"Speculator" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mind the cooking a bit, Doctor," Billie was saying. "Especially with Nancy, although I suppose I am really her assistant. She makes things exciting enough. I think she's a kind of culinary speculator and takes a lot of chances, but she's awfully lucky. She takes all sorts of rag-tag ends of things, chops them into bits and turns out ...
— The Motor Maids at Sunrise Camp • Katherine Stokes
... at the custom-house that they belonged to the King, and so escaped the payment of duties. Theywere then, as occasion rose, sold to the King at a huge profit, always under fictitious names. Often they were sold to some favored merchant or speculator, who sold them in turn to Bigot's confederate, the King's storekeeper; and sometimes they passed through several successive hands, till the price rose to double or triple the first cost, the Intendant ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... reigned throughout the castle. Between the corner towers, upon that part which runs immediately parallel with the Seine, there is a noble terrace, now converted into garden ground—which commands an immediate and extensive view of the embouchure of the river. It is the property of a speculator, residing ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... mighty dangerous when you move such principles to practice. Mark me! you'll have to pull down the iron walls of the south, make planters of different minds, drive self out of mankind, and overthrow the northern speculator's cotton-bag love. You've got a great work before you, my dear madam,—a work that'll want an extended lease of your life-time. Remember how hard it is to convince man of the wrong of anything that's profitable. A paid system, even emancipation, would have been a small affair ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... squatting, that is, taking possession of land belonging to government and cultivating it: such was the custom of the back-woodsmen, and, for want of this law, it often happened that after they had cultivated a farm, the land would be applied for and purchased by some speculator, who would forcibly eject the occupant, and take possession of the improved property. A back-woodsman was not to be trifled with, and the consequences very commonly were that the new proprietor was found some fine morning with a rifle-bullet through his head. ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... Committee's recommendations under the second head, and this Act has undoubtedly effected an enormous improvement in the prices paid by public bodies for land which they require, although, most unfortunately, the same immunity from the extortion of the land-owner and the land speculator has not been extended to private bodies such as railway companies who need land for the improvement of public services. Moreover, it has not attempted to bring the purchase price of land into any relation ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... vivid literary contribution, some powerful and popular work, a new despotic of combustion in that mighty mine on which stood in thin and fatal security the throne of France. Rousseau, the most impassioned of all romancers, the great corrupter of the female mind. Buffon, a lofty and splendid speculator, who dazzled the whole multitude of the minor philosophers, and fixed the creed of Materialism. Moutesquieu, eminent for knowledge and sagacity in his "Spirit of Laws" striking all the establishments of his country into contempt; and in his "Persian Letters," levelling ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... was a little older than Cicero, took refuge in Sylla's camp. He made himself useful to the Dictator by his genius for finance, and in return he was enabled to amass an enormous fortune for himself out of the proscriptions. His eye for business reached over the whole Roman Empire. He was banker, speculator, contractor, merchant. He lent money to the spendthrift young lords, but with sound securities and at usurious interest. He had an army of slaves, but these slaves were not ignorant field-hands; they were skilled workmen ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... differences, or against the delivering of stock. (2) The period between two settlements. A nineteen-day account is one in which nineteen days elapse between one pay-day and another. (3) The volume or condition of commitments. A speculator is said to have a large account open when he has dealt heavily either for the rise or fall. A bull account exists in a stock or group of stocks when it or they have been bought for the rise by a Iarge number of operators; in the contrary case, when ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... known for the ruinous rate at which he lent money. Castanier went forthwith in search of the said Claparon, a merchant who had a reputation for taking heavy risks that meant wealth or utter ruin. The money lender walked away as Castanier came up. A gesture betrayed the speculator's despair. ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... call on Louvier on your behalf? I shall but inquire if he is inclined to take on himself the other mortgages; and if so, on what terms. Our relationship gives me the excuse for my interference; and to say truth, I have had much familiar intercourse with the man. I too am a speculator, and have often profited by Louvier's advice. You may ask what can be his object in serving me; he can gain nothing by it. To this I answer, the key to his good offices is in his character. Audacious though ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... heavy deposits of caution-money required by the government as security for good behavior, is within the reach of all who care to pay for it, and has turned the fourth page of every journal into a harvest field alike for the speculator and the Inland Revenue Department. The press restrictions were invented in the time of M. de Villele, who had a chance, if he had but known it, of destroying the power of journalism by allowing newspapers to multiply ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... doctrine by pains and penalties. We would not grudge the amplest recognition of Lord Baltimore's faith or magnanimity or political wisdom; but we have failed to find evidence of his rising above the plane of the smart real-estate speculator, willing to be all things to all men, if so he might realize on his investments. Happily, he was clear-sighted enough to perceive that his own interest was involved in the liberty, contentment, ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... the Railway King, originally a linen-draper in York, the great speculator in the construction and extension of railways, in connection with which he made a huge fortune; acquired civic honours, and was nearly having a statue raised to his honour, but certain frauds being ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... agree with Mr. Fiske that we have here "the most subtle conclusion now within the ken of the scientific speculator, reached without any disregard of the canons prescribed by the doctrine of relativity," I would like to point out to minds less clear-sighted than his, that this same "doctrine of relativity" effectually debars us from ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... her head at him. "No," she said; "you certainly wouldn't while I had any