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More "Distract" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... O wretched piety, that art so distract In thine owne constancie, and in thy right Must be unrighteous. If I right my friend, I wrong my husband; if his wrong I shunne, 170 The duty of my friend I leave undone. Ill playes on both sides; here and there it riseth; No place, no good, ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... been her head-gear on Sundays and important occasions, but to this the old lady positively objected. She was not going on a mere visit of state or ceremony; her visit at Midbranch would require her whole attention, and she did not wish to distract her mind by wondering whether her bonnet was straight on her head or not, and she was so unaccustomed to the feel of it that she would never know if it got turned hind part foremost. She could never be at her ease, nor ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... from Hedgeville he would know her. Everyone knew the girl at Hoovers', whose father and mother had deserted her. Bessie had long been one of the most interesting people in town to the farmers and the villagers, who had little to distract or ...
— A Campfire Girl's First Council Fire - The Camp Fire Girls In the Woods • Jane L. Stewart
... be together! That very sweet girl, Miss Murray, was so much distressed about her brother to- day,—something was the matter with him—a touch of fever, I believe,—that she begged me to let Fulke dine with them in order to distract Mr. Denzil's mind. Fulke is a dear boy, you know—very consoling in his ways, though he says so little. Then Mr. Courtney volunteered to join them, and there they are. The Chetwynd Lyles are gone to a big dinner at ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... regarding the railroad were being carried on, another matter arose to irritate Mr. McKettrick, and, in some measure, to take the keen edge off his attention. Scattergood usually endeavored to have some matter arise to irritate and distract when he was engaged on a major operation, and it was for this reason he had bought the four strips of ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... its awful port assumes, And in the tempest shake thy crimson plumes, I mark thy lofty mien, thy steady eye, So fall thy foes! with tears of joy I cry. But ne'er may Anarchy, with eyes a-flame, And mien distract, assume thy awful name; Her pale torch sheds afar its hideous glare, And shows the blood-drops in her dabbled hair; 90 The fiends of discord hear her hollow voice, The spirits of the deathful storm rejoice: As when the rising blast with muttering sweep Sounds 'mid the branches of the ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... dissipate, emit, put forth, shoot forth, disgorge, distract, exude, radiate, throw off, disperse, eject, give up, send ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... lover? Fault have I none save poverty; so, by Allah, I am resolved to remove me from this region and wander over the wild and the word; for my position in this city is a torture and I have no friend nor lover therein to comfort me; wherefore I am determined to distract myself by absence from my native land till I die and take my rest after this shame and tribulation." And he began to improvise and recited ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... apparently indifferent to Larkin's collapse, began to dance a jig behind the bar. A look of scowling reproach instantly appeared on Sonora's face. It was uncalled-for since, far from being heartless and indifferent to the man's misfortunes, the little barkeeper had taken this means to distract the miners' attention ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... emotions obtained yet more powerful dominion; again did remorse distract him, and there were moments of darkness, when his spirit questioned the justice of the Creator. Why was not his crime visited on his own head? Why did the guiltless and unstained fall thus around him, and he remain unharmed? and it needed all the eloquence of Nigel, the pious reasonings of the ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... got with your "Nibelungen"? It will be a great joy to me to grasp your creation through your immediate aid. For heaven's sake, let nothing distract you from this, and continue to weld ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... Drama, abhors lengthiness; like the Drama, it must be kept doing. It avoids, as frigid, prolonged metaphysical soliloquy. Beauties themselves, if they delay or distract the effect which should be produced ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... says, because it saves him from hearing a lot of things he doesn't wish to hear. "It is like this," he once said to me: "deafness gives you a needed isolation; reduces your sensitiveness so things do not disturb or distract; allows you to concentrate and focus on a thought until you run ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... your windows, always take care to have them well up, when they are not being used. A little piece slipping down, and flapping with every draught, will distract a patient. ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... of bread, and laxness of principle brought down the old republics, so also ours may fall. Although the outward in this painting, and the classical, is wrought to as fine a point as in any French picture, it is so subordinate to the severity of the thought, that while it pleases it does not distract. ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... again to herself in her solitude at Grenoble, that these politicians, at least, owed her divorce, Vaudrey, not knowing what to do after a weary day of troubled rest, mechanically entered the Opera House to distract his ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... planning a new war. He aimed at the final destruction of the Hsiung-nu, so that access to central Asia should no longer be precarious and it should thus be possible to reduce the expense of the military administration of Turkestan. The war would also distract popular attention from the troubles at home. By way of preparation for war, Wang Mang sent a mission to the Hsiung-nu with dishonouring proposals, including changes in the name of the Hsiung-nu and in the title of the shan-yue. The name Hsiung-nu was ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... turned in early, tired out, and scarcely had we rolled ourselves in our blankets when a dismal howl made us "say things," and in half an hour all the dingoes in North Queensland seemed to have gathered around the camp to distract us. The noise they made was something diabolical, coming from both sides of the creek, and from the ranges. In reality there were not more than five or six at the outside, but any one would imagine that there were droves of them. Not liking to discharge our guns on account of C———'s mustering, ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... read the Psalms for the day, and one sermon in Clark. Scruples distract me, but at church I had hopes to ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... had been taken from her since she had been forbidden to see her mother and sister. The present was dreary, the future nothing but gloom and apprehension, and she had little to distract her attention. She strove hard to fulfil what she knew were duties, her household concerns and the readings she had fixed as tasks; but these over, she did not try to rouse her mind from her cares; nor ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... deity more real to the worshiper, to make the latter more sharply conscious of the divine presence, to fix the attention, and so far to further a real communion. On the other hand, it tended to produce a low physical conception of the divine person, and to distract the mind of the worshiper from the ethical side of worship. Its moral effect was dependent on the man's character and thought. When the image was regarded as the symbol of an ethically good Power, it was a reenforcement of pure religious feeling; ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... like the rest.—Here a slight shrug of the shoulders and curl of the lip contradicted her words,—yet, with a tone of rigid determination, she added, that it was also best she should cherish no tastes and form no associations which might distract her imagination and further turn her heart from this virtuous resolution; and therefore must she say farewell, firmly and finally, to the, she doubted not, most worthy gentleman who had done her the honor to entertain ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... lady of his love. But however she came back it would be she, the Beloved. He felt exultantly how little, after all, the frame mattered. Last time he had found her, his love had been set in the sunshine and the splendor of the Alpine snows, with nothing to jar, nothing to distract it from itself. And that was good. To-day, it was opening, a sudden and wonderful bloom, in the midst of the murky discomfort of an English November, the droning hum of the machinery of his daily work. And this, ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... had had nothing to distract his attention, he might have thought too much about his handsome partner, and then gone home and dreamed about her, which is always dangerous, and waked up thinking of her still, and then begun to be deeply interested in her studies, and so on, through the whole syllogism which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... had engaged a box for the season, and the girls attended nearly every matinee performance. The first few times Patty could scarcely listen to the music for her admiration of the wonderful building, but after she became more accustomed to its glories, it did not so distract her attention from the stage. Mr. and Mrs. Farrington occasionally gave opera parties, and dinner parties, too, but the girls were not allowed to attend these. Although indulgent in many ways, Mrs. Farrington was somewhat strict about the conventions for her ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells
... islanders was edifying, the costumes worn by these strange converts were such as somewhat to distract the attention of the visitors. A black coat or the waistcoat of an English uniform was the only garment worn by some, whilst others contented themselves with a jacket, a shirt, or a pair of trousers. The most fortunate were wrapped in cloth mantles, and rich and poor ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... most good it is for us and for you to think upon it; so far as our words suit the current of your own thoughts, use them and listen to them; so far as they are a too unworthy expression of what we ought to think and feel, follow your own reflections, and let the words neither offend you nor distract you. ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... It would distract us from our purpose to give a full description of the grievances of the Spanish colonies in America. They were justified and it is useless to try to defend Spain. Granting that Spain carried out a wonderful work of civilization in the American continent, and that she is entitled to ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... were both nice girls, accomplished, well-dressed of course, and well enough looking; but they had met no one at the seaside or the mountains whom their taste would allow to influence their fate, and they had come home to the occupations they had left, with no hopes and no fears to distract them. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... and never mingle with its waters. Not for our use is that intricate mind which in logic needs more than two premises to a conclusion, and in art is intolerant of all void space, entangling its figures in labyrinths of ornament which Maya herself might have devised to distract the ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... genius, it is written: 'Almost any worldly state in which a man can be placed is a hinderance to him, if he have other than mere worldly things to do. Poverty, wealth, many duties, or many affairs, distract and confuse him.' One sentence more is all that can be added here; and if it seems to be suggested by an aphorism of Bacon, it is equal to it in pith and penetration:—'Every felicity, as well as wife and children, is a ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... we go into the woods in the spring, our self-consciousness leaves us and we speedily make ourselves at home. We take things for granted, and are not careful about trifles. A great many things are going on, but the multiplicity does not distract us. We do not ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... pierced by her yearning still. Nor tender willows, nor dew-quickened grass, Nor the loved streams that glide along low banks, Can lure her mind and turn the sudden pain; Nor other shapes of calves that graze thereby Distract her mind or lighten pain the least— So keen her search for something known and hers. Moreover, tender kids with bleating throats Do know their horned dams, and butting lambs The flocks of sheep, and thus they patter on, Unfailingly each to its proper teat, As nature intends. Lastly, with any grain, ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... characteristick consists in an increase of the force and fullness."—Ib., p. 71. "The character of this opening fulness and feebler vanish."—Ib., p. 31. "Who, in the fullness of unequalled power, would not believe himself the favourite of heaven?"—Ib., p. 181. "They marr one another, and distract him."—Philological Museum, Vol. i, p. 433. "Let a deaf worshipper of antiquity and an English prosodist settle this."—Rush, on the Voice, p. 140. "This phillipic gave rise to my satirical reply in self-defence."— Merchant's Criticisms. "We here saw no inuendoes, no new sophistry, no ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... her had suddenly vanished before the accumulation of adverse facts. Again she collapsed, withdrawn into a sort of silent meditation from which Hortense's affectionate attentions were unable to distract her. ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... main branches along trellises to a length of 50 and even 60 feet, so as to give the sap the longest possible distance to travel; and, further, for the purpose of concentrating into the fruit the whole result of the wine, all the buds and little shoots, which would distract therefrom, are carefully taken away. This gives to the vine a very curious look, but it serves well to illustrate how greatly wines differ as to whether they require short or long pruning. It also helps to a better understanding of the two main styles of training the ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... it was soon discovered that the change was almost confined to forms of practice, and that the essentials of abuse were likely to be carefully preserved. All these, and other arguments, artfully modified to distract the people, were urged by the new bishops in the Netherlands, and by those whom they employed to arrest the ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... piece of paper, and with his pencil commences figuring upon it. He wants to get at the cost of free and slave labour, and the relative advantages of the one over the other. After a deal of multiplying and subtracting, he gives it up in despair. The fine proportions of the youth before him distract his very brain with contemplation. He won't bother another minute; figures are only confusions: so far as using them to compute the relative value of free and slave labour, they are enough to make ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... allowed himself to be persuaded; he was taken to the hospital, and Esther remained at home waiting for the fateful afternoon. Now that the dying man was taken from her she had no work to distract her thought. The unanswerable question—would Chasuble win?—was always before her. She saw the slender greyhound creatures as she had seen them at Epsom, through a sea of heads and hats, and she asked herself if Chasuble was the brown horse that had galloped ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... this is the foundation of all."[76] The senses and the memory, which collect and store up facts, must be assisted; there must be a ministration of the senses and another of the memory. For not only are instances required, but these must be arranged in such a manner as not to distract or confuse the mind, i.e. tables and arrangements of instances must be constructed. In the preliminary collection the greatest care must be taken that the mind be absolutely free from preconceived ideas; nature is only to be conquered by obedience; man must ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... be especially taken care of, that, the body being then in a ferment and disturbed, no cares of the soul, no business about necessary affairs, no labor, should distract and seize it, lest they should corrupt and sour its humors, Nature not having had time enough for settling what has been disturbed. For, sir, all men have not the command of that happy ease and tranquillity which Epicurus's ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another; foments, occasionally, riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which ...
