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More "Ominous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... became aware of a solid black mass looming in front of the bull's-eye window. An instant later the submarine came to a jarring stop, as if she had struck some soft, yielding substance. There was a confused shouting throughout the craft, the noise of machinery, a trembling and vibration, and then ominous quiet. ...
— Tom Swift and his Undersea Search - or, The Treasure on the Floor of the Atlantic • Victor Appleton
... lights burnt blue, as they're wont to do When Spirits are in the wind. Ho! ho! thought I, that's an ominous hue, And a glance on either side I threw, But I fear'd ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 384, Saturday, August 8, 1829. • Various
... by her coming, and filled with a quiet joy; the matrons of Elysium crowding to her marriage toilet, with the bridal veil of yellow in their hands; the Manes, crowned with ghostly flowers yet warmed a little, at the marriage feast; the ominous dreams of the mother; the desolation of the home, like an empty bird's-nest or an empty fold, when she returns and finds Proserpine gone, and the spider at work over her unfinished embroidery; the strangely-figured raiment, the flowers in the grass, which were once blooming youths, having ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... Lavington, as if to surprise in him a corresponding change. At first none was visible: his pinched smile was screwed to his blank face like a gas-light to a white-washed wall. Then the fixity of the smile became ominous: Faxon saw that its wearer was afraid to let it go. It was evident that Mr. Lavington was unutterably tired too, and the discovery sent a colder current through Faxon's veins. Looking down at his untouched plate, he caught the soliciting twinkle of the champagne glass; but the sight of ...
— The Triumph Of Night - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... Em. I don't need you to tell me what she is. I can see for myself." Alf rocked a little with an ominous obstinacy. His eyes were fixed upon her with an unwinking stare. It was as though, having delivered a blow with the full weight of party bias, he were desiring her to take a common-sense view ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... VALUED FRIEND,—Your letter from Penryth [sic] without date, but bearing the ominous post-mark, 'April 1st,' has completely made a fool of me, in that sense which implies that nothing else can excuse a grey head and a seared heart for thinking and feeling that there are such things in the world as affection and sincerity. Being fond of flying in the face of reason, ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... the start. It was bad enough though, for there was certain to be something of a swell—and other things; and now that he was in the midst of it, he had grave doubts as to what would happen. But his strange exaltation rose supreme to all fears; no danger seemed too great, no possibility too ominous, to dampen the ardor of this, his first big act of self-sacrifice. The song the Salvation woman sang ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... you're treading!" the Master exclaimed. His voice had deepened, grown ominous. "You understood perfectly well the conditions of the undertaking—unquestioning obedience to my orders, with life-and-death powers in ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... over him inch by inch; he reminded Winn of nothing so much as of an excited terrier hunting up and down a bank for a rat-hole. Eventually Dr. Gurnet found his rat. He went back to his chair, sat down heavily, and looked at Winn. For rather an ominous moment he was silent; then he ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... broke out just as they turned to go, and peered curiously through the boughs, till it found out and lighted on the angular ominous heap, shrouded with a cloak, that, ten minutes ago, was a strong, ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... have, and have escaped with their lives, say that the ship is buffeted as if by mighty billows which smack down upon her from all directions. Sometimes there is seen a space of blue sky, and there is a great calm, but this to the commander is the most ominous sign of all, for he knows he must be in the centre funnel of the storm, so to speak, and that it will be worse ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... is a doleful region! One cannot tell where it ends and where the jungle begins, and dark, heavy, ominous-looking clouds generally concealed the forest-covered hills which are not far off. I almost felt the redundancy of vegetation to be oppressive, and the redundancy of insect and reptile life certainly was so; swarms of living creatures leaped in and out of the water, bigger ones ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... brief period, and I have no other object of earthly ambition than to leave my country in a peaceful and prosperous condition and to live in the affections and respect of my countrymen. The dark and ominous clouds which now appear to be impending over the Union I conscientiously believe may be dissipated with honor to every portion of it by the admission of Kansas during the present session of Congress, whereas if she should be rejected I greatly fear ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... tightly together so that an ominous rent appeared in one of her pretty gloves. "I'll sing," she kept saying to herself all the way out to the platform, "oh, I'll sing—I'll sing." And later on, while looking down into the eyes of the girls waiting to applaud, "I'll sing—I'll sing," she had to declare to ...
— Five Little Peppers Grown Up • Margaret Sidney
... irresponsible power. Men of the most eminent intellect and character had suffered within its precincts for the crime of teaching new truth or exposing old superstitions. Voltaire himself had twice tasted imprisonment there. What wonder, then, that the people fixed their gaze upon it on that ominous fourteenth of July, and attacked it as the very citadel of tyranny? The Bastille fell, and the sound re-echoed through Europe. It was the signal of a new era and a new hope. The Revolution had begun—that ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... weighted like himself with the full panoply of battle, a perfect harmony being here subtly suggested between man and beast. The rich landscape, with a gleam of the Elbe in the distance, is still in the half gloom of earliest day; but on the horizon, and in the clouds overhead, glows the red ominous light of sunrise, colouring the veils of the morning mist. The Emperor is alone—alone as he must be in life and in death—a man, yet lifted so high above other men that the world stretches far below at his feet, while above him this ruler knows no power but that of God. It is not even the ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... exclusive club, which he had left but half an hour ago! The smile faded, and he passed his hand a little wearily across his eyes. The strain seemed to grow heavier every day—the underworld more prone to suspicion; the police more vigilant; that ominous slogan, in which Crime and the Law for once were one, "Death to the Gray Seal!" to ring more constantly in his ears. It was becoming more fraught with peril, danger and difficulty than ever before, this dual life he led. And he had thought ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... primeval brooded the abyss; Alone as men were never in the world. They saw the icy foundlings of the sea, White cliffs of silence, beautiful by day, Or looming, sudden-perilous, at night In monstrous hush; or sometimes in the dark The waves broke ominous with paly gleams Crushed by the prow in sparkles of cold fire. 130 Then came green stripes of sea that promised land But brought it not, and on the thirtieth day Low in the west were wooded shores like cloud. They shouted as men shout with sudden hope; But Bioern ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... as to see the person. Strange secrets of curiosity, of impertinence, of malice, of love, leak out in this way. There is no need of Mrs. Felix Lorraine's reflection in the mirror, to tell us that she is plotting evil for us behind our backs. We know it, as we know by the ominous stillness of a child that some mischief or other is going-on. A young girl betrays, in a moment, that her eyes have been feeding on the face where you find them fixed, and not merely brushing over it with their pencils of ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... heron had stood at a little distance away, uttering now and then an ominous croak. I could easily have shot it from where I stood, but thought the family had suffered enough ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... There was an ominous pause here, in which I ventured to say something like, "Yes, very trying," and then asked at what hour the church service was to be. "Eleven o'clock," Mr. Bowman said with a heavy sigh. "Ah, you won't have no such discourse from poor Mr. Lucas as what you would have done from our late Rector. ...
— A Thin Ghost and Others • M. R. (Montague Rhodes) James
... clicked, and sent a shudder through Carey, who started at the ominous sound and looked wildly round for the guns, in the mad idea that he might be able to catch one up, load it, and fire in defence of the man towards whom he felt as if he were an elder brother. But the guns were all in the hands of the blacks, and others had possession ...
— King o' the Beach - A Tropic Tale • George Manville Fenn
... had hoped for an outburst of rapture on the part of the little gun man he was disappointed, for Willie shifted his holster, smiled evilly through his glasses, and inquired, with ominous restraint: ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach
... on the beach here, like that pretty little reef that runs right out before your windows, but three miles from the shore there is a fatal stretch of sand where wrecks are frequent, and all along which ominous white clouds are springing up from the inky surface of the wintry sea, like warning ghosts. It is very dreary and dismal looking; but, nevertheless, as I have no rehearsal, I am going out to walk. Kiss Dorothy for me. I am ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... to herself. I lay in my bunk and listened to the wind in the humming rigging, while the moonlight, shining through the porthole, filled the cabin with dim shadows. Toward midnight, mingled with the noises of the ship, another and more ominous sound became audible—the grinding of the ice in the ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... Beneath the wide cap of frozen snow ran a torrent roaring. I remembered Colorado, and how I had crossed the Arkansaw on such a bridge as a boy. We went on in the uneasy dawn. The woods began to show, and there was a cross where a man had slipped from above that very April and been killed. Then, most ominous and disturbing, the drizzle changed to a rain, and the guide shook his head and said it would be snowing higher up. We went on, and it grew lighter. Before it was really day (or else the weather confused and darkened the sky), we crossed a good bridge, built long ago, and we halted at ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... ominous mutter came from a point toward the north, and glancing that way, although he knew his eyes would meet a blank wall, he saw that it was only Jacques, snoring, not an ordinary common snore, but the loud resounding trumpet call that can only come from a mighty chest and a powerful throat ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... in the open. An ominous stillness seemed to grip the very air—the awful silence of the polar wastes which lay ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... efface himself, but there were no sheltering corners or curtains, and there was not time to get into the bedroom and under the bed. Near the window was a large-sized medicine chest, and in despair Bunty crushed himself into it, his legs huddled up, his head between his knees, and an ominous rattle of displaced bottles in his ears. The next minute his father ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... Autumn night of sobbing rain. Then it would run like a steady stream Under pinnacled bridges where minarets gleam, Or lap the air like the lapping tide Where a marble staircase lifts its wide Green-spotted steps to a garden gate, And a waning moon is sinking straight Down to a black and ominous sea, While a nightingale ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... Union, can save America from as many standing armies as it may be split into States or Confederacies, and from such a progressive augmentation, of these establishments in each, as will render them as burdensome to the properties and ominous to the liberties of the people, as any establishment that can become necessary, under a united and efficient government, must be tolerable to the former and safe to ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... and so with his open hand, the captain gently and carefully waved the gull away. After it had been discouraged from the pursuit the captain breathed easier on account of his hair, and others breathed easier because the bird struck their minds at this time as being somehow grewsome and ominous. ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... of curious people. For as cupping-glasses take away the worst blood, so the ears of curious people attract only the worst reports; or rather, as cities have certain ominous and gloomy gates, through which they conduct only condemned criminals, or convey filth and night soil, for nothing pure or holy has either ingress into or egress from them, so into the ears of curious people goes nothing good or elegant, but tales of murders travel and lodge there, ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... down the empty streets paraded these worthies, pausing here and there at the door of some citizen that presented a tempting surface. One of their number would paint upon it the ominous red cross, whilst another who had skill enough (for writing was not the accomplishment of every citizen even then) would add in staring white letters the legend, ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... show off her newly acquired skill with firearms. Starr had told her that lots of people killed rattlesnakes by shooting their heads off. She wanted to try it, anyway, and show Vic a thing or two. So she rode up as close as she dared, though the pinto shied away from the ominous sound; pulled her pearl-handled six-shooter from its holster, aimed, and fired at ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... dying words glanced through my memory as he spoke:—"'Tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door, but 'tis enough." And John would have said the same, could he have seen the ominous black holes between his shoulders, he never had; and, seeing the ghastly sights about him, could not believe his own wound more fatal than these, for all ...
