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More "Disastrous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his own head with his clenched fist, angrily demanding that his brain bring forth the thought that was forming slowly. The metal that could be revolved in time without producing a disastrous explosion and without requiring an ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... to nobody about it for years, madam. Yet I would not mind speaking to you—you are so kind to me. During the time you mention I took an ocean voyage which was very disastrous to me and mine. The ship went down with all on board, including ...
— Young Captain Jack - The Son of a Soldier • Horatio Alger and Arthur M. Winfield
... through the door, when, as fatality ordained, there occurred to him an unfortunate and disastrous thought. He could not resist the desire to see Mlle. Moriaz once more, to impress forever on his memory her adored image. He turned, and their eyes met. He paid dearly for this weakness of the will. Apparently the violent restraint that he had exercised over himself ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... over General Hawley at the battle of Falkirk, and of the jealousies and machinations of Secretary Murray and the Irish Prince's advisers, particularly O'Sullivan and Sir Thomas Sheridan, against Lord George Murray and the chiefs, I can here make no mention, but come at once to the disastrous battle of Culloden which put a period to our hopes. A number of unfortunate circumstances had conspired to weaken us. According to the Highland custom, many of the troops, seeing no need of their immediate presence, had retired temporarily to their homes. Several ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... purpose, involving the plans of his whole life, implying, as he saw clearly, a brilliant future or a disastrous disappointment, with a great unexploded mine of consequences under his feet, and the spark ready to fall into it, he walked about the gilded saloon with a smile upon his lips so perfectly natural and pleasant, that one would have said he was as vacant of any aim, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... necessitated selling it at a loss and purchasing a mule the next day. On this animal Mary set out dressed in black silk, accompanied by Claire in a like dress, and by Shelley who walked beside. This primitive way of travelling was not without its drawbacks, especially after the disastrous wars. Their fare was of the coarsest, and their accommodation frequently of the most squalid; but they were young and enthusiastic, and could enter with delight into the fact that Napoleon had slept in their room at one inn. And the picturesque though frequently ruined French towns, ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... of Massan's suit. The force was enough to rock him slightly off-balance before the servos readjusted. Massan withdrew his arm from the sleeve and felt the inside of the shoulder seam. Dented, but not penetrated. A leak would have been disastrous, possibly fatal. Then he remembered: Of course—I cannot be killed except by direct action of my antagonist. That is one of the ...
— The Dueling Machine • Benjamin William Bova
... disastrous to the horse's skin. Allow neither singeing nor washing above the hoof, and even this only for appearance. For there is no more reason for washing the horse's foot when he is kept in a stable, than there is when he is kept in a paddock. ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... of his hand and a corresponding effort of his will, he could complete his mastery over Phoebe's yet free and virgin spirit: he could establish an influence over this good, pure, and simple child, as dangerous, and perhaps as disastrous, as that which the carpenter of his legend had acquired and exercised over the ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... words and times. As regards times, if he did not cause the times of the city's opportunities to be lost, he is not guilty; but if he did so, he has committed crime. And as to his words, if the words of his report were true or expedient, let him escape; but if they were at once false, venal, and disastrous, let him be convicted. {184} No greater wrong can a man do you, than is done by lying speeches. For where government is based upon speeches, how can it be carried on in security, if the speeches are not true? and if, in particular, ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... there was no time for other method of progression, but because he must be fit, fit, fit. No more 'Old Mooney' for him; he kept an eye for ever on that gentleman, and became doggedly the most practical of men. And practical in the cheeriest of ways. In 1894 a disastrous change came over the fortunes of the family, the father's money being lost and then Scott was practical indeed. A letter he wrote I at this time to his mother, tenderly taking everything and everybody ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... many States and distinct communities, of such diversified habits, interests, and domestic institutions, must be sacredly and religiously observed. Any attempt to disturb or destroy these compromises, being terms of the compact of union, can lead to none other than the most ruinous and disastrous consequences. ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... the sword of the enemy, till at length the victors of Damietta were compelled to sue for a peace which they could no longer obtain. A retreat was ordered; but those who attempted to escape by the river were taken prisoners, and the fate of such as proceeded by land was equally disastrous. While they were occupied in constructing a bridge over a canal, the Saracens entered the camp and murdered the sick. The valiant king, though oppressed with the general calamity of disease, sustained boldly the shock of the enemy, throwing himself into ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... the curiosity of those around him. Even Ole Thorwald and Montague agreed that it was best to let him alone, for although they might overcome his great physical force by the united strength of numbers, the result would certainly be disastrous, as he was the only one who ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... involve them in embarrassments, and then, under the guise of friendship and pretence of assisting them, further his own unprincipled views. The impetuosity of the young nobleman, and certain circumstances that he could not foresee, brought the affair to a crisis both unexpected and disastrous. ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... With disastrous result! For as the line came taut, up Jane went!—caught bodily from the ground. And still spinning, whizzed forward in that high wind and ...
— The Poor Little Rich Girl • Eleanor Gates
... few disastrous fires start under conditions which prevent their control. Usually they spring from some of the many small, apparently innocent fires which burn unnoticed until wind and hot weather fan them into action. It is far ...
— Practical Forestry in the Pacific Northwest • Edward Tyson Allen
... reserve and self-control, John Graham was quite unlike the average Lowlander by the spirit of feudal prejudice and romantic sentiment, of uncalculating devotion and loyalty to dead ideals, which burned within his heart, and were to drive him headlong on his troubled and disastrous career. A kinsman of the great Montrose and born of a line which traced its origin to Scottish kings, the child of a line of fighting cavaliers, he loathed Presbyterians, their faith and their habits together, counting them fanatics by ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... Much has been heard of government ownership in recent years; yet it is nothing particularly new, for many of the early railroads in these new Western States were built as government enterprises, with results which were frequently disastrous. This mania, with the land speculation accompanying it, was largely responsible for the panic of 1837 and led to that repudiation of debts in certain States which for so many years gave American investments an ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody
... of other bodies has prevented the original great founders from being invested with the power that is really needed in training and disciplining inferior and more inexperienced assistants, and produces a want of compactness and authority which has disastrous effects in movements of emergency. Moreover, the lack of forms causes a deficiency of framework for religion to attach itself to, and this is almost fatal to ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... with the question of further and more disastrous reductions, for our obligations must be met. The $100,000 borrowed for mission work must be paid. We do not believe that the churches wish this to be done by closing more schools and church doors against ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 4, April 1896 • Various
... at the time when the authority of religion was overthrown in this region. This event, due to the enlightened zeal of the clergy of Issoudun will, we trust, have imitators, and put a stop to marriages, so-called, which have never been solemnized, and were only contracted during the disastrous epoch of revolutionary rule. ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... lusts thereof." The church has not confined itself to a single form of influence. It has invested the command to purity with the sanction of a divine behest; has used threats and penalties; has employed asceticism, often with most disastrous results; has appealed variously to the spiritual imagination with legend and story. The fresh blood of the Northern peoples has come in to reenforce the spent and struggling morality of the South. A romantic conception of love has blended nature's two great forces—sense and ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... rushes" alternately with long periods of steady doubling, while the camels, who lose their heads as soon as they are asked to increase their dignified rate of 2-1/2 miles an hour, were floundering along at its side. Their loads, hastily packed and wildly hurled from side to side in their disastrous progress, again and again came sliding to the ground, to be painfully reloaded in the dark by furious escorts and despairing drivers. Sometimes the maddened beasts broke away and galloped off, shedding their precious ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... Jopp, read a disastrous garnering, and resolved to base his strategy against Farfrae upon that reading. But before acting he wished—what so many have wished—that he could know for certain what was at present only strong probability. He was superstitious—as such head-strong natures often are—and he nourished in ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... a loan of more than two millions to meet the redemption of treasury notes, which fall due before the 4th of March. The state of the country is such that a larger amount thrown on the market would have a most disastrous influence on the public credit. I do not think I can borrow two millions at more than 90 per cent. With a guaranty such as the states have offered, I can get eight millions at par. The alternative is to authorize me to accept the guaranty, or leave the treasury with ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... may not be difficult to suppose a reason for her giving an incorrect account of the state of her tribe. Shaw-na-dith-it knew from bitter experience, that all former attempts made by Europeans to open a communication with the Red Indians, had to the latter issued only in the most disastrous and fatal results. She knew too the antipathy her own people had to the whites,—so great was this, that she feared to return to them, believing that the mere fact of her having resided among the whites for a time would make her an object of hatred to the Red man.—Knowing all this, is it a ...
