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More "Amenities" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... (admittedly greater than his own); he admired her indomitable courage and self-reliance, while her positive genius in the matters of seamanship and navigation filled him with speechless wonder. The girls he had been used to were clever only in their knowledge of the amenities of an afternoon call or the formalities of a paper german. A girl of two-and-twenty who could calculate longitude from the altitude of a star was outside his experience. The more he saw of her the ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... more luxurious than in their own castles, and though there would scarcely seem as yet to have been any palace attached to that holy house, it was already a frequent residence of royalty, and with all its amenities of parks and gardens would be more fit for the reception of a young queen coming straight from princely Windsor than the narrow chambers in the castle. Among the many presents which she is said to have brought with her from ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... with a distinguished personage; and having smoked an invisible cigar, interspersed with such wit as accords with walnuts and wine, after the ladies had retired, he entered the drawing-room, exchanged parting amenities with the guests, bade his hostess good night, and gracefully withdrew ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... assured herself, already resembled the Mantegazzas', whose indifferent courtesy she had marked and wondered at. Perhaps in time, like them, she would grow accustomed to it; but now it took all her determination to maintain the smallest daily amenities. It was not that her actual condition was unbearable, but only that it was so tragically removed from what she had imagined; she had dreamed of romance, it had been embodied for her eager gaze—and she ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... whom they would all have elected to serve under, had the work to be done once more. As one of them said, "The sight of his long nose was worth ten thousand men on a field of battle." They were themselves a leathery breed, and cared little for the gentler amenities so long as the French were ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... tea—one does not stop for such leisurely amenities in a busy public library—but she saw the beauty of the idea, and saw to it that the tea was there. Lily-Anna was a jewel. She built the fire up to a bright flame, and brought in some daffodils from the garden without a word from her mistress. Phyllis herself saw that the victrola was in readiness, ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... his wife's attentions with an angry hand. But just as he was about to launch a reply more congruous with his gout and his contempt for 'Driffield's low-life friends' than with the amenities of ordinary society, and while Lady Venetia was slowly and severely studying David through her eyeglass, Lord Driffield threw himself into the breach with a nervous story of some favourite 'man' of his own, and ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... have read of them in different countries know him by. These comprise and present the character they honor with respect. What he was in the temper and disposition of his inner life, in daily walk and conversation, in the even and gentle amenities of Christian humility, in sudden trials of his faith and patience; what he was as a husband, father, friend and neighbor, to the poor, to the afflicted in mind, body or estate,— all this will remain unwritten, but not unremembered by those who ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... do so for you. I think one principal reason is because it is so very conventional that she would expect it, and think me either piqued or ill-bred if I omitted it. Then, deeper than that is a desire to tell her that I recognize in her and admire those graces and amenities which are supposed to be peculiar to her sex. And I suppose there is, also, a little selfishness in it, as if I were asking her to take note that I knew what were the usages ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... composure to shake hands with Mrs. Tom O'Hara, a tall, olive-tinted, black-haired beauty; presented Hamil to his hostess, and left him planted, to exchange impulsive amenities with ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... perhaps, carried off her feet a little—metaphorically speaking, of course—by his evident sincerity. At that moment she would have done anything that he had asked her. The pleasures of society, the social amenities of aristocratic life, seemed to have vanished suddenly into thin air, and only love was left. She had always known that Jack Meredith was superior in a thousand ways to all her admirers. More gentlemanly, ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... me that while living abroad she had often met American girls—intelligent women, well bred, the finest stuff in the world—who suffered under a disadvantage, because they lacked a little training in the social amenities. ...
— The Log-Cabin Lady, An Anonymous Autobiography • Unknown
... the sharp authentic tang, that really tickles our sensibilities, has thinned out and fallen flat during the centuries. My hearers have smiled and tittered perhaps—with a pathetic wish to be kind, or a desire to show themselves not quite dull to these classic amenities—and between us we have, in a kind of chuckling pedantry, shuffled through the occasion; but it is not pleasant ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... circumstances, to quit this beautiful residence; and he afterwards occupied a farm on the banks of Loch Lomond. Such a region of the picturesque was highly suitable for the development of those poetical talents which had already appeared in young Hector, amidst the rural amenities of Roslin. In his eleventh year, he wrote a drama, after the manner of Gay; and the respectable execution of his juvenile attempts in versification gained him the approbation of Dr Doig, the learned rector of the grammar-school ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... of dust, or fragments of meals, or dirty plates. There was neither a Winged Victory, a Venus de Milo, nor a Hermes after Praxiteles. And except for the bust of Bubbles there was no example of Barbara's own work by which to fish for stray compliments from the casual visitor. Of the amenities the studio had but a thick carpet, an open fireplace, and a pair of plain but easy chairs. Upon a strong tremorless table placed near the one great window, a huge lump of clay, swathed in damp cloths, alone served to ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... flat on the sidewalk[HW:?] beside the aged man I had passed a few minutes before. Out came my smile and a notebook. With only a few preliminaries and amenities the interview was in full swing. It neither startled nor confused him, to have an excited young woman plant herself on a public sidewalk at his side and demand his life's story. A man who had belonged to three different masters before the age of 15 was inured to minor surprises. ...
— Slave Narratives: Arkansas Narratives - Arkansas Narratives, Part 6 • Works Projects Administration
... under the light of a later and happier age, of the growth, when not rather of the arrest, of manners and customs roundabout our birthplace. I think we had never been so much as during these particular months disinherited of the general and public amenities that reinforce for the young private precept and example—disinherited in favour of dust and glare and mosquitoes and pigs and shanties and rumshops, of no walks and scarce more drives, of a repeated no less than of a ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... driven in order to fix any real blame on me, may be seen from what follows. The article in which the obnoxious passage which, Iwas told, deprived me of any claim to the amenities of literary intercourse occurs, had been reprinted in the "Indische Studien," before I reprinted it in the first volume of "Chips." In reprinting it myself, Ihad rewritten parts of it, and had also made a few additions. In the "Indische Studien," on the ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... introduced by the colonists manifest themselves at first in curious contrast to the primitive surroundings. The struggle between organized life and chaos, the laborious subjugation of nature to the requirements of our complex modern life, for a considerable period absorb the energies of the colonists. The amenities of culture, the higher intellectual life, the refinements of art can, during this period, receive little attention. Meanwhile a new national character is being formed; the people are undergoing the moral training ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... consequence, she was resentful and suspicious. The jealousy that prompted her to observe every falling away from the little amenities of the married relation on his part served to give her notice of the airy grace with which he still took the world. She could see from the scrupulous care which he exercised in the matter of his ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... shake hands and afterwards grin amicably as they move in circles seeking for a hitch. As I lay, however, the bathing-place could only be brought into view by craning my neck beyond the tent-door: and my posture was too well chosen to be shifted. Moreover, I had a more singular example of these amenities in face of me, on the rock ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... world is all very well when all is well, but it can so easily become an accursed world!" The old lady spoke with a strange bitterness, revealing the profound disquietude that existed under the serene amenities of her ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... sheets, the head languishing upon the pillow noticed and condoned, the sufferer would arise, hop out of bed fully clothed and partake of cookies and wine passed by the black dwarf, Selena. This small creature, after fulfilling her part in the social amenities, seated herself upon a small stool, joined in the conversation, and when amused (which was often) broke into a high falsetto laugh. In the last years of these two ladies she gained a most unholy influence over her charges and took cruel advantage ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore
... "lean-to", serving the purposes of kitchen and storeroom combined. The arrangements of the whole cabin showed that some one had built it with a view to passing in seclusion a few days at a time without forsaking the simpler amenities of civilized life; and it was clear that that "some one" was a woman. What interested Ford chiefly for the moment was the discovery of a sealed glass jar of water, from which he was able to ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... this pamphlet from instigating the unpropertied classes to hatred and contempt of the wealthy, that, on the contrary, I expressly declare myself for the legitimacy of such property. I explicitly declare that the satisfaction taken in the advantages and amenities which flow from such wealth are the most natural and legitimate things ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... this fact my wonder bred (Though known by all the nobly wise), It was the mountain stream that fed That fair green plain's amenities." ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... "Idle Hour," his superb estate on the Palisades. Waldron paid only a perfunctory court to Catherine, who manifested her pleasure by studied indifference. Both magnates felt relieved when she withdrew. They had other and larger matters under way than any dealing with the amenities ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... brought a courteous reply, extending to the Alabama the hospitality of the port; and the health officers having visited the ship, arrangements were made for laying in a stock of provisions, and such other articles as were required after the cruise. Nor were the amenities of the Alabama's reception confined to the authorities alone. An enthusiastic greeting awaited her from almost every one; the clubs were placed at their disposal, and invitations a discretion poured in from ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... time, and was duly taken home with me. "Old man," I said, "welcome back to the amenities of life; to the tender charities of man and woman; to the ties, too long neglected, which bind your being to the world's glad heart. You are the prodigal returning from sowing his wild oats in the backwoods: the fatted ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... within three hundred miles were shut within that hollow square, a community, dependent largely on each other for all the little every-day kindnesses and amenities which make life enjoyable, having no regular intercourse with the civilized world, except by mail, which at first was received semi-annually, after a while quarterly, and for many years not more frequently than bi-monthly. ...
