood, like a bull, on the banks of his own river, and defied the worst and most desperate men of all nations to pollute it. He had scarcely any followers or steadfast friends to back him; but his fame for stern courage was clear and strong, and his bodily presence most manifest. Not a shovel was thrust nor a cradle rocked in the ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... panted from the long desperate climb, his plump sides filling and caving as he drank ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... worse. One wonders why card-rooms are not provided at large balls (as is the custom abroad), where the bored husbands might find a little solace over “bridge,” instead of yawning in the coat-room or making desperate signs to their wives from the doorway,—signals of distress, by the bye, that rarely ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... witnessed the ruin of his antagonist. From the fatal field, unharmed in body, he turned away, henceforth to the followed by the execrations of his countrymen. Past services were forgotten, brilliant talents availed nothing. His desperate attempt to found a rival government by the partial dismemberment of the one he had helped to establish was thwarted, and after years of poverty and misfortune abroad, he returned to die in neglect and obscurity in his own country. As was truly said: "He was the last of ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... which absolutely and point-blank refused to go into other people's pockets. During this short period of his life he was the most successful and famous lobbyist in Washington, and the most sought after by the most rascally and desperate ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... fight with. Charlemagne had no such disciplined troops. Yet he had as many difficulties to surmount as Caesar,—rugged forests to penetrate, rapid rivers to cross, morasses to avoid, and mountains to climb. It is a very difficult thing to subdue even savages who are desperate, determined, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... he knew the hiding-place. And I presume that he became aware of the desperate condition of his chief, because, under the impulse of his alarm, he committed the imprudence to write that threat: 'Woe betide the young lady, if she ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... his madness though, he is a desperate fine soldier; and he cares no more for a troop of blues than I would for a flock of geese," ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... Herbert's superior strength compelled him to yield the flag after a desperate struggle to retain his hold ...
— Christmas with Grandma Elsie • Martha Finley
... rulers that was to arrest, if possible, before it was too late, the debacle of civilisation. Here, brought together by the indefatigable energy of that impassioned humanitarian, Leblanc, the French ambassador at Washington, the chief Powers of the world were to meet in a last desperate conference to ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... Lady Annabel, was devotedly attached to Venetia, though he had seldom an opportunity of intimating feelings, which the cordial manner in which she ever conducted herself to him gave him no reason to conclude desperate; at the same time that he had contrived that a day should seldom elapse, which did not under some circumstances, however unfavourable, bring them together, while her intimate friends and the circles in which she passed most of her life always witnessed ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... seems to record the last desperate effort of a "Lord of Misrule," in a manuscript letter of the learned Mede to Sir Martin Stuteville; and some particulars are collected from Hammond L'Estrange's Life ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... satire libellous.' Memoirs of the Reign of George III, iv. 167. Smollett in Humphrey Clinker (published in 1771) makes Mr. Bramble write, in his letter of June 2: 'The public papers are become the infamous vehicles of the most cruel and perfidious defamation; every rancorous knave—every desperate incendiary, that can afford to spend half-a-crown or three shillings, may skulk behind the press of a newsmonger, and have a stab at the first character in the kingdom, without running the least hazard of detection or punishment.' The scribblers who had of late shewn ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... have not yet realised decay, not to speak of death. The immortality of the soul is a question wide of you, who have as yet practically no doubt of the immortality of the body. But I—well, it would be melodramatic to say that I face death every day. The metaphor applies but to desperate callings and romantic complaints. To some Death comes like a footpad, suddenly, and presents his pistol—and the smoke that curls upward from his empty ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... the young man continued, with a desperate courage, "but I am. After all happiness is spelt with different letters for all of us. You have denied yourself—worked hard, carried many burdens and run great risks to become a millionaire. I too have denied myself, have worked ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... year by her beauty. She is an honest girl still. Since her mother sold her three years ago for sixty thousand francs, she has tried to find happiness, and found nothing but annoyance. She took to the stage in a desperate mood; she has a horror of her first purchaser, de Marsay; and when she came out of the galleys, for the king of dandies soon dropped her, she picked up old Camusot. She does not care much about him, but he is like a father to her, and ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... its shade I sat me down to moan; Resign'd to dumb despair, without a tear, } Prostrate I lay, or slowly wander'd, here, } And, wandering, thought upon the things that were: } 'Till crowding thoughts a sudden lustre flung, And my wild heart with desperate ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... and others like them, cost him would more than have recompensed Dick, had he been hard-hearted enough to desire a vengeance. 'For a quarter of an hour, or maybe twenty minutes,' said he, 'I can be as angry as any man in Europe, and, if it was required of me during that time to do anything desperate—downright wicked—I could be bound to do it; and what's more, I'd stand to it afterwards if it cost me the gallows. But as for keeping up the same mind, as for being able to say to myself my heart is as hard as ever, I'm just as much bent ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... The desperate Colonel who had snatched up his cap when he heard Walters coming, grinned painfully, pulling his straggly red and white beard nervously. The strain was beginning to tell on his iron nerves. He removed the cap, and with a few muttered words went back to the game, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... again, who employ these Mercurii from their own inability to attend in person, owing to distance, want of time, and other similar causes. Hence, many a desperate bibliomaniac keeps in the back-ground; while the public are wholly unacquainted with his curious and rapidly-increasing treasures. Hence SIR TRISTRAM, embosomed in ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... Corinth! To wreck his career! To deprive him of a companion so fitly qualified to help him realize to the full his splendid ambition! Small wonder that the daughter of the church had determined upon a desperate measure. ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... of the hacienda. Their entrance within the sala of course created some slight disarrangement in the tableaux of the dramatis personal already there. This confusion gave Tiburcio an opportunity to carry out a desperate resolution he had formed, and profiting by it, he advanced ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... soda when once he has got the habit. Everything was against me. The old convivial circle began to shun me. I could not join in their revels and they began to look on me as a grouch. In the end, I fell, and in one wild orgy undid all the good of a month's abstinence. I was desperate then. I felt that nothing could save me, and I might as well give up the struggle. I drank two pin-ap-o-lades, three grapefruit-olas and an egg-zoolak, before pausing ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... of Brittany opens with the account of Julius Caesar. At that period (57 B.C.) Armorica was inhabited by five principal tribes: the Namnetes, the Veneti, the Osismii, the Curiosolitae, and the Redones. These offered a desperate resistance to Roman encroachment, but were subdued, and in some cases their people were sold wholesale into slavery. In 56 B.C. the Veneti threw off the yoke and retained two of Caesar's officers as hostages. Caesar advanced upon Brittany ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... he retorted, growing desperate lest his mother, hearing their voices, should suddenly come out on to the verandah and learn what they were talking about before he had time to put his side of the story to her. "If you had you would have known I tried and tried to get Nellie to come in so that I could tell the old woman ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... Elizabeth; 'he will be there all day, and I shall not see Papa I do not know when. It really was a very convenient thing when the architects of the old German cathedrals used to take a desperate leap from the top of the tower as soon as it was finished. Well, I ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... support was most encouraging to the people of Ulster, and the Dublin correspondent of The Times reported that it gave no less satisfaction to loyalists in other parts of Ireland, among whom, as the position became more desperate every day, there was "not the least sign of giving ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... a dagger, stabbing through every nerve, came fear, a horror unspeakable of the depth she could not see, into which she was being so furiously hurled. She was clinging to the saddle, but she made a desperate effort to drag the animal round. It was quite fruitless. No woman's strength could have availed to check that headlong gallop. He swerved a little, a very little, in answer, that was ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... compact and strong, well commanded, admirable on the defensive but slow to move or to act on the offensive. His corps had sustained up to the time fewer hard knocks than any other corps in the whole army, and I was anxious to give it a chance. I always expected to have a desperate fight to get possession of the Macon Road, which was then the vital objective of the campaign. Its possession by us would in my judgment result in the capture of Atlanta and give us the fruits of victory. ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... marines. At eleven at night our party returned on board, bringing on a sledge Okotook, Iligliuk, and their son. That Iligliuk would accompany her husband, I, of course, took for granted and wished; but as the boy could do us no good, and was, moreover, a desperate eater, I had desired Mr. Bushnan to try whether a slight objection to his being of the party would induce Okotook to leave him with his other relations. This he had cautiously done; but, the instant the ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... which a red ribbon is passed. The small canes are not carried in the hand, but stuck in the girdle on the left side. Nobody summoned before the judges by a messenger carrying a staff of red Brazil wood dares to disobey the command. The most desperate criminal meekly goes to his doom, following often a mere boy, if the latter has only a toy vara stuck in his belt with the red ribbons hanging down. It is the vara the Indians respect, not ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... was in the desperate position of a person who, having staked more than he has in his pocket, and feeling that he can never make up his account, continues to plunge on unlucky cards—not because he hopes to regain his losses, but because it will not do for him to stop and ...
— Boyhood • Leo Tolstoy
... Mrs Chick, looking round the room with a prophetic smile, 'that's what she's going to say. I knew it. You had better say it. Say it openly! Be open, Lucretia Tox,' said Mrs Chick, with desperate sternness, 'whatever ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... a matter as the destruction of our national fabric, with all its benefits, its memories, and its hopes, would it not be wise to ascertain precisely why we do it? Will you hazard so desperate a step while there is any possibility that any portion of the ills you fly from have no real existence? Will you, while the certain ills you fly to are greater than all the real ones you fly from, will you risk the commission of so fearful ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Lincoln - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 6: Abraham Lincoln • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... The verandah was paved with marble, there was some fine mahogany carving in the central hall, the dessert-service was of George II. silver-gilt, and the china beautiful old Spode. Everything else about the place told its own story of desperate financial conditions. Our hostess declared that it was impossible for a woman to manage a sugar estate, as she could not always be about amongst the canes and in the boiler-house, and her sons were not yet ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... the situation was almost in statu quo. Though the Welshmen had, as stated, carried Samson's Ridge and had even advanced some miles along the coast, Ali Muntar still remained untaken. All day the Lowland Division had made the most desperate attempts to storm the position, going forward again and again with sublime disregard of their losses. But to no purpose. They were hemmed in by an inferno of fire which came from all directions: an attacking wave was swept away almost before it ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... a stage education, he had arranged the candles, the cards, the counters; he had poked the fire, settled the stool for Miss Riley's august feet, and was busily engaged in changing five shillings into small silver for a desperate victim of loo—when Mrs. Clanfrizzle's third, and, as it appeared, last time, of asking for the kettle smote upon his ear. His loyalty would have induced him at once to desert every thing on such an occasion; but the other party ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... conditions, time must have been rapidly bringing them civilization. But we must now turn to a sorrowful chapter in their history, and trace the dispersion of these tribes, their unavailing attempts to hold their own against a savage foe, and the desperate chances they took before leaving the land of ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... her roles seems to have crept. It was to her powers of impersonation and disguise that Jokai owed his life many years later, when, imprisoned and suffering in a dungeon, he was enabled to escape in her clothes to join Kossuth in the desperate fight against the allied armies of Austria and Russia. Since her death he has lived ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... accepted his orders with alacrity, and started forth on what seemed, as I watched from a grassy ridge, a most desperate enterprise. The dark brown mass of Bastion Hill appeared to dominate the plain. On its crest the figures of the Boers could be seen frequently moving about. Other spurs to either flanks looked as if they afforded facilities ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... were against him, and the outlook was indeed dark. But, even in these desperate straits, there was a buoyancy in his spirits that he had seldom enjoyed. Life seemed good while he was yet alive to fight for it; he had youth, strength, hope, and the spur of deeds to be done, all of which roweled his faith whenever it ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... eighty miles from Philadelphia. Whatever difficulties they, or their ancestors, struggled formerly with, are now over; their lands are cleared, and in the bosom of a fine country, with a sure market for every article of produce they can possibly raise, and entirely out of the reach of the most desperate predatory excursions of ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest
... more than St. Vitus's dance set to ragtime. Our hero climbed up eaves-pipes, plunged through trap-doors down into dungeons, jumped from the roof of a house into a tree, kicked his way in and out of secret closets, and engaged in hair-raising combats with desperate ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... motives of personal infallibility, to defeat the success of what has been resolved upon contrary to their sentiments. Men of upright, benevolent tempers have too many opportunities of remarking, with horror, to what desperate lengths this disposition is sometimes carried, and how often the great interests of society are sacrificed to the vanity, to the conceit, and to the obstinacy of individuals, who have credit enough to make their passions and their caprices interesting ...
— The Federalist Papers
... occasion, the Atheniens shall receiue great hurt and trouble." Which wordes many times he told to Alcibiades himselfe. He had a garden adioyning to his house in the fields, wherin was a Figge tree, wheruppon many desperate men ordinarily did hange themselues: in place whereof, he purposed to set vp a house, and therefore was forced to cutte it downe, for which cause hee went to Athenes, and in the markette place, hee called ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... them privately much encouragement. But month after month had passed by while they were waiting in vain for comfort. At last the "best"—that is to say, the unhappy Leicestrians—came to Willoughby, asking his advice in their "declining and desperate cause." ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... at her in astonishment. These were the words of a desperate woman, capable of anything. He, however, cherished a vague project and replied: "My dear, love is not eternal. One loves and one ceases to love. When it lasts it becomes a drawback. I want none of it! However, if you will be reasonable, and will receive and treat me as a friend, ...
— Bel Ami • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant
... crept upon me and mastered me, during all the weeks that I had let myself be so upset and delayed. I cannot picture what I go through when I lose my self-command in that way, but it is like one who is tied down upon a railroad track and hears a train coming. He gets just as desperate as he pleases, and suffers anything you can imagine—but he does not get free. And always the book would be hanging before me, a kind of external conscience, to show me what ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... just taking a desperate chance. No, I never expected to see you again, unless by accident," he said honestly. "And I've been crying the hurt of it to the stars all the way back from the coast. I only got here yesterday. I pretty near passed up coming back at all. I didn't see ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... these men—of either the restless and ambitious, or of the better class—were literally sent away. But such has been the politic practice of this church for many ages; and we may safely believe, that when she was engaged in an unscrupulous and desperate contest for the recovery, by fair means or foul, of her immense losses, there might be many in the ranks of her pious priesthood whom it would be inconvenient to retain at home. And during that conflict especially, with the most formidable enemies ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... this, at the sack of Troy, he had shown a want of self-control, and yielded to a mad passion of desperate fighting that is not to be found in the Aeneas of the last ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... told him; as far as that goes I've encouraged him. I've preached patience, have said that his case isn't desperate if he'll only hold his tongue and be quiet. Unfortunately he has taken it into ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... had actually effected her desperate purpose of waylaying the two surgeons in the interests of "baby's eyes." There she was, in a skirt and a shawl—with her novel dropped in one part of the lawn, and her handkerchief in the other—pursuing the oculists on their way to the chaise. Reckless of appearances, Herr ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... and, in order to secure the retreat of the main part of his command, Lord Stirling took four hundred men, and made a bold attack upon a house that was occupied by the British general, Cornwallis. During the desperate fight which followed, in which his little force was far outnumbered by the enemy, his command made a successful retreat, but he himself was captured, and afterwards ...