— Lecture On The Aborigines Of Newfoundland • Joseph Noad
... throne became the cause of the most dreadful civil wars and disorders. His son, Maharaja Dhulip-Sing, proved quite unfit for the high post he inherited from his father, and, under him, the Sikhs became an ill-disciplined restless mob. Their attempt to conquer the whole of Hindostan proved disastrous. Persecuted by his own soldiers, Dhulip-Sing sought the help of Englishmen, and was sent away to Scotland. And some time after this, the Sikhs took their place amongst the ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... Cape Leveque (volume 2 page 91) the brig was for a whole night surrounded by these enormous fish, and the crew in momentary dread of their falling on board, the consequence of which would have been very disastrous. The noise of their fall in the water, on a calm night, was as loud as ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... the motive assigned by the writer, that of the secret indisposition of the cabinet of James the First towards the fortunes of Gustavus, is to me by no means certain, unquestionably the knowledge of this disastrous event was long kept back by "a timid ministry," and the fluctuating reports probably ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... late in the week, Major Belwether kindly suggested Klondyke for Siward's benefit, which proved more quickly disastrous to him than anything yet proposed; and he went back to Bridge, preferring rather to "carry" Agatha Caithness at intervals than crumble into bankruptcy under the ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... the fertile vales which spread, intersected by many lucid streams, between the Roanoke and the Neuse rivers. Here they fixed their abode, and became the ancestors of the powerful Tuscarora nation. In the early part of the eighteenth century, just before its disastrous war with the colonies, this nation, according to the Carolina surveyor, Lawson, numbered fifteen towns, and could set in the field a force ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... that's all, is it?' said Nelson, 'then I wish you and loblolly would put the fire out without making such a confusion'—and he went on writing with the greatest coolness, although the accident might have been attended by the most disastrous consequences, as an immense quantity of powder was on board, and some of it close to the scene of the disaster. The third day after the above incident Nelson was no more, and the poor 'loblolly boy' left the service minus two fingers. 'Old Jack' used ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... carried with it the entire banking system of the Southern and Southwestern States. Although in no way similar to the semi-governmental institutions which preceded it, yet, from its similarity of name and identity of location, its disastrous failure added to the blind popular distrust of its predecessors, which narrow-minded politicians had fostered for their own selfish purposes. Fortunately the sub-treasury plan of Mr. Woodbury supplied the need of a safe place of deposit which, since the refusal of Congress ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... matter, and if we lose——. It will be a trying day for everyone, and we shall only have a few hours' sleep to-night, but I think no one grudges the discomfort. I write on the eve of what may be a very brilliant, a very disastrous, or a very simple affair. We are a small force, the march so far has been brilliant, and success will be a brilliant crown for the expedition and its leader. Everyone is more than a little anxious, but it is hard ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... sight made me wince, for they must have gone down like a cataract, all heaped together. But they were tough, and I trust no heads were broken. The effect on the eight fellows on the sleds came near being disastrous. I expected to see them leap off and run, which no doubt they would have done if Edmund had not taken, for other reasons, the precaution to tie them fast. But they strained at their bonds, and ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... see him, then and there, slyly try to take poor little Louie's hand, utterly forgetful of the disastrous result of a former attempt on what he believed to be that same hand? Didn't I see Louie civilly draw it away, and move her chair farther off from his? Didn't I see him flush up and begin to utter apologies? Didn't ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... thing, but the man seems to have some odd kind of gift. Whether it be that "second sight" which we Scotch people are so prone to believe in, or some other occult form of knowledge, I know not, but nothing of a disastrous tendency ever occurs in this place but the men with whom he lives are able to quote after the event some saying of his which certainly appears to have foretold it. He gets uneasy or excited—wakes up, in fact—when death is in ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... to complain of, for he got as good as he gave, and it occurred to him that he could not expect to start a disastrous conflagration in any maiden bosom so long as he had no brimstone, nor any substitute for it, ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... to become religious partisanship. If you would really understand Christianity you must look neither down to the deluded masses, and those ambitious worldlings who only use it as a means to an end by inflaming their baser passions, nor up to the throne, where power translates the impulse of a disastrous moment into sinister deeds. If you want to know what true and pure Christianity is, look into our homes, look at the family life of our fellow believers. I know them well, for my humble functions lead me into daily and hourly intercourse with them. Look to them if you purpose ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... past or more, to Scotland's court A traveller came, and to Geneura he Related tidings of disastrous sort; That Ariodantes perished in the sea: Drowned of his own free will was the report, No wind to blame for the calamity! Since from a rock, which over ocean hung, Into the ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... for a disastrous change. Case after case came up, bottle after bottle was burst, and bled mere water. Deeper yet, and they came upon a layer where there was scarcely so much as the intention to deceive; where the cases were no longer branded, the bottles no longer wired or papered, where ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... did the aftermath, as was shown by the advertisements in the auction columns of the daily papers and the motley mob of hungry, perspiring dealers, pawing over the household gods; and, more disastrous still, because of its rarity, Felix's brave fight to save his father's name, the whole struggle ending in ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... a fickleness of temperament that was disastrous to his self-respect. It deflated him to the proportions of an Adair. It toppled his lofty standards in the dust. It changed him from a loyalist, making a fanatical last stand, into ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... rim; then they, too, hurried away to see if Blake had survived that terrible ascent. For the last two hundred feet he had looked like a dead man. There was no cheering. Deep Canyon had been conquered; but it was yet to be seen whether the victory had not been won at a disastrous cost. ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... was need, for the horse went headlong down a long narrow hill, and if anything else had been on the road, we must have come into disastrous collision. We were, however, carried safely down, and reached the church ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... banishment of the second Charles; had fought by his side in his hour of peril, and shared the revelries of his court in his after days of prosperity. At an age when the judgement is rarely matured, unless by an untimely encounter with the dangers and adversities of the world, such as those disastrous times too often afforded, he had been employed with signal success in several foreign missions; and it was universally known that the monarch was ever prompt publicly to acknowledge the benefit he had on many occasions derived from the prudent counsels of his adherent, ...
— Theresa Marchmont • Mrs Charles Gore
... discomfort. In the course of the next three years two daughters were born to the couple; Anna in 1797, and Mary on March 12, 1799. At the time of Mary's birth her parents were passing through a period of pecuniary distress, owing to a disastrous speculation; but with the opening of the new century a piece of great good fortune befell Samuel Botham. He was one of the two surveyors chosen to enclose and divide the Chase of Needwood in the county of Stafford. In the early years of the nineteenth century there ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... is being rapidly effected. The agricultural status of the island was never so hopeful. The commercial activity is greatly increased. The educational awakening is universal and healthy. Notwithstanding the disastrous cyclone of 1898, and the confusion incident to a radical governmental reorganization, the wealth per capita has increased, the home life is improved, and the illiteracy of the people is ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... all material substances the best adapted to the monetary purpose, but even at that best it falls far short of an imaginable ideal. It undergoes spasmodic and irregular cheapening through new discoveries of gold, and at any time it may undergo very extensive and sudden and disastrous depreciation through the discovery of some way of transmuting less valuable elements. The liability to such depreciations introduces an undesirable speculative element into the relations of debtor and creditor. When, ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... king, when Thile had left the room, "tell me your opinion—the best way by which we may counteract this senseless and rash step, and succeed in preserving our country from the disastrous consequences." ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... rights and wrongs of this mode of classification, there can be no doubt about one most practical and disastrous effect of it. These lighter or wilder forms of art, having no standard set up for them, no gust of generous artistic pride to lift them up, do actually tend to become as bad as they are supposed to be. Neglected children ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... Italy in 1838, and published in 1840. No one of his poems is more difficult to read, and many are the stories told of the dismay occasioned by its various perplexities. The effect of this poem on Browning's fame was disastrous. In fact, after Sordello there began a period, twenty years long, of almost complete indifference in England to Browning's work. The enthusiasm over the promise of his early poems died quite away. Late in life Mr. Browning commented on this period of his literary career as a time of "prolonged ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... had to put through hotel linen,—the sheets, pillow-slips, spreads, table-cloths, and napkins. This finished, they buckled down to "fancy starch." It was slow work, fastidious and delicate, and Martin did not learn it so readily. Besides, he could not take chances. Mistakes were disastrous. ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... long been regarded in Europe as a work of more than ordinary merit, while to military men his review of the tactics and manoeuvres of the French Emperor during the few days which preceded his final and most disastrous defeat, is considered as instructive, as it is interesting."—Arthur's ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... had kept Mrs. Hartley up, but after a time a reaction set in which culminated in a wasting fever, and prostrated the poor creature on a bed of sickness. This, though apparently disastrous, ended happily for all. Beatrice's mother, so long as she was the object of pity, shrank from all communication with her rich relatives, but now that her child was in need of assistance, she flew ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... himself a consummate commander, and, in conversation with his jester, was fond of comparing himself to Hannibal. "We are getting well Hannibalized to-day, my lord," said the bitter fool, as they rode off together from the disastrous defeat of Gransen. Well "Hannibalized" he was, too, at Gransen, at Murten, and at Nancy. He followed in the track of his prototype only to ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... action is therefore essentially anti-social, sears the sympathies, cultivates a hard egoism, and produces general deterioration of character and conduct." The young should specially guard against this vice, which has been a rock upon which many a promising life has made disastrous shipwreck. ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... for himself a sad future? As for me, I am more and more satisfied, every day, that all events, even to the most minute, are in the direction or permission of Providence; and that out of the very occurrences we deem afflictive and disastrous, will often arise our greatest good. For the moment I was disappointed; but now I feel ...
— True Riches - Or, Wealth Without Wings • T.S. Arthur
... made other observations and predictions which had proved accurate? Or was he one of those men who are always making blunders for other people to correct? Is he known to have changed his opinion as to the approaching disastrous event? ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... unit of society in a republic is the individual, and not the race, the failure to recognize this fact being the fundamental error which has beclouded the whole discussion. The effect of disfranchisement upon the individual is scarcely less disastrous. I do not speak of the moral effect of injustice upon those who suffer from it; I refer rather to the practical consequences which may be appreciated by any mind. No country is free in which the way upward is not open for ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... criticisms and the proposed amendments taken one by one gained wide acceptance among economists. But when it came to embodying them in a general theory of economics, many economists have balked.[33] Most of the American texts in economics and much of our teaching show disastrous effects of this confusion and irresolution. The newer concepts, guardedly admitted to have some validity, appear again and again in the troubled discussions of recent textbook writers, which usually end with a rejection, "on the whole," ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... place was oppressive to the bright, high-spirited young man. The bare severity of the building was bad enough in church, he felt, but in Sunday school it was disastrous. It should be a bright place, full of light and life. He made up his mind he would set Miss Cotton and the Ladies' Aid to redouble their efforts towards improving the place. When the service ended with a long, slowly-droned psalm and the children filed quietly out, ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... himself and motioned his comrades to do the same. This unorthodox seventh-inning stretch was prohibited because it left the pilot's arm-rest controls without an operator, hence could prove disastrous if, through some malfunction, the ship ...
