|
|
|
More "Weird" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... consciousness, suggested the following distinct species of lies. It is often a well-marked epoch when the young child first learns that it can imagine and state things that have no objective counterpart in its life, and there is often a weird intoxication when some absurd and monstrous statement is made, while the first sensation of a deliberate break with truth causes a real excitement which is often the birth pang of the imagination. More ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... the stained glass made a faint twilight in the church, but there was something weird and strange about being there alone at that hour that set the boy's heart to beating faster ...
— The Bishop's Shadow • I. T. Thurston
... at Henrietta, who felt very much ashamed, and crept behind her two friends. Madame Torvestad now struck up a hymn, in which all the company joined. To Jacob Worse's ear, all these voices in the low room, the subdued tones of the women, and the rough bass of the men, sounded weird and unpleasing. ...
— Skipper Worse • Alexander Lange Kielland
... and faced Patty, with rolling eyes and a weird grimace. But Patty looked so astounded and frightened that the face broke into a reassuring ...
— Patty Fairfield • Carolyn Wells
... literature which had slumbered for several years after the death of Defoe, but which the genius of Fielding and Smollett had again brought into fashion. But their tales purported to be pictures of the manners of the day. This was rather the forerunner of Mrs. Radcliffe's[1] weird tales of supernatural mystery, which for a time so engrossed the public attention as to lead that "wicked wag," Mr. George Coleman, to regard them as representatives of the class, and to ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... continued at dead of night through the lattice. Here they discourse on the real nature of love. At length the gloomy lover persuades Isidora to marry him. Their midnight nuptials take place against a weird background. By a narrow, precipitous path they approach the ruined chapel, and are united by a hand "as cold as that of death." Meanwhile, Don Francisco, Isidora's father, on his way home, spends the night at an inn, where a stranger insists ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... ridiculous as this place at present. They expected the Emperor ten or twelve days ago, and put up all manner of triumphal arches made of evergreens, which look like tea-leaves now, and will take a withered and weird appearance hardly to be foreseen, long before the twenty-fifth, when the visit is vaguely expected to come off. In addition to these faded garlands all over the leading streets, there are painted eagles hoisted over gateways and sprawling across a hundred ways, which ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... sometimes a dozen revolved on one post, and Maurice would stop long enough to laugh. How easy it was to walk! All he had to do was to lift a foot, and the pavement would rise to meet it. The moon, standing high behind him, cast a long, weird shadow, and he staggered after it and cut at it with the saber. It was only when he saw the lights of the royal palace and the great globes on the gate posts that sanity returned. This sanity was of ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... fro, have to ask their way from battery to battery, or go yards beyond their real objective point. Little fires are burning here and there, and battery-lanterns are flickering in the gloom. Out on the face of the stream, too, one can see from the northern shore weird, dancing lights, like will-o'-the-wisps, go twinkling through the fog; and far across the waters, from time to time, there is heard the sudden crack of rifle. The Southern pickets are beginning to catch faint ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... waiting for a guest in that weird institution which she called her club. The weird institution, however, had lost some of its weirdness and gained in comfort and cachet. It now boasted many members of distinction, new decorations and enlarged subscriptions. Miss Julia Winter sat in the mauve drawing-room ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... the one pastime which could be practiced without making a noise of any sort to attract undesirable attentions, the boy took to it in self-defence. But before long it had become his passion. He read, by stealth, everything that fell into his hands, a weird melange of newspapers, illustrated Parisian weeklies, magazines, novels: cullings from the ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... "Do you think she would show you such consideration? I assure you, to-night is the time of all times!" There was something so malicious, so weird in his tone and manner that she shuddered as she listened to his words. In spite of her humiliation, her bitterness and suffering, and her desire for retribution, she never realized that one could find such sweet satisfaction in revenge as did Don Felipe. The prospect of it ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... change and 'cease to be,' And empires rise and grow and fall; But the weird music of the sea Lives, ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... forth in search of adventures in the thick of a 'London particular,' Mr. Guppy's phrase for a fog. When you are once ensconced in your garden seat by the driver, you go lumbering through a world of bobbing shadows, where all is weird, vague, grey, dense; and where great objects loom up suddenly in the mist and then disappear; where the sky, heavy and leaden, seems to descend bodily upon your head, and the air is full of a kind of ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... one of the 'properties'—the caldron for the witches' cave; and the three uncouth-looking figures, with broken clothes-props in their hands, who are drinking gin-and-water out of a pint pot, are the weird sisters. This miserable room, lighted by candles in sconces placed at lengthened intervals round the wall, is the dressing-room, common to the gentlemen performers, and the square hole in the ceiling is the trap-door of the stage above. You will observe that the ceiling is ornamented with the ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... few months under the black flag, until he went down on the Isle of Haut. The events of that brief and thrilling period are unfortunately obscure, with only a ray of light here and there. But the story of his passing is the most weird of all the strange yarns that are spun about the ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... spellbound. It seemed to him that the most exciting chapter of this weird tale was ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... hills across the water came the dull resonance of distant guns and a remote weird crying. Then everything was still. A cockchafer came droning over the hedge and past us. High in the west the crescent moon hung faint and pale above the smoke of Weybridge and Shepperton and the hot, ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... about sixteen, and to be a sort of animated flowers and make home bright and be given things. He was irritated that they would not remain at this, and still more irritated that they failed to suppress altogether their natural interest in young men. The tandems would be steered by weird and devious routes to evade the bare chance of his bloodshot eye. My aunt seemed to have no ideas whatever about what was likely to happen to her children. She had indeed no ideas about anything; she took her husband and the ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... we shall see any more of them," Harry said, "and I own that I shall be glad. There is something very weird in their noiseless flitting about, and in the shadows the fire casts on ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... night sounds through Johnnie's open window. From near-by came Chirpy Cricket's cheerful piping. And in the distant swamp the musical Frog family held a singing party every evening. Johnnie Green liked to hear them. But he objected strongly to the weird hooting and horrid laughter of Solomon Owl, who left the hemlock woods after dark to hunt for ...
— The Tale of Kiddie Katydid • Arthur Scott Bailey
... paler, day by day thinner, day by day a stranger light burns in his bonny eyes. Weird thoughts sweep through Baby's brain, weird questions startle Mamma out of the golden languors in which she is steeped, weird words frighten the gentle Ayah as she fondles her darling. The current of babble and laughter has almost ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... heavy upon the ground, the grass is saturated with dew, and the numerous trees not only freely bespatter everything beneath their widespreading branches with copious showers of dewdrops, as the wind sweeps through them, but many of them have a trick of assuming a singularly weird and uncanny appearance in the first faint light of the early dawn; yet Jack felt quite happy, not to say exhilarated, as he and his friend the Colonel of Cuirassiers stepped briskly along the dew- sodden gravel paths on their way ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... of the Steenbeek are left behind and flickering Verey lights cast into weird relief the rugged surface of the earth. At Pommern Castle our front trenches, in which figures of men loom indistinctly, are reached. At one corner, where the trench is littered with fragments, we are cautioned by a sentry, whose ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... man up trembling in every joint. Once in the saddle, he seemed to gather in a moment unnatural vigour; and the figure that went flying to Tergou was truly weird-like and terrible: so old and wizened the face; so white and reverend the streaming hair; so baleful the eye; so fierce the fury which shook the bent frame that went spurring like mad; while the quavering voice yelled, "I'll make their hearts ache. I'll make their hearts ache. I'll make their ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... language which often misses fire even with us, but that enormous alphabet of sun and moon and green grass and blue sky in which alone we meet, and by which alone we can signal to each other. That unique man of genius, George Macdonald, described in one of his weird stories two systems of space co-incident; so that where I knew there was a piano standing in a drawing-room you knew there was a rose-bush growing in a garden. Something of this sort is in small or great affairs the ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... own medium of expression as the most difficult. Mrs. Browning's "Hatty" had bestowed in her bag a volume of Mr. Browning's, and on the homeward journey from Albano to Rome he read aloud to them his "Saul." At the half-way house on the Campagna, the Torre di Mezza, they paused, to gaze at the "weird watcher of the Roman Campagna," the monument to Apuleia, whose ruins are said to have assumed ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... awkwardness suggestive of a greater skill with another instrument only less powerful. He was seated on two reversed buckets, pyramidally balanced, at a small table which had the air of wide capabilities in some other sphere of usefulness. There was a weird cunning in the legs of this table indicative of subtle change into a camp-bed ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... we dine we are not tempted by the Voice. We are wary of weird sauces. We shun the cunning aspics. We look about at our neighbor's table. He is eating of things French, and Russian and Hungarian. Of food garnished, and garish and greasy. And with a little sigh of Content and resignation we settle down to our ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... was most carefully-masked; but this precaution soon proved to be unnecessary, the boats having traversed less than half the distance between the schooner and the other two vessels when vivid sheet lightning began to play along the south-western horizon, lighting up the scene with its weird radiance frequently enough to enable us to steer a perfectly straight course. The fight was still going on when we left the schooner; but it appeared to cease soon afterwards, and we came to the conclusion that the crew of the Indiaman ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... the nose so impossible that it elevated his countenance from commonplace ugliness to weird distinction had taken a friendly fancy to her. He was Julius Bam, nephew of the proprietor. In her third week he offered her the forewoman's place. "You've got a few brains in your head," said he. "Miss Tuohy's a boob. Take the job and you'll push up. We'll start you ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... it! Oh, the spectral splendor of that vision! The whole great ship in full sail instantly makes an acute silhouette against the monstrous disk,—rests there in the very middle of the vermilion sun. His face crimsons high above her top-masts,—broadens far beyond helm and bowsprit. Against this weird magnificence, her whole shape changes color: hull, masts, and sails turn black—a ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... spectacle wild, weird, altogether indescribable; and by Captain Redwood not to be looked upon a moment longer than was necessary to ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... bureau. And if in all this "land of the free and home of the brave" there be a single throne, it must be this same curiously changeable chair. In spite of, or perhaps because of, its strange powers, that weird piece of furniture managed to make itself so felt that it was religiously avoided by every native who called at the Forks. Not the wildest "Hill-Billy" of them all dared to occupy for a moment this seat of Uncle Sam's representative. Here Uncle ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... to the right a huge intensely bright disc of weird colour span incessantly, and letters of fire that came and ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... was a ghost to some purpose—a ghost free from all the weird associations of death and the grave—a healthy, utilisable ghost, and a ghost, above all, which wanted to be photographed. It seemed too good to be true. Yet how strange it was! Here we have just been discussing ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... awesomely think of it, and how solemn it looked when I had reluctantly left it at dusk, an hour or two before; then I would picture it to myself, later, lying deep and cold and still under the stars, in the dark thicket, with all that weird, uncanny lite seething beneath ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... his father-in-law, the latter with rifle in hand, prepared for action. The first joy at beholding them safe and sound was damped by the news they brought. As soon as Carruthers could recover himself he spoke to the weird woman and invited her to come and rest at Bridesdale. Then he hastened on ahead to warn his wife and sister, and make arrangements for the reception of the strange visitor. When the party arrived at the house they found a large ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... valleys. The moonlight was now enveloping like a luminous mist the valley of Couesnon. Certainly a woman whose heart was burdened with a despised love would be sensitive to the melancholy which that soft brilliancy inspires in the soul, by the weird appearance it gives to objects and the colors with which ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... lease of human life Warns me to hedge in my diplomacy. The sooner, then, the safer! Ay, this eve, This very night, will I take steps to rid My morrows of the weird contingencies That vision round and make one hollow-eyed.... The unexpected, lurid death of Lannes— Rigid as iron, reaped down like a straw— Tiptoed Assassination haunting round In unthought thoroughfares, the near success Of Staps the madman, argue to forbid The riskful ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... groups of persons, gravely clad, were making their bargains before starting for some perhaps distant spot on the highway, to keep a dies rosationis, this being the time of roses, at the grave of a deceased relation. Here and there, a funeral procession was slowly on its way, in weird contrast to the gaiety ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... human. As the moth to the flame, we are led, even against our will, into all of life, even the most unpleasant. The charm possessed by the novel and unplumbed, by such stories as Jude the Obscure, or by the weird imaginings of a Baudelaire, comes from this source. It is no mere scientific curiosity, because it includes that "consciousness of kind," which makes us feel akin ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... which all present, but one, had heard a dozen times. It mattered the less, as it was a good one. Sir Charles capped it with a better. The Governor told a weird tale of Lunsford's men, the "babe-eating" regiment. Sir Charles recounted a little adventure of His Grace of Buckingham with a quack astrologer, a Court lady, and an orange girl, which made the ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... surprise the gruff voice of a man bade me enter. I found myself in a small room, blue with smoke and poorly furnished. An old man was cooking supper, as he hummed some weird old gypsy tune. He seemed scarcely to notice me and displayed neither surprise nor dissatisfaction at my sudden appearance. I murmured some excuse about being in the wrong house, that I was looking ...
— Futurist Stories • Margery Verner Reed
... brethren of the congregation might have felt inclined to hold up their hands in dismay could they have looked in there just at that moment, and seen all the weird goings-on that were taking place. Still, an investigation would have proven that the scouts were not responsible for the scrimmage; since they had a perfect right to ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts on a Tour - The Mystery of Rattlesnake Mountain • George A. Warren
... depression pervaded the group of riders as they wound in and out of the cottonwood clumps and threaded the deep coulee that led to the bench. For the most part they preserved an owlish silence, but now and then someone would break into a low, weird refrain and the others would join in with the mournful strain ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... but the tireless fireflies danced in the blackness of the wood. The river gurgled faintly in the wind-stirred reeds. From out the gloom of the thicket came the weird coco-coco of the horned owl. From the starlit sky above fell the shrill cry of the mosquito hawk, "peepeegeeceese, peepeegeeceese!" From an isolated bark tepee came the subdued incantation of the Indian medicine-man, while above the singing of the ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... ever stand listening to the seals just at nightfall, and did their weird, low call stir you to a feeling of kinship with all the creatures of the great deep, and did you lose yourself there out under the cold, dark water in that mysterious untamed world of the sea that is ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... jungle of pain and grief which seemed to spread round and about so many she loved; whilst Dekko, puffed out with sleepiness, sat on the back of a chair, muttering incoherently to some fanciful image of his weird brain. ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... and he thought unobserved, out of the front door of the section house, and slink stealthily to the very spot where his darling's tiny garments had been found, and there amid heart-rending shrieks, which we in our bunk house could plainly hear above the weird moanings of the winter storms, he would dig with his bare hands deep into the cruel snow, searching for his lost baby—his ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... Riches, Knowledge, and Love; and in depicting their peculiar and wonderful virtues Mrs. Prentiss has wrought into the story with much skill her own theory of a happy life. She wrote the book with intense delight, and its strange, weird-like scenes and characters—the home in the forest; Dolman, the poor woodcutter; Cinda, his tall and strong-minded wife; Nidworth, their first-born; wandering Hidda, boding ill-luck; the hermit; these and all the rest—seemed to her, for a while, almost as real ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... Mrs. Hunt tragically, as twelve strokes chimed from the grandfather clock in the hall. Wally and Norah, crowned with blue and scarlet paper caps, the treasure of crackers, were performing a weird dance which they called, with no very good reason, a tango. It might have been anything, but it satisfied the performers. The music stopped suddenly, and Mr. Linton wound up the gramophone for the last ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... colours in a kaleidoscope with the wavering and increasing light. At one time it seemed to me that one of the trees was a gipsy woman enveloped in a cloak, extending her arm towards me threateningly; at another, two weird dogs seemed to be fighting together; but however fantastic and fearsome had been these strange effects of light and fancy mingled together, I should not have minded—I knew what they were; it was a relief to have anything to look at ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth
... it into his head to entertain weird beings from other houses whose brothers or cousins he had met in the holidays. On such occasions he liked to have some trusty friend by him to help the conversation along. It struck Kennedy that this ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... skippers were ashore in the red-curtained public-houses. The roar of personal experiences sounded through the cloud of tobacco-smoke and steam, and the drinking was steady and determined. Out on the river the shadows fell on the racing tide; the weird lights flickered in the brown depths of the water; and the swirling eddies gurgled darkly and flung the boats hither and thither. In the stern of each boat was a crouching figure; for the little cabin-boy had to wait ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... suggestion of contrast still farther one should read Hugo's "Notre Dame" on the spot. It will give a wonderful and whimsical conception of those weird gargoyles and devils, which have only to be seen to awaken a new interest in what this great writer has put forth. For another sensation, pleasant or otherwise, one might look up a copy of Meyron's wonderful ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... that I—that we, for my wife and little girl would be at one with me in my wish, did they know of it, must not keep you from your purpose of fighting out your trouble alone. Every man, as the Scotch proverb says, must "dree his own weird." I shall not, I must not, ask you for any promise; but I trust that if ever you do come back you will make us all glad by seeing you. And remember that what I said of myself and of all I have—all—holds good so ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... effective than physical, if designed and applied with sufficient wisdom. The bull-roarer, of which something has been already said, furnishes the ceremonies with a background of awe. It fills the woods, that surround the secret spot where the rites are held, with the rise and fall of its weird music, suggestive of a mighty rushing wind, of spirits in the air. Not until the boys graduate as men do they learn how the sound is produced. Even when they do learn this, the mystery of the voice speaking through the chip of wood merely wings the imagination for loftier flights. Whatever else ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... Then her nervous fingers once more gripped my arm, as, looking into my face, her eyes shining with a weird, unusual light, she replied in quick, ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... air. A swarm of mosquitoes buzzed in the glare thrown by the lamp with a shrill, attenuated sound like the skirl of far-away bagpipes. A creature with bat-like wings flapped with a monstrous ungainliness between the outer posts of the verandah. From across the compound an owl called on a weird note of defiance. And in the dim waste of distance beyond she heard the piercing cry of a jackal. But close at hand, so far as the rays of the lamp penetrated, she could ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... was chartered for a sail of a couple of hours, and then followed the drive home to 'Sconset by a different course from that of the morning, and varied by the gradually fading light of the setting sun and succeeding twilight casting weird shadows here and there among the ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley
... then, to say that Kelley's music flags in no wise behind the divine progress of the words. The lute idea dictates an arpeggiated accompaniment, whose harmonic beauty and courage is beyond description and beyond the grasp of the mind at the first hearing. The bravery of the climax follows the weird and opiate harmonies of the middle part with tremendous effect. The song is, in my fervent belief, a masterwork of absolute genius, one of the very greatest ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... valley of the dead; Lit by a weird half light; No sound they made, no word they said; And they were pale with fright. Then suddenly from unseen places came Loud laughter, that was like ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... our guns, too, now, very well. They were giving voice all around me, but never a gun could I see, for all my peering and searching around. Even the battery we had passed below was out of sight now. And it was a weird thing, and an uncanny thing to think of all that riot of sound around, and not a sight to be had of the batteries ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... floor back and forth, stopping now and then to listen expectantly. Then again he seated himself to wait. Several times, passionately insistent, he shook his head, and it was as if the refusal were being made to an invisible presence. Suddenly he lifted his face as the sound of a weird, wild wail was borne to him, mingling with the elf-like moaning of the wind. He leaned forward slightly, listening intently. From somewhere above him pleading notes from a violin were making the night even more mournful. A change came ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White
... spirit-lamps, little pipes, little lacquer trays, little teapots, little cups-all the accessories and all the remains of a Japanese feast, resembling nothing so much as a doll's tea-party. In the midst of this circle of dandies are three overdressed women, one might say three weird visions, robed in garments of pale and indefinable colors, embroidered with golden monsters; their great coiffures are arranged with fantastic art, stuck full of pins and flowers. Two are seated ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... even this semblance of interest died out or was confined to strange tales whispered under breath on weird nights at neighboring firesides, and the old neglect prevailed once more. The whole place—new brick and old stone—seemed doomed to a common fate under the hand of time, when the present Philo Ocumpaugh, succeeding to the property, brought new wealth and business enterprise ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... she climbed upon the bed, took her dying husband's head upon her lap, and, bending close above his face, began to sing. It was a melody I had never heard before—low, and sweet, and quaint. The effect was weird and thrilling as the notes fell tremulous from the singer's lips in the hush of that dead hour of the night. Presently the dying man became more quiet, and before the song was finished he opened his eyes as a smile swept over his face, and ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... commence at eight o'clock. The wind blew fiercely through the stiff, naked boughs of the giant maples, and drifted the light powdery snow madly on before it. I had been in-doors all day listening to the weird wailing of the ceaseless wind as it whistled down the chimneys and swept past the house corners. I had written and read and stitched until my eyes were wearied and my fingers numb, and it was only four o'clock, that ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... something very weird and awful in the brief note of time with which the Evangelist sends Judas on his dark errand. 'He ... went immediately out, and it was night.' Into the darkness that dark soul went. That hour was 'the power of darkness,' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... animal it was, Confucius was sent for. At once he declared it to be a K'e-lin, and legend says that its identity with the one which appeared before his birth was proved by its having the piece of ribbon on its horn which Ching-tsae tied to the weird animal which presented itself to her in a dream on Mount Ne. This second apparition could only have one meaning, and Confucius was profoundly affected at the portent. "For whom have you come?" he cried, "for whom have you come?" and then, bursting into tears, he added, "The course of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... Some six or seven killer whales, old and young, were skirting the fast floe edge ahead of the ship; they seemed excited and dived rapidly, almost touching the floe. As we watched, they suddenly appeared astern, raising their snouts out of water. I had heard weird stories of these beasts, but had never associated serious danger with them. Close to the water's edge lay the wire stern rope of the ship, and our two Esquimaux dogs were tethered to this. I did not think ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... stories of his gifted son. One alone, called "Solomon-Nameh," fills eighty books. Arabia also claims Solomon as the Father of her kings, and to this day, under the eastern sky dusky Arabs sit around the lonely tent-fire and tell weird and wonderful tales of the wit, wisdom, and wealth of Solomon. Legends of which he is the hero are also preserved not only in Asia and Africa, but also in the remotest corners of Europe. According to ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... and gained a petty mound Beyond it, whence we saw the lights and heard the voices murmuring. While I listened, came On a sudden the weird seizure and the doubt: I seemed to move among a world of ghosts; The Princess with her monstrous woman-guard, The jest and earnest working side by side, The cataract and the tumult and the kings Were shadows; ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... let it be, John. But why am I evil if I have the second sight like my mother before me? Oh! she warned me what must come if I married you, and I would not listen; now I warn you, and you will not listen. Well, so be it, we must dree our own weird, everyone of us, a short one; all save Rachel, who was born to live her life. Man, I tell you, that the Spirit drives you on to convert the heathen just for one thing, that the heathen may make a martyr ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... their animals nearer and nearer to the pits, they urged them faster until the unhappy creatures, besides themselves at the weird occurrences of a night of terror, were at a ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... the knight did fondle, / and straightway saw him not, Unto her maids attendant / spake the queen distraught: "Meseemeth a mickle wonder / where now the king hath gone. His hands in such weird fashion / who now from out mine own ...
— The Nibelungenlied - Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original • trans. by George Henry Needler
... then are long, as the nights are short, for in the north of Finland there is a midnight sun, and even in Helsingfors, during June, he does not set till about eleven, consequently it remains light all night—that strange weird sort of light that we English folk only know as appertaining to very early morning. As we sat finishing supper about ten o'clock at the Kapellet, we were strongly reminded of the light at three A.M. one morning, only a week or two before, ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... them get real happy shouting, we did so. And now commenced a religious dance, perfectly indescribable, and as long as I have been in the South it was perfectly new to me. The leader started down one of the aisles chanting a weird plantation song, and every joint in his body moving in time with the measure; the sisters took it up and followed two by two until there was a complete circle all around the church, all dancing ...
— The American Missionary - Vol. 44, No. 3, March, 1890 • Various
... of there being snow falling outside and an eerie wind wailing through the skeleton trees, the night was still and muggy. Lastly, I did not know, until the journal reached my hands, that he was put into the room known as the Haunted Chamber, nor that in that room the fire is noted for casting weird shadows upon the walls. This, however, may be so. The legend of the manor-house ghost he tells precisely as it is known to me. The tragedy dates back to the time of Charles I., and is led up to by a pathetic love-story, which I need not give. ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... the ruins a faint sound reaches his ear. He stops instantly and listens, his head bent, every sense on the alert. He is not thinking of Honor now—not in his wildest dreams would he connect her in any way with these weird unholy old ruins; but he is anxious—as anxious as ever Launce was—to solve the mystery that attaches to the place. Again it comes, a long-drawn, gasping cry, with this time a ring of fear ...
— Only an Irish Girl • Mrs. Hungerford
... blanched and terror-stricken, for the last reverberations of the thunder, the whistle of the Fast Express, bound from Millville to the great city, rose wildly on the air, like the scream of an exultant demon, and died away in a series of weird and mocking ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... half shyly, and looked in startled wonder. The baby was strikingly like Gila, with all her grace, delicate features, wide innocent eyes. The sweep of the long lashes on the little white cheeks, that were all too white for baby flesh, seemed old and weird in the tiny face. Yet when the baby looked up and recognized its father it crowed and smiled, and the smile was wide and frank and lovable, like Tennelly's. There was nothing artificial about it. Courtland drew a long sigh of relief. For the moment he had been looking at the baby as if ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... to one of them, then the fellow began putting on the weird uniform. It made him look like a visitor from another world. The tremendous weight of his garb prevented him from moving at more than a slow shuffle across the deck, strong though ...