— On Picket Duty and Other Tales • Louisa May Alcott
... that she is out of breath, that she must have breathing time if she is to go on. At the general rehearsal this vaudeville act found no favour and the singer was without doubt vocally distressed. An ominous noise from the direction of the conductor's desk (Strauss himself) caused her some embarrassment. She eventually got under way, leaving the audience in doubt as to the success of the experiment—the score shows that it is all in deadly earnest. But the foot-stamping of Strauss and his remarks reminded ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... that is out of joint, much to justify doleful prophecies, in the social and religious conditions of the present age, but the signs of the times are not all ominous. At all events, nothing would be gained by a return to the monkish ideals of the past. The hope of the world lies in the further development and completer realization of those great principles of human freedom that distinguish this century from the past. The history of monasticism clearly ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... the afternoon our field-glasses picked up the Confederate head-of-column emerging from the range of hills previously mentioned, where it is cut by the Columbia road. But—ominous circumstance!—it did not come on. It turned to its left, at a right angle, moving along the base of the hills, parallel to our line. Other heads-of-column came through other gaps and over the crests farther along, impudently deploying on the level ground with a spectacular ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... the cheeks had receded slightly, the healthy lustre of the eyes had given way to an ominous glow, the warning of death had returned. Then my heart would sink, and, sighing, I would ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... thickening. The one way out of it, so far, was the way traced faintly through that strange story of the unfinished letter which the doctor had repeated to him in Mrs. Armadale's words. The nearer he approached his unknown responsibility, the more ominous it seemed of something serious to come. Should he risk another question before he pledged himself irrevocably? As the doubt crossed his mind, he felt Mrs. Armadale's silk dress touch him on the side furthest from ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... the place and swept it from end to end! But what of his mother and Jess! Were they alive? or were their charred bodies now lying exposed to the pelting rain? He called again and again at the top of his voice, but received no reply. The silence was ominous, for from where he was standing anyone, even in the middle of the small island, should be ...
— Jess of the Rebel Trail • H. A. Cody
... propounded, is at once solved if we consider him as a man insatiably greedy of wealth and power, and yet nervously apprehensive of danger. He rushed with ravenous eagerness at every bait which was offered to his cupidity. But any ominous shadow, any threatening murmur, sufficed to stop him in his full career, and to make him change his course or bury himself in a hiding place. He ought to have thought himself fortunate indeed, when, after all the crimes which he had committed, he found ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... whose Sable Armes[11] Blacke as his purpose, did the night resemble When he lay couched in the Ominous[12] Horse, Hath now this dread and blacke Complexion smear'd With Heraldry more dismall: Head to foote Now is he to take Geulles,[13] horridly Trick'd [Sidenote: is he totall Gules [18]] With blood of Fathers, Mothers, Daughters, ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... indecision had been removed, and I found myself entrusting Carter with a telegram to Davies, P.O., Flensburg. 'Thanks; expect me 9.34 p.m. 26th'; which produced, three hours later, a reply: 'Delighted; please bring a No. 3 Rippingille stove'—a perplexing and ominous direction, which somehow chilled me in spite ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... short post with straps attached to an arm nailed across it, and leaning upon this post in an attitude of one who possesses a most distinguished office was a young man with a three thonged whip in his hand. An ominous silence pervaded the circle, with the exception of the hushed whispering of a number of women who had forced themselves into the line of spectators, bent upon witnessing the sight of blood as well as hearing the sound of lashes. Nathaniel noticed that most of the women hung ...
— The Courage of Captain Plum • James Oliver Curwood
... Man had hitherto been but a tradition among them, a vague but alarming tradition. And now his appearance, yesterday and to-day, filled them with terror. That vision of the Boy, standing tall and ominous on the dam, and afterwards going forward and backward over it, pulling at it, apparently seeking to destroy it, seemed to portend mysterious disasters. After he was gone, and well gone, almost every beaver in the pond, not only from the main house but also from the ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... Taine, the son had nothing to do with it. Don't you think we might let the dead man stay safely buried?" There was an ominous glint in Conrad ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... and the Americas, the three were always spoken of together as the Three J's—Jaggers, the Jockey, and the Jew. Wherever horses raced their fame was great, and amongst the English at least it was evil and ominous. ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... for vantage in the fight. Noon came. The fire of pickets died away. All eyes were turned to Seminary Ridge, For lo our sullen foemen—park on park— Had massed their grim artillery on our corps. Hoarse voices sunk to whispers or were hushed; The rugged hills stood listening in awe; So dread the ominous silence that I heard The hearts of soldiers throbbing along ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... we talked of Viola. Writing to her had been, of course, impossible for him, and he had only had two short notes from her, so meaningless that I thought she wrote them fearing to disturb him while he was ill; but he muttered an ominous line from Locksley Hall, vituperated Piggy, and confessed that his ground for doing so was that his mother reported Viola as pleased with foreign life, and happy with her cousins. I said it was his mother's way, and he replied, "Exactly so; and a girl ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... cast an ominous glance around the work-room, at the table covered with work, his little supper waiting for him in a corner, and the two dear, anxious faces looking up at him with glistening eyes. He stood a full minute without speaking—and you know how long a minute's silence ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... off shakin' his head ominous. But then, Piddie has been waitin' for the word to fire Brink Hollis ever since this cheerful eyed young hick was wished on the Corrugated through a director's pull nearly a year ago, when he was fresh from ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford
... doorway that yawned along their path seemed ominous with memories of life that had perished there, of death that ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... the light of this setting sun ominous, but everything about me seemed ominous—the landscape, my father's face, the fret of the babe in my mother's arms that she could not still, the six horses my father drove that had continually to be urged and that were without any sign of colour, so heavily ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... could not shake off the fright that had startled him. It was as if an unseen thing of gloom had passed him by, casting upon him the intangible shadow of its presence. He was aware of a feeling of foreboding. Something ominous was about to happen. Calamity hovered in the air. He gazed fixedly across the table at the other man. He could not understand. Was it that he had blundered and poisoned himself? No, Matt had the nicked cup, and he had certainly put the poison in the ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... scene of the Witch's Kitchen; in that lurid moment of sunset over the quaint gables and haunted spires of Nuremburg, when the sinister presence of the arch-fiend deepened the red glare of the setting sun and seemed to bathe this world in the ominous splendour of hell; and, above all, if you perceived the soul that shone through his eyes in that supremely awful moment of his predominance over the hellish revel upon the Brocken, when all the hideous malignities of nature and all those ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... western sea-rim, and there was still no sign of the captain's boat. On the shore an ominous silence prevailed, though now and then it would be broken by the weird, resonant boom of a conch-shell. The night was passed in the greatest anxiety by all on board, every man, musket in hand, keeping a ...
— The Adventure Of Elizabeth Morey, of New York - 1901 • Louis Becke
... down into the ominous silence of the town with a lighter heart. The sublime faith of the child moved before him like a beacon. To the sick he spoke words of comfort, with the vision of Carmen always before him. At the altar ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... same point to take up their reconnaissance. But now, where clear sky had made a blue back-drop for rugged peaks, was a line of black. And the line, while Danny watched in disbelief, moved like a smoky serpent: its head stretched out and out while from behind it there came the ominous line ...
— The Hammer of Thor • Charles Willard Diffin
... word, O Women, Friend, makes that sharp terror start Out at thy lips? What ominous cry half-heard Hath leapt ...
— Hippolytus/The Bacchae • Euripides
... from boiled sowans, is ready. It is then poured into as many bickers as there are individuals to partake of it, and presently served to the whole, both old and young. As soon as each despatches his bicker, he jumps out of bed—the elder branches to examine the ominous signs of the day, and the younger to ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... ouer and ouer as my poore selfe in loue: marrie I cannot shew it rime, I haue tried, I can finde out no rime to Ladie but babie, an innocent rime: for scorne, horne, a hard rime: for schoole foole, a babling rime: verie ominous endings, no, I was not borne vnder a riming Plannet, for I cannot wooe in ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... still as though anchored, so that the body was seen to descend slowly alongside until it reached the calcareous, sandy bottom, where it assumed an upright and strangely lifelike position, as though standing upon its feet. An ominous silence reigned among the watching crew, and it was a decided relief to all hands when a northerly wind sprang up, filling the canvas and giving the vessel ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... had quieted down a little in Alexandria, George of Cappadocia resolved to return and see if he could not make a little more money. He was received in an ominous silence, for he was held in abhorrence almost as much by the pagans as by the Christians. A few days later the news reached the city that Constantius was dead and that his nephew Julian had ...