— Stories of New Jersey • Frank Richard Stockton
... to bury the bones of those who fell, and with them /yours/, O Pharaoh. I do not think that you will listen to me to-night, and I am sure that yonder lady, full of the new-fanned flame of the jealous goddess, will not listen. Still let her take counsel and remember my words: In the hour of desperate danger let her send to Shabaka and demand his help, promising in return what he has asked and remembering that if Isis loves her, that goddess was born upon the ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... the cry was not repeated, and at last spurred to desperate means, he gathered himself for the leap across the chasm. Going back twenty paces, he took a running start, and at the edge of the well, leaped upward and outward in an attempt to gain the ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... occupations and business; that exertion to the remotest limits of the possible, directed toward one object of thought and energy, seemed to penetrating eyes, not merely a thirst for acquisition and profit, but a desperate conflict with something undiscovered and invisible. At that moment of his life it seemed to some that Darvid was like a man running straight forward and with all his might, because he felt that were he to halt, something ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... the village of Zillebeck, a mile and a half further in, the R. A. P. was established and there carried on during the desperate fighting of the next three days. Through this post a continuous stream of wounded passed, the stretcher cases all night, the walking cases all day and all night. In spite of its scenes of horror and ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... brave boy seized the struggling, frightened youth he felt himself gripped by the panic-stricken Sam in a frenzied hold of desperate intensity. His arms were pinioned by the drowning wretch, and they both ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Eagle Patrol • Howard Payson
... Something; and that right quickly if— As the thought was flashing through Dick's brain he saw his friend's horse stumble heavily, make a desperate effort to recover himself, and finally roll over and disappear completely with his rider in the dense ocean of greenish-grey vegetation, while the elephant, a bare fifty yards in the rear, threw up his outstretched trunk and trumpeted a loud blast of savage exultation. There was now but one thing ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... Waterloo who would not surrender. "The Old Guard dies, but never surrenders." "Among those giants then," says Hugo, "there was one Titan—Cambronne. The man who won the battle of Waterloo was not Napoleon, put to rout; not Wellington, giving way at four o'clock, desperate at five; not Bluecher, who did not fight. The man who won the battle of Waterloo was Cambronne. To fulminate at the thunderbolt ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... anything but the repose it came in quest of. The book which is written in bold graphic English, flings considerable light on the state of society in Wales, in the time of the Tudors, a truly deplorable state, as the book is full of accounts of feuds, petty but desperate skirmishes, and revengeful murders. To many of the domestic sagas, or histories of ancient Icelandic families, from the character of the events which it describes and also from the manner in which it describes them, the "History of the Gwedir ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... it. Some may think that because the Law-French is no better than the old Norman corrupted, and now a deformed hotch-potch of the English and Latin mixed together, it is not fit for a polite spark to foul himself with; but this nicety is so desperate a mistake, that lawyer and Law-French are coincident; one will not stand without the other." So enamored was he of the grace and excellence of law-reporters' French, that he regarded it as a delightful study for a man of fashion, and maintained that ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... land, for those who have lingered in its byways: but, alas, a troubled tide of strange metres, of desperate rhythms, of wild conjunctions, of panic-stricken collocations, oftentimes overwhelms it. "Sordello" grew under the poet's fashioning till, like the magic vapour of the Arabian wizard, it passed beyond ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... made an awful emergency, and this emergency has affected the life and character of all the race, in a bad way, terribly, awfully, beyond words to tell, or imagination to depict. The whole earth is in the grip of a desperate moral emergency. ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... for to their fleets the Mission's vessels now take medical and surgical aid, books and magazines, woollen garments and tobacco, which, as adjuncts to higher religious aid, are turning the once wild and desperate ocean roughs into clean-living sailors and good husbands and fathers—therefore are these days on the North Sea better far than those that are gone. Thousands of these brave men turn at Christmas to the M.D.S.F. flag as to the one bright link which binds them to friendly hearts ashore, ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... dragged into the moral chaos in which, it seemed to him now, Miss Goold lived. He was unconscious of any Divine leading, or even of any direct reliance on the obligations of honour. He could not himself have told why he clung with such desperate terror to his plan of escaping from his surroundings. Simply he could not do certain things or associate as a friend with people who did them. To get away from Dublin was the first necessity. For a moment it occurred to him that he might ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... historical articles a quarter of a century afterward. The handling, tearing, and charging of his cartridge, ramming it home (we used muzzle loaders during the Civil War), the capping of his gun, the aiming and firing, with furious haste and desperate energy,—for every shot may be his last,—these things require the soldier's close personal attention and make him oblivious to matters transpiring beyond his immediate neighborhood. Moreover, his sense of hearing is ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... that so formidable an enemy, during whose life they had not dared to flatter themselves with the hopes of being able to put an end to this war; so well was his courage sustained by stratagem and artifice, and his genius so fruitful in finding new expedients, even when his affairs were most desperate. We are told, that Jugurtha ran distracted, as he was walking in the triumph; that after the ceremony was ended, he was thrown into prison; and that the lictors were so eager to seize his robe, that they rent it in several pieces, and tore away the tips of his ears, to get the rich ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... "it is not that. So far as luck goes, you are lucky you are alive. Little do you know our desperate band. Little do you know you have escaped the wrath of Lafitte, of L'Olonnois, of Black Bart. Luck! No, that ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... young person's first dream of freedom and a fascinating career had come to grief. As she reviewed her disappointment and the dreary days that followed, a flood of self-pity welled up in the girl's heart, and she felt as if she must do something desperate ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... show you all Billabong before dark, she'll have to hurry," said Jim lazily. "Don't you let yourself be persuaded into anything so desperate, Tommy." ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... the heavy goblet, raised it high above his head, and with a drunken and desperate gesture he flung it in the direction of the praefect, but his hand had trembled and his arm was unsteady. The goblet missed the head of Taurus Antinor and fell crashing along the marble-topped table, bringing a quantity of crystal down with it ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... I can not help reflecting that his fellows here are put to death in thousands. Yes, the reapers, famed in poems and lithographs, are desperate bird-catchers. At the season of migration they capture thousands of these weary travellers with snares or limed twigs; on Maggiore alone sixty thousand meet their end. We have but those they choose to leave us to ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... head. "So you decided to be a thief, did you, Jed?" he said, slowly. "Well, the average person never'd have guessed you was such a desperate character. . . . Humph! . . . Well, well! . . . What was you goin' to do with the four hundred, provided you had kept it? You spent the money I lost anyway; you said you did. What did you spend ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln
... fiercely, "I accept it." And producing a key, he threw it on the table. "My life is, in truth, set on the die," he added, with a desperate look—"for if I lose, I ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... single him out in the fray. The king ordered relief to be given to the importunate friar; but the eager glance of the intrusive applicant so disquieted him—agitated, doubtless, from the idea of his small force being about to engage at such desperate odds—that he presently caused the attendants to look for the friar, but he was nowhere to be found. This caused him to array one Gib Harper in his armour, and appoint Lord Alan Stewart general of the field. The fight commenced with a rapid charge on the Scots ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... stormy look forward, and the navigation of October was so threatening, awful, and almost desperate, as he stood alone through the dreadful watches at the helm, with hot cheek and unsteady hand, trusting stoically to luck and hoping against hope, that rocks would melt, and the sea cease from drowning, that it was almost a wonder he did not leap overboard, only ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... of the Cumberland in a comfortable position, I now began to look after the remainder of my new command. Burnside was in about as desperate a condition as the Army of the Cumberland had been, only he was not yet besieged. He was a hundred miles from the nearest possible base, Big South Fork of the Cumberland River, and much farther from any railroad we had possession of. The roads back were over mountains, and all supplies ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... very desperate straits indeed, and some of us seemed tempted to give ourselves over to despair. If it had not been for the steadiness of those that were under Lancelot, I feel sure that the most part of the sailors would ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... majority rule in government cannot fairly be demanded from a disfranchised group. It is not to be wondered at that the old slogan of socialism, "Strike at the ballot-box!"—the call to lift the struggle of the classes to the parliamentary level for peaceful settlement—becomes the desperate, anarchistic I.W.W. slogan, "Strike at the ballot-box with an ax!" Men who can have no family life cannot justly be expected to bother about school administration. Men who can have no home life but only dreary shelter in ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... farther expenditure would plunge me into bottomless insolvency. I must confess that this disclosure of my financial condition added zest to the undertaking, and filled me with that fine excitement which accompanies a desperate speculation. I have always felt that another cow would have made a financier of me, and that I could have taken my place among my brethren in Wall Street without a tremor of the muscles or the ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... recognised that the unfortunate old fellow's evils had been in great part of his own creating. He knew that he was far from faultless. That poaching business—a very venial offence in a labourer's eyes—he knew had been a serious one, a matter of some two-score pheasants and a desperate fight with a gang. Looking at it as property, the squire had been merciful, pleading with the magistrates for a mitigated penalty. The drunkenness was habitual. In short, they were a bad lot—there was a name attached to the whole family for thieving, poaching, drinking, ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of forced labor and sexual exploitation; large scale migration of Zimbabweans to surrounding countries - as they flee a progressively more desperate situation at home - has increased; rural Zimbabwean men, women, and children are trafficked internally to farms for agricultural labor and domestic servitude and to cities for domestic labor and commercial sexual exploitation; young men and boys are trafficked to South Africa ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... maxim of that excellent divine," said he, "that Christian censure should never be used to make a sinner desperate; for then he either sinks under the burden or grows impudent and tramples upon it. A charitable modest remedy, says he, preserves that which is virtue's girdle-fear and blushing. Honour, dear lad, is the peculiar counsellor of well-bred natures, and these are few; but almost in ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... the picture of the fallen desperate man. He takes great trouble to persuade Saint Lambert that though the rigour of his principles constrains him to frown upon such breaches of social law as the relations between Madame d'Houdetot and her lover, yet he is so ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... a desperate effort he threw her into the next room. She fell onto the table which was laid for dinner, breaking the glasses, and then, getting up, she put it between her master and herself, and while he was ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... approaches the menopausal stresses with anxiety and apprehension, having done her duty to family and race, often having lived an exemplary self-sacrificing life, the intolerable contemplation of a late pregnancy drives her to desperate measures often for the first time in ...
— Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Various Aspects of the Problem of Abortion in New Zealand • David G. McMillan
... being swept off into sin if one gives way, which one never suspected till then; and yet with all these, the most dreadful sense of helplessness, of slavery, of despair?—God grant that may not remain, for then comes the mad hope to escape death by death, to try by one desperate stroke to rid oneself of that self which is for the time one's torment, worm, fire, death, and hell. And what is this dark fight within us? What does the Bible call it? It is death and life, eternal death and eternal life, salvation and damnation, hell and heaven, fighting together ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley
... striking are that "To my Hairdresser," and the irresistibly comic satire on modern ordnance, in which during a naval battle, after all the fighting has been done by ramming, "the last stern order of the brave" is whispered through the ship: "We're going to fire the guns!!" This desperate course is taken and described—the air grows thick and dark with broken breech, flying tube, and disrupted armour-plate, and when ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... Volscians was imminent, and the State was torn with internal dissensions; the patricians and the plebeians were bitterly hostile to one another, owing mainly to the desperate condition of the debtors. They loudly complained that whilst fighting in the field for liberty and empire they were oppressed and enslaved by their fellow-citizens at home; their freedom was more ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... it was with his brother towards him; but his works being evil, they minister to him no heavenly joy, neither do they beget in him love to his brother; but contrariwise, his heart fill his eye with evil also; which again provoketh (while it beholdeth the godly carriage of Abel) the heart to more desperate resolutions, even to set upon him with all his might, and to cut him off from the earth. Thus the goodness of God's people provoketh to envy the wicked heart of the hypocrite. As it was betwixt Saul and David; for after ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... news was brought to her of such a chance (the intelligence was given to her by old Lady Rockminster, whose speeches were as direct and rapid as a slap on the face), the humbled girl winced a little at the blow, but bore it meekly, and with a desperate acquiescence. "He has a right to marry, he knows a great deal more of the world than I do," she argued with herself. "Blanche may not be so light-minded as she seemed, and who am I to be her judge? I daresay it is very good that Arthur should go into Parliament ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... As erst, or whether wand'ring and defect Of nourishment have worn it all away. He said, whom they with indignation heard Extreme, alarm'd lest he should bend the bow, And sternly thus Antinoues replied. 340 Desperate vagabond! ah wretch deprived Of reason utterly! art not content? Esteem'st it not distinction proud enough To feast with us the nobles of the land? None robs thee of thy share, thou witnessest Our whole discourse, which, save thyself alone, No needy vagrant is allow'd to hear. ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... well as I do that that doesn't make a particle of difference. If I had been a boy instead of a girl, and had bucked the world for a living, I'd probably have done worse; and, anyway, it doesn't matter!" Her voice rose as if she were growing desperate. "I—I—like you—to pieces, Ward, and I'd—I'd rather marry you—than anyone else. But I don't want to think about that for a long while. I don't want to be engaged, or—or any different than the way we've been. It was good to be just pals. It was like my pretend Ward. I—I always ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... in basket-ball, Jane soon found herself fighting hard to win a position on the freshman team. She also found herself engaged in a desperate struggle to rule her own rebellious spirit. How she won the right to play in the deciding game of the year, because of her high resolve to be true to herself, has already been recorded in her doings as a ...
— Jane Allen: Right Guard • Edith Bancroft
... plentiful fortune, and a gentleman of good reputation, fitted out a sloop and went a-pirating, for which he was hanged, together with twenty-two of his crew, in November, 1718. Even women, like Anne Bonny and Mary Read, turned pirates and handled sword and pistol. Desperate, reckless, and lawless, they were filled with the spirit of adventure, and were the forerunners of the men that Hawke, Nelson, and Dundonald ...
— The Pirates of Malabar, and An Englishwoman in India Two Hundred Years Ago • John Biddulph
... of the case. In OTHELLO we have indeed a very strictly dramatic array of the forces of wrong—weakness, blind passion, and pitiless egoism; but there is already a full suggestion of the overwhelming energy of the element of evil; and in LEAR the conception is worked out with a desperate insistence which carries us far indeed from the sunny cynicism and prudent scepticism of Montaigne. Nowhere in the essays do we find such a note of gloom as is ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... have instincts to which the east wind appeals strongly. It excites their neuralgic energies. On the other hand, it was a curious circumstance, discovered afterward by an exchange of confidence between the desperate male victims, that this cleaning rage was carried on almost exclusively by the members of the Women's Co-Citizens' League in each of the voting ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... letters? Not Anno Domini, but many years B.C. The African deserves no pity. His hideous crime was enough to drive a father to any madness, and too many such monsters have by their acts made Texas justly desperate. But for American citizens to crowd to the retribution, and look on as at a holiday show, reveals the Inquisition, the Pagans, the Stone Age, unreclaimed in our republic. On the other hand, the young men and women who will watch side by side the burning of a negro shrink from using such words ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... of Barere was the loudest in opposition to their prayer. When the crimes of Lebon, one of the worst, if not the very worst, of the vicegerents of the Committee of Public Safety, had so maddened the people of the Department of the North that they resorted to the desperate expedient of imploring the protection of the Convention, Barere pleaded the cause of the accused tyrant, and threatened the petitioners with the utmost vengeance of the government. "These charges," he said, "have been suggested by wily aristocrats. The man who crushes the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... little episode was being performed up stairs, an open carriage, showily caparisoned and drawn by a stylish pair of well-groomed bays, drew up at the door. A desperate effort had evidently been made to get the coachman into some sort of livery, for he wore a tall black hat, with a broad velvet band, and a buckle in front as big as an ordinary sized horse shoe. His coat, too, was ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... every creatur' in their camp, the night we first landed with that capital object! Had you not held back, Deerslayer, it might have been done, and then you wouldn't have found yourself, at the last moment, in the desperate condition you mention." ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... man sneered, and read forward. It was of that desperate fight; - The Muscovite stole thro' the mist-wreaths that wrapped the chill Inkermann height, Where stood our silent outposts: old England was in them that day! O sharp worked his ruddy wrinkles, as if to the breath of the fray They ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... doomed from the outset. But he made a desperate struggle, and his opponents were driven to sore straits to bolster up their case. The devils persisted in speaking bad Latin, and continually failed to meet tests which they themselves had suggested. Sometimes their failures were only too plainly ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... I. "Supposing a gang of men—men of no conscience, desperate, adventurous men—gets together, as men were together on that ship, the doings and fate of which seem to be pretty mysterious. They're all out for what they can get. One of them is in possession of a valuable secret, and he imparts ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... sick in body and soul, but learning the long patience, to confront his eternal enemy, Cheese- Face, who was just as sick as he, and just a bit willing to quit if it were not for the gang of newsboys that looked on and made pride painful and necessary. One afternoon, after twenty minutes of desperate efforts to annihilate each other according to set rules that did not permit kicking, striking below the belt, nor hitting when one was down, Cheese- Face, panting for breath and reeling, offered to call it quits. And Martin, head on arms, thrilled at the picture he caught ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... he said humbly, "but I ate the others before I knew you were coming. They are good, aren't they? Does your mother ever bake sugar cakes?" he ended in a desperate attempt ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... that they can enjoy the active elements in it with almost undivided delight. Such an accomplishment is far more difficult in the case of sorrow.... The creation of pain-sensations may be explained as a desperate device for enhancing the intensity of the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... slave, 'whatever the slave is, there is no king on earth who can tyrannise over her will. But when this very slave is in nothing inferior to the king that bought her, your majesty shall then judge yourself of her misery, and her sorrow, and to what desperate attempts the anguish of ...