— Key-Notes of American Liberty • Various
... cherished a rather hopeless inclination for Henry; now that he had lost that bold girl, she tremulously assured herself, perhaps it was not quite so hopeless. Laura, too, had an idea that such might possibly be the case, and hoping at least to distract her brother, about whom she was becoming quite anxious, she had Ida over to tea once or twice, and, by various other devices which with a clever woman are matters of course, managed to ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... last month you have fortunately had so much to distract your thoughts that you have not had time to dwell upon your loss. Moreover, you have needed all your strength and your energy for your search for your sister, and right sure am I that your father, who was as sensible as he was wise—and the two things do not always go together—would be far ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... engaged I did all in my power to distract Gwen's attention, as much as possible, from her father's body. Whenever she regarded it, the same intense and set expression overspread her countenance as that which at first had alarmed me. I was glad when Maitland returned from the window and began mixing some of the chemicals I had brought him, ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... that the men were all right, but the system all wrong; and that the proper thing was to adopt SULTAN OMAR'S plan, and give the supreme control of the War to a Cabinet of not more than four members, who with no administrative details to distract them might be able to "teach the doubtful battle where ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 23, 1916 • Various
... worthy contemplations of the means to procure it." In 1612 a new edition of the Essays appeared, with additions surpassing the original collection both in bulk and quality. Nor did these pursuits distract Bacon's attention from a work the most arduous, the most glorious, and the most useful that even his mighty powers could have achieved, "the reducing and recompiling," to use his own phrase, "of the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... imperfect representations of our actors and affairs, that you suppose our dissensions owing to French intrigues—we want no foreign causes; but in so precarious a letter as this I cannot enter into farther explanations; indeed the French need not be at any trouble to distract ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... three poor helpless infants? If they were a little more grown up, they might be helpful to me and to each other; but at their age how shall I ever rear them without the tenderness of a mother? And to see them pine away before my face, and not know how to help them, will distract me. ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... her eyes dilated. Actress that she is, she could control her muscles; but she could not control the beating of the blood in her brain. I felt that she was conscious of this betrayal, under the gaze of the policeman, and she laughed to distract his attention. My heart ached for her. I thought of a meadow-lark manoeuvering to hide the place where her nest lies. Poor, beautiful Maxine! In spite of her pride, her high courage, the veneer of hardness which her experience of the world had given, she was infinitely ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... was then, as it is now, the greatest military position on the Atlantic coast of the United States; and although the two could not communicate by land, they did support each other as naval stations in a war essentially dependent upon maritime power. Philadelphia served no purpose but to divide and distract British enterprise. Absolutely dependent for maintenance upon the sea, the forces in it and in New York could not cooeperate; they could not even unite except by sea. When Clinton relieved Howe as commander-in-chief, though less than a hundred miles away by land, he had to take a voyage ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... northward along the uninteresting streets beyond. At this moment, it occurred to me that Godfrey was behaving singularly as though he were hastening to keep an appointment; but I judged it best not to distract his attention from the street before us, and restrained the question ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... preferable to any public hearing. I never heard Grieg play at a concert, but I am sure that the hour I sat near him in his Bergen home, while he played and his wife sang, gave me a better appreciation of his skill as an interpreter than I could have got in a public hall with an audience to distract his attention. One afternoon I called on Saint-Saens at his hotel after one of his concerts in New York. Talking about it, he sat down at the piano, ran over his Valse Canariote, and said: 'That's the way I ought to have ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... tutor had to spend half his time in chasing her to rescue his hat, a book, an ink-bottle, or some other article which she threatened to destroy; and, sometimes she was so depressed that he had to give up trying to teach her, and just do his best to distract her. In her eighth year she was able to follow the church-service in the prayer-book, and make out the hymns, but that ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... to trials and vicissitudes and endowed with the same wishes, (for the observation, "there is no sex to soul," is certainly not untrue,) condemned, perhaps, to a succession of arduous though minute duties in which, oftentimes, there is nothing to charm and little to distract, unless she be allowed the exercise of her pen must fall into melancholy and despair, and perish, (to use the language of Mad. de Stael,) "consumed by ...
— Zophiel - A Poem • Maria Gowen Brooks
... me know what it is; come, don't distract yourself alone; let me bear a share of your grief, as well as I ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... the last analysis, Melanchthon, by reason of his deviations from Luther, which will be set forth more fully in the following, was the ultimate cause and originator of most of the dissensions which began to distract the Lutheran Church soon after the death of Luther. Andrew Musculus, who assisted in drafting the Formula of Concord, brought out this fact (though in terms too strong) when he characterized Melanchthon as a "philosophical theologian and a patriarch of all ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... was more anxious and doubtful than he had ever been. He hesitated a moment, and then requested that after we took our places the audience should preserve absolute silence, and refrain from even the slightest movement until the feat was over. The merest trifle might distract the attention of the performers and render their eyes and hold unsteady, he said. He left the stage, and the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... top buttons under your vest without anybody noticing that you're going to make a fresh start. This is a form of politeness that is necessary lest you alarm your host. Always do it that way, and in the meantime, if you can think of one, tell a funny story. It serves to distract attention from what you're doing, which is the success of all card tricks, sleight-of-hand performances, and getting a tummy full. Also that is probably the reason why napkins are worn in the lap instead of in the neckband of your collar. Incidentally I see ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... pictures are the thing. This, indeed, is a perfectly ponderable theory. But it may be questioned whether in its ardour it does not go a little far. For it affirms that people are a confounded nuisance at art exhibitions, and should not be permitted to be there, to distract one's attention from the peaceful contemplation of works of art, and to infuriate one by their asinine remarks in the holy presence of beauty. I have heard it declared with very impressive spirit, and reasoned with much force, that only one person, or at most only one person and his ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... and helped him with his work so that he had to think how much stronger she was. She evidently wished to take away from him all rights as master of the house. Sometimes she pretended to be very lively, to distract him and to prevent him from brooding. He had not done anything to carry out his plan, but she did not believe that ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... I must confess that I have but a very confused recollection. Many things conspired to distract my attention. Whether it was that my disappointment at not seeing Berenice indisposed me to be pleased, or whether the chanting was not this day, or at this synagogue, as fine as usual, it certainly did not answer my expectations. However ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... till she finds him, and there the first time he opens his eyes is that sweet, quaint piece of innocence leaning over him. He is shut up with her for ten days or so; she is as graceful as a sylph, and has a tender sort of baby face that's enough to distract a man, and I don't see how he could possibly leave that vessel without being in love with her, unless some other woman had already got hold of his heart. No, even if St. George did not know himself that he cared for her, he ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... ruyne must affryghte you You have not flynte enoughe to arme your soule Agaynst compassyon; & that kylls a souldior. Let me have roame to breathe at lardge my woes And talke alone, least the proceedinge ayre That easeth me beget in you a payne. Leave me, pray leave me: my rude vyolence Will halfe distract your spyrrytts, my sadd speeche Like such a noyse as drownds all other noyse Will so afflyct your thoughts & cares on me That all your care besyde must be neglected. My tyme of patyence ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... flatteries and compliments, this is an agreeable pastime: for you, it is a life-and-death struggle; all is hazarded on the one throw. For it will of course occur to you, that if you are rejected at the first trial, you will never pass current with any one else. A thousand different feelings now distract you. You are jealous of your rivals (for we will assume that there is competition for the post); you are dissatisfied with your own replies; you hope; you fear; you cannot remove your eye from the countenance of your judge. Does he pooh-pooh your efforts? You are a lost man. Was that a smile? ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... there is no such thing as nigger archaeology; for which let us be thankful. Here, at any rate, are no great names to scare us into dishonest admiration. Here is no question of dates and schools to give the lecturer his chance of spoiling our pleasure. Here is nothing to distract our attention from the one thing that matters—aesthetic significance. Here is nigger sculpture: you may like it or dislike it, but at any rate you have no inducement to judge it ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... the street, distract and insensate with grief and madness. I found the city seething with sullen unrest—not yet openly hostile to the powers that abode in the Castle of the Wolfsberg—too long cowed and down-trodden for that, but angry with the ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... new dreams affright My lab'ring soul! what visions of the night Disturb my quiet, and distract my breast With strange ideas of our Trojan guest! His worth, his actions, and majestic air, A man descended from the gods declare. Fear ever argues a degenerate kind; His birth is well asserted by ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... "In order to distract the country's attention from internal dissensions and the Eastern frontier," [Footnote: Life of Lord Granville, vol. ii., p. 313.] M. Ferry developed that "Colonial policy" of which Sir Charles ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... furnished with copies also, they cannot plead 'surprise,' as in the introduction of new matter, and as plaintiff's counsel relies evidently upon the jury's attention to his opening, he would not be the first person to distract it." After a pause he added, addressing the Colonel, who remained standing, "The Court is ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... made in the afternoon at the Museum, were still spread open before him, and he suddenly closed the book, fearful of anything calculated to distract him from the mood of tense resistance. His life, and more than his life, depended upon his successfully opposing the insidious forces which beyond doubt, invisibly ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... she sat for a moment, endeavoring to abstract her thoughts from all outward objects, so as the more readily to determine what course to adopt. But for a while it seemed as though it was impossible for her to fix her mind aright. Each instant some intruding trifle interfered to distract her attention from the only great object which now should claim it. A long-forgotten incident of the past would come into her mind—or perhaps some queer conceit which at the time had caused laughter. She did not laugh now, but none the less would she find ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... mind back with some effort from the consideration of the greater issues to fix it on the smaller ones. In its way Drusilla's interference was a welcome diversion, since the point she raised was important enough to distract Olivia's attention from decisions too ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... neither fame nor profit was the immediate result; and the author of the Ode on the Passions had little reason to expect, from its reception by the public, that it was destined to live as long as the passions themselves animate or distract the world. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... lips, the very residuum of all that is repulsive in the greatest city of the world. The noise of the traffic and the constant pressure from the crowds passing, their incessant and disjointed talk, could not distract me. One moment at least I had, a moment when I thought of the push of the great sea forcing the water to flow under the feet of these crowds, the distant sea strong and splendid; when I saw the sunlight gleam on the tidal wavelets; when I felt the wind, ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... with a hacking cough, or what I may properly denominate, especially from the result it produced, a 'king cough,' because a king or an ace was invariably its effect. The cough always came on at the most convenient moment to distract the attention of the other players, and was evidently indulged in for the purpose of abstracting their attention from the table and from the manoeuvre he was about to perform. However, I never saw him "slip the card," and I never had cognizance of its execution, but certain it was ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... most inflexible, stern and immovable. The passions which agitate or distract the mind, never alter its expression, nor do the highest ecstacies of which their nature is susceptible, ever relax its rigidity. With the same imperturbability of feature, they encounter death from the hand of an enemy, and receive ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... I felt my presence an indiscretion and was sorry I had promised to remain over the morrow. I put it to Mark that clearly I had best leave them in the morning; to which he replied that, on the contrary, if he was to pass the next days in the fidgets my company would distract his attention. The fidgets had already begun for him, poor fellow; and as we sat in his study with our cigars after dinner he wandered to the door whenever he heard the sound of the Doctor's wheels. ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... until bridges were constructed across the Apurimac at the distance of twelve leagues from Cuzco[35], as the enemy had broken down all the bridges over that river, and it was necessary either to construct new ones, or to make a circuit of more than seventy leagues to get to Cuzco. On purpose to distract the enemy, the president caused materials for the construction of bridges to be carried to three different points on the Apurimac; one on the great road of the Incas[36], a second in the valley of Cotabamba, about twelve ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... everything. But to have a friend die within your reach, while you are yet unable to help him, is the saddest of all. All this anxiety Julia suffered without even the blessed privilege of showing it. The pent-up fire consumed her, and she was at times almost distract. Every morning she managed to be on the upper porch when the doctor went by, and from the same watch-tower she studied his face when he ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... politicians with regard to the rebellion. In 1843 the leaders of the Repeal Association stated in one of their manifestoes, as an argument in favour of repeal, that England had resorted to the diabolical expedient of fomenting a rebellion in order to distract the country and give excuse for military violence and so bring about a Union. But the Nationalists of to-day have so completely identified themselves with the rebels of 1798 that within the last few years splendid monuments have been erected in all the towns of Wexford and the adjoining ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... these figures, tangled in some rare knot of Fate, and of Desire: these he painted, not attending much to the bustle of existence that surrounded them, not permitting superfluous elements to mingle with them, and to distract him. ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... seemed complete when suddenly Mme. d'Holbach died from a most loathsome and painful disease in the summer of 1754. Holbach was heart-broken and took a trip through the provinces with his friend Grimm, to whom he was much attached, to distract his mind from his grief. He returned in the early winter and the next year (1755) got a special dispensation from the Pope to marry his deceased wife's sister, Mlle. Charlotte-Susanne d'Aine. By her he had ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... interest in your husband's business affairs, and sympathize with the cares and anxieties which beset him. Distract his mind with pleasant or amusing conversation, when you find him nervous and fagged in brain ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... a mercy the fiddle is gone!' said Alda. 'I used to hear him playing it somewhere among the out-houses in the spring, and it was enough to distract ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... endless disputes between the religious and secular clergy[10] at this period tended to distract the attention of both from their spiritual work, and to give rise to considerable disorder and discontent. On the one side, men like the Paris professor, John Poilly and Richard Fitzralph, Archbishop of Armagh, ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... explained Mr. Hallowell senior, "there will be nothing to distract you from your studies, and in spite of yourself every minute you will be imbibing ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... not know her husband's crimes, but thinks he is hiding on account of debt, and is expecting him to fetch her away every moment. I think if we could distract her thoughts from this one subject she might get better; but she is very ill, bodily as well ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... to be alone during this period of discipline when my soul was perforce purged of its troublesome ferments. It was well that my neighbor should have gone where she might distract ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... glared redly to the sky, and were immediately responded to by answering signals, which were observed from the ramparts. The solitary sentinel on St. John's Bastion reported an armed body of men approaching. It was a feint to distract attention from the point where Montgomery was to make ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway
... for something to distract her aunt's attention, and caught sight of a colored man, dressed in sober gray, who was ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... prevented his capturing an incalculable amount of American property that would otherwise have fallen a sacrifice." "My calculations were," he wrote on another occasion, "even if I did not succeed in destroying the convoy, that leaving the coast as we did would tend to distract the enemy, oblige him to concentrate a considerable portion of his active navy, and at the same time prevent his single cruisers from lying before any of our principal ports, from their not knowing to which, or at what moment, we might return."[423] This was not only a perfectly sound ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... bed and deplored with many a sigh that bitter fact. And if aught had been wanting to increase the weight of fear and anguish on my already over-burdened mind, and to aid in what almost seemed an infernal plot to utterly distract me, I had it in fresh, wild conjectures touching Madonna Paola. Where indeed could she be that Ramiro's men had failed to find her for all that they had scoured that part of the country in which I had left her to wait for my return? ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... hard to be valiant; but the effort exhausted her strength. As the days went on, even Aristide's inexhaustible conversation failed to distract her from brooding. She lost the trick of laughter. In the evenings, when he was most with her, she would sit, either in the shop or in the little room at the back, her blue childish eyes fixed on him wistfully. At ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... Sam on his private vendetta with the clock that no ordinary happening would have had the power to distract him. What occurred now was by no means ordinary, and it distracted him like an electric shock. As he sat on the floor, passing a tender hand over the egg-shaped bump which had already begun to manifest itself beneath his ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... I think. I smile. And this too for a time is a diversion—that people no longer distract me. I carelessly restore the world. Let there be people, I say. And, alas, there are. I abdicate. I hand my Godhood ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... to distract the public councils, and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another; foments occasional riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... her. All she could make out amounted to this; that she must be careful not to forget whose child she was; that before Mrs. Laval she owed love and obedience to her Saviour; that she must be on the watch for opportunities; and not allow her new circumstances to distract or divert her from them or make her unfitted for ...
