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More "Madcap" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Madcap Ciss with her golliwog curls. You had to laugh at her sometimes. For instance when she asked you would you have some more Chinese tea and jaspberry ram and when she drew the jugs too and the men's ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... Cigarette had been as absolutely heedless and without a care as any young bird, taking its first summer circles downward through the intoxication of the sunny air. It was not without fiery resistance and scornful revolt that the madcap would be prevailed on to admit that any shadow could have ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... she knew it the little girl's arms were about her neck and the child was telling her about the dance at the stone house across the way. The sister smiled as she listened to the rush of eager words, but she was so glad to find this madcap telling her openly her heart's one desire, that she did what she had never done before in all her life of beautiful child-consecrated work: she said "Yes, and I will go with you. Wait for me outside the chapel door at ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... some attention, of course, when he descended down among the steerage passengers and then crawled up the iron rungs of the ladder to the windy height. But that did not trouble him. All at once such a madcap spirit had come over him, he felt so happy and refreshed; as if he had never had to suffer dull cares, or put up with the whims of a hysterical wife, or practise medicine in a musty, out-of-the-way corner ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... His son was Henry the Fifth, the greatest of the Plantagenet kings. When he was a young man, and only Prince of Wales, he was very wild and fond of games and jokes. They used to call him Harry Madcap. ...
— Royal Children of English History • E. Nesbit
... is in life that Fate, leading a traveler in easy gradients upwards along a road of triumph, suddenly assumes a madcap mood and with wanton hand throws a tiny obstacle in his way; an obstacle at times infinitesimal, scarce visible on that way towards success, yet powerful enough to trip the unwary traveler and bring him down to earth ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... to disowning English literature and the past of American literature (as many a writer directly or by implication would have us) in order to become 100 per cent American, let us first take breath long enough to reflect that, first, such a madcap career is eminently undesirable, and, second, utterly impossible. It is a literature which by general admission is now the richest and most liberal in the world of living speech. English is a tongue less sonorous than Italian, less fine than French, less homely than ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... 'peached,' I suppose, to curry favor. Whatever made you go, Maggie? You know you have never mixed yourself up with that Day, and Merton, and Marsh set. As to that poor Polly Singleton, there's no harm in her, but she's a perfect madcap. What could have possessed ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... tell you. I was riding down the river road and just as I came to the end of the clearing a man jumped out from behind some bushes and grasped Madcap's bridle. Imagine! For a moment I was frightened out of my wits. I instantly thought of the Girtys, who, I have heard, have evinced a fondness for kidnapping little girls. Then the fellow said he was on guard and ordered me, actually commanded ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... in progress. What a display of neat ankles and deft feet in mocassins! What a clattering of sabots and shuffling of "beefs"! The perspiration rolled off the brow of the musician, and young Lecour was whirling round like a madcap with the daughter of the ferryman of Repentigny, when the latch was again lifted, and ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... masters of their own lives. She quite captivated him by her simplicity and frankness; she washed her masses of brown hair and shook it loose in the sunshine, and she came in wet more than once, and changed her shoes before the fire—just as she had years ago, when she was a madcap little girl running wild ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... said Kitty, nestling quietly to her father's side as her madcap brother and sister whirled round the room. But they brought up with a round turn, though a little dishevelled-looking, to hear Mr. Maynard's reply to ...
— Marjorie's Maytime • Carolyn Wells
... A madcap young assistant on his pony comes tearing along across country. The weighing for the first race is going on; horses are being saddled, some vicious brute occasionally lashing out, and scattering the crowd behind ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... confidant, Curtius. The girl has always led a secluded country life, and this relationship is unknown to the Prince, who upon hearing the praises of Laura, beloved by Curtius, straightway resolves to win this lady also. Laura's brother Lorenzo, a wanton madcap favourite of Frederick's, gladly effects the required introduction, and when Curtius interrupts and forbids, Salvator, father to Laura and Lorenzo, promptly turns the quondam lover out of the house. Lorenzo himself is idly pursuing Clarina, wife to a certain Antonio, an ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... hay-gray meadow, the blas farmer-lad will not even lift his eyes from the plow to watch the pinkness of her passing. But here in the prudish brick-minded city where the Young Spring at her friskiest is nothing more audacious than a sweltering, winter-swathed madcap, who has impishly essayed some fine morning to tiptoe down street in her soft, sloozily, green, silk-stockinged feet, the whole hob-nailed population reels back aghast and agrin before the most innocent flash of the rogue's green-veiled toes. ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... dark nights, foul ways, and runaway horses! a mettlesome madcap, to start at the lightning and plunge with me head over heels in the brushwood; in scrambling out of that thicket, I certainly turned wrong, and have missed my road—how to regain it? 'sdeath! I could ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... anyone desire her departure, for she had made herself pleasant to all. In Mrs. Quirk's eyes she stood second only to Kathleen. Samuel Quirk regarded her as chief critic and adviser on the estate, and to Kathleen she was a cheerful, madcap companion, who reminded her that she was yet young. Denis Quirk's sentiments in regard to the girl he carefully concealed from the outside world, even from Sylvia herself. He was polite and deferential, yet ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... genial explosion of madcap humour. Not so another succession of scenes produced about the same time. The subject of them is that Leuchsenring whose acquaintance, we have seen, Goethe had made under the roof of Sophie von la Roche. Since ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... reprovingly. "She is a spoiled madcap, Sir Everard, and I am afraid the fault is mine. She has been everywhere with me in her seventeen years of life—freezing amid the snows of Canada and grilling alive under the broiling sun of India. And ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... SPEED. Come on, you madcap; I'll to the alehouse with you presently; where, for one shot of five pence, thou shalt have five thousand welcomes. But, sirrah, how did thy master part ...
— The Two Gentlemen of Verona • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... of that? From time to time I feel the need of breathing the atmosphere of such a life as this. My madcap existence is like a song; each of my love-episodes forms a verse of it, ...
— La Boheme • Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica
... sort of "mother's helper" to a lady residing in Elizabeth, whose brother was in a New Jersey College. Upon one of his visits to his sister he had brought Peyton Stewart home for a visit: Peyton, the happy-go-lucky, irresponsible madcap. Kitty Snyder's buxom beauty had turned all that was left to be turned of his shallow head and she had become Mrs. Peyton Stewart ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... chocolate, olives, and—the whiskey of the Americans! And supper's ready. But why Don Jose chooses to-night, of all nights, with this heretic fog lying over the Mission Hills like a wet serape, to take his supper out here, the saints only know. Perhaps it's some distrust of his madcap daughter, the Dona Jovita; perhaps to watch her—who knows? And now to find Diego. Ah, here he comes. So! The old story. He is getting Dona Jovita's horse ready for another madcap journey. ...
— Two Men of Sandy Bar - A Drama • Bret Harte
... two parties: the sages or good girls, and the diables, their opposites. Among the latter Aurore conscientiously enrolled herself and became a leader in their escapades, acquiring the sobriquet of "Madcap." These outbreaks led to nothing more heinous than playing off tricks on a tyrannical mistress, or making raids on the forbidden ground of the kitchen garden. But the charm that held together the confraternity of diables was a grand, long-cherished design, to which their ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... other houses, and told me the names of their occupants, all utterly unknown to me. At last I said, "Who are these people, Black? I don't know one of them." "You soon will know them, though, my boy," he answered. "Just wait and see if you don't." And sure enough, when "Madcap Violet" appeared, all the unknown personages of that night-walk at Camberwell were ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... grew steadily worse. Her dancing was delicate, accurate, even graceful, but the thing the British public likes to think typically American, a sort of breezy swagger, was gone. To bill her in her present state as the Madcap American would be ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... calmer sister, not a moment would elapse before she would cast herself upon her neck and weep her sincere contrition, and be for hours an altered being; until her natural spirit would prevail, and she would be again the wild, mirthful madcap, whose very faults could call forth no keener reproach than a grave and thoughtful smile from the lips of those who loved ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... have made the mistake of betraying their grief, however genuine it might be. And they were already smiling rather too broadly upon Sorelli, who had begun to recite her speech, when an exclamation from that little madcap of a Jammes broke the smile of the managers so brutally that the expression of distress and dismay that lay beneath it ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... for her fidelity to her friends, and for her honour. Listen, but tell nobody—four days ago, the King, passing her to go to supper, approached her, under the pretence of tickling her, and tried to slip a note into her hand. D'Amblimont, in her madcap way, put her hands behind her back, and the King was obliged to pick up the note, which had fallen on the ground. Gontaut was the only person who saw all this, and after supper, he went up to the little lady, and said, 'You are an excellent friend.' 'I did ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... received the fanciful title from a young visitor to the plantation who had studied Spanish. "Mariposa" meant butterfly, she told the baby's mother, who gratefully accepted the compliment to her newly born daughter. The mother and her mates called her "Mary Posy." The mistress, who was fond of the madcap sponsor, retained ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... the customary cowardly threat Ward made when he found himself caught in any of his madcap pranks. His rich father was a man of considerable influence in Stanhope, and many a man dared not treat the banker's son to the whipping he so richly deserved simply because it might be that his bread and butter depended in a measure on the good will or the ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts on a Tour - The Mystery of Rattlesnake Mountain • George A. Warren
... in this guise, however. You did not know me as the chief performer in that little comedy with Brigalow on Diamond Gully. You did not recognise me in the dark man who talked with you and Burton while the madcap from Kyley's was leading the troopers a merry dance along the lead. By the way, I admire your taste in women, Jim. She's a fine, unshamed barbarian, ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... Fin-Mac-Coul, should have disappeared before my search, rolling himself in his cloud like the spirit of Loda. Such an opportunity can hardly again occur to an ancient and grey-haired man; and to see it lost by the madcap spleen of a hot-headed boy! But ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... mind easy on that point,' replied the warders. 'We had tried everything we could think of, to get rid of her majesty the queen, but without effect. So a young madcap Shadow, half against the will of the older ones of us, slipped up stairs into the nursery; and has, no doubt, succeeded in appalling the baby, for he is very ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... her, make her your friend. Coax her secret out of her, and you will find that she is some madcap actress from a travelling company of mountebanks, who has done this thing in order to have the story told by the gazetteers and bring people to look at her. Get her to confess, and then let her story ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... has taken this madcap freak of turning painter," the uncle continues, "there is no understanding the chap. Did you ever see such a set of fellows as the Colonel had got together at his party the other night? Dirty chaps in velvet coats and beards? They looked like a set of ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... courageous nor mean enough to retract my words. The whole imposture would soon have been discovered if anyone had possessed a peerage, but it just happened that there was not a copy in Corfu, and the French consul, a fat blockhead, like many other consuls, knew nothing of family trees. The madcap La Valeur began to walk out a week after his metamorphosis into a prince. He dined and had supper every day with the general, and every evening he was present at the reception, during which, owing to his intemperance, he always went fast asleep. Yet, there were two reasons which ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... "Go, madcap, and take your idle fancies with you. There is certainly more of the bold Montespan in you than of the gentle ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... drawing nigh when we had to present ourselves before that company of men of genius, each with his own crow; and I was still unprovided; and yet I thought it would be stupid to fail of such a madcap bagatelle; [3] but what particularly weighed upon my mind was that I did not choose to lend the light of my countenance in that illustrious sphere to some miserable plume-plucked scarecrow. All these considerations made me devise a pleasant ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... unsoaped, ill-clad, turbulent, high-tempered young fellow, looked up to by his crowd very much as the champion of the heavy weights is looked up to by his gang of blackguards. Alexander himself was not much better,—a foolish, fiery young madcap. How often is he mentioned except as a warning? His best record is that he served to point a moral as 'Macedonian's madman.' He made a figure, it is true, in Dryden's great Ode, but what kind of a figure? He got drunk,—in very bad company, too,—and then turned fire-bug. ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... little madcap remained quite unconscious of the honors designed her. She had cried every day of the first week of Herbert's absence; every alternate day of the second; twice in the third; once in the fourth; not at all in the fifth, and the sixth week she was ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... A Madcap Thrush, in Miller, True Bird Stories; Antics in the Bird Room, in Miller, True Bird Stories; Fate of the Children of Lir, in Grierson, Children's Book of Celtie Stories; Halcyone, in Brown, Curious Book of Birds; ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... Take for example "Madcap Moll," Eighth Duchess of Wapping, and her famous ride to Norwich—and compare it with Jabez Puffwater's ride to the succour of his old Aunt Topsy. Or E. Maxwell Snurge's celebrated national appeal in West Forty-Second street, and Sarah, Lady Tunnell-Penge's dramatic ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... her eyes, the witching play of her dimples, the madcap air intensified by her attitude and the excitement of the violent exercise just ended—something compounded of all these and more—affected the good priest strangely. Involuntarily he crossed himself, as if against a ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... and shame as had been confidently predicted, he, much to the disgust of his congregation, went calmly about his duties as though nothing unusual had occurred, referring jocosely to this lark of his madcap ward as he ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... underlaid that courage that drew him to the young man; certain it was that in two weeks Myles was the acknowledged favorite. He made no protestation of virtue; he always accompanied the Prince in those madcap ventures to London, where he beheld all manner of wild revelry; he never held himself aloof from his gay comrades, but he looked upon all their mad sports with the same calm gaze that had carried him without taint through the courts of Burgundy and the Dauphin. The gay, roistering ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... going to say so, she must turn him away as soon as she arrived. There was no help for it. She dared not keep him after that in the face of society. But she might take the bold, and perhaps a little dangerous measure of adopting the flight as altogether her own madcap idea. Her thoughts went floundering in the bog of expediency, until she was tired, and declined ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... exiles now togged themselves out in all the gay regimentals of the Russian officers. Salutes of triumph were fired from the cannon. A Te Deum was sung. Feast and mad wassail filled both day and night till the harbor cleared. Even the Cossacks caught the madcap spirit of the escapade, and helped to load ammunition on the St. Peter and Paul. Nor were old wrongs forgiven. Ismyloff was bundled on the vessel in irons. The chancellor's secretary was seized and compelled to act as cook. Men, who had played the spy ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... Leclerc, young and rich, but weak in body and mind, "a quiet, insignificant-looking man," who at least loved her passionately, and would make a pliant husband to the capricious little autocrat. And we may be sure Napoleon heaved a sigh of relief when his madcap sister was safely ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... day something happened. I lost my way, blundered through into the woods of the annexe, and came to the Doctor's house. There were visitors there—the young ladies I had met before—young people dancing, just like madcap foals. ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... Mettrie, whom we once saw transiently as Army-Surgeon at Fontenoy: he is now out of all that (flung out, with the dogs at his heels); has been safe in Berlin for three years past. Friedrich not only tolerates the poor madcap, but takes some pleasure in him: madcap we say, though poor La Mettrie had remarkable gifts, exuberant laughter one of them, and was far from intending to be mad. Not Zanyism, but Wisdom of the highest nature, was what he drove ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... talent beyond the ordinary. He could write fairly well, make an excellent speech, and had a keen sense of wit. When he went to Paris, the British Ambassador, Lord Stair, took it upon himself to give this madcap some sound advice. He extolled the virtues of the late Marquess of Wharton, and, "I hope," he said, "you will follow so illustrious an example of fidelity to your Prince and love to your country." "I thank your Excellency for your good counsel," replied the visitor courteously, "and ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... be said that death, at whatever age it may overtake her, will find the Little Countess just as she left the cradle, if it were possible to suppose that she has preserved its innocence as well as she has retained its profound puerility. Has that madcap a soul? The word nothingness has escaped me. It is indeed difficult for me to conceive what might survive that body when it has once lost the vain fever and the frivolous breath that ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... dinner, behold her little boy, who was at that time about thirteen and a half, and resembled Rene more than it is allowable for a child to resemble his father, and had nothing of the Sire Bruyn about him but his name—behold the little one, a madcap and pretty like his mother, who came in from the garden, running, perspiring, panting, jumping, scattering all things in his way, after the uses and customs of infancy, and who ran straight to his well-beloved mother, jumping into her lap, and ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... could not last for ever; and, willing or unwilling, the moment had to come some time when Berta would quiet down; for it was not natural that she should remain all her life a madcap; and this moment at last arrived; and all at once the girl's boisterous gayety began to calm down, to cloud over, like a storm that is gathering, like a sky ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... valuable for its warm and generous testimony to the private character of this accomplished actress, whose part in real life, says Fielding, was that of "the best Wife, the best Daughter, the best Sister, and the best Friend." The words are more than mere compliment; they appear to have been true. Madcap and humourist as she was, no breath of slander seems ever to have tarnished the reputation of Kitty Clive, whom Johnson—a fine judge, when his prejudices were not actively aroused—called in addition "the best player that he ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... youth, the book will doubtless be bought. But he must be a dull person who does not find another charm in Mr. Moscheles's artless narrative, mostly about nothing at all, or about the nothings that make up the joy of living to madcap ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... amusement and Mrs. Ferguson's, who would have Dr. Rush set up a ward in the new hospital for the broken-hearted lovers of Darthea. When first Jack Warder was thus badgered, he fell into such a state of terror as to what the madcap woman would say next that he declined all society for a week, and ever ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... of the contrast that won him. Ever since he had landed in France he had, as it were, hung on to the old conventional position, and he had felt increasingly that it was impossible to do so. True, there seemed little connection between a dinner with a couple of madcap girls in a French restaurant and religion, but there was one. He had felt out of touch with men and life, and now a new phase of it was offered him. He reached out for ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... son for whose sake they were to grow up into wise sober women before they had done with being little girls. What wonder that Angel looked pale and grave after a wakeful night, and that Betty felt that madcap ways and tumbled curls must cease ...
— Two Maiden Aunts • Mary H. Debenham
... about that. You are all false! My sweet little lark, my sunshine, my little madcap, lay your head on my knee, I want to ruffle ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... received. And I was left with Miss Thorn. While my client had been there in front of us, his lively conversation and naive if profane remarks kept us in continual laughter. When with him it was utterly impossible to see any other than the ludicrous side of this madcap adventure, albeit he himself was so keenly in earnest as to its performance. It was with misgiving that I saw him disappear into the hatchway, and my impulse was to follow him. Our spirits, like those in a thermometer, are never stationary: mine ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... said Sir Ralph, "to view her more nearly. That madcap earl found me other employment than to remark her in ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock
... by Shakspeare on which to build the superstructure of his own fascinating imagination, and on which other writers more grave, though not more trustworthy as historians, have rested for conclusive evidence of the wild frolics and "madcap" adventures of Henry of Monmouth. Stowe's account is this: "In the year 1410, upon the eve of St. John the Baptist, (i.e. June 23,) the King's sons, Thomas and John, being in East-Cheap at supper, ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... led a truly chequered life in the gay garrisons of the new world, varied by a couple of voyages to the gayer Court he had left behind, but through all the reckless episodes of his long and stirring career, Francois was by his side, patient, adroit, silent when necessary, at other times a madcap for freak and fantasy. Faith of a gentleman—Francois Gaillard was everything his noble master should have been, and that master too often such as the poorest lackey might have been ashamed to be, yet—faith of a gentleman—De Clairville atoned ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... my dear brother, that I have been not a little amused, I may even say instructed, by a trick played by your madcap nephew, for the honor and glory, I suppose, of his scepticism, or for some other motive, not easily divined. He promised me significantly an entertainment, in which I should enjoy the "feast of reason and the flow of soul," by which I little thought ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... Pa, Ma, and daughters three, All drove in madcap hurry to the station, In fact, they might have tittered "Seven are we" Had they remembered the superb quotation; But Julia (housemaid) made some lamentation About some best back hair she'd left behind, But all was done to soothe her perturbation Till she became more quietly inclined; ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... attractive houses in Rue Prony. Since the flight of the pretty courtesan, it bears the sad notice: Residence to let. Its fast closed shutters give it the gloomy appearance of a deserted boudoir. Complete silence succeeds feverish bustle! Vanda was a boisterous, madcap spendthrift. Through the old windows with their old-fashioned panes there often used to escape snatches of song, airs of waltzes, fragments of quadrilles. Vanda's horses pawed the ground spiritedly as they started at the fashionable hour for the Bois, through the great gateway leading to the stables. ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... his son, The nimble-footed madcap, Prince of Wales, And his comrades, that daft the world aside And ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... conservative England, and I had been among its most conservative people. I had caught something of its old musty-parchment ideas, and the cricket-like manners of Harriet Hosmer rather troubled me. It took some weeks for me to get over the impression of her madcap ways; they ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... both on the veranda, enjoying the evening breeze that came laden with sweet scents from off the prairie. Blue Bonnet clapped her hands over Uncle Joe's eyes in her old madcap fashion. ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs
... about to do so in what I considered the most agreeable and appropriate manner when the madcap broke away from me, and sprang upon a footstool ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... agone— The madcap now hath sober grown And hose is better wrought, And neither now would run alone The risk ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... was hidden that evening behind thick dark clouds, but the boats full of guests glided over the black water to the accompaniment of music and laughter. The young madcap of a lawyer was there, again sitting on the lap of someone else's wife, and playing a concertina, till people in the farms on shore opened their windows and put their heads ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... maids Goes gaily tripping to the brook, For water-nymphs they mean to be, And seek some still, secluded nook. Here Laura goes, my own delight, And Colin's love, the madcap Jane, And half a score of goddesses Trip over daisies in the plain: Already now they loose their hair And peep from out the tangled gold, Or speed the flying foot to reach The brook that's only summer-cold; The lovely locks stream out behind The shepherdesses ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... three quarters of an hour, and we found the madcap count in high spirits. He embraced his Dulcinea with transports, and Betty seemed delighted to find him safe and sound. He told us triumphantly that he had beaten the rascally postillions, and had warded their ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the principle of his argument if not in the violence of his remedies. He was a young travelling Englishman; one of that class who are Radicals at twenty, Independents at thirty, and Conservatives at forty. He had not yet reached the intermediate stage. He saw in this madcap Radical Member one of the crude but strong expressions of advanced civilisation. He had the noble ideal of Australia as a land trodden only by the Caucasian. The Correspondent, much to our surprise, had by occasional interjections at the beginning of the discussion ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... blast, detonation, rush, eruption, displosion^, torrent. turmoil &c (disorder) 59; ferment &c (agitation) 315; storm, tempest, rough weather; squall &c (wind) 349; earthquake, volcano, thunderstorm. berserk, berserker; fury, dragon, demon, tiger, beldame, Tisiphone^, Megaera, Alecto^, madcap, wild beast; fire eater &c (blusterer) 887. V. be violent &c adj.; run high; ferment, effervesce; romp, rampage, go on a rampage; run wild, run amuck, run riot; break the peace; rush, tear; rush headlong, rush foremost; raise a storm, make a riot; rough house [Slang]; riot, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... and swept a low curtsy, coming up to the recover with the prettiest little foot in the world pointed out. Her mother came in as she was in this attitude; my lady had been in her closet, having taken poor Frank's conversion in a very serious way; the madcap girl ran up to her mother, put her arms round her waist, kissed her, tried to make her dance, and said: "Don't be silly, you kind little mamma, and cry about Frank turning Papist. What a figure he must ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... is a jovial Song of the Open Road, throbbing with the exhilaration of young life and madcap impudence. We must imagine that two vagabond students are drinking together before they part upon their several ways. One addresses the other as frater catholice, vir apostolice, vows to befriend ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... is to say, Madcap, in Italian. It appears that a very mixed language is spoken in the ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... in Henry IV. Mr. Wood displayed the versatility of his talents. In the gay, thoughtless, trifling rake, the "madcap" prince, he was spirited, and playful without puerility; in the serious parts, whether as the penitent apologizing son, or the martial hero, he was judicious, impressive, and not deficient in ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... no such thing; you are even more of a madcap than he is. The other day both of you looked as if you had taken a bath. How is it that a big girl like you cannot remain two minutes seated? Lucien!" she continued directing her eyes on her son, "turn ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... people found themselves in presence of a new Gregoire. The madcap had become wise, only retaining of his youthful follies the audacity which is needful for successful enterprise. And it must be said that he was admirably seconded by the fair and energetic Therese. They were both enraptured at now ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... never came such a thought into a madcap's brain; and, what is more extraordinary—but that you already know—it was so far successful, that the marriage ceremony was performed between us in the presence of a servant of mine, Clara's accommodating companion, and the priest.