— Tight Squeeze • Dean Charles Ing
... who robbed most and tyrannized most was the most powerful. If his children continued those tyrannies, they conserved that grandeur. If on the contrary, they were men of little ability, who allowed themselves to be subjugated, or were reduced either by misfortunes and disastrous happenings, or by sicknesses and losses, they lost their grandeur with their possessions, as is customary throughout the world; and the fact that they had honored parents or relatives was of no avail to them, or is of ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... gravity of world interest of 1914 has shifted and come to rest at a spot most significant for darker peoples. Victory to all participants in its glorious achievement must be less disastrous than defeat. In order to satisfy the liberal opinion of the world, some form of autonomy must be devised for the newly organized man in America. Durable peace requires that American prejudice be utterly and forever stamped out; first by ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... were soon through with their supper, being notoriously rapid feeders,—which disastrous habit they acquire while on freight, when they are expected to eat dinner and do an hour's switching in ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... would satisfy neither. The Tories hated him for protecting the Dissenters. The Whigs hated him for protecting the Tories. The amnesty seemed to be more remote than when, ten months before, he first recommended it from the throne. The last campaign in Ireland had been disastrous. It might well be that the next campaign would be more disastrous still. The malpractices, which had done more than the exhalations of the marshes of Dundalk to destroy the efficiency of the English troops, were likely to be as monstrous ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... not only born there, as a rule, but also breathes his last in the old four-poster, the most extraordinary, wonderful old bedstead you ever laid eyes on. Of course I do not believe in any malevolent influences from the unseen world, but the record of disastrous coincidences in that one room is, to say the least of it, curious. Not that this sort of thing will deter me from going into possession, and I intend to put a lot of ...
— A Master of Mysteries • L. T. Meade
... will go on always without meeting sooner or later with the ideas that occult study implants. So that the occultist does not threaten those who turn aside from his teachings with any consequences that must necessarily be disastrous. ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... there were brief addresses by Dr. David Dearson on the disastrous results to motherhood should women participate in the active life of the nation; by the Reverend Jayson Yerkes on the Pauline doctrine of the subserviency of the truly feminine woman; by Mrs. Workman Werther on the decadence ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... Hogshead Geoffrey brought it down on the table with disastrous results: the ancient worm-eaten board was split from end ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... and to this he was not equal. For Dick was sorely torn. On the one hand he had never ceased to hang on Quisante's words and to count on Quisante's deeds; on the other, he had never acquitted himself of responsibility for a marriage which he believed to have been most disastrous. Worst of all then for him was what threatened now, an end of the illuminating words and the stirring deeds, but no end to the marriage yet in sight. To him too death seemed the best thing, unless that wonderful unlikely resurrection of activity and power could come. And ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... will stay for dinner," said Auntie Sue, while her dear heart was faint with fear lest they accept, and thus bring about who could say what disastrous consequences through ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... volcanic cowboy he had hitherto been. His old slouching gait, in spite of his evident weakness, was quite gone; his shaggy head was held erect, and he gazed upon his enemy with eyes which the other could not face. For the time, at least, the indelible stamp of his disastrous life was disguised by the fire of his eyes and the set of his features. And this moral strength he conveyed in every action in a manner which no violence, no extent of vocabulary could have done. This man before him had robbed him of the woman he ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... of her stay, thought her resolution but a caprice. And viewed by the light of her subsequent success it is hard now to realize the boldness of an undertaking whose consequences, had it failed, must have been humiliating and disastrous. She had no practical knowledge of the world, had received no artistic training, and enjoyed none of the advantages of intellectual society. But she had extraordinary courage, spirit, and energy, springing no doubt from a latent sense of extraordinary powers, ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... come, and very shortly, when Andy's and Sam's observation of the tools was to prove disastrous for our hero. As Tom turned the corner he looked back, and saw, still standing in front of ...
— Tom Swift and his Airship • Victor Appleton
... rapidly as the forces grow in numbers, and no national treasure chest is inexhaustible. Tax as they may, the war lords cannot squeeze out of their people more blood than flows in their veins, and exhaustion of the war-chest may prove even more disastrous than exhaustion of the regiments. For these reasons a limit to the size of armies is inevitable and in any great war this limitation must quickly ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... letter was received of which the contents evidently caused Mrs. Bretton surprise and some concern. I thought at first it was from home, and trembled, expecting I know not what disastrous communication: to me, however, no reference was made, and the cloud seemed ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... in the parish of Tynron, Dumfriesshire, to which he afterwards added the lease of another large farm in the same neighbourhood. Misfortune still pursued him; he rented one of the farms at a sum exceeding its value, and his capital was much too limited for stocking the other, while a disastrous murrain decimated his flock. Within the space of three years he was again a penniless adventurer. Removing from the farm-homestead of Corfardin, he accepted the generous invitation of his hospitable neighbour, Mr James Macturk ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... last night leaves me no doubts on that head. Since the guilty person thinks it necessary to ask me to keep quiet, it is evident he fears my intervention; if he is afraid of that it is because it must be hurtful to him; if disastrous to him, a criminal, it is evident that it must be useful to honest folk. My duty, then, is to go straight ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... intelligence with feelings of rapture, and with bursting hearts they offered up thanks to their divine Creator, for his signal preservation of them throughout this disastrous day. ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... obstinacy as strong as his courage, caused young Charles of Sweden to miss the golden opportunity, and instead of seeking to rule his own country wisely, sent him abroad a homeless wanderer on a career of conquest, as romantic as it was, first, glorious, and at the last disastrous. ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... hold of her hand to keep her quiet. There had been whisperings, and uneasiness was already spreading. But what course could be adopted? It was impossible to carry off the corpse amidst such a mob, during the prayers, without incurring the risk of creating a disastrous effect. The best plan would be to leave it there, pending a favourable moment. The poor fellow scandalised no one, he did not seem any more dead now than he had seemed ten minutes previously, and everybody would think that his flaming eyes were still alive, ardently ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... was succeeded by a secret shuddering. Some disastrous influence appeared to overhang the scene. How many memorials should I meet with serving to recall the images of those ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... theatres. He had letters of introduction to some eminent literary characters, who, however, either could not or would not do anything for him; and he found no better situation than that of surgeon's mate in an eighty-gun ship. He continued in the navy for six or seven years, and was present at the disastrous siege of Carthagena, in 1741, which he has described in a Compendium of Voyages he compiled in 1756, and with still more vigour in "Roderick Random." His long acquaintance with the sea furnished ample materials ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... this remarkable prolonged interval in egg-laying now removed, the period will doubtless be reduced through gradual evolution to accommodate itself to the newly adopted conditions. The week's interval, taken in connection with the makeshift nest or platform of sticks, is now a disastrous element in the life of the bird. Such of the cuckoos, therefore, as build the more perfect nests, or lay at shortest intervals, will have a distinct advantage over their less provident fellows, and the law of heredity will thus insure the ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... whites—treaty officials, missionaries, and consuls—were determined to foist Tanumafili on the unwilling natives of the group, and backed by three men-of-war, they declared Mataafa a rebel and plunged the country into a disastrous and sanguinary war. England and America, in the person of their respective naval commanders, vied with one another in their self-appointed task; and while the Germans stood aloof, protesting and aghast, our ships ravaged the Samoan coast, burning, bombarding, and destroying with indiscriminate ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... and, from years of only dubious recognition, rather querulous. He had a solemn eye under a fringe of whitened eyebrow, a long nose, that his wife often fondly alluded to as "aristocratic" (they were keen on "blood," the Delancy Pottses), and a very retreating chin that one saw sometimes in disastrous silhouette against the light. Draped in the flowing fullness of hair and beard, his face showed ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... penetrate and explore the country of the long peninsula, which runs up northward between the Gulf of Carpentaria and the Pacific Ocean, and ends at Cape York, the northernmost point of Australia in Torres Straits. From this disastrous expedition he never returned. He was starved, ill, fatigued, hunted by remorseless aborigines for days, and finally speared to death by the natives of Cape York, when almost within sight of his goal, where a vessel was waiting ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... the schoolmaster, and the parents, should all alike fully understand that such external processes comprise but a small part of all that constitutes pubescence. A straining of terminology may at times be permissible; but on no account must we allow currency to so disastrous an error as the belief that the sexual life of the child either begins or is completed with the appearance of these external signs. The sexual life of the child begins long before, and the puberal development is not completed till many years after, the appearance of these external ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... thirty horsemen fully armed posted some hundred yards from our tent. To proceed with the demoralised crowd under me, and be followed by this company, would certainly prove disastrous and I felt again that some ruse ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... was a most glorious one for the material and mental progress of England, but most disastrous for Philip of Spain, Louis and Henry of France, Mary of Scotland, O'Neil, O'Brien, ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... conducting General Bonaparte, now become the Emperor Napoleon, up to the popular summit of his glory. He had already tainted it by many acts of violence, and by an exclusive devotion to personal ends, in defiance of justice and liberty. Henceforward and under the disastrous inspirations of a mad ambition, victory itself was to become a fatal seduction which by inevitable degrees draws us on to ruin. Great and terrible lesson of Divine justice on the morality of nations! Starting from the violation of the peace of Amiens, and in spite of ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... subsequently burnt six others which were built on the same side of the river, then crossing over, they fired on the canoes which were speeding towards the deep water of Bangweolo, through the channel of the Lopupussi, with disastrous ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... success; and, after four years, the zeal of the native churches began to flag, and some of the native pastors proposed to stop the work in Koordistan, and devote themselves more fully to the "home field." Knowing that the influence of such a course would be disastrous, Mr. Wheeler threw himself into the breach, and was off for a three weeks' tour in Koordistan. Redwan, the seat of the mission, was eighty miles east of Diarbekir. He was accompanied by Hagop Effendi, Civil Head of the Protestants, and two native preachers; and was rejoiced to find at Redwan ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... sin is a terribly complicated one, because it seems to be made up partly of an inner sense of transgression, a sense of failure, a consciousness that we have acted unworthily, meanly, miserably. Yet the sense of sin follows many acts that are not in themselves necessarily disastrous either to oneself or the community. Then there is a further sense of sin, perhaps developed by long inheritance of instinct, which seems to attend acts not in themselves sinful, but which menace the security of society. For instance, there is nothing sinful in a man's desiring to save ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... meaningless, in which opinion I heartily concur. More than one young woman dowered with generous blood, vitality, and courage has confided in me that whether she should marry or not she wished to be a mother at all costs. It is one of the disastrous results of men's shrinking from matrimony that fine women like these must deliberately stifle this glorious passion of motherhood, or pay a terrible price for expressing it—a price exacted not only from themselves but from the child to whom they have given life. ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... and accomplishments of refined society. The young man was not aware of his parentage, de Gersay having extracted a solemn promise from Mademoiselle de l'Enclos that she would never divulge the secret of the youth's birth without his father's express consent, a promise which resulted in the most disastrous consequences. ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... three foremost, whereat the other fled. In all, he took over thirty scalps of warriors, thus killing more Indians than were slain by either one of the two large armies of Braddock and St. Clair during their disastrous campaigns. Wetzel's frame, like his heart, was of steel. But his temper was too sullen and unruly for him ever to submit to command or to bear rule over others. His feats were performed when he was either alone or with two or three associates. An army of such men ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... broken the neck of this far-reaching and disastrous rebellion, and had restored to the Emperor of China the principal cities and towns in peace, the London Times wrote of him:—"Never did a soldier of fortune deport himself with a nicer sense of military honour, with more gallantry against the resisting, with more mercy ...
