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More "Rapidity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fact, in a short time, completely "used up," and then he determined upon returning to England, and finding out the dear object of his attachment at once. This resolution was no sooner taken, than his health and spirits returned to him, and with what rapidity he could, he now made his way to ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... and down one side of the room whilst the old professor was talking. I observed that he was smoking with extraordinary rapidity. It was evident that he shared our host's liking for ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... McGuire Ellis late in the afternoon of the day after the Willard party. Fascinated, he had watched that expert journalist go through page after page of copy, with what seemed superhuman rapidity and address, distribute the finished product variously upon hooks, boxes, and copy-boys, and, the immediate task being finished, lapse upon his desk and fall asleep. Meantime, the owner himself faced the unpleasant prospect of being smothered under the downfall of ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... that they were attended to before she would go on. She looked into the saw-mill itself in the by-going, and made sure that Rob McTurk was in due attendance on the whirling machinery which was turning off the spools, as it seemed to me, with the rapidity of light. She inquired as to ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... hands. Why did he not kill himself at once? Why impose on himself this hour of waiting, of anguish and torture? He could not have told. He began again to think over the events of his life, reflecting on the headlong rapidity of the occurrences which had brought him to that wretched room. How time had passed! It seemed but yesterday that he first began to borrow. It does little good, however, to a man who has fallen to the bottom of the abyss, to know the causes ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... the news got about—which it did with astounding rapidity—the entire town was in a fit of merriment over the latest exploit of the wily Langford and the discomfiture of DeRue Hannington; and early the following morning, when the local police magistrate was still negotiating his matutinal egg, the little Courtroom ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... translated into Latin by Pessuri, a Dominican monk of Bologna. Copies of the original manuscript, though written in the Venetian dialect, which is extremely different from the Tuscan or pure Italian, were multiplied with great rapidity in all parts of Italy, and even made their way into France and Germany. From one or more of these, corrupted by the carelessness or ignorance of transcribers, some of whom may have abridged the work, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... and macrame, to confuse the movements of the two. As soon as you realize that the upward drawing of the needle and the downward pressure of the stuff with the thimble must be simultaneous, you will find that you can work with great rapidity and with admirable results. Thread with a very strong twist, which the hook will not split, is the only suitable kind for tambouring. Of the D.M.C materials, Fil d'Alsace[A] and Fil a dentelle[A] are the ...
— Encyclopedia of Needlework • Therese de Dillmont
... he could be checked, Tom stepped to the opening, and with the rapidity born of habit lifted himself out, and then holding on by the sill, lowered his legs into the ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... shading them occasionally from the worst heat, are more than equal to anything a hothouse in England can produce. An idea may be formed of the really marvellous fertility of the soil and climate by the rapidity with which seeds develop. I remember one summer, when some of the new gardens were being laid out in the Buen Retiro, a grand concert and evening fete was to be given as the opening function. On the evening before this entertainment was to take place we happened to be near, and strolled in ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... credit for the success of his newspaper on the men who worked under him, listened to John's story with interest. It was John's first meeting with the "chief," for whom even Brennan, with all his skepticism, had a profound respect and the rapidity with which the publisher gave his decision ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... encountered a great multitude, now headed for purposes of peace by Walter Gerard. His mind inflamed by the accounts he had received, and hating at all times any popular demonstration, his lordship resolved without inquiry or preparation immediately to disperse them. The Riot Act was read with the rapidity with which grace is sometimes said at the head of a public table—a ceremony of which none but the performer and his immediate friends are conscious. The people were fired on and sabred. The indignant spirit of Gerard resisted; he struck ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... not yet paid for their claims. And so the Organic Act of 1838 continued to serve the people of Iowa as the code of fundamental law. Robert Lucas was disappointed, but he had to admit that the Territory went on increasing in population and wealth with phenomenal rapidity, notwithstanding the "facts" in the history of the Old Northwest. Not even the "imperfect conditions of Territorial government" seemed to affect in the slightest degree the economic prosperity and improvement ...
— History of the Constitutions of Iowa • Benjamin F. Shambaugh
... was resolved should be forced as rapidly as possible. A forlorn hope of thirty brave fellows were ordered to explore the dangerous pass: and Marion, though but a young lieutenant, had the honor to be appointed their leader. At the head of his command he advanced with rapidity, while the army moved on to support him. But scarcely had they entered the gloomy defile, when, from behind the rocks and trees, a sheet of fire suddenly blazed forth, which killed twenty-one of his men! With the remainder, he faced about and pushed back with all ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... vestry during the service, writing out notes on the inside of envelopes torn open, with the stump of a pencil which would only make marks at a certain angle. The service proceeded with a shocking rapidity, and when he got to the pulpit, spread out his envelopes, and addressed himself to the consideration of the blessings of the Harvest, he found on drawing to an end that he had only consumed about four minutes. He went through the whole again, slightly varying the phraseology, and ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... same way at any kind of discomfort. It begins before the end of the first year to croon when it is contented. As it grows older it begins to make different sounds when it experiences different emotions. And with remarkable rapidity its repertoire of articulatory ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... sentiment which forms the groundwork of the drama, nothing in fact can equal the power of the picture, but its inexpressible sweetness and its perfect grace: the passion which has taken possession of Juliet's whole soul, has the force, the rapidity, the resistless violence of the torrent: but she is herself as "moving delicate," as fair, as soft, as flexible as the willow that bends over it, whose light leaves tremble even with the motion of the ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... feverish haste and in unbroken silence, every moment flashing quick glances at the figure of the lookout who stood on the crest above, half dimmed in the shadow of a willow clump. Judging by their rapidity and ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... once the pride of the seas in all the great ocean highways of commerce. To my mind, few more important subjects so imperatively demand its intelligent consideration. The United States has progressed with marvelous rapidity in every field of enterprise and endeavor until we have become foremost in nearly all the great lines of inland trade, commerce, and industry. Yet, while this is true, our American merchant marine has been steadily ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... pup, ranging in the bushes, growled savagely. Momentarily the ranger lifted his eyes, letting his axe head sink to the ground. Something moved under it, and at the same instant a hideous head reared itself above the leaves and struck with lightning-like rapidity, hitting the ranger just above the wrist-bone. With a startled exclamation the ranger drew up his arm. As he did so, a huge rattler glided away ...
— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... game begins in the melancholy evening. The ball, thrown with much strength, flies, strikes the wall in great, quick blows, then rebounds, and traverses the air with the rapidity ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... not less than five waterfalls, one of which was rather steep, and was running at the rate of ten or twelve miles an hour. Above this part the water was about fifteen yards from side to side, and came down with some rapidity, a fall of rain having swollen the stream. Their navigation was here so intricate, lying between large pieces of rock that had been borne down by torrents, and some stumps of trees which they could not always see, that (after having ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... months the little force moved about in Catalonia, the rapidity of its marches baffling the attempts of the archduke's forces to interfere with its operations. These were principally directed against various small fortresses, held by partisans of Charles. Several ...
— In the Irish Brigade - A Tale of War in Flanders and Spain • G. A. Henty
... dealing with a boy now, however, but with the strongest man in Hillcrest. Tom knew this, but in his rage he had thrown reason to the wind. With lightning rapidity Captain Josh reached up, caught Tom by the arm, and in a twinkling brought him sprawling upon the side of the road. With an ugly oath, the teamster tried to regain his feet, but he was helpless in the grip of the captain's powerful arm. He writhed and cursed, but all in vain, and ...
— Rod of the Lone Patrol • H. A. Cody
... is like this," he said, mumbling rapidly, and scribbling a series of figures and letters which the pupil was expected to follow with intelligent interest. But the rapidity of the processes quite dazed Margaret: a result not unusual when the teacher understands his topic so well, and so much as a matter of course that he cannot make allowance for the benighted darkness ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... like that of Newera Ellia, even twelve months make a great change in the appearance of a new settlement; plants and shrubs spring up with wonderful rapidity, and a garden of one year's growth, without attendance, ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... plunderers. After his arrival at Me[vs]ica the trouble was brought to an end. Nor was it long before the Serbian troops, riding up through their own country at a rate which no one had foreseen, crossed the Danube and occupied the Banat, in conjunction with the French. The rapidity of this advance astounded the Roumanians; they gaped like Lavengro when he wondered how the stones ever came to Stonehenge.... When the Serbian commandant at Ver[vs]ac invited these enterprising Roumanian officers to an interview he was asked ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... long-drawn 'ca-awk' he flew to find his mate, for it would soon be time to repair the nest in the limes. The butterflies came again and the year was completed, yet it seemed but a few days to the squire. Perhaps if he lived for a thousand years, after a while he would wonder at the rapidity with which ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... but without apparent haste. The success of their efforts depended upon rapidity of execution, that and the most exact care for the detail of their organization. Provided these things were held foremost in their minds there was small enough chance of interruption. Had not the train, with ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... were not, like the religion itself, in the main Arabic in origin. "Primitive Arabian art itself is quite negligible. When the new strength of the followers of the Prophet was consolidated with great rapidity into a rich and powerful empire, it took over the arts and artists of the conquered lands, extending from North Africa to Persia" (p. 158); and it is known how this influence spread as far west as Spain and as far east as Indonesia. "The Pharos at Alexandria, the ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... But the spirit of the two crews had changed. The French were discouraged by their failure, and the British were exultant over their success. Consequently the guns of the English ship were fired with far more rapidity and precision than those of the French. Several of the port-holes of the French ship were knocked into one, and when at last her mainmast, which had been hit several times, fell over her side, her flag was run down amidst tremendous cheering from ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... this movement can be better explained than by supposing that all those of the luminous bodies which are liquid, such as flames, and apparently the sun and the stars, are composed of particles which float in a much more subtle medium which agitates them with great rapidity, and makes them strike against the particles of the ether which surrounds them, and which are much smaller than they. But I hold also that in luminous solids such as charcoal or metal made red hot in the fire, this same movement is caused by the violent ...
