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More "Drifting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... upon us in white billows blotting out everything. We spread a sheet on the ground to preserve any marks of the campers, but the drifting wind drove us indoors and we were compelled to cease searching. All night long Eric and I sat before the roaring grate fire of the hunting-room, he leaning forward with chin in his palms and saying few words, I offering futile suggestions and uttering mad threats, but both utterly ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... where they never do anything except read and talk. I'll wager, right now, you'll find fifty of Dick's latest, uncatalogued books in their cabins. They have the run of the library, as well, and you'll see them drifting in and out, any time of the day or night, with their arms full of books—also, the latest magazines. Dick says they are responsible for his possessing the most exhaustive and up-to-date library on philosophy on the Pacific Coast. In a way, they sort of digest such things for ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... surface covered by a perennial drifting polar icepack that averages about 3 meters in thickness, although pressure ridges may be three times that size; clockwise drift pattern in the Beaufort Gyral Stream, but nearly straight-line movement ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... idle impressions of the great American hotel, gained by sitting for the first time in its gallery and gazing on its drifting crowds with thoughts equally drifting. The first impression is of something enormous and rather unnatural, an impression that is gradually tempered by experience of the kindliness and even the tameness of so much of that social order. But I should ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... that be possible!—and never a hint drifting through the hotels of any blue man! Yet the intimate life of old inhabitants is not paraded before the overrunning army of a season. I felt vaguely flattered that this exclusive resident had hitherto noticed me and condescended ...
— The Blue Man - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... Frames that prayer so dear to me, Taught me at my mother's knee: "Now I lay me down to sleep," (Passing to Eternal rest On the loving parent breast) "I pray the Lord my soul to keep;" (From all danger safe and calm In the hollow of His palm;) "If I should die before I wake," (Drifting with a bated breath Out of slumber into death,) "I pray the Lord my soul to take." (From the body's claim set free Sheltered in the Great to be.) Simple prayer of trust and truth. Taught me in my early youth— Let ...
— The Kingdom of Love - and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... slowly sped the tiny boat; long gentle strokes touched the water; and presently the oars lay idle in their locks,—they were unconsciously drifting. The water dipped and lapped about the sides; the tender woman's voice across the water stole to them, singing of love; their eyes met—and ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... indulged in a nap after supper, expecting to wake up in time for the spectacle. But by ten o'clock, when I went to the beach again, all was over, and everybody had gone home. Over the water I saw something like a long swarm of fire- flies,—the lanterns drifting out to sea in procession; but they were already too far to be distinguished except as points of colored light. I was much disappointed: I felt that I had lazily missed an opportunity which might never again return,—for ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... to her own initiative. Carl's drifting theories of social structure concerned for the most part the wages of workmen and the ridiculousness of class distinctions. Reared in the farming district, the amateur college, the garage, and the hangar, ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... flight into the region of speculative politics, we hasten to add that the ideal condition we have pictured has never been reached. The British Parliament has perhaps most nearly approached it, but already shows signs of retrogression. America and the Australian colonies are drifting further away from it. Already political philosophers are shaking their heads and predicting the failure of popular government. The cry everywhere is for a stronger executive. Party organization is breaking down; small factions actuated by self-interest hold the balance of ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... coming generations of dwellers in the country — no bluebird in the spring! What will the farm-boy date from? But the fear was groundless: the birds are regaining their lost ground; broods of young blue-coats are again seen drifting from stake to stake or from mullen-stalk to mullen-stalk about the fields in summer, and our April air will doubtless again be warmed and thrilled by this lovely harbinger of spring. — ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... called her moods, and he brought her salts, and undid her cloak and bonnet, and kissed her once or twice, while his father, who was hot because she was hot, said it was like an August day all over the house, and opened a window, but shut it almost immediately, for a cloud of snow came drifting in, and Mrs. Geraldine knew she should get neuralgia in such a ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... on and walking the decks. This homeless wanderer on havenless seas recks little of log-book or transit. Unlike sure-winged passage-bird, he knows not his journey's issue. So perverse have been fate's courses that this high-strung, assertive mariner hesitates to direct life's drifting argosy. There are looks of indecision, tense resolve, and helpless perplexity. Eagerly scanning the arched blue, he notes stellar assurance. Hushed as by cradle-song, ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... its navy and its commerce, and nautical phraseology is thereby daily becoming more habitual with all classes of the lieges than of erst. Even our parliamentary orators, with a proper national bias, talk of swamping a measure, danger ahead, taking the wind out of an antagonist's sails, drifting into war, steering a bill through the shoals of opposition or throwing it overboard, following in the wake of a leader, trimming to the breeze, tiding a question over the session, opinions above or below the gangway, and the like, so rife of late in St. Stephen's; even when a member ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... lulled the wind,-the summer storm soon died; The shattered clouds went eastward, drifting slow; From the low sun the rain-fringe swept aside, Bright in his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... little Judith that the Great Mystery had shown truths, hid to man, to the trees, the streams, the hills; and the clouds that shaped themselves, drifting hither and yon, were the Great Mystery's passing thoughts. But he had deprived all these things of speech, as he did not trust them fully, and they could only speak to man in dreams, or in some passing mood, when they could communicate ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... is penetrated by the nests of birds. An old, shining tree-trunk, half in and half out of the water. An island of gravel, long and narrow, in the centre of the river. Chips, blocks of wood, slabs, and other scraps of lumber, strewed along the beach; logs drifting down. The high bank covered with various trees and shrubbery, and, in one place, ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... corners and in front of the newspaper offices little knots of men, wearing bits of white ribbon in their buttonholes, were idling. They were quiet, curious, dully waiting to see what this preposterous stroke might mean for them. In the heavy noonday air of the streets they moved lethargically, drifting westward to the hall where the A. R. U. committees were in session. Oblivious of his engagements, Sommers followed them, hearing the burden of their talk, feeling their aimless discontent, their bitterness at the grind of circumstances. This prodigal country ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... ground is thick with sleet, and still it falls! The atmosphere is plunging like the sea Against the woods, and pouring on the night The roar of breakers, while the blinding spray O'erleaps the barrier, and comes drifting on In lines as level as the window-bars. What curious visions, in a night like this, Will the eye conjure from the rocks and trees And zigzag fences! I was almost sure I saw a man staggering along the road A moment since; but instantly the shape Dropped from my sight. Hark! Was not that a ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... speak the homeward- and the outward-bound, And touch the helm of passing minds And bid them steer as wistfully— Saying: "He did great work, until the winds And waters hereabout that night betrayed Him to the drifting death! His work went on— He would not be gainsaid.... Though where his bones are, no ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... was not slow to observe the unconscious drifting of Job away from the church and toward the schoolma'am. Jane did not notice it till Dan hinted to her that the only reason Job had cared for the church was because she went there, and now that Miss Bright had come he had dropped her and the church both. Which was so ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... man, Melchior, And I shall live but little more Since I am old and feebly move. My kingdom is a burnt-up land Half buried by the drifting sand, So hot Apollo shines above. What could I bring but simple myrrh White blossom of the cordial fire? Hail, Prince of Souls, and ...
— Forty-Two Poems • James Elroy Flecker
... Oh drifting steam disperse and die, Oh tower stand shrouded toward the south,— Fate heard afar my happy cry, And laid her ...
— Rivers to the Sea • Sara Teasdale
... th' east'ard, an' keep free o' th' bad ice; the's sure t' be bad ice handy t' th' Kenemish," had been Mark Blake's parting injunction. So George kept well to the eastward as, hour after hour, we forged our way on through the bending, drifting snow. At length we came upon land, but what land we did not know. The storm had abated by this time, and a fresh komatik track was visible, which we proceeded to follow. On all sides of us ice was piled in heaps as high as a house. We had been travelling altogether about ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... steadfast as a wall. Presently the substitutes in the Languedoc battalion could not endure the strain any longer. They fired without orders and could not be stopped. At the same time Montcalm saw that his five little bodies of men were drifting apart. When the Canadian regulars had moved off, they had left the French flanks quite open. In consequence, the French battalions nearest the flanks kept edging outwards, the ones on the right towards their own right and the ones on the left towards their own left, ...
— The Passing of New France - A Chronicle of Montcalm • William Wood
... was fast drifting out into the Indian Ocean, far away from the haven Desmond desired to make. How long was this going to last? Whither was he being carried? Without chart or compass he could take no bearings, set no true course. It was a dismal prospect, and Desmond, glowing as he was with the excitement ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... there for any particular purpose. I was on a holiday. I'd been on a big job up in Colorado and was rather done up, and, as there were some prospects in New Mexico I wanted to see, I hit south, drifting through Santa Fe and Silver City, until I found myself way down on the southern edge of Arizona. It was still hot down there—hot as blazes—it was about the first of September—and the rattlesnakes and the scorpions were still as active as crickets. I knew a chap that had a ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... with foam, and the waves were tossing themselves up in prodigious heaps; the crests, as fast as they were formed, being seized and hurled away by the wind in a mass of driving spray, which went scudding over the water like drifting snow in a ...
— Rollo on the Atlantic • Jacob Abbott
... surface, thus evading the opaqueness or distortion caused by the ripples. One did not need this invention ordinarily, for the water was as clear as air when undisturbed, and the garden of the sea gods was a brilliant and moving spectacle below my drifting canoe. One must be a child again to see all of it; the magic shapes, the haunting tints, the fairy forms. The gardener who had directed the growth of the aquarium believed in kelpies, undines, and mermaids, and had ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... were overtaken and a parley ensued. The leader's thoughts were now in two places at once, and he was not far enough from the shore not to be able to cast a glance towards the Aimable, and to say to his lieutenants, as he saw the vessel drifting near shoal water, "If she keeps on in that course, she will soon be aground." Still, no time was to be lost. The parley with the Indians did not hinder them long, and soon they were on the way towards ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... submission. Such efforts as only infinite love and wisdom could devise, were made to convince him of his error. The spirit of discontent had never before been known in heaven. Lucifer himself did not at first see whither he was drifting; he did not understand the real nature of his feelings. But as his dissatisfaction was proved to be without cause, Lucifer was convinced that he was in the wrong, that the divine claims were just, and that ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... square spread and grew just as the yellow one had done while she counted, until Teddy seemed drifting off into endless green spaces. Then the Counterpane Fairy clapped her hands and he saw that he was hovering over ...