— Saint Athanasius - The Father of Orthodoxy • F.A. [Frances Alice] Forbes
... were made to fasten the hold of the pro-slavery party permanently upon the State, and as desperately were these efforts repelled. A certain John Brown, who requited assassination of free-state men by the assassination of slave-state men,—a very ominous appearance,—began to be heard of; men like Professor Silliman, who, during my stay at Yale had spoken at Union meetings in favor of the new compromise measures, even including the fugitive slave law, now spoke publicly in favor of sending rifles to the ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... the most comfortable one in the settlement, and occupied a prominent site on the hillside about one hundred yards from the fort. It was constructed of heavy timber and presented rather a forbidding appearance with its square corners, its ominous looking portholes, and strongly barred doors and windows. There were three rooms on the ground floor, a kitchen, a magazine room for military supplies, and a large room for general use. The several sleeping rooms were on the second floor, which was ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... drawing a long breath as he eyed these ominous proceedings, "that we had a few of Colt's revolvers, to keep these fellows at a respectable distance: I confess I don't like the notion of coming to such close quarters with them as they ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... Wynne and N.C. Marriott, both of whom were sent to "B" Company, where they joined Capt. Griffiths at dinner. They were half way through their meal when, without the slightest warning, the ground heaved, pieces of the roof fell on the table, and they heard the ominous whirr of falling clods, which betokens a mine at ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... we must, alas! submit to our fate. The habit of loving, le besoin d'aimer, is more powerful than all sense of the folly and the danger. Nor is the tempest of the passions so dreadful as the dead calm of the soul. Why did R—— suffer my soul to sink into this ominous calm? The fault is his; let him abide the consequences. Why did he not follow me to England? why did he not write to me? or when he did write, why were his letters so cold, so spiritless? When I spoke of divorce, why did ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... more enlightening were I to spend hours in telling of wrecked lives, of wrecked homes, of prisons filled with their victims, of the immense loss to states and nations from the loss to sufferers and the loss they inflict. Alcoholism has no sense for frowning, ominous statistics, for it is a disease to be rationally treated, a ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... of conditions mentioned in that ominous card. I was unacquainted with the Bohemian "song and dance" parlance in such extremities, and wondered would letting my secret come out let a dinner come in. Possibly, I may have often been deceived when appealed to, but that experience has often been fruitful ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... home and the family just about to take breakfast. Gray Michael had returned somewhat unexpectedly, with a fine catch, and did not intend sailing again before the evening tide. A somewhat ominous silence greeted the girl, a silence which her father was ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... held their breaths. From the Irish benches not a sound escaped. In most Parliamentary frays—especially when the storm rages—there are certain Irish members who are certain to figure largely and eminently; but on these benches there was a silence, ominous to those who are able to note the signs of the Parliamentary firmament. Anyone looking on could have seen that the silence did not come from inattention or want of interest, for the looks betrayed keen and almost ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... Justinian (531 A.D.). A remarkable comet was observed in 1106, and in 1456, the year in which the Turks obtained possession of Constantinople and threatened to overrun Europe, a great comet appeared, which was regarded by Christendom with ominous forebodings. The celebrated astronomer Halley was the first to predict the return of a comet. Having become acquainted with Newton's investigations, which showed that the forms of the orbits of comets were either parabolae or extremely ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... The populace were evidently more than ready to second any such attempt; the Sanhedrim and Jewish authorities must have trembled for the result. The hosannas, borne on the breeze from the slope of Olivet, could not fail to sound ominous of coming disaster. So incontrovertible indeed had been the proof of Lazarus' resurrection, that only the most blinded bigotry could refuse to own in that marvellous act the divinity of Jesus. In addition, too, to this last crowning demonstration of ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... cried and laughed. "Oh, la la! But no! Still, we must go from here. The police will be here any minute, and if they find you——" She left it unsaid, and the gap was ominous. ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... halted. One heard nothing but that indescribable, nameless flutter of falling snow—a sensation rather than a sound, a vague, ominous murmur. A command was given in a low tone and when the troop resumed its march it left in its wake a sort of white phantom standing in the snow. It gradually grew fainter and finally disappeared. It was the echelons who were to ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... See 'Paradise Lost', book XI., where Adam points out to Eve the ominous sign of the Eagle chasing "two Birds of gayest plume," and the gentle Hart and Hind pursued by ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... it seems to me that I can hear, at times like this, when one is alone, the sound of what one of your writers called footsteps amongst the hills, footsteps falling upon wool, muffled yet somehow ominous. There is trouble coming. I know it. I ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... would be let fly among the crowd assembled in the square before the palace. The seeming prince accepted the invitation, and with the disguised ladies was conducted to a gorgeous pavilion, open on all sides, to view the ceremony. The ominous bird being loosened from his chain, soared into the air to a great height, then gradually descending, flew round and round the square repeatedly, even with the faces of the spectators. At length it darted into the pavilion, where the lady and her companions were seated, fluttered around her head, ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... was not in the group that surrounded the ominous tree. But as they turned to disperse, attention was drawn to the singular appearance of a motionless donkey-cart halted at the side of the road. As they approached, they at once recognized the venerable ...
— Tennessee's Partner • Bret Harte
... I am, and it's twenty-three for mine." (Tom paused in suspense at this ominous phrase.) "My registration card is numbered twenty-three, so I'm the only original skiddoo soldier—take it ...
— Tom Slade with the Colors • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... by his mace. It was the Duke of Athens, Constable of France, but none had time to note it, and the fight rolled on over his body. Looser still were the French ranks. Many were turning their horses, for that ominous roar from the rear had shaken their resolution. The little English wedge poured onward, the Prince, Chandos, Audley and Nigel ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... VI. died at Greenwich, but his death was kept a secret until Northumberland's plans could be matured. Four days later Lady Jane Grey arrived in London, and the proclamation of her accession to the throne was received with ominous silence in the ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... blow with the staff of his spear; but it was not at the imaginary patriarch of the home herd, but at his own head, which was saved from harm by his helmet, the stroke causing a sharp sound sufficiently loud to make Lupe utter an ominous growl, and the horses where they were ...
— Marcus: the Young Centurion • George Manville Fenn
... nowhere very deep about them. If the points of the horse-shoe had been turned toward the east instead of the west they would not have been habitable and the place would have been known to navigators as the Devil's Reef, the Devil's Horse-shoe or by some other term ominous of shipwrecks. The group of islands now form a cosy though not very safe harbor where every evening in the mackerel season a small fleet of fishing-vessels sail in there ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... vigil was getting on her nerves, and the sight of that threatening figure had set her pulses to throbbing. The rider was on his guard, that was plain; he was armed, too, and probably desperate. The ominous possibilities of ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... was no time for that. Another explosion took place inside the building, which Charlie knew must have driven in the sides of more casks and let loose fresh fuel. A terrible roar, followed by ominous cracking of the roof, warned him that there was no time to lose. He looked steadily at the cart for a moment and leaped. His friends held their breath as the pair descended. The hay would not have sufficed to break the fall sufficiently, but happily the cart was an old one. When they came down on ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... kinsman, the orphaned and administered fils de famille, whose father, Alexander Wyckoff, son of our great-aunt and one of the two brothers of cousin Helen, just discernibly flushes for me through the ominous haze that preceded the worst visitation of cholera New York was to know. Alexander, whom, early widowed and a victim of that visitation, I evoke as with something of a premature baldness, of a blackness of short whisker, of ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... see how it works." Then Zoega pushed it all over, and it went slapping and dashing down into the steaming shaft. For a little while it whirled about, and surged, and boiled, and tumbled over and over in the depths of the churn with a hollow, swashing noise terribly ominous of what was to come. I peeped over the edge to try if I could detect the first symptoms of the approaching eruption. Zoega walked quietly away about twenty steps, saying he preferred not to be too close. There was a sudden ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... Shadrack. He turned his round face upward and gazed at the sky so solemnly that the others laughed. But there was no disputing the fact: the drizzle had commenced. To the south, in the direction of Chattanooga, the clouds had formed a dark, ominous wall, as though nature were raising ...
— Tom of the Raiders • Austin Bishop
... the second day of June, dawned over the battle-scarred earth—an ominous day for the armies of the Republic—for the sun rose on a new figure in command of the men in grey. Robert E. Lee had taken the ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... the voice of Sylvia: "You must beware of Douglas, Papa; he is an inveterate flatterer." She laughed as she said it; and of those present it was Aunt Varina alone who caught the ominous note, and saw the bitter curl of her lips as she spoke. Aunt Varina and her niece were the only persons there who knew Douglas van Tuiver well enough to appreciate the irony of the term ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... inopportune an appearance was Laurence Sterne. "My birthday," he says, in the slipshod, loosely-strung notes by which he has been somewhat grandiloquently said to have "anticipated the labours" of the biographer—"my birthday was ominous to my poor father, who was the day after our arrival, with many other brave officers, broke and sent adrift into the wide world with a ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... of sugar from British vessels? In the former case, indeed, the ships were ordered to be released; in the latter case, of which the complaint was made twenty-four hours later, the reply to inquiries was the ominous statement that 'no ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... stopped at Father Letheby's new house, and a vast crowd surged around it. The girls kept at a respectful distance, whilst the men unyoked their horses; but the boys stood near, in the attitude of runners at a tournament, ready to make off the moment the first ominous growl was heard. The adults were less excited, though quite as curious, and I could hear the questionings over the silence of expectation that had fallen ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... have told you I am an Apostle of the great Mormon Church; and that man would be cunning indeed who could shun the vengeance of our Destroying Angels. Now, Hickman Holt, which is it to be? yes or no?" The pause was ominous for ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... America has, however, been brought into undue prominence. It had such an ominous significance in Christian art, and one which chimed so well with the favorite proverb of the early missionaries—"the gods of the heathens are devils"—that wherever they saw a carving or picture of a serpent they ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... beyond that limit where the powers of restraint cease to operate with effect. At the period which our narrative has now reached, and for a considerable time before it, those low rumblings which stunned and frightened the ear of civilized society, like the ominous sounds that precede an earthquake, were now followed by those tremblings and undulations which accompany the shock itself. But before we describe that social condition to which we refer, it is necessary that we should previously ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... glanced at her for an instant, and his face darkened. The girl's ominous words filled him with vague apprehension. Was it possible that the blind man had any suspicion of what was intended? He held his breath, and made another vicious cast far ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... afraid of the little girl. But she ran from the old gobbler, and the big gander who believed he had pre-empted the farm from the Indians. She generally climbed over the fence when she saw old Red, who had an ominous fashion of brandishing her long horns. But she didn't mind ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas
... wasn't a-tellin' me." Mr. Gibney's tones were ominous; he glared at his friend suspiciously as from the Maggie's cabin issued forth Scraggsy's voice raised ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... that their onset might be the more effective, for when all was quiet, and everybody in camp asleep, the muttering of the thunder grew louder, lightning began to zigzag across the black cloud masses, and the whistling of the wind deepened to a steady ominous growl. Tent ropes creaked under the strain of the heavy blasts; trees writhed and twisted, and the rain came in gusts, swift, spiteful, and icy cold. In the dining-room Mrs. Royall awoke from a light doze and piled fresh logs on the fire. Anne and Laura, whom she had kept ...
— The Torch Bearer - A Camp Fire Girls' Story • I. T. Thurston
... and Spud sped over the uneven ground in the direction of the cap. Then both made a plunge forward in true football style. In a heap they landed on the rotted boards, each catching hold of the coveted headwear. Then came an ominous crash, and both boys disappeared ...