— Tom Swift and His Giant Telescope • Victor Appleton
... The superstition of the Highlanders. This is shown in Brian's faith and in the weird ceremonies in connection with the Fiery Cross. 2. The method of mustering the clans by means of the message of the Fiery Cross. 3. Their ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... dice with Ceres in Ilades, by investing one of their body with a cloak made in a single day, [Greek: pharos autemeron exyphenantes], Euterpe, cxxii. Gray, in his ode of The Fatal Sisters, has embodied the Scandinavian myth in which the twelve weird sisters, the Valkiriur, weave "the crimson web of war" between the rising and ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... Erlking, his long, spectral arms outstretched to grasp the child, the frantic gallop of the horse, the alarmed father clasping his darling to his bosom in convulsive embrace, the siren-like elves hovering overhead, to lure the little soul with their weird harps. There can be no better illustration than is furnished by this terrible scene of the magic power of mythology to invest the simplest physical phenomena with the most intense human interest; for the true significance of the whole picture ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... indulge such superstitious vagaries, my dear, wise Janet. The age of hobgoblins, haunted houses, and supernatural influences has passed away with the marvels of alchemy and the weird myths of Rosicrucianism. Because many deaths have occurred at that place, and the residents were consequently plunged in gloom, you must not rashly impute eldritch influences to the atmosphere surrounding it. Knowing ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... brought it up, and after some delay a place for it was found. The two lights now plainly showed a sudden enlargement in the area of the cave, and above them hung what appeared to be huge icicles, giving the interior a weird appearance. Still ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... clumps of feathery bamboo; there were big trees covered with scarlet flowers instead of leaves; there was the flaming bougainvillea in profusion; and, in addition, there were great trailing cables of orchids, of weird shapes and vivid colouring reaching from bough to bough. Yes, there was plenty to see and marvel at, and there would be more when those few yards of rippling water had been spanned and their feet pressed the lush grass of yonder flowery mead close by the river's ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... magic round me here; But fading, blotted, dim, a picture faint, With spell more silent, only pleads a tear. Plead not! Thou hast my heart, O picture dim! I see the fields, I see the autumn hand Of God upon the maples! Answer Him With weird, translucent glories, ye that stand Like spirits in scarlet and in amethyst! I see the sun break over you: the mist On hills that lift from iron bases grand Their heads superb!—the dream, ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... the young musician. In little more than a week's time he composed an opera, "Rodrigo," for which he obtained one hundred sequins. His next visit was to Venice, where he arrived at the height of the carnival. Whatever effect Venice, with its weird and mysterious beauty, with its marble palaces, facades, pillars, and domes, its magnificent shrines and frescoes, produced on Handel, he took Venice by storm. Handel's power as an organist and a harpsichord player was only second ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... according to the elder Pomeroy, little Albert who had not been at the O'Connor home the night before, heard the dolorous tale of the wonderful tree in Philadelphia, the gift of nuts and their weird disappearance. To confirm the sad story he picked up the carpet-bag, turned it inside out. Within a torn lining, he triumphantly extracted ten nuts. Child-like, he proceeded to sample them and had eaten three when his ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... I answered, takin' her baby from her arms, an' leadin' the way to the kitchen, where we would be alone, with a great, cracklin' fire in the stove to sit by. I gave her food and comforted her, an' tended the baby, while she told me about hersilf, with an occasional spell o' cryin' an' a wild, weird expression on her face that gave me bad ...
— Nancy McVeigh of the Monk Road • R. Henry Mainer
... sprang up on the rail with a blue light in his hand, and as the weird radiance flared in a long streak to leeward a cry rose from the water. In another few moments a blurred object, half hidden in flying spray, drove down upon the schooner furiously on the top of a sea, and then ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... League over the Negro was due in large degree to the mysterious secrecy of the meetings, the weird initiation ceremony that made him feel fearfully good from his head to his heels, the imposing ritual, and the songs. The ritual, it is said, was not used in the North; it was probably adopted for the particular benefit of the African. The would-be ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... strange, weird dance amongst the imagery of the rings, over which my earth planet was beginning to throw a haze of light. At first it was hardly more than a walk, a slow procession round the twin circumferences of the centred ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... watery mirror of the China Sea. And he will have observed striking features peculiar to this latitude of the Atlantic coast. I recall an atmospheric effect in springtime resembling a light pearl-colored mist, which had none of the qualities of a fog, but rather lent a weird transparency to the air. It gave the impression of sunlight faded or washed of its golden particles, or of a picture drawn on pearl. There was a statuesque stillness about the water, a near and yet a far look about the entire scene, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... bed greatly disturbed in mind as to whether she was doing well to marry the obstreperous Westerner. "He fascinates me in a wild, weird sort of a way when I'm with him," she had said to herself before going to sleep, "and the idea of him is fascinating in certain moods. And it is a temptation to take hold of him and master and train him—like broncho-busting. But is it interesting enough for—for ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... of the most curious and weird circumstances connected with this meeting. Hardly had he laid himself back in his chair before I heard a faint scratching against the table leg, and next moment an enormous cat, black as the Pit of Tophet, ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... domestic affection and fidelity to trusts. Two characters in particular are original creations,—"Dominie Sampson" and "Meg Merrilies," whom no reader can forget,—the one, ludicrous for his simplicity; and the other a gypsy woman, weird and strange, more like a witch than a sibyl, but intensely human, and capable of the strongest attachment for ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... forest. True, she had spent a part of the day in the same place, running no other danger than that of being struck, but the woods in the daytime are not like the woods at night, with the solemn silence and the mysterious shadows, which make one conjure up the vision of so many weird things. ...
— Nobody's Girl - (En Famille) • Hector Malot
... smoke-laden wind, scurrying townward across the barren quarry-lands. The vast canopy was red with the glow of flying embers and fire-lit clouds. Below, in the dusty road, swarmed the long procession of citizens. Grim, stark hemlocks gleamed in the weird, uncanny light that turned the green of their foliage and the black of their trunks into the colour of the rose on the side facing the fire, but left them dark and forbidding on the other. The telegraph-poles beyond the burning warehouse lining the railroad spur that ventured down ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... the fantastic coals. Without, the world was cold and bright, for a pale, tremulous moon filled the world with its beauty. The wind came in across the sea, and mingling with the murmur of the waters, produced a weird and ghost-like sound, as it swept through half-deserted streets, penetrating rudely the abodes of poverty, and whistling around the mansions of the rich. This sound Leah heard faintly, as it sought ingress at her windows, ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... shell screamed over and burst with a weird startling flash of flame a hundred yards away. We followed the right-hand path, and found that it bent to the left again. "This is getting puzzling," I said to Wilde in a low voice. "I think we've come right so far," he replied, "but I shall ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... pain and rage. If anything could have added more agony to the next few minutes it was the sight of Tricky. That ever gay animal was careering down the hill straight towards the feeding sheep. The pump-handle was still tied to its neck, and it clattered over the stones with a noise weird enough to drive the whole flock into the sea. The shepherd knew there must be a catastrophe, but he was powerless to avert it. He was too sore to follow, so he slowly limped towards the hut, to nurse his wrath ...
— The Monkey That Would Not Kill • Henry Drummond
... to Bradley to be an ordinary small hut. Outside the hut was what he took for a curiously shaped log of wood. The inside of the hut was in shadow, but as his eyes became accustomed to the dimness, he saw something in one corner. It was a weird-looking head, ...
— Divinity • William Morrison
... lineage of the Argive kings. After Io's departure, Prometheus renews his defiance to Jupiter, and his stern prophecies, that the son of Saturn shall be "hurled from his realm, a forgotten king." In the midst of these weird denunciations, Mercury arrives, charged by Jupiter to learn the nature of that danger which Prometheus predicts to him. The Titan bitterly and haughtily defies the threats and warnings of the herald, and ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... one of the picturesque incidents that Sturt has introduced in his narrative, and that help to fix on our memory the strangely weird picture of the lonely band of men confronted with the unaccustomed forces ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... who knew what was going on, had his reasons for welcoming this development. He concocted various legends of his own weird experiences at the valley-head, and these, as coming from him, had considerable weight. They were communicated in the first instance to the groom. By him they were conveyed to the coachman; by him, to the coachman's wife; whence they were not long in finding ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... who never forgot her in their Easter offerings, for which, as for all other gifts, she was requested to "call at the back gate." This seemed, indeed, the only way of reaching the weird old creature, who had for so many years appeared daily upon the streets, nobody seemed to know from where, disappearing with the going down of the sun as mysteriously as the golden disk itself. Of course, if any one had cared to insist upon knowing how she lived or where she stayed at nights, he ...
— Solomon Crow's Christmas Pockets and Other Tales • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... what might be called the chorus, were in twelve sets, each group clad in a different colour or design of feather-silk. Their head-dress, while composed of the entire body of a bird of plumage, lacked the flamboyant tail of the peacock. The music was weird and whimsical, as there were neither stringed nor brass instruments. It was made wholly by women playing upon a vast variety of drums and reeds. There were all sizes of whistling reeds or flutes; several of these of different lengths were grouped into one instrument ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... the sun was still a half hour high and filled the west with a red glow. The forest there was tinted by it, and seen thus in the coming twilight with those weird crimsons and scarlets showing through it, the wilderness looked very lonely and desolate. An ordinary boy, at the coming of night would have been awed, if alone, by the stillness of the great unknown spaces, but it found ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the gentle reader, Miss Alcott's stories perennially bloom. And, for some strange reason, the weird "Elsie Dinsmore" series is found under the popular Christmas tree, while nobody gives the Rollo books to anybody. Why? One may begin to believe that that degeneracy which the prevalence of jazz, lip-sticks, and ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... the dim mists had a certain weird quality and Robert's imaginative mind heightened its effect. It was almost like the blind shooting at the blind. A pink dot would appear in the fog, expand a little, and then go out. There would be a sharp report, the whistling of a bullet, perhaps, and that was all. The white men fought in silence, ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... short, and fixed his keen eyes upon the agitated girl, who stood in front of him. For at least two minutes the man and the girl stood face to face, motionless, and without exchanging a word. Through the dead, weird silence, the pulsations of their hearts were plainly audible. It seemed as if before speaking again each wished to fathom the depths of guilt that lay in the other's heart. It was a compact entered into by look and not by speech; and Daumon so well understood this, that at length, when ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... with an old governess, migrate from Kensington to the West of Ireland. Belonging as they do to "the ould family", the girls are made heartily welcome in the cabins of the peasantry, where they learn many weird and curious tales from the folk-lore of the district. An interesting plot runs through the narrative, but the charm of the story lies in its happy mingling ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... 248 The Sixty Stories of the Perfectly Constructed Colossus Building Had Mysteriously Crashed! What Was the Connection Between This Catastrophe and the Weird Strains of the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... the stamp of native heroism. He has, therefore, given a threefold division to the guilt of that crime. The first idea comes from that being whose whole activity is guided by a lust of wickedness. The weird sisters surprise Macbeth in the moment of intoxication of victory, when his love of glory has been gratified; they cheat his eyes by exhibiting to him as the work of fate what in reality can only be accomplished by his own deed, and gain credence for all their words by the immediate fulfilment ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... Spargo and Breton came late at night to Hawes' Junction, on the border of Yorkshire and Westmoreland, and saw rising all around them in the half-darkness the mighty bulks of the great fells which rise amongst that wild and lonely stretch of land. At that hour of the night and amidst that weird silence, broken only by the murmur of some adjacent waterfall the scene was impressive and suggestive; it seemed to Spargo as if London were a million miles away, and the rush and bustle of human life ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher
... Buttercup and his mother of the approach of the old hag. In 'Bushy Bride', No. xlv, he appears only as the lassie's lap-dog, is thrown away as one of her sacrifices, and at last goes to the wedding in her coach; yet in that tale he has something weird about him, and he is sent out by his mistress three times to see if the ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... never forget the sudden weird hush which followed that unexpected sound. The woman released her grasp of her victim as if she had been shot, and the crowd, with a shout on their lips, ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... the winds, gathered into their host the souls of the dead—thus giving birth to the Scandinavian and Teutonic legend of the Wild Horseman, who rides at midnight through the stormy sky, with his long train of dead behind him, and his weird hounds before. The Ribhus, or Arbhus, again, were the sunbeams or the lightning, who forged the armour of the Gods, and made their thunderbolts, and turned old people young, and restored out of the hide alone ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce
... it seemed that I was as old at fifteen as many a girl of eighteen; I had lived so much with grown-up people; I had received all my impressions from them. I was very quick and appreciative. I read character well, and seemed to have a weird, uncanny insight into the thoughts and ideas of people—into their motives and plans. I had too much of this faculty, for I was often made uncomfortable because shadows came between me and others, and because I seemed to feel and understand things ...
— My Mother's Rival - Everyday Life Library No. 4 • Charlotte M. Braeme
... reasoned with him, Why, how many things had bad names undeservedly, and how easy it was to give bad names, and did he not think that if he and I were persistently to whisper in the village that any weird-looking old drunken tinker of the neighborhood had sold himself to the Devil, he would come in time to be suspected of that commercial venture! All this wise talk was perfectly ineffective with the landlord, I am bound to confess, and was as dead a failure ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... the chief indunas ventured to communicate the fact that a very old and strange-looking man, who did not appear to be quite right in his wits, together with a. slightly younger, though equally weird-looking companion, craved an ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... 1905) Guinevere is married to King Arthur, whom she has never seen, when already in love with Lancelot, so that the "marriage" was merely a ceremony, and not a real marriage (cf., May Child, "The Weird of Sir Lancelot," North American ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the wind meanwhile blowing steadily, and playing its song upon the leaves. There was no other sound, but, when it was nearly midnight, a long howl, inexpressibly dreary and weird, came out of ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... was a recruiting of the best voices from several of the choirs of London, and many musical instruments beside. The result was to win general praise for the beauty, harmony and perfection of the music. The weird, dismal strains of a quartette of trombones, in a recess far above the heads of the congregation, playing the three splendid "Equali," Beethoven's funeral hymn, swept through the vaulted roof of the Abbey, in pure tones never to be forgotten. When these ceased and finally died away, the great ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... cannot understand or endure the tyranny of her mother-in-law) by vague predictions and threats of hell; and when a thunderstorm suddenly breaks over the assembled family, after her husband's return, and the weird old lady again makes her appearance, Katerina is fairly crazed. She thinks the terrible punishment for her wayward affections has arrived; she confesses to her husband and mother-in-law that she loves Boris. ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... and the whole army of "Codfederate Brigadiers" on the other. This accounts, in a large measure, for many of Longstreet's strictures upon the conduct of officers of the army, and, no doubt, a mere after thought or the weird imaginations of an ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... not unlike. I recall him, two months later, a little less uncouth, a little better dressed, but in singularity and in angularity much the same. All the world now takes an interest in every detail that concerned him, or that relates to the weird tragedy of his ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... yet published gives a better illustration of his genius, and of the weird charm which has given his stories such ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... coffin. The walls and pillars of each chamber are wonderfully carved and painted. The pillars show pictures of the King making offerings to the gods, or being welcomed by them, but the pictures on the walls are very strange and weird. They represent the voyage of the sun through the realms of the under-world, and all the dangers and difficulties which the soul of the dead man has to encounter as he accompanies the sun-bark on its journey. ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Ancient Egypt • James Baikie
... voluminous, white, canvas hoods, loaded with provisions; after these, countless, giant cannon decorated with branches, flowers and flags, mounted on open trucks without sides. All this procession was a weird phenomenon gliding by in the sky like a mirage, for the road-bed at the rear of the chateau is very high and is hidden by intervening shrubs and bushes so that the wheels of the cars are quite concealed. ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... divine led them to disregard their reason and give their passions undivided sway. One of the chronicles puts it: "Wherever the Almighty builds a church, the Devil comes and builds a chapel by its side." The thing that most distinguished these weird Dutchmen was their communistic views. They taught that, since we all were equal in the eyes of God, we should all be equal likewise in the eyes of men, that temporal government along with class distinctions of every kind ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... time risen above the horizon, and the whole countryside looked so fresh and sweet, from the blue, sparkling sea to the purple mountains, that it was difficult to realise how weird and uncanny was the enterprise ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... or thwart me. It seemed to change its position on the water, as well as in the atmosphere, and I was too busily employed in trying to reach it to discover in the darkness that the current, which I could not distinguish from smooth water, was whirling me down stream as fast as I would approach the weird vessel. ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... provinces, is such a popular element in every Adelphi melodrama; and it ultimately falls into the hands of an unscrupulous young man who succeeds in blackmailing Mr. Bourchier and in marrying his daughter. Mr. Bourchier suffers tortures from excess of chloral and of remorse; and there is psychology of a weird and wonderful kind, that kind which Mr. Conway may justly be said to have invented and the result of which is not to be underrated. For, if to raise a goose skin on the reader be the aim of art, Mr. Conway must be regarded as a real artist. ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... her hands frantically as the scene presented itself, in all its danger, to her excited fancy. She saw the night still and dark, herself stealing like a criminal from the house; she saw the old cypress rising up weird and solemn, she heard the low shiver of its branches as they swayed to and fro; she saw the earth laid ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... who were put to death for witchcraft, without recognizing the well-marked features of the victims of cerebral disorder. In this way I have no doubt a considerable number of mad people were destroyed. Their very appearance suggested to their neighbours the notion of something weird and impish; the physiognomy of madness was mistaken for that of witchcraft, while the poor wretches themselves, conscious of unaccustomed sensations and singular promptings, referred them to the agency of demons. Strangely ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... were our vigilant pickets, and then the vedettes of the enemy. All seemed strangely still and peaceful, but a single shot would have brought thousands of men to their feet. The moon poured a soft radiance over all, and gave to the scene a weird and terrible beauty. The army was like a sleeping giant. Would its awakening be as terrible as on the last three mornings? Then I thought of that other army sleeping beyond our lines,—an army which neither bugle nor the thunder of all our ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... who was willing to run the newspaper, and I turned the post office over to Ma Wagor. Amid the weird beating of tom-toms and the hoo-hoo ah-ah-ahhh of the Indians across the trail, I set up my farewell message in The Wand. In gorgeous regalia of beads and quills, paint and eagle feathers, the Indians had come to send the Great Spirit with Paleface-Prints-Paper ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... encourage this suggestion. There was, he thought, no historical evidence for it. But it seemed to me that if these people ever practised such sacrifices this was the place for them. A gloomier chamber for weird rites ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... supernatural beings dwelt for the most part. Out of culture back to nature the human being sometimes has to go and have strange communings with the spirits there; such is often the movement of the Fairy Tale. But who are these spirits or weird powers dwelling in the lone island or in ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... constant dropping in of friends, nothing to relieve the monotony of daily life. But none of this did Mrs. Orban mind; she was always busy and content by day. It was only of the night-time she was afraid, when strange-voiced creatures were never silent an hour, weird cries from the scrub pierced the air, and there arose from the plantation below wild sounds, sometimes of revelry over a feast, the beating of tom-toms, and wailing of voices as the natives conducted their heathen worship, or indulged in noisy quarrels likely to end ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... known as THE GREAT1 (356-323 B.C.), king of Macedon, was the son of Philip II. of Macedon, and Olympias, an Epirote princess. His father was pre-eminent for practical genius, his mother a woman of half-wild blood, weird, visionary and terrible; and Alexander himself is singular among men of action for the imaginative splendours which guided him, and among romantic dreamers for the things he ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Caliphs and the Caliphate return to Baghdad and Cairo, whilst Asmodeus kindly removes the terrace-roof of every tenement and allows our curious glances to take in the whole interior. This is perhaps the best proof of their power. Finally, the picture- gallery opens with a series of weird and striking adventures and shows as a tail-piece, an idyllic scene of love and wedlock in halls before reeking with ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... Northern Divers]. They were somewhere out on the glittering water, and far apart. We could not see them, but there were four, and one wild call answering another rang out into the great silence. It was weird and beautiful beyond words; the big, shining lake with its distant blue islands; the sky with its wonderful clouds and colour; two little canoes so deep in the wilderness, and those wild, reverberant voices coming up from invisible beings away in the "long light" which lay across the ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... know. All round,' he explained wildly, with a graphic gesture in the direction of the sea and the sky. 'All out round. We've left them all round at places.' To this day I don't know what he meant, but I merely asked when they would quit these weird retreats. He said in an hour: in an hour I called again. Were they in now? 'Well not in—not in, just yet,' he said with a sort of feverish confidentialness, as if he wasn't quite well. 'Are they still—all out at places?' I asked with restrained humour. 'Oh no!' ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... Emily, Charlotte and Anne. They, with their brother, lived in a kind of dream world. Charlotte was the natural story-teller, and she wove endless romances in which figured the great men of history who were her heroes. She also told over and over many weird Yorkshire legends. These children devoured every bit of printed matter that came to the parsonage, and they were as thoroughly informed on all political questions as ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... vast were the proportions of the globe that there was no swaying, shaking, nor trembling ever perceptible. It was as if the splendid structure were a rock, and all the world a swift flying panorama far beneath them. Very strange and weird was the sight of the sun, traveling in one continuous circuit but a few degrees above the horizon, never rising nor setting during six months of the year. The atmosphere was particularly clear and frosty, so that as they promenaded the balcony, ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... of gentle race. 'T were strange in ruder rank to find Such looks, such manners, and such mind. Each hint the Knight of Snowdoun gave, Dame Margaret heard with silence grave; Or Ellen, innocently gay, Turned all inquiry light away:— 'Weird women we! by dale and down We dwell, afar from tower and town. We stem the flood, we ride the blast, On wandering knights our spells we cast; While viewless minstrels touch the string, 'Tis thus our charmed rhymes we sing.' She sung, and still a harp unseen Filled up ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... reveries were broken. In the shallow water of the ford down at the river splashed a horse's hoofs and she heard a voice singing in the weird falsetto of mountain minstrelsy an old ballade which, like much else of the life there, was a heritage ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... about to strike, when his eyes met Jeanne's. The young woman was smiling, happy to die for her lover. Her pale face beamed from out her black hair with weird beauty. Cayrol trembled. That look which he had loved, would he never see it again? That rosy mouth, whose smile he cherished, would it be hushed in death? A thousand thoughts of happy days came to his mind. His arm fell. A bitter flood rushed from his heart to his eyes; ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... hand pulled Garrigan to freedom. Getting the other men up to the floor was the work of but a few moments. They were a weird-looking crew in the torn fragments of clothing that remained to them. Foster stationed them beside the locked cavern door so that they would be hidden behind ...
— The Cavern of the Shining Ones • Hal K. Wells
... this weird and hilly country, that prominent natural feature, Anthony's Nose, which was located on the opposite shore, strongly appealed to my imagination and somewhat excited my mirth. One needs a powerful imagination, I thought, ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... through Hitt of the girl's unusual voice, and had dropped in on his way home to ask that he might hear and test it. With only a smile for reply, Carmen tossed her books and hat upon the sofa and went directly to the piano, where she launched into the weird Indian lament which had produced such an astounding effect upon her chance visitors at the Elwin school that day long gone, and which had been running in her thought and seeking expression ever since her conversation with Doctor ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... and took hold of the old-style door bell. It did not respond at first. Using more force, it emitted a faint eerie tinkle. "It sounds positively weird," was Marjorie's thought. She smiled to herself as she rang it again. "I hope I shall never have to live in a boarding house like this. I am lucky to have love and a beautiful home ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... will make the holiest day more sacred still. Strike with hand of fire, O weird musician, thy harp strung with Apollo's golden hair; fill the vast cathedral aisles with symphonies sweet and dim, deft toucher of the organ keys; blow, bugler, blow, until thy silver notes do touch and kiss ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... darkness save for some weird object in the centre of it, on which a fire was burning, sending up a smoke which hung about the room. Ashe recognized an old Spanish brazier of beaten copper, standing on iron feet, which had been a purchase of his own in days when he trifled with bric-a-brac. Upon it, a heap of ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... exaggerated Milky Way, suddenly caught fire at its eastern end. Rapidly the red flame along ran its entire length to the other horizon. Then countless unexpected shadows woke up on the rocks about me, weird, undefined shapes, which became clear-cut only when the rim of the sun came ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... western sea-rim, and there was still no sign of the captain's boat. On the shore an ominous silence prevailed, though now and then it would be broken by the weird, resonant boom of a conch-shell. The night was passed in the greatest anxiety by all on board, every man, musket in hand, keeping a ...