— The House in Town • Susan Warner
... have been when she heard that Prince Muishkin, the last of his and her line, had arrived in beggar's guise, a wretched idiot, a recipient of charity—all of which details the general gave out for greater effect! He was anxious to steal her interest at the first swoop, so as to distract her thoughts from ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... thing continues," grumbled the foreman, who had Planchet's word that he should be his successor. In the midst of his despair, he approached Porthos, who blocked up the whole of the passage leading from the back shop to the shop itself. He hoped that Porthos would rise and that this movement would distract his devouring ideas. ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... and quietly," I said; "don't let anything distract you. Have a pencil and a bit of paper ready at your side, and note down any points upon which you would like further information. If there is anything you think I have missed out let me know. It may be that here and there you will be disagreeing ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... buzz of Babel and the heavy scents and the clatter and the tumult and the glare of light; otherwise I should have chosen a discreeter hostelry where the footfalls of the waiting-men were noiseless and the walls in quiet shadow, where there was nothing but the mellow talk of friends to distract the mind from the consideration of exquisite flavours. But in these palaces of clashing splendour, the stunned brain fails to receive impressions from the glossopharyngeal nerve, and one eats unthinkingly like a dog. But this matters little to Carlotta. Perhaps when I was nineteen it ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... foment animosities, and even suggested in print that the established church was in danger; she affirmed that such people were enemies to her and the kingdom, and meant only to cover designs which they durst not publicly own, by endeavouring to distract the nation with unreasonable and groundless distrusts and jealousies; she declared she would always affectionately support and countenance the church of England, as by law established; that she would inviolably maintain the toleration; that she ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... inferences take care of themselves. Never be special; never, a partisan. In safety, afar off, you may batter down a fortress; but at your peril you essay to carry a single turret by escalade. And if doubts distract you, in vain will you seek sympathy from your fellow men. For upon this one theme, not a few of you free- minded mortals, even the otherwise honest and intelligent, are the least frank and friendly. Discourse with them, and it is mostly formulas, or prevarications, ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... descending into the gloom of approaching decay, was present like a charged thunder-cloud ready to burst at any moment, if she allowed him to approach the chief subject of her thoughts. Though not in love with Mrs. Thrale, he had a very intelligible feeling of jealousy towards any one who threatened to distract her allegiance. Under such circumstances we might expect the state of things which Miss Burney described long afterwards (though with some confusion of dates). Mrs. Thrale, she says, was absent and agitated, restless in manner, and hurried in speech, forcing smiles, ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... murmured with a smile. "I wish your brother wasn't quite so uppish. Let's get on. Doesn't that church distract you?" ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... he was her inferior. She let him understand in the presence of others that he was stupid, and helped him with his work so that he had to think how much stronger she was. She evidently wished to take away from him all rights as master of the house. Sometimes she pretended to be very lively, to distract him and to prevent him from brooding. He had not done anything to carry out his plan, but she did not believe that he ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... death suddenly, perhaps in some wild adventure under an assumed name? Her lips tightened, and her white brows contracted over her absent eyes. It was an old anxiety, but none the less wearing because it was old. Ruth put it wearily from her, and took up the first book which came to her hand, to distract her attention. ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... tells people anything they want to hear to win their confidence. And the two Miss Dooleys who sing so badly that thousands who can not sing at all leave off singing altogether when they once hear them. And Mr. Flick, who misbehaves at funerals to distract mourners from their grief, and a Mr. O'Brien, whose duty it is to fly into violent passions in public places just to ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... had done, nor were they caused by any particular event; they expressed simply a general discontent with herself and a kind of Weltschmerz not uncommon in a young and thoughtful mind. For the first time she seems glad of outside interests because they distract her. ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... and beating the air in wild and aimless defence, will be able to enter a little into the trouble of this man's soul. To have the child, and yet see him tormented in some region inaccessible; to hold him to the heart and yet be unable to reach the thick-coming fancies which distract him; to find himself with a great abyss between him and his child, across which the cry of the child comes, but back across which no answering voice can reach the consciousness of the sufferer—is terror and misery indeed. But imagine in the case before ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... crusade. At Acre he very nearly fell a victim to a fanatic belonging to a body which counted assassination a religious duty. His wife, Eleanor of Castile, who was tenderly attached to him, had to be led out of his tent, lest her bitter grief should distract him during an operation which the surgeons held to be necessary. In 1272 Henry III. died, and his son, though in a distant land, was quietly ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... merely maintaining an observance of definitions which their intellects no longer really accept)—their professed beliefs, then, shall I say?—in all matters of doctrine are not more heterogeneous than those which distract the councils and the congregations of the Establishment. It is only on matters of administration and Church discipline that they fundamentally differ. We count upon the Free Church Bishops to give us a majority both on the secularization ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... compositions are as overfilled as the sheets of an illustrated newspaper—witness the "Massacre of the Innocents," a scene of such magnificent artistic possibilities. Finally, irrelevant episodes and irrelevant groups of portraits do what they can to distract our attention from all higher significance. Look at the "Birth of John"; Ginevra dei Benci stands there, in the very foreground, staring out at you as stiff as if she had a photographer's iron behind her head. An even larger group of Florentine housewives in all their finery disfigures ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... attention sharp, to be sure whether it ever had been a reality, or whether it might not be, after all, only a dream. I think my father was afraid of the fascination of the cape for us boys—afraid its charms, if we once partook of them freely, might distract our attention from the order and duties of school life. To be sure, we always went to the country with our parents for a month or six weeks, and enjoyed it exceedingly, laying up a stock of trout, squirrel, and badger stories to last ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... is that I am, it is a little flesh and breath, and the ruling part. Throw away thy books; no longer distract thyself: it is not allowed; but as if thou wast now dying, despise the flesh; it is blood and bones and a network, a contexture of nerves, veins, and arteries. See the breath also, what kind of a thing it is; air, and not always the same, but every moment ...
— The Thoughts Of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius
... his love. But however she came back it would be she, the Beloved. He felt exultantly how little, after all, the frame mattered. Last time he had found her, his love had been set in the sunshine and the splendor of the Alpine snows, with nothing to jar, nothing to distract it from itself. And that was good. To-day, it was opening, a sudden and wonderful bloom, in the midst of the murky discomfort of an English November, the droning hum of the machinery of his daily work. And this, ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... was one of Desire's "windows with a view." He was always stumbling upon them. But he knew she was shy of comment. "We'll tell Aunt Caroline that," he murmured hopefully. "It may distract her mind." ... ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... umpire Time shall have his way, With Care I let the creature stay: Let business vex him, avarice blind, Let doubt and knowledge rack his mind, 90 Let error act, opinion speak, And want afflict, and sickness break, And anger burn, dejection chill, And joy distract, and sorrow kill, Till, arm'd by Care, and taught to mow, Time draws the long destructive blow; And wasted Man, whose quick decay, Comes hurrying on before his day, Shall only find, by this decree, The Soul flies sooner back ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... arduous, but she did not regain her strength, and in her grandfather's mind sprang up a solicitude about her which never left him. From the time of his awakening to her weakness, never did he have any care for himself, any thought of his own comfort, which could distract his attention from the gentle object of his love and care, He would follow her up and down, waiting till she should tire, and lean upon his arm—he would sit opposite to her, content to watch and look, until she raised her head and ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... band was playing, peacocks' tails were waving, and singers imitating the plaintive notes of birds, to excite the feelings and distract the attention of the hearers, the conjurer turned round violently several times, with his eyes half-closed, and caused great hooded serpents to appear and vultures to come down from the sky ...
— Hindoo Tales - Or, The Adventures of Ten Princes • Translated by P. W. Jacob
... happened to be a wonderful new process of evolving gas from dirt and city refuse. He had been explaining it gently to a woman in the chair, from pure intellectual interest, to distract the patient's mind. He was not tinkering with teeth this time, however. The woman was sitting in the chair because it was the only unoccupied space. She had removed her hat and was looking steadily into the lake. At last, when the little office clerk had ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... a corner, he chanced to read the name of a street. It was familiar enough to him, as a Neapolitan, but just now it reminded him of something which might possibly help to distract his attention. He stopped and got out his pocket-book, and found in it a card, glanced at the address on it, and then once more at the name of the street. Then he went on till he came to the right number, entered a gloomy doorway, ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... Sound and sweet will be thy slumber;— All earthly pangs and troubles cease, Nor dare invade that house of peace. On that pillow, ozier drest, The worn, the "weary are at rest." Thy broken heart shall cease to sigh, And tears forsake that sunken eye;— No dreams distract that holy sleep— No tempests break that calm so deep. Come, then!—forsaken, wearied, come! Here is for thee a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various
... believe he was kneeling, and to ask him three times to rise, to the immense merriment of the cardinals; and that he had a daughter, Novella, so accomplished in law as to be able to read her father's lectures in his absence, and so beautiful, that she had to read behind a curtain lest her face should distract the attention of the students. He is said to have died at Bologna of the plague in 1348, and an epitaph in the church of the Dominicans in which he was buried, calling him Rabbi Doctorum, Lux, Censor, Normaque Morum, testifies to the public estimation of his character. Andrea wrote ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the human mind, when set at liberty from ancient prejudices, and permitted to range in search of expected good, to become extreme in its calculations and projects of improvement, and to distract itself amidst the variety of its experiments. And more especially when its enterprises are favored by the encouragement of wealth, and sustained by the indiscriminate approval of the multitude. It ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... distract your attention with the palaces of the Caesars, the Cenci, St. Angelo, and the remains of antiquity still to be seen here, but trust that when we meet again every wish that you formerly expressed regarding our stay in Rome ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... too much in evidence, Bobby. You would distract my mind from Mr. Arlt, and this is his party, you know. Even Mr. Thayer is subordinate. But, Beatrix child, where is Mr. Lorimer? I thought surely I should find him here, to-day. I've not congratulated him yet. That was one thing ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... around me," said she, "and will never be alone; the people about me shall always laugh and jest, to cheer me and distract my thoughts. Hasten, hasten—call my court; the most jovial men shall be most welcome! And, do you hear, above all things, bring me wine, the best and strongest wine. When I drink plenty of it, I shall again become gay and happy; it drives away all cares, and renders the ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... dead to me; for an absence of eight-and-twenty years, in the short space of our duration, is almost equivalent to death. She arrived among us, still in great affliction for the loss she had had of the King; and I tried to distract her sad thoughts by all the dissipations possible. It is only by dint of such that one compels the mind to shift away from the fatal idea where grief has fixed it: this is not the work of a day, but of time, which in the end ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... years," she said, coldly. "But you really must be careful of your driving, Lord Brompton. I distract ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... her with a bang. He set a lamp on a table at the head of his bed and read his political economy until dawn. It was, in fact, too hot for any nervous person to sleep. Now and then his thoughts wandered, the incessant drone of the night insects outside seemed to distract his attention from his book like some persistent clamor of nature recalling him to his leading-strings in which she had held him from the first. But resolutely he turned again to his book. At dawn he fell asleep, and woke an hour later ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... endeavors to promote my happiness have been repaid by the inexcusable folly of sacrificing it. The various emotions of shame and remorse, penitence and regret, which torture and distract my guilty breast, exceed description. Yes, madam, your Eliza has fallen, fallen indeed. She has become the victim of her own indiscretion, and of the intrigue and artifice of a designing libertine, who is the husband of another. She is polluted, and no more worthy of her parentage. She ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster
... paper, and with his pencil commences figuring upon it. He wants to get at the cost of free and slave labour, and the relative advantages of the one over the other. After a deal of multiplying and subtracting, he gives it up in despair. The fine proportions of the youth before him distract his very brain with contemplation. He won't bother another minute; figures are only confusions: so far as using them to compute the relative value of free and slave labour, they are enough to make one's head ache. ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... in front of him, Baya would drone him monotonous tunes with a guitar in her fist; or else, to distract her lord and master, favour him with the Bee Dance, holding a hand-glass up, in which she reflected her white teeth and ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... man and a courteous. He was so full of pretty ways and dainty devices for to distract my mind, I never thought of counting. Nor yet did he keep score. Needs therefore must I hold him quit of ...
