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Infrequent   /ɪnfrˈikwənt/   Listen
Infrequent

adjective
1.
Not frequent; not occurring regularly or at short intervals.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Infrequent" Quotes from Famous Books



... exciting address because slumber was not an infrequent phenomenon among the Immortals on such solemn occasions. Like dozens of dozing Joves a dull discourse ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers

... trading firm, there were two European traders who had married native women and eked out a lonely existence by buying copra (dried coco-nut) and sharks' fins when they were sober enough to attend to business—which was infrequent. However, Butaritari was a good recruiting ground for ships engaged in the labour traffic, owing to the continuous internecine wars, for the vanquished parties, after their coco-nut trees had been cut down and their canoes destroyed had the choice of remaining and having their ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke

... set in, and for three days we had high winds and cold weather. In spite of this, the brave birds persevered, and finished their nest during those three days, although much of the time they made infrequent trips. It was really most touching to watch them at their unnatural task, and remember that nothing but the cruelty of man forced them to it (one nest had been destroyed). Their difficulty was to get up against the wind, and, having ...
— In Nesting Time • Olive Thorne Miller

... no dignity in living except it be in the solemn presence of the universe; and only contemplation can summon such a presence. Moreover, the sessions must be not infrequent, for memory is short and visions fade. Truth does not require, however, to be followed out of the world. There is a speculative detachment from life which is less courageous, even if more noble, than worldliness. Such is Dante's ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry

... them concerning the manner of their intercourse with men. Jupiter granted their request for protection, and decreed that for the future they should not go among men openly in a body, and so be liable to attack from the hostile Ills, but singly and unobserved, and at infrequent and unexpected intervals. Hence it is that the earth is full of Ills, for they come and go as they please and are never far away; while Goods, alas! come one by one only, and have to travel all the way from heaven, so that ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop

... hour and day after day we are coasting along shores that become monotonous in their beauty. For leagues the sea-washed roots of the forest present a fairly impassable barrier to the foot of man. It is only at infrequent intervals that a human habitation is visible, and still more seldom does the eye discover a solitary canoe making its way among the inextricable confusion of inlets. Sometimes a small cluster of Indian lodges enlivens ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard

... the very thought of a female countenance. His ecclesiastical education had imbued Julien with very rigorous ideas as to the careful and reserved behavior which should be maintained between the sexes, and his intercourse with the world had been too infrequent for the idea to have been modified in any appreciable degree. It was natural, therefore, that this walk across the fields in the company of Reine should assume an exaggerated importance in his eyes. He felt himself troubled ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet

... departed from the whole street," she said, glancing around. The new-comers were of a different class. No one swept the debris up to the crown of the street any more; and the city street-sweepers were infrequent visitors. ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas

... upon them in good earnest, and Rose's visits "home," as she always called it, were naturally infrequent. By Christmas time, she was receiving attentions from Frank Mall, Nellie's second son, a ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius

... not gain an inch; our pursuers kept close behind us; but we held our own. Now and then a stray spear came hurtling through the air or struck the rock near us, but they were infrequent and ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout

... pound. In the more recent case—that of Attwood and Co.—they received a dividend of 11s. 3d. Both these cases compare favourably with others at a distance, where dividends of one or two shillings have not been infrequent. The banking business of the town is now in safe and prudent hands, and there is strong reason for hoping that the several institutions may go on, with increasing usefulness and prosperity, to a time long after ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards

... of the wealthy classes in the more advanced industrial communities. The latter have not yet had time to divest themselves of the plebeian canons of taste and of reputability carried over from their former, lower pecuniary grade. Such survival of the corset is not infrequent among the higher social classes of those American cities, for instance, which have recently and rapidly risen into opulence. If the word be used as a technical term, without any odious implication, it may be said that the ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen

... cancer of the womb. Between the actual bleedings there is a discharge resembling dish-water. This discharge has a foul odor. Pain is as a rule a late symptom. Sometimes a severe pain extending into the hip or abdomen is an early symptom but it is very infrequent. Every woman over thirty who has a persistent leucorrhea, or any irregularity of the menstrual function, ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague

... advantage that its wholesale traction reduces the prime cost by demanding only one engine for a great number of coaches. This will not serve the first-class long-distance passenger, but it may the third. Against that economy one must balance the necessary delay of a relatively infrequent service, which latter item becomes relatively greater and greater in proportion to the former, the briefer the journey to ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... for food and shelter and education—the chance to build and work and till the soil, free from the arbitrary horrors of battle—the desire to walk in the dignity of those who master their own destiny. For many painful years, in war and revolution and infrequent peace, they have ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Lyndon B. Johnson • Lyndon B. Johnson

... the place to which the latter assigns it, as it is very unlikely that he, who was actually present, should not know the time when it happened, and there was no motive to induce him designedly to misplace its date in his narrative of it, though it is not infrequent with him in his history to make excursions from truth into mere fiction ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... side ways and a gloomy one by night that backs up north of Les Halles: old Paris, taciturn and sombre, steeped in its memories of grim romance. But for infrequent, flickering, corner lamps, the street that welcomed them from the doors of the warm and cosy restaurant was as dismal as an alley in some city of the dead. Its houses with their mansard roofs and boarded windows bent their heads together like mutes at a wake, black-cloaked and hooded; seldom one ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance

... the apex of the sporangium, sometimes dichotomously branched a little below the summit, before blending into the common capillitium; capillitium lax, of slender, horizontal branches, anastomosing at infrequent intervals and ending in short, free tips; spores ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride

... anxiety. The likelihood of such crises as this had sometimes crossed her mind, and knowing how frail human nature is, she often marveled that instances seemed so infrequent. Her instinct told her that in every Community the risk must exist, even though all were doubly warned and armed against the temptations that flesh is heir to; yet no hint of danger had showed itself during the months in which she had been a member of the Shaker ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... Affected so variously and powerfully by magnetic means in the first years of her illness, she had now no life more, so thoroughly was the force of her own organization exhausted, but what she borrowed from others. In her now more infrequent magnetic trance, she was always seeking the true means of her cure. It was touching to see how, retiring within herself, she sought for help. The physician who had aided her so little with his drugs, must often stand abashed before this inner physician, perceiving ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller

... participant in her father's crime, she still felt herself in a measure responsible for it. He had determined to grow rich and powerful for her sake. More than once, in the empty rambling talk which he poured forth in a turgid stream during their infrequent meetings, he had told her so, with extravagant phrase and gesture. And so, at last, she had come to share his punishment in a hundred secret, unconfessed ways. She ate scant food, slept on the hardest of beds, labored unceasingly, with the great, impossible purpose of some day making things ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley

... alternating with piers, as at Hecklingen, Gernrode (958-1050), and St. Godehard at Hildesheim (1133). Atriple eastern apse, with apsidal chapels projecting eastward from the transepts, were common elements in the plans, and a second apse, choir, and crypt at the west end were not infrequent. Externally the most striking feature was the association of two, four, or even six square or circular towers with the mass of the church, and the elevation of square or polygonal turrets or cupolas over the crossing. These ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin

... occurred to Florent in all artlessness to ask his uncle to change a hundred-franc note for him, and after this the pork butcher showed less alarm at sight of the lads, as he called them. Still, their friendship got no further than these infrequent visits. ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola

... they had descended the straggling, tree-shaded street—along which the infrequent street-lamps threw little more light that that which came from the windows shining placidly out on lawns—and had emerged on the embankment bordering the Charles, that the events of the evening began for Davenant ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King

... success. Now, however, a bird, while under my eye, delivered both songs, and then went on to give further proof of his versatility by repeating one of them minus the final note. This abbreviation, by the way, is not very infrequent with Dendroeca virens; and he has still another variation, which I hear once in a while every season, consisting of a grace note introduced in the middle of the measure, in such a connection as to form what in musical language is denominated a turn. At my ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey

... slender stems of the yucca and infrequent clumps of dwarfed cacti cast clear-edged shadows on the bare, moonlit ground. Boyar, sniffing, suddenly swung up and pivoted, his fore feet hanging over sheer black emptiness. Louise leaned forward, reining ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs

... went up to the sick-room. Her first step had been to have the patient bathed and combed and made presentable for the occupancy of the guest-chamber. It had been with rebellion of spirit that she placed him there, but the judge had taken one of those infrequent stands which she knew it was useless to resist. She put the tray on a table near the big four-poster bed, and leaned over to ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice

... a "chest of four keys," from which it appears that books were kept in coffers and lent upon indenture or security, exactly as was done in the case of money. It was also a by no means infrequent occurrence for persons to give or bequeath books on condition that they were chained in the chancel of the church for the use of scholars and periodically inspected by the chancellor and proctors. By ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell

... heaven falling in coruscating cascades about us. Starting up, I found myself clutching Chapman, who had called to the pilot to stop the boat. A few of the attendants were grouped near us, and the loudly suppressed exclamations made me realize that these visitations were perhaps infrequent upon Mars. ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap

... of this I pushed on, wet and shivering now, towards my own house. I walked among the trees trying to find the footpath. It was very dark indeed in the wood, for the lightning was now becoming infrequent, and the hail, which was pouring down in a torrent, fell in columns through the gaps in the ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells

... with the old bear the first fall, but usually shift for themselves when the new cubs come, although it is not an infrequent sight to see an old bear with two ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes

... its confraternities of the Virgin, of Jesus, and of several of the saints, is proved by the character and the customs of its inhabitants; by the perpetual feuds, as terrible as they are causeless, which unite or separate them; and by the gloomy black eyes, pale complexions, laconic speech, and infrequent laughter ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various

... theory accounting for the presence of spawn is, therefore, out of the question. This spawn must have traversed hard clay deposits for the distance of half a mile or more to make their appearance in these waters. The only possible explanation of this class of phenomena, and they are by no means infrequent, is to be found in "favoring conditions" and the "presence of vital units." They are primordial manifestations of life, and such as would have made their appearance in any corresponding latitude of the southern hemisphere, ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright

... mean for July 45.9 deg. The almost continual cloudiness is undoubtedly a principal cause, not only of the low summer temperatures, but also of the comparatively high winter temperatures. Frosts are infrequent, and snow does not lie long. The climate is considered to be healthful notwithstanding the excessive humidity. The 600 m. of coast from the Chonos Archipelago south to the Fuegian islands have a climate closely approximating that ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various

... of human sympathy, and to make a neighbor of him you would have had to begin with his grandfather and work for three generations. He had seen Nancy and Gilbert at the gates of his place, and he had passed Mrs. Carey in one of his infrequent walks to the post-office. She was not a person to pass without mental comment, and Mr. Lord instantly felt himself in the presence of an equal, an unusual fact in his experience; he would not have known a superior if he had met one ever ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... entered the army on completing the school course, and soon received a commission in one of the most brilliant regiments of the Horse Guards. He did not come to show himself to his mother in his uniform, and his letters from Petersburg began to be infrequent. Varvara Petrovna sent him money without stint, though after the emancipation the revenue from her estate was so diminished that at first her income was less than half what it had been before. She had, however, a considerable sum laid by through years of ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... stairs to that "aft gangway," others speeding up them in equal haste with that excitement which always marks the infrequent traveler, and poor Alfaretta caught the same fever of haste. Without a word of real farewell, now that she had come thus far at so much risk to speak it, she dashed ahead, slipped on the brass-tipped stair and plunged headlong into ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond

... feverish spectacle on the mesa; as had Louise Graham, her father, and at rare intervals Mr. McDonnell. Bryant, on his part, had gone evenings to Sarita Creek when he could spare an hour, and, for that matter, when he could not. But the meetings with her were infrequent, and always left him with a sense of inadequacy, of dissatisfaction, because partly Ruth and he seemed to have no common interests and partly that she now let her affection go for granted. Her talk was not of the subjects usually discussed by an engaged couple—of their coming marriage ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd

... the young couple, when they had at last gained the cool open air, crossed the street to the side where over-hanging trees shaded the infrequent lamps, and they might be comparatively alone. The wife had taken her husband's arm, and pressed closely upon it as they walked. For a time no word passed, but finally he ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic

... had thickened all day long, and the turquoise blue of the Arizona sky had filmed. Storms in the dry countries are infrequent, but heavy; and ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White

... earlier months of this spring, Haworth was extremely unhealthy. The weather was damp, low fever was prevalent, and the household at the Parsonage suffered along with its neighbours. Charlotte says, "I have felt it (the fever) in frequent thirst and infrequent appetite; Papa too, and even Martha, have complained." This depression of health produced depression of spirits, and she grew more and more to dread the proposed journey to London with Sir James and Lady Kay Shuttleworth. ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... it all, as I've heard ofttime from father; he has spoken not infrequent of Sir John's high living; he had great demesne, a great heart and great temper; and 'tis the last named that has fallen clear and uncumbered to his daughter; and the heart will be found by careful probing, no doubt; and the demesne she will have when she condescends ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne

... injured, and not without cause. Then such a character will usually seek to "get even" as he calls it, he will go about for a long time inciting others to commit murder and other crimes. Then we have an epidemic of murders in a community, a condition not infrequent. ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel

... head. A sick-bed could recall Helen, but she was deaf to more human calls; after a glimpse at her aunt, she would retire into her nebulous life behind some poste restante. She scarcely existed; her letters had become dull and infrequent; she had no wants and no curiosity. And it was all put down to poor Henry's account! Henry, long pardoned by his wife, was still too infamous to be greeted by his sister-in-law. It was morbid, and, to her alarm, Margaret fancied that she could ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster

... realised how very weak she was becoming day by day. Her work-basket stood by her side still, for though she seldom touched it now, Graeme could not bear to put it away. Their daily readings were becoming brief and infrequent. One by one their favourite books found their accustomed places on the shelves, and remained undisturbed. Within reach of her hand lay always Menie's little Bible, and now and then she read a verse or two, but more frequently it was Graeme's trembling lips, that ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson

... competing teams did not remain and play the game off before playing elsewhere. That might result in playing all of the games in one city. Since drawn games are treated like postponed games in the regular season, and are of infrequent occurrence in world's series, any other arrangement than the present does not seem advisable. The patrons, who should be considered always, would be among the first to object if each team did not have an equal show to win. In the last series only four games that counted were played in Boston and ...
— Spalding's Official Baseball Guide - 1913 • John B. Foster

... close of the war duels between officers of the two armies were not infrequent. In the scrap-book there is the account of one of these affairs sent from Vicksburg to a Northern paper by a correspondent who was an eye-witness of the event. It tells how Major MacIver, accompanied by Major Gillespie, met, just outside of Vicksburg, Captain Tomlin of Vermont, ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis

... Mark Twain's journalism is full of delicious history, but we are permitted here to retell only such of it as will supply connection to the infrequent letters. He wrote home briefly in February, but the letter contained nothing worth preserving. Then two months later he gives us at least ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... infrequent. Captain Nesteroff, one of the most daring of Russian aviators, sacrificed his life in a successful attempt to destroy an Austrian aeroplane. He was returning from the front after an aerial reconnaissance when he saw an Austrian aeroplane hovering over the Russian ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various

... new tramways and light railways are created in an increasing number of cases by public bodies who retain them for the public good. Nobody who travels to London as I do regularly in the dirty, over-crowded carriages of the infrequent and unpunctual trains of the South-Eastern Company, and who then transfers to the cleanly, speedy, frequent—in a word, "civilized" electric cars of the London County Council, can fail to estimate the value and significance ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells

... of rape by white men is by no means an infrequent occurrence. Two instances of white men committing heinous assaults upon white children occurred in Washington during the preparation ...
— A Review of Hoffman's Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 1 • Kelly Miller