— The Adventure Of Elizabeth Morey, of New York - 1901 • Louis Becke
... reply. He could not have spoken if he had tried. Once more the spell had seized him—the spell of her weird fascination for him. As she sat typewriting, with her back almost toward him, he sat watching her and analyzing his own folly. He knew that diagnosing a disease does not cure it; but he found an acute pleasure in lingering upon all the details of ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... I fared till, treading the clear heights, I found one frantically painting the peaks and pinnacles of the mountains in weird stipples of alternate ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... I have been getting at. You dip and turn into Vandewater Street. Under the Bridge at once you go, where all sounds are weird, hollow sounds, and then out again. The atmosphere has been becoming more and more charged with the character of the printing business. Now may be felt the tremour and heard the sound of moving presses. Printing houses, dealers in "litho inks," linotype companies, ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... all the sins of that pupil, in connexion with the Occult Sciences, whether of omission or commission, until the moment when initiation makes the pupil a Master and responsible in his turn. There is a weird and mystic religious law, greatly reverenced and acted upon in the Greek, half-forgotten in the Roman Catholic, and absolutely extinct in the Protestant Church. It dates from the earliest days of Christianity and has its basis in the law just stated, of which it was a symbol and an expression. ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... abject terror, she let go her hold of her babe. The boy leaped from her arms into the air, and, whilst the distracted mother uttered a wail of anguish, Giovanni deftly caught his little son in his arms. The child chortled merrily, as if enjoying his weird experience, and, inasmuch as he never so much as uttered the slightest cry of fear, the intrepid Condottiere felt perfectly reassured as to the auspicious ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... across the water came the dull resonance of distant guns and a remote weird crying. Then everything was still. A cockchafer came droning over the hedge and past us. High in the west the crescent moon hung faint and pale above the smoke of Weybridge and Shepperton and the hot, still splendour ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... were these noises around her making her start? Rats! Yes, here they were, venturing out from all the corners. They knew there had been food in the room. This was why Madge had those to gaunt, weird-looking cats in her kitchen! Aurelia went and sat on the step into the court to be out of their way, but Madge hunted her in that the door might be shut and barred; and when she returned trembling to the sitting ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... between the Thier and himself. Werner's men were well content to let their master fight it out. The words spoken by Henker Rothhals, that the Devil had forsaken him, seemed in their minds confirmed by the weird song which every one present could swear he heard with his ears. 'Let him take his chance, and try his own luck,' they said, and shrugged. The battle was between Guy, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and found they had next to no wood to build them. There was scarcely anything in that rocky waste but the dwarf trees of olive; a poetic fantasy woven about that war in after ages described them as hindered even in their wood-cutting by the demons of that weird place. And indeed the fancy had an essential truth, for the very nature of the land fought against them; and each of those dwarf trees, hard and hollow and twisted, may well have seemed like a grinning goblin. It is said that they found timbers by accident in a cavern; they tore ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... Fra Angelico; and the possession of this treasure was regarded by her as a far richer inheritance than that princely state of which she knew nothing. Her neat little cell had a window that looked down on the sea,—on Capri, with its fantastic grottos,—on Vesuvius, with its weird daily and nightly changes. The light that came in from the joint reflection of sea and sky gave a golden and picturesque coloring to the simple and bare furniture, and in sunny weather she often sat there, just as a lizard lies upon a wall, with the simple, warm, delightful sense ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... eye was really there, or if, his imagination stirred by the weird scene and the fairy history of Japan which the sailor had repeated, he was seeing things not present to ...
— Boy Scouts in the Philippines - Or, The Key to the Treaty Box • G. Harvey Ralphson
... the roots of the gorse; the curious dodder spreading a tangled red skein of thread over it gemmed with little round white balls, the rare marsh cinquefoil, the brilliant yellow asphodel, the delicate, exquisite, bog pimpernel, the blue skull-cap, the two weird and curious sun-dews, and even in former times the beautiful dark blue Gentiana Pneumonanthe, as well as the two pinguiculas—Vulgaris, like a violet, and the ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... of emancipation. The boat which has been tethered to the weird, baleful shore is set free, and sails toward the glories of the morning. The man, long cramped in the dark, imprisoning pit, is brought out, and stretches his limbs in the sweet light and air of God's free world. Black servitude is ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... tree, the ash. Yggdrasil[6] is a tree worthy of the gods; it is a world-tree; its roots extend to all the worlds; its branches spread even over heaven. Under it is the fountain Mimir, spring of wisdom, from which Odin drinks daily. Near it is the dwelling of the Norns, fates or weird sisters, who establish laws and uphold them by their judgments, and allot to every man his span of life. They are named Urd the past, Verdandi the present, and Skuld the future. Daily do they water the ash from the spring to keep its leaves fresh, and help it to contend with its numerous foes, ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... to see the camp-fires of a caravan. She laughed, then cried, and she tottered toward Peter, who stood there, a lean weird figure in his tattered blue ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... as I pondered on her sorry tale, One weird, unearthly, melancholy wail, Broke from her lips:—a cry of agony, Of hopeless, mad, despairing misery: Then grim starvation on her little head Laid his cold fingers, and she fell ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 6, 1892 • Various
... than this world must seem To one who its vagaries first does scan; It is less weird than the enchanted dream Which life may change to ere you be a man. Such as it is, take it for this alone,— That ...
— Prince Vance - The Story of a Prince with a Court in His Box • Eleanor Putnam
... to which tree the fruits, flowers, and leaves really belong. The trunks run straight up to a great height without a branch, and then form a thick leafy canopy far overhead; a canopy so dense that even the blaze of the cloudless blue sky is subdued, one might almost say into a weird gloom, the effect of which is enhanced by the solemn silence. At first such a forest gives the impression of being more open than an English wood, but a few steps are sufficient to correct this error. There is a thick undergrowth ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... vary the entertainment by giving us extremely quaint illustrations of holy people in stained-glass attitudes: his power of twisting his limbs into weird contortions being very great. (I am told that Sir William Wilde, his father, possessed the same power.) It must not be thought, however, that there was any suggestion ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... evening greeting of a passer-by, wafted down to her from some higher path along the fell? distant voices in the farm enclosures beneath her feet? or simply the eerie sounds of the mountain, those weird earth-whispers which haunt the lonely places of nature? Who can tell? Nerves and brain were strained to their uttermost. The legend of the ghost—of the girl who had thrown her baby and herself into the tarn under the frowning ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... buildings. Above all this hung a dense pall of smoke, showing lurid where the flames were reflected from its dark and threatening surface. To those nearer the scene presented many pathetic and distressing features, the fire glare throwing weird shadows over the worn and panic-stricken faces of the woe-begone fugitives, driven from their homes and wandering the streets in helpless misery. Many of them lay sleeping on piles of blankets and clothing which they had brought ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... faces skulked about. Even when we felt no personal danger this incubus of savage life all around weighed on our hearts. Thus it was day and night. Even those hours of twilight, which brood with sweet influences over so many lives, bore to us, on the evening air, the weird cadences of the heathen dance or the chill thrill ...
— Among the Sioux - A Story of the Twin Cities and the Two Dakotas • R. J. Creswell
... Nevada left Auckland two feet deeper in the water than she ought to have been, and laboured heavily. Seas struck her under the guards with a heavy, explosive thud, and she groaned and strained as if she would part asunder. It was a long weird day. We held no communication with each other, or with those who could form any rational estimate of the probabilities of our destiny; no officials appeared; the ordinary invariable routine of the steward department ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... campaigns had already smashed her flabby fleets and driven the remnants from space, but the Council, faced with the destruction and casualties from just a few days of the weird surprise bombardment, was cowed. ...
— Tulan • Carroll Mather Capps
... upon the headland Where the wind-distorted cedars Cling upon the rocky hillside. Long she prayed to the Great Spirit For his guidance and protection. Long she prayed and watched and waited Till the moon came up and silvered All the sea, and cast the shadows Of the cedars, weird ...
— The Legends of San Francisco • George W. Caldwell
... Gormack, the weird, a thane of the Pictish race, had his dwelling near the giddy cliffs where the young eagles scream to the roar of the dark waters of the Forth. He had a daughter whose beauty was the theme of all tongues. Her ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... their figures show weird-like—all the more from their grotesque gesticulations. Even if scrutinised closely, and in clearest light, they would present this appearance; for although in human shape, and wearing the garb of men, their faces more resemble those of demons. They are human ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... of burnished silver. Stretching across the valley from distant heights, a fleecy veil of enchantment woven in the loom of mist, etherealized city and river, dome and monument, tower and steeple, cottage and castle; adding a weird beauty to the magnificent array of public buildings, which owned the Capitol and the Library as chief. Above and beyond all else in its unapproachable glory, the Dome of the Capitol in the mellow, hazy moonlight, shone resplendent as a matchless crown to the ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... moon of a weird foe. By a strange law of nature, not wholly without parallel among mankind, all partridges go crazy in the November moon of their first year. They become possessed of a mad hankering to get away somewhere, it does not matter much where. And the wisest of them do all sorts of foolish ...
— Lobo, Rag and Vixen - Being The Personal Histories Of Lobo, Redruff, Raggylug & Vixen • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... under the elm trees had been removed to the main pavilion. The diving springboard was submerged by the swollen lake, the rowboats rocked logily, half full of water, and the woods across the lake looked weird and dim through the incessant stream of rain, ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... was often at large, yet never seemed desirous of heading back to his old haunts where dinners were hard to secure, Toby had some weird-looking lop-eared rabbits; a bunch of quail from which he hoped to raise a family later on; a red fox that had a limp on account of the broken leg set by Toby after he had found the little animal apparently dying from hunger in the bitter ...
— Chums of the Camp Fire • Lawrence J. Leslie
... the Celtic divinities, when Belle-Isle was still called Kalonese, this grotto had beheld more than one human sacrifice accomplished in its mystic depths. The first entrance to the cavern was by a moderate descent, above which distorted rocks formed a weird arcade; the interior, very uneven and dangerous from the inequalities of the vault, was subdivided into several compartments, which communicated with each other by means of rough and jagged steps, fixed right and left, in uncouth ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... hand with that co-operation had gone other experiments. Just as the clumsy armored diving suits of the early twentieth century had allowed man to begin penetration into a weird new world, so had the frog-man equipment made him still freer in the sea. And now the gill-pack which separated the needed oxygen from the water made even that lighter burden of tanks obsolete. But there remained depths into which man could not descend, ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... they might take Doris to Salem with them. Doris thought she should like to see the smart little Elizabeth, who was like a woman already, and her old playfellow James, as well as Ruth, who seemed to her hardly beyond babyhood. And there were all the weird old stories—she had read some of them in Cotton Mather's "Magnalia," and begged others from Miss Recompense, who did not quite know whether she believed them or not, but she said emphatically that people had been mistaken and there was no ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... fancy, half in fact, the thread of an occult idea runs through this weird theme. You cannot, even at the end, be quite sure whether the author has been making fun of you or not. Perhaps, if the truth were told, he could not quite tell you himself. The tale all hangs about one of a group of friends who lives for years in the Far East and gathers some of the occult ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... are: Riches, Knowledge, and Love; and in depicting their peculiar and wonderful virtues Mrs. Prentiss has wrought into the story with much skill her own theory of a happy life. She wrote the book with intense delight, and its strange, weird-like scenes and characters—the home in the forest; Dolman, the poor woodcutter; Cinda, his tall and strong-minded wife; Nidworth, their first-born; wandering Hidda, boding ill-luck; the hermit; these and all the rest—seemed to her, for ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... rocks and gulls forever circling about the Brown Cow. His was a narrow and surly old age, not overwell provided, for he had never been a thrifty man; and he found among the rattletrap furnishings of his neglected home one living chattel quite as worthless—a weird, lean goblin of a boy, his sole descendant, fatherless and motherless, playing lonely little games in corners, making crass drawings with a charred stick on the walls, and viewing the blossoming orchards of spring ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... given account of weird and extraordinary matters, I will say little. It lies before you. The inner story must be uncovered, personally, by each reader, according to ability and desire. And even should any fail to see, as now I see, the shadowed picture and conception ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... moment a cock crowed, and the weird procession vanished and left not a shred or a bone behind. I awoke, and found myself lying with my head out of the bed and "sagging" downward considerably—a position favorable to dreaming dreams with morals in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... exactly the same table, vase, and flamingo on every one of the thirty-two landings of that towering habitation. This is where it differs most perhaps from the crooked landings and unexpected levels of the old English inns, even when they call themselves hotels. To me there was something weird, like a magic multiplication, in the exquisite sameness of these suites. It seemed to suggest the still atmosphere of some eerie psychological story. I once myself entertained the notion of a story, in which ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... asserting that this was the best clause in the whole Bill, and that only a melancholy humbug would oppose it. Instead he vigorously supported his former foe with an argument that I am sure Mr. DILLON would never have thought of. "Was it not a weird proposal," he asked, "that a child who had unwittingly walked; through a turnstile should forthwith become a convict ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CL, April 26, 1916 • Various
... sing, a quaint old Island lullaby, which rang weird and melancholy. William looked at her in alarm, but said nothing, and the other passengers watched her curiously, half in fear. She lifted her child from her knee to her breast, and held it there clasped a moment. 'I can't warm him,' she said, looking helplessly at all the wondering faces. ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... I weird ye to be a Laidly Worm, And borrowed shall ye never be, Until Childe Wynd, the King's own son Come to the Heugh and thrice kiss thee; Until the world comes to an end, Borrowed shall ye ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... to receive them. I have seen at times hundreds of squaws and children wading about in Yaquina Bay taking crabs in this manner, and the reflection by the water of the light from the many torches, with the movements of the Indians while at work, formed a weird and diverting picture of which ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... him appeared the principals in this dramatic encounter, revolvers and rifles in the hands of all parties, the Japs being still covered; while beyond, at sea, the two boats cleaving the water, their objective point the shadowy schooner, looking like a phantom ship, made a picture of weird excitement in an unearthly setting. The seconds seemed like hours. The row-boat was nearer the schooner and was traveling fast, but the launch was speeding even more rapidly, throwing up a high wave at the bow. It looked as though both boats would reach the ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... afraid we should," he said. "But that's nothing. I did all manner of weird things when I first started to drive. Take the wheel again and ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres
... an empty water-gourd and his long staff lying by his side. A great silence around and above. Perhaps on some quiet night the tremor of far-off drums, sinking, swelling, a tremor vast, faint; a sound weird, appealing, suggestive, and wild—and perhaps with as profound a meaning as the sound of bells in a Christian country. Once a white man in an unbuttoned uniform, camping on the path with an armed escort of lank Zanzibaris, very hospitable and festive—not ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... from Bluebell's point of view, who could not shake off the weird feeling that possessed her, to which, perhaps, fatigue, mental and physical, not a little contributed. Yet when they came in no depression could withstand the cheery look of the lamp-lit room, with its snowy cloth laid for dinner, blazing fire, and closely-drawn ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... with the breath of tropic winds, and the horizon to the west and south was festooned with fierce red clouds. The sun was just setting, and spreading the broad ocean with a crimson light, giving a weird and curious outline to every feature of the ship. There was something grand, even enchanting and sublime, in the picture here spread out, presenting as it did the highest example ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... nature had bestowed on him that frame of mind which might have won him a distinguished career, had she placed the period of his birth in the eleventh century. Volktman was essentially a man belonging to the past time: the character of his enthusiasm was weird and Gothic; with beings of the present day he had no sympathy; their loves, their hatreds, their politics, their literature, awoke no echo in his breast. He did not affect to herd with them; his life was solitude, and its occupation study—and study of that ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... pictures which illustrated it, and when she looked up was surprised to see how struck and interested he seemed to be. Like all people of his temperament he was very impressionable, and his life among hunters and Indians had made him superstitious; he believed in dreams, liked weird tales, and whatever appealed to the eye or mind, vividly impressed him more than the wisest words. The story of poor, tormented Sintram came back clearly as he looked and listened, symbolizing his secret trials even more truly than ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... stature of the great man, one of whose peculiar charms consisted in his being so unlike all other great men, will rather lose than gain by the idealization which so easily runs into the commonplace. For it was distinctly the weird mixture of qualities and forces in him, of the lofty with the common, the ideal with the uncouth, of that which he had become with that which he had not ceased to be, that made him so fascinating a character among his fellow-men, gave him his singular power over their minds and hearts, and fitted ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... is where the weird and uncanny part of it comes in," commented Craig, turning from the doctor to me to call my attention particularly to what ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... weird fascination of Poe's strangely beautiful poem "The Raven"? Perhaps on some stormy evening you have read it until the "silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain" has "thrilled you, filled you, with fantastic terrors never ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... fiction is, indeed, more strange than that which tells how this nimble-witted alien adventurer, with his poetic temperament, his weird Eastern imagination and excessive Western cynicism, his elastic mind which he himself described as "revolutionary," and his apparently wayward but in reality carefully regulated unconventionality, succeeded, in spite of every initial disadvantage of race, birth, manners, ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... not answer, did not so much as seem to hear. He was standing before the Brigadier. His eyes gleamed in his alert face—two weird pin-points of light. ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... Weird and tragical are the legends of the Kickapoo Corral, left for a stronger race to marvel over. For, with the swing of time, the white man cut a road down the steep bluff at the sharpest bend and made a ford in the shallow place between the whirlpool ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... Broad, and I got out to view better the new, three-fifths-built marble edifice, the City Hall, of magnificent proportions—a majestic and lovely show there in the moonlight—flooded all over, facades, myriad silver-white lines and carv'd heads and mouldings, with the soft dazzle—silent, weird, beautiful—well, I know that never when finish'd will that magnificent pile impress one as it impress'd ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... is it, Doc? Gee, I'm glad to see you! This is a darned weird place to-night. Every time the wind blows I ...
— Soldier Silhouettes on our Front • William L. Stidger
... continued to hold it from the middle of the eleventh century until the late disturbances in Italy. Most of the streets of Turin converge into the Piazza di Castello, in the centre of which stands the Palazzo Madama, a weird-looking, half-ruined building overgrown with ivy, with a gloomy look about its desolate towers. It is a fine and picturesque old place, especially on a moonlight night—a unique relic of the Middle Ages. Near it are the Royal Palace and the Duomo. The former is not unlike ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... been a garden-party at the Commander-in-Chief's, and we two joined the crowd of homeward-bound folk. As I saw them then it seemed that they were the shadows—impalpable, fantastic shadows—that divided for Mrs. Wessington's 'rickshaw to pass through. What we said during the course of that weird interview I cannot—indeed, I dare not—tell. Heatherlegh's comment would have been a short laugh and a remark that I had been "mashing a brain- eye-and-stomach chimera." It was a ghastly and yet in some indefinable ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... brotherhood and opened a straight way into his confidence. In two minutes the man—perhaps a wild hawk from the Afghan hills—would be pouring out into the ear of this sahib, with heaven-sent knowledge and sympathy, the weird tale of the blood feud and litigation, the border fray, and the usurer's iniquity, which had driven him so far afield as Lahore from Bajaur. To Kipling even the most suspected and suspicious of classes, the religious mendicants, would open ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... by—hot, dreamy, and with the water keeping exactly to the same depth, so that they were hopelessly prisoned still on their tree. They tried again to capture a fish, but in vain; and once more the night fell, with the sounds made by bird, insect, and reptile more weird and strange to ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... beard floating in the wind, the bronzed naked figure, like some weird old Indian fakir, still climbed on steadfastly up the mizzen-chains of the ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... a swarm of scorpions that had to be exterminated before a man dared move his possessions in. The once white calico ceilings moved suggestively where rats and snakes chased one another, or else hunted some third species of vermin; and there was a smell and a many-voiced weird whispering that hinted at corruption and war to the death behind skirting boards ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... The head of a man, without any body; with eyes in it that scintillate and see; a mouth that opens, and shows teeth; a throat from which issue sounds of human intonation; around this object of weird supernatural aspect, a group of wolves, and over it a flock ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... whenever he writhed or groaned under the tortures that, no doubt, that old accursed carle had inflicted upon him. But even this face did not dwell with pleasure in his memory,—it woke up confused and labouring associations of something weird and witchlike, of sorceresses and tymbesteres, of wild warnings screeched in his ear, of incantations and devilries and doom. Impatient of these musings, he sought to leap from his bed, and was amazed that the leap subsided into a tottering crawl. He found an ewer and basin, ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... came in to-day from The Hague to effect formal delivery of the first bargeload of food, and had weird tales to tell of his adventures by the way. Thank goodness, the first of the food has arrived in time, and if the flow can be kept up, the worst of our ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... haunches. Some of the women were engaged in milking the sheep and goats in an inclosure. Others were busy making butter in a churn which was nothing more than a skin vessel three feet long, of the shape of a Brazil-nut, suspended from a rude tripod; this they swung to and fro to the tune of a weird Kurdish song. Behind one of the tents, on a primitive weaving-machine, some of them were making tent-roofing and matting. Others still were walking about with a ball of wool in one hand and a distaff in the other, spinning yarn. The flocks stood round about, bleating ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... Salome followed the wild, weird, religious enthusiast. She pushed through the crowd and placed herself near the man, so the smell of her body would reach his nostrils, and his eyes would range the swelling lines of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... in the wild wind, and many a one draws his garment or cloak or coverlet closer round him; the gale sweeps in with such fury that the pitch torches against the wall are well nigh blown out, and the red and yellow glare casts a weird ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... valuable; but soon the banks show a long line of thick tall shrubs, one mass of glorious pink and green. Set these in a little valley, framed by mountains whose rocks gleam out blue and purple colours such as pre-Raphaelites only dare attempt, shining out hard and weird-like amongst the clumps of castor-oil plants, oistus, arbor vitae and many other evergreens, whose names, alas! I know not; the cistus is brown now, the rest all deep or brilliant green. Large herds of cattle browse on the baked ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had taken place among the machine men of Zor. They were overcome by a great curiosity which they could not allow to remain unsatiated. Accustomed as they were to witnessing strange sights and still stranger creatures, meeting up with weird adventures in various corners of the Universe, they had now become hardened to the usual run of experiences which they were in the habit of encountering. It took a great deal to arouse their unperturbed attitudes. Something new, however, about this queer space craft ...
— The Jameson Satellite • Neil Ronald Jones
... the place began to exert a weird fascination upon me. It is difficult to describe or to induce people to believe; but I felt as if the whole house was like a living organism slowly and imperceptibly digesting me by the action of ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... to convince them of its unlimited power and ferocity. She knew as well as he that the big drifts around the cabin had grown bigger; that other drifts were forming around the walls. For the sounds were muffled, and a great, weird calm had settled inside the cabin. The walls, snow-banked, ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... "Check Number?"—"Can you read?" "A little." The barest suggestion of amusement in his voice caused me to look up quickly. "My library," he said, with the ghost of a weird smile, nodding his head slightly toward an unpainted shelf made of pieces of dynamite boxes, "Mine and my room-mates." The shelf was filled with four—REAL Barcelona paper editions of Hegel, Fichte, Spencer, Huxley, and a half-dozen others accustomed to sit in the same company, ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... delighted in hearing them. She allowed herself to be elbowed and jostled by the throng, reaching every moment by judicious pushing a place where she could not only hear but see, and where escape was impossible. The jubilant chorus ceased and one of those weird minor wails, such as their music abounds in, floated ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... A weird effect of lighting is obtained by making lantern boxes from any discarded boxes which may be in the house. Cover them with crepe paper, cut eyes, nose, ears and mouth, paste colored tissue paper behind the features and set a ...
— Armour's Monthly Cook Book, Volume 2, No. 12, October 1913 - A Monthly Magazine of Household Interest • Various
... positively laughed, and a weird cackling sound it made in Hester's ears as she bent to support one of the smaller girls, who had fainted. "Agen' you? Take an' look around on your mornin's work! You've struck down my brother's son, Tom Trevarthen—isn't that enough? Go an' pack ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... sense that Mavering professed to have received from it, when he jumped out of the beach wagon in which he had preceded the other carriages through the weird forest lying between the fringe of farm fields and fishing-villages on the western shore of the island and these lonely coasts of the bay. As far as the signs of settled human habitation last, tho road is the good hard ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... I went out into the streets again, guided by the weird Voice, and via Grafton Street, Albemarle Street, the Royal Arcade, Bond Street, Burlington Gardens, Vigo Street and Sackville Street, Piccadilly, Regent Street, Pall Mall East, Cockspur Street and Whitehall, steadily wheeled my ...
— The War of the Wenuses • C. L. Graves and E. V. Lucas
... you mean!"—she said—"But I am sure you cannot possibly realise the weird nature of old Alison! She made me stand before her, just where the light of the sun streamed through the open doorway, and she looked at me for a long time with such a steady piercing glance that I felt as if her eyes were boring through my flesh. Then she got up ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... daytimes, you don't know a bit what pine trees really are. But I can tell you. Listen! This is what they say," finished the boy, whipping his violin from its case, and, after a swift testing of the strings, plunging into a weird, haunting little melody. ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter
... had a thing about him. He inspired you. When he looked at you with those weird eyes, you just knew you ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... As the weird strains died away, the host pressed the English lord to bide long as a guest, promising rest for horse, and refreshment and pleasure for man, with many a joust, or feat at arms, for those who wished to ...
— The Prose Marmion - A Tale of the Scottish Border • Sara D. Jenkins
... linen frocks that Lucilla was constantly making for him, but in a radiant tartan, of such huge pattern that his little tunic barely contained a sample of one of each portentous check, made up crosswise, so as to give a most comical, harlequin effect to his spare limbs and weird, black eyes. The disappointment that Phoebe had to inflict was severe, and unwittingly she was the messenger whom Mrs. Murrell was likely to regard with the most suspicion and dislike. 'Come home along with me, Hoing, my dear,' she said; 'you'll always ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... followed; the silence was weird—only the cracking of the fire was heard, and the mournful soughing of the ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... chief indunas ventured to communicate the fact that a very old and strange-looking man, who did not appear to be quite right in his wits, together with a. slightly younger, though equally weird-looking companion, craved an audience ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... sweet music of Cummins and the little Melisse that he played now, but a wild, wailing song that he had found in the autumn winds. It burst above the crackling fire and the tumult of man and dog in a weird and savage beauty that hushed all sound; and life about him became like life struck suddenly dead. With his head bowed Jan saw nothing—saw nothing of the wonder in the faces of the half- cringing little black men who were squatted in a ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... know if any one were harming his mate, brooding under a wild grape leaf in a scrub elm on the river embankment. A brown thrush silently slipped like a snake between shrubs and trees, and catching the universal excitement, began to flirt his tail and utter a weird, whistling cry. ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... a halt was always called, for the water of it had healing properties, and from their babyhood the children had, as a matter of duty, tested its powers by bathing their eyes; but to-day, as they stooped over it, a weird shriek in the distance brought them to their feet again. Then came a great racket, as though a pile of all the loose iron in the world were tumbling over, the ground vibrated, and the ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... —that, in spite of the milder and smoother and perhaps, pictorially speaking, considerably emptier, Neapolitan face of things, things in general, of our later time, I recognised in my final impression a grateful, a beguiling serenity. The place is at the best wild and weird and sinister, and yet seemed on this occasion to be seated more at her ease in her immense natural dignity. My disposition to feel that, I hasten to add, was doubtless my own secret; my three beautiful days, at any rate, filled themselves with the splendid harmony, several ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... still a great deal of absolute nonsense—viewed from any standpoint of common sense and logic—in most photoplay serials, and while the long-drawn-out mystery is often made possible only by the introduction of weird and unnatural happenings not even possible in real life, there is now a tendency toward serials more true to life and more dependent for their success upon plots that will stand the acid test of logical reasoning. The ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... and quaint, They reign in robes of magic round me here; But fading, blotted, dim, a picture faint, With spell more silent, only pleads a tear. Plead not! Thou hast my heart, O picture dim! I see the fields, I see the autumn hand Of God upon the maples! Answer Him With weird, translucent glories, ye that stand Like spirits in scarlet and in amethyst! I see the sun break over you; the mist On hills that lift from iron bases grand Their heads superb!—the dream, it ...