— The Counterpane Fairy • Katharine Pyle
... natural caprice these beds of rustling verdure were cut in an infinity of well-defined geometric forms. Seen from an eminence and at a distance, this arrangement gave a singular effect. In the midst of these native garden-beds were cut distinct and narrow alleys, where the drifting sands were packed like artificial paths. It is unnecessary to add that the soft footways, notwithstanding their advertisement of verdure and shade, proved to be ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... peace, I tell you. On my word, it is as well, though, that you have had it out with me here in the meadows. Listen: there is no harm in the drifting hither. What ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler
... stopped me one morning, on my way to fish in the river. 'Amelius,' she said, 'don't go to the fishing-house; Mellicent is waiting for you.' I stared at her in astonishment. She held up her finger at me: 'Take care, you foolish boy! You are drifting into a false position as fast as you can. Have you no suspicion of what is going on?' I looked all round me, in search of what was going on. Nothing out of the common was to be seen anywhere. 'What can you possibly mean?' I asked. 'You will only laugh at me, ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... drew. Hers were like dark whirlpools, and he felt himself drifting helplessly, irresistibly. He dropped his hands upon the railing and gripped; the illusion of fighting a current was almost real to him. Every fiber in his body cried out ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... speaking of Redmond. Her last conversation with me revealed her thoughts, and awakened feelings which I thought I had buffeted down. The tone of Harry Lothrop's note perplexed me, and I found myself drifting back into an old state of mind ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... to the window, he drank in all the zest and glory of green fields and blue skies with woolly clouds drifting over the tingling air. Joyfully he turned for a plunge in cold water and the unspeakable crockery set met his eye. Then he remembered. A shadow fell across the room; the day went into eclipse. Mechanically, ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... guard of suppliant hands! Look down benign on us who crave Thine aid—whom winds and waters drave From where, through drifting shifting sands, Pours Nilus to the wave. From where the green land, god-possest, Closes and fronts the Syrian waste, We flee as exiles, yet unbanned By murder's sentence from our land; But—since Aegyptus had decreed His sons should wed his brother's seed,— Ourselves we tore from bonds abhorred, ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... all your learning solve this riddle for me!" I exclaimed. "Can all the Martian women be like this? She is beautiful of body and strangely warm and winning to the touch, but as cold of heart as the drifting snow that suffocates a poor lost lamb. She has had a strange influence over me; a puzzling, baffling attraction. A suggestion of something delicate and subtlely charming, which, when one seeks to seize and to define, ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... The snooper was drifting aimlessly about, avoiding the parked vehicles. Conn used the manual control to set it down and deactivate it, then got out and ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... I should judge that nature had endowed you with a fine bump of drift, Humphrey. But has it not been rather well cared for? The trouble with drifting is, so say the preachers, that it ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... opened the door Sara heard faint little cries and tinkling laughter, drifting back from the hill where the children still played and frolicked in the snow. Presently Avrillia shut the door and came back to her place at ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... exciting, nevertheless, when the water in mid-channel came up nearly to the body of the wagon, and the swift ripples deluded the eye into almost conviction that horses, vehicle, and all were not gaining an inch in forward progress, but drifting surely down. They came up out of the depths, however, with a tug, and a swash, and a drip all over, and a scrambling of hoofs on the pebbles, at the very point aimed at in such apparently sidelong fashion,—the wheel-track ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... Guisborough, lying near the shelter of the hills, to the broad sweep of the North Sea, this piece of Yorkshire seems so small that one almost expects to see the Cheviots away in the north. But, beyond the winding Tees and the drifting smoke of the great manufacturing towns on its banks, one must be content with the county of Durham, a huge section of which is plainly visible. Turning towards the brown moorlands, the cultivation is exchanged for ridge beyond ridge of total desolation—a ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... the tavern during the afternoon. She could not help it, for she was full of news, and her aversion to the premises was fast drifting from her. In her heart she loved the strange old woman with the kindly eyes and rugged manner. Her talk was all of young John Keene's return, and she confided with happy tears stealing down her cheeks that his marriage with Miss Trevor would ...
— Nancy McVeigh of the Monk Road • R. Henry Mainer
... walked rapidly along, clinging to the arm of the tall fellow who strode silently beside her. A cheerfulness had come over Sam. He felt he had accomplished something—something he had set out to accomplish. He again thought of his mother and drifting into the notion that he was on his way home from work at Freedom Smith's, began planning the evening ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... It comprehends all mystery, secret power and divinity. Awe and reverence are its due, and it is as unlimited in manifestation as it is in idea. All life is Wakan; so also is everything which exhibits power, whether in action as the winds and drifting clouds; or in passive endurance, as the boulder by the wayside. For even the commonest sticks and stones have a spiritual essence which must be reverenced as a manifestation of the all-pervading mysterious power ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... and Philip was outside. It had stopped snowing, and the clouds were drifting away from under the moon. Crouched low, his pistol level at his side, he ran swiftly in the direction from which the shot must have come. The moon revealed the dark edge of the forest a hundred yards ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... to the neighbourhood of the capital—perhaps to Toledo itself. Larralde had, however, hitherto failed to come near her, and the news of the day reported an increasing depression in the ranks of the Carlists. Indeed, that cause seemed now at such a low ebb that the franker mercenaries were daily drifting away to more promising scenes of warfare, while some cynically accepted commissions in the ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... glistening moonlit water, the beating of birds' wings, rising startled from among the reeds in the salt-water pools; they could see the faces of the lovers, pale, close together, rapt in oblivious forgetfulness, drifting into the unknown. ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... the west wind held its breath. The flames crawled, ate their way instead of leaping hungrily. The smoke rose in dun clouds above the burning area and settled in gray vagueness all through the woods, drifting in wisps, in streamers, in fantastic curlings, pungent, acrid, choking the men. The heat of the fire and the heat of the summer sun in a windless sky made the valley floor a sweat-bath in which the loggers worked stripped to undershirts and ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Rodney, Henry's feeling towards her had become rather complex; equally divided between an impulse to hurt her and an impulse to be tender to her; and all the time he suffered a curious irritation from the sense that she was drifting away from him for ever upon unknown seas. On her side, directly Katharine got into his presence, and the sense of the stars dropped from her, she knew that any intercourse between people is extremely partial; from the whole mass of her feelings, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... drifting afar to the dim-vaulted caves Where life and its ventures are laid, The dreamers who gaze while we battle the waves May see us in sunshine or shade; Yet true to our course, though our shadow grow dark, We'll trim our broad sail as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... carrying a baby and a bundle of clothes. Great, wet flakes of snow were drifting down, and she bent forward over the child to shelter ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... forty-five minutes past 12, the Venerable and Pompee hauled to the wind on the starboard tack; at 1h. cut the sheet-cable, and slipped the end of the kedge hawser, and spring on the sheet-anchor,—got the boats ahead to tow,—found the ship drifting under the island fort, which did us considerable injury,—the rocks close under the lee-bow,—cut away the best bower-anchor to check her head, and bring her broadside to bear, it being calm; at twenty minutes past 1, a light ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez, Vol. I • Sir John Ross
... suppose, being carried onward by one mighty and irresistible stream. We may combine our strength and skill and make the best use of the surrounding forces. This is working and steering to the chosen goal. Or we may rest on our oars and let the stream take us where it will. This is drifting, and we shall certainly be carried on somewhere; but we may be badly bruised or even shipwrecked in the process, and in any case we shall have contributed nothing to the advance. Some few may even waste their strength in trying ...
— Progress and History • Various
... although it seemed as if water never had been so still before. It appeared impossible that anything uncanny should hide beneath that lovely mirror; and yet when some floating wisp of reeds suddenly coiled itself around my neck, or some unknown thing, drifting deeper, coldly touched my foot, it gave that undefinable sense of shudder which every swimmer knows, and which especially appeals to the imagination by night. Sometimes a slight sip of brackish water would enter my lips,—for I naturally tried to swim as low as possible,—and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... to touch the living afterward; that from the Towers of Silence nothing proceeds which can carry harm to the outside world. These are just claims, I think. As a sanitary measure, their system seems to be about the equivalent of cremation, and as sure. We are drifting slowly—but hopefully—toward cremation in these days. It could not be expected that this progress should be swift, but if it be steady and continuous, even if slow, that will suffice. When cremation becomes ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... look in his brother's face, and determined to break up the meeting. The opportunity for which he was waiting occurred in another minute. He was asked as a moderate politician to decide between two guests, both members of Parliament, who were fast drifting into mere contradiction of each other's second-hand opinions. In plain terms, they stated the matter in dispute: "Which of our political parties deserves the confidence of the English people?" In plain terms, on his sides Randal answered: "The party that lowers the ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... Deep" Emma Hart Willard Outward John G. Neihardt A Passer-by Robert Bridges Off Riviere du Loup Duncan Campbell Scott Christmas at Sea Robert Louis Stevenson The Port o' Heart's Desire John S. McGroarty On the Quay John Joy Bell The Forging of the Anchor Samuel Ferguson Drifting Thomas Buchanan Read "How's My Boy" Sydney Dobell The Long White Seam Jean Ingelow Storm Song Bayard Taylor The Mariner's Dream William Dimond The Inchcape Rock Robert Southey The Sea Richard Henry Stoddard The Sands of ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... quite lose consciousness. It seemed that I was frozen, and drifting off half into a nightmare sleep. Great metal arms were gathering Mary and me from the ground. Lifting ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... notched home on our chosen star. At this level the lower clouds are laid out, all neatly combed by the dry fingers of the East. Below that again is the strong westerly blow through which we rose. Overhead, a film of southerly drifting mist draws a theatrical gauze across the firmament. The moonlight turns the lower strata to silver without a stain except where our shadow underruns us. Bristol and Cardiff Double Lights (those statelily inclined beams over Severnmouth) are dead ahead ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... approval of reviewers; instead of doing real kingly work to be approved of by the gods! Our "Government," a highly "responsible" one; responsible to no God that I can hear of, but to the twenty-seven million gods of the shilling gallery. A Government tumbling and drifting on the whirlpools and mud-deluges, floating atop in a conspicuous manner, no-whither,—like the carcass of a drowned ass. Authentic Chaos come up into this sunny Cosmos again; and all men singing Gloria in excelsis to it. In spirituals ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... indifferently almost, therefore, over the plateau below the first range of hills, his instrument-case in hand, drinking from his brandy-flask now and then, to keep down nausea. The night was clear,—a low, wan moon peering from the west, a warm wind from the river drifting the heavy billows of smoke away from the battle-field. He picked his steps with difficulty, unwilling to tread upon even the dead: they lay in heaps here, thrown aside by the men who were removing the wounded. The day was lost: ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... were charging the atoms of the ship's beryl-steel hide with the same hazy force that had trapped and held the gangster ship in a mighty vise. Thus charged, no material thing could penetrate them. The greatest meteor would be crushed to drifting dust without so much as scarring that wall of mighty force ... meteors traveling with a speed and penetrative power that no gun-hurled projectile could ever ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... a fascinating pursuit. But it is a pleasure to be indulged in with caution; for one thing, you are certain to come across crocodiles. Now a crocodile drifting down in deep water, or lying asleep with its jaws open on a sand-bank in the sun, is a picturesque adornment to the landscape when you are on the deck of a steamer, and you can write home about it and frighten your relations on your behalf; but when you are away among the swamps in ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... am learning already. But, you and I are drifting from my task. I wish that you would take me to call on Miss Marigold, in my present lack of disguise. I do not care for that ancient garb any longer. It was stretching the chances rather far, but thanks to the darkness, the champagne, and good fortune, I succeeded in impersonating ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... this experience, supplied from memory of her brother's letters and conversations, contains some vivid supplementary details. The drifting away of the wreck put probably no effective distance between it and the ship; hence the necessity of 'sailing away' ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... and twelve o'clock, and walked across the platform, with the snow drifting in his face, toward the pier and the lower end of the town. The clock of St. Michael's Church was striking twelve as he crossed the quaint old square in which that edifice stands, and groped his way through the narrow streets leading ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... because the wind is blowing over an ice-floe," said her father, pointing to a large field of ice which seemed to be drifting slowly toward them. ...
