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More "Leer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the roof and dropped with a chug. Then the door, that hung awry like a drooping eyelid, gave a disreputable wink, and the whole front gable of the cabin loomed a giant countenance with a silly forehead and an evil leer. Now it seemed that a hand was hurling snow against the door, as a sower scatters grain,—snow that lay like beach sand on the floor, or melted into a crawling pool—red in the firelight, red ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... should continue to do so quite independently of him. But Peace would listen to no refusal, however decided its tone. Dyson threw over the card into Peace's garden. This only served to aggravate his determination to possess himself of the wife. He would listen at keyholes, leer in at the window, and follow Mrs. Dyson wherever she went. When she was photographed at the fair, she found that Peace had stood behind her chair and by that means got himself included in the picture. At times he had threatened her with a revolver. On one occasion when ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... "Of him I have heard much good! I grant," he said, "with you to wend, My brethren all in-fere: My purpose was to have dined to-day At Blyth or Doncaster." Forth then went that gentle Knight, With a careful cheer; The tears out of his eyen ran, And fell down by his leer. They brought him unto the lodge door: When ROBIN 'gan him see, Full courteously did off his hood, And set him on his knee. "Welcome, Sir Knight!" then said ROBIN, "Welcome thou art to me; I have abide you fasting, Sir, All these hours three!" Then answered the gentle ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... but consternation.' I spoke offhand and the report is horrible. Conkling's speech was carefully written out, and therefore you do not get all the venom, and no one can imagine the Mephistophelean leer ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... something that were better away, a latent corruption,—a hint as of an impure presence. Some of that dreary double entendre may be attributed to freer times and manners than ours,—but not all. The foul satyr's eyes leer out of the leaves constantly. The last words the famous author wrote were bad and wicked. The last lines the poor stricken wretch penned were for pity and pardon." Now a line or two about Goldsmith, and I will then let my reader go to ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... along the woodland way Strange creatures leer at me with uncouth love, And from the grass reach upward to my breast, And to my mouth ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... leetle too clevaire," said the maid with an evil leer,—"she would rob Madame, would she? She would play the espionne, hein? Eh bien, ma petite, you stay 'ere ontil you say what you lave done wiz ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... And see, the King is about to rise. Go forward, Monsieur," he continued benevolently. "A young man should show himself. Besides, his Majesty likes you well," he added, with a leer. He had an unpleasant sense of humour, had his Majesty's Captain of the Guard; and this evening somewhat more than ordinary on which ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... rite was done, and the marriage-knot was tied, And Colt withdrew his blushing wife a little way aside; "Let's go," he said, "into my cell; let's go alone, my dear; I fain would shelter that sweet face from the sheriff's odious leer. The jailer and the hangman, they are waiting both for me,— I cannot bear to see them wink so knowingly at thee! Oh, how I loved thee, dearest! They say that I am wild, That a mother dares not trust me with the weasand of her child; They say my bowie-knife ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... thoughts. She slept with his letters under her pillow. Since he went away he had done much to blot out all that had gone before. And yet sometimes the memory of that past unhappiness, of its disagreements and quarrels and petty unkindnesses would raise its ugly head and look at her with a sort of leer as if daring her to ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... young man with the inscrutable smile that at moments was wont to curl upon his lips. Ernest had once likened it to the smile of Mona Lisa, but now he detected in it the suavity of the hypocrite and the leer of the criminal. ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... better not to have thought at all, than to have thought such things as must go through a girl's mind whose life is passed in jilting and being jilted; whose eyes, as soon as they are opened, are turned to the main chance, and are taught to leer at earl, to languish at a marquis, and to grow blind before a commoner. I don't know much about fashionable life. Heaven help us (you young Brummell! I see the reproach in your face!) Why, sir, it absolutely appears to me as if this little hop-o'-my-thumb of a creature has begun ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... soft and easy. He bet there wouldn't many hit any higher spots than him. He bet there was one little girl that would be looked on as lucky, in case she was a good little girl and encouraged him to show his natural kindness. And I was favored with a blood-curdling leer from across the camp, of which I had put as much as possible between myself and ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... Davis, with a knowing leer, "he's not the man to marry a nice gal like that 'un he's got up to the Rest. Better let her be for some lucky young feller as could make her happy. ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... M. le Duc cast a brilliant leer at me, and prepared to speak; but the Keeper of the Seals, who, from his side of the table did not see this movement, wishing also to say something, M. le Duc d'Orleans intimated to him that M. le Duc had the start of him. Raising himself ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... fellow shoved his hands into the hip pockets of his striped trousers; and putting on a leer of pretended indifference, turned to a man named Benoit, who was ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... draught; and it is not very strange, if the instinct of mental self-preservation drives them to brandy-and-water, which makes the hoarse whisper of memory musical for a few brief moments, and puts a weak leer of promise on the features of the hollow-eyed future. The Colonel was kept pretty well in hand as yet by his wife, and though it had happened to him once or twice to come home rather late at night with a curious tendency to say the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the First favoured the court with a fascinating leer, which left no doubt on any one's mind that he ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... Cheel house was about to be produced in public. It was stopped by Jonas, who rose to his feet, and with a leer and chuckle round, he said, "Neighbors and friends and all. Very much obliged for the complerment. But don't think it is all about a baby. Nothin' of the kind. It is becos I wanted all, neighbors and friends, to be together whilst I made an announcement which ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... whose choice he was, seated aloft upon men's shoulders, with a purple robe thrown on his shoulders, there sat a brawny, grinning, bloated, jibbering thing, with curled lips and savage eyes, and satyr's leer: the creature of greed, of lust, of obscenity, of brutality, of avarice, of desire. This thing the people followed, rejoicing exceedingly, content in the guide whom they had chosen, victorious in the fiend for whom ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... dare not walk; that awful crew Might speak or laugh as you pass by. Might touch or paw With a formless claw Or leer from a sodden eye, Might whisper awful things they knew, Or wring their ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... Thou haunting whisperer? Spirit of beauty immanent and sheer, Art thou that crooked servitor, Done with disguise, from whose malignant leer Out of the ghostly house I fled ...
— Behind the Arras - A Book of the Unseen • Bliss Carman
... over his almost certain triumph. I laughed in return, and sincerely congratulated him on his nerve and probable success. I remained with him until the tenth week was finished, and handed him his $500. He took it with a leer of satisfaction, and remarked, that he was sorry I was a teetotaller, for he would ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... entrance of the Italian, who came just behind me. I am certain of this; he almost told me so himself, not in words, but the mistakable leer he gave her in reply. It was wicked, sardonic, devilish, and proved beyond doubt that there was some secret, some ...
— The Rome Express • Arthur Griffiths
... the wolves at any rate," replied the giant, with a wide grin at his witticism. "And if Yellow Franz is the particular wolf you're after, my friend, why here I am," he concluded, addressing the American with a leer. ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... arraignment of the corset are the creased backs and gooseflesh of his nudes! What lurking cynicism there is in some of his interiors! Voila l'animale! he exclaims as he shows us the far from enchanting antics of some girl. How Schopenhauer would laugh at the feminine "truths" of Degas! Without the leer of Rops, Degas is thrice as unpleasant. He is a douche for the romantic humbug painter, the painter of sleek bayaderes and ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... the empty Cacus to deny his acquaintance, and overlook men of merit in distress; and the little silly, pretty Phillida, or Foolida, to stare at the strange creatures round her. It is this temper which constitutes the supercilious eye, the reserved look, the distant bowe, the scornful leer, the affected astonishment, the loud whisper, ending in a laugh directed full in the teeth of another. Hence spring, in short, those numberless offences given too frequently, in public and private assemblies, by persons of weak understandings, ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... can see us eat, if you want to," said Josh Owen, with a malicious leer, as he spread a piece of paper on the ground and began to lay out the meal. "When are you two going to eat? I don't know. Maybe not for a few days yet. Ye see, it ain't so easy to make an enemy of a man by sneaky tricks, and then get ...
— The Submarine Boys on Duty - Life of a Diving Torpedo Boat • Victor G. Durham
... foyn[128] On height; Over your heads my hand I lift, Out go your eyes, fore to do your sight, But yet I must make better shift, And it be right. What, Lord? they sleep hard! that may ye all hear; Was I never a shepherd, but now will I leer[129] If the flock be scared, yet shall I nap near, Who draws hitherward, now mends our cheer, From sorrow: A fat sheep I dare say, A good fleece dare I lay, Eft white when I may, But this ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... parson"; housekeepers in search of stolen goods; the "widow who bounced" from one end of the room to the other and finally "scuttled too airily downstairs for a woman in her clothes"; and the chambermaid disguised as a fine lady, who by "the toss of her head, the jut of the bum, the sidelong leer of the eye" proclaimed her real condition—these types are treated by Defoe in a blunt realistic manner entirely foreign to Eliza Haywood's vein. Some passages,[2] perhaps, by a sentiment too exalted or by a description in romantic style suggest the hand of another ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... pale, still morning we looked upon the deed. We stopped our ears and held our leaping hands, but they—did they not wag their heads and leer and cry with bloody jaws: Cease from Crime! The word was mockery, for thus they train a hundred crimes while ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... of a waggish leer, thou owest the lad for the venison, I suppose that thou killed, Cousin Duke! Marmaduke! Marmaduke! That was a marvellous tale of thine about the buck! Here, young man, are two dollars for the deer, and Judge Temple can do no less than pay the doctor. I shall charge you nothing for my services, ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... trembling one moment, but firm the next, as the kangaroo, bending downward with the side of its head to him and nearly on a level with the water, which rose in violent ebullitions consequent upon Shanter's struggles, seemed to have a peculiar triumphant leer in its eyes, as if it were saying: "Wait a bit; it ...
— The Dingo Boys - The Squatters of Wallaby Range • G. Manville Fenn
... come with horns and tail, With diabolic grin and crafty leer; I say, such bogey-man devices wholly fail To waken in my heart ...
— Fifty years & Other Poems • James Weldon Johnson
... walked on with a species of leer peculiar to his physiognomy, which might be construed as expressive either of malice or of mere humour. The Varangian followed him with some suspicion, for it happened that he had had little intercourse with the unhappy race of Africa, and had not totally overcome ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... looked like a Lascar, who wore an ill-fitting slop-shop suit of blue, soaked and stained and clinging hideously to his body. His dank black hair was streaked upon his low brow; and his face, although it was notable for a sort of evil leer, had assumed in death ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... probability, the gratitude of the clergy is like their charity, which shuns the light — Mr Barton was immediately accosted by a person well stricken in years, tall, and raw-boned, with a hook-nose, and an arch leer, that indicated, at least, as much cunning as sagacity. Our conductor saluted him, by the name of captain C—, and afterwards informed us he was a man of shrewd parts, whom the government occasionally employed in secret services. But I have had the history of him more at large, from another quarter. ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... of the shire," &c. Truly on this occasion the holy father had not been unmindful of himself; and, considering the early hour and dreary state of the weather; was as jovial as the heart could desire. A peculiar leer and frequent ebullitions of laughter, from mysterious causes, showed the frame of mind he was in. After coffee, and a glass of aniseed brandy, we viewed his priestly robes, which were of cloth of gold and very handsome. We then ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... into a sneering laugh. "Oh, is that so?" he demanded. "Fine! I'd like t' see Perkins, all right!" His great shoulders shook, and a horrible leer distorted ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... reported. There was no doubt about the identity, and John Arniston soon possessed the proofs of it. But, after all, there was no need that the British public should know more than it already knew, or that the name of Miriam Gale should be connected with the drowned wretch, whose soddenly friendly leer struck John Arniston cold, as though he also had been in ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... N. vision, sight, optics, eyesight. view, look, espial^, glance, ken [Scot.], coup d'oeil [Fr.]; glimpse, glint, peep; gaze, stare, leer; perlustration^, contemplation; conspection^, conspectuity^; regard, survey; introspection; reconnaissance, speculation, watch, espionage, espionnage [Fr.], autopsy; ocular inspection, ocular demonstration; sight-seeing. point of view; gazebo, loophole, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... shame on his own shoulders, in exile and a branded man for her sake. She would still have his name, his income, her lover, her place in society, her right to explain his absence at her pleasure. He could ruin her ruined life by exposing her. Then would come the divorce court, the publicity, the leer of the mob, the pointed fingers of scorn. Impossible! Why could he not leave the matter untouched and keep up appearances before the world? Least endurable of any scheme. He knew that he could never meet her again without killing her, unless ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... makes seven bob. But,' he added, confidentially,''you couldn't buy 'em for that price in a shop, you know. They costs the committee a good bit more nor that—wholesale; but we've got some rich gents on our committee and they makes up the difference,' and with a nod and a cunning leer ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... uneasily, but replied with a knowing leer, "Aint ye Dicky Falkner what used ter live cross the ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... detail given with a minuteness that made every rich old burgher present turn uncomfortably in his chair. All this would be told with infinite glee, as if he considered it an excellent joke, and then he would give such a tyrannical leer in the face of his next neighbor that the poor man would be fain to laugh out of sheer faint-heartedness. If anyone, however, pretended to contradict him in any of his stories, he was on fire in an instant. His very cocked hat assumed ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... youth as solid in mind as in body, and ere the scene grasped him against his will he says he saw with an angry impatience the flicker of a leer on the darkened face of the Peruvian. But it did not last. In a few minutes the two young Burghers were not the only ones whom the spell had subdued—the wizard was netted too. And then, as he stood, his hands still fluttering, they heard him drone a string of words, a dull chant, level like ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... desde que colocaron el que ahora le sustituye. Si a alguno de mis lectores se le ocurriese hacerme la misma pregunta, despues de leer esta historia, ya sabe el por que no se ha continuado el ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... Miss Coventry!" said he, with his detestable leer. "Of course you smoke; any one who can tool 'em along as you do must be able to smoke. Mine are very mild, let ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... every glare of his eye, and in every knuckle of his hand with which he clutches the money bag, hypocrisy and avarice and hate and low strategy and diabolism. The quickness with which he grabs the bribe for the betrayal of the Lord, the villainous leer at the Master while seated at the holy supper, show him to be capable of any wickedness. What a spectacle when the traitorous lips are pressed against the pure cheek of the Immaculate One, the disgusting smack desecrating the holy symbol ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... his manner. And certainly his illustrators are drugged with the Dickens atmosphere. Those hideous-lovely persons, whose legs and arms are so thin that it is impossible to suppose they ever removed their clothes; do they not strut and leer and ogle and grin and stagger and weep, in the very ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... gave himself out as an Afrikander. You see in him a whiskered, dark-complexioned, good-looking man of twenty-six, but looking older, whose regard was either insolent or cringing, according to circumstances, and whose smile was an evil leer. The owner of the waggons stood waiting near the closed-up foremost one, the yellow-haired child on his arm. He looked keenly at the landlord, Bough, and the man's hand went involuntarily up in the salute, to its owner's secret rage. Did he want every English officer ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... marvellously constituted nature—and the shrill dissonance of his nerves, as seen in the physiological outbursts of the B minor Scherzo, is the agony of a tortured soul. The piece is Chopin's Iliad; in it are the ghosts that lurk near the hidden alleys of the soul, but here come out to leer and exult. ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... any mistake, my son. Your poor old father isn't quite a fool, though he is only an honest broken merchant." He looked up sideways at his son with a wink and a most unpleasant leer. "Where there's money I can smell it. There's money there, and heaps of it. It's my belief that he is the richest man in the world, though how he came to be so I should not like to guarantee. I'm not quite blind yet, Robert. Have you ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Nutty had thrown at Eustace had missed the latter, but it had hit the wall, and was now lying in many pieces on the floor, and the air was heavy with the scent of it. The remains seemed to leer at her with a kind of furtive swagger, after the manner of broken bottles. A quick thrill of anger ran through Elizabeth. She had always felt more like a mother to Nutty than a sister, and now she would have liked to exercise the maternal ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... very, very few women who liked the banter of Swift and Fielding. Their simple, tender natures revolt at laughter. Is the satyr always a wicked brute at heart, and are they rightly shocked at his grin, his leer, his horns, hoofs, and ears? Fi donc, le vilain monstre, with his shrieks, and his capering crooked legs! Let him go and get a pair of well-wadded black silk stockings, and pull them over those horrid shanks; put a large gown and bands over beard ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... poor ass that from his paddock strays Might sound abroad his field-companions' praise, Recounting volubly their well-bred leer, Their port impressive and their wealth of ear, Mistaking for the world's assent the clang Of echoes mocking his accurst harangue; So the dull clown, untraveled though at large, Visits the city on the ocean's marge, Expands ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... join thy hand! I will smooth the way for thee, Thou shalt furnish food for me. Come, let us speed our way Where the troops of spectres play. To charnel-houses, churchyards drear, Where Death sits with a horrible leer, A lasting grin, on a throne of bones, And skim along the blue tombstones. Come, let us speed away, Lay our snares, and spread our tether! I will smooth the way for thee, Thou shalt furnish food for me; And the grass shall wave O'er many a grave, Where youth and ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... up between us. There's my fist on it. See you soon," and, with a lurching step and a leer over ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... who had called him so hurriedly but a few moments before. Her tottering body, clothed in bear-skins, was bent forward over a large triangular shield of polished brass, on which she leant her lank, shrivelled arms. Her head shook with a tremulous, palsied action; a leer, half smile, half grimace, distended her withered lips and lightened her sunken eyes. Sinister, cringing, repulsive; her face livid with the reflection from the weapon that was her support, and her ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... old-time pier-glass Which had stood on the mantel near, Its silvering blemished,—yes, as if worn away By the eyes of the countless dead who had smirked at it Ere these two ever knew that old-time pier-glass And its vague and vacant leer. ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... glass, and I snatched at it. Great God! as I did so, another arm was thrust forth—not mine, I swear, if I live a thousand years; and as I recoiled, I saw in that glass a fiend step back. Not me, not me!—but a fiend with bloody hands, and a foul leer upon its face, and a fierce, cruel laugh in its glittering eyes. It was he, it was he! It was the devil that had possessed me before, come back again. And as I shuddered and gasped, and turned away, and then looked again into those eyes that pierced me through, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... and then at Mr Cripps's face. There was the same ugly leer about the latter, into which a spark of anger was infused as the boy still held back ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... naval crew called his fellows, and they approached their white prisoners with ropes—vegetable vines. And with the leer of a devil, the officer leaned down and flung Barry over on ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... write, converse, and live with ease; Should such a man, too fond to rule alone, Bear like the Turk no brother near the throne; View him with scornful yet with jealous eyes, And hate, for arts that caused himself to rise; Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer; Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike, Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike; Alike reserved to blame as to commend, A timorous foe and a suspicious friend; Dreading even fools, by flatterers besieged, And so obliging that ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Once more she descended the steps to meet him—Her mother arrested her on the stairway. A cunning leer was in her eye, as she looked into the woful, impassive eyes of her daughter. She grinned with a sort of delight expressive of the conviction that the advice she had given the night before was to ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... don't understand Thoorko better nor the English understand Scotch, it's little speed I'll come wi' them," said Dan with a leer. "Howsomediver, I'll give 'em a trial. I say, Mr Red-beard, hubba doorum bobble moti squorum howko joski tearum thaddi whak? Come, now, avic, let's hear what ye've got to say to that. An' mind what ye spake, 'cause we won't ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... fixed their eyes upon Victoria, and ogled her with an impudent leer. Victoria sat erect and immovable, and even her eye- lashes did not move; she apparently did not see the glances fixed upon her; nor even heard what Bonnier had said about her, for her countenance remained ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... was inaudible, but was evidently satisfactory to Hobson, for, as he opened the door, there was a leer of triumph on his face. He glanced suspiciously about the hall, and, on reaching the door, turned to Mrs. LaGrange, who had accompanied him, saying, in his ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... almost a leer, seemed to imply that Alix was in the secret, a party to Cherry's foolishness, and did imply very distinctly that Martin felt himself to be more than a match for all their cunning. The woman was silent, looking straight ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... glaring specimen of the sort of canting hypocrisy which is the object of my censure. It was a reverend and dignified pillar of the church, as demure as a saint, turning up his eyes, and professing and preaching morality, which I had more than once or twice before heard him do, while, with a sanctified leer, he expressed great horror at my breach of conjugal chastity, or violation of the marriage vow. The reader will easily imagine the manner in which I eyed him, while he was uttering these truly religious and moral ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... it does now, of an overdoing of the outward demonstrations of modesty; a 'leer' was once a look with nothing amiss in it (Piers Plowman). 'Daft' was modest or retiring; 'orgies' were religious ceremonies; the Blessed Virgin speaks of herself in an early poem as 'God's wench.' In 'crafty' and 'cunning' no ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... said the jockey, or whatever he was, turning to me with an arch leer, "I suppose I may consider myself as the purchaser of this here animal, for the use and behoof of this young gentleman," making a sign with his head towards the tall young man by his side. "By ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... of wheaten bread. Of bears and wolves they were at first in dread, But soon found out there was no cause for fear; For if such came and mortal showed his head, They soon ran off with a true coward's leer, Which made it seem surprising ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... thought best to leave it. Fleda stopped crying as soon as she could, lest somebody should see her; and was sitting quietly again, alone as before, when one of the sailors whom she had never spoken to came by, and leaning over towards her with a leer as ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... hence, perhaps, leer horse, a horse without a rider; leer is an adjective meaning uncontrolled, hence 'leer drunkards'" (Halliwell); according to Nares, a leer (empty) horse meant also a ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... he mentioned his fruitless visits, a startling, most repulsive leer just showed itself in Ladford's face; but it disappeared as suddenly and wholly as a monster that has come up, horrid and hideous, to the surface of the sea, and then has sunk again, bodily, into the dark deep, and is gone, as if it had never come, except ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... climbed story after story without getting sight of the madman. Finally he reached the roof. It was waving like swells on a lake before a breeze. He caught sight of the Mad Musician standing on the street wall, thirty stories from the street, a leer on his devilish ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... crouched down on his haunches. Margaret shuddered, for the uneven surface of the sack moved strangely. He opened the mouth of it. The woman in the corner listlessly droned away on the drum, and occasionally uttered a barbaric cry. With a leer and a flash of his bright teeth, the Arab thrust his hand into the sack and rummaged as a man would rummage in a sack of corn. He drew out a long, writhing snake. He placed it on the ground and for a moment waited, then he passed his hand over it: it became immediately as rigid as a bar of ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... of this was delivered with something like a leer, warning Ambrose's subconsciousness that Watusk, notwithstanding the flowery compliments, wished him ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... Suddenly she threw the book down on the table. It was impossible to read; Sam's talk had disturbed her to the point of sharp discomfort. What did old Mr. Wright mean by "knowing cakes and ale"? And his leer yesterday had been an offence! Why had he looked at her like that? Did he—? Was it possible—! She wished she had spoken to Lloyd about it. But no; it couldn't be; it was only his queer way; he was half crazy, she believed. And it would do no good ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... cried pish, and bid her go on. The gipsy told him that he was a bachelor, but would not be so long; and that he was dearer to somebody than he thought: The Knight still repeated she was an idle baggage, and bid her go on. Ah, master, says the gipsy, that roguish leer of yours makes a pretty woman's heart ache; you have not that simper about the mouth for nothing—The uncouth gibberish with which all this was uttered, like the darkness of an oracle, made us the more attentive to it. To be short, the Knight left the money with her ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... these are the sort we have in India," he answered with an unpleasant leer. "The English people are more fortunate, for they ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... struggled to recall a name. Then, almost as swiftly, he dismissed the idea. It was, however, a face of that kind which, once seen, is never forgotten—a frog-like face, with protruding eyes, and the frog's expressive leer. Somewhere, not very long ago, this face had been before him, and had stared at him in the same disconcerting manner—but where? when? In the few seconds that remained, his brain worked furiously, sped back in desperate haste over all the likely places where he might have seen ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... enfolds him and takes away his breath, like the heavy, stifling folds of a hideous black mantle; darkness that the active imagination of the timid child peoples with phantom shapes, grotesque and horrible—forms made unnaturally visible by their own light, that mouth and leer, and stretch out distorted arms to seize him, whose appalling presence fills the room from floor to ceiling, and which eddy and circle around him in horrid demon dances, whirling gradually nearer and nearer, until myriads ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... time.'[2] Let us behold what a picture Macaulay draws on the strength of this passage. 'If his first attempts to set a presuming dunce right were ill-received,' Macaulay says of Addison, 'he changed his tone, "assented with civil leer," and lured the flattered coxcomb deeper and deeper into absurdity.' To compare this transformation of the simplicity of the original into the grotesque heat and overcharged violence of the copy, is to see the homely maiden of a country village ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... of the general's years, he evidently is a little vain of his person, and ambitious of conquests. I have observed him on Sunday in church eyeing the country girls most suspiciously; and have seen him leer upon them with a downright amorous look, even when he has been gallanting Lady Lillycraft with great ceremony through the churchyard. The general, in fact, is a veteran in the service of Cupid rather than of Mars, having signalised himself in all the garrison ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... leer. "That won't do," said he. "He's put you up to telling me that, and I'm going to Cornwall, Connecticut. I know what's good for me, ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... I'd better—wait a bit. So I waited, I did." And here, again, Milo of Crotona touched the peak of his cap, and looked from Barnabas to Cleone's flushing loveliness with eyes wide and profoundly innocent,—a very cherub in top-boots, only his buttons (Ah, his buttons!) seemed to leer and wink one to another, as much as to say: "Oh yes! Of ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... to look grave and recall dire happenings to Captains who had elected to effect their repairs in the outer harbour—just here, at Port William. Old Jock's square jaw was set firm, his eyes were narrowed to a crafty leer; he looked on everyone with unconcealed suspicion and distrust. He was a shipmaster of the old school, 'looking after his Owners' interest.' He had put in 'in distress' to effect repairs.... He was being called ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... no se leer, ni tan siquiera[78-9] en castellano, que (p79) es lalengua mas clara del mundo; pero el diablo me lleve si esta escritura no es ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... they were high, and this feature, together with a broad bay-window where the door might have been expected, gave it by day the aspect of a human countenance turned askance, and wearing a sly and wicked leer. To-night nothing was visible but the outline of the roof upon ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... to win the gaping rout, Nor aim at Pinkey's leer with "S'death, I'm out!" An arch dull rogue, who lets the business cool, To show how nicely he can play the fool, Who with buffoonery his dulness clokes, Deserves ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... once more that my daughter is very irritable and passionate, and withal so fond of admiration, that nothing in the shape of a leer comes amiss to her. She likes a good squeeze above all things. Evil, and the Father of Evil though I be, I am not so very wicked as to wish thee to marry a woman of that description without thy knowing what kind of ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... his heel, with military precision. Then he chuckled Dolores under the chin with a leer, to have his hand indignantly pushed aside. As the girl glared at him with a flash of hatred in her eyes, he stalked into the taproom, followed ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... Carietta, her small face distorted with a leer of the most horrid satisfaction, "'Lihu's cops. 'Phrony ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... subserviency to caucus direction, and a party spirit upon a level with many of the least reputable elective Chambers in the world; and beneath the imposing mask of an assembly of notables backed by the prescription and traditions of centuries we discern the leer of the artful dodger, who has got the straight ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... did have one. Some class, too," he added with a leer that won Bulger's complete respect. He breathed freely again and was humming, "Love Me and the World ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... sort of swagger. He wes less intoxicated than Turner, but ugly enough. He faced the captain with a leer. ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... miniature castle near Cowes. This, my companion informed me, had once been occupied by George IV. when Prince of Wales. "Here his Royal Highness enjoyed what I call the perfection of life, sir; women, wine, and fox-hunting!" added the professor of the whip, with the leer of a ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... after year, until some life-interest should fall in, was selling his chance, just as it began to grow most valuable, for a twelfth part of its worth. It was a good speculation—a very safe one. The old man stowed his pocket-book carefully in the breast of his great-coat, and hobbled away with a leer of triumph. That will had made him ten years younger at the ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... you don't know much about lightin' a fire. Lemme show you. Let the White hunter learn the Injun somethin' about the woods," said he with a leer. ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... think yer got the cinch on me, don't yer, Job Malden! 'It's a long lane that has no turn,' they say, and yer'll wish some day yer'd treated Dan Dean square!" and he turned with a leer and was gone. ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... great immortal Jehosaphat!" swore Baumberger, with an ugly leer in his eyes, "I never knew before that I was so small I couldn't be seen with the ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... only apparently sugar of lead; really, it was sugar of milk—the milk of human kindness. The smile of the lost picture called "La Gioconda" is by fanciful people regarded as something very wonderful. It is really the clever portraiture of the habitual "leer" of a somewhat wearied sensual woman. It had a fascination for the great Leonardo, but no ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... to-night: My old Friend cried Pish, and bid her go on. The Gypsie told him that he was a Batchelour, but would not be so long; and that he was dearer to some Body than he thought: The Knight still repeated, She was an idle Baggage, and bid her go on. Ah Master, says the Gypsie, that roguish Leer of yours makes a pretty Woman's Heart ake; you ha'n't that Simper about the Mouth for Nothing—The uncouth Gibberish with which all this was uttered like the Darkness of an Oracle, made us the more ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... of the sailors chanced to set his eyes upon me; and, after regarding me with a comic leer, ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... to leer at me, because his voice was absolutely dying in his throat. My indignation was boundless. I cried out with the fire of ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... entrance of the enclosure Bakahenzie and the other two were arrested by astonishment. Lowering the body to the base of the idol which leaned sideways in a drunken leer, Birnier lifted the spear and brought it down accurately between zu Pfeiffer's left arm and breast, and dropping swiftly upon his knees to cover his actions, slashed his own left forearm. Then he jumped to his feet and held the blooded spear aloft ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... Christening Feast, had this advantage over her likeness, that she was invited everywhere; though how she, at her age, could fly about to so many parties, unless she was a fairy, no one could say. Behind the fairy, up the marble stairs, came the most noble Farintosh, with that vacuous leer which distinguishes his lordship. Ethel seemed to be carrying the stack of flowers which the Marquis had sent to her. The noble Bustington (Viscount Bustington, I need scarcely tell the reader, is the heir of ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... "I'll tell you honestly, that the last time I saw her, I was surprised to find how much she was improved. She has swallowed those abominable teeth, or done something with them, and is really quite decent looking. In short," he continued, with a malicious leer at Billy, which made the blood tingle to his finger's end, "In short, she'll do very well for a city buck like me to play the mischief with for a summer or so, and then cast off like ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... the order, passing the American skipper, who was leaning on the bulwark looking sick, and as the sailor came up he turned to him with an ugly leer. ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... turned full around and gave a leer which, if possible, made her face more hideous than ever. Without thinking Harvey caught her by the arm ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... informed of your whereabouts at present," said Boris, shortly. "Because," he continued, with a villainous leer, "I am only cruel to be kind. I want to have all the details of our marriage settled as soon as possible. A night of waiting will soften your dear brother's heart, and he will probably listen to reason in ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... upon me, "The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin." At this I made a stand in my spirit and began to conceive peace in my soul, and methought I saw as if the tempter did leer and steal away from me, as being ashamed of what he had done. At the same time also I had my sin and the blood of Christ thus represented to me: that my sin, when compared to the blood of Christ, was no more to it than this little ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... exterior—the face of the man who lifts a heavy dumb-bell and throws an impressive glance at the audience. Assistant Lusk was by no means thus proof against success I saw him put a bottle back in his pocket, his face already disintegrated with a tipsy leer. Judge Burrage, perceiving the rain-maker, came out of his gate and proceeded toward him, extending the hand of congratulation. "Mr. Hilbrun," said he, "I am Judge Burrage—the Honorable T. Coleman Burrage—and I will say that I am most favorably ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... pitchfork. One characteristic of the medival imagination is its fondness for the grotesque. It loved queer beasts, half eagle, half lion, hideous batlike creatures, monsters like nothing on land or sea. They lurk among the foliage on choir screens, leer at you from wall or column, or squat upon the gutters ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... that this is infernul nonsense. I manetane that wax figgers is more elevatin than awl the plays ever wroten. Take Shakespeer for instunse. Peple think heze grate things, but I kontend heze quite the reverse to the kontrary. What sort of sense is thare to King Leer, who goze round cussin his darters, chawin hay and throin straw at folks, and larfin like a silly old koot and makin a ass of hisself ginerally? Thare's Mrs. Mackbeth—sheze a nise kind of woomon to have round ain't she, a puttin old Mack, her husband, up to slayin Dunkan ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... were an astonishment to all who knew him. Such a course as this, however pleasant to a thirsty vanity, was lowering to his nature. He sank more and more towards the professional Don Juan. With a leer of what the French call fatuity, he bids the belles of Mauchline beware of his seductions; and the same cheap self-satisfaction finds a yet uglier vent when he plumes himself on the scandal at the birth of his first bastard. We can well believe what we hear of his facility in striking ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... decently enough to her, glanced upward, and, as he thought of Eva's father lying stricken with the Madagascar madness in the room above, an evil leer came over his fox-like face. As he left he completely ignored both Locke and Balcom, unless it was that the look in his eyes meant a sort of ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... of set purpose, had crept up behind us so softly that we should not suspect his approach, or else so engrossed were we that our ears had been deafened for the time. He stood there now in his untidy gown of black, and there was a leer of mockery on his long, white face. Slowly he put a lean arm between us, and took the sheet in his ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... the captain, John, with a shameless leer, stepped forward and stood passively on the grating, while the bareheaded old quarter-master, with his gray hair streaming in the wind, bound his feet to the cross-bars and, stretching out his arms over his head, secured them to the hammock netting above. He ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... remained in a tight grip till flushed and triumphant he again acknowledged the applause. Nothing was said between Blanquette and myself, but she became my sworn sister from that moment. And Narcisse sat at our feet looking down on the crowd, his tongue lolling out mockingly and a satiric leer ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... of drugs, and, untrammeled by old traditions, have sought and are seeking milder means of mitigating our bodily ills. All honor to them. They have driven away the old doctor of our childhood, whose most pleasant smile resembled the amiable leer that a cannibal might be supposed to bestow upon a plump missionary. The old curmudgeon, with his huge bottles of mixtures and his immense boulders—I beg pardon, I should say, boluses of nastiness—has vanished like ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... Arden, with a leer on his dark face. "You are the fool, Helmar, not I. But see here, I am on business. Not of my own, but that of the ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... He ended with a leer and drove them before him back to the table. There was more scratching in his register. The two uncouth witnesses scrawled something for their names and ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... Lucille more clearly, and the large, hazy outlines of Tode's features were beginning to assume the proper proportions. There was a diabolical leer upon Tode's face, unchanged during the five years since Jim had seen him last, except that it had become more evil, more powerful. The enormous and distorted face that Jim had seen had been simply due to the presence of some ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... remark with a chuckle of intense satisfaction and a leer at our big neighbour, Bob dived below again; and shortly afterwards a frizzling sound from forward, and an odour strongly suggestive of bacon and eggs, which was wafted upwards from the companion, informed me that he had entered upon the duties of the less dignified ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... such a willing—" added Schliemann, sidling up to him with a dreadful leer on his face. He made use of the ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... with a leer, "'specially the new superintendent, you'd like me ter give 'im an extra warnin' ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... River Police Depot. It was that of a man who looked like a Lascar, who wore an ill-fitting slop-shop suit of blue, soaked and stained and clinging hideously to his body. His dank black hair was streaked upon his low brow; and his face, although it was notable for a sort of evil leer, had assumed in death ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... chatted at doorsteps, with idle house-girls; some courtesans flaunted in furs and ostrich feathers, through a group of coarse engineers; some sergeants of artillery, in red trimmings, and caps gilded with cannon, were reining their horses to leer at some ladies, who were taking the air in their gardens; and at a wide place in the street, a Provost-Major was manoeuvring some companies, to the sound of the drum and fife. There was much drunkenness, among both soldiers and civilians; and the people ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... men Worked then but as a little leaven; From some more modest palace then The Soul of Dives stank to Heaven. But when they planned with lisp and leer Their careful war upon the weak, They smote your body on its bier, For surety ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... Argyle Street on a Saturday night; other nights it is quieter, of course. Oh, he won't harm you.' A lumbering carter in a wild state of intoxication had pushed himself against the frightened girl, and looked down into her face with an idiotic leer. ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... thing, or the ugliness of an ugly one; but it takes a clever beast like Crawley to show you beauty in anything so absolutely repulsive as that woman's face. Look at it! He's got hold of something. He's caught the lurking fascination, the—the leer ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... We changed cars at Leer, where on the platform a drunken German soldier lurched against us, and, seeing us tied together, offered to lend us his knife to cut the cord, but the guard ...