— Thoughts, Moods and Ideals: Crimes of Leisure • W.D. Lighthall
... footing and clings to a projecting rock. The height of the Gulf is ninety-five feet and the distant sound of falling water is not reassuring. The walls are not smoothly worn away, but have the rough and weird appearance of having been torn by a torrent in a narrow mountain gorge, and are ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... NEPAL. The weird story of the man-killer of the foothills. Tinged with the mysticism of ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... Even when we felt no personal danger this incubus of savage life all around weighed on our hearts. Thus it was day and night. Even those hours of twilight, which brood with sweet influences over so many lives, bore to us, on the evening air, the weird cadences of the heathen dance or the chill thrill ...
— Among the Sioux - A Story of the Twin Cities and the Two Dakotas • R. J. Creswell
... your own parlor, will produce as much sensation as a fake "medium." In all appearance, a violin, mandolin or guitar, placed on a table, will begin to produce music simply through stamping the foot and a few passes of the hand. The music will not sound natural, but weird and distant. ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... brought Stefana—roses," whispered Evangeline. "In a long box—an' tissue paper. Oh, my mercy gracious, stopped right straight at our house! An' nobody dead." Evangeline's whisper rose to a weird little cry. The wonder of the flower wagon stopping right straight! ...
— Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... present at more than one gypsy wedding in my time, and at the wild, weird orgies that followed them, but what is interesting to such as I may not be for a minister's eyes, and, frowning at my proposal, Gavin turned his back upon the Toad's- hole. Then, as we recrossed the hill, to get away from the din of the camp, I pointed out to him that the report ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... It gave him a weird feeling of unreality; as he hung there helplessly, to see one of the screens on the bulkhead pick ...
— This World Must Die! • Horace Brown Fyfe
... Biorn sought Leif and poured out his heart to him. For the first time he spoke of the weird-wife's spaeing. If his fortune lay in the west, there was the goal to seek. He would find the happy country and reign over it. But Leif shook his head, for he had heard the story before. "To get there you will have to ride over Bilrost, ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... winter, always a time for enjoyment in the days of old Guernsey, when evening after evening, people met together at the Veilles, to knit and sing and to tell stories of witchcraft and weird ...
— Where Deep Seas Moan • E. Gallienne-Robin
... these, when lifted, disclosed a swarm of scorpions that had to be exterminated before a man dared move his possessions in. The once white calico ceilings moved suggestively where rats and snakes chased one another, or else hunted some third species of vermin; and there was a smell and a many-voiced weird whispering that hinted at corruption and war to the death behind skirting boards ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... cotton bales: we reach the "weave-room." I am told that carpet factories are celebrated for their uproar, but the weave-looms of a cotton mill to those who know them need no description! This is chaos before order was conceived: more weird in that, despite the din and thunder, everything is so orderly, so perfectly carried forth by the machinery. Here the cotton cloth is woven. Excelsior is so vast that from one end to the other of a room one cannot distinguish a friend. I decide instantly ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... medium of expression as the most difficult. Mrs. Browning's "Hatty" had bestowed in her bag a volume of Mr. Browning's, and on the homeward journey from Albano to Rome he read aloud to them his "Saul." At the half-way house on the Campagna, the Torre di Mezza, they paused, to gaze at the "weird watcher of the Roman Campagna," the monument to Apuleia, whose ruins are said to have ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... shuddered. They had looked upon terrible human figures, but nothing so frightful as this, a woman with the strength of a man and twice his rage and cruelty. There was something weird and awful in the look of that set, savage face, and the tone of that Indian chant. Brave as they were, Henry and the shiftless one felt fear, as perhaps they had never felt it before in their lives. ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... place on the shore where the sea had undermined the cliff, and had made strange holes and caves, which could only be entered at low tide. I clambered over the rocks, and crossed about half a mile of slippery seaweed, until I came to one of these weird places. Creeping inside, I felt myself safe from any human eye. I was ...
— Christie, the King's Servant • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... she found that he had fixed in the keen damp draught which always prevailed over the wheel an AEolian harp of large size. At present the strings were partly covered with a cloth. He lifted it, and the wires began to emit a weird harmony which mingled curiously with the plashing ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... a profoundly dark night, for during the first part of it there was no moon, and the stars, although they lent beauty and lustre to the heavens, did not shed much light upon the sands. There is a weird solemnity about such a scene which induces contemplative thought even in the most frivolous, while it moves the religious mind to think more definitely, somehow, of the near presence of the Creator. For some time Lawrence, who crouched in profound silence beside Pedro, almost forgot the object ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... his carriage with every variety of plant and mountain flower. Hence Davy, and the late lamented Samuel Brown, analysed, in the spirit of poets as well as of philosophers, and gave to the crucible what it had long lost, something of the air of a weird cauldron, bubbling over with magical foam, and shining, not so much in the severe light ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... French and English stage in this particular is very strongly illustrated; but from every thing we have, understood, of the wonderful impression which is produced, when he describes his interview with the weird sisters—the terrors which accompanied their appearance, and the feelings which their predictions awakened, we are persuaded that the effect must be much finer than any thing which can result from the feeble attempt to represent all this to the eye. Macbeth, however, without the witches, ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... ahead, and he heard a voice crying in the night, "IT'S COMING! IT'S COMING!" This weird cry, which, perhaps, his own galloping and shouting had excited, seemed like an independent warning, and thrilled him to the bone. He galloped through Hatfield, shouting, "Save yourselves! Save yourselves!" and the people poured out, and ran for high ground, shrieking wildly; looking ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... league with the arch-enemy of mankind—in plain English, that they were witches. The celebrated Three Witches who figure in Macbeth, "and palter with him in a double sense," had evidently this distinguishing mark, for says Banquo to the "weird sisters" (Act i, ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... covered with limestone masses. There had been no frost nor rain to disturb the original rock-piling. Only the agencies of sand and wind had disarranged the distribution on which the builders of the earliest dynasty had looked. And this was weird, mysterious ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... certainty that Freedham's eyes were steadily examining my burning cheek. And, if it be possible to see a question in eyes which you are only imagining, I saw in Freedham's: "What the blazes do you want?" After giving him time to forget me, I turned again to look at him. But once more I caught his weird orbs full upon mine, and muttering. "Oh, dash!" concentrated my attention ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... would be water for our dumb brutes and rest for ourselves. There was lots of singing that night. "There's One more River to cross," and "Roll, Powder, roll," were wafted out on the night air to the coyotes that howled on our flanks, or to the prairie dogs as they peeped from their burrows at this weird caravan of the night, and the lights which flickered in our front and rear must have been real Jack-o'-lanterns or Will-o'-the-wisps to these occupants of the plain. Before we had covered half the distance, the herd was strung-out over two miles, and as Flood rode back to the ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... It all came back to him. It had been a dismal evening, way back in April. He had noticed her that evening. She had worn a weird thing of silver and black. She had even sat beside him on a sofa by the door—she and her partner. But he had not met her; he was sure of that. He had remarked, he remembered now, how curiously alert her eyes were, ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... low hills across the water came the dull resonance of distant guns and a remote weird crying. Then everything was still. A cockchafer came droning over the hedge and past us. High in the west the crescent moon hung faint and pale above the smoke of Weybridge and Shepperton and the hot, still splendour of ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... bull-roarer, of which something has been already said, furnishes the ceremonies with a background of awe. It fills the woods, that surround the secret spot where the rites are held, with the rise and fall of its weird music, suggestive of a mighty rushing wind, of spirits in the air. Not until the boys graduate as men do they learn how the sound is produced. Even when they do learn this, the mystery of the voice speaking through the chip of wood merely wings ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... expelled; and, finding that house in order, sweet and clean since his filthy self had been forced to vacate it, he calls other spirits more wicked than himself, and they take possession of the man, and make his state worse than it was at first.[606] In this weird example is typified the condition of those who have received the truth, and thereby have been freed from the unclean influences of error and sin, so that in mind and spirit and body they are as a house swept and garnished and ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... laughable, pour rire, grotesque, farcical, odd; whimsical, whimsical as a dancing bear; fanciful, fantastic, queer, rum, quizzical, quaint, bizarre; screaming; eccentric &c. (unconformable) 83; strange, outlandish, out of the way, baroque, weird; awkward &c. (ugly) 846. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Hibbert's father? Again and again the question came to him, and he could not dismiss it from his thoughts. He thought of the strange circumstance under which he had last seen him—of that weird scene in the cave with the man Brockman. All that had happened at that interview was fixed indelibly on his memory. He could see Zuker tracing with his finger on the chart the passage of the Dutch to the Medway—could hear his voice as he described ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... the linden," reported Marion in a low voice, "a little Jewish boy was standing. He had very large black eyes, two tightly twisted black curls hung down over his ears, and he wore a long coat like a grown man; he brought the letter. It was awfully weird." ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... burnt the face of the wanderer who hurried on with half-closed eyes and tightly-shut lips. A deep oppression seemed to have fallen on nature and on man; the sudden gusts of the heated breeze, the arrow-like shafts of lightning, the weird shapes and colors of the clouds, all combined to give a sinister, baleful and portentous aspect to this night, as though skies and waters, earth and air were ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... might have thought that the inhabitants had fled from it, as from many others in the neighbourhood, had it not been for the shouts of abuse that answered his thumping. In his feverish and enfeebled state the angry screaming seemed to him part of a hallucination belonging to the weird, dreamlike feeling of his unexpected condemnation to death, of the thirst suffered, of the volleys fired at him within fifteen paces, of his head being cut off at a blow. "Open the door!" he cried. "Open in the name ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... now all ablaze, the lurid fire feeding upon its walls lighting far the night scene, while throwing a weird glamor over the contending factions of war-crazed men, who had now both reached the further side of the plaza ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood
... often frightened her neighbors, and they treated her shyly, yet respectfully, because of her weird powers. But Tip frankly hated her, and took no pains to hide his feelings. Indeed, he sometimes showed less respect for the old woman than he should have done, considering ...
— The Marvelous Land of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... might well have been developed into a full-fledged romance, is less original than any of his longer writings. It is, like "The Weird of Michael Scott" and "A Northern Night," closely allied to essays of his other role, that of "F.M.," to catch and express "the tempestuous loveliness of terror," such as the catastrophe of "The Mountain Lovers," "The Barbaric Tales," ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... him, brother," whispered the young man to his companion; "look at the weird contrast of his gloomy countenance with the merry faces around him. He stands like some incarnate spirit of evil in the ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... the valiant Clayton, of Delaware, saw an opportunity to wipe out the stigma cast upon his treaty; and although the patriarchal Butler (owner of men-servants and maid-servants, flocks and herds) displayed the lily flag of peace in the Senatorial debate, it was as eccentric as were his weird-like white locks. Lord Clarendon had then his hands full, but his successors took their revenge in 1862, when attempts were made to obtain recruits in Ireland for the Union Army. Mr. Cushing's elaborate arguments against enlistments for a foreign power were copied and sent back ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... lower part of the State, where Jack Agery, a noted plantation orator, was holding forth, denouncing the Democracy and rallying the faithful. He was a man of great natural ability and bristling with pithy anecdote. From a rude platform half a dozen candles flickered a weird and unsteady glare. Agery as a spellbinder was at his best, when a hushed whisper, growing into a general alarm, announced that members of the Ku Klux, an organization noted for the assassination of Republicans, were coming. Agery, a born leader, in commanding tones, told ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... draws closer to her) There is one thing I should like to know—whether Sigismund has any idea that your mind is harboring such thoughts—which, after all, would appear rather weird to the ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... and of the same lovely tints, but I could recall nothing that was quite American when once we had plunged into the shadow of these great yews, and I could not even find their like in the English literature which is the companion of American nature. I could think only of the weird tree-shapes which an artist once greatly acclaimed, and then so mocked that I am almost ashamed to say Gustave Dore, used to draw; but that is the truth, and I felt as if we were walking through any of the loneliest of his illustrations. ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... the shield, and on hands and knees we crawled out into one of its compartments. Here we experienced for the first time the weird realisation that only the "air" stood between us and destruction from the tons and tons of sand and water overhead. At some points in the sand we could feel the air escaping, which appeared at the surface of the river overhead in bubbles, indicating to those passing ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... lie out of it in the most obvious manner. The game was finally discontinued, owing to a shortage of checkermen which they had secreted in their pockets, a fact which each one stoutly denied with many weird and rather indelicate vows. I left them engaged in the pleasant game of recrimination, which had to do with stolen golf balls, the holding out of change and kindred sordid subjects. In my weakened condition this display ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... parodist, during the long summer days and nights of 1915, when he was impatiently waiting for something to turn up. For three months and more we were face to face with an enemy whom we rarely saw. It was a weird experience. Rifles cracked, bullets zip-zipped along the top of the parapet, great shells whistled over our heads or tore immense holes in the trenches, trench-mortar projectiles and hand-grenades were hurled at us, and yet there was not a living ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... was dark and sinister, and all the more so when the moon rose high and lightened its face and left them looking into weird, abysmal blackness between moonlit branches. Bell thought busily, trying not to become too conscious of the small ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... eye, and broke into a strange plaint. The others concluded that One-Eye was making a curious, hoarse noise ceilingward for some reason. Presently, however, Cis made out that the noise was a tune: a tune weird but soul-stirring. Music, as Cis could see, was One-Eye's medium of expressing his emotions. And then and there it became her firm conviction that he was bearing a ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... the dark night, from sweet refreshing sleep I wake to hear outside my window-pane The uncurbed fury of the wild spring rain, And weird winds lashing the defiant deep, And roar of floods that gather strength and leap Down dizzy, wreck-strewn channels to the main. I turn upon my pillow and again Compose myself for slumber. Let them sweep; I once survived great floods, and do not fear, Though ominous planets congregate, ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... a new working schedule that precluded labor in the middle of the day was inaugurated. The more intense the heat grew, the more intense, it seemed to Roger, grew the weird beauty of the desert. The midnight stars seemed hardly to have blossomed before dawn turned the desert world to a delicate transparent yellow, deepening at the zenith to blue and on the desert floor to orange. As the sun rose, the yellow changed suddenly to scarlet and for a few moments earth ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... and lonely, Haunted by ill angels only, Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT, On a black throne reigns upright, I have reached these lands but newly From an ultimate dim Thule— From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime, Out of SPACE—out ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... be busy. He had often told himself that it was the part of prudence to burn those documents, yet some jackdaw quality of setting store by weird trinkets had always saved them from destruction. In a fashion they were trophies of triumph. With indefinable certainty he felt that some time—somehow—their possession would be of incalculable value. They constituted his birth certificate in this ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... raise the dead, rejuvenate the ageing, and cause both sighs and smiles, like a collection of photographs gathered together during long years of life. Constance had an astonishing menagerie of unknown cousins and their connections, and of townspeople; she had Cyril at all ages; she had weird daguerreotypes of her parents and their parents. The strangest of all was a portrait of Samuel Povey as an infant in arms. Sophia checked an impulse to laugh at it. But when Constance said: "Isn't it funny?" she did allow herself to ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... the whole Bill, and that only a melancholy humbug would oppose it. Instead he vigorously supported his former foe with an argument that I am sure Mr. DILLON would never have thought of. "Was it not a weird proposal," he asked, "that a child who had unwittingly walked; through a turnstile should forthwith become a convict and lose ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CL, April 26, 1916 • Various
... the weird romanticism of that most mysterious and fascinating of races, the Gypsies, as successfully as Chopin's music reflects the crushed aspirations of his unhappy country, Poland. Although they are called Hungarian, they are neither derived from nor founded upon national Hungarian music, ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... whole house. Where this is damp, it leads not alone to disease among the inmates, but to the disintegration of the house itself, through what is called "dry rot," but is paradoxically the result of dampness. Edgar Allan Poe, in his weird story, "The Fall of the House of Usher," has given a mystical interpretation of the dissolution of an old homestead which really has a scientific explanation that might be ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... in distinction from the others which seek moisture as well as darkness. By some they are called "silver witches," and as they dart off, when disturbed, like a streak of light, their bodies being coated in a suit of shining mail, which the arrangement of the scales resembles, they have really a weird and ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... sheet of sapphire under the radiant stars. Tiny wavelets broke crisply on the pebbled beach. From the boulders that fringed the point came the drowsy murmur of the surf. A sheep bleated plaintively high above in the pasture; while far over the ocean to the south floated the faint, weird cry of ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... you kith or kin To whom your life is precious?" "Not a soul: My line's extinct: I have interred the whole." O happy they! (so into thought I fell) After life's endless babble they sleep well: My turn is next: dispatch me: for the weird Has come to pass which I so long have feared, The fatal weird a Sabine beldame sung, All in my nursery days, when life was young: "No sword nor poison e'er shall take him off, Nor gout, nor pleurisy, nor racking ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... souls, who can endow even dumb misery with speech. Nobody can approach him in the colours of late autumn, in the indescribably touching joy of a last, a very last, and all too short gladness; he knows of a chord which expresses those secret and weird midnight hours of the soul, when cause and effect seem to have fallen asunder, and at every moment something may spring out of nonentity. He is happiest of all when creating from out the nethermost depths of human happiness, and, so to speak, from out man's empty bumper, in which the bitterest ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... Fred got out his concertina that for many days past had lain idle. The first few notes of it made me realize more than any other thing could have done what depths of despondency we must have plumbed, for hitherto, for as long as I had known Fred, he had always been able with that weird instrument of his to rouse his own spirits and so stir the rest of us. He resumed old habits now, and ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... the road was a ruined trench, and even in the weird half-light of the flares we could see what a shambles they had become. The road was well ...
— From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade • Frederic C. Curry
... impulse. It suddenly became changed to a feeling of terror. There was something so weird in the look of the reptile, something so strange in the manner of its attack and subsequent escape, that, on losing sight of it, I became suddenly impressed with a sort of supernatural awe—a belief that the creature was possessed ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... a tired sound in the tread, as if the Templar found his weird a very length one; then a long heavy breath, with something so essentially human in its sound that the fluttering heart beat more steadily. If reason told her that the living were more perilous to her than ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the willing professor out in favour of a "darnce"—and the other pubs decanted their contents, and chance souls skipped for the verandas of weather-board shanties out of which other souls popped to see the runaway. They saw a weird horseman, or rather, something like a camel (for Harry rode low, like Tod Sloan with his long back humped—for effect)—apparently fleeing for its life in a veil of dust, along the long white road, and some forty rods behind, an unaccountable tilted coach careered in its own separate ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... experiment. Belle, my mother, and I rode home about midnight in a fine display of lightning and witch-fires. My mother is absent, so that I may dare to say that she struck me as voluble. The Amanuensis did not strike me the same way; she was probably thinking, but it was really rather a weird business, and I saw what I have never seen before, the witch-fires gathered into little bright blue points almost as bright as ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the next few minutes it was the sight of Tricky. That ever gay animal was careering down the hill straight towards the feeding sheep. The pump-handle was still tied to its neck, and it clattered over the stones with a noise weird enough to drive the whole flock into the sea. The shepherd knew there must be a catastrophe, but he was powerless to avert it. He was too sore to follow, so he slowly limped towards the hut, to nurse ...
— The Monkey That Would Not Kill • Henry Drummond
... flared up as though saturated with oil, their flickering blaze lighting up a weird scene; the gaunt, bare, white trees, ghosts of a departed forest, the miry ground strewn with eggs of all sizes, shapes and colors, and dead birds of many kinds, in amongst which writhed and twisted dirty-looking, repulsive water ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... once been here vouchsafed to the faltering eye of man. The illusion had come to be very dear to him; in this insistent localization of his faith it was all very near. And so he would go down to the slope below, among the weird, stunted trees, and look once more upon the broken tables, and ponder upon the strange signs written by time thereon. The insistent fall of the rain, the incisive blasts of the wind, coming again and again, though the centuries went, ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... clew as he had hoped, and instead of lifting the fog grew heavier. He found himself at last no longer striving for any end, but rambling along mechanically, feeling like a man in a dream—a nightmare. Once he recognized a weird suggestion in the mystery about him. To-morrow might one be wandering about aimlessly in some ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... casket in the press and closes the lock,) Now quick! Away! That soon the sweet young creature may The wish and purpose of your heart obey; Yet stand you there As would you to the lecture-room repair, As if before you stood, Arrayed in flesh and blood, Physics and metaphysics weird and grey!— Away! (Exeunt.) ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... oppressed by the loneliness which had taken on a certain weird quality, walked closer to Prescott, and he could faintly hear her breathing as she fled with him, ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... journals, who screech out the name and title of their wares at the top of their voices. But even there where the crowd is thickest, one feels as if there were a void. The two contrary ideas of multitude and solitude seem to present themselves at once in one's mind. A weird impression! Imagine a vast desert ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... friend got a pair of "slaughter pen" boots and "jeans," and flung himself at his task. It was a weird sight, there on the killing beds—a throng of stupid black Negroes, and foreigners who could not understand a word that was said to them, mixed with pale-faced, hollow-chested bookkeepers and clerks, half-fainting for the tropical heat and the sickening ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... a youngster I was looked upon as a weird sort of creature, because, forsooth, I was a socialist. Reporters from local papers interviewed me, and the interviews, when published, were pathological studies of a strange and abnormal specimen of man. At that time (nine or ten years ago), because I made ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... she exclaimed, and laughed again, like some weird mite of a water-sprite, pleased to have frightened so sturdy a chap as Jack Harvey. "I won't hurt you," she continued, half-mockingly. "I'm Bess Thornton. Gran' got the supper for you. Oh, but I'm just furious at Witham for ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... not notice that the monster was chained, and he moved back again behind Moll, whence he gazed fascinated upon the grotesque group, over which the leaping flames cast such weird and curious lights ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... forest growth where weird branches let the pale moon through in splashes and patches, and grim moving figures seemed to chase them from every shadowy tree-trunk. It was a terrible experience to the girl. Sometimes she shut ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... between his brows, searched to see some sight on the chapel walls too much for him, to be listening to something that appalled. And the responses, low-muttered, in voices through which rose the same tone, the same unseizable family ring, sounded weird, as though murmured in hurried duplication by ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... herself on a low chair close to Sydney's side. It was extremely weird, this confidential ...
— Two Boys and a Fortune • Matthew White, Jr.
... pathway of the broad Potomac, whose unruffled bosom shone like a mirror of burnished silver. Stretching across the valley from distant heights, a fleecy veil of enchantment woven in the loom of mist, etherealized city and river, dome and monument, tower and steeple, cottage and castle; adding a weird beauty to the magnificent array of public buildings, which owned the Capitol and the Library as chief. Above and beyond all else in its unapproachable glory, the Dome of the Capitol in the mellow, hazy moonlight, shone resplendent as a matchless ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... it? White people aren't so plentiful here. At least I knew there were white men at those tents—that funny red-haired man and yourself. You see it was the only place about here where I knew I could find anybody who—what shall I say? Why, who doesn't belong in this weird atmosphere——It was uncanny over at our place this evening. At sunset the water in the swimming pool didn't seem to be water at all; it seemed molten gold; and the mosaic round it seemed to be made up of whitened ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... his life he supported himself, in poverty, with the aid of a devoted wife, by keeping a print-and-engraving shop. Among his own engravings the best known is the famous picture of Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims, which is not altogether free from the weird strangeness that distinguished most of his work in all lines. For in spite of his commonplace exterior life Blake was a thorough mystic to whom the angels and spirits that he beheld in trances were at least as real as the material world. When his younger ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... the valley of the dead; Lit by a weird half light; No sound they made, no word they said; And they were pale with fright. Then suddenly from unseen places came Loud laughter, that was like a ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... clouds. The thunder rumbles fitfully, and the wild casuarina clumps bend in waves to the stormy gusts which pass through them. The depths of bamboo thickets look black as ink. The pallid twilight glimmers over the water like the herald of some weird event. ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... then, revealed the face of one and another, sometimes the calm features of the Major, sometimes the eager, curious glance of Paganel, or the energetic face of Glenarvan, and at others, the scared eyes of the terrified Robert, and the careless looks of the sailors, investing them with a weird, spectral aspect. ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... the window again, as she did a year ago, two and three years ago, as she would, likely, in years to come, sunk in a reverie, watching the leaves fall, as they fell a twelve-month since; the leaves were just the same, the sky seemed still unchanged, the wind chanted the same weird, lonely lamentation, only she was different, something had come into her life in that interval of years, and had gone out of it again, leaving it so desolate, so aimless, so blank! She had had a good draught from ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... snow-line, Aconcagua reaching 23,500 ft. The rivers are short and rapid, of little use for navigation. The coast-line is even in the N., but excessively rugged and broken in the S., the most southerly regions being weird and desolate. The people are descendants of Spaniards, mingled with Araucanian Indians; but there is a large European element in all the coast towns. Mining and agriculture are the chief industries; manufactures of various kinds are fostered with foreign ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... brought Link broad awake before sunrise on that day of days. Ferris was infected with the most virulent form of that weird malady known as "dog-showitis." At first he had been tempted solely by the hope of winning the hundred-dollar prize. But latterly the urge of victory had gotten into his blood. And he yearned, too, to let the world see what a marvelous ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... down his fiddle, and catching The comb at arm's length, dived below. And Frieder, the instrument snatching Across the weird strings drew the bow, To ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... tempestuous night; the stars shut in With shrouds of fog; an inky, jet-black blot The firmament; and where the moon has been An hour agone seems like the darkest spot. The weird wind—furious at its demon game— Rattles one's ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... moonlight might stream in; and as the soft silvery beams stole silently into the room and laid their tremulous light on the young forms and awestruck faces, the flames leaping and crackling joined in enhancing the effect of the story by throwing on the walls weird shadows of a moving ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... flatter me, or pretend to think much of me. If he did, I couldn't bear him. You know how I am, Molly. He keeps me interested, don't you understand, and prowling about in the great unknown where be has his weird being." ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... it be manifest? Surely in his imagination. Tell him a story and the boy is lost. He sits with his little round, rosy face immovable and fixed, while his eyes never budge from those of the speaker. He sucks in everything that is weird or adventurous or wild. Laddie is a rather restless soul, eager to be up and doing; but Dimples is absorbed in the present if there be something worth hearing to be heard. In height he is half a head shorter than his brother, but rather more sturdy in build. The power of his ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... The scene grew rapidly weird as the sky darkened. A low sigh, like a premonition, crept through the heavy atmosphere and shivered ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... a very good sailor, and in preparation for "the voyage," as she called the crossing, had accumulated great stores of knowledge as to how to treat seasickness. She established herself on the upper deck, let down a deck-chair as low as it would go, and replacing her hat by a weird little Tam o' Shanter, covered her eyes with ...