— Gerda in Sweden • Etta Blaisdell McDonald
... could get the best view of the "Hole in the Wall"—a huge, arch-like opening through a jutting headland to the west of me. I went around to look at it, when I saw a sight that made me stop short in dismay. This was nothing less than the flat, drifting outward around the point. The swell and suction of the water around the rock must have pulled her loose—and I was a prisoner! At first my only feeling was one of annoyance. Then a thought flashed into my mind that made me dizzy with fear. The tide would be high that ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... his saying, with a tinge of polite regret in his tone, that he was sorry I had not put on a uniform overcoat with shoulder straps on it, before boarding the car; because, as he took pains to explain, in the event of our cable parting and of our drifting over the Allies' lines and then descending, he might possibly escape, but I should most likely be shot on the spot as a spy before I had a chance to explain. "However," he added consolingly, "those are possibilities most remote. The rope is not likely to break; ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... was installed a diamond-drill outfit of rods, pump, etc. Fourteen borings were completed in the river. Considerable difficulty was found in holding the pile-driver against the current, the material in the bottom being very soft, and several borings were lost owing to the drifting of the pile-driver. Each boring was continued, and the depth of several was more than 250 ft. below the surface of the water. The borings on land were mostly core borings, and were generally made with the chilled ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • Charles M. Jacobs
... "It is the drifting air," explains Fridrik Halldersson, he who has been in the Northern seas. "As the wind buffets the air, it looks blue against the white of the snow. 'Tis the air that ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... the Thunder Bird was bathed in its glow. Cliff's profile emerged clear-cut from the dusk as he gazed toward the east. Johnny, too, glanced that way, but he was not thinking then of the wonderful effect of the rising moon upon the drifting world below. He was wondering just why this trip to-night should be ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... and he was up again, beating the water with his hands, and looking out, with wild and glaring eyes that showed him some black object he was drifting close upon. The hull of a ship! He could touch its smooth and slippery surface with his hand. One loud cry, now—but the resistless water bore him down before he could give it utterance, and, driving him under it, carried away ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... of the canoe by this time was checked, and it was drifting with the current. The two young men had no desire for a nearer approach to the ...
— The Ranger - or The Fugitives of the Border • Edward S. Ellis
... trees had a silvery sheen on them, and the mist on the plain looked like drifting snow; the river, in which the stars were reflected, and which had a sheen as of mother-of-pearl, was gently rippled by the wind. The air was soft and sweet, and Caravan inhaled it almost greedily, and thought that he could perceive a feeling of freshness, of calm ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... keeping clear of the mills and drifted till day light. His eyes were almost closed by the swelling of his forehead. Soon after he discovered a castle high up on the banks on one side of the river, the inhabitants of which he stirred up by a blast on his bugle as he was drifting helplessly. A boat shot away from shore and picked him up. The boat contained an Austrian officer and two soldiers. The officer informed him that the castle to which he was being conveyed, was the fortress Komorn. His wounds were quickly dressed by the surgeon ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... and three old women on a bench, a man and a maid with a book and a parasol, a seagull drifting high in the wind, and a distant, tremendous meeting of sea and sky. Down on the wet sand stood a girl being wooed ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... foeman's challenge Only in a far halloo; Till the silence once more settled O'er the gorges of the glen, Broken only by the Cona Plunging through its naked den. Slowly from the mountain-summit Was the drifting veil withdrawn, And the ghastly valley glimmered In the gray December dawn. Better had the morning never Dawned upon our dark despair! Black amidst the common whiteness Rose the spectral ruins there: But the sight of these ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... which I spoke above; here there is half a fathom of water at low tide, many rocks, and a bank at the mouth; for vessels, if kept in the main river, where there are strong currents and tides, and ice in the winter, drifting along, would run the risk of being lost; especially as there is a sandy point extending out into the river, and filled with rocks, between which we have found, within the last three years, a passage not before discovered; but one must go through cautiously, ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 2 • Samuel de Champlain
... really the same soup, just as almost all puddings are, or may be, called cabinet pudding? The one word "Julienne" covers all the watery, chill and tasteless, or terribly salt, decoctions, in which a few shreds of vegetables appear drifting through the illimitable inane. Other names are given at will by the help of a cookery-book and a French dictionary; but all these soups, at bottom, are attempts to be Julienne soup. The idea of looking on soup "as a vehicle for applying to the palate certain herbal flavours," is remote indeed ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... Mrs. Haviland, who had been drifting comfortably along on a tide of words, stopped, a little at a loss. "I hope I don't have to defend your own husband to you, Rachael," ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... the rear admiral was shot away, and, drifting toward the shore, a Canadian swam out into the stream and brought it in triumphantly. For many years the precious trophy was hung up in ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... Mr. Colcord's The Drifting Diamond, critics throughout the country had a great deal to say on the pictures of the sea which it contained. Mr. Colcord was compared to Conrad, to Stevenson, and to others who have written ...
— Sight to the Blind • Lucy Furman
... find a reason. I have been accustomed to mix with people who read and think and write, and to discuss things freely with them, and I cannot forget for a single hour of my waking life that the old order has changed, and that we are drifting I know not whither. I do not wish to ignore this in the pulpit, and yet to avoid offending I am compelled to do so—to withdraw myself from the vexed present and look only at ancient things through ancient eyes. I know that you can understand ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... my program. But you are in my power and you have no hope of escape. I am unexpectedly provided with more subjects for my experiments. You will...." His words became hazy and unintelligible, for the hapless reporter was drifting off into a numb oblivion. He had long since lost the power to move a muscle. Out of the corner of an eye, just before he lost consciousness altogether, he perceived Handlon lying upon the floor still puffing at the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... suggestion after luncheon was ended, and Masters and Fred Caunter had left the room. Then the conversation showed signs of drifting back to sentimentality. Sir Walter saw it coming in their eyes, and sought to head them off by inquiring concerning their ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... then beating intermittently, now and then pausing. Occasionally, as the combatants spurred together, checked, wheeled, and recovered, they would be hidden for a moment in a misty veil of dust, which, again drifting down the wind, perhaps revealed them drawn a little apart, resting their panting horses. Then, again, they would spur together, striking as they passed, wheeling ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... imagining that there was anything ridiculous or funny about his story, he regarded it as a really important matter, and admired its two heroes as men of transcendent genius in finesse. To me, the spectacle of a man drifting serenely along through such a queer yarn without ever smiling, was exquisitely absurd. As I said before, I asked him to tell me what he knew of Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, and he replied as follows. I let him go on in his own way, ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... had soared above the reach of earthly intercession, and to the foreigners who stood around, it would have been a senseless form. And there they left him in his unquiet sepulchre; but it matters little, for we know that while the unconscious clay is "drifting on the shifting currents of the restless main," nothing can disturb the hallowed rest of the immortal spirit. Neither could he have a more fitting monument, than the blue waves which visit every coast; for his ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... me also as a man who seeks rather to be instructed than amused. In those salons I did, last year sometimes, however, meet Rochebriant—as I sometimes still meet you; but of late he has deserted such sober reunions, and I hear with pain that he is drifting among those rocks against which my own youth was shipwrecked. Is ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... arches of the facade; and all that glorious harmony into which the temple rises, of marble scrolls and leafy exuberance airily supporting the statues of the saints, was a hundred times etherialized by the purity and whiteness of the drifting flakes. The snow lay lightly on the golden globes that tremble like peacock-crests above the vast domes, and plumed them with softest white; it robed the saints in ermine; and it danced over all its work as if ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... doesn't matter,' he answered,—'for me nothing matters. Thank you a thousand times! Good-night!' The rain was coming down faster than ever and I stepped back into the shed, covering the child up so that the drifting wet should not beat upon it. He came after me and kissed it again, saying 'Good- night, poor little innocent, good-night!' three or four times. Then he went off quickly and sprang into his saddle and in the blur of rain I saw horse and man turn away. He waved his hand once ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... tower, through the thick plate glass, the three people in the shore boat made out the carroty-topped head and freckled, good-humored, honest, homely face of Eph Somers. The boat lay on the water, under no headway, drifting slightly with the wind-driven ripples. Then Eph raised the man-hole cover of the top of the conning tower, thrusting out his head to ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Middies • Victor G. Durham
... further explanation of who our captured knights were, now—I mean in case she should ever get to explaining who they were. My interest was gone, my thoughts were far away, and sad. By fitful glimpses of the drifting tale, caught here and there and now and then, I merely noted in a vague way that each of these three knights took one of these three damsels up behind him on his horse, and one rode north, another east, the other south, to seek adventures, and meet again and lie, after year and day. Year ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... together, and then the wanderers said good-bye to Perez. And soon he was gone with his bright blue sash, drifting homewards with the Segre, well paid yet singing a little sadly as he drifted; for he had been one of a quest, and now he left it at the edge of adventure, near solemn mountains and, beyond them, romantic, near-unknown ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... came and we were drifting about in the Adriatic Sea, the sailors about midnight thought that they were nearing land. So they took soundings and found one hundred and twenty feet of water; and when they had gone a little farther they found ninety feet. Fearing that we might be wrecked on the rocks, they threw out four ...
— The Children's Bible • Henry A. Sherman
... gliding fog-bank as a snake is drawn from the hole, They bellow one to the other, the frighted ship-bells toll, For day is a drifting terror till I raise the shroud with my breath, And they see strange bows above them and the two ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... along one side of the wreck, as far as his air-hose would permit him to go, and was satisfied that he had found the lost mail ship. The sand was already drifting against her sides, but she ...
— Boy Scouts in a Submarine • G. Harvey Ralphson
... and was read from notes at the speakers' stand. With the possible exception of his Tremont Temple lecture, delivered in Boston in 1856, it was the only one of his public addresses so carefully prepared and so dispassionately delivered. In his opinion the principles of free government were drifting away from old landmarks. The times were out of joint, the people were demoralized. The causes which afterward led to the great revolt in the Republican ranks in 1872 were already marked in the quick perception of Toombs, and this admirable state paper was framed to put the ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... While drifting, after the war ended, many old American friends came abroad for a holiday, and among the rest, Dr. Palfrey, busy with his "History of New England." Of all the relics of childhood, Dr. Palfrey was the most sympathetic, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... Lord Selkirk decided to throw in his lot with the Hudson's Bay Company. Why he did this will subsequently appear. At first, one might have judged the step unwise. The financiers of London believed that the company was drifting into deep water. When the books were made up for 1808, there were no funds available for dividends, and bankruptcy seemed {29} inevitable. Any one who owned a share of Hudson's Bay stock found that it had not earned him a sixpence during that year. The company's business was being cut down by the ...
— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood
... hall. Other men came, who wanted money, and went grumbling away, with voices which rose higher in complaint as they went further from the house. Thorbeorn himself was often away, and used to come back more silent and proud than he had gone out. The winter set in with wind and drifting snow. Darkness drew closer about the country; the sky was lemon colour, the fells were black. It was the time of great fires, and long festivals within-doors; but Thorbeorn's ...