— Fairy Tales From The Arabian Nights • E. Dixon
... driver, but this is a pure fallacy, for a sled-dog's gallop is like a donkey's, short and sweet. The average gait is a shuffling trot, covering from five to seven miles an hour over easy ground; and even then desperate fights frequently necessitate a stoppage and readjustment of the traces. There are no reins, the dogs being fastened two abreast on either side of a long rope. To start off you seize the sled with both hands, give it a violent wrench to one side, ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... their sockets and gleaming with a lurid light, as if fire was burning within them. His teeth were firmly set—his lips white and tightly drawn, as if he was meditating, or had already made, some desperate resolve. He scarce looked at the tracks, he needed their guidance no longer. He ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... of love and the salt sea—of a helpless ship whirled into the hands of cannibal Fuegians—of desperate fighting and tender romance, enhanced by the art of a master of story telling who describes with his wonted felicity and power of holding the reader's attention * * * filled with the swing ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... apprehension. Mears, a constable, in company with his brother, proceeded to Culver's house, when, on application being made for the men alluded to, Sir William immediately shot the young man who accompanied his brother in the execution of his duty. Such was the excitement, and the desperate menaces of Sir William and his party, that it became necessary for the magistrates to interfere to put a stop to the proceedings, by the capture of the ringleader of the party, from whose advice to his followers the most serious consequences were likely ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... the boy meditated leaping upon the warrior, in the desperate attempt to wrench his gun from his grasp; but the mother, ...
— The Daughter of the Chieftain - The Story of an Indian Girl • Edward S. Ellis
... immediately repaired in great numbers to the spot, to prevent the ingress of the enemy; while, on the other hand, a strong detachment of troops rushed forward from the camp of Polysperchon to force their way through the breach into the city. A very desperate conflict ensued, and while the men of the city were thus engaged in keeping back the invaders, the women and children were employed in throwing up a line of intrenchments further within, to cover the opening which had been ...
— Pyrrhus - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... that Philip effected his escape from Pocasset his fortunes were in a desperate condition. His forces had been thinned by repeated fights and he had lost almost the whole of his resources. In this time of adversity he found a faithful friend in Canonchet, chief Sachem of all the Narragansetts. He was the son ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... tried. The man on the floor, working with desperate energy to replace the base-board, coughed in an asthmatic, wheezing way, as there came the imperative smashing of a fist upon the door panels, coupled with a gruff, curt demand for admittance. Again the man coughed—to drown perhaps the slight rasping sound as the base-board slid back into place—and, ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... better than in any other way. But of course he couldn't do that. Instead, he muttered that the damage didn't amount to much after all, and he hoped she wouldn't mind what he said, and then he got himself away and strode through the orchard like a man in a desperate hurry. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Calais was in that age deemed an impregnable fortress; and as it was known to be the favorite of the English nation, by whom it could easily be succored, the recovery of that place by France was considered as totally desperate. But Coligny had remarked, that as the town of Calais was surrounded with marshes, which during the winter were impassable, except over a dike guarded by two castles, St. Agatha and Newnam Bridge, the English ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... as he urged them on singly to the French, who on that day had resolved to offer their lives as an immolation to their mother-country. Eude on that day, ardent to clear himself from the odium which he had incurred, with desperate valour, taking a wide compass, attacked his new allies in the rear. The camp of the Mahometan was forced: the shrieks of his women and children reached him from amidst the massacre; terrified he saw his multitude shaken. Charles, who beheld ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... beaten at Hochstett, Villeroy at Ramilies, and Villars himself, the hero of Friedlingen, had lost the famous battle of Malplaquet against Marlborough and Eugene. Europe, kept down for a time by Colbert and Louvois, rose against France, and the situation of affairs was desperate. ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... party measures, which led her sometimes further than she wanted to go, Eleanor kept a very steady way, as graceful as it was steady. So friendly and frank as to give no cause of umbrage; while it was so cool and self-poised as to make Mr. Carlisle very uneasy and very desperate. It was just the manner he admired in a woman; just what he would like to see in his wife, towards all the rest of the world. Eleanor charmed him more by her high-bred distance, than ever she had done by the affection or submissiveness ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... misgivings to himself, and seemed the most indifferent of gay Cavaliers, he had really been a modest and diffident man. From the first he had had grave fears of the success of his cause, and more than doubts about the loyalty of his comrades. He was quite prepared not only for desperate effort, but for final defeat. No man could say he had embarked on the royal service from worldly ends, and now, if he had been a shrewd Lowland Scot, he had surely consulted his safety and changed his side, as most of his friends ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... arrest of a notorious young desperado who hails to the name of Deadwood Dick! Ha! ha! ha! isn't that rich, now? Ha! ha! ha! arrest Deadwood Dick! Why, 'pon my word it is a sight for sore eyes. I was not aware that I had attained such a desperate notoriety as that document implies. They will make me out a murderer before they get through, I expect. Can't let me alone—everlastingly they must be punching after me, as if I was some obnoxious pestilence ...
— Deadwood Dick, The Prince of the Road - or, The Black Rider of the Black Hills • Edward L. Wheeler
... have confessed behind prison bars that when they were children they were called cowards. After a while they actually came to believe that they were cowards, and in their efforts to acquire courage and demonstrate their bravery they were led to desperate and even criminal acts. They prowled around the dark alleys just to convince themselves that they were not afraid, that they were not cowards, and there they made the acquaintance of the criminals who led them into new and dangerous paths. Even if a child enters ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... desperate and colouring, which he was very unapt to do. "If you please, Mr. Richmond, I was sent to speak to—I forget what her name is—the ...
— Opportunities • Susan Warner
... mines. And this indeed was the case, for in the first tide of the rush of gold seekers Clark had discerned the workings of an ancient rule. Always it had been gold which inflamed the human mind to endure to the uttermost. His imagination went back, and he saw the desperate influx heading for California, for Australia, for South Africa, that mob of adventurous spirits for whom there burned nightly over the hills the lambent promise of the morrow, strengthening and invigorating to further effort. He ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... and the rain beating in sharp, stinging drops like hailstones upon my face and hands. It must have been close upon midnight, and there was no light but the dim, glow-worm glimmer of the lanterns on deck. Every one was hurrying past me. I began almost to repent of the desperate step I had taken; but I had learned already that there is no possibility of retracing one's steps. At the gangways of the two vessels there were men shouting hoarsely. "This way for the Channel Islands!" "This way for Havre and Paris!" To which boat should I trust myself and my fate? ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... from which this decline of health might be supposed to proceed, to wit, his hopeless love for Miss Walton—for, according to the conceptions of the world, the love of a man of Harley's modest fortune for the heiress of L4,000 a year is indeed desperate. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... running out after "specials" we are absorbed in the mimic fight of Acacia Avenue—the desperate conflict between Mrs. Studholm-Brown, of The Hollies, and Mrs. Dawburn-Jones, of Dulce Domum. They have husbands, these amiable ladies, but the husbands are mainly concerned with the commissariat and supply department, and are neither ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 7, 1914 • Various
... and shrinking with a shuddering instinctive fear. Then suddenly the thunders seemed to stifle all memory of sound—and left only the silent universe with myself and this terribly beautiful thing in the midst of utter emptiness. And I loved it with a strange, desperate, tigerish love. It expressed itself so magnificently; and that is really all a man, or a waterfall, or a mountain, or a flower, or a grasshopper, or a meadow lark, or an ocean, or a thunderstorm has to do in this world. And it was doing it right out in the middle of a desert, ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... very hard, sir. But admitting this, will I not turn everything into money, in a situation so desperate? Only as it is impossible for me to procure between this and to-morrow one hundred thousand francs, I conjure you, employ this money to withdraw this unhappy draught. Or you, who are so rich, make me an advance; do not leave me in ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... during the last year of my residence at Craven Hill. I had no masters, and my aunt Dall could ill supply the want of other teachers; moreover, I was extremely troublesome and unmanageable, and had become a tragically desperate young person, as my determination to poison my sister, in revenge for some punishment which I conceived had been unjustly inflicted upon me, will sufficiently prove. I had been warned not to eat privet berries, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... friend of mine (John Abdullah Capricorn, to give him his full name) was commandeered by a publisher last year to write a book for 10. The work was far advanced when an editor offered him 15 and his expenses to visit the more desperate parts of the Sahara Desert, to which spots he at once proceeded upon a roving commission. Whether he will return or no is now doubtful, though in March we had the best hopes. With the month of May life becomes hard for Europeans south of the Atlas, and when my poor dear friend ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... that grow in the orchards in Winesburg." Now, broken and adrift, they clutch at some rigid notion or idea, a "truth" which turns out to bear the stamp of monomania, leaving them helplessly sputtering, desperate to speak out but unable to. Winesburg, Ohio registers the losses inescapable to life, and it does so with a deep fraternal sadness, a sympathy casting a mild glow over the entire book. "Words," as the American writer Paula Fox has said, "are nets through which all truth escapes." ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... I was getting a little desperate, and against Tchagan Hou's advice I decided to try bullying the weather, and when the rain came on again I refused to stop. As a result we were all soaked through, and after getting nearly bogged, all hands of us in a quagmire, I gave it up and we camped on the drenched ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... Desperate now, the lad placed her on the floor, and, thrusting his head from the window, perceived that he could clamber up the two or three feet of rain spout that ran close by, and gain a position on the roof just overhead. If he ...
— With Marlborough to Malplaquet • Herbert Strang and Richard Stead
... he sat behind the bars, where the desperate legions drew, But he caught the hasting Tomlinson and would ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... up family prayers in my house, went to meetings, and conversed with experienced members of the church; but, for nine months or more, all to no purpose. At length I got into an awful state, beginning to think that I had been so desperate a sinner that there was no forgiveness for me. While I was in this miserable condition, I heard of a camp-meeting about to be held on Cape May, and I immediately resolved to attend it, and to leave no stone unturned to accomplish the object which I had so much at heart. I went accordingly, ...
— Personal Memoir Of Daniel Drayton - For Four Years And Four Months A Prisoner (For Charity's Sake) In Washington Jail • Daniel Drayton
... The country was hilly, and more suited for sheep-farming than for corn. Water- privileges were abundant in the shape of picturesque torrents, and numerous mills turned their capabilities to profitable account. Our companions were rather of a low description, many of them Germans, and desperate tobacco-chewers. The whole floor of the car was covered with streams of tobacco-juice, ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... character-revealing episodes that are only real when handled by a supreme artist. Its involutions and undulations, its very recoil on itself as the pair face their memories, he haunted, she suspicious, touch the springs of desperate lives. As an etching of a vicious soul, the Eliza of Chance is arresting. We do not learn her last name, but we remember her brutal attack on little Flora, an attack that warped the poor child's nature. Whether the end of the book is justified is apart from my present ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... me, Abdul," I exclaimed, "surely this situation is desperate? What can your nation subsist on ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... panic, no matter what happened. He bowed his face to hers, so that he felt the velvety smoothness of her cheek. She turned her mouth to him, and they kissed. His embrace was crushing for a moment, fierce with his love for her, desperate with his determination to ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood
... did not show the least excitement after his desperate contest. He had attended to it as a matter of business, and when over he suffered it to pass out of his mind. He took out his watch and ...
— Driven From Home - Carl Crawford's Experience • Horatio Alger
... created a marquess. The English earldom of Brecknock was added in 1660 and an Irish dukedom of Ormonde in the following year. In 1682 he had a patent for an English dukedom with the same title. Buckingham's intrigues deprived him for seven years of his lord-lieutenancy, and a desperate attempt was made upon his life in 1670, when a company of ruffians dragged him from his coach in St James's Street and sought to hurry him to the gallows at Tyburn. His son's threat that, if harm befell his father he would ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... had first wounded. Ned, watching his chance, got in several blows, first at one and then at the other of the huge creatures. The third devil fish, which had not been wounded, had disappeared. Finally Koku, with a desperate blow, succeeded in severing the tail from the beast attacking him, and that battle ...
— Tom Swift and his Undersea Search - or, The Treasure on the Floor of the Atlantic • Victor Appleton
... Cressida part as a play, and then years afterward added the Hector part, and again years afterward the Ajax and Ulysses part, seems to me only a monstrous contrivance of an honest and an able man in desperate straits to make his theory square with fact. As to detail upon this subject, I shall only notice one point. Tag-rhymes, or rhymed couplets ending a scene or a speech in blank verse or in prose, are regarded by the metre-critics (and justly ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... suddenly vanished from the thoroughfares; and he found himself alone in places thoroughly unknown to him, waking to the displeasing recollection that the approaches to the city were said to be beset by brawlers and ruffians of desperate characters, whom the cessation of the civil wars had flung loose upon the skirts of society, to maintain themselves by deeds of rapine and plunder. As might naturally be expected, most of these had belonged to the defeated party, who had no claim to the ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... point of indifference to the nation, but what must either render us totally desperate, or sooth us into the security of idiots. We must soften into a credulity below the milkiness of infancy, to think all men virtuous. We must be tainted with a malignity truly diabolical, to believe all the world to be equally wicked and corrupt. Men are in public as ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... at once adopted, and the committee chosen. Besides the chairman and Baldwin there were the vulture-faced secretary, Harraway, Tiger Cormac, the brutal young assassin, Carter, the treasurer, and the brothers Willaby, fearless and desperate men ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and even leading her sometimes when she was in a room she did not know. Dolores knew that she could only hope to exchange a word with him when he came back, and that the terrace was bleak and wet now, and the roses withered, and that her father feared for her, and might do some desperate thing if he found her lover talking with her where no one could see or hear. For old Mendoza knew the world and the court, and he foresaw that sooner or later some royal marriage would be made for Don John of Austria, and that even if Dolores ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... between two plates, and its fragrance filled the narrow cell. The penetrating smell of cabbage reached the nose of Toad as he lay prostrate in his misery on the floor, and gave him the idea for a moment that perhaps life was not such a blank and desperate thing as he had imagined. But still he wailed, and kicked with his legs, and refused to be comforted. So the wise girl retired for the time, but, of course, a good deal of the smell of hot cabbage remained behind, as it will do, and Toad, between his sobs, sniffed and reflected, ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... to the word of General Saterges, it was rascality which the General could pardon. He had gained many a victory in desperate strife,—now one other, the last and most complete: the kingdom's fairest star to shine among his honors! The proclamation of Stephen Cordier's pardon would instantly make broad the way to Chateau ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... me it seems of the utmost importance that not a moment should be lost in discovering what has become of the Inca, whose life may at this moment be in the utmost jeopardy; for those who were desperate enough to carry him off would probably not hesitate to kill him, if need were: indeed that may be their purpose. Your task, therefore, must be to rescue him without an instant's unnecessary delay, which you should be easily able to do with the aid of your troops. Probably if the officials ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... Though all to shivers dash't, the assault renew, Vain battry, and in froth or bubbles end: 20 So Satan, whom repulse upon repulse Met ever; and to shameful silence brought, Yet gives not o're though desperate of success, And his vain importunity pursues. He brought our Saviour to the western side Of that high mountain, whence he might behold Another plain, long but in bredth not wide; Wash'd by the Southern Sea, and on the North To equal ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... carried flowers over to St. Joseph's Hospital. But she could not pretend to herself that charities occupied her whole being.... No, the only way out was Matrimony. A marriage, suitable and successful, would start her career once more. With something like a desperate resolve Milly put her latch-key into the hole, and let herself into the paternal home, where a familiar family odor greeted her sensitive nostrils. With a grimace of disgust she swept upstairs. Decidedly it was time for her to settle ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... set. I was long in getting near her, and then she said her card was full; and when I made some desperate entreaty, she said, in an undertone that stabbed me by its very calmness, 'After what has passed to-day, the less we meet the better.' And she moved away, so as to cut me off ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... battle during the Crimean conflict followed, with an escort of Tartars and with carriage horses which at times seemed to fly over the ground. General de Kotzebue knew every foot of the soil and was, of course, a splendid host on such an occasion. On this first day the field of the desperate Alma fight was gone over carefully and on the succeeding morning the ruined ramparts and redoubts of the once great Fortress of Sebastopol—not as yet restored—were visited and studied. The Cemetery ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... suppose that such a catastrophe would have filled the minds of all men who were not entirely occupied with the struggle for life, that all would have seen that a glory was passing away from the earth, and would have made some desperate struggle to preserve it. But, as I say, they saw nothing of it. They were not aware that a universal ugliness was taking the place of beauty in all things made by man; and therefore the new ugliness must have pleased them as much as the old beauty. So it appears once again ...