— Barbara in Brittany • E. A. Gillie
... "There's something weird and mysterious about the robbery, Kennedy. They took the very thing I treasure most of all, ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve
... more sullen, and the scenery became more weird and depressing. The few who watched him remarked that there were three places where Peter seemed to be more than usually moved. For a time he hurried past them, whistling as he rowed; but gradually he seemed to be fascinated. The idle loungers ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... deal of mystery and enchantment about this old house for the Lancians, who were endowed with imagination; more especially for the children, who are the only beings who are open to weird fancies in ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... a profound impression on Wilhelm, and for months he was haunted by the vision of that motionless form with its white face and blood-stained breast. It had a weird fascination for him, causing him to revert constantly to that tragical May night that had begun with a cheerful dinner, and ended in a fatal pistol shot. Paul's comment on the occurrence was short ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... forgive my childishness. I must tell you how she was dressed. After that weird night she never wore that costume again, and yet I can remember it so exactly. It is a long, long time ago. But were I to live as long as I have already lived again, I should not forget a single detail, ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... and Johnny heaved it away from the plane. It flared white; the third one, dropped almost before the door of the main building, revealed three men standing there gazing upward, their faces weird in its bluish glare. Red, white and blue—a signal ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... gone with their toys; Nor ever is its stillness stirred By purr of cat, or chirp of bird, Or mother's twilight legend, told Of Horner's pie, or Tiddler's gold, Or fairy hobbling to the door, Red-cloaked and weird, banned and poor, To bless the good child's gracious eyes, The good child's wistful charities, And crippled changeling's hunch to make Dance on his crutch, for ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... this point it was easy to carry on a talk; and there in the rain through the dark watches of the night those three had one of the most profitable conversations they had ever enjoyed. A yokel who chanced to pass, hearing those weird, celestial voices, took to his heels and ran a mile straight off, and reported with ashy face and trembling lips that a ghost had appeared on the arch of the abbey as he passed, and called to him thrice, and had shrieked ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... the other end, though it looked so simple, was full of weird pitfalls, into one of which Chatty fell an easy victim. She played too soon at a short-pitched ball, and spooned a catch to mid-on, who took good care not to drop it. Chatty retired rather ruefully, but was consoled by the applause she received from ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... cold and nervous shock, as he gazed at the weird-looking rocks and the folded snow, and then, grasping at Melchior's arm, he said pitifully: "Don't tell me you ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... There was something weird about this silent man's ability to turn the conversation as he chose to have it go. Sitting by the Granny's tea-table, nibbling corn-bread while he drank his glass of water, having declined even her sassafras, he ceased to stimulate her medical ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... It was a weird, bizarre nightmare, no more astonishing than the novels the Lapierres had read. America, they understood, was a land where the rivers were full of gold—a country of bronzed and handsome savages, of birds of paradise and ruined Aztec temples, of vast tobacco ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... winter's night at Yedo, as I was sitting, with a few Japanese friends, huddled round the imperfect heat of a brazier of charcoal, the conversation turned upon the story of Sogoro and upon ghostly apparitions in general. Many a weird tale was told that evening, and I noted down the three or four which follow, for the truth of which the narrators vouched ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... explained that I did not believe in love. That only made matters worse. He rolled his eyes and vowed that he would convince me. Then he began sending me letters and love lyrics. The lyrics were so original they were positively weird. ...
— Grace Harlowe's Golden Summer • Jessie Graham Flower
... the claim that phenomena like these, strange, weird, startling, "were so much like miracles that they had the same effect as miracles on unbelievers." They helped break up the apathetic torpor of the church and summon the multitudes into the wilderness to hear the ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... In the rich, weird realm of Omar Khayyam's Persian poem, the Rubaiyat, Mr. Vedder found the opportunity of his life for translating its thought into strange, mystic symbolism. Never were artist and poet so blended in one as in Vedder's wonderful illustrations for this poem. It has nothing in common ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... fire, and thorow flude, (Mudy mindis rage lyk a sea;) Thorow slauchtir, thorow blude, (A seamless shrowd weird ...
— A Bundle of Ballads • Various
... touch on his arm. It was a slight touch, as I said, but a cold one, a very cold one indeed. Billy turned swiftly around with his hammer in one hand and his red-hot iron in the other. Standing almost beside him, with the glare of the fire working a curiously weird effect upon one-half of him, while the other half was almost hidden in the dense shadow beyond, was a tall, spare, angular man with queer little snappy eyes that flashed like diamonds in the light of the forge. His hand was stretched out in a friendly way, ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... quietly at the stern, one after another they were springing over the rail into the small boat that was dragging behind, and even as I looked the last man disappeared with the painter in his hand. At the same moment I became aware of a strange noise. Down in the bowels of the lorcha a weird, gentle commotion was going on, a multitudinous 'gluck-gluck' as of many bottles being emptied. A breath of hot, musty air was sighing out of the hatch. Then the sea about the poop began to rise,—to rise slowly, calmly, steadily, like ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... dark village and the furry tops of trees flooded with gray moonlight. The odours of a summer night crept out to meet them, odours of flowers and dew-wet, sunburned grass. The roadside fences were wreathed with wild blackberry vines that took weird shapes in the dark. In the idle fields spreading oaks threw shadows ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... Algerian troopers and in the gleam of a star shell and the fading twilight they looked more like two escaped denizens of the chamber of horrors than anything I could well imagine. Indeed, their appearance was so ghastly under the weird light of the flares and the fading day, that I involuntarily shivered, hardened though I was by that time to grim sights. Each of them carried on his shoulder the hind-quarter of a cow that had been killed by a shell at a nearby farm, and the dripping blood ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... an omnibus and went still farther east, sitting at opposite sides of the car, and laughing and talking loudly to each other, amid the astonishment of the other occupants. But when they came to mean and ugly streets with green-grocers' barrows by the curbstone, and weird and dreary cemeteries in the midst of gaunt, green sticks that were trying to look like trees, Glory thought they had ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... warriors; in their centre two ensigns, and on their flanks, officers and non-commissioned officers with swords and pikes; more mounted men bringing up the rear. On they came, the fifes and flutes ringing out with a weird clearness in the hushed mountain air. I could hear the ground vibrate, the gravel crunch and scatter, as they steadily and mechanically advanced—tall men, enormously tall men, with set, white faces and livid eyes. Every instant I expected they would see me, and I became ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... Thursday night he was at No. 9. Friday he and Rob. stretched their cambric. Meanwhile, every day I slept. Every night I was glued to the eye-piece. Fifteen minutes before the eclipse every night this weird dance of leaps two hundred feet high, followed by hops of twenty feet high, mingled always in the steady order I have described, spelt out the ghastly message: "Show 'I understand' on ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... and stained its sleeves to the elbows. He was bare-headed, for his cap had remained in the moat at Blentz, and his disheveled hair was tousled upon his head, while his full beard had dried into a weird and tangled fringe about his face. At his side still hung the sword that Joseph had buckled there, and it was this that caused the two men the greatest suspicion of this ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... white-scoured tables stood ready with bowl and trencher, and Alwin carried food to and fro with leisurely steps. From Helga's booth her voice arose in a weird battle-chant; while from the river bank came the voices and laughter and loud splashing ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... found time as well to fill, as it passed, all the fluttering garments on the line and swell them into ridiculous travesties of the bodies they belonged to, tossing them the while with high mockery into all manner of weird contortions. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... came a weird groan and then the rattle of some heavy chains. Stanley turned pale and began to tremble, but the Rovers were ...
— The Rover Boys at College • Edward Stratemeyer
... to th' brae—he'll kill himsell wi' ower thinkin'—glowrin all the day lang—ah, there's na gude in that black stuff; it's worse nor whiskey and baccy forbye.' Such were some of the ordinary comments on the weird form which was seen emerging from 'the Paddock' and moving in solitude towards the hills. Taciturnity was a striking feature in DeQuincey's character, and was, no doubt, owing to intense mental action. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Pride servants had a whole boxful, and two or three were lighted at a time, and held so that the doctor could see the drowned face better than he could in the uncertain moonlight. It was a strange scene. The lonely, weird character of the place; the dark trees scattered about; the dull pond with its bending willows; the swaying, murmuring crowd collected round the doctor and what he was bending over; the bright flickering flame ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... tender pity whenever he writhed or groaned under the tortures that, no doubt, that old accursed carle had inflicted upon him. But even this face did not dwell with pleasure in his memory,—it woke up confused and labouring associations of something weird and witchlike, of sorceresses and tymbesteres, of wild warnings screeched in his ear, of incantations and devilries and doom. Impatient of these musings, he sought to leap from his bed, and was amazed that the leap subsided into a tottering crawl. He found ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... skeletons and falling towers of doomed buildings. Above all this hung a dense pall of smoke, showing lurid where the flames were reflected from its dark and threatening surface. To those nearer the scene presented many pathetic and distressing features, the fire glare throwing weird shadows over the worn and panic-stricken faces of the woe-begone fugitives, driven from their homes and wandering the streets in helpless misery. Many of them lay sleeping on piles of blankets and clothing which they had brought with ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... sensitive nerves of the women of those days? Viewed in its larger aspects this was an objective, not a subjective religion. It could but make the sensitive soul super-sensitive, introspective, morbidly alive to uncanny and weird suggestions, and strangely afraid of the temptation of enjoying earthly pleasures. Its followers dared not allow themselves to become deeply attached to anything temporal; for such an emotion was the device of the devil, and God would surely remove the object of such affection. Whether ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... lights were lit. Then she told us stories of witches and goblins, that sounded more impressive from her lips than from any other. We heard of the Blocksberg and the witches-Sabbath; the broomstick, so contemptible in appearance, acquired a weird importance, and the dark hole in the chimney, which in every house, and therefore in ours also, can be misused in such malignant fashion by the powers of hell and their handmaids, inspired us with dread. I can still remember ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... by the father of Mrs Anthony. Youth appreciates that sort of recognition which is the subtlest form of flattery age can offer. Mr Smith seized opportunities to approach him on deck. His remarks were sometimes weird and enigmatical. He was doubtless an eccentric old gent. But from that to calling his son-in-law (whom he never approached on deck) nasty names behind his ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... male whom they called Officer was coming with them, and that the janitress was coming likewise, and that divers lower-floor tenants were joining in the march, and that as they came the janitress was explaining to all and sundry how the weird miscreant had sought to inveigle her into admitting him to Mr. Slack's rooms, and how she had refused, and how with maniacal craft—or words to that effect—he had, nevertheless, managed to secure admittance to the ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... the pillow hours before, lighted up with triumph as the supposed guests departed; the dumb show of folding the dinner napkins belonging to myself and the master, and putting them in their respective rings, told us the ordeal was over. What a weird scene it was,—the dim light, the silent house, the spread table, and the empty chairs! One could imagine ghostly revellers, visible only to that one fragile attendant, who ministered so willingly to their numerous wants. The sort of nervous thrill that heralds hysterical attacks ...
— J. Cole • Emma Gellibrand
... reappeared bearing across his arms the short carbine with which Ste. Marie had already made acquaintance. The victim looked at this weapon with a laugh, and the old Michel's gnomelike countenance distorted itself suddenly and a weird cackle came from it. ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... principal dishes were to be: and on the answer depended his acceptance or declination. Dining with him one night, I was fascinated by his wife; it seemed to me that I had never seen a woman of such wonderful and almost weird powers: there was something exquisitely beautiful in her manner and conversation; and, on my afterward speaking of this to another guest, he answered: "Why, of course; she is the daughter of Goethe's Bettina, to whom he wrote the 'Letters to ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... It was weird to crouch there alone, with the great balloon swaying over my head, each plunge threatening to dislodge me from the seat to which I clung, the cords and the wicker-work straining and creaking, and the swish of the silk sounding like the hiss of a hundred ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... introspective boy found little to win him from that self-analysis which later enabled him to mystify a world that rarely pauses to take heed of the ancient exhortation, "Know thyself." In the depths of his own being he found the story of "William Wilson," with its atmosphere of weird romance and its ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... that's one sure thing," she murmured, approaching the little opening with extreme caution, while chills of alternate fear and excitement coursed all over her. "It seems so weird and ghostly to see that thing open all by itself, with nothing to help it along! Ghosts or not, I'm going to see what's there," and, strengthened by this resolve, she started to place her hand in the opening, but drew it back quickly with a ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... flowers and the Chartreux pansy; that lake of salt water, the sandy dunes, the view of Croisic, a miniature town afloat like Venice on the sea; and, finally the mighty ocean tossing its foaming fringe upon the granite rocks as if the better to bring out their weird formations—that sight uplifts the mind although it saddens it; an effect produced at last by all that is sublime, creating a regretful yearning for things unknown and yet perceived by the soul on far-off heights. These wild and savage ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... moved the figure of Porportuk, ominous, with shaking head, coldly disapproving, paying for it all. Not that he really paid, for he compounded interest in weird ways, and year by year absorbed the properties of Klakee-Nah. Porportuk once took it upon himself to chide El-Soo upon the wasteful way of life in the large house—it was when he had about absorbed the last of Klakee-Nah's wealth—but he never ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... Nude, don't cry! You've descended the stairs, I know; And the weird wild ways Of the Cubist Jays Have made you a holy show! But Post Impressions will soon pass by. There Little Nude, don't ...
— The Re-echo Club • Carolyn Wells
... was a weird rustle, there rose all about them the squeak of piping little voices, and the sounds of a confused scampering. At the crosspaths there darted in all directions, as thick as dust, countless hordes of grey sprites and evil spirits. Their running was ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... "this was puir John Blower's spleuchan,[I-16] as they ca' it—I e'en wear it for his sake. He was a kind man, and left me comfortable in warld's gudes; but comforts hae their cumbers,—to be a lone woman is a sair weird, Dr. Kittlepin." ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... if I follow you through the village in these weird clothes?" she said civilly, as one who hesitates to make a suggestion. "Where ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... expression. Every mysterious element in the neighborhood—whether emanating from the Perdu itself or from the spirits of the people about it—appeared to find a focus in the personalities of the two children. All the weird, formless stories,—rather suggestions or impressions than stories,—that in the course of time had gathered about the place, were revived with added vividness and awe. New ones, too, sprang into existence all over the country-side, and were certain to be connected, soon after their origin, ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... dimly lit room Nostromo rolled his head slowly on the pillow and opened his eyes, directing at the weird figure perched by his bedside a glance of enigmatic and profound inquiry. Then his head rolled back, his eyelids fell, and the Capataz de Cargadores died without a word or moan after an hour of immobility, broken by short shudders testifying to ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... of Chinna Tumbe walks,—that always at midnight, when the Indian nightingale fills the Baboo's banian topes with her lugubrious song, and the weird ulus hoot from the peepul tops, a child, girt with silver bells, and followed by a Persian kitten and a mungooz, shakes the Baboo's gate, blows upon a silver whistle, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... attain perfection that they lost the capacity to feel anything. When I was a monk I often wished I could see a saint. I pictured him as living in the wilderness, abstaining from meat and drink and living on roots and herbs and cold water. This weird conception of those awesome saints I had gained out of the books of the scholastics and church fathers. But we know now from the Scriptures who the true saints are. Not those who live a single life, or make a fetish ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... that Fray Antonio and I looked closely at their wrappings and noted the way in which their mummied forms had been ranged before this idol—that certainly belonged to a primitive time—the more were we inclined to believe that this weird sepulchre belonged to the very far back past. But for the moment it mattered not to us whence these dead forms came: the essential matter was that while we remained in the cave with them we were in ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... wronged its former rulers, nor broken the traditions of beauty. He stood a long time looking at the old place, wondering at the charm which it had so suddenly flung upon him. Then he shook off the new and weird feeling and flew to embrace his Sonia ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... to think much about it, for fear he would do his friend an injustice. The fact that he could not see Cairns differently in the latter's first fame-flush, and observing past doubt, that he was lifted for the world's eyes, helped Bedient to realize that he was a bit weird in judgment. At all events, something was gone from the friendship. He was sore at heart, more than ever alone.... The two separated a second time in Peking after the relief of the Legations. Bedient went to Japan, where he made the acquaintance of an old Buddhist ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... things and achievements. In Kansas is a village called Lane, a name which, to the old settler in Kansas, is big with meaning, seeing it brings to life one of the strange, romantic, contradictory, and brilliant characters of the "Squatter Sovereignty" days, when Jim Lane wrought, with his weird and wonderful eloquence, his journeys oft, and his tireless industry, in championing the cause of State freedom. Him and his history, reading like a tale told by a campfire's fitful light, this name embodies. What an archive of history ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... had just finished his lunch, and certainly his empty dish bore evidence to the good appetite with which his housekeeper had credited him. He was, indeed, a weird figure as he turned his white mane and his glowing eyes towards us. The eternal cigarette smouldered in his mouth. He had been dressed and was seated in ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... with clouds, yellow leaves strew the paths at the edge of the naked forest, and the forest itself turns black and blue—more especially at eventide when damp fog is spreading and the trees glimmer in the depths like giants, like formless, weird phantoms. Perhaps one may be out late, and had got separated from one's companions. Oh horrors! Suddenly one starts and trembles as one seems to see a strange-looking being peering from out of the darkness of a hollow tree, while all the while the wind is moaning and rattling ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... shore, I long watched the stars above me. As children sleep after a day of toil and play, so slept the dusky men who lay around me. It was my first night with these poor wild sons of the lone spaces; it was strange and weird, and the lapping of the mimic wave against the rocks close by failed to bring sleep to my thinking eyes. Many a night afterwards I lay down to sleep beside these men and their brethren—many a night by lake-shore, by torrent's edge, and far out amidst the measureless meadows of the West—but ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... choke; they're so soft, and lissom; the peace, and the pity—a sort of look of: "Why—why—when I was so alive?" Well, this elderly Johnny took a good squint at it, to see if the hole was big enough, then off he went again, sobbing and digging like a fiend. It was really a bit too weird, and I mouched off. But when I'd gone about half a mile, I got an attack of the want-to-knows, came back, and sneaked along the hedge. There he was still, but he had finished, and was having a mop round, and putting the last touches to a heap of stones. ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... confusion by howling at random and asking irrelevant questions, while they gazed at the figure of a man a little on in years arrayed in a long night-shirt, pawing fiercely at the unattainable spot in the middle of his back, while he danced an unnatural, weird, wicked-looking jig by the dim, religious light of the night-lamp. And while he danced and howled, and while they gazed and shouted, a navy-blue wasp, that Master Middlerib had put in the bottle for good measure and variety, and to keep the menagerie ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... poem is a triumph of romantic genius. The meter, the rhythm, and the music have well-nigh magical effect. Almost every stanza shows not only exquisite harmony, but also the easy mastery of genius in dealing with those weird scenes which ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... I can understand it, painters claim that while you are looking at an object you do not really see it all, you merely gain an impression; so they paint only the impression. In a museum of art I was shown several rooms full of daubs, having absolutely nothing to commend them, weird colors being thrown together in the strangest manner, without rhyme or reason, but over which people went mad. The great masters of Europe appeal to me strongly. In America, marine painters attract me the most, for example, Edward Moran, who is a splendid delineator of the sea. Bierstadt ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... legends she has obtained with a certain degree of historical criticism, that gives a value to her work as an illustration of national beliefs, without reference to its character as a hortus siccus of weird and marvelous stories. In point of style, her volume is unexceptionable; its spirit is modest and reverent; it can not be justly accused of superstition, though it betrays a womanly instinct for the supernatural: and without being imbued with any love of dogmas, breathes ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... He won't mind being offered a coffee and liqueur. We can give him something decent—Where's the waiter?" Angus lifted his pinched, ugly bare face and looked round with weird command for the waiter. The waiter, having not much to do, and feeling ready to draw these two weird young birds, ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... this cheerfulness, he found, glimmering like some weird death-fire over the actual horror, which made his realisation of the tragedy the more poignant, and lent even a certain distinction to the poverty which she described. Here, indeed, was the supreme vulgarity of suffering—and before it his own personal afflictions ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... land you out here. I coaxed a cross old tinner to make the frame for me. He expostulated the while that the thing was impossible, because it had never been done before in this part of the country. It was rather a weird shape, but I left the girls to trim it and went to the church to help decorate. The bell was to follow upon completion. It failed to follow and after waiting an hour or so I sent for it. The girls came carrying one trimmed bell and one half covered. I asked, "Why are you making two wedding-bells?" ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... what the principal dishes were to be: and on the answer depended his acceptance or declination. Dining with him one night, I was fascinated by his wife; it seemed to me that I had never seen a woman of such wonderful and almost weird powers: there was something exquisitely beautiful in her manner and conversation; and, on my afterward speaking of this to another guest, he answered: "Why, of course; she is the daughter of Goethe's Bettina, to whom he wrote the 'Letters ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... to one who has come out of the eternal shadows the world is ever strange—was drowned in the supreme indifference of absolute ease and rest. It seemed to him as though he were floating midway between the earth and the sun, not in a weird dream wherein the subconscious mind says, "This is not real; I know that I dream"; but actual, in that Pete could feel nothing above nor beneath him. Being of a very practical turn of mind he straightway opened his eyes and was at once conscious of the arm of ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... stretched the great brown moor, weird and lonely looking, except for where, less than a mile away, Paul could see the chimneys of Moor Farm smoking, and the sunlight shining on the windows. Stella had fallen with her back to the house, and all she could see ...
— Paul the Courageous • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... 'Shecase,' or fire-brigade, passing silently along the streets, lighted by its weird red-and-black distinguishing lanterns, is a strange sight. Some of its members wear armour, with helmets and black-lacquered iron visors, and carry 'martoe,' or 'fire-charms,' and various necessary implements; others are clad in head-and-shoulder pieces and gauntlets of light ...