— 'Three Score Years and Ten' - Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other - Parts of the West • Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve
... of the discussion by remaining severely polite while Rickman grew more and more perturbed and heated. Rickman, however, gained at the outset by making straight for his point. As Jewdwine gave him no opening he had to make one and make it as early as possible, before the great man's amenities had time to lure him ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... had learned enough to realize how important are the amenities in politics and business. The Colonel did most of the conversing; he could not have filled with efficiency and ease the important post that was his had it not been for the endless fund of humorous anecdotes at his disposal. One by one the visitors left, each assuring me ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... one's way. That idiot treated me to a piece of brazen sincerity which I couldn't stand. First of all he began to take me into his confidence; he boasted of his great affairs, then started groaning about his overstrained life which left him no time for the amenities of existence, for beauty, or sentiment, or any sort of ease of heart. His heart! He wanted me to sympathize with his sorrows. Of course I ought to have listened. One must pay for service. Only I was nervous and tired. He bored me. I told him at last ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... lengthening days and fading nights. At seven o'clock we are in the river again, and for three glorious hours we float, first one scow in front, then the other, social amenities in Cree being shouted from boat to boat. Then, in one voice from three boats, "Mooswa!" and far beyond white man's vision the boatmen sight a moose. There is a little red tape about the ethics of taking off those precious Peterboroughs which were to make history ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... it was to Mr. Boyce's dislike of himself, and to the wilful fancy for Wharton's society which this dislike had promoted, that Wharton's long stay at Mellor was largely owing—did Aldous subdue himself to propitiations and amenities wholly foreign to a strong character long accustomed to rule without thinking about it. Mr. Boyce showed himself not a whit less partial to Wharton than before; pressed him at least twice in Raeburn's ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... often been asserted that the possession of great mental power unfits the woman possessing it for the common amenities of life. That it does not necessarily do any thing of the kind, is sufficiently evidenced in the life of Hypatia. Though elevated to the very pinnacle of fame, in consequence of her mental attainments, she was nevertheless gentle and courteous in her manners, ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... when I received your invitation, having heard so much of the literary, artistic and social amenities of your famous Club, I resembled in feelings, not in feature, the beautiful bride ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... Meyer introduced them as the captain and first officer of the Titan, and seated themselves. A few moments later brought a shrewd-looking person whom Mr. Meyer addressed as the attorney for the steamship company, but did not introduce; for such are the amenities of the ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... many things which a larger mental digestion can assimilate without discomfort. In his dealings with Nature he is sweet, genial, patient, wise. In his dealings with men he exasperates himself over the least divergence from the desired type. Before any over-tendency to the amenities and luxuries of civilization, in particular, he becomes unreasonable and relentless. Hence there appears something hard and ungenial in his views of life, utterly out of keeping with the delicate tenderness which he shows in the woods. The housekeeping of bees and birds he finds noble and beautiful, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... been the only cause of my discontentment; I never coming from the Count, or Court, but still he filled and possessed me with new causes of discontentments.' The reading of the statement was set in a more than usually decorated framework of Coke's amenities. Ralegh throughout the trial had been for the King's Attorney an 'odious fellow;' the 'most vile and execrable traitor.' He had been stigmatized as 'hateful to all the realm for his pride,' to which Ralegh had retorted: 'It will ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... unconsciousness of the presence of others, 'is a custom more honored in the breach than the observance,' and may prove prolific of annoyance in coming years; for courtesy constitutes the keystone in the beautiful arch of social amenities which vaults the temple of Christian virtues. Lest you should take umbrage at my frankness, which ought to assure you of my interest in your happiness and improvement, permit me to remind you of the oriental definition of a faithful ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... met the luminous glance that came with the question. She, too, was of gentle blood,—not meaning by that that she was of any noted lineage, but that she came of a cultivated stock, never rich, but long trained to intellectual callings. A thousand decencies, amenities, reticences, graces, which no one thinks of until he misses them, are the traditional right of those who spring from such families. And when two persons of this exceptional breeding meet in the midst of the common multitude, they seek ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... brightness of my boyhood seems to linger about me. Contact with the world is an indurating process; I really did not know how hard I had grown, until I felt my heart soften at sight of you. I need you to keep the kindly charities and gentle amenities of life before me, and, therefore, I have come for you. But for my poverty I never would have given you up so long; I felt that it would be for your advantage, in more than one respect to remain with Mr. Clifton until I had acquired my profession. I knew that you ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... whether the Roads Surveyor was right or wrong when he said that you were not always over-civil. See here, Thurston, leaving all personal amenities out of the question, I'm inclined to figure that you will be of use to me, aid the connection also will help you considerably. My paid representatives are not always so energetic as they might be. So if you are tired of ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... time we were told of the Bedouins "with saddle, bridle, and life on the Islam," always mounted, always armed, always engaged in war or razzias and mutual pillage; of the Turkomans and their motto: 'Thy soul is in thy sword'; and those who thus celebrated the amenities of pastoral life, and the heroic adventures of the Arabs of the desert, never perceived the contradictions they had ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... Lightfoot makes upon the translation actually fall upon the head of his brother apologist, Tischendorf, whose rendering, as he so much insists upon it, I merely reproduce. The manner in which Tischendorf attacks Volkmar in connection with this passage forcibly reminds me of the amenities addressed to myself by Dr. Lightfoot, who seems unconsciously to have caught the trick of his precursor's scolding. Volkmar had paraphrased Origen's words in a way of which his critic disapproved, and Tischendorf comments as follows: "But here ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... made a direct change from the Washington Square studio to the ample house of the Hutchinsons, and it was as well for her that a change in Jimmie's fortunes had taken her back to the Winchester and enabled her to accustom herself again to the amenities of gentler living. Like all sensitive and impressionable children she took on the color of a new environment very quickly. The strain of her studio experience had left her a little cowed and unsure of ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... Anti-Nebraska Americans, and on October 12th, of that year, at Albany, formally announced his adhesion to the new Republican party. In the Senate he easily ranked as one of its most polished and effective speakers who, while resolutely maintaining his own convictions, scrupulously preserved the amenities of debate. He especially distinguished himself by his earnest, yet unavailing, resistance to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Among his popular addresses of conspicuous merit are those on "The Elements of Empire in America," ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... skeptical as to the reality of what is called mind. So far as his clients are concerned, it is notable for its absence. To be confronted day after day by the absent-minded, and to listen to their monotonous tale of woe, is disenchanting. It is difficult to observe all the amenities of life when one is dealing with the ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... of the term, argued that they must return that treatment, and it is not of record that they failed to give adequate return. Indeed the record tends to show that they added a little for good measure, although it is hard to outdo a Frenchman in courtesy and the common amenities ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... lying might be the means to help them to it. In Spanish one of them called from his cover, bidding Uncle Billy give himself up as a prisoner. He had, the herald said, been so brave that they would observe the amenities of the white man's warfare; they would not harm a hair of his head. But if he refused they surely would come on this ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... occasion, he was able to exercise this talent. Superfluous trouble! Madame de Crequi interrupted him at each sentence by the most disagreeable commentaries, by exclamations such as the following: "Detestable style!" "Confusion worse confounded!" and other similar amenities. Bailly did not succeed in extorting any indulgences from Madame de Crequi, when, fortunately, the arrival of another visitor put an end to this ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... bearing the name of freeman, be legally subjected to all the oppressive features of serfdom, peonage, and feudalism combined, without possessing the right to claim, much less the power to exact, any of the prerogatives and amenities belonging to either of those systems of human bondage. All this could be done without violating the letter of the emancipation proclamation; no argument is necessary to prove that it would be a total ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz
... respects Anson resembles a rough diamond, his brusque manner and impulsive temper needing the keen polish of the refining wheel of the conventional amenities of life to make his inherent worth shine forth in its full brilliancy. Anson, too, reminds one somewhat of that old Western pioneer, Davy Crockett, inasmuch as his practical motto is, 'When you know you're right, go ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... music, literature, discovery, invention, and pure science; for, if all the workers in all of these branches of human activity got together and demanded of the world the real fruits of their self-sacrifice and labor,—if they demanded all the riches and comforts and amenities of life that have flowed directly or indirectly from their efforts,—there would be little left for the rest of mankind. Each of these activities is represented by a craft spirit that recognizes this great truth. The artist ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... that he actually brought me love-letters from the King. But the purveyors of such gossip could surely know nothing of Bossuet's inflexible principles, and of the subtlety of his policy. He was well aware that by lending himself to such amenities he would lose caste morally with the King, and that if by his loyalty he had won royal attachment and regard, all this would have been irretrievably lost. Thus M. de Bossuet was of those who say, "Hate me, but fear me," rather than of those who strive to be loved. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... tail rattling down behind him like a length of thick cable. Once on the ground he became quite agile, moving with a sort of oddly graceful prance on his powerful legs. He approached, his attention centered on Kieran. But he observed the amenities, placing one delicate hand on his breast and making ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton
... Henderson found toiling cheerfully with his beloved parishioners in the hay-harvest of the brief arctic summer, combine with the vigorous diction and robust thought of their predecessors the warm and genial humanity of a religion of love and the graces and amenities of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... and with due deference to the amenities. There was gossip, of course—there always is gossip—and public opinion was many sided. Rumors circled around which played the whole gamut from infidelity to bankruptcy; these lived their brief span, and then gave place to other ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... of industrial invention that facilitated labor, the patient pains of science on the edge of great discoveries, the slowly increasing spirit of toleration, pity, and humanity, the gradual spread of education, the widening realms of knowledge, the increasing appreciation of the decencies and amenities of life—all these things make the reign of George the Third the hopeful preface to the reign of greater length, greater glory, greater promise and greater fulfilment that was to dawn when two more sovereigns of the House of Hanover had ceased to reign over England. ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... rate, almost all of them returned, though Victoria appeared to be by far the most prosperous colony. But I made an excellent colonist, in spite of my never becoming much attached to the place. I adapted myself to sheep wonderfully, and to black pipes and cabbage-tree hats, and all the other amenities of bush life; and now, Miss Rennie, will you be good enough to adapt yourself ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... is but an attempt to revive an old custom, and for those whom fortune has favored with leisure for social amenities at that hour, it furnishes an agreeable and informal occasion for exchange of courtesies and for harmless gossip or even more ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... suggested that war had its amenities and refinements and that in the nineteenth century it was simply barbarism to ...