— Progress and History • Various
... I'm waiting. Why don't you shoot? You are greater cowards than I have ever been, with all my shiverings and teeth-chatterings. Isn't the stake big enough to warrant your last desperate play? I'll make it bigger. You are the two men who broke the rail-joint at Silver Switch. Ah, that ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... composition of the paper were generally approved, but the University had never before been taken by storm in such a manner, and there was some commotion about it. I believe that very few persons would have taken the same step. Mr Sheepshanks wrote to me on Mar. 7th, intimating that it was desperate. I had no doubt of success. Whewell told me that some people accused me of bad faith, in omitting allusion to the L100 a year received as Member of the Board of Longitude, and to the profits of Lectures. I wrote him a note, ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... danger of pity—in some cases a commendable and Christian virtue, but inapplicable to this pernicious sect. He observed that such was their devilish obstinacy in error that even the little children, the sucking babes, were hardened and desperate heretics. He affirmed that no man without Heaven's especial warrant should attempt their conversion lest while he lent his hand to draw them from the slough he should himself be precipitated ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Otto of Nordheim laid his hopes in the dust, and Henry, for the third time, invested the eternal city. Hitherto, the Romans, encouraged by the Pope, had made an heroic resistance, and the besiegers had suffered incredibly from their desperate sallies, as well as from the diseases that decimated them. But the fidelity of the citizens was beginning to totter beneath the protracted warfare, and many sighed for a period to their calamities. Henry failed not to profit by these dispositions, ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... she stripped the cover off the first of the books the half-back had picked out for her, and really went to work. She bit down, angrily, the yawns that blinded her eyes with tears; she made desperate efforts to flog her mind into grappling with the endless succession of meaningless pages spread out before her, to find a germ of meaning somewhere in it that would bring the dead verbiage to life. She tried to recall the thrill in Rodney's voice when he had told her, on ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... foreigners and against the religion of the foreigners. He feared that this rebellion was begun at their instigation, and would be carried on with their encouragement and help. He prepared therefore for a sharp and desperate struggle, which he was determined should be carried out to ...
— Japan • David Murray
... Madame du Barry. Annoyed by their remarks, Beaumont determined to go and reside at the Lazaristes, his house at Versailles, to avail himself of the King's last moments, and sacrifice Madame du Barry when the monarch's condition should become desperate. He arrived on the 3d of May, but did not see the King. Under existing circumstances, his object was to humble the enemies of his party and to support the favourite who had assisted to ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... necessity of nature, into another sentiment of the same general character. This was the first instance in which I had witnessed a danger by fire. All was confusion around me, and all changed into hurricane within. The general situation, to my unpractised apprehension, appeared desperate, and I by contagion became alike desperate. At first I had been in some degree calm and collected, but that too was a desperate effort; and when it gave way, a kind of instant insanity ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... in particular places as reserve material for the making of milk. The qualities which are to appeal to the eye and ear and even nostrils of the male appear. Instincts dawn, an independence of spirit germinates, emulsified with a curious shyness and coyness and a desperate loneliness and secrecy. And all because there have been let loose in the blood from the glands of internal secretion the chemical substances that set going the clockwork of sequential incidents elaborated and repeated through countless aeons ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... of it? How can I think of it? There be times yet when Bertrand, and Guy de Laval, and I, talking together of those days, feel our hearts swell, and the blood course wildly in our veins, and truly I do marvel sometimes how it was that we and others were held back from committing some desperate crime to revenge those horrid deeds, wrought by men who in blasphemous mockery called themselves the servants ...
— A Heroine of France • Evelyn Everett-Green
... least to the complete occupation of our gunboats and armies, and the suffering enemy is thus cut off from his communication with Texas, and from the only available resources on which he can securely rely to sustain him much longer in his wicked and desperate game of treason. His condition is in the last degree perilous; he seems to be in the very agony of dissolution, or at least in that stage which immediately precedes it. His extremities are already cold with ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... peninsula, all these, however, being close at hand. I had for escort in my trips about the coast the famous Felix Martin, founder and Mayor of St. Raphael and of Valescure, a railway engineer who was known as the American of Provence, and who, in fact, is the most desperate and the most interesting and pleasant speculator of France. Speaking to me of Frejus, my favourite town, and its surroundings, Martin called it "the Roman Campagna on the Bay of Naples," a very pretty phrase, absolutely true of it, for the scenery ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... Suzanne, I had not believed ... Ah, you are more beautiful than ever ... No, I had not believed that the case was so desperate. ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... thickest darkness. Captain Ball, however, brought his vessel at length to Nelson's assistance, took his ship in tow, and used his best endeavours to bring her and his own vessel into Port Mahon. The difficulties and the dangers increased. Nelson considered the case of his own ship as desperate, and that unless she was immediately left to her own fate, both vessels would inevitably be lost. He, therefore, with the generosity natural to him, repeatedly requested Captain Ball to let him loose; and on Captain Ball's refusal, he became impetuous, ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... am a person, I can hold out no longer: I have wasted my spirits so to-day already that I am ready to sink under the fatigue; and I cannot but have some fears upon me yet, that my son Fainall will pursue some desperate course. ...
— The Way of the World • William Congreve
... His emotions were too powerful to permit his utterance. Maddened by despair, into which the terrible situation of his cherished wife had plunged him, he paced the jail with long strides, gazing about him, as if to seek some desperate remedy for his woes. Escape had scarcely presented itself to his mind. He had not the energy of character which rises superior to every ill, and had bent himself supinely to the fate which awaited him. To work through ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... "Listen, Jack, unfortunate man! When I heard of the—the misfortune, and of your folly in remaining, I instantly planned a last meeting for you. As it fell out, my wife has a fancy to spend the night here: I have asked her to bring her sister with her. But this inconceivably desperate plan of leaving in your ship, in broad light of day, frustrates all I would have done for you. For God's sake let us contrive some way of warning the Peregrine off till midnight; keep hidden, yourself; do not wilfully run your head ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... distinctly; 'twas the youth's, Who sung a doleful song about green fields, How sweet it were on lake or wild savannah To hunt for food, and be a naked man, And wander up and down at liberty. He always doated on the youth, and now His love grew desperate; and defying death, He made that cunning entrance I described: ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... proceeded either from Miss Cordsen or Madeleine, for the windows of both rooms were open. If it were Madeleine, the plot had become so involved that she did not dare to think of it. If it were Miss Cordsen, it was bad enough, but still not so desperate. From the sound she guessed that it must be a glass of water, or something of that sort, and as soon as day began to dawn she got up and left her room in the hope of clearing up the mystery. Madeleine sat up as she heard Fanny ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... do something—anything—to prove his manhood. For nothing ever makes a boy resolve quite so suddenly and firmly to become a man instantly as to be treated by a girl as he had been by Ruth. Had the most desperate danger then come in David's way, he would have hailed and hazarded it with delight. But he could not think of anything to overwhelm her with just at that moment, and so he could only stride on in helpless, angry silence. Ruth flew after him as if her thin ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... Roman Empire, sufficiently numerous to make it politic, in the opinion of Infidels, for a candidate for the empire to profess Christianity; sufficiently powerful to secure his success, notwithstanding the desperate struggles of the heathen party; and sufficiently religious, or if you like superstitious, to make it politic for an emperor and his politicians to give up the senate, the court, the camp, the chase, and the theater, and weary themselves with long prayers, and longer speeches, of preachers about ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... Carolina, entered the harbors of New York and New England, crossed Louisiana and northern Mexico to the Pacific, explored Mexico and Peru, marched across Georgia under the lead of the renowned Ferdinand de Soto, penetrated to the interior, and, after many romantic adventures and desperate hardships, discovered the magnificent river which we call the Mississippi; made perilous excursions into the wild depths of Arkansas and Missouri, and even to the remote banks of the ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... promiscuously, to our utter demonstrable ruin: the Dutch fighting otherwise, and we whenever we beat them. 2. We must not desert ships of our own in distress, as we did, for that makes a captain desperate, and he will fling away his ship when there are no hopes left him of succour. 3. That ships when they are a little shattered must not take the liberty to come in of themselves, but refit themselves the best they ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... grown three inches since he first gave it to me, but a man never sees anything and never suspects. If I had shown him a whole bush he would have thought it was the same. Well, it is a good night's work: the committee is safe. But this is a desperate game I am playing in these days —a wearing, sordid, heartless game. If I lose, I lose everything—even myself. And if I win the game, will it be worth its cost after all? I do not know. Sometimes ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to the purpose which I got out of Worcestershire. Two girls, daughter and niece of a farmer, bosom friends and bed-fellows, became involved in a love-affair and, desperate of a happy issue, attempted a charm to win their lovers back. On All Hallow Eve, two hours before the sun, they went into the garden, barefoot, in their nightgowns and circled about a stone which was believed to be bewitched.[13] ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... market they found that the wildmen upon whom they had banked as potential labor would not work. A few came and stayed, but most of them quit after earning a few pesos. So the hemp rotted in the field. Desperate, facing ruin, some of the planters went after labor too strongly, frightened and browbeat the Bogobos into working. The scheme worked, so a condition approximating peonage was developed upon several ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... with some difficulty, leaving his sword and one boot behind him. However, he at once pushed on, and placed himself at the head of the infantry engaged in the assault. But even his presence and example did not avail. The Russians maintained their position with desperate courage, and, when it became ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty
... easy," he observed, "to persuade desperate men that they've out-smarted themselves! Hold ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... at one time as many as 1200 people. Its passages were long and dark, and it abounded in rooms of all sizes and descriptions, in many of which were secure hiding places for men and stolen goods. The occupants were chiefly the most desperate characters in New York, and the "Old Brewery" was everywhere recognized as the headquarters of crime in the metropolis. The narrow thoroughfare extending around it was known as "Murderers' Alley" and "The Den of ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... her how the Canyon of the Colorado to the north, and the distance of the Mexican border to the south, made escape so almost desperate that the road agents preferred to devote their attentions to other routes. "If we were boarded, Miss Cullen," I said, "your jewelry would be as safe as it is in Chicago, for the robbers would only clean out the express- and mail-cars; but if they should so far forget their manners as to ...
— The Great K. & A. Robbery • Paul Liechester Ford
... "He made a desperate effort to move, and taking his cane in his left hand, passed his right hand slowly down it, from the golden head that adorned it to the other extremity. 'Look you,' ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... death he stood, but lo! the air Grew silent, and the horses ceased to neigh, And off his brow he tossed the clustering hair, And from his limbs he throw the cloak away; For whom would not such love make desperate? And nigher came, and touched her throat, and with ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... heads surged and quieted; murmurs burst out and died again; and all the while the hateful, insolent melody rose and fell; the horns bellowed; the drums crashed. It sounded like some shocking dance-measure; a riot of desperate spirits moved in it, trampling up and down, as if in one last fling ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... had but one hundred soldiers in garrison. He could not place much reliance upon the aid of undisciplined citizens. Still his brave spirit was disposed to present a desperate resistance. He called his council together, but was unwilling to have the people know the nature of the summons, lest they should clamor for ...
— Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam • John S. C. Abbott
... the People vs. James Day, alias 'Big-mouthed Scotty,' and William Jones, alias 'Billy Clews,' on the complaint of Captain Ira S. Garland, of the Twelfth precinct. Probably there are not two other men in this city who could fairly be compared with these. They are both of the most dissolute, desperate habits, and have been what they now are, thieves, since the date of their entry into this city. The first, who is truthfully styled 'big-mouthed'—that hole in his face being almost large enough to run in one of the cars on the elevated railroad in Greenwich street—was born in ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... have lived in the land, You who have trusted the trail, You who are strong to withstand, You who are swift to assail: Songs have I sung to beguile, Vintage of desperate years, Hard as a harlot's ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... more to father than I have," Dahlia cried, now stretching forward with desperate courage to confront her uncle, distract his speech, and avert the saying of the horrible thing she dreaded. "Rhoda was everything to him. Mother ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... auspiciously for our arms. Fort Donelson had fallen, after a desperate contest, and nearly all its garrison were taken prisoners. The scattered remains of the rebel army, under Johnston, had retreated precipitately from Kentucky, which had indeed been to them "the dark and bloody ...
— Daring and Suffering: - A History of the Great Railroad Adventure • William Pittenger
... utterly destitute and in need of medical care, to homes in many cases completely destroyed." The hospital and dispensary service was therefore continued. Dr. Finley and her group were sent to Germany and here met the returned prisoners of war, who were in desperate condition. ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... their strong attacks against the allied troops on the eastern bank of the San. Desperate attacks everywhere have been repulsed ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... ring again. We heard a swift rush. The elephant turned tail, and fled madly away, crashing through the matted brake that crackled and tore under his tread. The howdah swayed wildly, and the peon clung tenaciously on to the top bar with all his desperate might. The mahout, or elephant-driver, tried in vain to check the rush of the frightened brute, but after repeated sounding whacks on the head he got her to stop, and again turn round. Meantime the cries and shouting had ceased, and the beaters came pouring from the ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... the tiny clearing, he had grown afraid to start for home. As the dusk gathered, he had crept trembling into the cabin, whose door would not stay shut. When it grew quite dark, he crouched in the inmost corner of the room, desperate with fear and loneliness, and lifted up his voice piteously. From time to time his lamentations would be choked by sobs, or he would grow breathless, and in the terrifying silence would listen hard to hear if any one or anything were coming. Then again would the ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... seized with a whirlwind of frantic tears, of desperate sobs and mortal anguish. But through his frantic tears he looked at his father to see whether he had guessed it, and when mother came in he started to shout louder in order to divert any suspicion. But he did not go to her arms; he clung more closely to father, so that father had to carry ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... obedient animal had acquired through long experience of its master's habits. The locality had an unfavorable reputation. Sailors—deserters from whaleships—had been seen lurking about the outskirts of the town, and low scrub oaks which everywhere beset the trail might have easily concealed some desperate runaway. Besides these material obstructions, the devil, whose hostility to the church was well known, was said to sometimes haunt the vicinity in the likeness of a spectral whaler, who had met his death in a drunken bout, from a harpoon in the ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte
... once so dry and so excitable, and faint in swathes over a play (I suppose - for a wager) that would seem to me merely tedious, smile behind your hand, and remember the little dears are all in a blue funk. It must be very funny, and to a spectator like yourself I almost envy it. But never get desperate; human nature is human nature; and the Roman Empire, since the Romans founded it and made our European human nature what it is, bids fair to go on and to be true to itself. These little bodies will all grow up and become men and women, and have heaps ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... from New York, the image is that of a great green prairie, the monotony of whose surface is scarcely broken by the rivers which cross it here and there, and the great lines of railroad that serve as causeways through the desperate mud of spring and winter. A scattered people, who till the unctuous black soil only too easily, and leave as much of the crop rotting on the ground through neglect as would support the entire population; rude though thriving towns, where the grocery and the tavern, the ball room and the race course ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... off, for I shall not give it." At this moment the thief suddenly grasped the woman's hand in which she held the knife, seizing it by the wrist, and while she was writhing in desperate struggle against the iron grip, with his other hand thrust the end of ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... fall, for the rain had ceased, and there were outlines of moving cloud in the sky. It was the night which made his situation so terrible, by concealing the chances of escape. At first, he thought most of Roger. Was his brave horse drowned, or had he safely gained the bank below? Then, as the desperate moments went by, and the chill of exposure and the fatigue of exertion began to creep over him, his mind reverted, with a bitter sweetness, a mixture of bliss and agony, to the two beloved women to whom his ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... Sophronia. As I have told you, the condition of our affairs is desperate, and may be blown ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... been ever since. He had resumed his work at Aldershot, and owing to certain consequences of the wound in 1915 was not likely, in spite of desperate efforts on his own part, to be sent back to the front. His letters varied just as his presence did. Something always seemed to be kept back from her—was always beyond her reach. Sometimes she supposed she was not clever enough, that he found her inadequate and irresponsive. Sometimes, ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... inducement to the smallest efficient numbers. In this uncertainty, therefore, I put into motion fifteen thousand men, as being an army which, according to all human calculation, would be prompt and adequate in every view, and might, perhaps, by rendering resistance desperate, prevent the effusion of blood. Quotas had been assigned to the States of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, the governor of Pennsylvania having declared on this occasion an opinion which justified a requisition to the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of George Washington • George Washington
... first he had believed that she, like himself, had been deceived, for it had seemed to him out of the question that a young music mistress, who did not seem more than twenty years old, could have been mixed up in the doings of a desperate set of conspirators; however, he quite understood the alarm she must have felt, for though his story might have been believed owing to his being a stranger, and unconnected in any way with men who could have been concerned in a Nihilist plot, it would no doubt have been vastly more difficult ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... to Whitelocke from two mariners in hold for speaking desperate words,—that they would blow up the ship and all her company, and would cut the throat of the Protector, and of ten thousand of his party. One of them confessed, in his petition, that he was drunk when he spake these words, and had no intention ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke
... so lonely a position, so far removed from the possibility of assistance in case of attack. He settled there, however, just after Pontiac, who was at the head of an alliance of all the Indian tribes of those parts, had, after the long and desperate siege of Fort Pitt, made peace with us upon finding that his friends, the French, had given up all thought of further resistance to the English, and had entirely abandoned the country. Mr. Welch thought, therefore, that a permanent peace was likely to reign on the frontier, ...