— Sketches of Japanese Manners and Customs • J. M. W. Silver
... take no heed of all these earthly things. They lay grovelling in the mud before some unseen power; and beating their tom-toms in unison, with barbaric concord, they cried aloud once more as Felix appeared, in a weird litany that overtopped the tumultuous noise of the tempest, "Oh, Storm-God, hear us! Oh, great spirit, deliver us! King of the Rain and Queen of the Clouds, befriend us! Be angry no more! Hide your wrath from your people! ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... each other, bit and squealed, stamped their forefeet, and tossed their manes. The men were silent. It made a weird ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... spine, and formed this system of lakes. Another break occurs on the high plateau, from Portuguese East Africa in the south to British East Africa in the north, along the Great Rift Valley, with its magnificent escarpments and weird scenery, prolonged through Lake Rudolf to the Red Sea and on to the Dead Sea and Jordan Valley. Great volcanoes, now mostly extinct, though some to the north of Kivu are still active, are a still later feature ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... very clearly foretelleth unto everyone who is desirous to be certified of the condition of his lot what his destiny will be, and what future chance the Fates have ordained for him; for the Parcae, or Weird Sisters, do not twist, spin, or draw out a thread, nor yet doth Jupiter perpend, project, or deliberate anything which the good old celestial father knoweth not to the full, even whilst he is asleep. This will be a very summary abbreviation ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... the infernal mixture and inhaled the pungent sickening vapors, we were impressed with the idea that this was a most perfect realization of Shakespeare's image in Macbeth. It needed but the presence of Hecate and her weird band to realize that horrible creation of poetic fancy, and I fancied the "black and midnight hags" concocting a charm around this horrible cauldron. We ventured near enough to this spring to dip the end of a pine pole into it, which, upon removal, was covered an eighth of an ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... made such a mistake, and finding in his own forlorn heart an echo of the sweet, melancholy evening music. Around him the mosquitoes wailed out their dreary little song; away down by the edge of the wet, low pastures, where the fireflies wandered, each with his weird little torch, the frogs were piping mournfully. The whitethroat was sending out his "silver arrows of song" clearly and pensively from the depths of the velvet dusk. The discordant twang of the swooping night-hawks came down from the ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... know what to expect,—how to manoeuvre. If only he could have seen these beasts that filled the forest with their hob-goblin outcries—if he could have had a good look at the creatures who gave forth that weird, ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... of the town the white tower of the old church of Skagen may be seen peeping over the sand-dunes. This "stepped" tower, with its red-tiled, saddle-back roof, forms a striking feature in this weird and lonely landscape. The church itself is buried beneath the sand, leaving only the tower to mark the place that is called the "Pompeii of Denmark," sand, not lava, being answerable for this entombment. It is said that the village which surrounded ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson
... stand pressed against the houses; they greet the procession or scoff at it, according as they are friends or foes. Upstairs, behind the big windows, are gaily clad ladies and gentlemen, quizzing the procession with half- scornful, half-uneasy smiles. What weird, hungry, unkempt world is this that has suddenly risen up from obscurity to take possession of the highway? And behind their transparent lace curtains the manufacturers gaze and grumble. What novel kind of demonstration is this? The people have been forgiven, and instead of going ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... transparent roofing we saw clearly the bottom, one forest of soft, undulating weeds, which, catching the sunlight through the crystal-clear water, looked like golden woods of some enchanted world within its depths; and it looks just as weird and lovely when folks go drowning down there, only they don't see it. I sang Mrs. Hemans's "What hid'st thou in thy treasure-caves and cells?" and sang and sang till, after rowing for an hour over the hardly heaving, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... around the circle. Then something like a light ring of smoke up-curved from the saddle before him, and, slowly uncoiling itself in mid air, dropped gently to the ground as he passed. Again, and once again, the shadowy coil sped upward and onward, slowly detaching its snaky rings with a weird deliberation that was in strange contrast to the impetuous onset of the rider, and yet seemed a part of his fury. And then turning, Pereo trotted gently to the ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... In little more than a week's time he composed an opera, "Rodrigo," for which he obtained one hundred sequins. His next visit was to Venice, where he arrived at the height of the carnival. Whatever effect Venice, with its weird and mysterious beauty, with its marble palaces, facades, pillars, and domes, its magnificent shrines and frescoes, produced on Handel, he took Venice by storm. Handel's power as an organist and a harpsichord player was only second ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... place. I had had no experience in parachute jumping and I couldn't pilot the plane if Hughes jumped. We swooped down over the wreck as close as we dared and that was when we saw the condition of the bodies. The whole plane was cracked up pretty badly, but the weird part of it was the fact that the bodies of the crew had broken into pieces, as though they had been made of glass. Arms and legs were detached from the torsos and lying at a distance. There was no sign of blood on the ground. We saw ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... ears. This evening had completely confirmed him in his suspicions about his wife. He no longer doubted that his wife, with the aid of the Evil One, controlled the winds and the post sledges. But to add to his grief, this mysteriousness, this supernatural, weird power gave the woman beside him a peculiar, incomprehensible charm of which he had not been conscious before. The fact that in his stupidity he unconsciously threw a poetic glamour over her made her seem, as it ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... attractions that govern crystallization? Is the day dawning, when the phenomena of hypnotism will be analyzed and formulated as accurately as the symbols of chemistry, or the constituents of protoplasm, or the weird chromatics of spectroscopy? Beryl's head, that hitherto had turned restlessly on its pillow, became motionless; the closed eyes opened suddenly, fastened upon the lawyer's; and some inexplicable influence impelled her to stretch out ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... impressed with awe by it, and accounted for the phenomenon he had observed by ascribing to the dull fossil a living soul. That is the unconscious impression still, after twenty-five hundred years have passed since Thales died; that hidden in the heart of electrical phenomena there is a weird sentience; what a Greek would consider something divine and immortal apart from matter. But neither Thales, nor Theophrastus, nor Pliny the elder, nor any ancient, could conceive of a fact but dimly guessed until the day of Franklin; that this secret of the silent ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... the two paths to a something beyond an earthly life diverge. Up to this point the two religions are alike, but from this point on they are so utterly unlike that the very similarity of all that went before only suffices to make of the second the weird, life-counterfeiting shadow of the first. As in a silhouette, externally the contours are all there, but within is one vast blank. In relation to one's neighbor the two beliefs are kin, but as ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... events themselves than upon my possessing any special facility for recalling them. Perhaps I am too imaginative, and the earliest impressions I received were of a kind to stimulate the imagination abnormally. A long series of little misfortunes, connected with each other as to suggest a sort of weird fatality, so worked upon my melancholy temperament when I was a boy that, before I was of age, I sincerely believed myself to be under a curse, and not only myself, but my whole family, and every individual who bore ...
— The Upper Berth • Francis Marion Crawford
... 1200 Of Eormenric then, and chose rede everlasting. That ring Hygelac had, e'en he of the Geat-folk, The grandson of Swerting, the last time of all times When he under the war-sign his treasure defended, The slaughter-prey warded. Him weird bore away Sithence he for pride-sake the war-woe abided, The feud with the Frisians; the fretwork he flitted, The gem-stones much worthy, all over the waves' cup. The King the full mighty cring'd under the shield; Into grasp of the Franks the King's life was gotten 1210 With the gear ...
— The Tale of Beowulf - Sometime King of the Folk of the Weder Geats • Anonymous
... to Mrs. John Quincy Adams, who was Louisa Catharine Johnson of this same Maryland family, and, as she was an occasional visitor at the White House during her relative's residence there, she mingled with many prominent people. I recall a weird story she once told me in connection with a daughter of Smith Thompson, Secretary of the Navy under President Monroe. It seems she married the Viscount Paul Alfred de Bresson, the third Secretary of the French Embassy in Washington, and subsequently many elaborate entertainments ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... Beneath an oak weird eddies play, Where fate was writ for Saxon seer; And yonder park is white with may, Where shadowy hunters chased ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... through the dim light, that leaped out and plunged into the darkness again, shouting and thundering as it dropped into a yawning ink black void rimmed with granite boulders. She crept closer, her ears filled with the din, her eyes bright with the strange, weird, almost unearthly beauty of the place. She crept so close, gripping one of the boulders with tightening fingers, that she could peer downward into the chasm that swallowed the water. It was only a small stream, such as is ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... polished himself with the meticulous attention of a bootblack. Then he wandered into the bedroom, and whistling the while a weird, uncertain melody, strolled here and there buttoning, adjusting, and enjoying the warmth of the ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... is situated at the base of lofty peaks along the water's edge at the head of moderately pretty harbors. It seems to be the generic home of storms, and the mountains, the rocks, the buildings, and trees, and all, show the weird workings of nature's wrath. In 1863 it was a thriving town where miners outfitted for the mines of the Stikeen river and Cassian mines of British Columbia; but that excitement has temporarily subsided, and the $150,000 government buildings are falling in decay. The streets are filled with debris, ...
— Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax
... impossibilities are unknown to Strauss. Although he depicts with predilection the weird and ghastly, following closely the libretto, often sacrificing beauty of expression to realistic truth, yet he also finds motives of deep feeling. These are for instance the melodious songs of Chrysothemis, the sisters' first duet ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... this incubus of savage life all around weighed on our hearts. Thus it was day and night. Even those hours of twilight, which brood with sweet influences over so many lives, bore to us, on the evening air, the weird cadences of the heathen dance or the ...
— Among the Sioux - A Story of the Twin Cities and the Two Dakotas • R. J. Creswell
... in the weird and flashy costume considered by his class to be the proper thing for an outing in the country, and his face betrayed the sad fact that, while he was mentally, spiritually, and physically greatly in need of a change from the unclean ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... Miss Sally was four or five years older than her picture, and that later experiences, enlarged capacity, a different life, and new ambition had impressed her youthful face with a refined mobility; it was a weird fancy to imagine that the blood of those who had died for her had in some vague, mysterious way imparted an actual fascination to her, and he dismissed it. But even the most familiar spectator, like Sophy, ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... thing of literature, no other sort of book admits of such variety of topics, style, and treatment as the novel. As diverse in talent and quality as the story-teller himself,—now harlequin, now gossip, now threnodist,—with weird ghostliness, moping melancholy, uncouth laughter, or gentle serious smile,—now relating the story, with childlike interest in it, now with a good heart and now with a bad heart ridiculing mankind, now allegorical with rich meanings, now freighting the little story-cricket that creeps ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... wild drive. The trail threaded its way between great Ceiba trees, looming weird and gigantic with their buttressed trunks, all knotted and entwined with hanging lianas and curiously hung with air plants dropping from the branches. Gay-colored birds flashed in the patches of sunlight that filtered through ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... across the waters from the tug. There was a loud splash beneath the bows, while shadowy figures that howled a weird ditty as they hove the hawser in, rose and fell black against the foam-flecked sea on the dripping forecastle. Nobody had missed Black, who now sat astride the yard watching the tug, as the ship, listing over further and commencing ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... the boy, on whom the sight of the coin seemed to operate like some weird talisman, leading me to a remote part of the stage, the floor of which had been tastefully littered with orange-peel in a variety of patterns; "we shall ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., February 7, 1891 • Various
... hand, and placed her against the wall between the Thier and himself. Werner's men were well content to let their master fight it out. The words spoken by Henker Rothhals, that the Devil had forsaken him, seemed in their minds confirmed by the weird song which every one present could swear he heard with his ears. 'Let him take his chance, and try his own luck,' they said, and shrugged. The battle was between Guy, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... then sit and look at it. After that, it is a mere matter of choice and labour and—determination. When this"—he raised his calm eyes to the figure—"came to me—in the clay—I saw it as plainly as I see it now. I couldn't forget, or, if I did, I began again. Sometimes, I confess, I got weird results as I worked; once, after three days of toil, a—a devil was evolved. It wasn't bad, either, I almost decided to—to keep it; but soon again I caught a glimpse of the vision, always lurking close. So I pinched and smoothed off and added to, and, in the ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... they would leave him wi' me—but they bore him away, and he's been lang ower the sea, and now he's come for his ain, and what should withstand him? I swore to keep the secret till he was ane-an'-twenty—I kenn'd he behoved to dree his weird till that day cam—I keepit that oath which I took to them—but I made another vow to myself, and if I lived to see the day of his return, I would set him in his father's seat, if every step was on a dead man. I have keepit that oath, too;—I will be ae step ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... missionary hears the sound of Chinese music from somewhere up the street. To her ears it is weird and unintelligible, but the children at their play instantly recognize the tune, and raise ...
— Have We No Rights? - A frank discussion of the "rights" of missionaries • Mabel Williamson
... creature. He had been taught to fear the "painter," as it was called in Arkansaw, but he had no fear now. He almost felt that he must himself step out into that enchanted circle and join in the weird dance. ...
— The Arkansaw Bear - A Tale of Fanciful Adventure • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Most strange and weird is this extraordinary regularity. It seems to mean something, to be arranged on some plan and for some humanly intelligible purpose. In the evenings and early mornings especially, when these oft-repeated shapes stand solemnly round the horizon, cut hard and blue against the sky ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... followed. The lantern which gave out the light flickered in the wind and the beat of the rain increased in violence. In all the adventurous lives of the Boy Scouts nothing so weird, so uncanny, as this ...
— Boy Scouts on Motorcycles - With the Flying Squadron • G. Harvey Ralphson
... their bright colour, but retained some purple in the vapour for a long time. If the red sunset clouds turn black, the country people say it will rain; if any other colour, it will be fine. The path from the river led beside the now dusky moor, and the curlew's weird whistle came out of the increasing darkness. Wild as the curlew is in early summer (when there are young birds), he will fly up within a short distance of the wayfarer, whistling, and alight on the burnt, barren surface of the moor. There he stalks to and fro, grey and upright. He looks a large ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... out of the front door of the section house, and slink stealthily to the very spot where his darling's tiny garments had been found, and there amid heart-rending shrieks, which we in our bunk house could plainly hear above the weird moanings of the winter storms, he would dig with his bare hands deep into the cruel snow, searching for his lost ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... The sight was peculiar, and as the marsh ran into an actual swamp, he thought he had seldom seen a more weird effect. Still, what interested him most of all was the picture of Ralph, up to his knees in the soft slime that lay concealed under the ...
— The Boys of Columbia High on the Gridiron • Graham B. Forbes
... guard at the fort heard a weird chant and saw issuing from the distant forest a file of warriors whose naked bodies were smeared with black paint. Every one of them carried a pole over his shoulder, and the horrified watchers knew ...
— Four American Indians - King Philip, Pontiac, Tecumseh, Osceola • Edson L. Whitney
... into the so-called third courtyard. Here I took a lantern from the hall, lit it and crossed to the mill where the clay was prepared for the factory. The tall wheels and cylinders, with their straps and bolts, looked like weird creatures of the night in the dim light of my tallow candle. I felt my courage sinking even here, but I pulled myself together, opened the last door with my key and stepped out into the fourth courtyard. A moment later I stood on the dividing line between ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... those years I had become fascinated by psychic phenomena—by the intrusion into human experience of weird happenings that materialism could not very well explain. Many of these happenings indicated, at least to my satisfaction, not only future existences, but also previous ones. I admitted to Antonio that, since I was in Italy again, I intended to investigate the case of a Perugian peasant girl ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... glimpse of Mont St. Michel is strange and weird in the extreme. A vast ghostlike object of a very pale pinkish hue suddenly rises out of the bay, and one's first impression is that one has been reading the "Arabian Nights," and that here is one of those fairy palaces which will fly off, or gradually fade away, or sink bodily ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... not attain. Hawthorne's effects are moral where Poe's are merely physical. To Poe the situation and its logical development and the effects to be got out of it are all he thinks of. In Hawthorne the situation, however strange and weird, is only the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual struggle. Ethical consequences are always worrying Hawthorne's soul; but Poe did not know that there ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... that picture of the quaint, mysterious old piper piping through Hamelin's narrow streets, and the children following with dancing feet and thoughtful, eager faces. The old folks try to stay them, but the children pay no heed. They hear the weird, witched music and must follow. The games are left unfinished and the playthings drop from their careless hands. They know not whither they are hastening. The mystic music calls to them, and they follow, heedless and unasking where. It stirs and vibrates in their hearts and other sounds grow ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... How strong are little fancies! She should be a beautiful Queen. But she goes about white and crying, in fear of the gods. The gods, that are no more than shadows in the moonlight. Man's fear rises weird and large in all this mystery and makes a shadow of himself upon the ground and Man jumps and says "the gods." Why they are less than shadows; we have seen shadows, we have not ...
— Plays of Gods and Men • Lord Dunsany
... as much sensation as a fake "medium." In all appearance, a violin, mandolin or guitar, placed on a table, will begin to produce music simply through stamping the foot and a few passes of the hand. The music will not sound natural, but weird and distant. ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... pushed on still farther into the great Dismal Swamp, a weird section of strange vegetable and animal life, where great black trees stood silent and grim, with Spanish moss dangling from their branches, bright-plumaged birds flashed across the opens, ugly snakes glided sinuously over the boggy land, and sleepy alligators slid from muddy ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... number of attendants, and the swift flight of the princess and her retinue through the air caused a violent storm to rage over the lands they crossed. Like a thick black cloud they swooped down on the land where Bar Shalmon dwelt, and their weird cries seemed like the wild shrieking of a mighty hurricane. Down they swept in a tremendous storm such as the city had never known. Then, as quickly as it came, the storm ceased, and the people who had fled into ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... wind blew over a glassy sea. The sound of the rippling water on the reef of rocks and on the sandy beach had a weird, melancholy effect. Then came the dull noise of muffled oars commingling with the cawing of the gull and hollow surging of the waters into the Fairy Rocks. There was neither moon nor stars visible, but in the bay the experienced eye could ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... and white. The roof and the water send the light back to each other. Not a sound is heard save distant splashes here and there as a bucket descends to supply the necessities of some house above. Nowhere can be beheld a scene more weird and enchanting. It will remain printed on the memory when many another experience of Stamboul ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... was buried at sea on the 2nd of May, 1872. Poor fellow! He was the smallest in size of all the children, in his manhood reaching only to a little over five feet; and throughout his childhood was never called by any other name than the "Ocean Spectre," from a strange little weird yet most attractive look in his large wondering eyes, very happily caught in a sketch in oils by the good Frank Stone, done at Bonchurch in September 1849 and remaining in his aunt's possession. "Stone has painted," Dickens then ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... pirates. Over the single landing-place frowns from the cliff the keep of an old ruin, 'Moresco Castle,' as they call it still, where some bold rover, Sir John de Moresco, in the times of the old Edwards, worked his works of darkness: a gray, weird, uncanny pile of moorstone, through which all the winds of ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... the sandy road by ten or twelve donkeys. As to vegetation, there were huge clumps of mimosa-bushes, just shedding their yellow blossoms, through which the branches showed up with their long white thorns, giving them a weird and withered appearance. It must indeed have required great courage on behalf of the old Voor-trekker Boers, when they and their families left Cape Colony, at the time of the Great Trek, in long lines of white-tented waggons, to ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... Arctic Circle should, of course, be crossed to witness the midnight sun in all its glory, but I doubt if the quiet crepuscule (I can think of no other word) of the twilit hours of darkness is not even more weird and fascinating viewed from amid silent streets and buildings than from the sullen dreariness of an Arctic desert, which is generally (in summer) as drab and as flat as a biscuit. In Arctic Lapland, where for two months the sun never sinks below the horizon, you may read small print without difficulty ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... the saddest and most tragic of all. We saw high up in the wall, frowning over the river, the window of the chamber from which she had thrown herself after slaying her recreant lover in her rage and despair. A weird story it is, but if the luckless maiden still haunts the scene of her blighted love, an observant sojourner who fitly writes of Ludlow in poetic phrase never saw her. "Nearly every midnight for a month," he says, ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... It is bad enough, I know; but there is something more than an "only" round us here. Had it not been that I took a definite precaution I might have been like the Nurse there." She turned her eyes swiftly on the weird figure, sitting grimly upright like a painted statue; and then her face softened. With the action ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... away and upward, brick buttresses appear constantly, but always with the courses of brick laid slanting to the earth's level, and perpendicular to the thrust of the dome. Every possible effect of light and obscurity makes the strange vistas yet more weird, and, now and then, there is a feeling of standing upon the vast, rounding slope of some planet that shines at one's feet, then gradually falls ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... could I have wanted richer when the limits of reality, as I advanced upon them, seemed ever to recede and recede? It is true that but the other day, on the scene revisited, I was to be struck rather as by their weird immobility: there on the north side, still untenanted after sixty years, a tremendous span in the life of New York, was the vacant lot, undiminished, in which a friendly goat or two used to browse, whom we fed ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... the world, always assumed that Dante got his ideas of the Inferno. Lighted by a million candles, and crowded with peasants in their picturesque costumes, which made wondrous arabesques of moving shadows, the caves presented a weird and unearthly appearance, which the music and dancing subsequently intensified. Shortly afterwards Drake left for Palestine. In May (1874), Burton was struck down by a sudden pain, which proved to arise from a tumour. An operation was necessary, and all was going on well ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... but this morning. I wish people would come into the country on May-day, and fix in town on the first of November. But as they will not, I have made up my mind; and having so little time left, I prefer London, when my friends and society are in it, to living here alone, or with the weird sisters of Richmond and Hampton. I had additional reason now, for the streets are as green as the fields: we are burnt to the bone, and have not a lock of bay to cover our nakedness: oats are so dear, that I suppose they will soon be eaten at Brooks's and fashionable tables as a rarity. The ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... respectfully and even timidly over the objects about him. In truth the room in which he found himself was worthy of inspection, for it was no common room, either in aspect or furnishing. It boasted, it is true, none of the weird properties, the skulls and corpse-lights, dead hands, and waxen masks with which the necromancer of that day sought to impress the vulgar mind. But in place of these a multitude of objects, quaint, curious, or valuable, filled that half of the ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... of objects, acts and phenomena have been the subjects of taboo, and just as numerous and weird have been the charms and amulets and ceremonies that saved him from the dangers that everywhere beset his way. The life of the primitive human being was a journey down a narrow path; outside were infinite dangers from which magic ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... dree our weird. You are a canny Scotch-woman, and know what that means. Come, you must cheer up, for I have brought a young lady with me who is going to put your daughter-in-law a little more comfortable and see after her from ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... was the sight of Tricky. That ever gay animal was careering down the hill straight towards the feeding sheep. The pump-handle was still tied to its neck, and it clattered over the stones with a noise weird enough to drive the whole flock into the sea. The shepherd knew there must be a catastrophe, but he was powerless to avert it. He was too sore to follow, so he slowly limped towards the hut, to nurse his ...
— The Monkey That Would Not Kill • Henry Drummond
... voice was heard—deep, solemn, awful, portentous, ominous, sorrow-laden, weird, mysterious, prophetic, obscure, ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... individualities, once resident in mortal tenements, but torn from their sheltering envelope too soon, or too suddenly, to have acquired the strength and consistency of a fresh existence. And yet the numbers of these restless phantoms were legion, and their multitude seemed to be ever increasing, when, lo! this weird phantasmagoria too passed away, but not before the seeress had, with entranced lips, described to the listeners every feature of the scene she ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various
... later than the latest, swaying over his tubs and sad-irons in the shanty on the stranded scow by Pickett's wharf, dreaming perhaps of the populous rivers of his birth, or of the rats he ate, or of the opium he smoked at dead of night, or of those weird, heathen idols before which he bowed down his shining ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... hair from thy veiled eyes, show thy face as thee beseems, For yet is starlight in the skies, weird woman piteous through my dreams, 'Nay,' she mourns, 'forsooth not now, veiled I sit for evermore, Rose is shed, and charmed prow shall not ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... beyond Ctesiphon, Carus was not convinced, but he fell sick, and his projects were delayed; he was still in his camp near Ctesiphon, when a terrible thunderstorm broke over the ground occupied by the Roman army. A weird darkness was spread around, amid which flash followed flash at brief intervals, and peal upon peal terrified the superstitious soldiery. Suddenly, after the most violent clap of all, the cry arose that the Emperor was dead. Some said that his tent had been struck by lightning, and that his death ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... wearily disengaged himself from one of the Ionic columns of the portico and walked to the box, remained for a moment in serious and expectorative contemplation of the boot, and then returned to his column. There was something so weird in this baptism that I grew ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... the teamster's overcoats, its collar turned up against her dishevelled hair, had transformed her into a vagabond. She was still weak from shock, but she went to work with Margaret and Annette, brewing a pail of tea, while Thayor, Holcomb and the rest straightened out their weird bivouac in the acrid opal haze. The Clown was again busy with his fry-pan, the old dog watching him with ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... stopped; then, with the same attention that a dog gives to his master's gestures, he looked at the other bowls flying through the air, or rolling along the ground. You might have taken him for the weird and watchful genii of the cochonnet. He said nothing; and the bowl-players—the most fanatic men that can be encountered among the sectarians of any faith—had never asked the reason of his dogged silence; in fact, the ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... picturesque than any we had yet seen since leaving Bagamoyo. The ground rose into grander waves—hills cropped out here and there—great castles of syenite appeared, giving a strange and weird appearance to the forest. From a distance it would almost seem as if we were approaching a bit of England as it must have appeared during feudalism; the rocks assumed such strange fantastic shapes. Now they were round boulders raised one above another, ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... glued together on the inside with some tenacious substance, so that she was obliged to go without it. The sub-prefect finally asked for another appointment. The cowardly submissiveness of this officer had much to do with firmly establishing the weird and comic authority of the Knights ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... considering him with an enigmatical smile, that lay in the region between amusement and pity; her shapely chin resting on her hand, and the lace falling from the whitest wrist in the world. One day the smile lasted so long, was so strange and dubious, and so full of a weird intelligence, that it chilled him; it crept to his bones, disconcerted him, and set him wondering. The uneasy questions that had haunted him at the first, recurred. Why was this girl so facile, who had seemed so ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... coachman whips up the spanking Arabs, and the syces bawl louder than ever, and Kalidas Ramaya Mullick turns away his eyes. But for all that, the durhna woman heaps dust upon her head, which he sees, and mutters a weird warning, which he hears; and though the lawn is wide, and the banian topes are leafy, and a gilded temple, the family shrine, stands between, and the marble veranda is spacious, and the state apartments are remote, they do say the shadow of the durhna woman falls on the iced Simpkin ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... through a speaking trumpet has a most startling effect, and more particularly a blast on a horn. In this case after an interval of some seconds a wild note will be flung back from the house-tops below, answered and re-answered on all sides as it echoes from roof to roof—a wild, weird uproar that awakes suddenly, and then dies out ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... that had moved them both. And why had he sung that Bedouin Love Song just as she was thinking it as something that explained him and identified him? It was mysterious as the desert itself lying there so quiet under the moon. It was weird as the cry of the coyote. It was uncanny as spirit rappings. But she could not feel any resentment; only a thrill that was part pleasure and part pain. She wondered if he had felt the same; if he knew. But she could not ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... matters, an incident from the writer's boyhood in New England may be instanced. The house of an unpopular gentleman was assailed—not in the ostentatious manner just described, yet in a way that gave him a good deal of trouble. Dead cats appeared mysteriously in his neighborhood; weird noises arose under his windows; he tried to pick up letters from his doorstep that became mere chalk-marks at his touch, so that he took up only splinters under his nails. One night, as a seance was about beginning in his yard, he emerged from a clump of bushes, flew ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... surprised eyes with recognition of brotherhood and opened a straight way into his confidence. In two minutes the man—perhaps a wild hawk from the Afghan hills—would be pouring out into the ear of this sahib, with heaven-sent knowledge and sympathy, the weird tale of the blood feud and litigation, the border fray, and the usurer's iniquity, which had driven him so far afield as Lahore from Bajaur. To Kipling even the most suspected and suspicious of classes, the religious mendicants, would open ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... watched, and the woman danced. The lanthorn overhead threw a weird light on red caps and tricolour cockades, on the sullen faces of the men and the shoulders of the women, on the dancer's weird antics and her flying, tattered skirts. She was obviously tired, as a poor, ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... wave its head to and fro with a weird, graceful movement, and, as it waved, so Mona's eyes followed it—to and fro, to and fro—followed it because he ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... one Sunday in the summer season. There were enthusiasts whose interest ran from March to November. There were fanatics who insisted on trips thitherward in January. And there were one or two super-fanatics—ranking ahead even of the fishermen and the sand-diggers—who clung to that weird and changing ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... time," said Lydia ominously. "Mrs. Morgan, I can't stand that weird old gentleman any longer. He has got on my nerves so that I could scream when ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... not stranger than this world must seem To one who its vagaries first does scan; It is less weird than the enchanted dream Which life may change to ere you be a man. Such as it is, take it for this alone,— That it is all ...