— The Merrie Tales Of Jacques Tournebroche - 1909 • Anatole France
... punctuation than that employed by the well-known German editor. Wherever a variant reading is adopted, some good and recognized SHAKSPEREAN critic has been followed. In no case is a new rendering of the text proposed; nor has it been thought necessary to distract the reader's attention ...
— English as She is Wrote - Showing Curious Ways in which the English Language may be - made to Convey Ideas or obscure them. • Anonymous
... away? Or was I to fail? And just then another woman cut up playfully with one of the hall-men—stuck out her foot and tripped him, or pinched him, or did something or other. The matron looked that way and reprimanded the woman sharply. Now I do not know whether or not this was all planned to distract the matron's attention, but I did know that it was my opportunity. My particular woman's hand dropped from her lap down by her side. I stooped to pick up my bundle. From my stooping position I slipped the letter into her hand, and received another in exchange. The next moment the bundle was on ...
— The Road • Jack London
... Ireland, and wish her well from the bottom of my heart. I am confident the meeting on St. Patrick's day ought to be one of charity and good humour, and totally void of those politics which unfortunately distract that unhappy country; in your Grace's hands, I am sure the business will be ably conducted to the utter exclusion of topics which might produce discord, and I shall be happy, as Earl of Munster, to assist your Grace in supporting the object ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... insolent air, "is it true that it is a judicial maxim, a maxim resorted to by all magistrates, to begin an interview about trifling things, or even, occasionally, about more serious matter, foreign to the main question however, with a view to embolden, to distract, or even to lull the suspicion of a person under examination, and then all of a sudden to crush him with the main question, just as you strike a man a ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... the water, and made it the capital of their great Lake Province, which Ptolemy Philadelphus renamed to please his adored wife. Queen Arsinoe was charming, no doubt; and the Greek ruins and papyri of her day are interesting, but it is the city sacred to the crocodile god Sebek which can alone distract my thoughts now from the tragedy of the black lamb. If his Ka refuses to go I shall set crocodiles at it —ghosts of crocodiles mummied somewhere under the desert hills which separate the ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... however, no woman to distract the overworked Young Doctor by her freshness, drawn from the reservoir of her vitality; and that was a pity, because, as Patsy Kernaghan many a time said: "Aw, Doctor dear, what's the good of a tongue to a wagon if there's only wan horse to draw it! Shure, you'll think a lot more of yourself ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... been so happy at whiles with the thought, accounted providential, that he stood alone, with no one to distract him, to impose burdens on him and to claim a right to make inroads on his precious hours. He loved the loneliness in which he sank when he stepped out of the lecture-room and the amphitheatre. He had not felt the need, which others confessed, of some ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... and the most marvellous of them, not merely took place out of her reach, but under conditions of unexampled rigor. 'Eusapia's mediumistic limbs penetrated into the cabinet,' says Bottazzi. 'I begged my friends not to distract the medium's attention by requests for touches, apparitions, etc., but to concentrate their desires and their wills on the things I asked for....' What he wanted her to do was very simple, but ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... the girl's mood and left her to herself. She had come to tell something but must tell it in her own way. To question, to intrude a thought, would only tend to confuse and distract her, so Polly took up her knitting and nodded cheerfully. She had a feeling that all along she had been waiting ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... unaided filled her at first with dismay. Besides, there was the separation from her son, the feeling that she knew not whether she would ever again set eyes on him in this world, and the terrible uncertainty generally of the future, to further distract her; but at length the buoyancy and unquenchable hopefulness of Dick's spirit had its effect upon her; and, finally, when the moment of parting came, she had been brought to a frame of mind that enabled her to say the last ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... it is indisputable that from these different ground; for religion selected by the Apostles, many quarrels and schisms distracted the Church, even in the earliest times, and doubtless they will continue so to distract it for ever, or at least till religion is separated from philosophical speculations, and reduced to the few simple doctrines taught by Christ to His disciples; such a task was impossible for the Apostles, because ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part III] • Benedict de Spinoza
... army lay opposite Fredericksburg, looking at the fortified heights where they had received so bloody a repulse at the beginning of the winter. Hooker decided to distract the attention of the Confederates by letting a small portion of his force, under General Sedgwick, attack Fredericksburg, while he himself took the bulk of the army across the river to the right hand so as to crush Lee by an assault on his flank. ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... have lost them I feel as if more than half my life was gone. I must get away by myself into my old home, where I began my life, and readjust it as well as I can. I shall do it best there with no one to distract me. You need not fear my wishing to ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... never be happy at Shorne Mills again. Every tree, every rock, every human being would remind her of Drake, of the lover she had lost. With Dick gone, there would be nothing for her to do, nothing to distract her mind from the perpetual brooding over the few past weeks of happiness, and the long, gray life before her. With these people there would be sure to be some work for her, something that would save her from spending every hour in futile regret ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... the fourteenth century, Novella de Andrea, daughter of the celebrated canonist, frequently occupied her father's chair; and her beauty was so striking, that a curtain was drawn before her in order not to distract the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... plan came from the South. I knew that certain Southern gentlemen wished the acquisition of California, New Mexico, and Utah, as a means of extending slave power and slave population. Foreseeing a sectional controversy, and, as I conceived, seeing how much it would distract the Union, I voted against the treaty with Mexico. I voted against the acquisition. I wanted none of her territory, neither California, New Mexico, nor Utah. They were rather ultra-American, as I thought. They were far from us, and I saw that they might ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... adversaries—and a steady undercurrent of latent hostility between him and the girl, which prevented his thinking much about himself and his duty to Mason. There was everything, in fact, to thwart a man's resolution to discharge honorably a disagreeable duty, and to distract ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... ants in each nest, which do no work themselves, but accompany the workers on their expeditions; and the sole use of these idle mouths seems to be to attract the attention of birds and other enemies, and so distract it from the useful workers, the mainstay of the entire community. It is almost as though an army, marching against a tribe of cannibals, were to place itself in the centre of a hollow square formed of all the fattest people ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... 85 Let us prize death as the best gift of nature — As a safe inn, where weary travellers, When they have journeyed through a world of cares, May put off life and be at rest for ever. Groans, weeping friends, indeed, and gloomy sables, May oft distract us with their sad solemnity: 91 The preparation is the executioner. Death, when unmasked, shows me a friendly face, And is a terror only at a distance; For as the line of life conducts me on 95 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... seems," he said, "that that fair-haired daughter of the Greeks, Madonna Elena, the slim, the rosy-fingered disturber of the repose of cities, hath appeared to distract this our city of Padua. Me at least she hath distraught. Fair friends, sister and brother poets, you shall understand that henceforth I devote myself to this lady and her praise. More, I vow a vow, and call upon you to register it in the Golden Book of the Amorous ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... new habit or art, we must not employ any alarming excitements: small, certain, regularly recurring motives, which interest, but which do not distract the mind, are evidently the best. The ancient inhabitants of Minorca were said to be the best slingers in the world; when they were children, every morning what they were to eat was slightly suspended from high poles, and they were obliged to throw down their breakfasts ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... carriage from Tostes to Yonville, without counting the plaster cure, who falling out of the coach at an over-severe jolt, had been dashed into a thousand fragments on the pavements of Quincampoix! A pleasanter trouble came to distract him, namely, the pregnancy of his wife. As the time of her confinement approached he cherished her the more. It was another bond of the flesh establishing itself, and, as it were, a continued sentiment of a more complex union. When from ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... one great desire of his heart was the glorification of God by the erection of a temple befitting His worship at Jerusalem. Although he had plenty of cares to distract him, yet he never had this out of his heart. "I will not come within the tabernacle of mine house; nor climb up into my bed; I will not suffer mine eyes to sleep, nor mine eyelids to slumber; neither the temples of my head to take ...
— The Village Pulpit, Volume II. Trinity to Advent • S. Baring-Gould
... water-jets gleamed out of the blackness like rods of twisted crystal. He entered the narrow street, or rather alley, leading to the bridge. In the state of blank misery he was in his eye seized upon the smallest objects as if to distract his mind, and he observed—as he might not have done had he been happy—that in the lighted upper room of the corner house they had trained growing ivy along the low ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... earnestly seeking for the truth, when they have it at home—some on their domestic hearth, and others next door waiting for them—it can only act as a decoy to a crowd of sensation-seekers, who yearn to see a ghost as they would go to a pantomime; and this can only weaken and degrade it, and distract attention from its possible true object—science. Used vulgarly, as we have all sometimes seen it used, after misleading and crazing a small portion of sensitive persons, it must ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... have had wandering thoughts in the time of this duty, I have laboured to compose my mind and fix it upon God, then, with great force, hath the tempter laboured to distract me, and confound me, and to turn away my mind, by presenting to my heart and fancy the form of a bush, a bull, a besom, or the like, as if I should pray to those; to these he would, also, at some times especially, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... for Smythe or P. T. to "discover." Readers must have been strangely disappointed on finding not a single word to throw light upon this subject, and merely a long account of the negotiations between Curll and P. T. The narrative might serve to distract attention from the main point, which it clearly did nothing to elucidate. But Curll now stated his own case. He reprinted the narrative with some pungent notes; he gave in full some letters omitted by P. T., and he added a story which was most unpleasantly significant. P. T. ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... be delighted. An ache of loneliness was creeping over me. I wanted to put off as long as possible getting back to the hotel. I wanted to distract my thoughts from dwelling upon to-morrow and what I was going to say to Christopher. To-morrow—that seems ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn
... enjoyment, the bickerings and jealousies of families with their various alliances—all the animosities which agitate social life—all the intestine broils, ambitious emulations, endless contentions, and opposing interests that distract a state—all the melancholy wars that convulse nations and desolate empires, the record of which has stained the page of history in all ages—with every particular, form, and mode of evil, discoverable in ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... whinny and, talking to him to distract his attention, Sir Shawn got him along. Perhaps the horse knew that his master's heart was cold. It was a well-nigh unendurable pain to Sir Shawn to pass the place where the friend of his youth and ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... by a necessary bathe in the clear, but too cold water of the creek. We turned in early, tired out, and scarcely had we rolled ourselves in our blankets when a dismal howl made us "say things," and in half an hour all the dingoes in North Queensland seemed to have gathered around the camp to distract us. The noise they made was something diabolical, coming from both sides of the creek, and from the ranges. In reality there were not more than five or six at the outside, but any one would imagine that there were droves of them. Not liking to discharge ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... pirates had kindled on the forecastle, shone out over the sea there, besides illuminating the island beach—where a number of black figures could be seen moving about opening some casks, which, Ching Wang explained to me, he had assisted in getting up from the forehold, so as to distract their attention from us for awhile; for, knowing that these casks contained salt pork, and being acquainted with the predilections of his countrymen for this dainty, he was certain they would have an orgy before proceeding to ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... you retained for that wretch one particle of the love of which he was never worthy, I would die before I would distract you by telling you what I feel. No! were your husband the master of your heart, I might perhaps love you; but ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... know? Tell me that, red flower. Did he pick you? Shall I keep you—on the doubt? Well—but not where you will show. Yes, I'll keep you, but away down in the middle, where no one will see you, and where you won't distract my attention from the beautiful white flowers that are so ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... under the table, in whose good graces he was also thus firmly planting himself. As Trebassof had prayed his companions to let his young friend satisfy his ravening hunger in peace, they did not concern themselves to entertain him. Then, too, the music served to distract attention from him, and at a moment somewhat later, when Matrena Petrovna turned to speak to the young man, she was frightened at not seeing him. Where had he gone? She went out into the veranda and looked. ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... of this! I notice with a certain shame and surprise that all I have been writing has been done in order to distract my thoughts. Yes, that is true. I speak about landscapes, homesickness, and so forth, while all my thoughts are at Ploszow. I did not want to acknowledge it, even to myself. I feel restless, and something seems to weigh me down. It is very probable that my going there and the getting over the first ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... home I read the Psalms for the day, and one sermon in Clark. Scruples distract me, but at church I had ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... Nimphidius, out of hand: Two waies distract when either would prevaile. If they, suspecting but this fellowes absence, Should try the Citie and attempt their friends How dangerous ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... for you, Monsieur. Madame had to come in, to avoid suspicion. If you can get back to the terrace by the way you came down, I will go again and distract ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... inmates, seeking this paragon, this pearl of great price, this gem without flaw. "It must be Madame," I concluded. "She only, amongst us all, has the art even to seem superior: but as to being unsuspicious, inexperienced, &c., Dr. John need not distract himself about that. However, this is just his whim, and I will not contradict him; he shall be humoured: his ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... exert yourselves, my dears," she would explain, "to make the evening pleasant for the young men. And they require something to distract their attention from the too earnest ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... of paint outside and put on some kind of pretty paper, of an ecclesiastical pattern, on the inside. I declare, those staring white walls, with the cracks in the plastering zigzagging every which way, distract me so that I can't put my mind on the sermon. Don't you think that paper, say of a Gothic design, would be a great improvement? I'm sure it would; and it's Mr. Twelvemough's ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... that he could not long remain at Charlotte for the country between that place and Camden, having been traversed by the contending armies, was quite exhausted. In order, therefore, to procure subsistence for his troops, as well as to distract and harass the enemy, Greene, though fully aware of the danger of such a measure, felt himself constrained to divide his ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... of the winter, after a long interval, he received a letter from Mrs. Tristram, who apparently was animated by a charitable desire to amuse and distract her correspondent. She gave him much Paris gossip, talked of General Packard and Miss Kitty Upjohn, enumerated the new plays at the theatre, and inclosed a note from her husband, who had gone down to spend a month at Nice. Then came her signature, ...