— General Gordon - Saint and Soldier • J. Wardle
... interpreter of history had contradicted the accepted record, that the continued failure of Hayti to realize the dreams of Toussaint was due to the fatal want of confidence subsisting between the fairer and darker sections of the inhabitants, which had its sinister and disastrous origin in the action of the Mulattoes in attempting to secure freedom for themselves, in conjunction with the Whites, at the sacrifice of their darker-hued kinsmen. Finally, it had been explained to us that ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... soil. But if used for this purpose it should be backed up with a liberal supply of bones and castor cake, or of bones and farmyard manure, or bones and top soil, as, if not so backed up, the result would be unsatisfactory, if not disastrous, seeing that the nitrate of soda, if applied alone, would cause the plant to wring out everything that was available in the soil. The application of nitrate of soda on the estate alluded to was at the rate of 2 cwt. an acre, and cost 21 rupees an acre, inclusive of the cost of ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... of electricity and magnetism did not escape attention, and the derangement of the compass needle by the lightning flash, formerly so disastrous at sea, pointed to an intimate connection between them, which was ultimately disclosed by Professor Oersted, of Copenhagen, in the year 1820. Oersted was on the outlook for the required clue, and a happy ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... the scourge. But his thoughts had always been turned towards Greece; at last the call came, and he threw himself with all his hopes and all his fortunes into a struggle which more than any other that history can show engaged at the time the interest of Europe. His first efforts resulted in a disastrous defeat against overwhelming odds, for which, as is natural, he has been severely criticised; his critics have shown less quickness in perceiving the qualities which he displayed after it—his unshaken, silent fortitude, the power with which he kept together and saved the wrecks of his shattered ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... far as the Adriatic, though he remained a tributary of the Sultan. The same year, however, the Magyars broke the treaty of peace just concluded with the Turks, and marched against them under their Polish king, Ladislas; this ended in the disastrous battle of Varna, on the Black Sea, where the king lost his life. In 1451 Sultan Murad II died and was succeeded by the Sultan Mohammed. In 1453 this sultan captured Constantinople (Adrianople had until then been the Turkish capital); in 1456 his armies were besieging Belgrade, but were ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... repeats; this practice is sustainable while population levels are low and time is permitted for regrowth of natural vegetation; conversely, where these conditions do not exist, the practice can have disastrous consequences for the environment . soil degradation - damage to the land's productive capacity because of poor agricultural practices such as the excessive use of pesticides or fertilizers, soil compaction from heavy equipment, or erosion of topsoil, eventually resulting in reduced ability ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... honours deck thy story, To thy fame's eternal glory! Adverse fortune ever fly thee; No disastrous ...
— The Duchess of Malfi • John Webster
... submit, and was pardoned. Until 1236, he remained in control of the Duchy of Brittany, but then was obliged to surrender his power to his son, and turned his turbulent activity against the infidels in Syria and Egypt, dying in 1250, on his return from Saint Louis's disastrous crusade. Pierre de Dreux was a masculine character,—a bad cleric, as his nickname Mauclerc testified, but a gentleman, a soldier, and a scholar, and, what is more to our purpose, a man of taste. He built the south porch at Chartres, apparently as a memorial of his ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... assumed the feather, he means that he has donned the uniform of a soldier. He has come to town, in other words, to enlist. Then behold the transformation! He begins at once to act irrationally. The whole epic paints in never-fading colors the disastrous effect upon the intellect of putting on soldier-clothes. You will pardon me, my friends, if I speak thus plainly, but I must open to you the hidden wisdom of ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... action than to show marked favour to practical engineers and mechanicians. Moreover he started an aeronautical society, which made Bridgeford furious; but so far, I am afraid it has done us no good, for the first ascent was disastrous, involving the death of the poor fellow who made it, and since then no one has ventured to ascend. I am afraid we do not get ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... actuated by the feelings that had been petrified, not cooled, in all their sanguine fervour, like a boiling torrent of lava suddenly dashing into the sea, he thought a marriage of mutual inclination (would envious stars permit it) the only chance for happiness in this disastrous world. George Venables had the reputation of being attentive to business, and my father's example gave great weight to this circumstance; for habits of order in business would, he conceived, extend to the regulation of the affections in domestic life. George seldom spoke in my uncle's ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... that I witnessed yesterday still holds the same disastrous influence over me. I have vainly endeavoured to think, not of Mannion's death, but of the free prospect which that death has opened to my view. Waking or sleeping, it is as if some fatality kept all my faculties imprisoned within ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... the king of the Matsyas, then I lose all sense of directions. Surely, my mother-in-law doth not know Dhananjaya to be afflicted with such extreme distress. Nor doth she know that descendant of the Kuru race, Ajatasatru, addicted to disastrous dice, to be sunk in misery. O Bharata, beholding the youngest of you all, Sahadeva, superintending the kine, in the guise of a cowherd, I grow pale. Always thinking of Sahadeva's plight, I cannot, O Bhimasena, obtain sleep,—what to speak you of the rest? I do not know, O mighty-armed ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... wilt see thy mistress wherever she may be. If thou turnest it the second time, thou wilt know what her thought of thee is; and, if the third time, thou wilt find thyself in her presence. But I give thee fair warning that by doing this thou wilt place thyself in a more disastrous plight than any thou hast experienced ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... trump, but it subsequently turned out that the adversaries had called for them. Now I never see an adversaries' call, and but rarely those of my partner, unless when made glaringly conspicuous by a ten and a two, so I led this wretched card with disastrous results. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 19, 1892 • Various
... Suddenly it occurred to me to try that door underneath the steps; so I kissed my hand irreverently to the quarterguard of harridans, and turned my back on them—which I daresay was the most unwise move that I ever made in my whole life. I have done things that were more disastrous in the outcome, but never anything ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... the Captain, and in half an hour's time, aided by the darkness, the little party stole out of the fortified camp, and by great good fortune passed with Dick's guidance beyond the enemy's lines. Then every effort was made, and soon after daybreak the spot where the disastrous fight had ...
— Our Soldier Boy • George Manville Fenn
... truth. Our cry should rather be, "Lock up the lot." Experience has taught us that if complete latitude is given to eccentrics and incompetents, if, in the words of Professor SODDY, F.R.S., the destinies of the country are entrusted to people of archaic mental outlook, the result is bound to be disastrous and chaotic. But if you treat them as lunatics, there is a strong presumption of their mending their ways and proving valuable factors in the economic reconstruction of the Empire ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various
... forever!" cried Hostilius, grinding his teeth in rage at each new manifestation of the enemy's handiwork. "Could the most disastrous battle be worse ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... omission in the kind of reform which is spontaneously taking place at this time, and which is lauded by Mill, Buckle, Spencer, Draper, and the advanced Thinkers of the day generally, as the true direction in which change should be made; an omission which will bring Society to disastrous revolution, even, it may be, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... favorable to their production. The physical depravation thus induced is frequently transmitted to the brain in the next generation, and appears in the shape of mental disorder.—Again, it is now well known that the qualities of the race are depreciated by the intermarrying of relatives. The disastrous influence of such unions is exerted on the nervous system more than any other, and is a prolific source of deaf-mutism, blindness, idiocy, and insanity. Not, certainly, in all cases do we see these results, for the legitimate consequences of this violation ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... night so bad that it was worse than no night at all, she said she would go to the steamship office with him and question them up about the Colmannia. The people there had never heard she was called an unlucky boat; they knew of nothing disastrous in her history. They were so frank and so full in their denials, and so kindly patient of Mrs. March's anxieties, that he saw every word was carrying conviction of their insincerity to her. At the end she asked what rooms were left on the Norumbia, and the clerk whom they had ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... The contempt which a genuine old family ghost has for mere parvenus and impostors is not to be expressed in mere words apparently, for Mauth-hounds of prodigious size and blackness, with white birds, and other disastrous omens, now began to display themselves profusely in the Haunted Chamber. Accustomed as I had become to regard all these appearances as mere automatic symptoms, I confess that I heard with pleasure the ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... atmosphere, which would be always super-saturated and ready to condense upon any solid or liquid surfaces. But the quantity of land comprised in the upper half of all the mountains of the world is a very small fraction of the total surface of the globe, and this would lead to very disastrous results. The air in contact with the higher mountain slopes would rapidly discharge its water, which would run down the mountain sides in torrents. This condensation on every side of the mountains would leave a partial vacuum which would set up currents from every direction to restore the equilibrium, ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... this colour-test had cost Mr. Mix precisely two thousand dollars. Beyond that, he had paid off a few of his most pressing creditors, and he had spent a peculiarly carefree week in New York (where he had also taken a trifling flyer in cotton, and made a disastrous forced landing) so that there was practically nothing but his smile between himself and bankruptcy. Yet Mr. Mix beamed, with almost ecclesiastical poise, upon the holder of his demand note, and tried her ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... men behind us—and with considerable difficulty and a good many angry expostulations, we made our way out. Happily our carriages and servants with our wraps were waiting in one of the inner courts, and we got away easily enough, but the evening was disastrous to ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... as it was impossible to see the brutes through our scherm; but as the fire got lower, and they became more daring, we sent a few shots among them, and the hellish hubbub that ensued showed that some of them were hit. But this proved disastrous, for a wounded animal, in its death struggles near the fence, came in contact with the bushes and almost tore down our only protection before a few more bullets finished it. There came a lull for a short time after this, and ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... forever a grizzly place was haunted ever, in any century, in any land; but not by mere ghosts from all those thousands of graves and half-buried bodies and sepulchral shell-holes; haunted by things huger and more disastrous than that; haunted by wailing ambitions, under the stars or moon, drifting across the rubbish that once was villages, which strews the lonely plain; the lost ambitions of two Emperors and a Sultan wailing from wind to wind and whimpering ...