— Treatise on Light • Christiaan Huygens
... with astonishing rapidity. The recruits were not fighting men in a military sense, but their hearts were true and they hungered for the chance to stamp out the evil that lay at their feet. By the close of the second day nearly three thousand men were encamped above the city. Late ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... Government-industry cooperation, a strong work ethic, mastery of high technology, and a comparatively small defense allocation (roughly 1% of GDP) have helped Japan advance with extraordinary rapidity to the rank of second most powerful economy in the world. Industry, the most important sector of the economy, is heavily dependent on imported raw materials and fuels. Usually self-sufficient in rice, Japan must import about 50% of its requirements of other grain and fodder crops. Japan ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... still raining Tuesday morning, and camp was not moved till afternoon, when we crossed the river. Though smooth here, it flowed with fearful rapidity, and in midstream carried the canoe, as if it had been a feather, at locomotive speed. Three-quarters of a mile above where we crossed the course of the river bent away to the east, and we could see the water leaping and tossing in a wild rapid as it came round ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... traversing, rapidity is only a secondary consideration, the remarkable fact being in the endurance of fatigue and the continuity of the exercise. William Gale walked 1500 miles in a thousand consecutive hours, and then ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... considered the most valuable. These are principally charts, maps, grants, and papal bulls, all relating to early English history. Several of the presses were then removed bodily, but as the fire spread with alarming rapidity, and there was a delay in the arrival of the engines, it was discovered none too soon, that the backs of some of the presses were on fire. Then the books were seized and thrown out of windows, after which they ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... could have been more acceptable in his eyes than this addition to the circle below-stairs. Capua's hat was in his hand at once, and bows and curtsies and articulations and gesticulations followed with such confusing rapidity, that, when the mutually pleased pair turned in company toward the kitchens, a scrap of white paper, that had fluttered down in the disorder, was suffered to remain unnoticed on the floor. The courier had lost his despatch. Coming ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... And with the rapidity of lightning, in the silence which followed, he went back to his original criticism of himself, that he was a fool. Naturally she would request him to leave. She ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... growth, although that does not appear to be very much greater than in the oak. Some cedars, which have been planted in a soil well adapted to them, at Lord Carnarvon's, at Highclere, have grown with extraordinary rapidity. Of the cedars planted in the royal garden at Chelsea, in 1683, two had, in eighty-three years, acquired a circumference of more than twelve feet, at two feet from the ground, while their branches increased over a circular space forty feet ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XIII, No. 369, Saturday, May 9, 1829. • Various
... points, and bring us, gaping, to a standstill. The shutters of the two windows were suddenly closed before our eyes with a clap that came sharply on the wind. Then, in a twinkling, one window flew open again and a man, seemingly naked, bounded from it, fled with inconceivable rapidity across the front of the house and vanished through the other window, which opened to receive him. He had scarcely gained that shelter before a coal-black figure followed him, leaping out of the one window and in at the other with the same astonishing swiftness—a swiftness which was so great ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... young companions in the labyrinth and mazes of the castle gardens at hide-and-seek, or similar games of activity, she became animated with the same supernatural alertness which was supposed to inspire her in the dance. She appeared amongst her companions, and vanished from them with a degree of rapidity which was inconceivable; and hedges, treillage, or such like obstructions, were surmounted by her in a manner which the most vigilant eye could not detect; for, after being observed on the other side of the barrier at one instant, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XIII, No. 370, Saturday, May 16, 1829. • Various
... and a small body of the rioters cut off from The Warren beckoned to their pals, they forced into a very remarkable postchaise Dolly Varden and Emma Haredale, and bore them away with all possible rapidity; one of their company driving, and the rest running beside the chaise, climbing up behind, sitting on the top, lighting the way with their torches, etc. etc. If you can express the women inside without showing them—as by a fluttering veil, a delicate arm, or so forth ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... real beginning of it to Doctor Harpe, whose intelligence enabled her to realize to the utmost the position in which she now had irrevocably placed herself. She turned abruptly and walked to her office with a nervous rapidity ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... in the ward by the contest was prodigious, and the victory of this lad was as incomprehensible to the others as to Kobylin himself. The rapidity with which the blows were delivered, and the ease with which Godfrey had evaded the rushes of his opponent, seemed to them, as to him, almost magical, and from that moment they regarded Godfrey as ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... and crinoline, for whom a carriage and pair of horses is always waiting immediately after dinner, whose fathers' pockets are bursting with dollars, it is a very gay place. Dancing and flirtations come as a matter of course, and matrimony follows after with only too great rapidity. But the place was not very gay ...
— The Courtship of Susan Bell • Anthony Trollope
... Rae, how very clever of you to discover that!" replied Miss Brodie, smiling sweetly into Mr. Rae's radiant face. "And how very sweet of you—ah, I beg your pardon; that is—" The disconcerting rapidity with which Mr. Rae's smile gave place to an appearance of grave, of even severe solemnity, threw Miss Brodie quite "out of her stride," as Martin said afterward, and left her floundering in a hopeless attempt to complete ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... Further, Augustine says (De Divin. Daemon. iii), that "the demons' rapidity of movement enables them to tell things unknown to us." But agility of movement would be useless in that respect unless their knowledge was impeded by local distance; which, therefore, is a much greater hindrance ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... passed, with terrible rapidity through his brain—chimeras which were hard facts; rapidity, which was ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... words, but also that he was known among the natives as one white man not an animal-killer. His name Son of Power had followed him to Hurda; word about him had travelled with mysterious rapidity. To his amazement Skag found that the people of Hurda knew something of the story of the tiger-pit and his part in delivering the Grass Jungle people from the toils and tributes of the great snake. . . . He was not ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... But during a flood it becomes converted into a raging torrent, and you can hear its roar a mile off. Within about five hours the water in it had risen not less than twenty feet! This will give you an idea of the tremendous force and rapidity of the rainfall in this country. Of course the damage done was great, in MacCullum's as in Deep Creek. A heavy timber bridge had been carried quite away, not a trace of it remaining. Many miners' huts in the low ground had been washed away; while ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... the winter of 18—, there was a heavy rain, accompanied by high winds, which swelled the waters of the Sandy river to an amazing height, and every moving thing upon its surface was borne away with the rapidity of lightning. Standing upon its margin was Frank Somers, his eyes fixed with intense interest upon a frail raft that was plunging and heaving among the boiling waves. Upon it stood a man about the middle ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... into his seat in the corner, striving to hide his bedraggled apparel. He tucked a paper napkin into the front of his waistcoat, and so hid the hideous color scheme of the gaudy shirt, the stripes of which had spread with wondrous rapidity. Then he buttoned his coat tightly to hide the ruined waistcoat; but the coat was tight anyway, and the ducking had done it ...
— The Girls of Central High on Lake Luna - or, The Crew That Won • Gertrude W. Morrison
... character, had exhausted for the time the resources of the Government as regarded transport and supplies. Promptitude of advance on the part of the force to which had been assigned the line of invasion by the Khyber-Jellalabad route, was of scarcely less moment than the rapidity of the stroke which Roberts was commissioned to deliver. The former's was a treble duty. One of its tasks was to open up and maintain Roberts' communications with India, so that the closing of the Shutargurdan should not leave him isolated. Another duty resting on the ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... will be regarded by him who receives it, when it is altogether neglected by him who gives it. We do not defend Buckingham; but what was his guilt to Bacon's? Buckingham was young, ignorant, thoughtless, dizzy with the rapidity of his ascent and the height of his position. That he should be eager to serve his relations, his flatterers, his mistresses, that he should not fully apprehend the immense importance of a pure administration of justice, that he should ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... paying well at Dover, we set out yesterday morning in the Express coach, a noble carriage, drawn by four English horses, such as no prince need be ashamed of. With four persons within, four in front, and four behind, we dashed on with the rapidity of lightning, through this inexpressibly beautiful country: meadows of the loveliest green, gardens blooming with flowers, and every building displaying a neatness and elegance which form a striking contrast to the dirt of France. The majestic river, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 477, Saturday, February 19, 1831 • Various
... hour before high water. It is obvious that if sewage is discharged about two hours after high water the current will be nearing its maximum speed, but it will only have about three hours to run before it turns; so that, although the sewage may be removed with the maximum rapidity from the vicinity of the sea outfall, it will not be carried to any very great distance, and, of course, the greater the distance it is carried the more it will be diffused. It must be remembered that the foregoing data are only applicable to the locality they relate to, ...
— The Sewerage of Sea Coast Towns • Henry C. Adams
... an earthquake shock through the earth takes place with wonderful rapidity. The elastic wave varies in velocity from 800 to 1,000 feet per second in sand or clay to three miles per second ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... also many Pisachas, O master, of diverse forms and all daubed with fragrant powders of diverse hues, and dancing with joyous hearts in accompaniment with instruments of different kinds made of brass. Surrounded by these who move with electric rapidity in the mazes of the dance or refrain at times altogether from forward or backward or transverse motion of every kind, Mahadeva dwells there. That delightful spot on the mountains, we have heard, is the favourite abode of the great Deity. It ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... not be co-extensive with space, it must at all events extend as far as the most distant visible stars. In fact it is the vehicle of their light, and without it they could not be seen. This all-pervading substance takes up their molecular tremors, and conveys them with inconceivable rapidity to our organs of vision. It is the transported shiver of bodies countless millions of miles distant, which translates itself in human consciousness into the splendour of the ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... a Moscow paper in 1880, and after some difficulty he secured a position connected with several of the smaller periodicals, for which, during his student years, he poured forth a succession of short stories and sketches of Russian life with incredible rapidity. He wrote, he tells us, during every spare minute, in crowded rooms where there was "no light and less air," and never spent more than a day on any one story. He also wrote at this time a very stirring blood-and-thunder ...
— Swan Song • Anton Checkov
... carelessness where before had been art, precision, and cleanliness. To-day Paris streets are clean. There is even more evidence of rebuilding and of modern conveniences. Motor street-sweepers whirl through the squares, not singly but in pairs and more extended series, and they move with automobile rapidity, quickly cleansing ...
— The Audacious War • Clarence W. Barron
... terrific delivery of an American professional pitcher, the average cricketer is compelled to acknowledge the wide difference existing between the two positions. Then again, the quick handling of a batted or thrown ball, that it may be returned with all accuracy and lightning like rapidity to the waiting basemen are points which our cricketers are deficient in, when compared with the American professional ball player. It can be seen at a glance that the game is prolific of opportunities ...
— Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1889 • edited by Henry Chadwick
... tongue began to play in and out of its mouth with great rapidity. Apparently it was so confused or dazed that it could not see clearly and was feeling for the antagonist that was so near. The decisive moment had arrived. A massive forefoot bristling with claws an ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... a window, gazing vaguely out into the moist blue obscurity. Sidsall, she realized, was maturing with a disconcerting rapidity. Depths were opening in the girl's being at which she, her mother, could only guess. It was exactly as if a crystal through and through which she had gazed had suddenly been veiled by rosy clouds. ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the canoes were side by side, and with astonishing rapidity the luggage of the Landers found its way into those of their opponents. This mode of proceeding was not relished by them at all, and Richard Lander's gun being loaded with two balls and four slugs, he took deliberate aim at the leader, and ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... shut up his books with a sigh—for, like most books, though full of generalities, they did not tell him much—and went to bed. Before he had been asleep very long, however, the surgery bell was violently rung, and, having dressed himself with the rapidity characteristic of doctors and schoolboys, he descended to find a frightened footman waiting outside, from whom he gathered that something dreadful had happened to Lady Bellamy, who had been found lying apparently dead ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... work. The water tore through the nostril-pipe, boring a hole with such rapidity that the tall beam dropped into the socket with startling suddenness. Still breathing torrents, the pipe was withdrawn: the clutching sand seized, grappled the stake. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... to the opening between the rocks, where, upon seeing that there was open country beyond, the Indian at once crouched and approached cautiously, dropping flat upon the earth next moment, and crawling over the ground with a rapidity that astonished his companion, who was watching his face directly after, to try and read therefrom whether he belonged to the band of Indians in the open ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... consolation in Charley's rapid progress towards health. He was gaining with astonishing rapidity and bid fair to be completely ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... for exertion being over, his spirits fell with the rapidity of a spring too highly wound up, which snaps and runs down to immobility. He entered his tent and threw himself on the bed, from which he did not raise ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... to return to-morrow. By emphasizing the impression of an annoyance of to-day we are making it possible to suffer beyond expression from annoyances to come; and the annoyances, the pains, the disagreeable feelings will find their old brain-grooves with remarkable rapidity when given the ghost ...
— As a Matter of Course • Annie Payson Call
... I feel on touching a cold body, is in proportion to the rapidity with which my hand yields its heat ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... Doonas where the river rushes over huge mountain-rocks, affording a passage which the more daring only will make; for the current—narrowed to a boat's breadth—rushes along with such frightful rapidity, that the deviation of a few inches ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... her door and then sat at the window lost in thought. When once the idea of suicide has entered the mind it is apt to grow with startling rapidity. She reviewed the whole position; she went over all the arguments and searched the moral horizon for some feasible avenue of escape. But she could find none that would save Geoffrey, except this. Yes, she would do it, as many another wretched woman had done before her, ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... when you came to me and started to grow out of your clothes with such alarming rapidity. When your white satin, long-waisted frock grew too small for you, you said, for you did not like giving it up, 'I can really get into it if I hold myself in like this. And anyhow ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... and after he went away I continued my studies in the evenings when other boys were at play, so that I quickly mastered all those necessary preliminaries. I consequently got over them at school with a rapidity which astonished the master, and with no little pride I heard the inspector, a naval captain, remark, "First-rate boy—beats his brother—be a master in ...