— Prince Vance - The Story of a Prince with a Court in His Box • Eleanor Putnam
... deeply dejected, silent group that stood in this weird half-light, awaiting the development of Roland's mind regarding them; he, the youngest of their company, quiet, unemotional, whose dominion no ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... could hardly stand; but, notwithstanding the man's haggard face and hollow eyes, and his weird appearance, with the cotton sticking to his head, his tone was gentle, and she stopped to look at ...
— Diddie, Dumps & Tot - or, Plantation child-life • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... fittings of the roofless centre-chamber in which she was wont to perform her incantations and divinations argued no small outlay. On the walls were hangings with occult figures; the pillars were painted with weird and grewsome pictures; crucibles and cauldrons of various sizes were simmering over braziers on little altars; on the shelves and tables stood cups, phials, and vases, a wheel on which a wryneck hopped ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... replied Dam, daubing pipe-clay on the huge cuff of a gauntlet which he had drawn on to a weird-looking wooden hand, sacred to the purposes of glove-drying. "He got beastly drunk and insulted a better man than himself by insulting his Corps—or trying to. He called a silly lie after a total stranger and got what he deserved. He shouldn't seek sorrow if he doesn't want to find ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... ceased pulling they lay down forward to sleep, and that night the boat was moored to a tree on the eastern side of the stream, far-away from the haunts of civilised man, while Rob lay sleepless, listening to the strange and weird sounds which rose from the apparently impenetrable forest on ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... and white had returned to the young girl's cheeks. The dark rings round her eyes had disappeared. Raoul no longer recognized the tragic face of the day before. If the veil of melancholy over those adorable features had not still appeared to the young man as the last trace of the weird drama in whose toils that mysterious child was struggling, he could have believed that Christine was ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... for some time had been gathering together, and which by this time had completely obscured the moon, now burst with a torrent of rain. A flash of lightning for a brief moment illuminated the scene, and then died away again, leaving it more weird even than it had been before. A faint roll of thunder broke upon the unpleasant reverie into which the company had fallen, and Sir George's voice ordering the oil lamps to be lighted, somewhat reassured the more fearful among the spectators. ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... any note of his going; she was callous. The tie between them was being annulled by misery. She was ceasing to be his mother, he to be her son; they were not younger and older, they were the equal victims of necessity. Fate set each of them apart to dree a separate weird. ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... reflected in horrible black canals; processions of heavy vapour drifted in all directions across the sky, over what acres of mean and miserable brown architecture! The air was alive with the most extraordinary, weird, gigantic sounds. I do not think the Five Towns will ever be described: Dante lived too soon. As for the erratic and exquisite genius, Simon Fuge, and his odalisques reclining on silken cushions on the enchanted bosom ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... strange hard life, the weird, constantly shifting scenes, the wondrous, ever-changing colors—was the dominant, insistent, compelling spirit of the land; a brooding, dreadful silence; a waiting—waiting—waiting; a mystic call that was at once ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... recall the story of Hay's life—one weird tragedy after another, from the murder of Lincoln to the murder of McKinley, including the tragic end of two members of his immediate family—there rises in spite of the grandeur that pursued him a single exclamation: "The pity ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... the book back into his hip-pocket, and peered out of the doorway. "What is he up to now, in the devil's name, I wonder!" he added; "going round Sangree's tent and making gestures. How weird he looks disappearing in and out ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... scattered in all directions. 'After this,' says our chronicler, 'it was so uncanny in the house that no man dared live in it. Doctor Faust also appeared in person to his Famulus (assistant) Wagner by night, and related to him many still more weird and mysterious things.... And thus endeth the whole and truthful Historia and Magic of Dr. Faust, from which every Christian man should take warning, and specially those who are of a presumptuous, proud, curious and obstinate mind and head, that they may ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... The shafts in this mine are not sunk perpendicularly, but are slightly inclined: the huge buckets, lowered and raised by means of powerful machinery, are but ancient caldrons, counterparts of those in which the weird witches in "Macbeth" might have brewed their unholy decoctions, or such as the dreadful giants that formed the nightmare of my childhood might have used in preparing those Brobdignagian repasts among the ingredients of which ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... and heard again the solemn charge: "Be kind to your mother, John, and make her old age pleasant. She is all you've got now." With these words ringing in his ears John Lyman awoke to find the perspiration standing on his forehead, and a strange, weird sensation resting on him like a spell, which he tried in vain to throw aside. He tried to compose his mind, and again to sleep; but though nothing peculiarly frightful had troubled his slumber, he trembled from head to foot. In fact, Conscience so long soothed ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... among the trees, now swaying in the grip of the wind, their leafy boughs rustling sibilantly; as though the weird sisters whispered in the nodding branches that here was another thread full-spun and ready for the keen shears. Soberly we swung to the saddle and rode slowly away, lest the quick beat of hoofs should bring ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... have not read of the weird snake dance and other tribal rites of Moquis. In this volume, the habits of these fast vanishing Indians are explained in interesting detail. Few boys' books hold more thrilling chapters than those concerning Rob's ...
— The Boy Scouts on Belgian Battlefields • Lieut. Howard Payson
... frowns from the cliff the keep of an old ruin, 'Moresco Castle,' as they call it still, where some bold rover, Sir John de Moresco, in the times of the old Edwards, worked his works of darkness: a gray, weird, uncanny pile of moorstone, through which all the winds of heaven howl ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... splashing into the pools, and laugh as if they were fairies. Sometimes he would take Andrea for a walk, and all at once stop and gaze at a heap of rubbish, or mark of damp on a lichened wall, picturing all kinds of monsters and weird scenes ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... plains where he basked in warmth and the eye ranged far. Now, despite himself, he felt a chill that was uncanny. The forest, thick and black, spread away, he knew, for hundreds of miles, and neither city nor town broke it. A fervent imagination leaped up and peopled it with weird beings. Nor would imagination go down before will and knowledge. Boughs twisted themselves into fantastic, hideous shapes, and the moan of the wind was certainly like the cry of ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... why did she come?—why did she come? (No, I can't say that! It sounds too much like 'Why did he die! Why did he die?' But the alas is good! That sounds real creepy and weird.) Now then—Alas! alas! This is the worst thing that ever happened to me in all my life! My dear, old home! To think that anybody who isn't wanted should come and push herself like this into my dear, old home! O father! father! come home from Bombay, and save me from this awful woman. Turn ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... the thin walls came the dull, confused murmur of many voices. Doors banged, and when they opened, brief, broken sounds penetrated from the cabins, evidence of the bewilderment and alarm of their tenants. The thing that was particularly weird to Frederick in that swaying corridor, creaking like a new boot and lighted by electricity, was the incessant ringing of electric bells. In a hundred cabins at the same time, frightened persons, who had paid dear for their passage and were entitled to excellent service, ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... many times, even after starting on her pilgrimage, when the whole adventure had appealed to her as one that was no better than a weird, senseless obsession, one that she would do well to turn back from and forget. Probably, at first, she had only been kept to the task by a certain spirit of adventure, a youthful and long-repressed urge ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... two Chicamicomio settlements of scattered houses are each nearly a mile in length, and are separated by a high, bald sand-beach of about the same length, which was once heavily wooded; but the wind has blown the sand into the forest and destroyed it. A wind-mill in each village raised its weird arms to ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... generally swung out of the way—hung a faded, woollen blanket; from the opposite corner there fell an old, patchwork, silk quilt. Dainty white curtains in all their crispness were at the windows, and upon the walls were many rare and weird trophies of the chase, not to mention the innumerable pictures that had been taken from "Godey's Lady Book" and other periodicals of that time. A little book-shelf, that had been fashioned out of a box, was filled with old and well-read books; ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... themselves and amidst shouts of laughter from the crowd, they drove them from the space, and danced thereon and sang a song of victory. The dancing and fighting, the naked painted figures, and the constant yells and shoutings gave one a weird sensation, and suggested strange ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... evil spirits of all sorts, worship the high-souled lord of Uma, possessed of diverse characteristics. And there, O king, the adorable god sports with the wild and playful followers of Kuvera, possessed of weird and ghostly appearances. Glowing with its own splendour, that mountain looks resplendent as the morning sun. And no creature with his natural eyes made of flesh, can ever ascertain its shape or configuration, and neither heat nor cold prevails there, nor doth the sun shine nor do the winds ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... imagine I can almost see him sitting there, in his furs, upon the illuminated surface, and looking down in my direction. As I listen, one answers him from behind the woods in the valley. What a wild winter sound, wild and weird, up among the ghostly hills! Since the wolf has ceased to howl upon these mountains, and the panther to scream, there is nothing to be compared with it. So wild! I get up in the middle of the night to hear it. It is refreshing ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... long quavering cry which was taken up by those who followed him. Then the people in the village joined in the wail, and it came over and over again from the multitude. It was inexpressibly mournful and the dark forest gave it back in weird echoes. The procession poured on in a great horde toward the village, but the cry, full of grief and lament ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... fear. She had heard it once before, a night or two ago, when their train had stopped in a wide desert for water or repairs or something and the porter of the car had told her it was coyotes. It had been distant then, and weird and interesting to think of being so near real live wild animals. She had peered from the safety of her berth behind the silken curtains and fancied she saw shadowy forms steal over the plain under ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... Perhaps I am too imaginative, and the earliest impressions I received were of a kind to stimulate the imagination abnormally. A long series of little misfortunes, so connected with each other as to suggest a sort of weird fatality, so worked upon my melancholy temperament when I was a boy that, before I was of age, I sincerely believed myself to be under a curse, and not only myself, but my whole family and every ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... indulging his own reveries, dreamily heard the words "money," "Spratt," "great-great-grandfather," "rich wife," "family estates;" and they sounded to him vague and afar off, like whispers from the world of romance and legend,—weird prophecies ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of the south. But whatever be their explanation, be it a fierce neighbour, or be it a climatic change, there they stand, these grim and silent cities, and up on the hills you can see the graves of their people, like the port-holes of a man-of-war. It is through this weird, dead country that the tourists smoke and gossip and flirt as they pass up to the ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... scattering mud and stones around them. I can see, too, where trenches were levelled, just as I have seen pits which children make on the seashore levelled by the incoming tide. Now and then there come back to my mind dim, weird pictures of Germans crawling out of their dug-outs, holding up their hands, and piteously ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... snow-white Signy as she sat with folded hands And gazed at the Goth-king's Earl till his heart grew heavy and cold, As one that half remembers a tale that the elders have told, A story of weird and of woe: then ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... damp, it leads not alone to disease among the inmates, but to the disintegration of the house itself, through what is called "dry rot," but is paradoxically the result of dampness. Edgar Allan Poe, in his weird story, "The Fall of the House of Usher," has given a mystical interpretation of the dissolution of an old homestead which really has a scientific explanation that might be found in ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... with his companions as much as circumstances would allow him. In the evening he wandered a few paces into the gloom. From this little distance the many fires, with the black forms of men passing to and fro before the crimson rays, made weird ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... that gambolled along their surface. He took his hearers into the gloomy forests, with their myriad forms of life, their gaudy birds and gorgeous insects, their lurking beasts and dense-packed horrors. Weird cries and terrifying howls rang out in imaginative sounds. And what horrific beings stalked in the dim alleys betwixt the giant trees, or peeped forth at the intrepid traveller from cave and den! One-horned beasts with fiery hoofs; dragons ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... dwell here With a weird upon my life, When the clansmen shout for battle And the war-swords clash in strife? I canna joy at feast, I canna sleep in bed, For the wonder of the word And the warning of the dead. It sings in my sleeping ears, It hums in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... simplest and sweetest of his ballads, "Annabel Lee," and the wonderful poem of "The Bells," were published. His former friend and editor, Griswold, published a scathing denunciation of the dead man in the New York "Tribune." Poe's fame as a master of the weird and fanciful in literature was already established wherever his thrilling tales and superb poem "The Raven" had penetrated. He was one of the few poets of America at that period who had succeeded ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... best known in connection with the burning of a witch. The traditionary story makes out Kate M'Niven to have been a nurse in the family of the Grammes of Inchbrakie, and as a proof that she was a member of the weird sisterhood, a story is told of her in connection with a visit which the Laird of Inchbrakie made to Dunning on the occasion of some festivity. According to the fashion of the time, he took with him his knife ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... by accident, and were obliged to keep at close quarters in order to avoid freezing during the terrible winters. Some of them are not unlike the city of Eden in Martin Chuzzlewit. The entire absence of every thing approaching taste, comfort, or rural beauty in the appearance of these villages; the weird and desolate aspect of the boggy and grass-grown streets; the utter want of interest in progress or improvement on the part of the peasantry who inhabit them, are well calculated to produce a melancholy impression of the condition of these poor people. How can it be otherwise, held ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... solitudes you will find incense smouldering before wayside images,—little stone figures of Fudo, Jizo, or Kwannon. Many experiences of travel,—strange impressions of sound as well as of sight,—remain associated in my own memory with that fragrance:—vast silent shadowed avenues leading to weird old shrines;—mossed flights of worn steps ascending to temples that moulder above the clouds;—joyous tumult of festival nights;—sheeted funeral-trains gliding by in glimmer of lanterns; murmur of household prayer in fishermen's ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... civilization," the actor named it to his wife at their pilot-house point of view—and the "for-true" pair in sight below them took frank advantage of its conditions to appropriate and accept each other as simply and completely as if these weird conditions—with their Devil's Elbow, Race-ground, Island, Tea-table, and Back-oven—were a veritable Eden as Eden was before the devil got in. Without a note of courtship or coquetry love ran ever more and more smoothly, growing ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... early morn, the flutes whistle fine and clear, and the violins, with their tremulous, eager sweetness, seem dripping amber; viols and horns reply, shaking out quivering breaths to the summer night air, until it seems some weird, far-away world. Violet is so entranced that she almost forgets she is Floyd Grandon's wife, ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... its weird position, the Mantis surveys the acridian, its gaze fixed upon it, its head turning gently as on a pivot as the other changes place. The object of this mimicry seems evident; the Mantis wishes to terrorise its powerful prey, to paralyse it with fright; for if ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... and cold, I grant you; all this upland plateau about the Lizard promontory seems bleak and cold everywhere; but to my mind it has a certain wild and weird picturesqueness of its own for all that. It aims at gloominess. I confess in its own way I don't ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... not up thy lips forever—veiled in mist and mystery. I will sit and lowly listen at the phantom-haunted falls Where thy waters foam and glisten o'er the rugged, rocky walls, Till some spirit of the olden, mystic, weird, romantic days Shall emerge and pour her golden tales ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... has at every wedding for twenty years. Following her come three musicians; Pedro, in the center, his gray, thin hair straggling over the collar of his well-brushed long black coat, with young Vicente and Arturo, the bridegroom's brothers, one on either side, accompanying Pedro's weird, thin-blooded strain with thrumming mandolins. Next come, by two and two, six little girls, pretty as angels, with little wild sunflowers in their glossy tresses, and carrying, with conscious pride, large bunches of red roses. And here are the bride and bridegroom, Ysabel Alvarado, the flower ...
— The Penance of Magdalena & Other Tales of the California Missions • J. Smeaton Chase
... leaves. Have you ever listened—with your heart—and learned, by the faintest sound, the different voices of the trees—the quick, soft rustle of the maple; the stronger sound of the oak-leaves; the weird, ghostly shiver of the pine-needles? I know little of music, if anything out of heaven can touch a human soul more tenderly than these sounds. Then the birds—what joyous or solemn music they can make! Have you never felt your heart leap to the singing of a robin among the ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... put the shame off them? Therefore I say, show to us a token; and if thou be the God, this shall be easy to thee; and if thou show it not, then is thy falsehood manifest, and thou shalt dree the weird. For we shall deliver thee into the hands of these women here, who shall thrust thee down into the flow which is hereby, after they have wearied themselves with whipping thee. But thy man that kneeleth at thy feet shall we give to the true God, and he shall go to her by the road of the flint ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris
... with feet always flat on the floor, often turning on her heels. All the time her arms were extended and her fingers snapping, and snapping also were the black eyes. She was the personification of grace, but the dance was weird—made the more so by the setting of bright evening dresses and glittering uniforms. One never sees a dance of this sort these days, even in the South, any more than one sees the bright-colored turban. Both have passed with ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... seemed to obey and embody his whims. It sprang from his powerful hands in resolute and impetuous flight, whirred threateningly overhead, and returned to foot, fluttering and purring, as if endowed with affection for its unlovable master. None so mastered the missile; but for all his weird influence over it, he was subject to the restraints of another weapon which seldom left his hands. Is there not a spiritual law which imposes checks on the bombastic tricks of crude and cultured alike, or was it by force of gravity ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... leaving the other to follow or remain behind as it pleased, he advanced directly into the hills, steering by aid of the stars, his left hand ever on Murphy's bridle rein, his low voice of expostulation seeking to calm the other's wild fancies and to curb his violent speech. It was a weird, wild ride through the black night, unknown ground under foot, unseen dangers upon every hand. Murphy's aberrations changed from shrieking terror to a wild, uncontrollable hilarity, with occasional outbursts of violent anger, when it required ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... fiercest gales, and in the vast silence which ensued I heard the pines across the pond singing antiphonally. Black as it was under the trees, there was a moon behind the night. No suggestion of it showed through the clouds, yet from the pond surface itself came a weird twilight, filtered no doubt through a mile of flying scud a mile above, reflected from the wind-swept surface and showing these distant pines lifting heads of murk against the murky sky. But their antiphonal shout was no pine-voiced song of the sea, ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... necessary. By and by, as the sun rose up and warmed the world, we pulled off our clothes and got ready for breakfast. We were just pleasantly in time, for five minutes afterward the driver sent the weird music of his bugle winding over 15 the grassy solitudes, and presently we detected a low hut or two in the distance. Then the rattling of the coach, the clatter of our six horses' hoofs, and the driver's crisp commands, awoke to a louder and stronger emphasis, and we went sweeping down ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... authors quite different from each other and—except at the special points of contact—from him. He is like Borrow or De Quincey (though he goes even beyond both) in the singular knack of endowing or investing known places and commonplace actions with a weird second essence and second intention. He is like Charles Lamb in his power of dropping from quaintness and almost burlesque into the most touching sentiment and emotion. Mr. Lang, in his Introduction to Poe, has noticed how Gerard resembles America's one "poet of the first order" in fashioning lines ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... glimmering moonlight might stream in; and as the soft silvery beams stole silently into the room and laid their tremulous light on the young forms and awestruck faces, the flames leaping and crackling joined in enhancing the effect of the story by throwing on the walls weird shadows of a moving ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... gave its feeble light to the room, only half subduing the shadows that went creeping into corners and recesses. Something of a weird aspect was on every thing; and I could not but gaze at the two strangers in that strange place to them, under such peculiar circumstances, and wonder to see them so calm, dignified, and self-possessed. We sat down ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... professor out in favour of a "darnce"—and the other pubs decanted their contents, and chance souls skipped for the verandas of weather-board shanties out of which other souls popped to see the runaway. They saw a weird horseman, or rather, something like a camel (for Harry rode low, like Tod Sloan with his long back humped—for effect)—apparently fleeing for its life in a veil of dust, along the long white road, and some forty rods behind, ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... and pine, and passing bird and cradled boat; the Black Wood of Rannoch standing "in the midst of its own darkness," frowning out upon us like the Past disturbed, and far off in the clear ether, as in another and a better world, the dim Shepherds of Etive pointing, like ghosts at noonday, to the weird shadows of Glencoe;—not greater was this change, than is that from the dingy, oppressive, weary "cemetery" of mere word-knowledge to the open air, the light and liberty, the divine infinity and richness of ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... over rocks sheeted with opaque green ice. Here it is strange to watch the swirl of water freeing itself from these frost-shackles, and to see it eddying beneath the overhanging eaves of frailest crystal-frosted snow. All is so silent, still, and weird in this white world, that one marvels when the spirit of winter will appear, or what shrill voices in the air will make his unimaginable magic audible. Nothing happens, however, to disturb the charm, save when a sunbeam cuts ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... back upon the cushions of the chair and the Doctor's hand stole mechanically to the matches. He smoked and she played—quiet, large music, tranquilly filling the room: Bach fugues, German Lieder, fragments of weird northern harmonies, fragments of Beethoven and Schubert, the Largo of Handel,—and all the time she played she looked at the man who lay back in the chair, half turned from her, the cigar drooping from his fingers. There was no sound in the room but the music and light leaping of little flames ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... wind wailing through the skeleton trees, the night was still and muggy. Lastly, I did not know, until the journal reached my hands, that he was put into the room known as the Haunted Chamber, nor that in that room the fire is noted for casting weird shadows upon the walls. This, however, may be so. The legend of the manor-house ghost he tells precisely as it is known to me. The tragedy dates back to the time of Charles I., and is led up to by a pathetic love-story, which I need not give. Suffice it that for seven days and nights ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... narrative is supplied by the story of Cleonice: a story which, briefly told by Plutarch, suggests one of the most tragic situations it is possible to conceive. The pathos and terror of this dark weird episode in a life which history herself invests with all the character of romance, long haunted the imagination of Byron; and elicited from Goethe one of the most whimsical illustrations of the astonishing absurdity into which criticism sometimes tumbles, ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... back and brought it up, and after some delay a place for it was found. The two lights now plainly showed a sudden enlargement in the area of the cave, and above them hung what appeared to be huge icicles, giving the interior a weird appearance. Still no water ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... summer night in Finland is likely to forget it. The Arctic Circle should, of course, be crossed to witness the midnight sun in all its glory, but I doubt if the quiet crepuscule (I can think of no other word) of the twilit hours of darkness is not even more weird and fascinating viewed from amid silent streets and buildings than from the sullen dreariness of an Arctic desert, which is generally (in summer) as drab and as flat as a biscuit. In Arctic Lapland, where for two months the ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... with a queer feeling of awe at the weird, gray light which filtered through the cotton walls. A sense of oneness with Nature and the beat of Her eternal heart filled her soul. The soft wash of the water on the sands seemed to be keeping time to the ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... disturbing like the presage of a storm. As they traversed a region of hotels and apartment houses, Frank and Bertha noted many open windows; men and women staring out half dreamily. They passed a livery stable, out of which there came a weird uncanny dissonance of horses neighing in ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... Magruder points out, North American Review, April, 1905) Guinevere is married to King Arthur, whom she has never seen, when already in love with Lancelot, so that the "marriage" was merely a ceremony, and not a real marriage (cf., May Child, "The Weird of Sir Lancelot," ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the coarseness, like that of Fielding, is always on the surface, and devoid of the ulterior suggestiveness of the modern psychological novel. But perhaps no work of fiction has ever enjoyed such vogue among literary men as a collection of stories, some graceful, some weird, written in 1679 by P'u Sungling, a disappointed candidate at the public examinations. This collection, known as the Liao Chai, is exceedingly interesting to the foreign student for its sidelights on folklore and family life; to the native scholar, who professes to smile at ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... the majority holds its own; children among children can express with a very small vocabulary what they want to say to each other, whereas an only child who lives with its elders has usually a larger vocabulary than it can manage, which makes the sayings of only children quaint and almost weird, as the perfection of the instrument persuades us that there is a full-grown thought within it, and a child's fancy suddenly laughs at us ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... pastime which could be practiced without making a noise of any sort to attract undesirable attentions, the boy took to it in self-defence. But before long it had become his passion. He read, by stealth, everything that fell into his hands, a weird melange of newspapers, illustrated Parisian weeklies, magazines, novels: cullings from ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... other side of the wall came sounds of revelry, shrill squealings and shoutings. The Judies were disporting themselves at one of their weird games. It was known that they played touch-last, and Scandal said that another of their favourite recreations was marbles. The juniors at Wrykyn believed that it was to hide these excesses from the gaze of the public that the ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse
... the woods with the bright flames shooting upward the effect of the chanting was weird, ...
— Ethel Hollister's Second Summer as a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson
... for "the voyage," as she called the crossing, had accumulated great stores of knowledge as to how to treat seasickness. She established herself on the upper deck, let down a deck-chair as low as it would go, and replacing her hat by a weird little Tam o' Shanter, covered ...
