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More "Eccentric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... acted as Dick's servant when he was ashore, and as general housekeeper and caretaker when he was afloat, sounded the bugle as a signal to his master that it was time to turn out; and the neighbours in the houses round about—who, by the way, referred to Penryn as "that very eccentric young man"—had come to look upon the instrument somewhat in the light of a town clock; so much so that several of them set their watches by it, and one old gentleman was in the habit of leaving his front door and sprinting for ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... night; but when she arose in the morning, she felt doubly certain that she had acted to her own satisfaction. What real right had she to this money? It was coming to her as the result of the fancy of an eccentric old man, who, in a moment of needless pity and passing interest, had made a will in her favor to the prejudice of his natural heir. Of what odds was it that that heir had ample means already, or even that he was her bitter enemy? Did not the very ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... being occupied, and every nook in the garden too, we are accommodated with a rustic table in the "Grand Salon," part of which is screened off as a kind of bar. The "Grand Salon" is also full of quaint pictures and eccentric curiosities; it is cool and airy, bright flowers are in the windows, and the floor is sanded. We had stopped here to refresh the horses, intending to breakfast at Etretat. But so delighted were we, a party of "deux couverts," with this good ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 23, 1890. • Various
... gentlemen when they showed me their houses—mere sheds of the humblest description, but in their eyes far superior to any palace of Europe. An imported chair or an antiquated desk would supply them with conversation to last hours. The wives of those settlers were generally eccentric persons who looked suspiciously at us. One of them at Requena made me feel most uncomfortable by the annoying way in which she looked at my only shoe—as I was unable to put a shoe on the other much swollen foot. ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... that all our speculations will remain summaries of probabilities. No documents are extant to enlighten us; we have only mobile, complex and confused ideas, incarnate in eccentric, often contradictory theories. That this character attaches to such ideas should keep us on guard against framing theories whose symmetry is sometimes their condemnation' ('Daily ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... 'a detached and eccentric personality who had arisen on the outskirts; the world began to be conscious of ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... peculiarly unattractive in this work of restoration, and it was a fortunate day for Margaret when the pedantic young man of the house proposed to marry her. After this we discover that she has both a history and a will of her own. She leaves the Quakers, and goes as secretary to a lady who holds eccentric if broadminded views on every conceivable subject, and the change of atmosphere, however delightful in various ways, was too much for Margaret's peace of mind. The young Quaker was an obstinate wooer and followed her up, but his chances of success, which were never rosy, grew ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 2, 1917 • Various
... explain everything. It was a singularly bold, upright hand, distinct as print, free from all caligraphic flourishes, indicating, as most writing does indicate in some degree, the character of the writer. Slightly eccentric it might be, quick, restless, in its turned-up Gs and Ys, but still it was a good hand, an honest hand. Olive thought so, and liked it. Wondering who the writer could be, she opened it, ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... wish for the good C.F.B. as happy an evening as we spent (with our eccentric friend Mifflin McGill) bicycling from the Newhaven Inn in a July twilight. The Newhaven Inn, which is only a vile kind of meagre roadhouse at a lonely fork in the way (where one arm of the signpost carries the romantic legend "To Haddon Hall"), lies between Ashbourne and Buxton. ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... given this evening proves it; I admire your intellect and character, and your person pleases me. As for me, the step I am taking now gives you the opportunity of judging my worth—You may think my actions strange, improper, or eccentric—you are at liberty to appreciate me as you wish. If your judgment is favorable, however, I shall be proud and happy to become Madame de Saint-Herem and inhabit the Saint-Ramon mansion with you. ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue
... despised caste, he is, in the locality alluded to, truly a dull fellow. That the peasant there is not an ass or a sheep, you only know by his standing on end. You hear no strains of country drollery, and no characters of curious or eccentric humor; all is dull, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... a different stamp was one of the characters in Going into Society, who played the clarionet in a band at a Wild Beast Show, and played it all wrong. He was somewhat eccentric in dress, as he had on 'a white Roman shirt and a bishop's mitre covered with leopard skin.' We are told nothing about him, except that he refused to know his old friends. In his story of the Seven Poor Travellers Dickens found the clarionet-player of the Rochester Waits so communicative ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... and Princess of Wales descended this shaft, and Captain Jan was their amiable, not to say eccentric, guide. The Captain was particularly enthusiastic in praise of the Princess. He said that she was a "fine intelligent young lady; that she asked no end of questions, would not rest until she understood everything, and afterwards undertook to explain it ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... God, found it, after many a year of poorly requited toil; there he sat, with locks of silver gray which set off so nobly his fine bold but benevolent face, his faithful consort at his side, and his trusty dog at his feet—an eccentric animal of the genuine regimental breed, who, born amongst red-coats, had not yet become reconciled to those of any other hue, barking and tearing at them when they drew near the door, but testifying his fond reminiscence of the former by hospitable waggings of the tail whenever a uniform ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... The worthy but eccentric old chap then scrambled on board again, amidst the suppressed laughter of the boatmen, and kept his seat, wet clothes and all, until we ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... place Bob Power was not smuggling. In the next place the Chancellor of the Exchequer would never see Godfrey's letter. It would be opened, I supposed, by some kind of clerk or secretary. He would giggle over it and show it to a friend. He would also giggle. Then unless the spelling was unusually eccentric the letter would go into the waste-paper ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... by his idle friends, it was a long time before any of them discovered that he was engaged in practical business. In his own home he was not questioned, and he said nothing. The Saracinesca were considered eccentric, but no one interfered with them nor ventured to offer them suggestions. If they chose to allow their heir absolute liberty of action, merely because he had passed his twenty-first birthday, it was their own concern, and his ruin would be upon their ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... dassent go up, 'cause he thought the pope could see right through him, and would know he was a Baptist, but the rest of the Americans were going up, and dad didn't want to be eccentric, so he and I went up. The pope put out his hand to dad, and instead of shaking it, as he would the hand of any other man on earth, and asking how his folks were, dad bent over and kissed the pope's hand, ...
— Peck's Bad Boy Abroad • George W. Peck
... exclusiveness is wholly unknown. It is a society which includes every actor, whether he be Benedict or Hamlet, or the Ghost, or the Bandit, or the court-physician, or, in the one person, the whole King's army. He may do the "light business," or the "heavy," or the comic, or the eccentric. He may be the captain who courts the young lady, whose uncle still unaccountably persists in dressing himself in a costume one hundred years older than his time. Or he may be the young lady's brother in the white gloves and inexpressibles, whose duty in the ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... shop-keeper did not ask her very much more than its genuine value and next day all Paris knew of the transaction and flocked to the Opera to see her in the ornaments which had cost the Russian Duke his friendship for the bearer. But though eccentric, impulsive and domineering, no whisper had ever attached itself to her name. On her return to her native New York, was she not welcomed, feted, honored, besieged with invitations everywhere? People felt she was different ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... subject to continual and annoying interference from his colleagues. Before his arrival in Paris, Silas Deane had entered for Congress into semi-commercial relations with the French government through the eccentric and industrious Beaumarchais. Franklin was content to leave these affairs to him, and did not at the time even know their real nature. But with Arthur Lee it was different. Of all characters in American history Lee is almost the hardest ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More
... used to be seen on Wallack's stage, at the house he established upon the wreck of John Brougham's Lyceum, often rise in memory, crowned with a peculiar light. Lester Wallack, in his peerless elegance; Laura Keene, in her spiritual beauty; the quaint, eccentric Walcot; the richly humorous Blake, so noble in his dignity, so firm and fine and easy in his method, so copious in his natural humour; Mary Gannon, sweet, playful, bewitching, irresistible; Mrs. Vernon, as full of character as the tulip is of colour or the hyacinth ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... dock-gates, with a quaint balcony staircase, like the approach to a Swiss chalet, leading down into the yard. In London these apartments were his sole domicile; though, to his friends, none of whom lived nearer to him than Bloomsbury, this seemed a piece of conduct too flagrantly eccentric—on a parity with his explanation of it, alleging necessity of living on the spot: an explanation somewhat droll, in the face of his constant lengthy absence, during the whole of the winter, when he handed the reins of ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... drawing a line through the name of each saint up to the 2d of May, the day that she left the convent. A voice outside the door called "Jeannette." Jeanne replied, "Come in, papa." And her father entered. Baron Simon-Jacques Le Perthuis des Vauds was a gentleman of the last century, eccentric and good. An enthusiastic disciple of Jean Jacques Rousseau, he had the tenderness of a lover for nature, in the fields, in the woods and in the animals. Of aristocratic birth, he hated instinctively the year 1793, but being a philosopher by temperament and liberal by education, he execrated ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... a wealthy and eccentric Philadelphia merchant, financier, philanthropist and the founder of Girard College, was born near Bordeaux, France, in 1750, the son of a sea captain. He lost the sight of his right eye when eight years old and had only a meager education. Beginning a seafaring ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins
... loyalty were not founded upon memories, for she had none. They were given a father created by her own vivid fancy, aided by the photograph. This was a faded likeness of an unusually handsome man with waving hair of an eccentric length and bold dark eyes smiling straight out of the picture as if he were just about to speak to the Arethusa who worshipped it. He wore a Byronic sort of collar, with a wide tie, and his shoulders were draped in an Italian military cape, ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... The eccentric fisherman dropped his net and walked swiftly toward the spot, his new acquaintance following him. As they drew near there seemed a sort of monstrous irony in the fact that the dead machine was still throbbing and thundering as busily as a ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... An eccentric young millionaire had offered me eight thousand dollars for it. I had an absolutely original conception. But I cannot execute it. It's as if a breeze ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... struggled in vain to release myself from the eccentric female's claws, "where is the Capting—the man who was into the Crimea, amidst the cannon's ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 5 • Charles Farrar Browne
... "An eccentric, I fancy," drawled Miss Purvis. "You must know that each freshman class is bound to have numbered with it some most surprising individuals. Rarae aves, ...
— Ruth Fielding At College - or The Missing Examination Papers • Alice B. Emerson
... who disliked all eccentric departures from custom and routine; and he felt especially suspicious of the change proposed in the life of Agnes. With new interests to occupy her mind, she might be less favourably disposed to listen to him, on the next occasion when he urged his suit. The influence ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... than,—"Walk on;" and seizing the stole from the Taoist's shoulder, he flung it over his own. He did not, however, return home, but leisurely walked away, in company with the eccentric priest. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... superposed one above the other. The free use of white paint all over the sloping tiers of pews has prevented the interior from being as dark as it would have otherwise been, but the result of all this painted deal has been to give the building the most eccentric and indecorous appearance. Still, there are few who will fail to thank the good folks of Whitby for preserving an ecclesiastical curiosity of such an unusual nature. The box-pews on the floor of the church ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... delightful book about his pipe and tobacco, full of suggestion to the young humorist, lets out nothing or next to nothing of his meat and drink. His hints about pipes are very extensively followed, and nowadays every ambitious young pressman smokes in public at least one well-burnt briar with an eccentric stem—even at some personal inconvenience. But this jealous reticence on the part of successful men—you notice they never let even the interviewer see their kitchens or the debris of a meal—necessarily throws one back upon rumour and ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... exclaimed, with a ringing laugh, "aren't you a little bit eccentric, signor? You talk like a long-haired prophet! I never met an artist before who couldn't stand praise; it is generally a matter of wonder to me to notice how much of that intoxicating sweet they can swallow without reeling. But you're an exception, I ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... picturesque villages with indifference, and it was only when they reached some great city, or came upon some exceptionally fine temple or eccentric deity, that their curiosity was aroused. Mendes worshipped its patron god in the form of a live ram,* and bestowed on all members of the same species some share of the veneration it lavished on the divine animal. The inhabitants of Atarbekhis,** on the island of Prosopitis, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... presence of mind, presently he peeps cautiously out, and begins to ascend again. Here he comes toward us—slowly, majestically! Strike at him with a fan, and lo! he retreats in great disorder to a remote corner of the room, dodging about in most eccentric fashion, when, recovering his self-possession after a time, he goes about examining the pictures on the wall with the air of a critic. You lie down on your back, on the comfortable sofa in the corner, watching the balloon as it sails slowly about, and wondering what it will do ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... influence of teachers like Hervey, Romaine, Cecil, Venn, Fletcher, Newton, and Thomas Scott. The fathers of the Evangelical school were men of naturally strong and vigorous understandings, robust and rugged, and sometimes eccentric, but quite able to cope with the controversialists, like Bishop Tomline, who attacked them. These High Church controversialists were too half-hearted and too shallow, and understood their own principles too imperfectly, to be a match for antagonists who were in deadly earnest, and put them ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... the brute seemed scarcely aware that anything unusual had gone down his throat; but, as he was making another dart at the boat, he suddenly began to move about in an eccentric way—as Paddy said, "as if something troubled him in his inside," and then, turning away, buried his huge body in the mud, while his tail lashed the water into foam. Round the spot above where his head was probably hidden, a red circle was formed, which, whirling round in the eddies of the ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... had a truly wonderful memory. He seemed to remember every sample he had ever seen—goods, lines, trimmings, price, and all. He was an eccentric man. Sometimes he would receive a crowd of salesmen in rapid succession, inspect their merchandise and hear their prices without making any purchase. Later, sometimes on the same day, he would send out orders for the "numbers" ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... almost deafening, and at a glance they saw that the steam was escaping furiously from the two long boilers at the end farthest from where they stood, but the new bright engine, with its cylinders, pistons, rods, cranks, driving-wheel, governor, and eccentric, seemed to ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... many Browning is only a joke, Whitman an eccentric, Dante insane and Turner a pretender. These have all sought to express things which the many can not feel, and consequently they have been, and are, the butt of jokes and jibes innumerable. "Except ye become as little children," etc.—and yet the scoffers are often people of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... sagged about them at intervals, weighted down with the dust; but again it rippled like a sail when an eccentric gust swept ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... turn from systematic objectivity to my unsystematic reminiscences of many years. Of course, they abound with eccentric abnormities and startling phenomena. As I have devoted myself to psychotherapeutics, always and only from scientific interest, as a part of my laboratory studies and therefore have refused to spend any time on cases which offered no special ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... Mercedes lived on in the little brick house, as he had promised. Only one thing the Bowdoins noticed: he now dressed and talked and acted like a man grown very old. His coats were different again; his manner was more eccentric than ever. His hair helped him a little, for it really grew quite white. He asked Mercedes now to ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... unity of effect. The bearing-arches, which span it from bay to bay, being parti-coloured, with voussures of alternate white and a kind of grey or green, [134] being also somewhat flat at the keystone, and literally eccentric, have, at least for English eyes, something of a Saracenic or other Oriental character. Again, it is as if the architects—the engineers—who worked here, had seen things undreamt of by other Romanesque builders, the ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... Sybarite, "the first moth. Don't be precipitate, my dear fellow. Aunt Dora, pray sit quietly where you are, and don't disturb our operations. It is only a moth, to be sure; but don't let us cut short the moments of a creature that has no hereafter," said Jack, solemnly. He disturbed them all by this eccentric manifestation of benevolence, and flapped his handkerchief round Miss Dora, upon whose white cap the unlucky moth, frightened by its benefactor's vehemence, was fluttering wildly. Jack even forgot himself so far as to swear softly in French at the frightened insect as it ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... Camden says that Drinkwater is a corruption of Derwentwater. The incorrectness of this guess is shown by the existence as surnames of Fr. Boileau, It. Bevilacqua, and Ger. Trinkwasser. It is in fact a perfectly natural nickname for a medieval eccentric, the more normal attitude being represented by Roger Beyvin (boi-vin), who died in ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... century before, about the time when a great army passed over those parts, at a political crisis, one result of which was the final absorption of his small territory in a neighbouring dominion. Restless, romantic, eccentric, had he passed on with the victorious host, and taken the chances of an obscure soldier's life? Certain old letters hinted at a different ending—love-letters which provided for a secret meeting, preliminary perhaps to the final departure of the young Duke ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... convince men of the truth, or to lead them to think aright. The subtle human intellect can weave its mists over even the clearest vision. Remember that it is eccentric enough to ask unanimity from a jury; but to ask it from any large number of men on any point of political faith is amazing. You can hardly get two men in any Congress or Convention to agree;—nay, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... a clear, legible hand. Form a, o, u, n, e, i, properly. Write out and horizontally. Avoid unnecessary flourishes in capitals, and curlicues at the end of words. Dot your i's and cross your t's; not with circles or long eccentric strokes, but simply and accurately. Let your originality express itself not in ornate penmanship, or unusual stationery, or literary affectations, but in the force and keenness of ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... like Venus as painted by the ancients—why, I cannot think, for however fair a squint-eyed woman may be otherwise, I always look upon her face as distorted. I am sure that if Venus had been in truth a goddess, she would have made the eccentric Greek, who first dared to paint her cross-eyed, feel the weight of her anger. I was told that when Corilla sang, she had only to fix her squinting eyes on a man and the conquest was complete; but, praised be God! she did not fix them ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the success of which he came to think, in the latter part of his life, that the best interests of the community were dependent. The number of these honorably ambitious but ill-informed and somewhat eccentric testators increases every year, as the country grows in wealth and the habit of giving to ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... had been so anxiously expected, at length arrived, and the spell, which had bound every one to the spot was dissolved in a moment; they were then conducted to the king, and formally introduced to him, but the grave eccentric old man shook hands with them, without taking them from the tobe in which they had been enveloped, or even condescending to look in their faces, for he never made it a practice to raise his head above a certain height, fearing that he should discover the ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... Subject to frequent {lossage}. This use is of course related to the common slang use of the word to describe a person as eccentric, crazy, or just unreliable. A system that is flaky is working, sort of — enough that you are tempted to try to use it — but fails frequently enough that the odds in favor of finishing what you start are low. Commonwealth ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... "Enough of him. Seems eccentric. I have to see a lot of buggy people. They don't take me in any more. But I'm keeping you and I'm in a hurry myself. ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... that inhabit the country around them—even the strong heavy rhinoceros is not feared by them, though the latter frequently foils and conquers them. Young elephants sometimes become their prey. The fierce buffalo, the giraffe, the oryx, the huge eland, and the eccentric gnoo, all have to succumb to ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... Valdarno with a sneer. "That angel of beauty has the ineffably eccentric idea that she loves that old transparency, that old magic-lantern slide of ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... creature in it without a curve or a twist, and not one of them a mean figure to look at. You can make your own comment; I am fanciful, you know. I believe she is trying to idealize what we vulgarly call deformity, which she strives to look at in the light of one of Nature's eccentric curves, belonging to her system of beauty, as the hyperbola, and parabola belong to the conic sections, though we cannot see them as symmetrical and entire figures, like the circle and ellipse. At any rate, I cannot help referring this paradise of ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... were usually the same,—he was merely hoping for that relaxation and diversion which should freshen and fit him for later concentration. Still, he had often heard of the odd circumstances to which his craft were sometimes indebted for suggestion. The invasion of an eccentric-looking individual—probably an innocent tradesman into a railway carriage had given the hint for "A Night with a Lunatic;" a nervously excited and belated passenger had once unconsciously sat for ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... seriously, he was a puzzle to all who knew him, and had he died at this time he would only have left behind him the reputation of being one of the most brilliant, gifted, and honest, but at the same time one of the most unstable, eccentric, and ill regulated spirits of ...
