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More "Erratic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... had been conducting an experiment, assisted by a Professor Klenn Faress, to establish more accurately the velocity of subnucleonic particles, beta micropositos, I believe. Dandrik's story, as relayed to Handrosan by Khane, is that he reached a limit and the apparatus began giving erratic results." ...
— Ministry of Disturbance • Henry Beam Piper
... underground colony; their six little legs carrying their curious globular bodies backward and forward over the disturbed area from which the stone had been removed. At first the movements of the ants were extremely erratic and purposeless. Panic and alarm appeared to be the order of the day during the few minutes which elapsed after removal of the stone. But soon the eye could discern movements of purposive kind on the part of the alarmed residents. There was "racing and chasing" in all directions: but the ants which ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... evening was cloudy. Jupiter reported nothing new except that Neptune had deviated from its course and tended to pursue an erratic and ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei
... swiftly launching the curved wood from his hand. At first the boomerang skims along near the ground, then rises four or five feet, but only to sink again, and again to rise. As we carefully watch its course, and suppose it just about to stop in its erratic career, and drop, spent, to the ground, it suddenly ceases its forward flight, and rapidly returns to the thrower. It is thought that no white man can exactly learn the trick of throwing this strange weapon, and certainly few ever care to ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... frantic efforts, apparently, to put both legs simultaneously into one boot. Surprised in the midst of this arduous task by an unexpected lurch, he made an impetuous charge upon an inoffensive washstand, stepped on an erratic bottle, fell on his head, and finally brought up a total wreck in the corner of the room. Convulsed with laughter, the Major could only ejaculate disconnectedly, "I tell you—it is a—curious thing how she—rolls!" "Yes," rejoined Bush savagely, as he rubbed one knee, "I should think it ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... may be produced in solid bodies without material contact, by some hitherto unrecognised force'. Sub- committees 2 and 3 had many communications with mysterious intelligences to vouch for, and much erratic behaviour on the part of tables to record. No. 4 had nothing to report at all, and No. 5 which sat four times with Home had mere trifles of raps. Home was ill, and ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... the Empire. When, after more than a year, the unfortunate druggist reached the last outpost of Russian power in North-Eastern Asia, and was set at liberty, he made his way to the little log church, entered the belfry, and proceeded to jangle the church bells in a sort of wild, erratic chime. When the people of the town ran to the belfry in alarm and inquired what was the matter, Schiller replied, with dignity, that he wished the whole population to know that 'by the Grace of God, ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... December 20, appeared a statement of the test to ascertain the accuracy of the meter used, which showed that in an aggregate of twelve tests it varied nearly three per cent in its record from the actual quantity delivered, while at times it was so erratic that it varied in one instance over ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... these desert conveyances, that creak and groan across the arid wastes with an apparently lumbering inconsequence, the stage that brought the travellers to the Dax ranch left at sunrise to pursue a seemingly erratic career along the North Platte, while Miss Carmichael and the fat lady were to continue their journey with one Lemuel Chugg, who drove a stage northward towards the Red Desert, when he was sober ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... Wendt, this same year, show the interest of our foreign women citizens in the cause of their sex. In 1870, The Woman's Journal was founded in Boston, Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and Henry B. Blackwell, editors. Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, an erratic paper, advocating many new ideas, was established in New York by Victoria Woodhull and Tennie C. Claflin, editors and proprietors. The New Northwest, in Portland, Oregon, in 1871, Abigail Scott Duniway, editor and proprietor. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Cachama impatiently. "Let me follow him first as far as I may, lest I lose him, for now his way is growing erratic, his mind and body are becoming numb with the misery of his plight, and he no longer has any clear knowledge of anything, the one conviction which haunts him being that he must press onward anywhere—no matter where—otherwise his pursuers will overtake him and put him to a terrible ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... personal beauty would not have been unrivalled at a Cowes Regatta and her somewhat erratic motions were not calculated to bring balm to the soul of an unseasoned mariner, she was a faithful ship, and no one could ever question her courage. At the sight of a hostile periscope she used positively ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 26, 1919 • Various
... in quick succession, the vigorous, newborn echoes of one peal seeming angrily to chase the receding voices of its predecessor from cliff to cliff, and from recess to projection, along its rocky, erratic course up the caon. Vivid flashes of forked lightning shoot athwart the heavy black cloud that seems to rest on either wall, roofing the caon with a ceiling of awful grandeur. Sheets of electric flame light up the dark, shadowy recesses of the towering rocks as they play ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... the other side, I exerted every muscle to reach the beach; but my frisky friends were in no mood to leave me, but continued their fun with increased energy as reinforcements came up from all directions. The faster I rowed the more they multiplied, ploughing the sea in erratic courses. They were from five to seven feet in length, and must have weighed from two hundred to four hundred pounds each. Though their attentions were kindly meant, their brusqueness on such an unsteady footing ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... of pleasure prevented further speech at the moment, fairly carrying away the whole group by the intensity of the sensations which such erratic voluptuousness could not fail to produce upon natures which, after all, were only sustained by the ordinary powers of humanity, in fact it was too exhaustive to allow of further indulgence in venery upon the present occasion. But after recovering a little, the Doctor, who now thoroughly ...
— The Power of Mesmerism - A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts and Fancies • Anonymous
... earth, some people accept the mere fact of his soaring for sublimity, and mistake his dim vision of earth for proximity to heaven." And in like manner, when a thinker frees himself from all the trammels of fact, and propounds a "bold hypothesis," people mistake the vagabond erratic flights of guessing for a higher range of philosophic power. In truth, the imagination is most tasked when it has to paint pictures which shall withstand the silent criticism of general experience, and to frame hypotheses which shall withstand the confrontation ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... golden clothing comes The great drum-major with his drums And sun-smit brass of trumpets; then The scarlet wall of marching men, Midmost of which great Mavors sets The colours girt with bayonets. Yes, there were you—and there was I, Unshaved, and with erratic tie, And for that once I yearn'd to shun My social system's central sun. How could a sloven slave express The frank, the manly tenderness That wraps you round from common thought, And does not ask that you should ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... He had grown erratic in his gestures. His eyes seemed incapable of focusing themselves. They darted about the room, running away from him. The woman's smile persisted and he turned his glance abruptly at her. The red flesh of her opened mouth and throat confronted him as ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... month before she had not been aware—that sudden illuminating grasp of old Barzil's inner pain, of her mother's wasted spirit, and the sense that some unguessed potent motive was at the back of her Uncle Edward's apparently erratic strolling and reiterations. Nettie stopped to wonder a little at the change in herself: she was more alive, more included. There were no reasons that she could see why this should be so; never had the present, the entire future, been darker. With her deeper consciousness, too, came an ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... like the Delhi pandies, who are artillerymen trained by ourselves; here you will see the real genuine native product; and as the manufacture of shell is in its infancy, and as the shot seldom fits the gun within half an inch, or even an inch, you will see something erratic. They may knock holes in the wall, but it will take them a long time to cut enough holes near each other to make a breach. There, do you see? there are another lot of elephants and troops coming from the left. We shall have the whole countryside here before long. Ah! ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty
... bright starlight, with a moon not yet in its prime to throw shadows black and mysterious against the coulee sides. The coulee itself, Weary observed, was erratic in the matter of height, width and general direction. Places there were where the width dwindled until there was scant room for the cow trail his horse conscientiously followed; places there were where the walls were easy slopes to climb, and others where the rocks hung, a sheer ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... all these things that everything is still very erratic, and that the men remain badly distributed. Nor is this all. The general command over the whole of the Legation area is now plainly modelled on the Chinese plan—that is, the officer commanding does not interfere with ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... I have tried hard to keep right; and if I am not as full as I can hold of one-sided and erratic opinions, I think it some praise. . . . I do strive to keep in my mind a whole rounded circle of truth and opinion. It would be pleasant to let every mental tendency run its length; but I could not do so. ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... real Spain had generous though sluggish intentions, and noble though erratic impulses, but it awoke too late; too late for Doctor Rizal and too late to save the Philippines for Spain; tardy reforms after his death were useless and the loss of her overseas possessions was the result. Doctor ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... had established so complete a mastery over the Government, that even men of far greater ability and force of character would have been impotent for good. Her whole dependence was on Mirabeau; and his course at this time was so capricious and erratic that it often caused her more perplexity and alarm than pleasure or confidence. He regarded himself as having a very difficult part to play. He could not conceal from himself that he was no longer able to lead the Assembly as he had done at first, except ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... than in any other occupation in the bush. Hence it is an employment which industrious or enterprising individuals generally shun; and in the successive scales of advancement, in which the steady immigrant effects his rise, it is left to members of the lowest scum; who prefer the freedom of this erratic life, to the more settled conformities of ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... thus transformed into a matrimonial agent and pater familiae. The intentions of the King, however, were faithfully executed, and more than one rough but honest Canadian boatman of the St. Lawrence and of the Mississippi closed his adventurous and erratic career and became a domestic and useful member of that little commonwealth, under the watchful influence of the dark-eyed maid of the Loire or ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Vol. II - The Planting Of The First Colonies: 1562—1733 • Various
... lecturing on Shakespeare; contributing to 'The Morning Chronicle'; preaching in Unitarian pulpits; publishing his 'Juvenile Poems', etc. etc.; and throughout eccentric, impetuous, original—with contagious enthusiasm and overflowing genius—but erratic, self-confident, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... flying-jib-boom-end, upon which I took my stand, steadying myself by grasping the royal stay in my left hand. The motion away out there, at the far extremity of that long spar, was tremendous; so much so, indeed, that seasoned as I was to the wild and erratic movements of a ship in heavy weather, the sinkings and soarings and flourishings of that boom-end, as the vessel plunged and staggered down toward the wreck, made me feel distinctly giddy. The wait was not a very long one, however, and in less than five minutes I found ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... rocks, in which all possible intermediate stages may be seen between the solid rock and the loose sand. The sand is not stratified, and contains large, loose, rounded blocks in situ, completely resembling the erratic blocks in Sweden, although with a more rugged surface. The boundary between the unweathered granite and that which has been converted into sand is often so sharp that a stroke of the hammer separates the crust of granitic sand from the granite blocks. They have ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... by reputation, in all this country; he had readers in England and in several of the states of Continental Europe; but he had few or no friends; and the regrets for his death will be suggested principally by the consideration that in him literary art has lost one of its most brilliant but erratic stars. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... true. Already low clouds of smoke were drifting overhead like a broken veil. The erratic foothill wind, which a few minutes before had been coming down the valley, was now blowing back up again. Even while they took in the situation they could feel the hot breath of the distant ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... outlying hills until only one barely moving craft was in sight. This had received the brunt of our fire and seemed to be entirely unmanned, as not a moving figure was visible upon her decks. Slowly she swung from her course, circling back toward us in an erratic and pitiful manner. Instantly the warriors ceased firing, for it was quite apparent that the vessel was entirely helpless, and, far from being in a position to inflict harm upon us, she could not even control herself ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... rattled the cups into her dish-pan with dangerous haste, and Betty raised a cloud of dust "sweeping-up," while mother seemed to be everywhere at once. Even Sanch, feeling that his fate was at stake, endeavored to help in his own somewhat erratic way,—now frisking about Ben at the risk of getting his tail chopped off, then trotting away to poke his inquisitive nose into every closet and room whither he followed Mrs. Moss in her "flying round" evolutions; next dragging off the mat so Betty could brush the door-steps, or inspecting ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... popular fancy, especially in Paris, where he was best known, as erratic: as once when, by a stroke of financial sleight-of-hand, he got the young Government of Russia into a tight place, then refused them a loan, except on condition of the lease to him of the Kremlin: and for ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... appearance. To vulgar minds real depth is incomprehensible; it is perhaps for that reason that the populace is so prone to admire what it cannot understand. Monsieur and Madame d'Hauteserre, impressed by the habitual silence and erratic habits of the young girl, were constantly expecting some ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... with the movements of so erratic an individual," she said. "Since Robert Audley has taken it into his head to conduct himself like some ghost-haunted hero in a German story, I have given up attempting to ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of Clancy Gone a-droving "down the Cooper" where the Western drovers go; As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing, For the drover's life has pleasures that the townsfolk ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... years I had led this life of erratic wandering, returning to London only for a week or so in June, to see my lawyers and put in an appearance for a few days at Carrington to interview old Browning. And I must confess I found the old place deadly dull ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... (one of them suffering from a bad attack of yaws) propelled the craft from her forward part in erratic zig-zags; amidships sat Captain Kettle in a Madeira chair under a green-lined white umbrella; and behind him squatted his personal attendant, a Krooboy, bearing the fine old Coast name of Brass Pan. The crushed marigold smell from ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... the exterior slopes of the famed Garden of the Gods, quite in keeping with the spirit of the decorative red-man. Within that garden color and form run riot, and Manitou is the restful outpost of this erratic wilderness. ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... me about yesterday," he began, anticipating Sundown's leisurely and erratic recital. "I understand you found me on the trail and went ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... States; Washington Irving, Count Volney, Humbolt, the geographer; Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat; Lorenzo Dow, the eccentric preacher; several young naval officers from the Tripolitan War; and John Randolph of Roanoke. I wonder if it was from this old tavern that that brilliant but erratic statesman went out across the Chain Bridge to fight his duel with Henry Clay? It is recorded by a marker, just at the end of the bridge on the Virginia side, and reads thus: "Near here Henry Clay and John Randolph of Roanoke fought a duel April 8, 1826. Randolph had called Clay a 'Blackleg' in a ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... John Cheever's self-imposed tasks was the care of cranks. Though somewhat peculiar himself he had no use for odd fish—queer folk and the like—and kept a sharp look-out for erratic strangers. Of these there was a constant succession coming to the Farm; reformers of everything under the sun; fanatics demanding the instant adoption of—their nebulous theories; mental aliens not quite crazy but pretty near it; egotists, wild to be noticed, freaks and fakirs and humbugs ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... nursed him through his illness, and treated him like a brother, Etheridge, with the impulsive confidence of his simple nature, poured out his thanks and told his history, and eagerly accepted Lawson's suggestion to try his hand at trading, instead of continuing his erratic wanderings—wanderings which could only end in his "going broke" at Tahiti or Honolulu, Fifteen miles or so away, Lawson said, there was a village with a good opening for a trader. How much could he put into it? Well, he had L500 with him, and ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke
... business to come before the House was also to be considered, and the policy to be pursued determined upon. Unfortunately in this case again Jeffersonian theory did not accord with Jeffersonian practice. Even erratic Randolph complained of the want of system at these cabinet meetings, where each was at liberty to do and say as he chose; a severe trial, this, to Gallatin. In 1845 Mr. Gallatin wrote to Edward Coles that it was "quite unusual to submit to the cabinet the manner in which the ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... street. For such projectiles as laden toboggans, passing across the trunk line of the village traffic at an average rate of a mile a minute, were hardly less dangerous than cannon-balls, and of much more erratic flight. ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... world. He is temperamental, your father, a genius in his way, and a little mad, perhaps. Leave him to me, Monsieur, and it will be quite all right. Last night, it was so sudden, that I was frightened for a moment. I should have remembered he is erratic and apt to change his mind. I should have guessed why he changed it. It is you, Monsieur. You have had a bad effect upon him. You have made him turn suddenly grotesque. What did you ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... French with a most funny accent even yet, though she spent so many years abroad, so many in Paris. I do not know what would have become of my guardian if it had not been for her. Her father loved her, but was very erratic and undisciplined. Mrs. Talcott has been with my guardian for almost all the time ever since. It is a great and silent devotion. She is very reticent. She never speaks of herself. She talks to me sometimes in the evenings ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... the Coast at that time was a fellow so erratic that he was nicknamed "Crazy-horse." Right in the midst of the strike Crazy-horse wired that he had secured a big silk shipment for New York. We were paralyzed. We had no engineers, no firemen, and no motive power to speak of. The strikers ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... "He is a great name with all the young men, and he is decidedly an influence in art. But one can't definitely place a man who is original, erratic, and who is changing ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... and Umzimubu Rivers, and there for a time things went well. Pretorius was Commandant General in Natal, Potgieter Chief Commandant in the allied Western Districts. The legislative power was in the hands of a Volksraad of twenty-four members, whose ways were more vacillating and erratic than advantageous. "Every man for himself and God for all" seemed to be the convenient motto of this assembly, except perhaps on urgent occasions, when Pretorius and Potgieter were called upon as joint dictators to settle some knotty ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... universal space As with a flame of crystal, Rousing the Soul of Joy That slumbered in the patient sea, From every point of heaven the hurrying cars Conveyed the constellations to their thrones— The throbbing planets, and the burning suns, Erratic comets, and the various grades And magnitudes of palpitating stars. From the far arctic and antarctic zones, Through all the vast, surrounding infinite, A wilderness of intermingling orbs, The gleaming ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... German official—wedded as he may be to his rank or his title, anxious as he may be to preserve an outward decorum in exact keeping with the precise shade of his public status—is often the most delightfully unconventional, good-natured, unsophisticated, and even erratic being in the world, as soon as he has left the cares of his office behind him. Germany is the classic land of queer people. It is the land of Quintus Fixlein, Onkel Braesig, Leberecht Huehnchen, and the host of Fliegende ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... publishing garrulously in his old age what he was silent about in his better period, talks of the poet's oddity, awkwardness, and want of punctuality,—as if Percy were some clerkly man on 'Change; and Hogg, hilariously clever, says Shelley was so erratic, fragmentary, and unequal, that his character cannot be shown in any way but as the figures of a magic-lantern are shown on a wall,—Mr. Hogg's own style of description being the wall,—"O wall, O wall, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... the shadow of the grim and flame-throated mountain, while I was forced to listen to Major Stanleigh's persistent questionnaire and Leavitt's erratic and garrulous responses—all this, as I was to discover later, at the instigation of the Major's niece—had made me frankly ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... now the man stands before me exquisitely understood, a perfect piece of logic. All that seemed discordant and discrepant in his nature has now become harmonious and inevitable; the strangest and most erratic actions of his life now seem natural and consequential (I use the word in its grammatical sense) contradictions are reconciled, and looking at the man I see the pictures, and looking at the ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... Magazine, on "Moral Qualities in War," Major C.A.L. Yate, of the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, dealt with the "intensity" of the war strain, of which he himself had acute experience. "Under such conditions," he wrote, "marksmen may achieve no more than the most erratic shots; the smartest corps may quickly degenerate into a rabble; the easiest tasks will often appear impossible. An army can weather trials such as those just depicted only if it be collectively considered in that healthy state of mind which the term ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... had brought him fame. Francois, the younger son, was not forgotten though, and the father bethought him of some useful industry at which he might earn a living, and decided on clockmaking as the most suitable. Now mark the erratic workings of fate. The eldest son, from whom so much was expected, proved a comparative failure, inasmuch as that, instead of progressing, his work was distinctly inferior to that of his father.[1] Francois, on the ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George
... gentleman did not feel a very strong confidence that the king would thus reward his forty years' patient study of the Greek; but if he should conclude to behave in this rather erratic but highly honorable manner, it would give him a pleasant opportunity of waiting upon Mr. Lowington in his cabin, and politely informing him that he could no longer endure the insults of the Josephines, or countenance their want of appreciation of the ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... there, forgive me, Arthur; I think I must be getting a little bit hardened to the position, so far at least as any hope is in my mind of rather amateurish experiments being of much help. I may seem unsympathetic in saying frankly what I feel. But amateurish or no, you are curiously erratic. Why, if you really were the Dr Ferguson whose part you play so admirably you could scarcely ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... for the Boston Church was predominantly Hutchinsonian; but the ministers as a body supported Winthrop and Wilson, and the old magistrates were returned in the election of 1637. The victory was a crucial one. The erratic Vane went off to England; Cotton returned to his first allegiance; and when the cause of all the trouble was cited to appear before the court in the fall of the same year, the decree of banishment was a foregone conclusion. ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... that the tyrant little will would reign without mercy, if it reigned at all; and ever present with her was the uneasy sense that it was her duty to bring this erratic little comet within the laws of a well-ordered solar system,—a task to which she felt about as competent as to make a new ring for Saturn. Then, too, there was a secret feeling, if the truth must be told, of what Mrs. Kittridge ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... doubt you're right," said the minister. "She's a good woman if a little erratic, and a sovereign means a large part of ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... that he would dine at some cheap, even dubious, restaurant lower down in the city, where the erratic chefs from all countries of the world spread their national cookery for the omnivorous American. Something might happen there out of the routine—he might come upon a subject without a predicate, a road without an end, a question without an answer, a cause without ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... looking up at the sky above the clearing. His hair was white, his figure a little bent, and there was an anxious look upon his face, a permanent expression rather than one caused by any tardy arrival this evening. The man he waited for was too erratic in his goings and comings to make a few hours', or even a day's, delay a cause ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... avenues of young cocoanut-palms, saw a hornbill, followed it in its erratic flights to the high forest on the edge of the plantation, heard the cooing of wild pigeons and located them in the deeper woods, followed the fresh trail of a wild pig for a distance, circled back, and took the narrow path for the bungalow ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... the Gipsy to Robert in bewilderment. This was not the dazzling figure in gauzes and satins and jewels she had expected, a capricious lady of a foreign and Southern nobility, whose whimsical and erratic fancy was occasionally amused by a change of role. This was a daughter of the long, brown path, who afoot and light-hearted took naturally to the open road, with the tanned cheek, white teeth, and merry ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... fate threatened that he should always be known as the son of his father. And certainly it was asking much of a boy that he should live up to a father who was one of the most conspicuous, clever, and erratic statesmen of the later Victorian era, and a mother who is as brilliant as she ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... The memorial and erratic clock of Our Square was just striking seven of the following morning, meaning approximately eight-forty, when my astonished eyes again beheld Martin Dyke seated on my bench, beautifully though inappropriately clad in full evening dress with a pink rose in his coat lapel, and gazing at Number ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... satisfy their idea of studies from the life. Their schemes of colour are limited to harmonies in crimson lake, cobalt and gamboge, their skies are very blue, their grass arsenically green, and their perspective as erratic as ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... a young man quite erratic Who lived all alone in an attic, He wrote magazine verse That made editors curse, But his friends thought ...
— Poems for Pale People - A Volume of Verse • Edwin C. Ranck
... and another Tuttle, the good wife persisted in being called Madame Trouvelot, either through sentiment or a bit of irony towards the owner of that name. But, despite her vanities, her coquetries, and certain erratic phases of her life, she was absolutely faithful to the trust reposed in her by the Marquise; and who so capable as herself of finding the poor girls who stood most in need of training and the shelter of ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... succeeded in setting all the rules of drawing at defiance, are rendered the more remarkable by reason of the circumstance that the work now under consideration is interspersed with numerous charming drawings, the effect of which is wholly marred by these erratic performances. Meadows was an admirable water-colour artist, and a scarce edition of this work contains some engravings of Shakespearian heroines after his designs. The Germans fancy they understand Shakespeare better than ourselves (an amiable and complimentary ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... authority for the opinion that every man has his 'moment de peur'. No man is equally firm on all occasions. There are moods of weakness and irresolution in every mind, which is not exactly a machine, which impair its energies, and make its course erratic and uncertain. The truth was known in earlier ages. The old poets ascribed it to supernatural influence. Envious deities interposed between valor and its victim, paralysing the soul of the one and strengthening ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... been in vogue from the earliest introduction of cannon. The smooth-bore cannon from which they were fired, could not be relied on to project them with accuracy to distances greater than about 1500 yards; beyond this range, their flight became so erratic, that it was simply a waste of ammunition to fire them. Whitworth and Armstrong set themselves to solve the problem of how to make ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... not also set off and illustrate each other? Raise now your thoughts from this ball of earth to all those glorious luminaries that adorn the high arch of heaven. The motion and situation of the planets, are they not admirable for use and order? Were those (miscalled ERRATIC) globes once known to stray, in their repeated journeys through the pathless void? Do they not measure areas round the sun ever proportioned to the times? So fixed, so immutable are the laws by which the unseen Author of nature actuates ...
— Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists • George Berkeley
... apprenticeship,—still, useful in many ways, to develop the sense of realities, to teach one to do without a host of things deemed indispensable before to keep the soul in tune. I declare, for my part, I don't regret those long years of erratic life. I bless them, on the contrary; for they opened my eyes to the worth of my country. The right point of view to take in physical or moral beauty, in its fulness, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... watch is the balance wheel. This wheel requires careful adjustment for temperature error and for poise. Of these two disturbing factors poise is the most annoying to the owner because lack of it makes the watch a very erratic timekeeper. A watch in which the parts are not poised is subject to a different rate for every position it is placed in. This position error, as it is called, can and often does cause a most erratic and unpredictable rate. Abraham-Louis ...
— The Auburndale Watch Company - First American Attempt Toward the Dollar Watch • Edwin A. Battison
... do, for quite other motives than our high intellectual desire. There are ugly rebels and born rascals, cheats by instinct, and liars to women, swinish unbelievers who would compromise us with their erratic pursuit of a miscellaneous collection of strange fancies and betray us callously at last. Because a man does not find the law pure justice, that is no reason why he should fake his gold to a thieves' kitchen; because he does not think the city a sanitary place, why ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... she was never malicious, and could turn the laugh against herself as readily as against others. I have ventured to insert a specimen of her fun, which I hope will not be misunderstood. In a letter to C.T.G., dated March 13, 1874, she gave him a most graphic picture of the erratic condition of mind that had come over an old friend, the result of heavy responsibilities and the rush of London life. Julie had no idea when she wrote that these symptoms were in reality the subtle beginnings ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... Enright, comin' in on the pow-wow. 'Lynchin's, to have weight an' be a credit to us, ought not to be erratic. A lack of reg'larity about 'em would shake our ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... of our lectures he knew from the program that: "The lecturer does not give readings, or cast horoscopes for pay." But seeing on the door of the newly opened reading room, the legend: "Free Reading Room," his erratic mind at once jumped to the conclusion that although we were opposed to telling fortunes for pay, we were now going to give free readings of the future in the Free Reading Room. He was much disappointed that we did not intend to tell ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... engineer gave the signal for backing the train, and kept in motion. His purpose was to allay any panic on the part of the passengers, whom he knew must be alarmed by the erratic tactics of the past few moments. Then after thus traversing about half the distance back to the main line, he shut off ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... of himself that among his voluminous exegetical writings was a treatise on S. Mark's Gospel.(438) To Origen's works, Eusebius, (his apologist and admirer,) is known to have habitually resorted; and, like many others, to have derived not a few of his notions from that fervid and acute, but most erratic intellect. Origen's writings in short, seem to have been the source of much, if not most of the mistaken Criticism of Antiquity. (The reader is reminded of what has been offered above at p. 96-7). And this would not be the first occasion ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... When I am in the mood I am likely to write a dozen sheets to you. When I'm not, a page will be all you'll care to read. Will you agree to the most erratic correspondence you ever had, ...
— Red Pepper Burns • Grace S. Richmond
... Republic of Cyprus under government control has a market economy dominated by the service sector, which accounts for 78% of GDP. Tourism, financial services, and real estate are the most important sectors. Erratic growth rates over the past decade reflect the economy's reliance on tourism, which often fluctuates with political instability in the region and economic conditions in Western Europe. Nevertheless, the economy in the area under government ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... footsteps, he promised to study as an advocate to satisfy his father, who urged his son to follow a recognised profession. Owing to his easy-going schooling and lack of a settled course of study, the law classes were excellent training for the erratic, mercurial-notioned youth. Stevenson had the good fortune in 1869 to be elected a member of the Speculative, the famed Debating Society where Jeffrey first met Scott. There Stevenson encountered his contemporaries in years and social standing, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson
... supple and erratic as our understanding; it is the shoe of Theramenes, fit for all feet. It is double and diverse, and the matters are double and diverse too. "Give me a drachm of silver," said a Cynic philosopher to Antigonus. "That is not a present befitting a king," replied he. "Give me then a talent," said the ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... Greeley was at first all-powerful. As has already been seen, he had been able to prevent Judge Folger taking the presidency of the convention, and for a few days he had everything his own way. But he soon proved so erratic a leader that his influence was completely lost, and after a few sessions there was hardly any member with less real power to influence ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... greater number of women advance like the fleas, by erratic leaps and bounds, They owe their escape to the height or depth of their first ideas, and any interruption of their plans rather favors their execution. But they operate only within a narrow area which it is easy ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... procured a small quantity of sturgeon, in exchange for some articles of clothing. I was surprised to find Indians, in a quarter so remote from those tribes with whom I had hitherto been conversant, speaking a dialect which I understood perfectly: their erratic habits, and intercourse with the Crees and Algonquins, may perhaps account for this similarity ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... us out on a night like this," Miles said, as he crouched low in the sledge, holding on with both thickly mittened hands, for Katherine was driving, and the dogs were going with leaps and bounds, which made the sledge bounce and sway in a very erratic fashion. ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... the beautiful West Dean Park. Mid-Lavant church is Early English but boasts a Norman window. The name of this village perpetuates a phenomenon which is becoming more rare each year. At one time erratic streams would make their appearance in the chalk combes in the head of the valley and combining, cause serious floods or "lavants." For some unknown reason the flow of water is gradually becoming smaller and of late years it has ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... productions of ladies and gentlemen whose circumstances might be called altogether easy, but for an uneasy vanity that happened to have been directed towards authorship. Its importance was that of a polypus, tumour, fungus, or other erratic outgrowth, noxious and disfiguring in its effect on the individual organism which nourishes it. Poor Vorticella might not have been more wearisome on a visit than the majority of her neighbours, but for this disease of magnified self-importance belonging to small authorship. I understand ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... carelessly asked his name of the assiduous Gershom, who appeared to her to exist in innumerable reflections of himself. The next day when she had seen Stephen approaching her in the Square, she had obeyed the same erratic impulse, half in jest and half from the gambler's instinct to grasp at reluctant opportunity. After all, had not experience taught her that one must venture in order to win, that nothing came to those who dared not stake the whole of life on the next turn of fortune? She had ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... Niagara contain no more erratic currents than the strata of air which is now immediately above us, a fact hard to realize on ...
— Flying Machines - Construction and Operation • W.J. Jackman and Thos. H. Russell
... river was extremely erratic, zigzagging through the riven, rocky barrier which formed the ancient dam at the foot of the lake; and one minute they were swept to right, the next to left, while at every angle there was a whirlpool which threatened ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... over the sward; at the second it had met with some stone coping; and at the third it had turned over in complete dissolution, and Jack was free to tear up the turf with his hoofs, until finally his erratic course was stopped by the small boy who was responsible for the animal's behaviour. The arrival of Hubert and Emily saved the small boy from many a cuff and the donkey from a kick or two; and Jack stood amid the ruin he had created, as quiet and as docile a ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... events. The opportunity however was not taken. Indeed it is scarcely surprising that the signs of the times should have been misread. Maurice had helped Charles against the Schmalkaldic League before; yet everything depended on his discarding the apparently erratic politics of his past career, and displaying in full measure the organising and military genius of which he had given promise, though it still remained to be conclusively proved. He did in fact prove it a few ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... wandered among the Roman remains of the place by the light of a magnificent moon, and gathered an impression which has lost little of its silvery glow. The moon of the evening before had been aqueous and erratic; but if on the present occasion it was guilty of any irregularity, the worst it did was only to linger beyond its time in the heavens, in order to let us look at things comfortably. The effect was admirable; it brought back the impression ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... groves, and dwellings of celestial gods, "And temples richly deck'd with offer'd gold, "Where thou shall pass. Far else;—thy journey lies, "Through ambushes, and savage monsters' forms. "Ev'n shouldst thou lucky not erratic stray, "Yet must thou pass the Bull's opposing horns; "The bow Haemonian, by the Centaur bent; "The Lion's countenance grim; the Scorpion's claws "Bent cruel in a circuit large; the Crab "In lesser compass curving. Hard the ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... space of uneven ground crossed and recrossed by the narrow-gauge tracks upon which the sand and grit trucks ran, avoiding one or two localities where steam shot upward from the ground in a witch-like and erratic manner, with short angry hisses and chopping sounds that suggested danger, and finally stood before the door designated "OFFICE" in plain lettering. Joyce looked around at her companion with ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... J. C. Parke, Wallace F. Johnson, and Charles S. Garland. The first type of player mentioned merely hits the ball with little idea of what he is doing, while the latter always has a definite plan and adheres to it. The hard-hitting, erratic, net-rushing player is a creature of impulse. There is no real system to his attack, no understanding of your game. He will make brilliant coups on the spur of the moment, largely by instinct; but there is no, mental power ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... watered by the river Gila and its tributaries. This river, which takes its rise in the distant mountains of the Mimbres, passes under various names through an immense extent of sandy barren country, the arid monotony of which is interrupted only by the ravines hollowed by the waters, which in their erratic ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... obediently dipped his paddle and started pottering an erratic course in the general direction of the cluster of lights that marked the Makambo. But he was too feeble, panting and wheezing continually from the exertion and pausing to rest off strokes between strokes. The steward impatiently took the ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... and forth, shrieking their staccato war cries. Following the erratic dashes of their flight formation, Shann decided that whatever they railed against was on the lower level, out of his sight from that point. Should he simply withdraw, since the disturbance was not near him? Prudence dictated that; ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... where, I am credibly informed, Juno has been taking private lessons in the art of hurling thunderbolts—information which the extraordinary quality of recent electrical storms on the earth would seem to confirm. Thunderbolts of late years have been cast hither and yon in a most erratic fashion, striking where they were least expected, as those of you who keep in touch with the outer world must be fully aware. Now, actuated by their usual broad and liberal motives, the men of Hades wish to meet the views of you ladies ...
— The Pursuit of the House-Boat • John Kendrick Bangs
... erratic simply in not being in accordance with the fixed rules taught by the academies; but in all that I did there was a unity of purpose, and a plan which my commanding ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... the least studious; she had no one particular talent, unless it was an untrained and birdlike voice; she was always more or less in hot water about her lessons, always behindhand in her tasks, always leaving undone what she should do, and doing what she should not do. She was a contradictory, erratic creature—jealous of no one, envious of no one—dearly loving a joke, and many times inflicting pain from sheer thoughtlessness, but always ready to say she was sorry, always ready to ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... who have cherished the finest ideals have insisted that these should be shared by the multitude. In a newspaper of sixty years ago there is this contemporary character sketch: "Ralph Waldo Emerson is the most erratic and capricious man in America. He is emphatically a democrat of the world, and believes that what Plato thought, another man may think. What Shakespeare sang, another man may know as well. As for emperors, kings, queens, princes, or presidents, he looks upon them as children ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... asked me particularly to look you up, and 'take care of' you ... you made a hit with him ... but he's very much concerned about you—thinks you're too wild and erratic." ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... be sure you could prove your innocence. The working of the law is sometimes strange and erratic. That money has placed ...
— Frank Merriwell's Bravery • Burt L. Standish
... The movements of the Karlsefin were dependent upon the state of the market. Sometimes she would ply steadily between the Spanish Main and New Orleans in the regular transport of fruit; next she would be making erratic trips to Mobile or Charleston, or even as far north as New York, according to the distribution of the ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... up for this fiend fields of exertion great enough for the absorption of its tireless energies, and none of them is more hopeful than the great world of books, if the demon is docile enough to be coaxed into it. Then will its erratic restlessness be sobered by the immensity of the sphere of exertion, and the consciousness that, however vehemently and however long it may struggle, the resources set before it will not be exhausted when the life to which it is attached shall have faded away; and hence, instead ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... bright moonlight Phil did not use his flashlight at all, except to investigate other round black blotches that made a line parallel to the prints. As he went on he found his quarry's steps coming more closely together: becoming erratic. Soon they showed as painful drags in the sand, a laborious hauling of one foot after the other.... Phil put away his light and ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... to Taylor's, and have spent all the money I had on such a luncheon as neither of us had ever eaten before. Whatever else I am, I am not a snob of that sort. I show my colors. I led her into a little cross-street which I had noticed in our erratic morning pilgrimage. We stopped at a German baker's. I bade her sit down at the neat marble table, and I bought two rolls. She declined lager, which I offered her in fun. We took water instead, and we had dined, and had paid two cents for our meal, ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... painfully conscious of it. So did Mr. Bennet, whose eyes wandered about the room, resting for a few instants upon Boniface, then sliding toward his wife. Boniface himself seemed to be entirely unconscious of any pause, or of any person, or of any thing, except some mysterious erratic measure that he was ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... Why had Harold Beecham (who was a sort of young sultan who could throw the handkerchief where he liked) chosen me of all women? I had no charms to recommend me—none of the virtues which men demand of the woman they wish to make their wife. To begin with, I was small, I was erratic and unorthodox, I was nothing but a tomboy—and, cardinal disqualification, I was ugly. Why, then, had he proposed matrimony to me? Was it merely a whim? Was he ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... action in thus sailing away to a strange land alone was a shock to his parents. He was a man in years, but they regarded him as but a child, as indeed he was. He had never earned his own living. He was frail in body, idle, erratic, peculiar. His flashing wit and subtle insight into the heart of things were quite beyond his parents—in this he was a stranger to them. Their religion to him was gently amusing, and he congratulated himself on ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... workers must compete for employment, it inevitably follows that it is the fit and efficient who find employment. The skilled worker holds his place by virtue of his skill and efficiency. Were he less skilled, or were he unreliable or erratic, he would be swiftly replaced by a stronger competitor. The skilled and steady employments are not cumbered with clowns and idiots. A man finds his place according to his ability and the needs of the system, and those without ability, or incapable of satisfying the needs ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... hearts she realised that there was nothing more to say. Pixie was Pixie. As well try to move a mountain from its place, as persuade that sweet, loving, most loyal of creatures to draw back from a solemn pledge. Something might be done with Stanor perhaps, or, failing Stanor, through that erratic person, his uncle. She must consult with Geoffrey and Bridgie, together they might insist upon a period of waiting and separation before a definite engagement was announced. Pixie was still under age. Until her twenty-first birthday her guardians might safely demand a delay. Joan knew that ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... pursued my daily avocations; I employed myself even on literary work. To all appearance I was one of the sanest of the sane; and yet all the while I considered myself the victim of such strange delusions that, in my own mind, I fancied my senses—and one sense in particular—so far erratic and beyond my own control that I was, in real truth, a madman. How far I was then insane it must be for others, who hear my story, to decide. My hallucinations have long since left me, and, at all events, I am now as sane as I suppose most ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... his formal benediction,—then, turning away, he entered his own room and shut the door. Babette, grown strangely serious, turned to her brother and held out her hand, moved by one of those erratic impulses which often take sudden ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... even of the Mr. Bonteens, found themselves compelled to agree with her. She stood too high among her set to be subject to that obedience which restrained others,—too high, also, for others to resist her leading. As a member of a party she was erratic and dangerous, but from her position and peculiar temperament she was powerful. When she declared that poor Lady Eustace was a victim, others were obliged to say so too. This was particularly hard upon Lord Fawn, and the more so as Lady Glencora took upon her to assert that Lord Fawn had no ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... quitted her mother's side, and was playing at her own will about the market-place. She made the sombre crowd cheerful by her erratic and glistening ray, even as a bird of bright plumage illuminates a whole tree of dusky foliage by darting to and fro, half seen and half concealed amid the twilight of the clustering leaves. She had an undulating, but oftentimes a sharp and irregular movement. It indicated the restless vivacity of ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... course of her life materially by crossing the room to the strange boy, she did not seem to be thinking of it just now. She was not thinking at all. She was only dancing, following her partner's erratic course quite faithfully, and quite intent on doing so; feeling every beat of the music, and showing it, pink-cheeked and sparkling eyed, and pleasantly excited, ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... and as she happened at that moment to catch sight of the long tails of the Newmarket coat at the other side of the station, she begged Dick to call to the erratic musician. No sooner was the proposition put forward than it was accepted, and in five minutes they were at luncheon in a 'pub,' arranging the details ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... business; but his failure only serves as an offset to the general integrity and prosperity. His son is obstinate and wilful; but it is all on the side of virtue. His daughter is somewhat sentimental and erratic; but she is more conscientious yet. Conscience, in the classes from which George Eliot recruits her figures, is a universal gift. Decency and plenty and good-humor follow contentedly in its train. The word which sums up the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... down from one crossing to the next, from the needle to the twig, from the twig to the branch, from the branch to the bough and from the bough, by a no less angular path, to go back home. It is useless to rely upon sight as a guide on this long and erratic journey. The Processionary, it is true, has five ocular specks on either side of his head, but they are so infinitesimal, so difficult to make out through the magnifying-glass, that we cannot attribute to them any great power ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... man brought me a telegram from Sir Bernard, dispatched from Brighton, regarding a case to be seen on the following day. He was very erratic about telegrams and sent them to me at all hours, therefore it was no extraordinary circumstance. He always preferred telegraphing to writing letters. I read the message, tossed it with its envelope upon the fire, and then retired with a fervent hope ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... summer of 1811, Shelley's movements were more than usually erratic, and his mind was in a state of extraordinary restlessness. In the month of May, a kind of accommodation was come to with his father. He received permission to revisit Field Place, and had an allowance made him of 200 pounds a year. His uncle, Captain Pilfold ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... me for judgment. What is a feverish fugitive admiration for some more or less brightly colored piece of flesh and blood; some more or less rounded human form; what are all the disasters that wait on your erratic whims, compared with the magnificent power of conjuring up the whole world within your soul, compared with the immeasurable joys of movement, unstrangled by the cords of time, unclogged by the fetters of space; the joys of beholding ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... regal, nor had the Prince ever more passionately wooed her. Girls who did not belong to the society always flocked into the theater to see the rehearsals. Maggie's mood scarcely puzzled them. She was so erratic that no one expected anything from her but the unexpected: if she looked like a drooping flower one moment, her head was erect the next, her eyes sparkling, her voice gay. The flower no longer drooped, ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... deviate greatly out of the common course of nature. From time to time the historic and philosophic gravity of the last six books of the Annals suffers great eclipses by his leaving aside weighty affairs of State to descend into petty descriptions of the erratic conduct of Messalina, with her extravagant lewdness (XI. 26-8), Nero, with his abominable pollutions (XVI. 37), and that Emperor's mother, Agrippina, with her monstrous incest (XIV. 2). These matters, even if true of the ancient Romans in the ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... ardent for liberty, and so impatient of the control and customs of society; each so enthusiastic for the same object, yet so coldly contemptuous to the enthusiasm of the other. The one guided only by his poetical and erratic tastes, the other solely by dreams, seeming to the world no less baseless, yet, to his own mind, bearing the name of stern judgment and inflexible truth. Both men of active and adventurous spirits, to whom forms were ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... reiterated statement that Lizzie had the wild streak of the MacDuffs in her, and what could you expect? The Gordon family had generally been genteel enough to keep this objectionable MacDuff connection hidden, but occasionally it came out in red hair, deep gray eyes, and a wild, erratic disposition. To be sure, little Elizabeth's hair was not red, but a deep nut-brown, shading to rich yellow at the ends, where it curled upwards. But down the middle of her heavy brown braid ran a thick strand of reddish gold, quite enough to account for the ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... did what the sentry's voice had failed to do. There came a clatter of spasmodic hoof-beats, an erratic shower of sparks, a curse in clean-lipped decent Urdu; a grunt, a struggle, more sparks again, and then a thud, followed by a devoutly worded prayer that Allah, the all-wise provider of just penalties, might blast ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... and clays, often more or less regularly stratified, but containing erratic blocks, often of large size, and with their edges unworn, derived from considerable distances from the place where they are now found. In these beds it is not at all uncommon to find fossil shells; and these, though of existing species, are generally of an ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... confederates did not trust him greatly. But it was Soapy Stone and young Cullison that interested Flandrau most. The former played like a master. He chatted carelessly, but he overlooked no points. Sam had the qualities that go to make a brilliant erratic player, but he lacked the steadiness and the finesse of ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... like a distracted hen until she saw us safely started. Most people would have gone mad at our erratic proceedings, but nothing ever disturbed Mary's equanimity. In fact, crises fairly delighted her. In an emergency she rose to ...
— At Home with the Jardines • Lilian Bell
... saw the thing out there in the lake again, swimming in erratic circles, its big, dog-like head well ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... always out over the tremendous sweep of plateau which from that point looked illimitable as the ocean, settled upon a whirlwind that displayed method and a slow sedateness not at all in keeping with the erratic gyrations of those gone before. Watching it wistfully with a half-formed hope that it might not be just a dry-weather whirlwind, her droning voice trailed off into silence. A faint beating in her throat betrayed what it was she half hoped. ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... brilliant but erratic Earl of Peterborough, had been engaged for two years, after the unsatisfactory inquiry into his conduct in Spain by the House of Lords in 1708, in preparing an account of the money he had received and expended. The change of Government brought him relief from his troubles; ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... did not travel so far or so long as had been his wont in days gone by. A wife and family, in the village of Salem, exercised an attractive influence, fastening him, as it were, to a fixed point, and converting his former erratic orbit into a circle which, with centripetal force, was always drawing ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... in time for a late dinner), I wandered among the Roman remains of the place by the light of a magnificent moon, and gathered an impression which has lost little of its silvery glow. The moon of the evening before had been aqueous and erratic; but if on the present occasion it was guilty of any irregularity, the worst it did was only to linger beyond its time in the heavens, in order to let us look at things comfortably. The effect was admirable; it brought back the impression ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... he was just turned forty was clear-eyed, calm-hearted, hearty-pulsed, man-strong; and yet, his history, until he was thirty, had been harum-scarum and erratic to the superlative. He had run away from a millionaire home when he was thirteen. He had won enviable college honors ere he was twenty-one and after that he had known all the purple ports of the purple seas, and, with cool head, hot heart, ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... and scintillating brasswork, steamed into Guantanamo harbour and let go her anchor off the little town—or village, for it is scarcely more—of Caimamera. The visit of the yacht to this out-of-the-way spot was ostensibly for the purpose of enabling that erratic and irresponsible young Englishman, her owner, to enjoy a day or two's fishing, Guantanamo harbour being noted for the variety of fish with which its waters teem, and the excellent sport which they afford; but Jack's first act was to go ashore and pay an early visit to the telegraph office, from ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... speaker's voice came very low, and somewhat piping, too, and broken—an eery sort of voice it was, of brittle and erratic timbre and undulant inflection. Yet it was beautiful. It had the ring of childhood in it, though the ring was not pure golden, and at times fell echoless. The SPIRIT of its utterance was always clear and ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... the endless turn and twist of the erratic Missouri; warping over rapids and sticking on sand-bars; running by banks undermined by the flood; shaving here a shore and hugging there a bar; after the tie-ups to clean the boilers, or to get wood, or to wait for the high winds to abate; after perils by water and danger ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... was betrayed into one of his erratic positions, as when he moved to strike out the section against dueling, and also to expunge from the bill of rights all restrictions upon bearing arms. He said: "Let the people bear arms for their own protection, whether in their boots or ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... buried himself in the shack on the hillside of The Briers, that looked out over the Harpeth Valley, he had unconsciously buried that frozen hero in "The Emergence" and had gone to work and resurrected him in a kind of Samuel Foster Crittenden. Instead of being a complicated, heroic, erratic genius he was just a big, simple, strong young man who was doing his part in the corner of the world's vineyard where he had been sent to work. To help him Peter had written in a wonderful girl with a great deal of brains for one so young. Just the ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... Already low clouds of smoke were drifting overhead like a broken veil. The erratic foothill wind, which a few minutes before had been coming down the valley, was now blowing back up again. Even while they took in the situation they could feel the hot breath of the distant fire borne against ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... so to speak, that he owes his experiences; his after-life was all pudding, which attracts nothing but greedy children. With marriage the interest of his life ceased for all but one person, and his path became regular as the sun's instead of erratic as a comet's. ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... not over aquatic, Says he rows 'like a mangle'—what trash! That his swing and his time are erratic; That he puts in his oar with a splash. But these wonderful judges of rowing, If we win will be loud in applause; And declare 'the result was all owing To ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... any one should be walking there, to begin with, any one, at all events, not a Chinaman or a coolie, a dealer in second-hand furniture or an able-bodied seaman luxuriously fingering wages in both trouser pockets, and describing an erratic line of doubtful temper toward the nearest glass of country spirits. Or, to be quite comprehensive, a draggled person with a Bulgarian, a Levantine or a Japanese smile, who no longer possessed a carriage, to whom the able-bodied seamen represented ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... and erratic as our understanding; it is the shoe of Theramenes, fit for all feet. It is double and diverse, and the matters are double and diverse too. "Give me a drachm of silver," said a Cynic philosopher ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... whose eyes wandered about the room, resting for a few instants upon Boniface, then sliding toward his wife. Boniface himself seemed to be entirely unconscious of any pause, or of any person, or of any thing, except some mysterious erratic measure that he was beating with the ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... of very erratic flight to reach the planet. A haze of clouds obscured the atmosphere. They approached from the night side and no details ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... the steps required to make the conversion from man to superman had resulted in temporary insanity; the wild, swinging imbalances of glandular secretions seeking a new balance, the erratic misfirings of neurons as they attempted to adjust to higher nerve-impulse velocities, and the sheer fatigue engendered by cells that were acting too rapidly for a lagging excretory system, all had contributed to periods of greater or ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... repetition of ancient saws which become almost original every time they are applied, and one of these sayings was "Everything is for the best." She believed in miracles, and had reason, for she received her weekly allowance from her erratic husband with ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... will be seen, has become almost completely closed up, so that there is practically no communication between the hot part of the tube and the combustion chamber. This closing up of the bore is very gradual, and it is in the early stages of this process that erratic firing is likely to occur; sometimes the charge will be successfully fired and sometimes not. It may be as well to mention here that the length of the tube, although to a certain extent immaterial, should neither be excessively long ...
— Gas and Oil Engines, Simply Explained - An Elementary Instruction Book for Amateurs and Engine Attendants • Walter C. Runciman
... overview: The Republic of Cyprus has a market economy dominated by the service sector, which accounts for 76% of GDP. Tourism and financial services are the most important sectors; erratic growth rates over the past decade reflect the economy's reliance on tourism, which often fluctuates with political instability in the region and economic conditions in Western Europe. Nevertheless, the economy grew ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... he began, anticipating Sundown's leisurely and erratic recital. "I understand you found me on the trail and went ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... along? "Perchance imagination fills thy mind, "With groves, and dwellings of celestial gods, "And temples richly deck'd with offer'd gold, "Where thou shall pass. Far else;—thy journey lies, "Through ambushes, and savage monsters' forms. "Ev'n shouldst thou lucky not erratic stray, "Yet must thou pass the Bull's opposing horns; "The bow Haemonian, by the Centaur bent; "The Lion's countenance grim; the Scorpion's claws "Bent cruel in a circuit large; the Crab "In lesser compass curving. ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... man I met in the country, who showed me a good deal of kindness. From Yorkshire. Man named Browning. Very good fellow, but erratic. Said he'd wait for me in the cab, and disappeared before I could come down. Had an idea I should make him lose his train, I suppose. Well, never mind him. ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... next, from the needle to the twig, from the twig to the branch, from the branch to the bough and from the bough, by a no less angular path, to go back home. It is useless to rely upon sight as a guide on this long and erratic journey. The Processionary, it is true, has five ocular specks on either side of his head, but they are so infinitesimal, so difficult to make out through the magnifying-glass, that we cannot attribute ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... when the unfortunate Black first became clearly conscious of anything again, he heard the gurgle of sliding water close beside his head, and, opening his eyes, caught sight of a smoky lamp that reeled to and fro, in very erratic fashion. Moisture dripped from the beams above him, and there was a sickly smell which seemed familiar. Black, who had been to sea before, decided that he caught the aroma of bilge water. Rows of wooden shelves tenanted by recumbent figures, became discernible, and he started ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... be. It was tiny. It seemed hardly larger than some of the planes that swooped at it. But the planes were drawing back now. The shining metal thing was no more than two thousand feet up and it was moving in erratic, unpredictable darts and dashes here and there, like a dragon-fly's movements, but a hundred times more swift. Proximity-fused shells burst everywhere about it. It burst through a still-expanding puff of explosive ...
— The Invaders • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... descend the stairs; they are in the garden; Mrs. Morley comes to meet them—then George. Wife exerts himself to talk—to be gay—to protect Sophy's abstracted silence by his own active, desultory, erratic humour. Twice or thrice, as he leans on Sophy's arm, she draws it still nearer to her, and presses it tenderly. She understands—she thanks him. Hark! from some undiscovered hiding-place near the water—Fairthorn's flute! The music fills the landscape as with a living presence; ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... resumed our tense, unremitting round of toil. Now, however, it was vastly different. Every bucket of dirt meant money in our pockets, every stroke of the pick a dollar. Not that it was all like the first rich pocket we had struck. It proved a most erratic and puzzling paystreak—one day rich beyond our dreams, another too poor to pay for the panning. We swung on a pendulum of hope and despair. Perhaps this made it all the more exciting, and stimulated us unnaturally, and always we cursed that primitive method of mining that made every bucket ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... would fain do it in a sea where mine own impotency might have some excuse; not in a sullen, weedy lake, where I could not have so much as exercise for my swimming. Therefore I would fain do something, but that I cannot tell what is no wonder.' 'Though I be in such a planetary and erratic fortune that I can do nothing constantly,' he confesses later ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... Don Quixote had in him the spirit of a great epic poet. His lesser pieces prove it; unequivocal traces of it are to be found in the adventures of the Knight of La Mancha himself. The elevation of mind which, amidst all his aberrations, appears in that erratic character; the incomparable traits of nature with which the work abounds; the faculty of describing events in the most striking way; of painting scenes in a few words; of delineating characters with graphic fidelity, and keeping them up with perfect ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... of points so as to cut her off. I'm thinking it wouldn't be a bad idea to speak her if it could be managed, and find out where we are. As we haven't been able to rig a log-ship and line, and as the steering has been, to say the least of it, erratic, our dead reckoning has been some of the roughest. Personally, I wouldn't bet upon our whereabouts to quite a ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... the slow Maratta spoils, And hardier Sic erratic toils, While both their ease forego; For ease, which neither gold can buy, Nor robes, nor gems, which oft belie, The ...
— Quaint Gleanings from Ancient Poetry • Edmund Goldsmid
... were increasingly infrequent. But there was one time when he almost had come specially to see Ramos' new bubb, still under wraps, supposedly. Well—that erratic character had it out on a long test run. Damn him! As usual, time was crowding Nelsen. He had to get back on the job. He had just a couple of ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... this mutual confidence her old affection for her chum revived. Once more they went about the school arm in arm, sat next to each other at tea, and wrote each other private little notes. St. Elgiva's smiled again, but the girls by this time were accustomed to Marjorie's very impulsive and rather erratic ways, and did not take her infatuations ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... fatal delay; not knowing what to do with their prisoner, the Government shipped him to Caprera. Personally he was perfectly free; no conditions were imposed; but nine men-of-war were despatched to the island to sweep the seas of erratic heroes. In spite of which, Garibaldi escaped in a canoe on the 14th ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... seems to have some difficulty in unravelling itself: the story of a man who pretends to be dead in order that he may, under a changed name, investigate the character and eligibility of the young woman whom an erratic father has destined to be his bride. A golden-hearted old dust contractor, who hides a will that will give him all that erratic father's property, and disinherit the man aforesaid, and who, to crown his virtues, pretends to be a miser in order to teach the young woman, also aforesaid, ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... wildly all about the shed, Bab rattled the cups into her dish-pan with dangerous haste, and Betty raised a cloud of dust "sweeping-up," while mother seemed to be everywhere at once. Even Sanch, feeling that his fate was at stake, endeavored to help in his own somewhat erratic way,—now frisking about Ben at the risk of getting his tail chopped off, then trotting away to poke his inquisitive nose into every closet and room whither he followed Mrs. Moss in her "flying round" evolutions; ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... somewhat of a diplomatist. Perhaps a little natural reserve of character might have been the beginning of it, but the habit had certainly grown from Daisy's experience of her mother's somewhat capricious and erratic views of her movements. She could not but find out that things which to her father's sense were quite harmless and unobjectionable, were invested with an unknown and unexpected character of danger or disagreeableness in the eyes of her mother; neither could Daisy get hold ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... his contemporaries that he decided the character of his country's literature for a century; but his influence was finally lost in the growing Italian and German taste. The principal names of this period are those of Lucidor, a wild, erratic genius; Mrs. Brenner, the first female writer of Sweden, whose numerous poems are distinguished for their neat and easy style; and Spegel (d. 1711), whose Psalms, full of the simplest beauty, give him a lasting place in the literature of the country. The literary taste of Sweden, in the seventeenth ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... once, seeing that it has brought us out on a night like this," Miles said, as he crouched low in the sledge, holding on with both thickly mittened hands, for Katherine was driving, and the dogs were going with leaps and bounds, which made the sledge bounce and sway in a very erratic fashion. ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... research which roused my father's admiration was Mr. D. Mackintosh's work on erratic blocks. Apart from its intrinsic merit the work keenly excited his sympathy from the conditions under which it was executed, Mr. Mackintosh being compelled to give nearly his whole time to tuition. The following passage is from a letter to Mr. Mackintosh of October 9, 1879, and ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... closest imprisonment! His liberty gone, his freedom contracted to a few cubic feet, his space diminished almost to the mould of his body, the great wild philosopher created his own liberty, made it out of his own love of it. Like a live, erratic shuttle he went to and fro, unweaving, unravelling, unwinding, drawing out the knot of confinement, flinging out, radiating and spreading and breathing out space in all directions, by multitudinous motion of disentanglement! Space gone from him, space in the abstract should replace it! He ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... innumerable pigeons, "Allah's announcers,"[1] swirled in clouds from the arcades, mosques, and minarets surrounding the Haram, and from the Ka'aba itself, and began winging erratic courses all about the Forbidden City. Men, birds, and animals alike, all shared the terror of this unheard-of outrage when—according to ancient prophesy—the Great Devils of Feringistan ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... to Wigfall's exertion, and erratic conduct at the time, and his meritorious career during the existence of the Confederacy, prompt me to give a short sketch of this meteoric character. He was born in Edgefield County along in the first quarter of the century of good old South Carolina stock, and educated in the common schools ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... spent with former friends, we started up the river again. Keokuk, a long time ago, was an occasional loafing-place of that erratic genius, Henry Clay Dean. I believe I never saw him but once; but he was much talked of when I lived there. This is what was said ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... individuals. He did not believe (as some one has said) that the history of mankind is the history of its great men. Great men with him were but larger atoms, obeying the same impulses with the rest, only perhaps a trifle more erratic. With them or without them, the course of things would have been much ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... and every vice, Madame," said Mr. Jefferson, coldly. "A genius if you will, but a man without honor, without probity, erratic, unscrupulous, mercenary, passionate. Cupidus alieni prodigus sui. Great as are his parts, he will never be able to serve his country, for no dependence can be placed in him. He cannot even further his own interests, ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... agree," Fred was saying. "The correlation is erratic; it makes no statistical sense. Malone, there ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... his bed and the other was fitted up as his study. They were on the second floor of the house, and attainable through two turns in the lower entry, a winding flight of narrow stairs, and an uncertain, darkly erratic route above. ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... suffered more, or more nobly redeemed an apparently lost cause, than the one which was defeated at Quebec and victorious at Saratoga. The train of misfortunes which brought Burgoyne's erratic course to so untimely an end was nothing by comparison. And the quickness with which raw yeomanry were formed into armies capable of fighting veteran troops, affords the strongest proof that the Americans are a nation ...
— Burgoyne's Invasion of 1777 - With an outline sketch of the American Invasion of Canada, 1775-76. • Samuel Adams Drake
... great faith in the power of love, notwithstanding all the warnings he had received about Zalika's foreign birth, and the seal which her erratic education had stamped upon her character. But he had now to learn that she had never loved him; that it was the whim of the hour, or, more probably, the fleeting passion of a moment, which had made her throw herself into his arms. And she saw in him only an uncomfortable companion, ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... two of sleep, which seemed to turn, as sleep sometimes will, the erratic currents of his mind back into the old channels, from which it had been forced by this earthquake stress of life, he experienced ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... knew not what fear, akin to that little grey shadow of a fear, was to be found in the darkness there. At first I hesitated. Then Margot came with the candle, and as it guttered, the flame threw distorted shadows; at one moment lighting up a dark spot with a sudden flash, and then sending queer, erratic reflections chasing across the oak panelling. Then a flicker displayed the unmade bed on which Margot had ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... and the former philosophic methods had themselves fallen in disrepute, that the necessity of accommodating the remedy to the disease began to be recognized here and there, and of framing an argument that would appeal to the perverse and erratic mind of the day, rather than to an abstract and perfectly normal mind, which, if it existed, would "need no repentance." That a given medicine is the best, avails nothing if it be not also one which the patient is willing to take. If a man has closed his ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... way, and as I should have said before, I had still further enlarged my staff by one art director of the most flamboyant and erratic character, a genius of sorts, volatile, restless, emotional, colorful, a veritable Verlaine-Baudelaire-Rops soul, who, not content to arrange and decorate the magazine each month, must needs wish to write, paint, compose verse and music and stage plays, as well as move in an upper social world, ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... set herself to do. She speaks French with a most funny accent even yet, though she spent so many years abroad, so many in Paris. I do not know what would have become of my guardian if it had not been for her. Her father loved her, but was very erratic and undisciplined. Mrs. Talcott has been with my guardian for almost all the time ever since. It is a great and silent devotion. She is very reticent. She never speaks of herself. She talks to me sometimes in the evenings about her youth in Maine, and the long ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... by the way in which she tried to put me off, changing the conversation whenever I got on to the forbidden ground, and suggesting various irrelevant queries on my endeavouring again to chain her wilfully-erratic attention down to the one topic that I only thought worthy ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... gales manufacture the selectest and most mountainous brands of cross-seas. The way the poor Elsinore pitches, plunges, rolls, and shivers, with all her lofty spars and masts and all her five thousand tons of dead-weight cargo, is astonishing. To me she is the most erratic thing imaginable; yet Mr. Pike, with whom I now pace the poop on occasion, tells me that coal is a good cargo, and that the Elsinore is well-loaded because ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... of the gardens in Faubourg Ste.-Marie standing in silent wretchedness, so many tearful Lucretias, tattered victims of the storm. Short remnants of the wind now and then came down the narrow street in erratic puffs heavily laden with odors of broken boughs and torn flowers, skimmed the little pools of rain-water in the deep ruts of the unpaved street, and suddenly went away to nothing, like a juggler's butterflies or a young ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... and more, it appeared, the Roulets had been well remembered and frequently discussed as vivid incidents in the quiet life of a New England seaport. Etienne's son Paul, a surly fellow whose erratic conduct had probably provoked the riot which wiped out the family, was particularly a source of speculation; and though Providence never shared the witchcraft panics of her Puritan neighbors, it was ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... about his wagers until he frequently stood to win or lose L50,000 on a single race. If he had always kept his head under the intoxication of this wild gambling he might perhaps have made another fortune equal to that he had inherited. But his wagering was as erratic as himself, and his gains were punctuated by heavy losses which began to make inroads on even his ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... a shiver. Because of his own vagrant airs they had called him "El Pajarito" when he first drifted south over Mexican trails,—but happy erratic tunefulness was smothered for him temporarily. Over the vast land of riches, smiling in the sun, there brooded the threats of Indian gods chained, inarticulate, reaching out in unexpected ways for expression through the dusky ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... the street and entered the saloon where Manley was still drinking heavily, his face crimson and blear-eyed and brutalized, his speech thickened disgustingly. He was sprawled in an armchair, waving an empty glass in an erratic attempt to mark the time of a college ditty six or seven years out of date, which he was trying to sing. He ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... into the same distemper, which affected the other side of her face. This second time, "By the blessing of God, she was cured in sixteen days." But on May 24 of the same year she was struck down with an erratic fever. Sometimes she was hot, by-and-by sweating, again cold, all in the space of half an hour. Her father's treatment again healed her; "the symptoms remitted daily till she was well, thus was she delivered from death and deadly diseases, and was well for many years." ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... seemed like a beautiful dream. That Poppy Tyrell should be sitting in his cabin and looking to him as her only friend seemed almost incredible. A sudden remembrance of Flower subdued at once the ardour of his gaze, and he sat wondering vaguely as to the whereabouts of that erratic mariner until his meditations were broken by the entrance of the boy with the steaming coffee, followed by Bill ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... voluminous exegetical writings was a treatise on S. Mark's Gospel.(438) To Origen's works, Eusebius, (his apologist and admirer,) is known to have habitually resorted; and, like many others, to have derived not a few of his notions from that fervid and acute, but most erratic intellect. Origen's writings in short, seem to have been the source of much, if not most of the mistaken Criticism of Antiquity. (The reader is reminded of what has been offered above at p. 96-7). And this would not be the first occasion on which it would appear that when an ancient ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... animals, not shattered in their fall, rushed about the pit in erratic frenzy, like victims in a Roman arena. The mocking walls rose on every side, grim, unsurmountable, and thrust the captives back into the shambles; jagged flint arrow-heads stung their hearts like angry serpents. Oh, blessed quick death! better than the ...
— The Outcasts • W. A. Fraser
... figures, and diffidence; besides a dozen defects that existed only in their imaginations. Their struggles may have educated them; but had they possessed sufficient genius they would have had neither struggle nor education. Perhaps that is why geniuses are such erratic people, and mediocrities so respectable. I grant you that I was very limited when I first came out; I was absolutely incapable of comedy. But I never took any trouble about it; and by and by, when I began to mature a little, and to see the absurdity of most ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... blaze! Makes Euroclydon her zone— Sits upon her thunder throne! Who her eulogy shall dare, Whose brow is wreathed with lightning glare? She, who treads the surgy sea In her stayless majesty, Curbs each wild (erratic) wave. When Atlantic tempests rave! Speaks—the maddened storms increase— Speaks again—and all is peace. 'Tis her breath's propitious gale Swells the weather-beaten sail, Wafts the crew from Britain ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 551, June 9, 1832 • Various
... poetic Raggles in an erratic and singular way. It seemed to him that he had drunk cold tea and that the city was a white, cold cloth that had been bound tightly around his brow to spur him to some unknown but tremendous mental effort. And, after all, he came to shovel snow for a livelihood; and the cloth, becoming wet, ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... Cambridge. It is safe to assume that the young scholar, soon to become a licensed preacher, and overflowing with the Puritan zeal of his college, might be drawn either through curiosity or admiration to hear the erratic and almost fanatic preacher. Later, when Browne's writings were being secretly distributed in England, both Barrowe and Greenwood had come in contact with the London congregations to whom Browne had preached. The fact that many men in England were thinking along the same lines as ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... furtiveness in the movements of the figure, a something indicative of a desire to avoid observation, that attracted my attention from my book and aroused my curiosity. It seemed to be wandering about aimlessly; but when I had been watching it for some ten minutes I became convinced that, erratic as its movements seemed to be, they were not without method; and that method, I soon saw, was causing the unknown one—a man—to gravitate slowly but surely toward the wagon. So I waited patiently, and a quarter of an hour later he accomplished a masterly movement which brought him ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... along the side of an open field. As Oliver got near the office, his chin on his breast, deep in thought, he was seen gradually to deviate from the sidewalk, and direct his steps along the field. He continued on this erratic course until he ran almost against the fence at the other end. This awoke him from his reverie, and he started up, looked around, and made his ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... occasion. There was no hysterical cheering and shouting; everything was quiet. Harry Fleming saw a wonderful sight a whole people aroused and determined. There was no foolish boasting; no one talked of a British general eating his Christmas dinner in Berlin. But even Dick Mercer, excitable and erratic as he had always been, seemed to have ...
— The Boy Scout Aviators • George Durston
... stayed drunk during the holidays, and I had to discharge him. He was a very valuable man when he was sober; but he began to be so erratic in his habits that I was afraid he would make a ghastly mistake some time, so I discharged him before it ...
— From Whose Bourne • Robert Barr
... except as meeting him might make it harder to see Dorothy. He drank hard. But drink never affected him except to make him more grimly tenacious in whatever he had deliberately and soberly resolved. Drink did not explain—neither wholly nor in any part—this conduct of his. It, and the more erratic vagaries to follow, will seem incredible conduct for a man of Norman's character and position to feeble folk with their feeble desires, their dread of criticism and ridicule, their exaggerated and adoring notions of the master men. In fact, it was the natural outcome ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... brothers were of widely different temperament. Henry, even as a little boy, was sturdy, industrious, and dependable. Sam was volatile and elusive; his industry of an erratic kind. Once his father set him to work with a hatchet to remove some plaster. He hacked at it for a time well enough, then lay down on the floor of the room and threw his hatchet at such areas of the plaster as were ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... been lodged in his memory during early years. His mother had really taken pains to acquaint him with the Divine Man who "pleased not himself," even while she was practically teaching him to reverse this trait in his own character. Thus, while the youth's heart was sadly erratic, his head was tolerably orthodox, and he knew theoreticaly the chief principles of right action. Though his conscience had never been truly awakened, it often told him that his action was unmanly, to say the least; and that was as far as any self-censure could reach at this time. But it might prove ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... avocations; I employed myself even on literary work. To all appearance I was one of the sanest of the sane; and yet all the while I considered myself the victim of such strange delusions that, in my own mind, I fancied my senses—and one sense in particular—so far erratic and beyond my own control that I was, in real truth, a madman. How far I was then insane it must be for others, who hear my story, to decide. My hallucinations have long since left me, and, at all events, I am now as sane as I suppose most ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... in deep thought, when suddenly I was aroused—I may say the arousement lifted me out of my saddle as well as out of my wits—by the report of a rifle, and seemingly the gunner was not fifty yards from where my contemplations ended and my accelerated transit began. My erratic namesake, with little warning, gave proof of decided dissatisfaction at the racket, and with one reckless bound he unceremoniously separated me from my eight-dollar plug hat, with which I parted company without any assent, express or implied, upon my part. At a break-neck speed we ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... she was a brilliant but erratic personage, living sumptuously, even though her revenues from Sweden came in slowly, partly because the Swedes disliked her change of religion. She was surrounded by men of letters, with whom she amused ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... is simply this, that the whole section of the flood (Genesis vi.-ix.) is an isolated piece without any connection with the rest of the narrative of the Jehovist. Another strange erratic boulder is the intercourse of the sons of God with the daughters of men (Genesis vi. 1-4). ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... preparations had been pushed with great vigor. A powerful squadron under Admiral Cervera, which had assembled at the Cape Verde Islands before the outbreak of hostilities, had crossed the ocean, and by its erratic movements in the Caribbean Sea delayed our military plans while baffling the pursuit of our fleets. For a time fears were felt lest the Oregon and Marietta, then nearing home after their long voyage from San Francisco of over 15,000 miles, might be surprised ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... this "mob" is worth attention. I saw it at many angles. I followed its first erratic flights through the streets when Salandra resigned and a gaping void opened before the nation. I waited for the poet's arrival at the Roman station, for hours, while the dense throng of men and women pressed into the great square ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... Massachusetts and New York to the Republican candidate. His professional income as a lawyer was estimated at $100,000 per annum shortly before his death at Washington, D.C., on the 11th of January 1893. He was an able but erratic administrator and soldier, and a brilliant lawyer. As a politician he excited bitter opposition, and was charged, apparently with justice, with corruption and venality in conniving at and sharing the profits of illicit ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Suddenly, several hundred skaters, each bearing a lighted lamp at his waist-belt, emerged from the crowd, and shot under the bridge on to the Serpentine, and commenced quadrilles, polkas, and divers figures; in a few minutes their erratic motions were illuminated by red, blue, crimson, and green fires, lighted on the banks, and by rockets and other lights. This fantastic and beautiful exhibition ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... is the best and most serious thing in the way of friendship, protection and guardianship that I have had during my life. That butterfly acted as my godmother. Do you wonder now at the zigzags, the erratic flights of my mind? Lucky for me that I have clung ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... ones; the Princess had never looked more truly regal, nor had the Prince ever more passionately wooed her. Girls who did not belong to the society always flocked into the theater to see the rehearsals. Maggie's mood scarcely puzzled them. She was so erratic that no one expected anything from her but the unexpected: if she looked like a drooping flower one moment, her head was erect the next, her eyes sparkling, her voice gay. The flower no longer drooped, but blossomed with renewed vigor. After reading ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... intercourse; but even the average German official—wedded as he may be to his rank or his title, anxious as he may be to preserve an outward decorum in exact keeping with the precise shade of his public status—is often the most delightfully unconventional, good-natured, unsophisticated, and even erratic being in the world, as soon as he has left the cares of his office behind him. Germany is the classic land of queer people. It is the land of Quintus Fixlein, Onkel Braesig, Leberecht Huehnchen, and the host of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... dropping at times into little depressions of Euphuistic manners and intervals of "sensibility" but climbing, with the advance of science and the emancipation of thought to an ideal—the personal, original interpretation of life. The nineteenth century showed curiously erratic variations of the curve. From its beginning till 1815, Sulphitism was upon the increase, while from that year till 1870 there was a sickening drop to the veriest depths of bromidic thought. Then the Bromide infested the earth. With his black-walnut furniture, ...
— Are You A Bromide? • Gelett Burgess
... any other time since the gold standard was firmly established. Thrown completely out of gear by the premium of 3-1/2 per cent. a day for currency during the panic time, the exchange markets for some time would rise and fall several cents in the pound on the same day. Completely baffled by this erratic movement, many bankers temporarily withdrew entirely ...
— Elements of Foreign Exchange - A Foreign Exchange Primer • Franklin Escher
... particularist movements are gradually thrust to one side. In literary history, likewise, we best remember those authors who fall into line with what we now perceive to have been the course of our literary development. The erratic men and women, the "sports" of the great experiment, are ultimately neglected by the critics, unless, like the leaders of political insurrections, those writing men and women have raised a notable ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... one of the New Castle fleet which Bob firmly believed to be searching the seas to recapture him from Bonnet. Should it prove to be so, their lives were in worse danger than ever, for neither of the boys doubted that the erratic Captain would kill them at once if ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... engine-drivers are so erratic that if you're long enough on the line it's only a question of time when you get your smash up. Ours came last night when they were joining us up to go out again. They put an engine on to each end of one-half of the train (not the one our car is in), ...
— Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... it, and whimper for his friend. Tommy swam out of the sea, came to the boat, discovered, Heaven knows how, that his friend was there, and, in the way of noises, did everything but speak. The sea-birds followed and fluttered here and there in an erratic way, with now and then a peck at each other. All animated nature seemed to be uneasy at this ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... claiming God for its author, and the welfare of man for its object. It is a system so uniform, exalted and pure, that the loftiest intellects have acknowledged its influence, and acquiesced in the justness of its claims. Genius has bent from his erratic course to gather fire from her altars, and pathos from the agony of Gethsemane and the sufferings of Calvary. Philosophy and science have paused amid their speculative researches and wondrous revelations to gain wisdom from her teachings and knowledge from her precepts. Poetry has culled ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... arched window. The pleasant face of Phoebe—and doubtless, too, the liberal recompense which she had flung him—still dwelt in his remembrance. His expressive features kindled up, as he recognized the spot where this trifling incident of his erratic life had chanced. He entered the neglected yard (now wilder than ever, with its growth of hog-weed and burdock), stationed himself on the doorstep of the main entrance, and, opening his show-box, began to play. Each individual of the automatic community ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the training chambers had not prepared him for the surface of Pyrrus. There was the basic similarity of course. The feel of the poison grass underfoot and the erratic flight of a stingwing in the last instant before Grif blasted it. But these were scarcely noticeable in the crash ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... fluttering irresolutely, flitted Parnassus Apollo, still winging its erratic way where God willed it—a frail, dainty, translucent, wind-blown fleck of white above the gulf—symbol, perhaps of the soul already soaring up out of ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... release and safety, an agreement to recognise Texan independence. Mexico, however, did not recognise this, notwithstanding that a Texan Constitution was set up in 1836. Returning now to Santa-Anna's Presidency, his erratic acts disgusted his countrymen, and pronunciamientos followed. Hoping to divert popular opinion from himself, Santa-Anna proposed the prosecution of a war with Texas, for its recovery, notwithstanding his ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... so intense that nothing was heard save the hum of two great "bumblebees" that darted in and out among the trees and flew at erratic angles above our heads, the negroes came forward and stretched their necks over each other's shoulders, peering curiously at the little mounds of powder that lay before them, at the innocent-looking bottle that stood in their midst, and the great high priest who sat behind. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... a good general education in boyhood. Early left an orphan by his father's death, he had inherited his business, and for some years he carried it on prosperously, living with his mother and sisters. But before he was two-and-twenty his naturally erratic disposition asserted itself, and he chafed under the restraints and monotony of life in a small provincial town. He sold up his business at a great loss, well-nigh ruining his family, had it not been for his mother's ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... than a silver service, and give him the spirit of the tropics and the Rhine, whose fruits are on other tables. The golden light that transfigures talent and illuminates the world, and which we call genius, is erratic and erotic; and while in Milton it is austere, and in Wordsworth cool, and in Southey methodical, in Shakespeare it is fervent, with all the results of fervor; in Raphael lovely, with all the excesses of love; ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... pleasurable expectancy. Comus was one of the most junior of the prefect caste, but by no means the least well- known, and outside the masters' common-room he enjoyed a certain fitful popularity, or at any rate admiration. At football he was too erratic to be a really brilliant player, but he tackled as if the act of bringing his man headlong to the ground was in itself a sensuous pleasure, and his weird swear-words whenever he got hurt were eagerly ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... and villas and groves can do this, let us have them. Let us make a paradise out of a desert. Man was put into Eden to dress and to keep it. The material, rightly directed and used, is part of our just inheritance. Man is physical as well as intellectual. It is monkish and erratic to spurn the outward blessings of Providence. An inheritance in Middlesex is worth more than one in Utopia. Give us beauty and grace— they are invaluable. But let us remember, also, that it is chiefly from moral truth that the soul expands—the recognition of responsibilities and duties. ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... upon Rose, he was in doubt; but its effect upon Madame Carthame was all that he could desire. This severe person instantly took the cue that the Count dexterously gave her by affecting to palliate Jaune's erratic conduct. He urged that, inasmuch as M. d'Antimoine was a conspicuous failure as an artist, for him to engage himself to a tailor as a walking advertisement, so far from being a disgrace to him, was greatly to his credit. And Madame Carthame promptly and vehemently asserted that it wasn't. ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... which is documented with impressive references. But even if this particular account is not accepted, all astronomers agree that the effect of a comet passing near the earth would be appalling. Worlds in Collision states that Mars, like the earth, was pulled out of its orbit by the comet's erratic passage. It may be that this near disaster to the earth and Mars is known on other solar planets, or remembered on Mars itself, if the ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... find a parallel. There was nothing like it at the time, and nothing exactly like it has been attempted since. The nearest approach to it among its predecessors was the Observator, a small weekly journal written by the erratic John Tutchin, in which passing topics, political and social, were discussed in dialogues. Personal scandals were a prominent feature in the Observator. Defoe was not insensible to the value of this ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... but she's not erratic. She always has a reason for going off in that way. When you get to know her as I do, you will think she's the sweetest ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... more serene distress, On Fortune's ways erratic; And then delightfully digress From ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... of the Republic of Cyprus under government control has a market economy dominated by the service sector, which accounts for 78% of GDP. Tourism, financial services, and real estate are the most important sectors. Erratic growth rates over the past decade reflect the economy's reliance on tourism, which often fluctuates with political instability in the region and economic conditions in Western Europe. Nevertheless, the economy in the area under government control grew ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... clergy. Had the issue been confined to Boston the result could not have been doubtful, for the Boston Church was predominantly Hutchinsonian; but the ministers as a body supported Winthrop and Wilson, and the old magistrates were returned in the election of 1637. The victory was a crucial one. The erratic Vane went off to England; Cotton returned to his first allegiance; and when the cause of all the trouble was cited to appear before the court in the fall of the same year, the decree of banishment was a foregone conclusion. Like Luther before the diet, Anne Hutchinson pressed for ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... consonant remained unaffected (e.g., do, food, move, fool). Whatever the upshot, we may be reasonably certain that when the "phonetic law" has run its course, the distribution of "long" and "short" vowels in the old oo-words will not seem quite as erratic as at the present transitional moment.[154] We learn, incidentally, the fundamental fact that phonetic laws do not work with spontaneous automatism, that they are simply a formula for a consummated drift that sets in at a psychologically exposed point and gradually worms its way through ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... the articles he had dropped, and came prancing (no other word describes his erratic run) up ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... beautiful island of S. Giorgio it is almost necessary to take a gondola; for although there is the Giudecca steamer every half hour, it is an erratic boat, and you may be left stranded too long waiting to return. The island is military, save for the church, and that is chiefly a show-place to-day. It is large and light, but it has no charm, for that was not Palladio's gift. That he was a great man, every visitor to Vicenza knows; but ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... or means to do so even if our interests, political or otherwise, should prompt us to try it. From discussion of the partisan attacks on and defense of the administration's course of action toward Russia in 1918-19, both of which are erratic and acrimonious, we plead to ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... stations - 2 Intelsat (1 Indian Ocean and 1 Atlantic Ocean) (erratic operations); coaxial cable to Syria; microwave radio relay to Syria but inoperable beyond Syria to Jordan; 3 ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the laudable breaking of Czarism's back. But Lord Cardingham, who was not altogether ruled by his younger son, had declined to expend his seductions upon Mr. Gladstone in the cause of a possible laying of too heavy a rod upon England's back, and had recommended his erratic son to let the barbarism of absolutism alone in the future, and try his genius upon that of democracy. Dartmouth, accordingly, had spent a winter in Washington as Secretary of Legation, and had entertained himself by doling out ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... imprecations, but thought better of it. Tim had a long memory, and an uncomfortable way of exacting penalties for any such indignity. She soothed her outraged feelings somewhat by throwing a stone after the little, limping figure, her erratic ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... seafaring diplomatist, known for his love of the yard-arm law. The Commodore would hold a parley with the Rajah; the Rajah, whose dignity was first to be consulted, was too slow in preparing his palace. The Commodore, erratic of temper, was at times accustomed to growl for his own amusement; he now growled for the amusement of his countrymen. The result was natural. In the littleness of his vanity did the Rajah imagine himself a very great man. He was important of those small follies which prove the great misfortunes ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... passed on up the path, leaving young Arkwright seated on the ledge of rock, a prey to all the boiling, erratic impulses of adolescence. The negro sensed some of the innumerable difficulties of this white boy's life, and once, as he walked on over the silent needles, he felt an impulse to turn back and talk to young Sam Arkwright, ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... Peal after peal follow each other in quick succession, the vigorous, newborn echoes of one peal seeming angrily to chase the receding voices of its predecessor from cliff to cliff, and from recess to projection, along its rocky, erratic course up the caon. Vivid flashes of forked lightning shoot athwart the heavy black cloud that seems to rest on either wall, roofing the caon with a ceiling of awful grandeur. Sheets of electric flame light up the dark, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... of one's normal experience; so that while new centres of activity are as yet under imperfect control, the normal functions of the brain and other centres of action are left in neglect. Hence, to the casual observer, the erratic nature of Genius is not distinguishable from some incipent ...
— How to Read the Crystal - or, Crystal and Seer • Sepharial
... surface within ten yards of the canoe, which was making but feeble progress under Sir Arthur's erratic strokes. ...
— The River of Darkness - Under Africa • William Murray Graydon
... roughly," he said. "You could have walked it in less than ten minutes. And now let us get out the ordnance map and see if we can give to each of those marvellously erratic lines 'a local ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... Clausen occupied similar positions on the first eleven, and behind them stood Wesley Blair, the best full-back that Hillton Academy had possessed for many years. The full-back on the second eleven was Ned Post, a veteran player, but "as erratic as a mule," to use ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... to the Diluvial System, which brings us near to the present surface. To this era is referred the erratic blocks, or gigantic boulder stones, which have been driven by floods across our continents, or drifted in icebergs over valleys, and perched sometimes on mountain tops. To it also must be referred the till ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... for the water, fellows!" he exclaimed, as well as he was able, while being tugged along by the erratic rushes ...
— The Boys of Columbia High on the Gridiron • Graham B. Forbes
... number of our lectures he knew from the program that: "The lecturer does not give readings, or cast horoscopes for pay." But seeing on the door of the newly opened reading room, the legend: "Free Reading Room," his erratic mind at once jumped to the conclusion that although we were opposed to telling fortunes for pay, we were now going to give free readings of the future in the Free Reading Room. He was much disappointed that we did not intend to tell fortunes, either gratis or for a consideration, and we ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... to be done with a genius so unstable, so erratic? Nothing, apparently, but to let him qualify for orders, and for this he is too young. Thereupon ensues a sort of 'Martin's summer' in his changing life,—a disengaged, delightful time when 'Master Noll' ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... led by his reverence for Wordsworth and Coleridge to take up his residence, in 1808, at Grasmere, where he occupied for many years the cottage from which Wordsworth had removed to Allan Bank. De Quincey was a shy, bookish little man, of erratic, nocturnal habits, who impresses one, personally, as a child of genius, with a child's helplessness and a child's sharp observation. He was, above all things, a magazinist. All his writings, with ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... be like one of these erratic creations, or would she resemble the heroines of Russian political history whose marvellous courage and endurance excite the wonder of all who can even dimly realise what it must be to live from ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Gautier, and George Sand—were on the whole cordial. He had trouble with Sainte-Beuve, however, and often felt that his brother-writers begrudged his success. His constant attacks on contemporary journalists, and his egotistic and erratic manners naturally prejudiced the critics, so that even the marvelous romance entitled 'La Peau de chagrin' (The Magic Skin: 1831),—a work of superb genius,—speedily followed as it was by 'Eugenie Grandet' ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... with its "Scientific phraseology a speciality," fine and large, he saw the notes she had written out for him. Her handwriting was still round and boyish, even as it had appeared in the Whortley avenue, but her punctuation was confined to the erratic comma and the dash, and there was a disposition to spell the imperfectly legible along the line of least resistance. However, he dismissed that matter with a resolve to read over and correct anything in that way that she might have sent her to do. It ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... stone Greeting the smiling East Is not so purple, I must own, As that erratic beast. She lived unknown, that Cow, and so I never chanced to see; But if I had to be one, oh, The ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... classes of society except, perhaps, that which Thackeray made his peculiar field. The historians, too, furnish singular contrasts: the vehement pugnacity of Freeman is a foil to the serene studiousness of Acton; the erratic career of Froude to the concentration of Stubbs. The influence exercised on their contemporaries by recluses such as Newman or Darwin may be compared with the more worldly activities of Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce. Often we see equally diverse elements in ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... "Rodeur's" prow is turned toward it, for there is hope, there rescue! As the stranger draws nearer, the straining eyes of the French helmsman discerns something strange and terrifying about her appearance. Her rigging is loose and slovenly, her course erratic, she seems to be idly drifting, and there is no one at the wheel. A derelict, abandoned at sea, she mocks their hopes of rescue. But she is not entirely deserted, for a faint shout comes across the narrowing strip of sea and is answered from the "Rodeur." The two vessels draw ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... was left quite bewildered by these erratic proceedings, but she had no mind to question them; so many stories were rife in the Home of the eccentricities embodied in the charitable phrase "Mis' Blair's way" that she would scarcely have been amazed had her terrible room-mate chosen to drive a coach and four up the chimney, ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... were erected, and barrels of beer were broached. Suddenly, several hundred skaters, each bearing a lighted lamp at his waist-belt, emerged from the crowd, and shot under the bridge on to the Serpentine, and commenced quadrilles, polkas, and divers figures; in a few minutes their erratic motions were illuminated by red, blue, crimson, and green fires, lighted on the banks, and by rockets and other lights. This fantastic and beautiful exhibition ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... observations agreed with those of Tycho Brahe, and won for Maestlin the professorship of astronomy in the University of Heidelberg. No man had so clearly proved the supralunar position of a comet, or shown so conclusively that its motion was not erratic, but regular. The young astronomer, though Apian's pupil, was an avowed Copernican and the destined master and friend of Kepler. Yet, in the treatise embodying his observations, he felt it necessary to save his reputation for orthodoxy by calling the comet a "new and horrible prodigy," ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... away to follow some new toy balloon of erratic possibilities, and Crane wound through the narrow passage which led to the paddock. ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... was jarred through all her members; but she tore loose. And then, in erratic leaps and bounds, she kept on across the fields and woods towards Easton, never rising very high, but occasionally sinking so that she trailed across the treetops, threatening the whole party with death and the flying machine itself ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... agree with me to prosecute the search of the picturesque in a carriage; a waggon, a spring-cart, even a post-chaise might do, but the carriage upsets everything. I longed to slip out unseen, and to run away by myself in amongst the hills and dales. Erratic and vagrant instincts tormented me, and these I was obliged to control, or rather, suppress, for fear of growing in any degree enthusiastic, and thus drawing attention to the "lioness," the authoress, the artist. Sir J. K. Shuttleworth is a man of ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... in the dreary-looking block of flats in Holloway, attended through the day by the erratic ministrations of Doris, and at night by the yearning tenderness of Ethel, Basil Hayward dragged out a weary martyrdom, that prayed only for release. In vain Ethel murmured over him, that to work for him was a glory ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... earth—or at least that portion of it—for his own; so, when he was constrained to make a choice, he settled himself in the wider, more fertile coulee, which he thereafter called the Flying U. While it is good policy to locate as near as possible to the source of those erratic little creeks which water certain garden spots of the northern range land, it is also well to choose land that will grow plenty of hay. J. G. Whitmore chose the hay land, and trusted that providence would insure the water supply. Through all these years ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... view of the earth, some people accept the mere fact of his soaring for sublimity, and mistake his dim vision of earth for proximity to heaven." And in like manner, when a thinker frees himself from all the trammels of fact, and propounds a "bold hypothesis," people mistake the vagabond erratic flights of guessing for a higher range of philosophic power. In truth, the imagination is most tasked when it has to paint pictures which shall withstand the silent criticism of general experience, and to frame hypotheses which shall withstand the confrontation with ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... by the most futile reasons. It is lawful, it is even necessary, to refuse assent to the dictates of such a conscience. To persons thus afflicted the authoritative need of a prudent adviser must serve as a rule until the conscience is cured of its morbid and erratic tendencies. ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... high respect for her. But there is one other plain question I would like to ask you, in view of your rather erratic behavior." ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... lending in 2001 when the government failed to institute several anticorruption measures. Despite the return of strong rains in 2001, weak commodity prices, endemic corruption, and low investment limited Kenya's economic growth to 1%. Growth fell below 1% in 2002 because of erratic rains, low investor confidence, meager donor support, and political infighting up to the elections. In the key December 27, 2002 elections, Daniel Arap MOI's 24-year-old reign ended, and a new opposition government ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... truly amiable, erratic genius is a portrait of Dickens's own father, "David Copperfield" being Dickens, and "Mrs. Nickleby" (one can hardly believe it) is said to ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... silken cable, Swell, ye sails, by zephyrs kissed, Bearing me the walnut table Thumped by BETHMANN-HOLLWEG'S fist; Steering, not by course erratic, Safe to the appointed wharf, Bring, O bark, the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 12, 1920 • Various
... vigorously played was the instrument which created inspiration. It would take a volume to tell of all that was said and done on that great and memorable occasion—how the plump little Miss Gambarts fluttered about like erratic flowers, or like captivating comets drawing a long tail of the Partridge Bay young men after them; how, as the evening wore on, all social distinctions were swept away and the servants were invited to exchange duty in the kitchen for dancing in the hall; how Le Rue danced so often with Elise ...
— Wrecked but not Ruined • R.M. Ballantyne
... he could devote fifty years to the study of this work, he might come to be without great faults; but neither native nor foreign scholars can really make anything out of it. Some regard it as a Book of Fate. One erratic genius of the West has gone so far as to say that it is only a vocabulary of the language of some old Central ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... faces stiff competition in international markets with the end of the global quota system. However, other sectors, notably the automotive and electronics industries, are rising in importance within Turkey's export mix. In recent years the economic situation has been marked by erratic economic growth and serious imbalances. Real GNP growth has exceeded 6% in many years, but this strong expansion has been interrupted by sharp declines in output in 1994, 1999, and 2001. Inflation, in recent years in the high double-digit range, fell to 9.3% by 2004 - a ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... my dear erratic master has managed for years and years to cultivate the farm of La Haye and to bring up my godson in the fear of the Lord and the practice of land surveying is a proof that the late Mr. Matthew Arnold was hopelessly wrong in his categorical declaration ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... wantonness and ease" is to find the regeneration of his life—the rebaptism of his soul? Of what avail thy meek prudent household virtues to one whom Fortune screens from rough trial?—whose sorrows lie remote from thy ken?—whose spirit, erratic and perturbed, now rising, now falling, needs a vision more subtle than thine to pursue, and a strength that can sustain the reason, when it droops, on the wings ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... condor's weary wing Hath yet ascended! Let the rising thought Beyond the confines of this vapoury vault Be lifted, to the boundless void of space, How dread, how infinite! where other worlds, Ten million and ten million leagues aloft, In other precincts with their shadows roll. There roams the sole erratic comet, borne 210 With lightning speed, yet twice three hundred years Its destined course accomplishing. Then whirled, Far from the attractive orb of central fire, Back through the dim and infinite abyss, Dread flaming visitant, ere thou return'st, Empires ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... came to Idlewild to stay, how long I did not dream. Nor did I dream how often he was to come, for he was like an erratic comet. Fresh he would arrive, and cleanly clad, from grand folk who were his friends as I was his friend, and again, weary and worn, he would creep up the brier-rose path from the Montanas or Mexico. And without a word, when his wanderlust gripped him, he was off and away into that great ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... spite of well-meant attempts to substitute new constructions for the old, all had been disintegration. French society was to be reorganized only after further pulverizing; cohesion would begin only under pressure from without—a pressure applied by the threats of erratic royalists that they would bring in the foreign powers to coerce and arbitrate, by the active demonstrations of the emigrants, by the outbreak of foreign wars. These were the events about to take place; they would in the end evolve from the chaos ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... might make it harder to see Dorothy. He drank hard. But drink never affected him except to make him more grimly tenacious in whatever he had deliberately and soberly resolved. Drink did not explain—neither wholly nor in any part—this conduct of his. It, and the more erratic vagaries to follow, will seem incredible conduct for a man of Norman's character and position to feeble folk with their feeble desires, their dread of criticism and ridicule, their exaggerated and adoring notions of the master men. In fact, ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... been the old lady's companion for many years. And to Magsie, as they all called her, young Mr. Hoyt had paid some decided attention not many months before. Mrs. Frothingham had seen fit to disapprove these advances then, but she was an extraordinarily erratic and cross-grained old lady, and her silence now had forced her nephew uncomfortably to suspect that she might ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... saddle, and on the ground they were fleet and sure footed, but in the air they were extremely unreliable. They used their wings with much power, but were not responsive to the reins, and in flying pursued the most erratic courses. What was worse, they were seldom able to alight after an aerial flight on all four feet at once, having a disagreeable habit of approaching the earth vertically, and headfirst, so that the rider, unless he were strapped on, was usually unseated while forty or fifty feet in the air, with ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... reached their full development. As for Stanton, a man of much narrower mind, but acute, devoted, and morally fearless, kept in the War Department as a sort of tame tiger to prey on abuses, negligences, pretensions, and political influences, this was one among a hundred smaller erratic doings, which his critics have never thought of as outweighing his peculiar usefulness. His departmental point of view can easily be understood. Recruits, embarrassingly, presented themselves much faster than they could be organised ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... procession of nations in time, like the erratic phantasm of a dream, go forward without reason or order? Or, is there a predetermined, a solemn march, in which all must join, ever moving, ever resistlessly advancing, encountering and enduring ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... tight-fitting crenulate casing about the lower half. The cirri are sharply pointed, much broader at the base, and the two sets are so placed that, looked at from above, they have the appearance of a twisted cord. (Fig. 31 b.) Movement erratic; sometimes the animal swims steadily forward with mouth in front; again it shoots across the field of the microscope, either backward or forward or sideways, through the action of its powerful cirri. It is often quiet, usually mouth downward, ...
— Marine Protozoa from Woods Hole - Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission 21:415-468, 1901 • Gary N. Galkins
... the tragedy. The old man had always been cranky and erratic, and he'd played the despot on Hikihoho so long that he'd got the idea in his head that there was nothing wrong with the king—or the princess either. When Armande was eighteen he sent for her. He had slews and slathers of money, as Yankee Bill would say. He'd built the big house on Hikihoho, ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... the first eleven, and behind them stood Wesley Blair, the best full-back that Hillton Academy had possessed for many years. The full-back on the second eleven was Ned Post, a veteran player, but "as erratic as a mule," to use the ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... no tower. A Viking rests on its fins. Anyway, it took off. It climbed ten miles, then went on an erratic course. We couldn't control it. Fortunately it crashed on the Las Vegas Bombing and Gunnery Range, which is a closed military area nearby, so no one was hurt. At first we thought it was just one of those typical accidents that happen during rocket research. ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... were the denizens of this underground colony; their six little legs carrying their curious globular bodies backward and forward over the disturbed area from which the stone had been removed. At first the movements of the ants were extremely erratic and purposeless. Panic and alarm appeared to be the order of the day during the few minutes which elapsed after removal of the stone. But soon the eye could discern movements of purposive kind on the part of the alarmed residents. There was "racing and chasing" in ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... trust him greatly. But it was Soapy Stone and young Cullison that interested Flandrau most. The former played like a master. He chatted carelessly, but he overlooked no points. Sam had the qualities that go to make a brilliant erratic player, but he lacked the steadiness and the finesse ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... famous woman, by Miss Thomas, is the only one in existence. Those who have awaited it with pleasurable anticipation, but with some trepidation as to the treatment of the erratic side of her character, cannot fail to be pleased with the skill by which it is done. It is the best production on George Sand that has yet been published. The author modestly refers to it as a sketch, which it undoubtedly ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... spoils, And hardier Sic erratic toils, While both their ease forego; For ease, which neither gold can buy, Nor robes, nor gems, which oft belie, ...
— Quaint Gleanings from Ancient Poetry • Edmund Goldsmid
... very erratic in their course. Slides and faults throw them far from their true line, and sometimes the lode is represented by a number of lenticular (double-pointed in section) masses of quartz of greater or less length, either continuing point to point or overlapping, "splicing," as the miners call it. ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... excellencies in design and finish that had brought him fame. Francois, the younger son, was not forgotten though, and the father bethought him of some useful industry at which he might earn a living, and decided on clockmaking as the most suitable. Now mark the erratic workings of fate. The eldest son, from whom so much was expected, proved a comparative failure, inasmuch as that, instead of progressing, his work was distinctly inferior to that of his father.[1] Francois, ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George
... the dog and the rose this instinctive principle is reversed. With them we think of the artificial as the archetype; the earth-born as the erratic exception. We think vaguely of the wild dog as if he had run away, like the stray cat. And we cannot help fancying that the wonderful wild rose of our hedges has escaped by jumping over the hedge. Perhaps ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... very slight degree under the notice of certain good-natured people with whom Malkin was on friendly terms, and hearing that the children, Bella and Lily, aged fourteen and twelve respectively, were about to undertake alone a journey to the Continent, the erratic hero felt it incumbent upon him to see them safe at their mother's side. Instead of returning forthwith, he lingered in Normandy for several weeks, striking off at length, on the summons of a friend, to Orleans, whence he was only to-day returned. Two or three letters had kept Earwaker ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... the finest ideals have insisted that these should be shared by the multitude. In a newspaper of sixty years ago there is this contemporary character sketch: "Ralph Waldo Emerson is the most erratic and capricious man in America. He is emphatically a democrat of the world, and believes that what Plato thought, another man may think. What Shakespeare sang, another man may know as well. As for emperors, kings, queens, princes, or presidents, ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... guilt amounted to two or three kisses, the world already chose to believe the worst of both. Mme. de Bargeton paid the penalty of her sovereignty. Among the various eccentricities of society, have you never noticed its erratic judgments and the unaccountable differences in the standard it requires of this or that man or woman? There are some persons who may do anything; they may behave totally irrationally, anything becomes them, ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... postillion's authority for speaking. But it is, I am told, a finer test to embellish much gentleman-apparel, than to walk with dignity totally unadorned. This simply tries the soundness of our faculties: that tempts them in erratic directions. It is the difference between active and passive excellence. As there is hardly any situation, however, so interesting to reflect upon as that of a man without a penny in his pocket, and a gizzard full of pride, we will leave Mr. Evan Harrington to what fresh adventures may ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... friend and I returned in time for a late dinner), I wandered among the Roman remains of the place by the light of a magnificent moon, and gathered an impression which has lost little of its silvery glow. The moon of the evening before had been aqueous and erratic; but if on the present occasion it was guilty of any irregularity, the worst it did was only to linger beyond its time in the heavens, in order to let us look at things comfortably. The effect was admirable; it brought ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... as mistaken as were all those others who foretold my future; indeed he struck farther from the centre than any one else; he did not understand that my liking for natural history was no more than a temporary and erratic excursion of my unformed mind; he could not know that the cold glass and the formal, rigid arrangements of dead science had not power to hold ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... He is erratic and often queer. He believes, with Emerson, that "with consistency a great soul has nothing to do." And he is, of course, "a great ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... a long expected dinner suddenly snatched away from it; but the worse he became the louder M'Allister shrieked with laughter. The latter was now simply rolling about the room—for it could not be termed walking, it was so erratic—holding his sides and laughing, whilst the tears were chasing each other down his cheeks. He kept trying to speak, but had no sooner stuttered out the words, "Heh, mon! heh, mon!" than he was off again into another wild paroxysm of laughter, and ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... of Rugen erratic blocks on the seashore are called Adeborsteine, "stork-stones," and on such a rock or boulder near Wrek in Wittow, Dr. Haas says "the stork is said to dry the little children, after he has fetched them out of the sea, before he brings them to ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... his way back, beginning to sweat with the effort. The Navaho was an old ship. A lot of the handholds were missing, and he had to throw himself along by erratic leaps. He was gaining proficiency, but not enough to handle himself if the ship blasted off. Time was growing short when he reached the aft bunkroom where the other ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey
... was returning to position, but with a series of erratic swoops that seemed to close ...
— Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures • Edgar Franklin
... in Joy's mind on Gail. Nobody took her seriously. She was just a reckless, erratic creature who said and did as she pleased, and paid the penalty. Joy never felt so ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer
... the Chelyuskin Peninsula. But probably it was only a river, which widened out near its mouth into a broad lake, as several of the Siberian rivers do. All about the clay plains I was tramping over, enormous erratic blocks, of various formations, lay scattered. They can only have been brought here by the great glaciers of the Ice Age. There was not much life to be seen. Besides reindeer there were just a few willow-grouse, ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... 'Vogons'; see the {Bibliography} in Appendix C and note that Arthur Dent actually mispronounces 'Vogons' as 'Bogons' at one point] 1. The elementary particle of bogosity (see {quantum bogodynamics}). For instance, "the Ethernet is emitting bogons again" means that it is broken or acting in an erratic or bogus fashion. 2. A query packet sent from a TCP/IP domain resolver to a root server, having the reply bit set instead of the query bit. 3. Any bogus or incorrectly formed packet sent on a network. 4. By synecdoche, used to refer to any bogus thing, as in "I'd like to go to lunch ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... unnecessary to our narrative to relate the erratic discourse that ensued. The old man eluded the annihilating blows of his adversary, as the light armed soldier is wont to escape the efforts of the more regular warrior, even while he annoys him most, and an hour passed away without bringing any of the numerous ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... across the cloud-rack fluctuant and erratic As the strong star smiles that lets no mourner mourn, Hymned alike from lips of Lesbian choirs or Attic Once at evensong and morning newly born, Clear and sure above the changes of dramatic Tide and current, soft ...
— Studies in Song, A Century of Roundels, Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets, The Heptalogia, Etc - From Swinburne's Poems Volume V. • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... positions when the launch, executing another of its erratic evolutions, again swept by. A second later they were startled by a crash followed by screams and cries for help. Leary whistled shrilly to attract the Governor's attention ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... had been odder than ever the last day or so. He had ceased even to pretend that his guest's presence was anything but an annoyance. He had refused utterly to enter into any connected conversation and had been restless and erratic to a degree. "Too muchy moon-devil," according to Li Ho. That very afternoon he had met them coming down from their talk upon the rocks and the ironic courtesy of his greeting had been little less than baleful. At supper ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... that," Duvall replied, "but she did not. She is mentally rather erratic, and she at once conceived the idea that you had singled her out for persecution; that, in fact, you were envious of her abilities and meant to prevent her ...
— The Film of Fear • Arnold Fredericks
... 20, appeared a statement of the test to ascertain the accuracy of the meter used, which showed that in an aggregate of twelve tests it varied nearly three per cent in its record from the actual quantity delivered, while at times it was so erratic that it varied in one instance over ten ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... upon all investigation and questioning. In this way Wagner stood for the Christian concept, "Thou must and shalt believe". It is a crime against the highest and the holiest to be scientific.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} The "Flying Dutchman" preaches the sublime doctrine that woman can moor the most erratic soul, or to put it into Wagnerian terms "save" him. Here we venture to ask a question. Supposing that this were actually true, would it therefore be desirable?—What becomes of the "eternal Jew" whom a ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... sleeping guest it seemed like a beautiful dream. That Poppy Tyrell should be sitting in his cabin and looking to him as her only friend seemed almost incredible. A sudden remembrance of Flower subdued at once the ardour of his gaze, and he sat wondering vaguely as to the whereabouts of that erratic mariner until his meditations were broken by the entrance of the boy with the steaming coffee, followed by Bill ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... Elfride's erratic mind had from her youth upwards been constantly in the habit of perplexing her father by hypothetical questions, based on absurd conditions. The present seemed to be cast so precisely in the mould of previous ones that, not being given to syntheses ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... the Irish were negroes, and then we should have an advocate in the Hon. Baronet. His erratic humanity wanders beyond the ocean, and visits the hot islands of the West Indies, and thus having discharged the duties of kindness there, it returns burning and desolating, to treat with indignity and to trample upon the ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender
... the proclamation of the Republic they began to consider various projects of carrying the revolution into their own countries. Plans were being discussed for organizing legions to invade foreign countries, and a number of the German communists entered heartily into the plan of Herwegh, the erratic German poet—"the iron lark"—who led a band of revolutionists into Baden. "We arose vehemently against these attempts to play at revolution," says Engels, speaking for himself and Marx. "In the state of fermentation ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... solution of the riddle of that cut which had adorned Young Denny's chin as he had been. And yet, even while he hesitated, feeding his imagination upon the choicest of premonitory tit-bits, he knew he meant to go ahead. He was magnifying the unfathomed peril that existed in his erratic, hair-trigger old brain alone merely for the sake of the complacent pride which resulted therefrom—pride in the contemplation of his ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... scarcely surprising that the signs of the times should have been misread. Maurice had helped Charles against the Schmalkaldic League before; yet everything depended on his discarding the apparently erratic politics of his past career, and displaying in full measure the organising and military genius of which he had given promise, though it still remained to be conclusively proved. He did in fact prove ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... that Thomas Mugridge's erratic soul brought him into the scene. He had been listening at the galley door, but he now came out, ostensibly to fling some scraps over the side, but obviously to see the killing he was certain would take place. He smirked greasily up into ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... he would dine at some cheap, even dubious, restaurant lower down in the city, where the erratic chefs from all countries of the world spread their national cookery for the omnivorous American. Something might happen there out of the routine—he might come upon a subject without a predicate, a road without an end, a question without an answer, a cause without an effect, a gulf ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... Royson's placid temper was again ruffled, and he might have said nasty things about Fate had not that erratic dame suddenly thought, fit to alter his fortunes. As the street narrowed between lofty buildings, so did the blaring thunder of the music increase. The mob closed in on the soldiers' heels; the whole roadway was packed with moving men. ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... England. I was now sixteen, and continued in the house of my parents, passing my time chiefly in philological pursuits. But it was high time that I should adopt some profession. My father would gladly have seen me enter the Church, but feared I was too erratic. So I was put to the law, but while remaining a novice at that pursuit, I became a perfect master of the Welsh language. My father soon began to feel that he had made a mistake in the choice of a ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... conjecture, and not erroneously, to have been mine. All I can say is, that, when I lost my way last evening, my first feeling was one of a melancholy satisfaction; for it seemed to me that destiny itself had determined to contribute towards my aim and desire, and to forward me freely in the erratic progress, which, in a gloomy mood, I had most desperately and, perhaps, ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... could speak of her various experiences without being laughed at or put down as a lunatic. At the same time I am bound to confess that Mrs Peters, although extremely interesting, was also rather agitating, and certainly much too erratic to make an entirely satisfactory Chatelaine. She was given to reading "Aurora Leigh," instead of ordering dinner, and had to be sent for occasionally to sit at the head of the table, with a volume of Browning or Tennyson firmly clutched in her reluctant ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... thought he understood all, especially as Jim's visits to Kyley's shanty were comparatively rare of late. Meanwhile, Jim had written once to Lucy, but had received no answer—a fact that did not disturb him, however, as the postal service on the fields and in the Bush was extremely erratic. He was quite satisfied now that he had been in love with his shipmate all the time, but it was not easy to account for Aurora. Certainly he had been very fond of her: he was fond of her still, and could not bring himself ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... precocious youth adopted the new religion. The struggles of young William Penn with his ambitious father, were long and bitter. He was beaten and turned out of doors by his angry parent, then taken back by the erratic but kind-hearted father and sent to France to be lured with gayety and dazzled with promises of wealth and distinction; but William Penn had the courage of his convictions and yielded not one whit of his religious ideas. Conscious of being right, he was ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... of antisocial behavior can't be allowed. The poor fellow who thinks he's better than anyone else has to be segregated from normal society and treated for his aberrations. But not punished! Heavens no! His erratic behavior isn't his fault, ...
— The Highest Treason • Randall Garrett
... gnome went along in front of them, when suddenly he began walking right up, in the water. When the others came up to the same place, to their surprise, they found themselves doing the same thing. They couldn't possibly stay on the ground. 'I don't want to go up,' said erratic Cricket, kicking, and shamefaced Will called to the sparkling gnome, to know what was the matter. 'Nothing at all,' he called back, cheerfully, 'only gravity doesn't happen to act just there. Sometimes it doesn't and then you're just as likely ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... generous in Mr. Austin to assume that 'her Radical friend' had been prompting her. However, she thanked him in her heart for the calm he had given her. To be able to imagine Nevil Beauchamp intellectually erratic was a tonic satisfaction to the proud young lady, ashamed of a bondage that the bracing and pointing of her critical powers helped her to forget. She had always preferred the society of men of Mr. Austin's age. How old was he? Her father would ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... perceive they fit perfectly by putting them over the back of my hand. I make him assure me of the fit, and then buy the pair and proceed to take my old ones off and put the new on grimly. If they split or the fingers are too long—glovemakers have the most erratic conceptions of the human finger—I have to buy ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... had a sure, accurate drop-kicker!" reflected Captain Butch hopelessly. "One who could be depended on to average eight out of ten trials, we'd have a fighting chance with Ballard. Deke Radford is a wonder. He can kick a forty-five-yard goal, but he's erratic! He might boot the pigskin over when a score is needed from the forty-yard line, and again he might miss from the twenty-yard mark. Oh, for a kicker who isn't brilliant and spectacular, but who can methodically drop ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... would be deeply vexed, not by the conduct or the fate of Bras, but by her being the heroine of so mad an adventure. She knew that he wished her to be serious and subdued and proper, like the ladies whom she met, while an evil destiny seemed to dog her footsteps and precipitate her into all sorts of erratic mishaps and "scenes." However, this adventure was likely soon to have an end. She could go no farther. Whatever had become of Bras, it was in vain for her to think of pursuing him. When she at length reached a broad and smooth road leading through the pasture, she ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... Ireland's Case; Meaning thereby the case of his shop,- Of curate, vicar, rector, bishop, And all those other grades seraphic, That make men's souls their special traffic, Tho' caring not a pin which way The erratic souls go, so they pay.— Just as some roguish country nurse, Who takes a foundling babe to suckle, First pops the payment in her purse, Then leaves poor dear to—suck its knuckle: Even so these reverend rigmaroles Pocket the money—starve the souls. Murtagh, however, in his glory, Will tell, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... Bar-ree-e!" That day spent in the country made him angry for a week, and he worked sulkily at Julian's, all the time tormented by a desire to know where Clifford was and what he might be doing. This culminated in an erratic stroll on Sunday which ended at the flower-market on the Pont au Change, began again, was gloomily extended to the morgue, and again ended at the marble bridge. It would never do, and Selby felt it, so he went to see Clifford, ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... changing their places, and as it were wandering about the sky. It is certain that the Babylonians at a very early date distinguished from the fixed stars those remarkable five, which, from their wandering propensities, the Greeks called the "planets," and which are the only erratic stars that the naked eye, or that even the telescope, except at a very high power, can discern. With these five they were soon led to class the Moon, which was easily observed to be a wandering luminary, changing her place among the fixed stars with remarkable rapidity. Ultimately, it came ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... evening of Thursday, the twenty-seventh, it was fairly well occupied, but not to any great extent. One couple attracted my attention by reason of the gentleman's erratic steering. Had he been my partner I should have suggested a polka, the tango not being the sort of dance that can be picked up in an evening. What I mean to say is, that he struck me as being more willing than experienced. Some of the bumps she got would have made me cross; but ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... of the road chased each other like the figures in a zoetrope. Now and then with a shock and rattle they went through sleeping moonlit villages, which must have stirred an instant in their sleep as at the passing of a fugitive earthquake. Sometimes in an outlying house a light in one erratic, unexpected window would give them a nameless hint of the hundred human secrets which they left behind them with their dust. Sometimes even a slouching rustic would be afoot on the road and would look after them, as after a flying phantom. But still MacIan stood up staring at earth and heaven; and ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... have taken her to Taylor's, and have spent all the money I had on such a luncheon as neither of us had ever eaten before. Whatever else I am, I am not a snob of that sort. I show my colors. I led her into a little cross-street which I had noticed in our erratic morning pilgrimage. We stopped at a German baker's. I bade her sit down at the neat marble table, and I bought two rolls. She declined lager, which I offered her in fun. We took water instead, and we had dined, and had paid two cents for our ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... robust a stage-driver as ever extricated a coach from a quagmire. The team, playful through long confinement, tugged at the reins, and Sandy, who was at the bits, occasionally shot through space like an erratic meteor. ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... his suiting his composition to erratic themes. Beverley had painted borders for a woodland scene. Sullivan liked the work and complimented Beverley, who immediately said: "Yes, and if you could compose something to fit it now." Instantly, Sullivan, ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... a qualm of conscience. The child really was too simple to be made game of. Besides, he felt sure that she had spoken the truth, so far as she herself was concerned. She didn't know where her erratic aunt had gone; and any further questioning would only frighten her without winning him the knowledge he sought. He therefore took the parcel back, said some soothing words and made his way across the walk to his taxi. But the number he gave the chauffeur was that of the house ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... Milton must have sounded as y. On the whole, it is quite clear that Milton read his Hebrew with minute precision. To see how just this verdict is, let anyone compare Milton's exactness with the erratic and slovenly transliterations in Edmund Chidmead's English edition of Leon Modena's Riti Ebraici, which was published only two years later than Milton's paraphrase ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... bringing proofs of the new science before the commission. These were M. de Foissac, M. Dupotet, M. Chapelain, and M. de Geslin. It would be but an unprofitable, and by no means a pleasant task to follow the commissioners in their erratic career, as they were led hither and thither by the four lights of magnetism above mentioned; the four "Wills-o'-the-Wisp" which dazzled the benighted and bewildered doctors on that wide and shadowy ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... f. Jovial f. Natural f. Mercurial f. Celestial f. Lunatic f. Erratic f. Ducal f. Eccentric f. Common f. Aethereal and Junonian f. Lordly f. Arctic f. Palatine f. Heroic f. Principal f. Genial f. Pretorian f. Inconstant f. Elected f. Earthly f. Courtly f. Salacious and sporting f. Primipilary f. Jocund and wanton f. Triumphant f. Pimpled f. ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... unpublished letter from Governor Henry A. Wise, of Virginia, to a gentleman in Philadelphia, for a copy of which we are indebted to General Duncan S. Walker. The other letter of Wise—previously quoted—shows us his part and interest in the proposed conspiracy against Fremont; but the erratic Governor had, after the lapse of nearly two years, become an anti-Lecompton-Douglasite, and was ready to give confidential warning of designs with which he was only too familiar. As this was written nearly three weeks before Yancey's "Scarlet Letter," ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... ammunition pouches, some flung away by wounded men, some belonging to the dead. As the bush-fires licked from the lower slopes of the Sari Bair towards Chocolate Hill this lost ammunition exploded, and it sounded like erratic rifle-fire. The fires glowed and spluttered all night, and went on smoking in the morning. I had to go up to Chocolate Hill about some sand-bags for our hospital dug-outs next day, and on the way up I noticed a human pelvis and ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... nebulous but suggestive remark that the newspaper occupies the borderland between literature and common sense. Literature it certainly is not, and in the popular apprehension it seems often too erratic and variable to be credited with the balance-wheel of sense; but it must have something of the charm of the one, and the steadiness and sagacity of the other, or it will fail to please. The model editor, I believe, has yet to appear. Notwithstanding the traditional reputation ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... was batting and making good use of his opportunity; he was, it will be remembered, a magnificent though erratic hitter. Flower bowled him a short-pitched, fast ball, rather wide of the off-stump. Many men might have left it alone, for the ball was rising, and the slips were crowded, but Mallinson timed the ball splendidly, and drove ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... in the fugitive's path was narrow and dense. Below it, in a patch of hillocky pasture ground, sloping to a pond of steel-bright ice, a red fox was diligently hunting. He ran hither and thither, furtive, but seemingly erratic, poking his nose into half-covered moss-tufts and under the roots of dead stumps, looking for mice or shrews. He found a couple of the latter, but these were small satisfaction to his vigorous winter appetite. Presently he paused, lifted his narrow, cunning nose toward ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... He never entirely shook off his erratic use of negatives. See, also, Lamon, 424; Tarbell, ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... and Fred fancied they heard an exclamation, but they could not be certain. There was no perceptible commotion about the skylight, but the flickering, erratic movement which had puzzled them ceased on the instant. Whether the shot had accomplished anything or not could only be conjectured, but Mickey was of the opinion that the exchange was equally without ...
— In the Pecos Country • Edward Sylvester Ellis (AKA Lieutenant R.H. Jayne)
... as wrong to infer from this that the taint was universal, as it would be to gauge our own social morality by the erratic matrons and fast young ladies with whom satirical essayists delight to point their periods. The human heart is stronger than the corruptions of luxury, even among the luxurious and the rich; and the life of struggle and privation ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... of sight—but what? Who? Brant was unable to get it out of his head that all this secrecy centred around Naida. With those incautiously spoken words as a clew, he suspected that Murphy knew something about her, and that knowledge was the cause for his present erratic actions. Perhaps Hampton knew; at least he might possess some additional scrap of information which would help to solve the problem. He looked at his watch, and ordered his horse ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... magnetically drawing me to him!" With this thought, I heaped my parcels into the arms of Habu. He had been observing my erratic footwork with amazement, and now burst ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... can walk out in Beaulieu," he cried; "they shall not say it of me that I came back in rags. Look, here is a watch which I shall return to you, for it is mine; and, like its owner, it is erratic in ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... infirmities,—cannot but endear him to our deepest affections, while his unrivalled endowments command our highest admiration. To illustrate what is here alluded to, let the reader recall Burke's noble generosity towards that erratic victim of genius and grief,—the painter Barry; or his instantaneous sympathy in behalf of Crabbe the poet, when almost a foodless wanderer in our vast metropolis; and our estimate of Burke's excellencies as a man, will not ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... ascertain the course of social development among the Greeks, the inquirer is met by an initial difficulty. The Greeks were not one great people like the Israelites, migrating into and settling in a new country, flowing with milk and honey. Their movements were erratic and various, and took place at very different times. Several partial migrations are described in Homer, and others are referred to as having taken place only a few generations back. The continuation of unsettled life must have had the effect of giving cohesion to the individual ...
— On The Structure of Greek Tribal Society: An Essay • Hugh E. Seebohm
... naval preparations had been pushed with great vigor. A powerful squadron under Admiral Cervera, which had assembled at the Cape Verde Islands before the outbreak of hostilities, had crossed the ocean, and by its erratic movements in the Caribbean Sea delayed our military plans while baffling the pursuit of our fleets. For a time fears were felt lest the Oregon and Marietta, then nearing home after their long voyage from San Francisco of over 15,000 miles, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... cared little for individuals. He did not believe (as some one has said) that the history of mankind is the history of its great men. Great men with him were but larger atoms, obeying the same impulses with the rest, only perhaps a trifle more erratic. With them or without them, the course of things would ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... stony but anxious silence. The train continued its erratic progress, sometimes stopping altogether for a time, with whistle blowing repeatedly; sometimes creeping along the metals as though feeling its way to safety. At last, after a somewhat prolonged wait, the guard, whose hoarse voice they had heard on the platform of the small ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the creature, realising that again it was being cheated, started in pursuit. With leaps and bounds that seemed erratic and purposeless, it gradually diminished the distance between itself and the running man. Once it alighted on the outstanding branch of a gnarled tree, then from thence it took shelter in a clump of shrubs, then across the stream, swimming to the opposite shore; for the running man had ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Senor." They moved. The erratic Arizona breezes twisted the dust of their going. Senor Johnson watched them dwindle. With them seemed to go the joy in the old life. No longer did the long trail possess for him its ancient fascination. He had ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... population but supplies only about 50% of food needs and accounts for only 4% of GDP. Subsistence farming and cattle raising predominate. Diamond mining and tourism also are important to the economy. The sector is plagued by erratic rainfall and poor soils. Substantial mineral deposits were found in the 1970s and the mining sector grew from 25% of GDP in 1980 to 35% in 1997. Unemployment officially is 21% but unofficial estimates place it closer to 40%. On the plus side is the ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... at bat the visitors did not do as much. Perhaps Frazer managed to tighten up, and pitch better ball. He was very erratic, and could never be depended on to do consecutive good work. In every other inning the heavies could not seem to gauge his work at all, and he mowed them down. Then they would come at him again like furies, and knock ...
— The Chums of Scranton High Out for the Pennant • Donald Ferguson
... the lions were still leaping upon new victims. Fear-maddened horses still menaced them with their erratic bolting from one side of the enclosure to the other. Bullets from the guns of the defenders who remained alive but added to the ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... in a high-tensioned ball team. There were three other chief pitchers on the nine, Toe Barter, Sam Willard and Slim Cooney. Slim and Toe were veterans, and the mainstays of the team, and Sam Willard was one of those chaps so often seen in baseball, a brilliant but erratic performer. ...
— Baseball Joe in the Big League - or, A Young Pitcher's Hardest Struggles • Lester Chadwick
... exclusive right of "calling students to the bar,"[A] also of "disbarring" a barrister for questionable practices,—a right exercised by Gray's Inn in 1864 in the case of the late erratic but brilliant Dr. Kenealy, counsel for the notorious Tichborne "claimant." From their decision no court, as such, can give relief. The disbarred one has only the right of appeal to and review by certain of the judges. The Inns neither ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... divided them everywhere, and large, unruffled pools reflected the sun. The layers of melting ice bared the ground to their feet; it belonged to the great division of sedimentary earth, and the result of the action of the water, which is so common on the surface of the globe. Still a few erratic blocks were seen of a singular nature, foreign to the soil where they were found, and whose presence it was hard to explain. Schists and different productions of limestone were found in abundance, as was also a sort of strange, transparent, colorless crystal, which has ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... sound reasonable, and the lad was unsatisfied; whatever the cause of the redskin's erratic conduct, his captive could not ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... brown of the land can be seen numerous grey spots; these are erratic boulders of granite. Through glasses one could be seen perched on a peak at least 1300 feet ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... distempers. This last circumstance serves to decide the healthiness of climates in every latitude. Sudden changes from heat to cold are every where dangerous; but, in countries where little caution is used in dress, they must often prove fatal. The winds in Carolina are changeable and erratic, and, about the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, commonly boisterous. In summer, they are sultry and suffocating; in winter, cold and dry. Beyond doubt, the flat maritime part is a most unhealthy situation, and the first settlers ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
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