— The Two Whalers - Adventures in the Pacific • W.H.G. Kingston
... we met with another and larger branch of the same stream, and at the end of an hour and a quarter reached the Nahr el Kebir (the ancient Eleutherus), near a ruined bridge. This is a large torrent, dangerous at this period of the year from its rapidity. The Hamah caravans have been known to remain encamped on its banks for weeks together, without being able to cross it. On the opposite side stands a Khan, called Ayash, with the tomb of the ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... intelligence which is now brought down almost to the hour of the morning on which it is circulated. The Times Newspaper, which was the first to adopt this astonishing invention, is still printed by it with a rapidity which is scarcely conceivable.[10-*] An inspection of it cannot fail to gratify every intelligent observer. Its use has now ...
— The Author's Printing and Publishing Assistant • Frederick Saunders
... forty-nine guns, Captain Dacres, by the American frigate Constitution, fifty-five guns, Captain Isaac Hull, made British contempt give place to surprise. In this naval battle the Americans proved their superiority in rapidity and accuracy of fire, and it is perhaps needless to say that they showed themselves fully the equals of the British in bravery. It is pleasant to read in the official report of Captain Dacres the following tribute to his generous foe: "I feel it ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... latest frightfulness, retaliation by Prussian myrmidons, abductions, murders, and I don't know what besides—and you will have some faint idea of the tumultuous episodes of The Men Who Wrought (CHAPMAN AND HALL). To say that the story moves is vastly to understate its headlong rapidity of action. And, while I hardly fancy that the characters themselves will carry overwhelming conviction, there remains, in the theory of the submersible liner and application to political facts, enough genuine wisdom to lift the tale out of the company of six-shilling shockers. To this extent at ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 10, 1916 • Various
... requires, however, to be administered at the proper moment, and it was in the discovery of the right moment that he showed especial skill, noting most carefully the slightest symptom of disorder or undue rapidity of the pulse. It chanced that once, when he was returning to town from his country house, he observed an enormous funeral procession in the suburbs of the city. A huge multitude of men who had come out to ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... are: the subject of the picture, the lens and its aperture, the rapidity of the plate, and last, but not by any means least, the quality of the light by which the work ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 492, June 6, 1885 • Various
... of such apparently unwieldy bulk as an elephant could possibly have distorted himself as many did. Some curled their trunks about till they looked like huge writhing snakes. One kept curling up his proboscis and letting it fly open again with the greatest rapidity. It was almost harrowing to our feelings to see the whole ground below us covered with such huge, struggling, writhing masses. I made a remark to that ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... In the rapidity and scope of intellectual and material progress, the age of Elizabeth is unequaled in English history. The nation seemed to pass from the darkness of night into a sunshine which would never end. Freed from the trammels which had hitherto ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... be no operating room connected with this ward, and the operations, however painful or dreadful, were of necessity performed in the ward itself. The scenes presented were enough to appal the stoutest nerves. The men exhausted by marching and by a long journey after their wounds, died with great rapidity—in one day forty-eight were carried out dead—many reaching the hospital only in time ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... and their bronze vessels among the reeds in the Ancre; one could hardly believe one was in France. And where was one? Surely in a place and seeing a life that never existed before, and never will again. The rapidity with which these Indians (they were a cleaning-up party) changed the whole face of Thiepval and that part of the Ancre ...
— An Onlooker in France 1917-1919 • William Orpen
... beings as they have usually been represented. In their own arts they are admirable. A cap being fixed at thirty yards distance, they transfixed it with a spear, delivered by the throwing-stick with the rapidity of an arrow from the bow of a practised archer. In tracking animals or men they show most wonderful sagacity; and I heard of several of their remarks which manifested considerable acuteness. They will not, however, cultivate the ground, or build houses and remain stationary, or even take ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... concave face of a coming wave. On its summit a white edging arose with the aspect of a lace frill; it broadened, and fell over the front with a terrible concussion. Then all before them was a sheet of whiteness, which spread with amazing rapidity, till they found themselves standing in the midst of it, as in a field of snow. Both felt an insidious chill encircling their ankles, and they rapidly ran ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... through the country. Southern excitement became intense, amounted almost to panic. The activity of the anti-slavery press, the stream of anti-slavery publications, which had, indeed, increased with singular rapidity, was exaggerated by the Southern imagination, struck it with a sort of terror. There were meetings held in many parts of the South, tremendous scenes enacted there. In Charleston, South Carolina, the post-office was broken ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... eyes to a certain softness, of which they are very capable, and your face to smiles, which become it more than most faces I know. Give all your motions, too, an air of 'douceur', which is directly the reverse of their present celerity and rapidity. I wish you would adopt a little of 'l'air du Couvent' (you very well know what I mean) to a certain degree; it has something extremely engaging; there is a mixture of benevolence, affection, and unction in it; it is frequently really sincere, but ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... after the day's work, sitting "on the high stone of the kitchen hearth, where round logs of green oak were blazing," he would evoke, in his picturesque and figurative language, the memories of an old campaigner, he charmed all the household and the evening seemed to pass with strange rapidity. ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... lightning, and the death-bolts had come from they knew not where. With almost the rapidity of thought the rifles were again loaded and the whole united band rushed forward upon the Indians who were now flying wildly in all directions. Instinct taught them to perform all sorts of gyrations ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott
... universally provided with a man having exactly his attainments and no others. In less than a month he was installed in a responsible position as their foreign correspondent and in receipt of a very respectable salary. The rapidity of phrasing in this movement was abnormal—prestissimo, in fact, if we indulge our musical vocabulary. But the instrumentation would have seemed less surprising to Sally had she known the lengths her mother had gone in the proffer of a substantial guarantee ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... know until I read this book on divorce that he so little understood newspapers and their writers. Commenting on the fact that the Press is sensible enough to use divorce as a news item, he says: 'The newspapers are full of an astonishing hilarity about the rapidity with which hundreds of thousands of human families are being broken up by the lawyers; and about the undisguised haste of the "hustling" judges who carry on the work.' I wonder if Mr. Chesterton ever reads the leaders of certain papers, ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... a faint, fan-shaped aurora above a dun rampart of clouds. His love of nature was no less keen than his appreciation of people and events. The mathematician and the poet held alternate sway over him. This di-psychic quality was evidenced by the rapidity with which the expression of his eye would frequently change from cold calculation to a certain rapt observation, as if he looked up from a complicated problem to contemplate a glimpse of blue distance. Thus it was that he appreciated ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... of the rural districts of the United States where money does not circulate with great rapidity services are paid for "in kind." Farmers, for example, will give potatoes, eggs, etc., in payment for debts. A young surgeon who had occasion to operate in one of these districts hopefully approached the husband of the patient and asked for his fee, which amounted to $100. ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... them and offers to give me her right-hand-reliable, Jane McElroy, who cared for me when a baby, to stay here with the Infant. The second letter was from Maria Maxwell, a distant cousin of Bart's. She has also heard of our intended vacation,—indeed the rapidity with which the news travels and the interest it causes are good proofs of our stay-at-home tendencies and the general sobriety of our six ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... curiosity of the English chevaliers was partly gratified in beholding the Hippogriff at rest, and Rogero, to renew their surprise and delight, remounted the animal, and, slapping spurs to his sides, made him launch into the air with the rapidity of a meteor, and directed his flight still westwardly, till he came within sight of the coasts of Ireland. Here he descried what seemed to be a fair damsel, alone, fast chained to a rock which projected into the sea. What was his astonishment when, drawing ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... to his feet with rapidity, and, in great excitement, dropped his head and began hunting. In a minute a mottled pebble seemed to get up under his nose and run. He snapped at it, and it fell upon the grass, stretching out slowly ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... silent a second or two, then he sprang up so that his chair fell over: "Perhaps Alphonse imagined that he could do it better? Did he not know which of them was really the man of business?" And now the words streamed out with that incredible rapidity of which the French language is capable when it is ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors • Various
... wild asses passed us during the march towards evening; they were on their way from the desert to the Atbara river, some miles distant upon the west. Veritable thunder we now heard for the first time in Africa, and a cloud rose with great rapidity from the horizon. A cloud was a wonder that we had not enjoyed for months, but as this increased both in size and density, accompanied by a gust of cool wind, we were led to expect a still greater wonder—RAIN! Hardly had we halted for the night, when down it came in torrents, accompanied by a heavy ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... works with amazing rapidity, but it is impossible to see the direction it will take. There are little insects known to our childish days as skip-jacks. Scratch them with the end of a piece of grass, and they reward you for your pains—they will jump—bound with one spasmodic leap and ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... that the Church was in considerable danger, for these religious enthusiasts gained more credit among the people, and operated more strongly on their minds than the priests from whom they so entirely withdrew that they even absolved each other. Their strength grew with such rapidity, and their numbers increased to such an extent daily, that the State and the Church were forced to combine for their suppression. Degeneracy, however, soon crept in, crimes were committed, and they went beyond their strength in attempting the performance of miracles. One of the ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... me with her out of this desert island. And after having passed the night in this condition, the bird really flew away next morning, as soon as it was day, and carried me so high that I could not see the earth. Then she descended all of a sudden, with so much rapidity that I lost my senses; but when the roc was settled, and I found myself upon the ground, I speedily untied the knot, and had scarcely done so when the bird, having taken up a serpent of a monstrous length in her ...
— Fairy Tales From The Arabian Nights • E. Dixon
... graceful; her address, mien, and smile were in perfect accordance with the goodness of her heart. Madame Sophie was remarkably ugly; never did I behold a person with so unprepossessing an appearance; she walked with the greatest rapidity; and, in order to recognise the people who placed themselves along her path without looking at them, she acquired the habit of leering on one side, like a hare. This Princess was so exceedingly diffident ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... were crowds of people standing at the docks. The flyman took out the luggage and was on the point of leaving, when I asked him whether he had taken out all the luggage, which I had not been able to count, because of the pressure of people, and the rapidity with which the packages were taken to the vessel. His reply was, Yes. But all at once, by the good hand of God, I remembered the hind boot, and I asked him to open it. The man, somewhat confused, opened it, and in it were five or six carpet bags. This thing ...
— A Narrative of some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself. Second Part • George Mueller
... sat still for some minutes, Martha gazing into vacancy, Jane lying back in her chair, her eyes closed. One emotion after another coursed through her with lightning rapidity—indignation at the charge, horror at the thought that any of her friends might believe it, followed by a shivering fear that her father's good name, for all her care and suffering, might be ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... are an angel!' and turning his back to the house, papa bolted the muffin with grateful rapidity, inquiring with a laugh, 'Do you think those rogues will keep it up in this vigorous ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... men and white men constantly upon his track. His every move was rapidly reported to our ever-watchful enemies. But, quick as the enemy undoubtedly were in all their movements, General Rundle nullified their efforts by his rapidity. So terribly hard did he work his men that they nicknamed him "Rundle, the Tramp." How the men stood it I cannot understand. I know of no other men in all the world who would have gone on as they did, obeying orders without a murmur ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... reports of disaster and wilful acts followed with increasing rapidity. The sinking of American vessels disclosed a ruthlessness of method that was gravely condemned in President Wilson's message of armed-neutrality, only to be followed by acts of more wilful import—finally ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman
... whatever on the wild rabbit. Bumper could hear him scurrying away in the bushes. Then all was quiet. For a long time Bumper watched and waited. Once he caught a glimpse of his cousin on the right of the rock, then on the left, then behind, and again in front. The amazing rapidity with which the wild rabbit ...