... a long year. Milk did not take the place of it. Gravy and drippings, freely given by their mother, did not take the place of it, nor did the infrequent portions of preserves. Nothing met the same want. And if their health was improved by the abstinence it was in no way visible to the naked eye. They were well, but they ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... his remarks, they, as we have stated, were infrequent, so laconic, in reality, that they were mere exclamations rather than speech. But each time an explanation had been asked concerning the state of France, the Englishman openly drew out a note-book and requested those about him, the wine merchant, the abbe, or the young noble to repeat ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere

... voice with its languid evasions. "We have several neighbors, Colonel. They visit us at infrequent times." ...
— The Littlest Rebel • Edward Peple

... walk that ran alongside of the avenue, Miss Oldcastle struggling against the wind, which blew straight down the path upon her. The cause of my amazement was twofold. First, I had supposed her with her mother in London, whither their journeys had been not infrequent since Christmas-tide; and next—why should she be fighting with the wind, so far from the house, with only a shawl ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald

... Grover Cleveland, also his young wife, and his visits to Washington were not infrequent. Mrs. Clemens was not always able to accompany him, and he has told us how once (it was his first visit after the President's marriage) she put a little note in the pocket of his evening waistcoat, which he would be sure to ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... without exception very dirty; a child of a year or a year and a half is usually repulsively so. Its head has received no attention since birth, and is scaly and dirty if not actually full of sores. Its baths are now relatively infrequent, and its need of them as it plays on the dirt floor of the dwelling or pabafunan even more urgent than when it spent most of its time in the ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks

... better and brighter elements of the floating population. There was sure to be found the newest arrival, if he were worth knowing; the latest papers and news "from across;" and, as the blue smoke of the Havanas floated lazily out on the soft summer night, many a jovial laugh followed it and a not infrequent prediction of scenes to come almost prophetic. And of the lips that made these most are now silent forever—stilled in the reddest glow of battle, with the war-cry hot ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon

... rock. When all the "color" in sight had been cleaned up, the Desert Rat produced a drill and a stick of dynamite from the pack, put in a "shot" and uncovered a pocket of such richness that even the stolid Cahuilla could not forbear indulgence in one of his infrequent Spanish expletives. It was a deposit of rotten honeycombed rock that was nine- tenths pure gold—what is known in the parlance of the prospector ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne

... good reasons can be given why the presence of a cat should not betray itself to certain organizations, at a distance, through the walls of a box in which the animal is shut up. We need not disbelieve the stories which allege such an occurrence as a fact and a not very infrequent one. ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... It is the cause for which they fight that gives them dignity: embattled Greece must repossess the beauty which a lesser race has reft away from it. Even Helen herself is merely an idea to be fought for; she is not, as a woman, interesting humanly. It is only in infrequent passages, such as the scene of parting between Andromache and Hector, that the ancient epics reveal the intimate attitude toward character to which we have grown accustomed in ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton

... With my return to New York, the necessity of a larger office brought that one-time closer affiliation with the Doctor to an end. But the seeds were planted which were destined to bear for me the fruit of one of those infrequent friendships, the influence of which still goes on, finding fresh inspiration ...
— Some Personal Recollections of Dr. Janeway • James Bayard Clark

... caps set off to advantage the fine features and fair complexions which render some of the students remarkable, though the faces are too often disfigured by tell-tale sabre-cuts. After the passing of the procession, we drove through a portion of the Potsdamer Strasse where the lamps were rather infrequent and the overarching branches of the trees shut out the starlight from the handsome street. Crowds were hurrying to and fro,—but to this we had become accustomed,—when suddenly we met a company of mounted students returning from the ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton

... 16 years of age. Has suffered from attacks of nerves for three years. The attacks, at first infrequent, have gradually come at closer intervals. When she comes to see me on the 1st of April, 1917, she has had three attacks in the preceding fortnight. Up to the 18th of April she did not have any at all. I may add that this young lady, from the time she ...
— Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion • Emile Coue