— The Bravest of the Brave - or, with Peterborough in Spain • G. A. Henty
... around her, and said gently: "Poor child; it is cruel to make you suffer so. But rest assured Dr. Hartwell will never wound your feelings. I have heard that he was a very stern and eccentric man, though a remarkably learned one, yet I confess there is something in his manner which fascinates me, and if you will only be like yourself he will always speak kindly to you. But I am staying too long. Don't look so forlorn and ghostly. Positively I hate to come to see ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... recorded on several occasions at intervals of seventy-five or seventy-six years, he was led to the conclusion that these several apparitions related to one and the same object, which was an obedient vassal of the sun, performing an eccentric journey round that luminary in a period of seventy-five or seventy-six years. To realise the importance of this discovery, it should be remembered that before Halley's time a comet, if not regarded ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... history of this singular case may afford some hints and comfort to parents with children afflicted (as was my dear AUGUSTUS) with a disease so eccentric ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, January 18, 1890 • Various
... dyspepsia, you sit still and grow in stature and knowledge. By Jove! you are too big to wear my cast-off suits now. My valet will bless the increase of your outward man, and I don't think you have at all profited by the circumstance. Where the deuce did you get that eccentric turn-out? It certainly does not ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... self-discipline. The great catastrophe, the ruinous blow, which rendered him hopeless, is told in the Memoir; but there are particulars which help to account for it. Hartley had spent his school-days under a master as eccentric as he himself ever became. The Rev. John Dawes of Ambleside was one of the oddities that may be found in the remote places of modern England. He had no idea of restraint, for himself or his pupils; and when they arrived, punctually or not, for morning school, they sometimes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... importance of his lot; he was proud of his hereditary honours, blended, as they were, with some glorious passages in the history of his country, and prouder of his still more ancient line. The eccentric exploits and the violent passions, by which his race had been ever characterised, were to him a source of secret exultation. Even the late lord, who certainly had no claims to his gratitude, for he had ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... Una than with the bouncing girls who were natives of Harlem. But he smiled at her, as though they were understanding friends, and once he said, but quietly, rather respectfully, "You have nice hair—soft." She lay awake to croon that to herself, though she denied that she was in love with this eccentric waster. ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... the next scene two servants appeared with orders to clean out and remove the old chest from the landing. Hippy and Jessica, as the two mischievous prying servants, enacted their part to perfection. Hippy carrying a broom and dust pan, did one of the eccentric dances, for which he was famous, while Jessica, armed with a huge duster, tried ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... Richard made up his mind that the Christmas Eve dance would be a strictly family affair. "Probably the country relatives are a queer lot," he decided, "and the Grays don't care to show them off. Still—that's not like them, either. It's certainly like them to do such an eccentric thing as to get their cousins all here and try to give them a good time. I should like to ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... Arnold, alluding to an eccentric work of rationalizing tendencies written by an English scholar, and using M. Renan as his mouthpiece, expresses the opinion that 'an extravagance of this sort could never have come from Germany where there is a great force of critical opinion controlling ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... the path, and carry out the plans, of his predecessor. Great enterprises, commenced under one, were continued by another, and completed by a third. Thus, while all acted on a regular plan, without any of the eccentric or retrograde movements which betray the agency of different individuals, the state seemed to be under the direction of a single hand, and steadily pursued, as if through one long reign, its great career of civilization ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... much so that at first sight of the trapper and the Clown—two men whom Thayor had pointed out to him as being his most reliable assistants next to Holcomb—his only thought had been how Sam Thayor could have such eccentric boors on the place. He noticed, too, with irritation and astonishment, that none of the men raised their hats until Alice and Margaret arrived on the scene; then not a man among them ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... upon masses, not details; upon the use and shaping, not the ornamentation of features; and very few show half so plainly that mediaeval architects could realize this fact. We are too apt to think that Gothic art cannot be individual without being eccentric, or interesting without being heterogeneous ... but Salisbury is both grand and lovely, and yet it is quiet, rational, and all of a piece, clear and smooth, and refined to the point of utmost purity. No building in the world is more logical, more lucid in expression, more restful ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... Del Monte ate a box of bluing once, but it didn't hurt him. Later, however, he lost his mind and ran madly up the street, bumping into fences, rolling in gutters, and pursuing his eccentric course out of Amory's life. Amory cried on ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the door a figure which drew a stare of surprise from Markeld, accustomed as he was to eccentric habiliment. It was arrayed in a long, mouse-gray frock coat and shiny black trousers; a hand gloved in lavender kid carried a top hat, while the other caressed, from time to time, the carefully-waxed mustachios ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... off in the shallow dales of Hertfordshire there lies a village of great beauty, and I doubt not of admirable virtue, but of eccentric and unbalanced literary taste, which asked the present writer to come down to it on Sunday afternoon and ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... elsewhere sagely observes, "with more or less of what is truly remorse;" but he seems rather to have enjoyed even the remorse. It is needless to say that the complacency was its own reward, and that the resolution vanished like other more eccentric impulses. Music, he once told Johnson, affected him intensely, producing in his mind "alternate sensations of pathetic dejection, so that I was ready to shed tears, and of daring resolution so that I was inclined ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... got on capitally together. Frank soon become accustomed to the veteran's eccentric manners, and made great proficiency in his exercises. And it was not long before the hard-featured old drummer began to manifest, in his way, a great deal of friendly interest ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge
... extraordinary attention which had been given to the defense of the door. Besides the usual lock and key, it possessed two solid bolts, fastening inside at the top and the bottom. It had been one among the many eccentric sides of Reuben Limbrick's character to live in perpetual dread of thieves breaking into his cottage at night. All the outer doors and all the window shutters were solidly sheathed with iron, and had alarm-bells attached to them on a new principle. ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... springy and soft. But the mischief and spirit of both the runaways combined would not match his case. He did not indeed appear to be vicious, any further than a most vehement desire to please himself and that in all manner of eccentric ways, totally irrelevant to the purpose of getting ahead on the road or serving the will of his rider, might be called vice. It rather seemed the spirit of power in full play. However it were, there was no lack of either 'motion' or 'emotion' during the first ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... other all of our lives, and, although I have always regarded you as eccentric, I never saw you so completely off your balance before. The idea of you, with your proud family name, your vast wealth in land and negroes, intending to marry one of them, is a mystery I cannot solve. Do explain to me why you are going to take this extremely ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... necessary preface to any consideration of his literary work. Soon after his birth at Kensington (London) in 1846 his mother died, and thenceforward through all his youth he seems to have received little advice or attention from relations. His father, a barrister and literary man of retired and eccentric habits, exercised over him a merely nominal authority, and so he had liberty to gratify a spirit of inquiry and curiosity notably beyond his years. At his own home he became the pet of his father's acquaintances, a set ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... had become involved in a difference of opinion with the authorities. Though the matter was never made quite clear, it was generally believed that Wyllard had quietly borne the blame of a comrade's action, for there was a vein of eccentric generosity in the lad. In any case, he left Toronto, and the relative, who was largely interested in the fur business, next sent him north to the Behring Sea. The business was then a hazardous one, for the skin buyers and pelagic sealers ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... weed-like sea-anemones which outshone them in colored sheen. Fantastic pink-and-orange crabs sidled awkwardly but nimbly this way and that. Tiny sea-horses, yet more fantastic, slipped shyly from one weed-covert to another, aware of a possible peril in every gay but menacing bloom. And just above this eccentric life of the shoal sea-floor small fishes of curious form shot hither and thither, live, darting gleams of gold and azure and amethyst. Now and again a long, black shadow would sail slowly over the scene of freakish life—the shadow of a ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... I noticed when passing through the flat to the stoke- hold, which was, of course, on a still lower level, was working away pretty easily, the piston in the cylinder moving steadily up and down, and the eccentric, which always appeared to me as a sort of bandy-legged giant, executing its extraordinary double-shuffle in a more graceful fashion than when we were going at full speed, as it performed its allotted task of curvetting the up-and-down motion ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... to know who wrote it! Hm. . . . It is certainly a woman's writing. . . . The letter is written with genuine feeling, and so it can hardly be a joke. . . . Most likely it's some neurotic girl, or perhaps a widow . . . widows are frivolous and eccentric as a rule. Hm. . . . Who ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... She found her fate in an Englishman, who was the father of her only child, a daughter. She thought she had met in him a hero, a demi-god, a being of deep passion and original and creative mind; but he was only a voluptuary, full of violence instead of feeling, and eccentric, because he had great means with which he could gratify extravagant whims. Stella found she had made the great and irretrievable mistake. She had exchanged devotion for a passionate and evanescent fancy, prompted at first by vanity, and daily dissipating under the ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... most legitimate and most indispensable of ties. Even the Holy Scriptures, which were now circulated everywhere, while they imparted light and nurture to the sincere inquirer after truth, were the source also whence an eccentric fanaticism contrived to extort the virulent poison. The good cause had been compelled to choose the evil road of rebellion, and the result was what in such cases it ever will be so long as men remain men. The ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... it gay? She's a bit eccentric, and she advertised for a companion, saying the application must be a written one. So I pranced up to her house this ...
— Patty's Success • Carolyn Wells
... not subdue John Wesley: he was the original circuit- rider, and his steed was a Pegasus that took the fences of orthodoxy at a bound, often to the great consternation and grief of theological squatters. He was regarded as peculiar, eccentric, strange, extravagant, just as any man ever has been and would be today who attempted to pattern his life after that of the Christ. Perhaps it is needless to say that the followers of John Wesley do ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... are a scamp of the first water goes without saying, insinuating yourself into an eccentric old man's confidence in hopes to be his heir! I dare say, Amy is his daughter, and you will have to work for a living after all, and serve you right, too. But have a good time while you can, and I'll help you after a little, as I ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... him the soft voice of Madame Choudey, the hostess, could be heard. She was frankly gossiping and laughing a little. The name of the Marquise de Caron was mentioned. Delaven had told him of her—an aristocrat and an eccentric—a philanthropist who was now aged. For years herself and her son had been the patrons—the good angels of struggling genius, of art in every form. But the infamous 2d of December had ended all that. He was one of the "provisionally exiled;" he had died in Rome. Madame La ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... official had a moment of doubt. But he reflected that one is not a great artist without being eccentric; ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... furs, the fall before, having intrusted his interests to the care of Phillips; and now feeling, with the others, apprehensive for the result of the new expedition, he was anxiously awaiting the return of the absent trappers. Tomah, the eccentric young Indian, likewise had surprised the settlers by his sudden reappearance among them, in a suit of superfine broadcloth, hat and boots to match, gold watch, showy seals, and all the gewgaw etceteras that go to make up the animal they call a city dandy. ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... [Meditatively.] I cannot at the present moment recall what the General's Christian name was. But I have no doubt he had one. He was eccentric, I admit. But only in later years. And that was the result of the Indian climate, and marriage, and indigestion, and other things of ...
— The Importance of Being Earnest - A Trivial Comedy for Serious People • Oscar Wilde
... doubtless strengthened by Mr. Lincoln, whose homely but astute reasoning convinced him that the better and safer line of operations was overland against Lee's army wherever it might be encountered, and not through a widely eccentric movement by water to a secondary base on the James River and thence ...
— Heroes of the Great Conflict; Life and Services of William Farrar - Smith, Major General, United States Volunteer in the Civil War • James Harrison Wilson
... Anglo- Saxons, simply and sincerely rooted in the German nature, we are not and cannot be; all we have accomplished by our onesidedness is to blur and confuse the natural basis in ourselves altogether, and to become something eccentric, unattractive, ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... valley, quite enclosed by mountains. The present attorney has been in the island nine years, and is attorney for several other properties. In England he was a religious man, and intimately acquainted with the eccentric Irving. For a while after he came out he preached to the slaves, but having taken a black concubine, and treating those under his charge oppressively, he soon obtained a bad character among the blacks, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... although with a sufficiency to hire, if not keep, a carriage. She was, moreover, an authoress, having written two or three novels, not very good I was told, but still, emanating from the pen of a lady, they were well paid. She was very eccentric, and rather amusing. When a woman says everything that comes into her head, out of a great deal of chaff there will drop some few grains of wheat; and so sometimes, more by accident than otherwise, she said what is called a good thing. Now, a good thing is repeated, while all the nonsense ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... you Tom!" called John Mayrant; and after the man had come from the kitchen: "You may put the punch-bowl and things on the table, and clear away and go to bed. My Great-uncle Marston Chartain," he continued to me, "was of eccentric taste, and for the last twenty years of his life never had anybody to dinner but the undertaker." He paused at this point to mix the punch, and then resumed: "But for all that, he appears to have been a lively old gentleman to the end, and left us his version ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... Gabler, no doubt most of the dialogue would be given right at the back of the stage, out of ear-shot of the audience. In ordinary dramas the Villain who may have to use strong language, or in farce the Eccentric Comedian who frequently has to utter more or less playfully a meaningless "big big D," would by Imperial command be compelled to "retire up" to deliver himself of the expletive, and then would have to "come down to the front" and continue the stage-business. ...
— Punch, Or the London Charivari, Volume 101, November 21, 1891 • Various
... of age, through the influence of Mr. Barrett, an eccentric teacher who came to the village, he decided to go to college, and in six months he prepared for the sophomore class of Brown University. This preparation was a tremendous undertaking which broke down his health for life. He now had an opportunity to satisfy the cravings for knowledge, ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... are rather common, but still I have a great affection for these, because they were given to me by a dear old friend of our family named Murphy. He was a very charming man, but very eccentric. We always supposed he was an Irishman, but after be got rich he went abroad for a year or two, and when he came back you would have been amused to see how interested he was in a potato. He asked what it was! Now you know ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Louis Suffrage Association to go to Kansas and help in the woman's campaign. Accordingly he telegraphed that if the committee wanted him he was ready, would pay his own expenses and win every Democratic vote. Miss Anthony never had seen Mr. Train; she merely knew of him as very wealthy and eccentric. The Republicans not only had forsaken the women but were waging open war upon them. The sole hope of carrying the amendment was by adding enough Democratic votes to those of Republicans who would not obey their party orders to vote against it. ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... this series, like the story of Lyonesse and of Parson Dodge and the Spectre Coach, have their beginning in historical fact; yet into the latter story has been woven a tale that is centuries older, in origin, than the days of the eccentric priest of Talland. ...
— Legend Land, Volume 2 • Various
... than in any of the former assemblies of the people. It was composed of the lowest as well, and probably in as great proportion, as of the superior ranks and orders, and all had an equal voice. No eccentric or irregular motions were suffered to take place. All seemed to have been the plan of a few, it may ...
— Tea Leaves • Various
... miniature Stonehenge in fact. I had seen it several times, and happened to have been present not long ago at a meeting of an archaeological society when its origin and purpose were discussed. I remember that one learned but somewhat eccentric gentleman read a short paper upon a rude, hooded bust and head that are cut within the chamber of a tall, flat-topped cromlech, or dolmen, which stands alone in the ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... Berkenmeyer had him subscribe to the Loonenburg Church constitution. His parish included the congregations at Rheinbeck, Camp, Staatsburg, Ancrum, and Tar Bush. The capriciousness with which Hartwick, who remained an eccentric bachelor all his life, performed his pastoral duties soon gave rise to dissatisfaction. Complaints were lodged against him with Berkenmeyer, who finally wrote against him publicly. In 1750 Muhlenberg conducted a visitation in Hartwick's congregations, and reports as follows: "He went to Pennsylvania ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente
... to be anything but a woman. I do not think any one ever mistook me for a man, unless it may have been some stranger who slightly glanced at me while passing along the street or the highway. I adopted male attire as a measure of convenience in my business, and not through any wish to appear eccentric or to pass for one of the male sex; and it has ever been my rule to dress with the least possible ostentation consistent with due neatness. I have never had cause to regret my adoption of male attire, and never expect to return to a female ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... unruffled surface of the lake it spins upwards with inconceivable velocity, and with the strangest contortions. In vain the terrified cockatoos strive to avoid it; it sweeps wildly and uncertainly through the air, and so eccentric are its motions that it requires but a slight stretch of the imagination to fancy it endowed with life, and with fell swoops is in rapid pursuit of the devoted birds, some of whom are almost certain to be brought screaming to ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... thin meshes of white hair escaping through the border of the high fox-skin cap. The complexion was bronze and the face beardless. This last feature is said to be characteristic of low vitality, but it is also frequently distinctive of eccentricity, and Batoche was clearly eccentric, as the expression of his eyes showed. They were cold grey eyes, but filled with wild intermittent illuminations. The reflection of the fire-light ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... electro-magnets, whose bobbins have a resistance of no more than 10 ohms, and which are united in series. The interrupting plate, P, against which the style, s, rests at each vibration, is capable of a forward movement, or one of recoil, by the aid of a screw, V, and of an eccentric movement which is produced by a small handle, m, and during which its plane remains invariable. This arrangement permits the point of contact of the style and plate to be varied without changing the precision with which the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... away from Buckingham is Whaddon Hall, formerly a seat of the Dukes of Buckingham, but best known as the residence of Browne Willis, an eccentric antiquary, whose person and dress were so singular that he was often mistaken for a beggar, and who is said "to have written the very worst hand of any man in England." He wore one pair of boots for forty years, having them patched when they ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... her longings to be up and doing, and yet the ever difficult question between charitable works and filial deference necessarily detained her, and perhaps all the more because it was not so much the fear of her mother's authority as of her horror and despair, that withheld her from the decisive and eccentric steps that she was always feeling impelled to take. Gentle Mrs. Curtis had never been a visible power in her house, and it was through their desire to avoid paining her that her government had been exercised over her two ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sound along an eccentric course to its haunt, finding nothing more than the empty shell of a huge sea urchin, which in accord with a whim of the sea had floated and was now held aloft slantwise to the lips of the wind, firm in the branching tines of stag's-horn coral. A rustic ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... here an eccentric quality of humor, a daemonic conceit that reach the height of other classic expression of ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... thinking to what she had become an unwilling accomplice, for she never imagined that more than an evening's visit was intended by Shargar, which in itself seemed to her strange and improper enough even for such an eccentric boy as ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... proclaim it possible and prove it so, and to philosophize on the profoundest questions of the human reason, was irrepressible. This he did with an air of matured conviction and with the impact of conscious moral authority, but in terms as strikingly eccentric as the thoughts were lofty and inspiring, and in execrable French, the declaimer being known as minus habens in his studies and utterly incapable. All this was the very make-up of folly; and Brother Hecker was no doubt ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... in fact just what might be expected from a thoroughly modest, teachable, receptive, and at the same time most living, active, and aspiring mind,—a mind full indeed of native boldness, but yet restrained by judgment and good sense from the crudeness and temerity of self-will and eccentric impulse, and not trusting to its own strength till it had better reasons for doing so than the promptings of vanity ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... with me on the occasion bears it as strongly on his recollection. My servant Harris, who had shared my wanderings, and had continued in my service for eighteen years, led the advance with his companion Hopkinson; nearly abreast of them the eccentric Frazer stalked along, wholly lost in thought. The two former had laid aside their military habits, and had substituted the broad-brimmed hat, and the bushman's dress in their place, but it was impossible to guess how Frazer intended to protect himself from the heat or damp, ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... stranger in a city singularly picturesque. From what I had once called myself, "The Amateur Parisian," I grew (or declined) into a water-side prowler, a lingerer on wharves, a frequenter of shy neighbourhoods, a scraper of acquaintance with eccentric characters. I visited Chinese and Mexican gambling-hells, German secret societies, sailors' boarding-houses, and "dives" of every complexion of the disreputable and dangerous. I have seen greasy Mexican hands pinned to the table with a knife ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... your own ease and taste (if you have any), for nothing is so vulgar as to suit your convenience in these matters, as you should remember that you dress to please others, and not yourself. We have heard of some eccentric individuals connected with noble families, who have departed from this rule; but they invariably paid the penalty of their rashness, being frequently mistaken for men of intellect; and it should not be forgotten, that any exercise of the mind is a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... monastic life if not peculiar? And ought not the deeds of a monk to be as eccentric as he is himself? It was a sign from God that caused me to ascend here; it is a sign from God that ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... tea-time; Mr. Norham with a secretary and a valet, much preoccupied, and chewing the fag-end of certain Cabinet deliberations in the morning; Flaxman's charming sister, Lady Helen Varley, and her husband; his elder brother, Lord Wanless, unmarried, an expert on armour, slightly eccentric, but still, in the eyes of all intriguing mothers, and to his own annoyance, more than desirable as a husband owing to the Wanless collieries and a few other trifles of the same kind; the Bishop of Markborough; Canon ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... mademoiselle," he added in a tone yet lower, "I find the woman and the artist divorced. That is a vast advantage—an immense source of power. I am growing more certain of you; you are not merely cleverly eccentric as I thought. You have a great deal that no one can teach you. You have finished that—I wish to take it downstairs to show the men. It will not be jeered ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... settle once and for all the question whether the administration of the bequest has evinced evidence of insanity or not. A recent Royal Commission left the matter undecided. I do not, however, wish to criticise trustees, but to defend the memory of Miss Browne (who may have been eccentric in private life) from such a charge, because her testamentary dispositions were a trifle aesthetic. The will was un-English in one respect: 'no inscription of my name shall be placed on such erection.' Was that the clause which proved her hopelessly mad? The erection was to be Gothic. ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... to anything long, but every night for a week she gave Pete lessons in reading, writing, and arithmetic. His reading was laborious, his spelling was eccentric, his figuring he did on the tips of his heavy fingers, and his writing he executed with his tongue in his cheek and his ponderous thumb ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... for Calais and crossed the Channel to Dover. This time the eccentric strip of water was as calm as a pond at sunset. No jumpy, white-capped billows, no flying spray, no seasick passengers. Tarpaulins were a drag ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... must have thought me an eccentric to carry so large a sum, and I know he thought that Jacqueline and I had just been married, for I saw him smile over the entry that he made in ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... been the wedding, but no Madame Valiere. She had accepted the invitation, had given notice of her arrival; one had awaited the midnight train. The family was still wondering why the rich aunt had turned sulky at the last hour. But she was always an eccentric; a capricious and ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... his eccentric, red-painted mount. He clipped his safety-belt, plugged in his suit air-supply to the space wagon's tanks, and ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... the possession of the British, and Washington proposed to recover it by the united action of his army and the French fleet. After several weeks of rough campaigning, Washington was compelled to abandon his purpose, because the eccentric D'Estaing resolved to take his fleet to Boston ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... and the game is up, for the trochaic beat has been suggested. The eccentric scansion of the groups is an adornment; but as soon as the original beat has been forgotten, they cease implicitly to be eccentric. Variety is what is sought; but if we destroy the original mould, one of the terms of this variety is ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of getting there. The war was over long ago. A thousand things had happened of which he had not the remotest knowledge. And because he was a very normal, ordinary young man with a horror of anything queer and eccentric, the thought of that mysterious year filled him with dismay and roused in him a passionate longing to escape at once from everything which would remind him of his uncanny lapse of memory. If he were only back where he belonged in the land of wide spaces, ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... John, my eccentric assistant, could abide no possible rival, insulted every man engaged to help him, occasionally indulging in a free fight after too frequent visits to the cider barrels of my next neighbor, so he ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... et Juliette. Les deux freres ("Brothers of Corse"), JEAN and EDOUARD, excellent respectively as Romeo and Friar Laurent. EDWARD looked the reverend, kind-hearted, but eccentric herbalist to the life, singing splendidly. But Brother JOHN, in black wig, black moustache, and with pallid face, look so unhealthy a Romeo that his appearance must have first excited Juliet's pity, which we all know is akin to love. My advice to JOHNNIE DE RESZKE ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 11, 1892 • Various
... exclusively either a concentric or eccentric system. All my works go to show the eternal influence of principles, and to demonstrate that operations to be successful must be applications ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... duty to give to the people of St Ewold's the best clergyman he could select for them he could not give the preference to Mr Crawley, because Mr Crawley, in spite of all his zeal and piety, was a man so quaint in his manners and so eccentric in his mode of speech as not to be the best clergyman whom he could select. "What is my old friend Thorne to do with a man in his parish who won't drink a glass of wine with him?". For Ullathorne, ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... depends on circumstances disclosed to Laplace by analysis; circumstances which on the surface do not seem capable of exercising so great an influence. If instead of planets all revolving in the same direction, in orbits but slightly eccentric and in planes inclined at but small angles toward each other, we should substitute different conditions, the stability of the universe would be jeopardized, and a frightful chaos would pretty certainly result. The discovery of the actual conditions ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... fixed. A longitudinal missile must rotate with its axis coincident with its line of flight as it leaves the barrel, or else every rotation will throw the point into wider circles, until finally it becomes more eccentric than a round ball. It is a mistaken notion that a conical missile is more accurate in flight than a round; on the contrary, hunters always prefer the ball for short shots,—and a "slug," as the longer missile is called by them, is well known to err ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... of "Brownsmith's Boy" embraces the home adventures of an orphan, who, having formed the acquaintance of an eccentric old gardener, accepts his offer of a home and finds that there is plenty of romance in a garden, and much excitement even in a journey now and then to town. In a half-savage lad he finds a friend who shows his love and fidelity principally by pretending ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... morning, a protectionist champion presented himself, not in the guise either of a freeholder or farmer of the county, but in the person of a good-humoured, though somewhat eccentric printer, named Sparkhall, who had come from the celebrated locale of John Gilpin—Cheapside, and who having armed himself with a large blue bag fitted with elaborate treatises upon the corn laws, and among other pamphlets a recent number of Punch, forthwith travelled ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... with a sigh, "how I wish I didn't wish they weren't coming! If they are fearfully eccentric, all the neighbourhood will be talking about it in a week, and thinking it funny we have such relations. One can't explain to every one that they really are ladies and gentlemen ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... may find before an English mansion—a noble expanse of lawn and sward, with boscage sufficient to agreeably diversify it. After traversing the open plain, the road led through a grove of young ebony trees, where guinea-fowls and a hartebeest were seen; it then wound, with all the characteristic eccentric curves of a goat-path, up and down a succession of land-waves crested by the dark green foliage of the mango, and the scantier and lighter-coloured leaves of the enormous calabash. The depressions were filled with jungle of more or less density, ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... as we are obliged to remain here; and as for the piano, why it will enable the ladies to beguile an hour or two; but it is a queer present to make under the circumstances, and the man who made it is certainly a bit of an eccentric." ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... is said to have first driven the Duke into retirement, and rendered him shy and eccentric, with an especial objection to the society of ladies, although he had once been a gay, if not dissipated, young gentleman, fond of the turf. He rode a race at Trentham Hall, the seat of his brother-in-law, the Marquis ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... deceitful and favour is vain—qualities which are calculated to wear well. Queen Adelaide's goodness and kindness, her unselfish, unassuming womanliness and devout resignation to sorrow and suffering, did more than gain and keep the heart of her bluff, eccentric sailor-prince. They secured for her the respectful regard of the nation among whom she dwelt, whether as Queen or Queen-dowager. The Archbishop of Canterbury could say of her, after her husband's death, "For three weeks prior to his (King William's) dissolution, ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... religious grace, Bettine the fulness of instinctive impulse; Gunderode is the ideal, Bettine nature; Gunderode throws herself into the river because the world is all too narrow, Bettine lives and follows out every freakish fancy, till the enchanting child degenerates into an eccentric and undignified old woman. There is a medium somewhere. Philip Sidney found it; others had it ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... a scamp of the first water goes without saying, insinuating yourself into an eccentric old man's confidence in hopes to be his heir! I dare say, Amy is his daughter, and you will have to work for a living after all, and serve you right, too. But have a good time while you can, and I'll help you after ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... published in 1801, is Maria Edgeworth's one early example of a novel not placed in Irish surroundings, but dealing with fashionable life. Issued just a year after the appearance of her first Irish tale, "Castle Rackrent," it betrays entirely the influence of the novelist's autocratic and eccentric father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, with whom the daughter had been previously collaborating. No one could be less suited than he to advise about fiction, yet to his daughter his advice was almost the equivalent ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... models for the students, and proposed several of those in the Orleans collection. This recommendation was not relished, and in 1799 Barry was expelled from the academy, soon after the appearance of his Letter to the Dilettanti Society, a very amusing but eccentric publication, full of enthusiasm for his art and at the same time of contempt for the living professors of it. After the loss of his salary, a subscription was set on foot by the earl of Buchan to relieve him from his difficulties, and to settle him in a larger house to finish his picture ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... was an eccentric trapper. No one knew his real name, and it is within the realm of probability that ...