— Gudrid the Fair - A Tale of the Discovery of America • Maurice Hewlett
... for so many months had been centres of feverish activity. The enemy submarines were withdrawn from our shipping routes and merchant ships could traverse the sea in safety except for the occasional danger of drifting mines. "What is to be the future of the airship?" is the question which is agitating the minds of innumerable people ...
— British Airships, Past, Present, and Future • George Whale
... happy cowboy outside roared a grotesque ballad. He gazed at the interior of a rough shack built of pine boards, with bunks constructed in tiers on both sides. There were figures in them—Western cowboys, perhaps. Then it seemed, somehow, that the voice drifting from the outside was strangely familiar. Back at Bannister College, where he remembered he had gone in the dim and dusty past, he had often heard that same fog-horn voice, roaring songs of a less blood-curdling ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... her own all day, how she had friends coming often in the evening, friends who would love Marie, but whom she never need to see except when her heart desired. And she told of the lovely lawn, with its pavilions and pergolas and crevices and vines, and of the canyon drifting away down to ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... not a ripple on the sea last night. I saw a couple of steamers far out, and a sailing ship that had hove to, and the fisher-boats drifting ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... came my feeling for Will changed. He had worn me out. The love I had given him I lavished upon the child. Will's mother came to live with us—she had been drifting around miserably before—and while she failed me at the time of the divorce, yet she was a tower of strength to me during the baby's infancy. I was very fond of her and I think she sincerely liked me. But Will, her only son, ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... the Starr Ranch. He passed a group of riders drifting some yearlings toward town. A man spoke to him. He did ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... preparations! The launching of canoes upon the wave! The signalling and shouting!— Death and disaster flouting— The anxious haste, the strife, a human life to save Across the boiling surges, Each man his light bark urges, Though death is in the error of a stroke; And paddling, poising, drifting, O'er the floes the light shell lifting, The gallant fellows reach the whirling pack: And from the frightful danger, They save the worn-out stranger. And oh, to see the nursling in his arms! And oh, the pious caring, The sweet and tender ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... another dull wilderness of bricks and mortar, its silence broken only by the heavy, regular footfall of the policeman, or the songs and shouts of some belated party of revellers. A dull wrack was drifting slowly across the sky, and a star or two twinkled dimly here and there through the rifts of the clouds. Holmes drove in silence, with his head sunk upon his breast, and the air of a man who is lost in thought, while I sat beside him, curious ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... was what they said. But the skirmishers were now drifting into town. Orders snapped from man to man through the dark. The crackle of small-arms fire came sporadically, to be followed by the heavier boom-boom as cannon balls from Fort Clay ricocheted through the streets, the Yankees being forced back ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... Throw out the Life-line! Throw out the Life-line! Some one is drifting away; Throw out the Life-line! Throw out the Life-line! Some one ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... at first sight, but he realized that it was very beautiful, and then commenced to note details with observant eyes. There was a sawmill beside the river, for he could faintly hear a strident scream and see the blue smoke drifting in gauzy wisps across the hill. The square log-house which stood some little distance from the lake looked well built and substantial, and the road that wound through the green oblong had been skilfully laid with rounded strips sawn off the great fir-trunks. Sleek ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... stoop. The moon was higher and the ivy shadows were deeper. I sat at her side and we watched a little cloud tilt at the drifting moon and go asunder quite ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... boat had, indeed, vanished from her moorings. On the bronze current, nothing moved but three fishing-boats drifting down, with the smoke, toward the marsh and the bend of the river, and a small junk that toiled up against wind and tide, a cluster of naked sailors tugging and shoving at her heavy sweep, which chafed its rigging of ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... waste words on a man who could ask such a question as that. He lifted a large purple forefinger, with a broad white nail at the end of it, and pointed gravely to a printed Bill, posted on the wall behind him. The drifting foreigner drifted ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... from the barn boss, de Spain took refuge in riding. The season was drawing on toward winter, and rain clouds drifting at intervals down from the mountains made the saddle a less dependable escape from the monotony of Calabasas. Several days passed with no sight of Nan and no word from her. De Spain, as the hours and days went by, scanned ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... all but the most stalwart spirits: Canada quite lost to the cause; Arnold's army in full, though orderly, retreat from that province; a powerful British fleet just arriving in New York harbor, three or four ships drifting in daily, and now forty-five sail all at ...
— Revolutionary Heroes, And Other Historical Papers • James Parton
... put to rest on the southern slope of the ridge beside my camp, where the sunshine chases the shadows around the birch tree, where the murmur of the waves comes in rhythm to the robin's song, and where the red deer play on moonlight nights. Neither will I fear the snows of winter that come drifting over the bay, driven by the wind that whines through the naked tree tops, nor the howl of the hungry wolf, for what had no terror for me in life need not have afterward. And if the lessons that I learned at my mother's knee be true; if there be that within me that lives on, I am sure that ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... her sort chose to marry an illiterate apprentice of her uncle's, Thomas Lincoln, whose name in the forest was spelled "Linkhorn." He was a shiftless fellow, never succeeding at anything, who could neither read nor write. At the time of his birth, twenty-eight years before, his parents—drifting, roaming people, struggling with poverty—were dwellers in the Virginia mountains. As a mere lad, he had shot an Indian—one of the few positive acts attributed to him—and his father had been killed by Indians. There was a "vague ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... although the snow almost blots it out. There it is right in the northwest. I can just make it out. The herd is drifting south of it now. Better get over on your point, and head them up this ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... this he looked about, but the raft was nowhere to be seen except for a few pieces of wood drifting about. ...
— Kernel Cob And Little Miss Sweetclover • George Mitchel
... Chaldean embroideries. This is very probable, and would account for his poetical design on the shield of Achilles, in which his own inspiration dictated the possibilities of the then practised arts of Asia, of which the fame and occasional glimpses were already drifting westward. (Plate 5.) ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... her vehicle, when she tumbles over an object which, when torches are brought, was found to be the corpse of the suppliant rebuker of a few hours previous, alongside of which lay the unconscious form of his daughter, half buried in the drifting snow. 'Mon Dieu,' exclaimed Madame de Pean, 'Il ne dormira pas de la nuit, c'est bien sur.' This tragic event is narrated with thrilling effect, in the author's best style." ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... on, drifting into something sophisticated, with a suggestion of waltz rhythms running through it. There was a stir of movement in the room, and the sound of windows opening and shutting, once, and then again. Judith did not turn her head to see who had ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... autumn, melancholy and sinister, as you find her only in such low-lying immemorial drifting places of leaves, and oozy sinks of dank water. For the moors autumn is the spring come back in purple, and in golden woods and many another place where the year dies happily, she smiles like a widow ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... opportunity for studying his fellow-creatures; but it did not go very deep into his mind. He lived for some time in a confused glamour and glitter; surrounded by the fascinating specious life of the store, but drifting merely superficially upon it. The great place, with its columns of artificial marble and white censers of upward-shining electricity, glimmered like a birch forest by moonlight. Silver and jewels and silks and slippers flashed all about him. It was a marvellous education, for he ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... of us children. I got one girl very low now. She's in Memphis. I been in Arkansas 45 years. I come here jes' drifting looking out a good location. I never had no dealings with the Ku Klux. I been farming all my life. Yes, I did like it. I never owned a home nor no land. I never voted in my life. I had nine children of my own but only my girl ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Arkansas Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... was drifting back over all the events of the past few months, when a shadow passed over the curtain at the window. She stole to the door and placed her ear to the latch. From that position she could plainly ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... pensioners on man, and not unwisely improving this elevated tract for their habitation. They nibbled what was for them; I nibbled what was for me. Once or twice in the night, when I looked up, I saw a white cloud drifting through the windows, and filling the whole ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... population. One reason for this more rapid growth of the cities is that since the eighties the majority of our immigrants have flocked to the cities rather than to the rural districts. Another reason, however, is that the country people have been drifting to the towns and cities. This cityward drift has an important bearing upon the character ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... North Sea grimly prowling, Treading his dear Revenge's deck, Watched, with the sea-dogs round him growling, Galleons drifting wreck by wreck. "Fetter and Faith for England's neck, Faggot and Father, Saint and chain,— Yonder the Devil and all go howling, Devon, O Devon, in wind ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... cattle. Few of the homesteaders were permanent. They stayed their eight months—if they could stick it out—and left at once. Their uneasy stay on the land was like the brief pause of migratory birds or the haphazard drifting of tumble weeds that go rolling across the plains before the wind, landing against a barbed-wire fence or any other ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... not quite lose consciousness. It seemed that I was frozen, and drifting off half into a nightmare sleep. Great metal arms were gathering Mary and me from the ground. Lifting us; ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... right," she said; "she seems to be standing to the south, but she is evidently drifting fast towards the land. I see, though, she has got some after-sail set on the stump of the mizenmast, and I think I understand it; she wishes to weather the reef, and of course after that take shelter in the bay. Yes, yes, that is clearly her ...
— The Heir of Kilfinnan - A Tale of the Shore and Ocean • W.H.G. Kingston
... Billy Dodge was fast drifting, although unconsciously, toward a crisis in his religious and worldly experiences. At school, during the last term, and so far in the summer vacation, his scheme of fortifying his physical powers with mental stimulants in the form of warlike "thoughts" ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... in my country town. I, though a boy of twelve, passed the plate for two years while the minister's daughter sang a solo. Our village was not a happy one, and the incongruity of our emotional prayers and ecstasies of imagery, and the drifting dullness and meanness of the life outside, filtered in some way into my boy mind. I saw that suffering was real and pressing, and so many suffered resignedly; and that imagery and my companionship with a God (I was highly "religious" ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... rising to the setting sun. Ah! what a wilderness of floral beauty was hidden, or was suddenly revealed, upon the tropic islands, through which the pinnace moved. And upon her deck what a bevy of human flowers—young women how lovely, young men how noble, that were dancing together, and slowly drifting towards us amidst music and incense, amidst blossoms from forests and gorgeous corymbi from vintages, amidst natural caroling and the echoes of sweet girlish laughter. Slowly the pinnace nears us, gaily she hails us, ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... grew and began drifting down the trail, and behind it a black something rose over the hilltop and followed it, so proclaiming itself a horseman galloping swiftly towards her. The color spread from the schoolma'am's cheeks to her brow and throat. Her fingers forgot their cunning ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... they have such brilliancy and quickness of thought that they seem to see in a flash that which takes the other class hard work to attain. But these people with the "open Line of Head" must, above all things, have purpose in their life. Without purpose they are rather like a ship drifting on an idle sea. They may spend their life in an aimless way unless "the call" comes to them or the tide of ambition turns their way and carries ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... her once or twice, while his father, who was hot because she was hot, said it was like an August day all over the house, and opened a window, but shut it almost immediately, for a cloud of snow came drifting in, and Mrs. Geraldine knew she should get neuralgia in ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... the atoms of the ship's beryl-steel hide with the same hazy force that had trapped and held the gangster ship in a mighty vise. Thus charged, no material thing could penetrate them. The greatest meteor would be crushed to drifting dust without so much as scarring that wall of mighty force ... meteors traveling with a speed and penetrative power that no gun-hurled projectile ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... statesmen asserting with passion that "dumping" didn't occur, or that it was a very charming sort of thing to happen. Nobody would face and handle the rather intricate truth of the business. The whole effect upon the mind of a cool observer was of a covey of unsubstantial jabbering minds drifting over a series of irrational economic cataclysms, prices and employment tumbled about like towers in an earthquake, and amidst the shifting masses were the common work-people going on with their lives as well as they could, suffering, perplexed, unorganized, and for anything ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... flag of the rear admiral was shot away, and, drifting toward the shore, a Canadian swam out into the stream and brought it in triumphantly. For many years the precious trophy was hung up in the parish church ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... sitting in the Baron's private room finishing one of the renowned Hotel Mayonaise breakfasts. Out of the windows they could see the bright curving river, the bare tops of the Embankment trees, a file of barges drifting with the tide, and cold-looking clouds hurrying over the chaos of brick on the opposite shore. It was a bright breezy morning, and the Baron felt in high good-humour with his surroundings. On maturer consideration, the entertaining experience of the night before had greatly raised ...