say in the matter. You're rather a good farmer, but I haven't met one yet who made a successful speculator. Some of our friends have tried it—and you know where it landed them. I expect those broker and mortgage men must lick their lips when a nice fat woolly farmer comes along. It must be quite ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... William's reign could remember the days when there was not a single banking house in London. Goldsmiths had strong vaults in which masses of bullion could lie secure from fire and robbers, and at their shops in Lombard Street all payments in coin were made. William Paterson, an ingenious speculator, submitted to the government a plan for a national bank, which after long debate ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... for that kind of financial warfare were mostly supplied by the fathers and grandfathers of the present generation. Sometimes, no doubt, the capital was lost, and in those cases it must be said that the Jewish speculator disappears from the stage without a sigh or a cry. He begins again, and if he should have to do what his grandfather did, walk from house to house with a bag on his back, he does ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... had but a single opportunity, and for the brief space of less than half an hour, of witnessing the phenomena to which he referred. M. Cholet, the speculator who advanced to her parents the money necessary to bring Angelique to Paris, had taken the girl and her parents to the Observatory, where Arago then was, who, at the earnest instance of Cholet, agreed to test the child's powers at once. There were present on this occasion, besides Arago, MM. Mathieu ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... philosophy the most abstruse—a balance which even itself requires weighing previously, or he will have done nothing that can be received for an estimate of the composite Coleridge. This astonishing man, be it again remembered, besides being an exquisite poet, a profound political speculator, a philosophic student of literature through all its chambers and recesses, was also a circumnavigator on the most pathless waters of scholasticism and metaphysics. He had sounded, without guiding charts, the secret ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... light, took a book from his pocket: The Speculator's Manual of Proudhon, and set to reading it attentively and to marking the passages that struck him ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... already noted. Samuel, the oldest son of the first Holton, tried a variety of occupations before he was elected Secretary of State. He never fully severed his ties with Montgomery, retaining a house in town and the farm on Sugar Creek. After retiring from office, he became a venturesome speculator, capitalizing his wide political acquaintance in the sale of shares in all manner of mining and plantation companies, and dying suddenly, had left his ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... ostensibly an innkeeper, but this business, honest enough in itself, only veiled the man's real trade, in which he defied alike the laws of honesty and of his country. The other was by turns a gentleman of property, a merchant, a cattle owner, or a speculator, in all of which characters he acted excellently, and succeeded in making the acquaintance of men ...
— Do and Dare - A Brave Boy's Fight for Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... collected in summary fashion. A tariff thus enforced was not likely to be a mild one; and although the States considered that they had got a "good penny-worth" by the job, it was no easy thing to get the better, in a bargain, of the vigilant Martin, who was as thrifty a speculator as he was a desperate fighter. A more accomplished highwayman, artistically and enthusiastically devoted to his pursuit, never lived. Nobody did his work more thoroughly—nobody got himself better paid for his work—and Thomas Wilkes, that excellent man of business, thought the States not ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... absent wife's third. Sometimes, as in the case of a famous actor, the wives numbered four. Ordinarily in Canada—certainly in eastern provinces—a third is the wife's reserve unless she sign it away. How four wives could each have a third was a poser for the speculator and the knot was cut by ignoring the wife's claims. Now that the fevered mad mania of speculation is over this remissness of the law in two provinces will ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... wrote, on August 25, 1835, to President Jackson: "Governments, like corporations, are considered without souls, and according to the code of some people's morality, should be swindled and cheated on every occasion." Linton gave this picture of "a notorious speculator who has an ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... persons occupying lands not thus reserved were by the decision quieted in their possession, so far as any claim of the city or State could be urged against them. Property to the value of many millions was thereby rescued from the spoiler and speculator, and secured to the city or settler. Peace was given to thousands of homes. Yet for this just and most beneficent judgment there went up from a multitude, who had become interested in the sales, a fierce howl of rage and hate. Attacks full of venom ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... assure you Mr. Harrison exists very decidedly—a Wall-street speculator, and well known as such by business people, a capital man behind a trotter, an excellent judge of wine. Probably he will come here from the city once or twice before we leave, and I shall find an opportunity to introduce ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... travelled over an old Spanish military road, crossing rich rolling prairies, here and there watered by clear streams, the banks of which are sheltered by magnificent oaks. Fifteen miles from Austin there is a remarkable spot, upon which a visionary speculator had a short time before attempted to found a city. He purchased an immense tract of ground, had beautiful plans drawn and painted, and very soon there appeared, upon paper, one of the largest and handsomest cities ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... This may be, by some, called economy, but it is the very worst sort of economy. It excludes the honest workman, who knows the real value of the service to be performed, and is unwilling to undertake to do his duty well, at the expense of himself and family; while it lets in the needy and greedy speculator who, having nothing to lose in point of character or money, will readily undertake what he can not perform, and become dependent upon the magnanimity of Congress for remuneration for his losses, real or fictitious. An honest and fair liberality ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey
... was more familiarly than favorably known in financial circles of Boston, as the man who had put afloat more wild-cat stocks than any other speculator on the street. It might be supposed that his connection with any scheme would be enough to wreck its prospects, yet whatever he took hold of floated for a time. There was always a feeling among his victims that at length he had come ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... The speculator on a large scale feels no more elated over the rescue of a fortune from anticipated loss than did Miss Lacey in the recovery of her one thousand dollars. In the expansion of ideas which it caused she determined ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... not to be wondered at that the young and ardent eagerly embrace a line of life so replete with exciting events and incidents, and which at once enriches the successful speculator, and fills with plenty and prosperity the region which he enters. The first individual who opens a market, which no other Overlander has yet visited, rides into the district an ill clothed way-worn traveller; the ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... impetus to the mind of man at this period, was the discovery of the New World, and the reading of voyages and travels. Green islands and golden sands seemed to arise, as by enchantment, out of the bosom of the watery waste, and invite the cupidity, or wing the imagination of the dreaming speculator. Fairy land was realized in new and unknown worlds. "Fortunate fields and groves and flowery vales, thrice happy isles," were found floating "like those Hesperian gardens famed of old," beyond Atlantic seas, as dropt from the zenith. The people, the soil, the ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... of tiny homes; and if miners or steel-workers or cattlemen defied him and invoked disorder, he could be more lawless and ruthless than they. But this was done in the pursuit of legitimate business ends. Tens of thousands of the poor might curse his name, but the financier and the speculator execrated him no more. He stretched a hand to protect or to manipulate the power of wealth in every corner of the country. Forcible, cold and unerring, in all he did he ministered to the national lust for magnitude; and a grateful ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... demise of George the Fourth, obtained leave to bring in a bill for the purpose of preventing the spread of canine madness." Again, as the Alderman is a hop-factor, why observe "he is said to have realized a considerable fortune by his fortunate speculations in hops." This describes him as a mere speculator, and not as an established ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 536, Saturday, March 3, 1832. • Various
... blackness has no connection with the sublime blackness of the inkstand. Never have the fingers of night which contract beneath this stifling ceiling, turned the leaves of a book nor unfolded a newspaper. Babeuf is a speculator to Cartouche; Marat is an aristocrat to Schinderhannes. This cavern has for its object ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... active, intelligent, persevering man of business, and who, besides being a banker at Maidstone, in the heart of East Kent[23], was also engaged in the hop trade, as a hop merchant in the Borough; was a great speculator in this speculating business, which always was considered as a business of chance rather than of judgment. As, however, games of chance are greatly governed by the penetration of those who play them, Mr. Waddington payed that attention to the growth of hops, that he made ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... have its own proper origin, referrible to some particular place, time, and community, there must have been an era when it was wanting to mankind. Hence, an ante-metallic age is as much the conception of the speculator, as the discovery of ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... Mr. Fluette, financier, speculator, man of affairs that he was, and concluded that I did not at all envy him his self-imposed task of keeping asunder these two lovers. I wondered, too, in the event he could be brought to appreciate the depth and sincerity ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... statements. At the same time, with that part of him which seemed obedient, he asked the landlord if he knew of the gold discoveries on the Chicoutimi River, and tried to account for himself as an American speculator going to look into the matter in his own way ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... virtue of beneficence becomes a vice of theft. So it is with gambling. It is giving the natural tendency to chance, to risk an illegitimate play. The person who is afraid to risk anything accomplishes but little in any way, is seldom a speculator, and never a gambler. Usually the gambler is the man who is naturally full of hazard, who loves to run risks, to take chances. Nor will one find a more practical and useful tendency in one's make-up ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... after this event, before the country about the lakes and on the Genesee river was visited, save by an occasional land speculator, or by defaulters who wished by retreating to what in those days was deemed almost the end of the earth, to escape the force ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver
... time of public distress did Tom Walker set up as usurer in Boston. His door was soon thronged by customers. The needy and adventurous, the gambling speculator, the dreaming land-jobber, the thriftless tradesman, the merchant with cracked credit—in short, everyone driven to raise money by desperate means and desperate sacrifices ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... cases, continued to be one of the three careers open to the younger sons of good family; the civil service and the Church were the other two. In Genoa, nobles had engaged in commerce with equal honor and profit; nearly every argosy that sailed to or from the port of Venice belonged to some lordly speculator; but in Milan a noble who descended to trade lost his nobility, by a law not abrogated till the time of Charles IV. The nobles had therefore nothing to do. They could not go into business; if they entered the army it was not to fight; the civil service was ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... down in the charts. We had several passengers—two missionaries and their wives, newly married. I thought them inferior to John; but they were good men, humble too, with their hearts in the work. We had also another gentleman, a merchant or speculator of some sort. What he was going to do I could never make out. His heart was in his business, and he seemed to consider it of greater importance than anything else. This made him look down with undisguised contempt on the missionaries ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... modern arts enable us to enjoy the whole year round, and in the hard beginnings the orchard and the garden were forgotten for the fields. Their harvests must pay for the acres bought of the government, or from some speculator who had never seen the land; and the settler must be prompt in paying, or else see his home pass from him after all his toil into the hands of strangers. He worked hard and he fared hard, and if he was safer when peace came, it is doubtful if he were otherwise more fortunate. As the ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... have been, for all anybody heard of it," Abe went on. "In fact, the papers say that all through it there was loud cries of, 'Down in front!' from people which had probably bought their tickets at the last moment off of a speculator who showed them a diagram of Mirror Hall, Batesville, and not Versailles, on which it looked like they was getting four good ones in the fifth row, ...