— Barbara in Brittany • E. A. Gillie
... about them in their thousands. A gorgeous barge is floating slowly round the shrine. There is very little moon, but the whole place is alight; sometimes the water is ablaze with ruby and amber; this fades, and a weird blue-green shimmers across the barge, and electric lamps at the corners of the square lend brilliancy to the scene. The barge is covered with crimson trappings, and hundreds of wreaths of white oleander hang curtain-wise round what is within—the god and goddess decked ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... observe the attitude of the people of the countryside where he was brought up and where he built his early fame. There are a scattered few of the middle classes who in this remote country spot cannot understand the heights he has reached in public estimation. It is really a weird sensation to come from the outer world and talk to these people. No, no, he may to some extent have secured notoriety in circles even as far off as London, but really there is nothing in the man. Why, he was brought up here in the village! But these quaintly prejudiced ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... of never-dying fame, Virgin untouched by men and by men feared, Nor Venus in her eyes nor young Desire But Mars and Terror and the bloody Weird— France owes the Salic Law to her alone, And hers is the true king on the true throne. Let none lament her death who was all fire And never, or by fire ...
— An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams • Pierre Nicole
... the gleaming teeth; and the eyes not quite covered by the lids. One beautiful round arm curved above her head, and some of her soft brown hair rested in the little open palm. The other stretched down toward the centre of the bed, as if fearlessly to invite the touch of those weird things with which imagination peoples the solemn night—which the wakeful eye, in the still, small hours, sees moving in the darker corners, or passing swiftly by the bedside, or hovering in the air, wearing the semblance of one's dead friends, or filling large ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... I, that creeping red, and this whiteness I pride myself on is I, and my black hair, and my blue eyes are I. It is a weird thing to be a person. What makes me myself, ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... decks presented, with huge fires blazing away under our pots, and the men with the ladles skimming off the scraps, or baling out the oil into the coolers, was strange and weird in the extreme. Had I been suddenly introduced among them, I should not have recognised them as my shipmates, begrimed as they were with smoke and oil. I was, however, much in the same condition. Dr Cockle had become accustomed ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... from the village in which she had been living to a farm among the foothills of the Alleghany Mountains. Here it was that Edwin for the first time saw an outline of the wonderful Blue Mountain of which he had at Christmas time heard many weird and frightful legends. Blue Mountain was one of the tall mountain-peaks that stood out a little apart from the main ridge and was known among the people as the home of St. Nicholas and his elves. Strange stories were connected with ...
— The Poorhouse Waif and His Divine Teacher • Isabel C. Byrum
... verbal language which often misses fire even with us, but that enormous alphabet of sun and moon and green grass and blue sky in which alone we meet, and by which alone we can signal to each other. That unique man of genius, George Macdonald, described in one of his weird stories two systems of space co-incident; so that where I knew there was a piano standing in a drawing-room you knew there was a rose-bush growing in a garden. Something of this sort is in small or great affairs the matter with the madman. He cannot have a vote, because he is the citizen of another ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... first object observed by those who enter. It is an exquisite painting on glass, the work of Lang Qua, the best artist China has produced in our day, and it delineates the form and features of a singularly handsome young man. But it is the quaint Parsee garb that first attracts attention; and the weird romance that attaches to the history of the Fire-worshipers gives this work of art its real value, rather than its lines of beauty or the celebrity of the painter's name. This delicately-featured portrait may depict the countenance ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... medicine—so these stones are said to be the work of the devil. A friend tells me that in his childhood his nurse used to frighten him by saying that the devil lurked in a dolmen which stands near his father's house in Oxfordshire; and many weird traditions ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... stopped him. The man turned an electric torch on Dr. Mannering, and recognized him. It appeared that while one detective kept guard outside, the others watched within. At the sound of voices the door of the Grey Room opened, and in the bright light that streamed from it a weird figure stood—a tall, black object with huge and flashing eyes and what looked like an elephant's trunk descending from between them. The watchers, wearing hoods and gas masks, resembled the fantastic demons of a Salvator Rosa, or Fuselli. Their chief now accosted the ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... so ridiculous as this place at present. They expected the Emperor ten or twelve days ago, and put up all manner of triumphal arches made of evergreens, which look like tea-leaves now, and will take a withered and weird appearance hardly to be foreseen, long before the twenty-fifth, when the visit is vaguely expected to come off. In addition to these faded garlands all over the leading streets, there are painted eagles hoisted over gateways and sprawling across a hundred ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... with a subtle humour, often inventing stories that were weird and impossible, this strange character had lived the life of a hermit and a wanderer in the wilderness—a life compelling him to seek his companions among the trees or the black sides of the towering mountains. All nature, to him, was ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... suggests a great thought, perhaps I should say, principle of man's moral being, which Shakespeare has more than once worked upon with surpassing effect. For it is remarkable that, in Macbeth, the thinking of the Weird Sisters (and he cannot choose but think of them) fires the hero's moral and imaginative forces into convulsive action, and thus causes him to shrink back from the very deed to which the prophetic greetings stimulate him. So, again, in Hamlet, the intimations of the Ghost ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... show," said I. "Anyhow, I must dree my own weird—whatever that means. I don't know, and never heard of anyone who did, but it sounds appropriate. I should like to do a walking tour alone in the desert, if it were not for the annoying necessity to eat and drink. I want to get ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... as though saturated with oil, their flickering blaze lighting up a weird scene; the gaunt, bare, white trees, ghosts of a departed forest, the miry ground strewn with eggs of all sizes, shapes and colors, and dead birds of many kinds, in amongst which writhed and twisted dirty-looking, repulsive water moccasins and brilliant yellow ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... tapped the carpet, biting her under lip and seeming to be listening. Nothing stirred. Not even an echo of busy Bond Street penetrated to the place. Mrs. Irvin unfastened her cloak and allowed it to fall back upon the settee. Her bare shoulders looked waxen and unnatural in the weird light which shone down upon ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... the sick man's mind, his morbid appetite tends, strange to say, to horrors. He 'snatches a fearful joy' from the weird and supernatural. I have known those terrible tales of Le Fanu, entitled 'In a Glass Darkly,' which for dramatic power and eeriness no other novelist has ever approached, devoured greedily by those whose physical sustenance has ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... the battle passes in silence, the noise of one's motor deadening all other sounds. In the green patches behind the brown belt myriads of tiny flashes tell where the guns are hidden; and those flashes, and the smoke of bursting shells, are all we see of the fighting. It is a weird combination of stillness and havoc, the Verdun conflict viewed ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... was a youngster I was looked upon as a weird sort of creature, because, forsooth, I was a socialist. Reporters from local papers interviewed me, and the interviews, when published, were pathological studies of a strange and abnormal specimen of man. At that time (nine or ten years ago), because ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... given, of "Hell-Broth springs;" for, as we gazed upon the infernal mixture and inhaled the pungent sickening vapors, we were impressed with the idea that this was a most perfect realization of Shakespeare's image in Macbeth. It needed but the presence of Hecate and her weird band to realize that horrible creation of poetic fancy, and I fancied the "black and midnight hags" concocting a charm around this horrible cauldron. We ventured near enough to this spring to dip the end of a pine ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... to the old settler in Kansas, is big with meaning, seeing it brings to life one of the strange, romantic, contradictory, and brilliant characters of the "Squatter Sovereignty" days, when Jim Lane wrought, with his weird and wonderful eloquence, his journeys oft, and his tireless industry, in championing the cause of State freedom. Him and his history, reading like a tale told by a campfire's fitful light, this name embodies. What an archive of history does ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... was exceedingly picturesque; and the ladies, wrapped in their shawls and water-proofs, were delighted with the view of the forest, illuminated by the bright fires. The trees, the trailing moss, and the openings in the woods assumed weird shapes, and the alligators were as frisky as though they were ...
— Down South - or, Yacht Adventure in Florida • Oliver Optic
... superbly out across the water. The fantastic impression of the scene was so strong that it seemed as if the visible brilliance of the shining lights had entered into the voice itself, giving it a weird and uncanny splendour. The vast floating audience listened, motionless and silent, until the last note went out like a light suddenly extinguished. Then, after a gust of hand-clapping had subsided, the glittering barge moved forward once more, the dip of a hundred oars plashing ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... help Phil managed to draw the carcass of the deer up some ten feet from the ground. It looked quite weird swinging there in the moonlight; but Larry chuckled with pleasure every time ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... rats were all dead, and there was no chance of their returning to plague them, the people of Hamelin refused to pay the reward, and they bade the piper do his worst. He took them at their word, and a few moments later the weird strains of the magic flute again arose, and this time it was the children who swarmed out of the houses and ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... sat in the coffee-room, eating and drinking, if any of the folk about him knew anything about the dead man whose body had been quietly taken away by the doctors while the hotel routine went on in its usual fashion. It seemed odd, strange, almost weird, to think that any one of these people, eating fish or chops, chatting, reading their propped-up newspapers, might be in possession of some knowledge which he would give a good deal ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... is told regarding a solitary, weird figure which stands out, rudely weatherworn, from a hill-top in the pass called Shao-hsing Gorge, Canton Province. This point of the pass is called Lung-men, or Dragon's Mouth, and the hill the Husband-expecting Hill. The figure itself, ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... of the most weird and remarkable scenes of the war, probably of any war. An army was being landed on an enemy's coast at the dead of night, but with the same cheers and shrieks and laughter that rise from the bathers at ...
— Notes of a War Correspondent • Richard Harding Davis
... he was doubly glad that he had refrained from telling of his weird experience, for the professor, in ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering
... rather pretty legend—recalling the old Greek dream of dryads—about a willow-tree which grew in the garden of a samurai of Kyoto. Owing to its weird reputation, the tenant of the homestead desired to cut it down; but another samurai dissuaded him, saying: 'Rather sell it to me, that I may plant it in my garden. That tree has a soul; it were cruel to destroy its life.' Thus purchased and transplanted, the yanagi flourished ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... her hill the weird old Etrurian nurse of Florence, withered, superannuated, feeble, warming her palsied limbs in the sun, and looking vacantly down upon the beautiful child whose cradle she rocked. Fiesole is perhaps the oldest ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... dreaming, that's one sure thing," she murmured, approaching the little opening with extreme caution, while chills of alternate fear and excitement coursed all over her. "It seems so weird and ghostly to see that thing open all by itself, with nothing to help it along! Ghosts or not, I'm going to see what's there," and, strengthened by this resolve, she started to place her hand in the opening, but drew it back quickly with a ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... adoration she was so virtuously vain." While Sheil was striving to image to himself the fascinations of the "dangerous Papist," the door was opened: a volume of smoke had previously filled the room, and the rush of air causing it to spread in huge wreaths around her, "a weird and withered form stood in the midst of the dispersing vapor." Lady Palmer was a most vehement Catholic. Lord Chesterfield and the Catholic question were the only subjects in which she seemed to take any interest. On the wrongs of her country she expatiated with both energy and eloquence, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... mentioned The Fall of the House of Usher, Ligeia, which he regarded as his best tale The Descent into the Maelstrom, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and The Mystery of Marie Roget. The general character of his tales may be inferred from their titles. Poe delighted in the weird, fantastic, dismal, horrible. There is no warmth of human sympathy, no moral consciousness, no lessons of practical wisdom. His tales are the product of a morbid but powerful imagination. His style is in perfect keeping with his peculiar gifts. ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... overwhelming as the roar of a tempest; fluttering hymns, which seemed to be mounting to the throne of the Lord like a mixture of light and sound—all were expressed by the organ's hundred voices, with more vigor, more subtle poetry, more weird coloring, than had ever been ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... spite of their weird impressions, on seeing the jesting coolness of the American, while Ben-Zayb retired, quite abashed, to his seat, muttering, "It can't be. You'll see that he doesn't do it without mirrors. The table will have to ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... above the sea, and is fl00ded in a deep central depression by the waters of Lake Tsana. Above the plateau rise several irregular and generally ill-defined mountain ranges which attain altitudes of from 12,000 to over 15,000 ft. Many of the mountains are of weird and fantastic shape. Characteristic of the country are the enormous fissures which divide it, formed in the course of ages by the erosive action of water. They are in fact the valleys of the rivers which, rising on the uplands or mountain sides, have cut their way to the surrounding ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... started for the Indian trail. They took with them lanterns, torches, and horns, and a trumpet, to be sounded as a signal that the lost one was found. The wretched mother traversed the piazza slowly, gazing after them, as their torches cast a weird, fantastic light on the leafless trees they passed. She listened to the horns resounding in the distance, till the tremolo motion they imparted to the air became faint as the buzz of insects. At last, Charles, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... was listening to the weird call of that persistent whip-poor-will, perched in some neighboring tree, and sending forth its ...
— Phil Bradley's Mountain Boys - The Birch Bark Lodge • Silas K. Boone
... quoted which declared that a Roman emperor would never proceed victoriously beyond Ctesiphon, Carus was not convinced, but he fell sick, and his projects were delayed; he was still in his camp near Ctesiphon, when a terrible thunderstorm broke over the ground occupied by the Roman army. A weird darkness was spread around, amid which flash followed flash at brief intervals, and peal upon peal terrified the superstitious soldiery. Suddenly, after the most violent clap of all, the cry arose that the Emperor was dead. Some said that his tent had been struck by ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... had disappeared. The rocks, the distant mountains, some confused masses of far-off forests, assumed a weird and mysterious aspect under this equal distribution ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... head over her weird conduct. One thing gratified him concerning her, however: it was that she admired his little son unreservedly, and could be given no greater treat than to be allowed to hold the boy on her lap. She would sit as though worshipping the child, ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... piles of golden utensils, shields, etc. Left centre is a heavy iron door, opening into a vault. Throughout this scene there is a suggestion of music, rising into full orchestra at significant moments. The voices of the Nibelungs are accompanied by stopped trumpets and other weird sounds.] ...
— Prince Hagen • Upton Sinclair
... deepened the purple gloom of the valleys. Now, as we rode in merry groups of six or eight, over the country by-ways, the new moon slowly touched every tree and shrub with her magical wand until the land with its long, weird shadows and silver radiance seemed to belong to another world than ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... heard of him, to this day, but there was a time when he was very much talked of. That was in the middle nineties, following publication of "The Red Badge of Courage," although even before that he had occasioned a brief flurry with his weird collection of poems called "The Black Riders and Other Lines." He was highly praised, and highly abused and laughed at; but he seemed to be "made." We have largely forgotten since. It ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... led, partly carried into our tent—a small, thin, wizened woman, with keen features and a tongue as keen, which cackled and joked at a great rate with the crowd around her. It was almost awesome to look at this weird piece of antiquity, who was born in the Reign of Terror, and was a young woman before the war of 1812. She was quite lively yet, so far as her wits went, and seemed likely to go on living. [This very old woman died, I believe, ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... be common to this country, the spot only where the castle once stood is discovered,—the edifice itself being washed away. He determines to return. Geraldine being acquainted with all that is passing, like the Weird Sisters in Macbeth, vanishes. Re-appearing, however, she waits the return of the Bard, exciting in the mean time, by her wily arts, all the anger she could rouse in the Baron's breast, as well as that jealousy of which he is described to have been susceptible. The old Bard and the youth ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... brightness of her eyes, joined to the depth of the hollows in which they lay, and the red margin by which they were surrounded. It was not really the fact that Mrs Van Siever was so very aged, for she had still some years to live before she would reach eighty, but that she was such a weird old woman, so small, so ghastly, and so ugly! "I'll sew him up, if he's been robbing me," she said. "I will, indeed!" And she stretched out her hand to grab at the ledger which ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... vision! The whole great ship in full sail instantly makes an acute silhouette against the monstrous disk,—rests there in the very middle of the vermilion sun. His face crimsons high above her top-masts,—broadens far beyond helm and bowsprit. Against this weird magnificence, her whole shape changes color: hull, masts, and ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... from one of the Ionic columns of the portico and walked to the box, remained for a moment in serious and expectorative contemplation of the boot, and then returned to his column. There was something so weird in this baptism that ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... cavern cold, Like one who flies a crime, Fearful, and old as God is old, The spirit shrank from time; For a stifled scream was the angry gold Of the weird sunset, and the noonday bold Was the stare on the face ...
— Iolaeus - The man that was a ghost • James A. Mackereth
... stunted, and in many cases disfigured by the inroads of hungry cows among their lower branches, and a damp veil of mist hangs perpetually over the scene, softening the landscape, but sometimes depressing the spirits. As the hours pass the place grows on you: a weird beauty begins to loom up from among the mist-wreaths, the jagged rocks, the restless waves, and you forget the desolate moor, which in itself displays attractions you will realize later, in the grandeur of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... cleared away she saw a weird scene about her: hundreds of Japanese men and women, speaking in low angry voices which somehow reminded her of the breaking of the surf on the beach—perhaps because the Japanese language has a sing-song rhythm. The little boy, apparently limp and lifeless, lay in his sister's arms. Komatsu ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes
... a nest of winding alley-ways and blind bat and rat holes, where weird smells and strange unlisted poisons and prophecies were born. In its midst, tight-packed in a roaring babel-din of many-colored markets, stood a stone-walled palace, built once by a Hindu king to commemorate a victory over Moslems, added ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... brought him realization of the real menace of the radiant ribbons. There was a solidity and strength in those glowing streamers that held them as helplessly captive as though they were gripped in ribbons of steel. Dazed and helpless, the three struggled for a moment in the meshes of the weird net of flame like fish caught in the strands ...
— Zehru of Xollar • Hal K. Wells
... creamy, waxen whiteness of skin that was yet warm and peach-downy. And I wish to insist from the outset upon the plain fact that there was nothing uncanny about her. In spite of her singular faculty of insight, which sometimes seemed to illogical people almost weird or eerie, she was in the main a bright, well-educated, sensible, winsome, lawn-tennis-playing English girl. Her vivacious spirits rose superior to her surroundings, which were often sad enough. But she was above all things wholesome, unaffected, and sparkling—a gleam of sunshine. She laid no ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... beautiful plains of Lombardy lie beneath like a map, and the northern horizon-line is glittering with the entire sweep of the Alps, like a solemn senate of archangels with diamond mail and glittering crowns. Mont Blanc, Monte Rosa with his countenance of light, the Jungfrau and all the weird brothers of the Oberland, rise one after another to the delighted gaze, and the range of the Tyrol melts far off into the blue of the sky. On another side, the Apennines, with their picturesque outlines and cloud-spotted sides, complete the inclosure. All around, wherever the eye turns, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... way," said the boy, on whom the sight of the coin seemed to operate like some weird talisman, leading me to a remote part of the stage, the floor of which had been tastefully littered with orange-peel in a variety of patterns; ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., February 7, 1891 • Various
... "elemental fury" to subside, her attitude was quite worthy of the niece of Mrs. Siddons. When the thunder had grown less frequent, she threw back her beautiful classic head and touched the keys. The air she had been called upon to sing was so wild and weird, a dead silence fell upon the room, and an influence as of terror pervaded the whole assembly. It was a song by Dessauer, which he had composed for her voice, the words by Tennyson. No one who was present that evening can forget how she broke the ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... girls reentered their room, and were relieved to find that the long night with all its weird suggestions and imaginings, was really over. Beds and dressers were distinctly visible in the faint grey light that filtered into the room. Soon ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Army Service - Doing Their Bit for the Soldier Boys • Laura Lee Hope
... room was above the kitchen I determined to try that first, for thence the weird sounds of the night had seemed to come. Advancing rather nervously towards it, I gathered sufficient courage to turn the handle, when, discovering that the door had been locked from the outside, I began to ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... give an outline of our Saviour's features. Some of them present, as it were, the side face of Christ; others a bust of Christ; but Isaiah gives us the full-length portrait of Christ. Other Scripture writers excel in some things. Ezekiel more weird, David more pathetic, Solomon more epigrammatic, Habakkuk more sublime; but when you want to see Christ coming out from the gates of prophecy in all His grandeur and glory, you involuntarily turn to ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... given to throwing around the word "epic" lightly, but here is one! Swashbuckling action, a great many vivid characters, and a weird mystery—all spun for you by one of the master ...
— The Invaders • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... gulls forever circling about the Brown Cow. His was a narrow and surly old age, not overwell provided, for he had never been a thrifty man; and he found among the rattletrap furnishings of his neglected home one living chattel quite as worthless—a weird, lean goblin of a boy, his sole descendant, fatherless and motherless, playing lonely little games in corners, making crass drawings with a charred stick on the walls, and viewing the blossoming orchards of spring with a crazy delight in color. I fear there was not much affection ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... field. The day after his return to Northborough he wrote what he called an account of his journey, prefacing the narrative by this remark, "Returned home out of Essex and found no Mary." Mr. Martin gives this extraordinary document in his "Life of Clare." It is a weird, pathetic and pitiful story, "a tragedy all too deep for tears." Having finished the journal of his escape he addressed it with a letter to "Mary Clare, Glinton." In this ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... dancer's movements were wholly without sound. The quivering, whirling feet scarcely seemed to touch the floor, it was a dance of inspiration, possessing a strange and irresistible fascination, a weird and meteoric rush, that held the onlookers with ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... walking, so far below. A heavy fog, rolling in from the ocean in the night, submerged the valley in its dull, gray depths—leaving to the eye no view but the view of the mountains before them, and forcing upon the artist's mind the weird impression that the life he had always known was ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... terrible there in the darkness, illuminated only by the lightning, or by that weird blue glare that seemed to come from no place in particular, but which shone through the whole room—throwing into ghastly outlines the faces of ...
— The Outdoor Girls in a Motor Car - The Haunted Mansion of Shadow Valley • Laura Lee Hope
... flapping clap-boards contain more spirits than the Black Forests of Germany—a village so utterly desolate, that it has not even the vestige of a graveyard—if I could picture to you this village, as it appeared to me that weird midnight, ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... looking behind and under the larger objects, lifting the lids of the marriage chests and opening the doors of the cupboard. Into the cellar, too, they descended, and made a careful search. The five candles produced a weird effect in their promenade along this subterraneous apartment, lighting up an astonishing medley of furniture, garden implements, empty bottles, the posts and side pieces of an extra bed, a broken statue, another ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... profiling modes report units other than time (such as call counts) and/or report at granularities other than per-routine, but the idea is similar. 3.[techspeak] A subset of a standard used for a particular purpose. This sense confuses hackers who wander into the weird world ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... away from home every time I have a battle of this sort to fight, it would not do besides, the 'weird' would follow. As to shaking it off, that cannot be. I have declined to go to Mrs. ——, to Miss Martineau, and now I decline to go to you. But listen do not think that I throw your kindness away; or that it fails of doing the good you desire. ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... blew over a glassy sea. The sound of the rippling water on the reef of rocks and on the sandy beach had a weird, melancholy effect. Then came the dull noise of muffled oars commingling with the cawing of the gull and hollow surging of the waters into the Fairy Rocks. There was neither moon nor stars visible, but in the bay the experienced eye could discern the mysterious lugger. ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... stone yielded, and he proceeded to work with the mattock. Darker and more silent than the night itself, I stood by and watched him do it, while he, bending over his dismal toil, streamed with sweat, panted, and his hard-coming breath seemed to have the harsh tone of a death rattle. It was a weird scene, and had any persons from without beheld us, they would assuredly have taken us rather for profane wretches and shroud-stealers than for priests of God. There was something grim and fierce in ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier
... 'same afflictions were accomplished in the brotherhood which is in the world.' He did not mean to say, 'Take comfort, for other people are as badly off as you are,' but he meant to call to the remembrance of the solitary sufferer the thousands of his brethren who were 'dreeing the same weird' in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... promise came to nothing. Smith, however, told the girl that she must be mad to take up with a man who was surely wrong in his head. All the same, when she heard him in the gloaming whistle from beyond the orchard a couple of bars of a weird and mournful tune, she would drop whatever she had in her hand—she would leave Mrs. Smith in the middle of a sentence—and she would run out to his call. Mrs. Smith called her a shameless hussy. She answered nothing. She said nothing at all to anybody, and went on her way as if she had been ...
— Amy Foster • Joseph Conrad
... dukes. The House of Savoy continued to hold it from the middle of the eleventh century until the late disturbances in Italy. Most of the streets of Turin converge into the Piazza di Castello, in the centre of which stands the Palazzo Madama, a weird-looking, half-ruined building overgrown with ivy, with a gloomy look about its desolate towers. It is a fine and picturesque old place, especially on a moonlight night—a unique relic of the Middle ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... in search of adventures in the thick of a 'London particular,' Mr. Guppy's phrase for a fog. When you are once ensconced in your garden seat by the driver, you go lumbering through a world of bobbing shadows, where all is weird, vague, grey, dense; and where great objects loom up suddenly in the mist and then disappear; where the sky, heavy and leaden, seems to descend bodily upon your head, and the air is full of a kind of luminous ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... sailor on watch on a misty evening blown far out of his course away to the north saw something ghostly once on an iceberg floating by, or heard some voice in the dimness that seemed like the voice of man, and came home with this weird story. And perhaps, as the story passed from lip to lip, men found enough justice in it to believe it true. So ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... knife and awl at his dilapidated shoes, and the pale, patient face beyond still gazed dreamily into the fire. There were old scenes, doubtless, in among those burning logs—old familiar faces, dear memories of the past and weird fantastic visions pictured in the glowing coals. At last the eyes left the fire for a moment, resting on the two that sat by it, and he ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... cap from his ears, listened. From a high ridge to the northward, in the opposite direction from that taken by the Indian, came the long howl of a great grey caribou-wolf, and a moment later came an answering call—the weird blood-chilling, terrible cry of the big white wolf-dog. And then Connie returned to his outfit, for he knew that that night Leloo would run with ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
Copyright © 2025 e-Free Translation.com
|
|
|