— The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself • Cole Younger
... entered the grounds by way of the kitchen garden. At the sight of Flora he bowed very politely, greeting her with a charming smile and an allusion to the clemency of the evening. It is possible these social amenities might have carried some weight but for the appearance of Freddie Dirk, whose heavy jowl, grimed with dust and perspiration, was not consistent with the idea of an afternoon caller. Flora fell back a pace into the room, wondering fearfully what ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... course of traditionary repetitions of an incomprehensible language. And she knew besides a few German rhymes and jingles, half Christian, half heathen, with a legend or two which, if the names were Christian, ran grossly wild from all Christian meaning or morality. As to the amenities, nay, almost the proprieties, of life, they were less known in that baronial castle than in any artisan's house at Ulm. So little had the sick girl figured them to herself, that she did not even ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... painstaking was reckoned painful; and tomorrow was always waiting for today's work, while today was ready for tomorrow's share of play. On the other hand it was a satisfaction to work sturdily for a hard boss, and so be able to say in an interchange of amenities: "Go long, half-priced nigger! You wouldn't fotch fifty dollars, ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... Roman Catholic, could not take it, and said as much, but offered his own declaration of friendliness to the powers that were. This was declined. Debate followed, ending with a request from the Assembly that the visitor depart from Virginia. Some harshness of speech ensued, but hospitality and the amenities fairly saved the situation. One Thomas Tindall was pilloried for "giving my lord Baltimore the lie and threatening to knock him down." Baltimore thereupon set sail, but not, perhaps, until he had gained that knowledge of conditions ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... me due credit, although if he had not mentioned my name I would have been complimented to know that he had read the Good Stuff closely and pondered it well. As brother authors, you will please take notice that we observe the amenities. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... unconventional, appears in political and social life in Washington. He attains power in politics, and a young woman of the exclusive set becomes his wife, undertaking his education in social amenities. ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... He had not understood. They had arranged their lives so much as business partners, friends, fate-linked humans dependent on each other for the daily amenities of a joint existence. He had never suspected; never had cause to suspect, this hidden flood of sentiment. The simple man's heart responded. For such love she must be repaid. In the packed train which sped ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... public opinion by creating a belief in the failure of the expedition—would have changed into agonized shrieks over the outrages on its Southern brethren. The experiment of subjecting negroes to military rules and accustoming them to those amenities of civilized warfare which the rebels so uniformly practice would again have been declared to be a hopeless failure; and for the hundredth time the Proclamation and the radicals who advised it would have ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... These prefatory amenities led on 10 December to a detailed Agreement, the Greek Government promising to move its troops out of the way and "not to oppose by force the construction of defensive works or the occupation of fortified points," but reserving to itself the right to protest ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... such visitors as Mrs. Nesbit deemed of sufficiently small social consequence to receive the Captain's ministrations. At twilight the Captain greeted Laura coming from her home for her night watch, and with a rather elaborate scenario of amenities, told her how his Household Horse company was prospering, how his egg beater was going, and asked after Lila's health, omitting mention of the Judge with an easy nonchalance which struck terror to the woman's heart—terror, lest the ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... Doctor Abbott," said the boy, striving to make the introduction easily, though one could see that such social amenities were not a matter of habit ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs
... slain, the soil to be subdued to furnish them bread, the whole fabric of social order to be established under new conditions. They came from the sunny skies of France to the capricious climate where the summers were fierce and the winters terrible with winds and snows. They left the polished amenities of an old civilization, for the homely ways of rude settlers of another race and language. Their lips, which had shaped themselves to the harmonies of a refined language, which had been used to speaking such names as Rochefort and Beauvoir and Angouleme, had to distort themselves ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... the art of elimination, I want it not. If the farmer and the farmer's family must, by the nature of the occupation, be deprived of reasonable leisure and luxury, if the conveniences and amenities must be shorn close, if comfort must be denied and life be reduced to the elemental necessities of food and shelter, I want it not. But I do not believe that this is the case. The wealth of the world comes from the land, which produces all the direct and ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... much of a Miltonic spirit; and if it were clear that Milton had been familiar with Saxon, we should be induced to think that he owed something to Caedmon." And the elder D'Israeli has collated and compared similar passages in the two authors, in his "Amenities of Literature." ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... delight with which I received this announcement, the way I jumped and danced, and that Rubens jumped and danced with me, my gratitude and my father's satisfaction, the renewed amenities between myself and my pony, his obvious knowledge of the fact that I was his master, and the running commentary of the Irishman, I ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... convenient phrases which launch conversation into smooth waters. They were further silenced by Katharine's rather malicious determination not to help this young man, in whose upright and resolute bearing she detected something hostile to her surroundings, by any of the usual feminine amenities. They therefore sat silent, Denham controlling his desire to say something abrupt and explosive, which should shock her into life. But Mrs. Hilbery was immediately sensitive to any silence in the drawing-room, as of a dumb note in a sonorous scale, and leaning across the table ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... our public buildings, with their outside elaboration and inside mysteries; our places of amusement, with their gilded fascinations and shallow delusions; our clubs, bar parlours, prisons, cellars, and workhouses, with their amenities, frivolities, and severities, have all been commented upon; but the most important of our institutions, the best, the queerest, the solemnest, the oddest—the churches and chapels of the town—have ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... grotesque and pathetic tenderness. From such the conscription which has fed the Southern army in the deplorable civil conflict now raging in America has drawn its rank and file. Better 'food for powder' the world could scarcely supply. Fierce and idle, with hardly one of the necessities or amenities that belong to civilised existence, they are hardy endurers of hardship, and reckless to a savage degree of the value of life, whether their own or others. The soldier's pay, received or promised, exceeds in amount per month anything they ever earned before per ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... growled Clavering. He remembered with dismay that he hadn't even sent her the usual tribute of flowers. There had been no place in his mind for the small amenities. ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... to know that I was a desirable match and they gradually transferred their attentions to me, the girls in their own interests and the older matrons in those of their marriageable daughters. Their crude amenities sickened me. One middle-aged woman tried to monopolize me by a confidential talk concerning the social inferiority ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... engineer and pilot. Her son, like the swallows, was taught to fly by his mother. By the middle of 1911 a whole village of sheds had grown up. Most of the tenants were men of means, but they spent so much money on their experiments that they had very little left for the amenities of life. Mr. C. G. Grey remembers men, the possessors of comfortable incomes, who lived for years on thirty or forty shillings a week, and spent the rest on their aeroplanes. It was a society like the early Christians; it practised fellowship ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... spoke, these were wont to disappear, and the expression of her face became an animated intelligence, an eager curiosity, or a vivacious good-humour, Her lips gave a hint of sarcasm, but this was reserved for special occasions; as a rule her habit of speech was suave, much observant of amenities. One might have imagined that she had enjoyed a calm life, but this was far from being the case. The daughter of a country solicitor, she married early—for love, and the issue was disastrous. Above her right temple, just at the roots of ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... creek, or from isolated abiding-places round about. Here they would come, and, rolling cigarettes of the brown paper they affect and the eleemosynary tobacco open on the counter, to which all were welcome (such were the amenities of shopping on the ranch), they would lounge about, ever smiling and chattering in soft voices, finally to say 'uenos dias with two bits' worth of bacon, or corn-meal, or pink candy for the chiquitas. Here, too, would come Tomasa, and, with even more than usual feminine ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... a violation of the conscience of civilization. Cannibalism is an almost inconceivable outrage against all right, in moral, social, or even superior animal existence. Few animals or even reptiles devour their kind. It is, therefore, an act repugnant to human nature, and in violation of the amenities even of a nobler animal existence. In a word, it is unmitigated wrong, showing its subjects and votaries to ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit
... most favorable impression behind him, as a preparation for more easy intercourse. But for his own part those amenities had been carried on under the heaviest spirits. If these were really Mirah's relatives, he could not imagine that even her fervid filial piety could give the reunion with them any sweetness beyond such as could be found in the strict fulfillment ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... cookery, on the methods of preparing meats or vegetables, on acetaria, soups, and sauces; while the closing chapters on dining tables, dining-room decoration, table service, art in eating and on being invited to dine, have, to all who would further the amenities of civilization, a value that needs no ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... was opened to him, not by the old man with whom he had exchanged amenities on the previous night, but by a short, thick fellow, who looked exactly like a picture of a loafer from the pages of a comic journal. He eyed Fenn with what might have been meant for an inquiring look. To Fenn ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... ignorant of "society's" willingness to give him welcome. He was lodged in a remote and obscure quarter of the city and was already part of a little coterie from which earnestness had quite crowded out tact and in which the development of the energies left but scant room for the cultivation of the amenities. With this small group reform and oratory went hand in hand; its members talked to spare audiences on Sunday afternoons about the Readjusted Tax. Such a combination of matter and manner had pleased and attracted Abner from the ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... announcement opened up an anything but pleasing prospect. The professor and his companion did the best that could be done in these distressing circumstances—namely, took a stroll through the small town, although the latter had no amenities to boast of, and the fact of a battle having been fought there between the Russians and Prussians in 1759 would hardly fire their enthusiasm. Matters, however, became desperate when on their return there was still neither sign nor sound ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... restored. When, early in the last century, the seventh Marquess of Merchester very handsomely made it over to a body of trustees, to house a collection of books bequeathed to the public by old Dean Venables, Merchester's most scholarly historian, it was with a stipulation that the amenities of the house should be as little as possible disturbed. The beds, to be sure, were removed from the upper rooms, and the old carpets from the staircase; and the walls, upstairs and down, lined with bookcases. But a great deal of the old furniture remains; and, ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... I was succumbing to the influences of prison hash and "hot dog." It was part of his duty to visit the dining room every day—or was it every other day?