— The Rover Boys in Alaska - or Lost in the Fields of Ice • Arthur M. Winfield
... listening silence, a faint and very distant sound, barely audible as yet, but of unmistakable character. It was far away in the upper reaches of the building, overhead, remote, a little stealthy. Like the ominous murmur of a muffled drum, it had approach in it. It was coming nearer and nearer. It was significant ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... in the moonlight. They were showing an uncommon daring. Lone hunters had been killed and eaten in the winter by starving wolves, but it was seldom that two men in the spring were followed in such a manner. It became weird, uncanny and ominous. ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... a part of the world where our ensigns and gauds ought to be spread abroad to the wind, Mabel Dunham!" he said, with an ominous shake of ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... next year?" He put the question seemingly to the glowing log, and, as if in ominous foreshadow, it flared brightly and crumbled away ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... silence was ominous; even the gunboats had ceased firing, and their guard had made ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... passed quickly through it. He met no one, and no one molested him; but as he went he had glimpses of pale faces that from behind the casements watched him come and turned to watch him go; and so heavy on his nerves was the pressure of this silent ominous attention, that he blundered at the end of the street. He should have taken the southerly turning; instead he held on, found himself in the Rue Ferronerie, and a moment later was all but in the arms of a band of city guards, who were ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... mysterious or ominous in this plan. It has nothing to do with the pools and conspiracies of Wall Street. No one will be squeezed out except the promoters of paper companies. The simple fact is that Vail is organizing a complete Bell System for the same reason that he built one big comfortable ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... escort had followed the line of battle for nearly a mile to the right of Ransome's battery, and there learned that the division commander had gone in search of the corps commander. It seemed that everybody was looking for his immediate superior—an ominous circumstance. It meant that nobody was quite at ease. So General Cameron rode on for another half-mile, where by good luck he met General Masterson, the division ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... the Raven spoke, Perched on his crooked tree As hoarse as hoarse could be. Shun him and fear him, Lest the Bridegroom hear him; Scout him and rout him With his ominous eye about him. ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... three birds and got them boiling in the camp kettle, and while they were cooking talked over the outlook which was so flattering that our tongues got loose and we rattled away in strange contrast to the ominous silence of a week ago. While eating our stew of crow and hawk, we could see willows alders and big sage brush around and we had noticed what seemed to be cottonwoods farther down the canon, and green trees on the slope of the mountain. We were sure we were ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... turned his back in so pointed and ominous a manner that Horace judged it better to withdraw without insisting further. "I'm afraid," he said to Mrs. Futvoye, after they had rejoined Sylvia in the drawing-room—"I'm afraid your husband is still a little sore with me ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... with an ominous scream, and Hitty hurried into the house to give him to the servant's charge, while she returned to the sitting-room, where the old man had seated himself in the rocking-chair, and was taking a mental inventory of the goods and chattels with a momentary keenness in his look that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... no time in reporting the incident to the Zara. The Earth men were hustled to the throne room of the palace where the leopard woman sat in conference with her advisers. An ominous silence greeted their entrance. Ugly faces leered at them ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... my question struck me as ominous. To the Milan, of course, where Louis was all the time predominant! The girl might be innocent enough of all wrong-doing or knowledge of wrong-doing, but could one think the same of her uncle? I glanced at him ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... blood on her arm and dress, and ran through another door further along, leaving behind her a great whiff of coarse perfume. It was but for an instant that we saw her; yet, even in that instant, a sort of horror came on me again as if she were something monstrous and ominous, though—poor woman!—I have never heard anything against her more than was said at that time against all women that were actresses—all, that is, except Mrs. Betterton. She appeared more dreadful even than in the play, or than when she had ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... number of whom were armed, stood in front of Pegloe's tavern. Glancing in the direction of the court-house, he observed that the square before it held other groups. But what impressed him more was the ominous silence that was everywhere. At his elbow the ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... completed and the second will be so, before we even leave the east coast of S. America. And then our voyage may be said really to have commenced. I know not how I shall be able to endure it. The frequency with which I think of all the happy hours I have spent at Shrewsbury and Cambridge is rather ominous—I trust everything to time and fate and will feel my way as I ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... There was something ominous and gravely impressive in this interminable line of dark figures, close-pressed, soundless; a crowd, yet absolutely still; a close-packed, silent file, waiting, waiting in the vast deserted night-ridden street; waiting without a word, without a movement, there under the night and under the ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... and over the brook on the high bank a lady, veiled only in her hair, singing to herself. He stood transported, Actaeon in his own despite, then softly withdrew. Roy got back in his time, cooked the dinner, and had no drubbing. Then came the meal, with an ominous innovation. ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... to a sudden stop, and for a moment there was silence. Then came the sound of a whispered council, and like ghosts the phantom riders dispersed in all directions. Again the desert lay still about him, yet it was an ominous ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... mules broke loose and threw their packs down the hill. Poor Isaaco had to collect them all, physick the dying and distressed, and number the living and the lost. At nightfall he slept like a log "under a monkey-bread tree." The following day was darkened by an ominous message from the King of Bambarra. There was evidently trouble brewing ahead. To gain some friendship in the capital, Isaaco decided to bribe. To Sabila, the Chief of the King's slaves, he sent a pair of scissors, a snuff-box, and a looking-glass, and desired to be his friend. And to ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... home again happy and light of heart; he dreamed of glory. He gave not another thought to the ominous words which fell on his ear as he stood by the counter in Vidal and Porchon's shop; he beheld himself the richer by twelve hundred francs at least. Twelve hundred francs! It meant a year in Paris, a whole year of preparation ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... opened his eyes and regained his wits, amidst an ominous silence. The band watched his return to life with evil smiles: they quietly watched his pallid face turn a livid ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... fore-top-mast; and then he remarked the absence of the boat which was carried amidships, and the few men moving about her deck. Ay! he took it all in with that one comprehensive glance, and when he had done, he raised his fore finger quivering with anger, and slowly and unconsciously passed it with an ominous gesture ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... cut off the sharp angle which the Atbara forms at Umdabia, and, avoiding the thick bush, soon approached the Dervish camp. Not a sign of the enemy was seen during the march. The bush by the Atbara appeared deserted. The camp gave no sign of life; an ominous silence prevailed. The squadrons moved forward at a walk, keeping about 1,200 yards away from the enemy's zeriba and almost parallel to it. Presently, as they did so, a large force of cavalry became visible in front. It was difficult to estimate their strength, but they ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... which shone like haloes above our faces. The girls wore pink gowns, which they pulled to their waists as we forded the streams. Mahine had a mouth-organ on which she played. We sang and danced, and the tossing torches stirred the shadows of the black wold, and brought out in shifting glimpses the ominous shapes of the monstrous trees. With all our gaiety, I had only to utter a loud "Aue!" and the natives rushed together for protection against the unseen; not of the physical, but of the dark abode of Po. In this lonely wilderness they thought that tupapaus, the ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... last month of that fateful year was further darkened by the most dangerous and ominous event recorded in the United Kingdom since the war began. Over 200,000 coal miners of South Wales deliberately, obstinately and criminally withheld their labour from their own nation, whose existence at that moment was dependent on its bestowal. The coal pits of South Wales remained idle for over ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... men in front made at them at once, while Sher Singh and the others conferred in the background. Neither Gerrard nor Charteris had time to do more than notice this ominous confabulation, for their adversaries gave them plenty of work. They were as agile as cats, and the chance was small indeed of getting in a telling blow. One man went down with a bullet from Gerrard's revolver in his brain, but his place was ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... of yours pained me much because I seemed to have given you the painful trouble in it of describing your state, your weakness. Ah, I knew what that state was, and it was therefore that the slip of paper which came with 'Atherton' seemed to me so ominous! By the way, I shall see 'Atherton' before long, I dare say. The 'German Library' in our street is to have a 'box of new books' almost directly, and in it surely must be 'Atherton,' and you shall hear my thoughts of ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... we had nearly traversed the entire patch of reeds that the lion was found. It evidently lay silently ahead of us until we were almost upon it. Then, almost beneath my feet, came the angry and ominous growl, and my Somali gunbearer leaped in terror, falling as he did so. I expected to see a long, lean flash of yellow body and to experience the sensation of being mauled by a lion. All was breathlessly ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... all night, but ceased on the following evening without having committed further damage, and from that time till the morning of the tenth we had tolerably fine weather. It then fell a stark calm, but there was an ominous cold-grey silky look in the sky which I did not like. The captain was constantly on deck, anxiously scanning the horizon, and Jonathan Flood, our old master, kept his weather-eye open, as ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... on all fours, eating painted grass, with a huge gold crown on his head, which he bobs for a bite every other bar. In the right-hand corner is a sort of cavern, the abode of some supernatural and mysterious being of the fiend or vampire school, who gives an occasional fitful start, and turns an ominous-looking green glass-eye out upon the spectators. All these are in the background. In the front of the stage stands Napoleon, wearing a long sword and cocked hat, and the conventional gray smalls—his hand ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various
... Mortimer's Tower bore on its front the scutcheon of the Earl of March, whose daring ambition overthrew the throne of Edward II., and aspired to share his power with the "She-wolf of France," to whom the unhappy monarch was wedded. The gate, which opened under this ominous memorial, was guarded by many warders in rich liveries; but they offered no opposition to the entrance of the Countess and her guide, who, having passed by license of the principal porter at the Gallery-tower, were not, it may be supposed, liable ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... an authority in his bearing that gained him unopposed entrance. In the hall, nauseating with the ominous odor of antiseptics, he was met by one of ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... army,—such is the inheritance transmitted to Hooker, by the cursed Administration procrastinations. In all military history there is seldom, if ever, a record of a commander receiving an army under such ominous circumstances. If Hooker succeeds, then his genius will astonish even his ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... dreary black mountain, in a rambling old inn which looks like a ci-devant hospital or dismantled barracks, in a bed-room which resembles one of the wards of a poor-house, one little corner lighted by my lamp, and the other three parts all lost in black ominous darkness; while a tempest rages without as if it would break in the rattling casements, and burst the roof over our heads; and yet, insensible that I am! I can calmly take up my pen to amuse myself by scribbling, since sleep is impossible. I can look round my ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... to say, sir," said Bones, "that during the period I have had the honour to serve under your command I have settled possibly more palavers of a distressingly ominous character than the average Commissioner is called upon to settle in the course of ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... went on: for should the wick of one of the Christmas candles fall before the supper is ended, the person toward whom it points in falling will pass from earth before the Christmas feast is set again. But Mise Fougueiroun, to guard against this ominous catastrophe, had played a trick on Fate by providing wax candles with wicks so fine that they wasted away imperceptibly in ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... with funeral wing The ominous depths o'ershadowing, But she lay a dumb insentient thing— Alone with a heart of stone, With neither tears nor hopes nor fears And the booming swell like a monstrous knell Tolled ...
— A Legend of Old Persia and Other Poems • A. B. S. Tennyson
... to-day need not turn their eyes abroad to find their counterpart in spirit; so far at least the pessimists are refuted: but the note of death that Turgenev strikes in his marvellous chapter on Venice has still for young Russia an ominous echo—so many generations have arisen eager, only to be flung aside helpless, that one asks, what of the ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... Astrologers, are satisfied with this hour. I think he was born some minutes sooner. At his birth the Sun was in exact Square to Jupiter, and also in Square to Mars, and Mars was in Opposition to Jupiter. These are very ominous and important aspects. The former denotes great extravagance, and waste of money, and the latter gives impetuosity, and danger ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... went by the board. It fell slowly and with an air of dignified, solemn resignation, like Caesar under the daggers of the conspirators. The cross stays flew apart like cobwebs, but the lee shrouds unfortunately held good; and scarcely was the stick overboard before there was an ominous thumping at the sides, the drum-beat of death. It was like guns turned on their own columns; like Pyrrhus's elephants breaking the ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... did this there came a sudden ominous growl from the interior of the cave. It was the growl of a wild beast and caused the youth to leap back in alarm. Then a slinking body came into view and a full-sized mountain lion ...
— Dave Porter in the Gold Fields - The Search for the Landslide Mine • Edward Stratemeyer
... a foothold on the shores of Scotland, pushed hard for the ascendancy. At length the Papal religion prevailed. The black wings of apostasy, as of an ominous bird, were stretched from sea to sea. Dense darkness fell upon Scotland. The Thirteenth century was the horrible midnight, during which the people slept helpless in the grasp of a terrorizing nightmare. ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... funerals furnished at such and such a place, at cheapest rate and shortest notice, painfully reminded us, at every turning of the street, that death was everywhere—perhaps lurking in our very path; we felt no desire to examine the beauties of the place. With this ominous feeling pervading our minds, public buildings possessed few attractions, and we determined to make our stay as short ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... him forward. The mist had thickened, but there were more of those ominous lights at water level, spreading down both sides of the point, forming a wall. Dark forms moved out of the water ahead of them, flopping on the rocks, pressing higher, towards the ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... forms of astrology are therefore comparatively recent. Before that it was of course reckoned ominous if an eclipse took place, or a comet was seen, or a bright planet came near the moon, just as spilling salt or crossing knives may be reckoned ominous to-day. The omens had as little to do with observation, or with anything ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... my hand, heart, and fortune. I set out for Boston, and on my arrival instantly proceeded to the residence of Judge . Again my evil star was in the ascendant. Desolation and death presided in Judge 's family. The ominous badge of mourning greeted me at the threshold; Laura's mother had just been consigned, broken-hearted, to the cold grave. The venerable Judge bowed his hoary head to the blows that Providence inflicted. He could not speak to me. His reply to my offer in relation ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... rights of homa Brahmans chant their mantra high, There is heard the jackal's wailing and the raven's ominous cry! ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... figure of the clerk, Langhorn. His intrusion was startling enough, but there was still a deeper significance in the slight lurch that the manager gave as he halted, glowering, before Simon Varr. His flushed face and blurred utterance contributed their testimony to a fact that was ominous in itself; he had been drinking, drinking heavily, though he was notably abstemious by habit. Varr got hastily to his feet, so ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... schoolmaster, and unfortunate was the pupil who came into the room a laggard after that harsh summons had rung out across the fields and flats. There stood the schoolmaster—he could be seen from the Red Revenger—and it was not difficult even at that distance to imagine the ominous look upon his face. Again and again came forth the wooden call, and then the schoolmaster stepped out into the roadway. He looked about inquiringly. He came to the top of the hill, from whence, off in the flats, the jumper and its load were plainly seen, and then he paused. ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... in the far distance—ominous and low at first, but rapidly increasing to the tones of distant thunder. It is the night express for the North—going at fifty miles an hour. At such a rate of speed it might go right round the world in twenty-one ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... but just to the bridal parties, mamma. Oh, I must"—and there was the little ominous bend of the brows at the words "I must," when Mr. Grey coming up, her mother, glad in her turn to throw the ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... conscious will, in its moral assertiveness, is merely a sign of that energy and of that will's eventual fortunes. Dramatic terror and dramatic humour both depend on contrasting the natural pregnancy of a passion with its conscious intent. Everything in human life is ominous, even the voluntary acts. We cannot, by taking thought, add a cubit to our stature, but we may build up a world without meaning it. Man is as full of potentiality as he is of impotence. A will ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... steady!" and the quiet voice grew still more calm, though the forehead wrinkled a little, and there was an ominous tightening of the lips. "You must take that back. Peter Vanrenen is quite as great a man in the United States as you are in England—may I even say, without disrespect, a man who has won a more commanding position?—and his daughter, Cynthia, is better fitted to adorn a coronet than a ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... omen, auspice, portent, prodigy, prognostic, augury, foretoken, presage; mark, token, indication, symptom, index, emblem, symbol; trace, vestige, ensign, signal, beacon; gesture, motion; signature. Associated Words: ominous, portentous, augurial, semeiology, semeiological, sematology, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... became mobs, which speedily mingled together, and only formed one crowd. An enormous crowd, reinforced and agitated by tributary currents from the side-streets, jostling one against another, surging, stormy, and whence ascended an ominous hum. This hubbub resolved itself into one word, into one name which issued simultaneously from every mouth, and which expressed the whole of the situation: "Soulouque!"[12] Throughout that long line from the Madeleine to ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... not yet returned, it fell to the consul to accompany Miss Desborough and her maid to the station. But here he was startled to find a collection of villagers upon the platform, gathered round two young women in mourning, and an ominous-looking box. He mingled for a moment with the crowd, and then returned to ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... cupidity, determined to have back. This is the method he took to obtain them. All the nobles of the land were invited to meet him at Willamow, where he received them in a black tent, which opened on one side into a white, and on the other into a red one. Into this tent of ominous hue the waiting nobles were admitted, one at a time, and were here received by the emperor, who peremptorily bade them declare what lands they held as ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... bridge as early as 1006, probably built to stop the passage of the Danish pirate boats. Indeed, Snorro Sturleson, the Icelandic historian, tells us that when the Danes invaded England in 1008, in the reign of Ethelred the Unready (ominous name!), they entrenched themselves in Southwark, and held the fortified bridge, which had pent-houses, bulwarks, and shelter-turrets. Ethelred's ally, Olaf, however, determined to drive the Danes from ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... "How ominous," muttered he,—"became covered with black spots; that is a foreshadowing. How can I tell her," he thought. "It seems like wilfully destroying my own happiness." And he sat struggling with himself to obtain the necessary ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... with inconsiderate haste, That now their afternoon began to waste; And, what was ominous, that very morn The sun was enter'd into Capricorn; Which, by their bad astronomer's account, That week the Virgin balance should remount. 600 An infant moon eclipsed him in his way, And hid the small remainders of his day. The crowd, amazed, pursued no certain ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... one whispered his companion, who Whispered another, and thus it went round, And then into a hoarser murmur grew, An ominous, and wild, and desperate sound; And when his comrade's thought each sufferer knew, 'T was but his own, suppressed till now, he found: And out they spoke of lots for flesh and blood, And who should die to be ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... we could hear General Howard's guns at intervals, away off to our right front, but an ominous silence continued toward our left, where I was expecting at each moment to hear the sound of battle. That night we reached Renfrew's, and had reports from left to right (from General Schofield, about Morrow's Mills, to General Howard, within a couple of miles of ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... frantically from room to room, rousing the sleepers. Those who were sheltered by shed-tents awoke to see a rosy light spreading across the snow where they lay—a light that was not the aurora. Then, upon the rushing wind sounded an ominous roar and a mighty crackling. The great log house was afire, and the wind exulted in the flames, tossing them back and forth and upward with fiendish glee. Shouting hoarsely, the trappers leaped, wet and steaming, out of their covers, ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... kitchen, wiping his face, nervous, weary, embarrassed. Supper was on the table. The blue-bordered dish, heaped with side bones and second joints done to a turn, was moved to a side station, while in its accustomed place before Enoch's plate there sat an ominous bowl of gruel. The old man did not look at the table, but he saw it all. He would have realized it with his eyes shut. Domestic history, as well as that of greater principalities ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... over before he knew it. The yellow taxi turned down the alley upon which headquarters backed, and jerked to a halt before the ominous brown-stone building. Carroll parked his car at the rear, assigned some one to stand guard over the body, and the three men, Leverage carrying the suit-case, ascended the steps to the main room and thence to the ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... to wake at full daylight. Just as I woke, I heard the distant patter of a galloping horse. Such a sound at such a time is ominous to duffing bullock drivers; so, as I sprang to my feet, you may be sure my companions were not much behind me. Along the track, a mile in advance of the wagons, we saw an approaching horseman. And as if this was n't enough, we heard ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... into the red of wine. The scene transfixed them. Gladiators of other days became helpless children. During the solemn suspense of this tragic moment, waiting in confused and wondering silence, their faces lighted with the ominous sunset sheen, one great chief uttered speech for all: "Brothers, the West, the West! We alone have the key to the West, and we must bravely unlock the portals; we can buy no lamp that will banish the night. We have always kept our time by the sun. When we pass through the gates of this dying day, ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... the western sea-rim, and there was still no sign of the captain's boat. On the shore an ominous silence prevailed, though now and then it would be broken by the weird, resonant boom of a conch-shell. The night was passed in the greatest anxiety by all on board, every man, musket in hand, ...
— The Adventure Of Elizabeth Morey, of New York - 1901 • Louis Becke
... partly for this reason, and partly because of a certain ominous peculiarity of her physical condition, that she did not know for some months that she was going to have Peacey's child. It was indeed a rainy December morning when she heard a knock at the door and knew it was little Jack Harken, because he was whistling ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... was in sight, and the lake looked comparatively peaceful; but just across the middle stretched an ominous streak of muddy, rushing water, that beat against the high grass-grown dam, separating the lake from the village, and threatened every moment to ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... was; she answered, addressing the bridegroom, "Where thou art Caius, there shall I be Caia," intimating that she would imitate the exemplary life of Caia, the wife of Tarquinius Priscus. She was then lifted over the threshold, or gently stepped over, it being considered ominous to touch it with her feet, because it was sacred to Vesta ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... of THE SKULL—of letting fall a bullet through the skull's eye—was suggested to Kidd by the piratical flag. No doubt he felt a kind of poetical consistency in recovering his money through this ominous insignium." ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... had entered was likewise curtained, but the drapery hung from an ordinary curtain-rod. As the Duchess finally noted that the pattern was the same on both, she saw that the door at the bed-foot stood open; gleams of ruddy light from the room beyond flickered below the fringed border. Naturally, the ominous light roused her curiosity; she fancied she could distinguish strange shapes in the shadows; but as it did not occur to her at the time that danger could come from that quarter, she tried to gratify a more ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... shut the door to his house. The children reported that he would not even let them in, and that they could see him through the window stitching away in ominous ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... nervously crumbling a note in his fingers. Dalrymple sat motionless as a man of bronze, and, except to throw down a card when it came to his turn, never stirred a finger. There was, to my thinking, something ominous in ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... elements appeared in unison with the distracted condition of the kingdom. Dark clouds, seeming of ominous import to men's minds, gathered in the heavens, to be presently torn asunder and hurried in wild flight by tempestuous winds across the troubled sky. As night deepened, the gale steadily increased, until it raged in boundless fury above the whole island and ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... arm Burns was threatening his professional friend in a way that looked ominous. But a laugh was in his eye, now that he had got his way, and the altercation ended in a fire of jokes. Then ...
— Red Pepper Burns • Grace S. Richmond
... as Mr. Poynter stared at the shirt upon the bed, his appearance was that of a young man decidedly out of sorts. Presently with an ominous glint of temper in his fine eyes, he noiselessly rearranged his tent, viciously donned the offending shirt, whistled for Nero and leaving the camp of his lady as unexpectedly as he had entered it, set ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... were found, and all the time the trap-door overhead was being lifted a few inches every minute, and fell with a clap, while the shrieking of the wind, and the rattling and banging of the woodwork in the observatory, sounded ominous of danger to the work of ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... still later hour, over against the harvest moon, see them rise congruous with the gentle night, casting round them not palls of ominous gloom, but clear translucent shadows sifted through traceries of leafage which do but veil the light. And what variety of form and structure sunders them from other trees, what irregular persuasive grace. Some are tall and straight, springing ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... Gypsy were ominous. Gypsy Will was eventually executed for a murder committed in his early youth, in company with two English labourers, one of whom confessed the fact on his death-bed. He was the head of the clan Young, which, with the clan Smith, still haunts two ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... distrusted her own inflexibility, if she stayed too long in the presence of her penitent son; but Zack could not, unhappily, know this. He could only see that she left him abruptly, after delivering an ominous message; and could only place the gloomiest interpretation on ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... me foolish if I ask you to wait here while I go in there"—she pointed to the ominous thicket near ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... to expostulate farther but the ominous click of a .38 Colt's was incentive enough to make him stop and then he shoved her over and gave her ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... say a falling house is best known by the rats leaving it—a falling state, by the desertion of confederates and allies—and a falling man, by the desertion of his friends. If this be true augury; your last letter may be considered as ominous of my breaking down. Methinks, you have gone far enough, and shared deep enough with me, to have some confidence in my savoir faire—some little faith both in my means and management. What crossgrained fiend has at once inspired you with what I suppose you wish me to call politic ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... is still doubtful and victory will fall at last upon the strong, though it is not the final triumph but the present struggle that makes the joy. In rendering the "subject" upon his canvas, by the manipulation of composition and line and mass and color, he makes the storm ominous and terrible, or glorious, according as he feels. The import of his picture is not the natural fact of the storm itself, but its significance ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... an ominous sense of impending peril; but she was too angry to avoid even the risks she saw. To her surprise Raymond put his arm about her with a smile. "There are many reasons why I have to think about money. One is that YOU don't; and another ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... had to say before jumping to a conclusion. Thus the little group of Englishmen on the high poop of the Adventure lapsed into sudden silence as the boat drew near; but it was a silence that was ominous, menacing, a silence of set lips and burning eyes, pregnant with dire possibilities for the city and all within it if aught of evil had befallen their Captain therein. For not only was Marshall, rough almost to uncouthness of manner though he was at times, beloved by ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... the chemists and metallurgists in Europe, by denying the possibility of dissolving the golden calf; the solution of gold being actually found in every gilder's shop in Paris, and known even to coiners and forgers, for hundreds of years before he made this notable discovery. The result was ominous. ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... dealing with the fast-gathering trouble which the labour-struggle had brought about, was so clear, that the conditions of the times had begot a deep seriousness amongst all reasonable people; a determination which put aside all non-essentials, and which to thinking men was ominous of the swiftly-approaching change: such an element was too dangerous for mere traitors and self-seekers, and one by one they were thrust out and mostly ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... rider were taking the border trail. It led them through a desolate country of desert where the flat-leafed prickly pear and the occasional pudgy creosote were the chief forms of vegetable life. Now and again a swift might be seen basking on a rock or a Gila monster motionless on the hillside. The ominous buzz of a rattler more than once made the pony sidestep. Mesa and flat and wash succeeded ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... in the midst of the most thriving Occidental metropolis—The City That Was. There has never been much of Chinatown that savored of Bohemianism, but it has always been the vogue for visitors to make a trip through its mysterious alleys, peering into the fearsome dark doorways, listening to the ominous slamming doors of the "clubs," and shuddering in a delightful horror at the recumbent opium smokers, pointed out to them by the industrious guide. And when they were taken into one of the gambling houses ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords
... Parisian humanity. Oh, how deeply she feels the value of a minute! Her gait, her toilet, the expression of her face, involve her in a thousand indiscretions, but oh, what a ravishing picture she presents to the idler, and what an ominous page for the eye of a husband to read, is the face of this woman when she returns from the secret place of rendezvous in which her heart ever dwells! Her happiness is impressed even on the unmistakable disarray of her hair, the mass of whose ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... knee-deep with straw; and the knocker put by with Mr. Bowls's plate. She insisted that the Doctor should call twice a day; and deluged her patient with draughts every two hours. When anybody entered the room, she uttered a shshshsh so sibilant and ominous, that it frightened the poor old lady in her bed, from which she could not look without seeing Mrs. Bute's beady eyes eagerly fixed on her, as the latter sate steadfast in the arm-chair by the bedside. ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... fresh from his Scottish upbringing—"not dry behind the ears yet," John Fox put it—to take to the marriage customs of the country. Nevertheless he was not averse to the Factor's imperilling his own immortal soul, and, especially, feeling an ominous attraction himself for Lit-lit, he was sombrely content to clinch his own soul's safety by seeing ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... in some respects like theirs, have any better success: his fate at the hands of St. Bernard and the Council of Sens the world knows by heart. Far more consonant with the spirit of the universal Church was the teaching in the twelfth century of the great Hugo of St. Victor, conveyed in these ominous words, "Learn first what is to be believed" (Disce primo quod credendum est), meaning thereby that one should first accept doctrines, and then find texts ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... back was nearly turned to the chair where the attorney was sitting, said nothing; but he gave an ominous look round, which showed that he had heard what had passed. But it did not show that he by any ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... on, "because it seems to me that I can hear, at times like this, when one is alone, the sound of what one of your writers called footsteps amongst the hills, footsteps falling upon wool, muffled yet somehow ominous. There is trouble coming. I know it. I ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... mirth but to indignation. For these plotters and their schemes are themselves the causes of the mischiefs they affect to deplore and the dangers they pretend to be bent on averting. Whatever is now feverish and ominous in French Politics grows directly out of two great wrongs—the first positive and accomplished—the law of the 31st May, whereby Three Millions of Electors were disfranchised—the other contingent and ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... said Max, drawing a long breath as he eyed these ominous proceedings, "that we had a few of Colt's revolvers, to keep these fellows at a respectable distance: I confess I don't like the notion of coming to such close quarters with them as ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... falling trees, the incessant hum of insect life, the long-drawn howl of beasts of prey hovering on the outskirts of the camp, the soft whoo-whoo of an owl whose cry brought vividly to his mind the cool fragrance of the garden at Craven Towers and the nearer more ominous sounds of muffled agony that came from a tent close beside him where yet another victim of science was ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... plunderers. The incident proved the deterioration of the Grand Army from the times of Ulm and Jena. Raw conscripts raised before their time and hurriedly drafted into the line had impaired its steadiness, and men noted as another ominous fact that few unwounded prisoners were taken from the Austrians, and only nine guns and one colour. In fact, the only reputation enhanced was that of Macdonald, who for his great services at the centre enjoyed the unique honour of receiving a Marshal's baton ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... hand in the civilized world we now see childless marriages, the number of which incessantly increases; they are an ominous symptom of excessive luxury and other factors of decadence, if history is to be trusted. But it is not permissible for us, without special knowledge, to condemn individuals, whatever we may think of the phenomenon ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... the more recent "Debs Movement"; the thousand and one utopian and chimerical notions that are flaring up; the capitalist maneuvers; the hopeless, helpless grasping after straws, that characterize the conduct of the bulk of the working class; all of these, together with the empty-headed, ominous figures that are springing into notoriety for a time and have their day, mark the present period of the Labor Movement in the nation a critical one. The best information acquirable, the best mental training obtainable are requisite to steer through the existing ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... a bird on his shoulder, which bird would be let fly among the crowd assembled in the square before the palace. The seeming prince accepted the invitation, and with the disguised ladies was conducted to a gorgeous pavilion, open on all sides, to view the ceremony. The ominous bird being loosened from his chain, soared into the air to a great height, then gradually descending, flew round and round the square repeatedly, even with the faces of the spectators. At length it darted into the pavilion, where the lady and her companions were seated, fluttered around her head, ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... There was an orchestra, but what an orchestra! All the actors when not occupied on the stage assisted in it. Gudel at intervals played the trombone. The gallery was crowded; so crowded that, from time to time, there were ominous crackings, but the people in their excitement did ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... advancing slowly, and perfectly "dressed," with its red battle-flags flying, and the sunshine darting from the gun-barrels and bayonets. The two armies were silent, concentrating their whole attention upon this slow and ominous advance of men who seemed in no haste, and resolved to allow nothing to arrest them. When the column had reached a point about midway between the opposing heights the Federal artillery suddenly opened a furious fire upon them, which inflicted considerable loss. This, however, ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... to my question struck me as ominous. To the Milan, of course, where Louis was all the time predominant! The girl might be innocent enough of all wrong-doing or knowledge of wrong-doing, but could one think the same of her uncle? I glanced at him instinctively. In sleep, his features were ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the belief that his brother had gone mad. On the contrary, he saw that the latter had conceived a very fine idea; and though it did not yet appear how the thing was to be carried out, Karl fancied that there was something in it. His sweet dream recurred to him, and this he now regarded as ominous of the success of some plan of escape,—perhaps by the very means which Caspar had suggested,—by making candles out ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... about Em. I don't need you to tell me what she is. I can see for myself." Alf rocked a little with an ominous obstinacy. His eyes were fixed upon her with an unwinking stare. It was as though, having delivered a blow with the full weight of party bias, he were desiring her to take a common-sense view ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... began to rise in an ominous and threatening way; and at the head of republicanism in Paris stood forth Gambetta, with his impassioned eloquence, his stinging phrases, and his youthful boldness. He became the idol of that part of Paris known ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... Rarely has battle been forced upon an army after a greater number of fruitless attempts to avoid it than those made by the French ecclesiastics, backed by the alternate solicitations and menaces of Pius the Fourth, and Philip of Spain. Such reluctance was ominous. ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... force and urgency to these questions. The people began to clamor more boldly for the good time which had been promised by the kind-hearted king. The murmur swelled to an ominous roar. Thousands were at his very palace gates, telling him in no unmistakable terms that they were tired of smooth words and fair promises. What they wanted was a new ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... cold November morning by a direful conglomeration of sounds;—strange, discordant shrieks, ominous groans, a clanking, as of iron chains and fetters, a slow, heavy, elephantine tread gradually growing on the ear, and a deep, continuous rumbling as of earthquakes in the bowels of the earth. Mrs. Salsify Mumbles, nervous and delicate as she was, clung fast to the neck of her liege ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... came floating down the stream, and drifting about the harbor, with flights of crows, and other carrion birds, feeding on them, and hovering, and screaming, and fighting about their prey. The forlorn Spaniards contemplated this scene with shuddering; it appeared ominous ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... Inverkeithing; and four of the Nigg Presbytery, overawed by the stringency of the precedent, repaired to the parish church to conduct the settlement of the obnoxious licentiate, and introduce him to the parishioners. They found, however, only an empty building; and, notwithstanding the ominous absence of the people, they were proceeding in shame and sorrow with their work, when a venerable man, far advanced in life, suddenly appeared before them, and, solemnly protesting against the utter ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... to the assassination of Empress Elizabeth, forebodings of an impending catastrophe were prevalent at the Court of Vienna, and so imbued was Emperor Francis-Joseph with ominous presentiments, that he repeatedly exclaimed in the hearing of his entourage: "Oh, if only this year ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... Pottinger's terms, and of the gathering of some 20,000 armed Belooches about the capital, he called for the co-operation of part of the Bengal column in a movement on Hyderabad. Cotton started on his march down the left bank, on January Jeth, with 5600 men. Under menaces so ominous the unfortunate Ameers succumbed. Cotton returned to Roree; the Bengal column crossed the Indus, and on February 20th its headquarters reached Shikarpore. Ten days later, Cotton, leading the advance, was in Dadur, at the foot ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... the crew of the Halfmoon while the vessel lay off Honolulu, and deep and ominous were the grumblings of the men. Only First Officer Ward and the second mate went ashore. Skipper Simms kept the men busy painting and holystoning as a vent ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Venetian sun did, indeed, seem typical of the life beneath it; and Titian may have been justified in bringing thither those who were the recipients of his favors. One only did he not invite,—Philip II.; him he placed, dark and ominous, against a sky barred ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... down in the vested security of their great fortunes when an ominous situation presented itself to shake the entire propertied class into a violent state of uneasiness. Hitherto the main antagonistic movement perturbing the magnates was that of the obstreperous and still powerful middle class. Dazed and enraged at the certain prospect ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... Zand River I saw my first fight. That morning, as the troops were drawn up in marching order, the ominous command was given, "Charge magazines," and every man knew that something was about to happen, and a murmur ran along the ranks. After an hour's march we came in sight of the Zand River, with its kopjes ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers
... Within a week the plague came. On the 7th of June, 1665, Mr. Pepys makes this ominous entry: "This day," he says, "much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and 'Lord, have mercy,' written there; which was a sad sight to me, ...