— True to the Old Flag - A Tale of the American War of Independence • G. A. Henty
... been in any respect bettered, either by the minister's or David's interference. Aunt Janet had received no special reproofs or threats for her encroachments on Maggie's rights, and she made a point of extending them in many ways. Before March was over the girl was growing desperate. ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... of bearing and rearing a large family. She approaches the menopausal stresses with anxiety and apprehension, having done her duty to family and race, often having lived an exemplary self-sacrificing life, the intolerable contemplation of a late pregnancy drives her to desperate measures often for the first time in ...
— Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Various Aspects of the Problem of Abortion in New Zealand • David G. McMillan
... between newspaper articles duly pamphleted and distributed to the disgust of all decency, and the translation of an Arabian limited in issue and intended only for the few select. Nor could they fail to observe that black balling The Nights and admitting the "revelations" was a desperate straining at the proverbial gnat and swallowing the camel. My readers will hardly thank me for dwelling upon this point yet I cannot refrain from ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... by this, the desperateness of mans heart: {148b} for what is it but desperate wickedness, to make promise to God of amendment, if he will but spare them; and yet so soon as they are recovered (or quickly after,) fall to sin as they did before, and never to regard their ...
— The Life and Death of Mr. Badman • John Bunyan
... as so often Maggie found her, in a stiff-backed chair, her hands folded on her lap, staring in front of her. Her eyes were like the open eyes of a dead woman; it was as though, with a great effort of almost desperate concentration, she were driving her vision against some obstinate world of opposition, and the whole of life had meanwhile stayed to ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... did not decline, but only did not increase. Even of the real and not imaginary ploughmen at any time possessed by Italy, too many in the south were slaves, and therefore ineligible for the legionary service, except in desperate intestine struggles like the Social war or the Servile. Rome could not lose for her recruiting service any ploughmen but those whom she had really possessed; nor out of those whom really she possessed any that were slaves; nor out of those whom (not being slaves) she might have ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... it; she consented to it," said Jean Merle. "If she had uttered one word against my desperate plan, I should have recoiled from it. To be dead whilst you are yet in the body; to have eyes to see and ears to hear with, and a thinking brain and a hungry heart, whilst there is no sign, or sound, or memory, or love from your former life; you cannot conceive what that is, Phebe. I was ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... a cheap showiness, are the ingredients of this devil's cauldron. The worst of it is that it has no fine elements at all. There is a nobility about real tragedy which evokes a quality of passionate and sincere emotion. There is something essentially exalted about a fierce resistance, a desperate failure. But this abject, listless dreariness, which can hardly be altered or expressed, this miserable floating down the muddy current, where there is no sharp repentance or fiery battling, nothing but a mean abandonment to a meaningless and unintelligible destiny, seems to have ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... family I will not serve much longer," I cried, "for I am driven desperate. You have stricken the sword out of my hands; you have left us all defenceless. I had always these letters I could shake over his head; and now—what is to do? We are so falsely situate we dare not show the man the door; the country would fly on fire against us; and I had ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... child and learning to "suffer and grow strong." Fate had ordained, however, that Russell's father should not die upon the gallows; and soon after the verdict was pronounced, when all Mrs. Aubrey's efforts to procure a pardon had proved unavailing, the proud and desperate man, in the solitude of his cell, with no eye but Jehovah's to witness the awful deed, took his own life with the aid of a lancet. Such was the legacy of shame which Russell inherited; was it any marvel that at sixteen that ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... without heeding her. She was some way behind me, and feeling that she could not otherwise prevent my entrance, for I was now upon the very lobby, she made a desperate attempt to seize hold of my person: she succeeded in grasping the end of my shawl, which she drew from my shoulders; but slipping at the same time upon the polished oak floor, she fell at full ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... and humanity, with abusive Histories of the Greek and Roman republics, with fulsome panegyrics on the Roman Emperors (at the very time when we were reviling Buonaparte for his strides to universal empire) with the slime and offal of desperate servility—and we cannot but consider the Essay as one of the poisonous ingredients thrown into the cauldron of Legitimacy "to make it thick and slab." Our author has, indeed, so far done service to the cause of truth, that he has counteracted many ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... Thomson was kept on board, and had a cabin given up to her own use; good living and medical attendance soon cured the soreness of her tanned and blistered skin, and the ophthalmia, which had deprived her of the sight of one eye. The black Boroto grew desperate when he found that she would not return to him, and threatened to cut off her head to satisfy his vengeance—a catastrophe which the rescued woman avoided by not going on shore; and she was eventually handed over, in good ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... regulated by a scale of averages because it is constantly subject to arbitrary changes. If the duty be adjusted on that basis for any given date, a reduction of wages would at once be enforced abroad, and the American manufacturer would in consequence be driven to the desperate choice of surrendering the home market or reducing the pay of workmen. The theory of protection is not answered, nor can its realization to attained by any such device. Protection, in the perfection of its design as described by Mr. Hamilton, does not invite ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... cabin ten miles from Indiana, on one of the doctor's farms, some colored men had taken refuge and worked as harvest hands in the neighborhood. To it came the sheriff at midnight with a posse, and after as desperate a resistance as unarmed men could make, two were captured. On one of these was found ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... heart of the riotous district, in Second Avenue, when some one who had evidently been once in his clutches, recognized him, and pointing him out, shouted "Detective!" Instantly a rush was made for him, and he was knocked down, and kicked and stamped upon. Regaining, with a desperate effort, his feet, he sprang up the steps of a house, and fought his assailants fiercely, till the lady of the house, seeing his perilous situation, courageously opened the door and let him in, and then bolted and barred it in the face of the mob. Through some ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... lift himself she rolled down with his weight and threatened to capsize. But he must not be beaten. He was fighting for Carrie's life, and remembering this gave him extra strength. Sliding his hands along the side of the punt, he let the current take him aft, and then with a desperate effort lifted the upper of his body above the pointed stern. Next moment, he fell forward on the deck and crawled to the well. He had won. He tried to shout, but could not. His heart beat like a hammer and ...
— Partners of the Out-Trail • Harold Bindloss
... army informed us that affairs were equally bad in Paris. Rendered desperate by hunger, the citizens were up in arms, and no one's life was safe for a day. By a stroke of good fortune the Queen-Mother had escaped from the city, and was now with the young King at Poitiers. Of Raoul I could learn nothing, but the Duke of ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... opposition party, there is often bloody work; but this election was, in the electioneering phrase, a "hollow thing"—i.e. quite sure, as those who had voted for Admiral Hood now withdrew, without standing a poll, as being convinced beforehand their chance to succeed was desperate. ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... his nose; he drew two or three deep breaths, and then a strange thing happened: Derancourt began to sob in a terrible manner, and to talk of all those things he had never mentioned. The grief he had suppressed for months overflowed, or rather, rushed out in desperate, heartrending lamentations. ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... I was desperate. Then suddenly I looked at him and he looked at me and he said, with great dignity, "All gentlemen must be silent!" and sat down, with his ...
— Flash-lights from the Seven Seas • William L. Stidger
... in January, '48, just after breakfast, Jolivet trois (tertius) put a sparrow into his squirrel's cage, and the squirrel caught it in its claws, and cracked its skull like a nut and sucked its brain, while the poor bird still made a desperate struggle for life, and there was ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... thereupon was laid to the place. In a sortie the brave Schwartzenberg was killed, but Colonitz coming up in force the mutineers were locked up in the town which they had seized, and the Turk never came to their relief. Famine drove them at last to choose between surrender and a desperate attempt to cut their way out. They took the bolder course, and were all either killed or captured. And now—the mutineers having given the Turk this lesson in Christian honour towards captives—their comrades and the rest of the imperial forces showed them the latest and most approved Christian ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... will be put away long before he comes," responded Master Cheese. "Mind your own business. And, look here! if anybody comes bothering, Mr. Jan's out, and Mr. Cheese is out, and they can't be seen till the morning—unless it's some desperate case," added Master Cheese, somewhat qualifying the instructions—"a fellow dying, or ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... hostility. The Baron seemed to bring all the weight of his fortune to bear upon him, the better to humiliate him in his poverty. M. de Bargeton had counted on having no more to say, and his soul was dismayed by the pause spent by the rivals in mutual survey; he had a question which he kept for desperate emergencies, laid up in his mind, as it were, against a rainy day. Now was the proper time ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... harbouring that Minna's comfortable circumstances were in part due to this man's friendship, filled me with gloomy misgivings. But as I have said, although I could find no real cause to complain of infidelity, I was distracted and alarmed, and was at last driven to the half-desperate resolve of regaining my balance in this respect by obtaining complete possession of Minna. It seemed to me as though my stability as a citizen as well as my professional success would be assured by a recognised union with Minna. The two years spent in the ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... Plutarch, in his Life of Otho, after quoting the view of the emperor's secretary, Secundus, that Otho was over-strained and desperate, goes on to give the explanation of 'others'. This agrees exactly with the story given here. Plutarch and Tacitus are apparently quoting from the same authority, unknown to ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... not bring herself to believe this. She searched all the while. She searched between reeds and bulrushes; tramped and tramped on the muddy shore, never thinking of how deep her foot sank, and how wet she had become. She was unspeakably desperate. Her heart ached in her breast. She did not weep, but wrung her hands and called for her child in loud ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... were simply shrieking with laughter, and loud shouts of the most infamous encouragement reached us. "If you go on like that, you'll get there by Christmas," or, "Well done! stick to it. Now you're off." We were stuck faster than ever. Things looked desperate. At last, with the combined strength of all the animals and men, we got ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... studded here as everywhere with them; fine buildings put to the pernicious use of imprisoning for life those whose only crime is poverty, and destined to be metamorphosed ere long (so I prophesy) into lunatic asylums for desperate ministerialists, prisons for the Chartists, veterinary colleges for cattle with the rot, and as one good end, hospitals for the poor. Near Redruth, I took notice in the moonlight of Carn-breh, the remains of a British beacon or hill-fort, much of the antiquarian interest of which ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Hawkins, son of the noted English freebooter Sir John Hawkins. The reference in the text is to the fight between Richard Hawkins and the Spanish admiral Beltran de Castro, off the coast of Peru, June 20-22, 1594; after a long and desperate contest, the English were forced to surrender. Hawkins was taken a prisoner to Spain, but afterward sent back to England; he died soon after 1620. See his work, Observations ... in his Voyage into the South Sea (London, 1622; reprinted ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume XI, 1599-1602 • Various
... ever be able to recover it; though the recent boundless theatre of hostilities is gradually contracting, and the resources of the rebellion are rapidly melting away, until there remains no longer any doubt of our ultimate and even speedy success in crushing the wasted armies of the desperate foe; and though the boundaries of the boasted confederacy are uncertain, ever-shifting, and mystical, while whole populations of recovered regions of country hail the advent of our conquering flag ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... bow her dusky head to earth and kiss the print of his heel, she would have obeyed could she but feel sure that her reward would be a simple touch of his hand, an assurance that no other woman could find a moment's place in his love. Verily, he had been doing desperate wooing in the long winter, for the very depths of her nature were all athrob with love for him. And now he could no longer plead that poverty withheld his offer of his hand. She would soon be mistress of her own little fortune, and, ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... Roman soldiers denouncing their compatriots and themselves; others betook themselves to a safe distance from the cities; some hurled themselves into wells or over precipices. The leaders of the opposition confiscated the property of the rich, abolished debts, and gave arms to the slaves. It was a desperate contest. Once overcome, the Achaeans reassembled an army and marched to the combat with their wives and children. The general Dioeus shut himself in his house with his whole family and set fire to the building. Corinth ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... river." Balch describes it as an attempt to "penetrate into the city by galloping between the redoubts." It was the anticipation of the Crimean "Charge of the Light Brigade;" only in this case, no one blundered; it was simply a desperate chance. Cannon were to the right, left, and front, and the heroic charge proved in vain; the noble Pole fell, banner[8] in hand, pierced with a mortal wound—another foreign martyr to our dearly ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... murderer and his victim was a most desperate one. Half of a man's shirt sleeve was found near the dead body, soaked in blood. The woman had evidently torn it from her murderers arm in her ...
— The Mysterious Murder of Pearl Bryan - or: the Headless Horror. • Unknown
... Rosamund's room, feeling more and more that wild living thing inside her—that wild thing that would not be subdued, that would rise up and urge her to desperate actions. Then all of a sudden there came the patter of small feet, and those feet stopped, not at Rosamund's door, but at her own. It was opened and a little face peeped in. Irene, in Rosamund's room, could ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... Reform Bill in our times. But the Commons made a memorable stand against Edward III. when he was the most powerful sovereign of western Europe, one which would have been impossible had not this able and ambitious sovereign been embroiled in desperate war both ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... two had been the only white men who did us wrong, then might our plight not have become so desperate; but many there were, upwards of sixteen so Master Hunt declared, who from day to day carried away secretly such weapons and tools, or powder and shot, as they could come upon, thereby trusting to the word of the savages that they might live with them in their villages always, ...
— Richard of Jamestown - A Story of the Virginia Colony • James Otis
... with a lady, and a series of bows took place. Desmond held his hat in his hand till we had passed; his expression varied so much from what it was when I saw him last, at the breakfast table, he being in a desperate humor then, that it served me for mental comment ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... her eyes taking in one by one, the murky windows, the dirty floor, the unwashed dishes, the tumbled bed, the rusty, grease bespattered stove choked with cold ashes, she told herself hotly that it was not the dirt nor even the desperate crassness that was smothering her joy. It was the fact that there was nowhere a touch to suggest preparation for her home-coming. Martin had made not even the crudest attempt to welcome her. It would have been as easy for Rose to be cheerful in the midst of mere ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... of proceeding in this last case, the first plausible, and frequently used, as when it is hinted to them that the Roman people might entertain an ill opinion of them, or that there might be an appeal from their judgment; the other desperate, and not so much used, as when threatened with prosecution themselves if they suffer themselves to be corrupted. This is a hazardous point, and is conducted with more safety to the orator when in a large assembly where corrupt judges are restrained by fear, and the upright have the majority. ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... old self rose against this new self that was the slave of comfort. It made desperate efforts to shake off the strangling lethargy. When he went about saying that he was getting rusty, that he ought never to have left Leeds, and that it would do him all the good in the world to go back there, he was saying what he knew to be the truth. The life he was leading ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... a knight That road, who halted, asking, "What's the fright?" They told him, and he spurred straight for the site! The beast was seen to smile ere joined they fight, The man and monster, in most desperate duel, Like warring giants, angry, huge, and cruel. Stout though the knight, the lion stronger was, And tore that brave breast under its cuirass, Scrunching that hero, till he sprawled, alas! Beneath his shield, all blood and mud and mess: Whereat ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... discarded her honour to make of it a cloak for the protection of Tremayne? Did she love Tremayne and take that desperate way to save a life she accounted lost, or was it that she knew the truth, and out of affection for Una had ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... rifle. Now he let it sink slowly so that the butt came to rest gently upon the rock at his feet. Blenham held the high hand; Blenham was unthinkably vile; Blenham was desperate. And Terry, his little Terry on whom Blenham had always looked with the eye of a brute and a beast, was in there, just beyond three inches of solid seasoned ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... end, for his father would not hear of providing him with the necessary funds now that he had actually confessed his atheism. He was hardly allowed to speak to his sisters, every request for money to start him in some profession met with a sharp refusal, and matters were becoming so desperate that he would probably have left the place of his own accord before long, had not Mr. Raeburn himself put an end to a state of things which had ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... Emily made a last desperate effort. She wrung her handkerchief hard in her lap, and let off the name as if she had been letting off a ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... came out of it emperor. Fouche, minister of police, and his assistants were not going to be useless, for if in the eyes of the public, Georges' death seemed the climax, it was in reality but one incident in a desperate struggle. The depths sounded by the investigation had revealed the existence of an incurable evil. The whole west of France was cankered with Chouannerie. From Rouen to Nantes, from Cherbourg to Poitiers, thousands of peasants, bourgeois and ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... attack, but a body of Polish cuirassiers were at last sent to their aid, who, levelling their lances, and dashing with loud shouts against the flank of the Turkish batteries, carried the position, and put the defenders to the sword. It was not so much a battle, as a series of desperate but irregular skirmishes scattered over wide extent of ground—the Turkish troops (who were almost all cavalry, as most of the regulars and artillery were still in the camp) gradually receding before the heavy advancing columns of the Christians. By four P.M. they were driven so ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... the punishment of the confiscation of their property. They acted accordingly, and returned to the presence of Don Fernando de Silva and of his successor, Don Juan Nino de Tabora. Those barbarians endured very great delay, until, finding themselves in a desperate condition and poorly equipped, they returned, committing signal depredations on the way; and since then they have continued their incursions, to the very great injury of all the country. And although expeditions have been ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIV, 1630-34 • Various
... And last of all he appears as the disappointed, disillusioned man, "infelix academicus ignotus." A wife and children on his hands, his occupation gone, his hopes of the Revels Mastership blasted, he becomes desperate, and writes that last bitter ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... never moved once whilst they rowed. In the end, I myself broke the silence, shouting lustily to them, but getting no answer until I had repeated the call thrice. The fourth cry, loud and in something desperate, brought the response so eagerly awaited; but when I recognised the voice of him who then hailed me I fell down again in my boat with a heart-stricken burst of sorrow, for the voice was the ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... should be tempted to make trial of the powers of himself and his umbrella in this way, we think it right, by way of caution, to tell him that the French General Bournonville, who was imprisoned in the fortress of Olmutz in 1793, became so desperate that he attempted to regain his freedom by leaping with an umbrella from his window, which was forty feet from the ground. He hoped that the umbrella would break his fall. Doubtless it did so to some extent, and saved him from being killed, but being a large heavy man, he ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne
... declines the weight of other things, and alters the true state of the question: it is a shrewd sign, either that he has not weighed things maturely, or else (which is more probable,) that he maintains a desperate cause." ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... so much to ask a person to have a cup of tea!" Martie stammered, with a desperate attempt at self-defense. She felt tears pressing against her eyes. Lydia would have been meek, Sally would have been meek, but Martie's anger was her nearest weapon. It angered her ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... or two of the daily papers contained an account of Andrew's arrest, with his father's name and all the particulars of the transaction. Any one reading this account, with the reporter's comment, could not help but believe that Andrew was a desperate bad boy, and undoubtedly guilty in design ...