— The Hero of Ticonderoga - or Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys • John de Morgan
... spied bobbing in the sea was not exactly in the wake of the battleship, for those who rushed to the port rail could see it quite well. It wabbled about in a most eccentric way, as though the submarine attached to it had risen just as the Kennebunk passed and had received the full force ...
— Navy Boys Behind the Big Guns - Sinking the German U-Boats • Halsey Davidson
... their peculiarly Roman ways of thought; but these patriots in literature, while rewarded with the highest praise, did not exert a proportionate influence on the development of the national mind. They remained like comets moving in eccentric orbs outside the regular and observed motion ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... was a combination of his former improvements, with the cover extending over top of the gate to prevent it from tilting, and an eccentric wheel working in cam yoke to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... apparently unsympathetic creatures exasperating to a degree, and I did not wonder that the European whose lot had been cast in the interior, sometimes, on emerging into Western civilization, appears eccentric to his own countrymen. ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... I replied, and we started to find Smith and Spalding. We found them, and it was settled that they should go with us for a month among the mountains. Everybody knows Smith, the good-natured, eccentric Smith; Smith the bachelor, who has an income greatly beyond his moderate expenditures, and enough of capital to spoil, as he says, the orphan children of his sister. By way of saving them from being thrown upon the cold world with a fortune, he declares he will ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... Disraeli's genuine love of talent is refreshing. He dwells fondly upon the effervescence of genius which drives men to kick over the traces of respectability and strike out short cuts to fame. If at bottom his heroes are rather eccentric than original, they have at least a righteous hatred of all bores and Philistines, and despise orthodoxy, political economy, and sound information generally. They can provide you with new theories of politics and ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... the first cab we found. We tossed for it, and he won, for which I thank the gods. Then, acting on the impulse of the moment, I came back to say something to you. A very unusual—very eccentric thing to do, no doubt. But when something involving great issues has to be done or said, I think the best plan is not to wait for a favourable opportunity. Don't you ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... Cumberland, to whom the habits of the poet Wordsworth and his eccentric friend Coleridge were a mystery, had decided that they must be terrible scoundrels. One sage had seen Wordsworth looking fixedly at the moon; another had overheard him muttering in some strange language. Some thought him a conjuror; ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... trace of man. A large fish, apparently one of the huge cat-fish of the Mississippi, blundered against Marquette's canoe with a force which seems to have startled him; and once, as they drew in their net, they caught a "spade-fish," whose eccentric appearance greatly astonished them. At length, the buffalo began to appear, grazing in herds on the great prairies which then bordered the river; and Marquette describes the fierce and stupid look of the old bulls, as they stared at the intruders through the tangled mane which nearly ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... September. Neither has been seen since that day, so far as any one knows. The earth seems to have swallowed them. The authorities are searching the mountains and are making every effort to find Jones or his body. He is known to be eccentric and at first not much importance was attached to his actions. That is all we can tell you at present. There may be developments to-morrow. It looks bad—terribly bad. We—we had the utmost confidence in Jones. My God, I wish I could ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... the outlying streets, and established himself in it, with all his books and scientific odds and ends. And of books and odds and ends he had many—for he was a man of some considerable learning ... 'an out-and-out eccentric,' as his neighbours said of him. He positively passed among them for a sorcerer; he had even been given the title of an 'insectivist.' He studied chemistry, mineralogy, entomology, botany, and medicine; he doctored ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... myself when I compared my position with his. The berth where he and seven others eat their daily bread is hardly bigger than my cabin, except in height—and, of course, he has to sleep in a hammock. My friend is rather an eccentric character, and, being missed in the ship, was discovered the other day reading in the main-top—the only place, as he said, sufficiently retired for study. And this is really no exaggeration. If I had no cabin I should take to drinking in ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... house, where half the blinds were down, and all was suggestive of neglect and decay. She had spent some pleasant afternoons in the splendid gardens and conservatories with Mrs. Swinton in the old days, but her one recollection of the eccentric old man was not very encouraging. She remembered how keenly he had eyed her, like a valuer summing up the points of a horse, and how glad she had been to escape his penetrating scrutiny. Others were present on that occasion. She was to ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... publicist, as comedian and tragedian, showed itself to perfection. He gave a free rein to his imagination in his placards, in which he affected the proverbial language of the moujik, made himself a peasant, more than a peasant, in his eccentric style, to excite patriotism. He published pamphlets against the French, and the coarser his language the more effect ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... wearing crescents in their caps, with the inscription, "Rather Turkish than Popish;" renowned far and wide, as much for their ferocity as for their nautical skill; the appearance of these wildest of the "Sea-beggars" was both eccentric and terrific. They were known never to give nor to take quarter, for they went to mortal combat only, and had sworn to spare neither noble nor simple, neither king, kaiser, nor pope, should they fall into ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... before they reached the head of the valley where stood the house or wooden cottage which had been the abode of Will's eccentric old relative. The scenery was savage and forbidding in the extreme. Lofty mountains rose on every side, and only a small portion of the land in the neighbourhood of the dwelling had been brought under ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains - Wandering Will in the Land of the Redskin • R.M. Ballantyne
... and eccentric personality who had arisen on the outskirts; the world began to be conscious of him at ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... vivid as that which we receive from the characters of our own associates, are to be reckoned by scores. Yet in all these scores hardly one character is to be found which deviates widely from the common standard, and which we should call very eccentric if we met it in real life. The silly notion that every man has one ruling passion, and that this clue, once known, unravels all the mysteries of his conduct, finds no countenance in the plays of Shakspeare. There man appears as he is, made up of a crowd of passions, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... cousin and the aunt, during which I learned that said cousin sees me every Sunday in St. Stephen's. Oho! thought I, at the "every." The aunt was very anxious to know who that strange, wild man was? (didn't I wish Samuel in Tophet!). Of course, in reply, I drew it strong about eccentric genius and my never having known him before, and a good deal that was perhaps "strained to the extremest limit ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... half-alligator creature, such as they read of in the Beadle novels. I knew one trapper who was a student of numismatics, another who devoted his spare time to astronomy, and several traders and trappers who were men of considerable culture, though they are generally men who are a little morbid or eccentric in their mental structure. All Edwards's natural abilities, which were sufficient to have earned him distinction had he been "in civilization," were concentrated on the pursuits of his wild life, and such a man always ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... consulting Parliament, can by secret treaty saddle the nation with the most perilous obligations, and give away all such portions of the empire as do not rest on Statute. The prerogative of mercy, too, would enable an eccentric Sovereign, aided by an obsequious Minister, to open the jails and let all the convicted criminals in the land loose upon society.[22] But criticism which proves too much in effect ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... shivering with the cold, he remained some minutes, attempting in vain, with straining eyes, to pierce through the gloom of the night, when a flash of lightning, which darted from the zenith and continued its eccentric career until it was lost behind the horizon, discovered to him the object of his research. But a few moments did he behold it, and then, from the sudden contrast, a film appeared to swim over his aching eyes, and all was more intensely, more horribly dark than before; but to the ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... aimed at a reputation for elegance, for wit or for the deadly thrust in verbal fence which played so large a part in the game of politics; every one that refused to float was either an outcast from the best society, or was striving to win an eccentric reputation for national obscurantism and its imaginary accompaniment of ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... propensity by trying to hire her to give a dozen or more lectures on 'Government' in the Atlantic cities, but I could not engage her at any price, although I am sure the speculation would have been a very profitable one. I never saw this eccentric woman again; she died at a very advanced age, October 1, 1854, ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... hair was so closely cropped that it looked like a silver cap. He was a little restless and fidgety in his movements, too, and had ways that appeared singular to strangers, but I always regarded his habits respectfully. Clever men, I thought, were often eccentric; and I was quite angry with my mother when she used to say, "Geoff was an old bachelor, and he wanted a wife to polish him; I should like to see any woman dare ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Falmouth Bay, thinking then of taking our gold straight to the Bank of England, as eccentric lucky diggers—that night I thought would be the last for one or other of us. He locked her in her cabin. He posted himself outside on the settee. I sat watching him across the table. Each had a hand in his pocket, each had a pistol in that hand, and there we sat, with our four eyes ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... whim was respected. The fact that he should have given the best part of his life since he left Oxford to roving about foreign countries was lamented; but this roving temper was regarded as only an eccentric manner of sowing those wild oats which youth must in some wise scatter; and it was hoped that with ripening years he would settle down and spend his days in the home of his ancestors. He might come home at any time, he had informed Mrs. Mawley in his last ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... thymo-centric are often encountered. Life treats them badly. Misunderstood and misjudged, they are the hopeless misfits of society. If the pituitary and the thyroid can enlarge to compensate for their defects, they may become the queer brilliants, the eccentric geniuses of the arts and sciences. Should they not, mental deficiency and delinquency are their portion. Epilepsy, then, is sometimes their mode of escape from the terrors of an utterly foreign world. Should they survive all other hazards, suicide may still ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... reserved yet more indecorous dances—dances of such a character indeed that they would certainly not have been allowed in a theatre. And the beau monde rushed to see them at the houses of the bolder lady-entertainers, the eccentric and foreign ones like the Princess, who in order to draw society ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... an absurdity. Adj. ridiculous, ludicrous; comical; droll, funny, laughable, pour rire, grotesque, farcical, odd; whimsical, whimsical as a dancing bear; fanciful, fantastic, queer, rum, quizzical, quaint, bizarre; screaming; eccentric &c (unconformable) 83; strange, outlandish, out of the way, baroque, weird; awkward &c (ugly) 846. extravagant, outre, monstrous, preposterous, bombastic, inflated, stilted, burlesque, mock heroic. drollish; seriocomic, tragicomic; gimcrack, contemptible &c (unimportant) 643; doggerel; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... more original and more impulsive, thus far less "groovy," than the people among whom her lot was cast. There were even censorious folk in Witanbury who called her eccentric. She was generous-hearted, easily moved to enthusiasm, tenacious of her opinions and prejudices. She had remained young of heart, and her fair, curling hair, her slight, active figure, and delicately-tinted skin, gave her sometimes an almost girlish look. Those who met her for the first time were ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... correspondents. Figure to yourself a bald-headed personage, about forty years of age, near seven feet high, deaf as a post, stammering and making convulsive efforts to express a sentence of five words, which, after all, his gibberish made unintelligible. His dress was as eccentric as his person was singular, and his manners corresponded with both. He called himself Baron von Bulow, and I saw him afterwards, in the autumn of 1797, at Paris, with the same accoutrements and the same jargon, assuming ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... information as to his habits. Harcourt, Oxford's Chancellor, lent him a house whilst translating Homer. Sheffield, the Duke of Buckingham, had been an early patron, and after the duke's death, Pope, at the request of his eccentric duchess, the illegitimate daughter of James II., edited some of his works and got into trouble for some Jacobite phrases contained in them. His most familiar friend among the opposition magnates was Lord Bathurst, a man of uncommon vivacity and good-humour. He was born four years before Pope, ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... Exeter House, where Lord Burleigh's wily son lived; and, finally, Exeter 'Change, where the poet Gay lay in state. Nor shall we forget Cross's menagerie and the elephant Chunee; nor omit mention of many of the eccentric old shopkeepers who once inhabited the 'Change. At Charing Cross we shall stop to see the old Cromwellians die bravely, and to stare at the pillory, where in their time many incomparable scoundrels ignominiously stood. The Nelson ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... preach a fine sermon than wear a fine coat. He was celebrated for his common-sense way of exhibiting the principles of religion. He would speak just what he thought, and as he felt. He somehow got the name of being an eccentric preacher, as every man, I believe, does who never prevaricates, and always acts and speaks as he thinks. Somehow or other, Elder Blunt had heard of Sister Scrub, and that infirmity of hers, and he resolved to cure her. On his first ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... While that eccentric genius, Charles Townshend, whom no system could contain, is whirled out of existence, our more artificial meteor, Lord Chatham, seems to be wheeling back to the sphere of business—at least his health is declared to be re-established; but he has lost his adorers, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... colours, stood gazing in open-mouthed astonishment and infinite delight at some rudely constructed booths and shows, outside of which, clown and paillasse were rivalling each other in the broad humour of their lazzi. Parties of students, easily recognizable by their eccentric and exaggerated style of dress, and the loud tone of their conversation, were seated outside the cafes and ice-rooms, or circulating under the trees, puffing forth clouds of tobacco smoke; and on the road round the allee, open carriages, smart ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... the half-brother of that Prince Albert of Prussia, who is now Regent of the Grand Duchy of Brunswick. Old Prince Albert of Prussia, his father, was married to the eccentric and half-crazy Princess Marianne of the Netherlands. Not long after the birth of the present Prince Albert, she lost her heart to such an extent to a chamberlain in her household that her husband was ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... given over for the most part to his beloved books. He seldom went away. The monotony of his daily round was broken only by the occasional receipt of a parcel of musty volumes, which he had ordered to be bought for him at some sale. He was a man of varied learning, full of remote information, eccentric from his solitariness, but with a great sweetness of nature. His life was simple, ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... education of a cook should commence in the cradle. If this point received the attention which it deserves from sanitarians, there would be fewer digestive organs out of order, and consequently fewer police reports, and a vast diminution of eccentric degradation, and moping madness and suicide, and horrors ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... Stanley, on!" Murthley Castle, the seat of Sir William Stewart, and the beautiful grounds which front and surround it, will excite the admiration of the traveller and pay him well for a moment's pause to peruse its illuminated pages opened to his view. The baronet is regarded as an eccentric man, perhaps chiefly because he has built a splendid Roman Catholic chapel quite near to his mansion and supports a priest of that order mostly for his own spiritual good. Near Dunkeld, Birnam Hill lifts its round, dark, bushy head to the height of over 1,500 feet, grand ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... to pay me for my beautiful images?" asked the Italian, in some trepidation for his money, it being difficult to say which of all these eccentric young savages was the ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... on market days, when she came to the village for her weekly provisions, none of my parishioners ever held any intercourse with her. She was evidently insane, and although she did harm to nobody, yet she often caused considerable alarm and wonderment by her eccentric behavior. It is, as you must know, often the case in intermittent mania that its victims are insane upon some particular subject, some point upon which their frenzy always betrays itself,—even when, with regard to other matters, they conduct themselves like ordinary people. ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... with a repressive frown. "As I understand it, the disease cycle seems to be connected somehow with the once-every-48-years conjunction of the four moons, which explains why the Darkovans are so superstitious about it. The moons have remarkably eccentric orbits—I don't know anything about that part, I'm quoting Dr. Moore. If there's an animal vector to the disease, we've never discovered it. The pattern runs like this; a few cases in the mountain districts, the next month a hundred-odd ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... but his master; because it reproduced too readily, and carried too far, the grotesque imaginings to which great humourists are prone; which lie indeed deep in their nature; and from which they derive their genial sympathy with eccentric characters that enables them to find motives for what to other men is hopelessly obscure, to exalt into types of humanity what the world turns impatiently aside at, and to enshrine in a form for eternal homage and love such whimsical ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... seeming expansion of his powers, Erik Dorn had become a startling, fascinating figure in the new world he had entered. The flattery of men almost as clever as himself, the respect, appreciation of political, literary, and vaguely social circles, of stolid men and eccentric acquaintances, were continually visited upon him. He was a personality, a figure to enliven dinner parties, throw a glamour and a fever into the enervated routine ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... reaches Penang, but a Chinese gentleman acts as pilot across some rocking boats, with only a faint flare from expiring torches to light the way, and starts the cringing coolies, with true politeness to the "foreign devils," but manifest wonder at their eccentric customs. Chinese womanhood, painted, bedizened, and tottering on the pink and gold hoofs which cause a sickening shudder to the Western spectator, indicates the barrier of prejudice to be surmounted before China can mould national ideals into ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... was very pleasant to be with Mary Datchet and to become, directly the door was shut, quite a different sort of person, eccentric and lovable, with scarcely any likeness to the self most people knew. He became less serious, and rather less dictatorial at home, for he was apt to hear Mary laughing at him, and telling him, as she was fond of doing, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... signal to come nearer. When Zashue rejoined the group they all greeted the Queres in the same manner, and the one who was still holding Hayoue's hand began to pull him along, urging him to go to the village with them. The adventurers from the Rito felt that they might be welcome. Zashue even made an eccentric, ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... asked to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa oration at Cambridge. This was the opportunity for which he had been waiting. The mystic and eccentric young poet-preacher now speaks his mind, and he turns out to be a man exclusively interested in real life. This recluse, too tender for contact with the rough facts of the world, whose conscience has retired him to rural Concord, pours out a vial of wrath. ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... their preparations for landing, and had changed their eccentric clothing for apparel which was more suited to making their appearance in society. Bart had insisted that they should go to his house, and wait until they might decide what to do; and the boys ...