— Unhappy Far-Off Things • Lord Dunsany
... charges the first, and most disastrous, we have absolutely disproved. Scott did not write one verse of the Auld Maitland; he edited it with unusual scrupulosity, for he had but one copy, and an almost identical recitation. He could not "eke and alter" ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... American unit reached the field of battle, several furious combats had already taken place with disastrous results. Two of the enemy machines had been sent down, one of them in flames, after the pilot had fallen at his post, fairly riddled by the gunfire of the Frenchman. A birdman had also paid the great debt on the side of Petain's men. As the score was two against one ...
— Air Service Boys Over The Enemy's Lines - The German Spy's Secret • Charles Amory Beach
... sketches was the landscape of heavy blue, as if seen through powder-smoke, and all the skies burned red. There was in these notes a sinister quality of hopelessness, eloquent of a defeat, as if the scene represented the last hour on a field of disastrous battle. Hawker seemed attacking with this picture something fair and beautiful of his own life, a possession of his mind, and he did it fiercely, mercilessly, formidably. His arm moved with the energy of a strange wrath. He might have ...
— The Third Violet • Stephen Crane
... made an agreement with Moawiya by which each retained his own dominions unmolested. It chanced, however—according to a legend, the details of which are quite uncertain—that three of the fanatic sect of the Kharijites had made an agreement to assassinate Ali, Moawiya and 'Amr, as the authors of disastrous feuds among the faithful. The only victim of this plot was Ali, who died at Kufa in 661, of the wound inflicted by a poisoned weapon. A splendid mosque called Meshed Ali was afterwards erected near the city, but the place of his burial is unknown. He had eight ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... middle of the rapids. This river we christened the Taunay, in honor of a distinguished Brazilian, an explorer, a soldier, a senator, who was also a writer of note. Kermit had with him two of his novels, and I had read one of his books dealing with a disastrous retreat ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... was at the close of the disastrous wars of 1866, when the march of the Prussians on Vienna was only stayed within a few hours' distance of the capital by the ignominious peace of Nicolsburg. The second time was when he lost his only son by the frightful tragedy of Mayerling, and he saw ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... manifestations. Many instances of this have come under my notice, in young men and young women of sixteen or thereabouts. Even when the practice of masturbation has long been discontinued, and the patient is quite grown up, such symptoms may arise, owing to the persistence of the fear of disastrous results, and the auto-suggestive influence of this fear. Nowhere is more tact required by the physician than in his dealings with those who masturbate or have masturbated. There is even a real danger that a moral lecture may cause ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... a lawyer, furnishes (1602?) a paper containing "principal points in regard to the trade of the Filipinas." He notes the decrees forbidding Mexicans and Peruvians to trade with the islands, and their violation; the result of this illegal trade is disastrous to Spanish commerce. Complaint is made that the appointments of officers for the ships are made in Mexico, thus causing great and unnecessary expense. The ships lost in the Philippine trade, and the causes of ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 • Edited by Blair and Robertson
... the fountain and foundation of his hope and trust."—Exp. cor. "Christ, and He crucified, is the head, and the only head, of the church."—Denison cor. "But if Christ, and He crucified, is the burden of the ministry, such disastrous results are all avoided."—Id. "He never let fall the least intimation, that himself, or any other person whosoever, was the object of worship."—View cor. "Let the elders that rule well, be counted worthy of double ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... fire commenced against the invisible foe, the fire being no more frequent than it would have been had they been armed with muzzle loading weapons. Presently musketry was heard on the enemy's side, the king's bodyguard having opened fire. This was disastrous to them, for, whereas the arrows had afforded but slight index as to the position of those who shot them, the puffs of smoke from the muskets at once showed the lurking places of those who used them, and Mr. Goodenough and Frank replied so truly that in a very short time the musketry ...
— By Sheer Pluck - A Tale of the Ashanti War • G. A. Henty
... food of man, and itself seems never to die but annually to renew its youth, the Algonkins called it "grandfather" and "king of snakes;" they feared to injure it; they believed it could grant prosperous breezes, or raise disastrous tempests; crowned with the lunar crescent it was the constant symbol of life in their picture writing; and in the meda signs the mythical grandmother of mankind me suk kum me go kwa was indifferently represented by an old woman ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... no doubts on that head. Since the guilty person thinks it necessary to ask me to keep quiet, it is evident he fears my intervention; if he is afraid of that it is because it must be hurtful to him; if disastrous to him, a criminal, it is evident that it must be useful to honest folk. My duty, then, is to go straight ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... was not so obedient, and Campion's attempt to show his seamanship was disastrous. He ran right under the steamer's nose, and had just almost cleared her when her prow struck the boat, six or eight feet from the stern, sheared off her helm and steering apparatus as if cut with a knife, and struck Campion as he fell. Then in a moment the boat filled ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... below that of many classes of outdoor and even farm laborers, whose day is from twelve to fourteen hours, and whose children are worked, and often overworked, from the time that they can fairly walk alone, with as disastrous and stunting results as can be found in any mine or factory. Child-labor is one of the oldest of our racial evils, instead of, as we often imagine, ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... stifling, the moisture being excessive, and the miasma rising from the putrid water poisoning my men in a disastrous way. The drinking-water, too, from that swamp was full of germs of all sizes, so big that with the naked eye you could see hundreds of them in your cup. We could not boil the water because all our matches had got wet. We wasted hundreds of them in trying to light a ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... his eyes to Clementina. "Still more fortunate to make it where we did. I suppose it must have been the singing that lured us on to the bank,—as, you know, the sirens used to lure people,—only with less disastrous consequences." ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... Kate was allowed to ask her friends to tea; but that proved a disastrous affair. Fanny was prevented from coming; and in the absence of her quiet elder-sisterly care, the spirits of Grace and Adelaide were so excited by Kate's drollery, that they were past all check from Mary, and drew her along with them ...