— The Lunatic at Large • J. Storer Clouston
... appealing look these pale cheeks and staring eyes had. Hungry! Yes, that's what they all were. She thought, fantastically, for a moment, of poor Mr. Magnus's Treasure Hunters, and she seemed to see the whole of this company in a raft drifting in mid-ocean, not a sail in sight and the last ship's ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... the head of Toba after a fashion. He had the lay of the land in his mind. He had never seen it in midwinter, but the snow, the misty vapors drifting along the mountain sides, did not ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Mrs. McVey, drifting by, "you must feel sort of lonesome—such a turn-out of old folks I never saw. I wanted Evey to come, but she said she 'd as soon go to a tea at the Needy ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... to quiet down. By the time they had covered two more miles the wind was blowing the snow in their faces with stinging force. John Hardy was having trouble to keep the horses in the road. They, too, recoiled from the snow drifting in their faces. He finally persuaded his companion to go back under the robes. Sherm ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... volume, "Shagganappi," all tell of the spirit that tells them. Love of the blessed life of blue air without gold-lust is felt in the line and the interline, with joy in the beauty of beaver stream, tamarac swamp, shad-bush and drifting cloud, and faith in the creed of her fathers, that saw the Great Spirit in all things and that reverenced Him at all times, and over and above it all the sad note that tells of a proud race, conscious that it has been crushed by numbers, that ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... and the snow was drifting; and it was evident that in many places the road would be obliterated, and I had a long stretch of prairie to travel over on which there was not a human habitation. It was dangerous to undertake it, and I had to stay in Atchison. I found an empty ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... bet we didn't have any fun drifting up. Nobody said anything much; we just sat around the edge of the deck with our staffs and pushed her off, whenever she ...
— Roy Blakeley • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... what one defends be true, an attitude of defence, a continual apology, whatever the cause, makes the mind barren because it kills intellectual innocence; that delight in what is unforeseen, and in the mere spectacle of the world, the mere drifting hither and thither that must come before all true thought and emotion. A zealous Irishman, especially if he lives much out of Ireland, spends his time in a never-ending argument about Oliver Cromwell, the Danes, ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... waiting for food. For millennia it had been drifting across the vast emptiness of space. Without consciousness, it had spent the countless centuries in the void between the stars. It was unaware when it finally reached a sun. Life-giving radiation flared around the hard, dry spore. Gravitation tugged ...
— The Leech • Phillips Barbee
... clockwork, but the clockwork of the soul is called the Will. Hence, while the soul in passivity reflects the Image of the Lord, the Will in intense activity holds the mirror in position lest the drifting motion of the world bear it beyond the line of vision. To "follow Christ" is largely to keep the soul in such position as will allow for the motion of the earth. And this calculated counteracting of the movements of a world, this holding of the mirror exactly opposite to the Mirrored, ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... behind the British Constitution, dies out, and we are left with nothing but our system of checks, and our notion of its being the great right and happiness of an Englishman to do as far as possible what he likes, we are in danger of drifting towards anarchy. We have not the notion, so familiar on the Continent and to antiquity, of the State—the nation, in its collective [56] and corporate character, entrusted with stringent powers for the general advantage, and controlling individual wills ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... Barnaby True became aware that there was another boat coming down the river toward where they lay, now drifting with the strong tide out into the harbor again, and he knew that it was because of the approach of that boat that the other had called upon his men ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... almost all puddings are, or may be, called cabinet pudding? The one word "Julienne" covers all the watery, chill and tasteless, or terribly salt, decoctions, in which a few shreds of vegetables appear drifting through the illimitable inane. Other names are given at will by the help of a cookery-book and a French dictionary; but all these soups, at bottom, are attempts to be Julienne soup. The idea of looking on soup "as a vehicle for applying to the ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... for a while, and seemed to look at some dark clouds that were drifting along like a funeral out in the west. Presently he said half aloud something that sounded like ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... on a visit to a relative, he catches his first sight of the Channel waters, and of the royal fleet riding at anchor at Spithead. And at that sight, the "old Armada," and the "brave Rodney," and the "wooden walls," of which he had read, come drifting like a poem into his thought, and he vows that he will become a sailor,—maybe, in time, the Admiral Cobbett. But here, too, the fates are against him: a kind captain to whom he makes application suspects him for a runaway, and advises him to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... thus in total unconsciousness of his scrutiny, Hampton made no attempt to analyze the depth of his interest for this waif who had come drifting into his life. He did not in the least comprehend why she should have touched his heart with generous impulses, nor did he greatly care. The fact was far the more important, and that fact he no longer questioned. He had been a lonely, unhappy, discontented man for many a long year, shunned ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... into the rocky entrance. There was barely room, for each wave bumped it against the roof, but by clinging to the chain he worked his way along and shot through into the lake within. On the right of the cavern three figures, holding a light, stood on a kind of landing-place, while a skiff drifting far off in the shadows told its ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... that the war may assume another aspect, and be a short and bloody one. And to such a war—an anti-slavery war—it seems to me we are inevitably drifting. It seems to me hardly in the power of human wisdom to prevent it. We may commence the war without meaning to interfere with slavery; but let us have one or two battles, and get our blood excited, and we shall not ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... by a perennial drifting polar icepack that, on average, is about 3 meters thick, although pressure ridges may be three times that thickness; clockwise drift pattern in the Beaufort Gyral Stream, but nearly straight-line movement ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... a bed, and awake in an open boat drifting out to sea, is startling. Waring was not without experiences, startling and so forth, but this exceeded former sensations; when a bear had him, for instance, he at least understood it, but this was not a bear, but a boat. He examined the craft ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... last. "Only the question is—for how long? I understand a plunge, if you settle its duration; it is the drifting and trusting to chance, and a gradual sinking which seem to me a poor game. Did you ever ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... his cloak—he cast him off, and struck him: then, wildly hurried out into the night air where the wind was blowing, the snow falling, the cloud-drift sweeping on, the moon dimly shining; and where, blowing in the wind, falling with the snow, drifting with the clouds, shining in the moonlight, and heavily looming in the darkness, were the Phantom's words, "The gift that I have given, you shall give again, ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... were leaving the fields, and, with their breakfast cans swung on their fork handles, they were drifting in twos and threes into the Flying Horse. It looked warm and ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... jockeying a bit, began drifting the bow across the strings, the suppressed smiles faded and eyes opened. Here was a man who, as he said, once could play. And he wasted no time on airs composed by others and known to half the world. Under his touch the mellow wood began to ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... as I caught a momentary glimpse of a small dark object which appeared for a moment, hovering on the crest of a sea, and then sank out of sight again. And, as Murdock had said, it certainly presented very much the appearance of a small boat drifting slowly away toward the south-west before the freshening Trade wind. Moreover, although the glimpse I had caught had been but momentary, I thought I had detected the appearance of what might very well be a crouching human figure sitting in her. Presently I got another sight of the thing, ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... high-handed outrages and of a general disposition to run things wherever he went. The officers at Fort Halleck arrested him and refused to turn him over to the stage line unless the latter agreed to discharge him. This was done, and now Slade, out of work, began to be bad at heart. He took to drink and drifting, and so at last turned up at the Beaverhead diggings in 1863, not much different from many others of the bad ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... his lack of faith in Andy ten dollars worth, and Cal Emmett did the same. Irish, coming in on the afternoon train and drifting instinctively to the vicinity of the Happy Family, cursed them all impartially for a bunch of quitters, slapped Andy on the back and with characteristic impetuosity offered a hundred dollars to anybody who dared take him up, that Andy would win. And this after he had heard the tale of ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... and a blood-red sunset! The low log-cabins of the lumber camps were smothered in snow; they were fringed with pendant ice at the eaves, and banked high with drifts, and all window-frosted. The trails were thigh deep and drifting. The pines—their great fall imminent, now—flaunted long, black arms in the gale; they creaked, they swished, they droned, they crackled with frost. It was coming on dusk. The deeper reaches of the forest were already dark. ...
— Christmas Eve at Swamp's End • Norman Duncan
... in its depths concealed Lies all the wealth of this vast universe— Yea, lies some part of God's omnipotence The legacy divine of every soul. Thy will, O man, thy will is that great ship, And yet behold it drifting here and there— One moment lying motionless in port, Then on high ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Walter Sayers' office was from the beginning something different, apart from the young woman from Iowa who had been drifting from office to office, moving from rooming house to rooming house on Chicago's North Side, striving feebly to find out something about life by reading books, going to the theatre and walking alone in the streets. ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... large patches of herbs and weeds, all drifting from the west. Some were such as grow about rocks or in rivers, and as green as if recently washed from the land. On one of the patches was a live crab. They saw also a white tropical bird, of a kind which never sleeps upon the sea; and tunny-fish ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various
... oath; an intermittent rumble and jar from the infrequently moved artillery, not yet in action; and perhaps a groan or two from the wounded. But, even when the field-rifles began to boom and shroud the landscape in drifting smoke, the make-believe aspect of the affair did not in any degree diminish. There were no clouds of dust, no heaps of slain, no cheers, no desperate charges, and not even a glimpse of the stars and stripes. Away to ...