— Bumper, The White Rabbit • George Ethelbert Walsh
... readiness, Carson set out with his followers for their hunting-grounds. Their pace was one of so much rapidity, that after one day's march they discovered signs of the buffalo. On the following morning immense herds were in sight. A suitable place for a camp was soon selected, and everything which could impede their work well stowed away. The best marksmen were selected for hunters, and the remainder ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... exultation from the defenders, as the fire spread with ever-increasing rapidity; flakes of fire, driven by a strong wind, started the flames in a score of places, far ahead of the main conflagration and, in half an hour, only red embers and flickering timbers showed where Johore had stood. Beyond, ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty
... rapidity and vigour of these two poems will save them from death; the splendid qualities of direct narration, constructive skill, dignity and poetical power will always make Homer a name to love. Those who know no Greek and therefore fear that they may lose some of the ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... impress of the country through which it passes: and if there are many characteristics in common between a French Jew and a German Jew, there are many more different characteristics derived from their new country, of which with incredible rapidity they assimilate the habits of mind: more the habits than the mind, indeed. But habit, which is a second nature to all men, is in most of them all the nature that they have, and the result is that the majority of the autochthonous citizens of any country have very little ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... obliged the Germans to quit Alsace. In order to free themselves from Frederick, the French instigated the Swedes to invade Pomerania and Altmark, which they attacked in December, 1674, with 16,000 men. Frederick hastened to his dominions, and proceeding with great rapidity and secrecy at the head of only 5,000 men, he totally defeated 11,000 Swedes at Fehrbellin in 1675, and freed his dominions from the enemy. Following up his successes, he took Stettin. In January, 1679, he crossed the Frische Haff and the Gulf of Courland with ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... Africa. But here to day, within striking distance of a mobile enemy whom we wish to circumvent, every private soldier has canvas shelter, and the other arrangements are on an equally elaborate scale. The consequence is that roads are crowded, drifts are blocked, marching troops are delayed, and all rapidity of movement is out of the question. Meanwhile, the enemy completes the fortification of his positions, and the cost of capturing them rises. It is a poor economy to let a soldier live well for three days at the price of ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... scattered over a very wide surface of country, were so much divided by origin, by language, and religion, that, without the support of her Asiatic arm, she could not, according to the general opinion, have stood at all. The rapidity of her descent, it is true, had been arrested by the energy of her Sultans during the first twenty years of the nineteenth century. But for the last thirty of the eighteenth she had made a headlong progress downwards. So utterly, also, were the tables turned, that, whereas in ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... shame lingered as the younger sister followed with a spirited vivace. Her hollow-cheeked pallor remained unstained, but her thin lips were set and her hard eyes were harder. She played with determined nonchalance and an extraordinarily facile rapidity, and Miriam's uneasiness changed insensibly to the conviction that these girls were learning in Germany not to be ashamed of "playing with expression." All the things she had heard Mr. Strood—who had, as the school prospectus declared, been "educated in Leipzig"—preach and implore, "style," ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... Life-guardsman, and the little sandy, freckled, sun-dried engineer; and thus two courtships had to be carried on in the two rooms, only supplemented by the narrow parallelogram of a garden! For Ferdinand Travis was back again, rather amused at the family astonishment at the rapidity of his journey to America, which to his Transatlantic notions of travel was as nothing, and indeed had been chiefly performed in a big steamer, where he could smoke to ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... now broken up into shreds. The azure depths beyond had assumed the appearance of a blue tunic bespattered with white, and the clouds suggested the idea of a celestial shepherd, driving myriads of sheep to the pasture. Children alone can dry up their tears with the rapidity of Nature in the tropics; perhaps we may have already made the remark, and must, therefore, beg pardon for repeating ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... waste, were the sight the Poles beheld each day, while the homeless peasants crowded into Kosciuszko's camp to tell him their piteous stories. Then Denisov retreated so swiftly towards the Prussian frontier that Kosciuszko, either through the enemy's rapidity, or because he was detained by the civil affairs of the government with which his hands were just then full, and by the no less arduous task of organizing the war in the provinces, was not able to overtake him. At this moment the Rising promised well. The ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... settlers, principally in Upper Canada, the United Empire Loyalists, whose ideas of government were so different from those of the Lower Canadians that the separation of Upper and Lower Canada by the Constitutional Act of 1791 became necessary. These dates, so close together, emphasize the rapidity with which events moved in that period, as well as the sequence of cause and effect. We think also of the dates of Cartier's voyages, 1534, 1535, and 1541, merely to raise the question as to why so much time elapsed between the second and ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: History • Ontario Ministry of Education
... observations which have been made on the different materials which compose the terrestrial globe, on the elevations, the depressions, and the unevennesses of its form, on the movement of the seas, on the trending of mountains, on the position of quarries, on the rapidity and effects of the currents of the sea—this is nature on the ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... road, sixty-two miles in length, was built of stone at a cost of $465,000 and was completed in two years. Never before had such a sum been invested in internal improvement in the United States. The rapidity with which the undertaking was carried through and the profits which accrued from the investment were alike astonishing. The subscription books were opened at eleven o'clock one morning and by midnight 2226 shares had been subscribed, each purchaser paying ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... Bleakridge as a residential suburb. It had also been predicted that even Hanbridge men would come to live at Bleakridge now. Land was changing owners at Bleakridge, and rising in price. Complete streets of lobbied cottages grew at angles from the main road with the rapidity of that plant which pushes out strangling branches more quickly than a man can run. And these lobbied cottages were at once occupied. Cottage-property in the ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... his throat and for a moment he was consumed with self-pity. Then he went out of the wood, crossed the field, and with his peculiar, long, shambling gait that got him over the ground with surprising rapidity, went again along the road. Had there been a stream nearby he would have been tempted to tear off his clothes and plunge in. The notion that he could ever become a man who would in any way be attractive to a woman like Clara Butterworth seemed the greatest folly in the ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... figure. His heart was beating with remarkable rapidity. How light, how living she seemed! Little round flakes of sunlight raced down her as she went. She walked fast, then slowly, looking sideways once or twice, but not back, until she reached the park gates. ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... and find it to correspond to the formula C{6}, H{3}, O{3}, and NO{5}; it is well made nitro-glycerin; the substance freezes at about 46; it is made to decompose in a very peculiar way; on moistening paper with it it burns with rapidity; it does not explode when red-hot copper is placed in it; we tried it with the most intense heat—we can produce with a galvanic battery with two hundred cells holding a gallon and a half each; some nitro-glycerin was placed in a cup and ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... and completion of the structure was thus a little over fifty-five years, and when its dimensions are considered, it will be found in comparison with other churches to have been carried on with great rapidity."[432] ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... all too fleeting. With a young fellow of the habits of Philip, such injuries cannot be counted on to tarry long, even for the purpose of love-making, and Philip found himself getting strong with even disagreeable rapidity. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... put his crew to their utmost. But the decisive moment had arrived, and his body began to sway backward and forward with increasing rapidity, and a quarter of a mile more gave him half a boat-length's advantage ...
— In School and Out - or, The Conquest of Richard Grant. • Oliver Optic
... they had in reserve a check which soon brought the fiercest and proudest king to reason, the check of physical force. It is difficult for an Englishman of the nineteenth century to imagine to himself the facility and rapidity with which, four hundred years ago, this check was applied. The people have long unlearned the use of arms. The art of war has been carried to a perfection unknown to former ages; and the knowledge of that art is confined to a particular class. A hundred ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... (London, 1851), p. 454.] The Constitution was handled faultlessly; Captain Hull displayed the coolness and skill of a veteran in the way in which he managed, first to avoid being raked, and then to improve the advantage which the precision and rapidity of his fire had gained. "After making every allowance claimed by the enemy, the character of this victory is not essentially altered. Its peculiarities were a fine display of seamanship in the approach, extraordinary efficiency in the attack, and great readiness in repairing damages; all ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... came back, but still the Astronef continued to fall with terrific rapidity, and the awful landscape beneath them—a landscape of fire and chaos—broadened out and became ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... stone of the kitchen hearth, where round logs of green oak were blazing," he would evoke, in his picturesque and figurative language, the memories of an old campaigner, he charmed all the household and the evening seemed to pass with strange rapidity. ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... it possible for time alone ever to make its appearance, or be taken notice of by the mind. A man in a sound sleep, or strongly occupyed with one thought, is insensible of time; and according as his perceptions succeed each other with greater or less rapidity, the same duration appears longer or shorter to his imagination. It has been remarked by a great philosopher, that our perceptions have certain bounds in this particular, which are fixed by the original nature and constitution of the mind, and beyond which no influence of external objects ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... with feverish rapidity, and with every sign of the strongest agitation, occasionally stopping, and then resuming his remarks in a headlong way. But if he had felt agitation, Edith had felt at least quite as much. At the first mention of his proposal her head sank forward, and she looked fixedly upon the ground ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... dizzy with the flicker and glitter of the rocks beneath us and as we rounded dangerous curves of the track, or descended swift slides with almost uncontrollable rapidity, I had some doubts, but we kept our wits, remained upon the rails, and at last spun round the final bend and came to a halt upon a level stretch of track, ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... New York Central Railroad covers practically the whole period of railway construction, expansion, and development in the United States. It is a singular evidence of the rapidity of our country's growth and of the way which that growth has steadily followed the rails, that all this development of States, of villages growing into cities, of scattered communities becoming great manufacturing centres, of an internal commerce ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... armoured cruisers had to be attached to battle-fleets to support the weaker members of the screen. The crying need for this type of ship set up a rapid movement for increasing their fighting power, and with it fell with equal rapidity the economic possibility of giving the cruiser class its ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... Mackenzie's mind had been concentrated upon something else. She had not filled it at all. The next moment it was turned upon her and two swift turquoise gleams from under the shaggy brows swept over her, with the rapidity and brightness of search-lights. Dr. Mackenzie commenced speaking quickly, with a ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... minute can be transmitted by an automatic sender, and the recorder has been found on land lines and short cables to write off the message at this incredible speed. When we consider that every word is, on the average, composed of fifteen separate waves, we may better appreciate the rapidity with which the siphon can move. On an ordinary cable of about a thousand miles long, the working speed is about twenty words per minute. On the French Atlantic it is usually about thirteen, although as many as seventeen ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... slippers those were! He had only to say to them, "Go!" and they would impel him forward with the rapidity of the wind. They ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... and excitable a man is, if danger and responsibility instead of confusing and unsettling him, only winds him up to a higher tension, till he becomes like a tightly-drawn steel spring. Excitement then not only steadies him, but it quickens his perceptions, clears his judgment, gives rapidity to his decisions, and terrible force to his blow. Mr. Hawley's duties were of a various and exhausting kind, so that during all the riots, he allowed himself only one hours' rest out of every twenty-four. Besides his ordinary supervisory duties over the clerks, etc., he ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... wheel around the hunter; thus affording him a good opportunity of singling out the fattest of the herd, and upon these occasions they often become so confused by the shouts and gestures of their enemy, that they run backwards and forwards with great rapidity, but without the power ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin
... seventeen miles. Now, as always, the mountain air stimulated Mr. Browning's physical energy; and on this occasion it also especially quickened his imaginative powers. He was preparing the first series of 'Dramatic Idylls'; and several of these, including 'Ivan Ivanovitch', were produced with such rapidity that Miss Browning refused to countenance a prolonged stay on the mountain, unless he worked at a more ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... tongue, and in a tone of slight impatience, retracing her steps, and hurrying to meet another young girl who now advanced along the winding path, "why do you remain behind, Rosa?" And so saying, she threw herself upon her knees before the new-comer, and clasped her arms around her with a rapidity and suppleness that almost resembled ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... hard-tack box, jamming it away instantly into my haversack while he entered in a little book the amount received from each person, the sums given to pay for its expressage, and the addresses to which it was to be sent. No time to make change. Even sums were given, counted, and tucked away with rapidity. At the landing was a little stern-wheel steamer, captured from the Rebels, which was to leave from Brashear City in an hour or two. The sick and wounded were hastily transferred to it, and as the regiment ...