—and inspect the food served to the prisoners. During my six months' stay, he appeared twice in the doorway, where he exchanged amenities with the guard; and once he traversed the aisle between my row of tables and the next, accompanied by some very nice looking girls. He had other duties, which he discharged with similar punctuality and fervor. And all for fifteen ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... will be made in our existing laws, I have given my mandarin friends no reason to expect. Self-preservation stands on a higher plane than the amenities of intercourse. For many years these laws served as a bulwark without which the [Page 255] sparse population of our Western States would have been swamped by the influx of Asiatics. In early days it was easier for the Chinese to cross the ocean than for the people of our Eastern States ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... amenities? Why, Helena, how could you! And after all the cork-tipped cigarettes I have given you, and all the ninety-three I have given your Auntie Lucinda—why look at the empty message bottles she and you have thrown out into the helpless and unhelping bayou—a perfect fleet of them, bobbing ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... insurance man—and by that is meant primarily a fire insurance man—is in New England no mean or casual thing. South, West, in the newer and more open lands, where traditions are fewer and there is less time for the dignities and observance of the amenities of commerce, fire insurance takes its chance with a thousand other roads to an honest dollar. If a Western lawyer has a few spare hours, he hangs out an insurance sign and between briefs he or his clerk writes policies. The cashier of the Farmers' State Bank in the prairie town ekes ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... as these amenities became exhausted and he perceived that no one was taking any notice of him, "what about making a ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... street. The joyous sunlight—a stranger to him for years—shone warmly down upon his face, as if to welcome him to liberty and the world. The sounds of gay laughter rang in his ears, as if to woo him back to the blest enjoyments and amenities of life; but Nature's influence and man's example were now silent alike to his lonely heart. Over its dreary wastes still reigned the ruthless ambition which had exiled love from his youth, and friendship from his manhood, and which was destined ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... State occasions, and though sarong and kabaja be discarded at the nine o'clock dinner, the blouse and skirt of morning wear in England suffices even at this late hour for the fair Hollander, who also concedes so far to the amenities of civilisation as sometimes to put on her stockings. So much of life in Java is spent in eating, sleeping, and bathing, that but a small residuum can be spared for those outside interests which easily drop away from the European when exiled ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... heard of men who had justified themselves with vile tales to their insipid, disgustingly virtuous wives, but he had not counted such among his acquaintances. By the side of Flint, Lily Condor loomed a very paragon of the social amenities. ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... explosively, resuming his seat with uncalculated haste as old Bob, deaf to the amenities of social intercourse in an emergency involving as much as ten-bob, ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... a fixed idea—and talked much as he would have done a couple of years ago, with bright intelligence, with natural enjoyment of the hour. It was greatly his charm in such conversation that had made him a favourite with pleasant people of the world. In withdrawing himself from the sphere of these amenities he was opposing the free growth of his character, which in consequence suffered. He was cognisant of that; he knew that he was more himself to-night than he had been for some months. But the fixed idea waited in ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... who judge them from without, and by the broad results of their lives. Real tact, like good manners, is or becomes a spontaneous and natural thing. The man of perfectly refined manners does not consciously and deliberately on each occasion observe the courtesies and amenities of good society. They have become to him a second nature, and he observes them as by a kind of instinct, without thought or effort. In the same way true tact is something wholly different from the elaborate and artificial attempts to conciliate and attract which ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... wiser, possibly more urgent than the national prestige; but in the forum of patriotism all these other necessaries of human life—the glory of God and the good of man—rise by comparison only to the rank of subsidiaries, auxiliaries, amenities. He is an indifferent patriot who will let "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" cloud the issue and get in the way of the main business ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... passionate, so alive. In the months lately gone, there had been times when her mind was in a paroxysm of rebellion and resentment and remorse; but in this red corner of the universe, from which the usual world was shut out, from which all domestic existence, all social organization, habit or the amenities of social intercourse were excluded, she had been able to restore her equilibrium. Yet now here, all at once, there was an invasion of this world of rigid, narrow organization, where there was no play; where all men's acts were part of a deadly mortal issue; where the human ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... and me, old fellow, it's time to drop these amenities," continued Dolokhov, as if he found particular pleasure in speaking of this subject which irritated Denisov. "Now, why have you kept this lad?" he went on, swaying his head. "Because you are sorry for him! Don't we know those ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... and to teach them that there is no natural inalienable connection between labor and coarseness, ignorance and servility; that man, though compelled to win his bread by the sweat of his brow, may still enjoy all those graceful amenities of which woman was the type in Paradise and is the promoter here; that the light of knowledge and the divine light of faith may still cheer him in his pursuits and guide him to his rest. It seems to me that to bring out these principles fairly to the world's perception, is the mission ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... political questions Field had none. The same may be truthfully said of his attitude on all social and economic problems. He eschewed controversy and controversial subjects. His study was literature and the domestic side and social amenities of life; and he left the salvation of the republic and the amelioration of the general condition of mankind to those who felt ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... conceive,—angular, formal, stiff, windowy, bricky,—and the farther in you go, the worse it grows. Why, I pray to know, as the first inquiry suggested by Class-Day, is it necessary for boys' schools to be placed without the pale of civilization? Do boys take so naturally to the amenities of life that they can safely dispense with the conditions of amenity? When I entered those brick boxes, I felt as if I were going into a stable. Wood-work dingy, unpainted, gashed, scratched; windows dingy ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... me by the hand, whilst he was practising all the amenities with his countenance, he opened the parlour-door, where the supposititious visitor was expected to be found, and lo! the room was empty. Mrs Root and the servants were summoned, and they all positively declared, and were willing to swear to the fact, that a gentleman ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... they are known to "paint" and thought to dye their hair. They establish no relations, being much too preoccupied. making exceptions only, as a rule, in favour of one or two young men, to whom they extend amenities based—it is the common talk—upon late hours and whiskey-and-soda. They seem superior to the little prevailing conventions; they excite an unlawful interest; though nobody knows them black nobody imagines them white; and when they appear upon Main Street in search ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... the columned county hall, Mid-most before his eyes, Alerter dog and loitering maid Cross from the sunlight to the shade, And small amenities of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 18, 1914 • Various
... trees. This custom was introduced in royal merriment by Carlo Emmanuele I. He put a sprig in his hat, and was imitated by all his court, and the ladies wore the same in their bosom or in their hair. Assuredly it is one of the wonders of the world to see here, amid the amenities and allurements of the country, especially during the summer season, what a continuous festa or holy fair is maintained. For there come and go torrents of men and women of every nation under heaven. Here you shall see pilgrims and persons ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... (aesthetic ecstasy, for instance) worth taking seriously. In life, they can distinguish between the wood and the few fine trees. As for art, they know that it is something more important than a criticism of life; they will not pretend that it is a traffic in amenities; they know that it is a spiritual necessity. They are not making handsome furniture, nor pretty knick-knacks, nor tasteful souvenirs; they are creating forms that ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... of course, many drawbacks to the amenities of the place as a residence for a European; but these were not of a nature that my readers would perhaps imagine. There was scarcely any danger from wild animals— it seems almost ridiculous to refute the idea of danger from the ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... and thy morning cap, with its ribbons of blue, as coquettishly arranged as if thou hadst a fear that the least negligence on thy part might lose thee the heart of thine Austin,—not to wrong thee by setting down to frivolous motives alone thy feminine visions of the social amenities of life, I know that thine heart, in its provident tenderness, was quite as much interested as ever thy vanities could be, in the hospitable thoughts on which thou wert intent. For, first and foremost, it was the wish of thy soul that thine Austin ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Miss Quincey's case mortal passion had been shaken out of its sleep and forced to look at itself before it had time to put on a shred of immortality. In the sudden glare it stood out monstrous, naked and ashamed; she herself had helped to deprive it of all the delicacies and amenities that made it tolerable to thought. With her own hands she had delivered ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... triumphed. As the motorcars passed through Summer Street they raised only a little dust, and their stench was soon dispersed by the wind and replaced by the scent of the wet birches or of the pines. Mr. Beebe, at leisure for life's amenities, leant over his Rectory gate. Freddy leant by him, smoking a ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... miles of the way the cold had got such a grip on him that he desisted from further social amenities. Pincher quite understood his silence, though she, with her furry coat and hard exercise, was not ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... her mother, which had certainly not grown less since I saw her last, and to turn into something like a joke her valetudinarian austerities of sentiment and opinion. She made a pleasant mock of the amenities which passed between her mother and Glendenning, whose gingerliness in the acceptance of the old lady's condescension would, I confess, have been notably comical without this gloss. It was perfectly evident that Mrs. Bentley's favor was bestowed with a mental reservation, and conditioned ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... he reminded me of a bust of Achilles at the London Museum. He is indeed a swift-footed Achilles, but in another race, another warfare. Born of a noble family, naturally endowed with sensitiveness and ideality to appreciate all the amenities and suavities of that brilliant sphere, the sacrifice must have been inconceivably great for him to renounce favor and preferment, position in society,—which, here in England, means more than Americans can ever dream of,—to descend from being a court chaplain, to become a preacher in a Baptist ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... school-house stood with a meek aspect, entreating a long truce to war and savage life. Every one finds by his own experience, as well as in history, that the era in which men cultivate the apple, and the amenities of the garden, is essentially different from that of the hunter and forest life, and neither can displace the other without loss. We have all had our day-dreams, as well as more prophetic nocturnal vision; but ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... really becoming domestic," said Kent as he laughingly dodged. "The gentle amenities could not cluster more thickly around our fireside, ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... proving not less pliant than Mignon himself whenever Rose found her opportunity, the mutual understanding between the two men constantly improved. In fact, they were happy in a partnership which was so fertile in all kinds of amenities, and they settled down side by side and adopted a family arrangement which no longer proved a stumbling block. The whole thing was conducted according to rule; it suited admirably, and each man vied with the other in his efforts for the common happiness. That very evening Mignon had come ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... in 'The Troy Herald' was to harden the two friends' estrangement just at the moment when it promised to melt. Troy with its many amenities has a deplorable appetite for gossip; and to this appetite the contention of Captain Hocken and Captain Hunken for Mrs Bosenna's hand gave meat and drink. (There was, of course, no difficulty in guessing what Mr Shake Benny would have called "the inamorata's identity.") ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... It is quite certain that Madame Eglentyne was not unmoved by them; and it is a sad fact that she began to think the monastic habit very black and ugly, and the monastic life very strict; and to decide that if some little amenities were imported into it no one would be a penny the worse, and perhaps the bishop would not notice. That is why, when ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... aroused, their daily life on board ship and in barracks soon compelled attention. Its homelessness and monotony, its utter lack of quiet and rest, its necessary isolation from all the comforts and amenities of social life, the consequent eagerness with which the men—wearied well-nigh to death, yet full of lusty vigorous life—went anywhere for change, society, and excitement—all these things broke like a revelation on the awakened ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers
... law-abiding, though a magistrate warns Dundas that local malcontents are setting them against the Government. Multiply these typical cases a thousand fold, and it will be seen that the old rural system is strained to breaking point. The amenities of the rule of the squires are now paid back, and that, too, at a time when England needs one mind, one heart, one soul. At and near Sheffield serious riots break out owing to the enclosures of common-fields and wastes, the houses of the agricultural "reformers" being burnt or wrecked. On the ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... travel were entertaining. We exchanged invitations to the dining car so as not to stop the flow of conversation between Mr. Bryan and the Doctor. We would invite him to lunch, and Mr. Bryan would ask us to dinner, or vice versa, so that the social amenities were delightfully extended to keep us in mutual enjoyment of the trip. Dr. Talmage and myself agreed that Mr. Bryan's success on the platform was much enhanced by his wonderful voice. The Doctor said he had never heard so exquisite ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... ourselves forever to the philosophy of Capitalism and of Collectivism, which declares that work is a necessary evil never to be made pleasant, and that the workers' only hope is a leisure which shall be longer, richer, and well adorned with municipal amenities.[37] ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... manifest themselves at first in curious contrast to the primitive surroundings. The struggle between organized life and chaos, the laborious subjugation of nature to the requirements of our complex modern life, for a considerable period absorb the energies of the colonists. The amenities of culture, the higher intellectual life, the refinements of art can, during this period, receive little attention. Meanwhile a new national character is being formed; the people are undergoing the moral training upon which their subsequent achievements must depend. With the conquest of brute ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... whole of life, nor is adapted to its realities. Christ was "a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;" but he was also full of sympathy with all good, and enjoyed the charm of friendship, and the light of existence. Around that great Life gather many amenities. Below that face of agony beats a heart familiar with the best affections of human nature; otherwise, we may believe, the agony would not appear. The sadness of that last supper indicates the breaking up of many joyful communions and ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... have put off calling on the Bingles for a month or six weeks, being that scornful of social amenities; but he could hardly wait for the approach of sunrise to be on his way to Seafood on this brilliant Christmas morning. It was not a brilliant, shimmering day for him, however. He saw nothing beautiful in the steel-blue ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... men. And these labors and successes are they that those who have read of them in different countries know him by. These comprise and present the character they honor with respect. What he was in the temper and disposition of his inner life, in daily walk and conversation, in the even and gentle amenities of Christian humility, in sudden trials of his faith and patience; what he was as a husband, father, friend and neighbor, to the poor, to the afflicted in mind, body or estate,— all this will remain ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... is not a man, but a slave! tell me a being with such faculties should be thus sunken beneath the amenities of freedom! that man may barter almighty gifts for gold! trample his religion into dust, and turn it into dollars and cents! What a mockery is this against the justice of heaven! When this is done in this our ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... entertain'd (as I my self have likewise been often an eye-witness) than those about the houses and gardens of pleasure belonging to the nobles and gentry of most other countries: And in effect it is a most ravishing object, to behold their amenities in this particular: With us, says he (speaking of France) they make a jest at such political ordinances, by ruining these publick and useful ornaments, if haply some more prudent magistrate do at any time ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... sharp," said Dave, turning about and reaching for the shrinking Banker. "Come here, Jim, and say howdy, if you ain't herded with burros so long you've forgotten human amenities that a way. Mad'mo'selle wants to talk ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... did not believe that men could pass years in school and university training and know so little. Yet the truth is, that most boys, brought up as Browning was, would be utterly unfitted for the active duties and struggles of life, and indeed for the amenities of social intercourse. With ninety-nine out of a hundred, such an education, so far as it made for either happiness or efficiency, would be a failure. But Browning was the hundredth man. He was profoundly ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... by Mr. Horace Greeley. Dickens attended with great difficulty,[280] and spoke in pain. But he used the occasion to bear his testimony to the changes of twenty-five years; the rise of vast new cities; growth in the graces and amenities of life; much improvement in the press, essential to every other advance; and changes in himself leading to opinions more deliberately formed. He promised his kindly entertainers that no copy of his Notes, or his Chuzzlewit, should in future be issued by him without accompanying mention ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... is as accomplished as the Pierrot and 'Social Amenities,' parts of 'Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt,' and, in Limbo, 'Richard Greenow' (first 100 pages) and 'Happy Families' are syncopated actuality, and the mind jigs an appreciative shoulder, as the body jerks irresistibly ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... few months of Ibsen's life in Rome all was chaos in his mind. He was plunged in stupefaction at the beauties of nature, the amenities of mankind, the interpenetration of such a life with such an art as he had never dreamed of and could yet but dimly comprehend. In September, 1864, he tells Bjoernson that he is at work on a poem of considerable length. This must have been the first draft of Brand, which was begun, we know, as ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... Berkeley was a man of charming manners, proverbially polite, and he delighted the Virginians, who had a weakness for courtliness. He belonged to an ancient English family, and believed in monarchy as a devotee believes in his saint, "and he brought to the little capital at Jamestown all the graces, amenities, and well-bred ways which at that time were characteristic of the cavaliers. He was a cavalier of the cavaliers, taking the word to signify an adherent of monarchy and the established church," and thoroughly hated anything resembling republicanism. For his king and church, this smiling ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... their gardens and villas. The street kept its ancient width, and a few smoke-blackened trees—lilacs, laburnums, limes, and one copper-beech—still dignified the purlieus. Time, ruthless upon these amenities, had spared, ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Didyak of the Tr'en," he said. Amenities over with, he relaxed slightly—but no more than slightly—and came into the cell, closing the door behind him. Korvin thought of jumping the Tr'en, but decided quickly against it. He was a captive, and it was unwise to assume that his captors had no more resources than the ones ...
— Lost in Translation • Larry M. Harris
... quietly, "with regard to the safe conduct of this country, have been handed over to the military authorities, which in this particular case I represent. We are in no position for amenities or courtesies. Our country is in the gravest danger and nothing else is of the slightest possible significance. The charge which we have accepted we shall carry out with regard to one thing only, and that is our idea of what is due to the ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... excellent wine and barrels of beer. A very pleasant state of feeling, perhaps, to contemplate—as an advance in civilization over the not very distant days of the Haarlem and Leyden sieges, when barrels of prisoners' heads, cut off, a dozen or two at a time, were the social amenities usually exchanged between Spaniards and Dutchmen—but somewhat suspicious to those who had grown grey in ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... fourteen-year-old neighbor, Johnny Bennett, had climbed into the old black-heart cherry tree—(Johnny always conceded that Edith was a good climber—"for a girl.") But when they saw Lion, tugging up the road, Edith, who was economical with social amenities, told her guest to go home. "I don't want you any longer," she said; "father and mother are coming!" And with that she rushed around to the stable door, just in time to meet the returning travelers, and ask ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... fortunes; and Woburn's mother and sister, embittered by this final evasion, settled down to a vindictive war with circumstances. They were the kind of women who think that it lightens the burden of life to throw over the amenities, as a reduced housekeeper puts away her knick-knacks to make the dusting easier. They fought mean conditions meanly; but Woburn, in his resentment of their attitude, did not allow for the suffering which had brought it about: his own tendency was to overcome difficulties by ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... Ajax. "That is the worst of this confounded ranch. Here, we enjoy neither the amenities of civilisation nor the freedom of the desert. However, it's always darkest before dawn, and I've a feeling in my bones that the present state of affairs cannot ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... drawbacks to the amenities of the place as a residence for a European; but these were not of a nature that my readers would perhaps imagine. There was scarcely any danger from wild animals— it seems almost ridiculous to refute the idea of danger from the natives in a country where even incivility ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... dealt with Count Arenberg. And so hath he been the only cause of my discontentment; I never coming from the Count, or Court, but still he filled and possessed me with new causes of discontentments.' The reading of the statement was set in a more than usually decorated framework of Coke's amenities. Ralegh throughout the trial had been for the King's Attorney an 'odious fellow;' the 'most vile and execrable traitor.' He had been stigmatized as 'hateful to all the realm for his pride,' to which Ralegh had retorted: 'It will go near to prove a measuring ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... bitter companionship with anxiety, fear, and grief. Her heroism was not sordid or secular. Dearly did she prize the blessings of peace—household calm, the security of her loved ones, and the comforts and amenities of an unbroken social status. But she cheerfully surrendered them all at the call of her country in its hour of peril. For one hundred and fifty years she had toiled and suffered. She had won the right to repose, but this was not yet to be hers. ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... These journalistic amenities were accorded serious attention by the society of Bowen, which, by reason of the many Government officials established there, considered itself very exclusive. The majority of these officials were connected with the law, for Bowen was the proud ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... in low, dark, smoky huts, with earthen floors,—it is yet wonderful to see how these people preserve not merely the decencies, but even the amenities of life. Their clothes are a chaos of patches, but one sees no rags; all their well-worn white garments are white in the superlative degree; and when their scanty supply of water is at the scantiest, every bare ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... beaming commendation, and once a glimpse of the smiling faces of his father and mother. He strove to wave a hand toward the latter, but as it almost cost him his position on the shoulders of the shrieking fellows beneath, he gave it up. Social amenities might wait; at present he was tasting the ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... he lived at thirteen different places, and changed his abode twenty-four times. In the choice of these spots two motives seem to have influenced him—the neighbourhood of a university or college, and the amenities of the situation. Among these towns were Franeker in Friesland, Harderwyk, Deventer, Utrecht, Leiden, Amersfoort, Amsterdam, Leeuwarden in Friesland. His favourite residences were Endegeest, Egmond op den Hoef and Egmond ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... "with saddle, bridle, and life on the Islam," always mounted, always armed, always engaged in war or razzias and mutual pillage; of the Turkomans and their motto: 'Thy soul is in thy sword'; and those who thus celebrated the amenities of pastoral life, and the heroic adventures of the Arabs of the desert, never perceived the contradictions ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... Temple amenities and solemnities did not agree with Swift. He was half-killed with a surfeit of Shene pippins; and in a garden-seat which he devised for himself at Moor Park, and where he devoured greedily the stock of books within his reach, he caught a vertigo ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... friendliness to the powers that were. This was declined. Debate followed, ending with a request from the Assembly that the visitor depart from Virginia. Some harshness of speech ensued, but hospitality and the amenities fairly saved the situation. One Thomas Tindall was pilloried for "giving my lord Baltimore the lie and threatening to knock him down." Baltimore thereupon set sail, but not, perhaps, until he had gained that knowledge ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... religious discussion commonly occurs when men have just ceased to inflict legal penalties upon the heterodox, but have not yet learned those amenities which lend so sweet and gentle a dignity to debate. In looking over the dusty pamphlets which entomb so many clerical controversies of our Colonial times, it has often seemed as though we had lighted on some bar-room wrangle, translated out of its original billingsgate into scholarly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... re-entered the drawing-room, seated himself upon a chair, and surrendered his mind to the thought that he had shown his guest most excellent entertainment. Next, his mind passed imperceptibly to other matters, until at last it lost itself God only knows where. He thought of the amenities of a life, of friendship, and of how nice it would be to live with a comrade on, say, the bank of some river, and to span the river with a bridge of his own, and to build an enormous mansion with a facade lofty enough even to afford a view to Moscow. On that facade he and his ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... we noticed that the Doctor was very much vexed about something. We asked what was the matter? He said, "Never mind!" We insisted on his saying what disturbed him so. At last, he said "Well, I don't see why, because men are in the army, they should not observe the amenities customary among gentlemen." "Well," we said, "that is all right; but why do you say it?" "Why!" he warmly said; "did you hear that dirty, ragged infantryman call me an old fellow? A most disrespectful way to ...