— From Yauco to Las Marias • Karl Stephen Herrman
... another minute. She went and sat all curled up in the hammock, not letting it swing, but just keeping very, very still, and listening. There were voices in there mumbling sentences she could not catch. After awhile a sickly odor came drifting through the window, and more muttering between the two doctors. Sudden came wandering up, tiptoed to his chair on the porch, and sat down rather heavily and twirled a cigar in his fingers without ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... second tunnel above the first, but he insisted on descending a shaft that had been sunk almost vertically from the crest of Coal Hill to get a measurement of the veins, for stoping, or cross cutting, or drifting or some such technical work, I forget what; but the vertical shaft afforded estimates of the depth of the veins. Because it was not a regular avenue of work but only of examination, it had not been equipped with steam hoist and electric light, but ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... out! God knows how. Of course it was only a theory—only a notion in fact. He hadn't anything to go on that I could see. But after two years' drifting about in the Shamo, this is ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... the afternoon wore away, something else came in view. Masses of brownish seaweed, supported by small, berry-like bladders, began drifting by. Far apart at first, they began getting more and more dense, till at last, with a thrill, he realized that they were drawing into that strange area known as the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... employed in the business, he did not hesitate. He still hoped that the pacific party in Parliament would overcome the more violent, and that the tyranny of a small minority toward which the country appeared to be drifting would be nipped in ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty
... Certain General Groups.—We have just noticed that movements of labor in the group system, caused by improvements in method, consist mainly in an upward flow of labor, accompanied by irregular lateral movements, the labor drifting to the right or the left as it is more strongly attracted now to one point and now to another on the same horizontal plane. The general mass of it swerves now to the right and now to the left in its general ascending course, though none may be actually expelled. This ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... that we could not get our heavy loads up into the forest above, so we were obliged to make our fire and bed in the snowdrift at the base of the cliff. It was a poor place indeed. The snow, from the constant drifting in from the lake, was very deep. There was no shelter or screen from the fierce cold wind, which, changing during the night, blew upon us. We tried to build up the fire, but, owing to our peculiar position, could not change it. In the woods, at ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... read on Sundays, in her own room, where she usually passed her hours of solitude in hemming dish-towels, or making articles called "Takers." Dr. Price came, too, and even the haughty four Ryders. Alice was gratified with my popularity. But I felt cold at heart, doubtful of myself, drifting to nothingness in thought and purpose. None saw my doubts or felt ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... seen Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. Everywhere he had taken care of himself, and survived; nor had his strong heart yet waked up to any hunger for a home. Let me also tell you that he was one of thousands drifting and living thus, but (as you shall learn) one in ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... we see once in an age in the States, by moonlight, but barred with all bright and beautiful colors, like the children of the sun and rain. I saw one of them a few nights ago. What the sailors call "raindogs"—little patches of rainbow —are often seen drifting about the heavens in these ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... river, floundered, splashed, and flurried into deep water, while the awestruck individual with the rifle was too astounded to fire a shot. He may tell, too, of another instance of good luck on the part of the crocodile. How, drifting down silently with the ebb, the black boy indicated the presence of game on a slide overhung by a deep verandah of mud; how a shot was fired and a big log splashed into the water and the little one remained bearing the bullet-wound, the real having ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... Leavitt's Malay servant maintained an aloof and mysterious existence. I sat down beside Miss Stanleigh on the veranda steps to find my hands sooty from the touch of the boards. A fine volcanic ash was evidently drifting in the air and now to my ear, attuned to the profound stillness, the wind ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... so. I fear he is drifting very far from his boyhood's teachings. His mother was a perfect woman, so far as I ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... perfect tone of colour. From the top of the mountains downwards a rich olive was produced by the powdery snow and the grass, which olive was warmed with a little brown, and in this way harmoniously combined, by insensible gradations, with the white. The drifting took away the monotony of snow; and the whole vale of Grasmere, seen from the terrace walk in Easedale, was as varied, perhaps more so, than even in the pomp of autumn. In the distance was Loughrigg-Fell, the basin-wall of the lake: this, from the summit downward, was a rich orange-olive; ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... for those old-time brigs, when bound to the North in ballast, to be blown off the land by strong westerly gales, and these occasions were dreaded by the coasting commander whose geographical knowledge was so limited that when he found himself drifting into the German Ocean beyond the sight of land, his resources became too heavily taxed, and perplexity prevailed. It was on one of those occasions that a skipper, after many days of boisterous drifting, remarked to his mate, "I ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... said gloomily; "I suppose you two men sitting here comfortably by the fire, without caring whether school keeps or not, would call two feet of backwater over one's claim 'boomin';' I reckon YOU'D consider a hundred and fifty feet of sluicing carried away, and drifting to thunder down the South Fork, something in the way of advertising to your old camp! I suppose YOU'd think it was an inducement to investors! I shouldn't wonder," he added still more gloomily, as a sudden ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... I went on, drifting aimlessly from group to group and dallying of set purpose. If I had read Colonel Tarleton's glance aright, the moments were growing diamond-precious; but as yet neither half of my errand was done. Come what ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... shall lay some boughs of bush across my face and the kegs, so that there will be no fear of my face showing; and if a sentry should happen to catch sight of it, he will suppose that it is merely a bush drifting in the stream." ...
— Orange and Green - A Tale of the Boyne and Limerick • G. A. Henty
... of the detector began to swing back and forth slowly and precisely, covering the valley inch by inch. He heard their whispered consultations drifting up from below, though he couldn't make out what they ...
— The Judas Valley • Gerald Vance
... conning tower, through the thick plate glass, the three people in the shore boat made out the carroty-topped head and freckled, good-humored, honest, homely face of Eph Somers. The boat lay on the water, under no headway, drifting slightly with the wind-driven ripples. Then Eph raised the man-hole cover of the top of the conning tower, thrusting out ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Middies • Victor G. Durham
... have searched for the Christ-child, the giver of all their wealth. For to her he was everywhere that night—ubiquitous as the luminous mist that brooded all over London—of which, however, she saw nothing but the glow above the mews. John Jephson was out in the middle of all the show, drifting about in it: he saw nothing that had pleasure in it, his heart was so heavy. He never thought once of the Christ-child, or even of the Christ-man, as the giver of anything. Birth is the one standing promise-hope ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... Florence, now in Rome; living together in Alsace, drifting to Paris; and, when the Revolution drove them from the French capital, seeking refuge in London, where we find the uncrowned Queen of England chatting amicably with the "usurper" George in the Royal box at the opera—always ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... self-sacrifice, when all appears lost and her future looks colorless and hopeless, she fears that the years of her life are "like the floating leaves drifting down Lost Creek, valueless, purposeless, and vaguely vanishing in the mountains." All of the stories are by no means so tragically sad as this one, but all are overshadowed by the mountains. Among the best of the novels, Down the ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... bright dance of the waves. And now and then she heard what she knew to be the rush of a round shot far above her head, and following the sound saw a little silver fountain leap up into the sunshine and skim before the breeze; then glancing up the hill she saw the gray puff drifting, and presently felt the dull rumble of the air. At the root of the smoke-puffs, once or twice, she descried a stocky figure moving leisurely, and in spite of the distance and huddle of vapour could declare that it was Captain Stubbard. Then a dense mass of smoke was ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... true story of the plain life, the words and deeds of folk who lived a hundred or more years ago. The plain tales of Boswell, Pepys, Samuel Sewall, will live when all the series of six best sellers that have ever been are drifting dust. ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... land, he, typifying fortitude and discipline and unfaltering devotion, stood firm and stayed fast while all about him chaos reigned and fathers forgot their children and husbands forgot their wives, and vice versa, though probably not to the same extent; and how finally the drifting ashes and the choking dust fell thicker upon him and mounted higher about him, until he died and in time turned to ashes himself, leaving only a void in the solidified slag. I had always admired that soldier—not his judgment, which was faulty, but his heroism, which was immense. To ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... servants of Christ who have given up home and country to suffer and it may be to die for Him? Some of us remember that when Missions were destroyed, when clouds were all around us, and the very ground drifting from under our feet, that we were made brave to work and wait for the salvation of God by the prayers which went up to God for us. When "prayers were made without ceasing of the Church unto God," the fast-closed doors of the prison were opened for ...
— Five Sermons • H.B. Whipple
... weakness, partly to create a diversion, the Directoire was now drifting into a new war. In February, owing to French intrigues, a riot took place at Rome, which resulted in a republic being proclaimed and the Pope being driven from the city. Further north the same process was repeated. ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... different this religion was to the fiery gospel she had heard last year at Northampton from the harsh stern preacher, at whose voice a veil seemed to rend and show a red-hot heaven behind! How tender and simple this was—like a blue summer's sky with drifting clouds! If only it was true! If only there were a great Mother whose girdle was of beads strung together, which dangled into every Christian's hands; whose face bent down over every Christian's bed; and whose ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... Stillwell had safely reached Fort Wallace, and on the morning of the 25th of September, Colonel Carpenter and a detachment of cavalry arrived with supplies. This assistance to the besieged and starving scouts came like a vessel to ship-wrecked men drifting and starving on a raft ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody
... penetration enough to see in what, direction Mrs. Arnold's thoughts were drifting and his discretion ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... flowed, very softly, They heard sweet singing that the water sang, They came to a place where the sea was shallow And saw treasure hidden there. There was one poplar tree On the lonely island, Swaying for sadness. The clouds went over their heads Like a fleet of drifting ships. And there they sank down out of the ...
— Poems By a Little Girl • Hilda Conkling
... with great blobbery flakes of snow, which came elbowing each other down the wind, crossing and re-crossing, circling, drifting, whirling, fluttering, so dense and thick that the whole air darkened ominously, and the sun seemed to withdraw from the world, leaving the wind and the storm to their ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... the farewells were said, we were railroaded to Boston, embarked on the Cunard steamship Niagara, Captain Leitch, and steamed out of Boston Harbor on a day of cloudlessness and calm. Incoming vessels, drifting in the smoothness, saluted us with their flags, and the idle seamen stared at us, leaning over their bulwarks. The last of the low headlands grew dim and vanished in the golden haze of the afternoon. "Go away, tiresome old land!" sang out my sister and myself; but my father, standing beside us, ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... engines were reversed and worked by hand to keep the Bennett from drifting down-stream, a boat was lowered and manned, the Chums forming part of her crew, and the second officer went down to take soundings; while the passengers, to whom even so small a cause for excitement was a godsend, crowded ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... and sculan do not often connote simple futurity in Early West Saxon, yet they were fast drifting that way. The Mn.E. use of shall only with the 1st person and will only with the 2d and 3d, to express simple futurity, was wholly unknown even in Shakespeare's day. The elaborate distinctions drawn between these words by modern grammarians are not only cumbersome and foreign to the genius ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... thought of flattery so ruinous. Fresh regiments, too, were raised at this time, and a crowd of new colonels and staffs created, instead of giving a new battalion or a squadron additional to regiments already in existence. I saw quite plainly towards what rock we were drifting. We had met losses at Hochstedt, Gibraltar, and Barcelona; Catalonia and the neighbouring countries were in revolt; Italy yielding us nothing but miserable successes; Spain exhausted; France, failing in men and money, and with ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... up. A wonderful change had taken place. The view of the plains was completely cut off by masses of soft cloud, which, coming from the east, struck the mountain-side about two thousand feet below us and were swiftly and softly drifting up to where ...
— The Boys of Crawford's Basin - The Story of a Mountain Ranch in the Early Days of Colorado • Sidford F. Hamp
... his line had parted; so that the boat, drifting fast to leeward, was out of sight by morning. Reduced, after this, to great extremities, the boat touched, for fruit, at an island of which they knew nothing. The natives, at first, received them kindly; but one of the men ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... him, because she did not dare. He did not ask her to dance, which was rude. So she passed him back to Mr. Carvel, who introduced him to Miss Renault and Miss Saint Cyr, and other young ladies of the best French families. And finally, drifting hither and thither with his eyes on Virginia, in an evil moment he was presented to Mrs. Colfax. Perhaps it has been guessed that Mrs. Colfax was a very great lady indeed, albeit the daughter of an overseer. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... in that dim light, although the structures were all low and built of logs. The largest and most centrally located of these was evidently the homestead, as it had a rudely constructed porch in front, and a thin cloud of smoke was drifting from its chimney. As I drew nearer, I could perceive the reflection of a light streaming ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... found the passage very difficult, the dangers of the Channel being aggravated by the strength of the current and bad weather. The Captain, Vesuvius, and Royal William were aground for some time, but were ultimately got off again without much damage; and the Terrible, which was drifting and in great danger, was only brought up by means of an anchor constructed for the occasion by lashing one of the quarter-deck guns to two small anchors. When her large anchors were hauled up they were found to be broken; and so great was the loss of these ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson
... artist been there to paint the scene, it would have made a very striking picture. The sky had darkened suddenly, and a cheerless gloom brooded over the sullen river with its drifting ice, and the bare sandy ridges on either side, and the helpless figure stranded upon the islet, and the daring man winning his perilous way over the treacherous surface, and the group of anxious watchers on the shore, while the wind moaned drearily through the leafless trees, like a warning ...