— The Twenty-fifth Regiment Connecticut Volunteers in the War of the Rebellion • George P. Bissell
... difference in the kind of vibration. There are three things which characterize sounds; namely, pitch, intensity and character. Pitch depends on the rapidity of the vibrations; intensity on the extent or the amplitude of the vibrations; and character on the substance or instrument producing them. To illustrate: When you sing a very high note the vibrations may be five thousand vibrations a second, or ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay
... who has all his senses about him, a quiet walk, over not more than ten or twelve miles of road a day, is the most amusing of all travelling; and all travelling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity. ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... dependencies of Spain and Portugal gained their independence in connection with political revolutions in the European countries to which they had been attached. The United States, in the enjoyment of peace, and favored by great material advantages, advanced with marvelous rapidity in population and in wealth. Discord, growing out of the existence of negro slavery in the South, brought on at last the Civil War, which terminated in the conquest of the Confederate States and their restoration to the Union, in the freedom of the slaves, and in the prohibition ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... the initiation of more orderly study, was, after all, but of short duration, and the return tide of musical utterance was stronger than ever. Mary's delight was great when first he brought her one of his compositions very fairly written out—after which others followed with a rapidity that astonished her. They enabled her also to understand the man better and better; for to have a thing to brood over which we are capable of understanding must be more to us than even the master's playing of it. She could not be sure this or that was correct, according ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... sublime and audacious eloquence, the startling assertion that 'Experience is a fool.' There is a sense, no doubt, in which the sentiment is true. Neither the growth, nor the inherent power, nor the elasticity of the rebound from seeming exhaustion, nor the immense acceleration of the rapidity of the future career of the American people, is to be safely measured by a reference to what has occurred with former nationalities, in other and different times. Our experience of the future, whatever it ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... came running into the store, and, seeing the group, paused at the door—a shapeless, silent, shawled figure in silhouette against the day. The trader brought the girl to her foster-mother, who began to talk in her own tongue with a rapidity none of them had ever heard before, her voice as tender as some wild bird's song; then the two women went away together around the store into the house. Poleon had told Necia all the amazing story that had come to him that direful night, ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... definite and matter-of-fact to herself about it. He had stopped wanting her. Well then, she must stop wanting him, as speedily as might be. It took a little time. You could not shoot down the hills of the emotions with the lightning rapidity with which you shot down the roads. Also, the process was excruciatingly painful. You had to unmake so many plans, unthink so many thoughts.... Oh, but that was nothing. You had to hear his voice softened to someone else, see the smile in his ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... certainly was much pleased with Lord Byron's attitude, gesture, and delivery, as well as with his composition. To my surprise, he suddenly diverged from the written composition, with a boldness and rapidity sufficient to alarm me, lest he should fail in memory as to the conclusion. I questioned him, why he had altered his declamation? He declared he had made no alteration, and did not know, in speaking, that he had deviated from it one letter. ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... and reduced almost to a wreck. At length she was got before the wind, and away she ran towards the south and east, surrounded by a cloud of mist and foam which circumscribed our view to a very narrow compass. The sea, too, got up with a rapidity truly astonishing. It seemed as if the giant waves had been rolling on towards us from some far-off part of the ocean. All that day and night we ran on. Scarcely had the first streaks of dawn appeared, when ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... Love defies time as well as locksmiths. A few hours may bring kindred souls nearer to each other than double the number of years would do in an ordinary acquaintance. On board ship, especially in the tropics, things mature with a rapidity seldom found ashore. Certain circumstances conspire to hasten the happy development, and certain conditions may justify exceptional haste. When a long separation is pending a man may be forgiven for hurrying to know ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... banks. With the rapidity that characterizes its sudden inundations and transforms this peaceful stream into the most impetuous of torrents, the water had risen over the banks that border it and flooded the fields, sweeping away everything that stood ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... those who have least abstract minds. The most wonderful examples of imitation in the world are perhaps the imitations of civilised men by savages in the use of martial weapons. They learn the knack, as sportsmen call it, with inconceivable rapidity. A North American Indian—an Australian even—can shoot as well as any white man. Here the motive is at its maximum, as well as the innate power. Every savage cares more for the power of killing ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... at Turin, and cared little about views of any kind, did not comply with his wife's request, that they might survey some of the palaces; but staying only till the necessary refreshments could be obtained, they set forward for Venice with all possible rapidity. Montoni's manner, during this journey, was grave, and even haughty; and towards Madame Montoni he was more especially reserved; but it was not the reserve of respect so much as of pride and discontent. Of Emily he took little notice. With Cavigni his conversations ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... notwithstanding these grave objections this dangerous doctrine was at one time apparently proceeding to its final establishment with fearful rapidity. The desire to embark the Federal Government in works of internal improvement prevailed in the highest degree during the first session of the first Congress that I had the honor to meet in my present situation. When the bill authorizing ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 3: Andrew Jackson (Second Term) • James D. Richardson
... doors along our passage. The last night but one before we left I was roused from sleep by hearing the clock strike one, and immediately it had ceased six violent blows shook our own door on its hinges, and came with frightful rapidity, followed by deep groans. After this sleep was impossible. The next night, our last in Scotland, my husband and others watched in our passage all night, and though the sounds were again heard in different directions, nothing was to be seen. As I write, at the commencement ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... west coast of the Port Lincoln country. On this journey Mr. Stuart accomplished one of the most arduous feats in all his travels, having, with one man only (the black having basely deserted them), pushed through a long tract of dense scrub and sand with unusual rapidity, thus saving his own life and that of his companion. During this part of the journey they were without food or water, and his companion was thoroughly dispirited and despairing of success. This expedition occupied him till September, 1858, and was ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... steered; and the rapidity with which the speronare rushed to the beach was almost frightful. She darted like an arrow from wave to wave, and appeared as if mocking their attempts as they curled their summits almost over her narrow stern. They were ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... was brought all the way from Caen quarries, until, according to an old writer, a pious matron dreamed that stone in large quantities was to be found near at hand. Her vision leading to the discovery of a neighbouring quarry, the work proceeded henceforward with exceeding rapidity. ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... difficulty this small concession was obtained. But the reply from the French Court only brought more peremptory orders to expedite his departure. His health was now grievously broken. The severity of the weather, the rapidity of his journeys under the most trying conditions, above all, the anxieties and perplexities of his position, had brought on an aggravated attack of the gout, and he was unable either to stand or walk. Again he pleaded for that delay ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... a perceptive hostess, came to her husband's rescue by saying with equal rapidity, "Top of the stairs, end ...
— What's He Doing in There? • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... the world-religions which, springing from an abstruse system of metaphysics, brought forth such practical fruits as truthfulness, honesty, loving-kindness and universal pity, spread with extraordinary rapidity not only throughout the Indian continent but over the entire civilised world. Its apostles[150] visited foreign countries, touching and converting by their example the hearts and minds of those who were incapable of weighing their arguments, or unwilling to listen to their exhortations. ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... being thrown into confusion by the unevenness of the ground and the rapidity of their advance," said Willet. "Their surprise at our being here is so great that it has unsteadied them. Now they are about to ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the intestines. The discharge, which is at first unattended with pain, is soon succeeded by copious vomiting of matters similar to those passed from the bowels, accompanied with severe pain at the pit of the stomach, and with intense thirst. The symptoms now advance with rapidity. Cramps of the legs, feet, and muscles of the abdomen come on and occasion great agony, while the signs of collapse make their appearance. The surface of the body becomes cold and assumes a blue ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... something of physics, I am ready to admit that, although light travels with almost inconceivable rapidity, still, its journey through space does take time. Hence the impression made upon my eye by the falling apple is not simultaneous with the fall itself; and if I stand far away it is made a little later than when I am ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... two towns began about the time of the arrival of Gabriel Druse, his daughter, and Madame Bulteel, the woman in black, and it had grown with great rapidity and increasing intensity. Manitou condemned the sacrilegiousness of the Protestants, whose meeting-houses were used for "socials," "tea-meetings," "strawberry festivals," and entertainments of many kinds; while comic songs were sung at the table where the solemn Love ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... above the bed of the river, and against it the sand is blown in naked dunes. At 2 p.m., the surface-sand was heated to 110 degrees where sheltered from the wind, and 104 degrees in the open bed of the river. To compare the rapidity and depth to which the heat is communicated by pure sand, and by the tough alluvium, I took the temperature at some inches depth in both. That the alluvium absorbs the heat better, and retains it longer, would appear from the following, ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... humble desk in Hoppers' great establishment, on Sundays to the Second Presbyterian, and in season watered the twenty-six square feet of turf before his front door. He talked a great deal about Hoppers', which had been growing with astounding rapidity, like everything in Chicago, and now covered three entire city blocks. That and the church and Josephine quite filled all the corners of Horatio's simple being. Milly promised her father another, longer visit, but with her many engagements ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... it meant. There was no need for the enemy to increase the rapidity of his fire over us and over the boys in the trench to let us know what was up. Our ammunition had already given out, and we had to face the last few hundred yards without protection, meager though it had been throughout. ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... years old I was offered a situation as school-teacher. By this time the community was growing around us with the rapidity characteristic of these Western settlements, and we had nearer neighbors whose children needed instruction. I passed an examination before a schoolboard consisting of three nervous and self-conscious men whose certificate I still hold, ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... of the shoot has a tendency to throw all the vigor into the development of the young bunch, and the leaves remaining on the shoot, which now grow with astonishing rapidity. It is a gentle checking, and leading the sap into other channels; not the violent process which is often followed long after the bloom, when the wood has become so hardened that it must be cut with a knife, and by which ...
— The Cultivation of The Native Grape, and Manufacture of American Wines • George Husmann
... "Avenel and Egerton" knelled on the ears of Randal Leslie with "damnable iteration." The young man folded his arms across his breast in dogged despair. Levy had to shake hands for Mr. Egerton with a rapidity that took away his breath. He longed to slink away,—longed to get at L'Estrange, whom he supposed would be as wroth at this turn in the wheel of fortune as himself. But how, as Egerton's representative, escape from the continuous gripes of those horny hands? Besides, there stood ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... blood-red tint. This unnerving discovery was made by the cook, who was horrified to see a ruby stream pouring into the earliest kettle. Thinking that an iron pipe had become oxidized with startling rapidity, he tried another tap. Finally, there could be no blinking the fact that, by some uncanny means, the whole of the fresh water on board had acquired the color if not the taste of ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... distance of thirty years from that time the last enumeration, five years since completed, presented a population bordering upon 10,000,000. Perhaps of all the evidences of a prosperous and happy condition of human society the rapidity of the increase of population is the most unequivocal. But the demonstration of our prosperity rests not alone upon this indication. Our commerce, our wealth, and the extent of our territories have increased in corresponding proportions, and the number of independent communities associated ...
— A Compilation of Messages and Letters of the Presidents - 2nd section (of 3) of Volume 2: John Quincy Adams • Editor: James D. Richardson
... therefore determined to take a more circuitous route, by by-roads and through small and unfrequented villages. Relays of horses were to be privately conveyed to all these villages, that the carriages might be drawn on with the greatest rapidity, and small detachments of soldiers were to be stationed at important posts, to resist any interruption which might possibly be attempted by the peasantry. The king also had a large carriage built privately, expressly for himself ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... sweet young things performed, with the rapidity of thought, every lawless act known to the equine brain. They reared. They plunged. They bucked. They spun. They surged together. They scattered like startled quail. I heard squeals, and saw vicious shiny hoofs lash out in every direction; ...