— Countess Kate • Charlotte M. Yonge
... said Jim, grinning, "but insanity's worse. Had the maddest ride of my life, Dad—my poor old Garryowen's absolutely cowed, and has no tail left to speak of!" He ducked to avoid a cushion from his sister. "It's a most disastrous experiment to keep Norah off a horse ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... bodily activity, was suddenly checked; the inevitable chill succeeded; and that, in its turn, was followed by a fever. For the first time since his birth, Mr. Idle found himself confined to his bed for many weeks together, wasted and worn by a long illness, of which his own disastrous muscular exertion had been the ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... hold to be decidedly of evil omen; so much so, that to affix it anywhere is to make the person or thing a mark for calamity. And I was told a curious list of instances corroborative of this opinion. The first year of the reign of Pius was marked by an unprecedented and disastrous flood. The Tiber rose so high in Rome, that it drowned the stone lions in the Piazza del Popolo, flooded the city, and filled the Corso to a depth that compelled the citizens to have recourse to ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... perhaps not so thoroughly have understood all the dubiousness of Maggie's appearance with Mr. Stephen Guest on the quay at Mudport if he had not witnessed the effect it produced on Tom when he went to report it; and since then, the circumstances which in any case gave a disastrous character to her elopement had passed beyond the more polite circles of St. Ogg's, and had become matter of common talk, accessible to the grooms and errand-boys. So that when he opened the door and saw Maggie standing before him in her sorrow and weariness, he had no questions to ask except ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... hazard which is guarding the green, and notice the very deliberate way in which he goes about doing the one thing that he has been told hundreds of times by the most experienced players can only be attended by the most disastrous and costly failure. He has made up his mind that he will scoop the ball over the bunker. He will not trust to his club to do this important piece of business. So down goes the right shoulder and into the bunker goes the ball, and one ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... force supplies To the weak body of the cavalier. His lady, during this, whose crimson dyes Were chased by dread, to Doralice drew near, And for the love of Heaven, the damsel wooed To stop that evil and disastrous feud. ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... come to the heart of the discussion. You want to know if there are cases where self-respecting women enter into irregular love affairs and never regret it? Is it possible for a woman to break the moral law without suffering disastrous consequences? Are there cases where a girl or a woman yields to the desperate cry of her soul for a mate without degradation and without loss of her self-respect? Can such things be? Do you want my honest opinion?' The ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... built up an enduring empire, and the danger of military success is that it is apt to confuse means and ends in the public mind, and to encourage the subordination of the civil to the military spirit in national institutions. Such a result could only be disastrous to the British Empire, and so, while rejoicing in the success of the British arms, it behoves us to oppose with all our strength the growth of the ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... Doubtless the disastrous effects would have been increased tenfold, if possible, by uprisings in other cities, which events showed were to follow. Even partial success developed hostile elements slumbering in various parts of the country, and running from Boston almost to ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... very disastrous for Sir Hugh and many of his companions. After sailing along the east coast of England and Scotland the three vessels crossed in company to Norway, the coast of which came in sight the 24/14th July in 66 deg. N.L. A landing was ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... 'it was a most disastrous consequence of carelessness. I had a friend, a good fellow, but not a bit of a sportsman, as sometimes occurs. Well, one day he said to me, "My dear friend, take me out shooting; I am curious to learn what this diversion consists in." I did not like, of course, to refuse a comrade; ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... night of the Petite Duchesse proved supremely disastrous to Nana. She was atrociously bad and displayed such pretentions toward high comedy that the public grew mirthful. They did not hiss—they were too amused. From a stage box Rose Mignon kept greeting her rival's successive entrances ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... trade we owe not only the neglect of agriculture, but, what is far worse, the demoralization of the community. It generates excessive competition, which of necessity generates fraud. Trade is turned to gambling; and a spirit of mad speculation exposes public and private interests to a disastrous instability. It is, then, no part of the philanthropy which would elevate the laboring body, to exempt them from manual toil. In truth, a wise philanthropy would, if possible, persuade all men of all conditions to mix up a measure of this toil with their other pursuits. The body ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... philosophy—toward a deification of the body, a faith in the fugitive allurement of the senses, and because of his earlier initiation he had taken Laura's intellectual radiance as the shining of a virtually disembodied spirit. His own senses had led him, he recognised now, to disastrous issues; his love for Connie had been the prompting of mere physical impulse, and he had emerged from it with a feeling of escaping into freedom. Too much Nature he had learned during those months of mental apathy is in its way quite as destructive ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... will still recollect the disastrous harvest of 1817: October was begun before harvest-work commenced at all; and, after it did commence, day after day the rain poured down as if the sky had been an ocean supported by a sieve. It was after an evening of storm and darkness had succeeded to one of ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... for instance, sacrifice will naturally be offered to the deity presiding over germination; that is the deity that might, perhaps, withdraw his favour with disastrous results. He commonly proves, however, a kindly and responsive being, and in offering to him a few sheaves of corn, some barley-cakes, or a libation from the vintage, the public is grateful rather than calculating; the sacrifice ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... out of the question what he did to get to Moscow, and whether in his advance he did not miss many opportunities of bringing the Emperor Alexander to peace; we shall also exclude all consideration of the disastrous circumstances which attended his retreat, and which perhaps had their origin in the general conduct of the campaign. Still the question remains the same, for however much more brilliant the course of the campaign up to Moscow might have been, still there was always ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... war! Domination of peoples or of women! Attempts to master and possess those who did not want you! The negation of gentle decency! Possession, vested rights; and anyone 'agin' 'em—outcast! 'Thank Heaven!' he thought, 'I always felt "agin" 'em, anyway!' Yes! Even before his first disastrous marriage he could remember fuming over the bludgeoning of Ireland, or the matrimonial suits of women trying to be free of men they loathed. Parsons would have it that freedom of soul and body were quite different things! Pernicious doctrine! Body and soul could ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... understood by the competent teacher who should not be mistaken in the nature of the organ or attempt by obstinate perseverance to convert a low voice into a high one, or vice versa. The error is equally disastrous, the result being utterly to destroy the voice. The teacher's vocation is first to find the natural limits of the voice in question and then seek to develop them into their most beautiful tone production before attempting to develop either higher or lower tones until these have been properly ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... standing in the dark mouth of the stone conduit leading from the Old Bailey to the dungeons of Newgate, by virtue of the high resolve we made, we conquered Fate at her worst, and by our act in establishing a secret bond of sympathy in our separation dropped the bad, disastrous past, and starting on new things planted our feet on the bottom round of the ladder of success, feeling that, with plenty of faith and endurance, Fortune, frown as she might now, must in some distant day turn ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... children had arrived at Jagborough Cove, so there had been no sands to play on—a circumstance that the aunt had overlooked in the haste of organising her punitive expedition. The tightness of Bobby's boots had had disastrous effect on his temper the whole of the afternoon, and altogether the children could not have been said to have enjoyed themselves. The aunt maintained the frozen muteness of one who has suffered undignified and unmerited detention in a rain- water tank for thirty-five minutes. As for ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... that time a young Virginian officer of only twenty-two, fired the first shot in what presently became the world-wide Seven Years' War. The immediate result was disastrous to the British arms; and Washington had to give up the command of the Ohio by surrendering Fort Necessity to the French on—of all dates—the 4th of July! In 1755 came Braddock's defeat. In 1756 Montcalm arrived in Canada and won his first victory at Oswego. In 1757 Wolfe distinguished ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... spot near the office and halted. His first impulse to rush after Sorenson had been promptly suppressed, as cooler judgment ruled. To seek his quarry in that throng would be labor wasted, while to reveal his identity would be to court a disastrous interference with the business at hand. From where he stood he should much better be able to see Sorenson when he did emerge, unless he chose to remain in the crowd or steal away at the rear of the court house yard, a chance Weir ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... the fourteenth century saw the death of the great and able king, Edward I., the "Hammer of the Scots," the "Keeper of his word." The century itself— a most eventful period— witnessed the feeble and disastrous reign of Edward II.; the long and prosperous rule— for fifty years— of Edward III.; the troubled times of Richard II., who exhibited almost a repetition of the faults of Edward II.; and the appearance of a new and powerful dynasty— the House of Lancaster— in the person of the ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... a short time to become acquainted with the routine of the new duty before he was summoned to participate in those tremendous events which have passed into history as at once the most brilliant and disastrous operations of the war; brilliant in that our gallant army was almost invariably victorious, disastrous in that they were the forerunners of the ultimate failure of a hopeful campaign. The victory at Fair Oaks had raised the hopes of that brave, ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... Points that Balance the Preparation with the Result. Nothing could be more disastrous than to promise with weighty preparation some event stupendously big with meaning and then to offer a weak little result. And it would be nearly as unfortunate to foreshadow a weak little fulfillment and then to present a tremendous ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... young man found himself again in the outer office, and shortly afterwards in the busy street, with a keen sense of frustration upon him. His first move in the direction of forming a company had been a disastrous failure; and thinking of this, he walked past the ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... example of the famous Comte de Sainte-Helene, while modifying all that was ill planned in Coignard's daring scheme. To take the place of an honest man and carry on the convict's career is a proposition of which the two terms are too contradictory for a disastrous outcome not to be inevitable, especially in Paris; for, by establishing himself in a family, a convict multiplies tenfold the perils of such a substitution. And to be safe from all investigation, must not ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... faith to one was plighted, Lord of fief and domain wide, Who, ere he went forth undaunted War's disastrous strife to bide, ...
— Indian Legends and Other Poems • Mary Gardiner Horsford
... This long and disastrous retreat was rendered a necessity as soon as Fort Henry, on the Tennessee river, was taken by the Federal forces, as this river was opened, and they could throw an army in the rear of the Confederates as far south ...
— Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army • William G. Stevenson
... direct rays of the sun in a beehouse. A hive standing alone, with a free circulation of air on every side, will not be seriously injured by the sun. But when the rays are intercepted by walls or boards, in the rear and on the sides, they are very disastrous. Other hints, such as clearing off occasionally, in all seasons except in the cold of winter, the bottom board, &c., are matters upon which we need not dwell. No cultivator would think of neglecting them. Let no one be alarmed at finding ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... struck with the romantic guise of the female cavalier, and this was the first onset of a veritable intoxication, which many men have felt, but which no man before or since ever invited the world to hear the story of. He may truly say that after the first interview with her in this disastrous spring, he was as one who had thirstily drained a poisoned bowl. A sort of palsy struck him. He lay weeping in his bed at night, and on days when he did not see the sorceress he wept in the woods.[269] ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... it against possible ambush, and, in combat patrols, ground scouts, and cossack outposts, charge with it "as foragers." But he did none of these things. For at Agawamsett he met Frances Gardner, and his experience with her was so disastrous that, in his determination to avoid all women, he was convinced ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... ever intended. A few believe him culpable, many think him misled, and many acquit him totally: but all agree, that any violation of his person would be an atrocity disgraceful to the nation at large.—The fate of Princes is often disastrous in proportion to their virtues. The vanity, selfishness, and bigotry of Louis the Fourteenth were flattered while he lived, and procured him the appellation of Great after his death. The greatest military ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... follows that the current rate of production in Germany has sunk to about 60 per cent of that of 1913. The effect on reserves has naturally been disastrous, and the prospects for the ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... the disastrous defeat of Sebastian I, King of Portugal, at Al-Kaor al-Kebir in August 1578, when Luis de Leon was more than fifty years of age. If these inferences are valid, it would follow that many of his original poems were not composed ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... him not to lose it in the cogs and chains of that elaborate machinery of scientific representation to which he had been apprenticed. A determination to free artists from utilitarian vision and the disastrous science of representation was the theoretic basis of that movement which is associated with ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... The result is disastrous to Philander, since it knocks him off his perch; but, scrambling to his feet again, he looks out in time to see that his shot has played havoc among the animals of the attacking force. Three are down, and their riders crawl from underneath, ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... of most disastrous chances, Of moving accidents, by flood and field; Of hair-breadth 'scapes ...
— Familiar Quotations • Various
... share of a very frugal breakfast, he carefully examined his rifle. Though he kept it clean of superfluous grease, there was some risk of the striker and magazine-slide freezing; and a missfire might prove disastrous. Glancing up between the branches, he noticed the low, dingy sky; although he thought it ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... invariably stereotyped, cut and dried. They thanked the Lord for the beautiful morning, for kind friends, for health, and family, and parsonage. Connie always prayed in sentences extracted from the prayers of others she had often heard, and every time with nearly disastrous effect. ...
— Prudence of the Parsonage • Ethel Hueston
... my idol falling, and hastened to assure him that the Comandante had built a boat a short time before, but the result was so disastrous that he never tried it again. The Presidio was in great need of repair and the government at Mexico had paid no heed to the constant requests for assistance, so Comandante Argueello had determined to take ...
— The Lure of San Francisco - A Romance Amid Old Landmarks • Elizabeth Gray Potter and Mabel Thayer Gray
... she is apt to refuse to answer her helm, and he who is steering her loses all control over her; she seems to be seized with a perverse determination to take a broad sheer one way or the other, with disastrous results, despite a hard-over helm, and then the only thing to be done to retrieve the situation is to effect a lightning shift of helm against all your past experience and your better judgment. But notwithstanding this, it generally has the desired effect, the reason commonly assigned ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... the bed of seas and the movements of water and of wind expose vast deposits of sand, which occupy space required for the convenience of man, and often, by the drifting of their particles, overwhelm the fields of human industry with invasions as disastrous as the incursions of the ocean. On the other hand, on many coasts, sand-hills both protect the shores from erosion by the waves and currents, and shelter valuable grounds from blasting sea-winds. Man, therefore, ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... rather pretty little American, had the misfortune to lose all her children at their birth; and her last confinement was so disastrous as to deprive her of the hope of any other. She therefore attached herself to the two little Mignons, whom Dumay himself loved, or would have loved, even better than his own children had they lived. Madame Dumay, whose parents were farmers accustomed to a life ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... in St. James's Park. The Canal was formed by Charles II. from several small ponds, and Rosamond's Pond was a sheet of water in the south-west corner of the Park, "long consecrated," as Warburton said, "to disastrous love and elegiac poetry." It is often mentioned as a place of assignation in Restoration plays. Evelyn (Diary, Dec. 1, 1662) describes the "scheets" used ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... jotting down his impressions in the Sistine Chapel, was reminded of the Grand Army's flight after the burning of Moscow. "When, in our disastrous retreat from Russia, it chanced that we were suddenly awakened in the middle of the dark night by an obstinate cannonading, which at each moment seemed to gain in nearness, then all the forces of a man's nature gathered ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... the ocean where it belongs. On certain parts of the coast it sometimes leans with all its weight against the land, and it is as much as the poor country can do to stand the pressure. Sometimes the dikes give way or spring a leak, and the most disastrous results ensue. They are high and wide, and the tops of some of them are covered with buildings and trees. They have even fine public roads on them, from which horses may look down upon wayside cottages. Often the keels of floating ships are higher than the ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... the deep magenta juice of the Ink-berry useful. Notwithstanding the poisonous properties of the root, in some sections the young shoots are boiled and eaten like asparagus, evidently with no disastrous consequences. ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... and her friend Mary superintended this troublesome affair, Lyndsay lost no time in writing to the steamboat company, informing them of his disastrous attempt to meet the Soho; and the loss he had incurred by missing the vessel. They stated in reply, that the boat had been wrecked at the mouth of the Thames, in the gale; and that another boat would supply her place on the Sunday following; that she would ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... well deserve, They only wonder "some folks" do not starve! The grave, sage hern thus easy picks his frog, And thinks the mallard a sad worthless dog. When disappointment snaps the thread of Hope, When, thro' disastrous night, they darkling grope, With deaf endurance sluggishly they bear, And just conclude that "fools are Fortune's care:" So, heavy, passive to the tempest's shocks, Strong on the ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... laboriously smashed. It was heroic labor—sometimes they spent an hour making sixty yards—and Lisle's face grew anxious as well as determined. Game had been very scarce; the deer would not last them long; and disastrous results might follow a continuance of their present slow progress. When, utterly worn out, they made camp on slightly firmer ground toward four o'clock in the afternoon, Lisle strode off heavily toward the bordering hills, while Jake pushed on ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... not to tempt the sword! I warn'd thee, but in vain; for well I knew What perils youthful ardor would pursue, That boiling blood would carry thee too far, Young as thou wert in dangers, raw to war! O curst essay of arms, disastrous doom, Prelude of bloody fields, and fights to come! Hard elements of unauspicious war, Vain vows to Heav'n, and unavailing care! Thrice happy thou, dear partner of my bed, Whose holy soul the stroke of Fortune fled, Praescious of ills, and leaving me ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... benignitate excitavit." Vit. Rob. Cottoni, p. xxiv., prefixed to the Catalogus Librorum Manuscriptorum Bibl. Cott., 1696, folio. Sir Robert was, however, doomed to have the evening of his life clouded by one of those crooked and disastrous events, of which it is now impossible to trace the correct cause, or affix the degree of ignominy attached to it, on the head of its proper author. Human nature has few blacker instances of turpitude on record than that ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... to be incapable of doing anything to advance his own fortunes. The de la Barcas had once possessed great wealth in land in the country, and, I have heard, descended from an ancient noble family of Spain. During the long, disastrous wars this country has suffered, when it was conquered in turn by England, Portugal, Spain, Brazil, and the Argentines, the family became impoverished, and at last appeared to be dying out. The last of the de la Barcas was Basilio, ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... and it rejoiced me to observe, that those whom but a few minutes before I had looked upon as destined to be the perpetrators of my ruin, and very possibly of my death, were now themselves thrown into a dilemma nearly equally disastrous with the one from which I was ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... very successful if, all of a sudden, one of the rowers had not "caught a crab" with disastrous consequences. The oars were not moving, but a veteran, who looked very much like Joe, dropped the one he held, and in trying to turn and pummel the black-eyed warrior behind him, he tumbled off his seat, upsetting two other men, and pulling the painted boat upon them ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... generally directed. But the unit of society in a republic is the individual, and not the race, the failure to recognize this fact being the fundamental error which has beclouded the whole discussion. The effect of disfranchisement upon the individual is scarcely less disastrous. I do not speak of the moral effect of injustice upon those who suffer from it; I refer rather to the practical consequences which may be appreciated by any mind. No country is free in which the ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.
... the settlement of the Levine estate was completed. John's method of "shoestringing" his property was disastrous as far as the size of Lydia's heritage went. Her father tried to make her understand the statement of the Second National Bank, which was acting as executor. And as nearly as Lydia could understand, one portion of the estate ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... was passed in bitter poverty; her first marriage was disastrous, and when joy came at last in an ideal second marriage it was shattered by her husband's mysterious death. Yes; he was drowned; found drowned in the lake on their estate in Germany. Mercedes has never been there since. She has never recovered. She is a broken-hearted woman. She sees life ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... disembarked, and he was delighted when he was again able to join his squadron. Spies came and went daily, and they were unanimous in saying that Osman would fight another battle. The news that El-Teb was a disastrous defeat was by this time known, but his explanation that the misfortunes were solely due to his orders having been disobeyed, perfectly satisfied his followers, and their belief that he was invincible ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... neighbours, by the absence of any Poor Law in France such as we have in England. In the cases of drought, when the crops did not ripen; or in the phylloxera blights, when the grapes were ruined; or in the occasional disastrous floods, when the whole of the agricultural produce was swept away; the small farmers and labourers were reduced to great distress. The French peasant is usually very thrifty; but where accumulated savings were not available for relief, the result, ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... summoned his nephew, Gratian, to his assistance; but before the emperor of the west arrived, he imprudently engaged the Goths near Adrianople, and with the greater part of his army fell on the field. 19. This was the most disastrous defeat which the Romans had sustained for several centuries; and there was reason to dread that it would encourage a revolt of the Gothic slaves in the eastern provinces, which must terminate in the ruin of the empire. To prevent ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... by the fancy and hope of being the saviours of men! It is natural to goodness and innocence, but not the less is the error a disastrous one. There ought surely at least to be of success some probability as well founded as rare, to justify the sacrifices involved. Is it well that a life of supreme suffering should be gone through for nothing but an increase of guilt? It will be said that patience reaps its reward; ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... whole, we look back to the weeks at Achiet as a period of solid training, plenty of "Spit and Polish," but "lots of fun." On the 1st of August we got word of the big offensive at Ypres amidst all that disastrous rain, and we expected to move up there any day. It was not until three weeks later, however, that we did move, and then it was known definitely that we were for Flanders. The battalion marched down to Aveluy, near Albert, on an enervatingly hot day and remained ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... at all, not many days ago, after my Wife's return hither. Consider what kind of fact this was and has been for us! For now, if all have gone right, you are approaching the coast of England; Chelsea and your fraternal House hidden under a disastrous cloud to you; and I know not so much as whitherward to write, and send you a word of solution. It is one of the most unpleasant mistakes that ever befell me; I have no resource but to enclose this Note to Mr. Ireland, and charge him by the strongest adjurations to have it ready for you the first ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... us to skip our fill, "Well knowing that no one's the more in advance "On the road to heaven, for standing still. "Oh! it never was meant that grim grimaces "Should sour the cream of a creed of love; "Or that fellows with long, disastrous faces, "Alone should sit among cherubs above. "Then ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... tablets which he produced were "written with the finger of God"; wherefore, as they must have been written by himself, or under his personal supervision, he brazenly and deliberately lied. His good faith was obviously suspected, and this suspicion caused disastrous results. To support his lie Moses caused three thousand unsuspecting and trusting men to be murdered in cold blood, whose only crime was that they would have preferred another leadership to his, and because, had they ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... and policy, Man's tendencies, his aims and modes of pursuing them, his individual character, and his character in the mass, may be studied almost as well here as on the theatre of nations; and with this great advantage, that, be the lesson ever so disastrous, its Liliputian scope still ...