—We got into the carriage, and were a mile from the church, ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... to his absence from lectures the day before. But it was difficult to repulse rudely a very good comrade with a smooth pink face and fair hair, bearing the nickname amongst his fellow-students of "Madcap Kostia." He was the idolized only son of a very wealthy and illiterate Government contractor, and attended the lectures only during the periodical fits of contrition following upon tearful paternal ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... a state of dumb bewilderment that eclipsed all she had experienced before. Truly the world was topsyturvy this madcap night! What ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... madcap!" said her mother. "You'll be brought home on a shutter some day! Mark my words, Bab! You'll see!—or at least I shall; you'll be past seeing! But it don't matter; it's what we're made for! Die or be killed, it's ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... a journalist in connection with the Morning Star; has written several novels, over 30 in number, about the West Highlands of Scotland, rich in picturesque description; the best known and most admired, "A Daughter of Heth," the "Madcap Violet," "Macleod of Dare," "The Strange Adventures of a Phaeton," and "A Princess of Thule." "But when are you going to write a book, Mr. Black?" said Carlyle to him ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... us to a matter of no slight embarrassment. If this narration has a heroine (which may be held as a matter of doubt) that heroine is Josephine Harris, the wild, impulsive, loving girl, ever ready for help or mischief, whose madcap pranks have played so important a part in the fortunes of all. And if we have not been all the while entirely without a hero, Tom Leslie, the journalist, cosmopolitan, lover of nature, and strange mixture of boyish gayety and manly experience, must supply that ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... Lucy Stanhope, though they were not able to identify her. It was reserved for Mr. Ryland to clear up this difficulty. As he points out, Lady Lucy's elder sister, Olive, married George Stanhope, Dean of Canterbury, and left a daughter Mary,—Swift's "Moll Stanhope,"—a beauty and a madcap, who married, in 1712, William Burnet, son of Bishop Burnet, and died in 1714. Mary, another sister of Lady Lucy's, married Augustine Armstrong, of Great Ormond Street, and is the Mrs. Armstrong mentioned by Swift on Feb. 3, 1711, as a pretender to wit, without taste. Sir Berkeley ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... the locksmith, shaking his head, and smiling, 'how cruel of you to run upstairs to bed! Come down to breakfast, madcap, and come down lightly, or you'll wake your mother. She must be tired, I am ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... and that made everything easy to an optimistic youth. I never breathed a word concerning my marriage with Jean. Indeed, I came to look upon it as something that was utterly illegal, and that I could never be expected to stand by what was only, after all, a mere farcical thing, the act of a madcap boy." ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... a madcap young, who drove Through clouds of dust at postal pace, By the decree of Mighty Jove, Inheritor of all his race. Friends of Liudmila and Ruslan,(1) Let me present ye to the man, Who without more prevarication ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... no such thing, you dear little madcap!" returned the duchess, glancing admiringly at the beaming countenance of the beautiful enthusiast. "You have a brave heart, dear child; but you must not allow it to run away with your judgment. You must keep your place at my side, nor let magnanimity get ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... stream. And away it ran, prattling and chattering, and picking its way through moss-covered stones that lifted above its surface, and tumbling hastily down in little cascades, as though it were in a desperate hurry to get on in the world, and altogether misbehaving itself just as any madcap little stream might when ...
— Harper's Young People, October 19, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... the scrub ere they decided to take him at his madcap word, and let his blood be on the chuckle-head of the new-chummiest new chum that ever came out after the rain! Was it pluck or all pretence? It was rather plucky even to pretend in such proximity to the terrible Stingaree; on the whole, the coaching trio were disposed to concede a certain ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... with Touchstone on a bus From Ludgate Hill to World's End. It was he! Despite the broadcloth and the bowler hat, I knew him, Touchstone, the wild flower of folly, The whetstone of his age, the scourge of kings, The madcap morning star of elfin-land, Who used to wrap his legs around his neck For warmth on winter nights. He had slipped back, To see what men were doing in a world That should be wiser. He had watched a play, Read several ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... that—noli me tangere—or some such name. Well, that's Vicky Van. She'd laugh and jest with you, and then if you said anything by way of a personal compliment or flirtatious foolery, she was off and away from your side, like a thistle-down in a summer breeze. She was a witch, a madcap, but she had her own way in everything, and her friends did her will ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... youngsters roared. It was such a madcap frolic as students, utterly reckless of consequences, might engage in; but, after all, it was a serious affair. The clothes had to be returned; then the perpetrators of the outrage would be known at the college, and they might be expelled from the ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... all, she is a good girl ... a trifle of the wilful. She must have it that many things are hurtful to me ... reading in particular ... it makes people so odd. Tina is a small matter of the madcap ... in her own particular way ... but exceedingly discreet, I do assure you, if they will only leave ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... joy, joy! how did you manage it, dear? You have taken the wind out of Ada's sails and gained a feather in your cap, I can assure you. It all seems too good to be true. The queen dethroned at last!" and Winnie catching Nellie round the waist, danced her up and down the schoolroom in a regular madcap whirl. ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... nothing on but her bed-gown; but the water that streamed over her clothed her in shimmering colours. She hesitated at first and gave a glance around her; then, catching sight of Fire still whirling about like a great madcap, she made an angry and indignant rush at him, spraying his face, splashing and wetting him with all her might. Fire flew into a rage and began to smoke. Nevertheless, as he found himself suddenly thwarted by his old enemy, he thought it wiser to retire to a corner. Water ...
— The Blue Bird for Children - The Wonderful Adventures of Tyltyl and Mytyl in Search of Happiness • Georgette Leblanc
... Chicoree. Did you ever see a happier fellow than he is? I'll venture to say that he has been having such a good time that he hasn't even yet thought of building a nest, and here half the people of the Old Orchard have grown families. I've a nest and eggs myself, but that madcap is just roaming about having a good time. ...
— The Burgess Bird Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... quiet, insignificant-looking man," who at least loved her passionately, and would make a pliant husband to the capricious little autocrat. And we may be sure Napoleon heaved a sigh of relief when his madcap sister was safely tied to ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... softened and grew strangely handsome as she listened: she was drawing Phillis out,—leading her to speak of the old life, and of all their youthful sources of happiness. Then she fell into a retrospect of her own young days, when she was a spoiled madcap girl and had ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... declared that the planks would not bear such a weight of Romish sin, and that God was displeased with their pulpits and altars, their doctrine and sacrifice. One zealot remembered that, at the return of Prince Charles from the madcap expedition to Spain, a Catholic had lamented, or was said to have lamented, the street bonfires, as there would be never a fagot left to burn the heretics. "If it had been a Protestant chapel," the Puritans cried, "the Jesuits would have called the calamity an omen of the speedy downfall of ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... said she. "She is unique, I think, for her fidelity to her friends, and for her honour. Listen, but tell nobody—four days ago, the King, passing her to go to supper, approached her, under the pretence of tickling her, and tried to slip a note into her hand. D'Amblimont, in her madcap way, put her hands behind her back, and the King was obliged to pick up the note, which had fallen on the ground. Gontaut was the only person who saw all this, and, after supper, he went up to the little lady, and said, 'You are an excellent friend.'—'I did my duty,' said she, and immediately ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... those families were just a crowd of self-seeking creatures with no thought beyond their own petty interests. The Jervaises were snobs upset by the threat to their silly prestige. Brenda was a feather-headed madcap without a scrap of consideration for any one but herself. Banks was an infatuated fool, and the best I could hope for him was that he would realise the fact before it was too late. Frank, confound and confound him, was a ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... point of courage, lofty bearing, courtesy, but an unsoaped, ill-clad, turbulent, high-tempered young fellow, looked up to by his crowd very much as the champion of the heavy weights is looked up to by his gang of blackguards. Alexander himself was not much better,—a foolish, fiery young madcap. How often is he mentioned except as a warning? His best record is that he served to point a moral as 'Macedonian's madman.' He made a figure, it is true, in Dryden's great Ode, but what kind of a figure? He got drunk,—in very ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... but the care-free youngsters do, Is calling them to the fields and streams and the joys that once I knew. And if youth be wild desire for play and care is the mark of men, Beneath the skin that Time has tanned I'm a madcap youngster then. ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest
... disguised so that no one should recognise him; but as long as my mother lived he would not leave her. When death had taken her from him, he so evidently stood in need of a complete change of scene, that even those friends who had most strongly dissuaded him from what they deemed a madcap enterprise, thought it better to leave him to himself. It would have mattered little how much they tried to dissuade him, for before long his passionate longing for the journey became so overmastering that nothing short of restraint in prison or a madhouse could have stayed his going; ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... fatigue, and after one particularly long, swift flight the party went back to the house. There followed another gay hour before the fire, while Stuart roasted chestnuts, and Georgiana, sitting on the floor against her father's knee, told stones of madcap pranks at college, illustrating them by such changes of facial expression and such significant gestures that her hearers spent themselves with ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... crowd sure to be assembled there to witness the sights. Her sisters had no love for such shows, and nobody would be greatly troubled at her hardihood in escaping from the escort of her servants. She was always doing the like, and no harm had ever befallen her. Her father was wont to call her his Madcap, and her mother sometimes chided, and feared she would come to ill by her wild freaks; but she had always turned up safe and sound, and her independent ways had almost ceased to excite comment or uneasiness. On May Day, when all the world was abroad and in good ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... the wind out of Ada's sails and gained a feather in your cap, I can assure you. It all seems too good to be true. The queen dethroned at last!" and Winnie catching Nellie round the waist, danced her up and down the schoolroom in a regular madcap whirl. ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... be Southern Unionists—and were greatly petted in governmental circles for their sacrificing fidelity to the flag. His informant, an official in the State Department, added that Miss Matilda might have been a good deal of a madcap at the outbreak of the war—for the sisters had a brother in the Confederate service—but that she had changed greatly, and, indeed, within a month. "For," he added, "she was at the White House for the first time last week, and they say the President talked more ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... 's all right. No time for pettings now. There 's work to be done. Why didn't Jemima come? This is no place for a madcap like you." ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... Ralph, "to view her more nearly. That madcap earl found me other employment than to remark her ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock
... whose brother was now with him, and who lives in Memmingen. His name is Herr Unhold, and he pressed me very much to come to Memmingen if possible. We sent a hundred thousand loves to papa by them, and to my sister, the madcap, which they promised to deliver without fail. This change of carriages was a great bore to me, for I wished to send a letter back from Waging by the postilion. We then (after a slight meal) had the honor of ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... the crowning glory, the climax of their wonderful summer—the race! They felt again the straining of that moment when, with half a length to make up and scant twenty yards from the goal, she had led them in the glorious, madcap dash to victory! From that day on she had reigned supreme in the girls' warm hearts, and there was not one of them but felt "that nothing was too ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... and pleasanter plan of my own, but of that, as I knew, she would hear nothing. I did not smile at hers, however; though I confess it was not easy to imagine madcap Nina in the role of a landlady, regulating the accounts and presiding at the table of a boarding-house. I can't pretend that I believed there was the slightest likelihood of her filling it with success. But I said nothing to discourage her; and the fact that she is rich to-day proves ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... the madcap wind, he walked up on the nearer hills, and saw that this island was narrow, lying between blue fields of sea, both bay and ocean filled with wave crests, ever moving. The outer sea beat upon the sandy ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... not been for those two mettlesome tits, and that madcap of a postillion who drove them from Stilton to Stamford, the thought had never entered my head. He flew like lightning—there was a slope of three miles and a half—we scarce touched the ground—the motion ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... Maggot was a noted madcap, who stuck at nothing, and appeared to derive positive pleasure from the mere act of putting his life in danger. No human foot could, by climbing, have reached the spot where the nest of the daw, or Cornish chough, was fixed—for the precipice, besides ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... overhasty, indiscreet, inconsiderate, impulsive, temerarious, madcap, headlong, foolhardy, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... and daughters growing up in the Destournier household, Helene, who should have been a devotee, was a merry madcap, who exceeded her mother in daring feats, a dark-eyed, laughing maid the Indian girls adored. She could manage a canoe, she could fly, they said, she took such wonderful leaps. Rose could sing like a bird and had a fondness for all animals. Little Barbe was a dainty, loving being, ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... was full of antique furniture, and the walls were adorned with old family portraits. The place was in charge of an old man and his wife and a negro boy, who were the sole occupants, except when the nine would sally forth from New York and enliven its solitudes with their madcap pranks and orgies. ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... startled by strange news. Tragic forces, to which they had been accustomed to pay little heed, had been at work in their city during the dark hours, and young Romeo of the Montagues, handsome, devil-may-care lad as they had known him, and little Juliet of the Capulets, that madcap, merry, gentle young mistress, lay dead, side by side in ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... "Madcap schemes?" ejaculated de Marmont. "Nothing more or less, my dear Clyffurde, than complete revenge for the humiliation those de Cambrays put upon me ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... I swore I could employ Thine absence well. But all my pride is o'er! Now am I lashed, as when a madcap boy Whirls a swift top along the ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... must have 'peached,' I suppose, to curry favor. Whatever made you go, Maggie? You know you have never mixed yourself up with that Day, and Merton, and Marsh set. As to that poor Polly Singleton, there's no harm in her, but she's a perfect madcap. What could ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... the hour was drawing nigh when we had to present ourselves before that company of men of genius, each with his own crow; and I was still unprovided; and yet I thought it would be stupid to fail of such a madcap bagatelle; [3] but what particularly weighed upon my mind was that I did not choose to lend the light of my countenance in that illustrious sphere to some miserable plume-plucked scarecrow. All these considerations made me devise a pleasant ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... wisdom of your father; but another time avoid meddling with his highness's name; it is not safe to sport with the lion's paws. The matter is settled. The necklace is worth a hundred thousand piasters, is it not, Mansour? This madcap, shall give you, therefore, a hundred thousand piasters, and all parties ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... was tempted to try to persuade myself that all that had happened, since I rose to look out of the window in the old house, had been but a dream. For how could that wooded dell have come there after all? It was much too large for a quarry. And that madcap girl—she never flung herself into the pond!—it could not be. And what could the book have been that the lady with the sea-blue eyes was reading? Was that a real book at all? No. Yes. Of course it was. But what was it? What had that to do with the matter? It might turn ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... your letters of exchange; You travel as a count, it would appear, Going for pleasure and a little change; Once there, you play the rodomont, the queer Crack-brain good fellow, idle gamester, strange Spendthrift and madcap. Give yourself full swing; People are taken ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... was a young travelling Englishman; one of that class who are Radicals at twenty, Independents at thirty, and Conservatives at forty. He had not yet reached the intermediate stage. He saw in this madcap Radical Member one of the crude but strong expressions of advanced civilisation. He had the noble ideal of Australia as a land trodden only by the Caucasian. The Correspondent, much to our surprise, had by occasional interjections at the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... private character of this accomplished actress, whose part in real life, says Fielding, was that of "the best Wife, the best Daughter, the best Sister, and the best Friend." The words are more than mere compliment; they appear to have been true. Madcap and humourist as she was, no breath of slander seems ever to have tarnished the reputation of Kitty Clive, whom Johnson—a fine judge, when his prejudices were not actively aroused—called in addition "the best player ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... "Oh, you madcap!" exclaimed the elder girl, when the other entered. "When will you quit frightening us this way? It is two hours since you ran out in that rag of an old dress and Marie's hat. Mamma has been so alarmed. ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... this signal victory, Gallows Walsh now harangued his followers, and proposed to break open Newgate, or the Black Dog, as the prison was called, and effect a general jail delivery. He was answered by shouts of concurrence, and away went the throng of madcap youngsters, fully bent upon putting an end to the tyranny of law. They were joined by the mob of the city, and made an attack upon the prison with true Irish precipitation and thoughtlessness, never having provided themselves with cannon to batter its stone walls. A few shots ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... Maulevrier to be your guide in a matter in which your own instinct should have guided you—your womanly instinct! But you have always been an unwomanly girl. You have put me to shame many a time by your hoydenish tricks; but I bore with you, believing that your madcap follies were at least harmless. To-day you have gone a step too far, and have been guilty of absolute impropriety, which I shall be ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... down; before she knew it the little girl's arms were about her neck and the child was telling her about the dance at the stone house across the way. The sister smiled as she listened to the rush of eager words, but she was so glad to find this madcap telling her openly her heart's one desire, that she did what she had never done before in all her life of beautiful child-consecrated work: she said "Yes, and I will go with you. Wait for me outside the chapel door at ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... is a good girl ... a trifle of the wilful. She must have it that many things are hurtful to me ... reading in particular ... it makes people so odd. Tina is a small matter of the madcap ... in her own particular way ... but exceedingly discreet, I do assure you, if they will only leave ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... my friend, Ernest Dulkinghorn, of the War Office. He can help us if any one can. But, Mary, you must promise me one thing before we go ... you must agree to do what old Ernest tells you. You needn't be afraid. He is the most unconventional of men, capable of even approving this madcap ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... and that is plain even to the person rejecting it. How much more so must it be to papa, though he likes you, and when you are near him would perhaps, in a fit of unworldliness, be almost as reckless as the creature he calls madcap and would rather call countess. No! sooner with a Will-o'-the-wisp, my friend. Who could ever know where the man was when he himself never knows where he is. He is the wind that bloweth as it listeth—because it is without an aim ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... principal theme. Rumours about the private life of the Commodore in his cabin; about the Captain, in his; about the various officers in the ward-room; about the reefers in the steerage, and their madcap frolickings, and about a thousand other matters touching the crew themselves; all these—forming the eternally shifting, domestic by-play of a man-of-war—proved inexhaustible topics for ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... attracted by the flame of her beauty and charm, only to complain that it froze and did not burn. Longarine is discreetly unhappy for her dead husband, but appears decidedly consolable; Ennasuite is a haughty damsel, disdainful of poor folk, and Nomerfide is a pure madcap, a Catherine Seyton of the generation before Catherine herself, the feminine Dioneo of the party, and, if a little too free-spoken for prudish modern ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... Frank once more, his heart not a little sore within him for the good days he had spent in it, and especially because of the thought that he would now find there no madcap Die Vernon to tease and torment him out ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... appeared in the Contemporary Review (Oct. 1871), and evoked replies from Rossetti (The Stealthy School of Criticism), and Swinburne (Under the Microscope). Among his novels are A Child of Nature (1879), God and the Man (1881), and among his dramas A Nine Days' Queen, A Madcap Prince, and Alone in London. His latest poems, The Outcast and The Wandering Jew, were directed against certain aspects of Christianity. B. was unfortunate in his latter years; a speculation turned out ruinously; he had to sell his copyrights, and ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... his Regulations. Thereupon he attempted to shut up their House, which so provoked 'em that they were going to set Fire to it; but the Senate interposing, commanded the Patriarch to desist, and these Merry Maidens had full liberty to resume their Madcap Pranks. ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... most conservative people. I had caught something of its old musty-parchment ideas, and the cricket-like manners of Harriet Hosmer rather troubled me. It took some weeks for me to get over the impression of her madcap ways; ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... to her, make her your friend. Coax her secret out of her, and you will find that she is some madcap actress from a travelling company of mountebanks, who has done this thing in order to have the story told by the gazetteers and bring people to look at her. Get her to confess, and then let her story spread among the crowd—and the whole uprising that is now ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... however, whom I found at the encampment were a couple of insane fellows, determined to follow us—perhaps to show "by one satiric touch" what kind of madcap enterprise was ours. The first was a Neapolitan, who had dogged me all the while I was at Tripoli, pestering me to make a contract with him as servant. To humour his madness, I never said I would not; and the poor fellow, taking ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... plan too madcap for Peachy to undertake. She revelled in anything venturesome or bizarre. The Camellia Buds did as she decreed, and resigned the courts that afternoon to Bertha, Mabel, Elsie, Ruth, Rosamonde, Winnie, Monica, and Callie, who fell readily ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... first, yet held on and blazed, pealed, and smoked on, begrimed and gory. Here was Tracy borne away to field hospital leaving Avendano and McStea groveling in anguish under the wheels, and brave Converse and young Willie Calder, hot-headed Fusilier and dear madcap Jules St. Ange lying near them out of pain forever. Yet here their fellows blazed on and on, black, shattered, decimated, short of horses, one caisson blown up, and finally dragged away to bivouac, ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... the crowd surged, beneath the blossomed ale-poles, Lifting up to Whittington a fair face afraid, Swept against his horse by a billow of madcap prentices, Hard against the stirrup breathed ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... wicked than the smartest bodices; Polish pelisses, strained and tight as ripe gooseberries; tiny Greek caps, all awry, and clinging to the dark hair, Heaven knows how; every wild, quaint, bold, shy, pettish, madcap fancy had its illustration in a dress; and every fancy was as dead forgotten by its owner, in the tumult of merriment, as if the three old aqueducts that still remain entire had brought Lethe into Rome, upon their sturdy arches, ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... Gantry. But Dolores had vanished. "Really, Genevieve, that madcap girl—! About yourself, my dear. Promise me now, if you cannot say 'yes,' at least you'll not make it ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... 'Come in, you madcap!' he said good-humouredly. 'Do you know how heavy the dews are? There, I told you so; your dress is ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... makes a regular fortune and marries a native and has two daughters: Augusta and Margarita. Augusta, the younger, marries my father, Ricardo Hasting, who was a madcap and ran away from his home; Margarita weds a soldier, colonel Buenavida. They all come to Spain with plenty of money; my father plunges into disastrous business schemes, and after he has been utterly ruined he learns, I don't know how, that ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... this madcap freak of turning painter," the uncle continues, "there is no understanding the chap. Did you ever see such a set of fellows as the Colonel had got together at his party the other night? Dirty chaps in velvet coats and beards? ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and as great a liar as ever," Marya Dmitrievna's son continued; "and only fancy, yesterday this madcap"—pointing to the school-girl, his wife's sister—"put some pepper ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... had done this willful child some good, you see. They had taught her to think—to know herself. She never could be the same crude, madcap ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... knows whither these brilliant butterflies of all colors," said M. Baleinier, smiling with an air of paternal indulgence, "that are passing through your brain, are likely to lead you. Oh, madcap, when will she be as reasonable as ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... excuses of Francis's conduct, is the recovery of Henry's rights to the crown of France; and if this were the real object, it reduces both King and Cardinal to the level of political charlatans. To conquer France was a madcap scheme, when Henry himself was admitting the impossibility of raising 30,000 foot or 10,000 horse, without hired contingents from Charles's domains;[414] when, according to Giustinian, it would have been hard ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... surrounded by the young roysterers than Phoebe, breaking her long silence, seized her sister by the hand and began laughing, dancing, and running with the best of them. To crown all, what was Rebecca's surprise to hear her sister singing word for word the madcap song of the others, as though she had known these words all her life. She did not even skip those parts ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... Edward, snatching the feathers out of the tail of a splendid parroquet that was screaming on its gilded perch, in order to make a plume for his hat. Madame de Villefort merely cried,—"Be still, Edward!" She then added,—"This young madcap is, however, very nearly right, and merely re-echoes what he has heard me say with pain a hundred times; for Mademoiselle de Villefort is, in spite of all we can do to rouse her, of a melancholy disposition and taciturn habit, which frequently injure ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... John Oxon," said Warbeck. "And the beauty he makes his boast on is the Gloucestershire Wildairs handsome madcap—the one ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... a secret though,' said a young officer; 'which is, that we are to have a dance after all, and a rare madcap and riotous one it will he. Everything is already arranged; the musicians are come secretly, and quartered out of sight. Roderick has managed it all; for he says, one ought not to let him have his own way, or to humour his strange prejudices over-much, especially on such a day ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... prince of Wales in Henry IV. Mr. Wood displayed the versatility of his talents. In the gay, thoughtless, trifling rake, the "madcap" prince, he was spirited, and playful without puerility; in the serious parts, whether as the penitent apologizing son, or the martial hero, he was judicious, impressive, and not deficient ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... the saints in the calendar watch over her ladyship! But I wish she had never taken you at your hot-headed word. Then we would not have launched upon this madcap adventure." ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... strike a blow for Christianity. They expected to find the mythical Christian empire of Prester John, and to join hands with him in overthrowing the infidel. When Columbus persuaded Queen Isabella of Castile to supply the means for his madcap adventure, it was by a double inducement that he won her assent: she was to gain access to the wealth of the Indies, but she was also to be the means of converting the heathen to a knowledge of Christianity; and this double motive ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... flames on the retina; thunder, searching unnumbered gorges, echoed beneath the sharper crashes in one long, unending roll, and far out beyond the mountains the flooded desert tossed on a dancing screen into the glare, rippled like a madcap sea, and flashed in countless sheets of blinding facets. As if an unseen hand had touched a thousand granite springs above the Gap, every slender crevice spouted a stream that shot foaming out from the mountainsides. The sound of moving waters rose in ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... in her eyes, the witching play of her dimples, the madcap air intensified by her attitude and the excitement of the violent exercise just ended—something compounded of all these and more—affected the good priest strangely. Involuntarily he crossed himself, as if against ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... should have disappeared before my search, rolling himself in his cloud like the spirit of Loda. Such an opportunity can hardly again occur to an ancient and grey-haired man; and to see it lost by the madcap spleen of a hot-headed boy! But I submitHeaven's will ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... my madcap brother Louis and his sage tutor. By the bye, Emmy, I have never asked what you think of Myrvin's conduct in this affair; ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume II. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes • Grace Aguilar
... a lesson from the songs Of woodland birds discoursing on the wrongs Of madcap moths and bachelor butterflies. I should have caught the cadence of the sighs Of unwed flowers, and learnt the way to woo, Which all things know but I, beneath the blue Of Heaven's great dome; for, undesired of thee, I have ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay
... the hearth, as he would never tire; The home-baked loaf, the Indian bean's perfume, Fill with their homely cheer the panelled room. Come, crazy storm! And thou, wild glittering hail, Rave o'er the roof and wave your icy veil; Shout in our ears and take your madcap way! I laugh at ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... person in white beaded slippers and a green sport skirt broke free from the cavorting ring, and behind Mr. Leary's back the nimble fingers of the madcap tapped his spinal ornamentations as an instrumentalist taps the stops of an organ; and she chanted a familiar counting ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... organized in his quarter of the city[3163] a small independent republic, aggressive and predominant, the center of the faction, a refuge for the riff-raff and a rendezvous for fanatics, a pandemonium composed of every available madcap, every rogue, visionary, shoulder-hitter, newspaper scribbler and stump-speaker, either a secret or avowed plotter of murder, Camille Desmoulins, Freron, Hebert, Chaumette, Clootz, Theroigne, Marat,—while, in this more than Jacobin State, the model in anticipation ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... was one morning turning over his pages when I casually opened upon the comic scenes of Henry IV., and was, in a moment, completely lost in the madcap revelry of the Boar's Head Tavern. So vividly and naturally are these scenes of humor depicted, and with such force and consistency are the characters sustained, that they become mingled up in the mind with the facts and personages of real life. To few readers ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... said, shaking her white-capped head; "maybe ye think that the fifth commandment says nocht aboot grandmithers; but ye'll be tamed some day, my woman. Mony's the gamesome an' hellicat [madcap] lassie that I hae seen brocht to hersel', an' her wings clippit like a sea-gull's i' the yaird, tethered by the fit wi' a family o' ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... till you are grown a little more and better able to bear the toils of war; and the rather as you have war enough at home, considering all the amorous conflicts that are raging in your bosom. Gently, gently with you, madcap! Look what you are doing before you marry; and now give us a little dole for God's sake and for the name you bear; for truly I believe you are well born, and if along with this you are loyal and true, then I will sing ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... some young madcap would do more than think about it, and with cheers would sail away for Sigurd's Vik; but it is not recorded that many men thus won the fame they went for. So at last every one very sensibly decided that the Vik was ...
— The Iron Star - And what It saw on Its Journey through the Ages • John Preston True
... trouble—trouble enough at first, day by day, in fear, to confront the fabulous perils of his imagination. Trouble enough thereafter encountering the sea's real assault, to subdue the reasonable terrors of those parts. Trouble enough, too, by and by, to devise perils beyond the common, to find a madcap way, to disclose a chance worth daring for the sheer exercise of courage. But from all these perils, of the real and the fanciful, of the commonplace path and the way of reckless ingenuity, Terry Lute emerged at last ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... call him the parson. But now tell me what you think of my work during these fifteen years? Hasn't he grown a fine fellow? Who would recognise the madcap that ...
— Pillars of Society • Henrik Ibsen
... wind one morning sprang up from sleep, Saying, "Now for a frolic! now for a leap! Now for a madcap galloping chase! I'll make a commotion in every place!" So it swept with a bustle right through a great town, Creaking the signs, and scattering down Shutters, and whisking, with merciless squalls, Old women's bonnets and gingerbread ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... by grief and shame as had been confidently predicted, he, much to the disgust of his congregation, went calmly about his duties as though nothing unusual had occurred, referring jocosely to this lark of his madcap ward as he ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... to be king of England. His son was Henry the Fifth, the greatest of the Plantagenet kings. When he was a young man, and only Prince of Wales, he was very wild and fond of games and jokes. They used to call him Harry Madcap. ...
— Royal Children of English History • E. Nesbit
... Pecolat is another illustration of his character and of the strange, turbulent age in which he lived; and it went far to embitter the hatred of the duke and the bishop against him. This poor fellow was the jester, song-singer and epigrammatist of the madcap patriots who were associated under the title of "Sons of Geneva." Under a trumped-up charge of plotting the death of the bishop he was kidnapped and carried away to one of the castles in the neighborhood, and there tortured until a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... a Grub Street Poet.—Is there anything known respecting a strange "madcap," one Robert Innes, who, according to a printed broadside now before me, was a pauper in St. Peter's Hospital, 1787? He was in the habit of penning doggrel ballads and hawking them about for sale. Some of them have a degree of humour, and are, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 41, Saturday, August 10, 1850 • Various
... me while my mother presents me,' he ran on in English, making such a grotesque reverence that nobody except Mademoiselle could help laughing, and his mother made a feint of laying her fan about his ears, while she pronounced him a madcap and begged her ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... perfect salad, there should be a spendthrift for oil, a miser for vinegar, a wise man for salt, and a madcap to stir the ingredients up, and mix them well ...
— My Pet Recipes, Tried and True - Contributed by the Ladies and Friends of St. Andrew's Church, Quebec • Various
... ago. A return to the soil, forsooth! Reversion! Our biology teaches the absurdity of it. It has been truly said that a little learning is a dangerous thing, and you have exemplified it to-night with your madcap theories. Fallacy upon fallacy! I was never so nauseated in my life with overplus of fallacy. That for your immature generalizations ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... frankness; she washed her masses of brown hair and shook it loose in the sunshine, and she came in wet more than once, and changed her shoes before the fire—just as she had years ago, when she was a madcap little girl running wild through ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... Denver grit, as though the yegg were being driven on into this madcap venture merely by a pride which would not allow him to show less courage—even rash ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... never breathed a word concerning my marriage with Jean. Indeed, I came to look upon it as something that was utterly illegal, and that I could never be expected to stand by what was only, after all, a mere farcical thing, the act of a madcap boy." ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... You are all false! My sweet little lark, my sunshine, my little madcap, lay your head on my knee, I want to ruffle ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... given her, but it suited her very well, and stuck to her, and our yawl every week carried five merry, strong young fellows on the Seine between Asnieres and Maison Lafitte, who were ruled from under a parasol of colored paper, by a lively and madcap young person, who treated us like slaves whose business it was to row her about, and whom we were all very ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... She'd laugh and jest with you, and then if you said anything by way of a personal compliment or flirtatious foolery, she was off and away from your side, like a thistle-down in a summer breeze. She was a witch, a madcap, but she had her own way in everything, and her friends did her will ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... two, Pa, Ma, and daughters three, All drove in madcap hurry to the station, In fact, they might have tittered "Seven are we" Had they remembered the superb quotation; But Julia (housemaid) made some lamentation About some best back hair she'd left behind, But all was done to soothe her perturbation Till she became more quietly ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... village maids Goes gaily tripping to the brook, For water-nymphs they mean to be, And seek some still, secluded nook. Here Laura goes, my own delight, And Colin's love, the madcap Jane, And half a score of goddesses Trip over daisies in the plain: Already now they loose their hair And peep from out the tangled gold, Or speed the flying foot to reach The brook that's only summer-cold; The lovely locks stream out behind The shepherdesses on the wing, And Laura's ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... held us enraptured, and we had wept with COQUETTE, and fiercely cheered the WHAUP while he held WATTIE by the heels, and made him say a sweer. And we had talked with MACLEOD and grown mournful with Madcap VIOLET, and had seen many another fresh and charming face, and had talked Gaelic with gusto and discrimination. And Queen TITA had sped with us, and we had adored BELLE, and yet we cried for more. But now the dream-journey was past, and lo! suddenly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 30, 1892 • Various
... that day contain accounts of many a mad prank which [Lord Warwick, Addison's step-son] played ... [like] the lawless freaks of the madcap ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... turned to the Bishop and swore that he should marry these two forthwith. The gown was given back to him, and my lord of Hereford commenced the service. He thought it more polite to obey, remembering his last experience with this madcap outlaw. ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... The child then and there became mistress not only of Woodbine, but of every living thing upon the place, her uncle included, and no only daughter could have been cared for, petted, spoiled or spanked more systematically than the Madcap Mary Seldon. ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... the highest rank, too much given up to athletic sports—to that society which constitutes the aristocracy of the ring and the turf, and all that kind of thing. You see, I am putting all the worst points first. But I have known so many young men in my day, after a madcap career of a few years among prizefighters, wrestlers, and jockeys—learning their slang and affecting their manners—take up and cultivate the graces and the decencies. There was poor dear Newgate, ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... state of dumb bewilderment that eclipsed all she had experienced before. Truly the world was topsyturvy this madcap night! What under the ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... on a fresh May morning, I took my love to church, To see if Parson Primrose were safely on his perch. He scarce had got to Thirdly, or squire begun to snore, When, like a sun-lit sea-wave, A green and crimson sea-wave, A frolic of madcap May-folk came ...