... was forever digging at his books. In appearance Albert Digbee was a tall, slender, but scarcely frail youth, with a cleanly cut face that looked, in the firelight, far too pale. His eyes were strikingly bright, and though his smiles were infrequent, his habitual expression was one of eager and kindly interest. Joel had often come across him in class, and had ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour

... the changing of the scenes in his script to fit Enid had not taken him very long or else the photographing of this particular bit of action had proved sufficiently fascinating to draw him away from his work. I wondered at first if he had come to the studio to use his office here, an infrequent happening, from Manton's account. Then I realized that he was in evening dress. Without doubt he planned to play a minor part in the banquet. His ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve

... were broken through at a time of excessive emotionalism. The many hasty marriages were a sign of the nervous condition of the times. The customary criticisms of reason were not heard, or not until the emotional storm had subsided. This is, of course, a condition not infrequent in marriage; but now it was exaggerated; such marriages may not, unfortunately, bear the scrutiny ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley

... hawkers who had obtained their stocks at these gatherings. Along with increased population, larger industrial centres, and improved channels of communication, local supply became easier; and so frequent markets more and more fulfilled the purpose of infrequent fairs. Afterwards, in chief places and for chief commodities, markets themselves multiplied, becoming in some cases daily. Finally came a constant distribution, such that of some foods there is to each town an influx every ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson

... leisure these ominous words. Her reflexions indeed at this moment thickened apace, and one of them made her sure that her governess had conversations, private, earnest and not infrequent, with her denounced stepfather. She perceived in the light of a second episode that something beyond her knowledge had taken place in the house. The things beyond her knowledge—numerous enough in truth—had not hitherto, ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James

... while they sat there, alert behind their wall of rustling reeds, watching sky and water. False alarms were not infrequent from their decoys. Sometimes the outbreak of quacking and honking was occasioned by some wandering gull, sometimes by a circling hawk or some eagle loitering in mid-heaven on broad and leisurely wings, reluctant to remain, ...
— Blue-Bird Weather • Robert W. Chambers

... the comparative stillness of the early morning was punctured by faint, uncertain cries that seemed mere fireflies of sound, some growing louder, some fainter, waxing and waning amid the rumble of milk wagons and infrequent cars. Shrill cries they were when near—well-known cries that conveyed many meanings to the ears of those of the slumbering millions of the great city who waked to hear them. Cries that bore upon their significant, small volume ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry

... promptly in the one as in the other. The distinguished Paul Bert declared that the young of the axolotl could not form pigment when reared in a yellow light. Professor Semper, on the contrary, declares Bert's axolotls to be albinos, and states that albinism is by no means infrequent in the axolotl; also that Professor Koelliker, of Wuertzburg, reared a family of white axolotls in a laboratory where there was an abundance of light, and that he (Semper) never succeeded in rearing an albino, though there was less light in his laboratory than ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir

... insignificant degree,—pity only that our social conditions allow, or make its application possible only in rare instances. The means consist in regular and systematic sexual intercourse. The sight is not infrequent with girls, who lost their bloom, or were not far from the withering point, yet, the opportunity to marry having been offered them, that, shortly after marriage, their shape began to round up again, the roses to return to their cheeks, and their eyes to recover their one-time brightness. ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel

... relieved of their personal effects. Then the stage coach was systematically gone through together with the Wells Fargo & Co's. safe, which often contained gold into the thousands. These hold-ups were not infrequent and were the fear of all who were obliged to pass through these canyons of robbery and often death. The bunch that we harbored were undoubtedly as bold a band of robbers and murderers as ever infested the silent ...
— Dangers of the Trail in 1865 - A Narrative of Actual Events • Charles E Young

... are too infrequent and transitory to dissipate the poet's conviction that he is the loneliest of men. "Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart," might have been written by almost any nineteenth century poet about any other. Shelley, in ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

... secured practically no information. Merton had been an infrequent visitor and had made little or ...
— The Sheridan Road Mystery • Paul Thorne

... Atherton well. In his not infrequent moments of excitement he is apt to use strong language, but it goes no further. I believe him to be the last person in the world to do anyone an intentional injustice, under any circumstances whatever. ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh

... have told him! Infrequent traveler that she was she had been properly educated on that point. However much she may have yawned, at the tender age of ten, over a certain dissertation on the etiquette of travel, given one summer afternoon by Mademoiselle D'Ormy, Felicia aged twenty-seven, ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke

... she exclaimed. Letters for either of them were infrequent. She took it up curiously, scrutinised the address, sniffed at the fragrance the missive carried, noted the postmark, which was that of the town near by, and studied the waxen purple seal, ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed

... interference in episcopal elections was not infrequent under the Merovingians. Confused as the following account is, it is clear from it that the kings were accustomed to violate the canons and to exercise a free hand in episcopal appointments. See also the preceding selection. The date of the event is 585. For the Synod of Macon, A. ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.

... likely to regard the child who interrupts him wilfully naughty. No young child, on the contrary, objects to being interrupted in his speech, though he may object to being interrupted in his play; and he cannot understand why an adult should set so much store on the quiet listening which is so infrequent in his own experience. Grown persons object to noise; children delight in it. Grown persons like to have things kept in their places; to a child, one place as good as another. Grown persons have a prejudice in favor of cleanliness; children like to swim, but hate to ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne

... Clare's father, till now, had not included Harlan in his feud with the grandfather. He had always treated him with a brusqueness that had a sort of good-humor beneath it. His discourse with the young man had been curt and satiric and infrequent, and consisted usually in mock messages of defiance which he asked to have delivered by word of mouth to the grandfather. But his tone now was crisp and it had a ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day

... Sensation. If by that term we intend our whole Experience of the external, then of course it necessarily follows—or, at least, we admit—that our Knowledge of the external must be thence derived. But such a use of the term is loose, misleading, and infrequent. The only safe course is to confine the term Sensation to the immediate data of the five senses—touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste, with probably the addition of muscular and other internal feelings. It is in this sense that the word ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip

... glad to escape from the pressure of the crowd, he found himself face to face with Cornelius, an infrequent spectator on occasions such as this. It was a relief to depart with him—so fresh and quiet he looked, though in all his splendid equestrian array in honour of the ceremony—from the garish heat [232] of ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater

... was much interested in watching the proceedings in a case which he found on inquiry to be not infrequent. A man was complaining to the Mayor that his daughter, a lovely child of eight years old, had none of the faults common to children of her age, and, in fact, seemed absolutely deficient in immoral sense. She ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler

... things in those school-day years but she wanted most of all to become like Miss Lee. So earnestly did she try to speak as her teacher taught her that after a time the peculiar idioms and expressions became more infrequent and there was only a delightfully quaint inflection, an occasional phrase, to betray her Pennsylvania Dutch parentage. But in times of stress or excitement she invariably slipped back into the old way and prefaced her exclamations with an ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers

... relieving her was by acupuncture. He therefore inserted a needle which unfortunately pierced the synovial sac causing inflammation which finally resulted in complete destruction of the joint. Such cases are not infrequent both among adults and children in all grades of society, due to this method ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland

... S. and D.C. types appear in appreciable numbers. It is of some significance that the most irregular type of all, S. & S., in which the weight of interest and of mass is overwhelmingly on one side, should be invariably balanced by the third dimension (V.). As these somewhat infrequent cases are especially enlightening for the theory of substitutional symmetry, it is worth while to ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various

... religion was another." You have never hesitated to support any candidate, or to uphold any measure, dictated by the wisdom or the wickedness of your party. Although you must have observed, that, with occasional and infrequent eddies of opinion, the current of its political progress has been steadily carrying the Northern Democracy farther and farther away from the example and the doctrines of Jefferson, you have surrendered yourself to the evil influence without a twinge ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various

... of a certain combination of peculiarities of clothing being found to obtain in the case of two young women who were unknown to each other. If the finding of a single reference to Cleopatra had been a thing of so infrequent occurrence as to at once challenge Maitland's attention, what was to be said when, all of a sudden, her name, or some reference to her, seemed to stare at him ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy

... bounded lightly over the first prostrate tree-trunks of the windfall, an infrequent but not unfamiliar odor assailed her nostrils. It was a disagreeable smell, not unlike that of cabbage or potatoes in the first stages of decay. The first tinge of it lashed her into frenzy so that she sprang forward in great leaps ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller

... the captures were so infrequent that, it may be safely stated, never before was a Government at war so well supplied with arms, munitions, clothing and medicines—everything, in short, that an army requires—with so little money as was paid by the Confederacy. The shipment from England ...
— The Supplies for the Confederate Army - How they were obtained in Europe and how paid for. • Caleb Huse

... was Guillaume le Conquerant, was a magnificent, fluffy, grey bird picked out with green. His eye was knowing, and swift and deep his infrequent but never-to-be-forgotten bite. ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten

... to leave the gallery, but as he did so he paused suddenly. Far down, at the other end, something was slowly coming toward him. The gallery was very long and ill-lighted by the narrow, infrequent windows, and he could not distinguish whom it was. He stood, however, involuntarily waiting for it to approach him. But how slowly it came, as one groping or one walking in a dream! Then, as it gradually ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... was an open idolatress. One had only to watch the way she followed him with her dark, heavy-lidded eyes to know what was in her mind. Ruth tried not to despise her. She tried not to care, when she saw Percival laughing and talking with this beguiling sensualist,—and it was not an infrequent occurrence. ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon

... the whole course of her friendship with Harry was a dread lest Toby should see them together. That Harry should see her with Toby she did not mind, because she could at any time have relinquished Harry without a qualm; but she loved Toby, and took care to keep secret from him on their infrequent meetings anything which might disturb his ardent thoughts of the little girl he ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton

... however, there was no very immediate prospect of an outbreak, for the wind although light was steady, and the frigate, close-hauled on the port tack, was creeping along at the rate of about three knots per hour, while the gleams of sheet-lightning were exceedingly faint and infrequent, occurring at about ten-minutes' intervals. Very gradually the brilliancy of the flashes, as well as their frequency and duration, increased, until, by two bells, the glimmer of some of them endured for perhaps as long as three seconds, during which the entire sky, with its enormous, ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood

... The tug and the turmoil had gone. We were alone again in the beyond. There was no sound now but the water spattering under our craft, and the fumbling and infrequent splash of the sweep. Once we heard the miniature bark of a dog, distinct and fine, as though distance had refined it as well as reduced it. We were nearly round the loop the River makes about Millwall, and this ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson

... reinforcements from within the Straits, provided it were utilized as the station of a body of ships adequate to the duty. This was not done; the British European fleet being kept tied to the Channel, that is, to home defence, and making infrequent visits to the Rock to convoy supplies essential to the endurance of the garrison. There was, however, a difference in the parts played by Port Mahon and Gibraltar. The former, being at the time wholly unimportant, ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan

... laboring under that hallucination, not infrequent with maiden ladies rather advanced, that her own spring-time was perennial; and though by no means disposed to displace the hero of her youth from his supremacy in her heart, she yet accepted, with the ordinary feminine serenity, gallant attentions from youths over whose infant ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various

... Roman civilization had not yet succeeded in stamping out the old pagan beliefs of the early inhabitants, and superstition and ignorance were for a long time characteristic traits of the majority of the people. The air was peopled with demons, the devil himself was no infrequent visitor, witches and fortune tellers were not without influence, and stealthily, by night, many mystic rites were celebrated. Many of the Christian beliefs of the time are likewise the result of ignorance and superstition, but at that time, naturally, only the ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger

... recently reduced its already infrequent sailings for Singapore, which caused some delay, but finally, toward the end of March, I embarked for Sampit. I was glad to see the controleur, who came down to the pier, for the rare occasions when steamers call here are almost festive events, and arrangements were at once ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz



Words linked to "Infrequent" :   infrequency, sporadic, rare, occasional, frequent



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