— The American • Henry James
... behind the Methodist Chapel, answering the double purpose of a post-office and a storehouse for ropes and coals. Beyond these objects there was nothing (and this was the great charm of the place) to distract the attention of invalids, following the doctor's directions, and from morning to night taking care of ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... Nevers, and myself did all that lay in our power to distract or relieve the sorrows of the Prince; but the loss of Mademoiselle de Chatillon, his charming spouse, was much more present with him than that of his states; the bitterness which he drew from it was out of the retch of all consolation possible. The Marquise de Thianges procured the Chancellor ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... he seeks to sour our tempers, and promote habitual sullenness and despondency. If naturally cheerful, he prompts to the indulgence of levity. In private devotion, he stands between us and God, prevents us from realizing his presence, and seeks to distract our minds, and drive us from the throne of grace. In public worship, he disturbs our minds by wandering thoughts and foolish imaginations. When we have enjoyed any happy manifestations of God's presence, ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... gestures, gave a vivid character to his recital. The hearer might imagine that he saw the crime committed, and was present at the terrible scenes which he described. His companions held their breath, unwilling by a movement to distract ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... kitchen to bedroom to get her lord into his public clothes. Elihu forgot the knot, and brought it in after he had assumed the garb of ceremony; and then he had to be fussily brushed from possible sawdust, while Amarita, an anxious frown on her brow, wondered why mother Meade always would distract him at the most important points. The fire was laid, but Elihu was one of those who believe in their own personal magic over a blaze, and he had to adjust the knot and touch off the kindling and watch the result a minute, to be sure the chimney had not caught. By the time he had harnessed and ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... could not distract the thoughts of the young Livonian even for an instant. She had left her hand in that of her companion, and turning to him, "At what distance are we from ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... Louise, my child, I only rose to rid you of a dream, the awakening from which will be deplorable. I consider it my duty to distract you from your insane fancies. The more I think of what you told me the more is my sympathy aroused. But I am compelled to tell you the truth, cruel as it is; beyond doubt the duke has placed Fernand in some compromising situation, so as to make it impossible for him to retrieve his ...
— Vautrin • Honore de Balzac
... with no family ties to distract attention, are organizing and employing devoted, self-denying women, all over the land, to perform the distinctive work that Protestant women, if wisely trained and organized by their clergy, could carry out in thousands of scattered ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... their chief, seemed equally reckless of danger. The picadores advanced to the very centre of the circus, the banderillos drove their darts into the flanks of the bull without once missing. When any of them were hard pressed, Juancho was ever at hand, prompt to distract the attention of the furious beast, and draw its anger on himself. One of the chulos fell, and would have been ripped from navel to chin, had not Juancho, at risk of his life, forced the bull from its victim. Every thrust he gave was delivered with such skill and force that the sword entered exactly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... will lead. Imaginative minds see images where ordinary minds see nothing but signs: this is a source of power; but it is also a source of weakness; for in the practical affairs of life, and in the theoretical investigations of philosophy, a too active imagination is apt to distract the attention and scatter the energies of ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity. Now Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic. There is a very wide difference. If a man of science were told that the results of his experiments, and the conclusions that he arrived ...
— The Soul of Man • Oscar Wilde
... you will understand. This would be splendid if she, like Sylvia Reed, for instance, had to look to her wits to solve her life problems; but it will distract her along the path ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... The majority of termites—including warriors and workers—were sexless; that was perhaps why they were such good workers, as they had nothing to distract them. The males and females whose duty was merely to propagate and improve the race were provided temporarily with wings, so that they could fly away from the colony and disseminate their love among other winged termites of ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... Glyndon shunned those excitements by which he had so long sought to occupy his time or distract his thoughts, the gloom of his calmer hours became deeper and more continuous. He ever and especially dreaded to be alone; he could not bear his new companion to be absent from his eyes: he rode with her, walked with ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the town. To the east there was an inlet where it might be possible to land troops, though perilously near the guns of the citadel. It was resolved to make a feint here, and to send parties to each of the three other points, so as to divide and distract the attention of the enemy. Wolfe was to take command of the landing at Freshwater Cove, which was the spot where Amherst most desired to make his first stand, and here the most determined attempt ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... communication to make Juliana eagerly attentive, and to distract her from her own affair, cannot be said, but something of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... true boy, as well as a budding philosopher, for often, after a discussion which caused Hannah to prophesy, with ominous nods, "That child ain't long for this world," he would turn about and set her fears at rest by some of the pranks with which dear, dirty, naughty little rascals distract ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... sitting the other day, overwhelmed by the sufferings of my poor body, I began to re-read my treaty of Combourgeoisie with your city, to distract the ennui of my malady, when the countess' little dog who had been gamboling about me dragged off, while I was not looking, the ribbon and seal, which greatly annoyed me. I send you back the paper, therefore, asking you to be as good as to affix another seal, by which you will ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... higher nature.' Speaking with reference to the pursuits of men of literary and artistic genius, it is written: 'Almost any worldly state in which a man can be placed is a hinderance to him, if he have other than mere worldly things to do. Poverty, wealth, many duties, or many affairs, distract and confuse him.' One sentence more is all that can be added here; and if it seems to be suggested by an aphorism of Bacon, it is equal to it in pith and penetration:—'Every felicity, as well as wife and children, is a ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... occupied with crowds of wild speculations and suspicions respecting her mistress and her husband and the noises in the house. When the ferocious devotional exercises were engaged in, these speculations would distract Mistress Affery's eyes towards the door, as if she expected some dark form to appear at those propitious moments, and make the party one ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... agree to disagree; and they were more likely to do either of the last two than the first. There was no power of coercion anywhere. All that Congress could do was to try to frame laws that would reconcile differences, and bring thirteen supreme governments upon some common ground of agreement. To distract and perplex it still more, it stood face to face with a well-disciplined and veteran army which might at any moment, could it find a leader to its mind, march upon Philadelphia and deal with Congress as Cromwell dealt with the Long Parliament. There were some men, probably, ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... went the bits of lingerie from the consignment just arrived from Paris, and the other spoils of the day. When everything was buried she shut the door upon it, as in her heart she was shutting the door on her poor little fledgling hopes. Nothing remained to torment her vision, or distract her from what she had to do. The old gray rag and the battered black hat were all she ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... She tried to propitiate the General after her usual manner towards him. It was as though she tried to distract a froward child. ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... favor of the 26th of October did not reach my hands, till the middle of December. Time enough, you will say, to have given an answer ere this. Granted. But a variety of important occurrences, continually interposing to distract the mind and withdraw the attention, I hope will apologize for the delay, and plead my excuse for the seeming but not real neglect. I thank you most sincerely for your polite notice of me, in the elegant lines you enclosed; and however undeserving I may be of such encomium ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... "Blessed Boys" which some have found so distressing. As for the Devil, in the end, making "indecent overtures" to the little Heavenly Butterflies, who pelt him with roses—even that does not confuse my mind or distract my senses. It is the "other side of the Moon"—the under-mask of the world-comedy, and the incidental "saving" of Dr. Faust is not more essential in the ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... been erased from all his fashionable clubs, and his horses and carriages sold, and he had become a student of the Temple. He entirely devoted himself to his new pursuit. His being was completely absorbed in it. There was nothing to haunt his mind; no unexperienced scene or sensation of life to distract his intelligence. One sacred thought alone indeed there remained, shrined in the innermost sanctuary of his heart and consciousness. But it was a tradition, no longer a hope. The moment that he had fairly recovered from ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... his fingers on his own gun when he said, "I'm afraid I'll have to insist. I always feel a little uncomfortable around people who wear guns." He kept talking to distract attention while he pulled out ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... unsought allies were making a difficult situation a thousand times worse. A more acute observer than young Mr Martyn, he noted the tight lines about his mother's mouth and knew them for the danger-signal they were. Endeavoring to distract her with light conversation, he selected a subject which was a ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... of the rope which was handed him and pulled for some time. It was a relief to him to have something, however small, which would distract his mind from the events of ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Kensington,' and I must indulge myself with that. I assure you we make quite a picture. Mac lies at my feet, and Spot generally curls himself up on my lap. Tim prefers lying on the lawn and keeping an eye upon the kitten. She is such a droll little creature, and her antics quite distract me. ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... something designed to distract Straker's attention; and still, with an air of distracting him, of sheltering her sad sister, Mrs. Viveash, she led ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... diversions caused by these attacks from the sea were of much consequence; and on other occasions the smaller steamers, gun and rocket-boats, were sent off the mouth of the harbour during the night to distract the attention ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... fair-hair'd dames Of Troy invoke Minerva's awful name, But to the height of Ilium's topmost tow'r Andromache is gone; since tidings came The Trojan force was overmatch'd, and great The Grecian strength; whereat, like one distract, She hurried to the walls, and with her took, Borne in the nurse's arms, her ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... same direction, while I bounded to the opposite side. I have never been able satisfactorily to decide in my own mind whether this act on my part was performed in consequence of a sudden, almost involuntary, idea that by so doing I should help to distract the creature's attention, or was the result merely of an accidental impulse. But whatever the cause, the effect was most fortunate; for the rhinoceros at once turned towards me, and thus, being blind in the other eye, lost sight ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... In the same letter he wrote of what remained always a delight in his memory, the charm of the more private collections. He found magnificent portraits and paintings in the private palaces, where he thought them seen to greater advantage than in galleries; because in numbers not so large as to distract attention or confuse the eye. "There are portraits innumerable by Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt and Vandyke; heads by Guido, and Domenichino, and Carlo Dolci; subjects by Raphael, and Correggio, and Murillo, and Paul Veronese, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... knees when she chose to let it down in a flood of splendor. Her deep gray eyes contained wells of womanly wisdom. Her skin, fair as a lily of Artois, had borrowed from the sun five or six faint freckles, just to prove the purity of her blood and distract the eye with a variety of charms. The Merovingian Princess, the long-haired daughter of kings, as she was fondly styled by the nuns, queened it wherever she went by right divine ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... evening, they sat before the fire, and she began to talk of various things in order to distract him. But what their lips did not say, their eyes, on meeting, expressed with more intensity ...
— Conscience, Complete • Hector Malot
... of speeches for Miss Mayhew. She may possibly believe them. It would be all the same if I had the footfall of an elephant! Nothing short of siege-guns would distract your mind from that picture. It has ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... made himself their enemy. Then surely there could be no complaint at the disaster that would overtake him. He was clearly to blame. So why let the contemplation of it distract her? ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... That this committee would recommend to the members of this Convention, to discountenance, by all just means in their power, any emigration to Liberia or Hayti, believing them only calculated to distract and ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... sound was intolerable to her. Once it had broken, she drank in the tumult joyfully. She sat tense and miserable longing to get to bed. She wondered whether it would be of any use to explain to Fraulein that they would be safer in their iron bedsteads than anywhere in the house. She tried to distract her thoughts.... Fancy Jimmie's name being Christina.... It suited her exactly sitting there in her little striped dressing-gown with its "toby" frill. How Harriett would scream if she could see them all sitting round. But she and ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... designed to conceal a secret weapon. If the Air Force or the Navy did have a secret missile, what better way to distract attention? The old sighting reports could have been seized on as a ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... quite enough as a bachelor to distract me from my work, without adding to them those of a wife and family, and those little home lessons in the frailty of human nature, in which you advise me to ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... Mlle. Boncourt When she met him at the dinner-table she looked at him so mournfully that his heart sank. Her face was changed as though a load of sorrow had descended upon her since the day before. Rudin began to be oppressed by a vague presentiment of trouble. In order to distract his mind in some way he occupied himself with Bassistoff, had much conversation with him, and found him an ardent, eager lad, full of enthusiastic hopes and still untarnished faith. In the evening Darya ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... Bernard, who says:[1] "Now placed in heaven, he beholds God clearly revealed to him, swallowed up in joy, but not forgetting us. It is not a land of oblivion in which Victor dwells. Heaven doth not harden or straiten hearts, but it maketh them more tender and compassionate it doth not distract minds, nor alienate them from us: it doth not diminish, but it increaseth affection and charity: it augmenteth bowels of pity. The angels, although they behold the face of their Father, visit, run, and continually assist us; and shall they now forget us who were once among us, and who ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... all Barre's attempts to distract the attention of the bystanders from the subject, they still persisted in desiring to discover the extent of the devil's knowledge of foreign languages, and at their suggestion the bailiff proposed to Barre to ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - URBAIN GRANDIER—1634 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... could have done nothing to offend her while I was away; and my letters were, I hoped, tender and respectful. I had had but one thought ever present with me; her image never quitted my side, alone or in company, to delight or distract me. Without her I could have no peace, nor ever should again, unless she would behave to me as she had done formerly. There was no abatement of my regard to her; why was she so changed? I said to her, ...
— Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion • William Hazlitt
... that we shall not cause any suspicion, Bert," said Harry, presently, "you go and get the Midget and stroll forward. I do not need your help any more than to distract attention from me ...
— A Voyage with Captain Dynamite • Charles Edward Rich
... mysterious manner, Persis' animation had returned. The confirmed meddler has one thing in her favor, that whatever the crisis of her own fortunes, there are always the affairs of other people to distract her thoughts. She dropped into a chair by the lamp and read the brief letter with breathless interest, ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... of a century ago, especially in Great Britain and the United States, but also in other countries, the method of allaying discontent was to distract public attention from politics altogether by stimulating the chase after private wealth. But as private wealth is more and more difficult to attain, this policy is rapidly replaced by the very opposite tactics, to keep the people absorbed in the political chase after ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... complexion and beautiful brown eyes, who had cherished a rather hopeless inclination for Henry; now that he had lost that bold girl, she tremulously assured herself, perhaps it was not quite so hopeless. Laura, too, had an idea that such might possibly be the case, and hoping at least to distract her brother, about whom she was becoming quite anxious, she had Ida over to tea once or twice, and, by various other devices which with a clever woman are matters of course, managed to ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... utmost effort fails to accomplish, there are some available remedies that can palliate the disease. Society, travel and other amusements can do something, and such words as 'diversion' and 'distraction' embalm the truth that the chief virtue of many pleasures is to divert or distract our minds from painful thoughts. Pascal considered this a sign of the misery and the baseness of our nature, and he describes as a deplorable spectacle a man who rose from his bed weighed down with ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... o'clock in the morning, and allotting to every hour its appropriate work. "Leisure and I have taken leave of each other," said he. And yet such was the happy arrangement of his employments, that, amidst a multiplicity that would distract an ordinary man, he declares that "there are few persons who spend so many hours secluded from all company as myself." "The wonder of his character," said Robert Hall, "is the self-control by which he preserved himself calm, while he kept all in excitement around him. He ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... Content to find the sounds still drawing farther and farther away, they gave up their hearts to the enjoyment of the hour, walking already, as Alicia put it, in a wedding procession; and neither the rude solitude of the forest nor the cold of the freezing night had any force to shadow or distract their happiness. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... revivalism excited by this monk's preaching, which had roused all the old memories of Savonarola in Florence. It became necessary for the Bishop to put down the devotion by special edicts, while the Medici endeavored to distract the minds of the people by ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... him about the barrenness of her existence, as there was nobody she could go to see, and nothing to amuse her or distract her thoughts. She ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... of the old school, which the new was to correct, were (1) an over-elaboration of detail in the setting; (2) a realism which challenged reality. ("Challenge," I understand, is the catch-word they use.) Both these qualities were supposed to distract attention from the drama itself. The answer, almost too obvious to be worth stating, is that the grotesque and the eccentric are vastly more distracting than the elaborate; and that, if you only sound the loud symbol ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various
... infinitely good that Providence is, which has provided, in its government of mankind, such narrow bounds to his sight and knowledge of things; and though he walks in the midst of so many thousand dangers, the sight of which, if discovered to him, would distract his mind and sink his spirits, he is kept serene and calm, by having the events of things hid from his eyes, and knowing nothing of the ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... impressed with the falls as I ought to have been. They don't seem so high as in the pictures, and the terrible buildings on one side distract one so it seems as if even the water can't be natural, and must be just arranged by machinery. But it was fun going under them, and those oilskin coats and caps are most becoming. You go down in a lift and then walk along passages scooped out of the rock until you are underneath the volume ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... morning, receiving the reports of the police, and having the ringleaders arrested. They had gone about in the coffee-houses, and had carried their effrontery so far as to say that the French army was again in motion, and that Napoleon's sole aim had been to distract the attention of ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... I went to two or three different mediums so as to test them all. I found they had no objections to bringing your own slates and writing your own questions, but while they held the slate under the table they kept you talking to distract your attention, and from time to time they got convulsive jerks and movements by which it was quite possible for them to see what was written. Then you heard a scratching (the medium probably had a little bit of pencil in his finger-nail), ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... she jumped out and declared that I must come on home. I pleaded with her, but she wouldn't yield. Two old women were in the house and she said that they were company enough; she wanted to think and they would not distract her thoughts. I told her that if she would agree to let me stay I would not say a word, but she shook her head. 'You shall hear from me to-morrow,' were her words, 'but you must leave me to myself to-night. It is of no use ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... all serene, Feels not fierce Passion's raving tempest roll! Oh, ne'er may Care distract that placid mien! Oh, ne'er may Doubt's dark shades ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... such as red and green, may not be used in equal quantities in the dress, as they are both so positive in tone that they divide and distract the attention. When two colors are worn in any quantity, one must approach a neutral tint, such as gray or drab. Black may be worn with any color, though it looks best with the lighter shades of the different colors. White may also be worn with any color, though ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... the islanders was edifying, the costumes worn by these strange converts were such as somewhat to distract the attention of the visitors. A black coat or the waistcoat of an English uniform was the only garment worn by some, whilst others contented themselves with a jacket, a shirt, or a pair of trousers. The most fortunate were wrapped ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... power of feeling to the whole body. Sometimes it seems as if the very substance of my flesh were so many eyes looking out at will upon a world new created every day. The silence and darkness which are said to shut me in, open my door most hospitably to countless sensations that distract, inform, admonish, and amuse. With my three trusty guides, touch, smell, and taste, I make many excursions into the borderland of experience which is in sight of the city of Light. Nature accommodates itself to every man's necessity. If the eye is maimed, so that it does not see ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... must be confessed—could reveal this especial secret touching the murder of Vrain; but, for some hidden reason, chose to delay her confession for twenty-four hours. Lucian, all on fire with curiosity, found himself unable to bear this suspense, so to distract his mind and learn, if possible, the true relationship existing between Ferruci and Jorce, he set out for Hampstead to interview ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... cautioned Captain Dodge quickly. "Don't distract his attention from what he is doing for a second. It's too late ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and the Treasure Cave • Ross Kay
... impatiently. "Is supper laid? for we must be gone as soon as the mist rises." He took the little boy by the hand. "Would it not distract your mind to recite the ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... her husband's crimes, but thinks he is hiding on account of debt, and is expecting him to fetch her away every moment. I think if we could distract her thoughts from this one subject she might get better; but she is very ill, ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... was not of sufficient interest wholly to distract his mind, and during the performance of a very tragic comedian, Soames found his thoughts wandering far from the stage. His seat was at the extreme end of the back row, and, quite unintentionally, he began to listen to the conversation of two men, who, ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... not ashamed to talk like that! She sang and played the piano only to do me a kindness, because I positively entreated, almost commanded her to do so. I saw that she was sad, so sad; I thought how to distract her mind—and I heard that she had such marvellous talent! I assure you, Fedor Ivanitch, she is utterly crushed, ask Sergei Petrovitch even; a heart-broken woman, tout a fait: ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... month you have fortunately had so much to distract your thoughts that you have not had time to dwell upon your loss. Moreover, you have needed all your strength and your energy for your search for your sister, and right sure am I that your father, who was as sensible as he was wise—and ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... use of punctuation than that employed by the well-known German editor. Wherever a variant reading is adopted, some good and recognized SHAKSPEREAN critic has been followed. In no case is a new rendering of the text proposed; nor has it been thought necessary to distract the reader's attention ...
— English as She is Wrote - Showing Curious Ways in which the English Language may be - made to Convey Ideas or obscure them. • Anonymous
... nursery and school-room for companionship—insipid pabulum to the vanity of a young lady in her first glimpse of conquest, and who believed she had stricken down a quarry worthy of her bow. Having nothing to distract her, she considered the problem exhaustively from morning till night, and, if she were not in love with him before, she had got him into her head now, if not into her heart. His being so much with Cecil did not strike her as ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... he tried to distract himself by fancying how the discovery of their absence would be made. He heard the listless, half-querulous discussion about the locality that regularly pervaded the nightly camp. He heard the discontented voice of Jake Silsbee as he halted beside the wagon, and said, "Come out o' ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... cucumbers, or fed the roosters! Ungrateful girl! He drooped his head; finally he whistled a mazurka; then he jammed his casque down over his ears and went to the camp, where the sentinels were standing by the cannon: there, to distract his mind, he began a game of cribbage with the private soldiers, and sweetened his sorrow with the cup. Such was the ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... something to distract her aunt's attention, and caught sight of a colored man, dressed in sober gray, who was coming toward ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... endangered by it, lay this too aside, and take instead some appropriate etude, or perhaps a little prelude by Bach. If, in the place of these, you choose for instruction a ponderous sonata, in which the music would distract the attention of the pupil from the improved technique, you give up the most important aim of your instruction, and occupy yourself with secondary matters; you will censure and instruct in vain, and will never attain success. You must consider, reflect, and give your mind to ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... life, and that she ought to be thankful that the little it had given her was not taken from her. She hugged that little to herself now that its worth had been revealed to her. A short absence from Paris, ordered by her doctor to distract her in her grief, travel with Olivier, a sort of pilgrimage to the places where they had loved each other during the first year of her marriage, softened her and filled her with tenderness. In the sadness of seeing once more at the turn of the road the dear face of the love which they thought ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... This was one of Desire's "windows with a view." He was always stumbling upon them. But he knew she was shy of comment. "We'll tell Aunt Caroline that," he murmured hopefully. "It may distract her mind." ... ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... to march in two columns on either bank of the Adige, drive the French from Rivoli and push on towards Mantua: and yet a third division, led by Davidovich from the district of Friuli on the east, received orders to march on Vicenza and Legnago, in order to distract the French from that side, and possibly relieve Mantua if ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... many points the churches are merely maintaining an observance of definitions which their intellects no longer really accept)—their professed beliefs, then, shall I say?—in all matters of doctrine are not more heterogeneous than those which distract the councils and the congregations of the Establishment. It is only on matters of administration and Church discipline that they fundamentally differ. We count upon the Free Church Bishops to give us a majority both on the secularization ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another; foments, occasionally, riot and insurrection. ...