— Blister Jones • John Taintor Foote
... prized by fish and fishermen, and the most difficult to obtain. The game is very shy, and the hunter, when he has found the burrow, has to dig rapidly to overtake it, for the yabby retires with marvellous rapidity, and often half a dozen lifts of wet sand have to be made before he is captured. There is no time to be lost. In quite twenty-five per cent. of the chases the yabbies get away through flooding and collapse ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... elected a Building Committee to collect the money, and raised the sum required so rapidly that in 1892 they were able to open Comenius Hall at Bethlehem, free of debt. Meanwhile the number of new congregations was increasing with some rapidity. At the end of fifty years of Home Rule the Moravians in North America had one hundred and two congregations; and of these no fewer than sixty-four were established since the separation of the Provinces. The moral is obvious. As soon as ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... demons, rushed upon me and flung a large cloak round my head and arms. I yelled out, as you may suppose, like a dog that is thrashed, but the cloth smothered my voice, and I was lifted into a chaise with dexterous rapidity. When my two companions released me from the cloak, I heard these dreadful words spoken by a ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... dialectically or for expedition can always, with, some circumlocution, be explained. This power of interpreting itself is a peculiar advantage, for spoken languages, unless explained by gestures or indications, can only be interpreted by means of some other spoken language. When highly cultivated, its rapidity on familiar subjects exceeds that of speech and approaches to that of thought itself. This statement may be startling to those who only notice that a selected spoken word may convey in an instant a meaning for ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... seem to issue decrees of surprising number and rapidity," and Everson, who was a large man, looked down at Patty ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells
... raised him on his pillows, and the window near him was open. His powerful chest was uncovered, and he seemed even in his sleep to be fighting for air. In the twelve hours that had elapsed since Meynell had last seen him he had travelled with terrible rapidity toward the end. He looked years older than in the morning; it was as though some sinister hand had been at work on the face, expanding here, contracting there, substituting chaos and ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... measure the views of the other two. At least so far as the gnomes are concerned, most people who have lived long in forests and solitary places have discovered that their work, if they like it, is performed with a rapidity and skill which is marvellous in their own eyes, and if you do not call the little gentleman who comes at night and helps you by the name of Rubezahl, you may call him the Spirit of Peace. But as long as you receive him kindly and give him his ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... engines and put on full speed, but the luminous monster gained on us and played round the frigate with frightful rapidity. Its light would go out suddenly and reappear again on the other side of the vessel. It was clearly too great a risk to attack the thing in the dark, and by midnight it disappeared, dying out like a huge glow-worm. It appeared again, about five miles to the windward, at two in ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... pig-hunting (played after dark); mock turtle-catching (played in the sea); going after the Evil Spirit of the Woods; swinging by means of long stout creepers; swimming-races (sometimes canoe-races); pushing their way with rapidity through the jungle; throwing objects upwards, or skimming through the air; playing at "duck-and-drakes"; shooting at moving objects; wrestling on the sand; hunting small crabs and fish and indulging ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... their chairs. Astonished, she looked for the cause. The cause came her way, and the pupils had a fresh example of the miracles wrought by a mouse, for Little Teacher, usually the personification of dignity and repose, screamed lustily and scudded chairward with as much rapidity as that displayed by the scurrying mouse as it chased for the corner and ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... tradition, which would not, perhaps, be wholly out of character with the dark thread of this tale, were we in accordance with certain of our brethren, who seem to think a novel like a bundle of wood, the more faggots it contains the greater its value, allowed by the rapidity of our narrative ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a severe tempest in the Bay of Biscay, a flash of lightning struck the ship and set her on fire. The calmness with which orders were given and obeyed, and the rapidity with which the fire was extinguished, without the least hurry or confusion, made a deep impression on me. This was afterwards increased by the conduct of the crew in a severe gale of wind, when it was necessary to navigate one of the narrow channels, by which the squadron that blockaded Rochelle ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... the worse was sufficient to raise my apprehensions; yet, although the Morumbidgee had received no tributary from the Dumot downwards, and was leading us into an apparently endless level, I saw no indication of its decreasing in size, or in the rapidity of its current. Certainly, however, I had, from the character of the country around us, an anticipation that a change was about to take place in it, and this anticipation was verified in the course of ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... was brought out and he began to play on his kanoon, his harp, it was impossible to repress Naomi's excitement. The girl leaped up from her place at the woman's feet, and with the utmost rapidity of motion she passed like a gleam of light across the patio to the boy's side. And, being there, she touched the harp as he played it, and then a low cry came from her lips. Again she touched it, and her eyes, though blind, seemed for an instant ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... of the cotyledons are interesting from their complexity and rapidity, and in some other respects. The hypocotyl (2 inches high) of a vigorous seedling was secured to a stick, and a filament with triangles of paper was affixed to one of the cotyledons. The plant was kept all day in the hot-house, and at 4.20 P.M. (June 20th) ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... as a "stripper" and the influence of my landlord, I was advanced to a table and began to learn my trade; in fact, more than my trade; for I learned not only to make cigars, but also to smoke, to swear, and to speak Spanish. I discovered that I had a talent for languages as well as for music. The rapidity and ease with which I acquired Spanish astonished my associates. In a short time I was able not only to understand most of what was said at the table during meals, but to join in the conversation. I bought a method for learning the Spanish language, and with the aid of my landlord as a ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... Elmendorf is now at Tampa, Fla., making elaborate preparations for taking these pictures. The cinematograph is a wonderful invention. By a clever arrangement hundreds of photographs are taken, one after the other, with marvellous rapidity; these pictures are printed on a long strip, and made to pass through the magic lantern as rapidly as when the photographs were taken; the result is a composite picture which, when thrown upon a screen, reproduces ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 2, No. 23, June 9, 1898 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... coupled with the name of Glaucus of Chios, a name which, in connexion with this and other devices for facilitating the mechanical processes of art,—for perfecting artistic effect with economy of labour—became proverbial, the "art of Glaucus" being attributed to those who work well with rapidity and ease. ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... cold air, iron does not oxidize, but when the air is dry and moist, it oxidizes rapidly. This likewise takes place with great rapidity when the metal is heated to redness. When submitted to a white heat iron burns with ...
— A System of Instruction in the Practical Use of the Blowpipe • Anonymous
... Irving returned to Paris, to the society of the Moores and the fascinations of the gay town, and to fitful literary work. Our author wrote with great facility and rapidity when the inspiration was on him, and produced an astonishing amount of manuscript in a short period; but he often waited and fretted through barren weeks and months for the movement of his fitful genius. His mind was teeming ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... at 90 must see his capital increased; and what was true of this chief among securities was of course true of other securities. The panic came, and from 90, consols declined dismally, slowly, hopelessly, to 85-1/2; securities less secure sank with a rapidity corresponding with their constitutional weakness. As during the ravages of an epidemic the weaker are first to fall victims to the destroyer, so while this fever raged on 'Change, the feeble enterprises, the "risky" transactions, sank at an appalling rate, some to total expiry. ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... a French pistol, a revolver with six chambers, which I can offer your Excellency almost for nothing, with ammunition to match. It is a weapon which will save your life a hundred times by its accuracy and the rapidity of its fire; and what says the wise man? 'Life is sweet, even to the bravest.'" And all the time he was talking, Harry Forsyth kept thinking, "Where have I seen him? What circumstance does ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... trivial impression conveyed to them by external means assumed the gravity of a wound. While one fixed thought occupied and tormented his spirit, the rest of his being was left exposed to the rude jostling of surrounding circumstances. Groups of sensations rushed with lightning rapidity across his mental field of vision, like the phantasmagoria of a magic lantern, startling and alarming him. The banked-up clouds of evening, the form of the Triton surrounded by the cadaverous lights, this sudden descent of savage looking men and huge animals, these shouts and songs ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... more, blaze succeeded blaze, and crash followed crash, with such tremendous rapidity, that the whole heavens, nay, the whole atmosphere, appeared incandescent with white, sulphureous, omnipresent fire; and that the roar of the volleyed thunder was ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... troops will draw well out on the roads designated during today and to-morrow, and on the following day will move with all possible rapidity for Ashboro'. No further destruction of railroads, mills, cotton, and produce, will be made without the specific orders of an army commander, and the inhabitants will be dealt with kindly, looking to an early reconciliation. ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... maturity. The wild oat, Avena fatua, is very common in [101] Europe from whence it has been introduced in the United States. In summers which are unfavorable to the development of the cultivated oats it may be observed to multiply with an almost incredible rapidity. It does not contribute to the harvest, and is quite useless. If no selection were made, or if selection were discontinued, it would readily supplant ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... of his patient through the night watching over her sleep, holding her wrist with fingers on her pulse. Even his most advanced thinking involuntarily harked back to pulse and temperature and blood pressure. The rapidity of the change taking place in the girl was abnormal, but it expressed itself physically as well as mentally. How closely involved physiology and psychology were after all! Which was which? Where did one end and the other begin? ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... it is not in any other.[13] It happened by some accident that one of our men fell overboard; the boats were all alongside, and the man was an exceeding good swimmer, yet before any assistance could be sent after him, the rapidity of the stream, had hurried him almost out of sight; we had however at last the good fortune to save him. This day I was again on shore, and walked six or seven miles up the country: I saw several hares as large as a fawn; I shot one of them, which weighed more than six and twenty pounds, and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... of sympathetic vibration ran through the crowd, and with the rapidity of a flash of lightning the words, "There he is! there he is!" passed from group to group. At this cry some withdrew into their houses and shut their doors and darkened their windows, as if it were a day of public mourning, while others opened ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - URBAIN GRANDIER—1634 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... for the fact had not been considered that, at the rising of the Nile, the canal would want a much deeper bed than the present stream required. The canal had only just been opened up, when the water rose with unusual force and rapidity; the dam was completely destroyed, and many workers lost their lives. During the disturbance, many officers and men left the camp and hurried to Ptolemy. This was the beginning of the Egyptian war. The ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... of the writers whose names they bear, no one would have cared to challenge their genuineness who was thoroughly convinced of the resurrection of our Lord. And the real object of these speculations lies open before us in the now notorious work of M. Renan, which is shooting through Europe with a rapidity which ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... experiments carried on for many years Mr. Darwin demonstrated the great value of cross-fertilisation in increasing the rapidity of growth, the strength and vigour of the plant, and in adding to its fertility. This effect is produced immediately, not as he expected would be the case, after several generations of crosses. He planted seeds from cross-fertilised and self-fertilised plants on two sides of the ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... from the tyranny of a sous-officier, who called them the hardest names his tongue could find when they made any faux pas in their barrack drill, and swore as terribly as those in Flanders when they did not obey his commands with the lightning rapidity of soldiers who have nothing ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... stirred the red embers whereon a big pot was simmering, and sending forth an appetizing odor, and in five minutes we were all three sitting down to a stew of capercailzie, with a foaming light beer as a fitting beverage. We finished the dish with such lightning rapidity that our host boiled us a number of eggs, which, I fear, ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... into France. Desperate work! and desperate must be the men engaged in it. Being considerably recruited in strength, I found the passage of the glacier much less arduous than it was in ascending; and having passed it in safety, we flew down the snow inclines with delightful rapidity, in five minutes clearing ground which cost us an hour to surmount. We reached Gavarnie at seven o'clock, and pausing for half an hour, rode on to Luz, where we arrived ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 456 - Volume 18, New Series, September 25, 1852 • Various
... wheedled Steve until his conscience had been overpowered and, yielding to their arguments, he had set forth for the adjoining village with the triumphant throng of tempters. At first all had gone well. The fourteen miles had slipped past with such smoothness and rapidity that Stephen, proudly enthroned at the wheel, had almost forgotten that any shadow rested on the hilarity of the day. He had been dubbed a good fellow, a true sport, a benefactor to the school—every complimentary pseudonym imaginable—and had glowed ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... can be better explained than by supposing that all those of the luminous bodies which are liquid, such as flames, and apparently the sun and the stars, are composed of particles which float in a much more subtle medium which agitates them with great rapidity, and makes them strike against the particles of the ether which surrounds them, and which are much smaller than they. But I hold also that in luminous solids such as charcoal or metal made red hot in the fire, this same movement is caused by the ...