— The Iron Rule - or, Tyranny in the Household • T. S. Arthur
... me so smartly through my facings, that although it was quite a cold day for Spain, I give you my honor I perspired to the very tips of my fingers And toes. The chance of escape was, I felt, almost desperate. The previous evening a rumor had circulated that the British general had stormed Ciudad Rodrigo, and might therefore be already hastening in his seven-league boots, toward Badajoz. The French were consequently more than ever ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... this resolution so suddenly? There was time, all the time in the world, and having once neglected the thing at the very start, it was curious that she should now, at this late date, make her desperate resolve. Preston had not been worse, more difficult to handle. In fact, when the two women had grown used to his case, the management had been simple enough. He had thought she was inured to the disgust and the horror—placid ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... least, as Mart Benson could remember, it had gurgled across the foot of his father's garden, tumbling heels over head down the little fall in the middle, as if it knew it had got into some place that didn't belong to it, and was in a desperate hurry to get out. ...
— Harper's Young People, June 1, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... with him, there comes into the Hall Creed and Ned Pickering, and after a turne or two with them, it being noon, I walked with them two to the King's Head ordinary, and there we dined; little discourse but what was common, only that the Duke of Yorke is a very, desperate huntsman, but I was ashamed of Pickering, who could not forbear having up my Lord Sandwich now and then in the most paltry matters abominable. Thence I took leave of them, and so having taken up something at my wife's tailor's, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... Second-Lieut. Edmunds who had been on leave since we left Miraumont came back to assist me, for about another month. Great droves of German prisoners now began to pass us several times a day, a cheering sight in one way, but not a pleasant one in another. They were truly a desperate-looking collection of men, mostly of a ...
— Q.6.a and Other places - Recollections of 1916, 1917 and 1918 • Francis Buckley
... now. He was gloomy and desperate. He was a forsaken, friendless boy, he said; nobody loved him; when they found out what they had driven him to, perhaps they would be sorry; he had tried to do right and get along, but they would not let him; since nothing ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... bore up against what was harder yet to encounter than all these. Charles Barclay's was one of those natures which, being miserable, are apt to become desperate. To such men, affliction seems to be torture, but no discipline. But our humanity perceives from a level, and therefore a short-sighted point of view. We may well be thankful that the Great Ruler sees ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... such things (and he must be a lucky physician, methinks, who has no such mischief within his own experience) never weigh with deadly weight on any man's conscience. Something must be risked in the cause of science, and in desperate cases something must be risked for the patient's self. Septimius, much as he loved life, would not have hesitated to put his own life to the same risk that he had imposed on Aunt Keziah; or, if he did hesitate, it would have been only because, if the experiment turned out disastrously ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... betray him, he made desperate efforts to suppress it but Nature would have its way, and probably did so with greater violence than if no resistance ...
— Try and Trust • Horatio Alger
... and they will become desperate. Their interests are mine, of course. I am perfectly sincere in saying to you, Lady Deppingham, and to you, Mr. Browne, that in time they will win out against you in the courts. But they are impatient; they are not the kind who can wait and be ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... shining palace of the sun, And shiver all the starry firmament, For amorous Jove hath snatch'd my love from hence, Meaning to make her stately queen of heaven. What god soever holds thee in his arms, Giving thee nectar and ambrosia, Behold me here, divine Zenocrate, Raving, impatient, desperate, and mad, Breaking my steeled lance, with which I burst The rusty beams of Janus' temple-doors, Letting out Death and tyrannizing War, To march with me under this bloody flag! And, if thou pitiest Tamburlaine the Great, Come down from heaven, ...
— Tamburlaine the Great, Part II. • Christopher Marlowe
... confusion she was aware of her determination not to betray to them that she was ill. "If only the cat wouldn't grow so fast, I believe I could manage," was her desperate thought. There was a roaring in her ears; she caught suddenly from an infinite distance the voice of the stout ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... perfect pair in absolutely perfect surroundings. And no one supposes that he himself is perfect or that the world around him is perfect. So there is in the pair a consciousness of imperfection, a vision of perfection, and a desperate yearning to be more perfect and to make the world more perfect. Deep and strong as the creative impulse itself is the impulse to improvement. It is due to this impulse that the mother reaches over her child with such loving care, strives to ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... Marius she was thinking, when her mother, surprising her gazing into vacancy, would ask her, "What are you thinking of?" And, at every new vexation she had to endure, her imagination decked him with a new quality, and she clung to him with a more desperate grasp. ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... obtain from Parliament the self-governing powers of a spiritual society. I doubt it, and I do not desire it. My own ideal is Cavour's—the Free Church in the Free State; and all such schemes as Mr. Temple's seem to me desperate attempts to make the best of two incompatible worlds. By judicious manipulation our fetters might be made to gall less painfully, but they would be more securely riveted than ever. So in this new controversy Mr. Temple stands on one side and I on the other; but this does not impair my ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... broke out half against my will. Margaret was forced to listen, for I would not let her go, but she seemed to harden herself against me, growing colder, stiller, statelier, as I went on, and when I said in my desperate way,— ...
— On Picket Duty and Other Tales • Louisa May Alcott
... Gerald remains to sketch some jewels, which Lakme has left upon a shrine while she goes flower-gathering with her slave Mallika, evidently also to await developments when she returns. Lakme soon comes sailing in on her boat, and there is a desperate case of love at first sight. Their demonstrations of affection are soon interrupted by the appearance of the priest, whose anger Gerald escapes by fleeing, under cover of a convenient thunder-storm. In the next act Lakme and her father appear in the ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... again, that our enterprise is hopeless, because even if we obtained the land with supremacy over it, the poor only would go with us? It is precisely the poorest whom we need at first. Only the desperate make good conquerors. ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... victory over the youth. But Rodrigo was strong as a man, and his deadly hate of the count added vigor to his arm. Though soon wounded and bleeding, he yet parried with skill the blows aimed at his heart, and finally, with one desperate effort, drove the sword of Mudarra through and through the body of Gormaz. The head of his fallen enemy Rodrigo carried home in triumph to the proud Diego. Thus did the youthful Ruy Diaz de Bivar avenge the wrongs ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... to wilful men The injuries that they themselves procure Must be their schoolmasters. Shut up your doors: He is attended with a desperate train; And what they may incense him to, being apt To have his ear abus'd, ...
— The Tragedy of King Lear • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... disappear in the water in terror; but he must breathe, and out would come his nose again, nearer the dog each time. At last the water ran out of the hole as well as in, and the soaked beast came with it, and made a desperate rush. But in a trice the dog had him, and the boys stood off in a circle, with stones in their hands, to see what they called "fair play." They maintained perfect "neutrality" so long as the dog was getting the best of the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... ejaculated the widow, giving a desperate and impassioned plunge to the churn-dasher. "Now I know why I dreamt of snakes and muddy water the night before she come here to the Ladies' Aid Club. Well, she's seventy, and she can't live forever; she can't take Eben Packard's money into the next world with her, either, and I guess ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... system numbers of unfortunate persons either delay calling in medical assistance until the case has become almost desperate so far as the patient is concerned, or they resort to unqualified persons, with the result that in most cases what was in the first instance a simple attack, capable of treatment, results in serious complications ...
— Venereal Diseases in New Zealand (1922) • Committee Of The Board Of Health
... Denmark, even, it is said, from Iceland. The eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries are, in fact, the great period all over Europe for the incursions of the Northmen—high noon, so to speak, for those fierce and roving sons of plunder,—"People," says an old historian quaintly, "desperate in attempting the conquest of other Realmes, being very sure to finde warmer dwellings anywhere than in their ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... coming, and knew what a struggle we would have to elude them without food, we boldly marched into the midst of the warriors, only to find that we had been hiding from an entirely different tribe of savages. The knowledge of this made us desperate, but we were hungry, and we had read of instances where men had acted boldly when in great danger from enemies; so that we concealed our fears, and demanded something to eat. Catching sight of a roast fowl we took it from the spit on which it was hanging, and began ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... of Atkinson, and from them I have learned passages of his former life, and this in particular, that the illness of which he died was brought on by a wound of which he never quite recovered, which he got in the desperate attempt, when he was quite a boy, to defend his captain against a superior force of the enemy which had boarded him, and which, by his premature valour inspiriting the men, they finally succeeded in repulsing. This was that Atkinson, ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... HONOUR. I am so old a friend of you and yours, Cecil, that you may surely trust me. I was your father's friend. Side by side we stood in every crisis of his varied life. Together faced the Dervish rush at Abu Klea, and afterwards in India took our part in many a desperate unnamed frontier tussle. I helped him woo your mother, spoke for him when he put up for Parliament, advised him when he visited the city. In fact, I was his companion all through life, and I stood beside his bed ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... wiser than you were, King Midas!" said the stranger, looking seriously at him. "Your own heart, I perceive, has not been entirely changed from flesh to gold. Were it so, your case would indeed be desperate. But you appear to be still capable of understanding that the commonest things, such as lie within everybody's grasp, are more valuable than the riches which so many mortals sigh and struggle after. Tell ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... opportunity offered for crushing them was more than he could bring himself to. Nay, what father whose two bright young sons had been murdered, but would have done as he did? That fearful blow had struck him in a vital spot. Since that day he had felt himself slowly dying; and that sense of weakness, those desperate tremors, the discomforts and suffering which blighted every hour of his life, were also to be set down to the account of the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... "Of course, I was desperate and didn't know what to do. I had no money of my own, and I didn't dare ask my father for it. I had to tell some ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... would not be behind. Throwing off coat and waistcoat, and tying his handkerchief tight round his loins, he laid hold on the emblematic weapon of Time and Death, determined likewise to earn the name of Reaper. He took the last scythe. It was desperate work for a while, and he was far behind the first bout; but David, who was the best scyther in the whole country side, and of course had the leading scythe, seeing the tutor dropping behind, put more power ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... monsieur,' she said, taking my hand and pressing it affectionately, 'to be able to express to you my gratitude. You have indeed saved us. Were it not for you I might never have seen Mongenod again. He might,—yes, he would have thrown himself in the river. He was desperate when he left me to go and see you.' On examining this person I was surprised to see her head tied up in a foulard, and along the temples a curious dark line; but I presently saw that her head was shaved. 'Have you been ill?' I asked, as I noticed this singularity. ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... very seaworthy. As they were driven across the swift waters, they danced on the waves like leaves, and the boatmen bent to their oars with almost desperate energy and with most ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... and bursting into tears, for she had been working herself up as well, "when I am away from her I hate her for having won him from me, and I am almost ready to do anything desperate; but when I am with her she disarms me; there is something about the girl that almost makes me love her. If you could have seen her this morning, she looked so proud and happy when I praised ...
— Virgie's Inheritance • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... less happily, though I noticed that whenever a camel changed its walk for a trot, each one of the ladies reached back a desperate hand to clutch the saddle and save her spine from the bruising bump! bump! which smote the bone with every step. As for me, that feeling of middle age began to creep on while my coast-guard camel and I were getting acquainted. ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... Desmond with a lady, and a series of bows took place. Desmond held his hat in his hand till we had passed; his expression varied so much from what it was when I saw him last, at the breakfast table, he being in a desperate humor then, that it served me for mental ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... thousand other things which he knew he wanted if he could only think of them, but the innumerable boyish desires which had arisen since his birthday in June had fled, and, try as he would, he could recall none of them. As a last desperate resort, he scrawled a concluding "Anything else useful," and signed ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... Larry. The man's face showed how wrought up he was, and though he was not much taller or stronger than Larry he had a man's energy, and would prove more than a match for the lad if it came to a fight. And it looked now as though he was going to resort to desperate measures in order to ...
— Larry Dexter's Great Search - or, The Hunt for the Missing Millionaire • Howard R. Garis
... with the more desperate resolution, because it was expected that, as soon as the season permitted, an English fleet and army would certainly be sent to its relief. But the besiegers having a prodigious superiority of numbers, and conducting the siege with every advantage ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... out my notebook, from which under the most desperate circumstances I never parted, and wrote a few words ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... words with something less than her former confidence he was not aware of it. How could he know that she was making a last desperate stand? ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... Would rouse you, if you were straked. I'll have you with me, If I've got to carry you, chested: sink my soul! And for all I care, that luggish slubberdegullion May lounder my hurdies; and go to Hecklebarney! I'm desperate, Judith ... and I don't mind much ... But, ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... scene—rousing its priest, treacherously promising vaticination, perhaps filling its temple with a strange hum of oracles, but sure to give half the significance to fateful winds, and grudging to the desperate listener even a miserable remnant—yielding it sordidly, as though each word had been a drop of the deathless ichor of its ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... fulfilment of the cry of the ancient sufferer, who had lamented that his enemies made so sure of his death that they divided his garments and cast lots for his vesture. But he was 'wiser than he knew,' and, while his words were to his own apprehension but a vivid metaphor expressing his desperate condition, 'the Spirit which was in' him 'did signify' by them 'the sufferings of Christ.' Theories of prophecy or sacrifice which deny the correctness of John's interpretation have the New Testament against them, and assume ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... to give him the assurance he sought, her desperate, passionate voice grown gentle and quiet again. But she was too tired and spent to be comforted. For a long time she lay so still that he became alarmed, thinking she must have fainted again, and drew closer to her to listen to her breathing; at first there was a little catch in it, ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... the doctor when Baby was in convulsions," she said coldly. "It was terrible not having you here to advise. I have been desperate, and you—" a sob—"you were enjoying yourself in the jungles." She had not an atom of ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... not despair. He sent in every direction for troops. Nothing was forgotten. Nothing that he could do was left undone. Unceasingly he urged action upon Congress, and at the same time with indomitable fighting spirit he planned to attack the British. It was a desperate undertaking in the face of such heavy odds, for in all his divisions he had only some six thousand men, and even these were scattered. The single hope was that by his own skill and courage he could snatch victory from ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... Ralph again knocked on Bertha's door. He looked paler than usual, almost haggard; his immaculate linen was a little crumpled, and he carried no cane; his lips were tightly compressed, and his face wore an air of desperate resolution. ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... North Korea, one of the world's most centrally planned and isolated economies, faces desperate economic conditions. Industrial capital stock is nearly beyond repair as a result of years of underinvestment and spare parts shortages. Industrial and power output have declined in parallel. The nation has suffered its eleventh year of food shortages because of a lack ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... have Some dogs or horses to eat. a man whose wife had an absess formed on the Small of her back promised a horse in the morning provided we would administer to her, I examined the absess and found it was too far advanced to be cured. I told them her case was desperate. agreeably to thir request I opened the absess. I then introduced a tent and dressed it with bisilican; and prepared Some dozes of the flour of Sulpher and Creem of tarter which were given with directions to be taken on each morning. a little ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... he was sick with weariness, and mad with thirst, that he lost his head. Then he flung himself recklessly in every direction, bruising his poor body against the unyielding bars, desperate, ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... of the untouched viands; as the soup, for which we had ventured to ask, was particularly bad, we did not interfere to prevent this proceeding. The next course appeared; but still, except a solitary individual, who made a desperate move, and cut up a fowl which he handed round, no one put out a finger; as we were quite at the lower end of the table, and saw with consternation that our appetites, sharpened with the fine air of the sea, were not likely to be satisfied, and not relishing this Governor ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... then closed over it forever. No man heeded its fall. Not one of all that crowd, which oft had grown hoarse with shouts at his coming, paused to save the emperor from destruction. But he, calm and courageous, although at that moment he could have parted with life without a sigh, had made a desperate spring backward, and had alighted on ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... came out in 18881. It was originally intended to be one of a series of biographies of noted men, which were to give the facts accurately but to treat them humorously. History and comedy, however, have never been blended successfully, though desperate attempts have occasionally been made to achieve that result. Warner had not long been engaged in the task before he recognized its hopelessness. For its preparation it required a special study of the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the journey so far very well though unable as yet to walk, but as the cool of the evening came on I began to worry lest a night out of doors set her screaming with pain. So as I laced my boots, I decided to go back to Rebais and make another desperate attempt ...