— Harper's Young People, May 4, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... desolate! so lonely! I am drifting down the current of life aimless, hopeless, useless! What shall I do with my future? I believe I am slowly petrifying; I neither suffer nor enjoy as formerly; my feelings are deadened; I am growing callous, indifferent to everything. I ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... odd island of his began to fade away from him, he became queerly interested in it. He wanted particularly to go down into the deep sea again, and would spend half his time wandering about the low lying parts of London, trying to find the water-logged wreck he had seen drifting. The glare of real daylight very soon impressed him so vividly as to blot out everything of his shadowy world, but of a night time, in a darkened room, he could still see the white-splashed rocks of the island, and the clumsy penguins staggering to and fro. But even these grew fainter ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... among them. They made no attempt at concealment. Not having any clear views of the rights of property, they had no thought that they had done anything wrong in taking goods which they had found drifting in the water. The officers returned to La Salle ...
— The Adventures of the Chevalier De La Salle and His Companions, in Their Explorations of the Prairies, Forests, Lakes, and Rivers, of the New World, and Their Interviews with the Savage Tribes, Two Hu • John S. C. Abbott
... George III.'s Case Better Legally than Practically. Natural Rights. Townshend's Duties. Massachusetts's Opposition. Samuel Adams. Committees of Correspondence. The Billeting Act. Boston Massacre. Statement of Grievances. The Tea. Coercion Resolved upon. First Continental Congress. Drifting into War. ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... of the success of the plot, until—for I had not the best of consciences—I felt my hand would be spell-bound in the attempt to write to the princess; and with that sense of incapacity I seemed to be cut loose from her, drifting back into the desolate days before I saw her wheeled in her invalid chair along the sands and my life ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... when the dominie and his parishioners were drawing a step closer to each other, the laird and his son were drifting farther apart. Crawford felt keenly that Colin took no interest in the great enterprises which filled his own life. The fact was, Colin inherited his mother's, and not his father's temperament. The ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... her isolation terribly. To whom could she turn in her trouble? The thought of her father was both a reproach and a humiliation. He was drifting hopelessly, and almost unresistingly, towards final wreck, and, so far from seeking to restrain, she had added to the evil impetus. She shrank from the very idea of confiding in her garrulous, superficial mother. She ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... eating, dressed his own wound, and the two made themselves as comfortable as possible under the circumstances. The mate's account of what happened after Ralph's drifting away was ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... Commerce was drifting away from Baltimore to Philadelphia and New York. The Erie Canal had been opened and it looked as if this would be the one route to the West—the Hudson River to Albany, thence by canal to Buffalo, and on by the Great Lakes to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... cargo-boat, rather guided than propelled by its four heavy oars, came drifting down with the current. Its gunwale was hung with horsehair sieves. Up from the thwarts stood many poles, each with cross-pieces, every cross-piece hung with sieves. Its oarsmen edged it nearer and nearer to the Quay and slowed its motion until it was almost stationary ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... Grandissimes and De Grapions, through certain efforts of Honore's father (since dead) were making some feeble pretences of mutual good feeling, and one of those Kentuckian dealers in corn and tobacco whose flatboat fleets were always drifting down the Mississippi, becoming one day M. De Grapion's transient guest, accidentally mentioned a wish of Agricola Fusilier. Agricola, it appeared, had commissioned him to buy the most beautiful lady's maid that in his ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... incessantly begging for intervention from abroad. Shut up in the Tuileries, defended only by his Swiss Guards, the timid sovereign was drifting among contrary influences. He subsidised journals intended to modify public opinion, but the obscure "penny-a-liners'' who edited them knew nothing of acting on the mind of the crowd. Their only means of persuasion was to menace with ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... up from a fresh quarter, and another night of discomfort set in. In addition to this adverse weather, a still further difficulty was experienced in the strong current that appeared to set continuously from the westward, drifting the vessel bodily out of her course at the rate of sixty or seventy miles a day. During this period, the barometer ranged from 28.64 to 29.70. It was remarkable that the winds appeared to succeed each other with perfect regularity, rotating, as nearly as possible, once in every two ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... an ache in his throat, and an awful sorrow overwhelming him, with the richly blended voices of the happy Juniors drifting across to him, chanting a song of old Ballard, big Thor ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... resentful going with a grin, and then threw himself back on the thick bed of dry moss where he had been sitting, and watched the clouds drifting across the space of blue which the clearing opened overhead. His own action reminded him of Jackson, lying in the orchard and looking up at the sky. He felt strangely at one with him, and he experienced ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... looked off for the last time. The wind had changed. The fires were still burning. The smoke was drifting toward us—and oh! the odor of it! I hope you will never know what ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... shiftiness, to lie the fact of his mortality and decomposition out of existence, he has satisfied his mania for survival by the invention of souls. And so behold him—spectacle of spectacles—a chatty little tradesman in an immemorial hat drifting good-naturedly through ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... bluffs opposite me, while into my ear ripple the sweet, soft cadences of the river's song. Folded hands lie in my lap, for the time forgot. My heart and I lie small upon the earth like a grain of throbbing sand. Drifting clouds and tinkling waters, together with the warmth of a genial summer day, bespeak with eloquence the loving Mystery round about us. During the idle while I sat upon the sunny river brink, I grew somewhat, though my response be not ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... little of Ascher and nothing at all of his wife during the first two days of our voyage. My idea was that they stayed in their cabins—they had engaged a whole suite of rooms—in order to avoid drifting into an intimacy with Gorman and me. A millionaire would naturally, so I supposed, be suspicious of the advance of any one who was not a fellow millionaire. I was mistaken. Ascher was simply seasick. When he recovered, two days before Mrs. Ascher raised ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... when the gold had faded from sea and sky, the palaces and towers of Venice rising low on the horizon as in a City of Dreams, the Lagoon turned by the moon into a sheet of silver, lights like great fireflies stealing over the water, ghostly gondolas gliding past,—then we were the real Lotus Eaters drifting to the only Lotus Land where all ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... him. He and the pup brought me and then he was stolen from me into the fold, as it were," I answered as I paused at the front gate of the Poplars, which had a white clematis drifting over its tall stone pillars and clutching at the straight iron bars as if trying to keep me out of even my own fold. "Will you come in with me?" I asked with a laugh, as I flung the old gate wide in spite ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... shrouds were all cut away. The vessel was now little better than a raft, and was drifting at the mercy of the ocean currents. For my part I did not much care. I had no desire to go to Manilla or any where else; and the love of life which is usually so strong did not exist. I should have preferred to have ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... Gloucestermen among it, the champion fishers of the world, who spent their spare time in drifting past the English boats and hurling salty wit—at which pastime they ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... than see, that the schooner was veering slowly to the left, in obedience to her helm,—a fact which left no doubt that we were, as the captain had surmised, drifting with the storm against the current; or perhaps, before this, the tide coming in had made a counter-current up the straits. The roaring noise was growing more distinct every minute; till all at once Bonney, who was looking attentively ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... a tragic ending; there have been thousands of tragic endings to such enterprises as that in which I was engaged, but in my case, fate ordered otherwise, I have told the tale elsewhere, but it will bear re-telling. I was drifting about Fleet Street, mournfully conscious of the extent to which my appearance had deteriorated, of the unblacked boots and the yellow linen, and the general air of being unkempt and unwashed, when I found myself standing in front of the window of a filter-maker's shop, close by old Temple ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... Hendrik, who having been in their midst could tell what way they were drifting, "they came down upon us from a northerly direction. When we headed our horses homewards, we soon galloped out from them, and they did not appear to fly after us; I am sure they ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... with a wholesale breeze, grew as calm as a sheet of billowy glass, heaving only in long, gentle undulations on which the sinking sun bestowed a green and golden glory, dimmed only by the white fog-bank that came drifting slowly up from the Farralones, now shut out from view by the lovely haze. Captain Booden gazed morosely on the western horizon, and swore by a big round oath that we should not have a capful of wind if that ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... the drifting air," explains Fridrik Halldersson, he who has been in the Northern seas. "As the wind buffets the air, it looks blue against the white of the snow. 'Tis the air that ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... hardly be classified as sport. Thus, a man in search of wild duck will mark down a flock settled on some shallow sheet of water. He will then put a crate over his head and shoulders, and gradually approach the flock as though the crate were drifting on the surface. Once among them, he puts out a hand under water, seizes hold of a duck's legs, and rapidly pulls the bird down. The sudden disappearance of a colleague does not seem to trouble its companions, and in a short time a very considerable bag has been obtained. ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... in the next room except for the striking of a match that came with monotonous regularity. And always the peculiar scent of his tobacco drifting in through the heavy curtains, forcing a hundred recollections with the association of its perfume. Why didn't he come to her? Did he know how he was torturing her? Was he so utterly indifferent that ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... prevent this accident, the wolf was directed to keep moving with a quick step round the island, which he did for a whole year; and, in that time, the earth increased so much in size, that all on board the canoe were able to disembark upon it. After a long and perilous drifting of the canoe hither and thither, its voyagers were at length able to lay their heads down at night upon solid land, and to sleep ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... Hours aimless-drifting as the milkweed's down In seeming, still a seed of joy ye bear That steals into the soul when unaware, And springs up ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone
... time? Thus far no breath of the wretched days in Louisville had affected Berenice. Most of those with whom Mrs. Carter had found herself compelled to deal would be kind enough to keep her secret. But there were others. How near she had been to drifting on the rocks when Cowperwood ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... now, instead of drifting with the current of the creek, the boat could be more easily steered. Soon it had been run into a sheltered place, against the bank, where, no matter how hard the wind ...