— Lost in the Fog • James De Mille
... rather eccentric man, for once forgetting to bless something. "I'm in trouble, boys, and I need ...
— Tom Swift and His Giant Telescope • Victor Appleton
... was once my grandfather's; but since some months goes by the name of Henry James's, for it was there the novelist loved to sit - adds a touch of poesy and comicality. It is, I think, excellent, but is too eccentric to be exhibited. I am at one extreme corner; my wife, in this wild dress, and looking like a ghost, is at the extreme other end; between us an open door exhibits my palatial entrance hall and a part of my respected staircase. All ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... advice—not in a professional spirit, but as between man and man—I should warn you against wasting your time and fortune upon a useless pursuit. If Mrs. Holbrook has vanished from the world of her own free will—a thing that often happens, eccentric as it may be—she will reappear in good time of her own free will. If she has been the victim of a crime, that crime will no doubt come to light in due course, without any efforts ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... was more attractively repulsive than the sea-lion. It was such a luxury to hate him. He was such a counter-irritant, such a stimulant; such a flavor he gave to life. We are always on the lookout for the odd, the eccentric, the whimsical. We pretend that we like the orderly, the beautiful, the pleasant. We can find them anywhere—the little bits of scenery that please the eye, the pleasant households, the group of delightful people. Why ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... necessary to the novel, though not necessary to it alone, which Defoe, Addison, and Swift, each in his several way, worked mightily to supply: and that was a flexible business-like "workaday" prose style. Not merely so long as men aimed at the eccentric and contorted styles of Euphues and the Arcadia, but so long as the old splendid and gorgeous, but cumbrous and complicated pre-Restoration style lasted, romances were possible, but novels were not. You might indeed ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... fiction,' says a very old proverb, which is certainly illustrated by the following tale of an eccentric nobleman's life. ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... this eccentric kind always accompany periods of intellectual change. Most men live and think by habit; and when habit fails them, they are like unskilful sailors who have lost the landmarks of their course, and have no compass and no celestial charts by which to steer. In the years which ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... company schools. An abridgment was made and published in a very few days by Thomas Worthington, a graduate of West Point in one of the earliest classes,—of 1827, I think,—a son of one of the first governors of Ohio. This eccentric officer had served in the regular army and in the Mexican War, and was full of ideas, but was of so irascible and impetuous a temper that he was always in collision with the powers that be, and spoiled his own usefulness. He was employed to furnish ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... grow in stature and knowledge. By Jove! you are too big to wear my cast-off suits now. My valet will bless the increase of your outward man, and I don't think you have at all profited by the circumstance. Where the deuce did you get that eccentric turn-out? It certainly does not remind one ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... been disposed of and Shafto's room inspected and criticised, his companion still lingered talking. To Salter, the proverbially eccentric, this new-comer appeared to be an intelligent young fellow whom he would like and take to. There was no superior "just out from London to the back of God-speed" air about him. On the contrary, he appeared to be genuinely interested in his surroundings and insatiable ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... a special object of public regard and admiration at the time. His eccentric manners, his frank and honest air, his Roman simplicity of dress and demeanor, made him conspicuous; and his interposition to save the lives of the captured garrison of Pelusium, and the interest which he took in rendering such distinguished funeral honors to the enemy whom his army had ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... Emperor, his waistcoat pockets were lined with leather, so that he could take a handful of snuff at a time; he used to ride at full gallop up the staircase of the orangery at Versailles. Authors and artists ended in the workhouse, the natural close to their eccentric careers; they were, every one of them, atheists into the bargain, so that you had to be very careful not to admit anybody of that sort into your house, Joseph Lebas used to advert with horror to the story of his sister-in-law Augustine, who married the artist Sommervieux. Astronomers ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... character!" cried Mr Monckton, "yet of uncommon capacity, and full of genius. Were he less imaginative, wild and eccentric, he has abilities for any station, and might fix and distinguish himself almost where-ever ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... de Mirabeau, was born at Bignon, near Nemours, on March 9, 1749, and died at Paris on April 2, 1791. His father was a most eccentric and tyrannical representative of the French aristocracy, and Honore, a younger son, inherited something of his violent temperament, but was endowed with real genius. Entering the army, young Mirabeau soon displayed an erratic disposition by eloping with ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... have yourself to thank for her having done so; did you never treat her with coldness, and repay her marks of affectionate interest with strange fits of eccentric humour?" ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... food, he of course made his own garments—and what garments they were! Many years ago I used to see, strolling about St. James's Park, a huge hairy gentleman, with a bludgeon in his hand, and clothed with a bear's skin to which the head and paws were attached. It may be that this eccentric individual is remembered by some of my readers, but I assure them that he was quite a St. James's Park dandy compared with my hermit. He wore a pair of gigantic shoes, about a foot broad at the toes, made out of thick cow- hide with the hair on; ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... storehouse of treasures which no eyes but his ever behold. He is said to have the finest collection of pictures in the south of England, though nobody ever sees them to judge; pictures, fiddles and furniture are his hobby, and he is undoubtedly very eccentric. Nor can one deny that there has been considerable eccentricity in his treatment of his son. For years Sir Bernard paid his debts, and the other day, without the slightest warning, not only refused to do so any more, but absolutely stopped the lad's allowance. ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... not lost; and the amount—eighteen dollars—was right. The error was in making change. It was my own mistake. An eccentric old fellow, a farmer up in Martintown, had the money—the very same twenty dollar bill. He said he gave me a five dollar bill and I handed back the ...
— Under Fire - A Tale of New England Village Life • Frank A. Munsey
... round and round till I tell you to stop." The philosophic cabman did not regard me as eccentric, for he whipped up his horse cheerfully. When we had slid down the steep incline and got free of the precincts of that hateful station, I breathed more freely and collected my wits. Carlotta sucked her sticky thumbs and wiped them ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... seems to have been somewhat eccentric, and was very fond of dogs, of which he kept a considerable number. He had very strong views upon psychical subjects. He was a believer in spirit-return, and many witnesses have attested that he frequently spoke of his own return after death. Among these psychic ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... dances on a tub and rides a tricycle at a circus. Nothing of this sort has been attempted with the ostrich, but much might be done. He would make a first-rate bicyclist, and could get through much of the business of the "eccentric comedian." A couple of them would go to make a capital knockabout act. High kicks of the very highest, floor-strides of the very longest—and there would be a world of opportunities in the neck. No end of possibilities ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... to pay obeisance to cheeks more rubicund, and figure lither and more agile, and as you demanded the last pound of patience and endurance on her part you could, with the emphasis of an Edwin Forrest or a Macready, have tapped the eccentric marriage document and have said: "It's in the bond!" If this modern Rebekah had understood beforehand where she was alighting she would have ordered the camel drivers to turn the caravan backward toward Padan-aram. ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... will," said the Doctor firmly, "and at once. But this must be a private matter between us two. Let those who like consider the act eccentric; I shall have it done, and I look to you to take no one else into your confidence over ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... he came after his own hat quickly but cautiously, with burning eyes. The hat had seemed at first to droop and dawdle as in ostentatious langour on the sunny lawn; but the wind again freshening and rising, it went dancing down the garden with the devilry of a pas de quatre. The eccentric went bounding after it with kangaroo leaps and bursts of breathless speech, of which it was not always easy to pick up the thread: "Fair play, fair play... sport of kings... chase their crowns... quite humane... ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... Raven thoughtfully, "it's no secret. Only he was queer, he was eccentric, and so I've always assumed he had a pretty bad time of it. That's why I ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... to recover herself. That Cyrus Redgrave should still take an interest in her was decidedly more gratifying than the eccentric compliment of Felix Dymes. She strove to forget the humiliation of having been found standing in a public place, waiting for a tram-car. In Redgrave's manner no change was perceptible, unless, indeed, he spoke with more cordiality, which must be prompted by kind feeling. ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... laid hold of me in this eccentric fashion, have never loosened their grip. I have no pretension to be an expert in either subject; but the turn for philosophical and historical reading, which rendered Hamilton and Guizot attractive to me, has not only filled many lawful leisure hours, and still more sleepless ones, with ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Diana, Mars, and Venus, are supposed to have respectively predominated. Our author did not venture to assign a patron to the last years of the century, though the expulsion of Saturn might have given a hint for it. The music of the Masque is said to have been good; at least it is admired by the eccentric author of John Buncle.[46] The Prologue and Epilogue to "The Pilgrim," were written within twenty days of Dryden's death; [47] and their spirit equals that of any of his satirical compositions. They afford us the less ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... of the sexes is sweet, though shameful. So poignant is the sweetness that the accompanying shame is ignored, with open eyes. There is no hatred, or only among a few eccentric persons." ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... too, at Savigny, in the evening, when the park, the avenues, the blue slates of the chateau, the red brick of the stables, the ponds and brooks shone resplendent, bathed in the golden glory of a lovely sunset, this eccentric parvenu would say aloud before his children, ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... she understood my true meaning, and of course in her heart she agreed with it. She was town-bred and therefore was intended for the town. Yet so strangely stubborn and eccentric is a woman's reasoning that she can feel resentment toward a man because he has brains enough to comprehend the same simple ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... knowing all those within were to be searched I took a hasty resolution, born of my confidence in the Princess. It may be said here that the lady whom I escorted on that memorable night was known throughout the kingdom for her eccentric tastes, and noted for never meddling with intrigues of either state or love. Her passion lay with her dogs and horses, the hunt, and not in the ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... reversed the verdict of Lord Tennyson's hero is less eccentric than appears. Few men who come to the islands leave them; they grow grey where they alighted; the palm shades and the trade-wind fans them till they die, perhaps cherishing to the last the fancy of a visit home, which is rarely ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... we pay is up a number of eccentric little flights of shaky steps interspersed with twists of passageway. The floor is full of holes. The stairs have been patched here and there, but look perilous and sway beneath the feet, A low door on the landing is opened by a bundle of rags and filth, out of which issues ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... so forfeits the confidence of grave sensible people. This versification, and this impalpable and unprecedented prescription she had waited for so long, seemed all of a piece to poor mamma: wild, unpractical, and—"oh, horror! horror!"—eccentric. ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... does not as a rule commit suicide simply because he is eccentric or because he has made a mess of his estates, or because being a practical joker he suddenly finds his twin image to defraud. Rochester had evidently done nothing to bar him from society. Though perhaps coldly received by his club, he was still received ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... certain degree, undeservedly, his unfortunate affray with Mr. Chaworth had thrown upon the character of the late Lord Byron, was deepened and confirmed by what it, in a great measure, produced,—the eccentric and unsocial course of life to which he afterwards betook himself. Of his cruelty to Lady Byron, before her separation from him, the most exaggerated stories are still current in the neighbourhood; and it is even believed that, in one of his fits of fury, he flung her into the pond ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... moment Beth saw nothing but a mad grotesquerie of horse and man, almost ludicrously unnatural, and crazed with eccentric motion. ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... not be doubted, for the eccentric trapper had thrust his shovel through the wall of snow into what appeared to be a cavern beyond, and immediately followed up his remark by thrusting in his head and shoulders. He drew them out in a few seconds, with a look ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... well known, belonged to the intrinsically inner circle of the elite. Without any of the ostentation of the fashionable ones who endeavor to attract notice by eccentric display of wealth and show he still was au fait in everything that gave deserved lustre to his high position in the ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... a large red handkerchief from a pocket and mopped some huge beads of sweat from his face and forehead. When the handkerchief came out a sheet of paper, folded and crumpled, fluttered toward the floor, describing an eccentric circle and landing within ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer
... pre-eminently of the monarchy, of the court; and the fleeting human interests, fact or fancy, which gave its utmost value to the liveliness of the natural scene, found a centre in the movements of Catherine and her sons, still roving, after the eccentric habit inherited from Francis the First, from one "house of pleasure" to another, in the pursuit at once of amusement and of that political intrigue which was the serious business of their lives. Like some fantastic company of strolling players amid the hushed excitement of a little town, ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... not meant as a piece of bravado, but Stephen was eccentric, and it occurred to him that there was a "touch of nature" in a pipe which might possibly induce the Bushmen to be less rude to him personally than if he were to stand by and look aggrieved while his waggons ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... character. But very good humour nevertheless, the thoroughly popular humour of broad comedy and obvious farce—the humour that finds its account where absurd characters are placed in ridiculous situations, that delights in the oddities of the whimsical and eccentric, that irradiates stupidity and makes dulness amusing. How thoroughly wholesome it is too! To be at the same time merry and wise, says the old adage, is a hard combination. Dickens was both. With all his boisterous merriment, his volleys of inextinguishable laughter, he never makes game of ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... recklessly thrown out by the house of lords on party grounds. His public life, up to the year 1835, was perhaps the most brilliant and the most useful of the century, yet it was hopelessly marred in the end by a certain eccentric vanity, and want of loyalty to colleagues, not inconsistent with the higher ambition of leaving the world better than he found it. For some years after his fall he retained his astounding energy, and even his ascendency in the house of lords, ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... him; he bought for a trifle a little house in one of the outlying streets, and established himself in it, with all his books and scientific odds and ends. And of books and odds and ends he had many—for he was a man of some considerable learning ... 'an out-and-out eccentric,' as his neighbours said of him. He positively passed among them for a sorcerer; he had even been given the title of an 'insectivist.' He studied chemistry, mineralogy, entomology, botany, and medicine; he doctored patients gratis with ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... tend to approach those of urban communities. Social conditions in the West tend to approach those in the East. Boston is not eccentric. It ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... romance men, like Edmund Spenser, for example, may not possess these weaknesses at all. Robert Louis Stevenson was passionately in love with the romantic in life and with romanticism in literature; but it did not make him eccentric, weak, or empty. His instinct for enduring romance was so admirably fine that it brought strength to the sinews of his mind, light and air and fire to his soul. Among the writers of our own day, it is Mr. Kipling who has written some of ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... much for the old gentleman, but art little, so far as his personal appearance was concerned; for nothing could have been more quaint and out of keeping with Pall Mall and its fashionable surroundings than his eccentric costume. ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... she was the one out-standing proof of the reality of the Chapel. All the others—his sister, Miss Avies, Thurston, Crashaw, the Miss Cardinals, yes, and his father too, were, in one way or another, eccentric, abnormal, but Miss Pyncheon was the sane every-day world, the worldly world, the world of drinks and dinners, and banks and tobacconists, and yet she believed as profoundly as any of them. What did she believe? She was an Inside Saint, therefore she must have ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... particular about the wine. The waiter, who had been doubtful about him, was won over, and went off to execute the order, reflecting that it was never safe to judge a man by his clothes, and that Rutherford was probably one of these eccentric young millionaires who didn't care ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... they found it as full of hair as food in a city boarding-house; when they made soft soap it ran from the kettle and over the floor like lava; stones fell down chimneys and smashed crockery. One of the farmers cut off an ear from a pig that was walking on its hind legs, and an eccentric old body of the neighborhood appeared presently with one of her ears in a muffle, thus satisfying that community that she had caused the troubles. When a woman was making potash it began to leap about, and a rifle was fired into the pot, causing a sudden calm. In the morning the witch was ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... Dulcie by getting his only and elderly sister Hannah—"Aunt Hannah" as she was inevitably called by all who stayed at Holt Manor, and in fact by everybody who had seen her more than twice—to come and live with him. And there at Holt she had, in her eccentric way, ever since superintended domestic arrangements and mothered his beautiful little girl and her only brother, by this time an obstreperous boy of fourteen, at Eton and ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... he ought also to have brought away at the same time some of the sunlight of that country, a scrap of the blue sky, the eccentric costume and the bulrushes of the Tiber, and the large swing nets of the Ponte Rotto; in fact the frame with the picture. Then he would have been spared the cruel disenchantment he experienced when, having settled in a modest ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... was in a certain law school an aged and eccentric professor. "General information" was the old gentleman's hobby. He held it as incontrovertible that if a young lawyer possessed a large fund of miscellaneous knowledge, combined with an equal amount of common sense, he would be successful in life. So every year the professor put on his ...
— Toasts - and Forms of Public Address for Those Who Wish to Say - the Right Thing in the Right Way • William Pittenger
... Casanova had learned from Olivo, they were old bachelors. At one time members of the great world, they had been unfortunate in various undertakings. At length they had returned to their birthplace, the neighboring village, to lead a retired life in a tiny house they had rented. They were eccentric fellows, but quite harmless. ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... when they predict, at a given hour and place, the passage of a comet, that most eccentric of celestial travellers? What do the naturalists think when they reveal the myriad forms of life concealed in a drop of water? Do they think they have invented what they see and that their lenses and microscopes make the law of nature? What did the first law-giver think when, seeking for ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the end of May had profited him little; he had used up most of the divisions intended for a final resumption of his attack on the Franco-British liaison; and after more than a month's delay he could only launch his last bolt against an eccentric and subsidiary objective. Foiled in front of Amiens and Paris, he turned to Reims; but there was nothing in the previous history of the war on the Western front to suggest that, even were his last offensive as successful as his first, it would bring ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... gave me an idea, mademoiselle. To help you I must become an inmate of this house. Yesterday Seth brought me here, posing as a wealthy eccentric relative anxious to place me in safety. I am a little mad, and there is no knowing what folly I might commit were I allowed to continue at liberty. My stay here is likely to be a long one, and my relatives care little what they pay so long as I am out of their ...
— The Light That Lures • Percy Brebner
... finally be bad for the intellectual atmosphere which is Germany's ultimate strength. For example, the Emperor professes a violent and grotesque Christianity with a ferocious pro-Teutonic Father and a negligible Son, and the public mind is warped into conformity with the finally impossible cant of this eccentric creed. His Imperial Majesty's disposition to regard criticism as hostility stifles the public thought of Germany. He interferes in university affairs and in literary and artistic matters with a ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... principle, to run any risk of that situation becoming his own. An ambitious timeserver like Lomenie, or a contented adherent of use and wont like Morellet, might well regard such considerations as the products of a weak and eccentric scrupulosity. Turgot was of other calibre, holding it to be only a degree less unprincipled than the avowed selfishness of the adventurer, to contract so serious an engagement on the strength of common hearsay and current usage, without deliberate personal ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... vast magnetic field of the Sun in an eccentric orbit, tortured by the daily change from blistering heat to freezing cold in the thin atmosphere, was ...
— A World is Born • Leigh Douglass Brackett
... Coming to New York in 1746, Berkenmeyer had him subscribe to the Loonenburg Church constitution. His parish included the congregations at Rheinbeck, Camp, Staatsburg, Ancrum, and Tar Bush. The capriciousness with which Hartwick, who remained an eccentric bachelor all his life, performed his pastoral duties soon gave rise to dissatisfaction. Complaints were lodged against him with Berkenmeyer, who finally wrote against him publicly. In 1750 Muhlenberg conducted a visitation in Hartwick's congregations, and reports as follows: ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente
... Chancery at last. For forty years, ever since the death of the old squire, no one had rightfully called the Hall his own. The heir had lived abroad, and had lived in such an exceedingly eccentric manner as to give ground for a suit de lunatico inquirendo, brought by another heir. With the consistency of judicial purpose which characterises such proceedings the courts appeared to have decided ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... go up, 'cause he thought the pope could see right through him, and would know he was a Baptist, but the rest of the Americans were going up, and dad didn't want to be eccentric, so he and I went up. The pope put out his hand to dad, and instead of shaking it, as he would the hand of any other man on earth, and asking how his folks were, dad bent over and kissed the pope's hand, and the pope blessed him. Dad looked like a new man, a ...