— Potash and Perlmutter Settle Things • Montague Glass
... if the devil were wreaking his spite on Mr. Titmouse; nay, perhaps it was the devil himself who had served him with the bottles in Bond Street. Or was it a mere ordinary servant of the devil—some greedy, impudent, unprincipled speculator, who, desirous of acting on the approved maxim—Fiat experimentum in corpore vili—had pitched on Titmouse (seeing the sort of person he was) as a godsend, quite reckless what effect might be produced on his hair, so as the stuff were paid for, and its effects ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... may at first appear of keeping such a commodity for a voyage of probably a hundred days in such latitudes, I am informed the speculator is assured, that with an ordinary run, enough of his cargo may be landed to pay ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... like him," answered San Giacinto, looking quietly at Orsino. "Del Ferice is a banker, and I am a speculator, as you wish to be. His position is different from ours. It is better to leave him out of the question. Let us look at the matter logically. ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... that followed the close of the Revolutionary War, Judge Cooper was a speculator in lands on a large scale, and was steadily engaged in the settlement of the tracts which he owned and those in which he had a joint interest with others. His judgment concerning land values was keen and far-sighted. That he was not infallible is shown by his ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... along Lafayette avenue than there was need of one from the top of Trinity Church steeple to the moon! The greater facility of travel, the greater prosperity! But I am opposed to all railroads, the depot for which is an unprincipled speculator's pocket. ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... the speculation game. The only ones who make a success, and their success is ephemeral, are those who make speculation their whole occupation. The professional speculator is merely a high grade gambler, and he ...
— Dollars and Sense • Col. Wm. C. Hunter
... 'Speculator,' said Mrs Fuller. 'A strange man, successful, silent, unmarried and, I think, in love. Has beautiful rooms they say on Gramercy Park. Lives alone with an old servant. We got to know him through the accident. Mr Fuller and he have done business ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... Osbourne was present at the wedding and gave his wife away has no foundation in fact. Robert Louis never saw Mr. Osbourne and never once mentioned his name to any one so far as we know. He was a mine-prospector and speculator, fairly successful in his work. That he and his wife were totally different in their tastes and ambitions is well understood. They whom God has put asunder no man ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... their schooner sailed for another swing about the French groups of islands. Llewellyn and David were associates in planting, curing, and shipping vanilla-beans, but were roisterers at heart, and ever ready to desert their office and warehouse for feasting or gaming. Polonsky was a speculator in exchange and an investor in lands, and was reputed to be very rich. He, too, would leave his strong box unlocked in his hurry if cards or wassail called. These same white men were sib to all their fellows in the South Seas except a few sour men whom ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... adventurer, to cultivate the rich plains discovered, and lay the nucleuses of the towns and cities, which were so soon, and so rapidly, to spring up; and then came the surveyor, to mark the boundaries of individual possessions and give civil shape and strength to the unformed mass, the speculator to impart a new activity and keenness to the minds of men, and the chivalrous and educated gentleman, to infuse into the crude materials here collected together, the feelings and sentiments of refined existence, and to mold them into forms of conventional beauty and social excellence. ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... affairs, made up at home from materials bought in Rhodesian shops; but when well cut, they were battered and worn. Take, for instance, Mrs. Lisle's gown of pale-green satin and sequins. She had been an actress before she married Barton Lisle and came out to the ups and downs of a mining speculator's life, and all her clothes were rechauffees of the toilettes in which she had once dazzled provincial audiences. Gay Liscannon's frock of pale rose-leaf silk, with a skirt that was a flurry of delicious little frills and a bodice of lace, sewn with little paste dew drops ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... pure construction. The natural equilibrium between the three necessary elements of creation—mobility, combination of images, calculation—is destroyed. The rational element gives way, is obliterated, and the speculator is launched into adventure with the possibility of a dazzling success or astounding catastrophe. But let us note well that the primary and sole cause of this change is in the affective and motor element, in ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... exchange is much more than a mere roulette wheel for the speculator. Its real purpose is to provide a centre for the legitimate trader. It is a great information bureau of world happenings where every item of news concerning the wheat in any way is gathered and classified—drouth, rain, frost, rust, locusts, hail, Hessian fly, monsoon ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... I do not mean book-speculator, does not smoke a pipe? I refuse to believe that any book-lover could possibly sit in an easy chair before the fire and pore over Browne's 'Hydriotaphia,' Sidney's 'Arcadia,' More's 'Utopia,' or Cotton's 'Montluc' (all in folio, please) without a pipe in his mouth. ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... retired; he seldom visits, or receives company. Part of his money is supposed to be in the Funds, and part laid out in railway investments, which have survived the panic of eighteen hundred and forty-six, and are rapidly rising in value. He is said to be a bold speculator. Since his arrival in England he has invested, with great judgment, in house property. He has some houses in remote parts of London, and some houses in certain watering-places on the east coast, which are shown to be advancing in public repute. In all these cases he is reported ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... occupation as engineer did not hinder DesBarres from being an ambitious land speculator. In 1765 he obtained, in conjunction with General Haldimand and one or two others, a grant of the Township of Hopewell, comprising 100,000 acres on the Petitcodiac river. But he derived little benefit from his lands, as he was unable to fulfill the conditions ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... principles of the one they themselves profess—the vanity of the learned to display a various and recondite erudition—the passion of the ingenious to harmonize conflicting traditions—and the ambition of every speculator to say something new upon an ancient but inexhaustible subject, so far from enlightening, only perplex our conjectures. Scarcely is the theory of to-day established, than the theory of to-morrow is invented ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... each in their turn have given their sign and seal to their especial century, for better or for worse. The nineteenth century has some touch of all, but its own novelty of production is the female speculator. ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... interest in his welfare, and also warranted his putting the question, as to what were Alexander's views and intentions in visiting the Cape: for Mr. Fairburn knew from the letter that he was heir to Sir Charles Wilmot, and therefore that he was not likely to be going out as a speculator ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... else for less than he can make working for himself; and land was pretty nearly free in Monterey County then. All a man needed was a team, and he could get tools on credit; and I know plenty of cases of people breaking speculator's land and working it for years without paying rent or being molested. The rent wasn't worth quarreling about. But Gowdy couldn't get, on the average, as much out of his hired men in the way of work as they would ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... of prices such as to give you a profitable return. The operation is identical with that of betting that such a card will be turned, or that such a horse will win in a race, or such a candidate be elected President. On 'Change we are charitable enough to suppose each speculator possessed of data such as to make his venture seem reasonable to himself. This is the system, and, though very like gambling, it has the advantage of presenting to men of small means the chance of large profits, provided they are willing to run the risk; since, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... debt to the limbo which held so many other resources best forgotten. They were far from admitting the full measure of their inheritance, however, and opened the battle with a loud denouncement of the greedy speculator who had defrauded the impoverished soldier, to whose needs they had been indifferent hitherto. Most of this feeling concentrated in the opposition, but many Federalists were so divided upon the question of discrimination ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... and it was told over the place that Pen and Laura had visited Helen's grave together. Since Arthur had come down into the country, he had been there once or twice: but the sight of the sacred stone had brought no consolation to him. A guilty man doing a guilty deed: a mere speculator, content to lay down his faith and honor for a fortune and a worldly career; and owning that his life was but a contemptible surrender—what right had he in the holy place? what booted it to him in the world he lived in, that others ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... by modern researches, why do we not confess it? We would do so if it did not conflict with a human theory which presumes to point out how God ought to have instructed man.[184] The writer had no authority for what he asserts so solemnly and unhesitatingly, for he was an early speculator who stated as facts what he only conjectured as probabilities. Yet he seized one great truth, in which he anticipated the highest revelation of modern inquiry; namely, the unity of the design of the world, and its subordination to one sole Maker and Law-giver.[185] But ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... horses. There is too much said about fast trotters and race horses. On some of the farms around here, the people have gone mad on breeding fast horses. An old farmer out in the country had a common cart-horse that he suddenly found out had great powers of speed and endurance. He sold him to a speculator for a big price, and it has set everybody wild. If the people who give all their time to it can't raise fast horses, I don't see how the farmers can. A fast horse on a farm is ruination to the boys, for it starts them racing and ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders
... the industrial and plutocratic tendency, the tendency of the police spirit, the regularizing spirit of the Kulturstaat with the individual initiative of the capitalist entrepreneur, methodical habits of administration with the love of risk characteristic of the speculator, all this constitutes imperialism, German imperialism, distinct from every other, because to a definite object, economic conquest, it adds another, less precise, in which the moral satisfaction dear to aristocracy, ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... The speculator studied those forbidding bushy brows in silence for a moment. Beneath them, between heavy lids, glowed a pair of very stern gray eyes; but at the outward corner of each eye were two deep, diverging creases, which belied some ...