— Three Times and Out • Nellie L. McClung
... and was going to shut the door, when the drunken old man turned round once more, and inquired with a cunning leer, "So you expect some one, my child? Whom do you expect, little Itzig? Is it a lad ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... regarded his question with an expressive leer. "Arrah! now, ye won't tell?" he said, in a hoarse whisper; "sure it'll be the death o' me av ye do. There's no end o' them things here—as many as ye like to pick; it's only the day before to-morrow that I turned up a nugget of pure goold the size of ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... yet the leer of the gipsy's eye made him think of the lying magpie. So he left her, and hastened on, and, behold! there stood before him the village maypole, bedecked with roses and ribbons, and a living garland of youths and fair maidens dancing ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... are thinking. But the mind goes out under this regimen, like a fire without a draught; and it is not very strange, if the instinct of mental self-preservation drives them to brandy-and-water, which makes the hoarse whisper of memory musical for a few brief moments, and puts a weak leer of promise on the features of the hollow-eyed future. The Colonel was kept pretty well in hand as yet by his wife, and though it had happened to him once or twice to come home rather late at night with a curious tendency to say the same ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the king taunted him from the black chaos that hid the dungeon walls. The words struck at him, filling his head with shooting pain, and he tottered back and sank to the ground to get away from them. They followed, and that vengeful leer of the king was behind them, urging them on, until they beat his face into the sticky earth, and smothered him into what ...
— The Courage of Captain Plum • James Oliver Curwood
... this little piece of information, and with his leer an inch from my chin, I answered slowly and calmly that it certainly was. I might add that he spoke Spanish by preference (according to Mexique very bad Spanish); for The Fighting Sheeney had made his home for a number of years in Rio, and his opinion thereof ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... thought as 'ow I'd better—wait a bit. So I waited, I did." And here, again, Milo of Crotona touched the peak of his cap, and looked from Barnabas to Cleone's flushing loveliness with eyes wide and profoundly innocent,—a very cherub in top-boots, only his buttons (Ah, his buttons!) seemed to leer and wink one to another, as much as to say: ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... as solid in mind as in body, and ere the scene grasped him against his will he says he saw with an angry impatience the flicker of a leer on the darkened face of the Peruvian. But it did not last. In a few minutes the two young Burghers were not the only ones whom the spell had subdued—the wizard was netted too. And then, as he stood, his hands still fluttering, they heard him drone ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... have been accessory to such vile work as to stab an unarmed and unsuspecting man, yet often as I thought of Alessandro's satyr leer, and the loathing bravely coupled with defiance which I had seen leap in answer to it in the face of his child Duchess, I thanked God that Lorenzino had no such ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... got the cinch on me, don't yer, Job Malden! 'It's a long lane that has no turn,' they say, and yer'll wish some day yer'd treated Dan Dean square!" and he turned with a leer and was gone. ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... back was nearly horizontal, and his green-stockinged legs striking out behind him with the furious rapidity of a great frog trying to push his head into the mud, he turned back his little face with a leer of triumphant derision at every moving thing which might happen to ...
— A Bicycle of Cathay • Frank R. Stockton
... eloquently puts it. Did any single bloom escape the blight of ineffable depravity? No—not one! Occasionally some fresh young thing would appear at Court—appealing and innocent. Then the atmosphere would begin to take effect: some one would whisper something to her—she would leer almost unconsciously; a few days later she would be discovered ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... should teach me. There's never a day in the week but I carry coals from Croydon to London; and now, when I rise in the morning to harness my horses, and load my cart, methinks I have a tailor sewing stitches in my heart: when I am driving my cart, my heart that wanders one way, my eyes they leer another, my feet they lead me, I know not whither, but now and then into a slough over head and ears; so that poor Grim, that before was over shoes in love, is now over head and ears in dirt ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... and gave the company to understand he took this as a polite acknowledgment of respect. But his gesture was accompanied with a disconcerted leer of smothered malice, which I could not misinterpret. It was sardonic; and, to me, who knew what was passing in his heart, ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... with your lips—name her not!" cried Philip, growing livid with his emotions. "Talk not of the mercy—the forethought—a Beaufort could show to leer and her offspring! I accept it not—I believe it not. Oh, yes! you follow me now with your false kindness; and why? Because your ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was the answer, with a leer. "We have nothing of that breed among us; we are all honest men. But what if a man has an acquaintance abroad, and gets a commission to sell a cargo of tea or brandy, or perhaps a present from ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... will be to me, my lord, for having enabled him to establish the right," says Sampson, with a leer on his face. ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... than by a few touches of chalk. Among the heads of distinguished personages, finding those of the King of Prussia and the Empress of Hungary, he changed the cast of their eyes, so as to make them leer significantly at each other. Note.—These (which in the catalogue are called an original portrait of the present Emperor of Prussia and ditto of the Empress Queen of Hungary, its antagonist) were two old signs of the "Saracen's Head" and Queen Anne. Under the first was written ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... said the Knight; "Of him I have heard much good! I grant," he said, "with you to wend, My brethren all in-fere: My purpose was to have dined to-day At Blyth or Doncaster." Forth then went that gentle Knight, With a careful cheer; The tears out of his eyen ran, And fell down by his leer. They brought him unto the lodge door: When ROBIN 'gan him see, Full courteously did off his hood, And set him on his knee. "Welcome, Sir Knight!" then said ROBIN, "Welcome thou art to me; I have abide you fasting, Sir, All these hours three!" ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... his feet; but the business was over in two twos. The four living fellows looked at each other in rather a ghastly fashion, the dead man contemplating a corner of the roof with a singular and ugly leer. ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... paused by the door, while Tip, with a confident leer on his face, strode into the ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys in the Ranks - or, Two Recruits in the United States Army • H. Irving Hancock
... and Giorgione came Botticelli. Now, Botticelli builded on Giorgione, while Burne-Jones builded on Botticelli. Aubrey Beardsley, dead at the age at which Keats died, builded on both, but he perverted their art and put a leer where Burne-Jones placed faith and abiding trust. Aubrey Beardsley got the cue for his hothouse art from one figure in Botticelli's "Spring," I need not state which figure: a glance at the picture and you behold sulphur fumes about the face ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... variations any number of words will bear. He talks with a trillo, and gives his words a double relish. He had rather have them bear two senses in vain and impertinently than one to the purpose, and never speaks without a leer-sense. He talks nothing but equivocation and mental reservation, and mightily affects to give a word a double stroke, like a tennis-ball against two walls at one blow, to defeat the expectation of his antagonist. He commonly slurs every fourth ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... replied Gunn, with a leer toward the door. "Why, you don't think I'm afraid, Captain? You should ...
— Lady of the Barge and Others, Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... the expression of diablerie came in he found impossible to discover. Experiment was necessary. The eyebrows—it could scarcely be the eyebrows? But he altered them. No, that was no better; in fact, if anything, a trifle more satanic. The corner of the mouth? Pah! more than ever a leer—and now, retouched, it was ominously grim. The eye, then? Catastrophe! he had filled his brush with vermilion instead of brown, and yet he had felt sure it was brown! The eye seemed now to have rolled in its socket, and was glaring at him an eye of fire. In a flash of passion, ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... warmly padded, and much stained and splashed. She had fine dark eyes, and was young, bold-looking, and handsome; but when she came nearer, the moist pallor of her skin, the slackness of her lower lip and jaw, and an eager and worn expression in her fine eyes, gave her a thirsty, reckless leer that filled Marian with loathing. Her aspect conveyed the same painful suggestion as her voice had done before, but more definitely; for it struck Marian, with a shock, that Conolly, in the grotesque metamorphosis of a nightmare, might appear in some such likeness. The lamp did not seem ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... enclosure Bakahenzie and the other two were arrested by astonishment. Lowering the body to the base of the idol which leaned sideways in a drunken leer, Birnier lifted the spear and brought it down accurately between zu Pfeiffer's left arm and breast, and dropping swiftly upon his knees to cover his actions, slashed his own left forearm. Then he jumped to his feet and held the blooded spear aloft ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... to be Monsieur," said the obese Turk with a graceful wave of the hand in my direction, "and not you, who has robbed my home of its treasure, unless," he added, and I shall always remember the hideous leer of that pulpy-nosed and small-pox pitted face, "unless Monsieur has ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... drum with the white of one clown. Then mix with a prologue and roll very thin. Fill with a circus just coming to town. One leer, one scowl and one tragical grin. Bake in a sob of Carusian size. Result: the ...
— The Suffrage Cook Book • L. O. Kleber
... the cops!" cried Carietta, her small face distorted with a leer of the most horrid satisfaction, "'Lihu's cops. ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... responded Frye, in an instantaneously sweetened tone, "I am glad you were, and, as I told you, you are wise to cultivate him. I suppose," he continued with a leer, "that you were buying wine for some of the ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... mouldering linen, and stiffly upended bedpoles and curtain rods which nearly filled the room. The clock of a bygone generation stood on the mantel-piece, and the black winding hole in its white face seemed to leer at him like an evil eye as the light of the torch fell on it. But nobody had been in the room. The dust which encrusted the furniture and the floor had not been disturbed ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... there, shouting to all the world to come and help you, for you had caught Black Donald and would die before you would give him up? Ah! you little vampire, how you thirsted for my blood! And you pretended to like me!" said Black Donald, eying her from head to foot, with a sly leer. ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... watering-trough which usually distinguishes the front of the English public-house of the second class, there were three conveniences of that kind, for the use, as the landlord used to say, of the troop-horses when the soldiers came to search his house; while a knowing leer and a nod let you understand what species of troops he was thinking of. A huge ash-tree before the door, which had reared itself to a great size and height, in spite of the blasts from the neighbouring Solway, overshadowed, as usual, the ale-bench, as our ancestors called ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... case will the United States consent to go without its share of the swag. It is delicious. The biggest and proudest government on earth turned sneak-thief; collecting pennies on stolen property, and pocketing them with a greasy and libidinous leer; going into partnership with foreign thieves to rob its own children; and when the child escapes the foreigner, descending to the abysmal baseness of hanging on and robbing the infant all alone by itself! Dear sir, this is not any ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... He turned his head. A gas jet above the wretched little washstand lighted the room but poorly. The door opened slowly. A tall, ungainly woman entered the room—a creature with a sallow, weather-beaten face and a perpetual leer. ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... the driver, with rather a bold leer. The average lady who descended or ascended Mrs. Popple's steps; was not considered ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... and most conspicuous of these descendants of the Mohawks, the sleek and orderly scholar beheld the childish figure of his son. Nor did Gabriel shrink from his father's eye, stern and scornful as it was, but rather braved the glance with an impudent leer. ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the edge of the table pressing against his breast, and in so doing noticed the absence of the paper which he had forgotten in the fight. His face changed instantly, the drunken leer vanished. At first there was merely a puzzled expression, as of an intense effort to remember. He looked swiftly at me. I gave no sign. The two men were gone. His anxiety convinced me of the importance of the papers. ...
— 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
... bout among the officers in one of the German dugouts, the main beverage being champagne. With a drunken leer he informed us that champagne was plentiful on their side and that it did not cost them anything either. About seven that night the conversation had turned to the "contemptible" English, and the Captain had made a wager that he would hang his cap ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey
... discoloured by personality and merriment is distorted by malevolence.(!) No man who really knows the qualities of Mr. Whistler's best work will imagine that he really believes the highest expression of his art to be realized in reproduction of the grin and glare, the smirk and leer, of Japanese womanhood as represented in its professional types of beauty; but to all appearance he would fain persuade us that ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... you come with horns and tail, With diabolic grin and crafty leer; I say, such bogey-man devices wholly fail To waken in my ...
— Fifty years & Other Poems • James Weldon Johnson
... name to a woman whom one loves, and of whom one is sure? The reason was, that I should be tied to a disfigured, ugly creature with whom I should not venture to be seen in public, as my friends would leer at her with laughter in their eyes, and with pity in their hearts for the man who ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... lifelike portrait of my Sen, Drawn by the hand of Death; each fleshless pate, Cursed with a ghastly grin to eyes unrubbed With love's magnetic ointment, seems to mine To smile an amiable smile like his Whose amiable smile I—I alone Am able to distinguish from his leer! See how the gathering coyotes flit Through the lit spaces, or with burning eyes Star the black shadows with a steadfast gaze! About my feet the poddy toads at play, Bulbously comfortable, try to hop, And tumble clumsily with all their ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... had heard the unseen kobold, laughing in mockery, seat himself near me. The key turned in the door, it opened, and the Forest-master issued forth with papers in his hand. A mist seemed to envelop my head. I looked up, and—horror! the man in the gray coat sat by me, gazing on me with a satanic leer. He had drawn his magic-cap at once over his head and mine; at his feet lay his and my shadow peaceably by each other. He played negligently with the well-known parchment which he held in his hand, and as the Forest-master, busied with ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... conversation that I gathered, was night-watchman in the yards. He had one red-rimmed eye. The other was sightless but had a half-closed leer that seemed to express discreet ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... trying to classify people too definitely into types; you will find that all through their youth they will persist annoyingly in jumping from class to class, and by pasting a supercilious label on every one you meet you are merely packing a Jack-in-the-box that will spring up and leer at you when you begin to come into really antagonistic contact with the world. An idealization of some such a man as Leonardo da Vinci would be a more valuable ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... because of England's sea power; because of the unblushing, shameless, gilded corruption of the French court, which cared less for the fate of Canada than the leer of a painted fool behind her fan. But be this remembered,—and here was the hand of overruling Destiny or Providence,—the fall of New France, like the fall of the seed to the ready soil, was the rebirth of a new nation. Henceforth it is not New ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... little shepherdesses danced to their lords and smiled sweet porcelain smiles. It was all very real, this music of the middle century, and it was written for the time, it suited the time, and when the time passed, the music with the men grew stale, sour, and something to be avoided, like the leer of a creaking, senescent beau, like the rouge and grimace of a debile coquette. My advice then is, enjoy the music of your epoch, for there is no such thing as music of the future. It is always music of the present. Schumann has had his day, Wagner ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... a triumphant leer. "And you know what I am going to say. Ah ha! I was sure you did. And you've confessed. Gertie, my dearest girl, I—What! Going? Not until you pay toll. I'm keeper of the gate and you must pay before you pass, you know. If you won't listen you must ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln
... I turned from him, That hateful cripple, out of his highway Into the path he pointed. All the day Had been a dreary one at best, and dim Was settling to its close, yet shot one grim Red leer to see the plain catch its estray. ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... with civil leer, And without sneering teach the rest to sneer. 1369 POPE: Prologue to the Satires, ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... thee once more that my daughter is very irritable and passionate, and withal so fond of admiration, that nothing in the shape of a leer comes amiss to her. She likes a good squeeze above all things. Evil, and the Father of Evil though I be, I am not so very wicked as to wish thee to marry a woman of that description without thy knowing what kind of treasure ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... eyes on the plunging animal to see him leer, for whenever the sidling motion was made it brought to view the tawny horizontal form that seemed to be clinging to the bridle, as if riding for life. Suddenly there arose a cry ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... infirm old man, much bent, though evidently at one time he had been of great stature. His retreating forehead, heavy grey eyebrows, and loose sensual mouth, rendered him no pleasing object at any time, and, as he stood in the doorway now, with a half drunken satyr-like leer on his face, he looked ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... coarseness apart, I think I have met very, very few women who liked the banter of Swift and Fielding. Their simple, tender natures revolt at laughter. Is the satyr always a wicked brute at heart, and are they rightly shocked at his grin, his leer, his horns, hoofs, and ears? Fi donc, le vilain monstre, with his shrieks, and his capering crooked legs! Let him go and get a pair of well-wadded black silk stockings, and pull them over those horrid shanks; put a large ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... do. Shure a man is better than a baste any day; and besides, had I not a frind at my back ridy to help me?" Bryan cast a comical leer at La Roche as he said this, and the poor Frenchman blushed, for he felt that his conduct in the affair had not been very praiseworthy. It is due to La Roche to say, however, that no sooner had he found ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... at the hand and then at Mr Cripps's face. There was the same ugly leer about the latter, into which a spark of anger was infused as the boy still held back ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... reserve? Why should you pretend not to understand? Don't you see," he added, with a cunning leer, "that I can make these medals as perfectly as they can at the Hotel de la Monnaie, our ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... knew who you were, the moment you came in, sir," said he, with a very knowing leer out of his ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... so odd and funny, I cannot resist recording it here.— Methought that the Genius of Matrimony Before me stood with a joyous leer, Leading a husband in each hand, And both for me, which lookt rather queer;— One I could perfectly understand, But why there were two wasn't quite so clear. T'was meant however, I soon could see, To afford me ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... life were spent in prison. Toward the last she was allowed to live in nominal freedom. But despotism, with savage leer and stealthy step, saw that Fenelon was kept far away. In those declining days, when the shadows were lengthening toward the east, her time and talents were given to teaching the simple rudiments of knowledge to the peasantry, to alleviating their material wants and to ministering to the sick. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... advantage of the inner port: it was as useless for the local pilot to look grave and recall dire happenings to Captains who had elected to effect their repairs in the outer harbour—just here, at Port William. Old Jock's square jaw was set firm, his eyes were narrowed to a crafty leer; he looked on everyone with unconcealed suspicion and distrust. He was a shipmaster of the old school, 'looking after his Owners' interest.' He had put in 'in distress' to effect repairs.... He was being called upon to ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... the walls hung the works of Vandyke and Correggio and Raphael and Rubens; but the pure faces of art's creation looked down on statesmen bending low to the beck of adventuresses, old men pawning a noble name for the leer of a Portsmouth, and women vying for the glance ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... Merry, gads-bud, I'm serious; I'll give thee five hundred pounds for every inch of him that resembles me; ah, this eye, this left eye! A thousand pounds for this left eye. This has done execution in its time, girl; why, thou hast my leer, hussey, just thy father's leer. Let it be transmitted to the young rogue by the help of imagination; why, 'tis the mark of our family, Thy; our house is distinguished by a languishing eye, as the house of Austria is by a thick lip. Ah! when I was of your age, ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... reproduced, feature for feature, line for line. It was as though Nature, for an artistic freak, had set herself the task of fashioning hideousness and beauty from precisely the same materials. Between the leer of the man and the smile of the girl, where lay the difference? It would have puzzled any student of anatomy to point it out. Yet the one sickened, while to gain the other most men would ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... his leer and at his broad way of gratifying her whim. And she was more incensed than ever at his air of being ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... absurd choruses which make things go along as pleasantly as possible. Meanwhile the bottle is returned empty. He takes it, insists upon re-filling your "glass" from it, and tips it up over your cup. Then with a comical leer at you at the idea of attempting to pour wine from an empty bottle, he turns, dives into his cellar and fishes up another. You bid him go on with that capital song, offering to save him the trouble of unsealing ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood
... your long-winded preachers! But I want my things. I am going before it is too late. Advise you to go too, young man," he hiccoughed, "before you are overlooked. She is a witch! She's the devil's mark on her, I tell you! I'd like to have the finding it!" And with an ugly leer he advanced a step as if he ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... men laughed gruffly at these remarks, and threw leer-eyed looks at me. I asked one who seemed bad, what calibre his gun was. 'Forty-five ha'r trigger,' he answered. I nosed around over their plunder purpose. They had things drying around like Bannock ...
— Cattle Brands - A Collection of Western Camp-fire Stories • Andy Adams
... one moment, but firm the next, as the kangaroo, bending downward with the side of its head to him and nearly on a level with the water, which rose in violent ebullitions consequent upon Shanter's struggles, seemed to have a peculiar triumphant leer in its eyes, as if it were saying: "Wait a bit; it is your ...
— The Dingo Boys - The Squatters of Wallaby Range • G. Manville Fenn
... a group before of maladies, And griefs, and Famine empty as a breeze,— A double monster, with a gloating leer Fix'd on his other half. They drew them near, One after one, led onward by Despair, That like the last of winter glimmer'd there,— A dismal prologue to his brother Death, Which was behind, and, with the horrid breath Of his wide baneful nostrils, plied them on. And often as ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... awoke from his lethargy, and drank a pint of the wine at a draught. The nigger put out a glass with a satisfied leer. The Captain took a bottle and laid his hand on the cork. But there it stayed, for at that moment there came a horrible sound of grating and tearing from the engine-room, and it was succeeded by a moment of dead and ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... with scornful, yet with jealous eyes, And hate for arts that caused himself to rise, Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, And with our sneering teach the rest to sneer; Willing to wound and yet afraid to strike, Just hint a fault and hesitate dislike, Alike reserved to blame or to commend, A tim'rous foe, and a suspicious friend, Dreading e'en fools, by flatterers besieged, ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... begins at once, and will be perfected. The bloated look of self-indulgence passes away like the leprosy of Naaman, the cheek grows pure, the lips return to the smile of hope instead of the grin of greed, and the eyes that made innocence shrink and shudder with their yellow leer grow childlike and sweet and faithful. The mammon-eyes, hitherto fixed on the earth, are lifted to meet their kind; the lips that mumbled over figures and sums of gold learn to say words of grace and tenderness. The truculent, repellent, self-satisfied face begins ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... the spring. Ping! Out sprang the Jack-in-the-box, with the same red nose, the same leer, the same roguish eyes which had surprised the children ...
— The Christmas Angel • Abbie Farwell Brown
... but feminine characters, was without a signature; and when Fox had retired, with a cunning leer upon his sharp features, and Bruin was left alone to meditate upon the singularity of the adventure, that great beast lost himself in conjectures as to the writer, and figured to his imagination a creature very different, no doubt, to the being actually in question. His impatience, however, to ...
— The Adventures of a Bear - And a Great Bear too • Alfred Elwes
... disconcerted my companions, who were too proud to be protected by a woman. "Dahabo," however, relieved their anxiety by informing us that the Gerad had sent his eldest son Sherwa, as escort. This princess was a gipsy-looking dame, coarsely dressed, about thirty years old, with a gay leer, a jaunty demeanour, and the reputation of being "fast;" she showed little shame-facedness when I saluted her, and received with noisy joy the appropriate present of a new and handsome Tobe. About 4 P.M. returned our second messenger, bearing with him a reproving message from the ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... First favoured the court with a fascinating leer, which left no doubt on any one's mind that he ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... no harm comin' to y'u, lady, while I am with y'u," said the fellow, with a hateful leer that made Stella shudder. ...
— Ted Strong's Motor Car • Edward C. Taylor
... pursued by an angry farmer with a pitchfork. One characteristic of the medival imagination is its fondness for the grotesque. It loved queer beasts, half eagle, half lion, hideous batlike creatures, monsters like nothing on land or sea. They lurk among the foliage on choir screens, leer at you from wall or column, or squat upon the gutters ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... ruffian, interrupting. "There is one," he continues, looking askant at the Indian, with the leer of a demon, "one, I take it, whom the young Tovas chief would wish to retain as an ornament to his court. Pretty creature the nina was, when I last saw her; and I have no doubt still is, unless your Chaco sun has made havoc with her charms. ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... with the terror of his helplessness and the crushing weight of the quivering masses of muscle about him, would have fallen but for their dread support. His consciousness fast deserting him, fascinated, he watched the monstrous leer as the head drew farther back, poised. He felt the agonizing pressure as the great muscles steeled for the blow, and in the moment before his senses departed, heard two crashing shots that sounded from behind him. With the smashing reports the poised head thudded to the ground, the folds fell ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... where at the head of a long table sat a lady belonging to the Society of Friends. She was reading aloud to about sixteen women prisoners, who were engaged in needle-work. They all rose on my entrance, curtsied respectfully, and then resumed their seats and employment. Instead of a scowl, leer, or ill-suppressed laugh, I observed upon their countenances an air of self-respect and gravity, a sort of consciousness of their improved character, and the altered position in which they are placed. I afterwards ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... character, like Old Man Givins, the drunkard, or the weak-minded Binns girl. When she passed the drug-store corner there would be a sniggering among the vacant-eyed loafers idling there, and they would leer at each other and jest ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... want to quarrel with him if I can help it, and therefore I softened it down. "You hear me say, Mr. Moss, that I'm an engaged young woman. Knowing that, you oughtn't to speak to me as you do." "Why, what do I say?" You should have seen his grin as he asked me; such a leer of triumph, as though he knew that he were getting the better of me. "Mr. Jones wouldn't approve if he were to see it." "But luckily he don't," said my admirer. Oh, if you knew how willingly I'd stand at a tub and wash your shirts, while the very touch of ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... else become the rival of that degraded being. I will never do it. I will see Luella, and tell her she must decide at once between us, and take a decisive stand in the matter. I saw a sneer upon the licentious mouth and a leer in the bloodshot eye of the reptile as he saw me treated so cavalierly. If I had him here for about five minutes I would settle this matter with him. And then I thought Luella's parting was not as warm as usual. Was it my jealous fears, or has she really been influenced? ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... they parted, weak and wan: And he left the shore; His ship diminished, was low, was gone; And she heard in the waves as the daytide wore, And read in the leer of the sun that shone, ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... convolutions. I saw the other day a little Japanese picture of a boat in a stormy sea, the waves beating over it; three warriors in the boat lie prostrate and rigid with terror and misery. Above, through a rent in the clouds, is visible an ugly grotesque figure, with a demoniacal leer on his face, beating upon a number of drums. The picture is entitled "The Thunder-God beats his drums." Well, Carlyle seems to me like that; he has no pity for humanity, he only likes to add to its ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Kazan's head over with the butt of his gun, and the leer of satisfaction in his face gave place to a sudden look of amazement. For the first time he saw ...
— Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... me, Savile. Just tell me one thing," Jasmyn said, with an inquisitive leer. "Is she ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... are these? Why sit they here in twilight? Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows, Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish, Baring teeth that leer like skulls' tongues wicked? Stroke on stroke of pain,—but what slow panic, Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets? Ever from their hair and through their hand palms Misery swelters. Surely we have perished Sleeping, and walk hell; but ...
— Poems • Wilfred Owen
... go," cried Hen, with an ugly leer. "I know what you want to do. You want to drive me out to that shanty, so that big fellow will jump on me. Go ...
— The Grammar School Boys Snowbound - or, Dick & Co. at Winter Sports • H. Irving Hancock
... a poor weak woman," she answered, with a devilish leer. "You hate me, and you are afraid of me without any reason. If not, tell me, good sir, why you were so frightened the first time ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... rhetoric." Captain B—, who had eaten himself black in the face, and, with the napkin under his chin, was no bad representation of Sancho Panza in the suds, with the dishclout about his neck, when the duke's scullions insisted upon shaving him; this sea-wit, turning to the boy, with a waggish leer, "I suppose (said he) you don't understand the figure of amplification so well as Monsieur your father." At that instant, one of the nieces, who knew her uncle to be very ticklish, touched him under the ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... I couldn't tell what it was. I decided it was a lactone, and let it go at that. I nodded as I went past the receptionist, and her smile made me feel uncomfortable again, just as it always did; there was too much of a leer in it. I never stopped to tell her where I was going; I just ...
— The Professional Approach • Charles Leonard Harness
... Leather, 'those by the book-stall. That be Mr. Waffles,' continued he, giving his master a touch in the ribs as he jerked his portmanteau into a fly, 'that be Mr. Waffles,' repeated he, with a knowing leer. ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... "empty, hence, perhaps, leer horse, a horse without a rider; leer is an adjective meaning uncontrolled, hence 'leer drunkards'" (Halliwell); according to Nares, a leer (empty) horse meant also a led ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... unabashed, unawed, may strive to sting thee at heel in vain; Craft and fear and mistrust may leer and mourn and murmur and plead and plain: Thou art thou: and thy sunbright brow is hers that blasted ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... half-suppressed laughter as he speeds into the trap. The hoary cripple cannot hide his malicious glee, the "stiff blind horse" is as grotesque as he is woeful, the dreary day itself, as it sinks, shoots one grim red leer at the doomed knight as he sets forth; in the penury and inertness of the wasted plain he sees "grimace"; the mountains fight like bulls or doze like dotards; and the Dark Tower itself is "round and squat," built of brown stone, a mere anticlimax to romance; while ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... short and looked at the girl with a half-drunken leer, then wiped his mouth with the ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... where he sat, Came the Scalds and Saga-men; Is it to be wondered at, That they quarrelled now and then, When o'er his beer Began to leer Drunken Thangbrand, ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... and mouth were drawn and seamed and scarred in a frightful and hideous manner, the teeth protruded and the mouth was drawn to one side in a frightful leer; above that was all the beauty of "My Lady ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... with a wink at you, which sets the wicked part of us on fire: I have known it myself, and I own it to my shame; and if I happened to be ignorant of the history of Countess Fanny, I could not refute his wantonness. He has just the same benevolent leer for a bishop. Give me, if we are to make a choice, the beggar's breech for decency, I say: I like it vastly in preference to a Nymney, who leads you up to the curtain and agitates it, and bids you to retire on tiptoe. You cannot help being angry with the man for both reasons. But he is the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... one individual lingered near the May-pole. As he was especially active, we may describe him and his employment. He was apparently about fifteen. He had coarse straight white hair—a face that denoted stupidity—but with a cunning leer, which seemed to belie ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... masters. In place of the fine, delicate, low relief of the old school, they adopted a relief which, though very prominent, was soft, round, and feebly modelled. The eyes of their personages have a foolish leer; the nostrils slant upwards; the corners of the mouth, the chin, and indeed all the features, are drawn up as if converging towards a central point, which is stationed in the middle of the ear. Two schools, each independent of the other, have bequeathed their works to us. The least known flourished ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... in the direction of the vast shadowy figure, which to Laurence's eye appeared to turn towards his niche with a leer, as if to say, "Listen to him. What ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... An ugly leer came over the brutal face of the giant; "Oh, I ain't, ain't I? You think I'm drunk. But I ain't, not so mighty much. Jest enough t' perten me up a pepper grain." Then, turning to his companion, who was ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... cried Hen, with an ugly leer. "I know what you want to do. You want to drive me out to that shanty, so that big fellow will jump on me. Go yourself, Mr. ...
— The Grammar School Boys Snowbound - or, Dick & Co. at Winter Sports • H. Irving Hancock
... wind swept down from the heights, cutting the fog into shreds. For an instant, with an evil leer the sun peered through the naked woods of Vincennes, sank like a blood-clot in the battery smoke, lower, ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... night like mushrooms,' he said with a leer. (There was no mistake about his voice—it was Ombos; the words rang through my brain as if they had been shouted.) 'You can't expect a statue to turn into a god in a breath, or to come down and skip about ... it ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... glory some advance a lying claim, Thieves of renown, and pilferers of fame: Their front supplies what their ambition lacks; They know a thousand lords, behind their backs. Cottil is apt to wink upon a peer, When turn'd away, with a familiar leer; And Harvey's eyes, unmercifully keen, Have murdered fops, by whom she ne'er was seen. Niger adopts stray libels; wisely prone, To cover shame still greater than his own. Bathyllus, in the winter of threescore, Belies ...
— English Satires • Various
... Japanese picture of a boat in a stormy sea, the waves beating over it; three warriors in the boat lie prostrate and rigid with terror and misery. Above, through a rent in the clouds, is visible an ugly grotesque figure, with a demoniacal leer on his face, beating upon a number of drums. The picture is entitled "The Thunder-God beats his drums." Well, Carlyle seems to me like that; he has no pity for humanity, he only likes to add to its terrors and its bewilderment. He preached silence and seclusion to men of activity, energy ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... at the window looked like that of an East Indian!" declared Will. "His skin was brassy, and his eyes had the devil's leer in them just as the eyes of the Little Brass God are said ...
— Boy Scouts in Northern Wilds • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... born man—but you have had advantages. Make a good use of 'em. Mix with the young nobility. There's many of 'em who can't spend a dollar to your guinea, my boy. And as for the pink bonnets (here from under the heavy eyebrows there came a knowing and not very pleasing leer)—why boys will be boys. Only there's one thing I order you to avoid, which, if you do not, I'll cut you off with a shilling, by Jove; and ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the quarterdeck at this dismissal, but as he put one leg over the gangway to get down to his boat, he said in a hoarse voice, and with a sly leer in his ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... converse, and live with ease: Should such a man, too fond to rule alone, 195 Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne. View him with scornful, yet with jealous eyes, And hate for arts that caus'd himself to rise; Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer; 200 Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike, Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike; Alike reserv'd to blame, or ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... with an appraising leer. "Don't have to say so," he drawled, "if you ain't, what have you-alls got them dinky little canoes for, an' if you were after 'gators you'd be packing big rifles 'stead of them fancy guns. You ain't got no call to deny it, for I was aiming to give ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... the old bookseller. "You're as good as they are." He leaned forward from the easy chair, and tapped the clerk's arm with a long, claw-like finger. "I say," he continued, with a smile that was something between a wink and a leer, and suggestive of a pleased satisfaction. ...
— The Talleyrand Maxim • J. S. Fletcher
... going to succeed in the Navy, sir," Cantor continued, then, seeing the young ensign's face still impassive, he added, with a malicious leer: ...
— Dave Darrin at Vera Cruz • H. Irving Hancock
... He began to leer at her with amorous eyes when he spoke, and he began to find frequent occasions for taking hold of her arm. He managed to make himself odious in the extreme, so that in sheer self-defense Marion made haste to bring his ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... it began to grow most valuable, for a twelfth part of its worth. It was a good speculation—a very safe one. The old man stowed his pocket-book carefully in the breast of his great-coat, and hobbled away with a leer of triumph. That will had made him ten years younger at ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... been expressed, M. le Duc cast a brilliant leer at me, and prepared to speak; but the Keeper of the Seals, who, from his side of the table did not see this movement, wishing also to say something, M. le Duc d'Orleans intimated to him that M. le Duc had the start of him. Raising himself majestically ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... chin, was no bad representation of Sancho Panza in the suds, with the dishclout about his neck, when the duke's scullions insisted upon shaving him; this sea-wit, turning to the boy, with a waggish leer, "I suppose (said he) you don't understand the figure of amplification so well as Monsieur your father." At that instant, one of the nieces, who knew her uncle to be very ticklish, touched him under the short ribs, on which the little man attempted to spring ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... Macht von Stund zu Stund, Wie's Krueglein, das am Brunnenstein zersprang, Und dessen Inhalt sickert auf den Grund, So weit es ging, den ganzen Weg entlang,— Nun ist es leer. Wer mag daraus noch trinken? Und zu den andern Scherben ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... the quack drew together, and the eyes peered out sharply through half-closed lids. "There's plenty of wanting and not much getting in this world," he rejoined, with a leer of contempt, and spat on the floor, while yet the furtive watchfulness of the eyes indicated a mind ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... untrammeled by old traditions, have sought and are seeking milder means of mitigating our bodily ills. All honor to them. They have driven away the old doctor of our childhood, whose most pleasant smile resembled the amiable leer that a cannibal might be supposed to bestow upon a plump missionary. The old curmudgeon, with his huge bottles of mixtures and his immense boulders—I beg pardon, I should say, boluses of nastiness—has ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... had this advantage over her likeness, that she was invited everywhere; though how she, at her age, could fly about to so many parties, unless she was a fairy, no one could say. Behind the fairy, up the marble stairs, came the most noble Farintosh, with that vacuous leer which distinguishes his lordship. Ethel seemed to be carrying the stack of flowers which the Marquis had sent to her. The noble Bustington (Viscount Bustington, I need scarcely tell the reader, is the heir of the house of Podbury), the Baronet of the North, the gallant Crackthorpe, ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... plenty of all that makes life soft and easy. He bet there wouldn't many hit any higher spots than him. He bet there was one little girl that would be looked on as lucky, in case she was a good little girl and encouraged him to show his natural kindness. And I was favored with a blood-curdling leer from across the camp, of which I had put as much as possible between myself and the object ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... man," said the jockey, or whatever he was, turning to me with an arch leer, "I suppose I may consider myself as the purchaser of this here animal, for the use and behoof of this young gentleman," making a sign with his head towards the tall young man by his side. "By no means," said I; "I am utterly unacquainted with ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... understand Thoorko better nor the English understand Scotch, it's little speed I'll come wi' them," said Dan with a leer. "Howsomediver, I'll give 'em a trial. I say, Mr Red-beard, hubba doorum bobble moti squorum howko joski tearum thaddi whak? Come, now, avic, let's hear what ye've got to say to that. An' mind what ye spake, 'cause we ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... this is infernul nonsense. I manetane that wax figgers is more elevatin than awl the plays ever wroten. Take Shakespeer for instunse. Peple think heze grate things, but I kontend heze quite the reverse to the kontrary. What sort of sense is thare to King Leer, who goze round cussin his darters, chawin hay and throin straw at folks, and larfin like a silly old koot and makin a ass of hisself ginerally? Thare's Mrs. Mackbeth—sheze a nise kind of woomon to have round ain't ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... well-cared-for faces were lean in the wrong place, and puffy under the eyes. In place of courage they flaunted an insolent leer, and the smile intended to convey self-confidence betrayed to a close ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... Guyon's life were spent in prison. Toward the last she was allowed to live in nominal freedom. But despotism, with savage leer and stealthy step, saw that Fenelon was kept far away. In those declining days, when the shadows were lengthening toward the east, her time and talents were given to teaching the simple rudiments of knowledge to the peasantry, to alleviating their material wants and to ministering ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... time—a fact that was afterward recalled with some surprise and no little horror. At the time, the loungers thought his smile was a merry one, but afterward they stoutly maintained there was downright villainy in the leer. His coat was very dusty, proving that he had driven far and swiftly. Three or four of the loungers followed him into the store. He was standing before the counter over which Mr. Lamson served his soda-water. In one hand he held an ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... before. Her tottering body, clothed in bear-skins, was bent forward over a large triangular shield of polished brass, on which she leant her lank, shrivelled arms. Her head shook with a tremulous, palsied action; a leer, half smile, half grimace, distended her withered lips and lightened her sunken eyes. Sinister, cringing, repulsive; her face livid with the reflection from the weapon that was her support, and her figure scarcely human in the rugged garments that encompassed its gaunt ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... insolent look. Thinking he had come with a message from Omar Beg, a Hungarian brigadier-general in the Turkish service who was stationed here, we saluted in the usual manner. Without returning it, he walked up, stepped across us, flung himself on our rug, leaned on his elbow, and with an impertinent leer stared in our faces all round until he met Richard's eye, which partook of something of the tiger kind, when he started and turned pale. Richard called out, "Kawwasses!" The kawwasses and two wardis ran into the room. ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... say—trapped!" said Arden, with a leer on his dark face. "You are the fool, Helmar, not I. But see here, I am on business. Not of my own, but that of ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... on the shoulder. It was one of the men who had boarded the ship. An evil leer passed over Thurman's ...
— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton
... handsome, carefree boys of sixteen and eighteen, passed the drinks with many a jest and often a wink, but never a drop drank they, not until the Lodge had closed its doors on all visitors, and then Tom, the elder, with a final leer at Sandy the younger, drained off a glass of bad whisky with a grace that ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... with her eyes wide open, that at length Little Dorrit, to entice her from her box, rose and looked out of window. As she glanced down into the yard, she saw Pancks come in and leer up with the corner of his eye as ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... morning, Colonel Spaulding walked through his outer office. He stopped at the desk where the pretty brunette WAC sergeant was typing industriously, leaned across the desk, and gave her his best leer. "How about a date tonight, music lover?" he asked, "'Das Rheingold' is playing tonight. A night at the opera would do ...
— The Foreign Hand Tie • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Session's sentence wrung her to the soul, Nor could she lounge the gag to shule a win; The knowing bench had tipp'd her buzer queer, [8] For Dick had beat the hoof upon the pad, Of Field, or Chick-lane—was the boldest lad That ever mill'd the cly, or roll'd the leer. [9] And with Nell he kept a lock, to fence, and tuz, And while his flaming mot was on the lay, With rolling kiddies, Dick would dive and buz, And cracking kens concluded ev'ry day; [10] But fortune fickle, ever on the wheel, Turn'd up a rubber, ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... ain't got no time to fool!" prompted the man, with a leer. "I'm dead onto your lay, and there's a bull comin' along ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... that one individual lingered near the May-pole. As he was especially active, we may describe him and his employment. He was apparently about fifteen. He had coarse straight white hair—a face that denoted stupidity—but with a cunning leer, which seemed ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... clammy sweat superseded by returning warmth. Working earnestly, thinking of nothing but the human life that hung in the balance, I failed to observe the presence of the most disagreeable of the female nurses, who was standing, with "arms akimbo," looking on, until, with an insulting leer, she remarked, "It seems to me ye're taking great liberties for an honest woman." Paralyzed with surprise and indignation, I knew not how to act. Just then the surgeon in charge of the ward, ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... thankful you will be to me, my lord, for having enabled him to establish the right," says Sampson, with a leer on his face. ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... dogs and sledge were ready did Bucky utter a word. The terrific beating he had received had stunned him for a few minutes; but now he jumped to his feet, not waiting for the command from Walker, and strode up close to Billy. There was a vengeful leer on his bloody face and his eyes blazed almost white, but his voice was so low that Conway and Walker could only hear the murmur of it. His words were meant for ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... see—let me see:—Before George, I have it, and it comes as pat too! Go me to the very judge that sate upon him; it is an amorous, impotent old magistrate, and keeps admirably. I saw him leer upon you from the bench: He will tell you what is sweeter than strawberries and ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... weak and wan: And he left the shore; His ship diminished, was low, was gone; And she heard in the waves as the daytide wore, And read in the leer of the sun that shone, That ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... Harris laughed harshly. "Look here, my chick," said he, with an ugly leer, "you're comin' wi' us; that's settled, so you may stow yer cheek an' hurry up, or it'll ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... rose and turned With sideway leer; and printing with vague step Irregular the shining sands, on strode Toward his cold home, alone; and saw by chance A little bird light-perched, that, being sick, Plucked from the fissured sea-cliff grains of sand; And, noting, said, "O bird, when beak ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... shoved his hands into the hip pockets of his striped trousers; and putting on a leer of pretended indifference, turned to a man named Benoit, who was regarding ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... reached forth his hand, and grasped the slender stem of the wine-glass; but his arm trembled more than that of the most hardened toper in the group before him. He had been trembling in the presence of that squad of tyrants—those leer-eyed grinning debauchees, who seemed to be opening the gate of hell, and ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... can't give the whole description. There is not a page in Sterne's writing but has something that were better away, a latent corruption,—a hint as of an impure presence. Some of that dreary double entendre may be attributed to freer times and manners than ours,—but not all. The foul satyr's eyes leer out of the leaves constantly. The last words the famous author wrote were bad and wicked. The last lines the poor stricken wretch penned were for pity and pardon." Now a line or two about Goldsmith, and I will then let my reader go to the volume and study the lectures ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... mistake, my son. Your poor old father isn't quite a fool, though he is only an honest broken merchant." He looked up sideways at his son with a wink and a most unpleasant leer. "Where there's money I can smell it. There's money there, and heaps of it. It's my belief that he is the richest man in the world, though how he came to be so I should not like to guarantee. I'm not quite blind yet, Robert. Have you seen the ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the day before yesterday) be it merely in my nightcap, and still more when I come forth at full length and in my Sunday suit into the marketplace, one can't help swearing that the whole gang of them have started out of every hole and corner in Europe merely for my sake: they so leer, and ogle me, and whisper, and ask questions, and laugh, and are in ecstacies. I might grow rich, meseems, were I to let myself be stared at for money while I stay here; and if I chance to give them all this pleasure gratis, ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... of many duels and more scandals, and darling of the Nationalist Press, also saw her beauty. With him to see was to act, and he never passed her without a conquering twirl of his waxed moustache, and a staring leer which he fondly believed to be a glance teeming with passion. Since even he, conscious as he was of his extraordinary fascination, could hardly mistake her look of annoyance for the glow of responsive passion, he resolved on more masterly action. ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... Jean Kostka, and ask him to tell us confidentially and upon honour what it is that has changed his views, making him discover the leer of Baal-Zeboub where he once saw the smile of the spiritual Eos, he turns Trappist at once, and goes into retreat with M. Huysman; there is not a syllable of information in all his beau volume as to any intellectual process through which he passed on the ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... with a chuckle of intense satisfaction and a leer at our big neighbour, Bob dived below again; and shortly afterwards a frizzling sound from forward, and an odour strongly suggestive of bacon and eggs, which was wafted upwards from the companion, informed me that he had entered ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... the larboard rigging stood a big, broad-shouldered fellow, who nodded familiarly at the second mate, cast a bit of a leer at the captain as if to impress on the rest of us his own daring and independence, and gave me, when I caught his eye, a cold, noncommittal stare. His name, I shortly learned, was Kipping. Undeniably he was impudent; but he had, nevertheless, a mild face and a mild manner, and ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... general's years, he evidently is a little vain of his person, and ambitious of conquests. I have observed him on Sunday in church eyeing the country girls most suspiciously; and have seen him leer upon them with a downright amorous look, even when he has been gallanting Lady Lillycraft with great ceremony through the churchyard. The general, in fact, is a veteran in the service of Cupid rather than of Mars, having signalised himself in all the garrison towns and ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... regaling himself after having killed the monster Caricatura, that so severely galled his virtuous friend, the heaven-born Wilkes." Hogarth's use of the word caricatura conveys a meaning which is not patent at first sight; Wilkes's leer was the leer of a satyr, "his face," says Macaulay, "was so hideous that the caricaturists were forced in their own despite to flatter him."[5] The real sting lies in the accuracy of Hogarth's ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... "And you saw something else, William?" he gave me a wicked, frightened leer, and shuffled off to feed the mules. Flattery, entreaties, threats left him unmoved; he never told me what the third thing was that he had seen ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... soon forget the interview with the lawyer in which I was told the inhospitable truth. Nor shall I forget his truculent leer when he hinted that I had best be gone out of these parts, since it was not yet too late to bring down the sentence of outlawry from ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... shuffled uneasily, but replied with a knowing leer, "Aint ye Dicky Falkner what used ter live cross the river ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... pleasant-looking fellow, with huge black whiskers and a roguish eye. He touched the guitar with masterly skill, and sang little amorous ditties with an expressive leer." ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... eye, with a leer, lighted on the cask in the corner. He bethought him that it had a vent-hole even though the landlord had removed the spigot. He tiptoed unsteadily across the room, and proceeded with much difficulty to insert ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... dream so odd and funny, I cannot resist recording it here.— Methought that the Genius of Matrimony Before me stood with a joyous leer, Leading a husband in each hand, And both for me, which lookt rather queer;— One I could perfectly understand, But why there were two wasn't quite so clear. T'was meant however, I soon could see, To afford me a choice—a ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... that my daughter is very irritable and passionate, and withal so fond of admiration, that nothing in the shape of a leer comes amiss to her. She likes a good squeeze above all things. Evil, and the Father of Evil though I be, I am not so very wicked as to wish thee to marry a woman of that description without thy knowing what kind of treasure thou ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... was the burden of his song. Those Boches had come into his village early in the war, torn him from his wife and his 'petite fille.' Since then he had 'had fear,' been hungry, been cold, eaten grass; eyeing some fat little dog, he would leer and mutter: 'J'ai mange cela, c'est bon!' and with fierce triumph add: 'Ils ont faim, les Boches!' The 'arrogant civilian' had never done his military service, for his infirmity, it seemed, had ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... a leetle too clevaire," said the maid with an evil leer,—"she would rob Madame, would she? She would play the espionne, hein? Eh bien, ma petite, you stay 'ere ontil you say what you lave done wiz ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... heard every word which had passed, and he saw at once that he would have a field for his diabolical machinations. Could Claude have seen the leer with which the ghastly apparition followed him as he passed, he would have shuddered with a sense of approaching danger. He did not look back, however, and the Man in Green, having requested an audience with De Roberval, was ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... backs and gooseflesh of his nudes! What lurking cynicism there is in some of his interiors! Voila l'animale! he exclaims as he shows us the far from enchanting antics of some girl. How Schopenhauer would laugh at the feminine "truths" of Degas! Without the leer of Rops, Degas is thrice as unpleasant. He is a douche for the romantic humbug painter, the painter of sleek bayaderes ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... the arches spring, usually carved in some fantastic mask or face; and on these the Shakspearian imagination of the Gothic artists seems to have let itself loose to run riot: there is every variety of expression, from, the most beautiful to the most goblin and grotesque. One has the leer of fiendish triumph, with budding horns, showing too plainly his paternity; again you have the drooping eyelids and saintly features of some fair virgin; and then the gasping face of some old monk, apparently ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... This is better than raising potatoes on the Saskatchewan, or hiding among the niggers in Louis—hic—iana. Down with the Oligarchy. To hell with them. Hurrah! This is my palace. I am a king! Look-a-there,' he said, with a roll and a leer, pointing over his shoulder at the shrinking and terrified women; 'ain't they beauties,—hic—all ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... caught the general idea on the instant. The two exchanged looks, such as are only current between very 'cute, knowing, sharp-witted men. Hiram was betrayed into returning Mr. Bennett's leer before he was aware of it. It was a spontaneous recognition, and he felt ashamed at being thus thrown off his guard. He colored slightly, and said something about his duty ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... everybody and everything, especially the eider-down quilt, which rises in slow billows in front of my eyes and threatens to engulf me. When in a paroxysm of fury I suddenly cast it on the floor, it lies there still billowing, and seems to leer at me. There is something fat and sinister and German about that eiderdown. I never noticed it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 18, 1917 • Various
... Uncle John, who was dancing attendance on her with the leer of a satyr, "please do not let me disturb this lady. I am so troubled about the anxiety I must be causing my father and my friends at the present moment, that I could not really stop here. All I ask is that she will be kind enough to lend me a fresh horse and a guide, so that I may ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... as it does now, of an overdoing of the outward demonstrations of modesty; a 'leer' was once a look with nothing amiss in it (Piers Plowman). 'Daft' was modest or retiring; 'orgies' were religious ceremonies; the Blessed Virgin speaks of herself in an early poem as 'God's wench.' In 'crafty' and 'cunning' no crooked wisdom was ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... essay on "Martin Luther on Celibacy and Marriage" Dr. Brandes derides with a satyr-like leer all traditional ideas of chastity, conjugal fidelity, and ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... most lifelike portrait of my Sen, Drawn by the hand of Death; each fleshless pate, Cursed with a ghastly grin to eyes unrubbed With love's magnetic ointment, seems to mine To smile an amiable smile like his Whose amiable smile I—I alone Am able to distinguish from his leer! See how the gathering coyotes flit Through the lit spaces, or with burning eyes Star the black shadows with a steadfast gaze! About my feet the poddy toads at play, Bulbously comfortable, try to hop, And tumble ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... impotent rage, P. Sybarite climbed back on his stool, while George sat down at his desk, lighted a Sweet Caporal (it was after three o'clock and both the partners were gone for the day) and with a leer watched the bookkeeper carefully slit the envelope and withdraw ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... feared than any depth of serious love, however absorbing and apparently foolish, is that vicious condition in which trifling takes the place of all serious love, when women are viewed only as dolls, and addressed with an odious leer of affected knowingness as 'my dear,' wink, etc. Now to this tends the false condition of women when called 'the ladies.' On the other hand, what an awful elevation arises when each views in the other ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... and think they are thinking. But the mind goes out under this regimen, like a fire without a draught; and it is not very strange, if the instinct of mental self-preservation drives them to brandy-and-water, which makes the hoarse whisper of memory musical for a few brief moments, and puts a weak leer of promise on the features of the hollow-eyed future. The Colonel was kept pretty well in hand as yet by his wife, and though it had happened to him once or twice to come home rather late at night with a curious tendency to say the same thing twice and even three times over, it had always ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... noble pride, can Envy's leer appal, Or staring Folly's vain applauses soothe? Can jealous Fear Truth's dauntless heart enthrall? Suspicion lurks not in the ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... brothels invite the pencil of a Hogarth. Their bloated forms, pimpled features and bloodshot eyes are suggestive of an Inferno, while their tawdry dresses, brazen leer, and disgusting assumption of an air of gay abandon, emphasizes their hideousness and renders it more repulsive. Most of them have passed through the successive grades of immorality. Some of them have been the queenly mistress of the spendthrift, and have descended, step by step, to the foul, ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... of a young girl, but when duty seemed to call, this school-mistress could be brave, and she offered to give Elspeth her schooling free of charge. Like the other two hers was a "mixed" school, but she did not want Tommy, because she had seen him in the square one day, and there was a leer on his face that reminded her ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... ain't so. He is the worst one that comes here. They say he has sold himself to the devil for a pretty face. It's nigh on eighteen years since I met him. He hasn't changed much since then. I have though," she added, with a sickly leer. ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... A leer towards Lilian accompanied this laughter, rendering its hideous significance more palpably expressive. So provoked was I by the brutal behaviour of the yellow wench, I could scarcely restrain myself from rushing up, and kicking her over the bank upon which she was standing. Nothing ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... face against his and rubbed his cheek with hers. To Philip her smile was an abominable leer, and the suggestive glitter of her eyes filled him with horror. He drew ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... thus gossiped was a young man, Ambrogiuolo da Piacenza, by name, who, when Bernabo thus concluded his eulogy of his wife, broke out into a mighty laugh, and asked him with a leer, whether he of all men had this privilege by special patent of the Emperor. Bernabo replied, somewhat angrily, that 'twas a boon conferred upon him by God, who was rather more powerful than the Emperor. To which Ambrogiuolo rejoined:—"I ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... at 11 a.m. (six), "Leer ons alzoo onze dagen tellen" ("So teach us to number our days"); afternoon, 4 p.m. (six), "En de dooden werden geoordeeld uit hetgeen in de boeken geschreven was, naar hunne werken" ("And the dead were judged ...
— Woman's Endurance • A.D.L.
... assistance, Elodie held up a cheap bedroom wall-mirror. He played his one-stringed fiddle. I admired the technical perfection of the famous cigar-act. I noted the stupid bewilderment with which he received a typhoon of hoops thrown by Elodie, and his waggish leer when, clown-wise, he had caught them all. If the audience packed within the canvas amphitheatre had gone mad in applause over this exhibition of exquisite skill interlarded with witty patter, I might ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... the Italian, who came just behind me. I am certain of this; he almost told me so himself, not in words, but the mistakable leer he gave her in reply. It was wicked, sardonic, devilish, and proved beyond doubt that there was some secret, some ...
— The Rome Express • Arthur Griffiths
... leering or "empty, hence, perhaps, leer horse, a horse without a rider; leer is an adjective meaning uncontrolled, hence 'leer drunkards'" (Halliwell); according to Nares, a leer (empty) horse meant also a led ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... personality and merriment is distorted by malevolence.(!) No man who really knows the qualities of Mr. Whistler's best work will imagine that he really believes the highest expression of his art to be realized in reproduction of the grin and glare, the smirk and leer, of Japanese womanhood as represented in its professional types of beauty; but to all appearance he would fain persuade ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... accompanying her to the stairs and on to her room. She hardly said the word good-night to him, and her very lips were white. Wensleydown's face, as he stood with Mildred, drove him mad with its mocking leer, and if he had heard their conversation ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... said Mr. Russell, with a diabolical leer in the direction of the unfortunate Mr. Vickers. "The paper what your father found in your box. ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... —Yo no se leer, ni tan siquiera[78-9] en castellano, que (p79) es lalengua mas clara del mundo; pero el diablo me lleve si esta escritura no es ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... they are pornography. The initiated, after years of wading through the mire, will recognize instantly the significant difference between filthy filth and funny "filth." Dirt for dirt's sake is something else again. Pornography, an eminent American jurist has pointed out, is distinguished by the "leer of ...