— Peck's Bad Boy Abroad • George W. Peck
... Russian seemed to increase. In spite of the grotesque hair and unusual beard, there was an air of great distinction about him. His complete unconsciousness and calm were so remarkable. You might take him for an eccentric person, but certainly a gentleman, and with an extraordinary magnetism, she felt. When once you had talked to him, he seemed to cast a spell over you. But, beyond this, she only knew that she was growing more unhappy every moment, and that by her side one man represented everything that was tied ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... but eccentric American writer, was born in Portland, Maine. He went into business, when quite young, in company with John Pierpont, the well-known poet. They soon failed, and Mr. Neal then turned his attention to the study of law. ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... Army as a teacher of questionable ethics and of eccentric economics, as the legal adviser who recommends and practices the extraction of money by intimidation, as the fairy godmother who proposes to "mother" society, in a fashion which is not to my taste, however much it may commend itself to ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... I am making no accusation," he interrupted; "indeed, I am more inclined to argue that they occupy an eccentric point within the circle rather than the true center. Still, we must not overlook one or two facts which you have duly emphasized in your report. The rivalry between Morrison and Farrell does supply, as you say, ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... kite-flying Winifred felt differently towards her husband. She was of the comparatively rare women who hate pretence even in another woman, but especially in a man. The really eccentric she was not afraid of—could even love, being a searcher after the new and strange, like so many modern pilgrims. But pinchbeck eccentricity—Brummagem originalities—gave to her views of the poverty ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... off your guard, and thoughtless of consequences, Imagination took the reins; and Reason, slow-paced, though sure-footed, was unequal to the race of so eccentric and flighty a companion. How rapid was then my Evelina's progress through those regions of fancy and passion whither her new guide conducted her!-She saw Lord Orville at a ball,-and he was the most amiable of men! -She met him again at another,-and ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... pump-room, and I believe all public places—walking up and down, and dispersing his philosophic opinions to the right and the left, like a Grecian philosopher. The first time I saw him was at a concert in the Upper Rooms; he was pointed out to me by one of my party as a very eccentric man who had walked over the habitable globe. I remember that Madame Mara was at that moment singing: and Walking Stewart, who was a true lover of music (as I afterwards came to know), was hanging upon her notes like a bee upon a jessamine flower. His countenance was striking, ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... Landwehr infantry division, and was further divided into three Landwehr brigades. There was also a Landwehr Uhlan regiment, together with a howitzer division of field artillery. These batteries were armed with 10.5-centimeter guns, fitted with the German or Krupp eccentric breech action. The forts outside the town were said to be armed with the 15-centimeter siege gun made of steel, also with a Krupp action. The ammunition for these guns is chiefly high explosive shell and shrapnel; one of the forts is ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... promised to send; and having bestowed on her a condescending nod, passed out into the garden, where she told some of the visitors that the piano had been tuned at last, and that the tuner was a young woman of rather eccentric appearance. ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... counter-charges against Ord, whom he accused of purloining Father Pandoza's shoes, when the soldiers in their fury about the ammunition destroyed the Mission. At the time of its destruction a rumor of this nature was circulated through camp, started by some wag, no doubt in jest; for Ord, who was somewhat eccentric in his habits, and had started on the expedition rather indifferently shod in carpet-slippers, here came out in a brand-new pair of shoes. Of course there was no real foundation for such a report, but Rains ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 1 • Philip H. Sheridan
... That would settle once and for all the question whether the administration of the bequest has evinced evidence of insanity or not. A recent Royal Commission left the matter undecided. I do not, however, wish to criticise trustees, but to defend the memory of Miss Browne (who may have been eccentric in private life) from such a charge, because her testamentary dispositions were a trifle aesthetic. The will was un-English in one respect: 'no inscription of my name shall be placed on such erection.' ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... were such as in no part of modern Europe would now be shared by any educated teacher or ruler." (That's true enough.) "But in spite of these irreconcilable differences, there was a solid ground for the charm which he exercised over his contemporaries. His childish and eccentric fancies have passed away;" (I protest, No;) "but his innocent faith and his sympathy with his people are qualities which, even in our altered times, may still retain their place in the economy of the world. Westminster Abbey, so we hear it said, sometimes with a cynical sneer, ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin
... that the lad ran away. He came North, and was unheard-of for some time, living under an assumed name. Later some slight correspondence ensued between father and son, and the boy was granted a regular allowance. The father was a very eccentric man, harsh and unforgiving, and, while giving the boy money, never extended an invitation to return home. Consequently Philip remained in the North, and led his own life. He became dissipated, and a rounder, and drifted into evil associations. ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... are related of Peter during this portion of his life, which, though they may be apochryphal, are very characteristic of his eccentric nature. At one time he visited a celebrated iron manufactory, and forged himself several bars of iron, directing his companions to assist him in the capacity of journeymen blacksmiths. Upon the bars he forged, he put his own mark, and then he demanded of Muller, the proprietor, payment ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... lingering in his progress at this rose-tree and that, forgot all about me at least twice, waking up and apologising humbly after each lapse. During these intervals I put two and two together, and identified him as the Rector: a bachelor, eccentric, learned exceedingly, round whom the crust of legend was already beginning to form; to myself an object of special awe, in that he was alleged to have written a real book. "Heaps o' books," Martha, my informant, said; but I knew the exact rate of ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... guided Eastern and Western embroideries at their best periods, hoping thus to save the designers of the future from repeating exploded experiments against received canons of good taste; checking, if we can, the exuberance of ignorant or eccentric genius, but ...
— Handbook of Embroidery • L. Higgin
... my officers from duty, and by my own act had prevented the anchor-watch being formally set and things properly attended to. I asked myself whether it was wise ever to interfere with the established routine of duties even from the kindest of motives. My action might have made me appear eccentric. Goodness only knew how that absurdly whiskered mate would "account" for my conduct, and what the whole ship thought of that informality of their new captain. I was vexed ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... was not my uncle; indeed he bore no relationship whatever to me, but Uncle Ephraim was the familiar appellation by which he was known by all the school-boys in the vicinity. He was among the oldest residents in the section, and although a very eccentric person, was much respected by all his neighbors. How plainly do I yet remember him, after the lapse of so many years! His tall figure, shoulders that slightly stooped, his florid complexion, clear blue ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... given him credit for more than he deserves. He was unluckily a duellist almost by profession, and thus as dangerous to associate with as a mad bull. Yet I have heard traits of a generosity on his part as lavish as his manners are eccentric. He is, however, so well known to be alert in the use of the pistol, and to be of fiery temper, that some curious stories are told of the alarm inspired by his presence. One of those is now running the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... He was always eccentric. Perfect nuisance at home. None of us could understand him. I shouldn't in the least wonder if he had taken a rooted aversion to you, and taken it badly too! Miss Wynter! it quite distresses me to think that it should be my brother, of ...
— A Little Rebel • Mrs. Hungerford
... told with wild and compelling sweep, has remained so deep in oblivion, appears immediately on a glance at the original. The author, Charles Robert Maturin, a needy, eccentric Irish clergyman of 1780-1824, could cause intense suspense and horror—could read keenly into human motives—could teach an awful moral lesson in the guise of fascinating fiction, but he could not stick to ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... come a season Which shall rid us from the curse Of a prose which knows no reason And an unmelodious verse: When the world shall cease to wonder At the genius of an Ass, And a boy's eccentric blunder Shall not bring ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... historian of that party, has made us tolerably familiar with the men who composed it. They were a band of eccentric and mischievous spirits, bold of heart, ready of hand, and of boundless fidelity to one another. Professing to hold the most outrageous maxims, incessantly invoking Brutus and old Rome, and intermingling gallant with political intrigues, they suffered themselves to be hurried ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... office only two months, and in that short time had not had many cases to try, of course. He had no knowledge of laws and courts except what he had picked up since he came into office. He was a sore trouble to the lawyers, for his rulings were pretty eccentric sometimes, and he stood by them with Roman simplicity and fortitude; but the people were well satisfied with him, for they saw that his intentions were always right, that he was entirely impartial, and that he usually made up in good ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the quick surface of her mind glimpsing a parallel. "There have been eccentric inventors, starving their families while they sought such chimeras as perpetual motion. Doubtless their wives loved them, and suffered with them and for them, not because of but in spite of their infatuation ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... is no written law for him. He moves in his own eccentric orbit. He will come when most unexpected, suddenly, like an eagle from the clear blue depths of the sky, or as a comet from ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... became his intimate friend. The rapacious Agujari, who sang for nobody else under fifty pounds an air, sang her best for Dr. Burney without a fee; and in the company of Dr. Burney even the haughty and eccentric Gabrielli constrained herself to behave with civility. It was thus in his power to give, with scarcely any expense, concerts equal to those of the aristocracy. On such occasions the quiet street in which he lived was blocked up by coroneted chariots, and his little ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... confirmed when, some six months ago, on his release, listening both to her own pleadings and to those of his mother, the Sparrow had sworn that he would stick to the "straight and narrow." And Hayden-Bond, the millionaire, referred to by a good many people as eccentric, had further proved his claims to eccentricity in the eyes of a good many people by giving a prison bird a chance to make an honest living, and had engaged the Sparrow as his chauffeur. It was a vile and an abominable ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... there after dinner, watching intently, saying little, and hearing the very least possible, when there approached me one of the most eccentric figures in the country, where God has not made them lacking. He is a mixture of elevation and lowness, of good sense and madness; the notions of good and bad must be mixed up together in strange confusion ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... in whom curiosity was more strongly developed than even in the rest of her kind, was determined to find out something about this eccentric Mr. Seabright. She managed to get on intimate terms with Mrs. Seabright, and was very free in moving to and fro in the Seabright residence. Her intentions were not however hidden from Mrs. Seabright. She knew that Mrs. Marsh was planning ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... whose hats were proverbial, was uncompromisingly Lutheran. The men were past redemption, all save the Commissioner who, however, was under bad influences and an incurable wobbler, anyhow. Eames, the scholar, cared for nothing but his books. Keith, a rich eccentric who owned one of the finest villas and gardens on the place, only came to the island for a few weeks every year. He knew too much, and had travelled too far, to be anything but a hopeless unbeliever; besides, he was a ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... the door of the room, he crouched in a corner until the storm should pass. He was very varied and original in his discourse, and sometimes said such beautiful things, that he made his hearers burst with laughter. But when he was old, and near the age of eighty, he had become so strange and eccentric that nothing could be done with him. He would not have assistants standing round him, so that his misanthropy had robbed him of all possible aid. He was sometimes seized by a desire to work, but was not able, by reason of ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... wedding was extremely quiet. It was regarded by all but the two persons immediately concerned as an eccentric mistake. Even Colonel Hitchcock, to whom Louise was almost infallible, could not trust himself to discuss with her, her decision to marry Dr. Sommers. It was all a sign of the irrational drift of things that seemed to ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... satiric bent, great learning, and little originality. His prose—especially in Gargantua, his most important work, which is an amplified and Germanized version of the first book of Rabelais—is hard to read on account of its recondite allusions, far-fetched puns, and generally eccentric diction. As a poet he is at his best in the Lucky Boat of Zrich, a narrative poem which describes, with much patriotic warmth, the notable feat of a Swiss boat-crew in rowing from Zrich to Strassburg in a single day (June 21, 1576) to attend a Schtzenfest. The selection ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... piano teacher was Cossell; but to Eduard Marxsen, the Royal Music Director, he owes his real success as a composer. Brahms remained in Hamburg until 1853, when he went upon a concert-tour with Remenyi, the eccentric and somewhat sensational Hungarian, who has been a familiar figure upon the American concert-stage. He remained with him, however, but a very short time, for in October of that year they parted company. Brahms had attracted the notice of Liszt and Joachim; and it may have ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... was in America instead of France, without the slightest recollection of getting there. The war was over long ago. A thousand things had happened of which he had not the remotest knowledge. And because he was a very normal, ordinary young man with a horror of anything queer and eccentric, the thought of that mysterious year filled him with dismay and roused in him a passionate longing to escape at once from everything which would remind him of his uncanny lapse of memory. If he were only back where he belonged in the land of ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... replied, with a shrug, "I must remain among the eccentric millions who continue to act according to their ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... calculated to wear well. Queen Adelaide's goodness and kindness, her unselfish, unassuming womanliness and devout resignation to sorrow and suffering, did more than gain and keep the heart of her bluff, eccentric sailor-prince. They secured for her the respectful regard of the nation among whom she dwelt, whether as Queen or Queen-dowager. The Archbishop of Canterbury could say of her, after her husband's death, "For three weeks prior to his (King William's) dissolution, the ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... aunt. 'Because his brother was a little eccentric—though he is not half so eccentric as a good many people—he didn't like to have him visible about his house, and sent him away to some private asylum-place: though he had been left to his particular care by their deceased father, who thought him almost ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... for the Mediterranean. In the diligence he had some merry companions, and the party amused itself on the way. It was their habit to stroll about the towns in which they stopped, and talk with whomever they met. Among his companions was a young French officer and an eccentric, garrulous doctor from America. At Tonneins, on the Garonne, they entered a house where a number of girls were quilting. The girls gave Irving a needle and set him to work. He could not understand their patois, and they could not comprehend his bad French, and they got on very merrily. At last ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... than the individuality of other men; he has been knocked about by passion and circumstance. All his life he has had a dislike for iron rules and common-place maxims. There is something of the gipsy in his nature. He is to some extent eccentric, and he indulges his eccentricity. And the misfortunes of men of letters—the vulgar and patent misfortunes, I mean—arise mainly from the want of harmony between their impulsiveness and volatility, and the staid unmercurial world with which they are brought into ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... over what, to his conscience, was wrong, and soon forgot uncle, aunt, and cousin, and even the unlucky lap-dog, whose dismal howl had so discomfited him a moment before. Just such a luminary as Lottie Marsden had never appeared above his horizon, and her orbit seemed so eccentric that as yet he could not calculate it; but this element of uncertainty made observation all the more interesting. The wide old hall, without the embarrassment of observant eyes, was just the place to learn something more ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... received with attention in the highest circles of society. Among his friends at this period were Prescott, Ticknor, Longfellow, Lowell, Parker, Sumner, Felton, and Everett,—the last named of whom was then President of Harvard University. The eccentric appearance and character of the Count, of course, excited curiosity and gave rise to many idle rumors, the most popular of which declared him to be a Russian spy, though what there was to spy in this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... Lord Algernon wore a domino. His uncle (I need scarcely say) had made no innovation upon the laced hat and gaiters proper to his archidiaconal rank—though it is likely enough that the Venetians found this costume as eccentric as any in the throng. He had arrived in the city a bare week before; and walked with an arm paternally thrust in his nephew's, while he made acquaintance with the luxurious frivolities of a ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... spice of conceit? There was no success which she had wished for, that she had not attained. She had received a medal for sculpture at the Salon, and at the Exhibition of Excessives she had shown a water-color which looked eccentric, even there. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... was the genius of Warburton, it delighted too much in its eccentric motions, and in its own solitary greatness, amid abstract and recondite topics, to have strongly attracted the public attention, had not a party been formed around him, at the head of which stood the active and subtle Hurd; and amid the gradations of the votive brotherhood, the profound BALGUY,[187] ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... ascribed the crimes of lawlessness which rendered Rome under Innocent VIII. almost uninhabitable. Venice, praised for its piety by De Comines,[2] was the resort of all the debauchees of Europe who could afford the time and money to visit this modern Corinth. Tom Coryat, the eccentric English traveler, gives a curious account of the splendor and refinement displayed by the demi-monde of the lagoons, and Marston describes Venice as a school of luxury in which the monstrous Aretine played professor.[3] Of the state of morals in Florence Savonarola's sermons give ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... with her never came about. What, indeed, could they say? No doubt the little servant had broken the strict letter of domestic law by running off in that highly eccentric and inconvenient way; but, as Hilary tried to explain by a series of most ingenious ratiocinations, she had fulfilled, in the spirit of it, the very highest law—that of charity. She had also shown prompt courage, decision, practical and prudent forethought, ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... any malice in it, nor any of the basic enmity and destructiveness of the stupid toward the bright, just a recognition that an E was an E. They had a vast respect for an E, but you couldn't get around it that some of them were—well, maybe eccentric was the word. ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... up of the card-tables prevented further conversation. Lord Berrington again approached the sofa where Mary sat, exclaiming, as he perceived her companion, "Ah my good doctor; have you presented yourself at this fair shrine I declare you eccentric folk may dare anything. Whilst you are free, Miss Beaufort," added he turning to her, "adopt the advice which a good lady once gave me, and which I have implicitly followed: 'When you are young, get the character ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... man who is supposed to be "the most eccentric, the most artificial, the most fastidious, the most capricious of mortals? -his mind a bundle of inconsistent whims and affectations-his features covered with mask within mask, which, when the outer disguise of obvious affectation was removed, you were still as far as ever from ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... of home on the youthful female. This was represented as the central luminary of life. We are led naturally, in this place, to note those influences adverse to domestic piety. There are planets, in the moral heaven of woman, whose orbits are so eccentric, that their motions are of fearful import to her heart. When she enters society, an equal among elders, it is a trying exigency; a crisis then occurs in her character. Her temptations are numerous, while her moral energy is usually less decided than ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... the House, which would win admiration and applause from end to end of the Empire, he would, perhaps on the following day, exhibit something very like stupidity in debate. He would rise to address the House and take his seat again without having uttered a word. He was eccentric, said his admirers, but there were others who looked deeper for an explanation, yet failed to find one, and were thrown back ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... This is clearly impossible with the sun at the centre of the circle. But suppose the sun did not occupy the centre, while the planet, as before, revolved around the sun. The distance between the two bodies would then necessarily fluctuate. The more eccentric the position of the sun, the larger would be the proportionate variation in the distance of the planet when at the different parts of its orbit. It might further be supposed that by placing a series of circles around the sun the various planetary orbits could be accounted ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... just been talking with her. We exchanged only a few words, but in all that she said she was so perfectly rational, so perfectly sensible. Besides, one has only to look at her to feel sure some terrible mistake or some terrible injustice is being done. Surely there is nothing eccentric, nothing erratic about her; now is there? You must have been studying her. Don't you yourself feel that there might have been something wrong ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... observed,—when tables are smashed by invisible hands,—when people see ghosts through stone walls, and know what is passing in the heart of Africa,—how easily you unlock your wardrobe of terms and clap on the back of every eccentric fact your ready-made phrase-coat,—Animal Magnetism, Biology, Odic Force, Optical Illusion, Second Sight, Spirits, and what not! It is a wonderful labor-saving and faith-saving process. People say, "Oh, is that all?" and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... what it all comes to in the end," in a tone that made them tremble. Sometimes, too, at Savigny, in the evening, when the park, the avenues, the blue slates of the chateau, the red brick of the stables, the ponds and brooks shone resplendent, bathed in the golden glory of a lovely sunset, this eccentric parvenu would say aloud before his children, after ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... great minister, Robert Walpole, for whom Mr. Bedford had unquestionably done some service or other, and of whose son, Horace Walpole, the letter-writer, he had continued from that day to be a kind of dependent or protege, being precisely the sort of unobtrusive factotum which that fastidious eccentric needed to manage his mundane affairs. But now, after this long time, when the King's business was placed in the hands of George Grenville, who entertained the odd notion that a Collector of the Customs should reside at the port of entry where the customs were ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... the great house, where half the blinds were down, and all was suggestive of neglect and decay. She had spent some pleasant afternoons in the splendid gardens and conservatories with Mrs. Swinton in the old days, but her one recollection of the eccentric old man was not very encouraging. She remembered how keenly he had eyed her, like a valuer summing up the points of a horse, and how glad she had been to escape his penetrating scrutiny. Others were present on that occasion. She was to face him ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... outshone them in colored sheen. Fantastic pink-and-orange crabs sidled awkwardly but nimbly this way and that. Tiny sea-horses, yet more fantastic, slipped shyly from one weed-covert to another, aware of a possible peril in every gay but menacing bloom. And just above this eccentric life of the shoal sea-floor small fishes of curious form shot hither and thither, live, darting gleams of gold and azure and amethyst. Now and again a long, black shadow would sail slowly over the scene of freakish life—the shadow of a passing ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... replied, and we started to find Smith and Spalding. We found them, and it was settled that they should go with us for a month among the mountains. Everybody knows Smith, the good-natured, eccentric Smith; Smith the bachelor, who has an income greatly beyond his moderate expenditures, and enough of capital to spoil, as he says, the orphan children of his sister. By way of saving them from being thrown upon the cold world with a fortune, he declares ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... paint all over the sloping tiers of pews has prevented the interior from being as dark as it would have otherwise been, but the result of all this painted deal has been to give the building the most eccentric and indecorous appearance. Still, there are few who will fail to thank the good folks of Whitby for preserving an ecclesiastical curiosity of such an unusual nature. The box-pews on the floor of the church are separated by very narrow gangways—we cannot call them aisles—and ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... of the old-time Southern colonel, with his absurd grandiloquence, his eccentric garb, his quaint idioms and phrases, his motheaten pride of family, and his really kind heart, fastidious sense of honor, and lovable simplicity, is the best delineation of a character role on the boards to-day. The coat worn by Colonel Calhoun ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... Russians nor Siberians, were not accustomed to this sort of thing. The leader, rather larger than the others, kept to a steady long trot, perfectly regular, whether up or down hill. The two other horses seemed to know no other pace than the gallop, though they performed many an eccentric curvette as they went along. The iemschik, however, never touched them, only urging them on by startling cracks of his whip. But what epithets he lavished on them, including the names of all the saints in the calendar, ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... 'Eccentric?' replied the other, in an airy tone, 'not at all, sir. I'm merely a civilized being with the veneer off. I am not hidden under an artificial coat of manner. No, I laugh—ha! ha! I skip, ha! ha!' with a light trip on one foot. 'I cry,' in a dismal tone. 'In fact, I ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... Racine; with all his love of music he could see nothing in Beethoven; he adored Italy, and, so soon as he was given his Italian consulate, he was usually to be found in Paris. As his life advanced he grew more and more wayward, capricious, and eccentric. He indulged in queer mystifications, covering his papers with false names and anagrams—for the police, he said, were on his track, and he must be careful. His love-affairs became less and less ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... favorites that I could not help it, and it would not do to acknowledge it. And if any one asks you if I put these candles in here, just say you brought them with you, that's a love, because they will be jealous, as I only allow them lamps." Eccentric Mrs. Greyson! Many an hour's ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... eccentric dress of some sort, and as he waited for the applause to melt away, he stood, absent-mindedly picking crumbs out of ...