— The Lord of Misrule - And Other Poems • Alfred Noyes
... even with the sidetracked tramp, the bright-eyed girl, seized by some merry, madcap impulse, leaned out toward him with a sweet, dazzling smile, and cried, "Mer-ry Christ-mas!" ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... Henry—Prince Hal, as he was called—leading a wild, merry life, as a sort of madcap; playing at being a robber, and breaking into the wagons that were bringing treasure for his father, and then giving the money back again. Also there is a story that, when one of his friends was taken before the Lord Chief Justice, he went and ordered him to be released and that when the ...
— Young Folks' History of England • Charlotte M. Yonge
... one has your interest at heart so truly as your own father. Perhaps I have erred on the side of severity, but it is no light responsibility to keep five high-spirited lads under control, to say nothing of a madcap daughter. My father brought me up on the rule of 'spare the rod, spoil the child', and I thought modern methods produced a less worthy race, so I would stick to his old-fashioned principle. I have taken far ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... master, of you,' she began again, 'you are very sorry for me. But you mustn't be too sorry, really! I'll tell you one thing; for instance, I sometimes, even now.... Do you remember how merry I used to be in my time? A regular madcap!... So do you know what? I sing songs ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... struck up, and festivity was soon in progress. What a display of neat ankles and deft feet in mocassins! What a clattering of sabots and shuffling of "beefs"! The perspiration rolled off the brow of the musician, and young Lecour was whirling round like a madcap with the daughter of the ferryman of Repentigny, when the latch was again lifted, and ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... islet formed the key of the Gulf-head. It subsequently became an eyrie whence its robber knights and barons—including possibly "John, the Christian ruler of 'Akabah" (A.D. 630), and, long after him, madcap Rainald de Chatillon (A.D. 1182)—could live comfortably and sally out to plunder merchants and pilgrims. The Saracenic buildings may date, as the popular superstition has it, from the reign of Salh el-Dn (Saladin) ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... clickety-click. She looked cautiously round,—she was all by herself; Like a mischievous elf, She took from a shelf A mistletoe spray with its berries like pearls; Then tossing her head and shaking her curls, In a manner half daring and yet half afraid, The madcap maid, with a smile that betrayed Expectant thoughts of her lover dear, Fastened the ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... pointed out other houses, and told me the names of their occupants, all utterly unknown to me. At last I said, "Who are these people, Black? I don't know one of them." "You soon will know them, though, my boy," he answered. "Just wait and see if you don't." And sure enough, when "Madcap Violet" appeared, all the unknown personages of that night-walk at Camberwell were ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... a pretty business,' said the admiral to his secretary. 'Young madcap! I sent him to look after a pirate, and he goes after the governor's daughter! By the Lord Harry, Mr. Templemore, but you and I shall have ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... whom we give you. What a madcap you are never to listen to anything but your own ...
— The Impostures of Scapin • Moliere (Poquelin)
... one would have suspected these two very graceful and pleasant-looking girls of being madcap creatures at home. The elder was a tall and slightly-built blonde, with large gray eyes set wide apart; the younger a gentle little thing, with brownish eyes, freckles, and a ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... in the centre of the room with a settee and two or three chairs arranged close to it. Around this table now an eager little group had congregated: the Prince of Wales in the forefront, unwilling to interfere, scarce knowing what madcap plans were floating through Blakeney's adventurous brain, but excited in spite of himself at this momentous game of hazard the issues of which seemed so nebulous, so vaguely fraught with dangers. Close ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... and thrust my droning old ways down his throat,—as if Prince Hal could bear to be twitted with "that sober boy, Lord John of Lancaster." Not,' he added, catching himself up, 'that I meant to compare him to the madcap Prince. He is the finest of fellows, if they only would let ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... plantation who had studied Spanish. "Mariposa" meant butterfly, she told the baby's mother, who gratefully accepted the compliment to her newly born daughter. The mother and her mates called her "Mary Posy." The mistress, who was fond of the madcap sponsor, ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... Song of the Open Road, throbbing with the exhilaration of young life and madcap impudence. We must imagine that two vagabond students are drinking together before they part upon their several ways. One addresses the other as frater catholice, vir apostolice, vows to befriend him, and expounds ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... heavy footsteps overhead. A door opened, and his father's voice called sternly from the head of the stair: "What madcap folly art thou up ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... scrub ere they decided to take him at his madcap word, and let his blood be on the chuckle-head of the new-chummiest new chum that ever came out after the rain! Was it pluck or all pretence? It was rather plucky even to pretend in such proximity to the terrible Stingaree; ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... keep his mind easy on that point," replied the warders. "We had tried everything we could think of to get rid of her majesty the queen, but without effect. So a young madcap Shadow, half against the will of the older ones of us, slipped upstairs into the nursery; and has, no doubt, succeeded in appalling the baby, for he is very lithe and ...
— Cross Purposes and The Shadows • George MacDonald
... organized playful insubordination. The school had two parties: the sages or good girls, and the diables, their opposites. Among the latter Aurore conscientiously enrolled herself and became a leader in their escapades, acquiring the sobriquet of "Madcap." These outbreaks led to nothing more heinous than playing off tricks on a tyrannical mistress, or making raids on the forbidden ground of the kitchen garden. But the charm that held together the confraternity ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... him. How could you let a boat go away while the sea is tumbling about in this terrible fashion; and, pray, who has gone in her? Ah, Mr Paget, I am glad to see you have not risked your life. But where is Charles Dicey? Just like him, to do such a madcap trick. My dear girls, your brother jumped into the boat to pick up a silly man who tumbled overboard, and they cannot find him or any of ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... off immediately to search, but I called my little madcap back, till we arranged our plans. I advised that two of us should remain to watch the coast, while the other two penetrated into the interior. The first thing necessary to ascertain was if the island ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... A famous Prime Minister of Persia in past time, Haji Mirza Aghasi, was a well-known but rather eccentric dervish. My knowledge of this was the means, on one occasion, of averting a disagreeable display of violence by a gay sort of madcap, the relative of a post-house master, who had attached himself as groom to the stable establishment. My smart Armenian servant, who was equally good as groom or table attendant, had taken off his warm pea-jacket to help in bracing up the loads on my baggage post-horses, which were to be driven ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon
... word!" said my father gaily. "Children," he continued, "do you wish to go? What says my madcap, Amy?" ...
— A Grandmother's Recollections • Ella Rodman
... pleased to recount to you the quality of this joke, this madcap idea. You will find it lacking neither amusement nor denouement. Already I have put forth the casual observation that from Paris to the third-precinct police-station in Washington is several ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... MATER SAEVA CUPIDINUM. ...he sprang out of bed, surfeited with disgust.... And she rose also, and ran off to her room, laughing like a madcap, and carrying her dress and petticoats under ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... the Hague Gallery with one desire ungratified: I had not found in it any picture by Jerom Bosch, a painter born at Bois-le-Duc in the fifteenth century. This madcap of mischief, this scarecrow of bigots, this artistic sorcerer, had made my flesh creep first in the gallery at Madrid with a work representing a horrible army of living skeletons scattered about an immense space, in conflict with a motley crowd ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... the lawyer, "would be getting the consent of your parents to any such madcap scheme as going off into the woods to camp, day after ...
— The Grammar School Boys Snowbound - or, Dick & Co. at Winter Sports • H. Irving Hancock
... world, and everywhere in triumph, that whimsical, adventuresome, madcap woman, of whose life as an actress so many stories were told, had carried the arrogance of the virgin warrior-maid conceived by the master Wagner. In a bulky book, of uneven irregular pages, where the ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the saucy pranks of the madcap breeze In the blossoming trees! O the sounds that thrill, and the sights ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... you know, Father," said Kitty, nestling quietly to her father's side as her madcap brother and sister whirled round the room. But they brought up with a round turn, though a little dishevelled-looking, to hear Mr. ...
— Marjorie's Maytime • Carolyn Wells
... in life that Fate, leading a traveler in easy gradients upwards along a road of triumph, suddenly assumes a madcap mood and with wanton hand throws a tiny obstacle in his way; an obstacle at times infinitesimal, scarce visible on that way towards success, yet powerful enough to trip the unwary traveler and bring him down to earth with sudden and ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... man, suddenly arrested by some memory, remained on the threshold of that secret retreat. In the profound silence we heard the sigh that came forth form his breast; he removed the most beautiful of the rings with which his skeleton fingers were laden, and placed it in Marianina's bosom. The young madcap laughed, plucked out the ring, slipped it on one of her fingers over her glove, and ran hastily back toward the salon, where the orchestra were, at that moment, beginning the prelude of ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... author!" "Is it so? For this I'll like you all the more!" Then, writhing to evade the bore, I quicken now my pace, now stop, And in my servant's ear let drop Some words, and all the while I feel Bathed in cold sweat from head to heel. "Oh, for a touch," I moaned, in pain, "Bolanus, of thy madcap vein, To put this incubus to rout!" As he went chattering on about Whatever he descries or meets, The crowds, the beauty of the streets, The city's growth, its splendour, size, "You're dying to ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... Even with this madcap enterprise lopped off, La Salle's scheme of Mississippi trade and colonization, perfectly sound in itself, was too vast for an individual; above all, for one crippled and crushed with debt. While he grasped one link of the great chain, another, no less essential, escaped from his ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... possible in the diggings in this guise, however. You did not know me as the chief performer in that little comedy with Brigalow on Diamond Gully. You did not recognise me in the dark man who talked with you and Burton while the madcap from Kyley's was leading the troopers a merry dance along the lead. By the way, I admire your taste in women, Jim. She's a fine, ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... beauty, was General Leclerc, young and rich, but weak in body and mind, "a quiet, insignificant-looking man," who at least loved her passionately, and would make a pliant husband to the capricious little autocrat. And we may be sure Napoleon heaved a sigh of relief when his madcap sister was safely ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... Touchstone on a bus From Ludgate Hill to World's End. It was he! Despite the broadcloth and the bowler hat, I knew him, Touchstone, the wild flower of folly, The whetstone of his age, the scourge of kings, The madcap morning star of elfin-land, Who used to wrap his legs around his neck For warmth on winter nights. He had slipped back, To see what men were doing in a world That should be wiser. He had watched a play, ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... in the water, and covered with rotten, black-looking boards. As far as comfort and convenience go, they are far inferior to those of Cobourg and Kingston, or even to those of our own dear little "City of the Bay," as Belleville has not inaptly been christened by the strange madcap, calling himself the ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... curry favor. Whatever made you go, Maggie? You know you have never mixed yourself up with that Day, and Merton, and Marsh set. As to that poor Polly Singleton, there's no harm in her, but she's a perfect madcap. What could have possessed ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... know, Father," said Kitty, nestling quietly to her father's side as her madcap brother and sister whirled round the room. But they brought up with a round turn, though a little dishevelled-looking, to hear Mr. Maynard's reply ...
— Marjorie's Maytime • Carolyn Wells
... think, master, of you,' she began again, 'you are very sorry for me. But you mustn't be too sorry, really! I'll tell you one thing; for instance, I sometimes, even now.... Do you remember how merry I used to be in my time? A regular madcap!... So do you know what? ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... why it was given her, but it suited her very well, and stuck to her, and our yawl every week carried five merry, strong young fellows on the Seine between Asnieres and Maison Lafitte, who were ruled from under a parasol of colored paper, by a lively and madcap young person, who treated us like slaves whose business it was to row her about, and whom we were ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... Elfinhart outgrew The madcap antics of the younger crew, (For fairies age but slowly: don't forget That at two hundred they are children yet!) But still she frolicked with them, though scarce of them, And learned each year more tenderly to love them. But most of all she loved with all her heart On quiet summer ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis
... however, was not the only blot upon Lyly's Oxford life. From the hints thrown out by his contemporaries, and from some allusions, doubtless personal, in the Euphues, we learn that, as an undergraduate, he was an irresponsible madcap. "Esteemed in the University a noted wit," he would very naturally become the centre of a pleasure-seeking circle of friends, despising the persons and ideas of their elders, eager to adopt the latest fashion whether in dress or in thought, and intolerant alike of regulations and of duty. Gabriel ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... no news, he would have only himself to blame if he re-established communications with her in obedience to a passing whim. She was at Crawleigh, resting and building up her strength; he would be back in full harness within thirty-six hours, and there would be no room for her madcap incursions into ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... Warren presented a picture to bring admiration into any eye, and although she was entirely lacking in poise and dignity, her constant restless vivacity and the witch-like spirit of laughter that possessed her were quite as engaging. She was a madcap, fly-away creature whose ravishing lace was framed by an unruly mop of dark hair, which no amount of attention could hold in place. Little dancing curls and wisps and ringlets were forever ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... up from sleep, Saying, "Now for a frolic! now for a leap! Now for a madcap, galloping chase! I'll make a commotion in every place!" So it swept with a bustle right through a great town, Creaking the signs, and scattering down The shutters, and whisking, with merciless squalls, Old women's bonnets and gingerbread stalls. There ...