— The Bobbsey Twins on a Houseboat • Laura Lee Hope
... public opinion. The classes whose confidence in the British Raj is still unshaken are practically unrepresented in the Press, which is mostly in the hands of the intellectuals, of whom the majority are drifting into increasing estrangement, while the minority are generally too timid to try to stem the flowing tide. Nor, if the "moderates" in Bengal were overawed by the violence of the new creed, can the whole blame be ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... Immediately beyond this they turned towards the narrow cinder path which led through the marshes to Mrs. Jasher's cottage, and toiled on cautiously through the misty rain, which fell continuously. The fog was drifting up from the mouth of the river and was growing so thick that they could not see the somewhat feeble lights of the cottage. However, Archie's instincts led him aright, and they blundered finally upon the wooden gate. Here they paused in shocked surprise, for a woman's ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... part with him. Since then we have had great years together. We have been hungry and happy together, and together we have played by the cabin, faced danger in the wilds, slept peacefully among the flowers, followed the trails by starlight, and cuddled down in winter's drifting snow. ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... mad. He I love is still a traitor to France and me, and I am wretched forever. Oh! that I were dead! oh! that I were dead! No; don't speak to me: never mind me; this madness will pass as it has before, and leave me a dead thing among the living. Ah! sister, why did you wake me from my dream? I was drifting so calmly, so peacefully, so dead, and painless, drifting over the dead sea of the heart towards the living waters of gratitude and duty. I was going to make more than one worthy soul happy; and seeing them ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... the deep meaning after a moment and sank back shivering. The courage and endurance that had borne her to this hour deserted her. The help, that for a time had seemed to rise up in Lynda, crumbled. Alone, drifting she knew not ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... he said, "it is useless. In spite of your efforts we are drifting farther and farther out, and from the look of the sky I fear that we are going to have a great gale, and there is nothing to do but to set a little sail and to run before it. Maybe there will presently be a shift of wind, which may enable us to make for ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... perfect good-humor," echoed De Lancey gravely. O'Neil sat down at the piano and played "The World Turned Upside-Down," all drifting into the singing, voice after voice; and the beauty of Walter Butler's voice struck all, so that presently, one by one, we fell silent, and he alone carried the quaint old melody to ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... of "Waverley"—rather than involve himself further in transactions which he foresaw must lead to discredit and disaster; and, at the risk of a quarrel, strove to recall Byron to the ways of sound literature, when through his wayward genius he seemed to be drifting into an unworthy course. ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... Bourbon) come into power, when the prelate presented his project anew; indifferent and debauched, a holder of seventy-six benefices, M. de Tressan dreamed of the cardinal's hat, and aspired to obtain it from the Court of Rome at the cost of a persecution. The government was at that time drifting about, without compass or steersman, from the hands of Madame de Prie to those of Paris-Duverney. Little cared they for the fate of the Reformers. "This castaway of the regency," says M. Lemontey, "was adopted ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... to the Asiatic continent, with its important peninsula of Europe, we find that in the vast desert of drifting human speech three, and only three, oases have been formed in which, before the beginning of all history, language became permanent and traditional—assumed, in fact, a new character, a character totally different from the original character of the floating and constantly ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... 'Whither fliest thou, Aeneas? forsake not thy plighted bridal chamber. This hand shall give thee the land thou hast sought overseas.' So clamouring he pursues, and brandishes his drawn sword, and sees not that his rejoicing is drifting with the winds. The ship lay haply moored to a high ledge of rock, with ladders run out and gangway ready, wherein king Osinius sailed from the coasts of Clusium. Here the fluttering phantom of flying Aeneas darts and hides itself. Nor is Turnus slack to follow; he overleaps the barriers ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... a disappointment. Yesterday I half believed that the winter drew to its end; the breath of the hills was soft; spaces of limpid azure shone amid slow-drifting clouds, and seemed the promise of spring. Idle by the fireside, in the gathering dusk, I began to long for the days of light and warmth. My fancy wandered, leading me far and wide in a dream of summer England. . ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... check suit of remarkable virulence. Every day Mr. Polly looked round to mark how many of the familiar faces had gone, and the deepening anxiety (reflecting his own) on the faces that remained, and every day some new type joined the drifting shoal. He realised how small a chance his poor letter from Easewood ran against this hungry cluster of competitors at ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... the Glittering Plain, he cannot do according to them, for there is no other land than this which can hold him. Here he is strong and stark, and full of joy and love; but otherwhere he would be but a gibbering ghost drifting down the wind of night. Therefore in whatsoever thou mayst do within this land I will stand by thee and help thee; but not one inch beyond it may my foot go, whether it be down into the brine of the sea, or up into ...
— The Story of the Glittering Plain - or the Land of Living Men • William Morris
... great wisdom, but entitled him to the gratitude of his countrymen as a benefactor. He saw the vanity of political science as it then existed, the incapacity of popular leaders, and the sadness of a people drifting into anarchy and confusion; and, strong in his own will and his sense of right, he rose superior to himself, and directed the stormy elements of passion and fear. And this he did by his sermons from the pulpit,—for he did not descend, in person, into the stormy arena of contending passions and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... Hawkes came drifting downward. He started to cry out in fear, until he noticed that the ground was coming up at him slowly, and that he was slipping sideways. He landed on a street back of the tanks, as ...
— Pursuit • Lester del Rey
... there were green trees and distant hills, one saw a level horizon and brown boglands with a few green places and here and there the glitter of water. One could imagine that had it been twilight and not early afternoon, and had there been vapours drifting and frothing where there were now but shadows of clouds, it would have set stirring in one, as few places even in Ireland can, a thought that is peculiar to Celtic romance, as I think, a thought of a mystery coming not as with Gothic nations out of the pressure of darkness, but out of great ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... pines, motley forms and groups were moving to and fro, some seeking the "buyers" with full trays, others returning to their stations in the field with a new supply of empty baskets. Some of the pickers were drifting away to other fields, a few seeking work late in the day; more, bargaining with the itinerant venders of pies, made to last all summer if not sold, gingerbread, "pones," and other nondescript edibles, at which an ostrich would hesitate ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... immediately several sharp, muffled explosions, and then the white propeller began to turn. The balloon was drifting quickly toward the northwest and rising—Bob could see its shadow following on the sandy plain. Then the arms of the propeller turned faster and faster and a velvet whirr in the cabin showed that ...
— The Air Ship Boys • H.L. Sayler
... the voice of some night-wandering bird of melody, hid high in the upper realms of darkness, came faint sweet notes falling softly down. It was as if from the deep air above, and from the wide air around, there were dropping and drifting small links of silken steel, gentle but strong, so that one were helpless even had one wished to move. To listen was also ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... laugh at red death and I laugh at red fire; Brave Red Cloud is only afraid of fear; But Wiwaste is fair to his heart and dear; Then grant him, Wakawa, his heart's desire." The warriors applauded with loud "Ho! Ho!"[24] And he flung the brand to the drifting snow. Three times Wakawa puffed forth the smoke From his silent lips; then he slowly spoke: "Mahpiya is strong as the stout-armed oak That stands on the bluff by the windy plain, And laughs at the roar of the hurricane. He has ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... It's disabled—drifting! It must have been on the rocks. It's a large one, too. Look out ...
— Frank and Andy Afloat - The Cave on the Island • Vance Barnum
... needs must be In the deep wide sea of misery, Or the mariner, worn and wan, Never thus could voyage on Day and night, and night and day, Drifting on his dreary way, With the solid darkness black Closing round his vessel's track; Whilst above, the sunless sky Big with clouds, hangs heavily, And behind the tempest fleet Hurries on with lightning feet, Riving sail, and cord, and plank, Till the ship has almost drank Death from the ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... down amid the drifting snow, and said, 'O, my God, this is a day of trouble to me. Lord help me. The elements are subject to thy will: Thou holdest the winds in thy hands. If thou wilt speak the word, there will be a great calm. O Lord, for the ...
— The Life of Jesus Christ for the Young • Richard Newton
... they seem to be coming together for some aerial festival or grand celebration; and, as if bent upon a final effort to work off a part of their superabundant wing-power before settling down for the night, they circle and circle high above the chimney-top, a great cloud of them, drifting this way and that, all in high spirits and chippering as they fly. Their numbers constantly increase as other members of the clan come dashing in from all points of the compass. Swifts seem to materialize ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... sea-bed too rocky. Then shutting off her engines she listened. The surface ship, mystified by the sudden cessation of the noise she had been pursuing, also waited, and this stagnation sometimes lasted for hours. Then if the surface ship moved, as she was often compelled to do in order to avoid drifting with the tide away from the locality, the submarine moved also, and the one that stopped her engines first detected the other, but could not catch up to her again without deafening her own listening appliance. In which case the next move would probably ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... caught the Indian trick of seeing only what they look for, and so of separating an animal instantly from his surroundings, however well he hides. That is why the whole hillside seemed suddenly to vanish, spruces and harebells, snow-fields and drifting white clouds all grouping themselves, like the unnoticed frame of a picture, around a great gray rock with a huge shaggy she-wolf keeping watch over it, ...
— Northern Trails, Book I. • William J. Long
... would be romantic," conceded Jane Andrews, "but I know I couldn't keep still. I'd be popping up every minute or so to see where I was and if I wasn't drifting too far out. And you know, Anne, ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... beheld it winding along the edge of the cliff to an apparently endless distance, until, as I gazed steadily on the extreme limit of my view, I saw the grey mist from the sea here and there break and roll up into great masses of slow-drifting cloud, in the intervals of which I caught the white gleam of sunlit snow. And these intervals continually closed up to open again in fresh places higher up, disclosing peak upon peak of a range of mountains ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... consequently drifted in such a position, that both the English ships poured in an awful fire that raked her fore and aft. In a few minutes, her bowsprit was cut to shivers; her foremast was splintered and tottering; her main-yard broken up; her mizen-mast entirely carried away, and drifting under her counter; her bows riddled with shot; and her upper decks strewn with dead and dying. Only about half a dozen of her guns could be brought to bear, and although the crew made every possible attempt to manoeuvre the ship, so as to recover her original position, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... thoughts reverted to their exotic phase of his awakening, drifting into such introspection as he seldom indulged, and led him far from the immediate riddle, by strange ways to a revelation altogether unpresaged and a resolve still ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... dispersed the whole fleet, and on the second day the good ship Vrow Katerina found herself alone, labouring heavily in the trough of the sea, leaking so much as to require hands constantly at the pumps, and drifting before the gale as fast to leeward almost as she usually sailed. For a week the gale continued, and each day did her situation become more alarming. Crowded with troops, encumbered with heavy stores she groaned and laboured, ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... glanced at a morning paper as usual. But she had not stirred out of doors. The newsboys never invaded Brett Street. It was not a street for their business. And the echo of their cries drifting along the populous thoroughfares, expired between the dirty brick walls without reaching the threshold of the shop. Her husband had not brought an evening paper home. At any rate she had not seen it. Mrs Verloc knew nothing whatever of any affair. ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... of a New England county would reach. Then there is another interesting feature of this companionship. A great deal of it lasts through the entire year. There are ten times as many birds in England as in America in the winter. Here the fields are green through the coldest months. No deep and drifting snows cover a frozen earth for ten or twelve weeks, as with us. There is plenty of shelter and seeds for birds that can stand an occasional frost or wintry storm, and a great number of them remain the whole year around the ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... rest, misery made me indifferent. Montfort experience ought to have reminded me that the decks are always washed by the night watch. I was reminded of this about 2 A.M. by an unsympathetic seaman, who was pointing the nozzle of a hose threateningly at me. The awakened crowd was drifting away, goodness knows where, trailing their wet blankets. I happened to be near the ladder leading to the sacred precincts of the saloon deck. Its clean, empty, sheltered spaces were irresistibly tempting, and I lawlessly mounted the ladder with my bed, ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... stopped him. Dick had reappeared, but he was twenty yards at least astern of the boat, and drifting back ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... that despite the efforts she made to think of him tenderly she was drifting further apart from Gregory. She had two other offers of marriage before the wheat had shot up a hand's breadth above the rich black loam. This was a matter of regret to her, and, though Mrs. Hastings assured ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
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