— My Home In The Field of Honor • Frances Wilson Huard
... went, smothered beneath the weight of numbers, yet struggled up again. His great head was torn and dripping; his eyes a gleam of rolling red and white; the little tail stern and stiff like the gallant stump of a flagstaff shot away. He was desperate, but indomitable; and he sobbed ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... "I was desperate," she pleaded. "I had given up all that life held for me—given it up for a man who now looked at me coldly and spoke of marrying another. Can you wonder that I went in the evening to his rooms—went to plead with him—to beg, almost on my knees? It was no use. He was done with me—he said that ...
— The Agony Column • Earl Derr Biggers
... made, in fact, such desperate efforts to learn all about poetry that her system got quite out of order. But although she did not in the course of the day hit upon anything, she quite casually succeeded in her dreams in devising eight lines; so concluding her toilette and her ablutions, she hastily ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... scene. The step-sisters made desperate efforts to wear the slipper; Cinderella finally retired triumphantly on the prince's arm, and the curtains closed only to open again a few moments later upon a scene which bore a strong resemblance to Oakdale High School. The fairy godmother occupied ...
— Grace Harlowe's Plebe Year at High School - The Merry Doings of the Oakdale Freshmen Girls • Jessie Graham Flower
... most unsatisfactory condition. The army was wholly unreliable, and extravagance in high places had brought the exchequer to the verge of bankruptcy. In 1882 matters reached a crisis. A revolution broke out, headed by Arabi Pasha, and the situation looked desperate. Joint naval and military action by Britain and France was proposed, but the French ships sailed away and left Britain with a free hand. The British fleet bombarded the Forts at Alexandria and a military force, based on the Suez Canal, was landed ...
— With the British Army in The Holy Land • Henry Osmond Lock
... heavy-laden, the lady Euryale had noiselessly opened a secret door leading to Melissa's hiding-place, known only to herself and her husband, and had come close to her. She now stood watching the girl with surprise and astonishment, for she had expected to find her beside herself, desperate, and more than ever needing comfort and soothing. The unhappy girl must have been drawn to the window by the cries of the massacred, and at least have glanced at the revolting scene in the stadium. She would have thought it more natural if she ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Cross of the Bath. In 1838 he resigned his position and became governor of Jamaica. Perhaps the most significant incident in his career was his fighting as a volunteer in the storming of Deeg, on Christmas Day 1804. The courage which sends a civilian into a desperate hand-to-hand fight, to which he is not obliged to go, must be above proof. Metcalfe had no pecuniary interest in his position. He was a wealthy man, who spent far more than his official salary in the various ways a governor-general {83} is expected ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... living with another woman. He very coolly informed her that the marriage-ceremony between them was a mere sham; the person who performed it not having been invested with any legal authority. Thus betrayed, deserted, and friendless, the poor young creature became almost frantic. In that desperate state of mind, she was decoyed by a woman, who kept a disreputable house. A short career of reckless frivolity and vice ended, as usual, in the hospital on Blackwell's Island. When she was discharged, she tried to drown her sorrow and remorse in intemperance, ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... on the Manila side of the bay, while others were further out and near Cavite; and throughout the fleet there was constant activity and the utmost vigilance. There was incessant solicitude about what the desperate Spaniards might contrive in the nature of aggressive enterprise. It seemed incredible to Americans that nothing should be attempted. How would a Spanish fleet have fared for three months of war with us in an American harbor? There would have been a new feature ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... remainder of the day in a desperate state of ill-humour, which was increased by finding that Mlle. de Coulanges could neither stand nor walk. Mrs. Somers was persuaded that Emilie, if she would have exerted herself, could have done both, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... the first. You see the very doom burning out of his boy's eyes in the youthful portrait, and you see the logical end in that desperate and pitiful mask, the drawing of the last period in the Meynell Book. His was certainly the severed head, and his feet were pathetically far away, down on a stony earth. That he should have forfeited the ordinary ways of ease, is as consistent with his appearance, as it was necessary to ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... task at the same time. Consequently, during the big attack, delivered in the south on the 21st of August, which brought our troops level with the Arras-Albert railway line, our small side-show passed off successfully almost unnoticed. Desperate fighting had also taken place in the neighbourhood of Morlancourt, just north of the river Somme, in which the enemy troops had been driven back after stubborn resistance. They thereupon evacuated the town of Albert, as the place was getting too hot for them, and retired on positions to the east ...
— Three years in France with the Guns: - Being Episodes in the life of a Field Battery • C. A. Rose
... entirely undesirable to us owing to public opinion here. Also at the present moment we must avoid anything that might deepen the impression among our enemies that our peace offer is in any way the result of our finding ourselves in a desperate position. That is not the case. We are convinced that economically and from a military point of view, we can bring the war to victorious conclusion. The question of stating our conditions, therefore, Your Excellency will handle dilatorily. On the other ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... dog-fox down wind and vi. millia passuum, to the next gorse. But this L25 of his is a grueller, and I learnt with interest that you are inclined to get the fishes nose out of the weed. I have offered to lend him L10—hopes it may be lending—and have written a desperate begging letter to R. Monckton Milnes, Esq., which 'evins prosper. Poor T—— says to-night that he has written to Forster about it—which he must have the small of his back very hard against the ropes so to do, so the sooner we get the ginger-beer bottle out the longer ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... will assert that it depends upon Mr. Wood. I should be heartily sorry that this commendable resentment against me should accidentally (and I hope, what was never intended) strike a damp upon that spirit in all ranks and corporations of men against the desperate and ruinous design of Mr. Wood. Let my countrymen blot out those parts in my last letter which they dislike, and let no rust remain on my sword to cure the wounds I have given to our most mortal enemy. When Sir Charles Sidley[16] was taking the oaths, where several ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... neck He smote and burst the tendons; then the van Of Ilium's host, with Hector, all retired. 715 Far as the slender javelin cuts the air Hurl'd with collected force, or in the games, Or even in battle at a desperate foe, So far the Greeks repulsed the host of Troy. Then Glaucus first, Chief of the shielded bands 720 Of Lycia, slew Bathycles, valiant son Of Calchon; Hellas was his home, and far He pass'd in riches all the Myrmidons. Him chasing Glaucus whom he now attain'd, ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... enemy on guard. Then, on a given signal—a whistle from Captain FitzClarence—the men dashed forward on the foe, cheering lustily, while from the town the echoes and the voices of anxious watchers gave back cheer for cheer. The tussle was short and sharp. It was a case of fifty desperate men with fifty bayonets dealing destruction to a roaring rabble under the tarpaulins! Then came a storm of hostile bullets from the rear of the trenches, a swift reply from the attacking party, followed by Captain ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... but suddenly, when within thirty paces of the enemy, the royals found themselves on the edge of a deep ravine which separated them from the enemy like a moat. Some were able to check their horses in time, but others, despite desperate efforts, pressed upon by those behind, were pushed into the ravine, and rolled helplessly to the bottom. At the same moment the order to fire was given in a sonorous voice, there was a rattle of musketry, and several dragoons near M. ...
— Massacres Of The South (1551-1815) - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... slammed. They rolled homeward, and Ermentrude suffered from a desperate sense of the unachieved. The princess had been impertinent, the Keroulans rather banal. Mrs. Sheldam watched her charge's face in the intermittent lights ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... whom my agony is derision—my despair a source of enjoyment—beneath whose withering glance my spirit shrinks—who, with half-expressed insinuations, tortures my soul, awakening fancies that goad me on to dark and desperate deeds? Dead mother! upon thee I call. If in thy grave thou canst hear the cry of thy most wretched son, yearning to avenge thee—answer me, if thou hast the power. Let me have some token of the truth or falsity of these ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... two men working together could co-operate with a thousand times the effectiveness of men without them. Children playing together could have a degree of companionship otherwise impossible. And four children upon a desperate voyage, without adults to reassure them, would need this close linkage with their fellows. It would give them courage. They ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... hand them up. The conflict between the men of the pinnace and the crew of the vessel was carried on near the capstern, and a pistol fired had accidentally communicated with the powder, which blew up in the very centre of the dense and desperate struggle. ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... a rather desperate business to come suddenly into one's day's work. I don't think that I am a particularly brave man. I have an Irish imagination which makes the unknown and the untried more terrible than they are. On the other hand, I was brought up with a horror of cowardice and with a terror of such ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to advance. In a storm of shrapnel, bullets and flame, the British host swept down again upon the foe. The Germans gave desperate and deadly resistance. They fought hand to hand, with bayonets and clubbed muskets and grenades. It was a death grapple, with decisive victory on neither side. In the wild onrush and terrific clash, Pen ...
— The Flag • Homer Greene
... has got to be a success," declared Phil between his teeth, his plain face expressing a sort of desperate determination. ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the group; and then, towering above them, and steadying himself by the hand-rail in a desperate effort at erectness, Mr. Royall stepped stiffly ashore. Like the young men of the party, he wore a secret society emblem in the buttonhole of his black frock-coat. His head was covered by a new Panama hat, and his ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... this fascinating world of wealth, so dimly known and doubtless fiercely coveted, lay helpless, open to their plundering. The Vandals ravaged Gaul and Spain, and, being defeated by the Goths, passed on into Africa. The Saxons and Angles penetrated England[2] and fought there for centuries against the desperate Britons, whom the Roman legions had perforce abandoned to their fate. The Franks and Burgundians ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... girls do you suppose have believed that—were justified in believing he meant anything by his attractive manner and nice ways of telling you how much he liked you? He had a desperate affair with Mrs. Mortimer—innocent enough I fancy. He's had a dozen within three years; and in a week Rena Bonnesdel has come to making eyes at him, and Eileen gives him no end of chances which he doesn't see. As for Marion Page, the girl had been on the edge of loving ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... two girls clung together for a moment and then went into the house with hands close-locked and a kind of sad, desperate courage in their young hearts. What would either of them have done, each of them thought, had she been forced to endure alone the life that went on day after day in Deacon Baxter's ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the tact which never failed him, even in such a desperate crisis as this, he handed the doctor his binoculars. Then, both men looked at the summit of Guanaco Hill. Though it was high noon, and the landscape was shimmering in the heat-mist created by the unusual power and brilliance of the sun, they distinctly saw a thin pillar of smoke rising above the ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... her chair-swiftly, restlessly; and flung herself down at a writing-table. Seizing ink and writing paper, she began to write as if she had not time to breathe before she got her letter written. And suddenly she saw him. The air of desperate absorption vanished, she smiled, waved a kiss, made a pretty face as if she were a little puzzled and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Still, the people are fearfully spoilt. There are such types—desperate fellows, with whom one has to look sharp. To-day two of that sort had ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... back, the legs wide apart. One arm was thrust upward, the other outward; but the latter was bent acutely, and the hand was near the throat. Both hands were tightly clenched. The whole attitude was that of desperate but ineffectual ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... 'Arry,' asked the huntsman, ''ow is't possible? No man's fonder of 'untin' than I am, but to turn out on sich a day as this would be a daring—a desperate violation of all the laws of registered propriety. The Pope's bull ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... undressed and made to lie down on the sofa, for she insisted so that she would not go to bed that they dared not oppose her, the doctor made his diagnosis. It was double pneumonia, of that sudden sort which declares for life or death in forty-eight hours. At her age a desperate case. Her children must be wired to at once. She had sunk back, seemingly unconscious; and Augustine, approaching the drawer where she knew the letters were kept, slipped out the lavender sachet and gave it to the doctor. When he had left the ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... once begun it never could be stopped, and yielding to the instinct of danger, she closed her eyes in letting herself glide along, that she might retain her dream, that she might not be seized with dizziness at sight of the abyss or be made desperate by her impotence. ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... the priest's departure the first steamboat came up the Saguenay from Quebec. By this time Bird was a desperate man. Northwick was still there in his house, with all that money which he would not employ in any way; at once a temptation and a danger if it should in any manner become known. The wandering poor, who are known to the piety of the habitans as the Brethren of Christ, were a terror ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... there are angry spirits And turbulent mutterers of stifled treason, Who lurk in narrow places, and walk out Muffled to whisper curses to the night. Disbanded soldiers, discontented ruffians And desperate libertines ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... appeals summoning the people to arms. In the first week of April, the doctrine which John Mitchel had long been propounding, found expression in the leading columns of the Nation:—"Ireland's necessity," said Duffy, "demands the desperate remedy of revolution." A few weeks later, the same declaration was made in the very citadel of the enemy's power. It was O'Brien who spoke, and his audience was the British House of Commons. With Messrs. Meagher and Hollywood, he had visited Paris to present ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... said office. And on these accounts it appears probable that the said resignation was tendered and accepted as a consideration for some beneficial concessions made in consequence thereof to the said Warren Hastings in his said dangerous and desperate condition. ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... first in their designs against him. Yet did this action appear to some of the conspirators to be too cruel, as to this using such severity to a woman, because Caius did more indulge his own ill-nature than use her advice in all that he did; from which ill-nature it was that the city was in so desperate a condition with the miseries that were brought on it, and the flower of the city was destroyed. But others accused her of giving her consent to these things; nay, they ascribed all that Caius had done to her as the ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... the voice. Perhaps, had he done so sooner, he would have held on to his sword, and taken the chances of a more protracted and desperate resistance. ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... but Lynde's somewhat sedentary habits had made him familiar with his own company. When one is young and well read and amiable, there is really no better company than one's self—as a steady thing. We are in a desperate strait indeed if we chance at any age to tire of this invisible but ever- present comrade; for he is not to be thrown over during life. Before now, men have become so weary of him, so bored by him, that they have attempted to escape, by suicide; ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... of life thou makest her, If all her best-beloved she cast away To wreck blind hate on thee!—What, wilt thou say "Through every woman's nature one blind strand Of passion winds, that men scarce understand?"— Are we so different? Know I not the fire And perilous flood of a young man's desire, Desperate as any woman, and as blind, When Cypris stings? Save that the man behind Has all men's strength to aid him. Nay, 'twas thou... But what avail to wrangle with thee now, When the dead speaks for all to understand, A perfect witness! Hie thee ...
— Hippolytus/The Bacchae • Euripides
... portions of the stack, at the Hut. "You see them men under the eaves—they're a plaguy sight safer up there, than we be down here; and; if 'twere'n't for the look of the thing, I wish I was with 'em. That house will never be taken without a desperate sight of fightin'; for the captain is an old warrior, and seems to like to snuff gunpowder"—the reader will understand none knew of the veteran's death but those in the house—"and won't be for givin' ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... The young man hammered away tirelessly, insistently, delivering a hurricane of his two-handed blows, pressing relentlessly in as Murphy shifted and gave ground, his head up, his eyes steady, oblivious to the return hammering the now desperate handler opposed to him. Two minutes passed without perceptible slackening in this terrific pace. The gallery was in an uproar, and some of the members were piling down the stairs to the floor. Perspiration stood out all over Murphy's body. His ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... this, and indeed was very reasonable throughout. His coming back was a venture, he said, and he had always known it to be a venture. He would do nothing to make it a desperate venture, and he had very little fear of his safety with ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... face; {ein verzweifeltes Gesicht machen}, to look desperate or hopeless; {am Gesicht ansehen}, to ...