— Ptomaine Street • Carolyn Wells
... quaint and eccentric man, took his seat as senator from Tennessee. He was in the sixty-fourth year of his age, and in impaired health. He was born in South-western Virginia in the wild and mountainous region adjacent to the borders of three other States. In early life he was a Methodist preacher ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... notice a few things about them; and one is, that their eccentricities all give way at the first offer of marriage. I believe they are only adopted in desperation, to get married. What beautiful woman is ever eccentric? catch her! she can get a husband without. That doctress will prescribe Harrington a wedding-ring; and, if he swallows it, it will be her last prescription. She will send out for the family doctor after that, ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... their offspring advanced to this regal state of manhood, while all other pairs have remained stationary, or precisely where they were two hundred and fifty thousand years ago or more? Why this exceptional divergence in the case of a single pair of monkeys? Why this anomalous, aberrant, and thoroughly eccentric movement on the part of nature? We had supposed that her operations were uniform—conformable to fixed laws of movement. The doctrine of the "survival of the fittest" implies this. Why then, should nature, in her unerring operations, have selected the fittest ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... is mild, so the situation would have been even more "amusing" for the family on the side lines, had he been present. Owing to the placing of the house, we are doomed to have a lopsided garden whatever we do, but we want it to look wayward rather than eccentric. After a battle fought over nearly every inch of the ground the lady was victorious, for Will said to me as he watched her motor disappear: "I might as well do what she says or she'll make me do it over." In this J—— and ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... praised, except by Bowers, who has an eccentric attachment to our older form. We have discovered a hundred details of clothes, mits, and footwear: there seems no solution to the difficulties which attach to these articles in extreme cold; all Wilson ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... smiling, and with the child still in his arms drew her to a window looking northward. As far as the eye could see, nothing but snow, like a blanket spread over the land. Here and there in the wide expanse a tree silhouetted against the sky, a tracery of eccentric beauty, and off in the far distance a solitary horseman ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... and laboring chest, with other beauties of the like description, though calculated to impress the memory, Trotty could at first allot to nobody he had ever known: and yet he had some recollection of them too. At length, in Mrs. Chickenstalker's partner in the general line, and in the crooked and eccentric line of life, he recognized the former porter of Sir Joseph Bowley; an apoplectic innocent, who had connected himself in Trotty's mind with Mrs. Chickenstalker years ago, by giving him admission to the mansion ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... he came from church, and noticed her precarious footing; and, with the grave dignity with which he did everything, he relieved her of her burden, and steered along the street by her side, carrying her baked mutton and potatoes safely home. This was thought very eccentric; and it was rather expected that he would pay a round of calls, on the Monday morning, to explain and apologise to the Cranford sense of propriety: but he did no such thing: and then it was decided that he was ashamed, and was keeping ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... here given is compounded from two different sources, almost of necessity. Stanzas 1-19 were given by Scott, compounded from W. Tytler's Brown MS. and the recitation of an old woman. But at stanza 20 Scott's version becomes eccentric, and he prints such ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... strong;[54] it bore on its bosom every man and woman who aimed at a reputation for elegance, for wit or for the deadly thrust in verbal fence which played so large a part in the game of politics; every one that refused to float was either an outcast from the best society, or was striving to win an eccentric reputation for national obscurantism and its imaginary accompaniment of ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... known to the present generation as mystic and poet than as physician, was justly accounted one of the celebrities of the day. Eccentric and visionary, he was yet a man of solid learning and an intense patriot. It was owing to him, as his biographers fondly recall, that Weinsberg's most glorious monument, the well named Weibertrube, was not suffered to fall into utter neglect, ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... regarded; and in these matters there is no better course than to call in the aid of any respectable milliner and dressmaker, who will be found ready and able to give the best advice. The bridegroom should simply appear in morning dress, and should avoid everything eccentric and conspicuous in style. The bridesmaids should always be made aware of the bride's dress before they choose their own, which should be determined by a proper ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... supposes Pima lay (perhaps upon the river of Kiria). At Pima itself, in A. D. 644, there was a story of the destruction of a city lying further north, a judgment on the luxury and impiety of the people and their king, who, shocked at the eccentric aspect of a holy man, had caused him to be buried in ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... work was done. "Hippolyte," said he, to the hair-dresser, who stood breathlessly by, "this is the way in which my wig is to be dressed from this day forward." [Footnote: From this time Kaunitz wore his wig in this eccentric fashion. It was adopted by the exquisites of Vienna, and ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... academic proprieties, that when he entered Trinity College, Oxford, in October 1840, a criticism of his military moustache by a fellow-undergraduate was resented by a challenge to a duel, and Burton in various ways distinguished himself by such eccentric behaviour that rustication inevitably ensued. Nor was he much more in his element as a subaltern in the 18th Regiment of Bombay Native Infantry, which he joined at Baroda in October 1842. Discipline of any sort he abhorred, and the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... was to ride with Lucy, I had but one thing of any possible importance to do. And upon that business from first to last including the walk to the village and thence to the Club I spent no more than three-quarters of an hour. It had been an eccentric piece of business, and I was rather pleased with myself for having brought it to a satisfactory conclusion. But I wanted others to know what I had done and to be pleased with me for doing it; and to tell anyone was ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... Eudocia Emul, the Eccentric Epicurian Empress of Ethiopia, Electrified the East End of Egypt by Eagerly and Easily Eating, as an Experiment, an Egg, an Eagle, an Emu, and Electrical Eel, and an Enormous Elephant, larger than the one Exhibited next to Cole's ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... side and horizontal cross section of the cylinder; steam chest and the valves; cam wrist plate and cut-off mechanism; shaft for the cam plate; cross head; side view and section through the centre of the eccentric ...
— Mechanical Drawing Self-Taught • Joshua Rose
... the first maturation mitosis as it usually appears in sections from mercuro-nitric material stained with iron-haematoxylin. The odd chromosome is always more or less eccentric and is attached by a spindle fiber to one pole. In Hermann material, considerably destained, the tetrads and the odd chromosome appear as in figures 252, 253, and 254, the tetrads being in position for a transverse division. The odd chromosome is always so ...
— Studies in Spermatogenesis - Part II • Nettie Maria Stevens
... obedience to the laws.—Many things have been said, and very well undoubtedly, on the subjection in which we should preserve our bodies to the government of our understanding; but enough has not been said upon the restraint which our bodily necessities ought to lay on the extravagant sublimities and eccentric rovings of our minds. The body, or as some love to call it, our inferior nature, is wiser in its own plain way, and attends its own business more directly than the mind ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... "We were an eccentric family, especially in our peculiar aloofness from others. We clung desperately to one another long after the necessity was past. Neither eviction nor commerce could disband us. Only marriage or death could separate us. Though we were Catholics on the surface, we were pagans at bottom. ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... whole the principal dramatis personae, the Hawthorne household, are unchanged. The additions are Miss Barnicroft, an eccentric old lady from the village; Kettles, an impoverished child from Nearminster, the cathedral city close by; Dr Budge, a learned old man in the village, who takes on the grounding of one of the boys in Latin; Mrs Margetts, who had spent her life in the Hawthorne family's employment ...
— Penelope and the Others - Story of Five Country Children • Amy Walton
... that we think the whole scope of its philosophy utterly unworthy of the accomplished mind of the writer; the philosophy consists of an unpardonable distorting of general truths, to suit the peculiarities of an individual, noble indeed, but proverbially morbid and eccentric. A striking instance of this occurs in the laboured assertion that poets make but sorry domestic characters. What! because Lord Byron is said to have been a bad husband, was (to go no further back for examples)—was Walter Scott a bad husband, or ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... father's displeasure, for he had a most savage, revengeful temper, and his daughter possesses the same." This was bitterly spoken, and she continued—"Hardly an hour after we were married, a negro brought a letter to Richard from an eccentric old man for whom he had been named. In it the old man said he had made his namesake his heir, provided he did not marry until ...
— Rosamond - or, The Youthful Error • Mary J. Holmes
... in diameter respectively, with a piston stroke of 3 ft. The high-pressure cylinders are each fitted with a piston valve, and the intermediate and low-pressure cylinders with double-ported slide valves, all of which are worked by the usual double eccentric and link motion valve gear, by which the cut-off can be varied as required. All the shafting is forged of Siemens-Martin mild steel of the best quality, each of the three separate cranks being built up. The condensers are placed at the outsides of the engine ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... for the "transcendental"; Schelling christened it, intellectual intuition, and thereby gratified the most earnest longings of the naturally pious-inclined Germans. One can do no greater wrong to the whole of this exuberant and eccentric movement (which was really youthfulness, notwithstanding that it disguised itself so boldly, in hoary and senile conceptions), than to take it seriously, or even treat it with moral indignation. Enough, however—the world grew older, and the dream vanished. A time came ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... tricks, such as nipping off the tails of sucking calves, catching chickens in her manger, and making various pieces of them, and kicking in the ribs of strange dogs and horned cattle. But to the eccentric habits and bacchanalian customs of her ex-military master, the old mare's dormant talents owed their ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... misdoing, generous to a point which crippled his finances seriously, he was a puzzle to all who knew him, and had he died at this time he would only have left behind him the reputation of being one of the most brilliant, gifted, and honest, but at the same time one of the most unstable, eccentric, and ill regulated spirits ...
— The Bravest of the Brave - or, with Peterborough in Spain • G. A. Henty
... stepson; the Creole petitionists who had come to Washington to secure self-government had been cordially received by Burr and had a lively sense of gratitude. On his way down the Ohio, Burr landed at Blennerhassett's Island, where an eccentric Irishman of that name owned an estate. Harman Blennerhassett was to rue the day that he entertained this fascinating guest. At Cincinnati he was the guest of Senator Smith, and there he also met Dayton. At Nashville he visited General Andrew Jackson, who was thrilled with the prospect ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... shelling the town for some weeks the lighthearted Colonel sent out to say that if they went on any longer he should be compelled to regard it as equivalent to a declaration of war. It is to be hoped that Cronje also possessed some sense of humour, or else he must have been as sorely puzzled by his eccentric opponent as the Spanish generals were by the vagaries ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Gordon, who had effectually aided and abetted the riots in Scotland. Of all men in the world Lord George Gordon was the most unfit to preside over a Protestant Association. He was a member of parliament it is true, but he was chiefly remarkable there for his eccentric habits, slovenly dress, and by a progressive insanity, which on some occasions partook of the nature of oratorical inspiration. He was, however, known to be firm in his hatred towards the Papists, and adverse ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... it is really fatal to lose connexion with the open air of human nature, and to think in terms of shop-tradition only. In Germany the forms are so professionalized that anybody who has gained a teaching chair and written a book, however distorted and eccentric, has the legal right to figure forever in the history of the subject like a fly in amber. All later comers have the duty of quoting him and measuring their opinions with his opinion. Such are the rules of the professorial game—they think and write from each other and ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... could get anybody to accompany him. He was the most good natured man in the world, very badly dressed, very short sighted, and called everybody "old fellow." His name was simple Smith, generally known as Diogenes Smith, from an eccentric habit which he had of making an easy chair of his hip bath. Malicious acquaintance declared that when Smith first came up, and, having paid the valuation for the furniture in his rooms, came to inspect the same, ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... of a child, instead of being carefully observed, were either disregarded as meaningless or repressed as being naughty. No greater mistake could be possible; and this at last is beginning to be understood. The first struggles of a young consciousness to express itself externally are nearly always eccentric, and often seem perverse. But this is nothing more than we ought to expect. The oddities of a child's conduct are in reality nothing else than direct expressions of character, uncurbed by the conventions which regulate the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... was no longer interested in their usual pursuits. When the whole truth was known, it caused much comment. Of course ladies had painted, but to work with the hands in wet clay and be covered with marble dust—to say the least, Miss Conway was eccentric. ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... Speeches, vol. i. p. 456. The simplicity with which Carlyle attempts to avert the just indignation of the Irish, by saying that the garrison "consisted mostly of Englishmen," coupled with his complacent impression that eccentric phrases can excuse crime, would be almost amusing were it not that he admits himself to be as cruel as his hero.—vol. i. p. 453. A man who can write thus is past criticism. If the garrison did consist mainly of Englishmen, what becomes of the plea, that this barbarity was ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... which I turned over. There were letters from Carlo Angiolini, who was afterwards to bring the manuscript of the Memoirs to Brockhaus; from Balbi, the monk with whom Casanova escaped from the Piombi; from the Marquis Albergati, playwright, actor, and eccentric, of whom there is some account in the Memoirs; from the Marquis Mosca, 'a distinguished man of letters whom I was anxious to see,' Casanova tells us in the same volume in which he describes his visit to the Moscas at Pesaro; from Zulian, brother of the Duchess of Fiano; from Richard Lorrain, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... this story of the Persian. I wanted, if there were still time, to find this valuable and eccentric witness. My luck began to improve and I discovered him in his little flat in the Rue de Rivoli, where he had lived ever since and where he died five months after my visit. I was at first inclined to be suspicious; but when the Persian had told me, with child-like candor, all that he knew about the ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... path, and carry out the plans, of his predecessor. Great enterprises, commenced under one, were continued by another, and completed by a third. Thus, while all acted on a regular plan, without any of the eccentric or retrograde movements which betray the agency of different individuals, the state seemed to be under the direction of a single hand, and steadily pursued, as if through one long reign, its great career of ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... was as reserved and timid as you are—always worrying about her appearance and thinking that people were criticising her, until she went to visit an eccentric old aunt, who spent her time in finding ...
— Cicely and Other Stories • Annie Fellows Johnston
... mind was perfectly clear and collected; with the exception, that he would occasionally allude to his loss, in connection with some scene or subject of interest before them; and in a tone, and with language, that, appeared to his brother eccentric, but inexpressibly touching. ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... evenings here—when I don't actually force him to go out with me—and I spend mine down in the pleasanter quarters. I have the Liscombes and the Latimers in very often, but he never comes down if he can avoid it. They understand he's eccentric, and we let it go ...
— A Court of Inquiry • Grace S. Richmond
... manhood; and he who manumits the poet from social and ethical bonds is not logical, nor penetrative into the dark mystery of soul, nor is he the poet's friend. Nor is he a friend who assumes that the poet, because a poet, moves in eccentric paths rather than in concentric circles. Hold with all tenacity to the poet's sanity. He is superior, and lives where the eagles fly and stars run their far and splendid courses; but he is still man, though man grown tall and sublime. To the truth of this view of the great poet ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... on the point of being held, and it happened that a singular test of the lad's moral character coincided with the proof of his intellectual progress. In a neighbouring house lived an old man named Rawmarsh, kindly but rather eccentric; he had once done a good business as a printer, and now supported himself by such chance typographic work of a small kind as friends might put in his way. He conceived an affection for Godwin; often had the boy to talk with him of an evening. On one such ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... to prophesy the hid eclipse, The coming of eccentric orbs; To mete the dust the sky absorbs, To weigh the sun, and fix ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... who assists the seminary management by keeping some of the books, had a diamond ring said to be worth four hundred dollars placed in her possession by a Miss Parsons, another teacher. It seems that Miss Parsons had an eccentric old aunt, who wished to give the seminary some money, and so turned over the ring, to be converted into cash. This ring Miss Harrow left on her desk in the office. Nellie went into the office to see the teacher, but finding no one there, came away. Then Miss Harrow came back ...
— The Rover Boys in Business • Arthur M. Winfield
... course she was paid for her trouble; and indeed, in all his little plans and arrangements for these orphan children, Nicholas showed a sober judgment, and regulated method of thinking, which were at variance with his former more eccentric jerks of action. He was so steady at his work, that Margaret did not often see him during these winter months; but when she did, she saw that he winced away from any reference to the father of those children, whom he had so fully and heartily taken under his care. He did not speak ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... represented by Margaret Fuller, and of the feelings of Southern Europe, as embodied in the Marchesa Ossoli. Without at this time pausing to review her literary position, and her influence upon contemporary minds, we proceed to draw from these interesting, but frequently eccentric and extravagantly worded Memoirs, a sketch of her ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... learning and often culture, but more vulgarity than we did refinement, more splendor than delicacy of habit, more blatant ignorance than culture, more sans gene than dignity of manners and character. It is always thus in any mere "cosmopolitan mess," any "hotch-potch of nationalities." For the eccentric and obnoxious types are always and everywhere those most largely en evidence, while the gentle and refined nestles closest to the cool, still, mossy ground, leaving sunny flaunting to wider blooms ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... sufficiency to hire, if not keep, a carriage. She was, moreover, an authoress, having written two or three novels, not very good I was told, but still, emanating from the pen of a lady, they were well paid. She was very eccentric, and rather amusing. When a woman says everything that comes into her head, out of a great deal of chaff there will drop some few grains of wheat; and so sometimes, more by accident than otherwise, she said what is called a good thing. Now, a good thing is repeated, while all the nonsense is forgotten; ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... place who could have written such a letter. What would a New York society man, whose compliments are as extravagant as meaningless, think of it? Truly he doesn't know the world, and isn't like it. I supposed him an awkward, eccentric young countryman, that, from his very verdancy, would be difficult to manage, and he writes to me like a knight of olden time, only such language seems Quixotic in our day. The foolish fellow, to idealize poor, ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... for me, for they were full of study and anticipation. Long chats with the eccentric but masterful man whose friendship and love for my father had brought us together were the entertainment and stimulus of my existence—a man who knew nothing of science, except that he was master of it in his own way; who knew all about navigation, and to whom the northern seas ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... pointed ears and a short curled tail: a closely allied variety still exists in Northern Africa; for Mr. E. Vernon Harcourt (1/6. 'Sporting in Algeria' page 51.) states that the Arab boar-hound is "an eccentric hieroglyphic animal, such as Cheops once hunted with, somewhat resembling the rough Scotch deer-hound; their tails are curled tight round on their backs, and their ears stick out at right angles." With this most ancient variety ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... Morgan, the landlady in Macdougal Street, a melancholy little soul, was now the only link between me and my kinsman. I had a weekly interview with her. I learned that Mr. Flagg slept late, was seldom in during the day, and usually returned after midnight. A person with this eccentric scheme of life was not likely to be at home at such hours as I might find it convenient to call. Nevertheless, from time to time I knocked at the unresponsive door of his room. The two notes I had written ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... of those rugged, eccentric, self-developed characters, so common among the English. He was the son of a Lichfield book-seller, and after a course at Oxford, which was cut short by poverty, and an unsuccessful career as a school-master, he had come up to London, in 1737, where he supported ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... early summer, through which the young man still lay imprisoned, if not within his own chamber, within the limits of the house and garden, news reached him that Sir Blount's mismanagement and eccentric behaviour were resulting in serious consequences to Lady Constantine; nothing less, indeed, than her almost complete impoverishment. His personalty was swallowed up in paying his debts, and the Welland estate was so heavily charged with annuities to his distant relatives ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... within his Adam's apple. The man has run entirely to that feature; his moods, his emotions, his thoughts, his passions, his appetites, his beliefs, his doubts, his hopes, his fears, his resolves, his despairs, his defeats, his exaltations — all, all make themselves known subtly in the eccentric motions of ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... production of Pratt, author of Harvest Home and other lucubrations which have long since been consigned to the tomb of the Capulets; and both epitaph and monument are thus spoken of by Charles Lamb in the Essays of Elia. Alluding principally to the eccentric attitude of the actor's effigy, he observes, "Though I would not go so far, with some good Catholics abroad, as to shut players altogether out of consecrated ground, yet I own I was not a little scandalized at the introduction ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... settlers, had hitherto combined to render every effort vain. But, notwithstanding this, the Jesuits laboured incessantly, and not without success, amongst the wildest of the Chaco tribes. The gentle and eccentric Father Martin Dobrizhoffer passed many years amongst the Abipones, of whom he wrote his charming book. He enumerates many tribes, of whom he says* 'these are for the most converted by ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... such as they read of in the Beadle novels. I knew one trapper who was a student of numismatics, another who devoted his spare time to astronomy, and several traders and trappers who were men of considerable culture, though they are generally men who are a little morbid or eccentric in their mental structure. All Edwards's natural abilities, which were sufficient to have earned him distinction had he been "in civilization," were concentrated on the pursuits of his wild life, and such a man always surpasses ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... me to take care of you as far as Algiers," she said. "If you don't want me there I'll just put you ashore on the beach, near Cap Matifou or somewhere, and leave you there with your trunks. You are an eccentric, but that's no reason why you shouldn't ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... this, or prevented from following with close attention both his works and his life in all their eccentricity. These astonished him the more, as he found in the experience of past ages no element for the calculation of so eccentric an orbit. ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... choose. Self-praise is no honour, of course, and I ought to be silent with regard to my various perfections and imperfections; but if you wait patiently you will find out that Winnifred Blake is a most eccentric character, and says and does what no other person would say ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... suddenly and dramatically in London. He buried himself in this hotel, refusing all visitors and only advising the authorities of his return by telephone. He demanded that I should be sent to see him; and—despite his eccentric methods—so great is the Chief's faith in Sir Gregory's knowledge of matters Far Eastern, that behold, here ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... this letter reaches you, you will have found out. I had almost a mind to ask her to write to me, but then I knew both how she hates it and how little time she was likely to have, so I forbore. She has left me with the pleasing expectation that any of these days her eccentric musical friend Dessauer may walk in, to be by me received, lodged, entertained, comforted, and consoled, in her absence (in which case, by-the-by, you know, I should associate with him while she is away). From parts ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... equinoctials or storms resulting from changes on one part of the surface from intense heat to intense cold; every part would have a twelve-hour day and night, and none would be turned towards or from the sun for six months at a time; for, however eccentric the orbit, we should keep the axis absolutely straight. At perihelion there would simply be increased evaporation and clouds near the equator, which would shield those regions from the sun, only to disappear ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... and fell deliberately to filling the bowl of his wildwood pipe. Gnarled and twisted and marvelously eccentric was this wildwood pipe and therefore an object of undoubted interest. The bowl had somehow eluded Philip's desperate effort to keep it of reasonable dimensions and required a ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... forth upon their wedding journey down Anchor Street, with all the world before them where to choose. They chose to halt at the small, shabby tenement-house by the river, through the doorway of which the bridal pair disappeared with a reeling, eccentric gait; for Mr. O'Rourke's intoxication seemed to have run down his elbow, and communicated itself to Margaret. O Hymen! who burnest precious gums and scented woods in thy torch at the melting of aristocratic ...