— Key-Notes of American Liberty • Various
... little boy drunk teat-distilling showers. Faith to the witness Jove's praise doth apply; Ceres, I think, no known fault will deny. The goddess saw Iasion on Candian Ide, With strong hand striking wild beasts' bristled hide. She saw, and as her marrow took the flame, Was divers ways distract with love and shame. Love conquered shame, the furrows dry were burned, And corn with least part of itself returned. 30 When well-tossed mattocks did the ground prepare, Being fit-broken with the crooked share, ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... to himself and to me, now that I was established in my recovery, to inform me that, while he forgave my intrusion on a privacy he had already begged me not to break, he must desire that there should be no recurrence of attentions to his daughter, which might distract a heart destined either for the service of a free Catholic in regenerated Ireland, or for that ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... Proposition we may give salt is soluble, or water rusts iron: the copulative exponible is exemplified by salt is savoury and wholesome; and so on. But this procedure has some disadvantages: it is often cumbrous; and it may distract the reader's attention from the point to be explained by exciting his interest in the special fact of the illustration. Clearly, too, so far as Logic is formal, no particular matter of fact can adequately illustrate any of its doctrines. ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... phase set in, Maudie had sent into Dawson for Potts, O'Flynn and Mac, that they might distract the Colonel's mind from the pardner she knew could not return. But O'Flynn, having married the girl at the Moosehorn Cafe, had excuse of ancient validity for not coming; Potts was busy breaking the faro bank, and Mac was waiting till an overdue ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... to her—"Stop!" he cried, "Rebecca! do not wound your future peace. I plainly see under what prejudices you have been accused, under what fears you have fallen. But do not be terrified into the commission of a crime which hereafter will distract your delicate conscience. My requesting you of your father for my wife will satisfy his scruples, prevent your oath—and here I ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... the cardinals; and that he had a daughter, Novella, so accomplished in law as to be able to read her father's lectures in his absence, and so beautiful, that she had to read behind a curtain lest her face should distract the attention of the students. He is said to have died at Bologna of the plague in 1348, and an epitaph in the church of the Dominicans in which he was buried, calling him Rabbi Doctorum, Lux, Censor, Normaque Morum, testifies to the public estimation of his character. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... in advising that the sick be not suddenly interrupted so as to distract their attention, says that the rule applies to the well quite as much as to the sick. She adds: "I have never known persons who exposed themselves for years to constant interruptions who did not muddle away their intellects ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... let me know what it is; come, don't distract yourself alone; let me bear a share of your grief, as well as I have shared in ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... of having made a lapse, for he hurried on, as though to distract my attention from it, "I don't take any stock at all in such matters. 'Rats and mice and such small deer,' as Shakespeare has it, 'chicken feed of the larder' they might be called. I'm past all that sort of nonsense. You might as well ask a man to eat molecules with a pair of ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... stopping them by distracting their attention by some pleasant or conspicuous object which makes them forget that they want to cry. Most nurses excel in this art, and rightly used it is very useful; but it is of the utmost importance that the child should not perceive that you mean to distract his attention, and that he should be amused without suspecting you are thinking about him; now this is what ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... Yet I do enjoy the bed with sheets, it is an inexpressible luxury. How I have longed for it, but in vain, when suffering fever, to be able really to undress! But I must not write of such matters, nor of more serious ones that distract my judgment and ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... refitted, and the fleet furnished with fresh supplies of provisions and ammunition; but his principal motive was to take on board a number of troops provided for a descent upon France, which had been projected by England and Holland, with a view to alarm and distract the enemy in their own dominions. The queen was so pleased with the victory that she ordered thirty thousand pounds to be distributed among the sailors. She caused medals to be struck in honour of the action; and the bodies of admiral Carter and captain Hastings, who had been killed in the battle, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... the Drama, abhors lengthiness; like the Drama, it must be kept doing. It avoids, as frigid, prolonged metaphysical soliloquy. Beauties themselves, if they delay or distract the effect which should be produced on ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... straight quays, on this tranquil bank, she took the air on summer evenings, watching the graceful course of the river, and the distant landscape. In the morning she traversed these quays with holy zeal, in order to go to church, and that she might not meet in this lone road any thing to distract her attention. Her father, who liked her lofty studies, and was intoxicated at his daughter's success, was still desirous of initiating her in his own craft, and made her begin to engrave. She learned to handle the burin, and succeeded in this as in every thing else. As yet she ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... the island to another, in order to meet feigned attacks by the enemy who were ready to turn any of those diversions into a real assault, on finding the Jersey people unprepared. The Lieutenant-Governor had no choice but to distract and weary his men, marching them backwards and forwards to S. Aubin, S. Clement, and Gorey, according as the invaders appeared at one or other of those landing-places. The militiamen were worn out by these tactics, and were moreover of the class ...
— St George's Cross • H. G. Keene
... begin a little conversation about things in general. Even in these three days, nature and youth had done something for Lucy. She had slept and rested, and the unforeseen misfortune which had come in to distract her grief had roused all the natural strength that was in her. As she was a little nervous about this interview, not knowing what it might end in, Lucy thought it her duty to be as composed and self-commanding as possible, and, in order to avoid all dangerous and ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... and even 60 feet, so as to give the sap the longest possible distance to travel; and, further, for the purpose of concentrating into the fruit the whole result of the wine, all the buds and little shoots, which would distract therefrom, are carefully taken away. This gives to the vine a very curious look, but it serves well to illustrate how greatly wines differ as to whether they require short or long pruning. It also helps to a better understanding of the two main styles of training ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... two of the million-mark bills which Germany paid over in the indemnity, y'understand, are not. So, therefore, my advice to England is, examine the German indemnity carefully, and don't let no returned sultan's skull distract your attention, even if it would be made of plaster of Paris with a round hold on top for keeping matches in it, and on ...
— Potash and Perlmutter Settle Things • Montague Glass
... not thought, of course, of going down to dinner; she had, instead, sent Victor word simply that she begged to be excused from joining him for that meal. Then, unable longer to endure Chou Nu's efforts to comfort or distract her, Sofia had stepped out of her street frock and into a negligee and, dismissing the maid, returned to the chaise-longue upon which, in vain hope of being able to cry out the wretchedness of her heart, she had thrown herself ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... more suited to reanimate torpid intelligence and feeling, or to distract and console melancholy among the unfortunate insane, these edifices majestic in their general effect and comfortable in their details, these grandiose parks, with luxuriant plantations and verdant flowery lawns, whose harmonious association ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... sense. He was a little mistaken in this, but not the less resolved that money in some way he would have in order to fulfil his promise to his father, and for the ulterior purpose of giving the squire some daily interest to distract his thoughts from the regrets and cares that were almost weakening his mind. It was 'Roger Hamley, Senior Wrangler and Fellow of Trinity, to the highest bidder, no matter what honest employment,' and presently it came down to 'any bidder ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... friend ———, who left her as a keepsake for my boy. Jamie dotes upon her; and I do assure you I regard her almost as a second Whittington's cat: neither mouse nor chitmunk has dared intrude within our log-walls since she made her appearance; the very crickets, that used to distract us with their chirping from morning till night, have forsaken their old haunts. Besides the crickets, which often swarm so as to become intolerable nuisances, destroying your clothes and woollens, we are pestered by large black ants, that gallop about, eating up ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... mean who trade with it now? No—nothing of the sort. They use it to distract and perplex the public mind; to draw it off from the one paramount obligation which the times impose upon the nation—the obligation of saving the national existence by the military extinction of the rebellion, regardless of all other ends and aims. They trade upon the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... tongue. Its purpose is to make the words grow large, as it were; to expand and emphasise their meaning; hence the wisdom of the advice—"Suit the action to the word, the word to the action." If the action distract the listeners' attention from the word its ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... soldiers, and such as had never handled a weapon before. Besides, they had wholly neglected all religious usages, had not obtained favorable sacrifices, nor made inquiries of the prophets, natural in danger and before battle. No less did the multitude of commanders distract and confound their proceedings; frequently before, upon less occasions, they had chosen a single leader, with the title of dictator, being sensible of what great importance it is in critical times to have the solders ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... the land where troubles cease, Where toils and tears are o'er;— The blissful clime of rest and peace, Where cares distract no more; And not the shadow of distress Dims its ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... careening the gallant little craft to her covering- board, whilst it drove her along at the rate of a good honest nine knots in the hour. There was no other sail anywhere in sight, nor indeed anything to distract attention from the little vessel herself, save the shoals of flying-fish which now and then sparkled out from under our forefoot and went skimming away through the air to leeward, until they vanished with a flash, only to reappear, perhaps, next moment, with their ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... feeling that "my works were not seen to advantage when placed in juxtaposition with those of an essentially different kind," that I "determined to have an exhibition of my own, where no discordant elements should distract the spectator's attention." It is true that occasionally it has been borne in upon my mind that those whose "works are of an essentially different kind," are unwilling to place mine in juxtaposition ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... was caused by the immense crowd blocking the court, only pushed aside by archers on horseback, who separated the people. The marquise now went out, and the doctor, lest the sight of the people should completely distract her, put a crucifix in her hand, bidding her fix her gaze upon it. This advice she followed till they gained the gate into the street where the tumbril was waiting; then she lifted her eyes to see the shameful object. It was one of the smallest of carts, still splashed with mud ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... just what's wanted," said the Major, "to ensure the success of the day. A musical composition of yours, O'Grady, played by our own town band, will be quite likely to distract the Lord-Lieutenant's attention from the fact that here's no statue here ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... counsel of her family, for well she knew the outburst of condemnation, incredulity, and grief that would assail her there. They could not help her yet; they would only augment perplexities, weaken convictions, and distract her mind. When she was sure of herself she would tell them, endure their indignation and regret, and steadily execute the new purpose, whatever ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... might be found—everything is possible; but such are devoted more or less to a variety of plants, and the departments are not all gathered beneath one roof. I confess, for my own part, a hatred of references. They interrupt the writer, and they distract the reader. At the place I have chosen to illustrate our theme, one has but to cross a corridor from any of the working quarters to reach the showroom. We may start upon our critical survey from the very dwelling-house. Pundits of agricultural science explore the sheds, I believe, ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... especially—in whose presence he felt himself as diffident as she did in his. He was thinking of ladies in velvet dresses and diamonds, who could talk wittily of pictures and theatres and books, who could amuse him and distract him. And meanwhile she went about in her old stuff dress, her cotton apron and rolled-up sleeves, cooking and washing and cleaning—for her child and for him. She felt through every nerve that he was constantly aware of details of dress or menage that jarred upon ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... stationery. Hermia eyed her Dresden chocolate-pot uncheerfully. This breakfast gift had reached her with an ominous regularity on Mondays and Thursdays for a month, and the time had come when something must be done about it. But she did not permit unpleasant thoughts, if unpleasant they really were, to distract her from the casual delights of retrospection and the pleasures of her repast, which she finished with a thoroughness that spoke more eloquently of the wholesomeness of her appetite even than the real excellence of the cooking. Upon Titine, who brought her ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... tired out, and scarcely had we rolled ourselves in our blankets when a dismal howl made us "say things," and in half an hour all the dingoes in North Queensland seemed to have gathered around the camp to distract us. The noise they made was something diabolical, coming from both sides of the creek, and from the ranges. In reality there were not more than five or six at the outside, but any one would imagine that there were droves of them. Not liking to discharge our guns on account of C———'s ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... shalt please to restore her to her former health, give her grace to be ever mindful of that mercy, and to keep those good resolutions she now makes in her sickness, so that no length of time nor prosperity may entice her to forget them. Let no thought of her misfortunes distract her mind, and prevent the means toward her recovery, or disturb her in her preparations for a better life. We beseech thee also, O Lord, of Thy infinite goodness, to remember the good actions of this Thy servant; that the naked she hath clothed, ...