— Required Poems for Reading and Memorizing - Third and Fourth Grades, Prescribed by State Courses of Study • Anonymous
... broken in spirit and utterly cast down by grief and shame as had been confidently predicted, he, much to the disgust of his congregation, went calmly about his duties as though nothing unusual had occurred, referring jocosely to this lark of his madcap ward as he ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... feathers out of the tail of a splendid parroquet that was screaming on its gilded perch, in order to make a plume for his hat. Madame de Villefort merely cried,—"Be still, Edward!" She then added,—"This young madcap is, however, very nearly right, and merely re-echoes what he has heard me say with pain a hundred times; for Mademoiselle de Villefort is, in spite of all we can do to rouse her, of a melancholy disposition and taciturn habit, which frequently injure the effect of her ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... in white beaded slippers and a green sport skirt broke free from the cavorting ring, and behind Mr. Leary's back the nimble fingers of the madcap tapped his spinal ornamentations as an instrumentalist taps the stops of an organ; and she chanted a familiar ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... after dinner, behold her little boy, who was at that time about thirteen and a half, and resembled Rene more than it is allowable for a child to resemble his father, and had nothing of the Sire Bruyn about him but his name—behold the little one, a madcap and pretty like his mother, who came in from the garden, running, perspiring, panting, jumping, scattering all things in his way, after the uses and customs of infancy, and who ran straight to his well-beloved mother, jumping ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... been shot, but the times were extraordinary, and he rightly judged that when a Continental war was brewing, the most daring course was also the most prudent, namely, to go to Paris. Thither Paoli allowed him to proceed, doubtless on the principle of giving the young madcap a rope ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... i' the dust! Per De, my lord, a parch-ed pea am I— I'm all athirst! Athirst? I am so dry My very bones do rattle to and fro And jig about within me as I go! Why tramp we thus, bereft of state and rank? Why go ye, lord, like foolish mountebank? And whither doth our madcap journey trend? And wherefore? Why? And, prithee, to what end?" Then quoth the Duke, "See yonder in the green Doth run a cooling water-brook I ween, Come, Pertinax, beneath yon shady trees, And there whiles we do rest outstretched at ease Thy 'wherefores' and thy 'whys' shall answered ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... she were going to say so, she must turn him away as soon as she arrived. There was no help for it. She dared not keep him after that in the face of society. But she might take the bold, and perhaps a little dangerous measure of adopting the flight as altogether her own madcap idea. Her thoughts went floundering in the bog of expediency, until she was tired, and declined ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... was drawing nigh when we had to present ourselves before that company of men of genius, each with his own crow; and I was still unprovided; and yet I thought it would be stupid to fail of such a madcap bagatelle; [3] but what particularly weighed upon my mind was that I did not choose to lend the light of my countenance in that illustrious sphere to some miserable plume-plucked scarecrow. All these considerations made me devise a pleasant trick, for the increase of merriment ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... said before, different persons have their different specialties in courage, as in everything else; and while Reddy and Heady were brave as lads could well be in some ways, their courage lay in other lines than in running dead before the wind in a madcap ice-boat on ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes
... bent down; before she knew it the little girl's arms were about her neck and the child was telling her about the dance at the stone house across the way. The sister smiled as she listened to the rush of eager words, but she was so glad to find this madcap telling her openly her heart's one desire, that she did what she had never done before in all her life of beautiful child-consecrated work: she said "Yes, and I will go with you. Wait for me outside the ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... Persia in past time, Haji Mirza Aghasi, was a well-known but rather eccentric dervish. My knowledge of this was the means, on one occasion, of averting a disagreeable display of violence by a gay sort of madcap, the relative of a post-house master, who had attached himself as groom to the stable establishment. My smart Armenian servant, who was equally good as groom or table attendant, had taken off his warm pea-jacket to help in bracing up the loads on my baggage post-horses, which were ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon
... Embassy, virtually as Ambassador but without a staff. On this occasion he immediately startled us out of our senses by proposing that we should depose the Khedive and set up Prince Halim. He had converted Freycinet to this madcap view.' ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... that. You are all false! My sweet little lark, my sunshine, my little madcap, lay your head on my knee, I ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... said my father gaily. "Children," he continued, "do you wish to go? What says my madcap, Amy?" ...
— A Grandmother's Recollections • Ella Rodman
... manhood, those outbursts of volatility, which, to serious natures, act as safety-valves after prolonged tension of all the powers of the mind. At such moments of levity he is described as almost boyish in recklessness, plunging into any madcap escapade that might be afoot with heedlessness of all consequences. Stories of misadventures, quips and quiddities of every kind, were then his delight, and of these he possessed a fund which no man knew better how to use. He would tell a funny story with wonderful spirit and freshness ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... prince that afterward Belied his madcap youth and proved A greatly simple warrior lord Such ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... sprang up from sleep, Saying, 'Now for a frolic! now for a leap! Now for a madcap galloping chase! I'll make a commotion ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers
... her honour. Listen, but tell nobody—four days ago, the King, passing her to go to supper, approached her, under the pretence of tickling her, and tried to slip a note into her hand. D'Amblimont, in her madcap way, put her hands behind her back, and the King was obliged to pick up the note, which had fallen on the ground. Gontaut was the only person who saw all this, and after supper, he went up to the little lady, and said, 'You are an excellent friend.' 'I did my duty,' ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... life that Fate, leading a traveler in easy gradients upwards along a road of triumph, suddenly assumes a madcap mood and with wanton hand throws a tiny obstacle in his way; an obstacle at times infinitesimal, scarce visible on that way towards success, yet powerful enough to trip the unwary traveler and bring him down to earth with sudden and ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... who was an eye-witness of this madcap Paris, wrote in detail about the dance and the dress of these people. He told how they dressed in the brightest clothes they could obtain, for maddened with happiness as they were, they instinctively felt that bright clothes would enliven ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... in which your own instinct should have guided you—your womanly instinct! But you have always been an unwomanly girl. You have put me to shame many a time by your hoydenish tricks; but I bore with you, believing that your madcap follies were at least harmless. To-day you have gone a step too far, and have been guilty of absolute impropriety, which I shall be very slow ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... Cousin Chicoree. Did you ever see a happier fellow than he is? I'll venture to say that he has been having such a good time that he hasn't even yet thought of building a nest, and here half the people of the Old Orchard have grown families. I've a nest and eggs myself, but that madcap is just roaming about having a good time. Isn't that ...
— The Burgess Bird Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... Sir John Oxon," said Warbeck. "And the beauty he makes his boast on is the Gloucestershire Wildairs handsome madcap—the one ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... long, swift flight the party went back to the house. There followed another gay hour before the fire, while Stuart roasted chestnuts, and Georgiana, sitting on the floor against her father's knee, told stones of madcap pranks at college, illustrating them by such changes of facial expression and such significant gestures that her hearers ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... which they had been accustomed to pay little heed, had been at work in their city during the dark hours, and young Romeo of the Montagues, handsome, devil-may-care lad as they had known him, and little Juliet of the Capulets, that madcap, merry, gentle young mistress, lay dead, side by side in ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... when that madcap Lalie Spring honored me with her love, as I never can refuse anything to a woman who smells of fresh scent, and who has a large store of promises in her looks, and who puts out her red, smiling lips immediately, as if she were going to offer you handsel money, I bought a piano, so that ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... joy! how did you manage it, dear? You have taken the wind out of Ada's sails and gained a feather in your cap, I can assure you. It all seems too good to be true. The queen dethroned at last!" and Winnie catching Nellie round the waist, danced her up and down the schoolroom in a regular madcap whirl. ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... no love for such shows, and nobody would be greatly troubled at her hardihood in escaping from the escort of her servants. She was always doing the like, and no harm had ever befallen her. Her father was wont to call her his Madcap, and her mother sometimes chided, and feared she would come to ill by her wild freaks; but she had always turned up safe and sound, and her independent ways had almost ceased to excite comment or uneasiness. On May Day, when all the world ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... had come the crowning glory, the climax of their wonderful summer—the race! They felt again the straining of that moment when, with half a length to make up and scant twenty yards from the goal, she had led them in the glorious, madcap dash to victory! From that day on she had reigned supreme in the girls' warm hearts, and there was not one of them but felt "that nothing was too good ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... harshly, her lip curling in fierce disdain. The other laughed a false laugh and assumed an airy, condescending tone. "Ah! madcap! madcap!" And his glance, anxious and imploring, rested upon the Nabob, as if to beseech his forgiveness for that flood ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... in 1848, found San Francisco a manless Eden. Stanley, struggling with a few elderly Indians and squaws to carry on his work, bemoaned the madcap ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... fresh May morning, I took my love to church, To see if Parson Primrose were safely on his perch. He scarce had got to Thirdly, or squire begun to snore, When, like a sun-lit sea-wave, A green and crimson sea-wave, A frolic of madcap May-folk came whooping ...
— The Lord of Misrule - And Other Poems • Alfred Noyes
... think,' she said, catching my arm. 'That big mill down yonder hasn't ground the originality altogether out of you. I adore originality. It was clever of you to catch at the suggestion of this arrangement. Lois Cayley, you say; any relation of a madcap Captain Cayley whom I used once to know, ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... flight of the pretty courtesan, it bears the sad notice: Residence to let. Its fast closed shutters give it the gloomy appearance of a deserted boudoir. Complete silence succeeds feverish bustle! Vanda was a boisterous, madcap spendthrift. Through the old windows with their old-fashioned panes there often used to escape snatches of song, airs of waltzes, fragments of quadrilles. Vanda's horses pawed the ground spiritedly as they started at the fashionable hour for the Bois, through ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... preposterous scarlet jackets; quaint old stomachers, more wicked than the smartest bodices; Polish pelisses, strained and tight as ripe gooseberries; tiny Greek caps, all awry, and clinging to the dark hair, Heaven knows how; every wild, quaint, bold, shy, pettish, madcap fancy had its illustration in a dress; and every fancy was as dead forgotten by its owner, in the tumult of merriment, as if the three old aqueducts that still remain entire had brought Lethe into Rome, upon their ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... you madcap; I'll to the alehouse with you presently; where, for one shot of five pence, thou shalt have five thousand welcomes. But, sirrah, how did thy ...