— A Rivermouth Romance • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... cordial trivialities of ordinary greeting, to which Bonpre had responded with the suave courtesy and refined gentleness which always dignified his manner,—and then the Archbishop had ventured to offer a remonstrance on the unconventional—"Shall we call it eccentric?" he suggested, smiling amicably,—conduct of the Cardinal in choosing to abide in such a comfortless lodging as ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... once a week to examine the guns and all the iron work of the carriages, and see that they are kept free from rust, and especially the eccentric axles, elevating screws, and pivot-bolts, which must be protected by a mixture of tallow and white-lead, or other similar coating. The cap-squares must be frequently removed, the guns lifted and the trunnions cleaned; ...
— Ordnance Instructions for the United States Navy. - 1866. Fourth edition. • Bureau of Ordnance, USN
... famous in Germany, but rather of the class that delights in the literature and vivid force of a language. He spoke Latin and Greek, and held views on the teaching of these tongues that seemed more eccentric in his time than they do now. He declared that the linguistic achievement of which he was proudest was his mastery, such as it was, of the language of ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... of reading the letter over his shoulder, but Lagardere's seeming forgetfulness of their presence instantly changed. He looked up sharply, glancing right and left, and AEsop and Staupitz fell back in confusion, while Lagardere spoke to them, mocking them: "You will dub me eccentric; you will nickname me whimsical; you will damn me for a finicking stickler, and all because I am such an old-fashioned rascal as to wish to keep my correspondence to myself. There, there, don't be crestfallen. This letter makes me so merry that you shall share its treasure. But, first, fill and ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... a true son of the wildest and most eccentric of Irish peers. On getting over the first shock of astonishment, he broke out into short peals of laughter, exclaiming at intervals, that "it was mighty quare." When, after much questioning, his wishes in regard to his new life were made ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... the center of gravity is slightly displaced from the center. The centrifugal strain due to this is balanced by helical springs. But when the speed increases the centrifugal force moves the ring into an eccentric position, when it strikes a trigger and releases a weight which, falling, closes the throttle and shuts off the steam supply. The basic principle upon which all these stops are designed is the same—the centrifugal force of a weight balanced by a spring ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... of naked men fighting a series of savage duels in a wood, might be chosen as emphatic illustrations of his favourite motives. The fiercest emotions of the Renaissance find expression in the clenched teeth, strained muscles, knotted brows, and tense nerves, depicted by Pollajuolo with eccentric energy. We seem to be assisting at some of those combats a steccato chiuso wherein Sixtus IV. delighted, or to have before our eyes a fray between Crocensi and Vallensi in the streets of Rome.[95] The same remarks apply to the terra-cotta ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... of a century ago. He enjoys, perhaps, the most notable bit of superstition to be found anywhere in this country, in or out of Connecticut. He owns the farm on which he lives, and it is valuable; not quite so valuable though as it once was, for Mr. Stokes's eccentric disposition has somewhat changed the usual tactics that farmers pursue when they own fertile acres. The average man clears his soil of stones; Mr. Stokes has been piling rocks all over his land. ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... meadow? Drazk's philosophy was that the end justifies the means. And if the end would win the approval of Y.D.—and of Y.D.'s daughter—then any means was justified. Had not Linder said, "Burn the grass on the road?" Drazk knew well enough that Linder's remark was a figure of speech, but his eccentric mind found no trouble in converting it ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... numerous, but perhaps the most eccentric example is to be found in Stanyhurst's rendering of Virgil, published in 1583. It is full of cant words, and reads like the work of a madman. This is a fair specimen ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... has been knocked about by passion and circumstance. All his life he has had a dislike for iron rules and common-place maxims. There is something of the gipsy in his nature. He is to some extent eccentric, and he indulges his eccentricity. And the misfortunes of men of letters—the vulgar and patent misfortunes, I mean—arise mainly from the want of harmony between their impulsiveness and volatility, and the staid unmercurial world with which they are brought into conflict. They are unconventional ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... as if it had been the heaviest and hottest of crowbars. She laughed again when she looked at his face. He had an odd trick of lifting one of his eyebrows very high and at an acute angle when perplexed or ill at ease. This eccentric left eyebrow—now quite wedge-shaped—had gone up almost to the edge of his tousled gray hair. Ruth patted his great clumsy hands ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... and inexplicable disappearance, our astrologers were horrified by the apparition, in the day time, of stars they had never consulted—stars of this gross, lower world—stars which, in case of resistance, become shooting stars, and which revolve, in very eccentric orbits, around the central police station. What these portended, it needed no wisdom of Chaldean sage to decipher—exposure, ridicule, disgrace, and the prison. They had enjoyed their laugh at the world—now the tables ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... had taken this house a month ago; for two months before that it had stood desolate, wisps of paper and straw blowing about it, its "To let" notice creaking and screaming in every wind. The Hon. Mrs. Pentecoste, an eccentric old lady, had lived there for many years, and had died in the middle of a game of patience; her worn and tattered furniture had been sold at auction, and the house had remained unlet for a considerable period because people in the town said that the ghost of Mrs. Pentecoste's cat (a famous ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... The import of the visit of Governor Lewis and Mrs. Alston to the court-room during the Burr trial is better conveyed if there be held in mind the personality of that eccentric and extraordinary man, so prominent in the history of America and the traditions of Virginia—John Randolph of Roanoke. Irascible, high-voiced, high-headed, truculent, insolent, vitriolic—yet gallant, courteous, kind, just, and fair; the enemy ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... many of the views and habits of those with whom he found himself associated were very distasteful to him. In a new social movement, such as that of association as it took shape in 1849-50, there is certain to be great attraction for restless and eccentric persons, and in point of fact many such joined it. The beard movement was then in its infancy, and any man except a dragoon who wore hair on his face was regarded as a dangerous character, with whom it was compromising to be seen in any public place—a person in sympathy with ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... more complicated, and, if possible, more insolently mythical. John Pinkerton, writing under the name of Robert Heron, Esq., in 1785, in his eccentric Letters on Literature, is its source. According to him Ralegh, who had just completed the manuscript of a second volume, looking from his window into a court-yard, saw a man strike an officer near a raised ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... John Newbegin died and was buried in the little cemetery on the landward side of the island. Newbegin was a man of about forty-eight, without family or near connections, and eccentric to a degree that sometimes inspired questions as to his sanity. What money he had earned by many seasons' fishing upon the banks was invested in quarters of two small mackerel schooners, the remainder of which belonged to John Hodgeson, the richest ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... her brother, "Kiss your sister Therese," and later he dedicated to her his sonata, Op. 78. Some months after this he gave up his marriage scheme. Of Therese, Thayer says that she lived to a great age—"ca va sans dire!—" and was famed for a noble and large-hearted, but eccentric character. As for remembrance of Beethoven, one may apply to her the words of Shakespeare, 'She died and gave no sign.' Was it perhaps ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... and saucer were brought, and they caused a diversion so complete that Mr. Smith and his eccentric move were not named again during the visit. Nor, indeed, much after it. "What is the use of discussing a hopelessly disagreeable subject?" said Eleanor to Alice's first offer of sympathy. To tell the truth, ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... gentlemen copy after him in the manner of some persons who lived about his time,—pede nudo Catonem. Mr. Hume told me that he had from Rousseau himself the secret of his principles of composition. That acute, though eccentric observer, had perceived, that, to strike and interest the public, the marvellous must be produced; that the marvellous of the heathen mythology had long since lost its effects; that giants, magicians, fairies, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... not antagonism. Whatever you believe to be true and false, that proclaim to be true and false; whatever you think admirable and beautiful, that should be your model, even if all your friends and all the critics storm at you as a crochet-monger and an eccentric. Whether the public will feel its truth and beauty at once, or after long years, or never cease to regard it as paradox and ugliness, no man can foresee; enough for you to know that you have done your best, have been true to yourself, and that the ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... the history of all those intellectual labors, we never read of startling theories in philosophy or theology advanced by any of them, unless we except the eccentric John Scotus Erigena, whom Charles the Bald, at whose court he resided, protected even against the just severity of the Church. Without ever having studied theology, he undertook to dogmatize, and would perhaps have originated some heresy, had he found ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... to convince men of the truth, or to lead them to think aright. The subtle human intellect can weave its mists over even the clearest vision. Remember that it is eccentric enough to ask unanimity from a jury; but to ask it from any large number of men on any point of political faith is amazing. You can hardly get two men in any Congress or Convention to agree;—nay, you can rarely get one to agree with himself. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... once while presiding over a party convention at Sonora for the nomination of candidates for legislative and county offices. Among the delegates was the eccentric John Vallew, whose mind was a singular compound of shrewdness and flightiness, and was stored with the most out-of-the-way scraps of learning, philosophy, and poetry. Some one proposed Vallew's name as a candidate for the Legislature. He rose to his feet with a clouded ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... said abruptly, and he turned away. This seemed cold and strange; but I knew him to be rather curious and eccentric in his ways, so I walked to one of the cart-sheds and looked about for a ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... which commenced apparently in the previous autumn, had continued during several months, till the garrison were literally starved out, in May. The famished survivors were kindly treated, by order of Schomberg, and their gallant and eccentric chief, O'Regan, was knighted by the King, for his persistent resistance. A month from the day on which Charlemont fell, (June 14th), William landed at Carrickfergus, accompanied by Prince George of Denmark, the Duke of Wurtemburg, the Prince of Hesse-Darmstadt, ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... his breath, Hugh elevated his eyebrows. Apparently his interest no longer flagged, for he instinctively guessed that something unusual must come out of Thad's mention of the strange old place, where, as he well knew, Owen Dugdale and his eccentric ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson
... anxiety by principals, masters and scholars alike. It marks an epoch in their lives, and is the only period of the year in which there is anything like a rapprochement between them, as if in the presence of some imminent crisis. The eccentric jackanapes who is by turns the butt and witling of the school stands for once consciously on equal terms with his principal, and can for once even "cheek" the school-bully with perfect impunity. All is excitement, anticipation, preparation and much consuming ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... event, when he had forgotten all about it, he was loafing in his room one morning after breakfast, smoking an eccentric pipe from his collection, and comforting himself over his decision once more that German teachers and grammars ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... the eldest son of the Duc de Villars Brancas: he was, during his father's life, known as the Comte, and afterwards Duc, de Lauragais, and was a very singular and eccentric person. He was a great Anglomane, and was the first introducer into France of horseraces 'a l'Anglaise; it was to him that Louis XV.—not pleased at his insolent Anglomanie— made so excellent a retort. The ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... at work industriously. His appetite proved to be quite equal to the emergency, but his evident enjoyment of the dinner only gratified the ladies, who, though eccentric, were kind-hearted, and not in the ...
— Only An Irish Boy - Andy Burke's Fortunes • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... Jack Robinson wanted to know what his bullies were made of, and took rather eccentric methods of finding it out. He accordingly set off at his best pace, and pushed Ladoc so hard, that he arrived at the upper fishery in a state of profuse perspiration, with a very red face, and with a disagreeably vacuous feeling about the ...
— Fort Desolation - Red Indians and Fur Traders of Rupert's Land • R.M. Ballantyne
... I can't stop out of England for ever, and I tell you she's waiting for me at Dover. A relative (a very eccentric one, and quite different from the rest of us, or he wouldn't have made his home abroad) has left me a house in Italy, some sort of old castle, I believe—so unsuitable! I'm going over to see about selling it for I've no one to trust but myself, owing to ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... yet among them many a fellow is all snout, and confronts the learned physiognomists of the ocean with a countenance, grave, cold, calm in the consciousness of its originality: nay, the whole deep brims and swims with one can't count how many eccentric faces, and gills, and teeth, and eyes astart from their sockets, and every other kind of striking contour: but every monster there floats his own way quietly and peaceably, without having his sleeve twitcht or any other annoyance. Man alone is so absurd as to laugh and ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... varied forms, the most common being that of self-conceit and the desire to appear original and eccentric in feelings, moods, likes and dislikes. Like the fellows of the club of which Bertie, in "The Henrietta," was an illustrious member, the average boy winks, nods, looks wise and "makes the other fellows think that he is a Harry of ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... compositions were eccentric and at odds with the old canons of song, fancied with a grace, warmth, and variety of color hitherto characteristic only of the more pretentious forms of music, which had already been brought to a great degree of perfection. They inaugurate the genesis ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... daughter. The desperate condition of his finances, when he had been caught in a "corner" on wheat and nearly crushed, had not dismayed her in the least. It was she who had counseled him to appeal to John Merrick, since the name and fame of the eccentric millionaire were familiar to her ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... expensive supper. He was particular about the wine. The waiter, who had been doubtful about him, was won over, and went off to execute the order, reflecting that it was never safe to judge a man by his clothes, and that Rutherford was probably one of these eccentric young millionaires who didn't care how ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... answering. Her father's oiliness offended her. Scaramouche was clearly a great gentleman, an eccentric if you please, but a man born. And she was to be his lady. Her father must ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... he might. No one imagined old Mark Brownson had anything to will. But he was a very eccentric man; and the economical style of his establishment was ...
— Edna's Sacrifice and Other Stories - Edna's Sacrifice; Who Was the Thief?; The Ghost; The Two Brothers; and What He Left • Frances Henshaw Baden
... brought twice a year from the town of Lerwick; and it seldom happened that these ran short, for Miss Adiesen was a shrewd housewife and James Harrison a notable manager; also the Laird was somewhat eccentric, and objecting strongly to all society outside of Boden, did not like that "provisions short" should be made an excuse for frequent expeditions to the ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... laughed quickly and excitedly. "But what club is without its eccentric member? I am glad you spoke of that. I am glad you raised that point. It was a long time ago that I hit upon a reputation for moods as a shield for—for other things, and, the more useful it has become, ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... understand it, the disease cycle seems to be connected somehow with the once-every-48-years conjunction of the four moons, which explains why the Darkovans are so superstitious about it. The moons have remarkably eccentric orbits—I don't know anything about that part, I'm quoting Dr. Moore. If there's an animal vector to the disease, we've never discovered it. The pattern runs like this; a few cases in the mountain districts, the next month a hundred-odd cases all ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... industry of the neighbourhood. Mrs. Marie Kniepp was one of the fashionable women of the town, and several days before the Professor was murdered, this woman had thrown herself from the second-story window of her home, and her husband, whose passionate eccentric nature was well known, had been a changed man from ...
— The Case of the Golden Bullet • Grace Isabel Colbron, and Augusta Groner
... much," replied Auntie with a beaming smile, "I went for a walk across the fields. There seemed to be a great many people about, and some of them shouted to me in a most eccentric manner, but I just took no notice. And, by the way," she went on, "I found such a number of curious little round white things. I brought them home to ask you ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... seven cases, the Montenegrin generally contents himself with about five, and in some dialects they are all discarded.... The amount of Turanian, Petcheneg and other undesirable blood in the Bulgars does not—let the two or three eccentric Bulgars say what they will—prevent them being far more Yugoslav than anything else. Professor Cviji['c], the famous Rector of Belgrade University, has made personal examinations in Bulgaria, and is ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... a century; and the stairway upon the left was also black, but ornamented with a series of rough panels, upon each of which was painted a human face, giving it a somewhat fantastic appearance. Paul could not help glancing above, toward the mysterious regions with which this eccentric stairway communicated. An antique sofa, studded with brass nails, exhibited upon its towering back a picture of Tsong Kapa reclining under the tree of a thousand images at the Llamasary of Koomboom. There were scenes which were evidently intended to be historical, but there were ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... without any visible intervention of intelligence. For all that, their operations may be as essential as the other, in which the will-power sometimes gets into a deadlock, and sometimes telegraphs the most eccentric and incomprehensible orders. Puzzled by these contradictions, some philosophers have said that there may be somewhere outside of these two material centres another power that keeps affairs moving ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the North, near the Canada line, there lived at that time an eccentric old man, whose name is still to be found here and there on the tattered ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... not probable that there was any real connection between these Gates, of Saracenic design, carved (it is said) in Himalayan cedar, and the Temple of Somnath. But tradition did ascribe to them such a connection, and the eccentric prank of a clever man in high place made this widely known. Nor in any case can we regard as alien to the scope of this book the illustration of a work of mediaeval Asiatic art, which is quite as remarkable for its own character and indisputable ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... appended by leathern thongs, covered with quills, which, when they move, make a round rattling noise, almost equal to that of many small bells. It seems doubtful, however, whether this part of their garb be intended to strike terror in war, or is only to be considered as belonging to their eccentric ornaments on ceremonious occasions. For we saw one of their musical entertainments, conducted by a man dressed in this sort of cloak, with his mask ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... he replied, with a shrug, "I must remain among the eccentric millions who continue to act according to ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... to a position not very far from that taken by my eccentric friend. General or regular correspondence is useless, baneful, and in most cases impossible; but special correspondence, born of the necessities of man as a social being, and circumscribed by them, may be from time ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... worlds, of which more than a thousand are known to exist, are no larger than a gentleman's country estate; some are mere rocks in space. Eros, Nat knew, was distinguished among them from the fact that it had an eccentric orbit, which brought it at times nearer Earth than any other ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... to protest, but Betty, more in sympathy with the eccentric customs of inns, modestly lifted her skirts, untied her garter and offered it to the ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major
... French Convention," but they were seized by the British Government at Dover. As a matter of fact, the Convention was not constituted till September, and the Legislative Assembly which preceded it was not hostile to Britain. Thus, Burns's action, though eccentric and extravagant, was not treasonable in law or in spirit, and does not seem to have entailed on him any ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... Camden Neild, an eccentric and miserly bachelor, nominally a barrister, died on the 30th of August, bequeathing substantially the whole of his fortune (amounting to half a million) to the Queen. As there were no known relatives, the Queen felt able to accept this legacy; but she first ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... Elizabeth Bissell, who was now Mrs. Robert Falkner of Torso. The lonely old rancher, it seemed, had remembered the pretty, vivacious blond girl of eighteen, who had taken the trouble to show him the sights of Denver the one time he had visited his sister ten years before. Bessie, amused at his eccentric appearance, had tried to give "Uncle Billy" a good time. "Uncle Billy," she would say, "you must do this,—you will remember it all your life. Uncle Billy, won't you lunch with me down town to-day? You must go to the theatre, while you are here. ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... I don't intend to tell him anything. He is a jolly old fellow, who thinks he is very eccentric, and takes pride in being considered so. When I was ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... constitution of her posterity seems to have derived a morbid taint, had sate, year after year, by the bed on which lay the ghastly remains of her husband, apparelled in the rich embroidery and jewels which he had been wont to wear while living. Her son Charles found an eccentric pleasure in celebrating his own obsequies, in putting on his shroud, placing himself in the coffin, covering himself with the pall; and lying as one dead till the requiem had been sung, and the mourners had departed leaving ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... one of the deceased wearing a watch by a chain attached to his ears appears strange, but I give the statement as he made it. The chain may in some way have become attached to the ears, or, ridiculous as the story sounds, there may have been some eccentric person in the party who wore his watch in that way, and if such should prove to be the case, this would certainly identify him beyond doubt. While the old woman sat in our igloo giving her statement, or trying to recollect the circumstances, I succeeded in getting a good portrait ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... Heavens Hath left to their disputes, perhaps to move His laughter at their quaint opinions wide Hereafter, when they come to model Heaven, And calculate the stars; how they will wield The mighty frame; how build, unbuild, contrive To save appearances; how gird the Sphere With Centric and Eccentric scribbled o'er Cycle and Epicycle, Orb in ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... vicinity of his hip pocket, lighted his cigar (John declining to join him on some plausible pretext, having on a previous occasion accepted one of the brand), and after rolling it around with his lips and tongue to the effect that the lighted end described sundry eccentric curves, located it firmly with an upward angle in the left-hand corner of his mouth, gave it a couple of vigorous puffs, and replied to ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... as well complete this pencil-sketch. Vantine was about fifty years of age, the possessor of a comfortable fortune, something of a connoisseur in art matters, a collector of old furniture, a little eccentric—though now that I have written the word, I find that I must qualify it, for his only eccentricity was that he persisted, in spite of many temptations, in remaining a bachelor. Marriageable women had long since ceased to consider him; mothers with maturing ...