— 1601 - Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors • Mark Twain
... me sat Mother Borton, contemplating me as calmly as though this meeting were the most commonplace thing in the world. A candle furnished a dim, flickering light that gave to her hard wicked countenance a diabolic leer that struck a chill ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... delighted them by crying to Mrs. Eddie Swanson, youngest of the women, "Louetta! I managed to pinch Eddie's doorkey out of his pocket, and what say you and me sneak across the street when the folks aren't looking? Got something," with a gorgeous leer, ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... and splashed. She had fine dark eyes, and was young, bold-looking, and handsome; but when she came nearer, the moist pallor of her skin, the slackness of her lower lip and jaw, and an eager and worn expression in her fine eyes, gave her a thirsty, reckless leer that filled Marian with loathing. Her aspect conveyed the same painful suggestion as her voice had done before, but more definitely; for it struck Marian, with a shock, that Conolly, in the grotesque metamorphosis of a nightmare, might appear in some such ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... empty window of Number 13, with the reflected glare of the lamp opposite upon it, seemed to leer down on him like a mocking ghost, claiming him as its own. What was the use of keeping up the struggle any longer? After all, was there not one way ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... threatened life, Ardour look back to maiden Reclusion, and on (with a pang of foreboding) to mockery and evil judgment. Never fear but I brave your story out to the world ere many days. And if any, with profane leer and tongue in the cheek, take your sorrow for reproach or your pitifulness for a shame, let them receive the lash of the whip from one who will trouble to wield it: non ragioniam di lor. For your honourable women I give you Ilaria, ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... Police Depot. It was that of a man who looked like a Lascar, who wore an ill-fitting slop-shop suit of blue, soaked and stained and clinging hideously to his body. His dank black hair was streaked upon his low brow; and his face, although it was notable for a sort of evil leer, had assumed in death another ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... me with apprehension was that of Dejah Thoris and Sola standing there before him, and the fiendish leer of him as he let his great protruding eyes gloat upon the lines of her beautiful figure. She was speaking, but I could not hear what she said, nor could I make out the low grumbling of his reply. She stood there erect before him, her head high held, and even at the distance I was from them ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... gas jet above the wretched little washstand lighted the room but poorly. The door opened slowly. A tall, ungainly woman entered the room—a creature with a sallow, weather-beaten face and a perpetual leer. ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... Hilbrun alone kept a calm exterior—the face of the man who lifts a heavy dumb-bell and throws an impressive glance at the audience. Assistant Lusk was by no means thus proof against success I saw him put a bottle back in his pocket, his face already disintegrated with a tipsy leer. Judge Burrage, perceiving the rain-maker, came out of his gate and proceeded toward him, extending the hand of congratulation. "Mr. Hilbrun," said he, "I am Judge Burrage—the Honorable T. Coleman Burrage—and I will say that I am most ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... path after Death, who is his deceitful leader, and who turns back with a look of malicious glee to see his bewilderment and suffering;—and a Court Fool, whom Death, playing on bagpipes, and dancing, approaches, and, plucking him by the garment, wins him, with a coaxing leer, to join ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... stopped short in the middle of the street, with a cunning leer on his face. The change of purpose supported his belief that a ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... look of the establishment I could not be wrong in assuming that they did a large business in the way of feeding hungry politicians and honester people. 'You may stake some on that, old feller,' says he, with a suspicious leer. His nasal was somewhat strong, so I put him down as from Vermont State, perhaps from the more mountainous part of it. As if shy of my patronage he upon the counter, pompous, spread his hands, as if the ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... away and obeyed the order, passing the American skipper, who was leaning on the bulwark looking sick, and as the sailor came up he turned to him with an ugly leer. ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... was a replica of Shelton's robot control, teleview disc and all. Carlos had just pulled the switch and the robot was taking visible form. The man who prodded him with the automatic was Cadorna, no doubt of that. His evil leer and yellow eyes marked him at once. The other occupant of the room was a big square-built man with a patch over one eye and strips of adhesive tape across his nose—his antagonist of the night before. Must have sneaked off after he came to; it was safer to send one of the robots after ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... fringe, sweeping the furthest ends of the landscape, not with the strange glare of whiteness which it sometimes puts on as an alternative to colour, but as a splotch of vermilion red upon a leaden ground—a red face looking on with a drunken leer. ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... What lurking cynicism there is in some of his interiors! Voila l'animale! he exclaims as he shows us the far from enchanting antics of some girl. How Schopenhauer would laugh at the feminine "truths" of Degas! Without the leer of Rops, Degas is thrice as unpleasant. He is a douche for the romantic humbug painter, the painter of sleek bayaderes ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... magnificent to be such a willing—" added Schliemann, sidling up to him with a dreadful leer on his face. He made use of ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... Forsaken by th'inspiring Nine, I waited at Apollo's shrine: I told him what the world would say, If Stella were unsung to-day: How I should hide my head for shame, When both the Jacks and Robin came; How Ford would frown, how Jim would leer, How Sheridan the rogue would sneer, And swear it does not always follow, That semel'n anno ridet Apollo. I have assur'd them twenty times, That Phoebus help'd me in my rhymes; Phoebus inspired me from above, And he and I were hand ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... it at night, my dear Prince," put in Doola, with a leer. "The clattering of the shields would keep us ...
— Bright-Wits, Prince of Mogadore • Burren Laughlin and L. L. Flood
... and is so expert that he can tell at first sight how many variations any number of words will bear. He talks with a trillo, and gives his words a double relish. He had rather have them bear two senses in vain and impertinently than one to the purpose, and never speaks without a leer-sense. He talks nothing but equivocation and mental reservation, and mightily affects to give a word a double stroke, like a tennis-ball against two walls at one blow, to defeat the expectation of his antagonist. He commonly slurs every fourth or fifth word, and seldom fails ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... American spills her coffee and looks an exclamation; the Bishop pays for his daughter's tea, drops the change in the one chink which the buffet boards disclose, and thinks one; the travelled person, disdaining haste, smiles on all with a pitying leer; the foolish man, who has forgotten something, makes public his conviction that he will lose his train. The adamantine official alone is at his ease, and, as the minutes go, the knell of the train-loser sounds the deeper, the horrid ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... neighboring pictures. It is impossible to carry further than Steen did the art of flattening noses, twisting mouths, shortening necks, making wrinkles, rendering faces stupid, putting on humps, and making his puppets seem as if they were roaring with laughter, vomiting, reeling, or falling. By the leer of a half-closed eye he expressed idiocy and sensuality; by a sneer or a gesture he revealed the brutality of a man. He makes one smell the odor of a pipe, hear the coarse laughter, guess at the stupid or foul discourses—to understand, in a word, tavern-life and the dregs of ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... upon the callers, and many eccentricities, to use no harsher term, are the result. Towards the close of the day, everything is in confusion—the door-bell is never silent. Crowds of young men, in various stages of intoxication, rush into the lighted parlors, leer at the hostess in the vain effort to offer their respects, call for liquor, drink it, and stagger out, to repeat the scene at some other house. Frequently, they are unable to recognize the residences of their friends, and stagger into the wrong house. Some ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... was put, together with the leer that accompanied it, made her start. Alone? Yes, but should she acknowledge it? Would it not be better to say that her husband was up-stairs. The man evidently saw the struggle going on in her mind, for he chuckled to himself ...
— Midnight In Beauchamp Row - 1895 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... figure of languid elegance in evening dress that might have graced the lounge of a West End club had a voice soft with Celtic brogue. The other owned a gross body clothed in loud checks and, with his mean blue eyes, his mottled complexion, and cunning leer, would not have seemed out of place in ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... favoured the court with a fascinating leer, which left no doubt on any one's mind that he ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... here and there, one of which had rather an ugly bulge by the side near the toes. His mouth was exceedingly wide, and his nose remarkably long; its extremity of a deep purple; upon his features was a half-simple smile or leer; in his hand was a long stick. After we had all taken a full view of one another I said in Welsh, addressing myself to the man in grey, "Pray may I take the liberty of asking the ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... of Old Sharon—as dirty as ever, clothed in a long, frowzy, gray overcoat, with his pug-dog at his heels, and his smoke-blackened pipe in his mouth, with a tan white hat on his head, which looked as if it had been picked up in a gutter, a hideous leer in his eyes, and a jaunty trip in his walk—took her so completely by surprise that she could only return Moody's friendly greeting by silently pressing his hand. As for Moody's companion, to look at him for a second time ...
— My Lady's Money • Wilkie Collins
... sight that froze me with apprehension was that of Dejah Thoris and Sola standing there before him, and the fiendish leer of him as he let his great protruding eyes gloat upon the lines of her beautiful figure. She was speaking, but I could not hear what she said, nor could I make out the low grumbling of his reply. She stood there erect before him, her head high held, and even at the distance ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... sir," said the man. "Glad to see a new customer, sir." He pocketed the money, and showed them, out, standing to look after them with a malicious leer as they disappeared, and jerking his left ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... with an insolent leer; "and his she will be who casts highest. If two, or ten, or twenty of us should cast the same, we have ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... after story without getting sight of the madman. Finally he reached the roof. It was waving like swells on a lake before a breeze. He caught sight of the Mad Musician standing on the street wall, thirty stories from the street, a leer on his devilish visage. He jumped ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... spoken name and the tone were significant enough. He fell back a step, and scowled at Stonor as if he suspected him of a desire to make fun of him. Then his eyes went involuntarily to Hooliam. Stonor, following his glance, was struck by the odd, self-conscious leer on Hooliam's comely face. Suddenly it flashed on him that this was his man. His face went blank with astonishment. The supposed Hooliam ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... well known to his friends, as well as to his creditors. Lord Guildford met him one day. 'Well, Sherry, so you've taken a new house, I hear.'—'Yes, and you'll see now that everything will go on like clockwork.'—'Ay,' said my lord, with a knowing leer, 'tick, tick.' Even his son Tom used to laugh at him for it. 'Tom, if you marry that girl, I'll cut you off with a shilling,'—'Then you must borrow it,' replied the ingenuous youth.[8] Tom sometimes disconcerted his father with his inherited wit—his only ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... drunk talk to you," insisted Anthony with a leer. "Firs' place, my wife wants nothin' whatever do with you. Never did. ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... over toward Rex, walking a little unsteadily, and with such a leer in his eye that Rex ...
— Two Boys and a Fortune • Matthew White, Jr.
... old bookseller. "You're as good as they are." He leaned forward from the easy chair, and tapped the clerk's arm with a long, claw-like finger. "I say," he continued, with a smile that was something between a wink and a leer, and suggestive of a pleased ...
— The Talleyrand Maxim • J. S. Fletcher
... sprang to his feet; but the business was over in two twos. The four living fellows looked at each other in rather a ghastly fashion; the dead man contemplating a corner of the roof with a singular and ugly leer. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the paper," said Mr. Russell, with a diabolical leer in the direction of the unfortunate Mr. Vickers. "The paper what your father found in your ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... her go on. The gipsy told him that he was a bachelor, but would not be so long; and that he was dearer to somebody than he thought: The Knight still repeated she was an idle baggage, and bid her go on. Ah, master, says the gipsy, that roguish leer of yours makes a pretty woman's heart ache; you have not that simper about the mouth for nothing—The uncouth gibberish with which all this was uttered, like the darkness of an oracle, made us the more attentive to it. To ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... contemptuously on his heel, with military precision. Then he chuckled Dolores under the chin with a leer, to have his hand indignantly pushed aside. As the girl glared at him with a flash of hatred in her eyes, he stalked into the taproom, followed by ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... with a holy leer, Saw he might well be spared, and soon withdrew: This forced my servant to a quick retreat, For fear to be discovered.—Guess ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... looked he beheld this fellow go straight to the great cabin, where he disappeared with a cunning leer upon his face, so that our hero could not but be aware that the purpose of the eavesdropper must be to communicate all that he had overheard to his master. At this thought the last drop of bitterness was added to his trouble, for ...
— Stolen Treasure • Howard Pyle
... because this cession was of inestimable advantage to me. It protected my boundaries from the Turk himself, and then it produced dissension between the courts of St. Petersburg and Berlin and so deprived the latter of leer powerful ally. [Footnote: The emperor's own words.—See. Gross-Hofflnger, iii., pp. 428, 429.] But having permitted Russia to take possession of the Crimea, the aspect of affairs is changed. I never shall suffer ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... over her likeness, that she was invited everywhere; though how she, at her age, could fly about to so many parties, unless she was a fairy, no one could say. Behind the fairy, up the marble stairs, came the most noble Farintosh, with that vacuous leer which distinguishes his lordship. Ethel seemed to be carrying the stack of flowers which the Marquis had sent to her. The noble Bustington (Viscount Bustington, I need scarcely tell the reader, is the heir of the house ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... exhibit the bears and chuckled over his almost certain triumph. I laughed in return, and sincerely congratulated him on his nerve and probable success. I remained with him until the tenth week was finished, and handed him his $500. He took it with a leer of satisfaction, and remarked, that he was sorry I was a teetotaller, for he ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... man would look at him with a grin and a sly wink. And sometimes Thyrsis would make a casual remark in conversation, and the man would twist it out of its meaning, or make a pun out of it—to find some excuse for his satyr's leer. So at last Thyrsis was moved to say to him—"Don't you ever realize what a state you've ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... Earth-girl was pale and drawn, yet, when she saw Glavour, her head rose in an expression of defiance. Sonom saluted the Viceroy and left the room, the massive door clanging shut behind him. Glavour stared at the girl with an evil leer on his ...
— Giants on the Earth • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... attired man of about thirty, who, turning in his seat so that nearly the whole house was in his circle of vision, stroked his golden moustache, and ran his eyes over the thousands of faces with a smile of pride and satisfaction which in a less handsome man would have been almost a leer. His name was ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... says," interrupted the fermier-general, with a cunning leer; "but his colonel swears he never ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... other nights it is quieter, of course. Oh, he won't harm you.' A lumbering carter in a wild state of intoxication had pushed himself against the frightened girl, and looked down into her face with an idiotic leer. ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... upon the floor in assumed exhaustion, a Chinaman with a perfectly impassive face, and a Burman whose pock-marked, evil countenance was set in an apparently habitual leer, came running into ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... throng, whose choice he was, seated aloft upon men's shoulders, with a purple robe thrown on his shoulders, there sat a brawny, grinning, bloated, jibbering thing, with curled lips and savage eyes, and satyr's leer: the creature of greed, of lust, of obscenity, of brutality, of avarice, of desire. This thing the people followed, rejoicing exceedingly, content in the guide whom they had chosen, victorious in the fiend for whom they spurned a deity; crying, with ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... brutalized, ugly, and capable of anything. A neighboring clock struck eleven, and the workmen all descended to lunch. We remained until the last, Philip and I, but in stepping on the ladder to descend, he turned to me with a leer, and said, ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... appeared between the Professor's eyes—but he stood his ground defiantly. "Yes," went on Bunker thrusting out his jaw in a baleful leer at his rival, "for many years he has had the proud distinction of being the Champion Rough-Riding ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... to be always having the fellow dogging us, with his dejected leer, is not agreeable. He watches us now, because my lips are close by your cheek. He should be absent; he is one too many. Speed him on his voyage with the souvenir ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... happy jewelled alien men Worked then but as a little leaven; From some more modest palace then The Soul of Dives stank to Heaven. But when they planned with lisp and leer Their careful war upon the weak, They smote your body on its bier, For surety that you could ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... swept down from the heights, cutting the fog into shreds. For an instant, with an evil leer the sun peered through the naked woods of Vincennes, sank like a blood-clot in the battery smoke, lower, lower, into the ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... crucified. I built in his arms—his right arm first—and mortised the stones, then his left arm in the same way. I was careful not to look in his face. No, no! I didn't look in his face." Knightley repeated the words with a horrible leer of cunning, and hugged himself with his arms. To Wyley's thinking he was strung almost to madness. "After his arms I built in his feet, and upwards from his feet I built in his legs and his body until I came to his neck. All this while ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... hand and then at Mr Cripps's face. There was the same ugly leer about the latter, into which a spark of anger was infused as the boy still held back ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... scratched his head for a way to "play hunk." As he gazed sorrowfully at the saloon he heard a snicker from behind him. He, thinking it was one of his late tormentors, paid no attention to it. Then a cynical, biting laugh stung him. He wheeled, to see Shorty leaning against a tree, a sneering leer on his flushed face. Shorty's right hand was suspended above his holster, hooked to his belt by the thumb—a favorite position of ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... The Bard, enfranchised from his earthly fate, Now soars, from this probationary state To join the seraphs of sublimer tone, Whose harps are vocal round the Almighty throne: On earth his laurels no destruction fear From cold neglect, or envy's blighting leer. Verse, in whose influence the good rejoice, Is sure to echo from the human voice, While praise, as faithful as the mystic dove, Flows from the lips, of gratitude and love. Cowper still lives, to truth's clear optics ...
— Poems on Serious and Sacred Subjects - Printed only as Private Tokens of Regard, for the Particular - Friends of the Author • William Hayley
... light and loud with the raucity of phonographs and the stamping of feet. Everything was "wide open," and there was not even the thinnest veneer of respectability. Drinking and gambling and dancing go on all night long. Drunken men reel out upon the snow; painted faces leer over muslin curtains as one passes by. Without any government, without any pretence of municipal organisation, there is no co-operation for public enterprise. There are no streets, there are no sidewalks save such as a man ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... with superior love (as Jupiter On Juno smiles, when he impregns the clouds That shed May flowers), and pressed her matron lip With kisses pure. Aside the Devil turned For envy, yet with jealous leer malign Eyed them askance; and to himself thus plained:— 'Sight hateful, sight ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... to sage Piraeus sped the seer, His honour'd host, a welcome inmate there. O'er the protracted feast the suitors sit, And aim to wound the prince with pointless wit: Cries one, with scornful leer and mimic voice, "Thy charity we praise, but not thy choice; Why such profusion of indulgence shown To this poor, timorous, toil-detesting drone? That others feeds on planetary schemes, And pays his host with hideous noon-day dreams. ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... the carpeted menzil, in comparison with the dreary tumble-down place I have just left. My first impression of the officer himself, however, is scarcely so favorable as my impression of the picture in which he is set—the picture as just described; a sinister leer characterizes the expression of his face, and what appears like a nod, with an altogether unnecessary amount of condescension in it, characterizes his greeting. Hopping down to the ground, lamp in hand, he examines the bicycle minutely, and then indirectly ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... drew near the architect hurried to the rendezvous, where he found the Devil waiting impatiently. But a leer soon spread over his visage, and he was evidently overjoyed at the prospect of wrecking a soul. He quickly produced a weird document, commanding his victim to affix his signature at a certain place. "But the beautiful plan," whispered the young man; "I must see it first; I must be assured ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... ridden upon the seat of Daniel's wagon, with him sometimes trudging beside, in pride of new ownership, cracking his whip, and again planted sidewise upon one of the wheel animals, facing backward to leer ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... he tried to leer at me, because his voice was absolutely dying in his throat. My indignation was boundless. I cried out with the ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... Her dark, glowing, girlish face came as a revelation to the three sports. She had been hidden behind so much glass and leather that the transformation was startling. The horsy gentlemen uttered murmurs of surprise and gratification. One of them sidled up to her with a leer. ...
— The Motormaniacs • Lloyd Osbourne
... poetry? Both occupations are equally unhealthy." As he said this he watched the young man with the inscrutable smile that at moments was wont to curl upon his lips. Ernest had once likened it to the smile of Mona Lisa, but now he detected in it the suavity of the hypocrite and the leer of ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... specimen. He had the rolling gait of the deep sea. A squinting eye gave him a villainous leer, while a bristly beard and long gray hair made him a ferocious spectacle. His age was doubtful, as the lines in his ruddy skin might have been cut by dissipation as much as age. The most prominent feature of his unlovely countenance was a nose, fiery red ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... tumble overboard and nigh upon drownd people without somebody makes 'em," said Zekle with a cunning leer. ...
— A Terrible Coward • George Manville Fenn
... a aparecer desde que colocaron el que ahora le sustituye. Si a alguno de mis lectores se le ocurriese hacerme la misma pregunta, despues de leer esta historia, ya sabe el por que no se ha continuado el milagroso ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... rage, P. Sybarite climbed back on his stool, while George sat down at his desk, lighted a Sweet Caporal (it was after three o'clock and both the partners were gone for the day) and with a leer watched the bookkeeper carefully slit the ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... of your whereabouts at present," said Boris, shortly. "Because," he continued, with a villainous leer, "I am only cruel to be kind. I want to have all the details of our marriage settled as soon as possible. A night of waiting will soften your dear brother's heart, and he will probably listen ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... wrought, Worm-like vapours skirr thro' the halls And reach a distant, lurid moat, Where sighs and groans upon a flood Ascend to heights of a grey ghaut— Satellites to Destiny's crypt! And Vespers that the Twilight brought— More dooms that prayers nor sighs can break— Leer at each thought to Fancy's flight; And to the dais whereunder sit A demon-quire that Circe taught, Songs that echo to the isles in lake And valley deep, ravage the night Until Idols pall at the scene. And stationed Mounts toward the West Whose bones portray ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... blow at the exposed face. The Major, faint with the terror of his helplessness and the crushing weight of the quivering masses of muscle about him, would have fallen but for their dread support. His consciousness fast deserting him, fascinated, he watched the monstrous leer as the head drew farther back, poised. He felt the agonizing pressure as the great muscles steeled for the blow, and in the moment before his senses departed, heard two crashing shots that sounded from behind him. With the smashing reports the poised head thudded ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... shrewd leer of recognition, and smoking an imaginary pipe, with his head very much on one side and his eyes very much out ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... features any trace of mean or evil passions. The man was thoroughly wholesome. Even his occasionally free utterances on sexuality are only sins against decorum. They do not violate nature. He never spoke on this subject with the slobbery grin of the voluptuary, or the leer of prurience. He was at such moments simply unreticent. Meaning no harm, he suspected none. In this respect he belonged to a less self-conscious antiquity, when nothing pertaining to man was common or unclean, and even the worship of the powers of generation was not without ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... that any will wish to interrupt you," returned the soldier, with a waggish leer of his eye; "but, should they be so disposed, I have no power to stop them, if they be of the prisoner's friends. I have my orders, and must mind them, whether the Englishman ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... said as softly as his gutturals would permit. "There is one in particular you know a great deal about. Urga told me. A long-lost lover, no?" His gray-ridged countenance contorted into a thick disgusting leer. ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner
... otherwise towards this display than by a few touches of chalk. Among the heads of distinguished personages, finding those of the King of Prussia and the Empress of Hungary, he changed the cast of their eyes, so as to make them leer significantly at each other. Note.—These (which in the catalogue are called an original portrait of the present Emperor of Prussia and ditto of the Empress Queen of Hungary, its antagonist) were two old signs of the "Saracen's Head" and Queen Anne. Under the first ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... had finished his explanation there was a puzzled silence for an instant. But Dan's half-leer irritated Lieutenant Barnes. Then came ...
— Dave Darrin on Mediterranean Service - or, With Dan Dalzell on European Duty • H. Irving Hancock
... made the sch—sch—schooner go against the wind." Old Koogah dropped an open leer to Opee-Kwan, and, the laughter growing around him, continued: "The wind blows from the south and blows the schooner south. The wind blows against the wind. The wind blows one way and the other at the same time. It is very simple. We understand, ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... assumed an actual corporeal shape. In the uncertain light shed by the lantern, I seemed to see the face of this embodied curse with an ever-changing mockery of expression; at one moment wearing the features of my father; at another those of Tom Wynne; at another the leer of the old woman I had ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... going to put off the show I must be getting home or Mother will think I have been waylaid and my watch stolen. So long, everybody, and pleasant dreams." Then thrusting his face back into the room through the narrowing crack of the door, he added with elfish leer, "Just the same, I still think that Coulter had something to do ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... skies are faintly lighting, or do we know only the burlesque of your Maxim's and your Catelans? Do we, when the week's work of your humbler people is done, see the laughter in dancing eyes in the Rue Mouffetard or, in the revel of your Saturday night, do we see only the belladonna'd leer of the drabs in the Place Pigalle? Do we hear the romance of your concertinas setting thousands of hobnailed boots a-clatter with Terpsichore in the Boulevard de la Chapelle, in Polonceau and Myrrha, or do we hear only your union orchestra ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... barred the sitting-room door he came and stood beside the table, and there was a repulsive, insulting leer on his face as he ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... ascetic; I'm as pleasant as can be; You'll always find me ready with a crushing repartee; I've an irritating chuckle, I've a celebrated sneer, I've an entertaining snigger, I've a fascinating leer; To everybody's prejudice I know a thing or two; I can tell a woman's age in half a minute - and I do - But although I try to make myself as pleasant as I can, Yet everybody says I'm such a disagreeable man! And I ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... the operative, with a knowing leer. "Anything from planting divorce evidence to shoving the queer. I've been working for a pal of Pad's in St. Louis for three or four years—that's why I'm strange around here. Pad's up in the air about something, and wants this Charley-boy right away, and he tells me to look here for him ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... Sphinx in her menaced house—I know not how she fared—whether she gazes for ever, disconsolate, at the deed, remembering only in her smitten mind, at which the little boys now leer, that she once knew well those things at which man stands aghast; or whether in the end she crept away, and clambering horribly from abyss to abyss, came at last to higher things, and is wise and eternal still. For who knows ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany
... praise, assent with civil leer, And, without sneering, teach the rest to sneer; Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike, Just hint a fault, and hesitate ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... up at him, an odd leer on his sophisticated face, saying no more. He made a pack on his saddle of the camp outfit, and started off along the ridge, leaving Mackenzie to follow as he pleased. A mile or more along Reid pitched upon a suitable camping place. He had himself established long before ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... a dream so odd and funny, I cannot resist recording it here.— Methought that the Genius of Matrimony Before me stood with a joyous leer, Leading a husband in each hand, And both for me, which lookt rather queer;— One I could perfectly understand, But why there were two wasn't quite so clear. T'was meant however, I soon could see, To afford me a choice—a most excellent plan; And—who should this brace of ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... ordinarily gave himself out as an Afrikander. You see in him a whiskered, dark-complexioned, good-looking man of twenty-six, but looking older, whose regard was either insolent or cringing, according to circumstances, and whose smile was an evil leer. The owner of the waggons stood waiting near the closed-up foremost one, the yellow-haired child on his arm. He looked keenly at the landlord, Bough, and the man's hand went involuntarily up in the salute, to its owner's secret rage. Did ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... to deny his acquaintance, and overlook men of merit in distress; and the little silly, pretty Phillida, or Foolida, to stare at the strange creatures round her. It is this temper which constitutes the supercilious eye, the reserved look, the distant bowe, the scornful leer, the affected astonishment, the loud whisper, ending in a laugh directed full in the teeth of another. Hence spring, in short, those numberless offences given too frequently, in public and private assemblies, by persons of weak understandings, indelicate habits, and so hungry and ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... house or in another land you might find me employing, again solely for decorative purposes, the prints of Japan, the landscapes of the modern impressionists, the rugs of the East, or the blankets of the Arizona desert. Free me, then, from the reproach implied in that covert leer at my Early Sienese." Yes, we must, I think, exclude from the ranks of the true zealots all who in any plausible fashion utilise the objects of art they buy. Excess, the craving to possess what he apparently does not need, is the mark of your true collector. Now these visionaries—at ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... there, Commandant of Artillery, a brave officer, but a bad man; Varin, a proud, arrogant libertine, Commissary of Montreal, who outdid Bigot in rapine and Cadet in coarseness; De Breard, Comptroller of the Marine, a worthy associate of Penisault, whose pinched features and cunning leer were in keeping with his important office of chief manager of the Friponne. Perrault, D'Estebe, Morin, and Vergor, all creatures of the Intendant, swelled the roll of infamy, as partners of the Grand Company of Associates trading in New France, as their charter named ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... could help you to the man, if so be as you will deem him worth the finding," he added, suddenly turning upside down, and looking at them standing on the palms of his hands, with an indescribable leer of drollery, which in a moment dashed all the hopes with which they had turned to him. "Should you know this minks of ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... apart, I think I have met very, very few women who liked the banter of Swift and Fielding. Their simple, tender natures revolt at laughter. Is the satyr always a wicked brute at heart, and are they rightly shocked at his grin, his leer, his horns, hoofs, and ears? Fi donc, le vilain monstre, with his shrieks, and his capering crooked legs! Let him go and get a pair of well-wadded black silk stockings, and pull them over those horrid shanks; put a large gown and bands over beard ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... conscious of existence, was, that it was about fifteen feet in length, very dirty, and had a damp, unwholesome smell; my notions of mankind were, that it shaved only once a fortnight; that it had coarse, misshapen features; a hideous leer; that it abjured soap, as a habit; and lived habitually in its shirt-sleeves. Such, indeed, was the aspect of the apartment in which I first saw the light, and such the appearance of the professional gentleman who ushered ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... so sinister in this invitation and in the leer which accompanied it, that Hugh felt a qualm of misgiving. He hung back, uncertain what to say next, until cross-eyed Harry gave him a push that sent him staggering through the doorway. The four men then entered the cabin after him, closing the ...
— The Boy Scouts on Picket Duty • Robert Shaler
... violent execration, suddenly let go his hold on the knob, the door swung in, and Dan fell back on all fours upon the floor. By the time he had recovered himself for another dash, he was confronted by Jean, a disagreeable leer upon his unpleasant countenance and a ...
— The Inn at the Red Oak • Latta Griswold
... chuckle of intense satisfaction and a leer at our big neighbour, Bob dived below again; and shortly afterwards a frizzling sound from forward, and an odour strongly suggestive of bacon and eggs, which was wafted upwards from the companion, ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... world on a raft! A Duke is here At sight of whose lank jaw the muses leer. Journeyman-printer, lamb with ferret eyes, In life's skullduggery he takes the prize— Yet stands at twilight wrapped in Hamlet dreams. Into his eyes the Mississippi gleams. The sandbar sings in moonlit veils of foam. A candle shines from one lone cabin home. The waves reflect it like a drunken ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... with the same unpleasant leer upon his face, rolled down the deck in her wake, carelessly humming a fragment of the tune he had just been playing. He had collected all the contributions in his big hand—a pitiful little collection of nickels and dimes—and he tossed them into the air and caught ...
— Ruth Fielding at Briarwood Hall - or Solving the Campus Mystery • Alice B. Emerson
... Your pluck has saved your life; but remember, I've not said I won't shoot him or your father, if chance throws them in my way," he added, looking back over his shoulder with a malicious leer, as he left the arbor, then disappearing from sight among the ...
— Elsie's Womanhood • Martha Finley
... quiet as despair, I turned from him, That hateful cripple, out of his highway Into the path he pointed. All the day Had been a dreary one at best, and dim Was settling to its close, yet shot one grim Red leer to see ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... blow him up between us. There's my fist on it. See you soon," and, with a lurching step and a leer over his ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... for two days and nights the hound shall leer and snarl before the face of Mung-days and nights that shall be lit by neither sun nor moons, for these shall go dipping down the sky with all the Worlds as the galleons glide away, because the gods that made them are ...