— From the Rapidan to Richmond and the Spottsylvania Campaign - A Sketch in Personal Narration of the Scenes a Soldier Saw • William Meade Dame
... After this exchange of amenities Mr. Gilton stepped into his horse car. It was crowded, of course, as horse cars that are small and run once in half an hour are apt to be, and he had to stand up, and the turkey legs stuck out of the brown paper in a very conspicuous way. ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... Shvernik in the latter's office at two and they went through the usual amenities. Mr. Shvernik spoke excellent English so Mr. Smith was able to dismiss his interpreter-guide for the afternoon. When he was gone and they were alone Mr. Shvernik went ...
— Revolution • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... going on. Somehow I beat them, one by one—big engineers, financiers, financiers' syndicates, corporations—working late and working early, sinking every dollar made in another venture, and living any way. There were no amenities in that fight until those we had against us found that it was wiser to keep ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... boarding house for some English engineers engaged at the works of the St. Gothard Tunnel; and I could listen my fill to the sounds of the English language, as far as it is used at a breakfast-table by men who do not believe in wasting many words on the mere amenities of life. ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... the slaves of the colony of Virginia received little or no attention from the Christian Church. All intercourse was cut off between the races. Intermarrying of whites and blacks was prohibited by severe laws.[207] And the most common civilities and amenities of life were frowned down when intended for a Negro. The plantation was as religious as the Church, and the Church was as secular as the plantation. The "white christians" hated the Negro, and the Church bestowed upon him a most bountiful amount of neglect.[208] Instead of receiving ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... poor Ustane he was even more grateful at our survival, and much shocked, though Ustane had been no favourite of his, or he of hers, for the matter of that. She called him "pig" in bastard Arabic, and he called her "hussy" in good English, but these amenities were forgotten in the face of the catastrophe that had overwhelmed her at the hands ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... then died away, leaving him of an ashy paleness. He was standing by his desk, and he reached out one hand and rested it on some books, gripping the backs of them with a grip that made his knuckles stand out like white knots. He did not ask Hal to sit down. Commonplace amenities died in the stress ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... Stuart was answering Conscience enjoined him that, if they were to swim before lunch, time was scant and these amenities must wait. ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... showed in the boy's eyes as he saluted. No soldier could be stationed at Wellingsford without hearing of the hero of the neighbourhood. A great hay waggon came lumbering down the road and pulled up, there being no room for it to pass. This put an end to social amenities. Brown mounted his detested charger and trotted off. Marigold transferred me to Boyce's car. Several pairs of brawny arms righted the two-seater and Boyce and I drove off, leaving Marigold waiting with his usual stony patience for the promised tow. On the way Boyce talked ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... she spoke, these were wont to disappear, and the expression of her face became an animated intelligence, an eager curiosity, or a vivacious good-humour, Her lips gave a hint of sarcasm, but this was reserved for special occasions; as a rule her habit of speech was suave, much observant of amenities. One might have imagined that she had enjoyed a calm life, but this was far from being the case. The daughter of a country solicitor, she married early—for love, and the issue was disastrous. Above her right temple, just at the roots of the ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... change, and Grace was in high spirits when she ensconced herself at the top of Margery's seat—which was a much better observatory than her aunt's pew—where every thing could be seen that was interesting and amusing within the four walls. Besides, there were small amenities connected with a seat in nurse's pew which had great attractions for Grace when she was a little girl, and had still a lingering charm for her. In the pew behind there sat a worthy couple, friends of Margery, who exchanged friendly ...
— Geordie's Tryst - A Tale of Scottish Life • Mrs. Milne Rae
... no remedy for this evil; for, besides the absence of discipline, there is an inward and fundamental cause for the disorder. These people are too susceptible. They are Frenchmen, and Frenchmen of the eighteenth century; brought up in the amenities of the utmost refinement, accustomed to deferential manners, to constant kind attentions and mutual obligations, so thoroughly imbued with the instinct of good breeding that their conversation seems almost insipid to strangers.[2106]—And suddenly ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... and flew fearfully to Judge Blodgett and the professor, when Mr. Brassfield went free, with Alderson at heel. And all the time, as the crew of a ship carry on the routine of drill while the torpedo is speeding for her hull, these social amenities went on all unconscious ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... studied the attitude of the younger women whom I have approached, purely impersonally and without the slightest hypersensitiveness. They have all been perfectly pleasant, perfectly disposed for conversation or any of the usual social amenities. But they know that I have in the background a wife. To flirt with a married man ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... said Kent as he laughingly dodged. "The gentle amenities could not cluster more thickly around our fireside, ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... squared, as I was much astonished at; but he told me they had lost the art of squaring the flints, in which at one time they so much excelled, and of which the churches, best houses, and walls are built.' Further, Evelyn tells us: 'The suburbs are large, the prospect sweete with other amenities, not omitting the flower-gardens, in which all the inhabitants excel. The fabric of stuffs brings a vast trade ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... actually brought me love-letters from the King. But the purveyors of such gossip could surely know nothing of Bossuet's inflexible principles, and of the subtlety of his policy. He was well aware that by lending himself to such amenities he would lose caste morally with the King, and that if by his loyalty he had won royal attachment and regard, all this would have been irretrievably lost. Thus M. de Bossuet was of those who say, "Hate me, but ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... preparing meats or vegetables, on acetaria, soups, and sauces; while the closing chapters on dining tables, dining-room decoration, table service, art in eating and on being invited to dine, have, to all who would further the amenities of civilization, a value ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... accepted habit. For those years of lonely wandering and spasmodic rage of living, finding their climax in deepening disappointment, disillusion, and the shock of rudely inflicted insult and disgrace, had produced in Richard a profound sense of alienation from society and from the amenities of ordinary intercourse. Since he was apparently doomed to survive, he would go home—but go home very much as some trapped or wounded beast crawls back to hide in its lair. He was master in his own house, at least, and safe from intrusion there. The place offered the silent ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... cultivators of the earth, and lived under an organized political government. The school-house stood with a meek aspect, entreating a long truce to war and savage life. Every one finds by his own experience, as well as in history, that the era in which men cultivate the apple, and the amenities of the garden, is essentially different from that of the hunter and forest life, and neither can displace the other without loss. We have all had our day-dreams, as well as more prophetic nocturnal ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... in whose behalf it has been made. Having once helped Lily, she must continue to help her; and helping her, must believe in her, because faith is the main-spring of such natures. But even if Miss Bart, after her renewed taste of the amenities of life, could have returned to the barrenness of a New York August, mitigated only by poor Gerty's presence, her worldly wisdom would have counselled her against such an act of abnegation. She knew that Carry Fisher was right: that an opportune absence might be the first step toward rehabilitation, ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... hero of the occasion, who, soothed by all these social amenities passing around him, quickly put aside his stolid demeanour and became his little ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... publication, Merlinus Anglicus Junior, a sort of Old Moore's Almanac. The prophecies of storms, fires and disasters were as dull reading then as they are now, but one or two entries in his Life and Times, written by himself, are illuminating, especially his record of family amenities, thus:— ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... private amenities indulged in by Professor Tait, I do not consider it necessary to say ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... kindness, all the million favours showered on the Autonomists by their beloved friends the Magyars, after all the dark electioneering tricks and gutter legislation which for years had been committed by the Magyars to the end that the Autonomists and they should have all the amenities of some one else's house, it surely is the acme of ingratitude to call this tottering benefactor "Hote insalue." If the Autonomists did not desire to reap advantages from any Magyar corruption, they might at any time since ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... privet hedge, Nanty glanced up for a second to remark in her throaty little voice: "It is hard. That lovely garden of yours, Miss Ethel—— But tibe and tide wait for no ban!" Then she sighed and resumed her absorbing occupation, satisfied that she had taken her due part in the social amenities. ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... Marayne's pretty amenities and the good woman at Seagate who urged herself almost hourly to forget that William Porphyry was not her own son, was entirely unfair. The second Mrs. Benham's conscientious spirit and a certain handsome ability about her fitted ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... their utmost limit, and the treasures of her beautiful heart generously and without stint. I beg my readers to note that I have tried to differentiate between those spinsters who do not want to marry and those who do; between the rich spinster who can command all the amenities of life, and the poor one compelled to a relentless and unceasing round of uncongenial toil. Still more do I wish to distinguish between the placid contented woman who can adapt herself to circumstances and find a quiet sort of happiness ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... from Kenby. He did not care much for society, but he vaguely respected it as the stronghold of the proprieties and the amenities. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... house with his amenities; but gradually it became apparent that his most dazzling effects were directed exclusively to Jane. Lethbury and his wife held their breath and looked away from each other. They pretended not to notice the frequency ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... actually fall upon the head of his brother apologist, Tischendorf, whose rendering, as he so much insists upon it, I merely reproduce. The manner in which Tischendorf attacks Volkmar in connection with this passage forcibly reminds me of the amenities addressed to myself by Dr. Lightfoot, who seems unconsciously to have caught the trick of his precursor's scolding. Volkmar had paraphrased Origen's words in a way of which his critic disapproved, and Tischendorf comments as follows: "But here again we have to do with nothing else than a completely ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... non-appreciation of many things which a larger mental digestion can assimilate without discomfort. In his dealings with Nature he is sweet, genial, patient, wise. In his dealings with men he exasperates himself over the least divergence from the desired type. Before any over-tendency to the amenities and luxuries of civilization, in particular, he becomes unreasonable and relentless. Hence there appears something hard and ungenial in his views of life, utterly out of keeping with the delicate tenderness which he shows in the woods. The housekeeping of bees and birds he finds noble and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... being married himself, and out of the running, he appears to have been unselfishly anxious for his friend's success. In the packet Mr. Day had written down the conditions to which he should expect his wife to subscribe. She would have to begin at once by giving up all luxuries, amenities, and intercourse with the world, and promise to continue to seclude herself entirely in his company. Miss Sneyd does not seem to have kept Mr. Edgeworth waiting long while she wrote her answer decidedly saying that ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... Tea is but an attempt to revive an old custom, and for those whom fortune has favored with leisure for social amenities at that hour, it furnishes an agreeable and informal occasion for exchange of courtesies and for harmless gossip ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... Grosvenor Square. Nevertheless, he was conscious of a little annoyance as he followed the servant up the broad stairs. He would much have preferred waiting until Borrowdean had concluded his call. He remembered his grey travelling clothes, and all his natural distaste for social amenities returned with unabated force as he neared the reception-rooms and heard the softly modulated rise and fall of feminine voices, the swishing of silks and muslin, the faint perfume of flowers and scents which seemed to fill the air. At the last moment he would have withdrawn, but his ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Gospeler, turning and pausing in the doorway, "you allow your business-energy to violate all the most delicate amenities of private life, and will yet drive some maddened mortal to such resentful use of pistol, knife, or poker, as your mourning family shall sincerely deplore. The articles on Free Trade and Protection in the daily papers have hitherto been regarded as the climax of all that utterly ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 24, September 10, 1870 • Various
... With amenities of this nature the Quartier guests passed their time while waiting their turn to go to the front. There were always, while I was there, one or more parties in the field, either on the Italian or the Russian front, or both, while ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... there is nothing to justify the charge of 'non-committalism' so much made against him. When he spoke at all he spoke explicitly; and he plainly, though without acerbity, exhibited his likes and dislikes. Van Buren scrupulously observed the amenities of debate. He was uniformly courteous towards adversaries; and the calm self-control saved him, as some great orators were not saved, from a descent to the aspersion of motive so common and futile in political ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... across the table at Rainey, saving the latter a reply which he was rather at a loss how to word. Amenities from Carlsen were likely a Greek gift. And Carlsen rattled on during the meal in high good spirits, rallying Rainey about his poker game with the hunters, joking Lund about his shooting, talking of the landfall ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... found myself in the midst of a bevy of girls and married women. However, they all seemed to know that I was a desirable match and they gradually transferred their attentions to me, the girls in their own interests and the older matrons in those of their marriageable daughters. Their crude amenities sickened me. One middle-aged woman tried to monopolize me by a confidential talk concerning the social inferiority of ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... guessed whether, on this occasion, he was able to exercise this talent. Superfluous trouble! Madame de Crequi interrupted him at each sentence by the most disagreeable commentaries, by exclamations such as the following: "Detestable style!" "Confusion worse confounded!" and other similar amenities. Bailly did not succeed in extorting any indulgences from Madame de Crequi, when, fortunately, the arrival of another visitor put an end ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... hand, whilst he was practising all the amenities with his countenance, he opened the parlour-door, where the supposititious visitor was expected to be found, and lo! the room was empty. Mrs Root and the servants were summoned, and they all positively declared, and were willing to swear to the fact, that a gentleman ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... force. Time passed, and the brothers had separated. Eugenio had married a woman in every way his inferior. Rugiero had been drawn into a like union that surprised all those who knew his refined tastes and sensitiveness to the social amenities. Though a man of honor, his circumstances had become embarrassed. In his emergencies he had recourse to his old friends, whose aid was not withheld, but, a crisis arriving, he was declared bankrupt. Eugenio, instead of assisting his brother, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... the subject of my wife's family and friends and of the warm-hearted kindness with which they received me, I ought to say something about my father-in-law, Mr. Simpson. Though he had not his wife's charm of manner and delight in all the amenities of life and of social intercourse on its best side, he was to me a very attractive man, as well as one of very great ability. Through his shyness he made all but his intimates regard him as dull. There was in truth no dullness about him. His ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... William, who had no regard for social amenities, cut his remarks short by a resounding ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... The lack of restraint, the lack of balance, the lack of soberness and common sense were never more apparent than in the obsession of sex which has set us all ababbling about matters once excluded from the amenities of conversation. ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... anxiety—patient, true, and patriotic. As we read the lively and genial letters of the lamented Irving, when American minister at Madrid seventy years later, what a contrast to the high consideration and social amenities he enjoyed, are the humiliations and the baffled zeal of Jay, when obliged to 'stand and wait,' under circumstances at once so perplexing and hopeless! In March, 1782, the bills were protested; but the credit that seemed utterly destroyed was soon retrieved, though Jay found himself constrained, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... columned county hall, Mid-most before his eyes, Alerter dog and loitering maid Cross from the sunlight to the shade, And small amenities of trade Under ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 18, 1914 • Various
... takes its impulse from the passing moment. It must be remembered that timeliness is the essential element of right and obligation in many things that ought to be done, especially in all forms of charity, alike in great services, and in those lesser amenities and kindnesses which contribute so largely to the charm of society and the happiness of domestic life. There are many good offices which, performed too late, were better left undone,—courtesies which, postponed, are incivilities,—attentions which, out of season, ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... the silent Swiss governess. Though the two women were sumptuously lodged "in fair upper chambers," opening east and south, with their maid near at hand, the gloomy chill of the silent household had already penetrated the lonely girl's heart. No single sign of the warmer amenities. Only books, books, dusty books, by the thousand, piled helter-skelter in every available nook ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... perpetrating murder by wholesale, shouting for joy as disasters propagated by the chances of war hurled death and agonizing wounds into the ranks of their opponents! And yet the very same men, when chance gave them the opportunity, would readily exchange, in their own peculiar way, all the amenities of social life, extending to one another a draw of the pipe, and quid, or glass; obtaining and exchanging information from one and the other of their respective services, as to pay, rations, and so on—the ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... more courtly and gracious than some would like. The language and manner which betray the habitual desire of pleasing, and which add a charm to intercourse in the higher social circles, are liable to be construed by sensitive beings unused to such amenities as an odious condescension when addressed to persons of less consideration than the accused, and as a still more odious—you know the word—when directed to those who are esteemed by the world as considerable person ages. But of all this the accused are fortunately wholly ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... much of him. It seems curious now to look back upon that first interview. We all became so fond of him, he was a loyal, faithful friend, was always ready to help me in any small difficulties, and I went to him for everything—visits, servants, horses, etc. W. had no time for any details or amenities of life. We moved over just before New Year's day. As the gros mobilier was already there, we only took over personal things, grand piano, screens, tables, easy chairs, and small ornaments and bibelots. These were all sent off in a van early one morning, and after ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... with rude, not to say cruel, rites of initiation among themselves, plenty of rivalries and enmities between house and house, guild and guild, but a united, not to say ferocious, esprit de corps against every one else. Fisticuffs and wrestlings were the amenities that passed between them, though always with a love of fair play so long as no cowardice, or what was looked on as such, was shown, for there was no mercy for the weak or weakly. Such had better betake themselves at once to the cloister, or life was made intolerable by ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... managed, complete in itself, with its small army, still smaller navy, and miniature government. Labuan has not possessed a Governor since Sir Charles Lees (then Mr. Lees) left, but it boasts capital public offices, a first-rate Government House, Secretary's residence, church, parsonage, and other amenities of advanced civilisation. Only there is nobody to govern, and hardly anything for the officials to do. At present the colony of Labuan seems a farce, and ought either to be done away with or placed on an entirely different footing. The best plan would probably be to make it an adjunct ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... was interesting and there were few feminine clashes—merely a smiling and deadly exchange of amenities between a fashionable woman who was an ardent advocate of suffrage, and an equally distinguished lady who was scornfully opposed to it. But the franchise had nothing at all to do with the discussion concerning the New Idea Home, which is doubtless why it was mentioned; ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... act enough; but to do so delicately, reverently, without forcing one's preferences on those of another, may not always be so simple. Thane was not a Goth nor a Vandal; by choice he would have sought to preserve the amenities of life; but a meek man he was not, and the thing he now desired was, he considered, well worth the sacrifice of such small pretensions as his in the ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... outlying section of Thomas the Tiger, and note the effect. Irritate Wilfred the Wasp, or stand behind Maud the Mule and prod her with a pin. There is not an animal on the list who has even a rudimentary sense of the social amenities; and it is this more than anything else which should make us proud that we are human beings on a loftier plane ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... and many of the comforts of life yet in the future; post-offices, schools, and churches many miles away. In every cabin were to be found the powder-horn, bullet-pouch, and rifle. The restraints and amenities of modern society were in large measure unknown; and altogether much was to be, and was, "pardoned to the spirit of liberty." There were no great corporations to be chosen defendants, but much of the time of the courts was