— The Mystery Of The Boule Cabinet - A Detective Story • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... rather more eccentric. We were proceeding along Holborn when his attention was suddenly arrested by the window of a furniture shop, in which was displayed a collection of obsolete French small-arms—relics of the tragedy of 1870—which were being sold ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... singular. Yes, I remember. I have heard that the English highly prize this eccentric book. How very singular that the countrymen of the grand Bentham should set any value upon that ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... Worley, Archdeacon of Wells. Lord Algernon wore a domino. His uncle (I need scarcely say) had made no innovation upon the laced hat and gaiters proper to his archidiaconal rank—though it is likely enough that the Venetians found this costume as eccentric as any in the throng. He had arrived in the city a bare week before; and walked with an arm paternally thrust in his nephew's, while he made acquaintance with the luxurious frivolities ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... weaknesses with the conscious power of one who knows her strength, and who knows you will find her out if you are worthy of her acquaintance. She makes poor jokes—she's a little rude—a good deal eccentric; but she is ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... into silence, frequently, that bore the signs both of expectancy and reflection. Young men and young women sat together on one side of the house whispering and giggling. Alone among them was the big and eccentric granddaughter of Mrs Bisnette, who was always slapping some youngster for impertinence. Jed Feary and Squire Town sat together behind a pile of books, both looking very serious. The long hair and beard of the old poet were now white and his form bent with age. He came ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... by a variety of reasons. But that she should write him a cool and semi-humorous letter, showing no more agitation than one of Bret Harte's heroes who is about to be hanged—that certainly capped the climax of eccentric behavior. And that, after her passionate protests! But hold on! What did she say yesterday that was so passionate? Curiously enough, he could not remember a word of what she had said. It began slowly to dawn upon him that, during the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... not," said Rodd, "only a brave, eccentric nobleman who may have a good many more reasons for what he does ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... cutting the guy-lines, I found that this most degenerate spider had not only failed to make her house perpendicular, but had so far departed from the traditions of our ancestors as to have the centre thereof decidedly eccentric, and four times as near the upper as the lower border of the web, so that its upper portion was only a confused array of irregular lines, which it was impossible to secure to the frame. For any accurate observation my web was of no value. But perhaps this was best; for had I then learned ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... worship for a boy than the Stevenson mania on which so many of this generation grew up? We were the luckier in that our zeal was shared in all its gusto and particularity by a lean, long-legged, sallow-faced, brown-eyed eccentric (himself incredibly Stevensonian in appearance) with whom we lay afield in our later teens, reading R. L. S. aloud by the banks of a small stream which we vowed should become famous in the world of letters. And so it has, though not by our efforts, which ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... American army. Perhaps he had had enough of it. In any event, it had had enough of him; and seven years afterwards, when he died of a fever, his ambition to stand in Washington's shoes died with him. While he lived on his Virginia farm, he was as impetuous and eccentric as when he had been in the army, and he must have been a very unpleasant neighbor. In fact, the people there thought he was crazy. This opinion was not changed when his will was read, for in that document ...
— Stories of New Jersey • Frank Richard Stockton
... which seemed to be justified by some elegant and costly presents of which Mr Sutterby begged his friend's acceptance, as a token of his esteem and a mark of his appreciation of that kind hospitality which, as he said, an eccentric old bachelor living in lodgings in London was unable to ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... more consideration. Madame de Chateaubriand was a pretty, delicate woman, of quick natural intelligence. M. Danielo, Chateaubriand's secretary, has written an interesting sketch of her, which is affixed to her husband's memoirs. She was a person of eccentric habits, but of a warm heart and lively sensibilities, and was devoted to her religious duties and the Infirmary of Maria Theresa. She professed a great contempt for literature, and asserted that she had never read a line ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... remarkable keeping with his eccentric life. A figure only four and a half feet high, hunchbacked, with projecting chest, legs small and uneven, arms longer than his legs; a huge head, showing only beneath the enormous white hat large, solemn eyes and a prominent nose; the rest of his face covered with a snowy semicircle of beard ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... a lady of considerable wealth, being the widow of Sir George Donaldson, the great distiller; but she seems to have been decidedly eccentric. Latterly she had astonished all her family—who were rigid Presbyterians—by announcing her intention of embracing the Roman Catholic faith, and then retiring to the convent of St. Augustine's ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... soon as they had served their end That beautiful trust which habit gives That plain confession of a lack of wit; he offered combat The ass eats at my table, and treats me with contempt The grey furniture of Time for his natural wear You're the puppet of your women! What's an eccentric? a child ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... it; indirection is Walter's long suit," Mrs. Standish took up the tale. "First of all, you must know this aunt of ours is rather an eccentric—frightfully well off, spoiled, self-willed, and quite blind to her best interests. She's been a widow so long she doesn't know the meaning of wholesome restraint. She's got all the high knee-action of a thoroughbred never properly broken to harness. She sets her own pace—and Heaven help ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... protectionist champion presented himself, not in the guise either of a freeholder or farmer of the county, but in the person of a good-humoured, though somewhat eccentric printer, named Sparkhall, who had come from the celebrated locale of John Gilpin—Cheapside, and who having armed himself with a large blue bag fitted with elaborate treatises upon the corn laws, and among ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... thus triumphant in his schemes of foreign policy and conquest, his domestic life was clouded with the deepest anxiety, in consequence of the declining health of the queen, and the eccentric conduct of his daughter, the infanta Joanna. We have already seen the extravagant fondness with which that princess, notwithstanding her occasional sallies of jealousy, doated on her young and handsome husband. [10] From the hour of his departure ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... is tawdry but cheerful; it is built entirely of wood, with an oil lamp fixed in the wall over the occasional table. The room is comfortably furnished, though in fussy and eccentric Victorian taste; stuffed birds, Highland cattle in oils, antimacassars, and wax fruit are unobtrusively in evidence. On the mantelpiece, an ornate chiming clock. The remains of breakfast on a tray ...
— Night Must Fall • Williams, Emlyn
... desirable to ascertain with accuracy the state of the coast. The eldest son of the Duke of Leeds, now called Marquess of Caermarthen, undertook to enter the basin and to obtain the necessary information. The passion of this brave and eccentric young man for maritime adventure was unconquerable. He had solicited and obtained the rank of Rear Admiral, and had accompanied the expedition in his own yacht, the Peregrine, renowned as the masterpiece of shipbuilding, and more than ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... life. This means that, in youth, excessive energy in grasping the objective world, accompanied by a lively imagination and little experience, makes the mind susceptible to exaggerated ideas and a prey even to chimeras; and this results in an eccentric and even fantastic character. And when, later, this condition of mind no longer exists and succumbs to the teaching of experience, the genius will never feel so much at home or take up his position in the everyday world or in civic life, and move with the ease of a man of normal intellect; ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... away in some distant memory-world. Andy Malden seemed to hear Peter Cartright, as he had heard him in his father's cabin when a boy, and remembered for the first time in years the night he had promised the eccentric old preacher he would be a Christian—a promise that had been drowned by the drum-beat of the old war days and ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... said Mr. Bradley slowly, "poor Beatrice Powerson dead at last. I suppose she got as much out of life as any of us, though, in her eccentric way." ...
— Billie Bradley and Her Inheritance - The Queer Homestead at Cherry Corners • Janet D. Wheeler
... the students, and proposed several of those in the Orleans collection. This recommendation was not relished, and in 1799 Barry was expelled from the academy, soon after the appearance of his Letter to the Dilettanti Society, a very amusing but eccentric publication, full of enthusiasm for his art and at the same time of contempt for the living professors of it. After the loss of his salary, a subscription was set on foot by the earl of Buchan to relieve him ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... less) seems to be taken by the rich as a salve for their consciences, and with a belief that famine and fever may be kept at bay by M. Soyer and his kettles, it is right to look at the constitution of this soup of pretence, and the estimate formed of it by the talented but eccentric self-deceived originator. ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... congregational. In some places of worship it is considered somewhat vulgar for members of the congregation to give specimens of their vocalisation; and you can only find in out- of-the-way side and back pews odd persons warbling a mild falsetto, or piping an eccentric tenor, or doing a heavy bass on their own responsibility; but at Lune-street Chapel the general members of the congregation go into the work with a distinct determination to either sing or make a ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... genial fluency that at all events had the desired effect, for after Nazinred had translated it to the Eskimos, it was found that they, as well as the Indians, were quite disposed to fall in with the eccentric trader's views. Arrangements were accordingly made without delay ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... were, with the other furniture of his dark study, collected for the mere purpose of forwarding his ambitious designs upon the weak prince. His true character was supposed to be—what he possessed before he took to his new calling—that of a wild, eccentric, devil-daring man, who loved adventures for their own sake, and worshipped the fair face of the "theekit and tenanted skull" of a bouncing damsel, with far greater enthusiasm and sincerity than he ever did his mortal ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... life-size, so fearfully truthful to nature that when exposed to the public in the street, it immediately attracted a crowd of shuddering gazers. The place of exhibition being within view of the royal palace, the eccentric Viceroy, Don Pedro de Giron, Duke of Ossuna, who chanced to be taking the air on his balcony, inquired the cause of the unusual concourse, and ordered the picture and the artist to be brought into his presence. Being well pleased with both, he purchased ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... folks—how are they? I need not ask how you are," and, while John answered him, he placed camp-stools for us, and said to Syd and me, "Sit down, gentlemen; and excuse me if I address myself mainly to this eccentric cousin of mine, and, I am sure, your very good friend. I do not see him often, and he never will let me know when he is coming my way"—a statement which Syd and I could easily believe. For, with all John's faults, and he had many of them, he was one of the least obtrusive of men where ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... the least. The other is eccentric, explosive, amusing. This one is like a lawyer; very non-committal, not at all inclined ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... without an intelligent interest in Crabbe's own subjects. Moreover, among the visitors at Belvoir were many who shared that interest to the full, such as the Duke of Queensberry, Lord Lothian, Bishop Watson, and the eccentric Dr. Robert Glynn. Again, it was during Crabbe's residence at Belvoir that the Duke's brother, Lord Robert Manners, died of wounds received while leading his ship, Resolution, against the French in the West Indies, in the April of 1782. Crabbe's sympathy with the family, shown ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... it, nor any of the basic enmity and destructiveness of the stupid toward the bright, just a recognition that an E was an E. They had a vast respect for an E, but you couldn't get around it that some of them were—well, maybe eccentric was ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... thought that there was much to be supplied in other departments of our literature, and especially he desired a really great History of England; but he was disposed to regard the roll of English poetry as made up, and as leaving place for little more except what was likely to be eccentric or imitational. ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... was so eccentric as to go to bed sober on that glorious twenty- ninth of May, I greatly misjudge him. But he grew elderly. In 1661 he chronicles the deaths of 'honest Nat. and R. Roe,—they are gone, and with them most of my pleasant hours, even as a shadow ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang
... moral to a degree that furnished matter of jesting to the various ateliers where he sojourned; but everywhere he disarmed his comrades by his modesty and by the patience and gentleness of a lamblike nature. The masters, however, had no sympathy for the good lad; masters prefer bright fellows, eccentric spirits, droll or fiery, or else gloomy and deeply reflective, which argue future talent. Everything about Pierre Grassou smacked of mediocrity. His nickname "Fougeres" (that of the painter in the play of "The Eglantine") was the source of much teasing; but, ...
— Pierre Grassou • Honore de Balzac
... and help in the woman's campaign. Accordingly he telegraphed that if the committee wanted him he was ready, would pay his own expenses and win every Democratic vote. Miss Anthony never had seen Mr. Train; she merely knew of him as very wealthy and eccentric. The Republicans not only had forsaken the women but were waging open war upon them. The sole hope of carrying the amendment was by adding enough Democratic votes to those of Republicans who would not obey their party orders ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... of eccentric hobbies is always fascinating, more especially when the hobby-rider need spare neither time nor expense in humouring his ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... The men were past redemption, all save the Commissioner who, however, was under bad influences and an incurable wobbler, anyhow. Eames, the scholar, cared for nothing but his books. Keith, a rich eccentric who owned one of the finest villas and gardens on the place, only came to the island for a few weeks every year. He knew too much, and had travelled too far, to be anything but a hopeless unbeliever; besides, he was a particular friend ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... she exclaimed, interrupting him, "you remain quiet; I will explain this matter to Colonel Coffin. You see, colonel, Mr. Fogg is eccentric beyond endurance. He goes on continually in a manner that will certainly drive me to distraction. I can stand it no longer. We must be cut asunder. For years, colonel, Wilberforce has been attempting to learn to play upon the flute. He has no more idea of ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... "perhaps you have yourself to thank for her having done so; did you never treat her with coldness, and repay her marks of affectionate interest with strange fits of eccentric humour?" ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... a great deal of color in the coming bridal trousseau, beginning at the altar. The bridesmaids have thus lost one chance of distinguishing themselves by a different and a colored dress. But although some eccentric brides may choose to be married in pink, we cannot but believe, from the beautiful dresses which we have seen, that the greater number will continue to be wedded in white; therefore dressmakers need ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... bears it as strongly on his recollection. My servant Harris, who had shared my wanderings and had continued in my service for eighteen years, led the advance, with his companion Hopkinson. Nearly abreast of them the eccentric Fraser stalked along wholly lost in thought. The two former had laid aside their military habits, and had substituted the broad brimmed hat and the bushman's dress in their place, but it was impossible to guess how Fraser intended to protect himself ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... from the clouds," he continued. "I shall rob you of her. I adore her. To-day she may think me merely fat and eccentric. Don't rely upon that. I have the gift when I choose. I can tell fairy tales, I can creep a little way into her mind and fill her brain with delicate fancies, build images there and destroy them, play softly upon the keynote of her emotions, until one day she will wake up and what ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... fleshy coarseness of Rubens which Vandyck tried to mitigate by making it leaner. We must leap into Holland to find the mystic accent once more, and it reveals itself in the soul of a Judaizing Protestant, under an aspect so mysterious and eccentric that at first sight we hesitate, feeling ourselves, as it were, to make sure that we are not mistaken in regarding this as ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... hazard, which was no less than that of establishing a whale fishery on the coast of Labrador, and of civilising the Esquimaux Indians, in order to employ them in the extensive undertaking. During two years this eccentric plan occupied his thoughts by day, his dreams by night: all the smiles of prosperity could not tranquillise the restless spirit, and while he anticipated an acquirement of fame, he little considered the perils that ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... the inside of the house, on account of its being occupied by a very eccentric man, who will not permit a woman to enter the house, and it is said that he has been known to run when a female had unconsciously intruded herself upon his premises. And as our company was in part composed of ladies, we had to share ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... 22 in., 36 in., and 57 in. in diameter respectively, with a piston stroke of 3 ft. The high-pressure cylinders are each fitted with a piston valve, and the intermediate and low-pressure cylinders with double-ported slide valves, all of which are worked by the usual double eccentric and link motion valve gear, by which the cut-off can be varied as required. All the shafting is forged of Siemens-Martin mild steel of the best quality, each of the three separate cranks being built ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... Aline, is evidently not one of your more special possessions. For, had it not been for my—somewhat eccentric preliminaries—you would have accepted ...
— Five Little Plays • Alfred Sutro
... admitted. But his progress was slow. He applied himself diligently to the drawing of the human figure, and held on with the determination to succeed, as if with a resolute confidence in the result. He displayed none of the eccentric humour and fitful application of many youths who conceive themselves geniuses, but kept up the routine of steady application to such an extent that he himself was afterwards accustomed to attribute his success to his dogged perseverance rather than to any higher innate power. "The single ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... of the card-tables prevented further conversation. Lord Berrington again approached the sofa where Mary sat, exclaiming, as he perceived her companion, "Ah my good doctor; have you presented yourself at this fair shrine I declare you eccentric folk may dare anything. Whilst you are free, Miss Beaufort," added he turning to her, "adopt the advice which a good lady once gave me, and which I have implicitly followed: 'When you are young, get the character of an oddity, and it seats you in an ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... century, definitely propounded the nebular hypothesis, which was enlarged as a theory by the Herschels. The first writer to suggest the transmutation of species among animals was Buffon, about 1750, and other writers followed out the idea. The eccentric Lord Monboddo was the first to suggest the possible descent of man from the ape, about 1774. In 1813 Dr. W. C. Wells first proposed to apply the principle of natural selection to the natural history ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... was somewhat deformed in person, blind in one eye, one leg shorter than the other, one arm somewhat withered, with a mind as eccentric as his person was deformed. To say nothing of the deformity of his habits, suffice it, he had a propensity for taking snuff that may seem almost incredible, when in these days those who use it are not very much inclined to expose the article. He used to carry ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... distantly related, and had both been educated by an eccentric kinsman, with the belief among their connections that he designed dividing his ample fortune between them. To the surprise and chagrin of Barclay, he found on the death of Colonel Euston that the whole of his estate was bequeathed to his young cousin, encumbered with an annuity to himself, which ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... political agitator, the Chancellor Shaftesbury, who passed his whole life in storms of his own creation. The second Lord Shaftesbury was a man of crazy constitution, querulous from ill health, and had received an eccentric education from his eccentric grandfather. He was practised daily in talking Latin, to which afterwards he added a competent study of the Greek; and finally he became unusually learned for his rank, but the most absolute and undistinguishing pedant that perhaps literature has ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... are generally composed by persons in the spiritual condition. We have many good farces; and an unending source of material for amusing plays is found in the relationship between the spirit world and earth, and the eccentric conditions growing out of that relationship. For instance, there is a laughable comedy being enacted at my theatre, depicting the adventures of a pious merchant, who, after the toils and cares of life, becomes a resident of the ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... preoccupied, and chewing the fag-end of certain Cabinet deliberations in the morning; Flaxman's charming sister, Lady Helen Varley, and her husband; his elder brother, Lord Wanless, unmarried, an expert on armour, slightly eccentric, but still, in the eyes of all intriguing mothers, and to his own annoyance, more than desirable as a husband owing to the Wanless collieries and a few other trifles of the same kind; the Bishop of Markborough; ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... thousands from doing good. It's just as paltry and selfish and cowardly as any other fear that curses the world—it's rather more selfish than most fears, in fact—take the fear of being thought a coward, or being considered eccentric, or conceited, or affected, or too good, or too bad, for instance. The man that's always canting about the world's ingratitude has no gratitude owing to him as a rule—generally the reverse—he ought to be grateful to the world for being let live. He broods over the world's ingratitude ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... to 1, through four intermediate spur gears and a worm gear. The end lifts which transfer the weight of the bridge to the piers when the span is closed consist of massive eccentrics having a throw of 4 in. The clearance is 2 in., so that the ends are lifted 2 in. This gives a load of 50 tons per eccentric. One motor is placed at each end of the span to operate the eccentrics and also to release the latches and raise the rails ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... almost as much distracted as her father's house to hear of these strange discussions and of the incredible purpose of the bonne douce fille, whose qualities everybody knew and about whom there was nothing eccentric, nothing unnatural, but only simple goodness, to distinguish her above her neighbours. In the meantime her voices called her continually to her work. They set her free from the ordinary yoke of obedience, always so strong in the mind of a French girl. ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
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