— The Gods of Pegana • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... slightly flushed with champagne and excitement. But, as before, this impression passed quickly, and the face again became as exasperating to the artist as the visage of the Venus of Milo would be should some vandal hand pencil upon it a leer or a smirk. A heavy frown was gathering upon his brow when the young lady, happening to turn suddenly, caught and fully recognized his lowering expression. It accorded only too well with her cousin's words ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... me a curious leer. "No offence, you know, guv'nor," he said, "but I should wish for some evidence as to that afore I part with a vallyable dawg like ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... French 'argot,' and we 'Thieves' Language,' finds in this language the most decisive evidence of this fact (Kleine Schrift. vol. iv. p. 165): Der nothwendige Zusammenhang aller Sprache mit Ueberlieferung zeigt sich auch hier; kaum ein Wort dieser Gaunermundart scheint leer erfunden, und Menschen eines Gelichters, das sich sonst kein Gewissen aus Luegen macht, beschaemen manchen Sprachphilosophen, der von Erdichtung einer allgemeinen Sprache getraeumt hat. Van Helmont indeed, a sort of modern Paracelsus, is said to ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... sardonical mist, the face of the Man-in-the-Moon—looking right towards the combatants, as if he were standing in a trap-door of the sea, leaning forward leisurely with his arms complacently folded over upon the edge of the horizon—this queer face wore a serious, apishly self-satisfied leer, as if the Man-in-the-Moon had somehow secretly put up the ships to their contest, and in the depths of his malignant old soul was not unpleased to see how well his charms worked. There stood the grinning Man-in-the-Moon, his head just dodging into view ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... said, with an evil leer on her lips, "I hold a secret of yours that is worth the keeping! I give you two weeks more; within that time you must act! Destroy the witch,—bring back to me my grandchild Britta, or else—it ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... infernul nonsense. I manetane that wax figgers is more elevatin than awl the plays ever wroten. Take Shakespeer for instunse. Peple think heze grate things, but I kontend heze quite the reverse to the kontrary. What sort of sense is thare to King Leer, who goze round cussin his darters, chawin hay and throin straw at folks, and larfin like a silly old koot and makin a ass of hisself ginerally? Thare's Mrs. Mackbeth—sheze a nise kind of woomon to have round ain't she, a puttin old Mack, her husband, up to slayin Dunkan with a cheeze knife, while ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... stationed herself in the entrance where she had a view of both men, saw the cruel leer that accompanied Walcott's words and understood their significance as her father did not. Her hand sought the bosom of her dress for an instant, then dropped quietly at her side, but swift as the movement ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... piece of information, and with his leer an inch from my chin, I answered slowly and calmly that it certainly was. I might add that he spoke Spanish by preference (according to Mexique very bad Spanish); for The Fighting Sheeney had made his home for ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... of outrage. They stare at her as she approaches; and I have seen them turn and contemplate ladies as they passed them, keeping a few paces in advance, with a leisurely sidelong gait. Something of this insolence might be forgiven to thoughtless, hot-blooded youth; but the gross and knowing leer that the elders of the Piazza and the caffe put on at the approach of a pretty girl is an ordeal which few women, not as thoroughly inured to it as the Venetians, would care to encounter. However, as I never ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... the poor ass that from his paddock strays Might sound abroad his field-companions' praise, Recounting volubly their well-bred leer, Their port impressive and their wealth of ear, Mistaking for the world's assent the clang Of echoes mocking his accurst harangue; So the dull clown, untraveled though at large, Visits the city on the ocean's marge, Expands his eyes and marvels to remark Each coastwise ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... England's sea power; because of the unblushing, shameless, gilded corruption of the French court, which cared less for the fate of Canada than the leer of a painted fool behind her fan. But be this remembered,—and here was the hand of overruling Destiny or Providence,—the fall of New France, like the fall of the seed to the ready soil, was the rebirth of a new nation. Henceforth it is not New France, the appendage of an Old World ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... the candles. They showed the visitor to be an ill-looking visitor with a squinting leer, who, as he spoke, fumbled at an old sodden fur cap, formless and mangey, that looked like a furry animal, dog or cat, puppy or kitten, ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... gossiped was a young man, Ambrogiuolo da Piacenza, by name, who, when Bernabo thus concluded his eulogy of his wife, broke out into a mighty laugh, and asked him with a leer, whether he of all men had this privilege by special patent of the Emperor. Bernabo replied, somewhat angrily, that 'twas a boon conferred upon him by God, who was rather more powerful than the Emperor. To ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... no wiser," said she, with a cunning leer. "And now I must hurry off. I would not have the young baggage find me here ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... hit any higher spots than him. He bet there was one little girl that would be looked on as lucky, in case she was a good little girl and encouraged him to show his natural kindness. And I was favored with a blood-curdling leer from across the camp, of which I had put as much as possible between myself and the object of ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... shouted, When I saw his hateful leer; 'Tell me what this means, Jim Johnson. Where is Billy? Ain't he here?' He was standing on the doorstep, And the light that shone within Seemed to twist his wrinkled features In a sort of wonder-grin. ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker
... married, eh?" said Mr. Wurley, with another leer and oath. "You're right; that's a deal safer kind of thing ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... said she, with a cunning leer; "but this I know, that they had a love scene together this very morning, and that he kissed her very sweetly ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... absurd medleys for which you improvise absurd choruses which make things go along as pleasantly as possible. Meanwhile the bottle is returned empty. He takes it, insists upon re-filling your "glass" from it, and tips it up over your cup. Then with a comical leer at you at the idea of attempting to pour wine from an empty bottle, he turns, dives into his cellar and fishes up another. You bid him go on with that capital song, offering to save him the trouble of unsealing and dispensing the ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood
... will the United States consent to go without its share of the swag. It is delicious. The biggest and proudest government on earth turned sneak-thief; collecting pennies on stolen property, and pocketing them with a greasy and libidinous leer; going into partnership with foreign thieves to rob its own children; and when the child escapes the foreigner, descending to the abysmal baseness of hanging on and robbing the infant all alone by itself! Dear sir, this is not any more respectable than for a father to collect toll on the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... little attention to the men; it was the feminine portion of the audience that interested him, and he regarded it with a gloating leer, the expression of a senile satyr. Albeit a little on the seamy side of life, his rank and wealth were such that he himself attracted a good deal of attention, matronly eyes being turned in his direction with not unkindly purport. The marquis perceived the stir his presence occasioned ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... individual lingered near the May-pole. As he was especially active, we may describe him and his employment. He was apparently about fifteen. He had coarse straight white hair—a face that denoted stupidity—but with a cunning leer, which seemed ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... grow in one night like mushrooms,' he said with a leer. (There was no mistake about his voice—it was Ombos; the words rang through my brain as if they had been shouted.) 'You can't expect a statue to turn into a god in a breath, or to come down and skip about ... it takes ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... up, and so the trio proceeded, with William unable to decide which contaminated him more, Genesis or the loyal Clematis. To his way of thinking, he was part of a dreadful pageant, and he winced pitiably whenever the eye of a respectable passer-by fell upon him. Everybody seemed to stare—nay, to leer! And he felt that the whole world would know his shame ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... traditions, have sought and are seeking milder means of mitigating our bodily ills. All honor to them. They have driven away the old doctor of our childhood, whose most pleasant smile resembled the amiable leer that a cannibal might be supposed to bestow upon a plump missionary. The old curmudgeon, with his huge bottles of mixtures and his immense boulders—I beg pardon, I should say, boluses of nastiness—has vanished like a surly ghost at the approach of daylight, and in ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... made toward a noonday meal. Bill and Halloway appeared loquacious, and inclined to steal glances at Joan when Kells could not notice. Halloway whistled a Dixie tune. Then Bill took advantage of the absence of Kells, who went down to the brook, and he began to leer at Joan and make bold eyes at her. Joan appeared not to notice him, and thereafter averted; her ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... 'those by the book-stall. That be Mr. Waffles,' continued he, giving his master a touch in the ribs as he jerked his portmanteau into a fly, 'that be Mr. Waffles,' repeated he, with a knowing leer. ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... know," said she, with a cunning leer; "but this I know, that they had a love scene together this very morning, and that he kissed her very sweetly ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... Thinking he had come with a message from Omar Beg, a Hungarian brigadier-general in the Turkish service who was stationed here, we saluted in the usual manner. Without returning it, he walked up, stepped across us, flung himself on our rug, leaned on his elbow, and with an impertinent leer stared in our faces all round until he met Richard's eye, which partook of something of the tiger kind, when he started and turned pale. Richard called out, "Kawwasses!" The kawwasses and two wardis ran into the room. "Remove that son of a dog." They seized him, fat and big ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... is powerless! Ever he dares, And, daring, lands his public neck and crop. Even the many-tortured London ear, The much-enduring, loathes his Speeshul yell, His shriek of Winnur! But his dart and leer And poise are irresistible. PALL MALL Joys in him, and MILE END; for his vocation Is to purvey the ...
— Hawthorn and Lavender - with Other Verses • William Ernest Henley
... belonging to the Society of Friends. She was reading aloud to about sixteen women prisoners, who were engaged in needle-work. They all rose on my entrance, curtsied respectfully, and then resumed their seats and employment. Instead of a scowl, leer, or ill-suppressed laugh, I observed upon their countenances an air of self-respect and gravity, a sort of consciousness of their improved character, and the altered position in which they are placed. I afterwards ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... physiological outbursts of the B minor Scherzo, is the agony of a tortured soul. The piece is Chopin's Iliad; in it are the ghosts that lurk near the hidden alleys of the soul, but here come out to leer and exult. ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... postern open'd on a court— Say rather, grave-yard; gloomy yews begirt Its cheerless walls; ranges of headstones show'd, Each on its hoary tablature, half hid With moss, with hemlock, and with nettles rank, The sculptured leer of that hyena face, Softening as backwards, through the waves of time, Receded generations more remote. It was a square of tombs—of old, grey tombs, (The oldest of an immemorial date,) Deserted quite—and rusty gratings black, Along ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... harsher term, are the result. Towards the close of the day, everything is in confusion—the door-bell is never silent. Crowds of young men, in various stages of intoxication, rush into the lighted parlors, leer at the hostess in the vain effort to offer their respects, call for liquor, drink it, and stagger out, to repeat the scene at some other house. Frequently, they are unable to recognize the residences of their friends, and stagger ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... propriety. He commits openly the most uncouth acts, if he does not manifest the most indecent unchastity of manner. When spoken to, he stares rudely at the person addressing him, often with a very unpleasant leer upon his countenance. In some few cases there seems to be a curious combination of conditions. While mentally fearful, timid, and hesitating, the individual finds himself, upon addressing a person, staring at him in the most ungainly manner. He ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... I'm no ascetic; I'm as pleasant as can be; You'll always find me ready with a crushing repartee; I've an irritating chuckle, I've a celebrated sneer, I've an entertaining snigger, I've a fascinating leer; To everybody's prejudice I know a thing or two; I can tell a woman's age in half a minute - and I do - But although I try to make myself as pleasant as I can, Yet everybody says I'm such a disagreeable man! And I can't ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... don to make him discover his treasure,—a detail given with a minuteness that made every rich old burgher present turn uncomfortably in his chair. All this would be told with infinite glee, as if he considered it an excellent joke, and then he would give such a tyrannical leer in the face of his next neighbor that the poor man would be fain to laugh out of sheer faint-heartedness. If anyone, however, pretended to contradict him in any of his stories, he was on fire in an instant. His very cocked hat assumed a momentary fierceness, and seemed to resent the contradiction. ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... of pain appeared between the Professor's eyes—but he stood his ground defiantly. "Yes," went on Bunker thrusting out his jaw in a baleful leer at his rival, "for many years he has had the proud distinction of being the Champion Rough-Riding Barber ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... Hercules, regaling himself after having killed the monster Caricatura, that so severely galled his virtuous friend, the heaven-born Wilkes." Hogarth's use of the word caricatura conveys a meaning which is not patent at first sight; Wilkes's leer was the leer of a satyr, "his face," says Macaulay, "was so hideous that the caricaturists were forced in their own despite to flatter him."[5] The real sting lies in the accuracy of Hogarth's portrait ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... eine Macht von Stund zu Stund, Wie's Krueglein, das am Brunnenstein zersprang, Und dessen Inhalt sickert auf den Grund, So weit es ging, den ganzen Weg entlang,— Nun ist es leer. Wer mag daraus noch trinken? Und zu den ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... fussing and accompanying her to the stairs and on to her room. She hardly said the word good-night to him, and her very lips were white. Wensleydown's face, as he stood with Mildred, drove him mad with its mocking leer, and if he had heard their conversation there ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... that it was an old-time pier-glass Which had stood on the mantel near, Its silvering blemished,—yes, as if worn away By the eyes of the countless dead who had smirked at it Ere these two ever knew that old-time pier-glass And its vague and vacant leer. ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... reasons: because of England's sea power; because of the unblushing, shameless, gilded corruption of the French court, which cared less for the fate of Canada than the leer of a painted fool behind her fan. But be this remembered,—and here was the hand of overruling Destiny or Providence,—the fall of New France, like the fall of the seed to the ready soil, was the rebirth of a new nation. Henceforth it is not New France, the ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... here, ye maiden vile, And rob me of my mate?' And on her child the mother scowled 80 A deadly leer ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... so long with her eyes wide open, that at length Little Dorrit, to entice her from her box, rose and looked out of window. As she glanced down into the yard, she saw Pancks come in and leer up with the corner of his ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... of hesitation; which she, interpreting to her advantage, repeated her request, and endeavoured to force a leer of invitation into her countenance. He took her arm, and they walked on to one of those obsequious taverns in the neighbourhood, where the dearness of the wine is a discharge in full for the character ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... surveyed him. Really at that moment she did think his mind was gone; but the leer upon the old man's face ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... twenty years of age, son of a neighbouring small Squire, who lived in the doubtful capacity of parlour-boarder with Mr. Wapshot, flung himself into a theatrical attitude near a newly-made grave, and began repeating Hamlet's verses over Ophelia, with a hideous leer at Pen. The young fellow was so enraged that he rushed at Hobnell Major with a shriek very much resembling an oath, cut him furiously across the face with the riding-whip which he carried, flung ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... fraud, unabashed, unawed, may strive to sting thee at heel in vain; Craft and fear and mistrust may leer and mourn and murmur and plead and plain: Thou art thou: and thy sunbright brow is hers that ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... Before him sat the grim baron, with a face worthy of the father of such a daughter, and looking daggers and ratsbane. On one side of him was Muckle-mouthed Mag, with an amorous smile across the whole breadth of her countenance, and a leer enough to turn a man to stone; on the other side was the father confessor, a sleek friar, jogging the youth's elbow, and pointing to the gallows, seen in perspective through ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... cautiously by the side door, where a barman kept watch for the police. Presently the bricklayer came out, alone. He stood on the footpath, slightly fuddled, his giddiness increased by the fresh air. Immediately Chook lurched forward to meet him, with a drunken leer. ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... so quite independently of him. But Peace would listen to no refusal, however decided its tone. Dyson threw over the card into Peace's garden. This only served to aggravate his determination to possess himself of the wife. He would listen at keyholes, leer in at the window, and follow Mrs. Dyson wherever she went. When she was photographed at the fair, she found that Peace had stood behind her chair and by that means got himself included in the picture. At times he had threatened her with a revolver. On one occasion when he was more insulting ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... villainous drugs and combinations of drugs, and, untrammeled by old traditions, have sought and are seeking milder means of mitigating our bodily ills. All honor to them. They have driven away the old doctor of our childhood, whose most pleasant smile resembled the amiable leer that a cannibal might be supposed to bestow upon a plump missionary. The old curmudgeon, with his huge bottles of mixtures and his immense boulders—I beg pardon, I should say, boluses of nastiness—has vanished like a surly ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... almenaux. Leather ledo. Leave lasi. Leave (bequeath) testamenti. Leave (depart) deiri. Leave off cxesi. Leaven fermentilo. Leavings (food) mangxrestajxo. Lecture parolado. Leech hirudo. Leer flanken rigardi. Lees fecxo. Left, on the maldekstre. Leg (limb) kruro. Leg (of a fowl, etc.) femuro. Leg of mutton sxaffemuro. Legacy heredajxo. Legal legxa. Legation (place) senditejo. Legation senditaro. Legend legendo. Legible legebla. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... that there was a pretty lady come to church with Peg Pen to-day, I against my intention had a mind to go to church to see her, and did so, and she is pretty handsome. But over against our gallery I espied Pembleton, and saw him leer upon my wife all the sermon, I taking no notice of him, and my wife upon him, and I observed she made a curtsey to him at coming out without taking notice to me at all of it, which with the consideration of ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... figgers is more elevatin than awl the plays ever wroten. Take Shakespeer for instunse. Peple think heze grate things, but I kontend heze quite the reverse to the kontrary. What sort of sense is thare to King Leer, who goze round cussin his darters, chawin hay and throin straw at folks, and larfin like a silly old koot and makin a ass of hisself ginerally? Thare's Mrs. Mackbeth—sheze a nise kind of woomon to have round ain't she, a puttin old Mack, her husband, up to slayin Dunkan with a cheeze knife, ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... divided from Hannibal by many miles and a Consular army, fell back to the Metaurus, and Rome was saved. Two thousand years later, Prince Frederick Charles, divided by a few marches and two Austrian army corps from the Crown Prince, lingered so long upon the leer that the supremacy of Prussia trembled in the balance. But the character of the Virginian soldier was of loftier type. It has been remarked that after Jackson's death Lee never again attempted those great turning movements which had achieved ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... the man, with a leer, "sitting in sackcloth and ashes, more ashes than sackcloth. Have you got some ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... indifferent fustian gaiters, and shoes, cobbled here and there, one of which had rather an ugly bulge by the side near the toes. His mouth was exceedingly wide, and his nose remarkably long; its extremity of a deep purple; upon his features was a half-simple smile or leer; in his hand ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... waitin' in it," he growled. "I have waited long enough, and too long, and you must choose between us now. You know we will soon be at 'Five Fingers,' and you must be good or they may get you," with a wicked leer and clutch at her arm calculated to startle her as she carelessly sat ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... thinking of nothing but the human life that hung in the balance, I failed to observe the presence of the most disagreeable of the female nurses, who was standing, with "arms akimbo," looking on, until, with an insulting leer, she remarked, "It seems to me ye're taking great liberties for an honest woman." Paralyzed with surprise and indignation, I knew not how to act. Just then the surgeon in charge of the ward, ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... answered the old bookseller. "You're as good as they are." He leaned forward from the easy chair, and tapped the clerk's arm with a long, claw-like finger. "I say," he continued, with a smile that was something between a wink and a leer, and suggestive of a pleased satisfaction. "I've ...
— The Talleyrand Maxim • J. S. Fletcher
... Major, faint with the terror of his helplessness and the crushing weight of the quivering masses of muscle about him, would have fallen but for their dread support. His consciousness fast deserting him, fascinated, he watched the monstrous leer as the head drew farther back, poised. He felt the agonizing pressure as the great muscles steeled for the blow, and in the moment before his senses departed, heard two crashing shots that sounded ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... with champagne and excitement. But, as before, this impression passed quickly, and the face again became as exasperating to the artist as the visage of the Venus of Milo would be should some vandal hand pencil upon it a leer or a smirk. A heavy frown was gathering upon his brow when the young lady, happening to turn suddenly, caught and fully recognized his lowering expression. It accorded only too well with her cousin's words in regard ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... faint praise, assent with civil leer, And without sneering teach the rest to sneer. 1369 POPE: Prologue ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... for my place, but how about my principles, my conscience?" said Europe, cocking her crafty little nose and giving the Baron a serio-comic leer. ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... sinner," he said, "like Jonah warned the sinners in Nineveh. I'm exhortin' him about the fall. Adam fell in the Garden of Eden." Then the leer came back into his face. "Ever hear of the Garden of ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... a chuckle of intense satisfaction and a leer at our big neighbour, Bob dived below again; and shortly afterwards a frizzling sound from forward, and an odour strongly suggestive of bacon and eggs, which was wafted upwards from the companion, informed me that he had entered upon the duties of the less dignified but equally important ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... decorative purposes, the prints of Japan, the landscapes of the modern impressionists, the rugs of the East, or the blankets of the Arizona desert. Free me, then, from the reproach implied in that covert leer at my Early Sienese." Yes, we must, I think, exclude from the ranks of the true zealots all who in any plausible fashion utilise the objects of art they buy. Excess, the craving to possess what he apparently does not need, ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... moments before. Her tottering body, clothed in bear-skins, was bent forward over a large triangular shield of polished brass, on which she leant her lank, shrivelled arms. Her head shook with a tremulous, palsied action; a leer, half smile, half grimace, distended her withered lips and lightened her sunken eyes. Sinister, cringing, repulsive; her face livid with the reflection from the weapon that was her support, and her figure scarcely human in the rugged garments that encompassed ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... driver, with rather a bold leer. The average lady who descended or ascended Mrs. Popple's steps; was not considered ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... said, "with you to wend, My brethren all in-fere: My purpose was to have dined to-day At Blyth or Doncaster." Forth then went that gentle Knight, With a careful cheer; The tears out of his eyen ran, And fell down by his leer. They brought him unto the lodge door: When ROBIN 'gan him see, Full courteously did off his hood, And set him on his knee. "Welcome, Sir Knight!" then said ROBIN, "Welcome thou art to me; I have ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... into types; you will find that all through their youth they will persist annoyingly in jumping from class to class, and by pasting a supercilious label on every one you meet you are merely packing a Jack-in-the-box that will spring up and leer at you when you begin to come into really antagonistic contact with the world. An idealization of some such a man as Leonardo da Vinci would be a more valuable beacon to ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... obeyed the order, passing the American skipper, who was leaning on the bulwark looking sick, and as the sailor came up he turned to him with an ugly leer. ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... him to-night: my old friend cried "pish," and bid her go on. The gipsy told him that he was a bachelor, but would not be so long; and that he was dearer to somebody than he thought: the Knight still repeated she was an idle baggage, and bid her go on. "Ah, master," says the gipsy, "that roguish leer of yours makes a pretty woman's heart ache; you ha'n't that simper about the mouth for nothing—" The uncouth gibberish with which all this was uttered, like the darkness of an oracle, made us the more attentive to ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others
... that, though heredity and habit based on memory go about in different dresses, yet if we catch them separately—for they are never seen together—and strip them there is not a mole nor strawberry-mark, nor trick nor leer of the one, but we find it ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... jaw and mouth were drawn and seamed and scarred in a frightful and hideous manner, the teeth protruded and the mouth was drawn to one side in a frightful leer; above that was all the beauty of "My ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... slender, imperious judge in the council-chamber with a defiant leer on his face. If he went down into the depths he would drag with him the fairest treasure he had coveted in all his years of lust ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... wouldn't many hit any higher spots than him. He bet there was one little girl that would be looked on as lucky, in case she was a good little girl and encouraged him to show his natural kindness. And I was favored with a blood-curdling leer from across the camp, of which I had put as much as possible between myself and the object ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... Hen, with an ugly leer. "I know what you want to do. You want to drive me out to that shanty, so that big fellow will jump on me. Go yourself, ...
— The Grammar School Boys Snowbound - or, Dick & Co. at Winter Sports • H. Irving Hancock
... be informed of your whereabouts at present," said Boris, shortly. "Because," he continued, with a villainous leer, "I am only cruel to be kind. I want to have all the details of our marriage settled as soon as possible. A night of waiting will soften your dear brother's heart, and he will probably listen to reason ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... especially not for those of a typographical nature. In one of the five copies which we compared, the title-page, radically differing from the others, reads as follows: "Formula Concordiae. Das ist: Christliche, Heilsame Reine Vergleichunge, in welcher die Goettliche Leer von den vornembsten Artikeln vnserer wahrhafftigen Religion, aus heiliger Schrift in kurtze bekanntnues oder Symbola vnd Leerhafte Schrifften,: welche allbereit vor dieser zeit von den Kirchen Gottes Augspurgischer Confession, angenommen vnd approbiert:, verfasset. Sampt ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... his order. Tunis was conscious of a hoarse voice at his elbow. He glanced aside. His neighbor in the next chair was a little, common man, with a little, common face, on which was a little, common leer. ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... you lady owner there"—he laughed at his own astuteness in not being taken in—"you know the monikers, don't you? South Kentwood, 'Stinktown'; North Kentwood, 'Swilltown'?" He grinned, pulled at his hip pocket and, extracting a flat glass flask, took a prolonged swig and replaced the bottle with a leer. ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... drawn, yet, when she saw Glavour, her head rose in an expression of defiance. Sonom saluted the Viceroy and left the room, the massive door clanging shut behind him. Glavour stared at the girl with an evil leer on ...
— Giants on the Earth • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... he is!" cried one of the sailors, with a leer at the half-drowned man's face. "I'd like to see the lass we'd please in saving him. He's only fit to ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... dressing-gown, warmly padded, and much stained and splashed. She had fine dark eyes, and was young, bold-looking, and handsome; but when she came nearer, the moist pallor of her skin, the slackness of her lower lip and jaw, and an eager and worn expression in her fine eyes, gave her a thirsty, reckless leer that filled Marian with loathing. Her aspect conveyed the same painful suggestion as her voice had done before, but more definitely; for it struck Marian, with a shock, that Conolly, in the grotesque metamorphosis of a nightmare, might appear in some ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... the grotesque roots of trees will leer magically from the wayside to meet the uncouth gestures of the labourer and his trull; while in the smoke-thick air of mellow tavern-corners the shameless mirth of honest revellers philosophising upon the world will have ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... lean in the wrong place, and puffy under the eyes. In place of courage they flaunted an insolent leer, and the smile intended to convey self-confidence betrayed to a close observer anxiety bordering ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... button-hole Jean Kostka, and ask him to tell us confidentially and upon honour what it is that has changed his views, making him discover the leer of Baal-Zeboub where he once saw the smile of the spiritual Eos, he turns Trappist at once, and goes into retreat with M. Huysman; there is not a syllable of information in all his beau volume as to any intellectual process through which he passed on the way, and I suspect ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... pondered. "No, sir," he replied, allowing himself a prideful leer; "if I do say it as shouldn't, I'm an ...
— Yollop • George Barr McCutcheon
... had a leer. He looked impudently at Stafford, and Stafford read the meaning behind the unveiled insolence: Krool knew what no one else but Jasmine and himself knew with absolute certainty. Krool was in his own country, more than half a savage, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... a leer, half cunning half insolent, "if I have hid my rifle near the Sandusky swamp, the last time I ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... To her, he appeared ugly and loathsome. His smile was a vicious leer, and his voice sounded ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... suggested with a leer. "Here is an address. Send a messenger boy whenever you like. Every one thinks I am a ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... harvest-folks, and John, "Came in and look'd askew; "'Twas my red face that set them on, "And then they leer'd at Sue. ...
— Wild Flowers - Or, Pastoral and Local Poetry • Robert Bloomfield
... voluptuousity; whilst from his black, twinkling eyes, that seemed always as if they were about to herald a jest, broke forth, especially when he conversed with the softer sex, something which might be considered as holding a position between a laugh and a leer. Such was the Rev. Jeremiah Turbot, to whom we shall presently take the liberty of ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... fugitive Jock Drones, whose mother feared for him. No other usefulness of purpose remained in his reach. If he stood up, now, before any congregation, the imps of Satan, the patrons of moonshiners, would leer up at him in his pulpit, reminding him that he, too, was ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... it possible that these were people of his own kind? Had a madness of some sort driven all human instincts from them? He saw Thompson's red eyes fastened upon him, and he turned his face to escape their questioning, stupid leer. The bearded man was turning out the can of beans he had won from Scotty. Beyond the bearded man the door creaked, and Roscoe heard the wail of the storm. It came to him now as a friendly sort ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... person to whom it belonged, and struggled to recall a name. Then, almost as swiftly, he dismissed the idea. It was, however, a face of that kind which, once seen, is never forgotten—a frog-like face, with protruding eyes, and the frog's expressive leer. Somewhere, not very long ago, this face had been before him, and had stared at him in the same disconcerting manner—but where? when? In the few seconds that remained, his brain worked furiously, sped back ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... sacred rite was done, and the marriage-knot was tied, And Colt withdrew his blushing wife a little way aside; "Let's go," he said, "into my cell; let's go alone, my dear; I fain would shelter that sweet face from the sheriff's odious leer. The jailer and the hangman, they are waiting both for me,— I cannot bear to see them wink so knowingly at thee! Oh, how I loved thee, dearest! They say that I am wild, That a mother dares not trust me ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... that froze me with apprehension was that of Dejah Thoris and Sola standing there before him, and the fiendish leer of him as he let his great protruding eyes gloat upon the lines of her beautiful figure. She was speaking, but I could not hear what she said, nor could I make out the low grumbling of his reply. She stood there erect before him, her head high ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... rat. "This Trim," quoth she, "is an odd sort of a fellow; methinks he makes a strange figure with that ragged, tattered coat appearing under his livery; can't he go spruce and clean, like the rest of the servants? The fellow has a roguish leer with him which I don't like by any means; besides, he has such a twang in his discourse, and an ungraceful way of speaking through the nose, that one can hardly understand him; I wish the fellow be not tainted with some bad disease." The witnesses further ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... king taunted him from the black chaos that hid the dungeon walls. The words struck at him, filling his head with shooting pain, and he tottered back and sank to the ground to get away from them. They followed, and that vengeful leer of the king was behind them, urging them on, until they beat his face into the sticky earth, and smothered him into what ...
— The Courage of Captain Plum • James Oliver Curwood
... precision of their former masters. In place of the fine, delicate, low relief of the old school, they adopted a relief which, though very prominent, was soft, round, and feebly modelled. The eyes of their personages have a foolish leer; the nostrils slant upwards; the corners of the mouth, the chin, and indeed all the features, are drawn up as if converging towards a central point, which is stationed in the middle of the ear. Two schools, each independent of the other, have bequeathed ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... looked up with a triumphant leer at the calm face of Marguerite. She still did not feel really frightened, only puzzled and perturbed; but all the blood had rushed away from her face, leaving her cheeks ashen white, and pressing against her heart, until ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... said the other with a leer. "He learns a lot here by lookin' on, an' she tells him the rest at Mosman in the pale moonlight. If I won a sweep, I'd take a few lessons meself an' ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... could he? He's under examination. A cross-eyed Q.C. with an odious leer. Southminster's chosen the biggest bully at the ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... got no time to fool!" prompted the man, with a leer. "I'm dead onto your lay, and there's a bull comin' along now—half or ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... nature; and yet have not men of the most lofty sense of honor often fallen from their original nobility, and revelled in self-degradation? And it somehow seemed as though, at the last, the dwarf had looked up at her with a strangely knowing leer. And was it merely her imagination that made her think there was a certain sly approach to undue familiarity in the usually deferential deportment of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... spring. Ping! Out sprang the Jack-in-the-box, with the same red nose, the same leer, the same roguish eyes which had surprised the children of ...