— Five Thousand an Hour - How Johnny Gamble Won the Heiress • George Randolph Chester
... Maryland. He married a free woman and had several children. In 1802, his master sold him to a speculator, who was in the habit of buying slaves for the Southern market. His purchaser took him to his farm in Delaware, and kept him at work till he could get a profitable chance to sell him. His new master was a desperate fellow, and Levin was uneasy with the constant liability of being ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... a Nabob's prime minister, as he considers whether he will sign a pardon. Gobseck would take anything, from the present of game sent him by some poor devil or the pound's weight of wax candles from devout folk, to the rich man's plate and the speculator's gold snuff-box. Nobody knew what became of the presents sent to the old money-lender. Everything went in, ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... in the World." In this Mr. Warner tells us of one of the sweetest and purest of young women, who has the highest ideals, and whose standards of morality are of the noblest, who is married to an unprincipled young speculator on Wall Street, New York; and under the influence of her husband, and the society into which she is drawn by his business relations, in which he gathers millions of money, all her holy and lofty ideals are overthrown, and she becomes simply a material, ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... acre was a speculator in town-lots—a profession that was, just then, in high repute in the city of New York. For farms, and all the more vulgar aspects of real estate, he had a sovereign contempt; but offer him a bit of land that could ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... like many another brilliant cantatrice, in the very dawn of her great career fell into the nets of a shrewd and unprincipled operatic speculator. Signor Lanari, an impressario of Florence, recognized the future success of the inexperienced young girl, and decoyed her into an engagement for six years on terms shamefully low, for Giulia's modesty did not appreciate her own remarkable powers. Alone and without competent advisers, ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... the bush; asked how things were going on in Melbourne, and made enquiries about old friends there. But all the while he was calculating chances. He had acquired the valuable habit of the gambler and speculator, of talking about one thing while he was thinking about another. His thoughts ran on in this style: "This fellow (he could not think of him as a gentleman) wants to see my cash; haven't got any; must be near five hundred pounds short by this time; can't ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... presumes to criticize Mr. Darwin with the superciliousness of a young schoolmaster looking over a boy's theme, it is difficult not to take him more seriously than he deserves or perhaps desires. One would think that Mr. Butler was the travelled and laborious observer of Nature, and Mr. Darwin the pert speculator, who takes all ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... had admitted him to his society in order to make use of him in the world, just as a bold speculator employs a confidential clerk. The friendship, real or feigned, of De Marsay was a social position for Paul de Manerville, who, on his side, thought himself astute in exploiting, after his fashion, his intimate friend. He lived in the reflecting lustre of his friend, walked ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... remarkable part of this bitter persecution was the fact that the elder had lent money to almost all the principal members of the congregation. The bold speculator had never been appealed to in vain by any one in difficulty. Some had had a hundred, some fifty, some twenty, some ten—farmers whose corn had been a loss instead of a profit, whose hops had sold for less than the cost of picking them, little tradesmen who had ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... "in an openness to ideas, an aptness for intuitions, and sometimes a seemingly positive preference for the bird in the bush," which latter may account for that skilful Yankee versatility so perfectly exemplified in the chaplain, poet, editor, merchant, speculator, politician, ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... I really can not tell whether it is one of those ethereal creations of intellectual frostwork, more intangible than the rose-tinted clouds of a summer sunset,—one of those airy exhalations of the speculator's brain, which I am told are ever flitting in the form of towns and cities along those lines of railroad, built with Government subsidies, luring the unwary settlers as the mirage of the desert lures the famishing traveler on, and ever on, until ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... conversation prepares them gradually for that exceeding and eternal weight of glory which is to be theirs as they enter in at the gate. Bunyan has thus, in this blissful passage from the river to the gate, done what no other devout writer, or dreamer, or speculator, that we are aware of, has ever done; he has filled what perhaps in most minds is a mere blank, a vacancy, or at most a bewilderment and mist of glory, with definite and beatific images, with natural thoughts, and with the sympathizing ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... inauspiciously begun and never finished, rotted away. In another, the ground was cumbered with rusty iron monsters of steam-boilers, wheels, cranks, pipes, furnaces, paddles, anchors, diving-bells, windmill-sails, and I know not what strange objects, accumulated by some speculator, and grovelling in the dust, underneath which—having sunk into the soil of their own weight in wet weather—they had the appearance of vainly trying to hide themselves. The clash and glare of sundry fiery Works upon the river-side, arose by night to disturb everything except the heavy and ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... general rule a play when finished was sold by the author or authors to a company of players, or to a speculator like the notorious Philip Henslowe, and the new owners, "the grand possessors," were usually averse to the publication of the work, lest other companies might act it. The plays were primarily written to be acted. The company in possession could have the play altered ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... The speculator, whose name was well known in financial circles, took it, examined the seal and signatures curiously, and asked what ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... superciliousness of a young schoolmaster looking over a boy's theme, it is difficult not to take him more seriously than he deserves or perhaps desires. One would think that Mr. Butler was the travelled and laborious observer of Nature, and Mr. Darwin the pert speculator who takes all his ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... shown that in each case the reconcilers argued on the basis of their own ideas and of the philosophies of their time. The early physicist thought that myth concealed a physical philosophy; the early etymologist saw in it a confusion of language; the early political speculator supposed that myth was an invention of legislators; the literary Euhemerus found the secret of myths in the course of an imaginary voyage to a fabled island. Then came the moment of the Christian attacks, and Pagan philosophers, touched with Oriental pantheism, recognised in ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... tells you of his sufferings, at the boys' description of him, and his subsequent prosperity in the Rue d'Arras. You had better listen to the old man as long as he continues to grumble on, the more so as you will detect in the rancor and bitterness of his remarks all the vexation of a disappointed speculator. He will confess to you besides that he subsists entirely on the bounty of the lad, whom he had stigmatized as an ungrateful villain. Of course, the Duke will have to leave behind him some testimonial of his ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... prices. And this rise of prices has three consequences. First. It makes everybody else want to borrow money. Money is not so efficient in buying as it was, and therefore operators require more money for the same dealings. If railway stock is 10 per cent dearer this year than last, a speculator who borrows money to enable him to deal must borrow 0 per cent more this year than last, and in consequence there is an augmented demand for loans. Secondly. This is an effectual demand, for the increased ...
— Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market • Walter Bagehot
... adds, that "he will not inquire whether they demand any great powers of mind." Johnson, however, conveys to us his own feelings, when he immediately expresses them under the character of a "sullen and surly speculator." The anxious life of Shenstone would, indeed, have been remunerated, could he have read the enchanting eulogium of Wheatley on the Leasowes; which, said he, "is a perfect picture of his mind—simple, elegant, and amiable; and will always suggest a doubt whether ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... those who held it. Gradually, however, as men became more and more acquainted with the true functions of machinery, the dream dissolved. The hope of getting work out of mere mechanical combinations disappeared: but still there remained for the speculator a cloud-land denser than that which filled the imagination of the Tyrolese priest, and out of which he still hoped to evolve perpetual motion. There was the mystic store of chemic force, which nobody understood; there were heat and light, electricity and magnetism, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... exhaustive of the things that can be done in the field of possible and practical reform. It is plain enough that in many other directions the same principles may be applied. The rectification of the ownership of land so as to eliminate the haphazard gains of the speculator and the unearned increment of wealth created by the efforts of others, is an obvious case in point. The "single taxer" sees in this a cure-all for the ills of society. But his vision is distorted. The private ownership of land is one of the greatest incentives to human effort ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... ship had hailed Hindhaugh, and offered to tow him if anything had happened to his engines. He knew he would be reported as lying off apparently disabled, and he was in a feverish state of excitement. The Hebrew speculator watched the last bale down the side, and then handed over the money, had a glass of brandy with the pilot, and departed—whither Hindhaugh neither knew nor cared. The Jenny Jones ran for her port. She had just slowed down, and the great waves ...
— Stories by English Authors: The Sea • Various
... belief itself is false. If the God I believe in is a delusion, then my God ceases to exist. True, I may if I think it worth while acquire another one, but that will not revive the first. It is what people believe that is the important question, not what some ingenious speculator may succeed in making the belief ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... awning; so much so, that the first of them I saw I mistook for a mourning sociable. Some are ornamented with black feathers. Caparisons, hangings, every thing is in black, as well as the coachman. This speculator also lets out mourning coaches, black without and within, like those in use in London. At a few funerals, these are hired for the mourners, and at a recent one, fifteen of these carriages were counted in the procession. However, this luxury of burials is not entirely come again into fashion. ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... Denyer, but this gentleman was very seldom indeed in the bosom of his family. Letters—and remittances—came from him from the most surprising quarters of the globe. His profession was that of speculator at large, and, with small encouragement of any kind, he toiled unceasingly to support his wife and daughters in their elegant leisure. At one time he was eagerly engaged in a project for making starch from potatoes in the south of Ireland. ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... mineral wealth, and boundless forests of as fine timber as the world produces, the cause of Portland's growth and prosperity is the trade which it has as the center of collection and distribution of this great wealth of natural resources, and it has attracted, not the boomer and speculator, who find their profits in the wild excitement of the boom, but the merchant, manufacturer, and investor, who seek the surer if slower channels of legitimate business and investment. These have come ...
— Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax
... commercial life of Canada on our return, and I said something uncomplimentary about land speculators. I was told afterwards that I had caused much amusement in all ranks, for every man in the troop from the officers downwards, or upwards, was a land speculator, and had town lots to sell in the West. In conversations with privates and non-coms., I often found they had left good positions in Canada and not infrequently were men of means. I have given mud-splashed soldiers a ride in the car, and they have talked about their own cars at home. It was ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... scant schoolgirl knowledge was touched by this gentleman, who spoke French fluently, and delicately explained to her the libretto of a risky opera bouffe. And now she had finally yielded to a meeting out of San Francisco—and an ostensible visit—still as a speculator—to one or two mining districts—with HER BROKER. This was the boldest of her steps—an original idea of the fashionable Van Loo—which, no doubt, in time would become a craze, too. But it was a long step—and there was a streak of rustic decorum ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... knowledge of the art of war, and a great facility of conversing on military topics, made even the Emperor Joseph conceive a high opinion of this officer; but it has long been proved, and experience confirms it every day, that the difference is immense between the speculator and the operator, and that the generals of Cabinets are often indifferent captains when in the camp or in ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... as the gamblers, grafters, and organizers of "fake" companies. Several times he had made fortunes, but it was impossible for him to stay rich. He was always ready to back a drilling proposition that looked promising, and no independent speculator can continue to wildcat ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... the land. He might have done all the rest—might have laid out roads, proclaimed a "no fence" law, prevented the establishment of dram-shops, helped on educational and other enterprises—and still, had he raised the price of his wild lands as the settlers increased, he would have been a mere land speculator, and I doubt if his scheme would have obtained more than a very moderate and short-lived success. But the undertaking to sell his wild land always at the one fixed price, not only gave later comers an advantage which attracted them ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... rapidity; story rose upon story, till it seemed as if the new manufactory, with its windows and abutments, was destined to become another Babel. When Charlotte came to Clyde, she gazed with astonishment. "All this," said she to Howard, "is the project of a speculator! Grown men now-a-days remind me of the story of the boy who planted his bean at night, and went out in the morning to see how it grew; he found it had nearly reached the chamber windows; he went out the next morning, and it was up to the eaves of ...