— William Penn • George Hodges
... old Earth have to come to that? Daily those ominous threats had been repeated, until popular fears had become frenzy. And Nat was being sent out as a last hope. If he failed, there would be nothing but surrender to this man, armed with a super-force that enabled him to lay waste ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... arrange the folds of her best black silk, and to insist on her wearing her prettiest cap—in a state of pleasurable excitement that was infectious, and the whole party set off in fine spirits. Graeme and Rose exchanged doubtful glances as they passed the dining-room windows. There was an ominous display of silver on the sideboard, and the enlargement of the table had ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... these ominous words, and every face darkened as gloomy looks were exchanged. So omnipotent and unchallenged had they been that the very thought that there was possible retribution in the background had been banished from their ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... a conviction in the Colonel's deep voice that something extraordinary was afoot, and Uncle Noah, flurried by its ominous ring, hurried from the room. Dimly he had pictured his master's gracious astonishment and pleasure. Any queries relative to the financial source of the Christmas delicacies, however, had been lost entirely in the darky's jubilant excitement. Now ...
— Uncle Noah's Christmas Inspiration • Leona Dalrymple
... Drummond found it monstrously difficult to get along among the working people. He was not used to their ways, and they certainly were not used to his. They were suspicious. He had no antecedents. He could talk of no previous jobs. His hands were soft. His extraordinary politeness was ominous. His first idea of the role he would play was that of a free and independent American who chose to work with his hands and no explanations given. But it wouldn't do, as he quickly discovered. At the ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... descriptions of eye witnesses, what a typhoon really means. A Chinaman informed me that the last typhoon destroyed not less than 18,000 persons in this neighbourhood alone—not a large number when we bear in mind the enormous floating populations in Chinese towns. All the day the air was ominous of a coming something. At noon I asked a Chinaman when it might be expected. His answer shewed me how even this mighty destroyer is guided by a far mightier hand—"Suppose he no' com now, he com by'm by, nine clock." ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... sharpened by woodcraft and by constant danger, heard a growing noise coming nearer and nearer. He knew the sound of the footsteps of many people, and among the casual shuffling of feet recognised the ominous tramp of soldiers. ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... from ascending their strange scaling ladder. So they determined to follow, hoping to overtake and dislodge some of them. But Herode, who had found the upper branches bending and cracking in a very ominous manner under his great weight, was forced to turn about and make his way back to the main trunk, where, under cover of darkness, he quietly awaited the climbing foe. Merindol, who commanded this detachment of the garrison, was first, and being completely ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... finished ruling his sheet of paper, and now proceeded to trace the ominous words at the head of the following ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... later Madonna Lucrezia followed her husband, the fact that they journeyed not together, seeming to wear an ominous significance. Her eyes had a swollen look, such as attends much weeping, which afterwards I took as proof that she knew for what purpose she was going, and was moved to bitter grief at the act to which her ambitious ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... entered, he paused, cast an ominous glance around the work-room, at the table covered with work, his little supper waiting for him in a corner, and the two dear, anxious faces looking up at him with glistening eyes. He stood a full minute without speaking—and you know how long a minute's silence seems on ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the point of committing a great folly. This letter would of course accomplish the destruction of my hated creditor, but I doubt exceedingly if I would escape unharmed if I handed this ominous writing to the king. He would never forgive me for having discovered this affair, which he, of course, wishes to conceal from the whole world. The knowledge of such a secret would be most dangerous, and I prefer to have nothing to do with it. How can I manage to let ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... the fear which stirred and perplexed the solitary traveller; for he had heard things that afternoon—seen things that he did not like but could not ignore. He recognized an undercurrent of feeling, a silence more ominous than all the heated talk, and that was where the danger lay. Something would have to be done, and ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... less terrifying than the enemy at large and alone. It was, therefore, with a manner almost serene that she turned to greet the kindly concerned Principal and the dreaded "Gum Shoe Tim." The latter she found less ominous of aspect than she had been led to fear, and the Principal's charming little speech of introduction made her flush with quick pleasure. And the anxious eyes of Sadie Gonorowsky, noting the flush, grew calm as Sadie whispered to Eva, her ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... His attack had been for the moment repulsed. He gathered from Rose's manner that Catherine's action with regard to the picnic had not been unmeaning nor accidental, as on second thoughts he had been half-trying to persuade himself. Evidently those about her felt it to be ominous. Well, then, at worst, when they met they would meet on a different footing, with a sense of something critical between them. Oh, if he did but know a little more clearly how he stood! He spent a noonday hour on a gray rock on the side ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... born and brought up under the shadow of this ominous establishment, must have known many a tale of sorrow and woe that owed its origin to ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... the steps into the street, and the lean, hard-faced storekeeper turned to Drummond with an ominous frown. ...
— The Lure of the North • Harold Bindloss
... was flooded with moonlight. On all sides resounded the ominous hum of beetles' wings. Nature had summoned her burying squad. They had their work cut out, and blundered down from every quarter. For death had been very busy, and it was not the death that needs seeking out. About the centre of the field the ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... contains an account of a large part of Jenkin's experimental work in the Birkenhead factory during the years 1859 and 1860. This paper is called Part I. Part II. alas never appeared, but something that it would have included we can see from the following ominous statement which I find near the end of Part I.: 'From this value, the electrostatical capacity per unit of length and the specific inductive capacity of the dielectric, could be determined. These points ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hearts and their sense of honour most profoundly at some future time, when it may have ceased to be remediable. If that were all, for us there would be no arrears of mortified sensibilities to apprehend. But what is ominous even in relation to ourselves from these professedly inert associates, these sleeping partners in our Chinese dealings, is, that their presence with no active functions argues a faith lurking somewhere in the possibility of talking the Chinese ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... passed and the sun had set, yet Minawanda had not returned to his lodge, from which the wanderers had not ventured for fear of further exasperating the Indians. This occurrence troubled them, and in truth looked ominous, as it had never occurred before, and with great impatience they watched for his coming. Still, hour after hour passed, and he came not, and with forebodings of evil, they proposed that one of them should reconnoitre the village under the cover of darkness to discover ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... again at the card. A tiny silver bell seemed to tinkle a sort of warning in a recess of his brain. The name was not engraved in copper-plate, but printed in heavy type. Somehow, it looked ominous. His first impression was to bid Minnie send the man away. He distrusted any first impression. It was the excuse of mediocrity, a sign of weakness. Moreover, why shouldn't he meet Isidor ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... kind who believes that the annual moral let-down of the country is a very good thing or the kind who believes it's a very ominous thing. Either pince-nez or postures. Well, this girl talked about legs. She talked about skin too—her own skin. Always her own. She told me the sort of tan she'd like to get in the summer and how closely ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Washington was ominous. The California sinking, then the Laconia, proved how slender was the thread that held the sword of Damocles over the heads of the American people. Tension increased. "We are hoping for the best and preparing for the worst," ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... as Thayer bent over to fasten the straps. Then, buttoning his coat closely and pulling his cap down over his eyes, Thayer opened the door for the second time and went striding away across the gray, tempestuous darkness which had shut down again impenetrably between himself and those steady, ominous lights. ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... quality, and the arbitrariness with which phenomena are judged to be ominous, will be visible in the numerous "signs" here recorded. At first sight, it may be thought that extreme folly is their salient quality. Yet if we take a wide view the case is reversed; we are surprised, not at the unintelligibility of popular belief, but at its simplicity, ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various
... with sensibility, we must, alas! submit to our fate. The habit of loving, le besoin d'aimer, is more powerful than all sense of the folly and the danger. Nor is the tempest of the passions so dreadful as the dead calm of the soul. Why did R—— suffer my soul to sink into this ominous calm? The fault is his; let him abide the consequences. Why did he not follow me to England? why did he not write to me? or when he did write, why were his letters so cold, so spiritless? When I spoke of divorce, why did he hesitate? ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... British Army is not worse than others. Professor Finger, at a meeting of the Medical Society in Vienna early in the war, estimated that over 700,000, or some ten per cent of the Austrian troops, had contracted venereal disease. More ominous still is the fact that in almost every place yet investigated the majority of the men were confessedly living in immorality amid the temptations of ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... to step forth again the door gently closed with an ominous click, shutting him inside. And after five minutes' frantic fussing he realized that he was imprisoned by a spring lock at the top of a strange house, inhabited only by a cat and a bewildered young girl, ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... make such designs as those when we are well and strong," Raphael replied, burying his hands in Pauline's hair. But even then a horrible fit of coughing came on, one of those deep ominous coughs that seem to come from the depths of the tomb, a cough that leaves the sufferer ghastly pale, trembling, and perspiring; with aching sides and quivering nerves, with a feeling of weariness pervading the ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... off in his wake, that he had more holiday matter to show me. And so, indeed, he had; and all of it was to the same lawless tune. Like a black pirate flag on the blue ocean of air, a hawk hung ominous; then, plummet-wise, dropped to the hedgerow, whence there rose, thin and shrill, a ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... dust,— He the more fortunate! Yea, he hath finished! For him there is no longer any future. His life is bright—bright without spot it was And cannot cease to be. No ominous hour Knocks at his door with tidings of mishap. Far off is he, above desire and fear; No more submitted to the change and chance Of ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... are no funerals in the country. That is a word, funeral, of too forbidding, ominous, a sound to be under the broad and open sky. There where the neighbours gather, all those who knew and loved the departed from a boy, the "last sad rites are read," and the "mortuary services are performed." Then from the fruitful ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... desk a tallow candle, smoking and spluttering, throws a weird light, and more weird shadows, on the faces of clerks and President, on blank walls and ominous devices. ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... little ominous cloud in the serene sky of Mrs. Jenkins's happiness. She had nothing suitable for the occasion of the organ recital in the way of ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... a train of gunpowder. His determination to beat down his temper, no matter what came, was gone; his memory of her ordeals was wiped out; from his whole tense being there flashed out upon her a hot, heady anger, like stabbing lightning from an ominous cloud. His few words seared and scorched a place in ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... stand here and see how it works." Then Zoega pushed it all over, and it went slapping and dashing down into the steaming shaft. For a little while it whirled about, and surged, and boiled, and tumbled over and over in the depths of the churn with a hollow, swashing noise terribly ominous of what was to come. I peeped over the edge to try if I could detect the first symptoms of the approaching eruption. Zoega walked quietly away about twenty steps, saying he preferred not to be too close. There was ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... encounter with the enemy, and he hastily climbed to a high point to get some idea of their numbers. Far over the plain his eye could reach, and he was bewildered and dismayed by the sight before him. Greater far than he had reckoned were the Paynim hosts, and many times more ominous was their battle-array. One long look at their serried, glittering masses, and he ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... Halleck, as he phrased it to himself. He knew that Halleck had plenty of money; he could make the stock itself over to him as security; he did not see why Halleck should hesitate. But when he entered Halleck's room, having asked Cyrus to show him directly there, Halleck gave a start which seemed ominous to Bartley. He had scarcely the heart to open his business, and Halleck listened with changing color, and something only too like the embarrassment of a man who intends a refusal. He would not look Bartley in the face, and when ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... seized the Acropolis. Then the rest of the Athenians joined together by common consent and besieged them for two days; and on the third day so many of them as were Lacedemonians departed out of the country under a truce. Thus was accomplished for Cleomenes the ominous saying which was uttered to him: for when he had ascended the Acropolis with the design of taking possession of it, he was going to the sanctuary of the goddess, as to address her in prayer; but the priestess stood up from her seat before he had passed through the door, and said, "Lacedemonian stranger, ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 2 (of 2) • Herodotus
... enough may be gleaned to give readers a fair idea of it. The elevation of Simbamwenni cannot be much over 1,000 feet above the level, the rise of the land having been gradual. It being the rainy season, about which so many ominous statements were doled out to us by those ignorant of the character of the country, we naturally saw it under its worst aspect; but, even in this adverse phase of it, with all its depth of black mud, its excessive dew, ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... difficult. Even the words which she had carefully looked up in the dictionary and learned by heart escaped her fickle memory. She stumbled and floundered hopelessly, getting redder and redder with shame. Miss Huntley preserved an ominous silence, and did not attempt to help ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... sun, and fading to nothingness as the weird voyager recedes into the spatial void whence it came. Not many times need the advent of such an apparition coincide with the outbreak of a pestilence or the death of a Caesar to stamp the race of comets as an ominous clan in the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... the storm began. The clouds lay low like a dark grey hood over the fir-trees and moorland shaggy tops of the downs all round. There was not a break anywhere in the consistent grey, and the air, always so brisk, had fallen still with that ominous lull that comes over everything before a convulsion of nature. Some birds were still hurrying home into the depths of the copses with a frightened straightness of flight, as if they were afraid they would not get back in time, and all the insects that are so gay with their ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... Little attention was paid to those who were ill, and no sympathy was expressed. A young Sister who had been sent out on a begging expedition for the order, and had to trudge through the wet day after day, caught cold, and was obliged to return. She grew pale and thin, and the ominous red spot appeared on her cheek. She coughed incessantly, but still went through her duties. At night she suffered most; and to prevent the sound from disturbing others, she was ordered to move to a distant cell, without a ...
— Clara Maynard - The True and the False - A Tale of the Times • W.H.G. Kingston
... of heaven, it may perchance be a prophet in conceit;[125] for if night shall settle on his eyes as he is dying, verily this vaunting device would correctly and justly answer to its name, and he himself will have the insolence ominous against himself. But against Tydeus will I marshal this wary son of Astacus, as defender of the portals, full nobly born, and one that reverences the throne of Modesty, and detests too haughty language, for he is wont to be slow at base acts, but no dastard. ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus
... enjoying himself by keeping his game just open enough to be apparent to every other man in the room—just covert enough to deceive the drink-misted brain of Cochrane. And the pale, swinish eyes twinkled as they stared across at the dull sorrow of the old man. There was an ominous sound ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... long aisles, raising strange and ominous echoes, and making the vast folds of sable drapery wave slowly backward and forward, as if agitated by unseen hands. A few spectators, standing in the background, appeared like grim figures on a black tapestry; and the gleam of the ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... permitted himself to be helped to the ground. No sooner, however, had his feet touched the earth than there came that ominous rattling sound. ...
— The Young Engineers in Nevada • H. Irving Hancock
... port on the weather side; for I somehow seemed to realise instinctively that the Daphne's brief career was ended—that she would never again recover herself, but would "turn the turtle" altogether. The ominous words of the riggers on that day when, in the first flush of my new-born dignity, I went down to inspect the craft which was to be my future home, recurred to my mind as vividly as though they had that moment been spoken, and I felt that the prophecy lurking behind them was then in the very ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... happened that six weeks went by, and she heard nothing from Chupin. A month and a half! What had become of him? To Mme. Blanche this silence was as ominous as the ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... for open war, O Peers! As not behind in hate, if what was urged Main reason to persuade immediate war, Did not dissuade me most, and seem to cast Ominous conjecture on the whole success: When he who most excels in fact of arms, In what he counsels and in what excels Mistrustful, grounds his courage on despair, And utter dissolution, as the scope Of all his aim, after ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... him with the ominous restraint of a tiger crouching for its spring. Psmith stood beside the table with languid grace, suggestive of some favoured confidential ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... and was held in favourable esteem. Only a day or two ago, when the brother had remonstrated in a low voice against some recent cruelty, the husband's wrath had blazed out. Witnesses to that wordy encounter had seen Thornton go white with a rage that was ominous and then bite off his unspoken retort and turn away. Those witnesses had not heard what was first said and had learned only what was revealed in the indignant husband's raised voice ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... even of the Honourable George; some one to assure me that my horrid dream of the night before had been a baseless fabric, as the saying is. The very absence of these people and of his lordship was in itself ominous. ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... there was an ominous inflection in the word as if the question were portentous, "have you asked our new niece by what name she desires us ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... Duchess fainted when her daughter was brought back with ominous red stains upon the gray background of her traveling dress. But the wound was neither deep nor dangerous. The court surgeon was as consoling as he was complimentary, and by the time that messengers from the palace ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... confused account arrived before the occasion of these rejoicings was generally known. Suddenly the bells began to ring; bonfires were kindled; and in an instant all was a scene of public rejoicing. But ominous indeed were these rejoicings; for the greater part was occasioned by a false rumour that the duke was to be sent to the Tower. No one inquired about a news which every one wished to hear; and so sudden was the joy, that a MS. letter says, "the old ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... caused him to assume. Full and deep upon the still night air rang out the tolling of the mysterious bell. To the anxious watcher, its tones no longer rang full and sweet as upon the previous evening, but sounded slow and threatening, as if freighted with an ominous meaning. ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... like his Father, but his Mother more, Whom therfore she brought up and Comus named, Who ripe, and frolick of his full grown age, Roving the Celtic, and Iberian fields, 60 At last betakes him to this ominous Wood, And in thick shelter of black shades imbowr'd, Excells his Mother at her mighty Art, Offring to every weary Travailer, His orient liquor in a Crystal Glasse, To quench the drouth of Phoebus, which as they taste (For most do taste through fond intemperate ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... excellent drive, but unfortunately it didn't aviate quick enough. While the intrepid spectators were still holding their breath, there was an ominous crash. ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... and the stillness which ensued seemed ominous. Some one was elbowing his way forward, and as he passed through the crowd the uproar began again. Every one was on his feet, and although the prisoner stood and gazed toward the source of commotion he could not see the man who spoke. He looked across to ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... the sky. Presently we saw flames. Mr. Peabody was uneasy, and I walked out with him to see. Between the house here and the town lies the Common or City Park. As we crossed this, the signs became more ominous. We made our way into the principal street through the crowd, and then, looking down a cross street full of enormous warehouses, saw both sides of it in flames. The streets were full of steam fire-engines, ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... and wedged himself into the corner of the raft opposite to that other figure, ominous relic of the wild voyage the new-comer had entered upon; he put both arms over the ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... therefore, they, the guests on the island of Yaque, were in a perfectly impregnable position—counting out Fifth Dimension contingencies, which of course might include appearings as well as disappearings—and why shouldn't they stay there, and let the ominous noon of the following day slip by unmarked? And when the lawyer said, "But, my dear fellow," as he was bound to say, St. George answered that down there in Med there would be, by noon of the following day, two determined ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... caused him to jump ever so slightly and to cast a glance of inquiry at Annie, who altered her original course and moved toward the sitting-room door. In the kitchen a perfectly innocent skillet crashed into the sink with a vigour that was more than ominous. ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... he held each one sternly to her duty. Belle was smiling and working in the midst of a gathering storm, and she was becoming conscious of it. So far from cowering, her indignation was fast rising, and there was an ominous glow kindling in her dark eyes. Their seemingly unwarranted hostility and jealousy were beginning to incense her. She believed she had as much right there as they had, and she resolved to maintain her right. Catching an ireful ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... me back into the room which we had just left. As he partly reclosed the door, I heard the clapping of hands. In a condition of most dreadful suspense, we waited; until a new, ominous sound proclaimed itself. Some heavy body was being dragged into the passage. I heard the opening of a trap. Exclamations in guttural voices told of a heavy task in progress; there was a great straining and creaking—whereupon the ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
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