— The Christmas Angel • Abbie Farwell Brown
... of, Gentlemen of the Jury, not of upright and noble men, may it please your Honors! There is great joy in the judge's heart, and great rejoicing amongst his kinsfolk and intimate friends who whinney and neigh over it in the public journals, and leer at the indicted man in the street, lolling out their tongues greedy for his [Transcriber's Note: ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... he observed. "By the bye, where have all your owls departed to? Are they like the ducks, merely come, pause, and proceed on their migratory way? Or perhaps"—with a leer—"they only stand on sentry in the valley when—when you require ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... Lupey, with an insolent leer; "and his she will be who casts highest. If two, or ten, or twenty of us should cast the same, we have an equal ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... attractiveness; the high cheek- bones, the narrow forehead, and the lines above her brow show that this is no ideal sketch—it is the portrait of a woman who once lived. But the peculiar mark of depravity is the eye: this woman looks at you with a cold, calm, calculating, brazen leer. Hidden in the folds of her dress or in the coil of her hair is a stiletto—she can find it in an instant—and as she looks at you out of those impudent eyes, she is mentally searching out your most ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... full around and gave a leer which, if possible, made her face more hideous than ever. Without thinking Harvey caught her by the arm and ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... voices—passionate powers, Wrath, argument, or praise, or comic leer, or prayer devout, (Not nonpareil, brevier, bourgeois, long primer merely,) These ocean waves arousable to fury and to death, Or sooth'd to ease and sheeny sun and sleep, Within the ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... from her chair, and made towards him. Unhappily for her chance of reconciliation, she had that day quaffed more copiously of the bowl than usual; and the signs of intoxication visible in her uncertain gait, her meaningless eye, her vacant leer, her ruby cheek, all inspired Paul with feelings which at the moment converted resentment into something very much like aversion. He sprang from her grasp ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... had stationed herself in the entrance where she had a view of both men, saw the cruel leer that accompanied Walcott's words and understood their significance as her father did not. Her hand sought the bosom of her dress for an instant, then dropped quietly at her side, but swift as the ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... sage Piraeus sped the seer, His honour'd host, a welcome inmate there. O'er the protracted feast the suitors sit, And aim to wound the prince with pointless wit: Cries one, with scornful leer and mimic voice, "Thy charity we praise, but not thy choice; Why such profusion of indulgence shown To this poor, timorous, toil-detesting drone? That others feeds on planetary schemes, And pays his host ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... early powers to try; Sudden a look of languor he descries, And well-feign'd apprehension in her eyes; Train'd but yet savage, in her speaking face He mark'd the features of her vagrant race; When a light laugh and roguish leer express'd The vice implanted in her youthful breast: Forth from the tent her elder brother came, Who seem'd offended, yet forbore to blame The young designer, but could only trace The looks of pity in the trav'ller's face: Within, the Father, who from fences nigh Had brought ...
— Tales • George Crabbe
... men fixed their eyes upon Victoria, and ogled her with an impudent leer. Victoria sat erect and immovable, and even her eye- lashes did not move; she apparently did not see the glances fixed upon her; nor even heard what Bonnier had said about her, for her countenance remained ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... some full grown specimen of humanity, but had been torn off to suit the dimensions of the present owner—and, altogether, the appearance of this miserable object, with his one blind eye, and the cunning leer in the other, was calculated to excite both pity and disgust. The brothers looked upon him for a moment in mute astonishment, until again startled by that squeaking, supplicating voice—"Un picayune, Monsieur—one picayune ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... greed stood reproduced, feature for feature, line for line. It was as though Nature, for an artistic freak, had set herself the task of fashioning hideousness and beauty from precisely the same materials. Between the leer of the man and the smile of the girl, where lay the difference? It would have puzzled any student of anatomy to point it out. Yet the one sickened, while to gain the other most men would ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... with a cunning leer. "Oh, you ain't, ain't you? Nick 'lows that you're sure—" Again he caught himself. "But I ain't a-tellin' nothin' ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... holy leer; Soft smiling, and demurely looking down, But hid the dagger underneath the gown: The assassinating wife, the household fiend, And far the blackest there, ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... Montgomery favored the judge with a drunken leer. "Suppose I was to go home full, what's to hinder her from gettin' things out of me? I'm a talker, drunk or sober, and Andy Gilmore knows it—that's what ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... perhaps, leer horse, a horse without a rider; leer is an adjective meaning uncontrolled, hence 'leer drunkards'" (Halliwell); according to Nares, a leer (empty) horse meant also a led horse; ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... merit in distress; and the little silly, pretty Phillida, or Foolida, to stare at the strange creatures round her. It is this temper which constitutes the supercilious eye, the reserved look, the distant bowe, the scornful leer, the affected astonishment, the loud whisper, ending in a laugh directed full in the teeth of another. Hence spring, in short, those numberless offences given too frequently, in public and private assemblies, by persons of weak understandings, indelicate habits, and so hungry and foul-feeding a ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... he is in hiding—with the lady," said Spivak with a leer. "It is no new thing for a man to go in hiding with ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... his nudes! What lurking cynicism there is in some of his interiors! Voila l'animale! he exclaims as he shows us the far from enchanting antics of some girl. How Schopenhauer would laugh at the feminine "truths" of Degas! Without the leer of Rops, Degas is thrice as unpleasant. He is a douche for the romantic humbug painter, the painter of sleek bayaderes and of ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... echo in his heart was born, And sometimes mid the weary task, and leer Of felon faces, ere he was aware From a compress'd unmurmuring lip, it broke, O Lamb of God! If still unquell'd Despair Thrust up a rebel standard, down it fell At the o'er-powering sigh, O Lamb of God! And ere ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... kind. But let me now, for I can do it well, Your conduct in this new employ foretell. And first: to make my observation right, I place a statesman full before my sight, A bloated minister in all his gear, With shameless visage and perfidious leer: Two rows of teeth arm each devouring jaw, And ostrich-like his all-digesting maw. My fancy drags this monster to my view, To shew the world his chief reverse in you. Of loud unmeaning sounds, a rapid flood Rolls from his mouth ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... followed by three tall monks in a different habit, and with none of the rubicund joviality upon their faces that was seen in those of the brothers of Leighs Priory; whilst last of all, with a cunning and malicious leer upon his face, followed the little peddler, who, when he met the steady glance of Paul's eyes, shrank back somewhat and ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... can be,' said Riderhood, turning on his heel, 'Good-night!' But he turned again as the other set forth, and added under his breath, looking after him with a leer: 'You wouldn't be let to go like that, if my Relief warn't as good as come. I'll catch you ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... still morning we looked upon the deed. We stopped our ears and held our leaping hands, but they—did they not wag their heads and leer and cry with bloody jaws: Cease from Crime! The word was mockery, for thus they train a hundred crimes while we ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... highest honours and honourable emoluments of an established profession. The translation the reader will find in a note below [45]. "Am sorgfaeltigsten, meiden sie die Autorschaft. Zu frueh oder unmaessig gebraucht, macht sie den Kopf wueste and das Herz leer; wenn sie auch sonst keine ueble Folgen gaebe. Ein Mensch, der nur lieset um zu druecken, lieset wahrscheinlich uebel; und wer jeden Gedanken, der ihm aufstosst, durch Feder and Presse versendet, hat sie in kurzer Zeit alle versandt, und wird bald ein blosser Diener der Druckerey, ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... friend," added the Gorilla with a leer, "as for myself, I am so confident of being considered an Apollo that I wish for nothing so much as ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... be brave, and she offered to give Elspeth her schooling free of charge. Like the other two hers was a "mixed" school, but she did not want Tommy, because she had seen him in the square one day, and there was a leer on his face that reminded ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... if y'u was aimin' to be one of Ellen Jorth's lovers,' said Bruce, with a leer. 'Fer if y'u hedn't give y'urself away y'u could ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... brain has avenged itself by calling up crowds of hideous dreams. The blood-vessels of the eye are charged with bilious particles, and these intruding specks give rise to fearful, exaggerated images of things that never yet were seen on sea or land. Grim faces leer at the dreamer and make mock of him; frightful animals pass in procession before him; and hosts of incoherent words are jabbered in his ear by unholy voices. He wakes, limp, exhausted, trembling, nauseated, and he feels as if he must choose between suicide and—more drink. ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... and what is society coming to anyway? You might as well dress like one of them barefooted dancers, only calling 'em barefooted must be meant like sarcasm—and they'd die before they'd let a daughter of theirs make a show of herself like that for odious beasts of men to leer at, and so on—until a couple years later Mrs. Henrietta Templeton Price gets a regular one and wears it down Main Street, and nothing objectionable happens; so then they all hustle to get one—not quite so ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... talk to you," insisted Anthony with a leer. "Firs' place, my wife wants nothin' whatever do with you. Never did. ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... to proceed with the case?" inquired the judge with a courtesy in which was ill concealed a leer of triumph. ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... words a foyn[128] On height; Over your heads my hand I lift, Out go your eyes, fore to do your sight, But yet I must make better shift, And it be right. What, Lord? they sleep hard! that may ye all hear; Was I never a shepherd, but now will I leer[129] If the flock be scared, yet shall I nap near, Who draws hitherward, now mends our cheer, From sorrow: A fat sheep I dare say, A good fleece dare I lay, Eft white when I may, But ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... him, half frightened and much surprised, but the boy showed no symptoms of astonishment. His face relaxed into a ghastly leer, which showed the whole range of his glittering ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... claim, Thieves of renown, and pilferers of fame: Their front supplies what their ambition lacks; They know a thousand lords, behind their backs. Cottil is apt to wink upon a peer, When turn'd away, with a familiar leer; And Harvey's eyes, unmercifully keen, Have murder'd fops, by whom she ne'er was seen. Niger adopts stray libels; wisely prone To covet shame still greater than his own. Bathyllus, in the winter of threescore, Belies his innocence, and keeps a whore. Absence ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... Drayton took the letter from the lawyer's hands, folded it carefully, and put it in his fob-pocket. Then he peered into Hugh Ritson's face with a leer of triumph. Bonnithorne had slunk aside. The guests ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... of. Then Theodore Dodge was found lying bound and gagged on the floor. A ragged, foul-smelling coat had been substituted for the one that had been left at the river's bank. The banker looked up at the intruders with a stupefied leer, betraying ...
— The High School Left End - Dick & Co. Grilling on the Football Gridiron • H. Irving Hancock
... round at the door which had given her egress, by the light of the solitary lamp fixed in the alley, she saw that it was arched and old—older even than the house itself. The door was studded, and the keystone of the arch was a mask. Originally the mask had exhibited a comic leer, as could still be discerned; but generations of Casterbridge boys had thrown stones at the mask, aiming at its open mouth; and the blows thereon had chipped off the lips and jaws as if they had been eaten away by disease. The ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... how ugly he is!" cried one of the sailors, with a leer at the half-drowned man's face. "I'd like to see the lass we'd please in saving him. He's only fit ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... booth Mr. Lord looked at him around the corner of the canvas—for it seemed to Toby that his employer could look around a square corner with much greater ease than he could straight ahead—with a disagreeable leer in his eye, as though he enjoyed the misery which he knew his little clerk ...
— Toby Tyler • James Otis
... reckoned we might draw the game. I then added, that from the look of the establishment I could not be wrong in assuming that they did a large business in the way of feeding hungry politicians and honester people. 'You may stake some on that, old feller,' says he, with a suspicious leer. His nasal was somewhat strong, so I put him down as from Vermont State, perhaps from the more mountainous part of it. As if shy of my patronage he upon the counter, pompous, spread his hands, as if the mahogany was all his. This seeming ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... greift er nach dem Glase, Lchelnd macht er's auf der Base. Auf der Pest, Gesundheit leer; 15 ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... him Barney, and the name stuck. When they were at odds, as they usually were, they shouted "Barney Bluebeard!" after him, and ran away and hid in trembling delight as he shook his key-ring at them, and showed his teeth with the evil leer which he reserved specially for them. It was reported in the alley that he was a woman-hater; hence the name. Certain it is that he never would let one of the detested sex cross the threshold of his attic room on any pretext. ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... with an arch leer; "all above it, hay? warrant your Spanish Don never thinks of such a thing! don't believe 'em my duck! great cry and little wool; no more of the ready than other folks; mere puff and ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... morning we looked upon the deed. We stopped our ears and held our leaping hands, but they—did they not wag their heads and leer and cry with bloody jaws: Cease from Crime! The word was mockery, for thus they train a hundred crimes while we do ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... his arms outstretched on either side—the attitude of a man crucified. I built in his arms—his right arm first—and mortised the stones, then his left arm in the same way. I was careful not to look in his face. No, no! I didn't look in his face." Knightley repeated the words with a horrible leer of cunning, and hugged himself with his arms. To Wyley's thinking he was strung almost to madness. "After his arms I built in his feet, and upwards from his feet I built in his legs and his body until I came to his neck. All this ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... better can be,' said Riderhood, turning on his heel, 'Good-night!' But he turned again as the other set forth, and added under his breath, looking after him with a leer: 'You wouldn't be let to go like that, if my Relief warn't as good as come. I'll catch you up ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... get the razz for fair!" Now Gunch delighted them by crying to Mrs. Eddie Swanson, youngest of the women, "Louetta! I managed to pinch Eddie's doorkey out of his pocket, and what say you and me sneak across the street when the folks aren't looking? Got something," with a gorgeous leer, ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... Smith; but these are the sort we have in India," he answered with an unpleasant leer. "The English people are more fortunate, ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... in their Saviour's sight. The Bard, enfranchised from his earthly fate, Now soars, from this probationary state To join the seraphs of sublimer tone, Whose harps are vocal round the Almighty throne: On earth his laurels no destruction fear From cold neglect, or envy's blighting leer. Verse, in whose influence the good rejoice, Is sure to echo from the human voice, While praise, as faithful as the mystic dove, Flows from the lips, of gratitude and love. Cowper still lives, to truth's clear optics given, Endear'd to earth, and ...
— Poems on Serious and Sacred Subjects - Printed only as Private Tokens of Regard, for the Particular - Friends of the Author • William Hayley
... quantity of such relics, collected from all parts of the island, in the Royal Museum at Cagliari, a statuette of this idol, supposed to have been a household god. Its features are appalling: great goggle eyes leer fiercely from their hollow sockets; the broad nostrils seem ready to sniff the fumes of the horrid sacrifice; a wide gaping mouth grins with rabid fury at the supposed victim; dark plumes spring from the forehead, like ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... was general and cordial among the Southerners, while the intruder pressed hard upon Mr. Reybold. He was a singular object; tall, grim, half-comical, with a leer of low familiarity in his eyes, but his waxed mustache of military proportions, his patch of goatee just above the chin, his elaborately oiled hair and flaming necktie, set off his faded face with an ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... were ready did Bucky utter a word. The terrific beating he had received had stunned him for a few minutes; but now he jumped to his feet, not waiting for the command from Walker, and strode up close to Billy. There was a vengeful leer on his bloody face and his eyes blazed almost white, but his voice was so low that Conway and Walker could only hear the murmur of it. His words were meant ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... it!" repeated the old man, with another disagreeable leer; "perhaps, then, it will be well for you to wait till ...
— Timothy Crump's Ward - A Story of American Life • Horatio Alger
... inscription, or twelve lines of verse, for L4, 17s. 6d.,' I took up his packet of In Memoriam cards and went through them. The first one was a hand-drawn design in cream and gold—Kate's fancy. It represented in the centre an enormously bloated infant with an idiotic leer, lying upon its back on a blue cloud with scalloped edges, whilst two male angels, each with an extremely vicious expression, were pulling the cloud along by means of tow-lines attached to their wings. Underneath ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... little column at the left of the window, clutching it with her hand; for the dreadful thing had happened-Caracalla's eye had met hers and had even rested on her for a while! And that gaze had nothing bloodthirsty in it, nor the vile leer which had sparkled in the eyes of the drunken rioters she had met last night in the streets; he only looked astonished as at some wonderful thing which he had not expected to see in this place. But presently a fresh attack of pain apparently made him turn away, for his features betrayed ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... aspect, such as our venerable granddames would recoil from as absolutely disreputable, and Madame Reuter's jolly face bore evidence that she was no exception to the rule of her country; there was a twinkle and leer in her left eye; her right she kept habitually half shut, which I thought very odd indeed. After several vain attempts to comprehend the motives of these two droll old creatures for inviting me to join them at their gouter, I at last fairly gave it up, and resigning myself to inevitable mystification, ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... nature—and the shrill dissonance of his nerves, as seen in the physiological outbursts of the B minor Scherzo, is the agony of a tortured soul. The piece is Chopin's Iliad; in it are the ghosts that lurk near the hidden alleys of the soul, but here come out to leer and exult. ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... the baron, with his wickedest leer, "what for is my conclusion good? You Americans believe yourselves to be excepted from the operation of general laws. You care not for experience. I have lived seventy-five years, and all that time in the midst of corruption. I am corrupt myself, ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... when you come with horns and tail, With diabolic grin and crafty leer; I say, such bogey-man devices wholly fail To waken in ...
— Fifty years & Other Poems • James Weldon Johnson
... these boys will have it in for you,—if they ever get their hands on you," said Sid Jeffers, with a wicked leer. ...
— The Rover Boys in Southern Waters - or The Deserted Steam Yacht • Arthur M. Winfield
... his hands trembling one moment, but firm the next, as the kangaroo, bending downward with the side of its head to him and nearly on a level with the water, which rose in violent ebullitions consequent upon Shanter's struggles, seemed to have a peculiar triumphant leer in its eyes, as if it were saying: "Wait a bit; it ...
— The Dingo Boys - The Squatters of Wallaby Range • G. Manville Fenn
... sped the seer, His honour'd host, a welcome inmate there. O'er the protracted feast the suitors sit, And aim to wound the prince with pointless wit: Cries one, with scornful leer and mimic voice, "Thy charity we praise, but not thy choice; Why such profusion of indulgence shown To this poor, timorous, toil-detesting drone? That others feeds on planetary schemes, And pays his host with hideous noon-day dreams. But, prince! for once at least believe a friend; To some Sicilian ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... guilt, guilt! Success ne'er lit yet on thy feeble brow, But ever mock'd thee with dissembling leer, Whilst at thy feet graves open, at thy heart Remorse points daggers, and thou walk'st the world, Blood on thine hand and fever in thine eye, Friendless, by that thou ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... his tongue, and his eyes twinkled with a sort of leer, which indicated that the fellow was not without some humour. He submitted patiently to the rebuke, however, making no remonstrance ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... chief-king, had also set up for a priest. In the center of the village clearing, he stood holding a sullen and pale Varina Pemberton by one wrist, while he recited what garblings of the marriage service he remembered. His subordinates were gathered to leer and applaud. They did not know of the rush until it ...
— The Devil's Asteroid • Manly Wade Wellman
... act thus, for it would be a baseness foreign to his nature; and yet have not men of the most lofty sense of honor often fallen from their original nobility, and revelled in self-degradation? And it somehow seemed as though, at the last, the dwarf had looked up at her with a strangely knowing leer. And was it merely her imagination that made her think there was a certain sly approach to undue familiarity in the usually deferential deportment of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... was thinking of the familiar and lecherous leer with which the stranger had addressed her mother—the horror, the shame of it. Could even a drunken man, if utterly mistaken, be so defiant, so persistent, so willing to explain? What shameful things had she ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... how, is it?" said the pedler with a leer that was good-humoredly knowing. "Well, old fellow, as you've given me quite a lesson how to behave myself, I guess I must show you that I understand how to prove that I'm thankful—so here, Caesar, is a cut for you from one of my ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... "Harry of Shirley! Harry of Shirley! Methinks I could help you to the man, if so be as you will deem him worth the finding," he added, suddenly turning upside down, and looking at them standing on the palms of his hands, with an indescribable leer of drollery, which in a moment dashed all the hopes with which they had turned to him. "Should you know this minks of ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... that are not yourself," he retorted. "What makes you look so pale and worried—and why do you and the old man start if the door cracks, as if the devil was after you? What is the meaning of that?" asked he with a drunken leer. "You had better look out," concluded he; "I'm watching you both, and will find out all your ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... the face of the boatswain, hoping that in this proposal he saw a commutation of his death-sentence. Rogers returned the gaze with a look of grim satisfaction, which the second mate mistook for a half-drunken leer of benevolence; and, anxious above all things to propitiate this man, who undoubtedly held the power of life and death in ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... inspires the empty Cacus to deny his acquaintance, and overlook men of merit in distress; and the little silly, pretty Phillida, or Foolida, to stare at the strange creatures round her. It is this temper which constitutes the supercilious eye, the reserved look, the distant bowe, the scornful leer, the affected astonishment, the loud whisper, ending in a laugh directed full in the teeth of another. Hence spring, in short, those numberless offences given too frequently, in public and private assemblies, by persons of weak understandings, ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... praise; assent with civil leer; And, without sneering, teach the rest to sneer; Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike; Just hint a fault, and hesitate ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... short of outrage. They stare at her as she approaches; and I have seen them turn and contemplate ladies as they passed them, keeping a few paces in advance, with a leisurely sidelong gait. Something of this insolence might be forgiven to thoughtless, hot-blooded youth; but the gross and knowing leer that the elders of the Piazza and the caffe put on at the approach of a pretty girl is an ordeal which few women, not as thoroughly inured to it as the Venetians, would care to encounter. However, as I never heard the trial complained of by any but foreigners, I suppose it ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... young man," said the jockey, or whatever he was, turning to me with an arch leer, "I suppose I may consider myself as the purchaser of this here animal, for the use and behoof of this young gentleman," making a sign with his head towards the tall young man by his side. "By no means," said I; "I am utterly unacquainted with either ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... too clevaire," said the maid with an evil leer,—"she would rob Madame, would she? She would play the espionne, hein? Eh bien, ma petite, you stay 'ere ontil you say what you lave done ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... is all right," responded Frye, in an instantaneously sweetened tone, "I am glad you were, and, as I told you, you are wise to cultivate him. I suppose," he continued with a leer, "that you were buying wine for some ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... whole world on a raft! A Duke is here At sight of whose lank jaw the muses leer. Journeyman-printer, lamb with ferret eyes, In life's skullduggery he takes the prize— Yet stands at twilight wrapped in Hamlet dreams. Into his eyes the Mississippi gleams. The sandbar sings in moonlit veils of foam. A candle shines from one lone cabin home. The waves reflect it like a ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... signal for every hat to be lifted from the head; on the contrary, boys of sixteen or seventeen years of age would lean against the church, or the walls of the churchyard, with their hands in both pockets, and a sort of leer upon their faces, as though they defied the pastor on his appearance—and there would they remain outside during the service, meeting, unquailed and without blushing, his eyes, cast upon them as he came ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... departing with his order. Tunis was conscious of a hoarse voice at his elbow. He glanced aside. His neighbor in the next chair was a little, common man, with a little, common face, on which was a little, common leer. ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... and then threatened us with the rod. We did not think she would make use of it. Mary grew impertinent, and one afternoon turned sulky over her lessons, and set our teacher at defiance. Miss Evelyn, who had been growing more and more angry, had her rise from her seat. She obeyed with an impudent leer. Seizing her by the arm, Miss Evelyn dragged the struggling girl to the horse. My sister was strong and fought hard, using both teeth and nails, but it was to no purpose. The anger of our governess was fully roused, ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... everything, especially the eider-down quilt, which rises in slow billows in front of my eyes and threatens to engulf me. When in a paroxysm of fury I suddenly cast it on the floor, it lies there still billowing, and seems to leer at me. There is something fat and sinister and German about that eiderdown. I never noticed it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 18, 1917 • Various
... near me. The key turned in the door, it opened, and the Forest-master issued forth with papers in his hand. A mist seemed to envelop my head. I looked up, and—horror! the man in the gray coat sat by me, gazing on me with a satanic leer. He had drawn his magic-cap at once over his head and mine; at his feet lay his and my shadow peaceably by each other. He played negligently with the well-known parchment which he held in his hand, and as the Forest-master, busied with his documents, went to and fro in the shadow of the arbor, he ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... Helicon, I boast, is youth;— My Lyre, the Heart—my Muse, the simple Truth. Far be't from me the "virgin's mind" to "taint:" Seduction's dread is here no slight restraint: The maid whose virgin breast is void of guile, Whose wishes dimple in a modest smile, Whose downcast eye disdains the wanton leer, Firm in her virtue's strength, yet not severe; She, whom a conscious grace shall thus refine, Will ne'er be "tainted" by a strain of mine. But, for the nymph whose premature desires Torment her bosom with unholy fires, No net to snare her willing heart is spread; She would have fallen, though ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... furthest ends of the landscape, not with the strange glare of whiteness which it sometimes puts on as an alternative to colour, but as a splotch of vermilion red upon a leaden ground—a red face looking on with a drunken leer. ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... through the waiting-room, you leer at the others unpleasantly. The poor fishes! Why can't they take their medicine like grown people and not sit there moping as if they ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... work his arm free from the close and affectionate grip of his unwelcome companion, who was regarding him with a sort of admiring leer. ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... choruses which make things go along as pleasantly as possible. Meanwhile the bottle is returned empty. He takes it, insists upon re-filling your "glass" from it, and tips it up over your cup. Then with a comical leer at you at the idea of attempting to pour wine from an empty bottle, he turns, dives into his cellar and fishes up another. You bid him go on with that capital song, offering to save him the trouble of unsealing and dispensing ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood
... had been on board the yacht. The hesitation caused her to linger, as the cold air had caused her to think. It was as though she feared that when he was found the man would be impudent to her, and leer, behaving familiarly as he might have done to a common woman. Because she was alone and unprotected. It was terrible. Her secret filled her with the sense of irremediable guilt. Already she was staled with the evening's excitement. She stopped and wavered, her shadow, so black and small, ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... general idea on the instant. The two exchanged looks, such as are only current between very 'cute, knowing, sharp-witted men. Hiram was betrayed into returning Mr. Bennett's leer before he was aware of it. It was a spontaneous recognition, and he felt ashamed at being thus thrown off his guard. He colored slightly, and said something about his ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... that were better away, a latent corruption,—a hint as of an impure presence. Some of that dreary double entendre may be attributed to freer times and manners than ours,—but not all. The foul satyr's eyes leer out of the leaves constantly. The last words the famous author wrote were bad and wicked. The last lines the poor stricken wretch penned were for pity and pardon." Now a line or two about Goldsmith, and I ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... man who lifts a heavy dumb-bell and throws an impressive glance at the audience. Assistant Lusk was by no means thus proof against success I saw him put a bottle back in his pocket, his face already disintegrated with a tipsy leer. Judge Burrage, perceiving the rain-maker, came out of his gate and proceeded toward him, extending the hand of congratulation. "Mr. Hilbrun," said he, "I am Judge Burrage—the Honorable T. Coleman Burrage—and I will say that I am most favorably ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... when duty seemed to call, this school-mistress could be brave, and she offered to give Elspeth her schooling free of charge. Like the other two hers was a "mixed" school, but she did not want Tommy, because she had seen him in the square one day, and there was a leer on his face that reminded her ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... his haunches. Margaret shuddered, for the uneven surface of the sack moved strangely. He opened the mouth of it. The woman in the corner listlessly droned away on the drum, and occasionally uttered a barbaric cry. With a leer and a flash of his bright teeth, the Arab thrust his hand into the sack and rummaged as a man would rummage in a sack of corn. He drew out a long, writhing snake. He placed it on the ground and for a moment waited, then ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... I have shown, he makes a mistake of twenty years and more. John Mill is in a rage, and says that they are in a worse scrape than Croker; John Murray says that it is a damned nuisance; and Croker looks across the House of Commons at me with a leer of hatred, which I repay with ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... Tom would not work. An excellent painter and glazier, and a good cook besides. His only fault is that he has a great idea of his own reserved rights, to the neglect of those of his master." This was said with a waggish kind of a leer, as if he thought he had said a very smart thing in a very smart way. 300 dollars were first offered for him; but poor Tom went for 350. "Now, sir," said the man-seller to Tom, with a malicious look, "you'll go into the country." He was bought by one of the speculators, who no ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... was sure, could have left the foot-print in the court, and be the owner of the shoe I had seen—could hardly pass through the Rue de Seine without drawing the eyes of all the lodgers on the street. Dried up hag faces would have met the apparition with a leer; the porters would have turned to stare, and she would have had very ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... vision, sight, optics, eyesight. view, look, espial^, glance, ken [Scot.], coup d'oeil [Fr.]; glimpse, glint, peep; gaze, stare, leer; perlustration^, contemplation; conspection^, conspectuity^; regard, survey; introspection; reconnaissance, speculation, watch, espionage, espionnage [Fr.], autopsy; ocular inspection, ocular demonstration; sight-seeing. point of view; gazebo, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... and I thanked her for the care she had taken of the invalid. I again warned her to be prudent, and above all to treat the priest well when the lay-sister breathed her last, and thus he would not take notice of anything that might involve leer ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... by Loveday, leaving Aurelia standing in the middle of the hall, the old hag gazing on her with a malignant leer. "Ho! ho'! So that's the way! He has begun that work early, has he? What's your name, my lass? Oh, you need give yourself airs! I cry you mercy," and she made ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... but was evidently satisfactory to Hobson, for, as he opened the door, there was a leer of triumph on his face. He glanced suspiciously about the hall, and, on reaching the door, turned to Mrs. LaGrange, who had accompanied him, saying, in ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... their applause and admiration. Neither of the prisoners stirred. The pig's head grinned at the world with its inane, painted leer. A rumbling voice ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... rule, he bowed; and gave the company to understand he took this as a polite acknowledgment of respect. But his gesture was accompanied with a disconcerted leer of smothered malice, which I could not misinterpret. It was sardonic; and, to me, who knew what was passing in his ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... an appraising leer. "Don't have to say so," he drawled, "if you ain't, what have you-alls got them dinky little canoes for, an' if you were after 'gators you'd be packing big rifles 'stead of them fancy guns. You ain't got no call to deny it, for I was aiming to give ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... revelation to the three sports. She had been hidden behind so much glass and leather that the transformation was startling. The horsy gentlemen uttered murmurs of surprise and gratification. One of them sidled up to her with a leer. ...
— The Motormaniacs • Lloyd Osbourne
... And I shall say there till of good words a foyn[128] On height; Over your heads my hand I lift, Out go your eyes, fore to do your sight, But yet I must make better shift, And it be right. What, Lord? they sleep hard! that may ye all hear; Was I never a shepherd, but now will I leer[129] If the flock be scared, yet shall I nap near, Who draws hitherward, now mends our cheer, From sorrow: A fat sheep I dare say, A good fleece dare I lay, Eft white when I may, But ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... despair, I turned from him, That hateful cripple, out of his highway Into the path he pointed. All the day Had been a dreary one at best, and dim Was settling to its close, yet shot one grim Red leer to see the plain catch its ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... and from saddle to bottle, my Lord. We must have our pleasure ashore, and sleep at sea," and the captain tipped his flask with a leer. He turned his eye uncertainly first on me, then on my Lord. "We are lately from Boston, gentlemen, that charnel-house of treason, and before we leave, my Lord, I must tell them how Mr. Robinson of the customs served that dog Otis, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... my old friend cried "pish," and bid her go on. The gipsy told him that he was a bachelor, but would not be so long; and that he was dearer to somebody than he thought: the Knight still repeated she was an idle baggage, and bid her go on. "Ah, master," says the gipsy, "that roguish leer of yours makes a pretty woman's heart ache; you ha'n't that simper about the mouth for nothing—" The uncouth gibberish with which all this was uttered, like the darkness of an oracle, made us the more attentive to it. To be short, the Knight left ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others
... The pet of vaudeville, so the posters say, And every night the gaping people pay To see him in his panoply appear; To see him pad his paunch with dainty cheer, Puff his perfecto, swill champagne, and sway Just like a gentleman, yet all in play, Then bow himself off stage with brutish leer. ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... mead set before him. He soon grew so excited that he began to boast of his power, declaring he would come some day and take possession of Asgard, which he would destroy, together with the gods, save only Freya and Sif, upon whom he gazed with an admiring leer. ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... the Officious Leer of a Pimp; and I half suspect a Design, but I'll be upon them before they think on ...
— The Busie Body • Susanna Centlivre
... of these basement brothels invite the pencil of a Hogarth. Their bloated forms, pimpled features and bloodshot eyes are suggestive of an Inferno, while their tawdry dresses, brazen leer, and disgusting assumption of an air of gay abandon, emphasizes their hideousness and renders it more repulsive. Most of them have passed through the successive grades of immorality. Some of them have been the queenly ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... who were too proud to be protected by a woman. "Dahabo," however, relieved their anxiety by informing us that the Gerad had sent his eldest son Sherwa, as escort. This princess was a gipsy-looking dame, coarsely dressed, about thirty years old, with a gay leer, a jaunty demeanour, and the reputation of being "fast;" she showed little shame-facedness when I saluted her, and received with noisy joy the appropriate present of a new and handsome Tobe. About 4 P.M. returned our second messenger, bearing with him a ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... Italian, who came just behind me. I am certain of this; he almost told me so himself, not in words, but the mistakable leer he gave her in reply. It was wicked, sardonic, devilish, and proved beyond doubt that there was some secret, some ...
— The Rome Express • Arthur Griffiths
... narrow forehead, and the lines above her brow show that this is no ideal sketch—it is the portrait of a woman who once lived. But the peculiar mark of depravity is the eye: this woman looks at you with a cold, calm, calculating, brazen leer. Hidden in the folds of her dress or in the coil of her hair is a stiletto—she can find it in an instant—and as she looks at you out of those impudent eyes, she is mentally searching out your most vulnerable spot. In this woman's face there is an entire ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... broken door as best they could, the men left the apartment and when they were again alone Metak turned toward the girl. As he approached her, his face distorted by a hideous leer, his features worked rapidly in spasmodic twitches. The girl, who was standing at the entrance of the alcove, shrank back, her horror reflected in her face. Step by step she backed across the room, while the crouching maniac crept ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Bill and Halloway appeared loquacious, and inclined to steal glances at Joan when Kells could not notice. Halloway whistled a Dixie tune. Then Bill took advantage of the absence of Kells, who went down to the brook, and he began to leer at Joan and make bold eyes at her. Joan appeared not to notice him, and thereafter averted; ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... white and callous cliff. His hands were damp and chill; his back set against nothingness; his long eyelashes swept the chalk-surface. He had a sense that the cliff was swelling itself to thrust him off. It was alive; it was hostile. The leer he detected in the great blank face pressed against his own roused his anger. He clung the more tenaciously because of it, snarling back. G-r-r!—it ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... writing poetry? Both occupations are equally unhealthy." As he said this he watched the young man with the inscrutable smile that at moments was wont to curl upon his lips. Ernest had once likened it to the smile of Mona Lisa, but now he detected in it the suavity of the hypocrite and the leer of ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... doing here?' I shouted, When I saw his hateful leer; 'Tell me what this means, Jim Johnson. Where is Billy? Ain't he here?' He was standing on the doorstep, And the light that shone within Seemed to twist his wrinkled features In a sort of wonder-grin. 'Well! well! Nancy! sure's I'm livin'! Out there in the pouring ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker
... you passed up here, I saw three men on board. Where are the other two?" I answered him briefly that the same crew was still on board. "But," said he, "I see you are doing all the work," and with a leer he added, as he glanced at the mainsail, "hombre valiente." I explained that I did all the work in the day, while the rest of the crew slept, so that they would be fresh to watch for Indians at night. I was interested in the subtle ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... a shrewd leer of recognition, and smoking an imaginary pipe, with his head very much on one side and his eyes very much out of ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... her, glanced upward, and, as he thought of Eva's father lying stricken with the Madagascar madness in the room above, an evil leer came over his fox-like face. As he left he completely ignored both Locke and Balcom, unless it was that the look in his eyes meant a sort of ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... But the mind goes out under this regimen, like a fire without a draught; and it is not very strange, if the instinct of mental self-preservation drives them to brandy-and-water, which makes the hoarse whisper of memory musical for a few brief moments, and puts a weak leer of promise on the features of the hollow-eyed future. The Colonel was kept pretty well in hand as yet by his wife, and though it had happened to him once or twice to come home rather late at night with a curious tendency to say the same thing twice and even ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... precipitately or, if no retreat offered itself, stood stock-still, put a finger in his mouth, and seemed to be calling on some effort of the will to make him invisible. To-day he met her accost easily, familiarly, even with what in a grown male might have been taken for a drunken leer. ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... the young nobility. There's many of 'em who can't spend a dollar to your guinea, my boy. And as for the pink bonnets (here from under the heavy eyebrows there came a knowing and not very pleasing leer)—why boys will be boys. Only there's one thing I order you to avoid, which, if you do not, I'll cut you off with a shilling, by Jove; ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... each fleshless pate, Cursed with a ghastly grin to eyes unrubbed With love's magnetic ointment, seems to mine To smile an amiable smile like his Whose amiable smile I—I alone Am able to distinguish from his leer! See how the gathering coyotes flit Through the lit spaces, or with burning eyes Star the black shadows with a steadfast gaze! About my feet the poddy toads at play, Bulbously comfortable, try to hop, And tumble clumsily with all their warts; While ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... tumble-down place I have just left. My first impression of the officer himself, however, is scarcely so favorable as my impression of the picture in which he is set—the picture as just described; a sinister leer characterizes the expression of his face, and what appears like a nod, with an altogether unnecessary amount of condescension in it, characterizes his greeting. Hopping down to the ground, lamp in hand, he examines ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... black taled deer, but this I conceive by no means characteristic of the anamal as much the larger portion of the tail is white. the year and the tail of this anamal when compared with those of the common (leer, so well comported with those of the mule when compared with the horse, that we have by way of distinction adapted the appellation of the mule deer which I think much more appropriate. on the inner corner of each eye there is a drane or large recepicle ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... a ferocious leer, "that is the kernel under the limpet's tent! And I have uncovered it—I, Robert Garenne, ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... of sorrow and guilt, God knows), suddenly this sentence rushed in upon me, "The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin." At this I made a stand in my spirit and began to conceive peace in my soul, and methought I saw as if the tempter did leer and steal away from me, as being ashamed of what he had done. At the same time also I had my sin and the blood of Christ thus represented to me: that my sin, when compared to the blood of Christ, was no more to it than this little clod or stone is to the vast and wide field that ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... said to my Uncle John, who was dancing attendance on her with the leer of a satyr, "please do not let me disturb this lady. I am so troubled about the anxiety I must be causing my father and my friends at the present moment, that I could not really stop here. All I ask is ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... with holy leer; Soft smiling, and demurely looking down, But hid the dagger underneath the gown: The assassinating wife, the household fiend, And far the blackest there, ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... level with many of the least reputable elective Chambers in the world; and beneath the imposing mask of an assembly of notables backed by the prescription and traditions of centuries we discern the leer of the artful dodger, who has got the straight ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... makes life soft and easy. He bet there wouldn't many hit any higher spots than him. He bet there was one little girl that would be looked on as lucky, in case she was a good little girl and encouraged him to show his natural kindness. And I was favored with a blood-curdling leer from across the camp, of which I had put as much as possible between myself and the object of ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... and fraud, unabashed, unawed, may strive to sting thee at heel in vain; Craft and fear and mistrust may leer and mourn and murmur and plead and plain: Thou art thou: and thy sunbright brow is hers that blasted ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... everywhere; though how she, at her age, could fly about to so many parties, unless she was a fairy, no one could say. Behind the fairy, up the marble stairs, came the most noble Farintosh, with that vacuous leer which distinguishes his lordship. Ethel seemed to be carrying the stack of flowers which the Marquis had sent to her. The noble Bustington (Viscount Bustington, I need scarcely tell the reader, is the heir of the house ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... festive memory; but I am informed that he contributed no otherwise towards this display than by a few touches of chalk. Among the heads of distinguished personages, finding those of the King of Prussia and the Empress of Hungary, he changed the cast of their eyes, so as to make them leer significantly at each other. Note.—These (which in the catalogue are called an original portrait of the present Emperor of Prussia and ditto of the Empress Queen of Hungary, its antagonist) were two old signs of the "Saracen's Head" and Queen Anne. Under the first was written 'The Zarr,' and under ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... in a leer from Doolittle, that they had extraordinary need for Eve thousand dollars or so in your behalf—that they had consulted you. And then Doolittle winked and Noonan cocked his head rakishly, and Uncle Martin put—Hello, Mr. Jaffry. This is Penny. Dress and come down to the ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... the case of the other three, and which, if we had them, might probably alter our estimates of a good many now well reputed people. It is perhaps enough to say that his letters contain many good traits as well as some bad ones; that his unlucky portrait, with its combination of leer and sneer, is probably responsible for much; and that the parts which, as we shall see further, he chose to play, of extravagant humorist and extravagant sentimentalist, not only almost necessitate attitudes which may easily become offensive ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... large, that Hell hath wrought, Worm-like vapours skirr thro' the halls And reach a distant, lurid moat, Where sighs and groans upon a flood Ascend to heights of a grey ghaut— Satellites to Destiny's crypt! And Vespers that the Twilight brought— More dooms that prayers nor sighs can break— Leer at each thought to Fancy's flight; And to the dais whereunder sit A demon-quire that Circe taught, Songs that echo to the isles in lake And valley deep, ravage the night Until Idols pall at the scene. And stationed Mounts toward the West Whose bones portray a ghastly lust; And skulls ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... it, my Lord," said the man, with a leer, half servile, half cunning. "There came two young gentlemen of fashion yesterday morning, and almost lost their wits at sight of it. Either would have bought it, but both had had ill luck at basset for a week and so could do no more than ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... them. Thine ear Caught their defiance and thy lightening pen, In shattering the dark in evil's den, Caught hope amphibious from leer to leer Of those grim shadows, plotting to regain Lost Paradise, or bane ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... Success ne'er lit yet on thy feeble brow, But ever mock'd thee with dissembling leer, Whilst at thy feet graves open, at thy heart Remorse points daggers, and thou walk'st the world, Blood on thine hand and fever in thine eye, Friendless, by that thou lovest scorn'd ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... assent with civil leer; And, without sneering, teach the rest to sneer; Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike; Just hint a fault, and ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... the callers, and many eccentricities, to use no harsher term, are the result. Towards the close of the day, everything is in confusion—the door-bell is never silent. Crowds of young men, in various stages of intoxication, rush into the lighted parlors, leer at the hostess in the vain effort to offer their respects, call for liquor, drink it, and stagger out, to repeat the scene at some other house. Frequently, they are unable to recognize the residences of their friends, and stagger into the wrong house. Some fall early ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... Mrs. Eddie Swanson, youngest of the women, "Louetta! I managed to pinch Eddie's doorkey out of his pocket, and what say you and me sneak across the street when the folks aren't looking? Got something," with a gorgeous leer, "awful important ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... found impossible to discover. Experiment was necessary. The eyebrows—it could scarcely be the eyebrows? But he altered them. No, that was no better; in fact, if anything, a trifle more satanic. The corner of the mouth? Pah! more than ever a leer—and now, retouched, it was ominously grim. The eye, then? Catastrophe! he had filled his brush with vermilion instead of brown, and yet he had felt sure it was brown! The eye seemed now to have rolled in its socket, and was glaring at him an eye ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... no ascetic; I'm as pleasant as can be; You'll always find me ready with a crushing repartee; I've an irritating chuckle, I've a celebrated sneer, I've an entertaining snigger, I've a fascinating leer; To everybody's prejudice I know a thing or two; I can tell a woman's age in half a minute - and I do - But although I try to make myself as pleasant as I can, Yet everybody says I'm such a disagreeable man! And I ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... your Maxim's and your Catelans? Do we, when the week's work of your humbler people is done, see the laughter in dancing eyes in the Rue Mouffetard or, in the revel of your Saturday night, do we see only the belladonna'd leer of the drabs in the Place Pigalle? Do we hear the romance of your concertinas setting thousands of hobnailed boots a-clatter with Terpsichore in the Boulevard de la Chapelle, in Polonceau and Myrrha, or do we hear only your union ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... pardon for keeping you waiting, I'm sure," said the clerk with an apologetic leer, meant to ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... may forgive 'im," said Zook, with a humorous leer, as he wiped his bleeding nose—"I'd do a'most anything to ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... cordial among the Southerners, while the intruder pressed hard upon Mr. Reybold. He was a singular object; tall, grim, half-comical, with a leer of low familiarity in his eyes, but his waxed mustache of military proportions, his patch of goatee just above the chin, his elaborately oiled hair and flaming necktie, set off his faded face with an odd gear of finery and impressiveness. ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... far end of the room, his leer a little arrogant, a certain arrogance, too, in the tilt of his battered hat. He also was quite a celebrity in that gathering—Larry the Bat was of the aristocracy and the elite of gangland. Well, the show was over; he had ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... cards, checkers, and chess in the bar-rooms, every marble table being in requisition for the purpose of the games on Sundays. Having noticed the sparse attendance at the cathedral, we remarked to Jane that the church was quite empty, whereupon she replied with a significant leer, "True, Senor, but the jail is full." More than once an underlying vein of sarcasm was observed in the very pertinent remarks of which Jane ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... he bowed; and gave the company to understand he took this as a polite acknowledgment of respect. But his gesture was accompanied with a disconcerted leer of smothered malice, which I could not misinterpret. It was sardonic; and, to me, who knew what was passing in ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... a most lifelike portrait of my Sen, Drawn by the hand of Death; each fleshless pate, Cursed with a ghastly grin to eyes unrubbed With love's magnetic ointment, seems to mine To smile an amiable smile like his Whose amiable smile I—I alone Am able to distinguish from his leer! See how the gathering coyotes flit Through the lit spaces, or with burning eyes Star the black shadows with a steadfast gaze! About my feet the poddy toads at play, Bulbously comfortable, try to hop, And tumble clumsily ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... across the quarterdeck at this dismissal, but as he put one leg over the gangway to get down to his boat, he said in a hoarse voice, and with a sly leer in his dark eye: ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... it would be a baseness foreign to his nature; and yet have not men of the most lofty sense of honor often fallen from their original nobility, and revelled in self-degradation? And it somehow seemed as though, at the last, the dwarf had looked up at her with a strangely knowing leer. And was it merely her imagination that made her think there was a certain sly approach to undue familiarity in the usually deferential deportment of the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... man. "Glad to see a new customer, sir." He pocketed the money and showed them out, standing to look after them with a malicious leer as they disappeared, and jerking his left thumb ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... convenience and advantage of the inner port: it was as useless for the local pilot to look grave and recall dire happenings to Captains who had elected to effect their repairs in the outer harbour—just here, at Port William. Old Jock's square jaw was set firm, his eyes were narrowed to a crafty leer; he looked on everyone with unconcealed suspicion and distrust. He was a shipmaster of the old school, 'looking after his Owners' interest.' He had put in 'in distress' to effect repairs.... He was being ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... that was afterward recalled with some surprise and no little horror. At the time, the loungers thought his smile was a merry one, but afterward they stoutly maintained there was downright villainy in the leer. His coat was very dusty, proving that he had driven far and swiftly. Three or four of the loungers followed him into the store. He was standing before the counter over which Mr. Lamson served his soda-water. ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... priest. In the center of the village clearing, he stood holding a sullen and pale Varina Pemberton by one wrist, while he recited what garblings of the marriage service he remembered. His subordinates were gathered to leer and applaud. They did not know of the rush until it was all ...
— The Devil's Asteroid • Manly Wade Wellman
... the fireside with his feet on the table. He was reading a newspaper. A jug of whiskey and a glass were within reach of his hand. Without troubling to remove his boots from the table, he looked up with a leer at ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... of the words, the cheap passions which they implied, the leer and pomposity with which they had been uttered by the comedian, the unhealthy, narrow-chested, pavement-bred audience by which the effort had been greeted with applause, the total uncleanness and unnaturalness of city-life, came ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... very few women who liked the banter of Swift and Fielding. Their simple, tender natures revolt at laughter. Is the satyr always a wicked brute at heart, and are they rightly shocked at his grin, his leer, his horns, hoofs, and ears? Fi donc, le vilain monstre, with his shrieks, and his capering crooked legs! Let him go and get a pair of well-wadded black silk stockings, and pull them over those horrid shanks; put a large gown and bands over beard and hide; ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... laughed harshly. "Look here, my chick," said he, with an ugly leer, "you're comin' wi' us; that's settled, so you may stow yer cheek an' hurry up, or it'll be ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... narrow scull, 25 Go home, and preach away at Hull, No longer to the Senate{5} cackle, In strains which suit the Tabernacle; I hate your little wittling sneer, Your pert and self-sufficient leer, 30 Mischief to Trade sits on thy lip, Insects will gnaw the noblest ship; Go, W———, be gone, for shame, Thou ...
— No Abolition of Slavery - Or the Universal Empire of Love, A poem • James Boswell
... and John, "Came in and look'd askew; "'Twas my red face that set them on, "And then they leer'd at Sue. ...
— Wild Flowers - Or, Pastoral and Local Poetry • Robert Bloomfield
... of "Grace;" and an old gentleman, dressed in dingy black, who personated her father, the Curate; and who was, on this occasion (I presume through unavoidable circumstances), neither more nor less than—drunk. There was no mistaking the cause of the fixed leer in the reverend gentleman's eye; of the slow swaying in his gait; of the gruff huskiness in his elocution. It appeared, from the opening dialogue, that a pending law-suit, and the absence of his daughter Fanny in London, combined to make him uneasy ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... tried to leer at me, because his voice was absolutely dying in his throat. My indignation was boundless. I cried out with the ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... for all the world like a pepper-box afore he's gone half a mile. Those be yours in the far stalls, and since they were turned round I've won a bob of a gemman who I bet I'd show him two 'osses with their heads vere their tails should be.[11] I always says," added he with a leer, "that you rides the best 'osses of any gemman vot comes to our governor's." This flattered Jorrocks, and sidling up, he slipped a shilling into his hand, saying, "Well—bring them out, and let's ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... Temistocle, taking it, nevertheless, and examining it by the moonlight. "It has no visa," he added, with a cunning leer. Nino gave him another. Then ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... the prodigious quantity of such relics, collected from all parts of the island, in the Royal Museum at Cagliari, a statuette of this idol, supposed to have been a household god. Its features are appalling: great goggle eyes leer fiercely from their hollow sockets; the broad nostrils seem ready to sniff the fumes of the horrid sacrifice; a wide gaping mouth grins with rabid fury at the supposed victim; dark plumes spring from the forehead, like horns, ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... years, he evidently is a little vain of his person, and ambitious of conquests. I have observed him on Sunday in church eyeing the country girls most suspiciously; and have seen him leer upon them with a downright amorous look, even when he has been gallanting Lady Lillycraft with great ceremony through the churchyard. The general, in fact, is a veteran in the service of Cupid rather than of Mars, having signalised himself in all the garrison towns and ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... something of a waggish leer, thou owest the lad for the venison, I suppose that thou killed, Cousin Duke! Marmaduke! Marmaduke! That was a marvellous tale of thine about the buck! Here, young man, are two dollars for the deer, and Judge Temple can do no less than pay the doctor. I shall ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... caress, and was going to shut the door, when the drunken old man turned round once more, and inquired with a cunning leer, "So you expect some one, my child? Whom do you expect, little Itzig? Is it a lad ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... getting home or Mother will think I have been waylaid and my watch stolen. So long, everybody, and pleasant dreams." Then thrusting his face back into the room through the narrowing crack of the door, he added with elfish leer, "Just the same, I still think that Coulter had something ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... at the Fair were designed to be temporary, and they were superfluous when the occasion which called them into being had passed. The question of disposing of them was summarily solved. One day some boys playing near the Terminal Station saw a sinister leer of flame inside. A high wind soon blew a conflagration, which enveloped the structures, leaving next day naught but ashes, tortured iron work, and here and there an arch, to tell of the regal ...
— Official Views Of The World's Columbian Exposition • C. D. Arnold
... bear with it a little longer, sister? Does any thing provoke you now" (with a sly leer and affected drawl) "that did ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... "Poker" John indicated his approval with an upward leer as Lablache rose from his chair, and a grotesque pursing of his lips and his forefinger at the side of his nose. Then he, too, struggled to his feet, and, with unsteady hand, poured out two stiff "horns" ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... letters under her pillow. Since he went away he had done much to blot out all that had gone before. And yet sometimes the memory of that past unhappiness, of its disagreements and quarrels and petty unkindnesses would raise its ugly head and look at her with a sort of leer as if daring her ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... the gag to shule a win; The knowing bench had tipp'd her buzer queer, [8] For Dick had beat the hoof upon the pad, Of Field, or Chick-lane—was the boldest lad That ever mill'd the cly, or roll'd the leer. [9] And with Nell he kept a lock, to fence, and tuz, And while his flaming mot was on the lay, With rolling kiddies, Dick would dive and buz, And cracking kens concluded ev'ry day; [10] But fortune fickle, ever on the wheel, ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... hesitation. But after I had crossed I continued to hate that gap. I hated it as I drove back to the hotel, that afternoon, as I ate dinner that night, as I went to bed, and in my dreams I continued to cross it, and to see the river waiting for me, seeming to look up and leer and beckon. I woke up hating the gap in the bridge as much as ever; I hated it down into the State of Mississippi, and over into Georgia; and wherever I have gone since, I have continued to hate it. Of course there ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... and my wife telling me that there was a pretty lady come to church with Peg Pen to-day, I against my intention had a mind to go to church to see her, and did so, and she is pretty handsome. But over against our gallery I espied Pembleton, and saw him leer upon my wife all the sermon, I taking no notice of him, and my wife upon him, and I observed she made a curtsey to him at coming out without taking notice to me at all of it, which with the consideration ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... much wider than they were high, and this feature, together with a broad bay-window where the door might have been expected, gave it by day the aspect of a human countenance turned askance, and wearing a sly and wicked leer. To-night nothing was visible but the outline of ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... Just think of this wonderful opportunity. You have ze keys to his vaults, you have control of his bank accounts." Lowering his voice, and, with a significant leer on his face, he added "and ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... He was standing with his back to the window, and sprang forward, as pale as she, and grasped her, with a white leer that she never forgot, over his shoulder, and the Venice glass was shivered on ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... world knows or the printed page discloses. But when he wrote "Thas" it was neither histrionic nor musical art that be aimed primarily to exploit, but the physical charms of an individual. Something was needed for the jaded boulevardiers of Paris to leer at while they feebly clapped their hands and piped "Ah, charmante! Ravissante!" It may be that the fine command of Oriental color which is supposed to have affinity in the idioms of music with voluptuousness in all its forms, had something to do with the case, ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... had crept up behind us so softly that we should not suspect his approach, or else so engrossed were we that our ears had been deafened for the time. He stood there now in his untidy gown of black, and there was a leer of mockery on his long, white face. Slowly he put a lean arm between us, and took the sheet in his ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... portraits of that time like the day of judgment in their revelation of character. Titian's splendid harmonies of scarlet silk and crimson satin and gold brocade and purple velvet and silvery fur enshrine many a blend of villainies and brutal stupidities. What is more cruelly realistic than the leer of the satyr clothed as Francis, King of France; than the bovine dullness of Charles V and the lizard-like dullness of his son; or than that strange combination of wolfish cunning and swinish bestiality with human thought and self-command that fascinates in Raphael's ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... listened attentively, and Hawden looked at me with such a leer of triumph that my fingers tingled to smack his cars. Turning to my grandmother, I ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... ugly he is!" cried one of the sailors, with a leer at the half-drowned man's face. "I'd like to see the lass we'd please in saving him. He's only fit ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... who turns back with a look of malicious glee to see his bewilderment and suffering;—and a Court Fool, whom Death, playing on bagpipes, and dancing, approaches, and, plucking him by the garment, wins him, with a coaxing leer, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... discover whether Cromwell had communicated his name, but he suspected that it might be known to that acute person, and he could not tell whether his compeer spoke out of a sort of good-natured desire to warn him, or simply to triumph in his disgrace, and leer at him for being an impostor. At any rate, being now desperate, he covered his parti-coloured raiment with the gown Ambrose had brought, made a perilous descent from a window in the twilight, scaled a wall with the agility that seemed to have ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... began to conceive peace in my soul, in methought I saw as if the tempter did leer[35] and steal away from me, as being ashamed of what he had done. At the same time also I had my sin, and the blood of Christ thus represented to me, that my sin, when compared to the blood of Christ, was no more to it, then this little clot or stone before me, is to this vast ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Deputy, with a shrewd leer of recognition, and smoking an imaginary pipe, with his head very much on one side and his eyes very much out of their places: ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... unlaunch'd voices—passionate powers, Wrath, argument, or praise, or comic leer, or prayer devout, (Not nonpareil, brevier, bourgeois, long primer merely,) These ocean waves arousable to fury and to death, Or sooth'd to ease and sheeny sun and sleep, Within ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... girl, with the ends of a fly-blown boa floating out behind, aped a woman of fashion. Her swain moved a stick with a ragged bit of string dangling from the end, reproducing with strange fidelity the circular flourish of Swithin's whip, and rolled his head at his lady with a leer that had a weird ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... is leer, I warrant your purse is full, gaffer," shouted Hordle John. "See that you lay in good store of the ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the attitude of hesitation; which she, interpreting to her advantage, repeated her request, and endeavoured to force a leer of invitation into her countenance. He took her arm, and they walked on to one of those obsequious taverns in the neighbourhood, where the dearness of the wine is a discharge in full for the character of the house. From what impulse he did this we do not mean to enquire; as it has ever ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... officer, but a bad man; Varin, a proud, arrogant libertine, Commissary of Montreal, who outdid Bigot in rapine and Cadet in coarseness; De Breard, Comptroller of the Marine, a worthy associate of Penisault, whose pinched features and cunning leer were in keeping with his important office of chief manager of the Friponne. Perrault, D'Estebe, Morin, and Vergor, all creatures of the Intendant, swelled the roll of infamy, as partners of the Grand Company of Associates trading in New France, ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... conversation; a most respectable room; an intelligent girl. Only Madame herself seeing Jacob out had about her that leer, that lewdness, that quake of the surface (visible in the eyes chiefly), which threatens to spill the whole bag of ordure, with difficulty held together, over the pavement. In ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... applause and admiration. Neither of the prisoners stirred. The pig's head grinned at the world with its inane, painted leer. A rumbling voice ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... beams of the great red sun rising above the horizon as they fell on his eyes awoke him, and on looking round he caught sight of the fin of the shark gliding by a few feet off. The monster's eye was turned up towards him with a wicked leer, and he believed that in another instant the savage creature would have made a grab at the raft. His pole was brought into requisition, and the rapid blows he gave with it on the water soon made the monster keep at a respectful distance. He would not ...
— Charley Laurel - A Story of Adventure by Sea and Land • W. H. G. Kingston
... with a drunken, quizzical leer. But what he read seemed to sober him. He looked at the other reproachfully, tears oozing into his eyes ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... mystery, a key rasped in the door across the room. He turned his head. A gas jet above the wretched little washstand lighted the room but poorly. The door opened slowly. A tall, ungainly woman entered the room—a creature with a sallow, weather-beaten face and a perpetual leer. ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... basement brothels invite the pencil of a Hogarth. Their bloated forms, pimpled features and bloodshot eyes are suggestive of an Inferno, while their tawdry dresses, brazen leer, and disgusting assumption of an air of gay abandon, emphasizes their hideousness and renders it more repulsive. Most of them have passed through the successive grades of immorality. Some of them have been the queenly mistress of the spendthrift, and have descended, step by step, to the foul, degraded ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... welcome postern open'd on a court— Say rather, grave-yard; gloomy yews begirt Its cheerless walls; ranges of headstones show'd, Each on its hoary tablature, half hid With moss, with hemlock, and with nettles rank, The sculptured leer of that hyena face, Softening as backwards, through the waves of time, Receded generations more remote. It was a square of tombs—of old, grey tombs, (The oldest of an immemorial date,) Deserted quite—and rusty gratings black, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... als ich Abschied nahm, Waren Kisten und Kasten schwer; 10 Als ich wieder kam, als ich wieder kam, War alles leer." ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... I have ever seen. He has a squint and a leer, his mouth drops at both sides, he has no forehead, and his straight, combed hair meets his eyebrows—or rather, his left eyebrow, since that one is raised by a cut. He has the expression of a cut-throat, and yet he is quite young, good-tempered, ...
— A Diary Without Dates • Enid Bagnold
... case. I had never loathed the man more than I did at that instant when, with a cigar stuffed in his fat face, he came out of the card-room, dressed in his white waistcoat and pearl studs, and with a half-drunken leer asked what ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... the Captain, John, with a shameless leer, advanced, and stood passively upon the grating, while the bare-headed old quarter-master, with grey hair streaming in the wind, bound his feet to the cross-bars, and, stretching out his arms over his head, secured them to the hammock-nettings above. He then retreated ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... ain't as bad as it seems. I shut 'em up quick, feeling that no decent citizen could stand an' hear a pretty gal slandered like that. An' I'll tell you this, Miss Golden, you owe me something for the way I made 'em quit. Still," he added, with a leer, "I don't need payment. You see, I ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... the how, is it?" said the pedler with a leer that was good-humoredly knowing. "Well, old fellow, as you've given me quite a lesson how to behave myself, I guess I must show you that I understand how to prove that I'm thankful—so here, Caesar, is a cut for you from one ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... of his face, and in every curl of his hair, and in every glare of his eye, and in every knuckle of his hand with which he clutches the money bag, hypocrisy and avarice and hate and low strategy and diabolism. The quickness with which he grabs the bribe for the betrayal of the Lord, the villainous leer at the Master while seated at the holy supper, show him to be capable of any wickedness. What a spectacle when the traitorous lips are pressed against the pure cheek of the Immaculate One, the disgusting smack desecrating the holy symbol ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... but replied with a knowing leer, "Aint ye Dicky Falkner what used ter live cross the ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... evil genius in the person of the landlord, who took me out to the woodshed. "Dutchy, I have decided to adopt you as my only son; have you ever bucked a wood saw?" said he, and a sardonic leer distorted his evil features. After I recovered sufficiently from the shock, I answered indignantly, "Sir, know ye not that I have pledged my service to the vestal virgins of yon temple?" "Ha! Ha!" laughed the villain, "get busy now, son, ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... laughing harvest folks, at John, Stood quizzing him askew, 'Twas John's red face that set them on, And then they leer'd ...