— Rich Enough - a tale of the times • Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee
... were three other children, two girls and one boy, who was the oldest. When questioned regarding the birthplace and the movements of his parents, Mr. Bland stated that his father was born in Hancock County, Ga. His mother along with her mother was brought to Georgia by the speculator with a drove of other slaves. The first thing that he remembers of his parents is when he was quite small and was allowed to remain in the Master's kitchen in the "big house" where his mother ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... constituted the public domain is rapidly falling into private hands. It is certain that in the transfer the beneficent intention of the Government to supply from its domain homes to the industrious and worthy home seekers is often frustrated. Though the speculator, who stands with extortionate purpose between the land office and those who, with their families, are invited by the Government to settle on the public lands, is a despicable character who ought not to be tolerated, yet it is difficult to thwart his schemes. The recent opening to settlement of ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... an interest in me, I will teach her how to manage her husband. That husband of hers is a great speculator; he might put me in the way of making a ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... sleeping on cots and billiard-tables; that there are no front-row seats for the Follies, no berths in any cabin of any steamer, remind yourself that there is always a pony in Corea for Dinwiddie. The rule is that the hotel clerk discovers a vacant room, a ticket speculator disgorges a front-row seat, and the ship's doctor sells you a berth in the sick bay. But in Salonika the rule failed. As already explained, Salonika always is overcrowded. Suddenly, added to her 120,000 peoples, came 110,000 Greek soldiers, their officers, ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... walking with the mourners back to their own habitation, but respectfully leaving them at its entrance. The peddler and Katy were followed into the building by one man, however, who was well known to the surrounding country by the significant term of "a speculator." Katy saw him enter, with a heart that palpitated with dreadful forebodings, but Harvey civilly handed him a chair, and evidently was prepared for ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... curious as to the origin of the gentlemen of her Court, and found that many of their forbears were sullied by the taint of Trade. The founders of both Prince Tapfer von Schneiderleinberg's and Count Daumerlingenstamm's houses were tailors; Baron von Bohnenranken derived his title from a speculator who, after a remarkably unsuccessful venture in cattle, had made a colossal coup in beans. As for Prince Hansmeinigel, his pretensions to high descent were even more questionable—at least, if it was actually the fact, as the Fairy stated, ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... good-natured peasant who could not keep his accounts but who had a peasant's sagacity for a bargain, wormed his way into financial control. He wanted to make the colony rich, but he led it to the verge of bankruptcy. He became a speculator and promoter. Stories of his shortcomings were whispered about and in 1860 the peasant colony revolted and deposed Olaf from office. He then had himself appointed receiver to wind up the corporation's affairs, and in the following year the communal property ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... we turn for the most striking example of the playwright's powers. This first appeared as Le Faiseur (The Speculator), being originally written in 1838-40. Justice compels us to state, however, that another hand is present in the perfected play. In the original it was a comedy in five acts; but this was revamped and ...
— Introduction to the Dramas of Balzac • Epiphanius Wilson and J. Walker McSpadden
... their wealth, or made it in some high pursuit to which gain was only an incident, or they are exceptional cases. But of course Bagley isn't even a fair type of the regular money-grinder—he's a speculator in anything, and a boor compared with ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... clung to his figure like a warm and sunny skin. All over Mr. Pilkington and round about him there hung the atmosphere of the City. Not of the actual murky labyrinth, roofed with fog, but of the City as she stands transfigured before the eyes of the young speculator, in ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... also he listened to considerable talk of financial investment and adventure. He heard, for one thing, of a curious character by the name of Steemberger, a great beef speculator from Virginia, who was attracted to Philadelphia in those days by the hope of large and easy credits. Steemberger, so his father said, was close to Nicholas Biddle, Lardner, and others of the United States Bank, or at least friendly with them, and seemed to be able to obtain from that ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... a man who believed in keeping records, and so complete a file of them has now been reassembled at Mt. Vernon that it is possible to follow his career in any phase: officer, business speculator, host, farmer, legislative adviser, and friend. He gave to fishing the painstaking personal attention he gave to all else. As a "fisherman" he directed the manufacture as well as the repair of his nets, and the curing, shipping ...
— The Bounty of the Chesapeake - Fishing in Colonial Virginia • James Wharton
... doing, stand or fall, will never be my undoing—I am no speculator. How do your silver mines go on, Sir Ulick? I hear all the silver mines in Ireland turn out to ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... admitting a degree of co-operation by those who attended to see and hear; and an abundance of commodious places for religious instruction on the Sabbath, where there should be wise and zealous men to impart it. Our speculator has a right to suppose a high degree of these qualifications in his public teachers of religion, when he is to imagine a parallel in this department to the skill and ardor displayed in the supposed military operations. ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... de Fer du Nord, and, either trusting to reliable information or else himself possessing an intimate knowledge of the development of real estate in Paris, he urged Mme. Hanska to invest her capital in land in the Monceau district. He cited the example of Louis-Philippe, who was the cleverest speculator of his time, and who had acquired tracts ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... stored with wines and table stores, you will be offered a share in profits coming from a doubtful source. If a young woman dreams of this she will have an offer of marriage from a speculator or gambler. ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller |
