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More "Drifting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... nothing fretful about me any more; I feel harmonized, as if I were so much a part of the light and the air and the forest that I don't know now where they leave off and I begin. I sit and watch the fine-weather clouds drifting slowly across the tree-tops, and wonder if heaven is any better. I go down to the edge of the Haff, and lie on my face in the long grass, and push up my sleeves, and slowly stir the shallow golden water about among the rushes. I pick wild strawberries to eat with my ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... us, While lovely, and dispiteous! Ah, nights of flying scud and rout When scared the slim young moon rides out In her lagoon of open sky, Or older, marks your revelry As calm and large she oars above Your drifting lives of ruth or love. Boon were those nights of dusted gold And glint of fireflies! Boon the cold And witching frost! All's one, all's one To thee, whose nights and days go on Now in one span of changeless dusk On ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... found the conversation drifting round to botany, about which he knew little and cared less. Once more his hopes were raised only to be frustrated. He was sitting besides Mrs. Fane-Smith and Erica, and had managed to stem the tide of the botany. The ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... somewhat spiritually confused and physically broken young man that he gave up his studies and returned to his home at Randrup. His brothers were already well started upon their conspicuously successful careers, while he was still drifting, confused and uncertain, a failure, as some no doubt would call him. His good stepfather, nevertheless, received him with the utmost kindness. If he harbored any disappointment in him, he does not appear to have shown it. His stepson remained with him for about a year, assisting him with ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... difficult to avoid either of these two extremes, it will not do to refuse to choose at all, and leave things to chance. We drift into many of our connections with men, but the art of seamanship is tested by sailing not by drifting. The subject of the choice of friendship is not advanced much by just letting them choose us. That is to become the victim, not the master of our circumstances. And while it is true that we are acted on as much as we act, and are ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... palings, Leavitt's Malay servant maintained an aloof and mysterious existence. I sat down beside Miss Stanleigh on the veranda steps to find my hands sooty from the touch of the boards. A fine volcanic ash was evidently drifting in the air and now to my ear, attuned to the profound stillness, the wind bore a ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... abroad. He wrote a prose romance, The Pilgrims of the Great St. Bernard, and several books of poetry, including The New Pastoral, The House by the Sea, Sylvia, and A Summer Story. Some of the shorter pieces included in these, e.g., "Sheridan's Ride," "Drifting," and "The ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... worth considering. Always the chill winds shaved the barren land from the north, or veered unexpectedly, and blew dry warmth from the southwest; but never the snow for which the land yearned. Wind, and bright sunlight, and more wind, and hypocritical, drifting clouds, and more sun; lean cattle walking, walking, up-hill and down coulee, nose to the dry ground, snipping the stray tufts where should be a woolly carpet of sweet, ripened grasses, eating wildrose bushes level with the sod, and wishing there was only an abundance even of them; drifting ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower
... sad defection to Adonijah of such tried friends as Joab and Abiathar has its lesson. The reason for Joab's treachery is plain. He had been steadily drifting away from David for years. His fierce temper could not brook the king's displeasure on account of his murders of Abner and Amasa, and his slaying of Absalom had made the breach irreparable. No doubt, David had made him feel ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... that the Swedes are drifting away from old customs and are becoming modernized. The French influence seems to prevail, and modern Swedish life is becoming an imitation of that ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... gliding fog-bank as a snake is drawn from the hole, They bellow one to the other, the frighted ship-bells toll, For day is a drifting terror till I raise the shroud with my breath, And they see strange bows above them and the two ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... end to which the notes were drifting. Instead of answering his question, I entreated him to enter into the explanations that were still wanting to convince my own mind. He held up a warning forefinger, ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... weather-beaten, or ragged. Occasionally one was to be seen in heavy beery slumber under the hedgerow, or lying on the grass smoking lazily, or with painful thrift cobbling up a hole in a garment. Such as these were drifting in early that they might be on the ground when pickers were wanted. They were the forerunners of the ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... dullness, as also love of finery and joy in receiving presents, are the principal motives that lead girls into illegal relations. And what I want to make plain is this: a characterless girl, irresponsible, without care for the future, drifting, snatching at pleasure, taking the easiest course—this is the girl who bears a child illegitimately and this is the girl incapable of becoming ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... of Manhattan came to the rescue in battalions, and Geraldine was soon afoot, once more drifting ecstatically among the splendours of the shops, thrilling with the nearness of the day that should set her free among unnumbered ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... trimmer, or would seek a party in power simply for the spoils in sight, but because he had the breadth and liberality of enlightened opinions, the prophetic instinct, and the force of character to make things go his way, without drifting into success by a fortunate turn in tide and wind. He was not a mere day-dreamer, a theorist, a philosopher, a scholar, although he possessed the gifts of each. He was, rather, a man of action—self-willed, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... with callers, correspondence, and the routine details of the office, and have not therefore tried to keep abreast of the currents of opinion on any of the issues. My notion is that the true contest is to be between inflation and a sound currency. The Democrats are again drifting all to the wrong side. We need not divide on details, ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... thoughts were as they silently stood there. For some reason when they started to go down the hill they were not so jolly as when going up. Their course was directed to the east, but just why no one knew. It seemed as though they were simply drifting, each with his own thoughts; but ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... pyramid of roaring, blazing fire, sweeping upward in great fan-like rifts, then blowing outward, horizontally across the deep, as if greedy for the poor beings who had sprung in agony from its embrace. Millions of sparks were floating and drifting overhead and falling all around. The shrieks of the despairing passengers, as with their clothes all aflame they sprung blindly into the ocean, could be heard by our friends, and must indeed have ...
— Adrift in the Wilds - or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys • Edward S. Ellis
... squadron, which had engaged the forts in a most brilliant fashion, was passing out the Bouvet was blown up by a drifting mine and sank in less than three minutes, carrying with her most of her crew. At 2.36 P.M. the relief battleships renewed the attack on the forts, which again opened fire. The Turks were now sending mines down with the current. ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... had become suddenly absorbed as his brother paused, his gaze once more drifting away beyond the river. Finally, Charlie turned back ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... oldest daughter would leave the other girls alone! Here she was planning a row with Deborah over whether poor young George should be allowed to play with rats! It was all so silly!... Yes, his three children were drifting apart, each one of them going her separate way. And he rather took comfort in the thought, for at least it would stop their wrangling. But again he pulled himself up with a jerk. No, certainly Judith would not have liked this. If she'd ever stood for anything, it was for keeping the family together. ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... poured in an awful fire that raked her fore and aft. In a few minutes, her bowsprit was cut to shivers; her foremast was splintered and tottering; her main-yard broken up; her mizen-mast entirely carried away, and drifting under her counter; her bows riddled with shot; and her upper decks strewn with dead and dying. Only about half a dozen of her guns could be brought to bear, and although the crew made every possible attempt to manoeuvre the ship, so as to recover ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... with their tangled elf-locks, still peer out of the drifting sand—the twisted bodies in their sea armour, lie half surrounded by the green waters; but the log hut, and Atven have vanished into the misty shadows of the past. They, and the good old priest, ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... completely, the boy felt a strange dread of the unknown. There was something appalling in the mighty force of the Arctic blizzard that had fallen full upon them. Something ghostly in the silent, motionless figure of the Woman, covered as with a pall, by the drifting snow, and in the shadowy string of dogs faintly seen, from time to time, when a rare lull cleared the air to a dim and misty grayness. Something terrifying in the cruel sting of the bitter wind that cut into the flesh like whip-lashes, ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling
... peculiar voice, and was so assured of its identity, that she ran out under the awning and looked up and down the platform in front of the station buildings. The rain had ceased, but drops still pattered from the tin roof, and a few stars peeped over the ragged ravelled edge of slowly drifting clouds. By the light of a gas lamp, she saw an old negro man limping away, who held a stick over his shoulder, on which was slung a bundle wrapped in a red handkerchief; and while she stood watching, he vanished in some cul de sac. With her basket in her hand, and her shawl ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... but the postman would not make a start until next morning. Dorian joined him then, and mounted beside him. The sky was not clear, the clouds only breaking and drifting about as if in doubt whether to go or to stay. The road was heavy, and it was all the two horses could do to draw the light wagon with its small load. Dorian wondered how Carlia had ever come that way. Of course, it had been ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson
... of that magnitude which Adams ascribes to the Mar Zarak, nor was it precisely in the neighbourhood of Timbuctoo, when I was a resident in South Barbary: rivers, however, which pass through sandy or desert districts, often change their courses in the space of twenty-four hours, by the drifting of the moving sands impelled by the wind; instances of which ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... forty days out from Palos, the ship ran into what is marked upon your maps as the Sargasso Sea. This is a vast meadow of floating seaweed and seagrass in the middle of the Atlantic; it is kept drifting about in the same place by the two great sea currents that flow past it but not ...
— The True Story of Christopher Columbus • Elbridge S. Brooks
... retired to his father's farm at Tantramar. There he devoted himself to Jamie and the farm, but to Jamie especially; and in the summer, partly for amusement, partly for profit, he was accustomed to spend a few weeks in drifting for shad on the wild tides of Chignecto Bay. Wherever he went, Jamie went. If the weather was too rough for Jamie, Captain Joe stayed at home. As for the child, petted without being spoiled, he was growing a tough and manly little soul, and daily more and more the delight ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... emphasising immaculate daintiness, rather than the ready-for-sport note. A sheer blouse and French heels on white pumps will transpose the plain linen skirt into the key of picturesque relaxation, the hall-mark of sun-rooms. More than any other room in the house, the sun-room is for drifting. One cannot imagine writing a cheque there, or going ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... shaft two hundred and ten miles out from New York; we are drifting helplessly in the fog. Send out a tug as soon as possible. We are whistling one long, followed at once by one ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... water, where I could hear the twin harmonies of the sucking of the water into the spout, and the washing of the surge on the foot of the rock. I never passed a more delightful afternoon. Clouds of pearl and amber were slowly drifting across the sky, or resting a while to dream, like me, near the water. Opposite me, at considerable distance, was a line of rock, along which the billows of the advancing tide chased one another, and leaped up exultingly ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... a huge log, and waited while Blake ran up-stream to give help to the coachman. While the two had been battling in the water, the priest had stayed with the coachman to cut the horses free, till at last all four got clear of the wreck, and swam ashore. Then the men followed them, drifting down the current and fighting their way to shore at about ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... about it?" I said, "I embarked on that ship at Tronheim the 27th day of April on a Sunday afternoon at four o'clock, of the year 1881, with 384 other young people who were sailing for England, on our way to America. At nine o'clock we got into an awful snowstorm and just lay drifting until one fifteen a.m., exactly the same time of night as we struck the rock this time. We went on the rock and turned over on the side just outside of the Agness lighthouse." Then the captain said, "What kind of a man are you?" "Just an ordinary ...
— Personal Experiences of S. O. Susag • S. O. Susag
... scarcely do. He'd been there so often recently.... No, that wouldn't do.... Besides it was becoming almost a habit with him. He'd been drifting there so frequently of late!... In fact, he'd scarcely been anywhere at all, recently, except—except where he certainly was not going that evening. And that settled it!... So he might as ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... touched the lower edge of the upper cloud-stratum. It consisted of fine diaphanous vapour drifting swiftly from the westwards. The wind had been steadily rising all this time and it was now blowing a sharp breeze—twenty-eight an hour by my gauge. Already it was very cold, though my altimeter only marked nine thousand. The engines were working ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... boy Who lived somewhere in Illinois, His father was a blacksmith, and His Ma made pies for all the land. The pies were all so very fine That folks who sought them stood in line Before the shop of Dike & Co., 'Mid passing rain, in drifting snow, For fear they'd lose the tasty prize Of "Dike's new patent home-made pies." One day, alas, poor Mrs. Dike, Who with her pies had made the strike, By overwork fell very ill, And all her orders could not fill. So ill was ...
— Andiron Tales • John Kendrick Bangs
... the old battlements. Do men defend them still as we defended them? They are worn a little, the battlements,' and drifting nearer they peered anxiously. 'It is not by the hand of man that they are worn, our battlements. Only the years have done it and indomitable Time. Thy battlements are like the girdle of a maiden, a girdle that is round about her. See now the dew upon them, they are ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... awakened. The number of deuced pretty girls that had been in his life, and in the lives of his pals, was legion. They came and went like feathers dancing on the wind. The mere report of them, therefore, casual and drifting, could not excite his permanent attention, or fix their names and the record of their charms in his somewhat treacherous memory. Lady Holme had not once mentioned the American to him. She was a woman who knew how to be silent, ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... chair slowly. Out of a thousand chances against her, might this one chance be for her,—the chance of her hearing, and being called back to the shores she was drifting from, by this stiff, conventional fellow's voice. There was no knowing the wondrousness of a loving human thing, even when its shackles were loosening themselves ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... could help her. She called upon it fiercely. He was the man whom she had deliberately believed to be guilty of her father's death, the man whom she had set herself to entrap. She brushed all those other thoughts away and banished firmly that dangerous kindness of manner into which she had been drifting. ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... midnight approached, one sound after another died away in the Chateau. Caroline, who had sat counting the hours and watching the spectral moon as it flickered among the drifting clouds, withdrew from the window with a trembling step, like one ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... was drifting close in. His canoe would soon be caught in the current that ran close to shore here and carried toward the river that emptied the waters of Jad-ben-lul into Jad-bal-lul. The under priests were ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... could do it without detection and punishment. And is he not, at this very moment, stealing away from you the life of body and soul? Don't be offended, pray, Mr Oldfield; but I say again, I can't bear to see you drifting on to the rocks, and not lend a helping hand to ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... The raft ripped on a rock in midstream and stuck there at an angle of forty-five degrees. Money, tools, food, and clothing slithered into the tow of the rapids, while the men clung in desperation to the upper railing of the wreck. One man let go and dropped into the water. Swimming and drifting and rolling over and over, he gained the shore, and hurried back to the pass with word of the accident. Friends, accompanied by Indians, came in canoes to the rescue, and, by means of ropes, every man was brought off the wrecked ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... short foliage of the sturdier Scotchman; and down each stem runs a long, fresh scar, and at the bottom (in spring at least), hangs a lip of tin, and a neat earthen pipkin, into which distils turpentine as clear as glass. The trees have mostly been planted within the last fifty years, to keep the drifting sands from being blown away. As timber they are about as valuable as those Jersey cow-cabbage stalks, of which the curious will at times make walking- sticks: but as producers of turpentine they have their use, and ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... turned homeward from the riverside. She heard through the night the sound of the blows, the faint moan and the splash. She ran to the spot, saw the trampled grass, and, looking across the water, saw a bloody face drifting away. She ran to launch a boat, and rowed with all ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... fleet appears to have found the passage very difficult, the dangers of the Channel being aggravated by the strength of the current and bad weather. The Captain, Vesuvius, and Royal William were aground for some time, but were ultimately got off again without much damage; and the Terrible, which was drifting and in great danger, was only brought up by means of an anchor constructed for the occasion by lashing one of the quarter-deck guns to two small anchors. When her large anchors were hauled up they were found to be broken; and so ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson
... there passes the shadow of a deadly thought. He rises from the fire; he takes the wood back to the boat. His iron strength is shaken, but it still holds out. They are drifting nearer and nearer to the open sea. He can launch the boat without help; he can take the food and the fuel with him. The sleeper on the iceberg is the man who has robbed him of Clara—who has wrecked the ...
— The Frozen Deep • Wilkie Collins
... on even a greater aspect than it had already possessed. I shall not discuss my life, but life with its probabilities and possibilities of power and achievement; life in its earnestness and life that is merely drifting with the tide, of no benefit ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... to the use of the word "drifting" in this connection. It is used absolutely without any intention of slurring the Towne-Halsey system or in the least detracting from ...
— Shop Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor
... run your astonished eye down the damp, water-soaked wooden steps to the moist brick pavement below, and so on to the beds of crocuses blooming beneath the clustering palms and orange trees, before you could realize (in spite of the drifting snow heaped up on the door-steps of her house outside—some of it still on your shoes) that you were in Miss Felicia's tropical garden, attached to Miss Felicia's Geneseo house, and not in the back yard of some old home ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... cherished. Thou art a changed man—but for whose sake? For Argemone's. Is she to be thy god, then? Art thou to live for her, or for the sake of One greater than she? All thine idols are broken—swiftly the desert sands are drifting over them, and covering them in.—All but one—must that, too, be taken ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... her daily walk late in the afternoon. She read miladi to sleep about this time and was sure of an hour to herself. She was feeling the severe drain upon her quite sensibly, and though she longed to throw herself on a couch of moss and study the drifting clouds in the glory of the parting day, when the sun had gone behind the hills and the wake of splendor was paling to softer colors; lavender and pale green, that mingled in an indescribable tint, for which there could be no name. There ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... man they picture thee, Old winter, with a rugged beard as gray As the long moss upon the apple-tree; Blue-lipt, an ice-drop at thy sharp blue nose, Close muffled up, and on thy dreary way Plodding alone through sleet and drifting snows. They should have drawn thee by the high-heapt hearth, Old winter! seated in thy great armed-chair, Watching the children at their Christmas mirth; Or circled by them as thy lips declare Some merry jest, or tale of murder dire, Or troubled spirit ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow, Vol. IV (of IV) • Harrison S. Morris
... Curdie ate there came a change. Clouds had gathered over his head, and seemed drifting about in every direction, as if not 'shepherded by the slow, unwilling wind,' but hunted in all directions by wolfish flaws across the plains of the sky. The sun was going down in a storm of lurid crimson, ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... of reconciliation and the recognition of a common country and that communion of right and interest between all classes and creeds which was the evangel of Wolfe Tone and other northern Protestant patriots in sublimer days. Matters were drifting from bad to worse under the fatal weakness and irresolution of the Government. So little fear had Sir Edward Carson of any penal consequences to himself that he declared, ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... he said. "Under the cold, drifting gray rainclouds the whole semicircle of the horizon was edged by heights on which the German batteries were mounted, three ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... regret. Their appearance is a sign of attention aroused; and when discussion has become general and animated, we may hope to see the gradual emergence of a sound and operative public sentiment. What is to be deprecated and feared is indolent drifting, in wilful blindness to the approaching moment when action must be taken; careless delay to remove fetters, if such there be in the Constitution or in traditional prejudice, which may prevent our seizing ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... The drifting snow-shower fell like a veil between them, the wind whistled, and behind him he could hear the maiden laughing and singing, and the sound ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... Juliet Galt and Emma Carr, the prettiest women in the room, sat together upon a corn-coloured divan, and in front of them a file of men passed and repassed slowly on their way to and from the dining-room, pausing to exchange brief remarks and drifting on aimlessly. Near them a fair, pale gentleman, robust and slightly bald, with protruding eyes and anaemic lips, had flung himself upon a gilded chair, a glass of punch in his hand. He had danced incessantly for hours in the adjoining room, and at last, wearied, winded, with a palpitating ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... anarchists, speaking as trade unionists, fought throughout the congress against political action. A typical declaration was that of Tortellier, when he said: "If only those in favor of political action are admitted to congresses, the Latin races will abandon the congresses. The Italians are drifting away from the idea of political action. Properly organized, the workers can settle their affairs without any intervention on the part of the legislature."[2] Guerard, of the railway workers, holding much the same views, urged the congress to adopt the general ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... Chinatown, for the time was noon and the section was pursuing its midday habit of calm. The padding figures were becoming a trifle obscure, owing to a cold, pale fog that was drifting up from the bay. In a moment the woman reappeared, examined the street again with hostile eyes, held up a square of rice paper, and slowly ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... and lowing and browsing and multiplying over the open moorland beneath the blue sky. This is the prevailing impression of this day: and the symbol of it is the thin, quavering music of the pastoral pipe, following us wherever we go, drifting tremulously and plaintively down from some rock on the hillside, or floating up softly from some hidden valley, where a brown shepherd or goatherd is minding his ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... Every one was eager to get a glimpse of the unknown terrors without from the deck. This was out of the question, so people sat around the tables to listen eagerly to Experience and his wise saws on drifting ships and their prospects. ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... he seemed to be drifting upon literally, for a moment, nauseated John Wollaston. The sweat felt cold upon his forehead. And then, white hot, bracing him like brandy, ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... autumn was beginning, and over his thoughts, raised like a ghost from the ashes of the summer, stole a vague vision of the winter. He saw for a second the driving slant of the snow-storm over the old drifting road, he saw the white slant of Sylvia's house-roof through it. And at the same time a curious, pleasant desire, which might be primitive and coeval with the provident passion of the squirrels and honey-bees, thrilled him. Then he dismissed it bitterly. What need of winter-stores and provisions ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... tower, through the thick plate glass, the three people in the shore boat made out the carroty-topped head and freckled, good-humored, honest, homely face of Eph Somers. The boat lay on the water, under no headway, drifting slightly with the wind-driven ripples. Then Eph raised the man-hole cover of the top of the conning tower, thrusting out his head to ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Middies • Victor G. Durham
... wretched in the downpour, the scenery completely hidden by the clouds; but towards midday, as we climbed ever higher and higher, we plunged into pine forests where the rain began to thin to mist, veiling the trees with layers of drifting fog. Out of the forests we came—the rain having ceased—into a strange-looking landscape, whose japanesiness is equalled possibly only by Japan itself. There were the queer rounded hills, the gnarled and twisted little pines and dim fir-clad ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... our drills we lay under the young shade on the sweet young grass, with the odors of snowballs and horse-chestnut blooms drifting to us with every whiff of breeze, and amused ourselves with watching the evolutions of our friends of the Massachusetts Eighth, and other less experienced soldiers, as they appeared upon the field. They, too, like ourselves, were going through the transformations. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... my theory," Cameron went on, "that the range of mountains to the north holds gold in large quantities. It is a part of my theory, too, that the drifting ice brought tons of it down to the moraine. If I find any gold here at all, I'll find it in quantities sufficient to clog the ...
— The Call of the Beaver Patrol - or, A Break in the Glacier • V. T. Sherman
... better luck?" The question burned dully in his brain. "Don't suppose so; there can't be anything alive in this God-awful wilderness." As he stumbled on he found no answer in an unbroken vista of wind-scored ice and drifting snow that, swirling high into the air, momentarily cut off the view of that black line of ice-capped mountains barely visible ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... said, the friends have departed, and the train is moving slowly out of the station; a profusion of flowers, tempting new books, and other gifts are visible proofs of the thoughtfulness of friends on the eve of a long journey in untried fields, and it seems as if I had lost my moorings and was drifting out on ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... a heavy sea and contrary winds was abandoned by her crew, who made for shore in boats. The other two Spanish ships were deserted in similar fashion, whereupon the French, observing this new turn of affairs, re-entered the bay and easily recovered the three drifting vessels. Two of the prizes they burnt, and arming the third sailed away to cruise in the Florida straits, in the route of ships returning from ...
— The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century • Clarence Henry Haring
... was rolling somewhat heavily, and the splash of the drifting foam reached them occasionally where they stood. There were no other ladies in sight. Suddenly the clear, American voice broke through the man's ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... But it is a pleasure to be indulged in with caution; for one thing, you are certain to come across crocodiles. Now a crocodile drifting down in deep water, or lying asleep with its jaws open on a sand-bank in the sun, is a picturesque adornment to the landscape when you are on the deck of a steamer, and you can write home about it and frighten your relations ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... power, when the prelate presented his project anew; indifferent and debauched, a holder of seventy-six benefices, M. de Tressan dreamed of the cardinal's hat, and aspired to obtain it from the Court of Rome at the cost of a persecution. The government was at that time drifting about, without compass or steersman, from the hands of Madame de Prie to those of Paris-Duverney. Little cared they for the fate of the Reformers. "This castaway of the regency," says M. Lemontey, "was adopted without memorial, without examination, as an act of homage ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... are familiar with the events preceding the first Afghan War (1839-42) can now see that events were fast drifting into a position dangerously like that which led Dost Mohammed to throw himself into the arms of Russia. At that time also the Afghan ruler had sought to gain the best possible terms for himself and his dynasty from the two rivals; and, finding that the Russian promises were far more ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... over the port cat-head, hummed and drummed with an exhilarating note through the taut weather rigging and into the hollows of the straining canvas overhead. The weather was brilliantly fine, the clear, deep azure of the sky merely flecked here and there with a few solemnly drifting puff-balls of trade- cloud, and the ocean of deepest blue sweeping in long, regular, sparkling, snow-capped surges diagonally athwart our bows, from beneath which the flying-fish continually sprang into the air and went flashing away on ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... you follow me," I agreed. "Her coming seems to have steadied us up all round. The changes which we were obliged to make in our manner of living have all been for the better. I am afraid that we were drifting, Allan and I, at any rate into a somewhat objectless sort of existence, and our work was beginning to show the signs of it. The coming of Isobel seems to have changed all that. You, Allan, know that you have never done better work in your life than ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... heels of the reports, they heard a voice shouting: "Scowrers! A lot of them, coming from up the river!" A moment later, there was a light whip-crack of one of the long muzzle-loaders, from the top of the old Carnegie Library, and Altamont could see a wisp of gray-white smoke drifting away from where it had been fired. He jumped to his feet and raced for the radio, picking it up and bringing it to ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... and all its traditions to work upon and stores of natural history material. This falling feather began the book which in a few days she had definitely planned and in six months completely written. Her title for it was "The Falling Feather," that tangible thing which came drifting down from Nowhere, just as the boy came, and she has always regretted the change to "Freckles." John Murray publishes a British edition of this book which is even better liked in Ireland and Scotland than ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... a fine prospect was now at an end, but instead we had a compensating spectacle. For thick and fast the clouds came pouring into one chasm after another, drifting in all directions, here a mere transparent veil drawn across the violet hills, there a golden splendour as of some smaller sun shining on a green little world. At one moment the whole vast scene was blurred and blotted with chill winter mist; soon ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... a listless mass, helplessly digesting the product of the tragedy upon the spot of its occurrence, but crawled away slowly through the reeds, and instinctively to the water, into which it slid with scarce a splash, and then went drifting lazily away upon the current toward the sea. It had been years since one of these big water serpents had invaded the river at such a distance from its mouth and never came another up so far. There were causes promoting rapidly the extinction ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... A drifting, April, twilight sky, A wind which blew the puddles dry, And slapped the river into waves That ran and hid among the staves Of an old wharf. A watery light Touched bleak the granite bridge, and white Without the slightest tinge of gold, The city shivered in the ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... merged in the stoutly proven facts. Moreover, if we be adjudged to have succeeded, we have added nothing to Truth itself; no, nor to its outworks. That sacred temple stands complete, firm and glorious from corner-stone to top-stone. We do but sweep away the rubbish at its base; the drifting desert sands that choke its portals. We only serve that cause (a most high privilege), by enlisting a prejudgment in its favour. We propose herein an auxiliary to evidence, not evidence itself; a finger-post to point the way to faith; a little light of reason on its path. The risk is really ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... slowly sped the tiny boat; long gentle strokes touched the water; and presently the oars lay idle in their locks,—they were unconsciously drifting. The water dipped and lapped about the sides; the tender woman's voice across the water stole to them, singing of love; their eyes met—and Mrs. ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... past, sank with a profound echo into the deep recesses of the vast Egyptian tomb. Moonlight and the Hour wove their own mystery; the mystery of a Shadow and a Shape that flitted out like a thin vapor from the very portals of Death's ancient temple, and drifting forward a few paces resolved itself into the visionary fairness of a Woman's form—a Woman whose dark hair fell about her heavily, like the black remnants of a long- buried corpse's wrappings; a Woman whose eyes flashed with an ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... have a warning for thousands and tens of thousands of women who have not yet glimpsed the Gates of Despair, but are drifting towards them and will surely pass through them, as I did, unless they understand the perils that surround and beset ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... raced under the bridges, and at last shot out into the Pool, where a few belated barges were drifting down stream. A number of steamers lay at anchor, some working cargo, others idle. The majority were foreigners, odd-shaped vessels, with funnels like a steam threshing-machine, and gayly ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... gained in a practical school at Troy, George, with, his father, James Ingram, had made many experiments, mostly after business hours; each experiment was numbered and the various results had been carefully noted. Before leaving Harrisville his investigations were all drifting towards great possible changes in the production of iron and steel. He was glad to take this trip to Europe, as it might afford him opportunity to verify or change some of his conclusions. He resolved to use every moment for the ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... winds whistle shrill, And drifting snows each hollow fill, The source of pain and suffering great, So now it is in Wei's poor state, Let us join hands, and leave for aye, My friends and lovers all, 'Tis not a time will brook delay; Things for ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... Through the frayed and drifting edge of the smoke could be seen the frigate and the spars of the privateer; and sticking out of the water, a jagged mizzen—all that was ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... change from restraint to liberty, which is a difficult phase in every life. Will you make it a change from "the rich bounties of constraint" to self-restraint, which is better still; or will you let it be a change to the weak lawlessness of a drifting life? If you would respect yourselves, and be worthy to take part in the great battle between good and evil, make and keep some rules for yourselves. Have a rule about getting up in the morning and (almost equally important) ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... whistle, and to a mocking-bird echoing it; and to the fiddling of grasshoppers, the whispers of trees, the quiet, soft movement of the swamp water. The long thoughts that came to him in the open crossed his mind as clouds cross the sky, idly, moving slowly, breaking up and drifting with the wind. A bee buzzed about a spike of blue lobelia; ants moved up and down the trunk of the oak-tree; birds and butterflies came and went. With his hands under his head, Peter lay so motionless that a great brown water-snake glided upon a branch not ten feet distant, overhanging ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... chopped a space in the ice in which to lay the boat and carried the camp outfit hundreds of feet to shore. In the morning, they chopped the boat out through the new ice and caught the current. Shorty set up the sheet-iron stove in the boat, and over this Stine and Sprague hung through the long, drifting hours. They had surrendered, no longer gave orders, and their one desire was to gain Dawson. Shorty, pessimistic, indefatigable, and joyous, at frequent intervals roared out the three lines of the first four-line stanza of a song he had ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... possession of my office, I gained sufficient money to render me almost entirely independent of my mother. Occasionally I procured an old jacket or trowsers, or a pair of shoes, at the store of an old woman who dealt in everything that could be imagined; and, if ever I picked up oakum or drifting pieces of wood, I used to sell them to old Nanny,—for that was the only name she was known by. My mother, having lost her lodgers by her ill temper and continual quarrelling with her neighbours, had resorted to washing and getting ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... Shirley's two weeks' visit she and David were together, sometimes, through Mrs. Jim's contrivance, with others and often, by grace of their own ingenuity, alone, drifting carelessly down the most traveled stream of life. If Mrs. Jim's warning had awakened any doubts in Shirley's mind—and it had—the doubts were quickly laid by David's presence. She let herself drift; this in spite of certain very definite and very different plans which ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... was tingeing the black and threatening clouds with dingy red. Far as the eye could reach, the once green prairie presented an angry sea, whose inky waves were crested and flecked with foam, and the current was drifting the hut away into the abyss of blackness that seemed to gape on ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... along, wretched in the downpour, the scenery completely hidden by the clouds; but towards midday, as we climbed ever higher and higher, we plunged into pine forests where the rain began to thin to mist, veiling the trees with layers of drifting fog. Out of the forests we came—the rain having ceased—into a strange-looking landscape, whose japanesiness is equalled possibly only by Japan itself. There were the queer rounded hills, the gnarled and twisted little pines and dim fir-clad ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... chiefly attracted my attention was that which represented the monster steamer complete, with all its appendages and complement of passengers, in its majestic flight through the air. Below it were the drifting clouds. Its course lay quite above the storms and hurricanes and conflicting wind-currents which vex the lower strata of the atmosphere, where it comes in contact with the earth's uneven surface, and is kept in motion by the contractions and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... with loud "Ho! Ho!" [24] And he flung the brand to the drifting snow. Three times Wakwa puffed forth the smoke From his silent lips; then he slowly spoke: "Mhpya is strong as the stout-armed oak That stands on the bluff by the windy plain, And laughs at the roar of the hurricane. He has slain the foe and the great Mat With ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... regret," he said. "If that old man had lived, what a crop I might have reaped from him! What enormous transactions in moral agriculture it might have been my privilege to carry on! Ars longa," said Captain Wragge, pathetically drifting into Latin—"vita brevis! Let us drop a tear on the lost opportunities of the past, and try what the present can do to console us. One conclusion is clear to my mind—the experiment you proposed to try with Mr. Michael Vanstone is totally hopeless, my dear girl, in the case of his son. ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... how hopeless was the prospect of saving the lives of any of those who had the misfortune to be on board, for we believed that not one could have survived an instant after the vessel had struck, when the men who were with us asserted that they saw some of the wreck drifting towards us; and directly afterwards a chest and some planks were cast within their reach, and ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... him by one of the Beagle's officers, to take the inner passage. The next news we heard of her was, that she had been wrecked on the outer Barrier at four in the morning; no observation having been taken since the previous noon, by which they might have found a current drifting them to the northward. Fortunately, another ship was in company, and saved the loss of life, but that of property was great. The fact that the lives of so many souls should be placed at the mercy of careless masters of ships, who run such risks, ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... orders at short notice. Hence the increased proportion of the community's income spent on luxuries requires an increased proportion of the labour of the community to be expended in their production. This signifies a drifting of labour from the more steady forms of employment to those which are less steady and whose unsteadiness is constantly increasing. A larger proportion of town workers is constantly passing into trades connected with preparing and preserving animal and vegetable ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... without trouble far above the scene of our first fight,—the Battle of the Hundred Pines, as my officers had baptized it; and ever, as we ascended, the banks grew steeper, the current swifter, the channel more tortuous and more encumbered with projecting branches and drifting wood. No piloting less skilful than that of Corporal Sutton and his mate, James Bezzard, could have carried us through, I thought; and no side-wheel steamer less strong than a ferry-boat could have borne the crash and force ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... south coasts of Sweden, and in the Skagerrak south-east of Norway, navigation is interfered with by ice only in severe winters, and then the ice is usually drifting, compact sea-ice being very rare. Between Stockholm and Visby navigation usually ceases at the end of December and begins again about the 10th of April. During very severe winters the Aland Sea is ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... and he began to swim shorewards; as the current might, for aught he knew, be drifting him somewhat out into the bay. When he was able to make out the dark line ahead of him, he again resumed his former course. It was just eight o'clock when the guard had passed through the gate. He had started half an hour later. He swam what seemed to him a very long time, but he ...
— Held Fast For England - A Tale of the Siege of Gibraltar (1779-83) • G. A. Henty
... that laid his cheek open. To cap it, the mule blundered off the trail and fell, throwing rider and gripsack out upon the rocks. After that, Churchill walked, or stumbled rather, over the apology for a trail, leading the mule. Stray and awful odours, drifting from each side of the trail, told of the horses that had died in the rush for gold. But he did not mind. He was too sleepy. By the time Long Lake was reached, however, he had recovered from his sleepiness; and at Deep Lake he resigned ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... out of reach of the expectant maiden's extended hands. Another oar was hurled after her, with no better effect; when, for the first time, a shade of despair passed over her agitated countenance; for she saw herself rapidly drifting directly into the jaws of a wild and fearful labyrinth of breakers not fifty yards below, where, in all probability, her fragile canoe would be dashed to pieces, and herself thrown against the slippery and jagged rock, drawn down, and lost. Claud, who had witnessed, with trembling anxiety, ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... their tortures were aggravated by the sight of abundance. They drifted over coral rocks, at a considerable depth, but the water was so exquisitely clear that they saw five fathoms down. They discerned small fish drifting over the bottom; they looked like a driving cloud, so vast was their number; and every now and then there was a scurry among them, and porpoises and dog-fish broke in and feasted on them. All this they saw, yet could not catch one of those billions for their ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... safety of a state and insures its prosperity, to be applied wherever there is soil enough for a human being to stand on and thank God for making him a man. Is conservatism applicable only to property, and not to justice, freedom, and public honor? Does it mean merely drifting with the current of evil times and pernicious counsels, and carefully nursing the ills we have, that they may, as their nature it is, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... see all clear for a run of the anchors, Mr. Leach, should you set within a mile of the shore," called out the captain, as they pulled off from the vessel's side. "The ship is drifting along the land, but the wind you have will hardly do more than meet the send of the sea, which is on shore: should any thing go wrong show an ensign at the head of the ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... practised mountaineer; yet he thought he had never traversed so strange or so dangerous a glacier in his life. The ice was excessively slippery, and out of all its chasms came wild sounds of gushing water; not monotonous or low, but changeful and loud, rising occasionally into drifting passages of wild melody, then breaking off into short melancholy tones, or sudden shrieks, resembling those of human voices in distress or pain. The ice was broken into thousands of confused shapes, but none, Hans thought, like the ordinary forms of splintered ice. There seemed a curious ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... the district, and one hasty agent had bills printed, "If Mr. Remington is elected he will live here." The enemy obtained a number of these bills and stuck them on outhouses, pigstyes, dog-kennels; you cannot imagine how irksome the repetition of that jest became. The vast drifting indifference in between my meetings impressed me more and more. I realised the vagueness of my own plans as I had never done before I brought them to the test of this experience. I was perplexed by the riddle of just how far I was, in any sense of the ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... "semi-rigid." On the other hand the "non-rigid" type may be roughly described as a pisciform balloon fitted with propelling machinery, inasmuch as the car containing the driving machinery is suspended from the balloon in the manner of the car in the ordinary drifting vessel. So far as the French effort is concerned the Bayard-Clement type is the best example of the non-rigid system; it is represented in Germany by the ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... from restraint to liberty, which is a difficult phase in every life. Will you make it a change from "the rich bounties of constraint" to self-restraint, which is better still; or will you let it be a change to the weak lawlessness of a drifting life? If you would respect yourselves, and be worthy to take part in the great battle between good and evil, make and keep some rules for yourselves. Have a rule about getting up in the morning and (almost equally important) about going to bed at night; a rule against ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... He never saw that all over the ball-room curious eyes were watching eagerly. Hers were downcast, while his were fixed almost in adoration on her face. Sweeter, softer, dreamier rose and fell the exquisite strains. Will he ever forget the "Immortellen"? Soft ripples of her hair were drifting close to his lips. Their delicate fragrance stole over his senses like a spell. He felt the light pressure of her tiny hand upon his arm, and envied the dead gold of his shoulder-knot, when once, as they reversed and a quick turn was necessary to avoid collision with a bulkier couple, her ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... not assume its duty of leading the House, and Mr. Higgins graphically described the position of affairs by stating that the House was 'bushed;' while Mr. Shiels compared the situation to a rudderless ship drifting hither and thither." ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... cloud drifting across Old Ti as the expressman climbed to his wagon seat and drove away from the Inn. It had been a very hot day and was now late afternoon—just the hour ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... is one of constant hazard, as it keeps the vessel between the immovable rocks and the heavy and rapidly drifting ice, with the ever-present possibility of being crushed between the two. My knowledge of the ice conditions of these channels and their navigation was absolutely my own, gained in former years of traveling along the shores and studying them for this very purpose. On my various expeditions ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... soon increased to a violent gale. As we had nothing to eat and were destitute of the means of making a fire, we remained in our beds all the day, but the covering of our blankets was insufficient to prevent us from feeling the severity of the frost and suffering inconvenience from the drifting of the snow into our tents. There was no abatement of the storm next day; our tents were completely frozen and the snow had drifted around them to a depth of three feet, and even in the inside there was a covering of several inches on our blankets. Our suffering from cold in a comfortless ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... content, you, thus runs the current always. Let the heart swell into what discord it will, thus plays the rippling water on the prow of the ferry-boat ever the same tune. Year after year, so much allowance for the drifting of the boat, so many miles an hour the flowing of the stream, here the rushes, there the lilies, nothing uncertain or unquiet, upon this road that steadily runs away; while you, upon your flowing road of time, are so ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... the wire which had held it uncoiled, came aboard and coiled itself up beside the others. As the Mercurian ship rose I noticed idly that the door which had been torn from our ship and dropped lay within a few yards of the ship itself. The Mercurian ship rose to an elevation of a hundred feet, drifting gently over the city. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... passed away, and he had learned nothing. In truth, he had almost forgotten why he was aimlessly drifting from place to place, farther and ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... invisible, save where a twinkling light gave token of some lonely fisher's wife, watching the weary night through for the boat which would return with dawn. Here and there upon the sea, a black speck marked a herring-boat, drifting with its line of nets; and right off the mouth of the glen, Amyas saw, with a beating heart, a large two-masted vessel lying-to—that must be the "Portugal"! Eagerly he looked up the glen, and listened; but ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... off with it. We had seated ourselves among the branches, which waved to and fro in the wind, and as we looked down, we saw the water foaming round the trunk, and often it seemed as if it must be uprooted and sent drifting down with the current. ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... still among its roses,— Oldtime roses? while the choir Of the lonesome insects dozes: And the white moon, drifting higher, O'er its mossy roof reposes— Sleeps it ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... requesting readers not to run off and read Mr. MORRIS'S poem, after gazing on the above title. My very respectable reader, you're smart, very smart indeed, but let me assure you that you haven't discovered from the float which I have placed on the surface, which way my string is drifting, so, if you get on a string ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 14, July 2, 1870 • Various
... boat! It's disabled—drifting! It must have been on the rocks. It's a large one, too. Look out you ...
— Frank and Andy Afloat - The Cave on the Island • Vance Barnum
... claw and catching up one of the Mamelukes swallowed him. At the sight of this horror Sayf al-Muluk wept bitterly and he and the two men[FN408] that remained to him pushed off from the place where they had seen the crocodile, sore affrighted. After this they continued drifting on till one day they espied a mountain terrible tall and spiring high in air, whereat they rejoiced, when presently an island appeared. They made towards it with all their might congratulating one another on the prospect of making land; but hardly had they sighted the island on which was the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... few minutes more the sound of shots and yells and thundering hoofs came vividly through the still night air. All the time it was drifting away southward, and gradually approached the road. One of the ranchmen begged Phillips to let him have a horse and go out in the direction of the firing to reconnoitre and see what had happened, but it would have been ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... on calling over the names of the crew, found that, besides the two marines who had been drowned under the boat, two of the men were missing. The position of those on the boat was now perilous in the extreme. The wind was increasing, and was drifting her further and further from the shore. Although it was possible that she might be seen in the morning by the frigate, before that time all on her, in all probability, ...
— Owen Hartley; or, Ups and Downs - A Tale of Land and Sea • William H. G. Kingston
... Practically. Natural Rights. Townshend's Duties. Massachusetts's Opposition. Samuel Adams. Committees of Correspondence. The Billeting Act. Boston Massacre. Statement of Grievances. The Tea. Coercion Resolved upon. First Continental Congress. Drifting into War. ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... great with your love, though I am but one among the many, drifting in the common tide, rocking in the fluctuant ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore
... association? Was it no more than her blonde hair drawn up from the neck, her fragrant skin, or her perverse subtle senses? It was something more, but you must not ask me to explain further. I like to remember the rustle of a flowered dress she wore as she moved, drifting like a perfume, passing from her frivolous bedroom into the drawing-room. A room without taste, stiff and middle-class, notwithstanding the crowns placed over the tall portraits. I see a picture of two children; but she is the fairer, and in ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... floor, twelve-score couples swung and swayed to the intoxicating rhythms of an unseen orchestra; kaleidoscopic in their amazingly variegated costuming of colour, drifting past the lonely, diabolical little figure, an endless chain ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... them reach it. I see some who, on attaining a certain height, cease to go up and even lose ground, although moving their legs forward with all the nimbleness of which they are capable. The more they struggle upwards, the faster they come down. This drifting, which neutralizes the distance covered and even converts it into a retrogression, ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... pound of his baggage, which had accompanied him in a wagon under the care of some of his hired men. At Pittsburg he was much struck by the beauty of the mountains and the river, and also by the numbers of flat-boats, loaded with immigrants, which were constantly drifting and rowing past on their way to Kentucky. From the time of reaching the river his journal is filled with comments on the extraordinary abundance and great size of the various ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... quickly to the bedside and his sharp eyes darted from the bank-note in the boy's hand to the signature his patient had written. The man looked wonderingly about the room, his puzzled gaze drifting from one to another of his visitors until it finally fastened upon the pale ...
— The Girls of Central High Aiding the Red Cross - Or Amateur Theatricals for a Worthy Cause • Gertrude W. Morrison
... of the traders' camp-fire was curling up and drifting away into thin veils of film before the sun showed over the horizon hills. The bull-teams had taken up their steady forward push while the quails were still flying to and from their ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... my face through the dusk. "I have come to the river," she said, "to float my lamp on the stream when the daylight wanes in the west." I stood alone among tall grasses and watched the timid flame of her lamp uselessly drifting in ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... wanted not men, but a Man. During a whole generation which followed after the close of the gigantic and sanguinary conflict between the Northern and Southern States of the American Republic, a similar remark would have applied to the millions of slaves who, though nominally free, were drifting hither and thither, now groping in the wrong direction altogether, or missing opportunities they might have embraced, had there but been one commanding personality in their midst to give the word and lead the way. There seemed to be too many negroes, while they were still increasing ...
— From Slave to College President - Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington • Godfrey Holden Pike
... voice, and was so assured of its identity, that she ran out under the awning and looked up and down the platform in front of the station buildings. The rain had ceased, but drops still pattered from the tin roof, and a few stars peeped over the ragged ravelled edge of slowly drifting clouds. By the light of a gas lamp, she saw an old negro man limping away, who held a stick over his shoulder, on which was slung a bundle wrapped in a red handkerchief; and while she stood watching, he vanished in some cul de sac. With her basket in her hand, and her shawl on her arm, she sped down ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... to follow the suit through any of its details, and we shall only say that it progressed rapidly, while poor, unsuspicious Guy was working hard to retrieve in some way his lost fortune, and to fit up a pleasant home for the childish wife who was drifting away from him. He had missed her so much at first, even while he felt it a relief to have her gone just when his business matters needed all his time ...
— Miss McDonald • Mary J. Holmes
... the brim of his slouched hat, but the next moment his voice was heard strong and clear enough in the road. The little column trotted away as evenly as on parade. But those who climbed the roof of the barracks a quarter of an hour later saw, in the moonlight, a white cloud drifting rapidly across the plain towards the west. It was a small cloud in that bare, menacing, cruel, and illimitable waste; but in its ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... stoop. The moon was higher and the ivy shadows were deeper. I sat at her side and we watched a little cloud tilt at the drifting moon and go asunder ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... into the canon with dilated eyes, Ruth sees him nimbly clamber up the opposite side towards the point where Walsh is kneeling behind a rock,—Walsh with his Irish mug expanded in a grin of delight, the smoke just drifting from the muzzle of his carbine as he points with his left hand somewhere out along the cliffs. She sees her soldier boy, crouching low, draw himself to Walsh's side, sees him glancing eagerly over the rocks, then signalling to some one on their own side, pointing ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... the night of Tuesday, the fourth of September, the crew of Ribaut's flag-ship, anchored on the still sea outside the bar, saw a huge hulk, grim with the throats of cannon, drifting towards them through the gloom; and from its stern rolled on the sluggish air the portentous banner ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... times more for her sweet pity of last night, a pity that made my own hate of the monster seem despicable. Surely God will not permit the world to be the poorer by the loss of such a creature. This is hope to me. We are all drifting reefwards now, and faith is our only anchor. Thank God! Mina is sleeping, and sleeping without dreams. I fear what her dreams might be like, with such terrible memories to ground them in. She has not been so calm, within ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... rain. Desperate attempts at Hay-making engross the thoughts and efforts of a good many men and women, though the skies are black, rain falls at intervals, and a chill, heavy mist makes itself disagreeably familiar, while a thin, drifting fog limits the vision to a square mile or so. Some of the half-made hay in the meadows looks as though it had been standing out to bleach for the last fortnight. Even the Grass-land is often ridged so as to shed the water quickly, while deep ditches or drains do duty for fences. ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... the same that his brilliance will not altogether overshadow your memory of others. I should not like to think that we were drifting apart. Still, if it should be so, I must resign myself. I could still be happy in thinking of ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... the glimmering lake there are miles of silence and still waters and green shores, overhung with a multitudinous and scattered fleet of purple and golden clouds, now furling their idle sails and drifting away into the vast harbor of the South. Voices of birds, hushed first by noon and then by possibilities of tempest, cautiously begin once more, leading on the infinite melodies of the June afternoon. As the freshened air invites them forth, so the smooth and stainless ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... Yankee spoke, he ran down to the river, and walking out a short distance, caught a log drifting by and drew ...
— The Huge Hunter - Or, the Steam Man of the Prairies • Edward S. Ellis
... are drifting down into the purple dark, And the long low amber reaches, lying on the horizon's mark, Shape themselves into the gateways, dim and wonderful unfurled, Gateways leading through' the sunset, out ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... eight at pause by the gate to the Bohun place. The night was dark and murmurous with a sibilant wind that sent the leaves drifting, softly clashing one with another. At the far end of the straight brick walk, up through the formal grounds, he could just see the glimmer of the stately columns, and, between them, to one side, a little twinkling light. The gate ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... led to the Fort. Immediately beyond this they turned towards the narrow cinder path which led through the marshes to Mrs. Jasher's cottage, and toiled on cautiously through the misty rain, which fell continuously. The fog was drifting up from the mouth of the river and was growing so thick that they could not see the somewhat feeble lights of the cottage. However, Archie's instincts led him aright, and they blundered finally upon the wooden gate. Here they paused in shocked ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... it stands are very striking; for if they have any inclination out of the perpendicular, it is rather towards than from the road. It is indeed impossible, when you stand under the shade of this lofty barrier, and look up to the clouds drifting over it, to fancy that it is not in the act of toppling down upon your head. We had not as yet emerged from the land of castles, for, as in yesterday's route, almost every little town possessed some vestige of ancient fortification, a silent testimony to the peaceful ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... once, were all superseded by later remembrances now, were all left to fade as they might in the dim background of time. He could pass the room again and again, alone and anxious, and never once think of the boat drifting away in the moonlight, and the night's ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... clusters of red and golden fruit, and beds of strawberries, the fragrance of which scented the air. It was June: but there had been storms, and the weather was cold. The sky was gray and the light dim: the low-hanging clouds moved in a heavy mass, drifting with the wind, which blew only in the higher air, and never touched the earth; no leaf stirred: but the air was very fresh. Everything was shrouded in melancholy, even their hearts, swelling with the grave ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... characterized "I" is substituted for the loose and general "I" of the author; the loss of freedom is more than repaid by the more salient effect of the picture. Precision, individuality is given to it by this pair of eyes, known and named, through which the reader sees it; instead of drifting in space above the spectacle he keeps his allotted station and contemplates a delimited field of vision. There is much benefit in the sense that the picture has now a definite edge; its value is brought out to the best advantage when its bounding line is thus emphasized. ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... have to face hard truths and take strong steps, but we have not done so. Instead we have drifted, and that drifting has eroded our resources, fractured our economy, and shaken our confidence. Though our challenges are fearsome, so are our strengths. Americans have ever been a restless, questing, hopeful people, and we must bring to our task today ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... us. We have taken more pains to understand them than Professor Ray Lankester has taken to understand Lamarck, and by this time know them sufficiently. We thankfully accept by far the greater number, and rely on them as our sheet-anchors to save us from drifting on to the quicksands of Neo-Darwinian natural selection; few of them, indeed, are Mr. Darwin's, except in so far as he has endorsed them and given them publicity, but I do not know that this detracts from their value. We have paid great ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... twitched slightly, and that her fingers, twisting the threads of the tassel, were occasionally stiffened nervously. For he burst out: Oh yes; he had drifted into it when it was a toss up if it wasn't his body instead that would be found drifting out to sea from the first wharf of San Francisco. Yes, he had been a common laborer,—a farm hand, in those fields she had passed,—a waiter in the farm kitchen, and but for luck he might be taking her orders ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... a sturdy little sea-going tug, held close, close to the flank of the departing vessel, keeping even pace with her and lying alongside as nearly as she dared, for the fog had begun to thicken, and distant objects were shut from sight by occasional drifting patches. ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... in the lifeboat, and their old sailor friend died from exposure and over-exertion on the second day of the storm. Thus they were bereft of both kindred and friend, and, though they were unconscious of their situation, they were drifting upon the ocean on a wave-tossed bark, with no living companion but ...
— Golden Moments - Bright Stories for Young Folks • Anonymous
... was the secret of the pain which was tearing at his heartstrings, of all the excitement, the joy, the passion which had swept like a full flood across the level way of his life, which had set him drifting among the unknown seas. Yet it was Beatrice who had brought this upon him. If she had never left, if he had not tasted the horrors of this new loneliness, he might have been able to struggle on. He missed her, missed her diabolically. The other things, marvelous though they were, had been more ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Deringham saw at first sight, but he realized that it was very beautiful, and then commenced to note details with observant eyes. There was a sawmill beside the river, for he could faintly hear a strident scream and see the blue smoke drifting in gauzy wisps across the hill. The square log-house which stood some little distance from the lake looked well built and substantial, and the road that wound through the green oblong had been skilfully laid with rounded strips sawn off the great fir-trunks. ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... warriors shooting, and then came the faint sound of splashes as a half dozen leaped into the water to pursue him. Henry changed the rifle alternately from hand to hand in order to rest himself, and continued in a slanting course across the river, drifting a little with the current. He did not greatly fear the swimmers behind him. One could not attack well in the water, and they were likely, moreover, to lose him in the darkness, which was now heavy, veiling either ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... what one defends be true, an attitude of defence, a continual apology, whatever the cause, makes the mind barren because it kills intellectual innocence; that delight in what is unforeseen, and in the mere spectacle of the world, the mere drifting hither and thither that must come before all true thought and emotion. A zealous Irishman, especially if he lives much out of Ireland, spends his time in a never-ending argument about Oliver Cromwell, the Danes, the penal laws, the rebellion of 1798, the famine, the Irish ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... across the current. In the ripples. Around boulders. At the edge of fast water. Let the nymph drift with the current. Follow it with your rod tip, and be prepared to set the hook at the least hesitation of the line. Trout will sometimes take a drifting nymph and eject it, without being felt on the most delicate rod, so be ever on the alert when nymph fishing. A nymph fished down stream, and retrieved with slow, short jerks, will often work very well. When fished in ...
— How to Tie Flies • E. C. Gregg
... Daylight agreed. "Wait till that big strike is made up river. Then you-all'll see a new kind of mining. What's to prevent wood-burning and sinking shafts and drifting along bed-rock? Won't need to timber. That frozen muck and gravel'll stand till hell is froze and its mill-tails is turned to ice-cream. Why, they'll be working pay-streaks a hundred feet deep in them days that's comin'. I'm sure ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... Nova-Maurania was gone. I don't know where they went, or what happened to them. Here in my stronghold I sometimes imagine them safe and rebuilding a green world where they can smoke pipes and live their own lives. And sometimes I imagine them all dead and drifting out there in the infinity of space. I don't think they would mind ...
— Dead World • Jack Douglas
... Diablo Rears its peak above the fog banks Drifting landward from the ocean, Lived a warlike tribe of people. Fierce they were, and grim and cruel, Worshiping the Fire Demon Who ...
— The Legends of San Francisco • George W. Caldwell
... of importance, the Kara-kash, on which appeared a few drifting rafts, and files of horses and asses at the fords between the pebbly banks. The railroad crosses it about a hundred kilometres from Khotan, where we arrived at eight o'clock ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... range of hills, his instrument-case in hand, drinking from his brandy-flask now and then, to keep down nausea. The night was clear,—a low, wan moon peering from the west, a warm wind from the river drifting the heavy billows of smoke away from the battle-field. He picked his steps with difficulty, unwilling to tread upon even the dead: they lay in heaps here, thrown aside by the men who were removing the wounded. The day was lost: he fancied he could ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... time preceding and during a great strike; the hero is Etienne Lantier (La Fortune des Rougon and L'Assommoir). In a moment of passion Lantier had struck one of his superiors, and having been dismissed from his employment as an engineer, found it difficult to get work, till, after drifting from place to place, he eventually became a coal-miner. The hardships of the life and its miserable remuneration impressed him deeply, and he began to indoctrinate his comrades with a spirit of revolt. His influence grew, and he became the acknowledged leader of the ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... the desert lone and dreary; through the cold, drifting sands, The people fled from the hosts of Satan, from the wrath of ...
— The Secret of the Creation • Howard D. Pollyen
... adjudging the case between ourselves and our enemy. And the questions which present themselves for solution in the approaching conflict have their origin deep in the history of the past; it is only by the light of that history that it becomes possible to discern and appreciate the drifting straws which float on the currents of to-day. By its light we are more clearly enabled to comprehend the truth, to which our people appeal as a final justification for embarking upon the war ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... Suddenly she turned aside, drew herself up, faced him again, and began to inquire, "Do they ever—" but broke down once more, fell upon the old woman's shoulder with a silvery tinkle, shook, hung limp, threw one foot behind her, and tapped the deck with her toe. A married couple drifting by, obviously players and of the best of ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... people, lightly clad, simply rolled themselves up in shawls, beginning the account of the catastrophe as minutely and serenely as though they were in a parlor. A period of ten hours in the crowded narrowness of the boat, drifting at random in the hope of aid, had not broken ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... been built on such doubtful foundations. The greater part of the low ground was a bay in 1849, but it has since been filled in by the drifting sands blown from the ocean side by the prevailing west winds and by earth dumped into it. Much of this land was "made ground." Forty-niners still alive say that when they first saw San Francisco the waters of the bay came up to ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... down slopes ankle deep with rustling leaves towards Chingford again. Here was pleasanter walking than the thawing clay, but now and then one felt the threat of an infinite oozy softness beneath the stiff frozen leaves. Once again while we were here the drifting haze of the sky became thinner, and the smooth green-grey beech stems and rugged oak trunks were brightly illuminated. But only for a moment, and thereafter the sky became not simply unsympathetic but ominous. And the misery ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... crept down the cliff, it touched the drifted masses at its base and incontinently came striding with seven-leagued boots towards us. The distant cliff seemed to shift and quiver, and at the touch of the dawn a reek of gray vapour poured upward from the crater floor, whirls and puffs and drifting wraiths of gray, thicker and broader and denser, until at last the whole westward plain was steaming like a wet handkerchief held before the fire, and the westward cliffs were no more than ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... Humboldt and Stein, St. Just, Demousin, and Vergniaud; all were children of the common classical tradition, but how different is the use to which they put it. During the centuries that passed between the Renaissance and the Revolution, the education of the different countries had then in fact been drifting far apart. What has been done during the nineteenth century has been openly to carry into effect changes which had long been overdue and were already ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... knew no rest from the torment of a mocking voice which bade him bear in mind that all his dishonour had been superfluous, seeing that whilst he played the part of a zealous Christian, Sidwell herself was drifting further and further from the old religion. This voice mingled with his dreams, and left not a waking hour untroubled. He refused to believe it, strove against the suggestion as a half-despairing man does against ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... poet-wise, and wear broad collars turned down, wondering how such disposition may affect her. Her figure and step become a kind of moving romance to you, drifting forward and outward into that great land of dreams which you call the world. When you see her walking with others, you pity her, and feel perfectly sure, that, if she had only a hint of that intellectual fervor which in your own mind blazes up at the very thought of her, she would ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... marked by the characteristic mistiness of North Sea weather; and as the afternoon wore on the mist took on more and more the character of light drifting fog, making it impossible at times to see clearly more ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... approved of by the gods! Our "Government," a highly "responsible" one; responsible to no God that I can hear of, but to the twenty-seven million gods of the shilling gallery. A Government tumbling and drifting on the whirlpools and mud-deluges, floating atop in a conspicuous manner, no-whither,—like the carcass of a drowned ass. Authentic Chaos come up into this sunny Cosmos again; and all men singing Gloria in excelsis ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... great deal of smoke drifting and floating through the air, but it caused less inconvenience and annoyance than it did when they fled ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... left, Mutton Hollow lay submerged in the drifting mists, with only a faint line of light breaking now and then where Lost Creek made its way; and on the other side Compton Ridge lifted like a wooded shore from the sea. A black spot in the red west shaped itself into a crow, making his way on easy wing toward a dead tree on the top of Boulder ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... cattle and sheep, bales of embroidered cloth, ivory and jewels, silver and gold, the products of many countries; while thousands of prisoners were assembled there to rear stately buildings which ultimately fell into decay and were buried by drifting sands. ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... inquisitive bright eyes still followed Barbara, drifting in the dance, like a great waterlily caught in the swirl of a mill pool; and the thought ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... gloom of winter, the tender promise of the spring, the full overshadowing foliage, the declining pomp and deepening tints of autumn. He transports us to the scorching heat of vertical suns, or plunges us into the chilling horrors and desolation of the frozen zone. We hear the snow drifting against the broken casement without, and see the fire blazing on the hearth within. The first scattered drops of a vernal shower patter on the leaves above our heads, or the coming storm resounds through the leafless groves. ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... the steam exhaust ceased as abruptly as it began. The ship was riding easily in spite of the heavy sea. Drifting with wind and wave is a simple thing for a big vessel. There is no struggle, no tearing asunder of resisting forces. Thus might a boat caught in the pitiless current of Niagara glide towards the brink of ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... appearance of Mr. Colcord's The Drifting Diamond, critics throughout the country had a great deal to say on the pictures of the sea which it contained. Mr. Colcord was compared to Conrad, to Stevenson, and to others who have written of the sea with much success. It is gratifying, therefore, ...
— Sight to the Blind • Lucy Furman
... certainly produce a revolution in navigation, and make men wholly independent of steamers and other vessels when they desired to travel upon water with rapidity. Bradley intimated that the day would come when a man would mount a water perambulator and go drifting off to India, sliding over the bounding billows of the dark blue sea as serenely as if he were ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... Nature. We can none of us escape the all-pervading force of gravitation, or the influence of the climate under which we live, or the succession of the seasons, or the laws of growth and of decay; yet man is not a mere passive weed drifting helplessly upon the sea of life, and human wisdom and human folly can do and have done much to modify the conditions of ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... dead gray sky above them, and already a few scattered flakes of snow, really the first of the season, were drifting downward, looking like tiny feathers plucked from the downy breast of ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... the morning, the gale had died away, but the sky wept from low and ragged clouds, as if ashamed and sullen at the wrath of the day before. Water trickled in the cracks of the rock; and when David peered abroad, he looked into the thin drifting clouds. He had a great content in his heart, but the awe and the strange peace of ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a bitch has vanished." Dan leaned back against the wall, glowering at Carl and Jean. Through the transparent walls of the glassed-in booth, they could see the morning breakfast-seekers drifting into the place. "We should have him pretty soon." He bit off the end of a fresh cigar, and assaulted it ...
— Martyr • Alan Edward Nourse
... of a particular providence, taught in every leaf of the Bible. Now, Armytage, look back calmly over your past life, and forward, whither you were drifting, and see if the very kindest thing that could be done for you by an all-wise and all-loving God was not to bring you up suddenly, and lay you aside, and force you to think. Beware of trying to ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... and whatever borders its course as it breaks its way out to the sea. The wreckage is scattered along the coast for over a hundred miles, and the islands of Bering Sea get a small share. The islanders are constantly on the lookout for the drifting timber, and put out to sea in the stormiest weather for a distant piece, be it large or small. They also patrol the coast after a high tide for stray bits of wood. When one considers the toil and pain with ...
— The Dance Festivals of the Alaskan Eskimo • Ernest William Hawkes
... the wide bay into which it projects. Captain Mirolani, the Master, is a very careful seaman, and gives on his journeys a wide berth to the bay which is tabooed by Lloyd's. But when he saw in the moonlight, though far off, a tiny white figure of a woman drifting on some strange current in a small boat, on the prow of which rested a faint light (to me it looked like a corpse-candle!), he thought it might be some person in distress, and began to cautiously edge towards it. Two of his officers were with him on the bridge—Signori ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... most noteworthy example of chastity. Saintly and continent throughout his career, Noah had just rounded out his fifth century when he began married life. Thus far, he had renounced matrimony, repelled by the licentiousness of the young, who were drifting into the depravity of the Cainites. Notwithstanding, at the call of God, he obediently entered upon marriage, although it was quite possible for him to remain ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... are all striving after is happiness," Count Roumovski said. "Only we will not admit it, and nearly always spoil our own chances by drifting, and allowing outside things to influence us. If you could see the vast plains of snow in my country and the deep forests—with never a human being for miles and miles, you would understand how nature grows to talk to one—and how small the littlenesses of the world appear." Then ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... said, stepping out on to the moors, "How quiet it is!" Quiet at midday, except when the hunt scatters across it; quiet in the afternoon, save for the drifting sheep; at night the moor is ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... had only previously seen a little rough model of the statue, nodded his head, in order that he might not have to answer immediately. Decidedly, that good fellow Mahoudeau was turning traitor, and drifting towards gracefulness, in spite of himself, for pretty things ever sprang from under his big fingers, former stonecutter though he was. Since his colossal 'Vintaging Girl,' he had gone on reducing and reducing the proportions of his figures without ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... not intend to do anything that was really wrong, or even unbecoming in her position as Jack's wife; but still she was resolved on extracting the utmost amount of amusement possible out of life, and thus with slow, subtle drifting and unconscious eyes—eyes that would not see their peril—she reached the point where temptation ...
— If Only etc. • Francis Clement Philips and Augustus Harris
... then vanished poor Nicuesa and his faithful followers on that bright sunny spring morning. And none of them ever came back to tell the tale of what became of them. Did they die of starvation in their crazy brigantine, drifting on and on while they rotted in the blazing sun, until her seams opened and she sank? Did they founder in one of the sudden and fierce storms which sometimes swept {27} that coast? Did the deadly teredo bore the ship's timbers full of holes, ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... or aliens; Eliashib, son of the high priest Joiakim, did not even deprive Tobiah the Ammonite of the chamber in the temple which he had formerly prepared for him, and things were almost imperceptibly drifting back into the same state as before the reformation, when Nehemiah returned from Susa towards the close of the reign of Artaxerxes. He lost no time in re-establishing respect for the law, and from henceforward opposition, if it did ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... struck before we found ourselves in broken water off the fort of El-Muwaylah, where our captain cast a single anchor, and where we had our first escape from drifting upon the razor-like edges of the coralline reefs. In fact, everything looked so menacing, with surging sea around and sable storm-clouds to westward, that I resolved upon revisiting our old haunt, the safe and dock-like Sharm Yhrr. Here we entered without accident; and were presently greeted ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... felt there had been a great deal of drifting away between Germany and England, and that it was important to ask what was the cause. To ascertain this, events of recent history had to be taken into account. Germany had built up, and was building up, magnificent armaments, and, with the aid of the Triple Alliance, she had become ...
— Before the War • Viscount Richard Burton Haldane
... progress was slow, for the oak furniture was heavy and the roads were rough, leading across the moor and down steep hills into valleys, with equally steep hills on the other side. The sky was covered with a thin mist drifting slowly before the wind, and when the moon shone through it, about two o'clock in the morning, it was the waning-moon looking sad and forlorn amid the floating vapor. The houses they passed were few and far between, showing no light or sign of life. All the land lay around them ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... not long sustained; an occasional sharp cry of command or sharper oath; an intermittent rumble and jar from the infrequently moved artillery, not yet in action; and perhaps a groan or two from the wounded. But, even when the field-rifles began to boom and shroud the landscape in drifting smoke, the make-believe aspect of the affair did not in any degree diminish. There were no clouds of dust, no heaps of slain, no cheers, no desperate charges, and not even a glimpse of the stars and stripes. Away to our right we could see crowds of spectators on the elevated ...
— From Yauco to Las Marias • Karl Stephen Herrman
... the responsible position he occupied, and his services to the Government can hardly be overestimated. He had been a Democrat, a member of Buchanan's Cabinet, and was, says Dr. Holland, "the first one in that Cabinet to protest against the downright treason into which it was drifting. He was a man of indomitable energy, devoted loyalty, and thorough honesty. Contractors could not manipulate him, traitors could not deceive him. Impulsive, perhaps, but true; wilful, it is possible, but ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... literary shrine on earth is of more humble and disregarded aspect than Mickle Street. It is a little cobbled byway, grimed with drifting smoke from the railway yards, littered with wind-blown papers and lined with small wooden and brick houses sooted almost to blackness. It is curious to think, as one walks along that bumpy brick pavement, that many pilgrims from afar have looked forward to visiting Mickle ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... dulling ears did not distinguish. Then it seemed Mrs. Belding was beside his bed, her presence so cool and soothing and helpful, and Mercedes and Nell, wide-eyed and white-faced, were fluttering around him. He drank thirstily, but refused food. He wanted rest. And with their faces drifting away in a kind of haze, with the feeling of gentle hands about ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... matter over until I became excited and curious, and determined to set myself more seriously at work to find out what was going on in these wild hearts and where their passionate lives were drifting. I say wild hearts and passionate lives, because I think I can look through this seeming calmness of youth and this apparent feebleness of organization, and see that Nature, whom it is very hard to cheat, is only waiting as the sapper waits in his mine, knowing that ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... sifted through, but were quickly brought down as Otah's drifting rear-guard deployed to their assignments. It became evident early that Otah's tribe was more proficient in ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse
... tower and contained tubes of radioactive solution to simulate, at a low level of activity, the radioactive products expected from a nuclear explosion. The test produced a bright sphere which spread out in an oval form. A column of smoke and debris rose as high as 15,000 feet before drifting eastward. The explosion left a shallow crater 1.5 meters deep and 9 meters wide. Monitoring in the area revealed a level of radioactivity low enough to allow workers to spend several hours in the area ...
— Project Trinity 1945-1946 • Carl Maag and Steve Rohrer
... The bark is drifting through the surf, beside Its rocks of gray upon the coming tide; And lightly is it stranded on the shore Of pure and silver shells, that lie before, Glittering in the glory of the sun; And Julio hath landed him, ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... so common on the surface of sandstones of all ages (see Figure 8), and which is so often seen on the sea-shore at low tide, seems to originate in the drifting of materials along the bottom of the water, in a manner very similar to that which may explain the inclined layers above described. This ripple is not entirely confined to the beach between high and low water mark, ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... khodawund, lug, gea,' that bullet has told; oh your highness! and while the boat rocks violently to and fro, I abuse the boatmen, slang the syce, and rush to grasp a pole, while the peon seizes another; for we are drifting rapidly down stream, and may at any moment strike on a bank and topple over. We can hear by the growling and commotion on the bank, that my bullet has indeed told, and that something is hit. We soon get the frightened boatmen quieted down, and after another hour's weary work we spy the white outline ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... into silence. Jose began to feel that they were drifting hopelessly, abysmally apart. Desperation ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... the morning, the air was thick with snowflakes, and everything was heaped and piled high with snow. It seemed as if it would be impossible to get out to feed the hens, for not only was it very deep, but it was drifting ...
— Peggy in Her Blue Frock • Eliza Orne White
... when the water in mid-channel came up nearly to the body of the wagon, and the swift ripples deluded the eye into almost conviction that horses, vehicle, and all were not gaining an inch in forward progress, but drifting surely down. They came up out of the depths, however, with a tug, and a swash, and a drip all over, and a scrambling of hoofs on the pebbles, at the very point aimed at in such apparently sidelong fashion,—the ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... to learn what the war taught us. She is exactly like thousands of other good women, and men, too, for that matter. They simply don't understand. Good Lord!" he exploded, suddenly "when I think what a worthless snob I was before I enlisted I want to kick my fool self to death. But we are drifting away from the main thought," ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... in all parts of the texture—upper, inner and lower voices—and we are carried vigorously onward by the daring modulations. Just at the close of the Development we see Mozart's constructive skill in the fusion of this part with the subsequent Recapitulation. A series of drifting chromatic chords in the flutes and oboes, like light fleecy clouds, keeps us in a state of suspended wonder when quietly there emerges the first theme and the return home has begun. It is one of the truly poetic touches in musical literature and has been often imitated—especially ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... solitude in hemming dish-towels, or making articles called "Takers." Dr. Price came, too, and even the haughty four Ryders. Alice was gratified with my popularity. But I felt cold at heart, doubtful of myself, drifting to nothingness in thought and purpose. None saw my doubts or ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... after a few minutes again, 'how different the clouds of this season are from those of other times of the year? Look at those high bands of vapour lying along towards the south; they seem absolutely poised and still. Clouds in spring and summer are drifting, or flying, or dispersing, or gathering: earnest and purposeful; with work to do, and hurrying to do it. Look at those yonder; they are at rest, as if all the work of the year were done up. I think they say ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... slowly, Theatre people pass, Holding aloft their umbrellas that flash and are bright Like flowers of infernal moly Over nocturnal grass Wetly bobbing and drifting ...
— New Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... it without detection and punishment. And is he not, at this very moment, stealing away from you the life of body and soul? Don't be offended, pray, Mr Oldfield; but I say again, I can't bear to see you drifting on to the rocks, and not lend a helping hand to keep ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... turned gloomy and windy; heavy driving masses of clouds obscured the moon, which only now and then was to be seen, when the clouds permitted her to peep out. At the same time, there were many drifting showers, which lasted but a few minutes, and then the clouds were carried forwards by some sudden gust of wind so that, altogether, it was a most uncomfortable night as well ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... that time the greater part of the enemy's ships ceased to fire; some of the lighter vessels were adrift, and the carnage on board their ships was dreadful the crews having been continually re-enforced. Soon after this, the Danish commodore's ship took fire, and drifting in flames before the wind, spread terror and dismay throughout their line. The ships a-head, however, with the crown-batteries, as well as the prizes made by the British, still continued to lire, and Nelson, humane as he was brave, being shocked at the slaughter which their bold resistance ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... escape with their lives; they were innocent.... Then in a body we sallied forth, this time a fully-equipped and well-mounted body of marauders. It was a fate from which it was impossible to escape—my men had such decision left when every person in authority was already drifting.... ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... did not help him out—she could not. With her fingers locked together in her lap, she waited for what was coming, with the feeling that she was drifting down stream, and had neither the strength, nor inclination, to arrest her swift descent. He drew a sigh that was almost a gasp, ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... So his thoughts ran, drifting from his personal danger, which he knew to be great, to other matters, which he dreaded to consider, because they meant far more to him than his own life. Upon these bitter reflections a slight sound intruded, the first which had disturbed the stillness ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... an' keep free o' th' bad ice; the's sure t' be bad ice handy t' th' Kenemish," had been Mark Blake's parting injunction. So George kept well to the eastward as, hour after hour, we forged our way on through the bending, drifting snow. At length we came upon land, but what land we did not know. The storm had abated by this time, and a fresh komatik track was visible, which we proceeded to follow. On all sides of us ice was piled in heaps as high as a house. We had been travelling altogether about six hours, ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... to mulch the plantation each fall with light manure, leaf mold, or other material. Even though the shrubs are perfectly hardy, this mulch greatly improves the land and promotes growth. After the shrub borders have become two or three years old, the drifting leaves of fall will be caught therein and will be held as ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... few, And we heard the foeman's challenge only in a far halloo: Till the silence once more settled o'er the gorges of the glen, Broken only by the Cona plunging through its naked den. Slowly from the mountain summit was the drifting veil withdrawn, And the ghastly valley glimmered in the gray December dawn. Better had the morning never dawned upon our dark despair! Black amidst the common whiteness rose the spectral ruins there: But the sight of these was nothing ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... a beat. Down the river in the sunlight a shantyboat was drifting. Jimmy could see the Harmon brothers crouching on the deck, their faces livid with hate, sunlight glinting on ...
— The Mississippi Saucer • Frank Belknap Long
... all knows that a drop of "J.J." and a whisper (subdued) of hot water and a lump of sugar and lemon peel (if you care for lemon peel) and nutmeg (if you are a "jood ") is a drink calculated to tune a man's heart to the song of the wind slapping a beer-sign upside down and the snow drifting in under the door. Mr. Dooley was drinking this mixture behind his big stove ...
— Mr. Dooley: In the Hearts of His Countrymen • Finley Peter Dunne
... way, and Winter blustered into the past, too, without serving the emotions of Scalawag Run; and a new Spring was imminent—warm winds blowing out of the south, the ice breaking from the cliffs and drifting out to sea and back again. Still pretty Peggy Lacey was obdurately fixed in her attitude toward the sly suggestion of Skipper John Blue. Suffer she did—that deeply; but she sighed in secret and husbanded her patience with what stoicism she could command. There were times, twilight ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... but I do not suppose that we are very many miles away from shore. The mast and oars prevent our drifting fast, and I don't think we are further off now than we were when we left that ship yesterday. But even if we were four or five times as far as that, we should not take very long in sailing back again when the wind drops; and as we have ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... much to feel equally indifferent. Something like a pang shot through him as he reflected that for him the battle must be against wind and tide—a fierce struggle, more and more hopeless, to grasp at something drifting visibly out of reach. He was not a man, however, to be beat while it was possible to persist. Believing Dick Stanmore the great obstacle in his way, he watched that preoccupied gentleman as a cat ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... exploded," murmured the shadowy shape, mixing itself up with the motes of a sunbeam and drifting out through the window. Then Richard fell to laughing in his sleep, and so awoke. He was still confused with the dream as he sat on the edge of his bed, pulling himself together in the ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... hither and thither before us; while thick in our rear flew the inscrutable sea-ravens. And every morning, perched on our stays, rows of these birds were seen; and spite of our hootings, for a long time obstinately clung to the hemp, as though they deemed our ship some drifting, uninhabited craft; a thing appointed to desolation, and therefore fit roosting-place for their homeless selves. And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great .. ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... alarm all but the most stalwart spirits: Canada quite lost to the cause; Arnold's army in full, though orderly, retreat from that province; a powerful British fleet just arriving in New York harbor, three or four ships drifting in daily, and now forty-five sail all at once signalled ...
— Revolutionary Heroes, And Other Historical Papers • James Parton
... rope, while Uncle Tad held the Teddy bear and flashed her eyes about on the flood that was moving the car along. Bunny's father was trying to catch sight of a tree around a limb of which he could cast the rope and so bring the drifting automobile to a stop. It was not moving quite so fast now, as the stream was not quite so swift. In fact if the flooded stream had not been so swift it never could have carried the heavy auto ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue on an Auto Tour • Laura Lee Hope
... that skipped the four, like peas on a drumhead, but they could see neither to defend themselves nor to run away. Thwack! thwack! went the Miller's cudgel across their backs, and at every blow great white clouds of flour rose in the air from their jackets and went drifting ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... grace of self-denial and the spirit of a sound mind. It is that poise of spirit that holds us quiet, self-possessed, recollected, deliberate, and subject ever to the voice of God and the conviction of duty in every step we take. Many persons have not that poise and recollected spirit. They are drifting at the impulse of their own impressions, moods, the influence of others, or the circumstances around them. No desire should ever control us. No purpose, however right, should have such mastery over us that we are not perfectly free. The ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... small arms, so that the frigates threw them adrift, firing them sooner than they otherwise would. The burning boats floated toward the Hector, but having a stiff breeze, drifted past to leewards. Within half an hour after, we perceived many boats drifting towards the Hector, against which we again let drive, forcing the frigates to abandon them in such a hurry that they only set two of them on fire, there being four of them chained together. Fortunately we had a stiff ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... could tell just what it was that aroused him; perhaps it was a premonition of danger, perhaps the rocking of the boat. At any rate he was suddenly broad awake to find himself drifting out into the middle of the stream. In some way the boat must have become unfastened and the rising breeze carried it away from shore. Not that it mattered very much now. The thing that was of consequence was ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
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