— Eingeschneit - Eine Studentengeschichte • Emil Frommel
... saw the banking sector collapse, which helped precipitate an unprecedented default on external loans later that year. Continued economic instability drove a 70% depreciation of the currency throughout 1999, which forced a desperate government to "dollarize" the currency regime in 2000. The move stabilized the currency, but did not stave off the ouster of the government. Gustavo NOBOA, who assumed the presidency in January 2000, has managed ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... last desperate problem: "He's learnin' all kind of new things. Me, I ain't learnin' anything. When Chuck comes home he'll just think ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... fire was terrific between 4 and 5 when I woke up and came to the top of the ridge to see what was doing. Plainly something unusually desperate was on the move. "Asiatic Annie" was also busy and several shells came this way, one falling in the C.C.S. where no harm was done. Luckily it had chosen a clear spot in front of the store tent to pitch into. I had gone down to examine this when the wounded ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... in the hands of that heir was dimly rising within her, above all her prejudices and her rancor. But however that might be, her feelings for the time remained confused, and the only clear thing was her desperate torment at being now and forever childless, a torment which goaded her on to seek another's child with the wild idea of making that child in ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... opinion of the publick, when they see an address of this house, by which new expenses are recommended? Will they not think that their state is desperate, and that they are sold to slavery, from which nothing but insurrections and bloodshed can release them? If they retain any hopes of relief from this house, they must soon be extinguished, when they find in the next clause, that we are sunk to such a degree of servility, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... advise or help her or be her companion in inevitable death. Her thoughts must have gone to her brother, with his strength and courage, his skill as a swimmer; but he was far away, unconscious of her desperate extremity. She had to choose, and the river was her choice. With that tragic conception of the drowning of Zenobia fresh in his mind, the realization of his sister's fate must have gained additional poignancy in my father's imagination. He was hard hit, and the traces of the blow ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... contemptuously disregarding its virtues, its happiness, its knowledge, its great achievements, and its wisdom, and by stupidly or dishonestly magnifying its vices, its misery, its ignorance, its great slothfulness, and its folly; it is apt to be the way of the woeful, the unprosperous, the desperate—especially the way of such as find escape from the bore of routine life in the excitements of unrest, turbulence, and change; the past, they say, was all wrong, for it produced the present and ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... been little difficulty had not the contents of the kist caught in my feet and held on to them, like living things afraid of being left behind. I let down my hands to disentangle my feet, but failed; and then, grown desperate, I succeeded in reaching firm ground, dragging I knew not what after me. It proved to be a pillow-slip. Green Brae still shudders when I tell him that my first impulse was to leave the pillow-slip unopened. However, I ripped it up, for to ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... some of the footsteps were effaced, while others, to which Tascheron's shoes fitted, remained, certainly pointed to some mysterious assistant. Forced into hypotheses, the authorities once more attributed the crime to a desperate passion; not finding any trace of the object of such a passion in the lower classes, they began to look higher. Perhaps some bourgeoise, sure of the discretion of a man who had the face and bearing of a hero, had been drawn into ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... heaven hears my oath, I will never marry! Now, my king, try how far your power reaches; what you may do and dare; how far you may prevail with a woman who struggles against the tyranny of her destiny. You can lead an army into desperate battle; you can conquer provinces, and make thrones totter to their base, but you cannot force a woman to do what she is resolved against! You cannot break my will! I repeat my oath—I ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... with the frenzy of a man who is in a desperate strait. He was as strong as I, and he had the advantage in height. For a moment I was borne back. He struck me heavily upon the face, and I made no attempt to defend myself. I waited my time. When it came, I dealt him such a blow that he reeled away, and before he could ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... struggles to escape it drove one of its spurs into his hand. Dunham suddenly released it; and then ensued a wild chase for its recapture, up and down the ship, in which it had every advantage of the young man. At last it sprang upon the rail; he put out his hand to seize it, when it rose with a desperate screech, and flew far out over the sea. They watched the suicide till it sank exhausted into a ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... him after the service, a slight flush washed the white of her face with a delicate warmth,—nothing more. I said to myself, however, as we went home, and afterwards to my husband, that his case was not a desperate one. ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... letters, filled with details of woe, from all parts of the country. Fierce, heavy gloom brooded over the assembly; and fiercely and heavily did the men separate, towards eleven o'clock, some irritated by the opposition of others to their desperate plans. ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... give him "all Holland and Zeeland, with all their appurtenances," and he was ready to resign at any moment. He was not "ceremonious for reputation," he said, but he gave warning that the Netherlanders would grow desperate if they found her Majesty dealing weakly or carelessly with them. As for himself he had already had enough of government. "I am weary, Mr. Secretary," he plaintively exclaimed, "indeed I am weary; but neither of pains nor travail. My ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... nation, or perhaps the confederacy, of the Alligewi or Talligewi, the semi-civilized "Mound-builders" of the Ohio Valley, who have left their name to the Allegheny river and mountains, and whose vast earthworks are still, after half-a-century of study, the perplexity of archaeologists. A desperate warfare ensued, which lasted about a hundred years, and ended in the complete overthrow and destruction, or expulsion, of the Alligewi. The survivors of the conquered people fled southward, and are supposed to have mingled ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... his mind by making an analysis of a dull sermon. 'There is nothing particular in it,' he admits, but at least it is better, he thinks, to listen to a bad sermon than to the blasphemous rant of deistical societies. Indeed, Crabbe's spirit was totally unlike the desperate pride of Chatterton. He was of the patient enduring tribe, and comforts himself by religious meditations, which are, perhaps, rather commonplace in expression, but when read by the light of the distresses he was enduring, ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... so loud and shrill," that the Dutch pug began to bark, Carlo to howl, and the other nuisance, Master Charles, to cry. The German eolina was of itself bad enough, but these congregated noises were intolerable. Uncle John aimed a desperate blow with a large apple, which he was just about to bite, at the head of Carlo, who, in order to give his lungs fair play, was standing on all fours on the hampers. The apple missed the dog, and went some distance beyond him into ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... that no one could possibly have been more welcome. He had failed to find the control: he had to have it. So he might as well have it out with the Prince now as any other time. If Koltsoff but knew it, he was facing a desperate man; for until he had entered and searched the rooms, Jack had harbored no doubt that possession of the control was merely a matter of overhauling the Prince's effects. Now he knew better, and for the first time he was really alarmed as to its whereabouts. ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... singularly allied to the animal nature; they conduct the unconscious victim of feelings that appear divine into a state of life at which the world stands aghast." Fanaticism is always united with either excessive lewdness or desperate asceticism. The physiological performance of the generative function is sure to ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... the beasts, upon slight or sudden occasions; as, for instance, the carpenters and their (326) assistants, and people of that sort, if a machine, or any piece of work in which they had been employed about the theatre did not answer the purpose for which it had been intended. To this desperate kind of encounter he forced one of his nomenclators, even encumbered as he was ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... before the German infantry attack. The fighting on this section of the front was fierce throughout the afternoon, but finally the British were forced to retire. At Broodseinde, the extreme eastern point of the allied front, the Germans made a desperate attempt to take the salient, using asphyxiating and other bombs again and again on the men of the Twenty-eighth Division of the British. King George's men, however, repelled the attacks with severe loss to the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... commanding officer, in a cool Arab house about a flowery patio, but that brief interval over, the fiery plain began again. After Settat the road runs on for miles across the waste to the gorge of the Oued Ouem, and beyond the river it climbs to another plain so desperate in its calcined aridity that the prickly scrub of the wilderness we had left seemed like the vegetation of an oasis. For fifty kilometres the earth under our wheels was made up of a kind of glistening red slag covered with pebbles and stones. Not the scantest and toughest ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... faced him, with a kind of desperate courage. "I got it by going away for two days. It's no good disguising things, trying to ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... was put aboard for Spain. An hour before dawn Drake passed the word along the waiting line: "Shove off!" Bounding into the bay he saw a Spanish rowboat, which at once saw him and pulled hard-all for the shore. The English won the desperate race, making the Spaniards sheer off to a landing some way beyond the town. Then they landed and tumbled the Spanish guns off their mountings on the wharf, to the amazement of the sleepy Spanish sentry, who ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... up to; it seems to me to become, as it were, an act of divine justice. And when I use Miss Pross (though this is quite another question) to bring about such a catastrophe, I have the positive intention of making that half-comic intervention a part of the desperate woman's failure; and of opposing that mean death, instead of a desperate one in the streets which she wouldn't have minded, to the dignity of Carton's. Wrong or right, this was all design, and seemed to me to be in ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... revolution in Russia," he began at length. "But because the Duma is subservient, it does not mean that all is over. Not at all. We are not asleep. Revolution is smouldering, ready to break forth at any moment. The agents of the government know it. They are desperate. There is no means they would not use to crush us. Their long arm reaches even to New York, ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... she said. "Quick! lemme get in! O God!" she pleaded with desperate entreaty, as Mrs. Kane stood coldly unresponsive, "you have your baby. I haven't seen mine in seven months, and they never wrote. I'll never ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... for our arms. Fort Donelson had fallen, after a desperate contest, and nearly all its garrison were taken prisoners. The scattered remains of the rebel army, under Johnston, had retreated precipitately from Kentucky, which had indeed been to them "the dark and ...
— Daring and Suffering: - A History of the Great Railroad Adventure • William Pittenger
... &c. (wonderful) 870; unimaginable, inimaginable[obs3]; unthinkable. impracticable unachievable; unfeasible, infeasible; insuperable; unsurmountable[obs3], insurmountable; unattainable, unobtainable; out of reach, out of the question; not to be had, not to be thought of; beyond control; desperate &c. (hopeless) 859; incompatible &c. 24; inaccessible, uncomeatable[obs3], impassable, impervious, innavigable[obs3], inextricable; self-contradictory. out of one's power, beyond one's power, beyond one's depth, beyond one's reach, beyond one's grasp; too ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... untrustworthy garrison described by Colonel de Coetlogon. During the summer of 1884 there was therefore a growing fear, not only that the worst news might come at any moment, but that in the most favourable event any news would reveal the desperate situation to which Gordon had been reduced, and with that conviction came the thought, not whether he had exactly carried out what Ministers had expected him to do, but solely of his extraordinary courage and devotion ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... across to her own cabin, and left the angry girl among her boxes. It was in vain she fell to work upon them. Presently something had to be done over again, and when it was the box held several chattels less than before the readjustment. She played a sort of desperate dominos to fit these objects in the space, but here were a paper-weight, a portfolio, with two wretched volumes that no chink would harbor; and letting them fall all at once, she straightened herself, still stormy with revolt, eyes and cheeks still hot ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... Jovis, of his grace, As I have said, will thee solace Finally with these ilke* things, *same These uncouth sightes and tidings, To pass away thy heaviness, Such ruth* hath he of thy distress *compassion That thou suff'rest debonairly,* *gently And know'st thyselven utterly Desperate of alle bliss, Since that Fortune hath made amiss The fruit of all thy hearte's rest Languish, and eke *in point to brest;* *on the point of breaking* But he, through his mighty merite, Will do thee ease, all be it lite,* *little ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... chew upon that, instead of their tobacco," observed the captain to Mr. Leach, as he hunted for a good coal in the galley to light his cigar with. "I'll warrant you the sheers go up none the slower for the information, desperate philosophers as some ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... and performing miracles {48} after death. The second story is of a Jew who was converted to Christianity by the wickedness of Rome, for he reasoned that no cult, not divinely supported, could survive such desperate depravity as he saw there. The third tale, of the three rings, points the moral that no one can be certain what religion is the true one. The fourth narrative, like many others, turns upon the sensuality of the monks. Elsewhere the author describes the most absurd relics, and tells ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... too. When matters got desperate and he was forced to let Tremenhuel, he took what money he could raise and cleared out of the neighbourhood for a time; went off to Tregarrick when the militia was embodied, he being an officer; and there ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... stand at Vittoria, filled the centre of that formidable line, before which the troops of France fled in dismay; and by whose skill, prudence, and valour, exerted in a critical hour, the enemy was foiled in his desperate attempt to break through the barrier of the Pyrenees. Picton received the thanks of the house for his valorous conduct for the seventh time; but that was all, his ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... risen to adjust the lamp-shade, and now stood behind his chair with her arm resting on it, so that he was obliged to turn his head backward to see her—"Mr. Henderson, do you know you are getting to be a desperate flirt?" The laughing eyes looking into his said that was not such a desperate thing to do if ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... audience of Paris, Texas, appropriately date its letters? Not Anno Domini, but many years B.C. The African deserves no pity. His hideous crime was enough to drive a father to any madness, and too many such monsters have by their acts made Texas justly desperate. But for American citizens to crowd to the retribution, and look on as at a holiday show, reveals the Inquisition, the Pagans, the Stone Age, unreclaimed in our republic. On the other hand, the young men and women who will watch side by side the burning of a negro shrink ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... the desperate man, throwing the door wide open and stalking out among the crowd, "well, jest you two wimin put on your duds and go right straight home and bring back the old man and woman, and your grandfather, who is nigh on to a hundred; bring 'em all here, AND I'LL MARRY THE WHOLE D—D ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... A desperate shadow hovered over Mostyn's face. "I'll go back in the morning," he said, doggedly. "Mitchell, you say, wants to see me. I'm not afraid of the woman. If I had been there she wouldn't have made such a ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... God's mighty working within this realm, I have been with you in your most desperate tentations. Ask your own consciences, and let them answer you before God, if that I—not I, but God's Spirit by me—in your greatest extremity willed you not ever to depend upon your God, and in His name promised unto you victory and preservation from your enemies, so ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... and ruins be She fights through dark and desperate days; Beside the watchers on the sea She guards the ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 23, 1914 • Various
... and a cheap showiness, are the ingredients of this devil's cauldron. The worst of it is that it has no fine elements at all. There is a nobility about real tragedy which evokes a quality of passionate and sincere emotion. There is something essentially exalted about a fierce resistance, a desperate failure. But this abject, listless dreariness, which can hardly be altered or expressed, this miserable floating down the muddy current, where there is no sharp repentance or fiery battling, nothing but a mean abandonment ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of these Holland people in times of adversity is one of the wonders of history. For a hundred years they struggled against powerful Spain, but their faith saved them. It is said that at the siege of Leyden they were reduced to such desperate straits that all they had to eat was dogs and cats. In derision they were called "dog and cat eaters." They replied to their enemies: "As long as you hear the bark of a dog or the mew of a cat the city holds. When these are gone we will devour out left arms, ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols
... tripod. And suddenly she found herself on her knees beside it, staring into its dusky transparent depths, fixing her mind, concentrating every thought, straining every faculty, every nerve in the one desperate and imperative desire. ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... experience of its master's habits. The locality had an unfavorable reputation. Sailors—deserters from whaleships—had been seen lurking about the outskirts of the town, and low scrub oaks which everywhere beset the trail might have easily concealed some desperate runaway. Besides these material obstructions, the devil, whose hostility to the church was well known, was said to sometimes haunt the vicinity in the likeness of a spectral whaler, who had met his death in a drunken bout, from a harpoon in the hands of a companion. The ghost of this unfortunate ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte
... an abject appeal in the bloodshot eyes, a desperate tenacity in his clutch. He looked at me as if he dared look nowhere else. Some horror seemed pressing upon his confused and weakened brain, and I thought I could ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... cried out, "Ho, soldiers of Islam and defenders of the True Faith, if you flee, you are lost, and if you stand fast, you will conquer! Know that courage lies in endurance and that no case is so desperate but that God is able to bring about its relief. May He bless you and look upon you with eyes of compassion! "Then the Muslims cried out, "God is most great!" and the believers in the Divine Unity shouted the profession ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous
... stating what he intended to do, dashed up the roadway leading to Dr. Scoville's house. It was evident that he was about to resort to some desperate expedient to retrieve the shattered fortunes of his party; but he kept his own counsel; and Somers yielded himself to the master will of his companion like a child, as indeed he was in his exhausted and suffering condition. The roadway led to the rear of the house where ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... his own popularity. For a lady to say she did not admire Mr. Secretary Bolt, was strong evidence of her want of taste. I do not choose to enlighten the world as to how Bolt came to be Secretary of Legation!' Here the old man would make a desperate flourish with his crutch, by which I was led to believe that the means were none of the cleanest; in fact that they were of a character very similar to those used at this day, and to which may be traced the cause of certain of Mr. ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... the wall; but others to assure Themselves, some safer passage seek, where they Will have least pain and peril to endure. Rodomont only scorns by any way To wend, except by what is least secure; And in that desperate case, where others made Their offerings, cursed the god to whom ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... world too? If you'll give me some money I'll be off fast enough, and make assurance doubly sure. I'm not much afraid of Maggie. She's a little yea-nay thing, and I can always bend her round to what we want. She had better take care, too," said he, with a desperate look on his face, "for by G—— I'll make her give up all thoughts of Frank, rather than be taken and tried. Why! it's my chance for all my life; and do you think I'll have it frustrated for a ...
— The Moorland Cottage • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
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