— Treatise on Light • Christiaan Huygens
... and this time we had no sacking. Michael borrowed my pocket scissors, and with admirable rapidity cut a square of flannel from the tail of his shirt and squeezed it into the hole, making it fast with a splint which he hacked ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... any observant traveller in the Himalaya. One is the comparative absence of running or still water, except in the height of the rainy season, away from the large rivers. The slope is so rapid that ordinary falls of rain run off with great rapidity. The mountain scenery is often magnificent and the forests are beautiful, but the absence of water robs the landscape of a charm which would make it really perfect. Where this too is present, as in the valley of the Bias in Kulu and ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... admiration, gentlemen, for the judgment of our press than for the enterprise which is born of competition, and, although that judgment has often to be framed under conditions which demand almost breathless rapidity, it does not always bear unfavorable comparison with the protracted meditation of the philosophic ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... some enjoyment of the sort this coral-bordered road gave me, which not only charms my senses completely at the time, but returns again and again before my memory, delighting my fancy, and stimulating my imagination. I sometimes despise myself for what seems to me an inconceivable rapidity of emotion, that almost makes me doubt whether anyone who feels so many things can really be said to feel anything; but I generally recover from this perplexity, by remembering whither invariably every impression of beauty leads my thoughts, and console myself ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... was submitted to the President he said that it might succeed if the movement was rapid, otherwise not. The half of this opinion which concerned success was never tested; the other half was made painfully good. Instead of rapidity there was great delay, with the result that the early days of December found Lee intrenching strongly upon the heights behind Fredericksburg on the south bank of the Rappahannock, having his army now reunited and reinforced to the formidable ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... great head raised quite out of water at times, clashing his enormous jaws. Torrents of blood 10 poured from his spout hole, accompanied by hoarse bellowings as of some gigantic bull, but really caused by the laboring breath trying to pass through the clogged air passages. The utmost caution and rapidity of manipulation of the boat was necessary to avoid his maddened 15 rush, but this gigantic energy was short-lived. In a few minutes he subsided slowly in death, his mighty body reclined on one side, the fin uppermost ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... Catholic priest named Father Andre. On becoming satisfied that the best fruits of the march could be attained by bending towards the Missouri, the general decided to relieve his command of as much impedimenta as was consistent with comfort and safety and would increase the rapidity of its movements. He therefore established a permanent post at Camp Atchison, about fifty miles southeasterly from Devil's lake, where he left all the sick and disabled men, and a large portion of his ponderous train, with a sufficient guard to defend them if attacked. He then immediately started ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... acquired unusual facility in solving difficult problems. He early won the reputation of being the smartest mathematician not only in his immediate neighborhood but for miles around. He was often seen in the midst of a group of neighbors whom he constantly astounded by the rapidity and accuracy with which he would solve the mathematical puzzles put to him. This caused such widespread comment that he frequently received from scholars in different parts of the country, desiring to test his capacity, mathematical ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... chariot with four cherubim and four living wheels full of eyes, in the midst of which a bright fire glows and lightnings blaze. Chaps. 1, 10. From a careful study of the nature of this magnificent imagery we may infer with probability that the cherubim with their wheels, moving every way with the rapidity of a flash of lightning, denote all the agencies and instrumentalities by which God administers his government over the world, which are absolutely at his command, and execute with unerring certainty all his high purposes. The four faces of the cherubim, moreover, which ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... the knees. But the divine light of genius shone from the brown eyes and the ample forehead. The enthusiasm of the multitude now knew no bounds. There was first a strange stillness, then, when the word seemed to have passed with a strange and lightning-like rapidity from mouth to mouth, there burst forth a great cheer, and it was known ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... she said, and the eager rapidity with which she lifted her hands and began to alter it almost drew a smile from him despite ...
— Lodusky • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... streaming water-spout; the rain pelting, the wind rushing, the side-currents pouring and dashing. These latter, ordinarily but small rills, carrying off the drainage of the land by gentle course, were now swollen to rough cataracts, leaping with furious rapidity from crag to crag in deluges of turbid water, discolored to a dingy yellow-brown by the heaps of earth and stone which they dislodged and brought down with them, and hurled hither and thither over the precipitous projections, and occasionally flung athwart the highway. At one spot, where a heap ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... even before that time, the staple food of the Irish nation was once again the potato. In fact, it was cultivated to a far greater extent than before 1740, which caused the population to increase with wonderful rapidity.[33] ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... uttered by an eye-witness, almost at this very date, a friend and a competent diplomat: "You know that, while I am very fond of the dear general, I call him to myself the little tiger, so as to properly characterize his figure, tenacity, and courage, the rapidity of his movements, and all that he has in him which maybe ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... this," he said, mumbling rapidly, and scribbling a series of figures and letters which the pupil was expected to follow with intelligent interest. But the rapidity of the processes quite dazed Margaret: a result not unusual when the teacher understands his topic so well, and so much as a matter of course that he cannot make allowance for the benighted darkness ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... appointed near the close of the season.[-56-] He next crossed over into, although winter had set in. And he had no little success when, somewhat later, he made an unlooked for attack on his opponents. On all occasions he accomplished a great deal by his rapidity and the unexpectedness of his expeditions, so that if any one should try to study out what it was that made him so superior to his contemporaries in warfare, he would find by careful comparison that there was nothing more striking than these ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... whom the young earl of Huntingdon distinguished himself by very extraordinary acts of valour. Then the general invested Euremonde, which he reduced after a very obstinate defence, together with the fort of Stevensuaert, situated on the same river. Boufflers, confounded at the rapidity of Marlborough's success, retired towards Liege in order to cover that city; but, at the approach of the confederates, he retired with precipitation to Tongeren, from whence he directed his route towards Brabant, with a view to defend such places as ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... weapon used by the former; observation by the latter. Either may be false,—wilfully false; as also may either be steadfastly true. As to that, the reader must judge for himself. But the man who writes currente calamo, who works with a rapidity which will not admit of accuracy, may be as true, and in one sense as trustworthy, as he who bases every word upon a rock of facts. I have written very much as I have, travelled about; and though I have been very inaccurate, I have always written the exact truth as I saw it ;—and ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... left by the retiring tide, these animals were not easily caught. By means of their long arms and suckers, they could drag their bodies into very narrow crevices; and when thus fixed, it required great force to remove them. At other times they darted tail first, with the rapidity of an arrow, from one side of the pool to the other, at the same instant discolouring the water with a dark chestnut-brown ink. These animals also escape detection by a very extraordinary, chameleon-like power of changing their colour. They appear to vary their tints according to ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... hopes that the roc next morning would carry me with her out of this desert island. After having passed the night in this condition, the bird flew away as soon as it was daylight, and carried me so high, that I could not discern the earth; she afterwards descended with so much rapidity that I lost my senses. But when I found myself on the ground, I speedily untied the knot, and had scarcely done so, when the roc, having taken up a serpent of a monstrous length ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 1 • Anon.
... in which the horses were managed was very pretty, and seemed to answer admirably for this sort of skirmishing. They were never far from the men, who could mount and be off to another part of the field with rapidity, or retire to take up another position, or act as cavalry as the case might require. Both the superior officers and the men behaved with the most complete coolness; and, whilst we were waiting in hopes of a Yankee ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... saw the triumphant faces of Mexicans looking out, but he paid no attention to them. He thought alone of the Texans, who were now displaying the greatest energy. In the face of the imminent and deadly peril Travis, Crockett, Bowie and the others were cool and were acting with rapidity. The order was swiftly given to cross to the Alamo, the old mission built like a fortress, and the Texans were gathering in a body. Ned saw a young lieutenant named Dickinson catch up his wife and child on a horse, and join the ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... we war against the agents of oppression. To the conservative mind such an aspiration appears chimerical. But America, youngest of the nations, was born when modern science was gathering the momentum which since has enabled it to overcome, with a bewildering rapidity, many evils previously held by superstition to be ineradicable. As a corollary to our democratic creed, we accepted the dictum that to human intelligence all things are possible. The virtue of this dictum lies not in dogma, but in an indomitable ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... and rapidity with which Dryden poured forth his animated satire, plainly intimates, that his mind was pleased with the exercise of that formidable power. It was more easy for him, he has himself told us, to write with severity, than with forbearance; and indeed, where is the expert swordsman, ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... the latter, catching sight of our group, launched himself with lightning rapidity at the biggest of the ranch dogs, promptly nailed that canine by the back of the neck, shook him violently a score of times, flung him aside, and pounced on the next. During the ensuing few moments that hound was the busiest ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... stagecoaches, took two or three weeks, being now accomplished in a few hours. The perfection of the railway system has afforded facilities for a wonderfully complete system of postage—the mails being carried to all parts of the kingdom in one night. The rapidity of conveyance is only rivalled by the cheapness ...