taken up by suits in ejectment, actions for assault and battery, breach of ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... the north-east of Bath, which, as yet, had no existence, its site being occupied by a smooth level reach of white sand, or a stormy pool of black water, travellers of the time disagree which. At Swainswick Bladud found his level; throwing aside all such nonsense as kingly ambition, and the amenities of civilized society—utterly ignoring the deceitful pleasures of common sense—he contented his simple soul with composing bouts rimes for Lady Miller, at Batheaston Villa; that one upon a buttered muffin, falsely ascribed by Walpole to the Duchess of Northumberland, was ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... days. Evening dress is reserved for State occasions, and though sarong and kabaja be discarded at the nine o'clock dinner, the blouse and skirt of morning wear in England suffices even at this late hour for the fair Hollander, who also concedes so far to the amenities of civilisation as sometimes to put on her stockings. So much of life in Java is spent in eating, sleeping, and bathing, that but a small residuum can be spared for those outside interests which easily drop away from the European when exiled to ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... forgotten the amenities of life in the excitement. Professor Gurlone and his son, still clad in their black suits, but with their helmets off, were standing beside him, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... discovery, invention, and pure science; for, if all the workers in all of these branches of human activity got together and demanded of the world the real fruits of their self-sacrifice and labor,—if they demanded all the riches and comforts and amenities of life that have flowed directly or indirectly from their efforts,—there would be little left for the rest of mankind. Each of these activities is represented by a craft spirit that recognizes this great truth. The artist or the scientist who has an itching palm, who prostitutes ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... and already has acquired a fresh significance from the contrast its pleasing and naive details afford to the tragic and troublous times which have since almost obliterated the traces of all that is characteristic, secure, and serene. The physical resources and amenities of the State were recorded with zest and intelligence by Jefferson before Clinton had performed a like service for New York, or Flint for the West, or any of the numerous scholars and writers of the Eastern States for New England. The very fallacy whereon treason based her machinations ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... precarious life. The winter in particular is a time of anxiety, and sometimes of privation, even to the well-to-do among them. Work then is scarce, and what there is, is rendered disagreeable to them by the cold. Yet they take their chance with facile temper, and are not soured by hardships. The amenities of the Venetian sea and air, the healthiness of the lagoons, the cheerful bustle of the poorer quarters, the brilliancy of this Southern sunlight, and the beauty which is everywhere apparent, must be reckoned as important factors ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... loom and ship in the service of industry; lends pen and pencil to poet and artist in the service of beauty; through desk and pew enters into man's intellectual and moral life; through instruments of convenience strengthens the sweet amenities of the home; working, it also waited and is saved ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... the natives and dressing in the Chinese garb which, with his Caucasian features and blond complexion, caused him to present the drollest appearance. Only those who have resided in China can understand the repugnance with which anyone accustomed to the amenities of refined society would naturally regard such a life. He gave up body and soul to the spread of Christianity in a heathen land, recalling to my mind the early Jesuits, Francis Xavier, Lucas Caballero and Cipriano Baraza, who penetrated pathless forests and crossed unknown seas in conformity ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... in the pleasant labours or the social amenities of life. The busy hum of the great world beats outside her chamber, men and women are born, and marry and die, society may be convulsed with scandals, kingdoms may totter to their fall in a crash of wars and tumults, but the Invalid lies through the tedious days propped ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, April 12, 1890 • Various
... She had no doubt that they were looking for herself. They represented ease and safety, and a quick return to the amenities of civilization, but she had no desire to discover herself to them. She thought of the injured man lying in the tent a mile away. It was possible that the coming of these two, if she made her presence ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... were taken: fields sold for speculative building, land dug in public parks taken away in the name of "amenities." The little spark that could have been fanned into ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... courteously, in the Ojibway tongue. With all his impatience, he knew better than to be precipitate. Tom and Maria responded in kind to his salutation, and the usual amenities of those who find themselves at a camping-place together were exchanged. Of course, the newcomers would not think of occupying the cabin, since the others had reached it first, even though Donald's rank in the Hudson Bay Company entitled him to the ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... with which I received this announcement, the way I jumped and danced, and that Rubens jumped and danced with me, my gratitude and my father's satisfaction, the renewed amenities between myself and my pony, his obvious knowledge of the fact that I was his master, and the running commentary of the Irishman, I will ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... to regard it as the fountain-head of knowledge, and of that mental distinction which is so much rarer than knowledge. An innate passion for all that was thus distinguished and exceptional made her revere Hillbridge as the native soil of those intellectual amenities that were of such difficult growth in the thin air of East Onondaigua. At the first suggestion of a visit to Hillbridge—whither she went at the invitation of a girl friend who (incredible apotheosis!) had married one of the University professors—Claudia's ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... different from all the rest. Few of the houses are large; on the other hand, none of them is small: this is the region of the solid middle class, the class which loves comfort and piques itself on its amenities, but is a little ashamed or too timid ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... rather than. American hospitality Europeanized. The careful research which has been made into our social origins has resulted in bringing back many of the aboriginal usages; and, with the return of the old American spirit of fraternity, many of the earlier dishes as well as amenities have been restored. A Thanksgiving dinner in the year 1906 would have been found more like a Thanksgiving dinner in 1806 than the dinner to which Mr. Homos was asked in 1893, and which he has studied ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... Europe. But he had crossed the Atlantic for the first time only six weeks before, and having indulged his craving immoderately, had rested for a span at Aix-les-Bains to recover from aesthetic indigestion. He had found these amenities agreeable to his ingenuous age. He had also, quite recently, come across the Comte de Lussigny. Hence the depth of thought in which Aristide discovered him. Now, the fact that North is North and South is South and that never these twain shall meet is a proposition all too ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... need and in a higher degree the needs of recreation and conviviality, but they also serve an invidious purpose; and they serve it none the less effectually for having a colorable non-invidious ground in these more avowable motives. But the economic effect of these social amenities is not therefore lessened, either in the vicarious consumption of goods or in the exhibition of difficult and costly achievements ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... it more gently. He should have condescended a little to the amenities, for his imperious tone at once dried a generous spring of philanthropy. He was to regret this lack of a mere superficial polish that would ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... was simple, and her small-talk of no very ample flow; for all that, as she had said, she was a young woman from the country, and the country was West Nazareth, and West Nazareth was in its way a stubborn little fact, she was feeling the direct influence of the great amenities of the world, and they were shaping her with a divinely intelligent touch. "Oh exquisite virtue of circumstance!" cried Rowland to himself, "that takes us by the hand and leads us forth out of corners where, ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... place in the curricula of our colleges. It is only by training the student from the start, by fostering literary, dramatic and debating societies where not alone the practical art of speaking is developed, but the social amenities of good society are practised, that the young priest can be equipped to efficiently discharge the high office awaiting him, and so reflect a lasting credit on the Church of God at home ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... the proprietor now purveyed hooks and eyes to an impatient Mrs. Leffingwell. Merton Gill, behind the opposite counter, waited upon a little girl sent for two and a quarter yards of stuff to match the sample crumpled in her damp hand. Over the suave amenities of this merchandising Amos Gashwiler glared suspiciously across the store at his employee. Their relations were still strained. Merton also glared at Amos, but discreetly, at moments when the other's back ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... was plainly audible in every corner of the room, not so much because of its loudness—for he had but little raised it—as because of a distinct and precise enunciation. This very precision, which always implies a regard for the rules, proprieties and amenities of life, seemed to stamp him as a man worthy of confidence, even had not his sentiments been of the most high-minded character. He described the great flood of 1882, which wrought such havoc in Missouri, in which cataclysm his Uncle Henry Perkins had suffered ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... his plate with another waffle. Amos was giving no heed to these small amenities. He was eating his waffles ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... a little leaven of memory will sometimes work in the heart. Here was half a regiment of men, who had come to fight the battles of their country. As with one accord they had left the amenities of peaceful life behind them, and assumed the rugged manners of war. Of late they had seemed almost oblivious of the fact that God, and Christian worship, and Christian rules of life were still in existence. But to-day they were reminded. To-day the child was awakened—the ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge
... was no wild justice, as an old writer had said. Revenge was an evil possession.... An exhausting, sinister mood.... The men who would fight this modern battle, if battle there was to be one, were dark scowling men.... The amenities of battle, the gallantry of flags meant nothing to them. They would shoot from behind ditches in the dark.... In America was talk of dynamite—an idealist using a burglar's trick.... There was no ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... did, it doesn't exempt him from the ordinary amenities of human intercourse. He isn't the only man who has been hurt." And Diana kicked off ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... considerable sum then than now. And it must be remembered that this entire sum was drawn from the revenues of Ireland, besides the whole cost of an army numbering 125,000 men, which England maintained in Ireland at the time the Act was passed. What the amenities of the last three years of the eighteenth century cost Ireland we may judge from these figures: in 1797, while the hangings, burnings and torturings which brought about the insurrection of the following year were in an early stage, the national debt of Ireland was under $20,000,000; ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
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