— Three Sermons, Three Prayer • Jonathan Swift
... was a very magnificent chamber; but not so magnificent as he who sat in it. He was but just come from supper, and wore his orders on his coat; but all his dress could not distract those who looked at him from that kingly Stuart face that he had. He was, perhaps, the heaviest looking of them all, with not a tithe of Monmouth's brilliant charm, or the King's melancholy power; yet he too had the air of command and more than a touch of that strange ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... I am retracing my steps during the long wandering reveries which distract my thoughts along the path through which I saunter at random, my soul takes wing, and suddenly I recall little incidents of a gay or sinister character which, emerging from the shades of the past, flit before my memory as the birds flit through the ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... I daresay a great many of you are thinking that it is far harder for you, in the distractions and rush and conflict of business and daily life, than it is for people like me, whom you imagine as sitting in a study, with nothing to distract us. I do not know about that; I fancy it is about equally hard for us all; but it is possible. I have been in Alpine villages where, at the end of every squalid alley, there towered up a great, pure, silent, white peak. That is what our lives may be; however noisome, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... noon, part of the twilight, chief surely of the worshippers who swept on in the pale procession that received gifts from the desert's hands. She could no longer imagine the desert without him. The almost painful feeling that had come to her in the garden—of the human power to distract her attention from the desert power—was dying, perhaps had completely died away. Another feeling was surely coming to replace it; that Androvsky belonged to the desert more even than the Arabs did, that the desert spirits were close about him, clasping his hands, ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... appeal very strongly to the Western sense of religious beauty. Where the stanzas are full of the technical terms of the Buddhist system of self-culture and self-control, it is often impossible, without expansions that spoil the poetry, or learned notes that distract the attention, to convey the full sense of the original. In all these distinctively Buddhist verses the existing translations (of which Professor Max Mueller's is the best known, and Dr Karl Neumann's the best) are inadequate and sometimes quite erroneous. The connexion in which they ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... every afternoon ended, long before the time when I should have to go up to bed, and to lie there, unsleeping, far from my mother and grandmother, my bedroom became the fixed point on which my melancholy and anxious thoughts were centred. Some one had had the happy idea of giving me, to distract me on evenings when I seemed abnormally wretched, a magic lantern, which used to be set on top of my lamp while we waited for dinner-time to come: in the manner of the master-builders and glass-painters of gothic days it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... the morning two rockets glared redly to the sky, and were immediately responded to by answering signals, which were observed from the ramparts. The solitary sentinel on St. John's Bastion reported an armed body of men approaching. It was a feint to distract attention from the point where Montgomery was ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway
... glades and touched the surface of the rolling ground, where, in the hollows, on the heights, on the sloping sides of the dingles, knots of trees of yet more luxuriant and picturesque growth, planted or left by the cultivator's hand long ago, and trained by no hand but nature's, stood so as to distract a painter's eye; and just now, in the fresh gilding of the morning, and with all the witchery of the long shadows upon the uneven ground, certainly charmed Fleda's eye and mind both. Fancy was dancing again, albeit with one hand upon gravity's shoulder, and the dancing was a little nervous too. ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... here said, "I am certain he is ill; he's in a fever. You must not distract and torture yourself about his predictions. You sent for Doctor Torvey; ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... safety. If he were safe, I should feel comparatively happy; happiness, in its full extent, I never can hope to enjoy; but if he were only safe—if he were only safe, my dear Mrs. Brown! I know that he is hunted like a beast of prey, and under such circumstances as disturb and distract the country, how can ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... lately much to distract her attention," says the jest-hunting Squire; "but her things were never better in spite of—. Well we won't touch ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... obliged him to use an umbrella and a walking-stick as crutches. He was also nervous in crossing crowded thorough-fares, and particularly so at night; while he always liked to make Lehrs cross my threshold in front of him to distract the attention of Robber, of whom he stood in obvious terror. Our usually good-natured dog became positively suspicious of this visitor, and soon adopted towards him the same aggressive attitude which he had shown to the sailor Koske on ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... imitative in origin. Whether any of them are of value, as Lindley thinks, in arousing the brain to activity, or as Mueller suggests, in drawing off sensations or venting efferent impulses that would otherwise distract, we need not here discuss. If so, this is, of course, a secondary and late function—nature's way of making the best of ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... the other day, overwhelmed by the sufferings of my poor body, I began to re-read my treaty of Combourgeoisie with your city, to distract the ennui of my malady, when the countess' little dog who had been gamboling about me dragged off, while I was not looking, the ribbon and seal, which greatly annoyed me. I send you back the paper, therefore, asking you to be as good as to affix another seal, by which ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... tricks and frauds and deceits, and after the day is over I write these lines and try to inoculate myself with a serum or toxin that will serve as a safeguard on the morrow to ward off the things which try to annoy and distract me from my purpose: to do, and to be, as nearly right and fair as I can, in act and thought ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... I can henceforth bear anything. I shall never see her again. Oh, why cannot I fall on your neck, and, with floods of tears and raptures, give utterance to all the passions which distract my heart! Here I sit gasping for breath, and struggling to compose myself. I wait for day, and at sunrise the horses are ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... notice with a certain shame and surprise that all I have been writing has been done in order to distract my thoughts. Yes, that is true. I speak about landscapes, homesickness, and so forth, while all my thoughts are at Ploszow. I did not want to acknowledge it, even to myself. I feel restless, and something seems to weigh me down. It ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... should never be so gorgeous as to distract the mind from the picture. "Frames are to protect the picture and ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... be as zealous in allaying the troubles of France as he had been successful in fomenting discord—a remark which Beza did not let pass unchallenged, for he declared that he neither had distracted nor intended to distract his native land. From inquiries respecting Beza's great master, Calvin, his age and health, the discourse turned to certain obnoxious expressions which Lorraine attributed to Beza himself; but the latter entirely disclaimed ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... esquilador's agile fingers, and occasionally encouraged the patient, their constant companion and playmate both in quarters and the field, by expressions of sympathy and affection. The arrival of Paco, who established himself behind the esquilador, in a gap of the circle, was insufficient to distract their attention from the important and all-absorbing interest of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... care in entire security. The world had quite fallen from her, or so much of it as she had seen at Florence, and in her indifference she lapsed into life as it was in the time before that with a tender renewal of her allegiance to it. There was nothing in the conversation of the vice-consul to distract her from this; and she said and did the things at Venice that she used to do at Middlemount, as nearly as she could; to make the days of waiting pass more quickly, she tried to serve herself in ways that scandalized the proud affection of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of theirs. These torments, added to my desolate life—receiving nothing but torments, and where I should look for some comfort, together with the consideration of my cruel destiny, my days and times worn out in trouble and imprisonment—is sufficient either utterly to distract me, or to make me curse the time that ever I was born into the world, and ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... guns. These were to anchor in a close north-and-south line along the west face of the works, at about nine hundred yards distance. They were to be supported by forty gunboats and as many bomb vessels, besides the efforts of the ships-of-the-line to cover the attack and distract the garrison. Twelve thousand French troops were brought to reinforce the Spaniards in the grand assault, which was to be made when the bombardment had sufficiently injured and demoralized the defenders. At this time the latter numbered seven thousand, their ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... turned to the writing-table. She resolutely took pen and paper, but the least thing seemed to distract her attention—the coronet on the note-paper cost her five minutes of far-off reflection. She took up the pen again, and wrote ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... sight indeed for Tor Glen, and one that might well distract the whole school's attention. Two discreet ponies were picking their way down the zig-zag path, while behind walked a man. But greatest wonder! on each pony was seated a real lady. Erect and gracefully, too, did they keep their seats, as the patient beasts ...
— A Child of the Glens - or, Elsie's Fortune • Edward Newenham Hoare
... feeling to the whole body. Sometimes it seems as if the very substance of my flesh were so many eyes looking out at will upon a world new created every day. The silence and darkness which are said to shut me in, open my door most hospitably to countless sensations that distract, inform, admonish, and amuse. With my three trusty guides, touch, smell, and taste, I make many excursions into the borderland of experience which is in sight of the city of Light. Nature accommodates itself ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... corner, where the water-jets gleamed out of the blackness like rods of twisted crystal. He entered the narrow street, or rather alley, leading to the bridge. In the state of blank misery he was in his eye seized upon the smallest objects as if to distract his mind, and he observed—as he might not have done had he been happy—that in the lighted upper room of the corner house they had trained growing ivy ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... succeeds as its functions and organs become fitted to its environment. Man succeeds as he fits himself to a moral environment. To the undeveloped man the world is full of forces which are hostile or indifferent to his right action; a thousand things distract him from doing right; he is like a creature in a watery world with half-developed fins. But as a man becomes morally developed he finds moral opportunity everywhere,—finds occasion for service, for admiration, gratitude, reverence, hope. ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... many millions of livres. With her own hands she packed away the more precious and portable of them, while she arranged with her brother for the safe-keeping of the others. All day she was at work in a mood of feverish energy, doing anything and everything which might distract her thoughts from her own defeat and her rival's victory. By evening all was ready, and she had arranged that her property should be sent after her to Petit Bourg, to which castle she intended ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and take no revenge upon Thy tender youth; A love from me to thee Is firm, what ere thou dost: It troubles me That I have call'd the blood out of thy cheeks, That did so well become thee: but good boy Let me not see thee more; something is done, That will distract me, that will make me mad, If I behold thee: if thou tender'st me, Let me not ...
— Philaster - Love Lies a Bleeding • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... road, an ambulance dashing up to lift his bruised hopes tenderly and take them off somewhere for sanitary treatment, or even some childish sympathy of theirs commissioned to run up and offer him a nosegay to distract him in his walk toward old disappointments and old cares. He only knew they were welcome visitants in his mind. Sometimes the mind seemed to him a clean-swept place, the shades down and no fire lighted, and these young creatures, in their heavenly ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... have been served or even real lamb chops, but no power of special dishes served to distract the students ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... and copy out for me forty times the compound verb, 'I cough without necessity to distract the attention of my comrade Rapaud from ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... time she opened her mouth, a tiger padded in her direction down a path of currant bushes. There are, it may be admitted, heroic exceptions. The chaffinch sits in the plum and blusters out his music, cat or no cat. To be sure, he only sings, a flush of all the colours, in order to distract our attention. He is not an artist but a watchman. If you look into the buddleia-tree beside him, you will see his hen moving about in silence, creeping, dancing, fluttering, as she gorges herself with insects. She is a fly-catcher ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... we have no others to share our devotion, to distract our attention. Our only one should be, as near as a mother can make ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... trouble in securing quietness, attention, and docility. There was almost a painful earnestness in the old-fashioned faces which pored over the school-books; even such a rare event as the entrance of a foreigner failed to distract these childish students. The younger pupils were taught chiefly by object lessons, and the older were exercised in reading geographical and historical books aloud, a very high key being adopted, and a most disagreeable ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... morning, and allotting to every hour its appropriate work. "Leisure and I have taken leave of each other," said he. And yet such was the happy arrangement of his employments, that, amidst a multiplicity that would distract an ordinary man, he declares that "there are few persons who spend so many hours secluded from all company as myself." "The wonder of his character," said Robert Hall, "is the self-control by which he preserved himself calm, while ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... not want to pick a quarrel out of our many just causes of complaint. But it will be as well that Lincoln and Seward should see that we are long patient, and do nothing to distract their attention from the arduous task they have ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... to plunge himself into the Corri-nan-shian, and the sobered mood in which he now returned homeward, industriously seeking out the most practicable path, not from a wish to avoid danger, but that he might not by personal toil distract his attention, deeply fixed on the extraordinary scene which he had witnessed. In the former case, he had sought by hazard and bodily exertion to indulge at once the fiery excitation of passion, and to banish the cause of the excitement from his recollection; ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... display and because he was planning a new war. He aimed at the final destruction of the Hsiung-nu, so that access to central Asia should no longer be precarious and it should thus be possible to reduce the expense of the military administration of Turkestan. The war would also distract popular attention from the troubles at home. By way of preparation for war, Wang Mang sent a mission to the Hsiung-nu with dishonouring proposals, including changes in the name of the Hsiung-nu and ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... tell him soon, but not just yet. I do not want to distract his mind from his lessons, and I wish to be quite sure first. I think I should wait till I hear from ...
— Great Uncle Hoot-Toot • Mrs. Molesworth
... colorless and exhausted, but clinging to Tod still in a queer pathetic way, and letting him pull at her collar and her ribbons and her hair. The touch of his relentless baby hands and his pretty, tyrannical, restless ways seemed to help her a little and half distract her thoughts. ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... husband; by day as by night she is heard silently sobbing; she is a constant visitor to the place of rest; with the greatest reluctance will she follow the raised camp. The friends and relatives of the young mourner will incessantly devise methods to distract her mind from the thought of her lost husband. She refuses nourishment, but as nature is exhausted she is prevailed upon to partake of food; the supply is scant, but on every occasion the best and largest proportion is deposited upon the grave of her husband. In the mean time the ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... child, I can't tell. You know perfectly well yourself. Be preoccupied, absent-minded, indifferent, when he comes. Make him repeat what he says, and then answer him at random. Look as though you had a thousand things to distract your attention, and treat him as though he were the chair ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... safely reforming; above all to proceed as fast as the innumerable difficulties which impede their course will let them, in bringing Ireland into a state of quiet and contentment, and to pave the way for some definite settlement of the great questions which distract that country. This I believe to be the object of Lord Melbourne and Lord John Russell, but at the same time they have colleagues and supporters who have more extensive and less moderate views, and who would like to see the Government more cordially allied ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... by means of two lay alcaldes, who are appointed annually by the ayuntamiento from the citizens of the city. When the appointees are men of wealth, they resign, for this charge alone occasions them ill-humor and serious occupations which distract them from their business. Those who accept or desire it, can have no other stimulus than that of vile interest, tolerating prohibited games, etc. It is, then, necessary to appoint two lawyers with suitable pay to be judges of ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXXVI, 1649-1666 • Various
... well, D'Urville. The number of his assailants prevents the archers on the Turkish craft using their bows. Fire those bow guns!" he shouted to the knights forward: "Take steady aim at the galley. It will distract ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... we can all of us do something. If one has the courage and good sense, when in a melancholy mood, to engage in some piece of practical work, it is wonderful how one can distract the great beast that, left to himself, crops and munches the tender herbage of the spirit. For myself I have generally a certain number of dull tasks to perform, not in themselves interesting, and out of which little pleasure can ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Concorde, and in the Tuileries gardens beyond the breeze dreamily stirred the foliage which hid from Lynde's view the gray facade of the gutted palace, still standing there, calcined and cracked by the fires of the Commune. Presently all this began to distract him, and when he returned to the hotel he was in a humor that would have been comparatively tranquil if so many tedious miles had not stretched between ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... newly-elected King of Poland, was a veteran soldier of great military renown. He placed himself at the head of other divisions of the army, and endeavored to distract the enemy and to divide their forces. At the same time, Alexis himself hastened to the theater of war that he might animate his troops by his presence. The Turks, finding themselves unable to advance any ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... have another advantage. The singers on the platform, all handsome and well dressed, distract our attention from the minister, and what he is saying. We cannot help looking at them, studying all the faces and all the dresses. If one of them sits up very straight, he is a rebuke to us; if he "lops" over, we wonder why he does n't sit up; if his hair ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... those in the next. This sameness is not accidental. The more real the murderer's fancied security is made in this paragraph to appear, the more startling in the next paragraph will be the revelation of his mistake. Hence no novelty in the words or in their arrangement is allowed to distract our attention from the dominant thought. The sentences are made to look and sound alike and to be alike that their effect may be cumulative. The principle of Parallel Construction, the principle that sentences similar ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... specialization, and with specialization came even greater efficiency. Anyone who specializes will likely be more efficient because of the mastering of skills. He will also have a minimum of other cares to distract him. Of course, for the consumers, foreign or domestic, greater farming efficiencies resulted in abundant food at ...
— Agricultural Implements and Machines in the Collection of the National Museum of History and Technology • John T. Schlebecker
... that once more," said Mrs. Garth, pinching an apple-puff which seemed to distract Ben, an energetic young male with a heavy brow, from due attention to the lesson. "'Not without regard to the import of the word as conveying unity or plurality of idea'—tell me again what that ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... inclination for Henry; now that he had lost that bold girl, she tremulously assured herself, perhaps it was not quite so hopeless. Laura, too, had an idea that such might possibly be the case, and hoping at least to distract her brother, about whom she was becoming quite anxious, she had Ida over to tea once or twice, and, by various other devices which with a clever woman are matters of course, managed to throw ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
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