— Harrison's Amusing Picture and Poetry Book • Unknown
... be as much surprised at what we are going to do as the manner in which we are going to do it," replied Duval, with an evil leer. ...
— The Boy Allies in the Trenches - Midst Shot and Shell Along the Aisne • Clair Wallace Hayes
... Margaret shuddered, for the uneven surface of the sack moved strangely. He opened the mouth of it. The woman in the corner listlessly droned away on the drum, and occasionally uttered a barbaric cry. With a leer and a flash of his bright teeth, the Arab thrust his hand into the sack and rummaged as a man would rummage in a sack of corn. He drew out a long, writhing snake. He placed it on the ground and for a moment waited, ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... tone, "so all three shall go in; and as to who is to play Doll Wango, the master of the ceremonies will settle that, so you need give yourself no more concern about it; but if I were called on to decide," he added, with an amorous leer at Dame Baldwyn, whose proportions so well matched his own, "I know where my choice would light. There, now!" he shouted, "Open wide the gate for Squire Nicholas Assheton of Downham, and the three ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... entirely helpless, drugged as he was, and, with a triumphant leer, the man who had drugged him picked him up, and, moving as cautiously as ever, carried him to the motor boat. But he had underestimated the watchfulness of the Scout sentries. At the sudden, sharp explosions of the engine as it was started, ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters - or Jack Danby's Bravest Deed • Robert Maitland
... had at last become Tired of long waiting, and of sitting dumb Upon his charger; so with greenest leer He vented his impatience in a sneer. "Is this," he said, "the glorious Table Round, And is its glory naught but empty sound? Braggarts! I put your bluster to the test, And find you quail before a merry jest!" Then the great king himself stood up in ire, ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis
... father, with a holy leer, Saw he might well be spared, and soon withdrew: This forced my servant to a quick retreat, For fear ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... be roused from my writing by her cry that I am making strange faces again. It is my contemptible weakness that if I say a character smiled vacuously, I must smile vacuously; if he frowns or leers, I frown or leer; if he is a coward or given to contortions, I cringe, or twist my legs until I have to stop writing to undo the knot. I bow with him, eat with him, and gnaw my moustache with him. If the character be a lady with an exquisite laugh, I suddenly terrify you by laughing ...
— Margaret Ogilvy • James M. Barrie
... yes. Wherefore this reserve? Why should you pretend not to understand? Don't you see," he added, with a cunning leer, "that I can make these medals as perfectly as they can at the Hotel de la ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... hand I lift, Out go your eyes, fore to do your sight, But yet I must make better shift, And it be right. What, Lord? they sleep hard! that may ye all hear; Was I never a shepherd, but now will I leer[129] If the flock be scared, yet shall I nap near, Who draws hitherward, now mends our cheer, From sorrow: A fat sheep I dare say, A good fleece dare I lay, Eft white when I may, But ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... one of which had rather an ugly bulge by the side near the toes. His mouth was exceedingly wide, and his nose remarkably long; its extremity of a deep purple; upon his features was a half-simple smile or leer; in his hand was ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... damped the zeal of any other man. The listeners stood with their hands in their pockets, doubting whether to hear him to the end or to take their wonted way to the public-house. One moment their eyes would be fixed upon him, filmy, unintelligent, then they would look at one another with a leer of cunning, or at best a doubtful grin. Socialism, forsooth! They were as ready for translation to supernal spheres. Yet some of them were attracted: 'percentage,' 'interest,' 'compound interest,' after all, there might be something in this! And perhaps they ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... speak no English, but the spoken name and the tone were significant enough. He fell back a step, and scowled at Stonor as if he suspected him of a desire to make fun of him. Then his eyes went involuntarily to Hooliam. Stonor, following his glance, was struck by the odd, self-conscious leer on Hooliam's comely face. Suddenly it flashed on him that this was his man. His face went blank with astonishment. ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... the Pres. Part. used in this capacity in English is inadmissible in Spanish, e.g., we could never say "leyendo" for "el leer" (or "la lectura"). ...
— Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar (2nd ed.) • C. A. Toledano
... never enjoyed himself so well, nor found himself so easy as he had done since he cut off his tail. He said no more, but looked about with a brisk air to see what proselytes he had gained; when a sly old Fox in the company, who understood trap, answered him, with a leer, "I believe you may have found a conveniency in parting with your tail; and when we are in the same circumstances, perhaps ...
— Favourite Fables in Prose and Verse • Various
... repeated: "And you saw something else, William?" he gave me a wicked, frightened leer, and shuffled off to feed the mules. Flattery, entreaties, threats left him unmoved; he never told me what the third thing was that he had seen behind the ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... with a low chuckle and a leer, which sent a chill to the heart not only of Will Osten but of Larry and Muggins also, for it convinced them that their new master had guessed their intention, and that he would, of course, take every precaution to prevent its being carried out. After the first depression of spirits, consequent ...
— Lost in the Forest - Wandering Will's Adventures in South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... Peace would listen to no refusal, however decided its tone. Dyson threw over the card into Peace's garden. This only served to aggravate his determination to possess himself of the wife. He would listen at keyholes, leer in at the window, and follow Mrs. Dyson wherever she went. When she was photographed at the fair, she found that Peace had stood behind her chair and by that means got himself included in the picture. At times he had threatened her with a revolver. ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... was an immense apartment; eight sets of quadrilles might have been danced in it at one time. The walls were hung with extraordinary pictures of the Six Days of Creation, in which the Almighty was represented as an old man dressed in a long gown, with a peculiarly good-humoured leer, suggesting a wink, on his face. I have frequently seen the same series of pictures in the Swedish inns. In the morning I was aroused by Braisted exclaiming, "There she blows!" and the whale came up to the surface with a huge pot of coffee, some sugar candy, ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... doctor," sayth she, with an unpleasant leer, "that hath given that at first. In time he gets his hand in; and I've had a plenty o' ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... every word which had passed, and he saw at once that he would have a field for his diabolical machinations. Could Claude have seen the leer with which the ghastly apparition followed him as he passed, he would have shuddered with a sense of approaching danger. He did not look back, however, and the Man in Green, having requested an audience with De Roberval, was admitted ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... said the obese Turk with a graceful wave of the hand in my direction, "and not you, who has robbed my home of its treasure, unless," he added, and I shall always remember the hideous leer of that pulpy-nosed and small-pox pitted face, "unless Monsieur has relieved you ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... story after story without getting sight of the madman. Finally he reached the roof. It was waving like swells on a lake before a breeze. He caught sight of the Mad Musician standing on the street wall, thirty stories from the street, a leer on his devilish visage. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... late. His name is Gerald Van Alstyne, and he is tall, with curly golden hair, piercing blue eyes and a cleft chin; in short, a veritable Adonis and different, so different, from the traveling salesmen who leer at her across the counter and the loutish youths of San Pasqual who, despairing of her favor, call her by her first name because they know it annoys her. Donna has not the slightest doubt but that this young fellow will come rushing in to the eating-house some day, discover her when he comes ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... his hands on his hips, his head inclined towards his right shoulder, and an insolent leer ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... hierbei wohl manches vorkommen msste, was dem gemeinen Menschen als schdlich, der Geistlichkeit als gefhrlich, dem Staat als unzulssig erschienen mchte, daran hatten wir keinen Zweifel, und wir hofften, dieses Bchlein sollte nicht unwrdig die Feuerprobe bestauden haben. Allein wie hohl und leer ward uns in deiser tristen Atheistischen Halbnacht zu Mute, in welcher die Erde mit allen ihren Gebilden, der Himmel mit allen seinen Gestirnen verschwand! Eine Materie sollte sein von Ewigkeit und von Ewigkeit ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... him with scornful, yet with jealous eyes, And hate for arts that caused himself to rise, Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, And with our sneering teach the rest to sneer; Willing to wound and yet afraid to strike, Just hint a fault and hesitate dislike, Alike reserved to blame or to commend, A tim'rous foe, and a suspicious friend, ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... 'Well, what's the matter with you?' "'Aw,' said the soldier, with a leer, 'I've got de lapsy-palls, and I wanter go to de ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... dressing table before the glass, and I snatched at it. Great God! as I did so, another arm was thrust forth—not mine, I swear, if I live a thousand years; and as I recoiled, I saw in that glass a fiend step back. Not me, not me!—but a fiend with bloody hands, and a foul leer upon its face, and a fierce, cruel laugh in its glittering eyes. It was he, it was he! It was the devil that had possessed me before, come back again. And as I shuddered and gasped, and turned away, and then looked again into those eyes that pierced me through, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... with his order. Tunis was conscious of a hoarse voice at his elbow. He glanced aside. His neighbor in the next chair was a little, common man, with a little, common face, on which was a little, common leer. ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... gentleman was considered the handsomest man, and the most elegant dancer, in the circles of fashion. That he was at once a shallow coxcomb and an encroaching acquaintance, unfortunately did not prevent many young ladies from desiring him as a partner; and when Matilda perceived the leer of envy, and the pause of observation directed towards her, she half gave him her hand, being conscious that her own figure and style of dancing would be superior to any other of the candidates ...
— The Barbadoes Girl - A Tale for Young People • Mrs. Hofland
... contaminated him more, Genesis or the loyal Clematis. To his way of thinking, he was part of a dreadful pageant, and he winced pitiably whenever the eye of a respectable passer-by fell upon him. Everybody seemed to stare—nay, to leer! And he felt that the whole world would know ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... walk along the woodland way Strange creatures leer at me with uncouth love, And from the grass reach upward to my breast, And to my mouth lean from the ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... Abschied nahm, als ich Abschied nahm, Waren Kisten und Kasten schwer; 10 Als ich wieder kam, als ich wieder kam, War alles leer." ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... Heck!" Dorsey greeted them hilariously and with a half-leer. "Howdy, Skinny! How's the Cimarron? Don't reckon you've taught Old Quicksilver to run yet, have you?" with a boisterous laugh as he referred to the race in which Thunderbolt had defeated ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... enemy to Napoleon, a fanatic partisan of the Bourbons; he is one of our men. I looked, at him. At every fresh epithet of the Minister the Abbe bowed his head down to his plate with a smile of cheerfulness and self-complacency, and with a sort of leer. I never saw a more ignoble countenance. Fouche explained to me, on leaving the breakfast table, in what manner all these valets of literature were men of his, and while I acknowledged to myself that ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... slept in the house, and this morning as I was standing at the window I saw him go out. He glanced up and caught my eye. It was a loutish figure and a singularly repulsive face that I saw, and he gave me the benefit of a very unpleasant leer. At least, ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... stolen goods; the "widow who bounced" from one end of the room to the other and finally "scuttled too airily downstairs for a woman in her clothes"; and the chambermaid disguised as a fine lady, who by "the toss of her head, the jut of the bum, the sidelong leer of the eye" proclaimed her real condition—these types are treated by Defoe in a blunt realistic manner entirely foreign to Eliza Haywood's vein. Some passages,[2] perhaps, by a sentiment too exalted ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... Sirs, I manetane that this is infernul nonsense. I manetane that wax figgers is more elevatin than awl the plays ever wroten. Take Shakespeer for instunse. Peple think heze grate things, but I kontend heze quite the reverse to the kontrary. What sort of sense is thare to King Leer, who goze round cussin his darters, chawin hay and throin straw at folks, and larfin like a silly old koot and makin a ass of hisself ginerally? Thare's Mrs. Mackbeth—sheze a nise kind of woomon to have round ain't she, a puttin old Mack, her husband, up to slayin Dunkan with ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... as a practical man; though perhaps he did not, even yet. Nevertheless humanity stood before him no longer in the pensive sweetness of Italian art, but in the staring and ghastly attitudes of a Wiertz Museum, and with the leer of a study ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... I ain't got no time to fool!" prompted the man, with a leer. "I'm dead onto your lay, and there's a bull comin' along now—half or ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... Now Gunch delighted them by crying to Mrs. Eddie Swanson, youngest of the women, "Louetta! I managed to pinch Eddie's doorkey out of his pocket, and what say you and me sneak across the street when the folks aren't looking? Got something," with a gorgeous leer, "awful important to ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... with a pitchfork. One characteristic of the medival imagination is its fondness for the grotesque. It loved queer beasts, half eagle, half lion, hideous batlike creatures, monsters like nothing on land or sea. They lurk among the foliage on choir screens, leer at you from wall or column, or squat upon the gutters high on ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... pang of that memory remained with Beauty Stanton. She was a part of Benton. She was treading the loose board-walk of the great and vile construction camp. She might draw back from leer and touch, but none the less was she there, a piece of this dark, bold, obscure life. She was a cog in the wheel, a grain of dust in the whirlwind, a morsel of flesh and blood for the hungry maw of a wild and passing ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... set purpose, had crept up behind us so softly that we should not suspect his approach, or else so engrossed were we that our ears had been deafened for the time. He stood there now in his untidy gown of black, and there was a leer of mockery on his long, white face. Slowly he put a lean arm between us, and took the sheet in ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... drew back for another blow at the exposed face. The Major, faint with the terror of his helplessness and the crushing weight of the quivering masses of muscle about him, would have fallen but for their dread support. His consciousness fast deserting him, fascinated, he watched the monstrous leer as the head drew farther back, poised. He felt the agonizing pressure as the great muscles steeled for the blow, and in the moment before his senses departed, heard two crashing shots that sounded from behind him. With the smashing reports the poised head thudded to the ground, the ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... nor dreamed of them. These creatures were hardly to be recognized as human beings; they were some new grotesque race of apes. They could not walk, they could only shamble; they could not laugh, they could only leer. I saw a hand-organ playing, and turned away—the things they did in their efforts to dance were not to be watched. And then I went out into the beautiful English country; cultured and charming ladies took me in swift, smooth motor-cars, and I saw the pitiful hovels and the drink-sodden, ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... genial warmth of human nature, who could help it? It was an amiable weakness! At this time the profanation of the word "love" rose to its height; the muse of science condescended to seek admission at the saloons of fashion and frivolity, rouged like a harlot and with the harlot's wanton leer. I know not how the annals of guilt could be better forced into the service of virtue than by such a comment on the present paragraph as would be afforded by sentimental correspondence produced in courts of justice, fairly translated ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... hundred angry Italians who were trying to mob a Chinese laundryman. The evening papers said that I had stopped a runaway coach-and-four on Fifth Avenue, that morning, by lassoing the leader. On the coach were Mrs. Aster, Mrs. Fitch, Reggie Vanderbuilt, George Goold, Harry Leer and a passel of other "Among those presents." That night I went to a music-hall—according to the next morning's papers—and broke up the show by throwing a pocketful of solitaires to the chorus girls. The next day ...
— Colonel Crockett's Co-operative Christmas • Rupert Hughes
... neighbouring small Squire, who lived in the doubtful capacity of parlour-boarder with Mr. Wapshot, flung himself into a theatrical attitude near a newly-made grave, and began repeating Hamlet's verses over Ophelia, with a hideous leer at Pen. The young fellow was so enraged that he rushed at Hobnell Major with a shriek very much resembling an oath, cut him furiously across the face with the riding-whip which he carried, flung it away, calling upon the cowardly villain to defend himself, and in another minute knocked the bewildered ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Bard, enfranchised from his earthly fate, Now soars, from this probationary state To join the seraphs of sublimer tone, Whose harps are vocal round the Almighty throne: On earth his laurels no destruction fear From cold neglect, or envy's blighting leer. Verse, in whose influence the good rejoice, Is sure to echo from the human voice, While praise, as faithful as the mystic dove, Flows from the lips, of gratitude and love. Cowper still lives, to truth's clear optics given, Endear'd to earth, and recompens'd by heaven! ...
— Poems on Serious and Sacred Subjects - Printed only as Private Tokens of Regard, for the Particular - Friends of the Author • William Hayley
... back, had lured us into Bezers' power. Since that moment we had not seen him. Now he had wiped off part of the debt, and we looked at him, uncertain whether to reproach him or no. He, however, was not one whit abashed, but returned our regards with a not unkindly leer. ...
— The House of the Wolf - A Romance • Stanley Weyman
... are not yourself," he retorted. "What makes you look so pale and worried—and why do you and the old man start if the door cracks, as if the devil was after you? What is the meaning of that?" asked he with a drunken leer. "You had better look out," concluded he; "I'm watching you both, and will find out all your ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... die Welt ist leer, Und weiter giebt sie dem Wunsche nichts mehr. Du Heilige, rufe dein Kind zurueck, Ich habe genossen das irdische Glueck, Ich habe ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... She," he suggested with a leer. "Here is an address. Send a messenger boy whenever you like. Every one thinks I ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... not be informed of your whereabouts at present," said Boris, shortly. "Because," he continued, with a villainous leer, "I am only cruel to be kind. I want to have all the details of our marriage settled as soon as possible. A night of waiting will soften your dear brother's heart, and he will probably listen to reason ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... became aware that St. Auban stood opposite to me, hand on hip, surveying me with a malicious leer. As our eyes met—"So, master meddler," quoth he mockingly, "you crow less ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... short in the middle of the street, with a cunning leer on his face. The change of purpose supported his belief that ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... him. He soon grew so excited that he began to boast of his power, declaring he would come some day and take possession of Asgard, which he would destroy, together with the gods, save only Freya and Sif, upon whom he gazed with an admiring leer. ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... on his heel, with military precision. Then he chuckled Dolores under the chin with a leer, to have his hand indignantly pushed aside. As the girl glared at him with a flash of hatred in her eyes, he stalked into the taproom, followed by ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... now like the beak of a bird of prey over the face of the drowned man, upon whose eyelids she was placing penny-pieces, to keep them from opening; and her one eye was fixed on her work, its sightless companion showing white in its socket, with an ugly leer. ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... and gave a leer which, if possible, made her face more hideous than ever. Without thinking Harvey caught her by the ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... and everything, especially the eider-down quilt, which rises in slow billows in front of my eyes and threatens to engulf me. When in a paroxysm of fury I suddenly cast it on the floor, it lies there still billowing, and seems to leer at me. There is something fat and sinister and German about that eiderdown. I never noticed it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 18, 1917 • Various
... menzil, in comparison with the dreary tumble-down place I have just left. My first impression of the officer himself, however, is scarcely so favorable as my impression of the picture in which he is set—the picture as just described; a sinister leer characterizes the expression of his face, and what appears like a nod, with an altogether unnecessary amount of condescension in it, characterizes his greeting. Hopping down to the ground, lamp in hand, he examines the bicycle minutely, and then indirectly ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... foul-spoken, foul-tongued, foul-mouthed; slanderous; calumnious, calumniatory[obs3]; sarcastic, sardonic; sarcastic, satirical, cynical. critical &c. 932. Phr. "damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer; and without sneering, teach the rest to sneer" [Pope]; another lie nailed to the counter; "cut men's throats with whisperings" [B. Jonson]; "foul whisperings are abroad" "soft-buzzing slander" [Macbeth][Thomson]; "virtue itself 'scapes not ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... PERCEPTIONS OF LIGHT % 441. Vision. - N. vision, sight, optics, eyesight. view, look, espial[obs3], glance, ken, coup d'oeil[Fr]; glimpse, glint, peep; gaze, stare, leer; perlustration[obs3], contemplation; conspection|, conspectuity|; regard, survey;introspection; reconnaissance, speculation, watch, espionage, espionnage[Fr], autopsy; ocular inspection, ocular demonstration; sight-seeing. point of view; gazebo, loophole, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Slop, That imp of power, is powerless! Ever he dares, And, daring, lands his public neck and crop. Even the many-tortured London ear, The much-enduring, loathes his Speeshul yell, His shriek of Winnur! But his dart and leer And poise are irresistible. PALL MALL Joys in him, and MILE END; for his vocation Is to ...
— Hawthorn and Lavender - with Other Verses • William Ernest Henley
... privilege your beauty bears: Fie, treacherous hue, that will betray with blushing The close enacts and counsels of thy heart! Here's a young lad fram'd of another leer: Look how the black slave smiles upon the father, As who should say 'Old lad, I am thine own.' He is your brother, lords; sensibly fed Of that self-blood that first gave life to you; And from your womb where ...
— The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... more clearly, and the large, hazy outlines of Tode's features were beginning to assume the proper proportions. There was a diabolical leer upon Tode's face, unchanged during the five years since Jim had seen him last, except that it had become more evil, more powerful. The enormous and distorted face that Jim had seen had been simply due to the presence of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... Hypocrisy, with holy leer; Soft smiling, and demurely looking down, But hid the dagger underneath the gown: The assassinating wife, the household fiend, And far the blackest ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... muttered Carrie, drawing nearer to Durward, while with a sarcastic leer the captain continued: "Don't refuse before you are asked, Miss Livingstone. I do not aspire to the honor of your hand, but I do ask Miss Rivers to be my wife—here before you all. She shall live like a princess—she and her grandmother both. Come, what do ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... the hand and then at Mr Cripps's face. There was the same ugly leer about the latter, into which a spark of anger was infused as the boy still held back ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... inward, as if to watch the growth of the carbuncle. We are warned against bad judgments; but the Admiral was certainly not sober. He made no attempt to rise when Richard entered, but waved his pipe flightily in the air, and gave a leer of welcome. Esther took as little notice of him as ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... judge's heart,—it is corrupt judges I am speaking of, Gentlemen of the Jury, not of upright and noble men, may it please your Honors! There is great joy in the judge's heart, and great rejoicing amongst his kinsfolk and intimate friends who whinney and neigh over it in the public journals, and leer at the indicted man in the street, lolling out their tongues greedy for his [Transcriber's Note: ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... the same anaconda-like style of progression, until the individual stood revealed. He was a stoutly-built sea-faring man, dressed in a pea jacket and blue trousers and holding his tarpaulin hat in his hand. With a rough scrape and a most unpleasant leer he advanced towards the merchant, a tattoed and hairy hand outstretched in ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to whom the prelate would fain show how little he was to be despised, how far more honored and powerful he was among men. As for Gigadibs, it is to be noticed that Browning quietly makes him do more than leer enviously at his complacent competitor from a tomb-top. The "sudden healthy vehemence" that struck him and made him start to test his first plough in a new world, and read his last chapter of St. John to better purpose than towards self-glorification beyond his fellows, is a parable ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... Dr. Alphonse Mingana for this information. But the philological question is discussed in a learned memoir by the late Professor P. J. Veth, "De Leer der Signatuur," Internationales Archiv fuer Ethnographie, Leiden, Bd. VII, 1894, pp. 75 and 105, and especially the appendix, p. 199 et seq., "De Mandragora, Naschrift op het tweede Hoofdstuk der Verhandeling ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... to succeed in the Navy, sir," Cantor continued, then, seeing the young ensign's face still impassive, he added, with a malicious leer: ...
— Dave Darrin at Vera Cruz • H. Irving Hancock
... left of the window, clutching it with her hand; for the dreadful thing had happened-Caracalla's eye had met hers and had even rested on her for a while! And that gaze had nothing bloodthirsty in it, nor the vile leer which had sparkled in the eyes of the drunken rioters she had met last night in the streets; he only looked astonished as at some wonderful thing which he had not expected to see in this place. But presently a fresh attack of pain apparently ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... John, "Came in and look'd askew; "'Twas my red face that set them on, "And then they leer'd at Sue. ...
— Wild Flowers - Or, Pastoral and Local Poetry • Robert Bloomfield
... kept watch for the police. Presently the bricklayer came out, alone. He stood on the footpath, slightly fuddled, his giddiness increased by the fresh air. Immediately Chook lurched forward to meet him, with a drunken leer. ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... upon their cheeks. But Oh! it was so sad to see how soon the manly gait would change to the drunkard's stagger. To see eyes once bright with intelligence growing vacant and confused and giving place to the drunkard's leer. In many cases lassitude supplanted vigor, and sickness overmastered health. But the saddest thing was the fearful power that appetite had gained over its victims, and though nature lifted her signals of distress, and sent her warnings through weakened nerves ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... O'Gorman, with the leer of a satyr, "we'd take moighty good care you didn't do that. If Misther Conyers won't be obligin', why, we'll have to spare him, I s'pose; but we couldn't do widout you, my ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... label that swung Conspicuous, with letters in some foreign tongue, Which, when freely translated, the same did appear Was the Chinese for saying, "A White Man is here!" And as we drew near, In anger and fear, Bound hand and foot, Johnson Looked down with a leer! ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... divine; but one always wakes with surprise to find that it is all a dream. A few hours before Svidrigailov commits suicide he has an extraordinary dream of the cold, wet, friendless little girl, whom he places tenderly in a warm bed, and whose childish eyes suddenly give him the leer of a French harlot. Both he and the reader are amazed to find that this is only a dream, so terribly real has it seemed. Then Raskolnikov's awful dream, so minutely circumstanced, of the cruel peasants maltreating a horse, their drunken laughter and vicious conversation, ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... the sacred rite was done, and the marriage-knot was tied, And Colt withdrew his blushing wife a little way aside; "Let's go," he said, "into my cell; let's go alone, my dear; I fain would shelter that sweet face from the sheriff's odious leer. The jailer and the hangman, they are waiting both for me,— I cannot bear to see them wink so knowingly at thee! Oh, how I loved thee, dearest! They say that I am wild, That a mother dares not trust me with the weasand of her child; They say my bowie-knife is keen to sliver into halves ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... which shifted a little, noiselessly, just beyond the patch of light that streamed through the door. They waited, heavy-breathed, while Harrigan began to recover from the disconcertment into which O'Mara's coming had flung him. Slowly the former's lips twisted into a mocking leer; mockery rose and swam with the hatred in his inflamed eyes. He would have spoken, sparring for time, when Steve's hand leapt in and made of the joking effort only a rattle in his throat. Beneath the stiff red stubble the flesh was livid where those fingers had been, ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... bachelor, but would not be so long; and that he was dearer to somebody than he thought: the Knight still repeated she was an idle baggage, and bid her go on. "Ah, master," says the gipsy, "that roguish leer of yours makes a pretty woman's heart ache; you ha'n't that simper about the mouth for nothing—" The uncouth gibberish with which all this was uttered, like the darkness of an oracle, made us the more attentive to it. To ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others
... hangs a quaint, strong head, Though merely sketched. What a marked, cunning leer Grins on the wide mouth! what a ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... little piece of information, and with his leer an inch from my chin, I answered slowly and calmly that it certainly was. I might add that he spoke Spanish by preference (according to Mexique very bad Spanish); for The Fighting Sheeney had made his home for a number of years in Rio, and his opinion thereof may be loosely translated by ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... ancient Sardes, there is undoubted proof. We find among the prodigious quantity of such relics, collected from all parts of the island, in the Royal Museum at Cagliari, a statuette of this idol, supposed to have been a household god. Its features are appalling: great goggle eyes leer fiercely from their hollow sockets; the broad nostrils seem ready to sniff the fumes of the horrid sacrifice; a wide gaping mouth grins with rabid fury at the supposed victim; dark plumes spring from the forehead, like horns, and expanded wings from each shoulder and knee. The image brandishes ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... occupations are equally unhealthy." As he said this he watched the young man with the inscrutable smile that at moments was wont to curl upon his lips. Ernest had once likened it to the smile of Mona Lisa, but now he detected in it the suavity of the hypocrite and the leer of the criminal. ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... pluck has saved your life; but remember, I've not said I won't shoot him or your father, if chance throws them in my way," he added, looking back over his shoulder with a malicious leer, as he left the arbor, then disappearing from sight among ...
— Elsie's Womanhood • Martha Finley
... stumbles over a stony path after Death, who is his deceitful leader, and who turns back with a look of malicious glee to see his bewilderment and suffering;—and a Court Fool, whom Death, playing on bagpipes, and dancing, approaches, and, plucking him by the garment, wins him, with a coaxing leer, to join ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... Botticelli. Now, Botticelli builded on Giorgione, while Burne-Jones builded on Botticelli. Aubrey Beardsley, dead at the age at which Keats died, builded on both, but he perverted their art and put a leer where Burne-Jones placed faith and abiding trust. Aubrey Beardsley got the cue for his hothouse art from one figure in Botticelli's "Spring," I need not state which figure: a glance at the picture and you behold sulphur fumes ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... After two hours' dodging and maneuvering the fox came out at the very end of Bellman's Coppice, with nothing near him but Richard Bassett. Pug gave him the white of his eye in an ugly leer, and headed straight as ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... year, until some life-interest should fall in, was selling his chance, just as it began to grow most valuable, for a twelfth part of its worth. It was a good speculation—a very safe one. The old man stowed his pocket-book carefully in the breast of his great-coat, and hobbled away with a leer of triumph. That will had made him ten years younger ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... she lounge the gag to shule a win; The knowing bench had tipp'd her buzer queer, [8] For Dick had beat the hoof upon the pad, Of Field, or Chick-lane—was the boldest lad That ever mill'd the cly, or roll'd the leer. [9] And with Nell he kept a lock, to fence, and tuz, And while his flaming mot was on the lay, With rolling kiddies, Dick would dive and buz, And cracking kens concluded ev'ry day; [10] But fortune fickle, ever on the wheel, Turn'd up a rubber, for ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... for decorative purposes, the prints of Japan, the landscapes of the modern impressionists, the rugs of the East, or the blankets of the Arizona desert. Free me, then, from the reproach implied in that covert leer at my Early Sienese." Yes, we must, I think, exclude from the ranks of the true zealots all who in any plausible fashion utilise the objects of art they buy. Excess, the craving to possess what he apparently does not need, is the mark of your true collector. Now ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... church was gradually deserted—the appearance of the pastor was no longer a signal for every hat to be lifted from the head; on the contrary, boys of sixteen or seventeen years of age would lean against the church, or the walls of the churchyard, with their hands in both pockets, and a sort of leer upon their faces, as though they defied the pastor on his appearance—and there would they remain outside during the service, meeting, unquailed and without blushing, his eyes, cast upon them as he came out again. Such was the state of things in the ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... Building, the structures at the Fair were designed to be temporary, and they were superfluous when the occasion which called them into being had passed. The question of disposing of them was summarily solved. One day some boys playing near the Terminal Station saw a sinister leer of flame inside. A high wind soon blew a conflagration, which enveloped the structures, leaving next day naught but ashes, tortured iron work, and here and there an arch, to tell of the regal ...
— Official Views Of The World's Columbian Exposition • C. D. Arnold
... he chuckled with a drunken leer, "if you're not as crazy over the beggarly scribbler as my young gallant is over the Fenton girl who lives in the Old Bailey—at a coffee house, forsooth! Why, to see the pother you're in one would think the ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
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