— The Two Gentlemen of Verona • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... is sometimes the friendship that was fancied!" I cried. "What kind of justice do you call this, to blame me for some words that a tomfool of a madcap lass has written down upon a piece of paper? You know yourself with what respect I have ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... you copied for me, to look at; and one day, who should come in but Elliott, who was staying with his governor on the West Cliff, where the old gentleman has taken a house. Well, you know, I told you what a madcap fellow Poole is; and what should he do, but tell Elliott that I was going stark mad for a girl that couldn't have me because her dad had engaged her to somebody else; and then he shewed him the music that was lying on the table with your name on it. So you may guess how Elliott ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 - Volume 18, New Series, August 28, 1852 • Various
... recognise him; but as long as my mother lived he would not leave her. When death had taken her from him, he so evidently stood in need of a complete change of scene, that even those friends who had most strongly dissuaded him from what they deemed a madcap enterprise, thought it better to leave him to himself. It would have mattered little how much they tried to dissuade him, for before long his passionate longing for the journey became so overmastering that nothing short of restraint in prison ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... stomach frightful attacks of indigestion by stealing out to the pantry and devouring a whole mince pie because he had been refused two pieces at the table—this rebellious, unreasonable, whimsical old madcap was an electric element in our quiet, orderly life. He insisted on going to every picnic and church sociable, where he ate recklessly of all the indigestible dainties he could lay his hands on, stood in drafts, tired himself ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... It was such a madcap frolic as students, utterly reckless of consequences, might engage in; but, after all, it was a serious affair. The clothes had to be returned; then the perpetrators of the outrage would be known at the college, and they might be expelled from ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... good-humouredly, "and don't let that madcap get you into mischief. I shouldn't be surprised if he tries to get his information ...
— For The Admiral • W.J. Marx
... society which constitutes the aristocracy of the ring and the turf, and all that kind of thing. You see, I am putting all the worst points first. But I have known so many young men in my day, after a madcap career of a few years among prizefighters, wrestlers, and jockeys—learning their slang and affecting their manners—take up and cultivate the graces and the decencies. There was poor dear Newgate, many degrees lower in that kind of frolic, who, ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... thine old wine till he became drunken and boisterous; but thou art too noble not to bear with his ignorance and pardon his offence." When the Barmaki heard my brother's words he laughed his loudest and said, "Long have I been wont to make mock of men and play the madcap among my intimates, but never yet have I come across a single one who had the patience and the wit to enter into all my humours save thyself: so I forgive thee, and thou shalt be my boon companion in very sooth and never leave me." Then he ordered the servants to lay the table in earnest and they ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... such thing; you are even more of a madcap than he is. The other day both of you looked as if you had taken a bath. How is it that a big girl like you cannot remain two minutes seated? Lucien!" she continued directing her eyes on her son, "turn off the water ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... everywhere in triumph, that whimsical, adventuresome, madcap woman, of whose life as an actress so many stories were told, had carried the arrogance of the virgin warrior-maid conceived by the master Wagner. In a bulky book, of uneven irregular pages, where the singer with the minute conscientiousness ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... rules provide! This is scandal, this is a shame, This madcap prank in Our Lady's name. Out of the doors with him; back to the street: He has no ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger
... young man whose brother was now with him, and who lives in Memmingen. His name is Herr Unhold, and he pressed me very much to come to Memmingen if possible. We sent a hundred thousand loves to papa by them, and to my sister, the madcap, which they promised to deliver without fail. This change of carriages was a great bore to me, for I wished to send a letter back from Waging by the postilion. We then (after a slight meal) had the honor of being conveyed as far ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... and shaking her pretty little fist at Claude, 'that madcap! how he has betrayed me! When he is at his easel, he is so in the seventh heaven, that he sees nothing, thinks of nothing, but his ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... my kirtle to-day behind," said she, "so we couldn't go dancing the Halling-fling[3] together on the green sward. But the homestead in the Blue Mountains is my lawful property, and tell the old man that it was madcap Gyri thou wast running after to-day, because thou art so madly fond ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... course, when he descended down among the steerage passengers and then crawled up the iron rungs of the ladder to the windy height. But that did not trouble him. All at once such a madcap spirit had come over him, he felt so happy and refreshed; as if he had never had to suffer dull cares, or put up with the whims of a hysterical wife, or practise medicine in a musty, out-of-the-way corner of the ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... could reconcile him to his fate, it was the knowing how pure and good and loving was the wife he was getting. Then he wrote of the doctor and Margaret, whom he described as a dashing, brilliant girl, the veriest tease and madcap in the world, and the ...
— Aikenside • Mary J. Holmes
... she grew steadily worse. Her dancing was delicate, accurate, even graceful, but the thing the British public likes to think typically American, a sort of breezy swagger, was gone. To bill her in her present state as the Madcap American would be ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... good fortune to live in an unenclosed parish, and may thank the wise obstinacy of two or three sturdy farmers, and the lucky unpopularity of a ranting madcap lord of the manor, for preserving the delicious green patches, the islets of wilderness amidst cultivation, which form, perhaps, the peculiar beauty of English scenery. The common that I am passing now—the lea, as it is called—is one of the ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... contradiction, with two men who accompanied him, while his sleek claybank mare also argued loudly with her colt. She had much ado to pace soberly forward, even under the coercion of whip and spur, while her madcap scion galloped wildly ahead or lagged far in the rear, and made now and then excursions into the woods, out of sight, to gratify some adolescent curiosity, or perhaps, after the fashion of other and human adolescents, to relish the spectacle of the maternal anxiety. Ever and anon ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... poor Hector, how you would suffer if you had to put up with me during the process! You ought to marry a clever woman who would keep your house as you would like it kept, and help you on by her gracious ways, not a madcap girl who has not learned to manage herself, much less other people. Dear Hector, I thank you with all my heart for thinking so kindly of me and paying me such an honour, but, indeed, ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... may overtake her, will find the Little Countess just as she left the cradle, if it were possible to suppose that she has preserved its innocence as well as she has retained its profound puerility. Has that madcap a soul? The word nothingness has escaped me. It is indeed difficult for me to conceive what might survive that body when it has once lost the vain fever and the frivolous breath that seem alone ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... yawning fireplace cheery with the dying embers of a fire built hours ago to drive out the dampness, and its two high-posted beds standing there in lofty dignity, the little Yankee school marm could hardly realize what madcap freaks she had perpetrated since she bounded over the gate at the foot of the lane leading from the highway down to Mulberry Hill, the ancestral home of ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... remedies. He was a young travelling Englishman; one of that class who are Radicals at twenty, Independents at thirty, and Conservatives at forty. He had not yet reached the intermediate stage. He saw in this madcap Radical Member one of the crude but strong expressions of advanced civilisation. He had the noble ideal of Australia as a land trodden only by the Caucasian. The Correspondent, much to our surprise, had by occasional ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... alleges, besides (p. 149) the ex post facto excuses of Francis's conduct, is the recovery of Henry's rights to the crown of France; and if this were the real object, it reduces both King and Cardinal to the level of political charlatans. To conquer France was a madcap scheme, when Henry himself was admitting the impossibility of raising 30,000 foot or 10,000 horse, without hired contingents from Charles's domains;[414] when, according to Giustinian, it would have been hard to levy 100 men-at-arms or 1000 light cavalry in the whole island;[415] when the ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... surrey swept even with the sidetracked tramp, the bright-eyed girl, seized by some merry, madcap impulse, leaned out toward him with a sweet, dazzling smile, and cried, "Mer-ry Christ-mas!" in a shrill, ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... hear that she and her sister were considered to be Southern Unionists—and were greatly petted in governmental circles for their sacrificing fidelity to the flag. His informant, an official in the State Department, added that Miss Matilda might have been a good deal of a madcap at the outbreak of the war—for the sisters had a brother in the Confederate service—but that she had changed greatly, and, indeed, within a month. "For," he added, "she was at the White House for the first time ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... ought to do, Garry lingered. If by a word he could restrain this madcap penitent from roving off in a fit of sentimentality it must be spoken forcibly ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... Such madcap experiments might perhaps one day, in the distant future, be tried with reasonable success, but hardly at the beck of a Spanish king sitting in his easy chair a thousand miles off, nor indeed by the servants ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... plumes disappeared in the shadow of the trees. "She'll break her neck some day;" and thinking someone must be in fault, her eyes would turn reprovingly upon Mrs. Jeffrey for having failed in subduing Maggie, whom the old governess pronounced the "veriest madcap" in the world. "There is nothing like her in all England," she said; "and her low-bred ways must be the result of her having been born ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... Juan Manuel Nunez makes a regular fortune and marries a native and has two daughters: Augusta and Margarita. Augusta, the younger, marries my father, Ricardo Hasting, who was a madcap and ran away from his home; Margarita weds a soldier, colonel Buenavida. They all come to Spain with plenty of money; my father plunges into disastrous business schemes, and after he has been utterly ruined he learns, I don't know how, that the fortune of ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... torrent. turmoil &c (disorder) 59; ferment &c (agitation) 315; storm, tempest, rough weather; squall &c (wind) 349; earthquake, volcano, thunderstorm. berserk, berserker; fury, dragon, demon, tiger, beldame, Tisiphone^, Megaera, Alecto^, madcap, wild beast; fire eater &c (blusterer) 887. V. be violent &c adj.; run high; ferment, effervesce; romp, rampage, go on a rampage; run wild, run amuck, run riot; break the peace; rush, tear; rush headlong, rush foremost; raise a storm, make a riot; rough house [Slang]; riot, storm; wreak, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... magic of these mountains is getting in your blood! Of course not—they are just a very happy family who know a little more than most of us about what's really worth while in this world. Now tell me about your own nieces—Isobel, and that madcap Gyp, and little Tib." She knew well how fond John Westley was of these three girls and to talk of them brought to her a breath of what she had known at home before she had married Will Allan, ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... Newark, New Jersey. It was full of antique furniture, and the walls were adorned with old family portraits. The place was in charge of an old man and his wife and a negro boy, who were the sole occupants, except when the nine would sally forth from New York and enliven its solitudes with their madcap pranks ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... a small table in the centre of the room with a settee and two or three chairs arranged close to it. Around this table now an eager little group had congregated: the Prince of Wales in the forefront, unwilling to interfere, scarce knowing what madcap plans were floating through Blakeney's adventurous brain, but excited in spite of himself at this momentous game of hazard the issues of which seemed so nebulous, so vaguely fraught with dangers. Close to him were Sir Andrew Ffoulkes, Lord Anthony Dewhurst, Lord Grenville and perhaps ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Meanwhile our little madcap remained quite unconscious of the honors designed her. She had cried every day of the first week of Herbert's absence; every alternate day of the second; twice in the third; once in the fourth; not at all ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... recover with the prettiest little foot in the world pointed out. Her mother came in as she was in this attitude; my lady had been in her closet, having taken poor Frank's conversion in a very serious way; the madcap girl ran up to her mother, put her arms round her waist, kissed her, tried to make her dance, and said: "Don't be silly, you kind little mamma, and cry about Frank turning Papist. What a figure he must be, with a white sheet and a candle, ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... he has taken this madcap freak of turning painter," the uncle continues, "there is no understanding the chap. Did you ever see such a set of fellows as the Colonel had got together at his party the other night? Dirty chaps in velvet coats and beards? They looked like a set of mountebanks. ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... visit this morning? Why, Lydia Ames, who hasn't darkened my doors since Wilfred became interested in Marcia. The idea!" overcome by indignation. "What did she want? A princess of the blood? Apparently not! She wants instead a fortune-teller, a madcap like Ydo Carrothers. She spent the whole time this morning telling me how charming and fascinating Ydo was and what a fillip she gave to life. I told her frankly that I had been very thoroughly acquainted with Miss Ydo Carrothers ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... for your services? I want to engage you to teach my madcap daughters a little quiet bravery and ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... occupants, all utterly unknown to me. At last I said, "Who are these people, Black? I don't know one of them." "You soon will know them, though, my boy," he answered. "Just wait and see if you don't." And sure enough, when "Madcap Violet" appeared, all the unknown personages of that night-walk at Camberwell were straightway ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... piquant. There was a tang of the swift, immoral, fascinating 'seventies in Claire's still cautious reference to champagne and cigarettes. It was impossible for any San Franciscan who had lived through those splendid madcap bonanza days to deny the lure of gay wickedness. At least it was hard to keep one's eyes on a prayer-book while the car of pleasure rattled by. And a coffee-and-cake social was, after all, a rather tame experience in the face of beverages more ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
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