— Queen Victoria • Anonymous
... opinion as to whether this morainic material has been brought down in surface layers or pushed up from the bottom ice layers, as in Alpine glaciers. There is no doubt that the glacier is retreating with comparative rapidity, and this leads us to account for the various ice slabs about the hut as remains of the glacier, but a puzzling fact confronts this proposition in the discovery of penguin feathers in the lower strata of ice in both ice caves. The shifting of levels in the morainic material ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... recently advanced with extraordinary rapidity, and if it be not yet in the position of leader, it is certainly now ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... denunciation of the principle which he was then asked, and which he peremptorily refused to sanction, was not enough for Mr. Gladstone, for the records of debate show he went farther, but enough has been cited to show that never was prophecy more fully fulfilled. Outrage followed outrage with a rapidity unequalled in Europe, and that in a country which previous to his remedial measures had practically been unstained by an agrarian outrage for ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... work ethic, mastery of high technology, and a comparatively small defense allocation (1% of GDP) helped Japan advance with extraordinary rapidity to the rank of second most technologically powerful economy in the world after the US and the third-largest economy in the world after the US and China, measured on a purchasing power parity (PPP) basis. One notable ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the Bank of Burma came in for his share of annoyance. He was obliged to send out a dozen cables of notification of the loss, all of which had to be paid out of accrued dividends. Thus Warrington had blocked up the avenues. The marvelous rapidity with which such affairs may be spread broadcast these days is the first wonder in a new epoch of wonders. From Irkoutsh to Aukland, from St. Johns to Los Angeles, wherever a newspaper was published, the news flew. Within ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... beneath his shoulders. Archibald Mackenzie was delighted beyond measure at his figure, and pointed him out to his acquaintance with all possible expedition. The laugh and the whisper circulated with rapidity. Henry, who was dancing, did not perceive what was going on till his partner said to him, "Pray, who is that ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... witnessed in Constantinople and on Gallipoli and at Lemnos. What touches the heart at Athens will ravage the whole being at Constantinople. But of that anon. An episode at Athens on the day of arrival had a spice of novelty in it which soon dulled on the palate in a rapidity of repetition: ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... flower that can be brought here from any zone and temperature, and that many of these foreigners to the soil grow here with a vigor and productiveness surpassing those in their native land. This bewildering adaptability has misled many into unprofitable experiments, and the very rapidity of growth has been a disadvantage. The land has been advertised by its monstrous vegetable productions, which are not fit to eat, and but testify to the fertility of the soil; and the reputation of its fruits, both deciduous and citrus, has suffered by specimens sent to Eastern markets whose ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... sound sleep, Seaton awoke and sprang out of bed. No sooner had he started to shave, however, than one of the slaves touched his arm, motioning him into a reclining chair and showing him a keen blade, long and slightly curved. Seaton lay down and the slave shaved him with a rapidity and smoothness he had never before experienced, so wonderfully sharp was the peculiar razor. After Seaton had dressed, the barber started to shave the chief slave, without any preliminary treatment save rubbing his face with ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... strained upturned faces, the "hungry sheep"—girls among them, perhaps, in peril like Hester, men assailed by the same vile impulses that had made a brute of Philip Meryon. During the preceding months Mary's whole personality had developed with great rapidity, after a somewhat taciturn and slowly ripening youth. The need, enforced upon her by love itself, of asserting herself even against the mother she adored; the shadow of Meynell's cloud upon her, and her suffering under it, during the weeks of slander; and now this rending tragedy ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that he was acting strangely for one who had reached the supposedly practical view of life where all sentiment is barred from social intercourse with the fair sex, but he also realized that he was powerless to check the surge of what he now felt within. With kaleidoscopic rapidity there flashed through his mind every occasion when he had been with Miss Fox, from the first meeting beneath the elm-tree in the Captain's yard to the present time, and he recognized what it was that had sent scurrying his practical views of life. He was in love, not with the beauty of ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... difficult to see wherein lies the lightning-like speed with which the electric current passes from heart to heart. Such a man was Buddha, such was the essential of his teaching; and such was the inevitable rapidity of Buddhistic expansion, and the profound influence of the shock that was produced by the new faith upon the moral consciousness of ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... M. Petin, if we could once succeed in getting a fulcrum in the air in spite of its elasticity, this very elasticity would then enable us, with suitable motive-power, to move with a degree of rapidity far transcending the possibilities of locomotion in any other element. In fact, it would seem, according to M. Petin's computations, that we might breakfast in London, lunch in Constantinople, dine in China, dance the evening out in Havannah, and get home to ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... then he recollected an engagement and, dropping all, absented himself thence with such surprising celerity that to the eyes of spectators along the route selected he appeared like a long, dim streak prolonging itself with inconceivable rapidity through seven villages, and audibly refusing to be comforted. "Great Scott! what is that?" cried a surveyor's chainman, shading his eyes and gazing at the fading line of agriculturist which bisected his visible horizon. "That," ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... denying that Mr. Britling was, in a sense, distinguished. The hero and subject of this novel was at its very beginning a distinguished man. He was in the Who's Who of two continents. In the last few years he had grown with some rapidity into a writer recognised and welcomed by the more cultivated sections of the American public, and even known to a select circle of British readers. To his American discoverers he had first appeared as an essayist, a serious essayist who wrote about aesthetics and ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... he was not closely versed in such niceties of society) that there was a Mrs. Gissing, and he was annoyed, for he felt certain they knew he was a bachelor. But the children were a source of nothing but pride to him. They grew with astounding rapidity, ate their food without coaxing, rarely cried at night, and gave him much amusement by their naive ways. He was too occupied to be troubled with introspection. Indeed, his well-ordered home was very different from before. The trim lawn, in spite of his zealous ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... vegetables and milk as she proceeded. Once beyond Federal lines, and in friendly neighbourhood, it was but a few minutes' work to "off ye lendings," and secure a horse and riding-habit. With a courage and rapidity which must ever command the admiration of a brave people she rode at hard gallop that burning July afternoon to Fairfax Court-house, and telegraphed to General Beauregard, then at Manassa's Junction, the intelligence ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... rower, but he had no conception of the strength and rapidity of the current. He battled manfully, but the boat immediately began to tend towards the cataract with continually increasing rapidity. At length he came to realize the fate that certainly awaited him. His smile was succeeded by a look of despair. ...
— The Erie Train Boy • Horatio Alger
... moment later in the doorway of Jimmy's room, where, taciturn as ever, severe, martial, he stood at attention, shoulders back, arms at his sides, thumbs in. In this position he was making, with amazing rapidity, a series of hideous grimaces for the benefit of the little boy in the bed: marvelous faces they were, in which nose, mouth, and eyes seemed interchangeable, where features played leapfrog with one another. When all was over—perhaps when his repertoire was exhausted—the sentry returned ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... apprehension. He had unbounded confidence in himself, and felt a sense of power in the rapidity with which he could master a lesson. He therefore did not study much, and though he could not but see that Paul was rapidly advancing, he rejected with scorn the idea that Young Stupid ...
— Paul Prescott's Charge • Horatio Alger
... confidently predict that he is the long-expected successor of Count L. N. Tolstoy. This gifted man, who at one stroke, conquered for himself all Russia which reads, whose books sell with unprecedented rapidity, whose name passes from mouth to mouth of millions, wherever intellectual life glows, and has won an unnumbered host of enthusiastic admirers all over the world, came up from the ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... my heart was beating with extraordinary rapidity. So powerful and so unpleasant was the impression made upon my mind by this possibly trivial incident and by the extraordinary dream which had preceded it, that on returning to bed (and despite the warmth of the night) I closed both lattices and ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... another in embellishing her young mind with all the graces, learning and accomplishments possible for the human mind to contain. Her native brightness and active mind absorbed everything with an almost supernatural rapidity and tact, and it was not long before she became their peer, and her qualities of mind reached out so far beyond theirs in its insatiable longing, that she, in her turn, became their tutor, adviser and consoler, as ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... temptation to shoot presents itself. So the sale was held, not only in a secluded corner, but in the brief half-light between sunset and night. Some civilians came as a matter of curiosity to look on, but the majority were soldiers, regular or irregular, on business intent, and they soon ran up with a rapidity that gave the good traders of Ladysmith a lesson in commercial possibilities when it was too late for them to profit by it to the full. Eggs sold readily at nine shillings a dozen, their freshness being taken ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... by step, the progress of mental anguish, but when that point is passed, analysis loses its interest; the vocabulary of pain has exhausted itself, the phenomena already noted do but repeat themselves with more rapidity, with more intensity—detail is lost in the mere sense of throes. Perchance the mind is capable of suffering worse than the fiercest pangs of hopeless love combined with jealousy; one would not pretend to ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... steamer developed with great rapidity, the value of which was never more demonstrated than at the present time. It will always be remembered, however, that this Capt. Rogers with his crude little Savannah was the man whose bold enterprise gave birth to the idea of ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... with great rapidity, a prodigious circle of rain and clouds whirling overhead like smoke, while the lightning, every now and then, flashed with intense brightness, followed by ...
— Stolen Treasure • Howard Pyle
... know that it may take a long time before help can come from you, Comrades, American Workingmen, for the development of the revolution in the different countries proceeds along various paths, with various rapidity (how could it be otherwise!) We know full well that the outbreak of the European proletarian revolution may take many weeks to come, quickly as it is ripening in these days. We are counting on the inevitability of the international revolution. But that ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... look ahead, I could see the trestle here and there for miles; so small and so narrow and apparently so fragile that I could only compare it to a chalk-mark upon which, high in the air, I was running at a rate unknown to railroads. One circumstance during the trip did more to show me the terrible rapidity with which we dashed through the flume than anything else. We had been rushing down at a pretty lively rate of speed when the boat suddenly struck something in the bow, a nail, a lodged stick of wood or some secure substance ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... in the dark sultry evening of a burning day, when all employment was impossible, I have often found it a pastime to watch their glancing light, now here, now there; now seen, now gone; shooting past with the rapidity of lightning, and looking like a shower of falling stars, blown about in ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... the room for more than a minute or two.... As she crossed the narrow cobbled roadway, with the grass growing luxuriantly between the rounded pebbles, she stumbled and recovered herself with a swift little forward run, and the circular feet twinkled with the rapidity of those of a thrush scudding ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... the water. There was a broad band now of yellow with a white edge down the center of the stony flat, and it was widening with terrible rapidity. It was scarce ten yards from the windlass at the top of Red George's shaft when Dick, followed ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... daybreak in search of the young giraffe, of which they had lost sight not far from the camp. The sandy desert is well adapted to afford indications to a hunter, and in a very short time they were on the track of the object of their pursuit: they followed the traces with rapidity and in silence, lest the creature should be alarmed while yet at a distance; but after a laborious chase of several hours through brambles and thorny trees, they at last succeeded in capturing ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... and led the way to a carriage house. Here, with great rapidity, the four youths stripped off the odd suits and donned their regular garments. Then they hid the other things ...
— Young Hunters of the Lake • Ralph Bonehill
... distressing intelligence of the extreme—indeed, hopeless—illness of our dear relative, Dr. Wolcott. My husband immediately commenced his preparations for instant departure. I begged to be permitted to accompany him, but the rapidity with which he proposed to journey obliged him to refuse my entreaties. In a few hours his provisions, horses, and all other things necessary for the journey were in readiness, and he set off with Petaille Grignon, his usual attendant on such expeditions, ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... which he says: "It may be observed that the severity of the symptoms is not always commensurate either with the duration of the disease or the degree of stricture, and that, although the progressive development of them varies considerably in rapidity, in different individuals, it is, nevertheless, in the latter stages, always more rapid." Macilwain also graphically describes the insidious approach of these genito-urinary troubles. In speaking of stricture he says: "Although minute inquiry generally informs us that the ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... and fierce. His intuitive decisions were generally right, and he acted upon them instantly, without hesitation; but he had no cunning and little strategy. He was always for doing and never for waiting; and to the extreme rapidity of his movements he owed the success he had. In the first three years of his reign he fought nineteen battles and vanquished nine self-styled kings; but he never, on any occasion, detected a conspiracy, nor destroyed a revolution before it had broken out openly. ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... through with great rapidity, the project fully realising the designs of its inaugurators. By aid of this great structure, 2,500 square miles have been added to the area of the 10,500 miles hitherto subject to cultivation. Its value to the country is at the ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... manner in which he acquitted himself. The subject of his speech was similar to that of his countrymen who had spoken in English; but he related more minutely and graphically the occurrences on board the "Amistad." The easy manner of Cinquez, his natural, graceful, and energetic action, the rapidity of his utterance, and the remarkable and various expressions of his countenance, excited admiration and applause. He was pronounced a powerful natural orator, and one born to sway the minds of his fellow-men. Should he be converted ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... thrown off the surface of various electrodes, in vacuum tubes, they find not only that dust, however fine, suspended in a gas will not act like gaseous matter in becoming luminous with its characteristic spectrum in an electric discharge, but that it is driven with extraordinary rapidity out of the course of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... the Ency. Metropolitana, that "its current has great violence and rapidity, and its depth is unfathomable," must be ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... exaggerated the effect of the sinuous curves into which Ranji's body resolves itself before he makes a stroke. That he can unbend faster than any other cricketer past or present is an incontestable fact. The yarn of how in a match at Cambridge he once brought off a catch with such amazing rapidity that the batsman, under the impression that the ball had travelled near the boundary, continued running till Ranji extracted the ball from his pocket, is most likely apocryphal; but to anyone who has seen him fielding slip the feat ascribed ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... a chapter in Bentley's Magazine, entitled "A Day with Barnum," in which he said they accomplished business with such rapidity that, when he attempted to write out the accounts of the day, he found the whole thing so confused in his brain that he came near locating "Peeping Tom" in the house of Shakespeare, while Guy of Warwick WOULD stick his head above the ruins of Kenilworth, and the Warwick Vase ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... might, and see what we can do with this new enterprise, and the whole splendid continent of Africa opens before us and our children. Our nation shall roll the tide of civilization and Christianity along its shores, and plant there mighty republics, that, growing with the rapidity of tropical vegetation, shall be for ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... that which is perceptible. If, simply referring to the progress of science in our own times, we compare the imperfect physical knowledge of Robert Boyle, Gilbert, and Hales, with that of the present day, and remember that every few years are characterized by an increasing rapidity of advance, we shall be better able to imagine the periodical and endless changes which all physical sciences are destined to undergo. New substances and new forces will ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... and pleading that the interest on the bonds was in default and that Addicks was dissipating the assets of the company, had succeeded in inducing the judge to appoint Braman receiver. The whole performance was put through with such marvellous rapidity that not one of Addicks' innumerable henchmen had had a hint of it, and so no warning could be given in any direction. Braman, an adept in corporation try-outs, lost not a moment, for the instant his receivership appointment was signed he pounced down ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
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