— The Sister Years (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the rapacity combined with unscrupulousness and ingenuity displayed during that fateful period by dishonest individuals, and left unpunished by the state. Doubtless France was not the only country in which greed was insatiable and its manifestations disastrous. From other parts of the Continent there also came bitter complaints of the ruthlessness of profiteers, and in Italy their heartless vampirism contributed materially to the revolutionary outbreaks ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... Charles VI. of France, disastrous in the extreme to the material welfare of his own subjects, full of untold misery to the poor, and of oppression to the growing community of artisans and traders, was nevertheless, as regards literature and the arts, a period of progress and even splendour. The King's incapacity, by affording ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... smothered under the scenic delicacies brought into fashion by Behzad. If the Timourid age is to be dubbed the Persian quattrocento, Mr. Ruck's man will pass muster as the counterpart of some artist older than Raphael, who worked independently of the young prodigy unaffected by his ultimately disastrous inventions. ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... devastated—there is no other word for it—my modest array of pots. Hardly was a blossom out, when the ardent Megachiles came and scalloped it into crescents. The colour was indifferent to her: red, white or pink, all the petals underwent the disastrous operation. A few captures, ancient relics of my collecting-boxes by this time, indemnified me for the pillage. I have not seen this unpleasant Bee since. With what does she build when there are no geranium-flowers handy? I do not know; ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... break the child's will has long been recognized as disastrous by all educators. A broken will is worse misfortune than a broken back. In the latter case the man is physically crippled; in the former, he is morally crippled. It is only a strong, unbroken, persistent will that is adequate to achieve self-mastery, and mastery of the difficulties ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... determined. It must break up. Sooner or later, there must be a secession more or less discrediting and disabling those who remained. And so the break-up came, and yet, so well grounded and so congenial to the English Church were the leading principles of the movement, that not even that disastrous and apparently hopeless wreck prevented them from again asserting their claim and becoming once more active and powerful. The Via Media, whether or not logically consistent, was a thing of genuine English growth, and was at ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... Edinburgh and the exhibition of her well-known sympathy with the views of Sir George Grey—who, had he been allowed a free hand, would have consolidated and united those regions many years ago and averted the recent disastrous struggle. ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... King in the winds' track they sped. As when a hunter mid the forest-brakes Is by a boar or grim-jawed lion slain, And now his sorrowing friends take up the corse, And bear it heavy-hearted; and the hounds Follow low-whimpering, pining for their lord In that disastrous hunting lost; so they Left far behind that stricken field of blood, And fast they followed after those ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... what I've been through! It came near preventing us from discovering that you're not a grand lady but a human being." His mood veered, and it was he that was gay and she glum; for he suddenly seized her and subjected her to one of those tumultuous ordeals so disastrous to toilette and to dignity and to her sense of personal rights. Not that she altogether disliked; she never had altogether disliked, had found a certain thrill in his rude riotousness. Still, she preferred the other Joshua Craig, HER Joshua, who wished to ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... Valreas—to my place in Poitou for the shooting season. They were to come in the first part of October, and it needed a week to put all in order at Roche-Targe. A letter from my overseer awaited me in Paris, and the letter brought disastrous news; the dogs were well, but out of the dozen hunting horses that I had there, five, during my sojourn at Baden, had fallen sick or lame, and I found myself absolutely forced to ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... What's the use, one may ask, of our worrying our heads, inventing, rising above the hackneyed thing, feeling for the workmen, stealing or not stealing, when we know that this railway line will turn to dust within two thousand years, and so on, and so on. . . . You must admit that with such a disastrous way of looking at things there can be no progress, no science, no art, nor even thought itself. We fancy that we are cleverer than the crowd, and than Shakespeare. In reality our thinking leads to nothing because ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... do not think that we have been too cautious. We who are so accused, can point to the disastrous results of following the advice of commercially interested persons, results which have had much to do with retarding and discouraging nut planting and counteracting the labors ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... tried the descent through the canyons since our voyage. Some have been successful, some sadly disastrous. The river is always a new problem in its details, though the ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... was disastrous. In his efforts to ingratiate himself with Columbus' enemies he heaped favors on Roldan and his followers and gave them franchises and lands. He made the slavery of the Indians more galling than ever, obliging them to labor in the fields and mines. Columbus' ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... Some of the Rationalists were John-like in all they did, save when they discussed the holy truths of inspiration. Then they were possessed by the evil spirit. Nowhere can we find a more deplorable example of the disastrous effects of a false creed on the human character. It is an infallible law of our nature that the mind, not less than the body, becomes depraved by an impure diet. Many persons have been permanently injured by reading the Briefe ueber den Rationalismus, and other ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... man. "He engaged in the boldest operations, risking all to obtain all. He took the field in person, and having stormed Mirandola, he pressed into the city across the frozen ditches and through the breach; the most disastrous reverses could not shake his purpose, but rather seemed to waken new resources in him." "He wrested Perugia and Bologna from their lords. As the powerful state of Venice refused to surrender her conquests, he resolved ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... that is, in the eyes of the world, an indolent one, is often a great sacrifice, and even on that account, if not essentially, valuable. Philanthropy is generally distressing, often offensive, sometimes disastrous. ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... that which belongs to married men, in respect of their own wives; to whose estate, as no sweetness, pleasure, happiness can be compared in the world, if they live quietly and lovingly together; so if they disagree or be jealous, those bitter pills of sorrow and grief, disastrous mischiefs, mischances, tortures, gripings, discontents, are not to be separated from them. A most violent passion it is where it taketh place, an unspeakable torment, a hellish torture, an infernal plague, as Ariosto calls it, "a fury, a continual fever, full of suspicion, fear, and ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... arsenal workshops at Sebastopol. It would, no doubt, have been a delightful trip, but it was not to be. The unfortunate disruption occurred between our Government and that of Russia, which culminated in the disastrous Crimean War. One of the first victims was Admiral Kornileff. He was killed by one of our first shots while engaged in placing some guns for the defence of the entrance to ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... official European, and constitutionally too averse to resistance, to do aught but suffer in silence. No doubt he feels his wrongs most keenly, and a sullen feeling of hate and wrong is being garnered up, which may produce results disastrous for the peace and wellbeing of our ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... Had she not taught the entire village to break the Sabbath? Had she not made all its children either sick or cross under the pretence of giving them a treat? On the Monday she did something else that was equally well-meaning, and yet, as I shall presently relate, of disastrous consequences: she went round the village from cottage to cottage making friends with the children's mothers and leaving behind her, wherever she went, little presents of money. She had found money so extraordinarily efficacious in the comforting of Mrs. Jones ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... be seen that to the Solid South were added, California, Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, New Jersey, New York, West Virginia, and Wisconsin; while Mr. Cleveland obtained one electoral vote in Ohio, and five in Michigan. The result was certainly disastrous, and left no doubt that the people at large for the time being had rebuked the Republican party for what they wrongly supposed to be against their best interests. And yet, though a large majority of the people had voted for Mr. Cleveland, they were probably ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... had a rather depressing speech from Mr. MCCURDY. His policy had been gradually to remove all food-controls and leave prices to find their own proper (and, it was hoped, lower) level. But in most cases the result had been disastrous, and the Government had decided that control must continue. Sir F. BANBURY complained of the conflict of jurisdiction between the Departments. It certainly does seem unfair that the FOOD-CONTROLLER ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 12, 1920 • Various
... consistent and appropriate. But no sooner did Veronica's bright eyes appear than he fell at the young heiress' feet and pressed his suit so close and fast that in two months they were engaged and at the end of the half-year, married—with the disastrous ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... circumstances, said to have since occurred in the chateau, had so much shocked her spirits, that she now sunk, for a moment, under the weakness of superstition. The sounds, however, did not return, and she retired, to forget in sleep the disastrous story she had heard. ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... before her, the matter seemed trivial and unimportant. She caught the Rocking-R horse without much trouble and led him back to a broad, flat boulder on which Buck had managed to crawl. Obliged to hold the animal, whose slightest movement might prove disastrous, she could give no further aid, but was forced to stand helpless, watching with troubled, sympathetic eyes the man's painful struggles to gain the saddle. When at last he succeeded and slumped there, mouth twisted and face bathed in perspiration, ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... sufficient strength to stagger to her feet, "he's done a lot, hasn't he?" And then forgetting that her original adventure with Jimmy which had brought about such disastrous results was still unknown to Aggie and Alfred, she concluded bitterly, "All this would never have happened, if it hadn't been for Jimmy and ...
— Baby Mine • Margaret Mayo
... to brave the dangers of the deep for many years, can understand what its perils really are. Unfortunately, as the reader knows, these are so great and frequent, that to describe a wreck is but to take one of many which have been still more sad and disastrous. But as the wreck of the "Forfarshire" deserves especial mention, because of the heroic conduct of the lighthouse-girl, it will be necessary that we should become acquainted with as many of its ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... comp. L'Alleg. 112, "whose bright eyes Rain influence"; Par. Lost, iv. 669, "with kindly heat Of various influence." Astrology has left many traces upon the English language, e.g. influence, disastrous, ill-starred, ascendant, etc. See ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... we have another disastrous example of the Allied policy of allowing a disputed zone to be occupied ad interim solely by the troops of one interested country. The chronic state of war which followed the landing of the Greeks at Smyrna, the atrocities, the charges and the counter-charges, were investigated ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
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